Coronavirus Forces Us to Notice the Essential Role of Public Schools
Maybe someday we’ll all come to agree that we were crazy—for two decades after No Child Left Behind— to accept school closure as a “turnaround strategy” for so-called “failing” (low-scoring) public schools. Certainly the coronavirus pandemic, when public schools are being shut down to protect the public health, ought to be a wake-up call. While we cannot question the public health experts who are prescribing such a radical step, the widespread closure of public schools provides an occasion to examine the meaning of public education across today’s America.
Eve Ewing, the University of Chicago sociologist, recently examined the widespread, permanent, closure of public schools in Bronzeville, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. At the end of the 2013 school year, Chicago Public Schools shut down 50 so-called “failing” schools, many of them on the South and West Sides. Ewing’s focus is broader than this week’s lesson, but she does examine the essential role of public schools as core social institutions that anchor neighborhoods: “Judith Butler argues that when a community faces the loss of a place, that loss can become so insurmountable that it becomes part of the community’s own self-definition… The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school. A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city. A school is a safe place to be. A school is a place where you find family. A school is a home.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-156)
This week’s school closures—universal across many states—are only temporary, though parents and teachers cannot anticipate how long the shutdown will last. But although schools are closed only temporarily, the closures are disruptive and disorienting. Valerie Strauss presents tweets, some of them funny, from teachers trying to create online lessons and from CONTINUE READING: Coronavirus Forces Us to Notice the Essential Role of Public Schools | janresseger