ROCKVILLE, Maryland — “Where is the EQUITY for our Black, Brown, and Poor students?”
That was one of dozens of hand-lettered signs at the large car-rally at Montgomery County’s Board of Education building on Tuesday night.
This sign, like the rally, was protesting the plan to reopen the public schools in this large suburban county bordering the District of Columbia.
“Equity” appeared on signs at the protest and flowed from speakers mouths about as frequently as “safety.” It wasn’t just a throwaway word. “Equity” is at the heart of the teachers’ objections to the school board’s plan to get all willing students back in the classroom by the end of April.
Chris Lloyd, the president of the Montgomery County Education Association (the local chapter of the National Education Association), said, “We know that right now about 100,000 students will remain virtual. A hundred thousand students, most of whom are black, brown, and children living in poverty. Those children will receive less, effective March 15. That’s unconscionable, and it doesn’t fit into anything that we’ve done at MCPS for the past 30 years.”
The argument boils down to this: There exists data suggesting black and Hispanic and low-income parents are seemingly more likely to choose to keep their children remote (or, alternatively, less likely to answer a survey about their preferences). That means the students getting superior in-person schooling will be disproportionately white and wealthy, while the students receiving inferior remote schooling will be disproportionately non-white and poor.
This assumption flows from a survey of parental preference that the school district conducted last year. About 40% of parents opted for in-person schooling, about 40% opted for remote schooling, while about 20% of parents did not answer. That last 20% will be placed in remote learning by default.
An analysis of the responses suggests the 40% choosing in-person were whiter and wealthier, while the 60% choosing or defaulting to remote were less white and poorer.
There’s the “inequity” from a return to school, the teachers argue. White and wealthier students will see their education improve when schools open, while minority and poorer students will see their education degrade.
“If we’re in a classroom,” one art teacher at the rally explained to me, “we’re going to be teaching the eight students coming into the classroom, and we’re also supposed to be teaching the children that are at home, virtually … You cannot give that attention to the children that are at home.”
She added, “Some of their plans involve asynchronous learning for the students that are learning virtually.” That is, they would watch recorded videos or get printouts instead of live Zoom classes. That “means that they are getting less education than what they presently have.”
This “equity” argument against reopening is perverse in multiple ways. First, one elevates “equity” over quality education by refusing to improve what’s available to students just because some parents might fail to take advantage by sending their children to school, and the “wrong” ones will show up. Yes, teaching hybrid is tougher than teaching all-remote, but the teachers are treating this one challenge as a deal-breaker at a time when parents and teachers and students are all dealing with countless new difficulties from this pandemic.
There’s another perversity here, though: If, as the data suggest, “black and brown and poor” parents are more reluctant to send their children in person, that’s not due to some baked-in added danger in the county schools. The teachers didn’t argue that the richer and whiter schools are any more likely to have better ventilation, or that the more minority-heavy schools are inherently more dangerous virus-wise.
No, the difference stems from differing levels of fear. In-person schooling scares minority and poorer parents more than it scares white and wealthy parents. It’s perverse for teachers unions to lean on this argument when the unions are the very ones stoking that fear. Teachers should be teaching their students about how to make in-person schooling safe rather than endorsing that fear, especially since the fear is belied by the preponderance of the evidence.
A third perversity is that we know the costs of remote schooling fall disproportionately on poor and minority parents. They find it harder to stay at home and supervise remote learning. They are less likely to have great computing and internet resources. They are also less able to fill in the instruction lost when there is no physical contact with teachers.
And the final perversity is the long-term implication of this argument. Following the teachers’ logic of equity, the only way to ever get a single student back to class, even next year, is to either (a) force “black, brown, and poor” families against their will to send their children to school, or (b) alleviate all fear in every last “underserved” parent (while teachers unions and journalists go on railing about schools being death traps without any scientific evidence).
The other alternative is that schools stay closed for everyone for the foreseeable future. Not a good idea, but hey, that’s “equity” for you.
