Education, Childcare and Community need a divorce from their dysfunctional three-way

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an entrepreneur and activist, is that if you try to do everything at once, you end up doing nothing well. Currently, school serves as the primary place they turn to for education, childcare and making friends (because I cringe at the word “socialization” for a variety of reasons). And it’s

While it’s almost never talked about in discussions about how to improve learning, parents with kids ages 5–12 depend absolutely on school as a form of childcare. When schools closed to COVID, we also learned that many depend on school as a way to get their kids food and meet other basic needs. The irony here, is that the typical school day is 8–3 (based on a pre-industrial farm factory schedule), whereas the typical work day is more like 10–6 and increasingly, families have remote and flexible work, which greatly changes their childcare needs. Likewise, over 18% of the workforce is Stay-at-home-parents (plus entrepreneurs) whose childcare needs are equally vital. It’s kind of insane that we haven’t change school to accommodate better for the modern family’s work schedule in 100 years. And then, what about childcare when it’s most needed, before the age of five and um, the entire summer…? Parents spend 20% of their income on childcare over the course of their kid’s lifetime…