Lord knows I don't really want to revisit those halcyon days of 2020, but we are apparently going to be subjected repeatedly to fantastic tale of What Happened iBack Then The rough outline goes something like this:
In 2020, Dr. Fauci manufactured a panic over Covid-19 which was A) basically harmless, B) manufactured by the Chinese and/or C) some sort of Deep State plot. The teachers union forced (somehow) schools to close and then proceeded to keep them closed practically forever for no good reason at all, because teachers were excited about getting a paycheck for doing nothing.
I'm going to skip over some aspects of this fairy tale other than to point out that A) the leader of the US government in 2020 was President Donald Trump and B) millions of people died, including millions of people in countries all around the world, which is a hell of effort to make for a conspiracy aimed at fooling the American people.
But I do want to write down my own narrative from those days, jsut so that I can get it out every time US politicians are making me feel as if I'm nuts.
Covid-19 dropped for realsies in March of 2020. We had just started to hear about it, and then we were all on lockdown. Spring musicals all across the country were shut down. It was sudden and scary. "Just for two weeks," at first, and then indefinitely, when it became clear the spread wasn't slowing. Local districts here scrambled to cobble together some sort of distance learning. For districts like the one my wife works in, that sometimes meant teachers hand-delvering packets to student homes.
My newest grandson was born in March. I was booked to fly to Seattle to meet him. The airline postponed the flight, and then postponed it again. When the twins were exposed, it took a few days to find a place a couple towns over that could do testing. We ordered a lot of take-out in hopes it would keep our favorite restaurants in business.
Infrmation was soarse and uncertain. The feds, given a chance to show real leadership in a time of challenge, ttally biffed it. Betsy DeVos made one good call-- no Big Standardized Test in spring of 2020 (a decision that would mobilize an entire industry to launch a push to bring those tests back ASAP)-- but otherwise told local schools they were on their own. Your local newspaper was probably publishing a daily number of infected, hospitalized, and dead.
Some of them were teachers. Tick, tick, tick.
It became quickly clear that the school year was over. Maybe we could regroup in time for the fall.
The summer was filled with handwringing. Nobody (with the exception of a few outliers and the ed tech industry) wanted to do more distance learning, zoom school, or otherwise continue the excrutiating experiment of the spring. But what to do instead? I wrote the following in June 2020:
We know that nobody really knows how dangerous re-opening schools will be. Will students become super-spreaders, sharing it at school and bringing it home to vulnerable family members? How great a risk will teachers be running?
We know that “official” guidance on how to open schools is in short supply, and that what is out there is, for teachers, mind-boggling. The average teacher’s reaction to CDC guidelines is an eye roll powerful enough to shift the earth’s axis. Teachers have conjectured repeatedly that the members of the CDC must have never set foot inside a school, but that’s not the CDC’s job. Their job is to figure out what safety would require. Somebody else will have to figure out how, or if, that can be done.
Finally, we know that based on everything we think we know right now, the price tag for safely opening schools again is huge. Lots of folks are trying to run numbers, and everyone agrees that the figure will be in the billions—many of them. And simply throwing up our hands and going back to some version of distance learning is, we already know, not much of an option—unless we pour a bunch of money into getting it right.
That, of course, did not happen. Instead, the fall was marked by variations of this conversation:
Leaders: We really want to get these schools open again.
Teachers: Thank God. So what are we doing to mitigate danger to teachers, students, and families? Mandatory distancing? Regular testing? Air treatment for classrooms? School issued masks? What are we doing to keep everyone safe?
Leaders: Yeah, that stuff would be really expensive, so we thoughgt we'd, you know, open the building and let you all take your chances.
Teachers: We would really rather not do that.
Leaders: See, everyone! The teachers are refusing to re-open the building, for some unknown reason.
Remember all the fun variations in the fall of 2020? Split the student body in half and run alternate days, or morning and afternoon school. Have teachers teach half the students in person and half over the internet. Open full in person, but any time someone tested positive, send the class home for 5 days of Zoom school. All of these variations had one thing in common-- a shit ton of extra work for teachers. Betsy DeVos popped up to tell us "we're all in this together," which was some real baloney. She was busy harnessing Covid panic and discontent to sell school choice.
The fall of 2020 was a mass of school approaches. Cautious parents stuck to pods. Plenty of private and charter schools, as well as schools in states with powerless unions, chose to stay closed. More information about Covid suggested that children weren't in as much danger, but it was still unclear how much danger an infected Junior was to Grandma. Testing and reporting was by and large on the honor system.
By the fall of 2020, districts were pretty much on their own to make decisions. That was a challenge. It was not a good omen when administration at my old district decided to hold a planning session in person and it turned into a mini-spreader event.
In my corner of the world, the fall and winter of 2020 were actually the worst part. Our numbers were low in September, but by December everyone knew somebody who had been hit by the virus; many folks knew someone who had died. Our local hospital was at capacity. While people were still arguing that it was just like a bad case of the flu, a former thirty-something colleague was describing how Covid made it exhausting for him to climb steps, and hard to just think clearly.
You may have forgotten the timeline, but it was mid-December before vaccines were available. Trump could have justifiably claim them as a triumph, a win for his administration, but by then the loons were hollering at full volume, so, you know, maybe drink some bleach or have some horse worm medicine, but don't let them stick you with that secret micro-ship. Some of those anti-vax folks were teachers.
In 2020, most people did the best they could with limited information and rudderless government. Hindsight shows that some choices could have been better, but hindsight does not set policy. Millions of people died, millions more were hospitalized, and yet six years later, we're dealing with folks who insist that it wasn't real. That the teachers union somehow kept schools closed for no good reason because, I guess, teachers wanted to collect their big fat pasychecks for doing work that was harder and more grueling than their usual work. "I don't want to go back if you won't take steps to keep us all safe" has been shortened to "I don't want to go back."
The Covid story is a variation on an old education theme-- society faces a problem, won't muster the resources to fully address the problem, leaves teachers to pick up the slack (see also IDEA). All Covid added was a layer of A) the problem was made up and B) it was teachers' fault.
So if, like me, you hear the Covid rhetoric and wonder if your memories of 2020 are somehow defective, I'm here to tell you you're not imagining things.
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