Alternative solutions to parents’ dilemma just require more time, money, and imagination.
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In ordinary times, K–12 schools offer valuable services to two distinct populations, and arguably get far more credit for serving one than the other. School famously provides kids with an education—as well as socialization and, in many cases, support (in the form of meals and medical and mental-health services, to name a few). At the same time, with decidedly less fanfare, it provides their parents with some eight hours of daily child care, five days a week, for most of the year, freeing up time for adults to earn the money it takes to raise kids for the remaining 16 or so hours of the day. For families, economies, and societies, schools have been reliable, helpful partners for generations.
Of course, the coronavirus pandemic threw a wrench into that system the way it threw a wrench into just about everything. When offices and schools closed in March so that workers and students could comply with social-distancing guidelines, things fell apart for working parents. Suddenly kids were trying to learn but struggling because they weren’t in real school; meanwhile, their parents were trying to work but struggling because their kids needed looking after.
Because the subtraction of school created this crisis for parents, it’s tempting to see adding school back into the equation as the solution. Indeed, a number ofstate governments, as well as President Donald Trump, have subscribed to this logic and have pushed to reopen schools as a way to ensure economic recovery. But given what we know now about how COVID-19 spreads, the return of schools as they were—indoor spaces filled with people from different households, talking to and breathing on one another five days a week—is a nightmarish prospect for many parents, teachers, and students alike. Even in non-pandemic times, “anytime you bring together large groups of children who may not have the best hygiene practices in one place, you’re going to see increased transmission of a variety of different diseases,” Virginia Pitzer, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. Including a hyper-contagious illness with no cure or vaccine in the mix makes for a dangerous situation.
[Read: Will kids follow the new pandemic rules at school?]
Still, fully reopening schools is sometimes discussed as though it’s the only way to get parents out of this quagmire. It’s not. Other potential solutions exist—but implementing them would require substantially more time, money, and imagination.
If ensuring that parents make ends meet were the only objective, a universal basic income or a continued stimulus would help keep families from falling into dire straits, both personally and financially. For example, the federal government could implement a program that would regularly issue stipends similar to the $1,200 checks that many Americans received this spring. “To have people live in [a] situation where they literally don’t know where their next dollar is coming from, it not only creates economic hardship; it creates psychological hardship,” Francine Blau, who teaches economics at Cornell University, told me. So for parents who have had to reduce their hours or quit their jobs entirely to care for their children, she said, a reliable form of continuous income could help tremendously. But although a universal basic income could help working parents avoid falling into financial ruin, it wouldn’t do much to improve the outlook for kids’ education, which would still be remote (and therefore less effective than in-person learning).
A more comprehensive solution could look something like a nationwide compassionate-leave policy. Usually, compassionate leave refers to paid time off to care for an ailing relative or to grieve for a relative who has recently died. But during the pandemic, the Vermont-based nonprofit Let’s Grow Kids, which advocates for quality early-childhood education, gave workers up to 12 weeks of compassionate leave to take as they wished, and also allowed those whose kids’ schools had closed to work on flexible schedules. Let’s Grow Kids’ CEO, Aly Richards, told me that because a number of those employees are taking just two hours of leave a day, their paid-leave time will stretch into the future.
