A Teaching Moment – Michael Q. McShane

The passing of time has a funny way of playing with our memories. The coronavirus pandemic particularly distorted our perception, as days of monotonous isolation ran into each other, flattening weeks or months (or even years depending on where one lived). But even absent such a disorienting event, we humans tend to look back with rose-colored glasses and conflate what we know now with what we knew then.

Consider when Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation for Teachers, tweeted in 2023, “In-person learning is where kids do best, which is why educators & their unions worked hard to reopen US schools for safe in-person learning beginning back in April 2020.” A fair assessment of her union, and others’ actions, paints a different picture.

But combing back through history and trying to find where you were right and other people were wrong risks repeating the error that Talleyrand ascribed to the Bourbons when they returned to power after the French Revolution: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” We risk remembering every slight and villain and allowing that to blind us to the broader lessons we need to learn from the experience. Lest we want to go the way of the Bourbons circa July of 1830, we might benefit from a more clear-eyed analysis of what was happening during the pandemic, and what we can learn from it.

We at EdChoice made a fortunate, if entirely lucky, decision to begin a partnership with Morning Consult at the start of 2020, launching a monthly nationally representative survey of Americans and American parents. As a result, we have a close to real-time record of what people were thinking at the time that they were thinking it. It might surprise some people looking back today.

Americans, and American parents, were bitterly and often evenly divided about the proper course of action with respect to the coronavirus and schools. Governance and policymaking are easy when everyone agrees. The question we have to wrestle with, and the lesson that we need to learn, is how do we govern schools when there are profound and irreconcilable differences? Schools are either open or they aren’t. Masks are either required or they aren’t. Vaccines too. Schools had to choose.

And this is a microcosm of issues that schools deal with every day. People are divided on all sorts of issues related to education. Should we use more technology or less? How should reading be taught? What books should students read? Schools have to choose.

Reflecting on the pandemic can help us think about the day-to-day operation of our schools, as many of the solutions found during the pandemic teach us lessons about schooling in general. Strong leadership can cut through division, either by bending public will or deftly navigating it. But such leadership is often in short supply. Rather than relying on supermen and superwomen to lead the nation’s 13,000-plus school districts, flexibility, decentralization, and choice can allow schools to operate in an uncertain and polarized environment.

The Coronavirus Contradictions

To tell this story, let’s start with our poll that was in the field during the first back-to-school time since the pandemic struck: August of 2020. Seventy-eight percent of school parents told us that they were concerned about their child getting exposed to coronavirus at school. At the same time, 75 percent told us that they were concerned about their child missing instructional time. In a subsequent question, we asked parents about their comfort with their children returning to school. Fifty-five percent of parents said that they were comfortable with their children returning to school, 42 percent said that they were not comfortable, and the rest did not have an opinion or didn’t know. When asked, “This coming school year, if your school or school district allows for the option of e-learning instead of physically going back to school, how likely would you be to enroll your child in e-learning/distance learning provided by the school or district?” Seventy-three percent of parents said that they were likely to do so.

In that same poll, parents were asked how they thought their students were progressing with respect to academic learning, social development, and emotional development. More than half of parents said that their children were doing better than before the pandemic. Only a third said they were doing worse.

Let’s fast forward a year, to back-to-school 2021. At that time while 57 percent of parents said that they were comfortable with their child returning to school, still 37 percent said that they were uncomfortable. This is the time in which discussions around masking and vaccinations came to the fore. As with most things in the pandemic, respondents were polarized. When all adults were polled (not just parents), 50 percent said that public school teachers should be required to wear masks and 48 percent said that they should be required to get the vaccine.

The story was broadly similar for students. Forty-nine percent of respondents said that students 12 years and up should be required to wear masks, and 43 percent said students aged 5-11 should be required to wear masks. The numbers were smaller for vaccines, but still 37 percent of adults said that students aged 12 and up should be required to get vaccinated and 31 percent said that students 5-11 should get vaccinated.

In that poll, we asked school parents about their levels of satisfaction with their child’s school. In total, 91 percent of public charter school parents, 85 percent of homeschoolers, and 84 percent of private school parents were satisfied with their child’s experiences. But, perhaps surprising some readers, traditional public schools were not far behind with 78 percent total satisfaction. There was a difference, in that the first three groups had more parents saying that they were “very” satisfied, and the bulk of the public schools’ satisfaction was in the “somewhat” category, but the number is strikingly positive nonetheless.

What students should be taught, how they should be taught, who should teach them, and how we should pay for it, have been recurring debates since the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

That said, we should not downplay the animosity at the height of the pandemic. We asked a question in our poll in March of 2022, “To your knowledge, has there been a protest or other major disruption at your local school district board meeting this current school year? … What was that protest or disruption related to?” Sixteen percent of Americans and 21 percent of parents said that there had been a disruption at a meeting of their local school board. (Masking was the most popular flashpoint, followed by vaccinations.)

There was serious division and even acrimony during that time period, with opinions often evenly divided on the most pressing issues of the day. And yet, parents felt that their children were doing about the same or better across multiple different dimensions and were generally more satisfied with their child’s public school than not. Looking back, it was a time of contradiction and incongruity.

The Path Forward

To be fair, most of the history of American education has been a time of contradiction and incongruity. What students should be taught, how they should be taught, who should teach them, and how we should pay for it (and how much), have been recurring debates since the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the Old Deluder Satan Law in 1647.

In an educational world that is so divided, there are really two paths forward for politicians and school leaders: leadership and choice.

Isaiah Berlin wrote about two kinds of leaders: the “man of single principle and fanatical vision” and the man who “possesses antennae of the greatest possible delicacy, which convey to him, in ways difficult or impossible to analyse, the perpetually changing contours of events and feelings and human activities round them.” While the first (Berlin names Garibaldi, Trostky, Parnell, De Gaulle, and Lenin in this group) can bend the public will to his desires, the second (he names Bismarck, FDR, Lincoln, Lloyd George, and Masaryk as examples) can understand the winds of change and tack into them to sail forward.

There are numerous examples at the state, district, and school levels of leaders who took principled positions and stuck to them. (The education website The 74 Million profiled several such districts.) There were both Bismarcks and Garibaldis, those who listened and those who led. Where districts had strong, competent leadership, students’ learning was less disrupted.

That said, the experience of many, many districts across the country showed us that relying on strong leadership has several weaknesses. The first, of course, is that there is a shortage of great leaders. Needing someone who either has the steel spine to stake out a position and stick to it, or the acumen to understand the subtle contours of their communities’ opinions is a tall order. And that is just the start of it. The correct course of action is not always clear. Should there have been mask mandates for young children? Was it right to mandate vaccines? Taking a stand with no wiggle room on one of these issues might risk harming people who are taking the correct course of action. And the third is that, particularly for school districts, superintendents and school principals do not have unilateral authority to make such decisions. School boards are elected and could contradict them. Their teachers could go on strike. Both of these facts clearly hampered school leaders who wanted to do better.

So that brings us to a second approach: choice. What if instead of trying to get the 55 percent of people who want schools open to agree with the 45 percent who want to keep schools closed, we let the open school people choose open schools and the closed school people pick virtual education? Throughout the pandemic, a vast majority of parents told our pollsters that they wanted multiple options. Rather than turn up the heat, this could turn down the temperature of debates in communities and keep people doing what they thought was best.

Parents don’t have to hate their schools to want choices.

This is not without weaknesses either. If we believe, for example, that prolonged virtual education is bad for students, some parents may misguidedly choose an option that harms their children. The same goes for mask or vaccine requirements.

But looking at the sweep of possible solutions, choice seems preferable. Parents and policymakers agree. The pandemic ushered in the greatest expansion of private school choice policymaking in our nation’s history. Since the beginning of the pandemic, thirteen states have either created new universal or near-universal private school choice programs or expanded existing programs to universal or near-universal eligibility. More than one million students are using some form of government support to attend private schools, with the curve only bending upward. And it isn’t just universal programs that are growing; states are creating substantial, if not universal programs, as well.

So what does this tell us about schooling post-pandemic?

The first thing it tells us is that parents want choices. During the pandemic, parents told us both that they had serious differences in what they wanted from schools and that they wanted choices that could reflect those differences. They wanted flexibility, too. In that same poll from March of 2022, 80 percent of parents said that they would like their school to offer multiple learning approaches; 64 percent said that they were more favorable to homeschooling as a result of the pandemic; 44 percent said that they would like some kind of hybrid schedule for their child’s school; and 67 percent said that they supported Education Savings Account programs. After the pandemic, by their actions, they have shown that when choices are made available, they will take advantage of them. Parents have different desires and priorities, parents have different relationships that they want with schools, and parents have preferences for learning modalities and pedagogical philosophies. Unless we believe that there is one “right” way to educate children, offering them options seems to be a good place to start.

The second is that parents don’t have to hate their schools to want choices. Remember, even at the height of the acrimony during the pandemic, around three-quarters of parents were more satisfied than unsatisfied with their child’s school. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t leave if a better option was made available to them. This offers a lesson to choice advocates. Rather than trying to constantly bash public schools or convince parents that they are worse than they think, offering a positive vision for alternative options could be a better way to go.

Third, combining leadership and choice can be an educational force multiplier. While there are pros and cons to strong leadership within the public sector, having a choice-rich schooling environment where each individual school has strong leadership, a clear ethos, and a unified community might be the best of both worlds. Choosing between a bunch of bland or spineless schools doesn’t help anyone. But having schools that stand for things, that believe in things, and that have rallied a community to accomplish them creates a world where parents can link up with a thriving educational environment.

One does not have to be Charles-Maurice Talleyrand or Isaiah Berlin to appreciate that we have to learn as we go. The proper course of action is not always immediately apparent to us. That said, we have an obligation to look back honestly at the decisions we have made and the conditions under which we made them and humbly recognize where we were right and where we were wrong. The lessons from the pressure cooker that was the pandemic can help us during the slow boiling times in education in America.