As the third week in September began, millions of American parents experienced firsthand exactly what it means to be saddled with a president who bungled this country’s response to the worst public health crisis in over a century, leaving their children unable to attend grade-school classes or college lectures in person, and forcing them instead to flail through what is known as “virtual learning” for now and well into the foreseeable future. As one angry parent writing for ScaryMommy put it, all this follows an entire angst-ridden summer fraught with anxiety, with beleaguered parents commiserating on Zoom meetings and social media about what is now, inevitably, occurring in real time.
This back-to-school season is unlike anything American parents have ever experienced. There are no good options. Whatever you choice you make, you’re a terrible parent according to your neighbor or another parent at your kids’ school or the internet. Whatever choice you make, you’re potentially harming your child emotionally or physically, or both. And, whatever choice you make, you’ll likely end up quarantined anyway and having your kids at home, doing virtual learning for extended periods of time. Because our country and its leaders flatly refuse to get their shit together.
For the most part, America’s school-age children, teenagers, and young adults are still stuck in their parents’ homes, many of them desperately carving out a few feet of extra space in cramped living rooms, dining rooms, and kitchens in order to access online lessons beamed in by their teachers, who are also at home trying, many with equal desperation, to properly teach their students.
At all levels of education and in every age group, from pre-K to college, this nation’s inability to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered in-person learning unworkable from a practical standpoint, leaving American parents in the lurch and scrambling to reconcile work schedules with the dispiriting (and often economically devastating) fact that, after an entire summer of enforced social distancing and mask-wearing, their children still must remain at home. Meanwhile, the quality of K-12 public school instruction that is being provided varies wildly, dependent on the resources and talent pool of teachers available to each individual school district, while many college students are compelled to trade their undergraduate experience for at-home learning through an endless series of Zoom links.
This dismal, stressful situation wasn’t for lack of determination by parents to find another way. Hundreds of schools and colleges in this country ended the summer drafting up hopeful, optimistic plans for “hybrid” learning environments that combined virtual and in-person teaching, to try to provide some semblance of normalcy while still protecting students, teachers, and parents from the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But excepting a minority of schools defiantly insisting on only full in-person instruction (many of which are now regretting and backtracking on that decision), the intractably contagious nature of this lethal virus ultimately prevailed over the most obstinate parental and school board objections, with school administrators finally succumbing to inevitable closures, following the somber advice of their county health departments.
In the nation’s institutions of higher learning, the pain of coming face-to-face with this stark reality comes with literally an even higher price, with embattled parents now engaged in legal battles with universities unwilling to refund or reimburse sky-high tuitions, even as their ability to provide real instruction is curtailed beyond all reasonable measure from what anyone would consider a “complete” college education.
Following Trump’s lead, Republican elected officials made reopening an ideological litmus test for the public schools, and as a result there is still some residual finger-pointing going on as some parochial schools gamely try to reopen, providing short-lived fodder to those parents convinced that everything will be fine if pesky public health data is simply ignored. But the harsh reality is that relatively few schools in this country will likely be providing in-person education by the end of this month, as COVID-19 infections in those schools that chose to fully reopen continue to ramp up with no end in sight. Despite all of the heated rhetoric emanating from Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration, the stubborn fact of the pandemic remains constant. So the question naturally becomes: Who exactly is responsible for this situation?
As reported this past July in the Los Angeles Times, the cauldron of parental anger about how to go about sending their children back to school has been simmering all summer, while Donald Trump seemingly focused on everything except the looming crisis that has now come crashing down on parents everywhere in this country.
“It’s one of the most fundamental issues right now. Particularly for parents, this is the issue,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster. “Trump can talk about defunding the police or Confederate statues, but I can tell you the No. 1 concern on the minds of parents is whether or not their kids can safely go back to school, and if not how are they going to get through the school year.”
That die has now been cast: Most kids are not going back to in-person instruction. They’re right where they were in March, when the administration finally sounded the alarm about the seriousness of this pandemic: sitting at home, in front of screens. And despite all the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating from the White House about the need to reopen the schools, as far as the facts on the ground are concerned, nothing really has changed. As noted by Eliza Shapiro, writing for The New York Times in late August, if anything, Trump’s attempts to strong-arm the issue backfired badly.
There is widespread agreement on most points of the political spectrum that a functioning U.S. economy requires working schools, and that the abrupt, unplanned shift to remote learning was disastrous for many children who desperately need in-person instruction.
But even conservatives who said they agreed with the president’s focus on reopening schools say he has been a poor spokesman for the cause. They pointed to Trump’s downplaying of the danger posed by the virus, followed by his threats to withhold federal aid to districts that did not reopen classrooms, as potentially alienating to centrist and even right-of-center teachers and parents.
The recent revelations that Trump knew about the seriousness of the pandemic and its potentially lethal consequences for children as early as January have only sealed the fate of any further attempts at reopening. As former Vice President Joe Biden stated in a speech on Sept. 2, the ultimate blame for our schools’ inability to reopen falls entirely on the appalling inaction by this administration in controlling and containing the COVID-19 virus.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the developed world, life for children is returning to normal as they head back to their in-person schools. As highlighted by editorial columnist Trudy Rubin for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the futile fits and starts this country has made to rein in the pandemic and safely reopen schools contrasts dramatically to what is occurring in Germany and other European countries right now.
German children started returning to school in July and classes resumed full time in early August. All across Europe, schools are reopening after months of online learning due to the pandemic (with some countries having reopened in April or never shut down entirely).
So why do Germans feel safe sending their kids back to school? In large part, says Sauerbrey, because they trust their leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Ph.D. scientist, to give them the straight facts on the virus. Under her leadership,the country’s infection rate has fallen so low that its citizens believe any new spark is containable.
Back home in this country, little remains for parents to do except vent their seething anger as they are forced to watch their children cope with what everyone—with very few exceptions—acknowledges is a substandard education, one which disproportionately leaves behind poorer Americans, and one that could have been avoided had one individual occupying the Oval Office taken the pandemic seriously at the outset. Which brings us back to that mommy blogger at Scary Mommy:
That’s the tornado we are heading back into since my husband and I, like parents all over America, both work all day long while our kids are “in school.”
That’s the disaster you’re putting us all in because your administration and handling of this pandemic has been a complete embarrassment and a failure that will be remembered for all time.
Imagine if you’d done something truly presidential, like implement a mandatory six-week lockdown with rigorous public masking. Experts (I know, they scare you, but the rest of us like them) say if we had taken such measures, we could have lowered infection rates enough to open schools safely, as other countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Denmark, Italy, Germany, France) have done. But instead you squandered away the past few months, doing nothing but whine on Twitter, fan the flames of racism, and absolve yourself of any and all responsibility as our country has circled the drain on a worldwide scale.
Parents may be frustrated and angry, but most are clearly aware of the deadly seriousness of this pandemic. The preference for remote learning given the health risks involved now appears to be far more widespread among Americans than even at the beginning of this summer. A Gallup poll released on Aug. 3 showed a precipitous drop (of 20 points) in just two months among those who favored full, in-person learning in light of COVID-19. Conversely, the same poll showed a 21-point increase among those Americans who favored all-remote learning, with 36% favoring a hybrid approach.
In late May and early June, a majority of 56% of K-12 parents wanted full-time in-person school this fall. Now, 36% prefer this option. Meanwhile, 28% of parents, up from 7% in the prior survey, prefer full-time remote instruction. The remainder, 36%, favor a hybrid system of part in-person teaching and part distance learning.
There is no doubt that the vast majority of parents would want schools to reopen if it was safe to do so. But the brutal fact is that any reopening of schools, whether public, private, or parochial has consistently been accompanied by unacceptable spikes in COVID-19 infections, causing those schools to immediately shut down again. Rather than address this crisis in any meaningful way, both the Trump administration and its enablers in the Republican party have treated it as a political plaything, with Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos just this week urging parents to support “school choice” policies which would divert federal public school funds towards those religious and private schools that have (thus far) remained open, and with the Republican-led Senate refusing to provide supplemental aid to schools unable to provide quality online learning. And neither Trump nor Senate Republicans appear willing to acknowledge that the continued education of our children is wholly dependent on the basic task of controlling the spread of this virus.
There is one reason alone that this pandemic has grown beyond the capability of our schools to safely reopen. It has nothing to do with teachers, school district officials, or other parents, for that matter. As a consequence of this fiasco—and there is really no other word for it—American parents are finding themselves caught in a kind of helpless anger, and it is slowly, gradually dawning on many of them exactly who is responsible for their situation.
By Nov. 3, that anger will be far beyond the boiling point. Anyone who believes that it won’t translate in the voting booth is deluding themselves.
