One Question: How Can Public Schools Emerge from the Pandemic Better Than Before?

Q: “How Can Public Schools Emerge from the Pandemic Better Than Before?”

DIANE RAVITCH

Author and historian of education at New York University.

When in-person school resumes this fall, students will return to their classrooms, teachers will be delighted to see their students, and parents will heave a sigh of relief. The hawkers of “Ed-Tech” will find that their vision of an online-immersive future is suddenly harder to sell.

The greatest threats to public education are twofold: the expansion of privatization in Republican-controlled states and the readiness of the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the separation of church and state by legalizing vouchers for religious schools. Voters must not elect legislators who are happy to dispense public funding to privately managed charters or religious schools.

The way to preserve and improve our public schools is if voters throw out those who want to defund and destroy public education.

MICHÈLE FOSTER

Author, professor, and Henry Heuser Jr. Endowed Chair for Urban Education Partnerships at the University of Louisville.

The pandemic reinforced things we already knew about U.S. society and schools. The resource gap was on full display: Families with lower incomes had fewer tech devices at their disposal, less broadband access, and parents—more likely to be essential workers—unable to help with online classes.  

To emerge from the pandemic better than before, we must support families and children, making sure families have sufficient income, safe housing, adequate food and nutrition. We must provide parental leave, health care, dental care, mental health services, and free or subsidized day care and kindergarten.

We must diversify the teacher corps, invest in teachers, and trust their expertise to do their jobs as professionals and pay them accordingly. Schools must focus on helping students to learn, not merely pass tests. Schools must also offer relevant curriculum, including teaching those aspects of U.S. history that are unflattering. In short, society and schools must focus on equity.

CAROL BURRIS

Author and executive director of the Network for Public Education.

The question is vexing because it ignores the exhaustion of principals and teachers, who in many cases ran online and in-person schooling at the same time, while personally suffering the hardships of the pandemic.

But schools should and can improve over time, absorbing lessons learned from the past year. They can facilitate authentic and respectful conversations about race, power, and privilege. They can identify and eliminate policies in discipline and curriculum that result in racial and socioeconomic inequality. They can build emotional and social support plans for children who suffered in social isolation during the pandemic. They can use the best technology offered during school closures, while also realizing that no computer program can ever “personalize” learning.

Public schools can never emerge better unless we recommit to public schools as a public good, not a commodity. The challenge of “better” is on us all.