Friday News Roundup

Here’s your Friday News Roundup.

FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Launches National Effort to Support Student Success (WH.GOV)

According to this latest media release, “America’s students are on average two to four months behind in reading and math because of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Biden understands the pain and loss our nation’s students, families, and educators are experiencing, and is committed to supporting our nation’s children. That’s why President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) provided an historic $122 billion in funding to help schools safely reopen and stay open, combat learning loss, and address student mental health and other needs.”

Ten days ago, “Biden called on schools to use the $122 billion in ARP funds to provide high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs that are proven pathways to helping students make up for lost learning time and succeed in school and in life, including by supporting their mental health. …the Biden-Harris Administration is also joining with leading organizations to launch the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) to provide students with an additional 250,000 tutors and mentors over the next three years.”

Biden’s Tutoring Initiative: What Will It Mean for Learning Recovery? (EducationWeek)

“The U.S. Department of Education will work with AmeriCorps and a group of education organizations to supply ‘tutors, mentors, student success coaches, integrated student support coordinators, and postsecondary education transition coaches’ in schools, according to a fact sheet about the new initiative.” (referenced above)

“Tutoring as an academic recovery strategy is already widely used in districts. In a May survey of 1,287 districts, 87 percent told the Education Week Research Center that they offer tutoring to students.”

“However, the presence of tutors doesn’t always mean students are receiving intensive academic support, and schools often struggle to recruit and retain high-quality tutors. On average, districts reported 17 percent of their students were currently receiving tutoring in the Education Week survey. But 43 percent of students on average could benefit from tutoring, districts said.”

Sounds to me like America is trying to form a national tutoring corps. I’ve called for the same in this column.

Richard Elmore, the now deceased Harvard education professor, wrote about the “loose-coupling of schools,” where central administration and individual campuses were often not on the same page when it came to executing strategy. In the end, Elmore believed it was this “loose-coupling” effect that doomed most national, state, and district-wide strategy, since the individual campuses were going to do pretty much what they thought was best, not matter what their bosses told them.

Will this idea of a national tutoring corps fall prey to “loose-coupling?”

Schools Can Do More Than “Return to Normal.” Here’s How (EducationWeek)

Michael B. Horn is the cofounder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

In this article, Horn writes:

“As COVID-19 began wreaking havoc on schools and sowing devastation for students, educators, and their communities, one of the common early rally cries from educators was ‘we must not return to normal.’

And yet, as schools have reopened across the country and educators have completed a third year impacted by the pandemic, they have struggled to find the time and space to fundamentally reinvent schooling.”

Horn points to research by Clark Gilbert, a former president of Brigham Young University Pathway Worldwide and BYY-Idaho, that introduces the concept of “threat rigidity.”

Horn writes:

“Gilbert’s research found that when there was a ‘discontinuous’ change – an abrupt event in the environment – an organization was able to marshal far more resources to meet the challenge when it framed the change as a threat than as an opportunity.

That means that saying that the COVID-caused disruption is an opportunity to reinvent schooling is not only tone deaf, it’s also unlikely to gain traction.

Although framing something as a threat caused an organization to marshal the resources to tackle a challenge, it also caused organizations to respond with something called ‘threat rigidity.’

When this happens, an organization doubles down on its existing processes. That results in more top-down control; reduced experimentation at precisely the time that an organization needs to be experimenting more to adapt to new circumstances; and a focus on an organization’s existing resources, rather than questioning what else it might use to respond to the threat.”

Bingo! I think Horn exactly nails what is currently happening in America when it comes to figuring out a better way to get our young learners to experience deep and powerful learning.

And our national government (see above,) our state governments, and our school district leaders aren’t helping much as they fall pretty to “threat rigidity.”

Study: When School Board Members Are Elected, Their Property Values Go Up (The 74)

“With the actions of school boards coming under increasing public scrutiny, a recently released study has offered a surprising window into the motivation of their members.

In a paper examining a decade of election outcomes, academics at the University of Rochester, the University of Colorado, and Duke University discovered that many winners of North Carolina school board races saw property values rise in their neighborhoods. The gains may have been generated by winners’ manipulation of attendance zones to sort whiter and high-achieving students into nearby schools.

The findings also deliver an unmistakably partisan message. Board members registered as Republicans or independents yielded increases in home prices, while effects for Democratic winners were null.”

When I was a region superintendent, we opened a brand new school to help relieve a very popular elementary campus located in a middle- to upper-middle class neighborhood. Before it’s opening, we met with parents, neighborhood associations, and other community leadership to make sure each school was going to be assigned similar demographics when it came to who would enroll and attend each campus.

The day before the board meeting, when our recommendations would be considered, I was called into the general superintendent’s office to meet with the board member responsible for these two elementaries. With one stroke of a big black marker, the board member redrew our recommended lines to insure the popular elementary retained more neighborhood homes in its zone, while the new elementary drew more apartment housing.

I was shocked. All our hard work had been wiped away with one big black line drawn by a school board member who didn’t give one flip about community input.

The next day, the rest of the board approved the “big black marker” plan.

At the time, I couldn’t figure out why this school board member wasn’t committed to setting up both elementary schools for success, why he chose one of the other.

Now, based on the article referenced here, maybe the school board member knew what we didn’t either know or care about at the time – that his worth, his property’s worth, was at stake if he didn’t draw “the big black line.”

Plus, he was a huge Republican.

Enjoy the weekend. I’m headed out for a 80-mile bike ride. SVB