At Summit, Families Create Personalized Pathways to Finish Out the School Year
For my family, the first week of remote learning was a complete disaster, full of tears and frustration. I was trying to work from home, but instead spent the days keeping our kids focused and organized. At my 7th-grade son’s private school, teachers tried to provide meaningful activities, but we only received emailed assignments without […]
Schools Must Figure Out How to Support Parents as Co-Educators
Social distancing has forced parents into roles as co-educators. This is not entirely new—parents have always helped with take-home lessons for kids at home due to illness. But the expectation that parents will engage daily for a long time is new. Parents have good reasons to be unhappy. Distance learning for K–12 kids assumes that […]
Teacher Contracts Shouldn’t Be a Barrier to Continuing Student Learning
With school buildings across the country shut down for an unknown period of time, educating students necessarily means massive changes in how educators deliver instruction and how school and system leaders support these efforts. It won’t be “business as usual” when schools finally reopen. Could teacher labor agreements create barriers to necessary changes, such as blended […]
Remote Classes Are in Session for More School Districts, But Attendance Plans Are Still Absent
Six weeks into COVID-19 school closures, and at roughly the midpoint of the final academic quarter of this school year, we are stepping back to assess what schools and districts have accomplished—and the gaps in learning opportunities that remain—as students, teachers, and families prepare to close out 2019-20. Districts have come a long way in this […]
The Power of “How Are You?”: Teacher Check-ins in Remote Learning
Last week, Fairfax County in Virginia delayed the launch of remote learning due to technical challenges. Earlier in the month, Los Angeles Unified School District reported that about one third of their over 600,000 students were not logging into their online learning platforms regularly, and that about 15,000 had been completely absent since online learning […]
Lessons from Florida’s Fast Action on Remote Learning
On March 13, Florida schools announced an extended spring break, which would be followed by a statewide shutdown extending into April—and now, through the end of the school year. The initial closure order came on a Friday. The following Monday, the state’s largest school district, and the fifth largest in the nation, went live with […]
Three Ways States Can Tap ESSA to Better Navigate the COVID-19 Crisis
The novel coronavirus has shaken the very foundation of the U.S. public education system and upended assumptions about what “schooling” means. With virtually every school in the U.S. affected, the public health crisis has created unprecedented challenges and thrust families into the position of reluctant homeschoolers. States have emerged as a battleground for some of […]
What Post-Katrina New Orleans Can Teach Schools About Addressing COVID Learning Losses
This year, the “summer” break for school children will be six months long. Some learning loss is likely, but it will vary, depending on kids’ opportunities to learn during the coronavirus shutdown and on individual differences—for example, a taste for recreational reading. How can schools figure out where individual kids are? If the kids in […]
Dear States: Don’t Leave Remote Learning to Chance
Initial findings from the first month of CRPE’s in-depth reviews of district and charter school organizations’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis has revealed major gaps in learning opportunities available to students. States play critical roles in ensuring schools address this challenge. Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research in partnership with the […]
“We Should Have Been Working This Way All Along”: School District Central Offices Embrace Change in Crisis Response
The uneven and, in some cases, slow-moving efforts to support student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised new questions about whether school districts are prepared to respond to a fast-moving crisis. We should all wonder how organizations that can sometimes take months to award contracts or hire senior staff are now coordinating, directing, and […]