New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person | 89.3 KPCC

New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person | 89.3 KPCC

New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person

The U.S. Education Department has released the first in a series of school surveys intended to provide a national view of learning during the pandemic. It reveals that the percentage of students who are still attending school virtually may be higher than previously understood.

As of January and early February of this year, 44% of elementary students and 48% of middle school students in the survey remained fully remote. And the survey found large differences by race: 69% of Asian, 58% of Black and 57% of Hispanic fourth graders were learning entirely remotely, while just 27% of White students were.

Conversely, nearly half of white fourth-graders were learning full-time in person, compared with just 15% of Asian, 28% of Black and 33% of Hispanic fourth-graders. The remainder had hybrid schedules.

This disparity may be partly driven by where students live. City schools, the survey found, are less likely than rural schools to offer full-time, in-person classes. Full-time, in-person schooling dominated in the South and the Midwest, and was much less common in the West and Northeast.

The racial and ethnic gaps may also be driven in part by which families are choosing to stay remote, even where some in-person learning is offered. Three out of 4 districts around the country were offering some in-person learning as of January, the CONTINUE READING: New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person | 89.3 KPCC

CDC Says Schools Can Now Space Students 3 Feet Apart, Rather Than 6 | 89.3 KPCC

CDC Says Schools Can Now Space Students 3 Feet Apart, Rather Than 6 | 89.3 KPCC

CDC Says Schools Can Now Space Students 3 Feet Apart, Rather Than 6

Updated March 19, 2021 at 12:46 PM ET

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance for schools. On Friday, the agency announced it "now recommends that, with universal masking, students should maintain a distance of at least 3 feet in classroom settings."

Previously the guidance stated, "Physical distancing (at least 6 feet) should be maximized to the greatest extent possible." The new guidelines still call for 6 feet of distance between adults and students as well as in common areas, such as auditoriums, and when masks are off, such as while eating. And the 6-foot distancing rule still applies for the general public in settings such as grocery stores.

The change is momentous because in many places around the country, the 6-foot guidance has been interpreted as requiring schools to operate on part-time or hybrid schedules to reduce class sizes. A 3-foot rule would allow many more schools to open in person full time.

The revision was spurred by some new research, including a study published March 10 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which looked at schools in Massachusetts, where districts were given a choice of distancing students either 6 or 3 feet apart, and where the majority of districts also required universal masking. The study included more than a half-million students who attended school in person last fall.

"We didn't see any substantial difference in cases among students or staff in CONTINUE READING: CDC Says Schools Can Now Space Students 3 Feet Apart, Rather Than 6 | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: NPR/Ipsos Poll: Nearly One Third Of Parents May Stick With Remote Learning | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: NPR/Ipsos Poll: Nearly One Third Of Parents May Stick With Remote Learning | 89.3 KPCC

NPR/Ipsos Poll: Nearly One Third Of Parents May Stick With Remote Learning

One year after the coronavirus pandemic shuttered classrooms around the country and the world, U.S. parents are guardedly optimistic about the academic and social development of their children, an NPR/Ipsos poll finds.

But 62% of parents say their child's education has been disrupted. And, more than 4 out of 5 would like to see schools provide targeted extra services to help their kids catch up. This includes just over half of parents who support the idea of summer school.

The nation has lacked solid national data on precisely where classrooms are open to students. In our survey, half of parents said their children were learning virtually, a third were attending in person full-time, and the remainder were in person part-time. As other polls have found, Black and Hispanic parents were far more likely than white parents to say their children were all-remote — 65% for Black parents, 57% for Hispanic parents, and 38% for white parents.

In a sign of the disruptions that have become routine this school year, 43% of parents said that they had switched among virtual, in-person or hybrid since the previous fall.

It has been "a bit of a journey, to put it mildly," said Nick Ehrenberg, a father of two in Minneapolis, who was one of the parents polled. School for his children has shifted back and forth between virtual, hybrid, and virtual again due to closures and CONTINUE READING: Audio: NPR/Ipsos Poll: Nearly One Third Of Parents May Stick With Remote Learning | 89.3 KPCC

Lifelong Educator, Miguel Cardona, Confirmed As Education Secretary | 89.3 KPCC

Lifelong Educator, Miguel Cardona, Confirmed As Education Secretary | 89.3 KPCC

Lifelong Educator, Miguel Cardona, Confirmed As Education Secretary

The U.S. Department of Education will have a new leader. Late Monday, in a 64 to 33 vote, the U.S. Senate confirmed Miguel Cardona to be the next Secretary of Education.

Before being nominated by President Biden, Cardona served as Connecticut's education commissioner for the past year and a half, arguing forcefully that schools should reopen during the COVID-19 crisis in order to keep equity gaps from growing ever wider. Before that, he spent his entire career working for the public school system that helped raise him — as a fourth grade teacher, principal and assistant superintendent in the old factory town of Meriden, Conn.

Cardona assumes the Education Department's top job as the debate around how to safely reopen schools has grown increasingly bitter, with many parents clamoring for children to be able to return to classrooms and with many teachers resisting a return before all educators have been vaccinated. That has forced Biden to walk a political tightrope, reassuring teachers they should be prioritized for the vaccine while new guidance from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes clear that vaccinations should not be a prerequisite for reopening schools.

The school tracking website, Burbio, suggests schools have been gradually reopening. According to its tracker, 27.5% of students still attend virtual-only schools — down from 31% the week before. An additional 28% attend schools offering CONTINUE READING: Lifelong Educator, Miguel Cardona, Confirmed As Education Secretary | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: With One Move, Congress Could Lift Millions Of Children Out Of Poverty | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: With One Move, Congress Could Lift Millions Of Children Out Of Poverty | 89.3 KPCC

With One Move, Congress Could Lift Millions Of Children Out Of Poverty

The COVID-19 relief bill working its way through Congress is full of big ideas to help people. But there's one idea that's so big, it was politically unthinkable not that long ago.

President Biden and Democratic lawmakers want to fight child poverty by giving U.S. families a few hundred dollars every month for every child in their household — no strings attached. A kind of child allowance.

If this proposal survives the wrangling in Congress and makes it to Biden's desk, experts say it could cut child poverty nearly in half.

The idea even has some bipartisan support. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, of Utah, has pitched his own, smaller version of a child allowance.

More than 10 million of the nation's children lived below the federal poverty line in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And the pandemic has made life even harder for those already vulnerable families.

Over the past year, job losses have been especially concentrated among single mothers. And with so many school cafeterias still closed and unable to feed kids experiencing food insecurity, researchers are seeing alarming levels of child hunger.

Compared to other wealthy nations, the United States does little to reduce child poverty. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. ranks 37th among OECD nations — barely ahead of last-place Turkey — for how little it spends on family benefits: just 0.6% of gross domestic product in 2019.

"Right now, less than 3% of families [in the U.S.] receive any kind of cash assistance," says C. Nicole Mason, who heads the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "The social safety net has all but eroded and dissipated over the last two decades or so."

To begin to repair that safety net, Democrats would give caregivers $300 a month for each child under 6, and $250 a month for older kids — for at least the next year. Romney's benefit would last beyond the one-year window and be more generous for CONTINUE READING: Audio: With One Move, Congress Could Lift Millions Of Children Out Of Poverty | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: Teaching Students A New Black History | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: Teaching Students A New Black History | 89.3 KPCC

Teaching Students A New Black History

When you think of the history of Black education in the United States, you might think of Brown vs. Board of Education and the fight to integrate public schools. But there's a parallel history too, of Black people pooling their resources to educate and empower themselves independently.

Enslaved people learned to read and write whenever and wherever they could, often in secret and against the law. "In accomplishing this, I was compelled to resort to various stratagems," like convincing white children to help him, wrote Frederick Douglass. "I had no regular teacher."

After the Civil War, says educator Kaya Henderson, Black people started "freedmen's schools" to teach former slaves literacy and the other skills they would need to participate as citizens. "In the 12-year period that is Reconstruction," she adds, "we started 5,000 community schools. We started 37 historically black colleges and universities."

A century later, during the civil rights movement, educators founded "freedom schools" combining basic literacy with civic skills, like how to register to vote.

And in 1969, the Black Panther Party started a free breakfast program for schoolchildren. Eventually it fed tens of thousands of hungry kids oranges, eggs and chocolate milk at 45 sites around the country. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, reportedly got the Chicago police to try to sabotage the program, because he CONTINUE READING: Audio: Teaching Students A New Black History | 89.3 KPCC

Chicago Teachers At Odds With District Over School Reopening | 89.3 KPCC

Chicago Teachers At Odds With District Over School Reopening | 89.3 KPCC

Chicago Teachers At Odds With District Over School Reopening

The city of Chicago and its teachers are fast approaching a showdown.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Public Schools have been planning to reopen for some in-person classes next week. But the Chicago Teachers Union is concerned about the logistics of returning to school while the pandemic is still raging.

In a letter to staff and families Friday evening, Lightfoot and school district CEO Janice Jackson said that if certain pre-K teachers and other staff don't report to classrooms on Monday, they "will be deemed absent without leave," and would have their access to online teaching tools revoked.

If the district makes good on that promise, it could lead to the second teachers' strike in the city in less than two years. The union has said it would strike if the district locks out teachers from working from home.

"We love your children," the union wrote in a letter to parents earlier this week. "We desperately want to be back in classrooms with them, but we are not willing to CONTINUE READING: Chicago Teachers At Odds With District Over School Reopening | 89.3 KPCC

Education Dept. Launches First Federal Effort To Track School Reopening | 89.3 KPCC

Education Dept. Launches First Federal Effort To Track School Reopening | 89.3 KPCC

Education Dept. Launches First Federal Effort To Track School Reopening

Ever since the pandemic closed the nation's schools in March 2020, there has been no official national source for understanding where schools have reopened, how many hours of live instruction students are getting online and just how unequal the access to learning has been over the past 11 months.

On Friday, the National Center for Education Statistics, at the U.S. Department of Education, announced a new survey to answer all these questions and more. The survey will be administered to approximately 7,000 nationally representative elementary and middle schools across the country. It follows an executive order from President Biden.

Schools will be surveyed on, among other things:

• Whether they are fully remote, hybrid or fully in-person
• How full-time, remote and hybrid enrollment varies by student race/ethnicity, income, English learner status and disability status
• Attendance rates, whether online or in-person, and by each subgroup listed above
• If hybrid, how often students are learning in person
• If remote, how many hours of live instruction are offered
• Whether certain students, such as younger students or those with disabilities, are being prioritized for in-person classes

Results will be collected monthly from February through at least June 2021, and reported to the public. To get up and running quickly, the survey will rely on some of the existing data collection systems of the "Nation's Report Card" testing program, and the results will be used to help contextualize the results of that test when it is CONTINUE READING: Education Dept. Launches First Federal Effort To Track School Reopening | 89.3 KPCC

Did Closing Schools Save Lives Or Cost Lives? The Debate Continues | 89.3 KPCC

Did Closing Schools Save Lives Or Cost Lives? The Debate Continues | 89.3 KPCC

Did Closing Schools Save Lives Or Cost Lives? The Debate Continues

In November, I reported for NPR on a scientific paper that estimated millions of years of life could be lost due to prolonged school closures in the U.S. — far more, in fact, than might be lost by keeping schools open. The paper has since been corrected and critiqued. The central question it tried to answer remains.

The paper's author, Dimitri Christakis is a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital, editor of the American Medical Association journal JAMA Pediatrics and an outspoken advocate of opening schools when possible to protect children's well-being. He told NPR recently that he wrote the paper to flesh out his argument:

"The debate has been around kids going to school or life lost. When it's framed that way it's a no-brainer. But we're also killing people by not putting kids in school. It's just that they're not dying today, so we're not taking them into account."

Killing people? Because of several months of Zoom school? How could that be?

Well, there is a well-documented association between educational attainment and life expectancy. By young adulthood, according to one study, Americans with a college degree can look forward to a decade more of life compared to people who don't have a high school diploma. This gap tends to be larger in more unequal societies, like the United States. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports the average gap across rich countries is six years.

But could temporary school closures really hurt a significant number of young Americans' chances of graduating college? It's also been documented that even short interruptions in education — especially when they're combined with social and political upheaval, such as we're currently experiencing — can knock some students off track to their degrees. It can take years to recover from just a few months of lost learning, and some never do. Already, NPR has reported college enrollment CONTINUE READING: Did Closing Schools Save Lives Or Cost Lives? The Debate Continues | 89.3 KPCC

Education Pick Miguel Cardona On Biden's Promise To Reopen Schools | 89.3 KPCC

Education Pick Miguel Cardona On Biden's Promise To Reopen Schools | 89.3 KPCC

Education Pick Miguel Cardona On Biden's Promise To Reopen Schools

With many U.S. schools still shuttered or operating on a limited basis, and millions of children learning remotely (or trying to), the stakes are high for Miguel Cardona. He is President Biden's pick to run the U.S. Department of Education, and if confirmed, he'll be charged with making good on Biden's promise to re-open most K-12 schools during the new administration's first 100 days.

When asked Monday if that goal was "too optimistic," Cardona pushed back: "No, I think it's strong leadership."

That answer came in an interview with Lucy Nalpathanchil, host of Connecticut Public Radio's Where We Live, in which Cardona reflected on what it would take to meet Biden's goal.

"Ultimately, we can only safely reopen our schools while we are able to reduce spread and contain the virus," he said, an acknowledgement that, at the moment, the virus' spread remains unchecked in many communities.

Unlike former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Cardona has a long public school resume. He began as an elementary school teacher in his hometown, Meriden, Conn., then spent a decade as a principal in the same district, winning Connecticut principal of the year in 2012. Cardona eventually helped run the district as assistant superintendent, until he was tapped in August 2019 to be Connecticut's state CONTINUE READING: Education Pick Miguel Cardona On Biden's Promise To Reopen Schools | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: Amid Surges, Teachers Line Up For Their Vaccines | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: Amid Surges, Teachers Line Up For Their Vaccines | 89.3 KPCC

Amid Surges, Teachers Line Up For Their Vaccines

Don Brown has been driving a school bus for more than 20 years in the Chicago area. And for all that time, he's noticed one odd student habit.

As they climb aboard his bus, "when they get to the top step, they always cough," he says. "This was even before the pandemic! Or, when they get ready to get off, they say 'Bye, bus driver!' and they cough."

Because of this, Brown says, he hopes he'll be getting the vaccine, "as soon as I can."

As another semester gets under way, more than half of U.S. public school students are learning CONTINUE REAING: Audio: Amid Surges, Teachers Line Up For Their Vaccines | 89.3 KPCC

Where Is It Safe To Reopen Schools? New Research Offers Answers | 89.3 KPCC

Where Is It Safe To Reopen Schools? New Research Offers Answers | 89.3 KPCC

Where Is It Safe To Reopen Schools? New Research Offers Answers

Since the beginning of this pandemic, experts and educators have feared that open schools would spread the coronavirus further, which is why so many classrooms remain closed. But a new, nationwide study suggests reopening schools may be safer than previously thought, at least in communities where the virus is not already spreading out of control.

The study comes from REACH, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, at Tulane University. Up to this point, researchers studying the public health effects of school reopening have focused largely on positivity rates. As in, did the rate of positive coronavirus tests among kids or communities increase after schools reopened?

The REACH researchers worried that testing in the U.S., especially among children, is still too varied and unpredictable. Instead, Susan Hassig, a Tulane epidemiologist who worked on the study, says they focused on hospitalization rates as a more reliable indicator of virus spread. It's easy to imagine infections going undetected in communities with spotty testing, Hassig says, but "if you get infected with coronavirus and you become substantially ill, you're going to become hospitalized." Mining nationwide data from 2020, she and her colleagues looked to see if more CONTINUE READING: Where Is It Safe To Reopen Schools? New Research Offers Answers | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: A Quiet And 'Unsettling' Pandemic Toll: Students Who've Fallen Off The Grid | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: A Quiet And 'Unsettling' Pandemic Toll: Students Who've Fallen Off The Grid | 89.3 KPCC

A Quiet And 'Unsettling' Pandemic Toll: Students Who've Fallen Off The Grid

For American families and their children, school is more than just a building. It's a social life and a community, an athletic center and a place to get meals that aren't available at home. The pandemic has disrupted — and continues to disrupt — the lives of U.S. students in profound ways.

Many kids haven't set foot in their schools since March, when most in-person schooling shut down across the country. Teachers are working tirelessly to educate their students online, but they are growing increasingly anxious about the kids who aren't showing up at all.

An estimated 3 million students may have dropped out of school learning since March, according to Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit that focuses on underserved youth. The group's study cited a lack of Internet access, housing insecurity, disabilities and language barriers as major obstacles to attending virtual classes during the pandemic.

"It is really, really unsettling," says Alex, a teacher in western Virginia, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of repercussions for speaking out. "I think people don't realize how much we need to see these kids. A lot of times in schools, we are the first line for seeing signs of child abuse, for seeing signs of food insecurity. And you don't have that with virtual students. Especially when they ghost."

That "ghosting" is a constant problem for school employees who track attendance in CONTINUE READING: Audio: A Quiet And 'Unsettling' Pandemic Toll: Students Who've Fallen Off The Grid | 89.3 KPCC

5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020 | 89.3 KPCC

5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020 | 89.3 KPCC

5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020

Deborah Rosenthal starts her virtual kindergarten class on Zoom every morning with a song — today, it's the Spanish version of, "If You're Happy and You Know It." Her students clap along. There's a greeting from the class mascot (a dragon), yoga, meditation and then some practice with letter sounds: "Oso, oso, O, O, O".

Rosenthal teaches Spanish immersion in a public school in San Francisco's Mission District. Most of the families are low-income, and many are now affected by COVID-related job loss. She has taught kindergarten for 15 years, and she loves how "hands-on" "tactile," and "cozy" it is to work with 5-year-olds.

But this year, she's spending 10 or 12 hours a day on, basically, her own home production of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood En Español. "It's a very two-dimensional experience," she says.

Few people would tell you that online kindergarten was a good idea, or frankly even possible. That was, before 2020. The number has fluctuated as cases rise across the country, but throughout this fall pandemic semester, between 40 and 60 percent of students have been enrolled in districts that offer only remote learning, according to a tracker maintained by the company Burbio.

And even in hybrid districts, some students have been learning remotely, either part or full time. In short, online learning is the reality for a majority of students this fall.

We are still starved for data on what this all means. The earliest standardized test scores coming out show modest learning loss for students in math, but there are worries that the most at-risk students are not being tested at all.

For this story I talked to educators in six states, from California to South Carolina. For the most part they say things have improved since last spring. But they are close to burnout, with only a patchwork of support. They said the heart of the job right now is getting students connected with school and keeping them that way — both technologically and even more importantly, emotionally. Here are five lessons learned so far.

1. The digital divide is still big and complex.

Eight months after schools first shut down, how many students still can't sign on? We don't really know, and that's a problem, says Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. "We've not done a CONTINUE READING: 5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020 | 89.3 KPCC