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The coronavirus pandemic might be increasing stress levels and depressive symptoms among parents, but it is not necessarily affecting their capacity to nurture and care for their children—at least as long as they retain a reliable source of income. That is one of the somewhat surprising findings of a new study from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago, according to one of the study’s authors, Ariel Kalil. While past research has found that job loss “almost uniformly” has detrimental impacts on families and can worsen parent-child interactions, Kalil and her colleagues’ recent survey of 572 low-income families with preschool age children in Chicago found that hasn’t necessarily been the case during the pandemic. Parent-child interactions were only negatively impacted by families that reported both job loss and a substantial loss of household income, but not for other families. That includes ones who experienced job loss, but made up some of the inc...

As winter bears down on most of America and Covid-19 again surges out of control, pundits and parents alike are wondering when our nation’s 50 million schoolchildren will return to classrooms. With the election over, now is the time for legislators and leaders in states and the federal government to turn their attention back to education. The debate is raging on social media, school email chains, and even around the dinner table. On the one side you have folks arguing that the science does not indicate students are a major vector for the virus and that pandemic-induced school closures are causing deep and lasting harm to students, especially the most disadvantaged. There is truth here — evidence is clear that children are at less risk than adults, and there isn’t compelling evidence that careful school re-openings spike coronavirus rates. On the other side you have folks arguing that the science on transmission in schools is murky and that schools are not safe enough to reop...

Over the last few decades, our education system has consistently prioritized educating for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. The United States spends $54 per student on those subjects, but only 5 cents per student on civics education. The result is an education system that has neglected preparation for engaged citizenship, and a divisive, dysfunctional political environment that is coming into sharper focus in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Now that the results of the 2020 election have become clear, at least to most Americans, we’re all asking questions. How can America be so divided? How could so many Americans turn a blind eye to ongoing racial injustices, magnified in the past four years? Is this a victory for Democrats? Or do we continue to be a country divided by race, education and class? From an education vantage point, can we sum up the election results by pointing to a split between college-educated and non-college-educated voters?  Wha...

The topic of trauma — specifically, trauma-informed teaching — has become a focus in education. Almost 50 percent of students in the U.S. have experienced some form of trauma, so it’s critical that educators be equipped to support every student. Trauma is often linked to adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, neglect and other events that happen to people under the age of 18. All have been proven to have a negative impact on academic performance and overall student health. As the visual arts teacher at an elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., I teach about 500 students, many of whom have experienced trauma. I teach art via a program called Teaching for Artistic Behavior, which values student choice and agency and aligns perfectly with trauma-informed instruction. I aim to create a learning space that revolves around choice — and instruction that is interest-based, goal-oriented or social and emotional.   Some schools across the nation are now embracing trauma-infor...

There is a learning gap that is threatening economic and social productivity in the U.S. that must be addressed. The untreated white achievement gap continues to tear our country apart. Voting can be considered a test of sorts for assessing our knowledge and comprehension of the world around us. Voting data gives us insight into how people put into practice the information, facts and teaching they’ve received. Exit polls conducted by the research firm Edison Research show that President Donald Trump received 57 percent of the total number of ballots cast by white voters. They voted for a man who has denigrated established science, supported racist conspiracies and spewed the racist assertion that four U.S. congresswomen of color “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” He struggled throughout his term to renounce white supremacist groups. And as the election returns came in last week, he spun a web of lies about how the American demo...

Last summer, as the Monterey Peninsula district in California planned to go back to school, homeless students quickly became a major focus. Superintendent PK Diffenbaugh worried about the 200 students without stable housing or the internet. How could they access learning opportunities like everyone else if school remained remote? The months since the pandemic have spotlighted many such inequities within the district, helping Diffenbaugh’s team see more clearly where they needed to focus when designing a back-to-school experience that could work for students with few resources. That’s why, when Monterey reopened with remote learning in August, students without homes gained access to supplies and laundry machines as well as a safe physical space to learn. What happened in Monterey could serve as a powerful lesson for other school systems. Monterey is one of seven districts participating in a national cohort that has been planning more equitable and resilient approaches to teaching ...

Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today! When Audrey Green, a middle school teacher in Broward County, Florida, began the year working remotely with her students, she had a lot to think about. She had to establish a personal connection with students she’s never seen face to face and help children develop tools to cope during a pandemic. And she had to handle emotionally heavy issues, like the student who hung around after class online because she said she didn’t want to be alone. All of that while also ensuring they were being challenged academically. But before she could do any of the hard work of teaching students through a screen, she had to solve another problem. How would she set up those screens in the first place? Teachers have long spent their own money to outfit their classrooms — on average, te...

America seems more ready than ever for long-overdue conversations about race, gender and opportunity. One setting where those conversations matter a lot is in our schools — the places that explicitly define opportunity in our children’s formative years. When we select people to lead our education systems, we send a loud signal to our children about what is possible for them. That’s why we need to talk about who holds the role of the nation’s top education post, secretary of education. As President-elect Joe Biden mulls Cabinet appointments, I suggest it is high time a woman of color led the U.S. Department of Education. So far, no woman of color has sat in that seat. Since the role was established in 1979, there have been 11 secretaries. White men have held the post for more than 24 of those 41 years. No one should underestimate the public impact of the secretary. While it’s true that the federal role in education is limited, deferring in most areas to states and communities, and f...

How vulnerable is student data at U.S. public schools? That’s a critical question now that many, if not most, of the nation’s 51 million students are learning online at least some of the time. Congressional watchdogs recently attempted to get a handle on the cyber security problem in schools. In a report publicly released in October 2020 , the Government Accountability Office (GAO) counted 99 school data breaches over the past four years, from July 2016 to May 2020, that compromised the personal information of thousands of students in kindergarten through high school. Attacks by cyber criminals were rare, the GAO found. More common were unintentional leaks in which private information, such as health records and telephone numbers, were accidentally made public. Students were responsible for more than a quarter of the breaches; their most frequent motive was changing grades. The GAO relied on a private database of cyber attacks and leaks collected by Doug Levin of EdTech Strategie...

In the middle of the country’s current economic and health crisis, there’s a disturbing trend in higher education: Fewer high school seniors are filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which is typically the first step in receiving federal and state grants, federal loans and institutional aid for college. The FAFSA application window opened on Oct. 1, and as of Oct. 23, about 492,000 FAFSA completions had been filed from the high school class of 2021 – 16 percent fewer completions than this time last year for the class of 2020, according to the National College Attainment Network . There are several reasons for the drop, said Bill DeBaun, director of data and evaluation at NCAN. “You have so many families and students and communities who are facing housing insecurity, food insecurity, lack of access to technological infrastructure that would help them get into the classroom,” DeBaun said. “FAFSA completion is just kind of falling down the list of priorities for a ...

How good are America’s public schools? It depends on where you live. Education funding is like any other public infrastructure investment. School systems with sufficient funding tend to get better results . Schools that lack resources are less effective and resilient in the face of ordinary challenges, let alone unprecedented catastrophes like the coronavirus pandemic. Even as distance-education removes the spatial component from public education — lessons no longer happen in a particular classroom, or at a particular school, but on the (ostensibly worldwide) web — these lines still separate children from one another. The endless Covid-19 crisis is revealing the primary weakness of decentralizing the funding of public services: Stark resource divides that fuel some of the deepest social inequities. Related: “Kids wo have less, need more”: The fight over school funding This starts with interstate funding gaps. In states like Kansas and Arizona , leaders have long underfunded the...