TALAS E-newsletter – March 24

As various sectors have begun to rebound two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Latinx community continues to feel the pinch of job losses, health disparities, economic impacts and a downturn in education opportunities.

Their plight has rippled from school districts to businesses on up to colleges and universities, where Latinx students comprise 20% of institution populations but have sustained more losses in terms of enrollment and transfer mobility than White students. There also remain very few Latina and Hispanic women at the top of higher education.

Hunter, a 17-year-old from suburban Houston, was so nervous his aching stomach prevented him from falling asleep. So after practicing in front of a mirror over and again, he overcame crippling anxiety and told his parents a secret he’d kept hidden for years.

He came out as transgender, a revelation that was met with violent rejection. His mother hit him in the face, he said, while his brother’s reaction cut like a knife: No matter what, he told Hunter, he would never be a boy. With his worst fears validated, Hunter, who was 12 at the time, grabbed a razor blade and slit his wrist. 

Before Winter Shields was born, she faced an uphill climb to success — academically and otherwise.

When Shields’ mother, Nastassja Miller, was pregnant, doctors said her daughter was sickly, and could be born with Down syndrome or be developmentally delayed. While the doctors were wrong about that, at 6 months old, Shields needed her left kidney removed. And then, when Shields was 2 years old, her father was incarcerated, leaving Miller to raise Shields on her own for over a decade.

Despite all those challenges, Shields, now a senior at Crosstown High School in Memphis, is in the top 20 in her graduating class – with four years of straight As – and on her way to college.

A promise to end standardized testing in Florida is not what it seems, teachers said this week after Gov. Ron DeSantis launched the state’s new assessment system.

The Florida Standards Assessment, also known as FSA, was scrapped Tuesday after a months-long process that began with DeSantis declaring that a change in assessments would allow teachers to focus more on student growth. In a move that was welcomed by educators, DeSantis last September announced the state would transition to FAST—the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking program—to monitor student progress more regularly.

As teacher dissatisfaction rates rise and concerns about teacher shortages intensify, colleges of education are sounding the alarm: Enrollment has been steadily declining for the past decade, and the pandemic has likely made things worse.

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education released its second comprehensive report of the state of teacher preparation on Tuesday afternoon, noting the many challenges facing the teaching profession—and some of the ways colleges are adapting. The report uses the most-recent federal data, which are from the 2018-19 school year, providing a benchmark on the status of teacher preparation before the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic.

How many books children have access to at home predicts how well they learn language and even how long they stay in school. 

Children’s picture books might seem simple, but they are crucial to learning language. Picture books contain words and sentence structures beyond what babies and toddlers might encounter in speech or song. For children being raised bilingual, who are learning two languages at the same time, reading with parents and caregivers is crucial because these children must learn twice as many words. There are more than 12 million American children growing up bilingual, and over 8 million of these children speak Spanish at home.