Six on Schools: “The Prom Will Not Be Webcast” Push Back on "Distance Learning"; Randi Weingarten: The school year is far from...
panaritisp
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Thanks John and Gary
"As I teach, I determine the next step from the reactions of my students. Did they understand what I just said? Why is there a question in Clara’s eyes, while John seems to have gotten it? In my experience, John was more likely to have been confused by what I said, and Clara is one of my most perceptive students. Is Clara’s question directly related to the material, or has the material activated emotions from another part of her life? (I know that she’s in therapy, though she doesn’t know that I know—and she didn’t look her normal self when she walked into the room.) Good teachers know their students very well and adjust their teaching to achieve optimal results.
Good teachers also thrive on daily, face-to-face contact with students, even if working conditions are far from ideal. In my district, the average high school teacher has between 120 and 200 students. If I could earn comparable pay and benefits to teach 50 students online, and if wearing sweatpants to work were a high priority, I might be tempted. Unfortunately, online education would be prohibitively expensive if each teacher (paid at least $60,000 per year, including benefits) taught only 50 students. If the online teacher had to teach 120 to 200 students, the job would be nearly unbearable—all of the work (more, actually) and a fraction of the human contact, none of it face to face.
As a learning medium, online education is flawed. Designers of online courses labor to create a simulacrum of community, but community has more dimensions than software can emulate, so many participants find they are not engaged and conclude that online learning is not for them. As a substitute for face-to-face discussion, asynchronous threads appear to be inherently less efficient. The primary way to participate in an online class is to post messages. If a student logs on to a class with 30 participants, a large number of messages are likely to have been posted since he or she last logged on. If the fifth message prompts agreement, the options are to either immediately post a response or continue to read messages before coming back to that fifth message. It is far easier to reply immediately. Unfortunately, by the time the student has read the rest of the messages, there might be many messages that echo the same sentiment but add little substance. This duplication does not occur in face-to-face discussions, because everyone in a room can readily assess—from nodding heads—whether or not there is agreement.
The rush to bring technology to education is motivated more by commerce than evidence of educational value. Human beings were learning for many millennia before computers and the Internet, and it would be shortsighted to abandon this wealth of experience in favor of the unproven potential of a combination of technologies that has been available to schools for only about five years. The result will be a colossally expensive failure if pilot programs and properly designed research do not precede broad implementation."
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"Teachers, too, are trying to deal with a cascade of concerns — from how to make sure low-income students get meals, to how to help students keep learning at home, to how to juggle their own families’ needs. Teachers are proverbially building the plane while flying it, and as they work to address these basic needs and logistics, many think about how to land that plane — how to help their students demonstrate what they have learned all year and end the school year on a positive note.
At this extraordinary time, let’s trust teachers. I propose giving teachers the latitude to sum up either the semester or the school year, depending on how long schools are closed, by creating age-appropriate capstone or term projects that demonstrate students’ learning for the year. The U.S. Department of Education is rightly waiving federally mandated assessments as a result of the school closures, and New York State’s Board of Regents is considering what to do about the Regents exams for graduating seniors. But since the majority of the instructional year has already taken place, there are still meaningful ways teachers can help students sum up their academic progress and bring closure to this school year.
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"Valerie Strauss writes here about a growing exodus from the Zoom platform, which benefits Microsoft’s Teams.
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She writes:
Some school districts around the country have started to ban the use of Zoom for online learning from home during the coronavirus crisis because of growing concerns about security, and others are reassessing how and whether to use the teleconferencing platform.
Days after the FBI issued a warning to the public about the “hijacking” of online classrooms and teleconferences, the New York City Department of Education, which runs the largest school district in the country, said teachers should no longer use Zoom and should instead work through Microsoft Teams.
Other school districts, too, have banned Zoom or are trying to beef up security around its use. Clark County Public Schools in Nevada said in a statement that it had decided to “disable access to Zoom out of an abundance of caution due to instances of hacking that created unsafe environments for teachers and students,” but that it was looking at options to that might allow it to resume access."
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“While the virus has caused illness and hardship for many, keeping children out of school is not a global calamity,” wrote libertarian think tank operative Kerry McDonald in Forbes on March 11, two days before President Trump declared coronavirus a national emergency.
McDonald wasn’t the only cheerleader for homeschooling in the face of a pandemic. “Learning can happen anywhere,” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos enthused on Twitter.
School closings were turning parents into “the nation’s teachers,” according to the Washington Times, a consistent advocate for public school privatization. The article, by Christopher Vondracek, told readers not to think about home-schooling as being “associated with religious reactions to the secularization of public education and the banning of prayer in public schools during the 1960s.” Homeschooling, he contended, “looks nothing like that of yesteryear,” because now “innovative lessons abound” and new technologies—including video streaming, apps, and social media—have made homeschooling a better option for parents seeking “individualized instruction and safer environments” for their children.
But homeschool advocates, and other proponents of public school privatization, who cheerlead for their cause while tragedy unfolds resemble vulture capitalists that have taken advantage of other catastrophes.
Vondracek pointed readers to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), which “lists a variety of reasons for home-schooling.” What Vondracek failed to mention is that NHERI is not an educational organization but is instead part of a network organized by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an intensely powerful homeschool advocacy and lobbying group.
HSLDA founded Patrick Henry College, which, as the New York Times noted, is known as “the first college primarily for evangelical Christian home-schoolers.” In 2017, HSLDA received an audience with DeVos “to discuss the success of homeschooling and to determine what homeschoolers need from the federal government for continued autonomy and success,” according to NE News Now, the media outlet of the American Family Association, a Christian advocacy."
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"Now that Long Island is approaching a month into social distancing, psychologists are considering what effects isolation is having on children and families, and what the long-term impacts may be.
“We are all very wired to be social,” says Debra Reicher, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University. Children especially are dependent on their peers, therapists say.
Families may be experiencing the stress of being cooped up in shared spaces, especially if they live in apartments. Parents may be fighting with each other — or with their kids — as they get on each other’s nerves. Families may be dealing with financial stress.
Some psychologists are also concerned about what it will be like when we try to reenter the world after so much time cocooned."
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