Jobs that are common today may not be available in the future. How do educators prepare their students to succeed in the workplace? This week on Basic Black, host Crystal Haynes put the spotlight on education, from K-8 through high school to college and beyond.

Four years since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person classes, teachers still see the mental health impacts of remote learning. Marcus Walker, a humanities teacher at Fenway High School in Boston, sees much higher rates of absenteeism than he did before the pandemic. “I have a class in particular where, sadly, so many of my students are going through mental health issues, and it’s hard to come to school. We are concerned,” he said.

At the same time, the concept of a school’s role in society has changed. “We grew as a community through COVID, and I think that growth was really not in the typical school ways. We were in people’s houses, we were driving around like Lyft drivers with Chromebooks and bags of groceries,” said Carolina Brito, principal of the Rafael Hernandez K-8 School in Boston. “The fact that we were in people’s homes connected us back to what we were trying to do in ‘73,” when the Hernandez bilingual school was founded by Puerto Rican parents pushing for quality bilingual education.

Boston is seeing changes in higher education, too. The Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, a primarily minority-serving institution, broke ground earlier this week on its new building in Nubian Square. “We are very excited about moving to a place where about 15% of our students reside,” said Dr. Aisha Francis, President & CEO of Franklin Cummings Tech. “A lot of our majors are only available at our college unless you go far west. We want nontraditional postsecondary education to be more accessible and available to all students, particularly students of color,” she said.

“I want to name that education is an inherent good and a necessity for our progress, community level, national level. It is not the silver bullet on closing the wealth gap,” said Rahn Dorsey, Chief Impact Officer at the Eastern Bank Foundation and and chair of the Franklin Cummings Tech Board of Trustees. “We need to set our young people up for success. At the same time, we need to figure out what the wealth transfer in this country is going to be to achieve the parity that you want,” said Dorsey.

Disclosure: Mr. Dorsey is current member of the GBH Board of Advisors.