I believe I have an especially savvy group of readers. I don’t think my readers require much in the way of classroom management advice. But it’s September and some of you are newbies — in a time when fashions sometimes cram all of us together into overcrowded lifeboats. So I thought I’d run a small stream of useful observations:
Larger class projects heavily favor the self- and grade-motivated. Sometimes these students effectively take over the whole project, directing struggling students to paste shiny stars or glitter on backboards, or write a simple section that the self- and grade-motivated student then almost entirely rewrites.
My own thoughts: If you can’t do a project mostly in class where you can watch group dynamics unfold, I’d avoid that project. I’d also create related assignments to ensure that weaker or less-motivated members can’t simply hand all the hard work to fellow student “Frankie”– who really, really wants that “A” and is perfectly willing to do ALL the work if that’s what the “A” demands. Frankie probably does not care if fellow group members learn the actual content the project teaches.
Eduhonesty observation: EVEN WITH STRONG SUPERVISION, group projects mostly favor the students who least require extra help and remedial education.
There is not one banking sector. There are two — one for the poor and one for the rest of us… Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated. For some, a home creates wealth; for others, a home drains it. For some, access to credit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it.”
Matthew Desmond
Desmond’s arguments are heavily based in issues of ACCESS. For example, what if a person must pay rent because they cannot qualify for a mortgage? What happens if “payday loans” are the only way to make the month’s rent payment? Or if there is no possible way to make that rent payment?
Ironically, being unable to make the rent may be luckier than being able to get a “short-term” loan. Sometimes being forced to move may work out better than digging a deeper and deeper monthly financial hole. Payday loans are usually short-term loans, typically due on a person’s next payday, with variable fees and costs. These are expensive loans — especially for borrowers who cannot pay on the due date and must rollover their loan, adding interest and additional fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that “four out of five payday loans are rolled over or renewed within 14 days” — with “the majority of all payday loans … made to borrowers who renew their loans so many times that they end up paying more in fees than the amount of money they originally borrowed.” *
At a certain level of financial comfort, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that basic comfort is about access — access to funds, access to safe housing, healthy food, transportation, support services, technology, and all the small pieces that come together to shape a life and lifestyle. Access has become one of the invisible elephants in the room with us because millions of financially comfortable people in the United States never lack access. When their smart watch or laptop fails, they stop at Costco on the way to Whole Foods, gassing up their Toyota SUV while wondering if they should buy a Tesla instead.
Where does education fit into this picture? I would argue Desmond’s bifurcation permeates US schools. Poverty-tax based school funding creates a natural, inescapable bifurcation. In the interest of not writing another book, I won’t go into the many factors that contributed to the widening of the achievement gap during the pandemic — except to say I absolutely saw it coming, having lived in a district with flat screen TVs in the student lounge, with iPads, laptops, and other technology scattered across kitchens and bedrooms in my neighbor’s homes. Going virtual turned out to be fairly easy in my home district.
In underfunded districts, the road to virtual often proved tortuous and cripplingly slow. One case familiar to me: Chromebooks ordered from China did not arrive during September due to the unexpected, dramatic surge in demand for laptops. Essential technology arrived over a month late, pushed into many homes unfamiliar with that technology. Throughout the United States, urgently needed tech not in place before the pandemic remained unavailable for weeks or longer, even when districts sourced the necessary funds. New tech — like toilet paper — flew off the shelves to lucky schools who found money and cranked out purchase orders quickly enough, but much of that tech ended up on backorder. Even when the laptops finally arrived, students who were mostly unfamiliar with their new machines struggled to join online learning communities.
ACCESS — the difference between the kids with their own laptops and phones, and the kids who had been going to the computer lab at school twice a week.
The pandemic highlighted the issue of access, creating a dramatic moment in time, but that issue existed before any coronavirus swept the world. Before COVID, we had middle school and high school kids hanging out in fast food parking lots to gain access to the internet so they could complete school assignments. We had kids using their parents’ phones to get information for web search assignments. We had kids walking through unsafe neighborhoods to get to libraries to use techology that was never going to be inside their own bedrooms — kids who felt lucky to even have a bedroom, since past experience had shown them that a warm, safe place to sleep could not always be relied upon. From the USA Department of Education: “In the 2020–2021 school year, around 1.1 million public school students, or 2.2% of all enrolled students, were identified as experiencing homelessness.” **
The actual definition of homelessness can be tricky and homelessness often comes and goes. But without nitpicking on numbers, it’s worth stopping to think about childhood bedrooms. Bedrooms can change quickly. They can also disappear.
Eduhonesty: We will never fix the achievement gap until and unless we equalize access to education. Inequitable school funding necessarily results in inequitable educational access. Any cure for our bifurcated US education system demands that we look at access — access to tech, the written word, teachers, and supportive paraprofessionals, as well as access to reasonable class sizes, tutoring, a safe learning environment, and necessary remedial education, among other concerns which affect learning.
Equitable funding will not be equal funding. The fact is — financially disadvantaged districts don’t just need the same amount of money as the rich district up the road. To equalize access, those disadvantaged districts require more money. Property-tax based school funding works directly against educational justice, as funds get distributed based on neighborhood wealth, rather than a realistic assessment of the educational requirements of our children.
IF I WERE TO PICK A HILL TO DIE ON IN TODAY’S EDUCATIONAL REFORM EFFORTS, I WOULD CHOOSE THIS ONE: WE HAVE TO SCRAP THE CURRENT PROPERTY-TAX-BASED US SCHOOL FUNDING SYSTEM. This system guarantees inequitable access by definition. Those who have, get, and those who don’t are sometimes still sitting in fast food parking lots.
