Quarantine - Day 40

Ella bakes cookies

Ella baked cookies today and began a project rearranging her room. She drew up a floor plan and got busy. Meanwhile, Abbie had a full day of remote learning, and Laura participated in a Zoom discussion with various people from the literacy community.

During Laura’s meeting, a disturbing theme began to emerge. One of the educators on the call expressed her concern about the challenge students will face getting caught up in the fall with the steep difficulty of distributing teaching resources citywide. There are, of course, many students who don’t have devices to access the internet or even connections to broadband. Even getting paper packets to them in a timely manner is an exercise that is not going smoothly. Contrast that with how Ella’s teacher started the day by reminding all the 5th grade parents that no student is behind. She reassured us that the teachers will get them caught up in the Fall because that is their job. There are clearly two different methods of instruction at work. One practically insures that a number of students are going to be scrambling to “catch up” to some arbitrary benchmark of achievement that for many was already practically impossible before the crisis even began while another abolishes the benchmark and sets a new goal while relieving students of unnecessary anxieties that add nothing worthwhile to their current experience.

The remote learning experience cannot supplant what was occurring in the schools prior to March 17th. The spring testing cycle that is relied upon to help determine college placement, academic performance, and even factors into school budgets and teacher salaries will not occur this year. The carefully constructed system that incentivizes based on such metrics as attendance, and academic ranking has got a gaping hole blown right through it. Pretending it isn't there won't work.  Forcing students to try to catch up now places some ahead and some hopelessly behind and is a only a strategy for increased failure. I heard the deep worry in the administrator’s voice on the call. She is hoping for help to arrive so that so many kids will not get left behind. I am waiting for leaders to say what my daughter’s teacher said today. So far, there has only been silence on the subject.