Lost amidst the deserved lambasting of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for her ‘reopen no matter the consequences’ attitude towards schools is the pernicious effect on disadvantaged students of the loss of a year of learning. Parents lucky enough to be able to work from home and students whose parents can afford a fast, reliable internet connection may be inconvenienced, but the situation is not particularly dangerous. Only about sixty percent of Americans are able to work remotely; that leaves many parents scrambling to find ways to care for their children while they go into work. We also have evidence that children, particularly young ones, are less susceptible to the disease. However, keeping teachers safe becomes more of an issue, especially when we take into account the fact that teachers skew a bit older. The correct policy response is going to be more nuanced than something you’ll find on a 24-hour news cycle (and orders of magnitude more complex than anything Betsy DeVos is talking about).
Feasibility of any policy has to be the first step. It’s all well and good to talk about ensuring proper education, but we cannot open schools up without specific procedures in place and plans ahead of time for closing upon a certain number of infections. Our Secretary of Education does not appear to have anything in place, so states and municipalities are going to have to come up with their own plans. A plan must have two aspects: prevention and mitigation. Prevention will involve policies such as wearing masks, keeping students distanced, and minimizing contact between adults. Mitigation is a ripcord that will be pulled at a preset moment that closes schools back down at a certain number of infections. That part of the plan must also include virtual learning.
Ideally, we would never have to pull that ripcord. Effective preventative measures will keep that number down. Some measures may be a bit too expensive for lower-income communities to bear the cost, so Federal and State governments must step in to help. Keeping students distanced means reducing the number of kids in classrooms. Air filtration must be included so that central air doesn’t become a vector for transmission. Ideally, Plexiglas or something similar would be placed on desks. A proper set of guidelines would go a long way and funding them would ensure they are undertaken.
Inevitably, though, sometimes this will not be enough. The human element, especially when dealing with children, means compliance will not be 100% and, even if it is, there will still be some infections. When that happens, we need to make sure we know what comes next. If we make sure that students only are interacting in one group (their class) and teachers only go to their own classroom, we can quarantine an entire class if a teacher or student in that class contracts COVID. If it starts to spread among more classes, the entire school would probably have to go virtual again for a while. Clearly defining what that point lets us act quickly if things start to go wrong. Meanwhile, we can prepare for virtual learning when it is necessary. Students will need some sort of computer with access to the internet, video chat, and learning materials. Unfortunately, that will vary wildly in difficulty among students from differing backgrounds.
Virtual learning seems like an obvious route to take for those of us with reliable home internet and a computer. For the thirty-nine percent of students without access to the internet at home, this presents a problem. Some families may have multiple children and one (or no) computer. I know of one young person who had to use her father’s phone as a ‘hot spot’ for data in order to take a coding class. That’s well and good for a little while, but cell phone data can get expensive pretty quickly if you’re not on an unlimited plan. Everyone is going to need internet access if we want to provide equal access to education.
Here is also where we should delineate between young children and teenagers. The data I spoke of in the introduction was for children aged ten or younger. Older children will have an easier time learning online those under ten and we should allow or even encourage older children to go to school virtually, but you need access to the internet to learn on the internet. Instead of earmarking stimulus money towards F-35s, Congress should look towards our future. Children in households unable to afford internet access can ill afford to lose a year of education if they want to be upwardly mobile.
No plan will be perfect and, as the great philosopher Iron Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit.” We are going to get hit, so our plans are going to have to be flexible. We need a plan B, C, and D. We also need to allow states and municipalities to create plans that work best for them. The US is a big, diverse country and should be governed as such. What works in Chicago may not work in West Virginia or Atlanta. The best thing we can do is create an environment that will make succeeding easier for all school districts.