When Affirming the Obvious is Necessary

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 Apparently common sense is not so common. I wrote last year about a school denying an application from 17-year-old who sought to repeat Grade 11 because he felt that school interruptions from COVID-19 were putting his aspirations in jeopardy.

I was impressed by the student’s mature judgement and dismayed by the decision of the school to deny him the opportunity to further his education and by the lack of procedural fairness. I thought that the incident was an unfortunate one-off. I was wrong.

The California State Legislature is obviously concerned that such requests will be ignored or denied out of hand. It recently approved a bill amending the Education Code requiring a school district to formally respond to a consultation request from a parent that their child be retained in grade if s/he had significant deficiencies in their coursework during the pandemic. The ensuing discussion is designed to consider the recovery learning options, the perils and benefits of grade retention, the student’s academic record, and anything else relevant to a decision about whether grade retention is in the student’s best academic or social interests.

You would think that, at a minimum, such consultation would simply be common sense. The California legislature is taking no chances that common sense will prevail in its schools.

Under what we once called normal conditions, many schools engage in what is sometimes called credit rescue. ‘Credit rescue’ is the provision of extra help to students at risk of failing a course. Assistance takes many forms: additional one-to-one instruction or small group instruction; help with assignments that have been missed or handled unsuccessfully; formulating a plan to help a student improve, often in consultation with parents or guardians. In essence, credit rescue aims to help students to overcome obstacles to their successful completion of the course.

Some schools offer ‘credit recovery’ to students who may have completed a course, but not fully satisfied the curricular expectations at an acceptable, passing level. This typically means that students are permitted to repeat only those units or material that they have not mastered rather than the entire course.

The variation among students at any grade level will be greater post-pandemic than it was prior. This means that schools will need to make extraordinary effort to help students recover from its impact. This will require more frequent diagnostic assessments of student learning, more one-to-one and small-group instruction, closer monitoring of student progress, more finely tuned and tailored assignments linking prior knowledge to the new material to be learned, more opportunity to redo assignments and make-up units that were not successfully completed.

Teaching is always challenging, but post-pandemic teaching will prove more challenging than at any time in the past for teachers.  Closing the gaps and improving results will be more important than ever. Schools and teachers will need to make adjustments that they might not otherwise have made in the absence of the pandemic. The California legislation signals that fact indirectly and, in the process, exposes a truth about schools that many of us avoid discussing: that school structure and the convenience of the instructional staff too often take precedence over student welfare.