Anyone who cares about education and academics should be appalled by the lack of anything concrete in Jeffco’s Draft Restart Model.
What does the Academics section of the Restart Model really say? It is nothing but generic and high-level mumbo-jumbo. It doesn’t answer ANY key questions about Academics in the Fall such as:
- When will students be assessed to identify the COVID slide? Ideally, that should happen within the first week of school.
- What assessment tools will be used?
- What definitive and differentiated steps and actions will be taken to address the COVID slide?
- How will prior year academic short-falls be addressed in the new year? How are teachers preparing for that?
- How will Remote Learning in the fall be different than the questionable Remote Learning that just happened?
- What will be the Hybrid and Remote Learning standards that students will be held to? How will attendance be counted?
- What are the expectations for teachers? What standards will they be held to? How, and when, will they be assessed?
- How will teachers be held accountable?
- What are the District’s plans for when teachers get sick, since this could be for an extended period of time? We’ve all had our experiences with “Guest Teachers”. For this reason, shouldn’t the District be using a standardized, almost lock-step, curriculum across the District?
- Why doesn’t Jeffco use the summer to create a Flipped Classroom curriculum that can easily be used by teachers in all grades to provide standardized teaching quality and consistency and ease the burden on teachers instead of each individual teacher essentially duplicating what possibly 100’s of other teachers all have to do?
- How does it work for teachers and students when the teacher is in the classroom, but ½ or more of the students are at home? What is the expected effectiveness of that? I have a hard time grasping how that will be effective. Did the District consider team teaching – 2 teachers for a cohort, with one classroom teacher and one remote learning teacher?
- Has Jeffco considered a summer tutor program such as one launched in Tennessee, or even a targeted tutoring program once school starts to mitigate equity impacts?
The Academics section of Jeffco’s Draft Restart Model is worthless. Time is of the essence. If Jeffco doesn’t start really planning for the fall, 1,000s of kids will be permanently harmed by the ineptitude and lack of leadership coming out of Denver West.