America’s Rural Schools May Not Be Tragic, but They Have Known Tragedy

Maybe this is the turning point. 

Education advocacy is exhausting — particularly in rural communities like mine, where our opportunities are limited and our challenges are unique. A myriad of stereotypes obscure the reality of life in rural areas like Appalachia, leaving activists feeling a bit like Rodney Dangerfield. No matter how straight we shoot, we just don’t get no respect.

Rural activism is a whole other level of hard work. Everyone knows everyone and first impressions can last a lifetime. That leader you're trying to pressure isn't just some elected official; they sit in the pew across from you on Sunday mornings.

— Garris L. Stroud (@garrisstroud) September 18, 2021

Despite its ups and downs, 2016 marked the first time that the winds of change began to blow. Politicos competed for the junkiest Rust Belt election post-mortems. Blue-staters’ obsessions with “Hillbilly Elegy” —flawed as it may be— made it seem like Rural America was finally having its moment. And now, thanks to a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools,” journalist Casey Parks explores the multitude of ways that “the public education system has failed (rural Americans) their whole lives.” And it has a lot of people talking.

This is an interesting piece on rural schools. But the claim that “the public-education system has failed them their whole lives” is a simple-minded trope. Rural poverty and rural isolation are the actual one-two punch. https://t.co/Evv3K9TUYc

— Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian) September 11, 2021

We spend a lot of time talking about how bad K-12 Edu is in the inner city. 1) It's bad writ large. 2) You can make an argument that K-12 is the worst in rural America.
All in all, it's bad for everybody!

— Mr. Ankrum (He/Him/His) School Lunch Reformer (@Mr_Ankrum) September 14, 2021

I agree 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣% the situation you wrote about in the @nytimes IS heartbreaking, but I take exception with the title “The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools.” It indicates this is the prevailing narrative in rural districts across the country, which is simply NOT true. https://t.co/iT0romnocA

— Jared T. Bigham, EdD (@JaredBigham) September 9, 2021

Having spent the last few years trying to turn clicks into actions that can improve education for all students, I hope this lightning rod of an op-ed might ultimately resemble something of a watershed moment. Rural education has never been a “sexy” issue in ed reform, so putting a spotlight on our communities and bringing real awareness to our challenges may as well be first base.

That doesn’t mean the piece got everything right. Many have been quick to lambast the piece’s title for its audacity in calling rural schools “tragic.” While I personally didn’t take the title as an ad hominem attack on our schools — and of course, if you read the piece at all, you’ll know that wasn’t the point — it still probably turned off a lot of readers who may have otherwise agreed with op-ed’s most important points.

Take staffing shortages, for example. Rural schools struggled to find teachers before the pandemic. Now, with COVID-19 still surging throughout nearly every community, we have sub and bus driver shortages that are making a typical school day look like an act of Congress.

Furthermore, thousands of students, disproportionately low-income and rural, remain logged out from their virtual coursework. Despite schools mostly being in-person this year, COVID-related closures have already resulted in a number of districts switching to remote instruction for two week periods. And because of the isolation of some rural communities, access to reliable broadband still feels out of touch for too many families.

Issues like these are structural in nature, and while we should be careful in recognizing that rural communities are not all the same, so many of us who work in rural schools have had direct experience with these challenges.

Funding, too, is another frustrating but preventable inequity in rural education. The op-ed focuses on Mississippi, a state where roughly half of all students attend a rural school, yet spending on rural instruction ranks 48th among all 50 states.

Who among us would say that isn’t a tragedy?

But fortunately, tragedies can often strengthen the resolve of communities and unite them to take action. The challenges that rural areas face may be systemic, and therefore more complex to solve, but bringing those issues to light is the first step in building a movement.

We can crack jokes about how the New York Times has only recently discovered that people live outside of cities, but the truth is there’s nothing funny about communities struggling in silence. We’re battling poverty, inadequate health care, an opioid crisis, and a disturbing lack of economic opportunities for those who call Rural America home. And if you teach or work in a school, you know that learning doesn’t exist in some sort of vacuum where these factors don’t exist.

Don’t get it twisted: our schools are not tragic, but they have certainly have known tragedy. Until we see rural communities become a foundational part of our leaders’ plans, I fear many of those tragedies will only continue.

This piece originally appeared on Rural Ed Voices.

By: Garris Landon Stroud
Title: America’s Rural Schools May Not Be Tragic, but They Have Known Tragedy
Sourced From: educationpost.org/americas-rural-schools-may-not-be-tragic-but-they-have-known-tragedy/
Published Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2021 18:07:40 +0000

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Rep. Cori Bush: In 1994 "I was raped, I became pregnant and I chose to have an abortion."

Rep. Cori Bush: "My abortion happened on a Saturday...Choosing to have an abortion was the hardest decision I had ever made. But at 18 years old, I knew it was the right decision for me...in the summer of 1994 I was raped, I became pregnant and I cho […]
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Making Sure School Performance Measures Provide the Right Diagnosis to Improve Student Outcomes

Measuring school performance has been an important component of state and federal policies for two decades. Measures based exclusively on reading and math proficiency have given way to more complex and sophisticated approaches incorporating growth or value-added data as well as indicators of chronic absenteeism, college readiness, or school climate. Pundits and researchers continue to debate whether high-stakes accountability policies have led to improved school performance—and/or to unintended negative side effects.

As I’ve argued before, accountability—with a small “a”—doesn’t require a formal, rules-based system with explicit consequences tied to results. In particular, transparency can create a form of accountability simply by shining a light on performance. Regardless of whether a measure is used for “small a” or “big A” accountability, though, its success in promoting improved outcomes for students depends on whether it provides good diagnostic information, valid and reliable for assessing school performance.

My colleagues and I at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Educational Lab has worked with state and local decision makers to develop, refine, and stress-test measures of school performance that provide useful diagnostic information. Some have been intended as big-A accountability measures, incorporated in state ESSA plans. Others are used for informational purposes, giving decision makers a richer understanding of school performance. Collectively, these projects have highlighted that decision makers need a clear understanding of what a measure is diagnostic for.

A measure can be diagnostic for one purpose and non-diagnostic for another. For example, a low rate of proficiency in grade 3 reading suggests that students need additional support to read proficiently. It does not necessarily mean the school is underperforming in serving its students, because they might be learning rapidly from a very low starting point. Conversely, a high rate of proficiency does not necessarily mean a school is enhancing students’ learning, if they started out as high performing. Assessing whether a school is underperforming requires isolating its contribution from factors outside its control, thereby assessing whether students would do better if they were at a different school.

More broadly, our work has informed a conceptual framework of school performance measures that are potentially diagnostic for addressing three distinct questions:

1. How are students doing? Measures include not only traditional reading and math proficiency indicators, but also social-emotional learning (such as the “loved, challenged, and prepared” measures we developed with the DC Public Schools) and chronic absenteeism. They also include longer-term student outcomes such as graduation, college enrollment, degree completion, workforce participation, and even civic participation—the original public purpose of public education. Broad, rich, and robust measures of how students are doing are important for helping decision makers identify differences in student needs across schools. For diagnostic purposes, decision makers—including parents choosing among schools—must recognize that student outcomes are affected by both schools and factors outside the school’s control. If valid and reliable, these measures diagnose student need but may not reveal a school’s effectiveness in promoting the outcomes.
2. What does the school contribute to student outcomes? Every school serves a unique set of students with different supports and experiences outside of the classroom. Identifying a school’s contribution to its students’ outcomes requires accounting for out-of-school factors. For test scores, value-added measures or schoolwide aggregates of students’ achievement growth over time (such as median student growth percentiles) accomplish this task. In most states, these measures involve only a narrow range of student outcomes—typically reading and math test scores in grades 4–8. But statistical adjustments to measure school contributions can also be applied to any student outcomes. For example, we partnered with Maryland to develop the nation’s first school-level measures of student growth encompassing grades K–3 (and examine their validity and reliability). And our newest report describes the measures of “promotion power” we developed in partnership with the District of Columbia, assessing the contribution of each DC high school to the probability that its students will graduate, demonstrate college readiness, and enroll in college. Similarly, Mathematica has worked with Louisiana to develop promotion power measures that extend even further, to include each high school’s impact on employment and earnings of students in their 20s. These efforts demonstrate that it is possible to apply adjustments to almost any measure of how students are doing (including, for example, social-emotional learning) to better assess what a school contributes to that outcome.^[1]
3. What happens inside the school? Decision makers equipped with rich, broad, and valid ways to measure student outcomes and school contributions can identify high- and low-performing schools, but even the best measures of student outcomes and school contributions provide no information about how or why a school is high or low performing. To provide data on the internal processes that might drive school performance, REL Mid-Atlantic partnered with Pennsylvania, Maryland, and DC Public Schools to develop, analyze, and interpret measures of school climate based on staff and student surveys. Our analyses have confirmed that school climate survey measures can be sufficiently reliable to distinguish schools from one another—and even that they can provide a useful window on the performance of school leaders. Beyond climate surveys, other indicators of what is happening in a school might include measures of exclusionary discipline (such as suspensions), measures of teaching quality, and even reports from observational inspections like those that are often used in schools in Europe.

Whether any of these measures is appropriate for use in high-stakes accountability systems requires serious consideration of potential trade-offs and unintended consequences. But even if they are not used for high-stakes purposes, all of these measures can helpfully inform policymakers and parents—as long as they understand what they are diagnostic for. Our framework can help stakeholders developing and using measures understand their value for specific purposes and their limitations.

1. The resulting measures may not be perfect indicators of school contributions, but they will be much closer to identifying a school’s contribution than would a raw measure of the outcome such as a proficiency rate or graduation rate. Studies have confirmed that value-added measures can provide valid information about performance (see Chetty et al. 2014 and Bacher-Hicks et al. 2019).

Brian P. Gill is a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

This post originally appeared on REL Mid-Atlantic’s RELevant blog

The post Making Sure School Performance Measures Provide the Right Diagnosis to Improve Student Outcomes appeared first on Education Next.

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President Biden Arrives at Congressional Baseball Game

"We have a delay as the racing presidents...oh, that's why we have a break, the President of the United States, not the racing presidents...President Biden is in the house."


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Rep. Greg Steube Home Run at Congressional Baseball Game

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Exchange between Rep. Matt Gaetz and Gen. Milley

Exchange between Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley.


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Rep. Liz Cheney Thanks Gen. Milley for "Standing in the Breach"

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DESCRIBED: What Is an IEP and also Exactly How to Make Certain Your Child's Demands Are Met

If you have a child with disabilities, you’re not alone: According to the latest data, over 7 million American schoolchildren — 14% of all students ages 3-21 — are classified as eligible for special education services. With this classification comes a set of rights, codified in federal law through the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), that your school district guarantees to your child. While parents generally advocate for their children, parents of students with disabilities have to advocate a little harder. Here is a set of questions and answers to help you secure what your child needs to thrive.

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My son was evaluated at school and we were told he has a learning disability, is eligible for special education services, and we’ll meet with staff members soon to write an “IEP.” What does this mean?

Under the federal law IDEA, all public schools must provide children with disabilities a “free appropriate public education” in “the least restrictive environment.” These two pillars of disability education law are sometimes cited by their initials: your child is entitled to a “FAPE” in the “LRE.” In order to get what is promised by federal law, each child with disabilities has an Individualized Education Plan, or an IEP. This is a written contract between you and your school district that lists all the services, therapies, and accommodations your child will receive to adapt the classroom content to his particular needs. 

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Why are FAPE and LRE important?

IDEA was modeled on civil rights law. Just like people of color once were barred from “whites only” restaurants or forced to sit in the back of the bus, children with disabilities once were barred from traditional public schools. IDEA says that even children with the most severe disabilities must be offered a free (at district expense) appropriate (individualized to meet their particular requirements) education. Also, that education must be offered in the most inclusive environment that can still meet your child’s academic needs. Restriction is a spectrum: the “least” restrictive would be a classroom for typical children. The most restrictive would be home-schooling or even placement in a residential facility.

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Who creates an IEP?

Your child study team, which includes your child’s case manager (the go-to person when you have a concern), the classroom teacher, and the specialists who provide therapies. But the most important member of the child study team is you, and it is typically in this group where you’ll exercise your advocacy muscles.

In most cases, your child study team is your partner in providing your child with all the services, modifications, and accommodations they need to be successful in school. But sometimes things get a little chilly. If so, there are many ways to work things out. You can even bring a friend, a professional advocate, or a lawyer when you meet as a team to review drafts or get updates on your child’s progress. (It’s customary to alert your case manager ahead of time if you’re bringing any guests.) 

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What is in an IEP?

There are lots of rules about what must be in an IEP. For example, IEPs must include narratives that describe your child’s present levels of academic achievement and functional performance (based on evaluations conducted by specialists); list goals for the coming year; quantify how much of the school day your child will spend with typical children and how many minutes a week your child will spend in therapies (occupational, speech, physical, psychological, social, etc.). Your child’s IEP will even include how he or she will get back and forth to school, if and how a medication will be administered, and whether he or she will participate in afterschool activities. It’s a long document! Here’s a sample IEP you can look at.

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How does the child study team decide on where my child will go to school?

Everything comes back to the IEP. After specialists evaluate your child’s current academic levels, you and your team develop the goals necessary for your child to be successful. This includes all the supportive therapies necessary to achieve those goals. Then you look at the best places — the least restrictive places — to implement those goals. Usually this is in the district in a typical classroom, sometimes with an instructional aide, or in a self-contained classroom where all the students have similar disabilities. Sometimes children spend part of the day in typical classrooms and the rest in classrooms where they get more support. In other cases, your team may decide that your child’s services can’t be delivered within the district and will help you select another district or even a private special education school.

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What if I think my child needs certain services but my case manager says those services are not available in my school?

That’s a perfect example of the cart leading the horse. The IEP comes first, and then the team determines the placement, not the other way around. If a school can’t provide the services listed in your child’s IEP, then your child must 1) be placed elsewhere or 2) the district must pay the cost to make those services available in-district to your child. By law, the team may not use expense as a reason to not provide services you’ve agreed are necessary. 

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I have a disagreement with my team about the content of the IEP. I want the goals to be more specific but the team wants them more general.

IEP goals should be “SMART”: Specific, Measurable, Use Action Words, Realistic, and Time-Limited. For example, a smart goal for reading would be, “By the end of the second marking period Joey will read a third-grade level paragraph aloud at 50 words a minute with no more than five errors.” A not-smart IEP goal would be “Joey will improve his reading.” A district would have a hard time arguing before a judge or mediator that goals shouldn’t be SMART.

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My team says my child is academically at grade level but I think he needs more support. What can I do?

Your team’s assessment of your child’s functional level of performance must be based on a professional evaluation. If you disagree with the evaluation, you have the right to ask for an Independent Educational Evaluation at public expense. The district can challenge that request through due process — argue to a mediator or a judge that its original evaluation is fine – but parents usually prevail with this request. Typically districts have a list of independent evaluators ready and you can choose from that list. If you want your child evaluated by someone who’s not on the list, you have to pay for it yourself. You can’t ask for more than one independent evaluation per assessment.

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What happens if I can’t come to an agreement with my team on my child’s IEP?

The world isn’t perfect. Sometimes parents have to make compromises: an extra speech therapy session a week instead of an aide during gym. But don’t compromise on anything that you feel is essential to your child’s success. If your team can’t reach a consensus on something important, keep it civil but don’t back down. Your first step is bringing a third party, or mediator, to try to help you and your team work out the conflict. If that doesn’t work, you have the right to go to “due process.” This means that you send a letter to your school saying you feel your child’s rights are violated and you would like a due process hearing. Sometimes you need a lawyer. Many states have advocacy groups that can provide them for you. Here is a state-by-state list of Community Parent Resource Centers.

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What do I do if my child starts needing additional services mid-year?

You’re the boss. You can call an IEP meeting whenever you feel it’s necessary and ask for changes: additional therapies, an adjustment to curriculum, the services of an aide during a particularly challenging class. Often these mid-course corrections will involve just you and your case manager; if you’re in agreement, he or she will alter the IEP, you’ll sign it, and your child’s educators and therapists will be informed of the changes. 

And if all else fails, you can always go to due process. While some parents are reluctant to go on the offense and swear by bringing cookies to every IEP meeting, others bring heavy artillery. Over time you’ll develop your own “IEP style” that will keep your child’s needs front and center.

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2021 Congressional Baseball Game

Lawmakers from both parties take part in the annual Congressional baseball game in Washington, DC.

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Families Can’t Afford for Schools to Continue to Treat Students With Disabilities Like an Afterthought

Every single thing we do is challenging. My kids are being forgotten.

That’s Keri Akkawi, a Philadelphia mom of two boys with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic mutation that can cause multiple disabilities. According to their Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s), her boys are supposed to receive one-on-one speech therapy, reading and math instruction, social skills training, and occupational therapy, even during the pandemic. But their services were substantially diminished during COVID-19 school disruptions — her younger son’s speech therapy was reduced to 10 minutes per week — and the boys have regressed behaviorally and academically. 

It’s not supposed to work this way for the seven million American children — 14% of all K-12 students — who are eligible for special education services. According to state and federal laws, all schools are required to fully implement the therapies and accommodations listed in each child’s IEP during COVID-19 school closures. If circumstances render that impossible, districts are supposed to provide compensatory “make-up” services. But many are not even trying and few bother pretending these districts are complying with federal law. “It would break the system of public education if we tried to compensate for everything that everyone has lost,” said Phyllis Wolfram, the executive director of the Council of Administrators of Special Education, which represents district-level officials.

Many parents of children with disabilities, as well as advocates and researchers, regard school districts’ failures to provide legally mandated services for students classified as eligible for special education to be an ethical and regulatory failure. While education for all children was disrupted, students with disabilities suffered more, according to a nationally representative survey of 1,500 teachers conducted by the RAND Corporation last October. Our kids tend to be an afterthought in non-pandemic times. Now they’re victims of a widely-acknowledged boondoggle.

To add insult to injury, students with disabilities, particularly those with developmental and cognitive impairments, are prone to substantial regression without necessary therapies. Suddenly the “COVID slide” — academic setbacks among neuro-typical kids due to school disruptions — becomes the COVID nosedive.

The data backs this up.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has been collecting district-specific information throughout the pandemic, including for students eligible for special education. CRPE found that 12% of all school opening plans didn’t even bother to mention special needs students and only 33% of districts surveyed had plans that included interventions or increased support for students with disabilities to address pandemic-related learning loss. In addition, districts were neglecting to educate teachers on how to support special needs students during remote instruction. Both general and special education teachers said, “they had been largely left on their own.”

Lane McKittrick, a CRPE research analyst, said,

For me as a special education parent, I know sometimes special education feels like an afterthought, and as a researcher too, it kind of feels like that as well. There’s a lot of kids who were left behind last year because we just weren’t able to serve them.

How much of an afterthought are students with disabilities?

• An analysis in the Journal of Pediatrics found that 44% of parents of children eligible for special education reported “low satisfaction with their child[ren]’s therapy services during the pandemic.”

• In Massachusetts, the state said schools could modify IEP’s, without requiring any sign-off from families. This led “to this whole cascading nightmare where many school districts felt they didn’t need to provide everything if they couldn’t do it in person, and they didn’t need to provide services for the same amount of time or in the same way,” leaving children and their parents in the lurch — and without the required compensatory services.

• Fairfax County Schools in Virginia opened in-person childcare for general education children but refused to provide in-person instruction for students with disabilities.

• Seattle Public Schools, which serves 8,000 students with disabilities, was called out for serving only one student with disabilities in-person and telling its special education teachers “not to deliver specially-designed instruction,” prohibiting them from adapting lessons to meet each child’s needs. “We have heard similar complaints from all across the country,” said Denise Stile Marshall, head of The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, Inc., a group that fights on behalf of children with disabilities. “Many parents are desperate and at their wit’s end. It’s been 10 months of getting nothing or going round and round with the district for even the basics … and getting nowhere.”

• In New York City, a group of families has filed a class action suit against the state and city education departments demanding full compensatory services. One of the students listed as a plaintiff is Caleb Bell of Harlem, who is deaf and blind. His mother said her son got “nothing” from his classes and also stopped receiving many of his legally mandated special education services, or received them in a format that did not work. “I know my child was being left behind,” said Ms. Bell. The city has moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

Students with disabilities and their families are in crisis. They can’t afford to wait for local, state, and national governments to put out other fires before they turn to their needs. And there are resources to relieve the burn, including $125 billion for K-12 education in the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan. Any parent of a child with disabilities would tell you the same: It is a moral imperative to stop treating our kids as an afterthought. Or, as Keri Akkawi would say, “stop forgetting these children.”

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Secretary of Defense on Afghanistan Withdrawal: "Was it perfect? Of course not."

In his opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, "Was it perfect? Of course not."

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General Milley on Why He Hasn't Resigned

Senator Tom Cotton: "Why haven't you resigned?"

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Here’s how you can help Afghans fleeing the Taliban – *

-per MSU RED

Over the past month, the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban militant group’s seizure of power in the country has dominated headlines.

The Taliban – who ran Afghanistan in the late 1990s before the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2001 ousted them from power – have struck fear in Afghans who believe the militant group will reimpose a harsh interpretation of Islamic law. That fear led to jaw-dropping scenes of Afghans rushing to Kabul’s main airport trying to flee the country in August.

And while nearly 130,000 people were airlifted out, many were left behind, including the loved ones of Afghan refugee and activist Metra Mehran.

Mehran described those harrowing events and detailed current conditions in the country Wednesday at a town hall and panel titled “Crisis in Afghanistan,” held in the Tivoli Student Union at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

MSU Denver Cybersecurity Center Director Richard Mac Namee leads the Town Hall and Panel: Crisis in Afghanistan on Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021. Photo by Sara Hertwig

“(Afghanistan) feels like a graveyard,” she said, “where there (were) schools, universities, women and men going to school and university and work together. Now, (women are not) allowed to go work.”

Mehran added that since the Taliban took power, schools have been destroyed and some residents have been instructed to leave their homes abruptly. The militant group has also carried out targeted killings, even on women who were nine months pregnant. She said she keeps in touch daily with her friends who are activists in Afghanistan, many of whom have been beaten in the streets by members of the Taliban.

Mehran was joined at the town hall by panelists Atim Otii, director of the Denver Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs; Richard Mac Namee, director of the Cybersecurity Center at MSU Denver; and Nike Pulda, an activist volunteer who has helped to support evacuation and resettlement efforts for people in and from Afghanistan.

The panelists echoed Mehran’s grim description of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and discussed what options exist for those still trying to escape the country. They also spoke about how members of the Auraria Campus community can assist Afghan refugees and those who remain in the nation.

One option Afghan refugees have is to apply for the Special Immigrant Visa Program, which is intended to help interpreters, contractors and personnel who worked for the U.S. military to leave Afghanistan. Otii noted, however, that during the Trump administration, many international offices that processed applications for the program were closed. The application process can also take several months, if not years, because of a large backlog of applicants.

“It’s not just about an individual leaving their country, showing up to another country, and then there is a military plane waiting for them to come to the United States,” Otii said. “This has been … and it will continue to be a complex, humanitarian response that is needed and necessary,” Otii said. “We here in the United States, locally in Denver, I cannot stress enough (the importance of) just really being informed and trying to get as much information about the process as you possibly can.”

Panelists included Richard Mac Namee, director of the Cybersecurity Center at MSU Denver, Atim Otii, director of the Denver Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, Nike Puldra, refugee advocate; and Metra Mehran, Afghan refugee and co-founder of the Feminine Perspectives Movement. Photo by Sara Hertwig

Mac Namee, a former British Army officer who served as a Special Operations commander in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, is assisting nonprofit No One Left Behind in the evacuation of Afghanistan. At MSU Denver’s Cybersecurity Center, he and others on campus are collecting information about at-risk groups in Afghanistan, such as activists, journalists and others who are still stranded in the country.

He said he is looking for volunteers on the Auraria Campus who can help with data collection. He noted that those who are interested need only to know how to use a spreadsheet.

“I’d like to think one day we could just hand this (data) over to the government and say, ‘Look, this is the problem; we’ve done our piece; now go and fix it,’” he said.

 

Pulda, who is from Austria, said one way that Americans can make refugees feel welcome is to talk to them as normal people and to try to find common ground.

“All the people I’ve encountered from Afghanistan and the ones I’m in touch with now – they are so smart, and I’m so in awe of many of them because they’ve done a lot of great things,” she said.

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Hanushek Is Champion of $3.9 Million Yidan Prize

Eric Hanushek

Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a prolific longtime contributor to Education Next, is a winner of the $3.9 million Yidan Prize honoring individuals or teams that have significantly contributed to the theory and practice of education.

The prize consists of a gold medal, a cash award of 15 million Hong Kong dollars, and a project fund of 15 million Hong Kong dollars.

“Like no one else, Eric has been able to link the fields of economics and education. From designing better and fairer systems for evaluating teacher performance to linking better learning outcomes to long-run economic and social progress, he has made an amazing range of education policy areas amenable to rigorous economic analysis,” said Andreas Schleicher, head of the Yidan Prize for Education Research judging panel, and director for the OECD’s Directorate of Education and Skills.

The press release announcing the prize noted that Hanushek “has shown that it’s how much students learn – and not how many years they spend in school – that boosts economies.” This finding was the focus of one of his most influential contributions to Education Next, “Education and Economic Growth” (Spring 2008), an article co-authored with German economist Ludger Woessmann.

Hanushek told Education Next he was thrilled at the news. He said he plans to use the project fund to select and train fellows to support the development of a strong education research network in Africa. “A carefully selected group of policy analysts would participate in a two-year research and policy development fellowship that introduces them both to relevant research and analytical experiences and to international networks of researchers and policy advisers,” the project description says. “The objective is to build a group of country-specific leaders capable of developing evidence and shaping educational policies that are relevant for each country. They would be part of a global network of such people and, if successful, could also build out local networks of strong advocates for improvement of schools.”

“A small number of African fellows would get some training in visiting time in Stanford, Munich, and Paris. They would hopefully be in a position to translate research and evaluation into policy,” Hanushek said.

Hanushek’s other major Education Next articles include “The Achievement Gap Fails to Close” (Summer 2019, with Paul E. Peterson, Laura M. Talpey, and Ludger Woessmann), “Do Smarter Teachers Make Smarter Students?” (Spring 2019, with Marc Piopiunik and Simon Wiederhold), “What Matters for Student Achievement” (Spring 2016).

In the past 18 months, Hanushek has published two Education Next blog posts addressing the educational challenges posed by the pandemic: “Costs of Past and Future Learning Losses” (with Ludger Woessmann), “Focus on Teaching, Not Just Masks and Hand-Sanitizer.”

Among his recent Education Next and Education Exchange podcast appearances are “It’s Not How Much You Spend, It’s How You Spend It,” and “Comparing Teacher Skills in the U.S. and Abroad.”

Hanushek is a founding member of the journal’s editorial advisory board and had two articles in the first issue of Education Next (then known as Education Matters) in Spring 2001.

The other Yidan winner this year was Rukmini Banerji, chief executive officer of the Pratham Education Foundation, an India-based organization that focuses on teaching young children basic reading and math skills.

This isn’t the first time an Education Next author has won a prestigious international prize (See “A Nobel for Education Next,” 2019.) It may be the largest dollar amount attached to one, though. Cash value aside, the recognition to Hanushek, who in addition to being one of the most prolific and hardworking researchers in the education field is also one of the most personally gracious ones, is being celebrated today not only at Stanford but here in Cambridge, too.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.

The post Hanushek Is Winner of $3.9 Million Yidan Prize appeared first on Education Next.

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Secretary of Defense & Joint Chiefs Chair and Others Testify on Afghanistan Withdrawal

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley, and General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, testify on the Afghanistan withdrawal.

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As Open Enrollment Nears, Advice for Coloradans Picking Insurance Plans – *

 

DENVER – In less than two months, the open enrollment period begins for the state-run health insurance exchange, Connect for Health Colorado. That means it’s time to plan ahead for 2022.

Colorado established its own insurance marketplace in 2011 – and this year, enrolled nearly 180,000 people, an all-time high.

Eight companies offered insurance plans to Coloradans on the exchange last year. In the coming year, for individual plans, the insurers are asking for an average rate increase of 1.4%, which is still being reviewed by the Colorado Division of Insurance.

Dr. Rhonda Randall – chief medical officer for employer and individual policies at UnitedHealthcare – said when choosing from the plans available, it’s important to consider your health needs.

“Anticipate what your expenses are for next year,” said Randall. “So, are you anticipating you’re going to need to have a certain procedure, or you’ve recently been diagnosed with a specific condition? Or maybe you’re planning to expand your family.”

What’s known as the “easy enrollment” program will debut in Colorado in early 2022. It’ll allow residents to say on their tax returns that they’d like Connect for Health Colorado to determine whether they’re eligible for free or subsidized health coverage.

Open enrollment runs November 1 through January 15.

More than 940,000 Colorado residents are enrolled in Medicare, covering folks age 65 and older and people living with disabilities – but Medicare doesn’t cover everything, including prescription drugs.

So, Randall said Medicare “Part D plans” are needed for those who don’t have employer-based coverage for medications.

“So you need to pick a separate prescription drug, ‘Part D’ program,” said Randall. “It generally doesn’t cover supplemental benefits and things like vision, dental and hearing, in most circumstances.”

For vision, hearing and dental care needs, people can purchase supplemental coverage or what’s known as a Medicare Advantage plan. These also have open enrollment periods.

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There’s No Excuse for Not Teaching Critical Thinking

It was an engineer at Lockheed Skunkworks who coined the design principal of “Keep it simple, stupid.” His belief that complexity should be avoided, and that simplicity should always be the goal, has become a time-tested principle in design, business, and other endeavors.

Education, it seems, often ignores this concept. From elaborate teaching frameworks that emphasize complicated hand signals to complex policies and programs that grow into “Bermuda Triangles,” education often feels a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine.

This over complexity is evident when it comes to teaching young people how to think critically (if they’re taught this at all). Entire books and courses have been developed on the topic. I’ve long thought this was the wrong approach, and that we should strive to “keep it simple.”

Recently, the Reboot Foundation collaborated with researchers from Indiana University to test this theory to determine whether critical thinking skills can be developed through simple, quick classroom techniques and exercises. The results were, in the words of the lead researcher, “really spectacular.”

The research found that educators and others can support and hone their students’ critical thinking skills using a simple method – small amounts of critical thinking practice, employing basic exercises like multiple choice quizzes and analogies. The best part is that this method is easy to implement by virtually any teacher and can be used across diverse groups of students.

And it works.

When compared against a control group, the students who engaged in these critical thinking exercises scored three times higher than the control group on an open-ended critical thinking test.

There is no better time than now for these findings to emerge. Misinformation continues to run rampant online and across social media. Reboot surveys the American public annually, and every year an overwhelming majority — about 95% of respondents — agree that critical thinking skills are important in today’s world and should be taught in schools.

How Can Teachers Support Critical Thinking in Their Students?

The question of “how” to teach these skills has proven to be elusive, especially in this era of standardized curriculum and test-driven accountability for schools. How can teachers also ensure they’re supporting critical thinking in their students? It turns out they can do this by adding one simple step in their daily routine – a critical thinking challenge or query to kickstart students’ brains and encourage them to better analyze the information before them. 

In the Indiana study, teachers presented students with short scenarios in which an individual makes a claim based on some evidence or observations. The students were asked to determine, in a multiple-choice response, if the claim was faulty, invalid, or was based on an unsound argument.

Imagine students starting the day with the typical routine of greetings and announcements. Then, add in a short multiple choice quiz that spurs students to really think, consider, and assess all the information presented.

The implications from the research, by professors Ben Motz and Emily Fyfe at Indiana’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, are significant for educators from kindergarten to college. Their findings provide an easy-to-follow, scalable blueprint on how to achieve better, more robust thinking.

Dr. Motz put it this way on Twitter:

Of all the research I've ever done, I'm uniquely excited by this study's potential for positive impact. In collaboration with @FyfeEmily; full research article still in prep; big thanks to @BouyguesLee and @RebootFndn for making it possible. https://t.co/Ca84DX10rG

— Ben Motz (@BenMotz) August 30, 2021

Prior to the pandemic, I spoke to an association of school superintendents in North Carolina, and I asked them how many of their schools taught critical thinking skills. Only a handful of hands went up. Today’s children need more. Their parents want more. And while Reboot offers critical thinking guides for parents and resources for educators, the Indiana study points to a spectacularly simple solution: A low-key but consistent investment of time and effort to flex our critical thinking muscles. It is an efficient and affordable investment.

Photo by Wavebreakmedia, Envato Elements-licensed.

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The Education Exchange: In Miami-Dade, 75 Percent of Students Are Enrolled in Choice Options

The superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Alberto Carvalho, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how the district has supported school choice, which includes spreading choice options to communities and creating new programs that meet the needs of students and demands of parents.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

The post The Education Exchange: In Miami-Dade, 75 Percent of Students Are Enrolled in Choice Options appeared first on Education Next.

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Here’s Why Black People Being Whipped at the Border Is Like the Public Education System

Look at this picture of a white man on a horse appearing to whip a Black man. 

And no, this isn’t from the year 1712. It’s from earlier this week — the United States of America, circa 2021.

The United States of America, 2021. pic.twitter.com/CvIkBZdXsp

— PeeplesVoice (@PeeplesChoice85) September 21, 2021

This image of what looks like the Malboro Man from the cigarette box at a human rodeo was a United States border control agent trying to deter and detain Haitian refugees fleeing their country, desperately hoping to gain refuge and a better life in ours. 

If I can deflect for a moment, it’s interesting how the Statue of Liberty reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” but that motto seems to only apply to select tired, poor and huddled masses. I mean, over the past few weeks, the United States has been simultaneously welcoming thousands of Afghan refugees trying to escape the Taliban with open arms and turning its back on Haitians running from political turmoil, violent uprisings, poverty, and natural disasters in their country. 

Controversial post: Are we going to talk about how the U.S. opened its arms to thousands of Afghan refugees but is turning its back on #Haitian refugees? Aren't they both humanitarian crises? Somebody make it make sense for me.#Afghanistan #Haiti

— PeeplesVoice (@PeeplesChoice85) September 22, 2021

But many aren’t trying to talk about the history or trauma associated with this photo and how it’s shown up in the present. Nor are many willing to have a candid conversation about the contradictions in The New Colossus, the Bill of Rights, etc.— especially not in schools.

And while I could certainly go there, this isn’t a public policy conversation — it’s an unpacking of how this image is symbolic of the policies, practices and politics of our public school system. So aside from the blatant inhumanity, here are the other ways it showed up in my mind. 

High level, the border agent is the system itself that creates barriers for millions of parents and students (represented by the Haitian refugee) seeking the “American Dream” and, overall, some sense of freedom through education. But, the border agent’s job is to keep them in their place or send them back to their place — similar to plantation overseers. Either way, they do not get to pass go, they do not collect their freedom or the “American Dream” through education.

Getting into specifics, this whole “back to school” push has been irking me for weeks, feeling like the government and school districts are telling parents, students and teachers to get back to business as usual — like a master telling their slaves to get back in the fields right after a tornado devastated their families and the land. Meanwhile, there’s been nothing on getting back to education. And maybe “leaders” have been silent in their talking points about this because — real talk — you can’t get back to something you never really had in the first place. There’s been access (using that word loosely) to schools since Reconstruction, but has a quality education ever been consistently available for all students? Nope.

But nevermind that we’re still neck-deep in a pandemic with the numbers of youth contracting COVID-19 on the rise. Never mind that there’s a national shortage of teachers and school staff, which usually leads to overcrowded classrooms and an inability to provide quality instruction. And most importantly, disregard the opportunity gaps that widened and the learning loss during the pandemic, leaving the most vulnerable students at risk of complete academic failure — because all that matters is getting kids “back to school” and things getting “back to normal.” The overseers of public education are represented by the “Marlboro Man,” trying to maintain the status quo.

I’m not at all saying that our young people don’t need to be back in school, but I am saying that they need to actually be taught and learn while they’re there. Back to normal in schools isn’t an option — quality and equitable education have to be the present and future.

On the subject of quality education, I’d be remiss not to touch on the anti-history (aka “critical race theory”) controversy.

This one is easy. The border agent is all of the elected officials, history deniers, erasers and so-called “patriots” who want to keep raw and true history out of schools with their conspiracy theories of forcing critical race theory and activism on kids. 

The refugees are the pieces of history that have been denied access to classrooms to maintain a narrative of American virtue and valor, but also all of the people fighting for representation in books and curricula, classrooms and leadership.

And as my friend and educator, Monica Lewis pointed out, how can y’all explain the legalization of Juneteenth as a national holiday without telling the story of how we got here? Furthermore, how can we claim to take steps towards freedom and equality when Black people are still being threatened with whips in 2021? 

You are so right, and what message does it send to the little brown kids about their acceptance and overall value… we make laws about Juneteenth but still using whips like the 1800’s… nope… not going!

— Monica (Sims) Lewis NBCT (@wise1teach) September 22, 2021

Last thought. The “Marlboro Man” is emblematic of the discipline policies and practices schools and districts use to keep Black, brown and special needs kids in their place — except the “deportation” process is sometimes slower.

Think about it — when you have underserved students being suspended at higher rates, attacked by school resource officers and, in a lot of cases, ultimately expelled from school, those encounters are designed to cast them back into and perpetuate destitution that, deep down inside, they want to escape. It’s parallel to the experience of the Haitian refugees whose hopes were shattered at first contact with these border patrol agents.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” is a sham. These Haitian refugees migrated to the United States with those words as the north star leading them to a better life — the same hopes that many Black, brown and poor parents have when they send their kids off to school every day. But waiting to disrupt those journeys and dreams are the Marlboro Men (aka border agents) that represent these systems, these policies, these practices, and these attitudes.

Again, this isn’t a conversation about public policy or immigration reform. But if you can visualize what I see in the image above in the public school system, these are all the more reasons why we need to step into our power and turn the whip on these systems that seek to deny us educational freedom.

By: Tanesha Peeples
Title: Here’s Why Black People Being Whipped at the Border Is Like the Public Education System
Sourced From: educationpost.org/heres-why-black-people-being-whipped-at-the-border-is-like-the-public-education-system/
Published Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 23:48:06 +0000

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