Wokandapix / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand have reopened schools. Here’s what the US can learn. is a very good overview, with several videos. It’s from Vox. ‘Kids will be kids’: Furtive hugs, complex logistics on South Korea’s first day back at school is from The L.A. Times. The Los Angeles C
Adding Relevance to Instruction is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Seven educators write about ways they have injected relevance into their lessons, ranging from applying culturally responsive instruction to inviting students to be “co-teachers.” Here are some excerpts:
Back to school? 1 in 5 teachers are unlikely to return to reopened classrooms this fall, poll says is an article in USA Today that shares some pretty wild poll results. There’s a lot more than the quote I highlighted above – check it out. I’m adding it to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL .
geralt / Pixabay Last week, I shared the questions I was putting into a Google Form for my IB Theory of Knowledge students to answer in their anonymous evaluation of our class’ distance learning time (see Here Are The Questions I’m Having Students Answer In My End-Of-Distance-Learning Evaluation ). Here are the ones I’m asking my ELL Newcomer students – again, in a Google Form: How hard did you w
Though it’s no surprise, NPR’s story The Pandemic Is Driving America’s Schools Toward A Financial Meltdown was not a great way to start the day. It follows up last week’s news in California about the possibility of teacher layoffs here: California districts could pursue teacher layoffs if new state budget cuts K-12 funding . Not a pretty picture….
Ways to Make Lessons ‘Relevant’ to Students’ Lives is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Six educators share strategies for making lessons directly relevant to students’ lives, including by building
Boutique Virtual Pre-School For The Littles (I Am Not Making This Up)
Here's another entry in the swanky virtual pre-school field. It's Bumo Virtual School, and it is the brainchild of an influencer and an entrepreneur. They originally wanted to start a café where parents could hang out while their littles played and learned stuff. It was going to be "a chic little spot in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Century City." But then the coronavirus happened, so they shifted gears and launched a virtual school start-up instead, because it's practically the same thing.
Let's meet these two start-uppists.
First, we have Chiselle Lim, whose occupation is usually listed as "influencer" or "fashion stylist," and you may raise an eyebrow, but the woman has a Wikipedia page. Her fashion-beauty-lifetyyle blog, The Chiselle Factor, is slick as hell; on her other social media accounts (including the Instagram account with 1.4 million followers, she is billed as "your rich mom." This article paints her as the main push behind this operation, but it's her friend who is providing the educational leadership.
Not a great idea
That would be Joan Nguyen, "Award-Winning Entrepreneur & Educator." Nguyen started MeriEducation at age 20, which is now virtual and boasts "if you can shop online, you can learn online." MeriEducation is mostly a tutoring and test prep service, and Nguyen has won all sorts of entrepreneurial awards for it. Her own work as "Elite-Level Academic and College Coach" involves getting high school students well-positioned to get into the school of their choice, as well as helping with that application process. Her personal coaching programs are by invite only. She has grown MeriEducation into four centers (including CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Boutique Virtual Pre-School For The Littles (I Am Not Making This Up)
The USA TODAY Network is launching a series on the Latino community in the USA called Hecho en USA, or made in America. Roughly 80% of all Latinos living in the USA are American citizens, but media coverage of Hispanics tends to focus on immigration and crime, instead of how Latino families live, work and learn in their hometowns. Hecho en USA tells the stories of the nation’s 59.9 million Latinos – a growing economic and cultural force, many of whom are born in the USA.
LOS ANGELES – Preschool teacher Rosa Ramirez has a special way of asking her students to line up for playtime outside.
“Pueden pararse si llevan puesto algo de color amarillo, como una abeja,” she tells them.
In English, Ramirez would say, “You can stand up if you are wearing yellow – like a bee.” But this is the half of the school day in which she teaches exclusively in Spanish.
Her students are not confused by her language choice. Most of the 4-year-olds wearing even a smidgen of yellow stand up as instructed.
Bilingual education programs can help children from all backgrounds become better students
Research shows that dual-language programs where children learn both Spanish and English are especially helpful for Latino English-language learners. Editors note: Video has been updated to remove a student who opted out of appearing in photos and video.
HARRISON HILL, USA TODAY
The preschool dual-language program at Gates Street Early Education Center in Lincoln Heights, one of Los Angeles’ oldest neighborhoods with dense populations of Latino and Asian residents, is part of a growing number of bilingual education models taking root in California and across the country. Many of them are designed to serve students from Spanish-speaking families, as well as students from other cultures, under mounting evidence that learning two languages can help people from all backgrounds become stronger students.
Roughly 3.8 million students in U.S. schools are native Spanish-speakers who are not proficient in English. They make up the bulk of the approximately 5 million students nationwide identified as English language learners, the fastest-growing demographic in schools – and the lowest-performing, as judged by achievement tests and graduation rates.
Sixty-seven percent of students with limited English skills graduated high school after four years in 2016, compared with 84% of all students, according to federal data.
Schools call parents “co-teachers,” but we have no idea what we’re doing Learning only happens with a high-quality teacher, but parents have been dropped into the role with no training and little support
The assignment was simple: Write a story about a realistic character. Draw pictures showing the action, and then write down what’s happening. An hour in, my 6-year-old daughter was in tears. She loved drawing the pictures and imagining the plot. She refused to write it down. I was on the verge of tears myself.
By that afternoon, I was on the phone with the teacher, who told me that just a page of writing a day was fine. I braced myself the next morning, but within an hour, my daughter and I were at opposite sides of the living room. She was sprawled on the floor, furious and exhausted. I was taking deep breaths to calm down. We hadn’t even gotten to the tape diagrams and “quick tens” she had to master for her Common Core math lesson yet.
I’m an editor. It’s my job to help writers craft stories with engaging narratives and detailed descriptions of characters. Some of these stories even win awards. I had begun the week pretty excited about tutoring my own child in narrative writing. Instead, my attempt to persuade her to write three sentences was a disaster.
Not long after, I was allowed to listen in on a professional development seminar with a group of public school principals. They were listing some of the silver linings that have come with the shift to remote learning in the wake of coronavirus. I laughed out loud when one shared, “Parents are co-teaching at home!”
Start: Wednesday, June 03, 2020 • 7:30 PM • Eastern Daylight Time (US & Canada) (GMT-04:00)
End: Wednesday, June 03, 2020 • 9:00 PM • Eastern Daylight Time (US & Canada) (GMT-04:00)
The Network for Public Education invites you to join us for a video conference with NPE President Diane Ravitch. Diane's guest this week will be Journey for Justice National Director Jitu Brown. Join Diane and Jitu for a conversation about race, equity and civil rights.
Why Johnny Can't Read? Part 6: Quality of Instruction
In order to be highly successful literacy instruction must be informed, balanced, and responsive. To the extent that literacy instruction fails to meet these three components it surely contributes to why Johnny can't read. The other causes outlined in this series, income inequity, racism and segregation, brain-based learning difficulties, and limited resources, all play a part and all contribute to children not learning to read, but they do not excuse in any way the failure to provide the quality instruction that every child deserves. It is our responsibility as teachers, administrators, teacher educators, parents, and community members to insure that the very best quality instruction is available to all students, and for those most vulnerable readers, that the best of the best is available.
Informed Instruction Pre-service teachers simply do not get enough instruction in how to teach reading. Often formal reading instruction is limited to two courses or about 6 credits. Learning to read is a complex activity. Teaching a child to read is even more complex. At a minimum pre-service teachers should have 9 credits hours in literacy theory, research' and practice. followed by a 4 credit hour clinical practice course that includes the opportunity to work with individual students in reading under the watchful eye of college professors and reading specialists.
In addition pre-service teachers should be observing in regular classroom settings during the sophomore year, assisting a classroom teacher in the junior year, and completing a full semester of practice teaching under the mentorship of a skilled, experienced classroom teacher in the senior year. Ideally, all elementary teachers would be enrolled in a five-year program leading to a Masters degree in elementary education with concentrations in literacy and mathematics instruction.
An adult more than a decade out of college and working as a staff member in a local public school contacted me about a discouraging experience in an on-line course for a graduate degree.
This person’s story is one I have encountered quite often over almost four decades of teaching at both the high schools and college levels.
This person received a zero on an assignment, identified as plagiarism by the professor. The problem here is that this student was cited for plagiarism on the assignment, yet the citation strategy flagged is identical to a previous assignment that the same professor gave a 95.
As background, this 30-something student has been required in the first classes of their program to cite using APA, but has received no instruction in that citation format (which they had never used as an undergraduate). During the earlier course, I shared with this person some of the materials I provide students when I require and also give direct instruction and support in proper APA format in my courses.
Throughout the first course and including the first assignment in this second course, the student’s citations have not been flagged as incorrect or as plagiarism.
However, the student described for me the section flagged as plagiarism in the more recent assignment: They copied and pasted from the original source, CONTINUE READING: The Citation/Plagiarism Trap – radical eyes for equity
COVID-19 Exposes America's Broken Social Safety Net
As the saying goes, when the average American coughs, a person of color catches the flu. While COVID-19 is far more serious than the flu, its intensity — as measured by loss of life, lost wages, and learning gaps — has been devastating to people of color. Across the nation, we are now forced to reckon with just how inequitable and inadequate our social safety net actually is. Now, more than ever, we are seeing the critical role our public institutions play in anchoring our society in a storm. And we cannot help but see the deep inequities that people of color face in weathering that storm.
All of the issues that have been swept under the rug for decades are now laid bare for us to see: No paid sick leave. Broken healthcare systems. Lack of affordable housing. Families who were living paycheck to paycheck that are now unemployed. Inequitable funding for our public schools, worsened by closures and students without access to food or the internet.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the wide opportunity gaps for low-income families and communities of color. The truth is — the wealthy will be taken care of. They will work from home and be able to maintain their social distance, and their 401ks and stock portfolios will bounce back. Meanwhile, low-income students and their families will pay the price — yet again.
Two years ago, the Schott Foundation released the Loving Cities Index to sound the alarm. We understood that persistent inequities were undermining our communities’ ability to care for the most vulnerable — long before COVID-19 thrust them into the spotlight. With the Loving Cities Index, we sought to provide a new framework to help cities assess their ability to provide essential supports for students and their families. A “Loving City” prioritizes legislation and funding of supports that CONTINUE READING: COVID-19 Exposes America's Broken Social Safety Net | Schott Foundation for Public Education
The educational value of a black teacher Coronavirus is offering a chance to ‘reimagine’ education, but if the new landscape doesn’t include efforts to recruit and retain more black teachers, reform will be a farce
If, after a natural disaster decimated a city, I proposed to a governor or a school board that they replace a significant portion of a majority- white teaching corps with black teachers because doing so would potentially confer educational and social benefits, I’d probably be denounced as a racist and publicly excoriated.
But the reverse is exactly what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and it’s what could happen again across the country in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic if we’re not paying close attention. Thousands of black teachers were laid off after the hurricane and replaced by white ones. When schools come back after the coronavirus, black teachers are once again more likely to be lost to the budget cuts and health problems following in its wake.
If this is our chance to reimagine schools, remembering this history and prioritizing the protection of the black teaching force will be essential to create better places for black students to learn.
A cursory reading of the literature on black teachers should have given politicians and reformers pause before forcing their mass exit, and should do so again, but alas, even the research has apparently been devalued. For years, researchers such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Pedro Noguera, Lisa Delpit, Adrienne Dixson, Christopher Emdin, and James A. Banks — all people of color — validated the need for black teachers in New Orleans schools through their studies on teachers of color. Their scholarship serves as the foundation for inquiries like one by Stanford University researcher Thomas Dee who, the year before Katrina, found that black students of both sexes who had a black teacher scored 3 to 6 percentile points higher on standardized tests in reading than those who did not. Dee found a similar increase in the math scores of black students taught by a black teacher.
In a 2017 study published by the Institute of Labor Economics, researchers found that low- income black male elementary school students who were paired with a black teacher in the third, fourth, or fifth grades were 39 percent less likely to drop out of high school. The researchers also found that matching low-income black students of both sexes with at least one black teacher between the third and fifth grades increased their aspirations to attend a four- year college by 19 percent.There’s something about living in brown skin that gives you a different set of expectations for your black students than those of your white peers.
For the past nine weeks 70,000 New York City teachers have been teaching remotely. So have, I don’t know, three million more? across the US. But I know more about New York City.
So who doesn’t know how to teach remotely? Pretty much anyone who has not tried it. Mayors and Governors and Presidents, Members of Congress, State Legislators, Senators… None of them really have a clue – which, by the way, our governor has demonstrated quite adequately.
Who else doesn’t know how to teach remotely? I’d say pretty much every school system administrator, including the vast majority of principals and assistant principals. And also 100% of central administrators, at least here in New York City. They’ve thrown all the planning on us, and then while we are figuring things out throw us curves. Not only do they lack knowledge that would be useful to us in figuring out remote teaching, they lack empathy.
And then there’s us. Teachers. Trying to teach remotely. There are teachers out there who were already doing “flipped classrooms” or lots of video lessons. They had an easier adjustment. But even they could not anticipate the variety of problems students would have with the technology at home – without the “safety net” of in-class discussions. Some teachers were already familiar with Zoom or Google Meet Ups, which was an advantage. But most of us were new.
In the “planning week” (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, after schools shut for students) we came up with something. Actually, a lot of somethings. It seems like there were hundreds of approaches, maybe thousands of variations.
More than 200 advocates of public education endorsed this open letter to Joe Biden, which was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post.
They call on presumptive Democratic nominee Biden to reject the stale and failed policies of the past 20 years.
Their letter (our letter, since I signed it) begins with this preamble and then offers a list of specific proposals that together represent a fresh vision for American education:
Dear Vice President Biden:
As the Democratic Party presumptive nominee, you have the power to fight for the public schools and colleges and universities that our students deserve. We are concerned educators, public education advocates, union members, parents, and students, writing to request that you demonstrate your commitment to that agenda.
Over the past decade, politicians on both sides of the aisle have made devastating cuts to public education, while privatizing public schools, scapegoating educators, and providing massive tax breaks to corporations and the CONTINUE READING: An Open Letter to Joe Biden | Diane Ravitch's blog
We've all seen recordings of children playing in refugee camps and in war zones. In Peter Gray's book Free to Learn, he tells about the games Jewish children played even in concentration camps. They were games of survival, for the most part, like challenging one another to touch an electrified fence, but they were games and it was play. Children play with or without toys. They play with or without freedom. They play alone and together. They play when afraid. They play when they're sad. They play when they're confused. We point to the irrepressibility of childhood play as evidence of the resilience of children, and they certainly are resilient, but we make a mistake when we point to their play as evidence that the are "fine."
Children don't play because they are fine: they play because play is how children instinctively process the world around them. I watched children who could only have been frightened and confused (because we were all frightened and confused) fly their toy airplanes into block towers over and over in the weeks after 9/11. My daughter was part of a classroom of three-year-olds who spent days playing "earthquake," yelling and ducking under tables as they had been compelled to do during a real one. Play is not evidence of joy and happiness. Play is not evidence of being fine. Their play, even under the best of circumstances, is how children CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: The Children are Not Fine: None of Us are Fine
The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning
Well-planned online learning experiences are meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster. Colleges and universities working to maintain instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic should understand those differences when evaluating this emergency remote teaching.
Due to the threat of COVID-19, colleges and universities are facing decisions about how to continue teaching and learning while keeping their faculty, staff, and students safe from a public health emergency that is moving fast and not well understood. Many institutions have opted to cancel all face-to-face classes, including labs and other learning experiences, and have mandated that faculty move their courses online to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. The list of institutions of higher education making this decision has been growing each day. Institutions of all sizes and types—state colleges and universities, Ivy League institutions, community colleges, and others—are moving their classes online.1 Bryan Alexander has curated the status of hundreds of institutions.2
Moving instruction online can enable the flexibility of teaching and learning anywhere, anytime, but the speed with which this move to online instruction is expected to happen is unprecedented and staggering. Although campus support personnel and teams are usually available to help faculty members learn about and implement online learning, these teams typically support a small pool of faculty interested in teaching online. In the present situation, these individuals and teams will not be able to offer the same level of support to all faculty in such a narrow preparation window. Faculty might feel like instructional MacGyvers, having to improvise quick solutions in less-than-ideal circumstances. No matter how clever a solution might be—and some very clever solutions are emerging—many instructors will understandably find this process stressful.
The temptation to compare online learning to face-to-face instruction in these circumstances will be great. In fact, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has already called for a "grand experiment" doing exactly that.3 This is a highly problematic suggestion, however. First and foremost, the politics of any such debate must be acknowledged. "Online learning" will become a politicized term that can take on any number of meanings depending on the argument someone wants to advance. In talking about lessons learned when institutions moved classes online during a shutdown in South Africa, Laura Czerniewicz starts with this very lesson and what happened around the construct of "blended learning" at the time.4 The idea of blended learning was drawn into political agendas without paying sufficient attention to the fact that institutions would make different decisions and invest differently, resulting in widely varying solutions and results from one institution to another. With some of that hindsight as wisdom, we seek to advance some careful distinctions that we hope can inform the evaluations and reflections that will surely result from this mass move by colleges and universities.
Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody CONTINUE READING: The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning | EDUCAUSE
The Pandemic Is Driving America's Schools Toward A Financial Meltdown
Austin Beutner looked haggard, his face a curtain of worry lines. The superintendent of the second-largest school district in the nation sat at a desk last week delivering a video address to Los Angeles families. But he began with a stark message clearly meant for another audience:
Lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
"Cuts to funding at schools will forever impact the lives of children," Beutner said less than a week after California's governor called for emergency cuts in education spending. The harm children face from these cuts, Beutner warned, "is just as real a threat to them as is the coronavirus."
Similar alarms are sounding in districts across the country. With the nation's attention still fixed on the COVID-19 health crisis, school leaders are warning of a financial meltdown that could devastate many districts and set back an entire generation of students.
"I think we're about to see a school funding crisis unlike anything we have ever seen in modern history," warns Rebecca Sibilia, the CEO of EdBuild, a school finance advocacy organization. "We are looking at devastation that we could not have imagined ... a year ago."
What will September look like? What needs to happen for us to be safe enough to go into school? If we are remote, based on our experience so far, what would you do the same? What would you change up? Does a hybrid model make sense? Testing? Live lessons?
We had a chapter meeting coming up. And so, in preparation, I sent out a survey. It was explicitly NOT to tabulate, but to stimulate thought processes: “This is a “thought survey” – questions are to think about and to discuss.” This was not a vote. We were not in a position to set even school policy, let alone DoE policy. But it was good to bat around possibilities, concerns, insights.
The chapter meeting discussion, scheduled for half an hour, ran a full hour. And some people submitted their responses. I had not expected that. That was not my plan. Others asked if we could share the results with each other. So I rewrote the survey to incorporate points people made in the discussion, and redistributed it. (I will tabulate results, but, internally, for my chapter only.)
The survey was a good way to get discussion going. So I’m sharing the original, and the updated versions (if you would like a word document version, let me know): CONTINUE READING: Getting a conversation going about September | JD2718
Watching my wife deal with the challenges of doing crisis pandemic distance learning, I've been having flashbacks to my first job.
I taught in Lorain High School (not the current LHS but the one that stood where there is now a vacant lot), and I rented an apartment right across the street from the school. When I found the place, I was delighted-- the ultimate in convenience. I wouldn't even have to start my car, let alone navigate a strange city. Heck, it was even across the street from the same side of the building in which I worked.
My old neighborhood
At the end of the day, I'd stay at my desk in my room and keep working till I hit a stopping point. Then I'd throw a pile of papers in my briefcase, walk down the hall, out the door, across the street, up the stairs, and into my apartment, where I would grab something to eat, then open the briefcase and spread the papers out on my coffee table, sit on the couch with my grading and my supper, and go back to work. Maybe I'd turn on the TV (a portable twelve-inch black and white) or maybe I'd just play music. At some point I'd get up, walk six feet to my bedroom and go to bed. Fridays were extra luxurious because I could just leave everything out on the table so that it would be all ready to go on Saturday morning.
At some point it occurred to me that work had eaten my home, that I in fact didn't really have a home so much as a more comfortable supplemental work location. And partway into the year, I felt CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Separating Home And School For Teachers
How Does It Feel to Be One of the Beautiful Tweedies?
Chancellor Carranza says the budget it cut "to the bone." There's absolutely nothing left at Tweed to be cut. Otherwise, why would they be cutting so much from the classroom?
The city has proposed $827 million in DOE cuts, including slashing school budgets by $285 million. This would reduce arts programs, counselors and social workers in needy districts, and college-prep for high schoolers. The DOE would also put off new classes for 3-year-olds, installation of air conditioners, and rat extermination.
So what is so absolutely vital that our kids need to sit in sweltering, rat-infested classrooms, likely as not during a pandemic?
For those who work in Tweed, there are spiritual considerations. After all, when you're making 200K a year after the budget being cut to the bone, you have other things to think about besides salary. That's why they hired a guru for DOE employees with troubled souls. After all, when DOE employees with big questions need to explore their inner selves, we can't expect them to do so on their own time. After all, the sort of high quality service we've come to expect from them doesn't come easily.
It's not just anyone you can send your college transcripts to who will ask you to send them again because their on the fourth, rather than the sixteenth floor. It's not just anyone who will absolutely lose every single paper you hand deliver unless you get a written receipt. It's not just anyone who will invariably rule against the UFT when black letter contract regulations are violated. Not just any organization could say untimely letters are CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: How Does It Feel to Be One of the Beautiful Tweedies?
All of the issues that have been swept under the rug for decades are now laid bare for us to see: No paid sick leave. Broken healthcare systems. Lack of affordable housing. Families who were living paycheck to paycheck that are now unemployed. Inequitable funding for our public schools, worsened by closures and students without access to food or the internet.
Chancellor Carranza says the budget it cut "to the bone." There's absolutely nothing left at Tweed to be cut. Otherwise, why would they be cutting so much from the classroom?