Pandemic Teacher Woes Erase the Plight of Urban Schools
As we continue along in the third school year of teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing is certain: teachers are exhausted. We’ve seen headline after headline detailing the incredibly massive toll that the past 20 months have taken on our nation’s teachers. There is collective agreement that something must be done, and quick, in order to get teachers the support they need before we are faced with a mass exodus from the profession, which would essentially decimate our public schools.
While I am ecstatic to see that the subject of teacher wellness and sustainability is finally being given the attention it deserves on a national scale, I can’t help but to feel a pang of bitterness when I think about the decades of struggle that urban schools serving primarily Black and Brown students have endured — long before the pandemic. It’s almost as if these students and teachers, on their own, weren’t important enough for public concern and institutional reinvestment. One might dare to venture that the worth of a Black body in our nation’s eyes is the same whether it be in a school or a jail or a morgue.
Now that the spotlight is on schools as a whole, even those that have been chronically disinvested from will be included in the widespread efforts to retain teachers and support schools through the pandemic and its aftershocks. But that’s the thing about equity — it can only be achieved when all students get the targeted supports they need, not when every student gets their equal share of the same support. It then becomes painfully obvious that the upcoming attempts at mitigating the impact of a very specific harm done to our schools during a narrowly defined period of time, will fail to address the long-standing harms that have plagued our public school system for centuries. There seems to be an attempt at a unifying “we’re all in this together” sentiment as think pieces and exposés abound with regards to this “new” crisis schools are facing. But in actuality, we’re not in it together. We never were.
For generations, schools situated in Black and Brown neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty have been relegated to the margins as they continue to be responsible for the education of hundreds of thousands of youth. More often than not, these schools with inadequate academic and socio-emotional support, physically unsafe learning conditions, and high staff turnover, all exacerbated by what feels like intentional mismanagement of shoestring budgets act as a barrier for students to succeed in spite of, rather than as a springboard into the opportunities and upward mobility promised by the long forgotten American Dream. For these schools, the woes of the last two years were layered on top of decades of institutional misdeeds that must be addressed if we are ever to move toward any semblance of a democratic and just society.
One term that saw its ascension into buzzword fame throughout the pandemic is learning loss. All of a sudden, no longer were educators and parents the only ones concerned with the learning of children, but now politicians, business owners, and pretty much anyone with an agenda had an opinion about what needed to happen in order to prevent the nation’s children from experiencing severe deficits in their learning. This newfound concern, of course, was a superficial guise with the existence of an ever-widening learning gap along the lines of race and class being the proof.
Pedagogical theorist and teacher educator Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings more aptly refers to this gap as education debt, since it is a reflection of either the failure or the refusal of our leaders and policy makers to provide Black and Brown students with what they need in order to achieve academic success at rates comparable to their white counterparts. If education is a right, then every student is owed the opportunity of educational attainment. However, this is not possible when so many schools are set up for failure from the start with chronic underfunding, staff burnout, and severe teacher retention issues leading to long term-substitutes and inexperienced educators serving in schools with the highest concentration of need. Because this debt has been left to compound for decade upon decade, the concept of learning loss is far from novel in these communities and is unlikely to subside anytime soon as long as a return to normal continues to be the goal.
The call to action is simple: Demand equity in post-pandemic efforts to revitalize schools. We must keep the conversation going until all of the needs of all children have been met. We must refuse to allow schools to replicate the harmful cycle that tells us that some level of suffering and injustice is acceptable when experienced by the poor or by people of color, but that we must take action once it begins to impact the rich or the white. Be the voice that continues to center Black and Brown students in spaces of power. They deserve public outrage. They deserve relentless advocacy. In the words of James Baldwin almost seventy years ago, we must be prepared to “go for broke,” since we can’t be certain how many more chances there will be.
