Reply to The Atlantic on SF: is DC too a failed city or about to be one?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.[/quote]

This doesn't fully resonate with me as a DCPS parent (I did feel there were people within the schools willing to talk about return to school, learning loss, ventilation, even if there never seemed to be any real progress) but the thing that does resonate is that sense of anger and powerlessness as a parent. I actually envy that SF parents had a way to channel that energy towards a concrete action, even if the school board was not that powerful.

There will be no comparable message sent by DC public school parents this election cycle. The alignment is too convoluted anyway. Bowser supported reopening schools but was ineffective at either taking the safety measures the union wanted, or negotiating a different approach with the union. White and other challengers on the ballot are largely backed by the union and, rather than criticize Bowser's inability to get schools safely open in a timely manner, consistently argue that the closures were necessary and they had to go on as long as they did. There is no single politician, or group, arguing vocally that the city made a mistake in keeping schools closed so long, especially after vaccines had been made available to teachers. No one is talking openly about how severely learning loss hurt the city's most vulnerable students, the kids who are essentially in the wind after a year without school, or how long term closures almost certainly increased child hunger and criminal activity among minors.

It's very much as though it never happened. Sometimes I just want to scream. If a DC politician would just stand up and tell the truth about it (that the closure was a mistake that will be paid by kids, especially those at highest risk of negative outcomes to begin with) maybe I'd feel like this depressed about the state of the city. But no one will. This never happened.[/quote]

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