Schools Without a Plan for the New Normal

Schools are reopening this month and next. Most districts have spent considerable time and effort to plan for a school year where students spend all or part of each week at school campuses in classrooms. They assumed that pandemic would be under control. Now reality has begun to sink in. In most cases students will not be spending their days in classrooms. Yet to a considerable degree the school districts are totally unprepared to begin the school year on-line and few are even looking ahead to the possibility that the entire academic year will be remote learning on-line. They had months to plan for this eventuality and they did not.

Most districts were caught by surprise when they were forced to close early in the spring and attempted to go to remote learning. Teachers were left to fend for themselves to put together "Zoom" based learning. The states and the districts had no plan for this eventuality. School board members said the teachers were very creative, understand technology and would figure out ways to teach. A few did, most floundered. Most schools gave passing grades to students that attended "Zoom" classrooms. There was no learning accountability for either teachers or students. If only schools could re-open in the fall the problem would solve itself.

It has been five months now since most school campuses have closed down. In a well-managed situation this five months could have been used to plan how to best educate children if they can't come to school. Instead planning was focusing on how to create "social distancing" at crowded school facilities and should students be required to wear masks. There has been essentially no large-scale planning on how to best educate students if the crowded school facilities cannot be used. There is an easy answer to why this happened. If the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer (eg school buildings) every problem looks like a nail. School officials were so focused on returning to traditional education they ignored a plan "B". They planned for what they knew how plan for...they didn't plan for remote learning because the didn't know how.

In the real world (outside of education) we have already adapted to the shopping equivalent to remote learning. We may bemoan the loss of the small independent strores in a local downtowns, be we have voted with our dollars.. First we switched our shopping model from local small stores to national chain big boxes. Now we have switched from the big boxes to on-line remote shopping.. We search Google for bargains, we buy from Amazon, Walmart.com, and Ebay. These companies ship directly to us from their remote warehouses. These changes have not been forced upon us by Amazon or Ebay, we have voted with our dollars to spend them remotely.

Each fourth grade classroom teacher is now scrambling to figure out how to present their lesson plans remotely to a group of students who attended that particular school last year. . Yet the fourth grade curriculum is typically set by the state Superintendent of Public Instruction.. This is a perfect situation to adopt a true remote learning model.

All fourth graders in Washington learn Washington state history. Guess what boys and girls, Washington state history is the same in Spokane, Seattle, Chehalis and Bremerton... Just as books we buy from Amazon are. Why does each forth grade social studies teacher need to create from scratch a remote learning lesson plan. The state (or certainly the districts) could have created a basis for state-wide or district-wide teaching for several of the standard subjects. To my knowledge they haven't.

Certainly students should be grouped with individual teachers. But the groupings could be created using a variety of different criteria beyond the current one ...location. A state-wide model could mix inner-city kids from Tacoma with upper-income kids from Bainbridge Island, with Native American kids from Colville creating some of the diversity of educational opportunity the prople who consider themselves "Progressive" strive for. Or the groupings could be done on the basis of learning ability.

Trained master remote- learning teachers could present the main lesson plans to hundreds or thousands of students. These could be recorded sessions that are streamed on-demand. The individual teachers would observe the main sessions, and then interact with their learning groups at a classroom size level in real-time in enrich the learning and to assign individual home work..This would require a completely different preparation process for all teachers. Teachers really are creative and they can adapt... they are professionals.

However, it would require a completely different mind-set for administrators and school board members. Some will fail to adapt, some will need to be replaced. They have already failed to adapt to the "new normal" for the past five months. Those administrators who have and will continue to fail need to be replaced.