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Top Five Actions to Stop the Teacher Exodus During COVID and Beyond

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As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, schools across the United States are on the brink of collapse. 
 
There is a classroom teacher shortage. 
 
There is a substitute teacher shortage.  
 
There is a bus driver shortage. 
 
There is a special education aide shortage.  
 
The people we depend on to staff our public schools are running away in droves.  
 
It’s a clear supply and demand issue that calls for deep structural changes.  
 
However, it’s not really new. We’ve needed better compensation and treatment of school employees for decades, but our policymakers have been extremely resistant to do anything about it.   
 
Instead, they’ve given away our tax dollars to corporations through charter and voucher school initiatives. They’ve siphoned funding to pay for more standardized testing, teaching to the test, and ed tech software.  
 
But the people who actually do the work of educating our youth. We’ve left them out in the cold.  
 
Now with the smoldering pandemic and increased impacts on the health, safety and well-being of teachers and other staff, the exodus has merely intensified.  
 
Frankly, I’m not holding my breath for lawmakers to finally get off their collective asses.  
 
We need a popular, national movement demanding action from our state and federal governments. However, in the meantime, there are several things our local school districts can do to stem the tide of educators fleeing the profession.
 
These are simple, cheap and common sense methods to encourage teachers to stay in the classroom and weather the storm.  
 
However, let me be clear. None of these can solve the problem, alone. And even ALL of these will not stop the long-term flight of educators from our schools without better salaries and treatment.  
 


1)    Eliminate Unnecessary Tasks 
 


The list of tasks an average teacher is expected to accomplish every day is completely unrealistic.  
 
Think about it. Just to get through a normal day teachers need to provide instruction, discipline students, grade papers, facilitate classwork, troubleshoot technology, provide written and verbal feedback, counsel disputes, role model correct behavior, monitor the halls, lunches, breakfasts and unstructured time, meet with co-workers, follow Individual Education Plans, scaffold lessons for different learners and learning styles…  
 
The list is truly staggering. 
 
And it never stops. 
 
Researchers have estimated that on average teachers make at least 1,500 decisions a day. That’s about 4 decisions a minute. 
 
No one can keep up that pace, day-in, day-out, without strain. No one can do it without their work suffering.  
 
If we truly want to help teachers feel empowered to stay in the profession, we need to reduce the burden. And the best way to do that is to eliminate everything unnecessary from their plates. 

That means no staff meeting just to have a staff meeting. No shotgun scattered initiatives that teachers are expected to execute and we’ll see what will stick. No reams of paperwork. No professional development that wasn’t specifically requested by teachers or is demonstrably useful.

Nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary.

 
2) No Formal Lesson Plans

The number one offender is formal lesson plans.  
 
I’m not saying we should tell teachers they don’t have to plan what they’re doing in their classes. I’m not sure how an educator could realistically enter a classroom of students and just wing it.  
 
However, the process of writing and handing in formal lesson plans is absolutely unnecessary. 
 
Teachers gain nothing from writing detailed plans about what they expect to do in their classes complete with reference to Common Core Academic Standards. They gain nothing from acting as subordinates to an all knowing administrator who probably has not been trained in their curriculum nor has their classroom experience teaching it.  
 
For educators with at least 3-5 years under their belts, formal lesson plans are nothing but an invitation to micromanagement.  
 
Should administrators monitor what their teachers are doing? Absolutely. But the best way to do that is to actually observe the teacher in the classroom doing the work. And to conference with the teacher before and after the observation with the goal of understanding what they’re doing and how to best help them improve.  
 
Forcing teachers to set aside time from their already overburdened schedules to fill out lesson plans that administrators don’t have time to read and (frankly) probably don’t have the training or experience to fully comprehend is top down managerial madness.  
 


 
3)    More Planning Time 

Teachers need time to plan.  

It’s pathetic that I actually have to explain this.  

Education doesn’t just happen.

Parents need called. Papers need graded. Lessons need strategized. IEP’s need to be read, understood and put into practice.

All this can only happen within a temporal framework. If you don’t give teachers that framework – those minutes and hours – you’re just expecting they’ll do it at home, after school or some other time that will have to be stolen from their own families, robbed from their own needs and down time.

Every administrator on the planet preaches the need for self-care, but few actually offer the time to make it a reality.

Even if we could discover exactly how much time was necessary for every teacher to get everything done in a given day – that wouldn’t be enough time. Because teachers are human beings. We need time to process, to evaluate, to think and, yes, to rest.

I know sometimes I have to stop wrestling with a problem I’m having in class because I’m getting nowhere. After two decades in the classroom I’ve learned that sometimes you have to give your brain a rest and approach a problem again later from a different vantage point.

I need to read a scholarly article or even for pleasure. I need to watch YouTube videos that may be helpful to my students. I need to get up and go for a walk, perhaps even just socialize for a moment with my coworkers.

None of that is time wasted because my brain is still working. My unconscious is still trying untie the Gordian knot of my workday and when I finally sit down to revisit the issue, I often find it looser and more easily handled.

Administrators must prioritize teacher planning time.

There is no simpler way to put it.

Do not ask your teacher to sub. Do not ask them to attend meetings. Do not ask them to help you plan building wide initiatives – UNLESS you can guarantee it won’t interfere with their plans.


I know this is difficult right now with so many staff falling ill or being so plowed under that they simply can’t make it to work.

However, the more you push them to give up their plans, the more you diminish returns.

Not only will their work suffer but so will their health and willingness to continue on the job.

Some districts are finding creative ways to increase planning time such as releasing students early one day a week. We did that at my district last year and it was extremely helpful to meet all the additional duties required just to keep our building open. However, as the new school year dawned and decision makers decided to simply ignore continuing pandemic issues, this time went away.

Most teachers are in the profession because it’s a calling. They care about doing the best job they can for their students.

If you take away their ability to do that, why would they stay?

 
 


4) Better Communication/ Better COVID Safety  

Communication is a two way street.

You can’t have one person telling everyone else what to do and expect to have a good working relationship.

Administrators may get to make the final decision, but they need to listen to what their teachers tell them and take that into account before doing so.

This means setting aside the proper time to hear what your staff has to say.

Many administrators don’t want to do that because things can devolve into a series of complaints. But you know what? TOUGH.

It is your job to listen to those complaints and take them seriously.

Sometimes just allowing your staff to voice their concerns is helpful all in itself. Sometimes offering them space to speak sparks solutions to problems – and a whole room full of experienced, dedicated educators can solve any problem better than one or two managers locked away in the office.

However, not only do administrators need to listen, they need to speak.

When issues crop up, they need to make sure the staff is aware of what is happening.

This is especially true during the pandemic.

We are so sick of half truths about who has Covid, who is quarantined, what is being done to keep us safe, etc.

No child should return to the classroom after a negative COVID test without the teacher already being appraised.

No child should be placed in quarantine without the teachers knowledge.

No teacher with a prior medical condition should have to serve lunch duty while students eat unmasked.

Safety protocols should be the product of the entire staff’s input. If everyone doesn’t feel safe, no one feels safe.

 


5) Respect 


 
 This is really the bottom line.

Teachers need to feel respected.

We need to know that administrators and school board members understand our struggles and are on our side.

I don’t mean taking a day or even one week out of the year to celebrate Teacher Appreciation. I don’t mean free donuts or coupons to Sam’s Club. I don’t even mean a mug with an inspirational message.

I’m talking about every day – day-in, day-out – respect for teachers.

No union bashing.

No snide comments at school board meetings.

No gossipy whispering in the community.

Being a teacher should mean something to district leaders. And they should prove it in every thing they do.

The items I mentioned here go some ways to showing that respect.

Eliminating unnecessary tasks, not requiring formal lesson plans, respecting our planning time, better communicating and safety measures are all necessary to keeping your teachers in the classroom.

But they are not sufficient.

As a nation we need to change our attitude and treatment of teachers.

No profession exists without them. They create every other job that exists.

We need to start paying them accordingly. We need to start treating them as important as they are. We need to ensure that they have the time, tools and satisfaction necessary to be the best they can be.

No district can do that alone. No school director or administrator can do that.

But these are some ways you can start.

 

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My Students Haven’t Lost Learning. They’ve Lost Social and Emotional Development  

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There is a student screaming across the hall.  
  
He is holding his gut and rocking back and forth in cries of wordless emotional pain as the rest of the class looks on in bewilderment.  
  
Students from other rooms start to cluster around the door until a security guard makes them go away.  
  
I close the door to my own classroom and try to settle my students down – but we can still hear him through the walls.   
  
And then:  
  
“Shut up!”  
  
“You’re stupid!”  
  
“Why don’t you make me!?”  
  
Believe it or not, this is not what teaching middle school used to be like.   
  
Eighth grade students were never perfect angels, but at least by then they used to know how to talk to one another. They could usually interact without constant sniping. They knew what was expected to get respect from each other and at least tried to do it.   
  
But things have changed.   
 
After 18 months of a pandemic, even when they aren’t infected with disease, children still are suffering tremendously from the effects of Covid-19. 
 
Adolescents are dealing with higher rates of anxiety, depression, stress, and addictive internet behaviors.   
 
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that children between the ages of 5 and 11 visiting an emergency department because of a mental health crisis increased 24 percent from April through October of 2020 compared to the previous year. Among 12- to 17-year-olds, the number increased by 31 percent.  
 
Suicide attempts among 12- to 17-year-old girls increased by about 50 percent over winter 2019, according to the CDC. 
 
And these numbers are probably under reported since these increases took place at the height of a pandemic when many people were hesitant to seek medical attention.  
 
As usual, the place where these issues are most visible is our public schools. 
 
When Covid-19 swept our shores last year, much of the benefit of formal education fell through the cracks.   
 
Consistency went out the window. Many schools went to on-line learning or a hybrid model of in-person and on-line offset with increasingly common periods of quarantine.  
 
These were often necessary to keep kids and their families safe – and in some cases still are. As a society, we could have done more to blunt the blow such as paying parents to stay safe at home as well as supervise their children, but economic concerns took precedence to human ones.  
 
And now we’re seeing the cost. 
  
Many students attended school haphazardly and their parents often weren’t around to give them the kind of stability, role models or attention they’d normally get at school.   
  
Today, as the pandemic still smolders on, and schools struggle to function as if the danger had passed, the result is classes of emotionally needy and socially awkward children.  
  
There were so many fights in the halls of my building last week, we’re now operating on a soft lockdown to decrease unstructured time between classes.   
  
And you know what – it’s not really kids’ fault.  
  
They’re just trying to live in the world we’ve built for them.   
 
More than 674,000 Americans have died from COVID. 
 
According to the CDC, more than 140,000 children in the U.S. lost a primary or secondary caregiver such as a live-in grandparent or another family member to the virus. 
 
Globally, that’s more than 1.5 million kids who have lost a parent, guardian or live-in relative to the pandemic, according to the Lancet. 
 
No wonder kids are having trouble dealing with their emotions! Their support systems are shot! 
  
My students are bright, caring, energetic and creative people. They have the same wants and needs as children always have. They just have fewer tools with which to meet them.   
  
Administrators often focus on academic deficits.   
  
They worry about learning loss and what the kids can’t do today versus students in the same grades before the pandemic. But I think this is a huge mistake.   
  
My students are not suffering from a lack of academics. They’re suffering from a lack of social and emotional development.   
  
I teach Language Arts and, sure, my kids may not have been exposed as deeply to certain concepts as those who came before them. They may not have written an acrostic poem or read Dickens or had as much experience writing. But that doesn’t mean they’re deficient.   
  
Every child – every PERSON – learns at an individual rate. Some take longer than others. Some take more exposure, experience and practice. But learning is never lost.   
  
Teachers know this. That’s why we scaffold our lessons. We get to know our kids and where they are before we can gauge what they still need to learn.  
  
My students may not have read the play they would have in 7th grade, but I can help them understand the components of drama when we read a play in the curriculum for 8th grade. They may not have written a particular type of poem last year, but we can still read one and understand it this year.   
  
Many students have difficulties with spelling and punctuation. That’s true this year as well as any other. That doesn’t mean they’ve lost anything. It means they need more instruction and practice.   
  
I’m not worried about that. It’s really pretty similar to any other year.   
  
What does concern me is the level of immaturity and social awkwardness I’m seeing.   
  
People aren’t machines. You can’t flip a switch and they just learn.  
  
You have to create an environment that is conducive to learning.  
  
Part of that is creating a class culture where everyone feels respected and safe. That’s difficult to do when kids don’t know how to communicate without conflict.   
  
That’s difficult when their sense of safety has been deeply impacted. Community members whining about security measures like wearing masks and getting vaccinated don’t help this – not at all.   
  
In schools, we’re trying to instill a sense of consistency and care. We’re trying to teach kids the basics of human interaction again – something even some adults are having to relearn.  
  
And let me tell you – it’s extremely hard in large, anxious groups dealing with the continuing uncertainty of our times.   
  
My own health has suffered under the pressures with which educators are forced to contend. Unnecessary paperwork, increased expectations, lack of respect and compensation have teachers stretched to a breaking point.   
  
I was in and out of the hospital all last week and the district had great difficulty finding an adult to sub for me.   
  
For two days they resorted to hiring parents from the community to watch my classes. I’m told that one of them reported to the office at the end of the day and promptly told the secretary not to call her tomorrow, that she was never coming back.   
 
It’s hard for professional educators, too. 
 
According to a 2020 survey by the New York Life Foundation and American Federation of Teachers, only 15% of teachers feel comfortable addressing grief or trauma tied to the pandemic. 
  
My kids are not demons.   
  
They are not monsters or evil or incorrigible.   
  
They’re just kids who really need our love and support.   
  
I feel for them. I really do.   
  
When I’m here, I do everything I can to help them feel safe, secure, respected and cared for.   
 
It’s certainly not easy. 
  
At lunch the other day, one student came to my door and scratched on the window. He was in tears.   
  
I let him in and asked what was wrong.   
  
He was at his wits end about his home life and felt lost. I sat with him, we talked it out and I asked if there was anything else I could do for him.  
  
He said, “Yes. Can I have a hug?”  
  
So even now, with COVID out there in the community and my mask securely fastened, I did it. I gave him a hug.   
  
That’s the need I’m seeing in schools right now.   
  
It’s not academics. That will be fine if we can take care of the emotional and social needs of our students.   
  
But this can’t be accomplished by teachers alone – nor even administrators, school boards and districts.   
  
We need to build a world that cares about children.   
  
We need to value their lives and needs.   
  
It’s not enough to care whether a child is born. We have to care whether a child is taken care of, healthy and loved.   
  
And that means looking out for their parents, too.   
  
If parents didn’t have to sacrifice themselves to their jobs, they could spend more time with their kids.   
  
When your job constantly demands more time, at all times of the day and night, you can’t be there effectively for the ones you love.   
  
We talk about family values, but we do little to value families. Only their credit score and earning power.   
  
This is a problem that won’t be solved overnight.   
  
It may far outlast the pandemic, itself.  
  
To heal our kids, we have to heal our society.  
  
In fact, we can’t do one without doing the other.  

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Why Does Your Right to Unmask Usurp My Child’s Right to a Safe School?

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“Daddy, I’m afraid.”

My 12-year-old daughter just had a nightmare, and I was sitting on her bed trying to calm her down.

“What’s wrong, Sweetie?”

“I’m worried about school.”

That’s something with which I can certainly relate.

Even after teaching for 18 years, I always get anxious before the first day of school, and I told her as much.

“Really?” She said.


“Yeah. But I can understand why you might be even more nervous than usual. I’ll be teaching the same thing I’ve taught for years. I’ll be in the same classroom working with the same adults. Only the students will be different. But you will be in a new building with new teachers…. And you haven’t even been in a classroom in over a year.”

“That’s just it, Daddy. What if the other kids make fun of me for wearing a mask? What if I get sick?”

Our local district is reopening in a week with a mask optional policy and no vaccine requirements.

Her question was expected, but I had been dreading it.

I knew my answers and they sounded inadequate – even to me.

I explained how she would be wearing a mask and is fully vaccinated so it will be extremely unlikely for her to get sick. And even if she does, it will be extremely unlikely she’ll get VERY sick.

“And if the other kids make fun of you, just ignore it. You are going to be safe. If they take chances, they’ll just have to suffer the consequences.”

It seemed to satisfy her, but I left her room feeling like a bad parent.

Covid-19 cases are on the rise again.

Nationwide, nearly 94,000 new child Covid cases were reported last week- a substantial increase, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA).

Even in the Pittsburgh region where we live, the number of kids hospitalized with Covid at UPMC Children’s Hospital has nearly doubled in the last week, according to KDKA. That’s 50 hospitalizations in the past month including 20 in the last week.

My daughter is scared? So is her daddy.

I went to the local school directors meeting and asked the board to follow recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Allegheny County Health Department by requiring masking and vaccinations for eligible students and staff. They refused.

Now I’m stuck in the position of keeping my little girl at home for another year by enrolling her in the district’s terrible on-line program, Edmentum, or rolling the dice with in-person schooling.

I’m told there will be more synchronous teaching this year in the remote program, but I don’t trust it.

Last year, she only made it through because my father-in-law – a former math teacher – and myself basically taught her everything the on-line program struggled to get across.

We just couldn’t do it again this year. It was a full time job – several full-time jobs – too hard on him and me both.

I hope we won’t regret it.

And then there’s my own work situation.

I teach at a neighboring district that looks like it will reopen the same way with masks and vaccines mere options.

I’m fully vaccinated but immunosuppressed. Might I be putting my own health at risk teaching under these conditions?

Last year, even with masks a requirement, students and staff at both districts came down with the virus nearly every week.

With the more infectious and deadly delta variant on the rise, might it be even worse this year – especially if we are lowering precautions?

Last year I burned my sick days waiting to be vaccinated before returning to the physical classroom. This year I could take a leave of absence, but once again my district is making no accommodations for people like me. I have to work or else try to survive on a reduced salary.

When you’re already living paycheck-to-paycheck, that’s not much of an option.

I just don’t understand it.

Don’t my daughter and I have rights?

We hear a lot about the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. A lot about their rights. What about our right to safe schools?

Why is it that the right NOT to wear a mask supersedes the right to go to a school where everyone is required to wear one?

Because it isn’t – as I told my daughter – a matter of everyone having to deal with just the consequences of their own actions. My daughter and I have to deal with the consequences of everyone else’s actions, too.

Or to put it another way – if one person pees in the pool, we’re all swimming in their urine.

If someone else doesn’t wear a mask, hasn’t been vaccinated and hasn’t taken the proper precautions, they can spread the Covid-19 virus through the air and infect whole classrooms of people.

Everyone else could be wearing a mask. It just takes one person who isn’t.

Is it fair that everyone else has to pay the price for one person’s carelessness?

We talk about rights so much we seem to have lost entirely the idea of responsibilities. They go hand-in-hand.

Yes, you have the freedom to do whatever you like so long as it doesn’t hurt another person.

When your actions do hurt others, you have a responsibility to stop. And if you won’t do that, the government has a responsibility to stop you.

But in this anti-intellectual age, we’ve almost completely given up on that idea.

If people take precautions by masking up and getting vaccinated, the worst that will happen is they’ll be unduly inconvenienced. If my daughter and I are forced to exist in the same spaces with people not taking the proper precautions, we could get sick and die.

It’s not like we’re talking about two equal sides here. This is people who believe the overwhelming scientific majority vs. those who get their answers from YouTube videos and political figures. It’s doctors, researchers and immunologists vs. conspiracy theorists, internet trolls and the MyPillow guy.

I’m not even judging – believe what you like so long as it affects only you. But when it affects me, too, then we have a problem.

The lowest common denominator is allowed to run wild. They can do whatever they like and the rest of us just have to put up with it.

That’s why we’re beginning year two and a half of a global pandemic! Not enough of us got the vaccine by the end of the summer.

Now infections are rising and few policy makers have the courage to take a stand and protect those of us who took precautions from those of us who did not.

And don’t tell me our lawmakers don’t have the power. There is a mountain of precedent showing they have.

On the highway, you can’t just go wherever you want, whenever you want. There are lanes, speed limits, traffic lights.

Even vaccines! To enroll in Kindergarten, parents already have to prove their kids have been vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella and a host of other diseases. Why is Covid-19 any different?

Public safety is a PUBLIC issue not a private one.

It just makes me feel so helpless.

I can’t do anything to protect my students.

I can’t do anything to protect myself.

I can’t do anything to protect my baby girl.

And I can’t wait for the school year to start!

Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

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Just CLICK HERE.

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

What I Don’t Want My School to be Like this Covid Year

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I’m going to confess something.

I don’t like wearing a mask.

For a few hours on Halloween it’s fine, but trying to teach middle schoolers through a piece of fabric for 8 hours a day is no one’s idea of professionalism or efficacy.

You know what else?

I hate getting shots.

When they put that vaccination needle to my arm, I had to turn my head away and think about something else. Both times.

But guess what?

I did them.

And I am still WILLING to do them again.

If teaching in 2021-22 requires wearing a mask and even getting a third booster to the Covid vaccine, I’ll do it.

You know why?

Because I am an adult.

Even if we have to go back to teaching students completely on-line (which I don’t want to do), I’ll put on my big boy pants and do it.

It’s not optimal. It causes problems for working parents, but it’s better than the alternative if infections continue to rise.

I’m not saying I like it.

I’m not saying I want to do any of this, but we have to deal with the world as we find it.

I don’t want to have to teach during a pandemic, but that’s the world we’re living in.

That’s the world we’ve MADE.

Time to face it.

After a summer where not enough people chose to get vaccinated, Covid-19 cases are on the rise again. And now we have the new more contagious delta variant that can even infect and be spread by those who got the shot.

We had a chance to turn things around in June and July. Frankly, we blew it.

Restrictions were lifted too early. Safety precautions continued to be politicized. Folks just pretended it was over.

All we had to do was be cautious and get our Fauci ouchies.

Not enough of us did.

So here we are.

I’m going to be honest with you.

I don’t want this school year to be as bad as last year.

The last year and a half has been a nightmare for classroom teachers like me.

We were teaching remote, then in-person, then BOTH at the same time! Social distancing was erratic because there just wasn’t the space, some students were chronically absent, kids and adults got sick every week but the authorities could never seem to admit anyone might have caught the disease at school…

I watched my district and most of those around me fail at almost every level.

And just when we looked to the government for support, we were told to waste whatever class time we were able to scrap together on another meaningless standardized test.

It was a year that left me feeling blamed for things beyond my control and silenced from the decision making process.

I felt unsafe, subordinate, impotent and neglected.

And I don’t want to do that again.

It’s no wonder that one in four teachers might not return to the classroom this year according to a survey given at the beginning of 2020 by the Rand Corporation.

Research from Education Week published this week had similar findings. According to Lora Bartlett, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 20 percent of teachers either have already left the profession or are actively seeking employment elsewhere.

Most years teaching has an 8% attraction rate, according to the U.S. Department of Education. 

Educators like me are simply sick of being ignored, scapegoated, deprofessionalized and or actively obstructed from doing our jobs.

But we didn’t make this situation.

We didn’t create Covid-19. We didn’t ignore the warnings that it was coming here, we didn’t dismantle the pandemic task force, didn’t shirk our duties to put adequate safety precautions in place, didn’t make compliance entirely voluntary, didn’t prioritize economics over public health or a multitude of other things that lead us down this deep, dark rabbit hole.

We’re dealing with the situation, and frankly the rest of the country needs to do the same.

We need universal masking in schools.

Not suggestions from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). We need government mandates, and the fact that some states have mandated exactly the opposite just goes to show that some lawmakers aren’t grown up enough to do the job for which they were elected.

Magical thinking may get you re-elected, but it could also get me and my family killed.

Time for serious solutions.

While we’re at it, we need to require vaccinations for all eligible adults and children going to school in-person. Otherwise, we can find a remote option for them.

Because if we don’t, there are only two likely alternatives – a remote option for everyone or a steady increase in Covid cases in school. The former isn’t good and the later is just not acceptable at all.

We need frequent testing to see if anyone in the building has the disease – and NO I’m not talking about contact tracing. Anecdotes from people who unequivocally have the virus about who he or she may have come into close contact with is not good enough. We need blood tests – hard data.

Speaking of which, every district should have to prove they’ve been able to adequately circulate airflow in the buildings with HEPA filters and other equipment. If they can’t, the federal government should write them a check on the spot. Make them accountable for how they spend it, and make them accountable if they DON’T get the job done.

I know, I know.

This is America and no one can tell me what to do.

Wrong.

We live in a society, not the old West.

We already have a plethora of rules people have to abide by – even list of vaccinations you already need to be enrolled in school – mumps, measles, rubella, polio, etc. Just add Covid-19 to the list.

And grow the heck up.

Too many people can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Too many people have bought the myths and legends about what it means to be an American.

That’s why they’re having conniptions that teachers might actually be including the history of racism in their history.

We’re a country that couldn’t exist if white settlers didn’t first steal the land we’re living on from native peoples. We’re a country founded by mostly slave holders.

You think that’s not an important part of history because you believe our own bull crap propaganda.

And that’s why you don’t have the mental acuity to deal with real problems like a global pandemic.

When this whole Covid thing began, many of us hoped when it was all over we’d have changed things for the better.

We thought they’ll have to change the old way of doing things just to survive this mess, so maybe when we put it all back together, we can put it back together better.

But the reality is, we couldn’t even figure out how to change things enough just to survive this.

In the United States, about 630,000 of us haven’t survived it – more than our soldiers who died in World War II (405,000), the Vietnam War (58,000) and the Korean War (36,000) combined.

I don’t want more people to die.

I don’t want more students and staff to get sick in schools.

I don’t want us to have to go back to remote instruction.

I don’t want this school year to be as bad or worse as the last year and a half.

And I’m willing to make sacrifices to make sure these don’t happen.

I’m willing to wear a mask all day in school and require others to do so, too.

I’m willing to be vaccinated (again if necessary) and make sure everyone eligible is, too.

I’m willing to do all these things I don’t want (and more) in order to make sure worse things don’t happen.

That’s the choice we’re left with today.

And if enough people aren’t grown up enough to make it correctly, we need to make it for them.

Or else we’re all choosing to let the worst come to pass – again.

 

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We Don’t Need More ADVICE on How to Safely Reopen Schools. We Need RULES.

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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is full of advice about Covid-19.

It’s safe to do this. It’s not safe to do that.

But we don’t need advice. We need rules.

This week the CDC changed its advice to all staff, students and teachers when schools reopen. Instead of wearing masks in schools only when unvaccinated, people should wear masks regardless of whether they’ve been vaccinated or not.

This is necessary to protect children who aren’t eligible for the vaccine and slow the spread of new more infectious variants of the virus, representatives said.

The problem is that too many Americans don’t listen to advice – especially if it goes against their beliefs.

And there are a significant number of Americans who believe whatever crazy nonsense talk radio, Fox News or their savior Donald Trump tell them.

Immunologists talking about infectious disease just don’t rate.

So these people aren’t going to listen to the CDC’s advice.

That presents real problems both for them and for us.

First of all, they’re literally killing themselves.

More than 99% of people who die from Covid-19 these days are unvaccinated, and they make up almost the same percentage of recent hospitalizations.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky calls this a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, but they aren’t the only ones paying for it.

We all are.

The Covid-19 pandemic would be effectively over in the United States if everyone who was eligible for the vaccine had received it.

About 56% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, but in many places — especially in rural areas — the number is under 20% despite widespread availability of the drug.

As a result, cases of Covid-19 are on the rise again in most of the United States. In fact, this country leads the world in the daily average number of new infections, accounting for one in every nine cases reported worldwide each day.

The majority of these new cases are the more infectious delta variant, a version of the virus that could jump start cases even among the vaccinated.

And the reason the virus had a chance to mutate and become more resistant to our existing treatments was a ready supply of easy hosts – anti-vaxxers who refused to protect themselves and now have put the rest of the country back at risk.

Their ignorance and selfishness has put all of us in danger.

That makes me mad, and not just at the anti-vaxxers.

I’m mad at the federal government.

You could have done something about this. You SHOULD have done something, but you didn’t.

The Trump’s administration badly bungled the initial stages of the pandemic with late and inadequate international travel bans, failure to use federal authority to supply Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), failure to require mandatory universal paid sick leave for those unable to work due to the virus, and failure to mandate standards for the health and safety of workers.

In contrast, President Joe Biden’s administration has done better in making the vaccine readily available, but still failed to fix many of the problems it inherited and still continually neglecting to mandate anything.

“Hey, Buddy, why don’t you try this?” – is NOT good enough!

We need – “Do this OR ELSE!”

You can’t just make the vaccine available and hope people are smart enough to take it.

They aren’t. Not in America.

Not after decades of allowing lies and disinformation to infect the airwaves. In the name of freedom we’ve let Fox News and the former President poison the minds of admittedly easily lead citizens until their ignorance impacts all of us.

And the antidote to such disinformation – a robust public education system – has been stolen from too many Americans by decades of under funding, rampant school privatization and high stakes testing.

What we need now is to make vaccines a prerequisite to participate in all kinds of social congress – shopping, dinning at restaurants, movies, sporting events, schools, etc. But our government -our FEDERAL government – won’t do that.

Instead it’s a never ending cycle of passing the buck – that’s been our lawmakers response whether Republican or Democrat – to this crisis.

Authority is left it up to the states, who often refuse to allow safety precautions to be regulated or passed the decision on to someone else until it’s being made separately by every minor representative, podunk flunky and school director this side of Mayberry.

What a disgrace!

And here we are again.

The experts are telling us what we should do in the best interests of keeping our children safe. But the federal government refuses to back it up with its full authority.

Just advice. No rules.

Will people be required to wear masks in public schools?

Maybe.

It all depends on what local officials somewhere down the line decide.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf announced yesterday that he is not even considering a statewide mask mandate as Coronavirus cases surge nor will he require masks in schools.

Wolf said his strategy to fight the spread of COVID-19 is the vaccine, itself, – the masking mandate was for when there was no vaccine.

“People have the ability, each individual to make the decision to get a vaccine,” Wolf says. “If they do, that’s the protection.”

Meanwhile, Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald says he’d consider a mask mandate if infections were worse in the county, an area that includes the City of Pittsburgh. Though he suggests schools follow CDC advice, he’s not about to make that decision for them.

So it will be left to local school directors to decide what to do. Probably most of them will allow masks in school but not require them.

It’s a terrible situation with an incredible lack of leadership, but I get it.

School board directors do not have the power of the bully pulpit. They don’t have the power of Chief County Executives, Governors or the President.

If people challenge their decisions (as they probably would) that requires district finances for lengthy court battles and uncomfortable political confrontations for re-election.

None of these folks should have to make these kinds of life and death decisions.

That’s what the President is for. It’s what US Congress is for.

The buck has to stop somewhere. Right!?

But the matter has become so politicized and our representatives so spineless that our entire system hangs by a thread.

What if the federal government mandates masks and certain states or districts don’t listen?

Will its take the national guard to come in and enforce the mandate?

There was a time when lawmakers had the courage to do things like that – to legislate what was in the best interests of society and darn the consequences.

But today’s lawmakers do not have the courage to govern.

And once again, we’re paying for it.

Our society has failed to protect us. It barely functions anymore.

So get set for another rock ‘em sock ‘em school year where kids and adults will get sick.

In the few years since we discovered Covid-19, young children have rarely gotten as sick from the virus as adults. However, that is changing. Infections have increased this summer as the delta variant spread until approximately 4.1 million children have been diagnosed with the disease resulting in about 18,000 hospitalizations and more than 350 deaths. 

Add to that the facts that only 30% of kids ages 12 to 17 have been vaccinated, younger children are not eligible for the vaccine and probably won’t be until the end of the year at the earliest.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

The Delta variant is 225% more contagious, contains 1,000% higher viral loads from earlier variants, and hits those levels in just 3 ½ days. Delta has a stronger bond to ACE-2 receptors in nasal passages and lung cells.  

Vaccinated people can get infected if exposed to large enough viral loads.  Unvaccinated kids could easily have those high viral loads. This means that everyone is a possible link in the chain of transmission. 

But it’s not inevitable.

There is something we could do about it if we act now.

No more mere advice!

Pass some laws, make some rules to keep everyone as safe as possible and finally end this pandemic!

It just takes courage and common sense – two things in short supply in today’s United States.

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Stop Transforming US Schools into Prisons in the Name of Security

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You probably heard about the Texas mom who became Internet famous for posing as her daughter in school last week.

Casey Garcia, 30, was arrested after she was caught attending her 7th grade daughter’s classes while disguised in a hoodie, a mask and thick black glasses.

In a viral video she posted to YouTube, she said the stunt was a “social experiment” to “prove a point.”

“We need better security at our schools,” Garcia said. “I kind of feel that I proved it.”

“There have been one too many mass shootings,” she added, arguing that schools should have metal detectors and possibly ban backpacks.

However, most schools already DO have metal detectors, and the presence of these devices won’t stop a parent like Garcia from posing as a teen during a pandemic when students are often required to cover their faces behind masks.

Hopefully sometime next school year when more teens are vaccinated and mask restrictions disappear, no one will be able to take advantage of pandemic safety precautions to sneak into classes.

Don’t get me wrong, teachers should have caught Garcia last week long before the end of the day, but the El Paso parent did more to prove the necessity of smaller class sizes than additional security.

You can pay millions of dollars on new complicated and time wasting screening processes to enter the building, or you can simply have teachers responsible for fewer kids so they can actually give them all more attention. It’s less costly and would reap educational benefits along with improving safety.

The fact is, we already spend an awful lot on school security. And often those measures and the costs to enact them directly impede teachers ability to teach and students willingness to learn.

Let’s start with cost.

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world. You’d expect that we could afford to buy BOTH security AND education for our students.

However, in practice, it doesn’t work that way.

To put it bluntly – we’re cheap. Especially when it comes to children.

Correction: Especially when it comes to OTHER PEOPLE’S children.

Right wing pundits love to quote exorbitant figures of how much the US spends per student as compared with the rest of the world.

However, they neglect to mention (1) this money is spent unevenly so that we spend much more on rich kids versus poor kids, and (2) we spend that money on services in this country that most other nations do not.

One of those things is security.

It’s not that schools in Europe and other comparable nations don’t concern themselves with keeping students safe. But they typically don’t have metal detectors, armed police, and high tech security systems. While secondary entrances and exits tend to be locked, main entrances usually remain open and unmonitored throughout the day.

Nor do they have the same dangers as we do. In the US, there are more firearms – roughly 400 million – than people. Not true in other countries.

Moreover, even in other nations like Switzerland where gun ownership is high, they have comprehensive background checks that make it much more difficult for criminals or the mentally ill to get a hold of a gun.

In the US, we have a large population that is racially diverse, a history of social strife, runaway income inequality, and a crumbling social safety net. All of which, when mixed together, are a recipe for conflict.

Not so in most other countries.

Moreover, the way most European nations, for example, have addressed safety is completely opposite to the way we do it in the US.

School shootings were on the rise in Europe in the early 2000s, but instead of buying security systems to stop shooters from entering the building, most schools focused on prevention. They realized that the overwhelming majority of shooters were not interlopers from outside but were disgruntled students. So these schools invested in more psychologists, social workers and resources to help children navigate the turmoil of growing up. The result was an almost complete disappearance of shootings.

If you ask me, a similar investment in the US would have similar success. However, given the differences in our societies, I don’t expect it would solve all of our problems.

In fact, emphasis on security certainly hasn’t.

Since 2012, US schools spending on high tech security programs has increased by at least $3 billion – not counting the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — with very little research proving these measures are at all effective, according to the Washington Post.

In fact, there is evidence that these measures don’t work. A federally funded 2016 study by Johns Hopkins University, for instance, concluded there was “limited and conflicting evidence in the literature on the short- and long-term effectiveness of school safety technology.”

But in the United States, when there’s an entire industry lobbying to take advantage of a crisis, that industry will likely be seen as the solution. It might not actually work, but at least huge corporations are making a profit. That’s often enough to justify spending more and more.

Security firms tout their products as the solution just as hammers scream we need more nails. Never mind that buying them will impede our progress and bankrupt us in the process.

Which brings me to education.

Even if heightened security was 100% effective against violence, it has a negative impact on learning.

No one wants to go to a prison for school.

Prisons are not welcoming environments. Children don’t want armed guards watching their every move. They want empathetic teachers and adults to help them understand their world.

This is especially true for low income and students of color. There is already a tendency among white faculty (and others) to criminalize their behaviors. In a punitive environment, this is even more so. Children become not something precious to be protected but the inmates, themselves, whose adolescent behaviors become the excuse for treating them like suspects and criminals.

Even preparing for violent situations can have negative impacts.

Active shooter drills – especially those from the ALICE Training Institute — do more to traumatize students than make them safer. The increasingly popular ALICE program teaches kids to physically confront gunmen under any circumstances. Consultants, school psychologists, safety experts and parents say this is dangerous and irresponsible.

“There is no research/evidence . . . that teaching students to attack a shooter is either effective or safe,” Katherine C. Cowan, spokeswoman for the National Association of School Psychologists, says. “It presumes an ability to transform psychologically from a frightened kid to an attacker in the moment of crisis, the ability to successfully execute the attack on the shooter (e.g., hit the shooter with the book or rock, knock them down, etc.) again in a crisis situation, the ability to not accidentally hurt a classmate, the reality that unsuccessfully going on the attack might make that student a more likely target of the shooter.”

However, the feeling that we are doing SOMETHING that we are at least preparing for a crisis is what keeps programs like this viable.

It’s also why Home Depot and Walmart market $150 bulletproof backpacks to parents. They may not actually help in a real life emergency, but they give the illusion of safety.

That’s what most of this really is – an illusion.

The fact is that the risk of being the victim of gun violence is low.  There are more credible risks traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports. But we rarely worry about those.

Moreover, the risk of being a victim of gun violence is the same in the US whether you’re in school or not. And it’s higher in this country than in most others. A 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by guns lived in the United States. Schools cannot solve that problem. We need sensible gun regulations and background checks in combination with measures for universal healthcare, racial equity and a reduction in income inequality.

However, our public schools are so often left to solve the problems our policymakers refuse to tackle.

If our teachers and administrators weren’t tasked with such a heavy burden and were actually given the funding and support they needed, perhaps they could better do the job of educating students.

That is the central purpose of public schools, after all.

Not gratifying parents to make points on the internet.

Not even security or profiting huge corporations.

It’s to teach kids.

We’d do best to remember that.

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My Favorite Teacher in a Pandemic

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Mr. Singer, you are the best ELA teacher I’ve ever had. I’ve always loved ELA but for years now I started not enjoying [it] anymore mostly because of the teachers. But you changed my whole view about ELA. You made me enjoy these classes, the books, and even the Zooms. You taught me that teachers can have fun in classes, too. Thank you for not giving up on me, for always trying to help me, for showing me the books at school are interesting. THANK YOU FOR TEACHING ME!”

These words were written on a folded up piece of paper handed to me by an 8th grade English Language Arts (ELA) student the day before school let out this year.

It means a lot.

Especially this year.

Teaching is always challenging. That’s part of its appeal. But teaching through a global pandemic was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

We were on-line, in-person, BOTH at the same time.

We were wearing masks, ensconced behind plexiglass, wiping down surfaces with cleanser between classes.

We were praised then blamed, deified, demonized, vaccinated.

Nearly every week – sometimes every few days – someone (adult or child) came down with COVID-19.

Yet through it all we somehow managed to teach.

Now that the school year is over for me, I’m left here cleaning up the mess looking back on everything.

One thing I keep hearing from policymakers, pundits and other people with no teaching experience is a frantic concern abut learning loss.

They’ve spent decades looking at spreadsheets attempting to quantify learning, and turn it into a commodity – but they have no idea what it really is.

I’m not sure I do either.

But I know this much: Learning is never lost. It’s never late or early. It’s always right there when the circumstances allow.

On the last day of class, I invariably give my students a survey about how things went. I tell them I’ve graded them all year. This is their chance to grade me.

I tell them the surveys are not part of their grade and they can even turn them in anonymously if they choose – or not at all.

But most turn them in – many with their names clearly visible.

After a year like this one, you might expect the comments to be more variable than usual. You might expect them to go on about the difficulties, the problems, all the things they didn’t learn but hoped they would.

Instead, I got mostly gratitude.

And if you haven’t taught middle school, let me tell you, that can be rare for teenagers:

“He was the best ELA teacher I’ve ever had… [He} Never stopped helping me [on] every assignment I didn’t do. He would comment on it. He would always try to help me on it.’

And:

“I think you are a kind teacher and you should keep it up so more kids can like you like me :)… When I didn’t catch on to something and I asked what we’re doing, you didn’t get upset. Instead you announced politely what we had to do and I liked that about you because most teachers would yell at me for not paying attention.”

And:

“You actually want to teach the class!”

The biggest thing they singled out about my teaching was the way I interacted with them:

“My teacher helped me with something that helped me succeed this year, and that was patience. Mr. Singer was patient with me this year and worked through what I didn’t understand.”

And:

“He helped with turning in assignments late and explaining how it works. He also explains when and what everyone needs to do it on time.”

I even had students who were thankful for the difficulty of the work:

“I liked how we did essays to get us ready for next year. I also liked how we did essays along with the short stories.”

And far from low academic scores, I had students who earned better grades than ever before:

“This is my first class in ELA when I have gotten a C or higher [in] the past 9 years.”

All of those comments were from my regular language arts students. However, I also taught two sections of a creative writing class for the same age group.

They particularly liked my comments on their written work:

“[You] gave descriptive details on what I was doing right and wrong in my writing. It helped me understand and then improve my writing skills.”

And:

“[You did well] With helping people and not being mean about what we got wrong. That actually helps by telling us the mistakes that we did. I think that helps us get better.”

They also singled out my interactions:

“You’re nice and don’t harshly judge us or yell. You’re always willing to help.”

And:

“Our teacher helped us understand that there are many ways to improve writing.”

Of course, more of them had ideas for ways I could improve:

“…I actually like your class. It’s just sometimes there could be hand injuries [from overwriting]. Also, you can sometimes [let us] make up our own [prompts].”

And this from an honors student:

“The writing prompts were good and challenging. I like how unique they were. Overall, the instruction was good, but after I finished writing my journal, I found myself sitting around with nothing to do for about 15 minutes. Maybe provide extra assignments to keep us busy.”

And that about wraps up another year.

I hope things will be different at the end of August when we return to class.

This 2020-21 has been a year like no other. But reading through these comments it’s clear it wasn’t a waste.

My students learned something.

They learned a lot of somethings.

Like every year, I gave them my all.

And like every year, it was worth it.

And to prove it, here’s one more student response from a child I had in 7th grade and in this year’s 8th grade. He also was in my creative writing class where responses had to be a minimum of 5 sentences:

Dear Mr. Singer,

I never liked reading class. I have had you for two years now and you have made me like it. You helped me to write even though I don’t like it. You push me to write when I didn’t give details to my stories. You made me read books and I enjoyed them. Every book you picked this year I liked. I even would tell my parents and my sister about them. And since she read them we could talk about them. I enjoyed watching the movies, too. I even did well with you with Zoom classes and that wasn’t easy at times. Thanks for being my favorite teacher in middle school. by the way, I wrote more than 5 sentences.”

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Top 6 Administrative Failures of the Pandemic Classroom

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This school year has been a failure in so many ways.

But don’t get me wrong.

I’m not going to sit here and point fingers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has tested the public school system like never before.

Teachers, administrators and school directors have been under tremendous pressure and I believe most really tried their best in good faith to make things work as well as possible.

But as the year comes to a blessed close, we need to examine some of the practices common at many of our schools during this disaster and honestly evaluate their success or failure.

Some things worked well. Many made the best of a bad situation. But even more were blatant failures.

We need to know which was which.

As a classroom teacher with 17 years experience who worked through these times, let me clarify one thing.

I am not talking about things that were specific to individual classrooms.

Teachers struggled and stretched and worked miracles to make things run. We built the plane as we were flying it. As usual, this is where policy meets execution and that can differ tremendously from place-to-place.

What I’m talking about for the most part is policy. Which policies were most unsuccessful regardless of whether some super teachers were able to improve on them or not in their classrooms.

Here are my top six administrative failures of this pandemic school year:

1) SOCIAL DISTANCING

Health officials were clear on one point – keeping space between individuals helps stop the spread of Covid-19.

Exactly how much space we need to keep between people has varied over time.

At first, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. Then as health officials realized there wasn’t enough physical space in school buildings to keep students that far apart AND still have in-person school, they changed it to 3 feet.

The same happened with violating social distancing.

At first, you were considered a close contact only if you were within the designated space for 15 consecutive minutes. Then that was changed to 15 minutes in total even if that time was unconsecutive.

In any case, classes were held in physical spaces. Many schools at least tried to make an effort.

Was it successful? Did we actually keep students socially distanced all day?

Absolutely not.

Walk into nearly any school during a class change and you will see the same crowded halls as you would have seen pre-pandemic. Observe a fire drill, and you’ll see the same students right next to each other, skin against skin as they try to quickly find an exit.

These times generally aren’t 15 minutes consecutively, but think about how many class changes there are a day. If you have 8 or 9 classes, with each class change averaging 3 minutes, that’s 24 to 27 minutes of exposure a day.

If it weren’t for the fact that most children are asymptomatic, what would the result of this have been? How many kids did we expose to Covid-19 because of the sheer difficulty of administering social distancing protocols?

2) MASKING

Health officials told us it was important to wear masks on our faces to stop the spread of respiratory droplets that contain the virus. True there was some discrepancy on this issue at the beginning of the pandemic, but over time it became an agreed upon precaution.

There was also some discrepancy about what kinds of masks to wear and whether one should double mask.

However, putting all that aside, did schools that had in-person classes abide by this policy?

It actually depends on what part of the country you’re in. Some schools were directed to do so and others were not.

However, even in districts where it was an official policy, it rarely worked well.

Not only is it difficult to teach when the most expressive parts of your face are covered, it’s difficult to be heard. And for students, it’s even worse. They are still adolescents, after all. They abided by mask mandates with various degrees of success.

In my own classes, about a quarter of my students could never get their masks over their noses. No matter how many times I reminded them, no matter how often I spoke up, the masks always slipped below their noses – sometimes moments after I made a remark. Sometimes three, four or more times in succession to the point that I gave up.

Administration didn’t seem to take the matter as seriously as the school board written dress code policy, and teachers (including me) didn’t want to come down too hard on kids for neglecting to do something that many of them seemed incapable of doing.

Were we all exposed to respiratory droplets? Definitely. Without a doubt. Especially during lunch periods which were almost exclusively conducted in doors without even the possibility of opening a window.

Did partial masking have some positive effect? Probably. But I do not think we can call this policy a success.

3) CONTACT TRACING

How do you tell if someone has been exposed to Covid-19?

Health officials advised contact tracing. In other words, when someone exhibits symptoms and then tests positive for the virus, you identify people who came into close contact (within 3 feet for 15 minutes total).

However, this was conducted entirely on the honor system. So it was only as accurate as those reporting it were perceptive or honest. If someone was a close contact but didn’t want the hassle of quarantine, they could usually just refrain from reporting themselves.

Even worse was the fact that most children are asymptomatic when infected with Covid-19. Hundreds or thousands of kids could be walking around the school as carriers of the virus and you’d never know with contact tracing.

Random blood tests for Covid-19 and Covid-19 antibodies would have actually solved this problem, but it was never even recommended. This may have been because of costs or fears of inconveniencing students. However, it demonstrates perhaps the worst failure of the entire pandemic.

Any sense of security was completely false. Every week – often every few days – I’d get phone calls and emails from my district about students and staff testing positive for Covid-19 but miraculously there were no close contacts. Districts, administrators, school directors, health officials have lost a tremendous amount of credibility from this which may damage our society much worse than Covid-19 ever did.

4) STANDARDIZED TESTING

We threw caution to the wind and reopened in-person classrooms so children could have live instruction. Then the Biden administration mandated standardized testing which would eat up much of that time.

It’s nonsensical.

My last month of school is divided up almost equally in half between teaching and testing.

I’ve had to cut my curriculum to ribbons just to get a semblance of instruction done by the last day.

And it serves no purpose.

We all know students haven’t had the kind of robust instruction time they normally would. Why do we need tests to show that? It’s like looking at a person bleeding from an open wound and then testing to see if there was blood loss.

Not to mention the fact that these standardized tests have been shown to be bad assessments long before Covid-19 came on the scene.

This is a total policy failure that the kids are paying for with less time to learn.

But at least the testing corporations will get paid.

5) CYBER SCHOOL

Many students spent some or all of the last year on-line. The reasons why are clear and even potentially sound.

Their parents wanted to mitigate infection, and going cyber certainly did that.

However, the quality of instruction provided was variable to say the least.

At best, classroom teachers provided lessons through distance learning platforms like Zoom using accessories like Google Classroom.

At worst, prepackaged cyber curriculum based on credit recovery programs was used as the main provider of curriculum.

Platforms like Edmentum – which my daughter had to use – provided material that was not developmentally appropriate, assessed unfairly, and full of typos.

This just demonstrates the inferiority of cyber programs in general. The more interaction possible between teachers and students, the better. However, even at its best this is not as effective as live instruction.

Those districts that simply gave up and threw students onto fully cyber programs almost abrogated their responsibilities to educate at all.

However, I can certainly see why parents may have chosen this option for their children. After all, I made such a choice for my own daughter.

The best result though would be safety from Covid but somewhat less instructional quality. Either way, it’s a failure, but the degree will vary.

6) HYBRID MODELS

Many districts choose a hybrid education model combining some cyber and some in-person learning.

This tried to strike a balance between keeping children safe and providing the best possible education. However, both models were flawed and thus the hybrid model combines these flaws.

The worst part of this type though was how it often forced educators to educate.

Teachers usually had to instruct both live students in the classroom and cyber students on-line at the same time.

This is nearly impossible to do well. It’s like trying to perform a play to two different audiences at the same time. What works in-person does not work as well on-line and vice versa.

I found myself catering to one group and then another. Often it lead to the on-line students being left more to their own devices. Since most of them had their cameras off and rarely responded to questions, I fear they got an even worse education than under fully cyber circumstances.

In-person students also had to exercise patience as the teacher divided his or her attention to the on-line group.

And the degree of technical wizardry expected of teachers was astronomical.

In every class I was required to post material to a central in class TV screen so my in-person students could see it, while also making sure it was displayed on-line for my cyber kids. Sometimes it wouldn’t work for one group and I’d have to trouble shoot the problem in real time.

There were often instructional videos or examples I wanted to show where the volume or video wouldn’t display for one group or another. And sometimes on-line students couldn’t hear the teacher or their classmates.

Then we had Internet connection issues where cyber students were inexplicably dropped or in-person students couldn’t access materials on Google Classroom.

It was a nightmare – an every day, every period, never ending nightmare.

But teachers just got on with it and achieved amazing things despite all the issues.

CONCLUSIONS

This pandemic year can be characterized by epic failures at all levels.

But each failure contains within it a success.

In short, things could have been much worse.

At each level, these failures were mitigated by everyday classroom teachers who made the best of it.

The school year was not a complete waste academically for most students.

It would have been better under normal circumstances, but these were not normal circumstances.

Likewise, students, their families and educators were put at unnecessary risk of infection. And many paid the price for that with long illnesses, lingering symptoms and even death.

However, it could have been worse. Safety efforts – though insufficient – did protect people and fewer people were infected than might have been otherwise.

As more people are vaccinated against the virus and we move forward with vaccinating those 12 and older, risk should become even less prominent.

I dearly hope infection levels will be legitimately low enough in August that we can dispense with social distancing and masking, that we can have universal in-person classes.

However, we probably will do away with these measures WHETHER IT’S SAFE TO DO SO OR NOT!

And that is the worst problem!

Throughout the Covid pandemic, our policies have demonstrated a blatant disregard for human life and safety. Instead we have prioritized economics and capitalistic pragmatism.

Don’t let anyone tell you “Safety was our number one priority.”

It wasn’t. And it isn’t.

In America, the almighty dollar reigns supreme and your life and the lives of your children come in a distant second.

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Can Unions Defang Charter School Vampires?

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What if a vampire suddenly lost its fangs?

Would it still be a vampire?

That’s the question at the heart of a major change in the largest charter school network in western Pennsylvania.

This week, staff at the Propel network of charter schools voted overwhelmingly to unionize.

So the money men behind the Allegheny County system of charter schools are probably wondering if they’re still investing in charter schools at all.

After all, when encumbered by the need to collectively bargain with employees, can a charter still do all its usual profitizing tricks?

Thursday, Propel teachers and other staff voted 236-82 to join the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA).

The drive took 9 months to achieve. Propel enrolls about 4,000 students at 13 schools in Braddock Hills, Hazelwood, Homestead, McKeesport, Pitcairn, Turtle Creek, Munhall, McKees Rocks and the North Side.

Though PSEA represents staff at about a dozen charters throughout the state, unionization is a rarity at charter schools.

And the reason is pretty obvious.

Charter schools are all about escaping the rules that authentic public schools have to abide by.

Though publicly financed, they are often privately operated.

They don’t have to be run by elected school boards. They don’t have to manage their business at public meetings. They don’t have to open their budgets to public review. Heck! They don’t even have to spend all the money they get from taxes on their students.

They can legally cut services and pocket the savings.

Nor do they have to accept every student in their coverage area. They can cherry pick whichever students they figure are cheapest to educate and those who they predict will have the highest test scores. And they can hide this discrimination behind a lottery or whatever other smoke screen they want because – Hey! The rules don’t apply to them!

I’m not saying every charter school does all this, but they all can. It’s perfectly legal to do so, and we rarely even see it happening until the school goes belly up and taxpayers are left paying the tab.

So how do unions change this system?

Most obviously, they put a check on the nearly limitless power of the charter operators.

Now you have to pay a living wage. You can’t demand people work evenings and weekends without paying them overtime. You have to provide safe working conditions for students and staff. And if you want to cut student services and pocket the difference, the staff is going to have something to say about that – AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN!

How much will union power beat back charter bosses?

It’s hard to say. But there is no doubt that it will play a moderating influence.

And how much it does so may depend to a large degree on the individuals working at the school and the degree of solidarity they can exercise against their bosses.

One thing is for sure, with a union the gravy train is over.

Wall Street speculators often fawn over the charter industry because it’s possible to double or triple your investment in seven years.

This will probably not be the case in a unionized charter. And the impact of such a reality has yet to be felt.

Will the worst financial gamblers abandon school privatization because unions make it too difficult to make handfuls of cash? One can hope.

If it happened, the only charters left standing would be those created without profit as their guiding principle. The goal would really have to be doing the best thing for children, not making shadowy figures in the background a truckload of money.

Do such charter schools even exist? Maybe. With staff continuing to unionize, maybe there will be even more of them.

However, even if all of them become altruistic, there still remains a problem.

There still remains an authentic public school with which the charter must compete for limited funding.

Even a positive charter school that only does the best for its students still needs money to operate. And most districts barely have enough funding for one education system – certainly not two parallel ones.

This is a problem I don’t think unions can solve.

The state and federal government will have to find a better way to fund education. Relying on local property taxes to make up the largest share as we do in most parts of the country must come to an end.

But even if we figure out how to adequately, equitably and sustainably fund one education system, the presence of a charter school requires we do it twice.

Fiscal watchdogs may object to this as irresponsible, and one can certainly see their point.

However, in a country where we spend more on the military than the next ten nations combined, perhaps it isn’t so much to ask that we more than double spending on education.

Maybe there is something to be gained by having two parallel school systems. But there are certainly dangers.

Obviously the situation would be rife for de facto segregation. Charter schools already increase racial and economic segregation wherever these schools exist. However, if we regulated them to eliminate this risk, it is at least conceivable that these two systems could coexist.

It could certainly solve the problem of large class sizes by decreasing student to teacher ratios.

But will it?

Most of the people who work at charter schools are dedicated to their students and want them to succeed. They deserve every opportunity to thrive in a profession centered around children, not profit.

But can a system created to enrich the few ever be fully rehabilitated into one that puts children first?

When you defang a charter school, are you left with something harmless?

Or have you simply forced the beast to find other ways to feed?

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

A New Children’s Fund – Reducing Student Inequality Through Allegheny County Council

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Public schools are not funded fairly.

Every child does not receive equitable resources or even close to what they need.

The state and federal government provide some funding, but they leave it up to each neighborhood to take the brunt of the burden.

So the majority of funding comes from local tax revenues – rich communities give their kids more than enough and poor ones struggle to give them enough to even get by.

This means things like class size, access to tutoring and remediation, extracurricular activities, advanced placement courses, field trips, counseling, even access to a school nurse often depends on how rich of a community kids live in.

It’s a backward and barbaric way of supporting children – a kind of economic Darwinism that gives the richest kids the most advantages from the very start while holding back everyone else.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but don’t look to the state or federal government to fix it.

No matter who has been in power in the Oval Office or held majorities in Congress, national lawmakers don’t seem to care much about public schools unless it has to do with standardized testing or school privatization – policies that only make things worse.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf has been working his entire tenure to make the system more fair, but the Republican controlled legislature has blocked him at nearly every turn. And given our hopeless gerrymandered legislative districts, this isn’t about to be rectified anytime soon.

So what are we to do? Give up?

No.

In the Pittsburgh area, we have a solution ready at hand to at least reduce the inequality among rich and poor kids. All we have to do is reach into the trash.

Three years ago we had a ballot initiative called The Children’s Fund. It would have created a voluntary 5% property tax hike to pay for early learning, after-school programs and healthy meals for kids. It was defeated by voters.

And for good reason.

The proposal was an absolute mess.

As a local teacher, education activist and blogger, I advised against the plan because it raised taxes without stipulating where the money would go, it was unclear who would have been in charge of the money and other reasons.

But that doesn’t mean there was nothing of value there.

The idea of county tax revenues being used to help balance the scales of public school funding is not a bad one.

We could fix the problems with the original children’s fund and create a new one.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m running for county council. I want to increase our local investment in children and the future.

Here’s how we do it.

The 2018 Children’s Fund would have raised taxes by 0.25 mills of property tax — $25 on each $100,000 of assessed value. This would have generated an estimate $18 million a year and gone to a newly created government office under the supervision of the county manager. There would have been an advisory commission but it was really left under the discretion of the County Executive to figure out how all this would work. He’d get to pick who was in charge of the money and where it went.

This was a terrible idea.

We don’t need a big pot of money that a king gets to dole out as he chooses. Nor do we need to created unnecessary bureaucracy.

All we need is a funding formula. Collect X amount of tax revenues and send it to Y schools according to these guidelines prioritizing Title I schools and other institutions serving needy children.

Moreover, the fund doesn’t even need to include a tax increase. Council should first look to cut wasteful spending already in the budget to generate the money needed.

We already have a $2 billion budget. We spend $100 million of it to keep people locked up in the county jail, and 80 percent of them are nonviolent offenders who haven’t been convicted of anything. Many simply can’t pay cash bail, failed a drug test for something like marijuana or violated our ridiculously long parole period.

Finding $18 million might not be too difficult if we took a hard look at our finances and our priorities. And even if we couldn’t find the full amount, we could propose a lower tax increase. And if we do have to increase revenues, we can look to do so by making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share before putting more burden on residents.

We should at least explore these options before jumping on another across the board tax increase even if the cause is a good one.

Another problem with the 2018 proposal was that it was too broad. For instance, it suggested some of this money be used to offer meals to children in school. However, much of that need has been met by a program called the Community Eligibility Provision which is available nationwide as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act passed in 2010.

While food insecurity remains a problem for low income students and their families, I think there are better solutions such as increasing the minimum wage and creating more well-paying union jobs.

We should limit the new children’s fund to increasing pre-K access to needy children, offering funding to school districts to create or fund existent after school tutoring programs, reduce class size and increase teacher salaries at low income schools.

Another problem with the 2018 proposal was that it worked around instead of with local government.

Though almost everyone agreed with the stated goals of the proposal, many organizations and government officials complained that they were not consulted and made a part of the process.

There’s an easy fix for that.

Before enacting any new legislation, County Council should seek input from school districts and pre-K programs. That way, the legislation can be best crafted to meet need.

I care about schools, students and families, but I don’t know everything and neither does County Council or the County Executive. We should be humble enough to listen to what stakeholders tell us they need and then find a way to meet it.

Finally, there’s the question of fraud and mismanagement of funds.

One of the biggest red flags around the 2018 campaign is that it was not grass roots.

Financial documents show that the whole initiative had been funded by various nonprofit organizations that could, themselves, become beneficiaries of this same fund.

We have to make sure that the money is going to help children, not corporate raiders or profit-obsessed philanthrocapitalists.


To ensure this does not happen, we should put some restrictions on how the money can be used.

For example, the federal government is infamous for offering money to schools with strings attached. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, for example, was a huge corporate welfare scheme to enrich standardized testing and school privatization corporations. Schools could compete for limited funds by increasing test scores, and then if they won, they’d have to spend that money on test prep or privatization.

We don’t need any of those shenanigans in Allegheny County.

The new Children’s Fund should be barred from use in standardized testing preparation programs, it should not be available to buy new technologies or apps, and it should be used at the K-12 level ONLY at strictly public schools.

County residents cannot afford to bankroll people’s kids to private schools.

This money should not be available at any private schools even if those schools use school vouchers, Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC), Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs or other tax scholarship programs that function like school vouchers.

Moreover, county residents shouldn’t be pouring our tax dollars into schools that don’t have the same high fiscal accountability requirements as our fully public schools even if these schools claim to be fully public.

Unlike public institutions, charter schools do not have to be run by elected school boards, do not have to have school board meetings open to the public or even open their budgets to annual public review.

That’s why this new funding should be available at charter schools ONLY if those schools charters are in good standing AND if the charter schools will admit to a yearly public audit of how the money has been spent. Any misappropriation or unaccounted for funding would disqualify the charter school from further funding and prompt an immediate full state audit.

I think if we enacted legislation along those lines, we could really make a difference for the children of our county.

We have to face the facts.

Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in the country when it comes to educational equity for poor and non-white students.

The commonwealth ranks 47th in the nation for the share of K-12 public education funding that comes from the state.

The state ranks 48th nationally in opportunity gaps for high school students of color compared with white students and 47th for Hispanic students, according to a 2018 report from the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Research for Action.

A separate 2016 study found that Pennsylvania has one of the widest gaps between students along racial and socioeconomic divides in the country.

And the list goes on and on.

Only the federal and state government can truly fix the problem long term. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

We can sit idly by as our children get left behind or we can stand up and do something about it.

If elected to county council, I will do everything in my power to right this wrong.

Our kids deserve more than governmental dysfunction, class warfare and de facto racism.

Please stand with me to enact a new children’s fund that helps support our kids.

Please help me gain a seat on Allegheny County Council.

Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Patreon+Circle

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!