Life under the coronavirus has brought out the very best in our members and our neighbors while laying bare the structural racism and inequities in our society and our education systems that have been caused by decades of deliberate disinvestment in the public good.
In tele-town halls, Facebook Live events, Zoom meetings and one-on-one conversations, I have heard you talk with real emotion about how much you care about your students and how committed you are to helping them — and each other — get through this crisis. It is joyful to see MTA members connecting with each other in new ways and organizing to create better circumstances local by local.
Yet inequities are growing even wider as the pandemic hits black, indigenous and Latinx communities and families with low incomes the hardest.
Two years ago, a Federal Reserve study found that 40 percent of Americans would not be able to cover a $400 emergency expense with cash, savings or a credit card charge that they could quickly pay off. Some of you are among that 40 percent. If you work with students and families with low incomes, you know this well. You witness the anxiety and pain that they carry to our schools and colleges.
In this issue of MTA Today, Cathy Horkan, president of the Northeast Teachers’ Association and a guidance counselor at Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational High School, says of the coronavirus crisis: "This has taken a real social and emotional toll on students. There’s a lot of anxiety and depression. For a lot of our kids, life at home isn’t great. School is a safe place to escape to."
As reported in The New York Times on April 6, "Mounting data suggests that domestic abuse is acting like an opportunistic infection, flourishing in the conditions created by the pandemic."
In a report by NPR on April 7, Dr. Uché Blackstock stated that pre-existing racialized health disparities that black people often experience, such as obesity, asthma, hypertension and diabetes, "are all risk factors for developing serious complications of COVID-19."
Dr. Joseph Betancourt, vice president and chief equity and inclusion officer at Massachusetts General Hospital, identifies the social and economic determinants that put people of color disproportionately at risk of contracting COVID-19. They include living in areas with high population density and in housing with multiple family members; being essential workers for hospitals, grocery stores and gas stations — or employed as food delivery drivers — and lacking adequate personal protective equipment; and having to take public transportation to work. These conditions don’t allow for physical distancing and therefore create a higher risk of the transmission of infectious disease.
MTA members are also "first responders" in this crisis. Some of our cafeteria employees, custodians and professional and classified staff are among those required to come to work, risking possible exposure to the virus. We are all working long hours to provide our students and their families with support while we are challenged to tend to our own family needs. And there are stark contrasts based on socioeconomic status in how remote and online learning plans are being handled.
It is our job to resist. We should not try to replicate school at home or turn colleges into online learning enterprises. Instead, we need to organize around our vision of what public education should look like upon our return. Let’s take this moment to realign our school curriculum to once again be developmentally appropriate, as it was before we were shackled by MCAS. Let’s reassert the importance of affordable, accessible, in-person public higher education, led by fairly compensated full-time faculty and staff.
In some privileged communities, some parents expect that the districts will move full steam ahead with the curriculum. In disadvantaged communities, a bigger challenge is figuring out how to connect with students who are distracted by chaos at home or who don’t have access to reliable internet connections, physical materials and an adult in the household who can guide them. Absenteeism always has been disproportionately high in low-income communities. It’s now even easier to be absent from a remote learning platform. Educators in many communities across the state are reporting low rates of participation.
In about a week’s time — and with little consultation of faculty and staff — higher education was forced to transition fully to online learning. Rightly, dorm, food and parking fees have been partially refunded to students. But this loss of tens of millions of dollars has exacerbated the ongoing funding crisis in higher ed.
The continuing pandemic could mean significant drops in enrollment, including cuts to faculty and staff. The education "reformers" are already eager to advance their goals of more online education and possibly even shuttering campuses.
As we come out of the coronavirus crisis, we will once again be told we are in hard times so we must "tighten our belts" and "do more with less." We must reject austerity cuts, layoffs, outsourcing, a wholesale transition to online teaching, and all other privatization measures.
It is our job to resist. We should not try to replicate school at home or turn colleges into online learning enterprises. Instead, we need to organize around our vision of what public education should look like upon our return. Let’s take this moment to realign our school curriculum to once again be developmentally appropriate, as it was before we were shackled by MCAS. Let’s reassert the importance of affordable, accessible, in-person public higher education, led by fairly compensated full-time faculty and staff.
But we can’t just limit our concerns to the academic needs of our students. The real "education reform" we need to pursue is greater equity in our society. That is the basis of the Common Good agenda we released when this crisis first broke.
To protect our education system and sustain our economy, we must not only bail out our public schools, colleges and universities but actually reinvest in them at this very moment. This will require the federal government to provide massive aid to states and municipalities — on a scale that is necessary to heal the sick, support those in need of food and housing, preserve jobs and invest for the future.
The MTA — because of our size, our importance, our victories for public education and workers’ rights and our connections to our communities — is prepared to move through this disaster to recovery with collective action. The work ahead requires that we harness our power as a union to reach out, bring our communities together and advance a plan of action to make a more equitable future for our students, our members and our communities a reality.
Letters policy
MTA Today welcomes letters to the editor from MTA members. Letters should be no longer than 200 words. Each letter submitted for publication must address a topic covered in MTA Today, must be signed and must include the writer’s telephone number for confirmation purposes. Opinions must be clearly identified as belonging to the letter-writer. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and style. To submit a letter, mail it to MTA Today, 2 Heritage Drive, 8th floor, Quincy, MA 02171-2119, or email it to mtatodayletters@massteacher.org. For additional information, please refer to the guidelines posted on www.massteacher.org.
To read the Common Good agenda, go to massteacher.org/commongood. For other information related to the COVID-19 crisis, visit massteacher.org/coronavirus.
