THE WORLD AND the workplace are changing, and education reformers say the state’s education model needs to change with it.
A new action plan released by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy on Tuesday pushes adopting more flexible teaching models and enthusiastically incorporating new technologies to expand school systems and resources virtually.
“Even when we introduce new and innovative practices designed to make learning more effective and efficient, we rarely abandon our established notions of how schools should run,” Chad d’Entremont, executive director of the Rennie Center, said at a presentation of the report. Assumptions that schools should always look and function a certain way is “why we are struggling to achieve the outcome that we want our schools to produce,” he said.
The single-teacher classroom model, in which an educator delivers information to an assembled group of students, is still the dominant US teaching model. While there has been evolution in classroom tools and practices like differentiated learning within small classroom groups, the Rennie report recommends more learning models that depart from the traditional structure.
“Reevaluate the rigidity of school schedules,” said Alexis Lian, director of policy at the Rennie Center. This might mean rearranging classes so teachers could work in-classroom four days a week while students still attended five-day schools, or using a “flexible team teaching” strategy where a group of educators with different areas of expertise could supervise a larger cohort of students.
Offering teachers more leadership roles and investing in teacher development programs to address the “prevailing shortage of qualified educators,” Lian said, could help counter an ever-bleaker picture.
Educators are “suffering from unprecedented rates of burnout,” the report notes. Teacher job satisfaction has been on the decline for years, according to researchers from Brown University and the Merrimack College Teacher Survey, with declining morale, high stress, and stagnant wages contributing to historic teacher shortages across the country.
“Teachers are a little tired. Covid did a number on them,” state education commissioner Jeffrey Riley said after the presentation. “And we’ve got to find different ways to allow for flexible work schedules, things like that, but we also need to find ways to celebrate our teachers. We don’t do enough of that.”
On flexibility, Riley said he met recently with the machine learning scheduling company Timely, which told him that a high school saved about 40 positions, “because they were able to schedule better,” Riley said, “and that allowed them to recoup that money and then use it in different ways.”
The extra time, Riley said, could allow teachers to be able to plan more effectively and coordinate for any special scheduling needs like picking up and dropping off their own children.
“There’s an efficiency boom that’s coming that we need to react to,” he said. “I feel like the rest of the world in business has moved to a model where we have more flexibility. It’s trickier with kids, because kids have to be supervised, but I think we can find a way to manage a process where you can give flexibility to teachers.”
Riley considered possible expanded uses for pandemic-era educational tools like Zoom courses, where “perhaps kids could do internships, or more enrichment during the day, and also be able to have some of their classes after typical school hours, with a teacher that needs that flexibility.”
Several Massachusetts schools and programs are so-called “bright spots” of more creative and flexible education, according to the Rennie Center. Springfield International Charter School’s college-like schedule offers students more choice in course selection across grade levels, for instance, and the initiative Campus Without Walls works with teachers in several Massachusetts districts to create units that can be shared virtually outside their school or district.
Teachers aren’t the only ones struggling, noted Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, who highlighted several Healey administration initiatives during an introduction to the report. The governor’s budget proposes nearly $25 million dedicated to student mental and social emotional health supports, Tutwiler said, some of which will go toward developing and implementing a statewide “birth through higher education” mental and emotional health strategy through his office.
“Massachusetts has the best schools in the country,” Tutwilier said. “We’ve been number one for a long time in achievement. But that number masks critical inequities.”
Speakers pointed to the rise in chronic absenteeism – up 10 percent from 2021 to 2022 after schools reopened – particularly among students of color. Strides have been made to better connect young people to college, but a large gap remains. About 7,500 students are now enrolled in early college programs – about 2 percent of the 280,000 high school students in the state, d’Entremont said.
The Rennie Center on Tuesday released an interactive data dashboard looking at educational indicators from early childhood into post-secondary, d’Entremont said, “so we can get under the hood of what’s happening and really understand what challenges remain.”
