What I Told McKeesport Area School Directors About the Unsafe Reopening Plan Proposed by Administrators

August 6, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, Data, Education, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Prejudice, protest, School Choice, school closings, Schools, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, Mark Holtzman, McKeesport, McKeesport Area School District, Politics, reopening schools, safe schools, school board, Students, teachers

This evening I went back to my high school to tell school board members what I thought of administration’s reopening plan during the global pandemic.

McKeesport Area School Directors have not voted on the proposal yet.

So I gathered my thoughts, put on my mask and went to the work session meeting.

This is what I said:

“Thank you for allowing me to address you this evening. I appreciate all the time and effort you put forward to lead the McKeesport Area School District and do what’s best for students, staff, and families.

I am a life-long resident of this community. Most of my family graduated from this school as did my brother and I. Before I got a job as a teacher at a neighboring district, I subbed here in the high school for years. My daughter has attended the district for the past 6 years and has received a first rate education so far.

However, I am very concerned with Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman’s proposed plan to reopen schools. He would have students attend school buildings in-person for half days and do virtual instruction for the other half.

This is not a safe plan for students, staff and families. I ask you to reconsider and move to a reopening plan that begins with all students engaged in distance learning.

The reason is simple. New cases of COVID-19 are spiking throughout Allegheny County. Along with Philadelphia – where students will be getting 100% virtual instruction – we have some of the highest numbers of new cases in the state.

The largest district in Allegheny County – Pittsburgh Public Schools – has already decided to start with all virtual classes as have nearby East Allegheny, Woodland Hills and Wilkinsburg districts. We should do the same.

Safety has to be the primary consideration in reopening plans during a global pandemic. Maslow tells us kids cannot learn effectively unless their bedrock needs such as safety are met.

I appreciate Dr. Holtzman’s concerns about academic loss from distance learning – and under normal circumstances I would agree with him. However, these are not normal circumstances. The kind of academics he is proposing will not be as effective as he seems to believe.

Kids would have roughly 20 minute classes. As a classroom teacher, I know that little more will get done than taking role and getting kids ready to start. I am glad Dr. Holtzman reconsidered his original plan. which would have allowed students to forgo masks in the classroom and congregate only 3 feet apart. He is right to increase precautions with mandatory masks and 6 feet social distancing. But let’s be honest. If you think students will abide by them, you are engaged in magical thinking. Moreover, these precautions will inevitably have a negative effect on learning. Screen-to-screen instruction is less effective than face-to-face instruction, yes. But Mask-to-mask is NOT face-to-face. We may achieve more academically keeping kids online than trying to instruct through plague conditions.

But even if I’m wrong about that, it’s simply not worth it.

No academics is worth the death or debilitating illness of a child, family member or teacher.

Kids don’t learn well when their teachers are in quarantine. There are few accommodations made for special needs students on a ventilator. Childcare is the least of your worries if you survive the virus but are left with a lifelong disability as a result.

If we invite kids back into the classroom, we invite COVID-19 as well. If the virus is present in the community – as county data indicates – it will get into our schools where even the best precautions will not stop it from spreading and being brought home to families.

There is significant evidence that even the youngest kids can and do get sick. And those 10 or older are just as susceptible and can spread the disease at least as easily as adults.

Moreover, the CDC reports that African Americans and other people of color are hospitalized from COVID-19 four to five times more often than white people. What are we saying to our black and brown brothers and sisters if we value their health so cheaply. Don’t their lives matter?

Spreading this disease throughout the community will not help anyone.

And for those who respond that only a certain percentage of children and adults will die, which members of your family are you willing to sacrifice?

Whose lives are you willing to bet and do you really have the authority to play God?

We’re talking about human life here.

Speaking of which, let’s not forget our teachers and school staff.

Parents at least get a choice whether to send their kids to school in-person or opt for a cyber option. Dr. Holzman’s plan gives no such choice to staff. It does little to protect them from exposure to the virus. If you approve it, you are demanding staff decide between their employment and the possibility that they may take the Coronavirus home to their own children and families.

I have had some amazing teachers in this district who changed my life and made me the person I am today. My daughter loves her teachers. Approving this plan would be a slap in their faces.

Look, I know this is a tough decision. You are being asked to shoulder an incredible burden, but we are relying on you to make the best decision for all of us.

Please do not approve Dr. Holtzman’s reopening plan. Instead have all remote instruction until there have been no new cases in the county for a full two weeks.

Only then will it be safe to reopen school buildings.

Thank you.”

Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman responded:

“I’d like to respond to a couple of those statements if you wouldn’t mind.

First of all, it’s not Mark Holtzman’s plan. It’s the McKeesport Area School District’s plan. I worked with my administration tirelessly to make those efforts happen. I’m very proud of the efforts that we made. The time and effort that our administration put in.

I think moving forward looking at the big picture there is a virtual option for families so you are welcome to utilize or exercise that opportunity.

Unfortunately we are commissioned to make a very difficult decision for what’s the betterment of all children and providing options for those families that choose to use virtual learning as a platform is available to yourself, your family and anybody else’s family that is interested.

To say that it’s not fair for one person such as yourself or myself to make a decision to totally not have school in-person, I don’t know is the right decision as well. So I think we’re in the middle of this discussion where I think the best decision is not always the easiest decision.

We’re very comfortable with the proposal that we’re making and we hope that you can find the decision that is within those couple options that is in the best interest of your family.”

(My comments begin at 16:27. The audio is a bit muffled because I kept my mask on while speaking.)

(Dr. Holtzman’s response begins at 23:13)

The school board is set to vote on the reopening plan next week at its meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 12, at 7:30 pm at the high school.

I still hope school directors vote to begin the year with virtual classes.

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Reopening Schools Unsafely Will Not Solve Anything

August 2, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, computers, discipline, edtech, Education, Healthcare, home school, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, school closings, Schools, small class size, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology child safety, childcare, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, Politics, reopening schools, safe schools, schools, science, Students, teachers

Opening schools unsafely will not solve any of our problems.

In every case, it will make them worse.

Students don’t learn a lot when their teachers are in quarantine.

Children generally receive less socialization when their parents are hospitalized.

Kids with special needs will receive few accommodations on a respirator.

Childcare is the least of your worries when planning a funeral for a family member.

No matter what need schools usually meet, Coronavirus makes the situation worse.

Every. Time.

People propose having in-person classes or hybrid models that mix in-person classes with online instruction.

But from an epidemiological point of view, it makes more sense to keep the buildings closed and provide what we can on-line.

Unless perhaps you live in some secluded county that has had extremely low infection rates for a prolonged period of time.

Otherwise, this truth holds no matter from what angle you approach it – academic, economic, political, whatever.

After all, academics don’t mean much when you’re seriously ill. The economy doesn’t matter a lot when you’re dead. And politics won’t do you much good with lifelong health complications.

If we reopen schools, we invite COVID-19 into the classroom just as well as students.

So far as we know, the virus doesn’t care what your motivations are. It only infects as many people as it can leaving us to deal with the consequences.

Consider what the virus does to the human body.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), exposure to the virus can result in mild symptoms to severe illness up to two weeks later. These include fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, nausea or vomiting and/or diarrhea.

People who are sick should stay home, monitor their symptoms and separate themselves from other members of the household.

You should seek immediate medical care if you experience trouble breathing, persistent pain or pressure in the chest, confusion, inability to stay awake and/or bluish lips or face.

Severe illness often requires hospitalization that attempts to relieve the most common complications. These are things like pneumonia, hypoxemic respiratory failure/ARDS, sepsis and septic shock, cardiomyopathy and arrhythmia, and acute kidney injury.

However, you also have to beware additional complications from prolonged hospitalization. These can include secondary bacterial infections, thromboembolism, gastrointestinal bleeding, and critical illness polyneuropathy/myopathy.

Managing blocked airways is a particular concern. This can be done in less severe cases with simple nasal cannula or oxygen rebreather masks. However, in more extreme cases, you may need continuous airway pressure provided through a machine or even invasive mechanical ventilation.

The chances of this happening to you or a loved one because your neighborhood school building was reopened and children were exposed to potentially sick classmates and staff is far from negligible.

In the US, more than 150,000 people have died from COVID-19. That’s 3.4% of cases that have lead to death.

To put that in context, The US has 5% of the global population and nearly a quarter of all Coronavirus deaths.

Over this last week, the average daily deaths in Italy were 6, France 10 and Spain 2.

In the US it was 1,204.

And make no mistake. Children can and do get sick – especially those 10 and older. They also can and do spread the virus to others.

Around the world, school closures are the rule, not the exception. While a few countries have opened schools, 143 countries have closed them nationwide.

This isn’t just because of the chance of death.

There are potential long term effects for survivors, too.

These include inflammation of the heart, cardiovascular disease and strokes; lung inflammation including persistent shortness of breath; and neurological issues such as headaches, dizziness, trouble concentrating or recalling things and even hallucinations.

This will not solve any of our current problems.

It will only make them worse.

However, I don’t wish to be dismissive.

Many kids and families are struggling with school closures.

Teachers and classrooms provide necessary services way beyond simple education.

I’m talking about food, nutrition, healthcare, childcare, counseling, tutoring, socialization, self esteem, meeting special needs, protection from abuse and a whole lot more.

If we keep school buildings closed and go to distance learning as we did in March, many of these services will continue to be disrupted or completely severed.

While reopening school buildings is NOT a viable solution, there are other things we can do.

Food, nutrition and healthcare can all be met while conducting distance learning. In fact, most schools provided these services from March through June as classrooms across the country were closed.

Likewise, counseling, tutoring, socialization, and self esteem can be provided on-line. In most cases they won’t be as effective as they would be in a physical setting. However, given the precautions necessary to meet in-person – face masks, social distancing, etc. – they may be more effective screen-to-screen than they would be mask-to-mask.

Which brings me to the most difficult considerations – meeting special needs, protection from abuse, and childcare.

Not all students are neurotypical. Many require accommodations that are difficult or impossible to make in a virtual environment.

Special arrangements could be made for these students to come into the physical classroom on a part-time or full-time basis. This isn’t as safe as complete on-line learning, but if the numbers of students are small enough, precautions such a temperature screenings and social distancing were in place and exposure mitigated, this could be a viable option.

The same goes for protection from abuse. Some students live in unsafe home environments. It is observation by responsible adults who are mandated reporters like teachers that reduce the likelihood these children will be mistreated and provide a solution when abuse is reported. However, noticing the telltale signs of such mistreatment or even communicating with a teacher privately outside of the hearing of an adult in the home is more difficult on-line.

Special arrangements could be made for students who have already been identified as at risk. They could meet with counselors and psychologists in the school every week or so. Safety precautions would be necessary but the risk could be reduced enough to make it worth taking.

The biggest problem is probably the most widespread – childcare.

Having children at home to do their schoolwork on-line puts additional pressure on parents.

It requires them to perform some of the disciplinary functions typically provided by educators. Parents have to ensure their kids are awake and ready to do their lessons. They have to monitor their children and help ensure the work gets done.

This is less difficult for parents with higher socioeconomic status who have jobs that allow them to work from home. But for those who do not have such employment, it becomes almost impossible.

In short, the economy requires some kind of daycare for these children.

Many European countries that have best managed the Coronavirus have paid workers to stay home. This allows them to take care of their own children and reduce their own exposure to the virus.

Frankly, it is the only sustainable solution.

However, our government has almost completely abrogated its responsibilities to working class people.

Parents with similar age children can create childcare networks where the same families take turns watching each others’ children. This reduces exposure to some degree.

Childcare centers also have been kept open in many communities to meet this need. However,there have been massive outbreaks at such centers across the country that would only be worsened if we rely on them more. Any sane country would close them just as it closed schools.

Until our lawmakers get off their butts and do their jobs, we will have no good solution to this problem.

Reopening school buildings to serve as childcare centers certainly won’t solve anything except put a premium on respirators, coffins and graveyard plots.

And for those who respond that only a certain percentage of children and adults will die, which members of your family are you willing to sacrifice?

Whose lives are you willing to bet and do you really have the authority to play God?

That point cannot be made too often.

We’re talking about human life here.

Reopening schools is seen as a silver bullet to so many of our problems during the pandemic.

It isn’t.

It is shooting ourselves in the foot.

If we really want to solve our issues, we need to listen to science, logic and reason.

We need to keep schools closed and teach students online until the virus is under control.

We need to make it possible for parents to stay home with their children.

And we need to do it now.

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The Hybrid Model of School Reopening is Not Safe Either

July 25, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Data, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, Racism, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, standards, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology coronavirus, COVID-19, death, disease, distance learning, education, hybrid model, in-person classes, Internet, life, Local Control, online, Pennsylvania, Politics, reopening schools, risk, risk management, school board, school directors, sickness, Students, teachers, virtual learning

Safety is in the eye of the beholder.

No matter what you do, life involves some risk.

The question is whether certain actions or courses of action involve acceptable risk and exactly what you consider to be acceptable.

These issues are not academic. School directors across the country are juggling such questions in their reopening plans.

With federal and state officials largely leaving the decision up to local elected school boards of how to hold classes in August and September, people used to choosing between bids for text books and whether to renovate the gymnasium are forced to make life and death decisions for hundreds or thousands of students, staff and their families.

There are three main options:

(1) Open schools completely to in-person learning with safety precautions
(2) Keep classes entirely on-line as they were in April and May
(3) Offer some kind of hybrid of the two

Many schools are opting for this hybrid model.

This means reopening to in-person classes part of the time and on-line learning for the rest.

There are many ways to do this.

In my home district of McKeesport, this means having half of the students attend in the morning and the other half in the afternoon with the balance of their class work being done via the Internet.

In Steel Valley, the district where I work as a middle school teacher, this means half of the students attending full days on Mondays and Tuesdays, half on Thursdays and Fridays and the building is deep cleaned while students are taught completely on-line on Wednesdays.

In either case, parents can opt-in to an entirely virtual plan, but it’s expected that most adults would choose the hybrid model with its partial in-person classes for their children.

Let me be clear – the hybrid plan is preferable to the completely in-person proposal.

It reduces exposure to other people and environments compared to the entirely in-person program.

For instance, being in class half the day reduces student exposure by half. Being in class two out of five days reduces it by 60%.

However, let’s be real.

Any in-person instruction during a global pandemic incurs some risk. And that risk is far from negligible.

Moreover, the amount of risk is greater for adults than it is for children – both because adults would experience much higher exposure under such systems and because COVID-19 seems to affect adults more severely than children.

The hybrid model, then, is tantamount to putting children, teachers and families at risk for a reduced amount of time.

Why take the risk? On the premise that in-person instruction is more robust than on-line learning. Students learn more in the classroom from educators who are physically present than they do on the Internet.

There is significant evidence to back that up. However, this premise ignores the fact that invasive but necessary safety measures like wearing masks and practicing social distancing throughout the day will inevitably have negative effects on learning.

In short, mask-to-mask learning will not be as productive as face-to-face learning. We are in uncharted territory. It is entirely up in the air whether the necessary safety precautions of in-person learning – even during a hybrid model – will be better or worse than distance learning.

So the hybrid model tries to balance the unproven and questionable promise of increased academics against the threat of increased danger of disease.

How much danger? Well that depends to a large degree on where you live and the rate of infection present there.

I live in western Pennsylvania just south of Pittsburgh.

When schools closed in Allegheny County last academic year, a handful of people got sick each day, a hundred or more a week. For instance, 23 new COVID-19 cases were reported on March 19, and 133 for the week.

Now there are hundreds of new cases in the county every day and a thousand a week – 198 on July 24, alone, and 1,363 for the week.

Screen Shot 2020-07-25 at 11.34.44 AM — Source: PA Department of Health

Screen Shot 2020-07-25 at 11.34.56 AM — Source: PA Department of Health

That is not an insignificant risk. We have an infection rate of nearly 10%. We have some of the highest numbers in the state.

I don’t know how anyone can look at those numbers and conclude anything except that the risk of infection is GREATER today than it was when we took more precautions against it.

Moreover, the situation is little better nationwide.

Not a single state has met guidelines for reopening schools issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in May.

Moving into Phase 1 would require a “Downward trajectory or near-zero incidence of documented cases over a 14-day period.” Moving to Phase 2 would require a “Downward trajectory or near-zero incidence of documented cases for at least 14 days after entering Phase 1.”

No state has experienced a “downward trajectory” for COVID-19 cases for 28 straight days. In most states, cases are increasing.

Nor does any reopening plan that I have seen – including McKeesport’s and Steel Valley’s – follow the 69-page CDC guidelines published by The New York Times earlier this month, marked “For Internal Use Only,” which was intended for federal public health response teams as they are deployed to hot spots around the country.

That document suggested several expensive and difficult safety measures such as broad testing of students and faculty and contact tracing to find people exposed to an infected student or teacher – none of which is being done locally.

The issue gets complicated though because this month the CDC bowed to pressure from the Trump administration and publicly softened its tone about reopening.

However, no matter how you look at it, reopening school buildings – even with a hybrid approach – increases risk significantly.

If school buildings are reopened with students and staff coming and going – even at a reduced rate through a hybrid plan – one would expect the virus already present in the community to gain access to our schools where it would be further spread to different segments of the community.

Schools are great meeting points. They are where local neighborhoods connect, learn, grow and share. Reopening them in a physical fashion allows for greater sharing of any easily communicable diseases in the area.

So exactly how communicable is COVID-19?

It’s often compared to influenza which infects millions of people every year yet these outbreaks rarely close schools.

Unfortunately, the consequences of getting COVID-19 are much more severe. So far the Coronavirus has shown itself to be 52 times as deadly as the flu.

Only about 0.1 percent of the people who got the flu in the US last year died of it, according to the CDC. Yet about 5.2 percent of those who came down with COVID-19 have died, based on the reported totals of cases and deaths.

During the 2018-19 flu season, about 34,000 people in the US died, according to the CDC. So far, 143,193 people have died of COVID-19 in the US, as of July 23.

And keep in mind there is a vaccine for the flu. There is nothing as yet that fights COVID-19.

Some say that even given such statistics, children are less susceptible than adults.

However, the virus was only discovered in 2019. So little is known about it – for instance, the low percentage of cases in children may be because schools were closed in April and May before many kids were exposed to it.

A recent South Korean study – the most in depth of its kind to examine how the virus affects children – found that it is especially active in older kids.

“For people who lived with parents between the ages of 10 and 19, 18.6% tested positive for the virus within about 10 days after the initial case was detected — the highest rate of transmission among the groups studied. Children younger than 10 spread the virus at the lowest rate, though researchers warned that could change when schools reopen,” wrote Stephen Stapczynski for Bloomberg News.

Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University agreed.

“So long as children are not just a complete dead end – incapable of passing the virus on, which does not seem to be the case – putting them together in schools, having them mix with teachers and other students will provide additional opportunities for the virus to move from person to person,” he said.

Do such facts represent an acceptable risk for opening schools – even with a hybrid model?

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says it does.

She said, “there’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous.”

However, if even .02% of public school students were likely to die if school buildings were reopened, that’s 11,320 children!

Are we willing to risk the lives of tens of thousands – perhaps more – children on the unproven promise of a slight improvement in academics?

And keep in mind that doesn’t even take into account the cost to adults.

According to a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), 1 in 4 teachers in the U.S. – roughly 1.5 million people – are at increased risk for complications if they become infected with the Coronavirus. This includes educators over the age of 65 and those – like myself – with a pre-existing health condition that makes them more vulnerable.

According to the CDC, death from COVID-19 is significantly more common in older adults. Though the median age of U.S. teachers is 42.4 years, nearly 19 percent of teachers are 55 and older, reports the National Center for Education Statistics.

Health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and kidney disease also increase one’s risk for serious illness from the virus. The CDC warns that roughly 60 percent of American adults have at least one chronic medical condition, and about 40 percent have two or more.

The situation is even more dire when we look at parents and grandparents in students’ homes. The KFF issued a report in July concluding that 3.3 million adults 65 or older live in a household with school-age children.

And let’s not forget the racial component.

Most minorities are more susceptible to COVID-19 because of the higher rates of social inequality they are forced to live under.

According to the CDC, Native Americans and Black people are hospitalized from the Coronavirus five times more often than White people. Hispanic and Latino people are hospitalized four times more often than White people.

Physically reopening school buildings in communities that serve large populations of people of color, then, invites greater risk than in predominantly white communities.

Screen Shot 2020-07-25 at 1.24.46 PM — SOURCE: the CDC

In any case, though, reopening school buildings – even under a hybrid model – significantly increases the risk for all the people living there.

So in summary, it is clear that the three basic options for reopening schools each offer different levels of risk.

A full reopening of schools even with safety precautions brings the highest risk. However, the hybrid model also brings significant danger to students, teachers and families – even if somewhat less than full reopening.

Distance learning has the lowest risk of all. It keeps most children physically separate from each other and thus limits exposure to the virus to the greatest extent. Likewise, it limits jeopardy for educators and other adults because teachers would mostly come into contact with children through the internet and parents would not be further complicated through potential viral contacts of their children.

From an academic standpoint, distance learning certainly has its drawbacks compared with face-to-face learning. But compared with mask-to-mask learning, virtual instruction may actually be preferable.

In any case, increased risk of death or debilitating disease has a chilling effect on learning for all involved.

In most communities – perhaps all – a decision on school reopening that balances safety with academics would lean toward distance learning above anything else.

Even if on-line learning turns out to be less effective than that provided in the hybrid model, any deficiencies can be targeted and ameliorated once the pandemic ends.

As yet, death admits of no such remedies.

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Waiting For a Teaching Assignment This Year is Like Anticipating a Death Sentence

July 20, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Healthcare, home school, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, protest, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Teachers, Technology, Unions coronavirus, COVID-19, disease, education, life and death, Politics, public schools, Refuse to Return, reopening schools, schools, teachers

Going to the mailbox each time, my heart flutters.

I open the lid and see a stack of letters. My heart sinks.

Is today the day?

Has my teaching assignment finally arrived?

It’s not that I’m so anxious to find out what grade I’ll be teaching this year or whether I have lunch duty or have to monitor in-school suspension.

It’s whether I get to live or die.

And that’s no hyperbole.

As the summer whittles down, my district has yet to release its reopening plan. Meanwhile, no communication from administrators or school directors, no public meetings, nothing.

Meanwhile surrounding districts release plans that go against Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines in the name of expediency, politicians use the issue to demonize teachers and rally their base, and our unions pretend the only problem is a lack of funding.

The Sword of Damocles dangles over my head and the rope that keeps it in place looks more frayed with every pendulum swing.

For a person like me with at least two pre-existing conditions, an assignment in the school building during a global pandemic could be a death sentence.

Teaching has taken a huge toll on my body. I have heart disease and Crohn’s Disease. Not to mention that I’m certainly not getting any younger.

That’s at least twice the average risk of getting COVID-19 if my employer decides to assign me back in the building.

And it’s something my doctors made a point of mentioning.

From the middle of June to the middle of August, teachers like me try to take care of all our personal needs before the hectic classroom schedule begins.

That means renewing clearances, financial planning, medical visits, etc.

So when I went to a routine cardiologist appointment, I was somewhat taken aback as the doctor told me, “Remember, you can’t get sick.”

“I’m sorry? What?” I said.

He had just given me a clean bill of health.

“Remember, you can’t get sick. You simply cannot afford it,” he said.

Then he went on to complain about living in a country that put economics before science.

I heard much the same from my gastroenterologist.

They were both furious at how the pandemic is being handled but had no more advice on how I could protect myself.

“If they want you to go back to work, what else can you do?” one asked me.

“Refuse?” I said.

I still don’t have a better answer.

It’s incredibly unfair that decision makers may force me to choose between my job and my life.

I love my job.

Teaching has been one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve ever had. Every day I get to help kids become the people they want to be. I get to introduce them to a world of reading where voices long past get to speak to each of them individually. I get to show them how to participate in a conversation that’s been raging for millennia.

It’s challenging and exhausting and difficult, but I know I’m making a difference.

I love every minute of it.

But I love breathing more.

I don’t want to be buried under a respirator as my lungs slowly fill with fluid.

I don’t want to die gasping for breath.

Not if I don’t have to.

“You might want to update your will,” a friend told me with a grin when I mentioned this to him.

But there’s really nothing to smile about here.

I feel like I’m about to be thrown to the wolves.

After 17 years in the classroom, years of helping kids learn how to read and write, years of listening to their needs and worries, years of helping them overcome their anxieties and fears, years of advice, counsel and friendship – is this all I’m worth to the community?

I chaperoned field trips with school directors and their children, I’ve taught board members kids and sat across from the adults at parent-teacher meetings regaling them with tales of mischief and academic triumphs. Will they now callously decide that I need to put my life at risk or else step down?

How many times did I joke and laugh with administrators, how many times did I try my best to do what they asked, how many times did I go above and beyond – and now have they no qualms about making my wife a widow and forcing my daughter to navigate the rest of her childhood without her daddy?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A sane society wouldn’t reopen school buildings when Coronavirus cases are spiking. A rational country wouldn’t politicize safety precautions, undermine scientists and disparage facts. It would pay people to stay home, suspend rent payments, provide everyone with personal protective equipment (PPE) and universal healthcare.

And it’s not too late.

By the end of August, we can continue the distance learning initiatives we began in the spring.

To be honest, there were a truckload of problems in April and May. But at least we know what they are and can do better a second time around.

We can make sure all students have access to computers, devices and the Internet. We can make expectations clear and achievable and increase project based assignments. We can habituate participation, increase interactivity and offer multiple chances to do the work.

I’m not saying it would be perfect. On-line learning will never be as effective as in-person learning.

But any education attempted under the shadow of a pandemic will be less productive than under normal circumstances.

Even if we dispense with masks and social distancing in the classroom – which would be incredibly risky for all involved – children would be on edge, traumatized and frightened.

Distance learning is the safest way to go. Any academic shortfalls could be made up in subsequent years. But you have to survive first.

My life would certainly be at risk in the physical classroom. But so would every other staff member, children’s families and even the students, themselves.

The same people advocating for a full reopen of schools like to cite studies showing young people are immune or mostly asymptomatic. But kids were the first group to be quarantined.

As we have opened summer camps and daycare centers, an increasing number of children – especially those 10-19 – have gotten sick. And even the younger ones have been known to bring the virus home to their parents.

If my life has no value to you, what about your own? What about your child’s life?

Being a teacher kind of commits you to a sort of optimism.

To dedicate your life to young people, you have to believe the future can be better than the present and the past.

I let out a deep breath and went through the letters in my mailbox.

My assignment wasn’t there.

It may arrive tomorrow or the day after.

The uncertainty is hard, but it’s better than some certainties. I still have every hope that my community will not sacrifice my life.

But if it does, I will not go quietly.

I can’t be here for your kids, if I’m not here.

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Mask-to-Mask Instruction May Be More Problematic Than Distance Learning

July 11, 2020July 11, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Healthcare, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, distance learning, education, face-to-face, instruction, masks, online, Politics, ppe, reopening schools, safe schools, schools, teachers

People talk about the upcoming school year as if we have a choice between in-person classes or distance learning.

We don’t.

The fact is there will be NO face-to-face learning this year.

Neither in our school buildings or on-line.

No matter which path we choose, we will be teaching behind a mask or behind a computer screen.

There is no middle ground here – nor should there be.

Even if schools try to execute some hybrid model where kids only attend classes in-person two or three days a week and go on-line for the remainder of the time, when they are in the school building everyone will be wearing masks.

And that’s as it should be.

When in a public place during a global pandemic like that of COVID-19, we need to wear face masks to reduce the spread of the disease.

But let’s not pretend this has no side effects.

Social distancing, limited mobility, plexiglass barriers, cleanliness protocols – all will have an impact on academics.

So if we reopen physical school buildings, we will not be returning to the kind of face-to-face instruction students enjoyed as recently as January and February.

It will be a completely new dynamic that may present as many difficulties – if not maybe more – than learning on-line.

That’s something people would do well to understand before deciding which course is best.

Mask-to-mask learning will not be face-to-face learning.

Social distancing may rob the physical classroom of almost all of its benefits over distance learning.

Again, I’m not suggesting we do without PPE or safety measures. But let’s be honest about how these measures will alter academics.

First, let’s look at masks.

Admit it. It is hard to be heard in a mask.

Imagine trying to get a message across to a classroom of middle school children with a piece of fabric hiding half of your face, obscuring your expressions and garbling your words.

I’m not saying it’s insurmountable, but it’s not indistinguishable from classroom teaching at the beginning of last school year, either.

It generates distance, just as it’s supposed to do. But teaching requires connection, understanding and relationship building.

Many of my students come into my class with trust issues. They’ve been let down by adults and authority figures. They aren’t about to put in their best work for just anyone. They have to know the teacher can be trusted and cares about them as individual people.

How are you supposed to generate trust when students can only see your eyes?

Moreover, masks are a permanent symbol of the danger we’re all in just being together. Every time we look at each other we’ll be reminded of risk, threat and our own vulnerability.

These do not make for good teaching. On Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of  Needs, only physiological necessities like food and water take precedence. Without a sense of safety, it is difficult to impossible for students to achieve their full potentials.

Unfortunately, facial coverings aren’t the only problem. Consider physical proximity.

As a teacher, I rarely sit when students are in the room.

During a 40 minute class, I probably lap the space as many times going from desk to desk observing students progress, answering questions, reading work, making suggestions, etc. This will be much more difficult with the threat of Coronavirus in the room.

How can I closely observe my students from a minimum of 6 feet away?

I would suspect this will be even more profound with kids with special needs. Just because they’re in the classroom with the teacher does not mean the teacher will be able to serve them as well as under normal circumstances. This is bound to lead to increased frustration and acting out.

The most common diagnosis my middle school students have is ADHD. The most common adaptation I’m told to make to help them overcome this is to repeatedly prompt them back on task. And you don’t want to do this in a way that will draw attention to the issue. I often walk up to students and ask questions privately, or point to something on their papers.

This will not be easy when trying to avoid their physical space. Any verbal queues would be loud enough to be heard by the rest of the class.

Nor does this allow for students to work together on group projects. They can’t push their desks together and work on assignments cooperatively in the physical classroom. In fact, in the time of COVID, these kinds of projects may actually be better served on-line.

Finally, imagine the difficulty of getting children to comply with social distancing mandates.

If we can’t get adults to wear masks, how can we expect to get their kids to do it?

Moreover, children are mischievous. Some may try to purposefully cough on their classmates just to get a reaction. Others could intentionally take off their masks to annoy classmates. As every teacher knows, some kids will do anything for attention. Even negative attention.

In-person teaching could easily degenerate into a game of trying to get kids to obey the rules with little to no actual instruction going on.

Are administrators and school boards really prepared to suspend students for endangering their classmates? Are parents willing to accept such punishments?

And let’s not forget the elephant in the room.

What do we do when safety measures fail?

When a student gets sick, do we quarantine for two weeks all the other students who came into contact with him? When a teacher gets sick, who teaches her classes while she is in isolation? And do we keep her students home, too?

Before we can reopen schools to in-person instruction, there are a host of problems we have to solve.

We have to figure out how to get kids to and from school without crowding them together on buses. We have to arrange classes and move students safely from point A to point B within the building. We have to figure out how to safely feed them – since no one can wear a mask while they eat. We have to figure out how to adequately ventilate buildings that were in need of repair for decades prior to the crisis.

One has to wonder – is it worth it?

With so many challenges involved with reopening school buildings, might it not be better to just continue distance learning initiatives?

As we’ve seen, the push for in-person schooling isn’t justified by academic concerns.

Though under normal circumstances face-to-face learning is worlds better than on-line learning, that is not what we’ll be doing if we reopen schools this year.

In truth, the pressure to reopen schools during this crisis comes more from political and economic considerations than pedagogical ones.

Lawmakers and policymakers don’t want to put forward the funding necessary to reduce the risks. Teachers fear they’ll be laid off if they speak out against unsafe working conditions. Parents fear they won’t be able to return to their own jobs if they have to stay home to take care of their children.

These issues can all be solved by good government. Our lawmakers need to follow the lead of nearly every other country that has lowered infection rates. We need federal relief checks so people can pay their bills without having to risk their lives working through a pandemic. We need personal protective equipment (PPE), protection from evictions, and universal healthcare so that we can weather the storm.

It is not the job of schools and teachers to fix these problems. We can’t. We can only further enable bad leadership.

But putting aside political and economic issues, there is an obvious best course of action.

Under these circumstances, continuing distance learning is the best choice from the standpoint of both safety AND academics.

In any other year, having a teacher physically present in the classroom with a cohort of students is worlds better than Brady Bunch style ZOOM meetings or assignments posted on-line.

But this isn’t any other year. It’s 2020 and Coronavirus cases have topped 3 million in the United States. There were nearly 60,000 new cases just yesterday.

You don’t close schools when there are only thousands of cases and then reopen them when there are millions.

One thing to recommend on-line learning at the present time is that we know it can be done. We already tried it last school year. There were certainly major problems but we have a good idea what they are and can make changes to at least attempt to solve them.

We can do a better job ensuring all students have access to computers, devices and the Internet. We can make expectations clear and achievable and increase project based assignments. We can habituate participation, increase interactivity and offer multiple chances to do the work.

Don’t get me wrong. Distance learning will never be as effective as face-to-face instruction.

But we will not have face-to-face instruction this year. It will be mask-to-mask or screen-to-screen.

That cannot be emphasized enough.

None of the possible solutions does a perfect job overcoming the problems.

There are not enough adequate virus screenings to tell who has the disease. Nor can we screen those who have it and keep them quarantined from the rest. Nor do we have adequate PPE to reduce infection. Nor does any vaccine appear to be forthcoming.

With the exception of the last point, many other developed countries have done much better with these things and so are in a better position to reopen schools.

But we have to face facts. The United States is not in the same position. In fact, we’ve made wearing a mask a political statement instead of what it is – a public health concern.

Until we solve these issues, there will be no perfect solution for schools. We just have to choose the best of several imperfect options.

In my opinion, the only way forward is distance learning.

To do otherwise is like trying to figure out how to live in a burning building instead of putting out the fire.

The only sane option is to get to a relatively safe place first.

I hope we can do that for our children, families and communities.

I hope that the death cult of capitalism doesn’t require teachers to jump on the pyre of economic growth.

We all deserve better.

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Do NOT Play Russian Roulette with Our Lives – No In-Person Schooling During a Pandemic

July 6, 2020July 6, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Donald Trump, Education, Guns, Healthcare, history, Labor, Learning, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Republican, school closings, School Funding, school violence, Schools, Students, Teachers, Technology, Unions, Violence Against Children Accountability, child safety, Commonwealth v. Malone, coronavirus, COVID-19, distance learning, education, in-person classes, liability, Pennsylvania, Politics, reopening, responsability, risk, Russian Roulette, safe schools, schools, Supreme Court, teachers

Are you responsible for gambling with another person’s life?

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court says “yes.”

Back in 1947, James Malone, 17, and William Long, 13, played a version of Russian Roulette during a sleepover.

Malone stole a revolver from his uncle and Long sneaked into his father’s room and got a bullet.

They put the cartridge in a chamber, spun the cylinder and then took turns pointing the gun at each other and pulling the trigger. On the third try, Malone put the gun to Long’s head, pulled the trigger and the gun fired, killing Long.

Malone was convicted of second degree murder even though he said he hadn’t intended to kill his friend.

The case, Commonwealth v. Malone, eventually went to the state Supreme Court where justices upheld the conviction.

They ruled:

“When an individual commits an act of gross recklessness without regard to the probability that death to another is likely to result, that individual exhibits the state of mind required to uphold a conviction of manslaughter even if the individual did not intend for death to ensue.”

Lawmakers and school administrators better pay heed to this and similar nationwide decisions.

Reopening schools to in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic is tantamount to Russian Roulette with the lives of students, teachers and families.

Every day with this virus in the physical classroom is like spinning the cylinder and pulling the trigger.

You might survive, but every time you enter the building your chances of getting sick increase until the law of averages will come for someone… perhaps many someones.

The safest course is to continue with distance learning in the fall despite the numerous academic problems with that method of instruction.

With Coronavirus cases rising by about 50,000 a day in the United States, there is simply too much virus out there to ensure anyone’s safety in the physical classroom.

Students inevitably will get sick and spread the disease to adults – teachers and their own families.

We can’t take such chances with people’s lives.

But don’t just take my word for it.

Decisions makers are taking the possibility seriously enough to try to change the laws to reduce their liability.

They want to ensure they won’t end up in court if they reopen schools and people get sick.

In May,Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for schools to be legally protected from lawsuits that could arise due to resuming classes.

Along with fellow Republican Senator John Cornyn, McConnell proposed new liability laws protecting schools and businesses from Coronavirus-related lawsuits.

McConnell told reporters:

“Can you image the nightmare that could unfold this fall when K-12 kids are still at home, when colleges and universities are still not open? That is a scenario that would only be further aggravated in the absence of some kind of liability protection that reassures school administrators that they can actually open up again… Without it, frankly that’s just not going to happen as soon as it should have.”

The Kentucky Senator went on Fox News in late April saying that such legal protections would be necessary for Republicans to even consider any new Coronavirus relief bills.

And it’s not just lawmakers. In May, 14 college presidents from around the country teleconferenced with Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asking for the same thing.

According to those who were either on the call or were knowledgeable about the conversation, the college presidents said they needed to know their institutions would not get sued if people got sick – which they thought was almost a certainty.

One way the federal government can help “is to have some kind of liability protection,” said University of Texas at El Paso president Heather Wilson, who was on the call. Wilson is a former Republican congresswoman from New Mexico.

Big business is also calling for liability protection. Groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been asking to be freed during the pandemic from being held liable if workers, customers or others get sick on their property. Notably, a lawyer for Texas Christian University told senators such a situation is “foreseeable, perhaps inevitable.”

All of which begs the question of what we mean by safety.

Is it our responsibility to make sure customers, workers, students and teachers are safe from the virus? Or is it our responsibility to make sure businesses and schools aren’t sued for taking chances with our lives?

There are things we can do to increase safety.

We should not reopen schools until the county where it is located reports zero new Coronavirus cases for two weeks. That would be taking safety seriously.

And it shouldn’t be too much to ask because other countries have been able to do such things.

Other nations have been able to test for the virus and identify those who have the disease. They have been able to trace these people’s contacts and isolate them from the rest of the population.

But that requires a vast expansion of our testing ability through coordinated federal action.

The problem is our lawmakers don’t care enough to do this.

Nor are they willing to provide us with federal relief checks, personal protective equipment (PPE), protection from evictions, and universal healthcare so that were can weather the storm.

It’s much easier to protect business from consumers and protect schools from the kids, teachers and families who make up the community.

Some will say the danger is overblown.

Children, in particular, are less susceptible to COVID-19 than older people.

And while it’s true that young people have shown fewer symptoms and include the lowest numbers of deaths, this virus has been around barely more than a year. We simply don’t know much about it and its long term effects.

A recent study from the journal the Lancet found that teenagers are just as susceptible to the disease as older people.

Researchers found few children 5-9 (the youngest included in the study) who had contracted the disease but those ages 10-19 were as likely to contract it as people ages 20-49 – and more likely than adults older than that.

So even if young people remain mostly asymptomatic, it is entirely possible they can spread the disease to older people who have a more difficult time fighting it off.

The only consensus about children and COVID-19 is that we don’t know enough about how it affects young people.

We certainly don’t want to end up like countries that have opened schools too quickly with too high infection rates.

In May, two weeks after Israel fully reopened schools, there was a COVID-19 outbreak. There were at least 130 cases at a single school. Students and staff were infected at dozens of schools causing a rash of renewed closings.

We should not be taking chances with schools.

Any action comes with some level of risk, but we should err on the side of caution.

 Our government needs to serve us.

Representatives who do not serve our interests need to be sent packing.

And anyone who gambles with our lives needs to be held liable.

Anyone who demands we place our heads against the barrel of a loaded gun as a prerequisite to jump start the economy, needs to be held responsible for that decision.

The chances of dying during the first round of a game of Russian Roulette using a standard six-shot revolver is 1/6. With each pull, the chances increase – 1/5, 1/4, etc.
The average number of consecutive pulls before the gun fires is 3.5.

We know more about that than the Coronavirus.

In effect, we don’t know how many chambers are loaded, but we know there are bullets in the gun.

There are too many hidden factors to be able to say for sure what our chances are exactly. And in the presence of such ignorance, we should assume the worst.

That’s exactly what decision makers are doing by trying to protect themselves from responsibility.

We should take that as seriously as a loaded gun put to our temples.

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Trapped On a Runaway Train to a Public School Disaster

June 30, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Data, Donald Trump, Education, Labor, Learning, Pennsylvania, Politics, Republican, Schools, Special Education, Students, Teachers, Technology, Violence Against Children coronavirus, COVID-19, disaster capitalism, distance learning, Donald Trump, education, on-line, online, pandemic, Politics, public schools, teachers

Congratulations, America.

We did it.

We screwed up the response to COVID-19 so badly that things can only get worse in the fall.

I’m a public school teacher and the father of a public school student.

I spent the last 9 weeks of class trying to create a new on-line curriculum for my 7th and 8th grade students out of thin air. Meanwhile, I had to assure my 11-year-old daughter that everything was okay during a global pandemic that robbed her of friends and teachers – all while trying to help her with her own school work.

And now at the end of June during Summer break I look at the upward curve of Coronavirus infections in the United States, and I want to cry.

We had this thing on a downward trajectory in May. It continued until about the middle of June and then took off like a rocket to the moon – straight up.

More than 126,000 deaths, and 2.5 million cases – with 40,000 new cases for each of the last four days, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

To put that in context, the CDC also says our testing is so inadequate, there are likely 10 times more actual cases than that!

The coronavirus is spreading too quickly and too widely for us to bring it under control, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal CDC deputy director.

“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”

Screen Shot 2020-06-30 at 8.48.18 AM — Source: European CDC

Nearly every other comparable country kept that downward trend. But not us.

The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Canada…

But the United States!?

Ha!

You think we can wear masks in public to guard against the spread of infection? No way! Our President politicized them.

Stay indoors to keep away from infected people? It’s summer and the beaches are open.

And – heck! – we’ve got to make sure restaurants and bars and other businesses are open, too, or else the economy will suffer – and we can’t figure out how to run the country without a never-ending game of Monopoly going.

Gotta find out who owns Boardwalk and Park Place. (Surprise! It’s the same 1% who always have and now they’ve got enough to buy a few more hotels!)

A sane country would come together and provide people with federal relief checks, personal protective equipment (PPE), protection from evictions, and universal healthcare. But we don’t live in that country.

Instead we’re all just going to have to suffer.

Not only you and me, but our kids, too.

Because they will have to somehow try to continue their educations through all this madness – again. And this time it won’t merely be for the last quarter of the year. It will be at the start of a new grade when everything is new and fresh and the groundwork is being laid for the entire academic year.

I don’t even know what to hope for anymore.

Would it be better to try to do a whole year of distance learning?

I speak from experience here – April and May were a cluster.

Kids didn’t have the necessary technology, infrastructure or understanding of how to navigate it. And there was no way to give it to them when those were the prerequisites to instruction.

Not to mention resources. All the books and papers and lessons were back in the classroom – difficult to digitize. Teachers had to figure out how to do everything from scratch with little to no training at the drop of a hat. (And guess what – not much has changed in the subsequent weeks.)

Let’s talk motivation. Kids can be hard to motivate under the best of circumstances, but try doing it through a screen! Try building a trusting instructional relationship with a child when you’re just a noisy bunch of pixels. Try meeting individual special needs.

A lot of things inevitably end up falling through the cracks and it’s up to parents to pick up the pieces. But how can they do that when they’re trying to work from home or working outside of the home or paralyzed with anxiety and fear?

And this is probably the BEST option, because what else do we have?

Are we really going to open the school buildings and teach in-person? While that would be much better from an academic standpoint, there’s still the problem of a global pandemic.

Kids will get sick. As time goes on we see increasingly younger people getting infected with worsening symptoms. We really don’t know what the long term effects of this disease will be.

And even if young people are mostly asymptomatic, chances are good they’ll spread this thing to the rest of us.

They’ll bring it home to their families. They’ll give it to their teachers.

Even if we only have half the kids one day and the other half on another day, that won’t help much. We’re still being exposed to at least a hundred kids every week. (Not to mention the question of how to effectively teach some kids in-person while the rest are on-line!)

Even with masks on – and can you imagine teaching in a mask!? Can you imagine kids wearing masks all day!? – those respiratory droplets will spread through our buildings like mad!

Many of us are in the most susceptible groups because of age or health.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to get back to my classroom and teach my students in-person more than almost anything – except dying.

I’d rather live a little bit longer, thank you.

And even if you could guarantee I’d eventually pull through,I really don’t want a ventilator shoved down my throat in order to breathe.

It’s better than not breathing at all, but I’m not taking unnecessary risks, thank you.

So even with all its dysfunctions and discontents, I guess I’d rather teach on-line.

On the plus side, the state where I live, Pennsylvania, has done better with infections than many others.

Cases are generally down though we had more than 600 new ones a few days ago.

Screen Shot 2020-06-30 at 8.44.39 AM — Pennsylvania Cases – Source: PA Dept. of Health

But the Commonwealth is not a closed system. It just takes one fool to travel across state lines from a closed arena of thousands where he heard an insecure public figure spout racist diatribes. One fool like that can spread his infection to thousands more.

And he can spread Coronavirus, too!

So we seem to be facing a no win situation here.

We seem to be hurtling forward in time from July to August while a hard reality is waiting to smack us in the face like a brick wall.

We’ll have to make a final decision about what to do with schools soon.

And as much as I hate the idea, there seems only one sensible solution.

We can’t reopen the classroom until it is safe to do so.

It is not yet safe. It does not appear that it will be in August.

COVID-19 cases are not trending downward. We do not have adequate testing to ensure that it is doing so. And we have no vaccine.

We have to protect our children, families and teachers.

A crappy year of education is better than mass death.

We will pay for it, but that’s the best we can hope for – that we’ll all survive long enough to make it right somewhere down the line.

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Standardized Tests Increase School Segregation

June 19, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Budget, California, capitalism, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Eugenics, history, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege annual testing, education, high stakes testing, Politics, prejudice, public schools, racism, school segregation, schools, segregation, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability, tracking

Let’s say your community has two schools.

One serves mostly white students and the other serves mostly black students.

How do you eliminate such open segregation?

After all, in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education as essentially separate and unequal.

It’s been nearly 70 years. We must have a recourse to such things these days. Mustn’t we?

Well, the highest court in the land laid down a series of decisions, starting with Milliken vs. Bradley in 1974, that effectively made school integration voluntary especially within district lines. So much so, in fact, that according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, from 2000 to 2014, school segregation more than doubled nationwide.

But let’s say you did find some right-minded individuals who cared enough to make the effort to fix the problem.

What could they do?

The most obvious solution would be to build a single new school to serve both populations.

So if you could find the will and the money, you could give it a try.

Unfortunately, that alone wouldn’t solve the problem.

Why?

Standardized tests.

Even when students from different racial or ethnic groups aren’t physically separated by district boundaries or school buildings, the way we rate and sort these students within the same space causes segregation.

This is because our manner of placing kids into classes, itself, is discriminatory.

We have exactly this situation in my own western Pennsylvania district, Steel Valley. We have two elementary schools – Barrett and Park – one of which serves mostly black kids and the other which serves mostly white kids. However, even when the children get to our single middle and high schools, segregation persists.

They may finally be in the same building, but they aren’t in the same classes.

Most academic tracks have at least a lower and a higher level of each course. The former is invariably organized around remediation and basic skills, the latter around critical thinking and creativity.

Moreover, being in the higher level course comes with increased opportunities for mentoring, field trips, special speakers, contests, prizes, and self esteem. And the lower courses can degenerate into mindless test prep.

Which would you rather your child experience?

We don’t enroll students in one or the other at random. Nor do we place them explicitly based on their race or ethnicity.

Increasingly schools enroll students based primarily on their test scores.

Classroom grades, student interest, even teacher recommendations are largely ignored. Kids who pass their state mandated standardized assessments generally get in the higher classes and those who fail get in the lower classes.

And – Surprise! Surprise! – since test scores are highly correlated with race and class, most of the black kids are in the lower classes and most of the white kids are in the higher classes.

Let me be clear.

This isn’t because there’s something wrong with the poor kids and children of color or something right about higher socioeconomic status and white kids.

It’s because of (1) economic inequality, and (2) implicit bias in the tests.

In short, standardized assessments at best show which kids have had all the advantages. Which ones have had all the resources, books in the home, the best nutrition, live in the safest environments, get the most sleep, don’t live with the trauma of racism and prejudice everyday.

However, even more than that is something indisputable but that most policymakers and media talking heads refuse to acknowledge: standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy.

It was invented by eugenicists – people who believed that white folks were racially superior to darker skinned people. And the purpose of these tests from the very beginning was to provide a scientific (now recognized as pseudo scientific) justification for their racism.

A standardized test is an assessment where the questions are selected based on what the “standard” test taker would answer. And since this norm is defined as a white, middle-to-upper-class person, the tests enshrine white bias.

I don’t mean that 2+2=4 has a racial bias. But most questions aren’t so simple. They ask test takers to read passages and pick out certain things that are more obvious to people enculturated as white than those enculturated as black. They use the vocabulary of middle to upper class people just to ask the questions.

This is white supremacy. Using these tests as a gatekeeper for funding, tracking, and self-respect is educational apartheid.

Black students make up almost 17 percent of American students nationwide. If all things were equal, you’d expect them to make up a similar percentage of advanced courses. However, they account for only 10 percent of students in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) classes.

In some areas it’s worse than others.

For example, according to a Department of Education Office for Civil Rights report from 2014, black students in the northern California city of Sacramento make up 16.3 percent of the population but only 5.5 percent of GATE programs. Meanwhile, in the south of the state, in San Diego, 8 percent of students are black, but make up just 3 percent of GATE classes.

Those are big disparities. In fact, the phenomenon is so common that social scientists created a term to describe it – racialized tracking.

But it has also been the subject of civil rights complaints.

In New Jersey the imbalance was so extreme the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint in 2014 against the South Orange–Maplewood School District. In a statement, the ACLU said racial segregation across academic tracks “has created a school within a school at Columbia High School.” More than 70 percent of students in lower classes were black while more than 70 percent of students in advanced classes were white.

Even so there wasn’t much that could be done. The matter ended with the Office for Civil Rights ordering the district to hire a consultant to fix the problem, but it still persists to this day.

This “school within a school” went from metaphor to reality in Austin, Texas. In 2007, a city school, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Early College High School, split into two different entities existing within the same building. And the main factor separating the two was race.

The second floor became the Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), a public magnet high school serving mostly white and Asian students. Meanwhile, the majority black and Latino students stayed on the first floor taking regular education courses.

How can that be legal? Because too many people want it that way.

LASA is ranked the best Texas high school and the 11th-best high school in the United States. In fact, whenever you see those lists of the best schools in the country, they are often the result of a wealthy local tax base combined with how many poor and minority kids they were able to keep out.

It’s a matter of priorities.

Many people – especially white people – talk a good game about equity but what they really want for their own children is privilege.

It’s what happens when you let scarcity dominate public education, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can invest in our schools so that all children have what they need – so that they aren’t in competition for dwindling resources.

But this must go hand-in-hand with an emphasis on social justice. Black lives matter. We cannot continue to treat black children as disposable.

Being gifted, talented or advanced can’t be reduced to a score on a standardized test. In fact, I’d argue that such measures should be banished from our conception of excellence altogether as the tests, themselves, should be discontinued.

This doesn’t mean we can ignore the centuries of racist policies that keep our children of color down – housing segregation, inequitable funding, over policing, a lack of resources, being left out of specialized programs. Nor does it mean that we can ignore implicit bias white teachers invariably have about black students.
But we have to dismantle the systemic racism enshrined in our school policies. The most well-meaning individuals will make little headway if the system, itself, is corrupt.

The two must be accomplished hand-in-hand, at the micro and macro level.

Integration is absolutely essential. We must ensure that all of our students get to go to school together – but not just in the same buildings, in the same classes.

This requires an end to standardized testing but maybe also an end to advanced placement courses as we know them. Why focus on higher order thinking only for the privileged kids – do it for all. Individual student needs can be met with dual teachers in the room, pullout resources and the like.

It is important to meet the needs of every student, but we cannot in doing so allow unspoken bias to be the gatekeeper of opportunity.

Equity is not just a pretty word. It has to be one of our most cherished goals.

Otherwise our policies and our people will leave many children behind.

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The Student-Teacher Relationship is One of the Most Misunderstood and Underrated Aspects of Education

June 13, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Education, Learning, literature, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers Data, education, educators, empathy, high stakes testing, Politics, standardized testing, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher, Teacher Appreciation Week, teacher autonomy, Teacher Evaluation, teachers, teaching, test-based accountability

When I came back to school for the first time since the Coronavirus closed the building, there were a pile of letters waiting for me in my mailbox.

I took them to my empty classroom and read the first one:

“Hello Mr. Singer, I just thought you should know that you are the greatest teacher I’ve had since Kindergarten all the way to my freshman year of High School and probably will remain that way forever. You always helped me with my work when I was behind and gave me extra time to finish it. Your class was the class I looked forward to every day. You were always a nice and funny man. Thank you for being there for me and everyone else in your classes. I’ll be sure to visit you after school every now and then…”

I picked up another:

“You have no idea how much I miss you… I quite miss our talks after class about video games, movies and musicals. As cheesy as it sounds, I always looked forward to them; especially during the days I was having problems with other students, your wise words always helped…”

And another:

“…we had fun times in your class. There wasn’t one non-fun day that we had because if we was going to have a bad day you made it better and way more fun. You also helped us a lot even when we didn’t ask for it. When people didn’t want to do our work, you got them happy and got them to do their work. Thanks for everything and thanks for helping me be a smarter kid.”

I felt a lump forming in my throat.

My cheeks were hot.

And why was my face wet?

I hadn’t expected any of this.

After a semester of distance learning, I’d come back to school to return all the materials I had hastily marauded from my own filing cabinets and book shelves.

I had stopped in the office merely as a matter of course.

With the school year at a close, I had gathered the odds and ends in my mailbox including this bundle of correspondence.

Now as I sat at my desk smiling, laughing and crying – experiencing each letter like a warm hug on a winters day – I remembered something Ms. Williams had said in an email.

She had assigned a thank you letter to her high school business classes. Her students had to write a formal thank you to a previous teacher. But that was all that was required. Who they wrote to and what they said was entirely up to them.

She had written to me months ago to let me know these letters were coming.
It was just bad luck that the assignment was due just as the global pandemic closed everything down so I was only reading them now.

Kids usually spend about 1,000 hours with their teachers in a single year.

During that time we build strong relationships.

While just about everyone will tell you this is important, we’re often talking about different things.

Some policymakers will insist on limiting that relationship to connections that increase academic outcomes. Others advise a more holistic approach.

Both are backed by research.

A review of 46 educational studies concluded that strong student-teacher relationships are associated with positive outcomes in everything from higher student academic engagement, attendance and grades, better behavior and fewer suspensions to higher graduation rates. And this is true of both short term and long term effects and even after controlling for differences in student backgrounds.

However, many studies disregard everything but standardized test scores. That is the primary goal and arbiter of effectiveness. As such, in those cases the relationship they are looking for is much different than in those with broader aims.

A 2018 study from Arizona State University found a disparity in teacher-training programs that highlighted this difference.

Some programs prioritized an “instrumental focus” with students where teachers were encouraged to use personal information on students to get them to behave and do their work. The goal was compliance not autonomy or problem solving.

Other programs valued a more “reciprocal focus” where students and teachers exchanged information to come to a mutual understanding and shared knowledge. Here the goal was free thought, questioning, and engagement with authority figures.

Moreover, the study found that the differences in focus corresponded to where aspiring teachers were expected to get a job after the training was complete. The instrumental focused teacher prep programs invariably trained incoming educators for low-income and high-minority schools. The reciprocal approach was preferred for teachers preparing for wealthier and whiter students.

So once again the physical segregation of our children becomes “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” But while President George W. Bush used that famous phrase to demonize anyone who thought poverty and racism were barriers to achievement, it is actually a focus on test scores that is bigoted.

We expect teachers to care about their wealthy white students but merely manipulate their poor brown ones.

This just goes to justify my own reciprocal approach in the classroom.

Test-obsessed policy makers will tell educators to manage everything with a clipboard and a spreadsheet – for example, to increase the percentage of positive interactions vs negative ones in a given class period. But such a data-centric mindset dehumanizes both student and teacher.

The goal cannot be to maximize numbers whether they be test scores or some other metric. It has to be about the relationship, itself.

Teachers have to care about their students. All teachers. All students.

Or at least we have to try.

A little bit of empathy goes a long way. And not just to get students to jump through hoops.

You have to care about each student as a person.

The goal can never be a test score. It has to be self actualization.

Teachers have to help kids become their best selves. And the definition of what counts as your best self is largely defined by the student, his- or herself.

How telling that we implicitly understand this when it comes to high socioeconomic kids with lighter skin! How pathetic that we lower our sights when it comes to poor kids and children of color.

I teach mostly minority students in a low income school in Western Pennsylvania. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve always fought against this prescription to see student relationships as instrumental to their outcomes.

And the results are evident in what they wrote to me.

“…now that I’m no longer in your class I’ve decided it was about time that I give you a proper thank you for all you did, putting up with me and dealing with me in class… You helped me learn how to write essays. But most important of all, for two years you made school fun for me again, which was something I thought was impossible.”

***

“…Everyday I was always looking forward to having your class because I knew that having your class would be thrilling. I miss having your class because you made me laugh and in return I made you laugh a couple of times.”

***

“…Being in your class made me enjoy learning and reading more. It was almost always something I looked forward to throughout my day. We were always learning about interesting topics and I was never bored in your class… Thank you for being the greatest teacher ever and a cool dude.”

***

“…I’ll never forget you as long as I live.”

***

“You were my favorite teacher because your class was always fun and we were always doing fun things and fun projects in your class and your class was never boring. You also taught us a lot of useful things… we’ve been using them so far this year. You were also never in a bad mood and always were positive in the morning so you always brought my energy up… I never looked forward to a morning class besides your class because I knew that we were going to do something fun.”

***

“…Your class was the only class that I got excited for because we always read good stories and did fun things… I also wanted to say I’m sorry for talking and disrupting the classroom when I was carrying on. I should have been paying attention to what you had to say and what you were trying to teach me.”

***

“It was interesting to have a teacher that wrote a book because not a lot of teachers write books. It was also interesting [you had a] TED Talk…”

***

“You have had some pretty good accomplishments in your life if I may say so. Like your book “Gadfly on the Wall”, and I have to say it’s a pretty good book. I read some of it and I get what you’re saying.”

***

“…middle school was hard for me. I had difficult days with tons of IXLS piled [on from other classes] but instead of you giving them to me you actually taught me by yourself. Also we were able to joke around a lot about books and just random things in class.”

***

“…you taught me how to write and put punctuation in my sentences and in my paragraphs. Coming into your class in the beginning of 7th grade I didn’t know how to read that good or consistent… My vocabulary and speech increased in your class.”

***

“…You always had a way to make the class fun or easy. Also you always had a way to keep me on track and prepared… If I didn’t have you for 7th and 8th grade I don’t think I would be able to handle 9th grade… I’m glad to of had you for two years because I learned double the stuff and was double ready for 9th grade. I’m doing well [now] because of you…”

***

“I wanted to write to you because you’re honestly my favorite teacher and you kept my spirits up. I had your class for two years [7th and 8th grade]; the first year I wasn’t sure how I felt about you but overtime I realized you’re pretty cool. I loved Socratic Seminars . They were a way to voice your opinion and that’s always fun… You helped me find a few of my favorite books like “The Outsiders”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and “The Diary of Anne Frank” which my friends and I still mention to this day… I’m in the musical this year and… without you I don’t think I would have been able to build up the courage to try out… You made me the person I am today. You taught me to challenge things that are unfair and to treat people with respect.”

Those are just some of the highlights.

I think more than anything I could say, they prove the point.

But to put a cherry on top, I’ll add one last thing.

In my 8th grade poetry unit, we watch “Dead Poets Society.”

Last year my students threatened to reenact the ending of the film where the kids stand on their desks to honor Mr. Keating, their English teacher who taught them to think for themselves instead of being cogs in the machine.

On the last day of school, they did it, too.

I cautioned against it because I didn’t want anyone to fall and get hurt. But when the last bell rang and emotions ran high, I simply took the compliment.

A year later, they must have remembered the moment as much as I did because many, many of the letters weren’t addressed just to Mr. Singer.

They were addressed to “Oh Captain! My Captain!”

Screen Shot 2020-06-13 at 10.54.46 AM — I wrote each student a personal response and sent it to them via the US Post Office. For many this may be the first actual letter they’ve received.

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Pennsylvania Wants YOU to Give Standardized Tests to Your Kids at Home

May 23, 2020May 23, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, edtech, Education, home school, Keystone Exams, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, protest, Racism, Republican, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Technology CDT, Classroom Diagnostic Tools, Data Recognition Corporation, education, high stakes testing, Opt Out, parental rights, parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Profit, public schools, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability, transparency

A multi-million dollar corporation wants to make sure Pennsylvania’s children keep getting standardized tests.

Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) and the state Department of Education are providing the optional Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) assessments for use in students’ homes.

Students are not required to take the CDT in the Commonwealth unless their district decides to give it. The test is encouraged by the state as a way of telling how students will do on the required tests.

With this new option, parents finally can give multiple choice standardized tests to their own children on-line.

Which is kind of hilarious because no one really asked for that.

In fact, many parents, teachers and students breathed a sigh of relief when the requirement that students take high stakes assessments was waived this year nationwide.

With the Coronavirus pandemic closing most school buildings and students transitioning to on-line classes created from scratch by their teachers, there hasn’t been much time for anything else.

But the folks at DRC, a division of CTB McGraw-Hill, have been busy, too.

The Minnesota-based corporation sent out an email written by Matthew Stem, Deputy Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) to district contacts from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia encouraging the use of this newly available online CDT.

“I am pleased to announce that PDE is providing the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) as an optional additional resource for your Continuity of Education Plan,” Stem began.

“We anticipate that this option will be available through the reopening of schools in 2020.”

So if school boards and administrators choose, districts could assign the CDT at the end of this school year, during the summer or at the start of next school year even if school buildings are not yet open due to lingering pandemic problems.

This is the kind of academic continuity we should be rethinking not finding new ways to force on children.

For some state officials and testing executives perhaps it’s comforting that no matter what happens in this crazy world, at least we’ll still be able to sort and rank kids into Below Basic, Basic, Proficient or Advanced.

The rest of us would prefer more authentic education and assessment.

EVERYDAY USAGE

It should be noted that the CDT is not, in itself, a high stakes test.

It’s an optional test districts can assign to students in reading, math and science to predict how well they’ll do on the actual high stakes tests.

Normally, districts are encouraged (but not required) to give the CDT to students multiple times a year to determine where they’ll struggle on DRC’s other fine products like the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests given to children in grades 3-8 and the Keystone Exams given to high schoolers.

Of course this data is often used to determine which classes students are placed in, so it can play a huge role in deciding which resources and opportunities kids have.

A child who scores well can get in the advanced courses and gain access to all the field trips, guest speakers, pizza parties and other perks. Kids who score badly are often placed in remedial courses where they forgo all the glitz for extra test prep and the abiding label that they’re inferior to their classmates in the higher academic tracks.

However, you don’t really need the CDT to make such placements. Just put all the kids from wealthier families in the higher courses and kids living in poverty in the lower courses and you’ll have pretty much the same distribution.

Because standardized testing doesn’t really measure academics. It appraises socio-economics. And race. Let’s not forget race!

The Coronavirus pandemic actually leveled the playing field for the first time in nearly a century. Everyone – rich and poor – had their education disrupted.

But at least now with the reintroduction of the CDT, we can continue to discriminate against the poor black kids while privileging the richer whiter ones.

In some ways, that’s just the everyday injustice of American school policy.

However, the method DRC and PDE are using to clear the way for this particular scheme is truly spectacular.

A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN

They’re enlisting parents as test proctors.

Normally, as a classroom teacher when my administrator demands I give the CDT to my students, I have to block out a few days and give the tests, myself.

I have to pass out entry tickets with each student’s username and password so they can login to the DRC app on their iPads and take the test.

If there’s a problem signing in, I have to try and fix it.

If kids are kicked out of the testing program and can’t sign back in, I have to deal with it.

If there’s a problem with the Internet connection…. I think you get the idea.

And all of these problems are extremely common.

In the last five years of giving the CDT, I have never had a single day go by when I didn’t experience multiple technological snafus, disruptions or downright clusters.

And that’s not to say anything of the times students read a question, don’t understand what it’s asking, wave me over and I’m just as dumbfounded as they are.

In fact, the only positive I can imagine from such a situation is that parents will finally get to see how badly written and full of errors these tests truly are. Even the guidance materials are full of misspellings and confusing verbiage.

When presented with this nonsense, many kids simply zone out, clicking random answers so they can be done as soon as possible and then put their heads down for the remainder of the time.

This is the lions den the state wants to throw parents into.

PARENTS AS CORPORATE DEFENSE

Admittedly, parents won’t have a full class of 20-30 students to deal with, but complications are guaranteed.

However, the good folks at DRC are prepared for that.

They have a handy “Parent/Guardian Test Administration Guide.”

Here’s what it has to say on ASSESSMENT SECURITY:

“Parents/Guardians should remind their student that the CDT test content must remain secure at all times. None of the materials from the online test may be copied or recorded in any manner.”

That’s quite a step down from what the same company warns students on the PSSA:

“…Copying of material in any manner, including the taking of a photograph, is a violation of the federal Copyright Act. Penalties for violations of the Copyright Act may include the cost of replacing the compromised test item(s) or a fine of no less than $750 up to $30,000 for a single violation. 17 U.S.C. $ 101 et seq”

I guess that since the CDT questions are just the ones that prepare you for the REAL test questions, it doesn’t matter as much if their security is put at risk here. Or perhaps the risk of letting kids go without testing and having people realize how unnecessary these tests are is greater than any loss in test security or accuracy.

TECHNICAL ISSUES EXPECTED

The guide also cautions that the test only may be taken using a Google Chrome Internet browser. If students don’t have one installed, there is a link for parents to follow so they can install it for their kids.

For some parents, I’m sure this would be no problem. But many of my students’ parents have little access or knowledge of technology. They would pull out their hair at the very suggestion and come running to teachers and administrators for help.

Which is exactly what DRC suggests they do.

Here’s what the guide recommends for technical support:

“If technical issues arise during testing, parents/guardians are asked to contact the student’s teacher and/or the student’s school office for technical support. DRC customer service staff cannot directly support issues related to each home’s technology configurations.” [Emphasis mine.]

And this is true even if the test, itself, directs parents to contact the corporation:

“If a student receives an error message during the test administration that includes instructions to contact DRC for technical support, the parent or guardian who is assisting with the test administration should contact the student’s teacher or school office for additional instructions. Parents or students should not attempt to contact DRC’s customer service directly for technical assistance.

Teachers and/or a school’s technology staff will have the information needed to provide parents/guardians with the level of support to resolve most technology issues. If additional support is required, a school or district representative will reach out to DRC to determine a resolution.”

This is certain to put quite a strain on districts since these technological problems will occur not as they normally do within school buildings but potentially miles away in students’ homes.

Moreover, one of the most common glitches with the CDT often occurs with the entry tickets. These are typically printed by administrators and distributed to teachers who give them to students on test day. Students use the logins and passwords to gain access to the tests.

Stem’s plan would have these tickets distributed digitally over Google Classroom or whatever file sharing service is being utilized.

So this requires yet another level of distance and technological competency from parents and students just to access the tests. And once that access is gained, these logins need to be readily available in the highly likely event that students get booted from the program and have to reenter this data.

I’m sure there will be noooooooo problems at all with this. It will run very smoothly.

PARENTS AS PRISON GUARDS

But let’s say parents are able to help their children login to the test and no technical problems arise.

Can parents let their kids simply take the test alone up in their rooms?

No.

As a test proctor, you are expected to watch your children every second they’re testing to ensure they aren’t copying any information or cheating.

You can let your child have scratch paper, highlighters and calculators. But no preprinted graphic organizers, cell phones, dictionaries, thesauri, grammar or spell checkers, other computers or devices.

One concession DRC makes is that parents are encouraged to give the shorter Diagnostic Category CDT and not the full version. I’m sure distinguishing between the two on your child’s screen will be no problem at all.

This would reduce the test to 35-45 minutes – about half of the full CDT. However, times may vary – my own students have taken more than 180 minutes sometimes to finish the full version.

Still, none of this comes close to my favorite part of this catastrophe in waiting.

If parents still are uncertain about how to do all this, there is a link to a series of training videos on the PDE Website.

These are pretty much the same videos teachers are required to watch every year before giving the CDTs.

As you can imagine, they are perhaps our favorite moments of the year. We sometimes watch them over and over again. Not because they’re so riveting but because we’re required to before we give these infernal tests!

Oh, parents, you are in for a treat if your district decides to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity!

AN IMPOSITION ON PARENT’S TIME

Speaking of which, I wonder when Stem thinks parents will have the time to do all this.

Parents are working hard just to make ends meet. They’re trying to earn enough money to support the household, cook dinner, clean house, do laundry, and a host of other things.

Teaching is a full-time job and most parents don’t have the privilege to set aside that kind of time nor are they disposed to do this stuff in the first place.

When I teach my students over ZOOM, I rarely see parents guiding their kids through the lessons.

If a kid falls asleep, it’s up to me to somehow prod him awake over the Internet. If a child isn’t paying attention or playing on her phone, it’s up to me to direct her back on task.

In class, that’s fine. It’s my job and I’m right there in front of the child.

On-line, I cannot do it nearly as effectively. But I do my best because I can’t realistically expect all parents to step in here.

Yet DRC is expecting parents to do just that by becoming test proctors.

CONCLUSIONS

This is a terrible idea.

It will lead to fabulous disasters where teachers, administrators and parents fumble to make things work as DRC pockets our tax dollars.

Over the past decade, Pennsylvania and local school districts paid more than $1.3 billion for standardized testing. In particular, the state paid DRC more than $741 million for the PSSAs, Keystone Exams and CDT tests. Two of three DRC contracts were given sole source no-bid extensions.

Imagine what cash-strapped districts could do with that money.

Yet Stem, a former assistant superintendent in Berks County and former administrator in Lancaster, thinks we should give this money to corporations and then break our own backs meeting their needs.

Even if we could give the CDTs seamlessly online at home, it would hurt our most underprivileged children by taking away opportunities and unjustly labeling them failures.

No, if you ask me,it is not time to try to save standardized testing with a tone deaf plan to enlist parents as test proctors while kids are chained to the Internet.

It’s well past time to rethink the value of these tests in the first place.

We don’t need them.

Teachers can assess learning without the help of corporate America.

Our kids and their families deserve better than this.

Contact your local school directors and demand they NOT give the CDT – not now, not during the Coronavirus pandemic, not when the crisis is over, not ever again.

And if they won’t listen, opt your children out of standardized testing including diagnostics like the CDT. Then run for school board, yourself, with other likeminded parents and community members.

Write letters to the editor of your local paper, make some noise.

The people still hold the power. And we’re all being tested in more ways than one.

THE FULL EMAIL:

The following communication was initially broadcast by the Pennsylvania Department of Education on May 18, 2020. DRC is forwarding the same message to the district and school contacts on file in our databases.

May 18, 2020

To: Superintendents, Principals, Charter School CEOs, and IU Directors
From: Matt Stem, Deputy Secretary
Subject: Availability of the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) for use by students at home

I am pleased to announce that PDE is providing the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) as an optional additional resource for your Continuity of Education Plan. The CDT is a set of online tools designed to provide diagnostic information to guide instruction and provide support to students and teachers. It is aligned with the content assessed on the PSSA and Keystone exams. We anticipate that this option will be available through the reopening of schools in 2020.

This at-home testing option will allow students to access the CDT from a “public” browser without having it installed on their computers or being configured to their District’s Central Office Services network. The test-setup tasks that teachers/school assessment coordinators routinely complete for classroom administrations of the CDT are the same for the at-home administrations. Test tickets (login credentials) will be distributed directly to the students by school staff. Teachers will have access to all CDT data/reports from the at-home administrations as usual. An overview of the at-home testing option and a guidance document for parents/guardians can be accessed from the following links (or directly from DRC’s INSIGHT Portal under General Information >> Documents >> 2019-2020 Classroom Diagnostic Tools >> Memos/Documents).

At-Home Testing Overview: https://pa.drcedirect.com/Documents/Unsecure/Doc.aspx?id=32997b8e-13cf-42f0-9c2c-af1689d89323
Parent/Guardian Guidance: https://pa.drcedirect.com/Documents/Unsecure/Doc.aspx?id=cc242168-e06e-44d1-9fd4-ef859a519dab

All CDTs (Full and Diagnostic Category) are available for use. However, it is highly recommended to only have students take the Diagnostic Category CDTs at this time. Students and their parents/guardians may benefit from a much shorter testing experience using the Diagnostic Category CDTs that are aligned to current instructional content. The shorter, more focused testing will still provide teachers and administrators with the same level of reporting and resources to adjust instruction and planning during distance learning.

Thank you for all your efforts to support students during this challenging time. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact the curriculum coordinator or CDT point of contact at your local Intermediate Unit. If you are interested in using CDT for the first time, contact PDE here.

Sincerely,

Matthew Stem
Deputy Secretary, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education
Pennsylvania Department of Education

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gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

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