Category: Current News

It’s Friday, time for the news roundup. Despite Urgency, New National Tutoring Effort Could Take 6 Months to Ramp Up (The 74) The 74 recently reported: “With a third pandemic summer underway, the Biden administration’s new push to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors is getting a late start in helping students recover from academic and…

A good friend of mine served as a school board member in Houston when I was a public school educator there. She used to say, “Scott, there is only one way to know if kids are learning or not – you have to test them. If you don’t test them, then how do you know?”…

I like to write about creating a new system of learning for kids, one that personalizes learning for each individual young learner. The current system was not built to individualize learning for every kid and doesn’t seem interested in learning how to do it now. Furthermore, the current system seems too occupied with what I…

A big reason why I think our traditional school system is broken and can’t be fixed deals with the equity issue, especially when it comes to black, brown, and poor young learners. A new report, focused on federal funding sources for K-12 campuses, supports my claim that schools have become highly inequitable places. The report,…

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…

It’s the Friday before July 4th. 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…

I recently came across a report submitted to Congress by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) titled “As Students Struggled to Learn, Teachers Reported Few Strategies as Particularly Helpful to Mitigate Learning Loss.” The report was published by the GAO last May. The GAO found that “During the 2020-21 school year, students in all grade levels,…

A group of American Enterprise Institutute’s researchers recently released the Return to Learn Tracker, a way for traditional districts to estimate the level of student learning loss in their schools. According to The 74, “Back when districts wrote their ESSER plans (the federal government’s COVID relief initiative,) most didn’t have the information we have today.…

I noticed Education Reimagined, a Washington D.C.-based group committed to a different learning system for our young people, released a new resource titled The Big Idea. According to ER, “The Big Idea is designed to spark new conversations and inspire people to imagine a world of thriving learner-centered ecosystems. We are eager to grow the…

It’s Friday! Time for the Roundup. Let’s get to it. ‘The World Feels Less Stable’: Educators’ Sense of School Safety Right Now (EducationWeek) “Four in 10 educators feel less safe in their schools now than they did five years ago, according to a new survey by the EdWeek Research Center. School shootings factor heavily into…