As our children are heading back to school, the COVID-19 vaccine is become more available, and many of us are beginning to head back to our respective offices, our attention is rightly turning to recovery. For us at the Prichard Committee, that means education recovery. How do we take everything we’ve learned the last year, all the resources at our disposal, and all the creative capacity we can muster to stem the tide on learning loss, help our young people catch up, and accelerate learning to ensure we don’t have a lost generation?
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We know a year into a global health pandemic, one which left our students and our teachers displaced and scrambling to keep up, sounds like the worst time to maintain state assessments. In our view, it’s actually the exact right time to measure the toll of COVID on student learning. Let’s say I’m a health-conscious individual and over the holidays I splurged a little too often on food and drink and I backslid on exercise. I knew I wasn’t treating my body as well as I did before the holidays and it was time to get back on track.
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There are high hopes for the work of the Commonwealth Education Continuum which was announced late last year. The meeting agenda describes the effort as a “multi-agency education initiative” and the objectives outlined suggest the focus will be to increase postsecondary attainment. A laudable and much needed focus for a state which ranks 4th in the nation for poverty and whose economy lags the nation considerably.
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Congratulations President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.
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Whew, what a year it’s been! We’ve all weathered both collective and unique challenges in 2020 and, without a doubt, we’re pleased to the see the year come to a close. The core values we learned quickly to prioritize were innovation & engagement. As a team, we came together quickly in March to start providing answers and meaningful discussions during the early days of the pandemic with our Facebook Live Innovations in Education episodes.
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We urge our schools, districts, and communities to put all creative energy into re-imagining how we deliver on the promise and constitutional obligation of public education in these extraordinary times. This may include enhanced digital learning delivery and community learning pods to provide in-person supports in much smaller, safely distanced settings.
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Yesterday, in light of recent events of police brutality giving rise to state, national, & international protests, the Prichard Committee called on the state’s elected and appointed leaders to require competency in cultural responsiveness and implicit bias for all those working, or training to work, in the public sector.
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This week on Innovations in Education, we held our first all-student panel discussion about how middle and high school students are coping with COVID-19. The Prichard Committee’s Student Voice Team (SVT), started creating the survey on this topic when schools closed for the pandemic in March. Over the past several weeks, the team has developed the survey in consultation with research experts from Kentucky and around the country.
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This week on Innovations in Education, we wanted to better understand the decline in college-going happening in Kentucky and nationally. Since our panel included three superintendents and an education cooperative director, we also talked about plans for high school graduation ceremonies, how remote learning is going, and how districts are planning now for the start of school in the fall.
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Two months have passed since businesses and schools across the Commonwealth began shutting their doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As educators and business began adapting, one thing became abundantly clear: the internet is as necessary as electricity and plumbing is for our daily lives. As social distancing becomes a matter of life and death, a connection to the world outside our homes is vital to our economy, our education system, and our way of life.
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