We need accountability and transparency and reports from school boards as to how much the teachers are actually teaching!! At the elementary level, how many hrs of live video? How many hrs of recorded video? How many hrs on phone with parents or students?With school buildings closed, creating accountability through transparency might seem daunting. But even though principals can’t visit classrooms, schools and districts can do quite a few things to make their actions more transparent to state education agencies, parents, and the public. In Education Next, Chester Finn has suggested a few examples, such as reporting the number of students who complete their remote assignments and the number of students with disabilities whose families participate in individualized education program meetings by teleconference.
Schools and districts will need to take the lead on these kinds of accountability, because state education agencies rarely have access to the relevant data. Schools and districts can use two general approaches to make themselves accountable through transparency while their physical facilities are closed:
1. Document and report exactly what they are doing to help all students continue learning from home. What resources are they providing, and how are they providing them? What are they doing to ensure access for students with disabilities, students without reliable Internet access, and students without computers? What are their expectations for their teachers? Fortunately, many districts are already doing some of this, though with widely varying depth and specificity (as the database of district plans assembled by the Center on Reinventing Public Education shows).
2. Count successful engagements with students and start reporting these numbers. Some of Finn’s examples fall into this category. State agencies and the public ought to know not just how many laptops a school district has distributed but also how many students have successfully logged into the relevant systems and how frequently they have done so—a pretty clear and direct analog to conventional attendance.
interesting survey results. I wonder what Ontario parents are like;======Ontario Schools are spending $100M/mo on school bussing still! What large cost savings have they looked for in order to get more and more technology out to families. A chromebook costs $250.======Excellent journalist to follow:
CIA Blog 