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Reopening School: The Need for Day Care

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The critical attribute of school in a global pandemic is not education; it is day care and lunch.  In the face of COVID, these two functions top the list of “what the pandemic taught us about schools and our national health and economic crises” and “what does your community and state need its schools to do”.

Simultaneously, unforeseen consequences of COVID are carving the nation with demonic swaths.  The national box score this morning showed nearly 100,000 deaths and more than 1,500,000 positive cases of the virus.  These numbers dominate the news.  Pandemic not only makes people sick, it sickens all of life’s activities.  People shut down.  Businesses shutdown.  Community activities shut down.  Employees become unemployed.  Unemployment data shoots upward from less than 5% towards 20% and governments focus on how to pay massive unemployment benefits and keep businesses afloat.

The crisis has quickly grown geometrically in two daily graphs – cases and deaths, and, unemployment numbers and economic failure.  These represent the status of public health and the status of economic health.  The urgency to deal with the pandemic has taken two dimensions – how to restore the health of the nation’s people and how to restore the health of the national economy.  After two-plus months of crises, the need to restore the economy is overtaking the restoration of public health.

We remember from our history lessons that President Coolidge unabashedly said in the 1920s “… the business of America is business” and not even a pandemic has altered his truth.

COVID quickly exposed the critical attribute of public school.  Schools are by far the nation’s largest day care provider.  When children are not in school for an extended period, the urgency of day care becomes a state and national crisis.  In order to return to normalcy, schools must resume day care operations.  It is not the loss of reading, writing, and arithmetic or the cancellation of winter and spring activities and athletics that our governments and communities lament.  It is day care. 

I believe that schools will never return to what they were like in March 2020 and before COVID. 

The fall 2020 school term will begin with all children in a school setting.  Repeat – in September, all children will be in school and parents will be available to return to work.  The need for a working nation trumps the need for general public health.  But, schools will be different.  Even as businesses race toward normalcy, day care/school will be held to CDC guidance on phased practices.

  • Overarching public health advisories will require social distancing in school, in classrooms, in hallways, and every area of the school.  Guidance abandoned by business will be upheld for schools. 
  • Children will have their temperature taken at the school entry each morning and will not congregate with their friends.
  • In order to space children safely with a six foot radius between, class sizes in a standard classroom will max at 16 children per class, four rows by four rows, outer rows next to walls.
  • Schools will need more classrooms, almost twice the current number.  All spaces in the school will be considered for conversion to classrooms. 
  • School boards will rent “big box” buildings in the community for temporary classrooms that will then become semi-permanent in the next five years. 
  • More classrooms will require more staff.  Boards will hire more support staff to supervise children in classrooms. 
  • Teachers who mastered remote instruction will use their new pedagogical skills to stream grade level and subject area lessons to children in school and Big Box classrooms.  A new category of teacher will emerge – remote instruction designers.
  • Speaking of teachers, there will be a shortage of classroom teachers.  COVID and remote education will have been more than many current teachers can handle and they will leave the profession.  The current shortage of prepared teachers will be magnified.
  • Children who became acclimatized to screen time during the remote education will continue to learn through their screens.  Restrictions on in-school movement will keep children at their desks and screens.
  • Physical education and music instruction will be personally contracted between teacher and student, because large group instruction in gyms and rehearsal halls will be not be safe.  Children will video their PE and music practice time and submit these to their teachers.  Some gyms will be repurposed as classrooms.
  • School athletic programs will narrow to individual, non-contact sports with limited spectators.  Outdoor programs will be safer than indoor programs.  Major team and contact sports will not be safe.  Locker rooms and shower rooms will be converted for other purposes.
  • School lunch will be distributed to children at their desks.  Massed feeding programs in cafeterias and lines of children moving from classrooms to the cafeteria will be unsafe.  Cafeterias will be repurposed as food prep areas or classrooms.
  • School auditoriums will be repurposed as classrooms.
  • The most significant problem will be school transportation.  A 72-passenger school bus normally carrying three children per seat will carry 12 – one child per alternating seat row.  School buses will make multiple runs every morning and afternoon to transport children from home to school and home again.  More routes and each route will be shorter in time duration.  Activity and athletic transportation will require multiple buses per trip, if they are allowed.

Across the board, the cost of school will increase at a time when state revenues have been deeply diminished by the pandemic.  This will be a conundrum for state legislators.  In order for business to return to normalcy, children need to be in school.  In order for schools to follow prevailing pandemic safety guidance, each of the bullets above needs to be in daily practice.  This will cause legislators to find the money or return children to school without CDC guidance. 

Watch the box scores.  The critical attribute of public school will be on display.

Getting Covrosion Off the Learning Needle

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What do we call it when a student re-engages in learning after taking a substantial amount of time off from school?  Or after a child has been ill or home bound for a lengthy period and returns to school?  How do we describe the challenge when a student takes a test or tries to demonstrate what would have been learned during the hiatus?  We have named the outcome of decreased academic performance a “slide”, as in higher test results in June and lower results in September after summer vacation.  Summer slide.  We don’t have a word for the stagnant condition of learners not being tested over time.  We need one, especially post-COVID.

Professional athletes have words to describe a player returning to the game after periods of non-play.  When a PGA golfer returns to the tour after rehabilitating an injury or taking a vacation from play, reporters describe the player as “being rusty” or is “working to get the rust out of a swing”.  NFL quarterbacks work to regain their “timing”.  MLB players work to regain their “feel for the game” and they “loosen up”, “find their eye”, and “regroove their swing”.  Boxers “get their legs back”.  These metaphors work because they describe a difference in a state of being.  At one point the athlete was performing well.  Then, due to unforeseen circumstances, performance either stopped or significantly fell off its usual standard.  Now, the athlete is working to return to old form. 

Our grandparents had words for children getting busy with their schoolwork.  “You need to put on your thinking cap”.  Or, “it’s time to clear out the cob webs”.  No thanks.

During our COVID school closure, teaching and learning continues.  Teachers and children adapt to new daily strategies for remote education.  No one really takes off their thinking cap or gets cob webby.  Almost everyone is engaged in continuous K-12 schooling to some degree.  Remote education recognizably is not the same as regular education.  At best, remote teaching and learning allow children to “stay in play”. 

Perhaps one of the universal observations of schooling in the time of COVID is that this is an “assessment-free time.”  Most vendors of large-scale assessments are closed as non-essential businesses and schools can not access their tests.  At the same time, most schools understand that the irregular delivery of instruction does not allow children to demonstrate expected academic performances, so school are not enacting school wide assessments.  March, April, May and June are “assessment-free.” 

Learning and the assessment of learning have been “covroded”.  Corrosion is a synonym for rust, hence covroded.  We need to get the covrosion out of our educational work.

Let’s talk about covrosion on the assessment needle.  From September through early March, children were engaged in continuous, regular instruction.  Regular school means regular assessments on the school’s fall and winter testing schedule were well underway.  Then, nothing.  We knew the progression of a child’s learning through six months of school, but we know nothing since.  The assessment needle is covroded and stuck in March.

Is this the end of the world?  No.  Teaching and learning morphed into remote applications and pushed student learning through March, April and into May.  But, to what effect?  Schooling today is highly data driven.  The data of assessments informs teachers about what comes next in teaching and learning.  For our youngest children learning to read and understand arithmetic, these assessments are necessary an frequent prescriptions for teaching.  For children in ELA and Spanish classes, assessments verify how well a child is mastering language mechanics and vocabulary and fluency.  For children in the pre-Algebra through Trig sequence, assessments verify that a child is ready for more complex and complicated learning.  For children in music and art, performance assessments document the learning of skills.  Although many critics decry the amount of testing in schools, testing drives the progression of teaching and learning.  Today, in mid-May, we do not have have data about student learning.  The getting of data is covroded.

We must recognize that many teachers are using quizzes and tests to understand how children are progressing with remote lessons.  We understand that the credibility of remote education for many children is supported by quizzes, tests, graded assignments, and projects.  Tests and grades help to validate the doing of schoolwork.  If there are no tests and grades, many children say “…then why do the daily assignments?”.

As a side note, interesting stories abound regarding children who struggled with spelling and arithmetic during the winter and now are very good spellers and do well on remote arithmetic lessons and on-screen tests.  When a child yells out “How do you spell elephant?” in a home bound lesson, the child probably gets several in-house answers.  And, writing assignments e-mailed in are very nicely “proofed”. 

All of this is expected.  Why not!  But, just what have children learned and how do we know what they learned?  Are they still on track to achieve their annual grade level and subject course outcomes?  If not on track, what is the difference between the status of their learning and the annual expectation?  While we want to know the extent of learning at the close of the 2019-20 school year, we really need to know the status of learning at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year.

The assessment needle not only tells us the points of student learning at the end of a school year, it tells us the points at which student learning must begin at the start of the next school year.

Schools must get the covrosion off their daily instruction and off their assessment tools for teaching and learning to return to their normally high levels of performance in 2020-21.  Education is data-driven and educators, students and parents need the data so that a school’s academic, activities, arts and athletics programs can prosper once again.  Prescriptive teaching and learning will return when the covrosion has been removed.

In the Time of COVID, Choose Wisely

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There is a child’s voice in each of us and sometimes the child speaks out when the adult in us would not.  Most frequently that intervening voice says, “I want what I want and I want it now”.  Then, the adult must make good on a decision it may not be able to rationalize.

In the time of COVID, as well as other circumstances involving health risks, most decisions of human behavior are speculative.  We speculate that most people will not become ill and that we will not be among the sick or deceased.  We play with our sense of the odds even though the odds are mathematical and not malleable.  We speculate that following the guidance of health experts is like eating our vegetables and in the long run of things eating vegetables today does not matter.  We know what we should do, but we do not want to, so we don’t.  We speculate that what we do in the “now” will not affect the “future”.  The incubation period of the virus is 14 days and if we are not seeing symptoms today, we will be okay in two weeks.  We speculate that, like a person driving a car who tries to pass a slower vehicle in a no passing zone, that no one will get hurt this time.  The gamble is that no one is in the other lane when we want to be there.  We speculate.

In the third month of COVID, school leaders face decisions regarding re-opening school in full or in part or for special events, like graduations and promotion ceremonies.  Almost everyone is fatigued with their self- and guidance related-isolation.  Spring weather calls us to be outdoors and active.  We are cabin fevered.  However, in our rural area, health officials have determined that our communities are in the phase of community spread of the virus.  We currently have a relatively low number of positive tests but a probable number of untested people who are infected.  We are told to be safer at home.  Yet, the child voices rise up with “…we have a right to our ceremonies.  No one will be harmed.  Speculate and give us what we want”.

I am no better nor worse than others when I speculate about myself – only myself.  I am willing to bear the results when I risk me.  The onus of my responsibility when I speculate about the well-being of others beyond myself is an entirely different matter. 

As a public official, I will not be pointed at like the narcissist in Indiana Jones – The Last Crusade with the judgement made of me “…he did not choose wisely” when the data and his adult brain told him “do not do this”. 

Until the data clearly tell us that in-person interactions are safe, that there is no car in the on-coming lane because we can see the fact of the matter, school leaders should choose safety.

Nimbility in the Time of COVID

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“A plan for COVID?  Anyone?  Anyone?”  It sounds like the economics teacher in Ferris Buehler asking students questions for which they were not prepared.   Prior to March 2020 no school district strategic plan included a design for remote education in the time of a pandemic.  In all candor, good emergency planning in a school anticipated snow days, electrical outages, water and sanitation interruptions, tornadoes and hurricanes (depends upon your location), and now violent threats, but no plan anticipated COVID.  A school district file cabinet may have held a folder of literature about the past threats of H1N1, avian flu, SARS or MERS.  Files written but never enacted were considered in the abstract with theoretical responses.  COVID was an abrupt knock down punch and most school leaders resembled kids the econ class, absent the droolers.

From our work in the absence of a COVID plan, what have we learned?  The first lesson is a review lesson – “stuff happens!”.  Stuff that cannot be anticipated in the manner that it must be dealt with.  Stuff, stuff and more stuff just keep happening.  COVID is not just unanticipated, it is unfathomable.  Worse, it seems unwilling to go away quickly.  Now that we are in the unfathomable, our lesson learned is that we must pull up our socks and get about the work to be done.  Everyone has something to do or not do.

The second lesson is that leadership is not just an art and a science to be applied from an armchair.    There is a lot of this type of leadership in our schools.  When leaders have the enjoyment of time, resources and multiple options, leadership can consider what is best and what is needed and reconsider their considerations on the pathway to good decisions.  However, a crisis requires a different kind of leadership.  Crisis leadership contains a fast twitch muscle that responds to new stimuli quickly and nimbly.  Nimble leadership is a blur of art and science spinning in time.  Nimble leadership is a treasured commodity in our schools.  Leadership in crisis situations does not have the luxury of time and fluid leadership does not have the option for reconsideration.  The literature presents chapters on “nimble” leadership and its ability to monitor, adjust and make necessary, sometimes unforeseen, changes.  Nimble decision making in crisis is understanding the big picture in terms of human faces, the multiple small steps people need to take, and making the best decision available at the time.  Nimble is both decisive and transitive; there always is a next.  Nimble is better able to deal with the onslaught of stuff.

Case in point:  The announcement said, “Schoolhouses in this state will be closed as of tomorrow, but the education of children must continue”.  Small district or large district, what do you do at that moment of that announcement not only to comply with the order to close but to create a new organization for remote education?  Leadership’s immediate thought is that the schoolhouse will be closed for cleaning to assure student and employee safety and then we will re-open in several days.  Immediate decisions followed this design.  Closed for several days and then re-open.  Just like snow days, we can do this.  But, wait!  Schoolhouses will be closed for one month.  Stop.  This is no longer like snow days.  Teachers and students need to carry home everything they will need for teaching and learning for at least twenty-five school days.  Then, what?  Who knows?

I marvel at school leaders who were nimble over the first days and week of school closure in transforming their school’s teaching and learning from classrooms, studios, gyms and labs to school-provided home schooling.  They used collaborative leadership to have tech specialists, learning management systems (LMS), teachers and school supervisors work the problem.  It reminds us of NASA’s emergency with Apollo 13 and their need to focus solely on the problem of returning a disabled space capsule to earth.  Their mantra was “Work the problem” – timely advice for nimble school leaders today.  

I marvel at teachers who were nimble in creating lessons for home schooling that closely mirrored lessons at school.  They kept to their curricular map for learning so that at the end of a month of homeschooling student work at home approximated student work at school.  Teachers are morph the steps of a lesson they present in class to critical learning activities children can do on their own or with family assistance.  They are writing lessons in clear language and simple steps day after day.  The response from their students’ parents recognizes the effective work of these teachers.  It is not accidental that these nimble teachers also are adept in using school-provided learning management systems for interactive communication with students and their parents.  Nimble educators are connecting with children to cause them to be nimble learners.

Nimble leadership has work to do as their “nexts” keep arriving.  How do we end a school year in remote education?  How do we assess and grade schoolwork?  Graduation for seniors?  Summer school?  Summer PD for teachers?  What will school be like September?  If we cannot open, how can we make remoted education next fall better than this spring?  The list of stuff keeps growing.

The third lesson learned is that education is essential.  I read and discount tweets and posts saying that “…remote educator only shows how much time kids waste in school…” and “…remote education proves that most school assignments are from workbooks…”.  Those comments are always lurking.  Instead, I focus on the high number of children who remain hungry for learning.  They welcome contact with their teacher and the continuing string of learning assignments.  Children awaiting their daily schoolwork resemble the good news on an evening news broadcast.  They get little mention because their innate desire to learn is not sensational but naturally ubiquitous.  These children are so many and usual that they are not newsworthy.  They are real and they are the heart of essential, continuing education.  They are what makes overcoming the onslaught of stuff the driving force of nimble educators.

Nimble school leaders and nimble teachers and the millions of children engaged in continued teaching and learning are the educational heroes in the time of COVID.

Teaching and Learning in Education’s Lifeboats in the Time of COVID

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A Great Lakes analogy of schooling in the Time of Covid floats well today.  We are carrying on with teaching and learning from the lifeboats after all passengers on the SS Public Education were forced to disembark due to a pandemic on the water.  Now that we have been in the lifeboats for several weeks, it is time to reacquaint ourselves with lifeboat living and monitor and adjust to our new realities.

The lifeboat analogy is apropos because no one volunteers to transfer from the comfort of a safe and thriving big water boat with hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers to bob about for an undetermined time with minimal support systems.  In our socially isolated and sanitized boats, we are called to row toward the port of Re-Opening.

The first adjustment is to our foundational understanding of remote education.  Begin with this: Remote education is not regular schooling and whatever we do to try to make it seem and act like regular schooling remote education is not regular education.  This is why

  • Remote education suspends the reality of teaching and learning in a school environment.  When we shut the schoolhouse doors, we closed off school as we knew it and began something entirely new – remote education.  Hence, we cannot think about remote education in the same way we think about regular schooling.  The doors are closed – period.  Most teachers cannot access their school and classrooms due to the schoolhouse being closed and sanitized.  Teachers are teaching with what they carried to the lifeboat and can virtually access.  Remember this statement – the reality of regular teaching and learning has been suspended.
  • Remote education is school-provided mandatory home schooling.  Who would have thought that public schools would be encouraging and engaging in home schooling, but we are.  This recognition is essential to understanding our new circumstances.  Remote education is home schooling.

The “mandatory” part of this new home schooling is the killer, because most parents did not and would not choose to be home school parents.  Home schooling has always been a choice, but not today.  The entire emotional and logistical construct for successful home schooling is absent in mandatory remote education.  Without debate, that emotional and logistical construct is essential for successful home schooling.  Many parents do not view their role in remote education as voluntary partners in teaching their children.  They are kidnapped adults forced to do something they are not prepared to do – teach school.

  • Teachers have never been so valued as they are now that schools are shuttered.  On every regular school day, teachers are the surrogates that all parents rely on to supervise, care for and educate their children.  Without prejudice, parents make large assumptions in handing their children to teachers for more than seven hours each day and for almost 200 days of the year.  School attendance is a mainstay in the lives of families with children.   And, schooling is teachers teaching.  School activities, arts and athletics add another layer of schooling that we take for granted in regular times, but we grieve for when they also are shuttered. 
  • Remote education for socially-isolated children in homes where parents are still working or trying to work further stretches the suspension of school reality.  Literally, remote education says “Kids of all ages, you are on your own more than ever before.”  For many, there is not an adult at home during their remote school day and older children are in charge of younger children.  This new reality hits the concept of responsibility for learning with a “thud”.  Children as daycare for themselves and younger siblings are being called upon to be home school supervisors for other children while they also are students trying to learn.  Ugh!  Even in schools using the gradual release of learning responsibility model that eases a student toward independent learning, a teacher still is in the physical background ready to assist.  In remote education, teachers are present only on FaceTime, Zoom or in the mail.  In many homes, kids are physically on their own. 

The second adjustment for lifeboat teaching is that teachers need to get comfortable sitting at the oars of the lifeboat.  Can you picture Ben Hur?  No one else but a first grade teacher is going to teach the children in the first grade teacher’s class.  At a time when we were making headway in the movement from teachers as independent contractors in closed-door classrooms, remote education reverses that progress.  Every remote education teacher teaching from their own home now is an independent contractor again with oversight, communication and collaboration conducted in the virtual realm.  Kudos to principals who are checking in with teachers on a frequent basis.  However, a scheduled FaceTime visit is nothing like a classroom walk-thru or a casual chat in the hallway.  And, collaborative communication with other teachers is no longer as easy as sauntering into the classroom next door.  Remote education is conducted by remote educators.

The third adjustment is that remote education does not work for everyone.  Some lifeboats will sink.  After more than a month of attempting remote education, some school districts are throwing in the towel.  They are declaring “ENOUGH!  The school year is ended today!”  Why?  Because the suspension of school reality, the assumption that school-provided homeschooling can be mandated for all children, that parents will volunteer as home school parent/teachers, and that we can do all this without prior preparation is just too much to bear.

Other schools, our local district for one, are “remoting” daily toward the usual end of a school year in June. Teachers are truly demonstrating their expert understanding of instructional design by broadcasting daily lessons to their students.  These lessons look and act much like a lesson a child would experience in the teacher’s classroom.  I marvel at the care these teachers take in writing directions in simple and sequential language that leads a child through a morning of schoolwork at home.  We need to celebrate that there is a lot of good remote teaching for a lot of children.

Remote education in the lifeboats is not easy.  It is not easy for teachers, students or parents.  We were not supposed to be here.  That said, “Row on!”.