Education News – June 2022
School is out (or just about out) for most students, but the news in education never stops.
Here’s what we’ve been reading for the last month or so.
Chalkbeat Chicago looks at the year in Chicago Public Schools “in 5 numbers,” including “10,000,” the number of students who have left the district.
For now, the Illinois state board of education isn’t changing the state-level assessments, but there appears to be significant desire to reexamine practices in light of what the pandemic has revealed about students and schooling.
Inside Higher Ed looks at what books are assigned as summer reading for incoming freshman, including books like The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports on a study showing that child care workers were more likely to die of COVID in 2020 than the typical American worker, at rates similar to other “essential” workers who were also working in-person. The link is a correlation, rather than proof of direct causation, so it’s not known for sure if the child care work specifically was a direct contributor to those additional deaths.
Are letters of recommendation at odds with stated goals for increased institutional diversity? Erin Sommers at Gawker says, “Yes.”
What to do about the so-called “summer slide” is a perennial question, so even though this article from Jason Albin is now five years old, it seems as relevant as ever. Albin argues that making good use of the summer first requires thinking more about what we do during the school year, while keeping in mind that everyone needs a break sometime.
This link leads you to an epic series of blog posts by Matt Crump, a professor at CUNY-Brooklyn and what he did when he realized that a huge percentage of his students were cheating in his class. Filled with lessons on student motivation, instructor understanding, and the complex human dynamics that are at play in school contexts.