Which Unambiguous Disaster?

“We’re gonna have a *lot* of data on remote schooling after this year and my strong hunch (could be wrong) is that it’s gonna turn out to be a pretty unambiguous disaster. Teachers and administrators are doing an amazing job under terrible circumstances but it’s just not good.” – Chris Hayes

I don’t think Chris Hayes is wrong. Compared to a typical year of school, this will be a “disaster” by traditional (standardized) measures of student growth. Compared to 180+ days of in-person learning, hands-on and personal instruction from caring teachers who feel safe and able to do their jobs without hesitation, this year will underperform heavily.

But I have big problems with the mindset, and it’s because we aren’t talking about avoiding an unambiguous disaster, we’re talking about choosing one.

The districts who are fighting to remain in-person are facing appropriate backlashes from beleaguered teachers – teachers expected to teach their way out of an impossible situation, as more and more of their colleagues are quarantined for exposure. Along the way, this crisis is creating an adversarial working relationship between teachers and administration. This is going to lead to an unambiguous disaster of experienced teachers leaving the profession with far too few new teachers ready to step in.

Choosing full in-person school will lead to the unambiguous disaster of COVID spread. Now, this might not affect kids as much (the death toll is mercifully low for children), but there is evidence that there might be future health problems ranging from breathing problems to heart problems to fertility issues. Is that not an unambiguous disaster? To say nothing of the problems of kids passing the illness onto grandparents, immunocompromised relatives, teachers, and more.

Choosing a more comprehensive lockdown, and then prioritizing schools reopening, would be a better solution for kids and school communities. Unfortunately, attempts to do that have been an unambiguous disaster, and the lack of national coordination of response has been an unambiguous disaster for nine months now.

In the meantime, let’s look past the unambiguous disasters.

Let’s measure resiliency, creativity, and personality. Let’s celebrate students becoming more of themselves, rather than learning how to take a standardized test at their kitchen table.

Let’s measure the stable connection between students, between teachers and students, between students and their families.

Let’s measure the innovative ways that teachers are reaching students, and making sure they are safe and healthy.

And let’s recognize that it’s less important that third-graders learn all third grade material in one year than that they live to become fourth graders. Ideally with their parents, grandparents, neighbors, and teachers alive to see it.

All the choices are unambiguous disasters. Which one would you choose?