The Morning Dispatch: The Struggle to Reopen Schools

Happy Monday! On this day 206 years ago, British soldiers fighting in the War of 1812 engaged in a “mostly peaceful protest” by burning the White House to the ground.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 30,682 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 4.9 percent of the 622,311 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 425 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 176,797.

• Two major storms—Tropical Storms Marco and Laura—are expected to hit Louisiana within days of each other, with the former expected to make landfall as early as today.

• Firefighting crews in Northern California are struggling to contain some of the state’s worst wildfires on record. At least six people are dead, and nearly 1 million acres of land have been blazed.

• The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for convalescent blood plasma as a therapeutic for patients suffering with COVID-19. Drs. Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci reportedly intervened to delay the EUA last week because data from a plasma study were not conclusive enough. President Trump, tagging FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, tweeted Saturday that the “deep state” at the FDA is “hoping to delay” vaccines and therapeutics until after the election.

• Belarusians continue to protest President Alexander Lukashenko’s disputed election victory, with tens of thousands taking to Minsk’s Independence Square on Sunday despite threats of police violence.

• After former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour spoke at the DNC last week, a Biden campaign spokesman said Joe Biden is a “vehement opponent of anti-Semitism” and therefore “obviously condemns” Sarsour’s views and the “boycott, divest, and sanction” Israel movement. On a call yesterday, however, Biden campaign aides privately apologized to a group of Arab and Muslim activists for the spokesman’s comments. A Biden spokeswoman on Sunday said the campaign wanted to “make clear” on the call that they “regretted any hurt that was caused to these communities,” but that the campaign “continue[s] to reject the views that Linda Sarsour has expressed.”

• Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security committee on Friday, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy assured lawmakers election mail would be delivered “securely and on time” and denied that operational changes at the Post Office had political motivations.

A Patchwork of K-12 School Reopenings

With Labor Day just around the corner, we’re at the point where, in an ordinary year, most U.S. schools would by now be back in session. But under the fog of war created by the ongoing pandemic, the path back into classrooms is far more complicated than usual. Despite months of national debate over what school should look like in the fall, there is simply no meaningful national strategy. Between differing guidelines from state to state, and many decisions being made by local districts, America is going back to school with a patchwork of safety protocols and rubrics for what activities are permissible.

This isn’t necessarily problematic in and of itself. Both education and community disease prevention are necessarily deeply local practices; it makes sense that individual districts are assessing the state of the pandemic in their own communities and making decisions accordingly. But it does make it difficult to get a sense of how reopenings are going, except in a pointillistic way.

We’re already seeing some cautionary tales. Earlier this month, Georgia’s Cherokee County School District welcomed back more than 40,000 students without clear social distancing or mask wearing guidelines. The schools are already quarantining more than 2,000 students and have confirmed more than 120 active cases of COVID-19 as of last week. Another school district in Georgia—less than 50 miles outside of the hotspot city of Atlanta—has come under fire after a viral video circulated of a crowded high school hallway, where several students were shown in close proximity and without face coverings.

These cases present a hard lesson for fervent advocates of reopening: If COVID is bad enough in your community, it doesn’t matter how bad you want it—if you reopen, it’ll likely just get worse and worse until you have to close down again. That’s why many experts are advising that schools actively peg their reopening plans to COVID testing numbers in the community.

“It does nobody any favors to open and then, as we’ve seen in some of our failed reopenings in parts of the country, to have to close that day, that week, or week two,” says Dr. Meredith Matone, the scientific director for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s (CHOP) PolicyLab, which has helped to create guidelines for Pennsylvania schools to reopen safely. “That creates a logistical burden for schools, and it also breaks trust. It breaks the trust of teachers, it breaks the trust of families, and it’s going to be very hard for schools and families to rebound from a very quick open and shut. And I don’t think we want a revolving door at school; we want to reopen when we can stay open.”

To further complicate a highly individualized choice by school districts, localities must attend to the health concerns of their communities at large, not just students. Although new research into the effects of the coronavirus on children and adolescents confirms that the age group is less likely to fall seriously ill, younger people can still be discrete carriers. Many school districts have abandoned their plans to reopen in favor of remote learning out of caution for teachers and other community members, particularly as we near flu season.

In some states, the decision has been taken out of districts’ hands altogether. As confirmed coronavirus cases climb to nearly 600,000 in Florida, for example, schools are being forced to reopen across the state. Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran ordered that public schools conduct classes in-person to extend “the full panoply of services” to Florida students last month, and seems to be following through with this mandate by threatening no-show teachers with termination.

A similar story is unfolding in Iowa, where Gov. Kim Reynolds has insisted that schools open at at least 50 percent capacity and denied requests by school boards and teachers’ unions in populous areas to take classes back online. Guidelines issued by institutions like the CHOP PolicyLab warn that schools risk disaster if they remain open in communities where the test positivity rate exceeds 9 percent, suggesting serious community spread. “We feel pretty strongly about that 9 percent test positivity [threshold],” Dr. Matone said. “There’s not a lot of wiggle room.”

But Reynolds has said that schools can’t apply for a waiver to return to online classes until their communities show a 15 percent positivity rate—a rate that indicates rampant, runaway transmission. Closing schools at that point is a bit like putting Neosporin on a severed limb.

What to Expect When You’re Conventioning

Over at The Sweep, our campaign-focused newsletter, Sarah previews the Republican National Convention, which begins today, and shares some thoughts on what she’ll be looking at most carefully.

Who are Republicans targeting?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the DNC convention this week, saying “as a young progressive Latina I know I was not the target audience for this convention. The target audience for this convention was white moderates who aren’t sure who they’re voting for in November. Do I agree with centering the programming on that audience? Not necessarily. I think we could have done more to rally turnout enthusiasm from our party’s base.” 

And, of course, she was right. The Biden campaign made it abundantly clear who they were speaking to last week. A neon blinking “hey, you, suburban lady!” would have been less subtle.

But they also did something else very smart, which Ocasio-Cortez failed to acknowledge. They ensured there were no “basket of deplorables” or “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion” moments. In an election where 96 percent of voters say their minds are made up, not handing the Trump team a turn out battle cry may be the most important thing the DNC accomplished last week. 

Trump handed the Democrats “it is what it is” right before their convention, from which they have tried to make plenty of hay with mixed success in my opinion. But the convention provides four days for Trump to get carried away and give them his own “47 percent” or “mission accomplished” moment. Then again, it’s never mattered before.

So who is Team Trump targeting this week? 

Sure, his base. No question he needs to turn up the enthusiasm numbers and drive turn out. ‘Twas ever thus. I expect a lot more red meat this week than we saw last week. But will there be any persuasion messaging? 

Trump’s not so subtle tweets give us one clue: “suburban housewives of America!”

But there’s a new suburban mom in town. The soccer moms identified by Bill Clinton and the security moms targeted by George W. Bush have been replaced by “rage moms.” The New York Times’ Lisa Lerer and Jennifer Medina described them thusly: “the struggle for child care, education and economic stability is fueling a political uprising, built on the anger of women who find themselves constantly — and indefinitely — expected to be teacher, caregiver, employee and parent.” 

And here was a fun fact: “mothers with children in the home were twice as likely as fathers to report participating in a protest, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from June.” 

Who will they direct their rage toward? The Biden team wants them to know that the president dropped the ball on the pandemic response and everything bad that has happened since March can be squarely laid at his incompetent feet. The Trump team wants them to believe it is the Democrats who are rooting for the economy to fail, for shutdowns to continue, and for schools to stay closed just so they can win an election.

You can make sure you’re getting The Sweep in your inbox like TMD, the French Press, and the G-File by updating your settings here.

Worth Your Time

• Radio Free Asia—the U.S.-government-backed media company in East Asia—is out with a harrowing report on the lengths the Chinese government has gone to to enforce its “family planning” limits on the persecuted Uighur population. An obstetrician who worked for years in Xinjiang hospitals told RFA that Uighur families were restricted to three children in rural areas and two children in urban ones. “Enforcement of restrictions requiring women to space out pregnancies by at least three years included killing newborns who had been born after being carried to full term,” she said.

• Roughly 750 coronavirus treatment drugs are currently undergoing either Phase II or Phase III trials. “The challenge,” former FDA Commissioners Dr. Scott Gottlieb and Dr. Mark McLellan write in the Wall Street Journal, “is to develop evidence as quickly as possible without compromising standards.” They argue the “warp speed” approach to vaccine development could be applied to therapeutics as well to increase supply and improve data collection. “The FDA is granting an emergency-use authorization for plasma, despite concerns last week from public-health leaders at the National Institutes of Health about the limits of the evidence,” they write. “The decision would have a stronger foundation if patients had participated in a randomized study that looked at whether patients who received plasma fared better than those who didn’t.”

• Whenever there’s a booming market, many investors lose sight of the busts and bubbles that loom on the horizon. Even geniuses like Sir Isaac Newton have fallen victim to the market’s “get rich quick” scheme. Check out Thomas Levenson’s piece in The Atlantic for some insights into the financial crises that have ravaged global markets over the past 300 years and the people who should have seen them coming. Though much has changed since the 18th century, one thing has remained constant: “When financial markets offer the temptation of ever-rising values, not even the smartest people can resist.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• Is the fate of the pro-life movement in the president’s hands? Twitter tells us yes, but years of legal developments tell us that in reality, presidents have virtually no effect on the abortion rate. In fact, the abortion rate has been declining for years now, and that trend will likely continue regardless of who is elected in November. As it turns out, pro-lifers have state legislatures and a host of cultural arguments on their side. “We’re most passionate about the president,” David writes in Sunday’s French Press. “Yet too many of us are less interested in the crisis pregnancy center down the street.”

• Jonah is officially back on the grid; Friday’s G-File (and Remnant) is proof. From the latest developments in QAnon world to the rise and fall of Steve Bannon, he had a lot to catch up on. But perhaps most thought provoking is Jonah’s candid take on the state of our politics: “Both sides are catastrophizing our politics like members of competing doomsday cults.”

• What do you get when a high unemployment rate has left millions of Americans with lots of free time, and lockdowns and other restrictions mean they have nowhere to go? A spike in day trading. Audrey looks at the rise of Robinhood, an online brokerage firm that offers no-free trades, and the pitfalls of uneducated investors having undue influence on some companies.

Let Us Know

About an hour after the Republican National Committee put out the above resolution punting on a concrete party platform in favor of “the President’s America-first agenda,” the Trump campaign itself laid out its priorities. (The document is rather devoid of details: “Create 1 Million New Small Businesses” is one plank, “Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share” is another.)

Our question to you: If you were creating your own party platform from scratch, what would be your key principles?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), James Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto/Getty Images.