MindShift

Millions Of Kids Learn English At School. Teaching Them Remotely Hasn’t Been Easy

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 08:19:29 GMT

A year ago, the kindergartners learning English in Tanya Gan Lim’s class were thriving. Back then, she’d bring in props and pictures to help her students learn the language and sound out words. Then she’d lavish them with praise, even if they stumbled, to build their confidence.

Lim teaches in Prince George’s County Public Schools, just outside Washington, D.C. She is used to planning every minute of class, but that’s harder to do now that class time is punctuated with frozen screens, garbled audio and children wandering away from the camera. Sometimes, her kindergartners don’t have supplies. On a recent morning, Lim tells her class it’s time for a writing exercise, and a little boy interrupts.

“I need my book,” he says plaintively. “My mommy didn’t bring it.”

Needless to say, Lim’s job teaching English has gotten a lot harder during the pandemic. How much harder? Lim laughs and says she can’t quantify it. “Maybe 10 times?”

Five million children in the U.S. rely on public schools to teach them English, and those kids have been hard hit by online schooling. Children learning English are more likely to struggle in school and drop out, and school districts in several states, including Maryland, Virginia and California, already have data showing these students are falling further behind.

Among the challenges: There are fewer resources for teaching English learners remotely, and many English learners are less likely to have access to technology. Even in a school district like Prince George’s, which has distributed free devices and mobile Wi-Fi units, these children may not have support at home to navigate technology.

Lim, a former English learner herself, says it is harder to build relationships and engage her students virtually. It’s not like last year, when she saw them in the hallway or during lunch duty.

“This year, I only get to interact with my class for 30 minutes and then we log out and that’s it,” Lim says.

When children are learning another language, she says, it’s important for them to see nuances of communication, such as facial expressions and other non-verbal signs. But those are also harder to make out on a screen.

And Lim worries about her students when they go to their regular, online classes for the rest of the day. “In the mainstream classrooms, they feel shy, they don’t want to talk, they don’t want to make mistakes,” she says.

Ninth-grader Jimmy is self-conscious about his English skills. When he first moved to Prince George’s from El Salvador, he knew just three phrases in English: “Hello. How are you? Nice to meet you.” (We aren’t using Jimmy’s last name to protect his privacy.)

Last year, when school was in-person, he said some kids picked on him because he didn’t speak English well.

But he tried really hard, and he made a new friend who helped him with words he didn’t understand. “He’s like my brother to me. He helped me a lot,” Jimmy said.

Now with his school closed, Jimmy only sees his friend in his online class. And he’s sometimes afraid to speak up, worried about what his classmates will think of his English.

“Having one friend who speaks English well is a very, very good predictor of your grades,” says Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, who has spent years researching immigrant youth. Now the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston, Suarez-Orozco previously co-authored a study with his wife about the process of learning English.

“Very few youth in our study could say they had one friend who was an English dominant speaker.”

Those friendships have been even harder to foster in the age of social distancing.

Teachers worry students like Jimmy aren’t hearing even casual English on the playground or at the bus stop. Many live in neighborhoods where they don’t hear English spoken at all. That doesn’t only impact students, for whom English can be a way to fit in — it can also affect families who rely on children’s English skills.

Lim, the kindergarten teacher, has tried to adapt her lesson plans for remote learning. One new feature is a scavenger hunt in which she asks students to show the class one of their favorites things — she laughs out loud when one kindergartener drags a big plant in front of his computer screen.

Lim still worries about her students, but says she’s trying to accept there are some things that are out of her control. And she hopes to see at least some of them in April, when Prince George’s schools are set to reopen.

Young People Struggle To Keep Friends Close As Pandemic Pulls Them Apart

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 07:53:42 GMT

Emma Fritschel, 25, and Evelyn Wang, 23, met on the first day of their freshman year as roommates almost six years ago and have been inseparable ever since.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic strained their relationship in ways they had never before experienced.

“Things were really tense between us for reasons that we both kind of came up with in our heads,” Wang says. At the heart of it, they were both struggling with communication.

Brought together by a similar interest in visual art and fashion, they experienced many traditional milestones together, including graduation from college and beginning their professional careers.

Wang and Fritschel live in New York City and Cambridge, Mass., respectively. After graduation, they made a habit of visiting each other once a month to keep in contact until the pandemic slowed down travel and they were robbed of the short weekends they spent together. Their friendship, like many others, switched to purely virtual.

For Fritschel and Wang, a crucial part of their dynamic prior to the pandemic was being in each other’s presence. When that element disappeared, both had to grapple with a question: What does their friendship mean now with barriers and pandemic restrictions limiting their ability to be in the same space?

“Vulnerable and upset”

“Postgrad,” a transitional — and often challenging — period that recent college graduates encounter as they enter the workforce or move on to the next step of their lives, has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Many college graduates are struggling to find jobs in the worst economic recession in modern American history. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 46.7% of young people ages 16-24 were employed in July 2020, a decrease from 56.2% reported during the same time in 2019.

Emma Fritschel and Evelyn Wang, friends since freshman year, had to navigate a completely virtual friendship for the first time due to the pandemic. (Emma Fritschel and Evelyn Wang)

The prolonging of the transition amid a tough economy and shrinking of social interactions has its emotional toll. A study conducted by the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention found that 46% of surveyed young people ages 18 to 24 reported feeling symptoms of anxiety and stressor-related disorders due to the pandemic. Out of all age groups, young people reported the highest percentage.

A report released by Making Caring Common, a Harvard Graduate School of Education Project, indicated that more than 1 in 3 Americans said they experienced “serious loneliness” during the pandemic, but young adults are feeling it the most at 61%.

During the pandemic, Wang moved out of her family home. She got a new job and adopted a dog as well. Fritschel felt left out of those life updates, and Wang, in return, was feeling conscious of the fact that they both have moved on in their lives, and seemingly without each other.

“These big moments were happening and they were passing us by and I wasn’t a part of it,” Fritschel says. “I think each of us and in our minds would be happy for the other person, but also vulnerable and upset.”

As the pandemic’s restrictions’ stretched on, both Wang and Fritschel’s insecurities about their relationship started to bubble. Even when they finally saw each other, months later, socially distanced in a park, it was not the same. Fritschel describes it as “damaging” to the friendship. Wang agrees, saying that she kept thinking about how to maintain boundaries and stay safe.

Eventually, they had a big argument discussing the insecurities that festered over the course of the past year, mainly about their friendship, but also about each other’s artistic skills.

“It turns out that my insecurities that I thought were insane, were actually the exact same that Emma was feeling,” Wang says. “That’s crazy that we both feel this way,” she reflects.

Fritschel contends that it was often hard to express negative feelings because it takes attention away from the other person.

Postgrad tensions “amplified”

Maya Lee, 24, embraced virtual connection with her close friendships, but there are still some things she doesn’t want to talk about. (Maya Lee)

Maya Lee, 24, from Indianapolis, had a similar experience. Although she has successfully kept in touch with her close-knit friends virtually, sometimes she feels unsure about discussing certain topics in their limited phone time, like her recent transition to medical school.

“I have a lot of negative things to say as of late. That’s just genuinely how I’m feeling. And I own that,” Lee says. She does not want to bring herself or any of her friends down, even though she knows that would probably not be the case.

As a graduate of the class of 2019, she says that even before the pandemic, the year after graduation can be a somewhat hard experience to navigate for some.

Clare Mclnerney, 23, a 2020 graduate from Scarsdale, N.Y., who currently works as a first-grade teacher intern, says that the pandemic amplified natural tensions between her recent college graduate circles during the post-graduation transition.

Clare Mclnerney, 23, a recent graduate, reflects on the challenges of maintaining friendships. (David Gold)

For Mclnerney, one of the main challenges to maintaining friendships right now is navigating how each person is in a completely different and equally valuable place.

“People are feeling insecure about where they are in terms of the job search, in terms of the housing search,” Mclnerney says. “It all just really compounds when you add the pandemic.”

She adds that the “tension of not knowing what to share and what people want to hear about and what’s going to make them anxious” can be especially tricky to navigate. Therefore, she realized that connecting through games or watching movies can ease the impact of those stressors on friendships.

Mclnerney mentions that she sometimes feels guilty because she enjoys her job and is mostly doing well given the circumstances, which is perceived to be not very common among recent graduates at the moment.

Jonah Andreatta, a middle and high school band director, reflects on how the pandemic has put a pause on social and professional life. (Thomas Neidecker)

Loss of prime time

Jonah Andreatta, 23, from Lexington, Ky., a middle school and high school band director, found ways to connect with friends virtually but still feels a loss. The “romanticized” version of early 20s adulthood contradicts with life under the pandemic.

“Here we are at this young age wanting to start things, wanting to go out into the world and try everything and be young and travel and see each other,” Andreatta says. “But we are stuck in our apartments.”

For Wang and Fritschel, they knew that their friendship was too important to lose, and after their argument, the friendship rebounded stronger than ever.

They also found new ways to connect besides the occasional Zoom chat and are currently working on an art project together.

“You can’t just assume that things are good because you know that you love each other. That is not enough,” Wang says, reflecting on the experience of maintaining a long-distance friendship during the pandemic.

“You still have to maintain the relationship. If you care about that person, you put in work.”

Hadia Bakkar is an intern on NPR’s National Desk.

States Must Test Student Learning This Spring, Biden Administration Says

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 07:39:54 GMT

The U.S. Education Department says states must resume the annual testing of students that was suspended a year ago amid the pandemic.

For the past two decades, federal law has required schools to test students once each year in math and reading, in grades three through eight and once in high school. And they are required to publicly report these standardized test results, broken out by racial and ethnic group and disability status, and in some cases, hold schools accountable with various sanctions if their students score too low.

In March of 2020, with nearly every school in the nation suddenly pivoting to remote learning, the department waived these requirements.

But in a Feb. 22 letter to state schools chiefs and governors, the department wrote that states must again give these tests this spring and report the results. It remains “vitally important that parents, educators, and the public have access to data on student learning and success,” the letter says.

States must also publicly report other indicators, like chronic absenteeism, as well as, where possible, information on students’ access to computers and the Internet for remote learning. This information is intended “to address the educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, including by using student learning data to enable states, school districts, and schools to target resources and supports to the students with the greatest needs.”

The department is granting states lots of flexibility, but critics of the current accountability system are still unhappy with this move to reinstate mandatory testing.

The department invites states to request waivers of the requirement that they use this data to identify “failing” schools. These waivers would also exempt schools from the current requirement that at least 95% of students participate in testing. And the letter invites states to be flexible in how schools give the tests, such as by shortening the tests, administering them remotely and offering multiple testing windows into the summer and even the fall.

The move toward collecting data while reducing accountability measures effectively lowers the “stakes” on high-stakes testing. This has been a major issue of contention in education circles, with a national parent-led “opt-out” movement peaking around 2015.

Still, this news will be unwelcome for the states where leaders have already begun talking about canceling tests altogether this spring — California, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Georgia, to name a few.

Some education leaders say it is logistically impossible to test most students safely and accurately, and an unwise use of limited resources in an ongoing emergency.

“While the vast majority of Georgia schools are offering in-person instruction, students are dealing with the ongoing effects of a global crisis and the trauma of necessary, but unprecedented, isolation,” Georgia’s Department of Education wrote in a letter requesting a waiver.

More than half of the nation’s students are learning remotely or in hybrid classrooms with reduced in-person class time. Comparing this spring’s results with those of any other year will be difficult. When the NWEA, a nonprofit test organization, released fall 2020 test results in December, about a quarter of students were “missing” from the data — and these were more likely to be Black and Hispanic students, from high-poverty areas, or lower-performing in the first place. So even though the students who did take the test showed progress on reading and only a little less progress than a normal year on math, there are concerns that the data do not reflect the true learning loss of the most vulnerable students.

Conversely, if tests are given remotely, students might get help from family members or look up the answers, artificially inflating the results.

“Standardized tests have never been valid or reliable measures of what students know and are able to do, and they are especially unreliable now,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, in a statement urging states to seek maximum flexibility on waivers. “High-stakes standardized tests administered during the global health crisis should not determine a student’s future, evaluate educators, or punish schools; nor should they come at the expense of precious learning time that students could be spending with their educators.”

The Two Types of Independence Growing Tweens Need to Practice

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 08:10:31 GMT

Excerpted from FOURTEEN TALKS BY AGE FOURTEEN copyright © 2021 by Michelle Icard. Used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Two Types of Independence

In my work, I see two primary ways kids assert their independence after elementary school: 1) by isolating themselves from their family at home, and 2) by separating from their family to explore the world. Both of these cause parents a great deal of worry.

Before I help you launch into how to talk about independence with your child, it may help to first understand a bit about isolation versus exploration, so you’ll have a sense of what’s normal and safe, or if you might need to be more concerned.

Independence Through Isolation

Why do tweens spend a colossal amount of time in their rooms? Why do they stop (willingly) participating in family movie or game night? Why do family dinners feel like a timed race to the finish line, so your kid can hop up and rush back to their room? You used to be close, but these days it probably feels like you’re being ghosted by your kid.

Don’t worry. It’s not you. It’s them.

Adolescents need to cocoon. Cocooning is a term coined in the early 1980s by Faith Popcorn, a social trend analyst with a bizarre and compelling name. (That’s neither here nor there, but it can’t go unsaid.) Popcorn describes cocooning as “the impulse to stay inside when the outside gets too tough and scary.” Since its introduction to our lexicon, it has come to be used regularly to describe adolescents and their relationship to their rooms.

Tweens and teens cocoon because at a time when most things in their lives are changing—their bodies, brains, emotions, friends, and even their self-concepts—bedrooms are safe havens. There, they can think about any and all things ad nauseam, or push them aside and take a break from the mental turmoil of their busy minds.

Most kids take cocooning so seriously they will, if allowed, suddenly redecorate or rearrange their preteen rooms to reflect a new sense of self. They want to establish that this space is more theirs, and definitely not moms or dads. Due to financial constraints, I wasn’t allowed to redecorate my room when I was a teenager, so I covered the 1775 colonial-themed wallpaper I inherited when we moved in with floor-to-ceiling black-and-white ads I collected from old magazines. This décor wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it sent a clear message: this is my space, not yours. Eventually, kids emerge from their cocoons with a better-formed sense of self. It may feel like mindless sequestering to parents, but it serves as a safe place to grow.

When cocooning goes well, kids feel a sense of independence and autonomy right in the safety of your own home. When cocooning doesn’t go well, kids become overly self-indulgent, forgetting that they are still members of a family unit and they must still do chores, engage in pleasant conversation, and balance their own needs with what’s best for the group. As you talk with your tween about their cocooning habits, you’ll want to keep in mind that not all isolation is bad. Seek a compromise on balancing their needs with those of the family.

Independence Through Exploration

In contrast to isolating at home, sometimes your tween will want to assert their independence by venturing out into the world without you. However, because of our constant exposure to news showing us how seemingly every kid is in mortal danger from guns, drugs, and sexual trafficking, parents accordingly react by limiting those freedoms. Lenore Skenazy has written an incredible book about the perils of this crack-down phenomenon: Free-Range Kids. If you are nervous about letting your kids explore your neighborhood, town, or city, I urge you to read it.

Exploring the world in middle school might look like doing one of these things without parental supervision: going to the mall with a friend, meeting up with classmates at a roller rink or trampoline park, riding a bike to the gas station to buy a candy bar, taking public transportation, or being dropped off at the movies or a sub shop for lunch. All of these are fairly typical middle school explorations.

In any of these scenarios there are three kinds of learning happening for tweens:

Learning how to navigate traffic, strangers, and public spaces safely.
Learning how to assert themselves by asking for directions or help (as in, “What do I do? The soda machine is broken and I already paid.”), ordering for themselves, figuring out a tip, or trying not to get yelled at by grumpy people who don’t like kids milling around.
Learning how to think for themselves, by themselves, and becoming okay with the sound of their own thoughts. It’s about tuning in to that inner voice tweens may not yet be familiar with, if all they have ever heard is an adult’s voice telling them what to do.

When exploration goes well, kids develop confidence in their abilities to overcome obstacles and solve their own problems. Giving kids a chance to earn this confidence actually makes them safer, because if someone is going to target your kid, whether that’s a manipulative friend, bully at school, older teens at the mall, or god forbid, stranger with bad intentions, you want your child to be confident and street smart enough to speak up, get loud if necessary, and get help. People who do bad things at any level don’t like an audience.

When exploration goes wrong, it can go wrong in a broad range of ways. Like me when my parents left me home alone, kids may ask for more than they can handle. An experience like this can leave a kid emotionally drained, but it’s not likely to have any long-term effects (other than being useful one day when writing a book). I’d be more concerned about kids who are sent out before they’re taught how to explore safely. They may run the risk of getting hit by a car, or getting seriously lost, or as mentioned above, not knowing how to speak up for themselves or get help if approached by someone with the intention of testing your kid’s boundaries.

Tweens exploring their world also run the risk of making dumb decisions. Maybe they’ll get kicked out of a store for being too rowdy, or get yelled at by a server for leaving a bad tip or making a mess. Maybe they’ll decide to see what happens if they pocket a golf ball from the sporting goods store without paying for it. Think ahead about what choices you want your kid to make when you aren’t there, and have those conversations ahead of time.

Michelle Icard (Kate Weaver)

Michelle Icard is a member of the Today show parenting team and NBC News Learn. The author of Middle School Makeover, her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Redbook, Time, and People. Her leadership curriculum for middle schoolers, Athena’s Path and Hero’s Pursuit, have been implemented at schools across the U.S., and her summer camp curriculum is offered at more than twenty camps each summer. She lives with her family in Charlotte, North Carolina.

How Some Mistakes Can be Generative for Teachers and Students Alike

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 09:25:36 GMT

With all of the papers, homework and tests that cross a teacher’s desk, you’d think that a healthy relationship to mistake-making would come easy, but it’s not that simple. Messing up does not come naturally for most people, especially teachers who are constantly under the scrutiny of students, guardians, colleagues and administrators. And because teachers are tasked with making an estimated 3,000 non-trivial decisions everyday, it makes sense that some of those decisions will end up being mistakes.

As teachers navigate the pandemic in real time, many are trying to figure out how to hold themselves accountable in their mistake making without beating themselves up. In her new book “Risk. Fail. Rise.: A Teacher’s Guide to Learning from Mistakes,” New York-based educator Colleen Cruz explores how it can be generative and fruitful for teachers and students alike when things do not go quite according to plan. While an educator’s margin for error is oftentimes very slim, determining how to classify and learn from mistakes can make space for more freedom and adaptability in one’s teaching practice.

Different kinds of mistakes and their varied impacts

Believe it or not: even though it usually doesn’t feel good to make a mistake, there is such a thing as a good mistake. Eduardo Briceño, co-founder of Mindset Works, provides four categories that are useful for classifying mistakes. He looks at an error’s potential for meaningful learning opportunities to distinguish between positive and negative mistakes.

For example, stretch mistakes are positive and may occur when a person is trying something difficult and doesn’t get it right the first time. Similarly, with aha-moment mistakes there are sparks of realization that happen when someone understands they’re missing important information. On the more negative side, sloppy mistakes are the ones made in a rushed or a distracted state of mind. Lastly, high-stakes mistakes are the ones that everyone wants to avoid because they cause harm. And, unfortunately, they’re the ones that teachers are in a position to make because of their influence on young learners.

Mistakes are not the only things that vary. The impact changes too. “It’s not just that our mistakes affect us differently because of where we stand in the world, but also that our mistakes affect students differently because of their identities,” Cruz explains in her book. There are some mistakes where the impact can be so harmful to kids that adults should establish “zero-fail missions” to make sure failure is unlikely to occur. Teaching students to read and having students see themselves in their curriculum are important research-backed zero-fail missions, Cruz says.

“We have a habit of picking the wrong zero fail missions that are often based on tradition and belief, and not fact.” Once a “zero-fail mission” is identified, she recommends identifying potential obstacles and upholding rigorous prioritization to make sure that goals are met.

How grades can create a class culture based on “failure-rich” learning

Grading systems both penalize learners who make mistakes and limit high achieving students. However, there are alternative assessment tools teachers can use to help students feel more comfortable with error. “I would give students a kid version of a report card and ask them to assess themselves. Then, I would make an assessment,” says Cruz. “And if I was sitting with a [student] who had a different assessment of themselves than what I thought, I would have a conference with them and try to figure out why we saw it differently.”

During the pandemic, grading has become even more complex and contentious with many students receiving failing grades in academic subjects. “What we say grading is, which is a communication system, is different from what it ends up being, which is a merit system,” says Cruz. “Those systems come with advantages for people who come to school with certain kinds of privileges, whether it’s prior knowledge, full bellies, great Internet access or wonderful devices.” She recommends responding to learners who are not performing well with compassion. Teachers should make efforts to touch base with struggling students or call their caregivers to find out more about any obstacles to learning.

Debunking the teacher martyr trope

Teachers often fall into or are steered towards the savior-martyr stereotype, says Cruz. “The teacher archetype is basically working to the bone all hours of the night for a pittance.”

At first glance, that may seem like an asset. School closures and distance learning have created the conditions where teacher martyrdom seems more likely than ever before. However, she points out teachers are more likely to make mistakes when they haven’t taken care of their personal needs. And when teachers overcommit and overexert themselves, they are missing a valuable opportunity to show students that it is okay to prioritize self care.

Instead, try setting boundaries to delineate personal time from teacher time. It can be as simple as preserving the sanctity of lunchtime. High school educator Kelly Gallagher recalls that his classroom used to be open for students to have lunch. “I got to a point in my career when I said, ‘Nope. I’m going to have lunch with adults and I’m going to talk about things that we wouldn’t talk about in a classroom full of kids.’”

Stepping away from the classroom – which for some educators is currently the computer – can actually benefit educators’ teaching practices. “I think the best teacher planning is going to the museum,” reveals New York-based middle school teacher Donna Santman, who encourages educators to pursue their own interests outside of school. And while educators can’t necessarily access public spaces in the same way these days, regular breaks could reduce the number of avoidable mistakes they make in the classroom and increase capacity for more creative and innovative classes.

Even apologizing can become a meaningful model to students

Being an authority figure in a classroom can make teachers feel as if they have to put their best face forward all the time, so most teachers’ first instinct is to cover up their mistakes as soon as possible. However, second grade teacher Connie Pertuz-Meza urges teachers to turn mistakes into teachable moments and turn classrooms into more mistake-friendly environments. “I always felt like if I made a mistake I needed to sweep it under the rug,” she says. “Students need to see the action of a teacher realizing and rewinding to say, ‘Oops, I made a mistake.’”

Cruz advises that teachers own up to the harmful impact of their actions regardless of whether their intentions were good. While admitting to errors is uncomfortable, it shows students how to take ownership over their actions and impact. It also communicates that students are valuable and worthy of the respect that a genuine apology requires.

“My first response used to be defense before, and now it is to assess the damage,” says Cruz, noting that a school-wide culture of mistake-making is most helpful when acknowledging and recovering from consequential mistakes. Unless schools make it explicit that mistake-making is welcome and expected, teachers will avoid the risks necessary to being adaptive teachers who are responsive to students’ needs.

Teachers can rethink the power they have in their classrooms to make the necessary changes in the education system that help students succeed. So instead of becoming fixated on pandemic schooling missteps, Cruz urges educators to refocus on the values and goals in their teaching practice by asking themselves, “What are the things I want to do going forward that this mistake is giving me insight into?”

Almost A Year Into The Pandemic, Working Moms Feel ‘Forgotten,’ Journalist Says

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 21:53:45 GMT

The COVID-19 pandemic has left many American families without child care and in-person schooling. Those new household burdens have largely landed on the shoulders of women, says Journalist Claire Cain Miller.

Miller has been working from home, reporting on how the pandemic has affected the lives of mothers, in a New York Times series called “The Primal Scream.” It’s a subject she’s familiar with: Her children, ages 4 and 8,have been been attending school virtually since the pandemic began.

“I hear … from people I interview — and I feel that myself — that women stepped up, mothers stepped up,” Miller says. “And at this point, a year in, there’s just this deep feeling that we’ve been forgotten about.”

Miller says increased household responsibilities have forced many working mothers — and especially Black and Latinx mothers — to scale back on their hours or leave the workforce entirely during the pandemic, further widening economic and racial disparities.

“It took a very, very slow moving process from the 1970s until today to get women where they are professionally,” Miller says. “I do worry that this has erased so much of it so quickly that it could be a massive setback for decades.”

Perhaps more than anything, Miller says, the pandemic laid bare the need for public policy initiatives that support families: “We live in a country … that has left it to individuals to figure out their family caregiving arrangements on their own. … There were never the structures in place to help us and to provide for working families in this country in the way that there are elsewhere.”

Interview highlights

On a gap in perception between mothers and fathers about who is picking up the slack during the pandemic

We did a survey at the Times with Morning Consult, a survey partner we have that I found very amusing: 80% of mothers said they were managing the home school in their house; 45% of fathers said they were managing it. Now, that’s impossible. Three percent of mothers said the fathers were managing it. So there’s a really big disconnect here. And it’s really not surprising because this generation of men does a lot more at home. They do more housework and child care, even in normal times, than their fathers or grandfathers did. But it’s still nowhere near equal. And what we found is that men have done more, especially if you’re working from home or if your kids’ schools are still closed, there’s just more to be done. … Fathers are doing more, but their share hasn’t changed. So mothers are also doing more, and they’re both still doing the same share they used to. Which means men, in general — of course not all — men are doing less.

On things employers have done to help women work during the pandemic

One way that most employers responded at the very beginning is they offered flexibility. So for white-collar workers who could work from home, they said you can work at different hours. You can work in the early morning or late at night instead of being available for the midday meeting if you have child duties. Then for hourly and essential workers, they offered people to shift their schedules or to shift locations to a store near their house, things like that. And that was a helpful response last March.

The thing is that very few employers ever did anything else. And we did another survey: We found that over three quarters of working parents have received nothing else in the way of time off or money for child care. It’s just these flexible hours. And as a working parent, I can tell you there are only so many months that you can wake up at dawn or work after bedtime in order to get it all done. It’s just not sustainable. And so what’s happened is that either people have had to figure out their own alternate arrangements or they’re just really incredibly burnt out, [with their] mental health really suffering, or else they’ve had to cut back on work, either quit, cut back their hours, not apply for the promotion they wanted. And these things are just going to have really deep, long-term effects on their careers.

On why more employers aren’t providing child care subsidies, which can help employees be more productive

This enables your people to spend their day dedicated to the thing you’re paying them to do. It enables them to not have to quit their jobs and to be able to give you their dedicated effort, so I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more of an effort here.

I think at this point it’s really about money. Time is one thing. Paid leave, having a few weeks off, even having 12 weeks off, which the federal government offered to some employees last year, though that’s expired — that’s helpful. But the pandemic has lasted a lot more than 12 weeks. To me, if an employer gives money, then the employee can choose to use that to take an unpaid leave, or to hire a babysitter, or to help compensate a grandparent or an aunt or uncle who’s helping, or to hire a tutor and make their own personal family decisions about what’s best for their child. But again, very few employers are doing this. The ones that are are mostly the higher paying ones that employ people with college degrees or higher. So it’s really reflecting a lot of the inequities that we see in all parts of our culture, which is that people with college degrees and high earners are treated a lot better at work.

On parents’ weighing the risk of sending their kids back to school

As a parent, I can tell you it’s a really very difficult decision. It’s not clear cut. It doesn’t really matter — and I empathize with the teachers too — what scientists and doctors say if you feel that this is too much of a risk to your health or your family’s health to do. … People are really polarized and they’re really hardened, and I get it. On the one hand, it’s really terrifying that your kids could get sick. And on the other hand, it’s really, really hard to have your kids out of school, not just in terms of your day and getting your work done, but in terms of how obvious it is what we’re seeing happen with the kids who are struggling. They’re lonely; they’re anxious. Their entire lives — in some cases, a quarter or an eighth of their entire lives — has just been upended.

On what we know about how much the coronavirus spreads in schools

[Pediatric disease experts polled by the New York Times] said that children spread it less than adults do, that they’re not as efficient spreaders, probably because they don’t get sick. So they’re not sneezing and coughing all over. So they do spread it less. And they said vaccinations will be very important for life to return to normal. But they said that schools around the world that have been open have shown that when the kids are wearing masks, when the teachers and staff are wearing masks, when they’re maintaining distance by avoiding large gatherings and having their desks spaced apart and when they have adequate ventilation — and there are other safety measures, too, but those were really the most important — they thought that transmission is really not happening at high rates within schools. Transmission is happening outside of schools. And if restaurants and bars and gyms are open and if teachers and parents are socializing on the weekends, it’s more likely to come inside the school. But the school is not the site of most of the transmission, is what they said the research has shown so far, based on what we know now.

On proposed legislation to provide parents with a child tax credit

I think there’s a lot more recognition now of something that parents have always known, which is that child care is absolutely essential for society to function. High quality child care is absolutely essential and it’s really expensive. A lot of child care providers have gone out of business because they had to lock down last spring and they couldn’t afford to go [empty for] a few months. They were already working on very, very tight margins. Parents can’t afford to pay more for all these measures they have to put in place, like distancing and sanitizing and Plexiglas barriers and these things, in order to be open in a pandemic. So I think there’s recognition that it’s needed.

I would be very surprised if the United States Congress passed any sort of public child care like the kind that we see in Europe, because there’s historically been so much resistance to it. But one thing that there does seem to be growing support for is an idea of a child allowance, which is sending a monthly check to parents. President Biden has proposed this, as have several other Democratic senators. But what’s been really interesting recently is that Senator Mitt Romney, who, of course, is a Republican from Utah, has also proposed a version of it that’s actually more generous than President Biden’s. The idea would be to send between $250 and $350 a month to parents, multiple checks if you have multiple kids up to a certain limit. In Senator Romney’s proposal, it wouldn’t phase out totally until you made almost half a million dollars a year as a couple. So pretty much every parent in the country would be getting this.

A lot of other countries do this — I’m not sure Americans realize it — Canada, Australia and most of Europe. This is not uncommon, but, of course, it has not happened here. … It means that families could make their own choice. There could be a stay-at-home parent. They could use that check to pay their child-care tuition. They could use that check to hire a nanny, whatever they felt worked for their family. And that is something that both sides seem to agree on. Now, of course, $350 a month or so, while it would be very helpful, is not nearly enough to actually cover your whole child-care tuition. So this would not be replacing something like public child care.

Amy Salit and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Nichole Cohen adapted it for the Web.

5 Things Every Family Should Know About Paying For College

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 08:25:17 GMT

For many families, paying for college is one of the biggest financial decisions they’ll make. College tuition is the highest it’s ever been — and the financial aid process is anything but clear. American journalist Ron Lieber’s new book, The Price You Pay for College aims to take the black box of college financials and, “turn it lighter and lighter shades of gray.”

Of course, Lieber concedes, it is a messed up system. But he’s not out to fix it – he’s just here to help you and your family navigate it. “What I would really like to do is to blow it to smithereens. But this is not a blow-it-to-smithereens book,” he says. “I am taking the system as it is and trying to help people learn to beat it.”

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

What do parents get wrong about the price of college – the price listed on college websites?

Roughly 90 percent of people do not pay the full price. They get some kind of a discount. The number families will actually pay varies widely depending on how desperate a particular institution is to put heads in beds and whether it’s particularly desperate for some kinds of people more than others.

You don’t pay that list price because most families get aid — or as you call it, a discount. What are the two types of aid?

There is the need-based aid system running on one set of train tracks and then right next to it, in parallel, there’s the merit aid system – runs on its own set of tracks.

Okay, so as a student or family member – how do you approach that first type, need-based aid?

Every school is required to post a net price calculator. It’s often hidden – It’s not in an obvious place. So you just Google, you know, [insert college here] and net price calculator. There, you’ll be able to input your financial data. The net price calculator is supposed to spit back at you an estimate of what your family would be asked to pay if you were to get in. And so what you get is what the bottom line price would be and then hopefully a breakdown of how that financial aid might be divided up.

So the tricky part, once you get that net price. is to make sure that you understand what the components of that net price might be. For instance, how much debt did that school ask you to take on?

The other money you get from colleges is merit aid. I think of merit aid as money for being smart. But it sounds like this goes beyond academics?

It’s much more about who you are, about your profile, about grades and test scores and other kind of tangibles and intangibles. It may vary depending on the year, or the month and also how well the school is doing in its attempt to attract the right number of students paying the right amount of dollars per student.

Here’s another way to think of it: Imagine a really long list of all of the colleges and universities in the United States, ranked roughly in order of selectivity. Starting around slots 30 or 40, you start to get a trickle of elite institutions that do give away some money based on someone’s academic prowess. And then in the next 25 to 50 slots on the list, you’re finding a lot of selective schools that have a market problem and a marketing problem, which is that at $70,000 or $80,000 a year, people’s ability to pay no longer matches their willingness to do so, increasingly. So you’re trying to maintain some pricing power at the full price for a certain number of students, while giving others discounts.

Then, you go further down the food chain where very few people are paying full price, but most people don’t know that everybody’s getting a merit aid pony. And at those institutions, the schools are keeping that information to themselves — the fact that everybody’s getting the discount — because they want every parent whose kid gets an unsolicited merit aid offer from the school running around town bragging about how their kid got offered academic money from this or that college. Further down the food chain, it’s obvious that pretty much everybody gets something.

So merit aid – the discount unrelated to financial need – is basically a way for colleges to manipulate or convince often wealthier families to go to their university?

Look at what Tulane, Northeastern and even University of Southern California have done using merit aid. They just went out and bought smart kids. People are often surprised by this, right, because we’re not used to thinking of higher education as the highly competitive industry that it is. We’ve got a couple thousand undergraduate institutions, and they’re slugging it out for each and every student to commit and matriculate.

So it should not really come as any surprise to us that money is being used as leverage, even with children, because children have a role to play in this process. I’m in enough teenagers’ inboxes looking at this stuff to know that the money pitch is more common than it used to be and absolutely resonating, but also confusing the hell out of people because they don’t really know how this all works.

So where do parents even begin when determining how much money is appropriate to spend on college?

What I encourage people to do, first and foremost, is to take a look at something called the common data set that most schools make available. [To find, search Google for “Common data set” and the college name. Here’s an example result from the University of Richmond.] This is the document that schools send to U.S. News and World Report and other ranking organizations. Look for Line H2A. It tells you the number of students who did not qualify for any need-based aid, but still got merit money. So that gives you a sense of how desperate the school is and how much of a merit package it might offer even to people who do not need the money because of their assets or income. You start to get a sense of where you stand.

And then here’s something else you can do. Just go to the school and ask. All of this hocus pocus and having to dig through data tables, it’s not fair. It’s perfectly reasonable to call a school in September and say, could you please do a merit aid pre-read on my application. This is something that goes on. The College of Wooster in Ohio does it for anyone who asks. Whitman College in Washington state does it for anybody who asks. It’s obscene that we have to make decisions about where and how to apply without having a good sense of how this will shake out. It is not right.

For students applying to college this year, what should they do if their financial situation has changed because of the coronavirus?

The avenues for appeal [for need-based aid and merit aid] are different. If it’s need-based aid, you’re going to go to the financial aid office and you’re going to try to prove to the financial aid officer that you have had a change in circumstances since you filed your financial aid forms. And you’re going to ask that financial aid officer to use professional judgment to reconsider your offer.

On the merit aid side, you’re going to be approaching the admissions office and the best way to do it is with a whole bunch of humility, but also a competing offer.

If you have a quote from another school that competes with the institution enough to be a reasonable comparison, you go into the school that you want to appeal to and you say, ‘I would really like to go here. The bottom line price at this other school is lower than yours. We may have made a mistake here in our application to you that we didn’t make with the other school. Would it be possible to to just do a review here so that we understand what happened?’

And here’s the secret that most people don’t know: It’s not human beings that have generated these offers in the first place. It’s more often than not robots that have been programmed by software algorithms. And so humans do have the ability to intervene at the end within a certain amount of reason. Can’t hurt to try.

Why We Need to Pay More Attention to the Youngest Children Right Now (and Their Parents)

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:38:06 GMT

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.

By contrast, little attention has been paid to the pandemic’s effects on even younger learners.

“There aren’t a lot of people out there screaming ‘what about the infants?’” said Jack Shonkoff, a pediatrician and professor who leads Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child.

Perhaps there should be. In recent decades, neuroscientists and early learning experts have discovered just how much an infant’s environment contributes to the development of their brain’s structure and circuitry. When infants receive nurturing, responsive care in stable settings, “it literally shapes the architecture of the brain and builds strong brain circuits for learning, for emotional development, for self-regulation,” Shonkoff explained during an early childhood seminar hosted by the Education Writers Association.

When the opposite is true, the consequences can last a lifetime. Adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress can negatively affect education, jobs and health into adulthood.

Scientists knew all of that before the coronavirus sent rates of unemployment, hunger, depression and anxiety soaring. There are programs like Healthy Steps that can help families access resources and support. But Shonkoff worries that the the enormous stress and instability families are facing will harm babies and toddlers for years to come. To prevent that, he said everyone needs to step up to support struggling parents.

Disrupted development

Most parents work incredibly hard to provide the best they can for their kids. But stressors like job loss, illness or a lack of child care make it harder to provide the predictable, responsive care that little ones need.

Without those things, the brain detects danger and triggers the body’s chemical and biological stress responses. If fired too often in a child’s early years, these responses can disrupt their neurological development.

One example of where this can do long-term harm is in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region involved in controlling attention. The prefrontal cortex has two periods of rapid development, Shonkoff said in an interview. The first occurs between ages three and five when kids gain more self-control and ability to focus, or as Shonkoff put it, “all that preschool stuff that makes the difference between a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old.”

But if the base layers of the prefrontal cortex haven’t been laid before then, problems can arise. Psychologists observed this issue in a longitudinal study of children who grew up in Romanian orphanages and their peers who were placed in foster care. Researchers found that the institutionalized children, who received little human contact, had delays in cognitive, linguistic, motor and socioemotional skills. Those in foster care fared better — especially if they were removed from the orphanages before age 2. But even among that subset, ADHD symptoms appeared more often than in a control group.

“The brain circuits and the structures that underlie the early foundations of attention are clearly affected early, not in a way that’s necessarily irreversible, but the older you get — and by older I mean going from 1 to 2 to 3 — the harder it becomes to completely recover,” Shonkoff explained.

That’s why, he said, if society doesn’t make moves to support infants now, in a few years schools can expect to see “more kids with more needs” arriving in classrooms.

Serve and return

One of the best ways parents and educators can help children develop healthy brain architecture now is through “serve and return” interactions.

Think of it like tennis. When a baby does something like focusing on a new object, grabbing their feet or babbling, they’re serving the ball. A parent or caregiver can volley it back by noticing, naming and responding to these small moments. These back-and-forth interactions can activate and strengthen connections in a child’s developing brain, just as tennis practice builds an athlete’s muscles and reflexes.

Practicing serve and return doesn’t require fancy toys or oodles of free time. They can occur through simple play, like peek-a-boo, or during ordinary activities, such as making a snack. In its resources for caregivers, the Center on the Developing Child outlines five steps to serve and return:

Share the focus.
Support and encourage.
Name it.
Take turns.
Follow children’s lead for endings and beginnings.

To help children, help their parents

Another key to early brain development is having a predictable daily routine. But if these seem like simple directives, they have become much harder during the pandemic.

“It’s not to say that you’re doomed if you’re stressed, because we’re all stressed,” said Shonkoff. But the amount of stress and available support networks make a difference. Parents need to ask for help, he said.

And the rest of society needs to respond. “There’s nothing magic that the government or programs can do with babies. Whatever we do has to be done by empowering and enhancing the ability of the adults who care for them to be able to provide that kind of environment.”

In Congress, Democrats are currently pushing to expand the child tax credit for millions of families as a way to combat child poverty. The plan, which would cost an estimated $120 billion per year, has received some bipartisan support but also criticism from conservatives.

While politics can lead to pessimism for some early childhood advocates, Shonkoff said the scientific evidence showing what’s possible keeps him positive. “Optimism is the only way to think about the early childhood period, not just because we wish that things could be better, but we have so much untapped knowledge that could produce much better results if we used it.”

Home Visits, Deliveries and Care Can Help Students Who’ve Disappeared From Online Learning

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 06:03:42 GMT

When Dirigo High School, in western Maine, moved to remote learning for a few weeks last fall, sophomore Mason Ducharme started falling behind. And without athletics, he lost any motivation to keep his grades up.

“I just didn’t do anything, I just sat in my room all day,” he said. “And I didn’t do any work. I didn’t attend any classes.”

Many school districts across the country have reported big drop-offs in attendance as they’ve shifted to remote learning. Some students, like Ducharme, dropped off the map entirely.

In response, some schools have been calling, texting and even knocking on doors to try to connect with students.

“It’s a battle, for sure,” says Dirigo High School principal Pam Doyen. “When they choose to be virtual, and then don’t Zoom into classes. And it’s hard to find them sometimes.”

Doyen says after just a few weeks of classes this fall, the school saw that dozens of students had “disappeared,” meaning they weren’t showing up to remote Zoom classes or responding to communication. She says the school formed a small group to get them back on track.

“We’ve done calls, texts, emails, home visits, home delivery of materials,” Doyen said. “We’ve scheduled multiple parent meetings, including evening hours, that work best for parents to talk about, ‘Your kid’s not showing up for their Zooms.’ ”

Going from doorstep to doorstep

And even though the home visits may only take a few minutes, administrators say they’ve become a critical tool for keeping students connected to school.

Doyen says the school worked to connect families with basic needs, like heating assistance, and began making deliveries last fall to get them food.

Early on a recent chilly morning, Dirigo teacher Rachel Buck drove around the school district, her car loaded up with boxes of school materials and canned goods.

Buck wasn’t scheduled to teach for another two hours, but as the district’s remote learning coordinator, she went from doorstep to doorstep, distributing supplies to students she hadn’t seen in-person for weeks or months.

It was during the first few deliveries last fall that Buck says she already noticed that a quick face-to-face interaction helped families to trust her, and made it easier to work together to get their children to show up to class.

“So these deliveries, whatever way districts are able to reach out and connect with their families, and their community, it is putting action behind the words, ‘I care about your kids’ education,’ ” Buck said. “It’s a way to concretely look at it and say, ‘Yeah, they do care. They really do.’ ”

Knowing that teachers care

Administrators acknowledge that the texts and visits haven’t fixed everything, but their list of students who’ve “disappeared” has gone from a few dozen this fall to just a handful now.

After getting bombarded with texts and phone calls, Ducharme finally met with his teachers. He got back to work and is now mostly caught up.

“I’m very thankful to have them,” he said. “And having them reach out and say, ‘We care about you. We really want you to succeed in life. We want you to be here.'”

Ducharme said he doesn’t want to miss class now. He knows that if he does slack off, his teachers will hunt him down again.

More Counselors, Summer School And Other Bold Ideas To Help Students Catch Up

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 07:03:27 GMT

It’s been 11 months since schools first shut down across the country and around the world.

And most students in the U.S. are still experiencing disruptions to their learning — going into the classroom only a few days a week or not at all.

To respond to this disruption, education leaders are calling for a reinvention of public education on the order of the Marshall Plan, the massive U.S. initiative to rebuild Western Europe after the devastations of World War II.

It won’t be cheap, they say. The White House has put forward a plan that includes $130 billion in aid for K-12 schools. One estimate puts the full cost of recovery even higher: $12,000 per student over five years, about a 20% increase in spending for large districts.

But those in the education world say it would be more expensive not to fix this.

“The data on the amount of unfinished instruction that students will have from school closures is just so significant, particularly for our most vulnerable students,” argues Allison Socol of the Education Trust, which advocates for academic achievement and equity. “We’re really talking about this as a five- or 10-year plan.”

Education experts, parents and students are thinking about what is going to be necessary to recover — and at the same time the things that are not worth returning to. Here are four key ideas.

1. “Acceleration academies” — aka summer school

For students who have missed significant learning over the past year, there is one opportunity for them to make up some of that lost time.

“We’re talking about summer school,” says Keri Rodrigues, the co-founder of the National Parents Union, one of the groups invited to meet with Biden’s transition team to talk about priorities for children. One of their top asks is extra learning time for students who have fallen behind.

“We’re talking about ending this idea that the school year ends in June this year. It should not,” she told NPR. “If June is when every K-12 educator gets vaccinated, guess what, July 1st is the first day of school.”

Some small, pilot programs that supported student learning this past summer found success, such as the National Summer School Initiative, (which used certified teachers), Springboard Collaborative, (which enlists parents as coaches) and the Oakland REACH (which had staff and volunteers). The White House proposal specifically mentions that K-12 schools would be able to use aid for “summer school or other support for students that will help make up lost learning time this year.”

2. Tutoring

Robert Slavin has investigated many of the potential solutions that are on the table to help students recover learning. He’s the director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University.

“We’ve looked at all different kinds of things,” he says, “summer school, after school, extended day. … And what’s striking is that tutoring gets far bigger impacts than any of those other kinds of interventions.”

But not just any tutoring. Models that have been validated by research include careful training and support for tutors, plus software or other materials; a total of at least 60 sessions, three to five days a week; and groups of no more than four students to a tutor. Most of the evidence backs this kind of tutoring to help readers in elementary school, with some in math as well.

The programs Slavin says are well documented and could be scaled up are : Reading Recovery, Sound Partners, QuickReads, Leveled Literacy Intervention, and the Minnesota Reading and Math Corps.

Most of these programs can be run successfully with trained teaching assistants who aren’t necessarily certified teachers. Slavin likes the idea of creating a federal jobs program for tutors who are recent graduates, potentially an extension of AmeriCorps.

3. Safer and more equitable schools; “Never going to go back to normal”

Making sure every child can read and do math is not the only purpose of school.

After a year that saw a surge in child hunger, a mass racial uprising and an attempted insurrection, parent and student groups said they want schools to become more safe, supportive and just.

This encompasses many things: support for mental health and needed accommodations, strong relationships with caring adults. Biden’s rescue package currently includes funds for hiring more school counselors and for expanding the “community schools” model where schools are set up to connect families with housing help and other social services.

And, students are asking for different content in the classroom. An organization called Student Voice has been holding virtual listening sessions with high school students. Maya Green, 19, has conducted some of the sessions. She said, “A lot of students spoke for the desire for a decolonization of school curricula: speaking to the real and often violent history of America, encouraging empathy in learning and really just celebrating the diverse experiences and diverse identities of students.”

Jenna Yuan, 18 and also with Student Voice, noted that students are living through a tumultuous period in history. “Regardless of whether they return to the school building or they continue to be online,” Yuan says, “their school experience is never going to go back to normal, nor was normal something that worked for all students even before the pandemic. ”

Rodrigues says that, based on her organization’s polling, parents feel the same way: “Every single month since April,” by a 2 to 1 ratio, she says, parents have sent a consistent message: “They’re not interested in putting their kids back in the same status quo.”

4. Invest in a Moon Shot

“Tutoring and summer learning are not magic pixie dust,” cautions Socol, at EdTrust. She says if these endeavors are to work, they need a big commitment. “There is evidence that they work, but … they’re going to need to be at the federal level or state level, with [significant] investments and quality safeguards.”

Speaking of pixie dust, Mark Schneider at the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences thinks the U.S. needs a lot more investment in research and evaluation of what really works in education. Artificial intelligence-based tutoring software and other high-tech ed-tech applications, he says, have disappointing and inconsistent results. “On average, the effect size is zero.” And with all this new federal investment, “What I’m worried about is if we spend five billion dollars on massive tutoring, we’re not setting up an evaluation system–so that we actually start learning which tutoring programs work for, say, black kids in Philadelphia, for Hispanic kids in Brownsville.”

He proposes a federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for education — like DARPA, in the Defense Department, which invests in cutting-edge research for national security. In fact, his office has a grant out right now of up to $3 million for “transformative research in the education sciences.”

Strategies for Retaining Teachers of Color and Making Schools More Equitable

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 09:04:18 GMT

Imagine – just for a moment – going through your entire K-12 experience without seeing a teacher that shares one of your most significant identities. This might be baffling to some, but it’s an everyday reality for many Black and Latinx learners making their way through public school systems. According to the National Center for Education Statistics 2017-18 report, 79% of teachers are white, even as the majority of students attending public schools are children of color. However, research shows schools are missing out on many potential benefits when teachers don’t reflect the ethnic or racial diversity of their students.

“There is a clear body of evidence with Black teachers and Latinx teachers that there is this added value for their capacity to improve learning, to improve social emotional learning, course taking, reducing suspension, taking more rigorous courses,” says Dr. Travis J. Bristol, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

He notes that Black and Latinx teachers’ lived experience uniquely position them to relate to students of color. And it’s not only students of color that benefit from having Black and Latinx educators – research suggests that white students also benefit from teachers of color and those who offer different perspectives.

But Black and Latinx teachers are underrepresented in public schools in most large cities across America. In Boston and Los Angeles, there are 30 percent more students of Latinx descent than there are teachers, according to the Albert Shanker Institute’s major report on the state of teacher diversity. For Black students in Cleveland and New Orleans, that gap is 40 percent.

These numbers aren’t because of a lack of qualified candidates that enter the profession so much as it is about what happens after they enter schools. Black and Latinx teachers are the least likely to stay once they enter the workforce compared to their white colleagues, according to the 2016 State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce by the US Department of Education.

However, schools can develop solutions to better retain these teachers by confronting systemic issues related to why they leave. Bristol’s latest research unlocks effective strategies schools can apply to keep Black and Latinx teachers engaged in their practice and committed to K-12 teaching. The former New York City educator explains that retaining and supporting educators of color can disrupt notions of white supremacy and foster inclusivity. “Now, more than ever, we need people of color standing in front of our children in our classrooms,” he says, and what’s really at stake is creating a supportive environment for teachers and students alike.

A school staffed for success

Bristol says there are different levers to engage in order to retain Black and Latinx educators. One of those levers is teacher preparation programs. Teachers of color in predominantly white teacher certification programs often struggle with feeling like their identity is not reflected in their coursework with curriculums that overlook their experiences and privilege the preparation of white middle-class educators. These conditions often prevent teachers of color from showing up as their full selves, and make them more likely to grow weary or disengaged with K-12 teaching.

Another element of teacher prep programs relates to how they perceive students of color. Students are better supported when teacher prep programs prepare all teachers to engage with Black and Latinx learners by actively challenging deficit perspectives about students of color. Too often, educators are reluctant and even fearful when it comes to talking about race. However, developing school-wide racial and cultural literacy through professional development opportunities can equip them with some level of competency. Even among teacher-to-teacher relationships, a discomfort with race often leads to “typecasting” teachers of color as solely responsible for caring for, disciplining or supporting students of color and creating a disproportionate burden that also contributes to leaving the profession.

And the pandemic has only exacerbated the pressures teachers of color are experiencing because Black and Latinx people have been harmed by coronavirus at higher rates than other groups. “The burden is both the weight of experiencing this virus in ways that their white colleagues may not, then also having to worry about that for their own students,” Bristol says.

It has become increasingly important that when Black and Latinx teachers choose to teach in lower performing schools, which usually serve predominantly Black and Latinx children, school leaders need to make sure there are additional investments in services such as social workers, counselors and school nurses to support teachers and keep them from burning out. Additionally, there needs to be a feedback mechanism to keep administrators informed about any necessary changes they may need to make to positively shape school working conditions.

While many schools are rushing to reopen, Bristol advises that districts must make sure to attend to the mental and emotional supports that all teachers – especially teachers of color – need in order to teach. That includes taking time before school reopens to provide professional learning opportunities that prepare teachers to help students make sense of the pandemic. “Before we bring children back, we have to bring teachers back,” he says.

Thought partnership and affinity groups

Teaching has never been an easy or straightforward profession. With the added nuance of being a teacher of color who is already underrepresented in the profession, it’s no surprise that having a support network can provide serious relief. Even though each classroom poses dynamically different challenges, gathering with a workplace affinity group where members share a key identity offers community and comfort. Within the intimate confines of an affinity group, educators can address challenges, engage in honest dialogue and cultivate critical thought-partnership with colleagues and trained facilitators.

Bristol also says affinity groups should be part of professional development requirements and participants should be compensated for attending. “Too often, we place extra responsibilities on people of color, and this can’t be something extra.”

Although teachers can feel isolated at their schools, Bristol notes that most struggles that teachers deal with are not unique. Instead, there are patterns that are present in all types of schools, such as having to advocate for professional needs, communicating to colleagues about the ways in which their behaviors compound the added burden of being a teacher of color or creating necessary boundaries to sustain one’s teaching practice.

Africa’s Hit Science Show For Kids Is Coming To The U.S.

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 17:37:03 GMT

Lorraine Ololia is 10. She lives in Kampala, Uganda. And she recently came up with a new career goal.

A TV show about science, produced by teachers from her junior high school, has inspired her. She’s watched an episode on computer programming, another where two young explorers visit her country’s Lake Victoria to talk about wetlands and learned how to make a model of a digestive tract at home using bowls, crackers, water, food coloring, bananas and oranges.

She’s even appeared on the show, making and launching a rocket with her friend Samantha.

And now she wants to pursue a career in science.

“It’s boys who do all the fun stuff and sometimes a girl like me gets a little left out,” she says. “But girls can be scientists and go to the moon.”

The show is called N*Gen (pronounced “engine), or Next Generation Television.

N*Gen first aired on Ugandan TV in September — and since then, the show, which features a dozen 35-minute episodes, has been picked up by TV networks in more than half a dozen African countries.

On Feb. 6, it will debut in North America and the Caribbean on The Africa Channel, airing every Saturday and Sunday at 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. ET.

N*Gen is the brainchild of six teachers from Clarke Junior School in Kampala and East African nonprofit Peripheral Vision International, which funds and produces it.

“Choosing a science focus for N*Gen is an absolute necessity because not only is it a neglected area, it is considered one of the hard subjects [for many students],” says Joy Kiano, a teacher who has a Ph.D. in both biochemistry and molecular biology and is a consultant with Peripheral Vision International.

The show, targeting children ages 8 to 12, looks at science through an African lens. Weekly episodes are filmed in a studio in Kampala and sometimes on location (visiting a chocolate factory for an episode about food, for example).

Kiano says it was important to feature African women in science. Some male teachers appear but guest scientists are mainly female. And the two main presenters, Irene Nyangoma Mugadu and Annah Komushana, are women as well: Ugandan teachers from Clarke Junior School in Kampala.

“Society expects little from girls and women,” says Mugadu. “Girls need to be empowered to reach their full potential academically and explore disciplines that are mainly pursued by boys.”

A team of teachers and producers in Uganda as well as Nigeria and Kenya – where some segments are also filmed – brainstorm ideas for episodes. For many of them, it was their first time working in TV.

The goal is to “tackle topics which are all around us” but may be unfamiliar to the audience, says Komushana. “It has also given them a chance to explore and carry out different experiments.”

Episode subjects range from astrophysics to biology to the natural sciences. Presenters give short lessons on topics such as bees, robots, sounds, water and paleontology. They conduct science experiments – how to make a model of an X-ray of their hand using paper and flour, for example. The instructions: Sprinkle flour over the hand on a black piece of paper to create an outline, then place 27 sticks on the paper to represent the 27 bones in the hand.

For a segment called “The Africa Teacher Challenge,” teachers send in video clips of their science lessons. In one, a teacher from Tanzania gives a lesson on eating insects as a delicacy across Africa. “You may think it’s strange to eat worms, but worms and insects in general are a staple for many people and they are very nutritious,” says Seamê Rampling Ongala from Dar es Salaam. “They contain more protein than meat and a rich source of minerals such as iron and calcium.”

Educators have praised the show for prominently featuring women. Christine Kathurima, principal of Nova Pioneer Schools, an independent school network spanning preschool to secondary grades in Kenya and South Africa, describes N*Gen as “absolutely ground-breaking in the quality and the African female presenters.” She is not affiliated with the show.

“I absolutely love seeing women presenters,” she adds. “When I watched the show I realized that many of the educational videos that we use do not intentionally seek female hosts. Kids’ singing shows and storytelling shows have a good amount of representation across the board, however when it comes to science this is a first for me.”

The show’s focus on African perspectives, locations and scientific discoveries has also impressed broadcasters, who say it’s unlike any other science show that’s appeared on African TV.

“Most often we broadcast foreign content from Western countries. However, we hope more African productions will be made for African broadcasters,” says Kalumbu Lumpa, a content acquisition manager from Zambian TV network ZNBC.

Jeff Schon, CEO and co-founder of Akili Kids!, a children’s learning channel based in Kenya, said the network had been screening programs such as U.S. program SciGirls, which showcases STEM-related content.

“[It is] a lovely program, but it’s certainly not shot here,” he says. “It is in some cases dealing with subjects that are not going to resonate here.” SciGirls, he says, had a segment on shoes designed for safely walking on Minnesota’s icy winter streets, for example.

N*Gen, on the other hand, puts the spotlight on Africa. “I enjoyed a recent episode we broadcast, titled ‘Bones,’ that had a segment on [the fossil] Turkana Boy whose bones are housed at the Kenya National Museum,” he says. “The segment featured a paleontologist from the museum and the program did a great job of presenting him as a role model and inspiration for future generations of scientists.”

Schon is proud to share that in Kenya, where it’s been broadcast twice on weekends since Oct. 10, each episode is watched on average by 658,000 children under 14 and 642,000 adults.

The cast and producers began scripting a second N*Gen series in January with a focus on climate change-related issues. And they plan to keep filming even if the pandemic keeps kids out of the classroom.

Freelance journalist Amy Fallon has reported from Africa, Asia, Australia and the United Kingdom. She is on Twitter @amyfallon

Teachers Union Head: Examples Of Success And Trust Key To Reopening Schools

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 17:24:19 GMT

President Biden wants most K-8 schools to be ready to go back to in-person learning by the end of April. The problem is teachers and administrators don’t agree on how to do it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week made its case for in-person learning, arguing that data from K-12 schools that took precautions — like wearing masks, social distancing and ventilating rooms — show little evidence that in-person classes contributed meaningfully to the spread of COVID-19.

But some teachers – like those in big cities, where school districts have been closed to most in-person learning for months – have been among those pushing back against plans to return to classrooms.

In Chicago, for example, the school district and teachers are in a standoff over how to reopen schools for the 70,000 elementary school students the district says it plans to bring back. The sticking points, according to WBEZ, include finding a public health metric that would trigger a return to all-remote learning.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tells NPR’s Morning Edition that for teachers, it’s not a matter of simply preferring to stay home. It’s a safety issue, and they feel safer staying home, she says.

Many teachers are scared of contracting and spreading the virus. Not all places have prioritized teachers for vaccinations, although some local governments, including Ohio, have offered teachers vaccine priority. Some groups, like the Virginia Education Association, are pushing to get teachers fully vaccinated before returning to classrooms.

But on Wednesday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, citing the agency’s data released last week, told reporters that vaccinations should not be a “prerequisite for safe reopening.”

Weingarten says teachers want to be involved in the process of reopening, and they want the resources — to, for example, test, trace and isolate new cases — to ensure it can happen safely. But they’re scared, she says, and some of those fears are based on what she calls “misinformation” about the virus. She says getting teachers comfortable with heading back to schools will rely not just on the science, but also on rebuilding trust between teachers and local governments.

“New York has done that. We’re starting to have phased reopenings in Boston,” she says. “We have to have examples that can be lifted up because, frankly, people need to trust that elected officials are going to have their best interest in mind.”

Interview highlights

Is the problem that teachers don’t trust the science behind safe in-person school?

It’s not a matter of not trusting the science. It’s a matter of, there’s been so much disinformation, people don’t know who to trust. And so part of what’s vital here is to make sure that educators are involved in this process, as well as [given] the resources to make it happen.

Should all teachers be required to get vaccinated?

I think that all teachers who want to get vaccinated should be able to get vaccinated as quickly as possible. I think that that creates another layer of protection.

…

I’m a big believer that 100% of people should get vaccinated. I think that science suggests that. But given the country that we’re in right now, and given the level of distrust about vaccines, we have a lot more work to do about vaccine hesitancy before you can even address that question.

There’s wide consensus that a lot of kids are falling behind academically but the emotional psychological toll on kids has been huge. The CDC found that from April to October 2020, hospitals across the country saw a 24% increase in the proportion of mental health emergency visits for kids ages 5 to 11. How do you, as a leader of this union, measure the actual pain and suffering of the kids against the potential pain and suffering of the teachers?

There’s fear and pain everywhere, and frankly, the lion’s share of teachers are parents as well. For educators, they understand what’s going on with our kids. They’re scared for our kids, they’re scared for themselves. And that’s why we’re working double and triple time, and have been for months, to get the resources, to get the safeguards and to get a consistent message from government about what is needed.

React Calmly, Listen, Offer Hope: How To Help A Child At Risk Of Suicide

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 07:42:53 GMT

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (en español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

It was over a decade ago when Regina Crider‘s daughter first attempted suicide at age 10.

“As a mom, the thought of losing your child to suicide is overwhelming,” says Crider, who is the founder and executive director of Youth and Family Alliance, a support group for families of youth with mental illness in Rantoul, Ill.

Crider was upset and confused and felt that she had failed as a mother.

“I felt like maybe I missed the signs,” she says. “Because I work with families, why didn’t I see it?”

Her daughter survived the attempt, but the fear of losing her kicked Crider into action. “I needed to understand why and what I could do [to help her],” she says, “because I didn’t want to come home to her gone.”

That started her years-long journey into figuring out how best to help her daughter with her mental health struggles — a journey that hasn’t ended for the family but has gotten easier over time.

As the coronavirus pandemic has worsened the mental health of kids, more families are dealing with their children feeling anxious and depressed and thinking about and even attempting suicide. But mental health professionals say that suicide is preventable and that parents and family members can play an important role.

It’s hard work that requires parents to listen to their children, acknowledge their struggles and help them find a way out of their darkness. And in the long run, it calls for creating a home environment where kids feel safe sharing their emotional lives and where families solve problems together.

Here are some specific things that parents or a family member can do to help.

1. Get support for yourself

This could be a long and difficult journey, so parents need to have emotional support themselves, Crider says.

“If it’s a friend’s house that maybe they can go to if they need to have a meltdown, to release all of that,” says Crider. “They need to be able to talk about this, even if it’s going to therapy.”

When she was dealing with her daughter’s suicidal behavior, Crider says she found support in her sister and her staff.

Reann, a mother of two kids in Illinois, sought therapy for herself so she could better help her daughter when she started to struggle with anxiety and self-harm last year. (NPR is using only her middle name to protect her and her daughter’s privacy.)

“Definitely seeing a therapist really helped process just the pandemic anxiety in general,” she says. “And then [it] gave me a way to feel like I wasn’t screwing everything up with what was going on with my daughter.”

Opening up about what’s going on is the key to finding resources to help your child, says Dr. Richard Martini, a child psychiatrist at the University of Utah. “Parents need to feel comfortable reaching out.”

Crider says peer counseling groups like her own are also a good source of support and education for parents.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness is a good place to find support groups in your community or region. The American Association of Suicidology also has a directory of support groups. And Suicide Awareness Voices of Education has a guide on how parents can be partners for their kids.

2. When a child shares they’re in crisis, react calmly and be accepting

It can be hard for a parent to understand why their child is considering suicide — even so, parents need to resist reacting with shock or skepticism.

“As a parent, the first thing you think about is ‘you have a place to stay, you have food, you have clothing, we love you,’ ” says Crider. “What could possibly be the issue?”

But someone who is feeling suicidal or depressed is already overwhelmed and may be unable to see a way out of their pain and problems.

Instead of getting upset, parents should respond calmly and “put their game face on,” says Megan Hilton, a senior at Ithaca College, who has struggled with depression and anxiety and is a survivor of suicide attempts.

“When I’ve come to my parents, their reactions have been way over the top,” says Hilton. “And I’ve felt like I’m responsible for their emotions now. It just adds a lot more pressure to things.”

Hilton attributes a great deal of her recovery to her older sister’s support, precisely because she was not phased when Hilton was in moments of crisis.

Parents should also “really try to listen to what your kid is saying,” says Hilton.

When she first told her father she was depressed, Hilton remembers him telling her to “buck up, wipe it off, you’re fine.”

“To somebody who’s genuinely depressed, [who] is really not able to get it together, it is a very difficult thing to hear from a parent,” says Dr. Vera Feuer, a child psychiatrist at Northwell Health in New York.

Children who are struggling need their parents to tell them “that the feelings are valid and that these struggles are real,” she says.

One way to do that is by asking more questions. “Parents should ask, ‘Tell me more. What is it that you’re having a hard time with?’ ” suggests Feuer.

If they aren’t comfortable sharing with you, Feuer suggests you ask if there’s someone else whom they’d rather talk to, like another relative, a teacher or a school counselor.

3. Help problem-solve and find reasons to hope

If your child confides in you about their struggles, offer them hope and reassurance, says Feuer.

As psychologist Ursula Whiteside told NPR, some useful things to say are: “I know how strong you are. I’ve seen you get through hard things. I think we can get through this together.”

Feuer says it’s important for your child to know that you think there are solutions to whatever they are grappling with. She suggests using language like: “We’ll go and get whatever help you need so that you can feel better and you can be your best.”

Hilton cautions that not everyone needs the same thing when they’re feeling down.

“A lot of times, people try to comfort or fix things the way that they would want it,” she says. “Like if you’re feeling really depressed and isolated, some people might be like, ‘Well, what gets me out of a depression is to go exercise and go for a run.’ And it might not be someone’s thing.”

So, she suggests, ask them what they need and support them in getting that help.

4. Teach them a vocabulary for sharing their feelings — and model sharing your own

Kids who are struggling emotionally need help identifying their emotions and what’s causing them.

This is “where you begin to do the work and start to heal around things,” says Hilton.

“When I was younger, I would just get so stuck on the initial ‘I feel so awful’ or ‘I’m feeling this immense emotion right now,’ ” she says. “And I couldn’t get what’s behind it. What is causing this?”

She says that this ambiguity used to make her feel helpless. But in therapy, she learned the vocabulary to identify her specific emotions, like anger or sadness, and explore what was causing them.

“The more you do it, the better that you get,” she says.

And parents can lead by example, says Feuer, “by labeling and discussing our own feelings and our own struggles and really modeling for our kids how we talk about [emotions], how we cope in healthy ways.”

This is especially important during the pandemic.

“It’s OK for you to sit down with your kids and say, ‘This is a very stressful time. We’re all going through something. But we’re a family. We love each other,’ ” suggests Crider. “We encourage there to be open communication.”

Having conversations like these can help kids feel safe about opening up.

“It’s the feeling of acceptance, it’s the feeling of being supportive, it’s the feeling of being heard, it’s the feeling of ‘our family is working together,’ ” says Crider.

And that family connection alone can buffer your child against stress, which is particularly important right now.

5. Seek professional help, starting with your pediatrician

Navigating the mental health care system can be daunting, especially if you have never done it before.

If you need immediate support for a child’s crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can talk to a trained counselor about your child’s symptoms and be connected with local resources.

Another good place to start is your pediatrician’s office, says Dr. Sandy Chung, the medical director of the Virginia Mental Health Access Program, which trains and supports pediatricians to provide mental health care.

There are similar programs in more than 30 states around the United States. So your pediatrician may be able to treat your child themselves or at least refer you to the right person.

“It may be going to the emergency room if your child is in crisis,” says Chung. “It may be referring to a child psychiatrist, if there’s one in your area. … So your pediatrician will know what to do.”

You can also look for a therapist yourself using the online directory at Psychology Today, suggests Reann. That’s how she found a therapist for her daughter last year.

6. Educate yourself and stay involved in your child’s treatment

A parent’s job doesn’t end with finding their child a therapist; they have to stay involved in that process, inform themselves along the way and advocate for their child.

When Crider’s daughter was 14, she was diagnosed with autism and severe anxiety.

Once they had the diagnosis, Crider learned more about autism and how it was affecting her daughter’s emotional and social life. She finally understood why school had been such a source of stress and anxiety for the girl, who she says “had a hard time socializing with peers.”

What also helped Crider’s own education was going to therapy with her.

“We saw the same therapist,” she says. “The therapist would talk with her, then she would talk to me and then she would share with me what was appropriate in therapy, how to support [her].”

Along the way, she learned about her daughter’s triggers — her main one was school — and she was able to better advocate for her.

“I really began to work more closely with the school to help her to feel like she can come to the school and be in a safe space, not being judged or [criticized] by students or teachers,” says Crider.

It’s important to find a therapist willing to work with the parents, says Reann. Her daughter’s therapist spends some time at the end of each session explaining to Reann what her daughter is struggling with and gives Reann tips on how she can best support her daughter.

7. Remove dangers from the home environment

Suicidal thoughts can span a range of severity. Occasional passing thoughts are common and don’t necessarily pose an immediate risk to life. But more persistent thoughts that lead to someone making a plan and thinking about means puts that person at higher risk.

(Find more advice on how to assess your loved one’s risk level in this story. And if you’re worried your child is at high risk, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for help.)

If your child has a specific suicide plan, prioritize removing the means from your home, say suicide prevention experts. It is one of the easiest and most well-proven ways to prevent suicide.

“A lot of the time, thoughts about suicide or ending one’s life come as a wave,” says Feuer. “And then if you have nothing to hurt yourself with, the wave passes and you feel better.”

Guns and other weapons at home should be removed or safely stored, she says. And “medications — over the counter and prescription — should be out of reach and locked up.”

And you don’t need to do this discreetly, she says. Talk openly with your child about what you’re doing and why.

You can tell them, ” ‘We’re doing all of these things because for the time being, you’re really struggling and we understand that it’s hard,’ ” says Feuer. “Adolescents really respond well to honestly discussing with them what’s happening.”

8. Learn the early warning signs of a crisis

Look for sudden changes in behavior and mood, and listen for language that suggests they’re thinking about killing themselves.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, behavior changes such as withdrawing from social activities, sleeping too much or too little, and drug use are among signs to watch for. (See the AFSP’s full list here.) Watch for irritability or anger. They are signs of depression too.

Also pay attention to how they’re doing at school, suggests Martini, the University of Utah child psychiatrist.

“Most kids want to do reasonably well in school,” he says. “I think particularly when they fall far behind, then they can easily get into feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.”

Crider says that over the years, she and her daughter have learned to recognize the earliest signs of trouble bubbling up before it becomes a crisis — what she describes as “the rumbling stage.”

“I can say during that time, ‘Are you using your coping skills? Can we identify what’s stressing you, what’s challenging you?’ ”

Her daughter’s coping skills include writing, singing, listening to music and going for walks. Those things “calm her down, bring her joy, take her away from whatever negative space she’s in,” says Crider.

9. Make room for family fun time

Helping kids with mental health struggles doesn’t have to be all serious. It’s just as important to make time regularly to have fun as a family, especially during stressful times like right now, say parents and mental health experts.

Whether it’s watching a movie, cooking or baking together, going for a hike or doing any other activity, family fun times are good for several reasons, says Dr. Susan Duffy, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Brown University.

First of all, having fun together helps everyone destress, which, at a time like this pandemic, helps everybody.

And “it’s allowing a positive interaction between a kid and a parent, instead of arguing over schoolwork,” says Duffy. “It’s reinforcing a bond between a parent and a child, which right now is more important than actually completing a lesson.”

Reann says her family started doing regular gymnastics nights during the pandemic. “We would do movement challenges, like who can do the longest handstand or silly walks,” she says. “Something fun, something totally ridiculous. It gave them something to look forward to.”

These activities also create natural opportunities to talk.

“A lot of the reason that we’re seeing an increased number of kids with suicidal ideations, it’s a symptom of underlying anxiety and depression and hopelessness,” says Duffy. “So by having conversations that are about something else, that leads to further conversation about ‘What are the stressors? What’s bothering you? What’s going on in your life?’ ”

It can help parents gain more insight into their child’s life and mind and also do something we mentioned earlier — create a safe space for kids to share their struggles.

Christine Herman of member station WILL contributed to this report.

Child Psychiatrists Warn That The Pandemic May Be Driving Up Kids’ Suicide Risk

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 07:23:53 GMT

For ways to help kids at risk, read Part 2 of this story.

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.

“That was the most we could do because of COVID,” she says.

Anthony graduated with honors as he had planned to, wearing a white robe and cap and an advanced honors sash, says Pamela. But he decided against going to college.

“Right now … it’s all online, and you just lose the whole college experience,” she says.

Instead, he got a job working in construction. His parents thought he was doing fine. “He seemed happy to us,” says Pamela. “He seemed happy.”

But in August of last year, Anthony died by suicide.

While Pamela and her husband, Marc, struggle to come to terms with their loss, his school district in Las Vegas is trying to come to grips with the troubling statistic his death is part of.

He was one of 19 students who has died by suicide in the district since the shutdown last March. Thirteen of those deaths occurred since July.

“There’s a sense of urgency,” says Jesus Jara, the superintendent of the Clark County School District. “You know, we have a problem.”

Suicide is complex, involving layers of risk factors, including biological and environmental ones. And it’s hard to know the exact factors involved in the deaths of these 19 students.

But the sudden rise in deaths has school district officials worried that the coronavirus pandemic may have played a role. And educators and mental health care providers in other parts of the United States have the same concern.

In recent months, many suicidal children have been showing up in hospital emergency departments, and more kids are needing in-patient care after serious suicide attempts.

“Across the country, we’re hearing that there are increased numbers of serious suicidal attempts and suicidal deaths,” says Dr. Susan Duffy, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Brown University.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between April and October 2020, hospital emergency departments saw a rise in the share of total visits that were from kids for mental health needs.

Now, there are no nationwide numbers on suicide deaths in 2020 yet, and researchers have yet to clearly link recent suicides to the pandemic. Yet on the ground, there’s growing concern.

NPR spoke with providers at hospitals in seven states across the country, and all of them reported a similar trend: More suicidal children are coming to their hospitals — in worse mental states.

“The kids that we are seeing now in the emergency department are really at the stage of maybe even having tried or attempted or have a detailed plan,” says Dr. Vera Feuer, director of pediatric emergency psychiatry at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of Northwell Health in New York. “And we’re admitting to the hospital more kids than usual because of how unwell they are.”

She has seen a slight increase in 10-to-11-year-olds attempting, but the majority of kids she sees are teenagers.

Other places are seeing a rise in 2020 numbers compared with 2019 as well.

The number of kids with suicide attempts coming to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital Oakland, in California, in the fall of 2020 was double the number in the fall of 2019, says Marisol Cruz Romero, a psychologist and the coordinator for the hospital’s behavioral emergency response team.

At Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, the number of children and teens hospitalized after suicide attempts went up from 67 in 2019 to 108 in 2020. And October 2020 saw a 250% increase in these numbers over the previous October, says Hillary Blake, a pediatric psychologist at the hospital.

Psychiatrists and other doctors who work with children say the pandemic has created a perfect storm of stressors for kids, increasing the risk of suicide for many. It has exacerbated an ongoing children’s mental health crisis — suicide rates had already been going up for almost a decade among children and youth.

The problems brought on by the pandemic, they say, only highlight the weaknesses in the mental health safety net for children — and point to an urgent need for new solutions.

“The stories that we hear day by day in the emergency department really speak to us about the level of difficulties, the layers of traumas and the real problems that families are facing,” says Feuer.

Suicide can be prevented, and family members can play a role in keeping kids well. For ways to help kids at risk, read Part 2 of this story.

Loss of critical in-person support services

Many young people, like Anthony Orr, have no diagnosis or known history of mental illness when they start struggling with thoughts of suicide.

But the children who are most vulnerable right now, says Duffy, are the ones with underlying physical or mental illness, because the pandemic has disrupted in-person services they relied on in communities and at school.

“They have difficulties with their mood or difficulties with learning or socialization or medical issues,” says Feuer. “And now you have other layers of difficulties on top of that. These are the kids we see in real hopeless moments.”

Before the pandemic, many of these children were “relatively stable in the community with outpatient resources,” says Duffy.

For example, Duffy saw a 13-year-old in her ER recently who had underlying anxiety and depression. The at-home and in-school services she relied on had been suspended.

Without those supports, her mental health worsened and she started to fall behind at school, says Duffy. The girl turned to self-harm and eventually attempted suicide.

“It was her [older] teenage sister who found her in the bathroom and who called their mother, who had to leave work,” says Duffy.

Feuer recalls seeing a 14-year-old last fall who began to struggle at school after developing a medical issue that hadn’t been properly diagnosed because of pandemic-related delays in care. He was in constant pain and couldn’t focus on schoolwork, she says.

On top of that, the pandemic had taken away his access to sports, “which was his world and life,” says Feuer. “And then he looks at you and says, ‘What’s the point? What do I have to look forward to? You tell me, what do I have to be hopeful about?’ ”

Falling off the radar

Another layer of risk right now is that virtual schooling has made it much harder for teachers and school counselors to identify and help students who are struggling.

Colleen Neely is a counselor at Shadow Ridge High School in Las Vegas. Neely lost one of her favorite students to suicide last May, just two weeks before graduation. (Joe Buglewicz for NPR)

When Nevada shut down last March and the Clark County School District switched to virtual learning, Colleen Neely, a counselor at Shadow Ridge High School, on the outskirts of Las Vegas, tried her best to stay connected with her students by email.

But it wasn’t as easy as being in the school together, she says.

“There are just extra barriers,” says Neely. “We’re not there just in passing, or they can’t go to their teacher and be like, ‘Hey, I want to see my counselor.’ They can’t stop in at lunch. They have to make that effort with an email or clicking on a computer to make an appointment.”

In May, Neely’s supervisor called her to give her the news that one of her favorite students had died.

“He was a smart … shy kind of kid,” says Neely. “Very kind, polite and respectful.”

She was used to seeing him every day as he would stop by her office to check in. She says he had been homeless for a while and had some emotional struggles too. The school had eventually found him a family to live with.

And he’d been doing really well when the school switched to virtual learning, says Neely.

“He was passing all of his classes, going to earn the highest-level diploma that we offer at our school. So he was in a really good place,” she says.

She was devastated to hear that he’d taken his own life.

“I’d just sent him an email, telling him how proud I was of him,” Neely says. “And that he was almost there. And the next phase of his life was going to start.”

Neely doesn’t know the exact circumstances that led to his death. But she knew he was at risk because of his past struggles. And she wonders if someone could have helped him if the pandemic hadn’t upended everything.

“Part of me will always question, if we had been in the building — and if he had been able to just see another adult, his friends, possibly talk to me — if things would have been different.”

Social isolation

Losing the in-person interactions of life at school is itself a big risk factor.

“The vast majority of my patients want to go back to school, miss the social contacts, miss the life that they have,” says Dr. Richard Martini, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Utah. “I mean, these kids really do have a separate life in school that’s important to them.”

It’s among the reasons that the American Academy of Pediatrics is encouraging school districts to aim to bring back students into classrooms safely.

“There’s a level of social isolation for these kids … that they have not experienced before,” Martini adds.

That isolation isn’t just because schools are closed but also because the pandemic has restricted people’s social lives. And that has a big impact, especially for kids in communities where extended family networks matter a lot, like in Oakland, where Romero, of Children’s Hospital, works.

“Many of our patients that do have a mental health history, they really depend on extended family to be able to support them,” she says. “And that’s been really challenging lately.”

And social isolation is “one of the highest risk factors,” for suicide, she says.

New kinds of stress at home

Amid the upheaval of the pandemic, the home environment has become unstable for many kids, says Martini, pointing to job and income loss as major stressors.

Especially vulnerable are kids from families hit hardest by the pandemic among communities of color.

“Either they had the virus, they lost people to the virus or they’re impacted because they are a minority and their community … [has suffered] losses over losses,” says Feuer.

Dr. Warren Ng, a child psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center, says one of his patients, a boy, told him he wanted to die after watching his father die from COVID-19.

Romero also recalls suicidal kids she has seen recently who have lost family members to the virus or have parents who are currently sick and hospitalized.

“Families who have lost family members, parents who have lost jobs, kids who have lost contact with people who are close to them, children who have experienced some significant challenges at school,” says Martini. “All of these experiences are fairly traumatic.”

A child faced with these layers of difficulties can easily start to feel overwhelmed, he says.

“They may also be in a position where they feel they can’t talk to anybody, even their parents,” he says. “And as the number of solutions for that situation dwindle, they may begin to think that I’d rather be dead than sort through this.”

Especially when there is so much uncertainty around when the pandemic will end.

“I think it’s the coupling of those things that are pretty daunting for a lot of our youth,” says Dr. Nasuh Malas, a psychiatrist and pediatrician at the University of Michigan. “I mean, these are kids, right?”

Suicide can be prevented, and family members can play a role in keeping kids well. For ways to help kids at risk, read Part 2 of this story.

Thinking about prevention

In Clark County, the school district is grappling with what it can do to prevent more suicides. Last July, it started using a software that alerts staff when it identifies at-risk students by monitoring their online activity. The staff then contact parents and offer support.

“We’re trying to find kids that are just the ‘silent screamers,’ ” says Jesus Jara, the district superintendent.

After an abrupt spike in suicide deaths among students, officials at the Clark County School District held a series of listening sessions and are looking for ways to bring the most vulnerable students back for some in-person support. (Joe Buglewicz for NPR)

In October, the district hosted a series of listening sessions with parents and other stakeholders to try to understand what’s going on with student mental health and how to help. Based on the feedback it received, it is in the process of bringing some kids back to in-person school in small groups for academic and social and emotional support.

Nearly six months since their son died, Marc and Pamela Orr are still struggling to cope with their trauma and grief.

“Sleep is elusive,” says Pamela. “Any time can be a hard time. I mean, I can be in the grocery store, and I see his favorite breakfast cereal, and I just have to stop what I’m doing and just leave because anything, everything can be a trigger for the intense sadness.”

To cope, she and her husband go on long walks every day. They are also seeing a therapist for the first time and talking to other parents of youth who died by suicide. And in the process, they find themselves asking questions about suicide and mental health that they’d never asked before.

For example, why don’t schools and workplaces talk more openly about mental health and suicide?

“At work, we have all these tools — hard hats, gloves and glasses” to safely work with electricity, says Marc, who’s a crew foreman for NV Energy. “We have nothing for mental health. … It’s not talked about. Everybody turns a blind eye to it because it’s taboo, it’s icky.”

He also wonders why schools don’t have mental wellness checks for students. “They get well-checks, you know,” he says. “Insurance pays for a well-check. But there’s not any mental [health] screening that’s done or emotional screening.”

A crisis, but also an opportunity

The rise in mental health problems among children should spur the country to fix its mental health care system, argues Dr. Jennifer Havens, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at New York University.

“Crisis is often an opportunity,” she says.

To start, the U.S. should provide routine mental health checks for kids from a young age and their families, she says: “It should be just part of what we do to keep people well.”

Hospitals and behavioral health care providers are already required to do depression screenings for adolescents, she says; schools should also be doing these screenings.

“We have to be able to identify the kids … particularly for getting kids who are in early stages before they’re really sick, and help them,” says Havens. “You don’t have to wait until kids try to kill themselves.”

And mental health care providers can help teachers learn to spot the early signs of problems, says Martini.

The solutions aren’t just at schools. We also need better access to mental health care services for kids, says Martini.

“There is an incredible backlog in getting children mental health services,” he says. “If I had all the money in the world, I think what I would do is really invest in a broad scope of services for teenagers and children.”

Those services would include day treatment programs that are less intense than in-patient units and can diagnose a child’s problems. He would also expand access to telepsychiatry and create more programs that send mental health care workers into people’s homes.

But the biggest roadblock in making all this a reality is a lack of parity in insurance coverage for mental and physical health, says Havens.

“There are a lot of preventive interventions that are effective,” she says. “But the way the [mental health care] system is set up, we can’t actually get paid to do that.”

Ultimately, the country needs to invest in kids’ mental health, she adds. But, “there’s no magic bullet here,” she says. “We need to have a robust [mental health] care system … and insurance companies need to pay for it.”

Fair and Factual: How to Navigate Important Political Discussions with Students

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:38:15 GMT

This story about political neutrality was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Samantha Palu, a high school government teacher in South Dakota, came to school on Jan. 7, 2021, armed with a plan to talk to all of her classes about the attack on the U.S. Capitol the previous day. When she started at the school in August, she was told not to say anything “political” in class — a difficult mandate for an educator whose job it is to teach about politics.

But for Palu, not addressing the Capitol violence would have been a dereliction of her duty as an educator. “I just knew that I couldn’t stay silent, because that would just add to the problem,” she said. “This stopped being Republicans versus Democrats. These were domestic terrorists that did this and that’s what I told my students.”

During the discussion, a student walked out of her class. The school’s administration later received a phone call from the student’s family expressing concern that Palu was advancing a “political agenda,” she said. Palu’s principal backed her up, but she worries about backlash when she tackles controversial topics in the future.

Across the country, teachers like Palu have grappled with how — and whether — to discuss the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and other seismic events with their students. While some districts instructed teachers to address the insurrection in class, others did not provide any guidance at all or asked that their educators remain silent on the issue, teachers said.

There is a longstanding principle that public school teachers, as representatives of the state, must not attempt to influence their students’ political beliefs, according to Wayne Journell, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While that basic stance is relatively uncontroversial, he said, it has gradually morphed into a belief that teachers should be apolitical and refrain from sharing their personal views with students.

This has contributed to school and district policies requiring teachers to remain politically neutral in the classroom. Educators often hear cautionary tales in the media of colleagues who were disciplined for being “too political.” Parents, meanwhile, are increasingly pushing back when they hear of teachers discussing current events with students.

As a result, teachers are sometimes reluctant to discuss any controversial topics at all — especially in the current climate when the legitimacy of science and facts has been called into question.

Political neutrality “is really difficult to navigate, because it seems like as a country, we can’t even agree on some of the basic facts,” said Isabel Morales, a high school social studies teacher in Los Angeles. “One of my colleagues said, ‘I never thought that saying that we have to count the votes would be considered partisan or that I’m indoctrinating students.’”

Yet experts say that it’s impossible to remove politics from the classroom because teaching itself is a political act. “Education itself is political — who chooses the textbooks, who funds schools, how schools are funded,” said Alyssa Dunn, an education professor at Michigan State University. “So to say that curriculum has to be apolitical is a misunderstanding of the fact that education is a political space to begin with.”

Studies, meanwhile, show that teachers disclosing their beliefs has little influence on a student’s own political views. “It’s not synonymous with indoctrination,” Dunn said. “You’re not requiring students to share your belief, you’re just sharing yours with them.”

In his research, Journell found that students don’t care where their teachers stand politically as long as they feel like they aren’t being pressured to think a certain way. “They actually like knowing where their teachers stand,” he said. “It’s the district administrators and parents who cause the problems.”

In fact, teachers disclosing their beliefs can help students learn to think critically, Journell said. Being introduced early on to the idea that adults have individual viewpoints helps young people understand the concept of bias and better distinguish between fact and opinion, he said. But while teachers should share their own views, they should never tell students how they or their family members should vote. “Teachers should help students understand what they believe and why they believe it,” he said.

Yet many teachers say they feel uncomfortable simply discussing topics that might be perceived as political. In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey, 86 percent of teachers reported that they did not talk about former President Trump’s claims of voter fraud with students. Most said they didn’t because it was outside their discipline, but 18 percent said that the topic could lead to parent complaints and 14 percent said that they feared being accused of indoctrinating students.

While there hasn’t been any systematic study of how many teachers have lost their jobs because they expressed their political opinions in the classroom, educators sometimes have an outsized view of how often such discipline occurs because of the incidents that garner public attention, said Dunn. “All we see are the major stories that make the news, not the many hundreds of thousands of teachers who engage in issues of justice in their classrooms every day,” she said.

Last fall, for example, an English teacher in Texas made headlines after being placed on paid leave because she had Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ posters on the walls of her virtual classroom. The teacher was reinstated but then declined to return to her classroom and instead called for the introduction of explicit anti-racist policies in the district.

Teachers who do not feel they have the support of their administration, or hold political beliefs at odds with the prevailing views in their community, tend to feel less inclined to talk frankly with students about current events and other issues, say teachers and experts. Educators teaching remotely during the pandemic may also be more reluctant to engage in controversial topics because parents are often present for virtual instruction.

Teachers in schools with a progressive curriculum backed up by state standards about what students should learn, and those with the support of a strong teachers’ union, are often more comfortable having these conversations, according to educators and experts.

Mark Gomez, a history and social studies curriculum specialist for the Salinas Union High School District, works in Monterey, a predominantly blue county in California. He said that liberal and conservative educators alike feel they are silenced by notions of political neutrality. “I’ve had teachers express how they feel like they’ve been targeted and called out for having unpopular conservative views in our school spaces,” he said.

His district, which is majority Latino, has adopted a social studies curriculum that includes ethnic studies and critical race theory. But even though talking about race is built into the curriculum, teachers still sometimes get mixed messages from school leaders about what they can and cannot say on that and other issues, he said.

Duane Moore teaches U.S. government and African American history in Hamilton, Ohio. He doesn’t shy from letting students know his political views, but he grounds discussions in facts and builds mutual trust. (Duane Moore)

Other teachers say they’ve found ways to navigate potentially explosive conversations — with a lot of practice. Duane Moore, a 20-year veteran in the classroom, teaches U.S. government and African American history in right-leaning Hamilton, Ohio. He says he’s not shy about letting students know his political views because he builds a strong foundation based on facts and mutual trust. “It’s no secret that I dislike Trump,” he said. “But I don’t place my dislike at the forefront of my discussion of the events of the day. The kids also know that I’m going to be fair about the information that I share with them and that I’m very particular about my facts.”

When Terrance Lewis, a social studies teacher in Columbus, Georgia, first started teaching four years ago, he invited representatives of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit providing legal representation to wrongly convicted individuals, to come to his ninth grade government class to discuss racial disparities in sentencing. The topic is outlined in Georgia’s state social studies standards.

Soon after the classroom visit, a parent complained about it on a community Facebook page, arguing that talking about race is divisive and it’s time to move on, Lewis recalled. Some parents defended Lewis, he said, but most “were calling for my job.”

Lewis’s principal supported him, though, and emailed the parent who made the original Facebook post, which was eventually removed.

Terrance Lewis, who teaches in Georgia, emails parents ahead of class discussions on topics that might be deemed controversial. (Terrance Lewis )

Now, before any discussions that could be considered controversial, Lewis emails parents and describes how the topics fit into state social studies standards. “I think a lot of times parents think you force their children to think one way or the other,” said Lewis. “And I just do that just to be proactive and to ensure that parents are [informed].”

Some educators, though, say that sharing their thoughts on an issue can impede students’ ability to form their own opinions. “The heart of the work I do is based on inquiry,” said Shari Conditt, a government teacher in Vancouver, Washington. “So I’m really more focused on question-asking than I am on answer-giving.”

“I can’t divorce who I am and how I think about the world all the time from how I teach,” Conditt acknowledged. “The best I can do is try to cover it up as much as possible.” She does that by paying attention to her words.

When a video of former President Donald Trump making vulgar remarks about women was released just weeks before the 2016 election, Conditt said she “talked around it,” rather than directly criticizing Trump’s conduct. She told her students that one of the candidates had made a comment that angered people. And she focused the conversation on one question.

Shari Conditt, who teaches government in Vancouver, Washington, said she centers class discussions on questions and tries to avoid sharing her own opinions. (Shari Conditt )

“This is how I put it: ‘You have to ask yourself, are you comfortable with how the candidate has spoken about women?’ ” she said. “The minute I use the word ‘misogynistic’ in my classroom, I know that I’m going to be hearing from my conservative parents.”

The social studies teachers at Morales’ school in Los Angeles have focused on media literacy in the aftermath of the Capitol attacks. She showed a clip from PBS stating that pro-Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol, and also noted claims that the rioters were antifa, a far-left activist group. Morales then discussed how to think critically about those statements and discern which was accurate.

“This is something we’re seeing in our society that we cannot agree on,” she told her students. “And so the skill that we need to build as a classroom is really knowing what the truth is. And so if we are hearing people say different things, how can we find out the truth?”

Going forward, said Gomez, the educator in Monterey County, California, schools ought to be encouraging students to have more conversations about politics and other controversial topics — not less. That’s how youth will encounter different perspectives, and help refine their own.

“These are young people who are still formulating their own civic identities, so to deprive them of that, I think that’s a disservice,” he said.

This story about political neutrality was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Pandemic Schooling Is Overwhelming. Here’s How One School Lightened the Load.

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 08:00:08 GMT

From personal health concerns to worries about students who’ve fallen off the grid, the toll of teaching during the coronavirus pandemic can be immense. Many educators say their schools have done little to lighten the load. Not everywhere, though. In a MindShift survey this fall, some of our newsletter subscribers described structural changes at their schools that were making the year more manageable, such as shorter class periods or having one day per week devoted to teacher planning.

Principal Sarah Gillam of West Valley High School in Fairbanks, Alaska, was among those who responded to the survey. In a typical year, her school operates on a six-period schedule, with students changing classes after the first semester. This year, students are taking three classes at a time for just one quarter. Student feedback drove the change, Gillam said. In a survey last spring, students resoundingly reported that six daily virtual classes was overwhelming. So faculty and staff devised the quarter system, along with other adjustments, including:

A shortened instructional day — Students start at 9:15 a.m. instead of 7:45 a.m.
A common prep period for teachers — This 60-minute period occurs before the student day.
An additional section of classes for each teacher — Since the prep periods occur before students begin, there’s no prep period during the student day. Gillam said this change was made with the need for physical distancing when in-person schooling begins, and it brought class sizes down to around 25, compared to the usual 30.

When civics teacher Amy Gallaway heard about the proposed changes, her first reaction was relief. Trying to recreate brick-and-mortar school for seven hours per day online was “untenable” for both students and teachers, she said. But after relief came something else: “What was that feeling? Trepidation.”

Gallaway, who is Alaska’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, said that she wondered “Can I do this, and can I do it well enough that my students learn something really meaningful and their time isn’t wasted?” Toni Hawkins, a math teacher at West Valley, alighted on those questions more quickly. “With math, you can’t really go onto the next concept until you’ve really solidified what the previous one was,” she said. “So I got really nervous about it.”

Hawkins joined a committee to help redesign core math courses for the fall, and Gallaway got busy reinventing her U.S. government course. After two quarters, both teachers said the compressed schedule is full of challenges, yet holds benefits beyond reducing student and teacher overwhelm. It also has led to increased emphasis on higher-order thinking, more connection with individual students and an opportunity to make bold changes.

Math and metacognition

During the summer, Hawkins worked with other teachers to distill their Algebra I sequence to the essentials. Statistics, for instance, is usually a stand-alone unit, so it got the boot. And while students normally learn to solve systems of equations through multiple methods, this year they might only learn one. Hawkins said the teachers created a document of suggested changes that served as both a guide for colleagues and a record for future years to know what was missed.

That was just the start. Hawkins had other adjustments to make. To avoid online cheating, she scrapped her standards-based assessments and created one assignment per standard, with different weights based on the work involved. She said this move pushed her to limit procedural questions — which students can solve with Snapchat and other apps — and prioritize tasks that required students to explain their mathematical thinking.

When her classes learned to write equations of lines, for example, Hawkins assigned a project called “My Favorite Mistake.” At the start of the week, she told students they’d be diving into a complicated skill, and she asked them to note the steps they found tricky. At the end of the week, the students created Flipgrid videos describing their mistake and how they resolved it. Though Hawkins worries about retention with students only taking math for one quarter, she hopes that this increased focus on metacognitive skills will mitigate the issue.

Although eliminating tests saved some time, Hawkins noticed that the lack of discrete units made it harder for students to connect the dots between topics. So she shifted assignment deadlines from the start of class to the end of the day. That gave students the class period and office hours to get more help. It also gave her a better pulse on students’ confidence with the latest topic. If most students turned in an assignment before class, she moved forward. If they didn’t, she took more time for review.

With one quarter under their belt, Hawkins said her quarter two students “were a lot more savvy about what they needed to do right off the bat.” But by early December, their energy was flagging. “There’s more kids who are just like, ‘Uh! I just can’t do it anymore,’” she said. “So I find myself being more of a cheerleader and trying to keep their interests up.”

It’s been a loooong time… so a two for one virtually with the @wvhWolfpack this morning! #PositiveSignThursday #onFriday #PackPrideAK @casehighprinc, I got off track, but now I will begin again! pic.twitter.com/jKyvCjCQya

— Sarah Beth Gillam (@sbgillam) August 28, 2020

Freedom to experiment

As Gallaway prepared to condense her U.S. government curriculum, she asked herself a basic question: why do I teach? The answer — “to create empowered and engaged citizens who can go out and change the world” — led her to abandon her familiar routine of six units lasting two or three weeks. Instead, she envisioned the class like a figure eight, with students using key skills, such as media literacy and constitutional analysis, to “constantly move and spiral” around two topics: foundations of government and current events.

Though daunting, Gallaway said reimagining the course also gave her freedom to experiment with anti-racist teaching practices. In the wake of the country’s latest racial reckoning, she wanted students to engage deeply with issues of identity, power and oppression. To do so, throughout the quarter, she asked students to respond to recurring questions on those themes, drawn from the work of scholar Gholdy Muhammad. “I don’t have that luxury to fall back on what I usually do,” Gallaway said. “So I’ve been able to integrate that a lot better.”

Gallaway didn’t make those changes alone. She said that having a common prep period every day enabled West Valley teachers to collaborate within and across departments more than in the past. Social studies and English teachers, for instance, used that time to tackle shared challenges, such as how to facilitate fishbowl discussions, debates and student dialogues online.

Another gift of the schedule was being responsible for fewer students at a time. Gallaway normally has about 125 students per semester. With quarters, she has 60. “It allows me to know students better, get back graded work more quickly, and more easily personalize learning,” she said. “Small class size has been a veritable dream.”

The biggest challenge, Gallaway said, is for teachers to strike a balance between bare-bones and jam-packed courses. She’s heard from students who were disappointed about certain activities or content being in her class while at the same time feeling saddled with hours of homework in other courses. Despite those complaints, Gallaway said that most students reported loving being able to focus on just three classes.

West Valley completed its second fully remote quarter before winter break. The district is planning for high school students to have the option to return to in-person classrooms in February. Gillam, the principal, said the same daily and quarterly schedule will continue for the rest of the year.

For Gallaway, the schedule is imperfect, but given the imperfect reality of pandemic schooling, the best option. “I think six classes a day — it would just pummel students.”

School Districts That Never Opened Are Having Trouble Now

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 07:37:59 GMT

Diana Muhammad, who teaches PE and dance in Chicago Public Schools, was “unsure,” “uncertain” and “reluctant” about her district’s plan for in-person classes starting Monday. At a Chicago Teachers Union press conference earlier this month, she said the plan felt “rushed.” And then things got really scary.

“Over the winter break, my life was devastated when my daughter, who was sick with various symptoms all over the place for an entire week, woke up one morning and could not see.”

Her daughter ended up in intensive care for a week, she said. It turned out to be a case of multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. That’s an extremely rare, and very dangerous, complication of COVID-19 found in children, particularly in Black and Latino children. Noting this disparate impact, and the fact that Chicago Public School students are about 90% nonwhite, Muhammad said, “Now I am seriously concerned about us rushing back without having a well-thought-out plan.”

The idea that opening Chicago’s school buildings in February 2021, 11 months after they shut down, constitutes “rushing back” would be news in most of the country. As of the third week of January, 58% of students nationwide were in districts with at least some in-person learning. That’s according to the organization Burbio, which scrapes a selection of school websites for the data. And that’s actually a growing number. Burbio reported that late January brought the biggest drop in “virtual-only” students since September. Many districts opened up school buildings again after closures brought on by holiday-related spikes.

However, Burbio estimates that about a third of the country’s students have not had a single day in school since last March. This includes much of the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic and some big cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta.

In some of those districts, trying to open up for the first time right now is like spitting into a freezing wind (without a mask). On Tuesday, the Chicago Teachers Union and CPS failed to reach a deal on school reopening, triggering plans for 14,000 school staff to refuse to report to schools on Wednesday, and opening the door for a strike.

In Montclair, N.J., an affluent New York City suburb, teachers also refused to come to work, leading the district to abandon its opening plans set for this past Monday. And Washington, D.C., appears headed for a similar showdown over a Feb. 1 opening date. In all three places, this is only the latest in a series of torn-up reopening plans.

#OnlyWhenItsSafe

The terrible and mounting toll of the pandemic has caused positions to harden on both sides of the reopening debate. For districts that pledged in the summer or fall to reopen when coronavirus numbers got better, there are many cases where the numbers haven’t cooperated.

“There is little likelihood the low-income communities we serve, which have been hit hardest by the virus, will meet the proposed ‘Safe Schools for All’ COVID guidelines by February 1st,” Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner told his community on Monday. “Many experts say even March 1st is unlikely, given current health conditions. Sadly, COVID numbers remain at dangerously high levels in nearly every category — infections, hospitalizations and deaths.”

Up to now, there has been no centralized data collection on cases, outbreaks and mitigation measures in U.S. schools — something President Biden has just ordered federal agencies to begin doing. Still, there is an emerging scientific consensus that schools can be safe, given the right precautions, even when community spread is high.

On Tuesday, three Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists released a review of U.S. and international evidence in the Journal of the American Medical Association making just this point: “Accumulating data now suggest a path forward to maintain or return primarily or fully to in-person instructional delivery.” With precautions, and canceling higher-risk activities such as athletics, the paper said, reopening can be safe. Separately, the CDC itself released a study of schools in Wisconsin that found even when cases were spiking in the community, there were just seven cases among nearly 5,000 students and zero cases among staff. That’s with more than 9 out of 10 students reportedly wearing masks.

With heartbreaking experiences like Diana Muhammad’s to share, teachers unions in some places have rallied around the cry “#OnlyWhenItsSafe.” But “safe” means trusting management to report cases, sanitize buildings, improve ventilation — and multiple rounds of negotiations have detonated old landmines of mistrust and mistreatment.

In Chicago, for example, the tug of war between the union and the school district goes back to March. Administrators, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the head of the Chicago Department of Public Health did not initially want to close schools. But, just after the union held a press conference calling for schools to be closed in March, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker made the call that schools would be shut down statewide.

Once schools were closed, city and school district officials twice insisted that they reopen for in-person learning. Both times the union fought back, even threatening to hold a strike vote. Both times, the school district blinked.

Yet for much of the past year, CPS officials have insisted — and still insist — that the union cannot dictate whether schools are open or not.

In Washington, D.C., teachers explain their hesitation to go back to in-person learning by citing historic educational inequities.

“East of the river, things are dictated to us,” says teachers union activist Laura Fuchs, referring to a low-income, majority Black area of the city. “The [school] bathroom has not had a working soap dispenser since the building opened … they don’t seem to care.”

D.C. Public Schools told NPR over email, “We are proud to have worked collaboratively with the Washington Teachers’ Union on an agreement reached in December that represents our shared commitment to ensuring students have the high-quality education and supports they need to thrive, and our teachers and staff feel safe and prepared to return to school buildings.”

The goalposts on “safe” also seem to keep moving. Now that vaccines are out, some teachers say they will agree to return to work in person only when fully vaccinated, which could take months.

University of Washington epidemiologist Helen Chu, who became known early in the pandemic for detecting the first signs of local transmission in the U.S., endorsed that position recently on a public panel:

“Get the teachers vaccinated, that’s clearly important and can be done right now, and at that point, that’s when we reopen.”

In at least one state, Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine is asking superintendents to sign a pledge to resume in-person instruction by March 1 as a condition of their staff receiving priority access to the vaccine.

#OpenSchools

Grace Lee, chief medical officer for practice innovation and a pediatric infectious disease physician at Stanford Children’s Health, advised the CDC on coronavirus vaccine priorities. Her position differs from Chu’s: “Clearly, both schools in the U.S. and schools in other countries have been able to effectively reopen,” she says. With multiple “Swiss cheese” layers of precautions, including masking, distancing, handwashing and ventilation, she says school can be relatively safe; the vaccine is one more layer.

As the months drag on without the in-person learning, the specialized services, the social opportunities, the hot meals or the child care that schools provide, some parents have organized under hashtags like #OpenSchools.

Lisa Cohen, a parent of a kindergartner in Washington, D.C., is one of them.

“It’s fear-based,” she says of the drive to stay remote. “Like if it was science-based, fact-based, data-based, we could put out a metric or we could look at the data and decide when we get there and when it’s safe. But it has become an emotional conversation. It’s become a political conversation. And I don’t know where and how you end those.”

These open school advocates have marshaled the support of many pediatricians, as in this open letter. They point to the many states where schools are mostly open — such as Florida, Georgia and Texas — yet cases have started to come down again in the past few weeks, as they have elsewhere.

A mountain of makeup work ahead

In many late-opening districts, only a minority of families have signaled interest in changing their current remote school and child care arrangements in favor of a few days a week of in-person learning, sometimes with a different teacher than they’ve been working with all year.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that 5,200 D.C. students had signed up for in-person classes in a district of about 50,000. In Chicago, the district said it planned to bring about 70,000 elementary school students back, out of about 280,000 total students enrolled.

Laura Fuchs in D.C. says her district’s reopening plan is sorely lacking details and doesn’t sound particularly engaging for students.

“We’re going back once a week, with a group of students placed in a cohort, to do a combination of remediation, test prep, makeup work.”

Even as the voices get louder, the time remaining in this school year dwindles, and the pile of makeup work for everyone is just getting bigger.

Eda Uzunlar is an intern on NPR’s Education Desk.

CDC Makes The Case For Schools Reopening

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 02:39:33 GMT

Updated at 10:58 a.m. ET Wednesday

Data from K-12 schools that reopened for in-person instruction in the fall show little evidence that schools contributed meaningfully to the spread of COVID-19, according to a new article published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.

The overview from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, authored by three of its scientists, represents the clearest view yet of the facts behind what has become a heated debate over when and how schools should reopen.

Last spring and into fall, schools across the country closed — and many remain closed — out of fear that allowing students and staff to return to school buildings would drive communitywide spread of the virus, much as nursing homes and crowded bars have done.

The CDC report says data from reopened classrooms show that “the type of rapid spread that was frequently observed in congregate living facilities or high-density worksites has not been reported in education settings in schools.”

Meanwhile, evidence mounts of the social, emotional and academic toll remote learning has taken on children, especially in already vulnerable, low-income communities.

Among the school systems cited in the review were 11 North Carolina districts serving more than 90,000 students and staff. During a nine-week period this fall, researchers found just 32 infections acquired in school — compared with 773 cases of students and staff infected outside school. None of those 32 in-school transmissions involved students infecting teachers or staff.

In another study, of 17 schools in rural Wisconsin, mask-wearing helped keep the COVID-19 incidence lower in schools than in the larger community.

While the researchers call the findings “reassuring,” they make clear that much of the success schools have had in preventing transmission is the result of their embrace of safety precautions.

“All recommended mitigation measures in schools must continue: requiring universal face mask use, increasing physical distance … increasing room air ventilation, and expanding screening testing to rapidly identify and isolate asymptomatic infected individuals,” the report says.

The CDC authors do single out a few school-based functions that can drive infections, namely indoor sports practices and events. They cite a pair of high school wrestling tournaments in Florida where 38 of the 54 participants who were tested, tested positive, some of whom brought the virus back to their families and friend circles. The report also serves as a reminder that schools do not operate in a vacuum. To keep COVID-19 out of classrooms, communities should be prepared to fight it elsewhere, including by restricting indoor dining.

The summary was published online as a “Viewpoint,” and, though it was authored by CDC scientists, it included a disclaimer that its conclusions “do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” But, when asked by NPR if the article’s conclusions could be attributed to CDC, an agency spokesman confirmed that they could.

The report comes at an inflection point for the U.S., where more than 420,000 people have died from the disease and communities have been bracing for the arrival of more contagious coronavirus variants. At the same time, the federal government has begun a massive, if plodding, vaccination rollout. Some states have prioritized inoculating educators and school staff as teachers unions in some communities have resisted a return to school for safety reasons.

President Biden has pledged to help the majority of schools reopen within his first 100 days. His administration has proposed sending $130 billion in relief to K-12 schools to help pay for the kinds of costly mitigation efforts the CDC recommends, including socially distanced classrooms and ventilation updates for aging buildings.

What Lessons Does Special Education Hold for Improving Personalized Learning?

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 09:12:26 GMT

This story about IEPs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter here.

On a shelf in her Chicago classroom, third grader Arianna has a thick binder that details her achievements, strengths and goals as a student, along with some revealing information about her personality. It describes her love of guitar and singing and notes that she wants to advance to a higher level in reading and grasp math concepts more quickly. Her sister, Alanni, an eighth grader, has a binder too. It discusses her grades and standardized test scores, as well as her academic goals: to speak up more frequently in math class and read texts more closely.

The binders resemble, to a degree, the individualized education programs, or IEPs, that are at the heart of education for students with disabilities. But Arianna and Alanni aren’t special education students. Every child at their pre-K-8 school, Belmont-Cragin, has one of these so-called individual learner profiles. The profiles are part of the school’s embrace of personalized learning, which centers on the belief that a teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom is a bad fit for today’s students. Instead, the thinking goes, students must be encouraged to learn at their own pace, with lessons tailored to their specific aptitudes and needs, often with the aid of technology.

Personalized learning has, in recent years, become one of the most talked-about trends in education. Fueled by donations from Silicon Valley philanthropists, the instructional approach has spread to classrooms around the country and more than 40 states are exploring it in some form. As education leaders cast about for solutions to the performance gaps exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, some are hitting upon the idea that more personalized methods could help schools better serve students who’ve had wildly different experiences with education this year. In the process, they are finding inspiration in special education, which, since the 1975 passage of what’s now known as the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, has promised students with disabilities special services and accommodations to help them learn at their full potential.

“Can you imagine the power of an individualized education plan for every student?” Richard Carranza, New York City’s education chancellor, said recently in discussing his agency’s plans for new tools to help students recover the learning they’ve lost during school closures. “Just think about identifying the explicit skills that students need to work on and the plan that we have to help them achieve a mastery of that explicit skill.”

But there are plenty of reasons to be cautious. If anything, special education demonstrates the vast challenges of individualizing education. Tailoring learning to students’ exact needs takes significant resources, teacher training and, ideally, close collaboration with families — something many schools struggle to pull off. While there are limits to comparisons between the two educational approaches — special education is legally mandated and personalized learning is a loosely defined pedagogical philosophy that takes many forms — some of the cracks that have appeared in personalized learning are not unlike those facing special education. Both types of education, for example, require significant resources and trained staff — but often don’t get either. Schools introducing personalized learning have faced criticism for relying on technology to help kids learn at different paces within the same classroom as districts avoid having to drastically scale up their staff; staff shortages have long been endemic in special education. Meanwhile, for all the hype around personalized learning, evidence of its success remains scant.

“School systems and schools have struggled to deliver on the promise of special education,” said Betheny Gross, associate director of the nonprofit Center on Reinventing Public Education. “It isn’t just a matter of taking the principles of special education and doing them at scale.”

Students at CICS West Belden often work in small groups or with the help of technology prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Sarah Gonser for The Hechinger Report )

At present, roughly 7 million students, or 14 percent of public schoolchildren, are enrolled in special education nationwide. As personalized learning advocates push forward with plans to roll out their approach to many more of the nation’s schoolchildren, it’s worth considering how lessons from 45 years of educating students with disabilities might help shape this latest educational experiment.

One morning in 2019, close to 40 educators gathered in a commercial building on the Chicago riverfront that houses the offices of LEAP Innovations. LEAP is a nonprofit organization that trains schools and teachers to use personalized learning in their classrooms. The day’s professional development for these Chicago Public Schools teachers, alumni of the program, was a refresher, a way to strengthen their teaching practice, share ideas and return to the classroom newly inspired.

Chicago has embraced personalized learning in a big way. In early 2018, Chicago Public Schools and LEAP received $14 million in grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to train teachers and principals on personalizing learning. (CZI is one of The Hechinger Report’s many donors.) The grant funding provided 35 city schools with two-and-a-half years of professional development and instructional coaching through LEAP, plus technology and classroom resources, via the school district’s Elevate Program, which aims to bring personalized learning to 150 Chicago schools by the end of 2021. Concurrently, a portion of the funding went to LEAP to help train principals and teachers at more than 100 Chicago-area schools on personalized learning.

After a morning of workshops on topics like helping students puzzle through problems, working in teams and designing learning goals, teachers broke for lunch that day in 2019, gathering around large tables to chat. At one table, the conversation turned to the growing pains of changing course from the traditional “sage on a stage” teaching model, where a teacher holds forth at the front of the classroom while students listen, to a student-focused, personalized model.

“We started this process five years ago and all I could think was: ‘Oh my god, this is going to be a nightmare!’ Because I thought this would mean that, on top of everything I was already doing, I’d be creating an IEP for every single student,” said Kathleen Bourret, a teacher at R.H. Lee Elementary, a Pre-K-8 school on Chicago’s southwest side. “I didn’t have the mindset to make this shift. I’ve been teaching for 30 years, and now you’re gonna make me do what?”

Bourret’s learning curve when it came to personalized learning is pretty typical for teachers, said Chris Liang-Vergara, who was then serving as LEAP’s chief of learning innovation. And it’s something the people at LEAP try to alleviate by bringing in past cohorts, like that day’s group, to mingle and continue sharing ideas and inspiration.

“It’s definitely not always rainbows and sunshine,” said Liang-Vergara. “Keeping that honest and real is important. You don’t say: ‘I’m going to do personalized learning and it’s going to be beautiful.’ There’s a real shift that happens with you as a professional, with your kids in the classroom, and that change process takes time.”

Colleen Collins, school director at CICS West Belden, works with students prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Sarah Gonser for The Hechinger Report )

The shift in mindset involves moving away from a teaching model that is centered on curriculum and meeting benchmarks toward being student-centered in ways that demand differentiated instruction based on a child’s interests, strengths, weaknesses and background. Students often work in small groups, with help from a co-teacher, or one-on-one, with lessons fitted to their skills and abilities. In theory, their progress is tracked closely, with their goals and assignments updated continually to meet their needs.

Much of this may sound familiar to teachers of special education. As part of their jobs, special education teachers assess students and develop teaching plans based on each student’s skill levels. They teach students as a class and one-on-one or in small groups. They collaborate with school-based service providers such as occupational, physical and speech therapists, in order to cull reams of information and write IEPs that, often, run more than ten double-sided pages, and ideally provide detailed documentation of a child’s strengths, weaknesses and goals.

But teachers often come unprepared to do this work, and don’t get the support they need from their schools and districts, in part because special education is chronically underfunded. They may struggle to assess students’ abilities and needs, education researchers say, and turnover for special education teachers tends to be high. The paperwork involved can be overwhelming. All of this suggests that if personalized learning is to succeed, it must emphasize supporting teachers and investing in their professional development, say education experts.

“When you get a master’s degree in special education, do you come out knowing how to teach every single child with every singly kind of disability? Absolutely not,” said Megan Benay, senior national director of data systems and strategy at Great Oaks Charter Schools, a network of charter schools that focuses on preparing kids for college through personalized tutoring. “As far as I see it, the only path forward is to figure out how to invest in our people and invest in the kind of ongoing professional learning that provides practical, applicable research-infused training into the daily practice of our educators. This is hard because the reality of teaching is that you’re on every hour of the day, you’re lesson-planning, you’re calling parents, you’re writing curriculum. Oh, and then you have to figure out how to fit in eating lunch somewhere in there.”

Ace Parsi, senior consultant with Equity Journey Partners and the former director of innovation for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said that if school districts don’t invest in teachers while making the shift to personalized learning, they are bound to fail. “It’s not that educators don’t want to try personalized learning. But it’s a vulnerable feeling when you’re trying to implement this new thing and you’re like: ‘Oh my god, how do I approach this for these students, I just don’t have the skill set to do this’,” he said. “It’s really incumbent on school districts and states to create a professional learning system that meets the educators and empowers them to actually implement personalized learning for all kids.”

Stacy Stewart, principal of Belmont-Cragin Elementary School seen here before the COVID-19 pandemic, credits personalized learning for helping to improve student engagement. (Sarah Gonser for The Hechinger Report)

Stacy Stewart, principal of Belmont-Cragin, the school on Chicago’s northwest side that Alanni and Arianna attend, has heard teachers make comparisons between personalized learning and the IEPs that drive special education. “My teachers say: ‘It’s almost like all our students have an IEP’ — not formally, of course, but they each do have an individualized plan,” said Stewart. “It’s always evolving; it’s a very living document.”

Stewart, though, cautions against drawing too-direct parallels between IEPs and the individual learner profiles her school uses, also known as personalized learning plans. IEPs are rigid legal documents, written not for students so much as for teachers, parents and lawyers. Individual learner profiles, she said, aim to involve parents in their children’s learning but also give students more control over their own education. At her school, students lead learner meetings at least twice a year where they give a presentation to their parents about their progress, goals and challenges. That’s different from IEP meetings, which are led by adults.

Stewart embraced personalized learning even before the Chicago school district began to do so. A few years after joining Belmont-Cragin in 2010, she turned to the approach to help close achievement gaps at her school, where the student body is predominantly Hispanic and low-income, and roughly 68 percent of students are English language learners.

So far, the results are good. Between the 2015-16 and 2018-19 school years, attainment levels for third through eighth graders on the standardized Measures of Academic Progress test rose from 35 to 65 percent in reading and from 30 to 66 percent in math. Student growth in reading and math was far above average: in the 95th and 98th percentiles, respectively. Between the 2014-15 and 2017-18 school years, teacher retention grew from 60 to 90 percent.

At the school, personalized learning has many facets, some of which are reminiscent of special education. One is to involve families in their children’s learning. In special education, under legal mandates, parental input and the recommendations of educators and therapists must receive equal consideration. Stewart said she has found that parental involvement has been key to her students’ learning, because it gives teachers greater insight into their students’ needs and turns parents into partners in their children’s education. But she doesn’t limit it to scheduled meetings in an office.

One weekday morning before the pandemic shuttered school buildings, students gathered in an ageing auditorium for their daily morning assembly. One student read morning announcements in English and her partner made the same announcements in Spanish. The audience, a raucous, cheerful gathering of the entire school’s elementary-age students, plus more than a dozen parents, some with toddlers or babies scooting around nearby, greeted each announcement with cheering and hollering.

Before the pandemic, students at Belmont-Cragin often lead morning assemblies, part of an effort by the school to give young people more control over their own learning. (Sarah Gonser for The Hechinger Report)

Stewart and her team began encouraging parents to join the morning assemblies a few years ago. Her colleagues also started “bring your parent to school” days in which parents were invited into the classroom to see how their kids learned; they created a parent leadership team and trained parent mentors who visited students in classrooms. Before the pandemic, Belmont-Cragin also sent teachers out on “empathy walks,” when they spent an entire day joining students at their homes early in the morning, and traveling with them to school and then back home again to see how evenings unfolded. This was important, Stewart explained, because it helped teachers get a stronger sense of what motivated students and thus, how to better guide them into meaningful learning.

Even the classrooms at Belmont-Cragin are personalized to students’ needs. Some have gentler lighting — twinkling holiday lights in lieu of flickering overhead lights. Seating options range from bean bags to structured armchairs; students can choose to study alone in quiet workspaces near a lava lamp or a bubbling fish tank, or in groups at clusters of desks and tables.

Gross, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said one way in which special education goes awry is by becoming too compliance-oriented, with teachers struggling simply to fulfill the system’s legal and paperwork requirements. “The compliance requirements are intense and numerous and it’s very easy to fall into a compliance mindset,” she said. The schools that succeed in educating kids with disabilities are engaged not simply in following the legal rules but in finding the best way to serve each student; that same spirit will be key to tackling personalized learning, she said.

Meanwhile, educators around the country are finding that it’s virtually impossible to do personalized instruction without relying heavily on technology — for good or ill. Otherwise, the burden of having kids learning at different paces within one classroom is too great. “I find it difficult to find a district doing personalized learning where tech is not the top two or three things they’re doing,” said Sean J. Smith, professor of special education at the University of Kansas.

“Ideally every student would have a teacher, but that’s simply not a possibility,” said John Pane, a senior scientist at the research organization RAND who has studied personalized learning. “It would be way too costly.” And that’s where tech tools come in, by making it easier for kids to learn at different paces, and focus on different goals, within a single class.

CICS West Belden uses Summit, an online learning platform that has drawn criticism from some parents who worry about excessive screen time. (Sarah Gonser for The Hechinger Report )

CICS West Belden, a pre-K-8 school not far from Stewart’s elementary that is part of the Chicago International Charter School network, began rethinking its teaching model some six years ago. The school started with an initial push into blended learning, a teaching approach that aims to integrate online with traditional face-to-face learning, said Colleen Collins, the school director. Since then, Collins and her teachers — after receiving several grants, including a $100,000 technology planning grant and a Breakthrough Schools Next Generation Learning Challenges personalized learning grant — began working with LEAP to start personalized learning for each grade level.

In an eighth grade science class well before the pandemic hit, students were grouped at a variety of workstations. Some were seated on stools around tall desks, some worked at regular-height tables with traditional classroom chairs, others were on their feet working at standing desks. Each student was bent over a Dell Chromebook using Summit Learning software, a widely used online learning platform developed by the charter network Summit Public Schools with help from Facebook software engineers.

Students David Diaz and Emani Torres had been using Summit software at CICS West Belden since sixth grade. They sat side-by-side at a two-person desk facing a bulletin board on the far side of the classroom, each working through different lessons at their own pace. A small yellow rubber duck sat on the desk between them, a stress-buster toy for whenever students need to work out some energy by squeezing something cute. Torres and Diaz described their feelings about using Summit learning software as a sort of love-hate relationship.

“I like working independently and I can really go above and beyond,” said Diaz, his eyes glued to his laptop where an article titled “Creating Dramatic Tension” filled the screen.

Torres, on the other hand, said she misses a more traditional way of learning. “This is stressful, honestly. It’s so many deadlines and a lot more work,” she said, biting her lower lip. “But, I guess it does keep you engaged.”

Alanni, the eighth grader at Belmont-Cragin, which also uses Summit and other online platforms, said she tired of all the time spent in front of a computer. “I do prefer working on paper just because it really hurts my eyes and it makes you sleepy and less motivated when you are on the computer for such a long time,” she said. Alanni said teachers would sometimes accommodate her by printing out lesson plans from the computer program and allowing her to complete the lessons offline.

In recent years, Summit has drawn protests from parents and students in places like Kansas, New York City and Connecticut who worry about excessive screen time, among other concerns. It remains to be seen how much the pandemic and remote learning will influence students’ and educators’ appetite for screen time and new tech tools that might help students who’ve fallen behind catch up. Smith and other researchers say tech can be good or bad, depending on how schools choose to use it. Technology should supplement, not supplant, the teacher, he said.

At CICS West Belden, director Collins said the school never introduces students to new concepts through technology. “The best experience a child will have each day is the interaction with their teachers in small groups tailored to who they are,” she said. “Tech makes a lot of personalized learning possible, it helps us keep a close eye on progress, but it shouldn’t be the main experience students have each day.”

Meanwhile, despite the parallels between personalized learning and special education, educators are still trying to unravel how the new approach can effectively serve students with disabilities. The hope is that individualizing education across the board would bring big benefits for students served by special education. By helping educators recognize that there is no such thing as an “average” or “typical” student, and that brain differences are normal, personalized learning could de-stigmatize, and improve, education for students with disabilities, education experts say.

“It’s a reframing that the general inclusion movement for students with disabilities has been trying to accomplish for some time now,” said Laura Stelitano, an associate policy researcher at RAND. “But simply saying that all students with disabilities need to be included is a little different from saying all students have unique ways of learning and that learning needs to be tailored. It maybe takes inclusion a step forward.”

At some schools, this appears to be happening. Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School, which serves middle school and high school students in New York, has embraced personalized learning. At the same time, it is gaining a reputation for serving kids with disabilities well — unusual among charter schools, which are frequently criticized for pushing out students with complex learning needs.

“As somebody whose own profile as a learner was pretty darn jagged, I’m a big believer that we need to design and run schools in a way that leverages what special education has to offer,” said Eric Tucker, the Brooklyn school’s co-founder. “That means thinking through how we process information, how we learn, how we fill in language acquisition and processing gaps, while pushing for a level of rigor and inclusion for all young people that reflects what they’re really capable of.”

At the school, for example, every student, regardless of academic standing, receives small-group instruction for two hours a day. This has the dual benefit of helping students who are behind without making it obvious to their peers, while also enabling teachers to help high-achieving students go farther and deeper into the curriculum. It’s a leveler, of sorts, and a confidence-builder for children with disabilities who’ve traditionally been either pulled out of the classroom for special services or received “push-in” support in the classroom from therapists and special education teachers, according to Tucker.

And yet personalized learning has a long way to go when it comes to living up to the promise of improving education for kids with disabilities. Parsi, the consultant who formerly worked for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said that children with disabilities have often been overlooked as states implement personalized learning. When the NCLD examined how personalized learning was being developed in three states — Colorado, North Carolina and New Hampshire — researchers found that “there was a lot of retrofitting happening,” he said. “They would say, ‘We’re doing personalized learning for all,’ and then they would implement it in a most generic way. And then they would realize, ‘Oh my god, our kids with disabilities aren’t doing any better, they’re actually struggling more.’”

Parsi said that goes back to the idea that schools and school systems aren’t spending enough time ensuring that general education teachers have the skills to meet students’ individual needs, including the kids with disabilities. Meanwhile, he added, “The special educators don’t get training to do this type of more personalized, deeper approach to learning. And the two don’t collaborate.”

It’s concerning, to be sure. Still, advocates for personalized learning and researchers hope that the best models will proliferate, and that the personalized approach could ultimately avoid some of the pitfalls of special education while lifting learning for all. “If we have a system that is set up to individualize [education] for all students, we’re more likely to get quality special education,” said Stelitano of RAND. “The system just requires the right resources and the right training for teachers.”

Caroline Preston contributed reporting.