Category Archives: Blog

“Yesterday Is Gone And There’s No Getting It Back”

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I hear Robert Duvall’s voice as Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove say, “Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back”.  There is no false fact in his words.  We can do things differently going forward, starting right now if we choose, but we cannot redo what was or what was not done in our rear view mirror.  To the point: the education of children during the Time of COVID beginning last March and to this date is part of our history.  Whatever children as students have learned or not learned across these five months of two school years is their yesterday and there’s no getting it back.  The issue is what we will do for their future.

Take Away

The physics of time remain irrefutable – we move forward not backward.  We can attempt to re-interpret our understanding of our past, we can attempt to change the inferred value of what we experienced, and we can attempt to re-knit experiences into a different story, but the realities remain the same.  Learning experiences that did not happen did not happen.

Educators at their best are teachers and often reteachers and correcting teachers  It is a fact in our work that 100% of our students do not learn 100% of what they are taught 100% of the time.  As educators, we constantly are working to teach again, reteach, clean up what was mislearned.  We strive to create a quality of learned knowledge and skill sets when initial teaching and learning are not successful.  RtI programs are designed to improve the percentage of successful students by scaffolding this continuing teaching and learning. 

Compensation is a different beast.  We compensate when we accept the fact that something did not occur, was not achieved, or missed the mark by creating strategies to counteract that reality.  We counteract the reality with a new, parallel status quo.  Or, we apply equal or greater effort in opposition of what occurred in order to rebalance things.  Applied to schooling in the Time of COVID, many children did not learn and are not learning the curriculum they typically would learn if there were no COVID.  In the next months, we will assess and understand the differences between what was expected and what is.  And, as these yesterdays are gone and there is no getting them back, we will compensate.

What do we know?

The COVID Effect to the education of children to date is that a percentage of the learning we expected to accomplish in the close of the 2019-20 and the current 2020-21 school years did not happen and is not happening as intended.  To see the total landscape, some children are exceeding our school-based expectations and some are not.  Our assessment may show that some children flourished either as at-home learners of school instruction or as learners of virtual curricula from non-school providers.  We observe highly motivated AP students digging into their school-based assignments and online AP resources who will score the 5’s on their AP exams this spring.  High personal motivation at any time, COVID or not, is an ingredient for personal success.

We observe Kindergarten children who walk into a K-classroom mid-year where in-school learning have been delayed since September and demonstrate mid-year or better reading skills.  Parental support of school-based K instruction or parent substitution for school-based teaching has been highly successful.  We observe children at all grades and in all subjects who have enjoyed strong parental support for school-based learning, good Internet connection, and exercised personal commitment to their school work and are where they would expect them to be at this point in a school year in terms of their academic learning.

At the same time, we observe children who are the opposite of flourishing.  Causes abound and reasons can be understood.  The reality is that too many children at all grade levels and in all subjects have not learned their intended curricula.  Or, any curricula.  The reality is that some children have separated from our school entirely and will not return.  Some children were clearly idled by lack of school connections – Internet, personal, social – they were idled and stranded.  Their parents may not have sought other options because options were not available or due to time and/or money not obtainable.  The COVID Effect for manny of our continuing children is that across the yesterdays of their schooling, we/they were not successful in causing them to learn.  Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back.  Today we begin compensating.

Why is this thus?

We shall not generalize a compensatory strategy.  This is not a philosophical statement, but a descriptor of our reality.  If a school has 500 children enrolled, today we have 500 different educational stories.  Parse this among the 13 grades of a K-12 education and every grade and subject hold children spread across the field of expected learning, including motivated, diligent and supported students and students who were largely disconnected from school.  We cannot generalize a solution or remedy or compensatory strategy to rebalance all children in their school-based learning.  There are and will be groupings of children who demonstrate common needs for whom we can apply a common compensatory strategy.  We need multiple, well-designed compensatory strategies.

We shall not generalize educational outcomes.  There is no time like a crisis to evaluate what is essential for your well-being and future prosperity.  Annual curricula is a daisy chain of scaffolded learnings.  Each link in the daisy chain is essential for next learning.  Some single links blossom into multiple strands of curriculum.  Consider multiplication and division, then fractions, then Algebra.  Every school child knows this daisy chain first hand and many experience the challenges of manipulating fractions on their way to Algebra.  No fractions – no Algebra.  These are essential learning. 

But, is everything in an annual curricula essential.  As we cull 180 days of instruction, the scope of required compensatory education can be reduced.  If we could get yesterday back, we would not need every yesterday to prepare for our future.  Our compensatory strategies must be essential learning.  We will fill in the rest as we can when we can.

Compensatory teaching and learning will be woven into ongoing teaching and learning.  A child in fifth grade needs her compensatory instruction as well as her ongoing fifth grade instruction.  If not, we only trade lost yesterdays for lost todays and she will still behind where she needs to be tomorrow.  Weaving is a good verb for this teaching and learning.  Educators can do this.

Education is roundth not length.  Our yesterdays are not just academic, but contain all the elements of child and student development.  Again, we cannot generalize gain or loss because the COVID Effect treats different children differently.  That said, we need to explore our expectations for child experiences in creativity, artistry, musicianship, craftsmanship, intellectual development, exploration and inquisition, tradesmanship, entrepreneurship, physical and athletic development, collaborative and collegial capacities, and social-emotional development.  We need to know how children have grown in every aspect of a school-based education, not just academics.  A compensatory strategy just became much more difficult.

To do

Understand the learning status and needs of each individual child.  COVID is a universal pandemic but education is a personal endeavor and experience.  While our pandemic strategy moves children en masse from in-school to at-home and back, from in-class to quarantined based upon health data, and does these on a daily basis, we need to treat each child’s compensatory as an individualized and personal story.  The education of each child needs to be brought forward.

Chew what you can bite off.  The work will be in bite-sized chunks.  These are child-sized bites.  If compensation were a vaccine, what was lost could be regained in a moment.  As there is no quick fix, educators must create child-sized mini-curricula that in the aggregate create a child’s up-to-date education.

Get it right.  What a sin it would be if we compound what has been lost with less than our best work now.  Checking for understanding is required at every intersection of old and new learning and new learning upon new learning.  If a child is not solid in their compensatory learning, the entire design fails.

Think effect not time and effort.  A COVID Effect strategy will not be completed in what remains of the 2020-21 school year.  If we work on personalized educational needs, in bites, and ensure quality learning, our work will stretch well into the 2021-22 school year.  If we really are interested in compensating all children for the downside of their COVID Effect, this will be time well spent.

Don’t do what you can’t do.  A non-educator might tell us, “In the future, all children must be able to speak Mandarin”.  Whereas, we might agree with that futuristic educational outcome, it does not fit into the scope of necessary work in the Time of COVID.  Curriculum is always in a state of change, but now is not the time for large scale overhauls.  Tweak what would normally be tweaked and create child competence in the taught curricula.

The big duh!

Educating children remains our culture’s most noble enterprise.  In the Peanuts cartoon, a character asks, “I wonder what teachers make?”.  The other character says, “Teachers make a difference”.

The Time of COVID has clearly laid out the parameters of the magnificent difference teaching needs to make in the lives of children today.

Just a Smile and a Nod

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I stand on the plaza outside our local school the morning elementary children return to their classrooms after five months of COVID closure.  This is our 2020 opening of the schoolhouse day.  With temps right at freezing on the first Monday in December, parents are driving tentatively into the drop-off lane.  Vehicle doors open and small, K-2 children in winter garb carrying school backpacks and lunch bags emerge to be greeted by their principal and a bus-duty teacher.  Everyone has a momentary awkwardness.  In a soft opening, only K-2 children are called to school this Monday.  Children in grades 3-5 will come on Tuesday.  A Kindergarten boy stops in front of the principal and looks up to the man’s smile.  This is a first day ever for Kindergarten children. 

“Let’s get you inside and we will take you to your classroom”, the principal says, bending at the waist to get close but not too close.  Both child and principal are appropriately masked.  On this first day at school, a little personal proximity is well called for.  Yesteryear, there would have been hand holding as they walked into the school.  Not today

Cars, vans, and SUVs line up and children pile out.  Parents get out for parting words and a few kisses on top of stocking caps.  Second graders walk with some confidence toward the open doors, especially after being greeted by name.  This is a first day at school for moms and dads, also, though not their first day of the school year.  All have been at-home helping their children with daily remote instruction.  All have been in close communication with their child’s teacher.  All have been looking forward to this day, personal trepidations aside.

School buses roll onto the campus and drive to a different entrance.  The Pandemic Plan distributes children to a variety of school doors to diminish the number of children entering in groups.  Waves to bus drivers are exchanged.

As parents depart the drop-off lane, each lowers the driver side window to give a smile or a nod.  Some say “Thank you”.  Others mouth it. 

This school has moved slowly and deliberately toward providing parents the option to return their children to in-school classes.  Some parents are choosing to retain their children at-home.  Choices are a good thing.  Our teachers are very well prepared to continue teaching at-home children while they begin teaching in-school children.  School leadership has created an exceptional low-incidence environment for schooling in the Time of COVID.  All the pieces are in place for this transition in how we educate children.

It is a new day for our school.  A smile and nod and a mouthed thank you are more than enough to shake off the worries about today and tomorrow.  Smiling and nodding, I mouth “You are welcome”.

Collegiality and Camaraderie In The Time of COCID

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There have been few times in public education when educators have required professional association more than we are experiencing in the Time of COVID.  While health protocols require us to be socially isolated not only from children but from each other, we have a tremendous need for professional conversation – to share the challenges and solutions of schooling, leadership, teaching and learning, and supporting others in our school.  We need to hear and see the real-life work of our peers, and to uplift each other personally and professionally.  The combination of personal and professional stressors can become an overwhelming burden.  We need the strength of professional association now.

More than anything else, professional association tells an educator “You are not alone!”.

Take Away

The metaphor that we are in a war against COVID is not trite.  It says it all.  It provides the context for behaviors and expectations in which a war is waged.  War is not our normal condition.  We are seldom prepared for it.  War is not a democratic process.  It is imposed by forces outside our consent.  In a war, everything that is usual and customary can be discarded by daily reality or by decree.  Usual practices are replaced with emergency measures.  War requires our acquiescence to arbitrary and unusual rules.  We may rebel against the emergency measures until we or those close to us become war casualties and then our rebellion seems futile.  A pandemic is a wartime culture.

Wartime builds alliances and in the Time of COVID professional associations can be an educator’s best source for multi-alliances.  These alliances are necessary because wartime culture quickly disorients everyone into “we and they” groups and “me, all alone”.  Traditional and distinguishing differences between groups in our schools – teachers, administrators, office staff, custodians, food service, drivers, children, parents and community residents – want to remain although their continuation can paint people into actions and statements which may seem oppositional to each other.  The real and perceived threats of COVID to the personal health, the financial health, the community health, and the professional health of every person becomes the most important issue for each person – personally.  While the war against COVID is waged widely in every community in our nation, its impact is unbelievably personal.  Every person has a valid right to say “COVID or the threat of COVID has affected me/my …”.  No one is unscathed.

Professional association helps us gain perspective by aligning our circumstances and stories with others who work “in our shoes”.  They tell us that, indeed, we are not alone and that others like us are scathed yet continue to do our work toward a non-COVID future.

What do we know?

Professional associations abound for educators.  There are national associations with state affiliations for every educator depending upon professional assignment, subject area specialty, school level, and student disaggregation.  I want to quickly acknowledge the national and state associations and move to the more essential value of local and in-school associations.

A quick Google provides these examples of national associations for educators. There are hundreds more.

  • National Science Teachers Association
  • NEA
  • American Federation of Teachers
  • Council for Exceptional Children
  • International Reading Association
  • American Educational Research Association
  • AASA
  • NASSP
  • NAEP
  • WASB
  • ASCD
  • Phi Delta Kappa
  • National Art Education Association
  • American Association of Physics Teachers
  • Association for Middle Level Education
  • National Council for Teachers of English
  • National Council for Teachers of Mathematics
  • National Council for the Social Studies
  • National Association for Gifted Children
  • ASCD
  • American Association of School Librarians
  • ISTE

Read, watch, listen, and engage.  Our ubiquitous, digitized world allows us to be professionally connected wherever we are.  I, for one, read/watch/listen and write every day.  Most often, I am not able to mass my minutes to do so.  I use the odd 10 to 20 minutes throughout the day to start, stop and finish an article in a journal, podcast, audio clip, YouTube, or post.  My IPad and phone keep me professionally connected.

More importantly for in-school educators!!

It is the in-school, down-the-hall, faculty and staff associations that will carry an educator through the pandemic.   No one in a professional association’s editorial offices knows your working conditions like the person in the classroom, office, or workstation next door to yours.  Professional publications inform, uplift, and motivate.  But, no one outside your campus understands exactly how your Pandemic Plan affects your daily ability to do your professional work and how it affects you – professionally.

Why is this thus?

I am reminded of the binding camaraderie that develops when first-year teachers enter a school or when a first-year educator bonds with an experienced mentor.  The group of first-year teachers find each other and share with each other in ways that transcend friendship.  In their immediacy, it is the sense of a common rookie status to create each person’s professional entity.  Rookies flock together because us they lack the assumptive knowledge that comes with experience.  They build their knowledge by talking and sharing with each other.  In later years, the sense of trust derived from their rookie seasons keeps them close as professionals. 

This binding also takes place when a person new to an assignment aligns with an experienced mentor.  Their connections transcend time.  My mentor of 50 years ago and I still share e-stories.  We have insider knowledge and history that no one else shares.

I observe this camaraderie among teachers, custodians, secretaries, teacher aides, principals, district office staff – it is universal.  It is personally and professionally essential.

Every educator is a rookie in this pandemic.  No one has assumptive knowledge based upon prior pandemic experience and all are seeking mentors.  This pandemic requires educators to build their camaraderie through the personalized and everyday reality of facing and overcoming large and shared problems.  The insider relationships fashioned now will blossom even more in the post-pandemic.

To do

  • Re-establish the strengths of best collegial practices.  Tell others what you are doing, how you feel about your work, and how you are dealing with the pandemic pressures.  The root definition of the term collegial is a shared responsibility among colleagues or peers.  Today, it is a responsibility to share.  Stressful times call for an increase in collegiality not a decrease.  Talk to each other, if not in person through phone calls, text messages, and e-writing.  Colleagues talk with each other.
  • Move from collegial to camaraderie – there is a difference.  Colleagues live in the professional world and comrades live in a more personalized professional world.  The pandemic is making every story very personal.  Mind the difference and use it to your mutual benefit.  You will not be comrades against the world, but comrades against the ways that COVID are causing you to work as educators.  This commonality helps to allay the feelings of separation and working alone.
  • Be strengthened by the affirmation of your peers.  Most Pandemic Plans create closed office and classroom doors with little to no opportunity for physical proximity.  There is no gathering in a common prep area, a lunchroom, or a staff meeting room.  Hallway and parking lot talk are not inappropriate – just not safe.  Take time to share your professional work with others and listen/watch others share with you.  This is no time for silent observation – affirm each other’s work.  The more you affirm others, the more affirmation you will receive.
  • Build trusted and reliable voices.  In our state, teacher unions and local associations helped to build professional connections.  While legislation neutered unions, it was not a death knell to the need for professional collectivism.  Educators may not choose to certify in order bargain as a group, but they can join as a professional voice.  The isolation caused by mitigation protocols that demand isolation can give rise to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.  Trust requires conversation.  Conversation requires a willingness to speak and to listen. Trust your collegial voices.
  • Work in the big picture window.  The first order of schooling is to educate children.  All other discussions support that order.  There really are no “Yes, buts…”.  Accept this and then work out the details. 
  • Build the future.  Schooling in the post-pandemic will not snap back to the pre-pandemic.  New knowledge, skills, and dispositions about education are developing and these will need to be accommodated in post-pandemic education.  Professional voices will be necessary to sculpt this newness into future practices.  If we can bring our collegialism, camaraderie, best and affirmed practices, collective voice, and big picture thinking to these issues, a post-pandemic education will serve our communities and their children well. 

The big duh!

The pandemic will subside due to the alliances of medical resources and the alliances of people committed to living and working through a war on a disease.  The devastating tragedies of death and illness will be mourned for years to come.  Honoring and never downplaying these, today’s children require all educators to stay the distance.  Their future depends upon the quality education we provide during the pandemic.  The quality of our associative work today has a direct bearing on the education of these children.

Unemployment Is High Yet There Is a Shortage of Teachers: Time To Make Teaching a Preferred Profession

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The importance of teaching and teachers will be one of the lessons we learn from the Time of COVID.  The need to educate children is a constant and daily issue in every community.  This has focused attention on the essence of teaching.   As educators work to improve and refine strategies for in-person and at-home teaching and learning, we can use every community’s attention on educating children to refine and enhance teaching as an essential and newly-preferred professional career.

Take Away

Lesson 1 learned is that public education is essential to the economic and family structures of every community.  Across all states, local business interests want schools to be open for in-person learning to provide daycare for employee children.  Parallel to their employers, parents need to work to support their families.  They prefer in-person learning.  State, county, and local governments want children to be educated.  An under educated generation is a lost generation.   This makes teaching a profession of essential employees.  Fundamentally, this status is true with or without a pandemic. 

Lesson 2 learned is that teachers teach and others do not.  I apply to this to the teaching of school-age children.  Certainly, parents who choose to homeschool their children make a commitment to become teachers for their own children.  However, a vast majority of parents who are forced by school campus closures to be teachers-at-home want out of that role immediately.  A good day for a parent-teacher is buried by a score of bad days.  Parents are not prepared to be their children’s teacher.  They know it and so do their children.

Professional educators are essential to the education of a community’s children.  The pandemic has proven that there is no substitute for professional educators.

What do we know?

The pandemic will change teaching; the direction of the change is not yet known.  The need for remote, virtual, distanced, synchronous and asynchronous teaching have been so great and widespread that their effects will be part of the ongoing features of school for years to come.  The profession can passively go with the flow of the pandemic and do what it can, when and where it can, and provide continuous, responsive education for children.  Or, the profession can understand the moment and use the reality of educating children in a pandemic to inform and reform educating children after the pandemic. 

As a people, we focus on a problem if it personally affects our well-being in the immediacy.  This is the reality of our national attention span.  When these two conditions – personal well-being and now – are present, we can address large-scale problems.  As soon as the problem no longer is personal or immediate, we lose our focus on the issue.  Sadly, this is us.  Even large and enduring problems fade once the emergency subsides.  If there is to be a positive change in the profession of teaching, it must be addressed now. 

This is the problem.  We are not in an era of teacher shortage, but an era when teaching is an undesirable career choice. 

Before and during the pandemic, schools have had difficulty attracting and retaining teachers.  However, the problem is not the scarcity of persons entering the profession.   It is the scarcity of people wanting to be teachers.  These may sound like contradictory statements, but they are not.  Our problem is that teaching is perceived as an undesirable career pathway by college students considering their future and young teachers in their first five years in a classroom.  Too few people are being trained as teachers and too few trained teachers are teaching.  These are the issues this moment in time requires us to change.

Why is this thus?

Employing and retaining teachers is an historic problem that has plagued public education for more than a decade.  “The share of schools that were trying to fill a vacancy but couldn’t tripled from the 2011-12 to 2015-16 school years (increasing from 3.1 to 9.4 percent), and in the same period the share of schools that found it very difficult to fill a vacancy nearly doubled (from 19.7 to 36.2 percent).  These difficulties are also shaped by the dwindling pool of applicants to fill vacancies.  From the 2008-09 to the 2015-16 school years, there was a 15.4 percent drop in the number of education degrees awarded and a 27.4 percent drop in the number of people who completed a teacher preparation program.”

U.S. schools struggle to hire and retain teachers: The second report in ‘The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ series

We can point to many contributing agents leading to this problem.  Low starting salaries.  Slow and inadequate financial advancement.  Attacks on teacher unions and teacher organizations.  Blaming education when all other social institutions are failing.  Constant cuts in state financing.  Draconian federal accountability legislation. 

To address these issues, politicians, colleges and universities, and state departments of instruction continue to look for peripheral solutions.  Legislators massaged statutory requirements for teacher preparation and created alternative pathways to a teaching license to make it easier for college graduates and second-career adults to become teachers.  State departments allow teaching with permits not licenses.  A teaching permit is like a learner’s permit for a student in driver education.  A school board can employ a permitted teacher for several years without the teacher completing the full certification process.  School boards work within limited finances – an increase to salary is a decrease to classroom supplies.  Robbing Peter to pay Paul means that an increase in teacher pay is paid out by the teacher to purchase class room supplies.

Teacher shortage, however, is the symptom and not the problem.  People who invested money and time to graduate from college with teacher certificates choose not to teach. 

“The last time we checked we have about 120,000 people who hold a valid teacher license, and about 60,000 are teaching in public schools,” said David DeGuire, director of teachers, education, professional development and licensing at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.”

https://www.wbay.com/2020/08/29/as-school-districts-reopen-during-pandemic-many-also-struggling-to-find-teachers-substitutes/

Further evidence that teaching is not a preferred career comes to us anecdotally.  High school counselors, a traditional recruiter for would-be teachers, report that in their conferences with high school seniors and their parents many parents say to their son or daughter “… you don’t want to be a teacher…” and redirect college planning toward a different and more preferred career.

Further evidence derives from the choices made by the talent pool of students in college.  Prior to 2000, teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities attracted many students from the top quarter of their graduating class based upon grades and testing.  Many of these were young women who perceived teaching as an accepted profession for their gender.  Since 2000, teacher prep programs have drawn fewer, if any, college students from the upper half of their class.  The more talented collegians are choosing other professions, not teaching.

Unless we change these perceptions of teaching and the trend lines of people choosing teaching as a career, the outcomes of teacher shortage, understaffed schools, crowded classrooms, and discontinued school programs will continue unabated.  We cannot look to our politicians or state departments to change the attitudes about teaching.  We need to change the realities of schoolhouse teaching so that a new professionalism can attract and retain new professional educators.

To do

The list is long and varied. 

  • Focus a teacher’s work on professional teaching.  To do this, we remove all non-instructional duties for the usual teacher job descriptions.  A characteristic of a profession is its well-defined and accepted area of expertise.  Think about professionals in law, medicine, engineering, and architecture.  Each of these professions has an explicit educational and training requirement, as do teachers.  However, other professionals are not generalists and do not abide a constant addition of “…duties to be assigned”.  Teachers have this line in every contract.  A teaching contract is a potpourri of assignments, classroom teaching being just one.  In a school board’s employment, we can disaggregate the professional duties of teachers, counselors, administrators, school health specialists, and non-certified personnel.  Each of these has a specific purpose in the school and a matching training and span of duties.  Teaching is an expertise in pedagogy, subject area content, dispositions necessary for teaching and learning, and assessment of learning.  Professional teachers teach professionally.
  • Employ non-certified staff to do all supervisory work.  Segregating teachers from other schoolhouse duties will require “someone” to supervise playgrounds, bus zones, cafeterias, and hallways.  The trade-off of improved teaching is the cost of non-certified staff to execute these duties.  Children need adult supervision when they are “at” school.  Assigning teachers to these duties is at the expense of time, effort and focus on instruction and exacerbates the professional standing of teaching.
  • Hold teachers accountable for student learning of district-approved curricula.  Teachers are not independent contractors in a school.  There is a legal and linear relationship from the School Board’s responsibility to provide a free and appropriate education to every child, to ensure compliance with state statutes, and to align instruction and student learning outcomes with standards-based and performance-based curricula through school administration to classroom teachers.  A Board employs teachers to teach the district-approved curricula.  This is the “what” and “when” and “how much” of teaching.  The teacher supplies the “how” based upon assessment of child readiness, need and capacity.  Adherence to this simplified linearity greatly increases and improves the professional standing of teachers as pedagogical experts accountable under administrative supervision for causing all children to successfully learn their annual curricula.

Concomitant with accountability is the understanding that high quality teaching and achieving district expectations for student learning are a requirement of continued employment.  Professionals deliver profession work to achieve professional outcomes.  A teacher who cannot deliver will be counseled out of the profession.

  • Teaching is perceived by too many in the public as part-time work with nine months of school and three months of vacation.  Our school year organization has roots in an agrarian calendar when children were not available to attend classes year-round.  Farming communities required children as farm labor in the summer months.  In our state, children who are 13-years and older populate many of the summer jobs required for our tourist industry.  For this reason alone, schools cannot begin classes until after September 1 and local business owners decry a school calendar that extends past the first week in June.  Summers off creates the assumption that teaching is part-time annual work.

A more informed reality is that a school district’s professional development programs already are creating a fuller work year.  Many districts employ teachers in June, July and/or August to review student achievement from the prior school year, review and improve curriculum, learn new curriculum and delivery strategies, and learn and practice new technologies.  The list of summer work activities grows every year.  However, this work is understood as supplemental to a teacher’s contract.  And, it is not uniform for all teachers. 

At the same time, there is a body of teachers who prefer nine-month employment.  One of the things that attracted them to teaching was summers off.  Additionally, other teachers enjoy a different employment during summer months, often outdoor and work with adults not children.  Finally, summer has traditionally been a time when teachers engaged in post-graduate studies and continuing education.  Although much of this work is now on-line and year-round, we still abstractly connect a teacher’s summer with their going back to school.

A professional work year should be 221 days of paid employment, including 180 days of student instruction and 41 days of PD, district and school work.  A teacher would have a standardized four weeks of summer vacation plus Christmas/New Year’s and spring vacations and usual holidays that match their community’s annual calendar. 

  • Professionals have dedicated time for planning and assessment.  Teacher contracts include language regarding planning time or prep time.  In elementary grades this often is the time when children move from academic instruction with a grade level teacher to special instruction – art, music, physical education, foreign language, library, and technology instruction.  In secondary grades, a class periods) is designated as a teacher’s prep period.  In addition, teachers are expected to use time between their arrival at school and a first class and time after a last class and their departure from school for preparation. 

However, as soon as children arrive at school, all teachers share in the responsibility of student supervision.  Children are not let loose throughout the campus.  Also, teachers are to be available to assist children with their assignments before and after school.  And, administrators schedule school meetings, meetings with parents, and professional development activities before and after school.  Planning and review time are forfeit to each of these.

The result is that preparation, planning and a review of daily work seldom takes place at school.  Teachers do their reviews, planning and preparation at home.  Other professionals may also take their work home, but in other professions the norm is not preparing for every next day’s work at home.  Office time is carved out of the workday and officially reserved for review, planning and preparation.  This is not the case for teachers and it must change.

  • Teaching is a commitment to each child everyday.  This is a commitment of quality instructional and personal interactions between a teacher and each child the teacher teaches every school day.  It contrasts with assumptions that instruction presented to a whole class or group of students reaches to each individual child.  The commitment eliminates class periods or days of instruction in which a teacher and child have no direct, person-to-person interactions.  No children should be allowed to hide in class or to be invisible – never called on to speak or participate.   Instead, a teacher commits to personal interactions with each child and these interactions emphasize an “I care about you and your learning – personally”.

For decades, critics of public education have written about the school as a factory.  Children are the widgets of our industry, they say.  When schools are interested in outcomes only and are not people-first, this is a valid complaint. 

The list goes on with lesser detail.

  • “Japanese lesson studies” for all teachers.  This type of study parallels the ways in which other professions conduct a formalized, internal review of their ongoing work.  Lesson studies are a peer review not an employer evaluation.
  • Effective Educator assessments based upon student outcomes and attributes only.  Evaluate the effects of teaching not the characteristics of teaching.
  • Teacher discretion over how they use all school time but class time.  Professionals have control of personal professional time.
  • Use of science-based strategies.  As an example, the Science of Reading presents data- and performance-based pedagogy that is proven to cause all children to become readers.  Other subjects also have data- and performance-based pedagogies.  Using these, rather than anecdotally supported pedagogy, strengthen a teacher’s claim to professional preparation.
  • Employ more school counselors for social-emotional student care.  As caring as classroom teachers are for every child, a teacher is not a counselor and not prepared for SE counseling.  SE is another unprofessional piling on of the classroom teacher list of expectations.
  • Pa a bonus to teachers who are fluent in non-English languages.  Language-diverse school communities require linguistic- and culture-diverse faculty.  We need more teachers with the capacity to communicate effectively with non-English speaking children and families.
  • Annually enter student work in every state competition as a showcase of teaching and learning.  Successful work begets more successful work.  Professionals publicize their successes.
  • Annually nominate teachers for Teacher of the Year competitions as a recognition local teaching talent.  A local nomination is a local recognition and has meaning in the community.

The big duh!

COVID is the most significant change agent of this young century.  Its effects will last for decades to come.  As with all prior pandemics, mankind will survive but be changed by its experience.  We will be changed in ways not yet understood.  The extent and the after-effects of those changes lie within us not with the disease.  I prefer not to mourn the ways in which the pandemic changed schools and teaching but to celebrate what we learned and can use from the experience to enhance the future of teaching.  COVID reinforces the values of high quality teachers as essential at all times.

Commonweal in the Time of COVID

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The Time of COVID causes us to ask a variety of essential questions regarding who decides who should do what.  Mask up.  Socially distance.  Wash hands frequently.  These are three personal behaviors that have been at the heart of mitigative behavior during this pandemic.  The decision to do any of these ultimately is left to the individual.  Do I do these because I should or because I am told to?  What does the commonweal require of me?

Opened or closed businesses?  To gather or not to gather?  State and local governments provide guidance and issue mandates without unanimity of purpose or design regarding these two questions.  In general, the business of WI is business and businesses are open for business.  School?  854,959 children were enrolled in WI schools in March, 2020, when COVID threatened our state and nation.  Immediately, the Department of Health Services enacted our Governor’s order to close all schools for the remainder of the school term.  Teaching and learning became virtual for all. Immediately, the issue became partisan debate of who decides who should do what.  Since then, political rancor has left the question of in-person or remote education up to local school district debate.  In almost every issue of personal and organizational behavior during the Time of COVID, the essential question is “what does the commonweal require?”.

Commonweal is a 14th century term for the happiness, health and safety of all of the people of a community.  The archaic term is used to describe goals and programs intended for the common good of people.  The constitutions of Kentucky, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania describe their states as commonwealths.  The word, commonweal, is appropriate in considering personal and organizational behaviors in the Time of COVID, especially regarding schools.

I find three citations in the WI Statutes that relate to the question of pandemic, schools and commonweal.  And, who decides who should do what.

WI Statutes 119.18 (6) School Board Powers – School Calendar tells us “The board may determine the school calendar and vacation periods for each school year for the regular day schools, summer schools, social centers, and playgrounds.  The board may close any school or dismiss any class in the event of an emergency, fire or other casualty, quarantine, or epidemic”.

WI Statutes 252.02 (03) Communicable Diseases tells us “The department (DHS) may close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics”.  Further, WI Statutes 252.03(2) says “…a local health officer may forbid public gatherings deemed necessary to control outbreak or epidemic”. 

It is clear that in the Time of COVID, education is a continuing and uninterrupted program for the commonweal.  The WI DPI issued guidelines for the continuing education of all children during the pandemic and waivers that relieve boards of education from specific, mandated requirements, such as annual statewide assessments.  Absolutely, no allowances have been made for stopping education during the pandemic.  Teaching and learning for all children must proceed.

The issue is who and where.  Can school boards gather teachers and children at the schoolhouse for daily instruction?  Who decides?

119.18(6) considers a school closure within the context of adjusting the school calendar of instruction.  Days of instruction may be set aside for holidays and other observances.  Days may be set aside for seasonal vacations.  Days of instruction may be set aside in response to an emergency, such as fire or other casualty, as in water or electrical outage or weather damage.  The calendar is adjusted to accommodate these closings.  Days may be set aside for quarantines, as in an outbreak of measles or other childhood illness.  The calendar is adjusted to accommodate closings for these reasons.  In this statute, the Board is authorized to adjust the school calendar not close schools.

Epidemic?  I wonder what the writers considered in inserting this word.  There has been ample time since the Spanish flu pandemic and the polio epidemics to clarify the term.  Ebola, swine and avian flu epidemics touched the world but not Wisconsin.  Is epidemic rhetoric or specific?  Does the statute require the board to adjust the calendar of instruction to accommodate an epidemic?  All other closures are short-term or matters of displacement to another place where in-person instruction can continue.  Did the writers anticipate six months to a full school year, perhaps multiple years, to be a calendar disruption?  Or, is another statute appropriate; one that addresses the endangerment of epidemic disease upon community health not epidemic upon the school year calendar?

252.02(03) and 252.03(2) consider a school closure in the context of communicable disease.  The concept is that the gathering of community, children, teachers, and all staff, in a schoolhouse during a health emergency, such as an epidemic, is unsafe for the public health.  School could be a spreader event.   

Of interest, our Governor immediately closed all WI schools last March for the remainder of the 2019-20 school term.  He declared the spread of COVID to be a state health emergency.  Subsequently, the governor’s declaration was challenged by partisanship and his power to declare a statewide emergency was curtailed by the WI Supreme Court.  And, that was the last action taken by public health in the Time of COVID.  All communication from the WI Department of Health Services since is worded as community and personal guidance and recommendation and purposefully exempts schools.  WI statutes regarding schools and public health in the TIME of COVID have been neutered.

That leaves local school boards alone to decide the commonweal not from the perspective of public health but from their authority to amend the school calendar in the event of an epidemic.  School boards will tell who to do what.

Not to demean a school board, but we are lay persons elected and empowered to govern local schools on behalf of our constituent community.  Although a person with a medical or public health background may be elected to the school board, 99.9% are generalist residents with a commitment to local public education.  A school board’s commonweal is schooling not public health.  The powers and duties of a school board are described in WI Stat 118.01 and public health is not mentioned.  Yet, here we are.  Lay boards in 421 Wisconsin school districts are making 421 independent decisions of the commonweal for their respective school community’s public health.

Some children are receiving in-person instruction in-school.  Some children are receiving instruction at-home from in-school teachers.  Some children are in-school one, two or three days each week and home the rest.  Some children who receive in-school instruction are quarantined when a classmate, teacher or bus driver experiences a positive COVID test.  Fourteen days at-home and then back to school, perhaps until the next positive test. 

Lay school boards are doing yeomen’s work in sustaining a continuing education for all children during a statewide public health crisis.  School boards say who will do what according to WI Stat 119.18(6) School Calendar.  This is the condition of our commonweal in the Time of COVID.