Welcome to the first FutureEd newsletter of the new school year.
First some organizational news. I’m excited to announce that Maureen Kelleher has joined FutureEd as our new editorial director. Maureen’s public policy experience and journalistic background make her a tremendous addition to our team, where she’ll contribute to our long-form and shorter writing and help keep the editorial trains running on time. A former high school teacher and past contributor to the Upjohn Institute, a labor economics think tank, the Center for American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, she served most recently as a writer, editor and editorial director at EdPost, a digital platform for education commentary and analysis. Previously, she was an award-winning writer at Catalyst Chicago and she has written for Education Week, The 74, Chalkbeat and other platforms. She’s based in Chicago and will bring her sharp takes on Chicago’s education landscape to our work.
We’re also excited to have three new research associates on our team: Elena Koshkin, Jingnan Sun, and Kristian Thymianos.
New Approaches to Persistent Challenges
I had the opportunity recently to talk with Washington Post education correspondent Laura Meckler about her engaging new book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Question for Racial Equity. The suburban Cleveland school district’s harrowing, decades-long campaign to bring students of different races together in public schools and ensure that every student is taught to high standards is an important story for anyone concerned about equity and opportunity in education. Laura’s perspectives on the most recent chapter of the Shaker desegregation saga, the abolition of ability tracking in multiple grades, are particularly revealing.
As part of a longer-term project to examine policy and funding mechanisms to scale high quality tutoring in public education once federal pandemic-response funding expires, Policy Director Liz Cohen shared lessons from a new study of Tennessee’s ambitious statewide tutoring initiative.
We also recently shed light on how millions of students may lose access to health care due to Medicaid enrollment changes, in the final piece from our outgoing Associate Director Phyllis Jordan. Phyllis was integral to building FutureEd into what it is today, and we wish her the very best.
How Did We Get Here?
Doing research for a speaking engagement led me to think that it might be helpful to the education community to collect in one place the major milestones in the history of American education. The FutureEd team worked on the project over the summer and here’s what we came up with. From the founding of the nation’s first school (Boston Latin) in 1635 to the first law establishing free public education (in Massachusetts in 1827), the launching of the federal school lunch program in 1946, the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, and the Supreme Court’s recent striking down of affirmative action in higher education admissions, we invite you to journey through five centuries of key events in American education. Let us know what else we should include in the timeline.
This week, we’ll be tuning in to listen to Liz Cohen discuss chronic absenteeism on thisEducation Week webinar. If you missed it, FutureEd Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco shared our findings on scaling literacy reform on this National Association of State Boards of Education webinar last week. And we continue to update our state-by-state K-12 ESSER spending tracker. To date, states have used just under 60 percent of the $189 billion in federal pandemic-response monies.
You can see the latest leadership moves in the K-12 sector in The Churn, and you can view upcoming in-person and virtual education convenings on our Events page. Send your events and leadership news to [email protected], and we’ll be happy to post them.
Best wishes for a productive fall,
Tom
Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University [email protected]
@thomas_toch
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