Parents weigh private tutor, pod or petri dish
I don’t think this is what they mean by ‘school choice’
They’re as tired of us as we are of them. My wife and I can’t give our elementary-school-aged children the amount of attention they need daily since we each have our own work to do. Returning to school in the fall — almost six months after we started our quarantining — should be a time that all parties involved can look forward to. We all need a break from each other. But we, as Americans, have botched our response to the pandemic at both the federal and state levels to the point that the fall term poses impossible challenges for parents. Do we send our children back to school, knowing the risks involved?
All these years, “school choice” in Houston has meant the freedom to apply to public magnet programs and charter schools — now it is about risking a deadly disease. Now the word “choice” haunts us.
Since Houston ISD is starting the year in September, and initially in a virtual, online setting, the decision my family has to make about sending our children back to physical school has been delayed, but does anyone seriously think it will be any safer to send them to their classrooms six weeks after Labor
Day? I certainly don’t. It’s not as if our state and federal officials are going to change course between now and then to make it better.
For my wife and me, the problem of our children staying home has everything to do with how we will bear the burden of their online school. Our privilege — that we have the ability to do our work from home, unlike many others — means that sending our children to school this fall is an actual choice. Is it worth the risk? My wife’s work is much more structured than mine, so I will have to bear the brunt of overseeing their school days. We did struggle in the spring during the emergency virtual school run with organizing their day and keeping up with their assignments. Although I am sure the fall will be better since administrators and teachers have had time to plan for it, I do expect to be a bit lost when it comes to some of the things my children will be taught. They are learning math in a different way than I was instructed when I was a kid, and I am no elementary educator. My daughter is in a Spanish immersion program. How could it possibly be as immersive at home as it is in person? And while our concerns are trivial compared to those of people with fewer resources available to them, it remains a difficult terrain to navigate.
But education is more than working on reading and math. An entire generation of children is being deprived of the social development that comes with being around others of their own age and all the challenges it gives them. My wife and I can already tell that their use of language has changed; they are using linguistic shorthand by using abbreviations, dropping letters in words and slurring their speech more than they did six months ago. Our almost-6-year-old is especially egregious in his reverting back toward talking like a toddler, only with a larger vocabulary. Our daughter, who is going into fourth grade, misses her friends and teachers more than she is willing to say.
If there is one thing I’ve learned as the parent of elementary-school-aged children in the age of COVID-19, it is that even if children love to be home and have time to themselves, they want more than free time and vague requests to read and do math. Parents are not able to offer the same experience they encounter in school. The exposure matters, but now that very exposure has become a liability. My children have told me they miss school and can’t wait to go back. They crave the structure. They crave the learning. They crave their peers. They deserve to be educated and have a social life. We adults have failed them.
HISD, like every other school district in this country, faces an impossible task in both their charge to educate our next generation and in the social weight we have placed on our schools as a central node of the social safety net. They are doing the best they can to cover these twin mandates, but it is obvious that we collectively have decided not to prioritize our own ability to send our children back to school in a safe environment. Teachers are, on a whole, amazing people, but they are not superheroes who will save us from the COVID-19 fallout. COVID-19 has laid bare structural problems with our society in schooling our children. The choices (or lack of choices) parents face this fall have set up our children to be either educational hermits or part of a large-scale science experiment for our current plague, and school teachers and staff to be cannon fodder.
Social responsibility is difficult for we Americans to comprehend. Arguments that children contract COVID-19 less than adults, that they have less risk of dying and that schools are therefore safer are missing the point. Children are possible vectors of the disease. In many ways it is less important what COVID-19 does to them than what it does through them: It can spread to other, more vulnerable people. Of course, children can also die from it. My wife and I decided that our children won’t go back to in-person school for the foreseeable future. We decided that we are in a position to offer fewer people to act as vectors for the virus and will keep our children home. As believers in public schools, we haven’t considered changing them to a private school or hiring a teacher and forming a “pod” in our neighborhood. We are enrolling the children in HISD's online instruction, and we will make the best of it. The situation is far from ideal but we can make it work.
One of the base structures gluing our entire society together is the assumption that our children will go to school, easing parents’ minds about what their children are doing, providing them an environment where they can develop lifelong social skills, alongside the usual subjects of math, language arts, social studies and science. COVID-19 has forced us to see what would happen to our children if schools are taken away.
Johnson is a historian living in Houston with his family. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University and is currently working on a book to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.