by Anna North, VOX

Hybrid learning was supposed to be an improvement.
When school buildings closed in the spring due to the pandemic, students, teachers, and families all struggled with remote classes. But come fall, the virus was still raging across much of America. So many districts — including the nation’s largest, New York City — struck a compromise.
They would bring kids into buildings, but only for part of the day or week. That way, they’d reduce the number of students in schools at any one time, limiting viral spread, while still giving students crucial in-person time with their teachers and peers.
That was the idea, anyway. In practice, however, hybrid models could turn out to be the worst of both worlds, as David Zweig predicted at Wired in July.
To begin with, hybrid schedules don’t really solve one of the pandemic’s biggest problems for parents: the lack of child care. While having kids in school a few days a week or a few hours a day might give parents a bit more flexibility to do their jobs, “the benefits of being able to work a little less part-time and a little less erratically are not going to be anything like what you’d be getting from full-time school,” Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Center for American Progress who studies the impact of child care, told Vox.
And while some parents may be able to stay home with their kids on the days they’re out of school, others will need outside child care. That means kids will spend part of the week in child care centers, camps, pods, or other group arrangements — all of which increase their potential exposure to the virus, which they can then bring into their schools. “I do wonder if we are actually creating more problems through the hybrid model because now we are allowing more time for more exposures to occur,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told Vox.
Hybrid models appear to do one thing they’re supposed to do: They give kids a little bit of the in-person interaction they missed out on in the spring. But some say there are better ways of achieving that goal, from outdoor classrooms to prioritizing in-person school for younger students, who often struggle the most with remote learning.
Education during the pandemic is an incredibly difficult problem — “people are trying really, really hard to solve this,” Madowitz noted. But it may be a case where the compromise solution is far from the best one.
Hybrid models are supposed to limit the spread of Covid-19. Experts worry they might do the opposite.American schools began weighing the idea of hybrid instruction in the late spring and early summer, when it became clear that Covid-19 would be far from gone at the start of the fall semester. Ultimately, about 12 percent of districts around the country were planning on a hybrid start as of late August, according to a survey by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. That percentage amounts to thousands of schools nationwide — New York City alone has over 1,800, serving more than 1.1 million students.
Hybrid models vary in their execution — some have students coming in only a few days per week, while others split students into morning and afternoon groups. But however they work, the idea is roughly the same: A hybrid schedule reduces the number of kids in each classroom at once to better allow for social distancing. It may also reduce the number of people each student interacts with in-person, since students often stay with cohorts that are smaller than their normal classes. And many districts are setting aside time in their hybrid schedules to deep-clean schools, although some have begun to raise questions about how much surface cleaning really matters when it comes to reducing viral spread, Nuzzo noted.
Beyond questions about the efficacy of cleaning, there are a couple of potential problems with hybrid schedules. For one thing, hybrid education doesn’t necessarily reduce the number of students each teacher has contact with, since they may teach multiple cohorts. That’s concerning because adults are at much greater risk of serious illness or death from the virus than children are. “Really, who we’re concerned about most in terms of reducing risk in a school environment is the teacher,” Nuzzo said.
Then there’s the question of what happens during the days or hours when students are remote. While some parents are caring for children at home during that time, others are enrolling kids in camps or child care centers — some of which are adapting to care for more school-aged kids. Still other families are bringing kids together in informal groups sometimes called “pods” to share child care responsibilities. Finally, older children may be getting together with friends without adult supervision.
Overall, if kids “are in some other care environment where they are now exposed to another group of people, then we may have effectively increased the number of people all having contact with each other over the course of a week,” Nuzzo said.
That, in turn, increases the likelihood that a student could bring Covid into school and infect others. A number of epidemiologists have raised this concern in recent months. For example, William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote in an August op-ed in the Washington Post that “hybrid school plans make it easier for the virus to transmit into schools, simply by producing more links between schools and families along which the virus can travel.”
So far, there’s little comprehensive data on Covid-19 and schools in the US, let alone on hybrid models, but some data does show troubling hints. For example, the Covid-19 Schools Response Dashboard, which pulls together case counts and other data from a selection of schools around the country, found that, as of September 22, staff infection rates were actually higher at schools using hybrid learning than at schools with fully in-person instruction. There could be reasons for this beyond the model itself — for example, dashboard co-creator Emily Oster told Vox that schools might be more likely to use a hybrid schedule if Covid-19 transmission rates in the area are already high.
Still, there’s little evidence in the data so far that hybrid schedules make schools safer, and according to experts, there’s a lot of cause for concern.


With kids home for much of the week, parents still face child care strugglesThe other, related problem of hybrid models is one of child care. In the spring, the closure of schools and day care centers caused a crisis for working parents around the country. The problem was most severe for women, who still shoulder the majority of caregiving responsibilities.
Women also lost a majority of the millions of jobs shed by the American economy early in the pandemic, and many economists feared that without a solution to the child care problem, even more women would be pushed out of the workforce. Mothers, especially those who are primary breadwinners, faced the prospect of “having to choose between making a living and taking care of their families,” Nicole Mason, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told Vox this summer.
Some economists — and families — looked to fall as a possible respite, when a resumption of school would allow moms to get back to work. That didn’t happen. Instead, many districts started the fall either in hybrid mode or fully remote.
Hybrid models may have provided some parents with a bit of a break — as Madowitz put it, “for a lot of parents, anything is better than nothing.” But for many others, a few days of child care and supervision isn’t that much better than no child care at all.
That may be especially true for parents in low-wage service jobs who don’t have a lot of control over their schedules. Hybrid models may also pose a particular problem for families that rely on grandparents or other older relatives for child care, Madowitz said, since the virus exposure of a partial week at school could put those relatives at risk. Indeed, more than half of New York City families have chosen all-remote rather than hybrid learning this fall, with some citing older family members as the reason.
With millions of kids still at home for at least part of the week, then, millions of parents — a majority of them moms — haven’t been able to return to their normal working hours. Instead of rebounding with the return of school, women’s employment plummeted this fall, with 865,000 women dropping out of the labor force in September, compared with just 216,000 men.
And while hybrid learning may be helping some parents get a bit more work in, “when you look at what’s been going on with jobs, its really hard to believe you’re gonna get this huge pop” in women’s employment from hybrid schooling alone, Madowitz said.
Not to mention, any child care break that parents get from hybrid schooling may be short-lived if schools have to return to remote instruction due to rising Covid-19 cases in the area. That’s already happened at more than 100 schools in New York City, which closed earlier this month due to growing clusters of the virus in Brooklyn and Queens. And New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that the entire school system will close if the city reaches 3 percent test positivity over a seven-day period. That means any parents who have been banking on school to facilitate their work schedules will have to scramble for another solution — or quit.
When it comes to women’s employment in particular, “I’m just deeply scared,” Madowitz said.
Hybrid models may benefit students, but there may be more creative solutions that would work betterThe biggest benefits of hybrid models are likely educational. “At least in the hybrid education models, the students are getting some real-time, in-person instruction,” as well as interaction with peers, which is important for social and emotional development, Emiliana Vegas, co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, told Vox.
“We know that students really thrive when they learn to collaborate,” she explained. “That’s really much harder to do in a remote setting, particularly for the younger children.”
While there’s little data so far on the effectiveness of hybrid models, there is data showing significant learning losses during all-remote school this spring, concentrated among low-income and Black and Latinx students. Experts hope that having at least some in-person time will mitigate these losses, Vegas said.
And some families have seen the benefits for their kids. Amy, a New Jersey mom who asked that her last name not be used, told Vox that remote school in the spring for her two sons, then 8 and 3, was “like a nightmare.” But with both boys in school on a hybrid model now, “this fall has been a lot better.”
Amy’s younger son, who has an autism spectrum diagnosis, “really needs the in-person guidance” and is getting occupational therapy and speech therapy during his four days at school. With him out of the house, it’s also a bit easier for his older brother to focus on remote school. He’s at home three days a week and in school for two, and though he was recently diagnosed with a visual processing disorder that can make Zoom lessons challenging, overall “things are pretty good if you’re looking at pandemic parameters,” Amy said.
While families like Amy’s are benefiting from hybrid schedules, in some districts the model doesn’t actually guarantee much in-person instruction. For example, Nuzzo said that one plan floated by her child’s district would have students come into classrooms for online lessons. “I’m not sure that that’s worth the hassle of leaving the house,” she said. “I don’t want him to be on a screen anymore if he’s going to be in a school building.”
And some fear that the educational benefits of a hybrid model could be negated by the sheer logistical challenges of bringing students into schools in the midst of a pandemic. New York City, for example, has been forced to put all its energy into health and safety, leaving little time to help teachers with the challenges of hybrid education, Tom Liam Lynch, editor-in-chief of the website InsideSchools, and a parent of a New York City sixth grader, told Vox.
Starting in the summer, parent concerns about actual pedagogy have gone unheard, Lynch said: “Parents are asking for the plan for high-quality instruction, and the city’s saying we have sanitizer.” Now it’s October, and there’s still “no leadership in terms of what constitutes high-quality learning and teaching,” he said.
Given these and other concerns, some are pushing for different solutions to the problems of pandemic education. For example, a lot of districts chose hybrid models because it was the only way to allow for social distancing within their school buildings, Nuzzo said. But districts could use outdoor space or temporary structures to make room for more kids. Alternatively, younger children could be brought back first, freeing up larger high-school buildings to host elementary-school classes.
Overall, there’s been a lack of creativity around physical space when it comes to schools, Nuzzo argues: “Think about places that were able to create hospitals and have tents and things like that, and yet we haven’t applied that level of thinking with respect to schools.”
There’s also the potential for rethinking what school buildings are for. In New York City, a lot of the conversation around reopening schools (and closing them in the first place) has been around the crucial social services schools provide, from child care to meals for food-insecure students. Instead of trying to reopen schools on a hybrid model, the district could have focused on delivering those face-to-face services while keeping instruction remote, Lynch said.
Such a solution “would have freed up building principals to be able to very creatively use millions of square footage of New York City school building space for tons of non-academic services,” Lynch said. “You could have child care at your local school in some form; you could have access to guidance, to meals, to a nurse; you could have even informal clubs and other kinds of activities that students could come in for.”
But so far, such a solution isn’t on the table in New York City. And overall, in a time when policymakers are faced with many competing priorities, schools can often feel like an afterthought.
“I am very frustrated about governments that have made faster decisions to reopen restaurants and bars and movie theaters and public gatherings well in advance of opening schools,” Nuzzo said. “It just feels like very short-term thinking.”

By Steven Yoder, Washington Post

ITHACA, N.Y. — On a frigid Thursday in February, math teacher Marietta Gibb was warming up her sixth-graders at DeWitt Middle School with some algebraic expressions. She showed the students a video to review the math, and then sent them scattering to different tables to practice the exercises they had found challenging.

“We don’t want anything too easy, because if you go to the gym and you pick up two pounds, what purpose is that?” Gibb said as she encouraged her students to select math problems at their individual levels. “[And] we don’t want to pick up the weight that’s way too much for us, because we’ll end up hurting ourselves.”

At a table in back, two girls matched bright blue cutouts of unsolved equations with their solved counterparts. Two boys worked on riddles that tested them on combining like terms. A student practiced distributing negative numbers on a whiteboard.

​This is the look of the Ithaca City School District’s new effort to limit tracking — or separating students by perceived ability — in middle school math. Instead of sixth- and seventh-graders being divided into lower and accelerated levels, the students take classes of equal rigor but sometimes work in small groups, split up to practice specific skills, or pair up with another student who can guide them through a problem.

The district began rolling out the program two years ago after recognizing that students of color made up a disproportionate share of pupils in lower-level math classes. Just 22 percent of students in the district are Black, Latino or multiracial, but in some lower-level math classes, children of color were overrepresented, according to teachers and administrators. Ithaca is hardly unique: Nationally, Black and Latino students are significantly less likely than White and Asian students to take accelerated math in middle school.

But the racial divide wasn’t Ithaca’s only concern. Students in accelerated math were struggling when they entered high school, having failed to pick up the skills they needed. Tracking didn’t seem to benefit anyone, so Ithaca became one of at least three school districts around the country to limit or abandon the approach.

Math is the most-tracked subject in school: Three-quarters of eighth-graders attend math classes that are segregated by ability, according to the latest federal data. The pervasiveness of math tracking may be due, in part, to the persistent belief that some people are good at math and others aren’t, education experts suggest. Now some experts are encouraging school districts to step away from the practice. In a report published in May, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics recommended districts eliminate tracking in middle school math.

The group points to slumping test scores as a reason change is needed: Eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been flat for a decade, with just 34 percent of students testing proficient in 2019.

Still, researchers aren’t united on the benefits of eliminating tracking. In Ithaca, district leaders said it would be years before there was data to evaluate the success of the new approach. In the meantime, school administrators face a more immediate challenge, one that probably awaits other districts that attempt de-tracking: parent opposition. When Ithaca moved to reduce advanced math classes, parents voiced concern that students wouldn’t be challenged academically and would miss out on a chance to take algebra in eighth grade, which is often viewed as a steppingstone to high school calculus and a college STEM degree. Two years into the effort, school administrators are still contending with a backlash against de-tracking in this highly educated, politically liberal city.

ADThe changes to the math curriculum have their roots in Susan Danskin’s classroom. Danskin leads the math department at DeWitt, one of Ithaca’s two middle schools, which for years had separated eighth-graders into three different math levels. In her lowest-tier class in fall 2017, seven of the 10 students were Black, Hispanic or multiracial, compared with 25 percent of the school. Another DeWitt math teacher reported similar numbers. “We said, ‘We are just perpetuating institutional racism here,’ ” Danskin recalled.

The teachers worried the process for tracking children was overly subjective. Students were placed in regular or accelerated math at the end of fifth grade based on teacher recommendations. But teachers complained of sometimes feeling pressured by parents to recommend their children for accelerated math.

Over at Ithaca High School, Steven Weissburg, the math department leader, was also troubled. He once loved teaching ninth-grade geometry, a class for students who had completed accelerated eighth-grade math. But in recent years, he had come to dread it because the students had sped through content in middle school and had weak skills.

Weissburg and Danskin and other middle school math department leaders met with district officials and proposed de-tracking eighth-grade math. Superintendent Luvelle Brown needed no convincing. He and his leadership team felt the research about the benefits of de-tracking was clear. “But until we had the teacher connection and the ability to do that, we would have no chance,” he said.

In spring 2018, the district approved a pilot at DeWitt to collapse math for eighth-graders from three tracks to two: algebra and eighth-grade math. Teachers developed strategies to offer “differentiated” learning, like those practiced in Gibb’s class, to students of different proficiency levels enrolled in the same course.

The district liked what it saw and decided to take the changes a few steps further. In fall 2019, Boynton, the district’s other middle school, adopted DeWitt’s two tiers for eighth-grade math. Meanwhile, sixth- and seventh-grade math collapsed from two tracks to one. To support the changes, the district hired teachers to give students more individual attention and help them work more easily in small groups.

But almost immediately, parent opposition sprouted. At district meetings on the de-tracking effort, parents swamped administrators with questions. How would students be picked for eighth-grade algebra? What research had informed the move? How would children who excelled at math learn alongside students who were struggling?

Even parents who felt inclined to support the changes said the district wasn’t prepared to answer their questions. Tara Holm, a professor in Cornell’s math department who has a fifth-grader and a second-grader in the school system, said her understanding is that de-tracking “really is better for many kids.” But she wasn’t satisfied with the district’s explanations and how it had communicated the changes to parents. “It seemed like a very half-baked plan,” Holm recalled.

Parents started to organize. Deirdre Hay, a parent of two children in the district, drew up a petition asking the district reverse the decision. About 300 people signed. While the school board was united behind de-tracking, a parent named Erin Croyle jumped into the school board race as a write-in two weeks before the May 2019 election and defeated a longtime member after gaining the backing of de-tracking opponents.

ADStill, most parents are taking a wait-and-see approach. The resistance to the curriculum change “feels premature,” said Marianella Casasola, a senior associate dean at Cornell with two children in the district. She said she liked the idea of having students at different skill levels in the same classroom. But Casasola said, “It’s not clear how this is going to play out.”

Academic research tends to support de-tracking, but is not unequivocal. In a 2016 report, for example, education researcher Tom Loveless found that states that sort more children by ability in eighth-grade math wind up with more students scoring high on Advanced Placement exams in high school.

In Ithaca, Lily Talcott, the district’s deputy superintendent, said it would take years for the district to know for sure the impact of detracking. But she said the district would find ways to measure student performance and assess students’ views on the changes along the way.

ADTeachers, meanwhile, said they were satisfied with how the district has pursued detracking. Gibb, the DeWitt math teacher, said some parents told their children they would be bored in the combined math classes. But now, “I don’t hear kids saying they’re bored,” Gibb said. “I don’t see it. I’d never go back to the previous system. I think this is so much better for all the levels of kids.”

This story about middle school math was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

(CNN) — A 6-year-old afraid to go outside. A mom scared to send her children back to school, then thrilled at how they've thrived. A teacher worried she'll be ordered back to the classroom and become some kind of test subject.
​
These are some of the stressed stories of the pandemic-hit school year so far -- but it's impossible to know how widespread the experiences are because there is no national tracking of what happens when children and staff return to schools. And without that tracking, health and education experts say, there's no way to come up with best practices to restart schools, educate children most eFectively and open up their parents to commit to their work lives.

"Unfortunately, some of our knowledge is really just derived from anecdote," said Dr. Susan CoLn, professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "We don't have any good strategies to systematically collect the experience across a swath of the US to actually be able to study the different approaches that have and, in some cases, not worked so well."
Kimberly Berens, a scientist-educator with a PhD in behavioral science, told CNN she sees that play out around her in Long Island, New York.

"In a five-mile radius around my office there are several public and private schools, and every single one of those schools are doing different things, which is crazy," she said.

"What I know as a scientist is, if I'm manipulating multiple variables at one time, I have no idea what variable actually produced whatever outcome I achieved, or didn't achieve. So, with schools in one district all doing different things, then we can't put our finger on what contributed to an increase in prevalence or a decrease in prevalence."

New research on children and Covid-19
Some scientific knowledge about children and coronavirus has increased since schools across the country shut down in March.

CoLn told CNN that while new research has shown that children can catch and transmit coronavirus, which previously had not been as certain, "on average, a child's ailment will be less severe than that of the adult, provided they don't have underlying conditions."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study in late September saying that the incidence of Covid-19 among younger children appears to be much lower than in adolescents, which could give confidence that elementary schools, in particular, are safer to reopen. But there hasn't yet been a chance to study that.

Instead the anecdotes continue. Many remember the widely shared photos of crowded hallways as school started in Paulding County, Georgia, that were followed by cases of coronavirus and hundreds of students and staff in quarantine.
​
But for the majority of schools that have opened their doors, infection rates and case counts have not skyrocketed as much as medical professionals, teachers, and parents feared. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that could have been a cause for celebration if anyone had been tracking the situation effectively.

"Some schools opened well and fine, without transmission of illness and that would have created great confidence," Weingarten told CNN. "But instead of having a great national celebration about any of this stuff, everybody's just completely on edge and anxious about what's going to happen because there's no national guidance."

The problematic openings could even have helped others, Weingarten said. "I think that the Georgia ... situation, where you saw a huge number of kids running through those halls in the middle of real community spread, scared people enough to do masks and physical distancing."
Part of what has led to a safe reopening, experts say, is only introducing in-person learning when there is a relatively low community spread of coronavirus.

Hannah Watters said she was concerned about safety in North Paulding High School when she
posted this photo to social media.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at the Texas Tribune Festival in late September "you've got to look at the relative risk to the children in the particular area, county, city, state, that you happen to live" when determining when to bring children back to school.

Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, concurred that "the first requirement, of course, is that we have, you know, a relatively low level of infection in the surrounding community."

"In places where the case numbers are rapidly accelerating, or just increasing and uncontrolled, it's going to stand that as people in the community get infected, those cases will show up at schools. And obviously, nobody wants to open a school to only have to shut it down again, because of need to quarantine students or staff."
​
In its guidelines, the CDC laid out that mitigation strategies such as wearing masks, social distancing by having reduced class sizes, spacing out desks, implementing cleaning protocols, and developing a proactive plan for when a student or staff member tests positive for Covid-19, should be incorporated in any plans to reopen a school.

But again, the evidence to prove that such measures are having an impact is anecdotal at best as there is no tracking down students to fight low virtual attendance nationally mandated testing and reporting of coronavirus infections in schools. And while New York state releases that information, Georgia has decided to keep it under wraps.

'Encouraging' data

To try to fill some of the gaps, Brown University has created a Covid-19 school response dashboard, analyzing data from 1,006 schools with more than 167,000 students and 54,000 staff. So far, just 0.13% of students surveyed have tested positive for Covid-19 and that rises to only 0.24% for teachers.

"That early data is encouraging," said Emily Oster, economist professor at Brown University, who helped create the dashboard.

"The process of opening schools doesn't seem to be driving epidemics outside of the school," Oster told CNN.

"These risks may be lower than people thought."

But there are suspected cases among both staff and students, and Oster said schools need testing capability to get an even clearer picture. She did add that schools that have implemented social distancing and mask mandates have had even greater success.

"We're certainly seeing that some of these mitigation factors are strongly associated with lower rates, and so places that are doing them seem to be having less spread than other places," Oster said. Oster has also talked to parents and school administrators and has discovered that one widespread anxiety -- that young children may not be able to keep their masks on -- could be misplaced.

"Actually, it's completely fine," Oster said of young students. "The people I think we are struggling to get to wear the masks are the adults and high school students."

How some children have been impacted

Kelly Foster was scared to send her second and fifth graders to in-person schooling at their private school in Atlanta -- but now feels she is one of the lucky ones.

"When my kids spend too much time online, they just become mean. It changes their personality -- they get grumpy, they get short-tempered," she said. Now they are back in school, their moods have improved dramatically, she said.

Alexis Barad-Cutler is hoping for that to play out with her children. She says her 6-year-old son Gavi has become afraid to go outside and has developed an anxious oral fixation from spending so much time on his iPad. Now he has to have something to chew in order to be able to pay attention to the screen, she said.

The Barad-Cutlers live in Brooklyn Heights, and Gavi and his fourth-grader brother just started going back to their New York City public school for two days a week. New York City is the only one of the US' top 10 largest school districts to open the school year with anything but entirely
online learning. And while many private schools and smaller rural schools have been able to open with protective equipment and social distancing, large city schools have
stayed closed.

In Atlanta, Kristina Christy's sixth grader and ninth grader have spent weeks and weeks of the new school year learning in a virtual format.

"This is not working," Christy told CNN.

She says her children are not doing well academically and she does not understand why public schools can't open.

"Every private school here in Atlanta is in-person or they have an option in-person," she said. "Why can't we learn from what they're doing?"

The difference between learning in-person and online could become another dividing line between students.

Nuzzo, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the delays, interruptions and other difficulties of online learning could have "lifetime consequences" for students.

"We very much have to worry about this loss and have plans for how to address it and to bring students back up to speed," she said.

But of course students are only part of the equation. Teachers need to go to school as well and for Karen Ngosso, a third-grade teacher in Baltimore, the time is not right. She says she's seeing almost all of her 42 students at Hazelwood Elementary log on to lessons and she stresses everyone is doing what they can to give the children a high quality education.

And until there is a vaccine against Covid-19, Ngosso said she is not comfortable returning to teaching in person.

"I know how I'm handling the pandemic, and how I'm following the protocols with myself and my children and the people that come into my space, but I can't control what anybody else does out in this whole big wide world, and people are moving and traveling and doing different things. And some people are like, it's nothing," she said.

"I don't want to be a guinea pig. I don't want to be a petri dish," she added. "People really have to understand that just because I'm a teacher doesn't mean I stopped being a human."

NPR

​Orange County, Fla., has 18,000 missing students. The Miami-Dade County public schools have 16,000 fewer than last year. Los Angeles Unified — the nation's second-largest school system — is down nearly 11,000. Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina has 5,000 missing. Utah, Virginia, and Washington are reporting declines statewide.

Comprehensive national data aren't available yet, but reporting by NPR and our member stations, along with media reports from around the country, shows enrollment declines in dozens of school districts across 20 states. Large and small, rich and poor, urban and rural — in most of these districts the decline is a departure from recent trends. Over the past 15 years, data from the U.S. Education Department show that small and steady annual increases in public school enrollment have been the rule.
Six months after schools around the country shut their doors amid coronavirus lockdowns, these fall enrollment declines come as schools have been scrambling to improve remote learning offerings, and to adopt safety procedures to allow buildings to open for in-person classes, sometimes just a few days a week. In many parts of the country the start of the year has been marked by multiple changes in plans, widespread confusion among teachers and families, deep concerns about safety, and worries about unequal access to technology.

Article continues after sponsor message"We are not alone in this," Chris Reykdal, Washington State's Superintendent of Public Instruction, said in a statement this week announcing a 2.82% decrease in enrollment statewide, driven by a 14% drop in kindergarten. "As our nation continues to fight the spread of COVID-19, states across the country are seeing changes in K–12 enrollment as families make decisions about the safest and most effective learning environments for their children."

Reykdal said operational cuts might be looming, and schools would lobby the state for stopgap funds. "Counts are taken every month, and if these trends continue, many of our districts will need to make adjustments in the short-term even as they plan for booming kindergarten and first grade classes next year."

In many places, the enrollment drops are especially noticeable in kindergarten and pre-K. For our reporting, we reached out to more than 100 districts and heard back from more than 60. In our sample, the average kindergarten enrollment drop was 16%.

Many education experts are skeptical about the virtues of remote learning for very young children, and lots of parents seem to feel the same way.

"It was either going to be virtual or hybrid, or if they were in person it was going to be weirdly socially distant and masked," says Megan Olshavsky, whose son was scheduled to start kindergarten this fall in Austin, Texas. "And he wouldn't be able to interact, really, with other kids."
Instead, Jonah, who is almost 6, is staying in his small private Montessori school for kindergarten, where he'll attend in-person, full time.

"We had signed him up to start in Austin in the beginning of the year and then, you know, in the late spring and the summer, we kind of realized that school wasn't going to look normal," Olshavsky said. The school district started the year with four weeks of virtual learning before phasing in small groups of students.

Jonah's Montessori cut class sizes to fewer than 10 students to reduce the risk of COVID spread. And since it's licensed as a daycare, the children aren't required to wear masks. Meanwhile, the Austin Independent School District is down 5,000 students this fall, a 6% drop.
Olshavsky says she and her husband will have to tighten their belts to afford another year of private-school tuition.

And school districts stand to lose money as well.

Public schools are generally funded by states on a per-pupil basis. This first week of October marks the first of two "count days" in many states — a day in the fall, right at the start of the new fiscal year, where school districts must submit an official enrollment count to determine their funding for the subsequent year.

And that system tends to favor schools in better-off communities, which get more of their funding from local property taxes, explains Bruce Baker, an education professor at Rutgers University. It's the less well-funded districts that are more dependent on state aid.

"If you've got a district where 70, 80 % of the money is coming in state aid based on some enrollment count number, which would tend to be a poorer district serving a higher share of low-income and minority students," he explains, "those districts stand to lose a lot if the state decides to follow through with using this year's enrollment counts as a basis for funding in the future."
The potential loss is a hardship for school districts that already are facing the costs of schooling during a pandemic — from masks and hand sanitizer to hiring additional teachers to run both in-person and virtual programs. On top of that, the coronavirus-induced recession has already driven education budget cuts across the country.

Stephanie Elizalde, the superintendent of Austin ISD, told NPR that the state of Texas has agreed to "hold the district harmless" for enrollment declines for the fall semester only. She is hoping that students start to show up in greater numbers now that the school doors are open a few days a week. Otherwise, she says, "we could have huge cuts." "I don't think there's ever been a time I can recall where I visited with colleagues and all of us are like, how are we going to manage this?..knowing that you have these cuts during the most economically challenged times and a pandemic is--I mean, that's just unheard of."

Baker agrees that a downturn in enrollment this fall does not automatically equal a budget cut next year— states have time to pass measures in the spring to help schools make up the gap in funds.

But in the meantime, budget pressures may push schools to make reopening decisions that they wouldn't otherwise. In Florida, for example, enrollment in Miami-Dade, Broward County and Orange County — all of which are in the top 10 largest districts nationwide — has dropped by several thousand students each.

Back in July, on the same day President Trump implored schools on Twitter to open in the fall, the Florida Department of Education offered school districts the following deal: Reopen and get funded based on the much higher enrollment levels from before the pandemic. Or don't, and get funded based on the actual number of students. Plus, districts will get about $2,500 less for every student who remains online-only.

Judith Marte, the chief financial officer of the Broward County schools, said at a recent school board meeting that the expected enrollment drops of 8,500 students could lead to a significant reduction in a district budget that is already "disgustingly low." And that shortfall, she added, could lead to potentially cutting thousands of jobs.

On the other hand, echoing the difficult decisions educators around the country have faced, Marte said she worries about the safety of returning students to buildings full time: "This is also incredibly stressful for staff, it's incredibly stressful for this board and the superintendent ... To do what's right for our community, it's a very, very difficult place to sit."

Concerns about the youngest students

If students are not showing up at their public schools, where are they going? Possibly to private school, though dozens of private schools have shuttered since the start of the pandemic. Child care centers, which may accept pre-K and kindergarten students, are threatened as well. But there are some reports of private schools gaining students even as public schools are losing them, in places where private schools are in-person and public schools are virtual or hybrid.

"The inequity of the situation is just really staggering," says Olshavsky, the mother in Austin. "We were basically able to pay to keep our kid in a safe learning environment."

Austin Superintendent Elizalde agrees that her main concern is an "exacerbation... of opportunity gaps in students from different economic backgrounds."

Not all families have the means to send their children to private school, or devote a parent to home schooling full time. Some families, says Elizalde, will be leaving children home with older siblings or to sit in front of the TV.

Jessica Diaz is a nurse in Tampa, Fla., married to a firefighter, with three daughters. Since she and her husband work in high-risk environments, they don't want to send her children to school in person. But she's struggling with the district's online learning offerings, too. Her children's nanny is Spanish-speaking and has trouble with tasks like navigating Zoom class meetings.

"I don't think [virtual school] is a sustainable option for our family at this point," she told NPR. "For all of the burden of constant emailing, changes in schedules, assignments and submissions, etc., we feel the content of the education that is being delivered is far below our girls' capabilities and not worth the trouble at this point. "

She plans to pull them out and home-school after the winter break, when she hopes she'll have time to put together a curriculum; but she'll have to do the actual teaching herself in the evening hours after work.

Experts in early childhood education agree with Elizalde that keeping kids out of kindergarten and pre-K, in particular, is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities. Kindergarten is not compulsory in most states. That means children can sit out the year without necessarily doing formal homeschooling or private school.
They may enter next year as first graders, or simply delay the start of kindergarten — a practice sometimes called redshirting and, in normal times, more popular among affluent families and boys.
Diane Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University who studies redshirting, says starting kindergarten late has no long-lasting educational advantages and may even have some drawbacks, for example in lifetime earnings. And Chloe Gibbs, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, says decades of research have underlined the importance of early childhood enrichment for all children, and especially for children from lower-income and less educated families. "We have consistent evidence that these kinds of interventions can have big effects on children's both short-term skill development, but really importantly, their long-term life chances."
In other words, pre-K and kindergarten are the rare educational interventions that both narrow gaps and lift all boats.
​
When families keep children home, the opposite may be true, says Gibbs. "Parents may be choosing not to send their kids to pre-K or to hold back their age-eligible kids from kindergarten," she explains. " And that could be fine for kids in terms of their skill development, if they are in homes where they're ... reading a lot."
But, she adds, what experts really worry about are kids "for whom this early childhood landscape has changed so much. And what are they getting kind of in the absence of having those important early experiences?"

As the articles by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt and by Eric H. Holder, Jr., show, our democracy has been in decline for many years. To conclude this package on saving our democracy on a hopeful note, we turn to our youth. Their activism—especially for the Black Lives Matter movement—is inspiring: it should be supported, not squelched.

Free speech is the cornerstone of a high-functioning democracy. But all too often, speech that challenges those in power is ignored. When voices are not heard, they must become louder. And when they unify in mass protests, those voices strengthen our democracy. We are proud of the young people who are crying out to create a better, more just America that rejects its anti-Blackness and shares its opportunities. And we are proud of the educators who have helped those youth develop their understanding of social justice.

In support of young activists and the educators engaged with them, we offer excerpts from two new books: Campus Uprisings: How Student Activists and Collegiate Leaders Resist Racism and Create Hope, edited by Ty-Ron M. O. Douglas, Kmt G. Shockley, and Ivory A. Toldson, and Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, by Suzanne Nossel. Each offers thoughtful perspectives on how young people and their educational communities can preserve free speech while building a better society through protest. Both books are written with higher education in mind, and both have ideas that can be adapted to elementary and secondary schools, as well.

While both excerpts offer examples of students addressing racism, Campus Uprisings does so in a forthright manner that may be difficult for some readers. Describing racist incidents in which the N-word is used, these Black authors choose to use the word in full. The question of how to handle such language is a difficult one: we respect the authors’ choice to convey the full horror of the racist act, and we are also concerned about how it may affect our Black readers. After consulting with colleagues, we concluded that in this case, confronting the harsh reality of racism is part of the way forward. Please help us reflect on our practices by sharing your thoughts on this specific question, or on our broader efforts to reckon with racial injustice, by emailing us at ae@aft.org(link sends e-mail).

We are also committed to listening to students. We begin this salute to protest by highlighting findings from a recent poll of college students on free speech. If your students’ views on exercising their right to free speech are not being equitably voiced and heard, consider using this poll to begin a dialogue—or possibly create your own survey—and find out more about your students and the changes they aspire to make.

Helping Students Find Their VoicesFree speech is essential to our democracy, and learning communities—especially college campuses and classrooms—are key spaces for participants to explore difficult topics, to be exposed to new ideas and perspectives, and to learn to function with others in a society. Many educators cherish the ideal of truly free speech and relish opportunities to help students engage with complex issues like present-day school segregation, mass incarceration, and the treatment of refugees and immigrants—but educators also grapple with the difficulties, particularly the risk that students’ remarks will be harmful to their classmates.

Even in educational settings that aim to be inclusive, students may be discouraged from speaking up because of barriers like institutional racism and the implicit biases it fosters. For example, the tendency for educators (and other adults) to perceive Black children and teens as older, less innocent, and more disruptive than their white peers (beginning as early as preschool) leads to higher rates of suspension and expulsion, fewer mentorship and leadership opportunities, and other obstacles to preparing for college.1 Such messages are reinforced when, as we have seen repeatedly in the anti–police brutality protests following the murder of George Floyd, government responses to largely peaceful demonstrations have been mixed and have included violent, unconstitutional attempts to suppress that lawful speech.

When students who perceive that they have been silenced do make it to college, how might they feel about “appropriate” ways to make their perspectives heard? What if some students believe that safely disrupting (not merely silently protesting) a speech by a known white supremacist, for instance, is the only way they can be heard? In such situations, we hope the book excerpts that follow will foster a meaningful debate among faculty, administrators, activist students, and the broader educational community. It might at first seem necessary to punish students who disrupt events, but more productive options may emerge through dialogue.

In setting the stage for such conversations, faculty and administrators may want to consider the potential for causing real harm in asking members of marginalized social groups, such as the children of Central American immigrants or students who identify as LGBTQ, to engage intellectually with peers who believe they are inferior, sinful, or otherwise not worthy of equal rights and opportunities.2 These are tensions that educators often feel acutely as they strive to make their learning spaces welcoming to everyone while also providing opportunities for meaningful learning.

Hearing Our Students’ Words, Silences, and ActionsA recent Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of more than 3,000 full-time college students offers some insights into the ways students perceive freedom of speech to operate on campus—and emphasizes some of the challenges involved. (Download the report for free here(link is external).)

While 96 percent of students said that freedom of expression was very or extremely important (a dominant majority that persists across racial and gender demographics), many students had an incomplete understanding of what kinds of speech are actually protected and where 


​Students are broadly aware that the exercise of freedom of speech occurs within larger social contexts. Among all students surveyed, 91 percent believed that it was very or extremely important that society be inclusive and welcoming to diverse groups of people. But students also recognized that practicing free speech and valuing diversity and inclusion might sometimes conflict. Although 24 to 29 percent of men, women, Democrats, independents, Republicans, and white students perceived such conflicts as frequent, 40 percent of Black students saw such conflicts as frequent.
These results show that there are many opportunities to engage students as they too grapple with what the legal and ethical limits of free expression—and their rights and responsibilities—might be.

Notably, most students (62 percent) felt their professors were willing to consider other points of view, a sign that many faculty are doing a good job of listening and making sure students feel heard. Students saw themselves as doing an even better job, but they had a much lower opinion of their peers and of Americans in general (see Figure 2).4 These gaps suggest that students are not communicating with each other as clearly as they think!

Digging into the implications of free speech sheds some more light on these disparities. Over and over, the poll data show that female students and students of color feel less safe on campus than their peers. Only 60 percent of Black students agreed that “the First Amendment protects people like me” (compared with 94 percent of white students). And 38 percent of all students reported feeling uncomfortable because of speech related to their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation—even if those comments weren’t directed at them—including 41 percent of female students, 41 percent of Black students, and 44 percent of Asian students. Significantly, one in eight students reported feeling unsafe because of speech, with female students twice as likely to feel unsafe as male students and Black and Asian students much more likely than white students (see Figure 3).5

Among all students, there was broader consensus on what kinds of speech schools should restrict. While 88 percent of all students believed colleges should be able to bar the use of racial slurs and half favor restricting clothing with the Confederate flag, only 11 percent believed colleges should be able to prevent students from hanging posters endorsing political candidates in their dorm windows (see Figure 4).6

This is the heart of the issue, and it brings with it an invitation for educators to reflect: How can we help students understand the value of freedom of expression while also helping them to exercise that freedom responsibly and respectfully? How can we balance our desire to help all students to feel safe expressing themselves in our classrooms with our responsibility to make sure all students feel safe, period?

These are challenges those who work in education spaces need to think through, particularly before enacting policies, deciding punishments, or planning class discussions on difficult topics. And students should be involved in those conversations and decisions. As the survey results show, while students may have a lot to learn about free speech, they also have a lot to share.
–Editors

For the full article on American Educator, including graphics/images, click HERE.

American Educator, Fall 2020

By Joie Tyrrell
Updated September 28, 2020 5:36 PM

Finding enough substitute teachers often has been an issue for Long Island school districts, but securing subs during a pandemic has become an even greater challenge, educators said.
There’s a smaller pool of candidates to choose from as fewer younger people are going into the field, and retired teachers who have served as substitutes in the past may be sitting this year out due to fear of contracting COVID-19. Additionally, with a mix of hybrid, remote and in-person classroom instruction, substitute teaching is far different from what it used to be.
"There has been a shortage of substitute teachers for a long time. That’s nothing new. However, the pandemic has complicated matters in many cases, and this is true for Long Island, New York State and the nation," said Bill Heidenreich, superintendent of the Valley Stream Central High School District and president of the Nassau County Council of School Superintendents.
Because of the substitute shortage, the state Board of Regents in July approved emergency measures, including giving schools more flexibility in hiring. The hiring change allows for substitutes who are not certificated and not working toward certification — but who hold a high school diploma or its equivalent — to be employed beyond a 40-day limit, for up to an additional 50 days. That gives subs the right to work up to three months, or beyond in rare circumstances.

Zachary Schulman, 24, of Great Neck worked as a substitute in Middle Country last school year and signed up to do the same this year. Credit: Newsday / Alejandra Villa Loarca"The state has eased the requirements that one would need to be a substitute teacher. That is helpful, but it is also a little concerning because you want to make sure the person you are putting in front of the children is completely qualified," Heidenreich said.
Ron Masera, Center Moriches superintendent and president of the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association, said it's helpful that the Regents board approved additional substitute days, "But if the bodies are not there, it can only help so much."
Masera said his district has encouraged high school students to consider education as a career path "to build that pipeline for future teachers so down the road we have qualified candidates."
But fewer people are going into the profession. Between 2009 and 2017, enrollment in the state’s undergraduate and graduate teacher education programs declined 53%, from more than 79,000 students to about 37,000, according to a report from the New York State Educational Conference Board, which also noted that school districts statewide will need around 180,000 new teachers over the next decade.
The Middle Country school district may have found one solution for its shortage. The district partnered with Stony Brook University last school term to place student-substitutes in schools.
The program was expanded this year to include the Plainedge district, said Terry Earley, director of teacher and leader education at Stony Brook. Students can be either undergraduates or graduate students, and are in their last education methods course before they enter student teaching.
"We were looking for a way to get our kids more experience in the classroom," Earley said. "It’s a win-win for everybody."
Zachary Schulman, 24, of Great Neck worked as a substitute in Middle Country last school year and signed up to do the same this year. The Stony Brook senior is studying to teach grades 7-12, with a specialization in English. He said he would be comfortable serving as a sub for remote instruction as well.
"This program enhances the student-teacher prep experience," Schulman said, adding there was a "profound benefit of being able to work in a classroom with students as the teacher, even if I am reading lesson plans made by another teacher. I had the opportunity to lead a class."
Giovanni D'Ambrosio, 24, of Seaford, a graduate student at Stony Brook, is a student teacher who worked as a substitute in Middle Country until schools closed in March. He was disappointed he couldn't finish the year.
"I loved being there," he said. "I liked the experience. I went there every day as a sub, and when I finished my day, I went to Stony Brook to finish my classes."
Middle Country Superintendent Roberta Gerold said the program has helped meet the needs in the system's 14 buildings. The district pays its substitutes $145 per day. Long Island's pay scale for subs can range from $95 to $200 per day, Masera said.
With COVID-19, there are a new set of skills subs have to use, Gerold said, in that they are "not only in front of the classroom, but connecting virtually with the children at home. It is a different skill set and a whole different structure for schools."
Districts also have had to figure out how to handle instruction with a sub in charge. In the Valley Stream Central High School district, a teacher who may be absent will send assignments to all learners, remote and in-person, and a sub might supervise the students in the classroom, Heidenreich said.
Sandra Gaskin serves as a permanent substitute teacher in the Eastern Suffolk BOCES system and recently taught a hairstyling class at the Milliken Technical Center in Oakdale.
"It's quite a fulfillment to work with the students during the day in a field that I always loved," she said. "Being a substitute teacher is good because you have more flexibility to come and go. It's just welcoming to come back after being out for so long."
Eastern Suffolk BOCES partners with St. Joseph's College for recruitment of substitutes, and also runs a Substitute Services Program, which assists 36 districts with placing subs.
Recently, Eastern Suffolk BOCES had 234 positions that needed to be filled with subs across its 25 campuses. They were able to fill half, and many of the openings were covered with existing staff, said Ryan Ruf, BOCES' deputy superintendent for management services.
Per-day pay for substitute teachers can vary from $90 to upwards of $200.
The New York State Education Department does not issue substitute teaching certificates. Substitute teachers fall into one of the three categories:

• Substitute teachers with a valid teaching certificate can work in any capacity, for any number of days.
• Substitute teachers without a valid certificate, but who are working towards certification (taking college coursework) at a rate of not less than six semester hours per year, can work in any capacity, for any number of days, in any number of school districts.
• During the 2020-2021 school year, due to the COVID-19 crisis, substitute teachers who do not hold a valid teaching certificate and are not working towards certification, but hold a high school diploma or its equivalent, may be employed by the school district or BOCES beyond the 40-day limit, for up to an additional 50 days (90 days total) in a school year. In rare circumstances, a district or BOCES may hire a substitute teacher beyond the 90 days.
• School districts may have additional local requirements for individuals who are employed as substitute teachers.

The On-Line Application System OLAS is a web-based application that serves participating school districts as their source for filling jobs. This service, powered by Putnam-Northern Westchester BOCES, opens up recruiting to a significantly wider pool of candidates for participating districts than can be reached through traditional recruitment methods. It includes listings for substitutes
Source: New York State Education Department; CK Council of school superintendents, Nassau BOCES