It’s hard to believe that safety is the primary motivation for local governments’ efforts to close private schools when those same county governments are allowing private-run day care for school-age students “with learning assistance” in public school classrooms during the school day.
It’s hard not to wonder about corrupt motives when the county health office issued its closure order after sundown on a Friday.
When you consider that remote learning is terribly difficult for the poor and working class, that a huge portion of children never actually show up for remote learning, and that current science suggests young children are not significant spreaders of the coronavirus, it’s hard to understand why schools that can limit class sizes and school buses should be barred from meeting in person.
The simplest explanation is this: Because public schools will be offering a vastly inferior service this year (remote-only learning), the allies of public schools and their teachers’ unions worry about parents pulling their children into private schools — and so they are trying to take away some of the private schools’ advantage.
In my own county, after Gov. Larry Hogan struck down a county order barring private schools, one public school teacher wrote a public Facebook post nearly admitting as much:
“MCPS parents… Please keep your kids enrolled in MCPS! Loss of funding will be devastating, not only this school year, but in the years to come, when we need to try to increase funding again.”
And how about your children’s learning?
“As a teacher myself, I can tell you that we will be more than understanding if your children cannot keep up with the rigorous online schedule and the amount of work expected of them,” the teacher wrote. “Hell, I won’t be able to keep up with the work either, especially with 3 kids at home…. Don’t worry so much about keeping up. Don’t worry so much about falling behind. Just do what you can. Keep your kids enrolled in MCPS and JUST DO WHAT YOU CAN.“
The public school superintendent in Falls Church City, a small, wealthy municipality just outside of D.C., wrote a similar note warning against “Pandemic Flight.”
“FCCPS has seen a rise in families deciding to leave the system until we are either back in person or there is a vaccine to fight the virus.” The superintendent, Peter Noonan, warned parents that “disenrolling from FCCPS [will] have consequences. FCCPS receives funding from the local Government, the State Government, and the Federal Government based on the numbers of students we have enrolled. If there is an exodus of students from FCCPS, the funding of our schools will decrease.”
Notice what’s missing in this letter? Any suggestion that your children will learn just fine through the public schools’ online learning system.
What’s crazy is that it seems that nowhere in the FCCPS statement are district leaders making a strong case for why kids will be better served by staying enrolled in the district-led remote learning program https://t.co/H1nXJH0kCq
— Kathleen Porter-Magee (@kportermagee) August 17, 2020
So public school administrators know that they are offering an inferior product this fall. Sadly, rather than wanting what’s best for their students, they ask parents to do what will bring more taxpayer money for their schools.
