When school goes home: Reimagining the educator’s role

As school buildings reopened this fall, much of the conversation about K-12 education focused on how best to make up for the learning opportunities students have missed out on due to COVID. But some schools, such as the High School for Recording Arts (HSRA) in St. Paul, Minnesota, maintained, and in some ways exceeded, pre-pandemic metrics of student achievement and school performance.

When we began investigating what helped this school defy the odds, we expected to find that its success had to do with its specialized, arts-based curriculum. To our surprise, however, what has stood out as most important is the school’s approach to defining the professional responsibilities of the educators who work there. Long before the pandemic, HSRA had reconceived the roles of teachers and other staff in ways that allowed the school to continue producing positive outcomes for students during a period when many schools found themselves doing worse.

We cannot pretend to be impartial researchers: Michael is the director of social impact for HSRA and Linda has been a friend of the school for years. But as people who care about the broader American education system as well, we wanted to better understand the lessons that HSRA learned in this difficult context and see whether its innovations might be of use to other schools around the country, both now and long after the pandemic is over.