Want to know what’s really happening out there in the education market, direct from Learning Counsel Research? Here’s a briefing with the latest data from LeiLani Cauthen, CEO and Publisher at the Learning Counsel. According to Cauthen, “Let me start first with saying the biggest school administrative pressure per our research is a hidden one, it's space and time. You heard New York talk about earlier, the fact that they're all back in their classrooms live, with no remote option. Places like California passing AB One. Now every district has to have a fully online option. Most other places in the country are doing hybrid simultaneous, which means teaching live kids in front of you and teaching ones that are coming in via zoom link or however they're coming in, and then maybe also an online option. So we've reached this point now, where students are demanding remote flexibility. That's going to continue as long as there are viruses. Um, and then a master schedule complexity that's just gone off the charts like last year when we were talking to a lot of you guys in New York and New Jersey, we were hearing things like there's AB weeks, there's staged rollout time. So when you start the school year, you have situations like, this group can come in this week and then we're going to get the next group in the next year. There's also AB days, sometimes full Fridays off where everyone is remote; still there are things like the structure of how you use buildings and how social distancing works. Like this group can come into this half of the building, but not the other half of the building. And then you have things like changed block schedules. So you moved to a non-Carnegie unit looking day, um, where maybe there's a block that's longer for one subject and much shorter for another, more homeroom time, all that other stuff.
“So essentially all the software out there that does anything with calendaring and pacing guides is just not useful. There's nothing out there that even approaches doing real logistics at the order of magnitude of a FedEx or Amazon. You know, getting anything anywhere in the world in 24 hours just doesn't exist in terms of the scheduling complexity of K-12. This is the number one problem now.
“During the pandemic, what parents learned was that they could buy or subscribe to just about anything having to do with learning. And this was a huge mental shift for Americans, when they're looking at what you're delivering and executing on. The position of most schools is teachers are the central pin of all things, and we have to have physicality. True. We like to be together. Humans do love that, but maybe not all the time. There are a lot of parents that discovered their kid did better in remote learning. And so now what they really want is something that lives between the two worlds.”
You’ll want to catch every word of this exciting briefing. It will give you a greater understanding of the shift in thinking from parents and the community, so you will know what to expect in the near future. You’ll also want to tune in for Cauthen’s report on learning leadership versus systemic inequities. If you haven't downloaded the special report on the same topic on the Learning Council site, please do. This is valuable stuff, and is sure to help you in your own school or district at home.
