What was once unclear is now incredibly important…
48 states have ordered or recommended schools not reopen this academic year due to COVID. This response touches nearly every student in the US, but [as you may already know] has more dire consequences for under-resourced communities on several measures.
While the confusion continues to unfold about what all this means and how best to address strategic planning to reopen, we find ourselves waiting for national guidance and a scalable strategy to engage parents across the country on how to manage all this: homeschooling, distance learning, college access dilemmas, working from home and being laid off or furloughed, while retraining, and interviewing all at the same time. This makes me curious, who is best positioned to organize communities to figure out what to do moving forward? Who’s already doing this?
Where We Are Now
Conventional wisdom and some initial spit-balling leads to a “reopening commission” or several across each unique georgraphy. Stacked with educators who offer the smartest recommendations about trauma-informed practices, including but not limited to cultural competency leaders, school redesign creatives, high-achievement culture creators, parent institute trainers, wellness experts, pedagogy ninjas, digital platforms founders and teams, district takeover teams, school turnaround wizards, and summer slip thought leaders. But even if we did this, can we scale these best practices in the communities hardest hit by COVID? Who’s responsible for executing with everything else on their plate? Or are we again asking to add to the plates of our superhero principals, strategists, operating officers, and teachers?
Let’s say we could do it, DeVos and team have already nailed this with 67 links on the Department of Education homepage (yes, I counted). But I’m not sure this helps the nearly 33 million people living without the internet. We’ll leave that here for now.
Assuming progress is the goal, we’re back to school in the fall with the social distancing of kids or a hybrid model of half-week student teleworking. This leads to structural redesign and likely examining other sectors to create more creative theories of change, measurement of progress, engagement, and accountability.
A brief survey of similarly unwieldy systems approach achieving high-stakes outcomes progress coming from unique measures of accountability at the highest levels, while specifically naming change management and innovation. These systems (both public and private) lean into shifting culture to embrace change. Borrowing insight from tech, healthcare, and the gig economy, schools would now function best by harnessing the ubiquitous trait of highly effective teachers — salient pivots, creativity, and leading with empathy, coupled with leadership whose sole job it is to manage innovation.
For example, preCOVID, many of the higher-performing healthcare systems-built innovation centers to experiment while addressing exorbitant costs for patients, complex reimbursement processes, and rising drug prices.
Accepting the Trend
Assuming we accept the analogy and adopt the trend, what we know is that education is going to change indefinitely and the need for innovation has already arrived. Demand has landed. Innovation leaders will show up in the highest performing districts (traditional public and charter) and they will (1) move forward with aggressive technology tracking, (2) figure out how to foster change celebration culture, and (3) conduct regular idea-collection with all staff as part of the fabric of the new normal.
Without this role revisited in every district, we are left with a long list of attributes to recruit dream teams with lofty unprecedented goals. Scrumming nonstop with sparse senior support in a sector simply not designed for innovation.
Coincidentally, some school boards have recently approved schools that are Innovation Networks. One such example is Indianapolis Public Schools, whose Parent Institute has been a regular recommendation in my most recent huddle with SEL directors in the midwest. The school choice movement has offered some solutions to embracing the culture of change with nimble parent engagement and thoughtful pedagogy practices by design. Historically, there is an argument to be made that some measurable gains against the opportunity gap have been achieved in innovation districts — now hit the hardest by the pandemic by going beyond CIO staffing.
All this to say, we are now exposed to the systemic inequities that go beyond public health and our schools remain a critical touchpoint for every family. My hope is that our schools invest in leadership that devotes the necessary resources to embrace the pending change and the increasing change to follow. One thing is certain, change is truly here to stay. How schools shift operations now will affect generations to come that reach far beyond the school day.
Let’s continue the dialogue with your reaction to these thoughts in the comments. Learning from each other is the only way to further this work.
Note* a handful of districts have had CIOs since 2013. I’m curious about your opinion as there have been valid on both sides of this debate. We must all accept that 2020 is different though than anything we could have imagined pre COVID.