The Next Normal

The pandemic has underscored many longstanding educational inequities we knew about or should have known about. Among the most acute, I think, is the inequity caused by the vast differences in social networks that kids bring to the act of learning.

What makes a transformation in education desirable is the long-simmering failure of our education system to do most of what we need it to do for all of our learners: prepare them, as economic beings, to thrive in the next workforce and, as civic beings, to thrive democratically as citizens.

Superintendents and principals are measuring out six-foot-long spaces between desks and checking inventories of bleach. So we don’t want the question of what to do with our ASU teacher candidates to be an unresolved problem on the lower third of the to-do list of our school partners. We want to be part of the solution to the challenges already high on that list.

Crisis planning is unavoidable in the face of a pandemic. Yet, as we and our partner districts make future plans, we’re finding that school-related challenges presented by COVID-19 are not new. 

Times of extreme stress reveal cracks in the normal that have been there all along. As our college has responded to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus, we have lived in and peered through the cracks in the normal. What have we seen?