Rich people hiring tutors

There is so much about our world that is a retread of the Victorian era that it is causing me to ask a lot of questions about why the Victorians did what they did. I mean, how much of the Victorian era was quaranteams? The gender split (men go out, women stay home) was always a little mysterious and in conjunction with moving house at seasonal intervals, and occasionally going to an out of season location because Something Happened — well, it is starting to sound like a lot more of this was about avoiding disease than even I had realized. Turn of the century scare tactics around disease if you go out and about now suddenly seem less like, WTF, and more like tying into something that had been motivating people for decades.

Anyway.

Rich people hiring tutors. Earlier on, there were pods, and nanny shares. Now that the fall school reopening is going to be limited to nonexistent, a lot of families are not loving what was on offer in their district and instead signing up for K12 (the commodity version, which I have not personally used, but my sister used with my nieces, and it is fine) or hiring a tutor to teach the kids in their pod.

Obviously, I love this solution. I mean, I am not doing this, because my kids are fine with 100% remote, we have not been in a pod at all, and our collective social skills are not good enough to connect with a pod. Also, we do things that would get us rejected by pods (we got on planes in the middle of June. Come on!). But think about it! A whole bunch of people who would otherwise be trying to get the public school system to pay for stuff to make them feel better opted out and are voluntarily paying for it themselves, leaving more space in the school buildings for the people who actually need it. What is not to love!?! If you tried to tax people — the same amount — to set up pod tutor schools — they would never, ever agree to do it! And it would cost more, because this way, administration is totally volunteer work. If the district had to run it, it would cost even more in taxes. Plus, you do not have to pay any benefits to the administrators (the moms are doing this, so they can keep their jobs!),

There were people who were opposed to doing remote schooling _at all_ because of disproportionate impact (“equity reasons”). They are now attacking families for trying to ensure their kids continue to be educated, even tho it is at substantial expense to themselves. There isn’t obvious evidence the tutor crowd are as a group trying to get tax dollars to pay for this (directly or indirectly), which is distinctly unlike people who are accepting district solutions (which cost more than the Before Times) who are angling for a reduction in taxes because the quality is not the same.

And I will just point out again: this leaves all the in-school building space available for those who are not a part of this. Even if the school cannot get the headcount payment for the kids who are at home being tutored (who knows if they were already in private schools anyway), they _still get building space out of the deal_. And they no longer need to worry about whether they can allocate to marginalized kids preferentially. The privileged kids have removed themselves from the calculation without a fight.

Before you go attacking women trying to figure out a way to keep their jobs and have their kids educated, think long and hard about why you are doing this, and what alternatives you have in minds. Otherwise, you are just another self-righteous asshole saying we should stop educating all kids, because a few of them might not get as good an education. That is NOT what those families want you to do. They want you to help them get a good education. Do the work. Find the solution

And OMG if someone takes a huge chunk of the problem away from you and solves it on their own, let them! The United States is all about weird public-private hybrid solutions anyway. Tradition!

ETA:

STILL MORE YAMMERING!

Who is likely to take a tutoring job?

(1) Someone who is NOT credentialed to get a district job. If you are super pro union, you will not like this!

(2) Someone who cannot cope with computers, and thus cannot teach remotely. Maybe they have to have in person contact. Maybe they have a phobia of computers. Maybe they have some weird vision thing.

(3) Someone who is super terrified of being in a school around that many other people — maybe they are older, maybe they have underlying conditions, maybe they are just really rational.

(4) Someone who was going to retire soon anyway, and can stop teaching in their district job without any loss of retirement benefits.

(5) Someone who normally teaches specials or coaches or whatever and LOST their district job.

Because while we flounder around for some sort of solution, we should def prefer to make the parents do it (even if that parent / those parents have to work) vs. hiring the job out, and we would rather turn public school into a crazy dangerous and still zombie unappealing parody of its former self. And probably start fining people and putting them in jail if they refuse to send their kids to that shitshow.

If all the people who can supervise their kids during remote schooling and want to do that do that, and all the people who can pod up and hire a tutor and want to do that, do that, and we direct all the resources to making sure the remainder get a good education, I fail to see where the problem in any of this lies. Altho the _idea_ that podding up and hiring a tutor makes some people angry is def making me angry, apparently. Even tho I have zero interest in actually doing this myself. I suppose I should figure out why!

Mommy Wars Pandemic Edition

Once upon a time, a lot of media —books, TV, print articles, blogs — expended a lot of effort to slake what appeared to be an unreal demand for Mommy Wars coverage. Look, it was a horrible mistake. We were all hate-consuming it. Everyone said it needed to stop.

But look! It is back. The Pandemic Edition of the Mommy Wars is to find people who are stupid enough to go on record criticizing the choices other parents make to ensure their own children continue to at least survive and hopefully thrive in the middle of C19.

Since I generically disapprove of Mommy Wars, and because I am always trying to get better at putting the blame where it is due, here is the WaPo initial entry, bylined By Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson.

They have a very, very specific frame: privilege. The headline is, “For parents who can afford it”, and the setup is that “the trend is a stark sign of how the pandemic will continue to drive inequity in the nation’s education system”. Meckler and Natanson and whoever edited this hit piece do not suffer from nuance or subtlety. But wait, there’s more!!!

Family number one: pay extra, looking like $500/month. I look at $500 month and think of just how much I am paying per week for my niece and nephew to have child care so their mother can go to work. And that is entirely ignoring how much I am paying for the kid’s dad’s current environment. $500 a month sounds like on a par with costs for participating in a competitive sporting activity, and $500/month would not go anywhere near touching what it costs to fund an ice skating kid.

Family number two: four kids, hiring a person normally employed by a public school as a behavior specialist. THAT is not going to be cheap and indeed: $1300/kid/month for 40 hours a week. Depending on whether this is just for the 4 or if more kids will be involved, the specialist is still probably underpaid vs. her regular job.

The usual, but they do not have devices and wifi is deployed a this point in the article, along with having childcare responsibilities, etc. Life on the margin, milked for all it is worth to guilt people who can afford to make things sorta work for themselves. This is 2020’s version of, “You have to clear your plate. There are children starving in China!” Sure, back then anyway, kids were starving in China. Not clear how it relates to whether not the suburban USonian kid should be forced to eat peas they hate for that reason.

Moving on!

A BIPOC on the school board in the Bay Area learns about all this and feels fear. An Oakland parent fearlessly advocates for all parents to pressure their school board to Do Something About This. And now, drum roll please, for the bit that caused me to hate-blog this article (and probably more to come):

“In Portland, Ore., Laura Sutherland came upon a new Facebook group called “Portland Micro-Schools,” with nearly 1,000 members, and could not believe what she saw.
She thinks sending her 6-year-old daughter back to school would be unsafe, and she knows her daughter will need supervision while learning from home. But Sutherland said she would quit her job — and struggle financially — to help her daughter before she would hire someone from the outside.
“It just seems really privileged,” she said.”

YES BECAUSE BEING ABLE TO QUIT YOUR JOB AND ASSUME THAT YOU WOULD SOMEHOW STILL BE ABLE TO HELP YOUR DAUGHTER IS DEF NOT ANY FORM OF PRIVILEGE AT ALL.

*sigh*

Mommy Wars, Pandemic Edition

Look, can we just basically see other people adapting to the current chaotic reality and NOT criticize their choices?

Please?

Absent that, I am absolutely going to continue hate-blogging about people criticizing other people’s choices. And I will call it Balance.

The balance of the article tells you who you can hire at a slightly more affordable price point and how, and notes that some people were thinking about this until they realized it might jeopardize their sweet union gig with FCPS. Because, you know, when you write a celebrity bashing article, fundamentally it is because you care about celebrities. Wait. When you write a Mommy Wars article, fundamentally it is because you are knee deep in them yourself, you just feel kinda conflicted about it.

If you would like the substantially shorter actual article, here it is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/fall-remote-private-teacher-pods/2020/07/17/9956ff28-c77f-11ea-8ffe-372be8d82298_story.html

Also, while I am here, if pre-pandemic, you and your spouse commuted to Big Jobs, and had multiple nannies when the kids were young and paid for before and after kid care when the kids were older, and paid for piano lessons and gymnastics and swim lessons and Russian Math School or Kumon or whatever, and karate and and and. If you did all those things before, how does the cost of commutes + all that care and all those activities vs. hiring someone to be a tutor while your kids do the 100% remote option while you work from home? Like, still saving money? Because I am doing the math in my head and thinking, might still be saving money.

Not that I ever had that kind of life.

There are other articles. I _might_ come back and hate-blog them, too — the Marin one honestly did not strike me anywhere near as judgey as the WaPo one.

https://www.marinij.com/2020/07/18/marin-parents-seek-micro-pods-to-share-homeschool-distance-learning-duties/

But wow, look, here is another one!!

https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/the-learning-curve-the-dystopian-future-of-learning-pods/

Dystopia! In the headline!!!!!

It is not actually a Mommy Wars article, tho! It is sympathetic to the situation parents are in, and it falls back on blaming the schools and other leadership for failing to figure out something better.

It has a paragraph about how the schools call it “remote learning” or “distance learning” and the parents all call it homeschooling. After that, tho, things get odd. I mean, most homeschoolers pay for someone else’s curriculum and — these days — mostly that is online, with teachers. So, you know, under this definition, most “homeschooling” is actually “distance learning” or “remote learning” it is just that when you pay for K12 to do it for you, then K12 makes quite explicit the necessity of an adult being involved to handle the “classroom management” end of things. That is obviously necessary with younger children (safety! Duh. You cannot leave a 6 year old home alone with a computer. Altho I am sure someone does and I feel for everyone involved in that situation), but also true for older kids to deal with inevitable problems (does not necessarily have to be onsite in that case, but does need to be available for suitable definitions thereof).

ETA:

EducationWeek is tracking educator layoffs across the country:

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/07/14/thousands-of-teachers-laid-off-already-due.html

So, you know, there is a substantial pool of people who _do not have_ jobs at the schools they were working at until March. Which means they have all been background checked. It would seem to me that parents who hire from this group to run their pod tutoring arrangements would be doing us all a favor: helping educators bridge to the future, making sure children continue in their education safely and with credentialed professionals.