Some thoughtful and timely highlights from the “What Will It Take?” debate series:

1 Finances 

Assume districts can鈥檛 survive the coming fiscal crisis just by cutting a little bit of everything. What should they cut deeply, or just stop doing? What should they spend more on than they are now?

• John Deasy: School districts are not going to simply cut their way through, or out of, this recession.

• John Bailey: States could develop an Online Teacher Corps, consisting of their school systems’ best-of-the-best online instructors, and share them across district boundaries, which could then free up other teachers to provide tutoring and one-on-one instruction.
• A.J. Crabill: Our lives and our institutions have been disrupted by forces we could not control. What we can control is whether we take this opportunity to create a new, truly equitable order from the chaos. This means doing things differently. Student outcomes don鈥檛 change until adult behaviors change.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.
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2 Instruction 

What changes have you seen under remote learning that you would like to keep permanent? What are some features of schooling before the pandemic that our schools and systems should never give up?

• Lakisha Young: We can鈥檛 just work to bring our Black and Brown students closer to an equal playing field. We owe them a massive leg up that we build into the system from the start. And if there鈥檚 ever going to be a moment when we have the community on board with this kind of bold thinking, it is now.

• Margaret Molloy: Hopefully, now is when we realize that technology benefits all students, so we can move beyond criticisms like, 鈥淚t鈥檚 too expensive,鈥� 鈥淭hat鈥檚 an unfair advantage鈥� or 鈥淭he real world isn鈥檛 like that.鈥� The real world is like that!

• Cath Fraise: Liberated from the four walls of a classroom, children are getting a chance to explore. Parents are finding online spaces where children can safely discover what resonates with them. People are also finding that you can build a powerful and dynamic community online quite well.

• John Deasy: I often hear the phrase, 鈥淲e must get back to normal.鈥� I hope we do not go back to 鈥渘ormal,鈥� the way things used to be, because it was never good for so many of our youth.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

3 Individualized Learning 

Should families demand that schools take different approaches to supporting students’ diverse needs?

• Amy Berk Anderson: Affluent families will pay for therapy, tutors, materials and classes to supplement in-person learning. Families who are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, whose children could benefit greatly from additional resources and advocacy support, can鈥檛 afford these opportunities. In response, education systems and others could create funds that learner advocates and families could access.

• Antonio Par茅s: We have all seen the video of a police officer, an agent of the state, killing a fellow American, George Floyd 鈥� yet another display of state-sanctioned racism and violence. It isn’t new or only found in policing. It exists in many of our country’s systems, including schools. How many children have had their life squeezed out of them by “school” as we know it?

• Karla Phillips-Krivickas: Teachers and parents have always known that the existence of 鈥渢he average student鈥� is a myth.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

4 Parental Choice 

Should parents have more schooling options next year? What is best for individual students? What is best for all students?

• Lakisha Young: It鈥檚 not a win to tell the poorest parents their children go back to school first. We can鈥檛 require kids without resources at home to report to school in the fall just because they don鈥檛 have a computer.

• Derrell Bradford: Poor folks don鈥檛 get what they pay for all the time. It will be interesting to see what happens when the reverse is the case.

• John Legg: The answer to whether parents should have more schooling choices next year is simple 鈥� a resounding no. School choice is the process; education quality is the goal.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

5 Teachers

What new roles will teachers have to play in the future, and how should union contracts shift moving forward?

• Derrell Bradford: The challenges of remote learning aside, it has given us the opportunity to put more and more people in front of students who are both uniquely good at teaching online and uniquely skilled at their specific content area. 鈥� More kids can now get the best teacher. This places tremendous stress on teachers unions because the scale at which people can see excellence unravels their argument that all teachers are essentially equal.

• A.J. Crabill: Why are teachers expected to be therapists or counselors? Find partners for whom that is their area of expertise. Why are teachers expected to be athletic coaches? Find community partners who can provide afterschool competitive athletics. Why are teachers expected to be lunch monitors? Find a food services partner who takes responsibility for both the kitchen and the cafeteria. Why are teachers expected to search the internet for instructional materials, or pay for books and supplies on their own? Provide teachers with a strong curriculum and instructional materials that they can improve upon if they want to, but not because they need to.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

6 Politics

Will the pandemic create new political constituencies for education reform?

• Cami Anderson: Will the original vision of education reform gain new support during the pandemic? Only if education reformers learn the right lessons from their mistakes and work to correct them by committing to real equity and understanding that communities, not schools, are the driver of change.

• Howard Fuller: Put me in the skeptical group when it comes to believing that there will be significant “reform” in how we deliver K-12 education in this country, and who controls those delivery systems.

• Terry Moe: Although the unions will surely resist, the pandemic 鈥� and cost-pressured districts 鈥� may well hasten this line of reform, pointing to a future of schools that are hybrid blends of in-person and online learning.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

7 Accelerate Learning 

If we wanted schools to not just remediate but accelerate student learning, what would it look like? What would it require systems to do?

• Kenya Bradshaw: Helping students get back to grade level starts with rejecting the typical approach to remediation, where students spend most or all of the year on content from previous grades. Schools don鈥檛 need to fill in every gap from the previous grade 鈥� just the skills and knowledge that are most important to engaging with grade-level work right away.

• Sonja Santelises: We know we will not be able to remediate our way out of the academic ground that our students lost this spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus will instead be on accelerating student learning in the fall.

• B谩rbara Rivera Batista: Education models need to reflect the demand for lifelong learning to cope with the technological and social changes we face. The education system must take into consideration the knowledge and skills students will need to compete in the global economy. Now more than ever, education adaptability needs to occur fast.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

8 Learning Loss 

How can parents and policymakers know whether schools are making up for lost learning and addressing individual needs?

• Hanna Skandera: For the first time, most parents have 鈥渆xperienced鈥� school alongside their child. Some have expressed significant realizations, such as: 鈥淚 have a second-grader who can鈥檛 read.鈥� Many feel their children are doing less schoolwork under distance learning than they would in a classroom. With the start of a new school year upon us, many schools are 鈥渙n trial鈥� to demonstrate their readiness.

• Kenya Bradshaw: For years, we have lied to parents about their children鈥檚 mastery of content and preparedness for the future.

• Dale Chu: Speaking as a girl dad 鈥� my ferocious princess will be entering kindergarten this fall 鈥� the last thing I need are empty and unsubstantiated reassurances that my daughter is doing just fine.
• Go Deeper: Read the full exchange.

Reality Check: See all our experts鈥� answers to the 8 Big Questions at The74million.org/WhatWillItTake

We need to shine a light on the ‘COVID slide’

By Hanna Skandera

Every year, there are students who don鈥檛 master their grade level. But there is a more glaring and urgent challenge for the upcoming school year.

Parents and policymakers will need to ensure that schools are prepared to support students鈥� specific needs, bridge inequities and stem the loss of learning, all while establishing a safe and healthy learning environment.

COVID-19 presents the opportunity to be responsive to urgent needs and rethink how we use time, technology and talent to create solutions to close gaps exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic.

For the first time ever, most parents across the country have 鈥渆xperienced鈥� school alongside their child. Many have expressed incredible appreciation for teachers and the magic they create in the journey of learning.

However, some parents have expressed significant realizations, such as: 鈥淚 have a second-grader who can鈥檛 read.鈥� Further, that many parents feel their children are doing less schoolwork under distance learning than they would in a classroom, and are reluctant to return to school in the fall. In short, with the start of a new school year upon us, many schools are 鈥渙n trial鈥� to demonstrate their readiness.

While policymakers must provide the flexibility for states, districts and schools to adapt and innovate, as well as make sure all schools have an instructional continuity plan, they must also expect that all schools provide parents with quality information about a child鈥檚 academic progress and learning gaps, and then establish a clear strategy for that child to be on grade level in a safe environment. Resources to measure student performance, quality instructional supports and creativity with time, technology and talent will be key.

Specifically, parents should ask the following questions:

• How will we determine what learning was missed?
• What reporting can I expect?
• When will that be communicated?
• How will these results shape the need for instructional supports and conversations with my child鈥檚 teacher?
• What are the school鈥檚 specific strategies to close gaps?
• How will the school use time, technology and talent differently to close gaps and ensure a safe and healthy environment?

There is no question that data from assessments administered early in the school year and answers to these questions will provide parents with unique, child-specific data and highlight the schools that best mitigated the effects of the 鈥淐OVID slide.鈥�

Hanna Skandera is the CEO of Mile High Strategies, former secretary of education of New Mexico and a former deputy chief of staff to the U.S. secretary of education.

Parents and students have a right to know where they stand academically

By Kenya Bradshaw

For years, we have lied to parents about their children鈥檚 mastery of content and preparedness for the future. We know this because every year, tens of thousands of high school graduates find themselves in remedial college classes, forced to spend time and money to learn skills their schools told them they鈥檇 already mastered.

Schools need to operate from a place of transparency where they inform both parents and students about their true performance. In a perfect world, I would want every student to have an individualized educational plan, with joint goals and actions the teacher, student and guardian would take each year. Until that is a reality, parents should be asking teachers directly if their children are on grade level 鈥� and how they know.

Policymakers should look at assessment data (when we鈥檙e able to administer state tests again) and survey students and families about their experiences as school restarts. It鈥檚 especially important to look beyond just the 鈥渙utputs鈥� and dig into the classroom-level factors that shape students鈥� experiences, like the amount of time spent on grade-level assignments and the quality of instruction.

Lastly, I believe we need to leverage community organizations to support the educational success of students. Many times, these organizations have the most trusted relationships with students and parents. Schools should be willing to share data with organizations that parents and guardians say will help their child’s progress. It鈥檚 just one example of how we can reimagine the way we collectively support students and ensure that every child is prepared for civic, college or career success.

Kenya Bradshaw is TNTP鈥檚 vice president of policy and community coalitions. 

Beware the temptation to misuse assessments

By Scott Marion

Parents, teachers, education leaders and policymakers are worried that students will enter school next fall considerably behind where they would have been in a 鈥渘ormal鈥� year. There are calls for 鈥渄iagnostic testing鈥� to help establish a 鈥渂aseline鈥� for students this fall.

This recommendation has two major problems. First, the term 鈥渄iagnostic assessment鈥� is distorted to the degree that it is essentially meaningless in the current context. Second, the notion of establishing a baseline to evaluate 鈥渓earning loss鈥� leads to a mindset of deficit and remediation.

I have about my concerns about the push for diagnostic testing. Many advocates are proposing to use 鈥渄iagnostic鈥� tests to understand learning losses students might have experienced, but they have not explained how these tests 鈥� which have not been validated for these purposes 鈥� will be used to improve learning and teaching.

I am also concerned that educators will be more likely to misinterpret or misuse data from these assessments than to put them to productive use, leading to lost instructional time as teachers spend hours analyzing results that likely will not provide the necessary insights.

Most students, even the most disenfranchised, did not 鈥渓ose learning.鈥� Students learned many things, not all of which were aligned to state standards and local curriculum, but most still learned something. Approaching students with an asset-based mindset 鈥� focusing on the progress students made, rather than the learning they may have missed 鈥� helps teachers capitalize on what students are bringing to school and enable them to move to grade-level learning as quickly as possible.

Further, administering tests that are essentially mini-versions of the state end-of-year exam, no matter what they are called, runs the risk of what the 鈥�1,000 mini-lesson鈥� trap, whereby teachers try to remediate each student on each missed question. As a result, teachers wind up focusing on filling endless perceived gaps in students鈥� knowledge and skills, and lose sight of what should be their main focus: ensuring that all students have access to grade-level learning.

So what do I recommend to help parents know whether students are making necessary progress to meet grade-level standards next year?

It鈥檚 quite simple, and not very different from other years.

Rather than scores or even grades, parents need to see actual samples of their child鈥檚 work, tied to a high-quality curriculum. Educators can annotate these work samples to help parents interpret how their child鈥檚 performance compares with grade-level expectations.

Teacher progress reports and parsimonious use of interim assessments might supplement what parents are learning about student progress from the classwork, and even though the spring 2021 assessments are coming under fire, I support their low-stakes use next year as a monitoring instrument.

Scott Marion is executive director of the Center for Assessment.

We should learn from schools that have delivered competency-based education

By Susan Patrick

By the fall, . Some, , will lose the equivalent of a year鈥檚 worth of academic gains 鈥� all due to COVID-19 and the abrupt and ill-equipped shift to remote learning. The racial and ethnic gaps in learning will also widen.

When schools fail to support students in addressing critical gaps in knowledge and skills, students and communities become increasingly burdened by learning gaps that accumulate over time. By contrast, competency-based districts and schools proactively challenge these practices and institute alternative systems and structures that promote success for all.

Parents are asking for competency-based approaches. Competency systems portray student learning with authentic evidence of student work transparently. Parents know all students are held to the same high expectations and that students have voice and choice in performing real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of the essential knowledge and skills required of a given standard. It also means students have access to information about their progress.

Competency-based approaches meet students where they are and ensure that they have mastered key content. Importantly, competency-based pathways allow flexibility in using time, resources and supports to ensure that students continue progressing toward success. Mastery for all learners requires us to challenge and unlearn part of traditional education as we know it and embrace collective, reciprocal accountability, continuous improvement and personalization instead. Reciprocity means that everyone in the school universe 鈥� educators, administrators, systems leaders and state policymakers 鈥� understands what students need to know and be able to do, and whether they have demonstrated mastery (with evidence from their work). This reciprocity for accountability at all levels ensures high-quality learning for all students, whether at school or at home. Collectively, we have an equal responsibility to ensure that each level of that system is equipped to make that happen for every youth.

What it would take for parents to know whether schools were addressing individual needs and what learning was lost (or gained) are important questions during COVID-19. They underlie the essential contract between communities and schools as a fundamental public good and pillar of our democracy: knowing what our education systems are doing every single day, knowing how well they are doing it and seeing evidence of their effectiveness.

To do this, it would take each student having a comprehensive learner record. School systems need to have a learning standards reference framework: a set of clearly defined learning targets that map out the skills and knowledge every student will need to be successful.

A student-centered learning management system is a integrated online platform with learning resources, unique learner profiles and a dashboard guide to help parents, educators, school leaders, administrators and policymakers access the level of data appropriate to make decisions for addressing learning needs 鈥� both of individual students and of groups of students in a school 鈥� to evaluate gaps, opportunities for support and interventions, and policy directions.

What it takes is a seven-step capacity-building program for educator-leaders to redesign a system based on how students learn best and not on what鈥檚 efficient and uniform for the system. This includes parents building demand for:

• Learner profiles: All students have a comprehensive record (personalized plan) with data updated daily.
• Whole-child learning: Learning experiences are embedded in safe environments with strong relationships.
• World-class knowledge and skills: Learning standards frameworks map out knowledge, skills and competencies students need, supported by curriculum and technology systems.
• Educator leadership: Educators have the capacity to support student-centered learning and collaboration.
• Recognition of learning: Educators need to be able to understand performance assessments designed to measure student achievement and formative assessments designed to help guide learning. They should also be able to verify whether a student has mastered a specific learning objective using evidence like classwork or online portfolios.
• Responsive interventions: Needs are met with interventions and supports in real time.
• Continuous improvement: An orientation toward putting students鈥� individual strengths first, rather than characteristics that indicate their risks, and a focus on equitable resource management to make sure student鈥檚 unique gifts are recognized and their needs are met.

These principles won鈥檛 be easy for any school system to institute overnight. But leaders should be looking to learn lessons from .

Susan Patrick is president and CEO of the Aurora Institute and a co-founder of CompetencyWorks.

Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about lost learning

By Dale Chu

Informing parents and policymakers (two very different audiences with overlapping, but often not identical, needs) about the efficacy of schools in educating all students has seldom been a priority for states, absent some form of external pressure.

Sure, the dire projections of unprecedented learning loss post-COVID have put the urgent need for clear and objective information in stark relief, but the crisis hasn鈥檛 affected the education establishment鈥檚 stubborn resistance to assessment, accountability and anything that doesn鈥檛 fall into the bland categories of banal platitudes or syrupy praise.

To the contrary, what鈥檚 needed at the moment is more honesty. Parents need to know how their children are doing, compared both with their peers and with grade-level standards.

Speaking as a girl dad 鈥� my ferocious princess will be entering kindergarten this fall 鈥� the last thing I need is an empty and unsubstantiated reassurance that my daughter is doing just fine.

Schools can and should take different approaches in providing parents with honest information based on what their current capacity is. For some that have well-developed assessment systems, it would make more sense to think of measuring learning loss within the context of an overarching instructional approach. For others with less coherence across classrooms, an off-the-shelf solution might make more sense. Either way, schools must make sure that whatever they decide upon is instructionally relevant and useful to teachers. And it goes without saying, but I鈥檒l say it nonetheless, that the information shared with parents shouldn鈥檛 be used as ammunition for retaining or over-remediating students at a time when we should be looking for creative ways to push them ahead.

Flashing my other set of credentials, policymakers want to know how schools and districts stack up against one another. Without the ability to do so, we鈥檒l be flying in the dark at an extraordinary time when students and families can ill afford a return to the when the performance of marginalized student groups was swept under the rug. For all their imperfections, standardized tests represent the most cost-effective and efficient means of gathering this information.

Sadly, states are racing in the opposite direction. With many sitting idly paralyzed by the uncertainty of restarting classes this fall, have started signaling the death knell for annual testing. The challenge of measuring the drag on student performance caused by COVID-19 is about to get even harder.

Dale Chu is an independent consultant on education programs and policy. His experience includes senior positions at the Indiana and Florida departments of education.

Our schools needed to accelerate learning even before the pandemic

By Kenya Bradshaw

First, we have to acknowledge that although students have been out of school since March, many were behind grade level already. COVID-19 did not cause our children to fall behind. Years of educational neglect and lack of intervention did that. People at all levels of the system bear the responsibility, not just teachers.

One of the biggest reasons students fall behind is that schools consistently have given them below-grade-level content and failed to use research-backed instructional practices. , we found that most students don鈥檛 get grade-level assignments day in and day out, even though most students can rise to the challenge of grade-level material when they鈥檙e given the chance. And states like Mississippi by focusing on instruction grounded in the science of reading.

Helping students get back to grade level , in which students spend most or all of the year on content from previous grades. Schools don鈥檛 need to fill in every gap from the previous grade 鈥� just the skills and knowledge that are most important to engaging with grade-level work right away. And rather than spending big chunks of the year just on reteaching that content, schools need to find ways to do that reteaching when it鈥檚 needed, alongside the grade-level curriculum. For example, a first-grade teacher would want to prioritize filling in important gaps from kindergarten math, like adding within 10, as part of the important first-grade skill of adding within 20. That would mean spending less time on less-essential skills, like telling time on an analog clock.

Beyond academics, schools need to focus on partnering with students and families to ensure that their voices are heard as they make decisions for the year ahead. And system leaders need to address inequity head-on by acknowledging that students of color are the least likely to receive grade-appropriate assignments and strong instruction even under normal circumstances, and setting up controls to ensure equitable access to those critical resources.

Kenya Bradshaw is TNTP鈥檚 vice president of policy and community coalitions. 

Acceleration and individualization 鈥� not remediation 鈥� are necessary

By Sonja Santelises

We know we will not be able to remediate our way out of the academic ground that our students lost this spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus will instead be on accelerating student learning in the fall.

First, we believe that all students need consistent access to grade-level content. Unfinished learning will be addressed by prioritizing critical foundational skills. We will adapt the scope and sequence pacing guides to ensure that essential grade-level content is prioritized and that students are exposed to that grade-appropriate content starting at the beginning of the school year.

Diagnostic testing will also be critical to identifying skills and gaps in essential foundational standards in order to support teachers in understanding where students are in their learning and so that they can provide the appropriate scaffolds to make work accessible for students to master those standards. Data will also be used to guide small-group instruction, which will be essential for student growth and mastery.

Finally, students will have individualized learning plans informed by those diagnostics and student work. Ongoing progress monitoring of those plans will be essential to inform instructional decisions throughout the course of the year.

This will be a challenge in the 100 percent virtual or blended-learning settings that will likely be our reality in the fall. Teachers will need to monitor and assess students individually and quickly readjust to address students鈥� needs. Consequently, teachers will need clear learning plans, supplemented by ongoing support and coaching. They will also need to be supported with ongoing professional learning and best practices for virtual and blended learning.

In addition, all students will need to experience deep relationships to ensure that they are cared for, seen, heard and engaged in school. We found in the virtual environment this spring that the relationships our students and families had with their schools were critical to the consistent engagement of students in learning, which will be even more important in the fall if we are working to accelerate that learning. We will also have to continue our family engagement efforts, focusing on building the capacity of families to support their children’s learning at home.

We believe that the combination of these various components will be necessary to accelerate student learning so that our children can grow and thrive in this new reality.

Sonja Santelises is CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools.

We need to help families support all students to make the most of learning at home

By B谩rbara Rivera Batista

Students and families living in economic disadvantage are more vulnerable to academic gaps, socioemotional challenges and adverse circumstances within their households. Our education systems should be prepared to address not only academic gaps but also the socioemotional impact of living in poverty and the impact of external events such as COVID.

Ensuring resilient schools and teams, and preparing everyone to address trauma and to be empathic and sensitive to trauma, are important to understanding each student’s reality and accelerate learning.

Schools should have differentiated instruction that allows each student to move progressively, receiving what they need to learn and develop at their level. We need to ensure that students can manage remote education in an appealing, fun and meaningful way 鈥� but, at the same time, with quality standards that ensure rigor and depth.

We have seen the importance of creating a study environment at home and ensuring parental support for distance learning. Giving them the tools to do this is central to our efforts. Helping families understand how to prepare a space in the home, how to use technology and how to enjoy family learning will become part of our teaching and learning efforts. Ensuring integrated and in-context learning will enable its sustainability.

We are seeing many students thriving in this remote environment, making connections to prior or new learning, and applying their knowledge in their daily home lives. As teachers have focused on building opportunities for students to practice life skills and apply their learning with household tasks and objects, we have seen that the transfer of learning is more powerful and sustained for kids.

As we continue with remote, hybrid or in-person learning, we are looking to pay closer attention to how we encourage students to demonstrate their understanding of key content and skills and to give them some choices with how they represent their knowledge so they can find meaning and use in their daily life.

Education models need to reflect the demand for lifelong learning to cope with the technological and social changes we face. The education system must take into consideration the knowledge and skills students will need to compete in the global economy. Now more than ever, education adaptability needs to occur fast. Education needs to respond to a new reality.

B谩rbara Rivera Batista is director of Vimenti School, an initiative of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico and the first public charter school on the island.

All students deserve to be challenged 

By Cami Anderson

Schools and systems must actively guard against approaches based on stereotypes and generalizations 鈥� like assuming that all kids living in poverty, or Black students, or students with disabilities or kids who may have been struggling previously are worse off now.

This kind of deficit thinking and pathologizing of students and families permeates too many practices and policies. The truth: Many students have been thriving 鈥� now that they can work at their own pace, in their own way, and are free from complicated and biased school cultures.

At the same time, many students have struggled without a regular connection to skillful educators and caring peers. Our approach to these students cannot simply be to help them 鈥渃atch up.鈥� Rather, students should feel like 鈥淚 am working hard, and it is so interesting. I see myself in the materials, and I am excited to do the work.鈥� Research is clear: Approaches that feel more like 鈥済ifted and talented鈥� programs, characterized by high expectations and meaningful work, get results for students at all levels, as opposed to 鈥渞emedial programs鈥� characterized by dumbing down and rote memorization.

During this pandemic, some low-income families may want more and harder schoolwork 鈥� not less 鈥� and they should be able to get it.

Students must also feel seen, heard, motivated and challenged in order to learn. Too few students 鈥� particularly Black, Hispanic, LGBTQIA and those with disabilities 鈥� felt this way pre-COVID. We can鈥檛 repair relationships that were never built. This work has to take center stage with as much focus and resources as the push to ensure that all students have access to high-quality instructional materials.

Educators鈥� jobs have fundamentally changed 鈥� and we can鈥檛 act as if this isn鈥檛 true. They deserve time to really dig into the content, to take great tools and make them their own, and to collectively problem-solve in this new world. We can鈥檛 teach everything, and we shouldn鈥檛 try to. Experts have identified a smaller set of essential and prioritized grade-level skills for English Language Arts and math. School systems should adopt these power standards and select or amend the best online and in-person resources to teach them.

This summer and fall, while we have a pause in the action in school buildings across the country, school system leaders need to prioritize high-quality educator training around developing relationships and navigating struggle, difference and conflict.

This will require doing four things: paring down standards to prioritize must-cover content, investing in high-quality adult training, monitoring progress and adjusting, and prioritizing trusting relationships with students and families.

In some cases, this will require major shifts in curriculum, assessments and teacher professional development. School system leaders should be courageous in making these choices and not revert to the status quo during a crisis.

Cami Anderson leads , an organization that supports policy, government, nonprofit, corporations and philanthropies dedicated to equity and justice, and , helping traditional and charter systems radically rethink their approach to student discipline. She was previously superintendent of schools in Newark. 

To accelerate learning, match teachers with their passions

By Julie Kennedy

Way back in the day, I taught a middle school science unit on matter. Those tweens and I moved from atoms to endothermic reactions in 15 days. Our classroom hummed with elegant efficiency and deep thinking. A few units later, we鈥檇 slog our way through phases of the moon, with multiple days spent trying to position a flashlight in the room to demonstrate that the moon doesn鈥檛 actually emit light. It was brutal. Our elegant efficiency was nowhere to be seen. Deep thinking was nonexistent.

The difference between those two units? My undergrad chemistry degree and deep love for all things atomic (as compared to every other unit I taught).

It鈥檚 no surprise that deep content knowledge is a key factor in our ability to simultaneously remediate and accelerate student learning. Elegant efficiency and deep thinking require the kind of content knowledge that allows teachers to teach as if they鈥檙e the equivalent of an energy bar: just enough flavor to make it tasty, but expertly compiled for efficient consumption.

After decades of working with schools, I know it鈥檚 silly to imagine finding or developing teachers with energy-bar knowledge of everything they鈥檙e expected to teach. But what if we reimagined how we assign our teachers?

Instead of Mrs. Kennedy teaching 鈥渇ourth-grade math,鈥� I鈥檓 now the 鈥渦pper elementary school geometry expert.鈥� I rotate among third, fourth and fifth grades and teach all the geometry units. Maybe I鈥檓 a geometry savant, or maybe I just find it wildly interesting and spend my spare time really zeroing in on what it means to evolve as a third-through-fifth-grade mathematician in geometry. It takes some creative thinking to extend this thought experiment to other content areas.

To cultivate and leverage depth of knowledge in English, perhaps a teacher becomes the expert in 鈥渨ord recognition鈥� and zeroes in on that as students engage with texts? Perhaps school leaders leverage the teacher who is most skilled at moving student writing ability to spend a quarter with each grade level?

It would be thrilling to see how we could reimagine scheduling and teaching assignments to creatively unlock and leverage the spikes in each teacher鈥檚 content knowledge, where their passion and expertise jump off the charts compared with their colleagues. And maybe we can move closer to the elegant efficiency and deep thinking that now only happens, in many classrooms, during a few units per year.

Julie Kennedy leads the academic and character practice on the Impact Team at the charter school growth fund. She began her career as a middle school science teacher in Newark and Boston.

First, let鈥檚 get clear about what 鈥榬eform鈥� means

By Cami Anderson

I鈥檓 no longer sure what 鈥渆ducation reform鈥� means. At some point, I believe it meant a commitment to four things:

• Higher expectations for what all students can achieve;
• Clear systems for holding educators, schools and systems accountable for making progress toward all students reaching those high expectations;
• Different approaches to recruiting, selecting, training and retaining top-notch educators; and
• Building new schools that could more quickly achieve the first three commitments.

I still believe in these four commitments as cornerstones of the work left undone. But I have also thought for a long time that they are dangerously incomplete.

So, will this original vision of education reform gain new support during the pandemic? Only if education reformers learn the right lessons from their mistakes and work to correct them by committing to real equity and understanding that communities, not schools, are the driver of change.

Too many reform efforts lack a focus on communities 鈥� and we need to support a much broader set of strategies that fall outside the traditional education reform playbook. In my time in Newark, it felt like 鈥渞eform鈥� had come to mean pressure to build more charter schools, faster, with no regard for the larger issues affecting neighborhoods. Even as high-performing charter networks and schools expanded, the data were clear. Uncoordinated growth plans were emptying out , and the neediest kids were being concentrated in traditional schools. As schools shrunk, the district decided which teachers to keep based on seniority, or the number of years they had been in the classroom, instead of their effectiveness on the job. And our district was forced to shutter buildings that were historical landmarks and lay off Newarkers in a city where the school system is the biggest employer. Too few 鈥渞eform leaders鈥� regarded this as a problem, let alone theirs to help solve as members of the community. “Reformers” must remove the blinders that come with focusing exclusively on growing charter school footprints.

In fighting racism and other forms of inequity, the reform community must do more to root out bias in our own approaches. Reform strategies in some of the most coveted charter schools, and definitely in many district-run public schools, perpetuate and in some cases exacerbate racism and other biases in things like hiring practices, cultures, curriculum choices, approaches to discipline and how progress is measured.

I still believe in bold change, including charters. But we are not deserving of new constituents if we can鈥檛 meaningfully change the game for the students who are facing the longest odds and see schools as part of communities.

Cami Anderson leads , an organization that supports policy, government, nonprofit, corporations and philanthropies dedicated to equity and justice, and , helping traditional and charter school systems radically rethink their approach to student discipline. She was previously superintendent of schools in Newark. 

More parents have seen reasons to challenge one-size-fits-all 

By Paul Toner

During our collective pandemic remote learning experience, many inequities have been laid bare among communities and students in high-poverty, underserved districts. But even parents in well-resourced school districts witnessed enormous inconsistencies from district to district, school to school and classroom to classroom.

Parents and teachers have been comparing their experiences with other parents and teachers across district, charter and private schools.

Families were given a close-up look as to what was happening in their schools on a day-to-day basis. For some, it has been a wake-up call that has created enormous concern regarding their own students鈥� education and prompted questioning of traditional systems and structures. Why do we have schools and structures that are one-size-fits-all in nature, when families and children need much more individualization and flexibility?

I think parental and student experience with our education system during the pandemic will create increased advocacy for access to more personalized learning models.

There are possible alliances among traditional homeschooling constituencies, underserved urban and rural communities, and parents who believe that their children have not been well served by traditional schooling. I also imagine a backlash against strict local control with regard to developing curriculum, assessments and technology.

If, as is expected, remote learning becomes a regular part of our public education system, I see an opportunity for proponents of competency-based education built upon high-quality, rigorous standards and curriculum 鈥� but with year-long calendars and flexible scheduling that provides opportunities for project-based learning, internships and accreditation of out-of-school application of knowledge and skills (see ).

Paul Toner is senior director of national policy, partnerships and northeast region at Teach Plus.

Families will demand change, but what they want may surprise us

By Derrell Bradford

The pandemic will create new constituencies for education reform. But not for 鈥渞eform鈥� as we鈥檝e known it.

The new constituencies will be for 鈥渄ifferent鈥� in a way I think many families didn鈥檛 think was possible, and it will likely be driven by a different set of values than pure achievement.

Across our advocacy network, families are engaging with their kids and their learning in new ways that emphasize both the child鈥檚 growth and a growing bond between kids and caregivers.

Additionally, some folks have enjoyed what they believe to be the lower-stress environment of learning at home. None of this is what we鈥檇 describe as 鈥渞eform,鈥� but it is a radical departure from the brick-and-mortar schooling ritual.

Derrell Bradford is executive vice president of 50CAN.

Change will still be about power

By Howard Fuller

It’s possible that the pandemic will create new constituencies for reform.

But I think there will also be increased resistance to “reform” from all the forces that continue to benefit from maintaining the current structures and the power arrangements that control them.

Put me in the skeptical group when it comes to believing that there will be significant “reform” in how we deliver K-12 education in this country and who controls those delivery systems.

Howard Fuller is founder and board chair emeritus of Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, a charter school in Milwaukee, and recently retired as director of the Marquette University Institute for the Transformation of Learning.

Vested interests will likely remain entrenched 鈥� except, perhaps, in online learning

By Terry Moe

Disasters are opportunities for change. They force people to do things differently and seek out new ideas, at least in the short term. But that doesn鈥檛 mean they will lead to major, enduring reforms.

As I鈥檝e argued in my recent book, The Politics of Institutional Reform: Katrina, Education, and the Second Face of Power, Hurricane Katrina ultimately led to revolutionary education reform in New Orleans, not simply because it destroyed the city鈥檚 school buildings, but because it also destroyed the power of the vested interests 鈥� the local teachers union and the local school board 鈥� that had long protected the status quo. With vested-interest power swept away, policymakers were free to pursue reformist paths that never would have been open to them otherwise.

The coronavirus pandemic is not doing that. In districts throughout the country, teachers unions and school boards remain just as powerful and entrenched as before. This simple fact will seriously limit the prospects for major change. There are some changes that the unions and school boards would actually want 鈥� e.g., efforts to combat social inequities by vastly increasing spending on schools, teachers and social services for disadvantaged kids. But in a post-pandemic future, money is likely to be way too tight to fund these sorts of goals.

If the pandemic opens up any path to reform, it is online learning. In the late spring, districts were forced to adopt virtual teaching, and the experience was overwhelmingly negative for teachers, parents and students alike. But that was partly because they were so unfamiliar and unskilled with the new technology. It was chaos. In the fall, things will improve. With many districts unable to go back to fully in-person classrooms, online learning will inevitably be an integral part of schooling 鈥� and everyone will increasingly gain familiarity with how to use it to best advantage. Some will continue to hate it, but growing numbers will see its advantages. Districts will also see that 鈥� if used wisely and selectively 鈥� it can enhance student learning, cut labor costs and play key roles on campus even when all students are able to return full time.

Although the unions will surely resist, the pandemic 鈥� and cost-pressured districts 鈥� may well hasten this line of reform, pointing to a future of schools that are hybrid blends of in-person and online learning.

Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William Bennett Munro professor of political science at Stanford University.

Teachers and teachers unions may not want the same things

By Derrell Bradford

The challenges of remote learning aside, it has given us the opportunity to put more and more people in front of students who are both uniquely good at teaching online and uniquely skilled at their specific content area. Some school systems like Success Academy Charter Schools and the National Summer School Institute have used a 鈥渙ne to many鈥� approach to remote learning, where master teachers engage with a larger classroom of students and less experienced teachers, or those who work better with small groups, provide more individualized supports.

Put differently, more kids can now get the best teacher. This places tremendous stress on teachers unions because the scale at which people can see excellence unravels their argument that all teachers are essentially equal.

Unfortunately, and already, we鈥檝e seen teachers unions move to prevent this promising model and other staffing innovations from taking hold in school districts. They have enacted job protections that basically make distance learning optional (which makes the teacher scarce) and that limit the time teachers are required to teach (which drives up their price of their labor).

It鈥檚 pretty clear the teachers unions see this as a huge economic opportunity first (as the need to reopen schools gives them leverage over policymakers), and that surmounting the instructional challenges, though probably really important to many teachers, is pretty far down the list for their unions.

Derrell Bradford is executive vice president of 50CAN.

Teacher roles must shift to support personalization

By Paul Toner

To be successful in this new environment, we need to move to a more student-centered system that supports personalized learning. This will require reimagining the role of teachers and learners. We must rethink our school infrastructure, including contracts, job descriptions, calendars and schedules. We need to recognize that students learn 24/7 in formal and informal settings. We should eliminate age-based cohort structures and implement a competency-based education system. We must measure actual learning, not rote memorization and seat time. Assessments should measure mastery of skills and content 鈥� but also creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills. Technology is an important tool, but critical to mastery is the idea that learning is social, and it requires applying it in context.

A shift toward such a student-centered, personalized learning environment will require educators to become facilitators of the process rather than lecturers and keepers of content knowledge. They will need to closely partner with students and parents as advisers to support them in creating individual learning plans and pathways for lifelong success. This will require collaboration among district and school leaders, school board members, union representatives and classroom educators as they rethink collective bargaining agreements, district policies and long-held notions of schooling.

Teacher contract language must be flexible in order to quickly address shifts in the learning environment and support new approaches to delivering instruction as they emerge. There must be more time in the school calendar and a restructuring of the school day to meet the needs of students and families and to provide teachers with time for professional development, collaboration with peers, planning time, family engagement and student advising.

This is a big challenge; however, it is possible. It will require openness to new ways of delivering education and strong collaboration between district management and unions. The willingness to adjust and be fluid with decisions based on student, teacher and parent needs will require trust and effective communication among all stakeholders. These steps will help to ensure that all district employees are engaged in creating a new vision for our schools.

Our experiences during the pandemic have made it clear that it is necessary to move in this direction if we want to provide all students with a high-quality education and a chance for success in school and life.

Paul Toner is senior director of national policy, partnerships and northeast region at Teach Plus.

We need to make teachers鈥� 鈥� and school systems鈥� 鈥� jobs more manageable

By A.J. Crabill

The current crisis has revealed how underappreciated our nation鈥檚 teachers have been 鈥� which could be a catalyst for change.

My aspiration is that teachers should have less that takes their time away from the core work of teaching. Both as a resource-saving and a teacher-saving exercise, school systems should exit as many non-core functions as possible.

Why are teachers expected to be therapists or counselors? Find partners for whom that is their area of expertise.

Why are teachers expected to be athletic coaches? Find community partners who can provide afterschool competitive athletics.

Why are teachers expected to be lunch monitors? Find a food services partner who takes responsibility for both the kitchen and the cafeteria.

Why are teachers expected to search the internet for instructional materials, or pay for books and supplies on their own? Provide teachers with a strong curriculum and instructional materials that they can improve upon if they want to, but not because they need to.

School systems shouldn鈥檛 need to be doing these things either 鈥� unless they want to. District central offices can run more leanly with partners carrying more of the load. That frees up school systems to focus on growing the ability of teachers to support student learning, and it frees up teachers to focus on student learning as their core contribution to the well-being of children.

The most important new role for teachers involves their own self-care

By Cynthia Robinson-Rivers

How will teachers be able to address the academic gaps and emotional needs of their students after returning to school during a pandemic? It is nearly impossible without addressing those same teachers鈥� socioemotional and physical health needs first.

Teachers will have to become managers and caretakers of their own needs to ensure that they have the capacity and emotional constancy to support the students in their care. I see this as a new role teachers will have to play 鈥� caring for themselves so they can take care of students during a stressful and uncertain time. It鈥檚 time for school leaders like me to make self-care a reality, rather than a buzzword, by carving out time within daily schedules for teacher wellness and leveraging community resources for mental health supports for teachers, not just for students.

What could this look like at a real school? Here鈥檚 how I鈥檓 planning for it to look at mine next year: We will have a schedule that allows for frequent teacher breaks, physical activity for students and teachers woven throughout the day, an on-site clinical psychologist working with teachers one day each week, yoga instruction for staff, students and families, and spaces in the building 鈥� in addition to the teachers’ lounge 鈥� where teachers can have mindful moments and de-stress. We will have adequate protective equipment and adhere to health and safety guidelines, and we are providing opportunities for educators to focus on self-care in professional development sessions.

Flexibility will be critically important this upcoming school year, with many unknowns and a constantly changing public health landscape. Creating shorter, more frequent breaks, for example, requires creative master scheduling and a potentially unorthodox staffing structure that allows for time to address students鈥� academic needs while also prioritizing teacher wellness.

Parents and other teacher advocates can join districts to make teacher well-being and alternative schedules a priority, so both students and teachers are able to thrive.

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers is head of school at Van Ness Elementary, part of D.C. Public Schools.

Put the supports in place that allow teachers to teach

By Evan Stone

Systemic inequity is not a new problem in our society or schools, but it is one that the COVID-19 pandemic and recent, horrific examples of racial injustice have placed at the forefront of the public鈥檚 attention. Education policy, union contracts and teaching need to change to meet these challenges.

Educators have long called for more equitable resources, but the results of our most recent national teacher survey show that our most vulnerable students are in danger of losing access to their education entirely. Teachers who serve predominantly low-income communities were far more likely to report that their students did not have access to the requisite tools and resources, like stable internet connections and computers, to continue learning during the pandemic. And nearly half of these teachers reported daily student participation rates of under 50 percent, compared with just 16 percent of teachers who serve far fewer low-income students.

Similarly, the urgency of the moment requires policy changes to ensure that students feel safe and supported by removing police from schools and moving more quickly to diversify the teaching workforce.

In addition to policy changes, contracts need to be reimagined to set baseline expectations for virtual learning by prioritizing more time for academic instruction, social-emotional support and student outreach. More flexible contracts could allow shifts in teachers鈥� roles and responsibilities, as well as better meet the needs of historically marginalized students and communities.

Contracts should also provide clear opportunities for teachers to increase their compensation for taking on additional work, serving vulnerable populations of students and helping to lead necessary shifts in their schools. A one-size-fits-all contract that dictates how teachers spend their day and limits flexibility won鈥檛 allow for the constant innovation that is required.

Teacher contracts should move away from a seniority-first structure to one that values performance and focuses on ensuring that services for the most vulnerable students are protected. New agreements should mandate that students have access to the resources they need, not just to get online but to continue learning, if schools are closed. They should provide teachers and students with safety protections like sanitized buildings, access to protective equipment, and simple things that have historically been difficult, like ensuring that all bathrooms have soap.

With supports like these in place, teachers can focus on delivering a culturally responsive and rigorous curriculum in person, virtually or both.

Evan Stone is co-chief executive officer and co-founder of Educators for Excellence (E4E).

We need innovation, we need it now, and we need parents in charge

By Lakisha Young

Many families do not have a culture of distance learning in their homes. Most of the families the Oakland REACH supports do not have access to computers or reliable internet. But even in homes equipped with these tools, many of our parents were themselves failed by the public education system and don’t have the skills to help their children with schoolwork.

That means we can鈥檛 simply give parents a choice between distance learning and sending their kids to school, because that isn鈥檛 a real choice for most families.

It鈥檚 not a win to tell the poorest parents their children go back to school first. We can鈥檛 require kids without resources at home to report to school in the fall just because they don鈥檛 have a computer. And let’s recognize that, when less than 30 percent of our Black and Brown students are reading on grade level, virtual learning might not be the tragedy some folks imagine. Are we going to risk their health to send them back for more failure?

Distance learning is now part of the long-term education reality 鈥� whether for some or all of our students, and for some or all the school year. So let鈥檚 not just lament how hard that is. Let鈥檚 not talk about how sad it is that some kids face a digital divide. Let鈥檚 not waste time and have our kids lose months of learning. Let鈥檚 acknowledge this reality and plan for it.

That鈥檚 exactly what the Oakland REACH is doing. We see an opportunity to create a solution that gives parents the tools to be leaders in their children鈥檚 education, while working together to close the gap on critical learning they鈥檝e lost. That solution for us is our new , which will offer literacy and math instruction for our students and make our parents savvy in virtual practices.

As far as we know, this is a first-of-its-kind citywide resource. It鈥檚 not just about referrals, survival strategies and replacement instruction. It鈥檚 about making parents partners in the process and raising the bar on instruction. We were able to launch our first round of five-week programming by June 29, with more than 200 students.

We need a lot more big, out-of-the box innovation like this 鈥� with our parents at the head of the table. And we need it fast.

Lakisha Young is co-founder and executive director of The Oakland REACH, a parent-led group committed to empowering families from the most underserved communities to demand high-quality schools for our children.

All families need options; right now, only some have them

By Derrell Bradford

To me, the answer to this is always yes, but what I think we will see is tension arise between wealthy parents 鈥� who bought their publicly funded private school with an expensive mortgage 鈥� and school districts either unwilling to reopen fully or unable to give any compelling instructional alternative that isn鈥檛 deeply watered down with less time and less actual learning.

Poor folks don鈥檛 get what they pay for all the time. It will be interesting to see what happens when the reverse is the case.

Derrell Bradford is executive vice president of 50CAN.

The portfolio strategy post-COVID

By Paul Hill

Americans have never bought into the idea that all kids are alike. Parents with more than one child regularly say that a school that is just right for one kid is a tough stretch for another. Though many settle for the same school for all their children, most see big differences in what motivates kids and would like the opportunity to find the best possible fit for each one.

Yet American school districts often claim to provide a set of identical schools serving different neighborhoods. They never could, and they don鈥檛 now.

As they consider reopening for the coming COVID-19 autumn, school districts face questions that can be answered only by school differentiation and family choice:

• If students can鈥檛 all be in school full time, how to make a seamless link between what students learn in school and at home?
• What to do for parents who refuse to send their children to school, and for teachers who need to avoid face-to-face contact to preserve their health?
• How to deal with the wildly different levels of learning loss that different children will have suffered?
• How to deal with emotional needs while not slowing down learning and not wasting the time of those who don鈥檛 need it?

Even in districts like Cleveland, which has broken the link between students鈥� age and grade levels in favor of mastery-based instruction, the proportion of students needing to work below their age-normal grade will vary from school to school, as will parents鈥� and teachers鈥� willingness to accept face-to-face instruction and children鈥檚 ability to benefit from distance learning.

The core idea behind the portfolio strategy is totally relevant now: meaningful choices for parents provided by diverse schools, all overseen by a district that supports school distinctiveness and good matches for kids. The strategy supports school diversity by calling for schools to get real-dollar funding based on enrollment, and to be able to use funds flexibly.

In the COVID period, family choice and schools鈥� ability to solve problems will be necessary but more complicated than ever before. Families that enroll confidently in a school in fall 2020 might find that they need something else or that the school, in trying to serve the majority of its students, evolves away from them.

Portfolio, as a flexible problem-solving strategy, is necessary today, even more than when the first localities (New York, New Orleans, Denver) first adopted it.

Paul Hill is the founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a research professor at the University of Washington Bothell.

Now more than ever, school choice can鈥檛 be the end goal

By John Legg

As a lifelong school choice advocate, I believe the answer to whether parents should have more schooling choices next year is simple 鈥� a resounding no.

School choice is the process; education quality is the goal. Too often, we celebrate school choice but fail to ask if it customizes learning with rigorous content. School choice must give students access to engaging, collaborative learning environments with deep, meaningful relationships among learners and educators.

The question is not whether families should have more school choice next year, but whether they should have high-quality educational options that are equipped to meet their unique needs.

Not all educational options are equal 鈥� parents must have options, and indeed and in many areas, these options do not exist or exist in name only. All schools, including schools of choice, must be transparent to empower parents to make informed decisions. One thing has become abundantly apparent during the pandemic: Not all educational options are equal.

Some education systems simply gave up, while others, including many schools of choice, attempted to support remote learning but lacked an understanding of basic educational pedagogy. While well-intended, many remote learning systems simply consisted of e-worksheets and reading assignments.

Moreover, they were limited to almost no teacher-to-learner engagement and zero student-to-student engagement. This is not remote learning; it is basically just homework. In rare cases, some school districts delivered daily robust lessons and live interaction with teachers and maintained dedicated time for student-to-student collaborative projects. Quality schools must have periodic assessments to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness, as well as dedicated digital space for students to engage in social activities.

Having more programs labeled as school choice is not the answer if these new options are not coupled with rigor, collaboration, accountability and strong relationships.

School choice is merely a vehicle to get us to our final destination of a high-quality, rigorous educational system that embodies strong school cultures and provides learners with meaningful relationships and a sense of belonging.

John Legg is co-founder and business administrator of Dayspring Academy, a pre-K-12 charter school near Tampa. He also served 12 years in the Florida Legislature, including four years as chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

The pandemic has proved that parents need options

By Howard Fuller 

If ever evidence was needed that the “one best system” does not work for all students, the pandemic has provided it. Some traditional districts were able to respond effectively and provide education to their students; others were not.

In many places, charter schools were able to be nimble and creative to ensure that their students got the best education possible under the circumstances.

The “one best system” must give way to new structures that are driven by parent choice 鈥� structures that are able to provide students with an education using 21st century tools and organizational forms.

Howard Fuller is founder and board chair emeritus of Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, a charter school in Milwaukee, and recently retired as director of the Marquette University Institute for the Transformation of Learning.

Schools and districts must look beyond their walls to support students

By Amy Berk Anderson

The short answer to the question is yes. Parents should demand new solutions for students with complex needs.

Yet, this is not a new reality.

Pre-COVID19, many families were frustrated because their children鈥檚 needs weren鈥檛 being met by their schools. What is different today is that many rules and regulations around the delivery of these services are now obsolete, making it nearly impossible for people to settle back into the same old routines. We must rethink roles and structures in order to balance continuity of learning with health and well-being.

Students are most likely going to be splitting time between schools and remote learning this fall. So, how might we reorganize our system to be more attentive to the needs of students and their families, and to use all our resources and assets to meet them?

Here鈥檚 one idea.

According to a recent poll, 20 percent of teachers say they are unlikely to go back to school in the fall. For those over 55, the percentages are higher. Let鈥檚 not lose these seasoned professionals. Let鈥檚 think about how to tap their talents and time differently 鈥� for example, as , who could partner with families to navigate the complex and varied options involved in education and child development. Teachers who have an interest and skill set aligned with this role could meet virtually or in small groups with students and families to cultivate relationships and help them access resources aligned with their situations and goals.

What students need during non-classroom days may not be something a school can best provide remotely. Affluent families will pay for therapy, tutors, materials, and classes to supplement in-person learning. Families who are , whose children could benefit greatly from additional resources and advocacy support, can鈥檛 afford these opportunities.

In response, education systems and others could create that learner advocates and families could access. , including RESCHOOL, has been testing this concept this summer. The response from families statewide, the majority of whom are people of color with household incomes below $50,000, has far exceeded the supply of funding.

We hope to raise more funds to continue during the school year, but this can鈥檛 fall on the backs of philanthropy alone. It is ultimately the responsibility of schools and districts to ensure continuity of learning, and this includes leveraging people and resources in fundamentally different ways than in the past.

Amy Berk Anderson is executive director of RESCHOOL Colorado. She was previously associate commissioner at the Colorado Department of Education, where she created and led the Division of Innovation, Choice, and Engagement.

Demanding that oppressive systems change isn鈥檛 enough

By Antonio Par茅s

Many families were already demanding something different. Now is the time for families to fight for something much better: wholesale change. Why? America’s schools, classrooms and resources are genuinely unequal and unfair, and many schools have caused irreparable harm to communities and generations of people.

We have all seen the video of a police officer, an agent of the state, killing a fellow American, George Floyd 鈥� yet another display of state-sanctioned racism and violence. It isn’t new or only found in policing. It exists in many of our country’s systems, including schools. How many children have had their life squeezed out of them by “school” as we know it?

Families should go much further than simply calling for schools to change. They shouldn’t go back at all 鈥� especially Black, Indigenous, LGTBQ and differently abled children’s families. Schools of all stripes don’t just miss the bar academically. They ridicule, oppress, arrest and hurt these children. It’s time for families to say, “Enough is enough.” Though COVID-19 and the corresponding school closures have been difficult, they have shown many that there are other ways to “.”

Families should band together in small groups, forming cooperatives, and . They could share responsibility for the daily oversight of kids, pool their resources, leverage online content and bring educators into homes, neighborhood centers and churches. Community organizations, businesses and individuals could bring their assets to bear. Imagine small, safe, community-based spaces for children to engage in content with the support of caring adults and one another. Sounds better than what school like this fall and has looked like for decades for many families.

If just 5 percent of Denver’s Public Schools students didn’t return, the district would lose approximately $38 million. Not an insignificant sum, and when set against state cuts and impending decreases to other revenue streams that flow into schools, it is a powerful bargaining chip, to be sure.

What if these families see the benefits of “doing school” differently? What if they realize that demanding something different from systems that have done so much damage in the past won’t work? Maybe cooperatives and microschools are the kind of change they’ve long sought 鈥� self-actualization and liberation.

Families should abandon systems that have made it hard for so many to be, to breathe, and build a better future for their children and themselves in the process.

Antonio Par茅s is founder of Walnut Hill Workshop LLC, a firm specializing in helping new schools and nonprofits. He was previously a partner at the Donnell-Kay Foundation and led the development and startup of the Vela Education Fund.

We need a more sustainable approach to supporting families

By Jennifer Charlot

Families have gotten a special window into how learning happens for their children. They are no longer hearing about it secondhand. They are experiencing it themselves, reviewing packets, watching as teachers facilitate instruction, seeing in real time how administrative and policy decisions impact their lives.

Three themes surface as we listen to families.

Mental and emotional wellness: Health and safety concerns, fears about racial injustice and persistent social isolation from peers have made families sensitive to mental health challenges like anxiety and depression. It鈥檚 clear that for learning to happen, schools can鈥檛 just operate with business as usual, without giving children a space to process. One counselor for more than 300 students, or a five-minute morning meditation, feels insufficient to support children who are managing the challenges presented by society today. Families want to know that all teachers who engage with children are able to address, at minimum, their basic emotional needs.

Access to services: Distance learning made some families nervous about how their children with exceptional needs would get key services. Some districts asked families to waive rights to services because they were unclear how to provide them. The shutdown of buildings made it difficult to fulfill IEPs, especially for children who needed things like physical therapy or assistive devices. This highlights a need for better integration of resources between the classroom and the home. How can schools help to ensure that things children have at school are also present at home 鈥� sensory kits, physical therapy equipment, etc. 鈥� and that families are trained in using them?

One approach is for schools to consider more comprehensive strategies that might include partnerships with home care services or insurance companies so that the care children receive is not limited to what they can get when they are in school.

Families as partners: Many children with exceptional needs require a cocktail of services when they are in school. Students may have a speech therapist, an aide who follows them around during the day to ensure they are accessing learning, and a general education teacher. During distance learning, families are asked to play each of these roles, in addition to working and fulfilling other household responsibilities. This feels nearly impossible, especially given that they are not trained educators. However, with additional coaching, families can be better equipped to support their learners in the home.

Jennifer Charlot is a partner at , where she focuses on school design services and learning science. Transcend is a national nonprofit organization focused on supporting communities to create and spread extraordinary and equitable designs of school.

Schools can鈥檛 meet students鈥� needs with add-ons; everything has to fit together

By Julie Kennedy 

Every school consists of hundreds of tiny, individual puzzle pieces 鈥� from big pieces, like what teachers are focusing on in their professional development, to small pieces, like how the teacher in Room 104 greets her students at the start of the day. In the best schools, someone (or some group) is holding the picture on the top of the puzzle box and every year figures out how to make sure all these individual puzzle pieces fit together meaningfully as part of a larger picture.

As we look ahead, families should focus on working with school leaders to expand and revise the picture on the top of the puzzle, to respond to a range of student needs that are even more clearly exposed during school closure. This will take more than just adding individual puzzle pieces. Far too often, urgent demands for change result in a series of reactions 鈥� adding a new SEL curriculum, a new tutoring program, new blended learning software 鈥� and piling these on top of an existing program. If we focus on the on-the-ground changes we want to see right away, we end up feeling like we鈥檝e picked up pieces from a different puzzle and tried to fit them in. The pieces don鈥檛 fit, don鈥檛 stick and don鈥檛 add to a bigger picture.

What would it look like to focus on the puzzle box picture first? Some of the most incredible schools I鈥檝e seen developed their program specifically to embrace the diverse needs of students. Some of these schools were founded with this DNA, and some have reimagined their program to ensure there is deep alignment between new ideas and practices and the rest of the core program.

One thing they share is that this work 鈥� serving students鈥� diverse needs 鈥� is incorporated into everything they do: how they train and support teachers, their daily schedule, their curriculum choices, their approach to family engagement and so much more.

Let鈥檚 start with challenging and supporting leaders to imagine how different their puzzle top picture could look, and then provide them with the resources and time they need to reconfigure and add in the missing puzzle pieces they need to put it all together.

Julie Kennedy leads the academic and character practice on the Impact Team at the Charter School Growth Fund. She began her career as a middle school science teacher in Newark and Boston.

Parents and educators can demand that schools make the most of their newfound flexibility

By Karla Phillips-Krivickas

The pandemic-related shutdown of our schools has confirmed that they were not designed to support the diverse needs of learners and are not very malleable. The very existence of special and gifted education programs acknowledges this and attempts to right this wrong for students thought to be outliers.

But teachers and parents have always known that the existence of the 鈥渁verage student鈥� is a myth.

What parents observed during the school closures will increase pressure for more extensive and personalized supports. COVID-19 has thrown the diversity of student needs into sharp relief, but the push from parents to ensure that the needs of their students are met is not new.

It has been clearly seen through the evolution and growth of school choice. Beginning with parents seeking houses in 鈥済ood districts,鈥� from to to , the education landscape has changed dramatically in the past 30 years. Families have been emboldened to demand more and seek better.

The surge in interest in demonstrates not only that parents are seeking approaches that are more tailored to the needs of individual students, but also that educators know they are needed.

Prior to the pandemic, efforts to break out of the traditional, standardized mold have been hindered by state and local policy obstacles and .

The way instruction is defined, seat-time rules, attendance requirements and even local traditions like bell schedules have stood in the way of innovation.

I have spent the past six years advocating for flexibility, but I never imagined that many of the most burdensome policies would disappear overnight. States quickly extended flexibility to schools and districts to allow them to quickly implement remote learning efforts during the pandemic. The question that still needs to be answered is whether schools will take advantage of this flexibility to develop systems that better meet the needs of their students.

Great educators and leaders are out there, but they need policymakers at every level 鈥� federal, state and local 鈥� to partner with them and be bold. They need policymakers who want to move past crisis management and .

Parents can help enact long-term, sustainable solutions to meet every child鈥檚 needs, including their own, by advocating not only to their school leaders but also to policymakers, including school board members and state legislators.

Karla Phillips-Krivickas is senior director of policy at KnowledgeWorks. She previously served as policy director for the Foundation for Excellence in Education and has also served as special assistant to the deputy superintendent at the Arizona Department of Education, as the governor鈥檚 education policy adviser and as vice chair of the Developmental Disabilities Planning Council.

Schools must seize this opportunity to rethink how they educate all learners

By Lindsay Jones

Before 1971, it was illegal in several states for students with disabilities to attend public schools. Families, and dedicated educators, changed that. They brought anti-discrimination lawsuits against states and advocated before Congress to create a system that included and valued their children.

For the past 40 years, that system has included students with disabilities, but it hasn鈥檛 always valued them.

We saw this most clearly in March, when schools closed due to COVID-19, and several respected districts and educators immediately claimed they couldn鈥檛 possibly educate students with disabilities remotely. Within two weeks, there were proposals in Congress to completely eliminate the civil rights of students with disabilities for at least one year. Most recently, major education organizations have put forward proposals to weaken civil rights protections for students based on their belief that they can鈥檛 educate students with disabilities remotely. As an advocate for children with disabilities, and as a parent, it makes me sad and angry to see some in our community abandon our children so quickly.

But we have also seen incredible innovation from amazing educators who are creative and dedicated. My organization, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, joined with more than 40 others to start the Educating All Learners Alliance that highlights the amazing work schools across the country are doing to support students with disabilities. Much of what we are learning must continue.

Now is the perfect time to reimagine how schools support all students, because school won鈥檛 look the same for any student when they return in the fall.

Imagine if districts took this opportunity to design their new school year based on what they know about how to teach the most complex learners. that if we design schools with complex learners in mind, all students benefit. When teachers are trained to educate students with reading disabilities, they are better teachers for all kids learning to read. When systems individualize content for students with disabilities in the general education classroom, they do a better job customizing for all student learning.

Students with disabilities will still need specialized instruction and supports that others don鈥檛, but when districts include and value them, they value all students more.

For years, we鈥檝e talked about ending the factory model of education, and now we actually have that opportunity. If, after all this upheaval, things just go back to normal, with one teacher, in one room, using one book for all 40 kids, we鈥檒l all have failed. Families and dedicated educators can鈥檛 allow that to happen.

It鈥檚 time again to stand up for change.

Lindsay E. Jones is president and CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

Schools must prepare to support students socially and emotionally

By Sam Drazin

The 2020-21 school year promises to be unlike any other. Families are looking to schools for guidance in how we pick up the pieces of missed instruction, missed support services, missed social opportunities and missed celebrations. They will rightfully demand that schools be prepared to address the needs of all students not only academically but also socially and emotionally.

As such, schools must take a different approach than they have in the past to supporting students鈥� diverse needs. A proactive approach to social-emotional learning, or SEL, is a clear pathway to achieving this goal. But schools must think beyond a canned SEL curriculum because the challenges 鈥� and the stakes 鈥� are higher than ever.

Families can help ensure that this critical work occurs by advocating for schools to implement high-quality SEL programming that ensures accessibility of materials to all students and provides parents with education and resources to become partners in these efforts. They can help ensure that schools consider the best ways to seamlessly integrate social-emotional learning into the core academic subjects. Too often, schools teach SEL in isolation from subjects like English, math, history and science. Instead, they should be considering how best to teach social-emotional learning in conjunction with them.

In many states, students will have been out of classrooms for nearly six months. When school begins again, virtually or in person, students will not return as they left. And herein lies the challenge for educators: How do we address the needs of all students when the spectrum of individual and collective trauma is so broad? Troublesome achievement gaps have widened. Students have missed out on vital services and interventions. Kids have been cut off from their peers. Families are struggling with new landscapes of their own. Our nation is grappling with deep, difficult questions about equality and justice.

Students鈥� traumatic experiences are varied and will inevitably need to be processed, reflected on and supported by teachers and school personnel. Before schools can address academic regression, they need to first address students鈥� social-emotional well-being.

To construct and deliver high-quality SEL programming, education leaders will need to use the summer months to plan and collect resources. They must train their educators on how best to deliver materials, virtually and in person, to be most effective in supporting all students.

Families鈥� advocacy for schools to support their students socially and emotionally through the uncertainty they face this fall will offer schools opportunities to strengthen connections and extend SEL into homes.

By planning for the year ahead, and taking advantage of the opportunities this current situation affords, schools can support their students emotionally through this crisis and lay a foundation to support them more effectively in the future.

Sam Drazin is founder and executive director of Changing Perspectives, an organization that provides schools with disability awareness programming designed to help build empathy. He is also a former elementary school educator.

Schools must treat parents as full partners

By B谩rbara Rivera Batista

Education is a human right. Students and families 鈥� regardless of their economic, social and educational circumstances 鈥� should feel safe at school to ask questions, bring concerns and seek real solutions. They should feel they can work together to help schools meet the needs of each student and family.

The integration of parents is important. Bringing them to the table helps schools understand the circumstances and realities of each family.

Fostering relationships with all students and families is crucial to support students with special education, social-emotional or other needs. These students and families need to understand that they have an ally or an advocate within the school who can understand and empathize with the challenges of this period of remote learning, and that school staff have their child鈥檚 best interests at heart and will seek solutions.

As a small school with staff dedicated to fostering and supporting these family relationships, Vimenti is well positioned to provide targeted outreach and guidance to address each student鈥檚 unique needs and challenges. All schools should strive to dedicate time and resources to improving the strategies for family communication and support, making more purposeful connections, understanding needs and challenges, and crafting solutions for common and individual areas of need.

The integration of support staff to distance learning is also important. Staff such as psychologists, nurses and therapists and special education teachers are necessary to meet particular needs students and families have.

Giving students and families support resources and responding to individual needs allows schools to create a sustainable learning process for each student and family.

B谩rbara Rivera Batista is director of Vimenti School, an initiative of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico and the first public charter school on the island.

Black and Brown children need a radical new beginning

By Lakisha Young

Oakland鈥檚 education system was in crisis before COVID-19. One-third of our district schools are labeled as some of the lowest-performing schools in California. 

Now, closing school buildings amid the pandemic has only raised the stakes, exacerbating the inequities that have left our Black and Brown students underserved and undereducated for decades. 

When schools first closed, our leaders began describing steps they would take to ensure the continuity of learning. At The Oakland REACH, we are shouting from the rooftops to say we don鈥檛 want that: The learning experience our children have been receiving cannot continue. Less than 30 percent of African-American and Latino students are reading on grade level. Continuity of learning keeps our kids on a pipeline to prison 鈥� not college. 

So, if you want to know what features our systems should keep in place, my answer is: None. 

We need to tear down this system that has failed us for generations and rebuild it from scratch. We can鈥檛 just work to bring our Black and Brown students closer to an equal playing field. We owe them a massive leg up that we build into the system from the start. And if there鈥檚 ever going to be a moment when we have the community on board with this kind of bold thinking, it is now. 

There is something new since this pandemic started that I do want to keep in place: the anger, the passion and the spotlight on injustice. I want to keep our demands for change too big and too loud to ignore. 

For so long in Oakland, too many privileged folks have sat at make-believe tables of equity with Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. Meanwhile, they are taking full advantage of an 鈥渙ut鈥� and exercising choice for their own kids, buying their way into expensive communities or sending their kids to private schools, while they fight to curb our families鈥� access to choice in policy debates. 

Now, with a global pandemic and systemic racism thrust into our headlines every day, no one can look away and pretend injustice isn鈥檛 there. We are all getting mad, and we are all demanding something new. But like a lot of people, I worry that this sense of urgency for change will fade. My hope is that from this painful time of massive upheaval in all of our lives will come inspiration to move forward with radical, innovative transformation for our kids. If that means staying loud and starting over, let鈥檚 do it. 

Lakisha Young is co-founder and executive director of The Oakland REACH, a parent-led group committed to empowering families from the most underserved communities to demand high-quality schools for our children.

Universal technology access: An overdue necessity, especially for students with disabilities

By Margaret Molloy

COVID-19 forced schools to seriously consider a long-overdue priority: one-to-one technology and universal internet access in and out of school. 

Remote learning demands that every student have internet access and a laptop, something students with disabilities have needed for a long time. Now, any student with a disability can receive text-to-speech, read-aloud or other accommodations that allow them to access the curriculum at all times. Likewise, students learning English can use online dictionaries and translation features seamlessly. 

Ubiquitous technology access allows all students to work the way adults do. When they find unfamiliar words and concepts, they look them up. When they need to figure out how to complete a task, they watch tutorials. If they鈥檙e reading a book set in a place that鈥檚 unfamiliar to them, they can pull up a map. Technology is an essential tool, not a crutch; we must teach students the specific skills they need to expertly wield it. 

Hopefully, now is when we realize that technology benefits all students so we can move beyond criticisms like 鈥淚t鈥檚 too expensive,鈥� 鈥淭hat鈥檚 an unfair advantage鈥� or 鈥淭he real world isn鈥檛 like that.鈥� The real world is like that! All working adults rely on technology, and it behooves educators to strengthen the technological skills students can use to solve problems. 

I have the privilege to work at a school that made tech and internet access a top priority upon closing for the pandemic. My school also cultivates community and trusting family relationships that enabled us to have not just a successful technology rollout but also a partnership culture that kept students and parents engaged in remote learning. We leveraged student relationships and family partnerships to ensure that students had access to all school-provided social services, including meals, mental health supports, translation services, rent relief and health consultations with our school nurse.

Had we not had these trusting relationships prior to the onset of the pandemic, the technological progress we made would not have happened. Schools have long served as community centers, and the pandemic proved that they must continue to do so. 

Not all school districts made technology and internet access a priority, and not all districts sincerely strove to provide all students with the accommodations and social services they needed prior to or during the pandemic. After ensuring student and family safety and access to food, clothing, shelter and mental health services, technology access should be every district鈥檚 priority. 

Margaret Molloy is a fifth-grade English teacher at in Massachusetts.

Teacher training, parent choice and technology access are three important areas of progress

By Louis Algaze 

There are three educational areas that have had an increased focus that I would like to see continue: professional development for teachers on navigating the online learning environment, educational choice and an investment in technology. 

Districts, schools and teachers in Florida moved quickly to transition to remote learning. With school in session, they had to be nimble and work with the infrastructure in place to finish out the year. The verdict is still out for many schools on plans for reopening in the fall, but many are evaluating a blend of traditional school and online courses. By providing teachers with more intensive training for the online classroom, districts can better prepare to make sure students鈥� education needs are met. 

There is an increase in awareness of the educational choices available to families. The ability for parents to select the learning environment that best fits their child鈥檚 needs is a critically important focus. Some families may find that a comprehensive online education is a better fit for their child. Others may feel it is not right for them. Regardless, it is imperative that we put the needs of our students first. 

Technology and internet access are key to an online or blended learning environment. Investing in devices and internet access for students and teachers, as well as expanded server capacity, will bridge the digital divide and ensure that students are able to stay on track with their education. Florida Virtual School as a free resource with best practices, information, webinar recordings and more for teachers, school administrators and parents who are new to the online learning environment. We also upgraded servers and systems to expand our capacity to be able to support up to 2.7 million students in Florida. 

This is an important safety net that is now in place, should we see a need in the future. 

Louis Algaze is president and CEO of Florida Virtual School.

The future of education: Parents living, working and learning alongside their children

By Cath Fraise

A quiet revolution is going on that is not just about education. It is about reinventing the way we live, learn and work, and it is about having flexibility in how families can organize their lives. Gone are the days when every family was subjected to the snail’s pace of large, highly regulated, self-serving systems that did not serve their needs.

Families are waking up to the fact that children do not need to be in a school five days a week to learn. In fact, learning happens all the time, and there is an abundance of resources that configure learning to suit the needs of every member of a family. The conventional structure of schooling is inefficient, and it breeds conformity and passive consumption of material that is learned outside of context and soon forgotten. 

We actually need the opposite: a generation of divergent thinkers, solving real-world problems, finding meaning and collaborating with others, preferably embedded in a community.

During this time, liberated from the four walls of a classroom, children are getting a chance to explore. Parents are finding online spaces where children can safely discover what resonates with them. People are also finding that you can build a powerful and dynamic community online quite well 鈥� just look at teens playing multiplayer video games. To create such a community, you just need to be meeting regularly to master something together.

The schools of the future will be combinations of online and offline interdependent communities, with families coming together to create the education they need for their children by choosing from a vast array of available options. It is already happening. Families will be able to customize their lifestyles as easily as their Starbucks orders.

A new type of social architecture will be a fixture in every town or school system: a vibrant co-learning community with professional guidance to serve every child, with an attached co-working space for parents to reinvent themselves, learn alongside their children or lend their own expertise to the learning community. After all, we are all lifelong learners.

There are many benefits of creating communities of learners, and schools need to be exploded into vibrant learning communities with much more flexibility. This requires a shift in perspective, and the pandemic has opened up the possibility to design the learning infrastructure of the future.

Cath Fraise is the founder and executive director of Workspace Education, a co-learning community in Bethel, Connecticut, and the founder of the International Association of Colearning Communities.

We can鈥檛 simply return to normal; 鈥榥ormal鈥� didn鈥檛 work for many kids

By John Deasy 

This pandemic has been a terrible event. It has laid bare the known, but often not discussed, situation that many youth 鈥� and, in particular, youth who live in circumstances of poverty and peril 鈥� were never getting a quality education. These youth have constantly fallen behind their peers academically and in terms of access to quality instruction and supports. For decades, their outcomes have been tragic, even before the pandemic.

I often hear the phrase 鈥淲e must get back to normal.鈥� I hope we do not go back to 鈥渘ormal,鈥� the way things used to be, because it was never good for so many of our youth. I urge us to use this horrible event to establish a new normal, one that so many have hoped for and tried to establish for so long. 

Therefore, among the things that would be good to keep from our unplanned national experiment with distance learning are the new methods of building and sustaining constant connection with families and youth. Weekly calls, principal and superintendent town halls, home visits, and customized tutorials for those who never had tutorial support are among a few examples. Another is the creation of astonishing content and interactive processes that teachers have created out of whole cloth and, more importantly, shared with their colleagues. The experience of seeing true open-source material created by teachers, and teachers helping each other, has been a joy in a dark time. 

We must never give up the practices that engage families and youth in authentic ways. Learning and the development of executive function are communal events in so many ways. Returning to classrooms from a distance learning format will give us the opportunity to learn again the power of individual and collective support, in and out of the classroom. 

Lastly, among the less-discussed results of distance learning has been a dramatic fall in reports of bullying. In fact, many students report this as a bright spot on the terrible times we are going through. When we return from distance learning, we must not give up on a bullying-free experience for all.

John Deasy is the former superintendent of Stockton and Los Angeles unified school districts.

Our families need a more resilient education system

By B谩rbara Rivera Batista

Understanding the basic needs and circumstances of each student and family has been key to our purpose. Aiming to eradicate poverty is our mission. We help the next generation succeed by providing an excellent education for young people, sustainable economic alternatives for their parents and social-emotional resources for families.

Vimenti School is in its second year of operation as the first charter school in Puerto Rico, with 92 students from kindergarten through second grade and 83 families, 80 percent of them living under the poverty level.

COVID-19, like many other disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, has continuously impacted our students and families. And focusing and maintaining a connection with the families have proved essential.

A census of our families at the beginning of the pandemic showed that 65 percent did not have computers at home, 47 percent did not have internet access, and 31 percent lost their jobs during this challenging period. We needed to move fast to address those challenges in a creative way.

Focusing on family relationships was crucial to ensuring their well-being. Weekly calls from case managers, teachers, and economic and health support staff were part of the family support network.

Other efforts include cash assistance for families, internet connectivity, and identifying the necessary equipment and platforms for distance learning.

To accommodate the needs and challenges of distance learning without devices or connectivity was difficult. Teachers were very sensitive to these situations and worked with each family to provide support. This time of remote learning has strengthened teachers鈥� ability to be empathetic, meeting families where they are, and creating solutions that will work for everyone. This will continue into the next phase of remote, hybrid or in-person learning, and we must not forget how important it is to have strong school-home relationships to meet students鈥� needs.

Individualized instruction, sending assignments to students鈥� homes, was the first step to education continuity, but we knew that not all children and parents could handle information in the same way. We organized students into small groups according to their needs and looked for ways to reach everyone according to their resources. We transferred the classroom structure to an online environment, meeting the students at their levels. From now on, maintaining an alternative system for teaching will be crucial to ensuring that we are able to continuously serve our community and fulfill our mission.

B谩rbara Rivera Batista is director of Vimenti School, an initiative of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico and the first public charter school on the island.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our distance learning infrastructure overnight 

By John Legg

We have learned some valuable lessons as a result of transforming our brick-and-mortar classrooms into digital remote learning experiences. 

First, educators no longer fear technology and can use it to provide content, assess students and collaborate. This forced immersion into remote learning has demonstrated that educators can be proficient with digital curricula and platforms if we give them the support they need. 

Too often, school leaders underestimate the skills and ability of our educators to integrate content and technology. 

Educators have awakened to the idea that they are able to unlock a wealth of resources that make learning more engaging, efficient, relevant and easily accessible to a broader range of learners. This spring, I witnessed educators collaborating and using innovative educational programs such as Nearpod, Newsella, Loom, Kahoot and Quizizz. 

However, no software could substitute for live, real-time interaction between students and their teachers and classmates. As students interacted with the teacher and their peers, the level of engagement, excitement and learning increased dramatically. 

Second, students are masters of technology and need the proper connectivity, digital devices and instructional platform to succeed. When digital resources are available to everyone, learners of all socioeconomic backgrounds can excel. Too often, adults make excuses for why learners can鈥檛 do something, before even allowing the students to attempt to succeed. At the charter school I co-founded, in a matter of hours, learners as young as kindergarten were navigating educational platforms such as Schoology and Google Classroom. Students were uploading and downloading lessons and interacting with teachers and other students 鈥� often with little to no assistance from adults. The challenge is ensuring that each learner has a functioning device. The low cost of Chromebooks allowed us, as a tech-oriented school, to provide a device for each learner. We partnered with our local internet provider so all learners were able to have access to free internet.

Finally, rigorous content, collaboration and customization must be safeguarded and not sacrificed. Far too often, schools inadvertently focus on digital implementation, instead of actual learning, as the goal. Educators must resist the temptation to simply celebrate the success of delivering digital content. We need to make sure the content itself remains robust and rigorous. A less-than-engaging in-person educator will be the same lackluster educator via distance learning 鈥� perhaps even more lackluster. But great educators can deliver engaging lessons that enable all learners to reach their intellectual potential even in the face of a global pandemic.

John Legg is co-founder and business administrator of Dayspring Academy, a pre-K-12 charter school near Tampa. He served for 12 years in the Florida Legislature, including four as chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

The current crisis has forced some important innovations

By Jennifer Charlot

Some say that the only way education will change is if a monumental event causes the system to fall off a cliff. It could be argued that the system has fallen. 

This sudden 鈥渇all鈥� has had serious consequences. It has not only exposed, but deepened, inequities. However, as we observe in 鈥�,鈥� it has also forced schools to lean into reinvention and opened space for educators to unlock their own innovation potential. 

For example:

Understanding learners鈥� lives: Having learning occur in the home can make it much more intimate. It enables educators to see whether their students prefer to work at a table or under their bunk bed. They meet the family pets. Parents and siblings pop in to say hello. What happens in the home is top of mind and can鈥檛 be ignored. This level of vulnerability creates the possibility for deeper relationships.

Relevance: 鈥淪tudents are getting bored; they aren鈥檛 signing on.鈥� This concern plagued many educators and caused them to ask what they could do to make learning more engaging. Some opted for more relevancy 鈥� a shift that learning science . For example, instead of doing science worksheets, some students were asked to study the soil samples in their backyard and explain their findings on a video call with their peers. Others assumed the role of journalists and investigated the lives of essential workers during the COVID pandemic.

Family engagement: This homeschool situation has invited families to gain closer insight into learning and determine their own views on their children鈥檚 education. In the best of situations, teachers are coaching caregivers on how to support learners, and families are doing more than ensuring compliance with schoolwork. At one school we work with, families advocated that teachers send a smaller amount of disconnected work home and instead make assignments more coherent.

Learner agency and personalization: When asked, one of the biggest things students elevate when reflecting on distance learning is the control they have over their time. It also enables teachers to target their attention to the learners who need it most for more extended periods of time. This kind of individual attention was rare in our pre-COVID learning environment.

These changes aren鈥檛 universal, but where they are happening, we shouldn鈥檛 turn back.

Jennifer Charlot is a partner at , where she focuses on school design services and learning science. Transcend is a national nonprofit organization focused on supporting communities to create and spread extraordinary and equitable designs of school.

Now is the time to ask: Are we investing in the right priorities?

By John Deasy

It is my belief that school districts are not going to simply cut their way through, or out of, this recession.

Its systemic nature is unique and will last for a considerable period of time. Therefore, investments should be considered very carefully. And these investments must respond to the world beyond COVID.

First, I would end investments in school policing. If and when police are needed, use existing municipal or county services. Clear signals and symbols of criminalization have no place in schools. The same goes for programs of punishment. I would invest, rather, in programs of restoration. I would also reconsider the use of classroom aides. A true structure for individual and group instructional support and tutoring is required for all youth. I would stop funding any afterschool activities that do not have a demonstrated beneficial effect on learning, and I would increase investments in trauma-informed care and instruction. Finally, I would increase investments in authentic home-to-school routine communication.

This is an opportunity to imagine what an education that is youth-centered and trauma-informed could and should be. It is also an opportunity to imagine a school day that is not defined by minutes in a seat, but rather by providing opportunities for every student that have been historically afforded to our privileged families.

If the pain of isolation and “otherness” that this pandemic has laid bare for all to clearly see is to create an opportunity to truly reimagine education FOR ALL, then how we invest, and what we stop investing in, will be key to any good strategic plan.

John Deasy is the former superintendent of Stockton Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified School District.

Public education funding needs to accommodate students鈥� diverse needs

By Paul Hill

As schools reopen, depleted state budgets . It鈥檚 hard to see where the cuts can be made. The biggest cost item, teacher salaries, is insulated from cuts by law and politics.

In earlier financial crises, school districts hung on, waiting for a return to normal. But this crisis is different because districts face new costs, even as funding declines, for connectivity, devices, teacher and parent training, and distancing adaptations to school buildings. Fears of contagion and future virus spikes will force partial or full school closures.

In the future, public education needs a funding system built to accommodate a diversity of need and allow quick responses to changes in the balance of in-person and distance learning.

The new system needs to support individual children鈥檚 education, not a fixed set of buildings or employees. Districts will need to maximize the amounts spent directly on students.

The money for direct services to students will need to be flexible. It must be usable for classroom teacher salaries, but also for individual children鈥檚 shares of the salary of a master teacher who instructs thousands of students online, or tutors students individually, or for a college that provides a specialized math or science course for students from across the district or even the state.

This kind of flexibility is not possible if districts automatically fund schools, as now, based on a fixed staffing schedule. Funding needs to follow students to the instructional and service programs they experience.

To make this flexibility possible, state and local governments should provide a baseline amount for every student, plus additional weights based on poverty, language learner status or eligibility for special education services. Families could tap this money to cover their child鈥檚 cost of attending a school, or for online courses, tutoring, counseling or supplemental learning experiences.

To help guide the use of their child鈥檚 funding allotment, parents could use part of it to hire a navigator, an expert or organization to help them identify needs and assemble a coherent educational program.

The new, less rigid funding system sketched here is a necessary step toward public education for the post-COVID era. It will turn the system for allocating public funding to schools from an obstacle into a positive enabler of child-centered innovations in instruction and student support.

Paul Hill is the founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a research professor at the University of Washington Bothell.

Financial uncertainty requires leaders to make tough choices and stay focused on students 

By Marguerite Roza and Katie Silberstein

Districts are grappling with difficult decisions this summer. As they weigh scenarios for reopening schools, the crisis continues to unfold, creating financial uncertainties unlike any leaders have ever seen. How deep will cuts in state funds be? Will there be more federal dollars? How much? What reopening costs will schools face? If some staff can鈥檛 work, will districts have to pay them in full?

Act now to rein in promised spending increases: With financial unknowns, some have taken a wait-and-decide-later approach. That鈥檚 problematic, since doing so proceeds with decisions made when the economy was humming and that are now out of step with the current context of record-high unemployment. Doing so and raises the odds of deeper, more hurried, more disruptive cuts later 鈥� possibly forcing layoffs where students lose teachers mid-year. Where changing spending plans runs afoul of labor agreements, leaders can use the current context to , and have hard conversations about what’s at stake for students.

Keep the focus on students: Districts face myriad pressures to focus on staff needs, from preserving hard-fought raises to protecting jobs and safeguarding health when schools reopen. District leaders want to do right by staff 鈥� and they should. But the fundamental job of schools is to educate students, and that鈥檚 where the focus must stay.

A budget cut that reduces the number of school days may be more harmful for students than selected layoffs or delayed raises. Keeping students at the center of decision-making can help leaders make tough choices amid competing pressures.

Temporary salary reductions can keep the school system intact: A temporary across-the-board salary reduction 鈥� from the superintendent on down 鈥� can protect students while preserving jobs as districts await relief funds. While unpopular, salary cuts are less disruptive than widespread layoffs or furloughs, which mean less schooling at a time when students have already missed so much. Some districts have proposed or even because they can鈥檛 afford to operate with new health guidelines. A 5 percent salary reduction could avert a 4 percent reduction in force or furlough of 10 school days, allowing schools to maintain services during the rocky months ahead. Staff need to know the move is temporary.

For longer-term cuts, invite school leaders to weigh in: Principals can engage with staff and families to decide what鈥檚 worth protecting and make the trade-offs that make sense for their students and communities.

Marguerite Roza is a research professor at Georgetown University and director of the Edunomics Lab, a research center focused on exploring and modeling education finance policy and practice. Katie Silberstein is a research fellow at the Edunomics Lab.

Give parents the virtual options they need

By John Bailey

There is growing evidence that many parents will not send their children back to school and instead expect their child to have online learning options.

A , only 27 percent of parents felt comfortable resuming school in August or September. , in Georgia, will offer online learning as an option for any student who wants it next year, after a survey found that 24 percent of parents weren’t comfortable sending their child back to school. in New Orleans want the option for continued online learning.

Schools will need to invest more in platforms that choreograph online learning, online content and professional development for their teachers. Standardizing both platforms and content providers can help drive down costs in terms of both initial price and ongoing technical support.

This could also be a cost-saving opportunity. States could develop an Online Teacher Corps, consisting of their school systems’ best-of-the-best online instructors, and share them across district boundaries, which could then free up other teachers to provide tutoring and one-on-one instruction. States could enter into that allow their students to have access to the best online courses and providers across state lines.

Schools could also invest in telemedicine as a way of quickly scaling up health and mental health services to support their already overwhelmed school nurses. , for example, partners with schools to enable students to receive immediate care through telemedicine by connecting with one of the service鈥檚 network doctors. offers online mental health options for students and their families.

There’s no question that when students return to school this fall, parents will demand academic and nonacademic options that aren’t constrained by school building walls or geographic boundaries. The challenge for our school systems will be finding ways to meet that demand 鈥� quickly.

John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously served in the White House and the U.S. Department of Education. He worked on pandemic preparedness at the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2006.

Now is the time to tackle systemic inequity

By A.J. Crabill

If new contributions of state and federal funds aren鈥檛 available to help school systems cover ballooning health and safety costs triggered by the pandemic, local leaders will be tempted to let these costs cannibalize funds intended for instruction. This pattern, which is beginning to play out across the nation, will cause unacceptable harm to students and if left unchecked.

Because these extraordinary health and safety costs are predominantly one-time expenses (rather than new annually recurring budget items), I strongly recommend that Congress reimburse states that use rainy day funds to relieve local budget pressures caused by COVID-19.

If Congress and states refuse to lead, I suggest that school systems spend from their reserve funds to prevent a zero-sum competition that leads to raids on instructional funds as a way to pay for health and safety measures. A contest among student health, student learning and a large reserve fund should not privilege the fund.

It will not be enough, however, to fill the budget holes created by the pandemic. Restoration of the old order will not do. The larger challenge is the accumulated damage to instructional time and instructional quality during this crisis 鈥� damage that adds further injury to students who previously spent years in struggling schools.

The damage caused by curtailing instructional time is unlikely to be remedied without redesigning how funds are allocated to individual schools. We need to move away from flat allocations based only on how many students attend a school, toward weighted funding based on student needs and characteristics. Student need should be the basis for every dollar received and allocated by the school system.

Similarly, we must rethink systems to remedy the damage caused by erosion of instructional quality. School systems must inspire an intentional redistribution of educator talent. They must do away with systems that reward tenured educators with preferred placements, and replace them with a system that rewards the most effective educators for serving students with the greatest needs. Student need should drive educator incentives and placements.

Our lives and our institutions have been disrupted by forces we could not control. What we can control is whether we take this opportunity to create a new, truly equitable order from the chaos. This means doing things differently. Student outcomes don鈥檛 change until adult behaviors change.

A.J. Crabill has served as the Kansas City Public Schools board chair, adviser to the Council of the Great City Schools鈥� Governance and the Texas Education Agency’s deputy commissioner for governance.