Resilient education models need more support, not less
Imagine if support for mRNA research ended with the pandemic.
You don’t cut off R&D support once you’ve made a groundbreaking discovery. You 10x investment in it.
The development of mRNA technology has been one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in recent years. If you have a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, you have mRNA to thank. Unlike traditional vaccines that introduce a weakened or inactivated germ into the bloodstream to trigger an antibody immune response, mRNA merely instructs cells to make a protein to trigger an immune response. It’s a new way of delivering lifesaving vaccines.
For the layman (like me), it may have seemed that these approaches developed overnight. Far from it. The book, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine, is a mind-blowing story of the development of mRNA science. It’s a story of how dozens of scientists and business leaders from across the world worked for decades on approaches to vaccines that had the potential of never paying off. They were driven by vision, but were ignored and ridiculed, had their funding cut, were pushed around, and were repeatedly told their efforts were not contributing to the greater good.
Ultimately (and thankfully), they persevered – and their work served as the research base needed to create a vaccine for a novel virus within weeks of its discovery.
Today, the mRNA (and DNA) vaccine technology is being recognized as a potential delivery method to treat autoimmune disorders, genetic diseases, cancers, and other major health issues.
Great – but what does this have to do with education?
Just like the researchers who dedicated their lives to obscure mRNA, there are those in education who have spent years focusing on the creation of new delivery models for education: pods, microschools, hybrid schools, cooperatives, online platforms, and many other unconventional models. Pre-pandemic they were regularly told they’d never be able to serve enough kids to make a difference, that they weren’t wanted from families, and that their efforts would be better spent on more conventional education. “How could a one-room schoolhouse ever scale to make a difference when you have a 1,000-student high school down the road?” detractors would say.
Then the pandemic hit. With schools closed for months – or years – parents turned to these once obscure practices for continued education. Not only did they fill the gap, they proved to be an even more effective delivery method than the traditional environments for many families.
For instance, a recent report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) studied family and educator experiences in temporary pandemic pods over the course of a year. Those they studied reported overall (sometimes significant) improvements in student learning and well-being measures like student engagement, happiness, trust, self-motivation, and more. And these parents didn’t even set out to transform education – they mostly starting the pods to solve childcare and socialization disruptions.
In another CRPE study, teachers reported more overall satisfaction in the pod experience (76%) compared to their prior work in schools. Citing the joy of autonomy, creativity, and connection with families, many say they cannot return to the large school environments they started in.
A survey from Tyton Partners found that parent satisfaction with alternative school types increased since the start of the pandemic and was higher than the satisfaction of parents whose children were enrolled more traditional environments.
These small, student-centered environments emerged out of a time of tumult and, by most accounts, seem to have created a caring community of people dedicated to individualized education, where educators felt like they were doing what they set out to do as educators.
Now that traditional schools are mostly reopened, there are starting to be subtle calls of “now that the pandemic is over – it’s time to apply what we learned from out-of-system models to public schools.” Implicit in many of these messages is the idea that the out-of-system models have finished serving their purpose.
But the idea that investment and R&D should stop in the out-of-system model is foolish. That’s like saying we’ve learned as much as we can from mRNA vaccines, so let’s go back to the traditional vaccine research that didn’t prove nimble enough to solve the most pressing health challenge we’ve faced in a generation.
You cannot simply separate the delivery model from the results.
So, while I am completely behind efforts to apply the learnings from small unconventional environments to large conventional education settings – creating smaller environments, more flexibility, more autonomy for educators, etc. – solely focusing attention on replicating what worked for a 10-student environment within a 1,000-student environment seems like half of a strategy.
Why not also figure out how to support 100 ten-student environments while also focusing on transforming the big school down the road? To be sure, there are some – like the Vela Fund, whose entire ethos is supporting these bottom-up, small solutions. But the level of support (financial and otherwise) is nowhere close to the upside potential of what these models proved in the past 2 years.
Future breakthroughs will be the result of investments today. That’s why funding is flooding into the mRNA approach, in the hopes that the experimentation, innovation, and trial efforts will lead to even more breakthroughs in the future.
If we want a more resilient education system that can overcome any disruption – whether nationwide or within a single home – it only makes sense to pursue the models that proved most resilient during last disruption.
"Why not also figure out how to support 100 ten-student environments" Come and see it! We support founders (podleaders, microschool founders, and parents) and create low-cost virtual infrastructure where they can unite their teen communities, and get the support they need to deliver excellence. Come and visit! Email me: cath@100roads.org