Rounding up the issues of 2019 and the 2010’s (Part 1)

This week and next week, Thomas Hatch notes some of the common issues and key concerns mentioned in end-of-the-year and end-of-the-decade education reflections. As in the round-ups of 2018, 2017, and 2016, many of the reflections come from US sources, but there are some global links as well. This week, Part 1 concentrates on the waves of violence and activism and the discussions of outcomes mentioned across a number of sources. Links to many of the sources that inform both posts are also provided. Next week, Part 2’s roundup focuses on common questions about the role of research and technology in improvement efforts.

Although there are many educational experiences, schools, resources, technologies, companies and other ventures in 2019 that were not around in 2010, many of the key issues and stories of 2019 overlapped with those mentioned in the reviews of the decade of the 2010’s as a whole.

Safety, gun violence, trauma…and student activism
In the US, the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown as well as the shootings at Sandy Hook (to name only a few) made safety, gun violence and trauma key topics inside and outside schools throughout the decade. In 2019, 25 shootings in schools and at school-related events were in the headlines, along with questions about active shooter drillsand other means of securing student safety.

At the same time, traumatic events also fueled the emergence of Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement in the US and contributed to a wave of student activism globally. In 2015, Li Zhou and Adrienne Green chronicled in words and pictures the student activists who were demonstrating against soaring tuition, protesting police brutality, and demanding education reform. That wave continued into 2019 as students called for action on sexual assault, racism, and climate change, with Greta Thunberg’s scolding of delegates at the UN and the students’ climate strike echoing around the world.

Progress? stagnation?
Debates about whether schools are getting better or worse also continued throughout the decade. Internationally, PISA test results in 2012, 2015, and 2018 continued to highlight the high performance of East Asian countries like Singapore; showed a decline in Finland; and revealed high scores in some jurisdictions in China while raising questions about how representative and appropriate those scores were.

Globally, Lee Crawfurd and Susannah Hares of the Center for Global Development, summed things up by pointing out that progress on achieving primary schooling has stagnated but attention to learning has grown: they found that only about 50 articles mentioned the phrase “learning crisis” in 2010 but almost 300 mentioned it in 2019. For added emphasis, in 2019, the World Bank sought to focus on “learning poverty” by creating a new global target: cutting in half the number of children who are unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 (currently at 53% in lower- and middle-income countries).

In the US, Chad Alderman pointed out that the 2010’s “may be the best decade ever in terms of college attainment,” but Dana Goldstein noted that the decade concluded with reports of largely stagnant performance and continuing inequities in outcomes on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the National Center on Education and the Economy highlighted a widening achievement gap on PISA in reading as well.

Inside Philanthropy’s David Callahan described the 2010’s as “a decade in which a billionaire-backed K-12 reform push largely flopped.” Those elite-backed reforms in the US included the launch of the Common Core Learning Standards and numerous state-backed initiatives to increase accountability by tying teacher evaluations to student outcomes. Yet the decade ended with reports of little evidence of positive impact of the Common Core and continuing debates about its value. In 2019, studies also found little if any positive effect of the new teacher evaluation policies on student test scores. Those top-down initiatives also contributed to a backlash against testing, and, as Madeline Will of Education Week put it, spurred teachers to take leadership into their own hands, “leading strikes and protests across the country, and even running for office.”

The charter debate did get a little bit more complex over the decade. Charter schools in some regulatory environments like Massachusetts showed some positive results, but critics continued to question the impact of charters on students and neighboring schools. Charter schools even became an issue of debate among Democrats in 2019, with opinions breaking down along racial lines, as the74 illustrated in 14 charts that changed the way we looked at schools. (To be continued…)

Links to roundups and reflections for 2019 and the 2010’s
2010 to Now: A turbulent decade for schools, Education Week.

Teaching in 2020 vs. 2010: A look back at the decade, Education Week

14 charts that changed the way we looked at America’s schools in 2019, The 74 Million

Eight lessons we learned from research in 2019, Chalkbeat

Education may be pivotal in the 2020 election. Here’s what you need to know. Highlights from the Brown Center Chalkboard in 2019, Brown Center Chalkboard

Cheating scandals, charters and falling test scores: 5 takeaways from the year in education, The New York Times

Laugh, cry and gasp along with the best viral classroom moments of 2019, NPR

2019 education year in review with Erica Green, Alyson Klein and Josh Mitchell, The Report Card with Nat Malkus

The 7 most memorable pieces of education journalism for 2019, Phi Delta Kappan

10 pieces of education journalism that defined the past decade, Phi Delta Kappan

Online degrees slowdown: A review of MOOC stats and trends in 2019, Class Central

A decade in review: Reflections on 10 years in education technology, Ed Surge