What comes next for public schooling
BY JOHN KING AND RANDI WEINGARTEN, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS
The coronavirus pandemic has shuttered elementary and secondary schools across the country, with many closed for the remainder of this academic year.
Students are learning at home from educators who worked heroically to transition to remote learning, sometimes with barely a day’s notice, and who are finding meaningful ways to engage kids of all ages and abilities. We’ve seen firsthand that the health crisis caused by COVID-19 is exacerbating existing inequities in student access and learning — persistent issues in American education, and ones we must trust and support teachers to help solve.
It remains to be seen what our new normal will look like for school come fall, and our first priority is always keeping our students, families, educators and school personnel safe and healthy. But while we await adequate testing and, ultimately, a vaccine, we must start building a bridge to that future now: We must help students catch up from lost learning time, which particularly affects our most vulnerable students. We must plan for the future of education in a way that makes good on our promise to provide every child in America with the tools needed to succeed, regardless of geography or demography, but that does so within the reality of a very different world.
We have always known that remote learning is not a substitute for in-school education; the challenges posed by the distance model were only exacerbated by the lack of preparation, as the decision to close schools and make the switch happened seemingly overnight. Now, mitigating the educational inequities that so often present themselves with this format will require two key efforts:
First, we must invest in voluntary, multi-week summer school this year (online or in-person, based on the best public health guidance) as well as next year, in addition to other forms of extended learning time to help students make up for lost learning. Not every kid was able to log on to their Zoom classroom or FaceTime with his or her teacher over the last few weeks, so together with educators, parents and administrators, we must devise programs for summer and expanded learning to keep students from falling behind.
Second, we must make sure programs are adaptable — by engaging the best resource we have, our educators. By giving them the freedom to leverage their creativity, we might reimagine some of our standard CONTINUE READING: What comes next for public schooling | TheHill
