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Teaches how to reduce prejudice and systemic injustice. Emphasizes social justice, inclusive communities, and gives a supplemental curriculum you can use to help you achieve this goal.

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Learning for Justice is a community education program of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that centers civic and political action education for everyone.

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Humanities: Arts, languages, culture, history, and social studies!

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Humanities: Arts, languages, culture, history, and social studies!

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Free lesson plans for the humanities: arts and history. The lesson plans have been reviewed by two organizations: National Endowment for the Humanities and the National trust for Humanities.

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The resource provides several online books in various grade level texts. Gives teacher's a class code so they can set up a site specifically for their students. The teacher can assign a set a books for the classroom or for each individual students. The teacher will be able to know when the students have read a book and how many books they have finished. The children can access their books at home for a set number of hours a night. Great resource to encourage reading!

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Inspire a lifetime of reading and discovery with our award-winning digital library.

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online access fun thousands children great kids ebooks books

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Instantly access over 40,000 of the best books & videos for kids on Epic

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Get Epic to explore 40K+ kids' books online, from classic storybooks to audiobooks, comics & more.

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This free resource provides an essential question for teachers and students to focus on. It also gives lessons based on the reading levels of the students you are teaching. Provides close reading focused on historical issues.

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We're committed to providing educators accessible, high-quality teaching tools. That's why all our lessons and assessments are free. Please consider donating to SHEG to support our creation of new materials. All gifts are made through Stanford University and are tax-deductible.

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Books, yes, but also resources for teachers

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Books, yes, but also resources for teachers

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This site is not only for purchasing books. It also offers lesson plans, graphic organizers, whiteboard activities, and more for free. Great resource for teachers K-8.

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Scholastic | Books for Kids | Learning Resources

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Find the best kids books, learning resources, and educational solutions at Scholastic, promoting literacy development for over 100 years.

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Science, math, engineering, and technology 

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Science, math, engineering, and technology 

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This free resource is brought to you by the University of Colorado. Offers interactive simulations based on research through a game like explorations.

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Over 1.1 billion simulations delivered

160interactive simulations

97language translations

3001teacher-submitted lessons

Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

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Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

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This website gives reading and language arts high quality free lesson plans and access to other resources provided by the National Council of Teachers of English.

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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students.

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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students.

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Helps plan lessons, games, tech ides, and PDs

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Helps plan lessons, games, tech ides, and PDs

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This resource will help teachers in planning fun engaging lessons through education games and technology. It also gives PD lessons for administrators to help their teachers. There is a place where teachers can comment about the site what they like, think needs improvement, and what they want to see. There is also an administrator section that gives ideas and advice to admins.

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Education World | Connecting educators to what works

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Education World, connecting educators to what works. K-12 education resources, lessons and news. Classroom strategies and innovation for teachers all over the world

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This site connects to how policies and politics intersect. It makes reading the up to date information interesting with a humorous tone. Gives readers ability to connect readings with Facebook and Twitter as well.

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For Bellwether some good 2020 news was that we didn't have to let anyone go as our work was disrupted by Covid. But we also hit pause on growth. A result of that is that in 2021 we're going to have a lot of positions open.

Below are roles open now, all but Talent Manager are new roles on our 60-person full-time team of professionals. More coming so watch the space, as they say.

Bellwether has an office in Washington, D.C. and smaller office space elsewhere, but even pre-Covid much of our team works remotely from where they live all around the country - flexibility and the ability to live your life as you want and have a meaningful professional career is one of our Core Values. In other words, please apply from wherever you call home.
Digital Marketing Associate Editorial Manager Grants Manager Talent Manager Senior Associate Partner - Early Childhood Education Senior Associate Partner - Academic Program & Strategy Bellwether Education Partners is committed to providing equal opportunities and building a genuinely diverse team. It is our policy to ensure that all individuals with whom we are in contact are not discriminated against on the basis of age, race, ethnicity, color, disability, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran's status.

Literacy is power and opportunity, so great to see this from NSVF.

But that's not what I want to post about today.

There is a lot of important discussion and action on the school - police issue. The Times was on it this week with a big look at changes in LA. As with most things in education it's important to bear in mind it's a broad country and lots of places are not making changes. But, it's clearly a live issue.

This part of the Times story stood out to me for a couple of reasons,

Last summer's moves by school districts across the country to eliminate or shrink their school police forces were celebrated by activists, who argued that having officers in schools endangered and intimidated students.

But because most of the districts that made these changes have been teaching remotely for much of this school year, they have not yet had an opportunity to see how schools will change in the absence of the police. And some are grappling with what staff and programs should replace the officers.

Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd, a Black man, died on May 25 after a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, was among the first districts to take action, with the Board of Education moving quickly to terminate its contract with the city's police department to provide school resource officers.

To replace them, the district decided to hire roughly the same number of what it calls Emergency Management Safety & Security specialists. After the district posted a job listing asking for candidates with law enforcement backgrounds - it later said this was an error - it ultimately hired a number of candidates who had experience as former police, security or corrections officers, according to reporting by the education news outlet The74.

This prompted some activists to complain that the district was not really eliminating police officers from schools - it was just changing their titles.

First, the activists are right and it highlighted some great reporting by Mark Keieleber about this issue for The 74. Second, it points up an important question here: Should reformers be focused on changing the people doing security work in schools or should they be focused on changing the culture? Or both?

The evidence is pretty clear that Black students experience the presence of police in schools differently than white students. And Cami Anderson makes a compelling point that there is something about having the formal force of law attached to a person that makes any relationship fraught within schools.

Yet the issues are not cut and dry in a lot of places. For instance, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, hardly a conservative or reactionary, notes bluntly,

"Yeah we're not gonna do that," Mayor Lori Lightfoot said during a Friday morning press conference when asked if she would consider canceling CPS' existing contract with the Chicago Police Department. "Unfortunately, we need security in our schools."

Back in June I wrote about the rearranging the deck chair risk here, which is a risk anyone who has worked around government hiring and contracting appreciates,

...while counselors are not security guards, they can help with the work of changing the in-school culture that should be the cornerstone of any security approach. Bringing in counselors as police move out can minimize the risk that school districts will simply turn instead to education's bustling private security business.

Which is why at the end of the day I think we still fundamentally have a culture problem we don't talk about enough,

If your go-to discipline move is to call the police on young children, then focusing on whether the cops are school-based or a phone call away misses the broader problem: the absence of quality discipline strategies and a mindset that treats kids as if they were criminals.

In education it's pretty common to conflate and confuse culture with the forms of the solution. For instance, we argue endlessly about accountability policies but don't talk candidly enough about an education culture that doesn't have similarly high expectations for all kids. Accountability policy matters, just as school - police policy does, but whatever practices end up in place will reflect those underlying belief systems.

Posted on Feb 19, 2021 @ 12:09pm

Some interesting data in this Carnegie Corporation* survey on work, education, training, and Covid. For instance, the school data point here:

*BW funder, we were not involved in this work.

New Research: Kicking off @AEI's new Place-Based Philanthropy series, @JulietSquire of @bellwethered offers five lessons for successful #placebasedphilanthropy in rural communities. https://t.co/ykVbNrmWXU

- AEI Education (@AEIeducation) February 18, 2021

We talk a lot about school choice around here, various ways parents can choose schools from public school choice, public charters to vouchers, home schooling, and tax credits. Tradeoffs with all of those various policies and a hot set of politics around them.

But the most common way, and really the quietist, that parents choose schools is by choosing where they live. It's not, however, an opportunity that everyone has. Here's a new report on some of the structural issues there around that home ownership. Related, see this analysis from Urban.

The school choice landscape and school choice politics look different depending on your initial assumptions about who is choosing now.

Verbatim:

Lori Lightfoot talks with the Times about Chicago reopening lessons. And San Fransisco School Board Chair Gabriela López talks about why they are renaming schools there.

NCTQ on teacher preparation programs - selection and diversity:

Unfortunately, diversity and academic aptitude, both important, are often seen as conflicting goals. In contrast to that line of thought, a 2017 report from the Center for American Progress found states that increased admissions standards to teacher preparation programs saw increased diversity of undergraduate education majors. Beyond expanding diversity, greater selectivity helps raise the status of the teaching profession, supports the push for higher salaries, and, most importantly, provides students with access to the highest quality teachers.

Research shows an increase in admissions standards for teacher preparation programs was consistent with an increase in the racial diversity of undergraduate education majors.
In a unique undertaking, this study examines this important intersection between programs' admissions standards with their goals to achieve greater diversity and highlights programs that have successfully achieved both.

Uncommon Schools has a new blog, check it out.

Eduwonk and operator Sarah Silverman has co-launched a new firm, Outside Angle, focusing on organizational change, leadership, and DEI. Learn more.
The kids are alright?

The President flew to the Midwest last night, did a town hall meeting, flew back to the White House. How refreshingly normal. There was some news on education front. A clarification on the, still vague, reopening goal.

"I think we'll be close to that at the end of the first 100 days," Biden said during a Milwaukee town hall hosted by CNN. "We have had a significant percentage of them being able to be opened."

Worth noting that a significant percentage are open now. But seems like another sign the gears are turning and the extent of public angst is having an impact.

Also targeted student loan forgiveness still seems like a likelier play out of the administration. The President said $50k is not happening on his watch.

The Parkland school shooting was three years ago today.

One parent of a student killed that day, Alex Schachter's father, Max, created a non-profit to disseminate best practices about school safety. They're launching a database of school safety incidents in Florida - School Incident Report to increase transparency and support for schools to do better.

An unfortunate byproduct fo the politicized debate about school discipline and guns following Parkland was insufficient attention to just how much more could have been done to prevent this from happening in the first place. Lessons with enormous downstream consequences.

New Covid and schools guidance on the way - some grumbling about the distancing guidelines.

Times Magazine look at school reopening for live instruction (mentions Anthony Carnevale Elementary). In other Anthony Carnevale news, this Medium essay is worth your time.

Yglesias says the exam school debate misses the point ($).

Fordham on charter schools and district finances. "...in most states, an increase in the percentage of students attending independent charter schools was associated with a significant increase in their host districts." And for those of you who prefer to argue by author rather than evidence, well just read it. Important context on a pretty crazy debate.

ICYMI - here are some ideas from Bellwether on genuinely building back better and what's needed across a range of issues. And Bellwether checks back in with some education leaders during Covid.

Coming attractions: At the World Education Summit in March, Jeb Bush, John King, and I will discuss the politics and policy of building back better. And in a different keynote session Baltimore's Sonja Santelises and Philadelphia's Bill Hite and I will discuss the practice implications of building back better post-Covid.

It's hard to talk about schools these days.

Just as humans, ecological fallacies are hard for us. The idea that what's true of a group is not true of individuals, and the inverse can be vexing. Seems like that's on full display with the debate about school reopening, and schools and Covid more generally, in a host of ways. For instance,

- In general more affluent kids are far better off than other kids in terms of ability to weather this, but that doesn't mean they're all doing fine or this experience is without costs for kids in that demographic.

- Virtual learning isn't working for most kids, but there are some who are thriving, even reluctant to give it up.

- And of course on question with highest stakes: Overall the odds of getting sick or dying of Covid because of live school are very low, but it can happen and is obviously catastrophic when it does.

Yet on all of these questions, and others, Sweeping generalizations and broad claims seem to characterize the debate more than texture? Especially on social media?

Certainly could be wrong about this, but I'm really starting to think Twitter isn't a great medium to discuss complicated public health issues.

- Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) February 10, 2021

New publication from a variety of team members at Bellwether full of big ideas for the next few years.

From Pandemic to Progress: Eight Education Pathways for COVID-19 Recovery highlights a host of ambitious but achievable ways for the sector to re-engage in complex policy questions, rebuild education, and focus on equity as the country begins to emerge from the pandemic. Drawing on the breadth of Bellwether's unique expertise - we work in national policy, in schools, and everywhere in between - and the diversity of viewpoints on our team, these are important ideas about how to provide students with the high-quality education and supports they deserve.

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For Bellwether some good 2020 news was that we didn't have to let anyone go as our work was disrupted by Covid. But we also hit pause on growth. A result of that is that in 2021 we're going to have a lot of positions open.

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This child focused education tool will give opinions on leadership in education and how to integrate new technology into the education world.

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A blog about digital leadership, pedagogy, learning, and transformative change in education.

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This resource gives ideas to administrators on how to educate their educators through technological resources on training ideas.

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Bringing the data revolution to training & talent management.

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Bringing the data revolution to training & talent management.

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Helps admin keep up to date on new educational developments in a fun way.

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When the latest CDC research was release on January 26, 2021 in the JAMA article, " Data and Policy to Guide Opening Schools Safely to Limit the Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Infection," calls to Reopen Schools has increased each day. But many of those state governors and politicians as well as others selectively read only a portion of the article that says:

"...there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission."

They read this statement and ignore other parts of the same article which also state that,

"Preventing transmission in school settings will require addressing and reducing levels of transmission in the surrounding communities through policies that interrupt transmission (eg, restrictions on indoor dining at restaurants. In addition, all recommended mitigation measures in schools must continue: requiring universal mask use, increasing physical distance by dedensifying classrooms and common areas, using hybrid attendance models when needed to limit the total number of contacts and prevent crowding, increasing room air ventilation, and expanding screening testing to rapidly identify and isolate asymptomatic individuals. Staff and students should continue to have options for online education, particularly those at increased risk off severe illness or death if infected with SARS-CoV-2."

So, yes there is little evidence of transmission within schools, but there are also some additional measures schools should take to keep that transmission low. They include, according to the CDC:

1) Limit and restrictions on establishments, such as restaurants and gyms, in the community that do increase transmission rates within the community. (This one is never mentioned by governors who declare we need to get students back in schools.)

2) Continue to require masks in schools by all individuals.

3) Dedensify classrooms, cafeterias, and other common areas. This means reducing the number of people in these spaces at one time so that social distance can be practiced.

4) Use hybrid models of attendance so that the number of students in the buildings and on buses are reduced to allow for distancing.

5) Increase ventilation in buildings.

6) Expand rapid testing ability so that asymptomatic individuals can be isolated quickly.

7) Reduce and postpone school activities such as athletics, assemblies, concerts, and other events that are social gatherings that increase the risk of transmission.

The use of this article as a political sledgehammer to get schools reopened entirely is clearly underway. Yes, schools can reopen, but it is going to take the courage of our political leaders to make decisions that will perhaps restrict indoor dining and to provide schools with level of funding needed to dedensify education spaces too.

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When the latest CDC research was release on January 26, 2021 in the JAMA article, " Data and Policy to Guide Opening Schools Safely to Limit the Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Infection," calls to Reopen Schools has increased each day.