Attendance is now optional, a “new normal.” A young man who graduated from high school in upstate New York last. June described how the pandemic “delegitimized” school even among the academically inclined like him and his friends. “What’s the point in putting more effort into it when. I’m just gonna pass all my tests anyway, and I can get out of online class by telling the teacher my computer glitched out?” he asked. “That attitude definitely shifted over to post-Coved learning, as well.” There’s a vexing, blind-men-and-the-elephant feeling to all this. School district officials and education policymakers will tell you the post-pandemic lesson is that schools need to adapt and be more flexible, appealing, and relevant to students’ lives and needs. Counselors, mental health professionals, and even teachers talk about the need to make “social and emotional learning” co-equal to academics.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist
Worries about “the radical transformation Finland Phone Number List of childhood into a phone-based existence.” At it’s none of those things, it’s all of them plus disorderly homes, inattentive parents, directionless lives, and moral exhaustion. It’s a bromide now among teachers, administrators, and education policymakers to say chronic absenteeism is a canary in a coal mine. The implication is that schools as we have known and run them for generations need to change.
I pray that’s so
Cause the other possibility is nearly Latvia Phone Number List overwhelming to consider: that the canary is a large and growing cadre of disengaged and disaffected young people, and the coal mine is much, much bigger than just school. POLICY PRIORITY: HIGH EXPECTATIONS TOPICS: GOVERNANCE TEACHERS & SCHOOL LEADERS Robert Pondiscio is a senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) He writes and speaks extensively on education and education-reform issues, with an emphasis on literacy, curriculum, civic education, and classroom practice. His 2019 book, How the Other Half Learns, based on a year of observations at New York City’s Success Academy… View Full Bio
