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After the U.S. education system fractured into Zoom screens last spring, experts feared millions of children would fall behind. Hard evidence now shows they were right. A flood of new data — on the national, state and district levels — finds students began this academic year behind. Most of the research concludes students of color and those in high-poverty communities fell further behind their peers, exacerbating long-standing gaps in American education. A study being released this week by...

Millions of parents were already burned out by the demands of pandemic child-rearing in April . Summer , with school out and many camps closed, brought no relief. Then came fall, with many parents juggling the ins and outs of remote learning — and a staggering 865,000 women , many of them moms, dropping out of the workforce. Now it’s December, and parents are still in the same situation they were thrust into nine months ago: trying to balance work, child care, education, and keeping their...

By Erika Christakis, The Atlantic, December 1, 2020 T he litany of tragedies and inconveniences visited upon Americans by COVID-19 is long, but one of the more pronounced sources of misery for parents has been pandemic schooling. The logistical gymnastics necessary to balance work and school when all the crucial resources—time, physical space, internet bandwidth, emotional reserves—are limited have pushed many to the point of despair. Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially...

Just how stressed are teachers? A recent Gallup poll found teachers are tied with nurses for the most stressful occupation in America today. Unfortunately, that stress can have a trickle-down effect on their students, leading to disruptive behavior that results in student suspensions. One of those overburdened teachers is Jennifer Lloyd, a high school English teacher in Maryland and a graduate student at the University of Missouri. She has noticed how perceptive her students are to her mood...

Listening to the voices from current classrooms, the social-emotional needs that students are coming into classrooms are intense and demonstrate the importance of additional commitments for well-being and self-care. Schools and communities must recognize that teachers have ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) too. Similarly, they enter the profession as “wounded healers," being charged with filling needy hearts with hope. The levels of toxic stress and compassion fatigue are increasing...

We all know that children, especially when young, tend to be very open-minded and non-judgmental. It is during childhood that we should be teaching children how to express their needs by giving them a full vocabulary.

"This Giving Tuesday, and every day, we thank you for your support," said members of the ACEs Connection staff on a recent "all staff Zoom." L-R (top row) Laurie Udesky, Carey Sipp, Gail Kennedy, Lara Kain (second row) Cissy White, Rafael Maravilla, Donielle Prince, Jenna Quinn (third row) Ingrid Cockhren, (off camera) Alison Cebulla, Jane Stevens. Out that day, and grateful all the same, were Karen Clemmer, Dana Brown, Elizabeth Prewitt, Marianne Avari, and Samantha Sangenito Called “the...

HERE this NOW (HTN) is elated to announce the development of it's first podcast show, CONVOS during COVID . This is part of an ongoing conversation series that was developed last spring as a result of the pandemic, the collapsing economy, and the racial injustice crisis. Since then, we have enjoyed several guests such as the author of The Polyvagal Theory, Dr. Steve Porges; Anti-Racist Schools Activist Joe Truss; pediatric psychologist, Dr. Mona Delahooke; author Dr. Gholdy Muhammad;...

Gail Cornwall Nov 18 For years, education research focused on time-on-task as a measure of effective instruction, says Scott Gest , a professor at the University of Virginia. Through that lens, friends in elementary school appeared to be a negative, an impediment to focus and a catalyst for disruption. Even when the value of strong social ties gained recognition, friendships stood to the side conceptually, as developmentally important but not germane to academics. Yet recent research has...

When the last school bell rings at the end of the day, the bubbles we have created at school burst. The effort to keep our students and staff safe in schools across the country is negated when the adults in our students’ lives continue to make unsafe choices after school. It is disheartening, to say the least, to see the surge of the coronavirus when we did not have to get here. We recognize it is complicated. We all want our kids to have some normalcy, but casual gatherings after school and...

Brooke Brown has taught English language arts and ethnic studies in Tacoma, Wash., for the past 14 years. In September, the state named her 2021 Washington Teacher of the Year. Ms. Brown is also a biracial Black woman and a participant in a new program in her region aimed at retaining teachers of color, in a state where 88% of teachers in 2019 were white, according to a state agency. The program, the Educators of Color Leadership Community, “has been instrumental in me not just finding my...

By EdSource Staff, EdSource, November 19, 2020 Seven months after school campuses closed, Mayra Guzman, a parent in Fresno County, summed it up for just about everyone: “I feel miserable.” While some students have acclimated to distance learning and even thrived, most in EdSource’s project following California families on how they are coping with Covid-19, are still struggling with spotty internet access, technical glitches and the frustration of not seeing friends and teachers in person.