Trump’s Plan to Reopen Schools Puts Black Students at Risk

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are determined to reopen the nation’s schools for full-time, in-person learning, going so far as to threaten schools with defunding if they fail to do so.

When Trump and DeVos threaten to suspend federal funds to schools, Black children, as well as all low-income students, have the most to lose.

Sending students back to school every day, as Trump demanded, is especially dangerous for Black children because Black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.

An analysis by APM Research Lab this month found that African Americans have died from COVID-19 at twice the rate of other groups—roughly seventy deaths per 100,000 people, compared to thirty-four for the Latinx community and thirty for whites.

Where an individual’s race is known, Black people account for nearly a quarter of COVID-19 deaths. And nationally, in the top five counties with COVID-19 deaths, Black people make up the largest racial group.

When Trump and DeVos threaten to suspend federal funds to schools—although only Congress has the authority to do that—Black children, as well as all low-income students, have the most to lose. Title I, the largest federal government education program, funds K-12 schools with the highest concentration of poor students.

Black and Latinx students are more likely to attend Title I schools, and racist policies are to blame—in particular, a legacy of federal housing policies that, as Richard Rothstein explains in his book The Color of Law, mandated segregation and undermined Black home ownership.

DeVos may argue that reopening schools is necessary to fulfill the promise of American investment in education and point to evidence that many low-income parents have a hard time with remote learning, which could further exacerbate children’s potential losses of learning in the summer months.

She has also proposed sending federal dollars to parents who want to homeschool their children.

However, according to a new study, only one in five Black people is able to work from home during the pandemic. That’s because Black people are more likely to be part of the essential workforce than other racial groups.

Black workers are more likely to be employed in essential services (approximately 38 percent) than white workers (roughly 27 percent). Black workers are about 50 percent more likely to work in the healthcare and social assistance industry and 40 percent more likely to work in hospitals, compared with white workers.

Also, many Black parents, low-income or not, prefer that their children not return to school.

Black parents in Palm Beach County Schools in Florida, for example, were twice as likely as white parents to say they expected not to send their children to campus if full-time classes resumed. In a Massachusetts survey, 60 percent of Black and Latinx respondents said they did not think school buildings could reopen “in a way that keeps most kids and adults safe from the coronavirus.”

In my own informal survey of parents on Facebook (from New Jersey and Pennsylvania), I found that white parents selected in-person learning twice as often as Black parents. And that 60 percent of Black parents preferred remote learning as an option, compared to 40 percent of white parents and 87 percent for Latinx parents. 

Trump is forcing Black parents to make the unenviable choice between exposing their children to COVID-19 with a return to in-person learning, or forcing them to face quarantine-accommodated learning exacerbated by institutional racism.

It is not shocking that Black parents, and many other parents of color, are choosing the lives of their children over going to school. Children in the United States are more likely than kids in other countries to have underlying health conditions, such as asthma, that place them at an increased risk of becoming severely sick with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black children suffer from asthma at more than double the rate of white children.

It again comes back to racism. Black people are more likely to live in the areas hit hardest by the epidemic, as a result of the segregation and pollution that worsened it.

Black children are subjected to textbooks that either do not include them or whitewash history, despite the evidence that a relationship exists between positive racial representation and academic achievement for Black boys and Black girls.

Black students are, more often than not, without a Black teacher, despite research showing the benefits of a Black students being taught by a Black teacher. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 80 percent of teachers—for both public and private schools combined—are white; in the same study, only 6 percent were Black.  

Black students as young as preschool age are disproportionately suspended and arrested.

Black students are subject to abuse in schools, including physical beatings and being tased.

Trump’s demand to reopen schools is no favor to Black children and families, and many Black parents are likely to choose to keep their children at home.

And schools with larger percentages of low-income students and students of color are more likely to implement criminalized disciplinary policies—including police referrals, and arrests—rather than connecting students to psychological or behavioral care.

Guidelines implemented during the Obama presidency were an attempt to address the disproportionate disciplining of Black children. But the Trump Administration rescinded them, and DeVos has espoused racial pseudoscience to defend the move.

“Obviously, the African-American community has suffered from racism for a very, very long period of time,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s premier epidemiologist, has said. “I can’t imagine that that is not contributing to the conditions that they find themselves in, economically or otherwise.”

Trump’s demand to reopen schools is no favor to Black children and families, and many Black parents are likely to choose to keep their children at home, and focus their efforts on working to remove the President from office.