“You really want to get the best for your child,” a father told NBC News, describing his family’s motivation to secure private educational services.* They are part of the “Pandemic Pod” movement “now sweeping the nation” — as so many public schools offer only remote learning this fall.
Increasingly, parents are getting together to form small groups — or “pods” — and hire a teacher to better provide instruction to their children.
It shows initiative — and a refreshing sense of parental responsibility. Of course, not everyone can afford to hire a private teacher.
“It just seems really privileged,” a Portland, Oregon, woman advised The Washington Post.
“The frantic activity … of families soliciting private tutors for their children,” San Francisco school board member Alison Collins explained, “is frightening to many black parents and parents of color.”
L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, associate professor of sociology of education at New York University, called the private effort: “opportunity hoarding.”
“For those families that are most vulnerable, particularly lower-income families, black families, brown families, language-minority families,” declared the professor, “they are locked out of that.”
“Experts say that will widen the education gap,” NBC reporter Stephanie Gosk chimed in.
Ah, the experts — and their Procrustean** obsession!
Their fixation on gaps and inequality, as opposed to enhancing opportunities and achievement where possible, leads to the absurd notion that we should deny educational opportunities to some children (our children) unless we can provide those benefits to all children … city-wide, statewide, nationwide — or worldwide.
Read a bedtime story to your kid or grandchild tonight. Insist on quality … and leave the equality to feckless education theorists.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The father and the family happen to be black.
** Procrustes, in Greek myth, was a robber who made his victims lie on a bed and stretched them out if they were too short for the bed, or lopped parts of them off, if too tall; killed by Theseus on said bed: “Procrustean” is a synonym for absurdly strict egalitarianism.
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