Art by Bette Yozell

As the new school year approaches and Coronavirus cases are surging across the US, decisions about what education will look like in the fall are becoming paramount. Solutions that provide peace of mind and feasibility to parents have yet to come from national or state governments. The White House administration is pressuring schools to resume in-person teaching this fall, and they have blocked the Center for Disease Control from testifying on the reopening of schools. The options being announced by school districts across the country are far from optimal: models that involve classroom education pose greater health risks; online learning is particularly difficult for working parents and did not work well for many children this spring; and the school districts that are still undecided present the extra burden of not being able to plan or prepare.

With parents feeling the unease of an unpredictable and unsurmountable school year ahead, a new movement has arisen seemingly overnight: self-organized pods or micro-schools, in which families bring five to ten children together to learn, socialize and be cared for. These groups range from co-op-style, where parents take turns watching and teaching the children, to pooling resources to pay for teachers, tutors and caregivers. There are vibrant Facebook groups consisting of thousands of parents that have popped up across the country over the last few weeks. These parents are suddenly scrambling to find pods of similarly-aged children and to hire educators.

While self-organizing around schooling pods makes sense as a way of taking control and optimizing for several difficult factors, this trend can have highly inequitable results. There are several forms of marginalization that can result from this model.

Classism

One of the biggest concerns around this model is that, without intentional effort, these pod schooling groups will benefit economically advantaged families and will leave less-affluent families worse off, further widening the socioeconomic divide in the US. I spoke to Tyrek Laing, CEO and Executive Director of Educators for Justicean organization committed to creating a positive, inclusive, and empowering educational experience for students, educators and parents of all individual intersections, ethnic backgrounds, and socio-economic statuses. Laing shared: This would create a less equitable education for kids that are not part of the upper-middle class, who are not part of the 1%. What would school pods look like for children who live in public housing, for parents who are not able to work from home or who don't have the budget to hire teachers?

Those that are able to hire teachers, tutors and childcare will not only fare better, but they will potentially be taking resources away from the families that need them most. As families unenroll from public schools, those schools risk losing funding. When pods are able to offer public school teachers a higher salary taking care of fewer children, those teachers will not be available to the remaining public school students. And when parents are able to afford homeschool resources for their children, they are more able to focus on work and less likely to risk their source of income. Not only are pods less accessible for lower-income families, but many of those families also rely on public schools for meals and services, making micro-schools less feasible for them as well.

Racism

Even though school segregation legally ended in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education, the effects of redlining and historical segregation have resulted in more than half of American schoolchildren attending racially concentrated districts. There is also a direct correlation between race and income, with Hispanic families earning 73% and Black families earning 59% of the median household income that White families earn.

Families that are inclined to form homeschool pods are more likely to do so with other families in their school or district, and those families that are able to afford more schooling resourcesand spend the time connecting and coordinating these podsare less likely to be Black or Brown. Without intentionally working against these probabilities, Laing speculated: If school pods are formed at a mass level, it will increase the number of schools that are segregated. An anti-racist approach needs to be taken now in education.

Ableism

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 14% of all public school students received special education services in the 2019-20 school year, and of those, 33% had specific learning disabilities. As families form learning pods, there is the risk of leaving these students behind without the support they need. Remote learning can be more difficult for children with special education needs. There are often additional services these students needsuch as occupational therapy, speech therapy, and tutoringand students with physical limitations, such as limited vision, hearing and mobility might not have the support they need in a family-organized learning pod.

Sexism

Even before this pandemic, mothers were doing 2.6 times the unpaid care and domestic work that men do. When schooling went online in the spring, 97% of mothers reported doing the majority of the work to support it. Looking at the homeschool pod conversations online, it is clear that the majority of these self-organizers are mothersand its not a stretch to assume that they will be the ones handling most of the logistics and shared teaching as the pods form. All of this additional work risks furthering the pay gap between working mothers and fathers, as mothers have less time and mental space for their paid work.

Clearly, there are many risks of furthering already-existing inequities within our educational system as more parents take education into their own hands. But there are also ways to help mitigate these risks.

Advocacy

Parents who have the time and energy to organize pod schools can also be spending effort on advocating for better solutions from governments and school boards. I spoke with Shauna Causey, the founder of WEEKDAYSa company that provides support for starting in-home child care with the goal of bringing communities together to support each other and creating economic empowerment for womenabout ways that families can make pod schooling more equitable. She explained: Subsidies do exist in the form of childcare vouchers that could be used towards micro-schools, but there is nowhere near enough money to meet the demand from parents. We desperately need more subsidies and government funds. Parents can also work with school boards and PTAs to encourage creative educational solutionssuch as outdoor classrooms and school-organized podsthat optimize more for the health and learning of all children.

Hiring Decisions

The hiring choices that families make around educational professionals for their school pods can be done with an equity lens. As Causey suggests: Look at who you are hiring for micro-schools. A lot of women and educators of color have left the childcare and teaching profession because it didnt pay them a living wage. Teaching small groups of children is something they can do to get paid. Laing agrees: Parents should be intentional to make sure they are hiring teachers who may not look like them or aren't from the same backgrounds as them. Hiring graduate students of color who want to teach would be an excellent expression of solidarity on their journey to higher education.

Support Public Schools

Many public schools are funded based on Average Daily Attendance. This means that as more families unenroll students from public school, those schools can receive less funding, which hurts the students that are still enrolled there. Parents can think about keeping their children enrolled in public school, and using schooling pods as a way for students to work through the online curriculum together. And parents should be cognizant of not hiring teachers out of the public school system. Causey encouragingly shared: We havent seen very many of our micro-school teachers come from the public school, and 85% of our K-12 teachers are interested in using the public school curriculum.

Subsidies

Families that are forming school pods can make the decision to have all families pay a sliding-scale rate based on what they can afford, or can all pitch in to subsidize one family entirely. Causey has seen that A lot of our micro-school groups have one subsidized spot available, and oftentimes the teachers already know someone that would be able to fill that spot. As Laing points out, If you really want to educate your kids, you need to educate them about service. You can do that by connecting with families of lesser financial means, who don't look like you, and finding ways to be of service to them.

Employer Assistance

The ability to create more equitable educational outcomes doesnt only fall on families and governments. Companies can provide childcare perks for employees in the forms of partial childcare subsidies, backup childcare and help finding micro-school teachers. Childcare and schooling is truly the backbone of the US economy. Without it, millions of parents can't work. This should be the biggest thing companies are thinking about right now, Causey shares.

Laing recognizes that People have the right to educate their kids how they feel is needed. But on the mass level, schooling pods could make it difficult for kids of lower incomes, from Black and Brown communities, to keep up. The current pandemic, and the measures taken to reopen the economy without having education solved for, is leaving families in a position of having to optimize between several difficult parameters. This is hard on everyone - especially families that are marginalized by classism, racism, ablism and sexim - and as such we need to create solutions with equity in mind.

See the original post:

How Educational Inequality In America Could Be Impacted By The Homeschooling Pod Frenzy - Forbes