Friday News Roundup

It’s the Friday before July 4^th. Time for the News Roundup and then some vacation. Here we go.

Analysis: Many Districts Doing Less This Summer to Make Up for Lost Learning (The 74)

According to a recent article in The 74, “Despite national attention on bolstering summer school options for students who lost learning time during the pandemic, most large districts have not expanded or improved their 2022 summer programming, according to a review by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.”

“Even after an additional year to plan and more federal recovery dollars available, districts’ 2022 summer programs are mostly the same as last year, or have decreased in type of scope, based on our review of summer learning plans for 100 of the nation’s large and urban districts.”

“The findings are important because chronic absenteeism and declining enrollment have plagued U.S. schools. More than 1 million students have left public schools since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the latest Return to Learn Tracker data from the American Enterprise Institute. The summer offers additional time to re-engage students and families and to connect them to academic recovery programs.”

I’m not surprised this has happened – again. A crisis hits schools. Schools cry “help.” Our government steps in with funding. Schools get money but can’t figure out how to spend it effectively. And then they wait for the public to shift their focus from the current crisis to something else. And then they stop trying to address the crisis and return to normal operating procedures. I saw it continually when I worked inside a large, urban school district.

It’s pathetic.

Stress, Burnout, Depression: Teachers and Principals Are Not Doing Well, New Data Confirm (EducationWeek)

“Yet another survey confirms: Teachers and principals are stressed and burned out – and more than a quarter are experiencing symptoms of depression.

In fact, educators navigating pandemic-era schooling are faring worse than other working adults these days. That’s according to a new nationally representative RAND Corporation survey of 2,360 teachers and 1,540 principals, conducted in January.

Nearly three-fourths of teachers and 85 percent of principals are experiencing frequent job-related stress compared to just a third of working adults. Fifty-nine percent of teachers and 48 percent of principals say they’re burned out, compared to 44 percent of other workers.”

It’s time for a new system of learning. Our present system is breaking down.

Ignore NAEP. Better Yet, Abolish It (EducationWeek)

Al Kingsley, author of this article, is a school governor in England, a position similar in function to that of a U.S. school board member. Kingsley favors getting ride of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more commonly known as the U.S.’s “national report card.”

Kingsley writes, “All year long, important data are published in the United States. Spring is the season for state education report cards. Last fall, it was the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term-trends assessment. Next up is the biannual math and reading results from “the nation’s report card.” When it’s released, you should completely ignore it.”

Why ignore it? According to Kingsley, “when we judge an entire education system based on the results of a test, any test, we design solutions aimed at doing better on that test.” “If we really want to measure educational success, decide what kind of adults we want. Then, measure that. However, this takes time and patience – two things parents and politicians seldom indulge. Parents and politicians alike want fast fixes for obvious reasons, impulses that are only exacerbated by random scorecards of progress.”

Kingsley is right. There are much better ways to evaluate whether a learner has learned what they need to learn than a written test. But I’m afraid school-based American educators will read Kingsley’s piece and try to use it as fodder to promote the argument that tests like NAEP need to go away. They’ll make this argument, not because they want to move to another system of evaluation. Instead, they will push for the end of NAEP because our scores are just so, so poor.

Fuller: L.A. Offers Lessons for Helping Kids Recover from COVID Learning Loss (The 74)

Let’s finish this pre-holiday Roundup on an upbeat. Bruce Fuller is a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Fuller urges schools and school districts, wanting to help their kids recover from COVID learning loss, to look at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s approach to “catching kids up” over the past 30 years for answers.

Fuller writes “In the 1990’s, pupils in the Los Angeles Unified School District had fallen below peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in every other American city except Washington, D.C. Politically divisive efforts to desegregate schools, then deadly rioting, had spurred middle-class flight from the district. Charter schools began to sprout, attracting one-fifth of L.A. Unified’s students.”

“Then, to the surprise of many, achievement began to rise in 2002 – a winning streak that ran for nearly two decades. Fourth graders climbed more than a grade level in reading and eighth graders skyrocketed two full grades in math, never pausing until the COVID-19 shutdown. Learning curves grew steeper across L.A.’s diverse mosaic of children for nearly a generation.”

“Graduation rates climbed from 62 percent in 2010 to over 80 percent a decade later.”

How did this happen? According to Fuller, “The upward tilt at first resulted from Superintendent Roy Romer’s effort to keenly focus elementary teachers on core reading skills.” Second, “a young generation of civic activists surfaced in Black and brown communities, often allying with inventive teachers and principals, tending a blossoming garden of creative reforms.”

It’s hard work for the traditional system, but sometimes it can be done. The challenge for the traditionals is to keep “the main thing the main thing,” even though politics and disruption want to stop the progress.

I’m on vacation next week. I’ll post another column Monday, July 11^th. Happy 4^th of July. SVB