COVID-19 Chapter 10: Schools

In the tenth episode of our Anatomy of a Pandemic series on COVID-19, we continue our exploration of the diverse impacts of this pandemic by taking a look at how education and schooling has been affected, with a particular focus on the United States. Massive school closures and transition to distance learning has revealed vast inequities in access to basic educational needs and has highlighted the importance of public schools as more than just a place to learn. We are joined by journalist Jennifer Berkshire (Twitter: @BisforBerkshire) and education historian Dr. Jack Schneider (Twitter: @Edu_Historian), producers of Have You Heard, a podcast on educational policy and politics, to examine the current challenges in delivering educational content during this pandemic and some implications for the future of public schools (interview recorded April 17, 2020). As always, we wrap up the episode by discussing the top five things we learned from our expert. To help you get a better idea of the topics covered in this episode, we’ve listed the questions below:

1. Have we seen anything like this before, like with the 1918 influenza pandemic and school closures due to polio epidemics?
2. What are some of the services that public schools in the US provide? And how is this pandemic revealing that schools are more than just a place to learn?
3. Can you talk briefly about the inequalities in education and access and their historical roots?
4. Are these inequalities unique to the United States or are there other countries where similar inequalities are seen or being revealed by this pandemic?
5. Who is being left out in this switch to distance learning?
6. Can you discuss how well distance learning works across different age groups?
7. Do you think that this epidemic will make policymakers and politicians see the economic value of schools? Or is it going to further decrease funding to schools and result in the dismantling of the public school system? How do you think our definition of school will change after this pandemic?
8. What was the trajectory of funding for public schools before this pandemic?
9. How well does distance learning seem to work?
10. When schools re-open, what kind of effects are we going to see on current students? Specifically, how do we recover when some kids will have continued to learn during this pandemic and others will likely have fallen further behind?
11. What positive changes do you hope to see come out of this?

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