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Hopes that President Joe Biden and his team could exert a calming, decisive influence over getting children back in classrooms are now getting tested.
After nearly a year of massive disruptions to schools from the pandemic and a Trump administration response heavy on pressure and at times bluster
, Biden promised a swift, coordinated, and supportive response. But that pledge has run smack into the decentralized, politically hazardous specifics of actually reopening schools.
There’s no shortage of scrutiny as to whether the administration’s newly released technical guidance for reopening schools has struck a proper balance, put enough priority on key issues, or represented a major shift from what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump had already recommended. Critics who see the new guidance as too restrictive have drawn a straight line from heated reopening disputes involving teachers’ unions in several cities to Biden’s chummy relation