San Francisco sued its own school board this week as the pressure to get students and teachers back into classrooms here and across the state increases.
Reopening schools has been much more difficult than reopening restaurants and shopping centers, in part because of a tangle of issues ranging from economic and racial inequality to powerful teachers' unions to parents just struggling to work.
Online learning via Zoom might be the absolute safest route from a public health perspective, but it is definitely not the best path to a good education.
As more affluent communities go back to in-person learning at private and parochial schools, students at public schools largely continue online.
The longer this two-track educational path continues, the wider the achievement gap becomes.