We haven't even gotten into the problem of inequality.
There will be parents hiring tutors and gathering to do their own schooling, which could leave students who don't have access to those perks -- or in some cases even access to the internet -- behind. Those are problems that predate the pandemic, but will be made worse by it.
A few months ago, before this most recent surge changed everyone's plans, you might have seen this as an opportunity to really re-think education. In fact, Paul Reville, a former secretary of education in Massachusetts and leader of Harvard's Education Redesign Lab, argued just that. "In this situation, we don't simply want to frantically struggle to restore the status quo because the status quo wasn't operating at an effective level and certainly wasn't serving all of our children fairly," he said
back in April.
CNN called Reville to ask him about the current moment, which seems like total chaos. Here's what he said:
Reville: Right now I'd say you know a number of our districts are still an emergency response mode. They're kind of like a traumatized patient in the emergency room. They can't really change their lifestyle until they get up and functioning as a healthy sort of entity in the first place.
But he said some districts are already faring better than others, and that will only exacerbate an achievement gap.
Reville: In some school systems that's gonna be just fine because they're prepared to go online. They either have prior experience or they are small enough that they've been able to be nimble and move quickly to make decisions and build capacity over the summer.
Other places are just struggling to get the basic pre-requisites in place to get the internet access to everybody, to make system-wide decisions on platforms and applications, what curricula to be used.
In a lot of our bigger school districts I think are still struggling with that. It's a very messy situation. And many of them didn't do very well in the fourth quarter of this past academic year, so now you're gonna have students coming coming back to school with uh wider and wider gaps in terms of their readiness to do the next grade level.
Education will be forever changed by this, he said, when CNN asked if we've missed a valuable moment to rethink how we educate our kids.
Reville: No, that opportunity still exists. We are not returning to the status quo ante. The field will show permanent changes as a result of this crisis and our adaptations to it. However, in the present, we're like a community still reeling from an earthquake, emerging from the rubble, trying to get basic systems back in place before we can consider more transformative changes. There is no doubt, though, that because of this experience parents, students and teachers will be seeking profound changes in the way education operates in the future.
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