Giving Compass' Take:

• Experts at The 74 discuss the need for reinventing schools during COVID-19 to correct social injustices and provide students with a safe mental and physical environment.

• Why is it clear during COVID-19 that we need to make reinventing schools a priority? What can we do to make remote learning significantly more inclusive and equitable?

• Find out how you can fund equitable ways to reinvent schools during COVID-19.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education, in partnership with The 74, fielded responses from a diverse roster of educators and policymakers in order to promote creative thinking and debate about how we can collectively meet student needs in an extraordinarily challenging school year, and beyond.

Amy Berk Anderson:

Pre-COVID19, many families were frustrated because their children’s needs weren’t being met by their schools. What is different today is that many rules and regulations around the delivery of these services are now obsolete, making it nearly impossible for people to settle back into the same old routines. We must rethink roles and structures in order to balance continuity of learning with health and well-being.

 Antonio Parés:

Families should go much further than simply calling for schools to change. They shouldn’t go back at all — especially Black, Indigenous, LGTBQ and differently abled children’s families. Schools of all stripes don’t just miss the bar academically. They ridicule, oppress, arrest and hurt these children. It’s time for families to say, “Enough is enough.” Though COVID-19 and the corresponding school closures have been difficult, they have shown many that there are other ways to “do school.”

Jennifer Charlot:

It’s clear that for learning to happen, schools can’t just operate with business as usual, without giving children a space to process. Families want to know that all teachers who engage with children are able to address, at minimum, their basic emotional needs.

Julie Kennedy:

Let’s start with challenging and supporting leaders to imagine how different their puzzle top picture could look, and then provide them with the resources and time they need to reconfigure and add in the missing puzzle pieces they need to put it all together.

Read the full discussion about reinventing schools during COVID-19 at The 74.