The “Learning Loss” Trap
This school year, as teachers carefully construct unit plans, build community with students, and navigate ongoing staff shortages, they also have to contend with a barrage of media coverage catastrophizing […]
COVID-19
To Find What Works in the Virtual Classroom, Many Teachers Are Adapting Old Strategies
Matt Reed, a teacher at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, was worried about one of his 9th-grade students. Portland Public Schools, he explained, had been all-remote since March 13, […]
Who’s to Blame?
A middle school teacher organizes a tribunal for her students on responsibility for the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Among those on trial are Mother Nature, Gen Z/Millennials, the Healthcare Industry, Racism and White Supremacy, the Chinese Government, the U.S. Government, and the Capitalist System.
Our Stories: Students Curate the Museum of Corona History
The best teachers that I’ve had are still quiet voices in my head. In college, I took Professor Phyllis Jackson’s art history course “Black Aesthetics and the Politics of (Re)presentation.” […]
Schools Reopen — and Teachers Fight for Their Lives, Their Students, and the Future of Public Education
As schools begin to reopen, within teacher unions around the country, teachers have been coming together to discuss the risks they’re willing to take — both to protect public health […]
Coronavirus, Sick-Outs, and the Fight to Close New York City Schools
New York City has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, and its public schools, which serve 1.1 million students and employ nearly 135,000 people, officially closed on March 17. […]
The Fight of Our Lives
This has been a year like no other. Fear. Illness and death. Trauma for our students, their families, their communities — and for us, as educators. We are becoming new teachers, […]
How Google Classroom Erases Trans Students
There are so many voices right now grieving what we have lost with the school closure — our relationships with students and co-workers, the laughter and energy that echo down […]
The Pandemic Is a Portal
Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything anymore — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — […]
“I Don’t Like China or Chinese People Because They Started This Quarantine”
On April 20, 2020, blogger LittleGrayThread made a Facebook post of a note her daughter had written. She reported that in a Zoom class meeting, one of her daughter’s 2nd-grade […]
Crisis, Change, and Canceling the Teacher Performance Assessment
As former K–12 teachers who are now teacher educators in California, we share grave concern regarding the expectation for preservice teachers to complete their Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) in order […]
Paid Leave in the Time of a Pandemic
Educators know firsthand what lack of paid family and medical leave means for their students and families — and for themselves. Now, the pandemic has dramatically elevated the need for […]
From the Race to the Top to the Plunge to the Bottom
Horror movie sequels are notoriously bad. This one may be the worst. In 2009, federal intervention during the last financial crisis gave rise to the Obama administration’s signature education initiative: […]
The Coronavirus and Our Work
The coronavirus crisis is horrific, and even in its early days has led to great suffering, and widespread terror. But this crisis is not a time of retreat; it is a time to insist on, to organize for, an agenda of human rights and wealth redistribution. Has there ever been a time when the need for universal free health care was more essential — and more obvious? Or paid sick leave? Or for everyone to have guaranteed access to clean water and a safe place to live? So yes, please wash your hands, and then raise them, to continue to fight for equality and justice.