Let’s use this opportunity to address some of the chronic ones we’re seeing in government-supplied K-12 schooling.
There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted childhood education. In many countries, kids have physically returned to school. In others, schools were never closed. Yet in the United States, many public schools have been closed since March, yielding disastrous results for millions of kids. While scientific data say it’s safe to bring them back, incentives in the school systems are such that many kids continue to be locked up at home rather than receiving a proper education.
A school’s main role is to educate children. They can feed low-income children and supply day care for working parents, but these benefits are secondary to providing a quality education to all enrolled children. Continue reading