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AmeriCorps Montgomery

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Posts by Paul Costello1

On the Road to School Re-Openings – How to Get our bearings

July 9, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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The Principles of Narrative Design (POND) kick in whenever we face the question-What should we do now? They teach us five important lessons.


1.Who we are is Where we are.
2. Where we are is what we are In-Between.
3.We are always already in between Beginnings, Middles and Endings.
4.What to do is determined by where we want to end up.
5. Being Aware boils down to being A-Where.

Let us Apply this to our current situation with AmeriCorps Project CHANGE serving MCPS in the time of COVID19. Let us map what lies ahead.


Fluxgate Compasses, Part 1 – Context and principles

WHERE ARE WE?
Right Now, we are in the summer, in-between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. The energy that should normally boost us is the creative spark of a new beginning, a new year, a fresh start.



WE FINISHED BUT WE DID NOT END
But this is a beginning that is following an unfinished year, a Beginning that is not following an Ending, but an interrupted Middle, due to the Virus. That means that whatever we are starting has to contend with what was missing from the Ending of this past year. How can you say Hello if you have not said Goodbye?



You Won't Find Happiness at the Finish Line | Psychology Today

It is not a clean or even a fresh beginning because there was no Ending. Rather, we suffered an abrupt interruption that slowly faded into a hopeless finish that struggled to create the feel of an Ending. The year just petered out. Just think of all the graduations we had to improvise. The Beginning will be under the same cloud, caught up in the same energy field of the confusing, broken and contested end. That means that there is lots of unfinished business to address.


WE DO NOT BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING
This tells us something important. Whatever we are planning, we need to be clear that “the Broken Ending of the 2019-2020″ is what we begin with. We have to be dealing with what the students have missed out on, dealing with how they have felt about it, dealing with what their disappointments and the hopes and expectations that arise from that. Translation of this into action means we must allow them time and space to give meaning to their own experience. More than that, there are life lessons on offer here that no curriculum can replicate. 

Saying Goodbye to a Client. – Florida CAM Courses

SAYING GOODBYE
To just launch into 2020-2021 as if it were just another year would be to diminish or discount what they have been through. Part of the creation of a space for a new beginning is to clear the space of the troubled and messy ending. There are rituals for that, such as naming what was bad and what was good and declaring in a ritual “And we say goodbye to that.” It means that what we are starting off with is some process of grieving and loss. For some, it may even amount to trauma. Trauma, grief or loss provides no easy platform for kickstarting positive learning.

The clearing away of that Ending space invites them, the students and us- to create the energy we need to start again, Only then can we set some goals for what they want to catch up on, repair, or make good on. The task for all of us is to rebuild the platform for learning before they even start classes again. That means any wholesale rush to curriculum catch-up may be ignoring what is most necessary to start again, which is the connection for learning, the peer to peer support, the teacher-pupil connection and relational energy that goes with all of these. In other words, the SEL needs will be paramount. Summarized, there can be no reconnection to learning unless there is a connection for learning.

KEEP CALM AND BE PREPARED | KEEP-CALM.net

BEING READY NEXT TIME
MCPS like other school districts is still deciding when to announce a plan. The latest outbreak of COVID19 is a cautionary tale about relaxing health safeguards too early, or giving in to urgent pressures of other decision makers who have no expertize in public health. We therefore need to build in contingency plans that were missing back in March when we had no idea of what was ahead. We need to ask ourselves the clearing question

“What do we know from here that we did not know from there, that knowing and applying it, increases our chances of ending up where we need to go?”


WHAT WE KNOW ALREADY
We know that COVID19 is still in charge.
We know all we can do until a vaccine is developed is react in the safest way possible.
We know what is at stake is the life and health of the child, not just their educational needs. It is also the health of their families. “Festine Lente” is the old Latin maxim “hasten slowly.”
Also, we know that children are higly adaptable beings. They are built to learn, one way or the other. Their access to learning should not be totally conflated with being able to go to school. Maintaining schools is not the same as maintaining learning. Should we enter another period of intertrupted schooling, or unreliable virtual schooling, what do we need to remind ourselves of what matters? Where do we need even now to concentrate our resources?


FROM NOW TO THE END OF THE YEAR

DANGER Sign - THIS AREA IS OFF LIMITS

All this is happening in the last four months of a fiercely divisive election year so first, we need to build a wall around our children’s health that ensures they are not used as bargaining chips or election strategies. That has to be out of bounds.

Second, we need to be focused on CONNECTION, keeping students connected to their peers, and teachers and mentors STAYING CONNECTED with their students. If the data is correct, 30% of students have gone AWOL since March. They are not logged on or checking in. Imagine a 30% no-show for ordinary school!

Third, we need to be focused on what the COVID19 is teaching them about life, about themselves, about their resilience, about their own needs. Many have found creative ways to empower themselves and have not waited for adults to teach them anything. They know from their TikTok world that socially distant does not have to mean socially remote. They are digital natives and know how to cope better than we do. Only this week, when Saturday School launched its summer school, a group of students were stuck in a ZOOM waiting room and when we caught up with them, they were organizing their own learning lessons.


CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN
Children deserve a childhood where as far as possible, they are free to learn and play and have fun, make creative mistakes and be innocent. The adults in their lives are responsible for keeping them safe and secure. One of the biggest traps of the COVID19 crisis is that we drown our kids in the energy fields of our anxiety and turn them into little adults, way before their time. One of the requests of children we keep hearing during this time is “Let us still be Kids. Just because you adults have not got your shit together does not mean you can load all this ..@*#@!….. on to us.”

BUILDING MEMORIES
Lastly, if we are in between one year that never ended and another year that is stumbling to the starting blocks, we had better take care of the memories that our efforts right now are creating. What do we want them to remember about COVID19? In the POND method, this is the crucial question to rocket us out of the heresy of NOW.

We want them to remember that we did not abandon them.
We want them to remember that we believed that they still had the ability to learn and play.
We want them to remember that we did not blame or lose hope, or turn on one another but that COVID19 brought us all closer.
And finally, we want them to remember that we worked hard to not let this happen again.

We want to ensure this experience does not overshadow the more important things about their tender young lives. We need to make sure that the virus does not become the main memory of these times. Something else, something better must come out of it.



Michael Harrison's e-devotion: stronger together

COVID19 AS A LIFE LEARNING CURRICULUM
The curriculum ahead of us, from September 2019 to March 2020, has to be that we are together, we are creative, and though we are not perfect, that with patience, resilience and resourcefulness, together we overcame this.

The education for life that our kids need, and that COVID19 unexpectedly provides us is this chance to model how adversity can make us all the stronger. We may have suffered, but on the other side we are better people for it. That is the heart of the matter. Everything else, while it matters so urgently now, won’t matter a ‘hill of beans’ in the end. COVID19 has interrupted education, but COVID19 itself is an education. Time to learn what we want to teach.

Four ways for Joe Biden to reset our polarized and dysfunctional politics (Excerpt)

July 6, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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……

National service, national dividend

Steven Pearlstein wrote this piece for The Washington Post. July 5th 2020 G2

Fate of National Service Rests with Congress, Again - Voices for ...

The greatest threat to American capitalism and American democracy is the erosion of our social capital, the trust and responsibility we feel for each other and for the institutions that hold society together.

One way to begin rebuilding social capital would be to require all citizens to devote two or three years to national service sometime during their lifetime. Service could be performed when people are young, or after they retire, or sometime between. It could be provided through government programs such as the military, the Peace Corps or a reinvented Civilian Conservation Corps, or through an authorized nonprofit entity such as Teach for America, a local homeless shelter or arts group. Not only would such service improve the lives of our fellow citizens, but it also would give all of us a chance to meet, work with and live among people who are different from ourselves.

National service would reinforce the idea that we all have obligations to and responsibility for the country and each other. But it could also reinforce the idea that each of us has an equal claim on the nation’s bounty, tying national service to a national dividend that every citizen would receive. One way to do that would be for the government to set up a trust fund for every child born in the United States, to which it would contribute $2,000 every year until the child reaches 18. The money would be invested in a broad portfolio of U.S. stocks and bonds, so that by the time they set out in life, every young American would have around $50,000 that could be used to pay for college, start a business or put a down payment on a house.

I realize that at a moment when our politics is so polarized and the legislative process so dysfunctional, it sounds positively naive to imagine something so communitarian as national service tied to a national dividend — or for that matter, any of the other ideas on this list. But that is precisely why they would be so politically appealing, tapping into the deep craving among voters for initiatives that are practical and unifying and offer hope for the future. The administrative and financial details can be worked out later. For Biden, the more immediate challenge is to drag the political conversation out of an unsatisfying and unproductive rut by offering a set of bold, fresh ideas that promote equality and reinforce the feeling that we are all in this together.

Steven Pearlstein wrote this piece for The Washington Post.

Montgomery County’s public schools are still segregated. It’s time to fix that.

July 6, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Opinion by Nate Tinbite, Ananya Tadikonda and Matt PostJuly 3, 2020 at 2:30 p.m. EDT

Nate Tinbite is a former student member of the Montgomery County Board of Education and a recent graduate of John F. Kennedy High School. Ananya Tadikonda is a former student member of the board and a graduate of Richard Montgomery High School. Matt Post is a former student member of the board and a graduate of Sherwood High School.

Board of Education - Meetings - Montgomery County Public Schools ...

Last month, in the parking lot of a Bethesda library, a thousand Montgomery County residents raised their hands and swore their commitment to dismantling white supremacy.

A few months earlier, just a few miles away, a smaller crowd formed in the cafeteria of Quince Orchard High School. This crowd gathered not to fight racial injustice but to uphold it: to loudly oppose the school system’s nascent study of boundary lines and countywide segregation. At this public meeting, one parent took the microphone and, speaking of black, brown and poor children in their schools, complained that “you can’t put that burden on us.”AD

The most important question now is: which voices will continue showing up and which voices will Montgomery County’s elected leaders heed?

We must recognize that the outrage that has exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s death goes much deeper than any individual police killing. We are witnessing the rejection of a style of politics that has been more willing to delay on behalf of a prejudiced few than to push ahead for everyone else. In Montgomery County, there is no greater example of that approach’s insufficiency than the enduring segregation of our schools. Read More

We write as three successive student members of the Montgomery County Board of Education who, against fierce opposition, proposed and passed policies of school integration. Amid this renewed national conversation on race, privilege and systemic injustice, we must give Montgomery County’s elected leaders a clear mandate to push ahead in truly making our schools equal.AD

You might think integration would be a simple proposition for a progressive county. After all, integrated schools are empirically proven to produce the kind of equality that the country is marching for. For black and brown children, integrated schools lead to higher test scores, increased graduation rates and higher levels of college enrollment. Importantly, they prepare all students to live and work across racial lines without prejudice. And according to Stanford professor Sean Reardon, who led a recent study on modern segregation, “the only way to close the [achievement] gap is to racially integrate schools.”

But still, 65 years after Brown v. Board of Education, “de facto segregation by race, ethnicity, language, and income undermines student achievement” in Montgomery County. Why? As elected officials who sat at the table where these decisions were made, we can tell you.

What changes do you hope will come out of protests and debates about police and race? Write to The Post.

Our former colleagues on the school board are good people and have a deep, demonstrated commitment to racial justice in our schools. But, ultimately, their charge as elected officials is to respond to those who show up. And when the board pursues progressive policies, it is often the vocal, anti-equity minority sending the most emails, writing the most letters and speaking out the loudest.AD

This asymmetrical pressure has led to a kind of overcautious policymaking that too often ends with more data collection than action. In the late 1990s, white parents mobilized to exclude Bethesda-Chevy Chase and Sherwood high schools from the far more diverse consortium system. In 2018, several community members advocated for their school to be named after civil rights icon Bayard Rustin while simultaneously asking not to increase the number of black and brown students assigned to attend there. Just last year, under pressure from an angry Facebook group, the school system asked a firm studying countywide segregation not to make any recommendations on how to remedy it.

Make no mistake: The anti-integration contingent some fear upsetting does not represent our county. Stephen Austin — who ran for school board on a platform of opposing policies of integration and whose slogan “Neighborhood Schools”could have come straight from the signs of segregationist protesters in the 1960s — lost badly in the Board of Education primary last month. Despite raising more money than almost any other candidate, he got a smaller percentage of the vote than President Trump did here in 2016.

Through that election and the enormous recent protests across our county, the people of Montgomery County are giving the Montgomery County Public Schools a go-ahead to pursue bolder policies of racial and socioeconomic equality. We can’t stop there.AD

Sixty years from now, our sons, daughters and grandchildren will look back to this moment of division. They will look to what we did: the choices we made, the values we upheld and the policies we passed to push back. We ask our community: Will we be the forgotten dawdlers of history, those who believed in justice but lacked the courage to go further than post on social media about it, or those who bravely stood up and fought for what was right?

People of Montgomery County: Let’s show up, finish the job and integrate our schools.

Read more:

Karin Chenoweth: As long as Montgomery County fails to teach children to read, it will have gaps

The Post’s View: Montgomery County has made little progress on its achievement gap

Jack R. Smith: The growing achievement gap in Montgomery County schools must be addressed

Changing Mindsets-Re-building Trust

June 30, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Wayne Dyer - If you change the way you look at things, the...

I have just finished a ZOOM meeting with Ben, one of the great members of Project CHANGE 2019-2020 and I just want to share the overflow of our conversation so that I do not forget what came out of our sharing.

Ben is serving his second year with MCPS and about to sign on for his third and he is someone we cherish in our team because he is so reflective, always curious to not just understand the actions and choices but the belief and assumptions that underlie most of what we do.

Ben has a number of hunches that he has been testing out during his year of service and he says, they have worked to shift his mindset. Let me try and summarize some of them.

1. Right now, there seems to be something missing in how we experience community and trust and our shared sense of purpose. There are solutions but if we are to get at the heart of this, we need to ask ourselves what builds trust?

Brush lettering quote anything is possible at Vector Image

2.Ben says that formal meetings driven by time and agenda often never achieve their full potential because people are afraid to take risks. If they experience a sense of friendship, that goes along with the work ethic, that could make a difference, but how does one build more than a functional togetherness?

3. Trust goes along with a sense of possibility, that as we engage with each other, we leave behind our limits and our pessimism and that we presume that if we can connect, there are ways to share and ways to work that could take us to territory that we have never experienced before. Trust feeds on the sense of possibility that it creates.

4. Ben also questions the role that criticism plays and that while we say that constructive critisism is necessary at times, he says that more often than not, it shuts people down and dilutes the trust. He suspects that one can get to the same place that the criticism aims to take us without a conversation that calls out another for what they are doing wrong.


5. Ben has a superb reputatilon at MCPS and when I asked him how he achieved such recognition and affection, he said simply that he has learned to live and work together without using criticism. He has taught himself a way to ask questions and to rephrase what might have sounded like “Do it better this way” into an offer or an invitation or a contribution. He is careful with his conversations and deliberate about the words he chooses to use.

6. Ben is on a mission to find more people who think like this and want to expore the reflective way into more effective practices in terms of how we team together, how we build trust and how we move together toward a more healthy community.

7. One has conversations in AmeriCorps that are usually devoted to the stories of service and the challenges to be overcome, but this conversation is truly fitting for a program that calls itself Project CHANGE.

Commission Submits Recommendations to Encourage Americans to Serve

June 25, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Students meet soldiers.

“We found that as the case was 200 years ago during the earliest days of the republic, America’s extraordinary and long-standing spirit of service continues to shape our nation,” said Joe Heck, the commission chairman. “Americans repeatedly step up in support of each other, offering their sweat and ingenuity when needed, without expectation of anything in return.”

Cultivating that spirit of service is behind the recommendations, the commission chairman said, because much work lies ahead. “We have not unlocked the full transformational potential of service to address critical national and local needs and reinforce the civic fabric of American society,” Heck said. “Our vision is of a nation in which service is a common expectation and experience of all Americans — when it is the norm, not the exception, [and] when every American is inspired, and eager to serve.”

The commission looks toward 5 million Americans serving in one capacity or another in the military, in organizations such as the Peace Corps, or in federally supported national service opportunities each year, Heck said, as well as a modernized government personnel system “attracting and enabling Americans with critical skills and new generations to enter public service.”

The commission’s long-term goal is a culture of service in the United States that attracts people of all backgrounds who aspire to participate in opportunities to serve their communities or nation, Heck said. Read More

On the military side, the starting point is a strong, all-volunteer force that can recruit and retain the personnel it needs to meet current and emerging threats, said Debra Wada, the commission’s vice chair for military issues. This is complicated by the fact that Americans are less connected to the military than ever before, she noted.

“This growing civil-military divide poses challenges to military recruitment,” she said. “Fewer than one in five young adults can name all five branches of the military.”

Education itself is a recommendation of the commission. They noted that many Americans can’t name the rights protected by the First Amendment. Many couldn’t name the three branches of the U.S. government.

There should be some form of instruction for Americans to understand their government and how it works, said Mark Gearan, the vice chair for national and public service. This is the heart of an informed citizenry making informed choices, he added.

The commission wants to improve military outreach around the country. Access to bases, partnerships between National Guard and reserve component units and local schools are part of that outreach. The commissioners also would like to see Junior ROTC expanded. 

The commission recommended promoting administration of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Career Exploration Program. The battery is taken by fewer than 5% of U.S. secondary students. Expanding that percentage would allow “more students to learn about citizenship and service, gain familiarity with the military, and understand how their own strengths could translate into military careers and other service options,” the commission’s report says.

Recruiters should look in underrepresented markets to help the military meet its recruiting goals while improving the geographic and demographic balance of the armed forces to better reflect the diversity of the nation, the report states.

The commission also wants to enable greater movement among all components of military service and between military service and the private sector. The services are already working this aspect, and the commissioners believe this will offer the armed forces “a more effective approach to continual access to individuals with key skills, such as digital talent or engineering,” the report says.

Middle school is often difficult. Try experiencing it under quarantine.

June 25, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Steven Yoder June 19, 2020 at 11:03 a.m. EDTAdd to list

May I have this (virtual) dance?

Leah Hampton, an eighth-grader at Falling Creek Middle School in Virginia, jokes that without her friends she’d sleep through school. Seeing them was “the best part of the day,” she said. “They woke me up before my classes.”

Her mother, Leomia Hampton, says after classes went online in mid-March, that wasn’t far from the truth. “It’s very difficult to keep her motivated, very difficult to even keep her awake,” she said of working with her daughter at home.

Early adolescence is a time of rapid cognitive changes, when kids assert their independence from parents, form their own identities and become hyper-dependent on (and sensitive to) interactions with peers. Their “social brains” are developing quickly, and they are Hoovering up information from the world around them to figure out who they are and how they fit in. Read On

That’s why educators and researchers who study child development say school shutdowns resulting from the coronavirus pandemic may be particularly disruptive to middle schoolers. These kids are being sequestered at home at the stage in life they need their peers and teachers most.

The isolation “flies in the face of what their brains are telling them they need,” said Kenneth Ginsburg, a pediatrician who specializes in adolescent medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

When puberty hits, the brain reorganizes dramatically, said Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University, who specializes in adolescence. The neural pathways dealing with social connections become more active, helping adolescents become attuned to what other people are thinking and feeling and how best to relate to them.AD

It’s at this age that, through interactions with peers and adults, young people acquire the ability to read facial expressions and interpret nonverbal communication, Steinberg said. There’s an evolutionary reason for this social learning: Figuring out how to get along with others is key to flourishing in life.

Kids this age are “practicing who they are in relation to a complicated social world, with hierarchies, rules and nuances,” said Ronald Dahl, the director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley. “They are learning at a phenomenal rate.”

But accomplishing all this social learning without in-person interactions is difficult, if not impossible. “The dose has been dramatically diminished,” Dahl said.

Schools can help by providing real-time instruction online, opportunities for teacher-student interaction, and efforts to help students feel part of a group, even when they are working at home. But studies show that many students aren’t being engaged in this way, especially kids who lack Internet access at home. In a survey of teachers released in early April, only 39 percent reported interacting with their students at least once a day. The most common form of communication was email.AD

Students say they miss real-time feedback from teachers and peers. Class discussions can be stilted and awkward, if they happen at all. Group projects are very difficult to pull off. There are no chances to chat with peers in between classes and casually develop new friendships, at least not in the same way.

“I’m FaceTiming with my friends and everything but it’s not the same. Like I don’t feel that same like human connection,” said Seamus Lynch, an eighth-grader at Lincoln Middle School in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago. And the way he works academically has changed, too. Before the shutdown, if he and classmates were writing a story in English class, he’d normally workshop his writing with others. Now that’s not as easy to do.

Seventh-grader Saige Jensen lives in rural northeastern Oregon, attending Heppner Junior/Senior High School. She doesn’t have a smartphone or use social media, so it’s difficult to connect with peers. “[It’s] weird,” she said. “I’m used to like tons of kids talking all the time. And it’s quiet now.” While she has live online classes with her teachers every other day, her family’s slow Internet connection makes it difficult to participate. She can email questions, but her teachers are busy and can’t always respond right away. “You’re trying to do work on your own that you may not know how to do,” she said.AD

Missing out on social connections is hard for middle schoolers in general, and especially so for kids in sixth grade who are just beginning to create their social networks, said Geoffrey Borman, a professor of education policy and analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“To have that just suddenly taken away from them, to have to essentially be relegated to living in a cave with their parents at home … that I think is especially a daunting circumstance,” said Borman, who led a study last year on how to improve middle schoolers’ academic achievement and emotional well-being.

Teachers say they can see the toll social isolation is taking on their students. Andrea Nelson, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade language arts and social studies at the Oregon school Saige attends, said that in a journaling assignment, kids wrote about how lonely they are. One student messages her four or five times a day and sends her pictures of her pets. “I have kids where I’m like, ‘Okay, now log off, our meeting’s done. And they like are hanging on,” she said.AD

Even in non-pandemic times, early adolescence can be a precarious period academically. When kids transition from elementary to middle school, sometimes their grades drop because of all the changes they experience, researchers say. Instead of being assigned one homeroom teacher, they move among classes; school is often bigger and farther from home; and the social experiences in middle school, while exciting, can also be overwhelming.

There’s some evidence that middle-schoolers may be particularly vulnerable to learning loss resulting from the shutdowns. A worst-case scenario outlined in a paper released in May projected that sixth- and seventh-graders would retain an average of only 1 to 10 percent of their normal learning gains in math for the year, and just 15 to 29 percent in reading. For younger kids, even in the worst-case projection, the learning losses were less acute.

But many educators are doing their best to ward off social isolation and learning loss. Teachers at Mott Hall Bridges Academy, a public middle school in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods, are trying to mimic the classroom as closely as possible. Principal Nadia Lopez said many of her teachers are reading books aloud through video instead of assigning them, and they’re holding live discussions afterward.

It’s mid-June and schools still aren’t sure how they will open for 2020-21. Here’s why — and what’s likely to happen.

Still, more than two months into the shutdown, Lopez worries about the mental health of her students. When her teachers call homes and talk to parents and students, they’re hearing that some kids are staying up later, sleeping in more. Until it closed, the school was open until 6 p.m. every weekday, with kids engaged in all manner of after-school activities — basketball, cooking, art, softball.AD

“We’re really concerned about depression,” Lopez said. “Because our children thrive from being together.”

At the same time, there are some middle-schoolers who report learning better online than in person. That’s in part because kids’ intense connections at this age can often get complicated. Molly Hudgens, a school counselor at Sycamore Middle School in Tennessee, said several of the students she works with say they are happier with distance learning because they can avoid conflicts they have with other students.

Meagan Daughtry, a seventh-grader at Lopez’s school in Brooklyn, said she’s more comfortable working from home than at school. It helps that she has a quiet space to work and that her mother, Rose Daughtry, has been there to help with any computer glitches. Daughtry was sent home from her job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority for weeks after showing symptoms of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.AD

Back in Virginia, Leah Hampton has struggled to stay focused on schoolwork without her friends around. “I’m definitely not as motivated as I was before,” she said. “I don’t think I’m learning as well as I was when we had to go to school.”

Her mother worries what that will mean for next school year, especially if online learning continues into the fall.

“I’m concerned that her teachers won’t get to know who she is, she won’t get to know who her teachers are — you know, the relationship won’t be there,” said Hampton. The last few months of quarantine, meanwhile, have proved just how important those relationships are.

This story on middle-schoolers was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Baltimore students protest for anti-racist curriculum: ‘We don’t know the truth’

June 25, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Lauren Lumpkin June 19, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDTAdd to list

Can the American Black Lives Matter movement trigger an African ...

A’niya Taylor, a 16-year-old student at Baltimore City College, smoothed her green hair and held onto a microphone.

“This is not a moment, but a movement!” she shouted.

Taylor has organized protests before, for students bucking against climate change and, more recently, for young people resisting police brutality. On a recent afternoon she corralled a group of about a thousand teenagers in front of Baltimore School for the Arts, a public high school nestled in the city’s Mount Vernon neighborhood. The teens were bubbling; many hadn’t seen each other in person since March, when the novel coronavirus forced school buildings to close.

But the story behind the reunion was more somber. Motivated by the death of George Floyd, and eager to ride the national momentum generated by movements like Black Lives Matter, the teens assembled on a hot afternoon to demand that Maryland schools rewrite their curriculum to be more honest about systemic racism and slavery.

In Baltimore — a city still mourning Freddie Gray, 25, who died five years ago of a spinal-cord injury he suffered in police custody — roughly 3 out of 4 public school students are black. But those students say they feel neglected — by unconsciously biased teachers, by a Eurocentric curriculum, by racist policies. Statewide, black children make up about one-third of the student body.

Nyah Jackson, 17, one of the protest’s lead organizers, just finished her senior year at the arts high school. State and city school officials “have not done enough to be completely anti-racist,” she said.

She and several arts school classmates demanded reforms across Maryland’s 24 school districts. They want more equitable access to resources, improved mental health support for black children, and heartier lessons onblack history and literature. After watching fiery riots explode in other cities and police clash violently with protesters in their own, they say teenagers just want to learn — mostly about how America reached the point of chaos. Read More

“We shouldn’t have to learn this on Twitter,” Jackson said. “It’s sad to me that a lot of people see so much going on but don’t understand the historical systemic oppression of black people and how it exudes in our daily lives.”

Taylor led the Baltimore mass past honking cars and in front of restaurants, including one that set pitchers of water outside for protesters. She faced the crowd, walking backward, her shiny silver backpack bouncing to the rhythm as she marched and chanted: “Power! Transformation! Miracles! I neeeeed it!”

The signs that sprouted from the sea of protesters made direct requests to educational leaders: “Teach Anti-Racism,” “Our Curriculum Needs to Represent Our Students,” “#TeachTheTruth.”

Some educators are clearly listening. Matthew Caffrey, a white high school math teacher, arrived at the protest with a box of about 20 books written by black authors, including “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander and three Toni Morrison novels.AD

“They were just sitting on my shelf. I wanted to contribute,” Caffrey said. “All these books, they’re not going to learn about in public schools.”

Some of Caffrey’s titles are named in the student organizers’ list of demands, which push schools to require more books by black authors. In a time when misinformation spreads rampant, students just want accurate information, they said.

“We don’t know the truth,” said Kayah Calhoun, a rising senior at Baltimore School for the Arts. Black people “don’t get the respect or recognition we deserve” in history lessons.

Makayla Downs, 11, marched with her sister, Kimora, 12, and mom, Tina. She wants to learn about “not just the Greek gods, but the African gods,” she said as the group arrived at its destination: the headquarters of Baltimore City Public Schools.

Students want to learn about successful black uprisings and the history of white supremacy, organizers said. They want a history unit dedicated to the role black women played in the civil rights movement.AD

Rickelle Polley, 17, said the school district’s curriculum is “built on white supremacy.” Maybe more education would prevent another George Floyd case, the rising high school senior said, perched on a concrete ledge outside the district’s office.

On one hand, the changes students are calling for can be slow-moving. History textbooks can take up to a year, or longer, to rewrite and republish.

But students say they’re encouraged by districts that are swiftly removing police from campuses and scraping the names of Confederate leaders off buildings. Curriculum changes may come fast, too.

In California, the Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Education voted unanimously to mandate that students take an ethnic studies course before they graduate. Facing History and Ourselves, an educational nonprofit and professional development organization for middle and high school teachers, reported that an online guide for educators who want to talk to their students about Floyd’s death caused a surge in Web traffic.AD

“We’ve heard from many educators expressing appreciation for resources they can use in the classroom to help their students process this painful and rapidly evolving story,” said Valerie Linson, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit.

Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, attended the student-led protest and acknowledged “racial patterns” in the school system. She stood a few feet away from the crowd that filled the plaza in front of her office, near a vendor selling waist jewelry, with other district officials who “wanted to see what the young people had to say.”

Santelises said the district has tried to attack the problems outlined by demonstrators, developing strategies to recruit and retain more black teachers and hosting equity training sessions for educators. It also launched BMore Me, a series of three-week courses about African American history in Baltimore that have been piloted in a handful of schools.AD

But Santelises admitted there is more work to do. She and other educational leaders need to figure out “what we do next, what do we accelerate that we already have been doing,” she said.

At the state level, leaders said they have tried in recent years to revise school curriculum to include the perspectives of underrepresented groups, said Lora Rakowski, a Maryland Department of Education spokeswoman. The state agency recently established equity as a priority in education, and it is looking for ways to incorporate student voices in curriculum development, Rakowski added

But students have yet to feel the effects. Quinn Fireside, 18, a white organizer, graduated recently from Baltimore School for the Arts, where students must audition to get in. A majority-white staff that decides which students to admit has “made the school whiter than it should be,” Fireside said. As a result, she said, “Everything is told through a white perspective.”AD

And when her high school closed to slow the spread of the coronavirus, students had access to carts of laptops and tablets, Fireside said. But in one of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, administrators at the predominantly black New Song Academy struggled to find tech for every child, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Now, young people are blocking off traffic, hoisting signs and demanding that educational leaders upend a system in which they say resources are unevenly distributed, black students are disciplined at disproportionate rates and microaggressions are enmeshed in daily classroom life,exacerbating the effects of racist curriculum.

Some teachers have “really low expectations for students of color,” said Melanie Smith, an eighth-grade teacher. She said she’s encountered educators who assume black students can’t handle challenging coursework or that black parents aren’t involved in their children’s lives. Research supports her experience and shows that the differences between how teachers treat black and white students contribute to long-standing achievement gaps.AD

Outside the city’s school district office, the protesters, some of them weeping, knelt in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin spent pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck. Smith held a sign that called on the school district to adopt an anti-racist stance. “To not be racist,” she said, “is not enough.”

As long as Montgomery County fails to teach children to read, it will have gaps

June 25, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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A stock photo of a Montgomery County Public Schools bus. Dec. 23, 2015. (WTOP/Mike Murillo)
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No one who has paid attention could be surprised by the recent report that Montgomery County has failed to narrow test score gaps.

Karin Chenoweth is a longtime education writer and the parent of two graduates of Montgomery County’s Albert Einstein High School. From 1999 to 2004, she wrote the Homeroom column for The Post. She is author of “Schools That Succeed: How Educators Marshal the Power of Systems for Improvement.”

The county has spent a lot more time posturing as a national education leader than actually doing things that would make it an education leader, and a lot more time soothing public opinion than improving instruction and ensuring equity.

Part of the reason is complacency. Like many wealthy districts, Montgomery County Public Schools can rely on a large base of parents who pay close attention to whether their children learn to read and do math and who get outside help when their children falter. The wealthier areas of the county are crowded with commercial and private tutors. This makes it difficult to gauge the quality of the instruction in Montgomery County schools. Read More

Overall, roughly half of the county’s students meet state reading standards, but there are huge differences among student groups. Roughly 70 percent of white and Asian third-grade students meet state reading standards; only about 40 percent of African American third-graders meet them, and less than 30 percent of Hispanic third-graders do. Only 27 percent of third-graders who receive federal meal assistance meet standards. Similar gaps continue through the grades.

Superintendent Jack R. Smith rather courageously brought in Johns Hopkins University and Student Achievement Partners to do an audit of the county’s curriculum. The resulting report in spring 2018 explained why so many Montgomery County students are unable to meet reading standards. Among other things, it found that the county had “no systematic support for the development of foundational skills” in reading.

Decades of research have found that most children need systematic instruction in the 44 sounds of the English language and how to map those sounds onto the 26 letters of the alphabet automatically and fluently, but Montgomery County as a district has refused to incorporate this knowledge into its reading instruction.AD

In the words of the report, Montgomery County’s curriculum does “not include the necessary components to adequately address foundational skills.”

If you’re not immersed in these issues, you might not recognize just how scathing this language is. Montgomery County fails to do what just about all cognitive scientists and most reading researchers agree is critical to ensuring that children learn to read.

In addition, the report said that MCPS provided little to no support for students to build the vocabulary and background knowledge necessary for students to read well as they proceed through the grades. That doesn’t mean that teachers aren’t doing their best with what they have. But for decades the county has failed to provide a coherent, research-based curriculum that would mean that teachers don’t have to spend endless evening and weekend hours writing and finding materials. “Teachers should not be expected to be the composers of the music as well as the conductors of the orchestra,” the report said, quoting an educator.AD

In the wake of that report, Montgomery County adopted new curriculums for elementary and middle school that may help children to build vocabulary and background knowledge through the elementary and middle school years.

But if students don’t learn how to get words off the page efficiently and smoothly, huge numbers of children will continue to struggle academically. And there is little evidence that Montgomery County is providing teachers with either the knowledge or the materials to help them teach their students to read. Nor is the county ensuring that principals understand how to support teachers as they learn to improve reading instruction.

These are long-standing problems (I wrote about them in The Post 20 years ago) and, to be fair, they are not peculiar to Montgomery County. American Public Media’s Emily Hanford has documented the failure of many schools and districts to teach reading in the ways that we know work.AD

Reading and writing are enormously complex activities. Teaching children how to do them requires a great deal of knowledge on the part of teachers and principals. But just about all children, no matter their background, can learn to read. The fact that Montgomery County, with all its resources, fails to do what we know works is — frankly — embarrassing.

In the past 15 years, I have studied high-performing and rapidly improving schools and districts across the country that serve children of color and children from low-income backgrounds. Most have much less money than Montgomery County schools. When people ask me what their secret is, I always answer the same way: “They teach the kids.”

It is long past time that Montgomery County teach the kids.

Read more;

The Post’s View: Montgomery schools’ ‘not-so-perfect process’ needs transparencyAD

The Pot’s View: Montgomery County has made little progress on its achievement gap

Jack R. Smith: The growing achievement gap in Montgomery County schools must be addressed

Lockdowns are taking a toll on young people’s mental health. Everyone should be alarmed.

June 22, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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The data are stark on this point. Among those aged 18 to 29, 42 percent reported symptoms of anxiety and 36 percent had symptoms of depression. Those numbers decline with each successive age cohort, reaching their low points among respondents 80 years old or older. Only 11 percent of the most elderly had anxiety symptoms, and only 9 percent presented as depressed.

A recent study from the Census Bureau shows that about half of Americans reported symptoms of depression in early May, double that from a similar study in 2013-2014. In one sense, that’s unsurprising; nearly 100,000 people have died of covid-19, and more than 30 million have lost their jobs. What might be surprising, however, is that symptoms of psychological distress are directly correlated with age. The younger the person, the likelier he or she is to experience mental health issues. Read On

The data are stark on this point. Among those aged 18 to 29, 42 percent reported symptoms of anxiety and 36 percent had symptoms of depression. Those numbers decline with each successive age cohort, reaching their low points among respondents 80 years old or older. Only 11 percent of the most elderly had anxiety symptoms, and only 9 percent presented as depressed.AD

This may be counterintuitive, since the elderly are most at risk of dying of covid-19. But it becomes less surprising after considering the impacts of the measures taken to fight the pandemic. The shutdown has devastated the economy, and younger workers have borne the brunt of the layoffs. According to one study, workers under 25 years of age are 93 percent more likely to have lost their jobs than those over 35. The most recent unemployment report bears this out: More than a quarter of workers between 18 and 24 are unemployed, roughly double the rate of workers 25 or older.

Millions of college students were also forced to go home as campuses closed. Moving is tough at any time, but moving from a largely independent life to one with enforced dependency is even more stressful. These students also had to suddenly deal with the first economic crisis of their adult lives, worrying about their immediate or future job prospects as they went overnight from the hottest labor market in U.S. history to the coldest.

The shutdown also crushed their social lives. Most people over 30 are married or in a stable, adult relationship, so they have someone to socialize with during a shutdown. Being with the same person 24/7 has its stresses, but being alone all the time can be far worse. Restrictions on bars and social gatherings also disproportionally took away the socializing activities of the younger set. For many young people, the sudden loss of human contact and economic security is just too much.AD

This almost certainly has been a reason for the much criticized flouting of social distancing rules over Memorial Day weekend. The pictures of people crammed together drinking were almost uniformly younger — the same people most in need of respite. Older people look at those pictures and see potential disease carriers. Younger people see them as a picture of saving themselves.

Policymakers are almost all immune to these experiences. Governors, mayors and members of President Trump’s team are mostly people in their middle ages or more advanced years. They haven’t lost their jobs, and they don’t stay locked in a room with no one to talk to. It’s natural their views are affected by their own experiences. One can say that gives them the distance needed to make informed decisions, but it also means they lack natural empathy with those who are most affected by those decisions. That is potentially a huge problem for the nation.

The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.

This paradoxically creates an opportunity for Trump. While younger voters have tended to be the most hostile to him throughout his presidency, he is also the leading figure in favor of letting them return to a world where they can have hope and happiness again. While former vice president Joe Biden walks out with a mask and says, “Stay closed,” Trump walks maskless and says, “Embrace life.” Many pundits have noted that Biden is doing better than expected in polls among senior citizens, but those same polls also show Trump doing better than expected among the young. Those trends might be related.AD

The mental health plight of the young ought to be of prime concern to all regardless of the political impacts. The risk aversion and desire for creature comforts that characterized the generations that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II affected American life for decades. If today’s young are similarly traumatized by the pandemic, covid-19 will haunt us for the rest of the century.

Read more:

Read a letter in response to this column: Trump’s refusal to wear a mask sends the wrong message

Henry Olsen: Trump has unmasked his reelection strategy: Risk tolerance

Henry Olsen: Signs of rebirth are everywhere. They are simultaneously scary and wonderful.

Congratulations to the Class of 2020

June 16, 2020 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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We salute your service and your perseverance through tough times. You all stayed in the story of service and worthily celebrated your achievements together yesterday. Project CHANGE is proud of what you have done.