Friday News Roundup

Today’s Friday News Roundup is focused on the top stories of 2024, 2025 predictions, and a few other New Year surprises. Let’s get to it.

Every year, The 74 releases 12 charts that defined American education for that year. Here are the chart titles that made news for 2024, without the charts themselves:

“Federal Funds Lifted Learning – But Not Enough – Two papers released this summer by the Education Recovery Scorecard and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research attempted to quantify the effects of the federal government’s ESSER funds, which channeled $190 billion to schools and districts over the last four years in response to the pandemic. Their findings showed that the money has helped, but came nowhere close to filling the academic hole left by COVID.”

“Students Are Still Hurting – The full picture of learning loss remains discouraging, particularly for those who were in their foundational years of schooling when the pandemic threw their education into chaos.”

“The Disappearing College Freshman – Colleges and universities face punishing demographic challenges in the years to come, as smaller birth cohorts and shrinking high school classes leave institutions to fight over a diminished applicant pool. Even more worrying, data suggests that rising numbers of potential college-goers are reconsidering their future plans and heading directly into the workforce.”

“Charter Schools Boost College-Going, If Not Test Scores – Charter schools have long enjoyed an uneven reputation based on geography. While those located in cities – often built on a ‘no excuses’ framework that emphasizes high standards and tough discipline – can achieve incredible results, their suburban and rural counterparts generally underperform traditional public schools.”

“But a paper authored by University of Michigan researcher Sarah Cohodes added a striking addendum. In an experiment based in Massachusetts, where Boston-based charters post some of their best results anywhere in the country, she discovered that non-urban charters also manage to significantly increase students’ chances of enrolling and graduating from college. Paradoxically, however, they do so even as those same students perform worse on standardized tests than their peers in nearby public schools.”

“AI Could Get the Most out of Tutors – Tutoring programs exploded in the last five years as states and school districts searched for ways to country plummeting achievement during COVID. But the cost of providing supplemental instruction to tens of millions of students can be eye-watering, even as the results seem to taper off as programs serve more students.”

“That’s where artificial intelligence could prove a decisive advantage. A report circulated in October by the National Student Support Accelerator found that an AI-powered tutoring assistant significantly improved the performance of hundreds of tutors by prompting them with new ways to explain concepts to students. With the help of the tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, students assigned to the weakest tutors began posting academic results nearly equal to those assigned to the strongest. And the cost to run the program was just $20 per pupil.”

“Teachers Aren’t Happy – …A paper published this fall by Brown University economist Matt Kraft put [the teachers aren’t happy] fears into a much larger context. Using polling data going back decades, he found that public esteem for teaching – as measured by how many people called it a prestigious career, compared with other professions – is now at the lowest level seen in half a century. Fewer than half of all teachers said that the stress of their job was worth the effort, compared with over 80 percent in the 1970s.”

“The Culture Wars Are Coming to a School Near You – One likely reason for lower job satisfaction among those toiling in the classroom? Disputes over politics and culture, which have recently grown far more contentious.”

“A survey released by the RAND Corporation in February first publicized what many school employees have complained about for years. Lawmakers in 18 states passed legislation restricting classroom discussion of some topics, whether related to politics, history, race, gender, or sexuality, between 2021 and 2023. Those states are home to approximately one-third of all American teachers.”

“Screentime Is On the Rise. So Is Depression”

“Catholic Schools Might Need Vouchers to Survive”

“School’s In, So Is Crime – …[A] paper released this fall gave a much more sweeping overview of the link between schools and disorder. Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the authors found that criminal activity among children from the ages of 10 to 17 – whether as perpetrators or victims – peaks during the school year, particularly during the autumn and spring. That’s an exact inversion of the pattern for older offenders, who are much more likely to commit crimes during the summer months.”

“For High Schoolers, Weed is Everywhere”

“Pre-K Helps Families’ Bottom Lines”

Larry Ferlazzo, an opinion contributor for EducationWeek releases predictions every year about what will happen inside American education for 2025. Here is a summary of Ferlazzo’s predictions:

The state of Texas will challenge the Phyler decision mandating that undocumented children have the right to a free public school education.

Future President Donald Trump will announce he’s shutting down the federal Department of Education, but it definitely won’t happen in 2025 – and maybe never.

A handful of highly-publicized ICE raids on undocumented students will occur, but Trump’s big deportation effort will run into logistical and legal obstacles that will delay the movement.

Texas will push through a massive publicly funded school choice program.

The Trump administration will try to overturn the community eligibility provision that allows schools to serve universal free meals.

2025 won’t be an easy year for trans kids and their families.

Echoing a comment by University of Illinois education professor Paul Bruno, the Trump administration is going to be doing so much bad stuff in so many areas that their destructive attacks on education will get drowned out and ignored.

Hundreds of school districts, like the L.A. Unified, will defend their immigrant students from the Trump administration attacks.

And finally, two news stories that caught my eye recently.

First, a story from Iowa. According to the Des Moines Register:

“A new generation of popular slang words has created heartburn for an Iowa school and prompted a bigger debate on whether students who embrace trendy slang such as ‘Ohio,’ ‘skibidi,’ ‘chat,’ ‘rizz’ and ‘sigma’ are disrupting learning or exercising their free speech.”

“The issue recently came to a head in Iowa’s Fremont-Mills Community School District along the Nebraska border when parents and a free speech group accused a teacher of banning more than two dozen slang terms from her classroom that have been embraced by Gen Alpha students – kids born after 2009.”

Second, I’ll give you one guess what the education word of 2024 is, according to EducationWeek.

Cellphone ban.

And the beat goes on.

Have a great weekend and ABPTL will be back Monday. Til then. SVB