Can We Leverage Covid as Schooling’s Reckoning? Pete Hall
Educators bristle at politicians’ and media’s current hyperfocus on “learning loss” and the implication that this cadre of “Covid kids” is irreparably damaged. While the global pandemic’s effect is long-lasting and far-reaching in a lot of ways Pete Hall is a capacity-builder. A former teacher and school principal, Pete now serves in the professional-development world as the Executive Director of EducationHall, LLC (www. EducationHall.com) and President of Strive Success Solutions (www. StriveSS.com). He has authored 11 books and lives in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. You can reach him via email at PeteHall@EducationHall. com or follow him on Twitter at @EducationHall.
(to wit: half a million dead in a highly politicized environment causing economic and lifestyle shutdowns on the backdrop of significant racial tensions and equity issues), we know better than to harp on what’s “lost” when we’ve got a veritable bounty of information on our Zoom-exhausted laptops showing us a much brighter, much more optimistic view. For decades—generations, even—we’ve lamented the shortcomings of the American education system (see A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and others for the scathing imperatives), so this perspective is not new. And now, on the eve of school reopenings as we prepare to welcome students back to the buildings, if we’re to listen to the cacophony of pontificating from those outside of education, we’d curse the virus and our inconsistent reactions to it, and we’d believe that there’s a monumental lack of learning because kids haven’t been able to attend the very schools that don’t do the job they’re purported to do in the first place. Hmm. 8
