TALAS E-newsletter – February 21

The Texas Education Agency confirmed this week it now requires new charter schools to submit a “statement of assurance” that the school will follow so-called “critical race theory” laws before opening its doors to the public.

In the ongoing power struggle between conservative politicians, local school boards, teachers, and parents, library books have become, as the kids would say, iconic — and nowhere is the fight bigger than in Texas. 

For politicians like Fort Worth Republican Rep. Matt Krause — who demanded school districts audit their bookshelves for more than 850 titles related to sex and race — books are the encroachment of liberal values into classrooms. 

Young children learning to read — especially Black and Hispanic students — are in need of significant support nearly two years after the pandemic disrupted their transition into school, according to new assessment results.

Mid-year data from Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, shows that while the so-called “COVID cohort” of students in kindergarten, first and second grade are making progress, they haven’t caught up to where students in those grade levels were performing before schools shut down in March 2020. 

Black, Latino and Asian American students are less likely to be suspended from school when they have more teachers who share their racial or ethnic background. This is the central finding of a research study that two colleagues – Travis J. Bristol and Tolani Britton – and I released in October 2021 through the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

To figure out if a teacher’s race or ethnicity affected suspensions, we analyzed 10 years of data – from 2007 through 2016 – on suspensions for every student in fourth through eighth grades in New York City public schools. We followed individual students over time. We examined whether the proportion of teachers of the same race or ethnicity these students were assigned in a given year affected how likely they were to be suspended.

All 50 states could be doing more to help schools better address mental health concerns among students, a new report found.  

Adolescents and teenagers are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues as they grapple with all the complexities of becoming a fully fledged adult, and data shows that an increasing number of young people are struggling with feelings of sadness or hopelessness.  

Educators often have a tendency to use confusing terminology when speaking about their field. But jargon may now be playing a role in the politicization of social and emotional learning — often referred to as SEL.

Social and emotional learning isn’t a new concept. According to the Social Emotional Learning Alliance for the United States (SEL4US), it’s a practice that helps kids and adults learn and apply the skills necessary to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, set and achieve goals, feel and show empathy, establish strong relationship skills, and make responsible decisions.