One of the things that became clear in many communities is that private schools were more likely to be in-person during our ongoing pandemic than public schools. This was the case in Chicago, where I teach, and in Evanston, where I live.
From my experience and anecdotal knowledge, in-person teaching with COVID-19 mitigations was more effective than remote learning. Were there exceptions to this? Of course. It will take time to research and understand these differences thoroughly, but from what I saw and the information I have gathered, it’s not even close. In-person was better.
Why were the private schools able to be in-person?
As not to overly generalize, I’m going to speak specifically about my school.
There are several reasons my school is able to open in person. First off, like many other private schools, we had bigger budgets than many other schools. Also, we had more flexibility in their budgets. Reallocating money into different parts of the budget is not a big challenge in my school. Money solved many issues when it came to being in-person. We were able to hire more assistant teachers. There was more money that could spent on cleaning and supplies.
One of my jobs as music department chair is managing our budget. We spent a lot of money on things that were not budget for. We bought microphones for students to record music at home. We bought the individual instrument bags for our elementary school students and hand drums for the drumming curriculum we did without middle school students. Also, there were the masks designed for singing that I got for our choir students. This stuff, along with other things, was a significant expense. However, my budget did not end up going over because many things like field trips and concerts didn’t happen this year.
We were fortunate to have a medical advisory team that made hard decisions, so I didn’t have to. Guidance from medical professionals proved frustrating at times when it felt like there was tension between what they recommended and what was the most logical way to educate students. Still, at the end of it all, their guidance kept us safe.
Teachers at my school are unionized. This meant that there were structures for faculty to have their voices heard and limits on what we could be asked to do. This provided some willingness when teachers were asked to do different things because people were watching out for the faculty.
When I think about what we were able to do, it becomes clear that the things we had were privileges that other schools could have had. Money could have been made more available. Medical professionals could have played more active roles in advising schools.
Unions could work for ways to help teachers work in-person effectively.
What happened at my school could have occurred at other schools.
There is this idea that there is a dichotomy between private and public schools, that the illusion of scarcity means that private schools’ success limits public schools’ achievement. Like the false dichotomy of gender, this idea serves to divide. The truth is that private schools can provide a vision of a possibility of what could be and should be for other schools. Many private schools did just that this past school year, and instead of coming up with reasons what this example doesn’t apply to public schools, we need to figure out how we can from each other and together create a better vision for education in America.
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