Friday News Roundup…

It’s Friday! Time for another installment of the “Friday News Roundup.” Let’s get to it!

The U.S. Suffers From a Substitute Teacher Shortage (NPR)

According to a NPR story earlier this week, schools don’t have enough short-term teachers to fill in the gaps for regular teachers missing a day. District in Illinois are now holding one-day online training to get short-term subs, even ones without teaching backgrounds.

This story reminds of a recent scene from “Abbott Elementary,” where the school custodian was filling in for an absent teacher and doing a pretty good job with the kids if I may say so.

Remember what we talked about last Friday? System failure? Is this yet another example of the current public school delivery system failing in being able to deliver the goods when it comes to connecting young learners with well-trained professionals? Or maybe it’s a sign that we need to look beyond the traditional staffing models schools usually employ to access a community filled with expertise to share with our young people?

Texas Educators Losing Their Licenses for Quitting During the School Year (The Texas Tribune)

Yea baby. What better way to support classroom teachers struggling to survive a brutally challenging time inside public schools than to threaten to pull their professional teaching license away from them. But this is what school bureaucracies sometimes do to, in their eyes, protect their power toward a person called a teacher who doesn’t have much standing inside that bureaucracy in the first place. So we shouldn’t be surprised when ½ of the nation’s teachers are thinking about quitting. Who would want to work in such a draconian place? What’s wrong with Texas these days? Really!

Two Educators Set to Launch a National Tutoring Corps (The 74)

Janice Jackson and Kevin Huffman are no strangers to public education reform. Jackson is a former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools while Huffman is a former Tennessee commissioner of education. They and others have announced the launching of “Accelerate,” a nationwide tutoring service. As Jackson and Huffman writing in The 74 article, “Effective tutoring is one of the few educational interventions with a strong research base. The best approach meets particular design principles: student groups of four or fewer, meeting multiple time a week, with a trained and consistent tutor and high-quality curriculum.” It will be interesting to watch how Accelerate maneuvers through the land mines we all know exist within most public-school districts. But, if they can find success, this might be a game changer moving forward.

Innovations Announced from 161 Schools to Aid Marginalized Students

“The Canopy project, a collaborative effort to surface and share a diverse set of innovative learning environments, is releasing an updated dataset to help shed light on the practices and priorities of innovative learning communities. An early look at the data made one thing clear: One urgent reason schools are innovating is to design solutions to the problems most often faced by marginalized students and families.”

I’ve looked at what The Canopy project considers innovative practice. Most of it isn’t what I would consider innovative. For example, we’ve been working on “project-based learning” for at least 25 years in this country. Nevertheless, you will find “project-based learning” on The Canopy’s list of innovative practices.

What would be really innovative is if The Canopy project could get some of these practices, innovative or not, to scale beyond the 161 schools noted. Here’s the real challenge for a group like The Canopy project: how to scale effective practices throughout the current public school system. Until that happens, sorry, I’m not impressed (see my earlier column on “boutique” schools.)

The Des Moines Public Schools are Trying to Get Kids Back into Class after COVID (The Des Moines Register)

As I’ve said before, I spend time in Iowa these days, so it needs to be said that there are thousands of other public-school districts who are trying to do the same thing as Des Moines is. And because so many school districts feel the need to get kids back into classrooms, I think we need to ask one question – Why?

Why can’t kids learn anywhere and anytime? Why do they have to report to a place called school for learning, that counts in the eyes of public policymakers, to happen? Why can’t people inside schools be better trained to lead learning anywhere, anytime? The pandemic has exposed many weaknesses in our current systems, including our public school system. Shame on us for not being more prepared to lead learning beyond the wall of schools. To me, this might be the biggest disappointment of them all when it comes to the shortcomings of our current public school system.

Homeschooling Surge Continues Despite Schools Reopening (AP News)

Well, I guess not all learners feel the need to go back into classrooms and schools. According to the AP, “In 18 states that shared data through the current school year, the number of homeschooling students increased by 63% in the 2020-2021 school year, then fell by only 17% in the 2021-2022 school year.”

What that tells us is a whole bunch of kids who went home during the pandemic have decided to stay home and not return to school.

What would happen if school district, or another learning organization like an afterschool group, reached out to these kids choosing to learn away from a traditional school campus? Isn’t it more important for kids to learn than argue about where they learn? We need to open our eyes to different possibilities, or we will lose our younger generation to a lifetime of reading, writing, problem-solving, and character struggles.

Have a great weekend. Talk Monday. SVB