The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the closure of more than 124,000 public and private schools, leaving more than 55 million primary and secondary school students at home. For many students, these school closures have largely put their learning, and their preparation for their academic futures, on hold. As this tumultuous semester winds down, the COVID-19 era has revealed how many education organizations are ready to adapt and meet students’ needs in this trying moment. We’re also finding out just how well alternative educational models can work.
Take, for instance, college entrance exams. As with schools and many businesses, SAT and ACT testing sites are being closed across the country to prevent further transmission of the virus, leaving many juniors, who would otherwise take the tests around this time, in the lurch. The College Board, the company that oversees the SAT, issued refunds after canceling its March and May testing dates. ACT Inc. postponed its April ACT testing date to June.
An alternative college entrance exam called the Classic Learning Test, however, was ready to meet these new challenges head-on. The CLT administered its first virtually proctored test in April. As Jeremy Tate, CLT’s co-founder and CEO, explained to me, a number of measures were taken to ensure the integrity of the exam: Keyboard use was prohibited so that test-takers would not be able to “chat” during the exam, there were ID checks, and all test-takers were videoed, with a random sample of videos viewed after the exam, to prevent cheating.
The CLT pairs this new technology with old ideas. It draws its material from great books across a wide range of disciplines and traditions, from Confucius to Aesop, Søren Kierkegaard to Moses Maimonides. And since the SAT and ACT canceled their spring tests a few weeks ago, registrations for the CLT’s April 25 exam increased by 1,000%, including more than 2,000 students from more than a dozen countries. The CLT currently has more than 3,000 students registered for its June 20 exam.
Even before the COVID-19 crisis put a strain on the ability of the College Board and ACT Inc. to administer exams, the SAT and ACT had their critics. These criticisms could be leveled at the CLT as well. It is easy, for example, to view the great books as the province of the elite and fear, as some critics do regarding the SAT and ACT, that the tests exacerbate inequality. But the CLT aims to counteract that perception by spreading interest in, and access to, these books and ideas. Of course, there is also the concern that the new test, as with the old standardized tests, will fail to forecast college success. But that’s not the point behind the new test. “We have actually never argued that these tests predict success,” Tate explained. “We have argued passionately, however, that these tests drive the national curriculum and that students ought to be reading texts that are truly timeless. Success ultimately takes grit, reliability, consistency, and our test doesn’t attempt to measure those traits. But we hope to do our part by pointing back to the old way of education that cultivated the virtues of discipline and perseverance.”
Rethinking college entrance exams isn’t the only change accelerated by the pandemic’s disruption to education. The virus has forced many schools to confront the fact that they lack the resources and infrastructure to offer distance learning opportunities to their students. A micro-school network in Arizona, called Prenda, is trying to change that.
In the wake of mass closures in the Grand Canyon State in March, Prenda responded within 24 hours, creating an online learning platform called Prenda@Home. The software uses activities to guide students through a curriculum and peer collaboration. Parents are empowered to support their child’s learning digitally and receive help and share ideas in Prenda’s online community.
Prenda’s team developed this technology to help parents who have been overwhelmed by the sudden shift to home-centered education — a problem underscored by a recent George Mason University study, which joined a growing body of research in finding that students from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds tend to underperform in exclusively online learning environments. Researchers have found that, unsurprisingly, in-person interaction is important for both student outcomes and the overall quality of the learning experience. Prenda’s founder, Kelly Smith, agrees, which is why, under normal circumstances, its operation as a microschool is also primarily in-person. For the time being, however, the pandemic ensures that in-person group learning is simply not an option. The online-learning platforms that continue to proliferate are imperfect replacements for in-person education, but that does not mean they should have no role at all, even in normal times.
Unschool.school is another example of an organization adapting to meet the needs of students in the COVID-19 era. The education technology startup touts itself as the Airbnb of education: It connects learners with subject matter experts in the same way Airbnb allows underused resources, such as vacant rooms or homes, to be enjoyed by travelers. In doing so, Unschool.school matches subject matter experts with parents eager for their children to enjoy high-quality learning experiences. Beth O’Sullivan is one particularly notable example of this. Although she studied advanced mathematics at the graduate level at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is not a credentialed teacher in Massachusetts.
By leveraging the expertise of knowledgeable but unlicensed instructors, Unschool.school could help ameliorate the nationwide shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) teachers. As Stanford economist Raj Chetty’s celebrated research on the “lost Einsteins” of upcoming generations has shown, when we deprive students, especially low-income and minority students, of exposure to STEM subjects, we miss out on the innovations and inventions those students might otherwise make. This aspect of Unschool.school’s model also has a lesson for state policymakers when it comes to licensing teachers: Actual life experience is often more important than a piece of paper with an administrator’s imprimatur.
Unschool.school is helping students and teachers alike. Public school educators suddenly without work are now able to offer classes on Unschool.school’s online platform. Like Airbnb, Unschool.school allows educators to set their own rates for each class (whether an hourly fee or a flat rate), and Unschool.school takes 20%.
The mass school closures prompted by the COVID-19 crisis will invariably continue to have significant, negative ramifications for America’s students. But it’s important to see the silver lining, too. The pandemic is challenging long-held assumptions about the virtues of conventional education. People are now paying attention to educational offerings that have historically been on the periphery. Alternative methods of testing, learning, and educational delivery are now being given a moment to show their merit. Private solutions by local innovators are what will keep learning moving forward. These changes just might make education better — well after the pandemic ends.
Even during these dark times, that’s something to celebrate.
Alexandra Hudson is a former aide to Secretary Betsy DeVos at the U.S. Department of Education, a 2019 Novak fellow, and a Young Voices contributor.
