In middle-of-nowhere Arizona
This is so sad (and scary and unfair and unreasonable). A school superintendent in Arizona tells a Washington Post reporter what that’s like now:
The governor has told us we have to open our schools to students on August 17th, or else we miss out on five percent of our funding. I run a high-needs district in middle-of-nowhere Arizona. We’re 90 percent Hispanic and more than 90 percent free-and-reduced lunch. These kids need every dollar we can get. But covid is spreading all over this area and hitting my staff, and now it feels like there’s a gun to my head. I already lost one teacher to this virus. Do I risk opening back up even if it’s going to cost us more lives? Or do we run school remotely and end up depriving these kids?
This is your classic one-horse town. Picture John Wayne riding through cactuses and all that. I’m superintendent, high school principal and sometimes the basketball referee during recess. This is a skeleton staff, and we pay an average salary of about 40,000 a year. I’ve got nothing to cut. We’re buying new programs for virtual learning and trying to get hotspots and iPads for all our kids. Five percent of our budget is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where’s that going to come from? I might lose teaching positions or basic curriculum unless we somehow get up and running.
I’ve been in the building every day, sanitizing doors and measuring out space in classrooms. We still haven’t received our order of Plexiglas barriers, so we’re cutting up shower curtains and trying to make do with that. It’s one obstacle after the next. Just last week I found out we had another staff member who tested positive, so I went through the guidance from OSHA and the CDC and tried to figure out the protocols. I’m not an expert at any of this, but I did my best with the contact tracing. I called 10 people on staff and told them they’d had a possible exposure. I arranged separate cars and got us all to the testing site. Some of my staff members were crying. They’ve seen what can happen, and they’re coming to me with questions I can’t always answer. “Does my whole family need to get tested?” “How long do I have to quarantine?” “What if this virus hits me like it did Mrs. Byrd?”
Mrs. Byrd is the teacher who died of it.
We got back two of those tests already — both positive. We’re still waiting on eight more. That makes 11 percent of my staff that’s gotten covid, and we haven’t had a single student in our buildings since March. Part of our facility is closed down for decontamination, but we don’t have anyone left to decontaminate it unless I want to put on my hazmat suit and go in there. We’ve seen the impacts of this virus on our maintenance department, on transportation, on food service, on faculty. It’s like this district is shutting down case by case. I don’t understand how anyone could expect us to reopen the building this month in a way that feels safe.
He knows the kids need the school; he knows that better than anyone.
These kids are hurting right now. I don’t need a politician to tell me that. We only have 300 students in this district, and they’re like family. My wife is a teacher here, and we had four kids go through these schools. I know whose parents are laid off from the copper mine and who doesn’t have enough to eat. We delivered breakfast and lunches this summer, and we gave out more meals each day than we have students. I get phone calls from families dealing with poverty issues, depression, loneliness, boredom. Some of these kids are out in the wilderness right now, and school is the best place for them. We all agree on that. But every time I start to play out what that looks like on August 17th, I get sick to my stomach. More than a quarter of our students live with grandparents. These kids could very easily catch this virus, spread it and bring it back home. It’s not safe. There’s no way it can be safe.
He knows from experience.
Mrs. Byrd did everything right. She followed all the protocols. If there’s such a thing as a safe, controlled environment inside a classroom during a pandemic, that was it. We had three teachers sharing a room so they could teach a virtual summer school. They were so careful. This was back in June, when cases here were starting to spike. The kids were at home, but the teachers wanted to be together in the classroom so they could team up on the new technology. I thought that was a good idea. It’s a big room. They could watch and learn from each other. Mrs. Byrd was a master teacher. She’d been here since 1982, and she was always coming up with creative ideas. They delivered care packages to the elementary students so they could sprout beans for something hands-on at home, and then the teachers all took turns in front of the camera. All three of them wore masks. They checked their temperatures. They taught on their own devices and didn’t share anything, not even a pencil.
But she caught it anyway.
I’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times. What precautions did we miss? What more could I have done? I don’t have an answer. These were three responsible adults in an otherwise empty classroom, and they worked hard to protect each other. We still couldn’t control it. That’s what scares me.
But the authorities are telling him he has to open the school.
It’s a nightmare.
Formalities trump reality (nb, no play on words or presidential allusion there.) But this pre-vaccine Covid-19 period we are in will last as long as it takes to produce a vaccine and to vaccinate the planet’s population; or to bring the transmission rate down to zero.
Getting each kid safe access to the Internet for online schooling would appear to be pretty important at this stage, as we have no idea how long this situation will continue.
One of our school superintendents has been telling the local paper what it’s like. Parents say they’ll pull their kids out of school if he mandates masks. Another group calls and says they’ll pull their kids out if they don’t mandate masks. He feels caught in between, and of course there is always the funding issue. So what does he do? He’s holding off making a decision because…well, I don’t know. I say, make ’em wear masks. The parents who pull their kids out of school? Yeah, tough on the parents, tough on the kids, but if you won’t allow your kids to wear masks, they shouldn’t be around other people. Period.
One of our local bookstores is suffering because she has a mask mandate to come in the store. Her business has fallen off, and she gets a barrage of hate every day.
How the hell did this become so politicized? Oh, yes, it was Trump’s idea. A conspiracy to make him look bad, so people believe by wearing masks they’re supporting liberals and being indoctrinated.
If POTUS (or Congress, for that matter) had taken the right steps early on, shut down the damn country, put in safeguards for people who lost their jobs, and mandated masks, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Omar,
That’s not easy either, though. My sister in law teaches in a school in a fairly deprived area in North East England. There are families with several children, no computers or tablets and only one phone between them for internet access. It’s always that little issue of poverty that gets in the way.
The cost to the government of providing every child with a BBC Microbit at ~£15 retail (as it promised a few years ago it would) would be negligible. Or a Raspberry Pi, which is cheap enough to treat as disposable (I have about a dozen scattered around the house in various states of undress and contributing to various projects) or even a Chromebook, which would be more useful still to most families and wouldn’t tie up a TV or necessarily even rely on a broadband connection at home.
What I’m saying is that the issue isn’t cost but supply which means it would have been nice if the government had anticipated the problem and identified this partial solution several months ago as every single teacher did.
Not that having a machine for remote learning could be a substitute for classroom teaching, but it would knock down some of the barriers for the poorer kids.
My sister in law says that the real problem with UK schools at the moment is that the government has issued virtually no guidelines on what to teach and how to do it. It has pages and pages of guidelines on the requirements for the configuration of the physical space even though those are virtually impossible for many schools to achieve in practice, but they’ve said virtually nothing about what to teach while they are closed, when they open or how to measure success.
Some schools are holding online lessons, some are not. Some are sending out work, which is marked and returned to the students, some are not. Some of the work is relevant to the usual curriculum, some not. My sister in law has been told not to hold online lessons or to send out the work she’d usually be teaching. The school says this is because it would disadvantage the kids who didn’t attend the lessons or do the work. So she’s sending out stuff for them to do, but isn’t allowed to sit with them in a virtual classroom going over the work and answering questions. She has to answer questions on the message boards instead, which is not working at all.
It’s a mess. The kids (and their families, and staff and their families) won’t be safe when schools reopen and online teaching isn’t working because poor kids suffer more and nobody knows what they should be teaching anyway.
latsot:
The school classroom and the university lecture hall are just one way to get information across to those who need it and seek it. But self-motivation is the key. In that, Einstein was perhaps the type specimen.
The other question regarding education that I think helps frame the main issue is what is the product of the institution?
To many, it is the freshly minted graduate, diplomate or otherwise certificated individual, with a future employer as consumer. But I prefer the idea that it is the student who is the consumer, and that the experience the institution offers that consumer that is the product.
Omar,
Our ‘Prime Minister’ is concerned only with schools reopening. There is no indication that he’s interested in the actual education of children, just the opening of schools. You’d think that distinction would be important and some emphasis placed on the former but that is not how this government works.
While I don’t disagree that self-motivation is important, it’s a lot more difficult for disadvantaged people for many obvious reasons and it’s easy to be discouraged when you don’t feel you’re making progress in understanding something despite your best efforts and have nowhere to turn for help. Teachers need to be able to connect with their students and use feedback to adjust how they teach if they’re going to get the best out of those students.
Omar, as someone who is a higher education faculty member, I feel the answer to the question of what is the product is of utmost importance. As you said, many see the diploma/graduate as the product. It is not. You said the experience. I think that is important, giving the student experiences that no other setting offers; they may or may not enhance their future career, but they add richness to life.
But the most important product of education is…education. Learning how to think. Learning some facts so you can think about things. Learning how to learn. Learning how to work with others
The product is education; the diploma/degree/certificate is just a certificate of authenticity, verifying that said student learned (or was able to fake learning well enough to fool the faculty, all too easy with some faculty) what the paper says the learned.
Because we get this wrong – the product misidentified – we make huge mistakes in how we approach education. We approach it toward a goal of success, but we identify success as the paper, not as what lies behind the paper. A student who does not complete the degree, but learns tons, is more use than one that completes the degree but learns nothing. (Trump comes to mind for the last; Dubya, too.)
Many of the studies I see on “effective” education seem to interpret success as ‘student is happy’, because few of them that I have seen have actually shown any improvement in learning with the new methods. Those that do, the effect size is so small, and they get significance by generating a larger n, it isn’t worth throwing out things that are working as well and remaking the entire system around a nebulous maybe.
Try telling administrators that. Their eyes gleam at significance, and they never notice small effect. They get to start new projects, hire new administrators, and torture educators, so they will jump on board the newest, latest bandwagon. A year later, that will be declared “ancient” methods and they will move on to the latest shiny squirrel.
Sorry for the lengthy digression; the state of education and their constant moving toward an elusive goal they have defined poorly, is one of my pet peeves.
[…] a comment by iknklast on In middle-of-nowhere […]
iknklast @#6:
No disagreement from me on that. Experience = education, or if you would prefer, the experience = the education. But certification adds up to bean counting of some kind or other, which is the raison d’etre of the educational bureaucrat. Ranking the students is the name of the game.
The alternative is recognition of the reality of mastery learning, which is all around us. A child by age two has its first words, and by age five if Chinese is far more fluent in that language than I will ever be. A Chinese education bureaucrat then has the task of deciding how to place that individual into a hierarchical rank order.
However, my favourite example is driving. Very few people in the modern world cannot drive a car, and most cars are owned by those who drive them. They are skilful enough to drive in a variety of traffic situations: suburban streets, towns, highways, unpaved roads: no mean feat. A small minority have money enough behind them to master speedway driving, which I suppose many regard as the ultimate. But I was once driven by an Iranian professional driver from Tehran down to Isfahan, which would leave any Australian highway experience stalled at the starting gate. As the driver told me at the time, “we have rules of the road here, but they are best thought of as suggestions. No more.”
And speed limits I would say are thought of by the mass of the drivers as concoctions of the infidels.
latsot @#5:
A yoga teacher I studied/learned under told me that in his Indian tradition we exist in four levels or domains: the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual. By ‘spiritual’ he did not mean what a Christian preacher would mean. To him it added up to zest for living, and the joy of being.
He said they should all be in balance, and neglect of any one adversely affects all the rest.
So, putting that into effect, I practiced a Japanese martial art for 27 years, until a medical condition forced me to stop. I still go for a long walk every day (in the very pleasant company of my wife.) The emotional I mainly get through laughter: usually at one of the numerous comic situations or absurdities of life I can whistle up from my memory, and the spiritual: I am a singer-songwriter, keyboard and guitar, and can sing in 3 registers: tenor, baritone and bass, which I mastered to my own satisfaction by singing along with records (in private with nobody listening. Very important.