As they take office, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the new 117th Congress face unprecedented challenges. We bring you a gallery of recommendations thus far from Teachers College faculty and students — and we look forward to adding more in the weeks and months to come.
As President Biden fights for an ambitious infrastructure investment, Kevin Dougherty, Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy, and Tara Habibi (M.A. student, Economics and Education) analyze the political divisions — and common ground — to offer insight for the debate ahead
Kim Baranowski, Teachers College faculty member and Associate Director of the Mount Sinai Human Rights Program, applauds the Biden administration for making human rights a top priority, but says reforms haven’t gone far enough.
As the Biden-Harris administration nears its second month in office, the challenges it faces are formidable in every area of governance — and education and public health are no exceptions.
But the good news says, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Education Basil Anthony Smikle (Ph.D. ’19), is that “thought leaders have regained prominence in decision making.”
As the first-year anniversary of pandemic-related school closings approaches, education stakeholders are debating whether to resume universal standardized testing of students who, in many instances, have gone as long as a year without in-school instruction. In an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report, Aaron Pallas, Arthur I. Gates Professor of Sociology & Education at Teachers College, writes that testing this spring should be called off.
Could data collection be the Biden administration’s key to successful education?
The thought might elicit a collective groan from educators left bruised by the era of “weaponized” standardized testing ushered in by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, acknowledges Jeffrey Henig in a piece recently published in Education Week. But, asserts Henig, Professor of Political Science & Education, “a revamped approach to data collection could help restore and re-energize a community focus on public education — and also help the incoming Biden administration avoid a bruising partisan battle.”
In a letter published in the January 15th issue of Science, Peter T. Coleman, Professor of Psychology & Education, asserts that “piecemeal” tactics will be insufficient to reverse “a 50-year trajectory of runaway division” that have led to toxic polarization in the United States.
Coleman, who directs TC’s Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation & Conflict Resolution, argues instead that deeply divided societies are most likely to transform “when leaders take office after a major political shock — like the COVID-19 pandemic or the 6 January storming of the Capitol by political extremists — has destabilized the status quo and lead in a way that differs dramatically from the leadership that instigated the divisions.” He adds that in societies where “distrust and suspicion reign,” new political strategies are more likely to succeed when introduced with “a public declaration of intention.”
The expression “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” has been kicking around since the Great Depression. But since the COVID crisis hit last spring, the federal government has, in fact, been allowing schools to serve free meals to all students. And now, in an opinion piece published on the website of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, Teachers College’s Julia McCarthy is urging the Biden administration to permanently extend that policy, “making now the moment to end student hunger for good.”
Long before COVID-19 forced the shutdown of many early child care centers, early child care in the United States was in crisis, plagued by inadequate funding, lack of professional development for caregivers, and, in some places, ineffective oversight.
In an open letter to the Biden-Harris administration, published as in The Answer Sheet, a column in The Washington Post, Teachers College’s Sharon Lynn Kagan and Caitlin Dermody, Research Assistant at NCCF, offer a way forward.
Growing up in Jesuit schools, José Luis Vilson was instructed to write the letters AMDG, signifying ad majorem Dei gloriam (“for the greater glory of God”) atop all his papers.
In a recent opinion piece in National Catholic Reporter, Vilson, a mathematics teacher and Ph.D. student in Teachers College’s program in Sociology & Education, frames the message in terms likely to resonate with educators of all faiths (or none). “Every child needs a great school. We can't leave that up to the market,” he writes. “The Biden administration must create an educational system that allows for allocation of resources into every school regardless and because of their zip code and type. This means a system that holistically supports every school, not just financially, but spiritually as well.”
The New York Times’ podcast series “Nice White Parents” may leave listeners convinced that school integration is a failed experiment, doomed by insincere White liberals and no longer desired by many Black families. But in an article for The Century Foundation (TCF), Teachers College alumna Michelle Burris (M.A. ’19) and co-author Stefan Lallinger argue that, in today’s “multicultural, pluralistic society, in which K–12 White students are no longer a majority of American students, both the opportunity and the need to get it right have never been greater.”
Speaking on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, Sonali Rajan, Associate Professor of Health Education, reflected on a record-breaking year for gun homicides in America, when nearly 20,000 people lost their lives due to gun violence.
There were several reasons for that nearly 25 percent jump from 2019, said Rajan, Co-Founder of the Columbia Scientific Union for the Reduction of Gun Violence (SURGE). Certainly the “collective trauma, grief, economic anxiety, stress that all were exacerbated because of the COVID-19 pandemic” was a contributing factor. So, too, was the increase in gun sales, with 2 million firearms sold in March alone. Rajan also noted that “public resources simply were diverted due to the pandemic,” resulting in “the work of violence interrupters, social programs and support services not being as readily available.” And she pointed to the role of institutionalized racism, exacerbated by police violence against people of color. “Police officers are three times more likely to fatally shoot a Black individual than a White individual, for example. And we saw this year racism intersecting in a way with gun violence and with the COVID pandemic that really took its toll on Black and Brown communities in particular.”
Like all researchers, Amanda Howerton-Fox and Jodi Falk understand that citation of their work by others is one of academia’s gold standards — proof that their ideas are not only intellectually stimulating, but have recognized application to problems in the real world.
Citation by the nation’s incoming presidential administration, however, wasn’t on their radar. So the two doctoral graduates of Teachers College’s Deaf & Hard of Hearing Program were happily stunned when they received word that their study, “Deaf Children as ‘English Learners’: The Psycholinguistic Turn in Deaf Education,” published in 2019 in the journal Education Sciences, has become a cornerstone of President-Elect Joe Biden’s federal disability policy.
It’s a number that’s increasingly in the news: $1.6 trillion, the amount of student debt in the United States.
But what does it really mean?
That was the question put to Teachers College education economist Judith Scott-Clayton by National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro on a recent edition of the show Consider This.
The views expressed in these articles are solely those of the speaker to whom they are attributed. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the faculty, administration, staff or Trustees either of Teachers College or of Columbia University.