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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.
[“source=educationnext”]