Primary Education

Richard Ingersoll of the Graduate School of Education and School of Arts & Sciences spoke about how schools and school boards are working to meet demands from parents and lawmakers. “All these demands by parents are very understandable, such as lower class size,” said Ingersoll. “Who wouldn’t want their child to be in a class of 18? And, yes, let’s teach Mandarin and, yes, let’s bring back Latin. There are so many demands but very little recognition of the costs.”

Pam Grossman, dean of the Graduate School of Education, wrote an op-ed that proposing rethinking schooling to give students more time to learn. “Let’s use the pandemic to rethink how we expand and enrich learning time for children, especially those most impacted by COVID-19-related disruption,” she wrote.

Richard Ingersoll of the Graduate School of Education and the School of Arts & Sciences commented on how some states and school districts have lessened requirements for substitute teachers in order to meet demand. "When there's difficulty filling classrooms, often the reaction is let's lower the bar, let's widen the gate," he said. "That's disastrous to do that. Basically, you're sacrificing qualifications because you think it's an emergency."

Michael Gottfried of the Graduate School of Education said it’s difficult to quantify how school is going for students amid the pandemic. “We’re sort of building the plane as we fly it,” he said. “Everything’s up in the air now. Everything’s been disrupted just from the measurement side.”

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education, housed in the Graduate School of Education, has published five briefs about how U.S. school districts and principals have dealt with the pandemic. “The principals are doing all these amazing things, which are serving urgent needs of kids and families. That’s not taken into account in what we think of as a good school. There is an imbalance between our metrics for assessing quality and the actual role of schools in society,” said Jonathan Supovitz.