Stay Positive When Considering the Future of Education

Make no mistake, no one is thrilled with how education is currently operating in America. Parents are eager to send their kids back to school, frustrated by the lack of effective leadership from their district, and/or by having to spend weeks serving as full-time teacher, parent and employee. And schools are eager to welcome students back, knowing that what they’re offering kids right now likely doesn’t come close to meeting the quality standards it should.

As frustrating as these times are for parents and teachers, we cannot allow this widespread implementation of emergency “distance learning” reflect poorly on online education as a whole.

In tried-and-true virtual schools, parents are educational partners, not teachers. Curriculum, while still in line with state standards, is optimized for online learning. IEPs are implemented and followed through on. Students are given a schedule, and they are held accountable. And no one is “socially distanced” at all, as students are regularly interacting with their classmates during live sessions, on assignments, at science and career fairs, and in clubs like cooking, debate, FBLA and National Honor Society.

We especially cannot allow policymakers to walk back the progress they’ve made on making online education options accessible to families nationwide, because let’s face it – things aren’t just going to snap back to normal by September. Even when schools do reopen, there are going to be many parents, students and teachers wanting to return, but rightfully wary of the associated risks.

Take, for instance, a student whose parent has cancer, or a teacher whose elderly parent lives with them. Are we going to force those students and teachers to return to school, their only other option a lackluster repeat of what they’re currently experiencing?

The answer needs to be no. We need to protect parents,’ students’ and teachers’ right to choose what kind of learning and teaching works best for them right now. Not knowing what the next week, month, or season will look like, we need more, better options – not a select few offered by schools that are new to this space.

Effective online learning takes time and thoughtful planning, training and delivery. It’s taken us 20 years to get to a place where we are seeing students not just survive their K-12 online education, but thrive within it.

Online education is for anyone, but we realize that even under normal circumstances it isn’t for everyone. Some students’ needs can be better met online, while others can be better met in a brick-and-mortar school. Unfortunately, the misfires of many school systems in this experimental period are adding fuel to an old fire that pits in-person instruction against virtual.

It simply shouldn’t be a matter of either/or. Online and in-person instruction have coexisted with great success for years now, as online schools serve as a safe haven for students who were bullied, who suffer difficult or even debilitating medical conditions, or who want to get a head start on their career.

At the end of the day, that’s the point: We all want each and every student to thrive in school. Some aren’t thriving under their district’s makeshift online learning models and can’t wait to get back to school, but some are – perhaps because their district had a distance learning plan already in place. It’s for all students that we must leave negativity out of the conversation about the future of education.

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The CDC Provides Draconian Guidelines for Reopening Schools Without Reading Its Own Research

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has weighed in on the topic of reopening schools. It appears CDC staff wrote the guidelines without reading their own research. It is almost as if they would prefer hazmat suits become the fall fashion rage for those under 18.

The CDC guidelines are not mandatory, but they don’t seem to be based in current research or reality. Let’s start with the so-called ‘Guiding Principles’:

Lowest Risk: Students and teachers engage in virtual-only classes, activities, and events.

More Risk: Small, in-person classes, activities, and events. Groups of students stay together and with the same teacher throughout/across school days and groups do not mix. Students remain at least 6 feet apart and do not share objects (e.g., hybrid virtual and in-person class structures, or staggered/rotated scheduling to accommodate smaller class sizes).

Highest Risk: Full sized, in-person classes, activities, and events. Students are not spaced apart, share classroom materials or supplies, and mix between classes and activities.

Measuring the Risk: CDC staff should know that, according to the CDC statistics, the incidence of severe illness in children is near zero and generally attributable to preexisting conditions. Senator Rand Paul went through the data during a Senate hearing and Dr. Fauci had to grant his premise:

If these guidelines for reopening schools are intended to protect teachers, regular education classes generally keep them naturally distanced from the class with short face-to-face interactions. A significant number of them are also in a low-risk age group. The CDC’s updated fatality rates project a 0.05% mortality rate for people ages 0-49. This does not seem to make a compelling case to completely change how schools operate.

Focus the Effort

Rather than reconfiguring the way schools operate, it would be a better use of scarce resources in a strained system to focus on appropriate accommodations for at-risk students and teachers. Perhaps a teacher with a pre-existing condition can lead virtual classrooms for children whose parents choose to continue with homeschooling. At-risk students could participate in these classes or attend facilities that have a different schedule and precautions as the CDC recommends above.

But the idea that you are going to control students mixing with other children outside their class after is patently insane. As is the idea that they are going to stay six feet apart. Does anyone at the CDC have children? They are social creatures who share stuff, hug each other, and whisper secrets.

Further, many parents rely on school district-provided transportation to schlep their children to and from school. This would include interactions with children from other grades and classrooms.

More of the CDC reopening schools guidelines seem to go directly at surface transmission of the coronavirus. Eliminating communal spaces, the prohibition of shared objects, and eliminating the use of playground equipment are on the list.

The CDC’s own research concluded that surface transmission is highly unlikely because transmission seems to be a product of the amount of viral exposure and the length of time. Surfaces are unlikely to house the number of virus particles required to transmit an infection and the individual is not in contact with them long enough.

This does not mean that increased sanitation of surfaces should not be in order. This is contained within the CDC guidelines for reopening schools and it is appropriate. But the idea that a child is likely to catch COVID-19 from a trip across the monkey bars or a zip down a slide seems laughable.

This equipment is also outside in the sun. DHS research has found that the sun reduces the half-life of the virus to a minute or two and this effect is enhanced by heat above 70 degrees. It almost seems like the school playground would be a very safe place for children to be. And recess or free time increases learning and overall health and decreases behavior problems.

The guidelines for reopening schools also have children marching down one-way corridors and encouraged to wear masks. If the goal is to make children into little reservoirs of anxiety who think the world at large is a terribly dangerous place, let’s do that. Because the climate cabal hasn’t gone far enough toward creating little balls of neuroses. How about no.

If a child lives with an at-risk adult, he or she can mask at home with other family members. This framing would be much less stressful because it would be about protecting someone else. Grandma has a heart problem, so we want to make sure she doesn’t get sick. Parents can explain this in an age-appropriate way and model the behavior.

The Kids Are Alright

Finally, the chance of children being a large factor in COVID-19 transmission seems to be exceptionally rare at best. In Iceland, where DeCode Genetics has done extensive testing and genetic analysis of patient virus samples, researchers could not find one case where a child infected an adult. A child in the U.K. came in contact with roughly 170 people after contracting COVID-19 on vacation and infected no one. Not even his siblings. Further:

On Thursday, the picture was further muddied by coverage of a large review of 78 available studies conducted by the UK Royal College of Paediatrics, which said: “The role of children in transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role.”

Not really that muddy. Especially when additional information is added:

In Iceland, where 6% of the population was tested, none of the 848 children tested were positive. In a town in Italy where 2.6% of residents had the new coronavirus, 0% of children under 10 years tested positive.

Get Realistic

So instead of complete remaking school, which may not even be possible, the CDC could concentrate on a few basic things:

Give grants for districts to install UV-C lights
Recommend strict policies around ensuring the ill, staff and students, stay home

Focus epidemiologists on appropriately identifying risk factors for severe COVID-19 disease

Ensure educators and parents are taught about risk factors so that individuals and institutions can make healthy decisions for at-risk staff and children

Encourage time outside during the school day

Encourage good hygiene habits

Ensure proper notification procedures are in place should a case of COVID-19 be identified

We are going to be living with this virus for the foreseeable future. Children need to have the option to return to schools and daycare as parents are returning to work. The current CDC guidelines for reopening schools g do nothing but reinforce the panic porn culture that has become all-too-common in managing COVID-19.

We can do better than this and effectively manage public health without terrifying our children.

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California’s Common Core Apologia

In a recent blog, Dr. Michael Kirst, past president of the California State Board of Education between 2011 and 2019, attempts to defend his record of Common Core implementation in California during that period.

His first point goes to the fidelity of NAEP as a measuring tool, since it is not perfectly aligned with Common Core. Indeed it is not—purposely! NAEP was not designed to be aligned with any particular state standards and that has been true for decades. This hasn’t blocked states from exhibiting improvements over time, sometimes smoothly, sometimes in spurts. But the results on NAEP almost never—never!—declined.

Under Common Core, in the 2015, 2017, and 2019 administration of NAEP scores broadly and significantly declined across most states, including California.

Yet Dr. Kirst starts by blaming the national yardstick that has served us faithfully for decades. What does that say about the quality of his “rebuttal”?

Then Dr. Kirst turns to argue that California has made significant improvement since Common Core. His evidence? A 10% improvement in grades 3 and 4 over four years of SBAC administration. What was politely glossed over is the fact that half of this change occurred between the first administrations, when young students first confronted new ways to answer computer-based items with new formats and a new interface, and the second administration when they had an opportunity to practice and adjust to them. If we remove the first SBAC administration, the change from 2015 to 2019 are rather unimpressive 5-6% in early grades that declines to essentially zero or even slightly negative by grades 8 and 11.

Yet this raises another question. Is SBAC test even valid, both facially (do its items sample actual subject matter content?) and psychometrically (does item format allows us to reliably interpret the results, give the new fancy and untested formats introduced by it?). The answer is nobody knows, as no external experts were given access to validate that test.

Here is the little we do know—since California abolished under Common Core almost any continuous measure of achievement.

During Common Core, California students taking Algebra I in grade 8 dropped from 54% in 2013 just before Common Core started, to 18% by 2019. A two thirds drop in six years!

And here are California NAEP scores for that period. With the exception of fourth grade reading, the results are flat or negative.

Incidentally, we also know that successful Black AB Calculus takers dropped by almost half between 2014 and 2018, and successful Black BC Calculus dropped by one third. That is what we know about California achievement from objective sources since Common Core took over in 2014.

We don’t know how many students successfully took Algebra 1 in middle and high schools—that test was eliminated in Calfornia under Common Core. We don’t know how many students successfully took Geometry or Algebra 2—those tests were eliminated under Common Core. We don’t know how many students are truly ready for the California State University System—that customized test for CSU was replaced by some arbitrary passing score on SBAC.

So we don’t know a lot. The public can no longer track what is really occurring in California education. Clear test-based accountability has been replaced by meaningless colorful dashboards based on the single unvalidated test: the SBAC.

So this is California reality, rather than the tiny improvement sliver Dr. Kirst attempts to present as the whole picture. But what about the future? Kirst promises that things will just get better, instructional materials exist (well, they existed at least since 2014, many of them free), and the future is bright.

Is it?

In 2011, the authors of this article talked with Dr. Kirst to make sure he understood the problems with the Common Core validation by David Conley, and that the previous California standards were judged superior. Nothing was done.

In 2013 Kirst was informed by us in detail as to why the New Generation Science Standards were inferior to the then-current California science standards. This was at the time of a scathing report in June 2013 from the Fordham Institute showing the NGSS to be, effectively, content-empty. Kirst assured us that he was aware of these drawbacks and that California would not adopt NGSS.

In September 2013 Dr. Kirst presided over the adoption of NGSS for California.

Today in California, after 8 years of Dr. Kirst’s state board presidency, we have a system that has no external accountability, where everything is being based on an internal secret test. We have inferior science standards and a system that has seemingly declined in performance. Denigrating NAEP, the only external measure left, is not a very good argument.

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