If America is serious about wanting kids to become better readers, our elementary schools need to spend more time teaching social studies rather than doubling-down on “reading comprehension.” This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the key takeaway from a groundbreaking study the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released last week.

Mind you, we’re not the first to find that devoting tons of time to English language arts (ELA) instruction does not improve student reading. But we are the first to find that literacy gains are more likely to materialize when students spend more time learning social studies.

This underscores the crucial insight that E.D. Hirsch set forth in 1987 in his path-breaking book Cultural Literacy. Writers and speakers typically make assumptions about what their readers and listeners know. They have to do that, as they don’t take time to explain historical references and literary allusions or to resolve ambiguities. They can’t provide all the background knowledge, either. Which means that when their readers and listeners already possess a body of such knowledge, language comprehension comes much easier.

Think of it this way: Virtually all middle schoolers can “read” the words “Berlin Wall.” They surely can sound out the letters and all three syllables. But only some of them will instantly recognize the phrase and have a sense of what it implies. They will know that Berlin was the capital of Germany during World War II, after which it was divided between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. They will know that the wall was built to keep East Germans from escaping to the West. And they will know that those East Germans wanted to escape because of the lack of freedom and economic opportunity under Communist rule. So those students will be able to comprehend a passage that alludes to the Berlin Wall, while their less knowledgeable peers will not.

Over the years, a small but growing body of research has shown that focusing on academic content in the early grades—not on generalized reading skills and strategies—equips students with the background knowledge (à la the Berlin Wall) that they need to comprehend all sorts of texts and make them truly literate by the time they reach middle school, thus laying a solid foundation for further learning.

Moreover, this focus on knowledge has the potential to lessen socioeconomic and racial/ethnic gaps in literacy. If we acknowledge that more affluent and white students often have greater access to knowledge-building opportunities and resources at home (often including better-educated parents), we can make education more equitable by teaching knowledge-rich content to those who arrive in school with few of those advantages.

Yet rather than spending the past several decades making sure that all students—especially poor children and children of color—got a strong dose of social studies and science instruction in order to build this content knowledge and advance equity, American elementary schools mostly spent ever more time on the “skill” of reading comprehension. Instead of learning about the world, students were told to “identify the main idea.” And as any serious analysis of reading achievement can tell you, that hasn’t worked. It can’t. As Hirsch has tirelessly pointed out, language comprehension is not a “skill” at all: content is comprehension.

So what if elementary schools simply spent more time on social studies, science, and the like? Would their students end up becoming better readers? That’s the question that birthed Fordham’s new study, Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.

To investigate, Fordham’s associate director of research Adam Tyner and early childhood researcher Sarah Kabourek teamed up to better understand how classroom time is currently spent in U.S. elementary schools and how it might be better utilized to promote literacy. They plumbed nationally representative data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11 (ECLS-K: 2011), which sampled thousands of students in their kindergarten year and followed them through fifth grade. This long view is important because knowledge and vocabulary accrue slowly. Their primary analysis examines how much classroom time is spent on different subjects, whether students who spend more time on certain subjects make greater progress in reading, and how these effects differ by student characteristics. Their analytic models control for a host of student-, teacher-, and school-level factors to further isolate the relationship between time use and reading growth.

Here's what they found:

• Elementary school students in the U.S. spend much more time on ELA than on any other subject.
• Increased instructional time for social studies—but not for ELA—is associated with greater progress in reading.
• The students who benefit most from the additional social studies time are girls and those from lower-income and/or non-English-speaking homes.

The authors offer three important takeaways for policy and practice. First and most obvious is that elementary schools should make more room for high-quality instruction in history, civics, geography, and the other knowledge-rich—and engaging—subjects that comprise social studies. Excessive amounts of time spent on ELA appear not to yield the additional reading gains that well-intentioned educators hoped for, that the country needs, and that equity demands.

Second, teachers should use their ELA block to build student knowledge, ideally by adopting one of the well-regarded knowledge-rich curricula now on the market.

Third, policymakers and administrators should align reading assessments with curricular content. Daniel Willingham, a distinguished cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, once penned this simple yet profound statement: “Reading tests are really knowledge tests in disguise.” That means that we need to get serious not only about how we teach students knowledge but also how we test it. It calls for a much more deliberate approach to how we sequence particular content across grade levels and how we sample from it to inform new tests that reward and prioritize knowledge development—such as what Louisiana is doing with its middle-school English language arts assessment.

The poorly utilized ELA block has become a barrier to progress in reading, especially for poor kids and children of color. The best elementary teachers direct students’ gazes not toward the mirror, under the mistaken notion that children can only be engaged by texts about their lives and experiences, but out the window where they can glimpse a smidgen of the wonders and fascinations that our globe has to offer.

Spending so much time in elementary school on the “skill” of reading comprehension at the expense of teaching content may sound like a good idea, but it actually works against the very outcomes we’re trying to achieve. So let’s stop doing it!

A new study published last week by Fordham, Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, suggests that to become better readers, elementary students should spend more time on social studies. Using a nationally representative sample of thousands of students who were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade, co-authors Adam Tyner and Sarah Kabourek unearthed several key findings, none more eye-opening than strong reading progress (“clear, positive, and statistically significant”) for students who received an additional thirty minutes a day of social studies instruction.

Amid a renewed focus on curriculum and the link between background knowledge and literacy, the report challenges the conventional wisdom—and standard practice—of most elementary schools, where English language arts (ELA) holds an outsized place in the daily schedule. Indeed, the authors found—paradoxically—that additional time spent on ELA was not associated with reading improvement, buttressing arguments made by E.D. Hirsch and others that a myopic focus on reading skills and strategies can even undermine reading progress.

The well-timed and well-done analysis offers two other recommendations: (1) infuse more content-rich texts and topics into the literacy block and (2) align reading assessments with curricular content à la Louisiana. The overarching theme is clear: Knowledge acquisition is the hidden-in-plain-sight lever that policymakers have seldom thought to pull. Based on the report’s findings, they might do well to get cracking! As Daniel Willingham often says, “Teaching content is teaching reading.”

At the same time, Tyner and Kabourek’s oeuvre comes with a couple of key caveats. The first is that no data on specific curricula or teaching practices were available for the analysis. The second is that other factors, such as teacher quality, could be driving the correlation between class time usage and student learning (more on that below). These are two important points to consider because, as we urge more time on social studies, states and districts would do well to look under the hood and see what’s actually being taught.

To wit, as an earlier Fordham study concluded, social studies today is a “muddled, ineffectual curricular and pedagogical wasteland.” Tyner and Kabourek acknowledge as much by conditioning their recommendations to specify high-quality social studies instruction:

Unfortunately, social studies has long been neglected in American primary schools.... When schools do teach social studies, it is often so watered down or devoid of controversy that it neither builds knowledge nor captures student interest.

Ironically, social studies’ biggest shortcoming is that, as implemented in today’s elementary classrooms, it is largely free of content and coherence. As a former elementary school principal, I’ll admit that social studies was low on my priority list in part because of the curriculum’s utilitarian emphasis on “community helpers”—limiting instruction to institutions with which my students were already familiar—rather than the more engaging but controversial study of heroes and history.

Critics often charge that No Child Left Behind caused schools to neglect social studies (among other subjects) owing to the law’s narrow focus on reading and math. The truth, however, is that very little time (5 percent) was devoted to social studies in elementary classrooms even before NCLB. I suspect it has much to do with the teacher quality hypothesis raised by Tyner and Kabourek. Good social studies requires both knowledgeable teachers and sound curricula. Absent that, there’s not much point to devoting more time to it.

Before tacking on additional curricular time for social studies (or any other discipline), states and districts should lift the veil on present classroom practices. We still have an inexcusably poor understanding of how schools and systems spend billions of dollars on educational materials at a time when the country is correctly fixated on better civics and history education. Without this information, the effort to improve the civic knowledge and attitudes of our students will remain artificially hamstrung.

So yes, a diet rich in content is just what the doctor ordered for our youngest learners, but it’s amazing that the authors found such a strong effect given the “wasteland” that is elementary social studies. Imagine if we taught social studies well instead. The impact could be even greater.

There used to be two sureties when it came to American K–12 education: Kids would attend school, and school leaders would demand more money. This fall, with half the nation’s schools shuttered and school districts paying bus drivers to drive empty routes, the first is no longer a given. But the budgetary demands continue unabated.

Indeed, this summer has been filled with school and teacher-union leaders demanding billions to help schools weather Covid-19. But it’s not like these demands are anything new. More than a year before the coronavirus struck, United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl urged teachers to strike in order “to get the basics for [Los Angeles] students.” He neglected to mention that the district was spending $18,788 per student, average teacher pay was $78,962, and the cost of employee benefits had grown an astounding 138 percent between 2001 and 2016.

In May, New York City schools chancellor Richard Carranza told the city council, “We are cutting the bone. There is no fat to cut, no meat to cut.” He failed to mention that his district spent an extraordinary $28,900 per student in 2019, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office, or that he had added 340 positions to the central bureaucracy and borough offices in 2019.

In truth, the U.S. spends more than $700 billion on K–12 education a year, or about $14,000 per student. That’s 39 percent more than the average OECD nation. And many big-city districts spend considerably more, with per-pupil outlays of more than $20,000 per year in places such as Washington, D.C., and Boston.

While teacher-union leaders and Democratic politicians frequently suggest we’ve just been through two decades of “school disinvestment,” after-inflation funding actually increased by 27 percent between 2000 and 2016. But it’s not clear that we’re spending all of this money in effective ways. For instance, as researcher Ben Scafidi has documented, the ranks of non-instructional staff have grown more than twice as fast as student enrollment over the past thirty years.

In any event, the combination of school closures, plunging enrollment, and economic dislocation has made this an extraordinarily good time to rethink school spending. It just so happens that, last fall, we recruited a double handful of sharp analysts and budget thinkers to explore how schools could spend smarter.

There are at least four places where such efforts should start:

1. Pensions and benefits: Across the land, some big-city school districts will soon be spending a third or more of their annual outlays on retirement and benefits. In Los Angeles, to take one instance, benefits are projected to consume fully half of all school spending in a decade’s time. Schools should start enrolling future teachers in new retirement vehicles, while asking new staff to pay a share of their health-care costs more similar to that paid by other workers. Such an approach could permit states and districts to shift billions out of future obligations into today’s classrooms, boost actual take-home pay by 15 percent or more, and make teachers active participants in containing costs.

2. Staffing: Schools spend too much on employees who work outside of classrooms and too little on the teachers who actually educate students. They should shift away from the one-teacher-one-classroom model, and toward a model where educators fill a variety of crucial roles, led by the most experienced and accomplished staff. These leaders would split their time between teaching students directly and doing what many of those out-of-classroom hires do: overseeing, aiding, and directing the instruction of their colleagues. This could be an opportunity to routinely pay veteran educators six-figure salaries with the dollars recaptured from bloated bureaucracies.

3. Technology: American schools have a long-running, unrequited love affair with education technology. And, of course, technology has been front-and-center during Covid-19. But, too often, the focus is on gadgetry rather than impact. What’s needed is an inclination to use technology to augment and complement classroom teaching. Technology can give students the opportunity to practice new skills, perform experiments in virtual environments, and have one-on-one visits with teachers and counselors—even when the logistics don’t permit in-person contact. Schools must be redesigned to take advantage of these tools.

4. Operations: In education, faddish enthusiasms and “ambitious” reforms leave too little time for sweating the small stuff that can add up to a big difference for students. Whether it’s reducing outlays for substitute teachers, controlling line-item construction costs, outsourcing janitorial services, or streamlining procurement, there are myriad opportunities to bring outmoded district routines into the twenty-first century. Miami-Dade, for example, used the Great Recession as an opportunity to trim administrative staff by 55 percent—without any adverse impact on student achievement. That kind of leadership should be the norm.

It’s a truism that more money generally helps in life, and there are surely schools and school systems where more funds are needed. At the same time, especially in public bureaucracies, new dollars often double as a convenient excuse to avoid hard choices. Whether or not more aid is coming, it’s time for educational leaders to focus as intently on how they spend each dollar as on how many dollars they get.

Editor’s note: This was first published by National Review.

Modeling the effects of a global pandemic while it’s ongoing seems like a prime example of “inexact science.” It’s also sure to depress. But it’s happening. A group of German and American economists recently added to the bleak parade with a working paper that looks at the consequences of Covid-19-mitigation school closures on current students’ human capital over time.

The analysts built a “heterogeneous agent partial equilibrium” model with a human capital production function at its core. The model’s inputs are time and monetary investments into education made by parents via several avenues (everything from academic enrichment to home purchases to college savings accounts) and by governments through the provision of schooling. They estimate that current closures are equivalent to six fewer months of schooling. Parents respond by adjusting their own investments in their children, thereby potentially mitigating the effects of school closures. In the model, parental time inputs rise by 4.3 percent and monetary inputs by 5 percent, but the global recession is also at work on parental resources.

The model’s outputs are children’s human capital as they progress through high school and college choice, subsequent earnings, and, ultimately, welfare as adults. In short: their futures.

Other recent research predicted that so-called “school shock” will reduce average lifetime earnings at the individual level by almost $10,000. This new prediction is in the same range. On average (across children aged four to fourteen when the shock occurs), the new model implies a 3.8 percent reduction in high school graduations and a 2.7 percent reduction in college degrees. Eighty-seven percent of those losses are directly attributed to the school closures, the rest to parents’ reduced capacity to mitigate the school shock.

Negative effects will be felt most keenly by the youngest children (ages six to ten at the time of the school shock). Older children have already accumulated more of their human capital and thus, the shock is less severe. Low-income families suffer more, both because a greater percentage of their educational inputs come from the government and because their parents have more constraints on how much time and money they can realistically muster to cover the loss.

All of this may sound abstract, but similar alarm bells are ringing among professionals in education, the private sector, psychology, and others in the research community. It is still early, however, and the direst predictions here are based on a total loss of six months’ worth of education. Yet the 2020–21 school year has dawned with many schools, districts, and families looking to kickstart learning and change the equation for their kids. For them, the “Covid slide” may prove remediable. Those who do not break free of their own form of “school shock” to focus on student achievement and growth will see their students end up being weighed down by grim inevitability of the math.

SOURCE: Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Dirk Krueger, Alexander Ludwig, and Irina Popova, “The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures,” NBER Working Papers (September 2020).

1. For some reason meeting on a Saturday, the elected board of Dayton City Schools unanimously approved a phased-in plan to bring students back for a hybrid learning model starting for some students as early as tomorrow. Despite that short time window (and the overwhelming confidence indicated by the board vote), it sounds to me that the full plan is still a work-in-progress. It also seems that application to the district’s virtual academy will be reopened for those families not comfortable with their kids returning, which is heartening. (Dayton Daily News, 9/28/20) What’s not heartening is the comments from Dayton’s board and administration about the impending complication of busing district students along with charter and private school students. That’s ominous news—and familiar territory—for Dayton Leadership Academies, whose youngest students are scheduled to return for a hybrid half in-person, half-remote model starting October 19. At the bottom of this story, we hear that Dayton Regional STEM and Horizon Science Academy Schools, other educational choices in the area, are sticking with all-remote learning for now but that they will be making decisions on possible changes soon. Bet I know one factor they are monitoring closely to help them decide. (Dayton Daily News, 9/29/20
    
2. Meanwhile, Columbus City Schools announced this week that they too would begin phasing in a hybrid model—also starting with the youngest students—in mid-October. There is no mention here about what options families who are not comfortable with their youngsters returning to in-person learning will have. One figures that since the older grades are still going to be learning fully-remotely for an indeterminate time going forward, something will be worked out. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/29/20)
   
   

3. Speaking of which: Shaker Heights City Schools decided to extend the deadline for its all-remote option as the district heads to a hybrid model after hearing from some families who wanted more information as to the shape of the new plan before deciding. (Patch.com, 9/28/20)
    
4. On a related note: The entire fifth-grade class of an elementary school in Kent City Schools will be learning remotely from home for a while due to a single positive Covid test among the student body in that grade. Oh, and the district is having trouble recruiting substitute teachers for some reason as well. (Akron Beacon-Journal, 9/29/20) Similar situation in Perrysburg City Schools, which currently has nearly 160 students and staff members learning and working from home after three positive coronavirus tests among the student body there. No word on substitute availability there. (Toledo Blade, 9/28/20) On a related note (see what I did there?), kudos to Canal Winchester Local Schools for their imaginative new On-Line Creative Arts Expo. Not only will it feature digital student work in a huge range of categories (from performing arts, programming, and world languages, visual arts and the written word), music teacher Todd Phillips points out that, “This is not a competition. There will be no first, second or third place finishers. This is an On-Line Gallery platform to display our students’ diverse approach to the Creative Arts in their lives.” Sounds like just the kind of “relieved pressure” environment in schools that some folks in the Statehouse have been clamoring for. (Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, 9/30/20)
   
   

5. Wonder what spurred Akron City Schools to change their tune and start working to bring students with disabilities back into school buildings “in some fashion” as soon as possible? Probably that story from the local TV news that we clipped on Monday, if I had to guess. Sounds like that same mom was at the most recent school board meeting having her say there as well. (Akron Beacon-Journal, 9/29/20) Thirty miles north, Parma City Schools this week pulled the wraps off its new education center for students with autism. It is a dedicated and specially-designed space in Parma Senior High to be used to provide “a highly-individualized, therapeutic-based program” for students. It will initially serve students in K–5, with older students added in future years. (Cleveland.com, 9/30/20)
    
6. Here in central Ohio, the seeds have been planted for a new Catholic Montessori school in rural Johnstown. Quite literally, because the goal is for a farm-based model of education a far cry from the diocese’s other Montessori school smack dab in the middle of Columbus. Good luck to all in your fundraising work! (Newark Advocate, 9/29/20)

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Earlier this month, Harvard professor of government Michael Sandel published this opinion piece in the New York Times, arguing that discrimination towards the “uneducated” (i.e., people without a college degree) remains acceptable by society even among those who otherwise champion equality.

“They may denounce racism and sexism, but they are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated,” Sandel observes.

Judging by readers’ comments to Sandel’s piece, his analysis is upsetting many, but probably because he is right. The absence of a college diploma, or worse, someone not wanting one, has become something that must be overcome, which reveals our deeply rooted belief that someone who is uneducated has less value.

Sandel argues that there is a lack of compassion and understanding towards the struggles of uneducated people that helped elect Donald J. Trump. But the racial dimension here cannot be discounted as it wasn’t the uneducated people of color who elected Trump, but largely uneducated white voters.

The exaltation of the college degree is not just a problem for the nation’s politics but also the U.S. economy. As our economy has become more credentialized, a college degree has become the only recognized vehicle for upward mobility. Many of the jobs that once could be obtained straight out of high school now require a college degree. In what? It often doesn’t matter. It’s not the value of what was studied; it’s all about signaling. Risk-averse employers have kicked the cost of finding out a prospective employee’s abilities to the prospective employee, driving up the demand—and notably the cost—of higher education and loading up new graduates with massive student debt.

And it is not that this economy no longer requires blue collar labor. Sandel points out that nearly half of the labor force is still employed in working class jobs. But blue collar labor has lost much of its value, if not economically, at least in terms of standing in society.

In my view Sandel is not only right about economics, but his observations spill over into the education reform movement. It hammered away on the preeminent importance of college attendance, while tossing in a few bones to appease doubters with such assurances as “we’re only championing college-ready!” Still, the high school graduate who didn’t go on to college is chalked up as a loss, certainly by the most common metrics used by the movement to indicate progress.

This approach was both a symptom of and a temporary prescription for a much deeper problem that said more about the limited capacity of the reform movement than it did about the students it sought to elevate.

Sandel says “(w)e should focus less on arming people for a meritocratic race and more on making life better for those who lack a diploma but who make important contributions to our society—through the work they do, the families they raise and the communities they serve. This requires renewing the dignity of work.”

The problem with this proposition is that it supposes going back to a place when the nation recognized the dignity of the work of all people, which has never truly existed. For the fruit of all work to have value, we need to see value in all people from all walks of life. Until that happens, we’ll need to add another measure to prove our value. We’ve used add-ons throughout history: male, white, property owner, educated, and more. We’re still using add-ons because regardless of what we say, we still struggle with the whole inherent value of the human being thing.

Is there any point, then, in promoting high-quality education for everyone, if we are saying that educational attainment should not be the measure of one’s success? Of course there is.

We have to acknowledge where the system is broken, what the partial solutions are—admitting their limitations—as we deal with the underlying malaise that affects our country, which is discrimination in more ways than just by gender and race.

We must keep fighting for everyone, especially the underprivileged, to have access to the best possible education. But at the same time we must fight discrimination and inequalities in the rest of the system, which also means that we can’t elevate education to the point where it is venerated on its own, and becomes another dimension by which to discriminate.

We can’t lose sight of what we ultimately aspire to, which is that everyone, especially those currently discriminated against, can pursue their vocational choices—whether that involves a college degree or not—and produce dignifying work without fearing being stuck as second-class citizens in poverty and low social standing. Reforming education alone won’t achieve that.

Editor’s note: This was first published by NCTQ.

1. Here’s an in-depth look at the first month of the school year at Xenia’s St. Brigid School. St. Brigid opened with all-day in-person learning—as much like a normal school year as possible, given the health and safety precautions required. The ten percent of students whose parents decided to keep them home are participating synchronously alongside their classmates via two-way video. I don’t know how this school was faring pre-rona, but I’m going to guess that it was probably doing pretty well by its students. (Dayton Daily News, 9/26/20)
    
2. As we have noted here a few times, the fully-remote options provided by districts operating on fully in-person or hybrid models seem generally to be run by third-party vendors, to be totally asynchronous/self-paced, and have minimal oversight by local teachers. I will say with no bragging that I was pretty sure I saw that latter model clearly coming down the pike before school started this year. I will also say that I generally figured it would cause some trouble. About 25 percent of families in Hamilton City Schools opted for the district’s fully-remote Virtual Learning Institute (VLI) this year, as opposed to the partially-in-person/partially-remote hybrid plan chosen by the majority. A number of VLI families are not pleased with the vendor or with the education their children have been receiving thus far. A district official told the Journal-News that these families may have acquired a “general misunderstanding” of what VLI was. Dude also says that there are some moves being made to try and fix problems, but he also takes time to remind those parents about the “significant parent involvement” that is “required” of the VLI model. (You know, the model which they “generally misunderstood.) Yet another bold stance, I think, taken by the education establishment in these unprecedentedly fluid times. (Journal-News, 9/28/20)
   
   

3. Speaking of fluidity: Here’s a story about an Akron City Schools family who created a pandemic pod for their daughter, who has Down syndrome, and several other students with special needs. Complete with a fresh-out-college teacher who they hired to work with the students personally (in a tent outside) as they navigate their fully-remote district classes. There’s a ton to digest here. Make sure and read the whole thing. (News5, Cleveland, 9/25/20)
    
4. The pandemic couldn’t stop the launch of Steubenville City Schools’ new educational access channel, airing on Comcast in the area. All of the channel’s content has been produced by Steubenville students and they are hella proud of their work, judging by this report, and of all the new skills they have acquired in the process. Kudos, and Go Big Red! (Herald Star, 9/28/20)

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1. Aren’t search engines great? With them, one can search for an important name (say, Aaron Churchill) and sometimes find references to that name in new places. To wit: Here is a really interesting post from an organization out of Minnesota which covers and amplifies our Aaron’s recent blog explaining why standardized tests really really matter. (Center of the American Experiment, 9/23/20)
    
2. This piece doesn’t have any specific Ohio content but it seems relevant nonetheless. It is a brief analysis of a new report from Bellwether Partners which says that while distance teaching and learning is still a work in progress, “key solutions” to common problems are beginning to emerge. Let’s hope that’s right. (Education Dive, 9/23/20)
   
   

3. Closer to home, students in the Cleveland area will soon have free access to the internet at a number of different transit locations and onboard buses and trains thanks to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. Homework, yes. Search engines, yes. Netflix and Hulu, no. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 9/25/20)
    
4. Staying on the North Coast for the moment, Cleveland Metropolitan School District is reporting an enrollment drop of 1,500 kids between last fall and this. The largest drops are among preschool and Kindergarten students, which makes sense in the all-remote learning environment currently being offered. District officials say they will soon be ready to start “hunting for kids” they think should be attending but are not, although “attendance” seems to be an undefined concept here. Depending on the definition, however, that enrollment drop might end up being a bit larger than just 1,500 kids. (The 74, 9/23/20) Coincidentally, State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria was talking to national public media this week about that very topic. DeMaria told WGBH that he’s trying to shift the definition of attendance toward recognizing whether students are making academic progress. “If they're participating and engaging, that counts,” he said. He added that the flexibility provided by remote instruction is a good thing (echoes of CMSD’s CEO earlier this week) because he’s heard from plenty of parents of teenagers in the Buckeye State who don’t start their schoolwork until noon. (Holy cliché, Batman!) “I think the long-term goal is to actually be creative and understanding,” he suggested. “We're so used to testing and just taking attendance as kind of anchors of measurement. And we need to take our thinking to the next level.” The testing comment I get: dime a dozen these days. But if the mindset regarding attendance sounds a little different to you than when a bunch of online charter schools in Ohio got busted for “attendance issues” a couple years ago, I suspect you are not alone. (WBGH-FM, Boston, 9/24/20)
   
   

5. One more NEO clip, maybe peripherally related to the foregoing: a new Julie Billiart School campus will open in the suburb of Westlake next fall. Julie Billiart is a private school specializing in serving students with mild to moderate autism, anxiety, dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning differences. Quick internet search says that they do accept students on all the voucher programs. Thank you so much for asking. And thank you, Jeeves. (Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, 9/23/20)
    
6. Last Friday, we learned that Toledo City Schools was going to switch from all-remote learning to a hybrid model in October, but that they had decided families would have no all-remote option if they were not comfortable sending their kids back into school buildings just now. I called it a “bold strategy” at that time, which I know all of my dedicated Gadfly Bites subscribers realize is just my crafty way of saying “a surefire way to alienate those families and send them fleeing for an alternative”. I can only assume that officials in the district read and understood my clever wordplay right away. How else to explain why they are now said to be “considering” reopening enrollment to their pandemic virtual academy? It was either me or the recent sharp spike in Toledo-area internet searches for “online charter school registration”. As a tiny and ironic aside, the final paragraph of this piece is a corker (often the case with reporter Bri’on Whiteside’s pieces, I observe): anyone interested in applying to the virtual academy should that be allowed is instructed to do so directly with the staff at their assigned school because the district website doesn’t have an app for that. Hilarious. (Toledo Blade, 9/24/20)
   
   

7. In case any parents in the Toledo area are not feeling super happy with their school options, here’s a great piece where choice supporters discuss various options available—particularly private schools and homeschooling—with literally no “but traditional district school” counterpoint required. Great stuff, and a great event. But don’t forget parents, there’s always the internet! (Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune, 9/25/20)

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Making the case, part 1

In a detailed piece published in National Affairs this week, Fordham Institute’s David Griffith and Mike Petrilli summarize the findings from dozens of studies over the years, showing improvements in academics and social-emotional outcomes for students in urban charter schools with effects generally far above those of comparable traditional district schools. Additionally, while the findings are still not conclusive, studies of charter schools’ effects on segregation show moderate to null effects—more in line with longstanding race-influenced housing patterns and far from the cries of “re-segregation” routinely leveled at charter schools. There’s more to learn in this piece, and the read is worth your time.

Making the case, part 2

Results of a new poll conducted by The American Federation for Children indicates a strong increase in popular support for parental school choice—from 67 percent of public school parents in April to 77 percent in August. AFC President John Schilling credits the rise to the “inflexibility” of the traditional K–12 system which has been “on full display” in the wake of last spring’s coronavirus school closures and has continued into the disrupted start of the 2020–2021 school year.

Change coming to Kentucky?

Kentucky has a new education commissioner. Jason Glass sat down with a reporter from Louisville public radio station WFPL last week to talk about his vision for the future in the Bluegrass State, shaped by his stints as superintendent for a large suburban district in Colorado and as the top education official for the state of Iowa. On the topic of charter schools—a long-standing sore spot in Kentucky—Glass said in part, “The charter school structure is really just a different governance approach. It moves the control and authority of the school away from the school district into a more independent body. I think that charter schools have brought innovative approaches, a lot of more focused or mission-specific schools have come into being in states that have had charter schools.”

Identifying early indicators – report and upcoming event

A new report from the National Charter School Resource Center aims to label and categorize the “indicators of distress” that charter sponsors may encounter as a school’s quality begins to decline. It is the product of extensive qualitative research and formal interviews with nine sponsors across the policy spectrum and representing a variety of authorizing entities. The authors and a number of contributors will be presenting a virtual event to discuss the report on Wednesday, September 30, at 2:00 pm Eastern Time. You can register to attend by clicking here.

Blue ribbon

A total of sixteen schools across Ohio were recognized as National Blue Ribbon Schools for 2020, including Constellation Schools’ Westpark Community Elementary School in Cleveland. Congratulations to all of these great schools.

When students at Anser Charter School in Garden City, Idaho, begin returning to in-person classes September 28, everything about school will look different than six months ago.

Anser is an EL Education school, meaning it focuses on learning through projects and expeditions that regularly take students outside the school’s walls. Learning away from the classroom will be nothing new for veteran Anser students.

What will be new is that, for at least part of many days, the classroom itself will be outside the school walls as well. It’s an accommodation designed to decrease risk of Covid-19 transmission.

“We’ve put together a map where each grade level gets assigned a certain area of the playground or the parking lot,” said Anser Organization Director Heather Dennis. “So teachers know they can take their class outside anytime they want.”

Across the country schools, some charter, some private, some district-run public, are figuring out ways to minimize the spread of Covid-19. Since studies increasingly show that the virus transmits less readily outdoors than in, creative leaders and teachers are figuring out ways to get their students into the fresh air.

In Denver, one district-run middle school—McAuliffe International—plans to hold classes in event tents when schools resume in-person learning, currently scheduled for late October. “We can safely accommodate 110 students under each canopy—thirty-six square feet per student,” said Kurt Dennis, McAuliffe’s executive principal. “This will provide us with the equivalent of another twelve classrooms and concerns regarding ventilation will not be as much of an issue.”

Seasoned outdoor educators like many Anser teachers in Garden City know from experience that learning outside the classroom poses unique challenges but also enriches the educational experience for almost all students, if done well.

But a growing number of educators are pushing for more from moving outdoors than just a temporary accommodation. They say the pandemic-caused disruption presents a golden opportunity to shift the dynamic so that spending more time outdoors, learning through experience and in the larger world, becomes a permanent fixture in American education, forever altering how kids learn.

“It’s hard to talk about silver linings in a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, but this could be one of them,” said Wendy Wyman, who until this summer served as superintendent of the Lake County School District In the high Rockies of Colorado. “It gives us an opportunity to reflect on our practice and learn. And getting kids outside leads to more active, experiential learning. Most kids thrive on that.”

It’s easy, of course, for teachers, principals, and superintendents practiced in outdoor education to extol its virtues. Planning a shift to the outdoors can be daunting, however, for educators used to the comfortable, controllable confines of a school building.

Bluum interviewed several savvy outdoor educators to gather tips for schools that are pondering a move to more time outside the school walls, even if it's only for the short term. They stressed that whether the school is urban, suburban, or rural, private, public or public charter, best practices remain the same. Following are several key takeaways.

First, make sure everyone feels safe. Increase everyone’s comfort with the concept of learning outdoors by involving them in assessing and managing the risks involved. Nate McClennen, head of innovation at the independent Teton Science Schools in Idaho and Wyoming, said his school focuses intensively on risk management. Teachers and students alike participate. Making sure everyone feels safe is a necessary precondition for a healthy learning environment.

He defined risk management as identifying human and environmental hazards. “The intersection of those two potential hazards is where we have to manage risk,” he said. “It’s important that our teachers feel comfortable whether they are working with students in or out of a building. It entails how you conduct classes outside, how you lead a group when walking down a city street or on a hiking path.”

Second, do the basic preparation of securing supplies and equipment that make learning outdoors possible. Give each student a large clipboard, and equip teachers with handheld white boards. Make sure to buy boosters for WiFi so that the signal reaches the outdoors.

Figure out ways to make students physically comfortable. If an outdoor classroom is on a hard surface, move desks and chairs outside. If it’s on grass or a softer surface, consider buying folding chairs or portable Crazy Creek–style camping chairs.

That’s what the Independent Santa Fe School of Arts and Sciences did for its students. All students from third through eighth grade at the K–8 school got their own Crazy Creek chair, festooned with the student’s name and the school logo. Kids will keep their chairs until they graduate.

“Our students carry those Crazy Creeks into and out of the classroom,” said Principal Todd Stiewing. “We have them set them down socially distanced from each other. It just adds that different quality: ‘OK, now it’s time to do Crazy Creek learning.’”

Third, make sure kids have adequate clothing for conditions. “There’s a saying from Sweden that’s there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes,” said Wyman, whose school district sits at 10,000 feet above sea level. “You can learn outside under almost any conditions with the right clothing.”

In districts like Lake County, where the majority of kids come from low-income households, schools must be prepared to provide warm coats, boots, and snowpants to students whose families can’t afford pricey gear. Lake County schools have access to a grant-funded gear library, but not all schools or districts will be so fortunate.

Establishing relationships with service organizations that can help solicit and manage donations is a viable workaround. Lake County has a close partnership with the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, which manages a donation program each fall.

In the Covid-19 era, schools will have to provide students with the gear for an extended period, rather than on an as-needed basis. Otherwise, the need to launder outerwear will become burdensome.

Fourth, even if a school or district is forced by circumstances into extended periods of remote learning, educators can and should have most lessons include an outdoor component. Every educator interviewed for this article stressed that as kids spend more learning time in front of screens at home, the need to get them outdoors becomes increasingly important.

“The rewards from getting outdoors, for fulfilling the human need to be outside, can’t be overstated,” said Michelle Dunstan, Anser Charter School’s education director. “Even if it’s just sitting in the grass reading, it’s incredibly important.”

McClennen said his Teton Science Schools always have stressed what he called place-based learning. This means, under normal circumstances, using the community as a classroom. Now, however, a student’s house or apartment, and the surrounding area, can be the classroom.

“We are continually preaching that everything we typically do—taking kids outside the classroom and using the community to engage them—should be applicable no matter if you're online, doing a hybrid version, or on site,” McClennen said. “You want to make sure learners are experiencing the world around them and not just staring at a screen.”

Finally, schools should be thinking now about how new practices they’ve been forced into by circumstances can create a positive and permanent shift in how they view and structure learning environments and opportunities.

This means “increasing teacher comfort level with having a classroom that can be done anywhere, online, in school, in community,” McClennen said. “We just haven’t trained around that very much. It’s not something that is taught in schools of education. Schools aren't really set up that way.

“How do we help schools adapt so post-Covid they can use this as a great learning environment? So that there is no fear, no worry, because students and teachers are already well versed in it.”

Making this shift thoughtfully and with adequate preparation is vitally important, because doing it haphazardly risks creating a backlash, said Becca Katz, who runs a grant-funded Lake County Public Health Agency program called Get Outdoors Leadville!

“My hope is that we decide after this pressing need passes that it was worthwhile in and of itself to move learning outdoors,” Katz said. “But that will only happen if teachers have a successful experience. Teachers really need to get the support they need in this area.”

Editor's note: Alan Gottlieb wrote this piece as a consultant to the Boise-based education nonprofit Bluum.