Today’s Literacy Headlines

America’s librarians announced their top children’s book picks virtually on Monday – awarding the 2021 Newbery and Caldecott medals, among several other honors. The John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished children’s book in 2020 went to When You Trap A Tiger, by Tae Keller. The book’s central character is a girl, Lily, whose family moves in with her dying grandmother — and a tiger from Korean folklore shows up looking for something that was stolen. The Randolph Caldecott Medal, which the American Library Association awards to the most distinguished American picture book for children, went to We Are Water Protectors illustrated by Michaela Goade and written by Carole Lindstrom. The book stresses the urgent need to take care of Earth’s water. ALA’s Youth Media Awards include many other honors, as well, such as the Coretta Scott King Award, which was awarded to Before the Ever After, by Jacqueline Woodson.

The Americans with Disabilities Act says schools have to help not just students but parents with disabilities, too, like making sure deaf or blind parents can communicate during parent-teacher conferences. But what happens when kids are learning at home? That’s uncharted territory. Rosabella Manzanares, a first grader at Betsy Ross Elementary in Forest Park, Ill., has a spelling test. Like so many kids around the country, she’s taking the test at home, sharing a Zoom screen with a class full of other boisterous 6-year-olds. Rosabella’s teacher relies on parents to grade simple assignments like this. But while Rosabella can hear the spelling words, her mother can not. Chantelly Manzanares uses American Sign Language, or ASL, which is different than English. It’s a visual language. It has its own grammar. It uses different sentence structure. Rosabella and her siblings grew up using ASL. But while they’ve become fluent in English, Manzanares is not. She can grade this spelling test, which Rosabella holds up to the screen with a big smile. But it can be tough for Manzanares to help with other work in English.

Social studies students regularly consider the past through its written and material culture, whether that means diving into daily life in colonial America through letters or examining ancient coins to better understand the spread of the Roman Empire. Students can learn a lot about the work of historians by applying this approach to items from their own daily lives. I’ve found that if I remind my students that in the future, our lives and culture will be reconstructed in a similar fashion, they’re intrigued, and if I challenge them to imagine what a student 100 or 200 years from now might infer when examining a contemporary artifact, they’re keen to get to work. My students have analyzed their own artifacts within this historical framework and have been pushed to think in new ways, both creatively and conceptually. This activity fits into a variety of curricula, as it gets students to practice evaluating artifacts so that they can make hypotheses about a society from its material culture and weigh how different interpretations of historical objects can shape our understanding of the past.

As a first-grade teacher for nearly a decade, I enjoyed nothing more than teaching early readers to unlock the code and discover the joy of books. Three years ago, I was hired as the literacy coach for my district. In this role, I led professional development sessions on teaching reading in the primary grades, training teachers and support staff on explicit, systematic instruction, and managed committees on English language arts curriculum. Everything I had been teaching other educators involved in-person, hands-on instruction. How could we ever reproduce literacy instruction in a distance learning format? But no matter the venue, whether on-site, remote, or a hybrid format, teachers can continue delivering high-quality literacy instruction. The following tips have helped me, and I hope will do the same for others tasked with teaching reading and writing virtually.

President Joe Biden launched a new, more centralized strategy to combat COVID-19 and reopen schools, formalizing pledges he made during the campaign and the transition. Biden has set a goal of “getting a majority of K-8 schools safely open” in the first 100 days of his administration. The 200-page federal plan, and executive orders he signed Thursday, call for “sustained and coordinated” efforts with the cooperation of states and new resources, guidance, and data for schools as they continue to respond to the pandemic. Biden’s school reopening pledge comes as states and districts around the country take a patchwork of approaches. While many school districts have held in-person learning with modifications like mask wearing a social distancing, some large urban school districts have remained in or switched back to remote learning amid new surges in virus rates.

What does it mean to go to public school in the United States during the pandemic? The answer looks so different in different parts of the country, it is hard to tell that we are one nation. In some rural and suburban areas, especially in the South, Midwest and Great Plains, almost all students began the 2020-21 academic year attending school in person, and they have continued to do so, except for temporary closures during outbreaks. In many cities, the bulk of students haven’t been in a classroom since March. And in some districts, like New York City, only younger students have the option of going to school in person, with many attending only part-time. With little guidance from the federal government, the nation’s 13,000 districts have largely come up with their own standards for when it is safe to open schools and what virus mitigation measures to use.

San Antonio teachers are combatting pandemic learning loss with a surgical approach to keep young students at grade level, focusing on a core curriculum of must-have skills in reading and math. Given the challenges of limited class time and distance learning during the pandemic, San Antonio educators know students are simply not learning everything they would in a normal school year, especially in the early grades. So this year, educators are going deep. They have identified a strategic set of skills for kindergarten through second graders, such as phonics and arithmetic, so that students build the mastery needed to move on to the next grade.

The Jane Addams Peace Association has announced the recipients of the 2021 Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. The winner in the Books for Younger Children category is We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom, illus. by Michaela Goade. The winner in the Books for Older Children category is A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat. Additionally, two Honor Books were named in the Books for Younger Children category: Ocean Speaks: How Marie Tharp Revealed the Ocean’s Biggest Secret by Jess Keating, illus. by Katie Hickey; and Black Is a Rainbow Color by Angela Joy, illus. by Ekua Holmes. Beginning in 1953, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award annually recognizes children’s books that effectively engage young readers in thinking socially and globally.

In this lesson, students will learn about Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history; how she came to write “The Hill We Climb”; and how it fits into the tradition of “occasional poetry.” They will also learn about Ms. Gorman’s belief that poetry is political, and that reading and writing are instruments of social change. Finally, they will be invited to create their own occasional poems.

In this lesson, students examine the poetry of Amanda Gorman, who was chosen to read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Gorman’s poem complements Biden’s message and themes of “unity.”

At a charter school in a poor area of Washington, some teachers spend one day a week going door to door, tracking down students who aren’t logging on, and whose education is suffering. Making sure that students participate in classes during the pandemic has been a tall order across the country, with districts reporting record-high absentee rates. It can be especially difficult for large urban school systems, which serve tens of thousands of low-income families and, for the most part, have remained entirely remote since March. The impact on learning is starting to show: A recent study of assessment scores found that public school students in Washington this fall were four months behind in math, on average, compared with a typical year, and one month behind in reading.

Prolific children’s book author and former editor Kathleen Krull, widely acclaimed for her skill at crafting detailed and entertaining biographies and other narrative nonfiction, died on January 15 following a brief illness. She was 68. Illustrated biographies became Krull’s format of choice, and she was often praised in reviews for her lively writing and her knack for including quirky or unusual tidbits about her subjects. She said in interviews that that she enjoyed “playing detective” in researching her books. “To hold their own against all the competition for a child’s time, nonfiction books have to reflect something special…. I try to make fresh, contemporary choices from my research—little ironies, amusing juxtapositions, concrete details, strengths and weaknesses. I use a ‘warts and all’ approach because I want to write biographies for kids living in the real world. I know readers have to survive all kinds of hurts and traumas; my way of helping is to dramatize how people in the past have done it.” In addition to the Lives Of… series, Krull created the Giants of Science and the Women Who Broke the Rules biography series. A critic once dubbed her ‘The Queen of Kids’ Nonfiction.’ ”

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2021. The Presidential Inauguration will be a departure from years past due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, but there are still a number of engaging learning opportunities for in-person and virtual students. The ceremony will be broadcast on television news stations and most are expected to also offer a livestream.

Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to take a more aggressive stance holding back Tennessee third-graders who are struggling to read is drawing criticism from educators and parents who question his logic and timing. As part of a plan to help stem pandemic-caused learning loss, Lee wants to strengthen a 2011 state law that has been largely unenforced, with few students actually being retained. Beginning with the 2022-23 academic year, the governor wants to require schools to hold back third-graders who don’t meet his definition of proficiency — and who also don’t enroll in and show improvement through new summer school or after-school tutoring programs slated to launch this year.

Story time is a powerful tool for helping preschool and elementary kids and their families feel connected during distance learning. One school librarian shares how she set up a virtual story time for her students. “As the weeks progressed, we fell into a comfortable rhythm. Students would drop in at story time, I’d read a picture book, students would offer comments, I’d lead a mindful moment, and then students would stay on to chat. With each passing day, I did less of the talking and leading as students took ownership of our time together. The comments they make after a story often reflect how they’re feeling.”

Kids learning about science remotely, in particular, need opportunities to interact with their surroundings, observe and collect data, and draw conclusions about it. Here are 4 low-tech activities for drawing scientific conclusions for 5th graders that can be adapted for most elementary grades, with appropriate parental supervision. Though these activities are designed to mostly avoid screens—one involves taking photos—some technology might come in handy at times: Students can report their findings by taking photos and/or uploading their findings using Padlet or other sharing tool, or answer open-ended questions on a Google Doc or Notability.

“For many of us in the field, when we hear ‘online’ and ‘preschool’ used together, we think it’s an oxymoron,” says Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, an early childhood expert and psychology professor who directs the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University in Philadelphia. But the constraints of the pandemic present a new set of considerations—namely the safety of educators and families, some of whom are not yet ready to consider in-person schooling. “Is getting something better than getting nothing? Probably so. Should it just be what we did when we were offline, now moving it online? Probably not.” Limiting screen time whenever possible is a good first step.

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2021. The Presidential Inauguration will be a departure from years past due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, but there are still a number of engaging learning opportunities for in-person and virtual students. Traditionally, the public has been able to attend inaugurations, but people are discouraged from doing so due to COVID-19 restrictions. The ceremony will be broadcast on television news stations and most are expected to also offer a livestream.

Public school enrollment is down across the country. For example, enrollment is down by 15,000 in Chicago public schools and by more than 20,000 in the District of Columbia’s public schools. The trend is particularly acute among pre-K and kindergarten students. In an NPR survey of 60 U.S. districts in 20 states, public kindergarten enrollment was down 16% on average. Delaying children’s kindergarten entry is not new, but the pandemic has broadened its scope. Inequities in children’s kindergarten experiences compound inequities in early childhood experiences. Research consistently shows the benefits of early childhood education for children’s development. But access to early learning opportunities has become even more inequitable in the pandemic, according to a report from the Center for American Progress.

Coaching special education students on metacognitive strategies helps them stay motivated during the pandemic. I realized that a majority of my students with learning disabilities were showing signs of frustration, lack of focus, a decrease in motivation, and negative attitudes. These learners were getting burnt out. I decided to promote the idea of intentionality, a metacognitive strategy that would help students focus on those things they could control. The idea was to create strategies and opportunities for students with learning disabilities to monitor their actions and behaviors—and for students without learning disabilities, this would be a chance to reinforce their skills while picking up on some new strategies. Here are some practical strategies that can be implemented at all grade levels within a hybrid learning format.

New America analyzed the national landscape of educator micro-credentials (MCs) to determine how to best harness their potential to more successfully attract, develop, and retain great teachers. We find MCs to be a promising alternative to more traditional (and largely ineffective), compliance-focused teacher professional development, as well as an effective vehicle for defining and determining eligibility for some teacher roles. We summarize early best practices for ensuring quality MC offerings as well as lessons learned about the necessary conditions for teachers to succeed with MCs. As an added resource, New America has built a companion State Policy Guide with recommendations for policymakers looking to integrate MCs into their educator professional development, license renewal, and advancement systems.

President-elect Joe Biden has made reopening school buildings a top priority, but districts are going in the opposite direction, retreating into all-remote instruction as COVID-19 levels soar in their communities, according to new data set. A new analysis by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which tracks how school districts are conducting instruction during the pandemic, found that between early November and late December, the share of school districts offering only remote instruction jumped 10 percentage points. The shift isn’t surprising, given the dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases all over the country this fall and early winter. But it offers a sobering picture for the incoming president, who has included opening most K-8 schools for in-person instruction a top priority for his first 100 days in office.

UNICEF estimates that 93 million children have disabilities worldwide. Yet the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s most recent study found that only 126 out of the 4,034 children’s books they received from 2019 had a main character with a disability. There is an astonishing lack of children’s books with disabled main characters, especially #OwnVoices books. Unfortunately, these books also seem to lack the marketing funds publishers give to other books. However, that has begun to change in the last few years. Many of the books listed here are debut novels or picture books that have been published in the last two years. These books for the Read Harder Challenge show disabled children enjoying science, flying kites, playing baseball, and being the kids that they are. They’re fun, beautiful, and desperately needed books.

Recent articles and position statements have been calling for pediatricians to view literacy as a developmental domain and to participate in screening for future literacy concerns as early as preschool age.1-4 As a pediatrician, I agree wholeheartedly with one article’s statement that “The development of reading proficiency in childhood is a public health issue.” There is robust evidence linking lack of reading proficiency with school failure, negative impact on meaningful employment, increased risk of involvement in the criminal justice and welfare systems, as well as mental health consequences of reduced self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. As pediatricians we should be aware of and attempt to modify all of these negative outcomes by helping to identify risk factors for future reading disabilities and referring our struggling readers for further evaluation and remediation if available. Yet, is it really that simple? To help answer this question I would like to point out existing barriers that make executing these recent recommendations difficult if not near impossible.

One of the most powerful ways we can bring children together to experience a sense of community during this unprecedented time is through shared stories in the form of reading aloud. And nearly everyone enjoys it—in fact, the Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report: 7th Edition™ shows that more than 80% of both kids and parents love or like read-aloud time because they consider it a special time together. The beauty of a read-aloud is that it can happen anywhere, any time, and with anyone. One of the largest read-aloud moments happens each year on World Read Aloud Day. This year, the celebration will take place on Feb. 3, 2021, and will call attention to the importance of sharing stories by challenging participants to grab a book or share a story of their own, find an audience, and read aloud.

Picture books are the perfect medium by which to introduce one of the more difficult and complicated of life’s challenges: grief. Authors such as Andrew Arnold and Matthew Cordell appreciate the unique privilege of creating safe spaces for our children to explore these multifaceted emotions. Their [new] books promote self-awareness and understanding. After they are closed, there may be hard conversations, and questions that have no answers, but we’re left with a comforting message: It will be OK if we are here for one another.

Educator Doug wrote two books full of precise examples of great instruction. They became a publishing sensation: “Teach Like a Champion” and “Teach Like a Champion 2.0” have sold 1.3 million copies, and “TLAC 3.0” arrives this summer. The books allowed Lemov to create a team of teaching experts who have just produced one of the most useful books ever written for this new year. It describes the best kind of online lessons, and how to turn parts of the worldwide experiment in Zoom pedagogy into something that might enhance future instruction anywhere. The book is “Teaching in the Online Classroom: Surviving and Thriving in the New Normal.”

Our district’s one-to-one technology program has made a big difference for my students in our Title I school, as my early learners are equipped with iPads to use both in class and at home. Through these devices, I’m able to foster communication skills that support the language domains of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as the academic standards that accompany them within the hybrid setting. Through videos and interactive online tasks, early elementary students can increase fluency and build vocabulary. Our technology allows me to collect evidence to keep track of my students’ continuous development and growth.

Five educators offer instructional strategies to use when teaching writing revision, including the power of an authentic audience.

Writing improves learning by consolidating information in long-term memory, researchers explain. Professor Steve Graham and his colleagues at Arizona State University’s Teachers College analyzed 56 studies looking at the benefits of writing in science, social studies, and math and found that writing “reliably enhanced learning” across all grade levels. While teachers commonly ask students to write about a topic in order to assess how well they understand the material, the process of writing also improves a student’s ability to recall information, make connections between different concepts, and synthesize information in new ways. In effect, writing isn’t just a tool to assess learning, it also promotes it. This article also includes five engaging writing activities to use in all subjects.

Since the beginning of this pandemic, experts and educators have feared that open schools would spread the coronavirus further, which is why so many classrooms remain closed. But a new, nationwide study suggests reopening schools may be safer than previously thought, at least in communities where the virus is not already spreading out of control. The study comes from REACH, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, at Tulane University. Lead research Douglas Harris says the public health risks posed by COVID-19 are tangible and have received considerable attention, but communities must also weigh them against the less obvious public health risks of not reopening schools — to kids’ mental health, of child abuse going unreported, not to mention learning loss and caregivers having to drop out of the workforce and falling deeper into poverty. And because the facts vary so wildly from city to city, county to county, town to town, Harris says, this cannot be a one-size-fits-all national reckoning — but a local decision driven by local facts.

As schools continue to grapple with coronavirus outbreaks, displaced students and classroom reopening decisions, much of the focus has been on how educators can help students catch up academically after months of virtual learning and, in many cases, limited interactions with their teachers. But what about students’ social-emotional growth, which could be stunted after months of limited time with peers and stress over the pandemic, economic difficulties and racism? That question is at the center of work by psychologist Elizabeth Englander. The 74 spoke with Englander about how socialization looks different online, what teachers should know about trauma and cyberbullying, and how parents should set limits on screen time.

Science has never mattered more than it does today. From the devastating realities of COVID-19 in our communities to a climate crisis that now spans the globe to the paucity of scientifically based public policy, one thing is certain: Society benefits when scientific literacy informs civil discourse. For the adults of tomorrow, that literacy begins today, with high-quality, equitable science education for all students. Giving students the opportunity to learn science in elementary school, as with mathematics, provides a solid foundation for later learning. Middle and high school students are expected to learn complex scientific ideas, and in order to do that, they need exposure to high-quality science instruction in their elementary classrooms. Students learn to think critically about the world around them, noticing details and patterns, gathering data and forming sound explanations based on evidence.

Tennessee plans to invest $100 million of one-time federal funds in phonics-based reading programs in a sweeping attack on low student literacy rates that have bedeviled the state for decades. Calling it an “exciting moment,” Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn on Monday unveiled Reading 360, an array of programs to train teachers on reading instruction, provide more resources and mentoring networks to school districts, and support families to help their students read better. The goal is to reverse this year’s anticipated learning loss due to the coronavirus pandemic and then catapult third-grade reading proficiency rates from 37% to 62% by 2025 under a new campaign known as “25 by 25.” The state’s previous reading goal, set in 2016 by former Gov. Bill Haslam, was for 75% of third-graders to read on grade level by 2020.

During her decades-long career as a poet, novelist, journalist, and artist, Nikki Grimes has garnered numerous accolades, including the Coretta Scott King Award. Her work for young people is wide-ranging, from the picture book biographies Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, and Kamala Harris: Rooted in Justice, to such young adult novels as Bronx Masquerade and the verse memoir Ordinary Hazards. As with Talkin’ About Bessie, her illustrated biography about African American pilot Bessie Coleman, Grimes’s work often counteracts the erasure of African American lives. Grimes spoke with PW about her latest work, Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance, her artistic mission and process, and breaking boundaries in representation.

Students who reluctantly revise often want to finish an assignment, receive a grade, and move on to the next task. When required, these reluctant writers might even go through the motions of revising a draft or peer-reviewing activities. How can teachers shift students from this grade-getting mindset to an intrinsic desire to want to revise their writing? Five educators make suggestions that might help students want to revise their writing, including by using “editing stations.”

Parents have worried all year that arts education will be among the casualties claimed by the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting pressures on local school budgets. Depending on how long districts are forced to cut programs, fire or reassign staff, and cope with remote learning, some advocates warn, little money or instructional time could be left over for activities outside of core academic subjects. Those concerns may grow louder following the release of research this fall that shows young students receiving measurable academic and social-emotional benefits from exposure to the arts. Even a few brief trips to cultural institutions can lift engagement, tolerance, course grades, and standardized test scores for participating students, the authors find. The study, circulated as a working paper by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, offers the latest round of findings from the first-ever multi-visit experiment measuring the long-term effects of field trips.

Around the country, educators and local television stations have teamed up to help teachers make their broadcast debuts and engage children who are stuck in the doldrums of distance learning. The idea — in some ways a throwback to the early days of public television — has supplemented online lessons for some families, and serves a more critical role: reaching students who, without reliable internet access or a laptop at home, have been left behind. In some places, the programs air on weekends or after school. Elsewhere, districts have scheduled time to watch it during the school day. In New York, the program airs every weekday on a public television channel, part of a network of PBS stations working with school districts. Fox stations in several cities are airing teachers’ lessons as well.

Host Michel Martin speaks with Aaron Carapella of Tribal Nations Maps about children’s books that address the history and experiences of Native Americans. Carapella is the creator of Tribal Nations Maps. That’s a site dedicated to mapping the lands that Native Americans lived on prior to European settlement. And he’s recently launched a section of the site to highlight children’s books focused on characters and stories rooted in the Native American experience.

The shift to online learning has drastically widened existing equity gaps in U.S. education, driving drops in attendance, college applications and academic performance among the nation’s most vulnerable students: children who are low-income, Black or Hispanic, as well as those with learning disabilities and those whose first language is not English. All too often, homeless children — of whom there are 2.5 million every year in America — combine these factors. The shuttering of schools nationwide in March immediately shattered any semblance of stability for millions of homeless children who depend on schools for food, emotional support, or even just a warm, uncomplicated place to think. Trying to learn inside shelters for the past nine months, students have faced spotty WiFi, crowded rooms, high noise levels and harassment from some peers who deduce, over Zoom, that they lack a home.

2020 was — to borrow a phrase from a popular kid’s book — a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. And for parents, one of the year’s hardest jobs was trying to explain current events to young kids. “We are living in challenging times,” says children’s book author Matt de la Peña — and kids are taking a lot of it in. “While you and I read the news, watch the news, listen to the news — our young children are watching and reading us, and so they’re not getting the whole picture,” he says. De la Peña believes books can explore deep or difficult issues without hitting them head-on. “I don’t think the job of a picture book is to answer questions,” he says. “I think it’s just to explore interesting topics.” He offers several suggestions for books that can help young kids think about tough subjects.

No matter how districts respond to the COVID-19 pandemic—fully virtual, in person, or hybrid instruction—some families remain unsatisfied. Yet recent data collected in Forest Grove, Ore., demonstrate that relationship-focused communication between families and schools can mitigate some of the frustrations of pandemic-induced educational disruptions. In June, we surveyed approximately 1,500 parents in the Forest Grove district to learn which practices were most helpful during the first wave of distance learning. The parents who responded were primarily Latino (40 percent) and white (55 percent), which matches the student population. The responses sent a resounding message: Communication is key. Parents praised teachers who kept them informed about classwork and offered ways to supervise at-home learning.

This year, the fields of outdoor learning and green schoolyards reached a tipping point, as thousands of schools around the country took their chairs, desks and easels—and log stumps, straw bales, picnic blankets and Wi-Fi—outside, to study under leafy tree canopies and shady tents. Ten months into the pandemic, there are still too many students who don’t have access to devices and reliable broadband, and who live in home environments that are not conducive to virtual learning. For these students in particular, and all students in general, we’re asking school district and site leaders to consider using—or continue using—their outdoor spaces for learning, because the risk of virus transmission is roughly 20 times lower outdoors than indoors.

As 2020 comes to an end, let’s reflect on the year behind us—a year full of new experiences, of meeting and overcoming new challenges. Throughout the year, we published a variety of Literacy Now blog posts to help educators through these tough times. Here is a list of the top 10 most read Literacy Now blog posts of 2020. First up: “Observing Young Readers and Writers: A Tool for Informing Instruction” by Alessandra E. Ward, Nell K. Duke, and Rachel Klingelhofer examines the LTR-WWWP, or The Listening to Reading-Watching White Writing Protocol, a new tool educators can use to assess students’ reading and writing skills when listening to students read aloud and watching them write. The LTR-WWWP is thoroughly explained for readers in this post, along with access to the tool and resources on how to use the tool and what it looks like in action.

Any education journalist will remember 2020 as the year that all the planned student profiles, school spotlights and policy investigations got thrown out the window as we scrambled to capture and process the disorienting new normal of virtual classrooms. Here at The 74, our top stories from the past nine months were dominated by our reporting in this area, by features that framed the challenges and opportunities of distance learning, that surfaced solutions and innovations that were working for some districts, and that pointed to the bigger questions of how disrupted back-to-back school years may lead to long-term consequences for this generation of students. But with the first vaccines being administered this month, we’re seeing our first glimpse of a light at the end of this chaotic tunnel — hope that the virus will quickly dissipate, that schools will fully reopen, and that we’ll then find a way to help all of America’s 74 million children catch up. Here are our 20 most read and shared articles of the year.

With millions of kids still learning remotely, the learning losses are piling up. The pandemic is causing Black and Hispanic students in particular to fall further behind their white peers. Former Education Secretary John King Jr. thinks a national tutoring corps is one way to help make up for lost time. Older students and graduates could receive credit or be paid to tutor younger students. “We have decades of research showing that high intensity tutoring can help students make up lost ground academically very quickly,” King tells Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered. King now heads the nonprofit The Education Trust, which works to close opportunity gaps in education. He talked about the challenges facing schools when they fully reopen. Here are excerpts of the interview.

More than two years after Cynthia Peitich Smith (Muscogee Creek Nation) decided she could help harness and hone the talents of Native writers for children, the first books in her Heartdrum imprint begin arriving on shelves this month. Leading Heartdrum, which she helms with HarperCollins vice president and editorial director Rosemary Brosnan, is the latest in a long list of accomplishments. She’s a New York Times bestselling author who’s written stories for ages that range from picture-book to young adult audiences, and in formats that include prose, poetry and graphic novels. Heartdrum’s books aim to fill a significant gap in the market: Only 1% of children’s books published in 2019 featured Native or indigenous characters, according to the most recent survey from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By design, the books are also page-turning contemporary stories, Smith said.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought a host of new challenges to teaching the foundational skills of reading and writing. With masks, social distancing and millions of young children nationwide learning online at home—either several days a week or full-time—teachers say they have to find new ways to tackle literacy instruction, so students don’t miss a crucial window in kindergarten through second grade. “When kids are just starting out is when they really need a teacher who can see what’s going on day to day,” said Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. “My heart goes out to every teacher trying to deal with this. I don’t know how I would teach a first-grader to read at a distance.” At P.S. 105 in the Bronx, teachers tackle literacy instruction in new ways amid coronavirus restrictions.

Authors Valentina Gonzalez & Melinda Miller answer questions about their book Reading & Writing with English Learners: A Framework for K-5.

Selecting the year’s Best Books has always been a challenge. Sifting through the stellar titles that have graced our monthly Stars list. Meetings upon meetings of (sometimes heated) discussions about the merit of this work and the timeliness of that one. And of course, reading, reading, and more reading. Art can give us a language to interpret the chaos of this world. Most of all, we believe that the most important thing we can give the young people who will read these 108 titles is the message that there is still hope in these times of uncertainty. The following selections offer a way to share the message that rings through Tami Charles’s revelatory book: “You, dear child, matter.” We are supremely privileged to have had the great Bryan Collier, illustrator of Charles’s All Because You Matter, create our Best Books cover.

At the Education Development Center, where I work to support young children’s STEM literacy, we are seeing successful virtual instruction strategies and practices emerging in the preschool teaching community, particularly among Head Start educators. Best practices range from the “take care of yourself” mantra that we all hear so much these days (and need to hear) to suggestions for onscreen read-alouds. Here are some ideas that we hope will be useful to early childhood educators.

My hopes for next year are different … they are quieter, simpler, more cautious, and I find I am surrounding myself with books that offer me a quiet hope and a profound story; books that lift me up when I am down, and books that speak to hardship and change, but where change and hardship are not the end of the story. Here are just a few of the most meaningful books my kids and I have shared this year, and a few we are really looking forward to.

For American families and their children, school is more than just a building. It’s a social life and a community, an athletic center and a place to get meals that aren’t available at home. The pandemic has disrupted — and continues to disrupt — the lives of U.S. students in profound ways. Many kids haven’t set foot in their schools since March, when most in-person schooling shut down across the country. Teachers are working tirelessly to educate their students online, but they are growing increasingly anxious about the kids who aren’t showing up at all. An estimated 3 million students may have dropped out of school learning since March, according to Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit that focuses on underserved youth. The group’s study cited a lack of Internet access, housing insecurity, disabilities and language barriers as major obstacles to attending virtual classes during the pandemic.

The pandemic has driven the national education conversation to focus on getting kids back in schools and attempting to repair the widening gaps in students’ educations. As a former third grade teacher in Memphis, I’ve been thinking about how schools are going to handle this enormous task of addressing the academic challenges created by the pandemic. One thing I know from my teaching experience is that Tennessee schools already have a tool at their disposal: a program called Response to Intervention and Instruction. The program is state-mandated, so every school uses it. But it’s also severely underfunded relative to the enormous need. So despite teaching in a variety of schools and neighborhoods, I have never once seen a successful, thriving RTI² program. If done well, though, it could be exactly what students need. Here’s how it should work.

Michigan has spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars aimed at improving early literacy, yet roughly one in three Michigan fourth-graders don’t have basic reading skills, a figure that has hardly budged in two decades. Sen. Jim Runestad says he can help explain why: In the 50 years since he was an elementary schooler with dyslexia grappling with a “mishmash of letters” in English class, little has changed for people like him. Maeve Janssens, an 8-year-old from northern Michigan who was diagnosed with dyslexia this summer, knows the feeling of struggling to decode text on a page. “It just didn’t click in my brain,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t do anything.”

President-elect Joe Biden has chosen Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s education chief and a lifelong champion of public schools, to serve as education secretary. The selection delivers on Biden’s promise to nominate someone with experience working in public education. Cardona is a product of public schools, starting when he entered kindergarten unable to speak English. According to a source familiar with the President-Elect’s decision, Cardona was selected in part because of his experiences as a former public school teacher, an administrator, a public school parent and someone with the experience to do the job on his first day in office. The source said one of Cardona’s top priorities as education secretary will be to work with state and local officials to get kids back to school safely amid the pandemic, which Biden aims to achieve within the first 100 days of his presidency.

Alittle over a year ago, Miguel Cardona was an assistant superintendent of a 12-school district south of Hartford, Connecticut. Now that state’s education commissioner could be President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to lead the nation’s 131,000 public schools after months of closures that have left many children roughly more than a year behind in learning. A graduate of the Meriden Public Schools, as well as a former elementary teacher and principal in the district, the Hispanic leader, who began school speaking no English himself, is viewed by some observers to still be close enough to the classroom to understand educators’ concerns. A focus on reducing achievement gaps is what stands out to those who don’t know him personally.

Nine months after the pandemic closed down Stedwick Elementary School, learning in suburban Montgomery County is still all remote. But while most students plug in on laptops from home, some are on campus, working from holiday-decorated classrooms. They are part of “equity hubs” that bring small groups of children together, so that parents who struggle financially have a safe, supervised place for their children to focus on online learning. The hubs are akin to the “pandemic pods” that more affluent families have created, often hiring tutors or teachers. Among those who participate, the average family income is less than $30,000 a year, and nearly all children qualify for free and reduced-price school meals. Families pay up to $50 a month per child. “This is an effort for equity for people who can’t afford to hire a teacher or do the things that other parts of the county can do,” said Byron Johns, co-founder of the Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence, which advocated for the project.

Today’s education system resembles much of what you’d see in the early 1900s: rote memorization, a teacher speaking to dozens of pupils who must remain silent unless called upon, curriculum at scale. Coronavirus-related distance learning pushed that same operation online, and because of the severity of the crisis, educators and parents understandably yearn for getting back to normal. But for educator Gholdy Muhammad, normal hasn’t served all students well, especially in literacy education, and no amount of testing or data has changed that. Instead of continuing with this form of education, Muhammad developed a model of learning that strikes more deeply into who we are and what agency we have in the world. In her book “Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy,” Muhammad, a professor of education at Georgia State University, looks to 1830s-era literary societies as a highly engaged model for teaching and learning that can cultivate literacy, intellect and self-efficacy.

From “the father of the Underground Railroad” to the first woman vice president, these Black action figures are poetry in motion.