Our response to the coronavirus pandemic has been marked by many failures, but chief among them was the decision to shut down schools.
In an article for the New York Times, a public charter school teacher from Washington, D.C., explains just how devastating continued school closures were for children, especially those from low-income minority neighborhoods.
Lelac Almagor writes:
If they could work out the logistics, their kids got a couple of hours a day of Zoom school. If they couldn’t, they got attendance warnings. In my fourth-grade class, I had students calling in from the car while their mom delivered groceries, or from the toddler room of their mom’s busy day care center.
Home alone with younger siblings or cousins, kids struggled to focus while bouncing a fussy toddler or getting whacked repeatedly on the head with a foam sword. Others lay in bed and played video games or watched TV. Many times each day, I carefully repeated the instructions for a floundering student, only to have them reply, helplessly, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,” their audio squealing and video freezing as they spoke.
There was never a scientific justification for keeping children out of the classroom. Study after study proved children were not at risk of transmitting or falling seriously ill from COVID-19, and as Almagor notes, many of the private and charter schools that reopened as soon as they were able proved that in-person learning could take place safely as long as certain social distancing precautions were put in place. But still, public school districts across the country dragged their feet, and children suffered as a result.
Almagor also hits at the heart of the issue: Why did public schools not think of themselves as essential? Why were they content to continue the remote learning charade when they knew it was leading to severe academic and social decline?
Education is essential, and the public school system exists to make sure everyone is afforded the right to learn. The fact that so many public school teachers and administrators abandoned this responsibility, even when it became clear that they did not need to, says all you need to know about them.
