Today’s Literacy Headlines

Four educators share their—and their students’—favorite books, including song picture books and ones focusing on SEL skills, as well as emphasizing the importance of ones that represent “a wide range of experiences.”

Distance learning proved a difficult experiment for many students, teachers and parents this year. Its urgent adoption underscored gaps in access and income. Now, school districts are scrambling to figure out how to adjust plans for the fall. We hear from viewers about their own school experiences, and NewsHour talks to Mark Bedell, superintendent of Missouri’s Kansas City Public Schools.

Throughout the pandemic, many child care centers have stayed open for the children of front-line workers — everyone from doctors to grocery store clerks. YMCA of the USA and New York City’s Department of Education have been caring for, collectively, tens of thousands of children since March, and both tell NPR they have no reports of coronavirus clusters or outbreaks. As school districts sweat over reopening plans, and with just over half of parents telling pollsters they’re comfortable with in-person school this fall, public health and policy experts say education leaders should be discussing and drawing on these real-world child care experiences.

Dr. Sonja Santelises joins ExtraOrdinary Districts in Extraordinary Times to discusses the Black Lives Matter protests and the decisions she faces as superintendent of Baltimore in planning for the return of students in the fall — from what equipment she is having to buy to what changes in the curriculum she will have to make. Although it is clear that many children lost valuable learning time in the spring, Santelises said that for some children remote learning worked very well. One teacher who teaches in one of the hottest of the nation’s coronavirus hotspots has consistently had 95 percent of her students logging into lessons and doing standards-based grade-level work. “She has the relationship, she has the content,” Santelises said. Similarly, Santelises said, the schools that were most successful in engaging students were the ones where relationships and culture had been built before the pandemic

Four teachers discuss specific titles, and common elements, in books that students find popular, including the importance of being able to see themselves in the characters.

The realities of COVID-19 spreading in our communities without a vaccine or herd immunity means that a return to full schools without restrictions is simply out of our reach for many months. We will likely see students returning to school in shifts to classrooms that have been specifically designed to protect students and teachers. Cafeterias, gymnasiums, and libraries may be off limits. Practices we once took for granted, such as community supply stores, learning in groups and soft seating may be on hold for now. All of these things will stretch our ability to redesign our spaces so that students can explore, discover, and connect in meaningful ways. As the number of things that remain out of our control grows (spacing of desks, movement in and between classes, scheduling), there are still a number space design considerations that we can control and which can allow our students to truly benefit from where they learn. Consider these five ways to craft your classroom in these unique moments when we need to balance the health and humanity of our spaces.

A long, long summer is stretching ahead of us — many summer camps and programs are closed, kids are restless and parents and caregivers are stretched thin. But story time is always a little moment of escape. So this year, we want to hear all about your very favorite books for the littlest readers, specifically picture books and very easy chapter books. Is it something you loved as a kid? Something the kids in your life demand at Every. Single. Bedtime? Something they love to read by themselves? Something you gift to every kid you know? Tell us about it! And, of course, there are always those weird books, the ones not necessarily written for kids but that you or a kid you know glommed onto, something that obsessed or transformed you.

My autistic second grader thrived during remote learning. In the past three months at home, he’s moved up several reading levels, improved his writing stamina and conquered fractions. In a virtual session in April, his doctor couldn’t believe he was the same child she’d been seeing in her office. “Do you have to send him back to school?” she asked. At home during the pandemic, I’ve been almost solely responsible for teaching my son. After the first 15-minute weekly meetup with his class, he wasn’t interested in engaging with anyone online again. Instead, I relied on the paper remote learning packets we picked up each week from school and often solicited advice from my next-door neighbor — a special-education teacher — across the fence about how to teach the material. Because of his visual processing disorder, my son has difficulty with reading online and can get distracted when completing work there. So we stuck to paper, which his special-education teacher supported. It worked because my son isn’t overstimulated the way he can be at a school, with hundreds of kids, loud bells, a smelly lunchroom, whistles on the playground and rules, so many rules.

“I can help the next in line,” says Azalea Arredondo, leaning forward on her elbows and craning her neck to make eye contact with the next customer. He’s busy chatting with the person in line behind him. Arredondo signals again, more urgently, “Next in line!” Arrendondo, the all-business “IRS agent,” is in first grade. Her shoulders barely clear the top of the desk, and a giant rainbow-colored bow bounces on top of her head as she swings her legs. Her customers are third-graders queuing up to pay their taxes in Jaguar Valley dollars (JVD), the currency of Jaguar Valley, a Minitropolis site inside Gloria Hicks Elementary School in Corpus Christi, Texas. It’s one of the newest chapters of a program started in 1996 as an attendance incentive at Sam Houston Elementary School in McAllen, Texas. More than two decades later, Minitropolises have boomed to more than 30 communities throughout Texas and Oklahoma, driven by partnerships with the International Bank of Commerce and other local businesses. During that time, their mission has grown from providing old-fashioned encouragement to show up at school to teaching cutting-edge social-emotional and project-based learning skills.

I broke the rules. Under normal circumstances I won’t consider a children’s book for this podcast unless that title is less than 20 years old. But since I made that rule in the first place, I guess I’m the one who gets to break it. And today’s book is, in its blood, a rule breaker. In the course of this episode I attempt to encapsulate all of Jacqueline Woodson’s major awards (this is a difficult thing to attempt, by the way), Kate and I honor Juneteenth, and we try desperately to figure out why this book never won any Caldecott love (to add to its Newbery Honor love).

Young children who are learning English require special consideration during virtual instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 1 in 6 children in kindergarten and 1st grade in the United States are learning English as a second (or third) language. As teachers grapple with the monumental task of providing remote instruction to English-language learners, it’s important that state and district leaders provide extensive support and clear guidelines for engaging their ELLs. As state and district leaders consider outreach through email, phone calls, and physical copies of instructional resources for providing equitable access to possible remote instruction when schools reopen, we offer the following evidence-informed suggestions for consideration.

f you’re a parent working from home with minimal or no help in the childcare department, this summer is likely going to be tough. Even getting an hour or two to focus on your work can seem like a dream when your kid is stuck inside and clamoring for attention. Michaeleen Doucleff is a reporter on NPR’s Science Desk, and she’s been feeling this stress big time. Up against a publishing deadline for a book she’s writing called Hunt, Gather, Parent about child-rearing traditions from other cultures, Doucleff was also fielding requests from her 4-year-old daughter, Rosy: “Draw me a narwhal!” “Read me a book!” “Bring me some milk!” Frustrated by Rosy’s interruptions, Doucleff decided she would retrain her daughter to occupy herself and demand less attention.

If the coronavirus pandemic placed issues of racial equity to the front burner, the historic weeks of protest have brought the topic to a rolling boil. Some districts have responded by reaffirming their commitment to racial equity, or by pledging to evaluate their teaching for bias. Others have severed ties with local police departments that have provided security in schools. But those who work to promote equity in schools see an opportunity to attack the deeper-rooted structures in school that perpetuate racial bias—if leaders are willing to see opportunity in the turmoil. Education Week asked six district leaders to share specific practices and processes they use in their school systems to promote equity. A common thread? All of them require deep, sometimes difficult reflection on district and school practices and assumptions that might otherwise go unexamined.

Working from home with small children, an ordeal and a privilege, has been de rigueur since agrarianism got going. Parents managed it for thousands of years — without day care, compulsory schooling or camps. What did children used to do all day? Short answer: They worked and and they played, often with minimal adult supervision. Unfortunately, as Steven Mintz, the author of “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” told me, “The pandemic has exaggerated and intensified the worst features of children’s play today: adult intrusion; the decline of physical, outdoor and social play; and mediation by screens.” Ow. So, how do we adults ameliorate that while staying safe, employed and reasonably sane? Here are some ideas.

There is no one answer for what the coming school year will look like, but it won’t resemble the fall of 2019. Wherever classrooms are open, there will likely be some form of social distancing and other hygiene measures in place that challenge traditional teaching and learning. Future outbreaks will make for unpredictable waves of closures. Virtual learning will continue. And all this will happen amid a historic funding crunch. American education has long been full of innovators practicing alternatives to the mainstream. When the giant, uncontrolled experiment of the pandemic rolled across the country, certain approaches proved their mettle in new ways. Here are some ideas that seem newly relevant given the constraints of 2020 and beyond.

This essay, by Hayden Miskinis, is one of the top three winners in the middle school category of our Seventh Annual Student Editorial Contest for which we received 1,242 entries. “I look down at my book. I slowly read the first line of jumpy letters that won’t stay still. It takes me a minute to find the next line, as my eyes jump around. This is a repeating process until I’m at the end of the page. This doesn’t just happen to me; it happens to 70-80 percent of dyslexic students in schools, and yet schools aren’t providing resources, teachers aren’t getting trained and people don’t even really understand dyslexia. … What is dyslexia? I didn’t know until 2015 when I was faced with the truth as to why I wasn’t progressing in school. I had been given interventions through a program called Title I which helps kids who don’t have access to books or reading in their homes, but it wasn’t working for me. I had plenty of books; I just couldn’t read them. What I needed were interventions that would work for me.”

The so-called coronavirus- or “COVID slide” may be especially troublesome for English-language learners, the 5 million students still learning English in the nation’s K-12 schools. Many of them could fall farther behind because of a confluence of factors, including limited access to the internet and the language support services they often receive in school. Along with their native English-speaking peers, English-learners likely will face a battery of tests when school resumes to gauge what they’ve learned and lost during the extended school closures—but those assessments may not fully reflect what they know and can do in academic subjects, especially if they cannot demonstrate their knowledge in English. A new policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute explores the policy and practical questions for states considering implementing native-language assessments, tests that may be better suited to gauge what students know and what subjects they need support in apart from their English-language instruction.

The International Literacy Association (ILA), in partnership with Kwame Alexander, award-winning children’s book author and founding editor of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint Versify, announced today “How to Raise and Teach Anti-Racist Kids,” a Facebook Live event starting at 7:00 p.m. ET this Thursday, June 18. The free event is a follow-up to June 4’s overwhelmingly successful KidLit Rally for Black Lives, hosted by advocacy group The Brown Bookshelf. The first half of Thursday’s event will be a panel discussion moderated by Alexander, followed by a 45-minute Q&A.

After teaching for more than 20 years, Kahlil Mwaafrika said he’s used to being an anomaly in urban Indianapolis schools. As an adjunct professor of early childhood education at IUPUI, only a handful of his hundreds of students are Black men. “There’s very few people who look like me in buildings,” he said. So in early 2018, he started working on a program to recruit, train, and place Black men as Indianapolis preschool teachers. Mwaafrika brought his idea to Blake Nathan, CEO of the Educate ME Foundation, an organization that works to diversify the national teaching population by recruiting and retaining educators of color. Earlier this year, Mwaafrika and Nathan formed the idea into a program called Educate ME Early and partnered with Early Learning Indiana to create 50 two-year fellowships for men of color.

Seven educators explain the importance of tapping students’ background knowledge in order to learn new content, and they describe ways to do just that, including through the use of surveys and anticipation guides.

When it comes to parenting students with learning differences, every family’s experience is unique. And that reality has never been more true than it is now as millions of students are out of school due to the coronavirus pandemic. As they juggle remote learning on top of already full plates, parents of these students offer a window into their world— what their challenges are, how they’re adapting, what their schedules look like, and the trauma they’re seeing in their kids.

Almost everything researchers know about what affects learning—time on task, online learning, summer learning loss, and chronic absenteeism—indicates that many students will come in with significant deficits from the 2019-20 school year. Just how much students could regress remains a matter of some debate; one estimate put it at a half or more of a year of learning. And every district must devise ways to diagnose and respond. But how do you start getting that gauge? Part of the problem, educators say, is that the term “diagnostic” in K-12 is a slippery, ill-defined one. So-called diagnostic tests may not provide as much helpful information as leaders think, and some of the most powerful strategies are also the simplest, though they will involve detailed work before school begins: Putting teachers in touch with one another, and going through what was actually taught from March onward with a fine-toothed comb. Here are their five tips for grasping what students know and don’t for the 2020-21 school year, and how to respond.

When Montgomery County Public Schools in southwestern Virginia transitioned to remote learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the district used school buses to deliver daily meals—and reading material—to students’ homes. But now that the academic year is over, the county has adopted an alternative delivery method: drones. The Montgomery County school system is located in Christiansburg, where Google’s drone delivery division, Wing, launched its services last October. Offered as a commercial service in partnership with such businesses as FedEx and Walgreens, Wing soon found a satisfied customer in Blacksburg Middle School librarian Kelly Passek, who petitioned the company to help send students library books. Wing’s Virginia head of operations, Keith Heyde, enthusiastically agreed.

When actor Melissa Victor thought about where she learned the stories that shaped her—important things about life, and how to braid hair—she realized that a lot of that education took place on the Baltimore stoop where she grew up. Victor is deeply spiritual, and at a certain point, as her theater parts started to dry up, she asked God for guidance. His advice, she says: Create a podcast for children of color. Create stories for them because they need to be represented. Victor published the first episode of Stoopkid Stories in January 2020 so that young Black children could hear themselves reflected in audio stories. This Black Voices playlist includes voices from Stoopkids Stories and other Black kidcasters, storytellers, authors, poets, activists, musicians, and leaders.

Teachers across California are worried that students who are learning English will fall behind in their language skills due to the school closures and are trying various approaches to connect with those students and their families. Even as concerns have been raised about the quality of instruction for native English speakers, those who are still new to the language face an even greater hurdle. “The big missing element is that we learn language, usually, in a face-to-face context,” said Leslie Hubbert, who teaches 3rd grade in the small agricultural town of Boonville in Mendocino County. “And English language learners are not getting as much face-to-face contact as they need. It’s just another way that this gap is widening more and more.”