An early start to the school year?

This week, while about half of the states in the nations began to tentatively reopen their economies, California extended its shelter-in-place order through the month of May. I don’t think anybody was particularly surprised, or upset. We were the first state to start sheltering in place and I believe we will be one of the last to lift certain restrictions. And that is fine. I trust Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and London Breed, SF’s mayor, to do what is best for our city and state (SF has been committing to public health policy along with six other counties in the Bay Area so they are always working more or less in concert). They are opening the San Mateo County Parks again, which I’m thrilled about, and I don’t plan on writing much else about public policy as it relates to the coronavirus here, or anywhere else, as I clearly do not have anything of value to add on the subject. If anything I just misconstrue facts and create confusion and that is the last thing we need right now.

Having said that, I do think I might have some clarifying perspective on Newsom’s suggestion that California public schools might open up early this summer – possibly even in July. This was mentioned at the same press conference as the extended shelter-in-place, and it got a lot of press as people weren’t sure what to make of it.

Someone asked me for my thoughts on it here, and I wrote a long response in the comments, which I’m going to re-organize and then re-publish as a post. This post!

First of all, Newsom did suggest starting the school year early. And he did mention the month of July. But he suggested the possibility of an earlier start in late-July or early-August. Most public school districts in California already start in mid-August. So the early start he suggested was only 2-4 weeks early, not the eights weeks I heard people freaking out about. If we started eight weeks early, we’d get no summer at all.

I understand why Newsom wants to open schools early – kids are falling behind, and it’s the ones who were already not meeting standards who are falling behind the most. In my district, all but one week of the third trimester has been distance learning. That means the kids who are not able to effectively learn right now are missing a full third of the school year. That is a massive amount of time. Teachers are not even attempting to cover the regular curriculum, so even the kids who are thriving with this new kind of learning are missing important topics and skills. Teachers will not be able start teaching next year at the same places in the curriculum that they usually start. The amount of school these kids are missing is a really big deal.

And yet, I don’t think Newsom can actually force school districts to start in late July or even early August. School districts would have to negotiate an earlier start date with their unions, as the 20-21 year contracts have already been passed. If districts did try to start the year early, it would be incredibly hard to reach an agreement with their unions. But I don’t think districts will be attempting to start early, and the biggest reason for that is funding.

Asking teachers to teach a longer school year would require paying them more. Districts are going to be facing massive budget crises, which will probably lead to them using furlough days to effectively shorten the school year in an attempt to balance their budgets (In CA, at least, public schools are funded partly by business taxes, which won’t be at their normal levels because of the economic shut down, plus other methods of funding are also not tenable). It’s true that students need to make up the time, but the reality of our public school system doesn’t make it possible. In fact, the opposite is much more likely.

And of course, we’re talking about all without even mentioning the biggest elephant in the room – that schools currently have NO IDEA how they might bring students back safely once the new school years starts. You can’t effectively social distance in a small class room with 28 to 35 students, or hundreds of students eating lunch at the same time.

I’ve heard of a couple possibilities for returning next year: starting with a staggered morning/afternoon schedule, or alternating days, or some hybrid of classroom and virtual teaching. In all these scenarios, teachers are on campus five days a week but students are not. Again, this requires teachers teach more hours (they would have to teach the same thing for twice as long if class size is halved – or three times as long if it’s cut into thirds) or require hiring more teachers to cover the same amount of curriculum. Since budgets crises will prevent paying teachers more, AND will also prevent hiring more teachers (if they even could – there is already a shortage of educators in the country), I don’t really understand how they will implement social distancing and fully cover the curriculum. The only situation that works is for students to effectively get less instruction, when what they absolutely need is more.

I’m worried we will be asked to teach small numbers of students in the classroom, and also have asynchronous lessons ready to send to the students who aren’t at school on a given day. This would be absolutely untenable. Asynchronous lessons are preferable for students, who can access them on their own timeline and finish them with some flexibility (as opposed to synchronous lesson which require students to on a virtual call to receive the initial instruction), but they also require an incredible amount of time and effort to plan, create, manage (respond to questions via email, etc), and then grade. My district has requested we do the majority of our teaching asynchronously, which is more equitable, and I have complied. And now I work 14 hour days because creating a meaningful learning experience that can be done in the almost complete absence of the teacher is incredibly difficult. There is no way teachers can be teaching in person AND creating these kinds of asynchronous assignments for the kids that aren’t in the classroom on a given day. I really don’t understand how any of this is going to work.

Teachers are incredibly burnt out right now. And we’re very stressed out about next school year. Currently we have no idea what the 2020-21 school year will look like.

I’m not saying that we should all go back in the fall like nothing ever happened (or isn’t continuing to happen). That is impossible, and I wouldn’t want to be a part of that if it were being pushed (it won’t be). I just don’t see how our public education system, which is already so underfunded and dysfunctional, will be able to rise to the challenges of teaching our student population in a pandemic. It’s already May and the wheels of change in public education move so, so slowly. How are all these different districts going to figure out a plan, negotiate it with their unions in three short months, and then implement it. (even an MOU will take months to negotiation, let along a whole new contract – and really a new contract will be necessary because our jobs will be entirely transformed). I’m very curious to see what things will look like next year; I have absolutely no idea how this will possibly play out.

Newsom dropped the “maybe early start school year” bomb on Wednesday of last week. The day before I spent two hours in a zoom staff meeting discussing how our tiny district can cut $3- to possibly $10-million dollars over the next three years. We’ve lost over a million dollars to our closed preschool and after school programs, and rental fees for property use over the summer (which we created and developed to balance our budget when state funding was inadequate). We’ll be losing countless more millions when the state announces its budget – a month late – in August. They are talking about increasing class sizes and implementing furlough days – effectively crowding our classrooms and shortening the school year- the exact opposite of what teaching in a pandemic requires. Other districts will be having these conversations very soon too – we’re just ahead of the game because 20% of our budget is made from preschool and after school and we know those funding sources have disappeared for the foreseeable future. When the state budget is released, everyone else will be panicking too.

If the idea of maintaining the economy while we control the spread of the coronavirus for 1-2 years confuses me, the idea of us going back to school next year sends me into a profound stupor. I cannot fathom how they will make it work. At this point the whole enterprise it totally untenable.

I guess the only thing we can do is wait and see. If we thought the last seven weeks were crazy, just wait until next fall. It’s going to be a doozy.

The only thing I do know for sure is that California will not be going back to school in July. There is absolutely no way that is possible.