Online Learning and Equity

America’s public schools do not have the resources to switch to online learning. America’s public schools are woefully underfunded. America’s public schools cannot provide free computers and internet access to every home in America so that children can learn during this pandemic because the US Government, and especially the current administration, actively undermines the US public school system.

Jim Crow exists and is alive and well in our segregated cities and our segregated school system. The link between race and poverty in our country has only been exacerbated by neoliberalism, deindustrialization, and repeated crises in capitalism that continually funnel public wealth into the coffers of the mega-rich. This reality is written all over America’s decrepit public school buildings, it’s lack of classroom resources, and it’s mismanagement.

But can’t Google and Spectrum and Amazon step in to provide computers and internet for America’s schools? After all, their untaxed profits could easily provide this. Some might argue they have a moral obligation. We cannot accept hand outs or charity or crumbs thrown from Tech Monopolies as a replacement for just economic policy. Policy that provides for basic social needs like safe housing, access to nutritious food, access to health care, and access to clean air and water on a livable planet. We need to support the Green New Deal. We need it now more than ever, and we cannot trust the electoral two party system to deliver it. We have to elect insurgent local politicians and practice Mutual Aid on the grassroots level.

Teachers across the country, myself included, are waking up thinking about if our students can eat, if families can access relief aid, and, of course, if our students are doing their homework. Access to education is a human right, and a legal right of US citizens. Universal public education was born out of the flames of Emancipation and Radical Reconstruction, because our ancestors knew that democracy and a just society could only be possible with a population empowered by knowledge and critical thinking.

The NEA’s endorsement of Joe Biden is a sick joke and goes against every value that has led me to commit to a life of public service. He is a puppet of capitalism.

I spent my last tank of gas today hand delivering homework packets to a handful of families. We have been calling families multiple times a day to arrange for them to pick up printed homework packets. We have been distributing scientific calculators, and chromebooks to our early college students who have switched to remote learning for their college courses. We have two weeks to figure out how to deliver quality and necessary education to our young people without putting ourselves or our school community at risk. Online learning is, frankly, not an option for many public schools in this country, my own public charter school included.

Only through meeting these basic needs of access can we transform US Public Schools into the vehicle for social transformation we need it to be.