How covid-19 is inspiring education reform

IN THE FIRST three months of the pandemic Shawnie Bennett, a single mother from Oakland in California, lost her job and her brother, who died of covid-19. Grief made the trials of lockdown more difficult—including that of helping her eight-year-old daughter, Xa’viar, continue her schooling online. In November Ms Bennett signed her daughter up for online classes provided by a local parents’ group, which arranged for her to see a tutor every Saturday morning. A test this month showed that her reading skills are improving fast.

The weekend lessons are among several online services created over the past year by The Oakland Reach, an advocacy group. Less than a third of black and brown children in Oakland read at their grade level, says Lakisha Young, its co-founder. For five years her group has lobbied for improvements to their schooling. But when learning shifted online it began hiring teachers to work with children directly. Ms Young thinks families who have benefited from this will demand more from their schools in future; the local district has already found cash to adopt and expand some of her group’s work. She says the pandemic brought a moment “to create the things we have been fighting our asses off for”.

Big shocks have sometimes changed schooling for the better. The second world war midwifed the Butler Act in Britain, which increased years of compulsory schooling and abolished the fees still charged by many state schools. After Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, officials there embarked on sweeping school reforms. Nine years later graduation rates had increased by 9-13 percentage points.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/24/how-covid-19-is-inspiring-education-reform

 

Educație sexuală, la pachet cu responsabilitate: La clasă și în spațiul public

Imaginează-ți că ești părintele a două fete, una într-a VII-a și cealaltă cu un an mai mare. În același an, afli că ambele sunt însărcinate și că sarcina e prea avansată ca să mai poți interveni cumva. Ce-ți trece prima oară prin minte?

Diriginta băiatului tău de clasa a VII-a te sună înaintea unei excursii și te anunță că a aflat de mesajele deocheate pe care el și colegii lui și le trimit: despre prezervative și cu ce fete ar putea să facă sex. Cum discuți cu el despre asta?

Pune-te în pielea unui profesor de gimnaziu care vede la ore o fată de clasa a VIII-a însărcinată. Ai discuții cu elevii din clasă sau te prefaci că nu s-a întâmplat nimic?

Sunt situații reale care au apărut în școli din România. Pornind de la existența unor astfel de exemple, în ultimii ani, activiști, politicieni și o parte a părinților au cerut introducerea educației sexuale în școli – numai în 2015, peste 60 de ONG-uri au semnat un apel către Ministerul Educației pentru introducerea materiei printre orele obligatorii. Asta nu s-a întâmplat însă, pentru că mereu a intervenit rezistența unor grupuri conservatoare; Asociația Părinților pentru Ora de Religie ori Coaliția pentru Familie, sprijinite de Biserica Ortodoxă Română (BOR), sunt doar câteva dintre organizațiile care au blocat astfel de inițiative.

https://www.dor.ro/educatie-sexuala-responsabilitate-scoli/

Educație sexuală, la pachet cu responsabilitate: La clasă și în spațiul public

 

Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders

School-based data from other sources show similarly low rates. Texas reported 1,490 cases among students for the week ending on September 27, with 1,080,317 students estimated at school—a rate of about 0.14 percent. The staff rate was lower, about 0.10 percent.

These numbers are not zero, which for some people means the numbers are not good enough. But zero was never a realistic expectation. We know that children can get COVID-19, even if they do tend to have less serious cases. Even if there were no spread in schools, we’d see some cases, because students and teachers can contract the disease off campus. But the numbers are small—smaller than what many had forecasted.

Predictions about school openings hurting the broader community seem to have been overblown as well. In places such as Florida, preliminary data haven’t shown big community spikes as a result of school openings. Rates in Georgia have continued to decline over the past month. And although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I’ve read many stories about outbreaks at universities, and vanishingly few about outbreaks at the K–12 level.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-arent-superspreaders/616669/

 

Chiudere la scuola ha conseguenze gravissime

Chiudere la scuola è il modo giusto di affrontare la pandemia? I benefici della chiusura sono così evidenti da compensare il prezzo che gli studenti pagheranno nel corso intero della loro vita? I risultati preliminari delle analisi empiriche successive alla riapertura delle scuole in Europa sono contrastanti e sollevano molti dubbi.

In Germania tre ricercatori dell’Institute of labor economics di Bonn hanno stimato l’effetto della riapertura delle scuole sulla diffusione del covid-19, approfittando del fatto che i länder cominciano l’anno scolastico in date diverse. Quelli dove le scuole non erano ancora state riaperte al momento della ricerca hanno funzionato da gruppo di controllo.

Le stime suggeriscono che la riapertura delle scuole abbia causato una diminuzione dei casi statisticamente significativa. Secondo gli autori la riapertura potrebbe aver contribuito a contenere l’epidemia, anziché accelerarla.

https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/fabio-sabatini/2020/10/21/chiusura-scuole-italia

 

La scuola d’avanguardia a Rimini che può essere un modello anche oggi

Nel 1945 le condizioni di Rimini sono tragiche: 396 bombardamenti subiti in undici mesi, più di seicento vittime civili, più di quattromila edifici distrutti e tremila gravemente danneggiati, l’82 per cento della città porta i segni delle bombe. Il sindaco Alberto Ciari chiede aiuto al Dono svizzero, un programma internazionale di aiuti. Qualche mese dopo arrivano in città Margherita Zoebeli e Felix Schwarz. Lei ha 33 anni, nel 1936 durante la guerra civile spagnola ha soccorso ed evacuato i bambini da Barcellona verso la Francia, e nel 1944 ha fatto la staffetta partigiana in val d’Ossola. Lui ha 28 anni, è un architetto e ha studiato con il meglio dell’avanguardia europea. Sono due socialisti.

Con i fondi del Dono svizzero progettano un centro sociale – con docce e mense– di cui fa parte anche un giardino d’infanzia (un asilo) per 150 bambini. Trovano uno spazio nel centro della città bombardata, accanto alle rovine dell’anfiteatro, e in pochi mesi creano una struttura di emergenza con tredici grandi baracche di legno.

https://www.internazionale.it/reportage/christian-raimo/2020/08/29/ceis-rimini-scuola

 

Coronavirus shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils form.

All this is knowledge as basic as being aware that Shakespeare was a playwright. Yet ignorance of such earthy matters sometimes seems to be worn as a badge of sophistication. I love Shakespeare, and I believe the world would be a poorer and a sadder place without him. But we would survive. The issues about which most people live in ignorance are, by contrast, matters of life and death.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/12/coronavirus-education-pandemic-natural-world-ecology

 

Italian lessons: what we’ve learned from two months of home schooling

Most of us in Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy, remember the weekend of 22 February very clearly. To begin with there were just rumours – phone calls and messages flying around between friends – but then it was confirmed: all schools in the region were going to close for a week.

The decision was, in many ways, shocking. At that time, there had only been three deaths from Covid-19 in Italy, and only 152 reported infections. It seemed strange that education was the first social activity to be sacrificed. I guessed it was because it wasn’t perceived to be economically productive. Nothing else was closing: football grounds, bars, shops and ski resorts were still open for business, and no schools in any other European country had closed.

Still, to our three kids – Benny (15), Emma (13) and Leo (9) – the idea of a week off seemed like bliss. We had moved back to Parma from the UK three years earlier, and by comparison with the UK, education here seemed relentless. Many pupils go to school six days a week and there are no half-term holidays. But my wife, Francesca, who is Italian, and I were both worried. She works with Syrian refugees, which isn’t a job you can suddenly drop, and I had just been offered a 9-to-5 job, after 21 years of being freelance. We, like all our friends, suddenly had an acute childcare crisis.

The announcement had been so sudden that schools had few plans or resources in place to teach remotely. Italy spends a lot less on education than almost every other western country. Spending per student (from primary school to university) equates to $8,966 per annum, compared to $11,028 in the UK and $11,502 in Sweden. The under-investment is so serious that in December 2019, the education minister, Lorenzo Fioramonti, resigned in protest.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/24/italy-home-schooling-coronavirus-lockdown-what-weve-learned

 

Abolire il carcere, prove di utopia in Europa

Una mattina di qualche inverno fa, il freddo di Padova aveva seccato i terreni intorno al carcere Due palazzi e gelava il fiato di decine di persone davanti al suo ingresso. Erano giornalisti e familiari di detenuti, ed erano lì per partecipare a un convegno organizzato dall’associazione Ristretti orizzonti. Tra loro c’era una ragazza di diciotto anni. Piccola e magra, era contenta e nervosa per il padre, che doveva intervenire a uno degli incontri. Lui era in prigione da quando lei era nata. Lei non aveva mai mangiato un gelato con lui. Le chiesi qual era stata la cosa più complicata da gestire in tutti quegli anni. Ci pensò un po’ su, poi rispose: “All’inizio è stato il pensiero che mio padre fosse innocente, poi il dover fare i conti con i suoi sbagli, infine il giudizio degli altri. Per tutti sono solo la figlia di un ergastolano. Ho cominciato ad avere meno paura di questo giudizio quando ho capito che il carcere è uno specchio. Giudichiamo i detenuti e le loro famiglie, ma dimentichiamo che stiamo giudicando anche il nostro riflesso”.

https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/giuseppe-rizzo/2019/06/19/abolire-carcere

 

Who Needs the Humanities When You Have Jair Bolsonaro?

According to President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian education leaves a lot to be desired. “Everything is going increasingly downhill,” he said last month, to journalists during a trip to Dallas. “What we want is to save education.”

That would seem a reasonable thing to say if Mr. Bolsonaro were, for example, announcing a new education plan or a substantial increase in spending on public schools. But instead, he was alluding to a $1.5 billion “freeze” to Brazil’s education budget. (The government insists on calling it freeze, rather than the cut it is; that’s because, in theory, the funds will be made available when the economic situation improves.) These cuts amount to 30 percent of the discretionary budgets (which cover utility bills, scholarships, cleaning, maintenance and security, among other things) at all federal universities.

 

Why streaming kids according to ability is a terrible idea

A class of 15-year-olds. We’ve just read a scene from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I hesitate for a moment, before launching into a group discussion. Half the students have (I hope) been reading their copies of No Fear Shakespeare, a kid-friendly translation of the Bard’s original. For three students, even these literacy demands are beyond them. Another simply can’t focus. Having confiscated his iPad, I give him pens and paper to draw with. I just need to keep this one at school for as long as possible.

I can ask the terrified No Fear group to identify the key characters in this scene, and maybe provide a tentative plot summary. I can ask most of the class about character development, and how Romeo is feeling (he’s very upset, by the way) – if they were paying attention. Five of them might be able to support their statements with textual evidence. Three will be able to explain how the imagery might affect the audience. Now two curious students are wondering if oxymorons reflect Shakespeare’s thematic concerns with extremes, and arguing about whether it is better to live a life of moderation or one of passionate engagement. Meanwhile, I non-verbally de-escalate an arms race of scribbled penises that threatens to spill out onto the desks.

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-streaming-kids-according-to-ability-is-a-terrible-idea