Tears of a Black Male Educator

The day I decided to become an educator was, ironically, the same day I could have disengaged from the education system for good. I was a 2nd grader who was dark, male, and fat. After clinging to the climbing ropes and losing to the stopwatch during a physical fitness test, I was crushed when my teacher told me I would “never amount to anything.” While experiences like this cause many young people, especially Black boys, to want nothing to do with school, I made up my mind on that day that I would become a teacher so I could bring about change in a system that was not created to serve people who looked like me, and to provide much needed-healing and motivation for little boys and girls who needed it.

When I entered the classroom as a new teacher on an emergency certification, I was excited to make a difference. But I often felt pigeonholed into stereotypical roles, asked to serve as a disciplinarian for young Black boys or to teach more basic, non-academic classes. My instructional leadership potential and intellectual brilliance were not recognized.

My experience as a Black male educator is not unique. Teachers of color make up only about 6% of Pennsylvania’s teacher workforce, compared to 36% students of color, and Black men represent less than 2%. While many school systems express a desire for more Black male educators, especially as research continues to confirm our positive effects on students, we remain some of the least respected personnel in American education. It is well documented that we are often viewed as “disciplinarians first and teachers second,” expected us to serve as overseers of the school-to-prison pipeline rather than transformational educators. We are also often locked into teaching electives, introductory courses, and remedial classes rather than advanced courses because we are not seen as academics.

Over time, I have silenced the little boy inside who repeats the echoes of his 2^nd-grade teacher, and I have embraced my formidable talents, skills, and power as an educator. I am proud to give my students a quality and culturally responsive education, and I know that my students need me. Teachers of color, and specifically Black male educators, are precious and should be protected. A 2017 study found that low-income Black students who have a Black teacher for at least one year in elementary school are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to consider college.

But until we change our schools and systems, we will continue to face a shortage of Black male educators like me. We must explicitly focus on the recruitment, retention, and professional development of teachers of color in order to increase student engagement and decrease student drop-out rates.

At the state level, our lawmakers must implement policies to support the recruitment, retention, and professional development of teachers of color. In Pennsylvania, Senate Bill 99, sponsored by Senator Vincent Hughes and Senator Ryan Aument, would create pathways into teaching for underrepresented youth, provide funding for educator preparation programs to diversify the workforce, and remove barriers to certification that disproportionately impact teachers of color. Although the bill has bipartisan support, it is still awaiting a vote in the Senate Education Committee. A House version sponsored by Representative Jason Ortitay and Representative Gina Curry is soon to be filed in the House Education Committee. Other measures are also needed to make teaching a profession that students of all races can access and make a living in.

At the school level, administrators need to be trained to respect Black male educators as intellectual and professional leaders, and not view us as security. We are more than a single, isolated muscle; we are the brain. Instead of reducing Black male educators to overseers who keep Black and Brown children in line, administrators would do better to value their craft and learn from their non-traditional, culturally responsive methods of delivering instruction. Schools need to work to create spaces where teachers of color can feel safe and supported. Cultural responsiveness training for teachers and principals can help teach them to foster culturally affirming environments free of bias and microaggressions against teachers and students of color. We also need to encourage students of all races to enter the teaching profession, with special attention paid to Black boys, who are so often overlooked by the education system.

Ensuring that teachers and professional staff are reflective of the students and community they serve shouldn’t be a bipartisan issue. It is a human rights issue. If we make enough progress, maybe more students will eventually want to become teachers—not out of a determination to change a cruelly broken school system, but because of inspiration gained from an education in which they were treated with dignity.

Durrell Burns teaches 9th grade English and Public Speaking at Harrisburg High School: John Harris Campus. He is a 2021-2022 Teach Plus Pennsylvania Policy Fellow.

The post Tears of a Black Male Educator appeared first on Education Next.

By: Durrell Burns
Title: Tears of a Black Male Educator
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/tears-of-a-black-male-educator/
Published Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2022 09:00:29 +0000

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The Education Exchange: High School Grade Inflation "Actually Dramatically Increased," ACT Researcher Discovers

The lead research scientist in Applied Research at ACT, Edgar Sanchez, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Sanchez’s latest report, which investigates how grade inflation has grown since 2010, and how inflation increased during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report, “Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade,” co-written with Raeal Moore, is available now.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

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What Might Prevent Yet Another Catastrophe Like Uvalde?

Pallbearers carry a casket following a joint funeral service for Irma Garcia and husband Joe Garcia at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Wednesday, June 1, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Irma Garcia was killed in last week’s elementary school shooting; Joe Garcia died two days later.

Last week, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. It was too horrific for the mind to comprehend, yet unfortunately all too familiar. Tucking in my 8-year-old that night was surreal, as I could only think of all those parents who’d sent their hearts off to school that morning and would never again get to kiss them good night.

This is an instance when the emotion is universally shared. And all of us, parents and educators and politicians alike, are seeking to channel the pain, hurt, and anger into preventing this kind of tragedy from happening yet again. That’s a healthy impulse. Yet, as we’ve seen time and again, it’s tough to agree on effective responses. One option that may hold more promise than trying to broadly restrict guns or secure 100,000 schools is using “red flag” laws to keep potential mass murderers away from deadly weapons.

Now, I’m broadly supportive of gun control. I’m in favor of waiting periods, background checks, and anything else that’s consistent with the Constitution. Hell, I’m open to amending the Constitution to permit more expansive limits. Of course, in this case, as in many similar atrocities, the suspect didn’t have a criminal record, bought legal firearms from a licensed dealer, and would’ve passed a background check. So a check wouldn’t have stopped this tragedy. But it might help next time. I’m also in favor of working to reduce the number of guns floating around out there. It’s just that there are legal difficulties (turns out it’s technically difficult to write laws that distinguish “assault weapons” from other kinds of guns), it’s tough to get huge numbers of guns out of circulation, and the Clinton-era “assault-weapons ban” wound up not having any discernible impact.

There are also those who urge better planning and prevention at the school level. This, too, seems sensible, so long as we appreciate that “hardening” schools is both enormously difficult and risks turning schools into foreboding, unwelcoming places. After all, as NBC News has reported, in recent years, the Uvalde district had doubled its security budget, in line with Texas legislation adopted in 2019 after a 2018 school shooting, which allocated $100 million to districts for this very purpose. NBC reported that Uvalde had instituted “its own police force, threat-assessment teams at each school, a threat-reporting system, social media monitoring software, fences around schools, and a requirement that teachers lock their classroom doors.” Yet, none of this managed to prevent last week’s calamity.

As for preparation, I think we need to pay more attention to the extraordinary downsides of teaching millions of little children that practicing hiding behind desks to avoid being killed is a routine part of their school experience.

What else might we do? Well, rather than focus sweepingly on guns or hardening schools, perhaps we can do more to keep guns out of the hands of the sociopaths who commit these atrocities. This is where red-flag laws come in. Such laws are already on the books in 19 states and the District of Columbia, although they need to be enforced more aggressively. As political commentator David French explained recently, these laws allow police to temporarily confiscate a person’s weapons (and bar them from purchasing any) if a judge deems them a threat to themselves or others.

It turns out there are typically a lot of warning signs before one of these rampages. “The warning signs are [generally] so explicit,” said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist and an authority on mass shootings. “Nobody said after the Uvalde shooting, ‘Oh, I spent a lot of time with this guy in the last year and I can’t believe he did this.’ And that’s often the case.” A recent book by Mother Jones reporter Mark Follman similarly notes that these incidents are typically preceded by recognizable warning signs which have been studied and cataloged by threat-assessment specialists.

The 2018 Parkland murderer posted threatening images. Classmates later said that, if there was ever to be a shooting at their school, they’d guess he was the culprit. In fact, my colleague Max Eden wrote a book that made clear just how many times the Parkland killer could’ve and should’ve been flagged. The alleged perpetrator of the recent shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., purportedly told classmates that, after graduating, he wanted to commit a famous murder/suicide. Warning signs were also there in the shootings that happened in El Paso, Texas; Thousand Oaks, Calif.; Pittsburgh; Sutherland Springs, Texas; Charleston, S.C.; Isla Vista, Calif.; Newtown, Conn.; Aurora, Colo.; and Virginia Tech.

And, as Lankford observes, while cartels or gangs may find it easy to get their hands on illegal guns if legal ones aren’t available, the same is not true of these killers. They tend to be loners without criminal ties and so may not be able to get their hands on illegal substitutes. That’s why they buy legal guns or use those already in their homes. Red-flag laws can be used to keep these people from obtaining guns in the first place.

Policy is an inadequate response to tragedy. But if we’re going to try to channel the hurt and pain into something productive, let’s look for an approach that’s most likely to matter next time.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The post What Might Prevent Yet Another Tragedy Like Uvalde? appeared first on Education Next.

By: Frederick Hess
Title: What Might Prevent Yet Another Tragedy Like Uvalde?
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/what-might-prevent-yet-another-tragedy-like-uvalde-red-flag-laws/
Published Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:00:49 +0000

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Satisfy the Metaverse

Interest in the metaverse is rising after a disruptive pandemic kicked off the rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world.

It’s hard to decide which recent “metaverse” headline has felt more unreal.

On one hand, consider Facebook’s rebranding itself as Meta—a nod to the shared virtual spaces where the company believes its future lies. In this vision, large groups of individual users will meet in an immersive, simulated, digital environment, where they’ll work, study, create, and form relationships that mix avatars and real-world elements to varying degrees. On the other hand, there was Meta’s subsequent 60-second Super Bowl commercial, which featured an animatronic dog reuniting in virtual reality with its animatronic friends, and which cost the company an estimated $13 million.

Either way, both showed that the hype behind the metaverse is real, even if the metaverse itself does not yet actually exist. Within two months of Facebook’s transition to Meta, Google searches for “metaverse” increased by roughly 20 times and the term was mentioned in 12,000 English-language news articles. The year before, it had been mentioned just 400 times.

Educators excited about the future of technology haven’t missed a beat, and they’ve jumped on the metaverse bandwagon too. The Brookings Institution released a policy brief warning that “when education lags the digital leaps, the technology rather than educators defines what counts as educational opportunity.” The authors recommend that researchers, educators, policymakers, and digital designers should get ahead of the trend while the metaverse is still under construction.

What is the Metaverse?

The exact definition of the metaverse is still up for debate. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash. The most widely used definition today is from venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has boiled it down to seven elements.

In this understanding, the metaverse:

• Is always present and has no ending

• Can be experienced synchronously by multiple people

• Does not have a population cap and can be shared by everyone, while each individual retains their agency

• Can offer a fully functioning economy

• Can span both the digital and physical worlds, as well as open and closed platforms

• Is interoperable, so digital tools and assets from one app can be used in others

• Contains content and experiences created by a range of contributors.

According to technology writer Ben Thompson, the Internet satisfies all these requirements. “What makes ‘The Metaverse’ unique,” he writes, “is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual-reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.”

There are active debates about this. Some wonder just how interoperable does the metaverse need to be. How important is it, for example, for a digital tool that works in one video game to be usable in a different application? Do we need standard protocols like those that apply to blockchain, or the open-source databases that form the foundation of the current “open web”?

As a result of the complexity, it’s easy to default to extended reality—virtual reality and augmented reality—when talking about the metaverse. But much as the mobile Internet has built upon the infrastructure of the Internet, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others argue that the metaverse will simply be the successor to the mobile internet.

More Than Web 3.0

This isn’t the first time educators have gotten excited about virtual reality—nor the first time I’ve written about it in these pages (see “Virtual Reality Disruption: Will 3-D technology break through to the educational mainstream?” What Next, Fall 2016). Remember educators’ short-lived obsession with Second Life, the online platform in which people create avatars to navigate a 3-D online world? That excitement faded fast, and Second Life was laid to rest alongside many other educational fads.

What’s different this time around?

For starters, interest in the metaverse is rising amid a long, deeply disruptive pandemic that kicked off an unprecedented, rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world. According to the Digital Learning Collaborative, in the 2018-19 school year, 375,000 students were enrolled in full-time, statewide virtual schools. By the 2020-21 school year, the number had nearly doubled to 656,000 students. That count does not include virtual schools run by local districts, which also grew dramatically during the pandemic. And many students enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools now regularly learn online for parts of their day, either in school or at home.

That has smoothed over one of the main barriers to using virtual reality in class: the equipment. In the past, logging on to a laptop and wearing a virtual-reality headset were viewed as an intrusive ordeal. But the game has changed, according to Thompson. If students are doing significant amounts of work online already, why couldn’t they have a headset on for most of that time as well?

In this vision, a virtual-reality headset is just a workaday accessory, like a computer mouse. But with it, students can “walk” into different education seminars and co-working spaces for projects and experience a range of virtual-reality environments, learning applications, lectures, and more. Just as the rising popularity of now-familiar learning technology tools like laptops fueled the creation of online learning applications and environments, this dynamic, coupled with a broader interest in the metaverse, seems poised to spur the creation of more learning environments that take advantage of virtual reality and 3-D.

Under Development

There are dozens of metaverse-type experiments underway in K-12 education.

For example, American High School touts its virtual-reality offerings on its website. The accredited, private online school has operated since 2004 and enrolled more than 8,000 students in grades K-12. Later this year, students and teachers at Optima Classical Academy, an online charter school based in Florida, will meet as avatars in a social virtual-reality platform created for the school that its founder described as a “metaverse.” It is set to launch in August for students in grades 3-8, who will follow a great books curriculum. Women Rise NFT, a collection of unique pieces of digital art by artist Maliha Abidi, was formed with the ultimate goal of building a school in the metaverse to serve the 258 million children around the world who cannot access traditional schools.

Then there are plans to support educators through the metaverse. The company k20 launched the Eduverse, a “metaverse hub for educators,” to connect teachers and administrators in a shared virtual world, where they can learn, network, and advance in their careers.

Finally, there are an array of enablers and supplemental providers that provide virtual-reality experiences for students and educators. Companies like Labster offer virtual-reality laboratories and FluentWorlds allows students to learn English in a variety of virtual worlds. Kai XR offers “360 degree” virtual field trips and EDUmetaverse has over 35 virtual worlds that educators can use.

And consider Dreamscape Immersive, a virtual-reality company founded by computer scientists and former Disney leaders. While its main funders are from the entertainment world—major Hollywood studios, Steven Spielberg, Nickelodeon, and AMC Theaters, which is planning to co-locate Dreamscape virtual-reality experiences in some of its theaters—the company also has partnered with Arizona State University to create Dreamscape Learn. Its first offering, a series of virtual-reality labs called “Immersive Biology at the Alien Zoo,” was created by Spielberg and company CEO Walter Parkes as an alternative for conventional lab work in college-level Introductory Biology. A high-school course is planned for later this year.

And even Meta has a team dedicated to developing education applications in the metaverse.

Looking Ahead

As metaverse mania continues, three things appear true.

First, innovation theory suggests that the early successful instances that apply elements of the metaverse will be proprietary in nature. They will be optimized initially to maximize the performance and reliability of an immature technology at the expense of scale and interoperability. That immediately suggests a problem. Many of the instances that are called a metaverse won’t meet a key criterion of Ball’s definition: interoperability. Indeed, much of what passes for metaverse hype right now is still virtual reality clothed in new marketing language.

This may not be a bad thing, however, given concerns about whether the metaverse will be a safe and healthy place for children. Experiences in walled-off gardens—think Prodigy and America Online, not the whole of the World Wide Web—could be safer, at least initially, even though that might temporarily undermine the vision of innovating instruction or skill development through the blockchain or decentralized autonomous organizations.

Second, the metaverse seems more of a sustaining than a disruptive innovation for full-time virtual schools. Unlike disruptions, sustaining innovations improve the performance of an existing product or service to better serve users who already exist. Full-time virtual schools that have sometimes struggled to engage students would likely benefit from a more immersive, social experience. Combining their programs with the metaverse, as well as with in-person learning pods, could create a more robust and accessible schooling experience. Alongside the flexible models of learning that took root during the pandemic, such as pods and hybrid online and in-person programs, a socially rich, immersive metaverse could, eventually, disrupt traditional, brick-and-mortar schools.

Finally, metaverse applications can create educational experiences that are otherwise impossible in a traditional environment. Virtual reality can bring content alive with dynamic images and hands-on digital exploration. It can bring real people and knowledge from other parts of the world into classrooms everywhere. Consider the potential for science labs, language learning, internships, cultural exchanges, and field trips (see “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” research, Winter 2014).

When the metaverse comes to class, these are the areas where you’ll want to point your virtual-reality goggles.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of the upcoming book From Reopen to Reinvent.

The post Meet the Metaverse appeared first on Education Next.

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Title: Meet the Metaverse
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The Education Exchange: Gun Ownership Rates Decline, as School Shootings Spike

An assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, Daniel Hamlin, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Hamlin’s research on gun ownership in America, and its relationship to school shootings over 40 years.

Hamlin’s paper, “Are gun ownership rates and regulations associated with firearm incidents in American schools? A forty-year analysis (1980–2019)“, is available now.

Additionally, Hamlin and Peterson are currently moderating the virtual conference, A Safe Place to Learn, hosted by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

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Tears of a Black Male Educator

The day I decided to become an educator was, ironically, the same day I could have disengaged from the education system for good. I was a 2nd grader who was dark, male, and fat. After clinging to the climbing ropes and losing to the stopwatch during a physical fitness test, I was crushed when my teacher told me I would “never amount to anything.” While experiences like this cause many young people, especially Black boys, to want nothing to do with school, I made up my mind on that day that I would become a teacher so I could bring about change in a system that was not created to serve people who looked like me, and to provide much needed-healing and motivation for little boys and girls who needed it.

When I entered the classroom as a new teacher on an emergency certification, I was excited to make a difference. But I often felt pigeonholed into stereotypical roles, asked to serve as a disciplinarian for young Black boys or to teach more basic, non-academic classes. My instructional leadership potential and intellectual brilliance were not recognized.

My experience as a Black male educator is not unique. Teachers of color make up only about 6% of Pennsylvania’s teacher workforce, compared to 36% students of color, and Black men represent less than 2%. While many school systems express a desire for more Black male educators, especially as research continues to confirm our positive effects on students, we remain some of the least respected personnel in American education. It is well documented that we are often viewed as “disciplinarians first and teachers second,” expected us to serve as overseers of the school-to-prison pipeline rather than transformational educators. We are also often locked into teaching electives, introductory courses, and remedial classes rather than advanced courses because we are not seen as academics.

Over time, I have silenced the little boy inside who repeats the echoes of his 2^nd-grade teacher, and I have embraced my formidable talents, skills, and power as an educator. I am proud to give my students a quality and culturally responsive education, and I know that my students need me. Teachers of color, and specifically Black male educators, are precious and should be protected. A 2017 study found that low-income Black students who have a Black teacher for at least one year in elementary school are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to consider college.

But until we change our schools and systems, we will continue to face a shortage of Black male educators like me. We must explicitly focus on the recruitment, retention, and professional development of teachers of color in order to increase student engagement and decrease student drop-out rates.

At the state level, our lawmakers must implement policies to support the recruitment, retention, and professional development of teachers of color. In Pennsylvania, Senate Bill 99, sponsored by Senator Vincent Hughes and Senator Ryan Aument, would create pathways into teaching for underrepresented youth, provide funding for educator preparation programs to diversify the workforce, and remove barriers to certification that disproportionately impact teachers of color. Although the bill has bipartisan support, it is still awaiting a vote in the Senate Education Committee. A House version sponsored by Representative Jason Ortitay and Representative Gina Curry is soon to be filed in the House Education Committee. Other measures are also needed to make teaching a profession that students of all races can access and make a living in.

At the school level, administrators need to be trained to respect Black male educators as intellectual and professional leaders, and not view us as security. We are more than a single, isolated muscle; we are the brain. Instead of reducing Black male educators to overseers who keep Black and Brown children in line, administrators would do better to value their craft and learn from their non-traditional, culturally responsive methods of delivering instruction. Schools need to work to create spaces where teachers of color can feel safe and supported. Cultural responsiveness training for teachers and principals can help teach them to foster culturally affirming environments free of bias and microaggressions against teachers and students of color. We also need to encourage students of all races to enter the teaching profession, with special attention paid to Black boys, who are so often overlooked by the education system.

Ensuring that teachers and professional staff are reflective of the students and community they serve shouldn’t be a bipartisan issue. It is a human rights issue. If we make enough progress, maybe more students will eventually want to become teachers—not out of a determination to change a cruelly broken school system, but because of inspiration gained from an education in which they were treated with dignity.

Durrell Burns teaches 9th grade English and Public Speaking at Harrisburg High School: John Harris Campus. He is a 2021-2022 Teach Plus Pennsylvania Policy Fellow.

The post Tears of a Black Male Educator appeared first on Education Next.

By: Durrell Burns
Title: Tears of a Black Male Educator
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/tears-of-a-black-male-educator/
Published Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2022 09:00:29 +0000

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The Education Exchange: High School Grade Inflation "Actually Drastically Increased," ACT Scientist Discovers

The lead research scientist in Applied Research at ACT, Edgar Sanchez, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Sanchez’s latest report, which investigates how grade inflation has grown since 2010, and how inflation increased during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report, “Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade,” co-written with Raeal Moore, is available now.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

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What Might Prevent Yet Another Disaster Like Uvalde?

Pallbearers carry a casket following a joint funeral service for Irma Garcia and husband Joe Garcia at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Wednesday, June 1, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Irma Garcia was killed in last week’s elementary school shooting; Joe Garcia died two days later.

Last week, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. It was too horrific for the mind to comprehend, yet unfortunately all too familiar. Tucking in my 8-year-old that night was surreal, as I could only think of all those parents who’d sent their hearts off to school that morning and would never again get to kiss them good night.

This is an instance when the emotion is universally shared. And all of us, parents and educators and politicians alike, are seeking to channel the pain, hurt, and anger into preventing this kind of tragedy from happening yet again. That’s a healthy impulse. Yet, as we’ve seen time and again, it’s tough to agree on effective responses. One option that may hold more promise than trying to broadly restrict guns or secure 100,000 schools is using “red flag” laws to keep potential mass murderers away from deadly weapons.

Now, I’m broadly supportive of gun control. I’m in favor of waiting periods, background checks, and anything else that’s consistent with the Constitution. Hell, I’m open to amending the Constitution to permit more expansive limits. Of course, in this case, as in many similar atrocities, the suspect didn’t have a criminal record, bought legal firearms from a licensed dealer, and would’ve passed a background check. So a check wouldn’t have stopped this tragedy. But it might help next time. I’m also in favor of working to reduce the number of guns floating around out there. It’s just that there are legal difficulties (turns out it’s technically difficult to write laws that distinguish “assault weapons” from other kinds of guns), it’s tough to get huge numbers of guns out of circulation, and the Clinton-era “assault-weapons ban” wound up not having any discernible impact.

There are also those who urge better planning and prevention at the school level. This, too, seems sensible, so long as we appreciate that “hardening” schools is both enormously difficult and risks turning schools into foreboding, unwelcoming places. After all, as NBC News has reported, in recent years, the Uvalde district had doubled its security budget, in line with Texas legislation adopted in 2019 after a 2018 school shooting, which allocated $100 million to districts for this very purpose. NBC reported that Uvalde had instituted “its own police force, threat-assessment teams at each school, a threat-reporting system, social media monitoring software, fences around schools, and a requirement that teachers lock their classroom doors.” Yet, none of this managed to prevent last week’s calamity.

As for preparation, I think we need to pay more attention to the extraordinary downsides of teaching millions of little children that practicing hiding behind desks to avoid being killed is a routine part of their school experience.

What else might we do? Well, rather than focus sweepingly on guns or hardening schools, perhaps we can do more to keep guns out of the hands of the sociopaths who commit these atrocities. This is where red-flag laws come in. Such laws are already on the books in 19 states and the District of Columbia, although they need to be enforced more aggressively. As political commentator David French explained recently, these laws allow police to temporarily confiscate a person’s weapons (and bar them from purchasing any) if a judge deems them a threat to themselves or others.

It turns out there are typically a lot of warning signs before one of these rampages. “The warning signs are [generally] so explicit,” said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist and an authority on mass shootings. “Nobody said after the Uvalde shooting, ‘Oh, I spent a lot of time with this guy in the last year and I can’t believe he did this.’ And that’s often the case.” A recent book by Mother Jones reporter Mark Follman similarly notes that these incidents are typically preceded by recognizable warning signs which have been studied and cataloged by threat-assessment specialists.

The 2018 Parkland murderer posted threatening images. Classmates later said that, if there was ever to be a shooting at their school, they’d guess he was the culprit. In fact, my colleague Max Eden wrote a book that made clear just how many times the Parkland killer could’ve and should’ve been flagged. The alleged perpetrator of the recent shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., purportedly told classmates that, after graduating, he wanted to commit a famous murder/suicide. Warning signs were also there in the shootings that happened in El Paso, Texas; Thousand Oaks, Calif.; Pittsburgh; Sutherland Springs, Texas; Charleston, S.C.; Isla Vista, Calif.; Newtown, Conn.; Aurora, Colo.; and Virginia Tech.

And, as Lankford observes, while cartels or gangs may find it easy to get their hands on illegal guns if legal ones aren’t available, the same is not true of these killers. They tend to be loners without criminal ties and so may not be able to get their hands on illegal substitutes. That’s why they buy legal guns or use those already in their homes. Red-flag laws can be used to keep these people from obtaining guns in the first place.

Policy is an inadequate response to tragedy. But if we’re going to try to channel the hurt and pain into something productive, let’s look for an approach that’s most likely to matter next time.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The post What Might Prevent Yet Another Tragedy Like Uvalde? appeared first on Education Next.

By: Frederick Hess
Title: What Might Prevent Yet Another Tragedy Like Uvalde?
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/what-might-prevent-yet-another-tragedy-like-uvalde-red-flag-laws/
Published Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:00:49 +0000

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Meet the Metaverse

Interest in the metaverse is rising after a disruptive pandemic kicked off the rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world.

It’s hard to decide which recent “metaverse” headline has felt more unreal.

On one hand, consider Facebook’s rebranding itself as Meta—a nod to the shared virtual spaces where the company believes its future lies. In this vision, large groups of individual users will meet in an immersive, simulated, digital environment, where they’ll work, study, create, and form relationships that mix avatars and real-world elements to varying degrees. On the other hand, there was Meta’s subsequent 60-second Super Bowl commercial, which featured an animatronic dog reuniting in virtual reality with its animatronic friends, and which cost the company an estimated $13 million.

Either way, both showed that the hype behind the metaverse is real, even if the metaverse itself does not yet actually exist. Within two months of Facebook’s transition to Meta, Google searches for “metaverse” increased by roughly 20 times and the term was mentioned in 12,000 English-language news articles. The year before, it had been mentioned just 400 times.

Educators excited about the future of technology haven’t missed a beat, and they’ve jumped on the metaverse bandwagon too. The Brookings Institution released a policy brief warning that “when education lags the digital leaps, the technology rather than educators defines what counts as educational opportunity.” The authors recommend that researchers, educators, policymakers, and digital designers should get ahead of the trend while the metaverse is still under construction.

What is the Metaverse?

The exact definition of the metaverse is still up for debate. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash. The most widely used definition today is from venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has boiled it down to seven elements.

In this understanding, the metaverse:

• Is always present and has no ending

• Can be experienced synchronously by multiple people

• Does not have a population cap and can be shared by everyone, while each individual retains their agency

• Can offer a fully functioning economy

• Can span both the digital and physical worlds, as well as open and closed platforms

• Is interoperable, so digital tools and assets from one app can be used in others

• Contains content and experiences created by a range of contributors.

According to technology writer Ben Thompson, the Internet satisfies all these requirements. “What makes ‘The Metaverse’ unique,” he writes, “is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual-reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.”

There are active debates about this. Some wonder just how interoperable does the metaverse need to be. How important is it, for example, for a digital tool that works in one video game to be usable in a different application? Do we need standard protocols like those that apply to blockchain, or the open-source databases that form the foundation of the current “open web”?

As a result of the complexity, it’s easy to default to extended reality—virtual reality and augmented reality—when talking about the metaverse. But much as the mobile Internet has built upon the infrastructure of the Internet, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others argue that the metaverse will simply be the successor to the mobile internet.

More Than Web 3.0

This isn’t the first time educators have gotten excited about virtual reality—nor the first time I’ve written about it in these pages (see “Virtual Reality Disruption: Will 3-D technology break through to the educational mainstream?” What Next, Fall 2016). Remember educators’ short-lived obsession with Second Life, the online platform in which people create avatars to navigate a 3-D online world? That excitement faded fast, and Second Life was laid to rest alongside many other educational fads.

What’s different this time around?

For starters, interest in the metaverse is rising amid a long, deeply disruptive pandemic that kicked off an unprecedented, rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world. According to the Digital Learning Collaborative, in the 2018-19 school year, 375,000 students were enrolled in full-time, statewide virtual schools. By the 2020-21 school year, the number had nearly doubled to 656,000 students. That count does not include virtual schools run by local districts, which also grew dramatically during the pandemic. And many students enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools now regularly learn online for parts of their day, either in school or at home.

That has smoothed over one of the main barriers to using virtual reality in class: the equipment. In the past, logging on to a laptop and wearing a virtual-reality headset were viewed as an intrusive ordeal. But the game has changed, according to Thompson. If students are doing significant amounts of work online already, why couldn’t they have a headset on for most of that time as well?

In this vision, a virtual-reality headset is just a workaday accessory, like a computer mouse. But with it, students can “walk” into different education seminars and co-working spaces for projects and experience a range of virtual-reality environments, learning applications, lectures, and more. Just as the rising popularity of now-familiar learning technology tools like laptops fueled the creation of online learning applications and environments, this dynamic, coupled with a broader interest in the metaverse, seems poised to spur the creation of more learning environments that take advantage of virtual reality and 3-D.

Under Development

There are dozens of metaverse-type experiments underway in K-12 education.

For example, American High School touts its virtual-reality offerings on its website. The accredited, private online school has operated since 2004 and enrolled more than 8,000 students in grades K-12. Later this year, students and teachers at Optima Classical Academy, an online charter school based in Florida, will meet as avatars in a social virtual-reality platform created for the school that its founder described as a “metaverse.” It is set to launch in August for students in grades 3-8, who will follow a great books curriculum. Women Rise NFT, a collection of unique pieces of digital art by artist Maliha Abidi, was formed with the ultimate goal of building a school in the metaverse to serve the 258 million children around the world who cannot access traditional schools.

Then there are plans to support educators through the metaverse. The company k20 launched the Eduverse, a “metaverse hub for educators,” to connect teachers and administrators in a shared virtual world, where they can learn, network, and advance in their careers.

Finally, there are an array of enablers and supplemental providers that provide virtual-reality experiences for students and educators. Companies like Labster offer virtual-reality laboratories and FluentWorlds allows students to learn English in a variety of virtual worlds. Kai XR offers “360 degree” virtual field trips and EDUmetaverse has over 35 virtual worlds that educators can use.

And consider Dreamscape Immersive, a virtual-reality company founded by computer scientists and former Disney leaders. While its main funders are from the entertainment world—major Hollywood studios, Steven Spielberg, Nickelodeon, and AMC Theaters, which is planning to co-locate Dreamscape virtual-reality experiences in some of its theaters—the company also has partnered with Arizona State University to create Dreamscape Learn. Its first offering, a series of virtual-reality labs called “Immersive Biology at the Alien Zoo,” was created by Spielberg and company CEO Walter Parkes as an alternative for conventional lab work in college-level Introductory Biology. A high-school course is planned for later this year.

And even Meta has a team dedicated to developing education applications in the metaverse.

Looking Ahead

As metaverse mania continues, three things appear true.

First, innovation theory suggests that the early successful instances that apply elements of the metaverse will be proprietary in nature. They will be optimized initially to maximize the performance and reliability of an immature technology at the expense of scale and interoperability. That immediately suggests a problem. Many of the instances that are called a metaverse won’t meet a key criterion of Ball’s definition: interoperability. Indeed, much of what passes for metaverse hype right now is still virtual reality clothed in new marketing language.

This may not be a bad thing, however, given concerns about whether the metaverse will be a safe and healthy place for children. Experiences in walled-off gardens—think Prodigy and America Online, not the whole of the World Wide Web—could be safer, at least initially, even though that might temporarily undermine the vision of innovating instruction or skill development through the blockchain or decentralized autonomous organizations.

Second, the metaverse seems more of a sustaining than a disruptive innovation for full-time virtual schools. Unlike disruptions, sustaining innovations improve the performance of an existing product or service to better serve users who already exist. Full-time virtual schools that have sometimes struggled to engage students would likely benefit from a more immersive, social experience. Combining their programs with the metaverse, as well as with in-person learning pods, could create a more robust and accessible schooling experience. Alongside the flexible models of learning that took root during the pandemic, such as pods and hybrid online and in-person programs, a socially rich, immersive metaverse could, eventually, disrupt traditional, brick-and-mortar schools.

Finally, metaverse applications can create educational experiences that are otherwise impossible in a traditional environment. Virtual reality can bring content alive with dynamic images and hands-on digital exploration. It can bring real people and knowledge from other parts of the world into classrooms everywhere. Consider the potential for science labs, language learning, internships, cultural exchanges, and field trips (see “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” research, Winter 2014).

When the metaverse comes to class, these are the areas where you’ll want to point your virtual-reality goggles.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of the upcoming book From Reopen to Reinvent.

The post Meet the Metaverse appeared first on Education Next.

By: Michael B. Horn
Title: Meet the Metaverse
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/meet-the-metaverse-new-frontier-virtual-learning/
Published Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:00:01 +0000

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The Education Exchange: Weapon Ownership Rates Decrease, as School Shootings Spike

An assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, Daniel Hamlin, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Hamlin’s research on gun ownership in America, and its relationship to school shootings over 40 years.

Hamlin’s paper, “Are gun ownership rates and regulations associated with firearm incidents in American schools? A forty-year analysis (1980–2019)“, is available now.

Additionally, Hamlin and Peterson are currently moderating the virtual conference, A Safe Place to Learn, hosted by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

The post The Education Exchange: Gun Ownership Rates Decline, as School Shootings Spike appeared first on Education Next.

By: Education Next
Title: The Education Exchange: Gun Ownership Rates Decline, as School Shootings Spike
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-gun-ownership-rates-decline-as-school-shootings-spike/
Published Date: Tue, 31 May 2022 08:59:30 +0000

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