Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, November 27, 2020

Schools Struggle To Stay Open As Coronavirus Sidelines Staff | Across America, US Patch

Schools Struggle To Stay Open As Coronavirus Sidelines Staff | Across America, US Patch
Schools Struggle To Stay Open As Coronavirus Sidelines Staff
Around the country, contact tracing and isolation protocols are sidelining school employees and closing school buildings.


COLUMBUS, OH — The infection of a single cafeteria worker was all it took to close classrooms in the small Lowellville school district in northeastern Ohio, forcing at least two weeks of remote learning.

Not only did the worker who tested positive for the coronavirus need to quarantine, but so did the entire cafeteria staff and most of the transportation crew, because some employees work on both. The district of about 500 students sharing one building had resumed in-person instruction with masks and social distancing and avoided any student infections. But without enough substitute workers, administrators had no choice but to temporarily abandon classroom operations and meal services.

"It boils down to the staff," Lowellville Superintendent Geno Thomas said. "If you can't staff a school, you have to bring it to remote."

Around the country, contact tracing and isolation protocols are sidelining school employees and closing school buildings. The staffing challenges force students out of classrooms, even in districts where officials say the health risks of in-person learning are manageable. And the absences add to the strain from a wave of early retirements and leaves taken by employees worried about health risks.

It's another layer of the "tremendous stress" faced by administrators and educators navigating the pandemic, said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, the nation's leading school CONTINUE READING: Schools Struggle To Stay Open As Coronavirus Sidelines Staff | Across America, US Patch



US Education: 5 Ways Biden Can “De-DeVos” the System - LA Progressive

US Education: 5 Ways Biden Can “De-DeVos” the System - LA Progressive
US Education: 5 Ways Biden Can “De-DeVos” the System



Teachers and other education advocates are feeling giddy at the possibility of moving forward a progressive agenda that the current education secretary, Betsy DeVos, stopped dead in its tracks four years ago.

President-elect Joe Biden campaign’s policy director, Stef Feldman, told the Education Writers Association that as president, Biden would “get some big, bold education legislation passed and certainly immediate relief for our schools and our educators,” and said Biden would take executive actions as well. Many of those executive actions, education advocates hope, will de-DeVos the Department of Education.

Here are some of the likeliest ways public education will change in a Biden-Harris administration.

Enforce All Students’ Civil Rights 

Earlier this year, Betsy DeVos announced sweeping revisions to the federal civil rights law Title IX, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded schools. As a result, a judicial-like process is now used to investigate sexual harassment complaints, giving the accused a right to cross-examine accusers in a live hearing. Student advocates have said this would deter survivors from reporting assaults, which were already underreported.

Activists must also pressure representatives to fund Biden’s initiatives: “We can’t just get people elected. We must show up daily with a grassroots push to help Biden-Harris.”

Biden has also vowed to restore Obama-era civil rights guidance letters, which were rescinded by DeVos. Those include allowing transgender students to choose their own restrooms, addressing the disproportionate disciplining of Black students and pressing for diversity in colleges and K-12 classrooms.

“The good news is that Secretary DeVos has been more effective at doing damage to Obama-era policies than at creating anything new,” Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, told Capital & Main. “So the first and easiest items on the Biden education checklist should be reissuing — and CONTINUE READING: US Education: 5 Ways Biden Can “De-DeVos” the System - LA Progressive

Teacher Tom: How Brains Grow

Teacher Tom: How Brains Grow
How Brains Grow




When our daughter was a preschooler, authority figures informed parents that the human brain was fully formed by around five-years-old. After that, there would be no new brain cells, which was why, they told us, the early years were so important. These were the scientific facts. Just a few days ago, a parent of a preschooler told me that the director of her child’s school told the assembled parents that the human brain was “90 percent developed” by five, information which she conveyed to me in a kind of jittery breathiness that betrayed both awe and panic. I recall feeling similarly about these scientific facts. 

The problem with these facts is that they were not facts 20 years ago and they are not facts today. They are the product of a debunked theory about human brain development. Sadly, these non-facts were, and still are, being used to support the toxic academic pressures being applied to our youngest citizens.

It seems that the earlier “facts” were based largely upon studies done on monkey brains in a laboratory. When skeptical scientists more recently tested the theory on CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: How Brains Grow

A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog
A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized



I am about one-fourth of the way into Jack Schneider’s and Jennifer Berkshire’s A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of Public School. As I experience one in three of my students in quarantine related to COVID-19, I am keenly aware of how limited computer-delivered education is absent immediate, in-person, teacher-student and student-student relationships.

Human beings grow and learn best in relationship, which should come as no surprise since humans are social beings.

And yet, as Schneider (no relation) and Berkshire so deftly explain, the likes US ed sec Betsy DeVos– who would like nothing more than to erase public education from existence– would just as soon also eliminate as many teachers as possible in favor of students interacting with machines– and all in the name of reducing human beings to “career ready” servers of the market. After all, machines are cheaper and cannot unionize, and a *successful* outcome is one that serves business and industry.



However, in this time of pandemic-induced, online-ed proliferation, it is the rare person who sees isolated students sitting in front of computer screens as pedagogically desirable. Having my students in quarantine connected to my classroom only via their Chromebooks is not an “answer” but a tolerated necessity during this COVID crisis, and it has me constantly trying to figure out ways to keep my students’ education afloat until next I see them in person– a “figuring out” that is tedious, time-consuming, and exhausting.

I am not saying I am against quarantining, but I sure do understand the push by some CONTINUE READING: A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Selling Edtech when Disguised as Philanthropy | tultican

Selling Edtech when Disguised as Philanthropy | tultican
Selling Edtech when Disguised as Philanthropy





By Thomas Ultican 11/27/2020

“Personalized learning” is being driven by foundations derived from companies that stand to profit by its implementation. Last year, George Mason’s Priscilla Regan and the University of Ottawa’s Valerie Steeves wrote the peer review paper Education, privacy, and big data algorithms: Taking the persons out of personalized learning in which they state, “Other than the Carnegie Corporation, the private foundations who have been most supportive of personalized learning are those supported by the technology companies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Google Foundation.”

In the case of the Carnegie Corporation, the authors note that the philanthropy has been supporting education causes since its founding in 1911. Recently, Carnegie has given monetary support to “personalized learning” but “typically in partnership with one of the tech foundations.”

Based on a listing of the fifteen largest education spending philanthropies in the first decade of the millennium,  the paper’s authors selected the technology linked Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the largest donor); Michael and Susan Dell (fourth largest donor); and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (#8 in 2010) for analysis. They added two newer giving organizations, the Google Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to complete their list of five tech associated education grant making companies to analyze.

In their review of scholarly papers and the popular press, they identified five CONTINUE READING: Selling Edtech when Disguised as Philanthropy | tultican