100 Days Is Too Long, Mr. President
Kids Need the Option to Get Back to School Right Now
President Biden has pledged to get (most) kids back into school in his first hundred days but stopped very short of requiring schools to reopen within any set time frame. This pledge —which is nothing more than a push—sounds a little promising until you do the math and realize that 100 days puts us at the end of the school year in many states. Add to that the fact that nearly half of America’s students are currently attending at least some school in-person and the 100-day promise makes no sense.
No parent should be compelled to send their children back to school in-person—remote learning must remain an option for the foreseeable future. But we must reject the blanket notion (largely being pushed by unions) that it is not safe to open schools. There may be reasons why schools in specific communities can’t open but the overarching push needs to be in the direction of getting the nation’s children back into buildings with their teachers and peers. In-person supports are essential (and legally mandatory) for countless students and we have done them a grave disservice by allowing the re-opening conversation to turn into a political hot potato.
Democrats (and comedians and political pundits) love to caricature Republicans as “anti-science.” Well, if they have any hope of proving their ‘party of science’ bona fides, they need to draw a line in the sand on this school issue fast and come out swinging for getting students back to school.
The unions are predictably unwilling to even commit to the Biden 100-day timeline. They will fight hard against reopening schools. So be it. They were always going to negotiate the issue to death because, as Mike Antonucci has written in The 74, “they know a bargaining situation when they see one.” Don’t for one minute think they are going to stick to the topics of PPE, masks and vaccine priority—they have already said they want smaller class sizes, more counselors, wrap around services and the promise of no standardized tests this spring.
Yup, that’s right. The unions do not want any of us—parents, policy makers, elected officials, taxpayers—to see an objective measure of where students are in reading and math after a full year of COVID learning. We absolutely need that information.
One NYC teacher finally spoke out in the pages of the New York Post and made the case that he should be back teaching in person in his classroom in Queens. He shares that at the outset of the pandemic, he was convinced that the virus would be brutal in schools. But he goes on to say, “I’m delighted to be wrong. There really is no reason to teach from home.”
And he’s hardly alone. Rank and file teachers from across the nation have begun to speak out more loudly about what they see as an urgent need to reopen schools.
Meanwhile, we continue to see stories like the one about California governor Gavin Newson —while his state remains in lock down and its largest school districts remain closed, his own children attend a private school in-person. We see the Chicago union official who insists it’s “unsafe” to return to school buildings as she jets off to Puerto Rico for school vacation.
Is there any doubt that this reopening debate has become politics in its most grotesque form?
There is no one way to “do school” during a pandemic that will work for everyone, largely because there has never been a version of schooling that works for everyone even in the best of times.
If districts refuse to open their doors, state legislatures need to get money into the hands of families so that they can access in-person learning somewhere else or supplement remote learning. (12 states currently have active legislation to do exactly this.)
This need for getting money directly to families is especially urgent for students who need extra support and targeted intervention in reading (and are regressing in their growth due to the pandemic.) For the Boston area mom who says “instead of reading, we got websites and circle time”, flexible education dollars would be a game changer for her son. The failure of schools like hers to comply with federal special education law will come to light over time and become a big story (Seattle and Indianapolis are already under investigation for special education violations.) But she and the millions of parents like her do not have time to wait for year long investigations to play out—they need tangible support now either in the form of open schools or education dollars in their pocket.
They certainly don’t have 100 days to wait.