The Kids are Not All Right: Educational Inequalities in the Time of COVID-19

• In Event: Parenting Stress and Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In March 2020, the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus created both a public health crisis as well as an education crisis. Schools, often overnight, moved from in-person instruction to remote, online education. Because there were no strategies in place for moving education into the home, the onus for structuring and delivering learning fell completely on caregivers. A chief concern regarding this shift is that well-documented socioeconomic inequalities in education will expand even more over the 2020-2021 school year, creating what some are calling the “COVID-19 gap.” To prevent and address this potential gap, we need to understand the process by which these inequalities may emerge. We know that parents of higher socioeconomic status (SES) have greater access to and information about educational resources than lower SES parents, and that these differences partially explain SES-based achievement gaps. It follows that these resource differences will play a key role in the COVID-19 gap, as learning moves into the home and, increasingly, online. Our paper uses social media data to analyze the types of online resources that parents across the socioeconomic distribution are accessing related to “homeschooling” and related terms. Specifically, we will answer the question: Do higher- versus lower-SES parents differ in their online discussions of “homeschooling” and in the types of resources they are seeking through social media interactions? We provide initial evidence of these differences by tracking the frequency of words related to homeschooling on the social media platform, Twitter, and compare their emergence from February to June 2020.

Our team has been gathering a large sample of Twitter posts, or “tweets,” containing keywords related to “parenting” since 2017. Since mid-January 2020, our team has also been gathering tweets containing hashtags related to “COVID-19”. To date, we have collected over 180 million tweets related to COVID-19. These data were collected using the Twitter Streaming Application Program Interface (API). We identify tweets about education and home learning in particular. The key to answering our research questions is our ability to observe changes in the content of tweets about education before and after March 2020. We began by tracking the frequency of terms associated with homeschooling from February through June 2020, as the pandemic took root and social restrictions, including school closures, were imposed.

Results from these Twitter data (see Figure 1) show that there was a steep increase in the mentions of terms like “homeschooling,” “remote learning,” and “distance learning” in March 2020, with the largest peak for “distance learning” on March 23rd. Most schools in the U.S. began announcing the end of in-person instruction around March 18th. These data will be examined by education level (i.e., less than college, more than college) and tweets will be analyzed for potential differences in the content of these tweets related to providing educational experiences in the home environment.

Authors

• Pamela Davis-Kean, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Ryan, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa Singh, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicholas Waters, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Samantha Steimle, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author