When I read about how school is adapting to shelter in place requirements, I wonder who will want their kids back in a physical classroom and who won't. Ultimately it will become a test of privilege that decides. Those parents who can afford to keep their kids around and work with them on school and extra curricular activities while they themselves work from home would be among the privileged. Being a functional two parent household will definitely go a long way. Both parents holding white-collar jobs that make remote work possible even more so. It will also matter how many kids are in the household and how heavily one or more of them need to be supervised.
Families that score average and better on all key factors that allow them to successfully home-school will likely see better academic outcomes for their kids than what they saw before the pandemic. So these folks will be reluctant to downgrade to public school, physical classroom education once that becomes possible. They will likely push to keep the kids in the flow that they got used to. For schools it will be hard to make the case for why the kids are needed in the classroom if they did fine without physical presence. The longer schools remain closed the harder it will be to mandate the return.
On the other hand would be the parents who lack privilege in a myriad of ways - single parents, low-income parents who need to work multiple jobs and gigs, kids with special needs, kids who are plain difficult to manage, dysfunctional families, blue-collar workers, people who need to physically show up to their place of work everyday and the list goes on. These parents will want their kids back in school so they could work and provide for the family or maybe just get help with raising their child because it is overwhelming.
If physical attendance in school were to become optional, this will be a game-changer and create the ultimate privilege based fault line in society.
Comments