"Since beginning online learning, she explained, Saige has been liberated from hearing negative tropes about Black girls in the lunchroom and hallways."

"For one, the eighth grader can control her exposure to racial microaggressions. When a classmate wore a 'Make America Great Again' hat — attire that some people see as a symbol of racism — during a video class session, Saige simply changed her settings to view only the teacher. 'Although the violence is still there, she has the ability to maneuver in a way that she didn’t have when she was in school,' Ms. Aryee-Price explained... [S]ome Black families value keeping their children at home... to protect them from racial hostility and bias.... More than 40 [Black] parents [of 373 in a private Facebook group] said they appreciated virtual schooling because it allows them to, as one put it, 'hear how the teacher speaks to children.'... Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate education professor at the University of Georgia, studies why Black families choose to home-school. 'I’ve never had a parent tell me it was one particular factor,' she said. 'It’s a multitude of factors, and a lot of them revolve around what I would just plainly say is racism.... If Black children so much as wiggle, it’s "Keep still!" White kids are wiggling, and they don’t say a word. It’s nothing but misgivings, misinterpretations, mis-whatever about Black people moving,' she said. 'They feel like they’re being picked on.'...  Dr. Aryee-Price, a former public-school teacher... said while she truly believes in education, she sees schools as 'sites for anti-Blackness.'" 

 From "'You’re Out of Your Mind if You Think I’m Ever Going Back to School'/When learning is virtual, Black parents can watch for unfair treatment" (NYT).

And yet teachers — as a group — seem to take special pride in their anti-racism. But it's hard to be a teacher. They have to interact with so many students at once. How can you serve them all well? Maybe students with a strong need for physical activity should be be in a different group and using different methods from the ones who easily sit still and adhere to book-learning. I sympathize with these parents who see their own children stigmatized — or believe that's what they are seeing. 

I'll bet a lot of parents of male children would make some similar observations. It's deeply disturbing to see your own child treated as a problem, when your own child is simply an individual with needs that don't align well with the needs of the group. And it's so much more disturbing if you think it's not just that your child is an individual who isn't appreciated for her individual characteristics but that your child is seen as a member of a group and the group is regarded — intentionally or not — as inferior. 

The urge to take your child out of school altogether is strong. It's the parent's primal urge to protect one's own children. What's new, with coronavirus, is the real experience that has been imposed on all parents — a different mode of learning, with the child required to be out of the classroom. It's harder to go back to a less-than-perfect situation than it is to keep going. Stopping school created an occasion for reflection and judgment, and re-opening school creates a new occasion for decision-making. The child's resistance to school is a familiar occurrence in normal times. But abnormal times have arisen, and all the resistance is coming at once.