Opportunity for a “Hard Reset”

In late July, the Center of Equity, Justice, and the Human Spirit at Xavier University hosted a panel titled Education, Children, Families & COVID-19. During the discussion, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, the originator of the concept “culturally relevant pedagogy,” observed that we are facing four pandemics at the same time – the crisis of COVID-19, systemic racism, the coming economic pandemic, and the climate catastrophe. According to Dr. Ladson-Billings, what we need right now is “a hard reset.” “Going back to normal is not the answer because normal is where the problem was.” 

As the Executive Director of BE NOLA, an organization whose mission is to help Black children thrive by supporting Black educators and “Black-owned and operated” schools, Dr. Ladson-Billings’ comment hits at the core of our work: normal is indeed where the problem was. When we return to school next week educators are going to be trying to make up for at least 3 months of lost learning in a system where even pre-COVID only 26% of New Orleans public school students were scoring at grade level on state assessments. Black students, teachers, administrators, and families have experienced a disproportionate number of losses as a result of the crisis, and students, in particular, will have a significant need for mental health and wellness supports in a school system with a poor track record of restorative responses to manifesting behaviors. “Black-owned and operated” schools – disproportionately smaller, standalone schools attended by students with the highest concentration of needs and lowest access to non-governmental dollars to keep them afloat – are projecting budget gaps of 10-15% as their staff members and faculty attempt to recover and care for both themselves and their majority-Black student bodies in the face of the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism. And Black educators – frontline workers in a back to school debate that has become highly politicized – are being asked to literally put their lives on the line in order to get the economy moving again.

There are no easy answers to the challenges we face. What is certain is that COVID-19 has opened the door to the possibility of a “hard reset” in our education system so every child in New Orleans has a real opportunity to thrive. Here are five things we can do right now to take advantage of this narrow window:

Track school funding to maximize the efficient use of resources

School funding models based on property taxes are inherently inequitable and to truly address resource inequities  in schools we’re going to realign in the belief that education is a public good and fund it accordingly. In the meantime, there are things we can do right now to maximize our current resources.  NOLA Public Schools’ district-level computation policy (Differentiated Funding Formula) does not require schools to track spending on students in weighted categories. Without knowing how much schools spend on students in weighted categories, and the nature of the expenditures, it is difficult to understand whether schools’ expenditures align with the weighted funding they receive and with estimated costs of additional support for students in specific categories. A policy requiring schools to track spending on our most vulnerable students this year – especially English Language Learns and students with Tier 4 and 5 disabilities – would help identify opportunities for collaboration and economies of scale and also surface best practices for serving our most vulnerable learners.

Coordinate Back to School Strategies with Employers

The New Orleans business community has played a prominent role in shaping our public school strategies given its vested interest in ensuring a workforce pipeline. But that influence has too often one-directional. Employers need to be at the table making concessions that enable people to get back to work AND ensure schools are reopening safely. NOLA-PS’s EnrollNOLA office has a treasure trove of data about New Orleans students including where their families work. NOLA-PS could use this data to identify local employers who employ a majority of families with students enrolled in grades K-5. NOLA-PS can convene these employers with school leaders and families to do some co-planning together on how to deal with inevitable COVID-19 disruptions impacting employees who have younger learners. For example, subsidized emergency childcare when schools or daycares close unexpectedly.

Address the “Persistent Traumatic Stress Environment”

Dr. Shawn Ginright is a Black education scholar who has coined the concept of the Persistent Traumatic Stress Environment (PTSE) to focus attention on the underlying causes of trauma – the constellation of racist policies in healthcare, housing, criminal justice, education, etc – that contribute to the oppressive environment in which individual traumatic experiences occur. He suggests that trauma-informed practices must include strategies to eliminate the racial inequality structured in students’ environments. Given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the Black community, we can expect that many children coming back to school have experienced COVID-19 related losses that may be manifesting poor behaviors. Schools should review their discipline policies to ensure that schools are not in danger of increasing the persistent traumatic stress environment for students and NOLA-PS can support schools to incorporate restorative approaches in their response to students’ behavior needs. NOLA-PS can also provide back-office support to help eligible schools become school-based Medicaid service providers so that federal dollars available to schools to provide health and behavioral health services are fully utilized. 

Provide Targeted Supports to “Black-Owned and Operated” Schools

When we talk about schools in New Orleans we tend to paint with a broad brush when there are at least three buckets of schools in New Orleans:

• Fully scaled charter management organizations which tend to have 4 or more schools
• Single site and small network schools 
• Single site and small network schools “owned and operated” by Black people

Depending on the bucket the school falls in they are having a qualitatively different experience as they navigate COVID 19 and it largely has to do with their access to financial resources.  We need to calibrate our policies around the needs of the most resource-strapped schools  – which tend to be Black-owned and operated standalone schools. Right now this isn’t happening. Most of our COVID-19 response strategies are calibrated around the needs of our large-scale charter management organizations and it obscures the higher cost and burden of implementing these policies in smaller-scale schools in our city.

Commit to stability.

In the fall of 2020, more than 25 schools are up for renewal or extension. Every year this high-stakes review process leads to a set of recommendations on which schools to keep open and which schools to close. For the next 18 months, we need to put these decisions on hold in the name of stability and give educators the support and flexibility needed to focus on accelerating learning for every child.  We also need to strengthen avenues for families to share their experiences and ideas as we move forward. Now more than ever we need a nimble school board able to respond to community needs. That means listening deeply to a broad, diverse range of stakeholder voices, but it also means centering the voices and experiences of those most impacted by the challenges and questions we face, especially students.

In the education realm in New Orleans, COVID-19  has taught us that it is possible to be a system where schools share resources and collaborate to support students regardless of their One APP assignment. We have learned that it is possible to get students to college without high stakes testing. More globally, COVID-19 has revealed that we have the capacity to house the homeless, provide a universal basic income to families and increase wages.  It has also given us an appreciation for the real essential workers in our economy: the teachers, healthcare workers, grocery store clerks, emergency responders, and mail carriers.

How do we build on these collective insights to move towards the education future we imagine? A “hard reset” is possible but it starts with us practicing being different from where we are.  On August 22, BE NOLA will host a “very black education summit for visionaries” – Black Brilliance – where we will dig into these questions and build our reservoir of support and sustainable practices to move towards a radically different “new normal” in which Black children, educators, and schools are thriving.