The Real Meaning of School Reopening

Source: Nenad Stojkovic, Creative Commons (some rights reserved)

In the current national debate over the reopening of schools amid the pandemic, our political leaders appear to be united in what they accuse the other side of doing: politicizing the issue. “Corrupt Joe Biden and the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons, not for health reasons!” President Trump tweeted on July 6. “They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!” For their part, the Democratic National Committee launched an ad that accused the president of being “desperate to reopen schools because he thinks it will save his reelection.”

In a joint statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, and the School Superintendents Association urged a “safe return” in the fall but stressed that officials “must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics.” We can agree that school policy decisions should not be political in the pejorative sense of prioritizing partisan electoral advantage over all other considerations.

Nevertheless, schools are inherently political in that they are the most important public spaces in which the nation’s youngest citizens learn what citizenship means. What happens there affects not just their health but their capacity and disposition to engage in the practice of democracy. This is no less true in a season of plague, when schools—whether reopened or not—will be imparting lessons in the fundamental democratic value of trust.

Schools are not just public in the institutional and economic sense that they are tax-funded entities accountable to a broad range of stakeholders. Unlike family homes, they are public in the philosophical sense, shared spaces in which one encounters others bonded not by intimacy or blood but by a political community and its shared problems. As the education scholar Walter C. Parker (2005) has observed, schools are places:

where diverse people are thrown together, places where people who come from numerous private worlds and social positions congregate on common ground. These are places where multiple social perspectives and personal values are brought into face-to-face contact around matters that “are relevant to the problems of living together,” as John Dewey put it. (p. 348)

For young people, a group that is politically disenfranchised and largely kept from the collective world of work in post-industrial societies, the experience of school is often the very first experience of belonging to a public, “not a species or an identity group, not homo sapiens or an ethnos, but a demos” (Parker, 2010, p. 2817). Even in the context of highly segregated—and resegregating—American schools, this demos presents them with a significant and unfamiliar diversity of class, race, gender, ethnicity, ideology, and ability. Across these differences, students are called to coexist and collaborate with one another.

As such, schools are sites of political socialization. In the words of the educational psychologist Constance Flanagan, they are “mediating institutions” that shape young citizens’ understanding of what it means to belong to a political community and to exercise the rights and responsibilities that define its membership (Flanagan, 2013). This socialization does not proceed solely or even primarily by formal instruction in government or “civics,” which has been declining for decades, subjecting low-income students and students of color to a “civic empowerment gap” no less pronounced and troubling than the equity gaps in educational outcomes (Levinson, 2012). More fundamentally, it is effected by the structures of governance and discipline that regulate the halls, libraries, and cafeterias and by the informal curricula and cultures that prevail in the classrooms.

Students’ daily experience of their schools’ climates can inculcate knowledge, competencies, and attitudes that are conducive to self-government or corrosive to it. Perhaps the most vital of these civic capacities is trust. In her exploration of democracy and “political friendship” in the historical circumstances of interracial distrust, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (2009), the Harvard classicist and political theorist Danielle Allen writes:

Trust in one‘s fellow citizens consists in the belief, simply, that one is safe with them. This trust can be registered cognitively, as when one believes that a particular fellow citizen is unlikely to take advantage of one‘s vulnerability; ... or it can be registered emotionally, as when one feels confidence, or a lack of fear, during a moment of vulnerability before other citizens. (p. xvi)

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While a healthy skepticism of government is compatible with democracy, Allen maintains, distrust of one’s fellow citizens is not. For everyone must have confidence that even when they find themselves on the losing end of a majoritarian contest, the majority will not fundamentally disregard their interests. But when distrust “pervades democratic relations, it paralyzes democracy; it means that citizens no longer think it sensible, or secure enough, to place their fates in the hands of democratic strangers.”

Social trust, or generalized interpersonal trust, has been studied extensively by political sociologists for generations. At an individual level, it has been positively associated with volunteering and giving to charity, participating in politics and civic organizations, respecting those who are different from oneself, and favoring policies that redress discrimination (Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005). Somewhat more controversially, it has been identified as a factor in political trust, the kind of confidence in government institutions that strengthens voluntary compliance with public cooperative programs and support for social welfare policies that immediately benefit some but indirectly benefit all (Zmerli & Newton, 2008; Hetherington, 2004). “Social capital” theorists point out that places with more trusting populations tend to have better functioning democratic institutions, more flourishing economies, and less corruption and crime (Rothstein & Stolle, 2003).

The cultivation or withering of social trust in schools has been linked to their most ubiquitous but often neglected centerpiece: the cultures of talk in classrooms and the models of authority these cultures exemplify. At its best, classroom talk is a form of democratic deliberation that develops and exercises civic competencies of inquiring, listening, and offering reasons as well as civic dispositions of tolerance, empathy, and mutual respect. At its worst, it signals to students that their agency and voice don’t matter, that they are subjects of an autocratic regime, not citizens of a democratic republic.

In a two-year study of 1,535 adolescent students, Flanagan and Michael Stout investigated the relationship between social trust, solidarity—the extent to which students feel “like they are an important part of school” and that “most students seem to care about each other, even people they don’t know well”—and their experience of an “open classroom climate”—the extent to which they were afforded the opportunity to debate and discuss issues, to voice their opinions, and to disagree with teachers (Flanagan & Stout, 2010). The study found that experiences with open classroom climates predicted increased solidarity and trust, a result echoed by international research (Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001). Flanagan, Stout, and colleagues note that “by virtue of being a member of a community of learners at school, by having a voice, and by identifying with fellow members of the institution, young people develop the disposition to trust a more generalized other” (Flanagan, Stoppa, Syvertsen, & Stout, 2010, p. 307).

Young people stand to benefit from inclusion in academic environments, but everyone stands to benefit from their inclusion in the broader policy conversations as well. Objective observers of the school reopening debate such as the Brown University economist Emily Oster have pressed the case for in-person education on the economic and egalitarian grounds that remote schooling will “hurt kids, especially poor students and students of color” and “make it harder for economies to open as more and more parents must choose between parenting and work” (Oster, 2020, para. 2). Responsible reopening will require not just a clear-eyed, data-driven assessment of the risks and trade-offs but careful, creative, and flexible planning—and, of course, funding. (The Association of School Business Officials International and the School Superintendents Association have estimated the COVID-related expense of reopening for the average school district at nearly $1.8 million.)

Largely untapped as a source of information and innovative solutions are students themselves, whom Amanda Ripley has rightly called “the most valuable and least consulted education-policy experts in America” (Ripley, 2015, para. 8). Throughout their academic careers, students “spend roughly 2,300 days contemplating their situation, considering how their schools and neighborhoods could be better—or worse.” And compared to their elders who control these schools and neighborhoods, they are far less swayed by political partisanship.

Will schools be held to higher public health standards than public spaces where adults predominate? Will responses to the health crisis be guided by a commitment to equity? Will they license a wave of punitive disciplinary measures? Will young people be treated as trusted partners, as at one South Bronx high school where students have been trained to conduct community outreach and contact tracing? Students are paying attention.

Decisions about reopening are political decisions because they shape the character of the political communities we call schools and thus the political character of the young citizens for whom schools are the most formative public spaces in their lives. Whether civics classes are meeting, or whether any classes are meeting, students are learning how far they can trust others and how far others trust them. Plague is a teacher. It has sensitized millions of Americans—many for the first time—to our “vulnerability before other citizens” and our need to feel safe with them. We elders must remember that in meeting this moment we are also modeling and cultivating citizenship, for good or for ill.