A team at Chalkbeat chronicles six students in third grace and their experiences with remote learning.
The highs (and lows) in a day of remote learning for NYC third graders: illuminating, thoughtful work from the @ChalkbeatNY staff that's also beautifully presented. It's my pick for this week's @EdWriters#tellEWA. https://t.co/WcsQYDE6cQ
For The Seattle Times, Danielle Dreilinger examines how techniques developed by educators serving immigrants can help teachers working with COVID-traumatized students.
DETROIT — Kenneth Chapman Sr. was hopeful as he navigated a
hulking Detroit Public Schools van down the street, pulling up to
a brick home. Out front, there were signs that the girl he was
looking for lived inside. Amid the discarded plastic cups in the
yard, there was a ball, and on the porch a small bike, painted
fluorescent pink.
“Normally when I get to the house and I see toys or bikes, I
think, ‘Okay, somebody’s going to be here,’ ” Chapman said.
In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith
College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating
lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer
walked over and asked her what she was doing there.
The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left
her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that
this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at
Smith.
Nicole Miller remembers crying every day for two weeks after
schools moved entirely online last March. Miller, a Kindergarten
teacher at Evans Elementary School in Yeadon, said the instincts
she had honed over 19 years went out the window. “This is not the
career I signed up for! I can’t do it! I hate it!” Miller recalls
saying.
But, as the days turned into weeks and then months, Miller
developed a new rhythm. She learned the best camera angle for her
kids to see how she enunciates words, and created an interactive
daily slideshow to keep them engaged.
EWA Reporting Fellow Janelle Retka of The Yakima Herald looks at the child care crisis in central Washington state, and its impact on young children, families, and the region’s economy amid COVID-19.
Also on the early ed front, Kara Newhouse of KQED reports on the risk of familial stress interfering with infant brain development.
Early brain development is critical for learning, but it can be disrupted by the stress families are under during the pandemic. W/o support for parents, schools can expect to see “more kids with more needs” arriving in classrooms in a few years.https://t.co/V3PdUT3RIo#tellewa
Meet Rebecca Rogers, a 27-year-old from Yakima. She’s a single
mom of two young boys, ages 4 and 8 months. Her family of three
qualifies for the Working Connections Child Care program, a state
system that helps low-income families pay for child care so they
can continue working or pursuing work.
The state pays a subsidy of the cost of care to providers, and
parents make a co-payment based on their income. It covers child
care for anything job-related — from applications to working
hours. It’s a life-saver, Rogers said.
In a major overhaul of the Los Angeles School Police Department,
the Board of Education on Tuesday approved a plan that cuts a
third of its officers, bans the use of pepper spray on students
and diverts funds from the department to improve the education of
Black students.
When The New York Times (courtesy of Raj Chetty at Harvard
University) a few years ago decided to examine the issue of
wealth and higher education, the figures for Stanford University
were striking.
Driving to work before dawn last winter, Valerie Norris heard an
NPR report about a terrible disease spreading in China — a
pandemic, people were starting to call it. It sounded sad but
very far from Rocky River, Ohio, where she’d led the Rockport
Early Childhood Center for 34 years.
In October 2013, Cindy Marten had been superintendent for just
eight months. She stood in Kearny High School’s auditorium and
made a case for a shining new world of public education that
would sweep away the past era of reforms.
Years of research show that principals can significantly impact
student achievement. Now, a major new study quantifies just how
much difference an effective principal can make.
Throughout the coronavirus outbreak, nearly everyone connected to
children has raised the alarm about pandemic learning loss.
Parents, educators, physicians and politicians — they might
disagree on solutions, but they’re all concerned about how the
current educational upheaval will affect K-12 students.
In a move long awaited by educators, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention released new guidelines on Friday for how
to operate schools safely during the pandemic.
The recommendations, more detailed than those released by the
agency under the Trump administration, attempt to carve a middle
path between people who want classrooms to reopen immediately and
those teachers and parents who remain reluctant to return to
in-person instruction before widespread vaccination.
A team of journalists from newsrooms across the Florida Public Media network collaborated on a project (proudly supported by an EWA Reporting Fellowship) exploring COVID-19’s impact on public education.
Chalkbeat Colorado’s Jason Gonzales chronicles the struggles of many older students in a state that offers few targeted programs or other supports for this non-traditional student population.
Thousands of English language learners could be headed for
American public schools in the coming months due to recent
changes in U.S. immigration policy and devastating natural
disasters in Central and South America.
Their arrival could pose a challenge for local school systems,
particularly poor districts that might not have enough teachers
or space to support them. In recent years, several have turned
these children away in violation of their legal rights.
I still remember the nauseating feeling that consumed me when I
put my daughter on a school bus two years ago and sent her off to
prekindergarten. I thought I would have until college, when I
dropped her off to start her adult life, before I would feel such
anxiety again.
Instead, it returned last month, when we got a survey from our
public school system in Maryland asking whether we wanted to send
our daughter, our firstborn, now a first grader, back to school
two days a week during a raging pandemic.
Fifty-four-year-old Lupita’s alarm clock goes off at 6:00 a.m.
It’s still dark outside.
She immediately starts to cook eggs and gets cereal out for her
first guest, who’ll arrive in about 15 minutes.
The silence of her home will soon be broken by the shouts of
three preschoolers, one of them her granddaughter. They’ll be
under her care for the next 12 hours. Then Lupita will clean the
house for an hour or two and finally fall into bed.
Randi Weingarten, the nation’s most powerful teachers union
president, has a message: She wants to get students back in the
nation’s classrooms. She spends 15 hours per day on the phone,
she says — with local labor leaders, mayors, the White House, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — trying to figure out
how to reopen the three-quarters of school systems that remain
fully or partially shuttered.
A decision by Maria Montessori Academy in North Ogden to
allow parents to opt students out of Black History Month
curriculum after receiving multiple requests to do so has ignited
a debate over whether parents should have such an option.
For St. Louis Public Radio, Ryan Delaney and Elle Moxley contrast the school reopening decisions of Missouri school districts with those made in Germany.
Anthony Orr was almost done with his high school coursework when
the governor of Nevada ordered a statewide shutdown of
nonessential businesses on March 17, 2020. ”
He was looking forward to all of the senior activities, prom and
graduation,” says his mother, Pamela Orr. But all he got was a
“mini [graduation] ceremony,” with only a handful of students
walking, wearing masks and at a distance from each other.
When Virginia’s largest school district began allowing students
time off to protest in 2019, the backlash was swift and partisan:
Conservative critics denounced Fairfax County Public Schools for
coddling its too liberal, too sensitive youths and predicted kids
would abuse the policy to play hooky.
Holding kids back is typically seen by parents and schools as an
option of last resort, a socially stigmatizing action that often
has a negligible academic impact. But after a year of
unprecedented disruptions, some parents ― particularly those of
children with disabilities ― are asking their districts for a
redo.
Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, Hannah Natanson and John D. HardenThe Washington Post
The steady stream of Latino students arriving on college campuses
in recent years has been a bright spot in higher education, but
some worry the pandemic could threaten those gains.
The Keystone Oaks Education Association (KOEA) has notified the
district that it will strike effective Monday, Feb. 1.
Classes are canceled for Keystone Oaks students until further
notice.
On Jan 22., the KOEA delivered a notice to Superintendent William
Stropkaj of its intent to strike.
In a statement Sunday, Stropkaj said despite several negotiation
sessions, the KOEA and the Keystone Oaks Board of School
Directors did not reach an agreement on a new contract.
D.C. Public Schools has met most safety criteria to reopen for
in-person learning, an arbitrator ruled Saturday night, finding
the Washington Teachers’ Union failed to prove many of the
violations it alleged in a complaint about the school system.
The outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent transition to online
learning was a challenge for students everywhere. But for
international students living and studying in a foreign country,
it has taken
a special toll.
The Chronicle StaffThe Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle has teamed up with Davidson College’s College
Crisis Initiative (C2i) to present the reopening models of nearly
3,000 institutions for the spring semester. Most colleges have
stuck with similar plans to what they had in the fall (we tracked
fall plans here), though you’ll notice some differences. Vastly
fewer colleges are opening fully online, and many fewer colleges
are opening fully in person as colleges move to more mixed
options.
Parents of school-age children who are spending part or all of
their time taking classes from home are less likely to be
employed full-time, in the latest indication of how the
pandemic-fueled school closures have taken a toll on working
parents.
NY1’s Jillian Jorgensen covers the challenges and benefits of remote art classes.
Two charming minutes that pack a punch: @Jill_Jorgensen vividly conveys emotional benefits of students expressing themselves through art, especially now. (Don't miss cameos by @DOEChancellor and bearded dragon Rocky.) It's my pick for this week's @EdWriters#tellEWA. https://t.co/MyIsg8W6zO
Many California parents dreaded returning to remote learning last
fall, but they did it anyway, holding onto hopes of going back to
campus at some point during the school year. But for those whose
children were just entering kindergarten, the decision to commit
to distance learning was a far tougher choice: Wrangling a
5-year-old in front of a computer screen for several hours a day
requires constant supervision, technical assistance and cajoling,
an impossibility for many working parents, particularly essential
workers and those juggling multiple children.
Five days after extremists used the fringe video gaming platform
Dlive to livestream a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, a youthful
white nationalist logged onto the site and offered his take about
the future of a movement he helped create.
Robin Cornish was at work in the fall of 2018 when she got a text
message from another parent. It was a link to a video showing
several white high school students laughing as they filmed
themselves shouting the N-word at a party.
One of the students in the video had shared it on Snapchat, and
now it was going viral.
Cornish, a 51-year-old Black mother of five, recognized the girl
leading the chant as the younger sibling of one of her son’s
former friends. Cornish was upset as she watched the 8-second
clip, she said, but she wasn’t surprised.
Hours after two educators died of COVID-19, more than 100
teachers, students, parents and community members packed the
parking lot outside a Cobb County Board of Education meeting to
demand the school district continue with remote-only learning.
Two educators — Kemp Elementary School teacher Dana Johnson and
Sedalia Park Elementary School paraprofessional Cynthia Lindsey
— died Thursday from COVID-19. Patrick Key,
another Cobb educator, died Christmas Day after a
month-long battle with the disease.
For The 74, Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez and Jackie Valley report on a rural Nevada school’s efforts to prevent Native students from falling behind during the pandemic.
As the first full semester for U.S. schools during the pandemic
comes to an end, education experts and parents alike are
concerned about its effects on children’s academic progress. From
the Mexican border to the Upper Midwest, Oregon to Virginia and
on Native American reservations across the West, that anxiety is
magnified in rural areas, which are far less likely to have
access to high-speed or even consistent internet in a time of
extensive virtual schooling.
The city is close to half Black and half white, according to the
most recent Census data.
But there aren’t a lot of neighborhoods where you see that kind
of split. By and large, there are Black neighborhoods and there
are white neighborhoods, especially in the older core of Norfolk.
Decisions made 60, 80 or 100 years ago segregated neighborhoods
by race and deprived Black residents of economic and educational
resources afforded to those in white neighborhoods.
What does it mean to go to public school in the United States
during the pandemic?
The answer looks so different in different parts of the country,
it is hard to tell that we are one nation.
In some rural and suburban areas, especially in the South,
Midwest and Great Plains, almost all students began the 2020-21
academic year attending school in person, and they have continued
to do so, except for temporary closures during outbreaks.
America’s child care providers have hit a breaking point.
In a survey last summer, 86 percent said the Covid-19
pandemic had hurt their enrollment. Seventy percent said it had
driven up costs. With less money coming in and more going out,
just 18 percent believed they could stay open longer than a year
without some kind of help.
Those numbers are just one sign of a crisis that’s been brewing
ever since the pandemic began spreading across the US.
A top adviser to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos exceeded
her authority when she helped struggling for-profit colleges
access hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money,
according to the preliminary findings of a review by the
Education Department’s internal watchdog.
As the coronavirus upended life in higher education, both at UNL
and at institutions across the country, the university decided to
offer a pair of three-week sessions to keep students engaged in
their learning.
The U.S. Department of Education last week released details on
exactly how much money thousands of colleges and universities are
receiving out of $21.2 billion in COVID-19 emergency funding
signed into law at the end of December.
While COVID-19-related “learning loss“ is a new phenomenon,
making up lost ground is not. There’s plenty of research on what
happens when education is disrupted by natural disasters, like
Hurricane Katrina, or planned breaks in learning, like summer.
President Trump’s “patriotic education” commission released a
report on Martin Luther King Day that equates American
progressives with European fascists and says it is “untrue” that
the Founding Fathers were hypocrites for enslaving people while
calling for equality in the nation’s founding documents.
As exposure to the coronavirus forced thousands of teachers
across the United States to stay home and quarantine this winter,
administrators in the Washoe County School District, which serves
62,000 students in western Nevada, pulled out all the stops to
try to continue in-person instruction for students.
Two major stress points in the grueling rituals of college
admission testing are vanishing this year: the optional
essay-writing section of the SAT and the supplementary exams in
various fields known as SAT subject tests.
PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE Biden outlined a sweeping plan Thursday to
address the country’s child care crisis.
“We are facing an acute, immediate child care crisis in America,
which is exacerbating our economic crisis,” he said in a
statement. “If left unaddressed, many child care providers will
close – some permanently – and millions of children could go
without necessary care, and millions of parents could be left to
make devastating choices this winter between caring for their
children and working to put food on the table.”
President-elect Joe Biden is calling for $130 billion in
additional COVID-19 relief funding for schools, ramped up testing
efforts, and accelerated vaccine distribution strategies to help
reopen “the majority of K-8 schools” within the first 100 days of
his administration.
The proposals, which Biden announced in a speech Thursday night,
are part of a $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that also
seeks $350 billion in aid to state, local, and territorial
governments.
#tellEWA Member Stories (Feb. 19-25)
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week:
A team at Chalkbeat chronicles six students in third grace and their experiences with remote learning.
U.S. News & World Report’s Lauren Camera explores the 20 biggest school districts’ reopening plans to see how they compare to the latest CDC guidance.
For The Seattle Times, Danielle Dreilinger examines how techniques developed by educators serving immigrants can help teachers working with COVID-traumatized students.
Missing Students Hard to Find During Pandemic
DETROIT — Kenneth Chapman Sr. was hopeful as he navigated a hulking Detroit Public Schools van down the street, pulling up to a brick home. Out front, there were signs that the girl he was looking for lived inside. Amid the discarded plastic cups in the yard, there was a ball, and on the porch a small bike, painted fluorescent pink.
“Normally when I get to the house and I see toys or bikes, I think, ‘Okay, somebody’s going to be here,’ ” Chapman said.
But when he knocked, no one appeared.
Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College
In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.
The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.
‘Difficult To Split Yourself’: Philly Area Educators On The Pros And Cons Of Hybrid Learning
Nicole Miller remembers crying every day for two weeks after schools moved entirely online last March. Miller, a Kindergarten teacher at Evans Elementary School in Yeadon, said the instincts she had honed over 19 years went out the window. “This is not the career I signed up for! I can’t do it! I hate it!” Miller recalls saying.
But, as the days turned into weeks and then months, Miller developed a new rhythm. She learned the best camera angle for her kids to see how she enunciates words, and created an interactive daily slideshow to keep them engaged.
#tellEWA Member Stories (Feb. 12-18)
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week:
EWA Reporting Fellow Janelle Retka of The Yakima Herald looks at the child care crisis in central Washington state, and its impact on young children, families, and the region’s economy amid COVID-19.
Also on the early ed front, Kara Newhouse of KQED reports on the risk of familial stress interfering with infant brain development.
The Faces Of Child Care: Meet Parent Rebecca Rogers Of Yakima
Meet Rebecca Rogers, a 27-year-old from Yakima. She’s a single mom of two young boys, ages 4 and 8 months. Her family of three qualifies for the Working Connections Child Care program, a state system that helps low-income families pay for child care so they can continue working or pursuing work.
The state pays a subsidy of the cost of care to providers, and parents make a co-payment based on their income. It covers child care for anything job-related — from applications to working hours. It’s a life-saver, Rogers said.
Lausd Diverting School Police Funds To Support Black Students
In a major overhaul of the Los Angeles School Police Department, the Board of Education on Tuesday approved a plan that cuts a third of its officers, bans the use of pepper spray on students and diverts funds from the department to improve the education of Black students.
Faculty Want to Know: Is Stanford Letting In Too Many Wealthy Students?
When The New York Times (courtesy of Raj Chetty at Harvard University) a few years ago decided to examine the issue of wealth and higher education, the figures for Stanford University were striking.
Read the full story here.
Child Care Options Will Be Scarce After the Pandemic
Driving to work before dawn last winter, Valerie Norris heard an NPR report about a terrible disease spreading in China — a pandemic, people were starting to call it. It sounded sad but very far from Rocky River, Ohio, where she’d led the Rockport Early Childhood Center for 34 years.
What Cindy Marten’s Rise Tells Us About the State of Education Politics
In October 2013, Cindy Marten had been superintendent for just eight months. She stood in Kearny High School’s auditorium and made a case for a shining new world of public education that would sweep away the past era of reforms.
Top-Tier Principals Spark Big Gains in Student Learning. A New Study Shows How Much
Years of research show that principals can significantly impact student achievement. Now, a major new study quantifies just how much difference an effective principal can make.
Read the full story here.
What Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers Need During the Pandemic
Throughout the coronavirus outbreak, nearly everyone connected to children has raised the alarm about pandemic learning loss. Parents, educators, physicians and politicians — they might disagree on solutions, but they’re all concerned about how the current educational upheaval will affect K-12 students.
Read the full story here.
The C.D.C. Has New School Guidelines. Here’s What You Need to Know.
In a move long awaited by educators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on Friday for how to operate schools safely during the pandemic.
The recommendations, more detailed than those released by the agency under the Trump administration, attempt to carve a middle path between people who want classrooms to reopen immediately and those teachers and parents who remain reluctant to return to in-person instruction before widespread vaccination.
#tellEWA Member Stories (Feb. 5-11)
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week:
A team of journalists from newsrooms across the Florida Public Media network collaborated on a project (proudly supported by an EWA Reporting Fellowship) exploring COVID-19’s impact on public education.
Chalkbeat Colorado’s Jason Gonzales chronicles the struggles of many older students in a state that offers few targeted programs or other supports for this non-traditional student population.
Influx of Unaccompanied Minors Along Southern Border Could Pose Test for Schools
Thousands of English language learners could be headed for American public schools in the coming months due to recent changes in U.S. immigration policy and devastating natural disasters in Central and South America.
Their arrival could pose a challenge for local school systems, particularly poor districts that might not have enough teachers or space to support them. In recent years, several have turned these children away in violation of their legal rights.
Opinion: How We Decided to Send Our Daughter Back to School
I still remember the nauseating feeling that consumed me when I put my daughter on a school bus two years ago and sent her off to prekindergarten. I thought I would have until college, when I dropped her off to start her adult life, before I would feel such anxiety again.
Instead, it returned last month, when we got a survey from our public school system in Maryland asking whether we wanted to send our daughter, our firstborn, now a first grader, back to school two days a week during a raging pandemic.
Colorado’s Latinas Are Key to Confronting a Child Care Worker Shortage. Even So, Challenges Remain
Fifty-four-year-old Lupita’s alarm clock goes off at 6:00 a.m. It’s still dark outside.
She immediately starts to cook eggs and gets cereal out for her first guest, who’ll arrive in about 15 minutes.
The silence of her home will soon be broken by the shouts of three preschoolers, one of them her granddaughter. They’ll be under her care for the next 12 hours. Then Lupita will clean the house for an hour or two and finally fall into bed.
Randi Weingarten Says She Can Get Teachers Back in Schools –
Randi Weingarten, the nation’s most powerful teachers union president, has a message: She wants to get students back in the nation’s classrooms. She spends 15 hours per day on the phone, she says — with local labor leaders, mayors, the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — trying to figure out how to reopen the three-quarters of school systems that remain fully or partially shuttered.
Read more of the story here.
North Ogden Montessori Charter School to Allow Students to Opt out of Black History Month Curriculum
A decision by Maria Montessori Academy in North Ogden to allow parents to opt students out of Black History Month curriculum after receiving multiple requests to do so has ignited a debate over whether parents should have such an option.
#tellEWA Member Stories (Jan. 29-Feb. 4)
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week:
A team of reporters at The Washington Post cover this year’s drop in Latino college enrollment.
For St. Louis Public Radio, Ryan Delaney and Elle Moxley contrast the school reopening decisions of Missouri school districts with those made in Germany.
Statesman Journal’s Natalie Pate compiles a list of the 37 Oregon education bills to watch during the 2021 state legislative session.
Is The Pandemic Fueling A Rise In Suicide Attempts Among Kids?
Anthony Orr was almost done with his high school coursework when the governor of Nevada ordered a statewide shutdown of nonessential businesses on March 17, 2020. ”
He was looking forward to all of the senior activities, prom and graduation,” says his mother, Pamela Orr. But all he got was a “mini [graduation] ceremony,” with only a handful of students walking, wearing masks and at a distance from each other.
Virginia Set To Pass Historic Bill Giving Students Time Off To Protest — Because Teen Republicans And Democrats Teamed Up To Demand It
When Virginia’s largest school district began allowing students time off to protest in 2019, the backlash was swift and partisan: Conservative critics denounced Fairfax County Public Schools for coddling its too liberal, too sensitive youths and predicted kids would abuse the policy to play hooky.
Parents Plead: Hold Them Back a Year, They Haven’t Learned a Thing
Holding kids back is typically seen by parents and schools as an option of last resort, a socially stigmatizing action that often has a negligible academic impact. But after a year of unprecedented disruptions, some parents ― particularly those of children with disabilities ― are asking their districts for a redo.
Read the full story here.
Latino College Enrollment was Increasing Until the Pandemic Hit
The steady stream of Latino students arriving on college campuses in recent years has been a bright spot in higher education, but some worry the pandemic could threaten those gains.
[Historic Latino student wave reshapes many colleges. But access is uneven.]
Keystone Oaks School District Teachers to Strike Beginning Feb. 1
The Keystone Oaks Education Association (KOEA) has notified the district that it will strike effective Monday, Feb. 1.
Classes are canceled for Keystone Oaks students until further notice.
On Jan 22., the KOEA delivered a notice to Superintendent William Stropkaj of its intent to strike.
In a statement Sunday, Stropkaj said despite several negotiation sessions, the KOEA and the Keystone Oaks Board of School Directors did not reach an agreement on a new contract.
DCPS Cleared to Welcome Students Back for In-Person Learning
D.C. Public Schools has met most safety criteria to reopen for in-person learning, an arbitrator ruled Saturday night, finding the Washington Teachers’ Union failed to prove many of the violations it alleged in a complaint about the school system.
Read the full story here.
International Students Reflect on a Lonely Pandemic Year
The outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent transition to online learning was a challenge for students everywhere. But for international students living and studying in a foreign country, it has taken a special toll.
Tracking Colleges’ Spring-Reopening Plans
The Chronicle has teamed up with Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative (C2i) to present the reopening models of nearly 3,000 institutions for the spring semester. Most colleges have stuck with similar plans to what they had in the fall (we tracked fall plans here), though you’ll notice some differences. Vastly fewer colleges are opening fully online, and many fewer colleges are opening fully in person as colleges move to more mixed options.
Read the full story here.
Parents of Remote Learners Have Smaller Roles in U.S. Workforce
Parents of school-age children who are spending part or all of their time taking classes from home are less likely to be employed full-time, in the latest indication of how the pandemic-fueled school closures have taken a toll on working parents.
#tellEWA Member Stories (Jan. 22-28)
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week:
NY1’s Jillian Jorgensen covers the challenges and benefits of remote art classes.
For Education Week, Catherine Gewertz and Stephen Sawchuk dive deep into the questions hanging over President Biden’s goal to open schools.
The CalMatters College Journalism Network shares the stories of six college seniors who will graduate into a pandemic and an economic crisis.
What Happens To Children Who Missed Kindergarten During Covid-19 Crisis?
Many California parents dreaded returning to remote learning last fall, but they did it anyway, holding onto hopes of going back to campus at some point during the school year. But for those whose children were just entering kindergarten, the decision to commit to distance learning was a far tougher choice: Wrangling a 5-year-old in front of a computer screen for several hours a day requires constant supervision, technical assistance and cajoling, an impossibility for many working parents, particularly essential workers and those juggling multiple children.
How White Extremists Teach Kids to Hate
Five days after extremists used the fringe video gaming platform Dlive to livestream a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, a youthful white nationalist logged onto the site and offered his take about the future of a movement he helped create.
A Viral Video Forced a Wealthy Texas Suburb to Confront Racism. A ‘Silent Majority’ Fought Back.
Robin Cornish was at work in the fall of 2018 when she got a text message from another parent. It was a link to a video showing several white high school students laughing as they filmed themselves shouting the N-word at a party.
One of the students in the video had shared it on Snapchat, and now it was going viral.
Cornish, a 51-year-old Black mother of five, recognized the girl leading the chant as the younger sibling of one of her son’s former friends. Cornish was upset as she watched the 8-second clip, she said, but she wasn’t surprised.
After 2 Educators Die of COVID, Cobb County Teachers Demand Classrooms Stay Closed
Hours after two educators died of COVID-19, more than 100 teachers, students, parents and community members packed the parking lot outside a Cobb County Board of Education meeting to demand the school district continue with remote-only learning.
Two educators — Kemp Elementary School teacher Dana Johnson and Sedalia Park Elementary School paraprofessional Cynthia Lindsey — died Thursday from COVID-19. Patrick Key, another Cobb educator, died Christmas Day after a month-long battle with the disease.
#tellEWA Member Stories (Jan. 15-21)
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week:
For The 74, Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez and Jackie Valley report on a rural Nevada school’s efforts to prevent Native students from falling behind during the pandemic.
Ruth Serven Smith of AL.com covers young students’ reactions to Inauguration Day.
Rural Schools Have Battled Bad Internet, Low Attendance and Academic Decline Through the Pandemic. Now the Push Is On to Return Students to Classrooms — Safely
As the first full semester for U.S. schools during the pandemic comes to an end, education experts and parents alike are concerned about its effects on children’s academic progress. From the Mexican border to the Upper Midwest, Oregon to Virginia and on Native American reservations across the West, that anxiety is magnified in rural areas, which are far less likely to have access to high-speed or even consistent internet in a time of extensive virtual schooling.
Dividing Lines: How Norfolk Remains Deeply Segregated, In 8 Maps
Norfolk’s segregation isn’t hard to see.
The city is close to half Black and half white, according to the most recent Census data.
But there aren’t a lot of neighborhoods where you see that kind of split. By and large, there are Black neighborhoods and there are white neighborhoods, especially in the older core of Norfolk.
Decisions made 60, 80 or 100 years ago segregated neighborhoods by race and deprived Black residents of economic and educational resources afforded to those in white neighborhoods.
13,000 School Districts, 13,000 Approaches to Teaching During Covid
What does it mean to go to public school in the United States during the pandemic?
The answer looks so different in different parts of the country, it is hard to tell that we are one nation.
In some rural and suburban areas, especially in the South, Midwest and Great Plains, almost all students began the 2020-21 academic year attending school in person, and they have continued to do so, except for temporary closures during outbreaks.
Biden’s Covid-19 Stimulus Plan Includes $40 Billion For Child Care
America’s child care providers have hit a breaking point.
In a survey last summer, 86 percent said the Covid-19 pandemic had hurt their enrollment. Seventy percent said it had driven up costs. With less money coming in and more going out, just 18 percent believed they could stay open longer than a year without some kind of help.
Those numbers are just one sign of a crisis that’s been brewing ever since the pandemic began spreading across the US.
Watchdog Faults DeVos Aide Over For-Profit College Deals in Preliminary Report
A top adviser to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos exceeded her authority when she helped struggling for-profit colleges access hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money, according to the preliminary findings of a review by the Education Department’s internal watchdog.
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UNL Sees High Student Demand for ‘Winterim’ Courses
As the coronavirus upended life in higher education, both at UNL and at institutions across the country, the university decided to offer a pair of three-week sessions to keep students engaged in their learning.
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Search to Find How Much Funding Your College Or University Will Receive in the New Round of COVID-19 Funding
The U.S. Department of Education last week released details on exactly how much money thousands of colleges and universities are receiving out of $21.2 billion in COVID-19 emergency funding signed into law at the end of December.
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How a Diverse School District Is Using a Strategy Usually Reserved for ‘Gifted’ Students To Boost Everyone
While COVID-19-related “learning loss“ is a new phenomenon, making up lost ground is not. There’s plenty of research on what happens when education is disrupted by natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, or planned breaks in learning, like summer.
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Trump’s ‘Patriotic Education’ Report Excuses Founding Fathers for Owning Slaves and Likens Progressives to Mussolini
President Trump’s “patriotic education” commission released a report on Martin Luther King Day that equates American progressives with European fascists and says it is “untrue” that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites for enslaving people while calling for equality in the nation’s founding documents.
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Pandemic Teacher Shortages Imperil In-Person Schooling
As exposure to the coronavirus forced thousands of teachers across the United States to stay home and quarantine this winter, administrators in the Washoe County School District, which serves 62,000 students in western Nevada, pulled out all the stops to try to continue in-person instruction for students.
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College Board Is Scrapping SAT’s Optional Essay and Subject Tests
Two major stress points in the grueling rituals of college admission testing are vanishing this year: the optional essay-writing section of the SAT and the supplementary exams in various fields known as SAT subject tests.
Read the full story here.
Biden Outlines Plan to Solve Child Care Crisis
PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE Biden outlined a sweeping plan Thursday to address the country’s child care crisis.
“We are facing an acute, immediate child care crisis in America, which is exacerbating our economic crisis,” he said in a statement. “If left unaddressed, many child care providers will close – some permanently – and millions of children could go without necessary care, and millions of parents could be left to make devastating choices this winter between caring for their children and working to put food on the table.”
Biden Calls for $130 Billion in New K-12 Relief, Scaled Up Testing, Vaccination Efforts
President-elect Joe Biden is calling for $130 billion in additional COVID-19 relief funding for schools, ramped up testing efforts, and accelerated vaccine distribution strategies to help reopen “the majority of K-8 schools” within the first 100 days of his administration.
The proposals, which Biden announced in a speech Thursday night, are part of a $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that also seeks $350 billion in aid to state, local, and territorial governments.