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As the omicron wave crests and public schools face teacher sickouts, strikes, and a rash of student absences, it is worth reviewing some basic facts about the pandemic and public education. The results of last year's experiment in remote learning have confirmed what any minimally competent teacher could have told you from the outset: instructing students online yields disastrous consequences. Indeed, the results are so bad that defenders of a maximally cautious approach can only argue about terminology (please don’t say “learning loss!”) while proposing that we shouldn’t actually measure how far students fell behind under lockdown. Meanwhile, the psychological costs of the pandemic era continue to mount.

With omicron cases rising, many school districts are returning to remote learning for the first few weeks of January. That, of course, could be extended, as we have seen happen so many times during the pandemic. As a school social worker, I can attest that remote learning has been an absolute disaster. Far from the “abundance of caution” approach, school closures have devastated our youth, with many still struggling to function. It boggles my mind that many large cities are repeating this mistake. While nearly all students suffer amid virtual schooling, our most vulnerable suffer the most. The following three hypothetical students exist in every school, as I have witnessed over the past 15 years working with New York City teenagers.

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.

‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ You hear a lot of that glibly categorical punditry around the COVID-19 outbreak. Already, the progress of a mindless virus through the human population is being touted as the herald of the reorganization of the world’s economic system and the end of neoliberalism, the harbinger of a world in which nurses and shelf-stackers are valued more highly than investment bankers. Well, we’ll see. There are, as has been often said, two great things of which we can always be certain: death and taxes. The former is currently enjoying a bit of a moment. But the latter, sooner or later, is going to make the sort of roaring comeback not seen since First Blood Part II.