Homeroom with Sal & Randi Weingarten - Tuesday, August 4

Uh hi everyone, welcome to our homeroom live stream. Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. I'm very excited about the very relevant guest we have today, Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Before we jump into that conversation, I encourage you to start thinking of your questions. Put them in the message boards on Facebook and YouTube.

But I will give my standard announcement, a reminder to folks that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through philanthropic donations. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. I also want to give a special shout-out to several organizations that have stepped up over the last several weeks—actually months. When COVID picked up, they realized that Khan Academy was already running at a deficit pre-COVID. And then, as you could imagine, the traffic to our site has increased. We've wanted to accelerate a whole series of programs for families and teachers, so our deficit has only increased.

But these organizations really stepped up and helped close some of that. Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and actually the Amgen Foundation, and many of the other supporters—both organizations, foundations, corporations, and individuals—who make all of this possible. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating.

So with that, I am honored to invite our guest. To introduce our guest, Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Thank you so much for joining us, Randy.

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you and really honored that the whatever tropical storm or hurricane we're going through seems like it is passing through quickly. So people will appreciate it. That's the honor.

Well, I guess it's better to go fast than to go slow.

Exactly. I grew up in New Orleans, having all of this right. I really admire your work, and I'm really excited to have this conversation, so thank you.

No, likewise. And clearly, the hurricane is only one thing that's going on in everyone's lives right now. As you just mentioned, COVID. And obviously something that you've been very central in is a conversation around how schools should and could reopen and what are the supports we need.

So maybe a good place to start, you know, I just love to know where your head is. You know, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis, and how are you thinking about the school opening situation?

So thank you for asking the question that way. I mean, my head is kind of bursting all the time right now because this would be hard regardless of if you had good leadership in the country. This would be hard with leadership that is incompetent and still denying COVID exists. It makes it almost impossible to try to figure out how to get people the right information—the science-based information—and how to keep communities safe.

So I find it very frustrating. I want to scream most of the time, and I don't because it's really important to be heard right now. It’s important to make sure that people hear what is accurate information, even if they don’t want to believe it. So we started thinking about how to reopen schools safely in the beginning of April because we didn’t want to have what happened in March happen again—the haphazard way that schools were closed.

Our view was we were going to learn as much as we possibly could from as many of the world-renowned epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease folks as we could. We had the advantage that we are the second largest nurses’ union—not simply the second largest teachers’ union. So in April, we put out our first plan about how do we open schools and communities safely. We spent a lot of time talking to people before we did that, including our own members, parents, and all the scientists I just talked about. We just put out another one, an updated one, about a week or two ago.

But frankly, even though we know a lot more about the virus, the safeguards are basically the same. You have to contain the virus in a region; you have to maintain that containment by testing, tracing, and isolation. You have to have the school safeguards that would prevent a virus from spreading in the school, which includes six feet of physical distancing, mask-wearing, cleaning, and ventilation. And that's on top of reasonably accommodating those who are high risk, and obviously washing our hands.

You have to actually have a way to pay for that, and that's just on the safety side. On the well-being and the instructional side, we need to have a lot better way of making sure remote instruction can engage kids in some ways like you have done so successfully. We also need to really focus on well-being issues, digital divide issues, and food and nutrition issues. So we’ve been trying to do all of those things at the same time in 3,500 locations.

No, it’s not an enviable task. And you know I speak to a lot of district superintendents and administrators and teachers and everyone is in this really, really difficult situation right now.

I know, and we'll get into a little bit of some of the contentious points about should a school be open or closed and distance learning, good, bad, etc. But have you seen pockets of people doing it well, either at the district level or the state level?

Yes, they're very, very quiet about it because they don't want people to follow them, and they don't want—because anyone who's doing it well knows that at any moment, there could be a kid or a teacher that tests positive for COVID, and then you have to close down immediately. You have to actually go through all the safety protocols, and then you pray that, you know, that people don't get sick, you know, or don't get very, very sick.

So a lot of the places—like for example, Newark had summer school. I frankly pushed for places to do some summer schooling if they could, first and foremost because of the kids who really needed it—who, you know, didn’t connect well on the screens like you and I are having right now—but also to do it in a very safe way and in a way where we could learn things.

So, you know, in places like Detroit, it didn't work very well, but a place like Newark, it worked pretty well, or a place like BOCES in Suffolk County; it worked pretty well. Montana, it worked pretty well. Now, to me, what do I mean when I say it worked pretty well? It means, one, there were no negative cases, there were no positive cases of COVID, and kids came, teachers were there—the safety measures in place were, you know, wonderful. But it's also luck.

When I say Newark worked very well, it’s because there were a couple of positive cases, and they handled it well. They closed the school. They communicated with parents and with teachers. They made sure that people got tests immediately, and they made sure they did everything that they could to keep kids and to keep educators safe.

And then before they reopened, they did all the kind of protocols, including cleaning and everything, and contact tracing to make sure that everybody who was in contact with the person who tested positive, they had gotten in contact with, and those people were isolating.

So that's the kind of thing that you have to do. If you have like what is happening in Gwinnett County in Georgia, you see 240 people testing positive in the first few days—that is a big problem. That is a "big SOS." That means you've got to have a different structure; that's not "close a school," "close a pod," "see what happens." That means you've got too much community spread in that community, and you need to be on remote instruction because school should not be open in that situation.

So we're seeing with both summer school as well as the starting of the school year places that are doing it well and places they're doing it badly. But we also don't have the resources from Washington yet, which we need very badly. And we also have a president who is breeding chaos instead of responsibility. This is the moment that you need to be really responsible, not chaotic, and his recklessness is actually hurting things.

I’ll give you one example: In June, we polled our members. And remember, this is before you saw this huge escalation in the South and Southwest. 75% of them said that if we could get the safety safeguards that we were advocating for, they were comfortable with going back to school buildings because they knew how important it was—and it is—for kids not just for feeding and not just for well-being but for instruction as well.

And so if I polled my members right now, you'd see the exact reverse, and you see the reverse because they don't have confidence that some of the precautions that you mentioned in a Newark, a place like a New York context, those are in place. That's where the fear is.

I would say you'd see it for four reasons: one, because of the huge increase in spread in the South and Southwest; even though this week you seem to have—we have 14 states that are hotspots rather than 18 states, you still have 40 states where you see the line going like this as opposed to going like this. That is not—and—and—and—that's number one. Number two, you have a president who is a denier. So yesterday he got on TV and said everything is going well, even though Dr. Birx the day before said that, um, that things are really not—my words not her words—her words were things were really, um, were really um, spreading very extensively.

So number two is the president's recklessness. Number three is that there's been a lack of resources from Washington. So number four, the planning that's been done is still in many, many places very, very vague because they've planned hybrid, but there's not a whole lot of meat behind, you know, there's not a lot of muscle behind that planning.

If I'm understanding it correctly, I mean it makes a lot of sense. I'm just trying to think through it logically. If you're in a part of the country that has low community spread, it can have some spread, but low community spread, but it seems like it's in control, then open up in a very careful way. Have your contact tracing, have the social distancing, have the ventilation, and keep track. And as soon as the contact tracing traces contacts within a school, you do have to shut down, which makes all the sense in the world.

And in places where you have high community spread, there's no point in trying to be physical because you're very quickly going to trigger a situation, and you're going to just exacerbate the scenario. So that to me feels like a very reasonable—logical—I don’t know; somehow this does feel like it's gotten politicized. When you look at the media, it seems like there's these kind of polar camps: one is, you know, kind of open schools no matter what and one is don't open schools no matter what. And I don't—I'm definitely not hearing that from you.

No, and it’s different. Look, oh, we have 50 states, we have 98,000 schools, we have 16,000 school districts. We've never had a one-size-fits-all for schooling ever on virtually anything. So why would you do it on the most complicated things that have affected America in probably a hundred years? We haven't had a pandemic like this in a hundred years.

So that's why I'm saying—but I think that the reason we have this polar opposite is because—and I'm—you know, I'm sorry that I'm blaming the political leadership so much—but they deserve to be blamed. I don't believe we would have—I don't believe this is a Republican or Democratic issue. I do not believe Margaret Spellings would have been like Betsy DeVos if she was the Secretary of Education right now. I know Arne Duncan wouldn't be; he's been on TV a lot and said this is crazy.

What would have happened with any normal Republican government or a Democratic government would be what happened in Europe, which is here's an emergency. You bring stakeholders together: you know district superintendents, chief school officers, principals, teacher-parent groups, PTAs—and you bring them together under the auspices of the Secretary of Education way back in April, and you come up with guideposts about how to do remote learning just like you have done so well, just like we did with capstone projects and we have done with our platform “Share My Lesson.” But you socialize this, and I don’t mean it politically—you socialize it, you broaden it, you communicate it through the country, and you do it through the Department of Education as guidance.

And then you do the same exact thing in April and May and June in terms of the preparing for the next year so that districts had some guidance about what to do. Instead, we’re still having this bizarre conversation about whether or not COVID is dangerous. Yes, COVID is dangerous. Yes, it has killed over 156,000 people; yes, we have over four million cases right now. This is a pandemic. The fact that the president and the Secretary of Education don’t actually say that over and over again is completely unconscionable.

Thank God younger children are more resilient than everyone else, and thank God they don't seem to get as sick as others, and thank God we've had enough therapeutics and other things so that people who are testing positive, who are getting sick right now, who are on ventilators right now, many of them get well. But the fact that there’s any dispute about whether or not this virus is dangerous—that is part of the lack of credibility and the lack of trust that’s making our work much harder because of the polarization.

No, I mean this is incredibly difficult for—for—I could imagine. A couple of questions. I definitely want to get to the instructional side of things and how can teachers and families navigate as there's a ton of questions that are coming in through social media. But just to stay on this kind of the logistics question and also to kind of understand how this might play out, you know, I've also heard alternative solutions.

You touched on this notion that potentially your five-, six-, seven-, maybe eight-year-olds don't necessarily spread the virus or spread it as much. Are there hybrid cases where we bring those kids back? You know, in the tuberculosis epidemic almost 100 years ago, people did things like outdoor schooling. Are types—are things like that on the table?

They should be, but what's happened is this political reality that many mayors face, that schools have been used as childcare. And instead of actually having side-by-side childcare, that's absolutely essential as well right now, where, you know, kids could have done remote education while they were in childcare. But we need—schools are not childcare; schools are schools.

And so part of this is that schools are used in normal times for many purposes. Yes, they are Central community yes, they are about, you know, empowering kids. Yes, they need to be equitable. Yes, we need to make them excellent for all. But, you know, they are basically relied on for so many communal purposes, and that's part of the problem right now.

So I do think if we looked at the research today, what we would be doing is what Israel did in terms of its second take at it, which is you would open. First off, you have to have professional development, which hasn’t happened. I’m lifting up the Massachusetts example because I think them pulling together two weeks of professional development for their teachers at the beginning of this year to really think through how to use remote, how to use hybrid, how to instruct kids because it’s really different.

As you know, instructing kids through a camera is very different than instructing kids personally. You know, it’s a different art; it’s a different engagement; it’s really different, and it takes different skills, and you have to do things differently. So having that knowledge and professional development is very, very important.

The second piece that’s important is really trying to have professional development about where kids are right now because the anxiety level is huge, particularly in communities that have been most affected. COVID affects people who are Black and Brown more than it affects people who are white. It affects people who are poor more than it affects people who are not. And so we have to be mindful of the objective that is—and the anxiety.

The same is true in terms of unemployment. Unemployment has affected people who are Black and Brown more than it has affected people who are white, and the same is true in terms of all the reckoning that we're doing right now in terms of racial injustice. So you have three kind of crises that have careened into each other, and so the well-being issues and how we address that with our kids are really, really important.

So you have to have that professional development, but the second piece to your question, which is really important—sorry—is that knowing full well that younger kids seem to have less—or seem to have more resilience, even though they can spread more. Even though that there are studies that say that they are carriers, they have more resilience, you can actually start having smaller hybrid models or smaller pods of 12 kids or so with a teacher and do it with young kids.

That seems like it's been more successful both in Denmark now, in Israel and in Germany. So why don’t we learn from that and bring the younger kids in in that kind of way and keep the older kids either on hybrid or slowly have outdoor schools with group sessions and things like that?

So what you just said sounds very, very reasonable. I'm actually not getting this nuance when I read newspaper articles, when I’m watching the news. Is this where the conversation is? Are people having this conference, or has this gotten polarized, and people are just kind of, you know, we’re not opening schools or we are opening schools?

It is where the conversation started to go in, I would say, in late June. I started seeing a lot of much more robust, thoughtful conversations. But throughout July, since Trump did his recklessness, you have basically, you know, he interjected himself in this and you have basically the huge polarization as a result of it.

Because all those, you know, "Trumpster" governors like the one in Georgia and the one in Florida and the and and Arizona are not going to do a thing that he doesn’t like. And so they—instead of being much more nuanced about what we need to do to actually help schools to help open school buildings responsibly and gradually in a way that helps children and doesn’t endanger children and teachers, you would be doing it the way I just talked about.

But if the goal is that you have to get kids into schools in a sardine-like way because their parents need to go to work or the goal is you need to do this because you, you know, you want to see the employment numbers go up or your goal is you know, just to create a divide because you think the teachers' unions are going one way, so you want to show parents you're going to go another way and you're doing it politically—so if those are all your goals, you get to where you've gotten to right now, which is chaos.

If your goal is how do we actually help, knowing full well we’re in a pandemic, get kids back to school safely in a way that doesn’t endanger kids and teachers, you would be starting with professional development, remote, and slowly bring kids in using younger kids and special needs kids first because there seems to be much less transmission for those kids, and they probably need the physical experience the most.

To your point, especially special needs kids. There are so many questions I want to get to on the instructional professional development side that you've heard, but just one last question on just kind of how this is going to play out.

I guess you could say logistically or politically over the next two or three weeks as we get into the meat of back to school, you know, what is your prediction? I mean it sounds like you're—you are not holding your breath that great things are going to happen in some of the states that are going to kind of open and I guess pretend that things are normal. But are you seeing pockets where there’s hope?

I mean you mentioned Massachusetts and Newark. What do you think is going to look like, you know, if we were to have this conversation a month? What's our postmortem of the back to school season?

So if you asked me a month ago, I was much more optimistic than I am right now. I’m, you know—and every time the president tweets some foolishness, I’m much less optimistic because it creates the polarization rather than having the conversation. You know, Betsy DeVos is useless; there’s no guidance from her. We haven’t had the resources that we need, and we know states are still laying people off, and they have had 20% budget cuts, and we need millions and millions of dollars for PPE and cleaning and all of this stuff.

So, you know, I feel—as glad that they’re negotiating this week—but we need the resources from Washington, and we need Trump and DeVos to shut their mouths. If that happened, I would say that you’d see a lot of places starting on remote. I think that, unfortunately, because of the lack of resources and because of the COVID increase, you're going to see a lot of places starting on remote education, and then, you know, slowly, with the professional development and with tackling the virus, you’ll start seeing school districts bring in the most at-risk kids in a hybrid fashion.

I think that this notion that they were going to start with every single child back on the day after Labor Day, you know, and that that would be, you know, and they would be able to do that, every school district that has attempted to do that initially is now rolling back their plans.

And, you know, part of it—let me just say, part of it is what has happened in Gwinnett County in Alabama and in Georgia and what's happened in Indiana and also what's happened in terms of summer school. Summer school places did some of this very slowly, and a couple of places did it well, like Newark, and a couple of places like Detroit had real outbreaks, and there was real consternation as a result of it.

And when I say Newark did well, I mean there were places like BOCES on eastern Long Island where, knock wood, they had summer school; they had a very small summer school; they had summer school; they didn’t have a case of COVID; they didn’t have a positive case.

That I would say that’s luck, you know. Because when I say Newark did it well, it's because if you have a positive case, it’s a matter of how you deal with it, how you create trust, and how you actually do the work you have to do to shut down the school, make sure it's communicated that there's a positive case, make sure you make sure that you do the contact tracing so that you isolate everybody who was in, you know, contact with that person—and Newark did that well, and it created, you know, it created some credibility.

But think about what's going on—we spent all this time talking about logistics and how little time talking about what we need to do in terms of instruction, whether it's hybrid or whether it's remote.

Absolutely. And one last question on the logistics, because the instruction is at least as important in this world. You know, obviously, when you read the headlines, especially the last few weeks, this notion of potential strikes, I have at least been surfaced. If I’m you know, based on our conversation so far, I’m perceiving that what you’re saying is strikes where there are not precautions, where community spread is so high that it would be just fundamentally unsafe to send someone into—that is, is that what y’all are advocating?

How are you thinking about that?

Right, the word in front of strike was the word safety. Safety strikes and labor have a very particular meaning, and they are only a last resort if you can’t make it safe in any other way. We feel that we are now the conscience of the country of making sure our kids, our communities, and our educators are safe. And the fact that others are reckless makes us need to be more responsible.

Like, no one got into teaching to be a safety monitor and, you know, I’m a social studies teacher and a lawyer, so learning all this—learning all the science was hard for me to learn. But you have to learn it in the middle of a pandemic, and you have to have those guardrails. I have to look at a lot of people straight in the eyes and say that in order to advise that a school building should reopen, the kind of things that are done to prevent virus spread are in there.

And if they’re not in there, I in good conscience cannot advise that a building should reopen. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be a COVID positive case, but we need to make sure that everything we can do is done. That’s what hospitals do; that’s what nursing homes should have done, and we need to do that for schools as well.

We know what we need to do those, and yes, it’s a logistical challenge, but if others refuse to do it, that’s why you have unions. That’s why you have collective bargaining. That’s why you have collective goodwill—sometimes you have to take the moral responsibility to make sure that things are safe for people.

Right, it is boiled down to kind of the most fundamental purpose of unions, which is workplace safety, which—and this isn’t some blanket statement that, you know, no school openings at all; it's only when it is unsafe.

Exactly, and frankly, that’s why even at our convention last week, somebody raised that motion. You know, we had a virtual convention, we had resolutions, and you know, there were two or three resolutions where people tagged on a motion that says we will not reopen schools unless the virus rate is zero or unless there is a vaccine. And those motions were rejected by my membership.

We know that there is not a zero-risk situation here. We know that it's—that kids need in-school schooling. Teachers would tell you that, you know, pre-pandemic, they would have said we need to see our kids; we need to have smaller class sizes, and remote instruction doesn’t work very well, Saw, Khan notwithstanding. That’s what people would have said.

Now they’ll say it even more, but it has to be safe because if it’s not safe, then what ends up happening is a school outbreak could end up reinfecting an entire community. And so places like New York and New Jersey and Connecticut that went through those sacrifices that the businesses that didn’t reopen early—why would we put them through this again after all the work that they have done?

We have to educate our kids, but we have to make it safe.

No, that makes sense. I mean, my wife and I were talking about it. She’s a physician and even she works for the county hospital. She’s a rheumatologist, so she’s not a, you know, pulmonologist; she’s not one of the frontline workers here. But for the rheumatologist there too, they’re making sure that they have all the PPE, patients that they can see remotely, they are—the patients that they absolutely have to see.

The precautions are incredible that they’re taking with the monitoring, the temperature checks, the PPE, etc. And then, you know, if you didn’t have those, my wife did not have those precautions as a healthcare professional, I would not encourage her to show up.

If, you know, our mother-in-law lives with us, I mean, you know, it's just for the safety of the community. I mean, going into the instructional side, which, as we’ve both been alluding to, you know, we’ve been so focused on logistics, the whole world has that the teacher training, the PD days, etc.

You know, there’s a lot of questions coming in. I’ll try to give a synopsis of some of them. This is a question from a teacher on Facebook: “Randy, will remote learning make teachers obsolete? Will it damage the profession?” And then from Facebook, Sarah Jabin is asking, “What kind of student engagement through remote learning is actually working?”

So what does good distance learning look like? Even you were very kind when you said Khan Academy, but you know, I think it's working—even Khan Academy in certain places, I think some places it's not working optimally because they're not getting enough supports. The teachers aren't getting enough support.

So I’d love your frame on, you know, what should that professional development look like for teachers? Right? What does at least decent distance learning look like?

So you know, all kids are different and all ages are different. So again, there’s not a one-size-fits-all in terms of distance learning. But for the teacher who raised that question, I think that this—that we have now—that the pandemic has now proven that distance learning is a supplement, not a substitute for in-person teaching and learning.

That, you know, that the alchemy that happens in a class, the engagement in person is really, really important for kids. But it can be a supplement, and ultimately, right now, I see this year as a bridge year. We're in the middle of a pandemic, just like with TB, just like with the Spanish flu of a hundred years ago, just like with polio.

We have to take these things seriously, and then we have to catch—we have to help kids feel confident that they will be able to achieve regardless. And then as these things subside or we get a vaccine or we get therapeutics like in AIDS—we don’t have a vaccine for AIDS, but we have therapeutics—we’re able, you know, you can see what has happened in terms of the LGBTQ community, in terms of what happened in the aftermath of having the therapeutics, you know, in the late 80s, early 90s.

What I think we have to do in terms of instruction—this is what I’ve seen work—and frankly it’s just from talking to people who have done it over the course of the last several months. Number one, we have to be mindful of how much screen time people have. We also have to make sure that there’s real group instruction. Asymmetric learning can actually really work, but schedules are really, really important for younger kids.

And when I say asymmetric learning can work, high school teachers have said to me that they could actually tape a lesson and then use screen time to reinforce that lesson. You know, screen—you can use time, you can—I'm a big believer in getting some tents up and having some open-air classrooms in parks in September and October and doing small group instruction that way, just like some parents in well-off communities are thinking about hiring a teacher and doing a pod in that way.

But what for younger kids, direct instruction like this may work, but you cannot be on a screen for more than 45 minutes at any particular time. Kids have to be off the screen; they have to be able to engage in their own kind of learning. And we have to figure out how we get kids together in some way, form, or fashion to stop the social isolation.

In terms of older kids, I think you flip it; you can actually do direct instruction asynchronously if you want to. You can—just like with, you know, college kids, you can tape a lecture, but then you really need the group work to reinforce or to create some alchemy. And that’s, you know, but just like you have done so much work.

So in this, we have Share My Lesson. We have unprecedented numbers of people who have joined Share My Lesson. We make it for free for everyone—for parents, for kids, for teachers. And every day we put tricks of the trade up.

The other thing I think is you could do things like using TV. You know, Fox in Washington, D.C. would have like an hour where it was dedicated every morning to, you know, to a different lesson by a different master teacher. You saw that in California as well in the spring.

I think that, you know, lectures from the masters, finding ways to have really interesting content is going to also be really important. Doing things in a way where families can come together—I love the fact that we had Lin Manuel at our convention. I love that Disney decided to put that on air around July 4th weekend.

Using having a family watch Hamilton and then you’re doing some kind of, you know, group instruction follow-up and you could do it with a whole family. You make it a family enterprise as opposed to kids being isolated.

Or you can do what, you know, some people—some families have done this summer, which is they have a pod in the backyard, or you could do it in the middle of a housing project in the middle of the lawn in the middle of the housing project.

So we need to really kind of think about different ways of getting together, having that engagement, using the screen for certain things and reinforcement for other things, dependent upon pedagogically where kids are.

That makes a ton of sense and rhymes or in some ways is exactly what I think. When we've been trying to advocate very, very similar things, you know, you can have asynchronous learning. Obviously tools like Khan Academy, there’s other tools out there where kids can get practice, feedback, teachers can monitor, but then the necessity of having some form of whole group synchronous community building.

I loved your ideas, especially if you could figure out ways you could do it in person somehow at a park in smaller groups, but at least have some time. But what I was hearing is, you know, 45—you don't want a stretch of more than 45 minutes on a screen. It's just bad for the eyes and the brain. I think that's true for adults as well.

But, and obviously just, you know, make sure there’s breaks in there, but kids feel like they're part of a community. What is there, some baseline recommendation? You know, I’ve seen a—you know, in the spring we saw versions where it’s just like here’s a couple of links to some virtual schools that are doing everything asynchronously, which doesn’t seem like a great experience based on what you just described.

You know, all the way to I’ve seen some schools that have been doing everything you just described. What’s kind of a, you know, a minimum viable experience in your mind that at least parents and teachers should strive for?

So, you know, at the end of the last year, we thought—we were very big believers in capstone projects done, um, in a developmentally appropriate way. I mean, you’re not going to have a fourth grader write a PhD project on, you know, Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address and, you know, why did that not actually, you know, eliminate or eradicate racism in America? That’s not going to be what a fourth grader does, but it could be what a 12th grader does, an 11th grader does.

And we’ve seen in terms of portfolio schools how they were actually very adept at being able to move to remote because of the kind of guidance they had done in terms of critical thinking and group work and things like that. So at the end of last year we thought capping off what people had done—kids had done during the year was really important as—and we called it capstone projects.

In terms of the beginning of the year, I would actually say as a bottom line well-being and community building and that the children will be okay is going to be most important. Pam Cantor, um, who leads turnaround schools or Turnaround for Children, said something to us at a town hall we did with the PTA in March or April, and she said, "A calm mind will be a learning mind."

We have to make sure we reach kids, and we create confidence and calmness that they'll be okay. And that means that the well-being issues become really important, and the engagement issues become very important as a pathway to getting to instruction.

I want to double underline that last part. People might even be surprised hearing it from me because obviously Khan Academy is very much focused on, you know, do have you learned this math or this science or this humanity standard. But I couldn’t agree with you more on what you just said that, you know, so many people right now are so focused on, "Oh, what if my kids don’t learn to factor polynomials on time?"

Well, yeah, that is an issue, but if their mental health, if their friendships, if their connectedness, if their confidence somehow atrophies or dies through this process, then we have a much bigger problem. And what do you—how do you address that if we have to be distanced? If we can’t figure out the logistics of meeting in a park, is it, you know, you need at least 30 minutes on Zoom together with your friends and teachers?

What does that minimum situation look like?

There’s another question, you know, from YouTube, Susana Garcia-Dominguez: “Do you think students have to have the same number of hours in online learning? You know, is it nearly six hours? What is that?”

No, I don’t. I don’t know some of this; I think that some of this we’re gonna learn. We’re trying to create this box like, "Okay, we have to figure out 180 days, okay, we have to figure out X number of hours, okay, if we don’t do this, what is going to happen?" We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Can we actually—if we could try?

So yes, I know, you know, I’m basically saying the rules have to be rewritten. The rules have to be rewritten right now. The pandemic isn’t over. When it’s over, we can actually figure out what we need to do moving forward. But just like you said, if we don’t actually create confidence and engagement for kids, if kids are socially isolated, what—why are the pediatricians, including my sister, who is an intensive care pediatrician at Montefiore Hospital—why are they constantly saying the kids?

Look at the kids; look at the social isolation. Look at the fact that kids who are not on digital—look at kids that need grab-and-gos. Maslow comes before Bloom any day of the week. And we have to make sure that we meet kids’ primal needs; that has to be our job. And if we do and we create confidence, we're going to get to the other instructional pieces.

And so that’s why, you know, I know all these states are saying, "What do we do with all our rules?" I’m focused on how do we help start school in a meaningful way for kids and for their teachers, who are, in some ways, their lifeline to their dreams.

So is there a minimum? You know, I don’t know what the minimum is. We’re just—we have a lot of practices now. I don't think we can say we know what's best yet because they haven't been tested. What we do know is that, you know, just like with adults, if kids end up having like a Zoom dinner with their friends, just like, you know, my friends and I, we have—sometimes we’ll have a Zoomed drink, you know?

Or before—in the midst of the New York shutdown, so we’d have a Zoom drink together; you know, we’d have a Zoom dinner together, we’d get together in that kind of way—not more than 45 minutes or an hour because of the same reasons. But I do think we have to find a way to get kids together and that creating these kind of pods that families are doing, creating ways of getting kids together in a, you know, socially appropriate way—wearing masks, being physically distant—is very, very important.

And if we can do that in terms of schooling, if we can use even a school building, even if we’re doing remote, and we have like a Saturday afternoon walk with our kids, that’s, you know, that will be important. But that’s gonna—we're gonna learn more and more. But the point is it’s important for people to get together and to see each other and to be in community with each other.

No, couldn’t agree more. And the time has gone by way faster than I expected. I could— I could talk to you for another several hours. There’s so much I want to learn from you.

On one kind of last question maybe to sum up everything—and I learned, look, I’ve been learning from teachers and educators and paraprofessionals and bus drivers and guidance counselors. We’ve basically really taken in all the learning from people all throughout the last several months in terms of what has worked and what hasn’t.

No, absolutely. And I mean, based on that, based on all of these data points you’ve seen, if we’re talking a year from now, I’d love to know kind of both your hopes and fears. You know, the fears—what are—what's kind of some of the—there's going to—that this is clearly a suboptimal situation on so many dimensions. What’s some of the things that we’re going to have to repair a year from now? And are there some silver linings? Are there some things that we might, a year from now, come out better for?

So, you know, I’m an optimist, so I always have to think about a silver lining even in the midst of these three crises. Look, um, so number one, we have to fight the pandemic; truth is very important; science is very important. And those things we need leadership that will fight the pandemic; that’s number one.

And I think, frankly, even though the country is very polarized right now, more and more and more people see that, and that is really important. Number two, I think that out of this will be a sense that public schooling is really important and that community building and people—kids being together in person is very important, and—and that—and it’s not simply the means of parents who now have a healthy respect for that, that teaching is both a science and an art form and a craft as well as a skill.

But that the whole alchemy of having public schools is important. And that remote can be a supplement, but it's not a substitute. Number three, I think that this gives a new kind of movement builder to science and the importance of science and the importance of data and understanding the world and understanding what science means to the world.

Number four, I think it gives a sense that we have to work on things equitably; that in this pandemic, just like so much else, the people who have gotten really, really hurt are the people who are most at risk in normal situations. And you see it in terms of who’s gotten the racial health disparities; you see how racism is really built into so many of our structures in America.

And number five, I would say that working families and working people are the ones who have gotten us through where we've gotten thus far—the grocery workers, the nurses, the doctors, the EMT folk, the people who have been on the front lines actually making sure that the rest of us got fed, got helped, the teachers who made sure that kids were engaged last year or trying to figure out right now.

And so this has not been, you know, as important as, um, you know, a president is supposed to be or, uh, you know, or a big media star is supposed to be. This has been everyday people and governors in many states who have really gotten us through this. So those are kind of the silver linings that I see.

I think if we can create a confidence that dreams will not be—the, you know, dreams may be deferred for a minute or two, but we can get the economy back after the virus is tackled. I think if we get a sense of confidence that we can fight the virus, and confidence that America can pull itself up again like it did in the recession, the Great Depression, then I think we will be able to meet the needs of our kids.

But if we don't fight the virus, and if we don't make sure people are safe, then I am very fearful for the future.

Yeah. Well, Randy, thank you so much. I mean this was an incredible conversation.

As I said, I could keep going, but I, you know, I know in this—in this time to have any time with you is a real honor and I think you’ve really helped a lot of the folks watching understand all of the issues at play a lot better. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you for everything.

So thanks, everyone, for joining today's conversation. Obviously, we went over—my apologies to Randy; I probably kept her longer than we originally promised, but I thought there was just too much to talk about, frankly. There’s more that I would like to, but I got a couple of very powerful takeaways there, obviously.

And so, you know, safety first. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. What I heard is what I thought made a lot of sense is, you know, when you can create safe environments, and let’s be creative about creating safe environments with ventilation with, uh, maybe it’s the younger kids, maybe it’s not a full day, whatever it might be. You know, you meet up in the park. Those are reasonable options.

But when community spread is very high, we kind of have to hunker down as a little bit of society. And I also heard on the instructional side, let’s not try to do everything for everyone—that’ll just create a lot of stress, and it’s frankly an unrealistic goal; we’re in the middle of a pandemic.

Try to focus on the basics, and the most basic of basics is kind of the Maslow's hierarchy—people feeling safe and secure and part of a community. And if they have that, if their mental well-being is good, their social well-being is good, then we can start to build up on that.

And once again, we don't have to do everything, but if we can get some of those core skills of math, reading, and writing, make sure they don’t atrophy, make sure we have some progression that we're holding the fort reasonably well when it comes to education.

So thanks everyone for joining, and thanks for your great questions. I will see you—I’m actually going on a mini—a much-needed camping trip tomorrow, but I will see you next week.