Schooling for the 2019-20 school year is closing several months after the schoolhouses closed. The shuttering of schoolhouses and the end of this instructional year are two events that will be marked on our calendars and not fade into history quickly. Most important is our recognition that closing a schoolhouse and closing a school year are not synonymous. Schoolhouses closed in late March and schooling continued until June. If this were June of any prior year, children would exit school doors after a last day of their school year, teachers would box up classroom materials, and schoolhouses would be darkened for the summer. Someone would be yelling “School’s out. School’s out. Teacher’s let the monkeys out.” In those days, schoolhouses, schooling, and a school year had clear markers. Not so much today.
A side note worth considering. Schools and governors chose the safety of closing schools instead of staying in school and remote education instead of in-person, large group education. These were health and safety decisions not based on educational or economy-based rationales.
According to NWEA, an educational assessment, professional development, and research vendor in Oregon, posting in the NY Times, “New research suggests that by September, most students will have fallen behind where they would have been if they had stayed in classrooms. . . . Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps will most likely widen.”
NWEA believes that the usual and traditional summer slide of student academic performance indicators, June compared with September, will be greater next fall than in prior years due to schoolhouse closures in the spring of 2020. Other commentators agree with NWEA’s opinion that the loss will be greatest for students of color and poverty. Most everyone agrees and understands that remote education this spring was not the equivalent of normal in-person teaching and learning. The big question now is, “what do we do about it?”.
Some responses are knee jerks. Others are contemplative. And, a few are progressive. Knee jerk reactionaries want to open schools in late July or August to add back weeks of learning time lost this past spring. They want to open schools regardless of health and safety and complete the 2019-20 school year as if it were still the month of March. For those who believe that schooling is time in school, that nothing was learned during remote education, and schooling is a cut and paste enterprise, this works. It is a traditionalist’s approach to making things whole. Once whole again in school time, the future looks like the past.
The contemplatives look backward and rethink the decisions of governors and school boards to close schoolhouses in the ramp up period of the pandemic. “If only …” thinking tells them “we cannot know how COID would have affected the health of children, their families and communities, because we closed schoolhouses. But, we do know the educational and economic impacts of closure and they are not pretty. Perhaps if we had not closed schools, educational loss and economic disasters would not have been as great”. The unknown effects of COVID on the health of children due to closure is weighed against the known losses in educational performance and across-the-board economic losses. This causes contemplatives to want to open schoolhouses to recoup our educational and economic losses. “We gave a lot in to sustain healthy children. Perhaps school closures were not necessary. Now, it is time to balance things out.”
Some facts. Educational data will show disparate results in student learning resulting from remote education. Some disparity arises from the differences in school and home resources. Certainly, some schools and homes were better positioned to support remote education than others. Certainly, some communities have better Internet connectivity than other communities. And, certainly some teachers and students were better able to transfer rigorous teaching and learning from in-person and in-classroom to home-based strategies. I know teachers whose daily, remote instruction caused children to sustain their academic growth and approximate student’s in-class academic growth. I also know teachers whose daily instruction did not. There will be differences in outcomes.
What do do?
- Get the data. When in-school schooling resumes, assess. Use the same learning assessments that were used in September 2019 and January 2020 to understand the educational performances of all children. Add in data from assessments taken in September 2020. We need side-by-side comparisons. Look at each child’s beginning of year and mid-year indicators. What is the difference between anticipated educational gains and real educational status?
- Schooling in May always is differentiated from schooling in September through April. May is ramp-up for high school AP testing and it is ramp down for almost everyone else. How does comparative data from past ramp down years relate to data from remote education?
- Summer slide is an annual phenomenon. Educators have forever shaken their heads about the loss of performance indicators from June to September. How does the data from remote education plus slide differ from in-class plus slide differ?
- Should the compensation for differences in what the data shows us be time-based or effort-based? We know that education “percolates”. Children need time and opportunity for learning to gel and make sense. Instruction over time also builds learning strength and adds depth to knowledge and skills. Some compensation will require time on task.
- Learning time also is personal. Some children require more time on task to master new learning than other children require. We need to disaggregate the data so that children receive the compensation they need. We would error greatly in requiring all children to receive identical compensatory instruction they may not need or others not to get the instruction they need.
- We also know that instruction has critical attributes that lead to essential learning and enrichment values that may not be essential. Compensation should ensure that all children achieve essential educational outcomes.
- Urgency is relative. There are content knowledge and skills that are urgent because they are necessary for children to engage in what comes “next” in school. Learning is additive. The mastery of early learning outcomes allows children to learn later outcomes. Other knowledge and skills are cumulative and urgency is not a matter of concern. Children will learn these over time. We need to deal with the urgent but not be overwhelmed by the not-so-urgent.
- The issues of health and safety in the time of COVID are not going away quickly. While we want all children to return to school to resume schooling and repair any educational loss and our parents and community adults to be available for work to repair local, state and national economies, we also want everyone to be healthy and safe. Consequently, re-opening school must follow our best knowledge and facts about the continuing pandemic. It is more than probable that social distancing, masking, screened access, and hand washing will be requirements in a re-opened school.
- Re-opening school will cost more money than a typical fall opening of school. The issues of compensatory instructional time and new instructional designs combined with compliance with health and safety guidelines will add new costs to a traditional September opening of school. When all is said and done, these facts may the real driver of the decisions a school board makes regarding September 2020.
Next will arrive in its own time. We need to understand exactly what will be our next.