Boy, would I love to say, “Here. This is how you do it.” But I can’t, because I’m not proposing a utopian solution. Many inner-city schools would get no significant relief from the plan I’m proposing. But some schools would be essentially empty. Rather than having to run your buses triple the normal workload, what about busing some kids from the inner-city schools a half-hour farther out, to a school where there’s room? That’s a hopeful, but probably not a practical, solution. Good thing there are smarter people than I am who can see things I can’t.

You’ll need para-educators in fleets to help handle the online cohort. No doubt about it. I have conducted on-campus/online hybrid classes. They can work, after a fashion. They aren’t ideal. For the kids online, the experience is worse, beyond question. But it’s not worse than nothing, which is more or less the alternative.

Flattening the curve is a useful metaphor for more than viral spread — it can be valuable when considering problem load as well. If you have a complete locked-up failure of the entire education system — and make no mistake, that’s what we’re heading for — the problems become insoluble and everyone suffers tremendously. But we can take steps to flatten the curve, to reduce the problems to a place where we have a decent chance to solve some of them, even if we can’t get to them all right now.