By: Chris Soto, Senior Advisor, Office of the Secretary
The Puerto Rico education system is at a pivotal moment with many influences converging to help accelerate positive change for the Puerto Rico Department of Education, and ultimately the students it serves. The combination of the influx of federal relief dollars, a strengthened relationship with the U.S. Department of Education, and an island-wide recognition of the urgency for structural changes that address root causes and prioritize student outcomes, provides an opportunity to take a proactive approach towards addressing long-standing challenges.
It was just over a year ago when U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona reaffirmed the U.S. Department of Education’s commitment to support the students of Puerto Rico. Since then, the work has progressed including consistent engagement with stakeholders across the island ensuring everyone’s voice is included as Puerto Rico invests nearly five billion dollars of federal education relief funds to respond to the needs of students and educators. Thanks to the help of these federal funds, schools reopened with a nurse in most buildings, hundreds of school psychologists were hired, an island-wide after-school program was launched and most significantly, teachers will see a significant pay increase starting in the next school year.
The Department of Education also constituted the Puerto Rico Education Sustainability (PRES) Team, which initially focused on three key areas: financial responsibility, safe and healthy school buildings, and federal program support. Our colleagues at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been working closely with the Puerto Rico Department of Education (PRDE) as they craft a master infrastructure plan for the repair and rebuilding of schools. Alvarez & Marsal, the PRDE’s Third-Party Fiduciary Agent, has been embedded at the PRDE and will soon release a corrective action plan for fiscal improvements. And today, the Department is releasing a comprehensive technical assistance plan that responds directly to the needs of PRDE staff in the management of federal programs and funds.
Additionally, we’ve engaged directly with Puerto Rico’s legislature, hosting an informational session about the historic amount of federal education funds made available to the island and the Department reinforced the Secretary’s message of transparency as investments are made. We’ve also worked with the PRDE, sharing best practice examples of state dashboards that track the spending of relief dollars such as those in New Mexico and Louisiana.
Following two natural disasters and a global pandemic, it is critical that trust is rebuilt with students and families across the island. The public should be aware of how federal funds are contributing to the educational recovery of their schools and actually see the benefits in classrooms across the island.
While progress has been made, we know there is more work to do.
During this year, it has become evident that in order to achieve transformational change, we must collectively address the longstanding systemic issues that continue to hinder the effective operation of Puerto Rico’s education system. That’s why the Department of Education, in collaboration with the PRDE and through feedback received from stakeholders, will develop a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) identifying specific areas for improvement that are critical to the system’s success. Formal listening sessions will be held throughout the island in order to ensure maximum participation from students, parents, teachers, and stakeholders. This MOU will represent the next phase of our collective work.
As communicated in Puerto Rico’s ARP ESSER Plan approval letter, ongoing engagement with all stakeholders is vital to ensure that implementation of Puerto Rico’s recovery plan and the use of federal dollars is transparent, effective, equitable, inclusive, and best meets the needs of Puerto Rico’s students.
Today is another step towards progress in order to meet the moment for the students of Puerto Rico.
Adnan Syed, who was freed in September after he spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” has been hired by Georgetown University as an associate for an organization whose work mirrors the efforts that led to his release, the university has announced.
Mr. Syed, the subject of the 2014 podcast and pop-culture sensation that raised questions about whether he had received a fair trial after being convicted of strangling his high school classmate and onetime girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, will work for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.
Mr. Syed, who was 17 at the time of Ms. Lee’s death in Baltimore, has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
The university said that Mr. Syed, now 41, will help support programs at the organization, such as a class in which students reinvestigate wrongful convictions and seek to “bring innocent people home” by creating short documentaries about their findings. The program, founded in 2016, “brings together leading scholars, practitioners, students and those affected by the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of mass incarceration,” according to its website.
Georgetown University, which is in Washington, said that in the year leading up to his release, Mr. Syed was enrolled in the university’s bachelor of liberal arts program at the Maryland prison where he was incarcerated.
“To go from prison to being a Georgetown student and then to actually be on campus on a pathway to work for Georgetown at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, it’s a full circle moment,” Mr. Syed said in a statement. “P.J.I. changed my life. It changed my family’s life. Hopefully I can have the same kind of impact on others.”
He added that he hoped to continue his education at Georgetown and go to law school.
The new job this month culminated what has been a remarkable year for Mr. Syed, whose case has again received widespread public attention after a flurry of recent legal activity.
In September, Mr. Syed was released from prison after a judge overturned his murder conviction. Prosecutors said at the time that an investigation had uncovered various problems related to his case, including the potential involvement of two suspects and key evidence that prosecutors might have failed to provide to Mr. Syed’s lawyers.
In October, prosecutors in Baltimore dropped the charges against Mr. Syed after DNA testing on items that had never been fully examined proved Mr. Syed’s innocence, officials said.
Ms. Lee’s family filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals after prosecutors dropped the charges.
On Nov. 4, the court said in an order that the appeal could be heard in court in February.
Marc Howard, the director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, said in a statement that Mr. Syed’s “commitment to the program and to his education was clear from the moment he stepped into the classroom.”
He added that Mr. Syed “is one of the most resilient and inspiring people I’ve ever met, and he has so much to offer our team and the other students in P.J.I. programs.”
In a Georgetown University article about the hiring, Mr. Syed said that he was in disbelief when he first saw a flier for the program.
“It became this domino effect to see us be accepted,” he said. “It made it become something real in the eyes of others, that there are opportunities. There can be a sense of hope: a sense of hope that things can get better, a sense of hope that I can work hard and still achieve something, a sense of hope that I can still do something that my family will be proud of.”
His attachment to the school was evident on Sept. 19, when he walked out of prison for the first time since he was a teenager.
Amid a throng of reporters and his supporters, Mr. Syed walked down the courthouse steps in Baltimore, smiling. He gave a wave.
And in his hand, he carried a binder with a Georgetown sticker. His graded papers and tests were inside.
“Supporting Palestinian liberation does not mean opposition to Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” the group said in a statement to the Berkeley law community. Members of the group did not respond to messages seeking an interview.
After learning about the bylaw, Mr. Chemerinsky met with the university’s Hillel rabbi and spoke with several Jewish students, but, aside from concerns within the law school, the reaction was relatively muted, he said.
That changed, he said, after Kenneth L. Marcus, the civil rights chief of the U.S. Education Department during the Trump administration, wrote about the bylaw in September in The Jewish Journal under the explosive headline “Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.”
Mr. Marcus wrote that the bylaw was “frightening and unexpected, like a bang on the door in the night,” and said that free speech does not protect discriminatory conduct.
The article went viral.
Mr. Chemerinsky said he learned about Mr. Marcus’s article, which he described as “inflammatory and distorted,” while he was in Los Angeles for a conference. Mr. Chemerinsky said he typed out a response to the article, which was appended to it, and then didn’t think much of it. That afternoon, he was deluged by emails. At an alumni event that night, the law school’s perceived hostility to Jews was “all anyone wanted to talk about.”
In an interview, Mr. Marcus, a Berkeley law school alumnus, said that he was contacted by law students there who were concerned about the bylaw. He said he spent weeks trying to support them and wrote his article after Berkeley did not “rectify the problem.”
Not allowing Zionist speakers, he said, was a proxy for prohibiting Jews. The provisions, he said, are “aimed at the Jewish community and those who support the Jewish community,” even while acknowledging that the policy could allow Jewish speakers and bar those who are not Jewish.
“People with learning differences are human,” wrote Deanna White, a neurodiversity advocate and parent learning coach in response to a question we posed on LinkedIn. “Unique individuals and wonderful humans that are better defined by their strengths. So stop focusing on the weakness.”
We invited our social media followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to weigh in on the most effective way schools can better support students with learning differences.
Responses ranged from shifting educators’ mindset—like highlighting student strengths—to more far-reaching changes that would require schoolwide or district support.
Focus on students’ strengths
There are many ways of encouraging students to play to their strengths, as educators Winston Sakurai and Phyllis Fagell demonstrated in an August 2022 article by Education Week Assistant Editor Denisa Superville.
They detailed how they shared their own learning struggles as a way to connect with their students. Their personal successes show students, who may be struggling academically or socially, that anything is possible.
Here’s what other educators had to say.
1. Help them understand their learning strengths and challenges and growing them as strong self-advocates.
2. Devoting time and money to developing teachers’ abilities to differentiate.
– Amy S.
By having high expectations and giving them exposure to high-quality materials and experiences, even ones that seem “above them.” They will shock us with their insights every time.
– Angela P. 😒😒🥴
Meet students where they are
In a 2015 primer on the topic, EdWeek Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks wrote about how “differentiated instruction”—the process of identifying students’ individual learning strengths, needs, and interests and adapting lessons to match them—became a popular approach to helping diverse students learn together. Respondents largely agreed.
Time to work with every student. If you can meet with a child for a bit of time to help with exactly what she or he needs, it might ignite both learning and understanding.
In a 2017 Opinion essay, former teacher Marc Vicenti wrote about “the daily wear and tear on educators when trying to juggle a full teaching load and meaningful relationships with lively young people who all have different needs and experiences.”
“We can either choose to be less effective in our practice or exhaust ourselves—neither of which is beneficial to students or our own well-being,” he wrote.
Smaller class sizes are one way of mitigating the risk of burnout while working to meet each student’s needs.
Small classes, small schools, local control. I am the principal in a pretty small school in a small community and I know every child, and every family and we can build programs to meet our students’ needs. A country run or state run school system can’t do that.
Standardized tests have long been criticized for narrowing instruction and for holding all students to the same standard when “students enter school at varying levels and learn and grow at different rates.”
The backlash against standardized testing renewed interest in alternative ways to evaluate students’ learning progress, like “performance assessments—the idea of measuring what students can do, not merely what they know”.
Sometimes it’s best to go to the source to discern how to best tackle an issue. Giving these students a voice can not only empower them in their learning, but also help educators understand how to have the biggest impact.
Ask them how they learn and what helps. Give them a voice!
Yes! Listening to what students need and giving them a voice is something we need to do for all students, but especially those who need more help in the classroom.
