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What Did We Learn? Lesson #4 – The Value, Cost and Worth of an Education

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The worth of something can be measured by what a person is willing to give to obtain or to provide something of interest.  Sometimes, we refer to the cost or value of what we are considering, but at the end of the day the real issue is worth.  “What is an education worth?”, I ask.

Value, cost, and worth are different concepts and are understood differently and deferentially.  We use the terms interchangeably, but they are not. 

Value is a fleeting quality.  We do not know the value of a child’s education until years have passed.  This was true in pre-pandemic times and it will be even more true in post-pandemic times.  The real value of an education is the manner and extent to which the education is used by a graduate in later life.  Some values are expressed early on, as in how a college or university or trade school or employer values a high school student’s transcript.  Value is expressed in terms of scholarships and financial incentives given to the graduate to matriculate to her next level of life.  Value also is given by initial employers who observe that higher achievement in school attaches to higher performance on the job.  The value of an education is perceptual.

Values of an education slowly unfold in later life, as in a graduate’s interest in continued learning, unfolding of latent skill sets that support developing mid-life interests, and appreciation for broader, esoteric concepts.  A graduate who later in adult life takes piano lessons may draw a line from her piano bench directly back to learning to read music in elementary school.  Or, who starts a woodworking or plein air painting hobby or learns a second or third language.  Values derived from learning and how to learn are lifelong.

We may value our personal education differently at different times and at different phases in our life.  On the last day of summer vacation, our value of the next nine months is different than it will be next June when the school year is over.  Value is transitive.  Our sense of value is different at midnight when cramming for a final or crazy-stressed with a project due in the morning.  Value is sweaty.  We wonder in August anticipating a semester of English Literature how these dusty writings will benefit our interest in being a restauranteur or being a potter.  Value is speculative.  Value is relative to the moment.

Value also is very real.  We value the skills and knowledge of our physician or surgeon when we require their care.  We value the skills and knowledge of our auto mechanic when our vehicle won’t run.  We value the artistry of composers, conductors, and musicians when we attend concerts.  We value expertise and artistry, no matter the field, that is the result of personal commitment and learning. 

Value is confused with cost. 

A quick Google will disclose the monetary cost of one year in the education of a student.  Each state  publishes the cost per pupil as a state average and by local school district.  For the 2020 school year, New York spends the most per pupil ($23,091) and Utah spends the least ($7,179).  Individual school districts in a state push these averages to higher and lower extremes.  The Wisconsin average is $11,968.  Is the education of a child schooled in New York better than the education of a child in Utah based upon cost?  Spending on education is more influenced by local politics and culture than the real cost of teaching and learning. 

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state

Education is expensive, if we consider dollars spent.  In Wisconsin, a K-12 education for one child costs the public taxpayers $155,584.  Add, another $80 – 100,000 if the student attends a UW school.  One-quarter of a million dollars is the cost of an average college degree, Kindergarten to baccalaureate, in Wisconsin.  Money is a cold but real estimate of the value of an education and one that taxpayers use and understand.

The worth of an education brings a different twist in our understanding.  The worth of an education is comparative and a matter of priorities. 

For many and most families, parents constantly consider how much of their weekly paychecks will be committed to educating their children.  Parents prioritize the number of dollars paid out for school clothes, books and supplies, school fees, and music lessons against all other family expenses.  Will a child have a hot lunch or bagged lunch?  The cost includes the price of gas for every car drive from home to school and back, bus tokens, and travels to away games.  Education is a real, dollars out-of-the-pocket matter at the family level.  It is a constant “what is it worth” computation.

Worth is what a person is willing to pay or give in exchange for an education.  Worth includes but is not limited to money.  Worth can be what a person is willing to do to earn the money that is paid for an education.  Family savings, student savings, working extra jobs or shifts – each is a strategy for creating a sum of money to exchange for an education.  Worth is visceral.

Most high school students today consider the amount of student debt they are willing to undertake in order to pay for their education.  And, for some, the worry and stress of debt causes closes doors to their education.  Worth-debt lasts for years if not decades.

At a personal interpretation of worth, my baccalaureate diploma was paid for by a local meat packing slaughterhouse.  The costs of annual tuition, room, and board were paid from weekly paychecks earned in the hog kill, beef offal, and hide cellar.  Four years of meat packing paid for a BA.  It also provided an education unto itself.  There are millions of such stories.  The worth of an education is what you are willing to do to obtain it.

Worth is risk.  In the pandemic, the worth of an education is expanded well beyond the normal.  Teaching and learning have taken on issues of personal risk.  To what extent does teaching and learning expose a student or teacher or their families to the virus?  What are the health risks of catching the virus?  Are these risks worth engaging in continuing teaching and learning?  Some teachers on the cusp of retirement retired rather than risk their exposure to the virus.  Some teachers resigned.  Teachers with underlying health conditions teach from-home.  Many families disenrolled their children from public school seeking safer home schooling options.  Schools that offer the choice of in-school and at-home learning are finding parents who will keep children at-home long after community vaccination and decline in local positive tests.  Worth is a matter of very real personal risk.

In the pandemic, schools have bought heavily into remote learning platforms, like Zoom – a trade name that has become a verb.  It is easy for school district to spend $1,000,000 or more on pandemic technology and still be under-teched.  Is it worth spending $2,000,000?

Worth is learning new skills and strategies that are necessary to educate and be educated.  Standing in front of a classroom is an assumed strategy, but being a face on a screen in a distant home, a face constantly displayed by a camera, seeing no more of your students than their faces on your screens in your home office or classroom – this is a new strategy that must be learned.  What is is worth to become a screen personality?  What part of being a teacher is traded for this tech persona?  Worth brings us back to what we value about teaching and about ourselves.

Worth is demonstrated every morning in classrooms and homes during the pandemic by this simple question – “Will I push the on button?” 

Five years hence, we will know much more about the worth, value and cost of a pandemic education.  Until that enlightening, we will spend money we don’t have, extend ourselves in unimagined ways, learn new strategies that allow us to teach and learn, make compromises in our worth equations, and hope that the value of an education will surface.  Was it all worth it?

What Have We Learned: Lesson #3 – School Is More Than School

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Corny as it reads, “You don’t know the value of something until you lose it”.  School in the Time of COVID is more than school. 

When our school closed its campus last March and shifted to at-home teaching and at-home learning, we experienced the short-lived excitement of sudden change.  Teachers and children alike spent the first days of remote schooling not going to school.  In a nutshell, that was exciting.  Everyone working and learning at home was concept that had long been discussed as a potentiality but never attempted on a large scale.  Suddenly, potential was our real.  It took a school a few days to arrange its initial logistics.  Then, at 8:00 a.m. one the first remote Monday, teachers said “good morning” to their students virtually and teaching and learning was without school.

Looking backward, the “I miss …” statements began immediately.  Every statement was factual in pointing to something a teacher or child felt as absent from their teaching and learning.  For too many, it was the immediate and cold fact that their Internet connection would not support teaching from home or learning at home.  Without beating up a list, almost every teacher found that teaching at-home could not be made the same as teaching at-school and almost every child found learning at-home could not be made similar to learning at-school.  Of the hundred thousand teachers and millions of children, at-home worked successfully, equitably, and with equality for a few.  For the vast, vast majority, what is missing for the teacher or the child’s individually is making remote education unsuccessful.  Any other statement ignores reality.

This is not to say that children are not learning in their status as at-home or hybrid at-home and at-school learners.  They are learning.  But, when we hold up the screens of high quality academic success, equitable and equal education, and the totality of what school provides to children and a community, and we apply these screens to all children, we also should say “I miss school”.

“I miss school.”  Who would have thought that this statement would be said by so many?  Every June in every school in every community, the last day of a school year is a break out day.  No school tomorrow!!  Children and teachers alike looked forward to summer recess and no school tomorrow.  However, no child and no teacher contemplated not going to school for the next five months and perhaps longer.

“I miss school” is more than missing a physical presence in a classroom.  Consider each of the following statements and talk to yourself.  Fill in the rest of the story that follows from these short leads.  Your words are better than mine.

  • School is our community. 
  • School is a sub-culture within the fuller culture I live within.
  • School is our local identity.  It is our neighborhood or out town,
  • School provides continuity in childhood. 
  • School is the place and substance of my career. 
  • School is a child’s stepping stone into adult life.
  • School is where children are fed.
  • School is sports, theater, and the arts – it is life expanded.
  • School is where children grow up, families grow together and teachers become lifelong memories.
  • School is a way of life.

When we remove any or all of the above from our daily life, we remove chunks of significance in the lives of our children, our adults, our families, our school staff, and our community.

School in the Time of COVID is what it always was – more than school.

So, What Have We Learned? Lesson #2 – Adapt Or …

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It is nearing half-time in our academic year.  In the semester break respite, we are called to review the successes, challenges, and failures of the the first half of the school year so that we can learn from these and be more successful in the second half.  So, what have we learned?

In the prior blog, Lesson #1 is that the world does not stop for a crisis.  In every regard, the world, our nation and state, and our communities and schools kept spinning – we are constant motion.  Nothing in our world stops, not even for a pandemic.

Lesson #2 today is that we have the choice to adapt to the changes and demands in our world or not to adapt.  Normally, we want to hear more about the options if we do not choose to adapt.  Somewhere down the list, we will find something that is less odious, less threatening, and does not give into full-fledged adaptation.   Today, the story line is this – adapt or rethink your future as a teacher.  The Time of COVID is a game changer in teaching.  Adapt to the changes because teaching is no longer what it was and it will not be that way again.

Teaching used to sound like this:

  • I am the expert in the classroom.  Children look to me for answers, what to do when, and for permission to do it.
  • Students come to me and into my classroom to learn. 
  • My lesson plan today may well be the same plan I used last year or the years before to teach this unit. 
  • I use the 80-80-80 rule.  I want 80% of the children to understand 80% of their instruction 80% of the time. 
  • I talk with the parents of my students during conferences and Open House and only occasionally beyond those times.
  • School and home are separated in my life.  No students have been to my home.

And, the list of “used to be’s” is long.

Night fell on this scenario last March. 

The following citation gives insight into how the pandemic has changed, for better or for worse, the teaching practices, professional considerations, and feelings about teaching of professionals around the country. 

https://www.edweek.org/technology/how-did-covid-19-change-your-teaching-for-better-or-worse-see-teachers-responses/2020/06

It is naïve to think we will return immediately to pre-COVID schooling when the pandemic is over.  No, naive is too soft a term.  It is illogical, unrealistic, and irresponsible to believe that schooling will return to its pre-pandemic life when the virus no longer has its illness/death grip on our nation,  First, non-pandemic time is still long off and we will be teaching and learning in the hybrids of in-person and at-home for several semesters to come.  We will continue to create more effective pandemic teaching methodologies, make better use of remote technologies, and refine our educational services for children regardless of their location.  We have not yet seen the real and lasting adaptations in teaching and learning as a result of the pandemic.

Second, some children and some teachers will not return to school.  Choice of “where”, now a fundamental pandemic decision, will continue to be an overarching decision in our future.  Just as choice of homeschooling, charter schooling, and virtual schooling took hold in our educational world, families will have the option of at-home learning in the post-pandemic era.  Some, not all, children do better outside the classroom and school.  Some parents who can be at-home during school hours will demand that their children remain at-home learners.  Likewise, teachers who have become effective teaching from at-home or who have persistent underlying health conditions will want to continue teaching outside their classroom.  Highly effective remote teachers will have the weight of their success as an argument.  Additionally, our successful experiences will have demonstrated that off-campus teaching is a realistic option.  School boards wanting to retain enrollment, its accrued funding, and the talents of highly effective teachers will make at-home learning a local and ongoing option.  Teaching in the future will continue in hybrid modes.

Third, our hybrid practices are evolving and causing children to learn.  Hybrid (we will use this term more and more) assessment processes will point us toward children whose learning is lagging and we will attack these deficits.  Because we must, we will have closed the deficits of COVID Slide before the pandemic is over.  Our own effectiveness will make hybrid education a continuing option.

Fourth, the pandemic has caused us to discern essential education from non-essential.  Every veteran teacher recognizes the presence of “filler” activities in a school day, school month, and school year.  Some filler is necessary in transitioning children between classrooms, to and from lunch, and other school day activities.  Some filler is used to accommodate children who finish assignments before their peers.  There are other types of non-essential time in school.  Once we eliminate the waste time, why put it back?  Keep teaching and learning focused on essential education.

Lastly, change too often happens in glacial time in public education.  The pandemic moved us into real time change.  In the glacial era, change in a school was contingent upon the faculty’s willingness to change.  Some teachers rode out change efforts for years and retired without making a single change from their preferred practices.  Closing and opening campuses based upon health data is real time change.  Not having a classroom is a real time change.  Teaching through cameras and video screens is a real time change.  Each of these real time changes have been non-negotiable and factual.  Change happens.  The need to adapt happens. 

Lesson #2 is the pandemic makes change and adapting to change real and necessary.  Most in our schools understand this new dynamic and are working hard and diligently to adapt.  Some are not and will not and will be not.

What Have We Learned? Lesson #1 – The World Does Not Stop For A Crisis

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When a team goes into the locker room at half time, it is not just to rest.  With another two quarters to play, someone will ask, “What have we learned from our first half of play?”.  Our school is nearing the semester break, the mid-point of our academic year.  We played the first semester in pandemic mode and face the second semester in a similar mode.  What have we learned in the past 90 days that will help us in the next 90?

Without being too simplistic, too critical, and without pointing fingers, consider this lesson already learned.  And, what we should teach our children from what we learned.

Even though 300,000 US lives have been lost, hospital beds are full, bodies lie in makeshift morgues, and hotspots of infection roam the nation, our national life plows forward.  Our indicator of this truth is that UPS or FedEx will deliver whatever you order to your door.  The business of America is business and America delivers.  Exchange the “man in brown” for a grocery clerk, gas station attendant, meat packer, farmer, home builder, car assembly line worker, or local EMT – life goes on.  Add, school teacher.  The world does not stop for a pandemic. 

In short, public education continues during a pandemic.

What did we expect?  Anything else was naïve.  Ironically, our world came closest to shutting down last March when the infection rate across the nation was almost nil.  School campuses closed.  Retail stores went to curbside pick-up only.  Grocery shelves were bare of cleaning supplies and toilet paper.  Only essential workers were physically at their job sites.  Across the summer and through the fall, our culture pushed hard for life to be open while the number of fatalities skyrocketed.  Go figure. 

Our most unique dichotomy of opened and closed is that bars are open for defiant patrons but school campuses are closed for needy children.  Or, this is not a contradiction.  We are protecting that which we value most, children as our future. 

What do we teach children about this?

Education is essential for life and for our future.  Children have been educated during every national crisis in our history.  During wars, depressions, past epidemics, while our ancestors were on the move across the continent, and all time in between, our nation has been committed to educating its children.  This pandemic only causes us to explore new strategies for educating. 

If the first semester was full of changes, expect no less during the second semester.  2020-21 will be a full year of schooling.

School campuses may close to in-person learning, but schooling does not closedown.  Teachers are teaching from their homes, off-campus tech centers, and from their classrooms.  Children are learning at-home, in neighborhood pods, at new schools open for daily attendance, and sometime in-person.  Schooling has become a pattern of hybrid strategies, but it continues providing children with needed education. 

Expect the second semester to extend the hybrids.  In fact, anticipate using features of remote education for the remainder of your life as a student.

Now, more than ever, it is apparent that it takes a community to educate children.  With school campuses closed, parents and grandparents are staying home to be with their youngest children not just for daycare, but to support daily schooling.  Older children tutor younger siblings.  Community donors are providing school supplies to children in need.  School buses deliver meals, not just lunches, to children at-home.  However, all at-home support systems are experiencing pandemic fatigue.  We currently are experiencing support system failure due to exhaustion, not a lack of desire to help. 

As more parents and grandparents return to employment due to need or because they no longer can be at-home tutors, schools will need to create new options for at-home learners.  Stay tuned for new game plans during the second half of play.

You can make your kitchen table into your classroom desk, art table for drawing and painting and making art projects, music studio for reading and writing music and tapping out a beat, and a table-top studio for social networking with classmates, teachers, friends and family.  Schooling is not a place; it is wherever you are. 

Expect even more table-top experiences in the third and fourth quarters of the school year.  Geographic maps will spread out, timelines will be drawn, science experiments will foam and smell, and writing and math work will cover the area.

Learning is being engaged.  For at-home learners, the first step in engagement is pressing the “on” button.  Once powered-up and connected, engagement is a greeting from your teacher and classmates.  The second step of remote engagement is talking and listening.  Your teacher wants to hear your voice asking questions, responding to questions, making observations, explaining what you think and how you feel, and being you.  Engagement is participation as a student and that is the same as always. 

Expect more frequent personal checking on your learning by each of your teachers, your counselor, and your principal.  Our locker room examination of first half experiences tells us that too many children are drifting.  Drifting is due to your passivity as an engaged learner and our failure to personally talk with each student every day.  Talking is not just “hello” and “good by”, but our asking and you making explanations related to daily learning and personal well-being.  Expect daily talk to become more personal.

Everyone is learning new skill sets.  Teachers and students alike are becoming adept at using cameras, screens, digital platforms, and sharing techniques to engage in daily schooling.  Children, as so-called digital natives, may be most adept at learning new skills. 

Expect your skill sets to shift for learning new skills to using new skills in more sophisticated ways.  Expect more group work in which you are networked in problem-based assignments.  Expect questions and assignments that push your past “yes and no” responses to “tell me more”.  Expect to use your skills in new ways.

School lessons are the same for children in-school and at-home.  Your teachers expect you to learn your annual grade level or subject area curriculum regardless of your location.  As you participate as at-home learners, flop between in-school and at-home due to quarantining, and finally become more permanent as an in-school learner, you will be receiving a continuous instruction in your 2020-21 curriculum. 

Expect assessment to be an increasing part of your second semester.  Your teachers and principals want to know the quantity and quality of what you learned in the first half of the school year.  They need to know what to re-play so that your first half learning was solidly learned.  They need to clarify their game plan for the second semester.  Expect a lot of school testing.

The pandemic is not going away; we are improving our capacity to live with it until it can be prevented from spreading as an epidemic.  We may have COVID at a lesser degree for years to come.  Vaccination and mitigation are essential to our new capacity.  With parent permission, you will be vaccinated.  As a student in-school, you will be mitigated.

Expect that your school will use mitigation – masking, social distancing, small groupings, and limited public access to school during the second semester.  That word, mitigation, that few of us understood prior to COVID will be part of our future school for years to come.

Stay tuned for Lesson #2.

Normal Never Was

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What is an educator to do?

Everyone whose eyes and ears are open in the Time of COVID has a valid perspective.  They remember what normal seemed to be, and in their perception of what now is, want their future to be like their perception of the past.  They do not want to be afraid of an invisible virus made mortal.  They do not want their world to be reduced by quarantine or sheltering or any other mitigation that restricts their living.  They want the economy of their community to return to the opportunity of choices and the prosperity of merit.  They have had enough of the survival culture of the pandemic.  While they cannot resurrect the dead or cure the ill, they want to get on with their living.

Join the herd!  I have not heard a single person in our community want less. 

It has only been nine months since the first pandemic shutdowns in our state.  It seems like longer.  It has been a full, complex, and devastating time.  A candid photo album of this three-quarters of a year shows us that more than COVID has diseased our sense of normal.  No pundit I, but parallel to the pandemic have been rising illnesses in our political, cultural, economic, and spiritual well-being.  Our faith in truth, justice, and the American Way visited the ER multiple times and has not emerged in good health, in fact it is incredibly sick.  Like too many COVID patients shuttled from one hospital to the next looking for someplace with an open bed, our faith in us remains on a gurney.

The egocentric nature of perception creates a mirage of wants that hinders our going forward.  With personal and familial well-being being centerpiece, the landscape needed to support our mirages may be oppositional and even non-negotiable with another’s.  Considering all that has been said and done in these months, the concept of and interest in our commonwealth eludes us.

What is an educator to do?  What stories do we teach to children that assist their growing and knowing about the world they are inheriting from their adults?  No book on today’s school shelf is adequate.

Ironically, to be a teacher through the mid-1900s meant a person graduated from a Normal School, the name given to the school of education in a college or university.  If anyone can get us back to normal, it should be a graduate from Normal.  But, not to be.

An educator’s normal is the curricula and pedagogy of the pre-pandemic.  That is the past many want to be our new present and future.  However, if we are to prepare children to rise out of the pandemic, we must address all the ills of the era and that curricula and pedagogy will not fit the bill.  There is need for an entirely different discussion.  What is the new truth, justice, the American Way that children must learn?  We can teach children to read, write and do their sums, but if doing these does not lead them to knowledge of whatever the American Way is to be, we have failed.

We have work to do.