1. Not much education news to chat about today. The leaders of Ohio’s teachers unions have several feelings to express regarding Governor DeWine’s plans for Covid vaccinations and school reopenings. (The 74 Million, 1/8/21)
    
2. The state board of education is having its first meeting of the year this week. It will include three brand new elected members, one old new elected member, and one new appointed member. I’m sure it will be a hoot. (Gongwer Ohio, 1/8/21)
    
3. Speaking of boards, it has been one year since a slate of newly-elected school board members took office in Akron City Schools and three months since a group of local nonprofits and corporations which have “significant investments” in the district sent a letter to that school board about which folks are still having several feelings. Those feelings are fully expressed in this long piece. The issue seems to revolve around the length of school board meetings this past year (four hours now vs. one-ish in the past) and the board vote tallies on certain issues this year (split votes now vs. unanimous-ish in the past), about which those community leaders also have several feelings. See what I said? Slow news day. (Akron Beacon Journal, 1/11/21)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Vaccination for school personnel

Yesterday, Governor DeWine announced that Covid vaccinations would begin February 1 for school teachers and staff across the state, as long as school leaders sign a document stating their intent to have students in buildings—either a hybrid or fully in-person model—for learning by March 1.

Grant dollars for charters

Apologies for the subscriber-only content in this link, but the news is so great that we had to share! We learned earlier this week that Philanthropy Ohio and the Ohio Department of Education awarded $2.6 million in grants to help schools and districts improve their remote learning efforts while the pandemic still requires it. And perhaps longer. While the Gongwer story doesn’t note it, but the detailed list of awardees includes a number of charter schools and networks across the state. Kudos to all!

Lessons learned

An in-depth piece published just after the first of the year looked at lessons learned in education at schools in the Dayton area during the fall pandemic-influenced semester. Teachers and school leaders, including the head of Dayton Leadership Academies, are heard loud and clear. It is hoped that these lessons will help improve remote and hybrid learning models going forward for as long as they are needed in 2021.

Myth busting

Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews produced a fantastic piece looking to establish unequivocally that charter schools cannot—and do not—cherry pick their students. It’s an important canard to dispel. Here’s hoping he has succeeded at last.

1. No students in Columbus City Schools have attended in-person learning since March of 2020. Sports have been on hold since mid-November. Guess which one of those things district parents are agitating to have restarted? (Columbus Dispatch, 1/6/21) While the parents were agitating virtually, a group of students came in person to protest for the same. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/8/21)
    
2. Not that any of the above folks asked, but Governor DeWine yesterday said that Covid vaccinations would begin February 1 for school personnel across the state…as long as school leaders sign a document stating their intent to be in buildings in-person—either hybrid or fully in-person—for learning by March 1. No mention of extracurriculars here though. (Cleveland.com, 1/8/21)
   
   

3. No mention of extracurriculars here either, but most private schools in Wayne County are reporting a sizeable boost in enrollment this year due, their leaders say, to their fully in-person academics. And even the one reporting a loss of students actually seems happy about that situation…for now. (Wooster Daily Record, 1/7/21)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here. 

NOTE: We’re back from the holiday break. Today’s special edition covers news from 12/19 – 12/31/20. This first regular edition of 2021 will be published tomorrow and will catch up on news from 1/1 – 1/8/21.

Covid-related legislative changes

House Bill 409 gained Senate and House approval as the legislative session drew to a close in late December. The bill extends previous Covid-related education provisions (such as suspension of report card grades and third grade reading requirements for 2020-2021) and adds some new ones related to substitute teacher licensure. As of December 31, the bill had still not yet been signed into law by Governor DeWine.

No changes in school funding…yet

While House Bill 305—the Cupp/Patterson school funding plan—did not pass the Ohio Senate before the end of the year, some specific pieces of it were incorporated into the capital budget (Senate Bill 310), which was approved by the full legislature and signed into law by Governor DeWine. A number of studies will be conducted on various aspects of education, including gifted education, special needs services, and charter school funding. The aim is to use the findings to inform the next iteration of school funding legislation.

Covid quarantine changes

On New Year’s Eve, Governor DeWine announced a change in the state’s pandemic guidelines for schools which meant that students and teachers who are exposed to a Covid-19 positive person in school would no longer be required to go into quarantine as long as other mitigation measures—like masking and social distancing—were observed in that school. The changes were informed by findings by the Ohio Schools Covid-19 Evaluation Team and would likely make reopening schools for in-person or hybrid learning a bit easier in 2021.

Dream classroom

Brooke Herbert, a kindergarten teacher at Beacon Academy in Canton, was one of two nationwide winners chosen to receive a dream classroom makeover courtesy of home goods retailer Wayfair. She was chosen from among 1,100 applicants. She was initially offered new desks and chairs but she was looking for something else and so asked for more creative, individualized items to help with student focus and learning. Awesome!

New Ed Sec

On December 22, President-Elect Joe Biden introduced his choice for Secretary of Education. He is Miguel Cardona, currently the state education commissioner in Connecticut. There were a number of analysis pieces written on how Mr. Cardona might run the agency if confirmed, but here’s an interesting one from his home state which covers several issues related to charter schools…and quoting snippets from his doctoral dissertation which was titled “Sharpening the Focus of Political Will to Address Achievement Disparities”

As the world struggles through some of the darkest days of the pandemic, and more schools shift back to remote learning, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are spending most of our time thinking about what comes next: educational recovery. Next month, we expect to announce a new initiative to crowd-source a set of evidence-based recommendations for addressing learning loss—or what some prefer to call “unfinished learning.” Whatever the label, there’s little doubt that the challenge facing educators, parents and kids, as well as policymakers, will be immense, and take years of smart, dedicated effort to address—especially for our youngest, neediest students, for whom remote learning is particularly ineffective.

The best way to help the students most effected by the disruption, we will argue, is to run fantastic schools. That means equipping talented teachers with high quality instructional materials—materials aligned to rigorous standards and reflecting high expectations—and surrounding those teachers with effective coaching, time for professional learning and collaboration, and systems that help them know whether their efforts are hitting the mark. These practices were tried and true before the pandemic, and will be so long after.

Elementary schools in particular will need to enhance their efforts to accelerate student learning, given all that our children have been through over the past year. That means identifying opportunities for extended learning time and investing in high-dosage tutoring.

To meet the moment, then, we need schools—and especially high-poverty elementary schools—to embrace evidence-based practices, emulate the efforts of the best district and charter schools, plus add a few key elements to their models to help kids make rapid gains. Let’s call that the “traditional schools on steroids” strategy. We want it to take hold, spread, and last long after the pandemic is a distant memory.

Let’s be clear, though: Such a strategy embraces a fairly conservative model. By its nature, any attempt to embrace “evidence-based” practices will be such, since true innovations are by definition untested. Most importantly, it does not seek to disrupt our longstanding practice of assigning students to grade levels based on their age, and moving virtually all kids through the grades in lock-step fashion.

But there is another strategy worth experimenting with, at least in a subset of our schools: seizing this moment to embrace a “move at your own pace” model, one that blows up the standard kindergarten-through-grade-five progression in order to give students who need it significantly more time to get back on track.

This second strategy will be the focus of a series of forthcoming blog posts. In this inaugural discussion, I will (re)state the case for it. Future posts will describe various versions of the idea, and wrestle with the logistical, pedagogical, social, and financial challenges of making them work.

—

Nine months ago, just a few weeks into the national shutdown, I argued in the Washington Post that high-poverty elementary schools should consider keeping all of their students in the same grade when they returned this fall.

The reaction was swift and nearly unanimous: Just about everyone hated the idea. Baltimore’s excellent superintendent, Sonja Sontelises, fired back in her hometown paper with an article declaring that “Baltimore educators won’t be spending one minute of time or one ounce of their brain power exploring this option, for a simple reason: It will not help children.” She pointed to studies showing disappointing results for grade-retention policies, plus the enormous costs of educating students for an additional school year. That’s fair enough, though giving all kids an extra year is a whole lot different from retaining individual students as most of their peers move ahead.

Still, it was clear that I erred in calling for schools to “hold students back.” As I acknowledged in May, that sounds punitive, as well as counterproductive. Plus it felt like overkill. At the time, we assumed that most pupils would return to in-person learning in the fall, though possibly on a part-time schedule, given the need for social distancing. Little did we know that full-time remote learning would continue to be widespread, especially in urban districts serving our most disadvantaged students.

Now it’s clear that many low-income students and students of color will spend at least a year away from school—and possibly longer unless educators are prioritized for vaccines and everyone can return to class this spring. So let me restate the case for a dramatically different approach, this time starting in fall 2021: throwing out the traditional progression through grades K–5 to give kids who need it a lot of extra time—up to a whole extra year of elementary school to make up for the year they lost to the pandemic.

Even before the pandemic, no high-poverty elementary school in the country was getting all of its students to grade level before they left for middle school. Take KIPP-DC, which starts with full-time pre-k at age three, spends over $20,000 per year, has a longer school day and school year than normal, and achieves breakthrough results for its students, yet still doesn’t get all kids to this level by the end of fifth grade.

What this means is that high-poverty middle and high schools must struggle to educate kids who may be three, four, or five years below grade level—an impossible task. In the best systems overseas, as Marc Tucker points out, this simply does not happen.

The answer is not to lower our standards, to declare that our expectations for young children are not “developmentally appropriate.” After all, plenty of kids—especially affluent kids—are meeting grade-level standards. Nor would universal pre-k solve this problem. There are only so many academic skills kids can learn at ages three and four. Rather, we need to give kids who need it the gift of time. More time on task has lots of support in research. And yes, that can mean longer school days, or years, or Saturday school. These are all worth trying, especially if these strategies include high-dosage tutoring. But it could also mean an extra year of schooling.

Affluent parents have long been giving their kids a whole extra year by red-shirting their kindergarteners, especially boys. Data indicate that many more such parents red-shirted their kindergarteners this fall rather than send them to “pandemic school.” Why shouldn’t we consider doing this for poor kids, too?

There are several flavors of what this might look like. A truly individualized approach would allow students to move through the grades—or even key skills or units—at their own pace. A more wholesale approach would rethink the K–5 progression, for example by adding a “second 2nd grade” as the default for high-poverty schools, forever. Yet another model would target the cohort of students most impacted by the pandemic—such as today’s preschoolers and kindergarteners—and give them extra time to catch up—either by providing them more time in elementary school or by rejiggering the curriculum (for example, covering some kindergarten content in first grade).

In future posts, I’ll flesh out these options and think through their pros, cons, and implementation challenges. I hope others might join me—because if we’re going to “build back better,” as President-Elect Biden has called for, we need to be willing to rethink our traditional ways of doing school.

When the news broke last month that Dr. Miguel Cardona had been tapped to be the nation’s next education secretary, a friend of mine texted me asking, “Have you heard of him?” To be honest I hadn’t, but it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable question. Back in the early aughts, I was an elementary school principal in New Haven, twenty miles south of Meriden, where Cardona was plying the same trade over at Hanover Elementary School. While it’s possible our paths may have crossed at any number of state functions, I couldn’t say for certain. What struck me was how reform enthusiasts and union sympathizers alike quickly locked arms around the selection.

Indeed, the gravity defying reception to Cardona was something of a Christmas miracle. The AFT wrote of his potential in leading a “renaissance” following “years and years of the school wars.” Andy Rotherham described the nomination as an offering of a “détente” while Rick Hess called the pick a “clever play.” Democrats for Education Reform declared Cardona a “strong advocate for equity” and, not to be outdone, Diane Ravitch opined that he is “very decent” and not a “fake reformer” (a curious sort of compliment). It was as if Cardona had inoculated the education policy world against the bitterness between pro- and anti-reform camps and the virulent effects of longstanding distrust and animosity.

It’s early to be sure, though it’s difficult to see how any education secretary can be entirely effective in the face of education’s well established divides. Still, at a time when many crave healing and unity, there’s reason for encouragement given Cardona’s personality and personal history. Three things in particular will be worth watching upon his likely confirmation as the twelfth U.S. Secretary of Education.

First and foremost is the question of safely reopening schools. The feds can play a lead role by providing a new coronavirus aid package—on top of the one President Trump just signed—that among other things enables states to invest in the infrastructure required to guard against the virus’ spread. As it stands, schools have taken a scattershot approach, shaped more by politics (including union politics) than by data, that has left many frustrated and confused. Uncle Sam should do more via resources and guidance to bring greater cohesion and improve the likelihood of more schools reopening.

To his credit, Cardona has been an advocate for in-person instruction, but of the myriad challenges involved (e.g., proper ventilation, PPE supplies, ever-evolving health and safety protocols), none may be more daunting than the “last mile problem”: With vaccine distribution now underway, Cardona would do well not to underestimate the formidable step of getting it into the arms of hesitant teachers, administrators, and support staff.

Consider some of the early warning signs. The vaccine rollout has thus far been slow and cumbersome in part because state departments of health were already overextended by the Covid-19 response effort. At the same time, anti-vaccine activists have begun a deliberate campaign to erode public trust by spreading propaganda and preying on fears. Taken together with major media outlets irresponsibly covering every allergic reaction as news, a skewed perception of risk could soon set in. To wit, the president of the Clark County Education Association, representing the fifth largest district in the United States, recently said, “Some don’t want to go back unless there is a vaccine, and others absolutely don’t believe in it.” The head of the California Teachers Association added, “We need to be sure it’s safe and there are no lasting side effects.”

But whether teachers are vaccinated shouldn’t hold up schools from reopening. Ten months into the pandemic, we’ve learned that the initial emphasis on coronavirus transmission in schools was largely misplaced and that the risk of spread is significantly lowered when appropriate mitigation measures are put into place. However, the current predicament for students and families will stretch out indefinitely if too few educators are inoculated. Recognizing this, Cardona could play a significant part in diffusing the anxiety by staying vigilant and pulling out all the stops to inspire schools and systems to get back into buildings. It also wouldn’t hurt for Cardona himself to get vaccinated in public as a way to lead by example.

Next is the contentious issue of annual assessments this year and beyond. To be fair, testing opponents have made some legitimate arguments against testing during Covid-19. Namely, that it’s virtually impossible to do if kids aren’t back in school, and even if they are back, there’s a question as to whether precious time should be spent on testing. Yet the data provided from state assessments are arguably more important than ever in light of what students have been through, especially those living in marginalized communities, which have been deeply affected. Without it, states won’t have a valid way to honestly confront what they’re dealing with.

Cardona’s state department of education defended testing last fall, but it’s anyone’s guess how he might react in the face of the full-court press expected in state legislatures to halt it once again. Cardona should heed these concerns and press ahead with state testing, but consider easing off on accountability requirements for the time being.

Finally, all eyes will be on how Cardona handles the competing interests of charter school supporters and skeptics. Amid the sweltering hothouse of today’s politics, there would appear to be no middle ground between the two, as explained well by Andy Smarick:

Perhaps the most important objection to charters from the educational establishment is that charters embarrass traditional school districts. By proving low-income, inner-city kids can achieve at the highest levels, they pose an uncomfortable question: Why aren’t you accomplishing the same?... Successful charters are a rebuke to teachers’ unions, colleges of education, district leaders, and other institutional defenders of the traditional system—so those interests have declared war on them.

This dynamic is more uneven at the state and local level, where charters and traditional districts sometimes have a less adversarial relationship. Although Cardona has been described as neither a politician nor an ideologue on charters, those sensibilities could be put to the test should the federal Charter Schools Program come under renewed assault.

Largely unknown outside the Nutmeg State, Cardona is like a shapeshifter, in that observers, for better or for worse, are seeing what they want to in the secretary-designate. In one respect, Cardona has nowhere to go but up, being in the fortunate position of following a widely reviled predecessor. Nonetheless, there will be plenty of opportunity for him to disappoint when the honeymoon period wears off. Some are clearly keeping their powder dry for when hard policy questions and unresolvable tensions come to the fore. In the meantime, we should ride the prevailing goodwill to pull for Cardona as he steps into the breach, where millions of students remain disconnected, dispirited, or hanging on by a thread.

Nearly every day, social media plucks some poor, anonymous face in the crowd from obscurity and makes him famous. If you’re making New Year’s Resolutions this year, one should be never to be that guy. Over the weekend the unfortunate soul was musician and podcaster John Roderick, doomed to be known henceforth as “Bean Dad,” the trending topic sobriquet earned when he declined to make lunch for his hungry nine-year-old daughter, insisting instead that she make herself some baked beans. The child brought him a can of beans and an opener, which she didn’t know how to use.

“So I said, ‘How do you think this works?’ She studied it and applied it to the top of the can, sideways. She struggled for a while and with a big, dramatic sigh said, ‘Will you please just open the can?’” began Roderick in a since-deleted Twitter thread. “A Teaching Moment just dropped in my lap!” In a series of two dozen tweets he chronicled his daughter’s six-hour struggle to perform a task he might have easily demonstrated and allowed her to try, practice, and master in less a minute, freeing her to focus on higher-order skills, such as following a recipe, or cooking

If Bean Dad thought he deserved an award for Father of the Year, Twitter had other ideas. “Child abuser” and “psycho” were among the milder terms of abuse. “You’re an ass---e, dude,” wrote another dad. “Feed her. Then Teach. Then delete your account.” But the tens of thousands of denizens of that digital hellscape who savaged Roderick’s reputation and drove him off Twitter and into infamy might be surprised to learn that teachers have another name for his child’s mechanical trial by ordeal. We call it “discovery learning.” For over a century we have elevated it as an authentic, hands-on, guide-on-the-side best practice. Indeed, since it was his daughter who decided she wanted lunch—intrinsic motivation!—we’d even recognize it as a “child-centered” approach to learning. Bean Dad was merely being a good constructivist, which requires that teachers facilitate learning and “create a responsive environment” that allows pupils “to achieve autonomous discoveries.”

If this sounds fanciful or like overstatement, pick up a copy of an outstanding new book, The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction, by Australian teacher and education blogger Greg Ashman, himself a smart and energetic edu-Tweeter, who notes that the clear message he derived from his teacher prep program was that “explaining concepts directly to students was a last resort.” He describes an exercise he completed during his teacher training that involved questioning a pair of sixteen-year-olds about how satellites orbit the Earth, gently pushing on their misunderstandings until they figured things out on their own. “I now realise that this is an appalling way to try to teach students about satellite motion.” Somewhere Bean Dad nods, grimly.

Ashman’s slim and readable volume is a defense of knowledge-rich curricula, and he notes that “those who want students to gain a specific body of knowledge tend to be drawn, inevitably if sometimes slowly, to explicit forms of teaching.” If constructivists are disciples of Dewey (and Rousseau even further back) rejecting a “banking” theory of learning, Ashman is devoted to the idea most famously made by Newton that we see further when we stand on the shoulders of giants. His book also offers some brisk history of education theory, research in support of his thesis, and a smart takedown of pedagogical fads—the hardy perennials that the field cannot seem to let go of. In sum, there is not much mystery behind the teacher behaviors associated with learning gains, he writes. They include “effective use of time; a coherent curriculum in sequence; active teaching...a balance between conceptual and procedural knowledge; proactive management; teacher clarity, enthusiasm and warmth; pace; teaching to mastery; review and feedback; and teachers’ possession of adequate subject matter knowledge,” Ashman concludes. These also happen to be “the key features of effective explicit instruction.”

If the weight of evidence suggests that explicit instruction is the key to student achievement (and it does) what explains the field’s reluctance to move in the direction that decades of research point? Ashman cites “deep, philosophical reasons” for our reluctance to abandon constructivism and discovery learning. Explicit instruction is “viewed as authoritarian and antidemocratic.” Anticipating pushback, he points out that constructivism is a theory of learning, not a theory of how to teach. But he correctly notes that theory is clearly seen as having implications for the way we teach. “Plucked from its philosophical and scientific roots, constructivism in the classroom usually equates to asking students to find out something for themselves—to ‘construct’ knowledge rather than passively receive it like empty vessels.” In common classroom practice, Ashman quips, “it is as if the giant is there, offering children his shoulders, but instead we are asking them to construct a ladder out of sticky tape and drinking straws.”

It takes a resilient and determined teacher to question and resist education’s dominant models and orthodoxies. Ashman is not the first teacher to begin his career in willing suspension of disbelief only to find (first by failed and frustrating discovery, then in the library) the practical benefits of a knowledge-rich curriculum and direct instruction, nor will he be the last. But to the uninitiated who have never heard of Project Follow Through, Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, or who have been acculturated to hear “direct instruction” as an epithet, Ashman offers a strong pair of shoulders to stand upon.

Meanwhile if, after an appropriate period of introspection and abject public apologies, Bean Dad seeks to recover from his cancellation by the Twitter mob and resume a productive career, he may find that his misadventure has left him unwittingly qualified for a surprising new career. He’d be wildly successful as a professor of education.

• “Charter schools deliver extraordinary results, but their political support among Democrats has collapsed. What will Biden do?” —Jonathan Chait
• The affluent suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts is home to leading scientists who advised the reopening process, and parents welcomed in-person learning. But opposition from teacher unions split the community into different camps. —Slate
•  “[T]he average teenager in England has missed only about 6 days of in-person school during the fall.” If Americans had not politicized reopening, perhaps they would have had a similar experience. —The Atlantic
• The Rhode Island state education council granted preliminary approval for the expansion and creation of charter schools in Providence despite union opposition. —Wall Street Journal
• Here is a brief look at where Biden’s education secretary pick, Miguel Cardona, has fallen on key issues over the last years. —Education Week
• College admission essays from privileged students fall into typical molds. But the well-performing students of color who attended Success Academy charter schools produce essays that “capture the ordinary and the sweet.” —Wall Street Journal
•  “Schools Rethink Covid Rules. ‘We’re Over-Quarantining Kids Like Crazy.’” —Wall Street Journal
• Washington D.C.’s Mayor Bower’s failure to educate the public about its reopening plan and the ever-changing demands of teacher unions kept schools shut during the safest window for reopening. —Washington Post
• California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a $2 billion plan to subsidize in-person education for students in early grades, but there are still many obstacles to making that a reality. —Ed Source
• “Joe Clark, New Jersey principal who inspired ‘Lean on Me,’ dies at 83.” —Washington Post
• This study of Chicago Public Schools finds that the most effective schools aren’t necessarily the ones with the highest test scores—they’re ones that improve student social and emotional wellbeing too. —Hechinger Report
• Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued new school safety rules that should reduce quarantines by 90 percent based on a study of the state’s school health data. —Fox8
• “Can charter schools pick the best students? No, but many believe the myth.” —Washington Post

NOTE: This is our first regular Gadfly Bites edition for 2021, covering clips from 1/1 through 1/6/21. Huge thanks for reading and subscribing! 

1. While this piece on the Covid slide is mainly focused on states other than Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch editorial written by Fordham’s Aaron Churchill in December and making the case for conducting standardized testing this school year is both linked and quoted in the intro. It’s not hard to see why. (The 74 Million, 1/3/21) Meanwhile, Fordham’s Chad Aldis is paraphrased on the importance of and on his support for standardized testing this school year in this Ohio piece. And, interestingly, he is not the only one sending that message for a change. (Dayton Daily News, 1/3/21)
    
2. While parents are noted first in the headline of this story looking at “lessons learned” in education in the Dayton area during the fall pandemic-influenced semester, it is mostly teachers’ and school leaders’ voices that are heard. As usual. While the inclusion of insight from the head of Dayton Leadership Academies is welcomed here, I might have thought that the full shutdown of Dayton City Schools for the last six weeks of 2020 merited at least a mention. One assumes the lessons learned by parents bereft of all schooling for weeks are a bit different than the few others we are actually given. (Dayton Daily News, 1/3/21) School is back in session now in most places – even in Dayton City Schools, I think, wonder of wonders – after the holiday break. But the formats vary widely…and for varying reasons. (Local 12 News, Cincinnati, 1/3/21) Fully in-person learning is the most-desired outcome across the board, so the media tell me, also for varying reasons. The administration of Covid vaccines to the point of herd immunity is seen as the path to that goal, but the media tell me that outcome could still be many many months away. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/4/21) School personnel are quickly rising to the top of the list of those to be vaccinated in Ohio, according to Lt. Governor Jon Husted. But the state is tying vaccine distribution and in-person learning a bit more tightly and specifically together than perhaps originally imagined. (Fox8 News, Cleveland, 1/5/21)
   
   

3. Going back to the topic of lessons learned, here’s an in-depth story of a grandmother stepping in to raise her grandson when circumstances required it. A rough start gave way to a positive situation today and Grandma is sharing her hard-won wisdom more widely to others for the future. A great story all around, even to this cynical curmudgeon, but two things stood out to me (for purposes of the clips, of course): We learn that Grandma worked for many years at Dayton City Schools (scheduling buses!) until retirement and currently sends her grandson to a private school using an EdChoice voucher. Just sayin’. (Dayton Daily News, 1/1/21)
    
4. Looking at the near term, we learned yesterday that Philanthropy Ohio and the Ohio Department of Education awarded $2.6 million in grants to help schools and districts improve their remote learning efforts while the pandemic still requires it. (And maybe longer…?) The Gongwer story doesn’t note it, but the detailed list of awardees includes a number of charter schools and networks across the state. Kudos to all! (Gongwer Ohio, 1/5/21)
   
   

5. My memory is not what it once was, but certain things tend to stick in there. The weirder they are, the stickier. Thus it is that I am doomed to recall the week in late 2019 when Youngstown City Schools’ elected school board was, by dint of the Academic Distress Commission law, supposed to be dissolved and replaced due to four straight years’ worth of overall F grades for the district. Remember? A moratorium on dissolution was agreed to at that time, pending an Ohio Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of ADCs. While the ruling came in May, 2020—upholding ADCs, as I’m sure you will recall as well as I still do—the advent of a global pandemic in the interim seemed to bring along amnesia as well as its other, better-known symptoms. How else to explain this story in which the elected school board of Youngstown—the Board that Should Not Exist—voted in its new president, who is the son of the outgoing president due to term limits, like clockwork just last week? (And that the membership of that board is exactly the same as it was in 2019?) While I am utterly gobsmacked to realize that ADCs are still the law of the land here in Ohio after everything that has happened (my memory keeps coding those events under the term “abject folly”), it is clear that no matter what the law said, the effort was never going to succeed in its true aim to improve education for kids in chronically-underperforming school districts. Not one tiny bit. (Mahoning Matters, 1/5/21)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

It is becoming increasingly clear that pundits and well-meaning education advocates fail to fully grasp the deep distrust that some parents have long had for their children’s schools. A steady stream of articles, op-eds, and twitter threads tell us that closed schools are doing the most damage to children of color, children from low-income families, and children with special needs. Yet many parents of the children who fall into one or more of those categories do not want their schools to reopen—and say that, if they do reopen, they will not send them. This is a major head scratcher for people who have never been zoned to an unsafe or chronically underperforming school.

There is a profound lack of understanding between parents who have only known chronically underperforming schools and parent advocates who have never had that experience but are very familiar with academic data and how it breaks down by race and income.

I have been fielding questions since the summer from people who see the consistent survey and polling results and can’t understand why black parents and low-income parents are the least likely to want their children to return to school in person. Or why Latino parents seem much more hesitant than White and Asian parents. The questions are coming from a good place, from people who know the data around reading proficiency and academic outcomes and are convinced that the children with the greatest needs are the ones who most need to be back in school. To their mind’s eye, this is obvious. And it’s easy to see why.

But there is a blind spot in this question that comes from lack of personal experience with really bad schools. Sarah Carpenter is a mother and grandmother in Memphis, Tennessee, who has been fighting for quality education for her own family and countless others for decades. In her current work as the Executive Director of The Memphis Lift, she knows the pain of that broken trust all too well. I spoke to her on a day she had three school-aged grandchildren and one great grandchild with her. The school aged ones have formed a pod to do their distance learning at Grandma’s house.

Carpenter does not pull any punches when she talks about schools reopening. Having seen her own daughter and other family members get sick with Covid-19, the fear is real and personal. She uses the word “terrified” to describe how she feels when she imagines her grandchildren bringing the virus home to her from school. She has diabetes.

I hope you receive this in the manner it is intended, in-person v. virtual school Twitter does not represent parents who are terrified to send their children to school during a pandemic. No matter what the science says, parents know what they know about what can be trusted.

— Vesia (@VesiaHawkins) December 8, 2020

I think the concern among Black and Brown parents in my district is this: if the district can’t implement proven strategies to protect 80% of their children from illiteracy, how confident should we be that they’ll protect those same students from Covid?

— Jim (@jim_again) December 8, 2020

Figure 1: How much of a risk to your health and well-being is sending your child to school in the fall?

Many will be quick to jump on those fears and share studies that show that Covid-19 is not spreading in schools. But this is where the fundamental issue of distrust comes into play. There have already been rumors of cases in their schools, and because of past experience with dishonesty and lack of transparency by school officials, she and others in the community don’t know who or what to believe. As my colleague Mike Petrilli wrote last year, “reopening decisions are mostly a matter of trust.”

“It makes me upset when people act like they’ve got this down pat when they don’t,” Carpenter said. She added that she and other parents in her North Memphis community knew their kids were behind academically long before the pandemic. She wonders why anyone thinks they would jump at the chance to get their kids (and grandkids) back into schools that plan to keep on doing what they were doing before. She says there has been no indication that anything will be different in the schools, other than fears of a virus they see ravaging their community.

Joe Cantu, a father of two in San Antonio and the co-founder of MindshiftED, echoes Carpenter. His son Lucas is ten years old and has Type 1 Diabetes. If he couldn’t trust the school before a pandemic to be sure his son got his shots, how can he be sure that they’re going to keep him safe now when he’s in a high-risk category for the virus?

“I admit I’ve had trust issues with the school,” he says. He points out that parents left in March with no idea how their kids were doing academically and, like Carpenter in Memphis, wonders why anyone would rush back to a place that wasn’t even transparent with us about the most basic information about our children. “If a child is in eighth grade and reading on a second-grade level, why don’t we know that?” he asks.

He goes on to express frustration that the conversation is so focused on getting students back into buildings. “It drives me bonkers that no one seems to be talking about making remote learning as good as possible,” he said. He contends that if families had a really good and “robust” option that allowed them to keep their kids home forever, they would. As far as he is concerned, more than half the children in his city already don’t read on grade level, and he sees little sense in the idea that the only way to get kids caught up is to send them back into the same classrooms they left in March.

Cantu also hits on the transparency issue: “Transparency and accountability were not strengths before. Now I’m supposed to believe they will be? If you’re hiding information about how kids are doing, how can I be sure you won’t be hiding information during a pandemic?”

It is inevitable that readers familiar with “the science” will be tempted to immediately start sharing links to studies from Europe or pieces by Brown professor Emily Oster about the low risk of catching Covid-19 at school. And that makes perfect sense because they are not looking at the pandemic through a prism of decades of distrust and educational failure. What may look like ignorance or an anti-science mindset to the highly educated, including physicians and scientists, is the actual life experience of the parents and caregivers for whom they advocate. Failure to understand and address these very real fears of parents will be a disastrous mistake with long term consequences.

Trust is a necessary ingredient for schools to thrive. Experts, advocates, and school officials would be wise to listen to understand before rolling out data dashboards and sharing quotes from Dr. Fauci that fail to land with the parents they are trying to persuade.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s website, Project Forever Free.