Season 2, Episode 11: Reopening debate reprised

Foreign.

Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. I hope you're doing well. The snow is falling here and it's been in the single digits. So we know winter has finally arrived. But on the cool side of that, we were able to walk across the pond by our house the other day with the whole neighborhood was out and skating and playing ice hockey. And I have to be honest that it felt really good in its own way because, you know, rhythms and predictability of seasons are good things, it turns out. How are you doing?

Yeah, that sounds amazing. It's a little bit different here in California. While we got some rain, it is quite warm here, so it doesn't feel very wintry. And, you know, maybe that is what goes along with this feeling I have, Michael, that we're in this really weird and dangerous time in the pandemic right now. And I think it's based in that vaccines seem to represent the beginning of the end to people, but we're still pretty far away from the end. And there's an extraordinary number of people who are still getting sick and dying. And for me, this is really personal as a significant number of my close family members and friends and colleagues have Covid and people are pretty much over with being cooped up like you said. And so we're seeing all sorts of things open up. And that just feels a little bit, but stressful, I guess I should say.

Yeah, I can hear you, but I look, I hope your family obviously is doing okay amidst all this, and this is obviously why we started this podcast, right? And we started in response to the pandemic and at the time we wondered if, you know, we might finish the first season and the pandemic would be over shortly thereafter. And now here we are well into the second season and the number of education related topics to keep our fingers on the pulse of only seems to grow. Which gets into what I wanted to talk about today with you, which was this breathtaking and for me, heartbreaking article in the Boston Globe by Sarah Carr, a longtime education reporter about children who were struggling to read and not getting the support that they need from their schools during the pandemic. What's on your mind, Diane?

Well, Michael, in previous episodes we have broken down the difficult decisions surrounding reopening school buildings and returning to in person learning and also talked about the unions role in those decisions and some of the politics. We're halfway through the school year and things are only getting more challenging. I think that's typified by what's happening in Chicago right now where the nation's second largest school district is at the center of a heated battle around reopening. And I just feel like, given what we're trying to do here, we need to revisit this topic. But I think from some slightly different angles today. And so that is what is on my mind.

That sounds good. Well, let's get into that topic second and we'll start, if that's all right. And we'll start. All right. So we'll start with this Boston Globe article by Sarah Carden. And the title is For School Children struggling to read, COVID 19 has been a wrecking ball. And it's essentially just to boil it down, it's essentially a series of punishing stories about children lacking the support that they needed to learn and the regression in learning that they experienced. And you know, she has one child that she talks about who was, after many years of struggling to read and not getting the interventions he needed, was finally getting them. And then the pandemic hit and he's no longer getting the precise intervention he needed. He starts meeting online with his teacher and classmates about twice a week starting in April. But his mother said it was always an informal meeting, sort of like a glorified circle time and not the precise intervention that we know a struggling reader needs to get them on track. And so much of the response, as Sarah notes in the article, has been been marked by confusion. And, you know, as we've talked a lot about, districts and states have focused on the daunting logistics of reopening schools. We'll talk more about this in a moment in terms of the negotiating with teachers unions and so forth, but also securing enough personal protective equipment, upgrading air ventilation systems. And, you know, someone we both know, Robin Lake from the center for Reinventing Public Education has noted a lot that a lot of schools right now are failing to meet the needs of their most challenged learners From a distance. Right. Sarah, in the article talks about how the blame is shared at all levels of government, yet many districts, this is her words, you know, should have done better. And too few forged creative partnerships to offer low or no cost virtual reading support for families. Kids who struggle with reading need more instructional time. And it looks a specific way, she quotes experts as saying. And there's another piece of this story that grabbed me, Diane, which is that well before the pandemic, you know, this dates well before students of color and low income children in particular have been disproportionately shut out of reading supports. And she quotes Sean Anthony Robinson, a reading faculty member at the Madison Area Technical college in Wisconsin who studies the intersection of race and dyslexia, saying, quote, there are racial biases in our system in terms of how we see students with dyslexia. And I, I think my big starting questions are twofold, Diane, because I struggled a lot with the story. I was heartbroken, but didn't necessarily have an immediate reaction. And so I guess I'm curious, as an educator, how would you think about rectifying this and tackling it? And then I guess the second thought that occurred to me is that for those who are worried about the absence of testing and accountability in this moment, we're both on the record as saying that giving the traditional summative tests at the end of the year isn't a great answer. But how do you think about creating accountability for this moment? Because the article describes parents going to extraordinary lengths for their children, and I just, I want to make sure that they get the proper support.

Yeah, good questions. Big questions. And I agree with you, Michael. It's a painful article to read. And there's a sort of child after child. And so I want to be really respectful of that and those children and those families and honor that there's such reality and truth to what they're saying. I also just have to give a little bit of a cautionary tale here. As a school leader who has been written about in articles and had my schools written about, I read that article knowing that there was more to it than what was in the article. And schools can't talk about those situations. They can't be parts of those articles. They can't describe what's happened.

Yeah.

And so I just would caution us to think, not think that we have the whole entire story there and to not rush into sort of painting people as good guys and bad guys and blaming and things like that. I just, I'm not sure that it's helpful. Yeah, so that's a really good point. That's a little bit of a caveat. That said, sort of the first thing that strikes me about the article, Michael, is that, and you said it, this could easily have been written before the pandemic. I mean, everything in there was true. These are not new stories. And so, yeah, they've been complicated by the pandemic, but there is plenty of kids who were sitting in classrooms not getting any of the supports they needed before. Now they're just sitting on a zoom call or whatever. And so I would say there was nothing unique to the pandemic that struck me about that article. As we've talked about Maybe the changes that parents are really seeing up close much more what's missing and what's happening and whatnot. It's really in focus for us in a way that it may not have been before, but again, it didn't feel new, which is terribly tragic. It would be one thing if the pandemic could just cause these terrible problems, but now we're talking about these long ingrained challenges. Let's just zero in here with some data because you went to the testing piece. Pre pandemic, according to the NAEP or the national assessment of progress, 32% of fourth graders in the U.S. and 24% of eighth graders are reading below grade level. And so like a full one third of kids at that moment where they really need to shift from learning to read to reading to learn, aren't making the shift. And in my experience, the 8th grade number is very consistent and real. That at least a quarter of our kids enter not reading on grade level and in our case, often more not new. Super frustrating for me, incredibly frustrating. Because as a profession and as a field, Michael, we actually have the knowledge and the tools to ensure that virtually every child can learn to read. We should just say that again, as a profession, we know how to enable virtually every child to read. And so it sounds crazy, those numbers sound crazy. Like why is the reality that they're not, that so many kids are not and this tragic article has to be written. I would say that I was trying to think of how to explain this in a rational way. I think maybe medicine is the best analogy. As I understand it, there's these specialty hospitals where renowned doctors develop, let's say, life saving operations or procedures. But just because those operations exist and the tools for them exist, it doesn't mean that you, as a patient in some small community that doesn't have one of those hospitals can actually get that, that procedure. Because if your doctors in your hospital don't know it, haven't been trained in it, don't understand it, if it hasn't made its way there, you're not going to have access to it. And I feel like that's the best way I can explain what's happening in education is that we've got millions of teachers and 100,000 plus schools and this hasn't made its way to those places for a variety of reasons. And as a result we have this sort of intractable problem and kids suffering.

Yeah.

And it's very depressing. I'm sorry.

It's a tough situation because we know, I mean there's been a lot of reports in the last 12 months, in particular, maybe 18 months about this challenge of reading. And that as you said, the science is pretty well developed. There are, you know, if a child is stuck in a certain way, there's pretty prescribed ways to address that, that to build the ability to do basic decoding and fluency and things of that nature. Before you start, you know, flipping the script, as you said, where, where you're reading to learn, we're talking about the learning to read part of the equation. And the other piece we know is that schools of education are not instilling these principles in teachers for the most part. I suspect that is starting to change in the. But it, but it's going to be slow, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so that sounds skeptical. So I guess I had five additional thoughts and the first one was about this particular article in the sense that I think virtual learning, but all online learning is really best done as a team sport. And I guess that continues to be one of my frustrations, which is that there should be lots of interactions with adults and kids that are really high value interactions where the child is getting what they need. And that might mean you use your teachers in different ways, right? You create a team where one is focused on content, another is focused on tutoring and relationships, another is focused on pulling in the best resources from around the world, which exists online to make sure that you get those supports for your struggling learners. And that just hasn't, that differentiation of roles just to create something cohesive hasn't happened as a general rule. And I feel bad for teachers, frankly, in that backdrop because they haven't had the support that they need. The second one is, I think, seeing each student as an individual as opposed to thinking about this as a whole district or whole school or even whole class approach and starting with what does each child need to succeed? Which is a mindset and culture shift, I think, and it'll, it'll play into, frankly, this the next conversation I think that we're going to have. The third one that just occurred to me was just a tangible suggestion for schools struggling with this precise problem, which is, you know, Digital Promise Global's Learner variability project exists to say, hey, if your child, if a child you're working with exhibits these different characteristics, this type of working memory capacity, you know, English as a second language. Right. These different things, this is the way to teach them reading for this particular concept at that point in time. And so there's actually like a map that can be personalized for each child and it's a resource that I'd encourage people to check out. And then I guess the last thought, I'll actually skip one, but just a last thought on the accountability is, look, this is why tests were put in place is because we know that kids weren't being reached. But what I keep coming back to is that the tests we would offer at the end of the year, they wouldn't give anywhere near the precision we need to identify these problems at an individual level and arguably even at a macro level, because most places have done poorly in this moment. And so I think it goes to what we've been talking about on this more general podcast, which is that we need a growth mindset in our assessments toward mastering sets of competencies ready to graduate, prepared for life. And that means we need innovation in what counts as assessment and how we think of measuring. And so what would I do in the moment given this infrastructure, given that we don't have those tests? I confess I'm stuck. But I, I think I'd start by building a better system because when you're in a hole, stop digging.

I'm with you, Michael, but I would say we actually do have those tests. We have reading, you know, teacher based reading assessments that are valid, reliable, they take more time. Teachers do them, but they also help the teacher who is the instructor of the student. And so I would say we don't even have to innovate. We've got these things here. What we have to innovate around is how we actually use them and deploy them and think differently about assessment. As you said, thinking differently is a nice segue into the topic that I would like to talk about today, Michael, which is reopening school buildings. We would be remiss if this morning we weren't talking about what's happening in Chicago. So let me give you the big picture quickly of where we are, as if people don't know. But the high level summary of where we stand is that as we all know, President Biden has said he wants all K8 schools to open for in person learning during his first hundred days in office. He's currently working on a legislative package to financially support the effort. And I think much of the country is watching this process and this legislation to see if people are going to collaborate on it. Vaccines are rolling out, although much slower than promised. And in many states, teachers are being prioritized and starting to get those vaccines or they're coming very soon. Many schools and districts across the country now believe they have put in place the combination of protective equipment, ventilation, testing, contact tracing, and now vacation vaccines to bring school buildings and in person learning back online. But. And there is a big but. The virus has surged and in most of the country, case counts are higher than what was previously established as safe for in person learning. And we now have new strains of the virus that are much more contagious and perhaps more dangerous. And you know What? We are 10 months in and. Well, I think it's accurate to say that everyone has opinions and emotions about the reopening of schools, and those are just sort of reaching this fevered pitch. All of that is setting the stage for some intense battles that are playing out. And one of the most watched is what's happening in the nation's second largest school district, Chicago, where the mayor and the teachers union have been publicly sparring and where we could potentially see a teacher strike and. Or lockout this week.

Yeah, we should say we're recording this in the midst of knowing that there's no agreement on a Monday, but a very highly fluid situation.

Highly fluid. And so, you know, Michael, we could dissect this for days, but honestly, from my view at this point, this is a no win debate because everyone is right. Depending on your role, responsibility, experience, your values, each and every person, it's so personal and so specific that literally every person has a valid perspective grounded in their own reality. And so from a policy perspective, this really does call for the thing that you and I are constantly calling for, which is a solution that is as personalized as possible with as much choice as possible. And these are the types of solutions we talked with Todd Rose about in season one. And as a society that has been historically focused on one size fits all solutions built on these mythical averages, we seem to be really struggling to think and act this way. That leads me to Michael, my big question today, which is, given all of what I just said, what are parents supposed to. To do? And can what they do today actually move not just their own family and their children's experience closer to a place where they want it to be, but to can it help move our institutions to really focus on personalization versus industrialization? Is there anything that can be salvaged out of this? In other words, I'd love your take.

So I. Well, so look, I love your framing, first off, because it's a highly fluid, emotional question. There's a lot of politics going on in Chicago and elsewhere right now, But I think bringing it back to sort of this principle, right, of how do we handle this is the right frame. And I'VE sort of had two reactions to the saga in Chicago specifically. And then a third thought that I think relates to your question. And the first one is just to put it out there, like, I feel really bad for the kids who are getting caught up in the politics of the adults. And look, I know that's part of life. I'm not going to be, you know, naive about that. And with COVID I'll. I'll go a step further, which is, I think we could excuse a fair bit of it because adults, you know, are at higher risk. Like, there's a lot of emotion around it.

Right.

And I think we could look, you know, say, like it's just reality. Right. But that would ignore the fact that this has been true for kids getting caught up in adult politics for a long time. They're always getting caught up in issues that are about the adults, not what's right for children. And so that's one reflection I have. The second one goes more to your framing, which is, I think it's just why we need to go small and grassroots as opposed to one size fits all and top down. You know, schools within school schools, micro schools, pods, like school districts, need to lead these efforts to create different choices the same way you did in your school, with four different pathways for families and parent and kids to opt into and make these choices. And frankly, give educators way more latitude and authority to figure out what's right for them and their own families, as opposed to, say, all of the teachers in Chicago are going to do X, which is. Makes no sense. And I, you know, the third thought I had was I was taken by a piece that Rick Hess of AEI wrote recently where he framed this question, in essence, that that was, quote, sort of, the public believes that educators are essential workers. But do educators believe that? Because when they're acting sort of in this way, you're not. You're not sure. Right. And I guess with my parent hat on, you know, as you know, Diane, this year we've opted to keep our children at home.

Yes.

I don't know what we'll do for next year. It's really. This is becoming a live conversation for us. It's difficult. There's a lot of questions about what the fall will look like, but, gosh, I'd like the option to figure out what's best for my children, which means that there has to be a choice. And I think if we can build from that at the grassroots level and not think there has to be one size fits all approach, I mean, this is Chicago.

It's huge.

How are you going to get something that creates something that works for every educator and every family and every student? You're not?

No.

And so start with that acknowledgment and principle and figure out a way to build up. It would be my attitude.

Well, not surprising. My approach is very similar to yours, Michael. When I put my parent hat on, I'm focused on what do we value most as a family. And I know that's been a question you've been asking yourself all year and has driven your choices and what is most important to us. And, you know, here's where I go with that. And as I think about parents in general right now who are really stuck in these terrible positions at first, what I know from the science of learning and development is that there's no magical timeline on learning specific concepts or skills or ideas. And what. While our school system has divided kids into age bands and delineated what should be learned, what year, these timelines are arbitrary. And I want parents to internalize that message because they're hearing all this crazy about learning loss and missed opportunities and whatever. And we act like it's not possible that a child can learn the quadratic formula in six months from now. And if they missed it, they missed, missed it forever. It's just not true. So I keep that really close in my mind. I also know that happy and healthy, both physically and emotionally, kids learn faster, easier, better than kids who are miserable and stressed and anxious and all of those things. And that learning happens best in real world, authentic curiosity driven experiences, which has been the thrust of this podcast from the beginning. Right. And so, realistically, if I'm a parent I need to come to terms with, most schools simply aren't going to be able to provide a good learning experience throughout this entire pandemic. That's been true so far and it's going to continue to be true for a while. Then I think about the stress and the emotion of anticipating and hoping and waiting for things to get back to normal that might be more destructive than simply accepting that it isn't going to happen for a while and creating my own family priorities and my own family stability that is not dependent upon and sort of hanging on the decisions that these systems are making or not making or postponing or changing or all of those things. And, you know, I think it's important to pause right here because most people believe the ability to do this is reserved for families with lots of financial resources. And I don't actually think that's true, Michael. And I think it's actually a really dangerous narrative that we somehow believe that families, lower income families, can't make these decisions for their families and act on them. And it's just not true. I know many lower income families who've taken this year to bring their extended family together, which is a really significant value for them, and to prioritize physical and mental health and to focus on learning that occurs naturally from curiosity and is around their culture or their family or their various histories or whatever it might be, or their vocations and their professions. And so I also know many families with ample financial resources who are angry and struggling because they're in this constant state of waiting for the normal to return and trying to do normal in these times. And it's totally exhausting and impossible. So I just want us to not assume that that is tied to race or economic status or anything like that. And all of that to say, as a parent, these times may not be optimal opportunities for learning traditional subjects in traditional ways, but they do do present many opportunities for the development of equally important skills and habits like self direction and curiosity and civic engagement and purpose, to name a few. And we aren't through this yet. And so if you've been waiting for normal and think it's around the corner and you can't wait longer, I think you might want to consider the cost of that waiting. And so, you know, one thing that very pragmatically comes to mind as you know, preparedparents.org has been doing a ton to put together tips and all sorts of plans and whatnot that parents can use to think in this way, to act in this way. And I've been going on for a long time. So let me just wrap by saying I hope that parents who have taken this step back and decided what's important and are making decisions that are best for their family continue to do so even after, after the pandemic, because that is the only way that we have figured out that the education system is going to become more personalized and more aligned to what we care about. It needs a constant and consistent pressure from parents to adapt and evolve to what we want from it and expect from it. And so I'm on my soapbox this week. I don't know.

I love it, I love it, I love it. Diane, I think those are, those are great points and I do hope we see that lasting pressure because topic for another episode as we wrap here, but there's so many families that I talk to that just say, oh, we did this because it was in person and just sort of optimizing for that, you know, and not putting that pressure. So we'll see where that goes, but it's a different topic. Let's, let's switch gears as we wrap. And I think we've given some good, tangible pieces of advice from prepared parents to the digital promise idea. People can grab them, do something about this. And what are you thinking and listening to as we, as we turn from that?

Well, I'll be quick on this, Michael. I don't think I'm alone in this by any stretch. I am still thinking about and listening to Amanda Gorman and the hill we climb. I was so thrilled and inspired by the selection of a 22 year old and as the poet laureate for the inauguration. And I completely agree with the critics who believe she stole the show from, you know, with the greatest competition in the world, Lady Gaga and amazing people that she was there with. To me, her selection and message embodies the optimism and honesty of our youth. And as someone who's a lifelong educator, there is a possibility that our youth will lead us to a better future if we care for them, invest in them and educate them. Well, how about you?

So Saturday night we spent a bunch of time watching Amanda Gorman actually on all the talk shows and things like that, which was super fun. But then that led us on Sunday night to watch the Pete Souza documentary, the way I see it. And there's a lot of politics in the background of it, but it's also just a really fun and sentimental, emotional walk down the presidency for the people that don't know. Pete Souza was the official White House photographer during the Reagan administration and during the Obama administration. And it's, it's an incredibly cool walk down those two presidencies lane and sort of putting up the face of what being president should look like is sort of the central message from it. And I will add that if you aren't crying during the scene on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and President Obama's reaction to that, I don't know what to say. But it's sadly topical right now given that one of the newly elected Congress women from Georgia has expressed skepticism and surfaced conspiracy theories about school shootings, which I'll just say is disgraceful and in this time of recovery and healing, something our nation decidedly does not need. So, a lot, a lot of reflections, but I would recommend it. It is a, it is, it's just a fun and emotional, sentimental sort of journey down memory lane. But.

Well, I look hard.

I will leave it there.

I look forward to it. I look forward to our next conversation. Thanks to everyone for joining us today. Until then, this is class disrupted.