TOP TASKS

Express gratefulness for educators and advocates who have navigated a challenging year

When the American education system confronted a challenge unlike any it had seen before, educators and advocacy leaders across the country stepped up to meet the moment. Parent groups organized to ensure that the voices and experiences of families were being heard by public officials. Educators and innovators built new online curricula and shared best practices to strengthen virtual learning. District leaders, grappling with immense financial and logistical challenges, found new ways to connect with students. And policy advocates helped ensure that new resources made their way directly to students and their families.

Over the past 40 weeks, we featured the work of countless educators and advocates making a difference in 2020. Here are some of favorites:

• Keri Rodrigues and her team launched the National Parents Union to give voice to low-income parents, parents of color and special needs parents, among others. Their toolkits and polling have already proved invaluable to many families and policymakers across the country.
• Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion, has been a guiding light for many educators as they’ve navigated the shift to online learning. His new book, Teaching in the Online Classroom, is out now, and we discussed the highlights in a 50CAN video interview.
• ConnCAN’s Subira Gordon ensured that fixing the inequitable technological divide was an early priority in the Constitution State, in what became a blueprint for many other states across the country.
• Chris Stewart of Brightbeam and Citizen Ed held a series of discussions with educators and advocates, “Education is Power,” that were both provocative and informative.
• Dr. Susan Dyrnaski pointed out the economic crisis awaiting American schools in a New York Times editorial, galvanizing a national conversation.
• Nina Rees, among others, played a critical role in demanding that stimulus dollars go where they were most needed.
• I was thankful for the opportunity, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, to hold a candid conversation with 50CAN’s Derrell Bradford.
• Superintendent Chad Gestson of Phoenix Union emerged early on as a model of district leadership during the pandemic, coupling bold thinking and a relentless focus on the student experience to solve problems other districts couldn’t surmount.
• Sarah Carpenter and her Powerful Parent Network proved that no politician had too big a spotlight to be held accountable for policy positions that would affect parents of color.

Express gratefulness for the education journalists who kept us informed

Back in March, we issued a call for districts to find the missing kids, spurred by exceptional reporting from Howard Blume and Sonali Kohli of the Los Angeles Times. Within days, that reporting was coupled with other pieces from the New York Times and Huffington Post that sparked immediate actions by districts across the country. It was an early indicator of the deeply important role that education journalists would play in informing the public about the state of an education system in crisis. They did so, often without the ability to meet sources in person, and shaped our understanding of both the pandemic and how our schools were responding.

Here are some of the stories we found the most illuminating in 2020:

• The CT Mirror‘s Jaqueline Rabe Thomas, in the first major article we published in this newsletter, identified the technological equity gaps that would become a major problem for advocates and officials to solve during the early pandemic.
• Erica Green, writing for The New York Times, powerfully examined Covid-19’s effect on the lives and education of incarcerated students in the juvenile justice system.
• Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat was among the first to really dig into the immense impact that school closures and the economic downturn would have on student learning.
• Alexander Russo’s The Grade covered a huge number of education stories this year, but one of our favorites was a long-form take on the need for more coverage of educational redlining.
• Dana Goldstein of the New York Times highlighted the widening of achievement gaps during the pandemic, including portraits of both low and high-income families.
• Rebecca Klein and Emily Peck, of the Huffington Post, examined the pandemic’s potential generational impact.
• Eliza Shapiro, writing about the local politics of New York City, portrayed the chaotic education decisions made by the nation’s largest school district in a way that resonated and drew parallels with those being made across the country.

Key Resources

Over the course of 2020, we shared hundreds of resources for advocates, educators, district leaders and policymakers to consider. Here are 15 of the most widely-shared:

• EdWeek created a district and state closure map that, particularly in the ever-shifting first months of the pandemic, proved to be invaluable.
• CRPE’s tracking of districts throughout the pandemic became a key resource for many advocates and journalists struggling to gain clarity of what was happening across the country.
• Chiefs for Change, which played a critical role in helping district leaders understand best practices in an unprecedented situation, curated an essential resource page.
• yes. every kid’s “Learn Everywhere” campaign gave parents, suddenly thrust into the role of educators, a valuable guide. They also launched a pandemic policy playbook, setting priorities of flexibility and family empowerment that informed a number of advocacy efforts over the past months.
• The National Conference of State Legislatures maintained a bill tracker on public education’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• EdChoice examined the financial impact of parents exercising a greater amount of choice during the pandemic.
• Success Academy made the early decision to release six weeks of their distance learning plans, giving educators a much-needed resource.
• EdBuild’s “Clean Slate” report charted ways to reform school financing systems to get more dollars into school buildings.
• FutureED took up the question of assessment and measurement during the pandemic, offering a blueprint for how schools should assess.
• McKinsey looked at the economic impact of the learning loss caused by Covid-19, with dramatic findings.
• NPR tracked the shift in student enrollment, including the drift away from district schools as a result of the pandemic.
• Bellwether looked at the financial levers available to districts to avoid children experiencing the brunt of major cuts.
• The State Policy Network looked at regulations facing learning pods and how they could be removed.