Opinion: Don’t Open The Schools

(Opinion) Don’t open the schools. Create a new way to educate our kids. Now.

Across the country, as schools have somewhere between a week and month before they’re supposed to reopen, parents, teachers, administrators, and school officials are wrestling with the problem of how to teach kids during the worst pandemic the world has seen in a century. The pandemic has stripped away the flesh of American society and revealed its bones.

Some of those bones are strong. There are the connections of friendship and community, the state and local officials who have pulled together to lead us through this the best they can, the medical workers who took extra shifts, the teachers who turned on a dime in the spring to finish out the year. A million smaller acts: people getting groceries for one another, starting gardens, saying hello to each other on the street more, taking time to ask — really ask — if everyone is OK.

But a lot of those bones are broken, rotten. There’s the economy that officials told us was as strong as it has ever been, until it buckled and shattered within weeks. The legacy of 400 years of predatory racism, which means more Black and brown people are dying of Covid-19 than white people are while they still keep getting killed by police. The long lines at food banks. The looming wave of evictions. The failure of a national system to contain a virus that is now wreaking havoc on us like a slow-moving forest fire; even after it’s over, we will take years to regrow.

We can see it all now. We can read it on the bones. We keep saying that the pandemic has changed the country, has changed us, that we can’t go back. Talks like that are the first sprouts out of the ashes where the fire has already passed, the first signs of the work to come, the work of decades, of reimagining what this country can be, now that we know what we know. It starts with keeping the schools locked.

* * *

America’s public schools have become so much more than the place kids get educated. They’re where millions of children get meals, health care, and counseling. Sometimes, in our segregated society, they’re one of the few places where kids have a chance to meet who never otherwise would. Other times they’re the flash point for the ways in which that segregation pervades everything.

School officials now are under extreme pressure to reopen in some way. There is the general consensus that online learning as we experienced it in the spring, at the beginning of the pandemic, didn’t work. Too many kids didn’t get the attention they needed. Too many kids disappeared altogether. There is the threat from the national administration to reopen or else. And there is the bare fact that millions of younger kids need someplace to go when their parents are working.

But the virus has laid out rules for us that we now know and can’t argue with. We know that when we share air in an enclosed space, the chances rise that we get sick and die. When we spend too much time close together, the chances rise that we get sick and die. There is nothing we can do about that. We have already gotten used to the death, made it into an abstraction by talking about rates of infection and mortality. It’s human to do that; we have to find ways to live with the fire around us and not lose our minds with fear and grief. But we are talking about people dying, and if we’re talking about schools, then we’re talking about kids dying.

Reopening schools means accepting the deaths of a certain number of children, deaths that we already know how to avoid. We all know this. How many dead kids are acceptable? Which kids? Whose kids? Are we prepared to speak at their funerals? To stand in line at their services and say to their grieving parents that the deaths of their children were worth it?

These are monstrous questions, and having to contemplate them is driving us mad. We can’t talk about it head-on; we say we can reopen schools but be prepared to close again ​“if numbers go up.” By ​“numbers going up,” we mean kids dying. There is no leadership on how to reopen a school. How can there be? It means being OK with dead kids.

So we turn to the rotten bones laid out in front of us. Parents who can pull their kids out of the school system altogether are talking about doing it, if they haven’t already. Parents who have the means to keep their kids home, doing distance learning, are doing that. That leaves the families struggling the most with the fewest options. They have to send their kids to school. We know what that really means: When we say ​“dead kids,” we’re really talking about dead Black and brown kids.

That is the manifestation of the deepest racism in the bones of American society, the structural kind, the 400-year rot, and in this time of greatest crisis, it will turn us all against each other if we let it. We don’t have to let it. We can understand it as another symptom of a system that has told us for our entire lives to accept the unacceptable.

* * *

We have lived all our lives with the grossest inequality anyone in America can remember. Some kids get private tutors and music lessons and dance classes while others don’t. Some kids live in near-complete financial security while others wonder how and what they are going to eat this week. The schools function in the midst of this; they’re part of the glue holding us and it together. We want them to help hold us together now. We want the community. We want the support. But do we want the inequality back too?

Take a good long look at those bones again. We say we’re not going back. It is time, then, for us to move forward, together. What are we really asking the schools to do that will really help us? And do the schools need to reopen to make it happen?

Did distance learning not work because of a fundamental flaw in the medium, or simply because we gave teachers in the spring all of three days to prepare for it? Are we interested in finding out? How do we fix the problems in it? Many schools continued to provide meals to kids while they were shut down. We have time to figure out how to improve that. Can we provide the counseling and other services, too? Is there a way to do that without opening the building altogether? Are we interested in figuring that out, too? Why can’t we hold classes outside when it’s warm out, and revert to distanced classes when it gets colder?

The questions now begin to cascade; they go all the way out. Why do we want to return to a system — not just the school system, but the overall economic system, the whole damn society, the U.S. of motherfucking A. — that we already know was so flawed to begin with?

The public school system is full of dedicated teachers who care deeply about their students; they work harder than most for not nearly enough money, and then they spend some of that to get their students what they need in the classroom. But we also know that public school test scores were at least partly a measure of wealth anyway, a way to game the system. We know that America’s meritocracy is a shell game now. We know that the people on the top of that game love to pit us against each other all the time so we don’t pay attention to the obscene profits they reap, just the latest round in 400 years of exploitation.

They want us to put flesh back on those rotten bones, so they can get back to the business of trading our time and labor for dollars in their pockets. If we give them what they want, that flesh is going to come from dead kids. Dead Black and brown kids.

We have the chance, now, to stop the game. To reimagine what school is, why we go and why we send our kids, and what we hope our kids learn. It will be messy work, but it’s already a mess. We are already starting from scorched earth. We can bury those bones in the earth, let them nurture the soil, and tend the sprouts that grow. We can do it a day at a time, with compassion and respect, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a better society to show for it.