Meeting the Moment: Decisions to Accelerate Equitable Recovery and Transformative Change

John Gomperts, Executive Fellow of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, moderated a conversation based on the premise that, as schools and communities move past the COVID-19 pandemic and attempt to “build back better,” K–12 educators will need to prioritize decisions and choices that accelerate equitable learning recovery and advance transformative change.

Karen Mapp, Ed.D., Senior Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Director of the Education Policy and Management Master’s Program, urged educators to seize this opportunity to move toward a family engagement practice that is liberatory, solidarity-driven and equity-focused. She called on schools to reject deficit-based views of families and shift to a codesign model of engagement in which educators and families work together to define shared challenges and improve children’s educational experience. Family engagement should be seen as a core element of effective and equitable educational practice, not an add-on, Mapp said.

Rey Saldaña, President and CEO of Communities In Schools (CIS), followed Mapp with the observation that students can’t learn unless they are healthy. CIS reaches nearly 3,000 schools, providing school-based coordinators who bring community resources in to help address the physical, mental and social-emotional health issues that might otherwise prevent students from achieving academically. A strategy for sustainable, resource-rich learning environments must completely redesign how schools and school systems focus on those key resources, Saldañasaid. 

Sal Khan, Founder and CEO of Khan Academy, highlighted the need for all students and families to have broadband access, digital devices and technology support to complete learning disrupted by the pandemic. The technology and services should support personalized learning that meets students where they are and advances them toward mastery, Khan said. Efforts by New York City, Los Angeles and Miami-Dade school districts to increase families’ access to technology and connectivity during the pandemic are bright spots that hopefully will become “keepers,” he added. Partnerships between school districts and nonprofits like NWEA (to administer assessments) and Schoolhouse.world (Khan Academy’s new online peer tutoring community) offer additional support. 

Linda Darling-Hammond, Ed.D., President and CEO of Learning Policy Institute, called the present moment a “once-in-a-century opportunity to reinvent schools.” She named these priorities: (1) more equitable resources to close the digital divide; (2) relationship-centered schools; (3) curricula that are authentic and culturally responsive; (4) use of technology to connect students with each other across schools and across the country; and (5) social-emotional learning and whole-child supports infused into everything schools do. Darling-Hammond also observed that recent research on brain development underscores the finding that positive relationships and experiences open the brain to learning, while anxieties, trauma and negative experiences close the brain to learning. “We need school environments filled with a sense of trust, belonging and positive affirmation for every child,” she said.