What To Do About the Schools?

As the summer of “meh” winds down, the debate about how to handle the new school year amidst the ongoing COVID pandemic grows more raucous by the day as time to develop a good option for restarting American education (and there are no good options) runs out.

The Atlantic recently featured an article by New York ICU nurse Kristen McConnell titled “I’m a Nurse. Teachers Should Do Their Jobs Like I Did.”

Now, Ms. McConnell likely had nothing to do with that rather combative title. The construction of click-baity links is something left to professional journalists and editors, but McConnell’s argument that teachers are essential just like grocery store workers and, yes, medical professionals like herself is not far removed from the sentiment slapped at the top of her essay.

And, to be sure, some of her argument makes sense. Yes, education is essential to our society. Yes, social distancing and mask-wearing have made grocery stores and hospitals reasonably safe to resume necessary operations. Her question, then, is why not schools?

There’s no easy answer here, and that’s where McConnell is wrong. She pretends that the situation on the ground and the immediacy of the societal need is simply the same as with her grocery store and hospital analogies.

New York city just released a plan to add 2,475 new ICU beds to the system. To. The. System. City-wide. At my suburban high school, we have more than 2,475 students. Every. Day. Likewise, a grocery store on a slow day (which they should all be slow days if we’re sticking to essential shopping only) will have at least two thousand customers. In. A. Day.

But in an American high school like mine, there are three thousand bodies stuck inside a big, blocky building for eight hours. Eight. Long. Hours. Thousands of teenage bodies colliding with one another again and again like billiard balls.

It’s not the same. It’s not controllable.

And, of course, McConnell also admits that her teacher husband was doing his job even when schools weren’t in session–through Zoom, through e-mail, through whatever means necessary. (Just as she admits we’re only having this conversation because of a monumental failure of leadership in our government.)

My job in the next few weeks will not be easier. I will not have the next couple of weeks off. (Granted, the being able to wear shorts every day is kinda nice.)  We will be conducting live classes following a bell schedule, but through Microsoft TEAMS. However, we can’t bank on every student being able to log in with their schedule because of potential conflicts for students, like taking care of younger siblings or watching over elders or a thousand other things we can’t and shouldn’t presume to know about their lives at home. So students will also be able to access our recorded lessons and do the classwork asynchronously later. Taking attendance for the day to report our head counts to the state will become a fun little game of detective work! Hooray!

So this isn’t a vacation for America’s teachers and we’re not asking for one. I think most of us would prefer to go back to normal. But that’s not happening.

Social distancing in school, as Ms. McConnell suggests, means that my classroom right now has only half its desks out (the rest are piled against the wall) and their positions are mapped out by blue tape on the floor. Our current cockamamy plan is that some students will remain online in the coming weeks and some will come back, further complicating the challenges of teaching during the pandemic.

I understand that teaching elementary kids online seems highly problematic. We might expect high school age students to learn through a computer screen, but how much are little, little ones going to get out of such an experience? But, as my wife who has taught second and third grade for over twenty years will tell you, there’s something pretty unpalatable about trapping kids in their classrooms all day without breaks for PE, music, lab time, lunch in the cafeteria, etc. Those little bodies and minds don’t deserve to be stuck in socially-distanced rows, unable to circulate. The monotony and sameness is stifling.

And maybe that’s the lesson we need to learn from all of this.

Our schools are not healthy places for our kids to go back to during this pandemic, but maybe that’s because our schools weren’t healthy places to go to in the first place.

Many–myself included–have argued that this crisis presents myriad opportunities to reevaluate how our society runs. How much are we paying those “essential” workers anyhow? Why should people who suffer through weeks and months of recovery for COVID leave the hospital only to face inevitable bankruptcy because of our for-profit healthcare system?

Maybe we need to also ask: What should our schools look like?

We are still running an industrial-era school system in the post-industrial world. Kids, with their bright, curious minds, shoved into rooms with fluorescent lights for hours and hours. Asked to sit still. Listen. Take this test. Then another. And another.

Though we can’t make every pie-in-the-sky idea for transforming schools work for this upcoming school year, we should seize the larger opportunity to make fundamental change in the way we teach and the way students learn.

I’ve embraced this ethos for the upcoming semester. After years of flirting with the Ungrading movement, I’ve rebuilt my syllabi to deprioritize arbitrary numbers as a means of assessing student performance and product, and shifted toward a model that (hopefully) focuses them more on reflection, self-assessment, and meaningful learning. It’s an experiment, but honestly, it can’t be worse for kids than the mind-numbing system based on constant multiple choice testing and teacher-centered “engagement” that has dominated educational thinking in the 21st century. Through my twenty year career, I’ve watched our school system sink deeper and deeper into a morass where students are measured only based on what circles they can bubble in and where teachers are expected to run a three-ring circus of constant stimulation to command students’ limited attention spans and (somehow) work miracles.

It’s absurd. So let’s start asking some hard questions: What do these tests actually measure? Do students need to be in class this many hours? Could we redesign schools to focus less on hours of education and more on actual progress–but not measured just by standardized tests? Smaller classes for less time? More student-driven learning? Outside learning?

This is an inflection point in history. We’re seeing the limits of our politics, of our healthcare system, of our justice system, of our economy–it’s time we reckon with education as well and build something better.