8 to 3: Parents, I’ll get you answers and information you need about school

I’ll level with you — I never expected to be here.

Not here, typing this newsletter on my phone on my couch while my 5-year-old paints my face with an Otter Pop. And not even here, writing about schools and parenting for the Los Angeles Times.

For one thing, The Times already has one of the best education teams in the business. I joined them a year ago. Some of our award-winning journalists have been covering this subject for longer than I’ve been alive.

Meanwhile, I’ve been a mom for less than half as long as I’ve been a reporter, and I spent most of those years writing about murder. I got my start at The Times covering the trial of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and have since chased a dizzying array of stories — baby raves, as well as Bel-Air food trucks and the contested translation of “Black Lives Matter” in American Sign Language.

A mother on Rikers Island once told me you don’t understand love until you have a child. But I don’t think that’s true. I think you don’t know fear until you become a parent. And then you don’t know a day without it.

Fear is what brought families to the center of my reporting when schools closed last March. I was afraid — for my health and my family, but most of all for my son, who seemed so terrifyingly vulnerable despite early evidence that young children were resilient to COVID-19. A rare inflammatory illness brought me minutes from death when I was a kid. How could I risk him contracting MIS-C? What made the state think preschool was safe when kindergarten wasn’t? And if it really was safe, when would his reopen — and how would I do my job and care for him until it did?

As a veteran journalist, I knew there were fears much more urgent than mine. The parents I met in those early days were preoccupied with where and how they would give birth or pay rent or find diapers. Healthcare workers scrambled for day care and day-care workers improvised PPE. By summer, the pandemic’s education inequities had gone from conspicuous to blinding: Public preschools kept the neediest students remote, while private centers brought little learners back to the classroom; K-12 teachers continued working from home while private schools reopened as day camps, and day camps and day cares became remote learning hubs.

For many parents, fall marked the moment their fear turned to frustration. For many others, the deadly winter surge confirmed what they’d known in their hearts: School wasn’t safe, and wouldn’t be for months to come.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum, I want this newsletter to be a space for you. If you have kids, you know 8 to 3 are the hours of formal education, just as 9 to 5 are the hours of paid work. It’s not to say those hours contain all learning or labor — how could they? But metonymy gives us shared language for the tangle of law, labor, funding and bureaucracy that governs child care and education in California.

I’m no expert here. My job, as I see it, is to be an accountability yenta, the person who finds things out for you. To do it, I’ll draw on a decade-plus of reporting experience, my half-decade as a mom, and 18 years as a student in the state’s public school system.

The state of California underwrote almost my entire education, from kindergarten through scholarships and work-study at UC Berkeley. I have also been a teacher, first in preschools, starting at age 14, and later at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. My insight into union politics comes from my role in the L.A. Times Guild and from my single mom, a proud union nurse. And I owe my ability to attend public school at all to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which opened general education classrooms to disabled students.

Still, there are many experiences I don’t share — of institutional racism and of poverty and language barriers — and I’m trusting you to help me bring those to light. Among the most profound differences between us right now is likely remote learning. Like so much about education in this era, that’s not by choice.

My son, Ram, is 5. His name means “supreme” or “exalted” in his father’s language, though in most ways he’s perfectly ordinary. His favorite animal is an octopus, and he loves mango with Tajín and monkey bars and “Waffles + Mochi” on Netflix. By the time you read this, he’ll likely have lost his first tooth.

But Ram is several days too young for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s transitional kindergarten. My Times salary disqualifies him from either expanded transitional kindergarten or public preschool. Instead, like many working parents across California, I spend roughly my rent again every month for early education at a private school.

This is a privilege: Even pre-pandemic, there was one spot for every four children in the private market, and one for every nine in subsidized care. Now, those spots are scarcer.

But it is also a caprice of California bureaucracy: If my son had been born just a week sooner, he might only this month be returning to the classroom. Instead, by an otherwise trivial twist of fate, he has been learning in person since summer.

Why is it like this? Why is any of it like this at all? Lenny Bruce said, “Let me tell you the truth: The truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie.” That’s how I’ve always done this job. I’m not here for opinions, speculation, or ad hominem attacks on parents who are “sick of their kids” or teachers who “don’t want to work.” The truth is what is — not what we wish, not what we imagine or believe, but what exists, in front of us, right now — and that’s what I’m here to make sense of for you.

Parents are making tough back-to-school decisions ...

School reopenings are picking up speed this month, and my Times education team colleagues are looking at how parents are weighing whether to send their children back to campus.

Reporter Howard Blume looked at the personal reckoning of Los Angeles parents. But it’s high school students who are opting to stay home in the greatest numbers. Melissa Gomez got inside the minds of teenagers, who had somewhat of a different take than parents.

... while deep learning losses mean sobering challenges are ahead

This fascinating article from radio station WBUR-Boston by Molly Colvin, a developmental neuropsychologist and assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, offers insights on how our pandemic-traumatized brains are working these days when it comes to making decisions — including back-to-school decisions.

And last week a sobering report by the Los Angeles advocacy group Great Public Schools Now showed just how much ground LAUSD students at all levels lost academically in the last year. The preliminary data are alarming, Blume reported.

For a nationwide look at learning losses when it comes to reading, the Stanford Graduate School of Education offers this insightful article on its study of young students during the pandemic. Reading fluency has dropped roughly 30%, researchers found.

And finally, did you know that of 1.1 million California students, nearly 20% are English learners? Times education reporter Paloma Esquivel delved into their situation, showing how this population of students is at great risk of intractable educational loss.

Throw your questions at us

One of our main goals is to harness the expertise of our team to answer your questions about schools and learning. Email me at parenting@latimes.com, and let me know what issues we can untangle for you as parents.