By Sikivu Hutchinson
The bright-eyed bushy tailed, white Atlanta-area
elementary school kids featured
frolicking, reading, and doing math problems in suburban “Pods” on a recent CNN
morning show were Exhibit A for everything that is wrong with Covid-era
education. Pods are the latest trend in elite learning for privileged, mostly
white families who can afford to provide their kids with protected academic enclaves
beyond the Covid storm. Decried for their exclusivity,
pods simply crystallize the disparities that already exist in hyper-privatized,
segregated K-12 American schools. One widely touted K-4 pod run by New York’s elite Hudson Lab
school will run parents $125,000 for the
academic year, or $68,750 for a five-month commitment.
As districts across the nation pushback against
Trump’s fascist demand to reopen, pod learning underscores how the neoliberal
crisis of public education has accelerated. Trump and Education Secretary DeVos have
exhibited near sadistic glee in threatening to withhold
federal
funding from districts that don’t comply. Over the past several months, DeVos has moved even
more aggressively to siphon
funding from public schools to private religious schools. Meanwhile, some charter
schools unscrupulously double
dipped to receive PPP funds
designated for struggling small businesses, following the “greed-is-not-enough”
model of multinational corporations who got PPP loans. According to the
Washington Post, “Well-funded charters with ample
funding were applying for and receiving large PPP awards”. California
charters alone sucked
up approximately half a billion dollars in forgivable loans. L.A. area
charters accounted for $201 million of these funds.
Pods, and
the relentless privatization of public education, are symptoms of deep multigenerational
wealth gaps. White children get to be children in single family homes in
homogeneous community networks with high homeownership rates and home equity. Propped
up by generations of white affirmative action and the wages of whiteness, white
children’s care systems are already built in, subsidized, and largely invisible
as socioeconomic entitlements. The divide between this reality and that of
children of color has been re-exposed by Covid and the Black Lives Matter
movement. There’s a clear through line between the corporate greed/graft exhibited by charter operators
(of all ethnicities), the Trump/DeVos regime, and systemic divestment from Black public schools. Although
it’s tempting to see recent activism to defund school police and reinvest in
Black student capital as novel, the groundswell in Los Angeles, Portland,
Oakland, and other cities is the outcome of generations
of national grassroots, abolitionist activism against the school-to-prison pipeline and racially
disproportionate discipline. In
June, the BLMLA and
Students Deserve-led coalition of over 50 community organizations
successfully pushed the LAUSD school board to cut $25 million from the force’s
budget. The coalition (which I have been proud to participate in as an educator,
mentor, and parent) has pressed to redirect this funding to culturally
responsive programming, resources, and initiatives for Black students.
The landscape
is bleak. Across the district, only 2 in 10 African American students are proficient
in math, while only 3 in 10 are proficient in the language arts. Math educator Dr.
Michael Batie has meticulously documented Black
students’ math outcomes in every LAUSD school with a significant African American
population. Commenting on the potentially disastrous impact of the pandemic, he
notes, “We were at an 85% failure rate in 2019. By 2021 we may be looking at a
100% failure rate in math.” Over the past twenty years, the district has passed
resolution after resolution after resolution to “redress” inequitable academic
conditions for Black students. Millions of dollars have flowed into programs,
trainings, and consultancies with little long term impact. Hence, for Batie and
some Black parents, working within the corrupt district is a dead
end. In their view, breaking away from the district is the only viable
solution for Black student success.
Despite
years of community organizing and resistance against racist teaching practices,
deeply ingrained cultural stereotypes about Black student aptitude continue to play
an insidious role in African American academic outcomes. As I wrote in the 2011 article
“LAUSD’s Apartheid Hall of Shame,” “From South L.A. to the Westside to the Valley the
implication is the same—Black students… need to be controlled, neutralized, and
heavily policed to maintain the institutional ‘sanity’ of ‘chaotic’ urban
schools. In a recent discussion about adult perceptions, one of my students commented
that some teachers appear to be ‘scared’ of Black students.” If Black students are taught by
faculty and administrators who believe that “scary” Black youth aren’t as
intellectually capable in STEM disciplines as Asian, white or Latinx students,
then they will continue to be shut out of gifted and talented programs, honors
classes, AP classes and IB (International Baccalaureate) classes. AP and IB
classes are especially segregated by race.
As one former Black AP and IB student noted,
“Because tracking had started in elementary school, my public education had
also included the following lesson: the more rigorous the class, the fewer
students who looked like me. Even when I was only 17, I was painfully aware of
the fact that few black and brown students made it into AP/IB courses.”
Pods are Covid-era vehicles for the
kind of pipelining that facilitates placement in AP and IB classes. These
disparities, along with nationwide racial
gaps in access to technology, rigorous instruction, and social welfare resources
will only widen
the divide between Black students and non-black students as they prepare
for college and careers. Although the LAUSD has proposed a reconfigured 2020-2021
school schedule
that requires up structured daily virtual instruction, tutoring, boosted
outreach to students with disabilities and specials needs, as well as limited
childcare for K-8 students, they are pale
substitutes for hands-on engagement and social
support.
Against this backdrop, Black parents
disproportionately juggle homeschooling, work responsibilities, and higher
rates of Covid contraction and death. According to the “Color of Coronavirus” report, African
Americans represent approximately 74 out of 100,000 victims who have died from
Covid—the highest in the nation (By contrast, whites comprise 32.4 out of 100,000
victims). Clearly, the pandemic has the potential to be the single greatest catalyst
for the collapse of public education. Ensuring that it doesn’t is now the “essential
work” of every conscious parent, educator, and community stakeholder who doesn’t
have the luxury of a wages of whiteness “pod”.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the co-facilitator
of the Black LGBTQIA+ Parent and Caregiver Support group and the founder of the
Women’s Leadership Project. Her latest book is Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (Pitchstone).
