For more than a year now, a handful of medical experts and op-ed writers have condemned educators for being too cautious about reopening schools during the pandemic. It was repeatedly argued that in-person instruction should occur as soon as possible. Teachers were often blamed for being overly worried, even when they expressed legitimate safety concerns.
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist, for example, wrote in late 2020 that we have been “too willing to close schools.” More recently, in January, as Omicron surged across the country, public health commentator Dr. Leana Wen insisted “Schools must be open now, not in two weeks, as some have suggested,” and condemned teachers who disagree with her as “leftists” and “extremists.”
Those who insisted on immediately reopening all schools ignored the fact that schools face vastly different challenges.
Those who insisted on immediately reopening all schools ignored the fact that schools face vastly different challenges, depending on where they are located. Currently, in Oklahoma, where I taught for twenty years, only 9 percent of children aged five to seven years old are vaccinated, while the number for teens is around one-third.
Besides the risk posed by daily contact with unvaccinated students, educators must also work in a state whose Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, has repeatedly undermined local mask mandates, implementing a statewide ban on requiring them in public spaces.
In Oklahoma and other states, anti-vaccination and anti-mask ideologies make it impossible to implement the “layered prevention strategies” recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The situation has been made worse by other ideologically-driven attacks on public education.
Oklahoma is facing a perfect storm of low vaccination rates and rightwingers trying to undermine public schools. It’s also one of many states where fear of critical race theory, and the political benefits of attacking free speech in schools, are fueling a modern version of McCarthyism.
One bill currently making its way through Oklahoma’s legislature, HB 1775, bans educators from teaching concepts about race that actually are not being taught in primary and secondary schools. The rightwing Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs claims it will “prevent schools from mandating coursework based on Marxist-derived critical race theory.”
Two other Republican-backed censorship bills, SB1102 and HB 2988, were also recently filed; the first would require at least forty-five minutes of instruction on “victims of communism,” while the second specifically outlaws the use of The New York Times’s “1619 Project” as teaching material in public schools.
In states across the country, Republican lawmakers are rapidly pushing through bills targeting what they see as “divisive concepts,” including racism and sexuality. In Oklahoma, Republican state senator Shane Jett proposed SB 1442, a bill that, if passed, would essentially ban social and emotional learning in Oklahoma schools.
As local news station KFOR reported, this would mean that schools would be forced to “zero in on reading, writing, and math, and push aside classroom programs that incorporate a student’s behaviors, beliefs, or emotions.”
Commentators who berate schools for being cautious about the safety of in-person learning should consider the article published in The New York Times this past December about the city of Enid, Oklahoma. The article, written by Sabrina Tavernise, accurately captured how schools are intertwined with a full set of dangerous challenges to our democracy.
“From lockdowns to masks to vaccines to school curriculums, the conflicts in America keep growing and morphing, even without Donald Trump, the leader who thrived on encouraging them, in the White House,” Tavernise reported. “But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture—one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?”
Obviously, I’m not blaming public health experts and reporters for these assaults on schools and democracy. They face the difficult task of balancing the complexity of the coronavirus pandemic with messaging that is simple enough to be widely understood. I also recognize their need to balance science with the politics of the day.
I’m dismayed, however, by the way general guidelines are increasingly portrayed in a simplistic manner as being appropriate for all types of schools. This has prevented schools with low student vaccination rates from requiring masks, while they endure a variety of extremist attacks.
In many cases, deriding teachers and unions for not moving fast enough often only serves to provide more rhetorical ammunition to the right’s efforts to hobble public education.