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I can't agree here. Boards could have prepared (not spent) by splitting into preparation teams for all three eventualities, producing a plan for each scenario.

by cik 6y ago

I can't agree here. Boards could have prepared (not spent) by splitting into preparation teams for all three eventualities, producing a plan for each scenario. In each case they could have gathered freely available resources (Youtube videos, websites!) for the associated and chosen technology set. They could have gathered and organized these items into something as free, and as simple as a Microsoft Word document - something they already have. This information could be passed upstream until such time that a decision was made. For those boards that had summer education hours, the time could have been allocated to familiarization with the learning materials and technologies. I can heartily attest that even boards that were 100% planning on remote learning in April (I'm looking at you TDSB, YRDSB, TCSB in Toronto area) did literally none of this. How do I know - teachers all over the family, and my own efforts to literally help a private school board do this. I'd also note the private board spent zero dollars until the day before the first day of school. It costs money to purchase things. It costs time to train people. But when you literally have the board "working" during the summer, and not on a curriculum, this is really just an indictment of an inability to organize.

vorpalhex 6y ago
Humans could have come together and agreed we would move entirely to clean sources of power and be 80% of the way there. That clearly hasn't happened either. Surely you've been in a meeting room with more than about 5 people? All of those people have conflicting viewpoints, theories about the situation, risk analysis and so on. Can you imagine being a board member who spent 30% of a school budget on remote learning only to have in-class instruction all year? Hindsight is 20/20. School budgets are generally tight, their IT teams have less-than-desired-bandwidth, and they've already had to handle costs and challenges with the current situation such as getting mobile hotspots and video conferencing solutions up. Remember that not all kids have laptops or internet at home - and school IT gets to handle that situation too.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Hindsight is 20/20. Especially when predicting failure was inevitable after somebody has clearly failed. Citing a list of challenges (and renewable energy and imagination) is not a proof that failure couldn't have been avoided, it's a version of the "it's all so complicated, we can't say anything because we weren't there" trick. But the fact is that plenty of people understood the challenges, which were not at all new (what was new was the scale), and plenty of people were there (including the person you replied to) and are telling you about the failures that they saw.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    I have a family member who is in a school IT department. They spent all summer preparing for remote learning. Then they spent the last two weeks bulk flashing student laptops and ripping apart streaming servers to restore normal in-person learning because the governor put in a new order. Anyone can predict that a failure will occur, predicting the specific mode of failure is almost impossible.

by cik 6y ago

vorpalhex 6y ago

Humans could have come together and agreed we would move entirely to clean sources of power and be 80% of the way there. That clearly hasn't happened either. Surely you've been in a meeting room with more than about 5 people? All of those people have conflicting viewpoints, theories about the situation, risk analysis and so on. Can you imagine being a board member who spent 30% of a school budget on remote learning only to have in-class instruction all year? Hindsight is 20/20. School budgets are generally tight, their IT teams have less-than-desired-bandwidth, and they've already had to handle costs and challenges with the current situation such as getting mobile hotspots and video conferencing solutions up. Remember that not all kids have laptops or internet at home - and school IT gets to handle that situation too.

pessimizer 6y ago
> Hindsight is 20/20. Especially when predicting failure was inevitable after somebody has clearly failed. Citing a list of challenges (and renewable energy and imagination) is not a proof that failure couldn't have been avoided, it's a version of the "it's all so complicated, we can't say anything because we weren't there" trick. But the fact is that plenty of people understood the challenges, which were not at all new (what was new was the scale), and plenty of people were there (including the person you replied to) and are telling you about the failures that they saw.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  I have a family member who is in a school IT department. They spent all summer preparing for remote learning. Then they spent the last two weeks bulk flashing student laptops and ripping apart streaming servers to restore normal in-person learning because the governor put in a new order. Anyone can predict that a failure will occur, predicting the specific mode of failure is almost impossible.