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Dear Colleagues,

The American education system was a hospitalized patient in 2022—on a path to recovery from the devastating early stages of the pandemic but beset by complications ranging from teacher shortages to students’ mounting social and emotional needs, the fraught political environment in many school districts, and troubling reports on learning loss.

A staggering $275 billion in federal aid to the elementary, secondary and post-secondary education sectors since 2020 improves the prospects of recovery. But does the nation's vast, decentralized education system have the capacity to spend the unprecedented federal largesse effectively?

FutureEd has sought to help policymakers navigate that task and the many other challenges they’ve faced in 2022 with independent analysis and innovative ideas contained in more than 130 publications podcasts, webinars, and conference presentations. Here are some highlights.

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Students and Families
If there’s one lesson from the pandemic, it’s that schools and education policymakers ignore students’ social and emotional well-being at their peril. And because the pandemic turned kitchen tables into classrooms and gave families up-close insights into their children’s education, parents' traditional hands-off relationship to schools has given way to a new era of activism across the political spect
* FutureEd Associate Director Phyllis Jordan profiled solutions to devastating, post-pandemic levels of chronic student absenteeism ([link removed]) for The New York Times.
* FutureEd Research Advisor David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin discussed ways that educators can help students manage stress ([link removed]) .
* Paul Reville and Lynne Sacks of the Education Redesign Lab at Harvard examined strategies for re-engaging students ([link removed]) in the wake of the pandemic.
* We partnered with Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families to explain how Medicaid can support student mental health ([link removed]) .
* Teaching expert Doug Lemov discussed the importance of building a sense of belonging ([link removed]) among students and ways to do so.
* Journalists Greg Toppo and Jo Napolitano and I wrote a FutureEd report ([link removed]) on the new parent activism, a piece that was excerpted in Education Next ([link removed]) .

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The Teaching Profession

The pandemic, the culture wars, historically low unemployment rates in the general economy and the massive infusion of federal Covid aid to spend on new staff have disrupted teacher supply and demand—deepening teacher shortages that were already severe in some subjects and schools, but also spawning new staffing strategies that may strengthen the teaching profession longer term.
* We published a comprehensive picture ([link removed]) of school districts' Covid-response investments in the teaching profession.
* I explored the best ways to respond toteacher shortages ([link removed]) for The New York Times, and we hosted a webinar ([link removed]) on shortages with national experts.
* Phyllis Jordan and Matt Kraft of Brown University outlined a strategy for addressing a national shortage of substitute teachers. ([link removed])

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Standards, Teaching and Testing
As achievement lagged during the pandemic and teachers struggled to help students recover, we sought to support state and local efforts to counter learning loss:
* We compiled states’ 2022 test results ([link removed]) to paint a comprehensive, state-by-state picture of achievement declines during the pandemic.
* Laura Slover and Michael Cohen of CenterPoint Education Solutions wrote an extended essay ([link removed]) on the need to bring the standards movement into the nation’s classrooms. And we hosted a webinar ([link removed]) on the movement’s unfinished agenda.
* We worked with Education Trust and Education Reform Now to highlight the ingredients of promising state tutoring strategies ([link removed]) .
* FutureEd Senior Fellow Lynn Olson wrote about critical information gaps in early education ([link removed]) .
* FutureEd Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco examined the rise of evidence-based reading instruction ([link removed]) for The New York Times.
* Bruno Manno of the Walton Family Foundation and Lynn Olson made a case ([link removed]) for expanding secondary and post-secondary curriculum pathways.
* FutureEd Research Advisor Morgan Polikoff examined the impact of Florida’s curriculum battles ([link removed]) on the textbook industry.
* Researcher Bob Balfanz of Johns Hopkins discussed “early warning systems ([link removed]) ” to keep high school students on track for graduation.

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Pandemic Recovery
With the federal government giving state and local education leaders wide latitude in spending Covid aid, many wanted to understand emerging state and local recovery priorities. In response, FutureEd published a series of analyses of proposed spending in school districts educating 75 percent of the nation’s students.
The reports explored:
* Planned local spending ([link removed]) on staffing, academic recovery, facilities and more than dozen other priorities
* Spending priorities of school districts with differing student poverty rates ([link removed])
* The varying Covid aid investments of rural, urban and suburban school districts ([link removed])
* Spending priorities in red and blue states ([link removed])
* School districts’ tutoring ([link removed]) ([link removed]) and summer-learning ([link removed]) spending plans

We also explained Department of Education guidance ([link removed]) on spending federal Covid funding, provided testimony ([link removed]) to Congress on using relief funds for academic recovery, and co-authored a detailed analysis ([link removed]) of local Covid-relief spending plans in Connecticut.
The Year Ahead
The year ahead holds considerable opportunity for the education sector, and many challenges.

We’ll start to learn what dividends state and local investments of the federal pandemic funds might pay in schools and colleges. We’ll begin to get a sense of whether more tutoring and summer schooling, more school psychologists and social workers, a spreading commitment to sounder reading instruction and other trends will translate into greater student engagement and more learning.

But the hard work of pandemic recovery and racial equity in an increasingly diverse education system continues in the absence of an over-arching national education agenda of the sort that drove school improvement for decades. In the elementary and secondary sectors, that leaves leadership in the hands of millions of teachers and hundreds of thousands of principals, administrators and school board members, and state officials. We need to help them in every way possible, because the stakes are high for both students and the nation.

FutureEd will continue to contribute as a source of independent ideas and analysis. We’ll feature a new look in 2023, a new website, new staff, and new work designed to further our mission of promoting educational equity and social mobility.

We wish everyone in education and beyond the happiest of holidays and a joyful new year.

Tom

Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University
[email protected]
@thomas_toch


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