What Makes a RICH Student?
For many Bay Area public school students, this week marked the return to in-person learning. Thirteen months after the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to pivot to virtual instruction, students, parents and caregivers, teachers and administrators are all grappling with what the “new normal” will – or could – look like.
Battery Powered’s Expert Night on Public Education could not have been more timely. Our panel of experts shared insights on how the pandemic has affected student wellbeing and academic progress, where California schools can go from here, and how philanthropy can help. Here’s what we learned.
“It’s really hard”
We started the evening with a basic question: how are students doing? Kathya Correa Almanza, a senior at San Francisco’s June Jordan School for Equity and student representative to the SF Board of Education, spoke of extreme isolation, the repetitiveness of school days spent on Zoom, loss of motivation, and the challenges many of her fellow students face: lack of reliable internet access, the need to work to help support their families, exhaustion. But she also emphasized student resilience. “They are showing up. They might not have their camera on … they maybe waited until the last day of the grading period to hand in 10 assignments, but to me that’s still showing up.”
How have the past 13 months been for teachers? Elmhurst United Middle School Principal Killian Betlach summed it up in two words: really hard. They too are experiencing isolation and frustration. Teachers who are moved by student achievement aren’t getting fed and neither are those who thrive on connectivity with students. “You put in 10 times the work for 1/10 of the result. It’s a bad equation to be trapped in.”
Learning Policy Institute and California Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond noted that some kids have been lost to the system entirely. K-12 students are showing less gain on foundational reading than in past years, and a large number of high school students are getting Ds and F’s, putting their college and career futures at risk. She also highlighted that in a state of extreme wealth disparities, the effects of the pandemic – illness and death, unemployment, food insecurity – have fallen disproportionately on families with low incomes, often families of color. “Part of the challenge is understanding this range of experience so we can organize education in ways that are responsive to a range of needs.”
“Education can be so much more than just sitting in a classroom”
So how do we go about that? As over $26B in federal Covid relief dollars for education pour into California, what are the opportunities for creating a system where education is responsive, families are supported, and learning is, in Linda’s words, “joyful and experiential”?
Nedra Ginwright, Chief Flourish Officer at Flourish Agenda, observed that students of color have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, but that everyone has experienced some level of trauma. This shared experience creates an opening for schools to integrate more social-emotional and cultural wellbeing and healing in schools – not only for students, but for teachers, parents and caregivers. “We have to take this opportunity to be bold while the dollars are flowing and people are open to seeing that what we were doing before wasn’t working.” Linda concurred: “The path to academic learning is through social-emotional learning, and schools that put those strategies in place have higher achievement.”
Time and again our panelists emphasized the critical importance of putting relationships front and center. Schools with strong advisory programs, where a teacher or group of school staff checks in frequently with students, have been more successful in keeping students engaged over the past 13 months. One positive of remote learning has been new relationships that schools have built with families to support their children’s learning – a relationship base we want to keep as kids return to the classroom.
Panelists elevated the community school model, where a school moves beyond delivering instruction into understanding the totality of needs in their community. Elmhurst – whose student body is 100% youth of color and 100% from low-income households – is working towards that vision with an onsite clinic for behavioral, mental and physical health, dental and vision van visits, a mobile food pantry and diaper bank ... but more resources are clearly needed to achieve this at scale. Good news! Linda noted that the state is looking at making a significant investment in community schools statewide.
Kathya credited three characteristics of her school for its success engaging students: small size, opportunities for experiential learning both in and out of the classroom, and teachers who look like her and who understand and affirm her culture and background. “At our school, all students are RICH: we live in Respect, Integrity, Courage and Humility,” Kathya exclaimed!
Her fellow panelists agreed. As Linda summed it up: “I would love to see big factory-model schools completely redesigned around small learning communities with strong advisories, so that all kids are within relational settings and engaged in authentic, project-based, inquiry-based learning that is culturally relevant.”
How do we get there?
What’s standing in the way of this vision? Tradition, a “medicine cabinet” of state regulations and policies that need to be overhauled to meet current realities, and of course, the need for more resources, wisely and creatively allocated. As Linda said, “the role of philanthropy right now is not to make up for lack of government funding,” but rather to invest in new designs and models that could be scaled.
Nedra highlighted the need to address the trauma that’s resulted from COVID and create healing spaces for educators and students to talk about the loss through the lens of shared humanity, while Killian highlighted the need to dial back punishment-based schools – and specifically, to remove police and police-like organizations from schools. “You can’t create environments to heal trauma if you continue to replicate harmful structures.”
Killian and Linda emphasized the need for science-based reading and tutoring programs, and Kathya targeted lack of transportation as a continuing barrier. All our panelists reiterated the importance of closing the digital divide for good, not through unreliable hotspots, but by infrastructure changes that recognize internet access as a basic utility that should be universally accessible.
Killian captured the prevailing mood when he said that while the needs of his students, and the public school system at large, long predate COVID, we must use this crisis opportunity. “Opportunities for fresh starts are few and far between – we should take advantage of this one.”
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To learn more about our spring theme, check out the Issue Brief here.
Our Public Education theme continues on May 18 with virtual Organization Night, where our 12 grant finalists will present their work. You can RSVP here.
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