A few days after reading what I found to be a misleading headline about the American Academy of Pediatricians supposedly calling for in-person schooling this fall, another headline caught my attention, this time on the other side. Here are the headlines:
Internal CDC Documents Warn Full Re-Opening Of Schools Is 'Highest Risk' for Coronavirus Spread
As Trump Demanded Schools Re-Open, His Experts Warned Of 'Highest Risk'
The wording of these headlines seems to communicate to me that the CDC said opening school is the highest risk society could take on with respect to transmitting the Coronavirus. From the way I saw these two headlines being shared and commented upon online, it seems to me that many others read them the same way.
So is that what the CDC actually said? Their report is a long and detailed one. After reading the portion that pertains to K-12 schools, I personally reached two conclusions that don't match the headlines. First, the report was not written as a "warning" and is not intended to declare whether schools should re-open or not. It is a set of guidelines written to help guide the decisions of school officials, not a written warning or conclusive decree. Second, the "highest risk" portion of the report comes on page 1, and looks like this: Personally, what I see here is "opening schools with no precautions whatsoever is the riskiest of all the school-opening options." And of course it is. Are there many districts out there planning for a full re-opening of school and activities without any mitigation practices? I'm certainly not aware of any in my area. So what's the story here, then? This seems to me to be another instance of a news headline designed to mislead the reader. If you're already worried about school re-opening - and most of us are - here's a headline designed to get you to share it (hopefully without reading it, first). Bring Trump's name into it, and of course it becomes all the more controversial. I'm not going to keep doing this with every headline. I've never even been a big critic of the media before. However, I'm also not going to stop reading with just a headline anymore, particularly when the article supposedly summarizes someone else's work. I've caught on to the game now.
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About MeI'm an award-winning teacher in the Atlanta area with experience teaching at every level from elementary school to college. Categories
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