An honest and detailed conversation must take place within every school district in our readership area. Parents, teachers and taxpayers interested in how their money is spent and children in the community are educated deserve an explanation about how this is allegedly being executed.
Districts finally got honest recently and acknowledged children are not receiving a proper education. It was refreshing to hear two women speak up during the public comment period of the April 15 Española School District meeting. They were tired of the District trying to convince anyone that children were being educated.
The state Public Education Department’s answer? Add 11 to 25 days to next school year.
It’s a reasonable assumption that more school equals more education. However, there are several questions that must be answered before blindly adding “instruction days” to the 2021-22 school year.
Probably the most important is whether instruction is actually taking place. We’re all assuming this miserable failure called “distance learning” will not be a factor in the fall. We don’t know how vaccines for teens will progress over the summer. Then there’s the anti-vaxxers and surely there are plenty in the teen crowd.
So if we’re in this same hybrid learning mode in August, adding days is not going to make an iota of difference. It’s just more days of students not attending school, not paying attention and not learning much.
Española School District Superintendent Fred Trujillo painted a rosy picture of students returning to school and also a failure in teaching. During the April 15 Board meeting he said about 1,000 students have returned to in-person learning. That means 2,000 are still at home, if we accept the current student count. However, the problem is that it doesn’t matter where the children are, most aren’t learning. Trujillo acknowledges that.
During the meeting he said several things that were in line with what the speakers said at the beginning of the meeting.
“(Using the) remote platform with hybrid learning, we’ve seen regression with performance,” Trujillo said.
That’s a diplomatic way of saying we’re getting worse. And we were scraping the bottom in test scores before the pandemic. We’re not sure how much “worse” we can get.
He said doing the same things and expecting different results was a form of insanity.
“We’ve been doing a lot of the same things and they’re not working,” Trujillo said. “In math, we’re up to 90 percent not proficient and in language arts it could be 80 percent.”
Then he turned left by saying “This learning loss would be addressed by adding 11 days, to (a total of) 190 (instruction days) along with an extended learning plan.
“It’s about creating a learning (environment) that works for students,” he said. “This is not lip service. We need to step up to the challenge.”
Surely we can all agree on everything Trujillo said.
The question that always nags at education promises is: how? What will be different that takes it out of the “lip service” category we’ve been getting for decades?
Adding 11 days to continue doing what is going on in schools and in homes right now is a waste of time and money. Adding days could be beneficial if all the students attended and there were changes, real changes, to lesson plans in place to address the acknowledged huge loss of learning.
To help hide the loss of learning, the state planned ahead for it and eliminated any sort of accountability. Letter grades for schools are out the window. No school district has filed an accountability report since 2018. They had the information but didn’t bother reporting 2019, because the governor lifted that requirement.
So parents don’t really know how their child’s school is doing. Many of them know their children are not learning. We believe the two outspoken women on the virtual meeting spoke for many more than themselves.
There are no more tests. Why take tests when it’s just going to prove a huge lack of learning? Since one room schools in the 1800s, tests are how teachers determine if a student has learned the information presented to them. Without tests how do teachers know who should be passed to the next grade or graduated?
Quite simply, they don’t and no one seems to care. But let’s spend more money on education.
Paying millions for 11 or 25 more days of school with no plan in place to do things differently is not only insane, it’s clearly a waste of money and manpower.
If you could drag teachers back for 11 days, what will they do differently?
Parents need and deserve answers from school leaders everywhere about what will be done next fall to address this huge loss of learning. There is no way any class can jump into business as usual, which did not work before the pandemic, and act like the previous year-and-a-half of poor/no education won’t affect the way a class operates.
A plan needs to be developed and a schedule for implementation shared with parents. Students, especially younger ones, will pay for this education black hole when they hit middle and high school. Educators need to shine a light to lead them back into a real learning model where students are truly educated.