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On March 17, 2022, the Collaborative for Student Success sponsored the Future of Education virtual summit hosted by the Hill newspaper. The event focused on pandemic recovery and the importance of driving high-quality science education. 

After two years of virtual and hybrid learning, many students are still playing catch up. During this time, the federal government has provided billions of dollars in relief funds to school districts across the country.

How have state education officials been using these funds to advance education and combat learning loss? Can initiatives that show promise be replicated? How can equity issues be tackled? And how do we ensure every child has access to quality education today and tomorrow?

“As we started out this school year and took inventory of the last [one, two, or three] years, we honed in on how our students had been performing, how they’ve been impacted, and how federal dollars could help us here in the Atlanta Public School System. But there’s a two fold dynamic; we’ve invested in things such as a universal screener, both for academic proficiency and to help us assess student well being. And we share that data results with parents, [which] gave us an opportunity to start building baseline data on how our scholars are performing both in reading and mathematics.”

– Dr. Lisa Herring, Superintendent, Atlanta Public Schools

“Connecticut has been one to watch when it comes to data. [We asked] how do we make sure we know what works? And that’s where we lean in on this groundbreaking collaborative, having our public colleges and universities [work] together to evaluate [programs] almost in real time, so we know how to move forward. For example, we invested about $8 million in student enrichment last summer. Before we make another investment this summer, let’s pause and see what worked and what didn’t work so that we can better target the funding for this upcoming summer.”

– Charlene Russell-Tucker, Commissioner of Education, Connecticut

“There is not one type of learner, the world and what we know about learning science shows us that it’s rich and complicated. And our education system has to be designed to maximize that. What we’ve learned over time through almost everything is that when we design with accessibility in mind, with inclusion in mind, we end up helping everyone so much more, we make a system that’s much more flexible for all of us.”

– Lindsay E. Jones, Esq., CEO, CAST

“I also got on the EduRecoveryHub and it is just a really great resource to identify, with $180 billion out the door in federal support, the kind of flexibility that school leaders and principals and superintendents are really going after [as they work to] address pandemic aftershocks.”

– Rey Saldaña, President and CEO, Communities in Schools

“We need a Sputnik moment. We need a national initiative and campaign around STEM education to raise the bar of expectations of our young people.”

– Dr. Bernard Harris, CEO, National Math & Science Initiative

“One of the greatest travesties is, as I would call it of our current education system, is not only is science an afterthought, so far too many children are not even getting exposure to scientific ideas, but we teach it as a memorization exercise. We don’t teach it as a domain of inquiry and problem solving and question asking and all of the skills that are essential in today’s world, and that’s criminal. During the pandemic, so many of our fellow citizens [were] skeptical of science, they don’t trust it. They don’t believe in it. And honestly, I think that has a lot to do with the very anemic state of science education in this country. There’s a tremendous amount of work we have to do to change that.”

– Dr. Margaret Honey, President and CEO, NY Hall of Science

“One of the biggest things is we’ve got to set a goal for where we want to be over the next 10, 20 years, [because] the workforce is changing. We’re predicting in the south that if we don’t do a better job of science education, we may see 18 million unemployable adults by 2030 because they don’t have the technical skills to be involved in a workforce that is so reliant on scientific thinking. You can’t work like the Jetsons, if you’re thinking like the Flintstones.”

– Dr. Stephen Pruitt, President, Southern Regional Education Board