Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Anne Marie Slaughter’s NYTimes Op Ed article, decrying the narrow definition of “infrastructure” adopted by the GOP and many centrists (i.e. neoliberals) in the Democratic party calls for a more expansive definition that would create a “Care Economy” in our country similar to that in place during World War II. She suggests we imagine “...a scenario in which those same men didn’t have wives at home and yet still wanted to have children, or to ensure that their own parents received love and support in their final years” and then notes that such an imagined world DID exist not that long ago:

That is exactly what the men in Congress concluded when the government was actively recruiting women into factories to produce the equipment and weapons needed to fight World War II. In 1941, they passed the Defense Public Works law of 1941 (known as the Lanham Act) to provide for the building of infrastructure like water and sewer treatment, housing and schools, all of which were recognized as necessary supports to the war effort. Two years later, Congress relied on this authorization to allocate $52 million (about $800 million today) to build over 3,000 federally subsidized day care centers.

And Ms. Slaughter then reminds readers that this wasn’t only true decades ago, it was true a year ago!

That is even what the federal government concluded just last year, under the Trump administration. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued guidance on who should be considered “essential critical infrastructure workers.” It included child care workers of many kinds and “human services providers” bringing things like food and personal care to “older adults, people with disabilities, and others with chronic health conditions.”

How then, she asks, can anyone having lived through the past year disagree that child care and service provision for elders is not an important element of our infrastructure? And the fact that the census reported that “some 1.6 million fewer mothers living with school-age children were actively working compared with a year before. Some 705,000 of those moms had “given up on work outside the home entirely” makes it clear that our workforce NEEDS the child-care infrastructure for these female workers to go back to work.

In reading about the need for a more expansive definition of “infrastructure” I couldn’t help but think that we needed a similarly expansive definition of school safety. So far school safety funding consists of metal detectors, door locks, video cameras, and student resource officers. As I have written frequently, “hardening” schools without providing counseling and social workers is divisive and counterproductive. But the public and politicians believe that the infrastructure needed to “harden schools” is limited to durable goods and enforcement of the law. We’ve spent billions on durable goods that reinforce fear, adapt children to surveillance, and promote the notion that the rule of law consists of close monitoring by individuals in uniforms. Maybe a broadening of the definition of “school safety” is in order at the same time as our definition of “infrastructure is redefining.