Homeroom with Sal & Lily Eskelsen García - Wednesday, August 12

Hi everyone, welcome to the Homeroom live stream. Sal here from Khan Academy. Super excited about the conversation we're going to have today. But before we get started, I will give my standard announcements.

First of all, a reminder that we are not for profit and we can only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate and make a donation of any level; it all makes a huge difference. We've been running at a deficit pre-COVID, that deficit has only grown as we've gone through this crisis.

With that in mind, I'd like to give a special shout out to several organizations that have stepped up to help us close our gap. A special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, the fascinating artists, and the Amgen Foundation, and many others who’ve supported Khan Academy through the years to allow us to be in a position to help folks—teachers, parents, students—through the COVID crisis. But we do need more help, so anything you can do is much appreciated.

So with that, I'm super excited to introduce our guest today; there's a lot to talk about. We have Lily Eskelsen García, President of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country. Is that right? Or? Thanks so much for joining us, Lily.

Thanks so much for joining us. It's an honor.

Thank you for having me.

So maybe a good place to start—obviously all the conversation— and this isn’t, you know, normally this is, you know, we have these education conversations, but this has turned into a national conversation, or international conversation about the state of school closures, or school openings and safety. Just where is your mind right now? Where are we in the process? How are y’all thinking about it? What are y’all advocating for? What do you see is actually happening? And how is it going to play out over the next few weeks or months?

Well, so it’s really why I was so excited to be on this show because there’s so much misinformation out there about—it seems like everything.

So first I want to say, there is no one probably other than their parents who want those kids back in in-person learning more, more than their teachers and all of the counselors and the school nurse. Everybody, we want our kids back, but we want to go back in that school building when and where we can do it without someone dying. You know, that I even have to say that out loud is a little weird, but I noticed when I was subtle and I’d say, you know, without someone getting sick. Bottom line is, it’s a global pandemic out there.

There’s something in the air swirling around that’s killing people, right? Thousands and thousands of people have their lungs attacked; it’s impossible for them to breathe. It’s a horrible way to die, and we don’t seem to all be getting that. Medical professionals have told us that the most dangerous place to be in this global pandemic is in a closed, poorly ventilated building with lots of people crowding together, breathing on each other, hour after hour, day after day.

Which is the description of my sixth-grade classroom the year I had 39 kids. So I worried on any given day that if someone, you know, coughed in the back of the room, I was gonna catch their cold. I knew it; three times a year I was gonna get somebody’s cold. This is not that; this is quite different. This means somebody coughs and I end up in the ICU. Somebody coughs on their best friend and this kid is infected and asymptomatic and goes home and hugs his babysitter, who’s his babysitter grandma.

And we know now, with some—there’s new information coming out all the time, this is still so new, but that we have people who say kids can’t get sick; kids are immune. The president, governors, the secretary of education—lots of people giving really bad information. We now know that not only can kids get sick, not only can kids end up in the hospital, but a disproportionate amount of those kids who are ill are minority children; they’re black and brown children. They’re from immigrant communities; they are at greater risk.

And so they’re also in the schools with the oldest buildings, with the poorest ventilation, the most overcrowded classrooms. We have to understand that this is dangerous to children, and it is dangerous to their families and it is dangerous to their teachers. And I am an excellent, very, very good sixth-grade teacher. You would want your kid in my sixth grade.

I’m not an infectious disease medical professional, so when I need to know something about that, I hear what Dr. Fauci is saying or public health professionals—they're not saying anything different. They are all together—the scientific community. The only thing we can do right now is try not to infect each other, because if we do, people die. So they’re saying you don’t even think about opening a school, a restaurant, a movie. You don’t go to a rally until you’ve got this infection rate under control.

It’s now skyrocketing; it’s exploding in more and more places instead of fewer and fewer places. And so we’re really worried about these one-size-fits-all, open up the school, stuff those kids back in—why? We need to get our jobs numbers up; we need their parents back. It’s gonna backfire; it's gonna backfire. And they will be doing what they’re already doing in those premature openings—kids are getting sick, they’re infecting the community, everybody—and now they’re having to close the schools. The chaos, the insecurity that families are going through, it’s a crisis.

Let’s treat it like a crisis; listen to the people who know what they’re talking about. You know, that makes a ton of sense, and it’s your point— a lot of it—it’s, you know, amazing that we have to articulate it, because it makes so much sense.

How do you think this plays out? And then you mentioned kind of this fits-all—everyone open schools by, you know, no matter what. It doesn’t make sense especially where we are in the pandemic and then the incidence rate and some of these early cases that we’re seeing. You know, the school season hasn’t even—the school year hasn’t even started yet, or so it’s—the very early stages in several places, but we’re already seeing these cases as soon as they opened up. Within three, four days, 200 students, 800 students—whatever. People are testing positive.

Is— I guess there’s two questions. One is, are there not one-size-fits-all solutions that could get us a little bit closer to this? Whether it’s hybrid—you know, could we use outdoor learning? I know during the tuberculosis crisis last century they did a lot of outdoor schooling. Are there things that we can do, or are there incidence rates in certain communities at which point, you know, the epidemiologists are telling you that yeah, at that rate, and maybe if you take the right precautions, and maybe if you use outdoor learning, it might be okay?

What are you seeing there?

So I’m seeing some of the most creative educators in the world who are really trying to say, all right, so distance—how are we going to distance? Disinfect? We’re not talking about a little Windex—you know, we’re talking about disinfecting using some pretty specific things. And by the way, little kids, I love them; I loved those 39 kids. They are little germ factories, all right? So they are touching their noses and they’re touching their little grubby mitts everywhere. So it’s especially important that we have a protocol on disinfecting. Do we have the masks? And do we have the ability to do some serious screening as kids come into the building? Where do they have a cough, a temperature? Are we doing any kind of even group and random COVID testing?

So all of the above are what the disease professionals are saying we have to do. But here’s the important thing, and I’ve seen some of the most creative—here’s how we’re going to distance those kindergarteners. How are you going to keep kinder hula hoops? Really? Yes.

As one of my members, she said, we’re using creative use of space. Instead of having 20 kindergarteners, we’re putting like 8 to 10 in a room. We took out all the desks and we put hula hoops and pillows on the floor, and that’s their space, and they don’t go out of their hula hoop space. They’re not going to wear the mask. Little kids, that’s a toy. So they’re wearing space helmets. But they’re going to the moon, and they’ve got the plexiglass helmets.

They’re doing what they can with what they have, which isn’t a lot. But here’s what I want people to know: Folks keep forgetting the most important part—the number of the infection rate in your community is going to be the infection rate of the people walking into that building. The teacher lives in the neighborhood; those kids and their families live in those neighborhoods. That school is a reflection of what’s going on in the broader community.

And so if you have, like they had in New Orleans, a 20 or 25 percent infection rate, you can probably bet that 25 percent of the big and little people that walk into that school are going to be infected by COVID. Only this time you’re putting them in these classrooms that have poor ventilation; that even with your hula hoops, they’re gonna be passing each other in the hall.

That’s why the first thing—and it’s the thing most people say, yeah, well, we don’t really care about that—you care about the community infection rate until you get it down to about 5 percent, where it’s manageable. Where you can say, maybe 5 percent of the folks coming into this school and we can screen for them, we can screen and do some health checks for them. But that’s the most important part, and it’s the part that’s out of our hands.

All the hula hoops and face masks in the world will not help a surging virus rate. And so that’s what we’re worried about, is that folks are looking at this list—infection rates, masks, disinfectants, distancing—and there are people who don’t really know what they’re doing saying, well, let’s do the masks and the plexiglass, but we don’t know how to distance the kids. And yeah, we’ve got a 30 percent infection rate; we can’t do anything about it, so let’s just pick and choose what might be easiest, most convenient, least expensive. It doesn’t work that way; this is complicated, it's hard, and it’s expensive if you’re gonna do it right.

I was alarmed when I heard the president say, well, I looked at the guidance— that cost a lot of money, and you know I told them to go back and rewrite it. That’s not how it works. Don’t do that; listen to the people who are trying to save our lives. And why wouldn’t we listen to them?

So number one, I’m a little mad. Okay, I’m very angry about a lot of politicians—local, state, and national—who told folks we don’t have to have a plan; it’ll go away. It’s magic. Nope, it’s science; it’s really science. And what they didn’t do in January and February is the result; is that we’ve prolonged this.

We are the outlier in the United States of America. There are countries who do not have an infection; got it. And now I’m getting questions like, what are you going to do, teachers, to make sure we can still keep them safe? What’s your plan B? I don’t have one.

I mean, what you’re describing is—it’s not a fair question to ask a teacher. What politicians—and what you’re describing makes all the sense in the world. You know, we had Randy Weingarten, your peer at the National Federation of Teachers, saying essentially the same things: You know, you have to take basic precautions, do contact tracing, and then get your infection rate in a community down to a certain threshold.

At which point, you know, what your point you’re making, and Randy Weingarten made is that, like, it’s not that people are saying that it has to be risk-free. Obviously, even in pre-COVID, there’s all sorts of risks in our lives, but it just has to become a reasonable risk. And it’s not just about teachers or students; this is about the community. This is just epidemiologically sound for the entire community.

So, you know, we—we actually had Dr. Fauci on the same live stream, and the best that I could understand when, you know, when I asked him the questions of how this is all gonna play out, it really feels like the most optimistic scenario is one of these vaccines that are currently in phase three, which we’ve already started manufacturing essentially speculatively that they might hopefully get 6—you know, prove effective in the December, January timeframe, at which point we have this massive logistical challenge of distributing hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine. And we don’t know to what degree they’ll work or how people take it.

Simultaneously, you have the therapeutic lens where hopefully some therapies will come out in the January, February timeframe where COVID can be less deadly, less severe; hopefully, we get to some of those things. But any way you look at it, everyone I’ve talked to—we had the CEO of Novartis on this live stream as well—they’re all saying it’s kind of a year that we’re in this world that you’ve just described.

So how are you thinking about it? How do you think the education—how do you think educators should think about what looks like it could be at least a full school year of some form of distance learning?

And first of all, we were so thrilled that the House of Representatives—and who says they’re ever thrilled with anything that Congress does—but we were actually thrilled that they listened to us and they said, yes, you prepare for the face masks and the disinfectant, and yes, we need all these things—and please don’t make us have to lay off the school nurse!

All right? So we got a chunk of money from the House of Representatives that is languishing now with Mitch McConnell not wanting to bring it to a vote. But one of the things we said was—and you do have to have simultaneously the ability for a school district to deliver distance learning. And so we asked for all kinds of funding for a family to be able to bring Wi-Fi into their home. That’s like indoor plumbing now, you know? Just—there were two. And guess what? Not everybody’s mom has a laptop and has an extra tablet sitting around the house.

We kind of take that for granted that, well, everyone has one. No, stop thinking everyone has just because you have it. And so there’s some extra money, four billion dollars that would help with the technology that could deliver distance learning, especially to the neediest families who are least likely to be able to afford things like an extra tablet and Wi-Fi in their home.

When, you know, when we ran out of those school buildings—120,000 school buildings back in March—like someone pulled the fire alarm, and you know, it all simultaneously—120,000 school buildings emptied out. It wasn’t for the fun of it; it was because infectious disease medical experts said this is a pandemic. It is growing; we have to do something to stop infecting each other, and a school is like the worst place to do something like that.

So we left, and within a day, we had people who were not trained in delivering virtual classes saying, all right, what’s this thing called Zoom? What are we doing here? What’s—and they were going online, and they were getting information, and they were connecting with each other. My organization, we were just bombarded with people saying, what you got? I gotta do this tomorrow, and I’ve got third graders, or I’ve got a calculus class, or I’ve got special ed students, or I’ve got kids that don’t speak English, and I’ve got to deliver instruction and sometimes services and sometimes lunch to these kids because that’s what a school is.

It’s a community, and it does take a village to deliver what those kids need. Sometimes that school nurse is their family’s primary care physician because they can’t afford to go to the doctor. So we took all of that.

We pulled it together. Oh my Lord, it wasn’t perfect; it was frustrating, it’s still frustrating. But we knew in May, people were saying this is going in the wrong direction. This is not going to be okay. Now they told us the warm weather would clear it all; no, it didn’t clear it all up. And in fact, they opened up some places inside that they shouldn’t have, and folks rushed into the bar, and they should’ve known better, and they ended up getting sick, getting other people sick, who went to work, who sat on a bus, who did what people do, and all of a sudden things are spiking all over the country.

So it became very, very clear to teachers, to school boards, and even to governors: okay, this is not going away. What are we gonna do in August and September as schools start to reopen? And that’s when we—it was in May—we went to the House and said you’ve got to give us some money for technology, for home technology for kids that don’t have access, don’t have opportunity. We were delivering to some of these kids paper packets of worksheets. I hate worksheets, but it was all we could do. The only technology in some homes was mom’s telephone, and she took it to work with her because she had a service job stacking grocery shelves or something.

And we couldn’t even call on the telephone our students and find out how they were doing or give them some instruction. And we’re still just appalled that in May we had—we thought we were on a fast track to getting this, and it’s still sitting in the Senate.

So, abandon all hope, you know, something coming from the Senate that’s gonna get to these kids in time. Schools are already opening, and they didn’t do it right, and those schools, many of them are already closing, and it’s causing chaos in families when we could have had a plan—we could have. It didn’t have to be like this.

But now we’re still trying to figure out—now in some places in Nebraska, one of my colleagues called and said we know which of our kids didn’t have Wi-Fi; we just lost them. So now we’re working with local television stations. We’re just talking about—you know, you’ve got a 10-antenna on your old-fashioned TV. It’s not even cable. But some of the TV stations are giving us an hour where we could say this is for younger grades, this is for middle school, this is for high school. We’re doing some general project-based learning, so at least there’s something. At least there’s something, and the parents can, you know, tune into it, a television program.

We’re doing whatever it takes. We wish that some of the lawmakers, the people that have the purse strings, we wish that they would step up and see that they could be helping us instead of being the obstacle for getting something very important done.

And what would you think would be kind of the order? Let’s hope—and I agree with you 100—you know, in a world where we’re doing a trillion here and a trillion there of stimulus packages, the internet connectivity issue is a small pittance there.

But let’s hope that we’re able to get the devices and get the internet access for a lot of these students. And I know that a lot of school districts have been doing some heroic things distributing tens or hundreds of thousands of devices. Even then, you know, we’ve been hearing about there’s some subset of kids that just don’t have enough support at home; maybe not ideal environments—you know, 5, 10 percent of kids that even if they’re getting the access, they’re just getting disengaged.

So if we had more resources, where would it go? You know, would it go towards—you know, there’s a question here from Janet Martin, Rugrats, on Facebook: Are teachers getting enough support and training they need to keep students engaged, even excited?

So, you know, teacher training is one element there; is more social supports is another element. I don’t know how that—how you deliver that in a world of COVID. Then there’s obviously online tools and instruction—obviously what we do at Khan Academy and other tools. Where do you see, you know, if you had a blank check—and I know that’s a little bit of daydreaming right now—but I would love, you know, I think there might be an openness hopefully at some point when people realize how serious this is.

Where what would be the order of operations?

And I’m never going to be one of the Pollyannas; let’s make, you know, lemonade out of this—this is horrible and people are dying, and I’m not gonna say, oh but the good news—there’s no, no, there’s no good news here. But let me tell you, the urgency that it has produced is how important that basic teacher training.

And I know I’m talking about, you know, you said, you know, like a magic wand or a blank check, you know, and I’m saying, what if we could go in a time machine, you know, to the future? I know that this is the long game; this is the long term. But we need it. We need how to engage with teaching on technology, distance learning, what that looks like if you’re an art teacher, if you’re a calculus teacher, if you’re a third-grade teacher.

I’m a sixth-grade teacher, and I know that you will be impressed to learn that I have a master’s degree in instructional technology, which I got on an Atari 800 in 1983. So, yeah, I need to like up my game just a tiny bit. I can do Oregon Trail like nobody’s business, but I’m thinking that maybe I could upgrade.

Most of us, unless you were in a special program that did distance learning for kids in rural areas—we do have some educators whose specialty is distance learning. Now we have to look at this, like technology is your blackboard; technology is your, you know, is the chalk you use.

It’s how you have to deliver. This isn’t going to be the first time and the last time that we have some kind of emergency where kids—where they can’t walk into that school building. We’ve done things with snow days, and there’s a hurricane, or a tornado. I mean we’ve—we’ve had these horrible crises where the school got blown away. Look at how long Katrina took to recover from, and there was no plan B for these kids.

So now maybe our eyes are open that becoming a teacher means you know about your subject; you know how to teach that subject. And those are two different things, by the way. And you know all the tools that you may have to use to teach that subject. And technology is going to be more and more important that we become comfortable with it and that we understand how important it is to have that technology in a child’s home so that they can do their homework not just in case of a global pandemic.

But we’ve always known that the homework gap mimics the technology gap in that child’s living space, in that child’s home. And that there are kids who have wonderful tools; they have access. I wouldn’t take anything away from anybody, but it was important for those kids, and their parents were able to afford it and saying, yep, this is really, really important for my kid to succeed. They’re right; it’s important for all kids to have that access and that opportunity.

And just like we would say in the school building for those kids, we fight for a kid’s access to a school nurse, a librarian, a counselor, the arts—the broad range of programs that every child needs. And now they’re all going to need access not just to the equipment—that’s actually the easy part—but access to a professional who knows what she or he is doing to make sure that those kids who are learning that way are being taught well.

It’s not my favorite way to teach; it really isn’t. I love to hug kids; I can’t do that now, and I don’t want them to fall behind, and I want them to be safe. So if I’m a true professional, I have to say, all right, on a dime, I know how to best use this technology, I know the do’s and don’ts, and I know what my audience, what my students need from me. And sometimes they need a hug, and sometimes they need me to know how to engage them on a screen that they’re looking at.

I want those things.

And what do you think that could look like? Obviously, you know, we can’t do a paint the full picture, but sketch what it looks like. ’Cause I think, to your point, everyone’s been talking about, you know, just the social distancing—do we open or close? And then the next level, they’ve been talking about device access, but there hasn’t been a lot of conversation about just what does at least adequate—we don’t even have to talk about great—but what does an adequate experience look like in this world?

You know, if you could sketch, you know, what would be your expectations for your own children or if you were in the classroom teaching a sixth-grade classroom? How would you run your classroom in math or English or social sciences right now?

Well, one of the things that we know is a great advantage to our students is to have mom or dad or a big brother or sister helping them, especially if you’re dealing with younger kids. But I think it’s the same with older kids too where they don’t plug in or they don’t engage. And part of it may be that we need to know how to develop better pacing and better lesson plans and things that are meant to be engaging on that screen.

Right now, for a lot of our teachers, it was, all right, we’ve got, you know, a free Zoom, or we’ve got to free something, and I’ll go do whatever you were doing with your 35 kids yesterday, and now just do the same thing looking at them as sitting in 35 different kitchens on their tablets and laptops. And we know that’s not the best pedagogy.

We know that you have to engage kids, and you have to ask them questions, and they have to be able to ask questions and interact with each other. And there’s ways that we can do that. NEA is actually giving some webinars for teachers that have never taught online that are saying I just need a—I need a primer on this; I don’t know the first thing about what this format can do or my district is using this kind of platform, and I don’t know what a platform is.

So, I mean we’re talking about strict beginners, and doing some webinars. Anybody that wants to find out more about what NEA is just putting out there free, it’s nea.org/covidedaction, because these are the actions that many of our members, thousands and thousands have said, if you can do anything for me, just help me know what the options are. Because I don’t want to just look at a screen and recite from a textbook.

I know what I’m doing when I’m with those kids; how do I get to something that looks like that online? And so again, I’m not an expert in that, but we’re putting some of the teachers that have done this before, and we want to look at what you’re doing, Sal, with, you know, with your online experience. Because people are desperate to say, if I don’t know what I’m supposed to know, I gotta learn it, and I got a short time to really ramp this up, because we don’t want to close teaching and learning.

I’ve had too many reporters who’ve said, you know, are you for closing the schools, or are you gonna call? And the whole thing, it’s like this is the building. And yeah, we don’t want the building to be unsafe, unhealthy—we don’t want to rush into a place that they told us to rush out of because it wasn’t safe.

So let’s get that part right, but we don’t want to close teaching and learning. Those kids need us; they need us to deliver instruction; they need us to deliver services; they need us to deliver lunch.

So we’re trying to develop our own plan as a learning community, sometimes school by school or district by district. And along with all of those practical things, I want to know how to use this so that my kids get all I can give them. And it’s—for us it’s not like—another reporter said, are you scared that now that everyone knows how easy it is to teach online and that parents are just—they know how easy it is to just turn on their computer.

And I went, you know, talk to some of those parents because they’re the ones that are begging the schools to please open up. It’s not easy; it’s hard to be a teacher. It’s hard to do this right. We love our work; we’re professionals at it. We put a lot of sweat equity into it. It’s a labor of love for us, and it is for those parents as well.

We want to get it right, and we’re—that’s what we’re committed to. And I don’t have a magic wand, and it’s gonna look very, very different in every community. And by the way, there are some communities—this is the most creative one—that’s online learning that I’ve heard of and it’s in Maryland; it’s a state—the state of Maryland. They have a plan. Whoa!

So they’re the outlier. But their plan was, look, we probably could open this building; it’s super disinfected with all the masks and those health screenings, but we can put a small fraction of the kids in here and socially distance. So they said, so let’s go with that; we’re going to do distance learning; we are going to have a plan for distance learning so that it’s not just, you know, we’re closing school tomorrow, go do distance learning.

Everyone has planned for this. We’re going to plan on how we’re going to deliver those lunches and those homework packets. We’re going to use the buses in a reverse way; they’re going to be delivering things to the kids’ homes, not picking up the kids to go to school.

And so all hands on deck, they’re all doing it. But they said there are some kids who might not have mom and dad at home. You know, we can hand them a laptop; we might even be able to set up some kind of Wi-Fi broadband in a parking lot somewhere, where mom and dad aren’t there to bring the kids to download something in a parking lot. They’re not there to explain to a second or third grader what it is that we’re doing.

So they’re going to open up their schools to those kids who need the most, who don’t have it in their homes, and they’re not giving in-person instruction to those kids. Those kids are opening up the school, a laptop and tablets. There’s adult supervision, but the teacher is online, and it’s some of the paraprofessionals who are saying, all right, I can help you like your mom or dad would be helping you if they had a job where they were working from home or had access to that.

And for those teachers that are teaching special education kids, especially the medically fragile kids who need so much and they’re in a very specific atmosphere, they’re saying we’re going to bring those kids in. They’re very few of them; we can distance, we can disinfect, and we’re not opening the school, but we’re making sure that everybody has access to what the most fortunate kids have access to.

So I’m so proud of educators, and there are lots of school boards that are listening to us as they say, all right, Dr. Fauci says it’s not ready to open the school. We still want teaching and learning going on; you’re the professionals; tell us how we can do this safely and do it competently.

And it’s happening in more places than you’d think. What makes the news is we did it wrong; we opened the school, hundreds of kids got sick; we click front page news. And it is a cautionary tale; it should be front page news.

But those places that have quietly done it the way they were supposed to—they listened to medical experts, they listened to education experts—they said, parents, what can you do in your homes? What can’t you do in your homes? Those are the places that are quietly showing us the way forward, and maybe we can give a little more attention to the—not just the cautionary tales, but the success stories.

No, I love that. The example you gave, Maryland, actually hadn’t heard of it. And I hadn’t heard of that model, but it makes a ton of sense, and it’s gonna—I’m gonna add that to my talk track of ideas for folks.

I also giggled a little bit because I also get the question that you, I guess, got around—will distance learning replace teachers and all of that? And you know, I almost laugh every time I hear that because, you know, I’m sometimes a bit of a poster child for online learning or whatever else, and I’m the first one to say if I had to pick between a live teacher and technology, I would pick the live teacher any day for my kids or anyone else’s kids.

And pure distance learning is not a good solution for the great majority of students. What we should be thinking about is how do we get all of the power of an amazing teacher—especially, ideally, once we’re post-pandemic, in person—so that you have that, you’re sharing a room, you can have that hug, you can have that human connection, and then think about how tools can be in service. Once again, not technology for technology’s sake, but technology in service to true pedagogical or social-emotional goals.

So it couldn’t be more aligned, and I’d love to go offline and talk about how we can help because I think we’re very aligned on this. You know, just in the remaining time we have, what do you think? You know, everything we’re describing—this is clearly a suboptimal year; not everyone’s gonna be able to do what Maryland did.

There’s gonna be kids that are going to fall further behind, not be supported. It’s probably—this year’s probably gonna drive more inequity, not less. What do you think is going to be the outcome of it? If we’re talking about, you know, if we’re having this conversation in five years or we say, yeah, COVID changed a lot, and this is what the outcome of it was—positive, negative? I’d love to, you know, put your prognostication hat. You know, what are we gonna be looking at permanently in the education system or in society because of this?

I really appreciate the gravity of that question, and I don’t think we ask it enough. We’re going to look back on this year as a lost year for so many kids because of the political lack of will to take this seriously and to do what needed to be done.

The magical thinking of too many key political figures—local, state, and national—has devastated lives, and not just the people who lost someone, lost their health or their life to COVID, but these school children. I just keep saying this because I have—you can’t see it because I turned my computer away from the wall that I have punched several holes in—just so upset and so angry at the poor judgment of the magical thinking of politicians who got really, really good advice.

I’m a sixth-grade teacher; I understood that advice. I understood—I’m not a scientist, but anybody could explain or listen to the explanation and say, well, yeah, that makes sense. And these politicians that have could have done something about it, I hate to just dwell on that, but these kids have been sacrificed to the bad judgment of too many politicians.

And I want to make it my life’s mission to try and recapture some of their loss this year, and it’s going to be a really tough job. What we should be doing going forward, I think with new and better decisions, will be what are we gonna go back and take especially those kids that had access and opportunity to nothing.

If anything, I’m not even just talking about, well, look at all the folks that didn’t get to go to their graduation party. Yeah, that’s really sad; I’m—you know, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about—someone, you only get one year to be a first grader; you only get one year to put the consonants and the vowels together and have it click and go: I get it; this is called reading. Oh my Lord.

And to have fun so that you make reading something that you just do because you love it. For some of these kids, we’re gonna have to go back and give them something extra and give them something—not just remedial but something where we say you’re the kids that we’re not gonna put in an overcrowded classroom and expect to get caught up.

You’re the kids that we are going to prioritize the tools and the techniques and the programs that we’re going to be doing with you, that are going to incorporate the arts and sports and field trips. We’re gonna do something to bring joy into your learning experience that was lost because of this last year.

Funding for public schools has been miserable for so long, and I reject people who, well-meaningly, they will think they’re saying something wrong, and they say schools are the fundamental, you know, foundation of our economy; it’s our best investment. All right? So yes, and for me that’s like four on the list; it’s a human and civil right to an education.

I don’t care if that choir puts one dime into the economy; it was that child’s right to have that experience. It is the foundation of our democracy, of being a good citizen, of being a good neighbor, of being a good parent, a good human being.

So there’s so much wrapped up in that public school. I’m gonna start crying. We forget that, and we think of it as a transactional piece of the economy; it’s so much bigger than that. And we have got—we owe this last year to millions of kids, and we should make that a national priority.

Well, no, I couldn’t agree with you more, Lily. And, you know, I’m saying this completely generally. You know, view Khan Academy as, you know, in service to you and all of the teachers that you’re representing.

You know, we view ourselves that way, and especially in this crisis, we want to do whatever we can to mitigate the suboptimality of what we’re all facing this coming year and to help mitigate and close whatever gaps we can in the aftermath of whatever all of this is.

But really appreciate the conversation; I learned a ton, and I hope that this is the start of our conversations together.

Absolutely; thank you so much for having me.

Thanks so much, Lily.

Well, thank you all for joining what I—you know, again, of a fascinating conversation. The whole world is going through a very tough set of circumstances right now, but I think the school issue and the ability to make sure that inequity doesn’t grow as we go through school closures or physical school closures.

As Lily mentioned, we’re going to hopefully continue to educate kids in any ways we can. It’s the—I think it’s the issue of our day. You know, that and the economics and the education one in a lot of ways might be more important even than the economics because it has very long-lasting implications.

So thanks so much for joining this conversation, and I look forward to seeing you all later this week for more of this Homeroom live stream. Thanks, everyone.