School from Home Work Hurts Children of Color
School children don’t care that the United States, and world, is in unprecedented times while their parents are yelling at their failed attempts to do long division. However, they do know that their parents aren’t qualified to teach them math.
Parents who were secretaries, servers, and dentists have recently been promoted to the job of home school teachers in wake of stay-at-home orders and school closures across the country. Schools have sent assignments home with students, given them online resources, and conduct “Zoom” classes, as well. However, they’ve neglected to give parents the skills needed to make their children’s learning experience enriching and the transition as seamless as possible.
Considering just how quickly everything went from “normal” to not, it’s important to keep in mind how hard schools and educators worked to facilitate the switch to online learning. But we must also keep in mind that students will be the ones who suffer if these plans are not properly executed.
While many parents were in positions to take over where teachers left off, many did not have that luxury. Parents who are essential workers, are living below the poverty line, or don’t have the resources to help their children with schoolwork have completely different realities from those in more comfortable situations.
Rasheerah Pringle is a single, low-income mother to first and eighth-grade students. Pringle has been grappling with the reality that her son can’t truly receive an education that’s equivalent to the one he was receiving prior to school closing.
“I don’t have the patience so that takes away from what I could be teaching him,” Pringle explains. While she does her best to teach her younger son and help the elder when he needs it, she isn’t the most qualified for the job. There are reasons some people go into education, and others don’t.
Although parents are now more responsible for their children’s education, the school and teachers still play a big role. According to Pringle, they should be doing more.
“They should’ve switched up the curriculum because they’re (the students) doing the exact things they were doing in school. This isn’t school, this is school at home.”
America’s culture of hard work and productivity was something that once seemed admirable, but the ongoing pandemic has exposed the cracks in our nation’s way of life. In an attempt to conduct business as usual and make things feel as normal as possible, marginalized people and children are hurt once again.
Although education varies from district to district, students attending the same school were able to get the same education regardless of their socioeconomic background or their parents’ access and education. The transition to homeschool didn’t account for the different lives students live.
Students from a single parent, essential worker household won’t receive the same education as students who have two parents who now work from home. These differences will not only be evident, but possibly detrimental, when in-person schooling commences.
It’s essential that schools account for the many different experiences that students had with learning from home when it becomes a thing of the past. If the “business as usual” mindset trickles into the foreseeable future, low-income and students of color in particular will fall behind their classmates and be victim to the negligence of their educators.
