Sorting Out the School Reopening Worries and the Political Issues Swirling Around Public Schools This Week
This morning we are poised between the Democratic and Republican conventions. Public education policy has become highly politicized in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic that has upended the autumn opening of what we all expected would be the 2020-2021 school year.
While public education was unlikely to arise as the top issue at either convention, a mass of newspaper coverage shows us that public schooling is of urgent importance to many people. The papers are filled with all kinds of spreads about whether or not schools ought to reopen and what has begun happening in places where schools have reopened. While we may take our public schools for granted, we can see that when the opening of schools is disrupted, it touches our lives in the most basic way. And we know that problems with reopening school are likely to hurt the children whose needs are greatest: The coronavirus is not only exposing inequality in America, but it is at the same time exacerbating the challenges for disabled children, and very poor children.
The purpose of today’s post is to sort through some of the confusion about reopening schools and to sort out the policy issues swirling this week around public education. What follows is an attempt to provide some clarification.
The Pros and Cons of Reopening Schools Full-Time, In-Person
Everybody seems to agree that children would be better off educationally and psychologically if the 2020-2021 school year could open normally with children back in class. However, as a team of writers at Politico reports: “Thousands of kids and… (college students) are getting sick, along with their teachers, triggering mass quarantines, campus closures and last-minute switches to online learning. Virus-proof kids who are ‘virtually immune’ to the scourge—that CONTINUE READING: Sorting Out the School Reopening Worries and the Political Issues Swirling Around Public Schools This Week | janresseger