The fact that many kids are no longer coming to school. The number of students in Providence and elsewhere who have left the schools completely and/or barely attending spells trouble and should be a wake-up sign.
Parents continue to say their young people are not getting the right stuff – their children are not getting real relationships, understanding and investment in them as people, real talk about race, politics, and equity issues in their world, or the skills that really matter after high school. Our traditional school design guarantees us more of the same — year after year; we also think it has normalized mediocrity for many others; “10-30-60” (10%= success; 30% fail and/or leave; 60%=mediocre;)
Our schools pay little attention to social determinants which we know continue to damage and undermine schools and learning everywhere; connecting to the community can address much of this.
Powerful, smart organizations with incredible resources all around RI are not involved in our schools in ways that really make a difference. They should be part of a “3-legged stool” — community folks, partner organizations and schools, not just the one group “in charge” and doing a poor job. Designing and running new kinds of schools with these entities in reciprocity is our goal.
A colossal failure of imagination to solve persistent problems with learning. The establishment education sector only supports new clones of the traditional model and is displaying an increasing favoritism toward “machine-dependent” learning — (Summit Learning and others). It’s troubling and wrong for 2 reasons: a-it shows our lack of capacity to organize and create highly-personal and dignified learning for our children and b- after all of the damage and loss from COVID, it subjects our students to more relationships limited to machines, top-down choices of topics, and cartoonish versions of important issues.
Our parents want better solutions than robotic machine learning replacing teachers. Achievement data continues to decline, revealing the ongoing failure of our policy-driven learning strategies over 20 years. RICAS came very late to a party that’s already ending and an approach that’s been more harmful than helpful. As U.S. Secretary of Education Cardona said, “the results in the Nation’s Report Card are appalling and unacceptable, but let’s be very clear: the data prior to the pandemic did not reflect an education system that was on the right track. The pandemic simply made it all worse.” People in other place are asking “what’s next after standards?”