On the radio this morning, I heard an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The interviewer asked Mr. F if he agreed with Florida teachers who are suing their state because they believe it's too dangerous, given the current pandemic, to reopen schools in the fall.
Fauci said something broad about the importance of keeping children safe; said that our large country is heterogeneous and that different protocols will be appropriate in different locations; and also said that we need to get schools open "because of the downstream negative consequences that we know can occur, unintended, when children are not in school."
Before we go further, a couple of disclaimers:
*I chose homeschooling, so I'm biased positively toward it as an option. (I felt especially militant after reading a recent Washington Post headline: "Homeschooling During The Coronavirus Will Set Back A Generation Of Children." Yikes. That's quite a claim.)
*I acknowledge that homeschooling children during a pandemic will pose serious—in some cases, insurmountable—challenges for some households, e.g., a single, underpaid mom who is a full-time essential worker with multiple children. This is one example; there are other situations that will be unsustainable. As a society, we need to provide enough appropriate support to shift these situations from unbearably stressful to, not simply workable, but to scenarios that allow all parties to thrive. If we really value raising and educating children, our policies will reflect that. Current policies and practices do not, and that has been true for a long time.
*I also acknowledge that some living situations will make spending time outdoors difficult or impossible, and that creates a profoundly suboptimal situation.
Those last two disclaimers, though, involve societal issues that need to be addressed. I.e., attending school doesn't cure or resolve what it means to be so economically and practically overstretched that you need to decide between caring for your kids or earning a living; nor does it provide an antidote to living situations without access to natural or green spaces. In fact, neighborhoods that lack open and green space tend to include schools that also lack open and green space. If you have ever visited a schoolyard that is poured asphalt or that weird springy synthetic material that is supposed to result in fewer injuries when you fall on it—without a plant in sight—you know what I'm talking about.
I can go down a lot of rabbit holes here, but back to Fauci's comment about the "downstream negative consequences" that result when children are not in school. I can think of some possible positive downstream consequences, e.g.:
*Children can spend more time with their parents and siblings and really get to know them. Typically, you learn more about others when you spend more time together.
*Children might have time and space to develop a genuine interest or talent instead of experiencing the forced dilettantism of the 45-minute class period. In school, everybody sits in biology for the same predetermined amount of time, even if you're really into insects and want to learn more about them. Everyone has music class once a week (or not at all according to the vagaries of local funding), or maybe band practice for 45 minutes after school, even if you really love your instrument and you want to play or sing four hours a day.
*Children and the adults in their world might have the opportunity to look critically at the institutions we inherit, such as schooling as we know it, and examine who, how, and in what circumstances they actually serve. If you're in The Matrix and you never step out, you don't even know there's A Matrix.
Since people in the U.S. began getting sick and dying from Covid-19, it feels like a lot of our decision-making around the disease has not been based on data, but rather on guessing. Sometimes the guessing seems intelligent and informed, sometimes not so much.
*For example, why are we supposed to stand six feet apart? Why not 12 feet? 8 feet? 5.5 feet? (Clarification: I believe social distancing is valuable and important. I’m trying to make a point about the possible imprecision of the recommendations we’re working with.)
*The CDC web site says that if you test positive with a coronavirus antibody test, it could mean that you have been infected with the organism that causes Covid-19 and maybe you now have protection against that disease OR it could mean you have antibodies from a different kind of coronavirus that causes the common cold. So: Ha ha on you. You might as well use a Magic 8 Ball to interpret your results. If you can even find somewhere to take the antibody test. It’s not easy to find where I live.
*Decisions to open bars, restaurants, schools, etc. seem to be driven more by economics or by a general fatigue over taking precautionary measures than by best practices for disease prevention. I get it. People need money. C.R.E.A.M. And many folks are tired of Sheltering In Place, the masks, the whole bit. I favor precaution.
*For the record, I think wearing masks, hand washing, wearing gloves, maintaining distance, abbreviating the length of contact with others, and using alcohol swabs all seem to be valuable practices based on real data.
*I’d like us to have a better understanding of Covid-19; a robust system of contact tracing; and rapid turn-around disease testing as well as testing for specific Covid-19 antibodies before we make decisions about whether to open schools and other public gathering places, and thus bring into close proximity a lot of people who will then spread out into their communities, with various microorganisms inevitably hitchhiking on their persons.
The rush to open schools seems especially confused and misguided to me. I’m beginning to think that there’s more at work here than simply wanting to “get back to normal,” or to relieve some beleaguered parents of the care of their children for six hours every day, or to ensure that kids “stay on track with their education.” By corollary, in some corners, there appears to be a deep hostility toward the homeschooling option, and I find that intriguing and curious.
What’s so scary about homeschooling? Years ago, I was part of a small panel of homeschooling parents who presented to a political group in San Francisco. Organized by a homeschooling friend, the presentations raised a lot of questions for the audience, and interesting discussion ensued. One audience member, however, at the end of the programming, reported that she found the presentations deeply problematic and irresponsible. She was a public school teacher, and she clearly hated the idea of homeschooling. Her response felt disproportionate and closed-minded to me at that time, but I think I’ve developed a better understanding about how homeschooling may feel threatening to some who are invested deeply in School As It Is.
More recently, as homeschooling has become a necessity because of the pandemic, I’m seeing a lot of articles like the Washington Post piece I mentioned above: "Homeschooling During The Coronavirus Will Set Back A Generation Of Children." (I can’t link to the piece because, despite Post owner Bezos’s obscene and growing fortune, he won’t allow non-subscribers to read the paper’s articles online.) Salon ran its own homeschooling hate piece: “Homeschoolers want you to believe the pandemic has a silver lining—they’re wrong.” And Harvard University law professor and director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program Elizabeth Bartholet wants to see a presumptive ban on homeschooling. Bartholet’s Child Advocacy Program also organized an anti-homeschooling, invitation-only conference that was cancelled because of coronavirus.
My point here: How can a small movement like homeschooling be so threatening as to warrant this kind of attention? I think Jeff Bryant, the author of the Salon piece mentioned above, touches on the answer when he writes: “[E]xperts warn that any growing popularity of homeschooling as a result of the pandemic will likely worsen education for students and pose serious problems to the economy and the nation's social well-being.” I’m referring to his linking of schooling and the health of the economy. Somehow, schools are interwoven with our economy at a cellular level. Part of that will be the tax advantages they provide when corporations like Microsoft donate oodles of computers and take the write-off; part of that will be the captive audience that the school system delivers when it contracts with entities like Channel One, which produces a news program punctuated by lots of ads that schoolchildren are required to watch. (Those contracts specify that teachers cannot change the channel, or shut the program off. Blech.) But I think the most basic and insidious way that schools feed the economy is more nuanced: Schools demand so much time, and require a tamping down of intellectual diversity and excellence and creative imagination that they make a grand contribution to creating a citizenry that’s basically anesthetized before they even get their SAT scores back. What better way to create a nation of consumers? Who benefits?
I'd like to circle back to some popular, current arguments about why we should open schools: Some children rely on free school lunches and breakfasts for regular nutrition. Children's physical activity decreases when they are not in school. We need mandated reporters, such as teachers and bus drivers, to notice and report instances of abuse and neglect so that those cases can be investigated.
No one should go hungry, but surely we don't believe schools are the only way to deliver daily, nutritious, prepared food to children who need it? Meals on Wheels has been delivering meals daily, seven days a week (not the five days of a school week) to elders who are housebound. Can we hack that model and create contact-free meal delivery for school-age children too? What about meal delivery for everyone that needs food? That's a project I would like my tax dollars to fund.
As for the idea that children's physical activity decreases when they don't attend school, I think the smart braniacs who invent stuff like the Fitbit app and identification systems that recognize a person when he or she presses a finger on a phone screen could come up with something helpful here. Can we deliver screen-based exercise programs and routines that require no equipment—body weight exercises, yoga, mat Pilates, dance routines, whatevs—with some means of accountability? I.e., can we ensure that the kid at home whose physical activity is decreasing is actually doing the exercise stuff? Could we incentivize doing the physical activity? Like pay money for completing a semester of a physical education class? It's not the same as Dodge Ball, I give you that, but the idea would be to introduce activities that a person can continue throughout the lifespan. It's hard to find a field hockey team to play with once you leave high school or college.
Even though I know there are big, hairy problems with the foster care system that children enter when they leave situations of serious abuse, the mandated reporter issue, where teachers, bus drivers, nurses, doctors, etc. are legally required to report signs of abuse and neglect, seems very important. I ask this rhetorically; I don’t have an answer: Is mandatory school attendance the only way to ensure children's safety in this regard? I do think it would be valuable for us, as a society, to consider what factors contribute to the abuse and neglect of children. I'll name a few that I think should be on the list: spotty or nonexistent mental health services for parents; lack of robust addiction services for parents; financial stressors; social isolation; lack of physical activity and access to open spaces. These are all big issues, but economic democracy and also giving a shit would go a long way to begin to address them.
One of Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s arguments against homeschooling is that it can create a context in which child abuse can occur unchecked. As I outline in the preceding paragraph, I’m sympathetic to this very serious concern. However, Bartholet’s simplistic belief in school as…what? A safe, wholesome alternative for every child? That belief smells skanky and disingenuous to me. News accounts report that sexual abuse of students by teachers has been increasing; as of 2016, corporal punishment was still permitted in schools in nineteen states, with the intervention used most commonly against children who were black, boys, or disabled; and a cursory exploration of the biographies of many young school shooters often reveals bullying and extreme social isolation. Bartholet and I both want to see children safeguarded physically and emotionally. We disagree that schools provide a consistent and reliable safe haven.
I get that our president wants things to be normalish so that the stock market doesn't tank, but pressuring schools to open sounds like a patently dopey idea. The other day at the farmer's market, a group of people, all waiting to get their bok choy and Thai basil, standing at marked six-foot intervals, watched the (adult) guy at the front of the line pull his mask under his chin to place his order. We all started saying, "Put your mask over your face, dude! Otherwise what's the point?" or some variation thereof. He's not the first noodlehead I see "wearing" his mask in a meaningless way. Good luck getting a classroom of six-year-olds to properly wear theirs while they maintain appropriate social distancing.
Given predictions that Covid-19 and flu cases are going to surge this fall, it seems prudent to actively decide to do school differently—at least for now. Once that decision is made, it's possible to plan and prep to make it as good as it can be. I think the hybrid idea—part online school, part face-to-face school—is flawed; if we are practicing social distancing and limiting the size of gatherings, any time spent in groups at school would seem to inherently violate that. Also, when we began to understand the magnitude of what we were dealing with in March, and so many institutions, including school, just screeched to a halt, everything, by necessity, had to be improvisational. Teachers, understandably, were not prepared to teach online and I think a lot of children had dopey worksheets tossed their way so certain boxes on certain forms could “reasonably” be checked off. For households that were not digitally equipped or savvy, it seems like it was pretty much: Too bad for you. We don’t have that excuse of urgency any more. There’s time to prepare, to build in supports for families, and to address the needs of those who don’t have the latest Macbook.
Parents should be bolstered in homeschooling their children, with financial resources sufficient to both pay them if working with their children conflicts with their ability to earn a livelihood, and to buy materials to make their homeschooling project successful (another endeavor I would love to see my tax dollars fund). I’d also like parents to have access to a stable of paid mentors—teachers, educational advocates, experienced homeschooling parents—available for consultation and problem-solving. This would be more in keeping with the It takes a village to raise a child idea than the compartmentalized, isolationist model we typically work with now. I think online classes can be good; they can also be garbage, and I don't think children should be forced to do online classes if they and their parents don’t believe they get anything valuable out of them. Not every child is able to sit in a seat for 45 minutes—either in a classroom or at home—and, as the mother of six sons, some of whom found that particular challenge difficult, it really doesn't feel to me that that should be a requirement for “success.”
Rather, students might do and study what they consider, in consultation with their parents and possibly a mentor, useful and meaningful to learn. Radical, I know. But I think teaching to the test and state standards that often have little relevance to a lived life have left a lot of people outside of the school project anyway. I favor trying something different. I have seen teenagers who, when faced with a head of lettuce, did not know how to turn it into a salad. Learning to do so would be time well spent.
And then after we've had a chance to experience something other than school-as-we've-been-doing-it-for-the-last-century, let's convene and talk about what works, what doesn't, and imagine and plan from there.
This video, which I understand is completely serious, offers an eerie glimpse of what schools that open this fall might look like:
https://twitter.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1259484706480979969