11 votes

Many schools are already closed until the end of the year. So what happens to all those missed classes?

8 comments

  1. [2]
    Kuromantis
    Link
    Mildly interesting question from the article: @kfwyre, Do you think that's a good reason to not have a threshold or be cautious of such? There's also the question as to what happens to all the...

    Mildly interesting question from the article:

    Once schools are back to regular operations, a district could attempt to assess each student, set a cut line for passable achievement, and then move forward students accordingly. But that line would be arbitrary (Should 5 percent of students be held back? Maybe 20 percent?), and educators would suddenly face scads of frustrated families. Moreover, any assessment would capture effects caused by influences other than school closures. For example, considering that, on average, low-income students and students of color have lower achievement scores, and that more affluent families have probably been better positioned to continue home instruction during closures, any large-scale effort to hold back students will disproportionately affect disadvantaged boys and girls.

    @kfwyre, Do you think that's a good reason to not have a threshold or be cautious of such?

    There's also the question as to what happens to all the people who will change schools after this is over.

    5 votes
    1. kfwyre
      Link Parent
      I don't think you'll see a lot of "hard cuts" like this. There's a couple of reasons: First, accountability culture primarily frames education as something schools provide rather than something...
      • Exemplary

      I don't think you'll see a lot of "hard cuts" like this. There's a couple of reasons:

      First, accountability culture primarily frames education as something schools provide rather than something that students do. Thus, widespread failure of students will more likely be seen as a failure of the school than a failure of the students. Few schools are going to willfully shoot themselves in the foot like this.

      Second, it's incredibly hard to enforce any sort of rigid policy when the pandemic caught so many states and districts with their pants down. Few prepared or took this seriously, so their responses after the fact have been haphazard and short-sighted. I've complained on here about how my own district failed to heed warnings. My coworker was told by an administrator that we didn't have a plan because they didn't think we would be affected by the coronavirus less than 48 hours before our district fully shut down!

      Third, the reality of this situation is that it is very different for everyone. There are some families for whom this is like an extended vacation. They haven't felt any of the stresses, economic or medical, created by the pandemic. There are other families, however, for whom this experience has been incredibly difficult. People they know might have gotten sick or died; families might have had to put individuals in quarantine; families might not have enough money or food to get by from day to day; families might not have internet or technology that allows them to do online learning; families might be sharing limited technology among a large number of people (imagine a family of six all trying to juggle working from home and remote learning, all on one internet connection and with limited device availability). Inequality has always been embedded into American education, and those with the least resources and stability are the hardest hit by this. Failing them would be a further hardship on those with the most already.

      Fourth, there's the simple pragmatic idea that failing students following a global pandemic is just really bad optics. If there were ever a time for reducing stringent accountability and bureaucratic requirements, a near-global shutdown is it.

      I also think a lot of the discourse I've seen about this, especially at higher policy levels, has been very short-sighted. At the beginning, this was treated like a small one-or-two week interruption. Then it was "We'll go back in May." Now it's we'll go back next year. There's this assumption that everything will suddenly be normal by the beginning of the next school year that makes me very uneasy, because it goes against a lot of what we know about the longer arc of this pandemic. I don't believe that, come August or September, schools are just going to reopen as normal. I think there will likely still be a need for things like masks, social distancing, etc. I think remote learning is likely going to continue to be needed in some form, if not for everyone, at least for some to reduce the amount of students in schools.

      Articles like this, and I think a lot of the discussions I've seen, seem to be trying to figure out how to reset to normal as best as we can, but that sort of thinking has made us look more at where we think we should be than where we actually are. The rhetoric is constantly shifting as the closures extend because it's always seemed like the comfort of normalcy is just around the corner. I'd much rather districts and policy makers start to look at the reality that we might need a fundamental restructuring and reprioritization of educational outcomes, at least for the moment, if not long-term, on account of how unprecedented this is.

      9 votes
  2. [5]
    The-Toon
    Link
    This is an anecdotal hot take, but for American middle school, how much more content were they going to cover? Based on my experience in it, large amounts of content were repeated year from year....

    This is an anecdotal hot take, but for American middle school, how much more content were they going to cover?
    Based on my experience in it, large amounts of content were repeated year from year. I feel that for some of the students, they could easily survive with online school* for the remainder of the year with few negative consequences. This might be the same for elementary school too, but I don't remember enough to comment on it.

    Also, for anybody with experience with transitioning to online school, how long did it take after the shutdown to start online learning and what challenges were faced?
    This is partially addressed in the article, but from a bystanders point of view I felt like the time it was taking to transition — three weeks in the case of my local district — was somewhat long and in the case of my local district, felt haphazard.

    For context, I'm gen z and live in Southern California.

    Footnote

    * This is primarily addressing students with access to online school. I don't know much about the situations of people in districts without the option.

    4 votes
    1. [3]
      kfwyre
      Link Parent
      The repetition is somewhat by design and somewhat a failing of the design. Though standards still vary somewhat by state, by and large the "Common Core" is the base that most states share. The...

      The repetition is somewhat by design and somewhat a failing of the design. Though standards still vary somewhat by state, by and large the "Common Core" is the base that most states share.

      The Common Core is designed to repeat concepts in iterative ways. So, you might be introduced to a topic in 6th grade that then gets reintroduced and expanded on in 7th and then again in 8th. The idea is that each time the concept is encountered, depth and rigor are added to it.

      This sounds great in theory. It unfortunately collides with another reality, which is that students are, largely on account of the standards, asked to do so much, that many of the concepts don't stay in students' memory. They learn it in that particular unit, show it on the test, and then it gets flushed after they move on. As such it's not uncommon for teachers in, say, 8th grade, to have to go back and teach 7th and 6th grade standards because the students have forgotten the foundational skills required to reach the 8th grade requirements.

      Furthermore, the whole model assumes that widespread mastery will be achieved in the first place. We know, from data, that this isn't happening and hasn't ever happened. If you look at proficiency data for schools everywhere, you'll see that there are hardly any schools showing near 100% proficiency in their subject areas. I teach in a district that is revered for its quality schools and we are considered a local leader. Parents buy houses specifically in our district so that their kids can go to our schools. Our proficiency rate on standardized testing? About 70%. The school that I started teaching in, which was in a low-income area where 100% of students received free and reduced lunch? We had a 5 to 15% proficiency rate.

      This data is almost unilaterally looked at as a measure of school quality but is rarely interrogated as a failure of school policy. Accountability culture has pushed the "bad schools/bad teachers" narrative pretty hard. If, even in a great district, 30% of students are failing to meet standards, what does that say about the standards themselves? If there are districts with proficiency rates so low that they're in the single digits? What does that say?

      If 70% of students in my school are proficient on a regular basis according to standardized test data, that means that any given teacher can expect that roughly one in three students in a given classroom doesn't have the prerequisite skills. Does that make us a bad school? Or, perhaps, is the bar that students are being held to unachievable? Furthermore, if a teacher sees that many of the students in the classroom are not prepared, is the teacher a bad teacher for regressing to earlier concepts to try to develop mastery in those? Or are they a bad teacher should they hold to the standard so that students on grade level are challenged but those below are sunk?

      I'll also add that repetition in and of itself is not actually a bad thing. Repetition is an incredibly powerful way of locking things into long-term memory. The problem is that is has to be done strategically, and right now, spacing things out a year at a time isn't enough face-time with material for it to get stored and retrieved. The repetition has to occur semi-frequently early on, then with continuing spaced retrievals over a longer period. This doesn't happen often in education, unfortunately, because there's simply not enough time for us to go back with meaningful regular repetition. Not only are we trying to teach students the new stuff they need to learn, we're trying to backfill the stuff they didn't, and this is happening concurrent with a lot of other interfering realities (e.g. puberty, developing self-identity, greater awareness of place in the world, etc.). Middle school is already a tough time developmentally, much less academically.

      8 votes
      1. [2]
        skybrian
        Link Parent
        I'm wondering if there are any kids who know about spaced repetition apps?

        I'm wondering if there are any kids who know about spaced repetition apps?

        2 votes
        1. kfwyre
          Link Parent
          In terms of explicit recognition, probably not a lot, but in terms of actual exposure, a decent amount. Spaced repetition is built into a lot of online learning platforms; a lot of teachers...

          In terms of explicit recognition, probably not a lot, but in terms of actual exposure, a decent amount. Spaced repetition is built into a lot of online learning platforms; a lot of teachers (myself included) try to build it in to our classrooms as much as we can; and flashcards and the like are still a commonplace study skill.

          Unfortunately, it's not a cure-all, as there's also the matter of proper practice. In order for it to work, a student has to legitimately engage with the skill/information in the first place, and that's hard to effect since it requires buy-in on the students' part. It's the "making them drink" part of leading the horses to water.

          When it comes to skills practice, many students will just guess in order to move through things quickly, or they'll just cheat by sharing answers with one another. This closure has been especially eye-opening, as nearly everything we're now doing has moved to a digital learning platform. The data we get varies depending on the platform, but we'll see students who will finish a robust, complex 20 question assignment in seconds and score a 100 -- an almost sure sign of cheating. If the platform allows for multiple attempts, we'll see students blaze through it over and over again, taking it eight or ten times, guessing each round in hopes of getting a high score at random. If the platform lets them know the right answers as they go, they'll take it once and write down all the right answers, then plug those back in a second time to ace it. I've also talked before about how students regularly disconnect from work they find boring or difficult, so a lot of students will just "tune out" questions they don't know, rather than going through the effort to practice the skill/reinforce the knowledge.

          That's not to say these platforms don't work. For students that are motivated to do things correctly, they can be remarkably effective. Unfortunately, that's not the norm for a lot of our students.

          Almost every online platform tries to get around this by applying a reward schedule to their work in an attempt to rope kids in, but those only work if the kids care about the rewards, and with seemingly everything in their life giving them a gamified treadmill, they experience a sort of reward blindness similar to notification fatigue. One student described it to me as "everything on the internet is always trying to give us coins!"

          Plus, there's also the reality that applying explicit motivators can actually extinguish target behaviors should students' motivations shift from fulfilling intrinsic desires to acquiring extrinsic rewards. If a student loves writing but then starts getting "internet coins" for their writing, it can make any writing they then do without getting coins feel hollow, despite the fact that they loved writing before. I actually wonder if widespread online learning hasn't been damaging to students' educations overall because so many platforms try to train kids to learn for "coins", rather than learning because it's important, interesting, or valuable on its own.

          4 votes
    2. Whom
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      The reason for that repetition is that students at that age are leaking material from their heads at such an astounding rate that the education system gives up and just tries to dump the same...

      The reason for that repetition is that students at that age are leaking material from their heads at such an astounding rate that the education system gives up and just tries to dump the same things over and over in hopes that they won't be behind where they started when all is said at done. If anything, that's the age group most vulnerable to disruptions like this.

      (Also, your experience is the standard, but I just want to mention that it isn't that way everywhere. Where I'm from, middle school was very educationally aggressive and the beginning of high school mostly just repeated a lot of that material.)

      6 votes
  3. skybrian
    Link
    From the glimpses I get from Facebook, I get the idea that my friends' kids are astonishingly bad at self-control. Like, hour-long tantrums seem common, and not in two-year-olds? As a non-parent I...

    From the glimpses I get from Facebook, I get the idea that my friends' kids are astonishingly bad at self-control. Like, hour-long tantrums seem common, and not in two-year-olds? As a non-parent I wonder what's going on, whether things have changed, my memories of childhood are bad, my parents unusual, or my friends are unusual.

    It seems like there are far more distractions available than there used to be? I was often bored with everyday life as a kid, but I carried books with me the way everyone these days carries phones. (Along with playing Atari, reading USA Today and watching a lot of bad sitcom reruns on TV.)

    3 votes