A Lost Opportunity

Whoops! I thought this article posted last evening, but I guess not. So here’s yesterday’s post, with today’s coming later.

I’m a historian by training. Historians enjoy looking back to see what people have said in the past about what might happen in the future, which often times becomes our present.

When the pandemic broke out in March of 2020, soon after the country saw how ill-prepared the traditional public education system was to get young learners to learn away from school, there was high hope that we would see transformational change regarding how we would produce a stronger and smarter young learner.

As late as September of this year, Madeline Will, an EducationWeek reporter, chronicled the hopes of educators, beginning with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, about how learning could be different for our kids moving forward. Will writes,

“So many people in education—from teachers to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona—have called this moment, as schools emerge from the darkest shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, our chance for a ‘reset in education.’”

“It’s a sentiment that repeatedly comes up in my interviews with teachers. They wonder if the pandemic’s disruption of schools was a once-in-a-generation chance to transform the education system, which is riddled with inequities and pedagogical practices that date back decades.”

“Some educators also wonder if we’re on the verge of squandering such a chance. That may be; in the rush to get students back on track, we’re at risk for overlooking many of the lessons learned from the last couple years.”

“’I hoped that we would take the time during the pandemic to reimagine and rethink how we do school for students,’ said Tamika Walker Kelly, the president of the North Carolina Association of Educators. ‘I feel like the window for possibility is closing because once we start going back to the old systemic processes and practices that we have normalized at school, then it’s harder to change those things.’”

“Kelly knows there’s a desire to return to normal. But she also knows that ‘normal’ wasn’t working for some kids, particularly students of color. And even before the coronavirus disrupted schools, teachers didn’t always have the tools they needed to create learning conditions for all students to thrive.”

“To be clear, when schools abruptly shut down at the start of the pandemic, teachers and students suffered. There were real challenges for making sure students were safe, fed, and learning. But Kelly said she also saw some positives during those initial school closures, like a renewed focus on relationships and an emphasis on student-centered learning. She wants those elements to stick around, although she’s worried they won’t.”

“’There’s a huge emphasis on testing to get students caught up—quote, unquote—to where they’re supposed to be at this time,’ she said. Instead, ‘we have to figure out how to maintain the things that work for students.’”

“The EdWeek Research Center asked a nationally representative sample of nearly 1,900 teachers, principals, and district leaders what the pandemic impact they would most like to see in their school or district a decade from now. The two most common answers were more attention given to student mental health (21 percent) and less focus on standardized testing (20 percent).”

“Smaller numbers of educators also named more attention to staff mental health, more wraparound services for student well-being, and the added flexibility of moving some meetings online.”

In the same survey, those 1,900 educators were asked to respond to the following prompt:

“In my district or school, I expect that LASTING positive impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on education a decade from now will include:”

The top five answers were “added flexibility of moving at least some meetings/gatherings online,” “more attention given to student mental health,” “better integration of technology,” “ability to offer remote learning when necessary,” and “more/better technology.”

Will continues,

“Christopher Dede, a senior research fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has studied educational transformation for decades. At the start of the pandemic, he wrote in a blog post that the crisis was an opportunity for schools to move from a “one-size-fits-all” model of lecture-style instruction. Instead, schools could create—and, he hoped, sustain—a “‘new normal’ of universal, blended, personalized, lifelong learning.”

“He saw pockets of that innovation happening in individual classrooms and even some schools during the early stages of the pandemic.”

“’But the rush of people who try to go back to the old model, and who say that online education is defective, … is very disturbing,’ he said in an interview. ‘As is typical with education, the rest of society has picked up on the benefits of hybrid [models]. But education just has dismissed it.’”

“Here’s the good news: Teachers may have more power than they realize to drive systemic change—especially at a time when school leaders are desperate to hire and keep good teachers. Teachers can ‘vote with their feet’ and leave a school district that refuses to innovate, Dede said: ‘If many talented teachers start to do that, that will put pressure on the system … so they can try to hang on to people who don’t want to be mired down in the old model.’”

So the way this educational transformation is supposed to begin is when teachers “vote with their feet” and leave their school districts because of lack of innovation?

I’m not holding my breath.

The answers from the 1,900 educators polled are telling. In 10 years, the two transformations today’s educators would like to see is “more attention on student mental health” and “less focus on standardized testing.”

When asked about lasting impacts associated with the pandemic, today’s educators answered “added flexibility of moving at least some meetings/gatherings online,” “better integration of technology,” “ability to offer remote learning when necessary,” and “more/better technology,” along with taking care of student mental health.

That’s it? No change in how we prepare adult learning leaders, no individualized learning plans, no anytime, anywhere learning?

Even if teachers left school tomorrow, based on their survey answers, I’m not sure these are the folks we want to create a new system of learning for our kids. It seems their vision is a bit limited.

We need a more courageous and creative group of adult learning leaders to find the pathway to build smarter and stronger young learners, especially black, brown, and poor ones.

Til tomorrow. SVB