Teachers don’t need teleprompters

Hello from Erica Meltzer and Kalyn Belsha on Chalkbeat’s national desk. Last week we asked educators what the choice of former teacher Tim Walz as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate meant to them. You had a lot to say! Keep reading for that story, plus our look at how Walz offers an opportunity for a different kind of conversation about public education and lots more news from around our network.

Sign up to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox for free a day early. And check out Chalkbeat's other award-winning newsletters for more.

The big story

What do teachers see in Tim Walz, the high school history teacher turned Minnesota governor who is now a vice presidential nominee?

Themselves.

Walz is the first K-12 teacher to appear on a major party ticket in over 50 years, and teachers across the country say they recognize in him traits that are forged in the classroom. These include making sure his message is easy to understand, speaking from the heart (and not the teleprompter), and understanding why marginalized students need educators to be allies.?

They hope his nuanced understanding of what it’s really like to work in a public school — often under challenging conditions for low pay — will shape the policies he champions.

Political observers, meanwhile, say Walz represents a chance for Democrats to embrace a positive vision of public schools and the teaching profession, after several years in which conservatives claiming to represent parents’ rights have largely driven education politics.

As governor, Walz focused on providing schools with more money and resources, addressing the affordability of child care and college, and working to reduce child poverty.

Those are the kinds of policy priorities that Democrats now frequently tout as the solution to what ails public education — and stand in contrast to the education reform policies that have divided Democrats in the past, like merit pay for teachers and closing low-performing schools.

“It feels like an opportunity to turn the page on the way education has been discussed for the last few years,” said Jon Valant, who heads the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Read more about what teachers told us, and our analysis of how Walz’s classroom teaching experience could shake up education politics.

Spotlight on girls’ mental health

When it comes to girls and school, there’s a paradox. They outperform boys in many academic measures, but they also report worse emotional and psychological health.

New York City’s massive annual questionnaire —?more than 350,000 middle and high school students responded — found that girls had significantly lower satisfaction than boys with their classroom experiences and their interactions with adults. Black girls and non-binary students in particular report worse school experiences. In interviews with Chalkbeat reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney and student journalist Liza Greenberg, girls said they also experience more pressures outside the classroom, including from racism and sexism in their daily lives.

A study out of Ohio found similar results, with girls doing well in school but struggling with depression, stress, bullying and food insecurity, the Ohio Capital Journal reported.

Many studies have identified a crisis in girls’ mental health. Last year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that nearly 60% of U.S. girls reported persistent sadness and hopelessness, about twice the rate as boys. Girls told the Associated Press they experience stress about college and their futures, toxic friendships and bullying, pressure about their appearance, and threats and acts of sexual violence. Survey results this year show teen mental health improving a bit, but girls still struggle more than boys.

Programs like Working on Womanhood (or WOW), founded in 2011 by the nonprofit Youth Guidance, try to wrap Black and Hispanic girls in support and address mental health needs that go overlooked when girls do well in school and don’t cause trouble.

“Our theory of change is that WOW works because … [students] are attending this incredibly powerful support group every week and this support person is there every day in the school for them,” Youth Guidance senior research and evaluation manager Laurel Crown told The Hechinger Report.

?Local stories to watch

• Colorado is taking new steps to identify gifted kids from under-represented backgrounds after universal testing alone failed to move the needle. A decade after the state began universal screening, white students and kids from more affluent backgrounds still make up the vast majority of enrollment in gifted programs. Now, schools are using multiple tests and training teachers to spot signs of high abilities among children from different cultures.
• As student homelessness rises in Philadelphia, City Council members and advocates are putting pressure on the district to step up support. The number of students experiencing homelessness jumped 20% last school year, officials estimate. And while the district says it’s added teacher training and teen programming to help, schools are still relying on over-stretched counselors to serve as homeless student liaisons instead of hiring separate staffers, as other districts do.
• Indiana takes another swing at redesigning high school graduation requirements. After months of criticism, the state is scrapping an earlier plan that would have required high schoolers to complete 75 hours of work experience to obtain an honors designation that met state universities’ minimum admission requirements. Many parents worried that would put pressure on college-bound students to work at the expense of taking college-level coursework. But the state isn’t totally backing away from work requirements.
• Shifting to a four-day week didn’t help improve teacher turnover in Colorado, a new report finds. Nearly two-thirds of the state’s school districts operate on a four-day week, often in an attempt to recruit and retain teachers. But the schedule shift often isn’t enough to outweigh other reasons teachers leave, like low pay.
• Detroit has shelved a contract with the controversial virtual tutoring company Paper. The school district was considering hiring Paper to provide literacy tutoring to newcomer students and other high school English learners. But the deal was put on hold after several board members and a member of the public raised concerns about Paper’s spotty track record and cited Chalkbeat’s past reporting about the company.