Six on History: Schools
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"In the midst of growing uncertainty about the school year due to rising COVID-19 cases, it would be easy to lose sight of the potential possibilities for transformative change to the nation’s inadequate, inequitable, education systems. One potential paradigm shift for the school system would be to abandon the batch-processing factory model of education adopted in the industrial era of the early 20th century and replace it with a customized, personalized system that meets each child where they are and gives them what they need to thrive both inside and outside of school. This is an opportune moment for sweeping change since there’s a sense of public urgency about equity and resources available through federal American Rescue Plan to fund a process of deep change.
This shift to personalization involves changing underlying assumptions on which the current system is founded. For starters, states should abandon the idea, disproven by evidence, that schools can, by themselves, level the playing field and create genuine equality of opportunity. Despite best intentions and school reforms, there remains a consistent correlation between socioeconomic status at birth and educational achievement and attainment. Schools alone cannot do the job of creating an equal opportunity society. While an education can certainly make a big difference for those few who defy the odds, the data are clear: The nation’s education system continues to leave many children far behind. What’s also clear is something that has been long ignored or denied: Poverty matters. It creates serious impediments to children’s education.
While some students have been optimally supported with two professional parents at home as well as up-to-date technology, tutoring, and recreational opportunities, others have lost touch with schools altogether and struggled with challenges ranging from homelessness to family instability to untreated medical issues.
At the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s EdRedesign, we have been working on a personalization strategy called “success planning” for several years. We have developed guidelines and tools that enable school districts and communities to implement this strategy, which calls for navigators to develop a “success plan” that takes into account the strengths, interests, challenges, and needs of each student while reckoning with in-school and out-of-school factors ranging from academic needs to food security to technology and internet access. Each plan then stipulates strategies designed to create the best possible opportunities for that student’s success. Our underlying principle: Every student has the right to be seen, heard, and responded to as a unique individual.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote the following:
As you know, the House is trying to block federal funding to charters controlled by for-profits. But it will be an uphill battle. I recently did an investigation into the private sale of 69 charters by for-profit NHA. It is jaw-dropping. Please read about it and share. This is a critical time to get the word out. Thanks, Carol
Perspective | Charter schools are publicly funded — but there’s big money in selling them
"In New York City, over 1 million students return to school today. Most are hopeful, but I am sure many are more than a little apprehensive about what will happen this school year after a year and a half of disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last week I participated in an hour-long WABC7TV town hall “Back to School: Learning During a Pandemic,” hosted by Lauren Glassberg. The participants included Roger León, Superintendent of Newark, New Jersey schools, Dr. Jennifer Lighter, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at NYU-Langone Hospital, and Dr. Jill Emanuele of the Child Mind Institute in Manhattan.
As a scientist and medical doctor, Jennifer Lighter focused on the importance and safety of vaccination and masking to prevent spreading infections and the safety of school settings where COVID transmission is rare. Dr. Emanuele is a specialist in diagnosing and treating children and adolescents with mood disorders. She discussed how parents and schools had to be attentive to the needs of the whole child and provide emotional support as children faced potentially stressful situations. School Superintendent León was a very upbeat presence on the panel, ensuring parents and teachers that his school district was well prepared for the reopening of schools this fall and for any eventuality. Drs. Lighter and Emanuele were very informative and the town hall is available for viewing on Facebook and well worth watching. I enjoyed Superintendent León but I am concerned that if the school year does not go as smoothly as he projected and there are school closings because of upticks in COVID-19 infections, school officials risk losing credibility with parents and teachers.
The WABC moderator, Lauren Glassberg, spread questions among the panelists. These are the questions she addressed to me and my responses, edited slightly to make them sound coherent.
What do you think needs to be done in terms of catching kids up?
Brookings Institute posted a preliminary study in December 2020 that projected students would lose 30% of the expected learning gains in reading and 50% of expected learning in math because of COVID disruptions in education and in June, the federal office for civil rights reported that the pandemic widened pre-existing racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in education. Just this week, New York State released a report that the shift to remote and hybrid learning meant that the state’s half a million students with disabilities were left without legally mandated services. The problem of catching up, addressing what students were not able to learn during this past year and a half, are going to be very difficult. I think there will be pressure on schools, teachers, and students to catch up as fast as they can with performance measured on standardized test can lead to intense tutorial and test prep rather than focus on learning, on the joy of learning, and make school a dreary place for kids who are returning to school full of hope and joy and we don’t want to beat that out of them.
Have you learned any stories that suggest kids can’t learn in different situations?
I think the bigger problems are the political battles over vaccination and masks by adults will increase adolescent anxiety and can contribute to bullying in schools. I am afraid that those things will spill over into schools just as the virus does. We have seen COVID spikes in Louisiana and Texas, in places where there has been the most hostility to masks and vaccinations. New York City is now mandating that all of its school employees must be vaccinated by the end of September, but the union acknowledged that at this point there are an estimated 35,000 unvaccinated Department of Education workers including about 15,000 teachers. There really are going to be problems and there have to be contingency plans. We want to say that it is all going to work out, but we have to be prepared when it doesn’t. We know that during the last year and a half kids were very anxious, going to school and not going to school. We want to be hopeful, but we also need to be prepared. Kids respond to what is going on and the anxiety of parents and the anxieties of teachers.
Should children and parents know which teachers are vaccinated? Should they know if their teacher is not vaccinated?
These are legal matters and I know the groups that have been the fighting vaccination mandate and the mask mandates are taking them to court. These things are going to be resolved there. Teachers have rights. People with disabilities have rights. People with religious beliefs have rights. I don't know how that’s going to be resolved. That is beyond me. Those are things that have to be resolved in courts. That also increases the anxiety of parents, and as Dr. Emanuele will tell you, every time that parents get more anxious, so will there children.
There are studies that report that online learning is not as effective as being in the classroom. Can you discuss this?
Let me use some personal experience to kind of flush that out and its related to the educational inequalities that we have seen. I have two high school age grandchildren who were juniors and will now this coming year will be seniors. On Face Time (I actually said Facebook by mistake) I did their work with them. They got packages from school and sometimes they could do them sometimes they can’t, and I was able to work with them, and sometimes with their friends as well. But the reality is that most students do not have somebody who can work with them. Parents may not be fluent in English. Parents themselves may not be that educated. My grandson said, “You know chemistry?” I don’t know chemistry, but what I was able to do because I am an experienced teacher, was to ask him to explain it to me, and as he explained it he figured it out and I said that sounds good to me. But most kids don’t have that and it is a big problem with online learning. They get lost and they give up. The other problem during the COVID year – so part of my job as a teacher educator at Hofstra University, I virtually visited about a dozen metropolitan area middle school and high school classrooms during the COVID pandemic. There were some schools that had very high attendance, but there were other schools where attendance was below 50%, kids had just disappeared. You can have online learning, but students were not there, and even students who signed in, were not required to turn on their cameras. What did that mean? They weren’t there either. I taught teachers a trick. Ten minutes in, break them up into chat rooms. Students who were not really there, did not know to transfer into the chat rooms.
Haven’t you heard anecdotally that some of the older students were taking part-time jobs to earn income?
I worked with (a student teacher placed at) one school that is a vocational school. (In seminar, she reported that) because so many parents were out of work, because these primarily young men had job skills, they were working and signing into class on their phones, but the teacher was aware they were not really there. It was really difficult because the teacher did not want to come done hard on them because their families needed the income at the time, but they were not learning. There was one (suburban New York) school where the graduation rate during the last decade was between 40 and 60%, they announced they had an 81% graduation rate. This was reported in local newspapers (and television coverage). That is because the state suspended the requirement that students pass Regents exams and other standardized exams to get their diploma. What I am asking is, “Will those students be prepared to go to college?” There are sequential classes like math, if you passed one and two because there were no demands, will you be prepared for three and four? In second language programs, if you passed one and two because there were no demands, will you be prepared for three and four? Schools are going to be grappling with that because the reality is that the online instruction over the last year and a half left many young people behind.
Just give me some final thoughts on where you think this year is going?
First, for younger children, we have to make school and learning fun. That has to be the priority. For older children the challenge will be to reaffirm the habit of working hard, even when something is difficult or a little boring. That is preparation for future life. I would like to propose a civics project for every school and every student. We need to enlist our children as COVID educators. This was done during World War II when children were mobilized for recycling campaigns to educate their parents and it was done by Mayor Koch in New York City in the 1980s when there was a water shortage. We need to have our children become active in their communities and with their families, educating parents, family members, and neighbors, why they have to be vaccinated. That will bring excitement to school, will engage kids on many different levels, and help address the COVID pandemic."
In Washington D.C., New York City and Los Angeles, teachers unions have played a major role in ironing out the details of reopening, winning guarantees like regular Covid-19 testing and shorter workdays. In Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her appointed school board have clashed with the CTU, the fight over reopening elementary schools could have resulted in a strike.
Under the act, teachers technically could only strike over economic factors like salaries, but the CTU has still made other policies a central part of its proposals. During the 2012 strike, the union pushed to change teacher evaluations and health insurance, and in 2019, teachers advocated for an even broader set of demands from more support staff in schools to housing guarantees for lower-paid support staffers and homeless students.
But the question of whether teachers could legally push for these broader demands remained— in the winter, when the union told teachers to prepare for the picket lines, CTU President Jesse Sharkey noted that the union could face “legal repercussions” if a strike occurred. Now, it is clear that this is within the union’s legal rights.
CTU President Jesse Sharkey said in a statement:
“With the signing of this bill, we now at last bargain from a level playing field — with the ability to at last reject the chronic classroom overcrowding, incompetent and wasteful third party contracting, and the desperate shortage of school nurses, social workers, counselors and other chronic staffing needs that have plagued our schools for years.”
At the bargaining table, Rodriguez describes how district administrators have failed to bring teacher voices into their plans. A lawyer can say that schools will give health screenings and maintain social distancing, but teachers have to enforce these unrealistic promises. “Like have you seen a child?” she says. “I love my students, but they’re also gross.”
It’s been a brutal year, but Perales emphasizes the support of her fellow teachers and parents. When she was locked out of her classroom in February, parents also refused to log their students into class in solidarity with her. With every agonizing decision, she says the union has made her feel informed and supported. “I don’t think I could have gotten through all of this without CTU.”
"Fine, troubled by the “nationalistic ideology” that seeped into seemingly every corner of American life, saw room for more extensive classroom discussions about international policy and the United States’ history in the Middle East. The way that nationalism could frame contemporary explanations of how and why 9/11 occurred was inherently dangerous — and created opportunity for potential missteps in the future. Fine wrote:
“If we do not teach about conditions of oppression and terror (state- and corporate-sponsored, interpersonal, domestic and suicide bombs), even in times of relative prosperity and peace, we relinquish the space of public education to the globalization of terror, greed, fear, obedience and silencing. By so doing, we surrender democracy, hollow the souls of educators and youth, and threaten our collective futures...Today’s students will become tomorrow’s voters, policy makers, and world leaders. With such important responsibilities to look forward to, they deserve an education that interrogates what they know, and what they need to know.” '
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