They're Only Behind If We Move On Without Them: Addressing the Educational Inequities of COVID in the Future

 A few days ago I posted a tweet that ended up getting almost 30,000 likes. It was overwhelming. I muted the notifications almost immediately. I just got back on social media after a break from it, and this was exactly the opposite of what I needed. 

Here's what the tweet said: 

Heard someone today say, “The kids are going to be so behind when they get back.”

But, we recognize that the only thing they’re behind is our own perception of where they should be, right?

The content we assign to grade levels isn’t inherent to age. We did that. We can undo it.

I 100% stand behind that, but as with everything on Twitter, it lacks the depth and complexity that this conversation truly deserves. I wanted to take some time to really dig into the reality and the possibilities behind this. 

First, I have to address some truths.

1. It is true that there are some important time frames.

Especially at the younger ages, there absolutely are important time frames, specifically around literacy. If you look at Chall's Stages of Reading Development, they are linked to certain ages. I would argue again, though, that these (a) include a range of time that typically spans two years or more and (b) are mere expectations and a normative explanation. It's not an, "If they don't have it by now, they won't ever learn to read!" Now, there are plenty of studies that tie things like literacy to long-term educational outcomes. For example, you can check out these stats from WeAreTeachers or this student from Frontiers in Psychology. 

I point these out to say that it is important for students to learn to read as early as possible, and there can be serious consequences to not learning to read early enough. I'm just not convinced those consequences are inherent to the brain, but are instead created within the education system. 

2. It is true that a student who falls behind faces serious challenges.

We know that 65% of fourth graders read at or below a basic level, and we know that 23% of students who have "below basic" reading in third grade hadn't graduated by 19. Please don't think that I am downplaying the severity of the consequences of a lack of learning in terms of long term outcomes, and a lot of this can be attributed to two things: (1) a decrease in motivation due to the feeling of inadequacy and failure, and (2) the inability to keep up in future courses. Both of these are real in how they are experienced by the student and serious in their impact. 

However, like before, both of these impacts, while real for the student, are not in and of themselves inherent to any of the process of learning or education. At least I'm not convinced of that. 

3. It is true that falling behind impacts students of color and students receiving special services most.

This is the piece I can't stress enough, and the part that has me concerned about how people are interpreting my tweet. The way our educational system currently operates, and as I pointed out above, falling "behind" can have serious and long-lasting impacts, and those impacts are not spread evenly among different groups of students. We see it impact Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students most harshly. We see it impacts students on IEPs most harshly. 

We cannot ignore that reality. If we don't change how we do things, if we hold to how we've always approached grade-level expectations, we will perpetuate and exacerbate the inequitable outcomes we see already in our system. If we don't change, then the students truly will be behind, and the consequences will be severe. Most importantly, we will have to acknowledge, hopefully, that the consequences were something that we did intentionally. The refusal to change is an intentional choice. 

But here is the truth that my tweet was intended to point out. 

No student is behind. The student is exactly where they are at. They only become behind when we refuse to meet them there but instead forge ahead by starting where we think they should be. That's when the student is behind, but they're only behind us and our unwillingness to teach them what they need to be learning. 

The biggest issue we face right now is this: The pandemic didn't create this problem. These gaps, this unresponsive curriculum, this factory-line-pretend-learning-is-linear approach to education has always existed. The pandemic just highlighted it when we can typically cover it up in a normal year and pretend everything is fine. 

Yet, every year you hear teachers say things like, "Well, you should have known this already," or, "You should have learned this last year." Every. Single. Year. 

We create the curriculum and then hope our students are ready for it. 

This is a terrible way to do things. Absolutely terrible. 

We claim that it's efficient when it's the furthest from efficiency. Is it efficient to spend a lesson teaching a student who isn't ready for it? Is it efficient to have a student spent 180 days with their butt in a chair while they are exposed to concepts for which they don't have the foundational understandings needed to be successful? Is it efficient to convince so many students that where they're at isn't good enough, crushing their motivation and hope for success to the point where they give up and leave? 

I don't know how that could ever be defined as efficient. Let's define it as what it is. Inequitable. Unfair. A rigged system. A manufactured achievement gap. A willful blindness to reality. 

So, let's define it as it is: our education system. 

In far too many places, the foundation of our educational system is built on a lie that we don't have to know what students are ready for and our curriculum can be set year by year. 

But, I have hope. I have hope because there are bright spots where this isn't the case. I have hope because our kids have so much resilience and our teachers have so much passion for both those they serve and the craft they love. 

I have hope that we can change this. It doesn't even have to start with something big. It can start small. Here's where I hope we start, not just this year, but every year. 

1. Every course should identify a small number of key learnings.

I'm not talking your list of standards. The Common Core has 42 standards that are supposed to be addressed in 9th and 10th grade for ELA. To attempt to call all of those key learnings and teach them in-depth is absurd. Moreover, those standards are ridiculously broad. Here's one of the writing standards: "Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence." When you think about how many things a student has to learn to do that well...not happening. 

Break the standards down to really look at what students need to learn to be successful. If it says, "Write complete and varied sentences," well then I need to make sure my students know their parts of speech, types of clauses, etc. Those are the concepts that become the essential learnings because they are the building blocks upon which students stand to reach those standards. 

As an aside, when we talk about credit recover and helping students remedy incomplete grades, this step of identifying the key learnings is so important. Let me say that again with proper emphasis: SO DAMN IMPORTANT. To often kids sit through another entire term or do a bunch of packets in summer school simply because they didn't learn a couple concepts, but nobody knows that, which leads to my next step.

2. Every student should leave each course with a record of their current levels of understand for the key learnings. 

Wait, so you're telling me kids should leave each grade level with information that is actually informative to subsequent classes?! 

YES! Absolutely. Every teacher would say that assessment should provide them data to plan their future instruction in their own classroom, but why then does that concept not apply to anything beyond the individual class? Why aren't kids taking their data to their next class so the teacher can plan for future instruction? 

Here's the part that kills me. This makes so much sense. If you were to ask someone whether or not it would be helpful for students to take a record of their understanding for specific skills to their next teacher, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who disagreed. The instant you ask if it would be helpful to shift to standards-based grading, that tune changes pretty quickly. 

WHY?! What I just described is exactly what standards-based grading is. We are just now really grappling with the amount of value that could be added if we actually had a assessment system that provided meaningful information, but in so many places we've been pushing hard to resist that because it comes with the term "standards-based grading" that people instantly reject because of the connotations, associations, and anecdotes we have for SBG. 

It's time. It's long overdue, in fact. There is plenty of research that supports the value of standards-based grading and very little behind how we traditionally grade students. Unfortunately, that current status has what is, sadly, the statement that carries the most weight in education: "It's how we've always done it."

Here's my response to that: If you started potty training your kid, and when they refused to even try using a toilet, how would you feel if they went, "Sorry, but this is the way I've always done it," and just kept on making you change their diapers. 

That's how I feel about our system's refusal to shift assessment despite years and years and years of proof that what we're doing doesn't work and there's a better way. It borders on malpractice for me. It really does. 

3. Use the skills we've learned this year to begin addressing student needs.

You never have and never will have a room full of students with the same learning needs. Grouping students by age never has and never will result in similar levels of readiness. There will never be a curriculum that meets every student where they are at. A one-size-fits-all approach to education is a myth, one that we never really believed, and yet one that drives most of our system in its current direction. 

However, it exists because it had to exist. Notice the emphasis on the tense "had." At one point, there wasn't really an alternative to putting 30 kids in a room and having a teacher give them all the same lesson. There was one content-delivery vehicle – the teacher. They had one mouth. Pretty hard to provide multiple lessons simultaneously when you only have one mouth. 

Now? I can teach 30 concepts to 30 different kids at the same time. The key? Well, there are two.

1) Leverage the use of video. I know we are all sick of video, but think about the potential of it, especially whenever we are back face-to-face. One of my favorite lessons to do is to put three concepts up on the board, have students sign up for the one they want to learn, and then they go find videos and resources to learn it. This is a possibility in our current educational reality. Differentiation is too often seen as a teacher-centric activity, which is what makes it seem nearly impossible, which makes it nearly impossible. 

2) Train students to be independent learners. This doesn't just magically happen, especially if they've spent any significant time in a system that teaches them that the most important thing they can do is shut up and play follow the leader to their A+. They need to have the process modeled for them: watch a broad video, identify what they don't know, learn those, check their understanding, etc. They need to be taught how to identify reliable resources. They need to be shown how to engage with others to talk about what they're learning. It's not a simple process, but it's a necessary one if we truly want to be able to allow learners to learn what they need to learn. 

Let me say that again because it gets to the heart of what all of this is about: we need to create and support environment where learners can learn what they need to learn. 

Not what the grade-level standards say some robot should be learning. Not what we think students should be able to do in our classrooms. 

Learners need to learn what they need to learn. 

If – and I recognize that this is a big if – we can make these few small changes, then being "behind" won't be as harmful as it is right now. Being behind is harmful because our system has made it so. 

Sadly, our system won't fix this, and you will likely retire before the system itself starts doing the right thing for kids. 

But that doesn't mean that we can't. 

Right now, make your list of essential learnings and start tracking student progress. At the end of the year, make sure the students have those and take them on to their next grade level. Tell the teachers that those students have them. Force the change because the change isn't going to happen on its own. 

I hope this came out as you read: I have more faith in teachers than I do in the system of education. Teachers care about kids. I'm not convinced the system of education does. 

Next year, when those kids show up to class for the first time, ask yourself this question, "Are these kids behind, or are they exactly where they are?" Knowing teachers, I know what your answer will be, so then you have to ask yourself the harder question: "What am I going to do about it?"

This might be a dream, but if (another big if) enough teachers do something about it, if enough teachers recognize that it's more important to identify what the student knows than to make a curriculum based on what we think they should know – if that happens, we won't see kids who are behind be left behind.

We'll see kids who are exactly where they are, feeling like they are exactly where they need to be to learn and grow. 

It won't be easy, but just imagine what it would be like.