Dyer cautioned against hiring third-party instructors as a cost-saving measure. His district now pays Elevate K-12 for 15 remote teachers, most of whom are live-streamed onto largescreen televisions in physical classrooms that students attend in person. The district saves some money, because it doesn’t have to provide benefits to the teachers. But there are also added costs, Dyer said, such as paying paraprofessionals to help with classroom management when a physical teacher isn’t present. That fits with advice from García and other experts, who stressed that no matter what schooling looks like in 2021 and beyond, the combination of learning loss and trauma that children and families have experienced will require more educators, not less. The real value of live remote instruction, according to Dyer, is flexibility. If there’s an Advanced Placement course that 10 students at one high school and 10 students at a separate high school hope to take, Dougherty County can now contract with Elevate K-12 for a single remote teacher who can be livestreamed into both schools simultaneously. There are also options to hire Elevate K-12 teachers to provide synchronous instruction for just three or four days a week, or just a few periods a day. Some may worry about converting teaching into “gig work,” with educators going from being professional unionized employees to becoming independent contractors along the lines of Uber drivers. (Baranwal responded by saying that Elevate K-12 teachers, 83 percent of whom are women, “want the flexibility to work at the hours that work best for them.”) And an even more fundamental concern is that even the best live remote instruction is a poor substitute for face-to-face teaching. On that, the Dougherty County superintendent agreed—to a point. “If everyone could have an effective teacher physically in the classroom at all times, we would certainly prefer that,” Dyer said. “But that’s not possible in every school system in the country.” Officials in the 73,000-student Guilford County, Page 29 N.C., school system learned something surprising from their COVID-driven foray into remote learning. “It offers parents a unique opportunity to be much more deeply involved in their children’s education,” Superintendent Sharon Contreras said. “They actually get to observe instruction regularly. That hasn’t happened before.” Prior to last school year, online offerings in Guilford County consisted mostly of asynchronous supplemental and credit-recovery courses for high school students. The district was still recovering from an ill-fated experiment with 1-to1 computing several years earlier, and schools still had to contend with a significant digital divide in the surrounding community. As a result, teachers’ live instruction availability was limited to an hour or so per day in the weeks immediately after the coronavirus hit. Many parents weren’t happy. So this summer, the district decided to triple the amount of live remote instruction schools offered. “Expectations changed dramatically,” said Chief Academic Officer Whitney Oakley. She and Contreras wanted to avoid hybrid instruction as much as possible, believing it’s not realistic to ask teachers to teach in two fundamentally different ways at the same time. They also wanted to provide certainty to parents who knew last summer they wouldn’t send their children back to physical school at all during the 2020-21 school year. And the biggest challenge they faced was funding: There wasn’t enough money to allow teachers to be all-remote or allin person and to allow for appropriate social distancing inside classrooms. “Parent choice is going to drive much of this conversation. Districts would be wise to think about how they’re building out these new options,” Annette Anderson, Education Professor, Johns Hopkins University. Anderson advised. “Districts would be wise to think about how they’re building out these new options.” (continued on page 30) “Stronger Together!”
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