President Joe Biden might have hit his 100-day goal of reopening the majority of K-8 schools for in-person learning, but there are still a lot of unmet challenges facing the new administration.
They include reopening high schools, smoothing out tensions with the teachers unions, as well as repairing racial and economic disparities that revealed themselves during the coronavirus shutdowns.
To be sure, the pandemic has changed education in the United States forever. It cast a critical light on school financing, the ability of students, teachers, and parents to adapt to a new scholastic landscape, and gave teachers more power than they’d had in a generation.
On the campaign trail, Biden made education one of his top priorities and pledged significant changes during his first 100 days in office.
His goal of reopening most schools wasn’t that much of a feat, given his administration initially said he was only talking about Kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms and that “most” really meant 51%.
Even before Biden took office, the country had almost hit the 51% mark. Since then, school districts have slowly inched toward more in-person learning. As of February, 49% of elementary and middle schools had offered some form of in-person instruction, according to the Institute of Education Sciences.
By March 1, dozens of large school districts serving more than two million students had expanded their in-school operations, including Minneapolis, Boston, San Diego, Oakland, and Albuquerque.
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In Georgia, Susan Daniel told the Washington Examinershe couldn’t wait for her son Ethan to go back to in-person school.
Ethan, who has dyslexia and a chromosomal issue that adds to a learning delay, had a tough time with remote learning. Almost all of his schooling for the better part of a year had been virtual.
“It’s really hard to keep a second grader’s attention in a small breakout group on Zoom, especially when you hear all the other household background noise,” she said.
In fact, Ethan’s reading skills had dropped an entire grade level in one year. The second-grader was still reading at a first-grade level.Getting Ethan back into in-person learning was vital to the academic progress of her son, Daniel said.
A recent Dutch study found students made little to no gains while learning from home, even for short school closures under ideal circ*mstances. The COVID-19 shutdowns were anything but ideal.
John Bailey, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that while it’s “good news” more students are going back to brick and mortar schools, “there are still too many shut out of in-personal learning opportunities.”
It’s something the Education Department has acknowledged and pledged to work on.
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Parents in marginalized, underserved communities have said they don’t feel safe sending their children back to school. Parents in poorer communities already believed the schools were in massive disrepair and therefore did not trust the district, state, or federal government when they claimed, for example, a school’s ventilation system was up to par and would keep their children safe.
Eboni-Rose Thompson, a community activist who serves on the Washington, D.C., State Board of Education, broke it down like this to the Washington Post: “Pre-covid, I couldn’t count on the fact that I could send my kid to school and there would be soap and toilet paper in the bathroom, and now you’re telling me when we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic that all of a sudden my kids’ needs will be met?”
Thompson added: “You really can only move at the speed of trust. Trust is hard-earned, and it is easily disrupted.”
The Biden administration has also run into massive pushback from teachers unions, which have resisted a full, and in some places, even a partial, return to school, although earlier this month Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, finally came around to backing a return to in-person school by next fall.
On the positive side, Biden has had considerable success tackling education issues that have been directly under his control, including signing the American Rescue Plan, which provides nearly $130 billion in funds to K-12 schools to help with pandemic recovery.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also fast-tracked vaccines for teachers as school employees and has released new uniform guidelines to restore its credibility after its flip-flopping recommendations during the previous administration. Now, social distancing guidelines for schools is down to 3 feet, leaving some states to loosen their own restrictions.
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The U.S. Department of Education has also released a guideline for best practices and has sent first lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to tour schools around the country.
