We’ve finished the first semester of 2025-26 academic year, but we still find ourselves struggling to fix what the covid crisis wrought for students.
Ask almost anybody in the education biz, and they’ll tell you straightaway: Students have learned less since the pandemic.
While we applauded efforts to keep students on track, we must boo the results of remote instruction. Teachers were stuck with learning how to reach boys and girls without the resources or proper preparation for doing so, particularly in big-city districts like Cleveland.
They’ve had to wrestle with how to teach students as well as teach to state-mandated tests.
Expecting teachers to do the first was a big ask. Demanding them to do the second bordered on impossible. They had made that point long before covid.
Yet meddlesome administrators and bureaucrats, obsessed with mandatory testing, have refused to listen. Their approach to guiding education has led it toward perdition. Teachers near and far loathe the fact state mandates rob them of creativity.
Anyone who has taught, whether in primary or secondary school, understands the value of creativity. So do their students, and so do students’ parents.
Imagine sitting in front of a teacher who was stuck with an approach that simply doesn’t fit his teaching style. One word describes well how students in such a classroom feel; the word is “bored.”
As we’ve rolled back practices used during the pandemic, we can ill-afford to allow boredom to reign. Students have too much catching up to do for any of them to stay bored.
If students are bored, think about how teachers who peer into their indifferent faces must feel. Won’t they offer classroom instruction that can’t kindle anyone’s passion?
Some teachers will; perhaps some won’t.
“Passion at the beginning of a child’s young years can quickly get squashed when we remove critical parts of the curriculum that lead to creativity,” Robyn D. Shulman, a certified K-9 teacher, wrote in a Forbes magazine articles. “When a school is low on funds, most of the areas that encourage creative thinking are the first to go.”
Those who understand education, as Shulman does, push back hard against teaching to a boredom-inducing test. They want administrators (and politicians) to get out of the way and allow them to use the training received in colleges of education. None looked at education as a teach-by-the-numbers occupation.
Most colleges send their graduates into the classroom schooled with often cutting-edge approaches to instruction. Maybe graduates with education degrees don’t hammer away at the readin’, writin’ and ’rithmetic as teachers in the past used to do, but they have far more high-tech tools at their fingertips than educators a generation ago did.
When used properly, such technology opens the door wide to innovation — to creativity. All we need to do is let teachers walk through the open door, unhindered by the weight of one-size-fits-all coursework.
We are, however, too far down the road this academic year to reverse directions, so we’ll find educators slogging along as teaching to the test remains their No. 1 purpose.
Blame a post-pandemic malaise for some of this. Undoubtedly, it has made a mess of education, although not as hot a mess as administrators and state lawmakers have when they, years ago, decided to turn teachers into proctors.
