Battle Metaphor
Battle Metaphors in a Crisis
Most systems of public education are organized like the military. Each School district has an organizational chart with a clear chain of command. Educators and teachers occupy the entry level equivalent of a military private. Those who lead, work their way up through the ranks.
Hierarchy keeps officers above the fray. The image called to mind is a king and his generals on a mountaintop looking down at soldiers fighting. Officers observe the situation, make plans and issue orders to be executed by the lower ranks. In battle, soldiers are expendable - as one falters in the execution of their duties another takes their place. Without hierarchy, structure and order, there is chaos and the battle is lost.
Congratulations to the officers! The response of public education to the COVID pandemic has been successful largely because of it's military precision. The hierarchy served the public well through this emergency. Orders were issued (schools will be open, students will attend on these days, etc), supplies were distributed, educators were reassigned and life became as normal as possible under the circumstances. We “stayed calm and carried on”.
While some withdrew in 2020-21, the majority of students attended school in some combination of virtual and face-to-face format. The good news is that, once schools reopened in this state of back-to-school emergency, student achievement returned to normal levels, daily attendance was up, suspensions were down, and expulsions were virtually non-existent.
Perhaps, this collective COVID response has established a “new normal” for regular attendance, minimal classroom conflict, low suspensions and near zero expulsions.
However, what works on the battlefield does not work in peacetime. Deploying “peacekeeping” forces to separate warring factions is time consuming and expensive and, as history has shown in situations like the Bosnian War, does nothing to resolve long standing grievances and underlying conflict - instead, driving these underground to fester undetected. The battlefield mindset also considers unintended collateral damage and those left behind as acceptable sacrifices for the greater good.
Returning to pre-pandemic conditions, education cannot be treated as a wartime battlefield. Returning to “normal” education means accepting a return to higher daily classroom conflict, higher student absenteeism, more suspensions, and more expulsions.
The question looking forward to a post pandemic reality is:
How might we recover the withdrawn and repair the collateral damage while maintaining the new normal of low student suspensions and expulsions in all schools?
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