Latest news with #RobinLake
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
10 ways COVID changed American schools
COVID had already killed thousands of people in other countries and was spreading in the United States when a top federal health official said schools should prepare to offer "internet-based teleschooling" in case they had to close for a period of time. "We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare for the expectation that this could be bad," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, then a leader in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's pandemic response, told reporters on a Feb. 25, 2020 conference call. School leaders said they weren't really set up for remote learning. But ready or not, three weeks later, nearly every school in the country was closed, reported Chalkbeat. Some would not open their doors again for more than a year. Five years on, the impact of COVID-era closures—the ways schools rose to meet the moment and the ways they failed—continue to reverberate through the American education system and in the lives of students, parents, and teachers. "We just didn't do nearly enough of what we needed to do, and the results speak for themselves," said Robin Lake, who runs the Center for Reinventing Public Education. "We have a learning chasm that is shocking. We failed an entire generation of kids." Teachers were too overwhelmed, Lake said, and the drive to return to normalcy was too great. Student academic performance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Inequality has grown, with students in more affluent school districts largely back to normal—academically at least—and those in high-poverty communities still struggling. Students carry lingering emotional scars from the deaths of family members, from the anxiety and weight of responsibility they felt during the pandemic, and from the isolation of school closures. Far more students miss school regularly than before the pandemic. And teachers report many students seem less engaged in their lessons. "We are the generation that spent important years of our lives in the COVID-19 lockdown, then released back into the world without the tools to cope," high school senior Adonte DaCosta told New York City Council members at a hearing last fall. With the pivot to remote learning, technology is now everywhere in American schools, but a new digital divide has opened up between those filling out worksheets on Chromebooks and those learning how to use generative AI. Divisions over school closures and COVID safety protocols turned schools into political war zones and fueled the rise of the conservative parents' rights movement. Here are 10 ways schools have changed in the past five years: Karyn Lewis recalls thinking that the worst had passed when she saw promising signs from testing during the 2021-22 school year. Lewis is vice president of research and policy partnerships at NWEA, which administers the MAP test used by many school districts. But it's clear now—on NWEA's own assessments and on numerous other national and international tests—that the impact of COVID learning disruptions have only grown. "We were just thinking about the act of missing school in the wrong way," Lewis said. Students who missed out on foundational skills are struggling to learn more advanced material later on. Even students who would have been in preschool during the height of the pandemic are behind their prepandemic counterparts. Research finds that students are making up ground—but not fast enough to make up for what was lost. In retrospect, Lewis said, it should have been obvious that recovery would be a multiyear effort and one that will need to continue into the future. An NWEA analysis suggests it may take seven years to see full recovery in math. Schools should have been treated like emergency rooms, Lake said. Children should have been triaged for learning loss, given individualized assessments, and routed to specialized teams trained to help. Instead, classroom teachers were expected to address learning loss largely on their own—an impossible task. "I didn't imagine that people wouldn't act as if there were a crisis," Lake said. "Business as usual took hold." School districts around the country invested in tutoring, summer school, and academic interventionists. These strategies often showed promising results, even as districts struggled to scale those interventions to serve enough students effectively. In the process, many educators and administrators realized students needed this kind of support all along. Manuel Sanchez was a veteran math teacher with three decades of experience when his Chicago elementary school tapped him to be an academic interventionist. But at first he felt "lost" in his new role. Because students often hesitate to ask for help, he hadn't realized just how far behind some students were. Sanchez now works with several small groups of students, pulling them out of their classrooms for intensive help and also "pushing in" to classrooms to help teachers offer extra support. The relationships he's developed with students have helped him find his stride. He also works with a small group of high-achieving middle schoolers on more-advanced math. "Students now trust me in a way that they can ask me anything," Sanchez said. The challenge going forward is how to keep paying for these positions now that federal pandemic relief dollars have expired. Around the country, districts are reallocating money and lobbying their state legislatures for funds to keep tutors and other academic supports. School closures upended routines and left many students isolated from their peers and cut off from supportive teachers. Students also faced the loss of family members to the virus and the upheaval of parents losing jobs and housing. Students now struggle with mental health challenges that feel more pervasive and more persistent than before the pandemic. Schools continue to report more behavior problems and less student engagement. All of this has led schools to take a more active role in supporting student mental health and emotional well-being. They've invested in social and emotional curriculum—about 83% of principals reported last year that their schools use an SEL curriculum compared with fewer than half before the pandemic. Schools have also hired more social workers and counselors. In New York, local and state officials are ramping up investments in student wellness clubs and peer-to-peer mental health programs. The peer-led model allows students to hear from people their same age or just a little older, who have been through the same experiences. They can be more credible messengers than adults. Tamar Cox-Rubien, a youth peer leader at the National Alliance on Mental Illness NYC, was 20 when the pandemic arrived. She hit "rock bottom" during that time. "That allowed me to realize what I needed to change in my life," she said. "Forcing that growth can be really painful but needed, and I know that's true for many other young people as well." Susan Meek already was a veteran of political battles over school vouchers when she was elected—on the cusp of the pandemic—to the school board in Douglas County, a conservative suburban district southeast of Denver. But nothing could have prepared her for the intensity of fights over masking, hybrid learning, and quarantines—decisions that kept her up at night as she weighed complex trade-offs. "School boards became ground zero for debates on individual rights versus collective responsibility," said Meek, who spoke for herself and not on behalf of the district. "When you think about the role of school boards, parents advocate for their own child's needs, and school board members are responsible for the collective. We're responsible for all students." Keri Rodrigues Langan, founding president of the National Parents Union, said the pandemic broke the relationship between parents and schools. Parents were no longer welcome inside schools due to safety protocols, and they haven't been welcomed back in the years since, she said. Conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have used the sense that schools are hiding something to advance their priorities. Some parents didn't like what they saw during remote learning, including that many teachers struggled with basic technology. In some large cities, the influence of teachers unions contributed to schools staying closed longer. "There were a lot of teachers who were heroes, but there were a lot of teachers who weren't," Rodrigues Langan said. "They were just whipping out packets, watch this YouTube video, answer three really quick and simple questions on Google Classroom. And that's learning? And I think people were really shocked because they were expecting more and wanted more." Not long after the pandemic officially ended, most parents still gave their local school high marks. But the broader public perception of American schools is at an all-time low. And the political fallout can be seen in the recent expansion of school choice and in efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Kids missed school at alarmingly high rates during the pandemic. Students got COVID. They got sent home to quarantine after exposure to COVID. Their parents kept them home for sniffles and coughs. And when their classmates and teachers were absent too, school felt kind of pointless. All of that contributed to a dramatic spike in the share of students nationwide who were considered chronically absent, a designation that typically means they missed 18 days of school or more. Chronic absenteeism peaked during the 2021-22 school year when nearly 30% of students missed that much school, almost double the pre-pandemic rate. Many states have made improvements, but chronic absenteeism remains a stubborn problem. Schools have tried every strategy in the book. They hired more staff to call home and knock on doors. They bought better computer systems to flag kids as they accrued absences. They hosted family events to make school feel more inviting. None of these strategies have been particularly effective at reducing absenteeism, a nationally representative survey of school district leaders conducted by the nonprofit RAND Corporation and Center on Reinventing Public Education last year found. But why? Lydia Rainey, a Center on Reinventing Public Education principal who conducted follow-up interviews with a dozen of the surveyed districts, heard repeatedly that more students feel school is optional and not as important. To address that, schools have to make sure families know why in-person attendance matters and give students a reason to be there. "If there is this cultural shift away from thinking daily attendance is really critical, then we need different strategies that get toward that—which the early warning systems and the calls home don't get to," Rainey said. That reflects the experience of Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, an organization that provides counseling services at roughly 50 New York City schools. He's seen students grapple with questions like, "Why do I have to show up in school? I used to sit at home on my computer," or, "Why do I have to take this course, when life can be fleeting and things can happen that are out of our control?" Student reading scores on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were the lowest in 30 years—even as students showed modest improvement in math. Many states recently adopted policies to promote evidence-based reading instructional practices, in particular more explicit phonics instruction. These policies may take time to show up in test scores. Math may be easier to remediate now that students are back in school, while gaps in foundational reading skills could be following students into older grades where teachers have less training in teaching students how to read. Students who leave elementary school as poor readers may struggle the rest of their academic careers. Surveys also find that far fewer students read for pleasure than in the past, and cell phones and social media could be sapping children's attention spans. The pandemic fueled a technology access explosion in American schools. Before COVID, fewer than half of students had access to a personal device at school. Now it's estimated that 90% of secondary students and 80% of elementary students do. But surveys indicate the most common way students use technology at school is taking online tests and quizzes. Some educators are determined to buck that trend. "I didn't use those computers until COVID," said Adrienne Staten, a veteran English teacher in Philadelphia who was far more comfortable with textbooks, paper, and handwriting. "COVID was the catalyst." Now Staten weaves generative AI—another innovation she initially greeted with skepticism—into her own lesson planning and what she asks her students to do. She wants them to understand technology's potential and its pitfalls, including built-in biases and privacy risks. AI has been especially helpful for her students who are learning English as a second language, giving them more confidence in how they express themselves and opening up more content areas, Staten said. Staten has the support of the Philadelphia school system, where officials want to become leaders in using AI in education. By the end of the school year, Staten's seniors will use Google's Gemini chatbot and Adobe's Express Firefly image generator to create virtual zines about a community they belong to, in conjunction with reading the novel "There There," which follows the stories of Native American characters in Oakland. "I just want to know that I gave them all the equipment and tools that they need to be OK out there," Staten said. Districts large and small have seen a steady decline in the number of students. Declining birth rates and rising housing prices play a large role, but the pandemic accelerated underlying trends. Families who didn't like their pandemic schooling options moved to private schools or opted to homeschool, and some haven't returned. Expanded voucher programs in a dozen states provide financial support for alternatives to public schools. What's the result? Even as the student population has declined, schools employ more adults than before the pandemic, according to an analysis by researcher Chad Aldeman in partnership with The 74. Federal COVID relief paid for many of these positions—and research suggests that money helped improve student academic recovery—but now that money has gone away. With school district budgets largely dependent on student population counts, these trends set the stage for painful budget decisions, layoffs, and school closures. Many child care centers stayed open through the pandemic to serve the children of essential workers even as schools shut down. Staff at Chelsea Ndaiga's Day Early Learning Center in Indianapolis, divided into two teams to maintain social distancing, and became experts in ever-shifting CDC protocols. "If they don't have their children in a safe spot, they can't do their quality work," Ndaiga said. "Families need to feel safe, need to feel that their children are safe, in order to do that." The pandemic made clear that a functioning economy depends on families having access to reliable child care. Federal pandemic relief helped shore up an early childhood sector that nearly faltered under the weight of lost income and staffing shortages. But advocates warned of a "child care cliff" when that money ran out. While the worst-case scenarios have not come to pass, child care supply isn't expanding and prices are rising, according to a report from The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. With significant federal help unlikely, states have forged their own solutions. In Indiana, that looks like deregulation coupled with expanded access to child care subsidies. The state can now offer child care to 62% of the 466,000 children who need it, up from 55% in 2021, according to an analysis by Early Learning Indiana. But a smaller share of Indiana's available childcare seats are in high-quality programs, according to the state's evaluation metric. And there's now a wait list for subsidies. The University of Northern Colorado, where about 40% of students are the first in their family to go to college, launched University 101 before COVID to help freshmen adjust to college expectations. But in the pandemic's aftermath, the course has evolved to cover more basic ground. "I can't believe the class expects me to show up in person," one student told University 101 program director Angela Vaughn last fall via a class feedback form. "I should be able to make that decision for myself." "How dare you say I can't have my cell phone," she said another student wrote. "I'm an adult." Relaxed expectations for high school students have become a habit that's hard to break. Higher education institutions, in turn, are having to do more to educate students about how to be a student. "Students are pushing back even more against those boundaries, those expectations of college," Vaugn said. "They're struggling with understanding why those things might be important." University 101 instructors meet weekly to discuss strategies and find better explanations than "because I said so." They bring in upperclassmen to talk about why University 101's expectations are normal, and they emphasize how college expectations relate to workforce demands. "They're starting to become adults, and we're here to help them expand their perspective beyond what they've experienced and what they know or think they know," Vaughn said. Chalkbeat staff Aleks Appleton, Kalyn Belsha, Jason Gonzales, Mila Koumpilova, Julian Shen-Berro, and Carly Sitrin contributed reporting. This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Miami Herald
08-05-2025
- Health
- Miami Herald
10 ways COVID changed American schools
COVID had already killed thousands of people in other countries and was spreading in the United States when a top federal health official said schools should prepare to offer "internet-based teleschooling" in case they had to close for a period of time. "We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare for the expectation that this could be bad," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, then a leader in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's pandemic response, told reporters on a Feb. 25, 2020 conference call. School leaders said they weren't really set up for remote learning. But ready or not, three weeks later, nearly every school in the country was closed, reported Chalkbeat. Some would not open their doors again for more than a year. Five years on, the impact of COVID-era closures-the ways schools rose to meet the moment and the ways they failed-continue to reverberate through the American education system and in the lives of students, parents, and teachers. "We just didn't do nearly enough of what we needed to do, and the results speak for themselves," said Robin Lake, who runs the Center for Reinventing Public Education. "We have a learning chasm that is shocking. We failed an entire generation of kids." Teachers were too overwhelmed, Lake said, and the drive to return to normalcy was too great. Student academic performance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Inequality has grown, with students in more affluent school districts largely back to normal-academically at least-and those in high-poverty communities still struggling. Students carry lingering emotional scars from the deaths of family members, from the anxiety and weight of responsibility they felt during the pandemic, and from the isolation of school closures. Far more students miss school regularly than before the pandemic. And teachers report many students seem less engaged in their lessons. "We are the generation that spent important years of our lives in the COVID-19 lockdown, then released back into the world without the tools to cope," high school senior Adonte DaCosta told New York City Council members at a hearing last fall. With the pivot to remote learning, technology is now everywhere in American schools, but a new digital divide has opened up between those filling out worksheets on Chromebooks and those learning how to use generative AI. Divisions over school closures and COVID safety protocols turned schools into political war zones and fueled the rise of the conservative parents' rights movement. Here are 10 ways schools have changed in the past five years: Students are still paying for COVID learning disruptions Karyn Lewis recalls thinking that the worst had passed when she saw promising signs from testing during the 2021-22 school year. Lewis is vice president of research and policy partnerships at NWEA, which administers the MAP test used by many school districts. But it's clear now-on NWEA's own assessments and on numerous other national and international tests-that the impact of COVID learning disruptions have only grown. "We were just thinking about the act of missing school in the wrong way," Lewis said. Students who missed out on foundational skills are struggling to learn more advanced material later on. Even students who would have been in preschool during the height of the pandemic are behind their prepandemic counterparts. Research finds that students are making up ground-but not fast enough to make up for what was lost. In retrospect, Lewis said, it should have been obvious that recovery would be a multiyear effort and one that will need to continue into the future. An NWEA analysis suggests it may take seven years to see full recovery in math. Schools should have been treated like emergency rooms, Lake said. Children should have been triaged for learning loss, given individualized assessments, and routed to specialized teams trained to help. Instead, classroom teachers were expected to address learning loss largely on their own-an impossible task. "I didn't imagine that people wouldn't act as if there were a crisis," Lake said. "Business as usual took hold." Schools recognize struggling students need individualized support School districts around the country invested in tutoring, summer school, and academic interventionists. These strategies often showed promising results, even as districts struggled to scale those interventions to serve enough students effectively. In the process, many educators and administrators realized students needed this kind of support all along. Manuel Sanchez was a veteran math teacher with three decades of experience when his Chicago elementary school tapped him to be an academic interventionist. But at first he felt "lost" in his new role. Because students often hesitate to ask for help, he hadn't realized just how far behind some students were. Sanchez now works with several small groups of students, pulling them out of their classrooms for intensive help and also "pushing in" to classrooms to help teachers offer extra support. The relationships he's developed with students have helped him find his stride. He also works with a small group of high-achieving middle schoolers on more-advanced math. "Students now trust me in a way that they can ask me anything," Sanchez said. The challenge going forward is how to keep paying for these positions now that federal pandemic relief dollars have expired. Around the country, districts are reallocating money and lobbying their state legislatures for funds to keep tutors and other academic supports. Schools more active in addressing student mental health School closures upended routines and left many students isolated from their peers and cut off from supportive teachers. Students also faced the loss of family members to the virus and the upheaval of parents losing jobs and housing. Students now struggle with mental health challenges that feel more pervasive and more persistent than before the pandemic. Schools continue to report more behavior problems and less student engagement. All of this has led schools to take a more active role in supporting student mental health and emotional well-being. They've invested in social and emotional curriculum-about 83% of principals reported last year that their schools use an SEL curriculum compared with fewer than half before the pandemic. Schools have also hired more social workers and counselors. In New York, local and state officials are ramping up investments in student wellness clubs and peer-to-peer mental health programs. The peer-led model allows students to hear from people their same age or just a little older, who have been through the same experiences. They can be more credible messengers than adults. Tamar Cox-Rubien, a youth peer leader at the National Alliance on Mental Illness NYC, was 20 when the pandemic arrived. She hit "rock bottom" during that time. "That allowed me to realize what I needed to change in my life," she said. "Forcing that growth can be really painful but needed, and I know that's true for many other young people as well." School closures leave legacy of mistrust, political strife Susan Meek already was a veteran of political battles over school vouchers when she was elected-on the cusp of the pandemic-to the school board in Douglas County, a conservative suburban district southeast of Denver. But nothing could have prepared her for the intensity of fights over masking, hybrid learning, and quarantines-decisions that kept her up at night as she weighed complex trade-offs. "School boards became ground zero for debates on individual rights versus collective responsibility," said Meek, who spoke for herself and not on behalf of the district. "When you think about the role of school boards, parents advocate for their own child's needs, and school board members are responsible for the collective. We're responsible for all students." Keri Rodrigues Langan, founding president of the National Parents Union, said the pandemic broke the relationship between parents and schools. Parents were no longer welcome inside schools due to safety protocols, and they haven't been welcomed back in the years since, she said. Conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have used the sense that schools are hiding something to advance their priorities. Some parents didn't like what they saw during remote learning, including that many teachers struggled with basic technology. In some large cities, the influence of teachers unions contributed to schools staying closed longer. "There were a lot of teachers who were heroes, but there were a lot of teachers who weren't," Rodrigues Langan said. "They were just whipping out packets, watch this YouTube video, answer three really quick and simple questions on Google Classroom. And that's learning? And I think people were really shocked because they were expecting more and wanted more." Not long after the pandemic officially ended, most parents still gave their local school high marks. But the broader public perception of American schools is at an all-time low. And the political fallout can be seen in the recent expansion of school choice and in efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. School feels optional. Lots of kids are opting out. Kids missed school at alarmingly high rates during the pandemic. Students got COVID. They got sent home to quarantine after exposure to COVID. Their parents kept them home for sniffles and coughs. And when their classmates and teachers were absent too, school felt kind of pointless. All of that contributed to a dramatic spike in the share of students nationwide who were considered chronically absent, a designation that typically means they missed 18 days of school or more. Chronic absenteeism peaked during the 2021-22 school year when nearly 30% of students missed that much school, almost double the pre-pandemic rate. Many states have made improvements, but chronic absenteeism remains a stubborn problem. Schools have tried every strategy in the book. They hired more staff to call home and knock on doors. They bought better computer systems to flag kids as they accrued absences. They hosted family events to make school feel more inviting. None of these strategies have been particularly effective at reducing absenteeism, a nationally representative survey of school district leaders conducted by the nonprofit RAND Corporation and Center on Reinventing Public Education last year found. But why? Lydia Rainey, a Center on Reinventing Public Education principal who conducted follow-up interviews with a dozen of the surveyed districts, heard repeatedly that more students feel school is optional and not as important. To address that, schools have to make sure families know why in-person attendance matters and give students a reason to be there. "If there is this cultural shift away from thinking daily attendance is really critical, then we need different strategies that get toward that-which the early warning systems and the calls home don't get to," Rainey said. That reflects the experience of Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, an organization that provides counseling services at roughly 50 New York City schools. He's seen students grapple with questions like, "Why do I have to show up in school? I used to sit at home on my computer," or, "Why do I have to take this course, when life can be fleeting and things can happen that are out of our control?" Something has gone very wrong with reading Student reading scores on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were the lowest in 30 years-even as students showed modest improvement in math. Many states recently adopted policies to promote evidence-based reading instructional practices, in particular more explicit phonics instruction. These policies may take time to show up in test scores. Math may be easier to remediate now that students are back in school, while gaps in foundational reading skills could be following students into older grades where teachers have less training in teaching students how to read. Students who leave elementary school as poor readers may struggle the rest of their academic careers. Surveys also find that far fewer students read for pleasure than in the past, and cell phones and social media could be sapping children's attention spans. Technology is ubiquitous. Some educators are seizing the opportunity. The pandemic fueled a technology access explosion in American schools. Before COVID, fewer than half of students had access to a personal device at school. Now it's estimated that 90% of secondary students and 80% of elementary students do. But surveys indicate the most common way students use technology at school is taking online tests and quizzes. Some educators are determined to buck that trend. "I didn't use those computers until COVID," said Adrienne Staten, a veteran English teacher in Philadelphia who was far more comfortable with textbooks, paper, and handwriting. "COVID was the catalyst." Now Staten weaves generative AI-another innovation she initially greeted with skepticism-into her own lesson planning and what she asks her students to do. She wants them to understand technology's potential and its pitfalls, including built-in biases and privacy risks. AI has been especially helpful for her students who are learning English as a second language, giving them more confidence in how they express themselves and opening up more content areas, Staten said. Staten has the support of the Philadelphia school system, where officials want to become leaders in using AI in education. By the end of the school year, Staten's seniors will use Google's Gemini chatbot and Adobe's Express Firefly image generator to create virtual zines about a community they belong to, in conjunction with reading the novel "There There," which follows the stories of Native American characters in Oakland. "I just want to know that I gave them all the equipment and tools that they need to be OK out there," Staten said. Schools have fewer students and more staff Districts large and small have seen a steady decline in the number of students. Declining birth rates and rising housing prices play a large role, but the pandemic accelerated underlying trends. Families who didn't like their pandemic schooling options moved to private schools or opted to homeschool, and some haven't returned. Expanded voucher programs in a dozen states provide financial support for alternatives to public schools. What's the result? Even as the student population has declined, schools employ more adults than before the pandemic, according to an analysis by researcher Chad Aldeman in partnership with The 74. Federal COVID relief paid for many of these positions-and research suggests that money helped improve student academic recovery-but now that money has gone away. With school district budgets largely dependent on student population counts, these trends set the stage for painful budget decisions, layoffs, and school closures. Child care is now everyone's problem Many child care centers stayed open through the pandemic to serve the children of essential workers even as schools shut down. Staff at Chelsea Ndaiga's Day Early Learning Center in Indianapolis, divided into two teams to maintain social distancing, and became experts in ever-shifting CDC protocols. "If they don't have their children in a safe spot, they can't do their quality work," Ndaiga said. "Families need to feel safe, need to feel that their children are safe, in order to do that." The pandemic made clear that a functioning economy depends on families having access to reliable child care. Federal pandemic relief helped shore up an early childhood sector that nearly faltered under the weight of lost income and staffing shortages. But advocates warned of a "child care cliff" when that money ran out. While the worst-case scenarios have not come to pass, child care supply isn't expanding and prices are rising, according to a report from The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. With significant federal help unlikely, states have forged their own solutions. In Indiana, that looks like deregulation coupled with expanded access to child care subsidies. The state can now offer child care to 62% of the 466,000 children who need it, up from 55% in 2021, according to an analysis by Early Learning Indiana. But a smaller share of Indiana's available childcare seats are in high-quality programs, according to the state's evaluation metric. And there's now a wait list for subsidies. Colleges are adjusting to lower expectations in K-12 The University of Northern Colorado, where about 40% of students are the first in their family to go to college, launched University 101 before COVID to help freshmen adjust to college expectations. But in the pandemic's aftermath, the course has evolved to cover more basic ground. "I can't believe the class expects me to show up in person," one student told University 101 program director Angela Vaughn last fall via a class feedback form. "I should be able to make that decision for myself." "How dare you say I can't have my cell phone," she said another student wrote. "I'm an adult." Relaxed expectations for high school students have become a habit that's hard to break. Higher education institutions, in turn, are having to do more to educate students about how to be a student. "Students are pushing back even more against those boundaries, those expectations of college," Vaugn said. "They're struggling with understanding why those things might be important." University 101 instructors meet weekly to discuss strategies and find better explanations than "because I said so." They bring in upperclassmen to talk about why University 101's expectations are normal, and they emphasize how college expectations relate to workforce demands. "They're starting to become adults, and we're here to help them expand their perspective beyond what they've experienced and what they know or think they know," Vaughn said. Chalkbeat staff Aleks Appleton, Kalyn Belsha, Jason Gonzales, Mila Koumpilova, Julian Shen-Berro, and Carly Sitrin contributed reporting. This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker. © Stacker Media, LLC.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Stunned Education Researchers Say Cuts Go Beyond DEI, Hitting Math, Literacy
When the director of a small regional science nonprofit sat down last week to pay a few bills, she got a shock. In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF's Racial Equity in STEM Education program. But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute's entire research portfolio, according to several sources. Last week, the NSF began combing through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes opposed by the administration. The moves — as well as a broader Jan. 27 pause of all federal aid, which a judge has temporarily reversed — have spread uncertainty, fear and anger through the education research community. 'It is incredibly exhausting,' said the research director of a national nonprofit with several active NSF grants and contracts. She asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. 'It's definitely absorbing all of our time right now.' Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding. While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn't comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health. 'It's hard to believe this administration is serious about stopping the alarming decline of U.S. student achievement and competitiveness when it puts the kibosh on federally funded research and access to data,' said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. 'How will policy makers and educators know the bright spots to replicate and what practices are harmful? How will parents make informed choices? How will teachers know the best ways to teach math and prepare students for the jobs of the future?' Related CRPE currently receives no federal funding, she said, so the recent moves won't affect it immediately. But its ongoing work tracking pandemic recovery, studying the impact of social media, AI and school choice rely on 'a broad national infrastructure of data, subject experts, and rigorous field studies,' Lake said. 'The broad-based destruction of this infrastructure will affect us all and will cripple our efforts to make American students competitive in the world economy.' Ulrich Boser, CEO of The Learning Agency, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works in education research, likened the recent moves to remodeling a house to make it more efficient. 'Would you just cancel all of your contracts with gas, water, electricity, and then just redo them? It's not a logical way of doing things. It's just haphazard.' An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The Learning Agency, which has contracts to, among other things, provide a bare-bones chatbot that answers questions about IES's What Works Clearinghouse, this week released a report warning that GOP-backed plans to shut down the Education Department could mean the loss or delay of more than $70 billion in funding for students. Boser recalled that the recent debacle with college aid took place simply because the Education Department tried to redo a single financial assistance form. 'It caused massive delays, most harmful to the kids we care about most.' Now take that dynamic, he said, and imagine what gutting an entire Cabinet-level agency could do. The recent NSF moves to review grant language are already having an effect: An academic dean at a leading graduate school of education said researchers at the institution are now reframing new funding proposals 'in ways that allow them to ask the questions that they want' without being scrutinized — or eliminated altogether — 'based on a 'Ctrl-F review' process.' Ctrl-F is a keyboard combination used to quickly search a document for keywords. 'I don't think there's an upside to the chaos and uncertainty that is being experienced in real time,' the dean said. Related Likewise, the director of a research center that has long focused on K-12 education reform said the new administration has brought turmoil to a community that typically performs 'non-ideological, empirical' research on issues like literacy and math. 'I feel like every day there's new confusion,' he said, adding that restrictions on DEI could also chill a basic function of education research: studying the results of interventions on diverse student populations — students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations. 'What 'DEI' means is really very ambiguous,' he said. 'So if you are studying something and you look at differential outcomes between groups, is that DEI? I don't know.' The federal government funds billions of dollars in research each year for K-12 and higher education, but rarely has it scrutinized practitioners to this extent, said the leader of a nonprofit that advocates for better education research. She described conversations with scholars who are operating via grants through NSF, IES and elsewhere who 'just have no idea what's going on — they can't get through to program officers. Sometimes program officers have been put on administrative leave. It's just a huge amount of chaos, and overall [it] just creates this chilling effect' for both current grantees and future ones. 'This is a man-made disaster,' she said. Mike England, an NSF spokesman, said the agency 'is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.' He referred a journalist to an NSF webpage outlining recent executive orders 'and their impact on the U.S. National Science Foundation community.' An Education Department official on Tuesday said any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition, but Mark Schneider, who served as the agency's director in Trump's first term, said in an interview that the current chaos represents an opportunity to 'make something good' in the research realm. 'What we should really do is say, 'We've fallen into a rut for decades in the way we go about doing business,'' he said. ''We are not focused on the highest reward. We're not focused on mission-critical work.' ' Now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Schneider has already suggested breaking the Education Department up and distributing its work to other agencies. He said the new administration has the opportunity to refocus to provide 'data that the nation needs.' Schneider noted that the National Center for Education Research last year handed out 42 research grants worth well over $100 million. 'If we look at those grants, how many of those are really mission-critical?' He predicted that few focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis. The department did not release a list of zeroed-out programs, but a document shared widely online indicates that they include research covering a wide range of topics including literacy but also math, science, mental health, attendance, English acquisition and others. Also on the chopping block: contracts for The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a test given to students every four years in 64 countries and a key indicator of U.S. competitiveness. The long-term impact of research pauses could be devastating, said the senior advisor to a research advocacy group — comparable to the interruption of the COVID epidemic, which shut many researchers out of schools for months, diluting the effectiveness of their research and, in some cases, requiring them to insert asterisks for the years when no data was available. 'I just don't want more asterisk years,' she said. Related Several researchers said an even bigger fear is the prospect of key education, labor and other data sets such as NAEP being made unavailable. While NAEP data collection was unaffected by the recent moves, contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled, to be offered to new bidders. So far, U.S. Education Department data haven't been affected, but public health data — including guidance on contraception, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; and lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students — have disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website due to President Trump's order to strip 'gender ideology' from websites and contracts. Amy O'Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School for Public Policy, cautioned that removing data from public websites would 'have a chilling effect on what can be done, what can be measured, what services we deliver to our communities.' Even if some research funds are restored and researchers can go back to work, O'Hara said, she worries about the uncertainty created at the collegiate graduate school level, as well as for researchers who are early in their careers. 'If their funding is disrupted and their access to data is disrupted, they have an incentive to walk away,' she said. 'And if they walk away and find other work to do, what is going to be compelling to bring them back?' CRPE's Lake put it more bluntly: 'I'm a very pragmatic researcher and I believe the feds could do much better in how they fund and support research. But a wholesale end to federal investment in education research feels like a cop-out. The hard but necessary work is making smarter investments.'
