This September I attended a parent teacher conference for my child before school started. I knew what we needed to talk about before it began. “What do you plan to do to help my child stay on task?” I dove right in knowing our time was short. “This will be a lot of time in online classes with full access to whatever other internet tabs they want to open. This child’s IEP is for ADHD. How will you help them stay focused?” I was more than a little desperate for some reassurance. Both the homeroom and special education teachers blinked at me over the Google Meet window. One of them bumbled through a statement about how we’ll work together as a team, and the other told me she’d email me after class if my student wasn’t paying attention. I kept pushing. “I can’t sit and monitor the Chromebook for six hours a day, and this child doesn’t have the impulse control to keep themself from switching to other tabs or watching YouTube during instruction.” The teachers deflected with talk of the specially designed instruction that would also be delivered online. The real answer was they had no plan, no idea what they would do to help.
This is one of many meetings I’ve sat in for my child, pleading with the professionals at school to give them the support they so desperately need. This child is capable of doing grade-level work, but only in an environment with minimal distraction. They’re capable of writing creative stories, of rapid fire telling a completely improvised tale orally to whoever will listen, complete with plot and character arcs. When the child was in the first grade they created a toy that imitated the sound of a phone ringing using found objects in the house. It was so convincing that I looked all over for the phone or device that was ringing until they produced their invention. This is a child who, from age four onward, named and befriended the flies they found in the house or car, somehow getting the fly to land on their finger or wrist, and passing it from hand to hand as they held a two way conversation I only got to hear half of. This is a creative, inquisitive human being, but they don’t sit still in a chair at school. They get distracted when the teacher is talking and have no idea what to do with the paper in front of them when it’s time to start work; their head is overflowing with other ideas, which they are unable to prioritize as they flit from one thing to the next, never landing on the assignment they’ve been tasked with.
The intensity of this child’s curiosity has nearly knocked me over at times. In the spring during the early part of the lock down, we ditched our school and work tasks one Friday and went to the beach where we found a low spring tide. They found a baby California halibut and held it in their hand. They watched the crabs scuttle among the smoothed stones of a tide pool. They spent hours focused on observing the world, and in the car on the way home we speculated about the names of all the creatures we’d seen and how they eat, survive, reproduce. They spent the entire afternoon poring over every single fish in a book they had on their book shelf. It was a better day of education than I think they’ve ever had in school.
Yet when it comes to school, where the “real learning” is supposed to occur, I have to beg and plead with people to see this child’s need and their strengths, to find a way to engage them in learning.
I am met with blank stares and bureaucratic excuses. I am met with talk of tight budgets and student enrollment numbers. It is a familiar gridlock that transcends the specific teachers, administrators, and specialists. How do we fit this round peg into the square education hole?
Yes, the pandemic has thrown everyone off and created new obstacles for teachers, students and parents. But it is also highlighting problems that existed already. It is showing in the glaring light of day the disparity between the way “normal” students are treated and the way “others” are treated. Never has it been more evident that we are dealing in a system and a paradigm in which the closer you are to being the “right” kind of person, the higher you will rise. What makes you the “right” kind of person is, of course, related to your proximity to white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle/upper-class abled maleness.
And this is education! Of all the the systems in this country that are rooted in hierarchy and stratification, education might be the one that has more experts pushing for equitable outcomes than any other, and here we are: In the middle of a pandemic, where a disproportionate number of Black, Indigenous and POC, disabled, and poor students are left sitting in front of a laptop on their living room floor, being lectured about responsibility in a google meet all while carrying out responsibilities these teachers probably never dreamed of when they were in school. Some students at my child’s school are supervising their younger siblings at the same time they are attending school so their parents can work, either at home or away. Some of them are dealing with disabilities in environments where they are wholly unsupported. Some of them are rationing their free school lunches and sharing their portions with parents and siblings.
The pandemic isn’t doing anyone any favors, but it’s not the sole reason so many kids’ educations seem to be stalling out. The pandemic is only the flashlight that shows us the disparities this system was built to uphold in the first place. Many attempts at achieving equity, like adding free breakfast and lunch, transportation, and other accommodations for community members in need are truly helpful. Special education services can be genuinely life changing for some kids. The folks who secured these services for our kids and those who provide them are important players as we strive for true equity. I know teachers and schools who work with kids to make sure they have clean clothes to wear, food to take home on the weekends, school supplies, haircuts, and even tennis shoes. Some years my child has had teachers whose dedication and expertise ensured every student felt included and had their needs met. But when we are in online school, we can see that all of these are bandaids that rely almost entirely on (and in exploitation of) the good nature of teachers and the unpaid or underpaid caretaking of mostly women. We can see that while they have helped bolster our education system and make it more equitable than it could have been, they cannot fix a system that is doing what it was designed to do. There is no amount of duct tape that turns an ice pick into a jackhammer. In so many ways we are asking our schools to do the work of caring for our communities because we are unwilling to do it in other ways.
My child is fortunate to be able to lean on some of my privilege, including white, abled, socioeconomic, and other forms of privilege they might not have possessed had their chips fallen a little differently. They’re fortunate to have a parent at home full time who can help with school work where needed. They have a full belly and their own bed to sleep in, toys to play with, and numerous opportunities for exploration. They have the freedom of knowing that the other kids in the household are taken care of by the adults, and the knowledge that their laundry will be done on a regular basis, their messes cleaned up. They have two proactive parents who know the education system and advocate on their behalf to get the schools to make sure their special circumstances are accommodated.
What about the students who don’t have all of those advantages? Here’s my child with all of this privilege, with all of this support at home, and still they are failing classes. Still they are accomplishing little during the school day with essentially no support from the folks whose federal funding mandates they offer support. Still their needs at school go unmet, sometimes with little regard from their teachers. I’ve often sat in parent-teacher meetings and wondered about the students whose parents can’t or won’t be there. Who is advocating for them? Of course, you and I both know the answer to that question is, for the most part, nobody.
I understand the conundrum most educators find themselves in — I’ve been there myself, and I nearly drowned in the sea of criticism, in the expectation that I be everything to everyone all the time. I’ve experienced the exhaustion of trying to create equity in a system that was not built to support equity, that was created to exploit me and my precious labor. I have donated many hours of my life to meet the needs of students and families while my own child was cared for by somebody else, and I assure you that I have, out of ignorance, overwhelm, or lack of understanding, underserved students who had needs outside what our government has deemed “the norm.” We all have. If you’re a teacher and you think you’ve served every student’s needs perfectly, you’re lying to yourself. This system was built on our backs. It was built on free/cheap labor and the implicit caretaking assigned to women and other folks who may feel pulled to do whatever they can to help kids. In our own way, by participating, we uphold the very systems that exploit us. The exploited are too busy keeping their heads above water to have the energy to fight for something better. We have classrooms and school offices full of brilliantly creative people who are too burned out from their pressure cooker jobs to fight for their rights as employees, for their students’ rights as students, and for the rights of their student’s families to survive and thrive.
Maybe our system will never change. Maybe we’ll just keep moving in the same direction, but I’m writing this because I don’t believe that they always have to. I believe it’s possible to create spaces in our world and in education that presume a wide range of differences among students, that treat learning as a series of experiences with innumerable outcomes rather than a conveyor belt that produces identical outcomes for everyone. Maybe things won’t change, but I believe too ardently in the creative tenacity of educators and parents to stop pushing for something better.
