Education News Roundup – April 2022
There’s never a shortage of school-related news. This is what we’ve been keeping our eyes on over the last month or so.
The Wall Street Journal looks at the proliferation of online tutoring services that are seeking to take advantage of federal funding being made available to help schools and students recover from the disruption of the pandemic. We’re somewhat skeptical about the ability of these services to serve students well “at scale.” Education and learning are human endeavors. We know tutoring works, but that personal connection matters.
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The United States Supreme Court is about to hear a case that could return public prayer to public schools. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern report on how the case was engineered by activists who seek to take advantage of a Court that they see as ideologically favorable.
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PEN America reports on the current state of “school book bans,” finding that the number of challenges to books is “escalating rapidly,” fueled by a proliferation of what they call “educational gag orders to censor teachers, proposals to track and monitor teachers, and mechanisms to facilitate book banning in school districts.”
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Also at Slate, Evan McGarvey gives some love to how Abbott Elementary takes the work of teaching seriously, showing the challenge of the profession across all of its myriad dimensions. We’ve been fans of Abbott Elementary since the beginning.
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At The Conversation, two legal scholars argue that today’s unequal school funding is rooted in the legacy of the pre-Civil Rights Act Jim Crow system that privileged local funding over a shared responsibility to all of a state’s citizens.
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Teachers are three times more likely than other professions to hold down a second job in order to make ends meet. The impact this has on their lives — and their ability to do their teaching work to the best of their ability — is profound.
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At EWA Radio, the podcast for the Education Writers Association, Emily Richmond interviews Rebecca Koenig about her effort to bridge the gap between what schools offer and what young people want. She talks to teenagers.
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Lastly, Edutopia rounds up some of the traits and behaviors that seem to be common to “life-changing” teachers. The upshot: the best teachers engage in a constant cycle of presentation and feedback, staying attuned to student learning and student needs.