Op-Ed: The Hill: A school year lost, and a solution found

Read the Full Article Here.

One of the great lessons of the pandemic is this: American education does not work as it should.

It doesn’t work for millions of our parents or millions of our teachers — and it especially doesn’t work for millions of our children. 

The COVID-19 pandemic was cover for politicians and unions to take counsel of their fears — despite the extraordinarily low transmission risk to children and despite tens of millions of other Americans continuing to work — and shut down learning for millions of American children. Those kids lost a full year.

It’s a year they’ll never get back.

With millions of American households in our remote and underserved communities lacking either internet access or a computer, one would think that our schools in our nation’s most distressed communities would fight hardest to stay open. But, in fact, by December 2020, only 24 percent of traditional public schools had reopened. And so, the gap between underserved communities and those more well off continues to widen, if not worsen.