The New York Times Magazine 65children are going to have as adults because of
how they handled Covid and the educational
aspect of the pandemic.
From a teacher’s perspective, the big thing for
me is that some kids enjoy being away from school
because school is a traumatic experience for them.
Schools overpolice kids. Students often don’t see
themselves refl ected in the curriculum. They spend
time in classrooms being ignored or admonished.
So for me, the priority is to humanize education.
Too often we just consider students’ data points
now. When teachers see kids as full human beings,
it changes the entire scope of education. It changes
the feel of a classroom. It changes the feel of a
school. It can change the feel of a district so that
parents feel like they’re part of the team.
Hannah-Jones: The pandemic has revealed that
public schools are one of the few institutions that
most Americans use and that connect us in a way
that we are not connected anymore in almost any
aspect of American life. We’ve seen how much we
rely upon them and how the very fabric of our
country feels like it’s unraveling without the ability
for our children to enter a public-school building.
I agree with John, we need to take this as an
F.D.R. moment, a chance to push the common
good again over the individual good. It’s not just
about what can I do for my own child, but what
function a school serves in our democracy, in
our community.
I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers’ con-
cerns in New York as we’re talking about reopen-
ing. They’re saying things like: ‘‘We don’t have
good ventilation in our schools. We don’t have
soap in our bathrooms. We don’t have toilet
paper, so how can we go back to school?’’ And
I ask, How have we allowed this to be? How is
it only in a pandemic that we’re concerned that
our children can’t wash their hands with soap
when they use the bathroom in publicly fund-
ed schools? I don’t want any of our children in
school with poor ventilation. I don’t want teach-
ers to have to supply toilet paper — toilet paper,
in the United States of America. So I pray that
we’ll come out of this more determined. I’m not
a hopeful person, so I don’t know that we will.
Bazelon: One of my greatest frustrations, as a
citizen as well as a parent, is that sending my
child to public school is a reasonable, feasible way
for me to participate in the common good of the
democracy, but now what? Our school district in
New Haven plans to have only remote learning
for at least the next 10 weeks even though Covid-
19 is very low in my state (at an infection rate
of 3.5 per 100,000). Private schools and charter
schools in my city are reopening, and almost
every other district in Connecticut plans to
reopen, most following a hybrid model. For me,
without the sharing and mixing of public school,
it’s much harder to fi gure out how to contributeto the common good as a parent in a way that
allows you to have your job and lead your life. Will
we go back to school at all this year?
Cordova: We had a parent at a board meeting
talk about the importance of getting kids back. I
was agreeing, and then she said, Don’t prioritize
those kids who don’t know English. My kids were
born here, and they deserve it just as much.
I get it. Everybody wants their kids learning.
But we have to think about our entire community
as we deal with the complexities of reopening.
Noguera: If schools reopen bit by bit, we should
think about making the priority kids who are
homeless or kids in foster care.
Bazelon: I have one more question. It’s a sad one.
Is this a lost year?
Noguera: For some, yes. It may very well be a lost
year. For others, it’ll be a blip. Shana is right —
there are kids who benefi t from learning at home,
who are enjoying the time with their families.
Cordova: I think it is superimportant that I lead
our district with optimism about what we can
achieve and temper that with the realities of what
is so challenging in this time. I never know if I’m
erring too far on one side or on the other side.
We’ve had a huge rise in youth violence in our
city. Kids have died, and there are serious issues
around guns, and all of that is underneath what
we’re doing. The violence isn’t happening in our
schools or on our grounds, but all of it plays out
in school communities, among the same kids to
whom we’re saying, ‘‘Log in at 7:30 a.m.’’ I really
am stuck on what to do about that.
Noguera: I think of myself as a pragmatist. We
can’t aff ord to just sit around now and lament and
say, ‘‘Well, I wish we had a diff erent president or
a diff erent governor.’’ We’ve got to do the work
where we are to expand educational opportu-
nities for all students, because our kids’ futures
depend on it. We have to do what it takes to make
sure that our kids’ futures are not sacrifi ced.
History is helpful here. After slavery ended in
this country, the emancipated formerly enslaved
people pursued education, created colleges and
universities, passed the fi rst laws in the South for
public education that universally allowed white
kids as well as Black kids to go to school. The
drive to pursue education was based not on any
guarantee that it would lead to a job, but because
we knew that education was the key to freedom
and empowerment in this country. It still is.Roundtable
(Continued from Page 47) ‘For me, the priority is to
humanize education.Too often we just consider
students’ data points now.’
shelter to watch her; the family lost that opportu-
nity. At one point, after a fi re alarm went off in the
shelter and sent them out into the winter night
unexpectedly, J began sleeping in his clothes.
Ultimately, through her own connections, Mae
found a tiny apartment on Staten Island where
the landlord was willing to accept her voucher.
J cried when he learned he would be switching
schools again, and not coming back to our school.
He fell far behind academically. The Staten Island
apartment turned out to have black mold, Mae
said, so the family moved again to another place
in the borough, where a relative agreed to accept
her voucher. J went to a new school again.
In August, Mae called me from their current
home on Staten Island. It was a nice neighbor-
hood, she said, but hard for her to navigate. Many
of the children went to private Catholic school,
and there was no laundro mat or store she could
walk to. She wasn’t socializing in the new neigh-
borhood and was panicking more.
She still talked longingly about moving back to
the neighborhood where she had many relatives
within 10 minutes, where she had grown up, and
she talked about having J come back to our school.
School was supposed to start in two weeks, but
she hadn’t heard much. Bus service hadn’t been
set up, and if there wasn’t a bus, she had no way to
get J to school. Remote learning had not gone well.
J had no live teaching, and his speech therapist
had sent Mae cards to print out. She didn’t have a
printer, and her dyslexia made it hard to read many
of the instructions that came with the assignments.
We talked about trying to get the boys together,
as we often did, and I felt a familiar pit of grief and
guilt in my stomach. From my son’s perspective,
on a random school day, his best friend vanished
from school without notice or explanation. The
day before, J had apparently told a few children
he was moving to California. At the time, I wanted
to protect J’s face- saving story and actually didn’t
know what to tell my son about where his friend
had gone. I didn’t prepare him to lose his best
friend, because neither Mae nor I understood
what the process would entail or how long it
would take. I didn’t know J wouldn’t be allowed
to have visitors at the shelter or spend a night
at our house because of curfew. My son missed
J terribly for quite some time. He made other
friends, but he never found a new best friend.
School was an exposure to the wider world of
our city in unanticipated ways; to the truth that
there was no place for a family that had lived in
our neighborhood for generations amid the new,
understated charcoal- gray houses, and that more
broadly, the enormous wealth of the city would not
insulate its vulnerable citizens but rather accelerate
their destabilization, and that the adults involved,
myself included, were seemingly powerless to help
children no diff erent from our own.
Homeless
(Continued from Page 63)