Every parent with a kid in school at any grade level over the last year and a half has some strong opinions about today’s topic. We all remember exactly what it was like in March of 2020. The sudden closure of schools. The scramble to figure out exactly what was next for kids. And then the patchwork of things that schools tried to do to hold the rest of the school year together. And of course, an even greater patchwork of approaches that schools tried across the country in this past academic year. Remote learning. In person learning. Hybrid schools. There are 13,000 different school districts in this country and there were 13,000 different ways to try to tackle learning during the pandemic.
So with that year behind us and the upcoming school year still full of lingering uncertainty, what lessons can we draw from that experience? What are some of the best practices that we can apply for learning in the future.
Our guest today has led an effort to answer these questions. Dr. Khalilah Harris is the Managing Director for K-12 Education Policy at the Center for American Progress. They’ve authored an insightful new report Remote Learning and School Reopenings What Worked and What Didn’t, and she’s here to tell us all about it.