Today’s Literacy Headlines

Having spent our careers doing research on student motivation and learning with technology, we recommend these three strategies: (1) go out of your way to build relationships; (2) stress the relevance of what students are learning; and (3) establish new routines.

It’s not easy to teach young children remotely. These strategies can help make instruction accessible and engaging—for students and their families. Get 8 tips for home learning in preschool from an early childhood special education teacher.

All Classroom Q&A posts on The Inclusive Classroom (from the past nine years!) are described and linked to in this compilation post. Examples include four educators who consider how to provide inclusive learning opportunities during the school closure crisis (including by keeping IEP goals in mind and by keeping things simple), making an inclusive classroom work, and ways to be a successful co-teacher.

Kwame Alexander―poet, Newbery and Caldecott medal-winning, best-selling author, and founding editor of Versify, an imprint of HMH Books for Young People―has spent years visiting elementary and middle schools to share his love of writing with students. But Alexander wanted to reach more kids than he can with school visits and to teach young people that writing is cool and inspire them to tell their stories. With that goal in mind, he partnered with education technology company Age of Learning to create WordPlay, a digital series that combines live action and animation.

Poor regions across the globe where internet access is scarce are turning to television to reach students. That strategy could also help in wealthy countries that have focused on online classes. While television lessons are not as valuable as online interactions with teachers and other students, experts say, educational broadcasts do pay dividends for children’s academic progress, their success in the job market and even their social development. To make lessons less passive and more effective, many of the lessons being broadcast now use all the tools of professional studios, like eye-pleasing sets, script writers, 3-D animation, multicamera shoots, graphics and even related smartphone apps.

In April, the NWEA, a nonprofit assessment organization, published research showing some students could start school this fall nearly one year behind where they would normally be, part of a phenomenon referred to as the “Covid slide.” Not all students will be affected equally: Other research predicts that the losses will probably be greatest for low-income and Black and Hispanic students. Nationally, educators and officials have floated one possible solution: year-round school. Under this model, which has existed in parts of the country for decades, schools operate with shorter, more frequent breaks throughout the year, rather than one lengthy summer vacation. While research on the model’s effectiveness is mixed, proponents argue that it keeps vulnerable students from falling farther behind and ensures that students benefit more consistently from school meals and other services.

“Can you give an example of an online lesson that’s effective for students with disabilities?” That’s the question Elizabeth Barker has fielded over and over as schools have prepared to reopen. But it’s the one question that Barker, a special education expert with NWEA, a nonprofit data and assessment provider, can’t answer. Because students in special education, by definition, require individualized support, there is no such thing as a model lesson. She does, however, point to four ingredients for effective special education during in-person schooling that should guide educators as they look for ways to engage students with disabilities in distance learning.

The national shift to distance learning this spring left many of the nation’s nearly 5 million English-learner students shut out of the learning process—without internet, without language support, and without the devices they needed to participate in online education. The experience was tough even in places where schools found ways to connect with English-learners. Now, as schools begin to reopen, districts should redouble their efforts to make up for lost time, a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools suggests. The report urges districts to pay close attention to how they choose and use technology and assess what skills students have learned and lost since schools shut down. It also emphasizes the importance of: family engagement for parents and other relatives who are not fluent in English; professional development that emphasizes effective teaching strategies for all educators who work with English-learners; and rethinking how schools deploy English-learner specialists to ensure that students have ample opportunity for one-on-one or small-group learning support during online-only classes.

As a school year like no other gets underway, the laws surrounding individualized education programs remain unchanged and experts say parents should fight for the services their kids need. While the details may look different — with IEP meetings occurring virtually rather than in person, for example — special education advocates and attorneys say that families should approach the IEP process much like they would in any other year. Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, is reminding parents that the whole concept of the IEP is that services for students with disabilities should be individualized. The IEP team should consider the student’s present levels of performance, needs, goals and how to meet them before making any determinations about placements.

Creating a strong classroom culture is priority number one during the first weeks of school. This year should not be any different—in fact, creating connections and a sense of belonging has never been more important. And yet, as coronavirus numbers soar, many schools are opting to return at least partly to remote learning in the fall. So, how can we create a positive classroom culture when we can’t even see our students face-to-face? It’s going to take a mixture of adapting the old tried-and-true beginning-of-the-year traditions to digital media and creating whole new practices and activities.

Some U.S. schools have already begun the 2020-21 academic year, with thousands more set to launch in the next few weeks. Americans would be well-served to look beyond the country’s borders for signs of how school reopenings might go and lessons they might learn. In the United States, the volley of conflicting guidance documents and policy recommendations for safe schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult to parse, and tensions are high as the stakes for key decisions have life-and-death implications. Numerous countries managed to reopen school buildings earlier this year, and the resulting successes and failures are instructive. The Kaiser Family Foundation published a side-by-side comparison of the rate of positive COVID-19 tests on the day of school reopenings in 13 different countries. All but two had a national positivity rate below 4 percent on the day schools reopened.

Three educators offer tips for online instruction, ranging from keeping videos short (3-5 minutes) to laying out an agenda at the beginning of each class.

A generation of education policy has been shaped in part by an extended discussion around racial differences, and the lingua franca of that dialogue is testing data. Achievement gaps are at the heart of school improvement initiatives led by states, cities, universities and philanthropies, and civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Urban League have organized vigilantly around the exam performance of minority children. But there is new reason to think that the persistent focus on testing and disparities may yield unintended ill effects. An experimental study conducted by David Quinn, a professor at the University of Southern California, found that media coverage of the achievement gap “may have increased viewers’ implicit stereotyping of Black students as less competent than [white] students.” The negative perceptions were formed in response to a television news segment just two minutes long. The research comes at a time when prominent thinkers are re-examining the logic of the achievement gap and its starring role in education debates. While most believe that assessment should continue to inform school evaluations and accountability, some question whether the construction places responsibility for disappointing test scores on the heads of students themselves.

New children’s books published to mark the 19th Amendment’s 100th anniversary provide a wider lens than Alice Paul and dig deeper than “Girls Rule!” It was with trepidation that I tackled a new crop of children’s books published to mark the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. When the story of the long fight for women’s enfranchisement has been told popularly, it has too often been presented as flat celebration — all the complexities and nastiness, the racism and classism, the defining incompleteness of the project pressed out to make a neat fist-in-the-air tale of victory. If it’s so hard to honestly address the ways in which injustices have been replicated within movements for justice, how can those contours be effectively communicated in children’s books? Especially children’s books that are designed to inspire?

In the wake of national unrest and a renewed demand for racial justice, and on the eve of a back-to-school season unlike any in memory, Emily Hanford new radio documentary – “What the Words Say: Many kids struggle with reading—and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need” – is timely because it travels upstream to remind us why these deep-seated inequalities among U.S. children continue to persist. On national reading tests, more than 80 percent of Black and Native American students score below proficient, and 77 percent of Hispanic students remain mired under that same threshold. Making matters worse, many parents don’t know how far behind their kids are until it’s too late. As inexcusable as this state of affairs may be, it’s unclear how things are supposed to improve in the time of Covid-19. If Hanford makes one thing palpable through her reporting, it’s that schools have a hard enough of a time teaching children how to read when the lessons are conducted in-person, let alone through the keyhole of Zoom. With many schools planning to remain physically shuttered through at least the first semester, if not longer, they would do well to leverage the wealth of resources available to bridge the gap. If they don’t, the Matthew Effect on reading comprehension will take hold and never let go.

Have you ever revisited something you wrote, only to discover that it omitted important information or assumed the reader just knew what you meant? This spring, not being in the physical classroom with my students highlighted that challenge for me. I wrote directions and created assignments that made sense in my teacher brain, but they sometimes left out important components and didn’t make much sense to my students. To address this, I started to test-run my students’ experiences to ensure that my materials and learning experiences were user-friendly and accessible for all of my learners. This practice was humbling but very valuable. As we begin a new year that will likely include distance learning in one way or another, it’s more important than ever to steer from the student end. Here are some methods I’ve found to make test-running students’ experiences both efficient and effective.

The value of mass tutoring initiatives, whether in-person or virtual, in addressing the academic problems posed by the Covid-19 pandemic remains untested. But experts say making tutors available to more kids — especially those least able to afford to hire one themselves — could be vital to combating learning losses that resulted when the coronavirus forced schools to shut down and transition to online-only instruction. The toll on students’ attainment and engagement has been dire; it will almost certainly be compounded by the usual slide in learning many kids experience over summer vacation — and made even worse for students in places like Southern California that face prospective fall closures. The challenges are bound to be especially pronounced among disadvantaged children.

The first time the High Museum of Art devoted an entire exhibit to the work of a children’s book illustrator, the show focused on Jerry Pinkney, a Caldecott winner whose watercolor fairytales drew comparisons to Winslow Homer. That was 2013. Seven years later, a new exhibit includes another Pinkney, Jerry’s son Brian, whose work will be part of “Picture The Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Children’s Books.” One of the underlying messages of the show, and of the ongoing teamwork with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, is that children’s books are not a frivolous pursuit and that the story of the civil rights movement can be taught to adults, as well as children, through this medium.

Four educators share how they are going to apply lessons they learned in the spring to this new school year, including by reaching out to students as well as to parents.

For one week in March, Patty Leitz watched her 7-year-old son, Michael, who has been diagnosed with severe autism and is nonverbal, not follow her directions or even respond when she’d try to teach him at home. Then everything changed. Michael’s special education teacher started sending her not only a video greeting for Michael and lesson plans and timing for everything every day, but also a five- to six-minute video for Ms. Leitz. In it, the teacher walked her through exactly how to teach her son. The daily lessons for both student and parent meant that Michael was keeping up with his skills. But they also empowered his mother, helping her realize that she can be an effective part of his education.

As schools have entered a new normal during the Covid-19 pandemic, the words “hybrid model” have become buzzwords in education. In the Estacada School District in Oregon where I teach, we have sought to better understand what a hybrid model looks like and how we can use it to best serve our students. This summer, we implemented a summer school program using the hybrid model to allow us to pilot this new way of teaching. During this hybrid-model summer school, we learned several valuable things about student engagement, building community, and peer-to-peer discourse.

Children enter kindergarten with a wide variety of previous education experiences: some have participated in pre-K programs, whether private, state-funded, or part of Head Start, while others have spent time in a family child care setting or in informal arrangements with family, friends, and neighbors. Regardless of the setting, this transition is fraught with stress and uncertainty for many children and their parents. It is up to the educators in both elementary school and pre-K settings to ease the transition into formal education. New America is exploring strategies that support the planning of a stable, well-connected transition between early education and kindergarten.

Recently my daughter was searching for her sketchbook when she found her missing paintbrushes instead. Such is the recovery of lost belongings. You’re looking for one thing, you find something else. I’ve stumbled onto story ideas this way. I’m so sure I’m writing about a missing brother, when I discover I’m actually writing about empathy and self-acceptance. Most good mysteries strike a graceful balance between plot and character development. These three do just that, by inviting you to look and look again, to uncover the stories underneath.

When remote instruction started at my school last spring, I met with my students every morning at 10 to alternate math and reading lessons virtually. At first, my kindergartners thought it was fun, different, and exciting to have class through Zoom. But it wasn’t long before online learning stopped being quite so fun and exciting. For some of the kids, it was clearly becoming monotonous. There were lots of challenges for me in teaching virtually. The biggest was keeping the kids engaged. My teammates and I shared ideas, and I had varying amounts of success. The following are all strategies I used this past spring.

Students with special needs have been particularly hard hit by school closures in Chicago during the coronavirus pandemic. Vital services, many of which can only be done in person, disappeared for weeks when campuses shuttered in March — and some students weren’t able to access them for the rest of the school year. Some parents were hoping that the extended school year would give their child a chance to make up for lost time. But, they found programming riddled with the same issues as the spring: limited access to clinicians, difficulty navigating online applications, and not enough time with teachers and classroom assistants. The experiences of these two families — which show how difficult it has been for schools to serve children with special needs outside of the school building and just how wildly such services can vary by individual school — spotlight the challenges ahead as Chicago starts the year remotely.

There were―and still are―a lot of unknowns about the pandemic, but one thing was clear as soon as preventative measures took hold in the spring: Book signings couldn’t happen for a long time. Well, it couldn’t be done the traditional way. “We’ve got to innovate,” said “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” author and illustrator Jeff Kinney, who was determined to find a way to connect with kids over his April-turned-August release, Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Adventure, the second book narrated by Wimpy Kid Greg Heffley’s best friend. His solution was driving an orange “Awesome Friendly Adventure” van to some Northeast states, where the coronavirus cases were under control, for an honest-to-goodness, in-person (with all pandemic precautions in place), 10-day book tour. “I owe it to the kids who are readers,” he said before the tour began.

Nearly every primary school “does” phonics to some degree and it is often seen as a necessary but dull chore, akin to trying to get children to eat some greens when they’d more naturally want to be eating ice cream. Doubts over whether it is the “right” thing for children to be doing still lurk in some quarters, too. This negative perception exists despite reading probably being the most widely researched subject in education and the evidence for the superiority of systematic phonics being overwhelming. Why is this evidence so poorly known among educators? The ignorance about the evidence matters because there are still instances of phonics being taught badly. For example, using levelled books rather than cumulative, decodable readers, in which all the words encountered matched the phonemes already taught. Doing the former fundamentally undermines systematic phonics.

In 2016, the Putnam County School District decided to try a more rigorous literacy curriculum, beginning in the elementary grades—one that included solid phonics instruction and also built the kind of knowledge students would need in order to understand material at upper grade levels. They opted for Core Knowledge Language Arts, or CKLA. At first, third-grade teacher Deloris Fowler had serious doubts about the new curriculum. CKLA didn’t explicitly teach comprehension skills, and it covered topics that seemed far too sophisticated for third graders, like the Vikings, ancient Rome, and astronomy. It seemed, she says, that this approach was “taking a big gamble on kids.” And, like many teachers, she didn’t relish the idea of teaching from what she saw as a script. But Fowler found that her third graders were not only able to understand the material; they also loved it. Eager to learn more, they would often read ahead in their student books. Fowler still tried to make time for students to read books of their choice, but she found they often wanted more books on the CKLA topics. When they clamored to learn more about Pompeii, Fowler appealed to the school librarian for additional books, bought some with her own money, and brought in a friend who had traveled there to do a show-and-tell. Fowler was also impressed by the improvement in students’ writing.

With COVID-19 cases spiking in states across the nation, the prospect of school in buildings is becoming unlikely for many more students. Yet some schools are prioritizing students with special education needs, such as students with disabilities and English-language learners, ushering them to the front of the line for in-person learning. Most students slogged through a spring of difficult, jarring distance learning thrust upon them by schools’ efforts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But there seems to be consensus that the stakes for a strong return to school and face-to-face instruction are especially high for certain groups of students. In states from California to Connecticut, educators and advocates fear the outbreak-related school closures had severe consequences for the combined 12 million students who are English-learners or who have IEPs, the carefully constructed documents developed to guide the provision of instructional supports for children who are eligible for special education services. Some schools were unable to deliver services, such as speech, occupational, and physical therapy, that were guaranteed in IEPs. English-learners, especially those from homes where English is not the primary language, lost access to teachers and classmates who helped foster understanding of the language.

The Oneida Indian Nation announced recently it will release a new Oneida language-learning children’s book, “The Legend of How the Bear Lost His Tail,” based on the Haudenosaunee legend that has been passed down for generations. “The Legend of How the Bear Lost His Tail” is made available through collaborative efforts and support from Madison-Oneida BOCES. In development for nearly a year and produced with original illustrations, the new book features both the Oneida text and the full English translation, as well as phonetics and pictures using a rebus format for the two main characters of the story, the bear and the fox. The rebus format allows any person to pick up the book and learn the words by the end of the story by using pictures, color and phonetics right in the middle of the sentences.

The Black Lives Matter protests aren’t just about police brutality. The movement asks all institutions, including schools, to take a hard look at themselves and identify policies that contribute to systemic racism—and then to reform them. Data is a crucial tool for teachers, administrators, and principals to begin this reflection process. But too often, racial blindness and deficit-based thinking can corrupt data analysis. When they do, school personnel may inadvertently arrive at conclusions that mischaracterize or harm students of color. This is where data equity comes into play. Having an equity approach to data analysis means maintaining an awareness of potential distortion and taking proactive steps to counteract it. We must adopt an equity mindset in the collection, interpretation, and use of education data. Collecting the right information is the first step of any data project. Racial equity analyses often seek to understand how or why school opportunities, outcomes, and environments differ along racial lines.

There’s one key difference between schooling in the spring and this fall: We should rely on teachers and counselors more. That’s not to say parents won’t have a major role to play as translators and messengers to teachers, who will not be able to develop as deep a relationship with our child through a screen as they would in a classroom setting. “Let the teacher be the instructor, but the parent can be the observer and the facilitator,” said Bibb Hubbard, founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, an organization that collects data and creates resources to improve the parent-teacher relationship. Here’s how to get more involved without spending all day monitoring classwork, hiring expensive tutors, or losing sleep while wracked with guilt that we are failing our children.

With less than a month before most schools in the country are scheduled to start, many teachers still don’t know how they will be conducting classes this fall. Each model brings its own challenges. Remote teachers will have to build class culture and routines with students they may never have met in person; teachers in school buildings will need to figure out how to adapt their instruction, shaped and constrained by the physical environment. Experts say there are some priorities for instruction this year that cut across environments. Frequent communication between students, teachers, and parents is essential to re-engaging students in school, especially if class is online in the fall. Challenging students with cognitively demanding work, and providing them supports where needed, is more important than ever as schools anticipate significant learning loss. We discuss these priorities and present ideas for adapting common classroom routines for remote or socially distanced settings.

When it comes to youth and children’s books, no one is better equipped to make a recommendation than kids themselves. TODAY’s favorite book lover, Jenna Bush Hager, asked three kids who’ve already made a name for themselves in the literary world to help her pick books for a special summer kids’ edition of Read With Jenna. These bright young minds discuss the importance of representation in literature and share books that reflect different skin colors, cultures and beliefs.

Many kids struggle with reading – and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need. A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life. America’s approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on Black, Hispanic and American Indian children. The downward spiral that can start with early reading problems is a source of profound inequality in our society. This could be prevented if more educators and policymakers understood what cognitive scientists have figured out over the past several decades about what’s going on when kids struggle with reading. In this new podcast, you’ll also hear one mom’s story about her own son and how she is now advocating for other kids to ensure they get the reading instruction and support they need.

The necessary pivot to online everything has been disappointing, as often virtual events fall short of in-person experiences. But, in some cases, the virtual option is making it possible for a larger audience to view or participate in events that normally require prohibitively costly travel, as well as taking days off. From book festivals to education conferences to awards ceremonies, here are just some of the 2020 events that have moved online.

Even in schools offering face-to-face instruction this fall, one “class” of students likely won’t be the coherent unit that it was in past years. Within one 5th grade class, for example, students may be split in a hybrid schedule—half in-person two or three days, online the rest. Some may have opted for fully remote instruction while their classmates are in school buildings. The same teacher might be responsible for all of these students at once, or all 5th grade teachers might team up, each instructing in a different modality. With so many moving parts, how can teachers make sure all students have a coherent learning experience? Don’t try to plan two completely different courses, experts say. Instead, think about goals for the class: What is it that you want students to know and be able to do by the end? Those goals should guide instruction across environments, even if you’re using different techniques to achieve them online and in-person. Education Week spoke with educators, online learning experts, and curriculum providers for concrete advice on how to keep instruction and materials coherent when students are in and out of the school building. Here’s what they recommend:

Ayo Heinegg’s son, a rising sixth-grader in the District with dyslexia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, is typically a high-performing student. But he struggled to keep up with his coursework on multiple online platforms and lost his confidence in the classroom. And in Loudoun County, 8-year-old Theo Duran, who is autistic, struggles more to walk up the stairs or hold a crayon to write — all tasks he was making progress on before the coronavirus pandemic hit and shut down his school. Parents across the country who have students with special education needs say the stakes are high if schools do not reopen soon. They say their children are not just falling behind academically but are missing developmental milestones and losing key skills necessary for an independent life.

Baltimore City Public Schools teachers are part of a growing group of educators who have shifted away from the traditional ELA reading curriculum, which tends to expose students to unfamiliar subjects and teaches skills like “finding the main idea” and “summarizing.” According to the Baltimore district and other school systems, this skills-based approach to reading instruction has done little to improve reading proficiency for many students and ignores growing research that emphasizes the crucial role of background knowledge in comprehending what you read.

The coronavirus pandemic’s disruption to our lives and schools brings endless waves of risk and unpredictability. Best laid plans can be upended by a single positive case. As the nation’s K-12 educators, you are making high-stakes decisions and choices that impact the health, safety, and well-being of students, families, and yourselves. You’ve got many questions. EdWeek wants to help you find the answers. Below are questions that you have posed to us, organized into topical themes. Our newsroom responds to those questions with links to reporting that provides fuller answers.

With a growing number of fantastic Native-centered books being published and available today, I am hopeful that we are headed toward a renaissance of Native writers’ works being used as a matter of course in schools, from kindergarten through college. Certainly, with increasing awareness of social and racial justice, many librarians and teachers are using Native-centered books in their instruction, and not just for cultural learning or social studies. Native authors, writing about their own cultures, bring an accuracy and authenticity to their work that is hard for outsiders to replicate. With that in mind, the following books are all written by Native authors, about their own tribal nations. Suggested instructional uses assume that teachers and media specialists, prior to or upon the first reading, have set the scene for context, and will return to the book as mentor texts to teach targeted instructional goals.

If past upheavals are any indication, when this one stabilizes, the challenges we endured will shape the world that follows. As we return to classrooms, they are likely to look different as a result. We hope that our nation will approach education with a new sense of purpose and a shared commitment to ensuring that our schools truly work for every child. Whether or not that happens will depend on our resolve and our actions in the coming months. We have the proof points and know-how to transform learning, bolster instruction, and meet the needs of our most disadvantaged students. What has changed is the urgency for doing so at scale. Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it …. We need to reimagine the systems that shape student learning and put the communities whose circumstances we most need to elevate at the center of that process. We need to recognize that we will not improve student outcomes without building the capacity of the adults who work with them, supporting them with high-quality resources and meaningful opportunities for collaboration and professional growth. We need to promote stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and the world of work so that all students are prepared for lifelong success.

The simple truth is that remote and hybrid learning will be with us for the foreseeable future, as we continue to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. In that context, denying students access to broadband is tantamount to denying them access to education. We—as a former U.S. secretary of education and a current member of the Federal Communications Commission—believe this year’s summer assignment is clear and urgent: We must make sure that every student has the home connectivity and devices they need to make the most of learning during the coming school year.

In a rural sliver of northeast Indiana, Jessica Downey co-owns the only child care licensed in her small county to offer the state’s pre-kindergarten vouchers for low-income families. But last year, only one child signed up for On My Way Pre-K. Other children filled the rest of the spaces in Downey’s pre-K class. “I honestly think if everybody knew about On My Way Pre-K, and there were providers offering it, there would be more people interested in it — people who want to get their kids in preschool, but they can’t afford it,” Downey said. After several years of building up its pre-K program, Indiana is now poised to evaluate the success of On My Way Pre-K. The upcoming year holds the potential for expanding what has so far been a small-scale opportunity, but the coronavirus could foil future progress.

In the first two weeks of June, as the 2019-20 school year crawled to a close and the pandemic postponed or canceled graduations, proms, and spring sports, young readers turned to the comfort of trusted authors and old standby series. Follett Students’ Choice ranks the top ebook and audiobook titles checked out by reading level (Grades K-3, Grades 3-6, Grades 5-8, Young Adult) as determined by information gathered by Destiny Library Manager, a Follett service used by more than 60,000 schools. The elementary and middle grade lists are dominated by Kate DiCamillo, Jeff Kinney, Katherine Applegate, and Rick Riordan. Lois Lowry and Suzanne Collins have multiple titles in the Top 25 lists, as well.

Four educators share instructional recommendations for the pandemic-influenced fall, including setting boundaries and showing patience.

This is my choice, but I’m starting to wish that it wasn’t. I don’t feel qualified. I’ve been a superintendent for 20 years, so I guess I should be used to making decisions, but I keep getting lost in my head. I’m worried. I’m worried about everything. Each possibility I come up with is a bad one. The governor has told us we have to open our schools to students on August 17th, or else we miss out on five percent of our funding. I run a high-needs district in middle-of-nowhere Arizona. We’re 90 percent Hispanic and more than 90 percent free-and-reduced lunch. These kids need every dollar we can get. But covid is spreading all over this area and hitting my staff, and now it feels like there’s a gun to my head. I already lost one teacher to this virus. Do I risk opening back up even if it’s going to cost us more lives? Or do we run school remotely and end up depriving these kids?

Many parents are worried that their children will fall behind in their reading abilities given the cancellation of library story hours and the increasing number of public schools that will move to online instruction in the fall. There is one activity that all parents and childcare providers can do to help address these concerns, and that is to read aloud to the children in their lives. The act of reading aloud to children plays a major role in helping children build their vocabularies and learn how language works. Another benefit to reading aloud to children is that it provides a safe structure for children and adults to talk about the stresses that children are experiencing during this pandemic. Sometimes it is easier for kids to talk about how the characters in a story respond to stress than it is for them to talk about their own scary feelings.

Though there is more we can do in the early grades, our larger problem is increasingly not with the beginning of our students’ journey of literacy acquisition. Our bigger problem is the later grades where reading growth flatlines. In these years, the number of skills drops substantially. We have less that we must directly teach to students, but there is much more that must be done with them. This is because “after one has learned the mechanics of reading, growth depends, more than anything, on our ability to build up students’ knowledge base and vocabulary” through wide reading. This is why the Common Core places so much emphasis on text quality and complexity, and also calls for us to “markedly increase the opportunity for regular independent reading of texts that appeal to students’ interests to develop both their knowledge and joy in reading”.

As school districts across the country are trying to determine how or if they can open their doors in the fall, a California coalition has come together - offering districts everything from curriculum to architecture advice to take their classrooms outside. The initiative is divided into 11 working groups. Consisting of educators, epidemiologists, landscape architects, city planners, the group is offering districts a “how-to manual” free of charge on everything from curriculum development to infrastructure planning.

Today, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) sent a letter to the chief executives of 20 internet service providers requesting they take decisive action to support educational access for hundreds of thousands of disproportionately Black and Latinx children. These children were unable to fully participate in their school curriculum this past spring due to the unaffordability of internet access and data services, lack of reliable internet in their community, lack of access to the technological devices to perform their work, or all of the above. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and the new school year approaches, LDF calls on these providers to commit to ensuring that online learning is feasible and accessible for students of color throughout the country.

Across the nation, libraries are stepping up in a time of crisis. This summer, as communities continue to deal with COVID-19, both public libraries and school libraries are innovating new ways to provide services for communities that reach beyond physical books and buildings. One of libraries’ main goals has been to help children, many of whom have already missed out on a lot, stay engaged, reading and learning at a time when they can’t physically be in the building. School libraries have become tech hubs for educators teaching from home, while public libraries have worked to expand access to the internet, with many keeping their building’s WiFi on even when buildings were closed, so patrons can get internet access from the parking lot. Community events like story hours, maker spaces, and summer camps have moved online for easy access, and librarians are featuring themselves online, reading books and doing crafts, to stay connected.

If social media posts are any indication, Bitmoji classrooms are becoming a teacher obsession. Since so many teachers are planning to “return” only to online classrooms in the fall, they’re building these colorful virtual environments for their students featuring avatar versions of themselves. In thousands of posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, teachers are sharing the classrooms they’ve built. Using the Bitmoji app to create their avatars, and other tools like Google or Canva to build the classroom backdrop, they’re making welcoming spaces, complete with colorful rugs and posters, that can serve as a cozy home base for their classes. Students can move through the spaces virtually, clicking on a bookshelf image to get a reading assignment, for instance, or on a whiteboard to follow a link to read a science document.

A typical American school day requires proximity: High school lab partners leaning over a vial. Kindergarten students sharing finger paints. Middle schoolers passing snacks around a cafeteria table. This year, nothing about school will be typical. Many of the nation’s largest districts plan to start the academic year online, and it is unclear when students and teachers will be back in classrooms. Others plan hybrid models, while some are determined to go five days a week. When school buildings do reopen, whether this fall or next year, buses, hallways, cafeterias and classrooms will need to look very different as long as the coronavirus remains a threat. Even teaching, which has evolved in recent decades to emphasize fewer lectures and more collaborative lessons, must change. There is still considerable uncertainty and debate over how easily children of different ages contract and spread the virus, and whether some of the recommended safety guidelines would help or are even necessary. As a result, schools are adopting a wide range of approaches for the pandemic era. But those recommendations largely agree on at least some adaptations, and they all come down to eliminating one factor: proximity.

Because of the abrupt switch to remote learning when COVID-19 swept the country, districts nationwide have struggled to follow through with the services students are required by law to receive. It was made even harder by the fact that individualized education programs, or IEPs, that determine services for each special education student were never meant to be delivered virtually. These services might range from extra tutoring or speech therapy to extensive, one-on-one assistance for students with severe and complex health needs. Survey results released in May showed that almost 40 percent of parents whose children typically receive individual support in school did not get those services during school closures. Those with IEPs were also twice as likely to be doing little to no remote learning, and were just as likely to say that distance learning was going poorly.

Many parents may be at home during this pandemic, but whether working from home or not, helping young children continue formal learning – especially learning to read – is a formidable task. Teachers can provide remote learning plans, but not every family has the same access and ease of use when it comes to high-speed internet and electronic devices. And no matter how quickly kids do learn, it is difficult to follow remote learning on their own. This is why the educational public television program Let’s Learn NYC! was created by The WNET Group and the NYC Department of Education (DOE). Every weekday, teaching professionals practice the sounds of letters, read story books, and more to reach children ages three to eight (grades 3-K to 2) via broadcast television and live streaming. Andrew Fletcher, NYC DOE’s Senior Executive Director of Early Literacy, participates in each episode. He explains how Let’s Learn NYC! answers a pressing need in this interview.

Though it wasn’t always easy to engage students via Zoom or Google Meet, most of our early childhood teachers had success with their regular storytimes. Even during a pandemic, it is comforting to have classroom favorites as well as new titles read by a teacher. As we prepare for the upcoming school year and a slow transition back to school, many of these virtual resources like ebooks can be utilized by teachers as they plan learning activities. I loved how educator and professional development trainer Claire Landrigan used Padlet to create a virtual classroom and school library. I am already thinking about how to host Zoom meetings to share booktalks and how to assess the books in the classroom library to determine what gaps exist and how to ensure that the titles represent the diverse students in the classroom. Until we can return to story time and book sharing in a more traditional manner, I appreciate the growing resources available to get books into the virtual hands of students.

In this episode, Glean Education spoke with Dr. Maryanne Wolf, Director of UCLA’s Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice on her mission to raise awareness that literacy is a basic human right.

Racial inequality is a defining feature of the pandemic, both in terms of its health impact and its economic effect. This is no less true when it comes to education. Children of color are more likely to fall behind the longer they stay home from school, partially because of limited access to virtual education. Parents of color are also more worried than white parents about losing the other benefits that schools provide, like social services and food, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Only 9% of white parents are worried about their children having enough to eat at home if schools remain closed, compared to 44% of parents of color. Parents of color are also more worried about the health risks — to teachers, their children and their families — of reopening schools for in-person learning. They were significantly more likely than white parents to say that schools should reopen later rather than sooner, per KFF.

In May, the N.I.H. initiated a study to test thousands of children and their families over six months to see who gets the virus, whether it’s transmitted within the household and who develops Covid, while collecting information about participants’ recent activities. That’s the kind of detailed data collection needed to help determine under what conditions schools are likely to endure outbreaks or contribute to community spread. But none of that data will help us in time for the start of the school year. Instead, without the ability to consistently test students, get quick results and trace contacts, it will be impossible for schools to tell who has the virus and whether it’s circulating on campus; when students and staff inevitably get sick, individual schools will have to debate shutting down or staying open without any more useful information to guide them than they have now. To all of America’s failures in the Covid-19 crisis, we should surely add this one: the inability to get schools the tools and data they need to strike the best possible balance between education and health.