Coronavirus / COVID-19

Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Dan LipsDemographic ResearchEducation and Public PolicyFeatured

Commentary: Where the nation’s largest school districts stand on reopening

Dan Lips
Dan Lips

Editor’s note: redefinED guest blogger Dan Lips wrote this analysis on school reopenings amid the coronavirus pandemic for The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

Fifty of the nation’s 120 largest school districts remain fully closed as of mid-October 2020, according to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity’s latest review. This is an improvement from August, when 71 of these districts were closed. Altogether, currently closed school districts serve 5.2 million children, including an estimated 1.15 million children living in poverty.

Many of the closed school districts have no current timeline for reopening in-person learning. Several of these large school districts — such as Albuquerque, N.M., Howard County, Md., Long Beach Unified, Calif., and Cumberland County, N.C. — have announced that schools will be closed through December.

At least eight of these school districts have no announced or proposed timeline for returning to in-person learning. Table 1 provides an overview of the current operating status and school enrollment of the top 120 school districts.

To view the chart and to continue reading, click here.

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Demographic ResearchEducation and Public PolicyFeaturedJonathan Butcher

In staying closed, schools ignore low COVID-19 rates, needs of families

Jonathan Butcher
Jonathan Butcher

Editor’s note: This commentary from redefinED guest blogger Jonathan Butcher first appeared Oct. 21 on The Daily Signal.

At what would normally be the end of the first academic quarter for most K-12 schools, millions of students still have not set foot in a classroom.

Many haven’t done so since March.

Evidence continues to mount that COVID-19 affects children the least, and ad hoc school district e-learning platforms, hastily assembled in the spring, are driving families away from assigned schools.

Some of the largest school districts in the U.S. are still offering only online instruction, despite reports of losing contact with thousands of students from Philadelphia to Houston to Los Angeles, when districts went online earlier this year. According to reports, districts still have not been able to reach those students.

School officials have the unenviable task of balancing health and safety concerns with student learning; those leaders should be considering the research on the spread of COVID-19 and the needs of local families and children in making reopening decisions. Yet some district leaders are doing neither.

Parents have led protests in favor of reopening schools across the country, from San Diego to Baltimore and places in between.

Furthermore, at this point in the pandemic, research demonstrates that schools have not become so-called super-spreader sites – not even close.

The latest figures from Brown University researchers found a confirmed case rate among students of 0.14% in a database of nearly 1,300 schools. As explained in The Wall Street Journal this week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers show hundreds more fatal cases of the flu among school-aged children than COVID-19.

Two studies profiled on NPR recently found “no consistent relationship between in-person schooling and the spread of coronavirus.”

Yet are these low numbers the result of keeping schools closed? Findings from international studies and the available evidence from K-12 private schools in the U.S. that are open to in-person learning suggest that’s not the case.

The Brown research includes data from private schools. In fact, the case rate for private schools operating in person is still only 0.15% – admittedly 0.15% – admittedly with a smaller sample size, but still an encouraging number. The case rates for staff in those schools stands at 0.4%.

Teachers unions in some areas are ignoring those facts.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, where officials are already charging families for the use of school buildings for in-person day care, the union is demanding that public schools stay closed to in-person learning until August 2021.

That announcement followed news from school officials of a phased-in reopening in the coming weeks, a plan that includes basic protocols about maintaining spacing between students and asking parents to keep a student home if he or she shows symptoms.

Despite statements by federal officials last summer about tying federal spending for schools to reopening plans, Washington will not have to withhold spending for schools to feel the effects of frustrated parents.

At the start of the school year, schools in Washington, D.C., were reporting a drop in enrollment of 13%. Houston is reporting 7% fewer students; Orlando, Florida, a decline of 5%; and in Nashville, Tennessee, enrollment is down nearly 5%.

Meanwhile, private school closures have slowed, and since the middle of the summer, homeschooling numbers have soared.

In Connecticut, homeschool advocates are reporting higher figures than ever before, and interest in homeschooling has “exploded,” according to Minnesota Public Radio. The Texas Homeschool Coalition reports a 400% increase in students compared with last year.

Similar news can be found around the country. Learning pods, where parents bring together small groups of children during the school day to learn, continue to spread, and with each passing day, pods become less of a fad and more of a permanent solution.

Local school leaders’ evaluations of the health evidence remain a mystery, and many officials have not met parent and student needs during the pandemic. Now, families are leaving, reminding everyone that we should make students the priority of policy solutions, not the system.

Federal and state policymakers have used the bully pulpit to implore schools to reopen, but the most effective persuasion will be the kind that assigned district schools like the least – namely, fewer students.

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Coronavirus / COVID-19Demographic ResearchFeaturedNewsPrivate SchoolsSchool Choice

Survey of scholarship schools shows few have received federal COVID-19 relief

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

More than three months after the CARES Act appropriated billions of dollars to aid the education of low-income students in public and private schools, most eligible private schools in Florida have yet to see financial relief according to a recent survey of participating private schools conducted by Step Up for Students, which hosts this blog.

The nation’s largest state-approved nonprofit scholarship funding organization helps administer five scholarship programs in Florida, including two that are income-based programs, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and the Family Empowerment Scholarship, as well as the Gardiner Scholarship for students with unique abilities.

The Step Up survey asked more than 1,000 schools that participate in Florida’ scholarship programs questions about the Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), declining enrollment, and distance learning. Participants returned 662 completed surveys and 140 partial surveys.

Of 683 schools that provided responses regarding ESSER funding, 61%, or 415 schools, reported they qualified for the funding. But of those schools, nearly three-quarters – 74% – said they have not received any emergency funds.

Congress made available $13.2 billion to help stabilize K-12 education funding this summer amidst a global pandemic and rising unemployment. The U.S. Department of Education subsequently was sued over its directive on how to calculate the share provided to private schools. Though the U.S. Department of Education declined to appeal, it noted that local education agencies still were required to share the funds based on the enrollment of low-income students attending private schools.

Fifty-seven percent of survey respondents reported enrollment declines. “Unable to afford tuition” was cited in 63.7% of cases as to why parents no longer were enrolling their child. Forty-five percent of schools (298) expressed concern about losing new students because of the Family Empowerment Scholarship’s prior-year public school attendance requirement.

Additionally, the survey found that 54% of private schools worried that declining enrollment would impact their viability.

Though troubling, these findings nevertheless are more positive than those reported earlier in the pandemic. In April, 73% of private schools reported declining enrollments.

Overall, private school enrollment among lower-income students remains steady. For 2020-21, approximately 130,000 students are utilizing income-based scholarships, up slightly from last year, although these are preliminary enrollment figures.

The Florida Department of Education is expected to release its first-quarter enrollment reports either this month or in November.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParental ChoicePodcastSchool Choice

podcastED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill interviews education choice advocate Derrell Bradford: Part 1

redefinED staff
redefinED staff

In the first of a two-part conversation, Tuthill talks with the charismatic executive vice president of 50CAN, a national advocacy organization that supports education choice policies on a state-by-state basis.

Bradford’s straightforward analysis of complex education issues has earned him a sterling reputation in the education choice world, but his advocacy is personal. He recalls on the podcast a conversation between his mother and grandmother when he was growing up in southwest Baltimore about their decision to send him to a middle school out of his neighborhood zone to improve his educational outcome.

He also discusses two of his new policy papers – Fund Everything and Measure Everything – co-authored with 50CAN founder Marc Porter Magee. Inspired in part by the wide support for direct universal government assistance in the wake of COVID-19, the papers explain how to structure that support to solve a plethora of education problems that existed long before the pandemic.

“Parents and kids are trying to solve problems that are emergent … or created because a (school district) doesn’t want to play ball … What would you do if you were that parent that needed to solve that problem? The fundamental precondition has got to be a right to choose.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

·       Bradford’s education roots and his realization that education choice shaped his future

·       How 50CAN adapts its policy support based on each state’s landscape and political dynamics

·       What Bradford aims to accomplish with the Fund Everything and Measure Everything policy papers

·       How to pay and reward teachers in a Fund Everything education landscape

LINKS MENTIONED:

Fund Everything – Emergency Education Investments in a National Crisis (Direct PDF link)

Measure Everything – Emergency Data Collection in a National Crisis (Direct PDF link)

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParental ChoiceSchool Choice

‘Social justice issue of our era’ front and center during pandemic

Keith Jacobs
Keith Jacobs

Middle class, suburban families,  once likely opponents of education choice, are now rallying behind the right to choose where to send their children to school. 

All it took was a pandemic that suddenly limited their options.

Since the spring, school districts across the nation grappling with COVID-19 have closed their brick-and-mortar doors and moved students to online learning.  Many families already irate over mask mandates and restricted access outside their homes were overwhelmed by an explosion of anger, shock, tears, and questions about their children being forced to learn in an unfamiliar environment where they may not succeed. 

These families are finally advocating for education choice. Recent polls show an increase in support for choice among parents with children in public schools.

Welcome aboard!

For decades limited options have been the everyday reality for millions of low-income families trapped in their ZIP code, their children forced to attend a public school assigned them by a district. These parents have been denied their right to choose the schools that work best for their children.  The pandemic also has forced them to figure out how to educate their children at home when they are deemed ”essential workers,” while also facing the harsh reality of the digital divide.  They need flexible spending options to purchase technology and other learning resources.

These low-income families have been denied the privilege of having options because too many suburban families and politicians have refused to acknowledge that parent choice must be available to all.  Choice promotes equity in education and provides access to opportunities to close both the wealth and achievement gaps.

Furthermore, these suburban families and policy makers have opposed education choice under the guise of preserving public education.  They lead you to believe that attending your local public school is the best choice for parents even though 48 percent of Florida students, or 1.7 million, are now attending something other than their zoned schools.

This has been a rallying cry for low-income families fighting for the right to choose.  Ironically, suburban families are now echoing these same sentiments. They’ve always exercised choice by having the means to live in their preferred school attendance zone. Now that they have had that avenue blocked by pandemic-closed brick-and-mortar schools, they are finally seeing how restricting access and opportunity are detrimental to their child’s success.

In response, some of these suburban families are turning to “pandemic pods.”  These pods provide them the option of gathering a small group of students and hiring a teacher to help with online or hybrid learning.  Although innovative, they also can be exclusionary, reinforcing racial and socioeconomic segregation, because most low-income families can’t afford to pay for this level of service. This further demonstrates how privilege and financial flexibility continue to be the acceptable form of education choice.

The hypocrisy of this position is that these same families and policy makers who often declare they “can’t support programs that take money from public schools” are doing exactly that with these pandemic pods.  What they really mean is that they support the traditional public education system right up until they feel their choices have been restricted, and can thus use their financial capital to exercise choice.

Low-income families are entitled to the same fulfillment of equal opportunity. They shouldn’t have to fight to exercise these rights.  They should be able to spend their education dollars as they see fit – on technology, on pods, whatever works best. They need allies like the suburban families and lawmakers who understand that some parents already have a right to choose. 

Have these suburban families who typically oppose education choice options decided to join the fight for education equity?  One can hope.

If necessity is the mother of invention, this is the right time to support the social justice issue of our era by supporting a parent’s right to choose — while being provided the means and flexibility to make that choice. Now more than ever, we all need options.

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Coronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipNewsParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool ChoiceTechnology and Innovation

Reopening online was right choice for this faith-based Orlando school

Lisa Buie
Lisa Buie

Alpha Learning Academy fifth-grader Kamille Green started the new school year at her dining room table after a parent survey informed school leaders that most families were not ready to return to in-person learning.

Shakelia Henderson found herself in a tough spot.

The principal of Alpha Learning Academy had planned for a brick-and-mortar school re-opening based on declining COVID-19 numbers at the start of the summer, bolstered by parent surveys indicating families wanted their children back on campus. She and her team were excitedly making plans to be one of five Florida schools chosen to participate in a research project that required the use of a new curriculum.

But then in July, the number of coronavirus cases started climbing. Alpha families worried about health risks to their children and began having second thoughts about sending them to class. Some teachers also expressed concern about the risks of face-to-face instruction.

Henderson had to step back and reconsider. Should she forge ahead, as many other schools around the state were doing, and hope for the best? Or should she reopen online and have faith that her staff would be able to embrace the new ways of teaching in a virtual scenario?

Once again, she turned to her families, asking them to participate in another survey. Based on the response, Alpha Learning Academy classes resumed Aug. 31, all online.

Looking back, says Henderson, an experienced administrator who plans to pursue a doctorate at the University of Central Florida, she and her staff made the right choice.

“Taking a look at where we were and ordering PPE materials, I know school building-wise and maintenance-wise we weren’t ready,” she said. “A lot of our children have grandparents living in the home. There were so many layers to the decision.”

While parents elsewhere in the state and the nation staged protests and sued districts when their schools chose to reopen online, Alpha Learning Academy’s families embraced the decision to hold off. Based on reports from some experts, race may have played a role.

Districts where the vast majority of students are white have been more than three times as likely to reopen in person as school districts that enroll mostly students of color according to an analysis conducted by the Associated Press and Chalkbeat. The analysis attributed those findings in part to the fact that the pandemic has hit minority communities disproportionately hard, prompting more parents there to favor online learning.

Meanwhile, a survey of parents by the advocacy group EdChoice showed that 26% of Black parents said they were “extremely likely” to choose remote learning in the fall compared with 20% of white and Hispanic parents. In a related poll, Education Next found Black and Hispanic parents were more satisfied than white parents with their e-learning experiences.

Henderson sees her school reflected in those statistics.

Alpha Learning Academy, launched nearly 25 years ago, is sponsored by a church with predominantly Black membership. Nearly all its students are Black. All 144 participate in state scholarship programs, with 62% receiving the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, administered by Step Up For Students, host of this blog.

From the first day of the new school year, things have run smoothly, and enrollment has held steady, Henderson said.

“Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, our students beamed with joy to have the interaction and learning experience,” she said.

The transition to the new curriculum has gone smoothly as well.

“They are delivering it like a champ,” she said of her teachers. “Parents are seeing a difference in their children’s math and reading, and they really like the critical thinking skills they are seeing.”

While the pandemic undeniably has been a source of stress, it’s also been a motivator for the school, spurring creativity and innovation. Henderson has launched an online app called Group Me to organize her teachers and parents into collaborative groups for streamlined communication, recognition and celebration, a direct result of the need to move to online learning.

Henderson said she will reassess soon whether to reopen campus for the second quarter, which starts at the end of the month.

It won’t be easy. The school’s footprint is small, and common spaces such as the lobby are shared with the school’s sponsor, St. Mark AME Church. Henderson is working on enhancing safety protocols such as having students remain in cohorts, having teachers rotate among classes to reduce student movement, and possibly using the church fellowship hall to allow for more social distancing.  

Henderson recognizes that choices are important, and she wants to offer as many as possible so that each family can decide what is best for their child.

“We are currently exploring if we want to provide more options for parents such as modified schedules and continuing distance learning,” she said. “We are keeping a close eye on COVID-19 numbers and reports from the Department of Health to help us make the best decision.”

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Achievement GapCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Featured

Social science, climate change, shutdowns and achievement gaps

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

As a young graduate student, I participated in an exercise that should be routinely practiced in social science training.

Our statistical methods professor gave us an article published in a top political science journal and provided the same data used by the authors.

Our assignment was to replicate the results. The authors described the methods they used in the article, we despite having the same data, try as we might, none of us could replicate the results.

Our professor had taught us an important lesson about social “science” without having to say it out loud: caveat emptor.

All kinds of things can go wrong in social science research, some errors more innocent than others, so an informed consumer will be looking for results across multiple studies using higher quality methods and from scholars willing to share their data for others to examine. In situations where data is not shared and methods are complex and opaque, the opportunities for mischief multiply rapidly.

Having a press that tends to breathlessly report on studies that confirm pre-existing political narratives is not helpful, as these invariably travel around the world well before there has been time for replication or scrutiny.

This all came to mind recently when I read the following about research claiming to demonstrate that warm weather negatively impacts the academic achievement of students – but only Black and Hispanic students:

In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers found that students performed worse on standardized tests for every additional day of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, even after controlling for other factors. Those effects held across 58 countries, suggesting a fundamental link between heat exposure and reduced learning.

But when the researchers looked specifically at the United States, using more granular data to break down the effect on test scores by race, they found something surprising: The detrimental impact of heat seemed to affect only Black and Hispanic students.

So, could there be a correlation between climate and student learning?

There could be, and there should be more research performed. Do we have reasons to be skeptical? I would say we do. Florida, for instance, gets plenty of days of 80 degree plus weather, but here are the academic trends for White, Black and Hispanic students on NAEP:

That looks a lot like across-the-board improvement to these eyes. The percentage of Florida Black students scoring “Basic or Better” more than doubling between 1992 and 2019 in balmy Florida does not mean there is no role for climate, but it does seem it’s possible to overcome whatever that role may be.

I happen to live in a desert in a state (Arizona) which has a large majority of the state’s students living in Maricopa County, the greater Phoenix area, which is a desert – and a hot one to boot. Stanford University recently compiled data that allows us to compare academic growth rates by county. Maricopa County Hispanic students had an academic growth rate 16% above the national average during the period covered by the Stanford data (2009 to 2016) and Maricopa County Black students were 11% above the national average.

Delightfully, Arizona kids did not get the climate memo either.

Currently, approximately half of white students have access to in-person learning compared to only one-quarter of Black and Hispanic students. A recent analysis of district reopening decisions found politics and teacher union strength to be more influential than COVID-19 trends. The same analysis found that districts with more Catholic schools were more likely to reopen for in-person education.

Luckily for them, in my opinion.

This study, of course, deserves the same sort of scrutiny that the previous one discussed. I fear, however, that we have far more immediate concerns regarding growing achievement gaps than climate change.

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