SL 786

~ Laura

Online education could go on for years.

I’m reading Corey Robin’s New Yorker piece on public colleges.

What happened when work opened up, but schools stayed closed in Italy? Answer: Women are screwed.

A photoessay of the closed subways in New York City.

Just as some kids are learning more with virtual education, some workers, like my husband, are perfectly happy and productive at home.

I’m loving “The Morning” — The New York Times’ top stories of the day.

Andrew Cuomo on his daughter’s boyfriend.

Published by Laura

29 thoughts on “SL 786”

  2. Re: “women are screwed”. See, countries that view children and child-care (or for that matter elder care) as “women’s issues (rather than “everyone’s issues” with direct relationship towards a nation’s future), individualize the burden. The burden of finding care, or re-finding care when one’s primary provider closes or is otherwise unavailable. The burden of paying for it. The burden of lost wages for lost days at work when children are sick (or the child care provider is sick) or need to see a doctor. The burden of job loss and long-term ramifications for one’s career when any of the above go south.

    Remarkably, what execrably passes for “the feminist movement” in the U.S. went along with all that. Why? Well, working class women were cut off from that movement after the ERA failed. The upper-middle class women who morphed the grassroots movement into a lucrative (and corporate-sponsored) 501c3 career track blamed working class women for its failure rather than their suburbanite counterparts who belonged to the Eagle Forum (and various other anti-feminist groups). I can tell you how that worked out for Feminism, Inc. Not well. The generation of women who grew up in that aftermath see feminism through a race and class lens.

    The “women belong at home” evangelicals and the “rugged individualist” Randians set the policy here. And those affected by that policy? Largely chose to have fewer (or no) children. and even fewer marriages (since divorce is a financial burden too, and the cost-to-benefit ratio vs. the degree of risk doesn’t often pan out for people on the lower end of the economy). And now they’re howling about demographics. Gee, who’da thunk that so many people would simultaneously try to make their own “individualist” solutions?

    If elementary and secondary education morphs to a de-facto “homeschool” model (which is what remote learning is), you can expect literacy rates to plummet. If group daycares and schools aren’t around, you can expect a large number of adults (mostly but not all women) to be not just unemployed, but unemployable. You can expect a larger burden on public relief systems like TANF and WIC (and cutting people from benefits doesn’t make their children go away). You can expect private charities to be unable to assist with that burden (public systems exist because charity was never able to make a dent in that burden—for all their flaws, the public systems did and do). You can expect homelessness to shift composition. You can expect more families living out of vehicles (running or not running). You can expect an increase in street crime. You can expect prostitution (and STDs) to return to their historic levels. You can expect the fallout to impact women whose class-status keeps them from directly experiencing the worst of it. You can expect the generation of women more directly impacted to adopt a “fuck you, pay me” model of self-preservation (their male counterparts will have a similar, but less militant attitude). You can expect a lot of things, none of them good. And mostly because the pre-COVID “normal” was already destructive.

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    1. lubiddu said, “The “women belong at home” evangelicals and the “rugged individualist” Randians set the policy here. And those affected by that policy? Largely chose to have fewer (or no) children.”

      Americans don’t have noticeably fewer kids than our Nordic peers.

      US TFR is around 1.77 (2017).
      Sweden’s TFR is 1.85 (2017).
      Norway’s TFR is 1.71 (2017).
      Denmark’s TFR is 1.79 (2017).
      Finland’s TFR is 1.49 (2017).

      We’re right in the pack there.

      Whatever the big welfare state Nordics are doing is not leading women to decide that they’d like 2+ kids.

      Speaking as a mom of 3 (17, 15 and 7), any childcare arrangement that involves shlepping 2+ little kids anywhere early in the morning is extremely unappealing. Hence the appeal of grandma care and nannies among anybody who can finagle that instead.

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    2. lubiddu said, “If group daycares and schools aren’t around, you can expect a large number of adults (mostly but not all women) to be not just unemployed, but unemployable.”

      What I would expect in areas with long-term restrictions is black market daycare, especially for little kids.

      The black market is eventually going to be an issue for a lot of restricted but high-demand activities, for example haircuts. In fact, a lot of people are already doing it. (Show of hands, who thinks that the politicians and media people on TV look like they haven’t had a professional haircut in 7 weeks?)

      Also, the motivation level to stay away from grandma is going to be a lot lower as time goes on, so people will have fewer inhibitions about having older relatives watch kids.

      I don’t know what to predict for the NE, but my prediction for the rest of the country is that there will be a lot of local, time-limited school closures for 2020-2021, rather than the whole country being shut down for several months at the same time. I think it will be annoying and disruptive for families…but the school year will not be a complete loss. I think schools should be prepared to switch regularly between online and offline.

      I’m also betting that (on average and for a variety of reasons) red states are going to have their schools open for more days in 2020-2021 than blue states. (I’m saying red states not red areas, because the governors are behind the wheel right now.)

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  3. Yeah, the male workers who are perfectly happy at home, have wives who do all the kid-wrangling.

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  4. Re “women are screwed”.
    Anecdotal, of course, but among my friends with school age children, I do not know of one instance where the time required to assist the child/ren in home-schooling has been equally shared by both parents. In every case, it’s been overwhelmingly (or entirely) Mum who does this support.

    This is true for situations where both parents work full time (and both are expected to be working remotely). We already know that housework, cooking and child-minding are done predominantly by women – remote schooling will be no different.

    And, because here in NZ it’s very difficult to manage on a single income, if Mum isn’t able to both work and home-school, then the kids won’t get any support.

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    1. “Anecdotal, of course, but among my friends with school age children, I do not know of one instance where the time required to assist the child/ren in home-schooling has been equally shared by both parents. In every case, it’s been overwhelmingly (or entirely) Mum who does this support.”

      With S having escaped to Ithaca, I am the only person in the house with executive functioning skills. Also, my husband claims he doesn’t “get” our son. I told him I know exactly how to deal with our son because I’ve been dealing with his father for over 30 years (living together for 30 years as of September! Married for 28 years as of later this month!). Seriously, I could write a whole other dissertation on this subject, and it wouldn’t take me 5 years this time. On the other hand, I make my husband do all outside errands and much of the cooking and cleaning, so there’s that. On the other hand, one of my colleagues is doing nearly 100% of the remote learning support for his 3 kids (ages 7 to 14) as his wife is a doctor. Anecdata.

      My next goal is to find my son a life partner who will be the keeper of executive functioning skills in his household.

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  5. Corey Robin and his comrades destroyed CUNY with their liberal social engineering, just as they are now trying to destroy Bronx Science and its peers. For people like that to claim that they care about social mobility is contemptible hypocrisy.

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    1. Data, please, on CUNY’s destruction and how this was effected by social engineering rather than by state budget cuts. I’m not sure who is being socially engineered there: At the undergraduate level, CUNY schools have a large number of conservative students, many Orthodox, many anti-communist from Eastern bloc countries, and many from conservative Middle Eastern nations. There is also at least one climate-change denier on the faculty of a CUNY school.

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      2. Paging Harrison Bergeron. Paging Harrison Bergeron. Mr Harrison Bergeron, White Courtesy Telephone, Please!

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    2. It was the poor man’s Harvard when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had quotas for Jews (and potentially, others).

      “LOWELL TELLS JEWS LIMIT AT COLLEGES MIGHT HELP THEM; Says It Might Tend to Combat the Increasing Tendency to Anti-Semitism. ANSWERS JEWISH GRADUATE 40 Per Cent. Proportion, He Says, Would Make Harvard Prejudice Intense. CAN’T DODGE THE PROBLEM Favors Direct Action Instead of Indirect Methods Adopted by Other Institutions.

      Special to The New York Times.

      June 17, 1922”

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      1. Not a good explanation, because now those schools have quotas for Asians, but that hasn’t turned CUNY back into the poor man’s Harvard. And now De Blasio is trying to destroy the high-performing public high schools because they have “too many” Asians. But I know it’s much more soul-gratifying to fight against 1930s anti-Semitism than contemporary left-liberal dogma. So I judge not, lest I be judged.

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      2. CUNY is number 6 out of all national colleges for improving social mobility (measured by highest level of bottom-to-top-quintile mobility). http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/college/ If you are smart and trying to escape poverty, who cares if your school is called the “poor man’s Harvard”? Your degree is still helping you to improve your lot in life. (On the other hand, you really do care if state budget appropriations allow your public university’s science labs to enter the 21st century and your computer labs to have paper in the printers and the water pipes to not be constantly bursting in the bathrooms.) Not sure how this is left-liberal dogma. Besides, aren’t the conservatives the “pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps” types?

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  6. I still can’t think of a non-nefarious why they can’t run a packing plant more safely for the workers. I get that they don’t want to except as a last resort, but we’re at that point. Forcing people to come to work while ill during pandemic suggests an ideological commitment to hating your workforce.

    The latest action in Nebraska is the governor stopping the state from reporting data on the plants.

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    1. I’m guessing that they can, except it will be more expensive, and then they either have to eat the expense or pass the expense along to the consumers, who will then discover that – shocker! – it’s cheaper to build your meals around vegetables and grains, and might hold on to that knowledge even after the pandemic ends. So I guess that’s a bit better than an ideological commitment to hating your workforce; it’s more of an economic commitment to keeping meat cheap and thus part of the it’s-an-emergency-if-you-don’t-have-it American diet.

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      1. My point is that I think we’ve crossed the point where it would be more expensive. Not being open or able to get workers to come in sounds very low margin.

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    2. Forcing people to come to work while ill during pandemic suggests an ideological commitment to hating your workforce.

      Besides this being a general feature of late capitalism, this is and always has been endemic in the meatpacking industry.

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  7. “But as the push to reopen the country’s economy intensifies, so do feelings of dread at the idea of returning to the office, said Mr. Anderson, a self-described introvert and anthropology professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y.”

    Got to say I don’t understand how this person could be a college professor. What does he hate about his office, which is a campus and one, certainly, that is being sold as a place for collaboration and communication to its students.

    I mean, the article is potentially misleading on people being filled with dread about potentially contracting the virus and getting ill versus people who don’t want to be with other people, so I can’t tell for sure, but this is not someone I would want to hire to teach at a liberal arts college.

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    1. I agree with you about that article! There are definitely things I like/prefer about being home. I get so stressed about being somewhere at a particular time (which makes getting to classes on time an issue :D). I like that I don’t have to get dressed and put on makeup. But the one thing I do miss is seeing my students and colleagues and being in front of a class doing my teaching thing.

      I do dread potentially getting COVID. It sounds horrible, and I don’t think I’d do well with it.

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    2. bj said, “I mean, the article is potentially misleading on people being filled with dread about potentially contracting the virus and getting ill versus people who don’t want to be with other people, so I can’t tell for sure, but this is not someone I would want to hire to teach at a liberal arts college.”

      Kids aren’t the only people being desocialized by online education…

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  8. Does the county count identify meat packing plants? That is, are they concentrated in a particular county or set of counties? It’s unlikely I’d suspect that one meat packing plant in a county would have different rates of infection than another.

    And, WA has started transferring a few COVID+ nursing home patients to designated nursing homes (which are in specific locations, but, potentially it doesn’t matter if you can’t visit a nursing home, anyway).

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    1. In rural areas, the counties with high infection rates are all because of packing plants and everybody assumes the cases not at packing plants gets traced back to that source somehow. Now it’s getting into the urban counties, which have had very low rates before, and I think they are trying to make it less obvious why people are getting sick in and near Lincoln.

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    2. The governor has made a career of spending his dad’s money to get into office (and to restore the death penalty after the legislature dropped it). I assume his first priority is keeping the plants running by giving Lincoln residents less tools to argue the plants should be shut.

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    3. bj said, “And, WA has started transferring a few COVID+ nursing home patients to designated nursing homes (which are in specific locations, but, potentially it doesn’t matter if you can’t visit a nursing home, anyway).”

      That’s a relief.

      I have no idea how people are going to talk aging parents into going into nursing homes after this, given that so many nursing homes have been death traps.

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  9. I was at the store today for my weekly visit, and based on the profusion of Mother’s Day flowers, balloons and gewgaws, Mother’s Day is going to be the next big temptation to violate social distancing. Memorial Day is two weeks later, with the same issue.

    It’s going to be interesting to see if people have enough fortitude to get through May observing strict distancing.

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  10. Here’s a problem with what the public is being asked to do:

    It’s one thing to tell people to temporarily forego seeing their older relatives for 2-3 months in order to save them from a deadly disease…it’s qualitatively quite another thing to tell people to forego seeing their older relatives for 18+ months.

    For one thing, it is likely that either household is going to need substantial in-person help of some kind over the next 18+ months. For another, 18+ months may represent a substantial loss with regard to forming and preserving relationships with grandchildren, as well as a substantial percentage of an older person’s remaining healthy, active years. If there’s ongoing memory loss, 18 months may make a devastating difference.

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  11. Ohio is considering two days of in-person school per week for the fall:

    https://www.dispatch.com/news/20200506/ohio-gov-mike-dewine-one-option-for-schools-in-fall-is-two-days-in-person/1

    A lot of newer private schools already do a hybrid week with 2-3 days of in-person and 2-3 days of homeschooling. One of the virtues of this is that you don’t have to have lots of electronics and great internet to do this–the work done at home can be 100% analog.

    I also suspect that 2 full days would be way more popular with families than 5 half-days.

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    1. I forgot to mention that in the private school world, the 2-3 day model is called “the university model.”

      I personally don’t think it’s ideal (especially once you hit 7th grade), but if my choices were 5 half-days versus 2 full days of school in the fall, I would go for the 2 full days.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_University-Model_Schools

      “A University-Model® school is a Christian, college-preparatory school which blends aspects of private and home schooling. Students meet on campus two or three days per week, and complete lessons at home on alternate days under the direction of professional teachers, with parents serving as co-teachers.”

      “As of 2019, there were 88 operating member schools in 19 states, with a total student population of 11,626 students and one international school.”

      (Part of the appeal of “university model” schools is that they are a lot cheaper than a conventional 5-day private school.)

      I have a friend who has two kids in a similar school and she loves it.

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