Reinventing education by necessity: parents across the country scramble to form “learning pods”
If you are not a parent or in a moms group, you may not be aware that a historic thing is going on right now.
This week, there has been a tipping point in Bay Area families looking to form homeschooling pods. Or maybe ‘boiling point’ might be a better term.
Sounds niche? It’s actually insanely involved and completely transformational on a lot of levels.
Essentially, within the span of the last 48 hrs or so, thousands of parents are scrambling through an explosion of facebook groups, matchups, and spreadsheets to form homeschooling pods. I recently wrote a post about this on Facebook and in 2 days, it’s reached over 9K shares. After spending the last decade working in the innovation industry, there have only been a handful of times where I’ve seen movement exploding towards rapid change as quickly as I have here.
To give you some context, homeschooling pods are clusters of 3–6 families with similar aged and sometimes same-school children co-quarantined with each other, who hire one tutor for in-person support for their kids. Sometimes the tutor in question is full time and sometimes part time / outdoor classes, depending on the age of kids and individual circumstances.
This means a few things:
1) Suddenly teachers who are able to co-quarantine with a pod are in incredible demand.
This is maybe the fastest and most intense PURELY GRASSROOTS economic hard pivot I’ve seen, including the rise of the masking industry a few months ago. Startups have nothing compared to thousands of parents on Facebook trying to arrange for their kids’ education in a crisis with zero school district support.
I swear that in a decade they are going to study this because I have never seen an industry crop up and adapt so fast. Trends that would typically take months or years to form are developing on the literal scale of hours.
2) The race and class considerations are COMPLETELY BONKERS. In fact, yesterday everything was about people organizing groups and finding matches — today the social justice discussion is already tearing these groups apart.
For one thing, we’re looking at a breathtakingly fast acceleration toward a circumstance where educational access and stratification is many times more polarized even than it already is.
Distance learning is hell on all children — suddenly high income families are going to supplement it with quarantine pods and private tutoring, and low income families will be stuck with no assistance for 8 yos who are supposed to be on Zoom for 5 hrs a day. This is on top of already not having a way to work with children stuck at home, and being more exposed with “essential” jobs.
For another, the most obvious solution to this, ie individual family clusters scholarshipping disadvantaged kids into their pods, doesn’t even work at scale because there is a high correlation between kids who can’t afford tutors and kids in families where strict distancing rules just aren’t an option.
3) None of us have any idea where this is going to go. All possible actual solutions require government-level intervention beyond what school districts can do, and that’s clearly not going to happen. However, this is a great opportunity for freelance, trained educators and tutors to work collaboratively with parents to address the growing need for distance education in the face of the pandemic.
This is a unique grassroots upswelling where individual families are doing the innovation and industry shift work that governments and schools aren’t showing up for. It just goes to show that we must never underestimate the power of a community of parents creating a grassroots movement with the goal of protecting and caring for their kids in a time of crisis. Right now, parents are meeting needs in the field of education innovation like no one else is.
Whatever we create now has the potential to reshape education going forward, at least for the foreseeable future with COVID-19 in our midst.
