K12LEADERS

Author: Mike Bronder

  • Addressing the growing covid-learning-gap

    Addressing the growing covid-learning-gap

    While schools undoubtedly need some degree of accountability in order to assess effectiveness and identify areas for continual improvement, one of the major lessons from this past year of intermittent instruction was that effective education involves the entire learning community. Parents, libraries, and even municipalities all play significant roles in supporting kids’ learning.

    Unnecessary challenges arise when supplemental resources aren’t easily available for children and families that need them. Those challenges can be magnified in rural, low-income communities, and communities of color where under developed infrastructure may limit access.

    The Campaign for Grade-level Reading’s Learning Loss Recovery Challenge encourages communities to:

    • SLOW AND STOP LEARNING LOSS by investing in “fast track” assurances of student access to the internet, tutorial support and out-of-school learning opportunities as well as parent access to the information, supports and tools they need to succeed in their enhanced roles.
    • JUMPSTART THE RECOVERY PLANNING PROCESS by convening key decision makers and community stakeholders to develop a Learning Loss Recovery Compact that declares learning loss recovery an urgent priority; acknowledges the disproportionate impact on children of economically challenged families and children of color; and commits to a stakeholder-driven planning process that will include parents as essential partners in learning loss prevention and learning loss recovery.
    • LAUNCH AND LEAD LEARNING HAPPENS EVERYWHERE with local initiatives to transform formal and informal places and spaces into learning-rich opportunities and inspire a community-wide shared commitment to children learning.
  • Learning Loss and the Blame Game

    Learning Loss and the Blame Game

    I like The 74 and read their updates most mornings… Todays’ piece on 40,000 LA high school students being off track falls into a common trap as it outlines a number of distressing facts that we’ve heard or anticipated for this past year… (https://www.the74million.org/article/report-learning-loss-data-shows-40000-los-angeles-high-school-students-off-track-to-graduate)

    But we continue to ‘skate to where the puck is, not where it will be,’ to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky, by ringing our hands and proclaiming that students need to “learn more now” and teachers need to “teach faster.”

    That’s all embedded in some good observation, however… there are equity issues, there are remote learning issues, there are equity issues, there are staffing issues, there are health and safety concerns.

    If we’re going to have a successful response we need to shift how we’re approaching this fight..

    We need to accomodate the current situation, not blame students and teachers for what we call “learning loss.” Blame? Yes… when someone says “Students are going to have a hard time catching up,” that is putting the blame on the student.

    And we need to plan for better educational continuity, by ensuring that we have the curricular, technological, HR, and safety plans in place by Fall 2021 to create a meaningful and sustainable repsonse to our new normal.

    What would you include in your “Educational Continuity Plan?”