It’s the end of August as parents, students, and educators all wait to see how reopening schools is going to pan out this fall. So far, it doesn’t look great.
Several institutions have already seen outbreaks within two weeks of opening and have been forced to move to remote learning, and with photos of cramped public school hallways and raging college parties going viral, someone has to ask the hard question.
Does reopening make any sense at all?
It is natural for kids to want to see their friends at school, for parents to need some peace and quiet so they can work from home, for teenagers to demand they get the most out of their college experience.
It’s not their fault our government has no clear-cut plan for going back to school safely, but it is their lives that will be put in danger if we don’t come up with a solution, quickly.
Going back to school is yet another big business most of us were blissfully unaware of in our lives before corona, but with a price tag of $80.7 billion, we all have to worry about where the bottom line falls for our politicians, our retail industry, and the forces of Wall Street who are relying heavily on September spending to get the economy back on its feet.
And a similar story goes for colleges and private K-12 schools, who are, for the most part, charging pre-pandemic tuition—and in some cases, coronavirus-related fees—for hybrid or online classes.
The U.S. education market is valued at almost $2 trillion, with most of its revenue acquired from tuition, fees, federal grants, and depending on the size of the school, sports, and room and board, which explains why most people in positions of power want to see students back in the classroom this fall.
But the problem is, students are being asked to sacrifice way more than they will be receiving in return.
Many educators who could have spent the summer learning how to teach effectively online and, more importantly, how to engage in trauma-informed instruction, have instead spent their summers worrying about going back to school and connecting with students behind a mask, face shield, and plexiglass partition, not to mention worrying about their lives. This is a real problem considering almost 80% of teachers K-12 are over the age of 30, and the average age of a college professor is 55, meaning, their expertise lies more in in-person teaching techniques than in developing online material for a generation of digital natives.
And that’s not their fault either. The United States has fallen far behind in offering tools for students and educators in the 21st century, and while the pandemic could have revolutionized the industry in 2020, it has instead laid bare the many faults—both pedagogical and financial—that exist in American education today.
Many K-12 educators have lost their jobs over the summer, and full-time faculty are already being fired or furloughed to alleviate stress from the budget, leaving instruction to underpaid, overworked adjunct faculty, myself included, who are worried to speak to their bosses and provosts about their anxieties concerning returning to campus amid daily reports of school closures and rapid infection rates amongst students.
We don’t have tenure, we don’t have health insurance, and like so many other Americans, we have few—if any—options for alternative employment.
Whether schools announce last-minute transitions to online learning, like Columbia did last week, or they start in person and move online, steps need to be taken to ensure the health of all of our communities, not just the elite. Public and private schools and colleges of less renown need to be moved online, in New York City and around the country, because our children’s lives are more important than Wall Street.
We need to stop pretending as if people under the age of 22 are safe from this virus. They are not, and neither are the educators who are, as always, rising to the task of taking care of their students without the aid they so desperately need.
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