The COVID-19 pandemic is creating management and governance challenges for organizations large and small, and school districts are no exception. Systematically thinking about these challenges in terms of directors’ five core responsibilities can help school boards meet those challenges.
Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.
When children of the pandemic are old and gray, they won’t remember their remote learning lessons. They will reminisce about the time their teachers paraded past their house because the schools were closed. They don’t have the vocabulary today to describe it, but the lesson will stick and become clear in the retelling. It’s about social cohesion, love and loyalty, and how good people step up when we need them to
With more states and districts foreclosing upon the possibility of in-person learning through the end of the school year, the next few months will tell us a lot about whether our sector can muster the will and skill to overcome the contractual, logistical, and budgetary hurdles required to sufficiently meet the current challenge.
More and more students are taking advantage of the opportunity to earn college credit while in high school, but we don’t know enough about how they use these credits to shape their postsecondary pursuits.
Fervor for improving students’ post-secondary readiness has reached near deafening levels in the education community and beyond, as policymakers, advocates, and researchers grapple with the stark reality that less than half of high school seniors are graduating ac
Most of the discussion about schools adjusting to the COVID-19 crisis has centered on innovations in e-learning and how we reach our most vulnerable students. Thousands of traditional brick-and-mortar school systems are being forced to learn new methods of reaching all students through software programs, Google hangouts, and Zoom meetings.
“Our sight was on winning the whole thing this year. And now I will likely never coach some of these boys again.” —Steve Cardoso, Rhode Island teacher and baseball coach
For many educators, we are in the process of navigating one of the biggest challenges anyone has ever asked of us. As a country, teachers, schools and districts are experimenting with how to keep students learning while they are forced to be at home during the COVID-19 public health crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is first and foremost a healthcare crisis. But it also causes an identity crisis for schools. The next year and a half will require our education system to constantly reinvent itself in response to rapidly changing needs, and school system leaders will need grace, high expectations, and new mental models for what school can become to best serve students and families.
Given his track record of studying and analyzing the real world of classroom-based instruction, Doug Lemov may not be the person you’d expect to be paving the way forward on online learning. But if you view Lemov’s work through the lens of the entrepreneurial, “find a way” spirit that sparked the modern education reform movement, it makes a little more sense.
Less than three weeks into nationwide school closures because of COVID-19, two narratives have emerged about the role of philanthropy in supporting students through the crisis. The first is the distance-learning narrative and the second is the basic-needs narrative. Most often, they exist as separate entities in our conversations and how we make sense of the world.
I’m succeeding in my goal of running a B-minus Daddy Home School. Specifically I wanted:
Before the ink was dry on the CARES Act, talk had already begun about the next stimulus package. The need for this is obvious. There are over 50 million kids not attending traditional K–12 schools today, many of them poor, homeless, not speaking English, or requiring special services. Should such a measure come to pass, it ought to, among other things, help school systems provide remote learning at scale and expand economic on-ramps for youth and adults.
The debate on how schools will provide special education in the near term has generated its fair share of extreme arguments.
At about the same time last year that the College Board was letting go of its previously-announced plans to add an “adversity index score” to its test result reporting to colleges, the journal Educational Policy published a research paper describing the results of an experiment which simulated a
The education reform world is beset by many constant refrains. “Give schools more money,” for example, “recruit more highly-trained teachers,” or “schools need more autonomy.” But what do these things actually mean when put into practice? If reform is as easy as that, then why hasn’t someone done it already?
On this week’s podcast, Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffi
New York City has been brought to a halt; only the sirens of ambulances pierce the fateful silence. But for Success Academy students, learning continues. One week after the network launched distance learning at all forty-five schools enrolling 18,000 New York City students, I embedded in two days of classes.
Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.
We at Fordham, like so many around the world, are working at home. Our usual colleagues have been replaced by new “coworkers.” These are often of the younger variety, be they human children or beloved family pets. But not always. This is for them:
Days after we shut down all twenty-four of our New York City schools, we opened back up as a remote learning organization serving nearly 10,000 students in their homes.
Ours isn’t nearly as sophisticated or elaborate as the “Grandparents’ Academy” that Jake Halpern described in the New York Times, but after ten days of experimenting with it, I’ve had fun, my grandchildren have taken it seriously and worked at it, and we’ve all learned a thing or two.
If you had asked me a few weeks ago if I’d be publicly lauding the teachers unions in my state of Rhode Island, I would have probably shot back with a quick “sure, when hell freezes over.” I am a former union member in two states (NEA) and have gone on the record repeatedly to say that I don’t think unions—at least in their current form—should be anywhere near public education.
Joy Hakim runs a storyteller's website intended for anyone who likes to learn—at home, in school, or wherever. It may take you places in the past you haven't been before. It deals with big ideas and true stories, many of which are about science. Its offerings may be helpful for families adjusting to home instruction during the COVID-19 crisis.
Nearly every school building in the country has now closed to help stem the spread of coronavirus.
As the nation works to stem the spread of coronavirus, American schools are bearing an enormous part of the burden. With as many as nine in ten schools now closed, almost overnight they have retooled to navigate a new era of large-scale distance learning in an effort to meet the academic needs of the dispersed students they serve.
We can’t hold schools accountable for academic results over the next three months. Too much is out of their control. But there are steps that they—and their districts, networks and states—can and should take to ensure that kids learn and to encourage transparency. Once they deploy online assignments, for example, what about simple counts of how many kids actually complete them? What steps are schools and teachers taking to contact, nudge and help those who aren’t?
