The Utterly Predictable Disaster of Making School Reopening a Racial Issue
I was told by a union ‘building representative’ that my pushing for reopening was because I lived on 'White time' and that my sense of urgency around school reopening was a form of White supremacy.
I live in Portland, Oregon, which had some of the longest Covid-related school closures in the country, second only to San Francisco. Even Chicago, which arguably has the most extreme educators’ unions, opened before we did. Predictably, articles about how Portland’s metro area is facing school “consolidations” (i.e., closures) are now rolling in. While factors driving shrinking enrollment are complex, this sentence jumps out from a recent article in The Oregonian: “But even redrawing attendance boundaries won’t necessarily solve an issue that’s been driven by profound enrollment declines, exacerbated by families who left the public school system during COVID-era building closures (italics added).” Elementary enrollment was the hardest hit by Covid closures, because it is easier to start your child in a different system, i.e., private, or to move, when they are younger and less dug in with their friends and school ecosystem.
One of the reasons I started this Substack was to talk frankly about the forces that drove school closures here in Portland, and nationally in heavily democratic cities, in hopes of preventing them next time. I think there are three main forces that produced sustained school closures, closures that lasted well past any reasonable response to infection risk itself: 1. Racialization of the issue of reopening 2. Excessive influence of local educator unions and 3. Once statewide closures lifted, leaving control of reopening to local school boards. #2 has received the most national attention, so I will start with #1, and discuss #2 and #3 in future posts.
I published many (~50) Op-Eds in national media during the pandemic and after, and often what I wanted to say was heavily shaped by editors. I get it—it is their job to craft a cohesive narrative, and often the product is better because of it. But this process also results in moderating one’s thoughts and opinions to fit what an outlet is willing to publish. For example, I published a co-authored piece on how pandemic social isolation and over cleaning were contributing to immunity debt, and the editors took out a paragraph on how early exposure to microbes sets up a baby’s immune system for life, including via passing through the birth canal. The editors were concerned that women who had C-sections would feel bad reading that vaginal birth was an important component of microbial seeding of the immune system. My co-author and I both had babies by C-section and disagreed with the editor that this was a source of shame, but some battles are not worth fighting and we took it out. I still like the piece and think it makes important points that were not altered by removing this content, but in other Op-Eds I had to substantially water down my views to get them published.
One of the subjects no one wanted to touch was that racialized activism was a strong driving factor that kept schools closed. By racialized, I mean that the discussion centered around race but was taken up by activists of all races. I am using Portland as an example, but what happened here was representative of the phenomenon occurring in many strongly democratic cities in the USA, including in more conservative states, e.g., Atlanta and Raleigh, NC. In North Carolina, the state Board of Education forced mandatory in person school in March 2021, and many districts in democratic areas remained largely remote until then.
Among these activists, Portland’s small Black community (6% of Portland is Black) was represented by a handful of very vocal women who were mostly associated with the education profession in some way—teachers, or educational assistants, school counselors, etcetera. The (much more numerous) White activists were typical of those who rally around social justice causes in Portland: middle class, usually college educated democratic voters, the type who are the first to argue e.g., that accelerated math classes are racist, while their own kids attend Kumon and have math tutors on the weekends. There were activists from other demographic groups, but fewer, which is typical for demographic groups that contain more recent immigrants.
Advocacy for reopening schools took place in Facebook groups where rallies and email campaigns were organized, and articles shared. Many arguments on ‘reopening’ FB pages (the Portland one eventually consisted of about 1400 members, with similar groups across Oregon totaling around 20-30,000 members) occurred between people who joined solely to tell us that wanting schools open was racist, and those who joined to advocate for reopening. At one early meeting with a then-City Councilman, we were told that it would not be possible to get schools open unless spokespeople from minority communities endorsed it, which never happened. That City Councilman was, sadly, correct.
Local educator unions in Portland, which represent a nearly entirely White educator group (Portland Public School teachers are 89% White, 1% Black, and 10% other) ran with these tactics and used them as an excuse to keep schools closed for an entire school year (post coming soon). For example, the Chicago teachers union account tweeted that reopening schools was rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny. They later deleted the Tweet.
It was obvious to me and many others that this take was wrongheaded and that low income children of all races would be harmed more profoundly by school closures than higher income children would be. Since racial minorities make up a disproportionate number of low-income earners, clearly Black and brown children were disproportionately harmed by school closures, way more than they were by SARs-CoV-2 infections. This has been shown over and over and was also obvious at the time.
I and many others were saddened and baffled as to why the narrative that reopening was racist went unchallenged. I was told by a union ‘building representative’ that pushing for reopening was a result of my whiteness, because I lived on “white time” and that my sense of urgency around school reopening was a form of White supremacy. These types of statements were frequently made in local and national media by local Portland activists. This article, by a local Portland activist/educator, sums up the racialized arguments for school closure.
We, i.e., leaders of reopening efforts around the state, did hear through private FB messages from quite a few Black people that they wanted schools to reopen but were unwilling to face the wrath of activists by saying so publicly or in media outlets. We heard the same from a multitude of teachers who were afraid of retaliation from their unions if they spoke up for reopening. I remember how happy I was when I met, at one of our rallies for school re-opening, a Black mother who had children in the Portland-area district that has the most Black students of any district in Oregon and the most children in poverty, who was willing to go on the news and talk about how school closures were hurting her children. It had been extremely difficult to find non-White parents who would speak to journalists, with the exception of a few Chinese and Latino parents. I eagerly tuned in to the coverage and my heart sank as the camera panned to her and her five children, neatly lined up from oldest to youngest on her living room sofa, all six of them in matching All Lives Matter tee shirts. So much for that salvo in the hearts-and-minds campaign.
Since it was very difficult to get diverse parents to speak out about the harms of school closures, in the face of the extremely toxic discourse around reopening and race, we turned to pressuring the districts for evidence that minority parents were more unwilling to send children back than White parents were, an assumption parroted repeatedly in the news and by activists who fought reopening. We eventually got most of the districts to send out surveys to parents. I cannot explain why Portland parents may have differed from parents elsewhere on this question, if in fact they did, but the talking point that Portland parents of color did not want to send their children back was simply wrong. Portland Public’s survey asking parents whether they wanted students to return to in-person instruction (hybrid format, not full-time, was the only option offered), showed (you will have to sit through a Board meeting to verify these data) 68% of White parents, 63% of Black, 59% of Latino, 60% of Asian and 66% of Native Americans said they wanted to go back, essentially no differences by racial group. Some polling showed that non-White parents were more reluctant to send kids back, a phenomenon that I believe was created by misinformation propagated by educator unions and media (see: future post). Articles such as this one in the New York Times, extolling the benefits of virtual school specifically for Black children, surely made matters worse. This sentence may explain some of the later disastrous effects of virtual school on outcomes for Black children, “Granted, not all Black children are thriving at home. They’re overrepresented among the kids who don’t have reliable Wi-Fi or adequate equipment at home. And supervising online learning is not an option for parents who are essential workers — a group that disproportionately includes Black people.” So, maybe the ‘school is racist anyway so don’t go back’ narrative was not the best for kids?
I am talking about this now because racialized discussions as a driving factor of prolonged school closure are often avoided, and it is important to acknowledge that packaging reopening schools as a racial issue helped drive not just school closures, but vast racial disparities in school closures. US News reported that “As of January [2021], more than half of all Black, Hispanic and Asian fourth-graders were learning in a fully remote environment. By comparison, a quarter of white students were learning fully remotely, and… nearly half of white students were learning in-person, full-time.” So not only were students who already suffered academic achievement gaps falling even farther behind, they were doing so in much greater proportions than White students who were more likely to be back in school. Again, the reasons for this disproportionate return to school are complex and I will explore them more soon. But the media coverage and efforts by local activists to make school return a racial issue contributed, and massively, tragically, and predictably backfired on students of color.
It's amazing to me that the same unions who act like homeschooling is tantamount to child abuse because a public school education is so "essential" were the same people shouting that online school is great for kids and anyone who says otherwise is an anti-science, racist whackjob. The hypocrisy was disturbing to watch.
It's amazing, but not really surprising, that editors' speculations about how facts about giving birth would make some women feel triumphed over the facts themselves. It's an updated Victorianism, where certain embarrassing realities can't be mentioned.