The arrangement, which often includes the hiring of public school teachers to guide small groups of students, is setting off debate about education inequality
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.With schools across the U.S. scrambling to figure out how to resume classes in just a few weeks, families are forming small private classrooms known as “pandemic pods” and hiring teachers to guide their children through the complexities of distance learning.
“Suddenly parents were confronted with this realization that they were in an impossible situation where their kids needed to do distance learning which, especially for the younger ones, is a full-time thing. But most parents work,” said Kristen Vandivier, a meditation teacher and mother of three in Mill Valley, Calif., north of San Francisco.
In wealthy California neighbourhoods such as Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, some parents are even renting out commercial space or repurposing wings of their homes to turn into schools, while offering teachers six-figure salaries and stipends for health insurance. But the rise of pandemic pods has alarmed some educators, who worry that it will exacerbate existing inequalities within the U.S. school system and drain resources away from public schools.
Extended school closings, which shift the responsibility onto parents to manage their children’s education, are only likely to widen the achievement gap, Prof. Reardon said. “You can think of public schooling as a kind of equalizing force in society,” he said. “So when kids can’t go to public school, the worry is that’s going to exacerbate educational inequality because parental resources are much more unequal than school resources.
Mr. Zack is working to create a pod with five other families and hopes to sponsor at least two children to join for free, though the group’s all-white members have struggled to find families outside their social circle. “All the parents we’ve spoken to are united in this idea that we’re all trying to make the most of an unfortunate situation,” he said. “But we’re not trying to fundamentally change how school works. We’re not trying to leave anybody behind.
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