Monthly Archives: February 2021

Exit Interview: How the COVID Tracking Project Stepped Up When The Trump Administration Didn’t

Originally published in GQ on February 19, 2021.
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It perhaps doesn’t say great things about the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic that a plucky volunteer organization has grown into one of the most trusted data sources on COVID-19 in the U.S. But that’s the reality: The COVID Tracking Project, an improvised effort supported the Atlantic, was founded in the earliest days of the pandemic, after four journalists and data scientists realized there wan’t a good centralized source for essential stats like the number of tests administered and patients currently in the hospital with the virus. 

So every day for the last eleven months the project coordinated an effort of mostly volunteers to manually gather the latest public health data from all 50 states, Washington D.C., and five territories. They then worked to translate that information for the public—producing daily charts and analysis on the scale of the pandemic, which have been cited everywhere from local broadcasters to executive branch briefings. These daily updates on the number of tests, cases, hospitalizations and deaths have been invaluable journalists and public health officials, and for millions of people, become one of the few steady fixtures of this last year.

Earlier this month the group announced it would be ending its daily data compilation work on March 7, the one-year anniversary of it’s founding. Ahead of their last day, GQ spoke with two of the group’s co-founders, Alexis Madrigal and Erin Kissane, about the terrifying early days of the pandemic, why the government wasn’t doing this work, and their decision to shut down.

GQ: Can you both tell me about how this started?

Alexis Madrigal: I was talking with Robinson Meyer, another staff writer at The Atlantic, a lot in February about how we were worried about COVID. Rob realized that the number of people being tested in the U.S. was not actually known. He called me up one day and he was like, “Imagine we’re reporters on the Army Corps of Engineers beat, five days before Hurricane Katrina. Like what the fuck are we doing here? We should do something.”

We decided to try and count and compile the number of people who had been tested by calling all the states. We came up with a count of less than 2,000—when the Trump administration had been talking about having deployed millions of tests. Which meant the number of cases being reported was also an enormous undercount.

We published our first article [From March 6, Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing] and after that I got an email from Jeff Hammerbacher, a college friend of mine who went on to build data systems at Facebook and then became a bioinformatics guy. He asked me if I had used his spreadsheet to write our article. I was like, “What spreadsheet?”  He linked us to it, and that Google spreadsheet became the basis of what we do at COVID Tracking Project.

Erin had a lot of experience in managing distributed news projects, she came on as a fourth founder, we made this cattle call for volunteers, and that was it. Now it’s 340 days later and we’re still doing it.

Erin Kissane: Rob and I had been doing late night anxiety texts in February about how we just didn’t have eyes on the virus in the United States. As soon as I saw that Rob and Alexis had done this work, I got in touch.

You both grasped that this would be a bigger deal earlier than most Americans, and earlier than most journalists.

EK: There were so many concerns about not alarming people and not overreacting. But it happens that I’m just a person interested in pandemics and I also have an autoimmune condition, so I’m particularly concerned about respiratory viruses. I also read a lot of news out of China. It just seemed so bad and U.S. coverage in January and into February was so much about how it’s probably not going to come here, but it felt like there was very little attention on how bad it actually was in Wuhan.

And so your project quickly became the best place for testing data. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, at some point the CDC did start collecting a lot of similar data, but failed to package it in a way that the public could easily digest. At what point did that start happening?

AM: The short answer is I think it was roughly 100 days before the CDC released a testing dataset. It wasn’t until much, much later, in the fall, that the CDC put out a dataset on current hospitalizations.

But there’s two things, there’s data availability—is anything there? And then there’s data quality—are there reasons to suspect the data is not complete? And what we found with the CDC’s testing data is that there were major problems. Each federal data pipeline matches up differently with the stitched-together data from the 56 jurisdictions, and our job is to figure that out. That’s a lot of what our work became.

EK: May 9 is when the CDC began posting testing data, cases, and deaths all together in their COVID tracker. We did a pretty in-depth research report on that, and found the testing data was really quite dramatically off for a lot of states. In some cases, it was much higher than what states reported, in some cases much lower. So back in May we felt we couldn’t stop our project. When the federal hospitalization data came out, we did a lot of work to try to explain to our data users that their data was actually quite good.

We didn’t try to build a dashboard that was easy to use. We sort of backed ourselves into providing that. At first it was just journalists and data nerds, but eventually we brought on people with more science communication expertise. I think something we’re feeling very heartened and encouraged by is that some combination of the CDC and HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] now seem quite committed to doing science communication about the details of this pandemic—with regular briefings and all those things.

How would you say your tracker differs from other COVID trackers, like the one hosted by Johns Hopkins or the New York Times?

EK: The metrics we track are different, and we also work at the state level, and some of the other trackers work at the county level. The other trackers that I’m aware of are primarily scrapers, and our work is entirely manual. We have humans who go in and collect the numbers, more humans who check the numbers and double check them. The benefit of continuing to work this way, instead of moving to automation, has been that we are very, very close to tiny definitional changes in the data. We can dig through PDFs, and we can spot tiny blips in ways that a scraper might miss. It’s a very labor-intensive way of doing work, but it’s really about keeping the institutional knowledge about what exactly each number means.

AM: Unlike most of the others, we weren’t trying to build a standalone-destination tracker. Our role was quite different. We were building a node that fed information to a lot of those other trackers, as well as people who were extremely interested in some of the in-depth texture of Covid statistics. We gave top-lines, but that was not the primary goal of the project.

How many people would you say were involved with the project? And how did it break down between paid staff and volunteers?

AM: I think about 900 people have flowed through in some way, and about 400 have done a shift and entered data. So 400 Americans have really contributed to this dataset for their fellow folks. On an average week, I think it’s about 250-300 active people, and on a given data shift, there’s only so many slots, so it’s probably like 30 people on a given shift.

EK: On a given day we have the new folks, the checkers, the more experienced folks, the double checkers, and then the shift leads.

AM: Then there’s reporter folks who go out to the states, data infrastructure people, data quality people, and then there’s been about 30 paid staffers for the last few months.

So your project is winding down. While I know you didn’t launch this with the intention to run it forever, you all have created a trusted institution at a time when some of our other institutions have come to be seen as less trustworthy. So why are you ending next month, as opposed to the summer or once we get through the pandemic?

EK: We wanted to wind down as soon as we thought the federal government was doing a good enough job that we could hand it off. That sounds arrogant to say, but let’s be clear, there were deficits. Our orientation has been from the beginning that we would only go as long as we had to. And the reason for that is that we really want people to be looking at, working with, banging on, and using the federal data.

We don’t want to be a barrier between full attention on the federal data. That was really an ethical concern for us: We think it’s properly the role of the federal government. Our data can only get so good, because we’re at the wrong end of the pipeline: We can only look at what’s on public dashboards, and there’s a lot of work on those metrics that happens before they get to the dashboards. The federal government can see things we can’t see, they can do things we can’t do.

AM: We’ve had tons of interactions with states and the federal government to know that people have been making really, really good faith efforts to collect data. It’s easy to say now that the government does not appear to be cooking the books—and has not appeared to be cooking the books—but that was not at all clear through most of 2020.

EK: This has all been very ad hoc, and the people doing this work, whether they’re getting paid or not, they’re doing it because they need to be doing the work for themselves, for their country. They see it as their responsibility but it’s not a sustainable situation. We haven’t ever paid our people what they’re worth. This work should not be done by volunteers.

A real turning point for us was when we decided not to collect vaccine data. That was a strategic and tactical decision, because we wanted to put attention and pressure on the feds to track it.

I understand you’ve given some recommendations to the Biden transition team. Can you say more about that, and why you feel better about passing the torch?

AM: The number one thing is that the people we have been pressuring at HHS to deliver have really been delivering. When we first made contact with people there, they said, “We’d really like to make things more open and transparent.” And we said, “Great, let’s see that.” And week after week we continue to get more and more releases, and information.

EK: One of the things that has happened over the course of this project is that we’ve developed relationships with most of the states, with people in their public health departments, who have really helped us understand what they could and couldn’t do. And something that we’re trying to do now, as we make these recommendations to the federal government, is to include those perspectives and things that we learned about what is actually possible for states, where there are resource problems, tech system problems. We hope these can be seeds for the federal government to do the deep, difficult long-term work of rebuilding the country’s public health infrastructure, which is what it’ll take to do a really good job on the data. That’s a very long project that needs to be done, and it hopefully can be nudged along by the pressure around COVID.

What needs to happen to be better able to track things in the future?

AM: The short answer is that it’s nuts to run a country, from a public health perspective, in the way that we do. Each governor and state control an enormous amount of information. The federal government can request things, even mandate it, but they’re not providing the systems that go along with those mandates. It’s not so much tech capacity, narrowly construed. It’s more like state capacity, and within that there are counties with their own capacity issues.

If we really want to go about fixing this in a deep, systemic way, you build up that capacity from the county level on up. But that does require federal coordination.

EK: Right, the federal government can compel uniform reporting. There are states that can refuse but the feds do have a lot more authority than an outside organization like us to get clean, standardized data. And we’ve seen, like with the federal hospitalization data, that they can do this. We just think they need to better provide resources to support state collection of that data, to help build capacity. I’m sure you’ve seen the reporting about how many people have quit their local public health departments this year all over the country because they’re so burnt out.

When you look back on the project, what were some interesting or particularly meaningful ways you saw the work impact the world?

AM: All of it, but the bottom up way the project hit people is what made us feel particularly good. Like when we’d hear from individual people that their family members had changed their decisions because they were able to see through our data that this was real and they should take it seriously. Also things we heard from the actual people doing heroic work on the frontlines in healthcare.

The things that were oftentimes dispiriting was seeing how much use the data was getting in governments at all levels. While that should maybe occasionally feel gratifying, it actually felt destabilizing because it made us realize the state of play in the world.

EK: We wanted to help media organizations do accountability reporting, and we did see huge pickups from media organizations, including tons and tons of broadcast stations. That was really meaningful for us, and it was also important to show media organizations that they could trust the data coming from states. We’ve seen very little malfeasance from states. We’ve seen mistakes. We’ve seen big backlogs that made things look weird. But really for the most part we’ve done the work of saying, “Look, you can trust this information.”

But I think also seeing our data cited by two different administrations has been unsettling. The hardest thing on this entire project for me has been when we learned the federal government didn’t have something that we thought they were just sitting on.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

New Massachusetts Law Paves The Way for Police-Free Schools

Originally published in The Appeal on February 12, 2021.
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In Massachusetts, those who want police out of public schools are one step closer to making it happen. Lawmakers recently struck down a requirement that all school districts in the state have at least one “school resource officer”—a moniker for school cops. Now just two states—Florida and Maryland—have laws requiring police in schools, and advocates are pushing them to follow suit.

Massachusetts adopted the school police requirement in 2014 in response to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Connecticut where 26 people were killed at school, including 20 young children. Since then, the number of cops assigned to work in Massachusetts schools has steadily grown, as school shootings nationwide have continued.

Last summer, in response to the racial justice protests sweeping the country after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, civil rights attorneys, parents and students across Massachusetts formed a coalition to press for the removal of the state mandate. Advocates pressured the legislature to address the school-to-prison pipeline, which refers to overly harsh school discipline measures that disproportionately affect students of color. Despite Black and Latinx students representing 27 percent of Massachusetts students  in 2016, for example, they accounted for 64 percent of all school-based arrests.

The coalition’s demands were partially met with an omnibus police reform package that passed in December, which was watered down and full of compromises on issues like police training and facial recognition technology. Lawmakers agreed to remove the school police mandate, though they left it to local superintendents to decide whether to retain police; advocates wanted that power to rest with school boards, which tend to be more accountable to voters. Now some activists are gearing up to make the case for police-free schools to their local superintendents.

The legislation also calls for increased transparency, with annual reporting on school-based arrests, referrals to court, and the amount spent on school cops. “Schools have been supposed to be sharing that kind of information with the Department of Education since 2018, but there has been just a shameful lack of compliance,” said Leon Smith, executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice in Massachusetts.

Bay State residents were not the only ones pushing to reduce reliance on school police and redirect funds from law enforcement to restorative justice and mental health services. Last summer, school boards in cities like Minneapolis,Milwaukee, Denver and Portland, Maine,voted to end contracts with local police, and activists in Los Angeles pressed leaders to divest $25 million from the school police budget, and steer the funds to social workers and counselors. On the federal level, Democratic Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar and Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation to end federal funding for school cops. New bills introduced this year in states like Connecticut and Oregon would also phase out police from public schools.

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School police presence has increased sharply over the last few decades. According to federal data, roughly 43 percent of public schools, and 71 percent of high schools reported the presence of armed law enforcement officers during the 2015-16 school year (the most recent year for which this data is available). While states can play a significant role in shaping school police policy, only Florida and Maryland currently have laws that explicitly require schools to have police or a security presence, according to an analysis prepared for The Appeal: Political Report by the Education Commission of the States.

In Florida, the law requires all districts to station at least one armed officer on every K-12 campus, and Maryland’s law requires every school to have either an assigned police officer or a plan for “adequate local law enforcement coverage.” 

Both states passed their mandates after the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, where a gunman opened fire and killed 17 people and injured 17 others in Parkland, Florida. Activists in Florida and Maryland are pushing hard now to repeal those state-level mandates, which they also opposed at the time of passage.

Local efforts to remove police from schools have existed in Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties in Maryland for several years. But a statewide coalition formed over the summer and made five key demands of lawmakers, among them to remove police from Maryland schools.

Two state delegates from Montgomery County responded with a legislative package to prohibit school districts from contracting with local law enforcement agencies, and to reallocate the $10 million in state funding currently set aside for school police into mental and behavioral health programs. The legislation would also disband the Baltimore City School Police Force, the only sworn school police force in the state.

While it’s unclear whether the bills will pass, Renuka Rege, a staff attorney with the Public Justice Center’s Education Stability Project in Baltimore, noted that past legislative efforts to arm teachers failed to gain traction in Maryland. That could be a sign that the school police reforms have a chance of success. Maryland’s 2018 law, she adds, was a “knee-jerk reaction” not only to Parkland, but also to a fatal school shooting in Maryland that occurred two days before the state’s Senate Budget and Taxation committee took up the bill.

In Florida, activists statewide have been reeling from a widely publicized January video of a school police officer body-slamming and handcuffing a Black teenager at a high school in Central Florida. The teen, Taylor Bracey, suffered memory loss, blurry vision and headaches after the incident, which is under investigation.

It’s not the first time Florida has earned national headlines for viral footage of arrests of young people at school. Body camera footage released last year showed a police officer arresting a 6-year-old girl in 2019 as she cried to be let go. The ACLU of Florida published a study in 2020 finding that the increase in Florida school police since 2018 led to an increase in school-based arrests. The ACLU urged a repeal of the state mandate and a return to local community discretion.

Maria Fernandez, a senior strategist for the Advancement Project’s #PoliceFreeSchools campaign, told the Political Report that the campaign is supporting youth efforts to remove police from school in cities like Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, New York City, New Orleans, and Oakland, California.

“Some folks have been working on these issues for a long time, and we also have been receiving more calls for help since the racial justice protests began,” said Fernandez. Many youth activists, she added, are focused on their fast-approaching city council budget fights.

“Money for school police often comes from the city budget, so folks are looking and thinking about that,” she said, pointing to New York City, where the mayor’s newly proposed 2022 budget includes $445 million for school police, compared to $100 million for school nurses and $180 million for school social workers. “You don’t need to be a math genius to do the analysis here,” wrote Alexa Valera, a Brooklyn high schooler and member of the Urban Youth Collaborative in a recent op-ed. “New York City is spending less money on supportive programming to help students than on police to criminalize us.”

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In Massachusetts, advocates say next steps for them will involve ensuring that the transparency and reporting requirements of the 2020 reforms are honored, and they will continue to advocate for enhanced state funding of student mental health services.

“Looking at the pandemic, it’s just irresponsible and unacceptable to continue to throw money at cops when you know kids’ mental and social needs are greater than ever,” said Smith, of Citizens for Juvenile Justice.

Some activists in Massachusetts—including in Worcester, and New Bedford—are working to  pressure their school superintendents to get rid of school police. In Framingham, leaders with the grassroots group Framingham Families for Racial Equity in Education say that after meeting with the superintendent,  Robert Tremblay, he “made it clear he does not intend to remove SROs.” (A spokesperson for Tremblay did not respond to the Political Report’s request for comment.)

Cleopatra Mavhunga, an alumnus of Framingham Public Schools and a member of the Framingham Families for Racial Equity in Education, says despite the superintendent’s resistance, the group doesn’t plan on giving up its push for police-free schools.

“Right now the best thing we can do is rally the public,” she told the Political Report. “We need to have people understand what’s really going on.”

Biden’s Goal to Open Most Schools in 100 Days Is Not a Long Shot

Originally published in Bloomberg Businessweek on February 9, 2021.

Joe Biden pledged in early December to reopen most U.S. school buildings within his first 100 days as president: “It should be a national priority to get our kids back into school and keep them in school,” he said. Soon after, however, he narrowed that goal to a majority of elementary and middle—rather than all K-12—schools. And on Jan. 28, Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, warned that meeting even that lower target “may not happen.”

Technically, in fact, it may have happened already. There’s no comprehensive list of nationwide school reopenings. But according to a tracker by Burbio, a company that specializes in aggregating school calendars, more than half of the 53 million K-12 students in the U.S. had access to some in-person learning during the first week of February, and the number of students attending virtual-only schools trended down throughout January.

A reopened school isn’t necessarily one where all students learn in person five days a week; many students are likely to shift to a hybrid schedule with a mix of online and in-person learning, as millions of kids have so far. The arrangement is often necessary to keep class sizes small enough to meet social distancing requirements and prevent the coronavirus’s spread. Other students could opt to stay virtual full-time if their families have the choice.

Although the White House can work with industry to ramp up vaccine production and mobilize federal agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help distribute it, school decisions ultimately rest at the state and local level.

Political leaders want more schools reopened not just to aid the economic recovery but also to provide much needed relief to students and families. Douglas Harris, the director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University, warns of learning loss, mental illness, child abuse, and malnutrition resulting from keeping schools closed.

“Aside from their parents, there’s nothing children depend on more than their schools,” Harris says. Where it’s safe to do so, he adds, “it’s important to give students the option of in-person instruction as soon as possible.”

Recent research indicates that it’s safe to reopen schools where community spread of the virus is low. There’s less agreement on whether that’s the case where spread is higher. Some experts say it could still be safe to reopen as long as infection controls are in place. Rates of spread tend to be lower in younger grades than in high school, possibly because it’s harder to enforce social distancing with teens.

The vaccine rollout should help hasten reopenings, but supply chain challenges suggest it will take weeks, if not months, to inoculate educators. (There are no vaccines approved for children under 16 yet.) Districts are grappling with whether to require staff to return before getting vaccinated, and sometimes meeting opposition from teachers unions—most notably in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest district, which narrowly avoided a teachers’ strike in the first days of February.

In Ohio, teacher vaccinations have begun, but Republican Governor Mike DeWine acknowledged it’s unlikely that staff will have been fully vaccinated by March 1, the statewide reopening deadline he has set for all schools. (Forty-six percent of Ohio students were already attending school in person full-time as of Jan. 28, according to data DeWine shared.) Teachers union presidents for Ohio’s eight urban school districts protested that DeWine has pegged teacher vaccinations to schools committing to reopen, accusing him of using vaccines as a “bargaining chip.”

In California, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to give money to schools to reopen has sparked opposition from administrators as well as teachers. Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Austin Beutner said in a statement that it “falls well short of what’s needed to help our schools” and that local case numbers remain “dangerously high.” Beutner reiterated that infection rates were too high for reopening after an L.A. councilman threatened to bring a lawsuit on Feb. 4.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national union, would not directly say if all teachers should be fully vaccinated before reopening schools, but says the AFT is pushing to “align vaccine availability with school openings.”

Biden has suggested educators could return to classrooms without the vaccine if schools do regular on-site testing, take sufficient sanitation measures, and upgrade their ventilation systems. That position is endorsed by some public health experts, including those at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which has been advising school districts in southeastern Pennsylvania through the pandemic. Amid a virus surge in November, CHOP urged all schools to remain virtual; it now says reopenings can be done safely, particularly with rapid testing regimes in place.

On his second day in office, Biden signed an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide clear guidance on masks, testing, and cleaning, and to create a clearinghouse of best practices from schools across the country. The president’s Covid relief plan calls on Congress to allocate at least $130 billion in dedicated funding for schools, and $350 billion in flexible state and local funding could help school districts avoid layoffs and plug budget holes that might hobble their reopening efforts. Republicans in Congress offered $20 billion to schools in a recent counterproposal.

As Biden offers the carrot of funding, state and local politicians are using sticks to try to get schools open again. In South Carolina, the state board of education has threatened to revoke teachers’ licenses for up to a year unless they return to classrooms. Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, said that his administration will “explore every legal avenue at our disposal” to reopen schools by March 1.

Experts predict that the negative academic effects of closures will fall disproportionately on low-income Black and Latino children. But racial disparities are also likely to persist in the return to the classroom. A recent survey found that parents of Black students were 19 percentage points less likely than White parents to choose to a fully in-person option when it was available to them and that parents of Hispanic students were eight percentage points less likely. Among communities where the virus has taken a heavy toll, where schools have the fewest resources, and where access to high-quality health care is least guaranteed, many families think the risk of infection is just too great.

Among schools that have reopened, some, like New York City’s, are randomly testing staff and students weekly to monitor asymptomatic spread; other schools are prioritizing tests for those more likely to have been exposed to the virus, such as students participating in indoor sports. Some are finding that staffing is a challenge. Subs are in short supply, and educators who quarantine because of exposure or sickness can leave schools in the lurch and make social distancing more difficult.

Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, announced in January it will remain remote for the rest of the school year, primarily to avoid the disruption of closing and reopening buildings, often on short notice. At the time of the charter network’s announcement, more than 300 public schools in New York City that had reopened were shuttered again because of Covid-19 cases.

Even if Biden makes good on his 100-day pledge, reopenings are likely to be fairly bumpy through the spring—especially if more contagious strains of the virus take hold. For many American families, it’s unlikely to feel like success.

There Could Be an Energy Bill Debt Tsunami, Too

Originally published in City Lab on February 4, 2021.
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When the pandemic hit in March, as millions lost jobs and struggled to pay their bills, 34 states ordered mandatory moratoriums on utility shutoffs — measures that were all more critical as families were asked to stay home. The lockdowns translated into higher utility bills: One economist estimated that residential electricity use spiked 10% on average between April and July 2020, leading to households spending nearly $6 billion on extra usage. Another home energy monitoring company reported that April demand increased 22% from 2019.

Yet despite the need never dissipating, most states eventually lifted their utility shutoff moratoriums; by the end of October, just 16 states and Washington, D.C., had active moratoriums in place, covering 40 percent of the U.S. population, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association. Other states regularly halt utility shutoffs in winter, or when the temperature reaches a particularly cold level. NEADA estimates that 13 states are now relying primarily on these annual seasonal respites. 

Even in households that still have their heat on and water running, millions of customers are racking up significant debts as unpaid bills mount. And advocates worry that shutoffs, like evictions, are just being kicked down the road. 

A new economics working paper from Duke University released last week underscored the public health dimension of their concerns: Researchers estimated that, had Congress implemented a nationwide moratorium on utility shutoffs between March and November, Covid-19 infections could have been reduced by 8.7%, and Covid-19 related-deaths by almost 15%. The patchwork of shutoff moratoriums that did exist during that time, the economists found, reduced infections by nearly 4%, and mortality rates by 7.4% by making it easier for people to shelter at home. Without water or electricity, households can be forced to stay with relatives or other families, exacerbating crowding and disease transmission. “Ensuring that people have access to housing and essential services for water and electricity within their housing is necessary in any adequate government response to the housing precarity created by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers wrote. 

On Jan. 13, more than 600 organizations sent President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris a letter urging them to authorize a nationwide shutoff moratorium on water, electricity, broadband, and heat. Such a national ban on utility shutoffs was included in both versions of the House Democrats’ HEROES Act, which passed in May and October. But despite authorizing a national eviction moratorium on his first day in office, Biden has so far resisted calls to extend the ban to utilities: Instead, he’s asked Congress to authorize another round of stimulus relief, with $25 billion in rental assistance and $5 billion for energy and water assistance. 

Utility companies have been unenthusiastic about shutoff moratoriums. In the  Washington Post last week, Adam Benshoff, vice president for regulatory affairs at the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electric utilities, said that “customers with unpaid bills will not work with their electric companies on a payment plan until they receive a disconnection warning.”  (EEI did not respond to CityLab’s request for comment.) 

NEADA executive director Mark Wolfe told CityLab that while Biden’s proposal would surely help, they are concerned that the $25 billion in funding for renters will do little for homeowners who are behind on their bills. “We are also concerned that local agencies that will be charged with administering the funds might not have the resources to coordinate the payment of rent and utility, and as result only rental bills will get paid,” he said.

Different estimates of outstanding debt abound. Wolfe estimates between 9 million and 12 million households have unpaid bills, with those households being on average $6,500 behind on rent and utilities. A Moody’s Analytics report released in January estimated Americans’ back rent stood at $57 billion. Chief economist Mark Zandi said the average “delinquent renter” will owe $5,600, as they’ll be almost four months behind on monthly rent of $1,130 and utilities of $290. 

Clear data can be hard to come by. Civil rights groups like the NAACP have long called for federal reporting requirements on utilities, but most states do not require electric or gas providers to disclose how customers are accessing or retaining services, and utility companies have historically fought efforts to publish the information, aware of the public relations fallout that disclosing shutoffs could bring. In a report published in August, Michael Thomas, founder of the energy-efficiency startup Carbon Switch, mined data from state websites on expiring utility moratoriums to find that 34.5 million households would lose shut-off protections in the next month, leaving 9.5 million unemployed people at risk by Oct. 1. In a second report from October, he found that four states did let their moratoriums expire in September, affecting 16 million households, with 2.3 million of those below the poverty line before the pandemic started.

Charlie Harak, a senior attorney for energy and utilities issues at the National Consumer Law Center, says it’s also impossible for advocates like him to know exactly how many homeowners are behind on their utilities because companies don’t disclose arrearages by homeowners versus renters. Harak is based in Massachusetts, which has better reporting requirements than most other states. As of November, he says, 500,000 residential customers in his state were more than 90 days in arrear, owing an average of $1,000. “When our state moratorium ends, that’s a big number,” he said. “These families are at high risk of being terminated.”

Harak has been working to figure out how much money would be needed nationwide to address the outstanding utility debt, largely by extrapolating from Massachusetts’s data. “If you’re trying to pay down 100% of the arrearages — which is a better situation than pre-Covid, or if you’re trying to pay down the percentage needed so people don’t get shut-off, I think it’s reasonable to assume the number is between $10 billion and $30 billion, and that’s not including money for broadband or water.”

For now, cities have been trying to leverage federal stimulus money by establishing emergency funds for residents. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, the city awarded grants of up to $750 for water bills, and up to $500 for power bills. In Henderson, Nevada, residents could apply for aid up to $1,000 for utilities, and up to $360 for internet.

In December NEADA and 31 other groups representing state and local energy organizations sent a letter to congressional leaders asking for an additional $10 billion allocated to the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to help up to 7 million families pay off their utility debt. Prior to Covid-19, they noted, approximately 26 million households were eligible for low-income fuel assistance. NEADA projected in December that an additional 5 million households would be eligible for LIHEAP “as a direct result of virus-related layoffs.”

Bolstering money to LIHEAP, the energy groups said, is better than the alternatives, where utilities could offer repayment plans, but those could take households years to pay off, and slow families from getting back on their feet. Alternatively, utilities could raise rates on all their customers to cover the arrearages, which also would mean further strain on households after the pandemic.

On Jan. 28, Democratic representatives Annie Kuster and Peter Welch responded to that call, introducing the Energy Debt Relief for American Families Act, focused exclusively on trying to help families bring down their utility arrearages. The billwould likely not cover the full scope of need, but would provide $10 billion to states to pay off debts through LIHEAP. (Up to 15%  percent of those funds could be spent on administrative purposes, like contacting eligible families to make sure they know relief is available.)

As the pandemic stretches deeper into winter, advocates haven’t given up hope of a national shutoff ban, and the new Democratic majority in the Senate gives them the ability to get it through a budget reconciliation process. And the timing might be right, especially when paired with momentum for an eviction ban. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer endorsed the utility shutoff measure last year, as did Harris, before joining the White House. Senator Jeff Merkley, who introduced the Emergency Water and Energy is a Human Right Act in July, told the Washington Post he wants the president and his colleagues “to use every available tool at our disposal to put in place a national disconnection moratorium.”

Chicago Teachers Might Strike. A Group of Parents, Backed by a Right-Wing Law Firm, Stands to Sue.

Originally published in The Intercept on February 3, 2021.
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THIS WEEK IN Chicago, as the local teachers union considers whether to strike over the safety of the city’s school reopening plan during the pandemic, a group of at least nine parents represented by the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative public interest law firm, say they’re ready to sue if educators vote for a work stoppage.

Lawyers with the Liberty Justice Center — the same legal organization which brought the landmark Janus v. AFSCME lawsuit in 2018 to the U.S Supreme Court — argue a Chicago Teachers Union strike would be in violation of Illinois law and the union’s current collective bargaining agreement. The CTU contract commits to avoiding strikes or pickets while the agreement is in effect. “That doesn’t change even if [Chicago Public Schools] engages in an unfair labor practice or allegedly requires teachers to work in an unsafe environment,” attorney Jeffrey Schwab wrote recently in the Chicago Tribune. “It has become clear that kids are collateral damage for the union’s political and financial leverage.”

Chicago is not the only city where the anti-union law firm is seizing on parents’ frustration with virtual learning to help bring challenges against one of their long-standing political targets. The Liberty Justice Center is also representing parents in Chandler, Arizona, and Fairfax County, Virginia, where educators have organized sick-outs to protest school reopening plans. The group is an affiliate of the right-wing State Policy Network and has ties to the Bradley Foundation and the Koch network. Kristen Williamson, a spokesperson for the Liberty Justice Center, told The Intercept their lawyers stand ready to sue if teachers “use the illegal tactic again” and that they represent parents free of charge.

In late October, the Fairfax Education Association, which represents about 4,000 teachers and staff, urged its members to call out sick for a mental health day, as the union determined proposals to resume in-person learning. The vast majority of students in Fairfax County, the 10th largest school district in the country, have been learning from home since the coronavirus pandemic began last March. (A district spokesperson said the impact on instruction from the sick-out was minimal.) In December, the Liberty Justice Center sent a demand letter to the union and the school district warning them that the sick-out had been an illegal strike under Virginia law. The attorneys promised to sue if teachers take that step again.

Nellie Rhodes, a Fairfax County parent, is one of a handful of plaintiffs who have been working with the Liberty Justice Center. Her son, a freshman in high school, has been struggling with remote learning. “We heard about their work and reached out,” Rhodes told The Intercept. “They’re helping us in an effort, and we need their help. They’re putting the unions on notice that if they do something illegal, go on protest, have a sick day, we’re going to sue.”

In Fairfax County, the school board voted Tuesday to bring all students back for hybrid learning next month, beginning on March 16. The teachers union has indicated it wants to wait until all staff have received their second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine; 65 percent of staff have so far received their first dose. In Chicago, the school district has been trying to bring back K-8 students to the classroom, though currently has no plan or timeline for high schoolers.

Different parent groups have different goals for what reopening schools would look like, and multiple parent groups sometimes exist within the same city. Cristy Hudson, a mother of three in Fairfax who helped launch a grassroots group, Open Fairfax County Public Schools, over the summer, told The Intercept while they’re glad the school board is moving forward with reopenings, they’d like to see “a pretty quick expansion to kids back in school five days a week.” Another parent group, the Open FCPS Coalition, is currently focused on recall efforts of school board members they believe have delayed in-person learning too long. A new parent group that formed in January, the Chicago Parents Collective, says it’s pushing for clarity and commitments on reopening. “Let’s take baby steps, none of this is going to be perfect, we recognize that,” Ryan Griffin, a parent member, said in a local radio interview. “But we cannot let this pursuit of perfect get in the way of making some incremental progress on the education of our children.”

Other conservative organizations are capitalizing on parent frustrations with school closures to further political goals around weakening labor unions and public education. Since March, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in D.C., has been urging state and federal lawmakers to push private school vouchers and new subsidies for homeschooling in light of the pandemic. And this year, a wave of new private school voucher bills have been introduced in over 15 states across the country, with lawmakers hoping to advance the policies with less public resistance than they might typically face.

Jennifer Berkshire, a journalist who monitors education privatization efforts, says the school reopening debates have fascinated her, as they’ve activated a group of parents that school choice groups have historically struggled to mobilize.

“Many of these upset parents are in elite suburban districts who paid a lot of money to move specifically to those communities for those public schools,” she said. “They’re not the families who have historically embraced school choice and defunding schools.” Berkshire notes that State Policy Network affiliates have “seen the anger of those parents as something that can be weaponized” and have stepped in to offer themselves as a resource.

“It’s not a coincidence that you’re seeing these huge proposed voucher expansions now in all these different states,” Berkshire added. “And I think their hope is to basically mobilize parents who’ve never been interested before, or at least there will be less opposition.”

Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the libertarian think tank Goldwater Institute, says conservative groups have been looking for new ways during the pandemic to drive a wedge between parents and their individual schools. Parents typically give their own schools high marks in public opinion surveys, even if they have broader critiques about the public education system writ large. A 2019 national survey by the educator professional association Phi Delta Kappa found 76 percent of parents gave their own child’s school an A or B grade. A Gallup poll released in August found K-12 parents’ satisfaction with their child’s education fell 10 percentage points from a year earlier, though it still stood at 72 percent.

While it might seem counterintuitive to have conservative organizations fighting to get students back into the very traditional public schools they typically rail against, Siler says, hastening teacher returns can also help advance conservative movement goals of accelerating staff departures from the public school system altogether.

“If you force teachers to return to work in an unsafe environment, especially when safe alternatives exist, a lot of teachers will retire early or choose to not renew their contracts,” he said. “Fewer people will also want to become teachers because they see what’s happening, the lack of funding and respect. This exploitative assault could cripple public education for decades.”

An American Federation of Teachers national survey conducted in August and September found one-third of educators say the pandemic has made them more likely to leave teaching earlier than they planned.

Berkshire, the education journalist, says while making the teaching profession less attractive is certainly part of the “long game” of the conservative movement, another objective is to use the pandemic and the associated teacher shortages to advance bills that remove teacher licensing requirements. Ending or easing occupational licensing is something long-sought by education reformers and opposed by teacher unions.

In July, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C., urged states to waive their teacher licensing requirements to more quickly facilitate in-person learning. “These regulatory barriers and other concerns could hinder efforts to reopen schools,” he argued. A few months later, a fellow with the Empire Center for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank in New York, proposed “relaxing or abolishing teacher preparation program requirements” as well as easing certification rules to “invite more competition for teaching jobs.”

Shaun Richman, the program director of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State College, says the current distrust undergirding battles to get reluctant teachers back into the classroom is the result of years of hostile treatment from policymakers and administrators.

“Decades of union-busting attacks on teachers unions, under the guise of ‘education reform’ with the cynical manipulation of ‘civil rights’ and ‘student success’ rhetoric, have utterly destroyed the trust necessary to get school districts like Chicago to return to any form of face-to-face instruction during this actual crisis,” he said. “Anyone who’s serious about getting the buy-in from teachers that’s necessary [for reopening] needs to shun and denounce the [former Trump Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos and Janus crowd.”