Donald Trump’s failure to control the pandemic or to have meaningful support for schools (just pressure to open in person regardless of safety) is, as with so many things in the coronavirus era, creating a messy patchwork response in which not just red states and blue states but even towns within miles of each other are coming up with different answers. But one of the big trends is—as much as it’s an unintentional consequence of Trump’s larger failures—something Trump might have designed if he had given the matter any real thought. That would be the learning pod.
Facing the choice between unsafe schools or having their kids at home trying to learn remotely, many parents with the means to do so are forming small groups and hiring tutors, services, or even straight-up hiring teachers to make sure their kids don’t effectively lose out on a full year of school. Which is great if you can afford it, but since the vast majority of people cannot afford it, pods will inevitably exacerbate inequalities that were already being made worse by the pandemic.
Kids with parents who can work from home and maybe even have flexible hours were already going to have more support in remote learning than kids whose parents have to go to grocery stores or hospitals or offices or restaurants to work every day. Kids with college-educated parents were already going to have more support in remote learning. Kids whose families have blazing fast WiFi, enough devices for everyone in the house, and maybe even a little private space to work were already going to be better off than kids taking turns on a single aging device with balky WiFi, let alone kids sitting outside a Taco Bell to do their homework. Kids with an outside tutor or teacher? Forget it.
Learning pods have rapidly gone from desperate parents getting together to at least split up the work they’d been doing all by themselves to companies charging big bucks for pod services. Some parents are even reportedly renting separate spaces for their pods.
“Parents, and teachers, are trying desperately to keep kids engaged and learning. Parents with means will do whatever they can, including hiring tutors and joining with other parents in pods. But like holding school outdoors or in parks, pods are a privilege available to too few," Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement to CNN.
"Without public investment, pods will serve the few, not the many.” Which is just fine with Trump and Betsy DeVos, his education secretary. They’d always envisioned serving the few, not the many, through vouchers sending public money to private schools, but … sure. It’s not great for public education and it will harden existing inequalities, so this is a Trump-DeVos wet dream.
Parents are operating from a real place of desperation here, as Weingarten acknowledged. Kids are losing not just education about reading and math, they are—especially for the younger ones—losing significant time for social-emotional development. We’re all losing stability, but that’s something extra for kids. Then, too, parents need to work, and having kids at home during the pandemic is a major threat to women’s careers as individuals and to women’s progress in the workforce writ large. It shouldn’t be this way, but the reality is that women pick up most of the extra work of having kids at home at the expense of their paying jobs, and that’s not sustainable over time.
Staring down the barrel of a year of this—whatever “this” is in your school district, be it fully remote, a return to in-person learning that’s almost inevitably going to fall apart when COVID-19 arrives in a school, or a confusing hybrid system—and left on their own to figure it out, parents with money are leaning on that. “This is our emergency fund,” one woman told The New York Times. “And this is our emergency.”
But it’s an emergency for everyone, and everyone doesn’t have an emergency fund. It’s also an emergency for public education. When the Denver Board of Education warned that the consequences of pods could go beyond some kids pulling ahead while others fall behind over the coming year, the board’s key ask was this:
Stay enrolled in your school! This keeps the connection with the educators who know your student, and it helps ensure our schools have the desperately needed resources to meet the needs of our students and community. The State of Colorado funds the district based on Per-Pupil Revenue. For every student who unenrolls, the district loses approximately $10,600. The district is already slated to lose $65 million due to COVID-19. By not enrolling your children, class-sizes will grow and teacher positions could be eliminated due to the loss in funding. It’s an opportunity to support our whole community by keeping people employed who also know what they’re doing.
Learning pods are here because Donald Trump failed to do the things that would have made COVID-19 no worse in the United States than in so many other countries, and then Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to fund schools in a way that would make safe in-person reopening remotely possible in large parts of the country. They turned this into first a national crisis, then a crisis for schools, then dumped that onto individual families to figure out for themselves.
Now the challenge is to prevent the pods from contributing to the long-time Republican goal of demolishing public education, and instead to organize to get our cities and towns and states to fund the schools enough to do right by the kids whose families can’t afford private tutors. Knowing what to call on your individual school district to do about reopening can be almost impossible—Demand Safe Schools has a good list of demands for what schools should look like when they reopen, but since local transmission levels and ventilation systems will vary from district to district, the reopening decisions themselves are still enormously complicated and frankly beyond most of us who don’t have graduate degrees in public health. (Unfortunately, in many cases the people making the decisions aren’t paying attention to the public health experts, either.)
But several of those demands, the ones about how to make schools more just places and how to support the families of the students who need it most, are important under any circumstances, and made more urgent by the pandemic. To take one example, an eviction moratorium is an education priority because homelessness makes kids struggle in school. These days, homelessness would also make kids more likely to be infected, so preventing homelessness makes it less likely kids are bringing coronavirus into schools. So everyone—including and maybe especially parents forming pods—should be promoting equity along these lines.
As always, calling on your state legislators and your members of Congress to increase education funding right now—paid for by taxing the rich—and especially to invest in education for kids from marginalized communities is one good place to start.
(Here’s where I admit the awkward reality: I’m in a pod. Happily—the mitigating factor that allows me to write about this issue without too much shame—my child is preschool age, so my family’s choice didn’t carry consequences for our city’s public schools. Our only real alternative was the same private daycare he’s always gone to.)
