Reopen Schools? Boycott Them, Instead
America's K-12 public education system was already abusive & racist. Why would Black & Brown parents want to put their kids back in it?
Publisher’s Riff
Advocates, policymakers and stressed-out parents pressing governments to reopen schools fast are acting as if American schools were such great palaces of learning to begin with.
Breaking news: they never were and they're not.
The debate over whether or not to reopen schools is missing the biggest point: that schools in America have, for centuries now, been among the most traumatic, abusive, racist and anti-learning institutions in the world. As a result, the argument for re-opening schools draws from the baseless assumption that the current United States K-12 education learning model is a "safe space" - but, it's definitely never been that safe space for Black students especially, and equally so for Indigenous and Brown students.
These 4th, 8th and 12th grade reading assessment scores from the latest NAEP report card, by racial demographic, offer an example of just how much American K-12 is failing Black and Brown students …
It's somewhat astounding that Black communities, especially, have not grabbed on to this moment as a national mobilization to actively boycott sending their children back to these dysfunctional and dangerous American schools. Seize the moment: We should not be sending our kids back into these systems until they are dismantled and retrofitted into fully funded and fully equitable institutions that are producing full populations of fully literate and fully capable young people that are prepared to compete on a global scale.
This presents a potential watershed moment then for families who have suffered through generations of a hostile and inequitable K-12 education system in the United States that has, for the most part, battered, destroyed and abused non-White children from a relentless assault of racist educators, biased grading systems and school-to-prison pipelines.
Advocates currently against re-opening, from parents to teachers unions, have not mentioned this once in their reasoning. Current arguments focus, correctly, on the absence of universal public health protocols, a fledgling public vaccination campaign and the lack of everything from PPEs to adequate indoor ventilation systems. Yet, that's just part of it. Why exactly would parents want to send their kids back into institutions, particularly crumbling metro-area and urban school districts, that operate as either correctional facility funnels or substandard remedial schools?
Part of the problem is that mainstream arguments for both maintaining school closures and re-opening schools are based on what everyone else wants ... except the kids. Teachers unions are focused on keeping their members safe in the battle to keep schools closed; that's understandable - yet, they're not pressing districts, governments and corporations to provide the highest levels of broadband, resources and supplies for students while they're not in physical classrooms. Many other arguments for re-opening seem more driven by the pandemic-fueled stress of the need to return to work or being stuck in the house or apartment with rambunctious, restless kids.
Schools, however, are not supposed to operate as daycares for the working adult. Society needs to strike a real balance there. They are supposed to educate and prepare societies for achievement, productivity and global competitiveness. We need a scaled up "Montgomery Bus Boycott"-like rejection of the push to put marginalized youth back in underserving racist school systems. So, no, the kids don't need to go back to school just yet. Fix the schools, destroy the prison pipelines, force out the racist teachers, and then we can talk.