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

Two articles I read yesterday morning make me believe that after floundering and fouling up the opening of schools in New York City this year he is doing two things politicians seldom if ever do: he is acknowledging his mistakes and planning more than one news cycle ahead. And from what I’ve read, his plans have merit.

Yesterday mornings Gothamist article by Sophia Chang and Jessica Gould opens with these paragraphs:

Acknowledging the inconsistent and rocky school year for New York City’s public school students due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan Thursday to address educational loss and achievement gaps — starting next year.

“The foundation will be laid through this school year to get ready for a very different school year that begins in September,” de Blasio said at his press briefing Thursday. “In September, there will be a new normal.”

The 2021 Student Achievement Plan will commence with diagnostics measuring how students are doing with educational benchmarks in September, said Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza at the press briefing.

De Blasio emphasized this will not be high-stakes testing, but rather assessments for teachers to understand their students’ needs.

The Gothamist article also referenced the creation of a “one-stop digital learning hub” and the establishment of a “Parent University” in several languages to teach families how to provide assistance to kids, and “intense mental health assistance for school communities”.

A Chalkbeat article by Christine Veiga covered the same ground, but offered an elaboration on the proposed assessments, indicating that they would be formative NWEA-like assessments as opposed to the summative assessments that were the lifeblood of NCLB. In describing the testing protocols, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza indicted he planned to “give more assessments to gauge what students already know” and then “tailor digital lessons to catch students up in subjects where they’ve fallen behind”.

“Can you imagine the power of an individualized education plan for every student?” Carranza said. “Just think about identifying the explicit skills that students need to work on and the plan that we have to help them achieve a mastery of that explicit skill. That’s what we’re talking about with the digital curriculum.”

Ms. Veiga thought Carranza’s plans sounded suspiciously like “personalized education”, which she views as

…an approach that uses technology to tweak lessons based on a student’s progress. The approach has gained momentum in school districts across the country, with the backing of technology and software companies, as well as donors. There are reasons to be skeptical, however.

And she offers a list of those reasons before noting that in some instances in New York City with students who have fallen behind “personalized learning” HAS worked… and the district could use its experiences since the outbreak of the pandemic to inform the methods they can use going forward:

Some of the city’s transfer schools — which serve students who have fallen behind in credits, and often focus on individualized instruction and intensive counseling supports — have impressive records of helping students catch up. Small group tutoring, done well, can also be effective. Asked about tutoring, Carranza said it could be a possibility, but funding is likely a challenge and a wide scale program will require support from colleges and other community institutions.

The education department is proposing making “high quality digital curriculum” available for every school, and a “digital learning hub.” Carranza said more students will now have access to devices and the internet, and teachers have gained new digital skills that should be tapped to help students catch up, even outside of school hours.

“The new normal that we’re talking about post-pandemic has really created some opportunities for us to individualize instruction and really tailor instruction for students in a way that we just didn’t have the ability to do back in March,” Carranza said.

I am an advocate of technology-based “personalized learning” and wish that public school leaders had been in the vanguard on this initiative instead of venture capitalists and tech CEOs… But as Mr. Carranza and Mayor de Blasio note, teachers HAVE developed the comfort with technology required to make this approach work. The key to making it work for the students who fell behind as a result of the pandemic, though, is clear: “…funding is likely a challenge and a wide scale program will require support from colleges and other community institutions.

In some respects I think that the challenge of funding– which is unarguably daunting— will be easier to get than support from colleges and community institutions… and harder yet from the parents of students who are successful in school!