Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, took a bold stand this morning on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace: the presence of teachers in classrooms is irrelevant to student learning. The point came in the context of a question from Wallace about students falling behind grade level as a result of the crisis. It seems like that should have been a softball question. Teachers are concerned about it. Parents are concerned about it. The governor just had to say he was concerned about it and promise to use the full force of his office to ensure students succeed. You know, standard political pablum. Here’s what we got instead, according to Politico:
Pressed by Wallace on whether children will face setbacks in their educational attainment due to this spring’s abrupt transition to remote learning, Polis said: “There’s really no excuses in the business of education.”
“I made that very clear to our superintendents, I hope other governors across the nation are doing that,” he added. “You need that social side, right, and it’s a little bit harder to get that social side in an online setting. But academically, there are no excuses for every kid not to be able to accomplish their grade-level work.”
Polis, in other words, is confident that the physical presence of students and teachers in the classroom should have no bearing on academics. Sure, there is whatever the “social side” is, but that’s clearly less important than academics, irrelevant to learning.
I didn’t know much of anything about Polis this morning, and I clicked on the article nor for him specifically but to hear general perspectives on plans for the fall, which is an understandably hot topic in this particular household of educators. I like most of what Polis had to say early in his interview and was heartened thinking about my family in Colorado with elementary school children. But for a Democrat and a former member of the state board of education, this was a pretty appalling position to be taking–even on Fox News.
I sought out the full interview hoping for some redeeming context, but the context only seemed to make it worse (even if you don’t watch far enough to see the objectively unsettling explanation for why hundreds of Coloradans who died with COVID-19 as a contributing factor have been purged from the rolls of those who died of COVID-19). In the full version, Polis insists that students can universally “learn as well as better online” (which may be true, provided “as well as better” is the standard). He goes on to taut those “few percentage” of students who were online learning even before the pandemic.
All of this raises the question for me, if students are learning just as well online, why worry about thecostly overhead of school buildings, maintenance staff, teachers trained in curriculum design (rather than curriculum facilitators, which is what online school teachers often do), nurses, school resource officers, and administrative or disciplinary staff. The answer, taken again from the broader context in the rest of the interview, is that physical public schools serve as free day care for parents so they can work. Polis knows that schools being open is necessary for parents to be working, making money, and spending money in his state. Kids need to be in school not so they can learn but so that Mommy and Daddy can have money for Broncos games. (I’m beginning to despair of the Rockies, etc., playing in the foreseeable future).
There’s a truth to that–the kind of truth you expect to hear from an economist much more than an elected public official–but it comes with the attendant truth that the whole educational apparatus of public schools is for something other than learning. So there is the message to you teachers, straight from the governor’s mouth: your primary function in the classroom is not really academics. It’s economics. Teachers often feel like glorified babysitters, but I’m not sure if it is reassuring or insulting to hear Polis confirm it publicly and with a proud smile. In either case, at least Colorado teachers know where they stand now.
The Itinerant Mind 