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Now that everybody is homeschooling, a newsworthy elite assault slams the usual version

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The COVID-19 Era has produced a temporary revolution in American education.

Call it universal homeschooling. Just about everyone from kindergarten through grad school is studying at home. Unlike usual homeschooling, where parents are teachers, Covid coursework is led by schools’ regular teachers online, though parents often manage matters.

Right at this odd moment, normal homeschooling has come under a major attack that provokes vigorous reactions. The coronavirus news hook offers an ideal moment to take a substantial look at the pros and cons of this growing phenomenon that involves some 3% of American children and young people. The story fits the education and religion beats alike, since the majority of homeschool families are religious.

The big new development here is an 80-page anti-homeschool blast in the current issue of the Arizona Law Review by Harvard University Professor Elizabeth Bartholet (click for .pdf), who directs the law school’s Child Advocacy Program. She also makes her case in an interview with Harvard magazine.

The bottom line: Bartholet wants courts and legislatures to ban homeschooling, for the most part, as Germany and Sweden do.

She thinks government should permit exceptions case by case, for instance to accommodate the regimens of talented young athletes or artists. Such permission would be reviewed annually.

Less drastically, Bartholet thinks states are far too lax and should require home schools and public schools to meet similar standards. States would set qualifications for parents to teach (she favors college degrees for high school teachers and high school diplomas for the lower grades), ensure that the curriculum meets minimum state standards, check up via home visits, and require annual standardized tests. If home schools don’t measure up, states would transfer children to public schools.

Policy-makers might see those as common-sense proposals well worth debating. But her advocacy of virtual prohibition signals a strong aversion to the whole idea of homeschooling and a particular hostility toward religious subcultures.


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Faith played major role in life of New York ER doctor who took her own life: What was it?

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Back in my Charlotte News (RIP) and Charlotte Observer days, I sat across a desk from a truly fantastic general assignment and police and cops reporter — a kind, soft-spoken ex-U.S. Marine.

Over and over, I heard him make difficult calls to people involved in tragedies, including the families of people who died in all kinds of accidents, crimes or acts of nature. This has to be one of the hardest jobs in journalism, for a reporter who needs information but doesn’t want to inflict emotional pain.

The goal, he once told me, was to avoid pushy questions about feelings and emotions. Instead, he tried to ask calm, factual questions they only a parent, spouse of sibling would know. The goal was not to waste their time or hurt them — but to find other voices (at specific institutions or networks of people) to interview. So he would ask if a young person had a favorite teacher or was active in a sports team or musical ensemble. Frequently, in Charlotte, he asked about friends and pastors at a religious congregation.

I thought of this reporter, and this issue, when reading a stunningly tragic New York Times coronavirus crisis story that ran with this headline: “Top E.R. Doctor Who Treated Virus Patients Dies by Suicide.” Let me stress that I want to praise this story, while also noting that — at a key moment — the Times team mentioned a strong religion angle, and then dropped the topic. First, here is some of the overture:

A top emergency room doctor at a Manhattan hospital that treated many coronavirus patients died by suicide on Sunday, her father and the police said.

Dr. Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Charlottesville, Va., where she was staying with family, her father said in an interview. …

Dr. Breen’s father, Dr. Philip C. Breen, said she had described devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients.

“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said.


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Catholic media highlights trend in young people gravitating towards faith during pandemic

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The ever-evolving coronavirus pandemic has upended our world in ways no one could have ever expected. Journalists still don’t know where this story is going.

But one thing is clear. While death tolls climb and fall depending on which countries are effectively flattening the curve, the vast majority of those of us who are healthy and staying at home still have to deal with loneliness.

How does faith play a part in mitigating isolation? A survey released four weeks ago by Springtide Research Institute, which studies trends of those ages 13 to 25. What did they find? The survey revealed the following regarding young people, faith and the novel coronavirus. The following summary is long, but essential, especially for religion-beat professionals:

… For many young adults, shelter in place and social distancing provokes fear and uncertainty, leading to increased levels of isolation, loneliness, and anxiety. The survey found that the single most important way to mitigate loneliness is for trusted adults to reach out and connect with young adults.

* The survey consisted of a national panel of 508 respondents ages 18–25, with a margin of error of +/- 4% at a 95% confidence level, administered between March 24 and March 31, 2020.

* One in three respondents are sheltering in place alone.

* 63% of all respondents say that they do not feel as alone or isolated when people reach out to them.

* Among young adults who are sheltering in place with others, half still say that they feel alone, and nearly eight out of ten report feeling less lonely when a trusted adult from outside their household checks in on them.

* About 58% say they feel scared and uncertain, and 66% of those who feel this way say they don’t have anyone to talk to about their emotions. Thus, they feel isolated because no one is reaching out to them.

* Respondents are not experiencing a decrease in their faith; in fact, 35% increased their faith and 47% stayed the same.

* Nearly 46% have started new religious practices, and 43% have participated in at least one religious service online.


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Dawn of the dead: Faith-based colleges face challenges even bigger than coronavirus

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Dawn of the dead: Faith-based colleges face challenges even bigger than coronavirus

Every week or so, John Mark Reynolds does something that presidents of academic institutions rarely do -- he cleans his office at Saint Constantine School.

This isn't a symbolic gesture in an age of ominous trends, and now a global pandemic, that threaten private education. Reynolds always takes his turn -- with other members of his team -- cleaning administration offices at this classical school in Houston.

"We have no administrators who are just administrators. Everyone teaches. Everyone shares many of the jobs that need to get done," said Reynolds, reached at his "sheltering in place" home office. "We have a maintenance team, but we all help out. The first lady and I plan to water some plants later today. …

"We call this the economy of small."

Saint Constantine is a K-16 Orthodox Christian school, which means it offers four years of college credits. College tuition is $9,000 per year.

"Our whole model was created to survive the collapse of liberal arts education, while striving to preserve the core of liberal arts education through an Oxford-style tutorial system," said Reynolds. "This pandemic is only exposing the weaknesses of what was already a business model fraught with peril."

College educators have long known that painful challenges were coming in 2025, due to falling birth rates and the end of high millennial-generation enrollments.

Now, the coronavirus crisis is forcing students and parents to face troubling realities. A study by McKinsey & Company researchers noted: "Hunkering down at home with a laptop … is a world away from the rich on-campus life that existed in February."

What happens next? The study noted: "In the virus-recurrence and pandemic-escalation scenarios, higher-education institutions could see much less predictable yield rates (the percentage of those admitted who attend) if would-be first-year students decide to take a gap year or attend somewhere closer to home (and less costly) because of the expectation of longer-term financial challenges for their families."


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Slavic Pentecostals, coronavirus and California politics make a confusing mix at Sacramento Bee

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It isn’t often that a newspaper does such an awful job on a coronavirus story that it has to run several more stories correcting the initial report.

Let’s work our way through this case slowly.

A few weeks ago, I became aware of stories in the Sacramento Bee that blamed one megachurch for the spread of coronavirus among several dozen individuals. It’s the country’s largest Slavic Pentecostal church and, judging from one of the Bee’s pieces, a center of dangerous activity because of past opposition to gay rights. So when the church is linked to 71 coronavirus infections and one death and counting, it’s game on.

We’ll start with the Sacramento Bee’s initial April 2 piece on the virus’s spread. It had four bylines. What you see here is a second version of the story, which has the church’s response. But the original did not.

One church in Sacramento County is now the epicenter of a major outbreak of coronavirus, and frustrated county officials say church leaders are refusing to listen to their demands to stop fellowship meetings.

Seventy-one members of the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church near Rancho Cordova or people associated with congregation members have been afflicted with the virus, county officials say, making this one of the larger outbreak clusters in the country. One parishioner has died, officials said, and the pastor is sick.

Hmm … that second sentence is a cover-all-your-bases kind of statement. The region’s Slav community, which the Bee says numbers 90,000, is a close-knit one. So to say “people associated with congregation members” throws a pretty wide net.

Bethany is a large church at 3,500 members (but with up to 10,000 attending) but there are actually 103 other Slavic churches in the region. Was Bethany the main source of this problem or were there other churches involved? Or were there ethnic Slavs involved who weren’t members of any church at all?


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No #SURPRISE -- Another Womenpriests story offers public-relations ink instead of news

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How many times have your GetReligionistas written about one-sided mainstream press coverage of the tiny Womenpriests church, or movement, or association, or denomination, or independent church?

We have already noted that no one seems to know if the proper journalistic style for the movement’s name is Womenpriests, WomenPriests or Women Priests. Wait, are there now two organizations at work here, Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, Inc.? What’s up?

We have already published a post (“Surprise! It's time for another one-sided look at the birth of a new church — the Women Priests”) that opens with six essential journalism problems to look for when evaluating mainstream media coverage of this issue. Here are the first two and, yes, (2) is really a two-fer:

(1) As Mollie “GetReligionista emerita” Hemingway used to say, just because someone says that he or she plays shortstop for the New York Yankees does not mean that this person plays shortstop for the world’s most famous baseball team. Only the leaders of the Yankees get to make that call.

(2) The doctrine of “apostolic succession” involves more than one bishop laying hands on someone. Ordination in ancient Christian churches requires “right doctrine” as well as “right orders.” Also, it helps to know the name of the bishop or bishops performing the alleged ordination. Be on the alert for “Old Catholic” bishops, some of whom were ordained via mail order.

Also, we have issued this challenge to readers, which — so far — has drawn zero responses:

Would your GetReligionistas praise a mainstream news story on this movement that offered a fair-minded, accurate, 50-50 debate between articulate, informed voices on both sides? You bet. Once again: If readers find a story of this kind, please send us the URL.

We are still waiting. However, a reader recently sent a URL for yet another story that repeats almost all of the errors we have seen so many times. It is clear that, while the Womenpriests church is small, it has a fabulous press-relations team.

This latest Gannett press release on this subject was published by the Daytona Beach News-Journal, under a very typical headline stating, “Defiance in DeLand: Woman ordained Roman Catholic priest.” The reader that sent this in noted:


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Plug-In: Those seeking lessons on locked houses of worship can study 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

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I thought I knew a little about my family’s history.

I’ve written about my grandfather Lloyd Lee Ross, whose World War II service earned him a Bronze Star Medal and a Purple Heart. Papa died in 2011 at age 93.

I’ve visited the rural West Tennessee cemetery where generations of my relatives — going all the way back to my great-great-great-great-grandfather Daniel Ross (1791-1842) — are buried.

But not until the COVID-19 crisis hit did I learn about the global influenza pandemic of 1918 — known colloquially as the Spanish flu — and my family’s connection to it.

I knew that Papa lost his father when he was a baby. It turns out that my great-grandfather William Charles Ross (1883-1918) died on Nov. 15, 1918, at age 35 from the flu pandemic. Papa, the youngest of William Charles’ five children, was nine days shy of eight months old.

I appreciate my Uncle Chuck educating me on these details from our family’s past.

Given my interest in religion, I am grateful, too, for the journalists digging through newspaper archives to report on how houses of worship responded to the 1918 pandemic, which killed nearly 700,000 in the U.S. and 50 million globally.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Peter Smith wrote a fascinating piece on the subject, as did the Birmingham News’ Greg Garrison. For Religion News Service, Megan Botel and Isaiah Murtaugh related a Los Angeles church’s “tale of two pandemics, 100 years apart.”

At The Gospel Coalition, Joe Carter (a former member of the GetReligion team) offered “9 things you should know about the 1918 influenza pandemic.” And Word & Way editor Brian Kaylor interviewed a historian who says the 1918 pandemic shows churches can survive shutdowns.


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Thinking with Ryan Burge: Why it would be dangerous for most churches to reopen

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If you read newspapers, the world of coronavirus-era religion appears to be divided into two worlds.

On one side are lots of crazy white evangelicals — you know, the people in MAGA hats — who want to return to face-to-face worship and, thus, risk the lives of ordinary people in their communities. These are the bad guys in this drama.

There have been a few news reports that note that quite a few black Pentecostals are part of this camp, but, well, nevermind. That information just complicates things.

On the other side are the good guys — mainline Protestants and Catholics who have embraced online church life and deserve to be cheered.

Now, where does the following information from Baptist Press — the media arm of the giant Southern Baptist Convention — fit into this picture? This is from a story on initial discussions, among SBC leaders, of reopening the doors of their churches. That’s right — the Southern Baptists (I haven’t heard of any exceptions) have been worshiping online. This is long, but the details matter:

Michael Lewis, pastor of Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., said his team is cautiously planning to reopen as early as May 10, though the date is tentative and dependent on progress as measured by the official guidelines for reopening set out by the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Lewis said Marietta, one of Atlanta's northern suburbs, is almost through the Phase 1 of the COVID-19 guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for reopening states. When the city enters Phase 2, Roswell Street Baptist, which averages about 700 in attendance Sunday morning, would conduct two worship-only services.

Two staff members would monitor two designated entrances. There would be no greeters, but those doors would remain open throughout the services. Attendees would be seated by household, with groups separated by at least six feet. They would be formally seated and dismissed in order to maintain social-distancing. Restroom use would be limited. The church would not print bulletins.

"We're going to adhere very strictly to the CDC guidelines," Lewis said, noting that the May 10 target date could be postponed if necessary.


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Reading between lines of recent surveys: Is the worst of the Sexual Revolution over?

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THE QUESTION:

“Is the Worst of the Sexual Revolution Over?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The New York Times ran a feature last month about teens wearing shirts that proclaim “Virginity Rocks.” This fad did not originate with those Christian “True Love Waits” crusaders but a YouTube personality who professed a “tongue in cheek” attitude but said he’s happy if teens advocate abstinence, and some actually do take the slogan seriously.

A dog-eared maxim in our business says “dog bites man” isn’t news but “man bites dog” is. Likewise, this fashion curiosity is newsworthy because so many young Americans think the opposite. And yet we encounter the question above, which was the headline of a recent article for thedispatch.com by David French, who has emerged as among the more interesting weekly commentators on modern morals and religion.

French’s article sidesteps two major aspects of the “sexual revolution,” legalized same-sex relationships, which are broadly accepted but remain central to unresolved religious-liberty disputes, and transgender or “non-binary” causes that are more contested.

His focus instead is on heterosexual principles in the heritage of all great world religions that have been challenged in the U.S. by easy divorce, rising promiscuity and cohabitation, and resulting single motherhood. Hefty majorities found those practices “morally acceptable” in Gallup’s annual values survey for 2019. (Adultery, by contrast, was still judged to be immoral by 89 percent of Americans.)

The headline’s use of “worst” conveys French’s view that the revolution has been unfortunate, and we’ll see more about that below.


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