The debate over how to move forward with K-12 schooling is growing more heated as back-to-school season nears, with teachers resisting the push to reenter the classroom so long as COVID-19 remains a risk and others, such as President Trump, calling for reopening this fall. While the spring semester required a fast reaction to an unexpected crisis, education leaders have had months this summer to prepare for the upcoming school year. Yet despite this head start, uncertainty and confusion seem to still abound.
Meanwhile, parents are stuck very much between a rock and a hard place on the question of school reopening. Over the course of eight weeks, on behalf of the National Parents Union and the American Enterprise Institute, I conducted a survey of 4,000 parents of K-12 students across the United States to find out just how they felt about the effect of COVID-19 on their children’s educations and what it would take for them to feel safe sending their children back to school.
Their views, taken together, tell a story of parents stuck in an impossible situation — worried about the consequences of sending their children back to classrooms where the coronavirus can still present a risk but also gravely concerned about their children missing out on important academic and social development. They want their children to be safe, and they want their children to learn.
In our survey, roughly 6 in 10 parents said they were worried about their children losing ground in terms of their education, and a similar number worry about their children missing important social interactions. Those concerns are essentially tied with worries about someone in their family catching the coronavirus and outpace worries about being able to make ends meet during the crisis.
Asked what would be most helpful to them during the crisis, the top response was “help keeping my children engaged in good activities,” which over half of the parents named as their most critical need, outstripping even those who said they’d want “more money to spend on necessities.” Parents of younger children in particular note this as a problem and are significantly more likely than other parents to say that the pandemic has left them feeling “exhausted.”
Despite the clear worries that parents expressed about their children’s development and the strain that school at home is placing on their families, that does not mean parents are clamoring for children to go back to school at any cost. Offered a choice between schools reopening “as soon as possible so students don’t fall too far behind and can receive the educational support they need” and schools remaining “closed until they are certain there is no health risk, even if it means students fall farther behind,” a significant majority preferred keeping schools closed. In our final week of surveying in June, 54% of parents said they would rather that schools stay closed, and 36% said to reopen as soon as possible, with black and Latino parents even more in favor of keeping schools closed.
It may be impossible to open schools in such a way that there is absolutely zero risk in the absence of a vaccine. But society has pushed to try to find ways for us to grocery shop, travel, and continue to function in countless other arenas of life. In an ideal world, schools would have found a way to help parents out of this jam — to ensure necessary conditions such as masks, testing, and distancing, were met in order to protect students and teachers and to allow reopening to move forward. In our survey, more than 7 in 10 parents said it was important for schools to provide masks for students and teachers, to require significant testing and contact tracing, to communicate about any student or teacher who may have been exposed, and to limit crowded hallways and cafeterias in order to enable social distancing.
Many of these expectations are not easy to implement. But in too many districts, the answer instead is to throw up their hands and offer only online learning indefinitely — or alternatively to push forward with reopening in the absence of the precautions parents clearly say are necessary for them to feel safe sending children back. Neither of these outcomes should be acceptable.
Our survey showed parents giving schools the benefit of the doubt throughout the spring, reluctant to criticize schools that were trying to navigate a challenging, rapidly unfolding crisis. But months have now gone by, and as many districts stumble on the path to reopening, parents’ patience may soon run out.
