As a parent I'm grateful for the flexibility to choose where I work until next summer, however it has become very clear to me that a large number of lower-income essential workers who are parents are currently facing a major childcare crisis because they have to return to work despite schools being closed.
This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system. Given the immediacy and severity of this crisis, people in my community are trying to figure out if they can repurpose existing social service foundations, like school PTAs, to raise funds from more well off community members to support others who are in this sort of childcare bind.
But it's very hard going, not at the least because everyone is in their own personal logistical crisis and it's hard to think about others' childcare needs when you are trying to figure out your own.
I think communal support in this manner is a good idea. Schooling children at home on a lower income is possible, and I've known people who have made it work successfully (pre-COVID). I also think things like homeschool "pods" or "co-ops" where families form isolated clusters to help share the burden can help.
Worth noting that, at least in California, a decision was made to allocate funding to schools based on last years enrollment numbers, rather than this upcoming school year's numbers.
One major implication is that charter schools that are more prepared to help parents deal with schooling at home will not receive increased funding to help with the massive increase in enrollment applications these schools have received.
> Schooling children at home on a lower income is possible, and I've known people who have made it work successfully (pre-COVID).
Very often these are people who are highly educated themselves, having college degrees or are self-taught and whose work is intellectual or creative/technical in its nature. It's not a solution for people or communities who don't have those built-in advantages.
You can't expect low paid essential workers (grocery store clerks, janitors, etc) - people who have no higher education and even limited primary education but on whose labor we are all heavily dependent - to form home-school "pods" that provide anything like what their children had access to in their school. Doing so would be (and by all accounts currently is) exacerbating the inequities already present.
The public school teacher to a less educationally resourced community is much like rural schoolhouse teacher of the past was to theirs. Those teachers were often the only person in the community with any higher education at all. The parents within rural community weren't resourced to teach their children the basic skills needed to operate in an ever more sophisticated world, which is why they often imported a schoolteacher from a nearby city or town.
That said, even a lot of parents with higher education struggle to help their kids with subjects that they haven't considered since their own primary schooling, like algebra or critical reading and writing.
It's a way to make the best of a bad situation, not a long-term alternative to brick-and-mortar schools.
Providing funding for childcare services (from public school budgets) would also be a good idea, but if we are going to have large-scale child-care services, why not just re-open schools? If the point of closing public schools is to minimize the amount of social contact in order to keep the spread of the disease low, then it necessarily means more parents will need to care for their children at home. Homeschool pods and charter schools make this process less of a pain.
Btw, not all homeschooling families are well-educated. Many do it for religious reasons, or because they have concerns about the safety of the school environment, or because they have a child with special needs that aren't accommodated by the public school system. Charter schools that facilitate homeschooling have teachers who are resources for the parents and a variety of pre-packaged curricula that parents can choose from.
> It's a way to make the best of a bad situation, not a long-term alternative to brick-and-mortar schools.
Agree 100%
> Providing funding for childcare services (from public school budgets) would also be a good idea
There is no money in public school budgets for this. The pandemic hasn't lowered expenses for public schools by any appreciable amount.
> but if we are going to have large-scale child-care services, why not just re-open schools? If the point of closing public schools is to minimize the amount of social contact in order to keep the spread of the disease low, then it necessarily means more parents will need to care for their children at home.
The idea is to provide financial assistance to help low income parents pay for child care when they must leave the home for work, and do so in smaller pods to minimize disease transmission. Parents with high incomes and/or high work flexibility or work from home jobs are already forming these pods and hiring college students as childcare/tutors. Poor families with inflexible work are not able to do this.
These pods are a net increase in cost, since the safety and care function was previously provided by the school facilities and staff has been lost. As you say, it's making the best of a bad situation. The problem is that only people with particular privileges either in job flexibility or income can afford to make the best in the situation.
> Btw, not all homeschooling families are well-educated. Many do it for religious reasons,
I'd argue that from a literacy perspective, a religious home schooling family is better educated than many others even if they don't have secular credentials. The Bible isn't that easy to read, after all.
> lower-income essential workers who are parents are currently facing a major childcare crisis because they have to return to work despite schools being closed
Because I live in a middle-class bubble, I wonder what most of those folks do ordinarily while school is out for the summer.
Many of these programs are also provided on school grounds. Of course the hard reality is that many kids just slip through the cracks in our left to their own devices for the summer.
My child goes to a small-ish catholic school and coming up with plans for childcare and other services have been a big focus, at least on a contingency basis as everyone expects that school will not remain open in-person for long. Utilizing PTOs and such have been a big part of that.
It's tough that school districts and municipal gov are all on their own to plan things, and the lack of consistency makes it impossible to collaborate.
I see the lack of consistency (diversity) to be a good thing. This is a unique situation, doesn't it make sense to try many things and then converge on what works?
Education has been mostly unchanged over the last 100+ years, it's probably time to try some new ideas.
There will be 2 separate subgroups of "diverse" approaches.
One group of approaches will be used by people with money who spend it on innovative small group supplemental learning/childcare pods via hired tutors.
The other group of approaches will those used by those with very limited means scraping together whatever childcare they can afford with little ability to tend to academics or social development.
Which group of approaches would you want your child in?
We’re only likely to get the diversity, not the convergence. Just gathering and analyzing the data from how thousands of school districts handle this will take many years, and this will be long over by then.
Then the solution should not be to expect the federal government to come up with a plan. That's one of the few entities with even more stakeholders than schools.
> This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system.
COVID tragically exaberates inequities in basically all systems.
If you compare it to WWII or WWI, those wars were obviously awful, but they had a sort of equalizing effect economically. When you drop bombs on cities and factories, the rich — who own all of that physical infrastructure — get harmed more than the poor. Physical wars destroy capital, so they tend to reduce economic inequality.
But this pandemic is the exact opposite. It leaves every physical object untouched and only harms people. And, as has always been the case, it is the poor who always end up in harm's way. So this pandemic is making the poor drastically poorer while leaving the well to-do mostly alone.
It is horrible and profoundly unfair. This is exactly the time where you need a big government that is not afraid to do wealth redistribution to even some of this tragedy out. But, instead, here in the US we have Trump and the kleptocracy who are only interested in redistributing wealth into their own pockets.
If we don't get a better government in 2020, the US is going to be in very dire straits. We need an FDR right now, and not to re-elect Hoover.
As a parent I'm grateful for the flexibility to choose where I work until next summer, however it has become very clear to me that a large number of lower-income essential workers who are parents are currently facing a major childcare crisis because they have to return to work despite schools being closed.
This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system. Given the immediacy and severity of this crisis, people in my community are trying to figure out if they can repurpose existing social service foundations, like school PTAs, to raise funds from more well off community members to support others who are in this sort of childcare bind.
But it's very hard going, not at the least because everyone is in their own personal logistical crisis and it's hard to think about others' childcare needs when you are trying to figure out your own.