News

  • | The 74

    COVID-19 has increased the need for schools to communicate with families while reducing opportunities for face-to-face interactions. As a result, families have received an onslaught of emails, text messages and detailed websites. Many of these are dense. Too often, the best families can do is quickly skim — if they read these at all.

    While more information needs to be shared in writing than ever before, more communication is not necessarily better. The goal is not to just send information out, but for recipients to understand the information they receive. We all struggle with long emails that arrive in our inboxes while we are racing around doing a million other things. Or with multiple emails from the same sender that accumulate, unread. When we finally do open a message to figure out what we need to know, we get distracted before reaching the main point. So how can schools rise above the seemingly never-ending barrage of information to ensure successful outreach to families?

  • | Zoom Cares
    Up to 1.6 billion children around the world have been impacted by school closures during the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has exposed inequities in education - from access to computers and technology for remote learning, to the support teachers need to provide quality education during this challenging time.

    Please join us in supporting schools and teachers here in the US and globally as they ensure our world’s children continue to learn and thrive through this pandemic.

  • | Results for America

    Today, Results for America and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University released three new EdResearch for Recovery briefs that highlight what the evidence tells us about some of the toughest questions facing policymakers, educators and families, including:

    • What changes in central office systems are likely to support principals in leading for equitable, high-quality teaching and learning? 
    • How can schools create contexts that foster safety and prosocial behaviors in the wake of COVID-19 and the ongoing state of increased unrest over racial justice?
    • How can schools and districts support families in their diverse contexts and build practical trust to support student learning?
  • | AP News
    “When you look at the distance learning research, very little has been carried out on young students, even below middle school,” said Brown University’s Schwartz, who is a member of the committee that wrote the report and is also running a project that provides research to school leaders who are trying to make decisions during the pandemic. “Few people were even considering that it could be considered with kids this young.”
  • | FutureEd

    With teachers suddenly thrust into remote learning last spring, what impact did that have on their sense of success and their students’ engagement? Researchers Matthew Kraft of Brown University and FutureEd, Nicole Simon of CUNY, and Melissa Arnold Lyon of Brown University explored the work-from-home conditions during COVID-19 in a new working paper, Sustaining a Sense of Success: The Importance of Teacher Working Conditions During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

  • | Principal Matters - William D. Parker
  • | Albert Shanker Institute
    Teachers are used to playing many different roles, but this year they are facing the most complex challenges of their careers. They are being asked to be public health experts. Tech support specialists. Social workers to families reeling from the effects of layoffs and illness. Masters of distance learning and trauma-responsive educational practices. And they are being asked to take on these new responsibilities against a backdrop of rising COVID-19 cases in many parts of the country, looming budget cuts for many school districts, and a hyper-polarized political debate over the return to school.
  • | Education Week

    In the current pandemic reality, educators can improve learning, we believe, by finding better ways to use and structure students' work time. That's true whether learning is fully remote via computers, phones, or packets or whether it includes in-person instruction.

    When in-person schooling ended abruptly this spring, the learning opportunities then available to students varied enormously. Some students received no distance instruction, and others got a hodgepodge of a synchronous virtual classroom, asynchronous online activities, and worksheets and packets. Educators scrambled to keep a semblance of school going till normal returned.

  • | Education Week
    New research is already showing major setbacks to academic achievement in the months of disrupted schooling forced by COVID-19, with estimates that some students will have lost as much as a full school year’s worth of learning gains. How can districts and schools effectively measure and diagnose the learning losses? What types of interventions and staffing changes can be deployed to address the losses?
  • | Education Week

    The spring semester, in which schools across the country closed their doors and teachers pivoted to remote instruction on a dime, was challenging for everyone involved. But a new survey shows that teachers' sense of success dramatically declined—a troubling sign, since many schools have started the new school year remotely, too. 

    But there is some good news: Teachers who had supportive school leadership were the least likely to experience a dip in their sense of success.