Top Stories - Feb 2024 - Child Care on the Brink, The Future of Standardized Tests, The AI Policy Struggle
Early childhood
Running a child care business has long been a very challenging math problem: Many providers can barely afford to operate, yet many parents cannot afford to pay more.
During the pandemic, there was temporary relief. The federal government spent $24 billion to keep the industry afloat. Many providers were given thousands of dollars a month, depending on the size of their businesses, which they used to pay for expenses, the biggest of which was wages.
But that financing, which started in April 2021, expired in September. Five months later, the child care business is more precarious than ever.
An article that perfectly highlights the childcare conundrum that the country faces currently.
K-12
The growth in homeschooling from the pandemic is proving much stickier than people originally expected it to be.
Parents are feeling much more empowered to make choices about their children’s education. Not only are they choosing homeschooling, but more families are also choosing other alternative forms of schooling, such as private schools, charter schools, virtual schools, microschools, and a variety of hybrid homeschooling arrangements in which parents are stitching together their child’s schooling from a range of options.
Many traditional school districts are continuing to struggle given this context. They’ve lost students, particularly in urban and high-poverty districts, to other schools. They’ve shrunk because there are fewer students thanks to a broader demographic decline in new births that began in 2008 and hasn’t changed. They’ve struggled with chronic absenteeism.
Not your regular clickbait trends article. This one has some real substance. Homeschooling is clearly here to stay.
Higher Ed
In the past two years, the broad shift toward the test-optional approach has reshuffled the math of college admissions: Without what used to be the one universal element in a “holistic” admissions process, a student’s chances of getting admitted to a selective school today are significantly different from what they were two years ago.
A long (22 mins!) article that covers a very important (and timely) topic. Optional elements eventually move towards one end of the spectrum. It will be interesting to see where the pendulum swings here.
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Workforce Skills
First came role based learning, then competency-driven training and career-driven programs. These worked great, but they couldn’t adapt fast enough. So people resorted to short video, YouTube-style platforms, and then user-authored content. We then added mobile tools, highly collaborative systems, MOOCs, and more recently Learning Experience Platforms. Now everyone is focused on skills-based training, and we’re trying to take all our content and organize it around a skills taxonomy. Well I’m here to tell you all this is about to change.
Jargons aside, AI does seem to have the potential to disrupt the (broken) corporate learning ecosystem and this article explains it well.
When it comes to corporate learning, we have tools, tools to manage those tools, content, and content to manage that content. What's missing is how everything in that stack comes together to help an employee grow in their career.
AI + Education
As artificial intelligence steamrolls ahead, the nation's K-12 school superintendents are largely flummoxed by how they should teach, use and set guidelines around AI — even though they know it's an imperative.
What does your product love about teaching? What does it love about math? What does it love about students? What does it love about technology? What does it love about administrators? What does it love about schooling, about schools, the buildings, their relationship with caregivers, and on and on? Whether you and your team have answered these questions for yourselves, your products are communicating answers about them constantly, everyday to everyone who uses them.