Author: Editor

Weeks Become Months: Teaching During a PandemicIn March of 2020, I said, “See you on Monday” to my students on what I believed to be an ordinary Friday, albeit a Friday the 13th. That would be the last day I would see them for months. There was a period of uncertainty as everyone grappled with our new reality. The unadulterated meaning of pandemic, hit fast and hard.  After weeks of educational triage, sending emails and hoping that students would tune into our online classrooms, the 2019-2020 school year ended with only a brief respite before the next school year began. March to May was rough, but how could we learn from what didn’t work during “quarantine teaching?”  How do we uphold educational integrity while still acknowledging that we are in the midst of a global pandemic and a frag...

New FAFSA Changes – Winners and LosersThe Free Application for Federal Student Aid will be undergoing significant changes soon and families, who hope to obtain financial aid, need to prepare for the FAFSA changes. Tucked into federal pandemic relief legislation that Congress passed during the Christmas holidays, was a dramatic overhaul to the FAFSA and financial aid rules. Last week, I talked to Mark Kantrowitz, a nationally prominent financial aid expert, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the federal financial aid system. I’d urge you to listen to my conversation with Mark, who knows more about the upcoming FAFSA changes than just about anybody in the nation. The changes will kick in for the 2023-2024 school year. This means parents filling out the FAFSA as early as Oct. 1, 2022 will b...

Taking the ACT and SAT Going Forward – Or NotIf your child is a high school junior, it could be trickier this year to decide whether to take the SAT or ACT in 2021 (assuming greater availability) and also whether to submit scores. To help with this decision, I am running an informative post written by Bruce Reed, a cofounder of Compass Education Group, which regularly creates high quality advice about standardized testing. In addition to Reed’s post below, I’d urge you to download a copy of an invaluable guide that Compass has been producing for years and regularly updates. The Compass Guide to College Admission Testing, which is 69 pages, covers such topics as the current testing landscape, test-optional developments, PSAT and PreACT, Score Choice and superscoring and much more. Taking th...

Former lobbyist details how privatizers are trying to end public educationWhen champions of market-based reform in the United States look at public education, they see two separate activities — government funding education and government running schools. The first is okay with them; the second is not. Reformers want to replace their bête noire — what they call the “monopoly of government-run schools” — with freedom of choice in a competitive market dominated by privately run schools that get government subsidies. Published at Fri, 16 Apr 2021 10:00:56 +0000 Article source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/04/16/former-lobbyist-details-how-privatizers-are-trying-to-end-public-education/

What Can Teachers Learn by Strapping Brain-Monitoring Devices to Students?It’s a bit of a mystery what goes on inside the brain when students learn. But thanks to relatively new breakthroughs in portable EEG devices, which can measure the brain’s electrical activity in what are known as brainwaves, researchers are able to run experiments in classrooms as never before. Ido Davidesco, an assistant professor of learning sciences at the University of Connecticut, says such research will yield insights that can help teachers do their jobs better. One area he’s exploring involves trying to better understand what teaching practices best hold students’ attention. “This question became even more timely and relevant [during the pandemic] because students and teachers find it really hard to concentra...