An interesting column appeared in today’s New York Times penned by Dana Goldstein, a senior education correspondent.
The line under the title says it all – “educators say they need more support and clearer guidelines.”
Nothing at this moment could be truer.
Within the article itself was an “idea” floated that shows the disconnect between leaders and reality. How would this sound in a school?
Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, suggested that schools could save money by holding core classes in large spaces like auditoriums or gyms, allowing a single teacher to work with more students while keeping everyone physically distanced.
Too few systems, Professor Roza said, were willing to delay planned pay raises for teachers or furlough unneeded staff members. She also suggested cutting programs like indoor sports and chorus, which may not be safe this year because they spread respiratory droplets that can transmit the coronavirus.
Imagine being a teacher during a pandemic with 60 students in an English class that meets in the gym.
Actually, that’s not far off from what a certain former presidential candidate offered a while back. Remember this?
In that speech, Bloomberg said,
“If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers, and double class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”
This is not the time to try and save money to make sure that we have the appearance that schools are open.
If anything, it is time to invest in more people, resources, and more input from actual teaching professionals.
Or we are really going to be paying a higher price for years to come.
What we have right now are people in leadership on both the national and state levels who are offering baseless “solutions” that are funded only with the amount of money and resources that their fantasized ideal might require.
And that’s never been enough when there was no pandemic.
The letter below is from the state super in Arizona concerning opening schools in her state. Arizona is one of the biggest hotspot in the world.
Actually, it’s the hottest.
The third paragraph is especially insightful.
But we have people in pwer who say this:
And those things are then trumpeted:
caffeinated rage 