They continue to bar schoolhouse doors and send the students home for the farce called “distance learning,” all while bleating, “Equity! Equity! Equity!”
The political class has proven again and again its willingness to harm children in order to look like they are fighting a pandemic: quarantining uninfected 4-year-olds twice as long as infected 40-year-olds, masking children, canceling sports, requiring remote schooling. But how can you simultaneously lock children out of the classroom while pretending to deconstruct privilege?
If privilege gives you anything these days, it’s the ability to mitigate the harm of your child having to learn at home over an internet connection all day. If you wanted nothing more than to disadvantage the disadvantaged, you would revert to remote schooling.
Montgomery County, Maryland, is the ground zero of school closings and their disparate impact. The black and Hispanic families there suffered far more than the wealthy white families of Chevy Chase, Maryland, during the 12 months of Zoom school in 2020 and 2021.
So when the county’s public schools resumed remote learning in some schools during the omicron surge in January 2022, the district set up “Learning Hubs.”
The hubs are classrooms where students gather with laptops and headphones to do their remote learning. It’s children sitting together in a classroom with an instructor, just without human interaction!
Montgomery County is fond of this arrangement. Back in the summer of 2020, after the county announced it wouldn’t let children in classrooms come fall, the government cut deals with summer camps and tutoring programs. These companies would rent out a vacant school classroom and provide the tech help and some tutoring to any parent who would pay. The new hubs are at no cost to parents.
Near Philadelphia, some teachers whose schools went remote in fall 2020 sold their in-person tutoring services to wealthy families, while giving their public-school students digital-only schooling.
Who knows the future of remote schooling? Perhaps every flu season, suburban and urban school districts in left-leaning places will go remote for a few weeks. Maybe heat or cold will trigger remote-only weeks. Then you can expect more “learning hubs” and at-home tutoring — you know, for safety and equity.
