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Parents’ poll: Less than two-thirds give schools top grades for handling students’ pandemic-related academic, social-emotional needs

Less than two-thirds of parents give schools an A or B for their handling of students’ academic and social-emotional needs during the pandemic, and almost 60 percent said they haven’t seen or heard anything about additional resources their schools can provide to address these issues, according to a new poll released last month. Sixty-one percent assigned top...
By Linda Jacobson | December 28, 2021
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Survey — 56% of educators working with English learners say pandemic significantly disrupted learning; nearly 4 in 10 say students should have repeated grade

Nearly 40 percent of 669 educators who serve English language learners around the world said they should have repeated last school year because of pandemic-related learning loss, according to a recent survey. More than 56 percent of respondents said these students’ formal education was significantly disrupted, but they were not the only children to have...
By Jo Napolitano | December 21, 2021
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‘Equal treatment, not special treatment’: Conservative Supreme Court justices appear ready to strike down religious barriers to public school choice funding

Maine allows private religious schools to participate in its tuition benefit program for families that don’t have a public high school in their communities — except those that seek to instill religious beliefs in their students. That caveat is at the heart of Carson v. Makin, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday, a case that...
By Linda Jacobson | December 14, 2021
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Facing thousands of unvaccinated students, Los Angeles district pushes back vaccine mandate until fall

Updated December 15 The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education voted Tuesday to delay its vaccine mandate for students 12 and up until next fall. The district was facing the possibility of transferring 34,000 unvaccinated students into an already understaffed remote learning program called City of Angels. Leaders of the district’s administrators union were concerned about the...
By Linda Jacobson | December 10, 2021
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Miami’s Carvalho brings rock star status to top L.A. schools job, but observers warn of ‘political black hole’ that awaits

The Los Angeles Unified school board on Thursday unanimously selected Alberto Carvalho, one of the nation’s most respected — and buzzed about — school leaders, as the district’s next superintendent. “This is like LeBron coming to the Lakers,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. “He is by...
By Linda Jacobson | December 9, 2021
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Four things to know about Alberto Carvalho, Los Angeles Unified’s new superintendent

Alberto Carvalho, Miami-Dade’s long-time, charismatic and controversial schools chief, was selected Thursday by the Los Angeles Unified school board as its next superintendent. An advocate of school choice, nontraditional schools and known champion of undocumented student rights, Carvalho, 57, has run Miami’s schools for more than a decade. Carvalho’s sometimes unusual reform tactics have been...
By Marianna McMurdock | December 9, 2021
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‘We are here’: Debates over teaching history exclude Native people, Rhode Island Indigenous parents say

Growing up in Charlestown, Rhode Island, Chrystal Baker remembers reading a textbook in history class that said the Narragansett Indigenous people, who have lived in southern New England for tens of thousands of years, were extinct. “We’re not extinct,” the young student ventured, nervous about contradicting the lesson, but feeling she had to speak up....
By Asher Lehrer-Small | December 8, 2021
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Exclusive data: Experts hailed holding kids back as an emergency response to pandemic learning loss. Despite wave of new state retention bills, most parents balked

Charlotte Collins was a kindergartner in name only last year — enrolled in a San Antonio charter school, but not “super participating” in remote learning, her mother said. “Having a kindergartner sit at a computer to do online school was not a thing I was willing to make her do,” said Alison Collins. But she...
By Linda Jacobson | December 7, 2021
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‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: How three teachers created the computer game that inspired — and diverted — generations of students

In 1971, a trio of Minneapolis educators, using a hulking teletype machine connected to a mainframe miles away, designed the legendary game of westward expansion (and dysentery) that would help revolutionize personal computing. Despite more than 65 million copies sold, they never saw a dime. Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or...
By Greg Toppo | December 6, 2021
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As threat of Omicron variant looms, school closures continue ticking upward

Even before the World Health Organization labeled the Omicron coronavirus strain a new “variant of concern” Friday, school closures were continuing to increase across the country. Last week, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures for a variety of reasons including teacher burnout, staffing shortages and virus outbreaks, according to counts from Burbio, a...
By Asher Lehrer-Small | December 2, 2021