One central result of the pandemic was a huge increase in both teacher and student abilities in educational technology. In a way, COVID was the killer app for EdTech.
But COVID, of course, did a lot more than get a whole bunch of people used to using Zoom. One of the most important thing that happened was that parents, all of a sudden, were able to see into the teaching/learning process going on in their public schools. For some parents, this might have been happy-making. What great teachers!!! What a great curriculum!!! What a great school system!!!
Yeah. But.
For some OTHER parents, what they saw on Zoom was not only NOT inspiring (I mean, a lot of teachers and students really had no idea what they were doing at first), but truly troubling.
There are a WHOLE lot of reasons for this. First: teachers aren't perfect. They're human; they make mistakes; and (let's be honest) some of them aren't really very good at what they do.
Second: "curriculum" is one of those things (like colonoscopy?!) that most people really know little about and really DON'T want to know much about. COVID allowed (forced?) parents to see the curriculum in action, or at least see something that gave them clues about what the curriculum is in a given school. (Curriculum and instruction are very different things, as you know. But parents didn't always make this distinction.)
Third: take two people (say a random teacher and a random parent) and they will have a different set of skills, experiences, and values. Now add a third person: a young person, a child, a student. The parent is watching the teacher (try to) teach their kid. While some parents were like "yeah, it's not great, but during the pandemic this is better than nothing" and some others were like "I LOVE my child's teacher" while a few others were really outraged like "This teacher thinks transgenderism (or the idea of structural racism or whatever) is OKAY/True/Age Appropriate?!?!?"
The combination of these three situations lead SOME parents to start to get more involved. Many talked to their friends (through masks at the local park, maybe) and realized that parental dissatisfaction wasn't just something THEY felt. Indeed, in some places it wasn't rare, but it was shared (sometimes widely among certain parent groups). This realization of shared grievance (sound familiar?) has resulted in all KINDS of parent groups and parent action and even some major political action (Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis?).
One example here in Florida is the turning over of the Sarasota School Board to a group of people who were allegedly non-partisan but were funded by Moms for Liberty and Ron DeSantis. The three had a somewhat vague agenda (Students First! Transparency! Facts, not belief!) that kind of hid a fairly radical (right-wing?) view about the relationship between schools and society. (In Sarasota, the county is the school district. The city itself is lovely and pretty liberal. The county is...different.) Once elected in 2020, the board has done a whole lot of things, including firing the superintendent, banning certain books, and in general raising the idea among many Sarasotans that the schools they THOUGHT were really pretty good were, rather, being run by a bunch of radical left-wing cultural marxists. The rest, some day, will be history.
I could say more, but I might stick my foot (further) in my mouth.
