1. Following Wednesday’s voting/territory transfer story, we return you to this deep-cluster school district border story, STILL in freakin’ progress. (Cleveland Jewish News, 8/5/20)
    
2. There were protesters marching in front of a Columbus City Schools board member’s house this week. No, not those protestors. Good guess, but it wasn’t them. Nope, not those ones either. Oh for heaven’s sake, we could be here all day guessing. Just read the story! (Columbus Dispatch, 8/6/20)
    
3. The school reopening decisions of Mt. Auburn Preparatory Academy, a single smallish charter school in suburban Cincinnati, and the entire massive Cincy Catholic diocese are compared here. Honestly, you should just focus on Mt. Auburn’s plan as described here. Seems to be as thorough, flexible, and family-focused as it can be. (WLWT-TV, Cincinnati, 8/6/20) Speaking of thorough, here is a deep discussion of the possibility of some in-person classes being held outdoors in Northeast Ohio this school year. This includes both the national and international perspective, which might be just a skosh too much background when trying to make the point that it gets cold in Cleveland and that cities can be big, dirty, and occasionally dangerous. (Cleveland.com, 8/5/20) So, perhaps we should think inside the building when we’re thinking outside the box. Case in point: Canton art teacher Kathy Pugh designed a portable plastic desk shield for students to carry with them from class to class (and back home to be sanitized at the end of the day). A number of design and manufacturing experts in the area help Ms. Pugh with her idea and thus, the Pack-N-Go was born. Take a look and see what you think. (Canton Repository, 8/6/20)
    
4. For all those folks who think that remote learning didn’t go so hot back in the spring—or perhaps, more importantly, for those folks who fear that it will not go so hot this fall (either anew or still, YMMV)—the CEO of Cleveland Metropolitan School District has some nuance for you to consider. “Learning wasn’t lost,” he told the local news this week. “Time to learn was lost. We lost a lot of time. But you’re still able to learn. You maybe didn’t learn to read when I wanted you to, but I still need to teach you to read.” Is that optimism or wishful thinking? I think there may be a clue here: Bossman says that “if educators can overcome the disruption at the end of last school year and the beginning of this one, they can avoid lasting negative impacts on the education for his students.” (News 5, Cleveland, 8/5/20)
    
5. Finally this week, the I Know I Can program here in Columbus gets some national plaudits from Bellwether Education Partners for its success in helping low-income and minority students from central Ohio get to and through college. Nice. (The 74 Million, 8/5/20)
   

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As we prepare to reopen our schools, school administrators must examine our back-to-school rituals and upgrade plans for re-entry to account for the challenges presented by Covid-19. In particular, schools must create and clearly communicate the processes for school drop-off and arrival that support social distancing and wellness measures.

Like many New York City schools located in multistory buildings, Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools (LAB), located in downtown Brooklyn, has limited points of entry. Architects and planners predicted that, if spaced six feet apart, students could end up waiting in long lines for hours if all students arrived at the same time, causing congestion and health concerns.

The first effort to address these issues around school entry are included in LAB’s Back to School Facilities Tool Kit, which was prepared by five design firms and incorporates input from students, families, staff, and community members. Building on that tool kit, LAB, with support from Urban Projects Collaborative (a firm that manages project teams), engaged the architecture and urban design firms SITU and WXY to develop a “front porch”—an outdoor lobby that ensures safe entry and exit and helps integrate LAB’s education buildings into the greater community.

Image from WXY/SITU

LAB challenged the team to test the front porch concept over the main entrance to the school. The design implemented is based on an existing product developed by Urban Umbrella and an approval process that allows for expedited approval. Following ten days of final engineering, approval, and construction, LAB was able to hold a rehearsal of the queuing, wellness, and entry process.

Image from WXY/SITU

We want to share what we learned about how to create safe and healthy arrival, entry, and departure routines. The following seven steps can help other schools design a student-centric and health-forward arrival and exit strategy.

1. Incorporate community feedback: Students, staff, and families understandably have myriad concerns and questions, but they also have knowledge that can inform the design of a workable re-entry process. Soliciting feedback from the school community and, to the extent possible, incorporating those ideas into reopening plans can build confidence and trust.

2. Chart socially distanced entry routines: The CDC recommends social distancing as a simple, yet effective way to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Schools should designate a single-direction pathway into the school that has clear markings indicating a safe, six-foot distance between individuals.

Image from WXY/SITU

3. Require masks and hand sanitization: Consistent with CDC guidance, cloth face coverings also help prevent the spread of Covid-19. Schools will need to ensure that every individual who enters the building is wearing a secured mask that covers both the mouth and nose. Schools should provide a mask to anyone who doesn’t have one. The CDC provides additional information about how to use and care for cloth face coverings. Before entering the building, all individuals are required to sanitize their hands and cell phones.

4. Conduct symptom and temperature checks: Checking each student’s wellness status based on the CDC symptom checklists and responding appropriately is important in mitigating community spread. Schools should also develop systems and protocols to handle fever or symptom incidents. Schools may want to utilize a questionnaire that all students and staff submit prior to school entry to confirm that they do not have Covid-19 symptoms and have not been exposed to the virus. Schools should plan to use a thermal scanner to ensure no one with a temperature of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit enters the building.

5. Provide shade and shelter: At LAB, we created our front porch to provide comfort and shelter during the new, longer entry process. Children (and adults) will be facing new rules and protocols that will be overwhelming. Beyond providing refuge from weather, a shelter for the school entry process can help everyone feel safe and cared for, encouraging compliance. Consider building a covering that can provide shade when it’s hot and protection from the cold, rain, or snow.

6. Organize staggered scheduling: The new health requirements result in longer entry and exiting processes to ensure social distancing. During the school day, social distancing may require more space in classrooms and hallways. To address these challenges, consider alternating days or staggering groups to reduce the number of students arriving, exiting, or inhabiting the school at any given time.

7. Increase points of entry: Schools, especially those fortified against gun violence, have restricted points of entry. If possible, use or create additional egress routes.

—

At LAB, we envision our front porch as a place to welcome the broader community into our school once the pandemic is under control. A lot of people in our schools and those in surrounding communities are feeling a sense of trepidation about schools reopening during the pandemic. As our schools begin to reopen, we need to remember that our community is getting us through this pandemic. We need to make changes that prioritize the health, safety, and comfort of our schools and communities so that we can continue to support teaching and learning.

New research

A new study by Ian Kingsbury and Robert Maranto looks at the regulatory burden on charter schools across the country, finding that many high-regulation states (including Ohio) have erected barriers to entry for new and innovative charter models and for schools led by underrepresented groups. “In high-regulation states,” they write in an Education Next summary of the study, “White and Asian applicants are more than twice as likely to receive authorization compared to Black and Hispanic applicants. Moreover, applicants affiliated with CMOs are more than twice as likely to receive authorization compared to unaffiliated applicants.” The study is worth a deeper look.

New and expanding charters

As a new school year approaches, we are seeing some very positive media coverage of new charter schools opening their doors—such as a new Flex High School in Richmond Heights—as well as existing charters expanding in new locations—such as Golden Bridge Academy in Lima. Congratulations and best wishes to staff, students, and families of all these schools.

More reopening plans

With coronavirus cases still high in the Buckeye State, plans for the new school year continue to evolve. It is gratifying to see local media including charter schools in their coverage. Par Excellence Academy’s provision of both an in-person option (four days per week on a more-or-less traditional schedule) and a fully remote-option (afternoon classes with teachers four days a week), with a full-school virtual Friday is said to be unique and to have been very positively received by school families. Parent support is also said to be key in Mt. Auburn Preparatory Academy’s reopening plans—which include fully in-person, fully remote, and hybrid options from which families can choose.

Social-emotional learning in the time of Covid

Remote learning last spring strained schools’ ability to address the social-emotional needs of their students. With many schools continuing remotely this fall, the time to improve non-academic supports is now. Success Academies have a strong-sounding effort, as described in this blog, although it is clear that educators long for the day when they will have students back in class again.

Energy and innovation

Here’s a great look at Entrepreneurship Preparatory Cliffs student Keziah Dorroh, centering on how the technology focus of her school gave her support for learning both before and during the pandemic. She harnessed both her energy and the school’s technology to boost herself and her fellow students while learning at home.

1. While this is a story about the fall reopening plans for Par Excellence Academy in Newark, that is not the point I wish to focus on for the purposes of these clips. What I wish to focus on is that the paper decided to cover a charter school’s plan in this level of detail at all and that, once again, the school is never referred to as a charter in the piece. (Hybrid, BTW. Four days per week in-person, virtual Fridays; with a fully online option for those families who want it.) (Newark Advocate, 8/3/20)
    
2. No speculation about reopening for students at St. John’s Jesuit High School and Academy in Toledo. That happened already this week, with 88 percent of families opting for full in-person schooling. The piece is brief, but it notes that the school lengthened its school day and will be utilizing outdoor areas of its campus (as long as Northwest Ohio weather allows, I imagine) to allow for social distancing and smaller class sizes. It is also interesting to note that the fully-remote option chosen by 12 percent of families requires only a two-week commitment before students are allowed to switch if they prefer. (Toledo Blade, 8/3/20)
    
3. Speaking of Northwest Ohio, a brace of school district territory transfer issues were on the ballot up there yesterday, and the results were 50/50. (Two of them passed by a vote of 1-0, which I appreciate.) I’m not sure whether this is the final word on these transfers, especially the ones that were voted down, but it seems like the new system is working as intended. Unofficially, of course. (Toledo Blade, 8/5/20)
    
4. Back to remote schooling for a moment. Columbus State Community College is lauded in this piece for having made its decision to go almost fully remote (minus welding, some nursing classes, and the like) quickly and decisively and without, it seems, much fuss at all. Officials said they wanted to be “the voice of certainty” for their students and community. It is interesting to note, also, that this certainty kicked down to K-12 education also when Columbus State “developed an online program for its College Credit Plus offerings.” Thus, schools and districts “could do what they need to do for their communities, and know that…College Credit Plus was going to continue, and continue in a robust fashion.” I think this is interesting. If I had any personal skin in the K-12 game these days, I think I might—unofficially—encourage high schoolers (ALL high schoolers, you dig?) to perhaps fill up their time this fall (and you know what time I mean) with credit-bearing college classes via Columbus State or other providers. Seems like they will be there for you fairly robustly, if I may say so. And, if I were giving such advice, I might actually encourage those students to approach the colleges directly and on their own themselves so as to give their high schools the space for “doing what they need to do” for everyone else. Unofficially, of course. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/5/20)
    
5. Remote teaching and learning didn’t go so well for many students, schools, and districts across the state this spring. Thus it is important as Ohioans find themselves returning to that mode of education again in many schools across the state to learn from what didn’t work and to STOP DOING THOSE THINGS. I am reasonably certain that this is the sentiment attempting to be expressed in this piece. (WDTN-TV, Dayton, 8/4/20)
   

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In the first chapter of their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that a distinctive feature of many modern, wealthy cultures is a broadened impulse to protect young people from difficulties. From advising parents to keep peanuts away from young children to the “trigger warnings” placed on university course syllabuses, the authors trace this impulse from overly-protective childrearing practices all the way to college campuses.

They contend, however, that the underlying premise of this “safteyism” is the “fundamental untruth” that young people are fragile. Instead, they agree with the iconoclastic financial guru Nassim Nicholas Taleb that young people manifest “antifragility,” which means that they can benefit from life’s stresses. The antifragile aren’t just durable or resilient, like a glass that doesn’t chip when you drop it; they actually get stronger from being tested. It follows, say Lukianoff and Haidt, that shielding young people from difficulties and discomforts—whether peanut butter or Charles Murray—can make them weaker in the end.

The implication of the fragility thesis is that students who face disappointments or disadvantages will be worse off in the long run. Of course, the magnitude and number of stressors and setbacks matters greatly, and Taleb distinguishes between “acute” and “chronic stressors,” the latter of which can “make you feel trapped in life.” Education commentators often deem students too fragile to cope with rigorous standardized tests or the negative feedback that comes from honest grading or even feedback given in red pen. (For what it’s worth, Taleb himself lists “exam pressures” on students as a chronic stressor.) Yet a new study of high school students in Denmark suggests the opposite. It finds that, even in the face of an arbitrary and unfair disadvantage, students can rise to the occasion, redouble their efforts, and come out stronger in the end.

In this study, the researchers cleverly exploit an idiosyncrasy in a 2007 reform of Danish course grading whereby some students lost points when a new grading scale was introduced and previous grades had to be converted to the new scale. Denmark’s grading systems are points-based (rather than the A-to-F scale that most American schools use), but the point values changed in some odd ways as the system shifted from a 13-point scale to a 7-point scale. The following example is instructive:

[A] student with grades 5, 5, 6, 11, and 13 on the old scale would have his or her GPA transformed from 8.0 to 5.2, while a student with grades 3, 5, 10, 11, and 11 would have his or her GPA transformed from 8.0 to 6.8.

In other words, two students with the exact same GPA on the old scale could have substantially different GPAs on the new scale. Using some additional controls, the researchers can then isolate the impact of getting re-assigned an arbitrarily lower GPA on students’ later behavior and outcomes. Since Denmark uses high school GPA to determine college admissions, the reform had real impact on students’ educational prospects.

The analysts found that students whose grades were arbitrarily lowered worked harder, earned better grades, and learned more. A one standard deviation downgrade in GPA was associated with an 8 percent of a standard deviation GPA increase in later years. Interestingly, this seems not to have been just students gaming the system by taking easy classes or “grade grubbing” their teachers to improve their GPAs, because the same students improved on other academic measures, as well. Those students whose grades were lowered had higher scores on national standardized exams, were more likely to enroll in college, and were more likely to graduate from college within six years of finishing high school. Recall that since GPA is large factor in college admissions, students whose GPAs arbitrarily fell were put at an artificial disadvantage for college admissions, and yet these students are even more likely to get a degree than students who didn’t face that disadvantage.  

None of the student subgroups the researchers examined experienced statistically significant negative effects from having their GPAs artificially lowered, but the positive effects were not consistent for all types of students. Most importantly, the overall results are driven by girls, who experienced larger positive effects than boys. The effects were also stronger for students who had higher middle school GPAs, presumably because they were, on average, more motivated to attend a university.

This isolation of the positive impact of harsher grading builds on other work that has shown that students learn more when assigned to teachers who are tough graders, but in those studies, the mechanism was less clear. An article by David Figlio from 2004 showed that elementary students learned more when assigned to teachers less likely to award good grades, and a recent Fordham report by Seth Gershenson found similar results for high school students in North Carolina. Among college students, a 2010 study by Philip Babcock found that students spend more time studying in courses where they expect lower grades. In the Denmark study, the effect of harsher grading is completely separated from the quality of the teachers or the difficulty of the courses, yet when faced with this setback, students responded by working harder.

The implication for educators is that they must instill in students the understanding that a setback—even an unfair negative change to their grades—is not something that will break them. In other words, educators must teach students that they aren’t fragile, but antifragile.

SOURCE: Hvidman, Ulrik, and Hans Henrik Sievertsen. “High-Stakes Grades and Student Behavior.” Journal of Human Resources (2019).

Five years ago, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) launched an initiative called “Connected Education” in an effort to boost the number of students able to partake of Advanced Placement (AP) courses. More students meant more courses could be offered, but fiscal and personnel constraints prohibited them being offered in the traditional manner. Through a donation, the district received “telepresence systems” and began an experiment in remote learning, the results of which resonate beyond MPS boundaries.

While “telepresence” sounds like a tagline from Popular Mechanics in the 1980s, the system is actually quite advanced. An instructor teaches one group of students in person, as well as a second (and possibly a third) set of students who are connected via video. Enhanced site-to-site cameras and sound equipment, along with interactive widescreen monitors, allow the remote students to interact in real time with the instructor and their fellow pupils, seeking to mimic the environment in which all would be physically together. Analysts Jennifer Darling-Aduana and Carolyn Heinrich of Vanderbilt University examined students enrolled in a telepresence course inside the host school—where the student received instruction in the same location as the teacher most days—versus students who participated remotely and typically received instruction in a different school from the instructor.

The study is quasi-experimental, using data from student and instructor surveys, as well as models that compare students with themselves in alternative years. They have data on nearly 600 students who participated in telepresence courses—of whom about 200 were remote. Compared to the general student population, participants were less like to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch, to receive special education services, or to be English language learners. They were also more likely to be white and female. The analysis covers three years of data starting in 2015–2016. Seventeen different courses were ultimately offered via Connected Education, several of which were not AP courses.

The program took “connected” seriously. Not only was the technology interactive, but instructors used multiple icebreaker activities and held several in-person Saturday sessions to help build relationships between students. Additionally, the instructors would travel to the remote locations and teach in person several times per semester to have face-to-face interaction with the usually-remote students. Ironically, although we typically envision remote classes as huge lecture-style affairs, class sizes ranged from eight to thirty students, which is in line with district norms for AP courses and the recommendations of the College Board.

The key finding is that overall participation in telepresence courses in a given year translated into enrollment of 1.3 more AP courses per student compared to years in which students did not participate in telepresence. Remote participation in a telepresence course translated to 1.5 more AP courses. Since all MPS students had to take the ACT under Wisconsin law, they also use those scores as an outcome. After controlling for eighth-grade student and school covariates, they find that students enrolled in telepresence courses scored about two to three points higher on the ACT compared to students who never enrolled in them. Finally, the percentage of days absent from school was lower by approximately 2 percent among students who participated remotely. Survey data show that students enjoyed interacting with students from other schools and appreciated the out-of-school outings. Teacher surveys show that the technology didn’t always work, especially at the beginning, but improved over time.

The fiscal and personnel constraints that catalyzed this intervention in 2015 take on greater significance in the midst of today’s pandemic. Teachers, parents, and pundits decry the impersonal and disconnected nature of online learning. But MPS’s telepresence effort shows that we can do better. Synchronous teaching with small classes, strong interactive components, and traditional relationship-building features are all possible in remote learning. That’s not the in-person variety that teachers justifiably miss. But it will surely have to suffice for many American students and teachers in the meantime, so let’s make the best of it.

SOURCE: Jennifer Darling-Aduana and Carolyn Heinrich, “The Potential of Telepresence for Increasing Advanced Course Access in High Schools,” Educational Researcher (June 2020).