Weekend To-Do List

3/30 - 3/31

and

Mar 30, 2024

1. No Phones? Parents Say “Not So Fast”

READ/LISTEN: Elaine S. Povich wrote about the increasing number of states considering cell phone bans during class time. While more than 75% of U.S. K-12 public schools already have cell phone bans in place, parents remain skeptical:

“I like that it’s with her all the time. I want to keep my eyes on her 24/7. I want to know where she is at all times,” said Elisabeth Rice of Portland, Oregon, who has a 14-year-old daughter. “If she leaves the school, she won’t leave her phone behind, right?”

Read more in The 74 here. We’ve also discussed this topic at length on Lost Debate. Listen to my conversation with education expert (and Sweat the Technique co-host) Doug Lemov here and with New York Times columnist Pamela Paul here.

2. Teacher Pay on the Rise

READ: Matt Barnum at The Wall Street Journal reported on new legislation to increase teacher pay as part of an effort to address the nationwide teacher shortage. With teacher pay barely rising since 1990, states like South Dakota and Arkansas have recently passed legislation to raise minimum salaries. President Biden called for teacher pay raises in his recent State of the Union address, and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds recently proposed a minimum salary of $50,000 for new teachers in the state, up $11,000 from 2021:

“We want younger Iowans to see the teaching profession as something to aspire to,” Reynolds said in her Condition of the State address in January. “It’s one of the highest callings one can have, so let’s make sure that teacher pay sends that message.”

3. Benefits Are Breaking the Banks

READ/LISTEN: While teacher pay has remained flat over the past three decades, spending on teacher benefits has grown exponentially. Mark Lieberman at Education Week reported on the trend after a recent EdWeek Research Center survey found that more than one-third of school districts saw staff health insurance costs increase by more than ten percent over the past year. Districts with insurance plans that cover prescriptions for GLP-1s, like Ozempic and Wegovy, have been hit particularly hard:

Staff members in the last couple years have seen health insurance premiums increase annually at a rate of 10 percent to 15 percent, far outpacing the corresponding rise in their salaries, Jakubowski said. Expensive drugs like Ozempic, as well as cancer-treatment medications, are driving some of those increases.
“Every year, we lose more programming and extracurriculars because we have to pay for things like increased health care,” Jakubowski said.

Read more here, and listen to my recent conversation with Dr. Dhruv Khullar about the costs, stigma, and impact of GLP-1s here.

4. Action Required: Closing the Gender Gap in Education Leadership

READ: Women Leading Ed, the largest national nonprofit network of women in education leadership, surveyed over 110 women in leadership roles for their inaugural Insights Survey. With 95% of respondents reporting that they feel they have to make sacrifices that their male colleagues do not and nearly six out of ten respondents stating they think about leaving their current position due to the strain and stress of their job, the findings confirm there is still work to be done to close the gender gap in education leadership:

“The results of our first-annual survey paint a clear and at times painful picture of the reality that women face in education leadership,” said Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer, CEO of Women Leading Ed. “Bias continues to hold talented and capable women back and constrain their impact. It's a reality so ingrained and accepted that it's taken on the quality of wallpaper or background noise. The survey results expose just how little has truly changed, despite women gaining some entry into top leadership. We are in the same spaces, but women are still required to play a different game.”

Read the full report here.

5. D.C. Budget Cuts Threaten Vital Early Childhood Pay Initiative

Read: D.C.’s Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has paid over $80 million to 4,000 daycare teachers since it was created in 2021. The fund was created to retain quality staff and improve morale at daycare centers, where the median hourly wage in 2022 was $13.71. But as the city faces budget cuts, advocates worry that the fund may be in jeopardy, and daycare centers say they can’t afford to cover the difference. One early child-care worker says the stipend has only become more critical since the COVID pandemic:

“Children are coming in with real trauma. They’re coming in more aggressive, they’re coming in with less language, they’ve been exposed to a lot of screen time ... they have short attention spans,” Strickland said. “So are we ready for this influx? We can’t get ready if we’re paying people less money.”

Read more from Lauren Lumpkin in The Washington Post here.

6. Can AI Replace Language Learning?

READ: Enrollment in language courses other than English decreased by nearly 30% at American colleges over the past 15 years, and the downward trend is only set to continue as AI translation tools become more prominent. Louise Matsakis took to the pages of The Atlantic to caution that replacing foreign language learning with AI will lead to lost human connections and cultural understanding:

“Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security, told me.

7. An Inside Look at New York City’s Migrant Crisis

LISTEN: The Bell and Chalkbeat partnered for a special podcast episode exploring the impact of the migrant crisis on New York City schools. The episode features an interview with a current high school senior in the Bronx, a former high school teacher in Brooklyn, and Chalkbeat reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney. Listen here.