Richard Carranza on how NYC is handling school closures during Covid-19 | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Welcome to the daily homeroom live stream, which is something that all of us at Khan Academy started up once we started having mass school physical closures. I should say many seems like a lifetime ago. It's just a way to keep in touch, have interesting conversations, and understand what's happening in the world around us in education and beyond.

Before we get into the conversation with a very exciting guest today, I always give the reminder to folks that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. We exist because of philanthropic donations, so if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating. I want to give a special shout-out to several corporate partners who stepped up, especially because of our COVID response. You can imagine our traffic is almost three times what it typically is. Our costs are going up; we're trying to put more programs out there sooner than later.

So, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, Novartis, AT&T, Fastly for stepping up, and for the many other supporters for Khan Academy over the years. We would not be able to do what we're doing now if not for the many years of support, and we're still running at a deficit. So whether you're a corporate partner or even a small donor who can give three dollars, five dollars, everything makes a difference so that we can continue to accelerate what we're offering.

With that, I'm really eager to introduce our guest Chancellor Richard Carranza. As the chancellor of the New York City public schools, the largest school district in America, and obviously a school district in a part of the country that has had unusual challenges as we've gone through this crisis. Chancellor Carranza, thanks so much for joining.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you so much for the invitation! I'm really honored to be here, and I want to say hi to everybody. I'm sure many of our students are watching as well because they love what you do. So thank you for the invitation.

No, and so you know what I'm fascinated by is, I would love to know what was going on in your life. You know, you are a New Yorker, and obviously, you are the head of the largest school district, a highly complex school district in the country. What was going on in your head at the end of March when it was clear that we had a pandemic in the United States? It started to become clear that New York was getting hard hit, and people were at least starting to surface the notion of school closures. What was going on in your mind?

Well, we had been preparing for that eventuality back in February. One of the things that's pernicious about this pandemic and this virus is that it's had so many iterations. It keeps on iterating and looks different. But we were trying to be prepared. So when the decision was made on March 16th that we would transition to remote learning, the one thing that we kept in mind was that school was not closing; we were going to continue learning, but it was just not going to be in a face-to-face environment. That's why we said we've been in remote learning mode ever since then.

It's been just a matter of making sure that our teachers and our students and our families, quite honestly, because caregivers, parents, guardians, grandmothers, neighbors, they've all kind of become new teachers as well and supports for their students. So we're making sure that the entire organization is really pivoted to developing resources, providing resources, and supporting students and families in remote learning.

And I want to remind everyone, if you have questions for Chancellor Carranza or myself, feel free to post your questions on Facebook and YouTube where this is streaming, and we have team members who are going to be able to surface questions to us. Chancellor Carranza, in that, let's say that a week or two before that March 16th when the schools closed, what was the order of operations? You know there's so many schools; I think it's what, 1.2 million students you have. How did you think about internet access? How did you think about, I know, school lunches, special needs students—what was how did you juggle all of that?

So I have an incredible team of folks that I work with that had already started doing the logistical planning around those issues. But obviously, we were very concerned about if you remember during that time period, even the medical professionals were learning new things about how this virus was promulgating itself in the community. So we were trying to stay up to date because school was still in session and following the advice of our medical experts. We were very much into protocols about if there's a self-reported case, there's a confirmed case—what is the protocol? Do we shut down the school? How do we notify families?

But as it became more and more apparent that we were going to go into remote learning, then the focus was really about our most vulnerable students: students with disabilities, our multilingual learner students, our immigrant students, students in temporary housing, which is a term that we use in New York City for homeless students, and all of our vulnerable populations. At the same time, we were also very concerned about the fact that, you know, New York City has almost 9 million residents, and it was very clear that the emergency responders, our medical personnel, our essential workers really depend on the schools for their students to be taken care of.

So at the same time as we were planning how to transition to remote learning and shut the physical buildings down, we were also standing up over 150, what we call regional enrichment centers (REC) sites all over the city of New York, in every borough, specifically for the children of first responders, medical personnel, essential workers, so that they could continue to serve the residents of New York City and know that their children would be taken care of.

That was a surreal experience because now you have children in a school environment, so all of the social distancing and the face mask and the precaution, and having 24/7 cleaning happening all the time—how do you serve the food? All of those were the things that we were talking about and planning for. In addition, we know that over 80 percent of the students in New York City's public schools qualify for free and reduced lunch. So the poverty is real. We know that many of our students get their meals at school.

So at the same time, we planned for and stood up over 450 meal hubs across the city in every borough where students could come get breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in one fell swoop. And then about three weeks ago, we extended that to not only children but any resident can come to a meal hub and get all three meals as well. So we stood that up as well because we know that it's important for students and their parents not to go hungry.

I'll tell you this right now—since we transitioned on March 16th, we have served almost nine and a half million meals out of those food hubs, and we're averaging right now a little over half a million meals per day that are being distributed. And then we're also doing other things. We heard from some of our students that said, you know, during the school year we get feminine hygiene products at our school for free, and you know there's a need for that.

So we've started now distributing feminine hygiene products at these meal hubs, again trying to be responsive to the needs of our community and making sure that they're being taken care of. That's incredible! I can't even imagine the complexity of doing all of that so quickly, and we have a lot of comments coming in.

One from Facebook, David Wang says thanks for taking care of the homeless and those who don't speak English. TL Quo from Facebook says REC sites fantastic idea. They're asking what it's like—you kind of described it already. You know, it seems like it's hard. And I hadn't even thought about that dimension of the crisis until you just talked about it—that yes, these healthcare workers need some type of support.

There's a question here from Leslie Elder-Girl from YouTube: I work for the Bagwell College of Education in Georgia's Kennesaw State University. What can educator prep programs do to support what you believe will be the new norm? Chancellor Carranza, I'll add a question—so there's a short-term. How did you navigate that where you had to go to, whatever you want to call it, remote learning, distance learning, in fairly short order? What were the expectations? How did you do training? And then what do you think is, you know, to Leslie's question, what do you think is going to be the new normal, if there is one?

Great questions, so thank you for both of those questions. So let me give some context. When we decided that we would close schools, we were fortunate that we had three days to prepare for remote learning. People are going to say, what do you mean you have three days? Well, in essence, we took a system of over 150,000 teachers and 1.1 million students and, in a matter of three days—72 hours—we completely transitioned to remote learning.

Now, we know that many of our teachers were already experienced with and had done work with virtual learning, remote learning, online learning, blended environments, flipped classrooms—really incredible work here in New York City. But we also know that there was a modicum of our teachers that had never had that experience, so it was a crash course, a boot camp if you will, those three days to make sure that teachers had their devices, knew where to log in.

We created something in our department—a learning management system called Teach Hub—where we've put links, the link to Khan Academies in there, and lots of resources for teachers to teach remotely from home. We stood that up; we did intensive training for those three days, and then we went into remote learning mode. The schools have been closed except for the ones that are functioning as food hubs or these REC centers.

So for us, it was really making sure that educators had what they needed. What was also important was to recognize that not all of our students had devices. So immediately for those three days, schools assigned the school-based laptops and devices to their students, again prioritizing the most vulnerable students. For students that needed those devices, students went home with those devices—there are about 175,000 of those devices.

But what we immediately did as well is we worked with whoever could actually produce for us, and that happened to be Apple. So we put in an order for 300,000 Wi-Fi enabled iPads, and I'm happy to tell you—and we did a survey and we had principals and teachers in contact with their students—they were giving us that information as to who needed devices.

And remember, these are 1,800 schools in New York City, so lots of information flowing to us. But I'm happy to report that as of this week we've now delivered, shipped, and delivered over 290,000 devices that are in the hands of our students right now. So short-term versus long-term—the short term is making sure that our students had those devices, making sure our teachers had the support they needed to transition to remote learning.

But the long-term implications are vast and profound, and this gets to the question that came in as well about teaching programs. A crisis is always an opportunity to do something better, and we in education have lamented the digital divide for decades. This has forced us across the country to really take on the digital divide. If there's any silver lining with this pandemic, it is that when we get to the other side of this pandemic, we will have bridged the digital divide in New York City. That's an amazing accomplishment, but I think it's an important accomplishment.

Now what that means is that teacher preparation programs—we're never going to go back to the way it was. So technology and the ability to find resources and utilize resources in different ways, the ability to use technology to personalize even more so the learning needs of students in a very individualized way, we're seeing that there's tremendous power right now in the hands of teachers to be able to do that.

So if I was a professor in a teaching university preparing teachers, I would be insisting that we have lots of pedagogy for this flipped classroom, online teaching, virtual teaching, that teachers have the wherewithal to be able to use Google Classroom or to be able to use Zoom or to be able to use Microsoft Teams or Webex because it will provide them with additional tools in their pedagogical toolkit to be able to continue this trend that students will be learning in virtual mode, at least some segment of their day.

And it provides us with a lot of other opportunities. I'll give you just one more example—sorry for going on and on, but I'll give you one more example. So when you think about the fact that in AP classes, Advanced Placement classes in New York City—excuse me, in New York City, we have over 700 high schools. We have some very small high schools that may not have the ability to have an AP teacher for, let's just say, AP Statistics.

So what we piloted this year was a virtual remote AP class—some of the AP classes—and the notion was that if we have a very well-trained, very capable AP teacher, let's say in statistics, and they're at their school doing their job and doing a great job, but we know there's five other schools that have students that want one—one student at one school, two students at another school, three in another.

If we could set up that virtual classroom with that teacher providing AP instruction and then those students remotely at those other schools are able to tap into that teacher and get their AP instruction, would it work? Well, it was working gangbusters before we went into remote learning. Guess what? That has provided us now with the opportunity to think about, okay, how do we leverage the real skill set that we have embedded in our teachers and provide those learning opportunities to more and more students, especially in students in communities that have been historically underserved, especially in small schools where you don't necessarily have a lot of teachers but you still have students that want to have those experiences.

Those are the kinds of experiences that I think have presented themselves to us as a response to this crisis, and I think that we have a responsibility not to lose momentum once we get back to in-person learning. In-person learning will look different now, and I love that last example because it really shows how there's maybe a silver lining that now these teachers are able to go beyond the confines of their individual classrooms, and it's kind of like the whole district is serving the whole district, which is really, really powerful.

You know, tons of questions and comments from Facebook. Shelly Fox says, "Thank you to the New York City I.T. device deployment team." I actually relate to that. You just kind of nonchalantly said, "Yeah, we deployed 290,000 laptops, and we've essentially solved the digital divide." Exactly how did that happen? Because we talked to a lot of districts—obviously to leverage Khan Academy, you need device access, internet access. I am curious about the broadband aspect of it, and then just how did you pull that off?

You know, there's other superintendents who might listen to this, and they would love to be able to emulate what you did. So, I want to give tremendous kudos to our device deployment office, as well as our purchasing and procurement office, to our mayor. Very early on when we knew that the device issue was going to be an issue, we immediately jumped into action mode. We contacted— we put out calls to see who could actually handle the volume that we were going to need, and Apple stepped right up and said we will make sure that we get you what you need in record time, and they kept their word.

We also worked with IBM, that helped us with the installation of the Wi-Fi capability. Then we worked with FedEx and UPS to develop a protocol of how these would be shipped. Because obviously, we were then under a stay-at-home order, and we're trying to limit contact. The last thing you want to do is have people come out to get their devices. So all of those partners were incredible at making sure that they prioritized getting these devices into the hands of students.

And then what we also did is made sure that we had a way of surveying our students and our teachers to find those individuals that maybe hadn't raised their hand and said, "I need a device" so that we weren't leaving anything to chance. As those devices started coming in, again, they were prioritized for our most vulnerable populations. We went from there and expanded outward. We still have devices so that if there may be a case where a student had their own device and now it's broken, they can request one, and we'll ship it right to them.

It was a massive undertaking, but we have some incredible colleagues here in the Department of Education that just jumped right into action. One of the things that we also did with these devices is that we didn't want any family to feel that they couldn't request a device because, what if it breaks? Am I responsible for it? You know, I'm not working—what? So what we did is every device comes right out of the box; it comes Wi-Fi enabled. They get a hard case with it, and we also purchased insurance for every single device, so our students and parents don't have to worry if something happens. We want them to have the device as well.

And, you know, sometimes in New York, we sometimes get a little blasé about the size of the numbers, but you're right—290,000 devices, it's as if you took Seattle, and you took Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston and put them all together, and we just provided all of those systems with devices. That's kind of what the team was able to do in pretty record time.

And how are you all tackling—that's amazing, first of all—and how are you tackling the broadband issue? Have the telecom carriers helped out there?

Yes, our telecom providers have been great. They've really stepped up and provided Wi-Fi access for our students, especially our students that live in temporary housing or students that are in our public housing units. That was the first place that they went in and made sure that there was Wi-Fi available. We are in discussion with them now. Obviously, when we first went into remote learning mode, which was in March, the plan was that we would come back to face-to-face learning in April. Well, obviously, that didn't happen.

We were finishing the academic year through June in remote learning; summer learning will be in remote learning mode as well. As I've mentioned, our goal is to be back in person-to-person learning and in-person learning in September, but again, the medical experts are going to dictate how fast we come into in-person learning. So I have the entire organization focused on remote learning through the rest of this calendar year just to be prepared.

So we are in conversations now with all the carriers about extending that Wi-Fi access and looking at what that would look like. But I have to say that in times of crisis, you really see the true nature of individuals and organizations, and I just cannot say enough about what our Wi-Fi providers have done. I've mentioned some of the shipping companies; I've mentioned some of the technology companies.

But a lot of partners that provide online resources and online materials have really stepped up in a very unprecedented way to support our children. And I like to say to them thank you because without their assistance, I know that we would not be as successful with it as I think we are. A lot of work to do—we're definitely building the plane as we fly the plane, but we couldn't have done it without these partners and businesses. So I just want to give them a big public shout-out and thank you.

No, definitely. You know, what you just described over the last five— that's one of the best stories I've heard, frankly, in the last couple of weeks. And obviously, I've had a lot of conversations with folks about the digital divide and device access, and that really gives me hope for where we can go. And to your point, not just through this crisis, but post-crisis, hopefully, you know, the digital divide will be a smaller divide or hopefully even get solved.

You know, you touched on summer and back to school. How do you think summer is going to be different this year? Historically, things like summer programs would be for a subset of kids, maybe the kids who might have fallen behind a bit. Do you think it's going to be, you know, is it going to be, hey, everyone needs to just keep learning through the summer?

Well, I think one thing—I don't think we speak enough about, and it's critically important—is that the children and everyone in New York City, but everyone in the world and indefinitely in the United States, you know, New York City was the epicenter of the epicenter in the United States, which was New York State. So we were in the epicenter of the epicenter. We've been hit hard. We've lost colleagues. Everybody knows somebody that has been lost due to this coronavirus 19.

So we can't forget the trauma that our students and our staff and our community have undergone. It's a traumatic event, and we are starting to see some of the signs of the trauma, you know, with students and students not being able to sleep. I saw this also when I was superintendent in Houston and we were hit by Hurricane Harvey, and I remember seeing the manifestation of trauma and how that affected people in different ways, and the same thing is happening with this.

So as much as I want students to continue to learn and always to be learning, I also think that the first opportunity that we have for students to just breathe—that's going to be good. We've embedded social-emotional learning trauma-informed curriculum and trauma-informed supports in all of the materials and all of the resources that we've provided for teachers.

We also have a parent hub where parents have a lot of resources that they can use to work with their students, their children, and help support their children as they work through it, and they can work through it as well. But I think that the trauma-informed approach is going to be critically important as we come back to in-person learning. As a result of that, I also think that summer we're going to prioritize our vulnerable students.

Obviously, students with disabilities will be prioritized over the summer. We've had remote learning plans for every one of our students with disabilities that has adapted their individual education plan for a remote learning environment. We also instituted, through a lot of feedback, a new grading policy because you can't— you have a new attendance policy as well. You can't shove the old attendance policy into a remote learning environment. It just wouldn't work.

So we have a new attendance policy; we also have a grading policy, and in essence, students are continuing to work. They continue to turn in assignments, but instead of failing, no student’s going to get a failure at the end of this academic year. What they'll get is an "in progress" grade. And what the "in progress" grade signifies is that they have a little bit more work to do to finish the requirements of the class or finish the requirements of the grade in the third grade or fourth grade. And then those students will be prioritized for summer learning in the remote learning environment as well.

The whole point is to give students more time. And even there, I would just say this: the goal as an educator for me has always been that students master the subject matter, that they get mastery. I'm not necessarily wanting students to go for the A to B this year; I want them to master what they're trying to learn. So this has forced us now to really embrace this notion of mastery learning.

So if the student hasn't mastered that subject matter, they're not going to get a failure; they're going to get "in progress." And that says you have some more work to do; we have some more work to do to support you because the goal is not that you finish first, but that you finish. And that again is changing the narrative for how we look at and give weight to what grades really are.

So anyway, that's how we're prioritizing for summer learning. And I'll tell you that many of the organizations and institutions in New York City, the museums, the park and rec department, the libraries are really working with us to be able to create even if it's some virtual experiences that students can have over the summer as well. So it's not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they also have some other experiential experiences that they can engage in, even if it's in a virtual way over the summer.

Wow! And just so you know, you're getting a lot of praise on social media. Peggy says, "Chancellor Carranza, what a great leader! Really getting this from every angle. It's rare to find people with these abilities." And I think we can all sense the authenticity.

You know, we have a little bit of time left. What do you see as scenarios for back to school? Obviously, there are the two extremes where we stay fully remote or we go completely back to normal. But what are the other scenarios that you're contemplating, and how do you think things might be changed forever because of this?

Well, again, we're always going to be driven by what the medical experts tell us. So we're going to listen to the science. As a parent, I would not want my child to go back to a school environment unless I was confident that my child was going to be safe, secure, and not infected. So there are a number of things that are beyond our control as educators and my control as a chancellor.

We're going to listen to the medical experts and make sure that we have the protocols and the materials, the testing that we need, and the precautionary gear that we'll need as well. But we've actually been modeling a number of scenarios. I'll just give you an example of a couple, and these are by no means—do I mean to say this is exactly what's going to happen; it's going to be driven by whatever the circumstances are at the time that the decision has to be made about going back to in-person learning or not.

But I'll give you an example: so when we come back, it's pretty obvious that we're going to have to probably still practice social distancing. How do you practice social distancing in the very, very tight-knit, tight quarters that are New York City's public schools? We're a very compact city, almost 9 million residents. How do you do that in our schools?

Well, if you have an elementary school, for example, does that mean then that you have shifts? So you have an early morning shift and part of your students comes in the early morning, and then you have an afternoon shift, and the other half of the students come to that part of the learning? And then how do you split teacher schedules to cover both shifts? That could be one thing.

Or do you do something where it becomes a little bit more of a remote learning? For example, you take that same elementary school and you do a cohort model. So you take all of the students, you have cohort one, two, and three. Cohort one goes to school, while cohorts two and three practice remote learning on Monday. On Tuesday, cohort two goes to school while cohorts one and three are remote learning. On Wednesday, cohort three goes to school while one and two are practicing remote learning.

That's only because you want to provide the distance to do social distancing. What would that look like? We know that the CDC has talked about as part of what their recommendations are is that students don't congregate in lunchrooms when they get back to in-person learning, and that they'll eat their lunch and their breakfast in the classroom. So what does that look like, then, and how do you deliver it? How do you serve it? How do you clean up after it?

What does the day look like? What do buildings look like? Are there buildings that we're just not going to be able to use because they're just physically not equipped to handle the social distancing that may be required? All of those questions and a myriad of other questions are things that right now we're grappling with and modeling to see how that would look.

But it gives you a little insight into the complexities that all educators and all of my colleagues that are systems leaders are really grappling with right now, because we're doing it in an environment that we don't know what the ground floor is going to look like when we get to June and July and August. We just don't know.

I'll give you one other example of how the ground is shifting right beneath our feet. Two weeks ago, nobody was talking about PMIS, which is a pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome that resembles Kawasaki disease. Students—children are getting very, very sick in New York City. We have over 100 students that are being treated for that syndrome, and we know that doctors are exploring if there is a relationship between COVID-19 exposure and then this syndrome. Two weeks ago, we weren't even talking about that.

So that's how rapidly this is manifesting and iterating. This virus is iterating, so the sand is definitely shifting beneath our feet. So what we're trying to do is to model a number of scenarios and be prepared so that whatever those circumstances are, we can pivot very quickly to a model or at least we've thought about what some of these implications would be as we make those decisions to go back into in-person learning.

Wow! Chancellor Carranza, you know, given all of that you've done, I mean, what it's heartening, as I said, there's a lot of good news embedded in, obviously, the larger, not-so-good context that we are all dealing with, especially that you all are dealing with in New York. But I think, you know, I speak for everyone watching that you keep doing the amazing work that you and your team are doing.

You know, it gives confidence in folks to see leadership like what you're providing. And I'm honored, frankly, that you're able to make a little bit of time for us today because I can imagine there are many, many things going on in your life world. So thank you so much for joining us, and I hope we can do this again in a few weeks.

Chancellor Carranza: I would love to do it, and thank you for the invitation. And to everybody that's out there watching and listening, stay safe; take care of each other. This is a time for us to take care of each other. So thank you for the opportunity, and be safe.

Thank you! Well, thanks everyone for joining. I hope you were as inspired as I was. You know, I think it's in times of stress and times of crisis that people show their true colors, and I think you're seeing examples of really great leadership from Richard, from Chancellor Carranza, and from many others that we've had. And it's heartening to see how folks have been stepping up to do the right thing.

Look forward to joining you on future live streams. I will see all of you tomorrow. Stay safe and stay healthy, just like Chancellor Carranza has told us.