Education Week - August 18, 2021 - 5

part, school districts will be in charge of
investigating a complaint and deciding a
course of action. In instances where the
accuser or the accused disagree with the
district's decision, the state's commissioner
of education will have the final say.
Like Oklahoma's rules, Tennessee's also
require school districts to investigate complaints
if parents or students claim that an
educator violated the law.
Parents, students or district employees
can file complaints up to 30 days after the
violation allegedly occurred, according
to the rules. After a district receives the
complaint, it has 60 days to investigate. If
it finds the allegations to be true, it must
start remedial action such as removing the
reference material cited in the complaint
from the curriculum or taking " disciplinary
or licensure action against a teacher, "
the rules say.
Either the complainant or person the
complaint accused of violating the law can
appeal the district's decision within 15 days
to the state department's review committee.
If the committee finds that a prohibited
concept was taught, it can file a report
to the commissioner, who will determine
if the allegation is substantiated.
" It could be worse. It could've been that
[complaints] go straight to the state and
the state decides to take money away, "
said Orrin. " This puts enough layers of
local control in the process that it makes a
lot of sense to allow teachers to teach what
they need to teach, and figure out where
complaints are coming from and then
start to address it from there. "
If the department then determines that
a violation occurred, it can withhold $1
million or 2 percent of the district's state
funding, whichever is less. The fines ramp
up with each violation, amounting to a
penalty of $5 million or 10 percent of state
funding for the fifth time a district is determined
to be in violation of state law.
Tennessee's state department has already
started to receive complaints of violations
of the law.
In June, the Williamson County chapter
of the national group Moms for Liberty,
a group advocating for " parental rights, "
wrote to Education Commissioner Penny
Schwinn objecting to a lesson about Ruby
Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate
an elementary school in Louisiana,
which they said made white students in
the class feel uncomfortable.
" Targeting elementary age children
with daily lessons on fighting past injustices
as if they were occurring in present
day violates Tennessee law and will sow
the seeds of racial strife, neo-racism (and)
neo-segregation, " Robin Steenman, the
chair of the Williamson County chapter of
Moms for Liberty wrote in the complaint.
WHAT THE
RESEARCH SAYS
Reading on Screen vs. Print: New Analysis
Thickens the Plot on Promoting Comprehension
By Sarah D. Sparks
The pandemic has increased the amount of
reading young children do in digital formats, and a
new research analysis suggests parent and teacher
behavior can mean the difference in whether
e-books help or hinder reading skills in the long run.
All else being equal, children 8 years old and
students on the verge of being chronically
absent, there are more targeted approaches.
Often, Romero said, they're
designed to make kids feel wanted, not
punished.
" We often use incentives: 'Hey, if you get
to school every day, you're going to have
lunch with the principal,' he said. " It's
the personalizing of support for kids who
struggle with attendance that improves attendance. "
As
they develop those relationships,
district leaders also figure out how to problem-solve
each family's unique challenges.
Pomona's Shandria Richmond-Roberts,
then the principal at the Harrison Elementary
school site, knew that some students
who had been absent were living in a local
motel. On her visits there, she found that
students' attendance rates varied by which
room they were in: Those who were furthest
away from the Wi-Fi connection in
the main office were more likely to have
connectivity issues.
So she worked directly with hotel management
to get them better-situated
rooms, and brought staff to make sure the
login process to the school's learning platforms
was easy and efficient.
" It became apparent to the manager of
the motel-but also to the families-that no
Tiger is going to be left behind, " she said,
referring to the school's sports mascot.
5. Don't overwhelm your
teachers
Although teachers are essential to the
relationship-building process with families,
the experts cautioned against charging
teachers with all the work of tracking
down students and trying to re-engage
them. Some of the most effective strategies,
like the nudges described above, can
be directed by the central office-thus
allowing teachers to do their core job of
teaching.
As students return to school, then it
should begin to fall to teachers to sustain
relationships with students.
Pomona came up with one smart idea
during the 2020-21 school year: It reassigned
a beloved intervention teacher to
re-engage students who were reluctant to
log into remote school, said Gomez. Some
students who wouldn't attend their academic
classes often would agree to meet
with that intervention teacher on Zoom.
She became a bridge to getting them back
to attending regular classes.
6. Consider home-visiting
programs
Nearly all of the district officials said
that home visiting can be an effective
way to find those students who seem to
be disengaged and to begin building a relationship
with them.
Home visiting is one of Sacramento
City's most effective strategies. " We're
doing preventative work rather than
crisis-mode work, " said Jennifer
Kretschman, the director of multitiered
system of supports for Sacramento City
Schools. " We want on the first day of
school to have eliminated as many potential
barriers as possible.
" I was in an apartment complex yesterday,
and every single one of the students
who lives in it was chronically absent.
And that's on us, because we stopped that
bus route last year, " Kretschman said.
" This is a system function that needs
changing. Twenty to 30 kids doesn't
sound like a huge detail in a 42,000-student
district, but it's a huge deal to every
one of those kids. "
In Pomona, the district plans to expand
home visiting this fall and to make it
highly practical. Administrators will carry
iPads that can access available district
services, help parents fill out enrollment
or permission forms, or help the visitors
contact other staffers who can solve other
problems.
younger comprehend storybooks better when
they are in print rather than digital
form, according to an analysis of 39
experimental studies published
in the Review of Educational
Research.
But print wasn't an end-all, beall,
they found. Researchers also
found that most of the commercially
published e-books explored in the
studies didn't enhance the text in ways
that focused children's attention as adults
naturally would when reading a story to a child,
such as pointing out main story elements, asking
questions, and focusing children's attention on the
chain of events in a story. The electronic books that
did use these elements tended to outperform print
books in children's comprehension.
" We need to have a more nuanced language
about when reading digitally or print is beneficial
and when not, " said Natalia Kucirkova, the
corresponding author and a professor of reading
and early-childhood development at the University
of Stavanger in Norway and the Open University in
the United Kingdom.
Co-author Adriana Bus, professor of language
and literacy at Leiden University in Amsterdam,
agreed. " Digital devices may always be distractive,
thus predicting adverse effects of digital reading.
However, our study also shows that books with
digital enhancements can benefit and result in
better comprehension than paper books if the
enhancements support comprehension, " she said.
More reading time during the
pandemic
Children have been reading more during
the pandemic, including in electronic formats,
according to the latest census by Common Sense
Media, a nonprofit that studies children and media.
The group found that in 2020, children ages 8 and
under spent on average, 32 minutes a day reading or
being read to, up from 29 minutes a day in 2017.
Both print and e-reading increased overall,
but e-reading rose particularly for some groups
of students. Black students in that age group, for
example, have gone from reading 28 minutes a day,
including 8 minutes of e-reading and 20 minutes of
print in 2017, to 48 minutes a day in 2020, including
33 minutes of print and 15 minutes of e-reading.
Similarly, students in families who earn less than
$30,000 a year doubled their e-reading from 5
minutes a day to 10 minutes during that time.
Kucirkova said she expects wide variation in
how children respond to e-reading during the
pandemic, " attributable to the uneven quality
of home schooling. I am particularly concerned
about children who come from low-resource
backgrounds with little history of reading and who
do not have the supportive adult at home, who
would be interpreting, and at times supplementing,
teachers' instruction, " she said. " The crucial
influencing factor for these children is going
to be the quality of the reading materials they
accessed. "
The research analysis suggested
children's comprehension improved
when adults read to them-but
adults tended to read digital texts
with children differently than print
texts.
" Reading to children via Zoom
Getty
has been happening in many families
during the pandemic but anecdotal
evidence shows that this was mostly for the
most privileged children, " such as those with
highly educated parents or grandparents or family
members who could afford to spend more time
reading with them, " Kucirkova said in an online
message. She suggested teachers can help model
for parents by holding videoconferenced reading
sessions using both print and digital books.
The researchers analyzed the results of studies
of more than 1,800 children from birth to age 8,
comparing their comprehension and vocabulary
learning when reading on paper versus on
screens. The researchers also looked at the effects
of common e-book enhancements, including
spoken narration accompanying the text, design
enhancements, and in-book dictionaries.
Some of the most commonly used
enhancements didn't add much to students'
comprehension. For example, Bus noted that
audio narration of e-books did little, particularly for
children who needed the most reading practice.
" They were the children who closed their eyes
and just listened, " she said. In one eye-tracking
experiment, for example, " not surprisingly, we
found that good readers focus on the text while
listening, thus benefiting from this experience. The
poor readers did not look at all at the text, just at the
illustrations. "
The researchers also found dictionaries did not
improve children's comprehension, but did build
students' vocabularies.
The analysis also found digital texts tended to be
less effective than print ones in classroom settings.
In part, Kucirkova said, this could be because the
group-based reading used in schools may make
less use of the interactive elements in digital books.
In videotaped lessons, Bus noted, " teachers
[are] reading in small groups, and you can see that
children are eager to interact with the book where
possible in competition with their peers. However,
looking for an opportunity to interact takes so
much attention that they cannot concentrate on the
story. So teachers have to organize sessions so that
children can be sure of their share in the interaction
with the story. "
From remote learning for young children to playground infection risks, schooling under the pandemic is raising
a lot of questions for teachers and education leaders. This new research column aims to help readers understand
what the research says-and doesn't say-about our new context for learning. If you have a question, please send
it to ssparks@educationweek.org.
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Education Week - August 18, 2021

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