Let’s all rally for schoolkids
In the past there were times when the two of us engaged in heated debate about the best ways to effectively educate all children, especially low-income, Black and brown children. Today, we are coming together to sound the alarm jointly, because the challenges facing our children in the wake of COVID-19 are unprecedented; if we don’t act quickly and decisively to support them, we risk losing a generation of kids.
This is a call not just for the two of us — the leader of one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, and the leader of the well-known Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools — to work side by side. Our entire country must come together, reset, and prioritize schooling as a way to get our country back on track.
At this time of upheaval for children, families and the country, we are united about the need not just to return to in-person teaching and learning, but to re-imagine learning beyond COVID-19. Systemic inequities have long denied Black, brown, Indigenous and low-income children the equity, justice, and opportunity they deserve.
We’re confident that we will be back together in schools soon. Educators have been working tirelessly on reopening for months, and now, with the American Rescue Plan Act providing a massive shot in the arm — including funding for schools, and tax credits to help get kids out of poverty — we’ve developed a road map to make it happen. Our plan follows Centers for Disease Control guidance for mitigation strategies, including adequate testing, ventilation, cleaning, physical distancing, masks — and prioritizing educators for vaccinations, as President Biden recently announced. With the U.S. Department of Education serving as a vital clearinghouse for best practices, and Secretary Miguel Cardona’s upcoming summit on reopening, we’re confident we can make progress.
In many places, schools will likely finish the spring semester in person, and others are considering a summer session for recreation, social and emotional support, and academic growth. But once we’re back in the classroom, we’ll certainly have our work cut out for us; reopening schools can’t just mean a return to the pre-pandemic status quo. Our students are in critical developmental stages, and school is where they build relationships, develop resiliency, and have experiences that will affect their social and emotional growth.
Helping them do that now will require an incredible effort from their teachers, as well as from the allies that support our schools, providing the experiences and services that were once considered “supplemental,” but now are essential to wrap around every school community, wherever possible. These health, language and professional supports — particularly in low-income, Black and brown neighborhoods — offer guidance to students and their families. These support services have proven to pay off, in terms of academics and overall development.
The return to school buildings will be a relief for many, and it will also represent an opportunity to make these resources the norm, not the exception. The entire school community will need support to manage the stress and trauma that has been weighing on them for the past year and, in too many cases, well before the pandemic. All of this will require meaningful collaboration within schools, between schools and throughout the community. It will require sharing resources, training educators, encouraging parent involvement, and building partnerships beyond the school walls — much like the Harlem Children’s Zone has done with Promise Academy Schools, which offer fitness, nutrition and financial wellness courses, and like the AFT has done in upstate Massena, N.Y., working with three area hospitals to set up virtual school-based health centers.
We know that schools alone can’t shoulder the massive work required to get our students back on track. We must broaden the focus of education to encompass the communities around the school building too. A commitment to expand community schools, and to support the federal Promise Neighborhoods Initiative — both of which engage partners beyond the school building to support families and combat poverty using wraparound services and cradle-to-career interventions — would be a welcome start.
This work can be done. But thinking we can operate schools as usual in September is a mistake, and it will further increase the social and economic mobility gap between our most vulnerable students and those who are doing okay, or even fine. Indeed, this will be a multiyear endeavor, and it will require the cooperative effort that marked our COVID-19 experience.
For us, there was never any question about whether or not to reopen schools; it was always about how to get it right. How to keep our students, educators, families and communities safe, and how to return to school with a plan to meet our kids where they are. We know the continuing process of reopening in person will present challenges, but as the educators in the classroom, and as the community that supports them, we’re ready to get to work and do the right thing for children.
In a recent futile foray into internet love, I was contacted by a bonny woman whose profile featured the Oscar Wilde quote one regularly encounters in these matters: “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” “Oscar Wilde was a smart man with the job of creating clever sayings,” she went on to explain to me.
“Oh,” I said, which a perspicacious person could translate as, “We are not meant to love.”
I find myself thinking a lot about Oscar Wilde here on St. Patrick’s Day in 2021, and not just because I see that damn quote everywhere.
He was Irish for a start, and in 1890, published “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a novelistic primer for a lot of what plagues us in the anti-identity, pro-following-the-pack age.
The titular character strikes a kind of deal with the Devil, in which his portrait will age and show the signs of his various debauches, while his physical self remains as pristine as a polished penny.
I call it Dorian Gray-ing, this idea of putting forward the false front as the public face, while that part of us that is less rigorously on public view — like a painting in a home — betrays the effects of keeping up a pose, rather than embracing a reality.
Gray has a ripping old time of hollow conquests, buckets of wine, all of which is easy to equate with the “likes” of social media and half-hearted plaudits uttered so as to produce half-hearted plaudits in return.
But what if we didn’t dabble and pose, and dug deeper, both with ourselves and the world around us? Pulled a Wilde, as it were?
Quarterbacks have a phrase connoting when it’s time to go for a win, and not sit back: Sling it, they say. Oscar Wilde the writer was a great slinger. Of bon mots, certainly, but also sagacious counsel.
Conceivably there are many people who think Wilde’s vocation was quip-crafter, like he was this proto-Twitter pundit before the platform existed. We’re less inclined to deploy pragmatism in deducing how various pockets of reality function than we are to hammer that reality to match our whims, which often enough get termed “my truth.”
The result is the death of identifying something for what it is, and then adapting accordingly, which is the heart of the cautionary tale that is Dorian Gray. We thrust our over-daubed, over-worked self-portraits out into the world, bleating as we do so, “This is me! This is me!” Ah, but Wilde knew better. We do, too. Even as we ironically render ourselves more and more like everyone else who is taking this exact same damn course.
But it’s telling that the people inclined to cite the above bromide — which is kind of low-rent Wildean wit — never seem to think, “You know what? I should read something that dude actually wrote.”
This is a potentially meditative St. Patrick’s Day, COVID being what it is, and the quaffing of green-hued beer slipping from view. We’re parted from our groups. That’s when the genius and prescience of Wilde can swoop in and get you. Let it, I say. Rather than the cold beer in the belly, rejoice in the bracing, cold beer dashed into the face.
I thought of lobbing a beer — in dating app form — myself with the woman who sought to educate me. I wanted to say, “Let us put our minds together and discuss how Wilde was an influence on Stoker’s “Dracula,” and wouldn’t you agree with me that Richard Ellman’s Wilde bio is one of the finest of the twentieth century?”
But she didn’t know. She’ll probably never know. The point is the cliché. And it is the clichéd life that is a kind of death. Or, if you wish to be less macabre, we can just call it hardly a life at all. Not the life of an individual.
Read Dorian Gray and you’re confronted with a challenge in prose form. To kick through the skin of surface, and revel in what makes you you, and not everyone else. Anyone else. To sling it. Not pretend sling it — rather, sling it sling it.
Wilde, persecuted for his homosexuality, knew what he was on about, and his Mr. Gray is proof of how second-rate it is to be a kind of pose incarnate. Which is also as draining as a banshee sucking out one’s soul with a straw.
So don’t dip, but rather dive, on the holiday this year. Crack that book. Dispense with the platitudinous. Have a day, as they say, and drink hearty of the wisdom of the would-be quip king who was really so much more. As we should strive to be. You might find that not only are you de-Graying yourself, but you’re doing it with the ease and efficacy of a proper Irish goodbye.
Kew Gardens: There is a parallel between the oppression felt by the Thirteen Colonies under the occupation of the British military and the oppression felt in minority communities from the high concentrations of police and the abusive tactics used against them. The oppression felt in the Colonies caused patriotic leaders to state their claims in the Declaration of Independence against the occupying military force as sanctioned by the king of Great Britain. Taken directly from the Declaration of Independence, here are three main issues of occupation that engendered anger in the past and manifest in similar behaviors by police that engender anger in our minority communities today:
1. “He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without consent of our legislatures.”
2. “For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on inhabitants of these States.” 3. “For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.” The complaints stated in that revolutionary document were a significant reason for the discontent that led to the Revolutionary War. The parallel discontent in minority communities for similar oppressive acts should underscore the need for police reform and training.