Education in the post-Covid19 world OR how the education system failed the students

Sensational headline for eyeballs? No. That is my conclusion after observing, reading and speaking to educators in my network.

Unprecedented times call for unusual response. The education system at both K-12 level and higher education has responded with the tools and innovation (or lack of it) from the industrial era. Why do I say that?

Let's take K-12. The response has been about converting the classroom experience to a virtual setting. That is simply flawed.

Online learning to succeed requires all or some of these:

1. Technology platforms (Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Google for Education, Learning Management Systems)
2. Content libraries (lecture capture, assignments, collaborative activities, formative assessments/quizzes, simulations)
3. Learning management (e.g. scope and sequence of instructional and learning design/plans, course builders, automated assessment and grading and software proctored testing)
4. Digital proficiency (tools, content, LMS training for teachers and support staff)
5. Teacher well-being (stress of building content, screen time, pressure of deadlines and uncertainty of the board exam cancellation and responding to students and parents)

What did the education leadership do? Just asked teachers to figure it out themselves and simply provided free tools like Zoom (useless for education) to connect with students. In a vast majority of cases teachers responded with great enterprise and creativity. Only because they care about students. education leaders are only interested in showing their authority and build their public profile by saying the right things. Teachers are the only heroes emerging out of this challenge.

I am yet to hear about a K-12 operator who acted strategically and supported the teachers and students on the four elements mentioned above. All they were interested in was about preserving their bricks and mortar business and being able to collect fees. Shame on you.

Let me also talk about the examining boards yes IB, Cambridge, CBSE, ISCE. They haven't exactly covered themselves with glory. In fact, the opposite - they have acted with opacity, arbitrariness, un-empathetically and high-handedness.

Let's take IB - the so called gold standard board. It prides in having a rigorous process of Evidence Based Internal Evaluation, grade prediction and the final exam is simply an extension of student work. What did they do? They completely disregarded the teachers' grade predictions, re-evaluated the student work (already graded by their teachers!) and applied an algorithm (not joking) to normalize the grades on the basis of the school's historical grade data and god knows what else - maybe the ethnicity, gender and financial background. That's the nature of AI algorithm. It simply builds its own variables like an accomplished statistician shows here.

Then they come up with a rule that students who are only up to 2 marks below the next grade will not be considered for a remark? How cruel is that?

https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/hmbysb/your_ib_results_are_incorrect_unfair_and/

https://positivelysemidefinite.com/2020/06/160k-students.html

The above model shows a perfect correlation between number of lawyers in California and the money spent on pets in USA. Welcome to IB data science.

There are nearly 20,000 students who have filed a petition on www.change.org against IB's flawed process and Norway has sued IB for their lack of transparency.

In one fell swoop IB destroyed their reputation and credibility. In many cases the points dropped as much as 12 or more killing all chances of university admission for the students in their dream universities.

Let's now turn to universities - they simply continued to push the responsibility of final school year grades to the respective boards and sit in grand judgment on the basis of the flawed grades as we saw in the case of IB above. No adaptation to consider a vast array of other data - previous board exam results (grade 10), predicted grades, lowering of cut-offs to account for judgement or algorithm errors, higher emphasis on SAT or equivalent. None, nothing, nada.

On the delivery of the new term in September - most universities are unclear and have not had the engagement and conversation with immigration authorities (for international students). Health and Safety procedures for students coming/coming back are not yet published when we are only 4 weeks away. Many universities are even reluctant to reach out to students at virtual events, agent arranged webinars to comfort and clarify to students. They claim to be very busy with the admissions workload and the education delivery (not the concern of admissions staff at least directly).

Don't even get me started on education regulators. They have ended up being mouthpieces of private education businesses.

You let the students down and they will make you pay. The system was broken and operated in a high handed way - was known. But that it has no foundation or empathy for students was the revelation.

Education leaders - hang your head in shame or drown in your own hubris.