As a child I was fascinated with elasticity. First it was rubber bands. Stretch them, twist them, tie and untie them, bunch them into a ball, and they always return to their essential shape. Good old rubber bands. Then it was Silly Putty. Extract it from its container, shape it, tear it into bits, make it into anything you want, and then put it back in its container. Voila! Silly Putty melted and molded back to the internal shape of the container and was ready for more future silliness.
Public education, both in the pandemic and in the post-pandemic, has been exceedingly elastic. And, required to be exceedingly elastic by our school communities. All the accommodations schools made for the continuing instruction of children over two-plus fraught school years were stretches to meet the emergency. And, just as soon as the various levels of emergency ended there was an immediate expectation that school would return to its pre-molded shapes of the past. Public education is expected to be institutional silly putty in the face of change. Any forward movement or change will be countermanded by an equal or greater snap back toward past practices. Elasticity does not lead to permanent change.
This is not a put down or a slam, but an objective observation.
Test this hypothesis regarding educational elasticity. What aspect of institutionalization was permanently changed by the pandemic? School calendar and school day, curriculum, rules and regulations, school athletic and activity life, instruction of children with exceptional needs, and faculty and staff employments – all snapped back to the pre-pandemic norms just like a good old rubber band.
The pandemic certainly added to the challenges of future public education. Mental health and social-emotional welfare of children and school employees jumped to the forefront of many school conversations. Gaps in student learning and achievement are evident. Shortages in the candidate pool for every category of school employee arose during and continue after school closures. These three may be our most significant post-pandemic challenges. Yet, our elastic institution is required to meet all new challenges with old institutional thinking. We are struggling to fit mental health and SEO programming into the old Silly Putty can of a school day and school year and already budgeted school revenues. We are compromised – do we fill gaps in learning or teach this year’s curriculum? It is difficult to do both with fidelity. Even though there are real shortages in every category of classroom teacher, my work with the WI DPI finds few alternative pathways being approved even when the alternative meets the rigor of teacher license requirements. Snap back personified.
Test the hypothesis of elasticity within schools. What new options and pathways are being approved to meet these challenges? Generally, nada. The first and dominant impulse is to make the spring of 2022 look and feel like the spring of 2019. We are trying to fix post-pandemic challenges with pre-pandemic tools. Every news story about school districts across the nation trying new approaches to new as well as old challenges is quickly followed with stories about slap back and snap back.
Heaven help the school board that makes remote education, simultaneous studio teaching, and Zooming a regular instructional delivery.
It is the nature of a true institution to be change resistant. Institutions by definition have a constancy of predictable behavior. Lack of predictability causes lack of confidence. In general, our test of predictability is that today’s school must behave like the school adults attended when we were children. That is the same definition our parents and grandparents used to assure predictive continuity – unchanged schools.
Without causing too much uproar, we need to reform one of the three underlying assumptions about public education.
- Parents and the economic community depend upon the school as predictable day care for all children of school age.
- Children depend upon the school to educate them in preparation of continuing education after graduation or beginning steady employment.
- Schools are institutional not dynamic agencies.
The first assumption is tied to the constancy of day and time. As a generalization, the calendar is September 1 to June 1 and the clock resembles an adult workday, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Without exception, adults schedule their adult world around the predictability of the school’s provision of day care. This assumption is inviolate; the scope of educational reform is restricted by the need for all children to be in school on all scheduled school days. If the calendar and clock are malleable, many more options are available for matching selected children with selected programs at selected times of the day. Personalization and differentiation increase dramatically. Day care is day and time based; education is outcome based. Which will prevail?
The second assumption questions the two traditional tracks of 4K-12 education. Our traditional paradigm is all children are in a college track or they are in a world of work track. A new paradigm may say – in 4K-5 children achieve foundational learning and in 6-12 children apply, extend, and enrich foundational learning. Historically, the college track fed the future of professional careers, and the non-college track fed the future of business, trades, and labor. The reality of college debt and its punitive effect upon twenty- through thirty-year olds is reducing college matriculation annually. A local school that traditionally sent 95-97% of its graduates to college now sends 75-80%. Additionally, the very productive options for personal, experience-based education that is not associated with higher education tells us to rethink tracking in favor of blended education and career exploration, apprenticeship, and internship for students in grades 6-14. Will the snap back to traditional and institutional tracking define the future or will an extended and expanded secondary education provide innovative options for transitioning students into adulthood?
Finally, the third assumption is about fences. Is the best provision of public education institutional or dynamic? When a school board seeks a new district administrator, are they hiring leadership that assures continuity of past programming or innovative thinking for new opportunities? It makes a difference. Educators follow their leadership, and the nature of a school aligns to its leader. Institutional thinking is about fencing that assures constancy and the predictable delivery of past outcomes. Dynamic thinking looks beyond the fences to possibilities. What kind of agency should our school be?
If 2019 can fix our needs for 2022-23, then let’s keep playing with Silly Putty. If 2022-23 and beyond requires more than pre-2019 provided, let’s enjoy elasticity in our Spandex not our schools.