I've continued to see this truism online that the "overwhelming majority" of parents want their children full-time back in schools this fall, like so:
It's in today's New York Times again today. This may even be part of the calculation behind the President's push on reopening.Great story about teachers' fears re going back to school. But what about working parents and vulnerable kids, who overwhelmingly want & need to go back? What happens to them if schools don't reopen? When do they get to be centered in the reopening story? https://t.co/gZAfbZI5jK— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) July 11, 2020
It's not something I'm seeing in my own little corner of the education universe. Here's what I am seeing, all of which is anecdotal, and a lot of which is determined by my own relationships and such, of course.
First a lot of teachers are parents. In fact, a lot of educators--superintendents, business managers, custodians, and on and on--are parents. Drawing a line that puts educators on THIS side and parents on THIS side thus isn't actually possible.
Those who are in education, particularly those who are in or close to the classroom, by and large aren't under a lot of illusions about how this spring went. It was an emergency, on-the-fly, coping with an emerging disaster. Some things went right, a lot of things didn't, and there's a reason why we're getting "How Much Learning Was Lost" pieces now.
It's also a pandemic. And teachers know, school staff know, what school budgets look from their angle even in non-disasterous times. They know what their buildings are like.
And they're scared.
I would add to this group those who are most school-adjacent. There are parents and guardians who don't work for school districts that "get it" when it comes to schools. Maybe they're related to teachers, maybe they volunteer in their schools, but whatever their connection, this is not a group of families that are shocked to hear that districts are scrambling to find funding for COVID supplies or that their buildings that are crowded in regular times are not now magically going to fit all those kids back in much more spread apart.They get the impossibilities.
It's important when we talk about teachers to note:
- they're college educated
- they're public employees
- they're widely (though not universally) unionized
- they're predominately female
- they're predominately white
That set of characteristics means many, many things.
One thing it has meant during this discussion is that it lends itself to gendered arguments: those who have concerns are labelled "hysterical" or it is condescendingly assumed that they don't understand the science. There is also a long history of teachers as martyrs that this falls neatly into; see this headline from the UK from May:
And wow, are we seeing all of that in spades.No. Don’t guilt teachers into this. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued and then, like nurses, patronised in a time of crisis. The unions are right to worry. There are too many unknowns about the virus. We don’t want heroes. Or martyrs. We want people to be protected. pic.twitter.com/PG4YSXpkah— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) May 15, 2020
And no, those arguments don't all come from men (nor are they all directed to women).
There are also parents who see education largely or entirely as a service which they are being denied and which they are demanding return.
We are reluctant to talk about class in this country--we're all middle class, the story goes--but what I see here is the removal from the perspective of educators, These parents in no way identify with their children's teachers and are in no way sympathetic to their views, or if they are, they're viewed as an inconvenience to be overcome. Teachers should get back to work; after all, supermarket workers have.
(We don't, of course, treat service workers well, either.)
And parents can always "choose" not to send their children back to school, after all.
This reminds me of this passage from the book I finished last week, Lily Geismer's Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party:
Schools are intended to be the bedrock of at least the Massachusetts, if not the country's, democratic system. They're not a convenience, and they're intended to work to best serve all students.“The word choice thus joined the pantheon of terms that provided white suburban professionals a means to combine a commitment to abstract notions of equality and self-interest with more specific forms of class privilege.”— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) July 5, 2020
Some such families are discovering to their surprise that their schools are not well provided with supplies, or staffing, or space.
Families with students with special needs, we know from much earlier coverage, have in many cases particularly struggled, particularly if their students can't receive services and support remotely (or well remotely). At the same time, many of these children are medically fragile, and thus are at increased risk to their health by attending school with other. They face an impossible balance.
Black, Latinx, and indigenous people, due to, as the CDC acknowledges, "[l]ong-standing systemic health and social inequities" face significantly higher rates of both illness and death from COVID-19.
I have read a lot of coverage of white middle-class moms' perspective on schools planning for the fall. I have read very little perspective from parents in any of the above groups.
And those are the majority of public school parents in this country now. We need to reflect that in our consideration and in our coverage.
It has also been observed that for some children of color, this past spring was more peaceful and safer because they were not at school, due to the systemic racism within the K-12 educational system (note that the link there is to the U.S. Department of Education; the government itself has said this). We should be ashamed that this is the case, and we as a country should commit to do better by our kids.
I thus wasn't entirely surprised by the results from Mass Inc when they surveyed parents on kids going back to school:
In some cases, those driving for all students to be back full time now are citing students of color as their argument--surely such students need to be back in buildings!--without asking or consulting their families on what they want and need.
That isn't being a good ally.
There are also lots of families--some encompassed in the above!--who are really torn. They want their kids back in classrooms, both for the kids' sake, as they learn more there, and for the adults' sake, as we get more done with them there (or can get anything done at all). Kids get services at school, from food to mental health supports to kinds of therapy to sports and arts, that they simply don't get at home.
But parents also don't want their kids to get sick, or their kids' teachers to get sick, or their kids to bring the illness home to family.
As much as I am seeing it said, one thing I don't think is the case is that the majority of parents simply want their kids back in school full time. It's much more complicated than that.
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