Students need more support at home. Parents do, too.
Unpaid, untrained, and uncertified for their new role, parents and caregivers were the primary source of instruction for U.S. children this spring—and are likely to remain so for at least the fall semester. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, parents of the average school-age child spent 13 hours per week teaching their children this spring—helping with homework, getting them set up for lessons online, and much more. After multiplying by the 25 students typically in an elementary class, parents were providing 10 times the total amount of instructional hours that a teacher would have provided to the same class in a week! Whether they realize it or not, most school principals are now responsible for an instructional staff of thousands that includes parents as well as paid staff.
But not every child has a teacher at home. Their parents may be essential workers or unable to work from home. Most will lack the financial wherewithal to hire a tutor or pair up with other families in a pod. In the words of one parent we interviewed while researching the nation’s shift to remote learning: “I don’t have time to look up different resources for my kids to learn from. I’ve got to make sure we’ve got food, and a roof, and water, and soap.”
School leaders, then, must solve the two very different problems faced by these two different groups of students: those whose parents can play the role of teachers-at-home and those whose parents cannot. When inequities are more visible than ever, we must not make the mistake of treating all families the same—giving all families the same attention from paid staff or the same amount of time in school buildings—when their resources at home differ so greatly. To do so would only widen the gap between the trajectories our children are traveling.