Digitize This! (Can online education be better than in-person?) Artwork

The Hypothesis

Go behind the scenes of a PreK - 8th grade charter school in Santa Fe, New Mexico making decisions around whether to open school for in-person learning and how to do so amid a global pandemic. Set at Turquoise Trail Charter School, the state's oldest and fourth largest charter school, you'll meet teachers and administrators who are grappling with how to walk the fine line between public health and public policy during an historic moment in time. As a charter school, Turquoise Trail is able to make decisions both as a school and as a district and is directly accountable. Given that the school serves students across a wide range of ages, the tradeoffs and unintended consequences of decision making is even more complex. Younger students are more directly in need of in-person learning, given that they learn more through socialization, so the drive to get them in school sooner is urgent. Amid the complexity of site-based decision making in this context, the State of New Mexico's Public Education Department continues to issue guidelines that sometimes alter school opening timelines entirely. Along side the story of this school, topics such as the politics and sociology of schools will be explored in this context.

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The Hypothesis

Digitize This! (Can online education be better than in-person?)

November 03, 2021 • Protect the Pack Productions • Season 2 • Episode 4

Last year, we gathered our school community every full moon to update them on our plans and engage them in critical conversations. We're the Coyotes. We'd even all howl at the end of the meeting. At our gathering last March, I asked how many families were interested in keeping their students online in the upcoming school year. This year. I presented a possibility for a school within a school, nearly entirely online, with a dedicated faculty and staff. We would serve students in grades 5-8, where we believed the need would be greatest. Within the next 36 hours, the families of 101 students were signed up as interested. Of course, we knew that the conditions around the pandemic would change in ways we couldn't predict between March and August, but we decided to develop the project anyway. We gave it a name that captured the moment. We call it "The Academy of Extraordinary Circumstance". This year, we are asking a lot of questions of it as the future of The Academy is unclear. It was designed to address a community need in a very particular moment in time, but its usefulness may not yet be totally clear.

In this episode, we'll explore the still open question of the effectiveness of online learning - specifically two questions:

1) Can online learning be as effective or even more effective than in-person learning?
2) Has the pandemic changed the way we think about the actual purpose of education for students in grades 5-8?

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico.