Thoughts on Reopening Schools
The uncomfortable thing for the pundits and politicians is that most parents aren’t blaming teachers. They have finally come to understand their worth.
By Jim Miller
It’s time for schools to reopen. That’s what the TV told me all of last week as well as a host of cranky pundits in some of the nation’s most respected newspapers.
Despite the spread of dangerous new Covid-19 variants, the CDC says it’s OK to return to the classroom without vaccines as long as a litany of safety measures are taken and everyone wears masks, washes their hands, tries to maintain some distancing, gets tested weekly, and the buildings are properly ventilated. Boom! Get on it!
Persistently high-levels of Covid-19 in the community don’t matter, nor does the chronic underfunding of schools. Children, particularly poor children of color, are suffering and it’s educators’ fault for prolonging the school shutdowns out of selfishness. They don’t care about the children, only themselves. So goes the narrative.
If it wasn’t for your nearly omnipotent unions, you’d have been in front of an aerosol-filled classroom months ago. So, stop demanding vaccines, you fussy obstructionist teachers, the chorus scolds, and head back to work, pronto!
As an educator myself in the San Diego Community College District and a union member with a son at a local public high school, I have a number of thoughts about this pervasive chatter.
First of all, the anti-union nature of anti-teacher backlash follows a familiar script embraced not just by Mitch McConnell and company but also by a wide swath of Democrats who’ve fallen for corporate education reform talking points and like to show how they can “stand up to their base” by demonizing teachers when it suits them. Or they are just grandstanding opportunists seeking to redirect public anger over the glacial pace of vaccination.
Insert pictures of embattled California Governor Newsom here along with a number of big city mayors like our own Todd Gloria who signed a letter demanding teachers return to school before being vaccinated without bothering to have a single discussion with local educators.
Of course, this is garbage, and Democrats who’ve spent the last four years attacking Trump for his authoritarian impulses and callous disdain for frontline workers and the lives of ordinary Americans should be ashamed of themselves for adopting a similar tone.
Teachers and their unions have been presenting plans for what a safe reopening should look like since last summer, and the sad fact is that the Covid-19 numbers and lack of funding to effectively pull off the safety procedures needed are actually real, intractable issues.
As a New York Times story noted last week, my national union, the American Federation of Teachers, has been actively engaged in trying to make safe reopening possible. We are also seeing agreements being negotiated in many cities to start the process before teachers are even getting vaccinated. It’s just not fast enough to satisfy the anti-teacher crew.
And while it is true that working class children of color have been suffering the most because of school closures, it’s also true that their parents and communities are not the ones loudly banging the drum to reopen without vaccines. Indeed, those hard-hit communities are the most hesitant to rush to reopen before it’s clearly safe. In fact, the preponderance of the pressure to reopen now is coming from whiter, more affluent quarters.
The uncomfortable thing for the pundits and politicians is that most parents aren’t blaming teachers. They have finally come to understand their worth.
As the aforementioned Times piece notes, parents have seen up close the extra effort many teachers have put in while struggling to do the impossible online or over Zoom. I’ve witnessed this myself as my own son’s teachers have gone the extra mile to work with him, even talking to him late in the evening and on weekends when he has needed help.
The fact is that all across the country, teachers have been doing their best to make an intolerable situation tolerable, spending endless hours on screens and redesigning curriculum in order to deliver it virtually while training on the fly.
Nonetheless, virtual education doesn’t work very well for so many, and the toll is staggering, with a sizable chunk of a whole generation of students falling behind despite educators’ best efforts. That said, blaming teachers for the wages of a disastrously managed pandemic and the effects of the subsequent economic crisis is the cheapest of cheap shots. You may as well blame doctors and nurses for our overwhelmed healthcare system.
I’ll add to this that in my own context at City College, where we won’t be going back in person this semester, I have seen what it would have meant for me to return to the classroom before a vaccine, and it’s not encouraging. Indeed, I have had multiple students with Covid-19 in every class I have taught last spring, fall, and at present. This is also true for my wife’s classes at the same college.
Here’s a newsflash for you: there are even some of my students who’ve told me they don’t believe in masks or that Covid-19 is real. Something tells me these misguided souls wouldn’t be obeying campus safety protocols. Think there might be some students like that in local K-12 schools as well? It would be foolish not to expect it.
The bottom line is that if I was back in school, face-to-face, in the inadequately ventilated classrooms that my institution simply doesn’t have the resources to transform, I would have surely gotten sick as would have a large number of students, my colleagues, and my own family.
Right now, my wife has a student who was recently hospitalized with Covid-19 who would have been all over campus before if we were in-person. When I think of what this would have meant in a face-to-face classroom environment, it’s a “what could go wrong?” eye roll moment.
The fact is that despite the building political push to take the big gamble, many urban school districts in cities nationally such as New York and locally like Escondido have seen outbreaks after reopening, and a decent number of teachers have actually died of Covid-19. So have students. And though the CDC just laid out new guidelines for reopening, there are still a good number of epidemiologists and doctors who disagree with the recent push to reopen before educational workers get vaccinated.
The uncomfortable truth remains that not every school will have the resources and/or capacity to do it right.
Thus, I’m not particularly sanguine about forcing my son’s teachers back into the classroom before they have vaccines, but now that may very well happen due to the political pressure coming from our fair-weather friends in high places.
It makes me wonder why I’ve spent months pulling 10-hour days on screens, frequently 7 days a week. Why was it that I obeyed public health guidelines, stayed away from my extended family for a year, and watched as many of my colleagues in K-12 endured unhealthy stress, depression, anxiety, alienation, and burnout while grinding away in in the virtual purgatory that has been the lives of many educators for the last year?
With the possibility of vaccinating the educational workforce just around the corner, and only a few weeks away here in San Diego, calling for a rush back to face-to-face instruction ahead of a vaccinated workforce doesn’t make sense.
A lot of harm has been done to students over the last year, but I’m not sure that waiting another month or so when the vaccine shortage should ease is such a terrible notion or that rushing back will do much to reverse that damage.
If my son gets sick or one of his friends or teachers does and brings it back home to a vulnerable family member after all of the sacrifices we’ve endured to try to stay safe and keep others healthy, I certainly won’t be comforted that the pundits and politicians are happy.
The fact is that despite the political posturing, reopening schools won’t happen rapidly as transitioning from virtual to in-person and readying a multitude of campuses, however inadequately, will take a while. But that’s not such a bad thing.
A slower pace will help get shots in arms before we tell teachers to go back to work. It’s better to be slow and safe than sorry later.
Then, once we are past this crisis, let’s see if all the politicians clamoring for reopening have the political courage to call for fully funding American education. That will do more to honor the sacrifices made than scoring political points by throwing teachers under the bus.
Lead image by Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay