ACADEMIA Letters

“Ala Carte” Education: An Inevitable Outgrowth of

COVID?
Mark E. Deschaine

Traditional face to face education has remained dormant for a long time, with little change in
expectation or innovation at a systems level. Teachers have lectured, students have listened,
textbooks utilized, homework has been assigned, and tests have been administered. Students
typically have attended programs in their neighborhood, and they have participated in ex-
tracurricular activities after hours: instruction has seldom been delivered outside the confines
of the classroom (sans the occasional field trip, which really was a form of instruction lite).
Few opportunities have existed to move beyond the traditional formats utilized for teaching,
learning, administrating, and assessing.
Specialized curricular offerings have existed but were under the domain of mandated pro-
grams that required services for students with disabilities or needing accommodations for
recognized medical conditions. When necessary, and if you were incredibly adventurous, you
could enroll your children in programming for credit recovery that occurred totally online, in
a virtually mediated delivery system, with teacher assistance available within the room.
Magnet schools, few and far between, provided instruction for students through advanced
or specialized courses or curricula related to content areas of the students’ choice. Charter,
parochial, and private schools also offered parents “choice” from the recognized public-school
system but were usually designed around the traditional formats for teaching, learning, admin-
istrating, and assessing provided elsewhere.
All in all, these were variations of a theme: a standardized school day, with teachers
teaching, students learning, all within the confines of a physical school building. Even with
the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015), which
encouraged states and districts to be more flexible and adventurous in their programming,
most districts and programs stuck with the tried and true: the historically expedient options

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Mark E. Deschaine, [email protected]

Citation: Deschaine, M.E. (2021). “Ala Carte” Education: An Inevitable Outgrowth of COVID? Academia
Letters, Article 134. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL134.

1
set before them. Few were the innovators that took the lead in providing novel approaches
to teaching or learning, materials or methodologies, programming or evaluation even though
options were evolving in these areas in dramatic fashion.
Enter COVID – the medical behemoth that set the entire infrastructure of the world on its
head when it arrived in 2020. No longer were educational programs and services able to be
provided in a neighborhood building, with a real human dispensing content in a face-to-face
fashion, using chalkboards and textbooks as instructional tools. Instead, teachers franticly as-
sembled course content and placed the information online in the best way possible. Students
were forced into learning at home, in the car, or on-the-go, utilizing internet enabled tech-
nological devices that provided instructional content and information derived from sources
from who knows where. With implemented home based, online learning activities, parents’
participation in their children’s academic programs were no longer relegated only to parent-
teacher conferences, awards days, science fairs, and field days. Just the opposite: with little
notice parents were being thrust into the role of educator, instructor, counselor, technology
coach, and program evaluator. Instructional responsibilities were reactively lunged upon them
with little discussion as to willingness, ability, or capability to provide this level of service.
Over time, in less than a full academic year, a “new normal” developed for students, parents,
teachers, and educational programs.
The “new normal” had unforeseen short-term consequences on all involved. “Teachers”
became an open-ended definition as many educators appropriately struggled to effectively
provide content in new modalities with little, if any training. The educators and programs
that students and parents once relied upon for appropriate materials, methods, curriculum,
content, and assessment started to be less and less of the support they once were. With this
new online reality, students not only utilized the content provided by their schools, and their
new instructional guides (often their parents), but they often identified new sources of support.
They augmented and supplemented instructional content and instruction from any reliable
supplier. Parents and students soon came to realize the limitations of current educational
systems; more importantly, they came to understand the capabilities of instructional support
systems within their own reach. Gradual release of instructional control was anything but
gradual: a sense of ability and independence grew in some students and parents, and this is
the group that I would like to address in the remainder of this paper.
Here are a couple of examples of interventions and resources currently utilized to meet the
instructional demands of some students. Historically, during the summer, parents with pools
were known to hire certified lifeguards as swim instructors for their children, and they would
offer other families in the neighborhood an invitation to participate to defray the cost. A sim-
ilar educational opportunity has gained popularity during COVID. “Pandemic pods” where

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Mark E. Deschaine, [email protected]

Citation: Deschaine, M.E. (2021). “Ala Carte” Education: An Inevitable Outgrowth of COVID? Academia
Letters, Article 134. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL134.

2
parents collaboratively maintain their children’s’ educational needs, with families “bubbling”
together for increased academic, social, and emotional support appear to be growing in uti-
lization. “Support groups” have sprung up on social media sites like Facebook and an online
“dating” like site called https://pandemicpods.org has been created that states “Need help
finding or forming a Pandemic Pod? We’re here to help! Connect with other families nearby
based on interests and preferences. Reach out yourself or let us help you match with 5 other
families”.
Content wise, sites like https://hippocampus.org, https://kahnacademy.com, and
https://new.edmodo.com provide curricular supports and content to assist parents in finding
online resources to meet the needs of their children when the teacher is not available. In some
cases, parents have disregarded the content provided by the schools and found internet-based
content so they can allow their children to progress at their own rate to meet curricular content.
There are many more examples, but space doesn’t permit their inclusion. Ultimately,
the question remains … are these short-term interventions or long-term intercessions in the
educational opportunities for students, and how will districts address their utilization in the
future?
Fast forward … COVID realities of today are gone, and we can return to the “traditional”.
At the start of the year, the building administrator calls a “Welcome Back to School” assembly
and asks the parents and students in attendance to “Raise your hand if you vote yes to return
to where we came from”. How many of your parents, students, or constituents that are happy
with these new options will vote yes to returning to the settings they previously experienced?
What if they vote yes for only a portion of your offerings, like your extra curriculars, such
as athletics or choir, but not your core academics? What if they do not want to return to an
8-3 traditional face to face delivery system, but will send their child in from 10 – 12 because
that is when they want their child to receive instruction in a specialized program? What if the
parents or parents or students happy with these new opportunities demand …?
The potential permutations of available options are numerous and are dependent upon the
realities of your local system. The long-term consequences of these new programming options
for students and parents are yet unrecognized. The elasticity and longevity of programs that
COVID necessitated school districts to implement in their systems beyond the “traditional”
to meet the immediate need of students might become expectations for future interventions.
Whether the district likes it or not, the inclusion of these reactionary interventions has cre-
ated the potential for non-traditional, segmented “ala carte” educational opportunities, and
the expectation for their continuation into the future has the prospects for some dramatic pro-
grammatic impact. This leaves us with more questions than answers, some of which include:

• How will school systems which rely upon stable foundational allowances, based solely

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Mark E. Deschaine, [email protected]

Citation: Deschaine, M.E. (2021). “Ala Carte” Education: An Inevitable Outgrowth of COVID? Academia
Letters, Article 134. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL134.

3
 on student attendance, with adherence to an attendance system that closely tracks “seat
time” meet these requests, dare I say demands of their constituents in the future?

• What percentage of services will need to be utilized by the student for them to receive
a state endorsed diploma from their school system?

• With the increase in the utilization of micro credentials, will K-12 diplomas continue
to be a necessity?

• What types of instructional professionals will school systems need to hire to meet these
changing and fluid requests for instructional services?

• Will content teachers be needed to the same extent they are now?

• Will instructional coaches need to be hired to meet the increased technology profes-
sional development needs, not of the teachers, but of the parents or support personnel
running the “pandemic pods”?

• How will we plan for the traditional, but allow for the requests that might come as a
result of new programming options?

As a professor who writes about supporting online educational programming options at

multiple levels (Deschaine, 2018; Rice & Deschaine, 2020), a former school administrator
that was required to address the requests of a varied constituency base, and as someone who
teaches future administrators to be responsive to constituent need, I believe that systems would
do well to perform baseline assessments of all interventions that have occurred during COVID
and be willing to address the short and long-term viability of continuing to provide these
services once we are able to return to traditional. If not, requests for incoming “ala carte”
programming might create unanticipated outcomes for programs and systems.

REFERENCES
Deschaine, M. E. (2018 November). Supporting students with disabilities in K-12 online and
blended learning. Lansing, MI: Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute. Retrieved
from https://mvlri.org/research/publications/supporting-students-with-disabilities-in-k-12-
online-and-blended-learning/.

Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6301 (2015). https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-

congress/senate-bill/1177

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Mark E. Deschaine, [email protected]

Citation: Deschaine, M.E. (2021). “Ala Carte” Education: An Inevitable Outgrowth of COVID? Academia
Letters, Article 134. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL134.

4
Rice, M. F., & Deschaine, M. E. (2020). Orienting towards teacher preparation for online
environments. The Educational Forum, 84(2), 114-125.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2020.1702747

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Mark E. Deschaine, [email protected]

Citation: Deschaine, M.E. (2021). “Ala Carte” Education: An Inevitable Outgrowth of COVID? Academia
Letters, Article 134. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL134.