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

DC Charter school teacher Lelac Almagor wrote a heartfelt but dismaying op ed piece in today’s paper titled “I Taught Online School This Year. It Was a Disgrace“. These three paragraphs summarize how his experience with remote learning jibes with the pre-Covid realities of schooling where the affluent parents and children have entirely different experiences in school, where the well-being of businesses is a higher priority than the well-being of children, and where parents have lost faith in public education’s ability to deliver a quality schooling:

I don’t know the first thing about public health. I won’t venture an opinion on what impact the school closures had on controlling the spread of Covid. What I do know is that the private schools in our city quickly got to work upgrading HVAC systems, putting up tents, cutting class sizes and rearranging schedules so that they could reopen in relative safety.Public schools in other states and countries did the same.

More of our public school systems should have likewise moved mountains — repurposed buildings, reassigned staff, redesigned programming, reallocated funding — to offer consistent public schooling, as safely as possible, to all children.

Instead we opened restaurants and gyms and bars while kids stayed home, or got complicated hybrid schedules that many parents turned down because they offered even less stability than virtual school. Even now, with vaccinations rising and case rates dropping, some families remain reluctant to send their kids back to us in the fall. I can’t help thinking that’s because we broke their trust.

President Biden’s ambitious infrastructure proposal addressed the flaws Covid revealed… but they cost a lot of money, require the rich (i.e. those making more than $400,000/year) and businesses to pay more taxes, and implicitly place a higher value on care than on safety. I fear that the package is DOA… and the pre-Covid status quo will prevail.