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NPR Education
5 Radical Schooling Ideas For An Uncertain Fall And Beyond
Anya Kamanetz
June 17, 2020
There is no one answer for what the coming school year will look like,
but it won't resemble the fall of 2019. Wherever classrooms are open,
there will likely be some form of social distancing and other hygiene
measures in place that challenge traditional teaching and learning.
Future outbreaks will make for unpredictable waves of closures. Virtual
learning will continue. And all this will happen amid a historic
funding crunch.
American education has long been full of innovators practicing
alternatives to the mainstream. When the giant, uncontrolled experiment
of the pandemic rolled across the country, certain approaches proved
their mettle in new ways. Here are some ideas that seem newly relevant
given the constraints of 2020 and beyond.
1. Support families to help teach children.
Recently, parents told the U.S. Census Bureau that teachers were
spending about four hours a week in online contact with their children,
while they, the parents, spent an average of 13 hours a week helping
children with schoolwork themselves.
The debate over equity in emergency remote learning during the pandemic
has centered on the lack of equipment like computers and hot spots. But
access to home support is arguably even more important. A national
survey by the advocacy group ParentsTogether found big gaps by income
in the ability to access emergency learning. When asked about barriers
to children's participation, lower-income families who took the survey
were more likely to name issues such as "school resources are too
complicated" or "it's hard to get my child to focus" than they were to
cite a lack of equipment.
"Never in the modern history of our education system has the importance
of family engagement been more apparent," says Alejandro Gibes de Gac,
the founder of Springboard Collaborative.
Springboard is a social enterprise that looks at families as the
"single greatest resource" for helping struggling readers. In
pre-pandemic times, it offered a series of hourlong workshops to family
members, mostly in low-income communities, coaching them to set goals
and practice specific reading concepts with elementary school-age
children. In just five weeks, on average, 3 out of 4 of their
participants get to the next reading level or even further. And these
strategies work even though one-third of Springboard's parents,
grandparents and other relatives are unable to access the text their
child is holding, because of language differences, their own literacy
gaps, or both.
Now that parent-assisted learning has become the default across the
country, Springboard has created an app for the 10,000 families they
already work with. They've offered professional development webinars
for teachers, through unions and other organizations, on engaging
families. And they've recently announced a partnership with Teach For
America. This summer, 3,000 fresh TFA recruits will offer a remote
version of Springboard's reading strategies workshop for up to 9,000
pre-K through fourth-graders nationwide.
Gibes de Gac is excited about the impact this experience will have, not
only on families, but on the pre-service teachers themselves: "I expect
to look back on this as a turning point in how America prepares
teachers to partner with families not as a peripheral responsibility,
but as the very essence of teaching."
2. Give teens one-on-one support.
In this time, as in previous educational disruptions, teenagers are
most at risk for being knocked off course. One April survey found 4 in
10 U.S. teens weren't logging on to classes at all.
But not Christian Perez, 15, a sophomore at South Fort Myers High
School in Fort Myers, Fla. He stuck with his schoolwork online even
though his father, a plumber, sent him to stay with his family in
Puerto Rico. "I want to keep up my grades so I can stay on the baseball
team," Perez tells NPR, in Spanish.
His ESL teacher, Nelson Aguedo Concepcion, is the one who really kept
him on track. "I'm in touch with my students two, three times a week,"
by text, phone, Google classroom and Zoom meetings, Concepcion says.
There are devoted teachers everywhere, but the relationship between
Concepcion and Perez didn't come about by chance. South Fort Myers High
School follows a dropout prevention program called BARR, which stands
for Building Assets, Reducing Risks. The program, which is supported by
randomized controlled trial evidence, focuses on building strong
positive relationships between students and the adults in a building.
It groups teachers and other professionals like counselors for weekly
meetings where they compare notes and make plans to help students in
trouble. Costs associated with the model are relatively small, related
to scheduling and staffing. At South Fort Myers and other schools using
the BARR method around the country, these regular meetings have
continued over Zoom during the pandemic.
It's unusual for faculty in a high school to meet regularly to discuss
student success, rather than curricula or administrative details. South
Fort Myers High School Principal Ed Mathews credits BARR's "team
approach" with helping his faculty keep the vast majority of his high
school students engaged. "The first week that we did virtual education,
we missed 350 students," Mathews says. "And then the following week we
got it down to 125. And then the following week we got it down to two.
And then out of the two we were able to get a hold of the one. And then
unfortunately the other young lady was a runaway."
BARR is not the only education success model that prioritizes
relationships. Marquise Pierre, 20, is finishing his degree at a small
public "transfer" high school in Coney Island, N.Y., called Liberation
Diploma Plus. Pierre tells NPR that on lockdown he hears from one of
the faculty members every single day: "The school is more like a family
than staff and students."
And in King County, Wash., 15-year-old Osvaldo Riva Santiago is staying
motivated with the help of an incentive plan created by his education
specialist, Dani Erickson. Erickson works for Treehouse, a nonprofit
with a successful track record of helping foster youth like Santiago
graduate from high school. Through Erickson's incentive plan, Santiago
earns prizes, such as Amazon gift cards, for keeping up with his
schoolwork and doing self-care activities, such as jigsaw puzzles.
"She's been helping me emotionally," says Santiago.
3. Use online systems to assess, remediate and individualize learning.
One study of the "COVID-19 slide" estimates that children will be
returning to school this fall with 70% of a typical year's reading
gains and only half a year's gains in math. But those are averages;
most experts believe we can expect to see much wider variations in
progress than usual, because of equity gaps.
"Obviously going into this back-to-school, if you already had some
variance pre-COVID, the variance is going to be that much larger," Sal
Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, the free automated learning site,
tells NPR. "And we're going into a world where there's been no
standardized testing this past spring. So there's even less information
to go on in terms of where kids are and what they need."
Khan Academy has seen traffic nearly triple since the pandemic began.
In a typical week, says Khan, 30 million students are now spending 80
to 90 million minutes practicing everything from multiplication to AP
U.S. History. As students answer questions, the site tracks their
progress, which allows teachers or parents to easily see what areas
they need to work on.
Khan says his team is working on preparing what he calls "getting ready
for grade level" courses for this coming fall. For students beginning
sixth grade math, for example, the course moves quickly from basic
arithmetic onward, in a combination of review and assessment. "The kids
are learning, hopefully, while they're doing it, they're getting
practice. But then over a few hours you can actually form, in some
ways, a more granular view than you would in a traditional assessment."
Barry Sommer is director of advancement for Lindsay Unified School
District, which serves Spanish-speaking migrant agricultural workers in
California's Central Valley. The district has been lauded for its
technology-driven approach where every student follows an
individualized learning plan. Starting in 2016 it created a community
Wi-Fi project, which meant when school buildings closed for the
pandemic, there was little interruption in learning. Sommer says that
what worked well wasn't just the technology but the social and
emotional competencies that come when you create a culture of putting
students in charge. "Our learners have agency. They're taught to set
goals, be responsible and resilient. They transitioned really, really
well."
4. Form microschools and home-school co-ops.
A recent USA Today/Ipsos poll found that 60% of parents are "likely" to
continue with home-based education through next year, and 30% said they
would be "very likely" do so even if schools reopen. By contrast, about
3% of children have been home-schooled in previous years.
Some of these families will team up to share the work and allow
children some safe company, or if budgets allow, even hire a teacher to
help. Enter the coronavirus home-school co-op or microschool.
Matt Candler is the principal of NOLA Micro Schools in New Orleans,
which currently plans to reopen in the fall as a one-room schoolhouse,
with about 25 K-12 students, in a former cider house that allows ample
space for social distancing. Candler says what defines a microschool
from his perspective is not size alone, but a focus on empowering the
learner to pursue their own interests, which made his school's
transition to remote learning unusually smooth. For example, his high
schoolers organized their own morning "huddles" online, where they
share progress and goals for the day. "[Microschool parents] have
greater trust in the child's ability to self-direct and the school's
ability to adapt," he says.
Krystal Dillard is the co-director of Natural Creativity, a center for
self-directed learning that supports home-schoolers, who generally
attend between one and four days a week. She serves a diverse community
in Philadelphia. She says the interest in the alternative they offer
has exploded since the pandemic: "I can't tell you how many
[traditional school] parents who have reached out to me to say, 'This
isn't working. I don't feel that my young person is being served
through this virtual learning world that they're sort of being forced
into.'"
Parents are also forming networks and pooling resources to keep their kids happy, occupied and, hopefully, learning.
Homeschoolcoop2020.com is a site where children ages 6 and older can
tune in to live video classes. It's volunteer-run and free. Karen
Miller, a historian at LaGuardia Community College, started the project
to help occupy her 12-year-old son. "What I found is that the things
that were most helpful for me were the things that were synchronous
because the asynchronous stuff required a lot of my attention and
support." On Homeschool Co-op 2020, you can learn about the solar
system, DNA or poetry, usually from practitioners in the field. But the
most popular session — led by Miller's partner, Emily Drabinski, five
mornings a week — is Cat Chat.
5. Take education outdoors.
Evidence suggests that coronavirus transmission is much less common outdoors.
A forest kindergarten is generally a group of eight to 10 children
between the ages of 2 and 6 who spend the majority of their time
outside. "We always trot out this phrase:, There's no such thing as bad
weather, only bad clothing," says Kimberly Worthington, president of
the American Forest Kindergarten Association.
Worthington says there are currently about 60 forest kindergartens all
over the country, most having formed since the early 2000s, based on a
Northern European model. But interest in the idea is way up during the
pandemic, says Worthington. "This pandemic has us all separated and in
our homes. And just walking outdoors and getting a little bit of nature
is so beneficial," she says. Plus, it's safer.
"There's more physical space for children to be together and learn
together at a safe distance. And have less shared materials, because
most of the materials for learning are natural objects. And I can
safely say that there's no shortage of sticks."
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