Updates

Regular readers know that I have three areas of interest that frequently occupy my attention: the impact of the pandemic on education, the ever evolving role of AI and technology on teaching and learning, and the strong current of anti-intellectualism in our society. Well, this summer has been a busy one for all three of these topics; so it’s time for some updates. We’ll start with the pandemic.

Early on, when COVID was actively disrupting all of our lives, I made some sober predictions about the cost of this disease to our children, and it saddens me to report that it turns out that things are even worse than I had prognosticated. Teachers are now reporting that many of our littlest ones are arriving at school barely able to speak, that they are unable to remain still for brief periods, and that some do not even to know how to play with others. Rudimentary pre-school skills such as how to hold a pencil or identify simple shapes (think circle, triangle, etc.) are missing, and caregivers of all kinds are reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression in children as young as four or five.

However, the situation appears even grimmer in our older children. The gap in national test scores between recent and pre-pandemic scores has actually grown wider than anticipated, and “the gaps are so large that the average eighth-grade would need about nine months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-covid levels in math and about the same extra time to catch up in reading.” The realities of human development simply do not allow for nine extra months, and so we are confronting an entire cohort of children who will be put at some degree of permanent disadvantage moving forward. At least the little ones “only” need “2.2 more months of school to make up the reading gaps and 1.3 months for math.”

On the AI and technology front, the status of things is a little less “doom & gloom,” with interesting research about why paper remains better than screens. The data about the advantages of handwriting versus typing when notetaking has been known for some time, but it turns out that even the simple act of reading something that is on paper versus reading the exact same thing on a screen produces better brain engagement and comprehension. Scientists around the world have been analyzing the brains of early elementary age children with EEG and fMRI, and it turns out that “when children read on paper, there was more power in the high-frequency brainwaves” associated with higher-order cognitive function. Why the brain acts differently between paper and screens remains a mystery, but that it does is now documented by multiple studies.

Of course, the creep factor of AI remains, with a company in China now offering to make avatars of dead loved-ones so that you can continue to “communicate” with the deceased. But that’s a different issue for another day. For now, “pencil & paper” are clearly winning, and those of us working with children simply need to pay attention accordingly.

Finally, it demoralizes me to have to report that the ACT has now made the science section of their exam optional and have even reduced their core exam by 44 questions, with shorter reading passages. While I am not a fan of standardized tests, with their well-documented biases and other problematic features, I am also not a fan of dumbing things down even further in our general society than we already have. The ACT rationalizes their decision by arguing that with this new flexibility—students can now sign up for four different varients of the exam (two of which do still include science)—that students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible light while avoiding the fatigue of the longer, original exam. But I am confident that the proverbial “bottom line” (pun intended) is simply that fewer students were signing up for the test, and that this was the organization’s way of trying to keep the dollars flowing—all at the expense of actually demanding that our children actually know something.

Well, that’s it for now. For those of us in the classroom, important reminders of the challenges facing us as we adapt to the children in front of us (not the ones we might wish were in front of us), and for those not in the classroom, important reminders of matters impacting the society in which we all live.

Until next time.

References

Archie, A. (July 19, 2024) The Science Section of the ACT Exam Will Now Be Optional. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/nx-s1-5045587/act-exam-test-science-optional.

Barshay, J. (June 24, 2024) This Is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on Screens. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-neuroscience-paper-v-screens-reading/.

Feng, E. (July 11, 2024) Chinese Companies Offer to “Resurrect” Dead Loved Ones. It Raises Questions. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/17/nx-s1-5001751/chinese-companies-offer-to-resurrect-dead-loved-ones-it-raises-questions.

Meckler, L. & Lumpkin, L. (July 23, 2024) Four Years After COVID, Many Students Still Losing Ground. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-test-scores-learning-loss-absenteeism/.

Miller, C.C. & Mervosh, S. (July 1, 2024) The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html.

The Inner Journey

The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north;
round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:5-6, 9 (NIV)

What are the conditions
that might make it possible for us to operate
at a modest level of prophetic inspiration,
to bring a daily beauty to our lives,
sustaining to ourselves, our students,
and our communities?
—Mary Rose O’Reilley

If you have read even elements of Part I or Part II of this project of mine or followed any of my updates since I finished the body of my e-book in the spring of 2020, you know that I have focused nearly 100% of my attention on either discussing how to improve what takes place in our classrooms or examining the very pragmatic challenges we confront in education today. Only rarely have I addressed some of my personal motivations for why I teach or spoken about the teaching sojourn itself.

Yet I find myself struggling this school year with one of my classes in ways that I have not had to in a very long time—which is both proof-positive that you never fully master this profession and a humbling reminder of my own “work-in-progress” as an individual even after six decades of existence. Granted, the value of so many years (both in and out of the classroom) is the insight that this is not my first time feeling utterly ineffectual with a group of students nor am I likely to fail to have some modicum of positive impact on some child under my care (I must never forget Mark!). However, what those decades of insight also bring is the recognition that it is possible to “stay too long at the party.” Effective teaching requires authentic engagement, and authentic engagement demands: embracing the role of co-learner; appropriately intimate rapport; and a thorough understanding of the neuroscience of the brain. And it doesn’t matter how good you may be at any one of them individually, without all three, the “stool” doesn’t stand and genuine learning doesn’t happen.

Which is what I find myself wrestling with right now. I cannot seem to generate the necessary rapport to generate the necessary investment on the part of a group of my students, and what I’m not sure about at this moment is whether I’m simply dealing with a situational issue or a generational one. If the former, I can accept a transient failure. Those moments of loss are painful and to be fought against at all costs. But my finitude can never be completely overcome, and I have had and will have classes where I perform inadequately in my keystone niche as the teacher. Sin is real, and I will not succeed with every class or every child I encounter during my career.

However, if the issue is a generational one, that gives me greater pause. In a world where many in the younger generations openly prefer an AI chatbot for a romantic partner—and get upset when software updates alter their “significant other” (oddly enough simulating what can happen between actual human beings)—I don’t know that I have the cognitive tools to develop appropriately intimate rapport anymore. Nor do I think I would want the tools that might be needed today. As was once wisely observed, “the ‘secrets’ of good teaching are the same as the secrets of good living: seeing one’s self without blinking, offering hospitality to the alien other, having compassion for suffering, speaking truth to power, being present and being real” (O’Reilley, p. ix). None of which are possible in the zombified digital realm that seems to consume today’s young (and, in fairness, many of their elders as well).

The simple truth is that I choose not to live unable to read a map, perpetually terrified of FOMO, attending to conspiracy theories, and addicted to a screen. Yet in doing so, am I making it no longer possible to relate existentially to the realities of my students in the ways needed to develop authentic engagement’s required rapport? For example, for decades, I deliberately listened to their music because I knew the connections it could bring. However, for the last five years, I have been unable to bring myself to do so because I cannot find the tolerance within me to expose myself to something I find totally banal and empty of all meaning. Has my own personal journey, therefore, reached a relational wall through which I can no longer construct a door?

I wish I had an answer to that question—it is obviously part of my conundrum—yet what truly unsettles me about the current situation is the memory it stirs of my grandfather. He and my grandmother acquired a VCR sometime in the late 1980s (the recall of how alludes me), and I remember my dad trying to show my grandfather how to program it to record TV shows. To which my grandfather firmly declared, “NO.” At nearly 80, he had simply reached the end of his willingness to learn yet-one-more-thing in a lifetime that had started before most homes in this country had plumbing and which had eventually witnessed humans on the moon and space probes taking pictures of Neptune. He was done, and he was okay with being done.

Have I, I wonder, reached a similar moment in my teaching? Have I reached the point of “done” with the generation of students now entering my classroom? That is what I find myself struggling to resolve, and it is a disquieting experience as anyone who has read my work can well imagine. On the one hand, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes reminds me not to take my challenge with this one class too seriously; as my maternal grandmother oft said, “this, too, shall pass.” On the other hand, the wisdom of Mary Rose O’Reilley reminds me that “it’s impossible to hear a subtle call if you do not create a conscious time to listen to it” (pp. 43-44); so what might I not be hearing that I should be?

One answer, of course, is that it is perhaps my disquiet itself to which I should be listening. The fact that I have kept trying to connect with this class, one thing after another, attempting to breathe life into what feels daily like a black hole of ennui, is probably indicative that I am not “done” in the way my grandfather once was. If I did not care, I would not be so dissatisfied with my efforts to educate this collection of students. Hence, maybe I need to “cut myself a little slack,” as they say, and accept that working my hardest this year is simply going to have to be the best I can do with this group for this year.

And I think I would be okay with that if not for the fact that I am not experiencing this challenge with my other courses. I’m co-learning, rapporting, and neurosciencing just fine with my juniors and seniors, and in fact, on my course evaluation this past week for my Genetics class, one of my students—in response to my query “what is one thing you would never want me to change about this course?”—replied “you as the teacher.” Hence, I am clearly engaging authentically with at least a subset of the population at my school; it’s just the 9^th grade which is proving so intractable this year.

Which pivots me back to the generational question. Ninth graders have been my area of expertise for nearly my entire career. Indeed, for 14 years on the 9^th Grade advisory team at my former school, my friend and Grade Dean, Paige and I would jokingly refer to ourselves as each new class’s “mom & dad.” Therefore, finding myself alienated from a group I have historically been so effective with as an educator is dispiriting and begs for an answer to “why?” that has so far alluded me this year. I do recognize that I could simply be struggling with the learning fallout from the pandemic (this specific group would have been in Middle school throughout it), and I recognize that I may just not have fully evolved and adapted my teaching toolkit yet to meet such a need. But that recognition doesn’t make it any easier to watch still another attempt to generate the conditions for meaningful learning in this class fall short, and I cannot avoid wondering what in this situation am I missing? And how does that “what” need to inform my future as a teacher?

The school year, of course, is not over, and I am too much the scientist not to finish collecting all the data before coming to any final conclusions. Furthermore, those same decades of insight mentioned earlier also remind me that this is not my first time questioning whether I should still be at the “party,” and it is unlikely that it will be my last. Again, it is when I am no longer having this internal dialogue about my capacities as a teacher that I should probably be bringing the journey to an end.

Until then, I have another lesson to plan.

References

O’Reilley, Mary Rose (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) Conspiracy Theories Then and Now. Scientific American. Pp. 80-81.

Campbell, R. M. (Dec. 2023) AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security. Scientific American. Pp. 73-74.

The Pulse (Jan. 5, 2024) Virtual Worlds, Virtual Lives. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1200586530/virtual-worlds-virtual-lives.

More Random (?) Thoughts

We know that the quality of parenting is critical to the educational outcomes of children and that in fact, it is the single greatest influence on their overall academic progress. Indeed, so important is the quality of parenting to individual student success in schools that neuroscientist John Medina argues that courses in what he calls “authoritative parenting” should be offered by school districts to enable parents to be better at their job in order for schools to be better at theirs.

Yet even so-called “authoritative parents” can have their blind sides, and that, in turn, can affect how well their child is learning. Which is why I was disturbed to read recently that 90% of parents of school-aged children in this country currently believe their child is working at grade-level. Given that reading scores on national assessments are down 6%, math scores down 12%, and half of all students in this country have been identified as behind grade level in at least one subject, there is clearly a serious and concerning disconnect between parental perceptions and academic realities—with all the attendant consequences for our efforts in schools to recover fully from the pandemic (see my The 2023 State of Education for a full accounting of the pandemic’s impact so far).

However, while this parental blind spot disturbs me, it does not surprise me. For well over a decade now (and long before zoom school brought parents into their children’s classrooms), polling has regularly shown parents decrying the state of education in the United States, adamant that our schools are failing today’s youth. Yet when asked about their own child’s specific school and/or district, their thumbs are always firmly up. It’s almost like a reverse NIMBY: the quality of my child’s education is just great; it’s everywhere else that’s a mess.

Zoom school may have changed that, though. Many a parent of early elementary aged children was inadvertently introduced to the pedagogical “reading wars” going on in American education, frequently discovering to their horror that their third grader couldn’t read after all. Others experienced the impact of the digital divide on their child’s school and, consequently, on their child’s learning, and still others found themselves banding together into small pods of kids, learning that they could provide both centralized instruction and the appropriate social development without the constraints of any form of institutional regulation. The result of all of this has been that as many as 20% of children in any given district have still not returned to their former schools—with all the negative impact that has had on school funding—and what’s more, there has been a revolution in the home-schooling movement as the pod idea has led to the creation of what are essentially mini-schools of 10 to 20 families, allowing for what home-school advocates argue is the best of consolidated teaching with individuated learning.

Where, then, does all this leave us as a society? The potential problem with parental ignorance of their own child’s learning loss is that when a real loss is genuinely identified, there may be resistance to addressing it properly. Given the power of parenting over teaching, that could result in a failure to adequately remediate, and consequently, we could have some portion of our population who never fully cognitively recover from the pandemic’s impact on their learning (which is going to happen anyway, but let’s not allow parental blindspots to make it worse). As for the impact of the “reading wars,” I’ve already addressed that in my post, Sound It Out, and with the digital divide, both the federal and state governments have finally started addressing the issue through the BEAD program, allotting nearly forty-three billion dollars for states to use to expand their internet access to underserved regions and populations (in fact, Maryland just revealed its plans for its share of the funding a little over a week ago).

Which leaves my random thinking focusing on the drop in school attendance and the rise of mini-schools within the home schooling movement. These thoughts actually have me more concerned than the parental blindspots about their child’s grade-level progress because our traditional schools are struggling enough already without finding themselves underfunded due to decreased enrollment. Just recently, for example, the Baltimore County Public Schools announced that they have endured 100 resignations since early August, and even my small school has abruptly lost two teachers this academic year due to economic need. The profession is hemorrhaging educators right now, and it is in no small part due to salaries that do not compete with the employment opportunities available to individuals with comparable skills and academic backgrounds.

But what concerns me even more about this increasing move away from traditional schools is the greater threat this transition presents to what Jonathan Rauch has called “the republican virtues”—those common values and ground-rules for public discourse that make shared democracy possible. Independent of the potential for actual physical and psychological danger these unregulated mini-schools pose for the children attending them (I am fingerprinted and my institution accredited for a reason), they also contain the potential for spreading one of home schooling’s greatest weaknesses: the possibility of children learning contorted and misinformed understandings about the world without any external curb or check. Granted, home schooling (whether for liberal or conservative motives) has always run this risk of creating a biased view of the world. But now, with these mini-schools making it easier for more parents to leave traditional schools for the echo-chamber of their choice—because they can still earn income while someone else home-schools their child—the opportunity to avoid being challenged by a pluralistic worldview only increases.

And without that challenge, the intellectual diversity so critical to healthy public discourse can die. Hence, my concern at the spread of this mini-school movement is that the potential for disengagement from participating in a shared common reality becomes possible for an even larger segment of our population since its advocates have found a work-around to what has traditionally been the primary limit to home schooling—its economic cost. Yet, that’s where things get even crazier as the mini-school participants have started lobbying statehouses for the equivalent of “vouchers” to start paying the instructors at these schools. They are arguing that since they are not sending their own child to traditional schools, they should be able to use those tax dollars to support their home-schooling efforts instead. Therefore, we now have an entire educational movement in this country devoted to creating unlicensed, unregulated, and unsupervised private schools paid for by the state.

Could education in this country get any more dysfunctional?

It turns out the answer is “yes.” The one disadvantage I have when writing during the school year is that while I’m trying to wrap up one essay, I read yet another news story during the week, and the one I came across this past Thursday makes my concerns about the mini-schools seem positively quaint. You can imagine my reaction when I read about a school in Louisiana—Springfield Preparatory School—where for $465, you can simply purchase an accredited high-school diploma without taking a single course of any kind. Moreover, you can do this because apparently:

unlike public schools, formal homeschooling programs or traditional private schools, nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana don’t need state approval to grant degrees…[consequently] a list of prices is taped to the front window of the school building: $250 for diploma services, a $50 application fee; $35 for a diploma cover and $130 to walk in a cap and gown at a ceremony… [moreover] there is no way for the government to verify safety, quality or even whether a school exists [because] by law, the state does not have oversight over the unapproved schools (p. 8).

Wow. The educational standards in at least one state in this country have sunk so low that the dangers and expense of illiteracy and innumeracy can simply be ignored and glossed over for the cost of a TV, allowing the woman at the center of this story to buy a diploma as “her ticket to better paying work,” even though, having been kicked out of high school, she possesses few if any of the skills said diploma claims she should have. If the citizens of Louisiana ever wonder why they rank dead last in economic performance in the United States, they might want to look in a mirror.

Coda

I need to conclude by being clear that I do not think home schooling is an inherently bad way to educate a child. I have known and taught some highly educated, deeply thoughtful and self-reflective individuals who were home-schooled, and there are some excellent home-schooling networks with guidance (and even some oversight) by state departments of education. However, I do think it is a hazardous way to educate every child, and when 1.2 million students are no longer in traditional schools, I think the risks of those hazards increase. It is why I plan to start paying attention to the lobbying efforts of the Home School Legal Defense Association and others like them after learning what has happened in Louisiana. I want people earning diplomas that mean something—both for themselves and, even more importantly, for their communities.

Because the quality of a society depends directly on the quality of education it provides its children, and that is not a random thought.

References

BroadbandUSA (2023) Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. National Telecommunications and Information Administration. https://broadbandusa.ntia.doc.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equity-access-and-deployment-bead-program.

Lurye, S. (Nov. 30, 2023) Diplomas $465, No Classes Required. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=d8b1c9d5-06ab-453e-b33d-f33caa3ac8b3.

Ma, A. (Nov. 15, 2023) Many Parents Unaware When Kids Fall Behind at Grade Level. The Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/school-report-card-test-score-poll-755cc4b52f5c7946f28207ab07fd5794.

Meckler, L. (Aug. 17, 2023) For Many Home-Schoolers, Parents are No Longer Doing the Teaching. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-microschools-pods-esa-vouchers/.

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Mullan, D. (Nov. 23, 2023) Teachers Union Asks District to Negotiate Amid Resignations. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/ default.aspx?&edid=6177b45c-15ad-4325-8fb9-a02b484c2fd6.

Office of Statewide Broadband (2023) Maryland State Plans for BEAD and Digital Equity. Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. https://dhcd.maryland.gov/Broadband/Pages/StatePlans.aspx.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.