Without The Big Standardized Test, Would Schools Be Flying Blind?

The future of the big standardized test is in doubt. This year’s pandemic pause made the annual rite of spring both logistically impossible and generally pointless as a means of data collection. With the year thoroughly disrupted, there was no chance that the tests would generate any sort of usable information, but their cancellation raises two more questions—wouldn’t testing next year be equally pointless, particularly when the time could be better spent helping students catch up, and wouldn’t a two-year hiatus be the perfect time to end the practice entirely?

As noted in the delightfully-titled “Statewide Standardized Assessments Were in Peril Even Before the Coronavirus. Now They’re Really in Trouble,” the testing regimen has been falling out of favor with a wide variety of folks. Two years ago I was writing about the eroding support for high stakes testing, and things have not improved since,

This could be the end, but the annual Big Standardized Test still has its supporters. Some argue that even more testing will be required when schools open, perhaps to determine if students move up a grade, while one advocate tweeted that scrapping the tests means “we’ll fly blind.” That echoes the argument for the high stakes tests that has been pushed since the early days of No Child Left Behind—if there’s no Big Standardized Test, then policymakers, administrators, researchers, parents, taxpayers and students will not know what is happening inside each school.

As this argument is revived, it’s worth reminding ourselves what the tests do—and do not—measure.

The testing regimen (PARCC, SBA, your state’s special flavor, etc) is a standardized test focused on math and reading skills. 

That’s it. 

Do you want to know how well students are doing in the study of science or history? In most states, the test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know the depth of student knowledge about a body of literature? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know how strong the school’s arts and music programs are? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if your child is likely to grow up to enjoy “positive life outcomes”? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if your child is maturing into a responsible and healthy young person? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if the school is providing a safe environment? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if your child has a solid knowledge of US civics and government? The test won’t tell you.

You get the idea. There is a long list of things that people have in mind when they ask “How is this school doing” that are not addressed by the test.

And what the test does address, it doesn’t address very well. School results can be predicted fairly effectively just by using demographic information, and individual student results take far too long to come back for them to be of any use to classroom teachers. 

The notion that parents, teachers and students will have no idea what’s going on in their school unless they can see scores from that one special test is absurd. When students return, teachers will do what they have always done. They will do their own formal and informal assessments of students for quick, on the spot information about where those students are. They won’t be flying blind, and they won’t miss the scores from the Big Standardized Test.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

PA: Charter Advocacy Chief Booted For Offensive Post

Ana Luiza Lannes Meyers is known to folks who follow the charter school debates in Pennsylvania as a vocal charter advocate as the executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools. But as of yesterday, she is out of a job, one more casualty of emotional blowback from the current Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Working on her resume

Meyers has previously worked as "Director of Legislative Affairs" for LeadingAge PA (an advocacy group for aging services providers) as well as PA Field Director for Libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Before that she co-chaired the Kitchen Table Patriots, a Tea Party group in southeastern PA, and before that sales and marketing for the likes of Nickelodeon and American Airlines. Her degrees are in business. In short, she has virtually no background or expertise in education, but does have a long-standing experience in arguing that government services should be privatized. This is not new for PCPCS-- their previous chief's experience was as PR head for Westinghouse. Meyers held the job since March of 2017.

Meyers has been an active voice in opposition to Governor Wolf ever since he put charters on notice that there would be more regulation and less gravy train. Can't limit family choices, can't trap students in failing zip codes, etc, Meyers said. She tried hard to sell the idea that PA charters are non-profits (they are,  but the management companies that run some of them surely aren't). And she just helped the coalition launch 143K Rising, a PR push to resist attempts to cut charter budgets (something Wolf hasn't actually tried to do, but you have to keep your people scared). And shew wasn't very shy about it, calling Wolf  "an idiot on so many levels."

The world of charter supporters has long been an alliance between those who see charters as a tool for equity and social justice, and those who want to unleash free market forces in place of "government schools." Meyers' tea party past offers a hint about which group she comes from. But Saturday, May 31, she really put her foot in it.

Avi Wolfman-Arent caught the story and has been reporting it for PBS station WHYY. Saturday, Meyers posted a response to an emergency alert about "violent protestors" in Philadelphia. "None of this is okay," she said, noting that her husband is a retired state policeman, argued that all sectors have some bad apples "including the church." After offering support for the police, she closed with "These protestors disgust me. All lives matter."

When the station called to ask her about the post, it disappeared and an apology was posted. Meyers asserted her support for Black Lives Matters, explained she had not meant the protestors, but the looters. "I did not mean to insinuate that I don’t support Black Lives Matter,” she said. But it's pretty hard to read "All lives matter," any other way.

Criticism from the charter sector was swift. Sharif El-Mekki is a charter principal and heads up a group working on solving the problem of too few Black teachers in the classroom rejected her apology. At least one charter chain "condemned" her remarks. And as of yesterday, she was out of a job. Said the coalition board, "We have determined that new leadership is in the best interests of our member schools and the families they serve across the state." They thanked Meyers for her work, and buh-bye.

For more details from the story, you can catch Wolfman-Arent's reporting here.

No Teachers Teach Average Students

The average height of the staff here at the Curmudgucation Institute is about 4.5 feet (the Board of Directors really pulls the average down). Yet if you buy clothes that fit a 4.5 foot frame, those clothes will not fit anyone here.

The average guy named Peter Greene has made at least one major film. And yet, here I sit, with no IMDB entry or residual checks coming in for my work.

So here's one reason that a lot of educational research is that it is the findings are about average students. And nobody teaches an average student. Each student is a very specific individual with a specific complex of specific characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, history, etc.

So something like the widely-circulating NWEA "research" (aka "wild-ass guess") about the Covid-19 slide that everybody is kind of expecting to be a major feature of school in the fall. And really, three's no reason that the testing company can't make an edu-WAG; right now, WAG is pretty much all anyone has. But from a classroom teacher perspective, I have to ask what earthly good aa piece of research like that could be. From the classroom perspective, it boils down to, "Each of your students will be 'behind' some amount, more or less."

This is the problem with much of the "science" out there about learning--it describes what the average student does. But if I'm in a classroom, I don't want to know how the average student leans about widget decoding--I need to know how I can best get it across to Pat, who has a short attention span and not much interest in the printed word but likes to draw pictures all day, or Chris, who is pre-occupied most of the day with dinosaurs, and who doesn't read long multi-syllabic words easily, but who never forgets anything you read out loud.

One size does not fit all, but average size doesn't fit anybody.

Six Months From Now

I've whittled away at this post for days, which is unusual for me and usually means I'm making things worse, not better. And my first impulse in these days has been to stay quiet and listen, because a national conversation about racism doesn't really need one more white guy's voice. But 1) silence is not an option right now and 2) this all has implications for educators. But I warn you-- if I have a gift for making the complicated clear and simple, it will not be on display here.

I'm not telling you anything new to say that these are challenging times, though we have had times like these before, times when the ranker parts of our society have split open and spilled forth, times when the pain that people usually carry as a part of their daily routine suddenly erupts in roars, times when we have to confront (or in some cases, angrily defend) the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as a people.

In the moment, there is also the roiling clash between the complexity of reality and the reflexive grab for simple stories and explanations, all further complicated because it's during the noisy, difficult times that the worst of us slip out, under cover of chaos and noise, to spread more chaos and noise. Then there's the fear, and sometimes with the fear comes the stupid. There have been too many awful moments, some beautiful moments, some moments that weren't what they seemed.

What happens in the moment matters--how can it not, with so many words, so much action. But will it matter? Will there be a change, or will this moment fade. Is this rumble the kind of noise that comes when tectonic plates, long pressured, suddenly snap past each other to a new configuration, or is the noise of a rubber band, long stretched, snapping back to its original configuration?

Demonstrations and protests matter. They're a way to convey in real and effective ways just how strong and deep the feelings about an issue run. It's important that so many Americans are willing to stand up and be publicly associated with the message that Black Lives Matter. But that can't be the end of it, or all the walking and talking ultimately doesn't matter. The violence is a terrifying distraction from the main point, putting far too many people on all sides at risk; what agitators understand really well is that sparking more conflict puts both the crowd and the police at greater risk. You don't have to be that old to recognize the loop we seem poised to navigate yet again-- an injustice occurs, people rise up, noise is made, and then everyone goes back to the old normal. I'm interested in where we are, but I'm more interested in where we'll be six months from now. I see lots and lots of "We stand with Black Lives Matter," which is better than silence, but I still wonder what it will mean in six months. I mean, right now if I log on to Amazon, I see a big banner announcing that they stand with Black Lives Matter-- but what is the richest guy in the world actually doing about it?

White folks have work to do, especially white educators. And I would rather see us focus on doing the work than trying to look like we're doing the work. Education has to get its house in order. Rann Miller correctly points out that "Amy Coopers Are Everywhere," and that includes education. Horrifying examples abound. Little Miami University (in Ohio, not Florida) is going through a flap because a retired-now-part-time professor decided to shout some racist bullshit at demonstrators. This story gives you most of the pertinent data except for one item-- the professor is from the department of Teacher Education. Meanwhile, we've still got public schools commemorating Confederate figures and huge resistance to fixing that problem.

Cameron Barnett is a Pittsburgh middle school teacher who offers some concrete advice for white allies, including "the work of justice is never-ending, so stay tuned in for the long haul." Again, none of this is simple. One of the recurring theme I find among folks I know who are certain that there is no systemic inequity and that folks of all races exist on a level playing field, is the idea that at some point in the past Something Happened and that just erased all the historic effects. Maybe it was the end of the Civil War or the end of Jim Crow laws or a certain civil rights act, but they are sure that once that happened, everything became okee dokee and so all this BLM stuff is just baloney.

But US history on race (and a few other messy issues as well) is a tangled knot and there has never been and will never be a simple solution, and systems of racism and inequity have never gone away. There has never been and never will be a point at which folks can brush off their hands and say, "Well, that's all fixed" and just walk away.

That should feel familiar to folks in the education world, because education is also susceptible to magical thinking, to the belief that once we just wave the correct magic wand, everything will be okay. And we know that is bunk.

We should also recognize one of the problems of policing in many cities, and that's the attempt to use one tool--police work--to solve many problems that it's really not suited for. Can't fix the affordable housing problem? Have the police arrest the homeless. Dealing with the issues of poverty to hard and complicated? Just task the police with keeping a lid on all the growing frustration and anger. Basically, just make police responsible for dealing with the messes created by politicians' failures. I'm not a fan of the "defund" or "abolish" police movements, because the terms are unnecessarily provocative titles for a sensible movement about making the job of police smaller, or taking away all the responsibilities that shouldn't be theirs and which are not best handled by enforcement, anyway.

I have too many police in my life and family to view the institution as hopelessly irredeemable, but the system in some cities is stressed and stretched and damaged and damaging. And I believe that "defunding" would be immensely empowering for the best of our police and police departments. But there are lessons that teachers can learn from police and police unions in the current world.

The worst of police departments suffer from a bunker mentality. They have come to see their work as "us against them," with "them" being pretty much everyone else, from people on the street to politicians in City Hall. Because they have a whole raft of jobs that they can't possibly accomplish (fix poverty and homelessness by arresting people), they increasingly stressed, combative and, yes, racist.

Almost anyone who works in a school building recognizes the issue, plus one other that comes with it.

Extreme defensiveness. In the bunker, you never admit to any criticism from Them because you know in your gut that it will be used as a wedge to crack open your defenses and leave you vulnerable to all the other attacks that are about to be unleashed. That mindset is how you get the other 57 cops in the Buffalo super-duper cop squad quitting rather than admit, "Yeah, that shoving of a 75 year old man, no matter what his history of being annoying might have been, was over the top and shouldn't have happened." (Or maybe they were just cut loose by their union. Complicated.)

Teachers have been under relentless attack for at least two decades. It would be surprising if a bunker mentality hadn't developed. But that mentality does not serve teachers well, particularly not if they want to respond to the current crisis by doing the work. It's not a new problem--go look at every conversation in which someone says that we need more Black teachers in school and some white teachers get upset and start arguing that they are great teachers for their Black students. White fragility plus bunker mentality plus actual racism equals a school that has a hugely difficult time doing the work it needs to do. It takes leadership, both of the official and the personal type. And yes-- I know very well that the perception of being under attack for teachers is absolutely based in actual attacks (are you paranoid if they're really out to get you) which just makes being vulnerable enough to deal with our own shit and especially to say to some of our fiercest critics, "Yes, we screwed up on that one," all that harder. This work is complicated and twisty and involves balancing a whole lot of stuff. But if things are going to change, if things six months from now are not going to look just like six moths ago, then there is hard work to do.

When it comes to dealing with the students, the bunker mentality gives rise to Cartman Rules-- rules and confrontations that are all about "Respect my authority!" Which leads to an attempt to support authority with raw power, and that simply never ends well for anyone. The demonstrations have provided ample evidence of this, once again.

It's further complicated by vultures and bad actors all around. Another side lesson of these demonstrations and the pandemic pause has been that there are always people excited about the chance to set the world on fire and watch it burn, and there are always people ready to make a buck. The "defunding" movement is going to be embraced because for every responsibility removed from the police, there will be privatizing profiteers angling to get the contract. Teachers should keep an eye out, because we're already good at knowing this when we see it.

White folks have work to do, and white public school teachers, working in a system that by its nature reflects everything good and ill about society, have double the work to do. And not to make it seem to daunting, but it is work they will have to keep doing for the rest of their lives. That's a lifetime of explaining to colleagues why saying "All lives matter" is really missing the point, a lifetime of looking for ways to trying to promote justice and equity in systems that are not naturally inclined to welcome them.

This will not be easy. We have a national attention span problem. Even as everyone is caught up in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, everyone is also collectively deciding that the Covid-19 pandemic is over and just doesn't matter any more, not because of any actual evidence, but because we're mostly just tired of thinking about it and acting like it's a thing. People are looking at the current wave of demonstrations and declaring that This Time It's Different or that Everything Has Changed, but if there's one thing I know about this country, it's that there's nothing that's so traumatic and earthshaking that we can't collectively get over it in less than a year. Leaving, of course, a small section of the population to deal with it on their own while everyone else keeps asking, "Why don't you just get over it, already?" I suspect Black folks are pretty familiar with how that all goes.

I hope that a lot of folks in education are getting worked up, and I hope it's not in a "Let's find a march to go join in way" so much as a "Let's figure out how to work these issues of equity and justice into our curriculum for the coming years" or "Let's design and enact programs to better serve our students around these issues for the rest of ever" or even, "Let's start working on the state and local authorities to address inequities in funding and gerrymandering of school district boundaries." One Twitter commenter noted that white parents were bringing kids to marches even though those same parents would never let those children attend a predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood school. Educators should be addressing that. Educators should be addressing wealthy white neighborhoods that want to secede from the larger non-white non-wealthy district. Educators should be addressing racism among their colleagues. And White educators should be listening and reading (really--is there a better way to learn about anything?) and preparing to break the cycle. Just imagine how things might be different if White America had actually listened to Colin Kaepernick-- and not just listened, but done something.

From an interview with Ibram Kendi:

Education, love and exemplary black people will not deliver America from racism, Kendi says. Racist ideas grow out of discriminatory policies, he argues, not the other way around. And if his new center can help identify and dismantle those policies in the U.S. and around the world, he believes we can start to eliminate racism. At least that’s the goal.

Teachers are in a unique position to identify-- and change-- discriminatory policies. Let that be part of the work, too.

Today, tomorrow, the rest of the week, there will be more noise, more marching, more rumors, more violence. Please God, let people stay safe, and most of all, six months from now, may this nation look different in ways that actually mean something.

ICYMI: Just One Thing After Another Edition (6/7)

So things have been a little quieter than usual on this page (and I'm late today) in part because what the current conversation about Black Lives Matter needs is not more input from middle aged white guys, and partly because things have been a bit upheaved here at the Institute (not all bad-- the twins turned 3 since last Sunday's edition). But I still have a few things for you to read:

Weathering The Storm: School Funding in the Covid-19 Era

The Kappan offers some useful economic ideas for the post-pandemic era, courtesy of Bruce Baker, Mark Weber, and Dean Acheson-- all folks who really know this stuff. Four specific proposals (including the squawk-inducing recommendation to cancel aid programs that favor affluent districts).

Dept of Ed Discloses Illegal Seizure of $2.2 Billion

Man, I would hate to have this news lost in the shuffle this week. Remember how USED was supposed grabbing money from folks during the pandemic pause-- yeah, they didn't stop. To the tune of billions of dollars. Billion, with a B.

The Broken Promise That Broke Jacksonville

Florida, that is. The Florida Times-Union has the historical perspective on how the city cemented racist structures and kept its poor poor.

Gay HS Senior Barred from Walking At Graduation Because Pants

From the "News That Sucks" file, this reminder that some public school administrators need to remove their heads from their rectums.

Betsy DeVos Is Looting Public Schools  

There's no news here, except that this opinion piece is not from some cranky blogger, but from Newsweek. Specifically, we're talking about her attempt to grab CARES money for private schools.

Changing What We Teach

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at what schools need to do better.

Amy Coopers Are Everywhere   

Rann Miller at The Progressive reminds us that schools have an Amy Cooper problem, too.

PA Charter Leader Blasts George Floyd Protestors, Then Backpedals Like Crazy.

Ana Meyers got a little heated about the protests and became one more person who was not well-served by how quick and easy it is to fire off a stupid and inadvertently revealing Tweet.

It's Time To Fix Standardized Testing

Akil Bello takes a look at the wonky nuts and bolts of standardized testing and how it needs to be rebuilt, and he's just the guy for the job.

Public Funds Public Schools Website Provides Compendium of Research on School Vouchers

Jan Resseger looks at a trove of useful info, particularly if you are looking at the charter onslaught in Ohio, where the recent shift in law has really gutted public school finance.

Seven Tips for White Allies from a Black Pittsburgher

From Cameron Barnett, a middle school teacher in the burgh and editor of the Pittsburgh Poetry Journal.





 

Do Exit Exams Reduce Crime

Of all the claims made about high school exit exams, this has to be one of the most unlikely, but here comes Matthew Larsen in the ever reformy Education Next to argue that exit exams--tests that are required to get a diploma--reduce crime.

Larsen is an assistant professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. He's in the economics department, because of course he is. He set out to look at whether exit exams or increased course requirements had an effect on crime statistics. "Conventional belief holds that more and better-quality education reduces crime," he reasons. "Could exit exams improve teaching and learning in high schools such that criminal activity drops?"

The answer he came up with is that exit exams reduce the arrest rate, mostly for property crimes, but that increased course requirements do not. How did he come up with such sexy findings?

He collected FBI arrest data for 15-24 year olds from 1980 to 2010. He assumed that everyone was committing crimes in the same state in which they attended high school, and that they graduated when they were 18. There was also some estimating going on, like estimating the general age and gender distribution of the jurisdictions of the various police departments.

After that, it's pretty basic. If the state implemented exit exams in 2005, Larsen compares the arrest rates for the people who graduated before 2000 with that of the people who graduated afterwards. Larsen claims that by including cohorts in the same year (e.g. the arrest records for 2003 would include both cohorts that graduated before and after the test was implemented) he eliminates other factors, like police department staffing. Except, fo course, those overlap years would be a relatively small set within the 1980-2010 span. Nor does it correct for a variety of other factors-- graduates from, say, 1998, lived in a different world than those graduating in, say, 2002. Larsen claims to adjust, somehow, for factors like average teacher-pupil ration and average teacher salary and per-pupil expenditures, and I suppose that economists may have magical tools that can do this but that still leaves us with the problem that 1) he does not know how the arrest rates break down by high school and 2) no students attended schools with average conditions. The average height of people in my house is about 4.5 feet, but if you buy us clothes to fit that height, they won't fit anyone who lives here.

But Larsen makes his computations and somehow feels confident enough to write this:

I assume that, after making these adjustments, the only major difference between students from different graduation cohorts is that one group faced tougher graduation requirements.

Which is kind of nuts.

Once he gets a'crunchin', Larsen finds that there's no real effect for course requirements, and that the exit exam effect is greatest for poor white kids.

Larsen doesn't offer many compelling explanations for any of this. Maybe, he muses, the exit exams cause "more advantaged" students to get smarter and more knowledgeable and therefor commit fewer offenses, but make the poors drop out and turn to a life of crime (no thoughts about any of the biases or arrest patterns for advantaged vs. disadvantaged students). Maybe the pressure of exit exams makes schools do a better job. Or maybe the exams "boost the perceived value of a high-school diploma." Or students improve their attendance patterns because they want to get ready for those exams.

Curiously, though several states have dropped then exit exam requirement, Larsen apparently did not do any research to see if arrest rates went up aftewards.

My explanation for Larsen's results is that his data is filled with so much noise that any conclusions fall somewhere between "improbable" and "silly." Even if he has somehow scraped real data from the jaws of a gazillion different factors that could explain the results, we're still staring straight into the face of our old friend, spurious correlations.

Spurious correlations is a glorious website (and also a book) that helps illustrate why mistaking correlation for causation causes nothing but trouble. Some of these almost, kind of, if you squint, make sense.

But others are clearly ridiculous. And yet there's the chart, with numbers and chartiness so it must be, you know, science. Oh, Nic Cage-- when will the madness stop?

It's a weak argument, weakly supported. The only upside here is that I haven't seen the news of exit exams' crimefighting magic trumpeted from the websites of the usual suspects. Let's hope it fades quietly away, like a mediocre Nic Cage movie.

Graduation in the Age of Covid-19

There are three bridges that run in and out of my small town. Currently, each bridge is flying a batch of banners that collectively list the entire 2020 graduating class at our high school. When the banners went up, a photo of some seniors looking for their names on the banners ran on the front page of the local paper.

High school graduation is a big deal in small town USA. My old high school (the one where I taught for almost forty years and from which I graduated back in the day) holds the graduation ceremony in the city park. Graduates step up onto the band stand while all their family and most of their friends and a fair-sized helping of community people who aren't even related to any graduates all gather on the cool green grass under a canopy of trees, next to a Civil War monument. For years, a colleague and I led the procession of seniors down the sidewalk that cuts diagonally through the park, splitting the huge home town crowd as folks jostled to snap the first pictures of the day. Seniors speak and perform music; administrators speak briefly.

It's a big deal, possibly equaled only by a wedding, though nobody's wedding will be this well-attended by such a broad cross-section of the community. But it serves as one of the few moments in anyone's life in which their status, their place in the world, their fundamental self-image change in just a few moments' time. Small towns like mine are the kind of place in which where you went to high school remains one of your primary identifiers, like job and spouse, for the rest of your life.

The banners are, of course, just one sign that those transformational moments are not going to happen this year. My old school is hoping to stage a "regular" graduation later this summer. If it happens, it will be weird-- not in the park, not with all the graduates there (some will have already moved on to their next chapter), and after the real moment of transition has passed, though after a senior year that fizzled out in a deflated buzz of cancellations and zoom meetings, without even a real Last Day Of School-- well, it will be weird, not at all the same.

The challenge is the same for small town schools everywhere. In my region, one school staged individual graduations, running the graduates and their families through the school auditorium, one at a time, with caps and gowns, diploma handoffs, and photo ops for all. It took four days to cover the entire senior class. Another school staged theirs at a drive-in theater, families in cars, stage walk blown up on the gigantic outdoor screen. About a month ago, staff and faculty of my school loaded up on several different buses and rode around the district, delivering signage and congratulation to each senior.

It will be interesting to see, in the long run, how many of these many improvisations stick. Heck-- we could put up graduate banners on the bridges every year, and when would having your graduation moment blasted across a forty foot tall screen ever not be cool?

But mostly, there is a kind of sadness to all of these ideas, a sense that graduates are being cheated of a really special moment and anything that adults do to make up for it is just a sad, pale imitation, important only because whatever it is, it tells the students that they are not forgotten, that the adult world still cares about them this one last time. In your senior year, you're supposed to be kind of a big deal.

In the long run, this will not be the most critical fallout of the pandemic. High school graduation is also one of those moments that gets its poignancy by carrying the echoes of all that has come before and the foreshadowing of all that will come after. It is like a wedding-- getting married may be a big emotional deal, but what you do abut getting married is not nearly as important as what you do about being married. "Commencement" after all means the beginning of something, and that something is the true big deal. I don't remember much of my high school graduation ceremony; I bet I'm not alone.

If there is a silver lining in all this, it is that adults who could, in any other year, just go through the motions, must this year come up with a deliberate and thoughtful way to express care to their graduating seniors. "Slow down and think about what you're doing" is never bad advice. Wit the loss of regular motions to go through, schools have had to deliberately develop ways to support their departing graduates; it is a pleasure to see so many rise to the occasion. It doesn't remove the crappiness of what has happened.

This coming week would have been the week (by local custom, each area school has a different traditional day and time for graduation, so that none conflict with any other). Instead, it's a week like any other. This is nowhere close to being the biggest casualty of the pandemic; some young adults are going to learn sooner rather than later that in the grown-up world, you often just kind of slide from one part of life into another in ways that are barely perceptible. But it is still a challenge that schools and teachers had to meet. I hope your =s did well.