It’s been a tough year for education.

There’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. We’re seeing abrupt changes to practices and policies. Many of those appear to be rooted in fear or political priorities. Others seem to focus on discrediting educators and pushing the narrative that public schools are inept or ineffective. There are constant attacks on funding sources, and increased measures to funnel public dollars into private schools.

In all of this, we’ve lost sight of our most important job. Before COVID, I often said that the most important thing schools do is teach kids to read. There is no greater barrier to success — regardless of how you measure it — than illiteracy. Teaching students how to read is Job One. Or, at least, it used to be. During the pandemic, we learned that the most important thing schools do is take care of people. The biggest challenge we faced in the early days of the pandemic was helping our students feel seen, valued, validated, and safe. Kids connect with their teachers and lunchroom aides and bus drivers in ways that we never really realized before 2020. And they rely on each other for support just as much as those relationships with adults.

Schools foster communities. We celebrate the fact that our students aren’t all alike. We make room for differences, whether those are physical, cognitive, cultural, spiritual, or social. We encourage students to seek out people and ideas and traditions that are different from their own, because that helps them build a better understanding of the world and the people in it.

We’re caught in a war of words. We can’t talk about equity anymore, because it’s apparently not fair that some people need more resources, or different resources, than others. We can’t celebrate diversity, because some people want kids to fear and distrust people who are different from them. We can’t be intentionally inclusive, because if people feel like they belong, they’re going to expect to be treated the same as everyone else. We can’t acknowledge that students sometimes struggle with mental health, or social skills, and need support to interact with one another in ways that are effortless to their peers. We can’t admit that some kids have two dads because some parents are afraid of dads who are married to other dads. We can’t even talk about the fact that it’s hard to be a kid sometimes, and even as adults we don’t have everything figured out.

There are a lot of things we can’t do. But the one thing we have to do is to give our students a place to belong. We have to make them feel safe and valued. We have to give them hope that the future will be okay. We have to inspire them to make the world the place that they want to live and thrive in. We have to teach civility, the responsibility and the desire to take care of each other. Schools might be the only place where they’re going to learn this.

And then we can teach them to read.