The Old thing, The Current Thing, or The next Thing?

There will come a day when the Covid-19 pandemic no longer grips our schools.  It may be next school year, though I maintain my initial prediction that it will take longer than that.  Nonetheless, that day will come, and when it does, we’re going to have three options for how we organize our schools and our entire educational system:

1. We could go back to the old thing
2. We could keep doing the current thing
3. We could do the next thing

That’s it.  Those are the only three options.  What would each entail?

            1. We could go back to the old thing

“Back to normal.”   That’s an option.  I’ve already written that this would not be my choice, but nonetheless, it remains a choice, and a likely one at that.

What would we have to do to accomplish this?

Not much.

All we’d have to do is set up our schools the same way we always have: 

• Kids are dropped into a grade level based on their age
• They’re taught certain, predetermined things for a certain, predetermined amount of time
• Every so often, numerical or letter grades will be issued showing that some kids learned a lot of it and others learned very little
• Repeat

That’s pretty much the setup. ​

Report cards merely report that some students have learned and some students have not.  They don't report what a student knows, doesn't know, or should learn next.

Sure, many students will have fallen incredibly behind and be incredibly unprepared for their age-based grade level, but that’s nothing new - ⅔ of US students were already behind grade level before all of this.  We will simply make the same, empty promise we’ve always made - that the next teacher will have the ability to fill in these giant gaps and keep up with the next grade level curriculum at the same time.  We might modestly expand early intervention, response to intervention, special education, credit recovery, and remediation programs to show that we’re trying. Ultimately, however, the gaps created by the pandemic will just grow with each passing year, as learning gaps already did before.

This would be the easiest option.  It wouldn’t take much effort, problem-solving, or extra funding, which is why it remains such a likely option.  

            2. We could keep doing the current thing

​I’m starting to see the potential for pandemic-inspired school to simply become the long-term outcome.  The longer we spend operating fully and partially online and getting better and better at it, the more I think it is possible that we declare the emergency option to be a huge innovation on its own and to congratulate ourselves for “disrupting” education in such a contemporary way.  In the end, we could simply offer an online option from now on, and declare that to be an incredible and inventive solution that revolutionizes the system.

I think the potential is growing that the only change that comes from this experiment is a a new way to experience the old thing - a permanent online option.

Which, of course, it doesn’t.

It is simply offering two different options for experiencing the old thing.  All of the problems with #1 would persist here as well.  

I do, admittedly, believe that offering an online option is part of the long-term solution.  As I’ve written previously, some students’ issues have indeed been resolved by having the option to learn from home.  However, merely keeping an online option, while it may have solved some problems that existed before the pandemic, won’t solve the problems being created by the pandemic.  An online option alone will not help students who have fallen years behind to catch up or to navigate the system in a customized way. 

I sincerely hope we avoid the deception that changing the format is akin to changing the system.  It is a trap I see us becoming more and more likely in which to find ourselves entangled.

            3. We could do the next thing

Now is our chance.  We know full well that, whenever this is over, we’re going to have kids who have incredibly different learning needs.  Our current system is not built for different.  Our current system is we put you in the same grade, teach you the same thing in the same amount of time as other kids your age, and we report how much of it you did and didn’t learn.  Sure, we have tried to wrench some programs for different needs into the system, but they’ve never won out over the power that the main system exerts.

Unfortunately, building something to meet the needs we know we’re facing isn’t likely because it isn’t easy.  In my mind, the next thing differs from the old thing in four main ways:

If your reaction to reading that list was,

• Yes! Omigosh!  Absolutely!
• But
• That sounds impossible
• That sounds expensive
• And
• I don’t know how to do that

,then I'm with you. But I’m willing to try.  I think trying to build the new thing, even if it comes out less-than-perfect, would still be better than going back to the old thing.  We know the old thing can’t handle what’s coming.  We know it.  So do we go back anyways?  Hope for the best?  Promise we’ll tweak it and make it work for everybody this time?

Or do we start building?

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