Blue Apron vs. the Sword in the Stone
How about let's not freak out so much about learning loss and Critical Race Theory?
Honest question.
Was remote learning so bad?
Was it, as it has been described, “awful,” “miserable,” “impossible,” a failure, a “disgrace,” a “catastrophe,” a “nightmare,” “hell,” “hell on earth,” a “disaster, and terrible for children,” “detrimental to children,” a source of “toxic stress,” and/or, simply, a “bad joke?”
It’s beyond argument that the remote learning model was far from ideal for many, many students. We will be reckoning with the deficits for years.
However, I’m not so sure most of the educators I know, even on their worst days, would have called remote learning a “disgrace.”
Because the truth is, once you got used to it, online teaching wasn’t so terrible. It was the Burger King at the airport when you had an unexpected 4-hour layover and nothing else was open. Not your first choice, not by a long shot, but endurable. As long as your students showed up and gave you a modicum of attention, you could make it work. Some teachers, I suspect, might even quietly admit they were pretty good teaching on Zoom -- actually preferred it in some cases, and not just because they didn’t have to wait in line anymore for the Keurig.
Did bad classes happen? Sure. But were they “hell?” Please. Good teachers regard their failures the same way professional athletes do after losing a game: with a shrug, a bit of sangfroid, you win some, you lose some, tomorrow’s another day. What’s more, there is not a single teacher I know who would honestly say their own students did not learn significantly this year, and I don’t think any of the students who regularly showed up would have said that, either, a note Michael B. Horn echoes over at his Substack newsletter, The Future of Education.
So what to make of this giant gap in perception? Part of it is the flattening that happens when we generalize students into monolithic groups. For example, we know that one of the groups of students who struggled the most in remote school was students with disabilities, yet it is also true that every student with a disability did not, and definitely not to the same extent, and not the entire time, probably not even in every class equally, either. But that more nuanced story is harder to write and certainly wouldn’t get as many clicks.
Most of the gap in perception, by my lights, has to do with how we have come to describe remote instruction. At the very beginning of the pandemic and even into September, I seem to remember a lot of talk about synchronous and asynchronous classes. But once schools reopened and more students began attending real classes, the distinction between those two forms of remote learning evaporated and the conversation shifted to in-school students vs. remote students (as well as a much larger, more political conversation about school re-openings.) And I don’t want to make too much of this here, but I don’t think we should easily ignore that the harshest opinions of remote learning mostly came from well-off parents who evidently had the time to pen op-eds and Tweet about the travesty of remote learning, but that, as their own children went back to school, they wrote and Tweeted about online learning and its supposed failures less. The varied experiences of black and brown kids marooned in remote school in faraway districts was forgotten1.
And the problem with failing to distinguish between the two types of remote instruction emerged when we all started worrying more and more about learning loss, which has been correctly observed is far worse for students who engaged more in remote learning than it is for students who were able to get back into school.
Which doesn’t seem terribly controversial or even debatable, right?
Unless you recognize that not all remote instruction is created equal, which if you don’t -- and I’m not sure how you couldn’t -- then you’d be left with no choice but to admit that, actually, maybe, remote learning wasn’t quite so bad as we’ve been telling ourselves it has been, and actually, maybe, the learning loss isn’t as broad and deep as we think.
Because I do not believe for one second that learning loss has been worse for remote students who consistently engaged in synchronous instruction as it has been for remote students who consistently engaged in asynchronous instruction. A teacher in front of you as you do the work is always better than a teacher checking in later.
But where is the data on this? I can’t find any. Yes, there’s plenty of data on how much “real learning time” students have or have not received. Most notably, from the National Center for Education Statistics, which started tracking how much live instruction a nationally representative group of 4th and 8th graders were receiving each day. From January to May, almost a quarter got two hours or less of live instruction, and when you look at the entire semester, at no point did even close to 50% of remote students receive more than 4 hours of live instruction per day. Quite bleak. A study out of California also confirms how little live instruction students had in that state, and this RAND Corporation study documented the reduced access to live instruction, too. And I found these two articles about the negative effects of diminished learning time during COVID, but neither of them, nor the aforementioned studies, answer directly the question I’m asking: what is the learning loss of synchronous remote students vs. asynchronous remote students?
Luckily, a 4th grade teacher from Illinois, Krystal Clifton, apparently had the same question, and conducted her own little research experiment in her classroom. She found that her “students who worked asynchronously generally performed worse than their peers who received instruction from me in real time, either online or in person.” Small sample size, sure, but here’s the money quote: “My students’ relationship with me seemed to positively influence learning, and this was one of the missing pieces for my asynchronous students.”
Emphasis mine. With Clifton present, even beamed across the wifi, her students were happier, they put in more effort, and they got instant feedback, which in turn motivated them to improve. When she wasn’t, there was passivity, mere compliance, a cursory effort to get the work done. On top of that, I would surmise that part of the low scores had to do with something called Dunning-Kruger Effect— people with low ability tend to overestimate their own ability. Hence the shock on a student’s face when a teacher hands back an essay they toiled over for hours with a big fat C on it. Students only truly learn when teachers tell them, “This isn’t good enough, champ. Do it again.”
Clifton’s experience, then, affirms what we all already know: teachers matter. I know that’s trite— a vague hashtag, a cloying coffee mug slogan, but I don’t mean it as such.
I mean it as a balm.
For, if we remember just how indispensable and inextricable to the process of education teachers are, then we might not have to worry so much about two problems tormenting us at the moment: learning loss and Critical Race Theory, particularly as it impacts public school curriculum.
Because here’s something most people don’t realize. Lessons, and by extension curriculum, are not Blue Apron meal kits -- mise en place and idiot-proof to such a degree that even the most incompetent homecook couldn’t render the pan-seared scallops and red rice inedible. No, lessons, and by extension curriculum, are more akin to the Sword in the Stone -- inert until activated by the right hands.
Lessons and curriculum, to say it plain, don’t teach themselves. If they could, we could just put a stack of textbooks in front of children and tell them to have at it.
Which is not to say that curriculum doesn’t matter. Of course it does. We now know that when it comes to teaching children how to read, for example, curriculum that explicitly teaches phonics works, and its popular, gooey alternative, called the whole language, which relies on sight words and cue-ing, does not, especially with poor kids.
But curriculum is only as good as the teacher standing in front of the students - no matter how well-sequenced, coherent, rigorous, balanced, and/or aligned with the standards that particular curriculum is. Or even how strong and true the standards are themselves.
I suspect this basic misunderstanding is one of the reasons why, every decade or so, like clockwork, this country gets into an anxious debate about what our schools are teaching our children. Which makes sense! It’s as if we all collectively remember at the same time that we voluntarily send all of our children into an old building for 7 hours every day for literally half of their waking lives until they are 18 and under the guidance of adults we don’t know from Adam. And short of calling for every teacher to wear body cameras (lol), there’s really no way for us to ever find out what’s going on in there. You just kinda hope everything’s going okay and maybe peak into your kid’s backpack from time to time. It’s insane how much trust we grant schools. The actual future of our country is largely in the hands of people who love decorating bulletin boards.
Compounding this decennial panic is probably the awareness, too, that we have little control over the most important part of this process, the teachers themselves, who, despite appearances, are the most proudly disobedient Americans there are. Don’t let those bulletin boards fool you. Teachers won’t admit this to non-teachers, but there’s an unspoken code that no matter the initiative or diktat passed down from the principal or superintendent, or even the state, a teacher can always just close their door and do as they please. Which doesn’t mean that teachers, as many people seem to think, are ideologues bent on indoctrinating students into believing that America is either a racist plantation or an infallible city on a hill2. It simply means good teachers are fiercely protective of their students and will quietly break the rules if they don’t think what they’re being asked to do will serve their students’ needs.
Further complicating matters is the je ne sais quoi of what makes a good teacher a good teacher. It’s not how smart they are. Nor where they went to school or how many degrees or certifications they have. It’s not the curriculum. It’s also not even how many years they’ve been teaching. All of these factors are relatively easy to manipulate and control for and it’d be great if they are what made a good teacher good. They’re not. As Australian education research John Hattie has found, the one school-based factor that has the greatest effect on student achievement is a teacher with high expectations. This means knowing your students, knowing what they know, knowing they can do more, and then convincing them they can do it. It is as difficult to define — Hattie seems to call it both “collective teacher efficacy” and “teacher estimates of improvement” — as it is hard to cultivate and coach. It also resists measurement and is exhausting to maintain as a teacher period after period, term after term, year after year. But under its ward, it is where the actual learning happens.
So then ultimately, the most important factor of the education process is a free radical whose efficacy is based on a nebulous, hard-to-define quality that resists measurement. Scary stuff. And because we tend to ignore what we fear and also what we can’t measure, we take for granted not just how important teachers are, but why.
As a result, we imagine that school is a violin that can play itself. Thus, learning loss looks much worse than it actually is, and curriculum appears to have an outsized importance, as well.
We minimize the roles of teachers at our own risk. Let us not. As Merlin implored to a young King Arthur, “Learn why the world wags, and what wags it.”
Photo: “Students and teachers of Aisha Om el Mo’minin School for Girls. Wadiah Lofty (right) and a school teacher colleague. School courtyard, Saida, Lebanon, 1948-49. Hashem el Madani.” Akram Zaatari, courtesy Hashem el Madani and Arab Image Foundation, Beirut. \ From the Tate Collection.
For a trenchant analysis on the racial dynamics of learning loss coverage, read Ray Salazar’s piece over at the Kappan.
Admittedly overstating both sides here.