The uneven and, in some cases, slow-moving efforts to support student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised new questions about whether school districts are prepared to respond to a fast-moving crisis.
We should all wonder how organizations that can sometimes take months to award contracts or hire senior staff are now coordinating, directing, and motivating an unprecedented response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Recent conversations with district leaders in Texas suggest some central offices are rising to the moment—and, in the process, rethinking how they do business.
In one district, central office leaders consolidated information sharing, decision making, and communication under the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. With newly created cross-functional working groups, there are “no divisions, no assistant superintendent of this or that,” a district leader said. “Our job is to help [the CAO] turn this massive boat quickly to being an online school.” Coordinated crisis operations and decision making has been crucial to the district’s response effort.
In the first week of closures, the district began distributing meals and teachers began conducting “virtual story hour,” reading to students in online videos. Several departments coordinated an effort to distribute thousands of laptops, devices, and mobile hotspots, while teachers began checking in with families, assigning remote work to students, and preparing for full-fledged online instruction. The district communicates about these efforts through frequent bilingual video updates. In one update, the superintendent congratulated employees for their all-hands-on-deck response and announced a pass/fail grading policy for the remainder of the school year.
The district is now entering the next phase of its response to provide teacher-guided learning experiences for students at home. It’s not alone. CRPE’s nationwide scan of COVID-19 response plans in 82 school districts found 22 plans that now include providing students with instruction, formal curricula, and academic progress monitoring.
In other districts, decisions that central office departments used to make in isolation are now becoming joint work. “I didn’t used to see [people from the curriculum and instruction department],” said a leader in another Texas district. “Now I see them all the time.” The district’s hierarchy and organizational chart have been “blown out of the water” by the uncertainty and interdependency surrounding the crisis.
It’s unclear how widespread these shifts are. As part of Texas’ System of Great Schools initiative, the districts we spoke with were already revamping their central offices. Leaders said baseline collegiality in the central office was an intangible resource for the current response. At the same time, they are finding that legacy processes and structures in central offices need to change to meet the moment.
The uncertainty of the current moment makes it tempting to postpone longer-term thinking. But crisis management requires short- and longer-term recovery. How can districts build more strategic thinking into their crisis management response?
While we continue to learn from the field, crisis expert Eric Stern suggests the importance of creating a separate team dedicated to strategic analysis. Freed from the press of day-to-day operations, a strategic thinking team can analyze longer-run scenarios. For example:
- Consider what will happen if schools remain closed.
- Come up with a plan to assess students who return to school after a range of learning experiences during recent closures.
- Think through different approaches to remediation or acceleration.
- Start anticipating different fiscal scenarios, such as how enrollments might shift between schools or districts, and the resource and staffing implications.
More broadly, a longer-run view raises the question of whether new coordinating structures and processes emerging in central offices will persist when students return to school. As one district leader said, “We should have been working this way all along.” When the dust settles, will they still? Will district central offices snap back to business as usual, or will the silo-breaking last? Will district leaders make it clear that the problems central offices face have permanently changed and require new ways of working?
These are questions district leadership teams should start to consider. And they are questions we at CRPE will continue tracking as the crisis response unfolds.
