Back to School—But Not as We Knew It

many systems would otherwise have been preoccupied with at the time the pandemic hit.101

Then there are Andy’s twin granddaughters and his grandson. When he asked them to draw what they missed about school, none of them drew things that depicted their learning or even their teachers. Andy’s grandson drew a picture of digging up worms with his friends. One of the twins drew a slide out in the yard. Then the other one sketched an image of herself, with two figures, that represented what she was not missing at school. “Who are they?” Andy asked. “My two enemies,” she said. Life in school isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be.102

When everyone returns to school, then, it’s not necessarily going to be a glorious reunion with engaging and innovative learning. Nor will it mark a reluctant abandonment of superior home-based alternatives, either. For many students, teachers, and parents, when the health conditions are sufficiently safe, going back to school is mainly just a blessed relief—a return to some semblance of normality, being part of a community, getting back together with friends.

Back to School—But Not as We Knew It

As the COVID-19 lockdown stretched through into the fall and winter of 2020, pressure mounted to get children back to school. Once safety considerations have been ensured, getting children back to school really does matter. Schools play a vital role in smoothing out the extreme peaks and troughs that define the differences between family circumstances. When privileged families get more and more exclusively involved in their children’s education, educational inequalities increase. Richard Rothstein, Senior Fellow at the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote an article, which appeared in The Washington Post, on “Why Covid-19 Will ‘Explode’ Existing Academic Achievement Gaps.”103 He pointed to research findings predating COVID-19 that indicated how “children whose parents can more effectively help with homework gain more [academically] than children whose parents can do so less well.”

These differences extend into summer learning opportunities. “The educational gap is wider when children return after summer vacation than it was in the spring, because middle-class children frequently have summer enrichment that reinforces knowledge and experience.” When almost everybody is confined to “learning at home,” these inequalities are magnified many times over, he pointed out.

People like us, who have advised parents and teachers on public media to steer clear of dreary worksheets and to get children engaged with natural learning opportunities in their home environment like baking, gardening, playing music, knitting, skipping, bird-watching, writing postcards to grandparents, and so on, have been speaking mainly to middle-class parents, who already have time, space, knowledge, and resources to support their children’s learning in this way. Children in these families may have managed to more than keep up with the curriculum. Many middle-class parents, already used to inundating their children with extra activities to keep them ahead of the pack, actually helped their children surge even further ahead during the pandemic.104 Indeed, a few elite parents added their children’s awesome learning accomplishments to other pandemic boasts on social media about sourdough baking and epic home-gym workouts.105 Helicopter parents took advantage of the new digital learning environments to hover on Zoom, in front of the virtual teacher, their own children, the whole class, and each other—creating a kind of hyper-engagement that stressed everybody out beyond belief.106

Meanwhile, children in many working-class families, especially ones who were already in poverty or who had been thrust into it by the virus, where parents don’t have the financial or cultural capital of their middle-class counterparts, have often struggled to find a time and place to study. Millions stayed at home all alone with no one to look after them while their parents went out to work in hazardous situations with no personal protective equipment.107 These children have had to struggle to get the academic help they need whenever and however they can. For many of these families, issues like buying groceries and paying the rent became new and persistent problems. According

to The Washington Post, the surge of people living in poverty in the United States in 2020 was “the biggest single jump since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago.”108 By January 2021, nearly 11 million U.S. children—roughly one out of every seven—were poor.109 These problems were not specific to the United States. In the United Kingdom, by the end of 2020, and despite government programs of substantial financial support, 700,000 people had still fallen into poverty because of COVID-19—120,000 of them being children.110 In Europe, the collapse of the tourism industry was a major contributor to rapidly rising poverty levels across the continent.111

In many countries, issues of social class inequality are compounded by racial and ethnic marginalization. In the United States, the pre-existing poverty gaps between groups “have widened during the pandemic.” While “before the pandemic, the monthly poverty rate for White individuals was 11 percent, versus 24 percent for Black and Hispanic individuals,” by October 2020 the rate had climbed to 26.3 percent for African Americans, 26.9 percent for Hispanics, and 12.3 percent for Whites.112 Meanwhile, the aggregate child poverty rate in the United States had almost reached 20 percent, or one out of every five children.113 Like the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries also displayed unequal COVID-19 death rates along racial and social class lines, and especially at the intersections of the two. This was due to a number of factors, including poor and racially marginalized populations having a greater likelihood of holding high-risk occupations as essential workers, having a greater frequency of living in multifamily and densely populated dwellings, having to resort to crowded public transportation to get to work and back, or other life circumstances.114

Out-of-school factors normally make by far the largest contribution to social inequality.115 If anything, despite all their problems, public schools actually decrease inequality.116 In spite of everything that critics of so-called factory schools claim, one of the best predictors of longevity and occupational mobility is the number of years spent in school.117 What the natural experiment of COVID-19 has revealed

is that when we eject young people from in-person schooling, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we remove the counterbalancing forces that schools provide for vulnerable students. It exacerbates the problems that many children and teenagers from poor and racially marginalized backgrounds experience, by leaving them at the mercy of the unequal environments outside of their schools.

We have schools for many reasons. One of the most important of them is to flatten out the extremes of difference between children from opposite ends of the social class scale, to offer all children the same opportunities, with extra help for those who need it, and to enable children to learn to live together, and even make friends with peers who are different from them, as well as ones who are similar.

Having children in school is a public priority and a human necessity. Young people’s quality of life depends on it. But as countries, states, and provinces moved toward reopening their schools, a brutal reality imposed itself: Schools aren’t always or only about learning. One reason for the existence of public schools is, quite frankly, to enable parents to go to work. Without schools, economies cannot function, because those schools look after the young. Postindustrial societies have rightly chosen to put children in school, rather than in warehouses, workhouses, or prisons. But at the end of the day, it’s still somewhere for them to be when they can’t be left on their own at home.

Some systems during the pandemic wanted to get children back in school with almost indecent haste. They were driven more by the economic imperative to protect jobs and make money than by wanting children to engage with learning. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to withhold funding from districts if they didn’t reopen their schools, even in places where infection rates were high.118 England’s Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, at one point declared he would introduce punitive fines for parents who didn’t ensure their children returned to school.119 These leaders may have shed crocodile tears for disadvantaged students and how much they were falling behind every day they were not in school. But in

truth, their concern was less for the loss of learning than for a downturned economy.

But what did going back to school, with physical distancing and face masks, look like in practice? For the sake of putting parents back to work, has it been better or worse, more or less engaging, than learning at home?

Canada’s Globe and Mail education reporter, Caroline Alphonso, described the Quebec government’s plans to reopen schools earlier than any other province, even as coronavirus infection and death rates in the province remained the highest in Canada.120 Quebec’s plan, she pointed out, involved students sitting apart, in individual desks, without physical education, group work, arts, or play. In student engagement terms, this was like dialing schools back a century from the digital 2020s to the analog 1920s. When Andy shared this story on Twitter, there were outraged responses from educators. They described the move as “devastating” and “shameful.” It reduced schools to little more than “a babysitting service.”121

Physical distancing needn’t mean that education has to be this disengaging, though. Many countries are finding ways for children to gather in small pods where they can interact internally with each other but not outside their pods. A number of systems are following the lead of Denmark and other Scandinavian nations by organizing learning outdoors wherever possible, so that being back in school can actually enhance children’s well-being, rather than damage it.122 Perhaps this temporary innovation may turn into a permanent form of increased engagement for students in the future.

Even where physical distancing means that students can no longer sit together in small groups and chat with their friends while they are working, this is not the only way to cooperate. Paper “snowball” tossing activities, for example, involve students in a socially spaced circle throwing problems, answers, and insights to each other by tossing paper that has been crumpled up into balls.123 Likewise, students’ patterns of belief can be mapped out on a gymnasium floor for a reallife scattergram of human opinions that are physically embodied and