Am I a COVID “Superdodger”? Novid for me.

Time and again I am reminded that either the media class is abnormal or I am. No, don’t enlighten me.

Apparently the media left all decided simultaneously to wonder why some people haven’t gotten covid. The Washington Post wants us to meet the covid super-dodgers which must have been the impetus for this Josh Marshall tweet, asking people who haven’t gotten covid19 to speculate as to why. Or maybe it was this insane nuttiness by an Atlantic writer trying to make sure her fiance doesn’t get covid. Slate asked every Novid they knew to explain why, and the answer was they gave up life as we know it.

I haven’t gotten covid19. Vaxxed, not boosted. I didn’t really want to get vaxxed, but I’m a teacher and I was certain it would become a thing, a moral demand to get vaxxed, and once that happened I’m so stubborn I’d be like oh, fuck you people and never get vaxxed and either be not allowed to teach or go through testing every week. Ick. So I got vaxxed in March 2021 caring not one bit and mildly irritated at myself for giving in. But my reasoning was sound. By summer, I would have been like oh fuck you people and then I would have been forced into covid tests every week.

I travelled everywhere. Took my dad on a fishing trip. Visited my sister several times. Road and air. The only good thing about the 20 months spent teaching remote was that I could do it from anywhere, and I did. While restaurants were legally take-out only, my sushi bar let regulars eat in and I did so weekly, all through the shutdown.

I wore masks when required and at no other time. Cloth only. My school made the KN95 masks available free, handing them out several times. They sat unused on my desk. “Why don’t you use them? They’re better than cloth,” my students would ask.

“Yeah, I don’t want to wear a mask at all and if I understand the experts wearing cloth is the next best thing.”

The first day my district ended the mask mandate, I was afraid I read the calendar wrong. Everyone was still masked. Maybe four teachers and 20 kids weren’t. Some teachers took a vote in their class to determine whether to require masks in their classroom and I nearly lost my shit upon hearing that from my class. At the sight of my fury, two different students took off their masks.

“Oh, don’t do that! I hate masks. You don’t have to! That’s my point. I don’t want people forced to wear masks but forcing you not to is just as wrong.”

“Naw,” said Jacob. “I was just doing it because everyone else did.”

“Me, too!” said Alison, “I hate masks.”

“Ah. OK. So let me be clear. I’m fine with anyone wearing masks, but if you are wearing masks because you’re afraid people will judge you, then man up, puppies.”

Last day of school, a majority of students were still masking, but increasingly kids took their masks off around me. Not sure what that means.

I have never taken a covid19 test. I have allergy attacks that are bad enough I may as well be sick, but I now take allergy meds most of the year to stop outbreaks and so the bronchial disasters are infrequent. While covid doesn’t worry me, I get sore throats so bad that strep is a possibility and that does concern me.  An allergy breakthrough last December gave me a sore throat bad enough to warrant a trip to urgent care for a strep test. They made me sit outside and wait an hour for a covid test before seeing a doctor. Fuck it, I’ll risk strep. It wasn’t strep. It wasn’t covid, either. I just needed to go back on Mucinex.

At school, we get these automated emails warning us if a kid in the school or the class had covid19. The first was just a notification. The second sent out a list of actions we needed to take if we weren’t boosted. I ignored those emails, as did almost every other teacher I talked to. Students stopped calling in sick with a sore throat or sniffles; parents didn’t want to activate the protocols. Girls had cramps, boys had sprained ankles.

I have several classes of 35 kids and they sit in groups. At no point did covid sweep through my classroom, although many cases occurred randomly. Elmore and Leonid were brothers who sat next to each other and lived together. Elmore got covid, Leonid didn’t–not then and, last I checked he, like me, hasn’t had it.

I am not boosted. I will not get boosted for the same reason I don’t get flu shots. Maybe when I’m older and worried about lung function–at some point, with my bronchial history, it might be a good idea.

The official definition of close contact exposure is six feet for 15 minutes. My friend Bart, who left teaching last year, came back for the graduation and slept on my couch. We ate at the sushi bar, had dinner at my house, talked as I cleaned up my classroom, and traveled in the same car during the 36 hours between his arrival and his taking me to the airport for my flight to Florida.

Four hours later, Bart texted me frantically. He’d felt tired and had a sore throat and took a covid19 test which came back positive. He was so sorry!

Who does that? Who feels mildly sick and says oh, take a covid test! Well, Bart does, obviously. He was pretty obsessive about covid throughout, staying housebound for months. Vaxxed and boosted. Still got covid.

Anyway, I was definitely exposed to covid19. Ate at restaurants, went to the beach, went to a movie. Had a great time. No covid.

I never thought my covid virginity was unusual. My brother, who manages an elite grocery store, also hasn’t gotten it–vaxxed, not boosted. His son and daughter who live with us haven’t gotten it. My sister did get a fairly mild case in January–never vaxxed. Her daughter, a nurse, utterly and wholly obsessed about covid prevention, required every attendee at her baby shower to be vaxxed, boosted, and show a negative PCR test.  She’s had it twice. My mom and her husband never had it. Most of the teachers at school never had it–some obsessive protectors, some more like me.

My explanation is my immune system.. Thank my mutt ancestry. Viruses don’t have much hold on me.  Not colds, not flus, not covid. I personally attribute it to the hyperimmune response of allergies, but my brother and sister have much milder allergies and similar health. It’s certainly not my behavior. From February 2020 on I have openly mocked the cautious. It gets you or it doesn’t. I’m okay if it does. But it hasn’t.

Besides, the article already observed that only 60% of the population has gotten covid. 40% doesn’t seem like it’s worthy of superdodger status. Let me know when I’m one of the 1%.

Baraki, Caldeira, and Foolish Hysteria

(hey,kinda rhymes)

Back in November, Abigail Shrier, a journalist who achieved notoriety by pointing how much of the trans movement involves girls in their early teens,  revealed, with much fanfare, How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids: (Yes. A while back. I’ll explain the delay.)

Two California middle school teachers, Kelly Baraki and Lori Caldeira, of Spreckels Union School District, gave a presentation at an October union conference about their struggles and triumphs running a gay-straight alliance club. Based on the recordings, though, their primary focus appeared to be helping “trans” kids find themselves. Highlights of their claims:

• They advised finding alternate club names (UBU instead of GSA) that didn’t alert parents to the club’s purpose.
• They didn’t keep club meeting rosters to keep parents unaware of their child’s participation.
• They were concerned about club attrition and their efforts to keep the kids motivated and attending the gender awareness clubs.
• They described “stalking” kids’ online activity during the pandemic to identify students who expressed interest in exploring sexuality.
• They discussed the best ways to “integrate” their gender preference instruction into their anti-bullying presentations so the students are less likely to mention it to their parents.
• They mocked parents who complained about their kids being exposed to sex-ed. They crowed that with tenure,  the principal might “flinch” but couldn’t respond to parents’ concerns.
• In every way they presented their club as a recruitment project, in which parents were to be ignored and subverted whenever possible.

Shrier, as is evidenced by the title of her piece, characterized their presentation as “insight…into the mindset and tactics of activist teachers themselves.”  She saw this presentation as education and instruction.

I read about this at the time and several things immediately seemed obvious, pointing to a real failure on Shrier’s part to do any reporting or analysis.

First, and this is fairly minor but it speaks to the hysteria: Shrier was reading way too much into “union conference”. She clearly sees it as indoctrination. It’s not. Most teachers are required to document seat time for recertification; all of them have to come up with educational credits to move along the pay scale. These union conferences serve as seat time for recertification and, for extra money, can be converted into credits. Plus, Palm Springs! Take the kids, sit by a pool. Nobody–but nobody–sitting in that conference was being educated, advised, or instructed.

Clearly, Shrier didn’t know enough to ask the right questions. Namely, who was paying? Were teachers listening to this swill on district time? Were Caldeira and Baraki getting paid by the district to present? I did some research on union conferences, and am reasonable satisfied that districts don’t pay for teachers to attend. Someone ought to make sure, though.

Regarding the content of the presentation, I was stunned. Tracking kids’ internet activity? Total control over morning announcements? Not keeping attendance at club meetings? Mocking angry parents and gloating that tenure protects them? Smugly talking about the principal “flinching” but being forced to back them?

Why would anyone believe all this?

Teachers can’t hold club meetings and keep them secret. Morning announcements aren’t the personal domain of a teacher. No teacher is stupid enough to think pissed off parents can’t change her existence, especially with a principal who is privately flinching at her behavior but feels forced to comply. Tracking a student’s internet activity…that was so weird I googled and found out about GoGuardian, which freaked me right out, as I teach for one of the 90% of schools who don’t use it. I think it’s only for Chromebooks? And in the classroom I could see it being useful. But either way, I don’t believe any teacher, even one with the worst intentions in the world, could “stalk” kids internet use without singling them out ahead of time or running reports after the fact. No teacher would brag about the first, and there had to be controls on the second, which meant they were lying.

So most of what Caldeira and Baraki were recorded as saying was utter bullshit and obviously, once the tapes came out, these two tearchers were toast. If their presentation was accurate, they’d be fired now that it was public. If they were lying, as seemed likely, they were going to be fired for embarrassing the district.

I commented to this effect on Shrier’s blog. And I was right.

The district, upon learning from Shrier about the recordings, instantly sent out a response, suspending the club, requiring principals to sign off on announcements, and denying some of the claims the teachers made. As I expected, the district emphasized that Baraka and Caldeira were using personal days and not speaking as school representatives. The two teachers were placed on administrative leave while a formal investigation (done by a lawfirm, not the district) took place.

In early July, the lawfirm released the results of a thorough investigation: 1600 documents reviewed, 21 witnesses. The text of the report is very specific on a key point: Baraki and Caldeira made “harmful and disruptive comments” during the presentation that “were not reliable evidence of their actual conduct.”

That is, they lied.

Baraki and Caldeira never put any gender-related comments in the announcements. They didn’t mislead kids during their lessons. While they generated 30 reports of student activity between 2015 and 2019 (which doesn’t strike me as a lot, but I can’t be sure), but all of them had some other purpose. They did notice a student clicking on a link, but never followed up with that student. The only two kids they invited to the club meetings had first approached their teachers about joining.

Baraki and Caldeira resigned and were not fired. They almost certainly would have been, although it might have taken a couple years. But no administrator or district official would forget the shit those two caused by, let’s not forget, lying.

The details were reported sympathetically by the SF Chronicle which talks of the teachers being cleared but glossing over the fact that they lied. Oddly–or maybe not so oddly–Shrier wrote five stories on this in six weeks last winter but hasn’t mentioned this update in three weeks.

Brief aside: this has to be bad news for Jessica Konnen, mother of a former Caldeira student who went through a phase of believing herself transgender while attending the middle school. Konnen was notified by Caldeira and the principal, where the two made it clear that they’d known about this for a long time. After hearing the tapes, she was convinced that Caldeira had unduly influenced her daughter and got lawyer Harmeet Dhillon taking her case against Caldeira and the district, which was filed in June. The recordings were a key part of the evidence and now a law firm investigation has shown the teachers were lying.

What Shrier et al. see as an appalling example of business as usual in our public schools is, in fact, exaggerated or rule-breaking behavior the teachers are bragging about in order to impress their audience.

Of course, that’s still bad.  Baraki and Caldeira are bragging to make themselves look good The dreary reality, in their minds,  is that school procedures prevent them from finding all the potentially confused kids to straighten out. They don’t have the control they claim to have over morning announcements, student clubs. But they want to project a voice of authority to impress their audience–an audience, they presume, who is excited as they are at finding transgender kids who need their help. You want evidence of a polarized country? There you go. Many people support helping kids find their identities, as they think of it. 

But they aren’t the cause! Yes, Baraki and Caldeira want to “find” (convert, to Shrier et al) more transgender students. Yes, they want to run over the rights of concerned parents. Yes, they want to “educate” (indoctrinate) kids by making their club seem exciting, by normalizing gender issues in school, by growing their club. And yes, the union staff setting up the conference see those goals as admirable. All of these are, in my view, horrible objectives and reflect a terrifying mindset.

Except they can’t achieve their goals. School and district policies prevented it. Parents were leery and districts heeded parents. In fact, when the district learned that Baraki bragged about controlling announcements and not keeping a roster, it instantly created policies forbidding that control–policies that normally wouldn’t be needed, because if Baraki had indeed been sliding in propaganda, someone would have noticed. Doesn’t matter. Avoid the risk, mandate signoff. Mandate attendance lists (something common in high school, anyway).

So if the teachers like Baraki and Caldeira have to lie to pretend to have any power, they certainly aren’t the ones preventing parents from being told their kid is transgender. Who’s doing that? 

State and federal governments, that’s who.

I’m in this weird situation where I get reviled by progressives for being a hateful anti-trans bigot and yelled at by conservatives for being a pedophile groomer. I think  “gender dysphoria” is at best a phase and at worst a mental illness.  I am comfortable with finding adults finding whatever gender solution works for them. I am against younger kids taking medical steps. Use of proper pronouns is polite, but should not be required or forced at risk of social and economic obliteration. Any discussion of gender with young kids is wildly inappropriate, whether it’s a doctor, teacher, librarian, or drag queen raising the subject.  Kids should not be actively taught about sexuality….ever, as far as I’m concerned. Let them figure it out for themselves. All of this is enough to get me reviled by progressives.

But the people, whatever their ideology, who are appalled by this radical ideology and the insistence on demands and requirements that seem to violate the laws of reality seem to have no idea of what’s causing it and the wrong idea on who to blame. Once again they focus on unions, teachers, ed schools. 

Smug parents bragging that they homeschool are fooling themselves. Pediatricians think screening kids for gender is a great idea. If it’s not already a state requirement, just wait. Their churches probably won’t comply but why are so many corporations are coming up with DEI initiatives? 

The institutional capture people need to worry about is not teachers and ed schools but state policy makers and legal overreach. If you want to know why schools take a particular action, don’t look to unions but policy, laws, and accreditation–not just of K-12 schools but also colleges, universities, and every organization you can think of.  If states don’t play along, the feds can just devise some sort of mandate to qualify for funds.

This article is too long already, but in researching this story, I found a very troubling expansion that may illustrate the real perpetrator. From the most recent Chronicle article on Baraki and Caldeira:

The California Department of Education says that school staff should not disclose information about students’ gender identity without student permission under AB1266, which protects transgender students’ rights and went into law in 2014.

The first link goes to the CDoE policy which is a full page of things California schools must do to support transgender students because of AB1266–including restrictions against telling parents. The second is a link to AB1266 which says that California Education Code 221.5 shall be modified. It’s not specific about the modifications, which necessitates a look back to 221.5 as it existed in 2010 to learn that 221.5 had five clauses, a-e, and AB1266 added one more:

(f) A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.

That’s it. 

Well. That’s enough. That’s the wording, undoubtedly enacted in many states, enabling males to compete as females and the bathroom confusion. But there’s no mention of parents. 

So the CDoE is attributing a near total mandate forbidding schools from notifying parents (with a few weasel words for cover) and using as its rationale legislation changes that don’t mention parents at all. 

Now, go back to the CADoE FAQ and it’s clear that all the legal text added in that section is rationale. Someone took this opportunity to interpret privacy laws and create a whole slew of school mandates that were not in the original legislation. You have to wonder if that’s what Tom Ammiano, the legislative sponsor, had in mind. An attempt to recall the legislation failed. 

By the way, this change to California law happened back in 2014. Long before anyone was paying attention. 

Think it’s only California and those wacky progressives? Trump SecEd Betsy DeVos resisted his order to change policy on transgender students and bathrooms. GOP bastion South Dakota legislators passed a law to force transgender students to use the bathroom matching their biology in 2016, but the governor, a Republican, vetoed it. Even today, Governor Noem was willing to kiss any shot at the presidency goodbye by vetoing a ban on transgender athletes.  I see plenty of GOP opinion folks mocking Rachel Levine; far fewer mocking Dierdre McCloskey.

Understand what forces compelled Noem to veto that law despite the overwhelming support in her state and why DeVos resisted ending transgender access to bathrooms. Accept that people who pushed this started things in motion long before most people were paying attention. Remember  that schools, the institutions most subjected to these pressures, still care about parents and political pressure. Push them hard and they’ll close gaps. Ensure minimum compliance with laws and don’t allow overreach.

Untangling this craziness while still allowing self-determination will be a long process and the other side on this has a head start. But there’s an obvious state law that should be made immediately, one that reporters making their bones on transgender outrage should immediately support:

Mandate  schools to immediately notify parents should their child express a gender identity different from his or her biological one. Specifically: student confides as transgender to school employee, school employee notifies administrator, form letter goes out to parent. If the school’s opinion is the child would be endangered by parental notification, school notifies child protective services who takes it from there. Schools are not allowed to keep this information from parents.

This is a no-brainer. And quite apart from the logical reasons to support this change, there’s one additional positive side effect:  ending or at least wildly curtailing the clubs and activities that seem to encourage student gender confusion. It is perversely easier to force teachers to hide secrets from parents than it is dealing with really pissed off parents blaming the school’s UBU club for their suddenly transgender kid. 

 

 

Continuing Teacher Education

I’ve had some thoughts about the Baraki/Caldeira hooha first reported by Abigail Shrier (it will come as little surprise that I am disgusted by the teachers and rolling my eyes hard at Shrier), but one detail of the story caught my attention and it struck me as an interesting topic to discuss. I do plan on eventually responding to the overall story, but for the impatient you can infer a great deal from this article.

The detail in question: Baraki and Caldeira were presenting at a union conference and I’m like what the hell is a union conference? They have the political shindigs every year but this is clearly something different.  So I dug into union conferences to see where they fit into the teacher education universe.

Despite having chosen a career developing human capital, teachers have much the same attitude towards additional education that layfolk have in their own careers–that is, they don’t think much of it. Doctors and lawyers also have recertification requirements. I suspect doctors really feel they need to be updated on current technology, while lawyers probably view it much the same way as teachers do–an annoyance. But that’s just a guess.

Not all states require recertification education, and some districts ensure that sufficient PD is built into the year so the teachers don’t have to do any extra. But in most states, as the excellent Stephen Sawchuk explains, teachers have to drum up a bunch of hours to prove they’ve done some work, er, professionally developing.

Then there’s the practice of paying teachers for education, which began when unified districts wanted a way to pay high school teachers more than elementary school teachers but has morphed into a pay for play practice. Do not imagine, readers, that teachers fondly look for intellectually exciting courses to build their own human capital. Some teachers want to become principals and so paying for an admin degree is worth it. Others just find the cheapest way to get an MEd. Some–a very small number–want a Master’s degree in their topic–sometimes an intellectual challenge, other times to have access to additional teaching opportunities.  But I’m always amused when some education critic says portentously, “There’s no proof that a master’s degree improves educational outcomes.” Did someone get paid to research that?

Anyway. As you can see, there are two large categories of teacher education that they generally have to fund themselves to keep their job and get more money.  It is in this universe that union conferences exist.  The takeaway for the Baraka/Caldeira story: union conferences are cheap–at least for the teacher. They’re probably in fun locations so that teachers can at least hang out by the pool or take the family for a weekend. They are also attractive to progressive teachers who want to brag about the equity self-improvement they are undertaking. TThey are cheap–unions often give grants to attend them and help fund the CEUs. I have to believe the unions are making bank on it somewhere, although I’m uninterested in the details.

But they aren’t well-regarded.  They are unlikely to be funded by tax dollars in any way (and if Shrier were interested in really making a difference instead of getting credulous parents to hyperventilate, that’s what she’d ask about.) Union conferences are in no way evidence that these organizations are “instructing” and “advising” and “educating” teachers in any serious way, as Shrier charges. They are merely are offering seat time for teachers who need something cheap and easy, and are usually taught by other teachers looking for resume fodder (presented at LBTQwhatever Conference on Engaging Gender Clubs). More on that in my next article.

Take away the pesky policy requirements that union conferences exist to fill and it’s pretty tough to get teachers in the classroom. The two other broad categories are conferences for some sort of district or school mandates, which will in almost every case be offered by consultants–remember, folks, Jo Boaler bills. These will not be union conferences. They’ll be some sort of big picture approach. They will always be the new new thing. Teachers are not paid for attending, but they’ll get a few days off, food money, and people to party with if it’s 50 miles away. The conferences themselves will be very expensive.

The last category of teacher education is the summer fellowship, usually offered by research universities or large companies, often funded by NSF or other government grants. These fellowships do what the professional education requirements are supposed to do–keep teachers aware of modern developments in their field and pay them to engage in research, practice, employment…whatever delivery mechanism they think will work. The pay is usually excellent and teachers are often given money for instruction materials. The teacher deliverables apart from hours worked is almost always curriculum, along with presentations to potential donors to show how successful the program is. Examples: Ignited, RET (Research Experiences for Teachers), various Fulbright Grants, and many others. Also, career-technical teachers usually have to take courses to qualify to teach a given curriculum and if they work for a district they’ll be reimbursed a lot for their time (a few thousand dollars, usually).

So at a high level, teacher education looks something like this:

Description	Choice	Paid to	Paid by	How much?
Certification courses (required)	Required in many states	Varies	Teacher or districts	Not much
Education for pay increase	Required	Higher institutions	Teacher, usually	College tuition rates
District Mandates (optional)	Usually optional	Consultants	District always	A Lot ($3500-5000 per person in fees, plus stipend or sub for teacher)
Funded research or initiative	Optional	Teachers	Gov’t Grants, Donors	A Lot ($7-9K per summer)
CTE training	Optional	Teachers	District	A Lot ($1-2K per course)

So I’m hoping this table reveals something important: first, teachers don’t really want to spend time in education, particularly not education they pay for. The price tag for convincing teachers to give up their summers for education and opportunities that far exceed the crap they pay for is pretty significant. 7-9K is far more than summer school pays.

However, there are well-funded programs eager to reach interested teachers, and it’s clear enticing teachers to sign up for genuine intellectual engagement takes a serious chunk of money for relatively few teachers.  Moreover, these opportunities have a hierarchy, with STEM teachers at the top, other high school academic teachers far below, and all other teachers down at the base with limited options.

In a more properly ordered world, we’d can all the required make-work education and create fellowships or research internships that are available to all teachers, not just those in subjects that feds and donors care about. Pay teachers a good chunk of money for….well, what would probably be the equivalent of good ed school seminars. Let participants talk about teaching, listen to lectures about topics in their field, create curriculum and present it, practice delivery, get feedback. Might be fun.  It might even prevent millions of dollars from going to grifters or ideologues for little more than allowing bored teachers to check off a few hours.

Another suggestion I’ve made before is to offer significant recompense for additional credentials, particularly math, science, and career technical. Give teachers coursework or professional experience to build towards hard to find expertise that won’t only increase them along the pay scale but also work towards a second credential that will increase their pay. Make real education worth achieving for significant pay increases, not a few thousand dollars once they reach 25 units.

(The reason teachers aren’t given incentives to get additional credentials:  the pretense that teachers should be subject matter experts . Can’t have an English teacher doing the coursework to teach algebra if needed because algebra teachers should be real mathematicians! Except you don’t find any, and instead it’s a sub with no teaching experience and in that world an English teacher with some algebra knowledge is a huge step up.)

On the other hand, if that option was made too attractive, who’d be left to teach summer school?

The Pandemic School Policy Power Differential

I recently realized that the delineation between remote, in-person, and hybrid instruction doesn’t always mean the same thing to parents, teachers, media, and the general public. I don’t know if that’s why a significant power imbalance never got much notice–well. Not notice as such. It got a lot of notice.

Take a look at this table of different instruction models by Edweek, from a November 2020 survey:

This is a survey of school districts, and if you add up similar models, 49% offer full-time instruction, 29% offer part-time in=person, and 17% offer remote only.

Notice I say “part-time in-person” when most would simply say “hybrid”. I used to as well–but the “hybrid” definition varies based on whether the focus is on parents or teachers.

Parents define school model based on where their kids are during class-time. Teachers define school model based on where all kids are during class-time.

So using the above table, parents who opted for full-time remote instruction would experience all except the third as full-time remote instruction. Parents who were offered the choice of in-person instruction and accepted it would describe the first and third as full-time, the second and fifth as “hybrid” because their kids were at home some days, at school others.

For a teacher, “hybrid” means they are teaching online and in-person simultaneously: “Roomies” and “Zoomies”. Teachers working in the first, second, and fifth structures would say they were teaching in “hybrid”, even though all the parents in those situations would describe the education as full-time (either remote or in-person).

This could explain why Martin West et al did a survey at roughly the same time and found very different numbers–or seemed to:

Our data reveal that more than half of U.S. students are receiving instruction entirely remotely this school year, while 28% of students receive instruction that is fully in person. Of the 19% of students in hybrid models, in-person instruction varies from one to five days a week.

Was one survey just wrong? Unlikely. Edweek’s  surveys are generally reliable. Martin West’s team surveys are the gold standard, as far as I’m concerned.

I think they’re both correct, but tracking different issues. Edweek is looking at what schools offer. West is looking at what parents accept. The West researchers make this clear later in the article:

As for the range of available choices, the parents of only 41% of students report that their child’s school offers a fully in-person option, suggesting that more than two-thirds of students who were presented that option took it. The parents of 48% of students say that their child has a hybrid option, and the parents of 77% say that their child can attend fully online.

The Edweek graph doesn’t make this as explicit, because different rows are counted in more than one category. All but one of the described options includes full-time remote–and it wouldn’t surprise me if at least of those 100% in-person districts didn’t offer remote. While it’s not mentioned, most schools offering part-time inperson classes had Schedule A, B, and C, with A and B as the alternating schedules and C (or R) as full-time remote.

So once the Edweek values are totalled to include all options available to parents, the comparison looks more like this:

Option	Edweek	West et. al
Fulltime	49% (34+15)	41%
Hybrid	29% (20+9)	48
Remote	85% (100-15)	77%

Much closer, if not perfect. (Edweek is tracking districts while West is tracking parents, so it’s an imperfect comparison anyway.)

So overwhelmingly, parents had the option to remote instruction if they wanted, but far fewer parents had access to any kind of in-person instruction.

Remember, parents themselves were the primary drivers in determining whether school districts offered in-person instruction (hybrid or full-time being determined by the governor’s choice to follow CDC strictures). So a district decision was primarily influenced by parental majority.

But parents with the minority preference got wildly different treatment depending on which option won.

In rare cases, districts discontinued remote because so few students wanted it and were doing badly to boot; all of these districts seem to be in Texas (e.g., Blanco Independent District). But even when a district refused to continue offering remote, the parents  were supported–allowed to go to another district, hooked up with a virtual charter. Still, schools refusing to accommodate remote instruction were very much the exception.

This is supported by the West survey:

The parents of 84% and 89% of those being taught in the in-person and hybrid models, respectively, say they have a choice in the matter, but parents of only 60% of the fully remote children say they have an option for their children to receive instruction in a different way.

In contrast, parents who wanted in-person schooling in a remote-only district were generally ignored. Overwhelmingly, these parents were in blue states where the governor had insisted on following CDC guidelines, making part-time in-person with full-time remote available the only in-person option.

Why the disparate treatment? Why were parents wanting given remote catered to, while parents wanting in-person were ignored?

Well, for starters, the particular form of hybrid that the CDC regulations required is uniquely horrible.  Michael Pershan’s excellent article does the best at explaining why this form of instruction is terrible for teachers.  I recently described the additional complications that principals faced when their school offered any form of in-person instruction, whether hybrid or full-time.

The West survey and others show that parents didn’t noticeably prefer hybrid to remote.

Many central Florida schools had under half their students showing up for in-person instruction. The teachers’ lives sound miserable, but manageable, and many districts paid teachers more for hybrid. Most importantly, parents were given equal treatment.  But remember, Florida schools were 100% in-person, so even if only fifteen students came to class every day, it’s enough of a classroom experience to be worth it.

That scenario wasn’t the case in many other districts in blue states. The students were forced into alternate day scenario if the state was complying with CDC guidelines.  Moreover, far fewer  parents in these non-white districts were interested in in-person instruction–far fewer, even, than the numbers voting for it.

For example, my district’s survey showed about a third of parents wanted in-person instruction in a late winter survey.

(So first of all, if you are like me and think in-person instruction should have been the norm from the beginning, take a second to stop and think about that. Two-thirds of the parents of a very large district, with all the information they had about the low risk levels for young people, having been stuck in remote for months, voted for continued remote instruction. Realize that my district, close to 90% non-white, is typical of other majority non-white districts and then consider how many majority non-white districts there are. Then perhaps you will think twice about “blame” for remote education.)

When the district asked for signups to get schedules started, just ten percent signed up. That’s maybe 2-3 students per class.   Those are numbers that reasonably cause districts to decide it’s not worth the effort to move out of hybrid, even if it was unfair to the tiny number of parents who wanted it.

So there were reasons why districts didn’t support parents who wanted in-person instruction in high majority remote districts. It’s still unfair. It’s still disparate treatment.

But here’s the part that’s puzzling me: I don’t recall a single parent, much less parent organization, point out this inequity and ask for redress.

Here’s what I mean:

Virginia tracked its counties, which correspond almost exactly to districts, and their education model as of late September 2020. I’ve marked two counties that offered full-time instruction from the beginning of the school year, and two who were almost entirely remote through at least January 2021;. 

Tazewell and Hanover are labeled full-time, but both counties allowed parents to opt for full-time remote education in their local school–oh, hey, see the note at the bottom of the map? All VA districts offered family a remote option. Loudon and Fairfax were full-time remote. There is no note on the bottom of the map saying that all VA districts offered family an in-person option.

But I don’t remember a single Fairfax or Loudon parent asking why they weren’t given the same consideration as the remote parents in Tazewell and Hanover.

Why did no Fairfax or Loudon parent sue the districts and demand equal treatment? Where were their lawyer representatives on Tucker arguing that parents in the minority should both get their choice of instruction? Where were parents with placards saying “GIVE US EQUAL RIGHTS!”

This seems the logical strategy. It might not have worked, but it’s….American.

These parents didn’t suffer in silence, of course. But their strategy was stupid!  They insisted on in-person instruction as logical, “following the science”. They demanded open schools as the only response.  They didn’t appeal for equal rights, they demanded their schools submit.  They argued that their need was oppression, a clear-cut case of government misuse of power. These parents insisted they were acting not just for their own needs but representing countless black and Hispanic children who were being devastated by closed schools and remote instruction.

But in fact, the schools were responding to the demands of the majority–among whom were most of the black and Hispanic children the in-person parents claimed to speak for. (Asians, too, but you know, they’re always left out of the discussion.)

Thousands of Twitter debates with these angry folks has convinced me they were all utterly clueless of their minority status. They didn’t see themselves as a minority. They couldn’t even conceive of the idea. Even today, most people talking about “closed schools and the damage done to our poorest children” are still ignorant of the irony: huge majorities of non-white kids had parents who wanted remote and got their wish.

Surveys repeatedly reveal that 70% or more of parents are satisfied with their schools’ responses to the pandemic. The Understanding America survey is one of a number of surveys showing that just 15% of parents wanted in-person instruction that their schools didn’t offer.

Fifteen percent.

A very loud fifteen percent.

A very white fifteen percent.

A very loud, very white fifteen percent that are, to this day, unaware they weren’t outraged on behalf of an oppressed majority.

This ignorance cost them any hope of victory. I don’t know if an equal treatment argument would have prevailed in court, but at least it would have been an argument that made sense. A quest for equity might have yielded some solutions. Maybe the district could have had one or two in-person schools and assigned willing teachers. (Sure, that would have incurred union pushback, but think of that argument: “the union is blocking willing teachers from supporting a  minority!” Much more effective than blaming unions for all closed schools, since the decisionmakers knew otherwise.)

But they couldn’t see past their bubbles. Most of the parents whose kids were trapped in remote live in highly diverse areas–but enclaved enough that they only think white. Everyone they knew–Republicans, even!–agreed with them. So instead of asking for equal rights, they screamed about government oppression.

Keep in mind: I wanted these parents to win. And yet I found their willful ignorance appalling. So ultimately, despite the power differential, I find it hard to be sympathetic.

Except… the other side was just as bad! Progressives (and here I include teacher union leadership) were dogmatic and obnoxious. Only MAGA delusionals could possibly want in-person instruction. Reasonable, responsible, intelligent parents would understand in-person instruction was too unsafe for at risk individuals. Selfish parents who don’t value the well-being of the community are unworthy of support.

Of course, most of the arguments in the media were between white people–white parents and white progressives opposing them. The non-white parents whose preferences were keeping schools closed didn’t often participate in these debates. No need to. They had what they wanted. Like most public debate, the battle to get out of remote instruction was conducted white on white.

Make of that what you will.