Shame on you, AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest professional association of education scholars in the United States.  Each year its annual meeting draws 15,000 plus members.  Its policy arm is highly influential in terms of setting agendas for what research is considered critical in the very broad field.  Consequently, as a scholar of education, participation in AERA and specifically attending the annual meeting, are essentially required for any tenure track professor in the field of education.

AERA makes marginal attempts to make their meetings accessible to families with children.  AERA does arrange for on site childcare at a mere 10$/hour/child.  While this rate is basically out of reach for graduate students, and speaking from experience, assistant professors, it is certainly within the rates usually charged at hotels or drop-off centers. And I have found the quality of care to be quite good. 
However, recent changes in AERA annual meeting scheduling make things exceedingly complicated for families, especially those with small children. Two years ago, AERA voted to hold the annual meeting over a weekend, with a Friday and Monday included.   I certainly understand the motivation behind this decision, namely that since AERA is held during the spring semester, attendees are forced to cancel classes in order to attend. Yet, a weekend meeting means that scholars with small children have a larger challenge in terms of managing work and family. It may mean they are in fact more likely to need to bring their children with them since their usual daytime daycare will likely not be available during the weekend.


This brings us then to another even more difficult problem.  The daycare made available at AERA is only open until 6 p.m. Since 99% of SIG business meetings and all-important social mixers are at night, scholars traveling with young children are forced to figure out other arrangements or, more likely, not attend.  This may seem like a small thing on the surface, but networking is a critical part of the tenure track process.  It is necessary in order to secure external evaluators, become part of research teams and have your work become more known.  The combination of moving the conference to a weekend and not having any available childcare after 6 p.m. creates the potential for disenfranchisement of scholars with children, scholars we know are more likely to be young women, but are increasingly also men.
At the very least, this situation forces mama and papa scholars out there to get creative in how they plan to attend the annual meeting.  I have myself, and know others, who have paid for an additional family member to attend in order to watch children.  I have seen scholars pull together and create babysitting co-ops for nighttime events, a tricky situation if only because you tend to know people who will want to be attending the same events as you.  Yet, even in this AERA has made things a bit more difficult.  Most critically, AERA, which has a monopoly on housing through its conference board, has very few rooms that are family friendly.  Families traveling to the conference need suites in order to accommodate additional family members and be able to make meals for children.  This year in addition to there being very few actual suites, AERA scheduled the conference to coincide with another major festival in New Orleans.  Most apartments and vacation houses were booked out months ahead of time, and regardless cost an additional premium.


Unfortunately, ever shrinking travel budgets and cash strapped schools makes a difficult situation even worse.  But even if travel budgets were not being slashed, many of the expenses that parent scholars face are not reimbursable under school travel guidelines. Very few schools will reimburse childcare expenses at a conference.  And I can hear my conservative colleagues out there saying why should the school reimburse scholars for childcare expenses, you… chose to have children.  And on the surface this is a logical argument. But I did not choose to make attending AERA (or other similar conferences) a de facto requirement of my job. Beyond this, if we want to get serious about seeing diversity in the Academy, women, scholars of color, we need to get serious about making the tenure track accessible to scholars whose biological clocks literally overlap with the tenure clock.
Last year at AERA, I spent 250$ on childcare--that was for 2 days and 1 child.  This year, with two children, I am bringing my mother along (my husband is presenting at the conference as well) at an expense of $300. We will make our own meals in the kitchen of the townhome we are renting well out of the area of the conference, since the French Quarter festival made finding accommodations very difficult. We will make it work and it will be an adventure.  My husband and I will present our papers and mingle with the best of them, but I just wonder how many parent scholars are saying, I just cannot do that.  And what is the Academy—and more specifically the field—losing by not having parents as actively engaged in their association as they could be?


Somehow, this seems all the worse given that the members of AERA study education. And in fact in some real ways it might be.  Education, as a so-called feminized field, does have more women than many scholarly fields and education graduate students and recent graduates tend to be older than most other fields owing to the fact that they tend to work as educators in public schools (or other education arenas) before pursuing a doctorate. Simply by making childcare available after 6 p.m., negotiating for better rates for family friendly rooms and creating a formal way for parent scholars to communicate about AERA, we could be taking real steps towards making the conference and the field more representative of what we stand for as educators.