As Schools Open

What Do Our Kids Deserve?

The pitched battle between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) over reopening schools reveals how teachers, their communities, and the entire working class have been put in an impossible position with no good choices. And it’s all being done in a futile effort to manage an economy that works for billionaires, on the backs of children and real people who just don’t seem to matter anymore, in a digital economy controlled by market forces. The Chicago teachers, like teachers in Arizona, California, West Virginia, Maine, New York, and elsewhere, who are standing up for safe learning conditions for our students, are demanding openings based on science.

Teachers are outraged at being punished for refusing to teach under conditions determined without their agreement when the gaps in safety are obvious. They’re outraged by insinuations that they don’t want to work, that their students aren’t learning, and that students can remote-learn without access to good internet and computers at home. In Huntington Beach, around 60 teachers took a medical leave when Huntington Beach Union High School District ordered them to go back to work. In early January in Arizona, a massive sickout by teachers forced schools to close, teachers who simply wanted a clear plan.

Parents are incensed at being forced to work as essential workers in unsafe conditions, yet not making enough to have one parent stay home with their children, enough to afford computers and decent internet, and then being told their kids should go back to under-funded, dirty schools where ventilation is lousy, and sometimes the heat doesn’t even work.

Communities are furious when schools in wealthy areas are held up as examples of the possibility of safe reopening when BIPOC and poor communities lack the resources, and their people are dying of COVID at 3x the rate of more affluent whites. The whole reason there are rich schools and poor schools is that education in America is funded in the states and allocated locally, with less and less from the federal government and most of that in competitive grants. Wealthy communities with higher tax bases and families that can donate lots of money have great public schools; broke communities full of essential-yet-expendable working families have broke schools. It’s even worse in a pandemic.

In this context of attacks and inequities, our government is placing its response to the COVID pandemic entirely in the hands of corporations to deal with as the market pleases. They won’t even produce vaccines as fast as needed because they can’t maintain production facilities for emergencies if they’re not profitable all the time. By that logic, why should we fund fire departments when there aren’t fires – why not set them up during the fire?

Attacks on the CTU and other teachers are expressions of a divisive pattern of scapegoating happening nationwide. These attacks weaponize parents, communities, and society against each other, with no good answers for our students, families, and communities.  And while CPS said teachers were hurting Black and Latinx children, those same families were holding car caravans to support teachers! According to one study, only about 20% of Black and Latinx families want their kids back in school full time under the current conditions. The pressures on working families are tremendous, and while working class parents want their children back in school, they want them back safely.

To Reopen, or Not To Reopen. . .

The real question is, under what conditions should schools reopen, and who’s empowered and in control? No one disagrees that children need personal contact with their teachers and friends, but that need is being discussed in an atmosphere of mistrust and dictatorial behavior that shines a spotlight on every weakness and inequity of education today.

When politicians cite reports about schools that are safely and successfully reopening, they’re talking about wealthy, modern, clean, well maintained, fully staffed, tech-equipped schools where broad COVID preventive measures are commonly in place –  from temp checks, PPE, small classes, and contact tracing to total vaccinations. Such schools are mostly in wealthy communities with low COVID transmission rates because community members commonly can work remotely, have great health insurance, and tech-equipped homes with great internet connectivity.

“They’re not thinking of schools on the West Side of Chicago whose facilities haven’t been upgraded for a generation,” says CTU Executive VP Stacy Davis Gates. “They’re not thinking of schools on the South Side of Chicago that have been perpetually unclean because we have privatized our janitorial staff.”  That describes most public schools in the U.S.A. today, after 45 years of fund-starvation and neglect from government. It also describes most communities in the country today, where poverty grows constantly and “nearly all U.S. kids live in red zones under new CDC guidelines,” according to CNN.

It’s impossible to separate education, COVID, and communities from each other. None of these crises can be addressed without addressing all of them based on real human needs, not corporate bottom lines or distorted government budgets. Over and over, we see a system controlled by corporations is incapable of doing what the people need it to do, whether it’s schools, climate, COVID, clean water, or police violence.

Decisions by government to force reopening, without agreement in the community, and without adequate safety measures in the middle of a pandemic, are also attacks on the limited democracy we have because they dictate bad policies to serve corporate interests.

The pandemic is being used as a cover to turn public education into a corporate-controlled dictatorship. Every day, more and more of our public services and property are sold off by government or given away outright to corporate America. Corporate business requires a source of taxpayer-provided profit because actually providing goods and services is no longer profitable. The same thing is being done to our public schools. People want government to act like a democracy, not like a private company, which is to say a dictatorship.

It’s time to say “NO!” to the Reopen-Or-Else madness and the corporate takeover of public education.  It’s time to say “YES” to what’s really needed to reopen schools for students, families, teachers, staff, and communities and to move education ahead into the future. It’s time to listen to the voices of educators and communities across the nation.

With so many fighting for what education needs, it’s useful to see what folks are already fighting for. Educators around the country are demanding vastly better conditions as a minimum for safe return.

• Fund education nationally, no games, and no grants. National funding is the only way to stop the Rich School – Poor School disaster that feeds and maintains inequality and systemic racism. Fund schools and communities instead of the national pattern of spending huge percentages of city budgets on militarized policing
• Any solutions to promote education under COVID must be controlled by parents, teachers, staff, and students based on science and community realities. Administration and government must work with all of them, as an advocate for the community.
• Just teaching students in a single format – in person or remotely – is hard enough. Combining remote and in-person students in a single class is to be done only with full teacher, parent, student agreement, and with team teaching and extra staff to support the teachers, with no loss of instructional minutes for remote learners.
• Guarantee every school, every family, and every community the same conditions that allow wealthy communities to succeed in COVID;
• Full testing, contact tracing, PPE, and vaccinations for all students and staff, and the entire community at no cost, with paid time off for quarantine.
• Guarantee every student their own computer, every household internet/wi-fi to support all family members, and high-speed internet to their neighborhood, city, town, or rural area.
• Every teacher and school must receive full training on how to work effectively with their age group of students and their families via remote learning media.
• For classroom learning, conditions must be set up to meet both necessities – COVID safety and educational effectiveness, and that means reduced class sizes.
• Guarantee every school gets enough well-trained support staff to deal with complexities and difficulties educators and families are suffering due to COVID and the economic crisis. Food, nursing, custodians, IT, counselors, and mental health staff must be above and beyond staffing in normal conditions to reduce individual contact loads. Staffing decisions must be made by the students, teachers, staff, and parents. Government must support them.
• Upgrade, refurbish, clean and maintain every school in every community, just like the rich schools.
• Corporations claiming to act in support of public education must supply their goods and services at cost, with no profit. Tech corporations already get the internet through government funding, plus public education provides them with taxpayer-funded educated workers.

What’s listed above are minimum demands, which must be continued as permanent conditions when the pandemic is over. We will never go back to normal; normal was terrible anyway.

As anyone can see, even these minimum demands require the end of poverty, the end of systemic racism, the end of attacks on all workers – something today’s government and today’s system is incapable of providing. When we fight for these things our communities need, we’re fighting for a different world.

The Future of Education

Even at its best, when the capitalist system needed skilled workers and managers by the millions, public education was always focused on providing compliant workers to do the bidding of industry.  That means narrowing down independent thinking. Teachers who want to help students fulfill their true potential have always had to resist that model. Real education is to unleash the power of the youth.

We have to re-establish education on a new basis – trust. Trust that children want to learn and teachers want to teach. Education must be education for everyone, with every learning style and every kind of intelligence. It’s easy to panic because we know how insecure life is today, and we see that it’s becoming worse. It’s tempting to aim education at making kids ready for jobs. But science shows that a kid whose built-in brilliance and curiosity hasn’t been dimmed by rote learning and meaningless testing will be empowered to study, and grab knowledge and skills as needed. Like the rest of today’s youth, these students will play the strongest part in building a different world that we all deserve.

Fighting Forward for Our Future

Our communities, as well as our schools, are in a fight for our lives. Every School Board and Local School Committee meeting, every public policy meeting is a battleground for all of these demands, not just a few of them.

The future of humanity hinges on making massive changes to every aspect of life. It’s time to demand and aim for a life free of corporate power and greed. Every step on that path is for our kids. They deserve nothing less.

Published: March 12, 2021
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