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I can't agree here. Boards could have prepared (not spent) by splitting into preparation teams for all three eventualities, producing a plan for each scenario. In each case they could have gathered freely available resources (Youtube videos, websites!) for the associated and chosen technology set. They could have gathered and organized these items into something as free, and as simple as a Microsoft Word document - something they already have. This information could be passed upstream until such time that a decision was made. For those boards that had summer education hours, the time could have been allocated to familiarization with the learning materials and technologies.

I can heartily attest that even boards that were 100% planning on remote learning in April (I'm looking at you TDSB, YRDSB, TCSB in Toronto area) did literally none of this. How do I know - teachers all over the family, and my own efforts to literally help a private school board do this. I'd also note the private board spent zero dollars until the day before the first day of school.

It costs money to purchase things. It costs time to train people. But when you literally have the board "working" during the summer, and not on a curriculum, this is really just an indictment of an inability to organize.

Humans could have come together and agreed we would move entirely to clean sources of power and be 80% of the way there.

That clearly hasn't happened either.

Surely you've been in a meeting room with more than about 5 people? All of those people have conflicting viewpoints, theories about the situation, risk analysis and so on.

Can you imagine being a board member who spent 30% of a school budget on remote learning only to have in-class instruction all year?

Hindsight is 20/20. School budgets are generally tight, their IT teams have less-than-desired-bandwidth, and they've already had to handle costs and challenges with the current situation such as getting mobile hotspots and video conferencing solutions up. Remember that not all kids have laptops or internet at home - and school IT gets to handle that situation too.

> Hindsight is 20/20.

Especially when predicting failure was inevitable after somebody has clearly failed.

Citing a list of challenges (and renewable energy and imagination) is not a proof that failure couldn't have been avoided, it's a version of the "it's all so complicated, we can't say anything because we weren't there" trick. But the fact is that plenty of people understood the challenges, which were not at all new (what was new was the scale), and plenty of people were there (including the person you replied to) and are telling you about the failures that they saw.

I have a family member who is in a school IT department. They spent all summer preparing for remote learning.

Then they spent the last two weeks bulk flashing student laptops and ripping apart streaming servers to restore normal in-person learning because the governor put in a new order.

Anyone can predict that a failure will occur, predicting the specific mode of failure is almost impossible.

I very much agree. The whole situation is just crossing fingers and hoping things will go away as a replacement for pragmatism in the face of no good options. Complete failure of leadership at every single level.

Or really just where the buck is meant to stop.

The problem is that a pandemic is an n-th order effect nightmare, with a distinctly low failure threshold based on covid's epidemiological parameters. A country's commander in chief needs to listen to scientific expertise & provide clear public communication and apolitical leadership to avoid this kind of calamity, which just didn't happen.

If I receive poor direction from leadership, I have two options: say forget it and blame them for my lack of action, or determine my own course to handle the situation. I agree that ultimately, the federal government is to blame. But the fact that almost no one at the state or local levels took some initiative and started preparing for this eventuality tells me that we have no leadership anywhere in the whole system.

Why prepare when you can just bully people into doing what you want (in person school). No options will cause most people to just go along. This is all by design. I plan to vote out every member of my school board except the one guy who actually responded to my emails.

My school district in Virginia prepared the best they could. They had previously procured chrome books, just not in the massive numbers needed for every student to have one, which they gave to families on an as needed first come first serve basis back in spring and throughout the summer. They distributed hot spots to students without internet or adequate speeds. They provided lunch through the buses to students that needed them. They spent the summer fighting with other localities to procure as many chrome books as possible for the fall and when they found out they were going to come up short they used funds to make sure atleast everyone had a tablet as a stop gap until the student could receive a laptop. It's not prefect, Google classroom training could be improved, I noticed it was hard to find overall schedules and homework assigned that wasn't meant to be turned in via classroom and have heard younger students especially have trouble with the tablets over laptops, but the first week of class seemed to have gone as well as it could have given the situation.

The response has not been a resounding failure across the board in states that also didn't pretend like the federal government that the virus would just go away and wasn't a real problem. But if there had been a real federal response I'm sure more students would have laptops and internet, online classroom training would be better, and importantly cases would be down and we'd be safer.

Can you imagine beginning Kindergarten as a 5 year old this year? At least many of these kids have grown up around more technology than I did, I'm not sure I had even seen a computer when I was 5. I didn't have one at my house until middle school. How are they supposed to navigate online classes when they can't even read?

The main benefit of school at that age is learning to interact appropriately with your peers and teachers. Hopefully the younger kids are more resilient and adaptive than I'm giving them credit for, because I can't imagine it being anything less than frustrating and depressing for them.

My comment is specifically talking about the experience of fifth grade. Of course a five year old would have more trouble but it's not a wash for all of elementary school in places that decided early they were going to be remote and that they had to prepare the best they could with little federal help.

Yeah, I wasn't criticizing your comment, more observing how difficult things are going to be even in the most prepared districts.

It's no different than it's always been. All of the hard work, planning and preparation has been on the shoulders of teachers for as long as I can remember. They've never had much guidance from leadership, which is often nothing more than a target grade their students have to hit on a standardized test. Up until now the status quo has been fairly consistent, so teachers have been able to informally provide guidance and leadership to each other. Now that things are taking a massive left turn, what is supposed to be the actual leadership is being exposed for what it really is.

>>or even someone high in the Department of Education with the President's blessing, so it wasn't contradicted a day later

Very good chance of getting contradicted even with the president's blessing, most likely by the president himself.

Education in the United States is run at the local and state level. Also, The US Department of Education can only spend money they has been appropriated by Congress. When Congress hasn’t appropriated federal funds for the US Department of Education to send to local school districts for remote learning, they generally can’t send money no matter how worthy the expenditure would be.

The DoE could have set clear guidelines though- even without money that would have given local boards and teachers something to fall back on. Now pretty much every district has to make their own decisions, which only increases confusion.

More simply, they could have helped coordinate the preparations. Which is the only legitimate function of government. What happened is consistent, though; the Republicans have long made clear their opposition to any federal role in education at all.

well they are basing it on the constitution, which lists no specific power for the federal govt to be involved in education.

I don't understand why in-person and hybrid would be planned separately. Any realistic plan for in-person has to account for periodic positive tests followed by isolation, that is, you have to plan to be able to switch to virtual with little or no notice if one person in a group is infected. If you planned for in-person without also planning for virtual, you weren't actually planning, you were just bullshitting.

Because one has a hard deadline of late August to have enough resources for all children to be remote learning, and the other doesn't. If you are responsible for planning out the next year have another 2-4 weeks to procure what you need, or if the difference between getting them all now on short notice or four weeks from now is a sizable difference in money that your budget can't easily sustain, your decisions are going to be affected by that.

I imagine almost all the people planning this had very little practical experience with remote learning before this, and so had to learn about what it could and could not do well and implement a program to get all these resources to children.

That's something that many people here might be comfortable with, so I can understand why they may think this is the easy part, but let's flip this on it's head. How many people here, if instead of working out a digital solution and delivering to people were asked to work out a solution to have hundreds to thousands of children come in to a physical location, group into assigned categories for teaching, go to their individual rooms in these groups, and receive instruction for hours at a time with periods of play and lunch interspersed?

All the problems you might encounter in that scenario has equivalents for someone migrating from managing a fully in-person based teaching system to a fully, or even partially digital one. Whereas I might have problems knowing how to direct people as they arrive to the correct location effectively and efficiently, in a digital system they need to know how to find the students that are completely list in connecting to the classroom and never show up. Where I might struggle in making sure I had the appropriate staff at the correct locations to teach, they might struggle with the fact that not all students have digital accounts set up needed to connect (and not all parents are responsive to any contact during the summer).

Managing adults where you have a clear channel of communication to them that they are expected to pay attention to because it's their job is hard. I can only imagine what it's like to add a bunch of children in the mix (because you really are dealing with kids AND their parents) and have a sizable portion of the adults likely think "it will work out because it's their job, I'll just pay attention a couple days before school starts and do what they say, it's always worked out before".

I know I didn't want to read all the school emails coming to me over the summer (which reading between the lines mostly seemed to amount to "we're totally screwed but trying our best and we really hope school will be open because we have no idea how to do anything that we might need to".

I think your TL;DR is "shit flows downhill.". Teachers aren't near the top.

Teachers are the ones that have been sitting there for years preventing as much shit as they can from getting on the kids. My mom was a teacher for two decades and I can't tell you how much time and money I saw her and her coworkers put into things like classroom decorations, basic school supplies, textbooks that weren't a decade out of date, and even food and clothing for struggling kids.