November 3, 2020

What Bellwether Is Watching Out For in Election 2020

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That there’s a lot at stake in this election is obvious. And there is a lot at stake for schools even as they’ve been mostly an afterthought on the campaign trail. There are immediate questions about COVID-19 relief and, going forward, big questions for early education, higher education, assessment, accountability, and choice policies for K-12 schools. 

This is nothing new: Bellwether has an entire genre of blog posts about how little education gets talked about during presidential debates, vice presidential debates, State of the Union addresses, and other federal policy conversations. And while single-issue education voters may not be unicorns, they are pretty rare.  

At Bellwether we track the election and what it means for clients, and we pay attention to the context and conditions schools operate in. Our team is united by a shared mission of improving life and education outcomes for underserved students, but we differ about how best to do that — and, by extension, about politics. But like everyone, we are paying close attention this year.

Here’s some of what we are watching for: Continue reading →


November 2, 2020

ICYMI: Is There or Isn’t There a Looming Fiscal Cliff for Education?

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Throughout the past month, Bellwether has weighed in on the financial health of schools in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, with different reactions, resources, and recommendations from across our team. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap: 

You can read all the posts in the series here, and we welcome your reactions! Thanks for following along.


October 30, 2020

An Underused Path for Rescuing Early Care Providers

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This is our latest post in “The Looming Financial Crisis?” series. Read the rest here.

Even in the best of times, the community-based organizations, nonprofits, and schools that run early childhood programs in this country operate on extremely thin margins.

Because of COVID-19, they’re in crisis. Many are waiting desperately for families willing to sign up for in-person care or for the federal government to pass another stimulus bill. In a July survey, 40 percent of current early childhood providers said that without additional public assistance, they would close permanently. In that scenario, thousands of early educators would lose their primary source of income. The resulting loss would also have dire implications for parents and caregivers trying to go back to work — and for the economy. 

Outside of direct financial assistance, there’s another — and largely unexplored — route to help shore up the finances of existing early childhood providers and support the creation of new providers: state legislators should create flexibility from regulations that govern the facilities where early childhood operators can work.

Right now, for example, early childhood providers spend valuable money and limited staff time thinking about things like building individual “cubbies” within classrooms with individual hooks and ensuring an “adequate supply of blocks in varied sizes” that is “organized and labeled.” Facilities regulations can also prevent potential providers from ever opening. For example, in order to serve preschoolers, charter schools often must retrofit their existing classrooms to meet early childhood regulations, which can be a prohibitively expensive endeavor. 

There is no argument that children need safety, and that operators need to be compelled — through a combination of oversight, law, and agency guidance — to make the safest spaces for kids to play and learn. But states across the country have taken things a step too far, adding burdensome hoops that don’t actually do anything to ensure quality, safety, or rigor.

Loosening these regulations would ease the financial pressure on existing providers, allowing them to spend funds elsewhere, like on public health measures, staff salaries, or rent. Depending on the regulation, providers may even be able to reconfigure their existing space to enroll more students while still meeting COVID health and safety standards. And in the best case scenario, providers that have not previously offered child care due to facilities restrictions could begin to do so. 

Continue reading →


October 29, 2020

Which Outcomes Should Minnesota Hold Its High Schools Responsible For?

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Long before the pandemic, schools and communities recognized that a high school diploma is no longer enough. Today, eight in 10 Minnesota students graduate high school, but as more graduates look to a future amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they may question whether their high school has adequately prepared them to succeed in college or career.

Minnesota has taken steps to create programs to prepare students for life beyond high school, as well as collect critical information and data about those efforts. Yet the state has failed to incorporate postsecondary outcomes into the way it evaluates high school performance. It’s time to fix this mismatch.

Minnesota’s Post Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program, which dates back to 1985, was the first-of-its-kind to help students complete high school and college coursework at the same time. Nearly 250,000 Minnesota students have benefited from this program since its inception, and that number doubles once you include Minnesota’s other dual enrollment programming.

In addition to information on the PSEO program, the state tracks student performance in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, as well as SAT and ACT results. Minnesota also tracks a variety of additional measures on high school graduates, such as postsecondary enrollment and employment outcomes like the number of hours worked, in what industry, and the hourly wages earned. 

Unfortunately, Minnesota’s efforts at data collection result in nice graphs on a website with little effect on student success. What is the point of data collection unless it informs programming, benefits students, and helps ensure all students are given equal opportunities?

High school leaders may think it’s unfair to hold them accountable for what happens outside their walls. But students need to be prepared for the world that awaits them, whether that is a pandemic-ravaged economy or remote college learning, and schools bear significant responsibility to provide that preparation. Continue reading →


October 27, 2020

How Can Educators Evaluate Virtual Student Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, educators commonly assessed student engagement using student self-report measures, teacher reports, and observational measures. These measures work for in-person learning environments where student participation and connectivity can be easily visible.

Now most teaching and learning occurs in virtual spaces, where instruction is delivered through learning management systems (e.g., Google Classroom) either synchronously or asynchronously. Teachers and school leaders have to engage students — and evaluate their engagement — in a remote environment with little formal or comprehensive training and often a limited ability to even see their students. 

There has been a great deal of writing recently about improving student engagement, but few resources provide guidance around measuring student engagement during remote learning. 

Based on a close read of the existing research and resources, and our own in-house expertise, Bellwether’s evaluation team is currently helping three clients to design and implement tools to evaluate virtual student engagement. While the measures themselves have not changed much since the pandemic, the uses and evaluation of these measures must adapt to our current realities, like many other approaches in education, to better serve and engage students and families. 

Here are two key considerations for educators and school leaders to keep in mind when evaluating virtual student engagement:

There is no one-size-fits-all model for measurement  Continue reading →