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Barriers and Facilitators to Racial Equity in K-12 Education: An Integrative Review
Jamaal Marshall, EdArXiv, 2023/01/30

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These are issues a bit beyond the ken of educational technology, but there are three resources here I think people should at least see. This first item is a paper (68 page docx) arguing that "a complex set of evolving barriers continues to impede access to the equitable delivery of education for racial minority K-12 students in the U.S." The gist of the argument is that treating everyone exactly the same entrenches existing socio-economic, racial and cultural disparities in society. Essentially the same point is raised in Paul Gorsky's article, Stop Punishing Poverty in Schools. "For many students experiencing poverty," he writes, "being priced out of inclusion is only the tip of the inequity iceberg." The third item is a warning, I think, about what happens when you don't emphasize a diverse and inclusive public school system: David Gilbert's look Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members. Is this even real? I don't know, but it serves as a stark warning.

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Employers, hire more people without college degrees, says the New York Times
Bryan Alexander, 2023/01/30

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Bryan Alexander summarizes a New York Times editorial (paywalled, but archived here) arguing that governments and companies shouldn't require that new hires have a college degree. Such 'degree screening', it argues, penalizes poor and minority students, who are less able to attend college, and prevents U.S. employers from accessing the estimated 50 percent of applicants who earned knowledge through alternative means. "For a generation we thought that the more people get more college experience, the better," writes Alexander. "Since 2012 or so there have been signs of that national consensus breaking down." It's not so much that the consensus broke down, in my view. It's more like the ideal was never achieved, so people are giving up on it. But the thing in, in a modern information-age society, you can't simply give up on having a higher education system, you have to replace it with something. How the U.S. responds really is a sink-or-swim moment for the entire society.

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Learning styles don’t exist
Carl Hendrick, Aeon, 2023/01/30

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This is quite a good article covering the full breadth of the argument against learning styles. It's interesting, though, that the title on the page - "Learning styles don't exist" - is different from the title in the metadata - "The evidence is clear: learning styles theory doesn't work". And the trouble is, most people can identify different preferences or even needs among people, and this simple fact (I think) explains why there is so much resistance to the argument presented here. And saying "learning styles theory doesn't work" is a very different proposition, depending to a great degree on how your define "works". If one child has trouble sleeping, providing extra reassurance "works". If another child hates the taste of brussels sprouts, does forcing them to eat them anyways "work"? If a student hates step-by-step instructions, does forcing them to sit through them "work"?

We read in this article that we should use "the robust findings from cognitive science... as a base to inform how we design and sequence learning." But cognitive science is a mish-mash of competing theories, including the "astonishing 71 different models or ways of classifying learning styles" we find in the literature in the first place. I'm not here to say "learning styles work". But I would be very surprised if some form of differentiated pedagogy were not the best way to promote learning - whether it be as simple as teaching students in their own language, as progressive as tailoring content to adapt to their culture, or as complex as attending in a very precise way to their individual needs and interests.

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Education: the five concerns we should debate right now
Meghan Stacey, Deb Hayes, Phillip Dawson, Sarah O'Shea, Scott Eacott, EduResearch Matters, 2023/01/30

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The five concerns listed are: teacher working conditions, public funding of private schools, equity in admissions, chatGPT, and education funding. While I note that this is offered in an Australian context, I still wonder whether these are the five most important issues facing education today. But as I think about it, it seems to me that the issues that are important are also hard to articulate. How, for example, do we learn how to learn? What skills are needed for life in a dynamic, information-rich and constantly changing environment? How do we help people make good value judgements? How can we learn to structure global society to avoid sectarian violence? These are the sorts of issues that keep me up at night, and yet they can barely be articulated in the context of contemporary schooling.

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Gates Foundation Response to Posts on Courseware Evidence - PhilOnEdTech
Alison Pendergast, PhilOnEdTech, 2023/01/30

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This is a response from a senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to criticisms Phil Hill offered last fall. I covered it here. She writes, "our work in courseware is rooted in the goal of ensuring that many more students can complete their certificates and degrees and that race, ethnicity, and income do not serve as predictors of student success... every person deserves a chance to live a healthy, productive life." To this end, they see "digital learning curricula and courseware as a critical level in helping to help enact higher quality undergraduate digital learning," the argument being that quality courseware lowers DFW rates.

If that sounds like something David Wiley would say, it should. Pendergast reports that "we're working with courseware partner Lumen Learning to do user research on a new statistics courseware for the general or introductory-level statistics course." Additionally, she says, "we're actively engaging with and centering the needs of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students and students from low-income backgrounds and the institutions serving these students in a participatory design and development approach to ensure we're designing with – not for – our focus populations."

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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