At this boot camp, Ed Trust will leverage the voices and skills of students, families, educators, and advocates who are finding solutions to the educational inequities that surfaced during the disruptions and societal trauma of a two-year-long pandemic.

Our P-12 sessions will cover topics such as how states and districts are addressing staff shortages in schools in high-poverty areas; how to use advocacy funding tools to develop equitable school funding policy; and updates on statewide standardized assessments and accountability systems.

Higher Ed sessions will focus on the Black student debt crisis, as well as advocacy tools designed to remove unjust barriers that keep incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals from accessing a higher education to participate fully in society. There will also be plenty of opportunities to meet, learn from, and share strategies with advocates on how to advance education equity — from cradle to career — in your state.

It’s been an incredibly challenging time for families, advocates, teachers, and most importantly, students. However, the fight for equity is more important than ever as the pandemic has revealed what we already know: Students of color and students from low-income backgrounds are not being served equitably.

At our October two-day virtual bootcamp we covered a wide array of topics from school funding, addressing the equity and critical race theory backlash, early intervention in early childhood education, school nutrition, Black student debt, how to create winning messages, the latest with the billions of dollars in federal aid provided to states, and much more. You can find recordings of all the sessions below, and sign up for announcements about upcoming webinars and the next bootcamp to the right.

After a very challenging year of remote learning and social distancing, and as millions of Americans begin to get vaccinated, calls for a return to in-person learning are growing. How do we, as equity advocates, fight for students, in P-12 and higher ed, to return to safe learning environments?

At our April two-day virtual bootcamp we learned about strategies to accelerate learning, best practices for supporting students’ socio-emotional needs, ideas for fostering equity in higher ed, must-keep “promises” from the Biden administration, and so much more, you can find recordings of all the sessions below, and sign up for announcements about upcoming webinars and the next bootcamp.

“Advocates in Action” was the theme of this convening, which opened with a plenary discussion on the harmful policies of the Trump administration (e.g., human rights violations at the border, the public charge rule, and the attempt to rescind DACA) and the implications for schools. John B. King, Ed Trust’s president and CEO, moderated the conversation and the panelists shared what their organizations are doing to help the immigrant and refugee community. The organizations represented were Texas AFL-CIO, The Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), and Texas Civil Rights Project. For this convening, we focused on skill-building and facilitated sessions that covered advocacy campaign strategies using social media, tactics for grassroots mobilization, and how to effectively use data to persuade policymakers to make changes for historically marginalized students. There was also a resource fair for advocates to interact with data tools and grab fact sheets, reports, and other materials.

This convening, titled “Keeping Our Eye on the Ball: Making Sure Equity Matters,” equipped state advocates with policy and data on key issues for equitable implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Participants dug into critical school improvement strategies like diversifying the teacher workforce, bringing an equity lens to early childhood education and social emotional learning initiatives, and ensuring access to high quality instructional materials. Ed Trust created state-specific materials on the shortage of teachers of color and school counselors, as well as prepared a data analysis of key equity indicators for each state represented at this convening.

This bootcamp was designed to be an intensive series of workshops that tackle the question: What to do when a school is struggling, for all its students or for some of its students? Participants heard from principals who had have led sustained improvement efforts, and they had an opportunity to learn about the most recent research on “escalated interventions” (i.e., governance changes and school closures). Dr. Janice Jackson, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and former Louisiana State Superintendent John White closed the meeting with a discussion on their school improvement efforts, lessons learned, and next steps for sustaining improvement.

By this point in time, almost every state had submitted their ESSA plans to the U.S. Department of Education, and so this convening was aptly titled, “We Have an ESSA Plan. Now What?” The primary objective of this convening was to highlight important provisions in ESSA that can be used as levers to promote educational equity. We explored questions on how data should be publicly reported in a way that is understandable to parents and community leaders so that they can spark necessary improvements in their schools; how to push state leaders to move beyond generic improvement strategies; and how to monitor the implementation of new English learner provisions, as required by ESSA.