This week, tens of millions of school children will be starting a new academic year. However, instead of throwing on their backpacks and heading to receive in-person lessons from their teachers, many of them will be at home staring at computer screens and tablets, if they bother tuning in at all.

In the early stages of the pandemic, school closures were billed as a last resort, a desperate and temporary effort to “slow the spread.” Yet even as distance learning has proven an unmitigated disaster for working parents and for the social and academic development of children, here we are, six months into school closures and with no end in sight.