Five years from now, will the world give today’s children a pass saying, “You were educated in the time of COVID 19 and we know that your academic education was incomplete. That’s okay. We will not expect as much from you.” I don’t think they will and I do not expect them to do so. Our task today is to educate children while schools are closed and then make their education whole so that no one will need a pass.
Scope of the issue
Most schools were closed by order of school boards and state governors in the last weeks of March. At first, the belief was that schools would be closed for the month of April and re-opened in early May. As the pandemic bloomed on the east and west coasts and then in larger cities and more slowly across the middle of the United States, hopes for May became a realization that the 2019-20 school year would end with most schools closed. The next issue to be faced is how schools will open in the fall. And, if there will be a second wave of COVID 19 in late fall/early winter as is suspected.
School curricula is either a spiraling band of K-12 instruction or it is chunked into subject area courses. In both constructs, the teaching of academic units is packaged and scheduled on an annual calendar. Seldom is the K-12 spiral systemically broken as it has been by COVID. Organizationally, the machine of instruction begins in September and grinds steadily until June. With 90%-plus of children present in class every day, a school year is a steady stream of teaching and learning. We know how to compensate missed learning for children due to their illness or other reasons for school absence. With lessons either before or after, children become whole in their academic year.
The issue now is that all children missed two or more months of teaching and learning. A second issue is, although teachers and children used remote education services to sustain teaching and learning while schools are closed, no one knows the relationship of what was learned to what was expected to be learned. Remote education is idiosyncratic to the local school district and within a school district it is dependent upon an individual teacher’s skills and dispositions for working remotely. Add to that the issues of Internet connectivity and instructional effectiveness becomes more of a question.
A closed school faces many issues. As one elementary principal said, “We are focused on assuring that our students are safe and secure at home. We are working to assure they are fed and that their social-emotional concerns in this crisis are addressed. Daily lessons come after these problems are resolved.” For some children, remote education is last on their day’s concerns.
Key questions
Much of education is scaffolded. What a child learns in third grade is foundational for what a child will learn in fourth and fifth grade. Scaffolding is most easily illustrated in the spiral of mathematics education. Fractions, a troublesome subject for many children in the best of schooling times, is taught in 4th and 5th grades. We know from decades of experience that children who are not secure in their understanding and manipulation of numerators and denominators and ratios have difficulty learning Algebra. And, Algebra is the fundamental to secondary mathematics. A deficit in fractions plagues a child’s education for years afterward. Focus then on this question, how can we assure that children in the 2019-20 school year who are scheduled to learn and become secure in fractions are secure in fractions?
Move the scaffold across the curricula to ELA, science, social studies, world languages, the arts, and technical education. What chunk of foundational learning lacks security?
Look inside the scaffold. How well did children with special needs prosper under remote education? Many schools are diligently providing IEP-required modifications to lessons during remote education. Special education and school interventionists make daily contact with children to assist their remote learning. As we look carefully at the learning performances of all children post-COVID, we must look with care at the performances of special needs children to assure they made expected progress. This includes children with gifted and talented needs as well as children with disabilities.
Work to be done
Our task is to adapt re-opened schools with a focus on making the education of all children whole regarding the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. There is not a singular solution for doing this. Every recommendation will have its proponents and opponents. Each solution attempted will have its challenge, because it will be implemented within the moving parts and new expectations of the 2020-21 school year. The assessment piece will be difficult, because children’s experiences in remote education will be so varied as to make each child a case of one. And, continuous monitoring and adjusting of compensatory education filling in the learning gaps will be ongoing requiring more assessment.
At some point in time, perhaps June 2021 or June 2022, we need to say to every child who was schooled in the time of COVID, “Your instruction has been made whole. Your future education and career will not be impacted by lost instruction doe to COVID 19.”
We have work to do.