Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

In Jeff Bryant’s November 1 post in the Progressive titled “Bad Leadership Is Plunging Public Schools Into a Crisis” he opens with this blistering and completely unfair criticism of public school Superintendents:

Michael Barbour, a professor at Touro University California and an expert on K-12 online learning, believes that more than half of the nation’s school superintendents “should be fired.”

The basis for Mr. Barbour’s assertion is that

…deep into the 2020-2021 school year, many schools are still struggling with virtual learning during the pandemic.

Stories of school districts’ online learning systems crashing are widespread. Teachers complain about not being included in decisions about online curriculum and pedagogy. Alarming numbers of students are not engaged or not showing up, especially in low-income areas and among communities of color.

As Mr. Bryant ultimately explains, the story is far more complicated and the problems with leadership begin at theta and trickle downward. I am sure that some of my colleagues might have fallen short of the mark in engaging teachers “in decisions about online curriculum and pedagogy” but I am 100% certain that they were swamped. Few people appreciate that summer is an extraordinarily busy time for central office administrators. The business office prepares for and conducts audits and prepares budgets for the coming school year. The transportation office (assuming the services are not contracted) adjusts bus routes and completes preparatory work on the vehicles. The food service office (again, assuming the cafeterias are operated by the schools) has to place orders for the coming year. The technology staff has to modify the data-bases to reflect changes in students’ grade levels and baseline information. And, the most arduous and complicated work of all is completed by the maintenance and operations staff, who need to thoroughly clean the facilities and complete any infrastructure projects the district was able to fund. Teachers might not be working in the summer… but the administrators and non-certified staff are working diligently and quickly to make certain that when schools open in September everyone will be ready.

Now add to that full schedule the need to plan for at other contingencies such as:

• a complete closure of schools whereby students learn remotely
• a “hybrid” schedule where only some of the students (i.e. elementary school children) are in attendance while others remain home
• a “hybrid” schedule where students alternate weeks
• a “hybrid” schedule where students attend on different days of the week
• oh… and a “full opening with COVID precautions”

You get the picture, I trust, that school leaders were working more than full time to explore each of these options AND at the same time conferring with their elected Boards on which of these options would work best for their district.

As I watched this scenario unfold in late Spring, I blogged and wrote op ed articles encouraging someone at a higher level than the local district to make a determination on which option to pursue so that local Boards would not have to make the decisions on their own. Alas, few States took the initiative to lead and there was no federal leadership whatsoever other that tweets exhorting schools to open— an idea that lends itself to a Twitter post but requires money that was not forthcoming from any source except local property taxes.

After describing the failure of leadership at the state and especially federal level, Mr. Bryant acknowledges, albeit too late and too little, that local leaders were hamstrung from the out. He concludes his article with this:

Certainly, the lack of funding and guidance from government leaders has put school leaders in a bind.But most of that discomfort trickles down to teachers who are hit the hardest. And now, in schools that have decided to reopen in-person (either full-time or partially), 88% of teachers have to purchase their own personal protection equipment, and 11% buy it for their students.

Of course, public education is not the only American institution where the pandemic has exposed leadership failures.

But an essential lesson of the pandemic is its tendency to strip down complicated social relationships to their essentials. People have had to start making decisions based on what is physically safe, how they can have access to staples like food and transportation, and whether or not they can still have a job.

What the pandemic revealed about public education is that schools have become the essential safety nets for families, that access to education services is grossly inequitable, and that the education process at its very core is about the relationships between teachers and their students.

If education policy leaders want to improve the way they run schools during a pandemic, maybe they should start with that.

I retired eight years ago… and when I did I could not call to mind ANY school superintendent in New Hampshire or Vermont who did not know that schools were “…the essential safety nets for families, that access to education services is grossly inequitable, and that the education process at its very core is about the relationships between teachers and their students.” To call them out because they were not given clear directives on how to open schools, they were not given the financial resources to execute decisions made by their local boards or State governors, or unable to engage teachers in decisions that were not theirs to make to begin with is unfair. I hope Mr. Bryant will reconsider his broad brush criticism of “school leaders” and appreciate the extent to which they are in the same predicament as teachers and the extent to which they appreciate the hard work teachers do.