Thread by @TracyNovick

Hm. This “overwhelmingly” isn’t what I am seeing from families in my own corner of the education universe.
Here’s what I am (yes, largely anecdotally, and not exhaustively) seeing:

https://twitter.com/alexanderrusso/status/1282025376471027713

None of the below is a monolith, of course.

First: there are lots of teachers who are also parents.
There are lots of educators who are parents.
That’s why these Battle of the Titans framings always strike me as odd.

You’re not going to find tons of illusions about this spring from these folks (they also were probably the ones managing their own children’s learning, too). Remote learning isn’t their best case scenario, for certain.

And it’s a pandemic, and they know what school budgets are like from their end, and they know how school buildings are, and many of them are scared (and some of that depends on local levels of trust plus building space and district funding).

I’d tag on here families that are closest to schools as institutions and employers: there are a lot of parents who “get it” from the classroom perspective on this, whether it’s because they’re related to teachers, or they’re the PTO president, or what have you.

This isn’t to say these families haven’t struggled and mightily with current circumstances, just that they aren’t advocating for everyone back full-time yesterday as the answer.
They get the impossiblities.

We have to mention in here (and I think we need reminders in framing) that teachers are:
•college-educated
•public employees
•often unionized
•the majority of whom are white
•the majority of whom are female

That means several things, one of which is:

It lends itself to implicitly gendered arguments: charges of “hysteria,” condescending assumptions that the science isn’t understood, and the typical assumption of martyrdom.

And wow, are we seeing that.

(And no, those arguments don’t just come from men, of course.)

I’ll add there are *definitely* those see education as a service they are provided and now are demanding return, and on their terms.

I will observe here that some write for national publications.

There is what we resist speaking of as Americans here, I think, which is a class identifier: are schools a service you are provided, and those who provide it must get back to work, or are they human institutions subject to human frailties?

Your perspective on that can be informed by a number of things, but one is how closely you identify with those working in schools.

And some are discovering to their surprise that schools don’t have that much space. Or money. Or staffing.

There are families of students with special needs, many of whom are in the particularly impossible position of knowing how much their child loses by not being in school and also being concerned that their child, who may be more medically vulnerable, is more at risk in buildings.

We heard from them somewhat this spring; those are stories for now, too.

There are other populations at high risk: if the coronavirus rate is multiple times higher among Black, Latinx, and the indigenous communities, why aren’t we reading more widely about the perspective of such parents?

I have read a *lot* of white middle-class mom perspectives on children’s education during the pandemic—and I get it, we’re loud!—but that isn’t who the majority of public school parents is in the US anymore.

We need to reflect that in our conversations and coverage.

It has also been observed that the structural issues around schools and race meant, for some children, that the spring was safer and better for them *out* of school buildings.

That should be of grave shame to us as educators and lend itself to a national commitment to do better by our kids of color in schools.

In some cases, BIPOC communities are being cited by the “all back now” folks as an argument, when that may well not be what is desired *by those families themselves.*

That’s...not allyship.

Many families are really torn, too:
They know what school buildings provide for their kids, and they want that.
They don’t want their kids, or their teachers (or cafeteria workers or crossing guards...) to get sick.
They don’t want the illness brought home.

The one thing that I don’t think is accurate is that parents all want their kids all back in buildings now under current conditions, even as that perspective is taking up much of the oxygen in the room.

There’s a reason districts are doing surveys, after all. /fin

Here's all that in a (longer) blog post: who-cester.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-p… #MAEdu