Opening the Conversation on Reopening Schools

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I’m listening, from the part of occupied Lenape lands called New York City, from East Harlem where the sirens and refrigerator trucks left and left us pandemic poverty without resolving the struggles of redlining and gentrification that were here before them. I’m listening, by which I also mean reading and watching, as the conversations of now what settle on their new themes.

These themes include “school reopening,” in which kids’ well-being is gestured at, their susceptibility to the virus is debated in terms of magical thinking as often as (if I’m generous) in terms of emerging research, education workers with families and bills are pitted against please-I-need-childcare workers with families and bills as if there isn’t a whole protected billionaire class sitting pretty while we fight over crumbs, and a striking determination to arrive in the fall more burnt out and unprepared for children-in-a-pandemic to be children-in-a-pandemic than was necessary. There’s the related topic of “safe” schools and reopening “safely,” often including talking points about how necessary masks are and which air filtration systems our classrooms need while failing to admit that pretending HVAC upgrades schools can’t afford while also trying to source enough PPE for staff without threatening the ability of medical professionals to do the same will provide “safety” through a pandemic, housing crisis, financial crisis, looming mental health crisis, climate change, and pervasive racism is some real gaslighting double-think nonsense.

My recent favorite topic is families creating “pods” where small groups quarantine(-ish) together and hire childcare for that private group. Like…having an arrangement with a family or group of families where we’re on the same page about risk/exposure and I’m consistently going to get paid for working with a small group of kids sounds dreamy compared to yet another year in which the school budget is in the red, I never know what kids (or staff) will bring in from their households, and last minute changes to state requirements can mean hours of surprise paperwork and legalese deciphering at any moment. Pretty sure the stress is taking hours off my life as I write this. But the school can serve families who, for a variety of reasons, couldn’t homeschool. Maybe they are concerned about the paperwork. Maybe they have a co-parent who insists the kid/s be enrolled in an official school. Maybe they’re just anxious. A critique of the new enthusiasm around pods is that it will exacerbate class differences because the rich will be able to afford to hire teachers away from schools while poor folks won’t. It’s a valid critique, but then what? We’ve known about tutors and pay-to-play college schemes, about how poor kids get preyed on and punished. We know how much new glasses and epipens cost. Sure, setting up families who can replicate prep school at home to do so is problematic…but so is so much of the rest of what we normalized. Critical op-eds on how families adapt to a pandemic while state and federal budgets continue to prioritize war and wealth over social supports put the pressure on the wrong point. (Or the right point, if the writers are interested in talk but not in change.) Listening to conversations about how making pods is elitist has also been hard as someone interested in radical approaches to childcare (distinct from families’ anxieties about ‘education’ managing and direct instruction…) People have been being each others’ childcare and alloparenting support, with or without money involved, for as long as we’ve been having kids. Writing about pods as some new innovation by wealthy families, with overwhelmingly white people in the pictures and neighborhoods being discussed, erases a rich, long, and learning-filled history of organizing and leadership by the very marginalized folks these articles claim to be worried about. What a disservice to their struggle and brilliance, and what a disservice to the future to leave their histories buried!

I’m also topics that I haven’t heard hit the mainstream yet. Since educators often make ends meet with summer and seasonal work that didn’t exist this year, narrowly dodging burnout over vacations that weren’t possible this spring and summer, counting on their kids getting their spending and book money from summer and seasonal work that didn’t exist, what happens when a critical mass of us are broke and burnt out mid-winter? How should the reality that most educators have family members who are educators in different schools, and that many families have kids at different schools, influence our moves in the coming months? I mean…I don’t see my mom or sister regularly, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep the bubbles of my school, my mom’s school, and my sister’s enrichment program from touching, as much as it sucks to cancel the few annual visits we do usually have. But my friend and her husband work in two different large high schools and send their 2 kids to a local elementary. Other friends teach together, with one of them keeping his kids at the same school he’s at, and they both teach classes at different universities [adjuncting is a whole other mess to sort out] and have partners who work in non-school youth education programs. Unless we’re resourcing everyone to stay remote across the board or expecting families and partners to find ways to live apart all year, nearly all our schools will be consistently exposed to several others. And speaking of going remote, since schools jumped online short notice, mandating to teachers and students tech suites provided by beyond-regulation companies with sketchy histories around gathering and use of ‘user’ data, who is looking out for kids’ privacy? And if adults can’t read all the terms and conditions to “consent” to privacy forfeitures in order to access work they are obligated to attend to, how can we now expect them to offer up their kids’ privacy, too, or to study up enough to advocate against a school’s decision in the middle of pandemic-parenting? Where kids’ privacy, and that of teachers and in-the-background-of-the-videocall household members, has been violated already, whether through malice or carelessness, is it too late to stop and repair that damage?

The bodies are piling and sea levels rising, so…a deep breath and bringing things back to the most basic of basics. Here’s a question — the question —

What do the kids need?

Pre-pandemic, in the US education-land, this question was usually interpreted narrowly as asking about what resources and content schools needed to provide to students. We have this emphasis on civil rights and protections in our social discourse that leaves educators and others interested in all our people flourishing constantly underfunded and overmanaged by institutions while those controlling the budget are interested in providing the absolute bare minimum. New York City can’t find the funds to make the subways wheelchair accessible or make sure kids have stable and mold-free housing but we can put up luxury highrises and new prisons easily. And so “What do kids need?” easily slips to become “Precisely how many minutes of recess must we allow and which kinds of math problems do we need them to test well at solving?”

We can start narrow, with schools and content, with the assumptions that by “schools” we mean safe places kids go to have caring adults support them in learning what they will need for the start of their adult lives. (Of course, it bears mentioning that they have not always been and still are not for all people this place of abundant curiosity and care. Also the difference between “can go” and “are forced to go” definitely changes how people relate to a place.) Adults often get distracted debating the details of which specific skills kids need to be inculcated with when. All of mathematics available, and we debate which arithmetic kids need by 3rd grade, how specifically they should solve problems to conform to our [arbitrary] standards, and how to test to make sure they have learned it. For any of the futures we’re guessing they’ll find themselves in, they’ll need navigating-a-changing-world skills, “21st century” skills, contributing in relationships skills, and the skill of developing new skills. Writing from a moment of ‘rona and rebellions, I’m also thinking about what skills they need to navigate disaster times and generally to develop resilience for times of struggle. I’m watching adults realize they don’t know how to manage stress, communicate through a healthy conflict, assess the trustworthiness of internet news, cook a quarantine’s worth of meals, do basic home repairs, or protect their privacy on live streams and video calls. One of the challenges and gifts of running live video call classes has been that parents and caregivers are often part of the group. On one hand, this often means cuing them in real time to when us adults helping is helpful and when the kids actually need us to give them space to wrestle with a problem. (This isn’t a complaint about parents; if they know all the kids in a group and have more child development knowledge than I do, of course I want them to cue me. Where our expertise is different, we need to help each other out.) On the other hand, this means skill-building with multiple household members at once, so when I log off they can help each other remember what to pack for a protest or apply what they know about how viruses reproduce to understanding a news report. From a social-ecological model perspective, getting to work with the kid, their caretaker, and the culture of that relationship is kind of a dream. If only the world wasn’t also crumbling and stressing us all out at the same time…

In focusing on ensuring kids have skills for the future, we’re assuming they’ll get to have a future. Some tragedies and disasters that threaten them are beyond our influence, but many aren’t. If we’re trying to meet kids’ needs, we have to take seriously that they need us to interrupt violence and protect them from disasters that threaten their well-being. There are all the ways they need care and support to be built up, and they also need society to stop killing them: no more man camps, police shootings, cages, coverups, poisoning the air and water, and destroying the planet they’re trying to live on. We have to stop the harm and heal what we can. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” For kids to grow, we need to make where they are a place where life is precious, by starting where we are, examining what we’re complicit in, and fighting for bold changes.

Jen Johnson: “In this moment, this covid 19 closure, it’s exposing the things that we value and the things that we don’t with schools. So what would you say this closure is teaching you about the role that schools serve and then what we value about schools?

Eve L. Ewing: “Yeah I think that there are some things that I already knew that are being reinforced in ways that give me petty feelings. And then there are a couple of things that are new for me. Um…so one thing that I feel like I already knew but that I feel like other people re learning is ummm okay so the first thing that happened was that uh we needed to figure out how kids were going to eat. Right? That was the very first thing. It was like, we’re going to close schools…the very first question was how are we going to feed children. That was the first question. And because as it turns out right for many many many children in this country school is the primary source of their nutrition and their food…literally the most elemental thing that they need to live. Maybe second to water, right. Food. the most basic element of things that they need for their survival, through no choice or decision of their own because they are children they are reliant on schools for food…. The second question that then emerged once we squared away the food thing…next question we gotta do remote learning. How are we going to get kids devices? Okay now we are going to get them devices, well they don’t have internet…”

https://youtu.be/NHo2egETxvI?t=1404

At the most basic level, children are people…body-mind social organisms who need breathable air and drinkable water. They need adequate nutrition, safe space and time to rest, clothing, shoes, and shelter that doesn’t endanger them or make them sick. They need healthcare, broad and holistic care for their health that considers how conditions present across skin tones, is free from supremacist biases, and rejects the classist death cult’s insistence that we normalize folks unnecessarily dying in astronomical medical debt so some rich people can keep getting richer. Most teachers wouldn’t say they became teachers primarily because they love and believe in free breakfast programs, but many will say they were motivated by care for kids and desire to make a difference. At this moment in much of the US, much of the most necessary care work people in schools do…or attempt to do…centers on providing these social services.

Bethany Saltman: “Children need whole people.”

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/bethany-saltman/register

In a crisis moment — or span of months — resources, rituals, and supportive relationships become extra important as factors that can counter the impact of stress and trauma. When disaster priorities prompt us to throw out grading, perfect attendance awards, and punishing kids for minor dress code violations by depriving them of time for movement and play like the toxic practices they are, our focus is left where it should always be. We ask if kids’ basic needs are being met, as well as their needs for opportunities to learn and play, and we ask as the whole question rather than as some sidebar to predicting their exam performance. Do they have the medicine and vegetables and shelter they need? Is there a rhythm of steadying, connectivity-building, and sense-making through their weeks, maybe at family dinners, daily walks, religious services, classes, video calls, or clubs? Do they have access to caregivers and other attachment figures who can sooth and support them, who can encourage them in developing a positive sense of agency and identity while nurturing their sense of hope? Where the answer to any of these questions is “no,” how do we mobilize a team and free up resources to change that answer, preferably meaningfully and long-term? If we want to increase kids’ chances of moving through challenging times, both those like this moment that challenge us collectively and those more personal moments of tragedy and struggle, we ought to be setting up these patterns and systems as part of regular life, staying ready so we don’t have to get ready to support them through extraordinary times.

“[People] focus on effects, not causes. The effects are very important, but unless we get to the causes, those effects are gonna come back and back and back.” Shoshana Zuboff @ RightsCon2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX2g6xPeftA

The frameworks popular in university psychology and education tend to suggest that survival and safety needs have to be met before a person can focus on building relationships, creativity, and self-expression. But experiments on primate attachment like the [super distressing] Harlow’s Monkey Experiment, the trauma research that informed the development of the “RAPID Psychological First Aid” framework, and the very Siksika Nation, Blackfoot Confederacy framework that Maslow ripped off when “creating” his famous framework all instead suggest needs for connection and meaning-making are less tangible but no less fundamental. Kids need relationships where they are cared for, valued, protected, and guided. They need to “feel felt,” the basis for forming attachments. They need to play to build skills, play to make sense of the world, and play to experience joy. As Dr. Stuart Brown says, “The opposite of play is not work, it’s depression.” So kids need to be able to giggle and dance, and they need to hear that we delight in their giggling and dancing. They also may need us to explain to them that we need to focus while we practice crossing streets without getting hit by cars. Meanwhile, micromanaging them or “rescuing” them from every struggle in their path is not helpful. Insisting on hurting them “for their own good” or working to convince them that bulletproof backpacks and ubiquitous surveillance are safety, common as these practices are, teaches kids to seek and express love with violence. Our kids need us, and we really need to check how our modelling miseducates our kids about what love and safety look like. And what courage sounds like. And what consent and justice feel like. Particularly the “we” that is those of us swimming and shaping against US overculture.

Brian Jones: “Are we also talking about abolishing schools?”

Bettina Love: “YES!… We’re not just trying to abolish these buildings. We’re trying to abolish the conditions that make it possible to treat our children like this…”

https://youtu.be/uJZ3RPJ2rNc

We know kids are embedded in social systems, far beyond the institution of the school. We know people’s development is influenced by the culture they’re raised in, and we know emotional security in kids’ relationships with caretakers and attachment figures can moderate the influence of a volatile and insecurity-inducing broader culture. So to support the kids and the caretakers we could take care of the culture…but that would require either convincing our attention architects to put people over their profits or en masse convincing the people that it’s time to take back ownership over our stories. What other options are within reach? The studies focused on kids, but considering the history of communities and movements it doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch to imagine quality relationships are good medicine for adults, too. So we expand our list of people-whose-needs-matter to include all the folks our caretaker adults are in relationship with. Spoiler alert: we can keep repeating this exercise or we can jump to acknowledging that our lives are really interconnected so ultimately we’re talking about all people getting their needs met. One path is slower than the other, but they ultimately both bring us to the same place. To take care of the kids and adults we take care of the kids and adults, expanding who we recognize as neighbors, as the brothers we’re keepers for, as relatives we’re invested in and responsible to.

Positive personal relationships with family, friends, and mentors can alter the course of someone’s life. Study after study supports this statement; Dr. George Everly Jr. goes so far as to say in one of his lectures that “social support is the single most powerful predictor of resilience.” So for the kids to have their needs met, the people their lives are entwined with need to have their needs met. Easy enough…everything listed as a child’s need above is actually a human need, so we can refer to essentially the same list and just adapt it slightly to account for what adults have learned, need to unlearn, and would benefit from opportunities to learn more about. As an aside, strengthening social supports to increase the stability and well-being of individuals in our communities can help decrease instances of violence in our communities. Current conversations about how increasing policing and punishment in our communities doesn’t prevent violence got you wondering where to move that tax money so it does prevent violence? It seems “economic policies which strengthen social protection can mitigate the social and economic consequences of those living in poverty, and are protective against violence.”

adrienne maree brown: “And recognize…I learned from Movement Generation: what is politically possible in this moment is what we have to be shifting all the time. Because otherwise we’re in false-solution land and it’s like what we actually need is revolution. Anything less than revolution is not actually going to work for us to be in right relationship with this planet. I don’t identify as a revolutionary because I think it’s cool. I identify because I want all the children that come from all the people I love to have this magical earth to live on and to be in right relationship with each other on it. To me, revolution is the only way we get there, so I’m like…How do we make revolution politically possible?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOm3mlLGpok

A domesticated imagination might assume our adaptation would include more focus on jobs and less on learning and play than our list for kids. But we can dare to dream of nicer things for our communities! Studies tying unemployment to decreasing life satisfaction and increased rates of violence among adults catch me poking at the proxy in the same way I do when I read research tying access to school to improved life outcomes. Like…is the relationship of someone’s education level to their life satisfaction about the dose of bullying, collective punishment, shame, and forfeiture of bodily autonomy that they experienced cumulatively with each year of schooling? Or are we talking about school as purveyor of mentorship, chances to experiment with new ideas, meaning and belonging, support developing executive function and literacy, regular meals, and positive peer pressure? Or are we talking about schools as institutions that resource kids from resources while offering those from marginalized classes mostly demoralization and control? The US is still too much of an apartheid state for assessments of the impact of “school” on “kids” to mean anything without mapping out which schools, which kids, and which metrics are our focus. Generalizations about institutions that vary broadly and have a wide range of impacts on a wide range of people whose needs and contexts vary broadly are just…not helpful.

Our “adult needs” list doesn’t need to be adjusted to guarantee “jobs.” Unemployment (here, at least) brings any number of stressors: financial insecurity that may jeopardize our ability to meet the basic needs of themselves and any dependents, increased insecurity about access to healthcare, tension as we have to renegotiate our household contributions with roommates or partners, a blow to one’s sense of self-worth and identity in a productivity-obsessed culture, loneliness if we were dependent on work relationships to meet that community-belonging need, disorientation if work had been dictating our schedule or giving us a sense of purpose…and, maybe, sometimes, the realization that we’d been focusing so much on the minutiae of the gig we’d had that we were missing opportunities to try something new. Look…I panic about rent first whenever money gets tight, but I’ve known people catalyzed into a mid-life career switch that they swear was them discovering a new calling! (And yes I’m grimacing at how Amurikan neoliberal it sounds to equate a wage-labor with a calling)(but actually they’re a physical therapist and an eco-informed mortician now, so I kind of actually believe them.) These are all legitimate stressors and tied to valid needs, but they’re tied to the loss of benefits we associate with “jobs,” not ones that are guaranteed with and exclusively tied to employment. Whatever role jobs, automation, oligarch apologists, and our relationship to work play in the future, we have to refuse to confuse our tools with our goals. Otherwise we may not notice when it’s time to throw an outdated system out.

Charlene Carruthors: “Incomplete stories will lead to incomplete solutions! And if we’re telling incomplete stories about the struggles of Black folk, struggles of humanity, struggles on the land then we’re going to end up with incomplete solutions…How we gonna craft full campaigns? We’re gonna miss stuff!”

…

adrienne maree brown: “Oh damn! We are settling for self-negation of our health and settling for something that’s not even close to what we actually need. And so that’s the other thing for me. How do we set and hold a standard?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOm3mlLGpok

Aiii but that’s a lot of people. Yes. And. We look for who is already doing the work. We look for efforts that are by impacted folks for impacted folks, from the community for the community. We are not fooled by a single, “genius” leader-innovator-disruptor-founder who wants to sell us the solution he [yup] either built in his Bay area garage or is exploiting the labor of others to build. We want to do a different thing. We look for leaderful collectives, experienced co-ops, the people that the people trust to have their backs. We keep applying research. We act on what we already know and use what we already have.

Because this whole piece is me pretending to buy that we haven’t created a better world for everyone because we don’t know what that would mean or how to begin. But we know. We know plenty. The research exists. The resources exist. The creativity and community bones are all there…What we lack is the will to change who and what we value, who is “we” and how are we valuable (inherently, as miraculous). Where is the will to take the power back, to quit letting our oppressors determine the terms of engagement and “incremental reform,” to change ourselves and the world? It’s in some of us individually and some of us collectively, as always with humans, but what will it take before we hit a tipping point and say enough is enough?

Ruthie Wilson Gilmore: “Abolition is long, abolition is presence. Abolition is how we connect with, form, grow from, and multiply organizations that have the capacity to lift the movement…Not to lead it – to lift it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf3f5i9vJNM

What could we create?! It’s such a good question, equal parts frightening and fun. We were wondering what kids need and realized they need us to also be considering what their peers and adults need. To circle back to the narrow and immediate questions about schools, clearly there’s lots of “school” that doesn’t meet kids’ needs. What if we focus on the parts that do, throw out the parts that don’t, and take care of communities as part of taking care of children? (In the US, taking kids away from their communities and forcing them through conformity and “assimilation”-focused schools has long been a favorite tactic of white supremacists and settler-colonialism. Creating a future where we meet all kids’ needs is impossible if we don’t also reckon with the historic and ongoing racist violence our current institutions were designed to perpetuate.)

So we get resources for the kids and their families and folks that they in turn lean on. Don’t ask me where the money will come from; we can fund the NYPD having standing units in 10+ cities around the world and the constant maintenance of exclusive golf courses, we can arrange sustainability for our people.

There are lots of places other than or in addition to school that work to meet kids’ needs. Libraries, museums, parks, some media, …. These knowledge production and community coherence spaces tend to be underfunded in our current budgets, but if we valued their role we could change that. And we could expand their programming. And we could look at the spaces with similar social roles that aren’t publicly accessible — makerspaces, sports centers, theaters, and lecture halls — and pry the doors open wider. Break the story that education is just something kids get at school by designing learning for all ages into our daily lives. Free the kids and free us all to grow and thrive.

What could we create? So many irresistible futures! As soon as we reclaim our attention from powers-that-be, counting on us staying focused/distracted with celebrity pods and whether kids will “fall behind” while sheltering in place. If we help each other stay creative and anchored in our dreams, another world is possible.

 

Walidah Imarisha: “Imagine different futures and build them into existence…Those who have held the liberated dreams of the future, that they were told again and again are science fiction, are the oppressed and the marginalized, are Black and brown folks, and that they are the ones who dreamed impossible dreams and then changed the entire world to make them our lived realities…”

…

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “It’s this idea that we could really vision to the end of what we could imagine and what we had been working so hard to achieve, like, as you say, imagining every day with our organizing and our practice and our decision to be part of revolutionary movements. We could go all the way to the end of what we could imagine, and then be creative there. That’s what was offered to me, and I saw it as and have continued to experience it as a blessing in so many ways. Because what it does for me is it allows me to see the limits of my own imagination, and it allows me to see whatever it is that I think I really wish would happen that would be so much better than this current situation and to be creative there. Which then means I’m not being reactive to the present situation; I’m being expansive, and going as far as I possibly can with my imagination which then makes me rigorous with myself. To say, what is the most beautiful thing I can imagine and how do I put myself there through my art and then be creative all over again from there. It’s challenging…it has made me a more generous participant in the present because it has made me understand that I have a creative role, not just in the future that we can have but more importantly the future we can imagine.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i27YaBjzYqY

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PS: Since I started writing this, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has offered this event on organizing childcare cooperatives – https://www.mobilize.us/ocasiocortez/event/295524/?fbclid=IwAR3O06EGq4e2udzWSDGnsGszRjeqPR4LJQaYvDSdcpep5XHVxCSUa7nrU_0 – Emergency Psychologist Tyler Black published this thread validating education beyond school https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1286713761739538435?s=20 – and author Austin Kleon published “Forget school for now” in the piece he co-wrote and illustrated with his kids for the NYTimes on their pandemic unschooling – https://www.instagram.com/p/CDZ3Pedg9mi/ – Bettina Love has put out this guide with her new Abolitionist Teachers Network – https://abolitionistteachingnetwork.org/ – and the brilliant panelists on this Brooklyn Public Library webcast questioned how we construct “we” and “safety” and “education” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvl7J672fB4

References/Notes:

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One response to “Opening the Conversation on Reopening Schools”

  1. Rubén Alvarado Avatar
    Rubén Alvarado

    I see you 💚

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