Held back
As parents realize how badly the U.S. botched
the next school year, we’re furious
JULY 24, 2020
The
happiest day in my household since the pandemic started — maybe the only truly
happy one — was the Wednesday in mid-March when we found out on the New York
City Department of Education website that my daughter, then in eighth grade,
had been accepted at LaGuardia High School for the performing arts. I cried,
she danced, we picked up a cake at the bakery and spent that night watching “Fame.”
From
then until the end of the school year, we lived the life that families with
school-aged children are sick of living and everyone else is sick of hearing
about: a miasma of sleeplessness, squabbling, incessant interruptions and
multiple simultaneous glitching Zooms. My low point came when, on a short break
from an unskippable work call, I went to the kitchen to retrieve my cold, abandoned
coffee and had to step over my kid, who was crying on the floor about algebra.
As someone who melted down over math problems throughout my adolescence, I was
sympathetic, but the most I could offer were a few words of comfort and a
promise to look at the assignment with her later. (At which point I would be
the one crying on the floor.)
We
were, and are, incredibly lucky: None of us, and no one in our extended family,
has gotten the virus. My spouse and I are able to do our jobs from home, though
in one case with a significant pay cut. We have broadband access and enough
functional devices to do Zoom school and work at the same time. Still, that
semester of online schooling was a miserable experience that we would all give
anything never to have to repeat.
Nearly five months later, though, it’s become
apparent that the Trump administration’s abject negligence means we’re about to
repeat it anyway. The implicit bargain of the spring was that if everyone
complied with the shutdowns, the isolation, the social distancing, the
working-while-parenting disasters and the rest, the government would use that
time to build enough testing, tracing and public health infrastructure so that
students could safely go back to school in person in the fall.
Instead,
having utterly failed to contain the virus, the administration is now employing
the crafty tactic of attempting to draw attention away from
the pandemic — as if we could be distracted out of noticing that we can no
longer safely leave our homes, we have no functioning public institutions
(libraries, museums, schools), we have lost more than 139,000
American lives, and we are well on our way into the worst economic downturn
since the Great Depression.
I can’t
be the only parent who finds containing my anger about this to be a full-time
job on top of the two I’m already performing poorly. So many of us did
everything the government asked, and officials responded by doing . . . nothing. After a
“Groundhog Day” summer of no camp, no vacations, no sleepovers, no public
pools, nothing to do with our children but wanly suggest another game of
Scrabble, it turns out that the plan for getting them back to school was as
vaporous as the rest of the coronavirus policy
all along.
Early
on, the administration shrugged its responsibility off onto the states, leaving
Americans with a wildly inconsistent patchwork of policies that varied
according to their governors’ political affiliations, the population’s trust in
science and the degree to which their states had shut down, or not. Now, with
case numbers rising in 44 out of 50 states, the
White House, abruptly abandoning its always spotty commitment to federalism,
has begun issuing marching orders about
opening schools full-time and on schedule, masks and social distancing be
damned. In a classic bit of Trump gaslighting, not only has any hope for
increased school funding dematerialized, but the administration is threatening to defund
individual school districts if they don’t comply with the order to reopen.
As late
summer closes in, there’s a special flavor of rage as parents realize that
we’re now being forced to advocate for the very outcome that, a few weeks ago,
we were hoping against hope to avoid: keeping school all-online in the fall.
However far from ideal this may be, we can at least be sure that our kids,
their teachers and the staff at their schools — who should get radical pay
increases for the risks they’re likely to assume — would stay safe and healthy.
Since
the spring, my family has engaged in thought experiments in which we talk about
everything we would be willing to sacrifice in exchange for other outcomes. We
agree, for example, that we would give up even our current limited interactions
with the world — daily dog walks, weekly grocery runs, the occasional
masked-and-distanced walk in the park with a friend — if it meant my daughter
could attend the school of her dreams in person.
In
those first days, when the lilac was blooming outside and the only goal on the
horizon was to shamble through to the end of the semester, this seemed like the
kind of bargain that atheists have been known to strike with God in foxholes:
an abstract “you give me this, I’ll give you that” transaction. Now it’s clear
that on a larger societal plane, this is precisely the deal we have all been
making every day in real life, though with the terms reversed.
What we chose as a country — or rather, what was chosen for us by an administration seemingly committed to chaos and entropy as governing principles — was to jeopardize the future of public education while prioritizing the opening of restaurants, bars and Home Depots, a chain the Trumpist governor of Florida has cited as a model for school openings, as if Americans had a long tradition of sending our children en masse to spend 40-plus hours a week in the aisle next to the garden tools.
What we chose as a country — or rather, what was chosen for us by an administration seemingly committed to chaos and entropy as governing principles — was to jeopardize the future of public education while prioritizing the opening of restaurants, bars and Home Depots, a chain the Trumpist governor of Florida has cited as a model for school openings, as if Americans had a long tradition of sending our children en masse to spend 40-plus hours a week in the aisle next to the garden tools.
If we
were willing, right now, to collectively agree to give up other activities for
a time — according to many epidemiologists, a hard six-week lockdown plus
rigorous public masking would do it — we could lower infection rates enough to
open schools safely, as other countries (Taiwan,
South Korea, Denmark, Italy, Germany, France) are doing. If the U.S. government
were willing to put more of the tax dollars Americans forked over this year
(perhaps with some resentment, given how little we can trust the feds to spent
it wisely now) toward overhauling schools for the coronavirus era, every child,
teacher and staffer could be supplied with masks or face shields,
well-ventilated facilities big enough to allow adequate spacing, and extra
in-school support for the physical and psychic trauma unique to this anxious
moment in history.
Prioritizing
schools in this way would be a universal public good, even for Americans with
no children and no connection to the school system. Set aside the enormous
significance of education for children’s enrichment, socialization and health;
just getting them out of the house during the week would allow parents to start
returning to work full time. That would put more money into a struggling
economy and lighten the load on their child-free co-workers.
Everyone
wants this to happen, if it can happen safely. Yet as summer wears on, parents
sound increasingly wary about sending kids back full time. An Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll this week found
that most Americans are concerned that reopening schools for in-person learning
will lead to a coronavirus surge, and 35 percent of parents think they
shouldn’t open at all. Another 41 percent of parents think they should only
open with “major adjustments.”
My daughter’s school-to-be recently gave families an early August deadline to choose all-online or “blended” classes for the fall. We’re hesitating, keeping an eye on the city’s case numbers as we weigh the familiar misery of Zoom against the incalculable risk of contracting or spreading a potentially fatal disease. Whichever we go with, we will no doubt spend the semester wondering if we harmed either our child’s education or our community’s health by not picking the other option.
My daughter’s school-to-be recently gave families an early August deadline to choose all-online or “blended” classes for the fall. We’re hesitating, keeping an eye on the city’s case numbers as we weigh the familiar misery of Zoom against the incalculable risk of contracting or spreading a potentially fatal disease. Whichever we go with, we will no doubt spend the semester wondering if we harmed either our child’s education or our community’s health by not picking the other option.
After
putting our lives on hold for what, by the time school starts, will be nearly
half a year, parents and teachers are now in the position of fighting tooth and
nail for an outcome we never wanted. Most of us are resigned to go back to the
hell of online learning, because the only alternative our leaders have left us
with is even worse. Their baldfaced abandonment of American families is only
one reason among many to wake up every morning ablaze with righteous anger. But
at the moment, it’s my favorite.