The Harvard EdCast

Many school districts are beginning to see pandemic learning losses greater than they imagined. It’s time to figure out what to next, says Harvard Professor Tom Kane, an economist studying catch-up efforts. He wants districts to be empowered to make the best decision going forward. In his latest research, he’s helping districts determine how to plan for these losses and shares what interventions might provide the most bang for the buck. In this episode, Kane shares troubling information about how these learning losses have the potential to shape the future of education and how what we do now can get learning back on track. 

Stewart Kwoh believes education is the best tool to fight back against ongoing anti-Asian American violence and damaging stereotypes. As co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, Kwoh has been dedicated to developing curriculums and trainings for educators. Despite many of the lesson plans and tools being available for free, Kwoh admits it has taken time for education to embrace this rich history. In this episode, he shares the importance of learning about Asian American history and what are the roadblocks to embracing such a curriculum in our schools. 

Harvard Professor Sarah Dryden-Peterson knows that we can do a lot better for the nearly 30 million refugees in the world. As an expert on refugee education, she says education needs to create better supports for displaced children whose education is disrupted, dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about the future. In her latest research, she shares how governments and international agencies have been hindered in this work and how refugee teachers and students are leading the way to better educational supports. In this episode, she reflects on the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and offers insight into what we've learned from other humanitarian crises.

A silver lining of the pandemic, says Harvard Professor Fernando Reimers, was the push for education to innovate. Through the pandemic, Reimers set out to study how education systems around the world sought out innovations, even in places that had few resources. While it was reassuring how many education systems worldwide tried to make changes, Reimers discusses how he saw a dip in that creative ingenuity over time during the pandemic and why. In this episode, he also shares the unique ways that universities collaborated with education systems and how the pandemic impacted global citizens. 

Juliana Urtubey, the 2021 National Teacher of the Year recipient, knows firsthand the importance of valuing all parts of a student’s identity. As a first generation, bilingual immigrant, Urtubey brings all parts of herself into the classroom. Today, as a special education teacher working at the Kermit R. Booker, Sr. Innovative Elementary School in Las Vegas, she leans into her diverse classroom and community, fully celebrating it. In this episode, she shares experiences and ideas for embracing student identity, and also how teachers can be better supported in their work.  

Harvard Professor Dick Light has visited 260 college campuses talking to administrators, faculty, and students to figure out what sets a great university apart from an okay one. It turns out there are simple and affordable steps higher education administrators can do to make impactful changes on their campuses. Light has long studied the work of higher education and has plenty of stories to share about what happens when a university gets it right versus what happens when it goes wrong. In this EdCast, he's sharing the secrets of university success and even offers some advice to prospective students trying to decide whether their top choice is a "great" university. 

Since the start of the pandemic, education has grappled with a looming threat of teacher shortages and a mass exodus of teachers. Elizabeth Steiner, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, has released two studies in the past year exploring job-related stress among teachers and recently school leaders. She says the changing modes of instruction, changing guidance on quarantining, mask and vaccine debates, and what's happening at home affects educators. They are one of the most stressed and depressed professions. In this episode, she reflects on the study's findings and shares what might help keep teachers in the job.

For the past decade, college enrollments have steadily been on the decline. The pandemic appears to have accelerated such drops with reports of more than a million fewer students attending college today. Chris Gabrieli, the chairman of the Board of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, agrees that this decline is a crisis with the potential to affect many different parts of society beyond just a person's future. He talks about how higher education is moving much too slowly to abate these shifts young people are making away from college. In this episode, Gabrieli outlines why we are seeing such declines in enrollment, shares how simple ideas like early college can lure young people back to college, and why we need to act now.

When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today.In recent years, the scrutiny of critical race theory – a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education – has become heavily-politicized in school communities and by legislators. She says it has been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually critical race theory. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor discusses the current politicization and tension around teaching about race in the classroom and offers a path forward for educators eager to engage in work that deals with the truth about America’s history. 

 Before the pandemic hit, Harvard Professor Stephanie Jones and Lecturer Emily Hanno were already tracking young children's development as part of the Early Learning Study at Harvard. As the pandemic began unfolding, they started to see shifts among the thousands of families and children participating in the study. Families reported a rise in temper tantrums, anxiety, and a poor ability to manage emotions, especially among the young elementary-aged children participating in remote learning. These findings may not come as a surprise to the many families who dealt with remote learning during the pandemic. However, Jones and Hanno say children's well-being and these experience matter now even as we inch toward a possible endemic. In this episode of the EdCast, they talk about how educators and families need to invest in social emotional learning before learning loss or lost classroom time. They share ways to support educators facilitating classroom experiences for children that allow them to process the experiences they've had. They also offer easy strategies for families to check in with their young children's well-being.