Author: Editor

The Pursuit of Education: A Story of Homelessness, Perseverance, and the Impact of Caring Educators By: Jahnee S. I was 8 years old when I first experienced homelessness. Homelessness then became a struggle that my family and I couldn’t escape. I experienced standing in the snow, hoping my family and I had a place to sleep on a church floor; how packed and unsanitary emergency shelters are, as I got lice within two days of staying there; how “The Florida Project” brought me flashbacks to the many months my family lived in motels, and how I viewed peers with “the basic necessities” with such envy. Constantly moving and being disappointed led me to become extremely detached and avoid relationships of any kind out of fear of abandonment. Eight years later, at 16 years old, I was still experie...

Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? Over the past year, Deprece Bonilla, a mother of five in Oakland, Calif., has gotten creative about helping her children thrive in a world largely mediated by screens. She signed them up for online phonics tutoring and virtual martial arts lessons. If they are distracted inside the family’s duplex, she grabs snacks and goes with the children into the car, saying they cannot come out until their homework is done. She has sometimes spent three hours per day assisting with school assignments, even as she works from home for a local nonprofit organization. It all sometimes feels like too much to bear. Still, when her fifth-grade son’s public-school teacher told her he was years behind in reading, she was in disbelief. “That was very off...

Envisioning Alternative Course and Program PortfoliosThe importance of envisioning future course and program portfolios will be familiar to readers of my recent blogs.  Provosts, deans, and others responsible for academic resourcing invest time and money to get better data on their portfolios:  e.g., by using Gray Associates’ Program Economics Platform (PEP).  These data help them identify strategies for improvement, which is especially important given the current Covid-19 disruptions.  We are pleased to introduce PEP+, our new predictive model for envisioning the consequences of changing a school’s lineup of courses and programs, just in time to help mitigate these disruptions.  Changes in student demand and modes of teaching can upend an institution’s operational activities and finances,...