Education sure looks different in a global pandemic. Some schools are opening for in-person classes. Many are teaching remotely. Some are using hybrid models. All the while, school administrators and parents are nervously keeping tabs on state watchlists to see who’s at risk and where.
Ohio legislators recently introduced Senate Bill 358, which proposes to cancel all state testing scheduled for spring 2021. The provision calling for the cancellation of state exams would only go into effect if the state receives an assessment waiver from the U.S.
Covid-19 is upending what parents think about America’s schools, motivating them to seek different ways to educate their children. It’s also inspiring enterprising individuals and imaginative policymakers to create new ways to support that parent demand for change.
I’ve made no secret over the years of my admiration for the work of Doug Lemov. When I was a new and clueless fifth grade teacher in 2002, his essential book, Teach Like a Champion, was unfortunately still a few years away.
The pandemic has left us in a world quite different from the one before. While we’re faced with plenty of new challenges, we also have the opportunity to test out creative solutions.
If schooling continues to be remote through the fall, as it seems to be in many districts across the country, what is to be done about the plight of kids who are at risk for child abuse or neglect?
There is no playbook for school this fall.
The first-ever virtual political conventions have come and gone, during which neither party offered a serious path forward on education reform. The Democrats belong to the self-interested teacher unions, and the GOP has become a single-issue party in pursuit of choice, leaving us with a lot of talk but little action.
Around six months ago, stay-at-home orders and school closures upended normal life for children of all ages across the United States. The loss of academic learning has been a huge concern, but we’re not talking enough about the implications of long-term “social distancing” for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers.
The National Center for Rural Education Research Networks (NCRERN) is a recently established organization out of Harvard that studies and supports a network of rural school districts in New York and Ohio.
On this week’s podcast, Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, joins Mike Petril
Remote learning did not go well in the spring. What we need, then, are concrete recommendations for how to significantly improve the remote learning experience for students, teachers, and families. Fordham’s new report, Schooling Covid-19, provides just that, with ideas culled from educators who achieved striking success in the face of the viral challenge this spring—educators from some of the nation’s leading charter school networks
If you do a quick search on Teacherspayteachers.com, one of the most popular sources for online teaching materials, you’ll see that “distance learning resources” are now front and center.
Eventually we’ll learn whether our mass experiment in “remote learning” leads to durable changes in the U.S. education system, such as more students taking some of their courses online or opting out altogether from school as we know it. In the meantime, the massive digital footprint this experiment is creating can provide fresh insights into how students spend their days.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused plenty of problems in education, but a recently published study offers a sliver of good news for schools that—despite recent budget constraints—may soon find themselves in need of additional teachers to make social distancing feasible
Lost in the political noise of the debate on reopening schools is what parents think about this complicated puzzle. While their varied responses reflect this complexity, there is important consensus on many issues—though significant disagreement on one.
Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to “virtual learning” was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do far better than others.
Equity need not be pitted against excellence. But let’s not pretend there are no trade-offs. The two are in tension, if not actual conflict, in many matters of policy and practice. We can assume that progressives will always take the “equity” side. So if conservatives don’t make excellence a priority—be it in matters organizational, academic, or related to extracurricular activities and other nonacademic pursuits—nobody will.
Editor’s note: This was first published as part of the American Enterprise Institute’s Sketching a New Conservative Agenda Series.
Perhaps it is only when we lose something that we realize its true value. A recent study by Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum finds that in-person teaching time in the classroom—now a precious commodity that many students and teachers won’t experience again for a while—was not properly safeguarded when we had it.
A newly released study by The Harris Poll fielded during the first week of August finds that 57 percent of parents of school-age children “wish schools would just cancel this fall and re-open in the spring.” An even higher percentage of fathers—63 percent—say so.
Following numerous Covid-19-related testing cancellations, over 50 percent of four-year colleges and universities have, for fall 2021, gone “test-optional,” an admission policy providing the choice to applicants of whether to submit their ACT and SAT scores.
For more than sixty years, Advanced Placement exams have been an “in person” affair. AP exams have always been administered in schools with paper test booklets, then hand-graded at massive gatherings of teachers and college professors.
Between learning loss from an interrupted spring semester and new pandemic-related financial struggles that families are facing, many students are canceling, delaying, or changing their plans to enroll in higher education.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought sudden and near total disruption to the K–12 system. Almost every single school in the country had to figure out how to serve students at home. Few succeeded.
In the Center for Reinventing Public Education’s latest report, I was shocked to read that, “less than a third of reviewed district reopening plans reference intervention strategies to help targeted students make up learning they may have lost during spring or summer.”
Many low-income parents and parents of color are in solidarity with most teachers in not wanting their children to return to school buildings until the pandemic has passed. One obvious explanation is that low-income communities and communities of color have been much harder hit by the virus than their more advantaged peers. But there’s likely something else: Many low-income and working-class parents simply don’t trust their kids’ schools to keep them safe.
The tremor that you felt last week was the dropping of a new Emily Hanford radio documentary, “What the Words Say: Many kids struggle with reading—and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need.” Since she started reporting on reading several years ago, Hanford has kept up the pressure on the
The private schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, are breathing a sigh of relief that, after much sturm und drang this past week, they’re back in charge of their own decisions about whether and how to re-open.
Research on education during the coronavirus pandemic has been robust. Much of it is table setting for longer-term analysis on virtual curricula, teaching effectiveness, and student achievement. But there is also important ephemera being studied that will form a more immediate image of a difficult and chaotic time.
