With recent calls for teachers and students to return to school in the coming weeks, many have had the opportunity to form their own opinions about whether or not teachers, students and staff should be forced to return to life as normal in the midst of a global pandemic. Threats of blocked federal funding if schools choose to operate on a virtual platform have also left legislators with a complicated task of trying to provide the safest education for students while also appeasing political leaders and their own constituents. At the end of the day, the President’s school reopening plans are both ignorant and disrespectful to public educators. Of equal significance is the fact that legislators who choose to support these plans also demonstrate a callous disregard for the education process and the value of human life as a whole.
Supporters of the messaging of the President regarding the reopening of schools argue that teachers are essential workers, and because of this they should go back to teaching students in person as soon as possible, even in the absence of adequate PPE or a plan for what to do if they or a student they teach contracts the virus. The difference between teachers and some other essential workers is that teachers have a viable option of performing their services that doesn't put them at risk. You can't drive a truck full of groceries across the country on Zoom, but as evidenced in March you can teach a class effectively on Zoom or Google Meet. Teachers are essential, therefore we should protect them and provide them with safe opportunities to work just like colleges and universities have done, not throw caution to the wind and treat it as if they have no other option to execute their duties to the children who they serve other than to go back to teaching in person, not socially distanced, with no masks required. It's a false argument to say that this is how people should be treated if they are essential to the way a society operates based on how other essential workers who had no option of working from home were treated at the beginning of March and into April. That was when our country was woefully unprepared to deal with the outbreak due to failures of leadership at the highest levels. The standard of being an essential worker does not equate to being expendable or to being a sacrificial lamb for others to try to cling to a false sense of normalcy in a time unlike any other in modern history.
Another common refrain from those pushing for teachers to return to life as we knew it before the virus is that we know more about coronavirus now, and so teachers should feel more comfortable with going back to work. While it is true that we know somewhat more about the virus as opposed to what we knew in March like wearing a mask reduces your chances of getting sick, and social distancing is crucial, and that the virus spreads much easier through aerosolized droplets than on surfaces, if masks aren't required when students are indoors and if social distancing isn't implemented and if students and teachers are meant to sit indoors with prolonged exposure to the same unfiltered air, then the things that we've learned don't matter anymore because we aren't taking the steps to practice this knowledge in a meaningful way. The glaringly evident fact is that the plans for teachers to go back to school are based on March knowledge, not July knowledge. July knowledge tells us that students and teachers should not go back right now without requiring masks, social distancing, and proper sanitation for all students, teachers, and staff. If that isn't possible then we shouldn't pretend that July knowledge doesn't exist and make plans based on what little we knew in March. That's irresponsible, ignorant and disrespectful to the teachers who are so essential to the way our society operates.
Being the daughter of two public school educators and someone who is at elevated risk of experiencing complications from this virus I'm glad my university is taking the right steps to provide my education in a way that is safe for me and my professors. It's disgusting to see that my parents and their colleagues in public education are being treated differently and are forced to go to work in an unsafe environment without proper planning or even a choice for an alternative, safer, equally viable option for employment. While I understand fears of students "falling behind" if classes are held with no in person instruction available, I also believe these concerns are largely misguided due to their reliance on a benchmark focused means of measuring student progress. Benchmarks are measures of progress that are used by educators to evaluate students on how they are performing based on how other students performed in the past. These benchmarks that people are using to reinforce the claim that students are "falling behind" were arbitrarily established long before the thought of a pandemic ever crossed anyone's minds. Today's students are faced with stressors that students of the past could not have imagined and are more likely to experience long term trauma from modern events because of it. To judge these students based off of the progress of the past simply ignores the significance of the struggles that modern students have faced and will continue to face regardless of whether classes are held in person or remotely come the fall term.
Ultimately, parents, students, and teachers alike all want the same thing-the best education possible for students in the fall. However, it is irresponsible for those in government who know very little about public education and what goes into being a teacher to blindly throw students, teachers and staff into potentially dangerous situations leaving no option for safer alternative means of education or employment. It's easy for those who don't personally know anyone who has been infected by or died from the virus to be desensitized to the fact that each new daily case of coronavirus and every death as a result of it is a person with a life as meaningful and complex as their own. Each person who dies from this virus is not just a number or a point on a line graph, but is also someone's mother, father, child, or grandparent and every one of those people's lives are equally significant and represent a tremendous loss. That very fact is why it is so extraordinarily important for legislators to get it right the first time in terms of back to school plans. In the words of everyone's favorite American patriot and one of Earth's mightiest heroes, "we don't trade lives". If Captain America's words ever mattered, now is the time to apply them. Trading the lives of teachers, students, and educational staff for a shot at restoring a sense of normalcy in these times which are anything but normal is something that no American should stand for and something that legislators with any respect for education and the worth of human lives should refuse to support.
