Bob Shepherd lists what he hopes will be the lessons learned from the pandemic nightmare.
Since I agree with him, I hope you will read his six lessons.
Feel free to add your own ideas.
Number one: Distance learning is a crock, and teachers are really, really important.
Unbelievable! A second-grade student in Palm Beach County hacked into the school district’s computer system.
What was that nonsense about distance learning being the wave of the future? Ha!
The Palm Beach County School District is in the midst of a massive computer security crisis that draws into question the authenticity of every assignment completed by every student since “distance learning” began, after BocaNewsNow.com learned that an elementary school student hacked the school district’s password system.
We are not revealing the password convention that is used in the school district, but the second grader’s — you are reading that correctly, the second grader’s — hacking resulted in an emergency login change for “live” morning meetings in several elementary schools last week. It did not result — yet — in a district-wide reassignment of student passwords for the School District’s “Portal” which provides access to Google Classroom.
It is unclear if teachers and administrators were aware that the second grader’s hack potentially impacted the entire 176,000 student school district.
Every Palm Beach County School District student is now utilizing “Google Classroom” during “distance learning.” The system is used for email, classroom work assignments, live communication with teachers, and tests. The hack potentially lets any student log into any other student’s Google Classroom account.
Mitchell Robinson is a professor of music education at Michigan State University. He has been remote teaching, and he is not pleased with it at all.
He begins:
A friend asked me how I was doing during this pandemic, and I thought I’d share my perspective as a teacher who has struggled to find my footing in our new reality…
How am I doing, you ask?
To be honest, not well. I’ve been a teacher for 40 years now, and I really love teaching. I love the interactions with my students, and colleagues. I loved teaching high school band for 10 years–I couldn’t believe I got paid to make music with kids–and I really get a thrill now out of helping my college students find their voices as musicians and teachers, and helping them to realize their dreams; whether that’s being a middle school chorus teacher, or an early childhood music teacher, or a freshly minted college professor.
But I didn’t go into teaching to invite students to a Zoom meeting, wear a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and talk through a mic to a Brady-Bunch-style laptop screen where my most frequent advice is to remind my students to “unmute” their microphones. It feels artificial, and stale, and impersonal. Few of my favorite teaching “moves” translate very well to online instruction–no one has figured out how to rehearse a band virtually, and I simultaneously kind of doubt they will, while hoping they won’t.
Because teaching isn’t about the mere transfer of information, like some sort of antiseptic banking transaction. The best teaching is messy, and loud, and unruly, and chaotic, and unpredictable.
And I really, really miss it.
So, not so well.
Now, if there is a silver lining in this situation, I dearly hope that everyone currently struggling with our temporary reality, juggling “homeschooling” (it’s not homeschooling–it’s emergency teaching) with working from home, and mostly failing, will somehow come to understand the real value of public education. That when done well, it’s about much more than just teaching and learning, and about a whole lot more than obsessively testing every student from kindergarten to graduate school, until we’ve beaten the very last drop of joy and wonder out of learning.
The Syracuse, New York, journal has sound advice for Andrew Cuomo: Remote Learning is a stopgap. Parents and students want real teachers and real schools. Stop musing about “reimagining” education. Your musings are unsound. Listen to parents and teachers. Let the Board of Regents and the New York State Education Fepartnent do their job.
The editorial begins:
Parents, teachers and students had barely come to terms with the cancellation of the rest of the school year when Gov. Andrew Cuomo dropped another bomb: Maybe, he mused, going to school in person is simply obsolete in the age of coronavirus.
The reaction from educators and parents was swift and fierce. Aides later walked back the governor’s ambiguous and tone-deaf inference that remote instruction could replace the face-to-face kind, saying it would be a supplement.
It can’t be a replacement. You know this if you are a parent with children learning at home for the past seven weeks, or a teacher trying to instruct those students. We see firsthand much is lost in translation from classroom to computer screen. It may be necessary to use remote learning as a bridge to returning to school full time, or when virus flareups close schools temporarily, but it cannot be permanent.
Kids need to go to school. And they need to go to school this fall, in whatever form the virus permits.
Despite good intentions, we can see that homeschooling is not going well for many students — most of all the ones lacking the technology to keep up, or having to share it among siblings. Special needs students are adrift. We also can feel how much being separated from their peers and mentors in a school community is damaging kids’ social and emotional well-being. They are increasingly sad, unmotivated and glued to one screen or another. Without support from teachers and counselors, stressed-out parents are struggling to keep it together.
The governor also knows that reopening schools and childcare settings are key to getting adults back to work. And yet schools are in the last phase of Cuomo’s four-phase plan to reopen the economy, alongside arts, entertainment and recreation. This is a major disconnect. Concerts and baseball games are not essential (as much as they make life more enjoyable). Education is essential.
We’re with Cuomo’s impulse to take the lessons from the coronavirus to “build back better.” What have we learned about schools? Inequities are magnified. Homes are not always ideal learning environments. Access to computers and high-speed internet varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, district to district and region to region. These are some of the issues New York needs to solve first, before it can lean on remote learning for anything beyond an emergency.
As for Gates and Schmidt, the editorial says, “Proceed with caution.”
When your only tol is a hammer, every problem looks,Ike a nail. When you ask two tech magnates to reinvent education, they have only one strategy: more tech. And the past two months have proved that more tech is not what’s needed.
What’s needed is smaller classes and the resources to meet the needs of children. Perhaps Gates and Schmidt could spare a few billions to solve real problems.
Peter Greene taught high school students in Pennsylvania for 39 years. Now he blogs and writes about education for Forbes, where people in the business world get schooled about education realities.
In this article, he makes clear that a Bill Gates has a horrible record in education policy and should butt out of New York.
Greene points out:
Nobody has expended more money and influence on US education, and yet even by his own standards for success—raising reading and math test scores—Gates has no clear successes. Nor are there signs that he is learning anything from his failures. Reading through years of the annual Bill and Melinda letter, and you find acknowledgement that their latest idea didn’t quite pan out, but the problems are never located within the programs themselves. Teachers didn’t have the right resources or training. The Foundation’s PR work didn’t properly anticipate resistance. After years of failed initiatives, the latest Gates newsletter concludes not that they should examine some of their own assumptions, change their approach, or invite a different set of eyeballs to look over their programs—instead, they should just do what they’re doing, but do it harder. “Swing for the fences.”
Currently the Foundation is focused on factors like curriculum and in particular computer-delivered education. This may seem like just the ticket for a governor who also questioned why his state is still bothering with brick-and-mortar school buildings. But regardless of what you think of the policies and programs that Gates is pushing, it’s important to remember that while he may be great at disruption, he has yet to build anything in the education world that is either lasting or which works the way it was meant to. And he can always walk away, having barely dented his fortune.
It is perfectly obvious that Cuomo’s invited Gates to “reimagine” education in New York because Cuomo’s wants to make distance learning permanent. Parents hate the idea. Students long to be back in school with their friends and teachers. Teachers want to see their students really, not virtually.
Cuomo should back off. He hasn’t talked to parents, students, or teachers, only to Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt of Google.
It’s also important to remember that the Constitution of the State of New York gives the governor zero authority over education. That power belongs to the Board of Regents.
Cuomo should take care of reimagining the economy, getting people back to work, and leave education to the appropriate state and local officials.
Gary Rubinstein was one of the earliest corps members of Teach for America. He knows it’s routines well. He has long been critical of the inadequacies of its teacher preparation program, which offers a five-week training to young college graduates before they start teaching real classes. As he explains here, the teachers in training get only 20 hours of practice teaching, which he thinks should be eighty hours.
The TFA training is about to be watered down considerably, as the recruits will be remotely taught this summer.
He writes:
I learned yesterday that TFA has chosen not to cancel the 2020 Institute, but instead to hold it remotely. So this means that TFA has weighed out the pros and cons of cancelling training vs. remote training and decided that the reward of remote training outweighs the risks of remote training. I see this as a huge mistakes that harms children. But for this decision to harm children, there are three other parties that share responsibility. I will outline who these other parties are in a minute.
Teach For America surely knows that a remote training with no actual student teaching will produce extremely unprepared teachers. And those teachers will each teach 30 (or up to 150) students next year and each of those students will suffer for having such an untrained teacher. I don’t know what alternatives TFA explored, but there was another option besides just cancelling the institute altogether. If I were in charge I would take some of the $300 million that TFA has in the bank and make this summer a remote training for teacher assistants. Next year will be a challenge for teachers and having 3,000 teacher assistants who are knowledgeable about the different remote learning options can be very useful. And TFA could pay the salaries of these 3,000 teacher assistants too. This way, the 2020 corps members can actually be helping improve education and there would not be student victims who have completely untrained teachers as their lead teachers. But this is not the decision TFA went with. They are comfortable sending teachers with zero hours of student teaching into real schools next year with students who have just suffered the emotional, physical, and educational trauma of the previous six months.
But as I mentioned, TFA is not the sole culprit here.
He also blames the states that approve contracts with TFA and the principals that hire “teachers” who have never actually taught anyone before entering their classrooms.
Maybe this won’t seem like a big deal to you, but it’s a portent of the future. It’s not a lot of students or teachers, but it signifies what’s coming down the pike.
A small alternative school in Avondale, Michigan, is going to be converted to a full-time virtual school.
All seven teachers will be replaced.
The district pretends that the decision was for the sake of the students, but in reality, it’s to save money. The district and the state of Michigan just could not afford to educate these students anymore so they settled on a cheap strategy. The kids will get an inferior digital education with no personal interaction with real teachers, but, hey, the state can’t afford to give them a real education.
This week is National Teacher Appreciation Week – but, for the seven teachers at Avondale Academy, they just found out they’re being laid off.
On Monday, the Avondale Board of Education voted to close Avondale Academy and to restructure it as the Avondale Diploma and Careers Institute Virtual School – a fully online alternative high school.
Social studies teacher Paul Sandy said he is horrified by the board’s decision. He created the petition “Save Avondale Academy” and, as of Tuesday evening, it has more than 500 online signatures.
“It’s a central truth that all children deserve real teachers – not virtual teachers who can’t see them, talk to them, hand them fruit snacks out of their big Trader Joe’s bag, buy them art supplies or talk to them out in the hallway between classes,” said Sandy. “All students deserve an education that is hands-on and involves physical activity, social interaction and authentic, real learning…”
As part of the decision, the Diploma and Careers Institute will provide all Avondale Academy students with their own Chromebook, and a resource center would be open Monday through Thursday, staffed with an adult mentor, for students who need in-person support. There would continue to be opportunities for breakfast and lunch, transportation and counseling for the students.
According to Frank Lams, assistant superintendent for Financial Services, this decision will save the district a substantial amount of money.
“The district would pick up 20 percent of the enrollment (from per-pupil state funding) and the net revenue. DCI would pick up the cost for the counselors and mentors, as well as all the hardware and software necessary for the program. So, there’s a shift of about $180,000 positive. This is based on 115 pupil enrollment for the Academy,” said Lams.
The online board meeting attracted nearly 150 attendees – a record number for the board. Teachers, parents, students and experts from Michigan universities and organizations all joined together to argue for the future of the 115 students at Avondale Academy.
Paul Sandy, the social studies teacher at Avondale Academy, wrote this about the school in his petition to save the school:
Avondale Academy is an alternative public high school in the Avondale School District that serves approximately 113 students from Pontiac, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills, Michigan. It is intended for students who have either struggled to succeed in a mainstream high school or for students who want a smaller school setting with more social-emotional support and a community style education approach.
Avondale Academy currently provides students with a positive educational experience through social-emotional supports to students, mentor groups that reinforce community norms, creativity through art and music endeavors, a mental health peer-to-peer group, project-based learning, and reading and math intervention. All of those things are made possible with teachers.
The board decided: These kids are expendable.
Governor Andrew Cuomo just announced that he has tapped a second billionaires to “reinvent”
education in New York state after the pandemic. According to the New York Post, Cuomo sees distance learning as “the wave of the future,” so who better to enlist as his advisers than Bill Gates and now Eric Schmidt of Google.
Reporter Rebecca C. Lewis of “City and State” just tweeted this report:
Cuomo has announced the third billionaire to lead state efforts amid the coronavirus crisis: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be focused on new technology utilization. He joins Michael Bloomberg, who’s doing contact tracing, and Bill Gates, who’s doing education
Neither Bill Gates nor Eric Schmidt is an educator. They made their fortune selling software. Selling stuff to schools does not make you an education expert.
Obviously Cuomo thinks that the future of education is online.
He seems oblivious to the eagerness of parents and students alike to return to real live teachers in real school buildings. Parents want to return to work, students want to see their teachers and their friends, and they want to return to their activities and sports. Teachers want to see their students. No one but Cuomo—and probably Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt—wants remote learning to become permanent.
Please someone tell Governor Cuomo that the state Constitution and laws delegate all authority over education to the Board of Regents, and gives zero authority to him.
The pandemic is turning into a grand opportunity for the foxes to raid the henhouse under cover of darkness. Parents, teachers, and students want a safe and orderly return to real education taught by real teachers in real schools.
Why doesn’t the Governor listen to parents and teachers and students, who will tell him to reinvent schools by fully funding them? They want smaller class sizes, well-maintained facilities, experienced teachers, a well-stocked library with a librarian, programs in the arts, a nurse and social worker and guidance counselor in every school. They don’t want the massive budget cuts that the Governor has in store nor do they want the distance learning that they are currently experiencing to become permanent.
Andy Hargreaves consults with eight education ministries about education strategy, after a long career as professor and researcher at Boston College. He is currently working with Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Iceland, Finland, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Uruguay. This article in The Conversation summarizes what schools have learned thus far in responding to the pandemic. What will schools look like when we someday emerge from the crisis?
One of my university projects connects and supports the education leaders of six countries and two Canadian provinces to advance humanitarian values, including in their responses to COVID-19.
From communication with these leaders, and drawing on my project team’s expertise in educational leadership and large-scale change, here are five big and lasting issues and opportunities that we anticipate will surface once school starts again.
Extra student support needed
Support will be needed for our weakest learners and most vulnerable children to settle down and catch up. (Shutterstock)
After weeks or months at home, students will have lost their teachers’ face-to-face support. Many young people will have experienced poverty and stress. They may have seen family members become ill, or worse. They might have had little chance to play outside.
Rates of domestic abuse and fights over custody arrangements have been on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many children will have lost the habits that schools teach them — sitting in a circle, waiting your turn, knowing how to listen and co-operate. More than a few will exhibit the signs of post-traumatic stress.
A lot will have spent hours looking at smartphones or playing video games.
And the learning gaps will undoubtedly widen between children from poorer and better-off homes.
Although governments may be anticipating upcoming austerity, we’ll actually need additional resources. We’ll need counsellors, mental heath specialists and learning support teachers to help our weakest learners and most vulnerable children settle down and catch up.
Prioritizing well-being
Well-being will no longer be dismissed as a fad. Before this crisis, there were murmurings that student well-being was a distraction from proper learning basics. No more.
It’s now clear that without their teachers’ care and support it’s hard for many young people to stay well and focused. Being well, we’ll appreciate, isn’t an alternative to being successful. It’s an essential precondition for achievement, especially among our most vulnerable children.
More gratitude for teachers
Teacher Angie Stringer, with a ‘Stringer loves her students,’ at a car parade in March 2020, in Suwanee, Ga. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Teachers are among the unsung heroes of COVID-19: preparing resources and guidance for remote learning, dropping off school supplies in plastic boxes, connecting with kids and their parents to make sure they’re OK — even while many have kids of their own at home.
Parents are fast coming to appreciate everything their teachers do.
It’s hard enough when parents have two or three kids at home all day now. Many will surely realize just how hard it must be to have 25 to 30 or more in a class. Once the working world regains a degree of normality, we won’t take our essential workers for granted so much. Teachers will be among these.
Vocational skills and training
Trades before social distancing: The dignity and importance of vocational education, skills and training will be reflected in what we teach.
The pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of the global economy to collapses in essential supplies. So Canada will look to bring some of its essential manufacturing back home.
There will therefore have to be a related push for vocational skills and training, and higher status for schools and programs that provide it.
It’s now obvious how much we depend on and need to value all our essential workers like care home workers, construction workers and retail staff who serve us from behind plexi-glass. My widowed Mum raised three boys while she cleaned people’s homes, worked in local stores, and cared for other people’s children. There was nothing unskilled about what she did.
While no one quite agrees on what it means to be “working class,” what’s clear is it involves sectors of work, pay levels and a generational accumulation of cultural and social capital, dispositions and tastes.
When the regular economy starts up again, some people will feel proud to call themselves working class once more and insist on the financial and broader recognition that goes with it.
This also implies rethinking the gig economy and its impact on people’s lives, as well as what kinds of learning position people to survive tumultuous changes, experience mobility and build meaningful lives.
More and less tech for education
During COVID-19, there’s been a mad scramble to find technology to support learning at home. But in our ARC Education project network, the deputy minister of education in one provinces informed us that upwards of 30 per cent of students don’t have internet access or digital devices at home.
As money gets tighter, families on the edge of poverty may also have to choose between maintaining internet services or putting food on the table.
Student Jillian Reid, 9, works at a laptop in Cremona, Alta., in March 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Uruguay, one of the countries in our project, set up an arms’ length government innovation agency in 2007. Every child was given a personal device and an internet connection. This stimulated more than a third of the country’s schools to develop projects in which innovation and deeper learning, not just technology, are in the foreground.
In this pandemic, technology has supplemented teaching and teachers; not replaced them. During the first week of school closures in Uruguay, use of the agency’s platform increased by 1,100 per cent. Canada needs to develop a coherent and comprehensive national approach to tech connectivity and learning that will support all schools.
Conversely, there will also be less technology. We certainly need better digital resources. But anyone who thought that online learning can replace teachers will be rapidly disabused of the idea — especially parents stuck inside with children when kids can’t concentrate or self-regulate.
We’re in a long, dark tunnel at the moment. When we emerge, our challenge will be to not proceed exactly as before, but to reflect deeply on what we have experienced, and take a sharp turn in education and society for the better.
“In The Public Interest,” a nonpartisan organization that supports a healthy public sector, has identified eleven warning signs that privatizers are targeting your school district.
Read them and be prepared to defend your public schools from privatizers and profiteers!
Here are the first six. Open the link and learn about the other five:
As students, parents, educators, and school districts struggle to adjust to the Covid-19 pandemic, others see the crisis as an opportunity to escalate their efforts to further privatize public education. For years, “education reformers,” private companies that want to profit from public education dollars, and others have worked to undermine public education by privatizing all aspects of it—from charter schools, to contracted out bus services and cafeterias, to private testing companies, to software and hardware providers touting the benefits of virtual/online education.
With the current need for districts to rapidly switch to distance learning, many of these same privatization advocates and corporations are using the crisis and the resulting confusion as an opportunity to greatly expand their privatization agenda by offering to help solve some of the problems that the crisis is creating.
The pandemic is creating a fiscal crisis for state, local, and school district budgets and these same forces are also offering up privatization as the solution to these longer-term economic problems. Consequently, we are seeing a major push now by online (virtual) charter schools to greatly increase their number of enrolled students. We are also seeing a major push by “EdTech” companies (education software providers, online pre-packaged classes and tests, computer hardware, cloud computing companies, and others) to peddle their goods and services. These companies seek to offer their services as a way to radically reshape education and education budgets for the long term by dramatically cutting back on qualified classroom teachers and overhead expenses of brick-and-mortar schools.
What to watch for:
Public education advocates need to be vigilant to ensure that during this crisis no long-term commitments are made that increase the privatization of public education.
Below are eleven warning signs and some follow-up questions to help advocates determine whether and how privateers may be trying to make inroads in your school district.
1. Emergency powers have been requested, given, or exercised by superintendents that circumvent normal oversight rules.
• Have emergency powers been granted to district or state superintendents of education? What, if any, are the limits to those powers? When will the emergency powers end?
• How are school boards informed of decisions being made, contracts being entered into, etc., under those powers? Does the board have the authority to review or overturn those decisions?
• Are other emergency orders being put in place? What do they waive or change?
• Are there efforts to suspend open meetings and public records laws?
2. Procurement rules and processes are being suspended, overruled, or ignored.
• In response to the crisis, has your district, locality, or state suspended normal procurement rules?
• Are procurements being made outside the normal process?
• Are there guarantees ensuring that the district isn’t entering into long-term contracts?
• What, if any, transparency is there in the procurement and contracting process?
• Who is responsible for the contracting process and what monitoring and oversight is
there?
3. Virtual/online charter companies are expanding their outreach and recruitment of students.
• Have online charters increased their advertising and recruitment activity in your area?
4. Charter schools and their advocates are pushing to change or ignore authorization and oversight rules.
• Are charter schools attempting to change or relax authorization, oversight, and renewal guidelines?
• Are charter schools requesting or being granted increased funding or extensions on funding or renewal periods?
• Are existing charter schools seeking to expand enrollment caps?
• Are districts providing additional services or technology to charter schools?
• Are there efforts to suspend or disregard open meetings and public records laws for
charter schools?
• Are there efforts to create long-term distance learning contracts with charters?
• Who is monitoring charter schools for compliance with all legal requirements? Are all
the services being delivered?
• Are charter schools ignoring requests for information?
5. Existing charter schools and new charter schools are pushing for immediate charter expansion.
• Are charter school chains or management organizations seeking expansive contracts to provide larger scale education services or replace schools struggling before the crisis?
• Are charter schools advocating for new or additional facilities, or changes in rules regarding facilities?
• Are homeschool charters aggressively marketing payments to families to be used to pay for educational and enrichment programs or services?
6. Education technology companies (hardware and software companies, online testing and lesson planning companies, etc.) are aggressively soliciting the district offering immediate solutions.
• Are education technology companies approaching the district to provide services during the crisis? Which companies? What services? Will those services be needed after the crisis has passed?
• Are companies that already have contracts with the district being allowed to expand those contracts?
• Are companies offering free introductory contracts that are tied to long term obligations?
inthepublicinterest.org
• Are educational technology companies offering free hardware that requires the district to purchase or lease software or other services?
• All students do not have equal access to the Internet. What—if anything—is being done to ensure equal access?
• Who evaluates education technology software for cost and effectiveness? Are new contracts for education technology being executed? What are the durations and terms, and who is providing oversight?
• Is there a protocol for ensuring that student and educator data is secure? What is the policy for responding in the event of a data breach?
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