Moderated by Emily Bazelon

School in the United States is nowhere near normal this fall. Most students are not walking through schoolhouse doors, sitting at desks next to their classmates or meeting their new teachers face to face. They’re at home, trying to learn through screens. (This is even more likely to be the case if the students live in cities or suburbs.) If they’re lucky, they have a laptop or a tablet and a fast internet connection — the bare minimum that remote education requires. If not, they may be cut off from school through no fault of their own or of their families. According to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research group, students in high-poverty districts are the most likely to start the year with fully remote learning.

The debate over what form school should take this fall foundered amid political division and uncertainty. In early August, as teachers raised safety concerns about reopening and education officials struggled with inconclusive and constantly changing public-health guidance, President Trump tweeted “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” It was a blanket statement, made with no consideration of where or how reopening could be attempted with reasonable risk, based on the local rate of coronavirus cases and testing. The Trump administration also threatened to take federal funding from schools that did not reopen rather than offering more assistance for the preparation and precautions the pandemic demands.

The risk of coronavirus outbreaks has been the primary concern. But shutting school and going remote will also inflict a serious cost, borne by students: a loss of learning and social-emotional development. In Los Angeles, for instance, kindergarten enrollment has plummeted this fall, a drop that school officials attribute to the difficulty families have supporting online learning full time at home, which is what young children need. “Once schools shuttered in the early days of the pandemic, educators quickly discovered the possibilities and limits of distance-learning technologies,” notes Justin Reich, director of the M.I.T. Teaching Systems Lab and author of the book “Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education,” which will be published this month. “Months later, it is obvious that the bright points of learning tech are substantially offset by the loss of schools as places for camaraderie, shelter, nutrition, social services, teaching and learning. Many things that happen in schools simply cannot happen at a distance.” We brought together five experts to talk about the lasting impact of this extended and unprecedented period of upended education. Accompanying this roundtable are photographs of students, school faculty and staff during the opening days of the 2020 school year, capturing the wide variety in learning environments around the country.

The Participants

Susana Cordova is the superintendent of the Denver public schools. She has worked in the district for more than 30 years, beginning her career as a teacher at a bilingual middle school. The Denver public schools serve about 94,000 students, 63 percent of whom are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch and 75 percent of whom are Latino, Black, Asian or Indigenous.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay in The 1619 Project, which she helped conceive. Her daughter goes to public school in Brooklyn.

John B. King Jr. is the president and chief executive of the Education Trust, a national nonprofit organization that seeks to identify and close opportunity and achievement gaps, from preschool through college. In 2016 and 2017, King served as the U.S. Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.

Pedro Noguera, a former public-school teacher and a sociologist, is the dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. His most recent book, which he wrote with Esa Syeed, is “City Schools and the American Dream 2: The Enduring Promise of Public Education.”

Shana V. White teaches computer science to about 200 students at a public middle school in Atlanta. In 2019, she was named a Diversity and Inclusion fellow at Georgia Tech and an Equity fellow for the Computer Science Teachers Association.

This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews.

What Do We Know About the Loss of In-Person School?

Emily Bazelon: Pedro, could you start us off by explaining what we know about the effect of missing or disrupting school?

Pedro Noguera: The research we have to draw upon is about school attendance and its correlation with academic performance. On average, when children miss school, that has a negative impact on their performance. It’s most noticeable in the early grades, with respect to reading, and in the older grades in math. And for kids with learning disabilities, it’s noticeable across the board, because those kids require more intensive direct support.

Bazelon: The research you’re citing is about chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year. Last spring, many students either never logged on or participated sporadically in remote learning after schools closed because of the coronavirus. “Two-thirds to three-quarters of teachers said their students were less engaged during remote instruction than before the pandemic, and that engagement declined even further over the course of the semester,” Matt Barnum and Claire Bryan wrote for the education reporting site Chalkbeat in June. “Teachers of low-income students and students of color were much more likely to report that their students were not regularly engaged in remote learning.”

John B. King Jr.: McKinsey, the consulting firm, did an analysis extrapolating from the existing research on the impact of remote learning. It projected an average of seven months of unfinished learning, assuming hybrid or fully remote learning continues off and on through January 2021. That rises to nine months on average for Latino students and 10 months for African-American students, given issues underresourced districts have with adequate access to the internet and devices and supporting teachers with remote learning.

It’s safe to say there has been significant missed learning because of the unavoidable closures this spring. Some districts and schools were better positioned to make that transition than others. And sadly, because of the failure of the federal administration to respond appropriately to the pandemic, and the failure of Congress to act, we are heading into a fall that is going to cause kids to lose even more ground academically.

Bazelon: The losses aren’t expected to be universal. Another study of third to eighth graders, by researchers at Brown University and the University of Virginia, projected that the top one-third of students would potentially make gains in reading. But on average, other students would return to school this fall having lost a third of the progress they would have been expected to make last year and half of the expected progress in math.

Noguera: The inequity of the situation is compounded over and over again. And we’re going to see the consequences of this for many years to come.

Jacob Poirer in his fourth-grade class at Saint Joseph’s Episcopal School in Boynton Beach, Fla. Erika Larsen for The New York Times

Bazelon: There’s also a risk of higher dropout rates for high school students. And lower educational attainment can translate later in life to lower earnings, worse health problems and shorter life spans.

King: Then there’s the social and emotional impact on children who have been isolated from their teachers and peers, or who are in homes where there’s been trauma from Covid-19 or trauma from the economic crisis. There are kids affected by violence or addiction or abuse who’ve been without the supportive relationships they have at school. That’s going to take a toll on our children that’s going to be with us for a long time.

Susana Cordova: Last spring was so unplanned. When we started moving to remote in March, kids didn’t have computers, they didn’t have internet. In a very short period of time we got out over 50,000 laptops and started working with our students to get signed up for free internet programs. But teachers weren’t prepared, families weren’t prepared. I had meetings with teachers where they were working and holding a baby. I mean, none of us were prepared.

King: Think about the child who was in first grade last year. My wife taught first grade, and that’s a crucial year for learning to read. So that child missed three or four months of school last spring, and now is coming back for a new academic year, and maybe the child is in a district that’s going to offer fully remote instruction or a hybrid of remote and in-person. The child is still likely not going to get the regular support around learning to read that he or she needs. I’m really worried about where that child is going to be two years out, three years out, 10 years out.

Shana V. White: Last spring, we had to have lessons on a learning-management system for students to access. In the beginning, it was just kind of like, “Let students know the hours that you’re available,” and kids could come and go as they pleased. About halfway through, when we realized we weren’t going back, we had set hours that we had to be online for students every day. Then more kids came. But I had several students who never logged in.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: In my daughter’s class of 33 in New York City, about 10 kids logged in. I don’t know what happened to the other 23. And even the kids who were logging on, I can’t speak to the quality of education they got in those three months.

Cordova: In Denver, we’re putting a lot of energy into stronger approaches for remote learning this year. But I think it’s essential that, whenever we have conditions that can provide for safe and healthy in-person learning, we do as much of it as possible.

Covid is really low in Denver right now, so the health conditions are favorable. It’s probably as good as it’s going to get. So we’re doing a slow, gradual re-entry to bring kids back safely. We are providing child care to a small number of working parents, staffed by licensed child care providers. And we are planning to open preschool in September and also centers where small groups of students — those with working parents or who may not have reliable internet access — can participate in remote learning, with support. The idea is to provide consistent internet and in-person adult supervision, from district employees like paraprofessionals.

Hannah-Jones: Why child care providers or paraprofessionals instead of teachers teaching?

Cordova: Our child care providers worked through the summer and are geared up to go, while we’re training our teaching staff and making sure that we have the protective equipment at scale to get going in all our schools. Working with people to address their concerns has been huge. You have to check all the health and safety procedures, and you have to address the emotional reaction that people have. Among teachers and parents, we have the entire spectrum from, “The science is clear, bring all kids back, kids need to be in school,” to “Don’t let anybody back until we have 14 days with no coronavirus cases.”

What has been really surprising to me, frankly, has been the lack of clarity from the medical experts. We’ve been meeting weekly with them to create a decision-making matrix for reopening. With school starting this week, we finally finished it.

Hannah-Jones: What’s confusing to me is the science doesn’t change based on whether you have a child care provider or a teacher in the building. If we’re saying we don’t know enough for teachers to come back in the classrooms but we know enough for low-wage child care workers to come back in — I don’t understand that.

Cordova: I agree 100 percent. That’s part of why we have really been pushing to have a decision-making matrix that helps us communicate why it’s safe to be back, by looking at the data. But yes, it’s a crazy world when we’re saying it’s not safe for teachers but people who make $15 to $20 an hour can come back. I’ve said to my teachers, I’ve said to my school board, “I don’t want to be the leader of an organization that believes that.”

Bazelon: Nikole, what other inequities do you see?

Hannah-Jones: I was reporting on schools in Louisiana, and I talked to parents in a mostly Black district that didn’t even mandate that there had to be instruction when school shut in March. Meanwhile, in a parish a few miles away that was predominantly white, students were getting instruction. Some affluent parents are moving to places where schools are opening. Some are putting their kids into independent and private schools that are having in-person instruction. I have this deep pit in my stomach about the disparities and really the devastating impact that this period is going to have on us.

Pedro mentioned special-ed students: A friend of mine from college has a child with autism who had made so much progress in school, and she has seen significant reversion since there’s been no special-ed services being offered to those kids.

White: We have a very high number of English-language learners, and meeting those students’ needs virtually is, I won’t say impossible, but it’s nearly impossible to me.

Noguera: For all kids, sometimes when they log on, you don’t know what they’re doing. They could be playing with the dog, as my daughter was doing, while Zoom was going on. When school is functioning as normal, we expect kids to show up, and then we have them. Now we are really dependent on the families to make sure their kids are participating from hour to hour. When parents have to work, then there’s no one. Kids are left to do this on their own. On top of that, you have districts that don’t have good relationships with the parents.

Bazelon: Last week, I interviewed Keri Rodrigues, the head of the National Parents Union. Speaking for parents, she said: “Now we are facilitators of education, especially for K-6. Education doesn’t really happen remotely without parents doing it. There are a lot of responsibilities on us.”

Hannah-Jones: At the end of the school year, I got a list from my daughter’s teacher about every assignment she had missed. I thought she was up in her room on her computer doing her assignments. She clearly was not, even though she was logged in.

Noguera: I think many of our teachers have not been prepared on how to entice kids into learning remotely, how to get kids engaged so they want to show up. That’s a whole other level of preparation that a lot of districts have not, I think, focused on. There are resources out there. Yet in a lot of districts, I’ve spoken to teachers who aren’t getting them. We’ve been much more focused on the logistics than on the substance.

Keshawn Townsend, 18, a senior at Aiken High School, in Cincinnati, Ohio does his remote lessons from his kitchen. Michael Wilson for The New York Times

What Will Remote Learning Be Like This Year?

Hannah-Jones: Now students are going into the next grade with brand-new teachers that many of them have never met before and vastly disparate starting points. That has existed in the past, but this year it seems far worse.

Bazelon: Shana, what does the beginning of the year look like in your district?

White: Some of our elementary schools are looping — having teachers stay with the group of kids they had last year into the new year.

Bazelon: I’ve been thinking about how going to school every day levels the playing field among students. They come from different kinds of homes, yes, but once they arrive, they share the classroom, and the teacher can control the environment. Over the summer, my 17-year-old worked at a program that was half in-person and half remote. The remote part was really hard. Kids were frequently distracted by what was going on at home, like if someone was watching TV nearby.

Cordova: Last spring, I did a pop-in visit to a special-ed class. It was a small class of six or seven students in fifth grade. They were doing a math lesson. The girls all had their bedrooms set up, and you could see them sitting at their computers. One of the boys was literally under the kitchen table, and you could hear his little brother crying in the background, and the teacher was saying to him: “How many tabs do you have open? Close those other tabs, let’s make sure you’re in the right place.”

We have tried to emphasize the power of relationship-building for the start of this school year. At the end of August, the only work the teachers did for a week was outreach to parents, so that every family could get a contact. We didn’t complete it, because of all the missed connections or disconnected phone numbers, so we’re continuing. We’re also monitoring attendance on a daily basis, because when we surveyed students, teachers and parents last spring, overwhelmingly the people who had the best experience with virtual learning had regular live contact with their teachers. Teachers have told me they had some kids who came to their online office hours in the spring who never asked a question. They just wanted to be around somebody while they were doing work. And they’d look up every now and then to make sure the teacher was still there.

We are trying to limit the areas for instruction to the most important aspects of a grade’s standards, and trying to go deeper as opposed to broader, and using that as a way to determine where there are gaps that we need to fill in. I just think it’s so important that we not squander the opportunity of the health conditions provided to have kids in person, because we know how much harder it is to do this effectively online.

White: I wish for the fall, the state and the district had been more proactive in thinking of the worst-case scenario. At this point, I’m teaching virtually and in person at the exact same time, and that’s basically doing two jobs at once.

We’re required to use Zoom, and students have to have their cameras on. But we’re not allowed to use breakout rooms, and children are not allowed to talk on Zoom freely. Teachers have to choose to unmute them, and I have seen some who don’t. My big thing is to make my class feel like a community. I think you can still do that virtually, not as well as you can in person, but somewhat. The kids in my class don’t have to turn their cameras on, and I unmute them if they want to ask me a question or talk. We engage in the chat, we do lots of interactive games.

Justin Rush, the head band director at L.W. Higgins High School in Louisiana, can only teach music history and theory for now. The students are not allowed to play instruments. L. Kasimu Harris for The New York Times.

We have to teach for 30 minutes straight, which I don’t think is helpful for students, because you’re not going to keep kids’ attention for 30 minutes straight doing a lesson. So I usually do mini-lessons that are about five to 10 minutes long, and then I turn the kids over to do their independent work after that, and I stay on Zoom for them to ask me questions.

Bazelon: What’s the rationale for not allowing students to talk freely on Zoom?

White: That what’s going on at home can be disruptive to the learning environment.

King: This is troubling. I think that, in part, what we’re seeing is the challenge of making up how to do distance learning on the fly. We should be using tools like Zoom breakout rooms to create opportunities for students to work together collaboratively, so that they are connected, not isolated, during this period.

Given the failures of the federal government around the pandemic, we knew in the spring that schools were still going to be doing either distance learning or hybrid learning. And yet, we didn’t as a country make the investment in devices, internet access and professional development for teachers to facilitate high-quality learning for their students remotely.

Hannah-Jones: We are an extremely wealthy country. It is a national shame that three kids are sharing a single device or that we are telling children, You have to go to your school parking lot in order to access Wi-Fi for your education, because we won’t provide internet service for you. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, almost eight million kids don’t have internet access at home through a computer. One-third of their families say they can’t afford it.

We are a country that can afford to educate our children in this circumstance, but we are making decisions that we are not going to. I hope every person who reads this feels a deep sense of personal shame about what is happening. Some of this could not be prevented, but a lot of it could.

Bazelon: Pedro, are there best practices for remote learning?

Noguera: I’ve been promoting Edutopia. They have great resources online for teachers and parents on how to make engaging lessons, how to do science projects at home, how to build relationships online. It’s better than the professional development I’ve seen most districts doing, and it’s available for free. We also have a whole population of home-schoolers out there who have figured out ways to provide high-quality learning for kids while they’re at home. That’s a resource we should tap into.

King: The federal Department of Education should be lifting up those best practices. In the absence of federal leadership, states should be doing that. There are a few examples of promising things people are doing across the country. Phoenix Union High School District in Arizona had an Every Student, Every Day campaign last spring, where an adult with the school district — a principal, teacher or someone from the central office — was in touch with every kid every day to check up on them. A San Antonio school district that’s starting remote is offering workshops for parents on how the distance learning is going to work and how families can support their kids’ learning. In the Baltimore city school district, they’ve had some teachers redefining their roles. A teacher who is really good at presenting content to students online does that, and then other teachers on the team provide direct support, by tutoring, coaching and mentoring students. There’s a teacher, Jonté Lee, in Washington, D.C., who does amazing science experiments in his kitchen, so kids want to log in and be a part of science class.

Bazelon: Shana, you tweeted last month to other teachers about how unsolicited advice is going to be in abundance now, especially from people outside classrooms. OK, so what’s helpful to teachers?

The seventh and eighth grade symphonic-band class at Needville Junior High School in Texas meets on the first day of school to discuss plans for the upcoming year. Eli Durst for The New York Times

White: First of all, time. I think every teacher has asked for more time. Teaching online and teaching in person are two totally different beasts. And we’re treating it as if it’s the same, just using a computer. Think about math teachers who use manipulatives. They can’t do the things that they normally do in the classroom. They don’t necessarily know the websites and resources that have virtual manipulatives. I have a really good friend who’s a language-arts teacher, and she’s asking, “I want to do read-alouds and annotate with students, but what are the tools for doing that virtually?” I have experience teaching virtually, so I know how to get kids engaged, and I’ve been able to practice. I have different expectations of students than I would if they were in person. But there are other teachers, competent teachers, who are saying: “I only have four kids come to my class. How did you get 28 to come?” I think the big thing is that teachers don’t have the time to figure it out, and we aren’t being given adequate resources and support. Many teachers are being told of changes at the last minute and expected to still be effective. Teaching during a pandemic is new for everyone, and the lack of grace and communication and support to truly plan instruction has been disheartening.

How Will the Pandemic Alter the Future of Education?

Bazelon: I have a devil’s advocate question: Given how hard this is, should we be just figuring out how to let kids run around outside together or socialize in big, safer indoor spaces, hoping that if we keep them socially and emotionally well, they’ll make up for the lost academic content later? There has been so little creativity about outdoor learning in much of the country. It’s warm out right now in a lot of places! We don’t have comprehensive numbers for day camp, but they worked well in many places, with low rates of transmission even in hot spots. Is that a route that we should be thinking about, even though it doesn’t reflect the usual priorities?

Noguera: The question you asked raises an interesting point. Suppose we had a national push to get kids reading. Low-tech. Actual books. And writing. We have, I think to some degree, become too beholden to the technology. I think outside learning could work in places like California. But it requires good leadership and guidance. Instead, school has been politicized. That’s a big part of what’s wrong here.

Hannah-Jones: We clearly could use this moment to rethink a lot of the ways that we’ve been offering education in this country. What if we said, “We’re not going to do high-stakes testing anymore”? I wish instead of just trying to stanch the bleeding, we were thinking bigger.

Cordova: And yet in the middle of this, I had to do $65 million in cuts to my budget. The intensity of need has just skyrocketed, and I have to cut, and this is after a couple of years of reductions already. How in the world do we square that?

Hannah-Jones: There is no right to education in the U.S. Constitution. But states have their own constitutions, and many of them mandate an equal education for our students. And they are not doing that. Simply saying we’re going to leave it up to every school district to come up with its own policy on how they’re going to ensure quality education for their students is a total forfeiture of the state mandate.

I think we should focus much more on the state level than even the local and the federal level, forcing states to provide what is necessary, in terms of guidance and equipment for all kids to have the same quality of education.

Bazelon: Susana, do you worry that public education will come out of the pandemic weakened? One of my fears is that parents are going to get angry and frustrated, and that will create a push for more vouchers and more private school.

Cordova: I definitely see parents leaving for home-schooling and parents with means looking at private schools (although many private schools are not necessarily taking a bunch of new kids). I was driving into work on Monday, our first day of school, and in my neighborhood, I saw what looked like two or three families getting together for the traditional first-day-of-school picture. They were on the porch with three kids. And my guess was that these are people who have decided that they’re going to do their learning cohort together at home. In the long term, how does that affect their beliefs about where they get their greatest supports — is it from each other, or their own family, or is it still from the school?

At Minnehaha Academy Lower School in Minneapolis, Kindergartens stand for the Pledge of Allegiance The hula hoops are used to maintain social distance when the children sit together on the floor. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Bazelon: Should we flip the classroom more often, meaning more instruction through taped lectures — tap the star lecturers for this — and then give teachers more time to answer questions and help kids one on one or in small groups, with writing or problem-solving in math? This doesn’t really work for younger children, I realize. But for high school and perhaps middle school, should teachers assume a different role for remote ed?

King: Some of that is happening. Great Minds is a curriculum provider that offers Wit & Wisdom and Eureka Math. Starting this spring, they put lessons online taught by teachers on their team as a resource for schools and families. The idea is that teachers can use these video lessons to introduce topics and then use their time to work with their kids on the math tasks or writing assignments. So yes, that’s possible. And some wealthy private schools were already doing some of that, so they had an easier time making this transition.

We need a national commitment to make up for our children’s unfinished learning. We’re going to need a nationwide focus on tutoring, of the kind we are seeing in Britain and the Netherlands. We’re going to need additional counselors and mental-health services. A brief by Matthew Kraft and Michael Goldstein for the Brookings Institution proposed what is known as “high-dosage tutoring,” full time throughout the school year, provided by expanding the federal AmeriCorps program or through state and city programs. Senators led by Chris Coons of Delaware have proposed bipartisan legislation that would expand national service in response to the pandemic, doubling the number of AmeriCorps positions for this year and providing hundreds of thousands of opportunities to youth who are currently unemployed.

Hannah-Jones: What about year-round school? I reported in Wake County, N.C., where some schools are year-round, and teachers and parents loved it because you didn’t have three months off, but you got regular breaks, and kids didn’t lose as much ground as they do when they’re out for the summer.

Cordova: I’m really intrigued by the idea of a third semester. But not the usual summer school. Parents with means figure out how to give their kids learning all year long. In the summer, their kids do programs based on their interests that get them engaged in learning for learning’s sake — not “third grade is the multiplication tables” — or are all about social and emotional development. What are the summer learning experiences that we should invest in for kids who are falling behind, that would be motivational, that would expose them to a larger world? For our older students, a lot of it could be work-based, exposure to colleges. That’s what I really want to push for.

What Should We Fight For?

Bazelon: That leads me to my next question: As we imagine someday coming out of the pandemic, what should we fight for in American schools? What are the priorities?

King: Maybe this is a nerdy-history-teacher way to frame this, but I was a nerdy history teacher. We have a choice between the Hoover path and the F.D.R. path. The Hoover path is the continued dismantling of public-sector responsibilities. It’s cutting resources for schools, doing less, hoping for less. In contrast, the F.D.R. approach would recognize how deeply interconnected we all are and make our investments accordingly. As a nation, we should be more conscious by now of how hard it is to navigate life and work, so we ought to make a major national commitment to universal access to quality child care for kids from birth to 4 years old. And we ought to make a major additional investment in K-12 education not only to address the consequences of Covid-19 but to remedy the many inequities, especially for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds, that existed before the pandemic. We have the resources. The question is, Do we have the will?

White: I have two kids myself, I have a third grader and a sixth grader. I would hate to realize that the adults in power have ruined the experiences that my children are going to have as adults because of how they handled Covid and the educational aspect of the pandemic.

From a teacher’s perspective, the big thing for me is that some kids enjoy being away from school because school is a traumatic experience for them. Schools overpolice kids. Students often don’t see themselves reflected in the curriculum. They spend time in classrooms being ignored or admonished. So for me, the priority is to humanize education. Too often we just consider students’ data points now. When teachers see kids as full human beings, it changes the entire scope of education. It changes the feel of a classroom. It changes the feel of a school. It can change the feel of a district so that parents feel like they’re part of the team.

U.S. history teacher Andrew Newton waits for his students to arrive at Greenville High Academy, in South Carolina. Juan Diego Reyes for The New York Times

Hannah-Jones: The pandemic has revealed that public schools are one of the few institutions that most Americans use and that connect us in a way that we are not connected anymore in almost any aspect of American life. We’ve seen how much we rely upon them and how the very fabric of our country feels like it’s unraveling without the ability for our children to enter a public-school building.

I agree with John, we need to take this as an F.D.R. moment, a chance to push the common good again over the individual good. It’s not just about what can I do for my own child, but what function a school serves in our democracy, in our community.

I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers’ concerns in New York as we’re talking about reopening. They’re saying things like: “We don’t have good ventilation in our schools. We don’t have soap in our bathrooms. We don’t have toilet paper, so how can we go back to school?” And I ask, How have we allowed this to be? How is it only in a pandemic that we’re concerned that our children can’t wash their hands with soap when they use the bathroom in publicly funded schools? I don’t want any of our children in school with poor ventilation. I don’t want teachers to have to supply toilet paper — toilet paper, in the United States of America. So I pray that we’ll come out of this more determined. I’m not a hopeful person, so I don’t know that we will.

Bazelon: One of my greatest frustrations, as a citizen as well as a parent, is that sending my child to public school is a reasonable, feasible way for me to participate in the common good of the democracy, but now what? Our school district in New Haven plans to have only remote learning for at least the next 10 weeks even though Covid-19 is very low in my state (at an infection rate of 3.5 per 100,000). Private schools and charter schools in my city are reopening, and almost every other district in Connecticut plans to reopen, most following a hybrid model. For me, without the sharing and mixing of public school, it’s much harder to figure out how to contribute to the common good as a parent in a way that allows you to have your job and lead your life. Will we go back to school at all this year?

Cordova: We had a parent at a board meeting talk about the importance of getting kids back. I was agreeing, and then she said, Don’t prioritize those kids who don’t know English. My kids were born here, and they deserve it just as much.

I get it. Everybody wants their kids learning. But we have to think about our entire community as we deal with the complexities of reopening.

Noguera: If schools reopen bit by bit, we should think about making the priority kids who are homeless or kids in foster care.

Bazelon: I have one more question. It’s a sad one. Is this a lost year?

Noguera: For some, yes. It may very well be a lost year. For others, it’ll be a blip. Shana is right — there are kids who benefit from learning at home, who are enjoying the time with their families.

Cordova: I think it is superimportant that I lead our district with optimism about what we can achieve and temper that with the realities of what is so challenging in this time. I never know if I’m erring too far on one side or on the other side.

We’ve had a huge rise in youth violence in our city. Kids have died, and there are serious issues around guns, and all of that is underneath what we’re doing. The violence isn’t happening in our schools or on our grounds, but all of it plays out in school communities, among the same kids to whom we’re saying, “Log in at 7:30 a.m.” I really am stuck on what to do about that.

Noguera: I think of myself as a pragmatist. We can’t afford to just sit around now and lament and say, “Well, I wish we had a different president or a different governor.” We’ve got to do the work where we are to expand educational opportunities for all students, because our kids’ futures depend on it. We have to do what it takes to make sure that our kids’ futures are not sacrificed.

History is helpful here. After slavery ended in this country, the emancipated formerly enslaved people pursued education, created colleges and universities, passed the first laws in the South for public education that universally allowed white kids as well as Black kids to go to school. The drive to pursue education was based not on any guarantee that it would lead to a job, but because we knew that education was the key to freedom and empowerment in this country. It still is.