Category Archives: Blog

Olly Olly Oxen Free

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On a dusky summer evening in our neighborhood a parent would hear “Olly olly oxen free” and know that children still unfound in a game of hide and seek could now come out of hiding, gather around the home base, and start a new game.  Hide and seek, a game that allows children to scatter, find cover, wait out the person seeking them, and if not found, return to home base a winner.  Many winners were possible in every game.  Sounds like remote education in a pandemic.

Olly olly oxen free was what children heard and repeated when the originators of the game actually yelled into the dusk, “All ye out come in free”. 

That should be the message to all children and their parents from a school today.  It is time to gather all the children who are enrolled in the school and provide everyone with a needed status check.  In the game of learning, we need to know the status of each child’s learning?  Schools don’t know.  Parents don’t know.  Children don’t know.  We all need to know.

This is not necessarily a call for all children to return to in-person learning in their pre-pandemic school.  Facts are that some children already have returned to in-person learning.  Facts are that some children have found new schooling providers and will not return to their pre-pandemic school.  Facts are that some parents are not yet ready to return their children to any school for in-person learning.  These are the facts regarding children who were enrolled in our schools when the pandemic sent them home.

There is another fact that must be addressed.  That is, the current learning status of each child after twelve-plus months of pandemic education.  Each school needs to say to its pre-pandemic parents with credible assessment results –

  • These are the achievement facts of your child’s pre-pandemic learning, and,
  • These are the current achievement facts of your child’s pandemic learning.

“All ye out come in free” is a call to parents to receive unblemished educational assessments.  Information always is powerful.  It informs decisions.  A lack of information can lead to uninformed decisions.  Parents and schools need information and they need it now.

Assessments are more than reading and math testing.  We need information about a student’s learning status regarding each of the standards-based curricula that is taught in our schools.  This includes all academics – reading, writing, speaking, language development, math problem solving, math information, science, and social studies.  It includes the arts – art, band, and choral music.  It includes each second language a child was studying at the beginning of the pandemic.  It includes each of the elective areas of education – business and marketing, technology, computer sciences, and driver’s education.  And, it includes health and physical education.  In our school, each of these represents a curriculum based upon school board adopted standards.  This curriculum is the substance of our school’s instructional program and we need to know about all of it.

Some may say that we should wait until a child returns to her pre-pandemic school or formally enrolls in another school to conduct such assessments.  I fully disagree with the first part of this caution.  Our school is obligated to provide this information on an annual basis to the parents of each child enrolled in the school.  Although statewide assessments for the purpose of school report cards have been waived, there have been no waivers for a school’s responsibility to inform parents about their child’s ongoing learning developmnts.  I will agree that a school is responsible for assessing each of its enrolled children and this extends to new school enrollees.  To extend this, a school is responsible for obtaining a new enrollee’s educational records so parents will have pre-pandemic and current pandemic information for their child. 

It is time to call “Olly olly oxen free”, gather our school children, and conduct a full range of educational assessments.  It is time for school, parents, and children to have these educational facts.  This spring, April, May and early June, is the time.  The fact is, we know what to assess, how to assess, and who to assess.  The fact is, teaching and learning in the 2021-22 school year requires these assessments.  The question is, will we?  Or will all the oxen still roam free?

School Board Work Is A Wonderful Responsibility

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To each person duly elected to the local school board, I say “Welcome.  Today you will begin to see, listen to, and think about school in an entirely new dimension.  Engage with fellow board members in a thoughtful discussion of how your board will meet its responsibilities to educate all children.  Then, get to know your school from the inside out.  We have a lot to learn and talk about.” 

An introduction to the school board was not always like this.

A few years back a newly elected school board member was chastised by the board president for visiting school classrooms and talking with teachers.  He was told, “Follow the chain of command.  Board members speak with the superintendent.  The superintendent speaks with principals and other administrators.  Principals and other administrators speak with teachers and other employees.  Don’t violate this chain for command”.  A conversation with the executive director of the state’s school board association confirmed this absurdity.  “Follow the chain of command”, he advised, “it exists for a purpose.”

And, they also should have said, “Take a firm grip on your rubber stamp, because the limiting funnel of information allowed through such a command structure will require little to no discussion by board members.  One voice.  One interpretation of information.  No discussion necessary.”

How absurd and how wrong! 

A quick review of state statutes describing the duties of a school board member disabused this new board member of what the president and executive director said.  The statutes contain no such limitations on the scope of a board member’s interaction with the district’s schools.    Our statutes tell us that our duties, among others, include these:

120.12 School board duties. The school board of a common or union high school district shall:

(1) MANAGEMENT OF SCHOOL DISTRICT. Subject to the authority vested in the annual meeting and to the authority and possession specifically given to other school district officers, have the possession, care, control and management of the property and affairs of the school district, except for property of the school district used for public library purposes under s. 43.52.

(2) GENERAL SUPERVISION. Visit and examine the schools of the school district, advise the school teachers and administrative staff regarding the instruction, government and progress of the pupils and exercise general supervision over such schools.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/120.pdf

Any board policies or regulations restricting a board member’s interactions are not founded in statute and are propagated only to protect an antiquated concept of the status quo.  The only valid admonition is a board member must refrain from discussion that might compromise the board member’s future role should the board meet in a judicial hearing.  For example, don’t engage in discussion of a specific employee’s work performance or a specific student’s discipline record.  A Board may fulfill its statutory role in hearing a case related to employee termination or student expulsion and the prior discussions of these by a board member may compromise the board member’s capacity to be objectively neutral. 

Better rules to follow are – “Treat everyone, adult and child, with integrity and respect.  Be informed.  Be a voice for the future of all children.  You are a legislator not an administrator.”

  • Integrity and respect are gold standards for boardsmanship.  Each person you speak with requires these two qualities from you.  No matter the person’s role in school – parent, student, teacher, custodian, administrator, community taxpayer – that person has a legitimate claim to your attention.  You are that person’s representative on the school board.  The integrity and respect you demonstrate sets the role model standard for the school district.  If integrity and respect are not present at the school board, how can you expect them be present anywhere else in the school?
  • Integrity and respect are demonstrated by listening rather than talking.  You want to understand their perspective not overlay your own.  You can do that at the board table.  Integrity is demonstrated by sharing the multiple perspectives you have heard.  Integrity is making fact-based decisions and holding to a decision as long as the facts support a decision.  And, when the facts do not support a decision, adjusting the decision to reflect new facts. 
  • Board members need first-hand information.  The old chain of command assured that most information was second- and third-hand.  Create your information base by proactively visiting classrooms to observe instruction, the use of curricular materials, and student and teacher interaction.  I call this “perching”.  You are not in a classroom to interact or participate, but to see and listen and feel.  However, if the teacher invites your participation, do not hesitate.  Enjoy the moment.
  • Engage in hearty discussions about employment policies, responsibilities and expectations, and practices.  Gain firsthand information about the school environment from an employee and student perspective.  See teachers, aides, district and school office staff, kitchen and food service, custodians and maintenance staff, bus drivers, and coaches, directors and advisors doing their work. 
  • Then, with respect and integrity, share your information appropriately at the board table. 

https://www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=13914

  • Your real constituency is the children of the school.  You may be elected from a precinct or supported in your election by voters who favor certain programs or want specific changes and improvements in the school district.  However, your focus should always be on the quality education of all children, emphasis on all.  When the board is called upon to vote on a matter, your vote is powerful.  Of all the voices speaking to the matter, when the votes are tallied, only board voices/votes are counted.  Make your vote stand for the highest quality of programming your schools can provide to all children.
  • You are a legislator not an administrator.  Board members work with policies stemming from the mission and goals of the school district.  Affirm policies that are creating desired school district outcomes and amend or delete policies that are not.  When in the school, watch, listen and feel – don’t direct.  You have no authority to tell anyone what to do.  That is a role of school administration and supervision. 
  • Always remember that you are not evaluating any employee’s work.  That is a supervisor’s role.  You are being informed by the work you observe.  This is one of the greatest cliffs from which board members fall.  And, the landing is never good.  Do not engage in an evaluative discussion with school employees of any rank regarding their work performance or the performance of another employee.  The board does this when it annually considers each employee’s contract renewal.  Wait until then.

“Welcome” to the work of the school board.  As you take your seat, consider your role as an elected educational leader.  Commit your tenure to integrity and respect, being informed by the work of every school employee, speak for the education of all children, focus on the connections between school mission and goals and school board policies, and always remember that you are one of the few, a member for the School Board.

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct93/vol51/num02/Rethinking-the-School-Board’s-Role.aspx

What We Learned – The School We Miss Did Many Things Very Well

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Hindsight is what hindsight is.  It is a memory of what what was.  As memory, hindsight is not 20-20 because memory is an interpreted thought shaped by our personal context, singular experience, and how we prefer to consider the event.  Pre-pandemic school is a memory today that is more than one year old.  As school emerges from pandemic education, many parents, children, and educators call for a return to the normal, our memory of school in the pre-pandemic.  As we make our future look like our past, many are identifying aspects of remembered school that we did quite well.

I do not find anyone labeling the school of their hindsight as a perfect school.  That educational institution had its challenges requiring improvement and change.  I do find, however, common points of reference that are more than just kind thoughts of yesteryear.  These shared references identify core values of schooling are enduring and, of need, will be part of our post-pandemic school.

There were moments in our pandemic experience when the future of public education was questioned and doubted.  In the absence of daily attendance by children and teachers, other educational delivery systems rose.  Some answered the call and many evaporated as quickly as they rose.  Commercial delivery, privatized delivery, and targeted delivery offered options that could replace local public school delivery.  Quickly, disparity in economic resources divided school communities.  Many parents with resources left public education, perhaps never to return.  The historic faults and failures of public education to meet the needs of all children equitably and equally were magnified by closed school campuses. 

However, through a full year of pandemic education, certain values of public education have been immutable.  In our national community, there is no replacing these.

School is “the place where it happens”.  Can it be that absence from school has made the heart grow fonder for the place of school?  It has.  In April and May, 2020, parents in our school chafed against the idea that school would not be the place for the Junior Prom, the spring musical, K-12 concerts, sports events, and graduation.  Chafing grew into vocal opposition to remote education in September when virtual learning was the instructional default for our school.  The place where it happens did not live in our school for six months; parents were given the option of in-school or at-home learning in January, 2021. 

Whereas, we commonly think children yearn and can’t wait for vacations away from school, in January we experienced children anxious and wanting to be in school.  Children, especially in rural communities, know that school is where it happens for them.  They are naturally distanced in their homes from their classmates and friends in healthy time and school is where they get to be together with all the children of the school district.  The distance of miles and time was magnified by the pandemic.  Returning to school means a child is with friends.

The pandemic retaught us that school is a place that is essential in the lives of children, parents, and community.  We also relearned that we know how to make that place serve the interests and needs and wants of children, parents and community. 

School is “proximity to adults not your parents”.  The pandemic reminded us that the role teachers, counselors, coaches, directors, advisors, and mentors play in the lives of children is irreplaceable in the life of a child.  Children need adults in their lives.  In the first order, they have their parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.  No one substitutes for these.  School adults add to the breadth and depth of each child’s adult role models.  Proximity, the physical, personal interactions between school adults and children, is critical to the development of children. 

Music programs highlight the significance of proximity.  For a beginning horn player, proximity is crucial to developing embouchure.   On-screen, a teacher can demonstrate how to form the lips, use the tongue, flex the facial muscles, and “blow” to create sound.  But, it is two-dimensional and the embouchure is three-dimensional.  Sound on-screen is automatically regulated and a teacher does not know the volume of sound a student is creating.  YouTube videos help, but all media suffers the same fault – students need the personal, proximity of their teacher. 

Magnify this by the number of times in an elementary classroom a teacher kneels next to a student’s desk to assist with a math problem, the quality of instruction derived from personal proximity used in a reading group, and the countless number of smiles shared by children and teachers each day.  Remote education cannot simulate or replace the value a child derives from personal proximity to teachers, counselors, coaches, directors, advisors, and mentors in school.

School is “community”.  The easiest portrayal of school as community is the gathering of community members for Friday Night Lights on athletic fields, in gymnasiums and pools, on theater stages, and in every public performance of school children.  School provides a community with entertainment, cultural appreciation, and communal gathering.  Parent pride, community pride, and school pride connect as one pride at school events where children are involved. 

Twelve months without audience at school events has been hard on everyone.  We use the term “school community” loosely, but its importance has been magnified in the absence of community as audience.  The first concert or play or musical production will be interesting when it brings performers and audience together again and both anxiety and appreciation will abound.

School is “partnership”.  We collectively and mutually have exercised and tested this concept of school and home partnership in the pandemic.  Closing the school campus was the first test.  How can there be a partnership when school doors are closed to children and parents?  A second test was telling parents that school remains accountable for providing daily instruction to all school-age children and parents needed to be the at-home teacher/tutor/mentor/supervisor – five days a week and many hours each day. 

We did not achieve universal success with remote education.  The lack of Internet and adequate digital devices in many homes was a game stopper at the word “go”.  Parents needed to work to support their families and work hours and school hours did not jive.  Inadequate school-to-home communication and ongoing instructional support caused students and families to drop out.  Some parents bailed out on their local schools immediately and joined private schools, formed home school clusters, or became full-time home schoolers.  These faults recognized, a vast majority of parents remained in partnership with their school, created new communicating strategies with teachers, counselors, and administrators and after twelve months of pandemic education remain connected partners with their school.

The post-pandemic partnership will not be pre-pandemic partnership.  We mutually pushed and pulled on the expectations of partnership and school-home relations will be amended.  We need to improve scope and quality of educational communication with parents.  After months of being their child’s teacher, “doing satisfactory” no longer cuts it as a performance indicator.  Parents want and deserve explicit achievement data on a unit-by-unit basis.  Parents and children profited from on-line, texted, and telephoned personalized, individualized conversations with teachers.  This practice must be extended into usual and best practice for all.  Teachers and children profited from personalized and individualized remote teaching and learning.  A return to whole and large group, anonymous teaching and learning will not and should not satisfy our reconstituted partnership.

As students return to school engaging in the academic, activity, arts, and athletic life of their school, the concepts of place, adult role models, community, and partnership will be the threads the bind us together again as a public school.

Remote Education Is An Emergency Response Not A New Parent Choice Option

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As public schools emerge from the pandemic and teachers and children return to their schoolhouses for in-person teaching and learning, a huge question emerges for public educators.  Are schools required to retain remote education as a new parent choice option?  Get to the answer quickly.  No!

This is “a bridge too far”, to paraphrase a military strategy of World War Two that looked good on paper but was not successful in action.  Today, remote education as a continuing, school district-dependent delivery system parallel to in-person learning is entirely “a bridge too far”.

At first, I thought, “Why not?”.  We are educators and we rise to every occasion.  During the height of the pandemic, teachers learned to teach from home to children at home.  They learned to teach from their classrooms to children at home.  Most recently, they learned to to teach in the hybrid model of some children in-person in the classroom and other children on-screen learning at home.  Teachers made the emergency strategy for remote education work.  Teachers pushed the veritable envelope to new dimensions.  But, there is an enormous difference between what we are called to do in an emergency and what we do as sustainable best practice.  There is no reason to keep the envelope pushed to its extremities in the post-pandemic.

Why is this thus?

The public concept of remote education is viewed entirely from the child’s perspective.  There is nothing wrong with a client-perspective, especially a child/student, but theirs is not the only perspective.  As a learner, synchronous virtual instruction satisfies those who prefer to learn away from school or children whose exceptionalities make home learning less of a conflicting challenge.  Accepted.  From the teaching perspective, synchronous virtual education is a perfect recipe for teacher burn out and failure.  Given the usual assignment of one teacher to a class schedule of children every day for a full school year, simultaneous teaching for children in the classroom and children on-screen is a severe conflicting challenge.  It requires one teacher to teach and cause high learner achievement in two distinct classrooms simultaneously.  This cannot be be accepted – it is not reasonably sustainable.

Remote education in the Time of COVID was education’s emergency program responding to our state constitution’s mandate that every eligible child will have access to public schooling.  Education did not stop; it just changed delivery systems.  As an emergency response,  remote education was a detour on a road under construction.  The detour got us to the destination we wanted to achieve only using different roads.  Better yet, remote education was staying with your relatives when your home is under renovation.  As soon as the renovation is complete, you are expected to move back home.  Remote education, as we installed it, was an emergency delivery system and when the emergency is over so is that delivery system for the every day education of children.

Remote education is authorized by the Department of Public Instruction as an “alternative delivery system” to be used at the discretion of a local school board during the emergency of the COVID 19 pandemic to ensure the education of every child eligible for public education.  There is no mandate that a school board must provide remote education as teaching and learning delivery system.  This alternative is premised upon waivers granted by national and state governments to educational rules and practices that are not sustainable in an emergency.  When the emergency ends, so do the waivers that permit the alternative delivery system

I understand that we live in a consumer economy.  Some parents and children found learning at home and not attending school to be a new preference for how they wish to continue their experiences in 4K-12 education.  They do not want to return to daily, in-school life.  Parents as consumers of child education will make their demands known.  Homeschooling, open enrollment, charter schools, and virtual education are responses to past educational consumerism.  And, each contains an element of what a consumer seeks in remote education.  Children can be taught at home.  Parents can choose their educational provider.  Parents can band together as their own schools.  Teaching and learning can be conducted on-line.  We will see if these legislatively-approved options appease new consumer wants.

Sadly, the pandemic will become endemic.  Resurgent infections and variants will cause schools to use quarantining and perhaps campus closure in the future as diligent responses for child and adult health needs.  Quarantining and closure will require the use of remote education strategies.  There also will be residual use of remote education for emergency times when children can not attend school.  A child who needs an extended absence due to illness or injury can connect with daily instruction remotely.  The technologies we use today will satisfy that child’s emergency and continuing learning needs.  We know how to use remote education in an emergency -in an emergency.  Consumer want is not an emergency.

To every parent or child who responds to the writing with “…but I want remote education…”, I repeat my “No!”.  Remote education necessitated by a school closed due to the emergencies of the pandemic is not the birth of another parent choice option. 

Some may use open enrollment options to find a school district that provides remote education within its usual programming.  Parents may demonstrate their wants in school board or school referenda elections.  These are real and positive options in our political life.  No problem.  The state legislature may make remote education their latest concession to the politics of education.  Again, no problem, if that is the mandate.  And, with a new mandate, appropriate study will be made regarding how to staff remote education for the success of all children.  Today, it is not the mandate and there has been no study of how remote education can serve all children with equal success.  What we know of synchronous virtual teaching and learning is the residual of our emergency strategy only.

Public education will return to its solid normalcy of in-person teaching, coaching, directing, guiding, advising, and mentoring of children attending school in a non-emergency environment.  And, as needed, we will rise to the next emergency.  And, as educators, what we learned in this emergency will help us to be better educators in the future.

Focusing On Crisis Has Obscured Big Picture Perspectives

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Admonished over time to keep the “big picture” in front of us, that panoramic view has become nigh unto impossible for school leadership in the pandemic.  The urgency of crises, plural, demands that each disaggregated, independent small picture must become its own focal point.  When time, effort, and resources are focused on discrete, immediate, and compelling problems, it is hard to see the wide landscape.   In the second year of the pandemic, it is past time to swivel our necks and look broadly at our schools.

A 360-degree viewpoint has become an educated and informed perspective for school leaders.  It was not always so.  Educational surveying as an organizational feedback tool took root in the early 1950s, although the root was slow to grow.  Most often surveys were targeted and focused.  Problems were identified, then taken “head on” with a questionnaire given in a linear fashion.  This is the problem and these are the people directly associated with the problem.  As computer technologies advanced, surveying and data collection became easier.  The 1990s advent of the Internet and access to greater populations opened thinking to multi-source responses to surveying and the idea was labeled as 360-degree sourcing. 

School leaders are trusted to look at all constituencies related to a problem.  A school problem may display itself across a grade, across grade levels, across schools, with some students or all students, and with some school programs but not all.  A 360 degree look assured that all information was sought and considered.

Then comes the pandemic.  It is not that leaders abandoned their problem-solving training; crisis thinking drove us to microscopic visions and tighter constituencies.  Last March, the pandemic was a blitzkrieg of problems demanding answers spontaneously and problem-solving skills were replaced with crisis solving skills.  Protect from the virus was the crushing issue.  School campuses closed to in-person teaching and learning, the walls went up, all vision was focused and tunneled. 

Inadvertently, leadership focused instruction on the maintenance of reading, ELA, and math – the big three of state assessments – and all other subjects drifted.  If a school could sustain child proficiency in the three “basics”, the state report card would not tumble too far.  And, a child who is proficient in these three will be best prepared for a post-pandemic education.  Though this seemed best at the time, the loss of 360 looking has taken a toll in the education of all children.

Music programs were virtually hibernated.  School bands and choirs were not allowed to meet en masse and forced to manage with virtual or individual lessons.  Really tough sledding for directors and children.  Ensemble work was barred for instruments that children blew through and for projected choral singing. Ironically, these programs are traditionally out front in the school’s public relations.  Communities take pride in their school bands and choirs and in the pandemic and during the pandemic – nada!

Distancing protocols played havoc with science labs, all small group work, tech shop work – virtually everything in school that put children and teachers in close proximity to each other was verboten.  Art classrooms closed and children were left with crayons and pencils and paper at home.  No ceramics or sculpting.  No metal work or jewelry.  Art studios went virtual as bases for teachers to demonstrate art to at-home learners.

Locker rooms were closed to physical education and athletics.  Contact sports of all kinds were looked upon with a jaundiced eye.  If it were not for the strength of parent and community booster demands, athletics entirely would have been abandoned for the duration.  And, herein lies the rub.  Booster groups for athletics got their games but booster groups for bands and orchestras did not.  Any bias here in the pandemic?

Auditoriums and theaters closed.  The school play, musical, and concerts were a patchwork of video at best, but usually not all.

Some schools jumped back to in-school learning options this past fall.  Hybrid models taught children in-school and at-home simultaneously, but with caveats for small groups and distancing.  Academic work found its way, but art, music, PE, tech, and all large group instruction remained on hold.  For schools sustaining at-home learners, instruction was predominantly academic with lip service to all else.

Early on we understood that student IEPs do not recognize the limitations of a pandemic.  We made necessary adjustments to our COVID thinking to meet the requirements of an IEP, but did not make anything similar to meet the learning needs and interests of children without exceptionality.  These children received a thin stream of academic and sparse arts and PE instruction. 

Our pandemic consideration of schooling became very siloed.  Mandates for viral protection shaped teaching and learning.  While many teachers became technical magicians using multi-screens to teach children in-school and at-home, classroom protocols forced each teacher to be a one-room schoolhouse for her grade level or subject area.  Arts, activities, and athletics were virtually shuttered in their respective silos.

Much like digging out from a tornado, we are beginning to look full circle at our school environment and the effect of the viral storm.  A 360 look-around tells us the landscape in March 2021 is nothing like the landscape in March 2020.  From a student learning perspective, the view is rather stark.  And, the view is not much different from a teacher perspective.  The trees of reading, ELA and math still stand, but the forests of arts, activity, and athletic education were knocked down.

We have work to do

We need to return children to the richness of a Four “A” School where Academics, Activities, Arts, and Athletics thrive.  While we cannot run back to the past, we need to walk quickly.  All the ingenuity that went into remote education must be focused on returning children to instruction and opportunities they have missed.  This is not a mission of compensatory education, but a mission of restorative visions and programming.

We have a quarter of the school year left in SY 2020-21.  The pandemic conditions of the first quarter of the school year do not exist during the fourth quarter.  There is no reason for us to maintain all of September’s restrictions in April, May, and June.  A catch word last March was nimbleness.  We wanted nimble school decisions that would safeguard schools from a virus we were just learning about.  Nimbleness was needed to sustain learning even with closed school campuses.  Now we need nimbleness in emerging our schools from closed to open campuses.

It begins with words and quickly moves to actions.  Use a 360 vision that assesses the status of every school program and its current status in pandemic education.  Re-establish the rationale for your original pandemic plan; it was what it was.  Recognize changes in the pandemic environment in terms of infection and hospital rates in your locale; they are what they are.  Create a plan for parents who choose to return their children to in-school instruction; it will be what it will be.

Think broadly.  Academics.  Activities.  Arts.  Athletics.  A parent option to return children to in-school is not limited to one “A”, but should be open to all “A’s”. 

Our springtime nimbleness will be demonstrated by how we open a school campus while still remaining vigilant about new strains of the virus, paying attention to data, listening the science of epidemiology, and looking closely at the children of our school.  A constant 360-degree view will show us what we need to know.  At this time, we know how to close a school campus.  We are learning how to open a school campus.