There has never been a time in my professional career — or in my life — when I have less wanted to be a school or district administrator.
You see, there is no good answer. There is no good policy. There are no good choices.
Though I have friends and colleagues and clients who work leading schools and school district, I know that I can barely imagine how hard this time is for them, whether they are trying to figure out what to do in their 2020-2021 school year.
Despite what so many preach and yell about, schools and school districts are very light on administrators and support staff. Relative to other industries, the work force is very concentrated in the line workers, the ones who do the core work of the organizations. That is, school districts are full of teachers and teacher aides. There are some school nurses and some counselors. That’s the people who work with the student. But supervisors and support staff? Other kinds of expertise? No, schools and districts are very light, in that regard.
Think about how teachers an average school principal is responsible for supervising and evaluating. Even if you split that up across the principal and the handful of assistant principals, the number of direct reports for administrators in schools is exponentially larger than what we see in virtually any other business.
I have peached for 25 years that if your team does not have slack capacity in it on a regular basis, then your team will not have the capacity it needs when a crisis hits. You can be efficient along the way and then suffer when the crisis hits, or you can be resilient then when crisis hits. You can be more efficient across time, without the major setback of the crisis, if you are willing to give up some that presumed efficiency along the way.
But we do not run our schools that way. Our schools are crowded, our teachers are under-supervised and under-reported and our school leaders are barely supervised or supported, at all. There are well over 12,000 public school districts in this country and fewer than 1000 have more than 10,000 students. To get a sense of that scale, that’s a district with more than two high schools. All the others are tiny, and are led by tiny district offices.
Where are these districts offices going to find the capacity to reinvent schooling over a summer? They can’t..
But the larger districts really can’t either, because there are no good options.
Distance learning is inferior to in-person learning, even simply judging on the traditional content in the explicit curriculum. While there are claims about efficiencies in online learning, no one really claims that it is better for individual students and there is are no credible studies that show that it is.
Distance learning widens inequality gaps. Everything that has contributed to those gaps over time is made worse in the COVID era.
School facilities — the buildings themselves — have suffered deferred maintenance for decades. HVAC systems are old and creaky. Windows may or may not open. They are not suited for a pandemic respiratory virus.
Schools are generally crowded. Not all are that over-crowed, but they are not sparely filled. Do simply do not have the space to spread students out. When there is declining enrollment, we shut down buildings or shift things around, so that we don’t have to fix up the ones we have.
State’s departments of education have always been short-staffed and under-resourced. They do not have any expertise in the areas that school and district leaders need help with.
One of our national parties has been against the US Department of Education ever since President Carter raised it to be a cabinet level post. Their presidential candidates and nominees have run on reducing or even eliminating USDOE. Other federal departments get to focus on emergency preparedness and disaster planning, but not USDOE. It lacks the resources to do that kind of work, too.
And there is no additional funding. States and municipalities are short on tax revenue and education is the largest line in the budget. Money will be cut, not added. The federal government is doing nothing to support schools and district in the COVID crisis, and we all know which party is keeping that from happening.
The thing is, other parts of our county cannot really come up with good solutions, either.
We know too little about the virus. Science takes time. Knowledge evolves and grows as get more opportunities to learn. We just don’t know.
Too many people want easy and simple answers, binaries that make decision-making easier. Children can’t get coronavirus, they want to think. Or, if they do, they cannot transmit it. They don’t get sick. But all of those are untrue.
We still lack the testing capacity in this country promised to us many months ago. We simply lack information about the state of the pandemic today, and individuals cannot get timely test results, even in the limited testing we do do.
A sizable number of people refused to take the most basic precautions to prevent spread of this disease. Among those who do wear masks, a ridiculous number lower their masks when they talk — which is the worst time to lower them. People wear masks without covering their noses.
Almost no one is acknowledging the long recovery period for many who get sick and even fewer acknowledge that there are long term health consequences, even perhaps cognitive effects.
If you had made decisions for your organization in this context, what would you? Could you come up with a for your people and customers that was safe?
But schools and distracts have it worse.
Small children squirm and move around. How can you keep them apart?
Teenagers can know the right thing to do, and yet still have trouble actually doing the right thing. That’s just where their cognitive development is. That’s just how their brains work, at their age.
Teachers almost always love their work and love their students, but they also love their own families and need to worry about their own health.
There has never been a ready supply of capable teachers to replace or augment the ones we have. We cannot find average teachers to replace the ones who are too vulnerable to work in schools and we cannot find appropriate extra staff to allow classes to be significantly smaller.
Teachers already work longer hours than most people understand, and asking them to significantly increase their workload by teaching both in-person and online is simply not possible there are not enough hours in a day.
Teaching online is a different skill than teaching in person.
There simply is no good answer. There’s no mediocre answer. Every school and district leader is trying to choose from among a bunch of really bad answers. They are thinking about children getting sick, their schools being vectors for spreading a pandemic through their communities and about their staff members dying.
We venerate fire departments and police departments who do not work nearly as hard as teachers do because when the shit gets real, they put their lives on the line for the rest of us. Cops love to talk about how much potential danger they face every day on the job. Well, we are asking teachers to face far more danger than cops ever do, and to do so every day.
In 2019, fewer than 100 officers were shot and killed in the line of duty, and we venerate them all for it. Teachers constitute approximately 1% of our nation’s population — and that does not count all the other school personnel. 1% of the deaths we have had so far in this COVID era is well over 1,000 people in just six months. Fewer than 50 cops were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2019, and we will see more than 200,000 Americans die this year in this COVID crisis.
We are asking school leaders and district leaders to come up with answers that will meet the needs of children and communities while bearing a moral and emotional burden to keep those children safe and to do right by their own people, the teachers and other personnel who work for them.
There are not good answer. There are no mediocre answers. There are only horrible answers.