Suffer the teachers

January 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

Perspective by Robin Givhan. Washington Post January 11 2023

Who will be left to educate this country’s children when all the teachers have had enough?

Who will remain when educators tire of picking their way through a political obstacles course of ginned-up outrage over bathrooms and manufactured controversies about racial justice? Who will be there when all the good-hearted, well-intentioned teachers finally become fed up with being lambasted by the left and the right for what amounts to simple human imperfection?

What will happen when teachers are no longer there to provide the school supplies, the warm clothing, the extra snack, the safe space, for the kids who fall through the country’s flimsy social safety net? Who will be there to notice the bruises? Or to hear the worrisome silences? Or to recognize the artist amid the engineers?

Who will educate children when teachers finally become fed up with dodging bullets — or taking bullets — in service to someone else’s child? What will happen when teachers can no longer be heroic?

These are the questions that come to mind in the days after the shooting of a teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va. The person accused of pulling the trigger of the 9mm gun that injured Abigail Zwerner, 25, is her 6-year-old student. Police have said that the gun was lawfully purchased by the child’s mother and that the child brought it to school and that the shooting was “intentional,” which is to say that the child actually pulled the trigger and didn’t somehow drop the weapon, resulting in an indiscriminate gunshot. Beyond that, what does it even mean to say that a 6-year-old child’s act of grievous gun violence was intentional when intent can be difficult to discern in an adult, let alone a mind still in thrall to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

6-year-old who allegedly shot Va. teacher used gun legally purchased by mom, police say

After the single bullet hit Zwerner in the hand and chest, she still had her students front of mind. According to the police, she ensured that they were out of harm’s way before she made her way to the front office and collapsed. “Ms. Zwerner was the last person to leave that class,” the police chief said. “She made a right turn and started down the hallway and then she stopped. She turned around to make sure every one of those students was safe.”

But how much longer can the country expect teachers to be that selfless? It’s no secret that they’re underpaid for all the duties they perform. The average public school teacher salary in the United States is about $66,000. They should be paid more. They should be paid more. They should be paid more. The country went through a brief phase of teacher worship when schools were shut down because of the pandemic and parents were left to wrangle their children on their own. After parents logged their homebound kids into virtual classrooms, they were able to bear witness to the kind of patience, calm, empathy and determination that’s required of teachers on a daily basis. Parents expressed their heightened respect for teachers. They oozed thankfulness.

And then the schools reopened. Parents quickly recovered from the shock of dealing with their own kids all day. They began to harangue teachers with a newfound gusto. They forced teachers to fend off accusations that they were teaching critical race theory when they were really just trying to get someone’s recalcitrant child to understand that racism has consequences. School boards began putting restrictions on how teachers discuss gender, in essence asking teachers to tamp down their sense of empathy and muzzle efforts at inclusion. School districts began banning books and narrowing children’s vision even as they demanded that teachers prepare students for a more complex and competitive world.

A White teacher taught White students about White privilege. It cost him his job.

The United States has lost 370,000 teachers since the start of the pandemic. And yet the teachers who remain continue to do those things that prompt police officers to call them heroic and that have parents compliment their ability to treat every student like an individual rather than an anonymous seat-filler. Teachers continue to speak up even when doing so can cost them their job for reasons that completely blindside them.

A parent at Richneck Elementary School recalled how Zwerner left notes of encouragement in her son’s backpack and noticed when he was out of sorts because of family upheaval. When three student-athletes at the University of Virginia were shot and killed in November, a professor who’d had two of them in class used social media to share stories about their good humor, intellectual curiosity and empathy. In Uvalde, Tex., teachers consoled students when law enforcement went missing. Students continue to have favorite teachers because teachers continue to form bonds with their pupils even as legislators seem intent on transforming those relationships into little more than rote transactions. Teachers persist in caring.

There are uninterested, inflexible and unprofessional teachers — same as in any field. But it does seem as though society has been making the work lives of teachers exceptionally difficult. Critics have been punching at them from all sides. The country asks public school teachers to carry this nation’s future on their backs, and then we force them to walk through a field of land mines. And as explosions go off all around them, teachers keep pressing forward because they have faith in the future.

They were college students, with all the limitless possibility that implies

When people talk about children, they have a tendency to introduce their comments with the phrase: as a parent. They say this as a way of adding heft to their opinion, as a way of announcing that they have intimate experience in the ways of children, as a way of proclaiming that they have certain inviolable rights. All of this is fair. But a non-parent’s point-of-view has importance, too. They have the capacity to see a child, not in the context of a beloved offspring and pride of the family, but as part of the broader society, as someone who will grow to be a neighbor, a colleague, a citizen.

Teachers help children make that transition in ways that parents oftentimes cannot. It may be natural that there’s friction in the relationship between parents and teachers. If a parent helps a child discover themselves, a teacher helps them figure out how that self-defined person fits into the world.

When teachers have had enough, it will all fall to pieces. And already, the teachers have suffered and endured plenty.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/10/suffer-teachers/

Building empathy in children takes practice. Parents can help.

January 5, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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Advice by Elizabeth Chang Washington Post Jan 5th 2023

Politicians making fun of an 82-year-old man who was attacked with a hammer. Online commenters calling anti-vaxxers who died of covid-19 “stupid.” Teachers refusing to address transgender students by their chosen names.

At a time like this, it can seem to parents more urgent to promote empathy — but also more difficult. “It’s hard to have a shared morality when you don’t have a shared reality,” said Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Weissbourd is also director of the Making Caring Common Project, which focuses on helping parents, schools and communities raise children who care about others and the common good.

“The challenge for parents is to cultivate kids’ capacity for empathy for people who are different from them or not in their immediate circle,” Weissbourd said. “So, different in gender, different race, different class, different sexual orientation. Different in political orientation and different religious orientation.”

That doesn’t mean parents should encourage children to agree with people who don’t share their views, he noted. “They may fiercely disagree, but it is a matter of listening and trying to take other people’s perspective and valuing other people as human beings.”

Most researchers concur that there are three dimensions of empathy, according to Jamil Zaki, a Stanford University neuroscientist. “One is emotional, vicariously sharing what other people around us view. The other is cognitive, which is trying to understand what other people feel and why. And the third is compassion or empathic concern,” said Zaki, author of “The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.”

A truly empathetic person must have all three, Weissbourd said. After all, “con men and torturers and politicians and salespeople can take other people’s perspective.” That’s why the third aspect of empathy, which he calls the moral or ethical aspect, is so essential.

So how do parents encourage their children to be proficient in all three dimensions? “I think learning empathy is like playing an instrument or learning a sport. It’s a lot about practice,” Weissbourd said.

How empathetic should your child be? Here’s an age-by-age guide.

Talk about feelings — theirs and others

One of the things parents can practice with kids is talking about and labeling emotions. This helps them recognize emotions in themselves and in others, which is probably an essential step for empathy.

It’s important that parents acknowledge and accept their child’s emotions, according to Tracy Spinrad, a professor and researcher in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University.

In fact, parenting style is key to raising empathetic kids. There is evidence “that warmth and support in parenting is predictive of children’s empathy and sympathy responses,” Spinrad said.

That could be because warm and supportive parents are more likely to raise emotionally regulated children, and there is some evidence showing that “children that are better regulated tend to be children that display more empathy and helping behavior.”

Research in the development of empathy also supports the practice of talking to children about their behavior and how it affects others and how amends might be made, rather than punishing them or forcing them into offering an apology. “We want to make sure that children’s emotional responses are coming from something internal and not something external,” she said.

Teaching kids how to understand what other people feel

Weissbourd says that the tougher work these days, especially with older children, involves understanding what other people feel and feeling compassion or empathy. “Most kids are growing up in quite politically homogeneous communities,” he said, “and there isn’t a lot of effort in schools typically — or in homes — to encourage kids to take the perspective of those who don’t share their political views.”

Practicing “cognitive empathy” — or understanding another person’s mind or what they feel — involves “having conversations that alert kids to how other people may feel in the family and outside the family in different situations,” Weissbourd said. “It’s talking about the news and having conversations with your kids about what people are experiencing in this country and other countries that might be different from them. It’s helping out neighbors and understanding neighbors who may be different in some way. It’s noticing and talking about the contributions that different people are making to kids’ lives,” including people who might not be on their radar, such as the school secretary, custodian or bus driver.

Weissbourd calls this expanding kids’ “circle of concern,” and through this approach, “we’ve increased the number and diversity of people that kids have empathy for.” A study of the effects of Facing History and Ourselves, an educational program that uses lessons about racism and genocide to encourage social-emotional learning, found that middle school students who participated in the program “reported higher levels of empathy, prosocial behavior, and stronger participatory citizenship beliefs” than a control group.

Zaki also says that older children benefit from a different approach to empathy: one that is peer-based. His Empathy Lab conducted an experiment that showed that seventh-graders who believed that empathy was popular among their classmates were more likely to engage in empathetic behavior. Parents can help make empathy contagious by asking tweens and teens to point out examples of empathy they’ve seen among their peers and praising actions they’ve taken on their own.

“It’s critical that if we want our kids to be empathic, that we also recognize and celebrate when they do it, when they do something kind, and we ask them about the kind of things that they do, just as much as we ask them how much they’re learning in math, science, and in reading and writing,” Zaki said. There’s data showing that parents don’t do this enough: In a national survey conducted by Making Caring Common in 2014, about 80 percent of the middle and high school students polled report that their parents were more concerned about achievement or happiness than caring for others.

Challenges to empathy

But just as important as building empathy, according to Weissbourd, is “removing the barriers” by addressing stereotypes and biases with kids, including your own. He shared a story with his children about an acquaintance who offered advice about caring for a cut on his hand. He asked whether she was a nurse. No, she replied. She was a surgeon.

Another difficult aspect of empathy, Weissbourd said, “involves having empathy for people or caring for people despite their mistakes or their flaws.” He calls this “hard” caring. To encourage it, parents need to give their children permission to hold conflicting feelings about others, such as, say, an uncle the family disagrees with politically. Parents can say: “He can be generous and he can be a lot of fun to be with. And he’s been kind to you your whole life. You can have all these feelings for him. You don’t have to land in one place.”

Parents need to watch their own behavior, too, Zaki said. “Oftentimes, I want my kids to be empathic, but then I get upset about an election result or something that I hear in the news. And if I act in a way that’s divisive, if I act in a way that’s angry, well, I have to realize that my suggestion to my kids to be empathic is going to fall flat.”

Finally, parents also need to keep in mind that the least kind, most extreme, most toxic voices are often those that get amplified in today’s society, Zaki said. “And I think that older kids feel a lot of pressure to fit in with whatever culture is around them. So if we give them a skewed perspective that people are really cruel, they’ll feel like maybe kindness and empathy are for dorks, and they won’t want to express those.”

The challenge for parents is to remind kids that, “despite what you read in the news, the people around you really want to be friends,” Zaki said. “They want to be connected. They want to be kind. And in many cases, they are being all of those things.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/12/06/parents-teach-empathy-children/

Inside the new middle school math crisis

January 3, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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While other grades recover, middle schoolers are still in freefall. Two Virginia schools are bucking the trend.

By Steven Yoder December 30, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EST Washington Post

ROANOKE COUNTY, Va. — It was a Thursday morning in November, a few minutes into Ruby Voss’s and Amber Benson’s eighth-grade math class at Northside Middle School just outside Roanoke, a city of roughly 100,000 in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thursdays are spent in review in preparation for tests each Friday. The teachers posted a question on-screen — “What’s the slope of the equation below?” — and gave students a few minutes to answer it. The room grew loud as students jostled into line to bring their completed graphs to the front, where Voss separated them into two groups: Those who got the right answer wrote their initials on a touch screen up front, and those who answered incorrectly went to Benson for additional help.

It was a public exercise, with the whole class watching. Each Monday, the class does something equally public: Teachers review test performances, with charts showing the group’s recent performance and that of each student. “The whole class will either go ‘yay’ or ‘ohhhh,’ depending on how the class did,” Voss said.

That approach turns students into stakeholders in each other’s success, Benson said. And this is possible because teachers dedicate significant amounts of time to fostering relationships with students and helping them get to know one another. At the start of each school year, for example, the class devotes a few days to trust-building exercises, not math. That focus, combined with other strategies such as longer math periods and tutoring, has helped Northside Middle’s students bounce back from learning losses during the pandemic more quickly than middle-schoolers in many other districts, teachers and administrators here say. Nationwide, students who started middle school early in the pandemic lost more ground in math than any other group and do not appear to be recovering.

Test data paints a dire picture: The educational assessment nonprofit NWEA found that seventh- and eighth-graders’ scores on its math assessments fell in 2022, the only group of pupils for whom that was true. NWEA researchers estimate it will take these students at least five years to catch up to where they would have been without the pandemic. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, average eighth-grade math scores declined eight points from 2019, hitting a level not seen since the early 2000s.

At Northside, the share of eighth-graders passing the state math standards test fell by 19 percentage points from 2019 to 2021, reaching 68 percent. (No tests were administered in 2020.) But in 2022, the pass rate roared back to its pre-pandemic level of 87 percent; the state average was 46 percent. Northside doesn’t owe its rebound to a well-off student body: About 42 percent of students qualified for free and reduced-price lunch in 2019-2020.

Falling behind in middle school math has ripple effects. Those who fail Algebra I (which most students take in ninth grade) are far less likely to graduate from high school on time and attend four-year college. More than proficiency in other subjects, math proficiency predicts both an individual’s future earnings and a country’s economic productivity.

So far, efforts to help students recover may not be enough. The federal American Rescue Plan Act, passed in April 2021, provided schools with nearly $200 billion to spend on needs related to the coronavirus, but relatively little of that money is going to academic recovery, and, until recently, some districts have been slow to use the money they received.

“Students are running out of time,” said Emily Morton, an NWEA research scientist.

Middle school is always hard — and the pandemic made it worse.

For a host of reasons, middle-schoolers were hardest hit by pandemic school closures. More independent than younger children and no longer overseen as closely by parents, they were more likely to sleep late, miss remote classes and struggle with the online format. Some, like high-schoolers, had adult responsibilities — babysitting younger siblings, for example — but, more often, these early teens lacked the learning strategies and executive functioning to manage, said Ben Williams, the assessment and research director for Roanoke County Public Schools, Northside’s school district.

Math, meanwhile, becomes more complicated in middle school, with the introduction of concepts such as equations and linear functions. And parents, even those who are strong in the subject, often lack the confidence to help their children, Williams said. Terrance Harrelson, an accountant and the father of Northside eighth-graders Braylen and Kylin Harrelson, found it tough to help his children work on math from home during the 2020-2021 school year because he did not understand the procedures being taught. “I would have to try to learn that process and try to get feedback out of my children. I need a textbook, I need some notes, right? Some examples. And I don’t have that,” he said.

Early adolescence also is a time of rapid cognitive change, when children need social interaction with peers and teachers to learn. For many middle-schoolers, working alone during the pandemic was a disaster.

That was the case for Evan Bruce, now a ninth-grader at Northside High School, across a parking lot from Northside Middle. Home five days a week during the 2020-2021 school year, Evan had trouble paying attention to remote lessons via WebEx. Midway into that year, his math grade hit single digits. “I started lying a lot to my parents about doing assignments,” he said. “At home, I don’t have the motivation to get out of bed, open a laptop and start working.”

Many of his peers were similarly struggling: The share of the school’s seventh-graders passing the state’s standardized math test dropped by almost 30 percentage points from 2019 to 2021.

When Evan’s seventh-grade math teacher, Stacy Puriefoy, saw what was happening to his grades, she started calling Evan’s mother regularly to check in and arranged for him come to school one day a week for at least three hours of one-on-one tutoring.

Evan’s mother also began returning early from work to watch him study, for 2½-hour stretches. “I had to start doing my work: Teachers were on me, my parents were on me,” Evan said. After only a few weeks, his grades started rising.

Northside Middle and Northside High have long-standing math intervention practices, such as tutoring and doubled-up math periods, that many districts across the county are just now introducing.

Although many districts are starting to hire tutors to work individually with students several times a week, at the Northside schools, math teachers tutor students themselves. Benson and Voss said they stay after school for an hour four times a week to work with students individually or in small groups. The district’s high school math teachers do the same, before and after school, said high school Principal Jill Green. Benson said she and Voss had been putting in the extra hours, unpaid, from before the pandemic.

Teachers are ideal tutors because they tend to be invested in their students, education researchers say. They’re also more familiar with the material students are covering. But some researchers are skeptical about any approach that relies on teachers to work without pay.

“It’s not a replicable model to have teachers volunteer or be ‘volun-told’ to stay after with students,” said Kenya Overton, a math education doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut and a former public school math teacher, who co-wrote a research brief on math catch-up strategies in June.

Students are behind in math and reading. Are schools doing enough?

Many districts also are considering adding math time during the school day. That approach has been in place in Roanoke County middle schools for almost 10 years. Students get more than an hour and a half of math a day, a change the district introduced after the stricter requirements of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act, Williams said.

If the extra math time is used well, if teachers work with students to more fully develop skills, it can be “spectacular” for students, said Beth Kobett, an education professor at Maryland’s Stevenson University. “Extra time allows us to look at the progression more deeply and help students fill in maybe a missing piece here and there and make important connections,” she said.

Northside High ninth-grader Taylor Orange said the double period helped him recover in math. As a seventh-grader in the 2020 school year, he attended class in person only twice a week. On the days he was home, he struggled to pay attention via WebEx, and his grades fell. Now, the hour and a half plus of Algebra I each day gives him time to focus and ask questions, Taylor said, adding that teachers often pull students aside to work one-on-one. He’s now earning As and Bs.

The Roanoke County district is so confident that longer math periods will enable students to make up ground, Williams said, that it is spending most of its American Rescue Plan money on hiring remedial teachers and tutors in its elementary schools, which do not have the flexibility to build extra math time into class schedules.

Northside educators insist, though, that their students’ recovery is primarily the result of strong teachers who are fanatically committed to meeting children’s individual needs. “The kids like us,” said Puriefoy, the teacher who helped Evan two years ago, explaining why students’ scores have rebounded. Added Northside Middle Principal Paul Lineburg: “Supporting students’ social-emotional needs, building positive relationships with them, is a key first step to their success in math.” Some research supports the idea that good teacher-student relationships are important to students’ achievement.

Back in school full-time last year as an eighth-grader, Evan averaged low Bs in math. Now in his second semester of Algebra I as a ninth-grader, things are looking even better; he finished the first semester with an 88 average and is at 100 percent so far in his second.

Puriefoy now teaches ninth-grade Algebra I at Northside High and has Evan again as a student. “I think he likes school. He’s social, he’s in sports, he’s got good friends. … He’s involved,” she said. “I really think that’s what a lot of the kids need, is to be connected.”

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 the Hechinger newsletter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/30/middle-school-math-pandemic-recovery/

Are grading, homework and graduation shortcuts making kids dumb? Maybe not.

January 3, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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Perspective by Jay Mathews Washington Post
January 1, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Many teachers complain that inflated grades, reduced homework and quick-and-easy credit recovery courses are leaving holes in students’ educations. I was convinced that the only reason superintendents and school boards embrace such devices is to inflate graduation rates and make their districts look good.

The debate and research about this are far from over. But I recently have found evidence that making it easier to get that credential has neither diminished learning, at least on average, nor reduced the value of graduating from high school. Even a diploma won cheaply can have a good effect on a student’s future education and job prospects.

There is no question the U.S. high school graduation rate has been increasing. Tulane economist Douglas N. Harris said the portion of students getting high school certification, after hovering around 85 percent for several years, has had “the fastest rise since the early 1900s.”

“Between 2001 and 2016, the percentage of 18-24 year-olds with a credential increased to 93% — an 8-percentage-point increase,” Harris said in a report published in 2020 by the Brookings Institution. The rise coincided with the adoption of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which forced states to set specific graduation rate targets.

The study found evidence that the law at least partially caused the graduation rate increase. “States with more districts below the statewide NCLB-induced graduation thresholds saw larger increases in graduation,” he said. “Moreover, districts that were below the threshold saw the greatest graduation increases, within their respective states.”

A follow-up study by Harris and other collaborators reported that the graduation rate remained high in 2021 despite the pandemic, possibly because students close to getting diplomas kept attending school, online or otherwise, with encouragement from family, friends and teachers. Harris told me that a widespread easing of graduation requirements because of the health crisis also had an effect.

Harris’s 2020 study looked closely at online credit-recovery courses, which can satisfy some graduation requirements in a few weeks. He found that the increased use of those shortcuts was “too small to explain the overall increase in high school graduation.”

He acknowledged that the bare-bones courses don’t demand much. “Credit-recovery programs operate increasingly online, with the extent of instruction limited and difficult to track,” he said. “They are also ‘competency-based’ in that students only have to pass a test in order to pass the course, and some principals told us that students can often access the internet while testing — and repeat the test until they pass.”

Harris’s examination of credit-recovery student-level data in Louisiana confirmed that the number of shortcut courses had increased, and were more common in schools threatened by state sanctions because of low graduation rates. But credit-recovery growth was not nearly enough, he said, to explain Louisiana’s big graduation rate increase from 64 percent in 2005-2006 to 81 percent in 2017-2018.

“Even if we are wrong, or credit recovery increased more in states other than Louisiana, it would still not necessarily mean that the increase in high school graduation is a mirage,” Harris wrote. “While students seem to learn less in credit-recovery courses than regular, in-person courses, students are probably still learning something in credit-recovery courses. And the availability of credit recovery could lead students to stay in school longer and participate in more regular courses.”

Other experts on graduation had similar views. Johns Hopkins University researcher Robert Balfanz said: “Given the high cost of dropping out of high school to both the individual and society, it would be worth it if we had to loosen standards or requirements a bit. There is almost no work available which can support a family for a high school dropout.”

“Over the past 20 years,” he said, “the percent of high school graduates taking more challenging courses has increased substantially” because of the spread of Advanced Placement courses, dual-credit local college courses given in high school, and advanced science and math courses in general.

Russell Rumberger, a researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said he believed that the national high school graduation rate “has been going up largely by efforts of individual students and schools/districts/states to get students to earn a regular diploma.”

Perhaps ubiquitous slogans such as “Be Cool, Stay in School” had more effect than skeptics such as me imagined.

Some teachers push back against 50-percent minimum grading policy

Available research indicates minimum grading policies that guarantee students no less than 50 percent on any assignment do little harm. Analysis of data from one large urban district by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell found no sign of significant grade inflation or social promotion because of the policy. Students who received the benefits of minimum grades did significantly better on state exams than would be expected from their grade point averages.

I have yet to find a study of what many teachers consider the worst of recent classroom reforms — removing any penalties for submitting homework late or not at all.

My own reporting on high school use of college-level Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge courses indicates that those programs have quickly recovered from downturns during the pandemic. There has been a long-term increase in the portion of high schools where at least half of 11th- and 12th-graders took those courses and their long, demanding, independently graded exams. Only 1 percent of schools had reached that participation level in 1997, but by 2019, that number was up to 12 percent.

Such challenges have been embraced by students and parents throughout the country as a gold standard for high school learning. The college-level courses have not been very affected so far by efforts to make high school easier. But we will have to wait for further research to see how much American teenagers are learning — or not learning — these days.

Note to readers: I expect to be writing less than before in the new year but still welcome your comments and criticisms, a great resource for me. If you have something to tell me, my new email address is mathewsjay67@gmail.com.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/01/01/grading-shortcuts-high-school-graduation/

Was your home once off-limits to non-Whites? These maps can tell you.

December 20, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Katherine Shaver Washington Post Dec 19th

A new map of one of the Washington region’s most affluent and liberal suburbs reveals an ugly past: scores of neighborhoods deemed Whites-only for decades, helping to set the stage for persistent racial inequities.

The interactive map devised by Montgomery County planners shows areas of Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring and Takoma Park that had pervasive racial covenantsfor much of the 20th century. While the history of racial covenants has been well-documented,urban planners and historians say plotting them on a map — neighborhood by neighborhood and, in some cases, parcel by parcel — lays bare the extent of discrimination in stark and often surprising ways.

The restrictions, which remain written into property deeds, prohibited homes from being sold or rented to people of “negro blood or extraction” or anyone not “of the Caucasian race.” Some also prohibited Jews, as well as Asians, Armenians, Syrians and other nationalities. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that courts could no longer enforce racial covenants, and the Fair Housing Act outlawed them in 1968.

The legacy of decades of housing discrimination still plagues the U.S.

Other cities and suburbs across the country have also begun mapping racial covenants, revealing some of the roots of persistentdisparities in homeownership. Affordable housing advocates say they reinforce the need to add lower-income housing in single-family home neighborhoods — areas that often overlap with those that had racial covenants. The patterns of segregation that racial covenants helped to establish, experts say, can still be seen in the demographics of many neighborhoods and public school systems.

By overlaying the maps with other data, researchers are exploring how those patterns might continue to play out in neighborhood home values, access to public transportation, government investment and health outcomes. A 2020 study found that land surfaces in areas that were subjected to “redlining” — the government-sanctioned practice that effectively denied home loans in predominantly Black communities — were up to 12.6 degrees hotter, partly because they have less tree canopy and more asphalt and concrete.

Perhaps most importantly, researchers say, the maps require the public, particularly White residents, to grapple with a racist history close to home.

Racist housing covenants haunt property records across the country. New laws make them easier to remove.

In Montgomery, at least 41 percent of the 1,763 subdivisions surveyed inside the Capital Beltway had racial covenants between 1873 and 1952. Other areas of the county have yet to be mapped, planners said.

America is more diverse than ever — but still segregated

“You have to be able to see the injustice,” said Rebeccah Ballo, historic preservation supervisor for the Montgomery planning department. “I think people have to see it in their communities.”

In the Washington region, mapping of racial covenants alsois underway in the District,Alexandria, andPrince George’s, Fairfax and Arlington counties. Other cities include Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Charlottesville, Seattle and cities across Washington state.

Historians say racial covenants were possible, and in some areas pervasive, in neighborhoods built in the late 19th century or first half of the 20th century — a period when suburbs boomed and Black southerners moved to northern and Midwestern cities as part of the Great Migration.

Racial covenants became more popular after 1917, when the Supreme Court prohibited zoning ordinances based explicitly on race. The deed covenants, along with legally binding agreements reached among neighbors, were considered private contracts that residents could seek to enforce in court.

“There’s a recognition that these covenants are almost everywhere,” said LaDale Winling, an associate history professor at Virginia Tech and director of a covenant mapping project for the Chicago area.

When residents see their own neighborhood was off-limits to non-White residents, Winling said, “People are horrified.”

Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It’s still hurting minorities today

Historians say they, too, have been surprised at how widespread racial covenants were. Kristin Neun, co-researcher on the Arlington mapping project, said she has found covenants throughout the county, which limited Black residents to certain neighborhoods.

“It’s the extraordinary breadth of it that I certainly didn’t have any idea about,” Neun said. “People think [segregated] communities just grew up, but you start to realize maybe it’s not quite so random.”

The work comes as more governments are digitizing their 20th-century land records, making deed searches easier, if still cumbersome and labor-intensive. It follows research into the racial wealth gap created when Black families were prevented from buying homes or were forced to live in less desirable areas, limitingwealth to pass down from one generation to the next.

The research also aligns with urban planners’ examination of their profession’s own role in racist land-use policies and has gained traction amid the racial justice movement surrounding the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

“We’re showing systemic racism,” said Mara Cherkasky, a historian mapping covenants in the District. “Here it is, completely mapped out.”

Single-family zoning preserves century-old segregation, planners say. A proposal to add density is dividing neighborhoods.

Some local officials say the maps could lay a case for directing government funding toward historically underserved, majority-Black communities.

Cherri Branson, an acting member of the Montgomery planning board, said she has heard stories from fellow Black residents who were blocked from living in sought-after neighborhoods. She recalled her mother’s frustrations when searching for a Montgomery home in the early 1980s. Real estate agents repeatedly steered her toward lower-income neighborhoods with substandard housing and no public transportation to her job in downtown Washington,Branson said.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Branson said of seeing the Montgomery map with broad areas shaded pink, indicatingracial covenants. “If you talk to any Black person over 75 in this county, they’ll tell you where segregation was and where they couldn’t buy a house. … This documents that these stories are true and real.”

Branson said county officials should consult the racial covenant maps to analyze areas that lack public transportation, social services, tree canopy and amenities.

“Have these areas been neglected?” Branson said. “If the answer is ‘yes,’ then fix it.”

In Evanston, Ill., public officials cited the city’s history of racial covenants and other discriminatory practices when they designated their early local reparations payments — the first in the country — for Black residents’ home repairs, mortgage assistance and other housing costs.

Minneapolis officials cited their “Mapping Prejudice” project when they eliminated single-family home zoning in 2018 to allow duplexes and triplexes throughout the city. The project’s director, historian Kirsten Delegard, said she started researching covenants in 2016, when 25 percent of Black families owned homes in the Twin Cities compared with almost 80 percent of White families — the widest gap of any major U.S. metropolitan area.

Perspective: ‘Midwest Nice’ hides a history of racial terror and segregation

Single-family zoning was codified in Minneapolis in 1963, the same year the state outlawed racial covenants. The zoning reinforced patterns of segregation by keeping all-White neighborhoods more expensive, Delegard said.

“Understanding what have been pockets of structural privilege really helps planners understand how to be strategic about investments and policy decisions to undo the damage,” she said. “You need truly affordable housing in a variety of neighborhoods, or the patterns you have are going to stay in place.”

A 2019 study of Minneapolis and the surrounding county found that houses that had racial covenants had home values an average 4 percent to 15 percent higher than those that did not.

Historians with the D.C. mapping project say they have found a more complicated legacy, including a link between covenants and gentrification. Some neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park, such as Petworth and Bloomingdale, had racial covenants. However, they became majority-Black after early 20th century “White flight” to growing — and largely segregated — suburbs, they said.

The majority-Black D.C. neighborhoods then lost government investment in amenities such as parks and attracted fewer home improvement loans, historians said. That lowered property values, leaving the areas ripe for gentrification.

“One thing covenants did was attach greater value to places that were exclusively White while devaluing areas where Black people lived,” said Sarah Shoenfeld of the Mapping Segregation in Washington DC project. “That had a long-term impact.”

Shoenfeld and Cherkasky have been researching the District’s racial covenants since 2014. They have found about 25,000in place before 1948 throughout the city, so far mostly east of Rock Creek Park, where they focused first. They said they are finding many in areas such as Cleveland Park, Palisades and Chevy Chase as they expand their search.

Acting D.C. planning director Anita Cozart said planners have used the racial covenant research as a “framework” for discussing with residents the need for more affordable housing across the city, including in areas long zoned for single-family houses.

How George Floyd’s death fueled a push for more affordable housing in mostly White parts of D.C.

The need for “reparative work” to correct housing inequities underlay planners’ recommendations to add more affordable housing types in the Chevy Chase area of upper Northwest Washington, Cozart said. She said planners also will take the history of racial covenants into account when they consider the future of single-family zoning as part of rewriting the District’s long-term growth plan in 2025.

“When you think about inclusion, you also have to look at exclusion — you have to look back and see who was excluded,” Cozart said. “It helps educate ourselves and others, that this is what’s contributed to what we see today.”

In George Floyd’s Houston, another generation tries to make it out of a housing project

Many historians are reluctant to say how the data should be used beyond raising public awareness, and some are wary of drawing links between racial covenants and current neighborhoodconditions. More research is needed, they say, to parse the lingering effects of covenants from other factors that promoted racial segregation, such as redlining and real estate agents and developers who steered Black home buyers away from majority-White neighborhoods long after 1968.

Many point to still-legal covenants that effectively restrict neighborhoods to residents of certain incomes and, in turn, are less racially diverse by requiring that homes be of a minimum cost or size.

The battle over single-family zoning is also a fight about what to call it

Researchers across the country say the work is slow going, with much of it relying on professors and their students, as well as volunteerhistorians and community members.

In Montgomery, planners said they so far have used limited resources to sample property deeds dating back to when a subdivision was laid out by the developer. If they found a deed with a racial covenant, they labeled the entire subdivision as having them because that was the practice at the time. Historians in other cities say such an approach, while quicker than reviewing every parcel, misses properties where developers, builders or homeowners added covenants after a subdivision was laid out.

Ballo said Montgomery planners will update their map as they broaden their research beyond the Beltway. But they also know it won’t show all the ways Black and Asian residents, Jews and other discriminated groups were long shut out.

“Just because an area isn’t shaded pink” showing it had racial covenants, Ballo said, “doesn’t mean in any way that these neighborhoods were welcoming.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/12/17/racial-covenants-mapping/

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”

December 16, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

Off

by Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

credit: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin. Copyright © 2016

To build a delightful library for kids, start with these 99 books

December 14, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

Off

By Alyssa Rosenberg Columnist December 8, 2022 at 3:53 p.m. EST|Published December 6, 2022

This holiday season, let’s press pause on one of the culture wars.

Recent tussles over the “appropriateness” of kids’ books obscure the genius and joy of so much children’s literature. As a reset, we asked dozens of parents across the political spectrum to share the children’s books they love best. They did, and reaffirmed an essential principle: One of our most important jobs as adults is to help foster in children a love of reading, and the lifetime of wonder and wisdom that follow from it.

All our participants knew this list might include books they wouldn’t choose for their own families. But together, they’ve created a library in which everyone can find something to awe and delight young people.

And this is just a start! Before Christmas, we’ll publish a list of essential books recommended by readers.

Birth to age 4

“The 20th-Century Children’s Book Treasury: Picture Books and Stories to Read Aloud,” edited by Janet Schulman

For any parent on a tight budget, this is the book that will last for hours. — Bethany S. Mandel, editor of the Heroes of Liberty series

“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” by Judith Viorst; illustrated by Ray Cruz

Kids’ books don’t have to be sugarplums and sunshine. This story takes us through the experience of a typical, difficult day in the life of a kid. We can all relate to its details and humor. And although it’s a terrible day, we feel better in the end, connected by the knowledge that we’re not alone. — Lisa Loeb, singer, songwriter and actress

“All the World,” by Liz Garton Scanlon; illustrated by Marla Frazee

I’ve read this book 100 times or more to my kids, and every time, I find new meaning in it. — Leana S. Wen, Post Opinions columnist

The Ana & Andrew series, by Christine Platt; illustrated by Sharon Sordo

Platt’s wonderful series also does serious work: introducing important moments in Black history in a fun, accessible way. — Hannah Grieco, editor of “And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative”

“A Bargain for Frances,” by Russell Hoban; illustrated by Lillian Hoban

Frances the Badger is one of the funniest fictional children ever invented, never more so than when she’s running a counter-scam on her friend Thelma. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“The Bear That Wasn’t,” by Frank Tashlin

A hilarious, absurd, pro-labor, pro-environment fable — intricately drawn by a Looney Tunes cartoonist — that satirizes the self-importance of stuffed-shirt capitalists while lamenting the destruction they blindly leave behind. — Anya Kamenetz, author of “The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now”

“Bee-Bim Bop!” by Linda Sue Park; illustrated by Ho Baek Lee

A delightful, grounded story about a girl who helps her mother make the classic Korean dish. Her excitement about shopping for groceries, cooking with her mom and serving up the meal to the entire family is a rhythmic delight. — Michael Thompson, co-author of “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys”

“The Big Alfie and Annie Rose Storybook,” by Shirley Hughes

At a moment of anxiety about boys and boyhood, Alfie’s kindness and courage are a delight, and a balm. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“The Book With No Pictures,” by B.J. Novak

Who knew that a book without pictures could be so much fun to read? — Nana Efua Mumford, manager of editorial talent and logistics, Post Opinions

“Cars and Trucks and Things That Go,” by Richard Scarry

There are always new things to point out and to learn. It’s perfect for letting the imagination go wild. — Leana S. Wen

“A Chair for My Mother,” by Vera B. Williams

When a single mother and her daughter lose their apartment and all their belongings in a fire, family and friends share what they have without hesitation. To replace their comfortable chair, however, the mother, a hard-working waitress, must slowly save the coins from her tips. — David Von Drehle, Post Opinions columnist

“The Day the Crayons Quit,” by Drew Daywalt; illustrated by Oliver Jeffers

The illustrations make you want to color — and to anthropomorphize everything in your life. The story lends itself to making up different voices for each crayon’s tale-telling. — Lisa Loeb

“Du Iz Tak?” by Carson Ellis

Pure joy, with wildly imaginative yet accessible illustrations that reward both the detail-obsessed observer and the child with limited vision who might see the vivid pages in their broadest outlines. — Rachael Brown, a partner at TNTP, a national education nonprofit

“Frog and Toad Are Friends,” by Arnold Lobel

My mother is a retired elementary school librarian, and this is her go-to recommendation for beautiful stories crafted with limited and simple vocabulary. — Mary Katharine Ham, host of the podcast “Getting Hammered”

“Go, Dog. Go!” by P.D. Eastman

This book turns a limited set of words into a fantasia of brightly colored dogs running through mazes, suffering car accidents, drinking cold drinks in the shade, playing baseball and insulting each other’s hats. — Amanda Katz, assignment editor, Post Opinions

“Good Night, Gorilla,” by Peggy Rathmann

You can set your own pace, either breezing through if you just can’t handle one more minute of the bedtime routine, or reveling in the pictures and dreaming up longer, more complex stories about the zoo animals’ great escape. — Helena Andrews-Dyer, author of “The Mamas: What I Learned About Kids, Class, and Race From Moms Not Like Me”

“Goodnight Moon,” by Margaret Wise Brown; illustrated by Clement Hurd

It’s soothing, which helps a young child sleep. It helps them confront fears of the night in a pleasant, non-threatening way. — Henry Olsen, Post Opinions columnist

“Harold and the Purple Crayon,” by Crockett Johnson

This book feels like a low-key inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”: It’s about a boy who drifts off to sleep and in his dreams uses his purple crayon to reshape reality, building huge cities and getting lost within them. — Sonny Bunch, Post Opinions contributing columnist

“Hattie Peck,” by Emma Levey

Motherhood doesn’t come easy to Hattie, so she adopts animals from all different species. Simple and quick to read, the book holds little ones’ attention while sharing an important message about parenthood. — Susie Allison, creator of Busy Toddler and author of “Playing Preschool”

“The Hello, Goodbye Window,” by Norton Juster; illustrated by Chris Raschka

No book captures the joy and excitement of time away from home, or the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren, quite like this one. — Susie Allison

“The House in the Night,” by Susan Marie Swanson; illustrated by Beth Krommes

Krommes won a Caldecott Medal for her intricate, high-contrast scratchboard illustrations of a child readying for bed and picking up a book “all about the starry dark.” There’s a literal “key” to the titular house, but it’s an exquisite metaphor, too, for the song and the love that make “a home full of light.” — Jen Balderama, associate editor, Post Opinions

“I Want My Hat Back,” by Jon Klassen

This book is unique in my mind for having no wasted space. The text is short, but incredible nuance is conveyed by the pictures, leaving even adults wondering whether there is a hidden message. — Emily Oster, author of “Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong — and What You Really Need to Know,” “Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool” and “The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years”

“If You Come to Earth,” by Sophie Blackall

This beautifully illustrated, meditative read alludes, lightly, to some of the travails of life on Earth — such as losing one’s home in a war or escaping a flood — while reminding us what brings us together. — Anya Kamenetz

“In the Night Kitchen,” by Maurice Sendak

As a psychologist, I have always loved the dreamlike, fantastical quality of “In the Night Kitchen.” Kids love it, too, because it is a story of a boy triumphing over the ridiculous, threatening adults who try to cook him in their cake. — Michael Thompson

“It’s Mine!” by Leo Lionni

This tale of three arguing frogs is a great book to read to siblings and might spark a few conversations to help with their family battles. — Susie Allison

“Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion,” by Mo Willems

I love the mix of photography and illustration. And the theme of letting go — for adults and kids — resonates, transcending age and circumstance. — Sofia Chang, chief executive, Girl Scouts of the USA

“Little Blue and Little Yellow,” by Leo Lionni

The abstract shapes and solid backgrounds of this book’s illustrations made it an early favorite for our son, who has cortical visual impairment, a neurological condition in which the brain struggles to process complex visual information. — Rachael Brown

“Mae Among the Stars,” by Roda Ahmed; illustrated by Stasia Burrington

This book’s lesson about believing in yourself, even when adults and children laugh at your aspirations, is a great one. — Stacia L. Brown, author and podcaster

“Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” by Virginia Lee Burton

Having kids and finding books to read to them has been a delight for the subversive part of my brain that loves rejiggering the messages in perverse ways. “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” is less about finding ways to remain useful in an evolving world and more a work of Cronenbergian body horror that ends with a sentient steam shovel chained to a building, bound like Prometheus to eternal employment/torment. — Sonny Bunch

“Milo Imagines the World,” by Matt de la Peña; illustrated by Christian Robinson

On his subway ride to visit his mother, Milo looks at the people on the train and draws what he thinks their lives are like. But he ends up redrawing his pictures, this time relying on imagination instead of easy-to-reach-for stereotypes. — Amber Noelle Sparks, author of “And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges”

“Miss Rumphius,” by Barbara Cooney

We can see the many people whose lives are shaped by the Lupine Lady, all because she committed to “do something to make the world more beautiful.” It’s a gift to be refreshed by the beauty of the illustrations and to get to keep reminding myself and my daughter of this charge. — Leah Libresco Sargeant, author of “Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers That Even I Can Offer” and “Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name”

“My Friends,” by Taro Gomi

A young girl encounters many unlikely sources of knowledge in the natural and human world around her. “I learned to nap from my friend the crocodile” is my son’s favorite line. — Rachael Brown

“Nutshell Library,” by Maurice Sendak

Kids feel small, and they like small things. This tiny, classic set in its own little slipcase includes a delightful alphabet book; a counting book with a plot of sorts; a savory book of months; and, best of all, a teeny moral tale involving a child so apathetic he gets eaten by a polite but hungry lion. — Amanda Katz

“Oh, Were They Ever Happy!” by Peter Spier

Every Spier book is a prize, especially this mischievous chronicle of a trio of helpful siblings and their adventures after a babysitter fails to show. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm,” by Alice Provensen and Martin Provensen

Lively, unforgettable sketches of animals including Old Eleven, a wise sheep; and Evil Murdoch, a gander. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“Outside Over There,” by Maurice Sendak

Sendak at his best: unsentimental, prankish, funny and full of the absolute strangeness of childhood. — Amber Noelle Sparks

“The Runaway Bunny,” by Margaret Wise Brown; illustrated by Clement Hurd

My 2-year-old has an independent spirit and is the runaway bunny; I’m the mommy bunny who will follow her to the end of the earth. — Leana S. Wen

“A Sick Day for Amos McGee,” by Philip C. Stead; illustrated by Erin Stead

In an era of influencers and self-branding, this book is a delightful reminder about the importance of quiet service to others, and the genuine friendships and returned kindness it can generate. — Sonny Bunch and his wife, Elizabeth Brotherton-Bunch

“The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats

This was the first kids’ book I can remember reading with a Black main character. But it is very much about how the world around us, no matter where you live, can be magical with even the tiniest shift of perspective. And it’s never too early to teach White kids that Black kids are kids, too. — Marc Bernardin, podcaster and writer of comics and graphic novels, including “Adora and the Distance”

“Too Sticky!: Sensory Issues with Autism,” by Jen Malia

Such a loving, accessible story about understanding sensory needs in children. I wish “Too Sticky” had been around when my autistic child was younger. I cried the first time I read it! — Hannah Grieco

“Triangle,” by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but the last line is the best cliffhanger ever! — Nana Efua Mumford

“What Pete Ate from A-Z,” by Maira Kalman

This list of an innocent-looking dog’s incredible ingestion (beginning with “He ate cousin Rocky’s accordion. All of it.”) has verbal treats on every page — Kate Cohen, Post Opinions contributing columnist

“The Whispering Rabbit,” by Margaret Wise Brown; illustrated by Annie Won

Forget “Goodnight Moon” and “The Runaway Bunny”; this is the Margaret Wise Brown book I’ve happily read hundreds of times. A sleepy rabbit opens his mouth to yawn and accidentally swallows … a bee! To expel it, he must emit the quietest possible sound — quieter than snow melting, a fly sneezing, a flower growing. Written in sleep-inducing cadences. — Jen Balderama

Ages 5 to 7R

“Amos & Boris,” by William Steig

A mouse is rescued by a whale, and, years later, the whale is rescued by the mouse. That’s it — and somehow it’s an entire novel in 32 pages. — Kate Cohen

“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” by Barbara Robinson

One of very few books that literally makes me laugh and cry, which is great fun for my kids, who enjoy making fun of me for it. — Mary Katharine Ham

“Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Stolen Diamonds,” by David A. Adler

The voluminous Cam Jansen series develops a habit of reading. It introduces story form and tropes from a history of literature. — Mary Katharine Ham

“Carla’s Sandwich,” by Debbie Herman; illustrated by Sheila Bailey

A story that’s told lightly but captures the serious themes of bullying and appreciation of difference. — Sofia Chang

“Chicken Sunday,” by Patricia Polacco

A young girl and her neighborhood friends do something special for the friends’ grandmother. In the process, they get into an accidental conflict with a neighbor who thinks they’ve vandalized his store — and readers learn about Ukrainian culture, and African American culture and food. — Lisa Loeb

“The Children’s Book of Virtues,” edited by William J. Bennett; illustrated by Michael Hague

We would gather all the kids on our bed at night and read one of the stories or poems — each focused on a particular virtue, such as courage, perseverance or responsibility — and then talk about what it meant and how they could apply it to their lives. — Marc A. Thiessen, Post Opinions columnist

The Chronicles of Prydain series, by Lloyd Alexander

The serial escapades of young Taran, the assistant pig-keeper, and his companions — strong-willed Princess Eilonwy, mercurial Fflewddur Fflam and loyal Gurgi, among others — eventually coalesce into a mythic coming-of-age tale. — Steven D. Greydanus, founder of Decent Films

“The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen,” Taschen edition

After a few years of the usual happy endings, every child needs to be introduced to the destabilizing force of Hans Christian Andersen. This volume is gorgeously illustrated, including images by a variety of Golden Age illustrators, so it’s a visual feast as well as a language one. — Amber Noelle Sparks

“Half Magic” and other novels, by Edward Eager

In “Half Magic,” siblings find a magic coin that half-grants wishes, which forces the family to be creative about how and what they wish for. Eager has a series of linked stories of magic adventures, each strikingly original. — Leah Libresco Sargeant

“Hiking Day,” by Anne Rockwell; illustrated by Lizzy Rockwell

We picked up “Hiking Day” at a nature center gift shop in the middle of the pandemic when “outside” was still a loaded word. I love it because it not only centers a Black family simply living but also celebrates curiosity and the radical notion that the world is everyone’s to explore. — Helena Andrews-Dyer

“Little House in the Big Woods” and its sequels, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I somehow avoided these books as a kid, probably from associating them with the often treacly Michael Landon show, until I started reading them aloud to our daughter as bedtime stories. Big mistake on my part! Wilder’s vivid, lightly fictionalized retelling of her frontier childhood is far richer, more complex and more morally ambiguous about the settling of the American West than I ever could have imagined. — Zack Stentz, creator of “Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous” and co-author of “Colin Fischer”

“The Monster at the End of This Book,” by Jon Stone; illustrated by Michael Smollin

How young is too young to introduce a kid to the concept of “meta”? Of “breaking the fourth wall”? Of “narrative realities”? — Marc BernardinPress Enter to skip to end of carousel

“My Mind is a Mountain / Mi mente es una montaña,” by Cindy Montenegro; illustrated by Nqobile Adigun

This beautiful book, which we publish, allows parents and their little ones to begin having conversations about mental health very early on, helping to destigmatize it and encourage resilience in children. — Patty Rodriguez and Ariana Stein, founders of Lil’ Libros

“Roxaboxen,” by Alice McLerran; illustrated by Barbara Cooney

A sparkling example of a true imaginative tale and the magical quality of make-believe within the heart and soul of a child. A grand adventure for young and old (but have a tissue handy). — Rachel Reeves, co-host of the RightBooks4Kids Instagram account

“Sábado / Saturday,” by Jorge Garza

This almost textless picture book is inspired by Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts and celebrates the first accomplishments of many immigrant families — in this case, the graduation of a school-age child. — Patty Rodriguez and Ariana Stein

“The Skin You Live In,” by Michael Tyler; illustrated by David Lee Csicsko

Tyler’s rhyming prose and Csicsko’s bright, joyful illustrations deliver a vital message: The skin you live in, whether “butterscotch gold skin,” “marshmallow treat skin” or “warm cocoa dream skin,” is beautiful — as is “the ‘you’ who’s within.” — Jen Balderama

“Small Sister,” by Jessica Meserve

This gets at so many of the big emotions involved in sibling relationships: admiration, competition, jealousy, rage, courage, but mostly love. — Helena Andrews-Dyer

“Stories for Children,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer

These moving stories shine a light into the lives of Jews in Europe and the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Singer is one of the best children’s writers in history. A great bedtime read-aloud for older kids. — Bethany S. Mandel

“A Story About Afiya,” by James Berry; illustrated by Anna Cunha

Written by Jamaican poet James Berry, this is a sweet ode to childhood full of gorgeous illustrations that bring Afiya’s bright personality and dazzling dress to life on every page. — Amber O’Neal Johnston, author of “A Place to Belong: Celebrating Diversity and Kinship in the Home and Beyond”

“Weasels,” by Elys Dolan

A James Bond movie if it were only about the villains and if the villains were coffee-addicted weasels trying to achieve total world domination — a phrase I had to apologize to my brother for teaching his kid. — Amanda Katz

“The Wreck of the Zephyr,” by Chris Van Allsburg

Van Allsburg’s books are great stories, but more important, they are haunting stories. They have a beautiful weight to them, even darkness and danger, in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. — Mary Katharine Ham

Ages 8 to 12

“Blended,” by Sharon M. Draper

“Blended” explores themes of biracial identity, divorce and remarriage, and police brutality. A good book to read and discuss along with your child, especially if your family is dealing with any of the book’s social themes. — Stacia L. Brown

“Bridge to Terabithia,” by Katherine Paterson

It appears as though it’s going to be an innocent book about two kids creating an adventure world, but it has a sad twist. I still loved it when I was younger, because it was relatable to me at that age. — Flora Saucier, child of Post Opinions contributing columnist Fernanda Santos

“Charlotte’s Web,” by E.B. White; illustrated by Garth Williams

The first book that ever made me cry was “Charlotte’s Web”; I think I was about 8 years old. It is a book of such wisdom, and sorrow, and joy, so much of it encapsulated in Wilbur’s summary of the barn in which he lives: “It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.” — Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of the Falcon Quinn series

The Chronicles of Narnia series, by C.S. Lewis

While the seven-book series weaves understated theological symbolism throughout, its powerful strength is its great appeal even to readers who don’t have a strong religious bent. — Rachel Reeves

“Echo,” by Pam Muñoz Ryan

I loved this book for its complicated plot, for its connections across time and for the conversations it sparked. It’s a perfect read-aloud.— Emily Oster

“El Deafo,” by Cece Bell

When Bell loses her hearing after an early childhood illness, she develops a fearless alter ego named El Deafo — to sweet, poignant and comedic effect. — Stacia L. Brown

“Farah Rocks Fifth Grade,” by Susan Muaddi Darraj; illustrated by Ruaida Mannaa

The first book in an incredible middle-grade series about a young detective, and it introduces a young Arab American girl as the protagonist! — Hannah Grieco

“From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” by E.L. Konigsburg

This is such a lovely book in its respect for children’s intelligence and discernment, and for its portrait of friendship between kids and adults. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“Front Desk,” by Kelly Yang

This story about a Chinese immigrant family gave my daughter perspective on what my childhood was like while also touching on themes of racism, socioeconomic exclusion and inclusion. — Sofia Chang

“The Great Brain,” by John D. Fitzgerald; illustrated by Mercer Mayer

A classic about the merciless but harmless manipulations of a younger brother by his older, in a mixed Catholic-Mormon family on the Utah frontier. Full of gentle moral lessons and diversity of the religious sort; it also imparts a lot of American history without forcing it. — Charles Lane, Post Opinions columnist and editorial board member

“Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans,” by Kadir Nelson

Narrated in the voice of a fictionalized African American elder, this book offers an engaging overview of the trials and triumphs of African Americans. It’s filled with Nelson’s jaw-dropping, full-page portraits, and the narrative writing draws each reader into a personal story. — Amber O’Neal Johnston

“The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien

Warmer, funnier and lighter on its feet than the author’s more celebrated Lord of the Rings trilogy, “The Hobbit” is still a perfect introduction to the world of high fantasy. — Zack Stentz

“The Lives of Christopher Chant,” by Diana Wynne Jones

A much funnier, more imaginative, more nuanced and less formulaic J.K. Rowling novel. — Amanda Katz

“My Side of the Mountain,” by Jean Craighead George

On the pier between childhood and stormy adolescence, this novel meets readers ready to imagine independence, self-reliance and life without parents. Part adventure story, part naturalist handbook, George’s story awakens a love for the outdoors even as she prepares preteens for what comes next. — David Von Drehle

“Out of My Mind,” by Sharon M. Draper

This book and its sequel, “Out of My Heart,” are compelling stories that teach bravery and compassion while giving a bold view into what life is like for some people with disabilities. — Amber O’Neal Johnston

Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, by Rick Riordan; illustrated by John Rocco

A good way to introduce early teens to their own situations while teaching them about Greek mythology. Plus, any story that says the gods live in New York and the entrance to hell is in Los Angeles gets huge props from me! — Henry Olsen

“The Phantom Tollbooth,” by Norton Juster; illustrated by Jules Feiffer

This classic is a magic trick: a fantasy adventure that fuses an overtly allegorical, “Pilgrim’s Progress”-esque ode to the importance of learning and education with anarchic Lewis Carroll-like whimsy and nonsense. — Steven D. Greydanus

“The Pushcart War,” by Jean Merrill; illustrated by Ronni Solbert

Simply the best book about politics ever written for children, and vastly more fun than that description makes it sound. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“Ramona and Her Father,” by Beverly Cleary; illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers

No other author has rendered ordinary childhood in such windowpane prose or with such unpatronizing dignity and deft humor. — David Von Drehle

A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket; illustrated by Brett Helquist

The books in this series are unlike anything we’ve read before: Though each is about an “unfortunate” event, the writer still finds a way to be funny. — Fernanda Santos and Flora Saucier

“Sisters,” by Raina Telgemeier

For many kids, I think graphic novels are a key to opening up a love of reading. There are many great ones, but in my house this book is distinguished by being the most coated in food crumbs, as it’s the top choice for reading while eating dessert. — Emily Oster

“So You Want to Be a Wizard” and its sequels, by Diane Duane

While movies about magic are dominated by third-act CGI-fests, Duane’s wizards are attentive to small things, and their adventures turn on small risks of generosity and trust. — Leah Libresco Sargeant

“Treasure Island,” by Robert Louis Stevenson

Pirates! Pretty much every buccaneer trope (maps to buried treasure, peg legs and eye patches, parrots who yell “Pieces of eight!”) comes straight from this tale of a boy swept into a high-seas adventure. “Treasure Island” is particularly fun to read aloud, since you can do all the pirate voices as you move through the chapters. Just don’t act out the sword fights unless you want your kids to stay awake long past bedtime. — Zack Stentz

“Watership Down,” by Richard Adams

Adams is the Homer of the hedgerow, the Malory of the warren — or, a bit more precisely, the Tolkien of rabbitry, complete with rabbit myths and folk tales, poetry, spirituality, even a sketch of a rabbit language. This is an epic saga, brimming with philosophical depth, about a special group of rabbits pursuing a better life, facing seemingly insurmountable difficulties with creativity, loyalty and hope. — Steven D. Greydanus

“Where the Sidewalk Ends,” by Shel Silverstein

If Dr. Seuss’s work feels like cartoons on mushrooms, then Silverstein’s illustrations vibe like they favor single malt. — Marc Bernardin

13 and older

“Alanna: The First Adventure,” by Tamora Pierce

The 22 books and novellas set in Pierce’s fictional kingdom of Tortall range from “The Wire,” with magic, to “Game of Thrones”-style social chronicle minus the grotesque violence. And without being explicit, the books are a wonderful starting place for conversations about healthy romantic and sexual relationships. — Alyssa Rosenberg

“Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card

A story of courage, doubt, and sibling love and rivalry. If your child ever thinks “that’s unfair!,” reflecting on Ender’s plight might put things in perspective. — Timothy P. Carney, a senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Katie Carney

“The Fellowship of the Ring” and its sequels, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Not a children’s book, but it teaches about honor, courage and duty at an age when it’s essential to inculcate those concepts in teens. — Henry Olsen

“Fifteen,” by Beverly Cleary

This story about starting to date is perfection, worth it alone for the chapter in which protagonist Jane Purdy deals with the heartache of not being asked to a dance. — Alyssa Rosenberg

The Kane Chronicles trilogy, by Rick Riordan; illustrated by Matt Griffin

This series, couched in a strong coming-of-age framing, doesn’t shy away from questions of identity, loss and sacrifice. — Rebecca Cokley, disability rights program officer at the Ford Foundation

The Legendborn Cycle series, by Tracy Deonn

An update to the Arthurian saga, centered on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the tensions between two communities with histories in magic. This series is unapologetic in its approach to race, gender and class. — Rebecca Cokley

“Northanger Abbey,” by Jane Austen

For teenagers who like dark classic novels. It’s one of Austen’s lesser-known works, but it has a great mixture of romance and mystery. — Fernanda Santos and Flora Saucier

“The Pilgrim’s Progress,” by John Bunyan

This book’s roots are firmly and deeply planted in truth found in scripture. It is infused with hope. — Rachel Reeves

“Right Ho, Jeeves,” by P.G. Wodehouse

Some of our happiest family reading moments came with Jeeves and the Woosters, starting with this volume. Words explode. Names pop. Harebrained schemes somehow stick the landing. All these fire the pre-adolescent brain. But the biggest draw, especially for young minds coming to the realization that their parents might be idiots? The welcome surprise that power dynamics are not what they appear. Bertie owns the cards, but Jeeves calls the plays, sir. — David Shipley, The Post’s opinion editor

“The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4” and its sequels, by Sue Townsend

Funny, gross, touching — and an opportunity for teenagers to see their own self-absorption from the outside. — Alyssa Rosenberg

Thank you for telling us which children’s books we missed. We are reviewing nearly 250 responses and will publish the list soon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/06/kids-books-recommendations-list-culture-war/

Schools got $122 billion to reopen last year. Most has not been used.

November 15, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Lauren Lumpkin and Sahana Jayaraman Updated October 24, 2022 at 6:27 p.m. EDT|Published October 24, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT Washington Post

In March 2021, the Biden administration released the federal government’s largest pool of pandemic relief for public schools. The American Rescue Plan infused campuses with $122 billion to reopen buildings, address mental health needs and help students who had fallen behind academically.

The need was so urgent that two-thirds of the money — $81 billion — was released less than two weeks after the plan was signed into law and before the Education Department could approve each state’s spending plan.

But despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15 percent of the federal funding, known as ESSER III, the most recent installment of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Washington Post analysis of data collected by Edunomics, an education finance group at Georgetown University.

The spending rates varied considerably between states, and even among school districts within a state. But the trend of a slow rollout was especially apparent in some of the school districts that have incurred the steepest learning losses in English and math, according to the data. About half of the 211 districts The Post examined, where Edunomics estimates students are the furthest behind, spent 5 percent or less of their ESSER III money last school year, the data shows.

Meanwhile, national test scores in elementary school math and reading have plunged to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and education advocates worry that children continue to fall behind. “The excuse in education has always been, ‘We don’t have enough money,’” said Keri Rodrigues, president of education advocacy group the National Parents Union. “Now we have a historic amount of spending, like never before, and you’re not even spending the money.”

The money was not spent for a variety of reasons — including delayed access to funds, a nationwide educator shortage that has made it hard to fill new positions, and a desire to make the money last, according to interviews with school officials and education experts in six states. ESSER III expires in September 2024, well after two earlier rounds of relief funding dry up, and school leaders say they want to stretch it as long as possible.

But while the money sits — much of which is slated to go toward tutoring and other measures to catch students up academically — millions of children continue to struggle in core subjects, the consequences of which might not be known for years.

School district leaders, however, insist they are making progress — particularly this school year as they plan to dip deeper into the remaining money. The vast majority of funds have already been committed to “critical needs,” such as addressing student mental health and reversing learning loss, and will be spent over the next two years, according to the White House and outside analyses of thousands of school districts’ spending plans. Many expenses, such as staff salaries, can only be drawn down gradually, officials added.

And inmany cases districts are still spending earlier waves of federal funding, a total of $67.5 billion released during the Trump administration that helped schools pivot to virtual learning and retrofit buildings to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.The White House said the passage of the American Rescue Plan expedited spending of those earlier rounds, and overall monthly pandemic education spending increased eightfold between February 2021 and August 2022.

Districts also explain the slow rate of spending by pointing to staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions that have made it difficult to fulfill their plans, as well as bureaucratic hurdles and reporting lags.

The state education agency in Maryland, for example, reports that Baltimore has not spent any of its relief dollars. Kimberly Hoffman, executive director of data monitoring and compliance for the school district of more than 77,000 children,said 14 percent of the grant has now been spent.

“We didn’t even have approval from the state to start spending it until October 2021,” Hoffman said. “A lot of our planning on using that third pot of ESSER funds is really what’s going to happen this year in the ’22-23 school year and next year, in 2023-24.”

Using factors including test scores, family poverty data and the number of weeks students spent in remote learning, Edunomics estimates that children in Baltimore have lost an average of 18 weeks of learning in math and 15 weeks in reading. Remedying that could total $177.8 million in tutoring costs — 40 percent of the city’s ESSER III allotment — researchers estimate.

Hoffman said roughly half of Baltimore’s $443 million award is slated to address learning loss, much of which will take the form of tutoring as the district expands programs that started before the pandemic. In the months after ESSER III was announced, officials created a spending plan that included $39 million to pay teachers to tutor over the summer and $57 million to hire outside help for summer learning programs. That spending started this year and will continue over the summers of 2023 and 2024.

Millions more will be poured into one-on-one instruction, online tutoring and after-school learning programs — including $9 million to bring in outside organizations to tutor students in 100 schools over two years, according to the district.

Baltimore’s budget for the federal funding also includes more opportunities for students who failed courses to regain credits, as well as money to hire bus drivers, purchase WiFi hotspots for families and address long-neglected infrastructure needs — from bathroom renovations to air-conditioning installations.

Schools have been given wide latitude in determining how to use the money, though at least 20 percent must be spent to address learning loss. Schools have reported purchasing new curriculums, furniture and school supplies. At least 31 of the 100 largest school districts in the country are paying teachers bonuses, according to FutureEd, another Georgetown education research group.

Some districts have shied away from purchases that can’t be sustained once the money runs dry, such as new positions or salary increases, although dozens have reported doing so anyway. In North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school district said it would use $5.8 million to hire about 400 “guest teachers,” whose positions are set to expire at the same time as the funding.

But most districts are eager to reverse the academic damage cause by the pandemic. The influx of federal dollars presents an opportunity to give unprecedented support to “kids who weren’t getting the educational opportunities they needed before the pandemic,” including children from low-income families, English language learners and students with special education needs, said Segun Eubanks, a professor and director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Education Innovation and Improvement.

In the nation’s capital, Edunomics estimates that students in the public school system are 20 weeks behind in math and 12 weeks behind in reading, which could cost more than $116 million to reverse. The district has reported spending less than 3 percent of its nearly $195 million allotment, according to the District’s state superintendent of education. The city’s charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated by nonprofit organizations called local education agencies, were awarded about $152.8 million.

Chris Bergfalk, a veteran D.C. public school teacher, said last school year — when most children came back to the building — was the hardest of his 20-year career. He returned to his fifth-grade classroom a mile from the Capitol to children who were traumatized.

In school, children eat two to three meals a day. They can talk to social workers and get after-school care. But when buildings closed, those services disappeared in many cases, Bergfalk said. Now teachers are seeing the effects.

“I have students who are at the beginning reading level, which means they can’t read, and I have students who are in the 99th percentile,” he said. One of the higher-scoring students, he added, said their parent hired a tutor while schools were closed.

In many cases, a child’s academic standing can be traced to whether consistent internet access was available at home, said Eric Teutsch, a high school Spanish teacher in Youngstown, Ohio. Schools recorded attendance issues throughout the pandemic as children struggled to get online, and when they came back to the classroom “they were behind academically and socially,” Teutsch said. Edunomics estimates it will cost $12.6 million to catch kids up who are, on average, 20 weeks behind in math and 16 weeks behind in reading.

Pinpointing the exact amount of learning loss incurred through the pandemic is tricky, and districts have different ways of measuring progress. But it is widely understood that schools are contending with a crisis.

Tennessee’s state department of education is awarding extra state funding to districts and charter schools that spend half of their ESSER III award on academics and participate in a multiyear tutoring program. In D.C., officials are pouring $40 million intofrequent, small-group tutoring, with plans to provide services to more than 8,000 children over the next two academic years. This type of tutoring, often called “high-impact,” is among the best methods to accelerate learning, research indicates.

Consistency and continuity are also needed for an effective tutoring regime. But spending federal dollars has been challenging in the absence of qualified people who can make the commitment, said Jonathan Travers, a partner at Education Resource Strategies. The Massachusetts-based nonprofit helps school districts determine how best to use their resources.

At first it was hard to find teachers who could take on the extra workload, Travers said. Schools started outsourcing to local organizations, community partners and nearby universities to fill the gap. But with nearly every school district in the country embarking on the same strategy, even those positions are hard to fill.

The case has been the same with other staff positions — from teachers to bus drivers to mental health professionals. Districts set out last year to hire counselors to help children cope with the emotional fallout of spending months at home, around sick relatives or in neighborhoods beset by surging violent crime. Morgan County Schools, a rural district of about 2,100 students in West Virginia, is contending not only with the pandemic but an opioid epidemic. Officials planned to hire a school psychologist, a behavior support specialist and a social worker.

So far, the social worker position has been filled, said Kristen Tuttle, the district’s superintendent. The behavior support role was changed to a special education coach to make the position easier to fill, but the district has not been able to find a qualified candidate to take on the psychologist job, she added.The school system has reported using about 10 percent of its $4.7 million ESSER III allotment.

But even with plans in place, some districts acknowledge they are behind on spending, said Travers, who is working with about 30 urban and suburban school systems. “In some cases, probably, the plan review and approval took longer than they assumed,” he said. “I think the majority of cases, though, were about challenges getting management capacity to get spending initiatives kicked off.”

Education experts also warn the data available about ESSER III use do not fully capture what is happening in schools. The figure that gets reported — whether it’s zero, 5 or 31 percent of funding spent — reflects only how much money a district has requested from the state. School districts are not sitting on those dollars, they say, but rather tapping into local funds and getting reimbursed later.

“That’s one of the reasons there’s a difference between the budget and the plan to utilize funds versus actually pulling the money down, receiving it in your bank account and using it to pay someone,” said Dean Zajic, assistant director of special education and title services for the Kansas State Department of Education.

In Yakima, Wash., officials say slow spending is intentional. The district has requested 20 percent of its $56.1 million ESSER III allotment, state data show.

Jenny Rodriguez, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said the district has focused on spending the first two rounds of relief before tapping into ESSER III. Students in Yakima schools lost an average of 22 weeks of math and 21 weeks of reading, Edunomics estimates, which would cost $47.8 million to reverse.

“Rather than a huge fire hose of funding in a single year, or even two years,” Rodriguez said, “we’ve been intentional to think about how do we stretch this funding to have supports for students as long as possible?”

In Youngstown, however, the public school district is more than three-quarters of the way through its $50 million ESSER III grant.

Justin Jennings, the system’s superintendent, said it’s because officials started requesting money early. “When other people were buying hotspots and laptops, we already had them on the way,” he said.

The district of more than 4,000 students also requested funding for big-ticket expenses, from air conditioning units to roofing repairs. Officials bought 48 new school buses, Jennings said, adding that some of the older vehicles “should have been out of service years ago.”

But one thing that has stumped Jennings, and school leaders throughout the country, is how to sustain some of these purchases. For example, many districts in 2020 became one-to-one device districts overnight, meaning that, for the first time, every student had a laptop. But those devices last, at most, five years, Jennings said — at which point officials will have to figure out how to replace hundreds of devices.

In Baltimore, Zabrina Harris, a middle school special educator, said she is proud of how her district has addressed education deficits. Although her students are behind, they are still making progress, she said.

But she also understands the reality. Children in the city — for myriad reasons, from poverty to exposure to violence — have long trailed their peers across the state. In districts like that, it may take more than one-time federal relief to reverse years of underinvestment.

“They may never meet certain standards,” Harris said. “But will they be readers and writers and thinkers? Yes, they will. I have faith in that.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/covid-spending-schools-students-achievement/

Plummeting U.S. test scores aren’t a red state vs. blue state thing

November 15, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Eugene Robinson Washington Post October 25th 2022

It turns out that all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned. Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released Monday, show that the pandemic ushered in a falling tide that lowered all boats. Scores for fourth-graders and eighth-graders in reading declined markedly — and, in math, showed the biggest drop since testing began in 1990 — regardless of what ambitious politicians said or did.

Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, made a big show of reopening their states’ schools in the fall of 2020, with DeSantis going so far as to threaten to withhold funding from school districts that did not comply. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, on the other hand, moved more slowly, conditioning the return to in-person instruction on the level of covid-19 infection in a given county.

But the NAEP report, based on testing this spring, showed that student performance suffered equally despite the different approaches. Math scores for fourth-graders dropped by four points in California, five points in Florida and five points in Texas. For eighth-graders, scores dropped by six points in California, seven points in Florida and seven points in Texas.

Scores in reading in those three states also moved in lockstep, falling by a point or two. Political posturing might have mattered to governors who’d like to be president someday, but it made no difference to the millions of children in the nation’s schools. From the students’ point of view, there was no “right way” to blunt the impact of the pandemic. All strategies, we now know, were equally futile.

The NAEP results — often called “the nation’s report card” — present a huge challenge to officials at every level, from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on down to every school district superintendent and every elementary and middle school principal. Following modest gains over the past three decades, student performance in reading is back to exactly where it was in 1992. And performance in math, after a hopeful stretch of significant improvement, is back to about what it was 20 years ago.

The pandemic caused math scores to fall more sharply than reading scores. The theory — and it certainly would have been borne out in my household, if I still had school-age children — is that parents were more equipped to help their kids keep on pace in reading than in math.

There are some puzzling findings in the NAEP data. Fourth-graders who were already the lowest performers lost more ground — falling even further behind — during the pandemic, especially in math. That raises the question of whether many of those students have grasped the fundamental principles they will need to survive their math classes in the higher grades.

The story is different, however, for eighth-graders. The top performers and the lowest performers lost ground in equal measure — two or three points in reading, roughly eight points in math. This presents an obvious challenge for high schools across the country: Will this cohort be ready for high school algebra and geometry? Or will some remedial instruction be necessary?

For that matter, how will the nation help our children catch up after what amounted to two lost years in their education? The NAEP report does not provide answers, but it offers a few clues.

Roughly 70 percent of students said they had at least some experience with remote learning during the pandemic. Higher-performing students — those who lost less ground — were significantly more likely than low performers to have full-time access to a computer or tablet; to have high-speed internet access; to have a quiet place to do their homework; to have a teacher available remotely to help them almost every day; and to have an adult help them in person with their schoolwork at least once or twice a week.

Wealthy, highly educated parents are going to do everything in their power to educate their children. Less affluent parents in financially strapped school districts will need federal and state aid to keep up. The last thing this country needs is more inequality.

Another takeaway is clear: These are the education issues we ought to be grappling with, rather than using schools as battlefields for the culture wars.

Enough, already, with the performative outrage about imaginary critical race theory, a handful of transgender students who want to play sports and what pronouns teachers can and cannot use. Our students need to learn reading and math — and they’re losing ground.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/test-scores-plummet-red-and-blue-states/

Six women poised to change the face of the Montgomery County Council

November 15, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Katie Shepherd November 13, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Montgomery County voters elected a historic slate of candidates to the County Council on Tuesday, adding Latina, Asian and Black representatives to a body that will be majority-female for the first time.

The six incoming members — all women — have their own priorities and beliefs that range from moderate to ultraliberal. On the whole, the changes are expected to shift the body further left in a deep-blue county that already prides itself as a haven for progressive ideas and policymaking.

“I’m really excited that we finally have a council that reflects the rich and beautiful diversity of our county,” said Laurie-Anne Sayles, who was elected to an at-large seat Tuesday.

In interviews, the newcomers cited plans to boost affordable housing and pedestrian safety and road quality, bolster the county’s mental and behavioral health resources, restore jobs lost in the pandemic and improve wages. Several campaigned on promises to improve equity for disenfranchised residents here, in one of the wealthiest counties in a state frequently ranked among the wealthiest in America by median household income.

Similar pledges lifted candidates across the state and nation to “firsts” this cycle: voters elected Maryland’s first Black governor, first Black attorney general and first immigrant and woman of color to serve as lieutenant governor. Nationally, voters elected the first female governors in Massachusetts and New York, and the first openly lesbian governors in Oregon and Massachusetts. Arkansas also elected its first female governor, Republican Sarah Sanders, though her politics are a stark contrast to the Democrats who made history in other states.

In Montgomery,where people of color make up nearly 6 in 10 of the county’s 1.05 million residents, incoming council members said they recognized the significance of representing people who aren’t accustomed to seeing themselves in the county’s elected leadership.

In Montgomery’s long neglected east county, a new map stirs hope for stronger representation

The new members include an accountant, a mayor, a Venezuelan immigrant and dreamer, an adoptee who serves as an assistant state attorney general, a first-generation Chinese American born and raised in the county and a first-generation Jamaican American who works in public health.

In addition to Sayles, also elected Tuesday were Marilyn Balcombe (D-District 2), Kate Stewart (D-District 4), Kristin Mink (D-District 5), Natali Fani-González (D-District 6) and Dawn Luedtke (D-District 7). They will join five incumbents who secured reelection.

The incoming council will be tasked with taking up implementation of the controversial Thrive 2050 planguiding growth and development that passed last month, appointing a new planning board after the entire body resigned amid scandal earlier this year, and continuing efforts on police reforms and steering Montgomery’s coronavirus recovery.

The council is expanding from nine to 11 members this year under a plan voters backed to alter the body’s makeup in 2020. District lines were redrawn to create seats that better represent residents in the eastern reaches of the county. Throughout the campaign cycle, voters and candidates have questioned whether the equity-minded countygovernment has done enough for the county’s east side, where immigrant communities and predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods have for decades gone without investment that helped other parts of the county prosper.

Mink will represent one of the new districts carved out to better represent east county residents, which consolidates Four Corners through Burtonsville. Mink ran on a liberal platform supporting rent stabilization and eviction protections, free bus rapid transit and substantial economic investment in White Oak and Burtonsville Crossing, among other progressive issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/13/montgomery-county-council-women/

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Posts by Paul Costello1

Suffer the teachers

Building empathy in children takes practice. Parents can help.

Talk about feelings — theirs and others

Teaching kids how to understand what other people feel

Challenges to empathy

Inside the new middle school math crisis

While other grades recover, middle schoolers are still in freefall. Two Virginia schools are bucking the trend.

Are grading, homework and graduation shortcuts making kids dumb? Maybe not.

Was your home once off-limits to non-Whites? These maps can tell you.

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”

To build a delightful library for kids, start with these 99 books

Birth to age 4

Ages 5 to 7R

Ages 8 to 12

13 and older

Schools got $122 billion to reopen last year. Most has not been used.

Plummeting U.S. test scores aren’t a red state vs. blue state thing

Six women poised to change the face of the Montgomery County Council

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