The best way to promote student learning isn’t to attack the very system providing it. Nor is it to endanger the lives of those who do the work and provide instruction.
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School reopening is the argument of the day as the Biden administration attempts to interpret its stated goal of getting kids back in school within its first 100 days.
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Teachers have consistently fought for a return to buildings #OnlyWhenItsSafe, but officials have relentlessly pushed to get everyone into classrooms, even during the recent highest infection, hospitalization, and death rates. Every couple of weeks for the last year, the school board held the ritual meeting of hearing another proposed plan and hearing community argue for and against it. It was exhausting.
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We don’t want to talk about race. We don’t want to consider the experience and history of others. The Manifest Destiny of the usual history book is the genocide of Native peoples. Two differing perspectives that no one wants to talk about.
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There’s a lot of uncertainty – new strains of the disease that the vaccine may or may not protect against. In a perfect world, we’d wait until the majority of people were as safeguarded as I am before getting on with everything. But we don’t live in a perfect world. If anything, the virus has shown us how imperfect it is.
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I am a public school teacher and my life has value. That shouldn’t be controversial. But every few weeks in 2020-21 as the global Covid-19 pandemic continues to spread unabated, I have to go to a staff meeting and justify my right to continue breathing.
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The appointment makes me think the Biden administration may become the best friend public education has had in Washington DC since the Department of Education was created. Of course, Marten does not walk on water but from my perspective she is the real deal.
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Make sure all teachers have the chance to be fully vaccinated before returning to the in-person classroom.
It is the least you can do.
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President Biden appears to be trying to create structure concerning this virus and its effects on school, and it looks like he supports educators and that is a huge positive.
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So to those in the media—STOP. Just STOP. Stop telling these kids they aren’t learning. Stop telling them that they are behind. Stop trying to justify sending us back into unsafe learning environments by lying to the public and demeaning the work being done. I’ve spent the last two days arming my students with the knowledge they need to combat this “fake news”. We all need to let the media know that our kids ARE learning and know more about how to function in this environment than most adults. Seriously. Enough already.
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The Trump presidency has cleaved the American timeline, and it seems Part 1 will close out in the same revolutionary spirit in which our nation began. The Capitol siege and the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo uprisings are the consequences of our history’s first volume. If we are to have any hope in healing the deep fissures of this nation, they must become the starting points of our second. What if from this point on, American History curriculum began with Standing Rock and not Columbus?
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It might not be controversial to use a seven year, 39% tax refund to incentivize wealthy investors to start caring about economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in dire need of manufacturing plants and low-income housing, but why does the NMTC favor charter schools over traditional public schools which are literally crumbling on our heads?
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I want to live in a country where majority rule is cherished and protected, where no one thinks the collective will should be trumped by white privilege.
No one can argue that there aren’t problems with children staying home and missing school; this is a tragedy of huge proportions. But Covid-19 will hopefully be less of a problem one day soon, and this country will need its teachers and public schools back along with healthy students, our future.
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It is clear that St. Louis Public Schools are in trouble and the vultures are circling. They have been weakened and are targeted by billionaires like Rex Sinquefield, Reed Hastings, Alice Walton, John Arnold, Bill Gates…
Read MoreOften, adolescent angst, high moments of extreme passion, and other normal developmental events pass soon after the triggering event. Far too often, it is the overreaction of adults that takes a minor concern and escalates it into a major crisis.
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In education, we know the power of expectations. Children, in general, rise or fall to the level of expectations we hold for them.
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There is a lot to these books. They highlight the multiple dangerous paths our nation is on which is indeed scary. Together Schoolhouse Burning and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door paint – a maybe not probable – but a very possible grim picture for the future of public education in America. Even grimmer is that this attack on universal free public school is also an attack of America’s 250-year experiment with government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” It is a credible attack on democracy.
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There will be no Christmas for a desperate state wanting its workers protected: EMTs, police, firefighters, teachers, grocery store workers, and more. Grinch DeSantis will keep the vaccine from them even as he insists that they risk infection each day they report to work.
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A system that places dollars and cents over life and health will never be acceptable. And that’s what we’ve got. Still. So don’t buy the latest version of corporate school baloney. Our children aren’t falling behind. They’re surviving a pandemic.
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