Schools in COVID: Excellence at the expensive of equity?

As the city and NYCDOE scramble to put a plan in place for the 2020-2021 school year, we can’t lose sight of the importance of equity.  We need to be mindful of what is happening to each segment of our diverse communities because equity isn’t found at the average or sum total of what is being experienced.

In 2013, Bill De Blasio ran a mayoral campaign that centered on the theme of a “tale of two cities” and an understanding that growing inequality, reflected in racial and economic disparities, was the most pressing issue in our city. A successful first step towards reducing such disparities for the de Blasio administration was ensuring that ALL 4-year-olds would be guaranteed a spot in a prekindergarten class through the Universal PreK program.

The de Blasio administration, including New York City Department of Education Chancellor Richard Carranza, has expanded on this goal by committing to the Equity and Excellence for All agenda.  The mission of which is “to provide every single child, in every classroom, in every New York City public school, with a rigorous, inspiring, and nurturing learning experience.” This is intended to be “true regardless of family income, race, nationality, disability, language spoken at home, sexual orientation, or gender identification.”

As it stands now, the reopening plan includes: promises to invest in the technology needed for quality online learning; working with teachers to develop their online teaching skills; updating curriculum at the city level to reflect the new models of education; ensuring that there will be a nurse in every school building (which requires hiring 400 nurses over these next few weeks). The city also promised to provide hand sanitizer and personal protective equipment.  Principals will be able to call a special hotline for supply needs, apparently.

The Mayor and Chancellor remain adamant in adhering to their policy that as long as the infection rate remains under 3% citywide, school buildings will reopen.  In an email from Chancellor Carranza to all DOE employees on August 21st, he once again promised that if the citywide numbers were to go over that threshold, then the city would move back into a fully remote model.

For many community members, including parents and teachers, this policy is inadequate and deemed inequitable.  If 3% is the threshold, how could it be ok for anyone to go back into a school building in a community with an infection rate over that percentage? When you have some communities above that rate being forced to go back into their school buildings because other areas have smaller ones, it becomes evident that this policy hurts people in communities primarily made up of those who have already suffered the most during the COVID-19 crisis. And the statistics show that those are lower income neighborhoods.

Ideally, equity and excellence go hand in hand, but it would be a mistake to abandon equity in the name of excellence. The Mayor’s argument is that holding classes in school buildings is more effective.  Very few will disagree.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air