Andrew Harnik/AP

President Joe Biden, accompanied by FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, speaks about the government's pandemic response, at the White House campus in Washington, Jan. 13, 2022. Democratic parents say they are weary of restrictions and want to see their children’s schools return to normal.

Jennifer Reesman has always been a proud Democrat. A single mother who lives in one of the nation’s bluest counties, she says some of her favorite items of clothing include T-shirts from both Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaigns.

But as America enters its third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Reesman is actively organizing to vote her local and state Democratic leaders out of office.

“I can’t look my kid in the eye and say I care about your education and vote for the Democrats right now,” says Ms. Reesman, a pediatric neuropsychologist from Rockville, Maryland. “I cannot believe that this is where we are – but it feels personal, and it feels painful.”

In 2020, Democrats won the White House and Senate in part by pitching themselves as the party that would take the pandemic seriously and get it under control. More than 90% of Democratic voters thought precautions like avoiding group gatherings and closing in-person schooling were necessary in the early months of the pandemic, according to Pew Research. In crucial swing states, a majority of voters said in exit polling that containing the virus was more important than rebuilding the economy. 

But a little over a year later, America is in a very different place. Vaccines are widely available, numerous studies have confirmed the virus poses little risk to children, and public health officials have characterized omicron as less virulent than previous variants. And a growing number of Democratic voters like Ms. Reesman are voicing frustration over the mounting toll of pandemic protocols – particularly those affecting kids and their education.

In cities where stadiums are packed with screaming sports fans and bars are fully open, many schools are continuing to impose mask mandates, separate children at lunch, and limit their extracurricular activities. Up until a recent change in guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, schoolchildren often had to quarantine for 10 days whenever anyone in their class tested positive, causing a steady stream of disruptions.

With Democrats already facing head winds going into November’s midterm elections, political strategists say being seen as the party of “never-ending” COVID-19 restrictions could pose a significant political liability. An early warning sign came with last November’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won in part by tapping into parental frustration. Post-election polling showed that education was the dominant issue for Biden-Youngkin voters, with almost three-quarters of education-minded voters supporting Mr. Youngkin. 

Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch/AP

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin works at his desk inside his private office at the State Capitol in Richmond, Jan. 18, 2022. Post-election polling showed that education was the dominant issue for Biden-Youngkin voters, with almost three-quarters of education-minded voters supporting Mr. Youngkin.

Notably, both Virginia and New Jersey – an even bluer state where the Democratic governor barely eked out reelection in November – were in the bottom 10 states for in-person schooling during the 2020-2021 school year. Maryland, where Ms. Reesman lives, was ranked 47th. She says that at this point, Democratic officials ignore pandemic fatigue at their peril.

“We are a family that has done everything right,” says Ms. Reesman, noting that she is boosted, her daughter is vaccinated, and they have conscientiously worn their masks when out in public. “There is just no end of restrictions in sight, and no one seems to give a damn about it. I think Democrats have really underestimated what this did to families – and our level of anger.” 

“Things don’t feel back to normal”

At a recent press conference, President Joe Biden acknowledged that “there’s a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country” due to the pandemic, but insisted the nation is in a better place than a year ago. He noted that last spring’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan provided $130 billion to keep students and educators safe and schools open.

Many school districts “spent this money very well,” the president said, although “unfortunately, some haven’t.” When asked directly if he thought school closures could be a potent issue for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, Mr. Biden admitted, “It could be.” 

“There is frustration, because people wanted to see a return to normalcy under Biden,” says Aliza Astrow, an analyst with the centrist think tank Third Way. “That’s what he promised and what people expected – but things don’t feel back to normal.”

Recent polls show a widening divide among Democrats when it comes to COVID-19 restrictions. When asked in a Monmouth University poll if they agreed with the statement “It’s time we accept that COVID is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives,” almost 90% of Republicans and more than 70% of independents said yes. Democrats, however, were almost evenly split – with 47% agreeing and 51% disagreeing. 

“It shows a fracture” in the Democratic Party, says Jason Roe, a GOP strategist and former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. And internal divisions are not something a party wants heading into an election – particularly as it becomes harder and harder to please both camps.

Several Democratic governors, such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, and even Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who had imposed some of the toughest restrictions in the country early on in the pandemic, have lately been emphasizing the need to “move on.”  

But the delay in getting there, and the continued push for restrictions by other members of the party’s base, may be enough to fuel a red wave next fall. In Michigan, Mr. Roe says county party chairs are seeing “swelling participation” at local meetings with a new kind of attendee: parents. 

“I think the Democrats woke a sleeping giant,” says Mr. Roe. “You are reaching a point where people on the left, who maybe were more collectivist about our responsibility, are done with it. They want their kids to be in a normal situation.” 

Disrupted schooling

While nearly all U.S. public schools have been operating in person since the fall, periodic closures and other disruptions have persisted.

Scott P. Yates/The Roanoke Times/AP

Ashleigh Moore, a parent of Roanoke County Public Schools students and a former public school teacher, and other protesters urge school board members to vote to end a masking mandate before the Roanoke County School Board meeting on Jan. 27, 2022, in Roanoke, Virginia.

According to Burbio, a data service that tracks school pandemic-related disruptions, more than 7,450 public schools were not open for in-person learning the second week back from winter break. Almost 5,000 were closed the following week. In Maryland, 11 Montgomery County schools went virtual for two weeks in January after more than 5% of staff and students tested positive – a threshold the district has since abandoned after a public backlash.

Some of the disruptions have been the result of pandemic-induced staffing shortages as teachers, bus drivers, and other staff have called out sick. Other districts were forced to close due to protesting teachers unions – sometimes pitting Democratic officials against a loyal component of their voter base. Students in Chicago missed five days of school last month when the Chicago Teachers’ Union held a strike after Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot opposed its demand to revert to virtual schooling.

It’s the one issue that comes up at campaign events “without exception,” says David Blair, one of four Democratic candidates running for Montgomery County executive.

“The pendulum has really swung from ‘Let’s be safe and cautious; let’s keep everyone home,’ to ‘Why don’t we have enough substitute teachers, masks, and testing? These kids should be in school,’” says Mr. Blair. 

In some Democratic strongholds, school masking also seems to be a growing point of contention. In Virginia, where Governor Youngkin recently issued a ban on mask mandates, seven school districts are challenging the ban in court. In Fairfax County, which voted for Mr. Biden by a margin of 40 percentage points, some 4,000 people logged into a virtual town hall in which the school district explained its decision to join the lawsuit. And while it was unclear how many attendees were in favor and how many opposed, almost all who spoke testified against school restrictions “going further” than they needed to. 

Maryland gubernatorial candidate John King Jr., who was secretary of education under President Barack Obama, says Democrats understand the importance of in-person education – and care deeply about children’s well-being – but have often faced difficult choices due to the unpredictable nature of the virus.  

“We should do everything possible to keep schools open safely, but acknowledge that sometimes, particularly staffing challenges make it necessary for schools to go virtual,” says Mr. King, a Montgomery public school parent himself. 

He says officials need to express more empathy about what the past two years have been like for parents: “It’s really important for leaders to acknowledge how hard it’s been.” To help children make up for lost learning, he is pushing for more tutoring programs. He’s also advocating for more testing, a vaccine passport system for the state, and free KN95 or N95 masks for all students – tools he believes will help schools stay open and keep students safe.

Still, some Marylanders say that at this stage in the pandemic, they want fewer COVID-19 measures, not more. 

Lori Trent, an independent voter from Silver Spring in Montgomery County, voted for Mr. Biden but says she’s disappointed with the president’s term thus far. A mother who works in health care IT sales, she wishes Mr. Biden had spent less time focusing on “multibillion-dollar bills for child care” through his Build Back Better legislation and instead just ensured all public schools stayed open – the most basic form of child care for many families.

“The Democratic Party is saying, ‘We are for families; we are for the working class,’ but at the same time they are also saying, ‘We are going to close down schools – so we’re not really,’” says Ms. Trent, who sent her high school son to live with her sister in Arizona last year so he could attend school in person.

“At some point, Democrats need to drop it,” she says. “It is 2022.” 

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that more than 7,450 public school districts were closed the second week after winter break. It was more than 7,450 public schools. 

Henry Nicholls/Reuters

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson outside 10 Downing Street in London. Fighting demands that he resign for breaching COVID-19 lockdown rules, he is seeking to bolster support by doubling down on Brexit.

It had fallen off the news radar, crowded out by a damning drumbeat of headlines about eating, drinking, and dancing in Downing Street while the rest of Britain struggled under lockdown.

But Brexit is back.

Britain’s withdrawal from its decadeslong membership in the European Union – the issue on which Mr. Johnson rode to the top job – is taking on new relevance. And, for the increasingly embattled prime minister, new urgency.

Brexit is Mr. Johnson’s defining achievement. Deepening its impact and widening its supposed benefits are key to ensuring continued personal support from fellow Brexiteers in the ruling Conservative Party. And as calls mount for his resignation over “partygate,” he needs every vote he can get.

Yet there’s also a longer-term reason for the renewed focus on Brexit, because how the process pans out will determine more than just the future political and economic shape of Britain.

Depending on its course, it could serve either as a shining example or a cautionary tale for populist politicians elsewhere in Europe who, like Mr. Johnson, have held out the promise of reasserting their countries’ ethnic and national identity by pushing back against existing international alliances and institutions.

Countries like Poland and Hungary, and right-wing opposition politicians in France, Germany, Italy and other European countries. 

That’s because Brexit was never simply about Britain’s trade relationship with the EU.

It was a political vision, for which Mr. Johnson was the ebullient chief spokesman, combining echoes of Britain’s imperial past with what he portrayed as new opportunities for the 21^st century.

“Unshackling” itself from the EU would allow Britain to “control its borders” – shorthand not just for ending the visa-free access that had brought in workers from other EU states, but curbing immigration more broadly. It would let Britain create a lower-tax, lower-tariff economy, and open the way for lucrative new trade deals, above all with America.

Peter Morrison/PA/AP

A truck is checked at Belfast Docks on Feb. 3, 2022. A U.K. government minister ordered Northern Ireland officials to stop inspecting cargoes arriving from other parts of the U.K., in violation of the Brexit agreement between Britain and the European Union.

Brexit would create a new “global Britain,” more respected and influential on the world stage.

All of that, however, still hangs in the balance.

A year on from the entry into force of the exit terms, the scant evidence that Mr. Johnson has made good on this Brexit vision has left even supporters frustrated.

Last month, Mr. Johnson’s Brexit minister resigned, unhappy at the pace of travel. And a recent poll found that among voters who had backed Brexit and expected it to go well, only 17% believe now that it has turned out like that.

Little wonder, then, that Mr. Johnson pledged this week to “go ever faster,” unveiling plans for a “Brexit Freedoms Bill” aimed at streamlining the process of removing EU-influenced regulations from Britain’s statute book.

His vision of Britain’s revitalized “global power” was also on show, in response to the Ukraine crisis. He signed off on further military deployments to the region, and declared that Britain was “leading” efforts to forge a united Western response.

Ahead of a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday, his office also revealed he would be speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin, though that call – embarrassingly – had to be rescheduled on Monday because Mr. Johnson was in Parliament, under heavy fire from both government and opposition benches over the “partygate” allegations.

Still, the main problem for Mr. Johnson – or his successor, if he ends up being replaced – is that making the vision of Brexit a success is proving harder than its supporters had hoped.

They had always acknowledged that some short-term economic difficulties were to be expected. But much of the reduction in British-European trade seems likely to last and the potential game-changer – a deal with the U.S. – remains a distant prospect.

Britain’s independent Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that in the long term, Brexit will cut 4% from British GDP.

The promise of fewer immigrants has also run into difficulty. When businesses faced production problems because the flow of workers from the EU had dried up, the government had to selectively ease restrictions. And Brexit has done nothing to stop record numbers of asylum-seekers from making the perilous trip across the English Channel in hopes of reaching British soil.

What of the dreams of a new, boldly independent geopolitical role for London? Britain does retain influence through its permanent U.N. Security Council seat, its place in the G-7 group of advanced economies, and its membership in NATO. Alongside France, Britain is the only serious European military power, something which has indeed given it considerable weight in U.S. moves to ensure a strong allied response on Ukraine.

But post-Brexit, Britain now has to compete for attention in Washington and other world capitals with the European Union.

Ben Stanstall/AP

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Minister of State for Europe Christopher Heaton-Harris (far left), and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis (right), welcome EU post-Brexit negotiator Maroš Šefčovič (second from left) as he arrives for a meeting. A year after Brexit came into force, the U.K. and EU are still arguing about how to implement aspects of their agreement.

Over time, Brexit’s advantages may indeed come to outstrip is challenges. But its short-term difficulties seem to have soured populist politicians on the European continent on the idea of leaving the EU.

Whether “exit” rebounds as a populist cause will hinge on whether Brexit itself can do so.

Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, doesn’t have the luxury of time. His top priority is to remind his party that, in the words of the slogan he parlayed into election victory in 2019, he “got Brexit done.”

Now, facing potentially career-ending scandals, he depends more than ever on support from Brexit loyalists if he is to save his political life. He will get it only if he can put the partying behind him, and walk the straight and narrow path of Brexit.

Mashona Dlamini knew his land was rich long before any mining company told him so.  

As a child, he often followed his father, a healer called an inyanga, down through the silver-flecked red dunes around their village to the coast. There, they gathered the octopuses, sea urchins, and seawater that his father used to make medicine. In winter, the land on either side of their path heaved up sweet potatoes and corn, in summer thick bunches of bananas. As long as they took only what they needed, Mr. Dlamini’s father explained as they walked, there would always be more.

So when international mining companies began to arrive in the early 2000s – first for titanium in the dunes, and later for gas they said might be beneath the ocean floor – Mr. Dlamini, along with many of his neighbors, wasn’t particularly interested in their pitch. 

“These companies can come and go, but we live with the consequences of what they do,” says Mr. Dlamini, now in his mid-80s and an inyanga himself. “The land and the ocean are a finite resource. We don’t want them to become a history lesson.” 

So in December, when a hulking blue and white ship called the Amazon Warrior appeared off the coast of nearby Xolobeni, many felt history repeating itself. The vessel had been hired by Royal Dutch Shell to blast powerful sound waves into the ocean floor as part of a seismic survey. By the way the sound bounced off the seabed, they would be able to tell if there were valuable reserves of natural gas in the water here. 

A few weeks later, a South African court ordered the multinational to stop the seismic survey pending a proper environmental assessment. The court ruled that Shell hadn’t properly consulted with communities that could be affected by the survey, and hadn’t made sure the survey wouldn’t be environmentally destructive.  

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Mashona Dlamini, a traditional healer in Segidi, South Africa, was a plaintiff in a recent court case forcing Shell to stop a seismic survey along the coast near his village.

Shell has said it is committed to continuing exploration using a “caring” approach, and the oil giant will likely return to court later this year for the right to continue its survey. Critics say the seismic survey will disturb endangered wildlife, such as penguins, dolphins, and migrating humpback whales, but the project has strong political backing, chiefly from South Africa’s energy minister. That could pitch coastal communities, which fear losing their ancestral homeland and the country’s most pristine stretch of coastline, into a protracted legal battle against powerful officials and one of the world’s biggest oil companies. 

“We’ve been told, ‘You are poor people in South Africa. What makes you think you can take on a rich company like Shell?’” says Nonhle Mbuthuma, an activist who led December’s successful opposition to the Shell survey. “But we know something they don’t – that our ancestors don’t have bank accounts. They can’t be paid off by these companies.” 

“Broken”

Growing up in the dying years of apartheid in the 1980s, Ms. Mbuthuma could – anyone could – see that mining had made her country rich. Minerals like gold, diamonds, and platinum had bankrolled South Africa’s skyscrapers, 10-lane highways, and glittering shopping malls. In 1980, mining accounted for more than 20% of South Africa’s gross domestic product, and employed more than 750,000 people. 

But equally obvious to Ms. Mbuthuma was the fact that the people whom mining had made rich weren’t those toiling underground. 

In Segidi, a village on the southeastern coastline colloquially known as the Wild Coast, she had watched each January as the village’s men queued up for the buses to take them to faraway “white” cities like Johannesburg and Rustenburg, where they would work the rest of the year as migrant laborers in gold and platinum mines. 

When they finally came back in December, they were tired, they were sick – and they didn’t have a whole lot to show for it. 

As a healer, Mr. Dlamini became accustomed to the rattling, full-throttle cough of silicosis, a lung illness commonly contracted by miners. 

“People went there normal, but they came back broken,” he says. 

So when an Australian mining company was granted a license to mine for titanium in the area’s dunes in 2008, many people here balked. The company pledged permanent jobs and paved roads, but Ms. Mbuthuma says that after decades of neglect by outsiders –  first the apartheid government, then a new democratic one – many people had little reason to believe it. 

“What we have is our land,” Ms. Mbuthuma says. 

And so, with the assistance of human rights lawyers, they launched a legal challenge against the company, and their own government. The Australian company eventually pulled out after a decade of opposition from local activists. 

“They think we are poor and desperate and therefore we will accept anything they offer us,” says Gcinamandla Mthwa, a resident of Xolobeni, one of the villages at the core of the titanium mining case. “But we have shown them we won’t.” 

Legal path ahead

In the case of Shell, the path ahead is uncertain for activists. In early December, a court initially struck down a legal challenge by Greenpeace Africa and a collective of local fishermen, who had argued Shell’s survey would cause “irreparable harm” to marine life.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s minister for mineral resources and energy, Gwede Mantashe, scorned those who brought the case. “We consider the objections to these developments as apartheid and colonialism of a special type,” he told local journalists.

Two weeks later, activists were back in court. This time, among the plaintiffs were Mr. Dlamini and several others from coastal communities. It wasn’t just marine life that would be harmed by the Shell survey, they argued. It was their spiritual connection to the water as well. It was the knowledge passed by Mr. Dlamini’s father to him, and from him to his children. And in any case, they said, it wasn’t up to Shell – or even the South African government – to decide what should happen to the oceans that skirted their communities. 

In court, the activists’ lawyers raised another point. As coastal communities in the global south, places like Xolobeni and Segidi are particularly vulnerable to climate change brought on, in part, by the use of fossil fuels like those Shell hopes to mine off the South African coast. Last year, a court in the Netherlands, where Shell is headquartered, ordered the company to cut its emissions by 45%, citing the global environmental damage caused by its products. 

On Dec. 28, a high court in the city of Makhanda ruled against Shell, ordering it to stop its survey pending the outcome of another case on whether it had the proper environmental approvals, which will be decided later this year. 

A few days later, the blue- and white-striped ship sailed away, bound for its home base in Spain. 

“I hope they won’t come back,” says Nozolile Shude, who lives in Xolobeni. “But if they do, we will just fight them again.” 

In the 1970s and ’80s, groups of primarily white, Christian fundamentalists drove a surge in the number of home-schooling families around the United States. As they pulled their children out of public schools, they also worked to dismantle state and local regulatory hurdles that kept kids in bricks-and-mortar institutions. By 1994, over 90% of families who home-schooled were white.

During the pandemic, there’s been another increase in the number of families that are home-schooling, only this time, the families leading the charge are decidedly more diverse.

Census data shows that rates of home schooling doubled between the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and the fall of that year. The largest growth was among Black families, with a fivefold increase, but all racial groups tracked have seen increases. By October 2020, nearly 20% of adults who reported home-schooling their children were Black, 24% were Hispanic or Latino, and 48% were white, according to data from the Household Pulse Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. The same survey found that only 19% of all adults who reported home schooling have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 53% report their income to be less than $50,000 a year.

According to Census data, the number of Hispanic families home-schooling doubled over the first several months of the pandemic. This increase has been felt by leaders on the ground, including those who run home-school groups or online home-school communities for Hispanic and Latino families.

Gisela Quiñones in Indiana has been home-schooling her two children for years and runs a Facebook group for Latino families who home-school. Over the course of the pandemic, “the group pretty much exploded nationally,” says Ms. Quiñones, mother of a 10- and a 12-year-old. 

“Some parents are really worried about COVID and their child getting sick, but one of the main reasons is about culture. We want our children to learn certain things now,” says Ms. Quiñones. “We want them to know a lot about their culture.”

The Census survey didn’t separate out data for Native Americans, nor did it explore home-school participation by religion. But Native American and Muslim leaders say they believe rates have increased in their communities as well, after the pandemic gave families the time and space to reflect on whether traditional schools were really serving their needs. 

While hard data is scarce, participation in Muslim home-schooling groups has gone up. The nonprofit Muslim Homeschool Network now has several thousand likes and follows on its Facebook page. The group connects Muslim home-schoolers in Southern California by hosting events and providing resources, such as books and curriculum. Fatima Siddiqui, an MHN member, says the group also has a WhatsApp group that is now up to 150 members. 

Muslim Homeschool and Education, a private Facebook group, now has more than 22,000 members, while another, Successful Muslim Homeschooling, has been followed and liked more than 13,000 times.

Since 2015, Kelly Tudor, in Texas, has run a Facebook group for Indigenous home-school families. In the past year and a half, that number has ballooned; there are now over 1,000 parents in the group.

“I had a lot of issues and there was a lot of incorrect information and stereotypes taught to us,” says Ms. Tudor of how her teachers taught Native American issues in school. “When we would try to inform the teacher, we would get called names.”

The three families profiled below came to home schooling for different reasons, but each family expressed disappointment with the public system and a desire to ground their children more firmly in their family’s identity and values.

The Gaddies

Before 2020, Helene Gaddie had never really considered home schooling. But ever since the 6- and 9-year-olds she’s raising were sent home at the start of the pandemic, she and her husband have been their primary teachers. The family has chosen a hybrid home-school model – half a day of distance learning with the local school and half a day of activities and lessons arranged at home.

“I thought we were failing, but the boys’ grades are OK,” says Ms. Gaddie, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. “They’re average.”

When the boys’ no-fee private school – on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the family lives – reopened to in-person learning more quickly than Ms. Gaddie thought was safe, she enrolled them in the tribally controlled public school she’d gone to as a child. That school continues to offer a distance-learning option – three hours a day of instruction from a grade-level teacher – and Ms. Gaddie and her husband take care of the rest.

“For our recess they get to go outside and practice archery,” she says. “They get to tan the hides that they make, make drums, work directly in the garden and be present.”

It’s also easier to participate in events on the seasonal Indigenous calendar, like the annual buffalo harvest or sacred site visits, that would previously have meant pulling the children from school.

The boys, whom she refers to as her grandsons, or takoja in Lakota, are her nephew’s biological children. She sees their upbringing, steeped now in the traditions and language of their people, as a sure path to making them stronger individuals. “If you know your culture, if you know where you come from, you’re stronger,” she says. “You’re stronger minded. You learn better.”

Ms. Gaddie has thought deeply about the education of the young people of her tribe. In 2013, she, her husband, and her cousin founded a nonprofit called Generations Indigenous Ways that offers after-school science programs and seasonal outdoor science camps.

“What we’re trying to do is revive our culture,” she says. “So it’s really hard having them in school anyway, because our culture is more diluted. These [schools] are in our homelands, our Lakota homelands here. But there’s no enforcement of language or kinship.”

It’s not easy maintaining jobs, motivating the boys – “I don’t care about what anybody says, stickers work” – and making ends meet. They get free school lunches delivered, but the family receives no other outside financial support. She and her husband are both artists, and Ms. Gaddie earns a modest stipend from their nonprofit. It’s not really enough, she says, but “we make it work.”

She’s not sure if she’ll continue home-schooling once she feels it’s safe for the children to return to school in person. She thinks she’ll let her older boy make his own choice.

“He’s a normal, wild Lakota boy,” she says, a smile in her voice. “He’ll adjust to anything.”

The Hidalgos

Olga Hidalgo had been volunteering at her children’s schools for years by the time the pandemic hit. The mother of two, who lives in Florida and runs a mobile pet grooming business with her husband, considered volunteering to be the best way to play an active role in her kids’ education.

“I noticed the kids were not respecting authority,” Mrs. Hidalgo, who is originally from Peru, says in Spanish, through an interpreter. “Many teachers were not motivated to teach the young people, and they felt like the students were not being respectful toward them.”

Courtesy of the Hidalgo family

The Hidalgo family poses for the camera in late 2021. “We like our children to have a connection with parents and grandparents and extended family,” Olga Hidalgo (front, left) says. “Home school is attractive because you get to spend more time as a family.”

Even before the pandemic, her daughter asked to be pulled from high school. And once she transitioned to virtual instruction, Mrs. Hidalgo’s daughter grew more interested in learning at home.

Mrs. Hidalgo’s son, meanwhile, struggled to complete virtual class assignments without a cellphone or laptop. Once he had the right technology, Mrs. Hidalgo says, he was exposed to inappropriate pictures on Instagram shared by other students.  

“I had a friend who already did home-school,” Mrs. Hidalgo says, “and when I went to visit, I saw how she was doing the schoolwork with her children. It just made me think my children had another option to learn at home without that hostile environment.” 

Early in fall 2020, Mrs. Hidalgo and her husband scoured the internet for curriculum and lesson plans that they could use at home to teach their kids. All four Hidalgos love American history, and a dual-enrollment course allowed their 17-year-old daughter to earn college credit while sharing the class content with her brother and parents. The Hidalgos’ 14-year-old son also jumped at the opportunity to earn college credit early, and enrolled in communications and composition courses.

The Hidalgos joined a home-schooling group at their church, where her children play the drums and piano in the band.

“Now they have even more friends – closer and more meaningful relationships – than they had at school,” Mrs. Hidalgo says. 

Although she hesitates to speak for the thousands of Hispanic and Latino parents who choose to home-school, Mrs. Hidalgo says her culture is very family-oriented.

“We like our children to have a connection with parents and grandparents and extended family,” she says. “Home-school is attractive because you get to spend more time as a family.”

The Siddiquis

Fatima Siddiqui always knew she wanted to home-school her kids.

She became fascinated with the idea while studying for her degrees in childhood education, psychology, and math education. She thought the idea “just went so well ... with that natural bond between a parent and child.”

A former private school teacher and assistant principal in New York, Ms. Siddiqui began home-schooling her kids six years ago after moving to Diamond Bar, California. She represents a growing number of Muslim families who are forgoing the public school system.

Many of the Muslim parents who are now choosing to go this route, unlike those in the past, are younger, born and raised in America, public school graduates, highly educated, and more diverse. The lack of personal attention students receive in a public school setting, the possibility of encountering bullying or Islamophobia, and a take on human sexuality and gender that many parents find too liberal were among the reasons Ms. Siddiqui and others she knows in the Muslim community cite for choosing to home-school. The ability to structure a school day to include the five daily prayers and to incorporate Islamic knowledge and study of the Quran, the Islamic holy book, side by side with secular subjects like reading, writing, math, science, and history was also appealing to Muslim home-schoolers interviewed for this article.

Ms. Siddiqui says she’s able to provide her kids with a “stronger Muslim identity” because they’re reading about Muslim characters. She can also help them apply Islamic thinking, and is able to introduce principles and concepts of Islam into all subjects. For example, when teaching a unit on telling time, Ms. Siddiqui says she would incorporate verses from the Quran that talk about time.

For many parents, including Ms. Siddiqui, religion isn’t the only driving force.

“I felt like I would be able to give more of the world to my kids based on their interests, on their skill sets, and help them become more well-rounded individuals by exposing them to a lot of different things at their level, at their pace,” Ms. Siddiqui says. 

The mother of five has home-schooled four of her kids so far. Her high schoolers are now independent learners. One daughter is a dual-enrolled student at a community college and in a seminary program. Ms. Siddiqui is the primary home educator for her two younger children.

She says home schooling allows her to give her kids opportunities to “go really deep into topics.” When it was time to learn about the ocean, for example, they went to the beach. That way, Ms. Siddiqui says, “we’re learning about the ocean, not through a book, but we’re at the ocean, learning. We’re at the tide pools. ... We’re making learning not just theoretical, but practical.”

At the same time, she says she is able to develop a stronger bond with her children by learning alongside them.

“You’re able to have deeper conversations, go deeper into a subject,” she says. “If there’s a math lesson that needs to be repeated, it’s fine. We had to repeat a whole year of math and it was OK. We could spend the whole year on a topic and get really deep into it.”

Prior to the pandemic, and even during its first year, Ms. Siddiqui says many parents reached out to her, asking how to get started. However, this school year she’s noticed that some families who started to home-school in 2020, and even some veteran home-schoolers, put their kids back in public schools, citing issues related to mental health.

“The pandemic really took a toll on kids, mostly middle school and high school,” she says. “It was difficult on parents. It was difficult on the kids.”

But despite that reversal by some families, Ms. Siddiqui says she expects home-schooling numbers to rise again in a year or two.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify how the Census data on home schooling relates to Native Americans.

This story about home schooling was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Martha Stewart/St. Martin's Publishing Group

John Della Volpe is the author of "Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America."

As director of polling at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, John Della Volpe has been talking to America’s young people for over 20 years. In “Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion To Save America,” he brings some of those recent conversations to life and looks at what Generation Z – those born from 1997 to 2012 – is doing to overcome challenges and contribute to the country. He spoke recently with the Monitor. 

What are some of the formative experiences that have shaped Gen Z?

Every generation has its share of angst and turmoil, but I don’t think that any generation in the last seven or eight decades has been confronted with more chaos than the 70 million or so young Americans that are a part of this generation. 

They dealt with the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street [in 2011] and grew to have deep concerns about income inequality. 

The movement that was Parkland came out of the lockdown drills and school shootings that made schools, places that were once safe, become uneasy. One of the other impacts that not a lot of people know about is the connection between the climate movement and the Parkland movement. Greta Thunberg was a middle schooler trying to find ways to engage her peers in the existential threat of climate change and it wasn’t until she was tracking the impact of the Parkland [Florida] students that she began to think about her own kind of walkout, which turned into climate strike and has touched tens of millions of young people around the world.

Also, George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and the fact that that also happened during COVID lockdown forced conversations on racial justice and systemic racism. 

You describe Gen Z as “united by fear.” How have they worked to overcome that fear?

What makes Gen Z so special is that when many of us are afraid or fearful, we tend to withdraw. This generation tends to vote. In fact, in 2018 and 2020 when we track the activities of those folks who say they’re fearful or they’re anxious, they are more likely than other young Americans to actually vote.

A recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll found 78% of 18- to 29-year-olds say it’s important that the United States is a democracy. How is this age group supporting democracy?

They have voted in numbers. No other generation can claim that when they were young. They doubled the turnout in the 2018 midterm elections relative to 2014, and relative to the average of the last 32 years of midterm elections, which had dramatic effects. They’re working within the current system to fight for the systemic changes that they believe are required for America to have a fully functioning democracy.

I find this generation to be the least selfish, most empathetic group of young people that I’ve engaged with. Rather than melting like snowflakes because of this incredible period of American history that we’re living through ... they’re emerging as ... stronger and more resilient and more determined to improve our democracy and change the world.

How do you see this generation going forward into adulthood?

Younger people are searching for jobs and careers that allow them to make an impact on the issues they care about. Their definition of success is far more modest. It’s less to do with money and more to do with the bonds they create in terms of friendship and family. They’re pressuring the private sector and government to modernize capitalism in ways where success is not only measured by the health of the balance sheet, but by the health of the communities in which they operate.

Reuters

Buildings in the business district of Jakarta, Indonesia, are seen during sunset Feb. 2.

Last year, Indonesia began a new training for 100 officials in charge of fishing ports. Over three days, they were taught to be “agents of change in integrity.” The goal: to curb illegal fish poaching in the world’s largest archipelago nation. “Principles of good governance must be created,” explained a government organizer.

The course on integrity reflects an ongoing shift in a country known for high levels of corruption: Focus more on reinforcing virtues such as honesty and accountability than on trying to capture and punish corrupt actors.

“Corruption eradication should address the root of the problem,” said President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in December. “Prevention is a more fundamental way.”

Upon taking office in 2014, Jokowi called for a “mental revolution” against corruption in the world’s third-largest democracy. “Propriety must be instilled in the culture,” he said, individual by individual. He asked religious figures, cultural celebrities, educators, and community leaders to help.

While he still supports punitive approaches to corruption, conducted mainly by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the attorney general, those efforts have proved frustrating. In 2019, for example, the legislature clipped the wings of the KPK on use of surveillance techniques. The agency also had its own scandals. The president himself advised against relying so much on high-profile arrests.

Indonesia now receives financial support for anti-graft efforts from the Biden administration, which has put combating corruption as central to its foreign policy. Last November, the United States gave $23.6 million to the Southeast Asian nation to increase “public demand for accountability” and advance “preventative measures against corrupt practices.”

In January, Indonesia received a bit of good news that might help back the president’s priority on prevention. Its global ranking on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index improved. Indonesia rose from 102 to 96 out of 180 countries.

In government and many big businesses in Indonesia, various programs now aim to strengthen individuals in making decisions with integrity and ethics. The president’s “mental revolution,” in other words, won’t be on the streets or in the courtrooms. Or as Mahmuddin, the principal of an anti-corruption training school in Aceh province told the Sydney Morning Herald: “We can at least start with ourselves.”