Today’s Literacy Headlines

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.

Public health officials say it’s inevitable that cases of COVID-19 will turn up in Colorado schools as the school year starts. But as they do, officials stress the use of cohorts as a key way to prevent uncontrolled outbreaks. Cohorts are groups of students and staff within a school building who interact mostly only with each other. The goal is to limit the number of people anyone is exposed to. As schools try to create smaller cohorts, they have to get creative with new schedules and alternating days. Here, we’ve answered some questions to help you understand the cohort model better.

A reading program for Philadelphia school kids is adjusting to the coronavirus pandemic in an effort to help the students avoid the summer slide. David Oplacio hones and sharpens his reading skills every week through the Philadelphia Reading Coaches. The Reading Coaches is a program where kids from kindergarten through third grade are paired up with teens and older volunteers in an effort to make sure they are proficient in reading. Philly Reading Coaches executive director Johniece Foster said they’ve since been able to restart via Zoom, and it will run to the start of the school year. The program not only provides kids with an opportunity to read with a coach a few times a week, it also gives them more than two dozen books to help build their libraries.

Read-alouds remain a powerful way to engage young readers and support their long-term reading growth. They also bestow benefits far beyond primary school: Secondary students show reading proficiency gains from regular read-alouds. The International Reading Association emphasizes, “Effective read-alouds increase children’s vocabulary, listening comprehension, story schema, background knowledge, word recognition skills, and cognitive development.” When students encounter a wide variety of texts, voices, and experiences through read-alouds, their social comprehension increases, too. As you consider three read-aloud benefits, brainstorm ideas for working with families and colleagues to ensure all students experience read-alouds this year.

The logistics of reopening schools are daunting. Plans are full of details about which days kids will be eligible for, and pages and pages on preventing students and staffs from getting sick. What kind of limits will be placed on class sizes? What kind of cleaning? Will there be symptom checks or temperature screens? Masks for everyone or just adults? These plans are important and necessary. But there is an issue that we aren’t talking enough about: What happens when there is a Covid-19 case in a school? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first guidelines on this topic last week, a long-overdue step toward getting schools to take this question seriously. The instinct, I think, is to say we are working to make sure that doesn’t happen, and of course that is the goal. But that goal is unrealistic. Even if schools are successful at ensuring there is no Covid-19 spread in schools at all, there will still be cases arising from the community.

Recently I participated in a National Writing Project webinar called Beyond the Storytime Livestream, where elementary educators and picture book makers gathered to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the classroom and to brainstorm ways for picture book creators to connect meaningfully with elementary educators in this time of virtual learning. I wanted to see if it would be possible to pilot a small-scale project that would bring together picture book makers, educators, and library staff to support “staying the course.” Could we develop open-source writing and drawing prompts for elementary students that didn’t rely on access to the internet, or necessarily access to our books themselves? Staff at the East Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library in Arizona were willing to help us take up this challenge.

The coronavirus crisis offers an opportunity to reimagine elementary school education by moving it outdoors. Even before COVID-19, American children were sitting more and moving less, creating deficits in health and wellness, and affecting attention and self regulation, studies have shown. Learning outdoors gives us a chance to have children move more, improving their gross motor skills, strength, endurance, and coordination. Learning outdoors gives children a chance to learn through play, which is essential for appropriate child development. Learning outdoors offers sensory experiences to support improved self-regulation and opportunities to promote and expand executive functioning skills. In my experience as a school-based occupational therapist, I’ve seen how much more grounded, focused, and ready to learn children can be after intensive movement-based play. And because the coronavirus is less likely to spread outdoors, student movement and their social interactions can be far less restricted outside than in school buildings.

Thousands of after-school programs closed their doors months ago—and a majority now fear they may never reopen. Nearly 9 in 10 programs have long-term funding concerns because of school closures caused by COVID-19—and 6 in 10 are concerned that they may have to permanently shut their doors, a survey commissioned by the Afterschool Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, reveals. The survey, the first in a series from the Afterschool Alliance, aims to gauge the health of an industry that served an estimated 10 million children before the pandemic struck. Now, heading into the fall, providers are bracing to serve only a fraction of that number.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread through the country, a common (socially distanced) conversation among friends and families compared how many hours of remote learning kids were getting. Preliminary results from a new survey of school districts confirm what many parents learned through the Zoom grapevine. The number of hours your kids got varied wildly depending on where you happen to live. But the amount of time was not the only difference, according to a recent survey: the type of instruction students received also diverged dramatically. Low-income schools spent considerably more time reviewing old content. Wealthier schools were more likely to teach new material. Learning materials — paper versus screens — were another chasm. Nearly half of low-income districts distributed paper packets of worksheets to families while more than three-fourths of wealthier school districts distributed everything digitally. This digital divide had enormous consequences for what instruction meant. Low-poverty districts offered far more live virtual classes, live one-on-one sessions with teachers and prerecorded classes for students to watch at their convenience. High-poverty districts were far less likely to offer any of these three things.

Preschool participation has fallen by half during the pandemic, according to new data from the National Institute for Early Education Research. And even with early educators’ efforts to connect with students remotely, few families have remained consistently involved. This “massive reduction in preschool attendance,” the report shows, affected all families regardless of race or ethnicity, parents’ educational level or income. But the “devastating loss of learning time,” the authors write, was more severe for children whose parents have less education. Based on a survey of almost 1,000 families, researchers found that most programs attempted to provide some academic support, such as sending home learning materials and contacting parents and students directly. But more than half of the families reported participating in activities such as listening to a story, video chatting with classmates, or doing a science activity less than once a week.

The United States Census reported that the Hispanic population accounted for almost 20 percent of the U.S. population in 2020. According to an infographic released in 2019 by Sarah Park Dahlen, an associate professor of MLIS at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN, and illustrator David Huyck, only five percent of children’s books feature Latinx characters or subjects. And out of that small selection, many of these titles often examine the same subjects or historical figures over and over again. Thankfully, more picture book biographies are being published about groundbreaking Latinx luminaries every year. Here are some must-add choices for your collections.

Few schools in the United States will get through the 2020-21 academic year without some form of remote learning, for some portion of the student body, for some period of time. Education Week interviewed more than five dozen educators and experts, and examined numerous districts’ reopening plans as well as guidance from organizations that support remote and technology-enabled learning. In the fourth installment of How We Go Back to School, we offer tips, checklists, best practices, and expert advice on how to make teaching and learning at home engaging, productive, and equitable.

The Nashville, Tenn., schools made the decision this month to stick to full-time remote learning when the 2020-21 school year begins. In Bennington, Neb., the school district is planning to open schools for all students five days a week. And the New York City public school district is designing a hybrid model in which students would be in school a few days a week and learning remotely the other days. The choice many schools appear to be leaning toward is the hybrid model, at least for now, because they are concerned about the health of students and staff members if buildings reopen, and about the learning loss that can happen in fully remote environments. Here’s what experts and educators say an effective hybrid model should emphasize.

Vanessa Ince’s daughter, Alexis, has a rare chromosomal abnormality and autism. Alexis has thrived at her public school in Wailuku, Hawaii, and loves spending time with her classmates. Ince says when the COVID-19 pandemic closed her school in Wailuku, the effect on her daughter’s well-being was “devastating.” Ince and her husband have filed a lawsuit seeking to get Hawaii’s Department of Education to pay for the services Alexis needs in a facility where she can see other children. They are part of a growing number of parents around the country who are suing schools and state education departments over this issue. The Ince’s attorney, Keith Peck, has also filed a suit seeking class action status for all families in the state who argue their students’ Individualized Education Plans have been breached during the pandemic.

There’s an experiment Sonia Livingstone had always dreamed of doing. She’s a social psychologist at the London School of Economics who researches children and media. And her dream experiment was this: “Let’s turn off the outside world and see how it is if you’ve only got the technology.”nNow that we’re all living through this experiment, this was a great time to sit down with Livingstone and her coauthor Alicia Blum Ross and talk to them about their new book, Parenting for a Digital Future. It’s based on several years of research with a diverse group of families in the UK.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a near-total shutdown of the U.S. school system, forcing more than 55 million students to transition to home-based remote learning practically overnight. In most cases, that meant logging in to online classes and accessing lessons and assignments through a home internet connection. Sadly, that was not an option for children in one out of three Black, Latino, and American Indian/Alaska Native households. Nationwide, across all racial and ethnic groups, 16.9 million children remain logged out from instruction because their families lack the home internet access necessary to support online learning, a phenomenon known as the “homework gap.” According to an analysis of data from the 2018 American Community Survey conducted for the Alliance for Excellent Education, National Urban League, UnidosUS, and the National Indian Education Association, millions of households with children under the age of 18 years lack two essential elements for online learning: (1) high-speed home internet service and (2) a computer.

This is the seventh in a series of invited responses to some of the big, unanswered questions facing America’s schools as they prepare to reopen in the fall. The Center on Reinventing Public Education, in partnership with The 74, fielded responses from a diverse roster of educators and policymakers in order to promote creative thinking and debate about how we can collectively meet student needs in an extraordinarily challenging school year, and beyond. Sonja Santelises, the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, says that acceleration and individualization — not remediation — are necessary. Bárbara Rivera Batista, director of Vimenti School, an initiative of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico and the first public charter school on the island, says that we need to help families support all students to make the most of learning at home.

When Emma Mancha-Sumners saw her school district’s proposed schedule for remote learning this fall, she knew it wouldn’t work for her or her kids. Mancha-Sumners looked into forming a “pod” of families that could at least provide some socialization for her children, who haven’t seen their friends since schools closed in March. She co-created a Facebook group for local families seeking to set up pods, and quickly discovered that many parents were looking for learning pods, which would be run by teachers or tutors and allow families to navigate distance learning. Many families estimated they would each pay $700 or more per month for teachers. In Austin, 53 percent of kids who attend the city’s public schools are economically disadvantaged. The Austin Facebook group that Mancha-Sumners co-created is full of parents for whom the cost of a learning pod is out of reach. Each day, distressed parents write posts saying they just don’t know what to do.

One of the best ways to learn about other cultures is through the arts, and that includes children’s books. Storytelling is a universal art that helps children develop language skills, concentration, imagination and empathy. With millions of children’s books out there, it’s hard to know where to start. In light of the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racist children’s books and children’s books by Black authors became widely popular. A similar avenue to help kids understand American history and how it relates to people today is to read books by Indigenous authors. Here are a few books that explore the lives, imaginations and traditions of American Indians from many tribes.

Without decisive action to include the voices and leadership of educators of color in reopening schools this fall, educators of color will continue to leave the profession at disproportionate rates. And if state and district leaders believe White teachers alone can lead the work in schools to address systemic racism and racial inequities, they’re not listening to the countless White leaders who have already leaned on their Black colleagues over the past month of national reflection for support with leading in anti-racist ways or even with how to facilitate conversations about racism and privilege. “We already have the least equitable K-12 systems in the country, and very few leaders of color at the top of these systems. Our voices need to be at the table to fix these issues,” says Arthur, a teacher in Brooklyn, New York. Bottom line: We need more educators of color leading our classrooms and contributing to decisions about reopening schools this fall if our country is to ever make real progress toward education equity.

For parents trying to figure out how to talk to their children about racism, film can be a useful tool for generating empathy. But many family-friendly movies with diverse casts are told from a white perspective, for a white audience. That can rob people of color of their turns as the hero, nullifying their voices. And the stories are usually about racism, presenting the issue as a problem to be solved, wrapping up in a neat resolution. The following eight movies, suitable for children 7 and older, are written by, directed by and star people of color. They depict stories of struggle, perseverance and joy. Most don’t end tied up nicely in a bow, which is more realistic and great for opening up a dialogue — even just to say, “What do you think happens next?” The beauty of that contemplation is that it gets families thinking and talking about the future, viewed through the lens of the past.

What kinds of literacies are required of young children and their teachers on Zoom or similar digital meeting platforms? There’s good old traditional literacy at work here: listening, speaking and, of course, read-alouds. But we have been privy to a peripheral view of other literacies that have unfurled during this crisis. Even when synchronous conferencing is frustrating or didn’t go smoothly (teachers’ words), meaning making manifests in many surprising forms, weaving together social, digital, and even artifactual literacies.

Some educators who want to make online learning more engaging and accessible are exploring the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. UDL – originally developed by researchers at the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in collaboration with Harvard University – supports special education students, but its flexibility, technology guidelines and aim to individualize learning are best practices that can serve every student. “While UDL can benefit students with disabilities, it’s a way of thinking about how to make instruction accessible for all,” said Kavita Rao, a professor in the department of special education at the University of Hawai‘i. “The beauty of UDL is that it addresses ‘learner variability’, which is the norm in our classrooms.”

If students return to the buildings in the 2020–21 academic year, there will be no library waiting for them. The spaces are being turned into classrooms to provide the required social distancing between students. Guidelines recommend three to six feet between students. Jennifer Powers, librarian at St. John’s Episcopal School in Dallas, learned her library would become three classrooms with partitions between them. “It’s not just the library we’re losing, we’re losing our performance auditorium, our gyms, we’re losing all the specialist classrooms,” says Powers. Powers will be moving around the school with her cart full of books. She plans to place bins with lids in the hallway for returning books and let them sit quarantined for 72 hours, as per the most recent guidelines from the American Library Association, she says.

“Read, my child, read!” a schoolteacher urged a young John Lewis. The last of the “Big Six” figures of the civil rights movement and Democratic congressman representing Georgia for the past 33 years until his death yesterday, Lewis would often share that anecdote from the dais. The inspired directive fit within his larger message of social justice; Lewis brought both to the 2016 School Library Journal Summit in Washington D.C., where he delivered the keynote. He cited a special librarian, his late wife, Lillian Miles Lewis, who earned an MLS from the University of Southern California and was Director of Special Collections for Atlanta University. “She taught me a great deal, about reading and the love of books,” the congressman told the room full of librarians, educators, and publishers. “So I want to thank each and every one of you for all that you do. I was inspired to get in the way, I got in trouble, good trouble. With books, with reading… you can dream dreams and you can stand up and speak up and speak out and be inspired by texts or by words.”

Members of the A.D.A. generation are quicker than earlier ones to claim disability as a crucial part of identity — and with pride. The A.D.A., after all, erased some of the stigma. Now, it’s not just those with evident physical or sensory disabilities who say they are part of a disability civil rights movement, but younger people and those with invisible disabilities, too. The A.D.A. generation is more likely to disclose a learning disability, a chronic condition such as lupus, or a psychiatric disability like bipolar disorder. Also true to their age group, members of the A.D.A. generation use social media to meet and organize. Ari Ne’eman was 18 when he started the Autistic Self Advocacy Network online in 2006 to challenge the prevailing narrative about autism, one that was driven by parents’ groups and researchers. It largely saw autism as a tragedy and the answer as a cure. For Mr. Ne’eman and other autistics, that ran counter to the proof of their lives, which were rich and fueled by the ambitions promised by the A.D.A. He and others wrote and organized to shatter the old images of autism. A recent academic study of newspaper content credited their work for a dramatic shift to positive depictions of autistic life.

The American Booksellers Association kicked off its eighth annual Children’s Institute, and the first ever held online, with hundreds of children’s booksellers in virtual attendance for author discussions, fall book picks, and a keynote by How to Be a Pirate author Isaac Fitzgerald. If there were any doubts about how the transition from hotel rooms to breakout rooms would go, they were quickly dispelled by an opening discussion on “Representation in Science Fiction and Fantasy Young Adult and Middle Grade Books” that riveted attendees. In a wide-ranging conversation, authors Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Dhonielle Clayton, and Tracy Deonn shared their perspective as Black authors with booksellers, describing the enormous hurdles that Black artists continue to face in a publishing industry that is largely white.

Highly trained, well-paid preschool teachers with low-student ratios, clean, safe classrooms with blocks, playdough, art supplies and outdoor spaces where kids can run and play could be key to closing the racial achievement gap, according to a new Rutgers University study. The June policy analysis by the university’s National Institute of Early Education Research concludes that preschools have more influence on the academic trajectory of children of color than previously thought — a finding unfortunately timed with the rolling back of many preschool initiatives due to dire budget cuts amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Parents, teachers and students across the country are gearing up for the new school year. But what school will look like is still a mystery. Some districts, like the Los Angeles Unified School District, have announced plans to teach remotely for the start of the school year. President Trump told CBS News that’s “a terrible decision.” But many educators remain hesitant to return to in-person classes without adequate safety measures in place. We asked readers and listeners for your questions about reopening schools. NPR science correspondent Allison Aubrey and NPR education correspondent Cory Turner answer some below.