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Saturday, July 25, 2020

Not to be Flippant, but NOW we care about poor children?

The powers that be say over and over again that we have to get back because children are falling through the cracks and the achievement gap is widening. Um, these are not pandemic related. Children, especially those mired in poverty have been dropping out and falling behind as long as we have schools, and the powers that be barely shrugged their shoulders. So what's different now? It is that they need their mothers and fathers and grandparents to go to their ten dollar jobs so they can continue to rake the money in. They don't care about children, and let's not pretend they do, they only care about dollar signs.   

Study after study talks about the debilitating effects of poverty. Those children in it as a group do worse than those children who aren't.

https://moveforhunger.org/the-effects-of-poverty

The powers that be know this but they often either ignore it or treat it as an excuse.

Then there has always been an achievement gap, and its mostly between those kids in poverty and those not.   

https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/index.html

These are not new things, they did not start when the pandemic hit, but Trump and DeVos and their surrogates are either tragically uninformed when they talk about the achievement gap, a real possibility, or they are disingenuous which is what I think we all know they are being.

We have inequalities that forcing children to go to schools where they can sick or worse infect their families and caregivers is not going to solve but instead exacerbate. 

If they cared about these children, which they do not, they would create job programs that would educate and train people so they could get jobs that paid higher wages, and provide for child care or require businesses to do so. If they cared about these children, which they do not, they wouldn't be expecting them to risk their and their family's health.

If they cared about those children, they would have spent the last few months making sure they had all they need to be successful, unfortunately for us, it's cheaper to risk their and their teacher's lives.

Whenever one of the people mention the achievement gap or kids falling behind, it's code for we don't give a $%#& about children and we want to get paid.

The thing is they don't care about kids, schools, teachers or families, they only care about putting money in their pockets.

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