The concerns in schools that are headed toward higher ed.
Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director for education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, invited me as a guest on The Report Card’s Year in Review podcast to help sum up 2022 and do a little looking ahead. I’m really glad he did — not least because he and the two other reporters on the podcast, Laura Meckler of The Washington Post and Linda Jacobson of The 74, offered a crash course in some of the biggest issues occupying reporters who cover elementary and secondary education.
I’m not minimizing the big higher-ed stories of the year and those on the horizon that I highlighted, among them: the enrollment decline, President Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan, the impending Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions, and the continuing wave of budget cuts and college closures and mergers (nicely tracked by Higher Ed Dive here). But I was especially struck by the stories that Meckler and Jacobson cited.
Issues like chronic absenteeism in big urban and rural districts, the impact of classroom shootings on kids, and schools’ struggles to handle teenagers’ mental-health challenges might not be day-to-day concerns for college leaders and those who work with them. But these will matter to higher ed in the not-so-distant future, as those K-to-12 students make their way to college. And they could matter even more if those students don’t ever even make it to college.
Those of us who might be a little higher-ed siloed in our thinking on education would do well to widen our perspective. The Covid-era damage to students’ academic progress is “going to be with us for a while,” Meckler said. And, as Jacobson noted, the high rates of absenteeism — as much as 30 to 40 percent in some districts — is a societal concern. “Where are those kids going?” she wondered.
Most sobering to me, though, was what Jacobson considered the biggest story of the year: the mass shooting in Uvalde County, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were killed at Robb Elementary School just months before the nation commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting, in which 20 children and six adult staff members were killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Jacobson didn’t mention the myriad other mass shootings that have come in between. She didn’t have to. Young people entering college have been raised with this reality, along with active shooter and lockdown drills, and that’s something colleges now need to remember, even as they themselves deal with their own episodes of gun-violence on campus. Last month, I saw a news report that Clemson University is installing new emergency lockdown technology in some of its classrooms. That isn’t really the kind of education innovation that I am excited to cover. But we don’t always get the stories we want.
Out and about in the months to come.
One of my resolutions for 2023 — Covid willing — is to see and talk to more of you in person.
I’ve just begun filling in my calendar, but I’m excited to report on a few events already locked in: In February, I’ll be on a panel at the Community College National Legislative Summit in D.C., co-hosted by the American Association of Community Colleges and the Association of Community College Trustees. In March, I’ll be back at SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas, hosting The Chronicle’s eighth annual “Shark Tank: Edu Edition” (details soon on how to apply to be a contestant). And in April, I’ll be gathering and sharing insights on higher-ed trends to watch when I’m at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. Hope to see many of you at these and other events as the year rolls along.
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- California and other jurisdictions that ban the use of public money for travel to states with restrictive laws on abortion or LGBTQ rights are also restricting academic freedom, a professor at Indiana University, Aaron E. Carroll, writes in an op-ed in The New York Times. Such bans “dictate where faculty members can go to learn, teach and research,” he argues, and that’s especially true for less-established faculty members who might not have outside grant funding to finance their work in those states.
- Faced with a shortage of childcare workers, the Southwestern Vermont Medical Center is paying students to work less so they can finish their degrees faster at the Community College of Vermont, according to a report in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. The grant-funded program is small — it will probably only fund about 10 students — but one medical-center official calls it a model that “could solve a lot of the labor pipeline [issues] across the country.”
- Forty-eight million American adults struggle to read basic English, leaving many of them unable to find and keep a decent job, navigate street signage, follow medical instructions or vote. They’re also vulnerable to scams and face stigma and shame. And as an investigation by Pro Publica finds, the infrastructure for adult education is profoundly inadequate. But as the news organization also reports, experts say several fixes, such as prioritizing those with the greatest need and ensuring that people’s immigration status doesn’t prevent them from enrolling in literacy courses, could ease the problem.
- New “chatty” digital assistants, virtual reality, and electric cars are some of the technologies likely to “invade our lives” in 2023, according to The New York Times “Tech Fix” writer Brian X. Chen. “It’s very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant,” Chen writes in his annual trends piece. Then again, even Chen says you might want to take these predictions with a grain of salt, since some of the same tech appeared in his prior-year prediction pieces too. As he noted a year ago, “technology takes a long time to mature before most of us actually want to buy it.”
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, (yeah, for now at least, I’m still there) @GoldieStandard is my handle.
