Ed Talk

Esther Cooper started the Arlington branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1940 to fight for educational equality of Black students in Arlington Public Schools (APS).

Under her leadership, the NAACP sued the school board challenging the inequalities in the county’s Black high schools. In Carter v. School Board of Arlington Co. (1950), the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that Arlington’s separate high schools constituted unlawful discrimination.

Ed Talk is a biweekly opinion column. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

Arlington Public Schools (APS) has opened for hybrid learning for students from pre-kindergarten through 12 grade whose families have chosen that option, one year after it closed its doors due to the pandemic.

The pandemic has shown us that reopening schools safely should not be left solely to school districts. Local governments have a critical role to play both financially and logistically in helping with reopening.

On March 2, APS began a phased return of additional students for the hybrid in-person option two days per week, since Level 1 students returned on November 4.

The political divide in the United States in the wake of the 2020 presidential election is palpable. In a recent Pew Research poll, 90% of Biden supporters and 89% of Trump supporters said that the election of the other candidate would lead to lasting harm to the country.

For the next generation of leaders to find common ground and advance solutions to pressing national issues, we must teach students how to engage in civil dialogue.

Since APS announced its decision to begin this school year 100% remotely, many parents and perhaps students – maybe even a few teachers – have been anticipating a disastrous start, if not a disastrous year.

We’re closing out week two of the distance learning year. Despite some significant technological issues and individual challenges adjusting to the new format, it has not been the initial overarching catastrophe many predicted.

While elementary and secondary school students across the country adjust to full-time distance learning, adults have been learning online for years.

Online courses offer adults the flexibility to continue their education while working and taking care of families. Some enroll in these courses to learn new job skills and expand their employment opportunities. Others are lifelong learners who enjoy studying the arts, literature, language, history and a myriad of other subjects offered online.

News articles and social media chatter are inundated with information and discussion about back-to-school plans for this fall.

Arlington Public Schools has decided that all students will begin the 2020-2021 school year virtually. Teachers have spent much of their summer vacation working to convert their in-class instruction to virtual formats and are “heading back to the classroom” next week for training and final preparations to begin the year.

As the school year begins online for students across the country, parents face the challenge of supporting the educational needs of their children while working at their own jobs.

This challenge is real for all working parents. But the opportunities that parents have to meet their children’s needs vary greatly depending on socio-economic status.

It is increasingly important in today’s world of global interaction and social media that our youth have the tools they need to thoughtfully discern their individual beliefs and political positions.

While Webster’s dictionary simplistically defines “education” as “the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools,” this definition from dictiontary.com better reflects what we need from our educational institutions today: “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.”

Last week, as our nation celebrated Independence Day, protests continued across America for racial equity and justice. The dissonance between the promise of the Declaration of Independence — that all are created equal with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and the failure to live up to that promise, has a long history.

In a speech on July 5, 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass praised the founding fathers. He also laid bare the simple truth that slaves, as well as free Black people like him, did not have the rights that the framers declared, saying: