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(soft inquisitive music) - [Announcer] Thank you for joining us for The Education Crisis with Chris Reykdal and Uti Hawkins, moderated by Donna Blankinship.

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- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Donna Blankinship, news editor at Crosscut, where I lead a team of reporters covering local, state, and regional issues, including education.

Today, I'm joined by two people who work in education here in Washington State.

Chris Reykdal is the Washington superintendent of public instruction, the person in charge of education funding and policy statewide.

And and Uti Yamassee Hawkins is the vice president of the Seattle Education Association, the Seattle Teachers Union.

She is also a racial equity and culturally responsive practices consulting teacher.

This session was titled The Education Crisis in the festival program, but you may be wondering which crisis are we talking about?

COVID-19 is the obvious answer, but the pandemic was more than a disruption for schools and families.

For some of us, it's shone a bright light on inequities within our communities and our school systems.

So while COVID-19 was a tragedy for many people, especially the friends and families of nearly a million Americans who have died, there were a few ways the pandemic actually made some things better for some people.

We'll spend part of our time here looking back at these past two years, but mostly I would like to look forward and think about what we can do with what we've learned during the pandemic.

Some of this conversation was framed around my experience working on season three of the Crosscut podcast, "This Changes Everything," which focused on education.

If you haven't listened yet, I hope you will check out this podcast, produced by Sara Bernard, and then keep this conversation going at home.

We were hoping to have this session in person, but there are some silver linings to virtual.

In addition to allowing people to join us from all over, we can pretend this is just a chat among the three of us.

That's what I'm imagining, anyway.

Thank you, Uti and Chris, for joining me today.

Let's chat.

It's clear the pandemic helped uncover inequities in our education system, and it may have even helped improve some of those problems in our public schools.

I'm curious what you think.

Are there ways that our education system is changed for the better because of COVID-19?

Chris, why don't you go first?

- Yeah, thank you, Donna, and thank you to the whole Crosscut team for having us.

It's good to be with Uti again on the screen here.

There's no question that the moment, as you said, magnified everything.

It magnified inequities and it created this opportunity for some students, some educators, some communities who really wanted something different, and it gave them that opportunity.

We've got a lot of districts now offering a permanent remote option for students, particularly in secondary, who are balancing maybe work or just simply learn better or feel safer by being remote.

So, we're seeing instructional models that have certainly evolved out of this for the better.

And then I do think it's gonna take us longer, but one of the things that sounds a little odd but that I'm grateful for is that it definitely put a big spotlight on student mental health.

This was a crisis.

I mean, I read the title of this as an education crisis and I really think what we have is a student mental health crisis right now, and it was building pre-pandemic.

And certainly during the pandemic, I think what a lot of families became very clear about was the weight of the world is on our students.

It's always been stressful to be in school at times.

Right now, it seems persistent and ongoing.

Our use of social media tools and the inescapability of negativity in our lives, it tracks us and follows us, and algorithms are written to feed it to us.

We didn't experience that mostly as children, but our students are.

They're a generation of young people who, from the moment they had a smart device in their hand, have been shaped significantly by a lot of the tragedy around the world, violence in our country, racial violence, elections up in the air, abortion rulings that are leaked out, climate change injustice that is imminent.

They feel all of this.

So I think the good news is a lot of policy makers have said, "Wow, we really have to invest in significant resources for student and staff mental health."

And they took a big step last session, so there are really are positives that have come out of this.

- Okay, thank you, Chris.

Uti, what do you think on this topic?

- When I think about our current reckoning with education, I don't think that it's new.

I think that the pandemic brought us collectively into a focus to re-look at what it is that we experience as children of a new generation and a new technology space in the way in which we connect with kids.

And so liberation and education has been a constant conversation.

How do we bring forward what was a traditional experience into a modern space, a new kind of conversation?

And I believe educators and students have been at the forefront of that conversation this entire time.

They've had to have those conversations intimately about what this collective experience of a pandemic means as they went from remote, transitioning back to in-person in the midst of a pandemic, as they adjust every time we have public health changes.

They're having those conversations about how education coincides with their lived families experiences, what support means with their families at home from both sides as educators and as students.

And I think that as a collective system, what this has done is bring forward what has been a conversation of modernizing education in the interest of children in Black and Brown communities for generations.

This is a civil rights conversation from its origin about what makes a better education system, because in communities that have been oppressed, education is a liberation.

It's a space of freedom and rights and access.

And so we have to take change very seriously right now, and if we don't learn, we are going to fall back into what normalcy was, which was not an experience for my family, generations within my family.

We have always been aware of the larger impacts of the whole world, so this is not a new conversation.

- Yeah, I've heard a lot of people say, "We don't wanna go back to what we called normal before.

It's just moving forward is what we wanna do."

- Yeah.

- You can feel free to interrupt each other if you wish.

Don't get too crazy, but that'll be good.

Obviously, not everything about the pandemic was good for schools or families.

If you could go back and change something, what would you do differently?

Chris, why don't you start?

- Oh, it's such a powerful question.

Obviously, if you could go back, and I do not live my life in hindsight because it's not very healthy, generally speaking, but our inability to embrace the reality of technology on the front end of this was massive.

We all noticed here more students turning in homework.

They were expected to do their work.

They were navigating systems of knowledge and inquiry through the web, and then suddenly the crisis hit us and we needed to connect 300,000 families, which we did ultimately, which was very, very good, but it's not as if we didn't know how dependent we were becoming on technology and the economic inequities of that, and sometimes the geographic inequities.

We had families with plenty of resource, but if you live in parts of rural Washington there's just quite literally no way to connect.

There is no broadband, there is no satellite technology.

So that's just one aspect of it, this idea that we often know our deficits and we don't address them until crisis.

And so what inspires me is, what is the deficit we're in now that we know we're gonna hit in the next crisis?

And I can guarantee you it's economic inequality, it's racial inequality.

It is definitely a question of mental health for young people.

We already know it, so we ought to get on to solving that right now before the next crisis.

- Did we completely solve the technology inequalities at this point?

- No.

- No.

- No, no.

We deployed 300,000 connected devices, which was great.

We ended up with, I believe, something like 100,000 web-enabled connections who otherwise could not, but we still, by the end of this remote time last year, had students who had no choice but to drive to a library or a community facility for school, 'cause that's where they could get connections.

So it's a big partnership between the feds and deploying last mile fiber, local communities, families, and schools.

We've got a lot of work to do and it's a long proposition, so no, we didn't totally solve it.

- And aren't kids still sharing devices at home?

- Well, these are things that I think absolutely have been the missteps of some of our process is not retaining those systems into the longevity of our school system.

When we think about returning to normalcy or this idea of coming back into education, what I still hear from educators, what I still hear from students, is that those systems that really worked for them, the systems that kept them connected, those are the things we have to maintain.

And I think the biggest regret is that those conversations are not still front and center, because that's the stability we've needed as we've had to shift forward and back in order to make sure kids stay in school and make sure that they are able to connect with schooling with their own capabilities and abilities as Superintendent Reykdal spoke to.

We're talking about a new generation of kids, where technology is a very meaningful part of their everyday experiences.

So if our systems don't do that work now of creating technology sustainability, I worry.

I worry that that's not in place or the targeted focus of some of our conversations right now because we're still very reactive in a lot of spaces because there's a lot of weight still on school systems right now.

- So is there anything else, Uti, that you would change if you could go back in time and change how things went with early pandemic?

- So, I came into this role as a union leader in the middle of the pandemic.

And prior to that, my work personally in education had been supporting schools across Seattle around racial equity and social justice work, as well as really intimately working with communities who are directly marginalized within public education.

So I work with the Indigenous communities, within Black communities specifically.

And I think that that still persists.

That's one of those issues for which, when we talk about these big system changes that we need to make, we often don't get to the heart of our communities in those conversations before we act, so I always feel like that's a space where engagement needs to be improved and we have a collective experience to build from.

So I do believe there's been gains in that, but I do believe it didn't necessarily reach our students as strongly as well.

Their voice has been incredibly pivotal in all of our work.

I would love for them to have a have a stronger voice in some of our conversations from the beginning, from the beginning.

They will charge us forward into what's next and what's needed in education.

- At Crosscut, we've been amazed by student voices lately.

Our education reporter, Venice Buhain, she just does such a great job connecting with young people, and we just wanna hear from them more and more.

They have so much to say.

They're definitely one of the stakeholders, right, in education.

Probably the main stakeholder.

- And when we look at stories across time, especially in oppressed communities, those education stories carry a lot of weight 'cause they tend to be generational.

And so if we listen to them, we look at what things have not been solved, and then also kids are inspiring about what they would like to see in the future.

And I think they have a really different look at education after this experience.

- Yeah, definitely.

One of the trends that I appreciate in corporate America right now is the 360 degree performance review.

My daughter has taught me about this.

It's designed to be a way to give your colleagues constructive criticism from all perspectives to help them do their jobs better.

I'd like to give this a try today, so you both will get a chance to offer some constructive feedback.

We'll begin with Uti.

How do you think Superintendent Reykdal and his team did during the pandemic?

What did he do right and what could have gone better?

- Hmm.

As a union leader, my role in our union is negotiations, and so we've had a lot of conversations across these last two years that connect myself and Superintendent Reykdal's work.

And I think that what is the hardest part about responding in this last two years is the unknown.

So when I think about critiquing somebody, there isn't necessarily a space of knowing what was the thing they should have done.

But what I'll say is what I would.

Most certainly things that have come out on the positive.

I think our connections to public health conversations.

We're all talking around the same pieces of information.

That's been a plus.

I don't know that that was happening in the same kind of collective conversations prior.

When I think about critiques around the way in which the pandemic has brought the state, as in the governor's space, OSPI, and Superintendent Reykdal's space, the district, and unions together into the same conversation, is that we should have been more collective in some of our initial conversations together.

There should never be spaces where we have to search for each other in the moments of a pandemic.

And more collective conversations, I think, should have been had overall.

But I do believe that we've been supportive when it comes to seeing the same issues with our kids' mental health, seeing educator burnout, which I hope is a recognized space across our state, and also seeing the spaces for which we can talk about racial inequity and we can see that they're happening everywhere, the inequities that come forward for educators, for students, for communities.

It doesn't matter what part of the state you're in, those things are persistent and they're real.

And so ideally what happens next in our conversation is funding addresses those at the root cause.

And that's what I'm hoping we end up in.

I don't know that we're there yet.

We've all been really busy- - (laughs) Very busy.

- And so I'm waiting for us to be less reactive and more responsive.

- Okay, great.

Okay, Chris, now it's your turn.

Turn the table back on teachers.

What went well during the pandemic?

How could they have done a better job during these crazy times?

Feel free to comment more generally about public schools in our state and not just Seattle, obviously.

- Yeah, I will specifically compliment Uti and the team at Seattle and a lot of districts.

Labor has a voice, and the important part about what we do in the State of Washington is we recognize that through a statute.

We legitimately have collective bargaining at the local level for a reason, because the best answers aren't in Olympia or Washington, DC.

So I do wanna be complimentary through all of this.

What we saw is labor and management really coming to the same conclusion, whether it's resources or public health or safety.

We had real geographic differences, so labor unions in Seattle didn't have the same focus as a labor union in Wapato or Yakima.

I mean, let's be clear, there's very big differences.

But generally, just wanna be very complimentary of that.

I think if I'm thinking about the future and what we could do better, when we respond with statewide activities, whether it's technology or something else, which we did.

Within the first legislative session, the legislature added 60 or 70 or 80 million dollars for forever for technology and devices for students.

I think our challenge is we always have this tension between state and local control, and if there's anything I would challenge organized labor to do is remember that when the legislature wants statewide solutions, we have a job to carry that out.

And I think the local response is everything's in one giant pot of money and we'll bargain and figure it out.

And part of that's on the legislature.

If they want devices to pay for it forever, and that money not to go to some other part of the bargain, then the legislature needs to carve that out.

So mostly I'm laying this on the hands of the legislature, but I think it is a tough state that we're in where we get pretty darn good results, but sometimes targeted dollars are there and then folks say, "Hey, they disappeared."

And the answer is no, they got reprioritized at the local level.

And what Spokane did with it was very different than what Vancouver Evergreen did with it.

It's something that is a systemic problem, so I'm not pointing fingers at labor or collective bargaining 'cause it's their job to represent their members.

But I am pointing out a larger issue that the failure of what we might see coming out of this is that the legislature did solve problems and then chose not to put the right protections around it for it to be a permanent solution.

And we'll see if they've got the discipline to do that going forward.

- Okay, hold on a second.

I'm gonna get someone on the line from the legislature to respond.

No, I'm joking.

I'm not gonna do that.

Quick reminder to people watching at home or in their office that we're going to be asking some of your questions soon, so be sure to enter them in the chat section on your screen.

I read something last week that talked about students losing years of progress during the pandemic.

Is this an exaggeration in your opinion?

Anybody?

- I'll definitely say I think it's a tremendous exaggeration.

Again, when you have inappropriately framed a national conversation around education progress around standardized tests, if that's your measure, then of course in crisis, test scores go down.

And we saw that in states that never shut down, states that never had mask requirements, states that never had vaccine requirements.

We saw assessment scores around the country drop in math and English language arts.

And certainly there's impact.

But what didn't happen was some significant setback where fourth graders are suddenly reading at the second grade.

What happened is we have benchmarks where we expect students to be, and in many cases en mass students aren't quite where we want them to be.

But we have another decade with most of these students or five years or 13 years or 12, and sometimes only a couple in high school, but the test score is the failure here.

And it's not that assessments are wrong.

We need assessments.

It's that we've got an entire culture of folks who have built a narrative that you can define an entire education experience or define the effectiveness of a teacher by a standardized test score.

And it's just fundamentally wrong.

The pandemic did impact us and students were impacted.

I think we have to ask ourselves, on the mental health side and the academic side, why didn't we see some of these effects pre-pandemic?

And there are contribution lists a mile long from our larger society that should have us question why there are persistent gaps.

And if you use tests as a measure, fine, but shouldn't we be focused on why there's a persistent gap between student groups based on resources, based on race, based on gender, and based on sexual orientation?

This is the stuff that gets me excited to solve.

But a scale score going from 1408 to 1400 in a year means nothing to anybody, and it isn't gonna deter any student from their progress or their success.

And I do hope that we'll contextualize this a whole lot better in the next couple years.

- I do hope so.

I hope that that becomes part of re-looking at our state spaces and investments, with all of our legislative funding coming in, that we actually get to addressing some of those issues.

I find the conversation on testing quite interesting because we have a system that is based on those assessments giving us access to secondary education, getting access to scholarship, getting access to spaces.

What I don't believe that the conversation around test scores and having learning loss provides us is a empowered view of students.

We've been through a pandemic collectively together.

Students have experienced firsthand not only their own experience of survival, but also watching adults around them go through this experience, elders, loss, grief, and they have prioritized and come about with very strong voices into what they want their education to look like now.

And so if we minimize their experience to test scores and learning loss, we forget all of the resiliency that they've brought forward through this experience.

And when you look at satisfaction through this experience at this point now where we have a breadth to reflect, I believe that the connection between students and educators and families is stronger than it was before.

That's one of the things that this experience provided us.

And in Seattle, those were the days that reformed education, that looked forward.

Wednesdays became an experience of making sure you made one-to-one connections with students and families about what they believed education should be in this moment and what supports they needed, not only in their basic needs but in their aspirational needs in education.

And I do believe that if we focus on learning loss, then we forget that there's many other things unmeasured in our system around resiliency, progress, and brilliance within our children.

- So are there new ways that we should be experimenting with measuring how kids are doing?

- I hope so.

I think that one of the things that we forget is that educators come to this profession-