BC EDUCATION
Saved by @jay_millerjay

For months, but especially after the new CDC school recs came out, supporters of reopening all schools now have been peddling the idea that schools across the country have been open all year successfully. This argument is used to push for ALL schools to be opened now.

A long 🧵

 Though some schools in the U.S. are open & doing well with safety protocols, many places used as examples of opening success have profoundly unsafe schools & are neglecting covid safety. Some have been lucky not to have outbreaks and other issues--it's not that they're safe.
In the last few weeks, I've been in touch with teachers in Ohio, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Utah, and Pennsylvania.

(Thanks to @eduwonkette_jen @GeoRebekah and @saribethrose for the threads and forums that have helped me meet SO MANY teachers this year).
I collected the accounts of dozens of teachers. Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list and it isn't a study! It's what teachers on the ground in some states are experiencing. And it's easy to see why so many in our profession are so frightened this year.

Here's the list:
There are currently open schools in the US that are being hailed as "successful" that have:

▪️no safety protocols at all besides contact cleaning, in some districts
▪️some districts with no mask mandate
▪️classes in windowless rooms, some with full classes of 20-30
▪️dozens of cases at a time but no changes in (poor) safety protocols
▪️no contact tracing or quarantining of close contacts at all
▪️teachers who have to pay for all masks and cleaning supplies for their classrooms because the school/district won't
▪️cases and spread that aren't reported to anyone
▪️teachers who are threatened not to tell anyone about cases and spread
▪️teachers who have been asked to come back early from quarantine when sick with covid
▪️ventilation that was condemned decades ago
▪️districts that threw out closure thresholds when they were reached, to keep schools open
teachers who have been threatened with retaliation for asking for PPE, ventilation and/or physical distancing
▪️administrators shame mask-wearing staff for "fear-mongering"
▪️teachers who were asked to teach remotely when sick with covid
▪️teachers who got covid at school & brought it home to vulnerable family
▪️teachers who were forced to quit because the school wouldn’t accommodate their medical conditions (including cancer and heart conditions)
▪️covid denier and mask denier administrators who are in charge of all covid safety decisions in the school(s)
▪️teachers who were told not to do anything to memorialize colleagues who died of covid bc it could upset families
NO ONE is coming to help the staff in these schools, and others like them across the country.@CDCgov recommendations (which don't need to be followed at all anyway) don't mean anything to many politicians and many school districts. There's no one REQUIRING school safety.
But many school staff are in schools NOW, some very unsafely. What can be done to help these school staff, with so little support for making schools safer?

School staff vaccinations might be the best answer.
Not a perfect answer, not without issues, but it would help overlooked teachers already in schools be there more safely, and it could also help educators in schools that haven't reopened yet be in schools more safely too.

And the fact is, we don't have many options.
@bhrenton has a great thread on educator vaccination, below. It mentions a really interesting idea of @JReinerMD that some of the soon-to-be-approved J&J vaccine, that only requires one shot, could be reserved for educators when production shoots up.
https://t.co/99Vlxn8VOK
School staff in the 21 states that aren't prioritizing teacher vax (& staff in priority states having a hard time getting vaccinated soon) could be fully vaccinated by the end of March & safer in even unsafe schools by April. This could help some schools reopen more safely too.
The CDC made sure nothing could stop schools from being open if people want them to be. Safety protocols are optional. Ventilation is ignored. They made sure to say teacher vaccinations aren't a requirement to opening too.

Teachers are regarded so poorly in this country.
With so much stacked against school safety and teachers, it's heartening to see growing interest in school staff vaccinations (@POTUS @DrLeanaWen @ashishkjha @CT_Bergstrom among others).

Now we just need a real plan.

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2. Education should be disconnected from geography. Students should be able to learn anything from anywhere on earth. With few exceptions, tying education to geography is a form of exclusion.

3. Education should be disconnected from a schedule. The most effective time to learn something is when the student is ready, not when the teacher or institution is available.

4. Education should not be admission- or permission-based, but freely available upon the asking. The current admission-based system is a vestige of a scarcity model that could only fit a limited number of seats in a classroom.

(4 continued) No one should have to be admitted or ask permission to learn a subject.
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He states, “The applied epidemiologist is by definition an activist, moving rapidly from findings to policy, putting epi knowledge to good use. The 21st century epi must do all these things while maintaining a foundation of high-quality epi research and practice.”

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An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
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So, I know it's the weekend but if I don't say all this I may burst.

A thread for those who think school days should be extended and holidays shortened to make up for 'lost learning'.

The narrative of 'lost learning' is based on the myth that in-school learning is the be-all-and-end-all for all pupils at all times. It isn't. Not all pupils engage all day in school. Not all pupils complete every task set every day, in school or as part of home learning

Part of a teacher's job, and one that we do hourly, is to assess where pupils are along a progression of learning. When they reach a milestone we challenge and extend, where we think revision and consolidation of previous learning is needed we plan and deliver that.

What we don't do when there is revision and consolidation required is declare that any child's life chances are lost. We seek support in school, at home and when necessary from our colleagues in education and third-sector partners.

When a child misses schooling through illness, family circumstance, war, refugee status, any non-attendance, we don't write off their life chances, we don't make them work longer hours and shorten holidays. We take a holistic approach to the support needed and work to meet that.
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This thread is for parents of teenagers. I have something for you: the first chapter of @ronlieber’s THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR COLLEGE. Because ye gods, here’s what we and our kids are facing.

Beyond obvious changes, like $$$ tuition prices, the system has changed from when we were in school. Nearly all colleges use so-called “merit-aid” to pay kids for good grades.

This is NOT need-based financial aid, and it’s not about expanding college access for the poor... it's an arms race by schools scrambling for US News rankings.

Tuition list prices are misleading at this point. College seats are more like airline seats, and your kid's actual price is calculated based on everything from his zip code... SAT scores... how much interest he and his cohort have shown in school X (yes they can figure that out.)

Ron has seen NYC high school classes in which three kids were offered admission to the same small school at three different prices-- and *none* of them had applied for need-based financial aid!
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