BEFORE THIS VIRUS (ON NYC SCHOOLS AND COVID-19)
It had to come to this.
In November of 2016, people kept saying that we’ll make it through this administration, as we had in the past. A critical analysis of history reveals that, to the contrary, some won’t. Indeed, some haven’t. Even with a Democratic mayor in a Democratic city and a Democratic governor as our head of state, a subset of people knew that the corrupt incompetence of the racist, sexist pseudo-billionaire from this city would reap what America has sown since its inception. America’s institutional diseases have prevailed even after mass labor transferred – ostensibly – from Black bodies to complex machines.
This country had a civil war over one of those diseases and – rather than quarantine it – decided to let the disease take new forms and spread from ocean to ocean.
As a Black Latinx teacher, I inherited the legacy of teachers who witnessed educational inequities firsthand and fought tooth and nail to overturn unjust policies and practices upon our children. For decades, the American public has known that teachers are underpaid for the preparation they do and the practice they take on. But there’s also an unwritten contract that teachers implicitly undertake when we assign ourselves to the teaching profession, whether it’s in public schools, charter schools, private schools, schools in alternative settings like prisons and shelters, and even homeschooling. Some of us are explicitly aware of this social contract in moments where the contract we signed and CONTINUE READING: Before This Virus (On NYC Schools and COVID-19) | The Jose Vilson