Beware of the Defenders

In Monday’s column I wrote about Rudy Crew and Pedro Noguera’s recent article titled “What It Really Takes to Leave No Child Behind.” In the article, Crew and Noguera encourage the traditional public school system to change their ways so that all kids inside their system can receive an excellent education. Crew and Noguera use Crew’s “Chancellor’s District” in New York City as a model for what it takes to leave no child behind. The “Chancellor’s District” hoped reduced class size, increased instructional time, after-school programming, uniformed curriculum, and intensive professional development and teacher support would improve low performing schools in the Big Apple. The authors note that the “Chancellor’s District” ended in 2003 with Rudy Crew’s firing and admit the program’s achievement results were mixed.

Why do so-called “school reformers” like Crew and Noguera insist on improving the traditional public school system, when much of their professional career has been spent watching the traditional system fail to implement their desired reforms? Is it money? Both Crew and Noguera are handsomely compensated as university professors supporting, albeit criticizing, the traditional system. Is it ego? Everyone knows this list is long of those who have convinced us that they are the ones who can fix our public school system, but never do.

Whatever it is, it’s not stopping.

Recently I had a chance to read an article published back in June by The Atlantic titled “The Biggest Disruption in the History of American Education.” The article was written by Meira Levinson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Daniel Markovits, a law professor at Yale Law School.

In the article, Levinson and Markovits write,

“On March 4, 2020, a week before the World Health Organization formally declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, Northshore School District, in Washington State, closed its doors, becoming the first in the country to announce a districtwide shift to online learning. Within three weeks, every public school building in the United States had been closed and 50 million students had been sent home. Half of these students would not reenter their schools for more than a year. No other high-income country in the world relied to such a great extent on remote instruction. The coronavirus caused by far the biggest disruption in the history of American education. Neither the Great Depression nor even the two World Wars imposed anything close to as drastic a change in how America’s schoolchildren spent their days.”

The two authors continue later in the article to state,

“A complete reckoning begins by explaining precisely how school closured affected children’s daily lives. For many students, physical school wasn’t replaced with Zoom school. Rather, physical school closures meant no school – literally none at all, for days and even weeks on end.”

“National surveys of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center, for example, reported that nearly a quarter of students ended the 2020 spring semester ‘essentially truant.’ In Los Angeles, the situation was even more dire: Four in 10 students simply failed to participate regularly in remote-learning programs during the first pandemic spring.”

“Zoom school in many cases amounted to no school in the next year as well. According to our best estimate, by the time schools let out for summer in May or June 2021, the average American public school student had experienced 65 school days without any contact whatsoever from their schools or teachers – no in-person classes, no Zoom classes, no videoconferences, no telephone calls. That’s more than a third of a school year without schooling, full stop.”

“One lesson of the pandemic is that, for all their inadequacies, schools do work, and for all their inequities, they provide a more equal setting than the worlds they draw children out of. Kids need to be in school – for their academic learning and for their health and safety. Parents need kids to be in school to do their jobs and keep their sanity. And communities need kids to be in school to sustain their solidarity.”

“The pandemic has amounted to a comprehensive assault on the American public school. It strained the ties – not just physical but also social and even psychological – that connect American families and children to the schools that are essential for delivering almost every support our welfare state provides. Kids miss out on all of it while schools were closed: not just academic learning but also nutrition, and exercise, and friendship networks, and stable relationships with caring adults, and health care, and access to social workers, and even attention, at home, of parents unburdened by the need to provide child care during school hours.”

I think we can all agree that the pandemic has been hard on all sectors of our society, schools included. But having Levinson and Markovits label COVID as “the biggest disruption in the history of American education” is a bit dramatic.

The biggest disruption in the history of American education might be the fact that most, if not all, American school districts were totally unprepared to go mobile with their teaching and learning. Health care did it years ago with urgent care pop-ups. Banks decentralized to make branches more important than the downtown structure with marble floors. But not schools, and still – not schools.

Or possibly the biggest disruption in the history of American education might be the fact that black, brown, and poor kids still aren’t given the equitable opportunity to succeed compared to whites?

The American public school system failed so miserably from March, 2020 until kids were literally forced back into schools that there really wasn’t another option. Hopeful prognosticators, like myself, quickly realized that there wasn’t going to be a new learning system created out of the pandemic chaos. American returned to school, and their traditional way of running them, as fast as they could.

Or possibly the biggest disruption in the history of American education might be the fact that black, brown, and poor kids still aren’t given the equitable opportunity to succeed compared to whites?

So-called critics like Crew and Noguera, and defenders like Levinson and Markovits [friendship networks depend on schools? Really?], are part of the same clan, a group that perpetuates the continuance of an old, tired system of public education. Neither do much to help those struggling inside these places called schools, especially black, brown, and poor kids – and their families.

Til tomorrow. SVB