The ugly underbelly of catastrophe schooling
Two things that could go very wrong
I promised to get to the ugly underbelly of schooling in the time of catastrophe, so here we are.
I wrote yesterday about the astonishing change in tone from district administration in this unprecedented time, and how impressed I was with CPS remote learning guidance. It is humane, gracious, and realistic, acknowledging limitations and resource disparities and attempting both to bridge gaps and allow for them.
But we have two problematic issues in this time of remote learning, and it is up to all of us to make enough noise that the worst case scenarios don’t happen. We need to protect special education and we need to protect digital privacy.
First, special ed. Special needs accommodations have been taking a beating in CPS at least since Forrest Claypool’s illegal cutbacks. It’s taken awhile to get back on track in a district where there have long been shortages of special ed teachers, aides, and cash. I have friends who have waited so long for the services outlined in their IEPs that they’ve given up. So we’re not starting from a great place. But bringing special ed accommodations home? It’s hard to see how certain services can be delivered remotely. How do you do occupational therapy online? How do you make a Zoom session work for a deaf child? How is it possible to bring services, many of which are one-to-one, into the home when the teacher or therapist cannot go into the home?
I don’t have any answers. I look forward to hearing how our teachers are going about this awkward project, and I know they are coming up with creative solutions even as I sit here. But the bottom line is, we’d already have a big enough problem on our hands with special education delivery even without the potential problems raised by the $2.2T stimulus bill. It lays out a provision for the Department of Education to waive special education requirements, explained in a NYT story April 2.
There really are two sides to this question. Some educators and administrators think the waiver needs to be granted in order to protect themselves from piles of future lawsuits generated by irritated parents whose students’ IEPs were not fulfilled throughout coronavirus school closures. It’s hard for me to see suing for services that are impossible to render, but then I’m naive. But we don’t need our districts to lose money to special ed lawsuits brought when there’s not even a fighting chance for any district to keep up all of its special ed services, dependent as they are on whole staffs, special equipment in some cases, nursing care, and a whole bunch of other stuff not usually found at home.
On the other hand—and this is where my sympathies lie—when special ed requirements are waived, it could be very hard to get them back. There is a real possibility that any changes Betsy DeVos makes now will stick around even after this extraordinary time. And after decades of expanding the premise and the promise of a free and appropriate public education for all children—since 1975—it cannot be left to the hand of Betsy DeVos to undo that. Which is entirely feasible. So: we must, as I said above, make our voices heard. The stimulus bill gives her 30 days to declare any waivers, so we have just about 30 days to be noisy. We need to make clear that special education law must not be rolled back. We cannot allow the federal government to undo critical protections for special needs students. You can reach her:
On twitter @BetsyDeVosED
At the DOE by mail:
Office of Special Education Programs
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20202-7100
DOE by phone: 202-245-7459
And click on this link for a complete directory of the Special Education division.
Now don’t be snotty, obnoxious, or outraged (although you have every right to be). It just doesn’t communicate well, and we need this message to be communicated well. Tell her why you think special education must be protected. Do what you special ed parents do best, and that is advocate.
Now on to worry #2. Our children’s digital security. This encompasses several different elements. Look, students have already been having their movements tracked by Google—without parental permission—when they are using CPS g-mail accounts. The College Board already has questions when 13 and 14 year olds are registering for the PSAT that allow very personal data to be doled out to colleges for marketing purposes. Already their private information is routinely subject to data breaches at both the city and state levels: the number of cybersecurity incidents reported in 2019 was triple the number of the previous year. You can look at this interactive map to see all incidents reported since 2016. Click on this interactive report to see every state’s grade for student privacy.
So this is what is happening to our students in normal, regular, everyday times. It’s pretty bad already. But now, the bulk of their education is being delivered digitally, and you can be sure tracking, data marketing, and privacy breach incidents will likely increase.
Then there is Zoom, in heavy use by all our schools, and suddenly the favorite hub for spammers, trolls, and racists to “Zoom-bomb.” Zoom itself says it is working on its security problems, and as this article points out, attorneys general from several states are starting to deal with them as well.
A further threat is the rise of student surveillance. Such technology has already taken hold at the college level. Several universities have contracted with SpotterEDU, a company that uses cellphone data to track where students are at all times. Professors check attendance using the technology; grades depend on a student’s presence picked up by bluetooth sensors in classrooms. The technology tracks students not just in classrooms, but all over campus. Here’s a super creepy Washington Post story about SpotterEDU. It could be an easy jump now for more schools to get in on more specific student tracking.
In this time of unprecedented dependence on educational technology, some public ed advocates worry that ed tech might take the place of teachers altogether. Personally I think these past three years, I mean weeks, of our children being at home all day has quickly put to death the idea that brick and mortar schools are somehow passé. But there are plenty of breathless corporate reform reports about how ed tech is here to save the day. This particularly tone-deaf piece from three days ago seems to have missed something CPS grasped immediately:
“[W]e should do what reform leaders did at the birth of the modern reform movement: look to the ‘positive outliers’ who are defying the odds, and focus not on whether we should set a high bar for driving student learning, but instead on how to clear that bar through innovative and effective teaching.”
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but now is perhaps not the right time to be talking about clearing ever higher bars of excellence. Especially using pedagogical means that not all students can access. CPS’s current emphases on empathy and moderation are like the bucket of water on this Wicked Witch of profiteer hype.
In our present moment we have to keep our eyes wide open to what our students are being asked to do online. We must, as Diane Ravitch noted in the NPE Report on Online Learning, be “wise consumers” of the ed tech being used with our kids. “Technology can be used creatively in the classroom by well-prepared teachers. But most of what is sold as ‘digital learning’ is a sham that allows vendors to mine student data.” This report was from before coronavirus, but it’s a good review of the diversity and quality of current ed tech, with an eye to the inherent dangers.
I want to hook you up with a one-stop shop for all the information you will ever need on data privacy and security issues: the work of S.T.O.P. from the Urban Justice Center. Their COVID-19 page covers all the issues I’ve mentioned plus many more, and they are a privacy-advocacy group whose work you can get involved in. And the ACLU has recently entered the data privacy fight as well, and you can support them as well.
These two potential dangers—weakened special education and further jeopardized digital privacy—are the real weak points of the CPS guidance for remote learning. I don’t know yet how the district can address these issues. But I do know that what I see every day from my city is a lot of folks making every effort to meet the needs of one another, look out for each other, uphold each other, and solve problems together. So I have a small hope that—with all of us working and advocating and hollering together—these pieces will be worked out too.
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