Education Week - August 26, 2020 - 10

By Daarel Burnette II
Every Thursday at 11 a.m., Tulsa's
school facilities director, Sue Ann Bell,
appears live on the district's Facebook
page to show parents the extraordinary and very expensive efforts her
staff is making to fight off the coronavirus when students return.
In one episode that's garnered
more than 2,000 views, Bell, along
with a Spanish-language translator, walks the glistening hallways of
Anderson Elementary School, detailing how her staff has repeatedly
scrubbed the walls, floors, lockers,
and door handles, installed Plexiglas around the front office secretaries' desks, and placed signage in the
hallways urging students to stand six
feet apart, wear a mask, and wash
their hands.
She then enters the school's now

spaced-out library where a janitor
hoses down chairs with BioSpray, a
hospital-grade disinfectant known to
kill 99.9 percent of bacteria.
"We want to be ready," Bell says,
staring into the camera.
America's schools are on average
more than 44 years old, aging buildings that can host thriving colonies
of bacteria, lead, and mold. Kids are
often taught in classrooms that are either freezing cold or burning hot. Flu
outbreaks are frequent.
Now, administrators are being asked
to fight off the coronavirus, which
causes COVID-19, a much more contagious and lethal airborne disease
than the flu.
Over the last couple of months, directors of school facilities have gotten a crash course on the dynamics
of building-air ventilation, personal
protective equipment, and effective

Charlie Neibergall/AP

What Will It Take
To Keep Coronavirus
Out of Schools?

cleaning chemicals. They're also
wading into public relations work,
deployed by their bosses to be the
messengers-in-chief on health and
safety protocols.
Bell, who manages a sprawling
portfolio of real estate, has seen all
sorts of things during her 25 years
tending to Tulsa's 82 schools, including tornados, floods, and dust

storms. ("You never know what
Mother Nature is going to throw at
you," she said.)
But nothing, she said, comes close
to the coronavirus. The research
keeps evolving, the guidance keeps
changing, and parents' fears keep
ramping up.
"I'm working seven days a week
trying to prepare for this," Bell

Race and Schools Are at the Center
Of Trump's 'Suburban Lifestyle Dream'
By Andrew Ujifusa
Over the last few weeks, President
Donald Trump has ramped up his
election-year pitch to the suburbs,
and it has drawn criticism for being a
racist and dated appeal to voters. His
focus on a supposed suburban ideal
also draws attention to the longstanding connections between housing and
schools, and what those connections
mean for educational inequities.
Last month, Trump highlighted a
New York Post column by Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York state, deploring
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's support for
high-density, affordable housing. In
doing so, he declared to the "Suburban Housewives of America" that he
would save their communities from
destruction at the former vice president's hands. He also made similar
remarks at a White House event.
His rhetoric is linked to policy. On
July 23, two days after the Post published McCaughey's column, Trump's
Department of Housing and Urban
Development announced it would
significantly scale back obligations for
state and local governments to show
that they are using federal dollars
under the Affirmatively Furthering
Fair Housing requirements to combat
discrimination.
"I am happy to inform all of the
people living their Suburban Lifestyle
Dream that you will no longer be both-

ered or financially hurt by having low
income housing built in your neighborhood," Trump tweeted July 29 to
highlight the new HUD rule, which
was effectively a repeal of an Obama
administration directive. "Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down."
Trump did not mention education
directly in those comments about
"suburban housewives" and the suburbs, which Trump won by 5 percentage points, according to a 2016 New
York Times exit poll. But they also
serve to highlight how "school policy
is housing policy, and vice versa," said
Peter Piazza, a researcher at the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative
Education Assessment who supports
school integration efforts.
"That rhetoric is just an age-old device to signal to white people that, 'I'm
just going to protect you from poor, violent Black people,' " said Andre Perry,
a fellow at the Brookings Institution's
Metropolitan Policy Program, about
Trump's comments. "He's trying to
get reelected by appealing to not just
white people, but racist white people."
That sentiment draws on a growing body of research about how education and other local officials have
responded to the increasing diversity of their suburban communities.
And clashes about school integration and rezoning in suburbs have
drawn significant media coverage.
Yet Piazza said he was concerned
that even "people that I'm not even

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 26, 2020 | www.edweek.org

sure will necessarily vote for Trump"
might sympathize with support for
what they see as key characteristics
of suburbs.
Ultimately, the impact of Trump's
rhetoric on the election could be quite
limited either way, in part because of
how ostensibly liberal suburbanites say
they favor diversity and integration but

That rhetoric is just
an age-old device
to signal to white
people that, 'I'm just
going to protect you
from poor, violent
Black people.'"
ANDRE PERRY
Fellow, Brookings Institution's
Metropolitan Policy Program

often resist concrete local school integration plans, said Max Eden, a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He
pointed to a major dispute over school
integration in Howard County, Md., as
one such example.
"Any effort to change the composi-

tion of their schools [they would see
as] a threat to their community. And
they would become defensive against
that. And they would never admit that
there is a racial component to that. And
I don't want to accuse them of harboring secret racist or racialist ideas," he
said. But many outside of those communities would see such motivations
at work nevertheless, he added.

'Makes Our Work Harder'
The rule Trump brought into the
public arena last month isn't his administration's only significant initiative that highlights the connection
between housing and education.
Last year, the administration introduced a proposal that essentially
would make it more difficult for
people to sue developers, banks, and
others for racial discrimination under
the Fair Housing Act. Several groups
criticized the proposal at the time
because, they said, it would make
it more difficult to address the root
causes of housing discrimination that
create a "disparate impact" for people
of color, regardless of whether such
discrimination is intentional.
Among such negative effects, they
said, are racially segregated schools
that often lack the same financial resources as their majority white counterparts.
"Every time we see standards used
under the Fair Housing Act, in this case
disparate impact, weakened ... it also

Custodian Joel Cruz cleans a desk
at Brubaker Elementary School
last month in Des Moines, Iowa.
School districts are spending
millions of dollars on specialized
cleaning products and protocols
to instill confidence that buildings
are safe for in-person instruction.

makes our work harder on the education integration side," said Sherrilyn
Ifill, the president and director-counsel
of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, when discussing the
proposal last year. (The proposed rule
has not been finalized by HUD.)
Regardless of how much these and
similar shifts in policy have affected
Trump's overall political standing,
there's growing evidence that with
the presidential election less than
three months away, Trump's support
among suburban voters has sharply
declined. That clearly hasn't gone
unnoticed by the president and his
supporters. In her New York Post column, for example, McCaughey noted
the increasing diversity of suburbs
and that Trump's comments should
appeal to people who live in them regardless of their race.
While it's fair for suburbanites to
have certain expectations for their
communities including their schools,
another factor limiting the political
impact of Trump's rhetoric either
way is that the issue remains abstract
for many people, Eden noted. It's not
as if, for example, Hillary Clinton was
elected in 2016 and implemented aggressive housing rules and school integration schemes that Trump could
now promise to tear down as a challenger in 2020, Eden explained.
"The argument that Trump is making would appeal to them if they actually had to see the effects of what
they're saying," Eden said.
It's not clear how much recent
suburban demographic change itself
might affect Trump's vote share in
November. But for years, think tanks
and others have focused on how, even
as the suburbs are growing less white
in many instances, this demographic

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Education Week - August 26, 2020

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