Stay optimistic. Rely on others. Keep informed but don’t go overboard reading all the headlines. TC’s George Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology, offers these and other tips for getting through the pandemic in a Q&A posted by the Association of Psychological Sciences. “We can cope with this,” asserts Bonanno, Director of both TC’s Resilience Center for Veterans & Families and the College’s Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab. “The majority of humans cope well and are resilient to just about any adversity.” Above all, Bonanno emphasizes, don’t go it alone. Resilience may be “intrinsic,” he says, “but it can also come from external factors, including support groups and social resources.”  

Published March 30, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a “secondary pandemic” of global anxiety, write Peter T. Coleman, Professor of Psychology & Education and Director of TC’s Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation & Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), and Anthea Chan, MD-ICCCR Research Associate, in the State of the Planet blog of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. While anxiety can be normal and healthy, sheltering with others can lead people down certain “derailing” paths. Research by the late TC social psychologist Morton Deutsch shows that romantic partners tend to respond to anxiety by either avoiding conflict or seeking it out; over-intellectualizing or becoming overly emotional; and other derailing extremes. MD-ICCCR’s free Conflict Anxiety Response Scale generates an “individualized feedback profile” on these behaviors.

Published May 26, 2020

Much advice has been dispensed on coping with life in the time of COVID — and that, says Lena Verdeli, Associate Professor of Psychology & Education and Director of TC’s Global Mental Health Lab, may be part of the problem. “We need to be clear not to convey the message that people always need guidelines and webinars and that there’s a right way to adjust to this,” says Verdeli, who has worked with refugees in Lebanon, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Uganda and elsewhere, in an interview on TC’s website. “It’s very important to trust that they can activate their own mental health immune system to survive. Because when we dictate to people what they need to do, we take away self-efficacy, which may be the most important tool for getting through this.”

Published July 9, 2020

In “A Lost and Found Thanksgiving,” an essay in Columbia News, TC’s Aurélie Athan, Research Professor in Clinical Psychology, welcomes “the chance this year to turn trauma into new learning — and with that opportunity, remake our world.” Athan, whose teaching centers on adult transformative learning through ritual and symbol, plans to set her Thanksgiving table with family heirlooms commemorating loved ones who will be missing from this year’s celebration. To introduce new traditions, she’ll also serve a scaled-down meal, assembled by preschoolers’ hands. “Rituals are made with what is at hand,” Athan concludes. “Just look around, and gather what you have.” 

Published November 19, 2020

Eleven months into the COVID pandemic and its accompanying disruptions, most people are doing “pretty well,” says George Bonanno in the British daily The Guardian. Still, Bonanno warns that sustained stress over a period of time “wears us out.” The key to adapting, he suggests, is “flexibility” — people’s proficiency at “reading the context, reading what’s happening and decoding it so you know what you need to do.” When a flexible response works well, he says, “the outcome is resilience.”

Published November 26, 2020

“Youth of color and young women are the demographic groups that use social media the most” but are also “the least represented among digital technology developers, who are predominantly adult White males,” write TC’s Ioana Literat, Assistant Professor of Communication, Media & Learning Technologies Design, and California State University Northridge’s Melissa Brough in The Hechinger Report, a Teachers College-based nonprofit, independent news organization. In the authors’ own research, Black, Hispanic and queer youth have “talked about the heightened social pressure to conform to dominant social norms online, and the ways in which platform design constricts their multifaceted, fluid identities.” The antidote, argue Literat and Brough: “Bring these voices directly to the design table.”

Published January 16, 2020

Games aren’t just fun, writes Joey Lee, Lecturer and Director of TC’s Games Research Lab, in the January issue of School Library Journal. They “can be a powerful way to teach, persuade, or raise awareness about important topics that young people should care about, such as social justice or civic issues." Games also offer students the opportunity to interact and play with material in a way that makes it more “understandable and accessible,” writes Lee, who coordinates TC’s M.A. program in Design and Development of Digital Games.

Published January 29, 2020

Online instruction often replicates a flawed status quo, write TC’s Nick Wasserman, Nathan Holbert and Paulo Blikstein in the New York Daily News. “We do education a great disservice when we describe it as only about memorizing or using facts,” assert Blikstein and Holbert (faculty in Communication, Media & Learning Technologies Design) and Wasserman, of TC’s Mathematics Education program, responding to calls to expand remote learning in lieu of traditional schooling when the pandemic ends. “Learning certainly involves the mind, but also interactions between students, teacher and student, and learning spaces and tools” for “diverse, rich, and multimodal educational experiences.”

Published April 8, 2020

Life pre-COVID included worries about excessive screen time, but socially-distant weddings, concerts and workdays can have upsides, says Ioana Literat in a new segment for Vice News. “It’s not what social media does to us, but what we do with social media. We are social creatures . . . so we will use existing tools in ways that enrich, rather than impoverish our communication.”

Published April 14, 2020

Zoom and other online meeting forums replicate many aspects of face-to-face gatherings — including the tendency of men to preempt, talk over and interrupt female colleagues. Yet the best-performing groups and teams afford all members equal airtime, says TC’s Sarah J. Brazaitis in Mashable. Brazaitis, Associate Professor of Practice in TC’s Department of Organization & Leadership, suggests that professors teaching online issue instructions to ensure that outcome — and that women stick up for one another: “It might be that they get labeled troublemakers . . . but better to advocate in groups than solo regardless.”

Published May 1, 2020

With young children spending their schooling hours online, “teaching about digital citizenship cannot wait,” argue Barbara Sprung, Merle Froschl and Nancy Gropper, co-authors of Cybersafe Young Children: Teaching Internet Safety and Responsibility, K–3 (Teachers College Press 2020). “In this day and age, it is not a supplement to regular curriculum, but arguably the most important part.” In an opinion piece for TC's website, the authors urge establishing classroom rules for online behavior and educating youngsters that in the cyberworld, “permanence” means that what’s posted online stays there. Teachers should create classroom cultures of empathy and friendship, and grown-ups should be mindful that “technology is more effective for learning when adults and peers interact or co-view with young children.”

Published September 10, 2020

During a glitchy radio interview on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show about the pitfalls of remote teaching during COVID, TC Associate Professor of Science Education Christopher Emdin and substitute host Brigid Bergin wryly note that they are dealing, in the moment, with precisely the issue that many fear is leaving a generation of low-income, BIPOC students behind: lack of access to the necessary technology. Yet Emdin also affirms that creative teachers can keep their students engaged, even via snail mail: “Technology is beautiful, but it will fail us, like during this call. But there are age-old practices of emotional connection that help us to develop skill sets that are lost in technology.” 

Published December 3, 2020

Tired of people with differing views squaring off against one another like warring tribes? In an article in The Hill, Peter T. Coleman argues that most Americans are part of the “hidden tribes” in the political middle, including those “working actively to bridge the tensions and promote understanding and compassion.” If you are aligned with this growing “miserable middle majority,” find and join them, Coleman writes, because they represent “a solid foundation for change.”   

Published March 11, 2020

Why is “cancel culture” — the mass shaming and nullification of politicians, celebrities and companies (think Al Franken, Ellen DeGeneres, J.K. Rowling) after they’ve said or done something considered morally beyond the bounds — increasing among the American left? Peter T. Coleman writes in The Hill that the practice evokes the “shaming and shunning” of Puritan times or the strict taboos of societies such as Pakistan, Malaysia and Singapore. Today, he says, “progressives are extremely frustrated and enraged” that Donald Trump was elected and has “remained, for the most part, untouchable” in the wake of impeachment and investigations by Robert Mueller. Acknowledging the Democrats’ need for party unity, Coleman nevertheless argues that “debate within the progressive tent is a healthy and necessary one.”

Published August 14, 2020

Fifty years of divisive politics has fractured American society. President Trump is hinting he’ll refuse to leave office if the election doesn’t go his way. How will Americans “pick up the pieces . . . and get back to work on our most pressing problems?” Peter T. Coleman’s answer, in The Hill, is through “positive deviance” — a peace-building term referring to effective, sustainable interventions that often come from bridge-building groups within a society. Coleman argues that, even in these fraught times, much can be done to support what he calls “our nascent ecology of unity.” He calls for “a national initiative to connect, support and expand to scale the many bridging groups currently working on their own,” urging the nation to strengthen “this most-essential autoimmune system and get us back on track.” 

Published September 22, 2020

An article in Chalkbeat extensively quotes Claire Raffel, Deputy Director of TC’s Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy on the importance of school food systems and the potential to expand their reach should the pandemic shut down more schools. Calling New York City’s school system “expert” in feeding students, Raffel urges focusing on students who might not be able to travel to school sites: “This is New York City — we have every food delivery system in the world. We should be able to figure something out for families who can’t walk to a school and pick something up.”

Published March 12, 2020

Distance learning has nourished millions of children during the COVID pandemic — but it is undermining sound nutrition for others who spend their days on education sites where food companies advertise unhealthy snack food. School-based food programs must respond by remaining a presence even during closures, write Julia McCarthy, Interim Deputy Director of TC’s Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, and Michele Polacsek of the University of New England in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald: “The current public health crisis has highlighted the important role schools play in students’ diets. Let’s take this opportunity to ensure that even in this time of distance learning, schools promote healthy, lifelong behaviors.”

Published September 20, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has “spotlighted a deeply inequitable food system, where wealthier New Yorkers have consistent access to healthy, affordable food while low-income, Black and Brown and immigrant households do not,” argue Pamela Koch, Executive Director of TC’s Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy and Associate Professor, and co-authors in the New York Daily News. The writers urge measures that range from expanding economic stimulus support, especially to small food businesses owned by women, people of color and immigrants, to expanding public benefits and improving conditions for low-wage food workers. “As the next wave of the pandemic looms,” they argue, “we could make a lasting commitment to the city by using the lessons from COVID-19 to dismantle the food apartheid which leaves so many New Yorkers without access to food.”

Published September 30, 2020

The closing of New York City’s public schools need not be a “win-lose proposition,” argues Roberta Lenger Kang, Director of TC’s Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), in the New York Daily News, in March 2020. Lenger Kang calls for daily messaging by the New York City Department of Education, opening temporary school zone sites, particularly for students with no secure place to go, and staffing those sites with teachers who live nearby. Also appearing on NY1 television, she advises parents that reward is more effective than punishment and that age-appropriate honesty can help children navigate the transition to online schooling. 

Published March 16, 2020

The school closings occasioned by COVID provide an opportunity to undo growing inequities that have been built into the nation’s education system, writes Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology & Education, in Education Week. Wells calls for a renewed appreciation for teachers, extension of the reprieve from state-mandated standardized testing, use of the virtual arena to fight de facto segregation, and a clear and urgent demonstration of the importance of civics. “It is time for educators, students, parents, and taxpayers to unite and demand a much-needed rebirth of our public education system,” she concludes. “Freed from shortsighted education reforms, [teachers] are better positioned to do what they were trained to do — teach our children to think. That is the teachable moment for us all.”

Published May 7, 2020

Carefully planning to reopen schools in Fall 2020 — not reopening bars and restaurants this summer — should be the top priority, writes Sarah Cohodes, Associate Professor of Economics & Education, in an article posted to The Atlantic magazine’s website. But that entails: 

• Allowing teachers and staff to opt out of in-person teaching if they are at high risk of contracting COVID-19 or spreading it to family.
• Designating elementary school students and older children with special needs to return to schools first.
• Providing online-only instruction to older students, a policy that will require adjustments to teaching and curriculum.

“Let us be bold together,” Cohodes concludes, “and halt reopening the economy — and choose reopening schools, and a better fall for our families.”

Published July 7, 2020

As part of TC’s "Schools vs. COVID” series, four TC education leadership experts outline challenges facing America’s K–12 superintendents and principals during the pandemic. Barbara McKeon, Director of TC’s Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished Principals, says leaders are “in the trenches 24/7.” Brian K. Perkins, Associate Professor of Practice in Education Leadership, asserts that “conditions for reopening are not being equally met,” with “your typical public high school, especially in a poor neighborhood,” lacking the space and resources to observe COVID safety guidelines. Jeffrey Young, Professor of Practice in Education Leadership, says school leaders are scrambling to meet “the academic, emotional and social needs of disadvantaged kids.” And Ellie Drago-Severson, Professor of Education Leadership, suggests that principals are struggling with their own “ways of knowing.” “Who do you go to,” she asks, “when you bump up against your own limitations?”

Published August 13, 2020

TC alumnus Thomas Chandler (Ph.D. ’09, M.A. ’00), Research Scientist at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute), argues that, in adapting to COVID, “we should look back to the 1918 Flu Pandemic, which is the only comparable disaster in the 20^th century in terms of spreading so rapidly and being so severe.” Says Chandler: “The lesson is that this is a global pandemic and that social distancing and sheltering in place when possible are vitally important.” Citing the vacationing college students who recently flocked to Florida’s beaches on the mistaken assumption that younger people weren’t at risk, he concludes: “We really just have to follow what the data is showing.”

Published March 30, 2020

Responding in the New York Daily News to President Trump’s prediction of “suicides by the thousands” if the United States doesn’t rapidly end mandatory social distancing, TC’s Louis Klarevas, Research Professor, and Sonali Rajan, Associate Professor of Health Education, together with Charles Branas and Katherine Keyes of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, warn against “a mistaken message” that suicide is an expected and “recognized way for dealing with economic hardship.” The authors argue that if “we privilege financial gain over human loss” by lifting social distancing protocols too soon, “the number of deaths associated . . . could increase by upwards of 2 million people.” 

Published March 25, 2020

Some societal ills have at least temporarily lessened during the COVID pandemic, but not so gun violence in America. Gun sales have jumped and gun-related deaths have reached new heights. Noting that current safety strategies “focus almost entirely on how to respond in the moment of a shooting,” TC's Sonali Rajan and Charles Branas, of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, ask, “What if, instead, we invested in stopping these tragedies from happening in the first place?” Writing in The Hechinger Report, Rajan and Branas suggest measures that range from involving school nurses in educating families about safe gun storage to replacing punitive discipline strategies with trauma-informed practices. Conclusion: “Let’s challenge the notion that school gun violence is inevitable and, instead, seek better ways to prevent it.”

Published December 10, 2020

The United States has fallen far short in its COVID prevention strategies, write TC’s John Allegrante, Professor of Health Education; M. Elaine Auld, Chief Executive Officer of the Society for Public Health Education; and Sundar Natarajan of NYU Langone Health, in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine. “Preventing further viral spread will require strengthening evidence-based behavioral change and implementation of science strategies to effectively reach the large numbers of at-risk Americans who are anxiously navigating the difficult social terrain to keep themselves and their families safe from COVID-19 and its long-term sequela,” the three write in "Preventing COVID-19 and Its Sequela: ‘There Is No Magic Bullet . . . It’s Just Behaviors.’” “In other wars, the U.S. committed resources, technology, and expertise to achieve overwhelming superiority and overcome the enemy. The strategy for winning this contemporary war will demand nothing less.”

Published May 30, 2020

The rapid development of several safe and effective COVID vaccines is an extraordinary scientific achievement — but with winter upon us and infection rates spiking, social distancing, frequent hand washing and wearing masks remain our best defenses, writes John Allegrante on TC’s website. Allegrante, Professor of Health Education, cites remaining challenges, from the unprecedented task of vaccinating 330 million Americans to the possibility that the virus could mutate, to the “vaccine hesitancy” of a segment of the population, as reasons for why Americans should remain vigilant and focused on prevention.

Published December 15, 2020

In a column for The Hechinger Report, the Report’s Editor-in-Chief, Liz Willen, analyzes a higher education plan put forward by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who entered the 2020 presidential fray. “As a Republican mayor . . . Bloomberg championed an education agenda that President Donald J. Trump could agree with: letting charter schools proliferate, giving parents choice and running education more like a business,” writes Willen. “Yet as a Democratic presidential hopeful, Bloomberg . . . echoes and expands upon policies his fellow Democratic candidates have already called for: free community college, greater investment in Pell grants and automatic income-based repayment plans for student loans.”

Published February 19, 2020

Student loan debt in the United States totals $1.6 trillion — but speaking with National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro on the show Consider This, TC education economist Judith Scott-Clayton says she’s not “freaked out” by that big number, much of which, she says, represents investments in education and in individuals’ future productivity. Her real concern is “the number of people who are ending up in default” — and never graduating. “It’s the worst of both worlds,” says Scott-Clayton, who has called at least some level of student loan cancellation “a no-brainer.” Furthermore, she adds, “student loan default can have implications for your credit, your ability to borrow, and potentially even your ability to get an apartment or get a license for some professions in some states.”

Published November 27, 2020

Higher education’s handling of the pandemic has created a “classic market failure,” write Sarah Cohodes, Associate Professor of Economics & Education, and University of Michigan education economist Susan Dynarski in The New York Times. Many colleges and universities reopened their campuses this fall seeking revenue, but the move often created hotbeds of viral transmission on campuses and in surrounding communities. Some institutions closed again, incurring greater costs. The takeaway: When facing “negative externalities,” free markets must be regulated to protect innocent bystanders. “Countries where the government traditionally plays a more active role in shaping markets have had more success in changing behavior and controlling the pandemic,” conclude Cohodes and Dynarski. 

Published October 8, 2020

“I am worried and brokenhearted,” begins the message from TC President Thomas Bailey. “I’m angry that my Black students, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizens are subjected each day to indignities that I neither have nor could ever experience.”  

The brutal police killing in May of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, prompted an outpouring of statements from Teachers College leaders, faculty members and many others.

“We lift up the name of George Floyd as an American patriot, a man with dreams and family and friends who loved him deeply,” writes Erica Walker, TC’s Clifford Brewster Upton Professor of Mathematical Education. “His name is now an invocation: We do not abide this malfeasance. We resist this injustice. We claim our humanity.”

“Communities of color, who already are disproportionately affected by the deadly coronavirus, are now facing harsher treatment by police,” writes Janice Robinson, Vice President for Diversity & Community Affairs. “These inequities remind us all that our collective work to highlight and address the needs of the most marginalized must persist even as we adjust to new ways of teaching, learning and researching.”

Christopher Emdin, Associate Professor of Science Education, speaks of “the larger pandemic” of institutionally and state-sanctioned “violence, oppression and racism that has gone on unaddressed for far too long.” Emdin urges critical examination of “the ways that we are part of a machine that ensures that Black bodies are being discriminated against, or that violence is being impacted on them or that lives are lost.” 

These and other messages confirm Bailey’s declaration that, at TC, “the fight against racism and inequity isn’t part of our mission — it is our mission.”

Published June 5, 2020

Better training around diversity and safe restraining procedures won’t bring about “change of the magnitude needed to transform deep-seated cultures of bias, discrimination, profiling and abuse at institutions like large urban police departments,” writes Professor of Psychology and Education, Peter T. Coleman in The Hill. In the face of “deep-seated cultures of bias, discrimination, profiling and abuse . . . training only works when combined with other structural initiatives, like instituting effective, transparent systems of accountability and oversight, carefully reviewing formal and informal incentives and establishing joint community-police opportunities for meaningful contact and relationship building.” 

Published June 7, 2020

Education in America has remained racially segregated because of White people who talk a good game but don’t walk the walk, agree TC’s Sonya Douglass Horsford, Associate Professor of Education Leadership, and other commentators in a New York Times roundtable on race and education. Horsford, founding Director of TC’s Black Education Research Collective, adds that “the integration conversation is more of a conversation that’s happening among those who enjoy some level of privilege — nice White parents.” Black parents are worried about whether or not their children will be safe, she says, whether because of COVID or violence on campuses or hate crimes or police brutality.

Published August 21, 2020

What’s offensive about a compliment to one’s husband for playing with your children? When the compliment is made to a Black father by a White onlooker — and when White fathers playing nearby with their children go uncomplimented — the message is that you’re “contradicting the stereotype of the absentee Black father,” writes The Washington Post’s Michelle Singletary in her award-winning syndicated column. Singletary — whose husband received that compliment — cites the work of TC’s Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology & Education, a leading expert on microaggressions, who explains that the power of these “everyday slights . . . that people of color experience in their day-to-day interactions with well-intentioned White [people] . . . lies in their invisibility to the perpetrator, who is unaware that he or she has engaged in a behavior that threatens and demeans the recipient of such a communication.”

Published December 4, 2020

Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate is playing well with a diverse cross section of Americans, says TC alumna Sayu Bhojwani in USA Today. “People are seeing the part of her they want to see,” says Bhojwani (Ph.D. ’14), Founding Director of New American Leaders, which recruits and prepares first- and second-generation Americans to run for elective office. “Black women are focused on her Blackness. Jamaicans and people from Caribbean countries are focused on that, and Indian Americans are much more focused on her Indian background.” Bhojwani, former New York City Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, adds that “the nomination of Kamala is a signal, an opening to the possibility that any of us who consider ourselves American can run for the highest office of the land.”   

Published September 9, 2020

Writing in Al Jazeera, Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, Associate Professor of Practice in TC’s Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis, draws on her teenage years amid the genocide in 1990s Bosnia and Herzegovina to call out White supremacy in the United States today. Sabic-El-Rayess warns that religious and racial violence are inherently related, and that White supremacists here are borrowing the violent tactics and nationalist and Islamophobic narratives employed by Serbs: “White supremacists in America today look at Muslims — along with Black people, immigrants, gays, Jews and all other minorities — through the imagery of the Crusades and see all minorities as an existential threat to their ethnic purity.”

Published October 1, 2020

In two interviews in Education Week, TC’s Mariana Souto-Manning, Professor of Early Childhood Education, addresses misconceptions about teaching strategies for honoring the knowledge of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC).

“Culturally responsive teaching and culturally relevant pedagogy have been misread by educators,” Souto-Manning says. “Both concepts demand a proactive positioning of teachers — so that they plan to teach for justice instead of taking reactive approaches to address issues of harm and injustice after the fact, after they take place.” Another strategy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, “demands moving away from the performance of White middle-class norms in favor of exploring, critically problematizing, honoring, and extending the histories, legacies, and practices of BIPOC.”

Published December 14, 2020

When children learn about Black people in America, what is the first thing that they see in textbooks? Slavery, Christopher Emdin tells NBC’s Rehema Ellis. “They may see a family that’s half-dressed. They may see slave quarters.” And yes, those are racist portrayals, says Emdin in discussing the battle to remove racial bias from America’s textbooks. “If your introduction to my history is my down-troddenness, you never see me as a victor.” Calling books “the bricks that build our society,” Emdin adds that deliberate omissions are as bad as misrepresentations — for example, a textbook that describes post-WWII government policies as encouraging home ownership but neglects to describe how those policies “intentionally discriminated against Black Americans.”

Published August 13, 2020

In an email interview with The New York Times, TC's Ioana Literat and her frequent research partner, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Assistant Professor of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discuss the importance of the TikTok social media app for the ideological and political formation and activism of young Americans. Research by Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik shows that TikTok is “a diverse, diffuse and not nearly united community of millions of young people,” the Times reports. Nevertheless, there is “a sense of generational awareness and generational solidarity.” Youth may be reclaiming terms such as Gen Z or Gen Alpha from academics, commenters and brands to “assert their agency, or perhaps these larger societal discourses are seeping into youth discourse too.”

Published June 28, 2020

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, and with the United Kingdom recently announcing billions of pounds in funding for the arts, Judith Burton, TC’s Macy Professor of Education, calls for a re-valuing of the arts in the United States and a rethinking of the role of the arts in education. “The arts nurture the ability to be collaborative across difference, to construct self-identity within relationships, to understand the continuity of past within present and old with young,” all of which “propel the kind understanding and empathy that will be required to heal our world,” Burton writes in an essay on TC’s website. “We might do no better than turn to the arts as a light in troubled times — a beacon that can guide our minds and imaginations.”

Published July 9, 2020

TC's Judith Burton calls for re-envisioning schools within clusters of cultural institutions in which the arts serve as extended “texts” for revitalizing learning. She argues that the shutdown of schools during the current crisis presents an opportunity to recast the arts as a central, universal language for education that restores an emphasis on making, socialization, and the imagination itself.

Published August 20, 2020

Kosovo’s repudiation of its recently elected prime minister, Albin Kurti, resulted from a U.S.-orchestrated “parliamentary coup d’état” that included the threatened withdrawal of $49 million in American support, charges Amra Sabic-El-Rayess in Fair Observer. “Progressive, pro-American, pro-justice and anti-corruption, Kurti was precisely the kind of politician Americans would ordinarily wish to see in power in the region,” Sabic-El-Rayess writes. His mistake: refusing American requests to remove import tariffs Kosovo had imposed on Serbia for its refusal to recognize Kosovo’s independence. Kurti’s successor has since made concessions to Serbia, Sabic-El-Rayess asserts, and given Russia’s Vladimir Putin new opportunities to expand his power. “Putin has successfully enlisted Donald Trump as a pawn in Russia’s long-term geopolitical game,” she writes. As a result, “we may soon be witnessing another round of serious bloodshed in the Balkans.”

Published August 6, 2020

Much like the COVID-19 crisis, budget cuts throughout New York State disproportionately threaten low-income students of color, warn TC’s Michael Rebell, Professor of Law & Educational Practice, and New York State Senator Robert Jackson in an op-ed for the New York Daily News. Fourteen years ago, Rebell and Jackson led a coalition of parents and community groups to victory in a court case to bring New York City schools more state funding. Now, the two call on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and State Attorney General Letitia James to join in establishing “a new funding system that will ensure on a permanent basis an equitable and cost-effective system for ending opportunity gaps and educating all of the state’s children.”

Published August 22, 2020

The United States must make “a national commitment to make up for our children’s unfinished learning,” asserts TC alumnus John B. King, Jr., President and CEO of The Education Trust and former U.S. Secretary of Education, in “Will This Be a Lost Year for America’s Children?,” a New York Times Magazine roundtable in print. Charging that “the failure of the federal administration to respond appropriately to the pandemic, and the failure of Congress to act [will] cause kids to lose even more ground academically,” King (Ed.D. ’08, M.A. ’97) urges “a nationwide focus on tutoring” and “additional counselors and mental-health services.”  

Published September 11, 2020

The 2008 Recession interrupted a long run of lawsuits that compelled states to provide more equitable funding for poorer school districts. But expect different outcomes during and after the COVID pandemic, says Michael Rebell in Education Week. Rebell cites a recent settlement in Delaware that compels the state’s governor to propose a budget by 2024 that will alter Delaware’s tax structure to annually provide at least $60 million for historically disadvantaged students. Rebell’s read: “Delaware basically said, ‘We’re not going to squeeze the state to come up with money during the middle of this pandemic . . . but we’ll make a settlement that’s looking at a future time period.”

Published October 20, 2020

Twenty years ago, as a novice teacher, Christopher Emdin was notified by the principal’s office that two planes had hit the World Trade Center and told to keep the news from his students. “I ignored the chaos of the world beyond the classroom because I believed it was my job to just keep on teaching,” writes Emdin, Associate Professor of Science Education, in The Atlantic. “Looking back now, I realize I was not actually teaching at all.” Today, with COVID “tearing through our collective sense of normal,” Emdin calls for teachers to employ a “reality pedagogy” that “involves connecting academic content to what’s happening in the world that affects students.” To do anything less, he argues, is to place “a metaphorical knee on the necks of young people.”

Published July 24, 2020

Schools’ importance has never been more obvious than during COVID, writes Amra Sabic-El-Rayess on TC’s website. Yet “our society continues to under-value and even denigrate the single most precious gift our schools give us: teachers,” with many calling for increased cyber education to make teachers superfluous or else blaming teachers for the failures of virtual instruction. Sabic-El-Rayess, Associate Professor of Practice, underscores the importance of “direct teacher-student interactions during dark times like these.” We risk marginalizing and radicalizing American youth unless we make post-COVID classrooms into “safe spaces” that “allow them to confront their traumas, losses, and fears about their futures,” she writes. That means investing more in teachers — from what we pay them to “how we esteem them for the courageous work they do.”

Published August 20, 2020

“We must recognize the inspiring and transformative role that teachers working in armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate change-induced disasters and protracted crises play in their students’ lives,” assert Teachers College’s Mary Mendenhall, Associate Professor of Practice, and co-authors writing in Inter Press Service on World Teachers Day. The authors urge prioritizing teachers “from the very onset of an emergency, through to recovery and development, with increased financial investments, better data, and effective planning” (including ensuring sufficient presence of female and minority teachers), and “respect[ing] teachers, including volunteers and facilitators, as individuals and professionals with appropriate and equitable recruitment policies, pay and employment terms, and working conditions.” 

Published October 5, 2020

With the pandemic diminishing social and learning opportunities for babies and toddlers, “there is going to be a bit of a collective lag in academic skills and in those executive-function skills that allow a child to navigate a classroom,” predicts developmental psychologist Aliza W. Pressman (Ph.D. ’11, M.A. ’05), Co-Founding Director and Director of Clinical Programming at New York City’s Mount Sinai Parenting Center, in The New York Times. But “you can turn almost any home-based activity or interaction into an opportunity,” from bath time to getting dressed, says Pressman. “It is in those caregiving moments that some of the biggest brain-boosting interactions occur.” Young children’s language skills may even improve through added time with their primary caregivers: “In some ways, babies are living their best lives.”

Published October 14, 2020

Responding to guidelines proposed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would require international students in higher education to take at least one class in person if they want to retain their student visas, Daniel Friedrich, Associate Professor of Curriculum in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching, warns that “President Trump, who is trailing significantly in the polls, is sending a clear message that he is hellbent on reopening the economy at all costs in the midst of a devastating pandemic.” Colleges and universities “must take a stand against this cruel policy,” writes Friedrich in a piece for TC's website, who came to the United States from Argentina to earn a master’s degree, while “even the most 'America First'-minded policymakers ought to recognize that, by and large, international students subsidize American students.”

Published July 14, 2020