I’m doing my duty as a California parent. I’m flunking distance learning.
Because failure isn’t merely an option when your job is to transform into a teacher in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. Failure is the whole point of the exercise.
If my fellow parents or I were to become awesome teachers under this hastily organized setup for internet home-schooling, imagine the educational carnage! If parents could surpass some teachers in instruction, how could teachers’ unions defend their weaker members? If I could administer my home classroom effectively, how could school districts justify employing expensive administrators? And if students did just as well at my kitchen table as in a physical classroom, why would construction firms ever donate to school board members who approve new buildings?
Educational success, in these circumstances, would be nothing less than an attack on public education. So if you’re still following every Google Classroom instruction and using this time to enhance your kid’s education, I must ask: What is wrong with you?
For the sake of California and social cohesion, those of us with school-age children must accept that we are actors in a show that, like the musical in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” is supposed to flop. Even Gov. Gavin Newsom, who imposed distance learning in March, has dropped any pretense that this is anything more than educational theater; he blames this period for “learning loss” among kids.
As my local school superintendent wrote to our San Gabriel Valley community: “California’s public-school system does not have the infrastructure or appropriate regulations to support a comprehensive, all-in, distance learning program for all students.”
Unfortunately, some parents, hearing words like that, have stopped participating in distance learning. They shouldn’t — parents’ role is even more vital now! Our job is to accept the blame for distance learning’s failure, so that our schools, teachers and kids don’t have to.
I confess: I was slow to embrace my own role as scapegoat. I never got less than an A until college. So I took it hard when distance learning began and I immediately seemed to be failing three grades — my sons are in first, third and fifth. Only Adam Sandler’s character Billy Madison, who flunked grades one through 12, has done worse.
At first, I made excuses, like that my full-time job distracted me. Then I lashed out.
I blamed my wife for offering no help; her lame excuse is that she’s a health journalist covering COVID-19 around the clock. Also, that I’m on her health insurance.
I blamed the confounding and error-prone educational apps that my kids must use from Sumdog, to Think Central, to Flipgrid, to the boss of the distance-learning mafia, Google Classroom.
I blamed teachers, who sent me online full of broken internet links — and of mixed messages. One day, they’d advise not to stress about whether assignments got done. The next, they’d ask why particular assignments weren’t turned in, or remind me that school was still in session.
But most of all, I blamed my three students — who are lazy (refusing to rise before 9) and undisciplined (ignoring my schedules). They ruthlessly exploited the fact that they needed to be on their screens all day to sneak video games whenever I wasn’t looking. With them skipping work and bombing tests, I threatened to call their parents, before remembering I was one of them.
I finally understood distance learning’s true purpose after reporting my first grader’s work refusals to the school. In a call, teachers and administrators politely declined my request that he be made to repeat first grade. My 6-year-old, recognizing my diminished power, soon took to making me write down his answers to school assignments. Last week, he warned me: “If I get an email from Google Classroom that I need to do this again, you will be to blame.”
So I have accepted my fate. I am not anyone’s teacher. Nor do I have any training in instruction or classroom control. I can’t give students a grade. I can’t even ground them — the whole world is already grounded. I am merely an unpaid go-between between two groups, my children and their teachers, who during a pandemic have bigger worries than schoolwork.
I am sometimes asked, “Does distance learning work?” The answer is we will never know, if we employ it only in these crazy circumstances, when it is certain to fail.
Right now, I’m just relieved that distance learning has allowed the state to justify continuing to pay teachers and other school employees during this crisis. If that means I have to play the 21st century Potemkin, and pretend the distance learning village is real, I’m happy to be of service.
Unfortunately, many of my fellow parents refuse to suffer in such productive silence. On social media and grocery store lines, they rage against distance learning. That’s understandable, but it’s also bad form. We California parents must keep our powder dry and save all our energy for the many fights ahead.
In June, we’ll need to challenge the governor and legislators if they use the COVID-19 crisis to make huge, lasting cuts in our schools that will make education even less equitable. More broadly, we should pressure the state to use the crisis to reverse its underinvestment in services for children, particularly on childcare and mental health. And when it is safe to reopen schools, we will need to insist that the instructional time our kids lost this spring is made up, that remedial work gets done and that no one falls behind.
We’ll need longer school years and school days, and a real and robust system of distance learning, to accomplish all that.
Most of all, we must demand that our students honor their parents’ public-spirited failures in distance learning in the best way possible: By studying harder and learning even more in the years to come.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
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