I just read the article–and again, it’s focused entirely on the results of standardized testing, which gives a blatantly terrible picture of student learning.
There WAS trauma due to the pandemic, and of course it affected student learning. But we shouldn’t be relying on standardized testing to measure it, even if they’re one of the best ways to get precise, measurable data. The problem is that the precise, measurable data isn’t accurate data, if what we want to know is what students are actually learning.
The conclusions–that we need to lengthen the school day or lengthen the school year–are unworkable, which the author nods to, but doesn’t really acknowledge why. We already have districts refusing to pay a living wage to staff, even in the face of a mass exodus of staff: suggesting we’ll implement universal tutoring is “I want a unicorn” level discussion at this point.
We’re in a terrible place in terms of student trauma and its effects on learning. I just don’t see this article, or its author’s focus on standardized testing, as anywhere close to addressing the actual problem, or to proposing actual solutions.
You mean like I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years?
I know what I’m talking about. You cannot address mass trauma through business as usual. You can’t just design a fancy new plan to fill gaps, when it’s the majority of students who have those gaps. If we could fit 18 months of learning into 10 months of school, we would be doing that already.
I hope it’s just that you’re misunderstanding those teachers. Otherwise they’re feeding you a load.
To be fair, it may be a load that their superintendent or school board is requiring them to feed you: folks in administration often want to imagine that you can solve the woes of the educational system on a shoestring budget, and that’s what this plan sounds like.
Well, what better ideas have you got that aren’t in “I want a unicorn” territory? You seem to be simultaneously saying that educators shouldn’t be using the data that we do have to help understand the impacts of the pandemic on student learning, and that any strategies for obtaining more useful data are hopelessly unrealistic.
In a lot of ways, educational data today is where medicine was in the 18th century, where seeing a doctor was more of a threat to your health than staying home. I’d rather have no mass nationally normed standardized data than have poorly created mass nationally normed standardized data.
What should we do instead?
We should massive improve our home-school connections. Aim for 2-way conversations with 95% of families every week.
We should ensure that children in public schools are getting all their needs met. Schools should be a center for services, and we should be looking at how schools can identify and coordinate these wraparound services.
We should focus our curriculum on culturally-responsive pedagogy. If we’re finding that our way of teaching isn’t meeting the needs of a particular cohort, don’t try offering more of the same. Instead, focus on building a curriculum that meets kids where they are and honors their deep cultural norms.
We should focus on high-quality teaching, measured through qualitative means rather than high-stakes testing. High-stakes testing distorts teaching (“teaching to the test,”) so de-emphasizing these tests allows teachers to focus instead on best practices instead of nationally-normed test results.
We should ensure that the people on the front lines have a voice. This means that teachers, custodians, instructional assistants, students, and everyone else in the building have regular opportunities to give meaningful input and make meaningful decisions about the school. Leadership is inclusive rather than top-down.
Discipline practices should be restorative, focusing on building and repairing relationships and on building prosocial habits, rather than on punishment and suspension.
Does this sound like a ready-made answer? It is. I’m part of a group that’s exploring the Community Schools model as an alternative to the technocratic kids-as-cogs approach that’s so damaged our educational system over the past few decades. Here’s a look at the model in Durham, NC; I’m really excited by its potential.
Building a community school is going to mean that we remove many of the barriers to learning. Unlike the article, which says, “Kids in trauma just need more tutoring and then it’s hunky-dory!”, this model says, “Figure out how to remove or address the trauma, connect with families, and kids will learn better.”
Sounds terrific, absolutely! Sign me up. But also sounds quite a bit like “Let’s ignore the OP’s question in favor of focusing on a more constructive larger issue instead.” Which, fair enough IMHO, but I’m not the OP.
Yes you can. “Business as usual” can be just the thing people need. It can be safe. It can be comforting. It can remind them of what their siblings did, or what their parents did. It can provide an attainable goal. It can provide a feeling of normal instead of a constant feeling of being behind.
Telling them they’re traumatized is terrible. Pretty soon we’ll have a cutesy name for the “covid retards”. (The name will be cuter, but that’s all the kids will hear.)
I think the salient point in the whole thing is the parental engagement. Without that, the rest just doesn’t matter. You can pretty much look at a school and see how engaged their PTA is and see how well the school will do on whatever metric you choose.
School districts tend to ignore this, because they don’t have any actual power over parents, just the students. But the real effort needs to go in with the parents to convince them to make their kids’ education a priority and to be engaged in how their kids are doing. Without that, all the culturally-responsive pedagogy is just a roll of the dice hoping you can get one of those kids to diverge from the cultural pattern they grew up in.
I think you are blowing the trauma way out of proportion. Your “fixes” only emphasize the differences and that creates more issues with their self-identity. I think you will get what you seek. You will beat it into their heads that they are damaged goods until they give you what you want.
I am not going to modify the discussion, which is interesting and should be kept general.
But I would ask, is adding an extra year of education at the secondary school level a good idea? We have one party in an upcoming election which has proposed this. I have literally no idea if this is needed, or money well spent.
You say that as if the tests are the reason we teach. There are things that we, as a society, have decided that children ought to learn before becoming adults. They are not learning these things. That’s an issue, completely independent of any standardized tests.
Of course that’s what we’re attempting to do, because we don’t have any choice. But realistically, if we actually could cover all of that material, in appropriate depth and with appropriate retention, that quickly, we would already have been doing it. Unless the “plans in place” involve things like missing out on summer break, or adding another year, I don’t think they’re realistic.
You think Long Covid is bad? We’re going to be facing the effects of Long Quarantine for the next 50 years, at least.
Whoa, whoa, whoa; I’m not a primary/secondary educator but even I can see the glaring problem with this reasoning.
Namely, you can’t just treat “parental engagement” as a separate factor in isolation from all the other issues that are affecting school performance on all the other metrics. Parental engagement is strongly impacted by all those issues.
Wealthier parents tend to be more engaged with their children’s school systems than poor parents. Better educated parents tend to be more engaged parents. More English-proficient parents tend to be more engaged parents. Less abused and overworked parents tend to be more engaged parents. Surprise surprise, all the factors that “culturally responsive pedagogy” attempts to take into account turn out to have substantial influence on how engaged parents are with their children’s education.
Pretending that school performance issues are merely a matter of some parents being neglectfully indifferent to their kids’ education, for reasons that are attributable to some unexplained “cultural pattern” that society as a whole bears no responsibility for nope nope, is absurd.
Sure, parents need to be encouraged to increase their involvement with their kids’ education. But to make that realistically possible, we have to start seriously addressing a lot of other problems. Not just lecture the parents about their bad “cultural patterns” and how they need to come to more PTA meetings (and so what if they miss their shift at their second or third job that puts food on their kids’ table).
Wow, wow wow. Are you seriously suggesting that this hasn’t had wide-ranging traumatic impacts–from children who have lost a caregiver to COVID, to children who experienced poverty because of parental job loss, to children who experienced abuse correlated with family stress or quarantines or remote schooling, to children who had nightmares about COVID, to various other sources? Because you’re way, way off in this regard.
My “fixes”–nice ironiquotes there–do a helluva lot more than “emphasize the differences.” It’s like you didn’t read them, or the source material.
If all you’ve got is some sneers and ironiquotes, I don’t see much point in continuing.
No, that’s not quite what I’m saying. The tests distort teaching, and inaccurately measure teaching. These are pretty well-known phenomena.
I agree that kids didn’t learn a lot of what they would’ve learned in pandemic-free years; and I agree that we need to figure out how to respond effectively; and I offered some proposals above that would comprise (IMO) effective response. What I DON’T agree with is the framing of the issue in terms of standardized test scores. The more we use these scores in the conversation, the less likely we are to hit on real, effective solutions to the crisis we face.
Wealthier schools tend to have more families with flexible work schedules, or with work that gives paid volunteer time, or even single-income, dual-parent families. Wealthier districts have families with two cars, have money to pay for childcare during PTO meetings. All these structures make it much easier to participate in PTOs.
Then there’s the cultural issue: people who had a good experience in their own elementary school days are a lot more amenable to volunteering in their child’s elementary school. People who dealt with racist teacher and staff when they were kids, or who had some other shitty experience there, are less likely to want to spend their time going back to an elementary school.
Last week I talked with a community schools organizer who worked at a school with about six white families, and the rest were families of color. The PTO when she got there, she said, consisted of the six white families. It took a lot of organizing on her part to figure out how to structure a PTO to be welcoming to families of color and to meet their logistical needs; but now the PTO looks like the school.
It’s not the case that good PTOs create good schools; nor is it the case that the schools have no influence in this matter. It IS the case that our current structures make PTO participation by certain families much less likely; and that’s something we gotta change.
Acronym query: Did the once-universal “Parent-Teacher Association” entity become “Parent-Teacher Organizations” while my back was turned for a few decades?