Reach every student, every day
"After schools closed to limit the spread of the new coronavirus," Eleanore Catolico reported in Chalkbeat, “advocates for Detroit’s vulnerable youth said the most frustrating part of trying to help them is finding them.”
We know that 56 million K-12 students no longer have school buildings to go to each day, but there is no reliable statistic on how many of those students have not been reached by their schools or districts since they were sent home.
A major challenge is the big gap in school record keeping. “Many districts do not have digital contact information (email addresses or cell phone numbers) for a significant portion of their most vulnerable families,” Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink explain in an EdWeek article. What this means is that now, two weeks after many school building closures began, tens of thousands of students may be unaccounted for by their schools and districts.
In this new era of distance learning, daily connection records should be the new attendance. School networks like Success Academy are leading the way with a practice of twice a day check-ins between every elementary school student and their teacher.
Insist on innovative instruction and real learning
“What will missing weeks or even months of school mean for students?” asks Matt Barnum in a recent Chalkbeat article. Surveying the research, he finds “Missing 10 days of math class in middle or high school led to lower test scores and grades, one recent paper found, while reducing high school graduation by 6 percentage points and college enrollment by 5 points” while research on long-term school closures found “those students were more likely to be unemployed, and earned between 2 and 3% less. There was even evidence that the children of those who missed more school did worse in school themselves, many years later.”
Simply put: if we let the long-term closure of school buildings result in a long-term gap in schooling, we are creating an education disaster for our children.
Most state leadership to date has been focused on setting limits for instruction and learning. For example, in Massachusetts the State Department of Education released a plan late last week that recommended that districts develop plans for “productive learning for approximately half the length of a regular school day.” The New Mexico Department of Education went further with guidance that set the “maximum student commitment in terms of direct instruction” at just 45 minutes in first grade, 60 minutes in third grade and 90 minutes in fifth grade.
How will districts address these limited learning goals? Survey results released on Saturday by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) found that "most districts are still not providing any instruction.” Further, CRPE found that "just four districts (less than 5% of those reviewed) provide formal curriculum, online instruction and student progress monitoring” and "none of the 82 districts we reviewed say they are attempting fully ‘synchronous' learning.” They conclude: “A critical component of effective distance learning is monitoring and tracking student progress…the most inequitable thing a school district can do right now is nothing."
It is clear that many of the plans rolled out to date fall short of what kids need. As the Washington Post Editorial Board put it on Friday: “Schools never prepared for this. But they better get ready now, fast.”
