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Showing 10 of 57 blog posts

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Understanding Teacher Layoffs During Times of Teacher Shortages

Patrick M. Shields,

Roberta Furger

Mar 23 2017
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Amidst news reports of teacher shortages throughout California, a small number of districts issued so-called March 15 notices to teachers, signaling a potential layoff in the next school year. How can we have layoffs in times of shortages? This blog, by LPI Executive Director Patrick Shields and Senior Writer Roberta Furger, puts the layoff news in perspective.

Topic Educator Quality
Blog

Trump’s “Skinny Budget” Would Put Educators’ Learning on a Starvation Diet

Linda Darling-Hammond

Mar 19 2017
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President Trump’s “skinny budget” proposal, calls for wide-ranging cuts in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), including the complete elimination of funding for Title II, Part A, the Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants program. Eliminating this section of the law, which supports educator learning and development, undermines the ability of states and districts to achieve ESSA’s ambitious goals for our schools and students.

Topics Educator Quality, Equitable Resources and Access
Blog

Ending the No Child Left Behind Catch-22 on English learner progress

Linda Darling-Hammond,

Kenji Hakuta

Jan 09 2017
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California’s State Board of Education has an opportunity to leave behind one of the most unfair and problematic features of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the way it calculates English learners’ progress for purposes of accountability. In doing so, however, the state will still need to address how it will focus on, understand, and support the nearly 1.4 million public students classified as English learners.

Topics The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Accountability and Improvement
Blog

Love Trumps Hate: Building Inclusive, Equitable School Communities

Linda Darling-Hammond

Dec 15 2016
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Since our November 8th election, educators across the country have been stunned by the increase in racial slurs, bullying, and graffiti featuring swastikas and hate speech on campuses, emulating what children saw and heard in the presidential campaign. While deeply disturbing, the explicitness and widespread public eruption of hate speech of all kinds gives us a direct opportunity to create a curriculum of civility and caring, and to unseat the tacit bigotry that is often under the surface in schools.

Topics Deeper Learning, Deeper Learning: School Organization & Design
Blog

Op-Ed: Nudges That Help Struggling Students Succeed

David L. Kirp

Oct 29 2016
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In scores of rigorously conducted studies, social psychologists have demonstrated that brief interventions, designed to combat students’ negative feelings, can have a powerful and long-lasting impact on students’ academic futures by changing their mindsets before they get to college.

Topics Deeper Learning, Deeper Learning: Curriculum, Instruction & Assessment, Deeper Learning: College, Career & Civic Participation
Blog

Teacher Supply and Demand: Getting the Numbers—and the Solutions—Right

Leib Sutcher,

Linda Darling-Hammond,

Desiree Carver-Thomas

Sep 29 2016
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On September 15th, the Learning Policy Institute released a report on teacher supply and demand that examines the data behind shortages that are emerging in a number of areas around the country. This blog responds to questions about the size and nature of teacher shortages and reinforces the importance of evidence-based solutions that ensure every student is taught by a well-qualified and supported teacher.

Topic Educator Quality
Blog

Strengthening the Early Childhood Workforce to Assure High-Quality Early Education

Titilayo Tinubu Ali

Aug 12 2016
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There is broad agreement among researchers across a wide range of disciplines that early education can give children a powerful start on the path that leads to college and career success. Early learning professionals need what any savvy businessperson wants for his or her company—a motivated, skilled, quality workforce. While recent studies have highlighted several obstacles to building a high-quality early childhood workforce, another points to promising models in four states.

Topics Early Childhood Learning, Educator Quality
Blog

Op-Ed: To Teach a Child to Read, First Give Him Glasses

David L. Kirp

Aug 06 2016
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Community schools serve as a neighborhood hub, where both students and their families can receive medical, dental, and psychological services and other supports in partnership with local organizations. Research shows that such schools can have an outsized impact, including cutting the achievement gap and absentee rates.

Topics Equitable Resources and Access, Deeper Learning, Deeper Learning: School Organization & Design
Blog

Teacher Residencies: A Long-Term Strategy to Solve California Teacher Shortages

May 18 2016
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By Linda Darling-Hammond and Steve Barr | This was a year of good news and bad news in California’s schools. Faster-than-expected infusions of new funding under the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) allowed many districts to replace teachers and programs lost during the Great Recession. However, as the school year opened last August, districts around California scrambled to hire qualified teachers, and many came up short.

Topics Educator Quality, Educator Quality: Professional Learning
Blog

Uncovering the Building Blocks of Preschool Quality

Joseph Bishop

Apr 05 2016
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The long-term rewards of quality early education continue to collect an impressive basket of evidence. An overwhelming majority of voters continue to call out the importance of quality preschool, even if the issue has not yet gotten much airtime in the 2016 presidential election. But how do parents know whether a preschool is of high quality?

Topic Early Childhood Learning

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Blog

Kerner At 50: Educational Equity Still a Dream Deferred

Apr 11 2018

Fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission issued a seminal report on racial division and disparities in the United States. With this blog by Learning Policy Institute (LPI) President Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, LPI is launching a new series, Education and the Path to Equity. With it, we commemorate the release of the Kerner report and examine the persistent struggle to provide an equitable education for each and every student.

Blog

Immigrant Students: Our Kids, Our Future

Apr 19 2018

This blog post, from Dr. Patricia Gándara, LPI Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, is part of the Learning Policy Institute series, Education and the Path to Equity. Dr. Gándara discusses the changing demographics of immigrant students and how they’ve been impacted by increased immigration enforcement practices. She also argues for reframing how we think about immigrant students to focus on their assets, which “prime them to be the very best learners in our schools.”

Blog

Deeper Learning: An Essential Component of Equity

Mar 01 2018

Access to deeper learning—classes in which students are engaged to think deeply and develop the skills and abilities they’ll need for college and work—is a central equity issue for our time, says Dr. Pedro Noguera in this LPI Blog. In this interview, Noguera discusses the role of deeper learning in providing all students with an equitable and empowering education and what it will take to “scale up” deeper learning practices.

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