As the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the United States, some public K-12 schools may be able to reopen safely, but doing so will not be cheap. A recent report from the Council of Chief State School Officers estimated that public K-12 schools will need as much as $245 billion in additional funding to open with the recommended protocols in place from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet with local and state budgets strapped, many schools are likely to fall short unless they receive considerable federal support.
The Department of Education, however, has not stepped up to fill that need. Funding for K-12 schools through the Cares Act is $13.5 billion — well below $245 billion.
Instead, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is pressuring schools to open and threatening to cut off funds to public schools that don’t fully open in the fall. She has suggested that those federal funds could be diverted to families to help pay for private or religious education. She has already put in place “micro-grants” for families that want to home-school their children this fall.
In other words, Ms. DeVos is not only failing to provide public schools the federal money they need to reopen safely; she is also potentially destabilizing the budgets of already struggling schools.
It is hard to say with certainty why the secretary of education would put public schools in this difficult position. But Ms. DeVos is, in effect, promoting a new form of school choice: If your child’s school can’t afford to open safely, you need to find one that can — probably a private or charter school — or keep your child at home.
Unfortunately, as with most forms of school choice, one result of Ms. DeVos’s actions is likely to be increased inequality in education. That’s because families with more resources and more flexibility will presumably be the ones most able to keep their children out of unsafe schools. Wealthy families may hire private tutors or send their children to private schools that can afford to minimize risk.
At the same time, many other families are enrolling their children in online charter schools or opting to home-school their children. While these families might not be as wealthy as those that choose private schools or private tutors, there is reason to believe they generally have more resources and more flexibility than families that are not availing themselves of these options. In current research on parenting practices during the pandemic, my colleagues and I have found that families with college-educated, stay-at-home and part-time employed mothers are especially interested in home schooling and online learning, because they want to keep their children safe and because they feel confident in their ability to help their children learn.
By contrast, families with fewer resources, less education and less flexible work schedules may have no choice but to send their children to less-than-safe schools. A recent national survey of parents found that many low-income families are struggling to keep children learning at home, because of limited technological resources and a lack of time and resources. Such findings are consistent with decades of research highlighting the challenges that low-income families face in helping their children with homework and preventing learning loss during summers, when schools are closed.
Low-income families, however, are not the only families struggling with at-home learning. Recent research suggests that other working parents and especially working mothers are also facing difficulties. Given those struggles, it is reasonable to expect that low-income families and families without stay-at-home parents will be less able to keep their children home in the fall, even if that means exposing the child — and the family — to the possibility of infection.
Pushing privileged families out of public schools has two notable effects, both of which happen to align with policies that Ms. DeVos has promoted throughout her career. First, it has the potential to shift resources from public schools. Second, it has the potential to undermine the public’s confidence in the quality of public education and the necessity of funding it as a public good. (As I have found in my research, privileged families play a critical role in maintaining the financial viability and perceived quality of public schools.)
If privileged families opt out of public schooling, they leave behind schools that even more disproportionately serve students of color and students from low-income families. Because of persistent racism and classism in America, that shift in school demographics may make it even easier for policymakers to underinvest in public education and push federal funds toward alternative options.
For Ms. DeVos, then, the current crisis may be more of an opportunity than a threat. By pressuring public schools to open, even if unsafely, she will compel many privileged families to abandon those schools. Many less fortunate students will find themselves with little choice but to attend unsafe schools with even fewer resources than they had before. And public schools will take the blame for the inequalities that will almost inevitably result.
Jessica Calarco (@JessicaCalarco) is an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author, most recently, of “A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum.”
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