School is child care, except when it isn't
When Covid-19 first hit, teachers were praised to the skies, recalled Maria Salinas, who teaches fifth grade reading in Florida. “You know: ‘Hey, you guys are doing a good job. It’s so wonderful what you’re doing.’”
Now, she’s hearing the polar opposite: “Teachers are lazy. They don’t want to work.”
Also a mother of four, Salinas finds herself at the center of an ongoing conflict among parents, lawmakers, and educators in which no one is satisfied and everyone is mad. Parents blame teachers for keeping schools closed. Teachers counter that the blame is misplaced — after all, it’s hardly their fault if a school has to shut down because so many staff are sick. At the same time, teachers have concerns about keeping their own families safe amid an ongoing pandemic, and about the burden society seems to be placing on their shoulders.
At the core of the conflict is the fact that parents don’t just need school to educate their kids — something that can, in many cases, be accomplished virtually (though some studies suggest that remote learning is less effective than in-person class time). They also need school, controversial though this may be, as a source of child care — it’s a supervised place kids can go while parents work, and at least in the case of public school, it’s free. This is the function that has truly broken down in the pandemic, with hard lockdowns giving way to rolling quarantines and intractable staff shortages that have left working parents constantly on edge, wondering when the next closure notice will send them scrambling for a backup plan.
The conflict between teachers and parents, however, obscures the crucial fact that school was failing as a source of child care long before the pandemic. The average school day ends before 3 pm, in a country where many parents are working until 6 or later. Kids are out of school for months in the summer, weeks in the winter, and many, many days in between. The result is stress for parents, expenses many families can ill afford, and in some cases, kids going unsupervised when they are too young to safely be alone. “We all act as though child care no longer becomes all that critical once kids enter kindergarten,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University who studies the economics of child care. “That’s not right.”
Like many problems exposed by the pandemic, this one is fixable. The solution is pretty simple: lengthen school, shorten work, or both. Doing that, however, will require a level of political will that hasn’t always been in evidence where families and care are concerned, even when the upheaval around the virus shows how necessary it is.
https://www.vox.com/22914503/school-closings-covid-closures-pandemic-child-care
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