Lisa Arrastia

This interview with Lisa Arrastia, Phd, took place via zoom conference on June 27th, 2022, with the narrator calling in from Canaan, New York. Dr. Arrastia is a tenure-track associate professor of education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLU) and a program supervising  professor for student teachers in the field of pre-K through 12th grade. Dr. Arrastia works with student teachers as they seek state licensure. Dr. Arrastia begins the interview by sharing that she is exhausted and teachers are exhausted. She observes that towards the end of this school year, kids, teachers, and staff were getting sick with COVID-19, but the schools remained opened with minimal safety protocols. She also shares that COVID-19 in her school and community is normalized as an inevitability; safety protocols of ventilation or open windows are no longer widely observed. Masks are the only safety tool available to teachers, though it is not required at this point. Dr. Arrastia observes that student choices around safety and masking in the classroom model adult choices and behaviors. She speaks at length to her disappointment in the U.S. public school system. She believes that public schools are broken, and the COVID-19 pandemic exposed what was already broken by design. Dr. Arrastia notes that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a turning point where U.S. public education became untenable. Now twenty-one later, NCLB standardized testing and curricula are systemically integrated into all aspects public education approaches. After working in education for decades, Dr. Arrastia feels that she may leave the field and shares about hopelessness in public education. She closes the interview with a hope that this interview and archive will speak to people hundreds of years in the future, where listeners hear her descriptions about the educational system unrecognizable to their own.