Amid the chaos caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, something beautiful happened in the realm of education: There was an immediate, staggering rush of grace.
What if we prioritized students’ holistic needs over preparing them for standardized testing?
Parents gave grace to districts scrambling to meet basic needs. Superintendents gave grace to teachers scrambling to work day and night, some totally unfamiliar with online instruction, many dealing with their own kids at home.
Teachers gave grace to administrators scrambling to develop new plans and protocols. And everyone gave grace to students, dropping the pretenses of standardized testing and grades, and doing everything possible within the madness of the moment to simply connect.
But as these connections were exposed, so were the inequities that made it harder to reach some students. More people began asking the hard questions:
Why are students and communities of color disproportionately impacted by this crisis?
Why are rural students and students in poverty so much more likely not to have the technology needed for distance learning?
Why do some districts have the resources and support to reach every student, while others struggle?
The murder of George Floyd also cast into sharp relief the inequities that are built into our systems. Teachers, parents, and students took to the street with a new set of demands:
Enough with systemic racism. Stop policing our schools and criminalizing the childhood of students of color. Fund counselors not cops in our public schools. Invest in the resources our kids deserve and our communities demand so that every child can thrive.
Black Lives Matter became a rubber band on the wrist of educators that snapped them into taking action on issues they have long ignored. People began to talk about what it would mean to have schools with more counselors, school psychologists, and mental health support staff and fewer school resource officers. What if we prioritized students’ holistic needs over preparing them for standardized testing?
But then, just as suddenly, the grace that felt like a gift at the start of this crisis turned into something far less attractive. Politicians and partisans began to bicker about everything. The HEROES Act—which would provide critical but insufficient support for reopening schools—passed in the House of Representatives but stalled in the U.S. Senate. And, through it all, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, America’s chief privateer, manipulated the crisis at every turn, looking for new and less accountable ways to funnel public money to private schools.
In Wisconsin, the birthplace of school vouchers (the nation’s first school choice program was launched in Milwaukee in 1990), in addition to federal aid earmarked for schools, more than 100 religious and private schools, and independent charter schools, received between $50 million and $122 million in CARES Act federal dollars not available to public schools through the forgivable Paycheck Protection Program, while also collecting their regular payments of state aid on schedule.
There is no clear state plan to support the 860,000 children attending our public schools through this crisis. Meanwhile, public dollars surge into private schools.
The Democratic National Convention may not bring the spotlight to Milwaukee in the way we once expected, but America has an opportunity to learn from the privatization story that started here and now drives the Department of Education, which is working to further deprive children of the opportunity for an excellent public education.
The COVID crisis has brought out our best and exposed the worst, and we have endured it so far with all the grace we could muster. But the grace period is over. It’s time to start putting our priority investments in the same place as our priority needs.
The only thing preventing us from reopening schools with all the safety measures and support they need is political will. It’s time to listen to the best economic minds of the nation and invest in our public schools first. It’s time to stop siphoning tax dollars away from public schools and into private pockets, and make sure every single public school has the resources and support to open safely and allow every student to catch up.
Despite the chaos and the madness, there’s really only one acceptable option: Doing what’s best for children. It’s time to stop playing politics with our children and their public schools.