While parents shelter-in-place maintaining a sense of normalcy for their children, those critical of public education won’t stop criticizing public schools. They believe that technology should replace teachers and brick-and-mortar schools. They imply that after this difficult period ends, we will move from brick-and-mortar schools to online instruction.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
In her recent talk about the Covid-19 crisis, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said:
I’ve always believed education funding should be tied to students, not systems, and that necessity has never been more evident (4:23).
Joy Hofmeister the school chief in Oklahoma may have put this best. She told me school isn’t a building. It’s students, teachers, and families working together to advance learning. She’s right and that’s our shared mission (5:52).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3814kITTNI
Hofmeister’s state has been using four online programs:
- Epic Charter School
- E-School Virtual Charter Academy
- Insight School of Oklahoma (This is powered by K12 Inc.)
- Oklahoma Connections Academy
- Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy (This is powered by K12 Inc.)
Oklahoma has seen controversy concerning virtual schooling, especially surrounding Epic Charter School. All of these programs have troubling track records. Why they continue to drain district and state funding from legitimate public schools is questionable.
Concerns swirl around Epic’s use of funding, but the Coronavirus has delayed court hearings. The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office has to wait to get Epic Charter Schools’ for-profit operator to comply with their state investigative audit. The online charter continues to thrive during this crisis.
Tulsa Kids editor Betty Casey raised questions about online Amplify’s Core Knowledge Language Arts CKLA. The point being, all has not been perfect with online learning.
School building criticism means to move students home to learn for good or to online charter schools, museums, or anywhere other than a place that brings students together with real teachers. Online charter schools will rely on facilitators, individuals who are more like babysitters, and not qualified teachers.
Whenever there’s disregard for public school buildings there’s an agenda to end brick-and-mortar public schools.
School Disruptor Advocate Michael Horn
Another concern comes from Michael Horn, who co-wrote Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns with the late Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson. Horn wrote an essay, “The Coronavirus Exposes America’s Misplaced Educational Values.”
Horn uses a parent’s complaint about attendance policies from the past to promote the idea that online instruction is best, that students learn better anytime or anywhere they want. It seems strange that Horn writes this while teachers work to get assignments to students online, and parents struggle to schedule their homes like a school environment to maintain consistency.
He gripes about public schools.
In an effort to create sensible policies that promote the well-being and learning of all children, we’ve built a system that is consummately focused on compliance around the time spent on learning—how many days do you attend school and how many minutes do you sit in a seat—that misses the bigger picture. That bigger picture is the “why” behind the various policies. In other words, when well-meaning policymakers wrote a specific law or regulation, what was the goal they were trying to achieve?
School leaders maybe should be more understanding when students miss school, but such accountability measures were placed on public schools years ago. Teachers and administrators understand the importance of school attendance to get funding.
A conversation on how to be more fair-minded when it comes to attendance might be warranted, but should we cast attendance laws aside? End public education altogether?
Horn makes a huge jump from attendance to what students learn in school.
The central questions we should care about revolve around things like: Are all students—each and every one—learning what they need to thrive as adults? Are we preparing them to participate in a vibrant democracy as informed citizens? Are they healthy? Are they receiving the social and emotional support and external relationships they need?
Most of the problems with public education came about due to the lousy policies foisted on schools by Presidents who wanted to privatize public education.
Horn works for an education ecosystem investment firm called Entangled Group. He’s also on the board of Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund and the LearnLaunch Institute. He’s executive editor at the conservative, anti-public school, pro-privatization publication Education Next, and he’s a venture partner at NextGen Venture Partners.
He says this about the Covid-19 pandemic:
The good news—amidst a sea of bad news with the COVID-19 pandemic—is that there may now exist an opportunity to begin to reset our nation’s focus on inputs over individual student outcomes.
Given that schools are no longer operating on a seat-time basis for the rest of the year—that is, they aren’t being funded based on the minutes students sit in seats as they customarily are—the onset of COVID-19 allows us to begin to rethink our flawed time-based educational model.
Remember Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s words after Katrina?
Duncan said,
…that education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better. And the progress that it made in four years since the hurricane, is unbelievable.
Many don’t consider the Big Easy charter school experiment a success story. Ask parents of students with disabilities denied services what they think of the charter schools in New Orleans.
Hopefully, online learning is working out for students during this difficult time. Technology can be useful, but it is not always quality programming. I know some parents who are working on skills that don’t require screens.
DeVos, Horn, and tech enthusiasts like them, are banking on what could be a real possibility of ending brick-and-mortar schools after the Covid-19 crisis ends. They hope Americans will become comfortable with online learning and seek learning ecosystems where students will learn whatever and whenever they want. They believe structure and consistency won’t matter.
This train of thought is not hidden or unique. The Denver Post recently reported: “Covid-19 Exposes Opportunity in Colorado for a Stronger Schools Not Based In Buildings.”
Will funding after the crisis transfer from teachers and brick-and-mortar schools to screens and online programs? Parents might not seem excited about this today, but will they be on board for it tomorrow?
We can do some soul searching to figure out how to improve our public school system. But if there’s anything this crisis has taught us, it’s how we miss communicating in person. I hope that after the crisis is over, the country will have renewed hope for public schools.
Thank you, This is a broad conversation in my view regarding what Covid-19 forces us to think about. Everyone parents, teachers have to confront with what is essential as we quarantine, whether it is who is in the workforce or what supplies are necessary. In this discussion, the one person essential to children’s education is their teacher, not a virtual one, a real live breathing teacher in a room filled with a sustainable number of children he/she can serve, nurture, respond to in real time and educate. Children respond in nonverbal cues more often than verbal as teachers lift their language so they are better at communicating their questions and needs to learn. In this cocoon stage of this virus, we must come out with a clear vision of what is essential in the caring of our young, As a former first grade teacher listening to children was being able to “read” all their emotional cues. This cannot be done virtually. It is a sensory, real time response. Parents know this, let’s not allow them to be convinced otherwise.
We must not allow the privatizers to write the script, use mal aligned data to promote. We must discredit those proponents of a system that dehumanizes a very human endeavor. Thank you again for being part of shining the light on the hidden agenda of these privatizers. We need a sustainable humane educational system.
The big issue I foresee is states defunding public ed to balance their deficit brought on by the financial impact of this crisis. Essential will be a conversation when considering budget shortfalls.
Thank you, Laura. I appreciate this comment very much. Few realize how important those emotional cues are to learning and understanding. Teachers might take these cues for granted since it is so automatic.
The concern for how the budget shortfall will hurt schooling is real too. I hope everyone reads your comment.
There is so much to respond to here! For the data driven, the fact that missing school has been correlated with lower performance metrics should be of interest. Simply put, kids learn more when they are physically present in school. The dismal performance of virtual charters should make that insight a “no brainer.” Even though this way of presenting the case vastly oversimplifies the argument for brick and mortar institutions, it has to be considered by those who insist on seeing schooling only as a numbers game.
Excellent point! Thank you!
I’m old, retired and grumpy but, IMHO, on-line learning (I’ve taught that way) is just another excuse for politicians and right wing budget cutters to segregate the students as the “haves” and the “have nots.”
On-line learning is not a panacea, it is not cheap, it is fraught with psycho-social and emotional dangers and limited efficacy. And unless the “Matrix” is real, our species can not survive by isolating learners in their homes; relying on flickering images on a screen.
I agree. Thank you.
Schools do much more than educate students, They are social institutions where kids learn sociocultural values through personal interaction with a broad range of people. There is also the interaction with other students that allows them to grow and mature socially. Online education can’t even come close to the richness and efficacy of learning in a living social environment.
Your first sentence says it all. Thank you, George.
We are headed to becoming recluses. Students won’t need social skills because we are headed to a socialless existence.
This is something that I have been speaking about for years, the government would save a ton of money by closing brick and mortar schools. The question remains is how will taxpayers be affected by a move such as this? There is also a major concern with regard to socialization of children. If students are isolated from daily interaction with their peers, how will it impact them when dealing with other people outside of their homes? Too much to consider here but I can definitely see this happening in the near future.
There’s nothing to show this will improve learning or society. Thanks for your comment, Terrence.
I agree, it will not improve learning in any manner, if anything it will be a detriment to learning as it is proving to be over the past month or so.
Might indeed save money in the short-term. It wouldn’t take too long, in my opinion, to live to regret such a move. When we largely take out human contact and replace it with hours of on-line instruction, would we be happy to save a few bucks and leave young people’s humanity impoverished? Big question. No simple answer. Big risk to take for unknowable costs.
I agree. Thank you for your feedback, John.
Besides, with all of this focus on standardized testing, the government has been disconnected from students actually learning for some time now.
The focus on standardized testing originated with poor policies and mandates placed on schools to privatize them. Public schools have great potential for a democratic society.
I see it differently.
I’ve been teaching online now for two weeks. My district has supplied me with a laptop and passed out over 30,000 laptops and ipads (105,000 student population). We use Google Classroom.and are a title one district. Its not good.
Currently as of this week, 89% of my 161 students have made contact at least once. Only 29% have completed 5 short lessons given this week in my subject. Unknown about other subjects (I teach middle school). Its unknown as to why so many students have not participated fully. We are trying to find out why..
I will not be surprised if a number of parents insist on online education through our school district next year. Will we accommodate for that?
This may be the death knell for online education. It’s not the same. It’s not as effective. It will not replace a classroom and face to face contact. When the politicians and colleges see the negative effects in test scores, that may change. We can hope.
One thought… how about using online instruction for severe classroom behavior issues? Think about it. The disruption in the classroom stops, other students who feed off of that return to normal. The disruptive student loses an audience. Parents of disruptive students are forced to deal with the child’s behavior. I believe that a majority of disruptive students could learn to moderate their behavior.
Yes, I understand that many disruptive students have issues beyond their control. But I have seen little evidence that how we handle these situations works. How about thinking about the mental health of the other students and the teacher in a classroom that isn’t functioning?
Thanks for listening. I feel better.
Hi William, 161 students! Wow!
Teachers have a lot on their plate right now, along with the fear of the virus. Feel free to reply anytime.
I have heard from parents who don’t like online, but do not blame their child’s teacher, and this has been especially difficult for students with disabilities.
You also raise some interesting points, especially about disruptive students. If students with severe behavior issues work better online, why not consider it? It would be especially good if it were part of a plan to work on socializing for some activities.
Great thoughts! Thanks for sharing.
That comment about disruptive students caught me, too. As a special education teacher, the rules were such that removing a child from school was not an easy task, nor should it have been. Otherwise, more of my students would have been removed before there was a clear and compelling reason to do so. However, if a child is suspended, online schooling could be a benefit since the child is given the chance to not fall so far behind while the rest of the class is no longer subjected to a continual barrage of out of bounds behavior.
You are absolutely right. I do think that classrooms are going to experience a permanent loss of 20% of the students.
No. This is just silly fearmongering. Brick and mortar schools are not going anywhere. Virtual instruction is not new but it has not been widely embraced by K-12 schools. It will expand the range of opportunities available to students that, for whatever reason, are not able to attend school in-person.
I hope you’re right, Jeff, but are you familiar with anyplace anytime learning? I am not against virtual instruction as a tool, but check out the groups and the many people who do see virtual online learning as the future of schooling.