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The Hechinger Report
Opinion: The truth about returning to school? There’s no easy answer
Parental qualms, subpar online classes, a lack of leadership and the
risk of death make the return-to-school debate nearly impossible to
resolve
By Morgan Polikoff
November 12, 2020
As winter bears down on most of America and Covid-19 again surges out
of control, pundits and parents alike are wondering when our nation’s
50 million schoolchildren will return to classrooms. With the election
over, now is the time for legislators and leaders in states and the
federal government to turn their attention back to education. The
debate is raging on social media, school email chains, and even around
the dinner table.
On the one side you have folks arguing that the science does not
indicate students are a major vector for the virus and that
pandemic-induced school closures are causing deep and lasting harm to
students, especially the most disadvantaged. There is truth here —
evidence is clear that children are at less risk than adults, and there
isn’t compelling evidence that careful school re-openings spike
coronavirus rates.
On the other side you have folks arguing that the science on
transmission in schools is murky and that schools are not safe enough
to reopen without the potential risk of inflaming the pandemic and
sickening or killing students and teachers. There is truth here, too —
many of the existing studies of school re-openings are flawed in some
way, and our schools don’t have the testing infrastructure or even the
physical spaces needed to ensure the situation won’t spiral when we do
reopen.
There are no good answers or easy options. Instead, we are paralyzed
because of four simple truths about the present situation. Recognizing
these truths is essential if state and federal leaders want to develop
and execute a careful plan that will get more kids back in classrooms
safely.
First, we have had a total failure of federal and state leadership on
education. From U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos saying it’s not
her job to track school reopening plans to states providing woefully
inadequate guidance and support for districts to move online, we’ve
done very little right. Of course, our leadership problems are
exacerbated by our wildly decentralized, 13,000-district,
every-leader-for-herself approach to school governance. As a result,
high-stakes reopening decisions have been left up to local leaders with
no public health expertise but strongly held political views.
Second, there is an unequal desire among families to return to school
that falls along racial and socioeconomic lines. Black parents are the
most concerned about in-person classes. The recent nationally
representative “Understanding America Study” to which I contributed
found that 89 percent of Black parents feel children are at serious
risk of health effects from Covid-19, relative to 70 percent of Asian,
69 percent of Hispanic and 44 percent of white parents. Most of the
lowest-income parents — 73 percent — were equally concerned about
health risks, compared to 42 percent of the highest-income parents.
Black parents have written about the ways that online learning can in
fact be a less biased, less harmful experience for their children than
in-person school and the pandemic has hit Black and Latinx communities
the hardest, so they have seen the dangers of the coronavirus first
hand. While online learning (which has a terrible track record) will
undoubtedly exacerbate opportunity gaps, it is the very groups that
have been the most historically underserved who are the most leery of
coming back to schools. In other words, even if schools reopened, it’s
not at all clear how many — and which types of — families would send
their kids back to classrooms.
Third, sending children and teachers back to school in person while the
pandemic is still raging will result in a non-zero number of deaths and
serious health effects. This is what we are all afraid of. But, of
course, keeping kids at home will also result in some deaths, as would
driving them to soccer practice or keeping them socially isolated for
months. And the down-the-road health consequences of keeping kids home
are unknowable. It is difficult or impossible to do the cost-benefit
calculation on health, but we can all respond to stories of teachers
dying. Even when the percentage risks are vanishingly small (certainly
true for children), that’s no consolation if your child (or your
parent, a teacher) is the unlucky victim.
Finally, we just cannot yet do online learning well. Traditional school
districts were not prepared for online learning when the pandemic hit,
and six months later it’s still a colossal task to deliver something
approaching the in-person experience. Our own data find that parents
who’ve sent their kids back in person report quality similar to
pre-pandemic levels, but those with kids still at home report quality
closer to their ratings of this past spring. With an aggressive,
centralized effort from state governments — perhaps requiring specific
online curricula, having clear requirements for synchronous instruction
and attendance-taking — maybe we could get some minimum level of
quality and equitable delivery across the country. But that’s
impossibly far from where we are now.
There are no easy solutions to this educational crisis, but
understanding these four truths could help us think about how best to
proceed.
What we need first is far stronger and more supportive state and
federal leadership. This starts with money — the new president and the
likely still-divided new Congress must infuse schools with resources at
the first available opportunity. Next, we need clear guidelines and
requirements for reopening that are based on our evolving scientific
understanding of this disease. This means things like requiring masks
in schools, which would reduce transmission, and which our
“Understanding America Study” has found are wildly popular among
parents. It also means supporting better online curricula, higher
quality broadband for families that need it and creative staffing plans
that allow the most vulnerable teachers the safest possible return.
Even with excellent leadership and quality online curricula, there will
still be parents — probably many at first — who want to keep their kids
home. Whether it’s Black parents wary of racism and the
disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on their communities or Republican
parents who resist mask mandates, no reopening plan will work for all
and we will likely be stuck in a hybrid plan well into the 2021-22
school year. That’s the hardest truth of all.
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