Educational REHAB: An Unprecedented Opportunity to Restore K-12 Public Education

We turn on the news and see parents banding together to share their grievances at school board meetings. Articles are emerging, daily, showcasing the shortage of bus drivers, cafeteria workers, special education teachers, and leaders. The U.S. National Guard has arrived to teach in some of our classrooms due to teacher shortages. This emerging K-12 public education crisis is escalating exponentially as politics, the pandemic, critical race theory and opposing curricula viewpoints pit community members against one another. This is like no other time in history. Our modern era is different because it has created long-term, devastating, multi-layered impacts on students and their learning.Learning gaps were already an insurmountable challenge as American students arrived to class with deficits more than one grade level. Schools were already suffering from a disconnect from Generation Z and now Generation Alpha. Fewer college graduates are joining the education profession. We have an unprecedented opportunity to fully reform K-12 public education through the allyship of relevant, authentic and knowledge-building learning environments. Schools still operate on an agrarian calendar. Have we asked students what they could imagine school to be? Have we adapted learning pathways that lead to future jobs? Educational REHAB is a call for a total systems analysis, community voice, full transparency, accountability at the federal, state and local levels to ensure high quality teaching and learning for all students, and an emergence of a system that the authors of this book believe that can be saved.