I lead a team of data analysts who review and categorize responses to a text message survey tool used by schools across 28 states. Having access to regular feedback from nearly half a million parents and educators allows me to see emerging issues and trends. One trend I see right now in our data is terrifying: a dramatic spike in school violence.   

Across the country, adults are struggling to manage their emotions 鈥� on airplanes, in grocery stores, even and . in many cities is on the rise. Last year was the in America, and this year is on track to surpass it. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly increased trauma, isolation, stress, anxiety and economic disparity worldwide: all events that can trigger violence. 

These stressors impact children as well. Not only have students been exposed to increased trauma, but many who relied on school mental health resources pre-pandemic were unable to access them during school closures. This is causing a troublesome environment for students and teachers who have returned to school this fall. 

Our data at Possip reflects this turbulence. The surveys our school partners send out ask a few short questions designed to gauge satisfaction and highlight specific concerns or praise. We organize the responses into reports for school leaders and identify trends by tracking frequently used keywords. In these results, we鈥檝e seen an increase in concern from families about students fighting, school violence, student safety and bullying 鈥� even at schools that never struggled with those issues before the pandemic.

In the first two months of school this year, there has been a 150 percent increase in the number of parent comments that reference bullying and violence over the same time period in 2019, the last time students were in school without a pandemic looming. Compared with this time last year, when many schools were virtual, we are seeing 26 times as many responses referencing bullying, fighting and violence.

Parents have responded with comments like: 鈥淭he fighting worries me.鈥� 鈥淢y daughter feels unsafe and is having a hard time concentrating.鈥� 鈥淚’m concerned that these kids could one day get seriously hurt from all the fighting that goes on.鈥�

We should all be worried. Given the fallout we鈥檝e seen from this global pandemic, this isn’t necessarily surprising. But we can鈥檛 just sit back and wait for the worst to happen. 

Here are three things that can help prevent school violence:  

Expand mental health support in schools

While many districts are investing in mental health services, the national labor shortage is making it difficult for schools to find qualified staff. But mental health support doesn鈥檛 have to come just from trained professionals. It can be embedded in a school鈥檚 culture. 

Teachers can learn trauma-informed classroom management and mindfulness practices. To kickstart this work right away, teachers and staff can be shown how to leverage apps like , or , to support their students’ mental health and their own. Daily wellness checks from teachers or counselors can help students make meaningful connections with others, and creating safe spaces for students when they need to talk or share a concern can make them feel like important and valued members of the school community. found that students who were involved in K-12 school shootings had a history of rejection, often being victims of or parental neglect. Allowing students to share, feel listened to and resolve problems at school improves their mental health.

Listen to and learn from families

It can be intimidating for schools to give families a platform for regularly sharing their ideas, opinions and concerns. School leaders often worry that addressing complaints will take time away from other administrative duties. But in helping schools do this, we鈥檝e found the opposite to be true. When parents are consistently asked for their insights and feedback, schools can identify issues early and prevent small problems from snowballing into major crises that put everything else on pause. When parents have a systematic, routine and simple way to share concerns about their child鈥檚 emotional or mental state, it gives schools time for intervention before a situation becomes a safety risk.

Lean on your community

Using the power of community and partnerships is an effective tool for decreasing student violence. This was the case in Chicago schools that implemented a system called , which places trusted adults along pedestrian routes to school. It was also evident in schools across the country that have used a program called to bring dads onto campuses. Students can also lean on one another for support during this difficult time. Implementing peer support groups or structured peer support systems may help and help them feel positive connections at school.

A holistic approach to school violence prevention is challenging work, but it is necessary to support student well-being and to make schools and school communities the safe havens they should be.

Amanda Richards is reporting and insights lead at and a former school principal.

To cast a ballot in person, voters must wear a mask or face covering and keep a 6-foot distance from others. However, vaccination cards are not called for, even as the city and, more broadly, for .

Many NYC parents are unhappy with this turn of events.

Elena Khasanova rages, 鈥淰accinated parents can’t even walk their child into the classroom under the excuse of COVID theater. We have to submit meaningless morning screening every day; do the voters have to do it?鈥�

鈥淢any high schools claim they can’t hold in-person open house sessions to fully vaccinated parents and their children because it’s ‘unsafe,’ but people with varying vax status can come into school buildings and vote?鈥� puzzles Majiya Chai. 

Katie N. concurs. 鈥�I’m incredibly angry about the hypocrisy. Parents are not allowed inside school buildings. Kids are being denied access to take sips of water in class. They must eat lunch in silence and 6 feet apart. If not, they can eat lunch outside on the concrete, quietly and in 15 minutes or less. They have to wear masks outside. Families cannot go inside school gyms to watch their kids play sports. BUT STRANGERS CAN GO INSIDE SCHOOLS TO VOTE? Which is it? Are adults all superspreaders and no parent can be allowed inside for fear of spreading COVID? But then we’ll let strangers inside and risk infecting our 办颈诲蝉?鈥�

A parent who wanted to be identified only by the initials JS adds, 鈥�I think it’s ridiculous. My daughter was unwell at school and I couldn’t even go inside to collect her from the nurse鈥檚 office. She threw up in the hallway on her way to the front door, and they put her mask back on her face immediately after and brought her outside. The poor girl had to smell her own vomit in case she gave anyone COVID (which she didn’t have) in the 10 steps to the front door, yet any Tom, Dick or Harry is going to be allowed into their building to vote. Absolutely nonsensical!鈥�

Some parents, such as this one, going by the initials SS, suggested a compromise: 鈥淧olling locations within schools should be limited to high school buildings this year. With young children unable to even receive the vaccine at this point, this brings a level of unnecessary risk. I’m all for making it easy to vote and have enough places to go to, but I worry about random adults in our children’s schools where we are not allowed. It seems a bit tone deaf for the current situation in our city.鈥�

Other parents had questions, such as MK, who asked, 鈥淲ho will be responsible for sanitizing after polling? School custodians are already working tirelessly to clean daily. This creates more work in a smaller time frame for sanitizing, especially considering the time polls close and the arrival of students. This also means that voters will simultaneously be in the building with afterschool students.鈥�

Still others were less concerned about potential infection and more about the online learning that is planned for Election Day. Prior to the pandemic, Election Day was simply a full day off from school and instruction.

鈥淭he thing that is super annoying is the remote school,鈥� said a mother of elementary school students. 鈥淚t鈥檚 inconvenient enough that there is no school and many parents have to scramble for child care or figure out how to do all their work plus watch their kids. Just give us all a break. Let the teachers, school administrators, kids and parents not have to mentally swing from one dimension to another and make it a day off, same for snow days.鈥�

A dad shares her concerns: 鈥淚 have issues with days that were traditionally days off now being remote. It was hard doing that during lockdown but necessary. I do not feel it is rational to expect parents who work to pay for help because small children will need assistance with online remote learning. Even worse, the new snow days will be remote days. Since those are not days we can schedule, it will be difficult if not impossible for many parents to both work and to also monitor children to ensure they are participating.鈥�

Diana Brogan spoke for many when she summarized, 鈥�This is all performative bull%&*$ they are putting our kids through.鈥�

Alina Adams is a New York Times best-selling romance and mystery writer, the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten and Getting Into NYC High School, a blogger at and mother of three. She believes you can’t have true school choice until all parents know all their school choices 鈥� and how to get them. Visit her website, .

The critical role of family-school partnerships, particularly in historically underserved communities, was well documented even before the pandemic struck. Decades of that family involvement 鈥�  including supporting at-home learning, participating in school activities and monitoring children’s academic and social activities 鈥� pays dividends across the developmental continuum. It鈥檚 particularly beneficial for lower-income students for whom school may be one of many competing demands (e.g., jobs, sibling baby-sitting) on their family鈥檚 time.

Traditional strategies, though, aren鈥檛 always effective. The pandemic strained what was already a tenuous school-family connection in many communities.There is a in schools among Black, brown and Asian families that the pandemic has only amplified, leading many parents of color to . And while schools may be trying to increase communications with families, more frequent one-way outreach is not a recipe for building trust.

For years, researchers like Harvard University professor Karen Mapp, have school leaders about the limitations of the one-way communications families traditionally receive. 鈥淭he heart of this work [of engaging families] involves treating families as true partners,鈥� said Mapp in an interview. She advises schools and organizations to shift the role of parents from spectators of the work schools do to co-designers of students鈥� learning and wellness. To do this right, schools must share power with families and acknowledge that every family has strengths and resources to offer, while remaining mindful of barriers to engagement (i.e., work demands, language and culture differences).

One two-way approach involves leveraging technology to enlist families as academic support to drive student learning. For instance, TalkingPoints, a family engagement platform, enables regular dialogue and collaboration between schools and families, tailored to each family鈥檚 preferred language. The purpose is to build the capacity of teachers and families to partner with each other to support students academically, socially and emotionally. Teachers use an app or text messages to share information, insights, photos, videos and documents with specific family members to give them a clear view of daily classroom activities. The family members can reply with questions or share information about the child鈥檚 home learning environment. If the replies are in the home language, TalkingPoints will translate them into English for the teacher. Compared to its June 2020 report, the platform’s July 2021 report revealed that after a year of using TalkingPoints during distance learning, teachers report a deeper understanding of their students鈥� circumstances, and families report feeling more confident in supporting their child鈥檚 learning. The platform鈥檚 most that 93 percent of participating teachers have seen positive changes in students鈥� behavior and performance as well.

PowerMyLearning, a program focused on strengthening the 鈥渢riangle of learning relationships鈥� among student, teacher and family, is another example of two-way engagement. It empowers educators to engage students and partner with families to implement research-based instructional practices across four domains: the learning environment, instructional planning and delivery, data-driven decision making and student agency. Family Playlists, one of the company’s products that delivers homework assignments in families鈥� home languages, helps students learn at home by becoming teachers themselves. Students receive assignments through text messages to their designated family member鈥檚 cell phone, and then teach their family what they are learning through real-world, hands-on activities. Families engage in meaningful dialogue with their child while providing feedback directly to the teacher via their phone in their preferred language. Results from show that compared with standard solo homework assignments, Family Playlists have a statistically significant positive impact on outcomes related to student agency, which were especially pronounced for English learners.

Models like these are establishing deeper relationships between schools and families by acknowledging and building on the myriad roles that families can play in students鈥� educational journeys. In the Christensen Institute鈥檚 latest report, , research reveals four key roles that families are playing in partnership with schools: as academic support to drive student learning, as guidance support to help students navigate out-of-school and postsecondary pathways, as informal mentors to cultivate and expand students鈥� career options, and as sources of community to promote student well-being. Tapping families as sources of community for one another is perhaps the most innovative of the four roles. Recent research family-to-family connections can lead to greater parental confidence in advocating for their children’s needs, access to resources and positive changes both in the way families interact with one another and in influencing the schools attended by their children. By building these relationships, parents are, in turn, expanding their networks, which translates to a available to their children long term. For example, SchoolCNXT, a family engagement app, connects families to build relationships with each other and school staff to exchange resources unique to their needs. 

Effectively and equitably serving every student this year will require new models and tools that help schools unlock the potential of families as sources of support for students’ well-being and learning. The good news is that families are ready for bold changes that shift the traditional power dynamic with schools and build the capacity of both to work together as partners. By weaving families鈥� aspirations and assets into students鈥� learning 鈥� inside and outside the classroom 鈥� schools can make the long overdue shift from one-way communication to two-way, authentic family engagement. 

Mahnaz R. Charania, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

In this episode of Class Disrupted, Michael Horn interviews Diane Tavenner about the difference between standards and curriculum, and why she’s in favor of a common core set of standards but not a common curriculum.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. It is good to see you. There continue to be so many headlines in the mainstream media about schools right now. But I will say that here we鈥檙e kind of happily settling into some good routine with our kids and their school. And hopefully I didn’t just jinx us, but things feel pretty good right now. How are you?

Diane Tavenner: Well, I’m glad to hear that, Michael. And I will say similarly, I had the really good fortune of spending Friday with a group of our school leaders and I was really heartened by a relatively consistent theme of things feeling like they’re starting to stabilize a little bit. This has been the hardest start of school I’ve ever experienced, we’ve ever experienced as a group. And so I don’t know about that jinx. It might just be that what we’re learning from COVID is it comes in waves. And so maybe we’re just on the up for right now. It’s weird to live both in that positive momentum space and simultaneously be preparing for who knows what might come next, which honestly, Michael is partly why we’re here and why we started a third season of Class Disrupted, something neither of us anticipated for a few reasons.

Most obviously we’re doing this because class is still disrupted in so many ways, but, more importantly, we get daily reminders of how the schools that we had before the pandemic are not the schools that our children need. And they are really in dire need of a makeover. And we are both eternal optimists and we both think this is our collective opportunity to do just that, to remake our schools. And so we really continue to explore, and I think in ever more nuanced ways, what redesigned schools look like and why they are so much better for kids and our communities and our country. And so this season, our take on that is we’re following our own curiosity, as well as what listeners are curious about. So thanks to everyone who’s writing to us to let us know what they’re wondering. But today, Michael, I think you are curious about something. It seems I may have said some things that have piqued your interest.

Michael: Well, with curiosity as the theme, I wanted to avoid the headlines of today in the news, but instead go deeper on two things that you’ve said in our last couple episodes that I suspect maybe have left a few people, a few listeners who are paying close attention, if you will close reading, scratching their heads. And so two episodes ago where we addressed what is taught, you said that you didn’t believe that schools or students should likely have the same curriculum. Made sense as we were talking about it. But then in the last episode, Diane, we were talking about who decides what gets taught. So from the what to the who, and you said that you were in favor of common core standards. And I thought, well, let’s go a step deeper because I suspect a lot of people heard that and had a little bit of whiplash. Not common curriculum, but common standards.

And so I’d love to play off that a little bit for people because I’d love to talk about what does that look like on the ground? What’s the difference between curriculum and standards and how do they impact each other? How does that sound?

Diane: It sounds fascinating. And it’s so funny. It’s so fascinating to see yourself and what you say through other people’s eyes. And so I love this topic. And so if two episodes ago we were exploring what students learn and then last time we talked about who decides, today I think we can focus on how鈥攈ow standards impact what’s taught and how they connect to curriculum. Yes, let’s do it.

Michael: Perfect. I love it. And I will say just as a prelude that I found a lot of times we use the same words in conversations, but we mean very different things. And so in many ways, this episode gives us an opportunity, Diane, to go just a heck of a lot deeper on these terms and go super deep so that there is no ambiguity at the end of what we mean when we’re talking about standards versus curriculum. So let me start with a what question and then we’ll get to the how, which is, just tell us what are state standards and help us understand what they do and don’t say, and what do they codify?

Diane: It’s a great place to start because so often people talk about standards. I don’t think they really know what they are. So I’m glad you’re starting here, Michael. And to be fair, standards have changed over my 25 years in education. And so just to give you a sense, when I started out teaching, state standards, honestly, to the extent that they existed, were probably more like what people think of when they’re thinking about them. They were often a list of facts and information, and sometimes books that were supposed to be taught in the schools. And you would get this list. Funny, when I started teaching, we didn’t have the internet. So I don’t even really remember how you got it quite frankly, but as we鈥�.

Michael: It was probably a hand-out or something.

Diane: Seriously, passed down, or copied down. As we previously talked about, these are pretty political so whatever folks in power valued would often make the list. And of course, textbook company publishers would lobby hard to have the list match what they were offering. So that was the list back then, if you will. When I was training for my teaching credential in the early 鈥�90s, things were starting to change. And I think I personally felt like I had incredible fortune of having one of my professors, who’s a very long time and very respected English teacher in a local high school, having been a part of a significant state effort to bring teachers together, to be much more intentional and explicit and coordinated about the skills and knowledge that all students should have access to and the opportunity to learn.

And so I was trained as a teacher on those draft standards that were being created. And they’re really the precursor to what we’re seeing today. There were many more efforts like those, and as a profession, I would say we’ve gotten better and better at identifying meaningful standards that are really grounded in how people learn. We’ve talked often about the science having really come a long way, and so how people learn and what they need to know to be successful in career and life today.

Michael: It makes a lot of sense. Can you just give us a quick example of how those standards have evolved over time? When you first got into teaching, what might it have looked like and what might it look like now?

Diane: Here’s a fun one. I’m going to go back to even before I taught. I’m going to go back to my ninth grade biology class. And while I don’t know what the exact standard was given the activity we did, I’m guessing it was something like this. The standard was probably along the lines of teach kids what an ecosystem is and quite frankly, the standard was probably something like that because what we ended up doing in my 9th grade class, Michael, was we had forest, grassland, tundra and desert ecosystems, and we all went to an encyclopedia or a textbook and looked them up and we made pretty poster boards where we cut out little animals and plants and pasted them on the poster board to show what a desert ecosystem was. So that’s kind of pre today. Let me share one, a real one from today’s next generation science standards. And this one, this standard literally is, the student will be able to 鈥渆valuate claims, evidence and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem鈥�. And so you see this one is significantly more complex and meaningful and relevant and deep than 鈥渨hat’s an ecosystem?鈥�

Michael: Well, so if those are the state standards, which I think start to give us an idea of how they may or may not connect to curriculum, before we go there, let’s just do one more beat on this and talk about what were the standards known as the common core?

Diane: All right. So common core standards, which I have said I’m in favor of were created in a similar way to what I just described just at a much greater scale. I mean, there were leaders and educators from all 50 states that came together and really hashed through what should all American students be able to know and do? Although it was still limited because they were really only tackling math and English, but I fear that’s not quite getting to your question. So let me see if I can make this concrete and give you a specific example, Michael. And for this one, I’ve picked one of my very favorite standards. It’s from the English language arts common core standards and what I want to do is start with the standard for a first grader.

So what we ask a first grader to do is when they’re reading to be able to ask and answer questions about key details in a text that they’re reading. So that’s first grade. The next year, we make that a little bit more complex. We say we want learners to be able to ask and answer such questions such as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text. I think that might mean, we’re operating at a second grade school-

Michael: I was going to say, we’re operating at a second grade level for a podcast, but that puts with us with the major newspapers, right, so. That’s okay.

Diane: But actually if we skip ahead a little bit to sixth grade, here’s how the standard gets more complex as kids are growing and learning. Now in the sixth grade, we want kids to be able to cite textual evidence. So they’re not just answering those questions anymore. They’re citing evidence to support an analysis of what the text says explicitly, as well as inferences drawn from it. So we’re getting much more complex here. What’s fascinating to me is ninth grade and then 11th grade and 12th grade, just keep building on that complexity. And so they don’t add much more to it. By ninth grade we want you to be able to cite really strong and thorough textual evidence. And by 12th grade, we want you to be able to do all those things and also figure out what the text leaves uncertain. But what you see is the same skillset, literally growing over the entire student’s journey in school, getting more and more complex.

But the other thing that you have to remember is that the material they’re reading is also getting more complex. And so they’re reading something very simple in first grade, but by the time they’re getting in ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th grade, they’re reading much more complex materials, so their skills get better. And what they’re doing their skill on or in is more complicated.

Michael: Got you. So it’s so interesting. Before I add some thoughts, just one more beat from you. That’s a far cry from a lot of the common core debates that we were hearing around the new math being equivalent to common core, right?

Diane: Michael, one of the things I noticed in those common core debates was that people loved to take a worksheet that a teacher had sent home with their child and post it on Facebook and call it common core math or common core reading. And inevitably it would be a worksheet that would have something like, I don’t know, a spelling error or some topic that the parents didn’t like, or their Facebook friends would find offensive. And the reality is that worksheet isn’t a common core standard. It actually has nothing to do with the common core standard. The common core has only ever been a set of standards, just like the one I just read to you. And that’s all. That’s literally what the common core standards are, is those types of things. And in my experience, when people actually sit down and think about and read those standards, no one dislikes them.

I mean, think about a world, Michael, where every child learned to really read and could bring evidence out of what they were reading and analyze it. I mean, I don’t know of many people who think that’s a bad thing.

Michael: No, that would be a wonderful world you just described, I would argue. It’s also interesting because what you just described really creates the architectural framework to create cohesion between grades and across subjects if we use it that way, which so many people point out is lacking in American education even within the school or across a grade, there is literally just very little semblance of how one concept connects to another. And this gives you an architectural framework to pin, I don’t want to get ahead of us because I want to ask you the question on curriculum. But together the other thing that’s interesting also about the common core specifically that I always found compelling was the motto was fewer, clearer, higher. And what people meant by that was that… And I’ll do it in reverse order, was that the standards would be higher, that we would go for something deeper than this surface recitation of facts that you were talking about was the 9th grade standard that you experienced, right.

And by the way, different episode, but has given projects a bad name for so many parents over the years. And then clear was to be way more clear and specific about what do we mean by the standard and was evidence that someone had learned it look like? And fewer, which meant that instead of a 180 days of school year and 180 different standards and so you’re just flying by trying to tick off every single one, that we’d have fewer, you could go deeper into them that instead of being a mile wide and an inch deep, we could actually have some depth to the curriculum. I don’t know about you, but my read of it is the fewer is the one that got dropped pretty quickly in a lot of these common core conversations. And we quickly piled on standards. And I’ll add one other bit of opinion on this, which is I’ve always felt also that a lot of the common nature of the common core should really be focused on that K through six to eight range and then we could give a lot more freedom of expression, if you will, of students following their different passions and things of that nature.

Although I think I’m going beyond common core when I say that and starting to think about all the other subject matters, right? But I think the notion is that we’re giving an architecture to have that exploration and passion, which starts to jump into this, I think that the curriculum conversation. And so I think it follows naturally, which is when you say curriculum, what does that refer to and how does it differ from standards? In other words, if that worksheet that that parent is complaining about on Facebook isn’t a standard and it’s not curriculum, maybe all of its own either. What is it and how does it fit together?

Diane: Thought you’d never ask! Let’s get a little bit nerdy here.

Michael: That’s good.

Diane: I love curriculum. So let me start by offering six critical elements of a quality curriculum. And so let me share those six elements, and then I’ll give you some examples to bring them to life, because otherwise this gets just way too theoretical. I want to give a little credit here to the, in my view, the Bible of curriculum, if you will, Understanding By Design, Wiggins and McTighe, through this classic way of thinking about building really quality curriculum. And so those six categories begin with what we call essential questions. So these being questions that really shape a whole learning experience and think about it for a year or multiple years and then within a unit as well of study.

Second are enduring understanding. So there are these questions that really drive from our curiosity, but then there’s these [inaudible 00:18:36] concepts so we know that we want kids to have that’s not group two. And then there are the skills and that’s the knowledge. So this is where the standards now fit in. You start to see them slot in, is that framework of like, okay, we’ve got these big questions. We got these big ideas. Here’s some specific skills, knowledge, concepts we need kids to learn and master, which then naturally leads to, how do you know if they’ve learned them and mastered them? So you need performance tasks where they can show their learning, and then you need rubrics. And non-educators are always like, “Rubric, rubric. What’s a rubric? You’re always talking about rubrics?” And so you need rubrics, which are basically tools to assess if kids have learned. And then the sixth bucket is learning experiences and activities.

And I would argue that the vast majority of people, lots of teachers included, think that curriculum is really only that last bucket, my goal, to learning experiences and activities, because that’s what happens day-to-day. And so that’s where this worksheet fits. It fits into that bucket. And you can do those activities and experiences all day, every day, without those five categories that I just listed them I’m going to go back to. Sadly, I think that’s what a lot of classrooms in our country are doing. And the reality is, this is not what is good for kids. It’s not how people learn. It’s not effective. And so maybe I can give you some examples of those five categories above and help eliminate why they’re so important in shaping the day-to-day.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, I think that’d be super helpful, Diane, because you sketching out those different areas. What occurs to me is, even in my own concept, I tend to think of curriculum, conflate it with the text that someone is using and the lesson plan that a teacher brings. And you don’t think about… I mean, you just had rubric, evaluation, assessment, the performance task, right? All of these other things to come with it that we tend not to think of it outside of the answer key at the back of a book that a publisher offered with the course. So I think that’s a super helpful area to continue to expand our sense of what this is. And I’d love to know how these… More explicitly how these standards and curriculum connect them. What codified in the standards? How does that impact what you’re teaching on the ground?

Diane: Right. Great. Well, let’s start with that first category, essential questions. And so we have talked at length about how kids are naturally curious, that the way people learn best is if they follow their curiosity. And so what we do when we think about backward planning and one of the things we say to ourselves, we want to think about that plan with the end in mind. So where do we want kids in 12th grade when they’re graduating from our schools? What do we want them to be doing? And so we start with these essential questions and let me give you one from science. We started with science, so let’s stick there, like an essential question in a high school science course could be, “How have scientific inventions transformed how we live?” So a lot of kids take physics, in high school. This would be a really interesting essential question for a physics course. “How have scientific inventions transformed how humans live?” And then what happens is, just think about that. You’re already starting to think, right? Like, “Well, how did that happen?” And you start looking around you.

Michael: Important point to insert here, right? Which is, there’s a considerable body of learning science that when you ask these essential questions that have a little bit of puzzlement and open-endedness, and even paradox in them, that it grabs people, even if you don’t think you’re interested in them, you tend to be because you want to solve or answer the question.

Diane: Yes. And so here’s a really good example where that question is so big and so open that it truly could drive an entire physics course for a whole year. And oh, by the way, it’s not the only one that could drive that physics course. And so this is where the customization starts coming in. It could be what… I’m in Silicon Valley. The question we might ask here might be different than maybe someone’s going to ask in Michigan because it’s contextualized. It’s more based on the community or things like… And that’s great as long as you’re going with a big essential question.

Next bucket is an enduring understanding. And I talked about this a little bit previously where each subject area has these, during understanding, these big concepts that we really need to understand if we’re going to be able to think like scientists or think like historians.

And so let’s turn to history, for example, on this one and a good example, I think, a really current example of an enduring understanding in history would be this idea that human migration is the story of humankind. It’s been going on for as long as we can possibly understand. It shapes our history, it shapes our present and it shapes our future. That’s a big idea and what we want to do throughout a course of study is have kids really come back to that idea and deeply internalize that enduring understanding and the course. Me just telling you right now, this is not going to stick with you. You’re going to have to need to revisit it over and over and over again. Right.

Michael: I’ll take your word for it.

Diane: Yeah. So how both of those two things tie, the next place we go is, like I said to the standards, so now we’re going to turn to the standards that tell us, for example, kids need to be able to take a text, read it, pull evidence from it. Now I do that in the context of these big questions and these big understandings. I’m learning those skills within the ideas and the knowledge within the ideas that are in those big questions and big understandings. And then I have to show you that I’ve learned it. And so I’m going to do that through performance tasks. And this is where the bubble test is very insufficient compared to really the way that these types of skills and knowledge get best demonstrated. Will be through some piece of writing and there’s like a million types of pieces of writing that are really relevant and coherent, speaking, some presentation or speaking, or dialogue or discussion, a model where I literally build a model. For example, you could build a model of an ecosystem, right?

Michael: This isn’t your poster board?

Diane: It’s not a poster board or an experiment. As a good example, when you can really show these skills and these understandings coming to life. Then I need these rubrics, these tools that really break down what we’re looking for to understand the quality of that skill or knowledge. If you think about it, an A, literally tells you nothing, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t tell you anything, but a rubric is going to have very concrete language that says, “When you brought out that piece of evidence, you did X, Y, and Z with it, which was really helpful versus over here, you didn’t, which makes it not as good.” And that is the differentiation between let’s say an A and a C, but most importantly, it helps the student know how to improve and get better and for the teacher to properly evaluate that across things.

And then finally, and again, now we’re back to learning experiences and activities. What are all the things kids are going to do every single day and at home and all over the place that will lead them to explore these questions, have these understandings, learn these skills and knowledge and be able to demonstrate that. Then everything you’re doing every day has been driving in that direction.

Michael: I mean, you’re starting to codify, right, how these standards impact your school on the ground, but then how much more you’re putting around them and not just letting them be the driving question somehow for what you’re designing? So go one step deeper, right? If I say I’m starting to understand how standards feature into the curriculum, if you will, and even if they drive what you make sure you’re covering and assessing in the rubric, let’s go deeper on this. How do they really drive what you’re doing? And I’m going to do a two-for-one. As you know I like to do, which is, tell us, why in favor then of common core and something common, but not for the curriculum?

Diane: Yeah. So, well, let’s start with this idea of maybe I can eliminate what the difference is in the actual classroom, let’s say, on this Monday in my approach or the other activity based approach. So one of the things that I’ve seen happen a lot since standards have come along is that you will go into a classroom and you will see that a teacher has written a standard on the board.

So they literally copy that technical standard that I just shared with you and they write it on the board and they will say to the students, “We’re going to learn that standard today.” And then they’re going to give them a worksheet and so let’s take the one about the textual evidence. They’ll give them a worksheet with a paragraph and they’ll say, “Read the paragraph,” and then there’ll be like five questions after it. Then I’ll say, “What evidence in that paragraph of the main idea? What’s the main idea? What’s the inference?” And it’s like fill in the little form, right?

Michael: Yep.

Diane: Okay. Boring, number one. So boring. We wonder why kids are so bored. Two, they don’t understand why they’re doing that and it’s not connected to anything meaningful in the world. And three, what we know about the science is that’s not actually how you practice and learn that particular skill. And it’s so one dimensional. You’re literally only focusing on that. With a rich learning experience you’re doing so many things at once. So that’s one version happening a lot in a lot of places and sadly, Michael, is getting labeled as good teaching because you have your standard on the board. That’s terrible.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Diane: Sorry. That was judgment.

Michael: No, I think it’s important because that’s one way that standards impact a curriculum. You do it very differently.

Diane: Yeah.

Michael: So, let’s do that.

Diane: So, let’s take, for example, the theme of human migration and that enduring understanding. Let’s say that I’m in a class that has been backward planned. That’s our theme for the year. And let’s take that same concept of, I give students a couple of readings that are literally in and of this moment. We can look at readings that are talking about the Haitian crisis at the border right now, because here it is. It’s linked to that big idea. We can look at the very same texts. We can look across multiple texts. We can see which ones are using evidence of an argument. We don’t even have to state a position on what’s happening there, but we can ask kids to try to figure out what are the different positions? What is the evidence for those positions? How do you think about that?

I mean, this is the type of critical thinking and learning that we want kids to do. They’re authentically interested in it. It’s relevant and meaningful to them. And they’re going to be so into and passionate about what they’re doing that they’re going to learn the skill significantly better than in that other scenario. But they’re also going to learn a whole bunch of other stuff around that at the same time.

Michael: Got you. That’s super helpful. Okay. So then let’s talk about the common piece, which is why common standards, not common curriculum. I think you started to answer the latter, but maybe not the former.

Diane:No, I think you’re right. So, I mean, here’s the deal. There are a universal set of skills and concepts that at this point in time, every child is well-served to know and have mastered when they graduate from our K-12 system. I would just say that’s fact, full stop.

Michael: Full stop.

Diane: So identifying those skills and concepts and validating them should be actually a large-scale coordinated effort that includes employers from across the country, families, learning scientists, educators levels, like all of us have a stake in having a really well-educated population, right. And none of us has the full view of understanding what all of those pieces should be. And we should negotiate through that and figure out what that looks like. It’s not a job for an individual teacher, or I would say even an individual school. It just doesn’t make sense, Michael.

What we would be asking people to do in my mind is the equivalent of if we went to every local hospital in the country and said, “You know what? You figure out what medical services and procedures you’re going to offer.” They’re not connected to anyone else. You just figure that out by yourself. I think people would think that’s crazy. There’s this whole body of science and learning from each other. But that is why we need common core set of standards so that we can collectively do that work to figure out what is most important. And then, there’s so much opportunity for that rich and local responsive curriculum that gets built around those standards. I truly believe this is an and. There does not have to be a trade-off here.

Michael: Yeah. That makes a ton of sense, Diane. One observation from that is likewise, an individual teacher’s not responsible for building up the curriculum. You can also rely on your local community and experts and others who have done a lot of the thinking around what are those driving questions that will grab, right, and going through everything that you just talked about. And frankly, there are a lot of great rubrics out there that have been created and validated and so forth to answer and so each of the steps, I think, you can do a lot of that work and customizing it into your circumstances. But let’s stay on this train one last time. One last question, which is, how do you think about on the ground, what should and shouldn’t be common in the curriculum now. And you gave a great framework a couple of episodes ago of how to think about what people should learn of starting curiosity about themselves and then their communities, et cetera, and going from the concrete to the more abstract.

But I’m curious, one more step, because we know that cohesion across disciplines, we’ve talked about this, years is important. And then there are folks like Doug Lemov, who will talk about the value of having an entire class read a common book, in say English Language Arts, and having a whole class discussion on it. And I’m going to leave my opinions out of this for a moment, because I would just love to hear your thoughts on that question as we wrap up around what do you make common and not common, and how do you make those determinations?

Diane: Well, I think we have to start by doing something we have historically not done, which is centering students and the student experience in whatever it is we decide and design. The truth is, what we’ve taught kids is really driven by adults. It’s what they’re passionate about or they’re interested in, or whatever they think is best. And we don’t actually put ourselves in the role of the student and think backward plan their entire K-12 journey and think about what will they need to be successful when they leave our system? So I think that’s where we start. Whatever schools are involved in that journey should be planning and coordinating a backward plan across disciplines. So if you’re a system that has K through 12, fine. If you have your elementary, middle, and high school, you should be thinking as a whole system, not separate from each other.

You should be thinking across the disciplines at a minimum, English, math, science, and history and what we call within those subject areas vertically. So K-12 and I think there’s really two ways to go about this and you’re alluding to them, Michael, is a school or group of schools can either do the work themselves. This is something we did at Summit. We took all of our teachers, everyone together. We spent years really mapping this entire experience, or you can adopt a model and deeply internalize it and customize it to your site. And you started alluding to that. There’s all these great pieces out there that you can put together. That might be a different episode because there are some real issues with what’s available and all of that stuff. But let’s just say, conceptually, I think there’s two ways of going about that to really create a coherent, backward, planned-

Michael: If you’re just grabbing a bunch of stuff off the shelf, because it was good to hear, and it’s not connected to the other thing you grabbed off the shelf, that’s not going to work.

Diane: It’s not going to work and that’s why you can’t just adopt a middle school science textbook and just plop it in there. And that’s one of the things that happens. Let me talk of this question about the value of students reading a common book, because honestly, this comes up so often, Michael, and them having a class discussion on it is like people are really attached to this particular activity. And so here’s what I would say. First of all, we have to ask what is valuable about reading a common book and having a class discussion on it and when is it valuable? And so here’s what I would say. That’s valuable if the discussion is, let’s say a really high quality Socratic seminar that is involving all of these skills that we’re talking about and that kids are truly preparing for and they’re engaging in a really thoughtful dialogue.

If you’re not doing those things, I’m not sure that it’s valuable just to have a teacher at the front of the room doing call and response on basic comprehension questions about a text, which is what we often see. It’s valuable to read a common text if the whole class is really grappling with maybe a common ethical dilemma or building community or culture by really deeply understanding something. That might be the reason to have the whole class read the same text, but you have to ask yourself, “What are you trading off there when you’re doing that?” Because this is where customization comes in and where kids can find themselves and their identities in texts. And we can get so obsessed by a title that we love as a teacher, and we can be ultimately dismissive of kids and what their interests are and their needs in denying them those opportunities.

And so I think you really have to balance and grapple with those trade offs. And let me just give you an example of when something like this goes really around. I’m going to go back again to my own education. I grew up in Lake Tahoe. In 8th grade, our teachers, I’m sure very well-meaning, thought it would be great if we would read the book about the Donner Party. And then they would take all the 8th graders camping where the Donner Party was and there was a big statue. Not valuable, Michael. There were no skills. It’s like this type of hat trick type of magic that I think educators turn to to try to keep attention when they don’t have something real and meaningful that are truly driving curiosity, like the enduring understandings and essential questions…. So instead they’re just going to try to be like, well, keep our interest because there was cannibalism. That’s the difference in my mind.

Michael: Yeah. It’s incredibly helpful, Diane. I’ve learned a lot through all this. I’m glad we went through this exercise and I hope we’ve answered for folks. I know for me, we certainly have what we have in mind when we’re talking about common curriculum versus common standards and how you navigate the common curriculum aspect of it and what is common versus what is personalized and the value around that. And so I think let’s segue to our final part then with this, which is, what are you reading or watching right now that might interest our listeners outside of our conversation?

Diane: Well, interesting that we just talked about that last example, because this one might be connected here. So one of the really fulfilling parts of my role is I get to help design and facilitate several leadership cohorts in our organization. And so as part of those experiences, we are often doing pre readings about leadership as a body of work. And we’ve really been searching for diverse voices in the leadership space. And it won’t surprise you to learn that this is a space that’s really dominated by white men. And so I was super excited when Ariea Jamal, who’s one of our great leaders, introduced us to a book called the Leadership Lessons From The Cherokee Nation by Chad “Corntassle” Smith. And I would say, Michael, this is everything I want in a leadership reading. It’s straightforward, it’s reflective, it’s honest, it’s useful. And none of what I usually hate, which is, it’s not arrogant, it’s not jargony, it’s not oversimplified. It’s really beautiful.

Michael: Wow.

Diane: Yeah.

Michael: Wow. OK, on my end I just finished a book that my wife insisted and recommended that I read by someone that she went to high school with and then went to the same college that she did as well. His name is Phil Klay and it’s called Redeployment. He served in the military in Iraq and it’s a collection of stories, not just his, but from veterans across the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it is raw, intense, disturbing, deep, gripping and you didn’t want to put it down, but you had to put it down because you needed the break. And just a reminder of freedom truly isn’t free for those who fight for it, or frankly, for like all of us on the other side of it. And some of the issues that it brought up. So incredibly moving, but I was glad to have read it.

Diane: Well, thanks for sharing that. Yeah. So much, so much to talk about as always.

Michael: So much to talk about as always, but I appreciate you nerding out and giving us this deep dive and I will look forward to seeing you and talking to all of our listeners next time on Class Disrupted.

Michael Horn is the author of numerous books on the future of learning including . He works with a portfolio of organizations to help transform education so that all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their potential.

Diane Tavenner is CEO of Summit Public Schools and co-founder of the Summit Learning Program. She is a life-long educator, innovator, and the author of

Naturally, after 18 months of hearing many of these same people demonstrate their commitment to catching and spreading the virus 鈥� gallivanting off to holiday family reunions, trips abroad, concerts, etc. 鈥� I wasn鈥檛 convinced. But, in Washington, D.C., where I live, if you would rather not send your too-young-to-be-vaccinated kids to in-person school this fall, the city hasn鈥檛 just blocked your access to a virtual schooling option 鈥� it鈥檚 started sending . 

So we acquiesced, gritted our teeth, pretended like we felt safe and went to work selling in-person school. We told our two elementary schoolers that we were excited, met up with some of their friends for distanced-outdoor play dates, made a big show of buying school supplies 鈥� and then sent them back to campus. 鈥淵辞耻鈥檙别 going to have so much fun!鈥� we cheered. 

And they did! But only for a moment, because, something doesn鈥檛 become true just because we collectively wish it were so. amid the Delta variant surge this fall always hinged on the accuracy of a series of assumptions about the probabilities of kids catching the virus, positive cases turning into serious long-term illnesses, and/or hospitals running out of room for new patients. 

Early returns from school reopening 鈥� a , 鈥� suggest that, perhaps, forcing most kids back to school this fall wasn鈥檛 the easy slam dunk that advocates promised. Indeed, the situation in our house is a sad reminder that when y辞耻鈥檙别 forced to live with the assumptions baked into someone else鈥檚 fantasy world, you can still get stuck with real-world consequences. 

On the fourth day of school, a COVID-positive classmate exposed one of our kids to the virus. The school learned about the classmate鈥檚 positive test on the sixth day of school, and the class was sent home. . They worsened for a few days, then plateaued for weeks, coughing and coughing until we got scared enough to go to our doctor, only to learn that there were amid the school reopening case surge. The nearby children鈥檚 hospital was also overwhelmed, so we searched around until we found an urgent care clinic. 

鈥淟ungs sound OK,鈥� the harried doctor told us. 鈥淪he鈥檚 just gonna have to wait this out.鈥� 

But, by then, we had already been waiting for what seemed like an eternity. The helpless anxiety of listening to your kid cough themselves awake at night is one of the darkest flavors of parental desperation. It doesn鈥檛 improve after weeks of repetition. And it reaches particularly deep now, marinated in the exhaustion of a year and a half of juggling full-time work and child care . 

Worst of all, it confirmed our skepticism. We had been forced to run risks we didn鈥檛 want by people we didn鈥檛 trust, and wound up proven bitterly right. 

Finally, nearly a month after exposure, our kid started feeling better. The cough eased up. So we (reluctantly) prepared to send them back to school 鈥� but it was much harder to sell this time. They were scared. 

How do you gaslight a child who鈥檚 been sick for most of the first month of school because their community and its leaders put them at risk? How do you tell them that, nah, that wasn鈥檛 so bad, the pandemic is totally under control?

Just talk your kid down, folks said 鈥� they鈥檙e only apprehensive because you are.

It felt like the perfect encapsulation of the kind of selfish motivated reasoning that has made it so hard for the country to successfully confront the pandemic. When humans interpret the world, when we try to make sense of the situations before us, we鈥檙e always in danger of misunderstanding them in self-serving ways. This isn鈥檛 such a big deal when it鈥檚 an individual matter 鈥� convince yourself that your daily sodas with breakfast have nothing to do with your pants growing tighter if you must. The consequences of willing comforting beliefs for yourself instead of facing those facts will largely fall on you alone. 

But since spring 2020, the pandemic keeps hammering home the same frustrating lesson: when groups of people are unwilling to deal with challenging facts, the rest of us suffer. Take the most obvious all-time example: sure, the climate appears to be shifting, and yes, have been screaming for decades that our own behavior is putting us at risk 鈥� but wouldn鈥檛 it be more convenient to find a different explanation that doesn鈥檛 require us to change our lifestyles at all? Maybe it鈥檚 not actually caused by our frequent flying or our meat-heavy diet or our automobiles or our air conditioners. That feels easier to believe, which is almost the same as being better to believe, which, you know, the more you ruminate on it, starts to feel simply true and right. 

The key to reasoning this way 鈥� interpreting the facts so that they almost always confirm what you鈥檇 rather do anyhow 鈥� is carefully  framing the terms of debate up front. If you think about confronting climate change primarily (or even solely) in terms of how it might impact your ability to fly cheaply to Caribbean beaches every year, then sure, it鈥檚 obvious that humans should change nothing about our fossil fuel usage and anyone who thinks otherwise is an ecoterrorist. But if you expand your framing to consider how the worsening storms linked to accelerating climate change could affect the , and of your preferred Caribbean vacation paradises, the chain of reasoning comes out somewhat differently. 

The pandemic era has been drenched in this kind of thinking. Folks have been constructing more convenient realities built around self-serving assumptions about what is safe. They鈥檝e isolated potential risks out of their reasoning and focused on other priorities so that they can wind up feeling good and responsible about the choices they鈥檝e made. Don鈥檛 like needles? Dig around a little and you can find some comforting conspiracy theory to excuse you from having to get vaccinated. Embarrassed that you missed a week of work with COVID after attending that mask-free wedding two time zones away? Just spend 15鈥�20 minutes on a couple of the right-right wing websites and you can reassure yourself that no, you totally did enough, the masks wouldn鈥檛 have helped. 

It鈥檚 the same reasoning for school reopening. For instance, it is absolutely true that 鈥� for their social development, their emotional health, and their academic progress 鈥� in-person schooling works better, for almost every kid at almost every time, than virtual learning. But that doesn鈥檛 mean that the health dangers involved with reopening in-person schools simply evaporate. And it鈥檚 certainly no excuse for undermining efforts to lower those risks by, for example, refusing to get vaccinated or preventing schools from requiring masks on campus or forcing cautious families to send their kids back before they are eligible for the shots. 

Sure, 鈥� but that appears to be driven by schools, districts, and deciding to set family notification and quarantine rules for students. In essence, schools aren鈥檛 closing as much as before 鈥� not because in-school cases and transmission aren鈥檛 happening, but because we鈥檝e changed our levels of precaution. Indeed, that by easing its standards, Michigan stands to define one-quarter of its school COVID outbreaks out of existence. That is, they鈥檒l still happen, but we鈥檙e just not calling all of them outbreaks anymore. It鈥檚 the same with in-school transmission. While it鈥檚 common to read and convenient to believe that 鈥渋n-school transmission is rare,鈥� it鈥檚 also hard to be sure of this, since U.S. schools have to keep up with throughout the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, know that in the two months between schools reopening in the South in August and now (early October), there have been . That, which is assuredly an undercount, given the limited state of U..S COVID testing and reporting, is nearly one-third of the total pediatric COVID cases since March 2020 鈥� in just two months. Convince yourself that that鈥檚 just a coincidence, that it鈥檚 somehow totally unrelated to nationwide school reopening if you must, but please look yourself in the mirror while you do it. 

Know that sending your child means you are accepting an of facing a month 鈥� 鈥� of living with a nightly jaw clench, as your child just doesn鈥檛 seem to be getting better. Know that some children do, in fact, . Know that the risks for everyone will be dramatically lower for all kids once they鈥檙e vaccinated 鈥� a possibility that appears to be just weeks away.  

And, most of all, know that shrugging and framing these possibilities out of the picture won鈥檛 make them actually go away. But hey, maybe you鈥檒l get lucky, and they鈥檒l just happen to someone else. Like my kid.

One initiative to embrace is tutoring that is accessible and available to all. Here鈥檚 what鈥檚 happening in our public charter school in Newark 鈥� and why it can serve as a model across New Jersey and beyond.

At Great Oaks Legacy Charter School, we鈥檝e seen firsthand the positive impacts that one-on-one or small-group learning can have on students. Our method is often called high-dosage tutoring, but it isn鈥檛 just about the number of hours. It鈥檚 also about the relationship between student and tutor.

One of our core guiding principles is building genuine relationships within our school community and ensuring that students feel known, valued and loved. Tutors work with students daily, either independently or in small groups, and contact their families each week to share progress. Building trust in this way is imperative and helps to generate the type of academic gains we are striving toward.

Since before the pandemic, Great Oaks has worked in partnership with AmeriCorps. Our program, the Great Oaks Tutor Corps, is a one-year AmeriCorps fellowship for recent college graduates who serve in Newark and provide every student in grades 3 to 10 with two hours of tutoring in English language arts and math every school day. Over the years, Great Oaks Legacy Charter School students have consistently achieved a high level of academic growth, and we attribute much of that to our daily tutoring model.

The results have been astounding: High-dosage tutoring has helped Great Oaks regularly send 80 to 90 percent of graduates to college. Research shows that tutoring programs like ours . High-dosage tutoring is also one of the most effective ways to . This is the kind of innovative program that other schools can implement in order to ensure that they are helping all of their students succeed, especially after the COVID pandemic.

Our program has received national and state during the pandemic for providing one of the most effective, research-based interventions to address learning loss. This is one reason why Great Oaks recently announced that we are beyond our charter school into the larger district. The new Newark Unites Tutoring Center, created in partnership with Newark鈥檚 Metropolitan Baptist Church and the New Jersey Children鈥檚 Foundation, is intended to make high-dosage tutoring available to ninth- and 10th-graders from any Newark public school and will provide individualized, personalized support in reading and algebra every Saturday.

Programs like these work across the world and at home. Great Britain launched its last year to support schools and address the impact of COVID-19 on students鈥� learning. In Tennessee, a is recruiting college students to tutor children from their own communities during the summer. For the cost of a stipend, they are making tutoring accessible and addressing student learning loss due to the pandemic.

As Congress deliberates over a slew of national recovery measures, legislators should prioritize funding these types of programs and specifically expand and strengthen AmeriCorps to provide these critical services to students. In New Jersey, legislators should enact a statewide program to scale our tutoring model 鈥� today. It鈥檚 time to expand high-density tutoring beyond Newark, to every student in New Jersey, so all have the tools they need to succeed.

Coming together to find solutions is crucial in this time of crisis. Programs like this one, that utilize service organizations like AmeriCorps, are what will help our country and our students recover from COVID-19. Service programs are made for moments like this. Let’s double down on their importance everywhere.

Jared Taillefer is executive director of Great Oaks Legacy Charter School in Newark. To become an AmeriCorps member or volunteer, go to .

One avenue for encouraging children’s personal wellness is a return to arts education, whose traverse their emotional, personal and academic lives.

Children engage with art in a way that is joyful and curious and encourages exploration of self. Participation in arts education fosters both coping skills and improvements to overall cognition and academic achievement. As such, in the rush to catch students up on math, reading and science learning lost to the pandemic, it鈥檚 critical that the valuable role arts education can play in easing their transition not be overlooked.

Advocacy campaigns like , which took place during the second week of September, make the case for the arts in school with scientifically proven facts illustrating the impact of arts education on children鈥檚 social and emotional wellness as well as their academic capability. It is clear that the arts can be a valuable tool in helping kids adjust to the new normal in their scholastic lives.

Reducing anxiety, depression and stress: Major life changes, especially ones that affect a child鈥檚 home life, are among the most likely causes of stress, anxiety and depression. Participation in , particularly those that include listening to music, can help relieve anxiety and stress, while weekly singing (as one might do in music education or chorus) is linked with reduced depression. Preschoolers who take dance classes seem less shy, aggressive and anxious, while toddlers learning music seem more sociable and cooperative. teachers report fewer instances of shy, aggressive, and anxious behavior among preschoolers taking dance classes, and toddlers receiving music instruction demonstrate increased social cooperation with other children.

Improving critical thinking: Solving problems, tackling new subjects and working out complex puzzles all use critical thinking skills, which children develop by flexing their mental muscles. Time spent observing art in a museum has been linked with the in kids, pointing to the potential cognitive benefits of courses including art history and analysis.

Boosting math, verbal skills, literacy and overall academic achievement: A common concern of parents and educators is that the 2020-21 school year made it difficult for children to stay on pace and excel academically where they might have otherwise. Various aspects of art education can help to , including:

• Music education, which has been associated with the acquisition of spatial temporal reasoning skills, a key aspect of mathematical learning
• General arts education; students who attended more than four years of arts education outperformed peers on the SAT
• The supportive environment of an arts ed class, is associated with motivating students to learn and helps to reduce the likelihood of dropping out of school

Increasing confidence and self-esteem: Walking back into a classroom to see peers they haven鈥檛 seen in a year and a half can be stressful for any kid, especially when they鈥檝e grown and changed and are nervous about seeing old friends. Arts education can play a positive role here. For example, studying and training in theater is associated with , which facilitates a boost in self-esteem.

These are but a few of the ways that arts education can benefit students. Here are 51 more:

Neve Spicer is a mother of three, writer, former primary school teacher and the founder and editor of .

In light of these challenges, educators should consider the following when preparing to support the mental health of adolescents and young adults as they ease back into classes:

• Prepare for a different educational landscape. Learning was compromised last year for many students. Educators should be prepared for young people to face difficulty in basic areas, such as their social skills, ability to focus, comfort, capacity to retain information or basic performance in class. It will take time and coaching to rebuild the skills that teens and young adults need and use regularly. Educators should have patience and set realistic expectations for students this school year.听As is often true at the beginning of a long time away from friends and routines, excitement and enthusiasm may mask vulnerabilities and challenges that have yet to surface. Be sure to maintain personal connections with young people and watch for signs of struggle over the course of weeks and months. Last year鈥檚 mental health impact was not solely linked to the COVID-19 pandemic; the racial trauma experienced as a result of George Floyd鈥檚 murder surfaced painful and longstanding anger, despair and frustration. A return to pre-pandemic systemic racism is not only undesired, but unethical. Schools, organizations that serve young people, workplaces and businesses are all responsible for absorbing the lessons of the past year and creating culturally responsive environments focused on equity and inclusion. As this conversation is, in many ways, just starting at a broader social level, creating space for ongoing exploration, expression and healing is imperative.
• Expect emotional, social and mental health needs. Some students 鈥� even those who were not struggling prior to COVID-19 鈥� may find the return to class overwhelming. Educators should recognize the impact the last year has had and plan a slow return to in-person learning, building in extra time to assess and address student readiness and support needs. Educators should find ways of checking in with all young people through informal channels or by administering brief assessments of their mental health and connecting to treatment when needed; broader family pandemic impacts; and/or learning status and readiness.听All faculty and staff should learn to recognize when students are having difficulty and know how to reach out to offer support, as well as be knowledgeable about where to refer students for professional help, when needed. The expectations for learning, focus and sustained attention should be kept at a minimum until it is clear that the pace can quicken. Staff will need to know how to create and sustain , or recognize the presence of trauma and acknowledge the role it may play in a student’s life. There may be a greater need for school meal programs, as some families may face ongoing financial hardships, and for extracurricular programs to increase child care hours for parents working new or extra jobs.
• Create opportunities for youth to process and understand their experience. Educators should create dedicated time and space to help students sort through their experiences. By using techniques like journaling, talking circles, culturally grounded rituals and healing, artistic expression, body movement and interactive group and/or self-reflective activities, students can review and understand what they’ve lived through, identify silver linings and set hopes for the future 鈥� some of which may have changed from before the pandemic.

Parents and caregivers can help to support the mental health of their children as they ease back into in-person classes by considering the following:

• Check in with your child regularly. It鈥檚 important to be calm and initiate conversations with your child. Children’s emotions will change regularly, and you need to show them that鈥檚 okay. Set up a regular time to only talk about how they鈥檙e feeling and ask questions to assess their social, emotional and mental health status and needs.
• Focus on building connectedness. Connectedness is essential for mental health, and young people’s desire for social connection is likely to be high. At the same time, they may feel awkward or uncomfortable in a school environment surrounded by people and lots of activity. Make space and time for your child to become reacquainted with other young people outside of school.
• Keep the things that worked. Teletherapy, remote learning and work, and new strategies for establishing and maintaining work-home balance are important to continue, even as the pandemic fades. Parents should take time to assess what worked in their families and what systems are worth keeping.

If you feel as though the last 17 months have been incredibly challenging, think how young adults, possessing less experience in dealing with hardship and adversity, are faring. Adults must acknowledge the depth of the pandemic’s impact on teens and young adults and recognize that their needs have changed. The return to the classroom can be an opportunity to reimagine and better support children, to set them up for good mental health and well-being that will serve them as they move into brighter futures.

John MacPhee is executive director and CEO of , a nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for teens and young adults.

Going into a new school year after a period that strained students鈥� social and emotional health, educators are focused 鈥� and rightly so 鈥� on getting onto a reenergized track of teaching and learning and supporting students’ mental well-being.

The last thing many teachers want is to sacrifice precious instructional time to assess student learning. But kids need us to do just that, because the information educators get from these tests helps to set them up for success.

After two straight years with few assessments, teachers lack critical information about how students have fared during COVID-19. But treating tests as they were always intended to be used 鈥� to measure the skills students have mastered, identify where they need additional support and direct resources accordingly 鈥� is essential for gauging what students have and have not learned during the course of the pandemic, what other skills they need to master and what support they need to achieve that.

Many teachers know that tests are far from a perfect measure of students鈥� academic, social and emotional growth. They want assessments that are closely aligned with the standards, they want a fast turnaround for results so they can be used to inform instruction, and they want test questions to be culturally relevant. The fact is that many district and state assessments fall short of those goals.

Teachers are also concerned about how test results might be used amid a pandemic 鈥� how we should think about assessing student learning heading in the new school year, what that will look like, when it will happen and whether the results be used to implicate educators for the interrupted instruction that has ensued during the pandemic.

The large influx of dollars districts will receive from the American Rescue Plan can and should be used to develop meaningful systems for addressing these concerns. To make up for the lost data educators would have had from annual state assessments, it is critical that districts collect their own by administering a test early in the school year. This will give teachers a roadmap for how to best meet their students鈥� needs.

Without a doubt, the pandemic impacted each and every student. But we can鈥檛 pretend that it impacted them to the same degree. COVID-19 didn鈥檛 introduce inequities in our public education system, but it’s the students who were already disadvantaged before the pandemic who were hit hardest by it. How big is this impact? Is it greater than we may think, or not as severe as we imagine? Without an assessment administered across the board, we simply cannot know.

But the impact of those tests should be limited. While it might make sense in other years to use assessments to help decide if a student is, for example, eligible for an honors class, that cannot be the case this year. The students most impacted by the pandemic 鈥� those who struggled to participate in virtual learning because of poor internet connections, a lack of adult supervision or quiet place to learn, or illness 鈥� must not be

Nor should teachers be judged by students鈥� scores right now. Despite heroic efforts to reinvent curricula for digital learning and reach out to students and parents online, on the phone and by text message to keep them as engaged as possible, widespread chronic absenteeism made interrupted learning an issue of national concern.

The best teachers are laser-focused on their students 鈥� ask about any student in the class, and they can rattle off where they鈥檙e excelling, where they鈥檙e struggling and the strategies they鈥檙e employing to further advance their learning. The case for assessments is made not at the ground level, but at the 30,000-foot level. In other words, the best teachers may have a good sense of how their students are doing, but it gets harder with a large number of students or responsibility across several subjects. Equally important, leaders and policymakers need to know, too, if they have any chance of providing the right help.

Love them or hate them, assessments allow decisionmakers at the state and federal levels to see student progress not only at the classroom level, but across districts, states and different student populations. Without this kind of data, there will be enormous pressure to hand out dollars to the districts with the most political clout, rather than those serving the most vulnerable students. And, we will miss the chance to measure which programs and supports are making the biggest difference.

The federal government’s unprecedented investment in education is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to confront inequity in our schools head-on. Let鈥檚 make sure we equip policymakers, teachers and families with the information they need to make those dollars count.

Carlotta Pope is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn and a member of Educators for Excellence-New York. Paula L. White is the executive director of Educators for Excellence-New York, a teacher-led organization.

Enter American Rescue Plan鈥檚 Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, about $200 billion with $22 billion dedicated specifically to address learning loss using 鈥渆vidence-based interventions鈥� focused on the 鈥�.鈥�

This historically large investment provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn what kinds of interventions work well for America鈥檚 students 鈥� but we will squander this opportunity if state officials don鈥檛 create the right infrastructure to make sense of what is taking place.

The U.S. has nearly 14,000 school districts making choices around COVID recovery. Districts are likely to try different recovery strategies, but we won鈥檛 be able to learn about these approaches without officials collecting the right information, including which students are getting them.听

This requires a degree of collective action currently lacking among states. The window of opportunity is short to get this right. With loose federal requirements, states and districts need to assume the lead role in ensuring ESSER funds change the trajectory of students鈥� lives.听

Our team recently analyzed state ESSER plans to better understand the level of guidance provided around recovery initiatives (described in more detail in a recent CALDER ). Most state plans call for programs that specifically target students who have been hit hardest by the pandemic. However, they’re often hazy on the specifics of how such targeting will take place.

聽The plans tend to include little information on how students will be identified for interventions or how interventions will be matched to specific student learning goals. They are even more vague on data collection, with general language indicating they will collect data required for the ESSER reporting, but only about half the plans explicitly described concrete steps for how they will collect data on the impact of ARP ESSER funded programs.

How can states increase the likelihood that ESSER spending leads to collective learning? At a minimum, states should mandate reporting around three specific questions:

• What recovery interventions are districts using and what are their key features?
• Which students are targeted for recovery efforts?
• Which students are actually participating in and regularly attending recovery initiatives?

More broadly, states hold powerful levers they can use to increase the likelihood that districts will be equipped to support and learn from individualized intervention programs. These include, but are not limited to:聽

• Building Capacity for Local Data Use: Local data is more timely and detailed than state data, yet, many districts struggle with the capacity to analyze and use data resources effectively to target individual students鈥� needs. States can use their funds to increase districts鈥� capacity to identify and address students鈥� individual needs by, for example, creating opportunities for enhancing local data systems, for professional development, or for regional data supports.听
• Contributing to a Culture of Learning and Continuous Improvement: Ultimately, states and districts have an incredible responsibility to help students recover from the pandemic and achieve their full potential, and should be held accountable for this responsibility. At the same time, it is likely some interventions and other ESSER-funded activities along the way will not work. States can create opportunities that focus on the importance of continuous improvement, while equipping districts to engage in that work too.听
• Encouraging Student, Family, and Community Engagement: Fundamental to the idea of offering individualized support is student and family engagement, without which districts will have an incomplete picture of the interventions that are needed and will work. At the same time that states encourage evidence-based academic interventions and supports, they should help equip districts to foster authentic engagement opportunities that can help shape the use of ESSER funds.听
• Peer to Peer Networking and professional development: Because states have cross-district data, they often have greater insight into which districts are struggling with similar challenges. States can use their data to connect similar districts who face similar challenges, creating opportunities for those districts to share knowledge, experiences, and resources.
• Using Cross-Sector State Level Data: States generally have extensive data resources that they can use to help districts understand where individual students are in their learning and identify students at-risk. States can enhance their reporting tools so that districts have access to actionable information about their students (e.g., Early Warning Systems, individual-level assessment reports tied to state curriculum standards).
• Grant Opportunities Requiring Individualized Supports: States may use state activity funds to create grant programs that target a high-need area (e.g., chronic absenteeism, math) and require districts to implement and collect data on targeted interventions as part of the grant program.听

That this is an unprecedented amount of federal funding to be spent over just four years cannot be overstated. To consider both the urgent needs of today with what we will need to know in the next three to five years is a balancing act. If we focus only on the immediate needs of the moment, we will miss the opportunity to answer the key questions that could shape the next several decades of education policy. We urge state and district leaders to keep broader learning goals top of mind as they design, implement, and adjust learning acceleration efforts.听

Heather Boughton, Ph.D., is director of research, evaluation & advanced analytics at the Ohio Department of Education. Jessica de Barros is director of policy, practice & outreach for the CALDER Policymakers Council at American Institutes for Research. Dan Goldhaber is vice president and director of research for CALDER for the American Institutes for Research. Sydney Payne is a research assistant for CALDER at the American Institutes for Research. Nate Schwartz is a professor of practice at Brown University鈥檚 Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

They pride themselves on their allegiance to a moral code, a firm compass that distinguishes them from progressives who are always 鈥� allegedly 鈥� trying to erode the core principles that make America great.

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Which is why it鈥檚 so tragicomic to witness conservative state leaders in , , , , and beyond search for some shred of principled moral reasoning to justify their mandates forbidding school districts from requiring masks on their campuses.

It鈥檚 a tough task, since most of conservatives鈥� usual lines just don鈥檛 fit. They certainly can鈥檛 justify their actions in the name of American federalism and local control of schools. It鈥檚 hard to squash local school boards鈥� abilities to determine whether or not students and staff must wear masks 鈥� in the name of local control. determining the masking rules for every locale in his state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained that 鈥淭exans, not government, should decide their best health practices.鈥�

Nor can conservatives shield themselves in the name of protecting personal responsibility. If the last 18 months have taught Americans anything, it鈥檚 that the cautious also suffer when their feckless, carefree neighbors ignore the pandemic鈥檚 risks. Which, by the way, is also why they鈥檝e shelved their 鈥減ro-life鈥� rhetoric for this particular debate.

So conservative leaders have made a desperate grab for the banner of individual freedom. For instance, in his executive order limiting districts鈥� pandemic mitigation efforts, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted he was acting to 鈥減rotect parents鈥� freedom to choose whether their children wear masks.鈥� That is, masks can鈥檛 be required at school during a still-raging pandemic because that would disempower families from choosing what鈥檚 best for their children and, presumably, teachers from managing their own tolerance for risking infection.

But this is a profound distortion of America鈥檚 traditional approach to freedom. about how virtuous behavior and personal responsibility were fundamental to sustaining individual liberty. It was obvious to them that the stability of America鈥檚 limited, representative government rested upon individuals behaving responsibly. 鈥淰irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,鈥� George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address. And, when it鈥檚 politically convenient, modern conservatives know this. 鈥淔reedom relies on virtue for its survival,鈥� announced . Its authors continued: 鈥淚t is virtuous citizens taking personal responsibility for their actions and exercising mutual responsibility for the welfare of others who make ordered liberty possible.鈥�

In his towering 1859 essay, 鈥淥n Liberty,鈥� English philosopher John Stuart Mill, articulated his 鈥渉arm principle,鈥� one of that tradition鈥檚 famous definitions of individual freedom. 鈥淭he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will,鈥� Mill wrote, 鈥渋s to prevent harm to others.鈥� The gist of the principle should be intuitive 鈥� indeed, to most Americans. It鈥檚 the intellectual ancestor of : my freedom to swing my fist ends precisely at the point where it hits your nose.

In that vein, then, the case for curtailing families鈥� liberty to send their children unmasked hinges upon whether or not this will cause harm to others. This is not a complicated calculation.

To be sure, throughout the pandemic, it has been both tempting and fashionable to claim that the coronavirus is not particularly threatening for children. Further, advocates from across the political spectrum have made a series of cavalier claims about the relative safety of school settings. Last March, Brown University economist and prominent school reopening advocate Emily Oster , 鈥淵our Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.鈥� In his executive order as proof that school masking was unnecessary.

However, much of the confident talk about the safety of school reopening comes from earlier moments in the pandemic when fewer children were being tested and attending in-person schooling. As in-person school reopening launches across the country, there is that children are to catching the Delta variant than previous strains of the coronavirus. It鈥檚 driving , perhaps because those under the age of 12 are still not yet eligible to receive any of the coronavirus vaccines. it increases the risk of hospitalization for people of all ages.

Data on the latest pandemic spike suggest that these concerns are warranted. Pediatric hospitals 鈥� 鈥� . Test positivity rates for school-aged children . That is, more of the kids being tested for COVID are testing positive. an overall as the baseline threshold for when it is safe for governments to reopen in general. Perhaps we might tolerate a slightly higher rate for school reopenings, but Florida鈥檚 positivity rate for kids is four times the WHO鈥檚 benchmark: in that state, . Meanwhile, over 98 percent of Americans live in counties .

Finally, in elementary schools with universal masking and widespread COVID testing, that nearly one-quarter of students will be infected in the first three months of school. Remove students鈥� masks, and their models suggest that nearly 80 percent of an elementary school鈥檚 students will be infected in the same time frame. These CDC models are looking gloomily prescient: as Georgia schools near the end of their first month since reopening, the state鈥檚 Department of Public Health reports that . Gwinnett County Public Schools, just outside Atlanta, by the end of the school year, and possibly more if case rates increase with colder weather 鈥� despite requiring masks at all times on campus.

In such an environment, at such a precarious moment for public health, the application of Mill鈥檚 harm principle is relatively straightforward. The new variant of the virus is already threatening the health of children and families, and it will threaten more if schools reopen without mitigation measures in place. Universal masking is just the simplest, easiest and cheapest of these. Political and education leaders are absolutely justified in taking all of the standard approaches to slowing the spread of the coronavirus 鈥� including mandatory masking, vaccine mandates and strict quarantine protocols for schools with new COVID cases.

Notably, as the Delta variant began taking hold of campuses around the country, even Prof. Oster and Brown University took touting Gov. DeSantis鈥� citation of her research .

That conservatives are abandoning their prior moral convictions to explain their behavior makes clear that the whole effort to 鈥減rotect the freedom鈥� of the recklessly unmasked is really about scoring political points in a moment of enormous peril for children, families and the country. Indeed, in the face of school districts鈥� opposition to his executive order, to families determined to send their children to schools unmasked. Note, of course, that this extension of freedom, in the form of 鈥渆mpowering families,鈥� doesn鈥檛 isolate the risks only to the private schools willing to tolerate these unmasked families鈥� choice. It simply provides the virus with more vectors to transmit, threatening everyone in Florida 鈥� and the rest of the country.

Worst of all, it鈥檚 not even the first time that conservatives have tried to use the virus as leverage for attacking public schools and educators. Last summer, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that would allow parents to enroll in private schools willing to open into the teeth of .

To be fair, modern conservatives鈥� brand of radical individualism is taken into account elsewhere in the Western intellectual canon. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that this rugged freedom was something like humans鈥� natural state 鈥� each of us fending for ourselves and charting our own life courses. Famously, however, he warned that this was incompatible with civil society, for in this state of nature, life was 鈥渟olitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.鈥�

Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Find him on Twitter . The views expressed here are his alone. 

The Food and Drug Administration has fully approved the Pfizer vaccine, further affirming that it is . Scientific and medical experts reviewed extensive clinical trial data and other evidence 鈥� in fact, has the agency had so much information to determine whether a shot is safe. Data showed the Pfizer vaccine was 91 percent effective at preventing COVID-19. We owe it to ourselves and one another to get the vaccine.

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It saves lives. It will help keep schools open. And it is how we will finally end this pandemic.

Ninety percent of the staff in my district have already been vaccinated. We have set up for employees and families at all our large high schools. Students and parents are participating in our outreach and have recorded about their experience. We are also partnering with local doctors to answer any questions people may have.

This is what my community expects and demands: Families have made clear that schools must be open this year, and that the district must use every available tool to protect health and promote stable classrooms. These tools include not only the vaccine, but the recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 鈥� like masks and regular COVID testing 鈥� that prevented the virus from spreading in our schools last year and that continue to make a difference this year. As the school year started, the positivity rate in Bexar County hit 20 percent. In our schools, however, it is less than 2 percent.

As we are seeing in San Antonio, there is nationally for requiring teachers to get the vaccine. In addition, the , some of the nation鈥檚 largest and many are doing so. States such as , , and have instituted vaccine mandates for educators and certain other workers. Increasingly, leaders are requiring the vaccine because they understand that it is necessary in order for our country to emerge from the COVID crisis and begin to recover.

As chairman of , a bipartisan network of school superintendents and state education commissioners who collectively serve one-third of the children in the United States, I know that, 18 months into the pandemic, educators continue to face tremendous COVID-related challenges in their communities. The school year just started, and already colleagues are scrambling to figure out how to feed students and get them to school, since so many food service workers and bus drivers are in quarantine.

In , the governor has said he will withhold federal relief funds from school districts that require masks. Florida is from school board members in districts with mask mandates. Here in Texas, the attorney general sued my district and me over our vaccine mandate. That lawsuit has since been dropped. In the latest case of political posturing at the expense of students and families, however, the governor recently issued a new executive order maintaining his ban on vaccine mandates for school district staff 鈥� despite full FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine.

This is not the time for politics. I encourage my fellow educators to stand strong against partisan interests and intimidation and to just do what is right for children. Everyone can see the devastating impacts of the pandemic, and we all know that kids urgently need the kind of learning and supports they get in school.

To help schools stay open, a few K-12 systems, including those in , , and are, like San Antonio, adopting staff vaccine mandates. For the good of our nation, I hope all districts will do the same. With the safe and effective vaccine, we have a way out of this pandemic. Let鈥檚 not lose sight of that. We must all do our part by getting the shot and following the health guidance that we know works. Students are not going to have a successful academic year unless everyone who is eligible gets vaccinated. The shot must be required in schools. It is just that simple.

Pedro Martinez is superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District and chairman of Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan network of district and state education leaders.

The current childhood COVID-19 outbreak in our county and in many places around the country is far worse than anything experienced to this point in the pandemic. We have become accustomed to depicting the number of daily new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population for states. Here is a chart for Knox County kids ages 5 to 18.

There is currently a daily average of 206 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 Knox County kids. For context, if there were a state composed only of children in our county, that state would have the highest level of COVID-19 spread, well-ahead of South Carolina, with its 100 new cases per 100,000. Through the entire pandemic, no state has ever experienced spread like this. COVID-19 is hitting kids at unprecedented rates.

The previous peak of childhood COVID-19 spread in Knox County was in December 2020, but the numbers are now about 100 percent higher. That previous peak led school officials to shut down the entire district two weeks early for winter break. But now, state and local officials in charge of our schools have collectively shrugged.

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We need help, and we need it now. Last year, our school district, like so many others, implemented a host of strategies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Those interventions worked well. This year, local school officials suspended almost all mitigation efforts, despite promising last spring that schools would 鈥渇ollow Tennessee Department of Health guidelines with regard to COVID-19.鈥� And amid a major outbreak among our kids, only shocking indifference remains.

As we head into the fourth week of school, numerous mitigation tools are absent 鈥� no physical distancing, no limits on large indoor gatherings, no universal face coverings, no enhanced ventilation and air filtration, no surveillance testing and no school-based contact tracing. The not-so-super superintendent of our district has routinely insisted that others 鈥� like the school board, Gov. Bill Lee or the Tennessee Department of Education 鈥� have tied his hands. The school board has done the same kind of finger-pointing. So far, there has been more effort to shift blame than there has been to protect our kids.

With this leadership void, many parents are doing whatever they can on their own initiative. Nearly every school and every grade level in the district now has a system of do-it-yourself contact tracing that parents set up to self-disclose positive COVID-19 tests and exposures. People are choosing to share this personal information to protect other kids as well as dedicated school staff who are trying to help students learn despite the harrowing conditions. This is clearly less than ideal because the DIY approach creates disparities, since not every family has the time or resources to connect to these grassroots contract-tracing efforts and it forces people to give up anonymity when they have to self-report directly to other families. Some parents have offered to provide HEPA air purifiers for classrooms, but the district鈥檚 central administration has prevented schools from accepting our donations.

I recognize that schools are largely controlled at the local level. But we are in a dire situation that demands an all-hands-on-deck approach. I am asking, begging, really, if you are in a position to help, don鈥檛 delay. If you are a journalist, I ask you to shine a light to further publicize our situation. If you are part of a public-interest law firm that wants to make a difference for some kids in need of help, look hard at whether anything happening here could be challenged in court. If you have decision-making authority in a relevant federal agency, please find creative ways to intervene that prompt compliance with existing laws and regulations at the school district level. Can a school fail to implement Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-recommended mitigation strategies and still provide an equal education to students with disabilities? Are transportation regulations being violated when face coverings are not required on school buses? Are workplace safety violations occurring? Are regulations regarding the use of federal recovery funds being circumvented? We need intervention at the local level.

We are in an emergency, and we are surely not the only locality experiencing this. As more schools open in the coming weeks, the scope of this emergency is likely to spread. The time is now 鈥� those in positions of influence must act on behalf of the kids in Knox County and across the country.

Nathan Kelly is co-director of the Tennessee Scholars Network, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee and director of data and analysis for .

Last March , just short of 40 percent of U.S. students were still learning entirely remotely. Roughly the same percentage were back attending full-time in-person learning (another 23 percent of students were enrolled in hybrid learning).

Thanks to a steady stream of vaccines and some sorely overdue national public health leadership, it finally seemed like schools might be safe enough to push towards in-person reopening for most students this school year. And yet, the new Delta variant of the novel coronavirus has left the United States with uncertain prospects for in-person schooling this fall.

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One thing is clear: families with young children are going to be stuck with mostly bad options this fall. Reopen schools even as warn us that the new variant of COVID-19 is a threat to our children? Keep schools mostly virtual as our collective mental health continues degrading? There鈥檚 stress, anxiety, suffering, and trauma down either route. The only certainty is that families and their kids are going to get another drubbing.

Think of it as a universal form of long COVID. Most of us, maybe all of us, whether or not we ever contracted the coronavirus, will carry some of this collective trauma along with us for years 鈥� perhaps for the rest of our lives. For our house, it鈥檚 the aches of aging parental bodies worn down by 18 (and counting) months of . I鈥檓 also staggering into the post-pandemic period with a shattered sense of after months of navigating our repeated collective failures to treat a generational crisis seriously.

I鈥檓 also carrying the solitary echoes of children shouting at one another from windows and porches last spring, pealing voices that bounced off the line of houses and down our block in a city frozen silent by the lockdown. Even when they were cheerful, the enveloping solitude was terrifying 鈥� a dystopian backdrop for an angry, anxious season.

. These same kids would come up to me when I was out for furtive walks with our infant. They鈥檇 run over from lonely games and distracted, exhausted caregivers to ask about the kid in my stroller, and whether I knew about the school they attended before the virus, and had I noticed the stick tent they鈥檇 been building?

As you rush to jettison your masks, as you charge off on vacations, know that the kids are not alright. Some are traumatized, most are bearing significant daily stress, and almost all are lonely. Last fall, in a Parent Institute for Quality Education survey of Spanish-speaking families in California said that they were 鈥渃oncerned about their children鈥檚 emotional needs.鈥� for American kids during the pandemic, particularly children of color. suggests that the impacts of this prolonged catastrophe won鈥檛 simply vanish with the end of lockdowns and the full reopening of schools.

That鈥檚 why educators must make children鈥檚 social and emotional well-being the lodestar this 鈥� whether or not they can reopen safely. This won鈥檛 be easy in every community. Many administrators will, understandably, want to focus all of their energies towards academics. suggest that were for most kids: many schools will feel the pressure to reorganize their schedules around launching remediation programs or instructional strategies targeted at identifying the math (or reading, or science, or etc) skills kids missed last year 鈥� and then hurl their teachers into addressing these posthaste.

But in most cases, this will be a mistake both conceptual and tactical. First, it mistakes teaching and learning for simple, cumulative processes. High-quality instruction isn鈥檛 a matter of simply pouring knowledge into kids like water into a bucket. It鈥檚 a process of conversing and connecting, of working out what a child knows and what they don鈥檛, determining what they care about and what they鈥檙e afraid of 鈥� and then drawing them from that place into new material. Kids learn best when they feel safe enough in their classroom and school communities to explore and take risks. In essence: all learning is both social and emotional.

Second, schools who scramble their pandemic recovery efforts around chasing students鈥� 鈥渓earning loss鈥� risk ignoring the depths of social and emotional challenges kids are likely to be carrying back to campus. A narrow focus on triaging students鈥� academic needs is unlikely to be as efficient as it might seem.

Whenever schools bring back their full student bodies for in-person learning, most will find that . They won鈥檛 be immediately prepared to launch into aggressive, intensive academic instruction. They鈥檒l return out of practice in, well 鈥� everything. They鈥檒l need time to get used to focusing on learning in the presence of friends, spending whole days indoors around crowds, working within the educational structures of schedules and authority. learning to be in communities with their teachers and peers.

Educators need to start there: to help kids reacclimate to the basics of spending their days living and learning in groups with their peers. This means giving children time to reconnect in organic, authentic ways with both kids and adults. It means making space to nudge kids into talking about how they鈥檙e feeling, about the struggles and challenges of the pandemic so that they don鈥檛 carry all of those stresses with them through the school year. And it means starting with informal activities that make reopening feel like the celebration and slow path back to normalcy that it should be. Critically, as they ease kids back into the routines of daily school, educators and administrators should be watching for red flags from those who may be suffering from trauma and other adverse childhood experiences.

This is one more instance of a pandemic lesson that鈥檚 worth carrying into the future: for more than a year, so many of us have repeatedly had to learn the hard way that we can鈥檛 set the terms for rushing back to normal. Over and over, we鈥檝e tried to hurry past the serious work of leaving the crisis behind, and we鈥檝e kept finding that there are consequences for skipping steps. School reopening is no different: we can take kids out of pandemic lockdown and back to school, but that doesn鈥檛 mean that the pandemic is done affecting kids.

Parents definitely want schools to open, and to remain open, for in-person learning. This week, , when the Delta variant was . The substantial sample of thousands of parents found that 89% of them planned to send their children back to classrooms this fall, up from 84% in June. Even among minority parents who have historically shown greater hesitancy, a substantial majority 鈥� roughly 83% 鈥� said they鈥檇 opt for in-person learning.

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Those numbers do not necessarily reflect parental home-schooling fatigue. Rather, 59% of parents say their child wants to go back to school, 60% said their child does better academically and 54% said their child does better socially in the classroom. Only 27% parents reported wanting schools to open in person to make it easier on the adults in the house.

Parents still have, of course, serious safety concerns. Two-thirds or more of Black, Hispanic and Asian parents who responded to the survey sending their children to school in person: good ventilation in classrooms; teacher vaccinations; enforced social distancing; mandatory masking; and regular COVID-19 testing.

Given that Congress and the Biden Administration have sent to the nation鈥檚 schools, these demands seem both reasonable and achievable.

But the juxtaposition of responsible parents and educators to politicians is jarring. School boards, superintendents and educators are working feverishly: developing contingency plans for keeping schools open when COVID outbreaks flare up; reconfiguring buildings and lesson plans; determining the smartest way to spend federal relief dollars; relentlessly recruiting to stave off teacher shortages; and a million other tasks to safely re-open schools in this very critical school year.

At the same time, conservative politicians, the misinformed, and the generally aggrieved are loudly rebelling against common sense public safety measures. No matter that these safety measures are exactly what the and (depending on the safety measure) say they want. And no matter that to safely allow students, including younger, unvaccinated students and older vaccinated students at risk for breakthrough infections, to emerge from nearly two years of isolation and get back to learning, socializing, and developing into future contributing members of society.

Because most of schoolkids for the vaccine, it鈥檚 perhaps unsurprising that the have revolved around mask mandates. No one loves wearing a mask, but everyone should hate increased , , , , , and for America鈥檚 youth. We are far enough into this disease now to know that is the ugly choice. While America鈥檚 most vulnerable children have borne the brunt of the , no socioeconomic group has escaped unscathed.

And when you think of it, is the single easiest logistical thing that schools can do to protect children. The governors or legislatures in who have tried to take this tactic out of school districts鈥� tool kits should be ashamed – not only for hamstringing administrators charged with students鈥� day-to-day wellbeing, but also for creating political firestorms, literally in some cases: a Florida man doused a tray of masks with lighter fluid and at a recent Broward County school board meeting.

Like overgrown playground bullies, politicians have willfully divided school communities and distracted from the critical tasks of educators who already face the challenge of making up for the months of lost learning affecting student performance across the country. Kudos to President Biden for ordering the federal and for school board members and superintendents for standing up for safe, in-person instruction – even when it has .

And, events continue to quickly evolve. This Thursday (Aug. 26), the Progressive Policy Institute鈥檚 Reinventing America鈥檚 Schools project, in partnership with 蜜桃影视, with leaders of two large urban school districts that have become ground zero in the bitter battle over mask rules, Dallas and Broward County, Florida. Joining the discussion will be a public health expert, an economist, and a parent advocate to examine the many angles of moving forward in what may be one of the most consequential school years in decades. The conversation kicks off at 1 p.m. ET, Aug. 26; you .

Tressa Pankovits is Co-Director of the Reinventing America鈥檚 Schools project at Progressive Policy Institute.

For all the talk about the pandemic鈥檚 impact on academic achievement, the coronavirus crisis remains at its core a public health emergency, one that schools will have to address before they can begin helping students recover from lost learning opportunities. shares how the influx of federal aid for public schools, totaling approved over the past 15 months, can help schools and districts navigate two key health priorities.

The first is ensuring that buildings are safe and healthy environments for students to learn and educators to teach. This is particularly important with COVID cases surging again and many families worried about sending their unvaccinated children back to in-person classrooms. To keep them safe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has renewed its recommendations for wearing masks inside schools and that schools and districts continue to provide the protective equipment, physical space and contact tracing needed to contain the spread of the virus.

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The second priority is addressing the broader health needs of children, particularly mental health concerns, so that students can recover from both the academic and social-emotional effects of the pandemic. and experience tell us that healthy students are better learners. They attend school more regularly, focus better in class and develop strong relationships with peers and teachers.

Recognizing these health needs is particularly important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, many of whom have experienced the worst of the pandemic. Many children haven鈥檛 seen a doctor in the past year, missing regular well-child visits. An estimated has missed key vaccinations needed to prevent childhood diseases. Other children have gone hungry when parents lost jobs and wages needed to support the family. And many others have suffered trauma from losing loved ones, moving to a new home or simply losing touch with friends and teachers.

Those who have been learning from home have gotten out of the habit of interacting regularly with other students, a reality that could manifest in anxiety and behavioral problems when they come back to the classroom. Many have missed weeks, if not months, of school. Again, the most vulnerable students are often hardest hit by these problems. They are more likely to have suffered hunger and trauma, less likely to have seen a doctor, more likely to be and more likely to have over the past year.

Fortunately, the COVID relief aid approved by Congress offers schools districts and states wide latitude to support student health and equity concerns. approved since March 2020 specifically mention safe and health school environments, student mental health, and reengaging students and families as top priorities.

Likewise, the U.S. Education Department to lay out COVID mitigation efforts and strategies for addressing social-emotional health before receiving full funding from the American Rescue Plan. The relief aid can be combined with other resources 鈥� federal, state or local 鈥� to deliver what students and staff members need.

Many districts and states are already hiring additional school nurses and mental health counselors to address student and staff needs. Education leaders, though, need to be mindful that the federal dollars will run out by late 2024, leaving districts to come up with the money to pay additional staff members. A more sustainable approach could be to hire short-term workers who can support contact tracing and health screening or work as mentors for students who need extra attention. The extra funding for national service programs such as AmeriCorps could be a source of such workers.

The new from the Healthy Schools Campaign, FutureEd, The Superintendents Association (AASA) and Kaiser Permanente outlines a number of other strategies that schools and school districts could pursue, including:

• Expand the equipment and training needed for the to provide students access to mental health counseling and physical checkups through remote networks. This could be a particularly effective strategy in rural communities, which often have a shortage of providers and long drive times to get to appointments.
• Adopt a that brings together other agencies and local nonprofit organizations to address the needs of students and families. COVID relief dollars can support the costs of a school-based coordinator.
• Conduct a schoolwide to gauge the trauma experienced by students and staff members and determine what services are needed.
• Launch a back-to-school campaign that includes immunization clinics to ensure more students are up to date on their shots, as well as outreach to in Medicaid or CHIP.
• Develop social-emotional learning programs that improve a school鈥檚 climate and train staff members on interventions, such as , that can resolve conflicts and behavioral issues at school without turning to suspensions.
• Create , which can keep students healthier and thwart the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.
• Invest in better tracking of student health data to identify future needs and support reimbursement for Medicaid expenses, when applicable.
• Upgrade both to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and improve student health. Poor air quality can lead to greater absences among students with asthma and allergies; likewise, buildings that are too hot or too cold can make it harder for learning to happen.

Equity should drive this work: Schools, districts and local health officials should recognize the disproportionate harm that the coronavirus crisis has done to disadvantaged students and their families. Spent wisely, this infusion of federal funding can not only help students recover from the pandemic鈥檚 disruption, but can also fix some of systemic health challenges that have kept these students from succeeding in the past.

Phyllis W. Jordan is editorial director of FutureEd, an independent, nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University鈥檚 McCourt School of Public Policy. She is the author of , released by FutureEd and Attendance Works.

Alex Mays is senior national program director for the Healthy Schools Campaign. She works on national and state policies related to school food, physical activity, school health services and environmental health.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, the economy responded to COVID-19 in a way that defied conventional wisdom. Many markers typically used to predict how severe a recession will be, and how to confront it, were completely out of whack.

Unemployment immediately shot up to levels far higher than those seen in the worst of the Great Recession of 2008. Small businesses closed at a precipitous rate, with little certainty about whether they would reopen. Many low-income workers were laid off, while others, forced to keep reporting to work despite spiking rates of viral transmission, lost child care as schools shuttered. But at the same time, stock portfolios swelled and affluent consumers flooded delivery services with orders for luxury goods to make homes that now doubled as offices ever more comfortable. For the well-off, the recession was over within weeks 鈥� if it was even felt at all.

Even small changes in the way money circulates within a city or neighborhood ripple through the local economy. This one was a shockwave. Wealthy Americans ordered fancy meal kits online and signed up for wine tastings on Zoom rather than spending at the neighborhood restaurants, nail salons, yoga studios and dry cleaners that had kept their less affluent neighbors employed.

John Friedman and Raj Chetty realized they were seeing something unusual. Co-founders of , a team at Harvard University that researches education鈥檚 potential to lift children out of poverty, they feared the pandemic had worsened already long odds.

The economists took the unprecedented step of asking credit card companies, payroll processors and other businesses that track money as it moves through the economy in real time to turn over what are essentially trade secrets. Using that information, the researchers built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code.

The data quickly revealed stunning implications on virtually every front.

In place of a typical recession鈥檚 V shape, in which people across the socioeconomic spectrum experience both the downturn and the subsequent recovery together, the economists saw a K. Affluent Americans at the top of the K bounced back right away 鈥� much more quickly than in a typical recession. Low-income families on the bottom, by contrast, were disproportionately impacted: more likely to be unemployed, quarantined in overcrowded multi-generational housing and experiencing higher rates of infection and death.

The inequities on display were not new, but for many people, the awareness of how profound and widespread they are is. Over the last year and a half, prosperous Americans who can afford iPads, reliable internet and tutors have woken up to headlines showing children forced to log into virtual classes from parking lots 鈥� or wherever they could find a Wi-Fi signal 鈥� skipping school to work at their own jobs and isolated, alone in COVID鈥檚 mental health crisis.

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation鈥檚 K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students鈥� progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.

Because it is widely understood that economic disadvantages show up in schools, 蜜桃影视 saw an opportunity in Friedman and Chetty’s work. Could their data predict long-lasting effects in the classroom years after COVID-19 has passed? And were there clues as to how educators could address them?

Just as Friedman鈥檚 and Chetty鈥檚 research holds key insights as to how policymakers could target relief, we knew their economic recovery tracker offered valuable information as schools seek to help the most disadvantaged children recover.

鈥淲e already had this deep inequality in American education. And the pandemic has just made it so much worse,鈥� Friedman, a professor of economics at Brown University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, noted in an interview with 蜜桃影视. 鈥淭he pandemic has taken children and set them even further back. Without some really dedicated effort to get these students caught up, what we’ve seen from broader data is that the types of educational gaps that arise in childhood can persist, they create lower college enrollment rates, lower college graduation rates, students earn less when they get out in the labor market. These things can have really large effects down the line.鈥�

Using Opportunity Insights鈥� data as a starting point, “COVID’s K-Shaped Recession and the Looming Classroom Crisis” is a series of stories probing how the pandemic鈥檚 impact on income inequality has shown up in schools in five communities 鈥� Delaware; Washington, D.C.; Austin, Texas; Reno, Nevada; and Colorado Springs. Each demonstrates a different aspect of how the K-shaped recession has played out in neighborhoods and schools; and several offer hints as to how educators and policymakers can help students recover lost learning and regain the opportunity to secure a prosperous future.

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America鈥檚 schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and 蜜桃影视.

The state was fortunate to receive an offer of help from a partner early on. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert and I had existing relationships with Renaissance鈥檚 , an online literacy platform, from previous positions we鈥檇 held. In April 2020, we were still trying to decide how to move forward for our students when Renaissance reached how they could help. With relief funding having not yet made it to schools, the company committed to temporarily providing myON at no cost; by June 2020, students and educators throughout Nevada had access to thousands of online books and news articles.

Part of the reason this happened so fast is that the governor issued an executive order streamlining the adoption process. Instead of going through several layers of review, we were able to flag the rollout as an emergency response to the pandemic, drastically shortening the process from several weeks to just days.

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Part of the challenge the state faced, even with a generous partner, was that we knew the federal government was likely to provide emergency funds, but we didn鈥檛 know how much, when or what restrictions there would be on spending the money. In short, we knew we could launch the program, but we weren鈥檛 sure how we could sustain it beyond that. So we looked for partners to bring on board to expand this initiative beyond the Department of Education.

We began by reaching out to the because it was already providing support and services to students and families throughout the state, from putting together packages of books and offering various mobile technologies so families could access the internet. It was a natural fit, so we asked them to start sharing information about myON along with their other offerings.

Next, we began working with our regional professional development program. We needed teachers to understand that myON was more than just a reading tool or online books, and to consider how they could leverage it for teaching and learning, given that the shift to remote classes was so abrupt and totally new to most of our teachers.

Finally, to inspire more excitement, we encouraged each school district and student to read as many minutes as possible through the partnership. To date, students have accessed more than 6 million digital books and read more than 58 million minutes. Meanwhile, my team and I began to address another statewide challenge: internet access.

Before the pandemic, about three of every four students in the state had a mobile device and access to home internet. But many were sharing a single device among multiple siblings or with parents. And entire communities didn鈥檛 have broadband internet at all.

A first step in improving access was to have districts identify the technology they already had that could be distributed to students. We knew that federal funding was coming through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund that would allow us to buy the additional devices we needed. However, 49 other states were also looking to provide devices and connectivity for their students, and placing orders that wouldn鈥檛 arrive until the fall wasn鈥檛 going to help students who needed to learn now.

Fortunately, Gov. Steve Sisolak allowed Ebert to reorient the Nevada COVID-19 Response, Relief & Recovery Task Force to include Connecting Kids, an initiative to solve the issue of providing students with devices and access. The head of the task force, Jim Murren, and Elaine Wynn, former CEO of MGM Resorts and former president of the State Board of Education, really stepped up for our kids. They went so far as to use their private planes to transport devices from countries where they were manufactured to Nevada to skip the fraying supply lines and get devices into students鈥� hands.

Some students still lacked access to the internet, though. My department partnered with the Governor鈥檚 Office of Science Innovation and Technology to help districts distribute hotspots throughout the state, but there were still some students and communities we weren鈥檛 able to reach. Fortunately, people and organizations from all over the state stepped up to offer community access at schools, at local businesses or via school buses with wireless access. Only four months after the launch of Connecting Kids, 100 percent of Nevada students who were learning remotely had connectivity and access to a device.

The circumstances around our transformation from 75 percent to 100 percent connectivity were extraordinary, but the process is applicable beyond any crisis.

Begin with an inventory of what you already have and, crucially, what you need. Find partners with a genuine concern for kids and start a conversation about what you need and how they鈥檙e prepared to help. Partnerships with philanthropic organizations and businesses are important not just for what they can give students and teachers, but for how they can help leverage resources or provide access to powerful people or systems. Then, think about how to communicate with your stakeholders in a way that will get them invested, such as a contest to generate excitement. Next, measure the effectiveness of your implementation.

Finally, make sure to celebrate, because this is difficult work. It takes time, and celebrating those who鈥檝e contributed as you reach milestones or achieve your ultimate goal will keep them engaged for the next push.

Dr. Jonathan Moore is deputy superintendent of student achievement at the Nevada Department of Education. He can be reached at jpmoore@doe.nv.gov.

The staff and board of stepped up this spring, recognizing an urgent need to develop an ambitious vision and catch-up plan that would support all children in getting back on track following more than a year of disruptions and struggles. Our objective: To ensure that, despite the significant challenges brought on by the pandemic, all our scholars will remain on track with grade-level performance, while receiving any and all supports they may need (academically, socially, emotionally and beyond).

At U Prep, we are unwavering in our belief that all children, from all backgrounds, can learn at the highest levels. They are brilliant, beautiful people and absolutely capable. Eighty-five percent of our students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches and 94 percent are students of color. In 2017, scholars at our Steele Street campus in Denver had the highest math growth in the state (out of all public elementary schools) and the eighth highest English Language Arts (ELA) growth, after a single year.

We take great pride that U Prep increased academic proficiency by more than 30 percent during that year while educating an equivalent student population to who we serve today, with more than 70 percent of our seats serving English Language Learners. You can read about that success .

As we now turn our focus to catch-up efforts in the wake of COVID, we鈥檙e leaning on that past experience along with our to drive our strategy.

Over the next two years, we are leveraging dollars to ensure that children who鈥檝e fallen the furthest behind during remote learning will now make the most rapid growth. And, while we drive that academic work forward, which we believe is critical in fulfilling our mission of providing every child with a life of opportunity, we are also expanding our partnership with the to ensure children and families alike receive any and all additional mental health support they may need.

Our learning recovery approach is being guided by three key pillars:

鈥� Grade Level is Grade Level: All scholars will be given access to grade-level content regardless of their level of current performance.

鈥� Rapid Acceleration: We deliver moderate to significant interventions through additional staffing and a variety of targeted supports so that children get what they need when they need it.

鈥� Family Partnerships: Every family deserves to know exactly where their child is, in relation to grade-level expectations. Built on a foundation of trust and honesty, educators engage with families as genuine partners who play an active role in their child鈥檚 鈥渃atch-up.鈥�

Grade Level is Grade Level

No matter what y辞耻鈥檙别 doing to catch kids up, you cannot stop putting grade-level content and work in front of them.

A fifth-grader who might be reading at a third-grade level must still be exposed to fifth-grade text and curriculum. We firmly believe that the more time a child is immersed in grade-level content alongside effective supports, the more growth they鈥檙e able to make.

Teachers regularly run critical grade-level assessments to gauge where children are, and create a game plan for aligning supports that will increase access to that grade-level work. Simultaneously, our school leaders have made significant investments in data analysis and are able to swiftly develop action plans that can support effective instruction with meaningful and rigorous grade-level curriculum.

Rapid Acceleration

This coming year, we will operate our K-5 campuses as if there were three small school models within them (while all staff, children and families remain deeply connected to the larger school).

Grades K-1 will operate as normal as possible (close to our ideal state), while we implement moderate interventions in grades 2-3. For our fourth and fifth graders, we will be committing to significant interventions; their needs in catching up and preparing for middle school (and beyond) is very different from our first graders鈥檚 needs, and we know that our remaining time with this oldest cohort is short.

With Rescue Plan dollars, we鈥檙e hiring an additional teacher at each campus to support grades 2-3, and two extra teachers to support grades 4-5 at each campus 鈥� one for each grade level. This means far more direct support and targeted individual and small group interventions for the children who are furthest behind and most need it. We will use assessments to further gauge unfinished learning and will then adjust instruction as needed with extra staff ready to play their part.

Beyond the school day, we have nearly 60 children (rising fourth and fifth-graders) in intensive tutoring this summer through a partnership with . This multi-week support provides scholars who are the furthest behind with a chance to begin their catch-up efforts now and build momentum heading into the school year ahead. In a bid to remove as many barriers as possible, all costs associated with the tutoring, as well as transportation, are covered by U Prep.

Tutoring will not conclude with summer鈥檚 end. Both U Prep campuses in Denver will provide afterschool tutoring Monday through Thursday throughout the school year, building on the knowledge and skills being acquired during core content instruction. Like the work over the summer, this tutoring opportunity will target upper elementary aged scholars and all costs will be covered.

Family Relationships

Strong home-to-school and school-to-home relationships must remain central in our efforts to catch kids up. This requires ongoing, honest conversations. Families deserve to know where their child actually is in relation to grade-level standards, and to understand the impact that this highly disrupted 15 months of school has had on learning.

One example of this belief being put into practice: Last December, U Prep had all students come to school in person during the height of remote learning to take part in literacy assessments, our 鈥淟iteracy-palooza鈥�. Parents reserved a time slot that worked for them, drove up to the buildings, were greeted with a hot cup of coffee and pastry, and waited while each child entered the school for a one-on-one test (with full health and safety guidelines in place). After their tests, kids selected brand new books to take home and add to their personal libraries.

Even during the most challenging of times this past year we found a way to communicate directly and honestly with families about where their child stands. They always deserve to know, and from that position of shared knowledge, we can build a shared plan. (What are we doing at school? What can you be doing at home? How can we do this together?).

Continuing to invest in relationship building, this summer we are making home visits to not only all of our new U Prep families, which we do each year, but to all of our returning fourth and fifth-grade families too. Through the year, every family will participate in four parent-teacher conferences, one each quarter, to make sure families have a crystal-clear view of how their student is progressing academically, socially and emotionally, and to ensure our partnership is strong and healthy. Every one of these moments, whether in conferences or home visits, is another chance to also learn from our parents鈥� expertise about their child 鈥� they are their first and primary educator and we have to be constantly learning from their expert knowledge.

A Challenge 鈥� and Opportunity

The three pillars of our catch-up plan, combined with our core values and historic success at targeting support, position us to do right by all children and families we serve. The U Prep board, together with the school teams, makes a promise to every child that they will be educated on the path to a four-year college degree and a genuine life of opportunity.

While the last year plus was an absolute test in maintaining our mission, the years ahead will be an even greater test of our level of care and commitment. We are ready and beyond excited to lean in to the opportunity ahead 鈥� to do anything and everything possible to ensure every student catches up.

That is our responsibility and one we take extremely seriously.

Recardo Brooks is a member of the board of University Prep and the parent of an alum. The tuition free public charter schools serve 727 children in Kindergarten through 5th grades at two campuses in Denver.

I remember my shock the first time I was working with one of my fourth-grade students who spent most days working asynchronously 鈥� on his own 鈥� at home during the pandemic. He had completed all the online lessons assigned to him and came to school to take a multiplication test in person. Of the 20 problems on the test, he got none correct. Since this was a student who had started the school year with a solid set of math skills, I expected him to be successful, but he simply had no idea how to multiply.

He could follow the directions on the self-paced lessons enough to receive credit, but he had not learned the skill. Then, when we moved on to division and fractions, the same thing happened 鈥� he passed the learning modules without really grasping any of the material. When he came to work with me in person, however, we reviewed the concepts and there was a clear and fast difference in his ability to understand them. He grasped a lot more.

To meet the needs of my fourth-graders during the pandemic, I had provided my students with multiple options for math instruction: synchronous in-person, synchronous online and asynchronous online. Synchronous in-person students received instruction in the classroom with me and completed their work online, with my support, in real time. Synchronous online students received instruction through Zoom and Nearpod with me. They completed practice problems online with me offering feedback and did lessons on their own as well. Asynchronous online students received instruction via video. They did not interact with me personally and worked through lessons on their own.

I was interested in the role that asynchronous learning could play in their learning, so I ran a study to see how it would affect my students.

I developed this study as a member of the , a group of educators devoted to answering their most pressing questions through research. assisted my research through workshops on experiment design, data collection, data analysis and one-on-one research support.

The formation of the network was timely, given COVID-19 and the sudden shift to remote and hybrid learning. As teachers, we are often asking 鈥淲hat works?” and COVID-19 only raised more questions, especially around learning environments and the role of the teacher.

There is also a bigger movement around teacher-driven research, which can leverage the knowledge of those who work most closely with students and lead to faster results from research in order to impact instruction. One example of this can be seen in a聽 done by Bill Hinkley, a math teacher who uses , an online math tool to explore how the use of pencil and paper to solve math problems affects his students. The results suggested that pencil and paper seem to be more effective than online tools for students learning math.

As I navigated through the new world of remote teaching during the pandemic, I was interested in the role that asynchronous learning could play in my students鈥� learning. Did they always need me to provide feedback? Was it possible that some students could work independently using online programs that will give immediate feedback to their work?

The data I collected provided a clear answer: No. My study showed that synchronous learning led to better outcomes overall. My students who worked asynchronously generally performed worse than their peers who received instruction from me in real time, either online or in person. The mid-range of scores on classroom assessments for in-person students was between 80 and 100 percent, while for online synchronous students, it was between 67 and 100 percent. The mid-range for asynchronous students was the lowest, at between 55 and 81 percent.

While I suspected that synchronous instruction would be more beneficial, I was surprised by how much the lack of teacher interaction affected my asynchronous students. I knew they had completed numerous lessons online, watched instructional videos, completed practice problems and used a program with assistive technology to help clarify misconceptions. Still, it was as if they had not done any of this at all.

My students’ relationship with me seemed to positively influence learning, and this was one of the missing pieces for my asynchronous students. I noticed that students who were learning in real time with me were more invested in the outcome. They were visibly happy when they did well and frustrated when they didn鈥檛 succeed. If students worked asynchronously, I saw less investment. When they interacted with me personally, they put more effort into their work.

Of course, it makes sense that students give more attention and effort when they are being held accountable by a teacher who knows them. It also makes sense that students ask more questions when working synchronously and therefore have more opportunities to receive feedback. Asynchronous learning seemed to promote passive learning behaviors in my students.

I do think there is a place for online platforms and that asynchronous learning can be beneficial in some contexts, but I would need to do more research on how to make that approach more effective. In future research, I might look into different options for delivering asynchronous instruction, like including a writing component.

The pandemic upended schooling for millions of students and teachers. Some have predicted that there’s no turning back from the infusion of technology that the pandemic forced on schools. However, the data from my research makes clear to me that the teacher will always be at the heart of learning.

Krystal Clifton is a fourth-grade teacher in Illinois’ Kankakee School District.

In April, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the creation of Summer Rising. Per the city : Summer Rising programs are full day and in-person experiences. All programs will鈥� give parents peace of mind as they return to work. All K-8 students participating in programs will have access to academic classes and enrichment programming.

On June 28, Hizzoner proudly tweeted:

More than 200,000 NYC kids are now signed up for Summer Rising, our unprecedented effort to reach young people and help them make up for time lost due to .

There鈥檚 still time to sign-up! Summer programming begins on July 6.

鈥� Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor)

De Blasio had that a Summer Rising seat would be available for every child. His tweet led many to believe he was saying all who鈥檇 applied were accommodated.

Dozens of families had found that untrue.

My in-box quickly filled up with emails from parents:

KOS: I still to this day haven’t received an email response from the school and program if my son has been accepted. When I applied, it stated that it should take about 5 business days to get a response but it’s been more than a week and a half. I signed on yesterday to see what’s going on and the application still says “submitted.”

DY: City’s information suggested every child would be able to attend a program they selected. In reality, it is every child will be assigned to a program but no guarantee as to where. We applied to all the programs in our area. All programs advised us that we were either rejected because of capacity, or waitlisted. 

XA: My home school told me I was supposed to apply to a specific local school. There were 4-5 schools told to apply to this same school. I got an email saying they had over 500 applicants but only 120 spaces. I emailed to find out his place on the wait list to see if there was any hope. I was told that they were entirely overwhelmed and hadn’t even organized a wait list. 

JJ: Yesterday I got 2 emails confirming my children’s placement in Summer Rising. I did not sign up or register for Summer Rising. 

After frustrated parents barraged the DOE, on June 30, the New York Daily News dropped a bombshell: All waitlisted students would now have to be accepted 鈥� but there weren鈥檛 enough teachers for them all.

A little more Summer Rising chaos to go w your election chaos.

Per DOE today, schools now required to accept everyone on their waitlists, potentially doubling size of some sites + sparking big new staffing challenges 5 days out:

鈥� Michael Elsen-Rooney (@MichaelElsenRoo)

According to : Principals say many of their schools are already overcrowded and understaffed, after the city guaranteed enrollment without a plan to properly place everyone.

A teacher emailed me to confirm, 鈥淥ur school had about 159 seats available to serve 5 local schools. Only 3 teachers applied. THREE. Because they鈥檙e burned out and need a break. Administrators also need a break. This is so incredibly unfair and ridiculous to ask of them with 5 days to go. It鈥檚 also unfair to kids 鈥� who鈥檚 going to teach them? They deserve more than to just be supervised in a jumbo-sized cohort by a tremendously overworked teacher for the summer.鈥�

Families did their best to remain optimistic:

VC: I think the hours (8 a.m.- 6 p.m.) are amazing. It gives me the space and time to do whatever it is I need to get done (in terms of work, household, etc).

JK: I enrolled my girls. Now, all we have left to do is to start it and enjoy it.

That optimism lasted until the morning of the first day, Tuesday, July 6:

JL: The DOE once again overpromised but underdelivered. We were notified on July 1 our child would now have a place for the entire summer from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. He was taken there this morning only for us to find out the school had not been notified all these students from all over the [Upper East Side] would be attending and the school did not have the funding. Therefore, instead of an 8-6 p.m. program we are to pick up our child at 12:00 p.m. today. Thankfully he had breakfast at home otherwise I don鈥檛 even think he would be fed. 

PD: We went to school today morning. But did not find her name in the list. They asked to go here, there. No one knows where is that list. Finally one lady took our name and email copy (from DOE) and asked us to go back to home. Someone will contact us later. Not sure when will it be. We planned so many things as assumed she will be in school. God knows what is the going forward from here.

Remember when we were assured NYC schools were ? They were not. Well, now we鈥檙e being told they鈥檙e even more . The same way we were told they were prepared for Summer Rising.

This botched rollout doesn鈥檛 exactly inspire confidence. And it makes us parents of public school students very nervous about the year to come.

Alina Adams is a New York Times best-selling romance and mystery writer, the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten and Getting Into NYC High School, a blogger at and mother of three. She believes you can’t have true school choice until all parents know all their school choices 鈥� and how to get them. Visit her website, .

In the early days of the pandemic, as we worked with educators, families and students to transition to virtual learning, we repeatedly heard a common refrain: Learning from home offered families a unique opportunity to see what their children were doing in school and become more engaged in their education. But these families also weren鈥檛 sure what they should be seeing, what their children should be learning in each grade, how best to support them and how to create partnerships with teachers to keep their kids learning under unprecedented circumstances.

The importance of helping families understand what is most important for students to know and be able to do by the end of each grade isn鈥檛 new, but the pandemic and shift to remote learning gave it renewed urgency.

Seeking to address this need, we partnered with families, caregivers and educators to create , a user-friendly, jargon-free and accessible resource in Spanish and English designed to ensure that caregivers of K-12 students understand what kids should know and be able to do in each grade, along with tools to help them support their kids鈥� learning.

Across the country, it’s become clear how the right resources and support can help make families true partners in their children鈥檚 education. For example, with support from , parents in Oakland, California, used the Guides as a framework for conversations with other families about shared challenges and successful strategies to help support their children鈥檚 learning. They used that new understanding to hold workshops earlier this year on language arts and math expectations, in part to help parents navigate summer learning opportunities. In Brooklyn, parents wanted to know how they could help their children stay on track to be prepared for the following year. By integrating the Guides into their curriculum and conversations with parents, public schools across the borough helped these parents look ahead to what would be expected of their children at the next grade level, laying the groundwork for future academic success.

According to a recent survey, feel more connected with their child鈥檚 day-to-day education than ever before. As schools consider summer programming and the transition to a new school year in the fall, there鈥檚 an opportunity for districts, administrators, teachers and organizations that work with families to keep this engagement going. Ensuring that families have a deeper understanding of grade-level expectations and engaging them more deeply in academics than ever before is key.

Even before the pandemic, it was understood that the benefits of increased family engagement in schools are crucial and wide-ranging. Kids with engaged caregivers do better in school, and keeping families informed and engaged in their children鈥檚 education through transparent and effective communication encourages connection and relationships that benefits students. But there were also significant challenges in keeping many families engaged and informed about their children鈥檚 academic progress. Many families didn鈥檛 know what their kids should know and be able to do in math and English by the end of each grade. Some families found it challenging to translate and decipher the jargon around their children鈥檚 education, and therefore did not feel empowered to ask questions and assess how their children are really doing.

Providing tools and resources that engage families can be especially beneficial for those who have historically received less of this support, including Black, brown and low-income families. Tools like these help families advocate for the education their children deserve, and serve as a foundation for rich discussions, recommendations and new ideas born of strong relationships between families and schools.

Offering resources that help families engage more deeply with the academic content in classrooms is powerful, but simply sharing this information without context or support often isn鈥檛 enough. Tools like the Guides are most effective when school or trusted parent communities provide opportunities for families to come together, ask questions and build their knowledge. We saw this in action, when one Connecticut parent created mini-focus groups to help parents determine how to best apply the Guides’ recommendations in their own family settings.

The best engagement happens when families can connect with other families in their community for honest conversations about challenges or questions about tracking their children鈥檚 educational progress and implementing strategies that focus on creating a friendly, welcoming environment for both students and caregivers.

As the country transitions back toward mostly in-person learning in the coming school year, schools and educators have a unique opportunity to ensure that the pandemic’s unprecedented level of family engagement in student learning doesn鈥檛 wane as children return to the classroom. By making family engagement about building academic partnerships between caregivers and schools and by offering all families the proper resources and support to engage, every student and family can be set up for success and support, next year and beyond.

Sandra Boyd is CEO of Seek Common Ground. Amy Briggs is president of Student Achievement Partners.

The global pandemic has laid bare the inequities in our education system. As school leaders now chart out ambitious recovery plans for the fall, we must do so with a keen awareness of what was lacking prior to the pandemic, and in particular what we have long failed to provide so many students attending our lowest-performing schools. It is through this lens that we must approach the upcoming reauthorization of the federal Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA), which sets accountability requirements for schools.

As we look to 2022 and beyond, we must commit to funding three critical programs to better support students assigned to struggling schools:

First, we need to fully fund high quality pre-kindergarten for all low-income students. High quality pre-k has been to increase participants鈥� cognitive and social-emotional skills, health outcomes and long-term employment trajectories, while also reducing male participants鈥� criminal activity.

In addition, for every dollar spent on high-quality birth-to-five programs for disadvantaged children, including pre-kindergarten, taxpayers can expect a 13 percent per annum 鈥� with, perhaps not surprisingly, the greatest returns associated with programs at the earliest stages of life. Yet only are enrolled in state funded pre-K. We must change that.

Second, we must ensure that every student assigned to a low-performing school can attend full-day kindergarten. Only require children to attend full-day kindergarten. Yet, shows students who participate in full-day kindergarten outperform similar students in half-day programs, with both short-term and long-term gains in reading and math. In turn, these gains narrow later achievement gaps between students enrolled in low-performing school districts and those of their more advantaged peers.

Third, we should fund and implement robust after-school tutoring programs that identify children falling behind in early years and provide help via one-on-one or small group instruction so they are able to catch up and then climb up the educational ladder. A found that, on average, students participating in tutoring programs made gains consistent with moving from the 50th to the 66th percentile of student performance. Moreover, gains were largest for students in the earliest grades.

We can鈥檛 achieve these goals overnight, but we must begin pursuing them as quickly and aggressively as possible. During my time as governor of Pennsylvania, we similarly focused on this three-pronged to build a foundation for all students they could use as a springboard for lifelong educational success.

The good news is that the Biden administration understands the challenges we face and how this early education approach can significantly improve educational outcomes for vulnerable students. In addition, states are receiving billions of dollars in federal funding as part of COVID-related relief funding, providing an unprecedented opportunity to put new programs into place for younger students.

But those funds will eventually run out, even as the need for them continues. Hence, we must also take advantage of the moment at hand by including pre-k, full-day kindergarten, and tutoring programs as part of the ESSA reauthorization and committing ongoing federal financial support to sustain those programs long after COVID-19 has become a distant memory.

Although the investment will be significant, the benefits will more than exceed the costs over time 鈥� not just in terms of return on investment, but also in improved quality of life for both the recipients and the communities in which they live.

If the 2019 school year ended in a surge of shutdowns and socially-distanced chaos, the 2020 school year commenced with an unprecedented mix of innovation, improvisation and isolation, as districts rushed to rethink everything from school safety to remote instruction, student nutrition, social-emotional supports and beyond. From fall to spring 鈥� through all the spikes in COVID cases, the rolling campus closures, the approval of vaccines for adolescents and the evolving CDC guidance surrounding the spread and mitigation of the disease 鈥� school communities did their best to pivot and adapt to the twists and turns that made the past nine months an academic year unlike any other.

Now with nearly every elected official and education leader calling for a full restoration of in-person learning for the 2021 school year, there鈥檚 a feeling today, in July of 2021 as we enter the holiday weekend, that we鈥檙e taking collective stock of the fallout from the COVID school year 鈥� and laying the groundwork for the engagement and interventions that will be required to help all kids make up for lost time.

If the 2019 school year was when things derailed, and 2020 was the year we did the best we could in an impossible situation, 2021 is poised to be the moment the nation turns the page and doubles down on education as a post-COVID priority.

Here at 蜜桃影视, we鈥檝e been monitoring and covering each new chapter in the pandemic. And as a second school year draws to a close, we wanted to take a quick snapshot of this moment in time: What are our top concerns about students after 15 months of disruption? What are the top issues that need to be addressed through summer school or first thing in the fall? As we look to catch kids up, where do we start 鈥� and what solutions have the most promise?

Looking back over the past nine months, at what reporting generated the most interest and sparked the greatest impact, here are 12 important stories about the challenges currently facing students and teachers that could well define the next school year:

Remedial Education? Not So Fast: Education researchers had some advice to offer school leaders in a report that was released in May: As educators decide how to spend federal stimulus dollars and address learning losses in the school year to come, they should consider the lackluster impact of remediation 鈥� the typical gap-closing practice of making up missed material before moving on 鈥� . TNTP and Zearn analyzed the experiences of 2 million students during the current academic year and found that, on Zearn鈥檚 math app, classrooms featuring acceleration 鈥� a strategy in which students are challenged by grade-level lessons and instructed in specific missing skills as needed 鈥� saw dramatic growth. Students receiving this kind of support completed over 25 percent more grade-level work than they would have using remediation. By contrast, students in remediation continued to struggle. .

鈥搁别濒补迟别诲: Miami data could offer dire warning of 鈥榰nfinished learning鈥� nationwide, with 54% of district students testing below grade level in math (Read the full report)

Achievement Gaps Have Grown Wider: The pandemic may have exacerbated achievement gaps not only by leaving some students behind, but by propelling more privileged children even further ahead academically. At least . The numbers, collected and crunched by economists at Harvard University鈥檚 Opportunity Insights research group, are from Zearn Math, a free online program for kindergarten through fifth-grade students. But they were the best early measure researchers had for overall engagement with online learning. The program was being used by more than 2.5 million students in more than half the country鈥檚 school districts before the COVID-19 shutdown. Researchers used a representative national sample of about 800,000 students from district public, charter and parochial schools to track what happened after that. .

The Promising Power of Tutoring: An abundance of research has demonstrated the power of tutoring in boosting students’ academic performance. Now, as families and governments seek the best ways to reverse COVID-related learning loss, a working paper released in March 鈥� and offers a theory about how they were achieved. In two experimental trials in Chicago, the authors find that ninth- and 10th-graders saw huge improvements both in their math test scores and their grade-point averages, with course failures reduced by as much as 49 percent. Particularly impressive, according to co-author Monica Bhatt, is that the effects were generated by a program serving older students, who often see weaker results from education interventions. “I really do think we have to stop asking ourselves, ‘Well, what really works?’ because we have more indications of what works,” Bhatt told 蜜桃影视’s Kevin Mahnken. “Now we have to figure out how to actually do it in the context of U.S. public schooling.” .

College Enrollment Continues to Plunge, Marking the Worst Single-Year Decline Since 2011

Community Colleges Are In Trouble: Hopes that college enrollment would begin to indicate some signs of resilience in the face of a waning pandemic were dashed again when the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released more detailed numbers last month. The fuller data set for spring 2021 shows that overall college enrollment fell by 603,000 students, from 17.5 million to 16.9 million 鈥� a drop that is seven times worse than the year before, when the pandemic first hit, and marks the steepest year-over-year decline since 2011, the first year the center began keeping track. Community colleges, which enroll the greatest percentages of low-income students and students of color, were hit hardest, declining 9.5 percent, or 476,000 fewer students. More than 65 percent of all undergraduate enrollment losses this spring occurred among community colleges. Author and 74 contributor Richard Whitmire reports on the persistently bad news, wondering, 鈥渨ill enrollments ever recover?鈥�

How Do We Confront the Failing Grades From the Pandemic?: As we reported in February, the number of failing grades were on the rise across the country 鈥� especially for students learning online 鈥� and the trend threatens to exacerbate existing educational inequities. The rise in failing grades appeared to be most pronounced among students from low-income households, multilingual students and students learning virtually. This could have lasting consequences: Students with failing grades tend to have less access to advanced courses in high school, . Addressing the problem, though, won’t be easy. In many school systems, the rash of failed courses could overwhelm traditional approaches to helping students make up coursework they may have missed. In a fresh analysis, Betheny Gross, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, implores school and district leaders to be especially wary of one long-established but questionable practice: credit recovery. Read more about her warning 鈥� .

School Safety 鈥� Science v. Politics: As we reported in October, the 2020 school year quickly exposed a national divide in America’s coronavirus response: Even as some districts were quick to welcome students back to physical classrooms, millions of their classmates were still receiving their education through a screen months later. Now, a growing number of academic and independent researchers . Across several analyses, experts found little or no correlation between the severity of COVID-19 spread and districts’ plans for reopening; in contrast, reopening decisions are shown to be strongly associated with partisan considerations, including the strength of local teachers unions and support for President Donald Trump in the 2016 election. According to Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, while the question hasn’t been settled, the influx of new evidence is “strongly suggestive” that political calculations are weighing heavily on the minds of school authorities: “There’s a long list of issues associated with COVID that should not be politicized, but have been politicized, and it feels as though school reopenings are on that list.” .

When Education and the Economy Collide: As we reported in January, listening to Zoom classes while blending smoothies and cramming homework into breaks between customers were among the ways teens . 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just to pay their cell phone bill. For some of them, it鈥檚 like, 鈥業 need to help my family pay the rent,鈥欌�� a college and career counselor told reporter Linda Jacobson. One Los Angeles student became the primary earner in her family when both parents contracted COVID-19 and had to quarantine. While some teens are determined to manage their added responsibilities without falling behind, others say they鈥檙e less motivated to keep up with remote classes. And counselors said they walk a fine line between being firm and showing empathy for students whose families are struggling. As one said: 鈥淚 respect the hustle.鈥� .

Is Remote Learning Here to Stay?: Parents 鈥� and especially Black and Latino ones 鈥� are not as eager to send their children back to in-person classes as they are to have access to better, more innovative distance learning, according to a poll conducted last fall on behalf of the National Parents Union. Two-thirds, the survey found, want schools to focus on new ways of teaching as a result of COVID, and . While respondents were overwhelmingly positive about their schools鈥� efforts to meet the moment, more than a third saying their children are learning less 鈥� a number that jumps among low-income parents and families of students with disabilities. Fifty-nine percent want less reliance on police in schools, with 75 percent of Black parents saying they favor replacing them with psychologists, counselors and social workers. .

鈥搁别濒补迟别诲: Returning this fall, by popular demand 鈥� Virtual school. For communities of color, it鈥檚 largely a matter of trust (Read the full report)

Bucking the Trend: How 2 D.C. Principals Restored Black Parents鈥� Trust in Returning Kids to the Classroom

Restoring Trust With Families: At Garfield Prep Academy in Washington, D.C.’s majority Black Ward 8, Principal Kennard Branch was pulling out all the stops last February to make worried parents more confident about sending their children back to school: He鈥檚 posted self-produced video tours of the building online, secured plastic shields for every desk and is sending kids home with bagged dinners. Principal Katreena Shelby at nearby Kramer Middle School was providing parents with one-on-one building walkthroughs upon request and answering their questions through text messages and calls on her personal cell phone. At both schools, more students had returned for in-person learning 鈥� and the principals believe these efforts at family outreach were the reason why. “It has been a struggle districtwide to really get parents interested in sending their students back,” Shelby told 蜜桃影视’s Taylor Swaak. “Our school culture plays a large role in [our momentum]. … Relationships and rapport have helped us.” Read our full report.

Ensuring Students Receive 鈥楥ompensatory Services鈥�: Even in normal times, families of children with disabilities must often fight to get the special education services they are entitled to. During distance learning, those services disappeared at many schools, . But a number of New Orleans schools offered a hopeful model last school year. Prodded by Louisiana education officials not to wait to begin making up for missed therapies and interventions special education students depend on, many began providing what special educators call compensatory services during the summer of 2020. Advocates credited the state鈥檚 push for helping teachers and principals take stock of what has and hasn鈥檛 worked for children with disabilities, both in brick-and-mortar schools and in remote learning. 鈥淚t made schools really think through their re-entry,鈥� a community leader who reviewed schools鈥� reopening special education plans tells Beth Hawkins. 鈥�.鈥�

District-Union Collaboration: As the Los Angeles Unified School District prepared to reopen elementary schools this past spring, recently released court documents provided a rare glimpse into negotiations between the district and United Teachers Los Angeles in the summer of 2020. The district鈥檚 labor chief pushed to improve on the four-hour schedule for teachers that was the norm in spring of 2020, telling the union鈥檚 team he wanted 鈥渢o see the workday mirror or parallel a regular workday,鈥� which had been eight hours pre-COVID, and that the district 鈥渃an鈥檛 shortchange the students.鈥� But between mid-July and December of last year, . The district鈥檚 relatively weak position in Los Angeles is a contrast to Chicago and New York, where mayors control the schools, the University of Nevada Las Vegas鈥檚 Bradley Marianno told reporter Linda Jacobson. Parents largely supported Los Angeles teachers two years ago when they went on strike, but 鈥渘ow we鈥檙e talking about actual disruption to school for a long period of time,鈥� he said. 鈥淧arents have an ability to separate their beliefs about teachers from their beliefs about teachers unions.鈥� .

A New Normal For America鈥檚 Schools?: A Nation at Risk, President Ronald Reagan鈥檚 1983 blue-ribbon panel鈥檚 review of American public education, is frequently referenced as the benchmark and starting flag of the reform movement. But in a new essay published last fall, contributor John M. McLaughlin argues that its 37-year reign as the reference point for educational progress is over. : 鈥淚t will be the new reference point for the evolution of public schooling, and changes as a result of COVID-19 will be more rapid and far-reaching than any measures of the past 37 years.鈥� From fiscal restructuring to reconfigured school days, millions of new homeschoolers and a renewed push for both individualized instruction and parental choice, McLaughlin says there is no going back to a pre-COVID world for public education 鈥� and that while the coming evolution will be messy and varied, the results will be a wider array of options for families and education structures that better reflect the society they serve.

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Over the past year, states have eased rules and regulations across sectors 鈥� 鈥� in response to the ongoing pandemic. One of the most critical areas is telehealth, which allows for virtual interactions between clinicians and patients 鈥� or, in the case of schools, therapists and students with disabilities.

Stay-at-home orders, social distancing guidelines and other barriers to travel prompted revisions to telehealth regulations in order to make health care more widely accessible via videoconferencing. In October, for example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services the list of telehealth services that Medicare fee-for-service will pay for during the pandemic. At the state level, California Gov. Gavin Newsom the for speech-language pathology assistants, as well as certain requirements for professionals operating on a temporary license, to allow them to practice via telemedicine. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy through legislation that authorizes any health care practitioner to provide telemedicine and telehealth services for the duration of the state鈥檚 COVID-19 public health emergency.

Now, states are realizing that expanding access to telehealth is important whether we鈥檙e fighting a pandemic or not. South Dakota recently made its pandemic-related telehealth waivers permanent, including the requirement for providers to conduct an in-person medical exam before delivering telehealth services to a patient. North Carolina recently made speech-language telehealth a permanently reimbursable service through . In California, has been introduced that would indefinitely continue the telehealth flexibilities that the state put into place during the pandemic. This spring, Nebraska became the tenth state to sign legislation into law, to begin to make the compact 鈥� which will allow licensed providers to apply to practice across state lines without having to become licensed in multiple states 鈥� operational.

These revisions to permanently remove barriers to telehealth will make providing and receiving care easier for people across the country, particularly when it comes to serving students in school-based settings. Prior to the pandemic, practitioner and clinician shortages, especially in rural and heavily populated school districts, left students without access to effective speech-language pathology, behavioral and mental health counseling, and occupational therapy. Even before the pandemic, more than half (54 percent) of school-based speech-language pathologists that job openings for clinicians exceeded job seekers in their type of school and geographic area; unfortunately, these shortages aren鈥檛 showing signs of improvement. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has noted that 41,900 speech-language pathologists will be to fill the demand between 2018 and 2028.

School closures in response to the pandemic have exacerbated these issues of access, at a time when students need mental health supports . As of December 2020, 84 percent of elementary school principals reported that they are and 68 percent do not have sufficient professionals on site to meet those needs. Since many underserved students rely on , it is likely that many children went without this critical assistance if their schools were not able to offer it remotely during the pandemic.

School-based telehealth, when implemented according to research and best practice guidelines, helps provide students with access to clinician expertise and high-quality care. Highly skilled, fully licensed and credentialed therapists and counselors use the same methods and evidence-based practices as they would in person. The most effective online therapy combines the therapist鈥檚 or counselor鈥檚 services, real-time progress tracking and a secure, high-fidelity videoconferencing platform.

Some students even prefer online mental health therapy, as they feel it provides a more confidential setting. They don’t have to be concerned about running into their therapist in town or their friends seeing them walking into the counselor鈥檚 office at school. In an era of Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, the youth of today are more comfortable in front of a screen than in person.

Recent federal and state waivers that remove barriers to telehealth should be made permanent. These licensing and regulatory changes make it easier for schools and districts to leverage technology to provide therapies to students with disabilities and students in need of mental health supports 鈥� providing continuity of service during the pandemic and beyond.

Kelly Wolfe is a former educator and advocacy leader for children鈥檚 health in Minnesota and vice president of strategic partnerships and regulatory compliance at PresenceLearning.