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5 ways schools have shifted in 5 years since COVID-19
The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago. Access to high-quality teachers and curriculum developed by teachers is shrinking, for example. Likewise, there has been a loss of emotional support for students and a decline in the school use of technology and social media. As education scholars focused on literacy practices in schools, we’ve identified five ways we believe the COVID-19 pandemic – and the rapid shift to remote learning and back – has transformed education:The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago. Access to high-quality teachers and curriculum developed by teachers is shrinking, for example. Likewise, there has been a loss of…
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Marion Joseph’s literacy crusade for teaching
phonics in California is paying off Dan Walters March 19, 2023 Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – one person can have a life-changing impact on the wellbeing of millions of people. Marion Joseph, who died nearly a year ago at age 95, was one of those people. She impacted millions of California schoolchildren present and future who struggle with reading comprehension, the vital skill that underlies all of education. The pandemic underscored that too many of California’s elementary school students lack effective reading ability. EdSource noted that, prior to the pandemic, fewer than 50% of the state’s third-graders were reading at the expected level for their age. Three years later, after students…
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Can learning cursive help kids read better?
Some policymakers think it’s worth a try Shawn Datchuk May 6, 2025 Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.” Then he handed it to me to read. If you have a child in the Philadelphia School District, chances are they have not been taught how to read or write cursive either. But cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States. Several states in recent years passed legislation mandating instruction in cursive handwriting, including California, Iowa and Oklahoma. Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as are other states. I’m an associate professor of…
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‘Number sense’ is one of the building blocks of math
By Holly Korbey February 19, 2025 The building blocks of math that students need to excel — but aren’t always getting ATLANTA — Students gathered around a bright blue number board in Melissa Williams’ kindergarten class at the Westminster School, gazing at the bank of 100 blank squares, organized in rows and columns of 10. Their assignment was to pick a numbered tile and figure out where it should go on the board. The task seems simple, but Williams’ goal was to bolster students’ “number sense” — a difficult-to-define skill, but one that is nevertheless essential for more advanced mathematics. One student with a “42” tile carefully counted the…
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Why it matters that Americans are comparatively bad at math
by JON MARCUS September 26, 2023 Employers, experts raise new alarms about competitiveness and national security Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates. “They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, who is 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.” Tran also loves math. He was speaking during a break in a Boston city program for promising local high school students to study calculus for five hours a day throughout the summer at Northeastern University. And his observation was surprisingly apt. At a time when Americans joke about how bad…
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How the ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ Fable Reveals the Folly of Student Loan Forgiveness
Michael Heberling Michael Heberling is the Chair of Leadership Studies in the Baker College MBA program in Flint, Michigan. Prior to this, he was President of Baker’s Center for Graduate Studies for 16 years. Before Baker, Dr. Heberling was a Senior Policy & Business Analyst with the Anteon Corporation. He also had a career in the Air Force retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. Dr. Heberling has over 75 business and public policy publications. His research interests focus on leadership, military history and the impact of public policy on the business community. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network
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Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you
Julie Boland, Robin Queen I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all. We were curious: what makes our reactions so different? We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others. What prior research tells us Writing errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types…
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Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you Julie Boland, Robin Queen I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all. We were curious: what makes our reactions so different? We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others. What prior research tells us Writing…
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A Teachers Union Shaped CDC School Guidance. Is That a Problem?
The influence of the union has prompted debate over its role in scientific decision making. BY HANNAH THOMASY June 10, 2021 WHEN THE U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued much-anticipated guidelines for school reopening in February, some critics argued that the nation’s premier health agency had set unreasonably strict standards for schools to follow. But the two largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, long hesitant about reopening schools amid the Covid-19 pandemic, rallied in support of the document. “For the first time since the start of this pandemic, we have a rigorous road map, based on science, that our members can…
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Held Back: Inside a Lost School Year
Thompson converted her daughters’ bedroom into a teaching space. Credit:Cydni Elledge, special to ProPublica Elledge, special to ProPublica Teacher Ashlee Thompson had a lot to worry about this year: A deadly virus. A poor district under threat by the state. And now, a new mandate for her students: Learn to read or flunk the third grade. Editor’s note: ProPublica obtained parents’ consent to feature their children in this story. Ashlee Thompson turned on her camera. At the other end of the screen one morning last September was a third grader she’d never taught. To assess his reading, Thompson showed the boy a string of letters. S B C He made a…
