Use this crisis to jump-start equity in education
Last week, Houston ISD got real and closed schools through at least Oct. 16 to keep teachers, students and families safe. And the likelihood is high that most area students will be learning at home all fall and maybe all spring too. One survey found that if schools do open in October, at least 50 percent of kids will be kept home, out of the viral stew.
With so many students online, we need to get virtual teaching right and not let all that learning time slip away. We can’t repeat spring 2020, when many HISD kids didn’t even log on to their classes once, and those who did got reduced content. All the good words about righting racial and ethnic disparities after George Floyd’s death are meaningless if this year, instead of addressing the big inequities in Texas school systems, we let them worsen. Emergencies can galvanize change, and we must use this emergency to jumpstart education equity instead.
Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan aims by Sept. 8 to get every student an internet-enabled device with a keyboard they can use to read an article, type an essay and video conference with classmates and teachers. This is a great baseline. If there’s a shortfall on the Wi-Fi or keyboard front, this community must step up to fill the gap.
But technology is just the start — to really learn, students need to be able to ask questions and get feedback on their work. Many parents aren’t literate in English, and many have to work and can’t be here to consult about classes.
A throng of new skilled online tutors is needed to work individually with students daily. That’s what the wealthier families are doing. Hired from the ranks of retired teachers and unemployed college graduates, individual tutors can provide personal attention, talk through questions, catch students up who’ve fallen behind and help them do better, rather than worse. To credential this game-changing group, supervise them and line them up with the right subject areas and grade levels — HISD needs efficient business partners willing to consult and assist at a high level for a low price in this crisis.
To pay the tutors, use funds from the CARES Act and the next relief bill. Community foundations and local businesses can adopt schools, and some of their employees can tutor too. Parent-teacher organizations of richer schools can help schools with less-ready cash. There are so many ways this community full of dedicated community-minded groups and individuals could organize to get resources to the kids who need them now, not later.
And we’d all benefit. Without an educated populace, Houston’s economic future goes south. Keeping the community focused on its children’s success gives the city a positive energy we’ll lack if the schools fail. And funds channeled into the expanded group of teachers’ pockets benefit the whole economy — landlords, merchants and tax revenues.
On the flip side, we also have to help working parents, who are suddenly being threatened with censure at work for looking after their kids. Parents of young kids in particular are overwhelmed; single parents even more so. Instead of thinking of them as distracted workers, think of them as a kind of parenting national guard, whose time away from work when needed, be it an hour here and there or something longer, gets covered — by the company or by the community. And it can’t be just be the moms who do the care work. Businesses and the couples themselves should insist that both do half if there are two working parents, so women as a group aren’t sidelined from careers by this pandemic.
There’s so much more to explore and do about this, and all these issues intersect. A citywide working group on how to deal equitably with all the aspects of COVID-19 learning would be a great way to innovate and share ideas widely.
There’s so much to be done — to meet the COVID-19 emergency and the many underlying emergencies that have been systemic all along but are newly highlighted. The first step is stepping up — to ensure that the 2020-21 school year doesn’t just stumble along but uses this challenging moment to get up to speed and educate all students equitably and well.