Passed Along

Despite the semi-religious-speak quality of remarks like ‘what kills us makes us stronger’ one of the truly devastating results of COVID-19 is the revelation of the inherent weakness of two of America’s largest and most important institutional systems: healthcare and public schools.

We have seen the staggering reality that in time of emergency life and death need, this country’s healthcare system could not provide basic safety equipment for its doctors, nurses and other primary healthcare providers at the hospital level where they are critically necessary.

Nor was it able to provide the necessary primary healthcare providers themselves begging for more doctors and nurses to come to the hotspots like New York even as we desperately searched markets for masks, gowns, gloves and ventilators.

For weeks the system itself was on life-support.

As the desperation eases with the preliminary downturn of the disease, the question remains will the healthcare system properly prepare itself for a return of the virus now or in the future, or for the already predicted possibility of a climate catastrophe or will it quickly return to the capitalist- structured basic supply and demand, insurance-controlled status it has known for years.

In the meantime, we know two things: thankfully there is no significant evidence yet that this disease kills or seriously injures our children and that yes, in fact, it is really doing both.

With the closing of America, came the closing of school just as our children entered the Spring term when classrooms focus intently on what must be learned by the end of each school year.

You might or might not remember that those last months of the year were always more intense as teachers worked hard to catch up to the curriculum demands before those final tests; homework and weekly quizzes increased accordingly.

Now all of that is gone…lost it appears now, forever. There seems to be a greater concern about how grades will be given than how or if what learning is lost will ever be made up before students are passed along as usual into the next term, ready or not.

This last note is critical. When the public school system failed America as it has for many, many years, one of the prevailing concerns of politicians who took over our public school system from educators was that children were being passed along whether they knew the material or not.

They demanded a fix. But it never came. Neither they nor the educators in charge did anything to change the system to accommodate mass ‘holding back’ of students who failed and were unprepared to move to the next grade.

And so the system of ‘pass along’ continues to this day. Miss the critical months of a school year and the learning that might have come from it? There seems a greater concern for those high school seniors missing a prom, waiting to hear from a college admissions department or deciding which of several schools to attend.

As for the grade school child needing help or moving to junior high unprepared to do so? Oh well…they’ll catch up once they get settled.

THERE ARE ALWAYS MYTHS

In all fairness no one saw a pandemic coming.

When it became obvious that most of America had to be shut down to stop the virulent spread schools had to be closed immediately.

Moms and Dads would be home to help students take instruction from teachers employing long-distance, remote teaching skills THEY HAD NEVER BEEN TAUGHT TO USE.

But everyone knew that teachers cared for students more than anything and somehow they would be able to do this…they would be able to do something they had never learned, had not prepared, had never experienced and all through a computer set-up in every home connected to every teacher…THAT DID NOT EXIST.

Doomed to failure? Far worse than the introduction of Common Core, an entirely different approach to school curricula during the Summer break with little or no teacher preparation possible or actual during that brief period. And so despite an extraordinary promise, the program was dead on arrival; failed on the spot and was driven away by schools, teachers and anxious parents who couldn’t understand or abide their children’s failing marks.

In truth after a number of years of silence, the Common Core still does exist but no one is talking about it. Teachers learned to teach it and while not exactly as designed, it persists.

Now teachers are again under the gun and here is the report to date:
Most teachers complain that barely a quarter of their students actually tune into their daily lesson;

When tests are given most teachers report that their students tell them the tests were fun because they are cheating on them;

An enormous number of students around the country have no means of receiving this computer driven teaching and so are doing nothing;

Many parents remain unfamiliar with present teaching methods of reading and math and so are of little help when they can find the time to help;

Children who are seriously participating spend hours and hours at the computer between class time and homework…far more time than they ever spend texting with friends or on Facebook.

Is distance learning really working? Obviously not.

Will Governors and school systems demand serious Summer School participation? No one has said yet…but time teaches us that no one tries to make Summer School real…that the time is spent away from school; that many schools are not air conditioned; that parents demand that children have a break so that they have one too.

Will the pandemic change this thinking for a whole number of reasons? It may but history teaches that the last reason for demanding that Summer School take place will be that children need the work and the learning.

At lower grades educators tell us that without school children lose almost half of the reading skills they have acquired and almost all of their math skills.

Is this what we mean when we suggest that the pandemic will kill or injure our children? Well perhaps the choice of words was somewhat inflammatory. Perhaps we should simply go along with these “Just pass them on to the next grade…they will be fine.”

Whether they are or not.