Let’s not waste this schools opportunity, North Carolina

As the pandemic mercifully begins to subside, two things are simultaneously true about public schools in North Carolina: many have done heroic work under impossible circumstances, and there has been deep damage to academic and social progress for students.

I spent the last few weeks talking to education researchers, school superintendents, and policymakers about what comes next for North Carolina Schools. Here’s a sampling of what’s on their minds.

Learning loss. By the time August rolls around, some North Carolina students will have been out of the classroom for nearly 18 months.

Eighteen months without normal schooling. Those losses will compound into lifelong problems if we don’t pull out all the stops to address them now. Summer school, extended school days, tutoring programs, mentoring programs — all of the above. And not just for 2021, but for years to come.

Either we find humane ways to help students catch up, or we’ll be paying the price in rising dropout rates, more remedial programs in college, and lower levels of economic growth long after the pandemic fades into the rear view.

Summer for everyone. Policymakers are rightly focused on summer school for students who have fallen behind academically. But nearly everyone has missed the social part of school — friends, clubs, sports, time away from home. We need a mass mobilization of every summer camp, state park, church, university and community college in North Carolina to make up for lost months of childhood. Use some of the latest stimulus money to subsidize free or low-cost summer programs for every kid in the state, with an emphasis on time outdoors and time together.

Reinforcements. Teachers and school officials are exhausted. Parents are at the breaking point. And the pandemic fallout is just beginning. Schools are going to need volunteers, and lots of them. People to serve as tutors and mentors, to help run summer academies, to donate books and supplies.

“This is hard, and we’re tired, but there’s a lot we can do,” said Pam Hartley, the former CEO of Communities in Schools North Carolina who’s now working for the newly launched NC Education Corps. “We can volunteer, we can open up our churches and community buildings.” Find out what your local school needs, and do it.

Testing that actually helps. “The autopsy.” That’s how one superintendent referred to state end-of-grade tests, which come at the end of the year and show how well students grasped key concepts like math and literacy. They can tell you what went wrong, but not early enough for teachers to do anything about it.

Whatever your view on accountability testing, we need to get much better at diagnostic assessments — low-stakes progress checks so teachers can see where individual students are doing well and where they need help.

That’s going to be especially important after a year when some kids got intensive tutoring and parental support while others got nothing. Use testing to diagnose learning gaps and make sure students get the level of education they need.

Every class, available everywhere. One of the big inequities in American education is the lack of advanced classes in smaller, low-income, and rural high schools. We can solve that now. “We can never again say to students, ‘You can’t take that class because it’s not offered in this building,’ ” former education secretary John King said last week. “Just because AP Spanish isn’t offered in your building doesn’t mean you can’t take it, because you can take through an online, blended-learning opportunity.”

Rebuilding school-parent connections. The pandemic has permanently changed the relationship between parents and schools — sometimes for better, sometimes not.

Millions of parents have seen first-hand what their kids are learning, how their teachers have handled remote schooling, and how their local schools responded to a crisis. “It’s about rethinking parents as part of a reciprocal relationship,” said Cassandra Davis, a researcher in public policy at UNC Chapel Hill. “Schools can use this opportunity to create more of a bridge between the home and schools.”

By any measure, it’s been an awful year for America’s schoolchildren. But spring is coming, and this ought to be a moment of intense energy and creativity around K-12 education. Shame on us if we let it pass by.

This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 8:06 AM with the headline "Let’s not waste this schools opportunity, North Carolina."