Pod used
to be a sci-fi term. Now it’s an organizational tool, and a societal goal: you
build pods among close friends, with other families, who all share
outside-the-home experiences.
You define procedures that create a safe unit
where you feel okay about things like taking one’s mask off. Think in terms
of dining outside around a table. Or who gets to come over to your house, as
well as whose houses you’ll venture to, or allow your kids to visit.
The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal recently published a piece by Lindsey Burke on
how to organize a pod. It speaks to a growing trend among some to hire teachers
outside of the education system to teach their kids more safely than what
they’re imagining schools to be once they reopen.
“As Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson of The Washington Post observe, pandemic pods are “a 2020
version of the one-room schoolhouse, privately funded,” Burke writes. “As one mother
named J Li wrote in a viral Facebook post last week, thousands of parents are scrambling’
to form pods through an explosion of Facebook groups, matchups and spreadsheets. Suddenly teachers, who are able to co-quarantine with a pod,
are in incredible demand.”.
Parents seeking teachers to direct pods
One pod tutor interview by Meckler and
Natanson, Christy Kian from Broward County, Florida, formerly a private-school
teacher, said she will earn more this year teaching two families (with four
total children) than she did in her prior teaching position. She said as soon
as she had set up the arrangement with those two families, she was immediately
contacted by five others.
The pods approach is analogous to micro-schooling,
which allow small groups of students to work together in flexible learning
environments alongside older and younger students, sharing resources and
teachers.
Unions will lose their clout because parents
need to find new directions
Burke
posits that, “While union policy demands
are leading many district schools to remain closed, podding is reinforcing the old
adage that the market finds a way. Understandably, equity and access concerns
have arisen as quickly as podding itself.”
She believes that states will
have to open up emergency education savings accounts for families, allowing them
to take a portion of their child’s public education funds for private tutoring
or online options of choice. Freeing up those dollars is the policy reform
needed to make access to pods, micro-schools, and cottage classes in reach for
all families.
“It’s time for policy to
catch up with families,” the article concludes.
Learn how pods are changing education
What are the unintended consequences of pods?
The discussion is not over, because faced with all this, parents
are panicking. And for parents in our community, home-schooling pods are
emerging as the attractive idea.
This world where some families hire their own teachers may seem
extreme, but is it that much more extreme than funding schools through property
taxes?
Developing pods is a new direction that is part of active
discussions on mom’s groups.
But as parents worry about their kids’ safety, there is another
consequence of this movement. The school-pods development may put educational
inequality in people’s faces in a way that is simply harder to ignore than it
might be otherwise.
The pods become active learning sources for those who can afford
it. Maybe best used by parents living closely within a community. But what
about those who cannot afford this alternative? Or for parents living in cities
who cannot commute to a pod group? This new direction creates inequity and
inequality. We, as a county, will lose many bright kids, who if nurtured, would
be an artist, an engineer, or the leader of our country.
What do we do with this anger we feel?
I know that many of us are angry at the virus and our government’s
inability to find a safe space for our kids. But author Emily Oster suggests
that we hold on to our anger and later see if we can use our frustrations to encourage
major reforms in learning.
Parents, who have had their kids home for at least three months, have
developed their own individual learning resources. Especially since our schools
were not prepared for this immediate shutdown. How can we use what we have
learned while being home to reform learning?
Also, parents should look at what schools are proposing for the
fall. Have schools used creative inspiration to offer unique directions for the
fall that we can use once this pandemic is over?