School

When future historians congregate to conduct their postmortem of the short-lived Biden administration, what date will they pick to mark the crisis that signaled the beginning of the end? I’d like to offer October 4, 2021 for consideration. In the weeks before, it is true, Biden’s approval rating had been in free fall. (Fun pastime if you’re bored: enter ‘Biden’ and ‘free fall’ into your favorite search engine). There was the world historical disaster of our evacuation of Afghanistan, the nearest parallel to which was not America’s ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 but William Elphinstone’s disastrous evacuation from Kabul in 1842. There was the unfolding crisis at our southern border.

Maddie, my three-year-old daughter, is home this week because one of her classmates tested COVID positive. You read that right. It’s July 2021, but our toddler, who is at virtually no risk of transmitting or getting sick from COVID, is forced by the ruling class to be out of school, as are her 23 tiny classmates. So while I try to do work as I listen to Maddie talk to her imaginary friends, I’d like to pose a question to those making and enforcing policy in Sacramento and Los Angeles. When is it enough? The folks now telling our beloved Montessori school to shut down the offending class do not seem to be the brightest among us — what with their unwillingness to grasp and apply basic science — so I’ll define the ‘it’.

You get a look at your high-school daughter’s smartphone. You see a note there, a note to you and your family. It’s a suicide note. What to do, that is, what after seeing the troubled girl through time on a psychiatric ward? You sue. I refer to litigation brought by desperate parents in Los Angeles and San Diego counties in an effort to get their kids back into public schools. While looking into the effects of COVID lockdowns, I happened upon certain court documents. I have since been provided others by one of the plaintiffs’ law firms, Aannestad Andelin & Corn. But let’s not consider these cases as literally what they are: legal prayers for relief in state courts, relief from persisting, on-and-off, lockdowns; relief from COVID hysteria.

Americans have mixed feelings about opening schools this fall. Some — like the Trump administration’s Department of Education — want schools to reopen, withholding federal dollars from those that remain closed. However, the majority of Americans see opening schools as a health risk to their children.After two-thirds of teachers opposed the reopening of schools, the Los Angeles School District will not be returning to in-person classes this fall. However, United Teachers Los Angeles, the main teachers' union in the city, seemingly wants to suspend the return of quality instruction indefinitely. UTLA — composed of 35,000 teachers — released a list of policy demands that must be met before schools reopen.

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: 'whiteness'. Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects. At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out 'a systematized campaign' for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project.