Ten years from now, we won’t recognize education
The only good-news story to emerge from COVID-19 this week is brought to you courtesy of the American education system.
I know, I know. American education? The punching bag for every vote-hungry politician in the past 40 years? The industry that thought sweeping change was altering classroom-desk configurations from rows to circles? The landing zone for the moonshot? That American education? I see you’ve met. With the help of gloved hands and a sanitary wipe, perhaps you should trade business cards again, because the novel coronavirus and the cataclysms it has caused are forcing a rusted, calcified, stuck-inthe-1890s delivery model to change overnight.
It’s not completely modernized yet and may not be for a few more years, but what you’ll see from public schools for the remainder of this calendar year is the equivalent of a day-after-Pearl Harbor moment, when the line separating possible and impossible went from miles-wide to dental floss-thin.
If you’re the parent of a school-aged kid in Santa Fe, education changed forever this week. Forced to innovate on the fly by a stay-at-home order that erased the traditional way of going to school, the district basically re-created itself. In essence, it held classes for roughly 13,000 students with the help of laptops, hot spots and hotshots — the kids, teachers and parents who basically figured out a way to make it work.
“I’m overwhelmed with joy at how well it has gone,” says Superintendent Veronica García.
Was it perfect? Not even close. Will it feel messy, perhaps not fully baked, for the remainder of this bewitched year? Almost certainly. But school, the hard-wired guidance system of our calendars, family structure and future, will continue to take place in Santa Fe and in other cities and towns across the state. If that’s not something in which to take comfort, what is?
That said, the real question for education is what to do with this moment; how to endure the disaster wrought by COVID-19 and transform it into a tool for improvement. Because that’s what this time frame really represents: The chance to examine what works, what doesn’t and what hasn’t.
One of the big thinkers on this subject — the transformation of education — is a man named Tom Ryan, who happens to work for García as Santa Fe Public Schools’ chief information and strategy officer.
That title probably makes Ryan sound like the IT geek, and there’s a little of that in him. But in a public school career that spanned everything from shop teacher to football coach to principal to high-level administrator, he has derived some of his greatest professional pleasure from moving schools toward what education could be, provided people were willing to shake loose from what it was.
That, of course, is easier said than done. For at least two decades, pushing for the possibilities of distance learning — actually, remote learning is now the favored term — was always more likely to be shouted down in favor of, well, anything else.
But when Ryan, at García’s behest, came to Santa Fe to help form a technol
ogy plan for the future, he found a community willing to fund it. García is quick to note that without a yes vote on a recent Education Technology Note that bought laptops for every student in the district, a lot of local kids might still be playing Fortnite instead of popping into a math class.
The COVID-19 crisis, Ryan says, is an unmistakable mile marker for education. The arguments that always seemed to nibble around the edges about what to fund or how to fund — the stuff that consumed too much passion in days before everyone had to stay home and face an uncertain future — fade into the background when the only worry is whether school can continue.
“COVID’s done that for us,” he says. “I don’t have to make the case [for technology]. Basically, it’s said: ‘We either teach or we don’t.’ ”
Having answered in the affirmative, Santa Fe schools will spend the next weeks and months learning how to educate kids via electronic means only. That doesn’t mean the traditional school is outdated, Ryan says. It just means parents, kids, teachers, administrators and taxpayers now have a chance to see how other methods work and incorporate them into 2021, 2024, 2029.
Clearly, the kids are interested: Ryan says stats on the first day back to school indicate 90 percent of those students who could log in actually did.
“We don’t have 90 percent attendance on any day,” Ryan marvels.
Well, that was any day before COVID-19. This is a new day. And maybe, a new way.