New data from the Fairfax school district in Virginia reported by the Washington Post shows that remote learning is drastically worsening the education gap between children in stable home situations and those whose learning styles, socioeconomic status or home situation have historically hindered their academic achievement. The percentage of middle school and high school students earning F’s in at least two classes has jumped by 83 percent since last year. By the end of this fall’s first quarter, nearly 10,000 Fairfax students had scored F’s in two or more classes — an increase of more than 4,300 students as compared with the group who received F’s by the same time last year. If you’ve never gotten an F in a class, take a moment to think about what that does to a child’s self-esteem. Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who directs research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education and recently published a book on public-school testing, told The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson that we’re at a tipping point: The damage done to schoolchildren with scarce resources is likely to be irreparable. The best thing the nation can do would be to offer everyone a “do-over,” Schneider said. “The default should be, once we’re in-person again, everybody could go back to the grade they were in March of 2020,” he said. “We need to slow the pace down in the name of equity.”
Teachers are also at a breaking point, Natasha Singer reports for The New York Times. She writes: “In a recent survey by the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, 28 percent of educators said the coronavirus had made them more likely to leave teaching or retire early. That weariness spanned generations. Among the poll respondents, 55 percent of veteran teachers with more than 30 years of experience said they were now considering leaving the profession. So did 20 percent of teachers with less than 10 years’ experience. If we keep this up, you’re going to lose an entire generation of not only students but also teachers,’ said Shea Martin, an education scholar and facilitator who works with public schools on issues of equity and justice.” Martin’s website, An Anonymous Teacher Speaks, is collecting testimonies from teachers sharing the reality of their jobs. Even a short dip into its content is heartbreaking.
“Our health care system is literally at the breaking point right now, thanks to Covid-19.” That’s Dr. Megan Ranney, director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health at Brown University, talking to CNN. “Even if you open a field hospital, if you have hundreds of staff who are sick – which is what many states across the country are currently facing – if you don’t have nurses and doctors and respiratory techs, even a field hospital isn’t going to save you,” Ranney said. Twenty-six states set hospitalization records last week.
Educators and health care workers are among the most other-oriented professions. (I come from a family of public school teachers, and have many friends who are doctors and nurses.) As we head into a bleak winter, documented today in blunt and clear terms in a must-read piece by Donald McNeil, The New York Times’ lead reporter on the pandemic, I have to wonder how and when the personal stress of being on the front-line against Covid with inadequate support or understanding turns into collective fury and action.
Looking Ahead
As we emerge from this election more divided than before, and with the first glimmers of progress against Covid on the horizon, I looked a bit further ahead in a more optimistic vein in this piece for InsidePhilanthropy, arguing that we need a big bet on building America’s civic infrastructure, akin to Andrew Carnegie’s support for library construction more than a century ago. While we know that places with strong social infrastructure are healthier, happier, more resilient and less violent, most of America is a civic desert, places with limited to no opportunities for civic and political learning and engagement, according to measures developed by the National Conference on Citizenship.
To be clear, if it were up to me this kind of democracy-building work would be paid for by public dollars, but we live in an age of shrunken public purses and swollen philanthropic pockets. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, just gave away nearly $800 million to an array of environmental groups, the first tranche of a $10 billion Earth Fund he recently set up. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave $300 million to shore up state and county-level election agencies this past year—nearly as much as Congress appropriated for the same task. We live in a time when a billionaire can sink $22 million (Dustin Moskowitz) or $35 million (Reid Hoffman) or $100 million (Michael Bloomberg) into an effort to tip a national election, so why not put out the idea of a long-term investment in civic infrastructure, I say!
Speaking of InsidePhilanthropy.com, which is a wonderful resource on the foundation world steered by my friend David Callahan, say hello to BlueTent.us, his new news site. Here’s how he describes its mission: “Blue Tent focuses exclusively on progressive organizations and the Democratic Party. The site reports on the dynamic constellation of change agents working to create a fairer America. It provides insider news on people, organizations, funding, strategy, and trends within the progressive/Democratic world. It also offers resources to help readers increase their impact—personally and collectively.”
Getting back to the political reality we live in, this meticulous examination by Tim Alberta of Politico Magazine of what just happened in Michigan contains a warning and a bit of hope. The warning: that fealty to Trump runs so deep many Republicans who want to have a future in their party will lie and continue with racist attacks on the democratic process, because of the power of right wing media figures and a narrative that too many of them are committed to. The hope: that a young Republican lawyer named Aaron Van Langevelde, one of four members of the state’s Board of Canvassers, showed that you could stand up against all of that. “We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” he said as he voted to certify the state’s election returns.
Odds and Ends
The Democratic tech powerhouse EveryAction has acquired upstart Mobilize, which was a key platform for campaigns up and down the ballot and millions of volunteers, and Joshua Green of Bloomberg News writes that this is good news. Count me as a bit more skeptical. I’m not so sure that monopoly is the best solution to Democratic tech challenges. EveryAction also owns NGP-Van, a ubiquitous organizing system that campaigns use to manage their contacts with voters, and just about every organizer I know grinds their teeth in frustration at the clunkiness of that tool set.
Related: RootsCamp 2020 is happening December 11-12, this time as a virtual unconference hosted by the Democracy Initiative, GAIN Power, New Media Mentors, Organizing 2.0, & re:power. It’s a great place to share learning and look ahead (and I’m hoping to be doing a panel on lessons from Indivisible’s four year run)—see you there!
On the online betting market PredictIt, there are still people betting that Trump will win the election. Enough to keep the price of a share in a Trump win at 14 cents on a dollar. So much for the wisdom of crowds!