Mental Health Problems Loom for the COVID Generation. Here’s What Schools Can Do

By Arianna Prothe

The nation’s schools were already struggling to meet students’ mental health needs when the pandemic hit. How can schools rise to meet students’ ballooning needs in that area as a massive school reopening gets underway?

To be sure, it will be difficult to balance mental health support with an equally massive academic recovery. But child development experts say it’s a balance schools must attempt to strike if they want students to regain their academic footing after an unprecedented year of disruptions, stress, and trauma.

An infusion of federal COVID-19 relief money will help, but how those funds are used will be pivotal. And experts say that schools cannot just focus on the students they know are in crisis; they must bolster supports for all students as well as staff members.

Even before the pandemic, mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, were on the rise among children and adolescents and many schools were struggling to keep pace with that demand. Suicide rates among children 10 and older had also climbed significantly since 2007, making suicide the second leading cause of death among adolescents before the pandemic.

And the pandemic certainly hasn’t made things easier for kids.

Felecia Evans, a principal at Lander Elementary in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, said her students are struggling with family housing loss, job loss, food insecurity, and just general anxiety about what may come next. Thirty percent of Evans’ students come from low-income households.

“My student support team, myself, my school psychologist, the school counselor, my assistant principal, we meet every week with our ‘high watch list’ of kids,” she said. “And it’s kind of changed the nature of my work. We used to spend a lot more time being able to talk about teaching and learning and now it’s really trying to problem solve and help people get access to resources.”null

Nationally, the number of young children and adolescents going to the emergency room because of a mental-health crisis has shot up during the pandemic, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

More students are asking for services through their schools, a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of teenagers found. Twenty-one percent of high schoolers said that during the pandemic they felt for the first time they would benefit from school-based mental health services.

But professional organizations such as the National Association of School Psychologists, the American School Counselor Association, and the National Association of School Nurses say that there are not enough support staffs in schools—at least not now. 

NASP recommends a ratio of 500 students per school psychologist, but the national average is actually closer to 1,500 to one. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 250 students to one school counselor, but the national average in the 2018-19 school year, the most recent year for which data was available, was 430 students per school counselor. Only about half of the nation’s schools have a dedicated full-time nurse, while the National Association of School Nurses advocates for one full-time nurse in each school building.

How federal relief money can help

Some states and districts have already committed to using their share of the $129 billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid to hire more school psychologists and counselors.

While some districts may be reluctant to hire new staff, whether it be school psychologists, counselors, social workers, or nurses, with funds that will run out in a few years, it may be a bet worth making, said Rob Coad, a school psychologist and a member of the National Association of School Psychologists’ School Safety and Crisis Re

Once schools, students, and parents get something they find valuable, he figures, it can be hard to take away.

“Our hope is that as you use this stimulus money to build support in schools, [these services] become normalized, and then the sites and ultimately the district see the value in it, and they reallocate and protect money to continue that over the long haul,” he said.

There are many other ways schools can expand their mental health services with the help of federal aid, such as using telehealth to connect students to mental health-care providers and training for teachers and staff on how to identify and respond to children who may be struggling with mental health issues, said Phyllis Jordan, the editorial director at FutureEd, a think tank based at Georgetown University.

“Another issue: You’re going to have some discipline problems this year,” said Jordan. “There are going to be kids who have behavioral outbursts, and you’re just going to have kids who are out of practice at being in school who are just not behaving properly. And the worst thing a school can do is flush them all out with suspensions or harsh discipline. There is going to have to be some attention and training on issues like restorative practices and ways of coping with these issues that kids are going to have.”

For districts that haven’t invested in a social-emotional learning curriculum, now, with this infusion of federal dollars, would be a good time to do so, said Jordan.

Schools can also tap personnel or volunteers from their community or a program such as AmeriCorps to mentor students, said Jordan. Research has shown that positive relationships play an important role in developing students’ ability to cope and learn.null

Jordan also recommends that schools consider either starting or stepping up teacher home visits, which are a powerful way to develop relationships with families and gain a thorough understanding of what students are facing in their home lives and the suppor they have outside of school.

STUDENT WELL-BEINGHow to Build Relationships With Students During COVID-19Arianna Prothero,

If schools are not in a position to go on a hiring spree or invest in, say, a new social-emotional learning curriculum, there are other steps they can take to make a difference, said Coad.

“This is a difficult time to try to start over and establish a new curriculum because students and teachers have been asked to pivot yet again.” Schools have more capacity to help students than they may realize, he said.“If a school is struggling, it’s probably more of a process of reallocating resources rather than not having them. We have to remind our fellow professionals about the skills that they have that help us screen and triage students that are in need.”

School partnerships with community mental health providers are another strategy for bolstering the supports students can access through school.

Finally, climate surveys are a low-resource tool schools can use to assess the mental health needs of their students as they return to classes at the end of summer, said Jordan. Even if a school already uses school climate surveys, Jordan recommends passing a survey out at the start of the academic year and adding additional, pandemic-specific questi

On mental health, schools must move from responding to preventing

Whatever route schools go, they should invest in prevention as well as in responding to children who are already in a state of crisis, said Sharon Hoover, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.null

While students will in most cases benefit greatly from more support staff such as counselors and psychologists, schools also need to have strong systems of universal supports in place, she said. For example, they should be teaching mental health literacy in all grades.

“This really should be a core part of your curriculum …teaching kids how to obtain and sustain positive mental health, understand mental illness, and how to seek help if they need it,” said Hoover. “Then as you think of moving up that triangle of support, investing in some kind of assessment system. Some people call it well-being check-ins. Some people call it mental health screening, but just a way to identify how your students are doing and if and when they need additional mental health support.”

Similar to screening for vision and hearing problems in school, said Hoover, if schools don’t have the staff in-house, they can refer students to a provider.

Another important component to prevention and universal supports is social-emotional learning.
While not a replacement for other mental health supports such as therapy, social-emotional learning can help root efforts to improve mental health schoolwide, said Stephanie Andrews, the interim executive director of student and family support services at Tulsa public schools.

“I don’t want anyone to think that if we do self-awareness, that we’re going to get rid of depression,” she said. But social-emotional learning can teach children how to name and express what they are feeling. “I think having emotional literacy is really important, just as important as academic vocabulary.”

Identifying emotions is key to tackling the tough ones, said Andrews, something that students—and oftentimes even adults—need help learning how to do.
SEL exercises such as “feelings circles” and “mood meters” can give students the space to examine their emotions and develop the vocabulary they need to express them and ask for help when they need them.

Another crucial piece to providing mental health supports school wide is teacher well-being.

“We can’t have healthy students if we don’t have a healthy education workforce,” said Hoover. “And so that is one thing that schools should be thinking about as they are considering how to support student mental health. They first have to assess and address educator well-being.”

One way the Tulsa school system has tackled this was by setting up a hotline specifically for teachers and principals to call when they’re stressed or overwhelmed.

SCHOOL & DISTRICT MANAGEMENT Teachers’ Mental Health Has Suffered in the Pandemic. Here’s How Districts Can Help Catherine Gewertz,

At Lander Elementary School in Ohio, principal Evans believes giving teachers breathing room and time for collaboration is an important part of well-being. She has eked out more time for planning and professional development for teachers during the pandemic by reorganizing the entire school day and week. Her campus has been teaching students in-person for most of the school year.

When they started in September, Evans lumped the school’s special courses for each grade—physical education, music class, art, and maker spaces—into a designated day during the week. For example, on Monday, all 1st graders start and end the day with their home teacher, but spend the rest of the day in special classes and lunch. On Tuesday, the schedule rotates to the 2nd graders, and so forth. 

This system frees up a four-hour block of time, including lunch, for teachers in each grade level once a week. They use the time to meet with their other grade-level teachers and game out an academic plan for the upcoming week, reflect on what’s working and what’s not, discuss students who are struggling, participate in professional development, touch base with parents, and conduct one-on-one assessments for the few students who are learning remotely.null

“I have seen them grow as collaborative teams because they don’t feel like they are on an island or on this constant treadmill,” said Evans. “With the curve balls that COVID has thrown us, just being able to count on … consolidated time with a team of people has been important for them.”

Evans also moved back the start time for students’ school day. Students and teachers used to start at the same time, and giving teachers an hour in the morning to prepare before the kids arrive has also helped with teacher self-care and morale, she said.

While Evans said her school could benefit from more direct mental health resources (at the top of her wish list is on-site, five-day-a-week therapy for students and families), this new schedule has gone a long way to provide more support for Lander’s teachers.

And it’s been popular with teachers, like Nicole Rucci-Macauda, who teaches 3rd grade. 

“I think that’s helped everbody’s mental health because you’re not as rushed,” she said. “You have time to look deeper into other things—to meet with parents, to meet with a counselor for one of your students and talk about strategies and things like that.”
The union was hesitant when she pitched this reordered schedule last summer, Evans said, but the teachers have since embraced it. And Lander Elementary will continue to operate on the same schedule, with minor tweaks, next school year.

Learning Loss, in General, Is a Misnomer’: Study Shows Kids Made Progress During COVID-19

By Sarah Schwartz

Students listen to their teacher at Hawthorne Scholastic Academy in Lakeview on March 1, 2021. A new study shows that students have continued to make gains in math and reading during the pandemic. Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times via AP

Even though the pandemic has interrupted learning, students are still making progress in reading and math this year, according to a new analysis from the assessment provider Renaissance. 

The company looked at a large sample of students—about 3.8 million in grades 1-8—who had taken Star Assessments, which are interim tests, in either math or reading during the winter of the 2020-21 school year. (Because they were comparing these scores to fall 2019 and fall 2020, only students who had taken Star tests in each of those three periods were included in the analysis.)

Overall, the analysis found, students’ scores rose during the first half of the 2020-21 school year. In other words, children did make academic progress during COVID-19. Even more encouraging, the amount of progress made was similar to what Renaissance would expect in a non-pandemic year.

STUDENT WELL-BEING OPINIONWant to Tackle Learning Loss? First Listen to Your Students (Opinion)

“Learning loss, in general, is a misnomer. Kids’ scores are going up,” said Katie McClarty, the vice president of research and design at Renaissance.

For the most part, the gap between where students’ scores are now and where Renaissance would estimate them to be in a “normal year” is shrinking. But, the company found, that gap still exists.

Using past results, the researchers made an estimate of how well students would have done on these tests had the pandemic not hit. Then, they compared this estimate to students’ actual scores from this winter. They looked at students’ percentile ranks—a norm-referenced score that compares a student’s performance to that of other students in the same grade nationwide. The scale was last updated in 2017, pre-COVID-19.

In math, on average, students were 6 percentile rank points below their expected performance. This means that a student whose past performance would have indicated that they should have been average by winter, at the 50th percentile in math based on pre-pandemic norms, could now be at the 44th percentile in math on that same scale.null

The difference was smaller in reading, where students were two percentile rank points below the predicted level. But in middle school reading specifically, grades 6-8, this gap is widening.

“The reason why you’re still seeing those gaps is because we had really profound differences from where the school year started,” said McClarty.

The COVID-19 impact was greater for Black, Hispanic, and Native American students than for their white and Asian peers, and for English-language learners and students with disabilities. Students in these groups also saw a slower rate of score growth during the first half of the 2020-21 school year compared to the overall sample.

“When you think about some of those communities, there have been other really hard impacts of COVID,” she said. “Education importantly is one of those, but so are higher death rates, infection rates, rates of essential workers.”

There’s a limit to what the data can show

The data from Renaissance echo other large-scale analyses of interim assessments from earlier this fall, showing that the pandemic interrupted students’ academic growth—and that these interruptions have had a greater effect in math.

In December 2020, the Northwest Evaluation Association published a studyshowing that students in grades 3-8 performed 5 to 10 percentile points lower in math than their peers had in 2019. Student performance was similar across years in reading, though. Curriculum Associates, a curriculum and assessment company, also found that math performance was further behind than reading performance on its formative tests for students in grades 1-5 in fall 2020.

Ideally, information like this, from Renaissance and other assessment providers, can help districts plan how best to allocate resources to help students catch up—putting money and time where students have the greatest needs, McClarty said.

Still, there’s a limit to what data like these can show, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, an organization that consults for states and districts on testing issues.

For example, he said, the absence of a big dip in performance in early grades reading doesn’t necessarily mean that students won’t need extra support in reading this summer and fall.

It’s possible that scores that look good on average could be hiding a lot of variability—some students who are doing very well and others who are really struggling. “We have a saying in New England: You can have one foot on a wood stove, and another on a block of ice, and on average you’re pretty comfortable,” Marion said.

Another consideration is that students who are able to take these interim tests—either because they attend in-person classes or have a reliable internet connection—may be qualitatively different than those who aren’t included in these samples. The most vulnerable students with the least access to instruction may not be present in these numbers, a concern that NWEA discussed in December with its data. 

“It’s the kids not represented that we really have to worry about,” Marion said.

Hi friends, we are making progress. Out latest book is available every where in the world now.

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What Will Camp Look Like This Summer?

A weekly update on the most important news in American education.

By Kate Taylor and Amelia Nierenberg

Today, camps are reopening with shifting precautions. And in New Jersey and elsewhere, remote learning could be a thing of the past.

Camp Winnebago summer camp in Fayette, Maine. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

A look ahead at camp

After a year of isolation, many children are looking forward to summer camp with more than the usual excitement. Whether they have been stuck at home, blocked from recess or kept distant from friends, camp will offer a chance to escape their parents’ and teachers’ closer-than-usual supervision and connect with their peers.

At a recent barbecue for new campers at Camp Kinder Ring, a Jewish overnight camp in Dutchess County, New York, one 10-year-old couldn’t wait to interact with other kids without being surrounded by a clear plastic barrier, said Marc Rauch, the camp’s director.

But of course, the pandemic is not over, and many campers will still be unvaccinated, so camp won’t look the way it did in 2019. (Many camps, including most overnight camps, didn’t operate last year.) So what protocols will be in place this summer?

“It’s very dynamic right now,” said Tom Rosenberg, the president of the American Camp Association.

Some states have not yet released regulations for camps. The C.D.C. issued guidance last month, but some experts criticized it as overly draconian. Now, in the wake of the agency’s advice last week that vaccinated people don’t have to wear masks, the agency has said it will update its camp recommendations “very soon.”

The good news is that, with each subsequent update, the rules become less strict.

“This time last year, every week the guidelines got harder and harder,” said Ron Hall, the executive director of the Association of Maine Summer Camps. “This year it is sort of the opposite.”

Here is what is generally clear at this point:

Many overnight camps will try to offer as close to a normal camp experience as possible by creating an N.B.A.-style “bubble.” Students and staffers will get tested for the coronavirus shortly before they arrive at camp, upon their arrival, and then again five days later.

During the first week, they will interact closely only with their bunkmates, wearing masks when they spend time with others outside that group. But after the first week, if everyone has tested negative, each camper’s circle can get larger.

“The longer it goes on, the more safe and secure we feel,” said Mark Benerofe, the chief executive of CampGroup, which operates camps at 11 sites throughout the Northeast and Midwest. “It’s more, I would say, a dimmer than just flipping a switch.”

For day camps, which can’t create bubbles, the situation is more complicated. The current C.D.C. guidance says that children at day camps should wear masks all the time, including outdoors, except when eating, drinking or swimming.

But that could change. On Monday, Massachusetts, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, said that children would no longer be required to wear masks when outdoors at schools or camps.

Some are optimistic that other states might follow suit. “We’re hopeful that outdoor masking is not going to be a big part of the summer,” Benerofe said.

Monica Squeri teaches her fourth-grade class at James Monroe Elementary School in Edison, N.J. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

The future of remote learning

Should school districts continue to offer the option of remote learning next year? It’s a matter of urgent debate, with some saying that in-person classes are clearly better, and that continuing to offer a remote option sends parents the message that schools aren’t safe.

But others argue that some parents and children are happier in remote learning and they should be accommodated.

On Monday, New Jersey’s governor, Philip Murphy, said families in his state would no longer have the option of sending their children to school virtually next year, in one of the bolder efforts to push families and districts to get children back in school.

As of right now, some of New Jersey’s largest school districts have not yet reopened to all students, and many families continue to keep their children in distance learning, according to our colleague Tracey Tully.

Other states in the Northeast are moving in Murphy’s direction. Connecticut has said it won’t require districts to offer virtual learning next fall. And Massachusetts has said that parents will be able to opt for remote participation only in limited circumstances.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom and some state lawmakers want to eliminate, or at least substantially curtail, remote options. But school districts and some parents, particularly of Black students, are pushing back.

Whether schools will (or can) require masks in the fall is also up for debate. Several states have already allowed schools to relax mask requirements in the final weeks of this academic year, against C.D.C. guidance. Many more may follow.

On Monday, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat, said he did not expect that the state would require masks in schools for the next academic year. The Republican governors of Mississippi and Utah have said the same. And the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the country’s fourth-largest school district, has said that masks will likely be optional next year.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has gone even further, issuing an executive order on Tuesday that prevents most government entities, including school districts and public universities, from requiring masks, starting on Friday.

Around the country

College update

• After coordinated student pressure, Stanford University reversed its plan to cut 11 varsity sports.
• A group of men tried to break into an affinity house for L.G.B.T.Q. students at Bucknell University last week, terrifying and traumatizing residents.
• The University of California, one of the largest public university systems in the country, will no longer consider SAT and ACT scores. But Georgia’s public universities will require test scores from applicants again in 2022.
• The Northwestern University athletic director resigned amid concerns of his past handling of sexual harassment and racism.
• Bloomsburg University severed ties with all of its fraternities and sororities.
• Students are calling for colleges to establish Asian-American studiesprograms amid the current uptick in violence.
• For some college students, this year was not all bad, our colleague Anemona Hartocollis reports.
• A good read from The Times: Colorado Mesa Universityhad, perhaps, the most sophisticated system in the country to manage outbreaks. Its innovative experiments have global implications for epidemiology and public health.

K-12 update

• Children 12 to 15 are now eligible to receive Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. In Kansas, hundreds lined up at Topeka High School to get their first dose.
• Some teenagers are eager to get vaccinated. But some parents who are usually not anti-vaxxers aren’t so sure.
• The commission to commemorate the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre ousted Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma after he signed a bill that banned schools from teaching certain concepts about race.
• A good read from The 74: Ila Kumar, a high school senior, wrote about starting a relationship during the pandemic. “It could be my distance from everyone else that amplifies my closeness to him,” Kumar writes. “When I look at him, I feel safe. After this year, that’s more than I could ever ask for.”
• A personal reflection from The Times: On Friday, we told you about our colleague Susan Dominus’s deep dive into one Missouri classroom. That reporting helped her connect with her own teenagers. “As I grieved for them,” she writes, “I grieved for my own children.”

A first-grade class during recess at Joy Elementary in Michigan City, Ind. Kelley Smith/The News Dispatch, via Associated Press

Tip: Manage playtime

A reader wrote to The Times asking if his daughter could play with unmasked children:

The only other kids in our neighborhood don’t mask or social distance when they ask her to play. When I talked to their parents about Covid precautions, they looked at me like I had three heads and refused. Nothing is more important than our daughter’s safety, but we care about her socialization too. What should we do?

Philip Galanes, who writes about social etiquette, responded: If you can trust them to stay outdoors, “there’s strong evidence that her risk of infection is very low.” That applies to parents everywhere: Outdoors is A-OK.

On a separate note, the pandemic has made it hard to assess whether a teenager is thriving.

Teaching Values in School

By Steve Johnson and Kirk Hanson

(After the Ikoyi school rape drama and its attendant fallout in 2017, we decided to do some research to see how we can help our children develop some morals. And we came up with this piece. Happy reading.)

How do children become moral people, and what role do schools have in that process? In this conversation, Ethics Center Executive Director Kirk O. Hanson discusses the issues with Director of Character Education Steve Johnson

Kirk O. Hanson: Steve, let me begin with a simple question: What is character education?
Steve Johnson: Schools have always been interested in three kinds of outcomes:

1. skills—what our students are able to do
2. knowledge—what they know
3. character—the kind of people they become

Sometimes character is talked about in terms of citizenship. When I was in school, we used the term deportment. But whatever we call it, as educators, we’ve always been interested in building positive, productive citizens.

H: What are the objectives of character education in the schools today?
J: In some schools, it’s about promoting pro-social thoughts, values, and behaviors and having students act as good citizens should in school. In others, it’s about developing specific desirable values. For schools in general, character education is about finding some way to help students develop good habits or virtues.
H: What is your approach to character education and how does it differ from other approaches?
J: We say that character education is a way of doing everything in the school. It’s not one particular program or focus; it’s everything we do that influences the kind of human beings students become.

To break that down, we use a triangle model to explain moral development. Basically, we look at three sets of factors that influence how human character develops.

The left section of the triangle deals with values. We recognize that there are core common values, and we are socialized to develop them through:

1. role models, such as parents, other adults, peers, and mass media
2. legends and heroes, people we look up to
3. stories and narratives in print, film, TV, or video games
4. reinforcement (We’re all more likely to continue to do what pays off or works for us.)

At the same time, coming from the right side of the triangle, are thought processes. These are the rational, cognitive ways we grapple with the moral life, and they include:

1. problem solving processes for helping to make choices
2. thinking in a way that is clear and straight, not distorted; seeing many possibilities in a situation—shades of gray instead of black and white
3. the ability to reflect on our experience and to learn from it
4. the ability to use a framework to make decisions when we genuinely don’t know what to do in a hard case.

The triangle sits on the foundation of skills, which we group into two sets: coping and cooperation. To understand coping skills, think about the moments in our lives when we have the most trouble and ask, What else was going on at the same time?

Were we tired or stressed or angry? In order to build character, we have to learn to deal with the times when it’s hard to be the kind of person we want to be. Those coping skills are emotional management, anger control, impulse control, stress management, and so forth. Cooperation skills include dealing with people and dealing with conflict situations.

In every lesson we do, in every program we put on, we balance the triangle, taking into account values formation, thought processes, and skill development. That’s our reference point.

Another thing that makes our program distinct is that we said right from the beginning, “We are not going to be another character education program that’s just for the most privileged. If it doesn’t work for kids who read across the spectrum—below the 20th percentile as well as above— and if it doesn’t work for kids who have trouble in school as well as those who don’t, and if it doesn’t work for kids who like school and kids who hate school, it isn’t for real.”

H: Why do you work with the language arts curriculum?
J: We wanted to tie the program to things schools already need to do. We spend so much time on the English language arts program because everyone takes English, and the curriculum is already full of strong narratives that provide an excellent vehicle for character education. Literacy is fundamental.

H: Do you have to teach character education to kids in the mainstream differently from the way you teach at-risk youngsters?
J: I don’t think so. Kids throughout the population face the same needs, the same challenges, the same realities in their lives. Perhaps more privileged youngsters have been able to struggle with them better because they’ve had more nurturing, better role models, wider opportunities, and so forth. But the substance is very much the same.
H: What about differences in culture and language?
J: Ethics is not about being part of any culture; it’s about being human. Whatever your background, culture, language, etc., you cannot be successful, you cannot run a society without human minimums in the way of conduct.

When I work with groups, I take the core values and I go around and ask if anyone is opposed to them: “Is anyone around here opposed to respect, at the least in the way other people treat you? Is anyone opposed to responsibility, at least in the way someone drives if he borrows your car? Is anyone here opposed to self-control, at least by the person holding a gun in the same room with you?” And so forth. What we find is everyone realizes right away that these are human minimums.
Even the most jaded kids recognize the importance of values.

Now, they may not be able to demonstrate them, but they at least agree that values are significant. For example, no matter how disrespectful they are toward other people, kids are very clear that they would like people to respect them.
H: Where did you get the specific values that are taught in your program and why those?

J: That took a long, long time. When we look at values and virtues, there’s no end to the list. Actually, we came to ours from a couple of different directions. One was Thomas Lickona’s work on educating for character. His notion is that two virtues, respect and responsibility, frame a public, teachable morality.

Respect is the regard due to me and to all other persons on the planet by virtue of our being human. It’s not honor or something we have to earn, but precisely that which we don’t. Respect forms the restraint side of morality. It’s what I restrain myself from doing because it might harm that which I value.
Responsibility is the positive, proactive side of morality—the things I do because I said I would, because I ought to, because they promote the common good.

We see respect and responsibility as the two hinges of a public, teachable morality, which integrity fills in. When we say “integrity,” we mean the whole person, undivided, developing all aspects of the self.

H: But you go beyond respect, responsibility, and integrity.
J: Yes. We were interested in what happens to young people who score below the 20th percentile on standardized tests and who may have a history of anti-social behavior. We wondered what virtues we could emphasize that might make a difference in the thoughts, values, and behaviors of those kids. What helps people to be more pro-social than anti-social, more virtuous than criminal? What could keep someone who’s having trouble from continuing to get in more trouble?

So we looked at research not only in the usual places—such as philosophy—but also in special education, correctional education, and criminology. We looked at psychological research on cognitive distortions that cause people to twist their filter of reality in a way that causes them to miss-see and miss—think about the world. And we looked at virtues that were a counter to the misperceptions that get people in trouble. In that process, we realized that virtues like self-direction and self-control are important.

We also saw that many at-risk kids valued courage, but they had a self-destructive vision of it. To them, the most courageous thing you could do was the most outrageous thing you could do. The more dangerous it was, the more courageous they thought it was. We try to teach the idea that courage is about risk, but for a purpose not for a thrill. Courage is about risk that promotes some greater good, which justifies the danger. So courage gets linked to the idea of self-control.

We also developed a unit called “change requires effort,” in which we teach that change is both desirable and requires work in the way we go about it.

In addition, we’re interested in values like moderation because we work with many kids who tend to go to one extreme or the other, for example relative to drinking or using drugs. In this area, we try to help them find a way to moderate their impulses and desires.

And we focus on justice, which for us means recognizing that there are other people in the world and that they make legitimate demands on us. When we work with kids, we always start by saying, “Ethics might not be necessary if you were the only one here, but you’re not. Because we have to share this planet with other people, we have to have some way of getting along together. We call that ethics. Ethics is about relationships, and justice is necessary in order to preserve those relationships.”

So, respect, responsibility, integrity, self-control, self-direction, change requires effort, moderation, and justice—those are the eight key values that frame our program.
K: Tell us about a core value unit. How do you teach self-control?
S: Typically a unit is two months long and involves a variety of activities arranged under four levels:

1. Which of the Language Arts Standards does the unit address?
2. What texts will we use?
3. What products will students create?
4. What processes will we use to teach the big ideas in the unit?

We start with a basic understanding of the value. With self-control, we use the notion of courage and risk for a purpose and the idea that courage requires self-control. You’ve got to be able to manage yourself in order to take purposeful risks.
To Kill a Mockingbird is the core work in this particular unit. In addition to our core novel, we have several hundred other items that teachers might choose from, including novels, poetry, nonfiction, plays—all of them dealing with the courage theme.

Of course, the unit is embedded in the English language arts curriculum, and, as it happens, the standards that are addressed in this particular unit involve academic proficiencies such as writing narrative responses to literature and exposition. Actually, the unit cuts across the six language arts: reading, writing, listening, speaking, feeling, and visually representing.

With each text, we work with students to create a visual product, which they then explain and eventually turn into written language. In a classroom that’s studying To Kill a Mockingbird right now, students started by making a bookmark that represented the town. As they made that bookmark, they indicated where all the various places in the town were, which not only helped them to keep track of where they were in the story but also gave them a visual reference point as we talked about the place.

In the first four weeks, we did open-mind portraits, for which students created a bust of a key character in the story. Then they surrounded that character with cartoon bubbles, which included things that character might think or say. As the unit goes on, they’ll add bubbles in different colors to show how they see that character changing through the story, and they’ll make open-mind portraits of other characters, as well.

They may also make posters. One of the things kids notice right away is the subject of racism in To Kill a Mockingbird. To address that issue directly, we have them make posters with some solutions they might suggest for dealing with that problem. When we get to the courtroom scenes, we do an actual cross-examination and create a newspaper to show what happens.

We follow each of these activities with daily journal writing, where the kids are really looking at characters and how they exhibit courage. Eventually, we ask them to choose the character they think is most courageous and, in small groups, they create a campaign ad for that particular character. We also have them do negative ads about characters that they think don’t exemplify courage, and why not.

After we put those ads up, we ask them to do a radio show, which they then write a paragraph about. The following week, we teach them how to turn that paragraph into an essay, where they compare four characters as to courage, with an introduction and conclusion about how their definitions of courage have changed.

Every teacher who works on this unit is going to do it somewhat differently. We offer about 300 basic strategies that we mix and match in various ways, but all of them include visual and oral language products that eventually turn into written language processes. Throughout, we’re really looking for ways that move the kids to think about values. We test and try to change kids’ concept of courage so that it includes a willingness to use skills such as anger control and anticipating the consequences of actions.

H: Character education has been a very popular idea nationally during the past 10 to 15 years. Why is it on the public agenda so prominently?
J: I think a lot of people are afraid of the kind society we’re becoming. Oftentimes, they think there’s some significant difference between kids today and kids “like we were,” and they believe things are deteriorating.

I’m not sure things are deteriorating, but we’re all often startled by the world we see. Some people find it easy to blame the schools and say, “The problem is based on character defects, and the schools should teach character.” Others say it’s about parents and the need for them to take their jobs more seriously.

I think we’ve almost lost interest in raising children in this society, and a good deal of our problem comes from that. Kids today spend more time with their peers and less time with adults than has ever been true in history. The result is that kids socialize one another.

If we want to have more impact on our children’s values, we have to be willing to devote more time to them. I remember the myth of the one-minute manager and that somehow you could apply this to parenting. But it’s not about quality time; it’s about time.

The interest in character education is very much from parents and schools feeling that they’re not doing a good enough job and asking, “How can we better influence the kind of people that our kids become?”

Education Briefing: A Deep Look at One Classroom

A weekly update on the most important news in American education.

By Amelia Nierenberg

For one A.P. class, remote learning and pandemic anxieties fomented mental health struggles and academic woes.

The woes of sophomore year

Susan Dominus, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, spent much of the school year with one sophomore class in Columbia, Mo. Today we’re breaking our usual weekly schedule to tell you about her phenomenal article chronicling the experience.

“When I started the piece, I thought I was going to write about the academic challenges of remote learning,” Susan said. “It was only when I started speaking to the students that I realized how in depth the psychological problems were — that that was a huge defining part of this year.”

During remote learning at the high school where she set the story, many students regularly slept through what was known as their A.P. World class. One coped with the trauma of helping family members recover from Covid-19. Another had too much time on his hands, which he spent obsessing and ruminating about family problems. All struggled to maintain their grades and bat away shame when they missed deadlines.

Their teacher, MacKenzie Everett-Kennedy, struggled too. She had never given her cellphone number to students before, but now, she sometimes found herself fielding their distressed texts at unusual hours. As she struggled with her own well-being, sometimes she wore her pajamas to class, hoping students would think it was a regular top.

“The sheer volume of their needs was troubling to take in — and to take on,” Susan wrote about the teacher. “It was demanding work, with a heavier emotional load than her $50,000-a-year job normally required.”

*MacKenzie Everett-Kennedy in her Zoom space at home. Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Many students consider A.P. World, a history-and-literature course, to be the hardest the school offers, a class that marks a student as academically ambitious and heading toward college. But as one missed assignment piled onto another, some felt as if they could never catch up.

“There was something that was a perfect storm about the challenging nature of the class and kids who were taking it who were accustomed to achieving,” Susan said. “A lot of kids got behind very quickly early on and could not imagine ever catching up, but because they had previously been so on track, were truly filled with despair and shame.”

Everett-Kennedy was shocked on Nov. 10, when a major essay was due: At least a third of her students, including many with whom she thought she had developed a solid rapport, did not turn it in. Ten days later, that was still true.

*Catherine, a student in the class, would FaceTime with her friend Charles late into the night. Kholood Eid for The New York Times

One student, Catherine (her middle name), often stayed up late on the phone with Charles, her friend who was also in the class. Catherine had her eyes on the University of Missouri, where her sister went, but she feared she might be following the path of her brother, who dropped out of high school.

Catherine likes to appear tough, she admitted; few adults realized how hard this year was for her.

“Usually I don’t show emotion until something triggers me, and then I’m a complete mess,” she told Susan, crying. “It’s like — conceal, conceal, conceal, then mental breakdown, then back to being fine again.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Charles would have said he was heading for a scholarship at a prestigious college, maybe Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. School used to come easily for him. But alone in his room, without theater or friends, negative thoughts crowded into his mind. He started sleeping through class, barely turning in assignments.

“And suddenly,” Susan wrote, “here he was, no longer a kid who got A’s but already a kid who had blown it this early in the semester.”

*Charles in April. During remote learning, he rarely left his bedroom when he was home. Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Everett-Kennedy wrote to Charles, trying to help him, trying to encourage him. “I am NOT OK with you sliding into this pit of despair,” she emailed him in December. “You are not so far behind that this can’t be fixed.” She texted him through his panic attacks. One day in March, when school reopened, she picked him up to drive him to school.

When school did reopen, first for hybrid learning, many students found their footing again.

“Almost immediately, Catherine really, really did seem to feel better,” Susan said. “Her sleep schedule regulated almost immediately, because she knew that at a minimum, two or three days a week she had to be up and ready to get herself to an actual building — school.”

For Charles, the road back has been slower. But school is now open five days a week. “My sense is he’s doing much, much better,” Susan said. “It is obvious how much he needs the structure and sociability of school for his well-being.”

*One of the A.P. World sections back in class this month. “I’m still in shock, I think,” Everett-Kennedy said. “It was a vortex that sucked a year of our lives.” Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Right now, we’re at a turning point in the pandemic, at least in the United States. Teenagers are now able to roll up their sleeves for the vaccine, schools are reopening and case numbers continue to drop. Still, this past year weighs heavy.

“Columbia is in the middle of the state, in the middle of the country,” Susan said. “That felt appropriate for a story that almost could have been set anywhere. Kids suffered — really suffered — almost everywhere.”

*The New York Times

A Testament of of River Ethiope: An Anthology of a Citizen

www.amazon.com/dp/B093NF4HC7/ref=cm_sw_r_oth_tai_VX4WJ3B892EE2M0GEKVQ

This is collection of poems by Anthony Ororho

Covid: Poor Pupils Fall Further Behind in Math

Poor pupils have fallen further behind in maths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to research. 

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) study suggests primary-school pupils eligible for free school meals have fallen another month behind their classmates since the first lockdown. 

And the gap is unlikely to narrow without intervention, despite all pupils returning to class in September.

The government has already made £1.7bn catch-up funding available in England.

But Sir Peter Lampl, who chairs the EEF, is calling for significant extra funding to mitigate against the long-term impact of school closures as failing to act now will be a “catastrophe” for disadvantaged children.

• Gap between poor and rich pupils widened in 2019 
• Lockdown pupils ‘three months behind in learning’
• Covid ‘will affect youngest pupils for years’

Pupils from 132 primary schools in England were tested in autumn 2019, September 2020 and then towards the end of the autumn term. 

Contrary to previous estimates, the interim findings of this study indicated no discernible change to the disadvantage gap in reading. 

Previous studies have suggested children in England are up to three months behind in their studies after lockdown, with boys and poor pupils worst hit. 

Research by the National Foundation for Educational indicated the learning gap between rich and poor pupils had grown by almost 50% between March and July 2020. 

‘Educational inequality’

The EEF report found considerable variation in how schools and teachers responded to the huge disruptions caused by Covid-19. 

For example, 23% of teachers surveyed reported phoning pupils at least once a week, while 37% never called them.

And 24% of schools in the study provided video lessons, while the remaining 76% did not. 

But the research found no clear evidence of a link between different teaching methods and changes to the achievements of pupils. 

EEF chief executive Prof Becky Francis said: “The pandemic has brought the significance of social and educational inequality into sharp focus. 

“Research studies like this one are providing clear evidence that substantial existing gaps have grown further due to the disruption to learning caused by the pandemic.”

A department for education spokesperson said: “We have invested £1.7 billion in ambitious catch-up activity, including high-quality tutoring and summer school provision. The majority of the funding is targeted towards those most in need, while giving schools the flexibility to use it as they believe best, to support their pupils.

“We are working with parents, teachers and schools to develop a long-term plan to make sure all pupils have the chance to recover from the impact of the pandemic as quickly and comprehensively as possible.”

*BBC

A Testament of River Ethiope: An Anthology of a Ctizen

www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_mac_ln_ar

What Teen Vaccines Mean for School Reopenings

A weekly update on the most important news in American education.

By Kate Taylor and Amelia Nierenberg

Today, we look at how vaccines for adolescents could shape the classroom reopening conversation. Plus, a jumble of unorthodox college commencement plans.

Teen vaccines and schools

*High school students in East Hartford, Conn., receiving vaccinations last month.Jessica Hill/Associated Press

Anyone with a 12-to-15-year-old in their life got encouraging news this week when our colleagues reported that the Food and Drug Administration is set to authorize the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for use in this age group by early next week. On Tuesday, Pfizer said it also expected to apply in September for authorization to administer its Covid-19 vaccine to children ages 2 to 11.

So what exactly does this vaccine news mean for the next school year?

Being able to have their kids vaccinated will no doubt be reassuring to many parents, including some who have not felt comfortable sending their children back to school in person yet. That will most likely mean more students attending in-person classes next school year. (Some states have already said that remote learning will not continue to be an option for most students in the fall.)

It may also change discussions about what school should look like: A number of districts that have not yet reopened full time for all students have recently made statements theoretically committing them to doing so in the fall. But there may still be fights in places with strong and reluctant teachers’ unions, especially in districts where students can’t maintain at least three feet of distance (and six feet during lunch, as guidelines call for) if all students attend full time.

But will social distancing still be necessary in schools in the fall?

In districts where vaccination rates among students and staff are extremely high — 90 percent or higher — or in schools that require vaccination to attend in person, students and teachers should be able to ditch their masks and end social distancing, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

He said that was part of what had led officials at Brown to require that students be vaccinated to attend classes. “What motivated us was a desire to have a fall semester that felt like it was the optimal experience that students really needed for college, and I would make the same case for high school,” Dr. Jha said.

For public schools, vaccine requirements are set by states, and it is unclear if any will mandate coronavirus vaccines for students. But private schools may be able to require that students be vaccinated, and Dr. Jha said he had been in touch with some in Massachusetts that were considering doing so in order to be able to offer a more normal school environment.

There are many parts of the country where the vaccination rate among children and adolescents is likely to be low, as it has been for adults. Those are also the places where many schools have already reopened full time, so the low vaccination rate probably won’t make a difference there.

At the same time, some experts think that, as long as more American adults get vaccinated, the country doesn’t have to wait to vaccinate children and adolescents before reasonably letting up on precautions like social distancing and masking in schools.

Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, pointed to data from Israel, where roughly 60 percent of the population has received at least one vaccine dose, and the United Kingdom, where roughly 52 percent has. (Forty-five percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose.)

“They’ve driven their case numbers way down without having to vaccinate kids,” she said. “So it’s not as though vaccinating kids is the only path to getting to a mask-free future. I actually think we can make a lot of progress without having to do that.”

Regardless of whether kids are vaccinated, Dr. Nuzzo said she thought it would be helpful to define “what the endgame is” — in other words, determining at what level of cases, hospitalizations or deaths Americans would be ready to let people, including children in schools, stop distancing and take off their masks.

“We don’t implement mask requirements and social distancing requirements for seasonal flu,” she said. “Certainly, if it’s at seasonal flu rates or lower, it’s going to be hard to justify.”

Unorthodox college graduations

Across the country, as seniors prepare to flip their tassels, colleges are scrambling to plan pandemic-safe commencements, our colleague Rukmini Callimachi reports.

Each institution is making its own decision, and many students are enviously eyeing other nearby schools. Some graduation ceremonies will be in person. Most will be atypical. A few have gotten contentious.

In Massachusetts, Harvard University announced that its seniors would graduate virtually and their diplomas would be mailed to them, while just two miles away, Boston University will be hosting two in-person outdoor graduation ceremonies.

Other schools are making modifications. Vanderbilt in Tennessee is staggering arrival times for its ceremony so students enter the venue in shifts. Methodist University in North Carolina will require its seniors to get tested. Indian River State College has held drive-in ceremonies in Florida. Yale will allow only students to attend the ceremony, while family members and guests can watch a livestreamed version.

And at the University of Tampa, dissent is growing. When the school announced it would host commencement online, graduating students started a GoFundMe for an in-person celebration. “A 45-minute virtual commencement of my name being scrolled across the screen just simply wasn’t enough,” said Allison Clark, who is organizing the unofficial alternative.

Around the country

College update

• At least 209 campuses will require coronavirus vaccines next fall, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Only 19 are in states that voted for Donald Trump, showing the ongoing political divide.
• Richard Cordray, a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren, will serve as the new head of federal student aid, leading the Biden administration through a thorny conversation about canceling student debt.
• Eight people have been indicted in connection with the death of a sophomore at Bowling Green State University who attended an off-campus fraternity event.
• Linfield University faces growing calls for some members of its leadership to resign after allegations of sexual misconduct and anti-Semitism.
• A good read from The Times: A student at Rutgers Law School used a racial slur while quoting from case law, prompting debate over the constitutional right to free speech on campus and the power of a hateful word.

K-12 update

• The head of the Chicago Public Schools, Janice Jackson, will leaveher job in June, meaning that the top posts at the nation’s three largest districts will all turn over this year.
• School districts are spending millions of federal dollars on unproven air purifiers that might be harmful, according to Kaiser Health News.
• Camps are getting ready to open, as families clamor for spots. Here are some of the ways they’re planning to keep kids safe this summer.
• An opinion: It’s time to stop closing schools one day a week for so-called deep cleaning, Robin Lake argues in The 74.
• A good read from The Times: Our colleague Patricia Mazzei took a deeper dive into Centner Academy, the Miami private school that sought to bar vaccinated teachers. It’s a chilling portrait of how anti-vax conspiracies can take hold.
• Another look: Without home internet, one 11-year-old boy in Mississippi struggles to stay connected to remote classes.
• And a listen: In the final episode of “Odessa,” a school district in West Texas faces a mental health crisis.

Time vaccines correctly

The C.D.C. currently recommends that people wait two weeks before or after a Covid vaccine to get any other inoculations. That could mean a seven- or eight-week window when other shots should not be given.

For children who need doses for camp, school or sports, parents may need to plan ahead.

“Parents will need to plan with their pediatricians how to coordinate those along with catching up on their other shots,” Dr. Perri Klass writes in The Times.

“And younger children who have other shots due might want to consider catching up right now, so that they’re fully up-to-date for sports, camp or school,” Dr. Klass adds. “That way, as soon as they are eligible for Covid vaccines, there won’t be so much juggling to be done.”

*New York Times