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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It’s an experience common to every writer in the world: the sinking feeling when you realize that the provocative headline your editor has placed atop your carefully-wrought piece is sure to send an angry mob in your (virtual) direction. So it was with my recent Washington Post op-ed arguing that “millions of elementary pupils who were already a year or two behind when the crisis struck” should not be socially promoted next year, so as to give their schools and teachers the gift of time “to fill in the gaps in kids’ knowledge and skills and accelerate their progress to grade level.” The truncated, click-bait version? “Schools should consider keeping kids in the same grade this fall.”

As Jay Mathews wryly noted in a follow-up column, my commentary “apparently enraged nearly everyone who read it.... Reader comments included: ‘I’m rolling my eyes so hard it hurts’ and ‘My question is how this idiocy found its way into The Post.’”

Jay came to my rescue, saying (correctly) that my article was really “a plea for creative thinking”—especially regarding how schools might use time differently in the face of this unprecedented challenge. Bingo—and something I should have said more clearly myself!

The flap reminded me yet again that words and language matter, especially when we’re dealing with what David Tyack has called “the grammar of schooling.” Washington Post readers (and especially folks on Twitter who never got past the headline) saw me proposing to hold kids back, which struck them as mean, punitive, and “blaming the victim.” That of course was not my intention. I wanted to give struggling students something extra, something that would benefit them: not just an extended school year or day or small group tutoring (though we should do all that), but an extra, free year of schooling, if that’s what they need.

Lesson learned: We need to be precise, especially in this moment of heightened anxiety and widespread uncertainty.

So it is with the larger conversation about how to help “catch kids up” when schools return to in-person instruction, one hopes in the fall—a conversation that has also been riddled with imprecision. And it creates the impression of disagreement when really we are just talking past each other.

To overgeneralize, let’s view this complicated matter of what to do when schools reopen as two main camps that come at it from seemingly opposite perspectives. Let’s call one Team Personalized Learning and the other Team Grade Level Standards. 

In broad strokes, TPL wants to make sure that every student masters key skills before moving on. And if teachers find pupils in their classes who missed critical concepts years before, they want the flexibility to go back and spend a good deal of time filling in the gaps before trying to tackle grade-level material. Of course, much of Team TPL would love to blow up the whole grade-level thing entirely and let kids proceed at their own pace rather than based on their age.

In contrast, TGL members worry that too much “going back and filling in gaps” means tons of dreaded “remediation,” shown by research to slow down student progress rather than accelerate it. Instead, they want teachers to spend most of their time on grade-level work, providing supports to students to help them access that “grade level material.” And they sure don’t want to make kids repeat a grade, given the multiple research studies showing that it doesn’t do much good, and in fact can do much harm.

It might seem that TPL and TGL are at loggerheads with irreconcilable views.

But that’s only because we are still talking in generalities; we haven’t yet gotten precise.

Let’s fix that. To answer the question of “how to catch kids up,” we need to ask at least three questions. First, how old are the students we’re thinking about? Second, which subject? And third, how far behind are they? Because the best path forward is going to look very different depending on the answers.

Consider some recent commentary on this topic. The other day in The 74, two captains of Team Grade Level Standards—David Steiner and Dan Weisberg—made a great argument for their view using high school English as their example.

You are a tenth grade English language arts teacher in Urban City, USA. Your curriculum says teach George Orwell’s novel 1984, but half your class lacks the vocabulary and interpretive skills to read the book. So, following your training to differentiate your teaching, you ask those students to read Lois Lowry’s The Giver instead—a seventh-grade text you think they’ll be able to manage…

Imagine that instead of assigning half the class The Giver, the teacher decided that no student was going to miss out on reading 1984. That teacher would have to do focused work with the less-prepared students: They might be asked to watch the movie rendition or listen to the book on tape; they might need to review plot guides or digital editions of early chapters with embedded vocabulary help and synopses. The key is that these interventions happen just before the whole class encounters the text. Done right, they can give students who’ve fallen behind access to grade-level materials at the same time as their peers.

Persuasive, yes?

Meanwhile, one of the captains of Team Personalized Learning—Joel Rose—has been making a strong argument using middle school math as his example:

Imagine that you’re a sixth-grade math teacher. It’s the first day of school, and the vast majority of your students arrived multiple years behind where they should be. Your job is to teach them concepts such as understanding percentages and dividing fractions. Both will appear on the sixth-grade state test, but your students never successfully learned much of anything about the basics of fractions in fourth and fifth grade.

What would you do?

Would you try to go back and address their unfinished learning from prior years and run the risk of not having enough time to cover all of the sixth-grade-level material? Or would you march dutifully through grade-level content and try to fill in gaps where you can, knowing that it probably won’t be enough?

Compelling, no?

Isn’t it possible that they’re both right? (Indeed, Weisberg and Rose co-authored a piece last year finding much common ground, and arguing that a combination of grade-level work and “filling in the gaps” is often the right move.)

Isn’t it likely that it depends on the subject matter and which specific knowledge and skills we’re addressing?

Given that there is a clear progression of standards in math, it makes a ton of sense that students will struggle if their understanding of prerequisites is faulty—especially when gaps are enormous. No amount of “supports” and “scaffolding” is going to magically make that problem go away. So we should encourage teachers to go back and help kids fill in the holes—while also helping students make progress on grade level material.

But English language arts—and especially reading—is different. After the decoding stage, it’s not a “skill” at all, as my colleague Robert Pondiscio often explains. A high-school student who can’t read “at grade level” can almost surely decode the words. What he can’t do is comprehend novels and informational texts because so much vocabulary and background knowledge is unfamiliar to him. So building up his vocabulary and content knowledge is the name of the game—which talented teachers can do with the strategies that Steiner and Weisberg suggest.

And all of this looks very different for our youngest children. A kindergarten student who was on the verge of sounding out her letters in March is most definitely going to need help picking up where she left off come fall. Likewise when it comes to counting to one hundred. Not to mention all of the social and emotional skills that kids learn (or are supposed to learn) in kindergarten. 

So how should we help catch kids up? Let’s get precise.

As with all students, children in the earliest grades will need to be diagnosed with high-quality assessments, both the standardized variety and those developed by teachers who know them best. For those found to be way behind, we should give them—and their teachers—the gift of time. Rather than call it “retention,” let’s dust off my idea of a “second 2nd grade.” Kids currently in second grade will graduate to grade 2.5 (ideally with their current teachers); schools can spread out all of the skills in the K–2 standards across four years instead of three. If fancy universities promised their students a free fifth year of the college experience given the current circumstances, people would cheer. We should do the same by offering struggling kids a free extra year of elementary school.

For older students, it depends on the subject and the specific skills that need strengthening. In math, we should err on the side of mastery, and if that means spending some time on below-grade-level content, so be it. But in English language arts, as well as social studies and science, supporting students to access grade-level content should be the default. And of course, we should follow the lead of great schools and draw tools from both tool boxes via a mix of well-designed small group instruction, one-on-one tutoring, online acceleration and enrichment, and whole class discussions.

None of this is going to be easy, but we also need an approach that’s not impossible. We shouldn’t pretend that the typical school is suddenly going to be able to embrace instructional models that are brand new to them, given everything else they are dealing with. But we also shouldn’t waive our hands and make-believe that kids will be fine if we just do what we always do. Specific, proven, precise strategies are the key to finding our way through this historical challenge and doing right by our children.

This year’s holiday from federally-mandated end-of-year assessments in math and English language arts will undoubtedly embolden test haters to declare once again—and louder than ever—that we never needed those damned exams in the first place and that our schools and students are far better off without them. Thus will commence another skirmish in a war on testing that rivals the Seven Years War. 

As Lynn Olson and Craig Jerald point out in a thorough and perceptive report from FutureEd, statewide assessments were getting plenty of pushback pre-coronavirus. The pandemic is merely deepening their peril and intensifying the pushback. Their seventeen-page report is well worth reading, as is the short version that appeared on Education Next. Their chronology is spot on. They’re right about the intensity of the “testing backlash.” I assume they’re right that this year’s testing moratorium will cause more people to urge scrapping the whole irksome, onerous process. And I agree that tests would be a lot more popular with educators if they were demonstrably helpful in improving instruction, which waiting to year’s end doesn’t do much to accomplish.

Yet there may also be a fundamental shortcoming in their analysis, a great big issue that they allude to but don’t develop: What if the hostility toward testing is not, at bottom, about the tests, but rather about what the present testing regimen is mainly designed to do, which is to hold schools and educators (and sometimes kids) to account for their results? What if tests are the unwelcome messengers, but what’s really at stake is the message? I submit that if testing vanished but some other form of results-based accountability remained, educators would complain just as much—and work just as hard to recruit allies among parents and others to discredit them.

Think about it. Nobody likes to be held to account for their results, particularly when embarrassment, inconvenience, and unwanted interventions, possibly even the loss of one’s diploma or one’s job, hangs in the balance. Doctors and hospitals don’t much like it when their infection, mortality, or readmission rates are publicized and sometime lead to sanctions. Restaurateurs understandably hate it when the health department padlocks their bistros or a reviewer offers no stars. Competitive divers bridle when judges give 1.5 points to their triple backflips. It’s human nature—and the higher the stakes, the stronger the feelings.

It’s different, of course, when high-stakes accountability leads to bonuses, gold medals, five-star ratings, and 9.5 point dives. Everyone loves accolades. That’s human nature, too.

But the reason America got into results-based accountability in K–12 education wasn’t because more accolades were needed. It was because many schools were producing wholly unsatisfactory results, sometimes for everyone in attendance, sometimes just for subgroups within the school. We were, it was rightly said, a “nation at risk” because of those weak results.

That led to national goals, to statewide academic standards, to mandatory assessments in core subjects, and to complex regimens by which to evaluate the scores on those tests and the remedies to be applied when scores were low.

It did not, in theory, have to be tests by which schools’ results were gauged. But for a host of reasons—cost, convenience, security, the appearance of uniformity, objectivity, and a sort of fairness, etc.—standardized tests are what we ended up primarily relying on.

Of course we got carried away, particularly in clumsy efforts to use kids’ test scores to evaluate teacher performance. Of course we neglected other important elements of learning besides what’s readily tested and important elements of good schools besides academic achievement. Of course we muddled—and still do—the balance between achievement and growth. Of course we didn’t pay enough attention to the seemingly Sisyphean quest for tests that would be both “formative” and “summative.”

All true, all culpable. Perhaps still all fixable. But I submit that the “peril” in which state assessments find themselves, according to Olson and Jerald and others who have analyzed the pushback against testing, is not fundamentally about testing burden or the distortions it causes in curriculum, pedagogy, calendars, etc. It’s about results-based accountability for a system that’s producing unsatisfactory results. Educators trying to escape the accountability have resorted to a war on tests themselves and convinced many, many others—especially parents—that tests are the problem.

Think about it this way: Imagine that we start rating elementary schools, A–F or five stars to one, based on how well their graduates do in middle school. We judge them by middle school grades, discipline, etc., not by tests. And we find a way to adjust for “value added” so as not to penalize schools just because their pupils are disadvantaged.

Extend that thought experiment to high schools. Imagine that we find ways to gauge—and report—their effectiveness based on how their graduates do in college and the labor market, as glimpsed in a recent Mathematica study of Louisiana high schools. Then we sanction or intervene in various ways in the high schools whose graduates fare poorly.

Would F schools be any happier once their grade isn't derived by tests? Would unions complain less vociferously if states moved to intervene with tough love in one-star schools? How much are you prepared to wager?

There are ample good reasons to find additional real-world measures of school quality and effectiveness, but let’s not deceive ourselves that doing so will end the war on accountability—or make our schools any better.

I repeat: Tests are the messenger, and it’s the glum message they continue to convey about many schools that’s the problem. Shooting them down won’t cause a single child to learn more, a single inept teacher to do a better job in the classroom, or a single crummy school to improve.

Otherwise, Lynn and Craig got it about right.

Editor’s note: A version of this essay was first published by Education Next.

As thoughts start turning to reopening schools, there’s been no shortage of advice on what educators need to do to prepare and how they should go about doing it. One emerging piece of consensus is that schools may need to start the school year remotely as part of rolling closures triggered by new outbreaks. On its surface, altering scheduling, staffing, and other logistics to effect social distancing seem like straightforward operational functions, but like all options being thrown on the table, each possibility presents a cascading series of obstacles, many of which could prove insurmountable.

Thinking back to the elementary school I once led, Elm City College Prep, we never had to tackle the novel challenges facing schools today, but there were many things we could have adjusted based on what the experts are forecasting. The stepped-up cleaning, physical distancing, and additional accommodations (e.g., allowing vulnerable teachers to work from home) would have called for considerably more planning than ordinarily required, but these are largely solvable problems assuming an adequate provision of resources and the suspension or removal of undue regulatory and contractual red tape. Granted, these are no small assumptions, but the logistics of remote learning and social distancing are not the most difficult part of the back-to-school equation.

No, the trickiest part in all of this—one that’s been lost in the Manhattan Project–style effort to build a new delivery system—is the primacy of school culture. The coronavirus has disrupted the rituals and routines of schooling, but it could have been much worse. Indeed, in hindsight, schools were fortunate that in-person schooling ended when it did in March, as teachers already had two-thirds of the year under their belts to establish relationships and make meaningful connections. I’ve seen the benefits of this firsthand with my five-year-old daughter as she wraps the year up with her teacher on Zoom. But how do you do that well with a new set of kids and a new teacher if their initial interactions are all or mostly online? It would seem almost impossible to start a school year with elementary age students in front of teachers they’ve never met and don’t feel any relationship with or accountability to.

One potential solution was raised by my colleague Mike Petrilli: Have kids stay in the same grade with the same teacher instead of moving onto the next. The idea was widely panned by educators and the public writ large, though policymakers were more sympathetic. Folks may have reasoned that the stigma associated with redshirting would have been yet another burden placed on the shoulders of students who, through no fault of their own, were already behind grade level. But regardless of one’s feelings about social promotion, there is considerable merit to Petrilli’s argument about students returning to the familiarity of their current teacher, especially as a hedge against the struggles many low-income, low-performing elementary students will assuredly face this fall.

A recent study suggests the answer could lie with what is often referred to as “looping.” Unlike retention, which requires students to repeat the same grade, looping calls for the teacher to follow her students to the next one. As one elementary teacher describes it:

It was such a positive experience. One of the big advantages is starting in September hitting the ground running—you already know the kids and the things they did the previous year and the things they need to work on.

There are no silver bullets, but looping would seem to address several of the uniquely sticky problems created by the pandemic. First, it directly confronts the issue of student-teacher familiarity, a foundation for learning and all of the other salutary effects of schooling. Second, it’s a low-cost policy, which is an important consideration with schools and districts facing severe budget shortfalls. Third, research shows not only improved test scores, albeit modest, for kids who loop, but the benefits accrue more to students of color, the population most likely harmed by school closures.

To be sure, looping all elementary grade students could present challenges. For one, moving teachers between grades would require them to quickly learn a new set of content standards and familiarize themselves with new materials. Second, the amount of research on looping is relatively thin, so it’s unclear whether the benefits would persist if the practice were suddenly expanded. Third, looping will not be effective, and can even be detrimental, if students are assigned to an ineffective teacher for two to three consecutive years. There’s also a question of what happens to today’s fifth grade teachers if their students move to middle school

Yet the potential upsides clearly outweigh the negatives. Teachers and students are already stressed by the “new normal,” and things will likely get harder before they get easier. As schools turn to what will be required of teachers in the fall, they must avoid complexity at all costs and do everything they can to make the job doable within the capacity of existing staff. Rather than having teachers fight through a screen to connect with their students, let’s have them build naturally upon the face-to-face relationships they’ve already established. Besides, ensuring forward progress on academics will be daunting enough.

Although there’s wide variation in teacher effectiveness, research shows that educators can learn from their colleagues and in supportive professional environments. Nearly all such research looks at year-to-year improvements. But could teachers also improve over the short term by doing what many of them, particularly at the middle and high school levels, do every day—that is, teaching the same material multiple times to different classes of students? Or could the tedium of such concentrated repetition lead to instructor burnout and declines in both teacher and student performance? A new working paper from the journal Education Finance and Policy digs into these questions.

The study was conducted in the Netherlands at a university business school, so there’s no claim of generalizability to an American K–12 context. But the teaching repetition model under study is not that far removed from the typical workload of American middle and high school teachers. And as this new study is only the second randomized controlled trial of the effects of teaching repetition ever conducted, its findings are worth a look.

Analysts observe 731 different instructors who vary in seniority from postdocs to full professors and each instructor teaches, on average, 2.5 sections of each course over six school years from 2009–10 to 2014–15. Thus, the sample includes around 7,300 sections. Of those, 42 percent are an instructor’s first section for a given course in the day. Thirty-three percent, 19 percent, and 8 percent are an instructor’s second, third, and fourth sections, respectively. This is the variation they exploit to estimate the impact of teaching repetition. Specifically, they are interested in four outcomes: a student’s final grade, whether they dropped out of the course, students’ evaluations of the instructor, and students’ self-reported hours per week they studied for the course.

Students are randomly assigned to sections within a course conditional on scheduling conflicts, which arise for about 5 percent of student-course registrations. Because the type of instructor and the course subject are likely to impact outcomes, the study compares student outcomes within instructor-course combinations, with the main analysis relying on comparisons between students in an instructor’s later sections of a course to their peers in the first section that have the same course plan. The effect of this is to control for the times that students take the course, so that time-of-day effects are not mistaken for repetition effects.

The headline is that the researchers find little to no impact for any of the outcomes. In terms of student grades, the estimates for an instructor’s first section relative to their third and fourth sections is statistically insignificant. There are also small and insignificant effects on teaching repetition for the probability of students dropping the course. Likewise, there’s little evidence that teaching repetition leads to better teaching evaluations, nor are there significant differences in self-reported study time related to teaching repetition. When they look at impacts by prior teaching experience, researchers also find just tiny differences, such that inexperienced instructors are not benefitting from teaching repetition compared to their more experienced colleagues. Finally, they examine whether having a same-day break in between teaching multiple sections changes the pattern of effects they observed in the study—akin to a planning period for American high school teachers—and might make for improvements, but again, no meaningful differences.

The researchers conclude that teaching multiple sections of a course neither helps nor hurts teaching effectiveness. Instructors don’t appear to use their first section as a trial run for later sections and students in earlier sections are not at a disadvantage compared to peers in later sections. Moreover, it appears that if they are going to get better as a result of repetition, they are going to need more than a short break in the same day. They also point out that the courses under study were mainly those where the instructor served as a facilitator—with students working in groups and teachers circulating to assist and provide answers to student questions—so perhaps different patterns would emerge in classes with different formats.

On the one hand, this study should be somewhat encouraging because it indicates that repetition does not lead to tedium-induced performance lags. On the other hand, neither does repetition boost short-term performance. Maybe part of the problem is that teachers aren’t accustomed to making adjustments on the fly in response to what they’re observing in real time. Such a process is nurtured through a building-wide culture of dynamism and adaptability that is deliberate, labor intensive, and yes, likely draining. It is far from the norm in American K–12 schools. But studies like this one remind us that it doesn’t have to be that way. Repetition need not be rote; with more effort, it can be riveting.

SOURCE: Harold E. Cuffe, Jan Feld, and Trevor O’Grady, “Returns to Teaching Repetition – The Effect of Short-term Teaching Experience on Student Outcomes,” Education Finance and Policy Journal (February 27, 2020).

The education policy discussion during the COVID-19 crisis is as raucous as ever. Equity. Learning loss. Online education. These are all familiar fights, and the pandemic has not arrested them. But these exchanges miss something that used to ground them, and that is a common view of the moment and a sense of the future within which they exist. This is also to say they miss some common realities whose impact, quite literally, changes everything.

There is a virus in the world right now, and that virus kills people. It’s extremely contagious. Early reports indicate that having it can do long-term damage to the heart and diminish lung capacity. There is no widespread testing for it. We do not know if having had the virus confers immunity. For all this uncertainty, we do know two things: There is no cure or vaccine at present, and gathering people together makes it more likely that the virus will be transmitted.

Even among those who consider the current social distancing regimes tyrannical, there is an acceptance that reopening not just the nation’s economy but our society will be a slow and cyclical affair. One in which stay-at-home orders are relaxed until infections spike and then put back in place again, as the seminal Imperial College London study offers (“The Hammer and the Dance” will be a long-playing tango to which we all sway).

It is against these facts—and this science—that the discussion about education and education policy must happen. All other frames miss the essential issue: that finality looms above all human action right now in a way with which many Americans are unfamiliar. Epidemiology, not pedagogy, is the prime mover.

So if you care about education policy and what we might call reform, and you have been involved in one of the key tranches of the effort to improve the country’s schools and expand opportunity for children who have had little of it, what should you derive from this grim take on the possible near future?

First, there will be no orderly and familiar return to school in the fall. It is fantasy to believe there will be, particularly in densely populated areas. The reasons are simple. Schools, in the best of times, are cauldrons of contact catalyzed by children, and that will accelerate transmission. Proceeding as if this is not the case will have two great costs. One will be visited upon teachers who will inevitably catch the virus and pay for the risk with their lives. The nation’s schools and its largest school systems are closed for a reason. While New York City’s feckless mayor, Bill de Blasio, dawdled over shutting schools down, the United Federation of Teachers, in an instance of genuine pro-educator advocacy, protested for its members who, rightly, feared for their own safety. Although leaders of varying degrees of competence may toy with the idea of opening schools this fall, it seems unlikely that the nation’s teachers would make the same decision so easily.

The second cost is simpler: money. A teacher, mom, dad, child, or grandparent will die ostensibly as a product of coronavirus transmission at school. Someone will sue, and school districts will crack under the weight of their liability in years when their resources will likely be diminished. Schools work to minimize risk, not compound it. No school leader or wary bureaucrat would take on such responsibility.

Here is what is also true. For the foreseeable future, children will be taught and learn online. This will happen not because virtual charter supporters, distance learning enthusiasts or unbundled education trailblazers want it. It will happen because when we bring people together, lives will be lost. There are profound questions of practice and technology that must be addressed in the process. That is a discussion we should have. But we should also be clear that it is a discussion grounded in life-or-death rules, not a debate over whether distance learning works, is optimal or is equitable in any of the myriad senses that the word is used during this crisis. Few things could challenge children’s learning more than a global pandemic that shuts down schools of all types. It is precisely for this reason that learning in the present must not stop even as we prepare for a future we hope will be familiar. How can we better engage families? How is learning organized so it also allows caretakers who work from home to continue to do so? Should we support moms, dads, and others—who are now educators—directly? These are the questions that need to be addressed in the country’s households while this storm rages outside.

And finally, while many reformers and traditionalists have been engaged in a détente as they work to address the basic needs of children and families who are now stuck in apartments and houses and concerned about their health, their learning and their income, others have stayed the course with an eye toward consolidating their power and eliminating diversity from the nation’s educational patchwork. Here, the Los Angeles Unified School District and, more specifically, its United Teachers Los Angeles chapter are instructive. While the children of the country’s second-largest school district were on lockdown, Alex Caputo-Pearl, the head of UTLA, took the opportunity to negotiate new work rules for his members. There is no time like a health pandemic to return to the collective bargaining table, it seems.

Caputo-Pearl’s requests were numerous, but two stood out. The first puts a cap on the amount of time teachers and students engage in distance learning. The second makes the use of live video optional, turning a key feature of teacher-student interaction—that they see each other—into a nice-to-have. One does not need to be an economist to know that caps and scarcity make things more expensive. Given the opportunity to drive up the price of his members (while continuing his and UTLA’s anti-charter advocacy) Caputo-Pearl has done so, even as thousands of students for whom this learning is vital are missing or barely engaged.

It is hard to believe that UTLA’s members or, for that matter, the families of Los Angeles would support this self-interested, tone-deaf agenda. Perhaps it’s because they’ve seen it before, as the last time the city’s children were at home and not learning, it was because of a strike led by Caputo-Pearl as well. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when you give someone the chance to show you who they really are, sometimes they do. Caputo-Pearl has revealed to us the depths to which the power-hungry will sink, and that should be instructive for all who care about preserving the diversity of the country’s educational landscape.

Worlds are based on rules, and right now those that govern education policy are unfamiliar. Pragmatism should be the guiding principle while we work to continue the education of millions of children who attend schools of all types in a way that is grounded in that same pragmatism. The new normal is now something else: the current normal. Sadly, strong notes of the divisions that captured our attention before COVID-19 made itself front and center remain. But what the world also needs are momentum and a clear understanding of what is at stake. The lesson is that, for now, epidemiology wins. Our decisions must consider the lethality of the coronavirus as a factor and that loss of life is a condition and consequence of those same choices. And our choices should emphasize the good, if not the perfect, of continued learning against the world’s uncertainty, which isn’t going away anytime soon.

Editor’s note: This article was first published by The 74 Million.

With schools shuttered nationwide by the COVID-19 pandemic, states had no choice but to cancel standardized testing for the 2019–20 school year. Although certainly less pressing than many other COVID-related issues, the test stoppage is a long-run concern for states and school districts that monitor student performance using annual tests. It will almost surely “freeze” test-based accountability for the current school year, and looking forward to 2020–21, accountability and other programs that rely on test-score growth will need to be revisited. Our research team at the University of Missouri, in partnership with the Fordham Institute, will be conducting a deeper dive on what that “revisit” should look like. We plan to release guidance for states and school districts based on our findings in early 2021.

In the meantime, we know that some advocates are already discussing the larger question of whether we should reduce testing requirements as a permanent policy. For example, should Congress amend the Every Student Succeeds Act to allow for testing in every other grade, or something similar, rather than annually in grades three through eight plus once in high school, as is now the law of the land?

We answer this question within the context of what we see as the three primary uses of test data in K–12 education: (1) to assess student progress and inequities, (2) to monitor school performance, and (3) to provide clear goals for educators and students.

If the value of testing were only with respect to the first item, assessing student progress and inequities, testing requirements could be reduced significantly and we would lose very little information. For example, suppose we replaced the current testing regime with universal testing in core subjects in grades four, eight, and ten. This would cut the number of universal testing grades in half (from six to three), plus remove high school end-of-course tests in states that use them, while still allowing us to track academic progress and inequities across a large portion of K–12 schooling.

When considering the need to monitor school performance, however, the value of additional testing becomes more apparent. To measure test-score growth, we need testing at regular intervals. Maybe not every year, but regularly. (We focus our discussion on test growth because growth is a more accurate indicator of school performance than the average achievement level.) In order to link achievement growth to schools, we also need the testing intervals to be self-contained within schooling levels. To illustrate with a counterexample, consider a hypothetical regime with testing in grades four, six, eight, and ten. If a school district is structured to have K through five, six through eight, and nine through twelve schools, there is no two-year testing interval that allows for a reliable measure of test-score growth at the K–5 level. The closest we can get is with the four-through-six testing window, but this growth period includes one year at K–5 schools and one year at six through eight schools, making it difficult to determine how much of the overall growth between grades four and six is attributable to K–5 schools.

There are potential solutions to this problem, such as adding second-grade testing to the front end of the regime, or testing in grades three, four, seven, eight, and ten. But even if such solutions allowed schools with most grade configurations to contain at least one testing start- and end-point, there would still be information loss relative to the current testing regime because there would be less growth data available per school. The empirical consequences of the information loss could be substantial or minor (this is a question that merits attention in research), but there would be consequences. To summarize, our sense is that there is the potential for modest reductions in annual testing that would still permit the use of test-score growth for monitoring school performance, but significant reductions in testing would compromise the value of testing data for this purpose.

Finally, we turn to the idea that testing may confer learning benefits by providing clear goals for educators and students. We are not aware of strong research studies on the value of testing per se that would allow us to confirm or refute this possibility with confidence, so we won’t belabor the point. However, it is worth noting that research shows the increase in testing initiated by NCLB has resulted in achievement gains, with the caveat that the increase in testing has been bundled with other policies, most notably (and perhaps obviously) accountability based on the tests.

So where do we land on the policy question of whether testing requirements could be reduced? There seems to be some scope for modest testing reductions without meaningfully harming our ability to use tests in the ways that we would like to use them. However, large-scale reductions in testing could cause substantial information loss. Our biggest concern is that we would lose the ability to track the performance of schools in a credible way. Given the general absence of external performance pressure in public education, reducing our ability to monitor school performance in terms of increasing student achievement is problematic.

COVID-19 may have forced us to freeze testing in the short term, but let’s not use it as an excuse to reduce testing requirements to the point where we undermine our ability to capture data on how well schools are serving students. That’s something we’ll need to know long after the virus is gone.

New partnerships are emerging across the U.S. that create innovative educational approaches to preparing America’s young people for jobs, careers, and further education, helping them develop an occupational identity and vocational self. These pioneering efforts can counter young people’s disengagement in school and the disappointment millennials express when they talk about their educational experiences.

Since 2009, the Gallup Student Poll has documented that students going through school experience an “engagement cliff.” In grade five, 26 percent say they are actively disengaged or not engaged in their education, a figure that rises to 60 percent in grade twelve. Disengagement affects entrepreneurial aspiration—the talent and energy needed to build a thriving business—which also declines through high school. Actively disengaged students are over seven times as likely as their engaged peers to feel discouraged about the future, while engaged students are nearly five times as likely to be hopeful.

Echelon Insights has studied millennials—those born in the 1980s and 1990s, numbering more than 75 million in the U.S.—and their views on their educational experiences. Only 39 percent of millennials overall say they were prepared for college success; of those not attending college, 21 percent felt they would have been prepared had they decided to attend; 22 percent felt high school prepared them for workforce success; and 20 percent felt prepared to navigate life and real-world challenges.

Millennials believe that K–12 schools must change but doubt that it will occur: 74 percent say schools need “big changes” to create opportunity for students, while 58 percent say “we won’t make significant enough changes … and the problems … will keep getting worse.”

Finally, 68 percent of millennial parents link education’s purpose with preparation for further learning or a successful career. A plurality—38 percent—say education’s most important purpose is “to prepare students for further learning, like college or trade school.” In the second most common answer, 30 percent said the goal is “to prepare students for the workforce so they can succeed in a career and make a living.”

Surely, the disengagement cliff partially reflects general adolescent malaise. And millennials’ thoughts about their educational experiences are a version of consumer regret. But neither consideration should belittle the genuine disconnect young people experience when going through high school or how, later in life, they express disappointment with how high school prepared them for work or further education.

Research shows that sources of social capital like affiliation with new networks and organizations create unexpected opportunities and strong feelings in young people of engagement and self-agency—the power or sense of control individuals have over their own lives. Creating a social-capital approach to school and youth engagement can contribute significantly to overcoming the disconnect and disappointment many young people experience.

What models are emerging on how to do this? (See links below for information on the response of these organizations and schools to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

District and charter partnerships: Wiseburn School District in Los Angeles County and Da Vinci Charter Schools created a partnership with more than 100 business and nonprofit partners that offers students internships, mentorships, workshops, boot camps, and consultancies, including student mental health and counseling services. Students receive their high school diploma as well as pursue associate’s or bachelor’s degrees through UCLA Extension and El Camino College or College for America.

Independent charter schools: The Boston public charter school Match, in partnership with Duet and Southern New Hampshire University, assists students with college completion and career placement, including student coaching and mentoring and accredited associate’s and bachelor’s degrees.

National Catholic school networks: Cristo Rey, a national network of thirty-seven Catholic high schools in twenty-two states, integrates four years of academics with work experience through its Corporate Work Study Program. The program places students five days a month in an entry-level, paid, professional job using more than 3,400 corporate partners.

Public-private collaborations: The Atlanta business community, Fulton County Schools, and Junior Achievement created a public-private partnership called 3-D Education. This project-based learning approach includes a six-week case study beginning in eleventh grade that pairs students with coaches in off-campus industry and professional settings.

Citywide collaborations: In New Orleans, the education, business, and civic partnership YouthForce NOLA works with open-enrollment charter high schools, offering career exposure and work experiences, soft-skills training, coaching for students, and paid internships for seniors. Twelve organizations comprise the program’s steering committee, including the school district, workforce and economic development organizations, community advisory groups, and philanthropic partners.

Private enterprises: Kenzie Academy in Indianapolis is a two-year, for-profit, campus-based, and online software engineering school taught by industry practitioners that includes a student apprenticeship in Kenzie Studio, the company’s consulting arm. An income-share agreement delays the $24,000-a-year program cost until a job placement that pays at least $40,000. A partnership with Butler University allows students to receive a certificate from both organizations.

Technology infrastructure: Communities are using platforms like CommunityShare, Imblaze, and Nepris to build virtual mentoring opportunities and networks between students and community partners.

These models generate what analysts call bridging social capital—connections and relationships with individuals and organizations different than ourselves. They create new opportunity networks that increase young people’s engagement in their educational experience and long-term opportunity equation. As Xavier DeSousa Briggs says, bridging social capital is for “getting ahead.”

These approaches also exemplify the new hybrid educational intermediaries that create “faster and cheaper” pathways to jobs and careers illustrated in the program models described above. Their elements include structured peer interactions; mentorships, apprenticeships, and internships; visits to service and professional organizations; work-based learning; career and technical academies; dual enrollment in high school and postsecondary institutions; boot camps for acquiring discrete knowledge or skills; staffing and placement services; and new approaches to paying for these programs. 

All these help develop young people’s occupational identity—their conscious awareness of themselves as workers—and vocational selves. They cultivate knowledge and skills for what students know as well as for whom they know.

(Click here to see current COVID-19 policies for Wiseburn and DaVinci, Match, Cristo Rey, 3-D Education, and Youth Force NOLA.)

Editor’s note: This article was first published by The 74 Million.

1. We start the week with our own Aaron Churchill’s latest op-ed. Title: “Even in a crisis, students must earn their diplomas”. Wonder how that’s going to go over? (Vindy.com, 5/3/20)
    
2. I’m not sure why anyone—besides a handful of Fordhamites, that is—thinks that K-12 students should work just as hard to earn their grades during distance learning when student teachers are thrilled that they do not. Ohio’s student-teaching time requirement got cut in half “within about a week” of the first school closure order. By my reckoning, that means they’ll end up about half as competent as previous student-teachers but I must be missing something in the equation because this story says that all of them will receive their full teaching licenses despite the lack of experience. The idea that the cut down time is seen as “overcoming” an impediment that could have taken them “off track” is just the icing on the garbage cake. (Dayton Daily News, 5/3/20)
   
   

3. Lordt only knows what those student teachers were even doing during their minimal online classroom time, because parents (or big sisters in this case) are apparently doing all the actual remote teaching. From my perspective, we’ve somehow gone from “nothing can replace the in-class teacher/student interaction” to “why bother trying to replace it?” (It takes a minute to get to the obligatory “teacher parent” perspective in this piece, but it’s there. Honestly, it should have a copyright symbol next to it anymore.) And what if we don’t get back to full in-class teaching next school year? Sounds like more guaranteed backward movement to me. (Toledo Blade, 5/4/20)
   
   

4. Speaking of which, remember when those law students petitioned the state to let them get their licenses without passing the bar exam? Wonder which side of this year’s passage rate those petitioners would have fallen on? (Highland County Press, 5/4/20)

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Alliance

A group of prominent of organizations supporting education for students with special needs has come together in the wake of the nationwide school closures, under the name Educating All Learners Alliance. Four founding members of the alliance published an important manifesto with the title “We can rise to the challenge of educating students with disabilities during COVID-19”. An important read.

“A whole new system”

Closer to home, John A. Dues, chief learning officer for United Schools Network in Columbus, published a deeper look at USN’s efforts to transition from in-class to online learning. It includes a detailed flowchart of the many actions required from the operations team to teachers to students and families.

Supporting parents in distance learning

The superintendent of Richland School of Academic Arts in Mansfield is focused on maintaining the progress of her school’s early readers during mandated at-home learning. “Parents have not been trained to start a reader or to give any kind of foundational strength to the reading,” she said. “And it’s not their fault, it’s not their job.” She describes the efforts she and her staff have implemented to support this vital work.

Another charter/district “merger”

Dropout recovery school Mound Street Academy will be “absorbed” into Dayton City Schools next year. Dayton superintendent Elizabeth Lolli says she does not expect major changes to the school’s programming right away. Except for the school choice aspect, that is.

Celebration

The theme for National Charter Schools Week 2020 is, serendipitously, Above and Beyond. Very appropriate for the important work we have been highlighting in this newsletter so far this year. The good folks at NAPCS will be hosting a webinar on Monday, May 4, with ideas for your celebration and advice for making sure that your great work does not go unnoticed. You can register for the webinar by clicking here.