The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times

The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times

Learning Pods Show Their Cracks

It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is … a lot of work.

This past summer, Emily Brady thought she had solved the puzzle of remote learning. Rather than send her 5-year-old to virtual kindergarten, she would set up a Spanish immersion forest school for a few children, hire a teacher and run the idyllic program from the cottage behind her house in Oakland, Calif.

“The parents needed to work, and we figured the easiest thing would be to pay and hire somebody to be the teacher,” said Ms. Brady, a writer who set the plan in motion with a cousin who also had school-aged children. “Oh my God, it all just sounds so naïve now.”

It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is a lot of work. To get the program running, Ms. Brady drafted Covid-19 guidelines and interviewed potential teachers, settling on a woman with a warm personality, but no teaching experience.

Ms. Brady recruited other families. One mother had so many questions before the school year started that Ms. Brady suggested she find a different pod. Her cousin dropped out after the first week, leaving the remaining two families scrambling to find two replacements to cover the cost of a teacher’s salary. The school year had barely started when an extreme wildfire season exposed one crucial shortcoming of a curriculum centered around outdoor learning: It’s hard to run a forest school when you can’t go to the forest.

“This whole experience, the whole year, has been like driving in the dark with your fog lights on,” Ms. Brady said.

If the summer was the season to fawn over learning pods as a pandemic panacea, the fall and winter have brought rude reminders that they are not so simple.

Learning pods, a newly popular term for families who band together and hire teachers to either replace or augment virtual  CONTINUE READING: The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults

As the time approached for the 2020-21 school year to begin, I remember reading about parents of means turning to “learning pods” as an option for creating a sort of one-room schoolhouse experience for a small group of children. Also referred to as “pandemic pods,” the idea is to provide a means for social interaction and face-to-face instruction to supplement the less-desirable online instruction that these children might otherwise be facing during the pandemic.

There are even freshly-created entities such as this one, Learning Pods (a New York- and San Francisco-school “collaboration” that can apparently somehow process contributions from foundations), willing to facilitate a learning pod experience for preschool or K-5 children. Interested in pricing? Use this handy pricing calculator to learn that the estimated cost for a K-5 student who is involved five days a week (where a “day” is 9AM – 2PM for K-5) in a pod of 4 students is $3,320 a month. The cheapest appears to be $893 a month for a preschool pod of 6 kids meeting 3 days a week for under three house a day (9AM – 11:45AM). (Financial aid is available; one can apply for private school financial aid using this application that costs $51 to submit.)

If you have the means and live in SF or NY and have the pod membership all lined up but have no teacher, and Learning Pods has no teacher for your pod, you can fill out this “teacher not found form pod” form, and we’ll see what happens. The form includes the question of who is pod captain, whether the pod is indeed complete (minimum of 3 kids), whether pod has a location, whether pod includes children with “learning differences or CONTINUE READING: Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Pod Save Us: How Learning Pods are Going to Destroy Public Education. Or Not. | Teacher in a strange land

Pod Save Us: How Learning Pods are Going to Destroy Public Education. Or Not. | Teacher in a strange land

Pod Save Us: How Learning Pods are Going to Destroy Public Education. Or Not.

The first thing I thought of when people started murmuring about getting groups of kids whose families were connected together for a little home-based mini-school, was the much-heralded advent of charter schools in my state, back in 1995.

Just about everybody who was around and in the thick of education reform back then thought charters held promise. Throwing off the regulatory shackles! Schools with a unique vision and purpose! No more factory-model instruction!

A group of parents, led by one of those perennial PTA-president moms, approached a group of maybe a dozen teachers in the district where I taught, hoping to start a K-8 charter. Several of the teachers had already been discussing a new, arts-infused ‘dream school.’ The parents had a centrally located vacant building in mind, and had run some numbers that showed, somehow, teachers would be paid commensurately with the district’s salary scale, including benefits—and would be freed to run their classes the way they saw fit.

It’s worth noting that this was before NCLB, the Common Core and mandated testing in grades 3-8. I’m finding it hard to remember, in fact, just what we found so onerous and constraining about practices in the buildings we were working in, but that group of teachers (male and female, including several movers and shakers) agreed to meet with the parent organizers.

The parents were super-enthusiastic. They, too, had ideas to roll out, and were thrilled CONTINUE READING: Pod Save Us: How Learning Pods are Going to Destroy Public Education. Or Not. | Teacher in a strange land

Jack Schneider: Is Homeschooling The Next Big Thing? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jack Schneider: Is Homeschooling The Next Big Thing? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jack Schneider: Is Homeschooling The Next Big Thing?

Jack Schneider is a historian of education. In this post, which he wrote at my request, he analyzes the new push for homeschooling. In the midst of the global pandemic, with millions of children quarantined at home, its not surprising that parents are compelled to be teachers. But how many parents will want to homeschool when real schools are one day available again?

Schneider writes:

Never let a good crisis go to waste. As any policy advocate knows, the destabilizing nature of an emergency creates a rare opportunity: sweeping change can happen quickly.

Both parties have a history of exploiting difficulties and disasters. During the Great Recession, for instance, the Obama administration pushed through a series of heavy-handed federal education reforms that might otherwise have met with stiff resistance. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the most ambitious education proposals have come from Republicans, because the shuttering of schools has played to their advantage.

With state revenues shrinking before our eyes and CONTINUE READING: Jack Schneider: Is Homeschooling The Next Big Thing? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Lessons from the pandemic’s education pod parents - The Washington Post

Lessons from the pandemic’s education pod parents - The Washington Post

Lessons from the pandemic’s education pod parents

It was only a few weeks ago that we began hearing about “pandemic pods” or “microschools” — which essentially are groups of students whose parents have paid for professional instruction because of the chaos the covid-19 crisis has wrought on America’s schools. And now they are all over the education news.

Some say these pods are a decent solution to a real-time problem, while others say the pods will only fuel the inequity already baked into our educational system because only people with money can participate.

For parents who can afford it, a solution for fall: Bring the teachers to them

This post, written by Kevin Welner, an attorney and professor specializing in educational policy and law, explains why both sides have it partly right, and what we can learn from what he calls the new “pod parents.”

Welner is the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and co-author of several books on school law, including the 2019 law school casebook “Education and the Law.” He is also author of “NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.”

The huge problem with education ‘pandemic pods’ suddenly popping up

By Kevin Welner

Hollywood told us in 1956 that the “pod people” are determined to subdue the entire planet, replacing each person with an alien surrogate devoid of feelings and personality. Those human traits keep individuals from pursuing their best interests, the Pod People explain in “Invasion of the Body CONTINUE READING: Lessons from the pandemic’s education pod parents - The Washington Post