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President Biden and Vice President
Harris are making steady progress toward their goal of reopening
schools for in-person instruction during the first hundred days of
their administration. Despite initial push
back from teachers and their
unions, most school districts have at least reached some hybrid form
of remote and in-school learning.
Mayors
and governors have yielded to teacher demands to be moved up in line
to receive the vaccines. But these moves do not address the complex
needs of poor children in low-wealth school districts in urban and
rural school communities. Schools are actually being built back
worse.
The
prevailing mantra is that the return to in-person school learning
will have an especially positive impact on poor children living in
poverty-ridden neighborhoods, which are viewed to have the greatest
need for traditional schooling since many virtually vanished from
remote instruction because of their lack of access to laptops and the
internet.
Also
ignored are the overcrowded, often intergenerational, single-parent,
overwhelmingly female-headed households of many of these children.
These families’ incomes are below or only slightly above the
poverty level for their family size. Schools have infrequently
addressed the complicated hardships of this student population.
Republican
corporate buzzards of public school privatization, circling above
low-wealth school districts, are also being overlooked as they wait
to swoop down on these schools and convert them into
corporate-managed private and charter schools to continue their
privatization initiatives.
To
quote Obama’s former education secretary, Arne Duncan, “…
the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans
was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it
took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘We
have to do better.’” Today, The New Orleans school system
is almost 100 percent comprised of voucher and charter schools.
Duncan would be likely to say that the COVID-19 pandemic presents the
best opportunity to privatize K-12 public education since that time.
This
view is underscored by the fact that corporate vultures promoting the
privatization of public schools are being aided by supposed stalwarts
of public education: Randy Weingarten, President of the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Majority
Leader of the U.S. Senate, whom teachers put in power.
Republican
leaders of major Wall Street financial institutions convinced Schumer
to slip a $2.75 billion line item for charter and private schools
into the American Rescue Act at the last minute without the knowledge
or approval of his Democratic colleagues. They also got Weingarten to
sign-off on this eleventh-hour addition to the original bill, while
keeping teachers in the dark.
As
the rush to reopen schools gains momentum, no substantial efforts to
remove lead from the water flowing into poor neighborhoods and cities
have begun, even though funds for these endeavors were in Biden’s
COVID-relief bill. We know that lead undermines the mental and
physical development of children and adults in neighborhoods ravaged
by this chemical.
This
public health disaster still plagues Atlanta, Flint (which led to the
indictment of Michigan’s previous governor), Milwaukee, Newark,
Washington, D.C. and hundreds of other cities mired in poverty.
All
the aforementioned cities have school systems that are
disproportionately populated by the poorest students in their
metropolitan areas. In addition, over two-thirds of these students
are from ethnic minority groups who now make up most of the nation’s
public school population and continue to surge.
The
Biden-Harris build back return to in-person education is failing to
respond to the numerous challenges faced by the nation’s
poorest public school students. Their educational needs are not being
met any better than they were prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
Reopening schools primarily benefits students from working- and
middle-class families.
Over
50 years have passed since the nation launched its War on Poverty,
and it is still losing the battle. President Biden and Vice President
Harris put forth ambitious programs for the elimination of the
pandemic and the improvement of K-12 public education, but they are
being waylaid by ineffective bureaucracies, other Democrats, and
so-called education leaders at national, state, and local levels.
Their
proposal to build the nation’s education system back better is
being frustrated at every turn by the lack of a comprehensive focus
by the program implementers. Moreover, corporate public school
privatization advocates are deploying their Democratic and Republican
supplicants to undermine the Biden-Harris political agenda which is
widely supported by citizens from both political parties.
So
far, the Biden-Harris public education agenda is being built back
worse through no fault of their own. To address the needs of
poverty-ridden students effectively, I recommend the following
strategies:
Facilitate and monitor
implementation of the education components in all 50 states and
territories.
Dispense with the notion that
getting back to pre-pandemic K-12 public education is sufficient for
poor students.
Unify the Democrats around support
for the agreed-upon program.
If
these or other viable approaches are not undertaken, the Biden-Harris
public education build back will have little impact on the education
of the nation’s poorest children - mostly of color - whose
numbers continue to soar.
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