Nora Flanagan What COVID19 revealed about US schools and 4 ways to rethink education TED
Transcriber:
The last day of school was barely school.
I fielded complicated questions
from students who braved
public transit to attend,
I wiped down every desk between classes
and reminded myself to breathe.
I held it together so hard
when students said goodbye,
with a strange,
scared weight on that word.
Colleagues and I
exchanged glances in the hallway,
at once tense and comforting.
We were in this together,
even if we were about to part ways
for several months.
And when school as we know it stopped,
we all took a long minute
just to process that.
It seemed impossible.
400,000 students in Chicago
now needed to learn from home,
and we would need to make that happen,
both as the third-largest
school district in the country
and as the human beings who constitute it.
But the seemingly impossible
keeps becoming reality really fast lately.
So teachers jumped and adapted.
We learned to host online meetings,
we hung whiteboards
on our living room walls.
Many teachers struggled
just reaching out to see
if their students were alright.
And in addition to making
remote learning plausible,
teachers have also been
organizing food drives
and housing resources.
They have made and donated
masks by the thousands,
and they’ve never stopped reaching out.
But this isn’t new.
This isn’t dramatic heroism
in the face of a pandemic.
This is teaching.
This is being invested in our communities.
As parents, we’ve had to adapt too,
because our working lives
and our family lives and our mental health
have all collided and coagulated.
Well-intentioned color-coded schedules
speckled the internet.
Everyone has cried at the kitchen table,
at least once.
Some of us several times.
And then, there are the students.
I’ve seen students participate in class
from the breakroom at work,
where they are frontline
for minimum wage to help their families.
They’ve attended
a makeshift funeral in the morning
and a Google Meet in the afternoon.
They are childcare providers,
they are experiencing housing insecurity,
they are scared, they are stressed,
and they are children.
When my son’s teacher
asked a screen full of nine-year-olds
if everybody was OK,
it almost broke me.
“How are you?”
“What do you need?”
“Is your family safe?”
School without school has been traumatic,
it’s been makeshift, it’s been messy.
Parents, teachers and students
have fumbled with tech,
fumbled even more with expectations.
And we’ve lost so much.
And maybe,
just maybe,
stripped bare like it’s been,
we can see more.
When words like “rigor,” “grit”
and a half dozen
other educational hashtags
don’t seem to matter,
we can see what’s in front of us
with new clarity.
And that includes the gaps,
the inequities, the failures.
They’re all heightened.
But so are the successes.
So what’s working?
What do kids need from their schools?
And what do we really mean
when we discuss, frame and fund education?
As both a parent and a teacher,
I keep coming back to four big ideas.
None of them are new,
all of them are necessary.
And in them, I’m hoping other parents,
other teachers and students
will hear echoes of their experiences
and outlines of what’s possible.
We can, and we must, engage parents,
demand equity,
support the whole student
and rethink assessment.
First and foremost, engaging the parents.
Historically, we’ve isolated
parents and teachers,
schools and neighborhoods.
We say otherwise,
but the influential forces in a kid’s life
rarely intersect with any depth.
We have parent-teacher conferences,
a STEM night,
a bake sale we all immediately
regret agreeing to do.
But the parents are here now,
every day,
inadvertently eavesdropping on class,
because we’re also making lunch
or sharing a workspace.
We are tutors, we are coteachers,
we are all relearning algebra,
and it’s awkward.
But maybe it’s exactly what we needed,
because parents are seeing
how school happens, or doesn’t,
what excites their kids
and what shuts them down,
whether there’s a rubric for it or not.
And we’re watching our kids learn
empathy and balance and time management
and tree-climbing and introspection
and the value of a little bit of boredom.
We might not want this to last,
but we can learn from it.
We can keep parents engaged,
beyond bake sales.
We can take this time and ask parents
what they and their kids need.
Ask again.
Ask in every language.
Ask the parents
who haven’t been able to engage
with their kids' remote learning.
Meet parents where they are,
and many will tell you they need us
to prioritize their children’s wellness,
support diverse learners,
protect neighborhoods
from housing instability
and attacks on immigrant communities.
So many parents will tell us right now
that they can’t support
their children’s learning
if they can’t support their families.
So next, we demand equity.
Our school system currently serves
a student population
that includes 75 percent
low-income households
and 90 percent students of color.
The fight for equity in Chicago
is as old as Chicago.
So what do we need right now?
For starters, we need
equal tech infrastructure for all.
This isn’t an option anymore.
We have to close the tech gap.
These are choices,
and we don’t have to keep making them.
We can refuse the isolation
and competition for resources
that pits schools and neighborhoods
against one another,
get rid of rating systems
and budgeting formulas
that punish kids for their zip codes
in a city that’s been segregated
since its inception.
The fight for equity in Chicago
did not become life or death
in the pandemic –
it’s been life or death
for a long time now.
We need to care
about other people’s children,
and not just as data points
alongside our own.
Third, we need to support
the whole student.
As much as parents might be
exhausted by remote learning
and can’t wait to get
the kids back to school,
or teachers can’t wait
to get back into our classrooms
and do some real teaching,
chances are the kids miss the playground
more than the classroom,
the activities as much as the academics,
that social emotional peace
that forms the core of human learning.
We will need social workers,
nurses and counselors in every school,
so much.
We will need them as we try
to help our students feel safe,
process their trauma and their grief
and find their way back to school.
To support our students,
we will also need smaller class sizes
and adequate staffing across the building,
something teachers
have demanded again and again,
with the overwhelming support
of our students' parents.
We will need art class, more than ever.
And physical education
and music programs and computer science.
And if wading through conspiracy theories
on the internet for the last few months
has taught us anything,
it’s that we need to put a librarian
back in every school, right now.
Finally, let’s rethink assessment.
We can dial down the testing a lot.
Elementary school students in Chicago
spend up to 10 percent
of their school year
just taking standardized tests.
We don’t know how many hours of learning
are lost preparing for those tests,
but we know the test-prep software alone
costs Chicago about
10 million dollars a year.
How much more could we do
if we got that time and money back?
And do we have to go back
to obsessively quantifying
everything a student attempts,
weaponizing grades
as a means of compliance
and reinforcing inequity
at every grade level?
Or can we keep considering
alternative models,
like proficiency-based grading programs,
and stop making school about scoring
better than the kid next to you?
150 colleges and counting
are now test-optional for admissions,
including NYU, the University of Chicago
and the entire California State system,
because they know
there’s more to a student
than a GPA and an SAT score.
You know who else knows that?
The students themselves.
If we are having conversations
about any of this,
and not authentically including
and empowering students
every step of the way,
we’re not having
conversations about any of this.
We have a moment now –
a short moment, and so much to get done
before the comforting choruses
of “back to normal” get too loud,
when we can take
what we’ve seen and experienced,
plant our feet and demand better.
We can make a system
as massive as Chicago pivot
to better serve our students,
their families and our communities.
If 3,000,000 teachers
can relearn their jobs in a weekend,
we can change school systems
to better fit what we know,
and what we’ve known for a while now.
And if we can set clear expectations
for our students,
we can do the same
for our school districts
and our cities.
I want to go back to school.
I can’t wait to go back to school.
I miss the hum of the hallways
and the weird energy of a room
filling up with sophomores,
and a better kind of exhaustion
from putting my heart and my guts
into what I love doing every day.
But we can’t miss this moment.
We can’t let go of the mantra
that we are in this together.
So don’t tell us
what is or isn’t possible,
don’t tell us it’s too hard
or too expensive or too aggressive.
It’s been our job
since the start of this pandemic –
no, it’s been our job since always
to make what seems impossible
really happen.
And when the stakes are this high,
and the evidence is this clear,
it’s our only option.