The Essential Work of Schools

I’ve been reading and listening to people share strong opinions about whether or not we must reopen schools for in-person learning in a few weeks, and I can’t remember a time in my thirty-year education career when so many people had so much to say about the role of teachers and schools.

On one hand, I’m glad the spring shutdown and shift to online or other substitute methods for learning forced people to take stock of the critical functions our schools and teachers serve in the lives of children and communities. On the other, I’ve heard my share of people whose sole conclusion from this reflection time has been that they really had a good babysitting deal from public schools and can’t possibly do their own work without that free childcare. Both things are true. I simply hope those who’ve reached the second realization think hard about the first. Children are not Amazon packages, produce, or a week’s worth of household trash…and the people who deliver learning, nurture their growth with rich and healthy daily experiences, and care for them during your working hours…well those people are a unique breed of “essential workers.” If we learned one thing during the last months, I hope it is that teachers are not fungible, easily replaced by machines and unskilled amateurs, or unimportant.

In the first weeks of the pandemic, I—like many others—found myself grateful and ashamed that I had not realized how dependent I was on the work of delivery people, food supply chain/grocery staff, sanitation workers, and health care providers. I had time to think about the entire team of people who keep an organization like a hospital running—the cleaning crews, the cafeteria staff, the ambulance drivers, nurses, doctors, administrators, maintenance, security staff…I know I’ve just scratched the surface. The same was true when I went to the grocery store. I’ve always appreciated cashiers and baggers who help me directly and the folks in the deli and butcher shop prepping food I select. But I found myself so appreciative for the first time of the men and women showing up to work behind the scenes of an industry I don’t work in or understand well: field workers harvesting produce or packing chicken to get it to stores, manufacturers of cleaning products, people who drove the trucks all night, the folks who unloaded it all tirelessly and stocked the shelves while we filled our carts. I’d been rather oblivious to the huge number of people I had depended upon to live. I’m not proud of that. It’s just true.

In the last months, we’ve all been given a chance to ponder just what and who are essential to us. I have appreciated the staff in our senior living facilities—men and women who have masked up and reported for duty with our most vulnerable populations, doing exhausting and dangerous work for not much per hour. When the power went out, I pictured the crews at IPL going in at night to help get things running or the guy up on a telephone pole after a storm restoring service. We’ve all experienced the frustration of waiting from 10-5 for a technician to show up, but I found myself more grateful than ever for people with the complex skills to diagnose and repair a broken refrigerator or HVAC unit or plumbing. These are gifts I don’t have and can’t fake. As a volunteer for the board of a children’s shelter, I’ve listened to stories of police officers showing up to a 911 call in the middle of the night, rescuing kids in dangerous situations, and taking them to the shelter where essential workers never stopped staffing the place during the pandemic and caring for those children. So many people kept working during this time at risk to themselves. Postal workers. Food service workers. Cleaning teams. Researchers. Transportation workers. Utility providers. Firefighters. Military personnel on ships and shores far from home.

That brings me to teachers…and schools.

We’ve heard a lot in recent years about the automation of learning. Since early 2000, entire charter enterprises sprang up (and often faded) predicated on computer-driven instruction in online academies or schools that delivered digital lessons with less-skilled aides supervising a lab full of students on laptops and fewer professional teachers. Technology, some said, would make teaching and learning more efficient. Some charter innovators even said computers could be leveraged to replace teachers, and learners would still progress. If the last months taught us anything, however, I hope it is that virtual learning can do some of what a school or a teacher does, but this is a human enterprise, and schools and the people who make them possible are essential.

Schools aren’t perfect. Not every teacher is great. For the most part, however, I hope the current situation helps us appreciate that the schools that meet the needs of 57 million children in our country every day are critical in our society. I’ll say that again: 57 million children attend public schools in the U.S. Over 3 million teachers serve them. Millions more school adults support teachers and learners to ensure they succeed. That means about 1 in 5 people in the United States walk through the doors of a public school every day to work in the field of learning and human development. Schools are massive, complex, essential enterprises…the heartbeat of our democracy, the safety net for our children, and the hope for our future.

When I have heard people argue that “children are low risk for the virus” as a flippant reason to reopen schools, I think to myself that some of them may have no idea of the part of the adult iceberg beneath the surface of a school—just as I had not really fully considered all the important people who made my grocery store possible. Just to be clear, when we talk about “reopening” schools fully, we are also talking about these millions of essential adult workers:

• bus drivers and monitors
• bus mechanics
• teachers
• custodians
• office staff
• administrators
• instructional assistants
• substitute teachers
• counselors
• cafeteria staff
• professors preparing/supervising student teachers
• department of education staff
• speech and language pathologists
• translators
• security officers
• home/school and homeless student coordinators
• technology teams and IT specialists
• school psychologists
• social workers
• behavior/occupational therapists
• school board members
• maintenance crews
• playground and building inspectors
• safety specialists
• school nurses and clinic staff
• treasurers
• library staff/media specialists
• college counselors
• athletic directors
• coaches
• community volunteers
• And more I may have forgotten

Any teacher will tell you he/she would rather be with students in person; that online teaching is grueling to design and deliver, let alone do well; and that returning to work given the case counts in some counties and the conditions in some school buildings is terrifying to some of them. Are they essential workers? Yes. Should we risk their lives if we can provide alternatives until it is safe for them to work? No. We need them well. In case people are unaware, we are already facing a shortage of teachers in this country. So keeping them healthy and able to return when it is safe is important, even if it means hybrid or online learning must continue a while. Are those alternatives as good for kids? No. To say otherwise is to deny the critical and important work that all those people I listed above do for 57 million children every day. I will add that, like many workers in this country, there were some years when, if it hadn’t been for my husband’s income, if I had to teach and pay for childcare for my own kids, I would have netted less than zero for my week’s work. We don’t pay many essential workers anywhere close to their true value to us, and that’s a fact, so if some schools go back but teachers’ children need care, it is a fact that many cannot afford to return to their jobs. I say this fully aware of the ironic paradox that the many essential workers I have grown to appreciate during this time have faced the same problem with their own childcare needs in the past months when schools were closed. Schools provide safe and enriching places children to learn and grow, surrounded by supportive professionals, so parents can do their own jobs with peace of mind and focus. That’s not free babysitting. That’s a critical national asset. It’s time we said so and valued the people who make it possible.

We cannot mandate that all schools reopen fully for in-person classes. Each situation is different; each district (sometimes even each school) has different safety considerations for the children/staff/community, and these will evolve and shift with the conditions as they should, as they do in severe weather or other safety calls we have to make when we are responsible for vulnerable humans. We aren’t delivering packages; we’re caring for people’s most precious treasures, and no school person I’ve ever known takes that responsibility lightly. Hard calls are ahead, and some people will be angry and unsatisfied as those impact their personal situation. Digital substitutes for real school will be imperfect and frustrating. That’s a given. But let’s not lose sight of something more important here.

The more important question I think is this: how will we take care of our nation’s schools and their essential staff now that we have seen how critical they are to us? Will we fund them better? Resource them according to their real needs? Stop talking about how disappointed we are with public education and respect the difficulty of the work and the vastness of the enterprise now that we’ve seen that it isn’t easy to replace or supplant? Most important, will we do a better job in the days ahead of honoring those who choose to do this essential, life-saving work?