We Need Entrepreneurial Educators
A successful entrepreneur recently said of the pandemic: “Businessmen will fail; entrepreneurs will make it through.” This same mindset we need to apply to schools right now. If we seek to carry on “business as usual,” we will fail our students and families. Many schools and teachers seem to be grasping their traditional ways, as if teaching the same way we have always taught will bring at least one piece of normalcy to a world in which everything seems to be changing. I have heard that tradition is like gravity in education; it holds things together. That may be, but we need to defy gravity right now. Schools have to take on an entrepreneurial spirit to build something new. Our students’ futures, and the future of public education depends on this.
Unfortunately, I fear most schools are falling short. There is a growing body of research highlighting the importance of social-emotional learning for youth during this time of virtual learning, and I have yet to hear any discussion of social-emotional learning even mentioned in school-wide professional development. I don’t have all the answers, but I know we need to center students’ lives right now. We need to ask them how they are doing, what they want to learn during this unprecedented time, and how we can help. We need to center their lives and their current realities and build our curricula around their needs.
Since this is the first time any of us are doing this, no one has any ready-made answers right now and I realize best practices will look different for each student, and each school. But we — teachers, students, families, and administrators- need to work together to find the answers. Unfortunately, instead of allowing us to collaborate in spaces that are open and authentic, with the autonomy needed to solve these problems, school districts are tempted to pretend they know the answers and give us, as teachers, prescribed agendas. While everyone recognizes the work we are being asked to do this year is harder and more time-consuming than ever, I often find administrative meetings fill so much of my day I can’t connect to my students or their families. Instead of giving power and voice to our students and teachers, we are being told what to do at a time when no one really knows how to do what we have to do.
This pandemic has pointed out the structural problems in our healthcare system, our criminal justice system, our economic system, and our educational system. I’m also seeing a lack of relevance or regard for the current state of things represented in our curricula. Our country is facing a racial and political uprising in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and we’re reading about how to choose a good math teacher. The lack of relevance of our current curricula for the lives of many of my students would be comical if it did not have such devastating results. My students are facing a school-work-life- survival balancing act. There are many social emotional lessons they need to learn to survive, but, generally, this is not what we are offering them. Most of my students work, and a vast majority come from historically under-served communities. Many have to work to help pay the bills at home, and a number of them are the bread winners for their households. Since many students are working in the service industry, I am hearing more and more about how they are being given hours that conflict with school schedules. Employers don’t seem to taking virtual learning seriously and see teenagers as unable to object to scheduling demands. My students are frustrated balancing getting online for class, fulfilling course requirements, taking the bus to work and working long shifts. This is where I need to focus my efforts in providing social-emotional support before we can even begin to teach more traditional subjects.
Many of the parents who are available to help have no idea what the virtual learning schedule is, what Google Classroom is, or how they can best support their student during this time. I’ve heard about 1st graders clocking in 5–6 hours of screen time every day. I’ve heard of dual-language programs resulting in double the work because they are learning in two languages, all in the name of equity.
We are in an educational crises within an economic crises within a health crises; teachers and students are facing unprecedented difficulties. District administrators are certainly facing unprecedented difficulties, as well, but the proposal to violate our teaching contracts without any collaborative discussions is not likely to solve the common problems we face. Giving building principals the authority to lay off staff with no clear criteria on how those decisions should be made is not going to solve our problems. Freezing our salary schedule without even discussing it with the teachers is not an answer to the crises we all face. We are all in this together. Even if we work as hard as we can together, we face unprecedented problems and success for our students is not assured.
Schools are institutions, and a certain degree of bureaucracy is unavoidable. School administrators, however, are not going to be able to solve the problems facing our schools. They are unavoidably removed from what’s happening in the classroom, and what’s happening with students, and with families. Administrators don’t have much data to go by to decide how we “do school” in this crises and we can see even more clearly than ever that top-down decisions are not going to allow the innovation we need to meet the real needs of students. This is not the time for a tight rein; it is not the time to micromanage classroom teachers. It is the time to give teachers the freedom to find ways to get their students through this storm, safely. We need to flatten the decision-making hierarchy and listen to teachers, students, and families as they tell us what they need and what works. This crisis gives us the opportunity to re-imagine what school looks like; right now, and for the future. Those school districts that cannot adapt, and try to manage business as usual will not make it. Those that are open to new ideas and to listen to the voices of teachers, students, and families will provide the transformation our public education has needed for a long time.
As teachers, we don’t need to wait for administrators to reach out to us; we all know how busy they are, after all. Contact your local school administrators and school board and ask how you can provide collaborative feedback. Individual teachers can do this, but teachers’ unions are also important as advocates for more teacher input in decision making during this time. Let’s work with our students and families to find out what they need, talk about what works and what doesn’t. Then, let’s come together across schools and across districts to offer bold new ideas to our school boards and the public. The future of our students depends on it.
