By Claire Cahen and Leah Z. Owens
Parents, students and education workers are anxious to know: will Newark Public Schools campuses reopen this fall? The official announcement has yet to be made, but we know that many questions exist in the minds of Newark education workers regarding the extent to which it is safe to return to buildings that weren’t fit before COVID-19. The delays and hesitation that have peppered this decision belie what many of us know to be true: resuming in-person learning prematurely will risk the lives of our students, education workers and the entire community.
Let’s consider the facts.
Though New Jersey has made important progress in flattening the curve, keeping infection rates low for most of June, Gov. Phil Murphy announced on July 2 that the state was no longer on track to contain the virus. Past experience has taught us how quickly one localized, but unmanaged outbreak can turn into large-scale community spread.
Reams of data confirm higher rates of death and infection among low-income populations, particularly those of color. The people of Newark, 28% of whom live in poverty, 50% of whom are Black and 36% of whom are Latinx, are deeply structurally vulnerable to the disease. While there is nothing natural or inevitable about this vulnerability— a result of the abandonment and exploitation of poor and racialized populations — it does reaffirm that, so long as the pandemic is raging in neighboring states and knocking at New Jersey’s door, the fate of Newark is particularly tenuous. Our institutions have yet to demonstrate their capacity to control this viral outbreak; we are simply not in the same situation as non-U.S. cities like Montreal, Canada, which are pointed to as models of success in safely reopening schools.
None of this is to minimize the risks associated with prolonging online learning. In an educational system already fraught with inequities, online learning threatens to inflict the greatest harm on low-income students and students with disabilities as well as students without stable internet, a computer, or study space. Online learning also places an undue burden on parents now tasked with childcare and tutoring in addition to working and holding on to a job in an economy that is bottoming out.
COVID-19 has illuminated disparities that exist in our society, and in our educational system specifically. These challenges require a set of bold solutions. How we decide to go about reopening schools, frankly, can help us usher in a more egalitarian era.
What if, in Newark, beginning with the city’s public schools, we were to do things differently? What if, instead of giving parents the macabre choice between “homeschooling” or earning a paycheck, between forgoing income or potentially dying of the virus, we implemented some sort of universal basic income? What if we made internet free at the point of use, not just for the duration of this pandemic but for the longer term, through some sort of public control of telecommunications?
What if we used taxpayer dollars to permanently distribute a laptop to every student because in the year 2020 that’s just common sense? We could hire additional multilingual teachers and social workers, and reduce class size to allow educators to give more individualized, albeit virtual, attention to students in need, as well as support to parents in this difficult time.
In the longer-term, the pandemic has laid bare our need to address housing issues like overcrowding and homelessness, which have always deeply impacted educational outcomes. And if public education is so important that we are discussing risking our students’ and educators’ lives to have schools return to “normal,” then we ought to be investing in education accordingly, rather than continually making cuts to personnel, infrastructure, and supplies. Nothing short of such investment will be necessary when, indeed, it is safe to return to the classroom and we can finally, in-person, confront the full injustice and trauma of this pandemic.
We can redistribute our public resources to make this reckoning fruitful, even transformative. The question is do we have the political will?
Leah Owens, Ph.D is a founding member of NEW Caucus,
Claire Cahen is a researcher and education scholar at the City University of New York (CUNY).
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