For the last few weeks, I have been working on a couple different committees on plans to reopen schools safely in August. Since this is the middle of a global pandemic, with terrifying new developments every day, these discussions seem surreal to me. We are meeting through Zoom because it is not safe to meet in person, but we are discussing sending kids back to crowded, indoor spaces in only a few weeks. Though there are valid arguments on both sides of this issue, I find myself wanting to hold off until we have better information. So many of our questions are based on little more than assumptions and it is unclear if we will even be able to put all the safety measures in place before the first day of school.  For example, it looks unlikely that we can even get adequate PPE for reopening, since so much is backordered for months past our reopening date.

I am certain, though, that there are some things we are not talking about that I would like to see more discussion about as we prepare to return to school. For one, there is still a pandemic going on, and conditions are quite a lot worse than they were when we decided to shut down for safety. Students have lost family members, families have lost income and housing, food insecurity has risen, and racism has been on the uptick as people continue to wrongfully blame Asian and Asian-looking people for the disease — including our own President, who continues to routinely use racist names for COVID-19 instead of its scientific name.

Also, there have been significant protests across the country in response to police brutality against unarmed black people, with images and stories of these horrific deaths filling our media and (rightfully) occupying our thoughts. These protests have also grown into a huge movement to combat racism and shine a light on systems and practices in our country — including many in our school systems — that are harmful to black kids. And by scrutinizing these systems, we’re uncovering huge pitfalls for brown, queer, female, indigenous, neuroatypical, students with disabilities, and more. While we are spotlighting these inequalities for very good reason, we must also own up to the fact that schools are part of these systems creating and perpetuating inequalities in our communities.

Can we just pump the brakes for a minute? I don’t want to go back to “normal.” Normal was a carefully-constructed illusion that things were OK. We went to school every day thinking that all our systems were working just fine, all our kids were getting what they needed, and that the kids who weren’t performing were just not trying hard enough or didn’t have the skills needed to do well in school. We assumed that kids who misbehaved in school were “problem kids” who had bad home lives or just didn’t get proper training at home. We went right on with our pacing guides and our learning objectives and our pre-assessments and our assessments and standardized assessments and high-stakes assessments, putting those low grades in our gradebooks and moving on. We worked on building “school culture” by promoting positivity and chanting school mottos and giving out positive behavior rewards and narrating positive things.  We continued to send students out of class for negative behavior and suspend them when things didn’t get better, and then we would shrug our shoulders because we did the best we could do.  

STOP.  We can not keep doing this.  No part of this was working.  Even on the best days, when test scores were good and nobody got sent out, we were still propping up a system that isn’t working.  And no, I’m not talking about sending all these kids to super innovative, privatized schools with crisp uniforms and claims of great test scores.  We need to take this as a wake up call to fix these schools — our public schools that are available to every student.  We need to fix our own practices and embrace difficult change so that every student gets — at bare minimum — a fair shake at success in life.  We need to get rid of practices that promote culturally biased views of what “success” is and punish students for having obstacles to participating in school. 

We need to take a really tough look at our school cultures and replace programs that promote toxic positivity with culturally-informed, anti-racist and truly intersectional practices. We need to get rid of punitive practices that feed into the school-to prison model and replace them with restorative justice and mental health services.  We need to put a hold on testing and work on empowering students to learn, even if it means revisiting our pacing guides and standards.  We need to involve BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and other marginalized groups in school leadership. And most of all, we need to address the fact that our students (and ourselves) have been through a lot this summer, and that trauma affects how we learn, how we socialize, how we process the world around us, and it even affects our physical health.  We need to help our students with basic, human needs before we can expect them to learn for 8 hours a day, every day.  We must Maslow before we Bloom.

We can not go back to “normal.”  Normal was only a myth.  We must take the lessons that were presented to us by these major events and improve our schools.  To go back to “normal” after upheaval like this would be like building a new city after an earthquake without first clearing all the debris.  We can not continue using unfair practices to prop up unjust systems and call it “education.”  We owe it to our students, our communities, and our future generations to fix what’s been broken.  Right now, when we are looking at reopening schools, sometimes with scaled-back services, during a global pandemic, is the perfect time to do this work.  

*Photograph by John Biggs. You can buy copies here.