Introducing 'Schools In the Time of COVID'
Keeping a justice lens on education issues during the pandemic
Dear friends and readers,
I want to share a little bit with you about why I decided to start this newsletter now.
Debates over whether to reopen schools this fall, as the coronavirus continues to rage, have hit a nerve with parents and teachers as we struggle with what seem to be impossible choices. This week I wrote two pieces about why the choices we are being asked to make are not inevitable but result from decisions that have prioritized profits over our lives and needs. (You can read them here and here.)
I was taken aback by the immediate and widespread response. I am not a professional journalist. Instead, I’ve spent most of my life as an activist and organizer for social justice. I self-published these pieces on Medium and hoped that several hundred people who follow me there might read it. Instead, they’ve been shared tens of thousands of times and I’ve had people write to me sharing their own stories.
One woman is an educator of 29 years who described feeling terrified and abandoned by our society. Another is a teacher of 17 years with two young children who she fears their safety if she has to go back to school buildings. In my own life, my best friend is a brilliant and dedicated teacher who also lives with and is a caretaker to her elderly, diabetic father. If her school forces teachers to return, she may have to leave teaching.
I realized that the reason these stories struck such a chord is that schools bring together and highlight so many of the crises we face—ones that pre-dated the virus but have been amplified by them. There’s a real need for news and analysis that keeps a justice lens focused on education issues as we navigate this perilous moment.
Schools are more than just a place where kids go to learn. They provide childcare for working parents. They provide meals for children that might otherwise go hungry. They provide vital services and screening for children with disabilities or other health needs. Schools are the primary social world for young people—where they develop friendships and learn about who they are and how they fit in the world.
But schools are also places where children of color are heavily policed and subjected to racial violence—both physical and psychological. Too often, schools are places that reproduce, rather than challenge, existing inequalities. They are places where children are tested and sorted.
Schools are also workplaces. As social justice union activists have taught us, the working conditions in our schools are also the learning conditions for our children. We are all in this together. And right now we are facing threats to our schools on a scale that we haven’t seen. Naomi Klein has described the process by which broader disasters (like a pandemic) become an opportunity for those in power to destroy and privatize the social services and safety nets we rely on as “the shock doctrine”. For our schools, I believe this is a shock doctrine moment.
I am a public school parent, an education student preparing to teach high school English, and a social justice activist. I write from a perspective informed by these experiences and commitments. I try to take complicated issues and make them clearer. I am deeply invested in the human stories behind the headlines—the experiences and voices of those directly affected by policies. And I think we always need to ask whose interests are being served, and whose aren’t, when trying to make sense of debates around schools and education (and everything else!).
This newsletter is an experiment and work-in-progress. I hope that you will subscribe and read—and also that you will share your thoughts and ideas with me. I would love to hear how these questions are impacting your schools and communities and what you would most like to understand or read about. I hope to find ways to provide a platform for the voices of parents, teachers, and students and to share experiences across localities.
In the meanwhile, I would appreciate it if you could help me get the word out about this newsletter. If you’ve already subscribed, then thank you! It means the world to me. If you haven’t, then signing up is free and easy. It’s also the best thing you can do to support this project. I’d also love it if you could share this information. You can email it to people you know would be interested, tweet it or post to Facebook.
Thanks to all of you taking this journey with me.
Jen Roesch