At today's @mocoboe meeting @MCPS offered families a choice between student engagement and student privacy wrt its policy of recording lessons for asynchronous use. While this argument is framed as helping those who cannot attend live zoom class, this is a false choice and

largely the result of poor planning and delayed decisions. Providing asynchronous material is super important; the real power of online education lies there, but rather than recognize this, MCPS set up its entire fall around the logic of synchronous/live instruction

Ideally, the decision to go virtual should have been made early (yes, it was possible to decide early), get teachers on board, trained, and ready to go. If teachers had been trained properly and in timely fashion, they would've known that the best option would be record lectures

in small segments prior to class, and then using those recorded materials for live instruction. These recorded segments would not feature student faces could be made available asynchronously for more than 72 hours.

But that would require giving teachers time and training and being paid for work. Far from recognizing this, MCPS has been instead engaged in labor standoff with teachers. So, setting up a false choice between student engagement and student privacy is really a crummy thing to do.