Today’s Literacy Headlines

Should teachers spend the precious time they have helping students dig deeply into a specific issue, problem, or question? Or should they teach more broadly about a wide variety of topics? The argument for the former approach—called “deep learning”—is that it improves student engagement and prepares kids to be better problem solvers in a world with increasingly complex challenges around health, economics, social justice, and climate change. A broader approach, the counter argument goes, introduces students to a greater mix of topics, giving them a better sense of all the issues and problems society is facing. Taking that “deep learning” approach is now more difficult than ever, as students are stuck at home learning remotely either full time or part time, or in socially distanced classrooms where collaboration, project-based learning, and lab experiments are hard, if not impossible, to do. That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t trying.

Voters around the country supported measures to strengthen ECE. States and localities have significant sway when it comes to designing and funding ECE programs, and these programs were on the ballot in a handful of places. There was already public support for investing more in ECE prior to 2020, but the pandemic has shined a glaring spotlight on our country’s child care crisis and brought urgency to this issue. Much of the action around ECE in this election was at the local level. For example, voters in Multnomah County,OR, which includes Portland, passed Measure 26-214 to create a universal pre-K program for three- and four-year-olds. Voters in San Antonio, TX overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition A to expand the city’s Pre-K for SA program, which provides high-quality pre-K in four centers and offers professional development and grants to other pre-K providers.

With remote learning looking like the state of play this fall, publishers have extended permissions for read alouds of their titles. To help educators and librarians engaged in online learning and storytimes held via Zoom and other virtual means, many publishers relaxed copyright restriction on their works at the start of the pandemic. The new Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster policies appear in this article, in addition to updates from Boyds Mills Kane, Enchanted Lion, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Sourcebooks, and TeachingBooks. These are included in SLJ’s full COVID-19 Publisher Information Directory.

Four teachers offer several suggestions for online tools to promote interactive learning, and many others offer readers’ comments about their favorites. Some of the tools discussed are Google slides, Padlet, and Nearpod.

Over the last decade, and certainly since March, when the pandemic shut down our schools, educators have become increasingly aware of the necessity to help students build social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies. In Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut, 77 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, and the strains of poverty have increased significantly since the pandemic. As educators, we recognize that meeting the needs of the whole child requires us to start early to avoid having disengaged and disenfranchised students in middle and high school. In response, Meriden has created a district-wide SEL program across our eight elementary schools.

In 1988, Katherine Paterson wrote in the Book Review that children need not only the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, but also “proper endings” in which “hope is a yearning, rooted in reality.” She says, “I know children need and deserve the kind of satisfaction they may get only from the old fairy tales. Children need all kinds of stories. Other people will write theirs, and I will write the ones I can. As a writer I have a responsibility always to come humbly and childlike to the empty page — a responsibility always to be ready to be surprised by truth, ready to be taught, even to be changed. It is a joy to write for the young, for most often they will come to my story eager to be surprised, to be taught, to be changed and to give their unique vision to the filling out of my imperfect one. And in this exchange of life and vision, of heart and mind, we come to know that we belong to one another.”

On Election Day, Multnomah County, which includes Portland, Ore., passed one of the most progressive universal preschool policies in the nation. The measure, to be paid for by a large tax on high earners, will provide free preschool for all children ages 3 and 4, in public schools and in existing and new private preschools and home-based child care centers. It will also significantly raise teachers’ wages so they are equivalent to those of kindergarten teachers. It seeks to overcome the central problem in early childhood care and education: It is unaffordable for many families, yet teachers are underpaid. The solution, Multnomah County voters decided, is to finance preschool with public funding instead of private tuition, and to pay teachers much more. It also seeks to overcome some of the pitfalls of universal preschool policies in places like New York and Washington, D.C. In doing so, early childhood researchers say the policy could serve as a blueprint for the rest of the country.

The coronavirus pandemic has allowed a long-standing educational myth to take on new force. Educators often claim that their efforts to serve some groups of children, primarily Black, Latino, and Native American, are hindered by things their families fail to do—things like supervise homework, comply with school requests, and communicate with teachers. During pandemic-initiated distance learning, these family contributions may be even more important than during normal classroom learning and even less possible, given that COVID-19 has hit families in these groups particularly hard. Concerned for their students, many educators fear that the pandemic will exacerbate the “family-disengagement problem.” We take a different view. Family disengagement is not inevitable during the pandemic or at other times. Our team of researchers and practitioners working toward school improvement in the Forest Grove, Ore., district believes that families of every background are ready to partner with schools when schools speak the right cultural language.

Texas has failed to prove it did enough to overhaul a system that illegally left thousands of public school students who have disabilities without needed special education services, according to a letter federal officials sent the state last month. A 2018 federal investigation found the state had been effectively denying students with disabilities the tools and services they need in order to learn, in violation of federal law. After visiting 12 Texas public schools in May 2019, the U.S. Department of Education did not find sufficient evidence Texas had done what was necessary to reach all the students who were previously denied special education services.