This Week In Education

#SEL​ #SEELearning​ #DalaiLama​

Are you looking to implement an SEL curriculum district-wide? We sit down with Dianne Acuna Andree and Ben Knaebel from City Schools of Decatur who implemented SEE Learning, a new K-12 education program started by Emory University and the Dalai Lama after their community experienced a challenging year ignited by the pandemic.

Watch SEE Learning Launch in New Delhi, India April 4-6, 2019 (https://youtu.be/by-P772kRM8​)

Download the SEE Learning Companion (https://compassion.emory.edu/_include...​)

Access SEE 101, our online training platform, and other free resources (https://seelearning.emory.edu/​) 

SEE Learning is free when you sign up for the training and has great lessons for small groups, even if you are not at a place to go district-wide. Expect the training to take about two hours to complete. The SEE Learning curriculum comprises thirty 40-minute long learning experiences (lessons) divided into eight chapters (units) covering the Personal, Social, and Systems domains. You can sign up for the materials and learn more in the description below. If you felt this information was helpful, please subscribe and share with colleagues as we highlight educators, trends, and districts every week who are doing meaningful work. In the meantime, keep changing the world.

Learn how to support Black male teachers and educators with Dr. Baron R. Davis, superintendent of Richland School District Two. Increasing the Black male teacher representation in schools across the nation requires strategic planning, including collaborative efforts at the national, state, district, and local levels. A long-term commitment of resources and continuous championing for diversity in our nation’s classrooms remains the most promising way to effectively staff schools with minority male educators. #blackeducators​ #blackmaleteachers​ #teacherrecruitment

#antimarginalization​ #antiracistschools​ #curriculum​ 

ICSD's Anti-marginalization curriculum: https://www.ithacacityschools.org/districtpage.cfm?pageid=1346​ 

As Americans, we are not just enduring a health pandemic but a racial pandemic reeled with deadly hate crimes and violence. Responding to the moment, districts across the country are accelerating the implementation of real instruction and conversations that will change their school culture around race, equity and inclusion with the goal of building antiracist school policies and curriculum that are sustainable. Just last week the California State Board of Education ended a years-long debate on Thursday becoming the first state to approve a statewide ethnic studies curriculum for high schools. The curriculum will guide how the histories, struggles, and contributions of Asian, Black, Latino, and Native Americans — and the racism and marginalization they have experienced in the United States — will be taught to millions of students. Other states have taken different approaches to teaching ethnic studies. Oregon is developing ethnic studies standards for its social studies curriculum, while Connecticut high schools will be required to offer courses in Black and Latino studies by the fall of 2022. The course materials in California include 33 lesson plans, which schools are not required to use but can pick from to fit their student communities. More than three-quarters of California’s 6.2 million K-12 students are non-white. Education is the vaccine to combat the virus of hate so in this episode, my guest Luvelle Brown Superintendent of Ithaca City School District in New York shares with us his experience prioritizing and implementing an anti marginalization curriculum for all students pre-k through 12th.

I had the privilege of sitting down with Angélica Infante-Green, the Commissioner of Education for Rhode Island to get her perspective on how innovation and policy come together to help students succeed through these difficult times.

Principal Jessica Cabeen is implementing a new schedule after her experience leading her middle school during the pandemic. She leads a team of 60 teachers who serve 850 students. She was able to keep a hybrid model scheduled for her school throughout the year and offer distance learning for families who still wanted to stay remote. Learn what she plans to do next year to help students transition back to five days a week. #schoolschedule #classschedule #principal

What will the pandemic experience mean for learning moving forward? How can we invest in our school models next year to be more engaging, flexible, and collaborative with students and their families? I sat down with Dr. Michael Lubelfeld superintendent at North Shore School District 12 in Illinois to learn how he builds tomorrow's schools today.

My guest is Erica Forti, superintendent at East Haven Public Schools. She was able to keep her schools open all year and offer a live streaming model for students and families who preferred to stay remote. I spoke with her to learn more about her model as some of her teachers have invested the longest time curating live stream instruction while having in-person classes at the same time.#EricaForti #EastHavenPublicSchools #Superintendent

Minorities and lower-income Americans have contracted the coronavirus at higher rates and suffered higher levels of job losses. The financial disruption is forcing many LatinX students to choose between their education and helping their families weather the recession. 

I sat down with Janicia Centeno Castillo, Assistant Director of GEAR UP 4 LA a federal program that services 19,000 students in Los Angeles with wrap-around services for college preparation in the LA Unified School District. Her depth of experience and impact on her community gives us a true understanding of what this looks like for LatinX students and families. 

President-elect Joe Biden will ask Congress for $130 billion to help K-12 schools reopen, plus billions more to implement rapid coronavirus testing in schools, a far more aggressive response than anything lawmakers have approved to date.

We can all agree we need to get back in school and these measures are necessary if we are going to make this happen. Human interaction is important for students to thrive but my concern now is that we also know the benefits of remote such as scaled asynchronous learning, increase parent involvement, and a more tech-forward staff.

This makes me think hybrid learning might not be here to just help us transition back into in person but instead transition us into a new digital forward school model that only requires students to be on campus two to three days a week. This will depend on two things...
 #hybridlearning #bostonpublicschools #backtoschool

Robert Balfanz, Ph.D., is an iconic researcher that ignited national change in reducing the number of high school dropouts in America. In the early 2000s, his first major findings showed that just twelve percent of the nation's roughly twenty thousand high schools are responsible for half of the nation's dropouts.

In 2006, Dr. Balfanz coined a term for these schools called "dropout factories,” which struct the minds of leaders across the nation like lightning leading to mainstream documentaries and large amounts of funding to solve the problem. 

He and his colleagues from the Everyone Graduates Research Center at the School of Education at John Hopkins University received a federal award of roughly 30 million dollars. It was matched in equal amounts by private donations to support a rollout of his program in ten of the nation's most troubled districts. After decades of stagnation, in the early 2000s, the high school graduation rate finally began to move up. It went from the low seventy percent range, where it had remained since the early 1970s, to eighty-five percent today.

However, when you read Dr. Balfanz’s research and how he defines dropout factories, it sounds a lot like what we are living through today as we struggle with distance learning. He defines a dropout factory as a school in which, year in and year out, a significant number of under-prepared and disengaged students enter the ninth grade, struggle to succeed, become further disengaged, stop attending regularly...

We have been living through the ramifications of Dropout Factories for decades as it's been a systemic problem, where COVID, on the other hand, has been an in-your-face shock disrupting every guard rail you knew that worked to support kids.