1. In case you missed it, the Senate Finance Committee voted out their version of the budget bill—amended before approval—moving it on to the full Senate for a vote. The Dayton Daily News covered a number of the bill’s education provisions and included a quote from our own Chad Aldis, speaking positively about the school-choice-centric nature of the Senate’s version. Link (Dayton Daily News, 6/8/21) On the topic of the Senate’s version of school funding, the Blade’s headline contains an error. It says that “a fight is coming” (that is, House proposals vs. Senate proposals) but I think they meant to write “a conference committee is coming”—because that is how laws are made. (Toledo Blade, 6/7/21) It seems to me that the editorial board at Cleveland.com would prefer no such conference, as they opine rapturously about the House’s school funding plan while tossing some grudging kudos at a couple of the Senate’s proposals. (Cleveland.com, 6/9/21)
    
2. But back to school choice for a moment. Explorers Academy of Science and Technology (EAST) is a new charter school opening its doors in the Glass City this fall. Go Rockets! (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 6/7/21) Meanwhile, charter schools in the Gem City are still using the dreaded “if” in regard to the state of bus transportation for their students in the fall. While Dayton City Schools has got lots of details about how it will be restructuring transportation to serve resident students attending its buildings (even preschoolers!), Dayton Early College Academy and other charter schools appear to still be waiting for any scrap of news as to how students will reach their buildings. (Dayton Daily News, 6/8/21)
   
   

3. This is a fascinating story for a lot of reasons. Be sure to read it in detail. It is celebrating Kacie Ramshaw, a recent graduate of Meadowbrook High School in eastern Ohio, who is headed into the working world a year earlier than the K-12 system originally planned for her. After a tough freshman year that included social anxiety and bullying, and the start of a sophomore year that promised more of the same, Kacie got a reprieve when the pandemic shut down her school and learning pivoted to a fully-online model. With help from a small group of fellow students, her family, and a counselor, she found her groove in remote learning and cranked out both her junior and senior years’ coursework in one school year. There’s way more to it than that, and a lot of education issues to consider, but it seems like Kacie’s story is one of success that owes more to flexibility and choice than it does to seat time and one-size-fits all. (The Daily Jeffersonian, 6/9/21)

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A few months ago I shared some reflections from Race to the Top and implications for this moment. As I am now supporting a number of state and district planning processes, the macro lessons hold true but I am struck by the degree of difficulty of the present task:

• The timing is challenging. While a few states have started releasing their guidance, most are still working through plans. District plans will be due between late July and September—out of step with budget processes, after the calendar for the year is set and curriculum plans are in place, and, critically, outside the window of education’s typical hiring season.

• The amount of money is so unfamiliar it is hard to digest. Teams keep losing track of place values.

• The funding is a short-term influx that will go away. Teams are clearly aware of this limit but it is also challenging to find high-impact uses of this much funding that they will not want to sustain.

• The level of scrutiny on both plans and process is high. There is constant talk about the stakes, the rarity of this opportunity, and the collaborative effort needed. Leaders are hearing this and taking it very seriously.

• The 2020–21 school year was not simple. Neither was 2019–20. Leadership teams are rarely coming to this planning gauntlet with fresh energy or a lot of free space on their schedule.

These constraints make it feel like asking an architect to collaboratively design a community center on a mountain top that will be judged by a panel with competing priorities by next Thursday.

As I engage with teams working through plans, I’ve seen three big challenges and a few approaches for each that support progress.

Challenge 1: Wanting to do it all. Every team I work with starts with a broad set of ambitions and feels the pressure to solve every problem all at once in the next three years. More often than not, this leads to difficulty making decisions, team tension, and anxious thinking.

Approaches that may help:

• Acknowledge the limits upfront. The sooner leadership teams, communities, and those of us privileged to work with schools acknowledge that we are not going to solve all of the problems in American education in the next few years, the sooner we can work together to identify a few areas where we can make significant progress.

• Start with, and spend significant time on, clarifying the vision and goals. Too often I see teams start with the question “How do we want to spend the money?” and those conversations always lead to ranging laundry lists of potential ideas. Instead, when teams start by getting clear and precise about what they want to be true in three years, the strategies become more obvious and exciting.

• Force hard choices. Teams driving toward a few clear outcomes also have long lists of outcomes they are clearly not driving towards. Establishing that list is a painful but important part of planning. Exercises like “you have 100 pennies to allocate across these options,” or “force rank these options,” or “if you could only pick three” can help teams find their focus.

Challenge 2: Strategies not feeling bold or impactful. I have talked to a number of leaders who have said some version of “I feel like we are struggling to find big new ideas beyond tutoring and summer school.” I have also talked to leaders that have plenty of ideas and are already worried about initiative indigestion. What those leaders have in common is that they are all trying to make sure what they do has real impact.

Approaches that may help:

• Start with vision, not the budget. (I am becoming a broken record.)

• Don’t skip the root cause analysis. Instead of jumping from “What do we want to accomplish?” to “How do we get there?”, teams that pause to ask “Why are we not there yet?” often unlock strategies that feel more impactful.

• Beware novelty obsession. We do need new approaches to strengthen education but we also know a great deal about what works. Plans do not need to have exclusively new approaches. Building on strengths is often a quicker and more effective path than launching new ideas.

• Start small. States will vary in their guidance, but all the money does not need to be spent in the first year. Year 1 can be a time to try a few things; teams can plan to spend more in years 2 and 3 on the things that gain the most traction and energy.

Challenge 3: Good intentions for a process hampered by the reality of time. Every leader I talk to wants the planning process to be a unifying opportunity for their team and key stakeholders. While many have the capacity to design and lead these kinds of processes quite effectively, the reality of multiple responsibilities, summer schedules, and the detailed communication that goes into setting up and managing a strong process is hard to imagine, particularly on a short timeline.

Approaches that may help:

• Have a facilitator whose job is to manage the process. It is incredibly hard to both facilitate and input at the same time. Whether it is asking someone with the facilitation skills internally or finding an external partner, having a person or group accountable to the success of the planning process always helps.

• Put the continuous improvement checkpoints on the calendar now. Even if the upfront planning is truncated and less collaborative than desired, there is no reason the continuous improvement journey can’t involve broad stakeholder input. Forming an implementation committee that monitors and evolves the implementation over time is a vital ingredient to successful curriculum implementation, and the same will hold true for any big plan.

I suspect that when we look back in three years at the stories of greatest impact, the teams with the strongest results will be those that 1) had the clearest upfront focus on the outcomes they want to achieve, 2) navigated the inevitable evolution of their plans with clear focus on those outcomes, and 3) operated with commitment to continuous improvement across the journey. And I suspect we will find that the strongest plans are the ones that set up teams to get those results.

Emily Freitag is the former Assistant Commissioner for Curriculum and Instruction for Tennessee and the co-founder and CEO of Instruction Partners. She led Teach For America in Connecticut and Washington, D.C., and is a former seventh grade teacher. If you’d like to join Emily’s mailing list and receive communications from her a few times a month, you can subscribe here.

Since the spring of 2017, all Ohio eleventh graders have been required to take either the ACT or the SAT at the state’s expense. Research shows that universal testing policies like this are beneficial for underserved students. Nevertheless, some lawmakers and educators have recently argued that the ACT and SAT shouldn’t be required for every student. They believe that because not everyone plans to go to college, the state shouldn’t require all kids to take a college entrance exam. And they’re not alone. Some colleges and universities have transitioned to “test-optional” admissions.

The problem with this shift toward a more “holistic” view of student readiness is that it assumes everyone has the same opportunities—and the same awareness of those opportunities. But that’s not true. In fact, students from low-income families, students of color, and students who attend chronically low-performing schools often rely on universal services and assessments to level the playing field between them and their White, affluent, or more privileged peers.

Consider a few of the benchmarks that test-optional colleges and universities use in place of college-readiness exams. GPA, class rank, school involvement (such as sports and other extracurriculars), and community involvement (such as volunteer hours) all seem like objective and fair measures at first glance. But a closer look reveals that many of these measures rely heavily on the school a student attends and not the actual student.

I saw this play out all the time when I was teaching in a high-poverty, chronically low-performing high school. I knew plenty of exceptionally bright students whose 4.0 GPAs and top-ten class ranks didn’t mean as much to admissions officers as the same GPAs and class ranks earned by students who attended the affluent, high-performing schools across town. It’s hard to acknowledge that attending a low-performing assigned school can put kids at a disadvantage. We tell students that if they work hard and get good grades, then colleges will notice. But there’s a reason that affluent parents pay obnoxiously high tuition prices for prestigious private schools or sky-high mortgage payments for a house in a certain suburb. The reputation of the school a student attends—or “program rigor,” as it’s sometimes referred to in admissions literature—matters, and it’s completely out of the control of thousands of students.

The activities that fall under the “school involvement” umbrella are completely dependent on schools, too, and opportunity gaps are enormous. For example, at the high school I attended as a student, kids could choose between thirty sports and dozens of other clubs and activities. But at the high-poverty urban high school where I taught, extracurriculars were extremely limited: The only sports that were consistently available were football, boys’ and girls’ basketball, and cheerleading; marching band was the only option for musically inclined students; and students with academically based interests—those who would’ve liked to write for the school newspaper, learn how to code, or join the debate team—had few options. The school didn’t offer consistent volunteer opportunities, either. And because many of my students lacked reliable transportation, worked part-time jobs to help pay the bills, or kept an eye on their younger brothers and sisters while their parents were at work, going out into the community to seek out volunteer or leadership opportunities wasn’t an option.

The upshot? A “holistic” admissions process isn’t as much of an advantage for underserved students as anti-testing folks think. When your school sets you at a disadvantage through no fault of your own, you need objective, third-party measures to prove that you’re just as ready for college coursework as your peers. Obviously, we should be working to close the opportunity gap and ensure that all kids have access to the same opportunities. But focusing on that while simultaneously removing a state requirement for all students to take the same test and be held to the same standards is both illogical and myopic.

Of course, the folks attempting to change Ohio’s universal testing policy will argue that making the policy optional still gives students a free opportunity to take a college entrance exam. They couch this argument in terms of choice and say that families should have the right to choose whether or not their students take an assessment.

But this line of reasoning incorrectly assumes that all families have the same informational access. They don’t. A 2017 study of six graduating classes in Michigan found that for every ten low-income students who sat for a college entrance exam and were deemed college ready, there were another five who also would have been identified as college ready had they taken the assessment. Once Michigan’s universal-testing policy kicked in, the ACT test-taking rates of low-income students more than doubled, from 35 to 85 percent. That’s a massive jump, and it should raise several questions. How many students didn’t take a test prior to the mandatory policy just because they assumed they weren’t college material? How many kids missed out on higher education and all it has to offer because they didn’t realize they had an opportunity right in front of them? And how many Ohio students will end up in the same boat if state lawmakers succeed in changing our mandatory policy?

The bottom line is that changing the state’s college-admissions-exam policy won’t harm students who are affluent, well connected, or attend high-performing schools. But it can and likely will harm underserved students with fewer opportunities. Data—both quantitative and anecdotal—indicate that a mandatory policy gives underserved students a boost and opens doors that may have been closed otherwise. If lawmakers are interested in crafting education policy that’s in the best interest of all kids, then they need to maintain the state’s current mandatory policy.

As post-pandemic life cautiously starts to take shape here in America, uncertainty abounds. Will our systems and processes and activities eagerly snap back to their 2019 forms? Or will our lives in 2021 and beyond take on new contours influenced by what we have learned, for good and ill, during the challenges forced upon us by 2020? A new report from the Afterschool Alliance that addresses students’ summer experiences might provide a clue.

“America After 3pm” is a periodic, nationally-representative survey of randomly selected parents of school-aged children. Pre-pandemic, this survey was conducted with nearly 30,000 households between January and mid-March 2020, providing baseline data on students’ summer experiences in 2019 as they had done in years past. These experiences are broadly defined to include camps, classes, vacations, work, and more.

Five additional data sources, two smaller parental surveys and three questionnaires of summer and afterschool program providers across the country, were obtained between August 2020 and mid-March 2021.

In 2019, 47 percent of families surveyed reported that at least one of their children participated in a summer program, continuing the upward trend seen in 2008 (25 percent) and 2013 (33 percent). Most common was a non-STEM specialty program (such as visual arts, sports, or drama), followed by voluntary summer programming run by schools or districts. STEM programs, jobs and internships, and mandatory or voluntary summer school brought up the rear. Overall, 95 percent of parents reported satisfaction with their child’s summer experience. While less than half of parents in 2019 said they preferred summer experiences to be “different” than the school year, three in four of those surveyed said that it was important that those experiences “helped keep their child from losing academic ground.” More physical activity, life skills, and access to the outdoors led the list of differences preferred, but differences varied between low-income and higher-income parents and between different racial and ethnic groups.

Forty-two percent of higher-income families reported that their children did not participate in summer programming due to “other family activities,” such as in-home supervision or vacation travel, while 35 percent of low-income families reported the same. But parents also reported that nearly one in three children not in a structured program during the 2019 summer would have been enrolled if one were available to them. “Availability” is not strictly defined, and that does raise some questions. It would be interesting to know, for example, how many parents forewent an available but undesirable opportunity (say, a baseball bootcamp) because a truly desired opportunity (say, a poetry camp) was not on offer near them. Using the general terminology, the report determines that up to 13.9 million children nationwide were unable to access a desired opportunity. Expense was the most commonly cited barrier to participation, with the average cost of activities estimated at $758 to $900—or approximately $200 per week—based on type and length of program. Transportation to and from programs and simple lack of awareness of available opportunities were also cited as barriers, but future surveys would do well to better define that term.

During the pandemic summer of 2020, participation in summer activities predictably declined. Thirty-four percent of families surveyed reported that at least one of their children participated in a structured summer experience. Thirty-seven percent reported that programming was fully virtual, 36 percent report that it was in fully in-person, and 26 percent reported a hybrid model. Participation in in-person programs was affected by social distancing requirements; 40 percent of in-person program providers reported running a waitlist in 2020. Satisfaction dipped a little but remained high, with nine in ten parents reporting that they were happy with their child’s summer program overall. Interestingly, the average cost for summer programming in 2020 was reported at about $120 per week, down more than $80 from the previous year. This was likely due to a combination of reduced cost to conduct virtual versus in-person programs and the availability of Covid relief funding to assist schools, organizations, and families. Forty-eight percent of parents reported that their child’s 2020 summer experience came at no cost to them. Schools provided about 30 percent of summer programming, community-based organizations provided about 23 percent, and cities and towns provided 21 percent. Unmet demand for summer programs remained high once again, with 57 percent of families who reported not having a child in a summer program saying they would have liked to have enrolled their child in one if they could have, although the caveats around the definition of “availability” remain.

What might all this mean for the summer that is now upon us? That’s far from clear, but what we can see so far is troubling. Seventy-nine percent of program providers surveyed in February and March 2021 said they would be providing structured activities this summer, but 36 percent of those said that they are most concerned about their ability to meet the demand from families. This despite the fact that the American Rescue Plan provides more than $1 billion for summer enrichment activities and allows state and local education agencies to target billions of additional dollars to summer learning programs to help students recover from the pandemic. Not to mention the expanded and refundable child tax credit, which parents could choose to use on enrichment activities like summer camp. School districts are gearing up, but even those with robust programs are shying away from calling it “summer school” and from mandating attendance for even those students with the clearest needs. Despite the fact that many of the barriers to access reported in previous years—cost, transportation, awareness—might be swept away in the tsunami of money available, and despite the need for more and better programming following more than a year of disrupted learning, the survey data seem to point to more of the same: sizeable numbers of students missing out on summer opportunities.

Even though the desire to return to pre-pandemic norms may be strong, we must be clear-eyed about whether those norms were good enough to begin with. And despite the obstacles we faced in 2020, they could help inform improvement so that a better version of systems and activities can go forward. How this summer’s programming for students fares could be a harbinger of what more is to come. Here’s hoping for detailed data and robust analysis thereof.

SOURCE: Afterschool Alliance, “Time for a Game-Changing Summer, With Opportunity and Growth for All of America’s Youth” (May 2021).

1. Just two clips today, neither of which are news. First up, in a surprise to no one, the education folks at the League of Women Voters of Ohio opined in favor of the school funding revamp put forward in the House version of the state budget bill. (Cleveland.com, 6/6/21)
    
2. Second, two students from Shaker Heights City Schools also opined in favor of the House school funding revamp plan. They also took the opportunity to opine against school and district report cards, attempting a difficult maneuver to link funding with accountability. And while Mr. Clips Compiler would only give them a C- on the effort, I suspect these high-flyers’ GPAs would barely feel it. (Cleveland.com, 6/6/21)

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Leading with the data

It is just possible that lessons in how education can positively rebound from the past year’s disruption could come from studying how New Orleans rebounded from the historic devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A new report from Tulane University economist Douglas N. Harris, who has been studying the topic for many years, indicates that while student achievement in the city still has many problem areas, much of the improvement observed can be directly tied to an increase in charter schools and school choice generally.

The view from Colorado

Early in May, lawmakers in Colorado began considering a bill which would likely allow for a new district-approval process for charter school applicants. It was feared that approval would have a chilling effect on charter growth in the Centennial State. This week, after weeks of impassioned testimony from charter school families, the bill failed in the House Education Committee on a 5-4 vote.

Meanwhile, in West Virginia…

Buoyed by passage of a new law expanding the number and type of charter schools allowed to operate in the state, and hopeful of a successful outcome of its state Supreme Court case, officials at the proposed West Virginia Academy believe it is once again on the path to becoming the first charter school to open in the Mountain State.

The money pt 1

The U.S. Department of Education this week released updated guidance for schools in how to spend their Covid-relief ESSER dollars. Meanwhile, President Biden’s proposed budget, unveiled this week, included $440 million in funding for the Charter Schools Program (CSP).

The money pt 2

This week, the Ohio Senate released its own plan to revamp school funding in Ohio as part of the state budget bill. The new model includes some of the best proposals from the previous House plan—direct funding of charters and vouchers, increasing support for Ohio’s most-vulnerable students—and builds upon it by fully funding the quality charter school fund, increasing support for charter and independent STEM schools’ facilities, and removing existing geographic restrictions on where startup charters can locate.

*****

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1. Sometimes this clips gig is fun; sometimes it lands somewhere south of that. I have to clip this piece—in which my boss Chad Aldis is quoted on the possibility of racial segregation occurring as a result of the state’s voucher programs—even though it is otherwise a confusing train wreck of dubious data, innuendo, and faux outrage masquerading as news. I feel icky. (Spectrum News 1, 6/2/21)
    
2. Fortunately, the folks at Gongwer keep things on the side of straight-up reportage (as usual) as they cover yesterday’s education-related budget testimony before the Senate Finance Committee. Several points from Chad’s testimony, including his answers to some interesting questions, are included. (Gongwer Ohio, 6/3/21) That’s not to say that there wasn’t some “discordance” in evidence during that hearing. In this non-subscriber-only coverage from the OCJ, we learn (to our utter non-surprise) that the education status quo blob prefers the school funding revamp contained in the House version of the budget bill over the one contained in the Senate version of the budget bill. And even though the Senate version of the budget bill was what was supposed to be discussed at that hearing, it feels like way more love is expressed for the House version here. And having watched some of that testimony live, it seemed to me like the witnesses weren’t the only ones disliking the Senate version of school funding reform. (Ohio Capital Journal, 6/4/21) Here is another look at that Senate education funding revamp plan from earlier this week…before so much discordance had manifested. (The Center Square, 6/4/21)
   
   

3. Columbus City Schools previous told us in that in early May, 55 percent of the approximately 2,700 district seniors were on track to graduate. In this piece, we learn that one month later, 72 percent of district seniors will actually walk the stages at the various ceremonies being held. “In total, Columbus City Schools will graduate 2,146 students this week,” said Superintendent Talisa Dixon. About a fourth of graduates, or 521, are headed off to college, she added. But 72 will likely not be the final figure the district reports because students are able to take credit-recovery classes in the summer—and we’ve seen that the high school summer program in Columbus is heavily geared toward this—and still graduate in August as on-time, four-year graduates. That’s more than two whole months! (Columbus Dispatch, 6/3/21)
    
4. Citing a decrease in student enrollment, East Cleveland City Schools terminated 10 teachers this week, after terminating 17 teachers last year for the same reason. The local teachers union is up in arms over the decision, by which they said they were “blindsided”. You know what makes this interesting? East Cleveland is being run by a CEO, who got to make those decisions on his own. And while East Cleveland’s iteration of the Academic Distress Commission has not seen the public rhetorical and legal fireworks that persist in Lorain and Youngstown, the union VP quoted here seems to indicate that that may change in the near future. (Cleveland 19 News, 6/3/21) Also interesting in the brief piece above is the topic of money. One assumes that the decrease in enrollment is not in question. The union flak isn’t quoted on it one way or another, but she does prominently note her belief that the state and federal largesse coming to districts meant that no further reductions in force would happen regardless of the situation on the ground. Meanwhile, St. Bridget of Kildare School will close after 60 years of service to the families of Parma, due to falling enrollment…and no additional giant piles of cash falling from the sky. Now that is logic I can understand. I don’t like it, but at least it makes sense. (Fox 8 News, Cleveland, 6/3/21)

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Sitting on a Boston city bus, I watched a mother with a young child. For the twenty-five-minute ride, they didn’t speak a word. No “Look at that little girl on the bicycle” or “We’re having pizza for dinner!” When you’re with a young child for that long, do you talk to her?

The dearth of language is where critical learning gaps begin for many poor and disadvantaged children—gaps that often don’t close in school, no matter how much we spend or how early we start. Now President Biden’s “American Family Plan” proposes to spend $220 billion to create “high quality” preschools for three- and four-year-olds, expanding on President Obama’s push for four-year-olds in preschool.

Will it work? It depends on why Biden is proposing it. If it’s for childcare and social and behavioral skills, then yes, it probably will work. But if it’s to build pre-academics and cognitive development for kindergarten readiness and future schooling, it probably won’t!

A long history of creating out-of-home institutions for young children reveals that they may not be the most direct path toward school readiness. While we know that preschools can improve children’s behavior and social skills, they don’t do much to boost language and academic development. And assuming that such programs will be “high quality” is unrealistic, given our disappointing history of “high quality” K–12 programs in many cities and other areas serving our poorest and neediest children.

A large body of research has shown that though preschool programs like Head Start may give children a boost, the gains often fade by third grade. Kalman Hettleman, responding to the assumption that a “universal guarantee of pre-K will enable students to achieve academic success all the way up the school ladder,” cautioned:

That is conventional wisdom, but it’s also wishful thinking. For various reasons, early childhood education has been oversold in education politics and policy... It is not a vaccine that prevents future learning failure. [Emphasis added.]

In short, preschools aren’t great at improving language or pre-academics, even as the benefits they do have don’t seem to last for long, especially for our most needy children. So they may not be the most direct way to get children ready for kindergarten.

Instead, President Biden should follow what works and build an “all-of-the-above” approach: not only “high quality” preschools for child care and the development of social and behavior skills—but also home-based support for language and other cognitive development. He should empower families—parents, grandparents, and other caregivers—to fulfill their vital roles as children’s first teachers, especially for language development.

Research, including the seminal 1995 Hart and Risley study, which led to the “30-million-word gap,” tells us that improving early education, especially those vital language skills, starts at home. School readiness grows out of these skills, as other leaders have recognized. In 2015, for example, President Obama convened a White House conference to “bridge the word gap and put more young people on the path to success,” stressing the importance of talking to babies to close that 30-million-word gap.

Indeed, because parents are children’s first teachers, research supports helping them be as good as they can be. One evidence-backed way to do this, as described by Grover Whitehurst, is to pay parents directly to take care of their little ones and talk, sing, and read to them at home, on the street, at the playground, everywhere! Hart and Risley’s legacy lives on in efforts, often by non-profits, to empower families through research-supported home visits and other means. (See, for example, California’s First 5, Child and Family Research Partners, Providence Talks, Start Early (formerly The Ounce), Child Mind Institute, and Zero to Three.) Indeed, by age three or four, when children head to preschool, those who haven’t enjoyed strong language development at home are often far behind, and schools have not been able to close those gaps.

Yet a home-based approach is a hard sell, even as research shows that the path to improve early education—especially those vital language skills—starts there. Washington remains deaf to this promising path. As I see it, the American Family Plan would ultimately disincentivize this most powerful approach. Families who choose to be home with young children would receive nothing for their effort, while those who opt out of home enrichment would get free preschools!

If President Biden’s goal is education, he should ensure that the American Family Plan supports moms, dads, grandparents, and other at-home caregivers to be the best teachers they can be, and make it more likely that when their children finally do head to school, they’re ready to learn. He should pivot toward home.

This year’s Wonkathon is over, and the results are in!

2021’s Wisest Wonk:

• Angela Jerabek, for “Reimagining teacher teams to address students’ mental health.”

Second place:

• Jeff McGuire, for “We need to admit that school is alienating.”

Third place:

• Justina Schlund, for “To address mental health, think systemically about social, emotional, and academic learning.”

Thank you to all of our participants! Read about the competition, as well as all twenty-five entries, below.

—

Over the past year, extended school closures caused by Covid-19 have wreaked havoc on our nation’s students. Thousands have lost parents, grandparents, and family friends to the virus. Children and teenagers have suffered from a lack of routines and extracurricular activities and the inability to see their friends and classmates. Their moms and dads have dealt with fallout from unemployment and small business closures. And far too many have suffered from neglect and abuse, which have gone unreported.

Those hit hardest are the most disadvantaged children, especially kids in big-city school systems where reopening decisions have been mired in controversy, pushback, and distrust. And even before the pandemic, teenage suicide rates and other signs of psychological distress were on the rise. For all of these reasons, many students will need increased mental health support as they transition back into a full-time academic environment, and as they struggle to manage grief, anxiety, or other emotional responses to recent events that will require long-term monitoring and an ongoing response.

School leaders recognize this, citing students’ mental health as one of their top concerns. But many educators don’t feel confident in their ability to identify who in their classrooms might require additional mental health supports. And many schools lack a clear, coherent system for addressing these needs, with roughly 40 percent reporting that they currently address concerns on a “case by case basis.”

This needs to change. Now and in the near future, as children reacclimate to traditional in-person classrooms environments, schools must develop, implement, and maintain distinct plans to support students’ mental health. Ample federal resources are heading into school systems to help offset the costs. To be sure, schools must remain focused on their core academic missions, rather than try to become full-service mental health providers. But just as children can’t learn if they are hungry or can’t see the whiteboard, neither can they learn if they are suffering psychological distress.

This year’s Wonkathon tackled these issues head-on. We are asking contributors to address this fundamental and genuinely challenging question: How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?

Below are their answers:

• Four ways schools can prioritize mental health as part of a safe reopening plan, by Glenn Albright


• To the fountains for healing: Classical education in the post-pandemic classroom, by Jennifer Babisak


• Four ways schools can expand mental-health supports for students and staff post-pandemic, by CAO Central


• Addressing students’ mental health: Early is good, earlier is better, by Laura Weeldreye, Margo Candelaria, Ph.D., and Douglas Lent


• Cultivating SEL in a digital learning environment, by Cody Bendix


• The power of words, by Sally Bergquist


• How schools can fund and implement strong mental health supports after the pandemic, by Sarah Broome


• Choosing “all of the above” serves all, by Dr. Alex Casillas and Dr. Bonnie A. Hain


• To support the whole child, support the whole school, by Laura Encalade and Dr. Hank Staggs


• How schools can establish a culture and instructional strategies that benefit all students, by Laurie Gardner


• Commitment over compliance must be the rule if we are to build sustainable supports for children, families, and educators, by Shelton Jefferies


• Reimagining teacher teams to address students’ mental health, by Angela Jerabek


• Cultivating an equitable culture of K–12 health advocacy in the wake of Covid-19, by Ebony Lambert, Ph.D.


• The primacy of trust: How to create an environment that promotes social emotional learning and academic success, by Brooke Mabry, Elliot Ransom, Nina Ryan, and Lauren Wells


• We need to admit that school is alienating, by Jeff McGuire


• SEL for all begins with SEL for educators, by Sulina Mohanty and Genesis Keller


• The non-negotiables for addressing students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, by Charles Ogundimu, Ph.D.


• Partnering with culturally-specific community organizations to provide consistent, expansive, and adaptive mental health services, by Christine Pitts and Elizabeth Gilkey


• Social-emotional learning: The fifth core, by Jordan Posamentier


• Taking a racial equity approach to support student mental health, by Abby Quirk


• To address mental health, think systemically about social, emotional, and academic learning, by Justina Schlund


• Relationships are where learning happens, by Jennifer L. Steele


• Fast break: Instilling emotional safety and engaged learning in high schools, by Barry E. Stern, Ph.D.


• Promoting student well-being is an investment in academic growth, by Turnaround for Children


• Breaking through the Covid fog and getting students ready for college—academically, socially, and emotionally, by Yonkers Partners in Education