Linda Otto's Blog: The Leading 10 Education Next Blog Posts of 2021

For a second year in a row, articles about how schools responded to the Covid-19 pandemic dominated our list of the Top Ten Education Next Blog Posts of the year.

Three of the top ten blog posts in 2021 dealt directly with the pandemic-related absences of students and teachers from in-person school. The most-read post, “The Government Is Paying Public School Parents Billions of Dollars to Keep Their Children Home,” by Ira Stoll, focused on the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer, or P-EBT, program.

“Under the program, parents whose children are home from school because of the pandemic receive money to compensate for the free or subsidized school breakfast, lunch, and snack that their children otherwise would have received,” the blog post reported. “The American Rescue Plan Act that President Biden signed into law on March 11, 2021, increased and extended the P-EBT benefits—with a price tag estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at $5,560,000,000—just as Biden was also urging schools to reopen for in-person instruction. Parents who send their children back to school would lose the electronic benefits.”

Other pandemic-related blog posts that made the Top Ten list included Derrell Bradford’s “A Rolling National Teacher Strike Is Why Schools Are Closed” and Robert Pondiscio’s “Is Hybrid Learning Killing Teaching?”

A fourth post, Frederick Hess’s “What Youngkin’s Virginia Win Means for Education,” also noted the effect on an election outcome of parental frustration over prolonged school closures. Three other Hess blog posts—“What It Takes to Actually Improve Math Education,” “The Problems With Biden’s Universal Pre-K Proposal” and “When Does Educational Equity Become Educationally Unethical?” also made the Top Ten.

Here’s hoping for a healthy 2022 in which pandemic-related news is less prominent.

The full Top Ten list is here:

1. The Government Is Paying Public School Parents Billions of Dollars to Keep Their Children Home
Family would lose $409 a month in Pandemic-EBT benefits by moving 3 children to in-person from remote
By Ira Stoll

2. What It Takes to Actually Improve Math Education
Repetitive practice lies at the heart of mastery of almost every discipline, and mathematics is no exception
By Frederick Hess

3. The Problems With Biden’s Universal Pre-K Proposal
“The proposed new investments in universal pre-K are not in step with the realities of the existing mixed-delivery system”
By Frederick Hess

4. Can Teaching Be Improved by Law?
At least twenty states have passed or are considering measures related to the science of reading
By Robert Pondiscio

5. New Cal State LA Ethnic Studies Dean Backed Farrakhan, Wished Clarence Thomas Dead
“Her history of advocacy will serve her well,” college president says in press release praising newly elevated economist
By Ira Stoll

6. A Rolling National Teacher Strike Is Why Schools Are Closed
Context isn’t just coronavirus, but years of union activism and potential for tens of billions in federal funds from Biden
By Derrell Bradford

7. Is Hybrid Learning Killing Teaching?
Bolstering the urgency of getting everyone back in person.
By Robert Pondiscio

8. What Youngkin’s Virginia Win Means for Education
It was all about values, frustration, and parental empowerment. And that is potent, deeply personal stuff.
By Frederick Hess

9. When Does Educational Equity Become Educationally Unethical?
“The push for equity stumbles into a truly gruesome place when educators are being trained or directed to shortchange some students based on how they look or where they live.”
By Frederick Hess

10. An Encouraging Consensus on Character Education
Some recommendations for developing compassion, courage, determination, fairness, grit, honesty, patience, respect, responsibility, self-motivation, and temperance.
By Andy Smarick