Building a better coal mine

In "Going The Distance," Lora Bartlett and her co-authors give voice to the impact of COVID on the teaching profession.

When schools across the U.S. shut down in March 2020, I was working for an educational service agency that supported more than 60 different school districts across New York state. While I’m not an educator by trade, I was (and am) deeply enmeshed in the world of K-12 public education, and the policy and public health landscapes that shaped that world.

During the tumultuous weeks and months that followed, I sat in conference rooms with school administrators and watched them try to figure out, in real time, how to get Chromebooks and lunches to kids, how to take care of their staff, how to budget and plan for a future that grew more uncertain by each passing day. When I wasn’t in a conference room, I was sitting at my kitchen table on my laptop while my kid sat upstairs on her Chromebook, both of us struggling to get through our daily schedule of Zooms.

Reading “Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World” by Lora Bartlett, Alisun Thompson, Judith Warren Little and Riley Collins brought me right back to those first few uncertain, stressful months. The book features first-person teacher narratives from the Suddenly Distant Research Project, a longitudinal study of the experiences of seventy-five teachers in nine states over thirty months, from the school closures of spring 2020 through two full school years.

The project highlights the profound challenges and lasting impacts of remote, hybrid and socially distanced learning, as well as the charged political environment that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is a moving testament to how deeply these experiences changed the lives of teachers, causing many to feel despair about a profession that had once been their passion.

I interviewed Lora Bartlett about this book, and the project that spawned it:

Tell me a little bit about how this project came together and what your role was in the research:

In the spring of 2020, I had twin daughters who were seniors. One moment, we were planning for their senior trip to DC, and the school musical had just posted its cast list, and then it seemed like the next second they were in our dining room online Zooming with teachers, and they could barely get themselves out of bed.

I could hear their teachers’ voices beaming out of those screenings and they sounded awfully upbeat. I knew several of them had children at home and I’ve also spent over 20 years studying the teaching profession.

And I was teaching as well – I was given one week to take my curriculum and figure out how to teach it online. Essentially, we were just told to figure it out.

I took those things together and I thought, This is a really important moment and we should be documenting how teachers are navigating it.

Initially we thought we would put out an intake survey and find maybe 50 teachers, and just document what happened for them in the spring. But when we pushed our intake survey out into the world, we had more than 750 teachers respond within 48 hours. We knew we couldn’t interview all 750 teachers, so we narrowed that down to 75.

We did 75 interviews, and we really thought that would be it. But in the fall, we circled back, because we said, it seems like things aren’t quite going back to normal. And then in the middle of the year, we asked them again if they would be willing to stay with us for a little while longer. In the end, the four of us got to spend this amazing journey with these teachers for more than two years.

What were the features of that moment in time that made it feel important to document?

It felt historically unprecedented. Ninety-five percent of the teachers who responded to our initial survey had never taught online. The majority of them had no experience with a learning management system. What is this huge lift going to look like for teachers? That was one big part. What is going to be the learning curve?

The other big piece was an awareness that, after more than 20 years of what I would call a managerialized orientation to teachers’ work, all of that really went away. Everybody was really figuring things out on the ground on their own. We wondered what that looked like.

Reading your book, I was struck by what a missed opportunity it was. Teachers got so creative during those initial months of the shutdown, and so many schools just slammed the door on that and said, ‘We’re going back to the way it was.’

The COVID-19 pandemic was a public health crisis, no one’s going to debate that, but it did not have to be an education crisis, especially in relation to teachers’ careers and teaching as an occupation. The degree to which it was a crisis was ameliorated and amplified by the context in which it was received and the response it received.

It was already a teaching profession in “crisis,” so to speak. We were at a 50-year low for the teaching profession in 2019 in terms of status, pay, retention, satisfaction. Teacher ed programs all over the country were already reporting difficulty recruiting teachers. So then enters the pandemic, and a lot of teachers who had perhaps been in the profession 10 or 15 years looked around and said, Wow, this just really changed things. This just really made me aware of the conditions I’m working under.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a public health crisis, but it did not have to be an education crisis.

In some places, they were able to really respond better. There were principals and schools who said, We know our teachers learned a lot, we need to bring them into the conversation.

Other teachers experienced a real speed to return to in-person, a strong desire to reassert control and to demand compliance. Many of them felt like, We spent all spring experimenting, and now our district said they're not supporting it anymore. And they were furious and disappointed and alienated by it.

Your book has some pretty clear calls to action, highlighting things like the importance of teacher voice, the value of collaborative work, other factors like that. Who needs to hear these messages?

In the book, we talk about Julian Le Grand’s model of knights and knaves. Policymakers tend to have an idea of who they’re making the policies for. If they believe teachers are “knightly,” then they’re going to to create policies that empower those teachers to do what they think is best. But if they believe the teachers are “knavely,” it’s going to be much more about controlling those teachers or preventing wrongdoing.

When you organize for knaves, you make working conditions that knights don’t want to work in.

Was there anything that surprised you, or really stayed with you?

One of the things I hadn’t anticipated was how intently teachers felt the public criticism of the teaching profession. Every time they opened Facebook, they would hear, “Those terrible selfish teachers, they only care about themselves. Why don’t they do what I want them to do?”

One teacher I spoke with said, These parents who are so vehemently angry with me, they’re the parents of my child’s friends. I’ve taught their children. I’m surprised that they could just vilify me.

We had teachers tell us that they feel so traumatized by the way they were treated – not by the pandemic itself. But many teachers don't feel like they can leave, for a number of different reasons. And it’s not a win for them or for us if we retain those teachers.

There’s all this rhetoric about teachers marking time until they can retire, as if the teacher is at fault. But when miners bring the canary down into the coal mine, it’s not the canary’s fault if it dies. It’s not that we need stronger canaries. We need healthier coal mines.

What role do parents have to play in supporting their children’s teachers?

For two decades now, we’ve been told that the best measure of school success are standardized test exams. And parents, families, realtors, continue to assess schools based on their standardized test exams.

With the pandemic, this whole rhetoric around learning loss really seemed to be about placing blame and being tightly focused on academic learning. But the teachers in our study pointed out that the solution to this learning loss is not an intensification of academics, because the students are traumatized. They’re traumatized by a pandemic, by loss in their families and community, and from not being in a normal social world for a couple of years. So what we need to do first is to help them reconnect, and find their confidence again.

But instead we’ve been told, 'Double math, double English, sports are marginalized, theater groups are put on hold,’ it all has to be about academics. And teachers were not surprised when we started to have an attendance problem and a mental health problem. They felt like this really disregarded their expertise.

So parents, we need to examine this almost religious belief that we’ve accepted that standardized test results are the measure of whether a school is good.

So if not standardized tests, what should parents be looking at?

Saying there shouldn’t be a standardized exam doesn’t mean there shouldn't be tests. There are all kinds of teacher-driven exams. We interviewed a teacher in New York City who was part of a performance standards consortium, in which the assessments are created by teachers working in collaboration. These schools are serving the broad spectrum of the New York City population. They have higher rates of completion and college-going. Their students do as well as, if not better than, other schools. But their exams are context-driven, and teacher-driven, based on the students that are in front of them.

We make a really powerful comparison between teachers and jazz musicians. Improv is only possible among some of the most talented jazz musicians there are. They sit with other musicians and together they co-create a piece that is technically very sound.

The very best of teaching is done by people with deep professional expertise; a repertoire to draw on and the ability to collaborate with their colleagues and respond to the students in their classroom on a given day. That’s really hard to script. But we can have expectations about what we hope children will be able to learn, understand that children learn in different ways, and empower teachers to collectively and professionally design their assessment systems.

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You can contact Lora and her team at suddenlydistantresearchproject@gmail.com. Lora said she would love to hear from readers! She also shared that you can get 20% off the book with the code HCPR24 at https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781682539439/going-the-distance/.