Kelly Clarkson and Kylie Kelce’s Conversation About Schools Has Sparked Backlash

Kelly Clarkson is not gonna lie ― she has a bit of a grudge against schools for holding events during the day. And her opinion is drawing lots of mixed reviews.

“I don’t know when the school systems thought it would be a good plan for families and their emotional stability to start having performances at 10 a.m. during the week,” the singer said during an appearance on Kylie Kelce’s “Not Gonna Lie” podcast, which aired Thursday.

“This just in ― a lot of us work!” Clarkson, who is now a daytime talk show host, said, adding that schools oftentimes are “surprising you with it!”

“Not giving you, like, an advance, so you can at least tell your work, ‘Hey, I’m gonna need this morning off,’” Clarkson said. “Our kids don’t understand, and we just look like assholes when we’re not there.”

The Grammy winner said that sometimes kids then ask, ”‘Why was this mom there?’”

“And then you have to say, ‘Because that kid got a better mom,’” Clarkson said, as she and Kelce started to laugh.

Clarkson’s comments drew both solidarity from fellow parents and a few opinions from teachers themselves, who explained why the daytime performances are so crucial to them.

“Public school music teacher here,” one commenter wrote on Instagram. “We don’t get paid for evening performances, so daytime performances ensure we get paid for the work that we do. An evening performance often looks like 5 hours outside of our contract time, and although we want everyone to come see their kids and what we’ve been working on, it’s also hard to donate so much time over the course of a year when we teach 6 grade levels. Just a different perspective!”

“I completely agree from a parent perspective, but from a teacher— school started having day performances so that every kid could participate and no one would be left out because they can’t get a ride to the performance,” the teacher shared. “A day performance ensures that all kids can participate and takes a little bit of the load off of a teacher.”

A former teacher put the blame on the school, and said if “schools would pay teachers better then this wouldn’t be a problem, but they don’t that’s just fact.”

Clarkson has spoken before about how important it is that she can still show up for her kids and their school drop-offs, even though she films two shows a day for her talk show.

“When we were doing the schedule for the show, I was like, ‘I have to drop my kids off at school.’ And I’m always the one who puts them to bed,” she told People magazine in 2019. “You just have to prioritize and juggle and make people know it’s an important thing. And don’t feel guilty about it.”