2018 was a year that kept us on our toes. From teacher strikes to student walkouts, Supreme Court stunners, school shootings, and the midterms, it’s been a nonstop churn of breaking news.
So we thought we’d take a moment, before careening into a new Congress and the next news cycle, to try to draw a frame around the year that was. These were our 18 most popular, most widely shared, and more influential articles and videos from 2018 Integration: Over several months this past spring, national correspondent Beth Hawkins tracked the groundbreaking integration efforts of the 78207, the zip code located on the west side of San Antonio, Texas. It is the poorest neighborhood in America’s most economically segregated city: 91 percent of students in the San Antonio Independent School District are Latino, 6 percent are black, and 93 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. As Beth reports, into this divided landscape three years ago came a new schools chief, Pedro Martinez, with a mandate to break down the centuries-old economic isolation that has its heart in the 78207. In response, Martinez launched one of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments.
He started with a novel approach that yielded eye-popping information: Using family income data, he created a map showing the depth of poverty on each city block and in every school in the district — a color-coded street guide comprising granular details unheard of in education. And then he started integrating schools, not by race, but by income, factoring in a spectrum of additional elements, such as parents’ education levels and homelessness. To achieve the kind of integration he was looking for, he would first have to better understand the gradations of poverty in every one of his schools and what kinds of supports those student populations require, and then find a way to woo affluent families from other parts of the city to disrupt these concentrations of unmet need. Martinez’s strategy: Open new “schools of choice” with sought-after curricular models, like Montessori and dual language, and set aside a share of seats for students from more prosperous neighboring school districts, who would then sit next to a mix of students from San Antonio ISD. Read Beth’s immersive profile of the San Antonio experiment.Election 2018: Education reform, or at least some of its more controversial components, didn’t have the best midterm night in November. Across more than 40 states and 70 races, The 74 chronicled key ballot propositions, state-level majorities and the broader blue wave that will reshape federal education policy in 2019. From key races in California and Wisconsin to surprising twists in Colorado, Florida, and Texas early Education: After New York State rolled out new standards that called for “active, joyful engagement” in its early-learner classrooms, Watertown City School District introduced a play-based curriculum that it will expand through third grade. Researchers have known for a while that playtime shouldn’t stop when children enter the classroom. In fact, it’s critical to the cognitive development of elementary-aged students by building better thinkers, collaborators, and creators. And child-directed learning has been shown to deliver significant academic gains, according to a study of three preschool programs in Washington, D.C. Students who had been in a formal, traditional academic environment during preschool earned lower grades after several years of schooling than their peers who had been in preschools where active, child-initiated learning was more common, the study found. While play-based learning can still be a tough sell as schools face the pressures of standards and teacher training, Kate Stringer reports
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