The Everything Providers

How schools became the answer to a flawed social safety net

I had a dream last night that I wrote you guys a newsletter titled "I Gave My Love A Pickle / That Had No Brine" but unfortunately Dream Me did not actually get beyond the title, a problem that Waking Life Me also experiences. So in lieu of that intriguing-sounding premise, please accept "The Everything Providers," a version of which appeared in Modern Parent in November 2020. 

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About 10 years ago, an education consultant named Jamie Vollmer wrote a list. If you are an educator, you might know about this list, even if you don’t know who Vollmer is. If you’re not, you have probably never heard of it or him. 

“Vollmer’s List” gets passed around from school to school. It gets added to slide decks during back-to-school conference days and budget hearings, and nodded over by nearly anyone who works inside a school building. It’s “a decade-by-decade list of all the academic, social, and health responsibilities that have been heaped upon our schools” for the past 100 years. On it are mandates like special education and Title IX, as well as programs that are not mandated, but so well entrenched that it would be almost unthinkable to remove them, like school lunch. In its entirety, the list totals more than 80 items — some of which are, admittedly, a little spurious (none of the schools I’ve ever worked with provide “elevator and escalator safety instruction” or “death education”). But his point is clear nonetheless: schools are being asked to do just about everything, and the list only gets longer — never shorter. 

What Vollmer doesn’t mention in his list is why this happened. It’s easy to complain about these “unfunded mandates” (and believe me, nearly every school leader does), but particularly as we prepare to go back to school during an interminable pandemic, it’s worth stopping to ask how we got here — especially since the path is a relatively short one 

Emotionally Priceless

About a century ago, secondary school was the province of a relatively privileged few. But the “high school movement” of the early 20th century saw American public education transformed within a single generation. Between 1910 and 1940, the percentage of teenagers attending high school increased from 18% to 71%. The two reasons why this happened both set the stage for the things we now expect school to do for our kids: prepare them for adult life, and shield them from delinquency. 

The first part is pretty simple. With more and more people living in cities, and a rise in white-collar jobs, there was a demand for workers who had achieved more education: specifically, a high school education. 

But the second part is much more interesting to me, because it speaks to how emotionally attached we are to the idea of school, and the ways in which it functions not just as a practical tool, but as a psychological barrier against the things we fear most. 

According to historian Viviana Zelizer, whose book “Pricing the Priceless Child” is a landmark work on the subject, the high school movement came at the tail end of a period that saw a total transformation of the way American adults viewed children — an era in which they were transformed into “economically useless but emotionally priceless” creatures. So school provided an acceptable function for these “sacralized” young people, who had been pushed out of the labor market, pushed out of their neighborhoods, pulled out of the farms and fields, and told that, as Zelizer wrote, “the proper place for a ‘sacred’ child was in a protected environment, segregated from adult activities.” 

It was around this same time, in the early 20th century, that we begin to see laws about not only child labor, but also compulsory schooling. As Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin explains it, these laws “were not pro-education. They were, instead, anti-truancy, anti-vagrancy laws designed to make certain that teens were either employed or at school and not loitering.” 

So by the time the Great Depression took hold in the early 1930s, parents and kids alike had become accustomed to the idea that children belonged in school, and that there was really no other appropriate place where they could go. But the Depression shut schools and shortened school terms due to lack of funding. A U.S. Office of Education report showed that nearly 2,000 schools didn’t open in the fall of 1933; by 1934, that number was up to almost 20,000 schools nationwide, according to other sources. The closures affected millions of students. Where schools remained open, programs were cut to the bone in what was called “retrenchment.”  

The New Retrenchment

The pandemic brought us a new kind of “retrenchment,” but unlike during the Great Depression, simply reopening schools won’t solve our problems. (In fact, we’ve already seen the cycle of “open school, shift to remote, quarantine” start back up again this fall.) Yet the anxiety over in-person school is just as urgent — in part because we have nowhere else to put our kids. 

The problems are no mystery. As parents, we are exhausted and stressed. We’re worried about our kids and ourselves. We’re struggling at work (for those of us lucky enough to still have jobs) and we’re facing impossible choices, caught between our children’s physical and mental health.   But our focus on school is in some ways a distraction from all the other things that are wrong — all the ways in which this country has been failing parents, and schools, for such a long time.

As existential a crisis as the lack of child care is, it’s not just the child care. It’s everything.

A century ago, children who were not in school for any number of reasons were almost definitely working, in some capacity. Many were working for wages — about 24 of every 1,000 children in 1930, according to a 1933 Bureau of Labor report. Young people not earning wages would have been expected to contribute by keeping house or taking on other responsibilities at home — in many cases, without direct adult supervision. 

None of this is to say that things were “better” during the Great Depression, for kids or for anyone else. Child laborers faced incredible dangers (alongside adults working in the same hazardous environments) and had little to no bargaining power to improve working conditions. But one unique challenge of this pandemic is the fact that the thought of our children idle, unhappy, or both, fills us with complete panic. 

In part, this panic stems from the very obvious fact that working parents need someone to watch their kids while they work. In 2019, 64% of married couples with children had both parents employed, and “overall, the labor force participation rate … for all women with children under age 18 was 72.3% in 2019.” But as existential a crisis as the lack of child care is, it’s not just the child care. It’s everything. 

The Invisible Funnel

By the mid-1940s, around 75% of all 5- to 19-year-olds in the United States were enrolled in school, although those rates were lower for Black students. And the more children enrolled in school, the more it made sense to use schools as a sort of invisible funnel through which the government could pour any mandate that had to do with young people. 

Yet for all of these mandates — which, as Vollmer’s List makes clear, are numerous and extensive — the real problem of poverty and inequality has stubbornly remained. It’s almost enough to make a person believe that the system isn’t working.  

Take the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program, for example. It was created to solve a very specific problem: farmers during the Great Depression were in some cases producing more commodities than they could sell on the open market, while at the same time children across the country were in danger of malnutrition. 

By buying up surplus agricultural products and distributing them (via public schools) to hungry children, the federal government was able to kill two birds with one stone. The program was born from a crisis, and indeed, by the more prosperous 1960s, only about 15% of American school children participated in the free meal program. 

But the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program did not go away. The reliable market for commodities was still valuable to agricultural producers, and of course, while the national level of participation in the program may have been relatively low, there were many communities where it was much higher than 15%. So the program persisted — and it is a good thing that it did, because participation rates have been climbing ever since. By 2019, nearly three-quarters of American school children were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The crisis of the Great Depression may have ended, but poverty and child hunger have not. 

In the 1970s, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act created the system of special education we know today, but the legislation has been deeply underfunded since its inception. Many schools turn to Medicaid to bridge the gap, but funding also comes from local sources. While the proportion of students with disabilities relative to the total student body has remained fairly consistent since the passage of the Act, the cost of providing needed services to those students has been steadily climbing. Some have attributed those rising costs to the changing nature of the services being provided — services that are largely invisible outside of the walls of the school building. 

Since 1988, when schools have been able to apply for reimbursement directly from Medicaid, schools are increasingly providing things like health screenings, immunizations, hearing and vision screenings and treatment, and other forms of medical care. In most schools, a licensed or registered nurse administers care to students during school hours, but in a growing number of communities, school-based health centers (SBHCs) do much more than that, filling in gaps in the local health care infrastructure with doctor’s visits for anyone in the community. The number of SBHCs doubled between the 1998-99 and 2016-17 school years, now serving more than 6.3 million students. So schools have rather quietly gotten into the health care business — something that might be less necessary if nearly 80% of rural America weren’t medically underserved.  

And then there is the actual child care itself that schools provide, in addition to the hours when kids are actually in a classroom learning. The Afterschool Alliance reports that both participation in, and demand for, after-school programs have risen in the past 15 years (and that’s to say nothing of before-school or “early bird” programs). The organization estimates that more than half of all school-age children have some need for after-school care, and many schools are providing it. 

Put this all together, and we can see that schools are: a) feeding even more children than they did during the Great Depression; b) caring for millions of children with therapy, support services and medical care; and c) watching over kids every morning and afternoon even when school is not in session. 

And all of this is to say nothing of the ad-hoc “services” so many schools provide — the granola bars teachers keep in their desk drawers for kids who look hungry, the schools that have washing machines and laundry soap for students and their families to use, the schools with hygiene pantries, and closets full of coats and prom dresses to give away or lend out. If all this sounds like a lot, it is.  

What we lost

This is what was lost when schools closed in March 2020 — not just a place for our kids to be while we’re at work, not just the benefit of being in the same room with their teacher and their peers, but a vast and often invisible network of services and supports that provide for children’s most basic and urgent needs. And that’s not to say there are no other programs providing children and families with meals and health care. But where these programs may falter or fail to reach a child, schools are left to fill in the gaps. 

And those gaps are growing all the time. In 2013, the average high-income family with school-age children earned 11 times more than a family in the 10th income percentile. A graph from Advisor Perspectives updates the data as far forward as 2017, showing how this gap continues to grow. 

And it’s not just wages that have changed. Between 1985 and 2005, the proportion of income spent on housing by the media family increased from 19 to 22 percent. At that time, 30% was the standard used to assess the affordability of housing — anything above that mark was considered unaffordable. But 2005 was also around the peak of the housing bubble. A September 2019 release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that housing now averages 32.8% of consumer expenditures — more than double the next closest expense (transportation). So basically, on average, housing in this country is just flat-out unaffordable. 

Now imagine if schools didn’t have to add all this to their plate, along with educating our kids. Imagine if our state and federal programs were well enough funded, and wages were high enough — if the United States were not among the developed nations with the highest rates of child poverty in the world. Imagine if there was enough relief available that parents could afford to stay home with their children when they needed to. The current pandemic would still be devastating — but we might not be so singularly desperate for school to solve all our problems. 

‘It’s a ----ing nightmare’

Parents are used to decisions where it feels like there’s no correct answer. Co-sleeping or cry it out? Bottle or breast? Cloth or disposable diapers? Should I let my kid drink juice? Is it safe for her to ride the bus? If I let him play outside, is someone going to call the cops? How much screen time is too much? Is she old enough for her own phone? I don’t know a single parent whose internal monologue isn’t filled with these questions.

So how do we face the choices we have to make about kids and school during a pandemic? And how are schools facing the crisis of trying to continue their role as “everything providers” during the same pandemic? 

Not well. Not well at all. 

“If you’re wondering why parents are so incredibly stressed out, it’s pretty straightforward,” read one Facebook post a friend shared. “Parents are struggling because literally every decision we make now feels like a choice between our children’s mental and physical health. … It’s a f***ing nightmare.” 

We have built a society in which schools and parents are constantly being told to do more, that what they are doing is wrong or insufficient. Schools are labeled as “failing,” and parents are chided for being helicopters or snowplows. Every time we look down, something else has been added to our to-do list. We are never done. It never seems to be enough. 

But in this current crisis — which shows no signs of abating — it has to be enough. We are going to have to knock a few things off the never-ending to-do list. We are going to have to triage education, and parenting, and zero in on the things that are actually necessary. We might have to consider children as more than just emotionally priceless, and potentially useful, members of our households and our school buildings and our societies, if we are going to come through this with our mental health intact. And we are going to need more help to do the things that definitely are necessary. Universal childcare, universal health care, and a fair wage for all would be a tremendous start. 

Parenting and education cannot keep running along these frantic, parallel tracks toward complete burnout, each side constantly feeling as if the other is not doing their job. We need to join forces, and find a way to team up against the systemic inequalities that really need fighting. We are going to need each other if we are going to survive this.

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