It’s Friday! Time for the News Roundup.
Gov. Greg Abbott Appoints First School Safety Chief Four Months After Uvalde Shooting (The Texas Tribune)
The Texas Tribune recently reported that,
“Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday appointed former U.S. Secret Service agent John P. Scott as the Texas Education Agency’s first chief of school safety and security, a position the governor created in response to the Uvalde mass school shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead.”
“In his new role, which started October 3rd, Scott will ‘take every action possible to ensure schools are using best practices to safeguard against school shootings or other dangers,’ according to a press release from Abbott’s office.”
Poor Greg Abbott. Unwilling to invest in mental health education and assistance, but ready to hire an ex-U.S. Secret Service agent to make Texas schools safe again.
I have news for Governor Abbott. The only way Texas or any other state in the country will make their schools safer is to accomplish three tasks:
- Limit access to guns in this country.
- Improve mental health education and assistance.
- Work on building relationships with kids instead of focusing on testing them.
Fueled by Pandemic, Homeschool ‘Hybrids’ Gain Traction with Middle-Class Parents (The 74)
The 74 continues to cover stories focused on hybrid homeschooling. Recently, reporter Greg Toppo wrote,”
“…hybrid homeschooling has been around for decades. Now the sector even has its own research center, based at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta.”
“Eric Wearne, who founded the research center, began studying what he calls ‘hybrid’ schools about seven years ago – he defines hybrids differently than most observers, not as a mix of online and live instruction, but as programs that meet in-person for fewer than five full days per week, with students typically home-schooled the rest of the week.”
“The schools also decide upon most or all of the curriculum, though varying levels of instruction and grading may be done by parents. And they’re more formal than learning pods or microschools. About 60 percent to 70 percent are private, according to Wearne.”
Over the past three years, our public education system has lost 10% of its enrollment. 1 out of 10 kids eligible to attend U.S. public schools aren’t attending.
Is this the beginning of a “tipping point”?
Equity Audit of Champlain Valley School District Highlights Concerns about Marginalized Students’ Experiences (VTDigger)
As most of you know by now, I spend a considerable amount of time in Vermont. Champlain Valley School District sits right outside of Burlington, Vermont.
Recently, VTDigger, a Vermont-based online news source, reported that,
“A first-time equity audit of the Champlain Valley School District indicates that students of color disproportionately have negative experiences and poorer educational outcomes compared to their white peers.”
“The audit found that historically marginalized students in the district had graduation rates of 82.6% in 2019 and 86.6% in 2021, compared to 97.2% and 98.3%, respectively, for all other students.”
“The findings ‘make it very clear that there is work needed in CVSD to close opportunity gaps and create a more welcoming and inclusive community,’ said Angela Arsenault, chair of the district’s school board. ‘I hope that our entire community will view the findings of the audit as a call to action.’”
Regretfully, the CVSD story abbreviated above could be the story of most school districts in the U.S. Which leads me to conclude that it’s not one school, not one district, not one state that is inequitable.
It is the system – period.
Should It Stay or Should It Go? Schools Trim Number of Tech Tools They Use (EducationWeek)
Alyson Klein recently reported for EducationWeek that,
“Veteran teacher and technology enthusiast Heather Esposito, from Cherry Hill, N.J., watched her colleagues scour education technology tools for anything that would make the intimidating world of virtual learning easier to navigate back in 2020.”
“Education technology companies were happy to comply, offering teachers free trials of their products.”
“Not, the coast of that expansion of tech tools is literally coming due.”
“Cherry Hill, like other districts around the country, has only about one more school year to spend the bulk of its federal COVID relief dollars, which were aimed in part at helping schools improve their digital capacity.”
“The means some tools teachers embraced over the past couple years could gain a firmer foothold in the suburban Philadelphia district. But many more will get the axe, at least in the form of no districtwide funding.”
And that is the trouble with spending “soft money” on materials needed over the long-term. When that money goes away, school districts won’t spend “hard money” on the technology – mainly because they have all their dollars tied up in human resource and not tech.
$700 Billion: That’s How Much It Will Cost to Fix Pandemic Learning Loss, Study Says (The 74)
Linda Jacobson, a reporter for The 74, recently wrote that,
“Schools have received almost $190 billion for pandemic recovery, but that falls far short of the $700 billion it will take to erase the damage to learning caused by COVID, according to a new study.”
“And the way the government has distributed the funds – through a formula that targets high-poverty schools – left some communities hit hard by the pandemic with insufficient funding to offset learning declines, wrote Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University in Virginia in a paper released by the American Education Research Association.”
“The most recent round of funding, the American Rescue Plan, requires districts to spend a minimum of 20% of their funds to address learning loss.”
“’But nobody had to stop there,’ said Heather Tolley-Bauer, co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a parent-led group monitoring spending in the Cobb County School District, north of Atlanta. The organization is among those that have received a grant from the National Parents Union to track the funds. ‘When we look at the things they could have spent the money on and the things they did spend the money on, it’s frustrating.’”
“Her leading example is the $12 million the district spent on “Iggy” hand-rinsing machines that dispense a mixture of water and ozone. The company’s website points to studies that say the machines kill COVID, but some experts disagree and others say there’s not yet enough evidence. But even if the technology is effective at killing the virus, the devices at some schools are inaccessible, with plastic over the openings, Tolley-Bauer said. (A spokesperson for 30e Scientific, the company that makes the machines, explained that some of them have experience ‘vandalism by unknown individuals.’)”
This is a mess. There must be a better way to help kids get stronger and smarter in their learning skills than to continually give money to a system that misuses that money time and time again.
ACT Scores Fall to Lowest Level in 30 Years (The 74)
The 74 reported this week,
“In yet another data point on missed learning during the pandemic, ACT scores from this year’s high school graduates dropped to their lowest level in three decades, according to a report released this week.”
“Exam-takers averaged 19.8 out of a possible 36 total points on the college admissions test, the first time since 1991 that nationwide results dipped below 20.”
“’There is no way to sugar coat these ACT results,’ Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, told The 74. ‘College entrance exam scores have plummeted, reflecting substantive holes in student knowledge and abilities.’”
Here’s the question now: Can our current public education system recover from the learning atrocities incurred over the past two years? Or, should we get busy accelerating a new system of learning, one that has already taken hold in many households and communities, in the form of learning pods, microschools, and the like?
Enjoy the weekend. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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