Hindsight is what hindsight is. It is a memory of what what was. As memory, hindsight is not 20-20 because memory is an interpreted thought shaped by our personal context, singular experience, and how we prefer to consider the event. Pre-pandemic school is a memory today that is more than one year old. As school emerges from pandemic education, many parents, children, and educators call for a return to the normal, our memory of school in the pre-pandemic. As we make our future look like our past, many are identifying aspects of remembered school that we did quite well.
I do not find anyone labeling the school of their hindsight as a perfect school. That educational institution had its challenges requiring improvement and change. I do find, however, common points of reference that are more than just kind thoughts of yesteryear. These shared references identify core values of schooling are enduring and, of need, will be part of our post-pandemic school.
There were moments in our pandemic experience when the future of public education was questioned and doubted. In the absence of daily attendance by children and teachers, other educational delivery systems rose. Some answered the call and many evaporated as quickly as they rose. Commercial delivery, privatized delivery, and targeted delivery offered options that could replace local public school delivery. Quickly, disparity in economic resources divided school communities. Many parents with resources left public education, perhaps never to return. The historic faults and failures of public education to meet the needs of all children equitably and equally were magnified by closed school campuses.
However, through a full year of pandemic education, certain values of public education have been immutable. In our national community, there is no replacing these.
School is “the place where it happens”. Can it be that absence from school has made the heart grow fonder for the place of school? It has. In April and May, 2020, parents in our school chafed against the idea that school would not be the place for the Junior Prom, the spring musical, K-12 concerts, sports events, and graduation. Chafing grew into vocal opposition to remote education in September when virtual learning was the instructional default for our school. The place where it happens did not live in our school for six months; parents were given the option of in-school or at-home learning in January, 2021.
Whereas, we commonly think children yearn and can’t wait for vacations away from school, in January we experienced children anxious and wanting to be in school. Children, especially in rural communities, know that school is where it happens for them. They are naturally distanced in their homes from their classmates and friends in healthy time and school is where they get to be together with all the children of the school district. The distance of miles and time was magnified by the pandemic. Returning to school means a child is with friends.
The pandemic retaught us that school is a place that is essential in the lives of children, parents, and community. We also relearned that we know how to make that place serve the interests and needs and wants of children, parents and community.
School is “proximity to adults not your parents”. The pandemic reminded us that the role teachers, counselors, coaches, directors, advisors, and mentors play in the lives of children is irreplaceable in the life of a child. Children need adults in their lives. In the first order, they have their parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles. No one substitutes for these. School adults add to the breadth and depth of each child’s adult role models. Proximity, the physical, personal interactions between school adults and children, is critical to the development of children.
Music programs highlight the significance of proximity. For a beginning horn player, proximity is crucial to developing embouchure. On-screen, a teacher can demonstrate how to form the lips, use the tongue, flex the facial muscles, and “blow” to create sound. But, it is two-dimensional and the embouchure is three-dimensional. Sound on-screen is automatically regulated and a teacher does not know the volume of sound a student is creating. YouTube videos help, but all media suffers the same fault – students need the personal, proximity of their teacher.
Magnify this by the number of times in an elementary classroom a teacher kneels next to a student’s desk to assist with a math problem, the quality of instruction derived from personal proximity used in a reading group, and the countless number of smiles shared by children and teachers each day. Remote education cannot simulate or replace the value a child derives from personal proximity to teachers, counselors, coaches, directors, advisors, and mentors in school.
School is “community”. The easiest portrayal of school as community is the gathering of community members for Friday Night Lights on athletic fields, in gymnasiums and pools, on theater stages, and in every public performance of school children. School provides a community with entertainment, cultural appreciation, and communal gathering. Parent pride, community pride, and school pride connect as one pride at school events where children are involved.
Twelve months without audience at school events has been hard on everyone. We use the term “school community” loosely, but its importance has been magnified in the absence of community as audience. The first concert or play or musical production will be interesting when it brings performers and audience together again and both anxiety and appreciation will abound.
School is “partnership”. We collectively and mutually have exercised and tested this concept of school and home partnership in the pandemic. Closing the school campus was the first test. How can there be a partnership when school doors are closed to children and parents? A second test was telling parents that school remains accountable for providing daily instruction to all school-age children and parents needed to be the at-home teacher/tutor/mentor/supervisor – five days a week and many hours each day.
We did not achieve universal success with remote education. The lack of Internet and adequate digital devices in many homes was a game stopper at the word “go”. Parents needed to work to support their families and work hours and school hours did not jive. Inadequate school-to-home communication and ongoing instructional support caused students and families to drop out. Some parents bailed out on their local schools immediately and joined private schools, formed home school clusters, or became full-time home schoolers. These faults recognized, a vast majority of parents remained in partnership with their school, created new communicating strategies with teachers, counselors, and administrators and after twelve months of pandemic education remain connected partners with their school.
The post-pandemic partnership will not be pre-pandemic partnership. We mutually pushed and pulled on the expectations of partnership and school-home relations will be amended. We need to improve scope and quality of educational communication with parents. After months of being their child’s teacher, “doing satisfactory” no longer cuts it as a performance indicator. Parents want and deserve explicit achievement data on a unit-by-unit basis. Parents and children profited from on-line, texted, and telephoned personalized, individualized conversations with teachers. This practice must be extended into usual and best practice for all. Teachers and children profited from personalized and individualized remote teaching and learning. A return to whole and large group, anonymous teaching and learning will not and should not satisfy our reconstituted partnership.
As students return to school engaging in the academic, activity, arts, and athletic life of their school, the concepts of place, adult role models, community, and partnership will be the threads the bind us together again as a public school.