Dysfunctional Richmond

In late June, Alec MacGillis, a staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote an article highlighting the difficulties the Richmond, Virginia school district was having getting their students back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic.

MacGillis writes,

“Richmond is a particularly stark example of what education researchers say is nationwide crisis. Student learning across the country, as measured by many assessments, has stalled to an unprecedented degree. Researchers have pointed to a number of causes, including the trauma experienced by children who lost family members to COVID, but the data generally show that the shortcomings are the greatest in districts that were slowest to reopen schools. They also show that the falloff was far greater among Black and Hispanic students than among whites and Asians, expanding disparities that had been gradually shrinking in recent decades. ‘This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime.’ Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, said, at a conference in Arlington, Virginia, in February. He presented findings demonstrating that the economic consequences of pandemic-related learning loss could be far greater than those of the Great Recession.”

“In Richmond, as in many other districts, the learning-loss debate has centered on time: the greatest challenge is finding extra hours for supplementary instruction. In early 2021, as it became clear that Richmond was not going to reopen its schools that spring, Jason Kamras, the superintendent of schools, shared online forum the rudiments of a possible remedy: switching to a year-round calendar, with summer vacation limited to July, and four two-week breaks during the school year. Most students would still have a hundred of eighty school days a year, but the district would select five thousand students to receive up to forty days of extra instruction during the breaks. Teachers who volunteered to work would be paid more.”

“Kamras cited a report issued by staff of the Virginia legislature which indicated that, according to recent research, a year-round calendar produced varied results over all but had clear benefits for Black students. Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology at Duke, who has researched the issue, told me that, though most students suffer from a ‘summer slide’ in math, losses in reading are bigger for students from low-income families, possibly because wealthier kids are more likely to have books around at home. He said that it made sense for districts to rethink summer break, which was a vestige of a more agricultural era and longer than in peer nations. ‘Our school calendar now is out of synch with the way most Americans live,’ he said.”

“After Kamras unveiled the proposed calendar, hundreds of comments were submitted to the district’s online portal. At the March 15, 2021, board meeting, which was held online, Kamras’s chief of staff, Michelle Hudacsko, spent two hours reading the comments aloud. Many parents and some teachers expressed their support for the new calendar as a needed response to the pandemic closures. Meghann Kennedy, a parent, said, ‘It would be so beneficial for our kids, who have lost so much time.’”

“Other parents and teachers expressed opposition. Some cited practical concerns, such as the fact that they had already planned trips, camps, or second jobs for the summer. But the overriding argument was that, after the pandemic’s upheaval, the district shouldn’t add disruption. ‘What students need most this summer is normalcy – time to reach out to family they’ve missed, time to breathe,’ a teacher named Amy Brown said. ‘Asking more than that of teachers and kiddos is nonsense.’ Shannon Dowling, a parent, said, ‘Our teachers have experienced trauma – they are running on fumes right now. Our families have experienced trauma. We need a break.’”

“The meeting had been going for almost five hours. Kamras was rubbing his eyes. Finally, he suggested that, if the board wasn’t ready to switch to a year-round calendar for the coming school year, it could resolve to do so for the 2022-23 school year. ‘Let’s put a stake in the ground,’ he said. ‘We have a reading crisis that is going to impact our students for the rest of their lives unless we deal with it.’”

“The board approved the idea, with [only one board member dissenting]. ‘Congratulations, everyone,’ the board chair said. ‘We’re going to have a traditional calendar for this school year, and then move into the 2022-23 year with added changes for year-round.’”

“But in the fall of 2021, some members of the school board started wavering about the year-round calendar. On November 15^th, Kamras presented to the board several options – one with the same number of school days as the status quo, plus extra days for certain students, and others with ten extra days for all students. The most expansive option would cost roughly thirteen million dollars a year in additional pay for teachers and staff, to come from the district’s federal recovery funds. The plan was to hold a public survey on the options.”

Kamras was taken aback when several board members declared that the survey should have another option, too: the status quo. [One board member] said that changing the calendar would spur teachers to quit, and that it was unfair to students. ‘We’re basically merging school into a full-time job,’ [the board member] said. ‘It’s not right that Black and brown students in our district are chained to their desks essentially further into the school year while their counterparts in the counties get to play and have a summer.’”

“The survey went out with the status quo as an option, and it received the most votes, with higher support from white families than from Black ones. Kamras presented the results on January 10, 2022, in the midst of another challenge: keeping schools open during the Omicron wave. A week later, he proposed a traditional calendar for the coming year.”

“A year after the defeat of the year-round calendar, Kamras decided to try again. His relations with the board had grown increasingly strained: In August, 2022, after the latest state test scores showed the district doing even worse in math and science than it had the year before, there was speculation that the board might vote to fire him. [The Richmond mayor], who is Black, had strongly backed year-round school, and he urged the board not to act rashly, saying that firing Kamras just before the start of the school year would be ‘catastrophic.’ ‘No one should be surprised that prolonged virtual learning and the trauma of the pandemic would negatively impact academic outcomes,’ the mayor tweeted.”

“This time, Kamras moved more incrementally. At a meeting this January, he told principals that he was launching a pilot program in which a few schools could adopt an extended calendar, adding twenty days by ending summer vacation in late July.”

“Allison El Koubi, the principal at Westover Hills Elementary, was [interested in the pilot]. Westover Hills had…suffered drop-offs in achievement, in addition to a brush with violence: …a woman had been fatally shot during an altercation just outside the school shortly before afternoon dismissal; a teen-ager was later charged with the killing.”

“Later I visited Westover Hills, where Allison El Koubi told me about the things that she had hoped to accomplish during the pilot. The next day, she informed her staff that she was leaving her job as principal at the end of the year. Her departure would prove unexpectedly abrupt: On June 6^th, a shooting outside the graduation ceremony for one of the City’s high schools killed a graduate and his stepfather, and wounded five other people; police arrested a nine-teen-year-old man. The district closed schools for the remainder of the week, ending the year several days early.”

“After speaking with El Koubi, I asked parents picking up their kids if they had been disappointed that the pilot hadn’t proceeded. One mother, Alanna Scott, said she hadn’t really seen the point of extending the year to make up for what children lost in the pandemic. ‘It’s past now,’ she said. ‘Whatever they know, they should keep rolling with it. The kids don’t know what they missed.’”

So much dysfunction in this story.

Lack of professional development to help adult learning leaders facilitate out of school learning with their kids.

School board and superintendent trouble.

Low expectations from parents and teachers alike.

Violence.

And our children are right in the middle of all this.

If a traditional school district like Richmond, Virginia can’t even get a minor change approved to their school calendar, how do we think they can improve student achievement for black, brown, and poor kids?

We can change to another system or continue to read stories like Richmond.

Til tomorrow. SVB