Arne Duncan and Pedagogical Badger Hats

Arne Duncan was at it again, popping up on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show to talk about post-covid education (looking kind of Herman Munster-ish on his Zoom screen). 

Much of his shtick was predictable. Students are months behind (which actually means, of course, scores on the Big Standardized Test are down, we think). We have to meet their social emotional needs, as we accelerate learning (just, you know, teach faster, because teachers have been holding back all these years). 

Zakaria says/asks, the "digital economy" did awesome in most sectors, but in education learning-through-a-screen didn't really deliver. Howcum?

Whatever else his failings, Arne could often say the right thing, and he does that here. Students are social beings, and being unable to have a personal connection with friends and teachers was rough on them. He's also worried about the "missing" 2.5 million students, which he suggests could be a lost generation, and that strikes me as a bit over the top, but reflective of a government bureaucrat attitude that if we don't have official paperwork on a person, they don't exist. But his idea of mobilizing teachers, social workers, etc to go out and find these children and make sure they're okay--that's not a terrible impulse. High touch, not high tech, says Arne of the solution.

Zakaria says that it sounds like there's no room for hybrid or virtually school in Duncan's vision, so now Arne will pivot and pretty much take back what he just said. And this is the part you may have seen quoted.

Duncan suggests, as an example, that we've got all these algebra teachers across the country, teaching just 100-125 kids. 

I think if we figured out who the best, who the Albert Einstein algebra teachers were in our country and rather than teaching 100 students each day, think about if they were teaching 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000, and then we could use that class time the in person time, for tutorials and small group instruction. So there are some lessons that we can take and run with.

This is a dumb idea. It's not a new idea--reformsters have dreamed of this world where we pay fewer teachers to teach more students. But this precisely the sort of thing that sounds good to somebody who doesn't really understand teaching at all. I mean, what person imagines that teaching 15 kids in person and teaching 100,000 online are basically the same thing, that any teacher who's good at one will also be good at the other. It's the Duncan crowds same old idea-- teaching is a human engineering problem and once you figure out what buttons to press on the student module, that (plus expectations) will just cause the student modules to learn. 

Duncan says we'll have to make access to equipment and wifi as ubiquitous as electricity and running water (oops--I have some places for him to visit). He nods at "anytime anywhere" learning, but then he pivots back and says that being in a physical school is the way to go. 

Fareed asks what the hope is, and Duncan says we can't go back to normal because normal didn't serve tens of millions of students and I'm now yelling at the screen to remind Duncan that he and his cronies created that normal and this is one of my least favorite Duncan moves--decrying policies that he pretends he didn't have a hand in creating. Gah. Also, he wants to accelerate learning somehow--maybe do away with three months of summer vacation (he's going to blame it on the agrarian economy which is incorrect), or maybe some children get 9 months a year and other children get 11, and longer days and I can't even start on how many ways this is dumb-- NCLB and RttT already gave us the treat of students with low test scores being punished by losing arts and science and recess, but sure, let's take their family time and after school play and summer vacations, too. Great idea, Arne.

After a stop at food, Duncan is on the old "Let's flip this on its head" and make time the variable and learning the constant. "Let's give every child exactly what they need to be successful," says Arne, and "successful" is doing a lot of work there, but not as much as "what they need" because mostly we don't really know--unless we pick a meagre, cramped definition of "successful" like, say, "gets a certain score on the Big Standardized Test."

He's going to bear down on the time thing, saying that "basically" you pass algebra by sitting in a desk five days a week for nine months, and I can personally guarantee you that is NOT how you pass algebra. Arne just wants you to sit there till you "learn algebra" which might be three, four, nine or fifteen months and while I get the mastery learning arguments and agree with many, Arne is unintentionally highlighting some of the structural and tactical issues in trying to make his outcome based/competency based/proficiency centered school actually work. But Duncan wants to take these ideas "to scale" because they could really accelerate progress (except, presumably, for the student who's spending 15 months in algebra class). 

The sardine superteacher, dispensing smartitude over a class of thousands (who can clock out once they pass a check test) is an old favorite. Fans have been pointing to many students who did just fine under the cobbled-together patchwork kluge of virtual learning that schools used last year, and certainly some did (just as a few students do well in cyberschool). But in education we have to be careful about the "some students do well" argument. Really careful.

Some students will always do well. Regardless (or even in spite of) what teachers do, these students will learn. I could tell every student in the classroom to wear a badger on their head, and some students would do just fine. They're bright, and they're motivated. That's why many teachers love to have them in class. It's why colleges and universities are such a fertile source of terrible teaching--because students are there on purpose and mostly motivated to learn (or at least get grades) whatever Dr. Dimbulb is doing up there at the front of the 500-person classroomitorium. 

Duncan is right when he says that human connection is critical to education, in this and in any other fall. But his idea about putting some "Einstein" on a 100,000 student internet hookup is deeply, deeply dumb. But man--the man can still make me yell at a screen. 

Backpacks Full Of Cash

Jeanne Allen's magical phrase, turned into a rhetorical weapon against her and other free market choicers, never seems to quite go away, perhaps because all sides find it an apt description of free-market choice. Right now they're getting ready to load up more backpacks out in LA. Allen was sure that this was a great portrayal of the awesomeness of choice, but I'm not sure we ever thought it through.

After all, in this vision of school, students are couriers. Their job is to carry backpacks full of cash to various vendors and business operators like little pack animals. The backpacks full of cash image unintentionally focuses on what many fans of the free market model are very interested in--easily moved, largely unguarded cash. We could as easily describe students as little foxes or minks, important mostly for the valuable pelts that they carry with them (and from which they will eventually be separated). 

One of the great tricks of free market choicers has been to hide their primary focus in plain sight, and the focus is not education or even choice, but in free marketizing public education. 

And yet, for years, few people stop to ask, "Hey, wait a minute. Why does school choice have to involve market forces? Why do we have to strap money to the backs of children?"

After all, we could offer school choice within a public system. We could offer a variety of different schools in one system. We could (and I'd argue already do) offer a variety of school options under one roof. If legislators believe that public schools are choking in too much red tape and regulation, well, then--get rid of them. Every educational goal that choice fans espouse could be met within the public system we already have. The goals the public system can't meet are the structural ones, the ones that are all about freeing businessmen to pocket some part of the vast stack of money we spend on education. 

Why does a requirement of school choice have to be that private operators must make money from it? 

I get that some folks have a sincere belief that market forces drive competition which drives excellence and innovation. I don't see a lot of evidence in the real world. Success in the market comes through many means other than excellence in products (eg Coke, Walmart, Microsoft), and once market dominance is achieved, market command is used to squash competition and buy up innovation before it can become a threat (eg see above). The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. They compete over the fat middle and leave the outliers to fend for themselves (eg cable tv). Then multinational winners in the marketplace create their own sets of laws, regulations and bureaucracy that any nation's government would envy. 

So I see no benefits to letting free market forces loose in a vital public service. On top of the fact that they don't deliver any of the benefits ascribed to them, they foster this view of students as pack animals tasked with delivering backpacks full of cash. 

There are valid arguments to be made in favor of some version of choice. But none of them require the inclusion of privately owned-and-operated marketeers.

Of course, to offer choice within the public system would require more money. Choice as we're currently doing it requires more money, but various shell games are being used to hide that fact. But here we are in the same old place--we can think of cool things that might make education better, but those things would cost more money, and when it comes right down to it, we don't want to pay that much for the education system (our own kids, sure--but not for Those Peoples' Children). 

So for some folks, the solution is to strap cash to the backs of children and turn them loose so that various business operators can compete at the work of coaxing the cash couriers into one business's doorway. Instead the object of education, the center around which school revolves, free marketeering transforms them into conduits of cash, one more cog in the machinery instead of young humans that the machine should serve. 

Who Is The Protagonist

Friend of the Institutue and religious historian Adam Laats has what I think is the very best take on the "CRT" panic. I've seen him say this a couple of times--here's a quote from a Guardian article:

“The heart and soul of the anti-CRT outburst is this anxiety of the changing protagonists in the story of American history,” said Laats.

That, for me, absolutely hits the nail on the head. It's not just an argument about what the story of America is, or even controversial topics or trying to make white kids feel guilty. On a really gut level, this freak-out is about people who don't want to hear the story as if it were somebody else's story and they were just a bit player.

You can understand the 1619 project that way--as an answer to the question, "What if we told this story not as the story of the United States government or the story of white settlers coming to a new world, but as the story of Black folks." If you've never really grabbed the notion of "centering" someone in a "narrative," these terms work fine as well--telling the story as if X is the main character.

We've seen that narrative exercise. There are a couple of great versions of the Three Little Pigs with the wolf as the protagonist. Gregory Maguire has made an entire career (and inspired a hit musical) out of making different characters the protagonists of stories you already know.

It's more challenging when you make it personal. Every one of us is the bad guy in someone else's story,. and some people never make peace with that in their entire lives. But the history of this country has always had as its protagonists a bunch of white folks. They have gotten better over the years at sharing that stage--but it has mostly always still been their stage. 

As a lifelong English teacher and lit guy, this is a framing that really clicks for me. This is a short post, but I want to put this idea down where I can find it. I expect I'll be using "protagonist" again.

IN: Parents And Their Rights

 Indiana is one of several states that has some version of a Parents Bill of Rights, in their case "released" back in June by the state Attorney General Todd Rokita, a GOP politician who hoped to follow in Mike Pence's footsteps, but couldn't quite make it. AG was kind of his political comeback. Democrats called the Bill of Rights a continuation of his 2024 gubernatorial campaign.

Rokita says, “Education policy and curriculum should reflect the values of Indiana families while meeting the mandatory requirements set forth in law." And in fact this particular batch of rights is mostly about being able to overrule your child's school:

*To question and address your child’s school officials and school board members at publicly designated meetings with proper notice of the meetings provided
*To question and review the curriculum taught in your child’s school by questioning local school boards and school administrators
*To expect that the academic curriculum taught in your child’s school aligns with Indiana and federal law
*To participate in the selection and approval of academic standards for the State of Indiana
*To obtain educational materials and curriculum taught to your child in the classroom
*To run as a candidate for your local school board

Rokita has heard first hand from parents around the state (because these kinds of laws/rules/edicts are always handed down because "some people told me they really want this" and never" because it suits my personal ideology" or "because I think this will be good for getting votes) and they are concerned about "the ideologies being imposed in their child's school curriculum."

It's an interesting stance to come across during Labor Day weekend, a weekend marked by articles reminding us that child labor laws ended the notion that children were the property of anyone--not employers, not parents, not anyone. It's also part of the general picture of education in Indiana, where voucher schools include a variety of schools teaching that evolution never happened, that Black Lives Matter causes racial strife, and that "black immigration" is how all those Black folks got here. Also, even though slavery was bad, "much was done in the name of abolition that was as evil as the institution of slavery itself."

So we end up with this weirdly tilted system where a parent can complain that their child is being exposed to "critical race theory" stuff, even as tax dollars go to private schools that teach the very biased view of history that CRT aims to point out. 

Meanwhile, of course, if you're not a parent, but just a citizen, taxpayer or employer who has thoughts about what students need to learn in order to take a spot as a responsible member of society, you get no say at all. It is parents who get the tools to craft a version of reality that suits them, everyone else be damned. 

Sigh. It's not that I don't get it--at least sort of. You raise your babies and you send them out into the world and you give control of a part of their lives over to people who are not you, and that is scary. But if your world view is so fragile that exposure to any single contradictory viewpoint jeopardizes it, maybe you need to reconsider. 

ICYMI: Labor Day 2021 Edition (9/5)

 Labor Day again already. Time sure flies when you're under stress and constant existential dread! But we have things to read, because these are busy times.

Jennifer Cohn: The GOP wants to take over all public school boards

I don't usually do this, but this Twitter thread is packed with informative  links and info, so here you go--an unrolled thread.

No Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created By Amateurs

Thomas Ultican looks at Scripting the Moves, a book about No Excuses schools and the story about how a bunch of education amateurs founded a successful business built on bad school practices.

The Right-Wing Political Machine Is Out To Take Over School Boards

Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch with the story on yet another one of these obnoxious groups.

Community Schools see revival in time of heightened need

Lauren Camera at US News on the renewed interest in and support for the community school model

In Minnesota’s ‘most diverse city,’ schools are addressing the community’s deep trauma

Sarah Lahm takes a look at how community schools are helping in Minnesota

65,000 fake students applied for aid

This is a crazy-cakes story of a California community college scam. The LA Times is on it.

Report provides deeply flawed picture of special ed funding for charter schools

The School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas issued a report about how sadly underpaid charters are. Bruce Baker is at NEPC to debunk the seriously flawed work.

The engineered student

Have you read Audrey Watters' new book yet? Well, do that. And if you haven't, here's a chapter about Mr. Teaching Machine B. F. Skinner to whet your appetite.

Teachers Didn't Sign Up For This

The Educator's Room has the list of current education shenanigans that teachers did not sign up for.

3 Vancouver schools placed on lockdown after Proud Boys try to enter during masks protest

One more sign of just how stupid things are getting out there.\

Big Educator Energy (Pt.1)

Jose Luis Vilson has some words of warning and encouragement.

See you in court

The state of Tennessee is going to court to defend itself against charges of underfunding education. Stay tuned. Andy Spears has the basics.

What does research say about Charter – District School Spending Differences?

Bruce Baker again, this time with a quick primer on what research actually says about whether or not charters are sadly underfunded (remember when they used to brag that they would do more with less--those were the days).

How States Are Privatizing Public Schools to Tech Companies During the Delta Variant Uptick

Nancy Bailey has a state by state breakdown of how tech companies are making their moves to acquire public schools.

A free lunch for all

Grumpy Old Teacher takes a look at the school district that decided not to spoil its students, and what we've come to expect from schools.

After the storm

Mercedes Schneider was in the path of Ida, and she's been providing reports of how things are going down in her hunk of Louisiana. Here's the first installment, and waiting.

College Essay Trauma Porn

Akil Bello, testing expert and college prep guru, takes a look, with help from his sons, at that very special genre of college admission essay.

Actually, I'm teaching these kids way more than they're teaching me

From Jeremiah Budin at McSweeney's, an antidote to that old baloney about how kids teach us more than we teach them.

We've Been Having This Fight For Decades. It Won't End Soon.

This next is from a report of parents speaking before a school board. Don't peek at the link just yet.

Ultimately, she said she didn’t want to see schools teaching students any values, arguing that it should be the parents’ sole responsibility.

“It’s our job as partners to [teach our kids] values — it’s not your job,” she said. “Respect us, respect [us as] parents. In the end, this comes down to me doing my job, and you doing your job.”

This could be from a board meeting from any time in the last fifty years. Because this is a central conflict in public education, and it's not one we'll resolve any time soon.

If you are of a Certain Age, you will remember Values Clarification. Personally, I encountered it at my church youth group (liberal-ish churches dug it), but it cropped up in some schools, sometimes in a watered-down form, across the country in the late sixties and seventies . The idea was for students to get a handle on what their own underlying values were, and to use the idea of values (what do people care about? what matters most to them?) as a lens for looking at society. It involved considering hypotheticals (If you were a mugwump, how would you design a government) and trying to see things from other value sets (How do you think someone who valued widgets would design a government). 

Some folks were not fans. These were folks who had trouble understanding the hypotheticals (What do you mean, telling my kids that mugwumps should design government!) as well as allowing that some points of view could be considered legitimate. And believe me when I tell you that some people stayed pissed off about it for a long time, because what they heard was "truth is just a matter of opinion, which means right and wrong are just matters of opinion."

Values Clarification handed off much of its shtick to Character Education. Then came Outcome Based Education, which also had a values and character component, and actually upped the ante by requiring these components to be measurable and graded. An army of conservatives (led mostly by Peg Luksik) trounced OBE soundly. 

The conflict has never gone away. Teaching Tolerance, Social and Emotional Learning, diversity training, etc-- all embrace the value of multiple viewpoints and tolerance for viewpoints different from your own. And that is not a value some folks share.

To be fair, virtually everyone draws a line somewhere. Everybody has a list of viewpoints and values that they don't believe deserves consideration. But some folks draw more lines, harder lines, and much sooner lines than others. When the various anti-"crt" laws and resolutions list the things that Must Not Be Taught, they generally lump things like the 1619 project in with Holocaust Denial on the theory that these are things that should not be given equal time. Most people agree with the stated principle of exposing students to all sides, except for X--and it's the definition of X that raises conflict.

We always seem to be fighting about the topic--feminism, racism, LGBTQ+, anti-racism. But the roots of the conflict are deeper than whatever issue is currently manifesting. 

Underlying that conflict is also differing ideas about what "promoting" an idea or value might mean. I tell the story of a colleague years ago who taught a gifted class, and one of his ideas was to do a unit on comparing the major world religions. One conservative Christian student said she would not be participating; there was, she said, no point to studying those other religions because they are all wrong. Sift through the many complaints sent in to the various groups collecting "reports" of "indoctrination" and you keep finding people who consider it indoctrination to even bring up certain things. A lesbian teacher mentions that she has a wife at home. A teacher lists the reasons that some people disagree with Christian beliefs. 

For some people, it's "indoctrination" just indicate by word or deed that certain things are in the world and that's okay. In the flap over the firing of a Black principal in Texas, various accounts quote students who say he always presented all sides and left students to sort things out, while other students claim that he was "pushing an agenda." I believe both sets of students are probably telling what they see as the truth, because for some people on one side of this issue, to simply present a point of view as existing and normal is "pushing it." 

We've got a fundamental disagreement about foundational truth and whether truth involves a broad a varied set of perspectives and ideas and facets or whether there is One Immutable Truth. And those divisions don't always line up exactly the way you think they do--liberals are also capable of hewing to One Immutable Truth in some areas. But it's that fundamental value of either truth or Truth that is the bigger part of the iceberg, the underlying issue that keeps us from working out the surface issues. Challenge someone's One Immutable Truth or, worse, treat it like it's just dumb to even believe in such a thing, and someone is going to fight back, hard. 

Further complicating this debate is that we are talking about beliefs and feelings which are both hard to change and harder to measure. The trouble with all of these programs has always been that savvy students quickly read the intent of the program as "The teacher wants me to act as if I believe X." Whether values clarification or SEL programming, a student who is an actual sociopath will be excellent at just sailing through the assessments. It's really hard to assess what someone thinks; it's even harder to assess what they feel.

And. (Yes, there are hundreds of "ands" and "buts" in this discussion). And the energy of these debates are further jacked up because they tap a deep parental fear-- the fear that you could do your best to bring your child up to believe in what is true, and somehow they are seduced into rejecting it all. Listen to this mother responding to the North Carolina witch hunt survey:

My daughter was raised with sound Biblical values, but just three short years [in]) public school has turned her into a full-blown socialist...even to this day, I cannot have a rational discussion with her regarding anything significant.

The woman's daughter graduated fifteen years ago. And we aren't hearing the daughter's "I grew up and my mother wouldn't and now we can't talk to each other at all." This kind of hurt leaves scars.

The point of all of this is that the current battle over what values should be--well, not even taught, but simply acknowledged and recognized in schools has been raging for fifty-plus years. If anything, it has been intensified by the iPod world in which we can more easily avoid ever dealing with people who don't share our values or beliefs. Now that has simply bled into education-- I can listen to only the people I agree with, only hear the music I like, only watch the shows that sit well with me, so why shouldn't I be able to send my child to a school where no adult in the building ever contradicts what I say at home?

The answer is of course around us--we're getting a good look at what a country looks like when a big chunk of the population believes it should be able to just make those Other People who believe those Bad Things--well, we should be able to make them go away or at the very least strip them of any power. It's not a good look, if for other reason than it makes the country not work very well, and it really, really keeps the country from responding effectively to crises like a massive global pandemic. 

We've been working on this for a long time. Louis Raths was working on Values Clarification in the mid-fifties, and he was building his work on what John Dewey had to say about the importance of values in education. I don't know a clear, inspiring easy way forward. This kind of conflict erodes humanity and kindness, and both are needed to deal, and yet neither can keep us from stopping people who are intent on just watching everything burn. But none of this is new, and what the history tells us is that we probably aren't going to socially and emotionally learn our way out of it.

 

The Troubles With The Learning Loss Debate

Like many education debates, the Learning Loss conversation has developed so many, many ways for people to be wrong, most of which can be avoided if one starts with the assumption that the problems facing us are complicated, defy a simple solution, and look different depending on where you're standing.

Some of what's coming out of union leadership offices makes me cringe. "There is no such thing as learning loss," say some union chiefs. "Oh, please stop," I think. It's not helpful to assert that it doesn't really matter what teachers do in a year or how they do it or under what conditions they and students do school. 

I get, sort of, where they're coming from. 

For one thing, there's an urge to counterbalance the kind of apocalyptic chicken littling that comes out in pieces like the New York Times editorial characterizing learning setbacks as "grave" to "catastrophic." 

Also--and I think this matters a lot--while the policy discussions can handle these extreme declarations of alarm, classroom teachers know that the best way to carry students forward and onward and upward this fall is not to greet students with some version of, "You are all disastrously behind and ignorant and we've got to hammer you with academics or you will all end up as pathetic failures." This is the tightrope that teachers always have to practice walking--you do not snow students by blowing happy talk smoke up their butts, but you don't make them feel big and powerful by telling them they're small failures. (Note: telling them this fall that it's not their fault they're currently small failures does not help.) 

So when I read things like "Our kids didn't lose anything," I cringes, even though I also understands that our path forward (as always) is for classroom teachers to pump children up, not to beat them down. Meanwhile, while there is no question that most students in this country got shortchanged last year, it's unlikely that a whole generation will now live in a van by the river eating cat food off hot plates because they can't read the food labels in the grocery store. But I really wish union leaders would stop making mouth noises that sound like, "Hey, there's no problems at all."

There are so many voices in this discussion that aren't helping. It doesn't help to say that students didn't lose a single step during the pandemic pause. It doesn't help to keep insisting that the gap occurred because a nation of slacking teachers treated the pandemic as a vacation and never tried to do anything. 

I'm also unexcited about the emergence of NWEA and McKinsey as prominent voices in "diagnosing" what has happened. Personally, I distinguish between learning loss (or the gap or the behindness or whatever term you want to use to indicate that students get as much learning in the last two years as they ordinarily would have) and Learning Loss, the latter the equivalent of halitosis, an attempt to make a problem look huge and the solutions you have for sale look scientific. NWEA and McKinsey are businesses, not impartial scientific observers. McKinsey is a global business consulting firm aimed at helping clients spot opportunities to profit, which is just what they've been doing during the pandemic. NWEA is a testing company. I've used their product (the omnipresent MAP test) and though our school, like many, used it as a predictor of Big Standardized Test performance, it was lousy at it, and in general did not provide me with information I didn't already have. Getting their input on the state of Learning Loss is like asking the Tobacco Institute to weigh in on the health benefits of smoking. 

None of which is meant to say that we do not need--desperately--data about Where The Children Are Right Now. But we are in danger of being led astray by the long-time love affair with high stakes testing. 

Here are the things we need to remember about the Big Standardized Test (and its various knock-offs, like MAP).

1) It only assesses reading and math.

2) It doesn't do it all that well.

3) Success depends a great deal on preparing students for taking that specific sort of test, a thing that many teachers didn't have (or take) time to do last year, or the year before that.

4) When you give students a standardized test during a pandemic mess and tell them it has absolutely no stakes for them, but policymakers really need accurate data, students do not necessarily give it their all. 

Even if the test were perfect, and even if the students gave it their best shot, we would still have gigantic, gaping, critical gaps in our knowledge of Where Students Are Right Now. For one, all of the tests were jiggered during the Common Core boom to assess "skills" rather than content. So they will tell us nothing about content gaps. For areas such as history and literature, that's a big question. Were I still in a classroom this fall, I'd be thinking, "I know which works are on the curriculum for last year, but I'll need to find out which ones they actually got to." Different areas will experience different sorts of gaps; musicians will miss out on the kind of development that comes from playing in an ensemble, while art and CTE areas will be missing the hands-on practice that develops skills in a normal year. I know policy makers really, really want an instrument that will tell them where students are compared to where they would have been in a "normal" year. No such instrument exists. Sorry. It just doesn't.

As the school year starts, classroom teachers are doing what they always do-- figuring out where their new batch of students are right now. Some of what they're discovering is not pretty (2nd graders who can't yet write their last names, high school seniors who have read half the usual stack of literature, the list goes on). On the other hand, the pandemic did not make students dumber, and most of the factors that could help them move forward are still in place (even if, in some cases, they're covered with layers of trauma and struggle from pandemic hardship).

But as has been the case since COVID first starting kicking sand in our faces, the challenges are specific and local. We can try to collect data, pass it up through levels of bureaucracy, let them try to craft one-size-fits-all solutions for distributing relief funds, or we can push that money down to the levels of decision-making closest to the situation and say "Use this as you think is best." I favor the second choice, but even that is complicated because we know that some local decision-making goes really poorly. So oversight is required, even as local decision-making is preferred.

The irony of the various new issues raised by the pandemic is that they are all versions of issues we've been debating for decades, just magnified by a medical--and cultural--mess. But magnifying them also makes clearer that it's all complicated and the complications look different depending on where you're standing and anyone who's plugging a simple, clear answer is both A) full of it and B) selling something. 

Educating our way out of the pandemic gap (and the pre-existing gaps exacerbated by the pandemic) is going to require hard, steady, thoughtful, day-by-day work. But that has always been true of education. Folks have been touting the pandemic as a reset, a sea change in how the system works, and I've said all along that I think they're dreaming--the human (and American) impulse is to get back to the normal and familiar as quickly as possible (or even more quickly). But if I could have my wish, I'd wish that the pandemic ended the Age of Easy Answer.