Considerations for the Vermont Educational Community during Long-Term School Dismissal
What better time do we have than the present one to critically examine and interrogate how “we do school”. It’s time to lean on the educators that are here because we see the inequities in our schools and spheres and we want to do something about it. There’s a growing legion of us. Now that everything has literally been upended, shaken out, and is being cobbled together as quickly as possible, the deeply embedded — and accepted — inequities in our systems are in full light. The rooster has come home to roost. It seems like the conversations I’m a part of right now acknowledge how very deeply inequitable our public schooling is across our resilient state — from which students have access to which:
- Resources
- Teachers
- Classes
- Technology/Access with Wifi
- Transportation
- Nourishment
- Enrichment
- Support
and how very few students have pathways to self-actualization through bias-free teachers, curriculum, administrators, practices, and policies.
As we each work with our teams and schools to construct what the next 12 weeks of remote teaching and learning look like in Vermont, it is the time for bold and radical changes. I am proposing the following as new prek-12 learning targets:
- Connect with others
- Stay active
- Be mindful & reflective
- Keep learning
- Contribute & be generous
These are transferable skills preK-12. They are bold, inclusive, and aspirational in all the right ways. If we try to recreate school, as it now exists, it will fail epically and with consequences that will last for many years to come. We cannot insist that students Zoom for hours on end. Or that they log in everyday (how is this even equitable in rural Vermont?) and keep them glued to their computers. We cannot insist on norms that do not support entire families. Students have siblings to care for, parents out of work, parents working from home, food insecurity, abuse of all kinds, and social media saturation that is all exasperated by the Coronavirus crisis to the nth degree. Or, the “junk show”, as worded so perfectly by Dr.Taharee Jackson.
Just as Paul Gorski says, “We can’t tinker and tweak our way to racial justice”, we can’t tinker and tweak our way to an equitable solution to remote teaching and learning for all students. It’s time for liberation. It’s time to read Bettina Love. It’s time for more James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. It’s time for MLK and Kendrick Lamar, Dr.Beverly Tatum and Louise Derman-Sparks. It’s time for anti-racist allies to show up and do deeply personal identity work. It’s time to examine how poverty and opportunities do not exist in vacuums, but intersect right before our very eyes in our classrooms and schools. We have always known these things, but like changing course on a cruise ship, change has been slow and felt daunting. Now is the time to show up brave troublemakers. Let’s make good trouble.
Anything less is compliance and maintains the status quo that we know is not equitable, has too many gaps, and falls short of meeting the needs of all our students. The structural conditions of teaching have been emptied out and lay at our feet. It’s up to us to advocate for new structures, imagine new possibilities, and liberate all children from damaging structural inequities that serve none of them.
If not now, when?
I invite you to share your thinking and let’s crowdsource some solutions. What does this look like in action? What solutions are working in your classrooms, libraries, and schools? We are all in this together and Vermont is small and nimble enough to reimagine a new way of serving all of our students
