KATY MURPHY - California families sue state over distance learning inequities - POLITICO

California families sue state over distance learning inequities

California families sue state over distance learning inequities

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Seven families took California to court Monday, accusing the state of failing to ensure "basic educational equality" during a prolonged period of remote learning brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The plaintiffs say the state isn't providing the equipment, training and support that low-income families desperately need and that it has left it up to districts and teachers to navigate the challenges on their own, providing scant guidance or oversight. Meanwhile, they say, families have been forced to pay for basic school supplies or make do without a computer for each child or reliable internet access.

“Because of the State’s inadequate response, parents and grandparents have had to become tutors, counselors, childminders, and computer technicians, and they have had to find a way to pay for what are now basic school supplies — laptop/tablets, paper, printing, and internet access,” the lawsuit says, adding that the state has "offered families no training, support, or opportunity to provide input into plans for remote learning, the eventual return to in-person instruction, or the delivery of compensatory education.”

The Alameda Superior Court filing comes as most public schools in the state have yet to return to classrooms nearly nine months after closing campuses when the pandemic struck. The challenges of distance learning are exacerbating the existing inequalities in the public education system, the suit said, causing many to miss lessons and fall behind their classmates whose families have the means to overcome such barriers. In particular, the suit says, Black and Latino students CONTINUE READING: California families sue state over distance learning inequities

How Our Biggest ISPs Are Failing Students During COVID-19 - PopularResistance.Org

How Our Biggest ISPs Are Failing Students During COVID-19 - PopularResistance.Org

HOW OUR BIGGEST ISPS ARE FAILING STUDENTS DURING COVID-19

Early in the pandemic, one of our MediaJustice Network members reached out to us in hopes we could support a group of high school students in Baltimore who were trying to amplify their campaign. The students are leaders in a Latinx and immigrant student organization called Students Organizing for a Multicultural and Open Society (SOMOS), and this was their first time organizing for digital equity.

When school ended last year, SOMOS realized that many of their fellow Baltimore city schoolmates who’d relied on Comcast’s Internet Essentials discount program didn’t have a connection fast or reliable enough for online school. Whenever they could get into virtual classes, they’d often get kicked off multiple times a day and sometimes multiple times during a single class. Households with multiple students or family members working from home had to schedule who could be online, when and for how long. Families were put in impossible situations, forced to negotiate whose education or work was more important, and who would have to sacrifice and fall behind.

Philadelphia MediaJustice Network member Movement Alliance Project (MAP) had been working with allies and students on a #ParkingLotWifi campaign highlighting stories that have become all too familiar in 2020: parents and students sitting in parking lots (like Taco Bell) just to get access to WiFi for CONTINUE READING: How Our Biggest ISPs Are Failing Students During COVID-19 - PopularResistance.Org

John Thompson Reviews “School’s Out” About Pandemic | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “School’s Out” About Pandemic | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “School’s Out” About Pandemic

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews Alec MacGillis’ “School’s Out,” a book about the response of schools and teachers to the pandemic. My takeaway: It’s tough to write a book about a pandemic when it’s not over.

When I first read Alec MacGillis’ School’s Out, I worried that he reached conclusions that were too optimistic, but it made me hopeful. After all, it was a co-production by ProPublica and New Yorker, and MacGillis had listened to numerous top public health experts. Upon rereading, and following his links, I’ve reached a more discouraging appraisal. The published research he cites actually makes the case for more caution, and against MacGillis’ implicit call to reopen schools more quickly for in-person instruction.   

School’s Out touched all bases in reviewing recent research, but I’m afraid MacGillis didn’t focus enough on the experience of educators. In fact, after discussing recent research with a Baltimore teacher who he respected, he was surprised that she still opposed the reopening for in-person classes. To his credit, MacGillis presented her side of the story but he didn’t seem to understand why school environments would “snowball” the transmission effects. 

At first, MacGillis did an excellent job of personalizing the CONTINUE READING: John Thompson Reviews “School’s Out” About Pandemic | Diane Ravitch's blog

What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in 2020 America - The New York Times

What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in 2020 America - The New York Times

What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in 2020 America

Teachers find themselves at the heart of the national crisis — responsible not just for children’s education and well-being, but also for essential child care as parents struggle to get back to work.

“It seems very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month for teaching children the ABC’s when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.”

— A school committee in Littleton, Mass., debating how to source teachers for its classrooms in 1849

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More than 150 years ago, Massachusetts lawmakers came up with a radical idea: All young people should be educated. The commonwealth passed the country’s first law requiring that children go to school, then was left wondering where to find the teachers it needed to educate all those children.

A school committee in Littleton, Mass., came up with a simple solution. “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind,” the committee wrote, in 1849. Why pay men $20 a month when “a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.”

Not only did women appear uniquely fitted to the work of teaching; they also didn’t have competing professional opportunities that would drive wages up — or so the logic went. “The argument was, ‘Look, women will learn to be better mothers by practicing on other people’s children,’” said Richard Ingersoll, a sociologist at University of Pennsylvania. “Proponents made the case it was a win-win.”

As other states followed Massachusetts’s lead, and public schools opened across the country, they filled with female teachers. By the late 1880s, women made up 63 percent of the country’s teachers. The profession has remained female dominated ever since.

In 2017, women comprised more than three-quarters of public-school teachers, in a profession that remains stubbornly underpaid and undervalued.

In 2018, the starting salary for a public-school teacher averaged $38,000. In more than 1,000 districts, even the highest paid public-school teachers with advanced degrees and decades of experience earn less than $50,000. A 2010 report from McKinsey looked at the state of teaching in America compared with other developed CONTINUE READING: What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in 2020 America - The New York Times

How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools | Full Frontal on TBS

 How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools | Full Frontal on TBS

 How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools 

How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools | Full Frontal on TBS

Will the students who didn’t show up for online class this spring go missing forever?

No participation in online learning could be detrimental

Will the students who didn’t show up for online class this spring go missing forever?

Districts are scrambling to locate the ‘lost’ kids of Covid and reengage them in school this fall

Monica Williams remembers the late May day she and first grade teacher Lizette Gutierrez reconnected with the four young siblings from Cable Elementary. No teachers from the San Antonio elementary had heard from the children since schools closed abruptly in March due to the pandemic.

When teachers at Cable Elementary in San Antonio couldn’t reach four siblings who attended the school this spring, Monica Williams of Communities in Schools was able to arrange a meeting with them at their grandmother’s house. Credit: Monica Williams

Williams is a former social worker who serves as a site coordinator for Communities in Schools of San Antonio, a support program for low-income families operating in more than 100 schools in Bexar County, including the city of San Antonio. She and her colleagues have had to intercede in evictions, deliver supplies and report children in dire circumstances to child protective services since the start of the pandemic. This time, she knew the family. She’d become acquainted with the children before the pandemic because of their academic struggles. After making some phone calls, she located them at a hotel, where the family had moved after wearing out their welcome with relatives. Williams arranged to meet the children at their grandmother’s.

Gutierrez and Williams spent 90 minutes standing on the sidewalk outside the house in the Texas sun, at arm’s length from the students, showing them how to sign into Google Classroom on their school-provided Chromebooks and helping their father figure out passwords.

The siblings logged on for the remainder of the school year. But then they went missing again, failing to show up for the district’s summer school program, which teachers had recommended for each of them. Now Williams and school staff are heading back out into the field, trying to relocate the siblings and other children who’ve gone missing and reengage them in learning this fall. With the siblings, they finally had some luck: The children showed up for school on September 29, the second day  CONTINUE READING: No participation in online learning could be detrimental

The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning — ProPublica

The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning — ProPublica

The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning

Has a desire to keep the coronavirus out of schools put children’s long-term well-being at stake?

This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

Shemar, a 12-year-old from East Baltimore, is good at math, and Karen Ngosso, his fourth grade math teacher at Abbottston Elementary School, is one reason why. “I would try to pump him up and tell him, ‘You’re a good student,’” she said. But she knew that he didn’t get enough sleep, and he was often absent. His home situation, like those of many of her students, was unstable: his mother suffered from drug addiction, and they moved frequently.

Ngosso kept an eye on Shemar even after he started fifth grade, which is when I met him, in late 2018, at First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the transitional housing where he and his mother were living. I volunteered to tutor Shemar, and once a week I picked him up from school and we’d do homework at a coffee shop.

Shemar has a remarkably good sense of direction, which came in handy when he had to catch multiple buses and the light rail to get to school from wherever home happened to be. He has a knack for impish one-liners, often prefaced by “Can I just say something?” He is the only kid I’ve tutored who will, without fail, stop mid-text to ask about a word he doesn’t recognize. “Personification?” he’ll ask. “What’s that?” His own vocabulary is charmingly esoteric — once, he said that an older sister had “bamboozled” him into going to the store; another time, he asked me to tighten his swim goggles “just a smidgen.”

His mother takes Suboxone every day at a clinic, but stability is elusive. She and Shemar often stay up late watching TV, and when Shemar made it to school he was often drowsy in class. But being around teachers and other kids revived him. I continued to see him when he entered sixth grade, and on days when I picked him up he was typically tearing around the jungle gym with friends, with an unself- CONTINUE READING: The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning — ProPublica

A parent-led effort to close the digital divide for Spanish speaking families

A parent-led effort to close the digital divide for Spanish speaking families

A parent-led effort to close the digital divide

For many Spanish-speaking families, getting technology for remote learning has been tough, so a Nevada parent launched her own initiative to help

When the Clark County School District in Las Vegas announced it would be staying entirely remote this year, mother and education advocate Valeria Gurr was immediately concerned about how the decision would affect low-income and Spanish-speaking families, especially those with students who are English language learners. She worried that the district might fail to provide enough support, as it did in the disastrous transition to remote learning last spring, when one third of the district’s 314,848 students never got online because they didn’t have the technology, according to reporting from the Las Vegas Sun.

For English language learners, who make up more than 5 million students in public schools across the country, the transition to remote learning has been particularly hard.

The district has been trying to avoid a repeat of the March transition, offering low-income students thousands of devices it was able to purchase with the help of federal dollars. But, despite handing out about 10,000 devices a day in the weeks leading up to the schools’ remote reopening, the district had still failed to reach some 19,000 students who were waiting for a device as of August 24, when classes began, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Gurr, a Latina who still views herself as an English language learner, speaks to low-income families regularly in her role as the Nevada state director for the nonprofit Nevada School Choice Coalition, a project of the American Federation for Children. Although her 3-year-old son hasn’t yet entered the public schools, she’s heard from many parents how challenging the transition to virtual learning was last spring. Many had trouble coping, even though they had resources to draw on, she said. “Imagine what it is for Hispanic families that don’t speak English and … don’t have the technology.”

Curious to know how many families in her community were still struggling, Gurr turned to a social media group she had started for Spanish-speaking parents for an answer. The group, “CCSD Padres y Madres,” has grown from 200 parents to a little over 1,200 parents in just a few weeks. Gurr asked group members if they had a laptop. The response CONTINUE READING: A parent-led effort to close the digital divide for Spanish speaking families

OPINION: Even before the pandemic, students with disabilities and other challenges were being left behind - The Hechinger Report

OPINION: Even before the pandemic, students with disabilities and other challenges were being left behind - The Hechinger Report

OPINION: Even before the pandemic, students with disabilities and other challenges were being left behind

Here are some ideas about ways to help all learners

Through no merit of her own, my 5-year-old daughter is already on the other side of an educational opportunity divide, in a world of haves and have-nots.

Through no effort or talent on her part, she was born into a community with good schools. She has two parents with advanced degrees and stable jobs that enable them to work from home.

In so many ways, she won the lottery. We have the flexibility to send her to school or to home-school her for the coming year. We have Wi-Fi, financial resources, supervision and an environment to make it work. My daughter has no disability, so we have no worries about advocating for her educational rights. Her school sends us materials in her native language.

My wife and I are anxious, but it’s an anxiety based on inconveniences, rather than on a lack of options.

I contrast that with what my own mother might have felt when I was my daughter’s age. A solo working parent, she emigrated from Iran to a new country alone and raised two sons, including one, me, who couldn’t speak English. Had broadband even existed then, chance are we wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

As vulnerable as she must have felt, my mother would have relied on one principle: The richest society in the world would have a moral responsibility for the well-being of kids like me, along with families who faced even more extreme obstacles.

The nonprofit education equity group I have the privilege to co-chair has drafted explicit questions for decision-makers, including educators, school leaders and district, state and national policy leaders. We are urging them to consider the needs of students who confront barriers to reaching their fullest educational potential.

They may have disabilities or not speak English as a first language or come from low-income families or lack access to stable housing. They may live in CONTINUE READING: OPINION: Even before the pandemic, students with disabilities and other challenges were being left behind - The Hechinger Report