Here's One Way to Do School—For Everyone—This Fall
Online curriculums could let teachers focus on students, whether they are in class or working from home.
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The ongoing spike in COVID-19 cases nationwide is happening at precisely the same time schools are trying to figure out how best to handle learning in the fall, and many districts are taking precautionary measures. The Houston Independent School District is starting the school year with six weeks of online schooling, lasting until mid-October. Atlanta is starting the year with nine weeks of online learning. Los Angeles students will be online for a yet-to-be determined amount of time at the start of the year. Just last week, Montgomery County, Maryland, announced that the entire fall semester would be online.
Other school districts are planning parallel online and in-person tracks, allowing students who wish to work from home to do so while other students attend class at least part-time.
This is a train wreck waiting to happen. As my friends Rick Hess and Nat Malkus pointed out in The Dispatch back in June, starting a school year remotely is different from transitioning to online learning after the school year has begun. Last year, teachers and students had months to develop relationships and rapport, so when they moved online, they had a strong foundation for the new medium. This fall, millions of students will have new teachers and new classmates. The foundation will be sand.
Having parallel online and in-person instruction is going to be tough to pull off. If teachers are expected to develop great lessons and monitor students both inside the classroom and working at home, it is going to be a huge amount of labor. If their own children are at home as well, it will be next to impossible.
Further, there are obvious questions in districts that offer some form of in-person learning as to what happens if case growth stays steady or local hotspots break out. What happens if a student or teacher is infected or a flareup happens in their community? They need to be ready to pivot from in-person to online learning overnight.
OK, that’s the doom and gloom. What if I told you that schools could provide coherent, continuous education without overwhelming teachers? It’s absolutely possible.
As it turns out, there are dozens of online learning curricula that already exist, ready to roll right now. Edementum provides online courses and assessments aligned to state standards. It is plug and play. FuelEd has more than 500 courses. Odysseyware has hundreds of courses too. The list goes on. These are not just elective classes either, they offer core academic classes for students at every grade level.
Districts have used these courses in the past for credit recovery, to offer classes that they might not have the staff to teach, for medically fragile students who need to work from home, and for a host of other reasons. Almost every state in the union, pre-coronavirus, already offered some form of online learning, whether through options provided by school districts or through online charter schools.
A school or school district would simply have to contract with these providers to access the courses for their students. Then students would work through their online coursework, mastering the necessary material on the provider’s platform, at home when necessary and at school when possible.
Given the fact that state and district budgets are already going to be stretched, these platforms have the advantage of being low cost. A license that covers all subjects for Study Island, one of the platforms offered by Edmentum, only costs $180 per student per year, a price point that could probably be negotiated down when purchased in bulk.
A system with an online learning platform as the backbone would be much more resilient to viral flareups. If a school has to close for a week, no big deal, students just work on their work from home. If the virus is at a low level, awesome, get everyone in the building working through their classwork in person.
Now there are issues around devices and internet access to be sure. In many districts, it would take time and money to get students the hardware that they need to make this work. But, freed from the worries about developing quality online learning on the fly, teachers and administrators can focus on getting students Chromebooks and internet connections. (Not to mention that these are problems districts are already going to face if they plan weeks of online learning at a time.)
So, now the $64,000 question: Can this work? Well, this is how the Epic charter schools in Oklahoma already operate for more than 30,000 students. Some of their students work online full-time while others come to in-person “blended learning centers” for a more traditional school environment. Whatever track students are in, they work away on self-paced online curriculum. Some just happen to do it at home while others do it in a school building. Others bounce back and forth. Seems like a pretty good proof of concept.
Julie Bohanon, whose son attends an Epic school in Tulsa, spoke about his experience at a blended learning center, saying, “He would go in and do the work that was assigned to him, he could get on the computer and do it. So he could get all of that stuff done at home, but he got the added benefit of being in the classroom with a teacher. And his teacher was just amazing. She's extremely smart, extremely caring, and she works hard with every student.”
This, rather than uncertainty, confusion, and frustration, could be the experience for children this year.
There will be a time in the future when schools can return to their normal rhythms and practices. But at least for this year, school leaders need to be realistic about what they are able to accomplish against the backdrop of an uncontrolled pandemic. Humility is key. Hand over instruction to platforms that are robust whether students are in the classroom or online and focus teachers’ energy on making sure that students are safe, feel part of a community, and are developing the social and emotional skills that they learn at school.
This will make teachers’ lives easier. It will ensure continuity of instruction. And, it will give parents an insurance policy that their child will keep learning even if school has to temporarily close.
Photograph by Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.
"Some of my friends survived for months on nothing but cake. There are cakes that contain all of the nutrition the body needs and it can even be a delightful change. Cake is a technological solution to the famine problems in our country. It's the obvious solution."
-- Marie Antoinette, 1789
Seriously though, can we talk about some of the problems for these plans for kids who do *not* go to an expensive private school or a private-money-enhanced charter school?
Starting with the fact that--and this may come as a shock to some--not all children possess a viable computer in their home.
And if you've ever actually *done* an initiative like this for a *real* school, the first thing you learn is that you either completely standardized on a set hardware platform or you basically need a dozen Nick Burns' to run around and fix everybody's computer and/or network connection so it works with the education software. And then the boxes you give out break, are lost, get stolen, spilled on, etc. All of today's Antoinette schools have built up systems to handle all of this over a number of years at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And of course, viable high-speed consistent Internet access. For some it would just take an appointment with the local cable company, others you would need to dig some trenches and put fiber down which would be done just in time for COVID-24.
And then there's the fact that online charter schools have *terrible* metrics for teaching since its so, so dependent on the home life of the given child. What suburban Marie Antoinette's often don't get is that for millions of children the care they get at *school* is the best care they will ever get. This is a hard reality of a big country.
Kids missing school over the next six months is going to be really, really bad. It will damage them in some cases permanently. It will lead to a lot of really bad situations with bad parents. It will cripple parent's abilities to hold jobs. It will lead to more crime. Etc. But opening schools in areas where the epidemic is strong and without major mitigation is a non-starter.
Our situation in our country is terrible. More terrible than any other developed country in the world. The virus, it turned out, wasn't an impeachment hoax.
I don't know all of the answers, but in a crisis our devotion to reality must be stronger than ever in order to get out of this mess.
This is a viable option that is certainly better than the attempt at “online learning” our school district attempted during the lockdown. That was essentially some randomly formatted, ad-hoc Google Docs that we’re horribly organized and impossible for my wife and I to navigate. The public school system lacks the expertise to put together a cohesive online curriculum and program that is both easy for the student to follow on their own and for the parents to administer and monitor at home.
The continuity of the approach laid out in this article would be huge for the children. We all crave stability and children are no exception. The question is: how do we get districts to sign up for this approach? Last year, I gave some constructive feedback to the principal about how we couldn’t figure out what our kids needed to do for the week or to monitor their progress. I was basically told to shove off. If they continue to attempt the same approach this year, then I’m going to have to do something else for the sake of my wife’s sanity.