But more broadly, Covid or no Covid, we’ve known for a long time that schools and education is a major critical information need that communities have. It’s [an area] where there are also inequities in information access across racial, ethnic, and socio-ethnic lines. With all of the future being paid to the importance of local news, the importance of schools in people’s lives, this seemed like a natural area to dig in really deep. With the overlay of the pandemic, the urgency of the research ratcheted up by orders of magnitude.

We asked a question that went something like: “Do you find news media sources to be the most useful in helping you with your education information needs, or do you find non-media sources to be most useful?” Maybe a little under half of all parents said, “Both of those sources are equally useful to me.”

But in the other half, there were a lot of parents who said “non-media sources” were most useful to them — that means networks, school officials, sources like that. And this was especially driven by white parents. There was a noticeable difference there by race and ethnicity.

It was intriguing to me, so I dug a bit deeper into the data and I think part of how we can explain that is that white parents seem to be able to leverage their informal networks with greater efficiency. These networks work better for white parents than they do for parents of color.

Our surveys show that, for one, Black and Hispanic parents are less likely to use or prefer email as a school communication source. You and I both know how much email is used [in schools]. Parents of color, especially Hispanic parents, are more likely to say that they’ve had bad experiences with school communication. Before the pandemic, they were less likely to feel comfortable going to in-person school events, more likely to feel that teachers are not responsive to diverse cultural backgrounds. There’s a host of issues that make these non-media or non-journalistic sources of information less useful for parents of color.

And so they’re left with professional news media. Local TV, and other sources like that.

We asked open-ended questions to allow people to tell us a little bit more about what kinds of information would be useful. A lot of this came down to things like: Parents who essentially had been relying on their school systems to help provide for their children’s nutritional needs now, through a large portion of the last couple years, now had to try to figure out some of that stuff on their own.

We got responses like, “I need to figure out how to get my child’s school to get meals to my kid.”

It speaks to the larger role that school systems play in things that are not just about learning. What we’re seeing in that data is parents who are looking for information about how to meet a whole host of needs for their families. Those needs, yes, include learning and, yes, include Covid safety, but they also include things like physical and mental health for their kids. Schools have social workers. Schools have a whole host of support systems that became more fragile during Covid.

There were other things that came up too, especially in the first survey we fielded back in 2020. Bullying was a pretty common theme when it came to school safety, in general. Prior to Covid, you would have thought about safety in terms of things like gun violence in schools and school shootings.

My response to this is a little bit speculative, but what I’ll say is that there are very high stakes in the American public educational system. Children’s futures are really determined in these institutions, in many ways, and deep structural institutional racism means that, unfortunately, parents of color, Black and Hispanic parents, as we see in this study, are paying especially close attention to how they navigate these systems, which can be stacked against them, and [which are] confusing to navigate for any parent.

I will say personally, as a white parent of privilege: The seas kind of part. It’s easier for me to just walk into the superintendent’s office or the principal’s office and get the attention and answers that I feel that I need. I think this study is a reflection that that’s not everybody’s experience.

I’m not saying that the politics has not further invaded this space, even since [the time of the second survey]. It may have. But even looking at recent political polling in the midterms — and CNN had a poll out just this week about parents’ voting priorities related to education — it’s a mix. It’s complex, it’s diverse, it’s not just school politics by any stretch. [School politics] are not what’s [top] on parents’ minds. It’s something of a secondary concern for the majority of parents.

It would also be nice to be able to actually get into the politics of school information even further. I may be able to do this with the data set that I have — explore responses by partisanship. I would like to know more about the impact of parent gender identity on information-seeking habits. These are all things that we intend to explore. I would love to be able to understand more about the experiences of parents who don’t identify as Black or white or Latino or Hispanic but who are from, say, Asian-American backgrounds. Survey research makes it very difficult to have a robust enough sample to really understand the experiences of these groups.