Education Week - September 7, 2022 - 5

mation about sexual health.
The term " grooming " refers to the
behavior of sexual predators, who develop
inappropriately close relationships
with child victims in order to
isolate them and reduce the chance
that they will report incidents. But
as Education Week reported earlier
this year, some conservative commentators
have weaponized the word
to falsely equate discussions about
LGBTQ identity with sexual abuse, a
development sociologists and others
warn is dangerous.
In a recent C-SPAN interview, Tina
Descovich, the co-founder of the
right-wing group Moms for Liberty,
said that the biggest concern reported
from local chapters was " the oversexualization
of children. "
" The National Sex Education Standards
right now, they actually say in K-3
that they want to teach gender ideology,
that children ... by the time they
reach 7 years old, should be able to understand
completely that they could be
a boy, or a girl, they could be neither or
both. And a lot of parents just don't
want that discussed with their youngest
children, " Descovich said.
But experts stressed that this is a
misreading and that conversations
about gender aren't inherently sexual
in nature.
The national standards say that 2nd
graders should be able to " define gender,
gender identity, and gender-role
stereotypes, " as well as discuss how
people express their gender and how
stereotypes might limit behavior. In
5th grade, students are expected to
" demonstrate ways to promote dignity
and respect for all people. "
What this means in practice, said
Goldfarb, is that teachers might explain
to the youngest children that
there aren't " girl toys " or " boy toys "
and that however kids want to express
themselves is OK. The message, she
said, is " we all get to feel good about
ourselves and our bodies as we are. "
She attributes the " hysteria " she
says activists are creating around
gender identity to deeper fears about
changing social mores and expansions
of rights. " This is a moral panic
that comes whenever society moves
away from this patriarchal, Christian,
white supremacist view of the way the
world should be, " Goldfarb said.
Parents also regularly cite concerns
about language and definitions, said
Advocates for Youth's Gelperin. For
example, the national standards require
that by 2nd grade, students
know the medically correct terms for
their genitals. By 8th grade, students
should be able to define vaginal, oral,
and anal sex.
" I think there's this worry that if we
say the words like 'penis' and 'vulva'
and 'anus,' that's going to be damaging
for kids. And that's just not the
case, " Gelperin said. In fact, research
suggests that teaching students accurate
terms can help prevent child
sexual abuse.
And standards for older students,
on defining vaginal, oral, and anal
sex, aren't about providing a howto
guide, said LoBianco. Rather, the
idea is to give students accurate information
from a trusted source so
that they're not relying on Google
searches and social media.
" Kids have 24/7, 365 access to information
about their sexual health, and
if no adult is intervening or providing
info, they're going to seek out information, "
LoBianco said.
How some schools are
approaching these changes
In LoBianco's state of New Jersey,
only a handful of districts have publicly
opposed the standards. Sex education
is mandatory, and department
of education officials have said that
they will penalize districts that don't
teach a curriculum that aligns to the
new standards.
But some districts have put in place
workarounds.
The East Hanover school district
said that it plans to include some new
lessons to meet the standards-but
they'll all be taught on the last day
of school, according to local news
reports.
And while all districts in the state
must let parents opt students out of
any sex education lessons, the Middletown
Township school system is
planning to require parents to opt in.
Considering all the controversy
" swirling around, " the district wanted
to be as transparent as possible with
parents, said Kate Farley, the curriculum
committee chair on the Middletown
board of education.
In April, New Jersey state Sen. Holly
Schepisi, a Republican, posted some
sample materials on Facebook, saying
that " some go so far as unnecessarily
sexualizing children further. " The
post ignited a media firestorm and
brought fresh pushback from GOP
state lawmakers.
It illustrated the confusion between
standards and curriculum: The lesson
plans Schepisi posted aren't mandatory.
And
in Middletown, parents and
community members thought that
some of the lessons they'd seen would
be required. Or, Farley said, they had
heard that there was a specific " gender
lesson " in 2nd grade or that the
district was planning to teach kindergartners
about sex. None of that is
true, said Farley.
So the district selected a set of materials
for K-5 and posted all of them
online for parents to review. " What
you see is exactly what you get, " Farley
said. " There's just no room for any
sort of question about what their child
will be exposed to. "
Given this intense scrutiny and social-media
misinformation, Gelperin
suggested that schools take a similar
approach to transparency, and make
information about what curriculum
they'll be using readily available.
Schools can also hold family
nights when parents can come in to
look at materials and ask questions,
she said.
Teachers and school leaders can
always come back to the " why, " said
LoBianco-that schools are giving
students information and skills that
they can use to protect themselves
and feel confident in their identities.
" When you explain this to the most
reasonable of parents, then they start to
understand, " LoBianco said. " If there's
one thing that parents want their children
to be, it's healthy and safe. "
WHAT THE
RESEARCH SAYS
How Schools Can Teach Students to Network
(Even When Students Don't Think They Have One)
By Sarah D. Sparks
Many schools have used federal funding to
hire or assign staff or volunteers to build one-onone
relationships with students. But as leaders
grapple with staff shortages and overwhelmed
teachers, it may be more effective and sustainable
to help students learn to find and develop support
networks on their own.
" Schools in the name of efficiency tend to focus
on the relationships that they can control within
the four walls of the classroom or the school
building, " said Julia Freeland Fisher, a social
capital researcher and author of a new Christensen
Institute study of social capital-building in schools.
" And while that's understandable, it means that
they suffer this huge blind spot of the true kind of
relationship ecology that young people grow up in
beyond school, and where they actually may be
more likely to turn for support.
" They're just leaving a ton of social capital on the
table by taking that more insular approach, " she said.
Social capital-the web of relationships that
students can draw on for things like information,
accountability, and physical or emotional support-
can be less visible to educators than more discrete
resources like family income or extracurricular
activities. In a series of case studies and surveys,
Fisher tracked how schools, community groups, and
social services organizations improved students'
academic progress and engagement by helping
them identify and build their social capital.
Informal support at school can be as or more useful
than formal mentoring programs. A 2021 longitudinal
study found that adolescents who identified an
informal mentor at school-usually a trusted teacher
or counselor-passed more classes, earned more
credits, and had higher grade point averages than
those who did not have such a mentor. And mentored
students were 15 percentage points more likely to
attend and persist in college-in part because the vast
majority of these informal relationships continued
well past students' high school graduation. A separate
2020 study also found first-generation college-going
students who learned to develop and build informal
relationships had higher GPAs.
However, researchers also found that low-income
and racial minority students often have less access
to informal school mentors than wealthier or white
students. And experts say staff in low-income
schools often have less mental and emotional
bandwidth to mentor students in this way.
Edward DeJesus is founder of Social Capital
Builders, which works with a dozen districts
nationwide to teach both teachers and students
" social capital literacy, " or learning how to build
and maintain important relationships over time.
He said students from low-income and minority
backgrounds often need to learn how to use
relationships with people they know to bridge to
new relationships, such as asking the accountant at a
parent's job to discuss financial aid.
" Say we're both African American and we live in the
same low-income neighborhood. There's probably
a lot of redundancy in our information, so we're not
jumping the opportunity gap, " DeJesus said.
In 2020, Elizabeth Raposa, an assistant psychology
professor at Fordham University in New York City,
and her colleagues adapted a mentoring program
which taught first-generation college-goers to build
networks on campus into Connected Futures, a free
online curriculum. Its goal is to teach middle and
high school students how to find people who can help
them meet academic, career, or mental health goals.
" We try to empower youth to think about what
a mentor is and who that might be in their own
lives, " said Raposa. " We give them a lot of tools for
mapping out their own social networks. And then
we're actually teaching them the nuts and bolts of,
how do you reach out to set up a meeting? What do
you talk about in a meeting with an adult? How do
you follow up and maintain relationships? "
Mapping relationships helps students find new
support
One idea: have students think carefully about
who they might be able to tap. " Students often don't
know who they know, " DeJesus said.
Social Capital Builders, Connected Futures, and
other programs focused on building students' social
capital use " relationship mapping " or " social network
mapping, " a model long used in social work. Students
chart out each person they interact with in different
contexts, such as at school, among family and friends,
or in community or religious organizations.
They mark " strong ties " of people they have
strong, ongoing relationships with, such as a family
friend or neighbor, as well as " weak ties " among
people with whom they do not have as close of a
relationship, but who can still provide important
supports. Examples might include a former coach
who holds a student accountable for getting good
grades or a church member who is an engineer and
willing to allow a student to shadow her at her job.
Schools can build lessons in social capital into
existing curriculum. For example, DeJesus noted
that a common high school assignment in English or
business classes-résumé writing-can be tweaked
to help students develop longer term relationships.
" Yes, I can teach young people about the necessity
of a résumé, how to write a résumé ... or I can tell
the young person, I want you to find a gainfully
employed person in your community who has a
résumé. Let's sit down together and come up with
some questions to ask them and go out there, get
that information and bring it back to the classroom, "
he said. " And now I'm connected to the person who
could help me get a résumé done when I need it,
because I'm going be out of this class in six months. "
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 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 - September 7, 2022

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