Much of our work at FutureEd explores ways to address systemic challenges facing the education sector. Nowhere is this more important than in reorienting how reading is taught. Next week, FutureEd Senior Fellow Lynn Olson will moderate a discussion among state and school district experts about taking the science of reading to scale, including Penny Schwinn, Tennessee’s former education commissioner and a FutureEd senior fellow. Register here.
Organizing as Advocacy
We look at the potential of community organizing to support education reform in a just-released report titled The Action Is the Reaction: Community Organizing for Local Change. Written by sociologist and 50CAN Chief Executive Marc Porter Magee, the report provides practical lessons for today’s reformers drawn from a wide range of research on successful organizing in multiple fields. It’s the latest product from our AdvocacyLabs partnership with 50CAN.
Chronic Absenteeism
Chronic student absenteeism—missing more than 10 percent of school days in a year—has emerged as a critical problem for schools in the wake of the pandemic. In a commentary for The 74, FutureEd Policy Director Liz Cohen examines how outdated attendance data from the 2021-22 school year impedes state efforts to tackle the crisis.
FutureEd Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco and our research associates have done an analysis of more recent, 2022-23 data that has emerged from 16 states and found that the absenteeism picture is only slightly brighter in most states. She’ll update it as more 2022-23 absenteeism information becomes available. You can see FutureEd's tracker and related charts here.
Tutoring
The struggle to help students recover from the pandemic’s effects continues to dominate the education debate and more states and school districts are expanding tutoring in response. Tutoring offers great promise in helping students regain lost academic ground. But it’s unlikely to be effective unless school districts and school leaders stick to a proven blueprint for how it should be delivered, Editorial Director Maureen Kelleher wrote recently in The 74.
Other Work
We continue to follow state and school district spending of federal Covid-recovery money. As of October 10, states and districts had yet to spend some $72 billion of the $189 billion they received in federal aid and five states had more than half their dollars still available.
We have expanded our timeline of historical milestones in U.S. education after receiving a lot of great feedback from readers.
And The Churn, a regular feature on our site, chronicles recent changes among senior education staff in Congress, foundations, and national media. Send your leadership news as well as upcoming in-person and virtual events to [email protected], and we’ll be happy to post them.
Thanks and best wishes,
Tom
Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University [email protected]
@thomas_toch
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