Contested Justice: Rethinking Educational Equity Through New York City's COVID-19 School Reopening Debates

• In Event: Rethinking "Learning Loss": Family, Community, and Educator Perspectives on Equity and Learning During COVID-19

Abstract

Decisions about whether and how to reopen school buildings for in-person instruction during the pandemic have been highly contentious, raising essential questions about which values, purposes, and constituencies should be prioritized in educational policy. This study of justice claims advanced in New York City school reopening debates illuminates the political stakes involved in seemingly technical policy making during COVID-19 and reveals alternatives to “learning loss” as ways to understand justice in education, the purposes of public schools, and the constituencies they serve.

Our research draws on Abu El-Haj’s (2006) conceptualization of educational “justice claims” as “frameworks within which ideas about equity are organized in everyday discourse and practice” (p. 5) that recognize the ways in which inequality is produced in the power relationships between groups. We turn to Fraser’s (1997, 2000, 2005) work to understand three, interrelated dimensions of claims-making about justice: redistribution, recognition, and representation. These forms of justice are interlinked, overlapping, and persistent in political and policy debates.

This study examines how justice claims about school reopening were invoked in four NYC media outlets. At the epicenter of the COVID crisis during Spring 2020 and in a school system serving over one million students, the large majority of whom are economically disadvantaged students of color, NYC students have disproportionately experienced pandemic-related death, hospitalization, food and housing insecurity, and/or financial hardship impacts (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021; Centers for Disease Control, 2021). We identified and coded 299 unique articles published between June 1 and December 15, 2020 that were: (1) focused on the terms and impacts of school reopenings and (2) included substantial opinions on this topic. Articles came from four major NYC education news sources reflecting a range of political stances: Chalkbeat New York, New York Daily News, New York Post, and The New York Times.

We identified multiple justice claims related to school reopenings, including how educational resources are distributed; whom district policies recognize; and who is represented in policy decision-making. Very few of these claims focused on “learning loss.” Rather, stakeholders’ competing justice claims referenced children’s mental health, families’ access to food and healthcare, long-term and inequitable school funding, voice in decision making, and the safety of educators and students. Our data further suggest that blanket claims about “all kids” writ large obscure the diverse experiences and concerns of families, especially families of color, and thus can undermine rather than advance educational justice

Our findings paint a complex portrait of the substance of school reopening debates, as well as the expansive and intertwined ways that stakeholders understand (in)justice in school policy. Despite growing concerns about “learning loss” in research literature and public debate (Bailey et al., 2021; Horowitz, 2021), the distribution of academic support was not raised as a primary concern in our data. After 20 years of a nationwide embrace of high stakes testing and recent anxieties about “learning loss,” one implication of these findings is that we need a more expansive understanding of educational justice than is commonly acknowledged.

Authors

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut

• Erica Owyang Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison