As a middle class suburban parent, let me tell you what's going on here. There are lots of reports of all of us organizing our own backyard schools with private tutors. This may be happening here and there, but this is NOT a widespread phenomenon.

These homeschool pods are being blown up out of proportion out of the fear that middle class families are going to weather the pandemic school shutdowns better than poorer families. They will. But not because of these so-called pods.

These parents have more resources to help their kids with their homework. Reporters are helping their kids with their writing homework. Accountants are drilling their kids on their math facts. I helped my high school with his history project on the public policy of Ronald Reagan.

Middle class parents have ALWAYS done this, though they have had to do a lot more since March. They have also hired tutors and signed up for online classes in coding and cooking. I did. Again, middle class families have ALWAYS done this, but now more so.

The question is what can you do about it? Not much. Are you going to tell a parent to not read to his kid at night, because somewhere there's a poor kid who doesn't have a parent to do that? That would be silly.

Let's get the right villain here. It's not middle class families that are failing poor kids. It's schools that are failing poor kids. Their schools did not provide live classes or computers. They completely flaked out.

Don't get me wrong, those schools failed middle class parents, too. My kid had less than one hour of live class per week, since March. Almost all worksheets. But we handled it as best as we could. I mean our kids were screwed over too, but not as much.