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Tiffany Luo, a senior at Boston Latin School, regularly cares for her older grandmother, her little brother and her two small cousins. She worries she’s going to be the one who exposes them to COVID-19: Students at her school wear low-quality masks and are crowded inside for lunch, she said.

She wants distance learning to count toward the 180 days that Massachusetts public schools are required to be in session. But Gov. Charlie Baker has refused to change the state’s rule that counts only in-person days. So Luo, 17, and other Boston students are protesting, walking out of class to draw attention to their demands for remote learning, better protective equipment and improved testing.

“We want to continue our education, but we shouldn’t be risking our lives or our families’ lives to have a quality education,” said Luo, a representative of the (BSAC), a group of elected student leaders advocating for youth in public high schools citywide.

The demonstrations led by BSAC last week, which included , students staying home and a with speeches from their peers, families and nurses, were one of a number of student-led actions across the country in recent weeks in response to COVID safety measures. Last week, students , and , to demand more protections as cases surge. On Tuesday, for improved safety measures as their .

Like Luo, many of the activists spearheading these demonstrations are young women or girls. At Brooklyn Technical High School in New York — where January 11 because of their concerns about COVID, kickstarting similar protests nationally — the organizers of the walkout were both girls. That’s not a coincidence but part of a larger movement of girl-led activism that’s gained visibility over the past 15 years due to the work of youth such as Malala, who advocated for girls’ education in Pakistan, and climate activist Greta Thunberg, according to Jessica Taft, a professor at the University of California – Santa Cruz who researches youth activism. In Flint, Michigan, Mari Copeny, now 14, has directed attention to that city’s water crisis for years.

“What we’ve seen in high school is that when there are student movements, they tend to be led by girls and young women,” said Taft, who has researched high school girl activists for more than 20 years. “And that’s not just in the U.S. That’s fairly true across the globe. Some of that [is because], at times, they do have more at stake. They’re more vulnerable on various issues. Also, a lot of it has to do with girls’ gender socialization to care for community and to care for others — the idea that you’re supposed to love the world, look out for other people and have a sense of interdependence with other people.”

It doesn’t surprise Taft that a student like Luo, a family caregiver, is organizing at Boston Latin, since “girls are more likely to be in these kinds of caring positions in their families and to be attuned to the needs of the sort of wider community that they’re caring for.”

Luo said that some of her classmates have waved away her concerns about COVID because they believe it’s not a serious illness for the vaccinated population. But she’s heard about people who’ve developed long COVID, or long-lasting symptoms after contracting the virus. She does not want to take a chance with the health of her loved ones.

“It was like a huge anxiety, every time I went to school, knowing that I could come home and bring it back to these highly vulnerable individuals,” she said. Also, if she gets sick, she won’t be able to care for her grandmother and young relatives, she said.

Although girl activism has become newly visible in the 21st century, Taft said, it is not new. In the 1970s, high school girls walked out of school to protest dress codes and sexual harassment, she said. But the pandemic particularly lends itself to girl-led activism because fighting the virus centers on the desire to protect individuals more vulnerable than oneself, according to Taft. Too often, high school boys are socialized to behave as if nothing, even a global pandemic, scares them, so admitting how fragile life can be doesn’t “necessarily align with certain versions of young masculine toughness,” she argued.

Boys, especially athletes, make up the bulk of students who oppose Luo’s efforts, the teen told The 19th. Even boys from other school districts have contacted her on social media to object to her efforts to bring back remote learning because they don’t want their athletic seasons cut short, she said.

They’ve told her that they don’t believe COVID is real, she added, or that they’ve already had the virus and recovered without developing serious health problems. Some have tried to intimidate her: “They’re saying that I should mind my own business, and I should just stay home and never attend school,” Luo said.

According to Taft, girl activists typically face “very specific kinds of dismissals and intimidation and harassment.” It can take the form of critiquing their looks or characterizing them as too noisy or disruptive to be adequately “feminine.” Often, as in Luo’s case, girls are simply dismissed as “not knowing what they’re talking about,” Taft said. “There are all kinds of dismissals that they face as well as some real threats of harm, really intense forms of harassment and bullying.”

The girls fighting for safety precautions during the Omicron surge have not only faced backlash from peers but also accusations that they just want to skip school. It’s a charge that Rommy Sasson, an 11th-grade organizer of the walkout at Brooklyn Tech, finds preposterous: They just don’t want to get sick or continue to attend half-empty classes because so many of their teachers and classmates are already out sick. She said students walked out of class last week to avoid missing school due to COVID-19 in the near future.

As it is, “the people who are attending school are attending a somewhat diminished version of in-person education,” she said, referring to staffing shortages at schools. She pointed out that students walked out before finals week, a key time for preparation. “Large numbers of students decided that this walkout and fighting for this cause to keep students and staff safe was in many ways more important for this one day than maintaining the grades they’ve worked so hard to achieve. It really takes a dire situation to get Brooklyn Tech students to skip their classes and walk out.”

Although they’ve faced criticism, the organizers have also won support from some of the adults in their communities. In Boston, both politicians and parents have supported the young activists. U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley and state lawmakers including Massachusetts Rep. Tram T. Nguyen have voiced their support for their concerned students, and Mayor Michelle Wu has described Baker’s ban on remote schooling as “too rigid.”

Sarah Horsley of the group BPS (Boston Public Schools) Parents for COVID Safety has participated in protests with the students as well as adults — mostly mothers and grandmothers, she said, concerned about their families during the latest COVID surge. Most recently, Horsley joined Friday’s webinar organized by Boston youth.

“Students are saying they are afraid for their health and their family’s lives,” said Horsley, parent of a BPS third-grader. “In some cases, students are sharing that they have grandparents who are fragile health-wise. They’re sharing that they’re afraid for their teachers who are out with COVID. So in terms of walking out, this is a way to kind of say, ‘Hey, wake up. This is how strongly we feel about this. Listen to us.’”

So far, student protests have yielded some conversations but no major shifts in policies. In New York City, Department of Education Chancellor David C. Banks invited student organizers to meet with him about their concerns with school safety during the coronavirus crisis. Classes in Boston and New York City remain in person. But Sasson hopes this recent burst of youth activism will ultimately make a difference and spur her peers to action.

“I hope that the fact that we’re girls leading this movement can give inspiration to other girls and women out there who might only be exposed to a lot of male role models,” she said. 

In Boston’s mayoral primary, city councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George , respectively winning 33.3 percent and 22.5 percent of the vote. Acting Mayor Kim Janey, the first woman and first African American to serve as the city’s mayor, finished in fourth place. Wu and Essaibi George will proceed to the general election November 2.

On September 9, public schools in Boston will open for the 2021-22 academic year — the first since last March, locals hope, not to be irreversibly damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. Five days later, the city will hold the first round of a two-step election process to decide its next mayor, whose time in office may come to be defined by the performance of a school district that has struggled in recent years.

Those two deadlines are clearly connected in the minds of the electorate. According to conducted by Suffolk University and the Boston Globe, schools were rated the most important issue by about 18 percent of likely voters across the city, ahead of the economy, crime, and police reform and practically identical to the top-ranking items of housing (20 percent) and racial justice (19 percent). In areas of the city that have historically posted some of the highest levels of voter turnout, K-12 was ranked the most important issue by far.

David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, observed that the public is drawing connections between the disparate K-12 issues, from police officers in schools to COVID remediation, in a way that could make education “the issue of the year.”

“You’ve got a constant thread where people are recognizing how important education is, and I think you’re going to see it continue to bubble up through the school reopening and even beyond,” Paleologos said.

Seven candidates have emerged to replace former Mayor Marty Walsh, who was appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor in March. That group, which will be winnowed to two finalists after the preliminary election on September 14, is striking for its representative diversity. Among the favorites to compete in November are three city councillors who would each be the first woman and first person of color elected to lead Boston. (A fourth, Acting Mayor Kim Janey, already set both precedents when she was elevated to the position this spring and is seeking her first elected term).

Whoever wins will face the significant challenge of turning around schools in the birthplace of American public education. Boston Public Schools, once considered something of an exemplar among major urban districts, was widely seen as regressing even before the emergence of the coronavirus. While local experts generally acknowledge the need for improvement, much of the public’s attention has been directed at an acrimonious debate over the admissions practices of the city’s three competitive-admissions schools. But the comprehensive improvements needed to lift the performance of the rest of the system, and arrest its persistent decline in enrollment, haven’t led the discussion.

Most of the bandwidth among parents is also consumed by concerns about the pandemic, says Paul Reville, Massachusetts’s former education secretary. The increased salience of K-12 schools measured in the Suffolk poll results from a desperate desire to return to the pre-COVID state of existence, when families, schools, and employers could take the school day for granted, he said; but the next mayor will need to accomplish a great deal more than negotiating a return to the status quo ante.

“We’re not debating strategy so much right now as we’re debating survival issues,” Reville said. “Are we going to open or not? Will we have enough room for all the students? Will they have to wear masks? What happens if the current spike in numbers keeps going? It’s hard to concentrate on the strategic when the day-to-day is so challenging.”

Critical audit

March 13, 2020, was the most significant day in the recent history of Boston Public Schools. That Friday, then-Mayor Walsh and Boston schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced that the district would close all buildings to in-person learning for six weeks. In fact, the initial reopening date would come and go, with most students stuck at home for the better part of a year.

But another crucial development had been announced just hours earlier, when local officials signalled that the district would be entering a unique governing partnership with the state of Massachusetts to improve learning outcomes for students. The announcement followed the release of of Boston’s academic performance, which found that one-third of its students attended schools ranking in the bottom 10 percent statewide. State authorities would provide support to the system going forward, but also hold it responsible for meeting specific performance goals.

The new arrangement was especially startling given Boston’s reputation as a comparatively high-flying district among its large, urban peers. Beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, national observers the steady growth in student test scores, which was widely attributed to then-Superintendent Tom Payzant’s efforts to restructure curricula and focus on literacy instruction. While large gaps still separated the city’s underprivileged children from their peers in nearby suburbs, the arrow was definitively pointing upwards.

The progress about a decade ago, according to a report by the research organization Bellwether Education Partners, as the district cycled rapidly through a sequence of short-lived and interim superintendents before landing on Cassellius in 2019. The 2020 “memorandum of understanding” — which created a substantial role for state oversight while stopping short of a takeover — might have offered an opportunity to reclaim momentum. But according to John Portz, a political scientist at Northeastern University, it was instantaneously overshadowed by COVID.

“That would have been a key jumping-off point, if you will, for where education was going to go,” Portz said. “But it just got totally swallowed up by the pandemic. Thinking back, no one has talked about it, and I wonder whether it’s simply a dead letter at this point.”

Exam school admissions

The prolonged closure of the city’s 125 schools pushed systemic recovery far down the agenda, with a proposed as Walsh and Cassellius attempted to chart a course to safe reopening. The process became bitterly political at times, as when the Boston Teachers Union passed in Cassellius last December, citing unequal access to ventilation, testing, and protective gear.

Once K-8 schools returned, attention shifted again to the city’s public “exam schools”; of the three, the best known is Boston Latin, whose lofty alumni roll extends from Ben Franklin and John Hancock to many present-day elites in media, politics, and business. A decades-old debate over the school’s rigorous admissions test was first reignited in 2017, when that just one-quarter of Latin’s students were African American or Hispanic — compared with roughly three-quarters of Boston students overall.

Hearings held on the subject last fall by the Boston School Committee — a seven-member body appointed by the mayor — quickly became heated, with many parents arguing in favor of the existing admissions requirements and others calling for the introduction of criteria that might increase the odds of disadvantaged students winning seats. The debate grew so charged that three members after it was discovered that they had mocked and insulted Asian American parents and those living in the predominantly white neighborhood of West Roxbury. Still, the committee to approve a new admissions system that will decrease the importance of exam scores relative to school grades and reserve more seats for students living in low-income areas of Boston.

The controversy has attracted enormous coverage in local media. The changes are supported by three leading candidates in the September preliminary, including Acting Mayor Janey, Councilor Michelle Wu, and Councilor Andrea Campbell. Only Annissa Essaibi George, another city council member who previously worked as a teacher in East Boston, the new system and the process that led to its adoption.

That position may position her favorably with families living in the largely middle-class West Roxbury and Hyde Park neighborhoods, who typically make up as much of a quarter of the city’s electorate. Attorney Larry DiCara, a former city councillor and longtime observer of city politics, said that the issue’s outsized importance could swing more votes than one might expect.

“In some neighborhoods, the Latin issue is the most important issue,” DiCara said. “There are parents who, if their kids don’t get into Latin, they move.”

But Will Austin, a former teacher who founded the nonprofit , said he was dismayed by the race’s persistent focus on what he called “click-bait-y” issues at the expense of a more substantive conversation of the district’s stagnant academic results.

“You can’t lead systematic reform by changing which kids go to three of your 125 schools, which is essentially what we spent a couple of months doing,” Austin argued.

No ‘education candidate’?

There is still little clarity on which two candidates will advance in the preliminary election round. The most recent polls, conducted in and , put Wu in the lead, with Janey, Essaibi George, and several lower-ranked candidates further behind. But around one-fifth of respondents were undecided, and any configuration of the top-four candidates is generally viewed as plausible.

All four can broadly be defined as progressive, with Essaibi George venturing somewhat toward the center in her attitudes on exam schools and public safety. But Northeastern’s Portz said that the lack of more ideological differentiation made it difficult for the candidates to build more distinct brands.

“It’s tough to some degree because they’re driven by events in the news, the exam schools or the school committee resignations,” he said. “Those things are capturing more attention, and it’s hard for them to strike out and distinguish themselves.”

The race is notably different in this respect from the recent primary held in New York City, in which leading candidates sorted into camps of progressives and moderates. The moderates — including the eventual Democratic nominee, Eric Adams — generally supported the city’s charter school sector and advocated for more modest changes to admissions criteria for the city’s own exam schools.

DiCara served on the city council in the 1970s, when the district still enrolled over 100,000 students and a robust network of parochial schools served tens of thousands more. In , he argued that runaway housing costs had made Boston less friendly to families and the working class, while the disappearance of children rendered public education a less relevant concern to the city’s newer, more affluent residents.

“The dramatic changes to the population, where we have so many single people in Boston or married people without children, make Boston very different from New York City,” DiCara said. “Once you get out of Manhattan, [New York is] really a city with a lot of families.”

The city’s thought leaders have taken note of the short shrift given to schools during the campaign, with an August op-ed in the Boston Globe why no “education candidate” had yet emerged. and (a former BPS teacher) have each released lengthy proposals concerning education and childcare; Janey, the acting mayor, can even boast of as an advocate for children and families. But so far, none of it has produced a sustained conversation about what it would take to put Boston schools on the road to improvement.

Austin said that Boston municipal races are often dominated less by policy debates than personal experience.

“Every candidate in Boston is going to talk about how housing is unaffordable. Every single candidate will talk about how we need to reform the police. Every one will say that racial equity is core to their work. They don’t have really significant policy differences, so they differentiate themselves through how they campaign and their biographies.”

Reville said that the lack of greater variation within the field has held back the kind of boundary-breaking proposals that would address the key issue plaguing education in Boston: “too many longstanding, ongoing, chronically underperforming schools.”

“Nobody’s coming along to propose radical change,” he said. “You’re not hearing someone saying, for instance, ‘Let’s make summer learning an entitlement for every child in the Boston Public Schools.’ Or, ‘Should we be doing something radically different, given the changing population within the Boston Public Schools?’ We don’t have a lot of outlier proposals to make a radical shift in the status quo. It’s hard to change, and there’s an enormous amount of inertia.”