Education policymaking with intent
From the student and educator perspective, the digital learning argument is clear and relatively simple:
Some students have a better learning experience and improved academic outcomes in non-traditional settings, and students should have those options available to them.
From the policy perspective, the discussions get more complex quickly, because inevitably the conversation must turn to first principles, as in “what is the point of education?”
A corollary point is: “what is the role of accountability and oversight, whether from school leadership, district leadership, state agencies, federal agencies, or elected officials?”
Post-pandemic, with the growth of online and hybrid schools and courses, the student and educator perspective that supports more options is increasingly common. Students and families want and expect alternatives, and most teachers and school leaders seem to support those options—even as some of those teachers and school leaders wish to remain firmly in the physical school world.
(That’s not a contradiction. A student, teacher, or parent can easily say “I want to be in a physical school and I support students having online and hybrid options.”)
But the policy world continues to struggle with these changes.
We’re seeing similar struggles in the world of work, as recently highlighted by Seth Godin in Management with intent
“Video conferencing, the pandemic and the powerful shifts that knowledge work and the internet have caused are at least as significant a shift in work as the stopwatch was.
And yet the Washington Post sent a memo to its reporters telling them that if they didn’t come into the office three days a week, they’d be fired.
That’s because an executive there has decided that “the office” and “work” are the same thing. Even though reporters generally report, and reporting is generally done anywhere except in the office.
Was there something special about hanging out over coffee, greeting people in the lobby and gossiping every day at the water cooler? Of course. But these were side effects of good work in the office, not the cause of it.
If a manager says, “the only way I can create connections, loyalty and a sense of purpose is to force people to shlep to an office every day,” they’re being lazy. Surely we can come up with something better than simply taking attendance.
If it’s important to have your brilliant designer review the work of junior architects in person, then do it on purpose. Schedule it and make it worth the focus and effort. If you believe that loyalty and communication increase when people have regular physical interactions without a screen in between them, then build this into the schedule for the work that’s being done, don’t simply wait for it to accidentally happen.
As knowledge work has shifted to a remote-first setting, organizations have generally done an astonishingly bad job of bringing any intent at all to how they will build a culture that they care about. Forcing people to show up so they can hide behind a screen in the office is lazy.”
I’ll put a few of these lines into an educational context:
Too many people have decided that “school” and “learning” are the same thing. They’re not. More than ever, learning can be done anywhere. More than ever, some of the learning that students prefer must happen outside of school buildings (as in, online college courses, jobs, internships, career training.)
If a teacher says, “the only way I can create connections, loyalty and a sense of purpose is to force students into my classroom every day,” they should talk to a successful online teacher.
Forcing students to show up so they can hide behind a desk in the classroom is lazy. That approach says to students, “we can’t be bothered to try something new because it’s harder for us adults.”
“Surely we can come up with something better than simply taking attendance.” I didn’t even need to change that line from the original post because it applies, as is, to education. The especially frustrating thing is that well over half of all states have figured out an alternative to just taking attendance, but too many of them are still limiting those attendance-taking alternatives to just a few schools that have to jump through lots of hoops.
Plenty of people believe these changes should be made for students. For others, maybe a reminder that the forward-thinking companies are making these changes is a sign that education needs to change too.