COVID-19, the educational equity crisis, and the opportunity ahead - ,The Brookings Institution

COVID-19, the educational equity crisis, and the opportunity ahead

COVID-19, the educational equity crisis, and the opportunity ahead

As the one-year anniversary of campus closures due to COVID-19 passed last March, nearly half of America’s children were 

attending schools operating remotely or open only on a hybrid basis. In California, more than 70% of students were attending schools that were fully remote.

But spring brings new hope. Amid steps to ensure safe health practices and the acceleration of vaccinations, the rates of transmission have decreased from earlier peaks in the winter and students are beginning to return to school.

While the return of students to campus is something to celebrate, it is essential to note that the pandemic and related prolonged school disruptions have and will continue to have a profound impact on the lives and learning of students.

Due to inequitable access to health care, income inequality, and disproportionate employment in high-risk, “essential” jobs, low-income, Black, Latino, and Native American communities have borne the brunt of the pandemic, with dire health and economic impacts that hinder their children’s educational opportunities and learning. It is difficult for children to learn if they are sick or hungry, or if they have family members who are sick or even dying. Some students have found themselves without a safe, stable place to live, lacking basic necessities, and disconnected from needed services and supports when schools—a primary avenue for public service delivery—closed for months on end. CONTINUE READING: COVID-19, the educational equity crisis, and the opportunity ahead

Recommendations for a restorative restart

1. Center relationships. • Connect 1:1 with every family and every student to build partnerships, trust, and communication between families and educators. • Create dedicated time and space for relationship-building and re-engagement. • Implement positive and restorative discipline practices.

2. Address whole-child needs. • Conduct regular student wellness screenings. • Assess student learning and review data on attendance, engagement, grades, and stakeholder perceptions about school conditions and climate. • Create an action plan to meet the individualized whole-child needs of every student, by addressing student trauma, implementing community schools strategies, and better aligning services within schools and districts to meet students’ diverse needs.

3. Strengthen staffing & partnerships. • Pair students with high-dosage tutoring and mentoring. • Provide mental health supports. • Offer expanded learning opportunities, including those in the summer and in out-of-school time, that are hands-on, fun and engaging, student-centered, and complementary to classroom learning. • Staff up to support student re-engagement by hiring new staff, liaisons, and community partners.

4. Make teaching & learning relevant & rigorous. • Advance racial equity and cultural responsiveness through instructional materials and books. • Advance racial equity in teaching through providing all educators with professional development opportunities and strategies and tools. • Offer students choice and voice in their learning. • Focus on priority standards and lessons to accelerate rather than remediate learning.

5. Empower teams to rebuild & reimagine systems. • Create restorative restart and transformation teams so that this work is systematized and continues long term. • Establish a districtwide vision and framework for transformational and systemic change.

COVID-19, the educational equity crisis, and the opportunity ahead

Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity? | Ed In The Apple

Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity? | Ed In The Apple

Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity?

We’ve been told for decades we can’t do anything about poverty, we can’t change property tax-based school funding, and we have to use our teaching skills to raise achievement.  Sadly states and school districts have relied on top-down edicts and standardized testing, teacher voice is absent.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, two Democratic Senators are elected in Georgia and President Biden’s American Rescue Plan is law.

The plan attacks childhood poverty. We may be the richest country in the world, we have turned out back on children.

  ,For more than half a century, we have failed to address child poverty in this country. This neglect has resulted in negative outcomes on child well-being and threatens our nation’s future. A child who grows up in poverty is far less likely to perform as well as their classmates in school, more likely to have food insecurity, more vulnerable to homelessness, and more likely to be subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect. While the United States proudly leads the world in science, technology, innovation, and sports, we sadly also leader in infant mortality, violence against children, and child poverty. Despite lots of expressed concern for children, our nation’s leaders have failed make needed investments in child well-being.

The Organization for Economics, Culture and Development, (OECD) studies the forty plus industrialized nations and takes a deep dive into the question: does income poverty affect child outcomes 

Childhood Poverty in the OECD?

The links between family poverty and subsequent child outcomes have been CONTINUE READING: Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity? | Ed In The Apple

Joe Biden's Golden Opportunity to Strengthen Public Education - LA Progressive

Joe Biden's Golden Opportunity to Strengthen Public Education - LA Progressive

Joe Biden’s Golden Opportunity to Strengthen Public Education

In picking Connecticut Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona to be his nominee for U.S. secretary of education, President-elect Joe Biden appears to have made a Goldilocks choice that pleases just about everyone. People who rarely agree on education policy have praised the decision, including Jeanne Allen, CEO of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit group that advocates for charter schools and school choice, who called Cardona “good news,” and education historian Diane Ravitch, who also called the pick “good news” because he does not seem to be aligned with advocates for charter schools and vouchers. Sara Sneed, president and CEO of the NEA Foundation, a public charity founded by educators, called Cardona an “ideal candidate,” in an email, and hailed him for “his emphasis on the need to end structural racism in education and for his push for greater educational equity and opportunity through public schools.”

But as Biden and Cardona—should he be approved, as most expect—begin to address the array of critical issues that confront the nation’s schools, there’s bound to be more of a pushback. Or maybe not?

After years of federal policy malpractice, the nation is eager for a fresh agenda for public schools.

After decades of federal legislation that emphasized mandating standardized testing and tying school and teacher evaluations to the scores; imposing financial austerity on public institutions; incentivizing various forms of privatization; and undermining teachers’ professionalism and labor rights, there is a keen appetite for a new direction for school policy.

Due to the disruption forced by the pandemic, much is being written and said about the need to “restart and reinvent” education and a newfound appreciation for schools as essential infrastructure for families and children. With an incoming CONTINUE READING: Joe Biden's Golden Opportunity to Strengthen Public Education - LA Progressive

Will President Joseph Biden Lead Us Toward Equity and Opportunity in the Public Schools? | janresseger

Will President Joseph Biden Lead Us Toward Equity and Opportunity in the Public Schools? | janresseger

Will President Joseph Biden Lead Us Toward Equity and Opportunity in the Public Schools?

Betsy DeVos, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of Education, has been complaining about the public schools again. The public schools are, of course, the schools she is supposed to be supporting through the operation of her federal department. But as a lifelong promoter of vouchers for private and religious schools, DeVos clings to the idea that “Government really sucks.” Last week Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa described DeVos’s attempt during this lame duck transition period to condemn states and school districts for failing fully to spend federal CARES Act relief dollars allocated last March for states to help their public schools cover the expenses of serving children during the pandemic.

Happy Thanksgiving! This blog will take a short break. Look for a new post on Monday, November 30.

Ujifusa quotes DeVos condemning school districts for failing to reopen fully in-person: “States that neglected their obligations to provide full-time education, while complaining about a lack of resources, have left significant sums of money sitting in the bank… There may be valid reasons for states to be deliberate in how they spend CARES Act resources, but these data make clear there is little to support their claims of being cash-poor.”

Last week DeVos set up a new data tool through which CARES Act spending can be traced. Ujifusa quotes some of the data DeVos’s department released as part of an obvious attempt to sow distrust of state departments of education and public school districts: “From the enactment of CARES to Sept. 30, the department said, $1.6 billion of the $13.6 billion provided for K-12 schools—or 12 percent—has been spent. And of the $3 billion in a governor’s education fund that can be spent on K-12 and higher education, $535 million—or 18 percent–had been spent.”

While DeVos seems dedicated to seizing every opportunity to condemn the operation of public CONTINUE READING: Will President Joseph Biden Lead Us Toward Equity and Opportunity in the Public Schools? | janresseger

IT IS NOT THE BUILDING THAT IS IMPORTANT – Dad Gone Wild

IT IS NOT THE BUILDING THAT IS IMPORTANT – Dad Gone Wild

IT IS NOT THE BUILDING THAT IS IMPORTANT

“If you cheat on your road work in the dark of the morning, you will be found out in the big fight under the bright lights.”
― Joe Louis

After all these years I’m starting to get a bit of an understanding of charter school parents, and some supporters, frustration with public schools. Before you slam the door, hear me out.

In the early days of school closures, due to the ongoing pandemic, I thought, “Well this sucks, but there is an opportunity here. There is a chance that since we are being forced to change already, we’ll use this time to re-adjust and address some of the past inadequacies and inequities. Ultimately public education we’ll come out better for this challenge.”

Under this cynical exterior beats the soul of an optimist.

However, innovation is not what has happened over the past 6 months. Instead, it’s been a constant drumbeat to get kids back in traditional school settings. Instead of focusing on providing the best educational opportunities for children, we have focused almost singularly on refilling school buildings.

Over the summer when districts should have been developing plans to, at the bare minimum, incorporate remote instruction into reopening plans, they focused almost entirely on preparing for the re-entry of students into buildings. As a result, when August arrived and it was clear that it wasn’t going to be possible to restart in-person learning, principals and teachers were left scrambling to develop plans to deliver remote instruction to students. Plans that, despite the best CONTINUE READING: IT IS NOT THE BUILDING THAT IS IMPORTANT – Dad Gone Wild