The Next Great Pivot

The pandemic asked schools to adapt once. Now they must do it again — and this time, the stakes are higher.

Nearly one year ago, Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. And while we are very much still in it, it is already clear that this disruption will alter the fabric of public education as we know it.

Many public schools have been shuttered as educators have been asked (in many cases little more more than the scant resources to which they are accustomed) to shift the locus of learning from the physical to the virtual.

School districts in locked-down parts of the world adopted their own response to the crisis, each one informed by advice from politicians and, at times, from public health experts.

While they all differed in flavour, they shared in common a vague and urgent directive that all learning, somehow, must now happen remotely.

This Great Pivot in modern public education has been a relatively swift one, if you consider that its policymakers are not exactly known for adaptability. Public education is something of a barge: it carries a lot, but it is a cumbersome thing. It can alter course if it must, though when it does, it takes a long time to slow the inertia of the way things have always been done.