A popular song begins, “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.” If allowed to continue, the government’s neglectful mishandling of K-12 public education during the coronavirus pandemic suggests a worrisome future. The lack of a national policy means that states and sometimes individual school districts have been left to make difficult choices among in-person, hybrid, or remote education. The result has been significant economic and ethnic disparities in access to education and documented learning and socialization losses for all public school children.
Approximately 3 million of the most educationally marginalized students in the country are estimated to have experienced NO FORMAL EDUCATION since March 2020, according to Bellwether Education Partners. By mid-March, most American schools closed their doors to contain the pandemic. About half remain fully or partially closed to in-person learning today. While schools were closed, a survey conducted by ParentsTogether found that low-income families were 10 times more likely to report their children were doing little or no remote learning compared to those making upward of $100,000.
As of early November, only one-quarter of the 1.1 million public-school children in the New York City system had returned to the classroom for any instruction, while most private-school students are receiving some form of live classroom experience, many of them five days a week. Low-income children are more likely to remain remote and are less likely to have access to the prerequisites of learning—devices, internet access, and live contact with teachers—than high-income children.
With the U.S. failing to contain the virus, American K-12 schools have reported more than 415, 000 COVID-19 cases as of December 22, with over 248,000 children, over 114,000 staff, and an additional 52,000+ unspecified.
Children need social interaction for healthy development. There has been a disturbing rise in child anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Sadly, 16 percent of children aged 10 to 18 visiting the Oakland, California’s Children’s Hospital emergency room in September reported suicidal thoughts, an increase from 6 percent in March, according to Jacqueline Grupp-Phelan, the chief of pediatric emergency medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
The most outrageous thing of all is it doesn’t have to be this way. In a society committed to children and families, there would be safe educational opportunities available to all children at no cost.
Some parents who can afford it have started their own small “pandemic pod schools,” hiring a professional teacher to educate 5-10 children in safe, socially distanced settings. The Chicago Tribune described pods as “Equal parts traditional homeschooling and Mary Poppins-style nurturing — with a COVID-19 sheltering-in-place twist.” Some have criticized these parents for being elitist, increasing the achievement gap, or undermining public education. Yet, they have been forced to choose between creating their own private schools or putting their children’s academic and social development (and potentially their lives) in jeopardy. They are trying to do what a functioning government organized for the people should be doing for all children.
The U.S. Department of Education could have designed a plan for safe public pod schools and other forms of small-group learning. They would need to hire more teachers so that each teacher would have no more than 10 children in their pod. They would need to find spaces for the pod schools, outside locations in states where the weather allows it, perhaps supplemented by outside heaters. Even online remote learning could better be done if each teacher were assigned smaller groups of kids. Teachers could give each child more attention and have time to make sure families had the needed technology and were comfortable using it. Hosting twenty to thirty 8-year-olds on Zoom is simply not effective.
This is reflected in measured “learning losses.” The cumulative learning loss over the course of the pandemic could be substantial, especially in mathematics—with students on average likely to lose five to nine months of learning by the end of this school year. Low-income children are disproportionately more likely to be Black, Indigenous and Latinx, making them dramatically more vulnerable to learning losses. Students of color could be six to twelve months behind, compared with four to eight months for white students. We must recognize the disparities while at the same time understanding that our government is leaving all children behind.
Why isn’t the Department of Education acting? The decline in public education funding began long before COVID-19. Our government, controlled more and more by huge corporations, no longer prioritizes mass quality public education because the advances in digital technology are replacing many jobs. This means that corporations no longer need masses of educated workers to make their profits, and government is withdrawing support accordingly. There is an economic revolution taking place based on the transition from old electro-mechanical technology to today’s digitally controlled technology requiring little or no human labor. All of society is adjusting to this change. The system of capitalism dictates that changes are made in the interests of corporations, not what is best for our children.
Parents and students are beginning to demonstrate and make legal challenges demanding schools reopen. Teachers and unions want to ensure safety for students and staff. The resources needed to open schools safely are available in society. But solving the crisis facing America’s public school children will require a political revolution that brings the organization of society in line with the technological advances that, in the hands of the people, could provide abundance. All of our energy must be put into this transformation. The families and teachers of the 50.8 million public school children are poised to be part of the leadership of this transformation. The vast majority are part of a new class of workers being created by the labor-replacing technology who must have a new society for their needs to be met. They will fight for it.
Published: December 23, 2020
This article published by Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
