Dear friend,
We are in this marathon together! Take time to recharge this summer. And when you have caught your breath, let's figure out new ways to collaborate as we return to the front lines and prepare to reopen school this summer or fall. The unprecedented impact of COVID on our nation’s schools, particularly for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty, will require an unprecedented response, and the responsibility of meeting that moment falls on all of us. We can meet this challenge if we collaborate and coordinate in new ways.
To this end, we are excited to support the Coalition to Advance Student Success, a group of partners anchored in the commitment to ensure the effective and equitable use of federal funds from the American Rescue Plan. They have proposed a Ten-Point framework that focuses on high quality, equitable options that promise to meet the needs of students and lay the foundation for a more effective K-12 system going forward. Part of the Coalition’s efforts will be to provide best practices and emerging lessons over the next three years. Read more about the plan and get involved!
This issue of Momentum highlights other critical tools to help parents, advocates and educators navigate the summer ahead and plan for the school year. And, please, continue to share what you are learning. We depend on it.
In partnership,
Bob Hughes
@BobHughesK12
Quick Takes
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Accelerate Don’t Remediate
A new study from TNTP and Zearn has big implications for helping students recover unfinished learning from the past year. Using data from 100,000 elementary school classrooms, they found that students learn more and struggle less with learning acceleration—prioritizing access to grade-level work—compared to traditional remediation, especially for students of color and students experiencing poverty. Learn more here. -
Making the Connection: Aligning Advising to Improve Postsecondary Access and Success
A new resource from Education Strategy Group highlights the importance of prioritizing alignment of advising across K-12 and higher education, and offers a vision for achieving that alignment by laying out concrete action steps and resources for the many stakeholders who have a role to play. Check it out here. -
A Summer Recharge
Learning Heroes’s new summer campaign provides families with resources to support parent-teacher partnerships that focus on social, emotional, and academic development throughout the summer and into the next school year. Check out Learning Heroes’s new resource “Summer REcharge" for helpful tips.
What Were Reading
- A new study from the Center for Educational Effectiveness identified 38 positive outlier schools in Washington State that successfully removed barriers to learning and created conditions to help students succeed. Find out more about their approaches here.
- Interested in learning how to create a useful, accessible data tool to drive impact? Check out the latest What We’re Learning blog post from our partners at Kitamba.
- US Program President Allan Golston discusses his personal experience as a mentor and mentee and the power of social capital. Read it here.