“Water, water everywhere.  Nor any drop to drink”, wrote Coleridge in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  We feel the mariner’s pain today when we write, “News, news everywhere.  Nor any idea to validate”. 

There was a day when I awaited the postman for my monthly subscriptions to educational journals and periodicals.  Today’s in-box is flooded with both subscribed and unsolicited postings.  As soon as I seek educational info on the web, the all-seeing eye of its hosts provides a torrent of information.  News information cascades in such a flood that it is often difficult to find one uncontradicted idea to pursue, one idea that is can be validated and is worthy of implementing.

Still, it is essential for an educator to read and inquire globally.  Reading with such a wide lens creates an understanding of the scope and depth of issues.  Case in point – the pandemic is worldwide and pandemic effects on education are worldwide.  Its manifestations lead to intriguing and unnerving stories that will affect today’s students and our educational institutions for decades.  Gaps in educational achievement caused by poverty, interrupted access to instruction, and personal social-emotional distress are evident across the nation.  Teaching and learning are changed by the pandemic.  The entire educational enterprise in our pandemic world is changed in ways we cannot yet fathom.

The lingering question is – all indications tell us that pandemic school is and will not be like pre-pandemic school – how does this information affect our local school?

What do we know?

One strand within the flood of news is this – pandemic children returning to school in 2022 are not like pre-pandemic children who left school in 2020.  Strengthen this strand to include teachers.  Students and teachers in 2022 are not like students and teachers in 2020.  Globally, all indicators tell us that this statement is true.

What to do?

This may be a lottery-winning question.  Hundreds of thousands of schools in our nation are on the cusp of this question.

Test the questions above.  Will the 2022 students and teachers in your school be like the 2020 students and teachers you knew?

We are at Robert Frost’s fork in the road.  We either –

• Like our 2020 school so much that we reinvent that iteration of teaching and learning, student and teacher relationships, and educational services, or,

• Accept that 2020 is history and 2022 is the present and has more to do with the future than 2020.  We analyze our current, local conditions and create/reform educational services that address the changed nature of students, teachers, and teaching and learning.

Why is this decision necessary?

Globally, the news tells us that pandemic education is caught in a whirlpool.  We are spinning around in a cycle of indecision – make schooling continuous, 2020 and beyond or acknowledge that true changes have occurred.  Test this statement in the evidence of your own reading. 

A local school needs to jump out of the spin cycle and decide its future.  It cannot be both – a 2020 and 2022 school.  Until a local school makes this decision and acts locally, that school and everyone associated with it remains in a quandary of a lack of focus.  Our children, teachers, and community deserve a focus.

Look at the state of education at large then act locally to bring your school out of the pandemic whirlpool.