Equity Issues As Pertaining to the Pandemic

1. White Flight and Opportunity Hoarding

Not everyone can afford truly private education, and these arrangements are raising concerns that this is just another way that the pandemic is exacerbating inequities that course through the educational system. Already, low-income children struggle for access to computers and WiFi service and face pressures at home that wealthy families do not. Now this.

These arrangements will allow children with affluent parents and connections to get ahead even as the system makes it harder for other children, said L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a sociology of education professor at New York University. He calls it a fresh example of “opportunity hoarding.”

For parents who can afford it, a solution for fall: Bring the teachers to them

pandemic pods / microschooling - basically private, paid teachers teaching a group of kids (usually self organized by parents who can afford to take their kids out of public school)
hard because you can't tell parents not to do what they consider the best for their own children

2. Undermining Public Schooling

public schools provide civic care = food, healthcare, safe spaces for children (whilst private schools often act solely as schools)

3. Persistent Inequality and Anti-Blackness in Schooling

this exists at multiple levels:
- US education policy
- teachers without CRT training
- in the classroom in general (being denied opportunities, wrongly disciplined, school-to-prison pipeline)
- district planning (including planning for pandemic planning)

4. The Disproportionate Stress and Work of Childcare

harder for working mothers
HARDEST for working class, low-income, and/or immigrant Black and Latinx families who disproportionately work in essential services
- have to rely on elders

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