1. Folks across the state are interested in the topic of how best to issue grades for K-12 students participating in remote learning in the final quarter of the school year. While the pass/incomplete model seems to be the most popular option, how those final grades will count – is it an A? A C? A confirmation of some composite grade from quarters 1, 2, and 3? – is still up in the air. Interestingly, things seem to be evolving a bit in some districts where plans had previously been announced. Our own Chad Aldis is among those learned folks weighing in on the topic here. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/11/20) But more to the point for me is what counts as a “pass” in the first place. It seems there is far more variety there than you might expect, and it also seems to have moved up a notch or two since our earliest brushes with this question. (You remember, don’t you? Districts counting any self-reported student attempts at 40 percent or more of a set of given work—incomplete, incorrect, rendered in Klingon—as a “pass”.) Perry Local Schools in Stark County appears to be continuing to toe that early line of “effort” all the way to the end, but Fairless Local Schools (those guys?!) seems to favor some teacher assessment of actual work content. And under the understated heading of “taking a different approach”, Dalton Local Schools has actually implemented a new content mastery grading approach that sounds pretty OK. Color me surprised. Wonder if mastery could ever catch on? (Canton Repository, 5/11/20)
    
2. St. Francis DeSales Catholic High School in Columbus has made no changes to their grading policies. The principal says it’s because his school was prepared for virtual learning. All students had been issued with iPads and much in-class work was already being completed and submitted via the devices. (ThisWeek News, 5/11/20) Middletown City Schools, not so much. (Washingon Post, 5/8/20) Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns Foundation has transitioned its school attendance initiative (you remember that, right?) into an effort to expand WiFi access to students in CMSD. A recent $100,000 grant from the Arby’s Foundation will provide free internet for a year to 520 students as part of that effort. Nice. (Cleveland.com, 5/8/20)
    
3. The topic of state budget cuts to schools came up in the Middletown supe’s congressional testimony, above. Continuing on that topic, it may not surprise you to know that some of the state’s bougiest school districts say they are better equipped to handle those cuts. Dublin City Schools says that’s because they knew the cuts were coming, in contrast to those districts we heard from last week who were “blindsided”, etc. (ThisWeek News, 5/10/20) For Grandview Heights City Schools, it seems like their bougie-ness alone was enough to shield them from the devastating consequences of a $320K cut. (ThisWeek News, 5/11/20)
    
4. You may think that the title of today’s clips refers to one or other of the preceding items. But it doesn’t. It refers to this one. Hurricane Jeff is swirling back to Lorain and he’s got his sights set on a familiar target. And you thought the ‘rona was bad news! (Morning Journal, 5/10/20)

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Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.

In the debate about re-opening school builds this fall, a number of health questions needed to be answered. Among them, are children dangerous “transmission vectors”? (No, according to the Economist; yes, according to this piece in the New York Times.) Is there widespread community infection? Are masks and frequent handwashing sufficient for curbing the spread of the virus? And more.

These are important questions. Other big-picture considerations are surfacing, as in AEI’s “A Blueprint for Back to School.” But at the school level, they don’t go quite far enough. In addition to these health and policy issues, there are thorny educational and operational questions on how to welcome students back while keeping faculty, staff, parents, and students safe. On the ground level, we are seeing five hard questions that school leaders must grapple with once they get the green light from state health officials to welcome students back. They are:

1. How do we staff for this?

By this fall one fact will loom like a dark cloud over all schools in America: massive budget cuts. This is especially true for private and Catholic schools that don’t have a guaranteed stream of public funding to keep the lights on. The big question right now is: How will we staff for the year ahead without breaking the bank?

Obviously, the safety and security of our faculty, staff, students, and parents is our top priority. But keeping our communities safe may well take more manpower than we expect. In early March, as the reality of the COVID spread in New York began to set in, Partnership School leaders grew increasingly concerned about staffing and coverage. Like many schools, we have a number of teachers and staff members in every one of our schools who are vulnerable to the most severe impacts of the coronavirus. To protect our most vulnerable, we need to be able to give teachers the time off they need should community spread become an issue. However, for Catholic schools with a lean staffing model, that means finding and paying substitute teachers who can not only cover duties but who can keep students learning in the event a core content teacher is out.

Moreover, if state guidelines forbid classrooms of more than ten students at a time, we will need to consider how to shrink teacher-student ratios to ensure we comply with health guidelines. This presents both a budget challenge (i.e., Where we will find extra money at a time our budgets are being slashed?) and a talent challenge (i.e., Where will we find great subs who are trained and ready to roll?).

Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute proposed the idea of a national substitute teacher corps. Ideas like that could provide a valuable lifeline to schools like ours as we look to the future.

2. How do we equip for this?

Aside from the virus itself, perhaps the biggest story of the early days of the COVID shutdown was how difficult it was to find masks, sanitizer, thermometers, and more. While there is no doubt the supply chain will eventually ramp up, at the ground level, we worry about how we’ll ensure we have sufficient supplies to keep children and adults safe. Here again, given the budget constraints we know we’ll face, this is a question not just of supply, but of how much we will be able to procure and when.

Prioritizing health and distance learning resources in the midst of tight budgets will, no doubt, affect programming; school districts like New York and schools across the nation are beginning to grapple with difficult trade-offs, such as cutting counseling programs to preserve essential services. And it will cause us to second-guess everything from facilities fixes to new curriculum materials.

Equipping for the next school year in every area from health to technology to student-facing resources may also mean forging new partnerships. It will undoubtedly take a patchwork of public and non-governmental partnerships to keep our school communities safely functioning in person.

3. How do we assess for this?

One of the challenges of being a building or network-level leader is that so much is out of our control. When it comes to decisions about health and safety, we understand that individual schools shouldn’t be navigating this crisis on our own. Yet when it comes to summative assessments of student learning, schools will be disadvantaged by not having any independent assessment data to guide our academic planning.

To be sure, state tests are not the only—or even the most important—indicator of student progress. But they do provide an independent and reliable benchmark of our progress and of our students’ progress. And now, in a world where state tests have been cancelled and will not come back online before Spring 2021, and where district leaders are downplaying the role report cards should be playing in communicating student struggles, diagnosing and addressing learning gaps will be more challenging.

4. How do we manage amid heightened emotions?

Let’s assume for the moment that states give the green light to open schools, in some form, beginning in August. That doesn’t mean parents will feel comfortable sending their children. How will we manage the fears of parents and children who may be reluctant to restart in-person learning, or the anxieties of staff who worry about coming to work each day? In schools where chronic absenteeism is already a challenge, how will we manage accountability for attendance against the very real health fears that exist?

5. How do we lead and manage for uncertainty?

While educators don’t often rely on advice from nineteenth-century Prussian field marshals, now seems like a good time to remember that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

Or perhaps we should look not to that aphorism, but to the specifics of what Helmuth von Moltke the Elder really said: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” This distinction is important; we must plan now—and we must also embrace our inability to anticipate every consequence of restarting in-person classes.

So we must build the nimbleness in our teams and routines to adapt rapidly, with a clear sense of our priorities and frameworks for making tough decisions fast.

—

Strong educators have always functioned with a clear, unwavering picture of excellence and Protean adaptability regarding the strategies and tactics to achieve that vision. Reopening schools will call on us to have both in spades. Engaging now with the hard questions on how we must adapt will help better position us to give students in this next school year the education and nurture they deserve.

The last time I saw my third grade reading students was more than 40 days ago. Like most schools across the country, ours closed its doors as a safety measure to help slow the spread of COVID-19. And like most schools and districts, we faced the challenge of how to ensure our students continued to learn when they could no longer be inside a classroom.

My district struggled with the transition as leaders grappled with concerns of equitable access to technology and providing individualized education programs. We were also confronted with the reality that our current K–5 English language arts instructional materials are neither strong nor set up to support remote learning. The decision the district ultimately made was to not offer virtual classes because we couldn’t reach all students.

I got in touch with my students to check on them personally and to offer any support that I could—but the district placed strict limitations on teachers. I came to realize that because of this crisis, and the district mandate, my students would enter their fourth grade year missing nearly two months of reading content and preparation.

The consequences of lost learning time

Third grade is a critical year for students in the development of their reading and literacy skills. Students are solidifying what they have learned in K–2 and are beginning to analyze texts while growing a passion for reading and writing. The importance of ensuring that literacy skills are strong as students move forward cannot be overstated. If students struggle to read, they are likely to struggle in every subject they encounter.

My students, along with millions of others, are now experiencing an interruption in learning at a critical time followed by a long break with little to no instruction at all. Studies conducted on school closures due to natural disasters, or simply summer break, show that being out of the classroom has lasting consequences for students to retain skills and content.

After most public schools in New Orleans were closed for a range of eight to twelve weeks due to Hurricane Katrina, it took students nearly two years to recapture the learning they lost. Research has also shown that the effects on early learners is even more dramatic. It is likely that by the time school starts back, the students in my district will have missed nearly twice the amount of time as many students in Louisiana did.

The promise of quality instructional materials

Despite these sobering challenges, there is a real ray of hope for our district. Before the COVID-19 crisis, we were in the middle of adopting new high-quality ELA materials using EdReports reviews as a guide to ensure standards alignment and local needs were met. After witnessing the ramifications of not having good resources on our ability to reach students, I am cautiously optimistic that a positive change is coming soon.

Of course, students always need access to aligned content, but materials are especially critical in overcoming the loss in learning gains that we will see as a result of this crisis. The right materials can provide scaffolds for students, content to strengthen the skills they already have, and resources to fill in the gaps they are struggling with.

Quality instructional materials matter for teachers, as well. More than ever, we’re expected to do it all and then some. We embrace those expectations because we care about our students’ wellbeing and their learning. However, it’s exhausting to be without the supports quality materials can provide, especially when the stakes are so high. Having been in the classroom for more than two decades, I know that having great content makes a huge difference in the kind of instruction I can provide.

Taking action to support teachers and students

In this time of uncertainty, I’m looking for the bright spots. I am hopeful that we are on the road to selecting quality instructional materials. That is a great first step that every district should consider if they found themselves scrambling to compile a coherent curriculum that could work for the moment we’re in. So much of our work for the fall relies upon completing this adoption and offering the professional learning to ensure the materials have the kind of impact on teachers and students we need.

We (and other districts) must:

1. Adopt quality instructional materials. Aligned, high-quality materials are the foundation for student learning. As education continues to shift and change over the next year to deal with the consequences of COVID-19, teachers must have great content to reach all kids.


2. Provide ongoing professional development for implementing materials long before the start of the school year. This step is key since learning and implementing a new program, no matter how great that program is, takes time and training. Districts should provide a series of virtual professional development sessions over the next weeks and months around how to utilize new materials. That way once we can begin teaching again, we’ll be ready to hit the ground running.


3. Invest in community. I’ve been in the classroom for more than twenty years and have never experienced anything like this health crisis we’re all in. I am sure many of my colleagues are feeling just as isolated and overwhelmed as I am. Establishing a strong mentoring structure and making an effort to show teachers that what they do matters can go a long way to keeping spirits up. We want to be partners in the work that lies ahead. If leaders are working with us rather than above us, there's no limit to what we can achieve.


4. Prepare for the fall right now. We don’t know what school may look like over the next year, but we can’t wait to see what the situation is before planning for it. Otherwise we risk students losing even more instruction time. We must begin now and plan for every contingency. Providing quality materials that teachers are trained to use is critical so that educators have tools to tackle whatever obstacle arises.

Editor’s Note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.

This week we are celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week. Teachers across Ohio and the country have been incredibly resilient in the throes of the COVID-19 virus. They have had to quickly transition to a remote learning model. They have been using their time away from their buildings to gather content and get training from every source they can find. We all need to celebrate these devoted, committed, and hardworking professionals.

School districts are doing their best to adapt to this new learning world. Although great effort is being made to reach their students, the remote learning being provided by districts is in most cases very different to the digital learning provided by a full-time online school. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

Ohio Connections Academy has been operating as a public K–12 virtual school since 2005 and has many staff members with an excess of ten years of online teaching experience. We have come a long way since 2005 in terms of what we understand about high quality digital teaching and learning. We have learned optimal ways to engage students and families in both synchronous and asynchronous instruction. Of course, we’re still seeking new and better ways to innovate and use feedback to gather data to inform and improve our practices. The learning platforms have become much more sophisticated, and our staff members continue to use their dedication to lifelong learning to study and incorporate practices that enhance the digital learning student experience.

Our full-time online model is done in a Learning Management System (LMS). Teachers, parents, and students have 24/7 access to a dashboard in our LMS to view attendance, grades, and performance. Our students communicate with their teachers and classmates in a secure online system. The LMS guides students through structured lessons for all of their assigned courses. Our teachers receive rigorous training throughout their tenure here at Ohio Connections Academy. Our skilled teachers are able to individualize and personalize the self-paced lessons to ensure all students learn at their own pace. We address student learning in a variety of modalities. This includes the use of virtual manipulatives in math and virtual reality simulations in science courses.

Our staff has strict guidelines to frequently contact students and families. We also conduct synchronous learning sessions with students several times a week. Teachers provide one-on-one or small-group tutoring sessions in a live format where students can share a screen and show what they know in real time. There is no risk of “zoom bombing” due to our students learning in a protected firewalled system. Support staff assist our teachers by, among many things, sharing best virtual teaching practices, reviewing data, and ensuring student engagement.

There has been investment in our platform and research to continually improve our practice. It has been a challenging environment for us to rise above the chatter surrounding e-schools in Ohio. I am hoping this will be an opportunity to elevate the conversation about digital learning and focus more on the policies and practices that work best for students.

Many teachers around the state are making Herculean efforts to reach their students, and for that, we’re all deeply thankful. But they also need the tools to succeed. To that end, we at Ohio Connections Academy are happy to provide advice and best practices such as these for districts, schools, and parents as they continue their journey in providing remote learning. In Ohio, we’re in this together.

Marie Hanna is the Superintendent of Ohio Connections Academy, a public online charter school that serves K–12 students from all over the state.

Education funding cuts

This week, Governor DeWine announced sizeable budget cuts to combat what is a bleak revenue forecast in Ohio. These include $300 million in cuts to K-12 foundation aid, which will affect charter schools as well. More details will be forthcoming soon, but this is a typical first-look piece appearing in media outlets across the state.

More details on unique graduations

The loss of year-end milestones has weighed on students and teachers alike; none more so than graduation. Here is a more-detailed look at the “unique and individual” ceremonies conducted by the leader of Dohn Community School in Cincinnati. Unique because they are being held one student at a time, and individual because they are happening at students’ homes. Caps and gowns; decorated folding tables; diplomas conferred in front yards and parking spaces. Amazing.

Teacher Appreciation Week

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week 2020, and there is more appreciation than ever for online school teachers this year. Of special note is the teamwork aspect of longtime online teachers reaching out and supporting the ranks of newly-deputized online teachers created during school closings across the country. Check out these appreciations from a news outlet in Michigan and from the Superintendent of Connections Academy here in Ohio.

Mutual appreciation

Horizon Science Academy in Lorain this week conducted a teacher car parade through the neighborhoods where its students live. Both the appreciation of teachers by students and of students by teachers was very clear.

See you next year?

The form that K-12 education will take next year is still to be decided. AEI recently released its own blueprint for returning to school, taking into account myriad moving parts both inside and outside schools themselves. You can check out a detailed description of the plan here.

This week’s non-pandemic news

Back in February, the National Charter Schools Institute hosted a number of in-person meetings of charter authorizers from across the country. Their goal was to brainstorm new forms of accountability for alternative education campuses. That is, schools serving former dropouts, pregnant and parenting teens, formerly incarcerated students, and others with extraordinary risks to successful learning. There are approximately 700 such schools in the United States. It is hoped that, despite the upheaval caused by coronavirus and the response to it, the work of these authorizers can continue so that the vulnerable students they serve can receive even stronger educational opportunities in the future.

NEXT WEEK = NATIONAL CHARTER SCHOOLS WEEK!

1. You don’t propose $300 million in education budget cuts without expecting a swift and coordinated response, I suppose. Expect to hear variations of all the following—often using the same exact words—from districts over the coming days. Cuts to things that parents value…like field trips. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 5/7/20) Some districts will actually have to give a portion of their money, already received this year, back to the state. (Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune, 5/7/20) Districts will express “surprise” at the size of the cuts (c.f. “blindsided”, “taken aback”, and/or “gobsmacked”…but that last one will only apply if the district leader was once an English or classics major) and will threaten to take funds away from other areas to backfill the new cuts. To wit: Lakewood City Schools eyeing student wellness funds. (Cleveland.com, 5/6/20) Many supes will remain “terrified” by the budget cuts, and there will be apocalyptic suggestions that many school districts will merge and some will simply “disappear”. Although, to be fair, it’s not district supes offering that gloomy and decidedly incendiary take. (Cleveland.com, 5/8/20)
   
   

2. Meanwhile, Ohio Connections Academy is having an online student art show like it’s nothing. NOTE: That’s first annual art show. Like, it’ll happen again next year. If you’re around. Just sayin’. (Patch,com, 5/8/20)
    
3. Meanwhile meanwhile, Licking Heights Local Schools has received nearly $1 million in a grant from Facebook to help buy a Chromebook for every student. You know what I just thought of? Chromebooks would be great way for kids to participate in an online student art show. I jest, of course. Any type of school-provided laptop would do the trick. (10TV, Columbus, 5/7/20)
    
4. This piece is supposed to be about how parents are faring with school buildings closed. The parent perspective on remote learning seems pretty clear to me in this, but because the outlet couldn’t find a parent who was a teacher (I imagine), they made sure to get the input of the local teacher union president. His perspective is less clear to me. In fact, it seems somewhat at odds with mom’s input. But I am, as folks are constantly telling me, probably missing something. I bet a dialogue between those two folks would probably help me understand. (NBC4i, Columbus, 5/7/20) The parent experience is dotted throughout this long piece from Youngtown—including a parent with a student attending a local charter school—but the district teacher (and CEO) perspective eventually swamps all of their voices. Two things jump out at me: When did we jump from “kids are ‘digital natives’” to “computers are so hard”? And didn’t the state implement an Academic Distress Commission in Youngstown to iron out these glaring inequities (c.f. the discussion of Rayen Early College students’ resources vs. East High School students’ resources) presented to us here as “on the way to being solved for the future”? Bonus question: Weren’t we supposed to avoid likening the pandemic-induced school closures to “snow days”?. (Youngstown Business Journal Daily, 5/7/20)
    
5. Finally this week: As locked-down student morale boosters go, this one is pretty good. And it adheres to proper virus-mitigation protocols. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 5/3/20) This one is good too, if extremely small scale. And perhaps a bit less mindful of the protocols than it should be. (Elyria Chronicle, 5/8/20)
   

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Early childhood care providers are heroes. On a regular day, they create loving, nurturing, and educational environments for our youngest, whose brains are developing more in this short period than they will at any other time in their life. These providers are, of course, employers and employees themselves, but their presence also allows others to go to work, who know their child is being safely cared for. As the First Five Years Fund stated in a recent letter to Congress, “the through line in all of [a community] is child care.” But as more states slowly reopen other businesses, what’s going to happen if early care providers can’t?

According to Child Care Aware, only one state requires that early care providers remain fully closed. Seventeen allow them to care for the children of essential workers, but these guidelines get muddy as states reopen non-essential businesses. And thirty-two states, primarily the ones that have partially reopened or will soon, are allowing providers to open for everyone. But despite this, many providers are, and have been, closed, and the likelihood of them reopening is uncertain. Just Google “daycares reopening” and you’ll see news stories from across the country wondering about the future of these crucial businesses.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children conducted a nationwide survey of providers and found the situation for most to be bleak. Only 11 percent of providers felt confident they’d be able to reopen after the pandemic, while 63 percent said they wouldn’t be able to reopen without public investment after they had closed for periods ranging between one day and one month. Fifty percent of providers are losing income primarily because many families can’t afford to pay tuition. Twenty-five percent of providers are losing income primarily because they’re not receiving the state subsidies they normally do, which are allotted based on attendance, not enrollment.

While some closed providers are still collecting tuition from families hoping to save their spot, many have stopped collecting altogether or have even given tuition back to families who may be out of work. Even those who’ve remained open to essential personnel like healthcare workers are sorely hurting. Legislators need to be prepared to support providers in the coming months as they attempt to get back on their feet, because for many providers, closing (or not collecting enough tuition) for the duration of the pandemic means a loss of revenue so significant that reopening will be impossible.

The March 27 CARES Act allocated $3.5 billion to the Child Care and Development Block Grant and $750 million to Head Start. This money is intended to support the early care providers who are still operating and those who will reopen after the pandemic. Some states have even allocated additional money to their child care funds to support more of them. There’s other resources, too, like the Paycheck Protection Program, to help providers continue to pay their workers. But legislators need to be sure that providers have awareness of and access to these options—and that there’s enough funding to go around. One provider we spoke with, who runs a highly rated childcare center serving over one hundred families, was only able to secure $10,000—not even enough for one month’s fixed expenses.

This is why early childhood advocates recommend considering long-term solutions, too. This could include creating economic subsidies for providers, such as rent deferrals or zero-interest loans to help pay for what they may need to retain their space, their staff, and the families they serve.

These will be important things to consider as more and more states partially or fully reopen, while still urging people to maintain social distancing to curb the spread of COVID-19. When people go back to work, they’ll need someone to watch their children. But you can’t really ask toddlers to stand six feet away from you, so will it be safe to allow a classroom to reopen for its twenty or so preschoolers? Most early care providers run on a really tight budget, so they need to operate at full capacity to pay their bills.

We’ll say it again: Early care providers are heroes. They do some of the most important work for notoriously low pay. Now we’re asking them to risk their own health to support essential (and maybe non-essential) workers, or risk losing their jobs. And amidst all the uncertainty, so many of these rock-star early childhood teachers continue to do activities and story-times via online platforms, some without the certainty of a paycheck.

As more working parents of preschool-aged children are juggling working from home while also caring for young children around the clock, the absence of high-quality early childhood care providers is keenly felt by all families. This will only get worse if states open but providers can’t. Legislatures across the country should ensure that doesn’t happen.

One of the tougher accountability nuts to crack is how to gauge educational quality in early elementary grades. Federal education law does not require state exams until third grade, and states choose not to administer end-of-year assessments in grades K–2. Despite the importance of these formative years in children’s lives, the absence of standardized testing makes measuring their academic growth difficult.

Some early-childhood education analysts have proposed that states rely on classroom observation or attendance data to evaluate quality. But a number of states, including Ohio, do require assessment when students enter kindergarten. The Ohio assessment, for example, includes content across four domains: social foundations, math, language and literacy, and physical well-being and motor development. A child’s teacher administers the assessment. The results have largely diagnostic aims—to inform instruction for the coming year—and are not widely used in accountability systems. Could states use these baseline data, combined with later state exam scores, to measure growth?

A team of analysts from Mathematica recently explore this possibility using data from Maryland, a state that administers a Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA). They examine student-level data from the first cohort of children taking the KRA in 2014–15 along with their third grade test scores from 2017–18. Approximately 54,000 students had scores on both assessments and are thus included in the analysis. Another 26,000 students, however, are excluded because they were missing either KRA or third grade scores (due mainly to exits from or entrances into the school system after Kindergarten).   

The research team first demonstrates that academic growth can indeed be measured using KRA and third grade scores. Relying on the same methodology that the state uses for accountability in higher grades—known as “student growth percentiles”—they calculate K–3 growth results for Maryland elementary schools.

However, their analysis raises a few concerns about the validity of the results—the extent to which they reflect schools’ true contributions to student growth. First, due to the significant time between assessment, a number of students switched schools within the Maryland system. To address mobility, the analysts apportion responsibility for growth based on the amount of time spent in each school. This “shared accountability” is sensible, but without annual testing, uncertainty remains about which school actually contributed more to transfer students’ growth. Second, the researchers discover only a modest correlation between KRA and third-grade test scores. This, they suggest, indicates that the two assessments may be “measuring different aspects of academic ability.” In comparison to correlations in higher grades—e.g., third and sixth grade test scores—the KRA-third grade correlation is weaker, leading the authors to conclude that the K–3 growth results are “likely less valid” than those calculated in the higher grades. 

Though imperfect, a K–3 growth measure may be better than flying nearly blind about educational quality. And a measure similar to what is used in this report could be superior to Ohio’s well-intended but rudimentary approach to measuring growth in the early grades. At the same time, policymakers should heed the report’s suggestions about implementing a K–3 growth measure: States should either place less weight on the results in an accountability system or report the growth data but not use them to inform ratings or consequences. Sound advice, given the limitations of such a measure.

Source: Lisa Dragoset, et. al., Measuring School Performance for Early Elementary Grades in Maryland, REL Mid-Atlantic (2019).

The coronavirus pandemic has confronted school district management teams with four unprecedented challenges:

• How to design new strategies that effectively respond to future uncertainties regarding school enrollment levels, new health and safety requirements for re-opening, greatly increased learning intervention needs, and possible future resurgences of COVID-19 infections.
• How to reallocate sharply reduced revenues to efficiently implement the district’s revised strategy, including changes in staffing models, structures, systems, procedures, and facilities.
• How to gain support for these changes from multiple stakeholders with differing priorities, including the school board, state regulators, parents, students, teachers, business leaders, and the district’s lenders and other creditors (e.g., contractors).
• How to manage these extraordinary complexities more quickly than anything most district leaders have ever encountered before.

Solutions will naturally vary with local circumstances, but these eight process tips may help most district teams meet their new challenges.

First, recognize that your normal organization structure—which probably contains overlapping responsibilities and complex decision processes—wasn’t designed to manage critical incidents, which require a streamlined approach.

As described in the FEMA guidelines, incident command teams need clear lines of authority and communication between the commander (and deputy) and leaders of a limited number of clearly defined functional teams. The latter include intelligence (to centralize information), operations (to develop and execute plans), liaison with outside organizations, logistics (including facilities and supplies), people, finance, systems support, and public affairs. While senior members of your current organization will likely fill most of these roles, the work to be done will not match their normal duties.

One of the best examples I know of effective incident management occurred in 2016, when a wildfire exploded near Fort McMurray, the center of Canada’s heavy oil industry in the far north of Alberta. When the fire was detected, every government agency and energy company activated its incident management teams, which all followed the same protocol. On May 3, the fire swept through the city of 88,000—and their coordination ensured that not a single life was lost.

As we recover from COVID-19, ease of inter-operation with multiple other organizations is just as critical for school districts.

Second, begin by defining a range of possible scenarios that focus on different outcomes for the greatest uncertainties you face. For most districts, these will include the timing of and requirements for school reopening; the number of students who will return to their physical schools (bearing in mind that almost 10 percent of U.S. children have asthma, diabetes, or an immune deficiency); and the timing and extent of revenue and cost changes (e.g., from falling taxes and state aid and/or rising pension payments) over the next three to five years.

Third, move beyond traditional budget lines and develop a detailed understanding of the mix of activities your district performs, their economic costs (direct cash costs plus employee time), and how they affect your critical goals. For example, TNTP’s famous The Mirage report found that large districts incurred estimated annual economic costs of $18,000 per teacher for professional development activities that generated little or no improvement in student achievement. Cutting line items without such activity-based understanding of true economic costs is flying blind.

Fourth, define the critical goals that your new strategy must meet. The most important goal shouldn’t change: ensuring that your students meet state academic standards and graduate career and college ready. In what will likely be, for a long time to come, a challenging post-COVID-19 economy, achieving this goal for your students and their families is more important than ever.

Fifth, focus on developing alternative plans that are robust, resilient, and adaptable.

Robust plans have a high probability of meeting your critical goals under most or all of your alternative scenarios. For example, a district with a common curriculum across schools will find it much easier to switch students back to remote learning than will a district in which each school chooses its own curriculum.

Resilient plans include buffers and options that enable an organization to absorb the impact of unwanted surprises with minimal reduction in effectiveness and efficiency.

Highly adaptable organizations focus on collecting information about critical uncertainties, continuously learning, and regularly updating their contingency plans to enable rapid adjustments to unanticipated circumstances.

Sixth, evaluate potential plans under your alternative scenarios, to determine their robustness with respect to achieving your critical goals and assess how well they line up with different stakeholders’ priorities. It’s usually easier to attract stakeholder support for plans that are robust, resilient, and adaptable than for those that are not.

Many strategic failures in history were due to failure by management teams to attend to critical time dynamics. Monitor the difference between the time remaining to implement your plan and the time before a critical threshold is reached (e.g., the day schools are set to reopen or the day resurgent infections force a return to remote learning). Hence, a key evaluation question is how much “safety margin” does each plan start with?

Seventh, have your team conduct a “pre-mortem” on each plan. Ask them to assume it is five years in the future and the plan has failed, then (anonymously) write down answers to three questions: (1) Why did it plan fail? (2) What warning indicators should we have paid more attention to? (3) What should we have done differently? Then discuss the answers. This quick risk assessment intervention never fails to trigger valuable management team discussions that improve plans.

Finally, remember that it’s easy to underestimate the challenges when a school district—or any organization that’s never dealt with anything like this—seeks to implement a complex transformation plan in the face of time pressure, evolving uncertainties, and conflicting stakeholder goals.

For a district management team to try to do this on its own ignores the lessons of history and tempts fate when a generation’s future is at stake. Prudent management teams will at least seek advice from board members and outside advisors with experience in crisis management and/or implementing complex change programs.

For many district teams, it must feel today as if their world has suddenly been turned upside down. Bear in mind that almost every management team around the world feels this, too. The best of them recognize, however, that the fundamental strategic challenge they face hasn’t changed. They still need to devise ways to achieve their district’s most important goals with fewer resources in the face of unprecedented uncertainty. And they rise up to creatively meet it.

1. Revere Local Schools has decided to end its school year early, despite guidance to the contrary from the Ohio Department of Education, just as it said it was going to do more than a week ago. (Cleveland.com, 5/4/20) Joining Revere will be Lakewood City Schools… (Patch.com, 5/5/20) …and Orange City Schools. Bet those folks in Yellow Springs are feeling a bit silly now having backed down on the issue so quickly. (Fox8, Cleveland, 5/5/20) So why are all these districts disregarding guidance from the state which oversees them? The superintendent of Lakota City Schools says it’s because the guidance received is “difficult to follow” and sometimes contradictory. There’s no information on the final length of Lakota’s school year thus far, and the only contradiction I can discern is that state guidance contradicted how the district had planned to handle graduation. But maybe I’m missing something. (WLWT-TV, Cincinnati, 5/5/20)
   
   

2. Meanwhile, a quick look at one district whose school year continues: another round of learning packets was released yesterday for students in Toledo City Schools. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 5/5/20)
    
3. So what does next school year hold? Governor DeWine suggested yesterday that “hybrid school” might be required. That is, two days of in-class instruction per week and three days of remote learning, with different groups of kids rotating in/out on that schedule. (Cleveland.com, 5/5/20) But some school districts seem to be hedging their bets and aiming to make sure that they can provide education entirely online next year…or whenever it might be needed. Here’s a story about how Lakota City Schools (them again?) and Hilliard City Schools will be partnering this summer to create a fully-online elementary-level curriculum. While there are some caveats about schools possibly opening fully in the fall and about the convertibility of the new product to in-class use, I was instead struck by two other points. The first is that Hilliard’s supe explains the curriculum will be provided for use “if families choose” a fully online educational experience. Sounds like a wise move to me, given what smart folks are saying about the shape of the next school year. The second is that supe says “There is not an effective K-6 (online) curriculum in Ohio; we get to be the first, (and) it will be stronger if we do it together.” Unless I’m missing something, this sounds like blatant salesmanship to me, seeing as thousands of students and parents have successfully utilized existing e-schools over the years…and could start to do so right now if you know what I mean. While the nod is given to “collaboration” in this Hilliard/Lakota plan, it seems to me that “competition” is a more apt term. Which ain’t a bad thing, but I say that folks should be straight up about their motivation. (ThisWeek News, 5/5/20)
    
4. Speaking of motivations, maybe this will be a catalyst for some near-term decision-making among schools and districts: An announced cut of $300 million for K-12 foundation payments from the state. This cut and others were announced yesterday by Governor DeWine in response to…well, you know. But actually, maybe you don’t know. In announcing the cuts, the governor evoked “the cruel nature of an economic downturn”. Cruel, I can get behind. But there’s nothing natural about this particular downturn, is there? Or am I missing something yet again? (Mahoning Matters, 5/6/20) Akron City Schools’ treasurer characterizes the state funding cut as part of a “roller coaster”, with a federal CARES Act funding infusion as part of the fun, uphill part of the ride, and a state cut (along with potential local funding reductions due to that aforementioned unnatural economic downturn) as part of the stomach-turning downhill plunge. (Akron Beacon Journal, 5/5/20) School district officials in Lorain County are reportedly surprised, stunned, and a little cranky about the state funding cut news. But at least they’re not flying off the handle yet. “I have to wait and see what he means by basically taking money away from us,” said Elyria’s supe of the governor’s announcement. Glad she’s keeping an open mind. (Elyria Chronicle, 5/6/20)
    
5. In news that predates the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (heck, it might predate the 1918 flu pandemic), Columbus City Schools conducted a curriculum audit in 2019 and the predictably grim findings were presented yesterday. You can read the piece to see the litany of issues landing squarely in the laps of the city’s most vulnerable young people. Why predictable though? Because the district has conducted such audits before – 1979, 1999, and 2005 to be precise – and each one has found equal suckitude and each one has been all but ignored by leadership. What’s interesting is that the student population of Columbus City Schools was around 80,000 in 1979; around 60,000 in 1999; around 51,000 in 2005; and just less than 49,000 this year. There’s some sort of correlation here I’m pretty sure. But as usual, I’m missing something and just can’t put my finger on it. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/6/20)
   

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