Schools Must Fully Reopen in the Fall - The Atlantic

Schools Must Fully Reopen in the Fall - The Atlantic

Schools Must Fully Reopen in the Fall

The American Federation of Teachers, which I lead, is committed to making this happen.

Schools must open this fall. In person. Five days a week. With the space and and health safeguards to do so. The American Federation of Teachers, which I lead, is committed to making this happen.

School is where children learn best, where they play together and form relationships and acquire resilience. It’s where many children who otherwise might go hungry eat breakfast and lunch. Parents rely on schools, not only to educate their kids, but so they can work. Nearly 3 million mothers have dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic.

Over the past 14 months, teachers have scrambled to redesign lessons and projects, and to create virtual field trips and labs to keep kids engaged and learning from afar. They are exhausted. They’re working longer hours, troubleshooting IT problems, and trying to connect with students despite the barriers—whether a computer screen or a plexiglass shield. School food workers kept meals coming, often feeding anyone in the community who needed it. Many school-bus drivers delivered those meals, along with schoolwork and internet hotspots so students could learn from home.

All the while, educators have yearned to be back in school, with their students. They asked only for a safe workplace during this pandemic, and the resources they and their students need to succeed.

Yet critics have scapegoated teachers and vilified their unions because of school closures during the pandemic, ignoring the extreme disparities among schools and blaming teachers for problems outside their control.

Creating safe conditions in schools during a public-health crisis is not an obstacle to reopening classrooms; it is the pathway to going back, staying back, and building trust throughout school communities.

We faced stiff headwinds. Donald Trump tweeted multiple times that schools should reopen but did nothing to help them do so safely. The Trump administration politicized safety and undermined science. As a result, from last April right up to January 19 this year, we were working to reopen schools in a climate of chaos, fear, and misinformation as the pandemic surged in wave after wave.

Thankfully, the Biden administration changed course and is fighting the pandemic with science, truth, transparency, and, yes, money. We have experienced some bumps, of course—this is a once-in-a-century pandemic. But today an overwhelming majority of schools across the country are open for in-person learning, either full- or part-time.

Vaccines have been a game changer. I hear this sentiment in educators’ voices and see it in our polling results. The fear that they will bring the virus home decreases the moment they get their shot. According to our data, 89 percent of our members are fully vaccinated or want to be. And this week we had more good news: The FDA authorized use of the Pfizer vaccine for 12-to-15-year-olds. CONTINUE READING: Schools Must Fully Reopen in the Fall - The Atlantic

How Do Students Catch Up After a Lost Year? - The Atlantic

How Do Students Catch Up After a Lost Year? - The Atlantic

Reopening Schools Is the Easy Part

Helping students catch up will be a much more difficult task.

None of this will be cheap, and after a year of unexpected expenses—laptops for students, facilities upgrades—many districts have exhausted their reserve funds. School-finance experts estimate that districts have lost north of $200 billion during the pandemic. The recently enacted COVID-19 relief bill includes $126 billion for K–12 schools, 20 percent of which is designated for helping districts make up for learning loss. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut successfully pushed for some of the funding to go to summer enrichment programs like those Columbus is planning. “While we were so laser-focused on learning loss, we forget the emotional toll that the last year has taken,” Murphy told me. “More kids than we think are going to need an emotional and psychological recharge this summer and are going to need to have a safe, fun, uplifting experience to kind of reset their brains so they’re ready to learn in the fall.”

No one I spoke with has any illusions that students will magically catch up because districts are extending the school year or offering more summer classes. If history is a guide, the commitment from state and federal officials for robust financial support will likely dissipate as soon as students from well-off families are fully back in classrooms. America has a habit of forgetting its Black, brown, and low-income citizens. Leaders like Woods and Dixon say they are looking at years of remediation, not months. “It will go way beyond 2021,” Woods told me. But the summer is a start.

ADAM HARRIS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming book The State Must Provide.

How Do Students Catch Up After a Lost Year? - The Atlantic

Should the Black Lives Matter Agenda Be Taught at School? - The Atlantic

Should the Black Lives Matter Agenda Be Taught at School? - The Atlantic

What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum

Last month, a public-school district that serves mostly elementary and middle-school students in Evanston, Illinois, held its third annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action—using a curriculum, created in collaboration with Black Lives Matter activists and the local teachers’ union, that introduces children as young as 4 and 5 to some of America’s most complex and controversial subjects. For example, parents of kindergartners in District 65 were asked to spend time at home discussing a book on race that teachers had read aloud to their children.

Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, by Anastasia Higginbotham, begins with a white mother turning off a television set to prevent her little daughter from seeing footage of a white policeman shooting a Black man. “You don’t need to worry about this,” the mother says. “You’re safe. Understand? Our family is kind to everyone. We don’t see color.” The book corrects the mother: “Deep down, we all know color matters,” it states. “Skin color makes a difference in how the world sees you and in how you see the world … It makes a difference in how much trouble seems to find you or let you be.” The book teaches that the truth about “your own people, your own family” can be painful. Next to an illustration of the mother locking her car door and grasping her wallet while driving in a neighborhood where Black children are standing on the street, the narrator notes, “Even people you love might behave in ways that show they think they are the good ones.” Later, the little girl castigates her mother for trying to hide the police shooting and other racism. “Why didn’t anyone teach me real history?” she yells. “I do see color … You can’t hide what’s right in front of me. I know that what that police officer did was wrong!”

The book instructs a young white reader that she doesn’t need to “defend” racism, and it presents her with a stark decision. An illustration depicts a devil holding a “contract binding you to whiteness.” It reads:

You get:

✓stolen land

✓stolen riches

✓special favors†

WHITENESS gets:

✓to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR

✓your soul

Sign below:

_____________

†Land, riches, and favors may be revoked at any time, for any reason.

In Evanston, parents are asked to quiz their kids on whiteness and give them approachable examples of “how whiteness shows up in school or in the community.” In its focus on “whiteness” and its invitation to readers to challenge racism by interrogating and rejecting it, the worldview of Not My Idea is similar to that of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, now a staple of diversity-and-inclusion programs and anti-racism training. Not My Idea is also a jarringly CONTINUE READING: Should the Black Lives Matter Agenda Be Taught at School? - The Atlantic

When Schools Punish Sick Kids for Poor Attendance - The Atlantic

When Schools Punish Sick Kids for Poor Attendance - The Atlantic

Are We Finally Done Encouraging Sick Kids to Come to School?

Staying home to avoid catching and spreading the coronavirus during the pandemic, for all the fear and anxiety it has caused, has come with one unexpected benefit for my family: My kids haven’t been sick once, not even with the common cold. My husband and I noticed this with a sense of relief after months of virtual schooling. We’re extremely fortunate that none of us have caught the coronavirus, but on top of that, our days and weeks hadn’t been upended by multiple colds or the flu over the past year. No missed work. No hospital bills. No sleepless nights.

During my oldest daughter’s kindergarten and first-grade years, I sent her to school several times with a runny nose or a slight cough, just like the parents of many of her classmates did. She was permitted to attend school as long as she was fever-free without the use of any medicine for 24 hours. But she has asthma, and it got progressively worse each grade, landing her in the hospital nearly every time she came down with “just a cold,” causing her to miss up to five days of school at a time, four times a year. Even if her asthma wasn’t flaring up during an infection, I had to monitor her closely for signs of an impending attack and administer several medications at precise times throughout the day. I didn’t want to sacrifice my child’s well-being to meet attendance expectations. So I started keeping her home, which meant playing catch-up with her assignments later.

Schools place a premium on attendance because it is associated with academic performance. Studies have shown that chronic absenteeism in middle school and high school hinders academic achievement and outcomes later in life, such as graduation rates and job opportunities. Less is known about the effects of frequent absences on elementary students, but a 2015 report out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison evaluated the impacts of first-grade absences on third- CONTINUE READING: When Schools Punish Sick Kids for Poor Attendance - The Atlantic

Is America's Educational System Becoming More Pluralistic? - The Atlantic

Is America's Educational System Becoming More Pluralistic? - The Atlantic

Is America’s Educational System Becoming More Pluralistic?

The past year has produced a cross-class coalition for educational choice that reaches deep into the suburbs.

President Joe Biden has made it clear that he wants to “reopen school doors as quickly as possible,” and that he’s willing to spend generously to make this happen. But he’s not going to get his wish. Even if Congress passes the president’s pandemic-relief plan, which includes $130 billion for the reopening of K–12 schools, in addition to the $67.2 billion Congress has already authorized under the CARES Act and the pandemic-relief legislation that passed in December, some teachers’ unions are setting out conditions for reopening that will be exceedingly difficult to meet, and threatening further “safety strikes” if they don’t get their way. In some districts where the teachers’ unions are especially powerful, the return of in-person learning might not happen until well into the 2021–22 school year. And the longer the COVID-19 disruption lasts, the more likely it is to have a deep and lasting impact on the politics of public education.

The heavy toll of school closures—on parents who are finding themselves under intense economic and emotional strain, on students who are experiencing profound learning loss that threatens to compound over time—might have been expected to put teachers’ unions at a political disadvantage. That’s certainly the impression you’d get from recent reports of fierce battles over school reopenings in cities and towns across the country. Judging by recent surveys, however, parental opinion of teachers’ unions has barely budged since the start of the pandemic.

Why has the political response to school closures been so muted? For one, at least 28 percent of students are receiving instruction that is fully in-person, and many reside in Republican-leaning districts. As the political scientists Michael T. Hartney and Leslie K. Fingers recently observed, the best predictor for whether a school district offered in-person learning this fall was Donald Trump’s vote share in that district in 2016. In California, for example, public schools in politically competitive and right-leaning areas such as Fresno, San Diego, and Orange Counties are mostly in-person while schools in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles remain entirely remote. Reopening battles between unionized teachers and parents desperate for in-person learning are mostly taking place in Democratic cities and suburbs.

Moreover, blue-state parents are divided on the question of reopening schools. Though learning loss has been  CONTINUE READING: Is America's Educational System Becoming More Pluralistic? - The Atlantic

The Whole Truth About Kids, School, and COVID-19 - The Atlantic

The Whole Truth About Kids, School, and COVID-19 - The Atlantic

The Whole Truth About Kids, School, and COVID-19

Federal health officials at the CDC this week called for children to return to American classrooms as soon as possible. In an essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they wrote that the “preponderance of available evidence” from the fall semester had reassured the agency that with adequate masking, distancing, and ventilation, the benefits of opening schools outweigh the risks of keeping kids at home for months.

The CDC’s judgment comes at a particularly fraught moment in the debate about kids, schools, and COVID-19. Parents are exhausted. Student suicides are surging. Teachers’ unions are facing national opprobrium for their reluctance to return to in-person instruction. And schools are already making noise about staying closed until 2022.

Into this maelstrom, the CDC seems to be shouting: Enough! To which, I would add: What took you so long?

Research from around the world has, since the beginning of the pandemic, indicated that people under 18, and especially younger kids, are less susceptible to infection, less likely to experience severe symptoms, and far less likely to be hospitalized or die. But the million-dollar question for school openings was always about transmission. The reasonable fear was that schools might open and let a bunch of bright-eyed, asymptomatic, virus-shedding kids roam the hallways and unleash a pathogenic terror that would infect teachers and their families.

“Back in August and September, we did not have a lot of data” to make a recommendation on schools, Margaret Honein, a member of the CDC’s COVID-19 team, told The New York Times. Okay, but September was 100 days, 15 weeks, and several dozen remote-learning school days ago! Meanwhile, anybody paying attention has long figured out that children are probably less likely to transmit the disease to teachers and peers. This is no longer a statistical secret lurking in the appendix of one esoteric paper. It has been the repeatedly replicated conclusion of a waterfall of research, from around the world, over the past six months.

In May 2020, a small Irish study of young students and education workers with COVID-19 interviewed more than 1,000 contacts and found “no case of onward transmission” to any children or adults. In June 2020, a Singapore study of three COVID-19 clusters found that “children are not the primary drivers” of outbreaks and that “the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission among children in schools, especially preschools, is likely to be low.”

By September, many U.S. scientists were going on record to say that transmission in schools seemed considerably rarer than in surrounding communities. “Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told The Washington Post. “We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation.” Throughout the fall, the evidence accumulated. “Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19,” Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, wrote last October in The Atlantic, summarizing the conclusions of her national dashboard of school cases. CONTINUE READING: The Whole Truth About Kids, School, and COVID-19 - The Atlantic

The Debate About School Safety Is No Longer Relevant - The Atlantic

The Debate About School Safety Is No Longer Relevant - The Atlantic

The Debate About School Safety Is No Longer Relevant

Even in places where schools want to reopen, too many teachers are sick or quarantining for classrooms to operate, and substitutes cannot fill the void.

For months, the debate about whether to open schools has centered on one question: Are schools safe? The only trouble is, this hardly matters anymore. Except in the few remaining regions with modest rates of viral spread, the transmission risk from and within schools is now beside the point. So many teachers and staff members are sick, quarantining, or have stepped down that many schools trying to remain open or to reopen just do not have the personnel available to do so well.

The examples are countless. Littleton Public Schools in Colorado, in announcingtheir shift to remote learning, stated that one of their primary reasons for doing so was that “keeping enough staff in schools for supervision is becoming a real concern. It is especially difficult, and impossible on some days, to have enough licensed teachers in classrooms delivering quality instruction.” Jeannine Nota-Masse, the superintendent of Rhode Island’s second-largest school district, was quoted in a local news story as saying, “Now you have students in the building and not enough adults to cover for the adults that are home for various reasons.” One elementary school near Milwaukee lacked 10 teachers on a recent day; Metro Nashville Public Schools has, according to The Tennessean, “had more than 200 teachers or staff members in quarantine or self-isolation each week since the end of October.” In a Reuters survey of 217 districts across 30 states, about half reported significant staffing issues—and this was before Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the arrival of deep winter.

[Nina Schwalbe: Why are we closing schools?]

The reason for the shortages isn’t intransigent teachers’ unions or unreasonable fear; it’s simply that the virus is too widely spread. Upwards of 200,000 new COVID-19 cases are reported most days, and Anthony Fauci recently warned that January numbers will likely look even bleaker. The new viral variant, if it takes  CONTINUE READING: The Debate About School Safety Is No Longer Relevant - The Atlantic