N.Y.C. will eliminate remote learning for the fall, in a major step toward reopening. - The New York Times

N.Y.C. will eliminate remote learning for the fall, in a major step toward reopening. - The New York Times

N.Y.C. will eliminate remote learning for the fall, in a major step toward reopening.

New York City will no longer have a remote schooling option come fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during a television appearance on Monday, a major step toward fully reopening the nation’s largest school system.

This school year, most of the city’s roughly one million students — about 600,000 — stayed at home for classes. When the new school year starts on Sept. 13, all students and staff will be back in school buildings full-time, Mr. de Blasio said.

New York is one of the first big cities to remove the option of remote learning altogether for the coming school year. But widespread predictions that online classes would be a fixture for school districts may have been premature. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced last week that the state would no longer have remote classes come fall, after similar announcements by leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

New York City’s decision will make it much easier to restore the school system to a prepandemic state, since students and teachers will no longer be split between homes and school buildings.

But the mayor’s announcement will no doubt alarm some parents who are concerned about sending their children back into school buildings, even as the pandemic ebbs in the United States. Recent interviews with city parents have shown that while many families are looking forward to resuming normal schooling, some are hesitant about returning to classrooms.

Nonwhite families, whose health has suffered disproportionately from the virus, have been most likely to keep their children learning from home over the past year. CONTINUE READING: N.Y.C. will eliminate remote learning for the fall, in a major step toward reopening. - The New York Times

Opinion | Does your child’s teacher know how to teach? - POLITICO

Opinion | Does your child’s teacher know how to teach? - POLITICO

Does your child’s teacher know how to teach?

The pandemic pushed a lot of ‘alternatively’ credentialed teachers into schools. That’s a problem.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated harmful educational inequalities in the preK-12 public education system. The nation’s poorest students, Black and Latino students, and our disabled students have been the most negatively impacted by school closings necessitated by the pandemic. Black students in high poverty schools have been especially hard hit because of the racialized, historic and ongoing disinvestment in the education of Black children and youth.

One of the most obvious — and dangerous — ways this inequality shows up is by channeling a proportionally larger share of less qualified or alternatively credentialed teachers to schools with higher percentages of Black, Latino and disabled students. Black and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be taught by teachers in training who are in alternative teacher preparation programs. These alternative route programs differ from traditional teacher preparation programs in at least one significant way: Most alternative route teacher interns become teachers of record prior to completing any teacher training. This means that as teachers in training, they are not profession-ready on Day 1. They are training on the backs of our neediest students — the students who most need a profession-ready teacher.

The pandemic and racial unrest have revealed just how much further the nation has to go to fulfill children’s constitutional right to equal educational opportunity. State constitutions define this right to an education in beautiful and compelling language as a "democratic imperative," "fundamental value" and "paramount duty." Yet, despite these powerful phrases, nearly 30 years of research shows that in schools serving students of color where 50 percent or more are on free or reduced lunch (one indicator of poverty status), these students are 70 percent more likely to have a teacher who is not certified or does not have a college major or minor in the subject area they teach. This finding holds true across four critical subject areas: mathematics, English, social studies, and science. CONTINUE READING: Opinion | Does your child’s teacher know how to teach? - POLITICO

How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era | janresseger

How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era | janresseger

How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era

On Friday, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss republished an article about learning loss, an article that raises some very serious concerns about what will happen next fall when we can presume that most children will be back in school.

The article is by a former teacher, now an editor at a website called Edutopia.  Steven Merrill writes: “It’s perfectly sensible to worry about academic setbacks during the pandemic… But our obsessive need to measure academic progress and loss to the decimal point—an enterprise that feels at once comfortably scientific and hopelessly subjective—is also woefully out of time with the moment… If there’s a pressing need for measurement, it’s in the reckoning of the social, emotional, and psychological toll of the last 12 months.  Over 500,000 Americans have died.  Some kids will see their friends or favorite teachers in person for the first time in over a year…  Focusing on the social and emotional needs of the child first—on their sense of safety, self-worth, and academic confidence—is not controversial, and saddling students with deficit-based labels has predicable outcomes… (I)f we make school both welcoming and highly engaging… we stand a better chance of honoring the needs of all children and open up the possibility of connecting kids to topics they feel passionate about as we return to school next year.”

We know that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is requiring states to administer the usual, federally mandated standardized tests for this school year. Cardona says he doesn’t intend for the tests to be used for school accountability, but instead to see which schools and school districts need the most help—a strange justification because the tests were designed for and have always been used for holding schools and teachers and even students accountable. And the punitive policies these tests trigger in schools across the country are well established. What if state legislatures and state departments of education merely use the test scores in this CONTINUE READING: How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era | janresseger

NYC Educator: Is Remote Learning Here to Stay?

NYC Educator: Is Remote Learning Here to Stay?

Is Remote Learning Here to Stay?

A Daily News article explores that this morning.  It works for some families, evidently:

“When they’re home, they can be one on one with you,” said Livingstone, a single mother of a fourth and eighth-grader who doesn’t work because of a disability.

I can see how it would appeal to people who have no issue staying home and supervising their kids. These days, though, that's likely a relatively small group. I can also imagine how supervised students might function better in online classes. If my kid were in an online class, I wouldn't allow her to place a cat picture up in Zoom and nap through classes. (Alas, a good portion of my students lack that level of supervision.)

And indeed the article covers drawbacks in online education:

“It doesn’t replace the magic that being in a classroom does, either instructionally, or just taking care of kids,” said Nate Stripp, a teacher at Middle School 50 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who’s also completing a masters degree in educational technology.

I don't know who Nate Stripp is, but I agree with him. I am acutely aware that what I've been doing for the last year does not compare with what I've done for most of my career. I'm constrained in many ways. For one, I simply do not trust the notion of giving tests online. I can't imagine why someone, especially someone hiding behind an avatar, wouldn't a. look up the answer on Google, b. text a friend for the answer, c. check classwork for a solution, or d. all of the above. 

More importantly, I don't believe that subject matter is the only thing we provide students. We are role models. On a fundamental level, every student who sees us sees people who get up every morning and come to work. They see people who've gone to CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Is Remote Learning Here to Stay?

'Parents are powerless': Students face being held back after a year of remote learning - POLITICO

'Parents are powerless': Students face being held back after a year of remote learning - POLITICO

'Parents are powerless': Students face being held back after a year of remote learning

Pandemic-related learning loss means some parents are weighing whether their children should repeat a grade. In 18 states, they won’t have a choice.

David Scruggs Jr. has spent most of the pandemic at his second-grade son’s side, helping him with virtual learning as their Nashville, Tenn., home became a schoolhouse as well as his office. In the next room, Scruggs’ wife, Dorothy, sat beside their first-grade daughter, a mirror image on the other side of the wall, doing the same while holding down her own job.

For a year, the Scruggs worked to keep their kids from falling behind as the pandemic forced children to stay home and America’s education system struggled to adjust. The family installed a whiteboard and baby pink desk next to their TV. The coffee table became a receptacle for homework, folders and laminated multiplication tables.

Now, the Scruggs and thousands of families like them in Tennessee and more than a dozen other states face a reckoning with how well they succeeded in their new role as substitute teachers. In the coming months, under a new, stricter state policy, if their son doesn’t do well enough on a standardized reading test next year, he could be forced to repeat a grade.

“I don’t know how much was lost or gained in this process. That’s the scary part,” Scruggs said of learning during Covid-19. “I would hope he’s not held back. CONTINUE READING: 'Parents are powerless': Students face being held back after a year of remote learning - POLITICO

The Country Moves Forward, Education Falls Back - Counter Punch org

The Country Moves Forward, Education Falls Back - CounterPunch.org

The Country Moves Forward, Education Falls Back

There’s hope in the air, a scent of spring, anticipation of change, democracy may pull through. Why, then, with K-12 public schools, the broken promise, the dismay?

Biden raised hopes when he promised, Dec 16, 2019, that he’d “commit to ending the use of standardized testing in public schools,” saying (rightly) that “teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” Yet on Feb 22, his Department of Education did an about-face, announcing, “we need to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on learning …parents need information on how their children are doing.”

How the children are doing? They’re struggling, that’s how, doing their best, and so are teachers and parents. And it’s the least advantaged who are struggling the most, who, in the transition to online teaching, are likeliest to be without access to the internet, whose families are most vulnerable to loss of jobs, health care, lives. Now this? It costs $1.7 billion to administer these tests, but the toll on kids— the tears, terrors, alienation— is incalculable.

Most people have no idea what a blight these exams are, how they’ve stripped K-12 curricula of civics, history, literature, the arts, languages, even the sciences. Since schools live or die on the basis of test scores, what does not get tested does not get taught, and education is reduced to CONTINUE READING: The Country Moves Forward, Education Falls Back - CounterPunch.org

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

TO REDESIGN OUR SCHOOLS, POST-PANDEMIC, WE NEED TO REMOVE SOME SACRED COWS

Watch this video. What do you see?

Video Player

00:00

00:31

Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute.

We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in Nepal they literally block traffic, in America they block our ability to think in new ways. And I can think of no aspect of our shared public life with more sacred cows than America’s schools:

Grades. Bells. Schedules. Credit Hours. Classrooms. Tests. Transcripts. Homework. 180 days. Age-based cohorts.

And the list could go on.

For this reason, we produced a short film series that looks at a few of these structures, and how and why they need to change. Here’s one of them: CONTINUE READING: To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

A simple proposal. Give public school teachers an extra year of retirement service credit for the pandemic year. – Fred Klonsky

A simple proposal. Give public school teachers an extra year of retirement service credit for the pandemic year. – Fred Klonsky

A SIMPLE PROPOSAL. GIVE PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS AN EXTRA YEAR OF RETIREMENT SERVICE CREDIT FOR THE PANDEMIC YEAR

I’ve been out of the classroom for nearly a decade.

But as I speak to my colleagues who have taught this year it is mind boggling.

That is true whether they taught remotely, in-person or hybrid.

I have a simple proposal. It doesn’t begin to demonstrate what should be our profound thanks.

The Illinois legislature can act to give every public school teacher an extra year of creditable service.

Now some Republican state representative has introduced a bill that offers that up, CONTINUE READING: A simple proposal. Give public school teachers an extra year of retirement service credit for the pandemic year. – Fred Klonsky

Marie Corfield: A Letter To My Students

Marie Corfield: A Letter To My Students

A Letter To My Students

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Dear Students,

Oh how I have missed you! I've missed your noise and your chaos and your smiles which are hidden behind masks, and your laughter and your hard work, and even your frustrations and tears. I have missed your creativity and how you never cease to amaze me with it. I have missed your fearlessness and your fearfulness, your good choices and your not-so-good ones. I have missed you because without you, there is no school. 

Many people who don't know much about what you and I do together call you 'lost'. But, you are not lost. Far from it! All of you who have diligently showed up on Zoom every day have been working so hard learning how to use computers and software in ways we teachers never imagined. You've been taking more responsibility for your learning, working independently, and learning from this global experience! 

Some of you have really struggled with this, and I want you to know that you are not alone. So many other students and, yes, even teachers (myself included), are struggling too. This is not easy work we are doing. It's really hard sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, not being able to talk to friends or eat together in the cafeteria or enjoy assemblies or play at CONTINUE READING: Marie Corfield: A Letter To My Students

NANCY BAILEY: Questions About The AFT and NEA’s “Learning After Covid Vision”

Questions About The AFT and NEA’s “Learning After Covid Vision”

Questions About The AFT and NEA’s “Learning After Covid Vision”

Teachers are the most important individuals in a child’s schooling, and during the pandemic, they have gone above and beyond to reach out to students.

AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA’s Becky Pringle are to be commended for speaking out about Covid-19 in support of student and teacher safety. The teachers’ unions have been criticized unfairly for trying to do what’s right for the safety of students and teachers.

But why does their new post-Covid-19 guide tip a hat towards nonprofits and groups that are not friendly to teachers and public education?

How exactly will schools change after Covid-19? Are teachers aware of the union connections and what they mean by words like restructuring schools? Is it about online learning? How involved will teachers be in that restructuring process and is it for the betterment of students?

Learning Beyond Covid: A Vision for Thriving in Public Education at first glance might seem positive and it makes some good points. But many of the links raise CONTINUE READING: Questions About The AFT and NEA’s “Learning After Covid Vision”

Marie Corfield: The 'New' Normal Post-Covid - Are YOU Ready?

Marie Corfield: The 'New' Normal Post-Covid - Are YOU Ready?

The 'New' Normal Post-Covid - Are YOU Ready?

If you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out. If you put a frog in tepid water and slowly raise the heat, it will boil to death. - Unknown

Photo Credit: Nick Fewings

Covid-19 has been raising the heat on all of us for a year. Stress, depression and anxiety have paralyzed millions. Personally, I've battled all three. As someone who lived much of my life in a state of chronic stress, I very quickly became that frog again and didn't realize it until I was almost ready to be served as an appetizer. I was sleeping either too much or too little, watching the same ten pounds turn my bathroom scale into a seesaw, and despite having almost twenty years of teaching experience under my belt, there were days when I just burst into tears because virtual teaching is just. so. hard. Even though I had Covid-19 and its accompanying brain fog, I've also had what Ellen Cushing, writing in The Atlantic, calls the Covid "fog of forgetting" that has crept into our brains simply from living in quasi-isolation for so long:

Everywhere I turn, the fog of forgetting has crept in. A friend of mine recently confessed that the morning routine he’d comfortably maintained for a decade—wake up before 7, shower, dress, get on the subway—now feels unimaginable on a literal level: He cannot put himself back there. Another has CONTINUE READING: Marie Corfield: The 'New' Normal Post-Covid - Are YOU Ready?

YONG ZHAO: New article: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19 - Education in the Age of Globalization

Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » New article: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19

New article: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19

Just published in Journal of Educational Change: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19

Yong Zhao and Jim Watterston

Accepted: 28 January 2021

Download the PDF here

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecedented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. We identify three big changes that education should make post COVID: curriculum that is developmental, personalized, and evolving; pedagogy that is student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful; and delivery of instruction that capitalizes on the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Download the PDF here

Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » New article: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19

A Reader: A Message for Teachers | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Reader: A Message for Teachers | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Reader: A Message for Teachers

Gary Stein, a teacher in his last year of teaching, read the post by retired superintendent Teresa Thayer Snyder and was inspired to share this message:

After reading Ms. Snyder’s article and all of the responses to it on the dianeravitch.net page, I was reminded of the best advice for all teachers, and what seems to me the best advice for teaching, always, regardless of social circumstance or historical situation. It comes from Chaim Ginott, (1922-1973), teacher, psychologist, theorist.

Dear Teacher,

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers,
Children poisoned by educated physicians,
Infants killed by trained nurses,
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates,
So, I am suspicious of education.

My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.

For those of you who know this quote, I hope this isn’t perceived as either ‘trite’ or too idealistic. This passage has guided my teaching for over 30 years, including this year, my last as a certified public school teacher. For those of you new to either teaching/learning, or ‘education’, I hope you take this quote to heart as you engage with young citizens in every interaction. Peace.

By the way, Superintendent Snyder’s post went viral; it has been opened more than 200,000 times on this blog.

A Reader: A Message for Teachers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Choosing Democracy: Are Children Falling Behind?

Choosing Democracy: Are Children Falling Behind?

Are Children Falling Behind?

What Shall We Do About the Children After the Pandemic

Teresa Thayer Snyder December 12, 2020

Diane Ravitch's BLOG

I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.”

Students line up to have their temperature checked before entering PS 179 elementary school in the Kensington neighborhood, Sept. 29, 2020 in Brooklyn, AP Photo/Mark Lennihan // Politico

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

I am writing today about the children of this pandemic. After a lifetime of working among the young, I feel compelled to address the concerns that are being expressed by so many of my peers about the deficits the children will demonstrate when they finally return to school. My goodness, what a disconcerting thing to be concerned about in the face of a pandemic which is affecting millions of people around the country and the world. It speaks to one of my biggest fears for the children when they return. In our determination to “catch them up,” I fear that we will lose who they are and what they have learned during this unprecedented era. What on CONTINUE READING: Choosing Democracy: Are Children Falling Behind?

John Thompson: What Teachers Should Do When Schools Re-Open | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: What Teachers Should Do When Schools Re-Open | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: What Teachers Should Do When Schools Re-Open

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, followed the debate about what to do “after COVID,” and he shares his wisdom here.

I’ve been wrestling with two quandaries regarding post-COVID schools. Yes, in the short-run, the tactical use of digital technology has been prioritized, but the longer term priority must be human-to-human relationships. The last thing we want are 21th century schools driven by screen time. So, what can we do to recover from the pandemic which came on the heels of the corporate school reform disaster that was imposed on teachers and students?

Last spring, I timidly made suggestions but I knew that educators were overwhelmed, and it wasn’t time to be pushy about future visions of schooling. It’s unlikely that many of today’s teachers would be allowed to do so, but I used to start my inner city high school classes’ orientation week with music, poetry, and film clips like Amiri Baraka’s “The X is Black,” Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin,” and Denzel Washington in Cry Freedom, playing Steve Biko, explaining colonialism.

So, if I were still teaching high school, I’d have used CONTINUE READING: John Thompson: What Teachers Should Do When Schools Re-Open | Diane Ravitch's blog

Doyle and Sahlberg: After the Pandemic, Children Need to Play | Diane Ravitch's blog

Doyle and Sahlberg: After the Pandemic, Children Need to Play | Diane Ravitch's blog

Doyle and Sahlberg: After the Pandemic, Children Need to Play

William Doyle and Pasi Sahlberg have a proposal for what children should do after the pandemic: Play.

They write at CNN.com:

When the novel coronavirus is no longer as great a threat and schools finally reopen, we should give children the one thing they will need most after enduring months of isolation, stress, physical restraint and woefully inadequate, screen-based remote learning. We should give them playtime — and lots of it.William Doyle Pasi Sahlberg As in-person classes begin, education administrators will presumably follow the safety guidelines of health authorities for smaller classes, staggered schedules, closing or regularly cleaning communal spaces with shared equipment, regular health checks and other precautions. But despite the limitations this may place on the students’ physical environment, schools should look for safe ways to supercharge children’s learning and well-being.We propose that schools adopt a 90-day “golden age of play,” our term for a transitional period when traditional academic education.

Play gives children a wide range of critical cognitive, physical, emotional and social benefits. The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing the nation’s 67,000 children’s doctors, stated in a 2012 clinical report that “play, in all its forms, needs to be considered as the ideal educational and developmental milieu for children,” including for children in poverty, and noted that “the lifelong success of children is based on their ability to be creative and to apply the lessons learned from playing.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also reported “substantial evidence that physical CONTINUE READING: Doyle and Sahlberg: After the Pandemic, Children Need to Play | Diane Ravitch's blog