How we told families school doesn't matter, and what we can do to fix it.
Our response to the COVID-19 Pandemic is only half over. We still have time to make things better for our families.
We made a grave mistake in telling families that much of what we do in education doesn’t matter.
Well, nobody got on top of a building and proclaimed that education doesn’t matter.
But we did do things that communicated that very belief, even though we didn’t intend to.
We froze grades, communicating that grades are just made up anyway, and we can’t do anything to change that.
We closed schools, signaling that we don’t need schools to be open. Formal education is not important enough to withstand a pandemic.
We canceled tests that we have bullied families into participating in, and faced sanctions for not completing with a high enough participation rate, communicating that in all actuality, these tests don’t matter, but are just legislatively easy to impose on students.
We promoted every student, communicating that it doesn’t matter that you didn’t attend school for a significant portion of the year, in some places that was nearly half of the entire school year.
For virtual lessons, most teachers went right back to their main role being dispensers of information, communicating that aside from babysitting, their job could easily be done (and more effectively) by robots! More on this in an upcoming article.
We talked about learning loss, telling kids that all the things they learned during the pandemic were worthless because they weren’t done in our schools in our ways.
Rather than recognizing the learning that did happen, we just assumed that because they didn’t master what they would have in school, it didn’t matter.
Despite what could be considered our best efforts, and surely, most educators were doing the best they could with what they had, we still managed to signal to kids and families that this whole education system is a complete and total farce.
It only matters when everything is exactly how it needs to be for the system to work.
Aberrations from the system are discouraged, even when they are better for kids.
In fact, often, those who go against the system are run out of the system.
Just before the pandemic, there was a big groundswell effort to have more personalized learning. This was, in fact, the very BEST thing that we could have done to prepare for a global pandemic. We could have doubled down on personalized learning and made the experience that much better for our students. That we didn’t betrays the very real truth that most teachers don’t want to do that in the first place.
Although many teachers got masters degrees in education (completely online!) the learning they engaged in never actually made it back to their classrooms! Yikes! But I do know, emergency remote teaching is different than online learning.
Unfortunately, the actions we took we took when the pandemic started had dire effects.
Where can I turn for education?
In Fairbanks, Alaska, my previous school district, they saw a reduction in enrollment of 2,000 kids. From 13,219 to 11,260. This unprecedented drop did severe damage to a school district already experiencing sharp decline. That is 15% of the student population gone in one year. Source
That's a huge drop. That leads to reduction in staffing, as it is not sustainable to keep teachers and other staff on board when you have that many students leave your district.
But where did they all go? Well, that district has a homeschool program that is supported by the district. Unfortunately, the district refused to allow people to transfer into the homeschool program at the time, as many families wanted. So, the enrollment in the homeschool program did increase, and significantly, by over 300%!!! But that 2000 student decrease in the district does not count any students enrolled in the district homeschool program as they stayed in the district. So, the actual decrease of students in physical schools is about 2600! That, again, takes it toll.
What Alaska has going for it is that families that enroll in homeschool receive an allotment, usually between $2,000 and $2,500 per student. But the district still receives the base student allocation given to a district for each student enrolled.
Where Fairbanks made the mistake is in not allowing students to transfer into their homeschool programs. While I don't have data to cite, I've heard that homeschool enrollment is up across the state.
Here's the point of all this. When families have choices, they will take those choices.
And I see this as only continuing as parents are more and more reluctant to send their kids to "indoctrination camps" they believe are teaching their kids bad messages.
Public schools should embrace alternative options for education, which I call a Hybrid Education System
What we need more of now, is personalized Education, notice the capital E. It's about changing our system to allow for learning from anywhere to be "credited".
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