Today, Explained - (Home)school is cool

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Covid-19 is surging (again). Schools are closing (again). Kids are learning online (again). And more American parents than ever are turning to homeschool (for the very first time).  Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Just about a week ago, President-elect Joe Biden addressed the country from Wilmington, Delaware. It was mostly what you'd expect from a Biden victory speech. Calls for unity, pledges to deal with the coronavirus, talk of renewal. But he also made sure to shout out his wife. As I said many times before, I'm Jill's husband.

And to talk about her resume. She has dedicated her life to education, but teaching isn't just what she does, it's who she is. For American educators, this is a great day for y'all. You're going to have one of your own in the white house and jill's gonna make a great first lady i'm so proud of her biden's already got plenty of plans on education he wants to drastically increase spending on public schools he wants free public college he wants to appoint an education secretary with teaching experience. Imagine that. Most pressing to students and

parents across the country, Biden wants to take a different approach to reopening schools in this pandemic. The outgoing guy was all about opening schools as soon as possible, which a lot of schools did. And now a lot of schools are second guessing that decision. Cities like Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and the biggest school district in the country, New York City, are all reconsidering. Biden wants to take a measured approach. He's promising a lot of federal expertise, PPE, and money to help schools plan their first or second or third reopening safely,

which is probably a relief to a lot of parents who have abandoned schools altogether. In this pandemic, parents have become teachers, and it's been educational. Father God, I am your humble servant. What I am not is a math teacher, God. Lord God, the spirit of Common Core has attacked our household. And right now, the only thing we have in common is frustration and no answer to the math problem, Lord God. I ask that you send down your angels of the carryover, Lord. Teach her that if you carry the one over to the 10th place, you can get the answer, Lord God. Halima Shah, you've been reporting on homeschooling during the pandemic for today.

Explain how many Americans are teaching their own kids now compared to before the pandemic. Homeschooling has nearly doubled, Sean. Doubled? Doubled, yeah. A Gallup poll from August showed that 10% of American families with school-age kids said that they were going to homeschool this year. And a year ago, it was only 5%. Huh. Does that mean, like, homeschoolers now won't be judged like they were in Mean Girls? I know what you're thinking. Homeschooled kids are freaks.

X-Y-L-O-C-A-R-P. Or that we're weirdly religious or something. And on the third day, God created the Remington Bull Action Rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs and the homosexuals. Amen. I don't have any Mean Girls data yet, but just broadly speaking, homeschool is also really popular among kids who might have health conditions that make being in a room with 30 other

kids and their germs really risky. Students with special needs often benefit from the more personalized learning programs that homeschooling offers. And one of the fastest growing homeschool groups in the country are actually African-American students. Yeah, in those cases, I've heard parents cite that Black kids are often over-disciplined or that Black history is often overlooked in public schools. And you spoke to a Black family here in D.C. that's homeschooling, right? I did, and I wanted to find out how regular parents are dealing with being their kids' primary teachers. But I started with the student who's dealing with this firsthand.

My name is Amir Smith Smith and I'm 10. As a homeschooler, Zoya enjoys a flexible schedule that's on her and her parents' time. But it still feels like school, you know? It's good, but I still have to wake up at a certain time. And it's still a lot of work. It's a lot of work on Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. And on Thursdays and Fridays, they're lighter days, but it's still work. I also spoke to Monica Yutzi.

She runs the homeschooling group that Zoe is part of, which is called Sankofa. We always had a lot of interest in Sankofa because of the types of classes that we offer, really creative, outside-of-the-box classes. Sankofa is an African-centered group that supports homeschool students and families in the DMV. That's D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. And COVID-19 has definitely impacted the level of interest. Our enrollment doubled since the pandemic. And because our classes are now offered online, we don't have space constraints, so we can offer a lot more classes and we can serve a lot more families, not just in the DMV area, but all across the country and outside of the country as well.

I grabbed my mask and my mic and decided to get a closer look at what homeschooling looks like at Zoe's house on a Friday morning. Y'all have different pages. Mr. Omari, I see your hands. Her dad, Brian Smithen, is a public school teacher. He's talking to his second grade math class from his kitchen table. In my section, because a lot of you guys have shown me that you know how to add and subtract. All right. So the first intervention block will be primarily adding and subtracting and all the things that we did in module one. All right. Brian's wife, Lauren, is an adjunct professor at a local university.

But right now she's sitting on the couch a few feet away, checking her laptop while breastfeeding Zoe's eight month old sister. A few feet away, Zoe sits with her laptop while eating breakfast. I eat the sweet potato. I just started throwing up potatoes. I just finished my egg. She's doing schoolwork, but unlike public school kids, she's working on math problems from a lesson plan that her parents create and help her with. It's done. It's done. Take it seriously. 24, 32, 43, 42, 53, 54.

Zoe did distance learning last spring, when public schools made a quick, chaotic shift to online classes. Her parents say she barely interacted with her peers. And when she did, it was for 20 to 30 minutes over video. The rest of the teaching happened through pre-recorded or PowerPoint lessons. Maybe. This fall, when it didn't look like distance learning was going to go much more smoothly, the Smithens took their daughter's education into their own hands. I guess what we saw last school year,

you just didn't know what you were going to be stepping into this school year. So like at the beginning of the academic school year for Zoe, the school system was sending out a ton of different emails with, you know, conflicting and confusing information. Again, they were just trying to play catch up. And I think the other thing, too, is the uncertainty of, will the students go back to school? That uncertainty with the virus, that's just unsettling. And we just decided that it was best for her to just stay home. The family says online learning in D.C. public schools is more robust since last year.

But Brian is still seeing challenges with his second graders. The students, they don't have the know-how to move around the virtual realm the way that I can. Most of the time, they need a parent's assistance. And then if the parent has multiple children, it can be a toss-up as well because maybe that child in my class is the older child and they have to hold their brother or sister for a little while.

The blessing is that a teacher has always wanted the parent to be involved. I haven't seen the parent involvement as much as I do now. So the behaviors have been top notch. You know, you still have those lingering students that want to lay down or they want to show their toys. So trying to find that balance is the hard part. Zoe is a fifth grader who is older than her dad's students. She didn't really mind distance learning so much, except for the packets of schoolwork that she might have to complete by the end of the week. I didn't like the packets, but I did like how we did only the meetings with the teacher like once a week.

Because I did not want to have to be online every day. When it came to work, it wasn't too much work, but I didn't want to do work at all. But I was happy that summer was almost there. Now, instead of interacting with a classroom teacher for only a few minutes a week, Zoe is interacting with her homeschool teachers, her parents, every day. She walked me through her homeschool day so far. I woke up, and then I got ready, and I tried to get ready, and then I came downstairs,

and then I finished getting ready. Then I ate apples, and then I started math. There was fraction, subtraction, and then there was just patterns. Next, I have science. On science, if Daddy's off, he helps me. And then after that, I have a break. And then ELA, and then I have civics. Mom usually helps me.

And then on break lunch, I help me. When I spoke to Monica Yutzi, who runs Sankofa, the homeschool group that Zoe is part of, she told me homeschooling offers kids a chance to do what distance learning doesn't, make learning work for the family and the student. Most distance programs, if they're through the public school system, it's going to be one size fits all. So there's no variety, there's no customizing. And for homeschoolers, a parent can choose a whole different program for each child. So in that respect, yes, homeschoolers have the advantage because they can pick and choose curriculum and resources that appeal to their child's learning style and interests. But the Smithens say homeschooling is a huge time commitment that is not an option for everyone.

They're glad to have more flexibility now that they can work from home and can tag team homeschooling Zoe. I'm focused, tell me. But the pandemic means everyone is under the same roof at the same time, trying to keep a delicate ecosystem of working, learning, and caregiving afloat. Brian misses his solo commute to work. I would at least have a 10-minute ride, you know, and it's just me and the radio, you know, or just me and the wind, you know, but now I don't have any of that. So I have to go out and find that, that time,

you know, so that's the only thing that's, that is different, you know, that you could literally pull each other's hair out because you're just like beside each other every day. I mean, I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted, but this is going to sound corny. I think because I love my family so much that I am just willing to make it work. Oh, that's really sweet. But I feel like listening to those two and like the Smith and family, it's just like the Brady bunch of homeschooling is just perfect. They're already educators. They have the assume that at least some people are satisfied with the way that distance learning is going. all have different Wi-Fi access. You might have different homework help, or you might just have the luxury of quiet time to do well in distance learning that other students don't always have. Some real classic education gap issues here. Yeah, and the pandemic is going to make those more apparent,

and it's going to make it more difficult to solve. How so? I will tell you after the break. Okay. Okay. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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Okay, so Halima, we heard from the Smith and family who are like uniquely suited and well positioned for this moment. They're both educators and now they're homeschooling. But that can't be the case with the rest of the country that's dealing with this, right? What's going on elsewhere? Yeah, I had a similar question, and that was why I reached out to Emma Vedera. Most recently, I served as chief of staff in the Obama administration at the U.S. Department of Education for Secretaries Arne Duncan and John King. Right now, she leads a policy think tank called Next 100. And she said it's too early for

comprehensive data on school enrollment since the academic year just started. But early data shows that there are drops in public school enrollment. In L.A. Unified, which is the second largest district in the country, kindergarten enrollment decreased by nearly 6,000 students, which is about a 14% drop. I think we can glean what we're seeing, a lot of us are seeing play out every day, which is remote learning, online learning is not working well for a lot of families. You know, we ask schools to do a lot of things. We ask schools to provide academic support, to provide social and emotional support. Schools provide a place for kids to be with their friends and form those relationships. They provide food and meals. And right now, schools can't do a lot of those things.

And out of all those families for whom online learning isn't working, only some are going to be able to find an alternative. We have some sense also really anecdotally and from surveys of more parents trying homeschooling, of more parents trying public charter schools, of more families trying private schools. Homeschooling, a learning pod with a private tutor, or switching schools will be most accessible to families that have the extra time or income. Which means that COVID-19 is widening the opportunity gaps that low-income families, students of color, students with disabilities, and English language learners already faced.

COVID has highlighted those challenges. It's made them harder to ignore, but also harder to address. And they've been exacerbated through remote learning, you know, and that's played out as the digital divide has meant that low-income students are less likely to have access to the best remote learning we have. Their schools were more likely to close earlier in the school year and be closed for longer. They were less likely to have synchronous instruction, i.e. instruction which students are actually engaging with teachers. And so we're just seeing each of these gaps actually widen at the moment when we know those students' needs and their communities are actually being hardest hit. What's more is that

when better resourced students leave the system, it's bad news for public schools. School systems are funded on a per-pupil basis. When your enrollment goes down, your revenue goes down. When your enrollment's unpredictable, it's also hard to plan around. That's on top of the financial constraints that public schools already face because of the pandemic. They're seeing budget cuts due to decreased state and local tax revenue. They're facing increased costs associated with providing safe in-person learning and remote learning, right, from PPE to closing the digital divide. Those are increased costs they weren't prepared to take on.

And they will see increased costs for the additional academic catch-up and non-academic needs that students will need as they return. Yeah, you went into the negative though, right? No, I didn't know it was going by sevens. Okay, I got it. The Smithens are a family of educators. Brian is a teacher, Lauren is a professor. So they both have their own concerns about what the move to homeschool means for the mission of public education. I mean, just from a political standpoint, I feel like the trends on one side of the coin can be very, you know, beneficial to young people and to families. But on the other side, it's like our public school system is under attack and it's been under attack for quite some

time. So it's great that people want homeschool. It's great that, you know, people are supplementing education and, you know, learning at home. But at the same time, I'm really concerned about the public school system. I really, really am. I used to substitute teach. But Lauren also sees an opportunity for busy families who decide to pursue homeschooling. When I think of, like, the gig economy that has taken over within, I don't know, the past, you know, decade or so, even longer, it seems that there are a lot of people who don't just have one job. I don't just have one job. You know, my husband doesn't.

So if that trend continues, then I think that people can do what they're doing. For people like Sal Khan, who launched the wildly popular K-12 free online learning platform Khan Academy, the drive towards online learning was a long time coming. It just happened in a less than ideal way. As sometimes a poster child for online learning or distance learning,

I make it very clear that what's going on with COVID is suboptimal right now. It's going to hurt a lot of kids. There are silver linings in that there might be more energy behind closing the digital divide than ever before. Everyone is thinking of really innovative models. There's more of a willingness to experiment and try new things. And so I'm hoping some of that energy continues. Sal says that in a perfect world, these technologies would be coupled with in-person instruction. And integrating these personalized digital learning

tools into public education will actually bridge the equity gap, which is getting worse in the pandemic. You could be in rural Idaho, which is actually the highest per capita usage of Khan Academy in the world is in Idaho. And it's for a reason, because you might not have someone who can teach you calculus within 20 miles of your home. And so it does open up ways to not be as bound by time or space or, you know, just the people that you have direct contact with. In 2019, $18 billion was invested in online learning platforms globally. It's not just because students in the pre-COVID world needed to take a calculus class that wasn't available. Sal says that self-paced online education is really useful for students who are behind in core subjects. And there will likely be more students

like that in the post-COVID world. 70% of all students who go to community college, so these are the kids who, for the most part, are trying to do the right things. They graduate from high school. They're trying to go to community college. 70% have to engage in some form of remediation. And so our whole argument pre-COVID was we need to create ways to reach these kids so that they can fill in their gaps, which does probably need for you to learn at your own time and pace to a certain degree. Without the use of online technology, you would have to have an army of tutors to do something like that. But now there are the tools. Policymakers like Emma Vedera also believe it's important to keep investing in public schools,

even if online learning makes other options more viable. That's because she thinks students will eventually go back to their public schools. I really do think the vast majority of families are going to come back to schools. First of all, the vast, vast majority are staying enrolled in their public schools, to be clear. And I think a lot of those who are leaving are going to come back.

I think the other thing I'd say is COVID is showing us just how unresilient our educational system really is, right? So nobody was prepared for this. All of our educational systems, even the most privileged, were not prepared, have been slow to transition. I think that in a lot of ways, this has drawn attention to just how much our schools do in our communities, right? They're not just teaching kids to read. They're also doing all the other things for kids and families. And so in some way, it's highlighted how critically we need them. Zoe Smithen is likely one of those students who will return to public school. Her parents say it's because she's excited to go to middle school next year.

But I want it to be actually in school. She misses lunch and recess with her friends the most. So we would sit around and everybody would talk and you do what you want. And then it would be so loud in the cafeteria, no one could hear you. But then sometimes you'd get in trouble. And it was just fun. I don't know why you got to switch food and stuff. It's like you can't do that anymore because there's no one to do that with.

And it's not going to be loud at the house. If you sit at the table, it's not a whole class of people. Zoe Smithen, she's 10, making homeschool cool before heading off to middle school. Halima Shah is a reporter and producer at Today Explained. Her story today was edited by Amy Drozdovska. The rest of the team includes Will Reed, Muj Zaydi, Amina Alsadi, and Noam Hassenfeld, who contributes music. The rest of it comes from Breakmaster Cylinder.

Extra help this week from Bird Pinkerton, Cecilia Lay, and Paul Mounsey. Afim Shapiro is the show's engineer. Golda Arthur is our supervising producer. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Today, Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm so sorry.