Even by our low standards for 2020, these have been a difficult few weeks. Let's take a moment together for gratitude: we've gotten this far.
I'm out of the office for a couple days. On my departure I gave my co-workers one of my standard jokes, "Please don't set the building on fire while I'm gone." It took me a second before I realized right now that could be taken as a serious instruction.
TweetMeet: Evolving Remote Learning
Some news! On Tuesday, June 16, I'm joining a set of co-hosts from around the world for a TweetMeet discussion of remote learning, including lessons learned and what's next. Join us! Follow the tag #MSFTEduChat on Twitter for more details. I'm already learning a ton from my co-hosts as we get into the event prep; it's a diverse and smart group of teachers and instructors. I'm looking forward to it.
Black Lives Matter
George Floyd in Minneapolis. Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Manuel Ellis in Tacoma. They're just the latest in a long, long line of black Americans killed by cops while in custody, or during botched no-knock police raids. Sandra Bland was likely another, a so-called "suicide" while in custody under deeply suspicious circumstances. Philando Castile. Terence Crutcher. Stephon Clark. There are so many.
What strikes me about the violent, undisciplined police response to the current protests in the United States is that so many of the police seem determined to prove the protestors right. T. Greg Doucette has been tracking everything from unprovoked baton-bashing to attempts to run over protestors with police cars to intentionally shooting people in the face and throat with rubber bullets, causing permanent head and eye injuries, all over the United States. (There's a spreadsheet.) Defunding police departments, once an extreme-left idea, is now a serious topic of conversation. A Minneapolis city council member called their police department "irredeemably beyond reform" and a "protection racket."
I was a middle-school kid living in a Philadelphia suburb in 1985 when the police dropped a firebomb on a residential neighborhood, killing 11 and leaving hundreds homeless. As a white kid, I'd been raised with Officer Friendly programs at my elementary school. I'd never been given "The Talk," because I didn't need it. The MOVE bombing was when I learned Officer Friendly wasn't always so friendly.
It's necessary to acknowledge that none of this is happening in a vacuum. As a culture, the US continued to devalue black lives after the Civil War in ways never taught or discussed in my public-school classes. I've learned a ton about the history here from people like Nikole Hannah Jones, Michael Harriott, Ijeoma Oluo, Desmond Cole, and many more. That long history helps to explain why some police today are quietly encouraging all-white vigilante groups or coordinating with armed Proud Boys.
About the federal response, I'll only say that when your last hope of avoiding outright fascism is hoping the military continues to refuse illegal orders, it's not a good sign for democracy.
It's heartbreaking to see my birth country in this state, but the protestors are right and their cause is just. And by the way, my new home of Canada has its own work to do.
Digital Divide
My Microsoft co-workers are (justifiably) proud of the work we've done to help K-12 educators adapt to a remote learning environment in a COVID-19 world, but it's not enough. This article was an eye-opener.
The average student could begin the next school year having lost as much as a third of their expected progress from the previous year in reading and half of their expected progress in math, according to a working paper from NWEA, a nonprofit organization, and scholars at Brown University and the University of Virginia.
A separate analysis from researchers at Brown and Harvard looked at how Zearn, an online math program, was used by 800,000 students both before and after schools closed in March. It found that through late April, student progress in math decreased by about half in classrooms located in low-income ZIP codes, by a third in classrooms in middle-income ZIP codes and not at all in classrooms in high-income ZIP codes.
When all of the impacts are taken into account, the average student could fall seven months behind academically, while black and Hispanic students could experience even greater learning losses, equivalent to 10 months for black children and nine months for Latinos, according to an analysis from McKinsey & Company, the consulting group.
The number one issue cited was lack of access to devices or internet connections able to stream video, especially but not exclusively in rural and minority-population areas. This has long been one of our great frustrations: all the remote learning tools in the world won't help if students and teachers can't access them. We see this around the world and at home: in my own province of British Columbia, only about a third of rural communities have access to 50/10 Mbps broadband connections. Indigenous communities, mostly rural, are especially affected.
Building infrastructure takes time. What do we do in the meantime? As with everything in education technology, the solutions seem to involve rethinking both the pedagogy and the technology. Microsoft and UNICEF have been partnering on a program called the Learning Passport, which is both a set of curricula and a platform that assumes intermittent or no internet connectivity. We need more efforts like this to help bridge the gap.
Another insight from the working paper cited in the article: K-12 educators in the fall should expect they'll need more differentiated instruction, as not all students will be at the same level. Add that to the list of challenges for hybrid instruction, along with "not sure which students will be in the classroom when" and "finding ways to keep students engaged and learning" without simply skipping lessons and assessments, as happened a lot this spring. We’ll need so much flexibility.
Interstitial
If you're just joining us: I'm Colin Birge, Ph.D. I work in Microsoft's Education Engineering group, mostly talking to customers, mostly in higher education. I live in Vancouver, Canada. Shrewsbury Tech is my weekly-ish newsletter on work, education, and whatever else is on my mind that day. Hello!
Inspiration
Everyone has their happy places. Mine is the water.
Onward
It's been hard, these last couple weeks, to be focused on the day-to-day. Most of my friends and family, not to mention my employer, are in the United States, which seems to be coming apart at the seams. As an expat and a human, it's hard to watch. I'm simultaneously grateful and guilty for being elsewhere, obsessively tuning in on the latest news to stay connected, feeling helpless.
I keep reminding myself: better times, and a better world, are possible. At the end of the day I will always believe that education can help bring that world - not just through reading and math, but through critical thinking, social & emotional learning, and bringing empathy through cultural understanding. Let's challenge ignorance and fascism together. And let's remember to take breaks when we need them.