who’s in-person, and who can be? families’ access to and decisions about in-person instruction in the wake of COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic has dragged on, schools across the U.S. have responded in varied ways. Some are offering only remote instruction, while others are giving students the choice between remote and in-person instruction, either through a traditional in-person model or through a hybrid model involving a mix of in-person and remote instruction.

The US Department of Education recently announced plans to gather data on school instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a much-needed effort, given the previous administration’s failure to support research on pandemic schooling. And yet, these efforts are likely to take time.

In the short-term, then, and particularly in context of heated debates about pandemic schooling, scholars, policymakers, and educators need data to understand which families have access to in-person instruction and what decisions families make when they have the choice between in-person and remote instruction.

My goal with this post is to help fill that gap. I’ll share some basic descriptive findings from a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 US parents with children under 18. The survey, which I fielded through Ipsos’s iSay panel in December 2020, included questions about how parents’ youngest school-aged child (those old enough to be enrolled in K-12 education) was participating in school and, if they were participating remotely, whether they had the option for in-person school. Recent news reports have highlighted racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in parents’ support for in-person schooling. Building on these reports, I’ll present a basic descriptive overview of: 1) how students are participating in school, 2) which students have the choice between in-person and remote instruction (among those who are currently enrolled in a school; i.e., not homeschooling or delaying kindergarten), and 3) which students are choosing in-person instruction when they have the choice between in-person and remote school. A more detailed description of the methods can be found below.

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Current Instruction

When we’re thinking about students and schooling during the pandemic, the first key question to ask is: How are students currently receiving instruction?

As of December 2020, and among school-age children:

• 24% were receiving traditional in-person instruction
• 17% were receiving hybrid instruction involving a mix of in-person and remote learning
• 42% were receiving fully remote instruction
• 17% were homeschooling or not in school (i.e., because they delayed kindergarten until next year)

Of course, those remote instruction numbers need some unpacking. Some of those students had the choice between in-person and remote instruction and chose remote instruction; others did not have a choice and could only receive remote instruction from their school. Among those receiving fully remote instruction:

• 48% did not have the option for in-person instruction from their current school
• 26% had the choice between traditional in-person instruction and remote instruction and opted for remote instruction
• 26% had the choice between hybrid instruction and remote instruction and opted for remote instruction

Access to In-Person Instruction

This raises our next question: Who has the choice between in-person and remote instruction, and whose schools are still closed?

To answer this question, let’s look at students who were enrolled in a school (i.e., not homeschooling or delaying kindergarten), and let’s separate students who had the choice between traditional and remote instruction, students who had the choice between hybrid and remote instruction, and students who did not have a choice because their schools were only offering remote instruction.

Overall, roughly 43% of enrolled students had the choice between traditional and remote-instruction, 33% had the choice between hybrid and remote instruction, and 24% could only receive remote instruction.

Not surprisingly, these numbers vary for students from different groups. The chart below offers a breakdown based on students’ racial/ethnic backgrounds and parents’ education (whether either of the child’s parents has at least a bachelor’s degree). With the exception of Asian/Pacific Islander students, students whose parents have at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely to have access to in-person instruction than are students from the same racial/ethnic group whose parents do not have a bachelor’s degree. White students and Black students whose parents have bachelor’s degrees are also more likely than Hispanic/Latino students whose parents have bachelor’s degrees to have access to in-person instruction (87% and 92% vs. 73%). Hispanic/Latino students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees are the least likely to have access to any form in-person instruction (62%).

Decisions Regarding In-Person Instruction

Now, as we saw above, not all students who have a choice between in-person and remote instruction take the in-person option. Some students opt for remote instruction, instead. And that brings us to our next question: When students have the choice between in-person and remote instruction, who chooses the in-person option?

Once again, it’s useful to look separately at students who have the choice between traditional and remote instruction and at students who have the choice between hybrid instruction and remote instruction. Between these two options, families with the choice between hybrid and remote are more likely to stick with remote instruction (38%) than are families with the choice between traditional and remote instruction (32%).

First, let’s look at families with the choice between traditional instruction and remote instruction.

Given the choice between traditional instruction and remote instruction, the majority of families took the in-person option—69% overall. Only 31% of families with choice between traditional and remote instruction opted to keep their children home for remote instruction.

Those overall patterns, however, do hide some differences by race and parent’s education. As we see in the chart below, and among students who have the choice between traditional and remote instruction, those whose parents have at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely to choose in-person schooling than students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees. Among students whose parents have bachelor’s degrees, white and Black students are roughly equally likely to opt for in-person instruction (76% and 86%) when they have the option for traditional instruction. Among students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degree, white students are more likely than Black students to opt for in-person instruction (73% vs. 59%).

Next, let’s look at families with the choice between hybrid instruction and remote instruction.

Given the choice between hybrid and remote instruction, a little more than half of families took the in-person option—62% overall. Roughly 38% of families with the choice between hybrid and remote instruction opted to keep their children home for remote instruction.

Once again, though, these overall patterns hide some differences by race and parent education. When given the choice between hybrid and remote instruction, white children whose parents have at least a bachelor’s degree are most likely to take the option involving in-person schooling (78%). White students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees are less likely to take that option (56%), as are students from all other racial/ethnic groups. Black students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees (45%) and Asian/Pacific Islander students are particularly unlikely to take the option involving in-person instruction (BA: 38%; <BA: 43%).

Takeaways

Overall, these findings suggest that there are wide variations in families’ access to and decisions regarding in-person instruction.

When given the choice between traditional in-person instruction and remote instruction, nearly seven in ten families take the option involving in-person instruction. Families in which at least one parent has a bachelor’s degree are particularly likely to take the in-person option. Black and white students whose parents have bachelor’s degrees, for example, are roughly equally likely to opt for in-person instruction when they have the choice between traditional in-person schooling and remote instruction.

Hybrid instruction is less appealing for families than traditional in-person instruction, and that’s especially true for families of color and families in which parents do not have bachelor’s degrees. When given the choice between hybrid instruction and remote instruction, only about six in ten families take the in-person option. White students whose parents have at least a bachelor’s degree are most likely to take the in-person option when given the choice between hybrid and remote instruction. Other students, especially Black students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees and Asian/Pacific Islander students are less likely to take the in-person option when given the choice between hybrid and remote.

Next Steps

Obviously, these are just descriptive data – weighted to be nationally representative, but not controlling for other factors that might influence families’ access to or decisions regarding in-person instruction. My next step, then, will be to consider the factors that contribute to the patterns we see here. Certainly, there are lots of factors to consider and lots of variations to explain.

One thing to unpack here is why so many families are opting for in-person instruction and especially why parents with bachelor’s degrees are more likely to opt for in-person instruction, particularly when they have the choice between traditional and remote school. Evidence from the interviews my team and I have conducted with mothers during the pandemic suggests that the stress of working from home while supporting students in remote instruction may be one factor for families in making these decisions. Just yesterday, for example, I interviewed a mom I’ll call Janet.

Janet initially opted for remote instruction for her kindergartner and 2nd grader (and took her toddler out of childcare), because her mother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer over the summer, and Janet wanted to reduce the possibility of exposing her to COVID-19. Janet’s husband, meanwhile, is an essential worker. So opting for remote instruction meant that Janet was working from home while also being the parent primarily responsible for helping the big kids with remote schooling and providing full-time care for her toddler.

Not surprisingly, this arrangement took a huge toll on Janet. She gained 40 pounds in three months. She was drinking more heavily than usual. Yelling at her kids. Resentful toward her spouse. Eventually, Janet’s therapist told her she had to send the kids to school/childcare.

Janet’s kids are now back in in-person school/childcare. And Janet is doing much better. It’s not perfect. There’s no aftercare because of the pandemic, so Janet can only work 9-3 unless she stays up late. But she’s sleeping more, eating better, drinking and yelling less.

And Janet isn’t alone. Preliminary analyses point to similar patterns in the national survey data. Compared to parents without bachelor’s degrees, parents with bachelor’s degrees were more likely to be working from home during the pandemic. They were also more likely to report high levels of stress and frustrations (including frustrations with their children) during the “worst two weeks of the pandemic,” and more likely to report that their stress and frustrations increased during the pandemic, as well. Preliminary analyses also suggest that parents who experienced more stress and frustration during the “worst two weeks of the pandemic” were more likely to opt for in-person instruction if they were given the choice between traditional and remote learning.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that parents who keep their children home aren’t stressed or frustrated. Many of those parents – especially mothers – are struggling, as well. And that’s why we need to do all we can to stop the spread of the virus and ensure that families are getting the support they need through this deeply difficult time.

Methods

Data

This study uses data from the Institutions Trust and Decisions (ITD) Study, a nationally representative, online survey which was conducted from November 30 through December 30, 2020 and which includes data from 2,016 US parents with children under 18. Participants were recruited through Ipsos’s iSay panels. iSay panel members are invited to take surveys in exchange for points which can be redeemed for incentives. Recruitment quotas were used to ensure that the demographics of the sample roughly correspond with the demographics of U.S. parents with children under 18. Post-stratification sample weights were then developed and applied in all analyses to further ensure the representativeness of the sample.

Sample

In this analysis, I focus on parents with school-age children. That includes children who are old enough to enroll in K-12 schooling, even if they are not currently enrolled (e.g., because they are homeschooling or because they are delaying kindergarten entry until the 2021-2022 school year). Surveys asked parents to name and discuss their youngest school-age child. 1,786 parents named a school-age child. Of these, 1,778 provided information about their child’s participation in school.

Variables

The primary dependent variables in this analysis measure families’ access to and decisions regarding various instructional options at the time of the survey (December 2020).

Type of Instruction Received. Surveys asked parents to report the type of instruction their child was receiving at the time of the survey. Options included traditional in-person instruction, hybrid instruction, remote instruction, homeschooling, and other arrangements (including not receiving instruction).

Access to In-Person Schooling. Parents who indicated that their child was receiving remote instruction were asked to report whether their child had the option of receiving in-person instruction from the school where they were currently enrolled. Parents could indicate that their child had the option for traditional in-person instruction, had the option for hybrid instruction, or did not have any option for in-person instruction.

The primary independent variables in this analysis are indicators are indicators of race/ethnicity and social class.

Child’s Racial/Ethnic Origins. Surveys asked parents to report the racial/ethnic origins of their youngest school-age child. Responses are grouped into five categories: 1) Asian, non-Hispanic, 2) Black, non-Hispanic, 3) Hispanic or Latino of any race, 4) white, non-Hispanic, and 5) Multiracial and other racial or ethnic or origins.

Parent’s Educational Attainment. Surveys ask parents to report the highest level of education they have completed. These responses are recoded into two categories: 1) parents who have completed at least a bachelor’s degree, and 2) parents who have not completed a bachelor’s degree. Education is an appropriate measure for social class in this analysis given that workers without bachelor’s degrees have had the highest risk of unemployment during the pandemic and are also the workers least likely to be able to work from home.

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This post is cross-posted on parenthoodphd.com.

adjusting expectations for empathy and equity in the wake of COVID-19

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, college and university instructors have been asked to keep teaching. Faced with that mandate, some instructors have to tried to stick as closely as possible to “business as usual”—transitioning to online instruction but otherwise keeping their expectations for students the same. That could mean required, on-time attendance, maybe even with checks on active engagement. It could mean keeping all the original assignments and deadlines in place, and maybe even adding new modules and assignments. It could mean online exams held during the normally scheduled times, maybe even with identity verification, browser controls, and live proctoring to keep students from cheating.

Now, I understand that those “business as usual” expectations might give some instructors the sense of normalcy they need to keep teaching in the face of so much uncertainty. At the same time, though, and as I argued in a recent webinar for Indiana University’s Office of Diversity and inclusion, those “business as usual” expectations are no longer equitable—if they ever were at all.

If our students signed up to take in-person classes this semester, then we can’t expect that they’ll be able to seamlessly make the switch online. We can’t expect that students will have consistent access to internet or to a personal laptop or tablet they can rely on to make Zoom calls, download video, take exams, or do assignments online. We can’t expect that students will have a safe place to live, enough food to eat, a distraction-free environment where they can study, or enough time to show up for classes. And we can’t expect that the students who need help will feel comfortable enough to ask.

Given the challenges students are facing, many instructors—myself included—have abandoned “business as usual” and radically shifted their expectations for students. That decision, however, is likely to be easier for tenured faculty—myself included—than it is for grad student instructors, adjunct faculty, lecturers, and tenure-track junior faculty. That decision is also likely to be easier for instructors from more privileged groups—myself included—than it is for instructors from systematically marginalized groups.

If you’re an instructor with a more tenuous status, lowering expectations in the wake of the coronavirus might feel risky. You might worry about being judged—by advisors and colleagues, by hiring committees, award committees, and tenure committees, or even by your own students. You might worry about how those judgments will affect your course evaluations or your chances of getting hired, promoted, tenured, or picked for a teaching award.

My goal in this post is to give you language you can use to justify choosing equity and empathy over “business as usual” in the wake of COVID-19. First, I’ll offer a few general suggestions for instructors on adjusting expectations and avoiding further harm. Second, I’ll share the message I sent my undergraduate students explaining how I would be adjusting my expectations for the remainder of the semester. Finally, I’ll share a template you can use in teaching statements for job applications, tenure dossiers, or other materials to explain how you’ve adjusted your own courses during this challenging time.

imagining sociology’s theorists as contestants on a home design show

A while back, I made a joke on Facebook about panopticons and open floor plans, and a friend commented that she’d love to see a version of the television show House Swap featuring Goffman and Parsons. That gem of an idea (thanks Carolyn Chernoff) then became this Twitter post, imagining various sociological theorists as contestants on a home design competition show (I was bingeing Ellen’s Design Challenge at the time).

I ended up sharing the thread with my Intro Soc students, and I thought I’d share it here, too. It’s a clever way to help students compare key points from each theorist, and it could also work as inspiration for a creative class assignment. You could have your students apply the same concept and imagine various theorists as contestants on food competition shows or quiz shows or as popular athletes or musicians.

Here’s the setup: Imagine that some of Sociology’s theorists are contestants on a home design competition show. Each theorist has been asked to choose a chair to complete a particular room. 

Host: Welcome to Soc Theory Design Challenge! First up, we have Talcott Parsons. Tell us about your design.

the first day of school

Wednesday was my daughter’s first day of Kindergarten. And I managed to get through the whole day without any tears. I got through Thursday’s drop-off, too, even when my daughter stopped me outside the school and said: “You don’t need to come in, Mom. I know where to go.”

As I walked back home, I scrolled through Twitter on my phone. And that’s when I first saw the articles.  On Wednesday, hundreds of immigrant workers in Forest, Mississippi had been detained, taken away without warning when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers raided the food processing plants where they worked.

The children of those workers came home from school to empty, locked houses. They were crying and looking desperately for their parents. It was their first day of school, too.

no more accommodations: how operation varsity blue changed my approach to in-class exams

There are so many horrifying pieces to the recent college admissions scandal. Dozens of celebrity and CEO parents have been indicted for lying and cheating to get their kids into “top” colleges. Some created fake athlete profiles and paid off coaches to get their kids in. Others paid for fake test scores. And still others had their children fake learning disabilities to get extra time on the SATs.

That last part. The fake disabilities part. That’s the part I can’t let go. And that’s how I found myself digging through the details of the affidavit, looking for an explanation.

flexible coding for field notes

As I tell my grad students, almost no one does “pure” grounded theory. It’s technically impossible (we can’t forget everything we’ve read before going into the field). And, as Nicole Deterding and Mary Waters explain in their recent Sociological Research & Methods article, it’s a poor fit for twenty-first century qualitative research (often large-scale projects with fixed protocols, as required by IRBs and grant funding agencies).

Given the limitations of grounded theory, Deterding and Waters offer a different approach, which they call “flexible coding.” I won’t go through their method in detail, but the basic approach has a couple of steps:

1. Organization
2. Indexing
3. Memoing
4. Data Reduction

The whole point of this approach is to allow for a more systematic analysis of qualitative data. And Deterding and Waters lay out what these three steps can look like with semi-structured interview data. It’s a terrific, hands-on guide to qualitative methods. But it left me wondering – what does flexible coding look like with ethnographic data, instead?

Reflecting on that question, I realized that I actually did a version of “flexible coding” with my research for Negotiating Opportunities. So I thought I’d share here in case it’s useful for other students and scholars embarking on ethnographic projects (or trying to climb their way up the mountain of ethnographic data they’ve already produced).

“it’s not fair”

“It’s not fair.”

If you spend time with kids, you probably hear those words a lot. And for adults, it’s easy to respond with “Life isn’t fair.” But if your kid is growing up with privilege, that response is problematic.

It’s problematic because when a privileged kid says “it’s not fair,” what they almost always mean is “I’m not getting what I want.” So if an adult responds with “life’s not fair,” what the kid hears is “You’re not getting what you want, and that’s not fair.”

That response teaches privileged kids to see fairness only through their own eyes. To ignore the real injustices that exist in the world, or, maybe worse, to see their own inconveniences as equally “unfair.”

So if your privileged kid says “it’s not fair,” acknowledge what they’re feeling, but challenge their meaning of “fair.”

holiday office party: soc theory edition

It’s that time of year again – time for colleagues to gather in office conference rooms, drink a little punch, and maybe swap tactfully dull gifts. And that got me thinking – what would sociology’s theorists bring to a holiday gift exchange?

Here’s what I’d guess:

the new digital divide on college campuses

It’s easy to look around a college campus and think – there’s no digital divide here. While waiting for class (or even walking to class) students pass the time by scrolling through Instagram or checking email on their phones. After class, students retreat to the library or to their dorm rooms to do homework on their laptops. These devices are ubiquitous to the point where some college professors have opted to ban them or relegate them to certain corners of the classroom.

And yet, despite that ubiquity, today’s college students are still very much divided along digital lines. In a new article published in the journal Communication Research, my co-authors—University of California Santa Barbara Communications Professor Amy Gonzales and Ohio State Communications Professor Teresa Lynch—and I argue that the digital divide on college campuses has shifted from one of technology access to one of technology maintenance. In a survey of college students at a large, midwestern university, we find near-universal ownership of cell phones and laptops. That said, we also find big gaps in the quality and reliability of the technology students own. Specifically, we find that students of color and students from low-income families typically rely on older, lower-quality devices that are more likely to break down over time.

go the f* to sleep

Travel with kids is rarely a vacation. But the trip we took last week left me utterly exhausted. And that exhaustion left me angry and on-edge. Which in turn sent me down a late-night rabbit hole into the research on parenting and sleep.

To give you the bleary-eyed backstory, we were visiting my in-laws in Florida for Thanksgiving. And my one-and-a-half-year-old went on a sleep strike. He’d go to bed fine around 7:30pm. But sometime between 10pm and 1am, he’d wake up screaming. And refuse to go back to sleep. My partner would try his best to soothe him, but kiddo would just scream and scream. And with a condo full of people (including a sleeping four-year-old down the hall), we couldn’t risk letting him get too loud. So I’d scoop him up and try my best to get him back to sleep. Sometimes I’d nurse him. Sometimes I’d walk in circles and sing to him softly. That almost always stopped the screaming. And most of the time I eventually got him back to sleep. But, inevitably, thirty minutes or so later, he’d be awake again. One night, he woke up more than ten times.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, usually sometime between 3am and 5am, I’d bring kiddo in bed with me. I’d tuck him into the crook of my arm, his head resting softly on my shoulder. And, almost immediately, he’d settle into a quiet sleep.

Now, that might sound like a sweet solution (and it’s not an uncommon one), but it was far from slumber-full. Because babies don’t actually sleep like babies. They sleep like wriggling worms. Kiddo would start off all curled up beside me. But then, thirty minutes later, he’d want to be on my other side. Then on my chest. Then, his favorite, with his face pressed up against mine. So even when he slept, I rarely did.

And the less sleep I got, the more the normal frustrations of parenting grated on my nerves.

notes from the field: show how you know what you know

Let’s say you’re working on an ethnographic project. And you just spent an hour – or three – in the field. Now you’re sitting at your computer. And you know you’re supposed to write fieldnotes based on what you saw. But where should you start? And what should you write? And how should you write it?

It’s easy to assume that fieldnotes are just a running log of everything that happened during your visit to the field. But that running log approach is problematic, at least on its own.

As a reviewer, I’ve read countless studies where the methods section describes how the author conducted both interviews and observations. But then only the interview data appear in the text. The fieldnote data are nowhere to be found. My hunch is that, in most of those cases, the fieldnotes just weren’t useful. Because they weren’t detailed enough for a reader to make sense of them. Or, worse, because they weren’t detailed enough for the author to make sense of when they went back and looked at them six months later.

How do I know this? Because when I first started my dissertation, I wrote my fieldnotes as a running log of everything I saw. And the stuff I wrote in those first few weeks of data collection ended up being almost completely unusable. Because it lacked detail. And because it lacked context.

So, why not write a detailed, contextualized description of everything that happened? Because there aren’t enough hours in a day.

And that means you’ll have to make choices about what to include in your fieldnotes and what not to include. But that’s okay. Because the point of ethnographic fieldwork isn’t to describe in detail everything you saw. Rather, the point of ethnographic fieldwork is to gather the data you need to answer your research question.

So here’s what I tell my students:

1. After you leave the field, write a brief, running log of everything you saw.
2. Circle the three events or interactions most relevant to your research question. And definitely circle any incidents that don’t fit your hypotheses or the larger patterns you’ve seen.
3. Write up each of those three events as a short story, with clear context, characters, action, motivation, and resolution.

“whole milk or two-percent?” mommy shaming in the doctor’s office

*cross-posted at parenthoodphd.com*

Last week, I took my son to the doctor for his 15-month check-up. I tried to keep my son entertained while the nurse went through the standard battery of questions, entering my answers on her laptop:

Is he in a rear-facing car seat? Yes.

Are there smoke detectors in the home? Yes.

Does anyone in the house smoke cigarettes? No.

Is he exposed to wood smoke? No.

Is he still breastfeeding? Yes.

Does he drink cow’s milk, too? Yes.

But then she followed up with one that required more brainpower.

Does he drink whole milk or two percent?

If I had been on my A-game, I probably would’ve gone with the “right” answer (whole milk). But I was trying to keep my son from catapulting himself off the exam table, so I went with distracted honesty: “Uh, a mix of both.”