Category Archives: Blog

Hypocrisy: Know Its Bounds

Posted on by
Reply

“My hypocrisy knows no bounds.”  The line from the movie Tombstone fit the character of Doc Holliday, who, as portrayed in the movie, walked on both sides of the line of law and order.  Sometimes a memorable line from a movie gives us something to consider.  In this case, Doc’s perception of his own hypocrisies tells us how to understand the possibility our own.  Our line should be “…my hypocrisy knows its bounds”.

Take Away

Health conditions, swirling arguments, and deeply held wants in the Time of COVID make it difficult to form some decisions.  Is it safe for children and teachers to be in school classrooms?  Is it safe for children to engage in school athletics and activities?  Recommendations by the CDC and DHS are changing – some changes being medical and others political.  Professional organizations, like pediatricians, mental health workers, teacher unions, and state athletic associations weigh in with position statements.  Parental voices are both silent and loud.  The intention of all is to influence school-based decisions.  What to do?

What do we know?

Conditions and Information will continue to change.  An argument made today may fail if infection and death rates surge and the same argument may swell if those data diminish.  New treatments provide promise, but the true goal is an efficacious vaccine and widespread vaccination.

What works in one community may not work in another.  In a neighboring state high school football and soccer seasons are under way while in this state there is admonishment to delay fall contact sports to spring.

Different people hold to different levels of risk.  Death due to COVID as a very low percentage of those infected suggests that all community activity can be justified.  Death is permanent – you can re-schedule school and games but you cannot reschedule a lost life.  Take your pick of statement – you may be correct in the end.  Or, you may be corrected.

What to do?  Hello, Doc Holliday.  Don’t be a hypocrite.  Find your high ground and keep to the strictures of that position.  Be consistent to your beliefs.  But, also understand that oppositional beliefs are present and in our representative form of government your beliefs may not become the local policies.

Why is this thus?

Decisions about school are public decisions and the public expects to participate in school decision-making.  Participation is built into school board practices and procedures by state statute and local policy.  School board work is our nation’s most grass root level of local government.  Mail, e-mail, texts, phone calls, personal conversations, and turnouts at school board meetings, in-person and remote, are expected by elected board members.  In isolated circumstances, even targeted calling out and protest directed at the person befall a board member.  Participatory decision-making sometimes is uncomfortable ground, especially in critical times.

Some confuse participatory decision-making with majority rule.  They are not the same.  While the public deserves to and must be heard, their opinions need not form the final decision.  Additionally, decision makers need to keep a perspective between loud voices and the greater community.  Often, repetitively vocal citizens appear to speak for a greater number than they are.  Two dozen constant voices do not speak for a community of 10,000.

To do

The the greatest extent possible, a School Board will know the bounds of its hypocrisies by doing the following.

  • Listen to everyone constantly and consistently.  Every speaker, writer, and e-mailer deserve the courtesy of the Board’s attention.
  • Do not allow personalities to color arguments.  Consider the argument regardless of the speaker’s personality.  It is too easy to find irritability in what you know about the speaker, but don’t.  Listen to the merits of each argument without prejudice.
  • Some are more or less articulate than others.  Do not mentally correct their grammar, listen to their ideas.  A speaker does not have to speak in complete and coherent sentences to make a speech.
  • Do not personalize.  Although all outcomes are personal, make the decision-making process impersonal.  Self-interest is at the heart of most communication to the School Board.  If you know this to be true, do not be surprised or put off when you hear it.  Treat it for what it is.
  • To greatest degree possible, base decisions on facts.  One man’s facts may be another man’s fiction, but there are building blocks in reliable and valid data.  When you find it, use it.
  • Set parameters and be flexible within those parameters.  Good decisions for large group behavior are not pinpoints but set parameters that allow for a variety of acceptable behaviors within stated boundaries.  Boards need to set their boundaries and give school administration and staff the opportunity to develop options within those boundaries.
  • If the basis for your final decision is proven wrong, be prepared to make a more current and corrected decision.  Change is a constant.  You may be faulted for a decision that does not work out; you will be damned for sticking to a decision after you know it does not work.
  • Don’t be a hypocrite.  Do the proper work.  Find your high ground.  Declare the decision and enact the decision.  And, monitor how your decision works.

The big duh

We watch our favorite sports team and understand and accept that how the team’s game plan changes.  A football team, for example, plans for its competition weeks in advance.  Hence, we expect a game plan and team practicing of that game plan.  However, when the game is underway, we watch our quarterback call an audible play.  He sees conditions across the line of scrimmage that the game plan did not anticipate.  He calls an audible and changes the play on the spot.

COVID is a humongous audible play.  All the players are adjusting rapidly to life in a pandemic that was not in the game plan.  School boards are quarterbacks considering the facts across the line of scrimmage in the state and community and they are calling audibles as the facts and conditions and guidance evolve.

Listen.  Rely on facts.  Provide clear details in each audible.  Be consistent in enacting decisions.  Allow for flexibility within the parameters of your decision.  Do not accept hypocrisy.

Lessons That Keep On Teaching

Posted on by
Reply

“I taught the lesson.  It was a good lesson.  I trust that my students learned from it.”  This is a teacher’s common refrain at the end of a school day.  Sometimes, the word “hope” substitutes for “trust”.  Most lessons are moments in time and reteaching a lesson does not quite approximate its originality.  But, what if students did not learn from the lesson?  Or, what if some students did learn and others did not?  What if it was a well constructed lesson, but some students were distracted or others were absent due to illness? 

Take Away

There will be a few good take aways from the Time of COVID.  One of these will be the opportunity to record in-school lessons for at-home learners became the necessity to record all lessons and these records are forming a library of a teacher’s continuous instruction.  A lesson no longer is a moment that is gone but is a moment that can be viewed and reviewed by students.  And, by the teacher.

What do we know?

Practice does not make learning perfect.  It does not make anything perfect.  Practice, or the act of repeating a statement of knowledge or a skill or of repeating a string of ideas, only makes learning persistent.  The more we practice something, the more likely we are to repeat its demonstration in the same way over time.  In fact, what we practice may not be correct and it may not mirror the instruction we are trying to learn

A question.  What if a child was absent, physically or mentally, when the lesson was taught?  Will the child ever be taught the same lesson as children who were present? 

Another question.  What if the initial learning was not quite correct?  What if the facts do not align into a true statement?  What if the skill to draw a straight line constantly creates a curved line?  Practice will only make our repeating of an untruth and our drawing of a curved line more likely.

Examining or re-examining the initial lesson in which the facts or skills were taught can fill in missing instruction.  It also can correct our imperfection learning.

There always are two personas in every lesson – the teacher and the student.  Each persona has an essential role in every successful instructional lesson.  We often think of the student, the recipient of the lesson, first.  However, recorded lessons have an equal value for the teacher.  How many times has a teacher wondered at the end of a lesson or school day, “Did I say or do or answer that correctly?”.  Or, “Could I have said, done or answered that better than I did?”.  Normally there is no way to know.  We do not get do overs.  However, a recorded lesson allows a teacher to take a “mulligan” and make another effort at something that could be improved.

Why is this thus?

Prior to COVID, zooming is what Mazda said happens when we drive a Mazda Miata.  “Zoom!  Zoom!”  Or, zooming is what a young child says when rolling a car across the kitchen floor. 

In the Time of COVID, teachers are zoomers.  (Another trademarked label that has become a common language verb and noun.)  With the help of district tech specialists, classrooms in schools and kitchen tables in teachers’ homes have become broadcast studios.  The ubiquitous built-in camera on a laptop or Chromebook or IPad portrays the teacher in real time and children in their homes see and communicate with their teacher in real time.  Synchronous zooming is next best to being in the classroom.

As important as zooming is for synchronous teaching, it is even more important for asynchronous learning.  A child can view the teacher teaching, hear the initial explanations, see the initial modeling, mimic the initial practicing, and chime in on the initial checking for understanding when viewing a recorded zoom lesson.  This is not reteaching or teaching again.  It is the real thing.

More importantly, a child can see and hear a lesson repeatedly.  Consider a math lesson demonstrating how to divide fractions.  How many children fumble with the idea of inverting the second fraction and multiplying?  “I don’t get it!”  However, if the lesson is viewable again and again by the child, the mechanics of inverting and multiplying can become standard practice for a child.

Consider technical vocabulary.  “How do I pronounce that word?”  A child can hear the teacher say the word again and again.  She can see how the teacher forms the word with her mouth.

Consider how to shape a mound of clay on a potter’s wheel.  “How do I move my hands to raise the clay vertically?”  A child can simulate that action even though the child is not sitting at a wheel.

Consider a science lab.  “What step did I miss?”  A child can check their lab work and verify that all steps were properly executed and recorded.  Or not.

Consider the dissection of an argument or discussion of an essay.  “That is logical!”  A child can cut and past a better and more logical argument.

The Khan Academy understands the value of repeated video lessons.  We can learn from Khan.

To do

In our local school and as instructional modifications due to the pandemic, the equipment for zooming is installed in every classroom.  A camera on a moveable stand.  A large, portable screen for seeing the zoomed students at-home while seeing children in the classroom, if health data allows.  Connections are in place between the teacher’s graphic display board and the zoom screen.  Every child sees the same display.  And, connections between the student’s devices at-home and the teacher’s laptop or display board so that the teacher and student are in real time communcation.  These are now standard teaching technology in every classroom in our schools.

Now what?

  • Make every lesson a recorded lesson.  And, keep all recorded lessons in the school’s cloud for future viewing.
  • Make every recorded lesson available to all students, not just those who were absent.  Every child in the class must have access to the cloud to see any recorded lesson.
  • Encourage students to look at a succession of lessons to review prior knowledge and post-lesson applications.  It is one thing to maintain a cloud library; it is another to assist children to access those lessons.  Persistent encouragement will create a new student habit.
  • Make every lesson available to all students for review prior to tests and assessments.  Traditionally, children have their personal notes or those of collaborating students to review for tests.  Encourage children to also review the original lessons as they review.  There should be no mystery in what children should know on a test – it was all in the lessons they were taught.
  • Use recorded lessons in teacher lesson studies.  A lesson study can be made by an individual teacher of her own lessons or it can be a collaborative and collegial activity for groups of teachers.  Lesson studies open the discussion of improvement of individual lessons and enter units of lessons the more teachers practice a non-evaluative of their teaching.

There always is the wondering if a recorded library of lessons can replace a teacher in the classroom.  It cannot.  Good teaching is essential for good learning.

The big duh!

The COVID pandemic is causing schools, teachers and students to struggle in untold ways.  For every struggle there will be a resolution and many resolutions create new and innovative practices that improve teaching and learning.  Recording all lessons, making the library of recorded lessons available to all children, purposefully using the library to make complete learning for all children, and using the library for a professional review of teaching will be one of the good Take Aways from the Time of COVID.

A Need for Principal Leadership and Supervision of Instruction in the Time of COVID

Posted on by
Reply

“COVID 19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt that could last a lifetime” is the title of an article by McKinsey.org.  The authors make a compelling case that changes in COVID 19 educational practices need to happen today in order to lessen the loss of learning by children, the loss of educational productivity by K-12 graduates, and the loss of school-community interactions.  The issue, they write, is not to prevent the loss but to lessen the loss that is inevitable.y.org community interaction.  The issue, they write, is not to prevent the loss but to lessen the loss.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-student-learning-in-the-united-states-the-hurt-could-last-a-lifetime#

Take Away

We are all in the COVID 19 pandemic for the long haul.  Mitigation, improved treatment, development of promising vaccines, and herd immunity together add up to several years of future life in pandemic-mode.  Schooling will be affected by COVID.  Traditional classroom teaching and learning will be exception and not the norm.  Any prior educational disadvantage will be a greater disadvantage to an equal and equitable education for all children.

That is such a downer paragraph.  Although it is true, it is not a reason for pessimism or defeatism.  Educators know how to teach to children is pandemic mode.  Schools know how to organize flexibly so that, given health data, children can be in-class as often as possible.  And, when children are not in-class they can receive the best remote education, including on-line and hand-delivered instruction and learning materials.  We can do this.

What do we know?

There is an element of best educational practice that is absent in most school pandemic designs that must be present if we are to lessen the degree of our children’s educational loss. 

A supervision of instruction and learning is a constant and proactive force in assuring that school curricula is being taught with fidelity, that teaching is directly connected with student learning, and that all children with exceptional needs prosper from their adapted educational programs.  In short, focused administrative supervision of teaching and learning holds schools accountable to the educational outcomes children need to achieve.

Principals and instructional leaders are playing huge and essential roles in organizing schools for teaching and learning in the fall.  They are sitting in and contributing to hundreds of meetings with school boards, school committees, community committees, and local health care leaders.  They are writing new pandemic rules and regulations and publishing these in online and in distributable handbooks.  They are locating and purchasing mitigation supplies, taping classroom floors and hallways for social distancing, erecting see-through barriers in classrooms and offices where distancing is not possible, mapping the bus delivery for school-to-home lunch programs, and determining screening and quarantining procedures for exposed teachers and children who are in school.  As a group, they are fully engaged in the logistics of education.  These needs will not go away in September – they will be a constant.  However, they are not the supervision of curriculum and instruction that teachers and children will need after school starts.  The supervision of teaching and learning is more important now than ever before.

Why is this thus?

Instruction in the Time of COVID can be an inadvertent return to black box teaching and learning.  When teachers are in their classrooms, each classroom is a one-room school operation.  Social isolation protocols say that only essential people – the teacher and students – may be in the classroom.  Visits are prohibited.  When teachers are on-line, they are in a tunnel of communication with students that is closed from other viewers.  When teachers are providing hands-on learning materials to children, the interaction is in a personalized backpack.  In each of these scenarios, teaching occurs in a literal black box, difficult to observe and more difficult to supervise.

Unsupervised teaching with all good intentions tends toward the expedient.    Work is planned and executed in the immediacy.  A rule of statistics is that over time all data trends toward the mean.  In the Time of COVID, average is not good enough.

To do

Principals are the engines of school site leadership.  They set not only the expectations for educational outcomes to be achieved but uphold the standards of teaching by which those outcomes are achieved.  In the Time of COVID, these standards must be accentuated.  The longs list of must do jobs must include:

  • Hold regularly scheduled faculty meetings.  The first step in keeping all teachers connected with each other and with their supervisors is to meet.  Virtual meetings meet this goal.  Just as teachers say to students in a remote lesson, “I need to see your face.”  Teachers seeing teachers faces is connection #1.
  • Sit in and observe in-class teaching when children are present.  Connection #2 is a principal’s classroom visits.  Wash your hands, mask up, keep your distance and get into every classroom.  There is no black box teaching when the principal is a regular visitor.
  • Sit in and observe in-school teaching to at-home learners.  Observe teachers at their work doing remote education.  The lesson is the same as if children were in the classroom.  Better yet, sit on camera with the teacher.  Let children know that you are present in their learning as well as present in the teacher’s teaching.
  • Join Zoom meetings.  Most teachers will create an automatic “join” for their students to connect with daily classroom teaching.  “Join” in and see the classroom from a student’s perspective.
  • Require teachers to submit lesson plans for a unit of instruction.  The rituals of teaching do not change because of the pandemic.  Teachers should submit lesson plans for units of instruction for 2020-21 just as they did for the 2019-20 school year.  Principals need to observe and validate that lessons comport with units and units comport with district curriculum – even in a pandemic.
  • Observe modified instruction described in IEP and 540 plans.  It is too easy for the instruction of exceptional children to become lost in the sea of work.  The active participation of a principal is the best assurance that plans made are plans enacted.
  • Observe enriched and accelerated instruction described in G-T plans.  The needs of students for enriched and accelerated instruction, like students with special education needs, continues in the pandemic.  It is too easy for teachers to say “regular education is good enough” for G-T students.
  • Review student assessments with teachers.  Teachers can access and use the school’s student data system from the classroom and home, so all student assessment scores can be recorded and observed.  Absent score reports alert a principal to a child who may have difficulty engaging or lacking home support.  A child who drops out of school during the pandemic may do so invisibly.  A principal who checks the regularity of submitted assignments and tests and quizzes can catch a potential drop out before the child wanders too far to return. Reviewing student assessments with teachers has the added benefit of quality control.  In a black box, assessments provide the necessary checks of understanding that physical proximity and observation can provide.  A review also assures that assessments include higher order thinking questions.
  • Check backpacks used for the delivery of instruction to at-home students.  Children at home who do not have any of adequate Internet access rely upon the daily delivery/pick up of school assignments.  Checking backpacks is quantitative and qualitative assurance that already disadvantaged children are getting what they need to achieve their annual curricular goals.
  • Complete the scheduled teacher effectiveness protocols.  The state statutes mandating schedules for teacher effectiveness evaluation are not suspended during the pandemic.  Principal work in implementing the district’s evaluation system must continue albeit in ways modified by the pandemic. 
  • Hold all scheduled IEP meetings and staffings.  Principals and instructional leaders work for the needs of exceptional children in IEP and accommodation staffings.  Once the IEP or plan is written and approved, these leaders assure that plans are implemented with fidelity, appropriate assessments are conducted, and progress data is shared with the IEP team, including parents.  The fact that meetings may need to be remote does not alter the need for meetings.
  • Constantly communicate the district’s plan that all children will be provided their annual grade level and subject area course curriculum.  Against the published beliefs that the current generation of children will be irreversibly harmed by their loss of learning due to the pandemic, principals are the front line of assurance that all children are being taught for the purpose of achieving their annual curricular goals.  The assurance needs to be realistic in pointing to slides in achievement data and equally realistic in the school efforts to ameliorate the temporariness of those slides.
  • Constantly communicate the district’s plan that at the end of the 2020-21 school year all children will be academically ready for the 2021-11 school year.  School districts have various personnel who make public announcements.  From the superintendent to public relations, people of different roles make comments.  However, school principals historically are the most centered and accurate reporters of a school’s work during times of emergency.  Principals have direct communication with school parents and community members and, to paraphrase a generalization about politics, all important school news is local.

The big duh

In the Time of COVID, a school principal is the “go to person” for almost every issue regarding her school.  However, all COVID-tasks are not of equal importance nor of the same priority.  When teaching and learning begins this fall, the job of instructional leader and supervisor must be at the top of each principal’s daily to do list. 

Masters of Curriculum in the Time of COVID

Posted on by
Reply

The Summer of COVID is almost over and we return to teaching and learning in the Time of COVID.  We have exhausted the summer with well-intentioned but conclusionless arguments about whether children should be in-school or at-home learners.  Opinion and data have abounded and most schools will implement an in-school and at-home design that fits their local dynamics of economics, politics, and school capacity.  Now, it is time to get do rather than talk.  It is time to teach. 

Never has a teacher been required to know her curriculum more than in the Fall of COVID.   Depending upon local COVID data, schooling will shift from in-school to at-home and back again throughout the school year for some if not all children.  One day she will be teaching in her classroom and poof!  Children and teachers may be quarantined into remote teaching and learning.  Where and how she sees her children may be an ever changing landscape.  In-class one day and at-home the next.  Now more than ever before, quality teaching and learning must be a constant in times of disruption.

Take Away

A teacher’s singular responsibility for the 2020-21 school year will be to cause each child to learn her annual grade level or subject course curriculum regardless of the student’s learning location.  This will, of course, be paired with the necessity of every teacher addressing the socio-emotional needs of children in a pandemic world and of families adjusting their work styles and life styles to a return to school.  With so many things disrupted and in disarray, a teacher’s clear and sustained knowledge of her curriculum will be the rock upon which we will educate children in 2020-21.  The battle cry for teacher’s will be “Know and Teach Your Curriculum”. 

What Do We Know?

Disrupted teaching and learning are not new to teachers.  Fire drills disrupt classes and hurricanes and blizzards disrupt school weeks.  Personal and family illness regularly absent teachers and children from the classroom.  A family that takes a prolonged vacation unrelated to school holidays requires modification to the flow of instruction and learning.  Within usual disruption, teaching and learning bounces back and returns to its yearly string of school days.  These are normal occurrences in the life and times of school.

Pandemic disruption is different. 

Teachers with hybrid schedules will have in-person contact with children one or two days per week on a rotating or alternating basis.  The other days of the week, teaching and learning will be remote.  This is juggling 3 or 4 balls in the air to assure that the teacher equally distributes in person time with all children and, while children are online, they continue to learn independent of the teacher.

Teachers of at-home children will teach a lesson to children with high-speed broadband Internet and with no or inadequate Internet connectivity, with parent support during the school day and without any adult supervision, and to children relying solely on mailed or school delivered packets of lessons.  A child’s time on task will be unseen.  A child may engage in today’s lesson today, tonight, tomorrow or next week.  And, then there is tomorrow’s lesson.  This is juggling 20 balls with the understanding that the juggler frequently must pick up dropped balls.

Toss in classroom or school closing when a child or teacher or staff member is exposed to or infected with the virus.  Then, all children will become at-home learners.  And, teachers will be teaching from home.

Teachers of children in-class and at-home simultaneously need to be be master jugglers.  The criteria for master juggling is a mastering of curriculum.

Why Is This Thus?

Disruption and broken strings of school days are facts.  Focused teaching and learning are a constant.  When reassembling during and after a disruption, a clear knowledge of her curriculum keeps a teacher pointed at the essential knowledge, skills and dispositions that all children must learn.  Equal to the national and community concerns about COVID is the national and community worry that children will not be provided the education required for their future.  Again, knowledge of curriculum is a teacher’s pathway to educating all children.

To Do

Focus on essential learning.  Knowledge of curriculum creates certainty in teaching what must be learned.  Every curriculum, every series, and every text provides a broad pathway of learning within which is a critical set of knowledge, skills and dispositions.  Knowing your curriculum keeps a teacher focused on what must be learned and allows disruption to shuck off the “it is nice to know”.  A teacher without this sound foundational knowledge chases every learning point possible without efficiency or effectiveness.

Focus on exceptional learning needs.  Knowledge of curriculum ensures that each child regardless of learning challenges is engaged regardless of location.  These are two significant “regardless” issues.  Children with IEPs or adaptive learning plans or without English fluency or who are children of various giftedness require modifications of essential curriculum that cause them to achieve and exceed the same outcomes as all other children.  These are equity and equality issues that cannot be excused by disruption or child location.  A mastery knowledge of curriculum keeps children with exceptional learning needs learning.

Focus on curricular outcomes.  Knowledge of curriculum creates deftness in the management of all learners.  Children range in their time and place within a unit of study and a knowledgeable teacher, like a shepherd, keeps them all moving in the same direction toward a known and necessary closure of the unit.  A teacher without deft management loses children along the way.  Deftness and a vigilant moving toward curricular outcomes keeps all children on the pathway to annual success.

Focus on formative assessments.  Knowledge of curriculum assures that checking for understanding and assessments of learning are included in every unit regardless of where children are learning.  Without this knowledge, it is easy for a teacher to become driven to deliver a quantity of instruction and lose sight of the quality of learning. 

Focus on learning modalities.  Knowledge of curriculum allows a teacher to shift from high tech to no tech teaching and learning while keeping all children learning.  An in-person child and an at-home/on-screen child and an at-home paper and pencil child can all be engaged in the same curricular standards and reaching the same learner outcomes.  A knowledgeable teacher works backward from the learning outcomes and builds instruction so that each child regardless of location reaches the same, high quality outcomes. 

The Big Duh!

COVID too shall pass.  When it does, we will not repeat the 2020-21 school year because some children did not learn their grade level or subject course curriculum.  Children will be promoted and graduated with what they learned this year.  We are called upon to deliver high quality teaching and learning in unbelievably difficult times.  A mastery knowledge of our curriculum is our best resource for succeeding in this responsibility.

And, there is no one else in our nation, state or community who can replace a master teacher.

Home Bound Teaching in the Time of COVID; Ichabod Crane Rides Again

Posted on by
Reply

The Time of COVID exposes a new category of educational challenge.  It is not that school has lacked for challenges these days, but we have found a new dilemma for educating children when school houses are closed.  These are no option households characterized by any of the following:

  • No Internet or totally inadequate Internet
  • No daytime supervision
  • No daycare
  • No daycare that supports schooling
  • Children too young to be left alone

We give nominal lip service to the fact that public education is our nation’s #1 day care provider.  Millions of children are cared for and educated every day of a school year.  In many communities, school-based wrap around services go far beyond the 3 Rs to include feeding, clothing, medical care, mental health care, family services, recreational activities, and the list goes on.  Even during vacation periods, children and families continue to receive school-based services.  In the lives of many children and families, school is a major player.

COVID closed most schools in March.  Closed meant human-contact services stopped.  When education shifted to online, households quickly were categorized in their capacity to support continuing 4K-12 education.  Households with

  • adequate Internet and
  • an adult at home

were able to engage in online learning and complete the 2019-20 school year.  Completion did not look like completion in prior years, but these households were able to engage with teachers and receive grade level and course specific instruction.

Opposite these engaged households, we found many, too many, no option households.  The term no option refers to the fact that children in these households have no option for education other than daily in-school attendance.  When school house doors are closed, they have no option for a continuing education.

An at-home adult.  In the 1900s, seems like a long time ago, it was more common for a mother to be a homemaker.  Many mothers worked, but even more were at home.  During school vacation periods or when a child was ill, a parent at home provided supervision and care.  An at-home parent is rare in the 2000s when each adult in the household typically works away from home.  During school vacation periods or when a child is ill, parents need back-up systems to provide supervision and care.  The Time of COVID clearly separated households into those with adequate back-up systems and those with no options for back-ups.

Adults need to work.  No option conditions are not necessarily related household employment or income level, but they can be.  The Time of COVID forced many adults in high to low income positions into unemployment.  The need to find work, to create income to pay bills, and to support the family financially left many at-home children without adult supervision or care in their homes.  This is not a fault; it is another type of no option.

Day care centers also closed.  A back-up for many families when the school house is closed are local day care operators.  In one sentence – when COVID closed school houses it also closed day cares.  No option there anymore.

Older children as home school support for younger children.  Older siblings are a natural and historic go-to when school houses are closed, adults need to work, and day cares are closed.  Older children take care of younger children.  COVID, however, has stressed even this arrangement.  The role of baby-sitter/care provider for younger siblings is different than the role of in-home tutor and school work supervisor.  As many parents find they are not cut out to be home school teachers, so do older brothers and sisters.  And, if older children also are students, all children compete for time online and with family digital devices. 

Digital devices.  No option conditions are not due to a lack of digital devices, but they can be.  In the era of online education, any screen will do.  A student with a cell phone to desktop computer array can engage with a teacher for online teaching and learning.  Cell phones, however, are too small for school work assignments.  To fill the gap when a child does not have an adequate digital device to do online lessons, especially written and calculated assignments, many schools gave their students a take home IPad, Chromebook or laptop.  And, due to worry that COVID can be spread on hard surfaces, many schools want their students to keep these devices.

No or inadequate Internet.  Online teaching and learning lives and dies on the Internet.  No option households are clearly defined by their having no Internet connection or an inadequate Internet connection.  As ubiquitous as the Internet seems, there are many households in every community without.  Households having subscriptions to cable providers and high speed are on one end of the Internet continuum and households, often rural, that lie in the dead zones of tower and satellite provision are on the other end.  A dead zone without Internet provider coverage is an online education desert.  In between these two extremes are the majority of households with low megabits per second for downloading and slower still for uploading.  Online teaching and learning requires access to enough connection to stream instruction into the home and to upload assignments back to school.  Connectivity is further stressed if two children or more are competing or online time at home.  Internet inaccessibility contributes to online dropouts.

As testimony, my home is connected via on copper wire telephone connections that averages 3.5 megabits for downloading and .5 megabits for uploading.  I  drive to the local school where I park outside and mooch on their Internet.  Zooming in my home is a stop and go session with more stops than goes.  This is a common problem in my rural area.

Yet, schools are mandated to provide a continuing education for all children in the Time of COVID.  But wait, there is an option.  It is an older concept with a renewed capacity to provide an option for no option households.

The school fall back is a teacher of homebound children.  In many schools, a homebound teacher serves children too sick with lengthy illness or injury to attend school, home schooled children needing IEP or 504 Plan service, or children out-of school for disciplinary reasons.  In Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, an itinerant teacher was hired by Dutch farmers to teach their children at home.  He was Ichabod Crane.  Our home bound teacher is a modern day Ichabod Crane who schedules time at no option households to transport assignments from in-school or at-home teachers to at-home students, provide linking instruction and tutoring for school assignments, conduct assessments and tests, and return completed school work to the teacher.  She drives a circuit of homes every day and provides continuing education where COVID prevents daily school attendance, lack of Internet prevents online connection, and children need a non-home body for their homeschooling.  Ichabod Crane rides again!

In the Time of COVID, schools do not spend as much every day for substitute teaching.  Funding for daily subs can be diverted to hiring home bound teachers.  Home bound teachers complying with CDC guidance of hand washing, masking, social distancing and sanitizing common surface and without own underlying health conditions can reasonably visit and teach children at home.  Teacher-certified substitute teachers who are unemployed by schools due to school house closure can supply a pool of potential home bound teachers.

Homebound teachers link an at-home child with the child’s regularly assigned teachers.  Homebound teachers keep a child on track to meet the school’s annual curricular goals for all students.  In combination with homes where Internet, digital devices, adults supervision, and adequate home schooling exist, a home bound teacher rescues the continuing instruction for no option children and keeps all children engaged in continuing education.

Just when we think there are no options, another option emerges.  Such is the work of public education.