Dear Colleagues,
I hope you're enjoying the summer and a well-deserved break before schools reopen. At FutureEd, we've been looking at education advocacy from several perspectives in recent weeks.
Change Agents
In a just-released report, we explore the pioneering work of researchers using “social simulations” to identify what works in public policy advocacy and what doesn’t. Written by sociologist and 50CAN chief executive Marc Porter Magee, Change Agents: What Social Simulations Can Teach Public Policy Advocates is the latest product of our AdvocacyLabs partnership with 50CAN.
Billion Dollar Question
After focusing on national trends in local Covid-relief spending for the first half of the year, we partnered recently with Connecticut analysts and advocates on a deep dive into how that state’s school districts plan to spend their federal aid. The resulting report, released today in partnership with the School and State Finance Project and ConnCAN, provides a detailed and in some instances surprising picture of local educational priorities in the Nutmeg State.
A program note, we’re speaking next week at the Education Writers Association annual conference in Orlando about this report and our national Covid-relief research.
Parent Power
Moms for Liberty and other new conservative parent groups may be grabbing headlines, but a different network of activist parent organizations, many of them led by women of color, has been evolving for nearly a decade, providing a new voice in the fight to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income students. Writers Greg Toppo and Jo Napolitano and I report on the movement in a new piece for Education Next.
FutureEd also explores the troubling alienation of many students in the wake of the pandemic and how to address the problem in an interview with teaching expert Doug Lemov, co-author of a new book entitled Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging.
On the higher ed front, FutureEd senior fellow Jeff Selingo writes about the implications of the rising number of partnerships among financially stretched colleges and universities and for-profit companies.
You can read about the newly announced changes in the Barr Foundation’s education team in The Churn, along with other recent leadership moves in the education sector. We continue to post upcoming in-person and virtual education policy events in The Horizon. Send your events and leadership news 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
