It’s Friday! Time for the Roundup.
‘Time is Running Out’: COVID-19 Set Back Older Students the Most, Study Finds (The 74)
According to The 74 online,
“Middle- and high-school students, who have the least time to catch up before they leave the K-12 system, may be suffering the most as school emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, warns a new report released [last week]. These students, researchers said, ‘deserve our urgent attention.’”
“The report, which relies largely on recent findings from outside research groups and the federal government, warns that on just about every indicator that matters – basic skills, college going, mental health and more – the pandemic has set older students back.”
Time isn’t really running out for these older kids when it comes to learning. We can learn anytime, anywhere. What traditional school leadership really means is that they think time is running out for these older learners because they aren’t attending school the way the system expects them to, and therefore working with these older learners turns out to be more difficult than the traditional system imagined.
A new learning system could make the difference with these older learners, and for that matter, younger learners too.
New Data: School Shootings Surge to a Record High – Two Years in a Row (The 74)
According to The 74 online last week,
“Despite heightened concerns about campus safety since the pandemic, in many ways America’s public schools are safer today than they were a decade ago, federal campus crime data released [recently] revealed. Yet in one startling way, they’ve grown exponentially more dangerous: An unprecedented growth in school shootings.”
“There were a record 188 school shootings resulting in injuries or deaths in the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest available data included in a report…by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. That’s twice as many shootings on campus than the previous record – set just one year earlier.”
When we opened our personalized learning lab in the Houston Museum District, we wanted to make the learning experience as mobile as possible, meaning the young learners weren’t “trapped” in one spot – the classroom – like many are in traditional school. An unintended outcomes of that decision was that we found our young learners to be much safer than kids in classrooms, for the fact that they were constantly on the move.
Part of the reason we have so many school shootings is that children inside those campuses sit their like, well, “sitting ducks.” The other reason is that we are out of control with the matter of national gun control.
State Education ‘Snapshot’ a Mixed Bag for Vermont Students (VermontDigger)
Vermont has always had the reputation for top public education systems. But the state seems to be struggling lately. Vermont Digger online recently reported,
“Data from 2022 showed improvements in some educational areas and setbacks in others. One troubling sign, the data showed a widening performance gap between historically marginalized students and their classmates.”
…
“Vermont students’ standardized test scores showed little improvement in 2022, following a dip between 2019 and 2021. The new test score data shows that Vermont students’ academic proficiency has improved little, if at all, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Maybe the reason no one wants to test anymore is that our kids do so poorly on the tests we give?
Attendance Gap: New Data from Minnesota Reveals Chasm in Chronic Absenteeism (The 74)
Traditional educators are convinced that, if only they could get their kids back into the classroom, everything would get better when it comes to improving school.
Witness what is happening in Minnesota these days. According to The 74 online,
“For the first time in four years, Minnesota has released fresh information on one of its key measures of school success: chronic absenteeism. In keeping with an increasingly worrisome national trend, the numbers of students who attend class consistently dropping from 85% to less than 70%.”
Instead of getting kids to return to the traditional classroom, why aren’t school leaders figuring out ways to meet learning needs, whether that happens inside school or out?
74 Interview: Stanford Economist Eric Hanushek on COVID’s Trillion-Dollar Impact on Students (The 74)
According to The 74 online,
“Experts have spent years trying to quantify the pandemic’s toll on a generation of K-12 students. Some have focused on the months of incomplete or nonexistent learning opportunities while instruction was being delivered remotely in 2020 and 2021. Others were most disturbed by the deferred development of social-emotional skills for the youngest students, or the damage dealt to the mental health of adolescents.”
“All significant harms. But then there’s the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.”
“That’s the projected cost, in lifetime earnings, to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totaling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don’t do something about those diminished skills.”
So here’s the sad part of this story. We are willing to put all of these kids in economic jeopardy, for the rest of their lives, because we don’t know how to build a learning system that works better for kids than the one we currently have.
We put a man on the moon for God’s sake. I guess it’s a matter of priorities.
Her Students Reported Her for a Lesson on Race. Can She Trust Them Again? (The Washington Post)
Teaching is not an easy job. But now it’s become arguably more difficult.
The Washington Post reported recently,
“As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. And extra pair of socks, just in case.”
“Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.”
“Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition (AP Lang) students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me,’ a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.”
“The students wrote in emails that the book – and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism – made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students ‘feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’ on account of their race.”
Within the current traditional school system, academic freedom is slowly eroding due to state legislative overreach. Part of a strong learning relationship is trust. Whenever that trust is compromised, it is fair to say that learning relationship is damaged.
Campus Road Trip Diary: 8 Things We Learned This Year About America’s Most Innovative High Schools (The 74)
Here are the top 8 innovative practices The 74 online reporters identified from high schools across the country:
- “They don’t worry about what came before.”
- “They focus intently on exactly what their students need.”
- “They embrace internships and personalization.”
- “They prepare young people for jobs in emerging industries.”
- “They’re rethinking what classrooms, campuses and school days look like.”
- “They redefine who high school is for.”
- “They serve students of color in a more supportive way.”
- “They cut through traditional structures to find what works.”
Why can’t all high schools focus on these 8 innovative practices? I’ll tell you why. Because they are trapped inside a systemic paradigm that no longer works for children, but that paradigm is so strong, it can’t be broken.
I’ll be away until October 9th enjoying Vermont’s fall foliage. Have a great weekend. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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