Why are we dying on this hill?
By: Sj Petteruti
Tags: Education Reform, Covid 19, Healthcare, Society And Culture

-Or- How we missed our chance to reform the American education system

The Battle of Weekhawken during the American Revolution. Or the COVID battle of 2020.

Since this outbreak began, I’ve been periodically tracking 2 metrics in my calendar:

Total number of new cases in the US

Total number of tests/million in the US

Here’s what I know…

In July we hovered mostly around 65,000 new cases/day. In August we dipped to about 40k/day. We were issuing around 130,000 tests per million people.

It was summer! Great weather! Football was coming back! Baseball playoffs!

Then we sent the kids back to school.

2 quick months went by. The weather got cold. We had daylight saving time (why is this still a thing?). It started getting dark at 4:45; darker days indeed.

Baseball went 50 games without a positive COVID case. Then they ended the World Series by letting Justin Turner back onto the field to celebrate with his teammates after he was pulled earlier in the game for testing positive. The message was clear:

Nobody cared about Corona anymore.

But just because we didn’t mean Corona was going away.

Since back to school season, here’s what’s happened in our country…

On Aug 25 we had 40k new cases, while testing 205k/ million

On Sept 20 we had 45k new cases, while testing 305k /million

On Oct 23 we had 81k new cases, while testing 395k/million

On Nov 9th we had 104k new cases, while testing 475k/million

On Nov 11th we had 140k new cases, while testing 485k/million

On Dec 12th we had 226k new cases, while testing 642k/million

Don’t tell me this is because we increased testing. I’m no math major, but I don’t need a calculator to tell you that those numbers are not growing proportionally.

Don’t tell me this is because people are socializing more indoors. Sure, that’s a factor here, but this kind of increase can’t be attributed solely to a change in adult socialization. People haven’t changed their behavior that drastically since the summer ended.

Don’t tell me it’s because we reopened too quickly. We’ve been reopening different kinds of businesses in different parts of the country since the spring.

The only large-scale change that happened across the country between summer and fall is that school began.

And yes, I know there are medical professionals who say kids can’t transmit the disease, or that they can’t get COVID, but that’s just not true.

A preprint report (one that has not yet been peer reviewed) co-authored by Yale on Sept 23rd showed that there was a significant rise in COVID cases in areas that had college campuses once students went back to school.

Why would what is true for college students not be true for high school students?

The problem is no one wants to keep the kids at home. The kids don’t want it. The parents don’t want it. And I don’t blame them. We don’t have the technical infrastructure. We don’t have the family structure to support at-home learning. We don’t even have the curriculum for online learning.

Education in this country has been in desperate need of reform for some time.

I don’t have kids and it’s been awhile since I’ve been in school, so I don’t have much expertise here, but it seems like this was an opportune time to rethink how we educate the American youth.

Experimenting with different methods of online learning.

Rethinking small group education.

Having a more modern conversation about relationships and sexuality.

Focusing on critical thinking and decision-making skills.

Providing more emotional support, socialization, and coping tactics.

But we haven’t really done any of that. Instead, we’re clinging to our old educational model as COVID cases skyrocket. We’re working independently, seeking different sources for best practices, schools in the same districts aren’t even coordinating.

The need is there, but the changes we need require substantial, sweeping reforms. Absent of unified coordination, or acknowledgment of the problem, reform doesn’t happen.

The only time I’ve seen substantial, sweeping reform happen in this country is in response to an extreme situation. 9/11 unified the government’s ability to share data across agencies (for better of worse). The Great Recession gave us universal healthcare, the Consumer Protection Bureau, and overhauled the American auto industry towards more environmentally-friendly fuel standards.