New legislation would raise awareness about educational disparities across the state. But first the state must address the stratification within schools.
Is The Pandemic A Chance To Reimagine Special Education?
by Cayla Bamberger, The Hechinger Report | February 4, 2021
Single mom Nicole Vaughn has spent the better part of her adult life advocating for her five adopted children with disabilities. But when schools shuttered for the coronavirus last spring, Vaughn gained a slew of new responsibilities, like helping her kids access virtual classrooms and coordinating the special education services they receive.
“I had to send emails to the speech and language provider saying, ‘Hey, they haven’t seen you, I haven’t seen you. What’s going on? ” said Vaughn, who lives in the Detroit metropolitan area.
Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER, caldercenter.org) at the American Institutes for Research and the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR, cedr.us) at the University of Washington. Both CALDER and CEDR use administrative data to do research that informs decisions about policy and practice.
Dan s work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level, including the broad array of human capital policies that influence the composition, distribution, and quality of teachers in the workforce, and connections between students K-12 experiences and postsecondary outcomes. Topics of published work in this area include studies of the statistical properties of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, the effects of teacher qualifications and quality on student achievement, and the equity of teacher distribution.
This week has seen restaurants open to indoor dining and public schools closed to in-person learning, but that scenario won’t last much longer.
The board of health’s decision Monday to put Pitkin County under Red level restrictions confines restaurants in Aspen, Redstone, Snowmass Village and other locales to outdoor dining and takeout meals only, starting Sunday.
Yet the Aspen School District isn’t bound to the same color-code restrictions that businesses follow. The district instead makes its operating decisions based on consultations with county health officials and virus trends among students and staff.
“For the most part, we are seeing a huge amount of quarantining but almost nobody gets sick while in quarantine,” Superintendent David Baugh said Tuesday. “And we don’t feel like here it’s being transmitted in the schools.”