FYI from BSF, 04.07.23
Every few weeks, the lingering academic impacts of the pandemic come back into view.
Concerns for “a lost generation.” A tale of two cities, neighboring Alabama towns with different post-COVID rebounds. In Boston, apparently we will soon see billboards reminding families this is a problem. Nearly half of American states can’t tell you with specificity how they spent federal stimulus dollars for schools (ESSER), let alone what the impact is.
Last year, rather than throwing up their hands, five Boston schools took matters into their own hands. As a part of our Recentering Initiative, five Boston Public Schools (BPS) committed to a year-long process (full guide here). With expert guidance and coaching from Attuned Education Partners, schools (1) assessed readiness, (2) identified academic and social emotional domains for focus, (3) researched evidence-based practices, (4) trained and aligned, (5) implemented, (6) and monitored.
It worked.
Those school's 1,882 students, mostly Black, Latino, and/or high-needs, outperformed the majority of BPS and American children on the annual MAP assessment.
Every school posted academic improvements. The results were most dramatic in math, with the entire cohort and each individual school closing the gap between their baseline and national peers.
Too often, efforts to improve education fall to the lure of unicorns. It is easy to label a problem as simply impossible. Many policymakers and educators grab on to “unicorn” solutions, fads and simple ideas (open classrooms!...blended learning!) to address challenging problems. Unicorns are magical and really easy to describe.
The only problem is that they aren’t real.
Platypuses are really hard to describe. They are most certainly not magical; with bills, fur, venom, and too many other component parts, they are best understood as a bit of a hodgepodge of animal.
But platypuses are real, and so effective at adaptation that they have outlived dinosaurs and most species on the planet.
States and districts still have 17 months and billions of dollars change the academic paths for millions of students.
Accelerating learning - in the wake of a generational global disruption - is difficult, complex work. It requires a lot of time and additional resources. Priorities must be set, trade-offs endured. The progress can be messy, slow, or uneven.
But we have seen progress is possible, and quite real.
Other Matters
Concerns continue at the Henderson school.
Our long-time tracking of the decline of Boston’s Black student population gets a new look with a more nuanced demographic study. A new report from Boston Indicators shows an increase in the Greater Boston Black population driven by diversity/immigration and growth outside of Boston proper.
On the AP exams, Massachusetts leads the nation, posting a rare accomplishment: higher performance while closing achievement gaps. Full data here.
Population estimates project Massachusetts will continue to lose public school enrollment by 2.6% through 2028. US Census data shows another year of population decline for Massachusetts, but there are no public numbers for Boston yet.
Two former educators vied to be the new mayor of Chicago this week.
New installments this week in the culture wars in education: the civil rights division of the US Department of Education closed a complaint about a school play in Newton, a look at an AP African-American Studies class, the email greeting that has since spurred protests and think pieces, protests in response to the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN have resulted in a political crisis, and the Biden Administration appears to chart a middle path in its guidance for transgender athletes.
The complicated, and at times conflicting, research on attitudes toward school integration.