Ms. Esfahani Smith is a doctoral student in clinical psychology and the author of “The Power of Meaning.” At the beginning of the pandemic, she wrote about how a key to surviving the mental-health trials of isolation is to look for meaning rather than happiness.
When schools shut down last spring, Carson Roubison, a charter school student in Phoenix, was initially relieved. There were some difficulties in those early days at home — when classes went online, Carson and his parents, both public-school teachers, had to share the sole family computer. But Carson’s stress levels fell as school became less demanding during the transition to distance learning.
“I wasn’t aware of the giant impact the pandemic would have,” he said, “so I was excited, to be honest, to have some time off school.”
But things changed in the fall. The academic load went back to prepandemic levels, even though learning was still remote. Carson, a senior, struggled to stay motivated. His mental health suffered. He hoped to attend community college the following fall, but grew increasingly “terrified” that the education he’d received in high school over the past year would leave him unprepared.
“I’m afraid I’m going to get to community college,” he said, “and be held to the same standards as past students, and fail. That’s the biggest source of my anxiety.”More on the pandemic and mental health
Carson’s story is not unique. The pandemic has taken a toll on the mental health of millions. But adolescents have been hit especially hard. According to a national poll conducted in January by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 46 percent of parents say their teenagers’ mental health has worsened during the pandemic. More alarmingly, a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the proportion of 12- to 17-year-olds visiting emergency rooms for mental health reasons rose 31 percent for most of 2020 compared with 2019. And this is all on top of an already existing mental health crisis among young people.
While many experts believe that the reason adolescents are struggling today is that they’re away from friends and school, a closer look at the research reveals a more complicated picture. According to psychologists who study adolescent resilience, one of the biggest threats to the well-being of today’s teenagers is not social isolation but something else — the pressure to achieve, which has intensified over the past year.
Psychologists define resilience as the ability to adapt well to stress. For decades, they have studied why some kids are more resilient in adversity than others. Suniya Luthar, emerita professor of psychology at Columbia’s Teachers College and a leading resilience researcher, believes the pandemic is a “natural experiment” that can help answer that question: When you expose adolescents to an event that changes their lives significantly, how do they cope?
Dr. Luthar began her career studying resilience among urban youth living in poverty in Connecticut in the 1990s. At the urging of one of her students at Yale, where she was teaching, she also started studying teenagers living in middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs like Westport, Conn., where many of the parents are high-achieving professionals who emphasize the value of status and achievement to their children.
Comparing these students with the poor, urban adolescents, she was shocked to discover that the suburban children were doing worse on drug and alcohol abuse. They also had higher rates of anxiety and depression as compared with national norms. Researchers knew that social conditions were important determinants of resilience, but they hadn’t known that living in success-oriented cultures was a risk factor.
In the years since, Dr. Luthar and her colleagues at Authentic Connections, a research group that works to foster resilience in school communities, have studied tens of thousands of teenagers attending “high-achieving schools,” which she defines as public and private institutions where students on average score in the top third on standardized tests. The students in these samples come from a variety of racial, regional and socioeconomic backgrounds. In one group of students Dr. Luthar studied, for example, one-third were members of ethnic and racial minorities and one-quarter came from homes where at least one parent did not attend college.
But regardless of these differences, many of them were struggling in the same way. In a paper published in 2020 in the academic journal American Psychologist, Dr. Luthar and her colleagues — the psychological researchers Nina Kumar and Nicole Zillmer — reviewed three decades’ worth of research findings showing that adolescents at high-achieving schools suffer from symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety at rates three to seven times higher than national norms for children their age.
What’s driving their misery, the research shows, is the pressure to excel in multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation suggest children living in an achievement-oriented culture are at risk for adjustment problems, like those facing more predictable forms of adversity, such as poverty and trauma.
The pandemic offered a rare reprieve for students — at first. Since 2019, Dr. Luthar and her colleagues have surveyed thousands of adolescents each year at public and private schools across the nation. Replicating findings of earlier research, these students reported suffering from anxiety and depression at higher rates than national norms before the pandemic. But when schools closed last spring, something unexpected happened — the well-being of these students actually improved. As classes and exams were canceled, grading moved to pass/fail and extracurricular activity ceased, they reported lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression compared with 2019.
But these improvements were short-lived. Dr. Luthar and her colleagues found that beginning in the fall of 2020, as schoolwork ramped back up, the mental health of adolescents returned to prepandemic levels or worse. According to research that will be published in Social Policy Report, a quarterly publication of the Society for Research in Child Development, the strongest predictor of depression among these students was perceived parental criticism and unreachable standards.
“Even though I’m trying my best, it never really goes the way I wished,” a student Dr. Luthar studied wrote, “and my mother adds stress because she is always saying that I NEED to have a 90 or higher averages in all my classes.”
Other research supports these findings. In a nationally representative study conducted by NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with Stanford’s education school, researchers studied over 10,000 high school students in the fall of 2020. Comparing the experience of these students with about 65,000 adolescents surveyed between 2018 and February 2020, these researchers, too, found that many students reported feeling more stressed about school during the fall of 2020 than before the pandemic. A chief cause of their stress: the pressure to achieve.
Nearly half of all students reported that the pressure to do well in school had increased since 2019, and over half said their school-related stress over all had risen. Grades, workload, time management, lack of sleep and college fears were the most commonly cited sources of stress. These findings held across socioeconomically diverse schools. At underresourced schools, students were more likely to report being stressed about family finances, according to Denise Pope, a founder of Challenge Success, but the top stressors were still grades, assessments and college.
“My school is giving too much work,” a 10th grader in this study wrote, “even though times are tough for everyone. At first, this was just a break from school, but now all I feel is stress, anxiety and pain.”
Parents appear to play a big role in this phenomenon. Fifty-seven percent of students said that their parents’ expectations for their performance stayed the same during the pandemic, while 34 percent said their expectations increased. The stereotype of the adolescent aloof from parental influence doesn’t seem to apply to these students, who report feeling more stressed about family pressure than peer pressure.
When Dr. Pope asks parents to define success, they inevitably say that they want their children to be happy and healthy, have loving relationships and give back to society. But when she asks children how they define success, many describe a narrow path: getting good grades, going to college and securing a high-paying job.
Dr. Pope believes the gap is due in part to how parents praise their kids. Many parents reward their children when they perform well, which sends a signal to the kids that the approval and love of their parents depends on how much they’re achieving. So inevitably, if they believe they are falling short of their parents’ expectations, their sense of worth and well-being suffers.
Larger cultural forces are also pushing students to define success narrowly. As inequality rises and two major recessions in the past decade have left millions out of work, many students may feel compelled to climb the ladder to ensure their economic security as adults. College admissions at top-tiered schools has become more selective over the same period of time, leaving students competing harder for fewer spots — only to receive an education that will likely leave them or their parents in debt for many years to come.
If we want more-resilient kids coming out of the pandemic, then we need to heed a lesson of this past year — that the pressure to achieve is crushing the spirits of many young people and should be dialed back. Parents can play a vital role here. They can help ease their children’s anxiety by reminding them that where they attend college will not make or break them — and that getting Bs does not equal failure.
They can encourage them to prioritize their health and well-being by getting enough sleep and making time for play and leisure. And above all, they can teach their children that loss is an inevitable part of life by speaking to them about the grief of the past year. This doesn’t mean parents should necessarily lower their standards. But they might emphasize different benchmarks for achievement, like those they themselves claim to most value for their children — happiness, health and love.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
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American presidents have long vied to echo John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you.”
The spirit of service, declared Ronald Reagan, “flows like a deep and mighty river through the history of our nation.” Bill Clinton created AmeriCorps. George H.W. Bush likened volunteer organizations to “a thousand points of light.” George W. Bush created the USA Freedom Corps. Barack Obama called on Americans to “ground our politics in the notion of a common good.”
Their arguments are all the more compelling today, in a bitterly divided America struggling with a pandemic.
Many aging Vietnam-era veterans attest to the sense of community that came with either involuntary military service or the alternative service routes that those who refused the draft opted for. Conscription came to an end in 1973, and in the years since, this board has several times called on the government to expand the opportunities for national service, military or civilian. “For those young people who do not feel moved by patriotism or propelled by economics to enlist in the military, there should be other options for national service like AmeriCorps,” we wrote in 2006.
The idea has a rich pedigree.When a nation is at peace, the philosopher-psychologist William James wrote in an early-20th-century essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” the martial virtues of “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command” — the backbone of a strong nation, in his view — can be achieved through civic works.S
James’s focus on male service and industrial tasks is largely obsolete today. But his fundamental argument, that “a permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy,” remains the basic case for national service. In an updated version of the case, Pete Buttigieg, now President Biden’s secretary of transportation, pushed as a candidate for a program offering hundreds of thousands of national service opportunities to young Americans as a way to counter the growing threats to social cohesion.
Mr. Biden has an opportunity to make some version of this a reality. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of international forces in Afghanistan and head of the “Serve America. Together” campaign, recently called on the president to invest in universal national service for one million young Americans annually as “the most important strategy we can implement to ensure the strength and security of our nation.”
On the surface, the idea would seem to be attractive across the political spectrum — the idealism to liberals, the service to conservatives, the virtues of selfless sharing to millions of Americans who already perform some form of community service. According to Google trends, search interest in mandatory national service hit a five-year high in 2017 as the yawning political divide in America became increasingly evident.
What could be objectionable in asking all young people to pause before plunging into the scramble of adult life to donate some of their time and energies to some socially beneficial, critically needed service at home or abroad?
It would be an introduction to the responsibilities of citizenship, a communion with different layers of society and people of different backgrounds, a taste of different life paths. It could even be rewarded by credits toward tuition at a public university or other federal benefits, much as the G.I. Bill did for some veterans in years past.
The devil, as always, is in the phrasing, like “mandatory” or “government.” To libertarians, talk of government-mandated service smacks of more government imposition on individual liberties, possibly even a violation of the 13th Amendment’s proscription against “involuntary servitude.” Some conservatives argue that national service would be, in effect, government-paid and government-managed social activism, displacing private and faith-based charity. Coerced service is not service, they argue. The rich would get the desirable jobs, while the poor would be stuck with the bad ones. The cost would outweigh the benefits to society.
These are serious arguments, and no doubt one reason mandatory service has been relegated to the fringes of legislative effort.
It is hard to imagine a government levying penalties on young people who do not want to do what is essentially volunteer work, unless it was offered as an alternative to mandatory military service, with women now also liable. That is not likely to happen, as Mr. Buttigieg acknowledged when he said his proposed national service would be “if not legally obligatory but certainly a social norm.”
That social norm is critically needed. With America’s democracy threatened by a political and ideological chasm that seems to widen by the day, with dialogue rendered almost futile on fundamental issues such as racial justice, the environment, a battered economy and America’s role in the world, the debate over national service is really a debate over how we move forward.
“It’s a debate over how we will solve public problems and what we owe our country and each other,” E.J. Dionne Jr. and Kayla Meltzer Drogosz wrote in a 2003 study on national service for the Brookings Institution. “If we decide there are no public things to which we are willing to pledge some of our time and some of our effort — not to mention ‘our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor’ — then we will have quietly abandoned our nation’s experiment in liberty rooted in mutual assistance and democratic aspiration.”
In his speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said, “It’s time we remembered that ‘we the people’ are the government. You and I,” and his call on the American people was “that we all do our part.”
Asking young Americans for a year of their time for their country would be a powerful way to inculcate that call to service. It would not be a panacea for America’s troubles, of course. But a year in which barriers of race, class and income were breached, working in areas like underresourced schools, national parks or the military, where the fruits of service were real and beneficial, could help restore a measure of the community, commitment and hope that America cries out for.
Our country is facing a crisis unlike anything it has experienced since the Great Depression. The long-term public health consequences of COVID-19 remain uncertain. Education has been disrupted and children face continued learning loss. Millions of Americans, especially women and people of color, have been left behind by the workforce. Communities across the country are dealing with the impacts of climate change in the form of fires, hurricanes, and coastal degradation. And while traditional infrastructure, like bridges and roads, are in desperate need of repairs, the pandemic uncovered the essential nature of broadband for all Americans.
At the same time, a generation of young people is increasingly disconnected from education and employment. Millions graduated from college and found no job prospects. Others who might have gone on to higher learning have faced uncertain futures. The impact on educational opportunities has been disproportionately felt by economically disadvantaged youth and youth of color.
Finally, the events of the last few years, climaxing with the coup attempt at the Capitol, have demonstrated just how polarized we have become as a nation. The Biden-Harris Administration has made tackling these issues their core priorities. These challenges — COVID response and recovery, workforce development, climate change, crumbling infrastructure, racial justice, and healing a divided nation — are complex. They require significant capacity and coordination from local communities up to the federal government.
While each of these challenges requires nuanced policy solutions, there is one tool flexible enough to begin to address each of them head on: national service.
Communities across the nation already utilize national service to meet their pressing needs, offer people a pathway to employment, and forge a common American identity by bringing people from different backgrounds together in shared purpose to solve problems. With additional investment and strategic expansion, it can rise to meet this unprecedented occasion, much like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) did during the Great Depression under President Roosevelt.
This paper offers a roadmap for how President Biden can reimagine national service to meet his Administration’s priorities. It highlights opportunities for expanding national service, outlines the gaps, and offers solutions to improve and expand upon the existing national service infrastructure.
It offers six steps that would allow President Biden to make national service a 2 foundational part of his Administration building off the principles and ideals that have shaped his career. Prioritizing national service in the Biden Administration means:
1. Expanding national service positions, including to 250,000 AmeriCorps positions a year, up from 75,000 a year today, and 10,000 Peace Corps positions, and progress toward an ultimate goal of one million;
2. Flooding the nonprofit sector and communities with critical support through a Service Year Fellowship and the creation of on-ramps for new programs;
3. Leading a whole-of-government effort to put Americans into national service to meet our country’s urgent needs, including elevating service in the White House by creating a National Service Advisor and service corps within and between departments and federal agencies;
4. Launching an awareness campaign and an online portal to connect people to military, national, and public service opportunities;
5. Making national service positions accessible to youth of all races, ethnicities, and income levels by increasing stipends and benefits and eliminating barriers for groups working with opportunity youth; and
6. Setting young people up for success by ensuring workforce development is integrated into national service programs.
By spearheading this bold transformation of national service and breaking down barriers to make national service more equitable and inclusive, President Biden will reimagine what it means to serve our country and make national service the cornerstone legacy of his Administration.
Meeting the Moment
President Biden has the opportunity to make a historic call to service that meets the demands of our next generation. And if asked, young people would answer the call. A national poll conducted in January 2021 by Change Research on behalf of Service Year 1 Alliance found that 44% of young people ages 18-28, including 60% of young people of color, would be somewhat or very likely to participate in a paid year of national service — that’s the equivalent of approximately 1.7 million young Americans who would be interested in service if given the opportunity.
Interest from historically underrepresented communities suggests an enormous opportunity to provide young people of color, in particular, the tools to make change in their communities that can also put them on a path to good-paying jobs in sectors that could benefit from increased diversity. (1 “New Poll: As President Biden Calls for National Unity, Majority of Americans Support National Service to Bridge Divides.” Service Year Alliance, January 25, 2021. 3)
Further, these young people indicate that a call to service from President Biden would be more persuasive than hearing from virtually any other messenger, with almost half of young people — and more than half of young people of color — indicating that if President Biden urged them to join a national service program, they would feel even more positively about national service.
Additionally, by significant margins, Americans of all ages and demographics support measures to increase national service opportunities. More than three-quarters of Americans — including 93% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans — support expanding national service opportunities. And because national service is highly cost-effective –- for every $1 spent on national service, the government, corps members, and society see a return of $11 — it is a 2 shrewd investment to make that pays dividends to the nation.
With the right investments and support from the current Administration, national service can tackle many of our nation’s problems and demonstrate to Americans their own ability to make a difference. It is effective, bipartisan, and time-tested, and it is a solution that meets this moment in history. Read More
On April 15, 2021, the CORPS Act (Cultivating Opportunity and Response to the Pandemic through Service Act) was reintroduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) in the 117th Congress.
They were joined in introducing the bill by 15 co-sponsors: • Senator Coons (D-DE) – Lead Sponsor • Senator Baldwin (D-WI) • Senator Booker (D-NJ) • Senator Duckworth (D-IL) • Senator Durbin (D-IL) • Senator Kelly (D-AZ) • Senator Klobuchar (D-MN) • Senator Reed (D-RI) • Senator King (I-ME) • Senator Wicker (R-MS) – Lead Sponsor • Senator Blunt (R-MO) • Senator Cassidy (R-LA) • Senator Collins (R-ME) • Senator Cornyn (R-TX • Senator Graham (R-SC) • Senator Hyde-Smith (R-MS) • Senator Rubio (R-FL)
The CORPS Act proposes an $8 billion investment in national service programs, members, and state service commissions over a three-year period in order to contribute to our nation’s economic recovery. The CORPS Act also enables national service to contribute to recovery by growing a more diverse group of participants and local nonprofit programs, improving the quality of service experiences through increased living allowances and education awards, stabilizing existing programs, and targeting COVID-impacted communities and economic recovery projects.
“America’s Service Commissions is proud to endorse the bipartisan CORPS Act as it is reintroduced in the 117th Congress,” said Kaira Esgate, CEO of America’s Service Commissions (ASC). “This bill is a bold-but-realistic proposal to make AmeriCorps, state service commissions, national service and volunteer programs a cornerstone of our nation’s long term economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanding national service opportunities and benefits is essential to making service accessible to all and engaging a diverse group of Americans who want to serve our country and gain valuable job skills and experience in the process. The CORPS Act also provides governors and their state service commissions the flexibility they need to get these national service resources out the door to local communities and nonprofits quickly and efficiently. Our network stands ready to implement the CORPS Act across all states and territories during the COVID economic recovery period.”
Recent articles: The Hill – National service is a bipartisan priority CNN – This program puts people to work serving America. Now it’s going to jump in size ROI Study – New Research Shows an Unprecedented Return on Investment from AmeriCorps and Senior Corps.
CORPS ACT Bill Summary— 117th Congress
The bill would enable the following policies to take effect from the date of enactment through the end of Federal Fiscal Year 2024 (September 30, 2024):
Authorization to Expand National Service Authorizes $8 billion in funding to be spent through FY24 to strengthen and expand the signature national service programs – AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps Seniors and the Volunteer Generation Fund. AmeriCorps Living Allowance and Cost Per MSY Increases the AmeriCorps State and National and AmeriCorps VISTA living allowances to 175% of poverty for a single individual ($22,540 in 2021), and removes the cap on cost per member-service-year (MSY) for programs. Requires that the federal AmeriCorps agency award supplemental grants to fund the increased living allowance plus additional associated costs.
Special Education Award Allows AmeriCorps members to earn a concurrent (or second) education award that is equal the same value as their regular education award — $6,345 for members enrolled by September 30th and $6,495 for members enrolled after September 30, 2021.
Tax Exemptions Permanently exempts both the AmeriCorps living stipend and the Segal Education Award from federal income tax.
Direct Placement Authority Establishes a pilot program allowing state service commissions to directly place AmeriCorps members in state-based national service programs.
Augmentation and Expansion Grants Allows for expansion grants and grant augmentations to meet the compelling needs of grantees.
Recruiting a Diverse Corps Prioritizes awarding expansion grants and directly placing AmeriCorps members with diverse entities that are:
1) Serving communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19; 2) Using culturally competent and multilingual strategies to provide services; and 3) Recruiting members to serve in the communities that they are from.
Match Waivers and Other Flexibilities Provides critical flexibilities to stabilize national service programs during the economic crisis and to allow them to grow and respond to dynamic local recovery needs, including:
• Waives program matching requirements for the duration of the COVID recovery period. • Addresses some seasonal and summer limitations within VISTA and NCCC. • Expands eligibility requirements for AmeriCorps Seniors. • Increases operating support for education award-only programs to $1,600 per member with a waiver up to $2,000.
Agency Reporting on Improvements Requires that CNCS submit a report that includes recommendations for improving grant programs, to include:
• Recommendations for improving the cost reimbursement and fixed price grants programs. • Analysis on establishing a new unit within CNCS to assist or manage background checks and the new member enrollment process. • Examination of flexibilities for state service commissions to strengthen the work of commissions and subgrantees.
With questions, please contact our policy team at policy@statecommissions.or
The coronavirus pandemic upended almost every aspect of school at once. It was not just the move from classrooms to computer screens. It tested basic ideas about instruction, attendance, testing, funding, the role of technology and the human connections that hold it all together.
A year later, a rethinking is underway, with a growing sense that some changes may last.
“There may be an opportunity to reimagine what schools will look like,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told The Washington Post. “It’s always important we continue to think about how to evolve schooling so the kids get the most out of it.”
Others in education see a similar opening. The pandemic pointed anew to glaring inequities of race, disability and income. Learning loss is getting new attention. Schools with poor ventilation systems are being slotted for upgrades. Teachers who made it through a crash course in teaching virtually are finding lessons that endure.
“There are a lot of positives that will happen because we’ve been forced into this uncomfortable situation,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, the school superintendents association. “The reality is that this is going to change education forever.”
School systems in America are not done with remote learning.
They want more of it.
After a year when some systems did nothing but school by computer screen, it has become clear that learning virtually has a place in the nation’s schools, if simply as an option.
“It’s like a genie that is out of the bottle, and I don’t think you can get it back in,” said Paul Reville, former Massachusetts secretary of education and founding director of Harvard University’s Education Redesign Lab at the Graduate School of Education. “In many respects, this is overdue.”
Few suggest that remote learning is for everyone. The pandemic showed, unmistakably, that most students learn best in person — in a three-dimensional world, led by a teacher, surrounded by classmates and activities.
But school systems across the country are looking at remote learning as a way to meet diverse needs — for teenagers who have jobs, children with certain medical conditions, or kids who prefer learning virtually.
It has also emerged as a way to expand access to less-common courses. If one high school offers a class in Portuguese, students at another school could join it remotely.
Colorado’s second-largest school system, Jeffco Public Schools, recently announced a full-time remote learning program across grade levels. Students would regularly interact with teachers, have mostly live instruction, and stay connected to their neighborhood schools, meeting with a staff member at least once a week.
To make it work, some of the system’s teachers would only be remote. Parent interest was one impetus for the program.
“We’re taking all that we have learned from the pandemic — and others have learned — and going with it,” said Matt Walsh, a community superintendent, who estimated that 1,000 to 2,500 students will enroll during the first year, starting this fall.
In the Washington region, suburban Montgomery County is exploring the creation of a virtual academy for full-time online instruction. Parents have advocated for a program for some time, said Gboyinde Onijala, a spokeswoman.
“The pandemic has helped us see that it is possible and can be done well,” she said.
A study by the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, found about 2 in 10 school systems were adopting virtual schools, or planning or considering the idea. It was the innovative practice that the greatest number of district leaders surveyed said would outlast the pandemic.
Not everyone imagines the same path forward.
“Remote learning is a supplement, not a substitute, for in-school instruction,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, emphasizing that classroom learning is best for most students and that remote school can mean intense isolation.
“Staring at a screen all day is not optimal,” Weingarten said. “Zoom fatigue is real.”
The quality of remote learning varied widely among school districts, with parents complaining about the lack of live instruction and individual attention as well as technical difficulties. Even many families who want remote learning to continue want it improved.
Kevin Dougherty, a Laytonsville, Md., parent, said that while remote education has worked for some families, most kids have struggled — and the toll on mental health and social well-being is hard to ignore. Any program, he said, should be operated by the state, with a dedicated budget so “the needs of virtual learning don’t interfere with in-person learning, and vice versa.”
Katie McIntyre, a mother of two in Damascus, Md., said that for family, virtual classes were “wonderful experiences” — especially for her 10-year-old daughter who has autism and is gifted. Teachers have gone above and beyond.
“If I had any opportunity to do this again, I would,” she said.
— Donna St. George
The great catch-up
Schools set to attack lost learning
Could this pandemic year — when so many children fell so far behind, when students dropped off the radar, when teachers could hardly tell who understood what as they tried to teach from a distance — could this be the year that American education gets serious about helping kids catch up?
An infusion of cash from Washington and a new determination from educators across the country are laying the groundwork for an unprecedented combination of summer programming and high-intensity tutoring, all aimed at helping children recover from what was, for some, a lost year.
What’s more, some believe that once this infrastructure is in place, it could last for years, especially if it shows results.
“We’ve got a big opportunity to do it much better, to really come up with practices that are actually going to catch kids up. If that sticks, it’s revolutionary,” said Dan Weisberg, chief executive of TNTP, a nonprofit group that focuses on effective teaching.
The coronavirus rescue package signed into law by President Biden includes almost $123 billion for public K-12 schools, and districts are required to spend at least 20 percent of their funding on evidence-based interventions to address learning loss. Districts across the country are now gearing up programming for this summer and beyond.
They are also rethinking what the great catch-up should look like, with many shifting the focus from remediation to acceleration, or what’s sometimes called “accelerated learning.”
With remediation, the goal is to make up what a child missed the first time around. Some call it meeting students “where they are.” The problem is students may never catch up. Accelerated learning, by contrast, seeks to make grade-level work accessible to those who are behind through a combination of intensive help and modifications.
So if a child is behind in reading, he might be given the grade-level text along with tools to make it more accessible, such as a plot summary or a list of characters, or perhaps the audiobook version.
That’s the approach that Alabama is encouraging for its districts, said Eric Mackey, the state’s schools superintendent.
“We are afraid that when we come back, many of our students are going to be way behind,” Mackey said. “Even if we said, ‘We just need to catch them up to where we were,’ where we were isn’t good enough.”
He said there is simply not enough time for teachers to make up all the lost material. Reteaching is unrealistic, so he is recommending that schools try accelerated learning.
“It’s a shift for most of our districts,” he said. “It’s something that everybody wants to do, but in the past we’ve had neither the time nor resources to really do that.”
The movement is also underway in Los Angeles. L.A. County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo, who works with 80 districts, said educators have been thinking about accelerated learning for a long time, but the deep losses of the last year have prompted them to try something new.
“In the past we have done a lot of remedial work and we’re finding we need to have really high expectations, finding ways of keeping students at the level they should be … not just giving them the same stuff all over again,” she said. “We’re looking at this as an opportunity to think about the whole system about what’s working and what’s not working and how we can improve.”
— Laura Meckler
When students struggle
More support for mental health
The mental health struggles of the nation’s schoolchildren will outlast the pandemic, and so too will school districts’ efforts to meet the far-reaching need.
“We’re getting countless questions from districts that are asking, ‘How do we do this?’ ” said Sharon Hoover, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.
A year into the pandemic, counselors and others in mental health report an increasing number of students who are depressed or anxious. Hoover says that 75 percent of students who get mental health services get them at school.
With the need so great, she expects schools to hire more staff and to forge partnerships with community mental health providers. In many cases, therapists are based at schools, working with students and families on campus.
“I think we will see more of this,” said Hoover, who once worked as a school-based therapist in Baltimore public schools.
Some school systems have started to expand mental health services. In Broward County, Fla., which was rocked in 2018 by the fatal shootings of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the school district was already attentive to mental health issues.
Following the mass shooting, it put at least one mental health professional on staff at each of its nearly 240 schools and opened a hotline. But a survey of students and families after the pandemic began revealed another wave of mental health needs.
The 2020-21 school year opened with a focus on mental health, mindfulness, social-emotional learning and equitable distribution of support, said Antoine Hickman, chief of Broward public schools’ student support initiatives. Schools were required to start every day with 10 minutes of mindfulness.
The district stationed a nurse in every school because “nurses are at the front line of mental health,” he said, and more support was added to the hotline. Teletherapy was arranged when in-person services were not possible. A new app — “Tell Another. Listening is Key” (T.A.L.K.) — on students’ learning platforms enabled them to confidentially request mental health support or report abuse.
Mental health services will continue, Hickman said, because the problems the pandemic caused won’t disappear.
In New York City, the country’s largest school district, Meisha Ross Porter, who is taking over as chancellor on Monday, said this month that schools were already arranging for guidance counseling check-ins with students — a step that added to other recent supports, including teacher training on dealing with trauma, grief and self-care.
Last October, 26 schools in neighborhoods hardest hit by covid-19 were connected to outpatient mental health clinics, therapy, evaluation and other clinical services. Plans are in the works to hire 150 social workers.
But in some school districts, mental health interventions underway are “relevant but insufficient,” according to Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, co-directors of the UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools.
Too often the focus is on hiring more support staff, increasing education and expanding social-emotional learning but, they said, those are “often unrealistic and usually produce counterproductive competition for sparse resources.”
What’s also essential, they said, is unifying the district’s services and then weaving in community and home resources “to develop a comprehensive and equitable system of student learning supports.”
— Donna St. George and Valerie Strauss
Teachers tested
Educators draw lessons from a challenging year
Kim Walker, a veteran public high school social studies teacher in Philadelphia, has 167 students in her six virtual classes. The students are not required to turn on their video during class and only a handful do. Most remain muted. A full six months into the school year, Walker has no idea what most of them look like or sound like.
“Some days I don’t see or hear anybody. There is no interaction at all,” she said. “When they’re in the physical classroom, you can see if they’re struggling. You can push them and help them. You can check in on them. But this is crazy.”
Crazy is a word many teachers have used to describe teaching during the pandemic. And frustrating. And exhausting. They had to become technology wizards, Zoom screen DJs, counselors, cheerleaders and teachers all in one. Workloads doubled and stress levels quadrupled. Nothing in their training had prepared them for this.
But as the end of the school year approaches, many are looking at what they’ve learned about teaching and about themselves during the pandemic and thinking about how they’ll incorporate that in their classes once something close to normal returns.
For Walker and many teachers like her, the past year has only confirmed for them the importance of their jobs. And being a present and encouraging educator for their students has never been more necessary. After a year of teaching virtually, Walker says she will make extra efforts to connect and check in with her students at every opportunity when they return.
“I don’t see myself leaving this profession at all and I want to continue to show them that they can make it out, they can find a path out of whatever environment they’re in,” said Walker, who is eager to return to a physical classroom. “Teaching is who I am and what I do.”
Mackenzie Adams teaches kindergarten in a small school district not far from Seattle. In the fall, Adams became an Internet sensation when videos of her enthusiastic virtual lessons went viral, and parents and teachers across the country applauded her vibrant approach.
Adams, 24, said she and her colleagues had to adjust on the fly.
“We really had to shift our thinking and shift the way we do lessons when we went online,” Adams said. “Even veteran teachers were back to being new first-year teachers with this whole new way of teaching.”
Being enthusiastic is an essential trait for kindergarten teachers in normal times. But online, Adams said, “you almost have to like triple that level of enthusiasm and engagement.”
That approach works, but it’s also wearying. Adams thinks that both she and the students are experiencing screen fatigue. But it hasn’t dampened her desire to teach.
The experiences of the past year, “really just made me want to teach more,” Adams said. “I can’t wait to be back in the classroom with my students … and really making those in-person connections, the social aspect of it all. And I think that’s really what’s missing right now.”
Aleta Margolis, founder and president of the Center for Inspired Teaching, said this past year should provide ideas and opportunities for teaching going forward.
“The best thing educators can do right now is to gather as much information as possible about what students have experienced over the past year — their learning, their worries and their ideas — and take that data seriously and build on it as we return to in-person learning,” Margolis said.
— Joe Heim
Connected at home
Laptops and hotspots likely to stick around
Before the pandemic began, millions of students got by without a computer or Internet connection at home. The “homework gap,” by which some students could Google their way through research papers and others could not, was derided by policymakers but, like so many other inequities in education, it persisted.
Over the last year, by necessity, the vast majority of students have been connected. Millions of devices and hotspots have been purchased and distributed. The question now is: Will this new, more equitable arrangement persist?
Most say yes.
In Texas, officials are looking into a plan that would bring broadband connections to every K-12 student beyond the pandemic, funded by a combination of state and local dollars.
The coronavirus rescue package signed into law by Biden includes more than $7 billion for the Federal Communications Commission to fund at-home Internet connections and devices through the E-rate program, which typically pays for service in school buildings and libraries. Pressure is mounting on the FCC to also use regular E-rate funding to connect students at home.
The FCC has yet to rule. But acting commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel has called the homework gap the most important issue of digital equity facing the nation and said the pandemic provided the incentive needed to finally address it.
“The days when out-of-school learning required only paper and pencil are long gone. Today, students live their lives online and use Internet-based resources for so much of modern education,” she wrote last spring.
Some argue an expansion would put too much pressure on the Universal Service Fund that pays for service and is funded by telecom user fees, but proponents say it’s urgent. A change in the FCC’s rules depends in part on the agency’s definition of “educational purposes.” Since the program began in 1996, that has been defined as inside school buildings.
“Our argument is even connecting people off-campus can be for educational purposes,” said John Windhausen Jr., founder and executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition. “Education does not only happen at school. Kids do homework at night and that’s education.”
For now, he hopes that some schools use the $7 billion in new E-rate funding to go beyond handing out hotspot devices to families who need them, and to deploy new wireless networks that can serve many homes and live beyond the pandemic.
In the meantime, school districts have invested millions of dollars to buy devices for students that should last for several years, and students have become accustomed to doing schoolwork at home. Some also see benefits beyond direct education. Parents whose schedules make coming to the school difficult can now easily arrange a 10- or 15-minute online conversation with a teacher.
It adds up to a no-turning-back moment, said Richard Culatta, chief executive of the International Society for Technology in Education, a large nonprofit focused on helping teachers use technology to improve quality of learning.
“There’s been a huge amount of work to build out the infrastructure,” he said. He estimates that the share of districts that provide every student with a device has jumped from about one-third to about 80 percent. It was necessitated by the pandemic but will persist, he said, especially if schools figure out how to best use the technology to advance learning most effectively. “I don’t think there’s a question the technology will stay around.”
— Laura Meckler
D-plus school buildings
Pandemic spotlight offers real chance for reform
Christina Headrick has pored over more than 100 scientific studies, questioned a dozen air-quality experts, filed five public records requests and launched a parent group and website dedicated to ensuring a safe return to classrooms in Arlington, Va. — especially when it comes to ventilation.
The mother of two children is one of thousands of people — parents and administrators alike — suddenly paying attention to school buildings after the pandemic placed a bright, unforgiving spotlight on the crumbling status of America’s school facilities and their often outdated heating, cooling and ventilation systems.
In the short-term, administrators are commissioning outside reviews of their air quality, installing portable air cleaners and advising teachers on how to maximize airflow (advice that often boils down to, “Open your windows”). But they are also requesting millions in funding from school boards and town councils to make upgrades over the next several years, that are decades overdue.
The difference is, now, their requests are actually getting approved.
“We’ve proposed air-quality improvements in our schools, and ventilation improvements, ever since I’ve been superintendent,” said Tom Moore, who has led West Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut for close to a decade. Fully half of his school buildings, constructed in the 1950s, “don’t have anything at all” when it comes to ventilation, he said. It’s just “single-pane windows, to let the air come in and out.”
But before, he said, “there has always been taxpayers with concerns, and pushback: ‘Are you just looking for air conditioning?’”
Not this time. Moore’s proposal to spend $57 million over the next 10 years upgrading — in some cases, installing — air circulation, heating and cooling systems at nine of its 11 elementary schools sailed past the school board on an unanimous, bipartisan vote earlier this year.
In Chicago, the public school system has spent $100 million upgrading the district’s HVAC systems since last spring. Chief operating officer Arnaldo Rivera said that amid the pandemic, a quality assurance team began checking air flow and cleanliness against industry standards every month at every one of Chicago’s more than 530 school buildings — a practice they will continue indefinitely. Likewise, every school will get a periodic air-quality assessment with special new devices.
“We want to standardize this, so that moving forward, our buildings always meet the standard of warm, safe and dry,” Rivera said.
The Chicago Teachers Union, however, has been sharply critical of these efforts, saying more must be done to ensure a quality and healthy learning environment. Chicago Public Schools has a $3.5 billion backlog of facilities repairs on its campuses, and the average age of its buildings is 80 years old.
In its 2021 report card grading the nation’s infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave public schools a D-plus, estimating more than half of districts need to update or replace their heating, cooling and air filtration systems. The problems are worst in low-income districts that are often majority minority, experts say.
“Every child in our system deserves to have clean air in their classrooms, now and for the long term,” said Headrick, the parent volunteer.
A lot hinges on what happens with federal funding, said Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for the modernization of public school facilities. Biden’s coronavirus relief plan sets aside roughly $123 billion for K-12 schools, and Filardo would like to see at least $10 billion of that go to building upgrades — although how the money is used will most likely be decided by state and district leaders, and could vary widely throughout the nation.
“We have the opportunity to really make some improvements,” Filardo said, “with the light that has been shone on this.”
— Hannah Natanson
Rethinking attendance
Who attends, who is absent
What it means to be in school is in flux.
For decades, students took their places at desks in classrooms, as teachers recorded who was there and who was not. But as schools shuttered and students began to learn remotely, the conventions of taking attendance through “seat time” fell away.
School systems scrambled to come up with new ways to define attendance in remote school. Was it enough just to log in for the day or tune into a Zoom class?
States took varied approaches.
In Connecticut, students need to spend half of the day in learning activities, including live classes, independent work and time logged into an electronic system. In Alaska, they are counted as present whether or not they log on, with the state viewingremote learning as similar to a correspondence course.
“The pandemic wreaked havoc with measuring attendance,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national nonprofit initiative that has tracked state policies.
The hodgepodge may well continue this fall, as many school systems continue to offer families the option of remote learning. Beyond that, a number of school systems are also planning virtual programs as a more lasting effort, for students who need or want to learn that way.
For many school leaders, the issue was a balancing act as they tried to support students who may be in crisis — as covid-19 has claimed lives and left many workers strapped and jobless — but also draw them into school.
Without reliable ways to track attendance, it’s harder to recognize patterns in chronic absenteeism — a major worry before the pandemic that is worsening, experts say. High rates of absenteeism are linked to academic failure and dropping out of school.
In Connecticut, described as the first state to produce monthly statewide data on the issue, the percentage of chronically absent students as of January was 21.3 percent — a 75 percent jump over a year earlier.
Harder hit were some of the most vulnerable students. The rate of chronic absenteeism for English learners more than doubled to 36 percent, and the rate for students from free meal-eligible families shot up by 78 percent, to roughly the same level.
“It’s pretty troubling,” Chang said.
Some say it’s past time to rethink attendance more broadly, to focus on mastery of skills and content.
“It’s not about seat time,” said Robert Hull, president of the National Association of State Boards of Education. “It’s about engagement. I think as a result of this pandemic we can see some innovation in that area.”
— Donna St. George
Funding schools
Changing the ‘butt-in-seats’ formula
Parents, students and teachers were hyper-focused during the pandemic on when shuttered schools would reopen, but John Kuhn and other district superintendents were sweating out something else too: state funding.
Because most state funding formulas are based in part on how many students are in schools, district leaders worried about pandemic attendance drops. Less funding would mean cuts in programs and personnel. And the districts that would be hit the hardest would be those with the poorest and neediest students.
Kuhn, superintendent of Mineral Wells Independent School District in Texas, said he and his colleagues were relieved on March 4 when Gov. Gregg Abbott (R) announced that schools would be “held harmless” from funding cuts for the rest of the 2020-21 school year. Kuhn said some 130 students of about 3,200 — a little more than 4 percent — have stopped coming to school (when during a normal year almost none do), and Abbott said districts where students stopped coming to school would not be penalized.
Some policymakers began to consider permanent changes that would meet the changed education landscape.
“The way we educate kids now is new,” said Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D-Austin), who has introduced legislation to change Texas’s funding formula — from being based on the number of kids in seats on certain days to enrollment — so that districts would get more state money.
Referring to remote learning that began during the pandemic and will last beyond the crisis, she said: “We are going to be doing a lot more of that now and this emerging way of teaching our kids through blended learning is not a butt-in-desks model of education and should not be funded that way.”
Public schools are funded primarily by local funds, mostly from property taxes, combined with state funding — though the divisions are different among states. Because wealthy areas pay more in property taxes, they get more of this funding than high-poverty districts. The federal government supplies about 10 percent of overall funding to try to make up the gap, but it usually doesn’t.
A majority of the state funding formulas involve attendance counts — but there are a host of ways and times during the school year to count kids, and the differences can mean plus or minus millions of dollars a year for districts. For example, some states use average daily attendance, and others take attendance in the fall and spring and average the two. Colorado uses an attendance count from a single day in October. Texas is one of seven states that uses average daily attendance.
Even before the pandemic, attendance methods put high-poverty districts at a disadvantage; children from low-income and unstable homes are more likely to be absent because of limited access to transportation, untreated health issues and other problems.
Hinojosa said she wants to use enrollment, not attendance, as the basis of Texas’s funding formula in part because districts have to budget for enrolled students — not for the changing number of students who show up daily.
With most public school students in Texas from minority and economically disadvantaged families, she said: “Our districts are getting shortchanged and our schools are getting shortchanged and so are our students.”
Now some districts are thinking ahead for the next school year beginning in the fall — but nobody knows for sure how many missing students will return.
— Valerie Strauss
The tests
Wanted: New ways to assess students
A few days before Christmas last year, many of the country’s state schools chiefs met over Zoom to address a foundation of modern school reform: standardized testing. The consensus was that U.S. schools need better ways to assess students — as soon as possible.
For nearly 20 years, schools have been mandated by federal law to test most K-12 students in math and English language arts and use the results in an “accountability system” intended to close the achievement gap between White and most minority students.
The exams have long been controversial. Supporters say standardized testing is vital to know how the most challenged students are doing. Critics say they don’t reveal valid, useful data and perpetuate educational inequity.
The coronavirus pandemic jolted the country’s fixation with standardized testing, bringing the first break in the annual spring exam ritual since the No Child Left Behind era began in 2002.
With schools closed last spring, the Trump administration told states they did not have to administer them. States would have to manage without the test results, used for high-stakes decisions such as teacher evaluation and A-F grading of individual schools.
Enter the Biden administration. In February, it announced that tests must be given in 2021 — but could be shortened and administered as late as the fall, and the results did not have to be used for accountability purposes. Education Department official Ian Rosenbaum said in a letter to state school chiefs that the data is important to collect because “it is urgent to understand the impact of covid-19 on learning.”
How the scores will be used remains unclear. Florida education chief Richard Corcoran said he would wait to see if there are score anomalies before deciding. Ohio, Colorado and other states decided not to use scores in teacher evaluations for 2020-21, and Arizona said it wouldn’t use them to assign A-F grades to schools.
The administration’s decision to allow states to go a second year without using test scores for high-stakes decisions could spur the drive for new assessments, said Bob Schaeffer, acting executive director of the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which fights the misuse of standardized tests.
Once “we see that not having high-stakes assessments for a year or two did not harm educational quality or equity — as the pandemic itself most certainly did — the door will be opened for broader assessment reforms,” he said.
The 2015 K-12 Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor law to No Child Left Behind, provided for a pilot program to create more varied and valid assessments.
That is what the state chiefs talked about last Dec. 23 at the event hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which brought together the leaders with Biden-Harris transition officials.
There were, according to participants, nearly unanimous calls for more opportunity to create assessments focused on “authentic learning” that can provide real-time information to direct student learning.
“I like to think this could be an opportunity to rethink the whole” standardized testing system, said Joshua P. Starr, former superintendent of Montgomery County schools in Maryland and now chief executive of PDK International, a professional organization for educators.
— Valerie Strauss
Illustrations by iStock
Story editing by Kathryn Tolbert. Copy editing by Jamie Zega. Design by Beth Broadwater.
From Kristen Bennett at Service Year Mar 10, 2021, 2:14 PM
We have amazing news to share! The American Rescue Plan — the COVID relief bill that passed in Congress today and awaits the President’s signature — officially includes $1 billion for national service over the next three years. This is the largest investment in national service in decades. (View our press release on this amazing news here.)
This is a huge deal for the national service movement. AmeriCorps’ annual budget is currently $1.12B, so this additional funding significantly increases the federal investment in national service, even if over a three year period. The investment also calls for an increase in the living allowance for national service — a key step to making the opportunity to serve more accessible to Americans of all backgrounds and something we at Service Year Alliance prioritized as part of our efforts.
There is no doubt that this amazing success would not have been possible without your support and your tireless efforts on the ground every day. Service Year Alliance worked over the past year to build bipartisan support on Capitol Hill to see national service as a critical component of the pandemic response, including supporting the introduction of bipartisan bills like the CORPS Act and Inspire to Serve Act. Additionally, both publicly through our Serve America Together campaign and behind the scenes, we urged the Administration to prioritize a significant investment in national service as a tool for responding to the needs across the country.
This investment in national service is a testament to the great work you all do on a daily basis to utilize national service to meet community needs. Because of your work, members of Congress feel the impact of national service in their states and districts and recognize that national service transforms lives, strengthens communities, and fuels civic renewal.
We’d appreciate your help in sharing this tremendous news on social media and thanking the members of Congress who made this possible, including Senator Chris Coons, Senator Roger Wicker, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. David Price, Rep. Bobby Scott, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, as well as the cosponsors of the bipartisan CORPS Act.
We teamed up with States for Service to thank members of Congress for including the $1 billion for national service in the American Rescue Plan. Please take five minutes to take action and thank Congress for this historic investment in AmeriCorps:
The $1 billion in the American Rescue Plan is a monumental first step toward making national service an opportunity for every young person who wants to serve. It sets the stage for President Biden who has the opportunity to make service a cornerstone issue of his administration. But our work isn’t done yet.
As a lifelong public servant and a huge advocate for service in all its forms, we believe President Biden has the opportunity to be the “Service President” and call young people across the nation into service to support our country’s unmet needs — all while addressing his Administration’s top priorities.
That’s why the Serve America Together campaign is issuing a new call to President Biden to “build back better” as the Service President. We’re kicking off this effort by outlining what it means to prioritize national service in the Biden Administration. We believe President Biden can offer a bold new vision that will put us on a path to making national service part of growing up in America by:elevating national service in the White House;increasing national service positions to 250,000 a year, on a pathway to one million;setting up inter-agency service corps;implementing a fellowship program;increasing the living allowance and wraparound services;intentionally incorporating workforce development into service; and launching an awareness campaign and online portal. This is a pivotal moment for our movement. National service is already making a real difference in communities across the country, and with this investment and our continued efforts, it has the potential to truly transform our nation, our young people, and our democracy.
I hope you’ll join us in celebrating this achievement. Thank you for your time, leadership, and dedication to making national service a common expectation and opportunity for all young Americans. We look forward to working with you to take this investment in national service to the next level.
7 Mar 2021 The Washington Post Sunday BY NATALI FANI-GONZALEZ The writer is vice chair of the Montgomery County Planning Board, part of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.Z
Within 30 minutes, on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 2020, I was able to capture the agony of the American experience: “[Housing] is too expensive unless you make over $60,000.” “You get what you pay for . . . as long as you have steady pay.” “Half of my monthly salary goes to pay the rent.” “About 70 percent of my monthly salary is used to pay the rent.”
Those were some comments I received when asking working adults about their housing experience in Montgomery County, one of the most diverse counties in the nation — ethnically, racially and economically.
Montgomery County is home to more than 1 million people. We take pride in our strong schools and planning efforts to connect communities to vibrant places to live, work and have a wonderful time. But despite pioneering initiatives to increase the minimum wage, build more housing and preserve affordable housing, the demand for places to live in the county outweighs the supply while existing rental rates increase faster than income.
The coronavirus pandemic has shown the ineptitude of our governments to care for those who are working in jobs deemed to be essential to the economy but who aren’t provided living-wage incomes to afford a safe place to live and have quality of life. Think of janitors disinfecting our hospitals and schools; the bus drivers getting cooks, nurses and doctors to their jobs; child-care workers educating the littlest members of our communities while their parents keep the economy moving.
But incomes have not kept pace with increasing costs of living, particularly for the lowest-income households. This is indeed our greatest American failure.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports that in 2019, the U.S. living wage was $16.54 per hour before taxes for a family of four. The living wage compiles specific expenditure data for housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and other basic necessities to achieve financial independence.
President Biden signed an executive order that began laying the groundwork by instituting a $15 minimum wage for federal workers and contractors. He listed many of the financial troubles facing communities, including that 1 in 7 households and more than 1 in 5 Black and Latino families say they don’t have enough food to eat and that 14 million Americans have fallen behind on their rent.
Our country desperately needs the political will to protect all members of our society. This means training workers to perform green jobs that provide a living wage and eliminate single-family zoning, particularly near transit systems, to increase housing supply that our communities need. We must transform housing policy to reflect its importance on a wide variety of aspects affecting people’s lives, including creating living-wage jobs that advance our environmental goals. This won’t be easy, but it is possible. It takes selfless determination to do the right thing for our communities. Last month, at a planning board meeting, we received a wave of opposition to multifamily housing. I was contacted by a number of people I respect — intelligent and highly talented men and women working in different professional fields. Each stressed that I should not be supporting multifamily densities on their properties. One of them had the audacity to say, “Think about your political future.”
We also received positive feedback from individuals who understood that it is time to update our zoning laws to accommodate more homes near transit. This is about giving a choice to property owners to be able to create more housing within their transit-oriented lots. It’s a choice. At the hearing, my colleagues and I announced our support for letting people have more choices to build multifamily units on lots near our transit systems.
The place you live is a clear social determinant of your health and economic well-being. Think about how safe it is for you to walk to a bus stop. Do you have sidewalks? Are there streetlights? How frequent and efficient is transit from your home to your job? Are there places to buy healthy foods near your home? Do you have bike lanes? Can you find and afford a place to live near your job? Can you access green spaces and playgrounds?
Local and federal governments should be focusing on increasing supply near transit to lower our carbon footprint and training our workforce for living-wage jobs that protect the environment. In fact, despite an increased focus on the importance of housing to health, and economic mobility, the federal government has to sharpen their pencils and work to formalize cross-discipline policy connections to further housing, economic and environmental justice. By coordinating policies across agencies and lifting up proven local innovations as we are doing in Montgomery County, the Biden administration can transform housing policy to help reduce racial and economic inequalities in the United States while creating green jobs that lift communities out of poverty.P
Silver Spring, Maryland developed during the early twentieth century as a sundown suburb: an area covering more than ten square miles where racial restrictive deed covenants prevented African Americans from owning or renting homes.[1] Located in Montgomery County about 6 miles north of Washington, D.C., Silver Spring didn’t begin desegregating its businesses until the late 1950s and housing discrimination remained legal there until 1968 when the county’s open housing law went into effect. Despite dramatic changes in Silver Spring’s demographics and politics, the community’s history and historic preservation efforts remain as segregated as its earlier public culture. African Americans, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights actions that helped break down racial barriers in Silver Spring in the 1960s remain invisible in published histories and in the commemorative landscape.
The ways in which history and historic preservation are produced in Silver Spring effectively reproduce the exclusion of people of color from earlier periods by rendering them invisible in published histories, designated historic properties, and heritage-themed placemaking.
I live in Silver Spring and I make my living in public history. My work since 2011 has focused on suburban gentrification and how people of color are erased from communities and the historical record. The processes leading to the displacement of residents of color are tied to the production of histories and historic preservation programs that render them invisible by omission. In late 2016 I began conducting Black History Tours in Silver Spring’s central business district to help raise awareness of the community’s African American history. In early June 2017, after one of my tours, there was an event in one of Silver Spring’s historical parks where residents shared stories of discrimination and participants could submit comments to Montgomery County agencies undertaking renovations in the park. The event invited people to “protest invisibility and help make Acorn Park more inclusive.” This article documents the June 2017 event and the story behind how history is produced, and its ramifications, in Silver Spring’s Acorn Urban Park and throughout Silver Spring.
A Little Silver Spring History
Silver Spring is an unincorporated community that shares a boundary with the District of Columbia. The community’s origin legend is that Francis Preston Blair, a Washington journalist, in 1840 was riding his horse through the area when he discovered a mica-flecked spring. Blair subsequently bought 289 acres and named his new plantation Silver Spring. By the time the Civil War broke out, Blair was one of the largest enslavers in Montgomery County (twelve slaves in 1860).[2]
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Blairs had substantial real estate holdings in Montgomery County. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Edward Brooke Lee (1892-1984), who was a Blair, expanded his family’s real estate investments by buying up and consolidating large farm tracts to develop “restricted” and “exclusive” residential subdivisions. In the 1920s, Lee founded the North Washington Realty Company, which developed most of his properties through the 1940s.
In 1925, Lee was one of several real estate entrepreneurs who founded the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce.[3] Two years later they embarked on a branding and marketing campaign that included full-page advertisements in Washington newspapers touting “Maryland North of Washington” as a prime investment opportunity: “the logical place in which to build for posterity.”[4] Maps published in these ads illustrated new and proposed residential subdivisions, proposed parks, major roads leading to downtown Washington, and the area’s two country clubs.
Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce display ad published in The Washington Post, September 18, 1927.
There was little development in Silver Spring during the first two decades of the 20th century; development accelerated in the 1920s.[5] That decade kicked off a real estate boom in suburban Montgomery County that for all intents and purposes has never ended.
The first restrictive covenants attached to properties in Silver Spring were included in deeds executed by Virginia attorney and real estate speculator Robert Holt Easley (1856-1941). In 1902 Easley bought 67 acres near Silver Spring’s B&O Railroad station; two years later he filed a plat of “Building Sites for Sale at Silver Spring” in Montgomery County land records with 156 lots.[6] Easley’s deeds prohibited the people buying his lots and all subsequent owners from selling or renting the properties, “the whole or any part of any dwelling or structure thereon, to any person of African descent.”[7]
Easley’s subdivision was the first of more than 50 racially restricted residential subdivisions that were platted and developed between 1904 and 1948 in an area roughly bounded by the District of Columbia, Rock Creek Park, the Prince Georges County line, and the unincorporated community of White Oak—essentially the entire area that Lee and his real estate cohort called “Maryland North of Washington” and which simply came to be known during the remainder of the twentieth century as “Greater Silver Spring.”
In 1948, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that racial restrictive covenants were unenforceable. For the next 20 years, however, redlining, steering, and discrimination in multi-family housing kept Silver Spring almost exclusively white. Though there were pockets of African American households on the margins of Silver Spring’s historic core (e.g., Lyttonsville and Chestnut Ridge), these nineteenth century unincorporated hamlets occupied areas where real estate speculators were unable to consolidate sufficient lands to create twentieth century subdivisions.
As late as 1967, Washingtonian magazine was reporting on the appeal Silver Spring held to whites moving away from Washington: “They love it because it’s easy to commute to Washington, Judith Viorst wrote. “And, they love it because Negroes, so far, have been safely left behind at the District line. Virtually everybody says so, one way or another.”[8]
Interventions by civil rights activists in the late 1950s; the relocation of about 200 African American Department of Labor employees to Silver Spring in 1961 and the subsequent enactment of an open accommodations law in 1962; and, the passage of an open housing law in 1968 (just before federal legislation) began breaking down Jim Crow’s racial barriers in Silver Spring.
Producing Silver Spring History
The ways in which history and historic preservation are produced in Silver Spring effectively reproduce the exclusion of people of color from earlier periods by rendering them invisible in published histories, designated historic properties, and heritage-themed placemaking. Historians researching housing, businesses, and commercial architecture omit the African American experience from Silver Spring’s narratives. These books, articles, historic preservation documents, documentary videos, and heritage trail signs privilege and celebrate stories of segregationists like Lee, his Blair kin, and other early community boosters.[9]
Silver Spring Heritage Trail sign, 8200 block of Georgia Avenue. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Some of the erasures are easily identifiable. In 2005, the Silver Spring Historical Society published a book titled Historic Silver Spring in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series. That book did not mention African Americans, 1960s civil rights protests held in downtown Silver Spring, and it did not include the Lyttonsville community, which abuts Silver Spring’s historic core.[10]
Earlier examples include Silver Spring Success: an Interactive History of Silver Spring, Maryland, a book first published in 1995, and a comprehensive historic resources survey of Silver Spring’s central business district that was completed in 2002.[11]
More academic studies of Silver Spring’s history include several articles on the community’s commercial architecture and planning by The George Washington University architectural historian Richard Longstreth. These works analyze suburbanization in the Washington metropolitan area by focusing on development in Silver Spring during the middle part of the 20th century; Longstreth’s work omits African Americans and the role Jim Crow segregation played in Silver Spring’s formative years.[12]
Though Longstreth’s work has focused on Silver Spring’s commercial properties and multi-family housing, his students have drilled down in into Silver Spring’s residential subdivisions. A 1994 master’s thesis in American Studies examined Silver Spring’s development between 1920 and 1955. Despite providing what at first blush appears to be a comprehensive history of suburban development, the author failed to address racial restrictive covenants, African Americans, or the stark demographic reality (virtually all white, except for domestic servants) of the area in which the subdivisions were developed.[13]
Other erasures are less accessible. These include the many racial micro-aggressions people of color experience when walking through downtown Silver Spring, i.e., heritage tour signs that omit segregation from celebratory narratives about local businesses during Silver Spring’s “heyday” and narratives that minimize the role Jim Crow segregation played in that period.[14]
A very public example of erasure is embedded in one of five murals comprising a public artwork installed in the 1990s. The Silver Spring “Memory Wall” is a series of murals in Acorn Urban Park depicting five important themes/aspects in Silver Spring’s history: Francis Preston Blair’s 1840s mansion; the Civil War; Silver Spring’s first armory on the eve of World War I; the B&O Railroad station in 1941; and, the rehabilitated 1938 Silver Shopping Center.
Acorn Park and the Silver Spring Memory Wall. Photo by David Rotenstein.
The murals’ content was developed among the artist, Mame Cohalan, a Silver Spring residents’ arts advisory board, and officials in Montgomery County’s Planning Department. Planning Department memoranda note that the murals were the “first attempt to realistically depict Silver Spring’s history in a representational public art form.”[15] Planners memorialized Cohalan’s observations that the historical photographs she was using to design the murals failed to show people of color: “The artist would like to explore having more cultural diversity in the 20th century images.” Cohalan confirmed this in an interview I did with her in April 2017.
The Silver Spring Memory Wall, with its insertion of black bodies into spaces and in a time where they never would have been found establishes erasure by creating an imaginary visual narrative. African Americans who see the murals recognize that African Americans could not have stood alongside whites on the train platform in 1941. Or 1951. Or even 1961.[16]
Protesting Invisibility in Acorn Park
In early 2017, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission began soliciting public input for proposed renovations in Acorn Park. A pair of local nonprofit organizations, IMPACT Silver Spring (IMPACT) and Showing Up for Racial Justice Montgomery County (SURJ), collaborated with me to organize an event to protest the invisibility of African Americans in the ways history is presented in the park and to take direct action with Montgomery County officials. Our efforts culminated Saturday June 10, 2017, in Acorn Park.
Protesting Invisibility event in Silver Spring’s Acorn Park, June 10, 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.
The Acorn Park protesting invisibility event was inspired by an account in architectural historian Dell Upton’s 2015 book, What Can and Can’t be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South.[17] Upton recounted efforts by residents of Savannah, Georgia, who protested against invisibility in Savannah’s commemorative landscape by demanding an official African American monument.[18] Silver Spring’s African American residents had much in common with their Savannah counterparts: both communities celebrated their white supremacist histories in public monuments and historical representations while omitting official commemorations dedicated to people of color.
Representatives from IMPACT, SURJ, and I met several times in the weeks leading up to the June 10 event. We drafted publicity flyers and shared them via social media and in businesses near Acorn Park. We also drafted a petition letter addressed to county officials, which participants could sign, and a postcard with a brief excerpt from the petition letter and space for individualized comments.
In addition to inviting the community at large, we also asked a couple of lifelong residents of Lyttonsville to share their memories of life in Jim Crow Silver Spring and about how they think history and historic preservation are produced in the community. They recalled being excluded from Silver Spring’s businesses and living in a neighborhood that lacked running water and paved roads until well into the Cold War. And, they described the marginalization they felt by being excluded from published histories and Silver Spring’s commemorative landscape.
After the dialogue in Acorn Park concluded, participants were invited to move to Bump ‘N Grind, a coffee shop in the next block. The store’s owners helped to publicize the event and they allowed us to set up several laptops connected to the store’s wi-fi where participants could file their comments on Acorn Park directly to the Montgomery County Department of Parks via the agency’s open town hall web portal. Conversations begun in the park continued inside the store and seven people filed comments electronically.
Protesting Invisibility participants file electronic comments to Montgomery County Department of Parks officials. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Suggestions for making Acorn Park’s history more inclusive included adding another bank of murals above the existing ones in the Memory Wall; commissioning a sculpture of a local civil rights leader; and, replacing the existing signage that celebrates Silver Spring’s white supremacist founders with signs that also discuss slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights actions (demonstrations, litigation, etc.) that occurred in Silver Spring during the 1960s.[19]
Next Steps
The Montgomery County Department of Parks plans to hold one meeting with community members later in 2017 to present the results of the agency’s outreach efforts. Parks agency officials expect to deliver finalized plans to the Montgomery County Planning Board for approval in early 2018. The loose coalition formed to produce the protesting invisibility event in Acorn Park will be following future releases by county officials and we plan to attend all additional public meetings.
We hope that the example set in Acorn Park will be a model for additional efforts in Silver Spring and elsewhere in Montgomery County to reframe how history and historic preservation are produced to make them more inclusive and accurate. Silver Spring’s downtown privileges white experiences at the expense of African Americans, presenting a white-washed history that overlooks the ways white residents accumulated capital and influence by excluding African Americans. Future efforts may be directed at replacing existing heritage trail markers and creating public art that engages and strives to tell the story of all of Silver Spring’s residents, including the many new immigrants who have moved here since the turn of the twenty-first century. One step I plan to take is to work with a Spanish language interpreter to adapt my existing Black History Tour to create a bilingual tour that helps create attachments to the community for new residents.
Silver Spring, like many communities throughout the nation, has invested heavily in promoting its diversity as part of its brand. That diversity is of recent vintage and it was not easily achieved. By protesting invisibility in Acorn Park we took steps towards reframing Silver Spring’s history and opening public spaces for a more honest and inclusive history. For additional information on our efforts to protest and erase invisibility in Silver Spring, please check out our website, Invisible Montgomery.
David Rotenstein is a Silver Spring, Md., consulting historian who is writing a book on gentrification, race, and housing history in Decatur, Ga.
They were some of the most impactful acts of protest and civil disobedience to happen in our region during the Civil Rights Movement. The park’s owners finally desegregated Glen Echo in March 1961, after then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy threatened to pull the federal government’s lease on the land where the amusement park ran a trolley.
Sixty years after that initial demonstration, those who were there are looking back at that fight and are comparing it to today’s protests against police brutality and racial injustice.
“Shakespeare once said ‘what is past is prologue,’ says 78-year-old Dion Diamond, who protested at Glen Echo Park (as well as at an Arlington lunch counter) and lives in D.C.’s Forest Hills neighborhood today. “If you don’t know your history and don’t know your past, it’s going to come back and bite you. I’d tell [those protesting today] be aware of what formerly was and what is.”
Diamond grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, and moved to D.C. to attend Howard University, where he joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). Inspired by sit-ins further south, their first protest was the lunch counter at Arlington’s Cherrydale Drug Fair.
It was marked by hostility and verbal abuse from some in the crowd, as evidenced by a photo that shows a young white kid aggressively sticking a finger in Diamond’s face. But the sit-in worked. Within two weeks, lunch counters across Arlington desegregated.
Later that summer, NAG went to Glen Echo Park.
“We were protesting segregation … which is a seed of what’s happening today,” says Diamond.
Diamond and others showed up to Glen Echo Park in suburban Maryland on June 30 holding signs that read things like “Glen Echo Should Echo Democracy,” “Discrimination is Not Our Generation,” and “Bigotry is No Fun.”
At about 6 p.m., a dozen of them, most of whom were Black, entered the park with tickets in hand purchased by white protesters. They took their seats on the brightly decorated carousel. After a few moments, a deputy sheriff approached them, demanding they move. None did.
“I remember a sheriff coming up to me and saying ‘I’m going to ask you three times to leave. If you don’t, I’m going to arrest you,’” retired dentist Bill Griffin, 83, told DCist in 2018. “He just wanted us out.”
In one well-known photograph, Marvous Saunders leans over a sculpted rabbit, calmly listening to the sheriff. “We were just trying to make life a little better for those folks who happened to be Black,” Saunders told DCist back in 2018.
Five protesters were arrested, but later that night, the local NAACP legal team bailed them out. The next day, they were back protesting at the park’s gates and for weeks afterward.
Diamond says the past month of consistent protests in D.C. has made him reminiscence about what he and others had to do 60 years ago. “It has gotten me to pause to applaud and to pause to cry.”
He thinks the country has come far since 1960 in terms of civil rights but says systemic racism and prejudice absolutely still exist and he understands the anger, frustration, and hurt of this moment. “It’s like a teapot. It starts out slowly and then it comes to a boil,” he says.
He says he has not gone out protesting himself over the last few weeks due to his age and the risks associated with COVID-19.
His own life experiences remain at the forefront of his mind, however. He shares an anecdote about recently going for a socially distant walk wearing a mask in his Northwest neighborhood of Forest Hills.
“I don’t know if it’s just me or my paranoia, but I walked by a couple of dog walkers. I’m looking over my shoulder and they are looking over their shoulders,” says Diamond. “There aren’t that many Blacks in this neighborhood. And, I must admit, sometimes I think people are saying ‘what’s he doing here?’ That’s a thought that has come with my experiences in life.”
Diamond acknowledges that there are a few differences between today and 1960. This month’s protesters, in particular Black Lives Matter D.C., have made demands for economic change, including defunding the Metropolitan Police Department and investing in social programs. This “dichotomy of the haves and have nots” wasn’t a huge focus back then, Diamond says.
There’s also, of course, the advancement of readily available cell phone cameras. “I don’t believe without the camera shots, you would have had the protest and the demonstrations that you have today,” says Diamond. “I don’t know, over the years, how many people were beaten by a policeman or a pedestrian was killed and nobody saw it.”
He also feels like these protests are more diverse, with more white people joining their fellow Black citizens in standing up than he’s seen in the past. “[I’m] very pleased with so many people in such diverse crowds all over the country.”
Joan Mulholland, in 2018, showing a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings and one of the tickets that the protesters used to get into Glen Echo Park.Matt Blitz / DCist
78-year-old Joan Mulholland (then Trumpauer) was also there on that day in Glen Echo and lives in Arlington today. She’s also the woman in the Cherrydale photo behind Diamond.
Mulholland, who is white, agrees that the diversity of these protests makes them different from the ones she participated in the 1960s. “Overall, in the Civil Rights movement back then, it was mostly Black,” says Mulholland. “A white person really stood out, which was part of my role.”
She also agrees that ability for images and video to quickly travel at the speed of social media is a big reason why more people of all backgrounds are participating. But, additionally, she says it’s due to the societal integration that Mulholland and many, many others fought for.
“People get to know each other now, become friends, and connect across these old barriers,” she says.
Today, Mulholland continues to fight for social justice despite knee surgery. “I can’t march anymore. But I can run my mouth,” she says. She specifically says that statutes dedicated to Confederates and racists need to come down, particularly one of former President Andrew Jackson that protesters nearly brought down last week. “President Jackson… please, let him be struck by lightning and melt,” she says.
Mulholland’s advice to protesters today is to find similarities rather than differences in fellow activists. “Make allies and come together with other groups,” says Mulholland. “You may not agree on everything, but come together on the things you do agree on.”
Diamond, too, continued as an activist for many years after the protest at Glen Echo Park, including becoming a Freedom Rider.
He’s hopeful that the protests and the diverse groups of people calling for change today will lead to a better America soon. But he’s realistic. He says when he first heard of and saw the murder of George Floyd, he thought of the assassination of Martin Luther King.
“Here we go. Another Black man,” says Diamond. “All of the Black men who were maimed or killed over the years… The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Project CHANGE Founder -Farewell Good and Faithful Servant -Dr. Anastasi RIP
Dr. Robert Edward Anastasi peacefully passed away on February 17, 2021 surrounded by his family.
Bob was born December 10, 1939, to Virginia Spigone and Anthony Anastasi in Washington, DC. He is predeceased by his parents and his step-mother, Martha Anastasi.
Bob was a proud 1957 graduate of Blair High School in Silver Spring. Upon his graduation he attended Towson State Teachers College where he received a bachelor’s degree in Education and was a charter member of the Towson State men’s lacrosse team. He taught elementary school in Montgomery County for five years. While teaching, he earned his Master’s Degree from the University of Maryland in Educational Administration and Supervision. In 1966 he became an assistant principal, and in 1968, he was hired as Montgomery County’s youngest school principal at the age of 28.
In 1976, Bob took a sabbatical to earn his Doctorate of Educational Administration at the University of Southern Mississippi. Bob was a beloved principal for 18 years. He worked tirelessly for the well being of his students and staff. He retired from MCPS in 1986, but never retired from his work in education. From 1986-1989, he went on to serve as the Director of the National Principals Academy for the National Association of Elementary School Principals. In 1989 he became the Executive Director of the Community of Caring, a Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.
From 1991-2000 Bob was the Executive Director of the Maryland Business RoundTable for Education Foundation. From 2000-2004 Bob was the Executive Director of the Montgomery County Business Roundtable for Education and while there, with MCPS Superintendent Gerry Weast, helped establish AmeriCorps Project CHANGE. From 2006 to 2008 Bob served as a consultant for Coffey Consulting in support of their federal education projects. From 2006 until just recently, Bob served as a Consultant to the President of the George B. Thomas Learning Academy in Montgomery County.
Bob’s motto was “family is everything” and was most happy spending time with his wife, Wanda, and their beautiful family whether it was in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Disney World, their home, “HQ,” in Urbana, Maryland, or attending any event that his grandchildren were a part of.
He is survived by his beautiful wife, Wanda McGee Anastasi, his daughters Karen Wills (Bob) and Lisa Rose, his grandchildren Francis Rose, Robert Wills (Kim), Connor Wills, Jake Wills, and Kate Wills, and his great grandchildren Evan and Tripp Wills. He is also survived by his beloved brother, Anthony Anastasi (Jeanne), his Aunt Amanda Anastasi, his brother-in-law Larry McGee (Kathy), sisters-in-law Cora Rencher and Sandra McGee, many, many cousins, nieces, nephews, and Godchildren.
The family will receive friends on Sunday, February 21, 2021 from 3:00pm-5:00pm and Monday, February 22, 2021 from 10:00am-11:00am at St. Ignatius of Loyola Catholic Church, 4103 Prices Distillery Road, Ijamsville, MD 21754. A Private Mass will be held for the family at 11:00 am. Interment Private.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be graciously made in Robert Anastasi’s name to The Saturday School of the George B. Thomas Learning Academy. Sligo Middle School. 1401 Dennis Avenue. Silver Spring, MD. 20902. You can also donate online – please put “in memory of Robert Anastasi” https://saturdayschool.org/donate/
Expressions of sympathy may be offered to the family at StaufferFuneralHome.com.
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