"As school districts across the nation announce that their buildings will remain closed in the fall, parents are quickly organizing 'learning pods' or 'pandemic pods'..."

"... small groupings of children who gather every day and learn in a shared space, often participating in the online instruction provided by their schools. Pods are supervised either by a hired private teacher or other adult, or with parents taking turns. At face value, learning pods seem a necessary solution to the current crisis. But in practice, they will exacerbate inequities, racial segregation and the opportunity gap within schools.... For parents who need to work and can’t supervise their children’s learning, joining a pod may feel like the only way they can educate their kids and keep their jobs.... Paradoxically, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a national reckoning with white supremacy, white parents are again ignoring racial and class inequality when it comes to educating their children. As a result, they are actively replicating the systems that many of them say they want to dismantle.... The history of public schooling in this country is one in which white parents have repeatedly abandoned public schools, or resisted integration efforts at every turn.... We can either take this moment to continue that pattern by retreating into the comfort of our own advantages, or...." Or what?

I'm reading in "The Latest in School Segregation: Private Pandemic ‘Pods’/If they become the norm, less privileged kids will suffer" by Clara Totenberg Green, a social emotional learning specialist in the Atlanta Public Schools (NYT).