Season 3, Episode 11: What is driving parent frustration with schools?

Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. It's been a topsy turvy couple weeks over here, as you know. But it's also given me the opportunity to think a lot about grace and gratitude, which are themes that, as you know, we've revisited a lot over the podcast.

Michael, I know you have been carrying a lot, and I appreciate all that you're holding and your ability to stay present through all of that. And so, if I'm reading you correctly, it sounds like there's something you might want to talk about this week. Week.

No surprise. But you know me well, Diane, and as we've discussed, you know, the Omicron surge obviously has really upended schools, and it's created even more frustrations and in some cases, even anger. You know, the opposite of that grace and gratitude. And a lot of parents and educators, it seems to me, are just fed up. But as listeners know, you and I, we didn't start this podcast just to talk about people's frustrations amidst Covid, but to also talk about the opportunities that these frustrations reveal to transform schooling more widely.

Yeah, Michael. And we've embarked on this season around trying to answer big questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. And we're focused on all of those questions in relationship to schooling and the design of schools. And we've really been trying to, you know, put our money where our mouth is and follow curiosity. And I must say, we. I'm pretty curious right now. What's on your mind with this?

All right, well, I'll. I'll take it a level deeper. I want to dig deeper into the what question today and specifically what is driving that parent frustration, because maybe the lack of gratitude or grace is actually more rational. And if we can understand it, I think it might have some implications for how we shape schools. So let me just try to frame this one, and then you can dive in more deeply, Diane, because what I'm seeing and hearing right now is all manners of reactions to the interruptions and efforts of schools right now. Some parents, they want in person schooling at all costs. They are sick of confirmed close contacts pushing children to stay at home. They're sick, in some cases, of testing asymptomatic children. And yet, at the same time, juxtaposed against that, we're seeing some pockets of educators, most visibly, perhaps in Chicago, with the teachers strike a little bit back, not wanting to really be near the classroom. Or for some schools, they just, you know, they don't have enough teachers and staff to be able to even keep the doors open, given COVID infections. So you have that juxtaposition. Then you have the parents who've been clamoring for schools to close and go remote again. They've been seeing the spiking numbers of people with COVID the stretched hospitals, the reports of children in hospitals, the interruptions to their routines with confirmed close contacts and the like. And they want their children nowhere near schools. They're frustrated with the many schools, I think, that have looked at the sum of the evidence and as we discussed with John Bailey a couple episodes ago, concluded that schools can be held in person safely and that it's actually important. Important for the majority of children to be in school in person. And then there's a third group, I think, which is a bunch of parents who are frustrated that their state or district has essentially barred any remote option at all throughout all this. And they don't want to hear that remote schooling doesn't work for most children. They can point to a, you know, a good online school here or there and show where it's working, or they can point to an n of 1 and say, hey, it's working for my kid, for my family. Why can't we have that? And then maybe there's this fourth group, Diane, which is like, people like my wife, who are basically like, I get there's going to be times where my kids aren't allowed to go to school. It's really annoying. But please, please don't do remote schooling when school closes. It's just too hard on the parents. And I'm not sure that's me, that we're in the same bucket. But, you know, that's a dynamic. And look, I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of nuance, but it feels like those are the tent poles to me and that families sort of exist somewhere across that wide spectrum right now.

Well, I love that you in your own family might be in different places because I think it's so reflective of the full space spectrum of perspectives we're dealing with. Michael and I. I actually think you've done a. A really good job of staking them out from what I'm experiencing and seeing, you know, which is very affirming of what you're talking about. Our families are pretty split on what they want right now, and some, as you've said, really want us to be virtual. They're just like, what do you thinking this is a huge surge. Like, why are we in buildings? This is crazy. Some cannot fathom going back to virtual. They're like, no, never again. We can't do that. Some are most worried about their children's physical health in relationship to Covid. Others are more worried about the mental health of their children in relationship to socialization and isolation. Others are more worried about their academic progress. And so there's different calculations that are going on here depending on what people think is more, you know, pressing, prevalent, important, given their own family and children. Everyone has different opinions on the various health and safety levers. So here's another sort of matrix element, because not only do you have those pieces, but now we've got what do people think about masks? Testing, contact tracing, isolation, quarantine. You know, I should say, not just masks, respirators, as we learned from John Bailey, because those are different things. There are so many intersecting dimensions to what an individual wants and needs. And you therefore have families literally all over the map. And so what does this look like and feel like for the people who are in schools, leading schools? Well, I'll be honest with you, Michael. It feels like a lose, lose situation every single day. It truly feels impossible to make everyone happy, let alone honestly, anyone happy, because you might make them happy on one dimension and then upset on another one. And, you know, catering to the majority is deeply challenging when people feel really strongly and act accordingly. As we're seeing and as you alluded to with your frustration and your anger at the top, Even if you're catering to the majority, what is the majority on each dimension? The people in the majority sort of shift around. And so you're right back to the place where literally no one's going to be happy, let alone satisfied with the decisions you're making. Because even if they like one part, they aren't going to like another. And that isn't even factoring in faculty members. And you noted educators up at the top, but they have equally complex and varied opinions. So the bottom line is this is a technical term. It really sucks to be a school leader right now. All of that said, I have noticed that many educators just do not share a fundamental perspective that I think you are saying most parents believe, which is that a core service that schools provide is child care. And in my view, this is one of the big disconnects, like a safe place for their children. This is what people believe. Parents believe a safe place for their children to be during the day to allow them to work and bring home important income for their families. Like, this is not what most educators that I know think is their job.

I think that's super interesting, Diane, and it actually relates to a new paper that came out by Karen Shea, D. Garcia and Benjamin Cowan, that a colleague at Education Next flag that showed that actually school closures had little impact on whether parents worked, which to me was surprising. Right. But here's where it's maybe perhaps less surprising. School closures had a huge or significant effects on whether parents worked full time and the number of hours they were able to work per week. So that's no surprise and no surprise. The effects were most concentrated among low educated parents. So I think it's maybe too simplistic to say that a core purpose of schooling is to provide custodial care. Like, I'll grant the educators that we have research, as you know, showing that parents opt into schools to do four jobs to be done in their lives, like escape a bad situation, be part of a values aligned community, be part of, of a school that will focus on developing the whole child, or help them execute, quote, unquote, their plan for their child, which is all about college. But I think a different and related model might be helpful here, Diane. And it's called the KANO model.

Okay, Michael, you've allowed me to geek out and vent a few times, and so I think it's your turn now. Okay, I'll bite. What's the KANO model?

I thought you never asked, Diane. So the KANO model is essentially a way of figuring out what features an entity ought to invest in. It basically helps organizations create a product roadmap, if you will, and prioritize what's most valuable. So the idea is actually really easy to visualize, but a little difficult to describe. So I'm going to do my best, given this is an audio format. But what I want listeners to do is essentially picture a graph where the Y axis represents satisfaction of users. So the higher you go, the more satisfied you are, and the lower you are, the less satisfied you are. And then the X axis would represent the sophistication of any given feature. So the more you go to the right, the more you've invested in making a given feature, you know, perfect, more advanced, complicated things like that. And what Professor Cano concluded in the 1980s when he developed this is that there are three kinds of features. And I'll do it in reverse order so I can land my punchline here. But the first set are what you would call excitement features. So these are features that when they're absent, no one cares, per se, because they didn't expect them in the first place. But when they're present, oh boy, do they excite users because of the unexpected. Delight that they create. So you might think about the school that maybe offers amazing connections to a local community based organization for after school internships or you know, projects that allow students to connect to that like not just a professional in the field, but like truly the rock star professionals in the field. The next set are what he called performance experiences. So these are essentially like every dollar invested in these features result in a one to one level of satisfaction improvement. So the way to think about it is like that parent who's really invested in school helping their kid get into college, maybe every single extra AP class offered brings that much more satisfaction. But not having any AP classes at all would bring that parent right, make that parent really dissatisfied. Okay. And then the third set are what he called basic features. And essentially these are the features that like if they're not there, your user is totally dissatisfied. But the more you invest in them, you don't get credit necessarily for making them better. So they're sort of the opposite of those excitement features. They just have to be there. Like think seat belts and cars. Ford doesn't get extra points with customers for improving the seatbelt, but if seatbelts aren't there or are totally dysfunctional, well, you get the idea that customers are going to walk.

Yes, I do. I get it. Okay. I like this framework a lot, Michael. I've got a lot of stuff going through my head right now. What I think is it says here is that childcare for the vast majority of parents is a basic feature. It isn't an excitement feature for sure, or performance experience, but it's just sort of table stuff mistakes. And you know, without that baseline of child care, most parents are just going to opt out and walk or be really, really angry because, well, they're not having a space for their child to be cared for. And so what I think is really interesting is that pre pandemic, I don't think anyone really thought much about this probably because school was relatively stable for everyone. Like there was this just basic agreement that school was for the most part happening Monday through Friday from around three, you know, eight in the morning till three in the afternoon. And you know that students and teachers are in the building for that. There are a bunch of requirements around supervision that I think teachers internalize as like legal requirements. But I honestly don't think they internalize them as I am providing childcare. And so I think it was more of thinking of their role as to manage a safe place classroom and a campus and create productive spaces for learning. And I realize that like all could fit into childcare. But I honestly don't think that most teachers process it that way. So that might be at the root of some of this disconnect, that when the pandemic, when the pandemic, when the pandemic comes along completely disrupts the basic elements of school. And so suddenly everyone is thinking about this differently. And in the absence of that reliable child care, families suddenly are getting really about that as a basic need because it's missing, right? And they have, you know, to actually supervise their children instead of the school. And so this was something that was probably, I'm guessing, taken for granted before. I'd be so interested to know if, like, those basic features often end up becoming taken for granted. But now parents, because of the pandemic, are really clear that this is a basic job that they need a school to do. But I still think, Michael, that many educators went in a different direction. And maybe this is where we're starting to see a further divide, because suddenly educators experienced a work life that didn't require them to be in a school building every day with child care responsibilities all day long. And I think that many of them honestly really liked it. And if they didn't see themselves as childcare providers pre pandemic, but rather educators, I think they started to think like, hey, wait, my job is to teach, not babysit. And I'm starting to see other ways to do that. And they're more flexible and less stressful and hey, I kind of like this. And they start to question if their job should be to provide that basic function, which since it wasn't super explicit before and more taken for granted, maybe doesn't feel totally real. I also think that the societal context is having a big impact here, Michael. We've got a huge percentage of people who are rethinking their jobs and or careers and quite frankly, quitting them. And we are starting to see that one of the top criteria that people want is work flexibility. And so let's be honest, working in a school is not a flexible job. It just isn't school as it is currently designed. It just doesn't work if teachers and educators aren't there every day from the beginning to end. And so I think we've got some really significant tension that is brewing here and now. This isn't going to be true across the board. If you've been an educator for 15 or more years, that's an arbitrary number. But say somewhere in there a year or so of virtually being flexible probably isn't going to fundamentally change how you think about your role, you'll probably be able to return to a routine that was working for you. But if you're a newer teacher and half of your teaching experience has been virtual or in some cases like all of it was, you know, well, that's going to be a pretty profound shift. And since that is the future of the teaching workforce, I think we've got some significant misalignment between what families are expecting and what teachers are expecting. And right now I'm not seeing them come together on what, you know, you're helping us to understand is a basic element of school.

I think it's all right, Diane. And something you just pointed out that I hadn't thought about before is the KANO model is really dynamic, right? So what at one point is a performance defining feature over time becomes taken for granted and becomes basic. What I hadn't thought about till you just said this is because all of a sudden the basic was taken away. Maybe for some families, that even became a performance defining feature. Like how much childcare. I never even thought about that. But you know, the other part of the KANO model that's really interesting is that it's all relative to individual circumstance and their job to be done. So for some parents, I think it turns out that like, childcare probably isn't one of those basic features. They never thought about it to your point before, but their circumstance is different. They, they don't need the custodial care and perhaps health and safety is like their baseline thing. Right. So custodial care might not be one of the features they care about at all. Or, or it might be the cherry on top. I, I just don't know. But I think this points to the fundamental problem here. And, and to answer the question, you know, we, we started with up top around what's causing a lot of that frustration, frankly, lack of grace, is that we continue to treat these challenges as needing a one size fits all solution and there just isn't one. The media and certain policymakers love to talk about how in person schooling is the only way to do schooling. Well, frankly, it's just, it's just not and it's not best for some kids and families in certain, certain circumstances and when done well now for most families, I think they need child care, it's, it's table stakes. And for those families who opted into a traditional brick and mortar school and now want them to stay closed because they don't need the child care, I think frankly, it's kind of nuts to expect most Individual schools, like I shouldn't generalize. I'll say most, and maybe you all are the exception and able to balance this. But I do suspect a lot of your families need the in person care. You know, I think it's nuts to expect most individual schools to be simultaneously doing both in person and a remote option. I think that's really a lot to expect. And so I think what we need to do is create room in the quote unquote system, if you will, for different options and for folks to specialize. I recently interviewed Pat Brantley, who leads the Friendship Public schools in Washington D.C. and she was telling me about the portfolio of schools they operate and how they're leaning into opening more micro schools now and things of that nature. But what really struck me was that they had a great virtual school before the pandemic. And because they were set up for virtual, it's, you know, it's been done really well and the enrollment in it has skyrocketed, but it's also held steady. It's not declining even as the other schools they operate are both fully in person and also doing well and fully enrolled in. And so I thought that dynamic is just showcasing, you know, there's a lot of people with a lot of different preferences right now.

Well, Michael, there is a very good reason that most of our conversations end up back in the very same place, which is personalization. I mean, the reality is that a gigantic one size fits all school design simply does not work anymore. And you've just pointed out all of the good reasons why. We are living in a time when people have the ability to customize almost every aspect of their life in most cases to a level of preference and granularity that can frankly be overwhelming. Like we have too many choices sometimes on that front. But when it comes to the care and development of their child, they simply have to take whatever is offered as it's offered well from a particular place. You know, it's kind of this package and you don't have the ability to customize. And to date, the. The only real choice has been a different school. But there's so many elements and nuances of the school in experience that like just picking another school doesn't mean you're going to get the package that actually fits your family. And so that this model just is not working in the modern world when people have so many things that they're comparing and contrasting to and the experience feels so strange to them. And what it says to me is that school choice alone is not nearly sufficient to address the need to personalize. I know a lot of people who are excited about school choice are all excited right now, and they think if this is what the pandemic's going to bring, I just don't think that it's sufficient. I don't think either of us have for a long time. It's great and not sufficient. And so while, you know, a growing number of parents may be exercising this choice, given their levels of frustration right now, it still isn't really addressing the core issue and the need. And so what we need to be thinking about is how are we personalizing the day to day educational experience with much more nuanced choice and opportunity. And what I think is exciting is this requires new designs and models that I believe could also provide some of the desired flexibility on the part of educators. And so, so that's where these two groups can come and meet together. I truly see incredible opportunity here. But it's going to take some courage because change is. People don't like change, especially when it comes in schools and kids. And so it's going to take courage, it's going to take collaboration to meet the variety of people's needs. And my hope is that this frustration actually gets turned into something positive, that people bring grace to it enough so that they can collaborate and that they're willing to take a bit of a leap to create what might be possible

if they do well, if that ends with educators and parents innovating together. That's a thought. I'm very happy to leave it on, Diane. But before we go, I'm curious, what are you reading, watching or listening to right now?

Well, continuing with my theme of pre reading for our trip to Germany. You can see my fingers crossed right now. And the fact that I love fiction. I have picked up the book the Book Thief by Marcus. I don't even know how you say that, Zusak and Michael, this book is old. I had planned to read it with my book club back in 2006, but there's an opening scene that at that moment, as a young mom, I was just like not equipped to read the book at that time. So I set it aside and I've just returned to it. It's this highly acclaimed young adult novel. I love the young adult sort of genre. It traces the experience of a young German girl during World War II. And I must say, Michael, it is a really beautiful expression of everything I love about that YA genre. It's. It's just a beautiful book and I'm really appreciating it a lot. How about you?

That's awesome. I'll go the TV route just coming off, you know, NFL playoffs. I guess this will be a little bit dated by the time it comes out but we're recording this just after four nail biter games, each one better than the last and it was gripping, it was fun and I confess I was stealing away to watch parts of it on my phone and not on the TV so that I could have a couple minutes by myself but try to get away from book editing over the weekend. But it was, it was a heck of a lot of fun and a great distraction and I think judging from social media a lot of people enjoyed that distraction which maybe is what we all needed right now. And with that I will leave you all with that thought of distraction and being able to come back to a place of grace hopefully as we do so. But thank you all for joining us on class disrupted. Sam.