Schools Are Starting Up Again (and Won’t Be Shutting Down Again)

Thank God.

The picture above features my family two years ago: My son William starting third grade, my son Wynn starting first grade and my wife, like me, trying to find a window to jump out of.

It has been two years since America began its grand virtual learning experiment. Sure, virtual school began in March 2020, when the pandemic first hit, but that was an emergency shutdown, a mad scramble to finish up the last month or so of the school year amidst the biggest public health crisis in 100 years. My children didn’t learn anything in March and April 2020, at least not from school; in the house they were stuck in, they certainly learned how much doomscrolling and terror-drinking their parents were capable of. But by September 2020, the expectation was that this virtual schooling nightmare would be over, that it would be understood that the cost of keeping elementary school age kids at home was too steep for any of us to bear. But it was not. Many, many schools — including ours, and almost all those in any large to semi-large American city — went virtual for most of that next school year. Which is to say: Most kids didn’t learn anything at all.

I have already written about the nationwide disaster that was virtual schooling, but in case you’ve been fortunate enough to forget: