On Monday, my first co-authored piece came out in Berkleyside about ways families can support kids reading at home! I was super lucky to write this with my friend and librarian extraordinaire, Louisa, & it’s always really nice to have something published locally. Some excerpts below and read the full piece here:

There are many ways to see your child build an identity as a reader and reap the subsequent benefits, like greater academic outcomes, an improved attention span, better mental health outcomes, and a more vibrant imagination. But one of the best indicators to ensure that your child is a frequent reader is by being a frequent reader yourself. Eighty percent of children who are frequent readers agree that a lot or nearly everyone in their lives enjoys reading. Ultimately, carving out time to sit down and enjoy your own book may make the biggest impact on your family’s reading culture. Reading aloud to your child is a great first step, reading alongside them is the next. Now is a great time to start.

This week, I’ll be talking about the start of the new school year at a free virtual roundtable with EdSource on Thursday August 27 at 4pm PST. Register here & more updates on Instagram at @mcizmane :)

_{(This photo has nothing to do with the article except for the fact that I took it on the same day and I read it instead of showing the kids old Sesame Street videos — which can also be great!)}

Happy Back-to-School! On Monday, OUSD implemented its new cellphone ban for students, in line with trends of other schools, districts, and states looking at how to curb the use of technology in schools. I wrote a piece in EdSource about how this moment could be used to support families doing the same at home too. Here are some excerpts, and you can find the full piece here:

The closing of schools in the spring of 2020 for 55 million students in the United States ushered in a technological revolution in education that has been a mistake. When students returned to school, online learning continued, with students spending hours of their day in front of a screen, with their teacher and classmates in the background.

I absolutely get it. I have played Sesame Street videos instead of singing the songs myself and I have put on episodes of “Bluey” when I should have read a story. Teaching can feel exhausting, and increasingly so, and technology is a way for me to take a break.

When I talk to parents, they often feel the same way. The introduction of devices and soaring screen times since Covid has obliterated their child’s attention when reading a story, increased their fears when they see something scary on the Internet and left them unpracticed in social interactions. And like me, burned out from parenting and increasingly isolated, they continue to hand the technology over.

The removal of technology from schools is imperative to improving students’ social-emotional well-being and academic success. And for children to really thrive, limits on devices should continue at home, too.

You can keep reading here and I’ll be talking more about the start of the new school year at a free virtual roundtable with EdSource on Thursday August 27 at 4pm PST that you can register for here. More updates on Instagram at @mcizmane :)

_{(I am not defending the book you see me holding, it was part of my curriculum, that I do however really like!)}

Two of my favorite websites this year have been respective London and New York Review of Books, so I was incredibly excited when I saw the recent launch of the Oakland Review of Books. I wrote a piece for them this week ostensibly reviewing Mac Barnett’s new essay collection Make Believe but actually spiraling into musings on the purpose of children’s literature and me talking about how much I love Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

My pandemic-era TKers are now fourth graders, and as a way to spend more time with them, I started a book club after school with a few upper-elementary students at my site who were reading at level, and whose teachers believed they would benefit from more higher-level texts. But despite being fluent readers, the majority of them had never read an entire book outside of the classroom.

Every Friday, we read a chapter from The Bad Beginning, the first book from A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. This is not a book with a wholesome message or with preselected sight words; it is a book with complex language, an engrossing plot, and characters who are heroes not role models. I picked it because I loved it when I was their age for all of those reasons, and also because my students remind me of the Baudelaires: kids who had gone through tribulations but carried and continued on, but in West Oakland instead of Briny Beach. There were no worksheets, no assignments, no tests, we just read and paused to ask each other questions and share our impressions (and for the kids to shriek in shock at the twist and turns). Two of the kids skipped ahead to finish the book at their own time; their teacher told me that the English-language learners in book club were reading not only with more fluency but more confidence in the classroom. Most importantly, to me, they all agreed that it was a really good book that was different than they had ever read before.

Shouldn’t this be what children’s literature is for? Shouldn’t it be to expose children to good art through “the sublimity of a sentence or a picture, the thrill of a plot, the intimacy of communing with a character,” as Barnett puts it? Regardless of its utility in imparting a lesson or teaching a skill, literature transports, and tells us about ourselves as it does so.

You can find the rest of the piece here and don’t forget to subscribe because *fingers crossed* there’ll be more writing coming soon (??). And I’m on Instagram occasionally too @mcizmane!

Recently did a little pivot from my usual beat to talk about how I expect my students to branch out to new people, be open to new experiences & try out new places to explore, without necessarily pushing myself to do the same thing.

As a preschool teacher, I’m constantly encouraging my students to try new things.

I’ll suggest they to do a puzzle with a kid they haven’t played with before or maybe try painting instead of racing toy cars again. Sometimes, I’ll ask if they want to abandon the slides and explore the garden and all its wonders instead.

At first, these suggestions are almost always rejected. Students feel shy, skeptical, and too comfortable with the familiar.

However, because kids are hardwired to be curious and adventurous, they soon branch out. They say yes. And the pay-off is immediate as they experience the joys of meeting someone new, trying something new, and going somewhere new.

My preschoolers were doing much better than me.

In Business Insider earlier this month, I wrote about how saying yes to the world around me made my world fuller and more expansive. Read the whole thing, let me know what you think & more coming soon :)

At the end of my first year of teaching, I wrote a piece for Education Week about that experience. This week, a follow-up piece came out where I wrote about how despite the challenges of the past five years of my career, I’ve fallen in love with teaching. In the years between these essays, I’ve been so incredibly lucky to be able to write about the work and have people read it and I don’t take it for granted at all. I wanted to say thank you to you for reading this sentence and for reading any and all other sentences you’ve read by my as I try my best to write about what (I think) this all means.

The last five years in education have been hard. Exacerbating these challenges has been a public discourse filled with daily declarations on all that is wrong with education—often with good reason. The front pages and political stages have been full of poor reading scores, troubling trends in student mental health, and continued learning loss.

But as all of this has gone on, I remained committed to teaching. I owe this commitment in no small part to the resilience I have seen from students, families, and other educators who inspired me to keep going on my hardest days. I think of my student who learned to speak and then read in English months after arriving in the United States. I think of the father of one of my students, who cried sharing how he wanted his son to have a kinder upbringing than his own. I think of my mentor who, decades into her career, would still stay for hours after school to work with students to practice what they hadn’t yet mastered in class.

The rest is over here: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-my-career-began-on-a-zoom-screen-5-years-ago-i-still-fell-in-love-with-teaching/2025/06. And more to come, I’m sure <3.

When the Nation’s Report Card was released last month, it reiterated a hard truth about our education system today: We are failing our students with disabilities.

Students with disabilities, who make up 15% of all public school students, continue to lag significantly behind their non-disabled peers. On the reading assessment administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), fourth graders with disabilities scored 39 points lower and eighth graders scored 38 points lower. In math, fourth graders with disabilities scored 31 points lower and eighth graders scored 40 points lower. And in both math and reading, eighth-grade students with disabilities saw a decrease in their NAEP scores since previous results from 2022.

This achievement gap reflects an ongoing crisis likely to worsen with inaction. Over the last 40 years, the number of students receiving special education services has doubled to over 7 million children today. If trends continue and these numbers rise but we refuse to change how we serve students with special needs, we risk denying millions of children their right to a high-quality education.

New piece out in the East Bay Times (https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/08/opinion-nations-report-card-education-students-disabilities/)! Follow @mcizmane on Instagram to stay up to date with updates and make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already :)

For students to become successful readers, they need instruction based on the science of reading — direct, explicit, and systemic lessons teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Children are expected to master these skills in the short years between kindergarten and when they sit for standardized assessments in third grade, despite the fact that many students begin school with limited literacy exposure or require more time to practice these skills.

But what if instead of beginning our literacy efforts in kindergarten and first grade, we began that work in early childhood classrooms? What would it look like to work with early childhood educators to integrate and align literacy efforts so that all students are set up for success?

New piece out on Chalkbeat! Follow @mcizmane on Instagram to stay up to date with updates and make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already

Hi hi hi very quickly! I’m volunteering on a school board campaign for Rachel Latta who is also a parent from my school :) If you are US-based, PLEASE donate at least $5 to her campaign because 1. Even if you don’t live in California, what happens in one state impacts what happens in another and we need more progressive school board members and 2. Even if you don’t have kids, in the next 10 years, you might have kids or godchildren and you want them to be able to attend good schools with all the other kids around them and beyond! So donate right now!

In April 2024, I was incredibly lucky to host a panel as part of a year-long fellowship with Teach Plus California (currently accepting applications!). In collaboration with Oakland Starting Smart and Strong, BANANAS, and Bonita the Bumblebee, we held a roundtable to discuss early childhood education (ECE) in the neighborhood of West Oakland. The live-streamed conversation took place at the Oakland Public Library and centered on the strengths, challenges and opportunities in ECE in West Oakland that can be used as lessons for the future of the ECE landscape.

The research is clear on the salience of early childhood education (ECE). High-quality formative early experiences lead to positive outcomes, like higher test scores, higher college attendance rates, and higher economic earnings. As leaders across Oakland, California and the United States look to invest in ECE, what would it look like to use West Oakland as a model? The diverse community is home to many students of color, English language learners, students with special needs, and students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch — and what works for these most marginalized student groups will work for all students. I wanted to learn from panelists, what is taking place in West Oakland that other ECE systems can learn from? Here were the key takeaways:

1. Parents are being empowered to be engaged participants in the children’s early education.

Tarsha Jordan — Founder and Executive Director of the STEAM non-profit, Bonita the Bumblebee — runs parent workshops “empowering” parents of early learners as their children begin their school careers. She teaches families how to initiate conversations with teachers, exposes them to ECE assessments like the DRDP (Desired Results Developmental Profile) so they understand how their children are doing, and she educates them on what a high-quality ECE program should look like. As a result, Jordan gets parents involved early in their child’s educational career, setting them up for a lifetime of engagement and participation.

2. Educators are meeting students based on their needs. 

Zazzi Cribbs — a mother to an eight-year-old in a traditional public school and a four-year-old in a Family Child Care (FCC) center — has been encouraged by her children’s teachers who “meet kids where they’re at.” Whether they are learning about healthy food choices or sounding out letters to begin to read, Cribbs sees her children growing as a result of teachers identifying students’ individual needs and developing their education from there, rather than applying a “cookie-cutter” approach to all students and their families.

3. Educators and parents are working to address young children’s special education needs.

Neymiya “Miya” Moore — a current transitional kindergarten and former preschool teacher working in a traditional public school — has found that over the years, ECE educators often see students presenting with special education needs that have not been identified yet. Under-staffed and under-resourced special education departments lead to lengthy assessment processes and the delayed provision of services, and in the interim, Moore guides parents through the process and adapts her classroom for her students.

4. Organizations are informing parents about the limitations and challenges of universal TK.  

Heather Lang — Family Services Manager at BANANAS — works to inform families of their ECE options because “things are changing so quickly” particularly with the expansion of transitional kindergarten (TK), which may not be the most viable option for all families. Lang speaks to parents about TK’s elementary school schedule and limited afterschool slots which will leave full-time working parents to make childcare arrangements. TK may also not be the best option for children who have never been in any school setting previously and will face a big adjustment. Through focus groups and reaching out to families in their network, BANANAS is making sure families understand the options.

5. There is money and legislation to support the development of ECE.

Trisha Barua — Policy Analyst for Oakland Starting Smart and Strong (OSSS) — is keeping track of the Oakland Children’s Initiative (Measure AA) and Alameda County’s Early Childhood Healthcare and Education Ordinance (Measure C) investing millions of dollars in the futures of young children. Barua and OSSS are reaching out to community members to apply for funding and join oversight committees to make sure that local partners remain involved in making ECE work in Oakland for all children and families.

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I am so grateful to the panelists who participated and those who were able to attend in person and virtually. There is so much happening in early childhood education and I am excited to add to the growing literature on what happens next to make sure that all children and their families are set up for success. More to come!

… While universal preschool is still on Biden’s radar, bringing the program to fruition at the federal level is not politically possible. And so, it placed the burden on states to do the impossible, and blue and red states alike have outlined their ambitions to do so. Alabama and Georgia are looking to transform their current first-come, first-serve, lottery-based system of free state-funded preschool to all families. The governors of Illinois and Michigan have made promises and budgetary commitments towards free preschool for all four-year olds in the next few years. But California is providing a model right now of what universal preschool could look like—and revealing all the challenges that come with it. 

New piece out with The Progressive! Follow @mcizmane on Instagram to stay up to date with updates and make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already :)

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New piece in the San Francisco Chronicle! Here’s an excerpt and you can read the rest here — See you at @mcizmane on Instagram and more to come ;)

Without fail, whenever my 4-year-old student Kimberly goes back to school, her return is always accompanied by tears. Sometimes screams. Often both.  

The adjustment back is an arduous one. Kimberly (not her real name) has forgotten the routines. She has no idea what we are learning. She misses her mom. All the stress destabilizes her little body and she erupts into a meltdown, making the 50th day of school feel like the first. 

As an early childhood educator, it has been startling to see absenteeism rise with the youngest students. Families think that a 4-year-old missing a few days is insignificant. Sometimes we as a nation think so, too. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. That time away leaves a child socially and academically ill-equipped for a successful school career. Kimberly remembers fewer numbers and letters and is less confident during classroom discussions. Before her education has even really begun, she is already behind. 

Continue reading…

I’m writing, I promise! In the meanwhile, new piece on Electric Lit & read below for the entries that were cut :))))) Subscribe here and follow me on @mcizmane for updates to come!

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Gabrielle Union, We’re Going To Need More Wine (2017)

(TW: Sexual Assault) In her first memoir, actress and activist Gabrielle Union takes the opportunity in-between stories of growing up in Nebraska and the Bay Area and becoming a world-famous celebrity and half of an iconic power couple to candidly discuss colorism, divorce, and rape, rarely holding back on the highs and lows of her life and her career. Union’s appeal as a public figure is her openness and her vulnerability, putting readers at ease by sharing her truth and not being afraid to call out all that she sees wrong in Hollywoods and the world writ-large. “You can love what you see in the mirror,” she writes, “but you can’t self-esteem your way out of the way the world treats you.”

Michelle Obama, Becoming (2018)

With nine copies sold per second on the day of its release, former First Lady Michelle Obama’s memoir is one of the bestselling memoirs of all time, and deservedly so. “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own,” she tells the reader, and in her own words, she tells us not just about the historic journey to the White House, but all of her life that came before it. Her childhood on the South Side of Chicago, her years as a college student at Princeton, her career as a lawyer and associate dean, laying it all out so that we walk with her through her road to discovery, encouraged to consider our lives and impact too. 

Mariah Carey, The Meaning of Mariah (2020)

Delightful in some parts, harrowing in others, Grammy-Award winning superstar Mariah Carey finally tells her story because as her father told her, “words have meaning and thus, they have power.” Co-written with Michaela Angela Davis, she describes her early experiences trying to fit in as a light-skinned biracial little girl in Long Island and her early career where her fame and popularity was tainted by an abusive marriage to her record executive first husband. Carey’s story ultimately is a fairytale, in which she saves herself, and the latter half of the book, with the most wonderful thinly-veiled insults is a particular treat. 

Viola Davis, Finding Me (2022)

EGOT-winner Viola Davis tells the story of her life, with vivid, detailed descriptions that are at many times difficult to read, but all of which become the experiences that shape her life and the woman she is today. “You don’t have to live in the past,” she writes, and as she shares her journey, she includes advice for others to use as they work through their own challenges, whatever they may be. Her story covers lots of thematic ground, including colorism and childhood poverty, and the stories she tells about her family, her husband, and her career allow for insight that all readers can gain from following her journey. 

Read the full and final piece here: https://electricliterature.com/10-contemporary-memoirs-and-essay-collections-by-black-women/

New piece for Slate, scroll for an excerpt and read the rest here! Missing you all tremendously, come find me on IG @mcizmane

I have spent most of the past decade working with kids 5 years old and younger, and I have seen it all. Biting, punching, kicking, screaming—all carried out by humans with the most cherubic faces imaginable. Years as a teacher have shown me that the violence is never more acute than during those first few months of school, when the toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners entering new and bizarre social contexts are suddenly being told to ignore their natural impulses to fight to defend themselves in favor of “using their words.” I have watched classrooms and playgrounds quickly descend to Brad Pitt–Ed Norton levels of no-holds-barred conflict over toys, sandboxes, and fruit snacks, and every fall, I have parents coming to me, anxious at best and horrified at worst, about what their child is telling them is happening at school. Without fail, I tell them all that same thing—everything is OK! But not enough time and space is made to explain what is happening with the babies during the first few weeks of school.

Continue reading here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/preschool-fights-biting-kindergarten-normal.html

This is my last newsletter!

When I started this Substack in October 2022, I had an idea of what I wanted and how I thought it would go. I was increasingly frustrated reading think pieces and commentaries and op-eds about education from perspectives that were rarely if ever penned by classroom teachers working in the post-2020 wilderness. And so, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, I wrote the stories that I wanted to read. Stories inspired by my kids and my teacher friends, realistic about the challenges facing schools but still grounded in joy and enthusiasm and possibility.

Narcissistically, I also wanted to write about myself. I had just turned twenty-seven, inching closer to my solar return, and finding myself increasingly reflective on my own educational perspectives and how they were influencing not only work as a teacher but my opinions on the field more generally. Again, I would have loved to read about perspectives like mine and my friends. Stories about contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa, stories about women’s colleges, stories about women and Black people and Africans and about those of us who are all three at the same time. I thought maybe the blog could be a way for me to make sense of my life and record the stories of my friends and my family where we could all live on in the infinity of the internet.

I truly thought no one would read this. Not self-deprecatingly, I just did not think these thoughts would be of interest to anyone beyond whoever I cornered into a conversation at a party who had gingerly asked how work was going. To have people read the blog would have felt like an accomplishment on its own, but to have people like and share and repost and text and bring it up in conversation feels truly surreal. I’m so grateful my heart could burst.

I have the unfortunate privilege of being an eldest daughter, a Virgo, and a woman who came of age during the transition between the third- and fourth-wave feminist movements. All of that is to say despite my best intentions, I am wildly ambitious and I want to take a pause before continuing to do other things. Large emphasis on the pause that will include hours spent in bed daydreaming in ways to cosplay as both Frog and Toad. I am also starting my fourth year of teaching and I want to continue to work on becoming the best teacher that I can be for my kids and their families. The writing will continue and I’ll share it here as soon as I have new work out. In the meantime, my IG (@mcizmane) is public and I’ll be there too.

Asanteni sana for absolutely everything. I am infinitely indebted to you all.

New piece out in Teen Vogue! Make sure to read here and on the original website :)

“…Millions of us are planning to return to the classroom in the fall (with the real masochists like myself also working summer school). As a third-year teacher who began her career teaching through distance learning during a pandemic, I’m often astonished that I am still here. More so when I consider that it is new teachers and teachers working in “high-poverty, high-minority, urban” districts like mine (as well as those in rural public schools) that are most likely to leave. But I also know that I am not the exception. At a time like this, when the work is so hard and the demands only continue to grow, it is not only understandable, but completely reasonable that so many teachers are leaving. The real question, I wonder, is why are so many of us staying?”

“…As a kindergarten teacher, I have had the privilege of seeing the glow in a students’ eyes as they sound out the amalgamation of symbols in front of them and realize that they have just read a word. I have watched in real time as students take deep breaths in the middle of conflict, to calm themselves down and prepare to use their words to vocalize their feelings when feeling stressed. I have gotten hugs and cards from babies who have no idea about all the threats coming against their education, but who are just ecstatically overjoyed to be at school with their friends, learning something new that they didn’t know before, like how syrup comes from trees or how hearts aren’t actually shaped like they are in cartoons. We’re staying not just because our kids need us, but because we need our kids, and we’re going to stay with them as much as we can.”

Continue reading here: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/teachers-quitting-education-students

The fall of my junior year at Barnard, I saw a flyer for a class with a course subtitle made just for me — The Mississippi Semester: Race, Inequality and Childcare. The seminar was part of the History department and was a collaboration between the Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative (MLICCI), where the former would help develop an index and report that could then be used to support the work of the latter. The class would take place during the spring semester and would include a trip to Mississippi for all seven days of spring break. Students needed to apply to enroll in the class and eight would be selected. I enthusiastically applied, crossed my fingers, and ended up being one of the eight.

Our professor described herself as a scholar-activist and explained to us how this course was a way of exploring how to use the academy as a way to serve local organisations making day-to-day, meaningful impact. In order to do this, we needed to study the history of the nation and understand what was happening currently in Mississippi. We read articles and essays and full-length texts like Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. We analysed census results and used GIS to make our own little maps showcasing the data. We video chatted with the team from Mississippi to find out from them what they would like us to do when we got to Mississippi in a few weeks.

The weeks sped by and suddenly the ten of us — eight students, one research assistant, and our professor — were in Biloxi, Mississippi. We rented a bus from the airport and drove to our hotel that had a view of the beach, the Gulf of Mexico, and a humongous Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. We checked in and walked to dinner, garnering stares from every passerby transfixed by our group of young, racially diverse women, but still making sure to greet us all. We had the first delicious dinner of many, wiped out back in our beds, and woke up the next morning ready to work.

Zadie Smith did an interview years ago where she spoke about duties, rights, and gifts as structuring our social and intimate lives. One way to consider all that our lives are is by taking inventory of the gifts we have, the rights we hold, and the duties we owe one another. But the three can also be used as a means for us to consider all that an education is. An education as a gift that holds and adds value. An education as an unalienable right to pursue knowledge. An education as a duty that obligates us to put our betterment towards the betterment of others.

It is the final idea that has found itself out of vogue. Education continues to be a gift that people spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on because to function without it is becoming near to impossible. Education continues to be a right fought for valiantly by parents, teachers, and students in school board meetings, picket lines, and ballot boxes. But the idea that an education bestows onto us a duty to get others their gifts and their rights? That we see less and less of as education becomes a means of achieving individual success and glory.

What is the duty of an education? How do we put to use the knowledge and skills developed in classrooms and lecture halls? How do we bestow in students a sense of civic responsibility to their fellow human beings? And how can we use education systems to provide those opportunities for students to see all that still needs to be done in their world and the duty that they have — that we all have — to do something about it?

One of the projects established by the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative was a job-training program for single mothers interested in working in construction, a higher-paying, predominantly-male profession. On our second day in Biloxi, our team held a focus group for interested participants to hear about their experiences that we would use to accompany the empirical data we were mapping. Almost all the women cited childcare as one of the biggest obstacles to economic empowerment, and how the free Head Start provided by MLICCI alleviated that tremendously. Many spoke about holding bachelors degrees, associate degrees, and other certifications, but being unable to find jobs due to a lack of work opportunities. And as grateful that they all were for the Women in Construction initiative, they shared that they remained in a tenuous economic situation, where if they missed work because of car trouble or unreliable bus schedules, or if they got sick or injured and lacked healthcare, they would be back to square one.

We took their stories with us when we traveled to Jackson the next day where we visited the state capital to meet with local representatives and members of the Mississippi Black Caucus as they discussed childcare with MLICCI. We heard what policies were already in place and what was in the works as MLICCI advocated for more affordable and accessible options and the difference that would make in the lives of Black women and Black children. We were then able to sit with Black teenage girls visiting with the Nollie Jenkins Family Center who told us about how they were able to use the Center as a safe space to do homework and have sleepovers and be teenagers in the ways that young Black girls are often denied.

On one of our last days in Mississippi, we visited Cooperation Jackson, a worker-owned co-op with a restaurant and cafe and a growing farm at the back. They taught us about the history of Black Power activism and the education work they were doing, providing literature and events open to all in order to inspire those in the community to work towards self-reliance and unity. Riding back home, close to the end of our trip, we reflected as a group on the importance of making sure both grassroots efforts towards progress co-exist with top-down changes happening through policy and legislation, brainstorming and planning on how we were going to synthesise the past seven days into a text that could be used as a snapshot of where the state was as all these different groups worked in the direction of where they wanted the state to be.

Bar the last hundred years, an education was seen more as a privilege and less as a right. When opportunities were more scarce and their provision not a given, only the most elite in a society or the most academically talented in a community were given the honour of an education, and that brought with it certain duties. Educated folks were expected to look after their families, transform their communities, and come back to educate others. And whilst these realities still exist for many outside of the Western World and for those who are historically marginalised and may be the first to graduate high school or go to college, the duty component of an education has fallen with the rise of a more individualist society.

That being said, there are still schools and institutions looking to instil in students a responsibility to others. The Mississippi Semester was not the only course at Barnard centered around serving community organisations. Around the same time that we were taking our seminar, a different class was researching and recording the history of our neighbouring Harlem neighbourhoods, whilst another class took a trip to an ICE facility in Texas to support the work of a legal aid group. Mississippi was also not my first experience in which community service was part of my education. In high school, it was compulsory for us to work with a local organization at least once a week, and I spent one year teaching elementary-aged kids to swim, another year teaching middle-school girls about feminism and gender equality, and many other years involved in other projects. Years later, living and teaching in Oakland, where education and activism go hand in hand since the days of the Black Panther movement, the district makes an effort to encourage and engage students to be a part of change in their communities, growing and distributing their own produce and engaging in sustainable design projects.

How do we make civic engagement not an accessory to an education, but central to it? First, it requires us naming and being honest with students about the myriad of issues affecting cities, states, and countries around the world. Many of these issues, students already see and have experience with but require us to name, explain and contextualise, such as houselessness and gender inequality. Along with educating students though, we also need to make the effort to educate ourselves. This is often easier on a larger level, where national news is broadcast constantly, but local news is overlooked. However, in order to be effective in this work with our students, it must begin locally, and starting small and meaningfully by collaborating with groups already doing the work is one place where we can begin.

We came back from Mississippi and completed our empirical graphs and wrote up our report, using the real-life testimonials of the individuals and organizations that we had met to ground the data in their lived experiences. We published “The State of Women’s Economic Security in Mississippi” on Issuu, mapping median earnings, education level, healthcare, coverage, poverty, and employment levels to display the specifics of where women were across the state and included paragraphs describing all that we learned in the words on the women themselves. We then shared it with MLICCI to complete our original objective of engaging in work that will support their efforts, which it did. The group was able to use the report and index to advocate for the best policies for the communities they serve, backed by the data and research we were able to do.

In her 1979 commencement speech at Barnard College, Toni Morrison said that, “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” Not paternalistically, not because others need saving, but because we have a duty to one another as human beings. For those who hold special privileges in society — and the gift that education is does make it a privilege — a particular duty falls on us to pay it forward and to make life better for others the way others have made life better for us. We can use schools as cornerstones of our communities, modelling modes of civic engagement that we would like to see where we all support each other not just because we can, but because we should. We owe it to each other.

We cannot be ambivalent about the state of the world and our role in it. The problems our world face will not be suffered by individuals alone and thus require more than individuals to respond to them. Climate crisis, rising inequality, threats of violence, all seem daunting and all are daunting when we stare at them from the screens of our phones. Getting out there, meeting people doing the work, tackling it bit by bit, and taking our kids with us, might be a more manageable solution and a more effective one too. It takes us shouldering that responsibility towards others. But we never have to shoulder it alone.

During orientation week, Barnard held a mixer for the families of incoming international students that my parents, sisters, and I were ecstatic about. I didn’t know anyone else going to Barnard or really anyone who had ever been, and as the eldest child, my parents had never taken a child to college before, and so the event was a way for all of us to meet other kids and families in the same boat. We walked around, meeting people, making connections, and waiting to get some 1-on-1 time to speak to the event’s keynote, the Dean of the College.

She was Black with beautiful, tightly-done locs and and warm and reassuring tone that she used to quell our fears and anxieties. She smiled and affirmed me and told me I’d do great. She fielded my parents’ questions, promising to reach out to them if anything happened, which of course it wouldn’t. Then she moved on to the next group and we let out a collective sigh, feeling better about this new journey we were embarking on. A few days later, my family flew back to Tanzania and I got an email assigning me an academic advisor for my freshman and sophomore years, and I excitedly called my mom to tell her the Dean was going to be my advisor.

In our first advising session, we sat in her office, tucked away to where all the other administrators were housed, and I rambled on about everything from the upcoming Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to Lean In, all of which she listened to patiently as she smiled politely in response. During my rare moments of pause, I asked her about her experiences attending Barnard as an undergraduate and how it felt to return to her alma mater, and as she answered, I stared at her, wheels turning, as I realized that she was who I wanted to be. Service-minded, incredibly smart, and badass.

Education can provide windows to students or it can provide mirrors. The former refers to the ways in which an education can reflect back to students their own experiences, and the latter puts a portal in the hands of students that transports them into the lives of others. Both can be achieved through the books read, the histories taught, and the cultural milieus in which the schools exist. But education can also be a third thing — a map, that lights the way for students looking for themselves and who they want to be in the world.

An education prepares students for the world and sometimes that looks like showing them who they can be, often most effectively through the example of the adults making that education possible. The principal sharing her story of growing up in the same neighbourhood as her students. The coach encouraging his players to pursue the same athletic scholarships that he did. The school counselor creating a safe space for those in her office that inspires others to do the same when they grow up. These role models and at best, mentors, turn students into cartographers, plotting the course of their lives to where they want to go. Students need these figures to energize and galvanize them through an education that can sometimes seem rudderless by showing them what potentially awaits them at the finish line, and this can be particularly vital for students holding marginalized identities needing to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

What is the role of a mentor or a role model in an education, and how has the imagery of that figure been both overstated and understated in our discourse? What mechanisms are at work within those relationships and how do we codify all that works and problematize all that doesn’t? How do we create and sustain education systems and institutions that show students who they can be and how they can get there, in part in order to achieve larger goals of academic achievement and professional advancement, and additionally to support self-actualization and personal fulfilment? What maps can an education provide?

For my first Thanksgiving, my plan was to rewatch old episodes of Martin and be the only person in my building for the long weekend. My advisor heard this and immediately invited me to her house in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving dinner. I walked around her kitchen and listened to stories about her childhood, I sat in her living room and talked to her siblings and family, and I dug in to a beautiful meal and reflected on how thankful I was that despite only meeting a few months earlier, she had made me feel cared for and at peace when I didn’t even realize I needed it.

The following year though, she really began to push me. I joined a committee that was part of student government and decided to make it my mission to get free laundry at Barnard. Because my advisor was the Dean, I figured I could use our sessions as a way to advocate for my cause and I would get what I wanted quickly — but she would not budge. She brought up sound points about financing and overhauling the machines, and I would respond with disrespect, to the point that one day I had to check myself and apologize for an earlier interaction. And yet she humored me, always listening, always taking me seriously, always giving me the respect that my hard-headedness was not great at reciprocating. Then the year eventually ended, we never got free laundry — it would happen the year after I graduated — and I managed to find an excuse back in her office despite the end of our advising period by formally joining student government.

When I started planning for the future, I of course consulted her. I had declared as an Education Studies minor and was working at a daycare off-campus and a daycare on-campus, and my plan was to go to graduate school right after college. My first choice was going next door to Teachers College and when I mentioned it to her, she reminded me that was her alma mater too. Without even thinking about it, my dreams were following in her footsteps, going from Barnard to Teachers College to a career in education working with students. And as I considered her life and her role in mine, the thought of being to others what she had been to me was deeply fulfilling. After all, she was who I wanted to be.

In education — and in life — much feels like happenstance. Why the people in our lives pick us to guide and mentor us feels superfluous, especially when we consider how our teachers and professors and guidance counselors and more get paid to do one job, but go above and beyond for us for free. And yet it is these seemingly random acts of kindness that sustain an education. Our literature and media understands how essential these figures are, from A Different World to Coach Carter, but when we think and talk about schools and all the things that make them work, we downplay the salience of the relationships beyond the student-teacher dyad within the four walls of the classroom.

In our valid criticisms of schools, we forget that at their best, they are the spaces where the village comes to life. The mentors housed in schools are the maps students need to guide the way and show them where to go. But our amnesia is well-earned, a consequence of the uncomfortable realities around how abusive, predatory, and problematic these relationships can turn. We hold valid fears around the negative sides of these vertical relationships and become understandably avoidant in order to protect young people. But what would it look like to promote more relationships, not less, so that students have places to go if things go wrong?

We need schools and institutions that attract, sustain, and retain the teachers, principals, professors, deans, coaches, tutors, and all the other adults who make up a school community, so that they are able to step into roles of mentorship and be the examples that students can look to on the road to their own development. That means changing the conditions that we work in, compensating all work that is done, and prioritizing social-emotional learning and mental health wellness as much as we do academics and professional preparation. We also need to move away from cultural practices and mental frameworks that center the self and be more open to serving others, even and especially if there is no personal gain to us. Rejecting the common and often applicable adage of “putting your mask on before helping others,” and thinking instead, how can I help others, how can I be there for others, even when I don’t feel at my best, because help and care and compassion towards others is what will give me that oxygen I need to survive. And the more we practice that with others, the more we model that to young people, the more altruistic world we create.

At home during the summer before my senior year, I got a school-wide email that our dean would be leaving and moving to California. I knew that she loved Barnard and any move would have been a hard one, and I was also never would have thought that the person who was there at the start of my journey wouldn’t be there for my last. But throughout the year, she would send me text messages checking up on me, making it hurt a little less.

Graduation day was a rush and it was busy and it was exciting, namely because I got to sit on stage right next to our commencement speaker (and one of my original maps), Viola Davis. There were so many people, and I felt so much love, but at one point sitting there, I got the strange sense that something was missing. And of course, as soon as I got off the stage, I had a message waiting for me from my Dean telling me that she was proud of me.

I never ended up going to Teachers College. I did, however, still continue to follow the same map that I had been moving by going to California. Not Southern California where she had moved, but the Bay Area where she had lived before moving back to Barnard. I took the map, made it my own, and I was grateful to have had it with me the whole time. I couldn’t have done it without.

More freelance ICYMI! Make sure to read here and on the OG site :)

There is no doubt that our schools are in crisis. The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing culture wars and disappointing academic performance results have made education discourse particularly fraught. As many families have rightfully become more involved, they are often pitted against teachers, resulting in each side antagonizing the other.

Across the country, we’ve seen conversations about education become charged. Books are getting banned from classrooms and libraries. Curriculum is being stripped and censored. School board meetings are devolving into hostility.

As a public school kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, I have seen these challenges widen the gap between teachers and families, especially over the past three years. My district was one of the last in the country to resume in-person learning and there was intense disagreement over how to reopen our schools safely followed by a seven-day teacher strike where campaigns to resume learning ran alongside campaigns to shut it down. We’ve also had heated debates over how to address the reality of declining enrollment. But as much as these conflicts have threatened to divide us, I have also seen my community and others collaborate and come closer together, which we need now more than ever…

Continue reading on EdSurge: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2023-06-28-teachers-and-families-are-more-divided-than-ever-and-students-are-losing-out

I took an Educational Foundations course as a sophomore in college where in one of the last weeks, we watched a truly bizarre video in class. In a rural area of India, a local researcher had placed a computer literally inside of a wall with a few programs, internet access, and no further instructions. Months later, he found that young children from nearby areas had taught themselves how to use the device and were watching videos, downloading games, and teaching others. Sugata Mitra, the researcher, coined this process as “minimally invasive education” and posited, upon conclusion, that schools were obsolete.

I understood the appeal of the sentiment. Like India, Tanzania also faces a crisis of a growing population of young people eager to learn and an educational infrastructure struggling to meet that need. The irrefutable benefit of non-invasive approaches like the “Hole in the Wall Project” is how they can recruit technological tools to circumvent the challenges standing in the way of a quality education for millions of children around the world. Perhaps, my classmates and I mused, self-directed learning would be the norm in education for all children as the role of technology in our lives and its capabilities grew exponentially.

Exactly four years later, a once-in-a-generation global pandemic hit, closing schools indefinitely and putting to test the feasibility of virtual education as students were sent online in droves. Left with computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all the information known to man, students struggled academically more than they ever had before. Teachers, we were being told, were indispensable. Classrooms, they insisted, was where students needed to be. Schools, it seemed, were not as obsolete as we had thought.

An education is a human experience. Or at least it should be, in my opinion. Time spent laughing in the cafeteria with friends, or running around a pitch with teammates, or reading quietly in the library next to classmates. Being able to take the marker from your teacher’s hand to complete the problem, or poking the person next to you to ask them to explain what’s going on, or sitting together in a group pretending to study and accidentally getting work done in the end. Education, when done best, is an accumulation of experiences to be learned from.

However, we can huff and puff as much as we like, but our human experiences cannot be divorced from all the technology dominant in our lives. In order for me to wax lyrically about the potency about human connection, I had to open my MacBook Air, wait for my wifi connection to come through, direct my browser to the Substack online platform, and then spend twenty minutes combing through Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia to find the video referenced in the opening paragraph (all the while playing the same MUNA song on repeat on Apple Music and window-scrolling through the SSENSE clothing sale on my iPhone). It would be disingenuous and completely impractical to pretend to live in a world untethered from the technological advances that define this moment. And, for better or for worse, schools live in this moment too.

Students today experience the impact of technology, first and foremost through the hardware present at their fingertips. Twenty years ago, in certain parts of the world, schools would have computer labs where hundreds of kids would share thirty bulky desktops. Today, in those same schools and more, thirty Chromebooks or iPads are wheeled around a single classroom and are opened up by students throughout their day. The software that students engage with also reveals the saliency of technology in their academic lives, as they learn subject matter from programs like ST Math and complete assignments on tools like Google Docs. And for older students today and younger students tomorrow, generative artificial intelligence is creeping into the classroom before inevitably bursting in and transforming what learning looks like. On the one end, generative AI is used to make learning easier (i.e. translating ). On the other end, generative AI is used to avoid learning altogether (i.e. writing assignments). These broad, interconnected swaths of educational technology — machines and devices, programs and applications, and artificial intelligence — are already changing what school is for our students. How do we reevaluate what an education is in our digital world? How we do reassert the values, principles, and lessons we believe are central to an education? And how do we reimagine what we want an education to be, not dictated to us by Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurs, but on our own terms, and with our students at the centre?

The nightmare challenge of teaching a combination class was trying to figure out what one group could do independently whilst the other group was with me, as we all shared the same room at the same time. My years in early childhood had made me staunchly anti-tech, arguing adamantly against placing children in front of screens, especially mere months after emerging (“emerging”) from a pandemic. But, I had nine four-year-olds who I needed to teach how to play with playdoh and fifteen five-year-olds who needed to learn addition and subtraction. So I caved and taught my kindergarteners how to log on to i-Ready for an hour every day so that I could have some time with my transitional kindergarten babies.

For those unfamiliar, i-Ready is an online, academic program for kids that has lessons in reading and in math where students are taught material, given activities based on said materials, and then are given summative assessments once completed. It is personalised, measuring where students are and what they are ready for, and also includes diagnostic tests for students to take at least twice a year. In many school districts, including my own, those results are used as official data to gauge student academic performance. Despite my gripes, within a few weeks, I found myself warming towards i-Ready. In addition to its practical benefits, I appreciated how for some students, I could assign lessons that I knew they were having a hard time grasping, and for other students, I could assign lessons to push them beyond or grade-level. And I could keep track of their progress from my teacher portal, letting the computer do more assessments in a day than I could ever even attempt.

Then came time for the end-of-year diagnostic and I flipped. For the August diagnostic, I left students to their own devices (literally), knowing that this was just a preliminary assessment. In May though, I wanted to see first-hand how students did and watch them work through material we had covered in class. Two tests in, and I was close to pulling my braids out one-by-one. The animated i-Ready monster would be singing the instructions and a kid would start asking me about donuts she saw on the other side of the room. The computer would read a story and before they even heard the question, a student would click the answer in the first bubble. I would re-read a question to them in response to their blank stare and when I asked them to repeat the question back to me, they stare would continue. I realised that even after months of practice, there was no way this test could capture all that my students could do because it just wasn’t appropriate. Even if my students were used to sitting in front of a computer at school and an i-Pad at home, what they were engaging in was less learning, and more watching or memorising or spacing out, all of which I do too when placed in front of a screen. The technology could only do so much without a human being to act like a bridge between the object (the information) and subject (the student).

Maybe technology is the canary, screaming sweetly to us all that is wrong in education today. The machines and devices our students are drawn to are more accessible than teachers in the classroom might be. Easier to see, easier to hear, easier to get a response from, and all of this especially so when we consider our students who are differently-abled and for whom technology can provide some sort of equity. Programs and applications that might be fun and engaging in ways that maybe our lessons aren’t, and might be personalised and adaptive is ways that maybe our instruction isn’t. And generative AI appeals to students who find our assignments too hard, our teaching too ineffective, the time constraints too restrictive, and the pressures of academic performance too high to skip out on having the computer do the work for you.

Sci-fi parables always end on the zero-sum argument that it’s either us or tech. And more often than not, we believe that, either envisioning a world with complete automation or occupying ourselves with fantasies of living off-the-grid. Neither are realistic, particularly when it comes to schools. We need technology to reinforce rather than replace the education we provide to our students. And maybe we need to start by reaffirming a definition of education as being the transference of skills and knowledge to students that is then applied and enacted on in further contexts. An education as an experience where students learn in order to act.

In a digital world, this means making sure that students are taught and given opportunities to practice. That means moving away from pedagogical approaches by computers or humans that emphasise memorisation and minimise critical thinking. Approaches where students are passive participants to the screen or teacher in front of them, when we need them to actively engage in their learning so that they understand the content well-enough to apply it. But we need to make sure that we are all on the same page about our values. That we still care about critical thinking and independent thought, and that we still want students to discover the world for themselves so that they can function on their own by their own terms. But the disputes and conflicts that come up in education around book bans, identity, history, and more reveal the deep schisms hindering our ability to fight collectively for what we believe is central to an education. Because that is what we need, ultimately. A united agenda around the future of educational technology that takes into consideration the goals and objectives of teachers, parents, and students, and how we want the latter to thrive academically and social-emotionally. What we do not need are the goals and objectives of private actors looking to increase profit margins, draw in consumers, and promote their own brands/products/personalities. We need to spend less time arguing about the positives and negatives of technology in the classroom, and more time advocating for what we want technology in the classroom to look like. That is where we are right now.

When I was a kid, I was transfixed one night by Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator when my family landed on it while we were channel surfing. At first, I was drawn in by the film debut of one of my favourite singers at the time (Gwen Stefani), but I stayed in awe of all of the technological achievements pioneered by Howard Hughes in his lifetime. As the movie goes on, the subplot of Hughes’ obsessive compulsive disorder becomes the central conflict of the film, as Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes gradually descents in to panic. The film ends with Hughes successfully flying the plane he had always dreamed, he is then rushed and hidden away as he repeats over and over again, “the way of the future,” eventually alone to himself in the mirror.

Nearly twenty years later, that phrase still sticks to me (and my family). This idea the the future is a refrain, repeated on and on, with little we can do to stop or thwart it. That regardless of my feelings on iPads in the classroom, computer-based assessments, and ChatGPT being used for every and all assignments, technology continues to be the way of the future and as a teacher, it is up to me to figure out how to drag myself along so that I can make sure I am still doing my job, educating responsibly future generations to come.

Teachers are not unique in this journey of discovering what technology means for us. But we cannot let these decisions be made without us demanding a seat at the table and being informed enough to ask for what we need when the floor is ours. This moment is one to learn, plan, and move. The future charges on with or without us. Let’s move with it.

During my first-year of teaching, I had a baby who was always logged on and ready by 8:25 am. I would let the class in from the Zoom waiting room and there she would be, seated for transitional kindergarten, pencils and crayons to one side, papers and supplies on the other, with her mom right beside her, getting her own work done. She was incredibly bright student, with a sharp memory, wonderful sense of humour, and was easily one of the cutest kids I have ever seen in my life.

Within a few months, she was spelling, writing, and sounding out the letters in her first, middle, and last name, and all before she turned five. We still had months left in TK and I was ready to let her coast, knowing that it was the next year in school where formal reading instruction would build on the foundational academic and social skills we were learning in our classroom. But her mom had other ideas. She sent me a text message one evening in the spring semester asking if I had any resources she could use to teach her daughter how to read. She’s ready — her mom stressed to me — and she’s itching to read. Mom had been researching online and had attended district meetings for parents around literacy, and although she understood reading wasn’t a part of what we would be doing that school year, she wanted her daughter to at least start doing that work.

And I agreed. I had most of my afternoons free with distance learning and figured that instead of signing up for more virtual professional development, I could teach my student to read, pushing her growth and mine in tandem. I had worked predominantly in early childhood education by this point and so I knew little about the mechanics of reading instruction. However, I still had credential logins to the Fountas and Pinnell literacy program that I had used when I was student teaching in First Grade, and so I figured that I’d start there. With some DIY Google Slides, a lot of improvisation, and a commitment by mom to work with her before, after, and during class, my student had learned how to read by the end of the year, and I had learned how to teach reading.

65% of students in Oakland are not reading at grade-level. That means from elementary to high school, when students are taking standardised tests assessing where they land across the benchmarks necessary to graduate as proficient readers, 65% of them are not meeting the mark. This should shock and shame, and as an educator, I feel both deeply. There are too many children across the country and around the world who are being locked out of academic and professional opportunities because they cannot read in the ways that they should, and this reality haunts teachers, parents, policy makers, and students alike.

You would be hard-pressed to find a publication with an education focus or beat that has not reported extensively on the “reading wars.” The term describes the conflicts and tensions that have escalated particularly over the past three years, in which teachers, parents, administrators, policy-makers, researchers, publishers, corporations, the media and more have all come to blows in disagreement on the best way to teach kids how to read. Regardless of the fact that students and their teachers have been engaging in reading instruction for centuries, there is little consensus on what this should look like. Trends, research, and publication markets have shifted and shaped discourse on best practices, shifting from rote memorisation, to balanced literacy, to phonics-based instruction, with each methodology touting being research and science-based. And yet, too many kids are still failing to read.

Parents seeing into their children’s classrooms during the pandemic were shocked into action when they realised the ways in which reading instruction was failing. Teachers, who had been experiencing curriculum vertigo as districts bought and switched programs in cycles, raised the alarm as well. School board leaders, local officials, and elected representatives have been routinely asked what their plans are to secure the children of constituents their fundamental human right to a quality education. The reading wars rage on with no discernible end in sight, and young people suffer as the casualties. But what would it look like to meaningfully collaborate to find and enact the most effective ways to teach children how to read? Where are we falling short at the moment and how do we overcome these challenges? And what is at stake when we sit idly by, pointing our fingers and looking away?

My second year of teaching was in actuality my first in the classroom, and my goal was to expand on what was working virtually on Zoom to a full-scale approach to literacy in the classroom. I continued having my students trace their names everyday and practice spelling it as they wrote it, and pushing those who were ready to include their middle and last names and their letter sounds too. I also included worksheets that we could work on together as a class, so that they could get used to the whole group instruction and individual work expectations that would be required of them in kindergarten and beyond. But I also had them play with magnet letters that they could use to write their name, reinforcing their letter knowledge by literally holding them in their hands as was appropriate given their age.

And again, I had a student who breezed through these activities and within months, had the letter names and sounds knowledge necessary to begin learning how to read. I spoke to his parents in our first parent-teacher conference and asked if they would be okay with me pushing him, and they said that they trusted me and were fine either way. I borrowed some materials from my school’s literacy coach that they were using in the older grades and we got started, focusing predominantly on memorising sight words and blending letter sounds in short words through 1-on-1 work either with me or with the instructional aid in my room.

Almost immediately, my student was not into it. Seeing others get to play and do what he viewed as “easy” work made him feel like he was being picked on. He was also a perfectionist and whenever he forgot a sight word or could not figure out how to blend a word, he would either shut down and explode. Learning how to read, I was realising, could be a pretty fraught endeavour emotionally, impacting how students’ saw themselves in ways that I suspected would reverberate for decades to come. Determined, however, to finish what I started, we pushed and pushed, and I relied on his natural strengths around knowledge retention and implementation. And by the end of the year, we got there.

64% of students in Mississippi are reading at grade-level. Over the last ten years, the state spent $15 million a year to support literacy and implemented strategies that included universal preschool, individual reading plans for targeted students, the selective hiring of coaches to work in specific schools on evidence-based reading approaches, intense professional development, and retaining third graders who performing below testing standards. Their success illuminates the fact that effective reading instruction goes beyond a singular methodology, but requires multiple pathways that include early intervention, financial investment, and an equitable approach that focuses directly on individual schools and individual students, with the knowledge that what is done to support the communities that need it the most can be expanded to others too.

What is hindering us in this moment is our search for a silver bullet and an easy target. We are looking for story that tells us that if we just spent more money, or just followed the science, or did one last overhaul, then we could get it right. But, like with most other issues in education, it is not that simple. We fall short when we look for shortcuts and antagonise, rather than coming together as stakeholders, figuring out to prioritise funding, implement wrap-around services, and uplift and improve schools rather than grade and close them.

Literacy is not only the first step of an education, it is the first step of life. Reading can build or destroy a child’s confidence and set the pace for how they see themselves as a student and as a human being. When students fall behind in those foundational years, the additional tasks required of them, year after year, across disciplines, suddenly transform an education into a Sisyphean ordeal. Furthermore, students not only miss out on fulfilling their educational and professional ambitions, but also — important in their own way — they miss out on the magic of reading. They miss the wonder and excitement that comes from reading Harry Potter or Twilight or Captian Underpants, and all the other worlds designed for children to lose themselves in. Joy too becomes a casualty of war.

My third year of a teaching, I had a transitional kindergarten/kindergarten combination class. This time, I was tasked with teaching the majority of my students how to read by working in a team with other teachers and literacy tutors across grade levels. I had the posters and flashcards and worksheets and mini stories and my twenty-four students and I were off. Almost immediately, I saw how for most students, reading was a pretty arduous journey, one riddled with challenges and mistakes that required repetition and perseverance to overcome.

And gradually, we got there. At their own pace, students grew and blossomed and parents did what they could to support students in their work too. But for as much as I saw all that worked, I also was able to see first hand all the little ways that reading instruction could be undercut. As a teacher, I often felt undertrained and underprepared and would have loved more professional development. Thirty minutes to an hour a day of direct instruction was not enough, and at the same time, there was no other time in the day in between writing and comprehension, and math and science and more. Students might be missing from school or teachers and tutors might be missing from school and everything would be set back. Students who were multilingual and students with disabilities had no specific scaffolds and supports to meet their unique needs. For all the steps taken forward, there was more my students and I could have done, and I was left with just as much regret as I had pride.

There was one student I had who had been in my class for two years, with me in TK and then by chance again in my combination class the next year. Over those two years, I sat with her as we wrote her name and months later, she still wasn’t getting it down. She was an English Language Learner, her attendance wasn’t great, and she enjoyed school but it wasn’t her favourite. I was distracted by other students, I delegated other tutors and volunteers to work with her, and I frequently changed the activities she was engaging in during our literacy block. She graduated from kindergarten without a single lesson in reading instruction and at times my guilt felt overwhelming. Not every story in education has a happy ending, and there are millions of students denied one everyday. Admitting our shortcomings should come first. Doing better comes next.

Hiiii from Alicia! Lots of fun freelance stuff coming, make sure to read here and on the original site :)

As a third-year transitional kindergarten teacher in the Bay Area, I have seen the effectiveness of the program up close. My students spend the year learning school-readiness skills like how to hold a pencil and sit at a desk. They are all introduced to early academic concepts such as the alphabet, counting routines, and phonemic awareness skills through nursery rhymes and children’s songs. Many of them have never been around dozens of other kids their age and TK allows them to learn social skills through play like working together, sharing and being empathetic.

I am excited for more 4-year-olds to have the opportunity to engage in this learning, but as preschool becomes folded into the K-12 public education system, we have a duty to protect the sanctity of the early years, and we must make sure we do so.

Continue reading on EdSource: https://edsource.org/2023/universal-preschool-is-coming-lets-prioritize-social-emotional-learning-and-play/691883