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  • Home
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    • Analysis
    • Commentary and Opinion
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    • Spotlights
    • Voices for Education Choice
    • factcheckED
  • Topics
    • Achievement Gap
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    • Customization
    • Education Equity
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    • Education Research
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    • Faith-based Education
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    • Parent Empowerment
    • Private Schools
    • Special Education
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    • Virtual Education
    • Vouchers
  • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Guest Bloggers
    • Ashley Berner
    • Jonathan Butcher
    • Jack Coons
    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
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  • Education Facts
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Coronavirus / COVID-19

Advocate VoicesCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParent EmpowermentPodcast

podcastED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill interviews American Federation for Children president, CEO Tommy Schultz

redefinED staff January 6, 2021
redefinED staff

On this episode, Tuthill begins a conversation with Schultz, incoming leader of the American Federation for Children, a national advocacy organization focused on state-level systemic change that advocates for legislation to expand education choice opportunities, particularly for low-income families.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tommy-SchultzPt1_EDIT.mp3

Schultz, who grew up on a farm in rural California and attended high school 60 miles from home, discusses how education choice impacted him and shares his belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened many people to inequities in the modern public education system. These inequities, Schultz proposes, create an uneven playing field for many families that must be addressed by robust legislation to assist families in customizing their children’s education to best serve their needs.

“Hearing sentiments from students that we’ve been able to help, especially from lower-income communities where they’ve said their education changed the course of their family’s life … to me it gets to the fundamental core of our work.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

The mission of the American Federation for Children, Schultz’s background, and his start in the education choice movement

Schultz’s priorities as he takes the helm at AFC

Why Schultz made the decision to move AFC’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Dallas and the future of choice in Texas

How the COVID-19 pandemic will impact and shape education choice legislation

LINKS MENTIONED:

AFC’s Voices for Choice advocacy program

Be sure to return next week for Part 2 of Tuthill’s interview with Schultz.

January 6, 2021 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJonathan ButcherLindsey BurkeMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Education in a time of pandemic: Not making the grade

Special to redefinED January 5, 2021
Special to redefinED

This commentary from redefinED guest blogger Jonathan Butcher, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, and center director Lindsey Burke, first appeared on Tribune News Service.

When it comes to her daughter Emerson’s education, Sarrin Warfield says, she’s “in it to win it.”

When Emerson’s assigned school in South Carolina announced plans for virtual learning this fall, Sarrin says she asked herself, “What if we just made this in my backyard and made a school?” After talking with friends who have children the same age as Emerson, Sarrin said, “Let’s do it. Instead of it being a crazy idea, let’s own this process and be really intentional about doing this and make it happen.”

Sarrin is one of the thousands of parents around the country who formed learning pods when assigned schools closed. By meeting in small groups with friends’ and neighbors’ children, these pod families could try to keep at least one of part of their child’s life from being upended because of COVID-19.

The time-honored practice of school assignment did little to help the Warfields — or thousands of other students around the U.S. during the COVID spring … and then COVID summer and fall. In the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, officials in some of the largest districts in the country reported significant enrollment changes from the previous school year, especially among younger students.

Officials in Mesa, Arizona, reported a 17% decrease in kindergarten enrollment after the first two weeks. In Los Angeles, Superintendent Austin Beutner reported a 3.4% decrease in enrollment, but said another 4% of students couldn’t be found, making the change closer to 7%. Figures are similar in Broward County, Florida, and Houston. In large school districts, these percentages amount to over 10,000 children per district.

Some of these changes can be attributed to learning pods. But officials in large cities and even those representing entire states simply reported having no contact with many students.

Under normal circumstances, if thousands of children who were once in school suddenly were nowhere to be found, this would be an issue of national concern. Hearings would be held, and officials would demand to know what is happening with schools around the country. Loud calls for change would be heard.

But life during the pandemic is anything but normal.

Likewise, if more students around the country were failing — say, twice the figure from last year — this would also be worrisome, right? From Los Angeles to Houston to Chicago to Fairfax, Virginia, school officials and researchers are now reporting that the proportion of students earning D’s and F’s in the first semester has increased, doubling in some cases, in comparison to the last school year.

Yet across the U.S., many school districts, especially those in large metro areas, remain closed to in-person learning for some if not all grades and may not reopen at the start of 2021.

According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of parents in lower-income brackets report being “very” or “somewhat” concerned this fall that their children are “falling behind in school as a result of the disruptions caused by the pandemic.” With thousands of students not in class, even virtually, and falling grades among those who are attending, who can blame them?

For taxpayers and policymakers looking for lessons in the pandemic, the utter failure of school assignment systems to provide quality-learning options to all students, especially the most vulnerable, is clear.

The quality and consistency of the education a child received during the pandemic has been dependent on the attendance boundary in which that child’s family lives. At the same time, so many of the issues plaguing education during the pandemic — and for that matter, the entire century leading up to the pandemic — are rooted in policies that fund school systems, rather than individual students.

Allowing dollars to follow children directly to any public or private school of choice is a critical emergency policy reform that states should pursue. Such a policy change is overdue.

Since it’s anyone’s guess how soon life will get back to normal, we can’t wait any longer for the system to fix itself.

January 5, 2021 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The pandemic has changed education; now let’s change how we fund education

Special to redefinED January 4, 2021
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: This commentary from Adam Peshek, a senior fellow for education at the Charles Koch Institute, first appeared on Real Clear Education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an unprecedented opportunity to rethink education in America. Instead of hoping for a return to “normal,” let’s learn from what has worked – and what has not – to make lasting improvements and create a more resilient system, one that can adapt to any challenge families may face in the future.

The first step toward realizing a more resilient and family-centered system is to reimagine how we fund education. In short, it’s time to start funding families, not the buildings that are meant to serve them.

Americans spend at least $720 billion on education each year. At around $13,000 per child, that puts the U.S. among the highest-spending countries in the world.  

Instead of providing this benefit directly to families – as we do for higher education, childcare, and health care – in K-12, we send this money directly to school buildings. Taxpayer dollars are collected and sent to a central office, and zones are drawn around individual schools where students are required to attend or forfeit the funds raised for their education.

The pandemic has exposed the flaws in this system. School closures, loss of childcare, and difficulties transitioning to online and hybrid-learning models are having devastating effects on children. According to one report, an estimated 3 million students have received no formal education since schools closed in March. That’s the equivalent of every school-aged child in Florida failing to show up for school.

The economic impact on students is estimated at $110 billion in lost future earnings each year. Unsurprisingly, this decline in learning has been felt more deeply by children in low-income families.

These challenges might seem insurmountable, and many of us look forward to the day when we can return to “normal.” But why would we want to return to a status quo that has proven a failure during a time of crisis? While we may not encounter an international crisis of the scope and scale of COVID-19, families face immeasurable local and personal crises each year.

This is a time to learn from innovations that have proven successful and integrate them into the system moving forward.

One of the biggest innovations during the pandemic has been the proliferation of individualized education. Families with resources – financial and otherwise – are taking matters into their own hands. They are hiring tutors, forming learning pods, enrolling in microschools, sharing childcare, reimagining after-school programs, and rearranging their lives to provide the continued learning opportunities that many children have lacked for months.

These unconventional models may yield academic benefits. Researchers from Opportunity Insights analyzed data from 800,000 students enrolled in an online math curriculum used by schools before and during the pandemic. The researchers found that students in low-income neighborhoods saw a 9% decline in math progression between January and April. Meanwhile, students from wealthy ZIP codes saw a 40% improvement over the same period.

In other words: in the spring, with schools closed during the pandemic, students in some wealthy families may have progressed academically at higher rates than if the schools had remained open.

This is raising understandable equity concerns from advocates concerned about widening gaps between low- and high-income students. But in a situation where some students are progressing and others are falling behind, the solution isn’t to move everyone to the middle. It’s to give those falling behind access to the same type of learning that is allowing others to thrive.

The sort of family-directed, individualized education taking place during the pandemic is likely to expand its presence in American life. As an Atlantic article observed, “COVID-19 is a catalyst for families who were already skeptical of the traditional school system – and are now thinking about leaving it for good.”

The author of that piece, Emma Green, recently said in an interview that home-based, unconventional methods of education are getting “a flood of interest from parents of all kinds.” Early data seems to confirm this, with large upticks in families opting out of school systems to pursue homeschooling.

To create a more effective and more resilient education system, we must learn from what has proven effective during the pandemic – namely, the ability of those with resources to identify and pursue a variety of individualized learning opportunities to meet children’s needs. To provide these same opportunities for all families, governments should prioritize direct grants to families, education spending accounts, refundable tax credits, and myriad other ways to get money into the hands of families so they can build an education that fits their needs. 

The way in which we currently fund education is blocking equal access to these learning opportunities. To expand that access, we need to fund families, not school buildings. 

January 4, 2021 1 comment
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Charter SchoolsCoronavirus / COVID-19Education ChoiceFeaturedNewsSchool ChoiceVirtual Education

redefinED’s best of 2020: Switch, now, to online learning? This charter school org was ready

Ron Matus December 31, 2020
Ron Matus

Natalie Keime, ESOL coordinator and sixth-grade intensive reading teacher at Somerset Oaks Academy in Homestead, delivers a virtual lesson to her students from her home.

Editor’s note: During the holiday season, redefinED is reprising the “best of the best” from our 2020 archives. This post originally published March 26.

About a decade ago, Fernando Zulueta was making a presentation to school district officials in Florida about why his charter school support company, Academica, needed to expand into online learning. For one thing, he told them, charter schools serviced by Academica must better serve students who need flexibility because of their talents (say, an elite gymnast) or their challenges (say, homebound because of illness). For another, he said, you never know when a natural disaster – maybe even a pandemic – might necessitate a transition into virtual instruction.

Fast forward to coronavirus 2020.

Academica, now one of the biggest charter support organizations in America, was among the first education outfits in America to shift online as thousands of brick-and-mortar schools were shuttered. The company began planning for potential closures weeks in advance. And when the closure orders were given in Florida, it trained thousands of teachers, distributed thousands of laptops, and acclimated tens of thousands of students to a new normal – in a matter of days.

“I’m not a doomsday prepper,” Zulueta said. “But when you do the work we do, you have the responsibility to be prepared … and to evaluate risks and contingencies in the future.”

On March 13, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered all public schools in Florida to extend spring break a week so students would not return to school. At the time, the vast majority of Florida districts were about to start their spring break, while a handful of others were ending theirs.

Most of the Academica-supported charter schools in Florida were still a week from break. But by March 16, about 40,000 of their 65,000 students logged into class from home. By week’s end, most of the rest had, too. Within days, Academica’s Florida schools were reporting, based on student logins, nearly normal attendance rates.

“I had a little bit of mixed reaction” when the call came to transition, said Miriam Barrios, a third-grade teacher at Mater Academy of International Studies, an Academica-supported school in Miami. Ninety-nine percent of Mater’s students are students of color; 97 percent are low-income. “A lot of these families don’t have computers. So, it was a little scary.”

“But overall things have gone so well, much better than I expected,” Barrios said.

“It ended up feeling a lot like being in school,” said Claudia Fernandez-Castillo, a parent in Miami whose daughters, ages 11 and 12, attend another Academica-supported school, Pinecrest Cove Academy. “They made the kids feel very comfortable with this massive change in their little lives.”

Academica services 165 charter schools in eight states, including 133 in Florida. Somerset, Mater, Doral and Pinecrest are its main networks. According to the most rigorous and respected research on charter school outcomes, students in all four networks are making modest to large gains over like students in district schools.

It remains to be seen how well schools in any sector respond to what is an unprecedented crisis, and what the impacts will be on academic performance.

School districts are mobilizing quickly. In Florida, most of them still have a few days to prep before the bulk of students return to “school” March 30. To date, there’s been little coverage of how Florida’s 600-plus charter schools are coping (though there’s been a glimpse here and there for charters elsewhere.) Ditto for Florida’s 2,700 private schools. Some are proving nimble and capable. But given the big resource disparities, it’s an open question whether others with large numbers of low-income students have the technology and support they need to turn on a dime.

For Academica, online learning is familiar territory. The organization supports three virtual charters in Florida. It offers online courses for students in its other Florida schools. For a decade, it’s also had an international arm, Academica Virtual Education, that serves thousands of students in Europe who need dual enrollment classes to earn specialized diplomas.

Given the events in China, Zulueta said his team began considering, in January, the possibility of school closures in America. The urgency ramped up in February, when the spread of coronavirus in Italy began affecting Academica students in that country.

In mid-February, Academica-serviced schools in the U.S. sent questionnaires to parents, asking if they needed devices and/or connections for distance learning. They ordered what they needed to fill the gaps. When Gov. DeSantis made what was effectively a closure announcement March 13, Zulueta said, “we were already ready to rock and roll.”

The day after the announcement, Academica used online sessions to do basic training in online instruction for 150 administrators. Over that weekend, it trained 3,000 teachers. Meanwhile, schools distributed several thousand laptops to families, in some cases through drive-through pick-ups. Zulueta said the need ranged from 4 percent at some Academica client schools to 20 percent at others.

Schools also immediately let parents know what was coming Monday.

Zulueta, who has three daughters in Academica-serviced schools, witnessed the new normal at his kitchen table.

“They got up. They logged in. And they went right to class,” he said. His daughters and their classmates wore their usual uniforms. The schools did their best to stick to established bell schedules. “We wanted to keep it as close to what they did at school as possible.”

Like students at Academica-serviced schools throughout Florida, television production students at Doral Academy Preparatory High School have quickly adapted to a virtual learning environment.

Academica uses an online learning platform it created itself. It’s integrated with a number of other tools, including Zoom, the video conferencing software with the “Hollywood Squares” look.

Fernandez-Castillo, the mom at Pinecrest Cove Academy, said she watched over the weekend as friends who are Academica teachers practiced the new online platform with each other. Barrios, the Mater teacher, said she contacted her students’ parents after her training on Friday to tell them she would be testing the platform at 8 that night if they and their children wanted to join. Eight to 10 families did. But she still had some anxiety about Monday morning.

“I thought it was going to be a freak show,” Barrios said. “The computers are going to crash, the kids are not going to log in … “

That’s not what happened. Monday morning was “a little jagged,” she said, because some students experienced technical difficulties and couldn’t log in right on schedule at 8:30. But by 8:50, 90 percent of her students were in. “It was amazing,” she said.

Barrios and other teachers used Monday to get their students familiar with the new set up. Any glitches, like problems with Internet access, were minor, she said. Over the next few days, she and her students quickly cleared little hurdles, like students learning to keep their mics on mute until it was their time to speak, and how to use chat functions to indicate they had a question.

Barrios doesn’t think there’s a long-term substitute for the dynamics of an in-person classroom, where students, in her view, can more easily “bounce ideas off one another.” But as a next best thing, she said what her school is doing is far better than nothing, and not bad at all.

Fernandez-Castillo agreed, and pointed to other upsides. “Everybody’s thrilled with the way this has been done,” she said, referring to other parents. “I think it glued the (school) community together even more.”

December 31, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedParental ChoicePodcastSchool ChoiceVirtual Education

revisitED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill follows up with Pasco County Principal of the Year JoAnne Glenn

redefinED staff December 31, 2020
redefinED staff

On this episode, Tuthill touches base with one of the nation’s top online learning leaders. Glenn earned one of three “Digital Principal of the Year” nods from the National Association of Secondary School Principals. A founder of Pasco eSchool, which offers full- and part-time K-12 digital instruction, Glenn has led the expansion of mastery-based learning over the past 12 years and has been instrumental in creating a model for digital learning.  

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/JoanneGlennUPDATE_EDIT.mp3

The two discuss Glenn’s experience during the summer and fall of 2020 as enrollment for Pasco’s digital school increased 500% to serve nearly 3,200 full-time students. While she doesn’t anticipate many students shifting to full-time online instruction post-pandemic, she does think families will continue to look for online options to create more flexible schedules.

“We still have ongoing needs in areas that we’re continuing to collaborate around, but overall, I think we’re moving in the right direction.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

·       The massive increase in online student enrollment and the challenges of forecasting enrollment and staffing

·       Helping teachers develop within new learning modalities

·       Long-term changes Glenn anticipates as the result of the pandemic

·       Intentional development of digital content and the hope that districts become savvier consumers of it

To listen to Tuthill’s earlier podcast with Glenn, click HERE.

December 31, 2020 0 comment
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Coronavirus / COVID-19Education ChoiceFeaturedNewsParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool Choice

redefinED’s best of 2020: Academic ‘redshirting’ gives families relief but threatens heartburn for school districts

Lisa Buie December 30, 2020
Lisa Buie

Brody Cholnik, 5, struggled with virtual prekindergarten but is showing promise as a kindergartner at the Wesley Chapel Montessori School at Lexington Oaks. His mother, Nicole Cholnik, chose to send him to a private school so she and her husband, rather than the public school district, will be able to make the decision to have Brody repeat kindergarten if necessary.

Editor’s note: During the holiday season, redefinED is reprising the “best of the best” from our 2020 archives. This post originally published Nov. 4.

Even after eight months of pre-kindergarten, Brody Cholnik struggled to learn his ABCs.  Regular sessions with a private tutor and supplemental lessons at home helped, but Brody’s mother suspected something beyond her control was in play.

Her 4-year-old’s birthday wouldn’t come until several months after many of his classmates already had turned 5. She worried that it put him at a disadvantage. On top of that, Brody’s pre-kindergarten was held in the day care he attended as a toddler and he was accustomed to it being a setting for play.

“It was hard for him to transition from a play atmosphere to a school atmosphere,” Nicole Cholnik said.

Then last spring, just when Brody began showing progress, COVID-19 hit. The tutoring center closed. His pre-kindergarten class made a hasty retreat to Zoom. And Brody, who was still two months away from blowing out the candles on his 5-year-old birthday cake, fell further behind, prompting Cholnik to wonder: What if my son needs to repeat kindergarten?

When school officials told her that decision rested with the principal, not with her and her husband, Cholnik took matters into her own hands. She transferred Brody to a private Montessori school, a move that allows her to maintain control over her son’s fate when he turns 6 and is required by state law to be enrolled in school.

“If we decide as parents that he’s not ready for kindergarten, then next year when he goes to (his zoned school) he can do kindergarten again,” said Cholnik, who lives in a suburb just north of Tampa. “Or, if we feel he’s prepared enough and ready for first grade, we can give them the certificate of completion and put him into first grade.”

A controversial but growing trend

A parent’s choice to delay kindergarten, commonly called “academic redshirting,” became a hot topic in academic journals in the early 2000s. Author, journalist and public speaker Malcolm Gladwell put redshirting on the public radar in 2008 with his bestselling book “Outliers,” championing the practice and arguing that the practice made a difference in a student’s long-term success.

Over the years, redshirting has been argued about in countless parenting blogs, journals and news stories, with critics saying it can harm children later in school.

There are many pieces in play. Research indicates the phenomenon tends to happen more frequently in white families, and more often with boys than girls. Because redshirting can require families to pay for an extra year of day care or kindergarten fees, it’s more common among those whose incomes fall in the middle or upper brackets, prompting equity concerns.

One argument supporters make in favor of redshirting is that when families hold children back a year, the child then likely will be the oldest and possibly most mature in his or her class, and therefore possibly more able to successfully compete in academics and sports.

Redshirting has taken on a new prominence in the COVID-19 environment as schools nationwide began reporting falling enrollments, especially in the kindergarten ranks, with the start of the 2020-21 academic year. According to an NPR survey of 100 school districts, the average kindergarten enrollment drop was 16%.

The survey attributed the decline partially to the emergency pivot to online learning in the spring. The negative experiences left some families dissatisfied and in search of other options, especially in districts that started the new school year 100% online. One parent of a 5-year-old boy in Texas told NPR she had concerns regardless of whether the school opened online or in-person because an in-person experience was going to be “weirdly socially distanced and masked.”

Though the parent chose not to delay kindergarten for her son, she did send him to a private school where masks were optional and class sizes were smaller.

High stakes for empty seats

Some Florida school districts experienced enrollment declines as well, especially in the early grades. An October student count in Palm Beach County showed enrollment for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in district schools at 187,776, the lowest level since 2016.

Kindergarten saw the biggest hit, with a decrease of 1,416 students, or 12%, compared with the previous fall. The figures prompted district chief financial officer Mike Burke to speculate that parents were delaying their children’s entry into school. It also caused district leaders to begin worrying how the enrollment decline would affect education funding for the district.

Though local property taxes contribute to education funding, districts depend on per-student funding based on the number of students occupying seats. At the start of the 2020-21 school year, districts were able to shield their funding by striking a deal with the state that allowed them to maintain pre-pandemic funding levels in exchange for reopening brick-and-mortar campuses. That deal expires at the end of first semester, leaving administrators bracing for draconian funding cuts in the spring.

‘A tough conversation’

For the Cholniks and other families who are sitting it out this year, learning is still happening, although it may be unique ways, such as reading books together at home and playing with Nerf guns, or enrolling in a private kindergarten that gives the parents the option of having their child take a second shot at kindergarten next year.

Brody has made progress at his private school, but Cholnik predicts he will end up having to repeat kindergarten. In the meantime, she has scheduled testing to see if he has a learning disability. If tests uncover an issue that has “a simple fix,” there’s a chance Brody could move on to first grade next year.

But Cholnik would rather have Brody repeat kindergarten than enter first grade behind his peers, and eventually have to repeat fourth grade if he fails the standardized test the state requires for public school promotion.

“That would be a tough conversation to have at that age,” she said. “That’s why we’re taking this route now.”

 

 

December 30, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedMicroschoolsPodcastSchool Choice

revisitED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill follows up with Prenda CEO Kelly Smith

redefinED staff December 30, 2020
redefinED staff

On this episode, Tuthill catches up with the founder and CEO of Arizona-based Prenda, an organization on the front lines of the micro-school tsunami that has soared during the global pandemic.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Kelly-SmithUPDATE_EDIT.mp3

Smith describes how these home-learning environments, catering to fewer than a dozen similarly aged students, are gaining traction among families looking for creative education options. Amidst rampant uncertainty and accelerated changes to public education, micro-schools and other smaller “pod” education formations are sweeping the country – and blending mastery-based education with peer collaboration.

Smith discusses Prenda’s expansion into Colorado and his team’s experiences in working with partners to bring micro-schools to as many communities as possible, noting he’s inspired by those in district schools who see the importance of adding micro-schools to their portfolio of options. He believes there are passionate visionaries and leaders working inside traditional systems, stepping up and taking risks against the wishes of institutional pushback.

“The genie is out of the bottle (on micro-schools) … Families are reporting their child is engaged, and the format really works … A safe comfortable environment right in the neighborhood can be empowering and kids can come out of their shell.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

·       Prenda’s most recent year and lessons learned during the pandemic

·       Assuaging parents’ fears about shifting from factory-model education and toward intrinsic, organic learning

·       The regulatory environment in particular states and Prenda’s plan for expansion

·       How school districts have stepped up to encourage micro-schools

·       The challenges that lie ahead

To listen to Tuthill’s earlier podcast with Smith, click HERE.

 

December 30, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedParental ChoicePodcastSchool ChoiceVirtual Education

revisitED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill follows up with public education pioneer Julie Young

redefinED staff December 29, 2020
redefinED staff

On this episode, Tuthill touches back with the vice president of education outreach and student services at Arizona State University, who also serves as managing director of Arizona State University’s Prep Academy and ASU Prep Digital.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/JulieYoungUPDATE_EDIT.mp3

Young, who has been celebrated as an education disruptor for nearly three decades, was founding CEO and president of Florida Virtual School, the world’s first statewide virtual school and one of the nation’s largest K-12 online educator providers.

The two discuss Young’s experience during the last few months of the COVID-19 pandemic that upended public education and accelerated massive education change. Young talks about the 700% increase in full-time students at ASU Prep Digital, which now serves more than 300,000 worldwide. Both Tuthill and Young believe new models of hybrid education will remain a part of public education post-pandemic.

“People swimming with (the changes in public education) are beginning to realize there are new and different ways of learning, that one size does not fit all.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

·       What Young has learned during the pandemic, what has worked, and improvement opportunities for the future

·       The creation of the Arizona Virtual Teacher Institute and Arizona’s support in empowering teachers’ evolution and skill development

·       How public school districts can ride the wave of emerging learning modes such as pods and micro-schools

·       Content development changes and new strategies that have emerged during the last school year

To listen to Tuthill’s earlier podcast with Young, click HERE.

December 29, 2020 0 comment
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