It is becoming increasingly clear that addressing the surface issues like food sustainability, as schools have, is plugging a roof whose gaping holes of inequity become only more apparent during national catastrophes like Columbine, Katrina, and corona. They beckon us to use our ingenuity, commitment, and moral outrage to not only solve the surface problem du jour, but also provide millions of desperate students a place in which they belong—one that provides safety, security, love, acceptance, and dignity as worthy human beings; a “home” that does not wash away when the rain begins to fall.
Yet our students are increasingly at risk, and home itself is ephemeral. The fastest-growing segment of the student population is no longer Hispanic; it’s homeless, with some 1.5 million students reporting homelessness in 2017–2018, an 11 percent increase over the prior year and the largest number ever reported. The biggest increase, of 103 percent, came in the number of children now living in unsheltered environments like cars, parks, and streets (Keystone State Education Coalition, 2020; National Center for Homeless Education, 2020). If these students all attended one district, they would far surpass the number of students in New York and Chicago—the largest and third-largest districts in the United States—combined.
Homelessness is clearly on the rise, but so is an array of issues facing children, including divorce, poverty, obesity, and depression, among others. While an argument can be made for the fragility of nearly all students nowadays, there is no denying their diversity of needs, all of which becomes apparent as each school day begins.
It is true that many students are still doing well, for example, and that others who might be expected to be “at risk” due to their demographic profile somehow beat the odds. Still others from backgrounds of low socioeconomic status receive the consistency and support from home and/or school that are necessary to thrive, as described in forthcoming chapters.
Yet educators are stretched to the limits in the demands placed on them by policymakers who don’t seem to understand the value of frontline professionals caring for and educating our nation’s children, or the depth of their diversity and needs. No wonder the United States was exploding in a series of teacher strikes leading up to the most recent crisis (Smith & Davey, 2019; Wolf, 2019).
This book will present examples of schools “beating the odds” before COVID-19, as well as a process for determining newly created approaches to educating children in a post-COVID-19 world. Perhaps more importantly, breakthrough leadership spotlights leaders at all levels now leveraging crises like this to shape local and national priorities toward a more equitable and healthy society for our children.
Courageous leaders at all levels have a unique opportunity in advancing an agenda of equitable and successful outcomes for students. The facts about what is at stake couldn’t be starker. Good leadership saves lives both in pandemics and in our profession.
The actions that Hilleman, his team, and ultimately the nation took saved millions of lives. The role educators play, likewise, for our nation’s children makes a difference in the trajectory of their lives: the difference between survival and malnourishment; between a future career and prison; and between young people who are socially, emotionally, and academically prepared for life and those who are on the road to a low-wage or impoverished existence (Valdez & Broin, 2015). Educators have the ability to affect students’ life trajectory through relationships, attitudes, social and emotional competence, contributions to learning conditions, and responses to student behavior (Coggshall et al., 2013). What will happen if we only respond to this and the civil rights crisis and return to “normal” afterwards?
Lessons of Willful Blindness and Its Deadly Outcome in the Pandemic of 1918
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a perfect example of why we need a real leader in place during bad times even more than in good times. (Dan Domenech, personal communication, April 6, 2020)
The horrific scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic—known as the “Spanish flu”—is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims—that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined. (Roos, 2020)
One example of a pandemic that shook the world is the Spanish flu that first emerged in February 1918. This had all of the characteristics of a seasonal flu, although it was highly contagious and extremely harmful. The virus spread rapidly throughout the United States Army installation, after one of the first cases was confirmed for an Army cook. As the month came to a close, 1,100 troops had unfortunately been hospitalized, causing 38 people to perish after developing pneumonia (Roos, 2020).
While virulent, this flu, like its 1957 “Asian” flu successor, might have been brought under control a great deal more quickly had the nation’s leaders been focused on that. Instead of protecting citizens, and particularly the armed forces, United States troops were deployed to France, England, Italy, and Spain, where the virus spread freely. Within months, three-quarters of the French troops were infected as was half of the British Army.
Spain was neutral in this war and actually had fewer incidents of infection. Yet the misnomer of “Spanish flu” arose out of the country’s free and open reporting of the virus’s existence while the American and other media quashed such reports, further exacerbating the pandemic.
Rather than quarantine and treat servicemen, the leadership at the time pursued an aggressive war campaign by moving soldiers throughout the European continent and America, often in close proximity to one another.
In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lockdown was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home. (Roos, 2020)
The dearth of nurses and plans for treatment were also exacerbated by racism. Well-trained Black nurses who were prepared to work were only permitted to assist German prisoners of war.
Ironically, at the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson himself was apparently infected during his Paris treaty negotiations (Roos, 2020). The terms of the treaty suffered as a result of his inability to focus and maintain mental acuity, and this set the stage for the next world war.
A New Way Forward: Breakthrough Leadership
Our choices are clear. As a nation, continent, and world, we can turn a collective blind eye to the interconnected equity issues that COVID-19 and the blatant murder of our citizens of color lay bare, or use our understanding of these issues to make a better and more equitable society. The breakthrough leadership model is rooted in the principles of courage, and is consistent with, but not reliant on, adaptive leadership, which is focused on innovating to address emerging challenges. At the root of breakthrough leadership, however, is a fundamental shift in perspective regarding the root cause of the challenge at hand, the solution to which is a new set of actions that often require going beyond one’s current “boundaries.” Whereas adaptive leadership might lead a team to mobilize in finding and delivering meals to homeless students and families, breakthrough leadership would in addition call for a deeper analysis to determine why they were homeless in the first place, and what set of alliances, resources, and common understandings and commitments are necessary to address this issue at its root, definitively and systemically. Both are rooted in courage, as indicated below.
This COVID-19 and civil rights crisis calls for the kind of breakthrough leadership described in Chapter 2. The viral breakout and civil unrest have led to a breakdown, which in turn can become a breakthrough for our collective commitment to a new level of equity.
Adaptive and courageous leadership at all levels is now becoming the norm in assisting and educating children during this pandemic. Next, we are called