Twice Denied Testing, Young Black Teacher Dies of COVID-19

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
18

This is a tragic story. A 30-year-old woman, the first in her family to go to college, felt sick and sought testing in Brooklyn. Both times she was rejected. The hospital gave her Tylenol and sent her home. She died of COVID-19.

Rana Zoe Mungin was a black woman. Was she brushed off because of her race?

She must have been a remarkable young woman. She was a graduate of Wellesley College, where admission is highly selective, and UMass at Amherst.

The president of Wellesley, who is also black and is a physician, said that the death of Ms. Mungin highlights racial disparities in access to care.

Rana Zoe Mungin, a graduate of both Wellesley College and UMass Amherst, died Monday from complications associated with COVID-19. On two occasions prior to her death, her family said, Mungin went to a hospital seeking a coronavirus test but was unable to get one.

As the first member of her family to attend college, Rana Zoe Mungin quickly stood out for her work on race and class.

At Wellesley College, where she majored in psychology, she wrote about her family, and her upbringing in Brooklyn. At UMass Amherst, where she later studied creative writing, those at the school said her work added to the national discourse about institutional racism within MFA programs.

And so when Mungin, 30, died Monday from COVID-19 complications — after, her family said, she was twice denied coronavirus tests during trips to a Brooklyn hospital — some who knew her saw a tragic irony: The very biases that Mungin, who was Black, sought to bring attention to in her work ultimately played a role in her death, they say.

The circumstances surrounding her death have left those who knew her reeling. Though her sister believes the doctors and nurses who eventually treated Mungin did the best they could with the resources they had, she is also left to wonder whether earlier testing would’ve resulted in earlier treatment — and a different outcome.

“I felt like she had no fighting chance,” said Mia Mungin, who works as a registered nurse in Brooklyn, in an interview Thursday.

“Rana Zoe’s battle with coronavirus unfortunately sheds light on the systems of racial, gendered, and class bias — entrenched power dynamics — that she sought to expose and change in her work,” read a statement this week released by the English department at UMass Amherst, where Mungin earned her master of fine arts in creative writing in 2015.

“The dismissal of her symptoms is a register of the long history of economic and racial barriers to healthcare faced by Black women in this country.”

Dr. Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College and a former chief of the division of women’s health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that Mungin’s experience highlights the longstanding disparities that exist when it comes to minorities’ ability to access health care — and the manner in which they’re treated once they’re there.

“This is historic — we have data points overall for many years, and I think this pandemic has really brought to light these disparities in the most profound way,” said Johnson, who also is Black. “Here’s a young woman, a teacher, and she can not get the care she needs.”

COVID-19 death rates in communities of color have been vastly higher than overall mortality rates in many cities. Black people in New York have been twice as likely to die as white people; and at one point earlier this month, Black people in Chicago reportedly made up nearly 70 percent of the city’s coronavirus-related deaths, despite making up just 30 percent of the population.

Mungin, who worked as a social studies teacher in Brooklyn, was hospitalized in New York. But in Massachusetts, where data on the race and ethnicity of those who’ve died has been spotty — the ethnicity of half of the state’s 3,562 deaths is unknown — Black and Hispanic people have made up about 22 percent of the deaths for which race and ethnicity is known. That’s about the same percentage the groups represent in the population of Massachusetts.

But Black and Hispanic people also make up a disproportionate share of the confirmed COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the state — roughly 40 percent of cases and 33 percent of hospitalizations for which race and ethnicity data is available…

According to her sister, Mungin visited Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn on two separate occasions between March 15 and March 19 with fever, chills, and shortness of breath. On both occasions, Mia Mungin said, her sister was told that the hospital wasn’t conducting COVID-19 testing.

Prior to one visit, her sister said, an EMT suggested Mungin was simply suffering from a panic attack.

“What they did was give her some Tylenol and sent her home,” said Mia Mungin.

On March 20, after her symptoms worsened, Mungin returned to the hospital for a third time, this time by ambulance. The following day, according to her sister, she finally received a test for the virus — which came back positive.

Brookdale Hospital did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Categories Health, Inequity, Injustice, Race, Racism

Luxury Hotel Provides Free Housing for Health Care Workers

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
5

The New Yorker describes an act of civic generosity:

The New York Four Seasons is not the most welcoming hotel, architecturally speaking. Designed by I. M. Pei and situated on East Fifty-seventh Street, between Madison and Park, it greets visitors with an intimidating slab of limestone façade and a metal awning that seems to want to clobber you. Reviewing the building in the Times when it opened, in 1993, Paul Goldberger was taken by “a reception desk that looks like a Judgment Day platform.” Rooms now start at twelve hundred and ninety-five dollars. Or they did, two months ago.

Like so many businesses, the Four Seasons closed in March. On April 2nd it reopened, transformed into the city’s cheapest and most civic-minded hotel—the first to host health-care workers free of charge. As of last week, there were a hundred and sixty such guests, sleeping, showering, and enjoying grab-and-go meals between long shifts of attempting to save the lives of covid-19 patients. All are screened each time they enter the hotel, which is now using its more human-scaled entrance on East Fifty-eighth Street. Nurses take temperatures and run through checklists of symptoms before people are admitted to the “green zone” (or banished to the “red zone” for possible off-site treatment). Videos provided by the Four Seasons show that the lobby’s usual cadre of super-attentive valets, bellhops, and concierges has been replaced by impassive metal stanchions, green directional arrows, and yellow crime-scene tape to enforce social distancing, although the onyx, marble, and soaring ceilings remain.

The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.
“It’s basically hospital housing, but Four Seasons-style,” explained Dr. Dara Kass, an E.R. physician at Columbia University Medical Center, speaking on the phone from her eighth-floor room. “You know why you’re here when you walk into the building,” she said, describing the lobby’s vibe as “purposeful.” But, she added, “the bed itself is still a Four Seasons bed.” Like many guests, she was keeping away from home so as not to expose her family to the virus; Kass has a son with a compromised immune system due to a liver transplant. “This room was really a godsend,” she said. “I have so many doctor friends who are living in their basements, or a closet. I have friends who have rented Airbnbs. I have a friend who rented an R.V. She and her husband are both E.R. doctors, and their daughter had a liver transplant like my son did, so they moved to the R.V. in the driveway and their au pair is living with the children inside the house.”…

The New York Four Seasons took this mission on at the prompting of its owner, Ty Warner, the Beanie Baby mogul. Rudy Tauscher, the hotel’s general manager, organized the operational changes—effected in a mere five days—with the help of International SOS, a medical and travel-security consultancy.

Categories New York City

Edweek: A Third of Teachers Are at Risk of Severe Illness from COVID-19

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
52

Education Week warns that almost a third of teachers are at risk of severe illness if schools reopen before COVID-19 is contained.

Madeline Will writes:

As states begin to consider what reopening schools might look like, a new analysis of federal data warns that teachers could be more susceptible to severe illness from COVID-19.

About 29 percent of teachers are aged 50 and older, federal data show. Older adults are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19—92 percent of deaths related to the disease in the United States were of people aged 55 and older, and that age group also has higher rates of coronavirus-related hospitalizations than younger adults. And as the brief report by the research group Child Trends points out, teachers have significantly more social contact than the average adult, since they’re in close quarters with dozens of students every day.

Already, teachers’ workplaces rank among the “germiest”—one study found that teachers have nearly 27 times more germs on their computer keyboards than other professions studied. Teachers report that they frequently come down with colds and other garden-variety illnesses over the course of the school year. After all, children are “effective transmitters of respiratory germs,” Donna Mazyck, the executive director of the National Association of School Nurses, told Education Week earlier this year.

The immune system naturally deteriorates with age, the Child Trends report notes. Also, teachers are more likely to report being stressed at work than average people, and some research suggests that stress can weaken the immune system.

Decisionmakers “responsible for reopening schools should weigh not only the health of their students, but also that of their teachers who are at elevated risk,” wrote Renee Ryberg, a research scientist at Child Trends. “Education administrators who choose to proceed with reopening should coordinate closely with health agencies to enact policies to keep teachers, as well as students, safe.”

Categories Health, Safety, Teachers

Dana Milbank: Can the Coronavirus Be Defeated by Lies?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
13

Dana Milbank is an opinion writer for the Washington Post. In this recent column, he suggests that Trump hopes to defeat the pandemic by lying about how successful he is in responding to it.

In his “whole of America” approach to fighting the pandemic, President Trump has begun clinical trials testing his most promising antidote: Can the novel coronavirus be killed with a lie?

Trump has at times speculated that the virus could be killed by an antimalarial drug and an antibiotic, or by ingesting bleach or other household disinfectants. But he has never abandoned the regular application of disinformation as his primary defense against the coronavirus.

“Some health experts say the U.S. needs 5 million tests per day by June in order to safely reopen,” NBC’s Kristen Welker told Trump in an East Room Q&A Tuesday afternoon. “Can you get to that benchmark?”

“We have tested much more than anybody else times two,” Trump replied. “We’ve tested more than every country combined.” He went on to say, “We inherited a very broken test, a broken system and a broken test, and within a short period of time we were setting records. We have done more than the entire world combined.” And he said the United States would “very soon” surpass 5 million tests per day — a figure beyond his own administration’s rosy forecasts.

Let’s leave aside the credibility of Trump’s claim that the U.S. would “very soon” test more people each day than the country has managed to test in all of the past four months. And set aside, for the moment, Trump’s claim to have inherited a “broken” test for a virus that did not exist when he took office.

Focus on just one of his falsehoods: his statement that the country has done more tests “than the entire world combined.” Trump has said this over and over, and it has been corrected over and over, for it is demonstrably false.

According to an updated tally by Worldometers, the United States, after a painfully slow start, has done 5.8 million tests. But the rest of the world has combined done far beyond that number. Russia alone reports 3.1 million, Germany 2.1, Italy 1.8, Spain 1.3, the United Arab Emirates 1.1 million, and other countries have performed well more than 10 million additional tests. And the Worldometers testing tally doesn’t even include China.

Yet this disinformation, which in its repetition has become an obvious lie, is at the core of Trump’s coronavirus response. As he pushes to reopen commerce and schools, the country is relying on luck (a viral lull during the summer) and the ability to test people and track the spread. Though we are accustomed to Trump’s nonsense, we are now in a position where lives depend on the capability of a testing system Trump has repeatedly and consistently misrepresented.

Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler and his colleagues explore Trump’s tendency to double down on falsehoods in their forthcoming book, “Donald Trump and His Assault on the Truth.” “One hallmark of Trump’s dishonesty is that if he thinks a false or incorrect claim is a winner, he will repeat it constantly, no matter how often it has been proven wrong,” they write. Though “many politicians are embarrassed,” Trump “keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version…”

Now the country, fed a diet of such disinformation about the virus, is preparing to reopen workplaces based on the false assurance — 5 million tests a day! More than the rest of the world combined! — given by Trump’s repeated lies. What could possibly go wrong?

Categories Lies, Trump

John Merrow: What’s Needed Now: Think Like a Librarian!

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
4

John Merrow has some good suggestions in this essay about the month of May and how to use it wisely and well:

May has been an educational ‘dead zone’ for years. Because of our national obsession with standardized test scores, teachers–particularly in low income areas–spend class time showing students how to guess at answers, giving practice tests, and even teaching children how to fill in bubbles for the standardized, multiple choice ‘bubble’ tests that await them. These activities come with a huge opportunity cost for students, because they are of no educational benefit whatsoever and probably set their learning back; for teachers, they are an insult to their profession. And school districts spend billions of dollars buying, administering, and grading the bubble tests required by their states and the federal government.

When I was reporting I occasionally heard people complaining–in song–about “the morbid, miserable month of May,” riffing off an old Stephen Foster tune, “The Merry, Merry Month of May.” As I recall, the expression surfaced in 2003 or 2004, which is when the unintended consequences of the 2001 federal “No Child Left Behind” law became apparent. Because NCLB penalized schools that didn’t achieve what it called ‘adequate yearly progress’ on standardized tests, many districts eliminated art, music, drama, journalism, and even recess in order to concentrate on ‘the basics.’

That’s when the month of May became a ‘morbid’ dead zone, educationally speaking.

I don’t remember where I first heard the expression. It might have been in the suburban North Carolina elementary school that held ‘pep rallies’ in advance of the upcoming state exams, or in Richmond, Virginia, where a veteran middle school teacher told me “Teaching and learning are done; now it’s all test prep.” Or perhaps it was the Chicago high school teacher who confessed that he vomited in his wastebasket when he saw his students’ scores, or the custodian in a Success Academy charter school in New York City who said he rinsed out classroom trash cans every night because students regularly threw up in them during testing. Another possibility is the Washington, DC, parent whose young son couldn’t sleep because his teacher said she’d get fired if they didn’t do well on the tests.

The good news is that May 2020 does not have to be ‘morbid,’ ‘miserable,’ or ‘malignant.’ Because schools are closed and state standardized testing has been cancelled, May is a blank slate–and an opportunity for us to make it ‘magical’ and ‘memorable.’

News reports indicate that many parents are unhappy in the role of ‘teacher at home.’ (They are also coming to realize just how hard it is to be an effective teacher!) Teachers are frustrated because nothing in their training prepared them for teaching remotely. And so, because the March-April experiment in ‘remote learning’ hasn’t been a rousing success and because May is a tabula rasa, let’s embrace ‘out of the box’ thinking. Stop thinking like educators whose jobs depend on high test scores. Think differently!

(An earlier blog post about librarians, swimming instructors, highway engineers, and gardeners is here.)

Imagine for a moment that you don’t have a captive audience (because right now you don’t). IE, think like a librarian. Public libraries are different from schools in one important way: they do not have required attendance. But even though no one is forced to attend the library, library usage continues to climb. To survive and prosper, librarians have had to identify their audiences and find ways to draw them into their buildings and electronic networks. For the most part, they’ve succeeded without pandering. That’s what’s called for in education at this moment.

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Education Reform, Librarians, Parents, Teaching, Testing

Peter Greene: What Happens to “Accountability” After the Pandemic?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
10

Peter Greene thinks that we should use this respite from the pressure of high-stakes testing to rethink accountability.

Our current accountability system was cobbled together hastily in 2001 during the writing of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. The NCLB law was based on a hoax, a fallacious claim that there had been a Texas miracle, all due to testing every child every year. Congress bought the lie and enacted the law. Since then, Congress has been unwilling to review the creaky and ineffective accountability system that it mandated.

No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. But we do. We have done it for 20 years and have little or nothing to show for it. The students who were left behind in 2001 are still left behind. Then Obama-Duncan brought in their “Race to the Top,” doubling down on standardized testing, and spent more than $5 billion without reaching “the top” or closing gaps or raising test scores.

Greene says: Let’s think about what happens next.

The defining question for any accountability system is this:

Accountable to whom, for what?

The “to whom” part is the hard part of educational accountability, because classroom teachers serve a thousand different masters.

Teachers need to be accountable to their administration, to their school board, to their students, to the parents of their students, to the taxpayers who fund the school and pay their salaries, to the state, to the students’ future employers, and to their own colleagues. School administrators also need to be accountable to those various stakeholders, but in different ways. Each set of stakeholders also has a wide variety of concerns; some parents are primarily concerned with academic issues, while others give priority to their child’s emotional health and happiness.

Parents may want to know if their children are on track for future success, or how their children’s progress compares to others. Those are two different measures, just as “How tall is my child” and “Is my child the tallest in class” are two different questions, each of which can be answered without answering the other.

Taxpayers want to know if they’re getting their money’s worth. State and federal politicians may want to see if benchmarks they have imposed on schools are being met. Teachers want to know how well their students are learning the various content the teachers have been delivering. Administrators may want to identify their “best” and “worst” teachers. School boards may want to know if their new hires are on track.

Answers to every single one of these questions require different measures collected with different tools. Some questions can’t be answered at all (there is no reliable way to rank teachers best-to-worst). One of the biggest fallacies of the ed reform movement has been the notion that a single multiple-choice math and reading test can somehow measure everything.

The reform dream was to be able to reduce school quality to a simple data point, a score or letter grade that tells us whether a school is any good or not. This is foolish. Ask any number of people to describe their idea of an “A” school; no two descriptions will match. A single grade system must by definition be reductive and useless for anything except as a crude tool for punishing some schools and marketing others.

Teachers and their unions are not opposed to accountability; they are opposed to accountability measures that are random and invalid. Meanwhile, accountability discussions never seem to include measures that would hold politicians accountable for getting schools the support and resources that they need. A good example would be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that Congress passed to hold schools accountable for properly educating students with specials needs, and also a law that Congress has never come close to fully funding.

My view: Accountability starts at the top, not the bottom. Congress has never been willing to hold itself accountable for the mandates it imposes. State legislatures have been unaccountable as well, never having provided the funding that schools require to provide the resources that schools need.

Yes, let’s have that conversation about who should be accountable and how will it be measured and what matters most.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

A Conversation about the Pandemic and Early Childhood Education

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2020 //
14

Every Wednesday at 7:40 pm EST, the Network for Public Education has hosted a conversation about education. All the conversations are archived here.

In the first one, I discussed my new book SLAYING GOLIATH with Carol Burris.

In the second one, I talked to Pastor Charles Foster Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children about their fight against vouchers and for public schools.

In the third one, I asked Mercedes Schneider about her new book and her skill at investigative reporting.

In the fourth one, I discussed the effects of the pandemic on early childhood education with ECE experts Denisha Jones and Susan Ochshorn.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Creativity, Early Childhood Education, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Play

Jan Resseger: The Pandemic Shows Why Betsy DeVos Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2020 //
36

Jan Resseger points out that Betsy DeVos has spent her years in office berating public schools and claiming that children and families are on their own when it comes to school choice. She reminds us of a speech DeVos gave at an ALEC conference where she scoffed at the very idea of a school system. Each of us, in her view, rows our own boat, without regard for others. We are definitely not in this together as a society or a community.

In that same speech, DeVos endorsed the rugged individualism of Margaret Thatcher, DeVos spoke of Thatcher admiringly:

I was reminded of something another secretary of education once said. Her name was Margaret.  No, not Spellings — Thatcher.  Lady Thatcher regretted that too many seem to blame all their problems on “society.” But, “who is society,” she asked. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families” — families, she said — “and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
The Iron Lady was right then and she’s still right today.

Every family on their own, no sense of mutuality, no connectedness with others. No society to protect the weak and to guarantee rights and responsibilities.

Then came the pandemic, and the world changed. Betsy is still singing the same tired song but the rest of the world recognizes that we are indeed knit together as communities and as a society, with shared responsibilities and needs. society does exist, and we all need it to function effectively. its terrifying to be on your own at a time of great peril that threatens us all, but is especially hard on the most vulnerable and weakest members of our society.

At such a time as this, we gain new appreciation for the ties that both bind and protect us. We turn to public institutions and count on them while the 1% lock themselves away in their cocoons.

She writes:

Despite public schools’ limitations in these virtual schooling months, and despite the inequity that surrounds and permeates them, however, the systemic presence of public schools—spread across small towns, city neighborhoods and suburbs; funded with state-constitution-driven formulas; organized with predictable curriculum; and staffed with millions of teachers educated about pedagogy, developmental psychology, educational philosophy, and their particular academic disciplines—leaves these institutions better prepared to serve students and to survive the current crisis with a strong foundation. Public schools are more stable than the many other institutions families need in these times when most parents have to hold jobs outside the home in order to survive.

Market-based solutions abandon children and families to fight for their survival on their own. The strong will manage. The weak will not. The inequities that already exist will deepen. DeVos’s do-it-yourself philosophy serves the haves and imperils everyone else. We must rebuild systems built around the needs of children and families and the principle of equal educational opportunity for all, accepting that society exists for our mutual protection.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform

Tom Ultican: Who Paid to Make Indianapolis the Second Most Privatized School District in the Nation?

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2020 //
8

In this post, Tom Ultican takes a close look at the takeover and privatization of the Indianapolis school district, funded by billionaires and managed by a well-funded group called The Mind Trust (which, of course, claims to be deeply concerned about “civil rights,” while stripping parents of color of their right to elect a school board that represents them). By Ultican’s reckoning, nearly 64% of the students in Indianapolis now attend privately managed schools.

He writes:

With the introduction of Innovation schools in 2015, Indianapolis Public Schools quickly became the second most privatized taxpayer supported schools system in America. It has zoomed past Detroit and Washington DC in the privatization sweepstakes to only trail the poster child for disaster capitalism, New Orleans. The right wing billionaire funded organization, The Mind Trust, has played a major role in this outcome.

He provides a handy list of the major funders of this betrayal of the public trust. Leading the charge is the Lilly Endowment, with a donation of $22.7 million, followed by the City Fund (Reed Hastings and John Arnold) at $18 million. And there are other familiar names, well known in the disruption industry.

Ultican traces the history of the disruption/privatization industry in Indianapolis and finds that its origins can be traced to the far-right extremists of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Koch brothers. You will not be surprised to learn that Teach for America and TNTP (the organization founded by Michelle Rhee) are integral to the privatization of Indianapolis’s schools. And Relay “Graduate School of Education” (the one with no real faculty or campuses or professors or researchers or library) is also in the mix.

Ultican reviews the sorry situation in Indianapolis, where disrupters have pulled the wool over the eyes of the public and the media with their dazzling sums of money, and he speculates about why billionaires are so devoted to undermining public schools and the teaching profession:

Why are billionaires spending so much to undermine professionalism in public education? It is probably not altruism. More likely, they want to reduce the biggest cost associated with education; teacher’s salaries. In the antebellum south, plantation owners preached anti-tax ideology because they owned the most and paid the most. Today’s billionaires aren’t much different. Most of them won’t put their children in public schools and really don’t value high quality public education. It seems the big motivation is to reduce tax burdens and simultaneously create new education industries.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Indianapolis, Privatization

Andy Hargreaves: What We Have Learned So Far from the Coronavirus Pandemic

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2020 //
23

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.

Categories Education Reform, International, Students, Teachers, Technology
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »