FYI from BSF, 10.9.20
Some things we have read through recently…
Pause
“Systemic barriers to quality education are dismantled. Every child in Boston has access to a school environment that is safe, supportive, and thriving.” (from BSF’s “What We Believe”)
Certainty is a fundamental human need - especially in a crisis.
Once again, schooling in Boston has been cast into uncertainty, as the city-wide positivity rate crept over 4%. The Mayor and Superintendent announced that the system’s phased approach for K0-K2 students would be delayed for at least one week, but that high needs, high priority students would continue to attend school. Roxann Harvey, the head of SPEDPAC (which represents Boston families with students with special needs) gave an impassioned plea to allow children to continue to attend school, given the growing body of evidence of harm from lost schooling, particularly those students with high needs.
At the exact same moment, the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) reminded its members and the public of a stubborn fact - the city’s agreement policy was that all schools would be automatically remote whenever the rate exceeded 4%. Teachers could not be required to teach in-person on Thursday.
This launched a volley of emails and social media posts throughout the day and since. The BTU told its members it was considering legal action, and then followed through. BPS managers warned that not appearing for work could have disciplinary consequences. The Boston Public Health Commission asserted schools were safe to open despite crossing the 4% threshold. Families worried if they could be possibly sending their children into an empty classroom the next day. And, once again, tens of thousands of Boston families no longer knew what the school-year held for their children.
From the very beginning of school reopening conversations, “science” has been the star surrogate for policy preferences. 3 feet or 6 feet? Mask or no masks for young children? Are older kids more contagious or less contagious? Replace windows or fix HVAC? Plexiglass or no plexiglass? 3.9% is “safe,” but 4.1% is not?
But a just-released working paper presents an arresting conclusion: science doesn’t really matter in school reopening. After surveying 10,000 American school districts, the predominant variables in whether or how schools reopened had little to do with local transmission rates or HEPA filters. The stronger predictors were (1) 2016 presidential election results, (2) how big a school district is, and (3) the presence of collective bargaining.
We are not watching a scientific or a public health debate; we are watching big city politics.
And with that comes the costs of uncertainty - for the family that doesn’t know if they should drop their child at school today, for the kids who bought school supplies that shouldn’t be opened for another week or more, for the teacher that doesn’t know if he doesn’t know if he needs to go to his classroom, for the principal that has to run around her building alone to see who is there and who is not (and then figure out what to do).
No one can predict the future, but one can reason from facts. City-wide rates are sensitive, and can fluctuate quickly.
From September 26th to October 3rd, the city-wide rate jumped up by 0.5%. But just a few weeks ago, from September 14th to September 21st, it dropped by 0.8%.
The city needs to revise its approach to threshold monitoring and decision-making. As the last 48 hours have shown, educators and families cannot continually re-shift their lives on whether or not as little as 10-20 Boston residents (out of almost 700,000) may or may not be diagnosed with COVID-19 by an arbitrary date and time. There has to be a better way that is, of course, safe.
No educator, family, or child is expecting a final answer to schools and COVID-19 - but they deserve clarity on what to do while we wait.
School Reopening MA, and Beyond
We are starting to get some data back on COVID rates in Massachusetts schools - weekly reports are coming from DESE. Catholic schools are reporting very low rates.
As the pandemic drags on, so does the pressure on the state. Some advocates continue to raise questions about state policies, and the latest data suggest signficant budget trade-offs are coming.
At least some kids are going to school outside?
Families are less satisfied with what is going on at home - a national poll shows parents want improved remote instruction.
Profiles of six American cities and how they are addressing remote learning.
Other Matters
In a special, non-Wednesday School Committee meeting, big news was proposed: a one-year change to exam school admissions. Given the challenges of administering a new standardized test during a pandemic, a task force has introduced a complex admission system involving past grades or MCAS scores, as well as neighborhood and median income. Details here. The last time a task force introduced sweeping technical changes grounded in equity was the attempt to change school start times in 2017. We all remember what happened next. School Committee votes on October 21st - watch this space.
Full agenda for the meeting is here, featuring new meeting norms. For the first time since becoming mayor, Mayor Walsh appeared and spoke at the beginning of the meeting. The Committee spent approximately two-three times more discussing how kids get into 3 schools than how the other ~125 schools are grappling with COVID-19.