Five Policy Considerations for President Biden’s Education Transition Team

We are now more than nine months into a global pandemic that has flipped our education system on its head. To use a football analogy, I equate the pandemic to a hard hitting linebacker and our public school system to a scrawny running back who was clobbered well behind the line of scrimmage and is too winded to get back up.

There are two patterns we are seeing across our schools thus far:

·       School leaders are overwhelmed and do not know what “enough” looks like. There is no model or bar for what successful schooling looks like in a pandemic. Many of the school leaders we work with feel like they are not doing enough despite working 16 – 18-hour days seven days a week.

·       Attendance and engagement are down significantly from a year ago, but how down, we will likely never know. There is not a single school in our network of over 100 schools that we are working with or have worked with in the past that has figured this out in a way that we could turn to as a model for excellence. Despite some general guidance on what counts for attendance, there are staffing shortages, scheduling constraints, poor accountability systems, and rushed operational designs that have left a lot of grey area in what counts for attendance.

Based on our experience, here are five policy considerations for the next administration:

1.     Address the public health crisis on a national level. If the pandemic continues to rage, teachers will call out to be caregivers, miss class to address their own health, and even disappear because of the virus. It also means classes are constantly being missed and schedules are being rearranged – adding additional complexity to an already challenging situation.

2.    Change the accountability system to get real attendance data. If teachers and school leaders are being held to the same levels of accountability during the pandemic based on the school’s attendance data prior to the pandemic, we will not get real data. As long as educators feel they could be punished or have their efforts called into question for reporting real data, we will not get a true baseline to improve.

3.    Reduce the flexibility to create stability. The option to go remote versus in-person should not be a decision made on a school by school or family by family basis. The constant changes in schedules disrupts staff and student schedules, which creates more deleterious effects for most learners.

4.    Re-evaluate per pupil funding policies or school planning in the short-term. The planning process for schools and districts is heavily impacted by the number of students anticipated at the schools. Traditionally there have been adjustments made to budgets throughout the school year based on increases or decreases in enrollment. The challenge with this model is that staffing changes are much harder to make a couple of months into the school year especially with such large swings in enrollment because of families relocating and schooling being online.

5.    Invest in programs and services to extend the school day and year. This spring may be too soon to expect a large-scale infusion of funds to support out-of-school programs, but summer may not be if we act with urgency. If the pandemic learning loss wasn’t enough of a reason to act, imagine a compounding effect when you add in the summer learning loss, which disproportionately impacts low-income children.

The stress and pressure teachers and school leaders are under is going to lead to a talent drain in education, which will have a ripple effect on teachers and low-income students – potentially accelerating an already widening achievement gap. And while the losses created by this pandemic are great, our willingness and urgency to address them must be greater.

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About the Author: Karim is CEO of Practice Makes Perfect (PMP), a Public Benefit Corporation that partners with K-12 schools to help narrow the achievement gap. He received over a quarter million dollars in scholarships to make his education possible. Karim founded PMP at 18. He is an author, a TED Fellow and Echoing Green Fellow. At 23, he was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in Education, and at 24 was named to Magic Johnson’s 32 under 32 list. In 2016, he was ranked in the top 3 most powerful young entrepreneurs under 25 in the world. Karim’s TED Talk was named one of the 9 Most Inspiring Talks of 2017 and his Forbes day-in-the-life feature is Forbes’ most viewed video of all time, collectively garnering over 5 million views. He graduated in the top 10% of his class from Cornell University and has a Master’s in Education Policy from Columbia University.