I just skimmed this article.
What Donald Trump and his Betsy Bobble head don't tell the American
People, is that we hold different expectations for the children of the
wealthy families than we do for the common folk. The "True American
First Class Citizens" are provided a top grade education, spare no
expense. These will be the future leaders and top corporate execs.
The Working Class and what some call the Middle Class need only basic
education, enough to enable them to follow orders and do the drudgery
labor.
This separation of the Classes speaks to why I continue to talk about
America's two class system. The small ruling class, and the rest of
us.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/4/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
BAD LEADERSHIP IS PLUNGING PUBLIC SCHOOLS INTO A CRISIS
By Jeff Bryant, The Progressive.
November 3, 2020 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
attend a roundtable on reopening schools at the White House on Aug. 12,
2020. Shealah Craighead, courtesy of Flickr.
COVID-19 Exposed How Important Teachers Are To Students And Families-It's A
Shame That School Leaders Still Won't Listen To Them.
Michael Barbour, a professor at Touro University California and an expert
on
K-12 online learning, believes that more than half of the nation's school
superintendents "should be fired."
His blistering criticism stems from the fact that, deep into the 2020-2021
school year, many schools are still struggling with virtual learning during
the pandemic.
Stories of school districts' online learning systems crashing are
widespread. Teachers complain about not being included in decisions about
online curriculum and pedagogy. Alarming numbers of students are not
engaged
or not showing up, especially in low-income areas and among communities of
color.
The chaos is especially concerning given that 76 percent of parents say
their children are attending school remotely, either full time or part
time,
according to a recent nationwide survey. Moreover, a majority of parents,
54
percent, think that improving online learning is more important than
figuring out how to reopen schools for in-person instruction.
"Any school leader who didn't reach out to teachers to ask what had worked
well and what didn't, and then use that [to prepare for the fall
reopening],
committed a dereliction of duty," Barbour tells me, recalling the moment
when schools closed suddenly in spring 2020. "After all, we knew this was a
pandemic . . . not a one-time thing."
Barbour's ire might be justified. According to a survey of California
school
superintendents conducted by EdSource, less than 10 percent of school
districts in that state offered more than sixteen hours of training for
teachers during the summer, when schools could have been preparing to
reopen
with online learning.
"School district leaders spent so much time over the summer trying to
create
reopening plans that would meet safety guidelines for classes inside school
buildings that they had little time to focus on improving online academic
offerings," Hannah Natanson and Valerie Strauss warned in The Washington
Post in August.
Improving remote learning, many experts agree, would have meant creating
spaces for teachers to collaborate and share models of effective online
instruction and lesson planning. And more time and resources should have
gone into providing teachers who were struggling with better coaching and
support.
Validating the experts, a nationwide analysis of teachers's working
conditions in the spring of 2020 conducted by Brown University and the City
University of New York found that, because of the challenges of pivoting to
remote learning, teachers experienced a "sudden and large drop" in their
sense of professional success. However, teachers were "substantially less
likely" to experience this decline when they could "depend on their
district
and school-based leadership for strong communication, targeted training,
meaningful collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their
efforts were least likely to experience declines in their sense of
success."
But the report's authors found teachers experience a wide range of working
conditions,with many falling in the "low" and "medium" situations, and they
call for changes in "the organizational conditions that make teachers' work
and students' learning possible."
"The disregard of teachers' shared professional expertise and practical
knowledge is no accident," wrote Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz in commenting on
the debacle of fall school reopenings.
D'Amico Pawlewicz, who is an education reform and policy historian at the
University of North Dakota and author of the book Blaming Teachers, argued
that policy leaders' lack of attention to teachers "reflects the way that,
instead of treating teachers like other American professionals, society has
long blamed them for the failings of schools."
This disregard for teachers is all the more galling given that 2018-2019
witnessed the #Red4Ed wave of teacher rebellions, where educators-mostly in
politically red states-held sickouts, walkouts, and mass street
demonstrations to protest a lack of funding, attacks on teacher
professionalism, and continuing threats to close and privatize public
schools.
The teachers' actions were ultimately beneficial for themselves and their
students, resulting in increased teacher pay, promises of smaller class
sizes, and more nurses and counselors in schools. Their protests also
proved
democracy was still alive and kicking in a country descending into
authoritarianism.
But during the pandemic, when support for teachers would seem to matter
most, their wisdom has too often been overlooked.
What might policy leaders have learned if they had listened?
"In the spring, we had to come up with creative ways to support our
families," Milwaukee educator Glenn Carson told me. Carson, along with
other
Milwaukee educators I spoke to, described an intense effort to deliver
devices and hotspots to homes, learn new technologies, and conduct family
outreaches. They also said they stitched together a safety net of food
delivery, health care, and social and emotional services for families hit
hardest by the virus.
Needing to find creative ways to fill in the gaps left by school districts'
lack of preparation seems to be a shared experience among teachers across
the country.
"I built a website where students and families could get daily lessons and
messages from me," Henry Jasso, a third-grade teacher at Dona Ana
Elementary
School, near Las Cruces, New Mexico, tells me. "We met daily online to
touch
base with one another and played learning games together."
"I video recorded my lessons and arranged one-on-one virtual meetings with
students," says Kathy Dorman, a high school teacher in Providence, Rhode
Island.
Teachers and school principals found "innovative ways to serve their
students," the National Education Policy Center reported in the midst of
the
growing contagion and pointed to organizations, including the Learning
Policy Institute, the Network for Public Education, and Local Progress,
that
documented how teachers responded to their communities' needs.
This is not to say that everything went swimmingly.
Online learning has never been as effective as in-person classes, according
to numerous research studies. The fact teachers had to so quickly go
virtual
made that mode of instruction even more challenging, especially for
low-income, Black, and Latinx students.
Additionally, special education advocates reported that at least seven
million students with disabilities and learning impairments were being left
behind due to school closures.
And a joint analysis by New Common Sense and Boston Consulting Group found
fifteen to sixteen million students had no reliable internet connection.
Yet, despite the downsides to the spring experiment with online schooling,
parent surveys conducted in the summer found that most "gave their
children's schools high marks."
Similar to nurses and other frontline workers, teachers were lauded as
"heroes" performing an essential role despite difficult circumstances. One
would think, then, that the process for opening schools in the fall,
regardless of the delivery format, would have put teachers and their needs
at the center of the effort.
But in all fairness to school superintendents, policy leaders higher up the
chain of command have also completely failed schools, teachers, and
families.
In August, Dana Goldstein, an education journalist for The New York Times,
highlighted how state and local governments were allowing bars and
restaurants to reopen while leaving local school leaders to "figure out the
details of running schools during a public health crisis largely on their
own."
Other education reports and experts pointed out the same. "The chaos can be
laid squarely at the feet of government leaders who have provided little
direction or financial support for schools," wrote journalist Liz Willen
and
Sarah Garland, The Hechinger Report's executive editor.
Even Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education during most of the Obama
Administration, fretted about this in New York Magazine: "The fact that
we've had such horrific leadership . . . . It's like we saw this tsunami
coming and we just stood there and let ourselves be drowned."
When Congress passed a coronavirus relief package with $13.2 billion for
schools, it was widely acknowledged that the one-time payment was
insufficient to meet most schools' needs. It was not enough to, for
example,
pay for free broadband access and laptops for students, hire more teachers
and school staff, and overcome school budget cuts enacted by or expected
from state and local governments.
Yet President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Senate spent months doing
nothing. In fact, Trump threatened to cut the funding of schools that
didn't
open with full-time, in-person instruction, something he legally can't do.
Education secretary Betsy DeVos, after trying unsuccessfully to direct more
of the federal government's financial aid to private schools, abdicated her
leadership responsibilities completely by declaring that she doubted her
department has "a role" in collecting data on school-related infection
rates.
Trump's careless tweet to "OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!" also overlooked the
concerns
of most parents and teachers.
When New York City opened with in-person learning, the only district in the
nation's ten largest to do so, only 26 percent of the system's 1.1 million
students attended in-person classes. When the American Federation of
Teachers surveyed teachers in June, 76 percent said they'd be comfortable
going back to school if key safety precautions were put in place. In
September, when teachers saw the lack of leadership to reopen schools
safely, that figure plunged to 14 percent.
Certainly, the lack of funding and guidance from government leaders has put
school leaders in a bind. But most of that discomfort trickles down to
teachers who are hit the hardest. And now, in schools that have decided to
reopen in-person (either full-time or partially), 88 percent of teachers
have to purchase their own personal protection equipment, and 11 percent
buy
it for their students.
Of course, public education is not the only American institution where the
pandemic has exposed leadership failures.
But an essential lesson of the pandemic is its tendency to strip down
complicated social relationships to their essentials. People have had to
start making decisions based on what is physically safe, how they can have
access to staples like food and transportation, and whether or not they can
still have a job.
What the pandemic revealed about public education is that schools have
become the essential safety nets for families, that access to education
services is grossly inequitable, and that the education process at its very
core is about the relationships between teachers and their students.
If education policy leaders want to improve the way they run schools during
a pandemic, maybe they should start with that.
