Tag: k-12 education

“A Teacher in My District Died of Covid Yesterday”

Jonathan Wilson1 Comment
Texas governor Greg Abbott in 2018 (photo by Jay Godwin, public domain)

One of my good friends is a schoolteacher in Texas, my home state. There, the governor, who is running for a third term in 2022, has ordered school districts and public colleges not to enforce basic pandemic precautions, even as COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are returning to last winter’s levels.

My friend has written the following update, which I’m reposting here with their permission.

“A teacher in my district died of Covid yesterday. His last day at school was one week ago, the first day of classes. He welcomed groups of 12 year-olds back for a new year, and then today those kids learned that he is no longer alive. And they learned this news at school, because classes are still in session at every campus. I don’t know how many cases we’ve had at any of those campuses because the district isn’t required to report that information, so they aren’t.

“I didn’t know this teacher, and I also don’t know when or how he got Covid. I assume he was with me 11 days before he died, crammed into the high school entryway for breakfast and a vendor fair with all the rest of the district faculty and staff, and later crowding the hallways playing teambuilding games. I don’t know if he was one of the 15% or so of people wearing a mask as we all sat together in the gym and the superintendent told us that he and the school board weren’t willing to end up in a courtroom over trying to impose a mask mandate in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott’s order.

“I have worn a mask in the building every day since I returned on August 4th, except when I am alone in my classroom. I am not enjoying it, and I’m not looking for any social bonus points for doing so . . . I just want to survive (and maybe even thrive). Actually, I feel a bit stupid wearing a mask in spaces where 95% of the people around me aren’t. Does it even matter? That ratio has improved over the past few weeks, but I don’t know whether it’s enough. I’d say roughly 1/4-1/3 of my students have masks covering some portion of their face at any given point during class.

“But of course, I’m not wearing a mask to protect myself from them. I’m wearing a mask to protect them from me (and hoping enough of them will do the same to move the needle). Because the other piece of this is that, although I don’t know how many people in this building have been vaccinated (the county is at less than 40%), I know they all at least could be if they chose to. Everyone else in my family is spending all day surrounded by people who definitely aren’t. All of my kids are under 12, and my spouse teaches pre-K. Their school has already had so many staff out sick that they’ve decided to impose a mask mandate effective today. I haven’t heard yet how that’s going. My 4th grader complains that I make her wear a mask even though only 3 other kids in her class do, and her teachers don’t, either. The 2nd grader is in pretty much the same boat. (Their campus has had 6 cases in the first 5 days of school, and 55 in the district as a whole.) And of course my toddler’s daycare is . . . a daycare; just a petri dish with 4 walls and a roof.

“I can’t stop thinking about 5 years ago when the Trump campaign put out an ad that said, ‘If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?’ in reference to desperate Syrian families seeking asylum. You’d be hard pressed to decide whether the analogy was more stupid, more racist, or more lacking in basic humanity (the Trump trifecta), but the basic analogy suddenly feels like it has merit in this whole new context that he and his party have landed us in. There are bowls of Skittles all over Texas with a few poison ones mixed in, and every teacher and student in the state is being told to reach into a bowl and eat a Skittle every single day. I’m being asked to gamble the lives and the health of my family every day, weighing the small but ever-present risk of disease and death against the certainty of losing my livelihood. Some choice.

“Conservatives like to say ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings.’ And it’s certainly a fact that they don’t care about my feelings . . . But they also don’t care about my health, my well-being, my life . . . or facts.”

My friend’s update is explicitly partisan in a way I normally avoid at this blog. But under the circumstances, I think it’s important for me not to censor their thoughts.

I’m hearing similar stories of frustration from a lot of other educators in states whose leaders have rejected their public responsibilities.

Red or Blue, Your State’s History Standards Probably Aren’t Great, a Review Says

Jonathan Wilson

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education advocacy organization that promotes charter schools, has released a report called The State of State Standards for Civics and U.S. History in 2021.

This review concludes that a bipartisan mix of governments—Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.—have state-level standards for American history and civics that excel in “content, rigor, clarity, and organization.” At the other end of the grade curve, the report gives its lowest marks to a red-blue mix of ten states: Alaska, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

I’ve read enough to say it’s an interesting document. I don’t share Fordham’s views on “school choice,” but so far, I don’t see any reason for that to affect my assessment of the report. I’m skeptical of the notion that it’s possible to assign a meaningful grade or linear ranking to a state’s standards, but then again, I know how disseminating a report through news media works.

My primary problem with its approach—again, so far—is that I don’t share the authors’ faith that specificity in state history standards is always a good thing. In this respect, I tend to agree with the criticism of the external advisor Meira Levinson (Harvard GSE), who comments on page 11 that “there is just too long a history of teachers’ treating packed knowledge standards as content to be marched through.” On the other hand, I tend to side with the authors, rather than Levinson, on (for example) the importance of chronological organization.

And I deeply appreciate other aspects of the report. For example, it advocates a strong emphasis on U.S. (and other) history throughout K-12 education, calling out state standards that relegate history courses to a small part of a student’s career.

The full document is almost 400 pages long, with assessments of the history and civics standards in every state, so it’s bound to include plenty of observations and claims that teachers of any background can argue over. What I appreciate most is that such debate is likely to be both possible and rewarding. This kind of review is difficult to do in a fair-minded way, especially at the present moment. There’s a lot of material here that seems good for thinking with.

You can read more about the review in Cory Turner’s story for NPR.

U.S. Adults Want Teachers Vaccinated

Jonathan Wilson

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in mid-February, adults in the United States have grown more concerned (since July 2020) about the effects of K-12 school closures on student academic progress. They have grown less concerned about the risk of SARS-CoV-2 spreading among students or teachers.

The risk of losing academic ground is now the leading factor cited by American adults as a determinant of whether schools should return to in-person instruction—ahead of students’ emotional wellbeing as well as pandemic transmission risks.

However, almost three in five American adults still say that K-12 school buildings should not reopen for in-person instruction until teachers have the chance to get vaccinated.

That becomes an overwhelming consensus among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and lower-income adults, as well as among Democrats, all of whom say, at least two-to-one and as much as four-to-one, that teachers should be vaccinated before K-12 schools return to in-person instruction.

In other words, statistically, the most vulnerable Americans are also the ones who most want teachers vaccinated before K-12 school buildings reopen.

You can find the news release about the report, along with links to the full data, at the Pew Research Center’s website.