No Sports. No Band. No Fun. (And Less Learning?)

[Music] this is ewa radio the official podcast of the education writers association and i'm public editor emily richmond from basketball to band debate clubs to dance teams the coronavirus pandemic has shut down extracurricular activities for many of the nation's k-12 students that could have a long-term impact on their level of engagement with both their academic work and their school communities veteran national education journalist greg toppo tackled this topic for the 74 million and he's here to discuss it greg welcome back to ewa radio thank you thanks for having me there are plenty of story ideas around the coronavirus pandemic why was this one you wanted to tell you know it's interesting it was one of these stories that i had just been kind of thinking about at a very low level for a long time actually the impetus was me thinking about how so many schools in the south seem to be bringing football back and i was sort of puzzled by that and wondered well okay so maybe that's what's happening there but what's happening in a lot of other places so i just sort of made a very informal kind of query into you know which cities are bringing sports back which ones aren't which states are saying it's okay for kids to be in you know marching band which aren't once i established that it was pretty sort of evenly split i thought okay well so then half the kids are having a different experience than the other half what does that mean for them and that was when i started thinking about folks like bob belfance at johns hopkins who's a obviously a kind of a legendary researcher in things like dropout rates and i knew from having worked with him in the past that he thinks a lot about the sort of the engagement piece of school and why kids like school or don't like school and what a big important part of you know that question of whether they graduate or not you know things like you know the things you were just talking about sports and the band and newspaper and cheerleading and drama and all these things so it sort of fell in very naturally and what actually the biggest surprise to me was that nobody had written this story before so i was sort of like oh somebody ought to write it and that's where we went from there greg let's back up a second you said that you found that it was pretty evenly split in terms of whether schools were bringing kids back for these extracurriculars where was that split you know it's kind of hard to to say you know where the split actually exists i guess all i did was sort of as i was sort of adding it up in my mind i was just sort of mentally thinking okay you know there are lots and lots of places especially in the in the south and the southwest where kids were going back to school were having experiences where they were back in class and then obviously you know the a lot of the places where you know we've been the ones we've been writing about a lot where they've just either started out remotely or started in person and gone to remote instruction i didn't like create a spreadsheet or anything like that well we do know of course that there's a split between who's in school and who's not and black and brown kids are much more likely to be learning remotely right now so it would stand to reason that they would probably be the ones who are missing out on some of those extracurricular activities as well is that a reasonable course of thought yeah no that's absolutely i would say that is a non-disputed point that if you are a non-white student in the u.s at this point you are more likely to be having that kind of experience absolutely tell us about the philadelphia science leadership academy that's a charter school yeah it's it's a really interesting place and one of the reasons i chose it is because i knew the principal i knew chris lehmann i had actually spent time there reporting on the school for the book that i wrote last year with the with a co-author so i sort of knew how the place worked i knew that engagement was a huge huge piece of what they're after and i thought you know okay i wonder what it looks like in that school which i would say is one of the most sort of engaged high schools i've ever spent time in and so i i thought if they're having issues gosh i bet everybody's having issues and it turns out that you know the the principal this is really something that's on his mind in a big way well they have a champion frisbee team they do yeah kind of remarkable and you can really tell how the students take it very seriously as you say i mean they're trying to have practices they're meeting with the nutritionist they're trying to stay in shape i found that pretty fascinating that for these students but one of them mentioned of course that he's worried not only for himself but for the younger students who may have new to the school who are not even going to get an opportunity to learn about this team and i thought that said a lot absolutely and interesting because he helped me actually sort of start thinking about something which i kind of forgotten which was that freshman year if you look at the research is like the year the key year that determines whether or not a student will stick around or not for four years so if you are having issues of any sort as a freshman whether it's you know do i like this place does it so meet my needs do i like the people here do i even know what the heck this place is about if you can't answer a bunch of those questions it really i think puts you at great risk of dropping out i mean you know the sort of the the rules of engagement don't really change even though we're in a pandemic right you want to keep students interested in what they're doing whether it's you know in person or remotely it just turns out it's just so much harder to keep that interest in a remote situation and for the reporters who are listening what greg said is very true about ninth grade being where the rubber meets the road in terms of graduation predictions you might want to look for research related to that from the chicago consortium for school research which has done a lot of groundbreaking work in that area and i'm pretty sure there's been also some work out of new york city around that but let's talk about another researcher let's talk about bob balvanz at johns hopkins university as you said he's pretty much the dean of this particular area of absenteeism attendance what it does to engagement what can you tell us about the impact of participation in extracurriculars on student engagement you know from belfance's point of view the way he kind of unpacks it is that what these activities do is they provide a different set of adults for these young people it may not necessarily be you know your math teacher or your history or your english teacher it might be another adult altogether who sort of gets you in a different way you know whether it's your coach or your band teacher or the sponsor of the the newspaper or whatnot and you know his point is that you know you're losing that kind of influence you're losing those people who can basically just see you in a different way than you might be seen in regular sort of straight academic classes and then the other piece of this which i think is probably even more interesting is the idea and bob talks about this in the piece the idea of doing something bigger than yourself we tend to sort of not really think about that too much as adults right because just about everything we do is bigger than ourselves right you know whether it's some project at work or you know raising our kids or you know almost everything we do has a sort of a bigger meaning and i think for kids in high school so much of what you're doing is just focused on you getting work done right so if you can have something that's bigger whether it's you know being on the basketball team or putting out a weekly newspaper or putting on you know the spring production of guys and dolls these are things these are big kind of long-term very difficult but very satisfying projects that you know kind of bring meaning to your experience of being in school and bob's point is if you don't have those things there's something really big missing one of the things that i think comes through in your story is this idea of extracurriculars having benefits to the individual but also to the group and what i mean by that is for the individual you have new skills you are more likely as you said to be engaged in your own learning but then there are also these more collective benefits like building relationships with your peers having another adult mentor and role model but also things like school pride and i think that's got to be incredibly difficult to build and sustain remotely yeah and a couple of people i talked to actually mentioned that sort of volunteered it to me without me even inquiring about that this idea that you kind of learn in a way i mean i'll use a funny word but you kind of learn about the culture of the school through things like that and that can often be missing when you know when you can't practice with the football team or rehearse with the band it's a really interesting thing there's actually another bit of research which i didn't mention explicitly in this piece but which has really played a big part in my kind of thinking about it which is david perkins from harvard he talks about what he calls playing the whole game and what he means by that is that when you are engaged in some of these extracurriculars you are basically sort of simulating what people do in real life now maybe not like football players but like for instance if you are on the school newspaper you are kind of approximating what real journalists do right if you're in the band you're approximating what real musicians do and what he found is that this is these are really really valuable experiences and they're almost always happening in the extracurriculars after school and so that it was sort of a tape playing inside my head the whole time i was thinking about this piece you also did some reporting at traditional public schools and i'm curious at the things that you saw or were able to talk to people about did you find any examples of really best practices or or things to replicate where they're doing a good job at keeping the kids connected what i found actually across the board was that people at all sorts of schools whether it's a traditional school or a place like um sla in philly they are just like working overtime trying to keep kids connected to the adults and to one another i wouldn't say i saw something that struck me as a best practice other than just you know things like lots of check-ins lots of attention given to adults trying to kind of take kids temperatures to see where they are emotionally where they are sort of with how much they like school and how they're doing so i guess that maybe that is a best practice now that i think about it i think that was what i saw sort of most often mostly just i think the folks in schools that i talk to they're just trying to keep kids spirits up they're trying to keep everything that's happening now in context kind of keep reminding them that you know there's still a community and they will be back together again one of the things that chris lehmann he's the principal of the school and also the ultimate frisbee varsity coach um said to me was that he just keeps telling his players you know it is going to happen we are going to get back together one of these days we are going to be back on the field we're talking with greg toppo about how the coronavirus pandemic is curtailing extracurricular activities for students nationwide and the long-term risks that could bring don't miss an episode of uwa radio you never have to you can find us on your favorite podcast app and don't forget to take a moment to rate us on itunes your support and your feedback are helping us to grow greg in addition to being a journalist you're also a musician and i'm wondering have you ever thought about what kind of student you might have been if that hadn't been one of your activities oh my goodness you know i i can't say that i would have dropped out of high school because that was sort of never a thing but it definitely would not have been as fun an experience at all like at any level of my education whether it was elementary school middle school high school even college i was playing music throughout the entire time yeah i really can't imagine what it would have been like um if i hadn't been able to get together with my friends and play music um it would have really sucked what were some of the formative extracurriculars for you when you were growing up um definitely music you sort of put your finger on it right away i did a couple of different things like i think about in high school like i was involved in you know after school plays but i was not on the stage i was like on stage crew and things like that um let's see what else what else did i do i was student senate president if that means anything and i had absolutely no power at all that maybe that was like you know my first reality check i had a meaningless title uh what else did i do i actually was involved in a radio production believe it or not a couple of friends of mine and i we inherited one of these sort of bi-weekly drive down to the local radio station and do like you know the news from port chester high school one of those things and by the time we got a hold of it we couldn't believe that it was still so square and so kind of dumb so we actually turned it into a sort of second city monty python 15 minutes of insanity and we had the time of our lives i have to say well i think you stumbled into something and that's sort of what high school in particular i think is about and also middle school in its own way which is a chance to sort of figure out who you are who you might be and and extracurriculars are certainly a piece of that yeah no i think that's right you know to think about perkins the harvard researcher i i think it's huge it really does give you a vision of like what adults do and how you could fit in with the real world personally i think it's i wouldn't say it's overlooked research but i don't think we give it enough kind of mental space when we think about things like high school and to perkins credit you know i think educators they really take him seriously and they really take these ideas seriously that's in a way he's sort of one of the fathers of like the project project-based learning movement so he he's getting plenty of face time i shouldn't i shouldn't say he's overlooked well but there are things that are overlooked and one of them i think you could argue is probably arts education which has i would say long been on the back burner but when you look at surveys of parents and students they value it tremendously and talk about how important it is to them in the school experience yeah yeah and that's like the irony of it all right when people interface with their school it's almost always through that right it's through you know friday night football or you know going to the school play or the band concert i think it's a fascinating divide where we think about the academics as being core to the experience yet we as adults we as community members are focused almost entirely on the other stuff as if like the academics will take care of themselves and we shouldn't worry too much about them so if i'm a local reporter and i want to follow your lead i'm looking at the extracurriculars right now where do i go where do i start great question i mean as i think about like my unfinished business i focused very much um just on high school so i think there's a huge amazing story to be told in middle school certainly which is where a lot of students i think get their first taste of some of these things those extracurriculars can be hugely influential the thing that i would think would be sort of happening very soon would be you know what's gonna happen to the spring musical right you know are you gonna put it on zuma i have no idea i think that would be a really interesting process to follow and then also i guess this started out as a kind of me thinking about the role of sports i was actually thinking this is just going to be a story about like what it's like to lose sports and i don't know if there have been enough stories that just focus on that you know i don't read everything so i don't know for sure but i imagine i think that's a real fertile ground to explore i think that's true and even just in the context of students physical health looking at what it means to lose recess even if it was just short to lose gym class even if it was just twice a week there was a distressing story out of boston last week some pediatricians testifying that since the pandemic they're seeing kids with huge weight gain because of an activity and i think that's definitely going to be another story for education reporters yeah no absolutely and you know i'd like to find out what kind of new clubs are forming who's stepping into this breach and you know taking advantage of this digital moment i spent some time at a high school in the north shore of massachusetts where the the culinary arts teacher is now doing home demonstrations of cooking lessons for her students and they're logging in after school to see what she's making and i just think that's pretty brilliant you know and it's interesting because i think the media focused activities i don't know if renaissance is too strong a word but i think they will really do well in some ways i mean i just think about my own students you know i teach undergraduate journalism right now at northwestern in qatar and one of the fascinating things about that is that we are remote our students are scattered throughout the region um actually even further i mean you know the school is in the middle east but there are students in china there are students in europe students in africa throughout asia and you know what they are working together i mean they are doing projects in class as if they were in the same room and i just got handed to them i mean obviously the technology has followed the needs of you know all these endeavors but they're willing to work together like in a way that i hadn't even conceived of before all this i'm not going to make you count them up greg but you have been on the education beat through multiple presidential administrations and i can't pass up this opportunity to ask you as a national education journalist i'm wondering what stories you're watching for in the coming months as we make the transition to a biden administration the one that comes to mind first is mostly just sort of like a coincidental one which is this idea that the first lady's going to be a working community college english instructor at nova in northern virginia community college i think it just is sort of inescapable that people will be talking about the importance of community college more and obviously biden has even said that he wants to put more money into it in order to do things like retain students and have them finish and graduate so i think we're going to be talking a lot about that i read a cool thing the other day which i did not know that mrs biden jill biden her dissertation was about student retention in community colleges so i imagine i'm sure the day came and went when she was waving that in senator biden's face and making him pay attention to that but i imagine we'll be thinking a little bit about that the thing that actually kind of worries me is how close things are in terms of political division and i wonder you know if we'll be able to get anything done we're still talking you know days and days later about what the senate's going to look like you know when i think about the names being floated for um secretary of education it's fascinating to me that people are talking about union leaders which is not to say that i don't think one of them could be approved but it just seems like kind of a long shot given the divide we've got in the senate but you know stranger things have happened i guess right absolutely i think one thing people are going to be watching for is that first day executive orders and executive actions that might be taken even if those just sort of set the tone whether it is something related to school loan debt which you know our higher ed members are telling us is probably a little less likely than it seemed to have been but what's going to happen on that first day to set the tone and i'm predicting it's something related to daca oh absolutely i think we're gonna have a totally different point of view from the past four years on that and actually i'm thinking as much about things like title ix you know the sexual assault regulations i think people on the left were just sort of waiting for the day when they could overturn those yeah i think it's going to be really interesting i think we're going to have a lot of 180s on uh some of these important things so we'll see i don't think there's going to be very much money to do much of what biden would want to do but certainly his priorities i think will be very different from what we've seen over the past four years this is a challenging time for a lot of people and that of course includes education journalists who are covering an unprecedented time on the beat right now i'm wondering what advice you might have for some of them who may be trying to hold off on the burnout yeah i definitely think burnout is possible and it's a huge thing i mean we have become kind of mono taskers at this point writing about almost nothing else and and i guess the thing that's kept me sane is trying to do different kinds of work at this point i'm obviously freelancing i'm working mostly for the 74 but i'm also working with a friend who's a cognitive scientist we just got this kind of crazy idea a couple months ago we wanted to work together and we got the idea to create a series of explainer videos about ethically questionable psychological experiments of the 20th century so we've had the sort of the time of our lives not only um you know thinking about and researching and writing about them but also producing 10 11 minute youtube videos that try to sort of translate the research so that people not only understand them but can sort of put them in the context of what was happening at the time it's been really really fun i i've never done anything like this but just having having a great time i think that's an excellent suggestion i would say to reporters if you have an opportunity to cross off the beat for a story or to team up with another reporter in the newsroom you know go ahead and take that opportunity but i would also say we're in the middle of something unexpected and unprecedented and just taking things the way the saying goes one day at a time and and just take some comfort in knowing we are going to come through the other side of this i actually think a good editor would recognize this and maybe let people sort of do something different for a while i say that as someone who dealt with many many editors in my career and the good ones always were sort of looking out for what the other possibilities were and i think you're right it's such an unprecedented time um we should be willing to sort of i don't know why break rules is the right term but we should be willing to sort of try new things greg toppo is a longtime national education journalist including for usa today in the associated press among others he's also the president of the ewa board of directors greg thank you for making time for uwa radio it was a pleasure to hear from you you bet and that wraps up another episode for us if there's a story or reporter you want to learn more about drop us a line with radio ewa.org the mission of the education writers association is to strengthen the community of education journalists and improve the quality of education coverage for more than 70 years ewa has helped reporters get the story right have a great week take good care of yourselves and thank you for listening [Music]

Channel: Education Writers Association

Views: 41

Rating: 0 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: kaZzd5uv0b4

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020