Personalized learning:
The future of education

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My Vanishing Country
by Bakari Sellers

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the violent death of George Floyd unexpectedly triggered a protest movement across America. What began as protests of police violence against African Americans is fueling widespread rejection of all forms of racism and racial discrimination. Seemingly from infancy, the life of Bakari Sellers has been preparation to voice rejection of racism and speak of its consequences for Black children growing up in a racist society. Bakari’s life, starting in rural Denmark, South Carolina, is a testament to what education can contribute to countering discrimination in every facet of American life.

Bakari grew up in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. At the age of 22, Sellers was elected as a Representative in the South Carolina General Assembly. Now 35 and a practicing attorney and CNN analyst, Sellers, along with multiple generations of his family, have experienced every form of inequality in schooling, policing, health, and economic status. His Harvard-educated father, Cleveland Sellers, Jr., was a protester of racial discrimination that led to the infamous Orangeburg Massacre, in which protesters were killed by the Highway Patrol. Shot, arrested and imprisoned for a year, Cleveland lives on in Bakari’s life at the heart of painful family history that the author revisits in My Vanishing Country.

“Bakari,” in Swahili, means one with great promise—one who will succeed. “Cleve Seller’s boy” was known from his earliest years as the child of an agitator. Bakari epitomizes the power of education to make a difference in the life of an African American child growing up in the midst of extreme poverty, scarred and traumatized by violence and rejection. “Growing up in a country that has a hard time loving you, my faith is oftentimes put to the test,” Sellers says. In his candid and moving memoir, Sellers chronicles his evolution as a political activist. He counts as decisive his education at historically black Morehouse College, where he was “bit by the political bug.” Sellers admits to suffering from anxiety from the fear, rage, and anger of continued racial oppression and family trauma. Sellers also expresses his belief that trauma can become a source of power— the power to endure tragedy and still achieve important goals.

As detailed in the main article above, overcoming racism and racial inequality will require the systematic application of advanced technology for the personalization of education, student by student, from preschool years to college. In order to make up for centuries of racial discrimination against Blacks, education needs to transformed, not just reformed. The COVID-19 pandemic could provide the impetus for fundamental changes in the ways that children learn in school, at home and in their communities. Bakari says that he wrote My Vanishing Country so that people in America could understand the traumatizing impacts of oppression and pain experienced by African Americans and, with that understanding, have conversations with empathy and compassion that begin to heal prevailing racial divides in this country.

Building a nutritional safety net for children

By ARNOLD SCHUCHTER, St. James Faith Lab Tech Editor

Millions of school children still are waiting for meals even after Congress approved billions to feed them. Only 15% of eligible children have received the benefits of Families First which provides free and subsidized meals to every child who needs them. That’s only 4.5 million out of 30 million eligible children. Families First is failing for a number of reasons including old computers and multiple agencies involved that are unable to operate efficiently. On an emergency basis, the management of Families First could be moved, for example, to the Salesforce Education Cloud (SEC). SEC is a philanthropic subscription software resource that can empower schools with a cloud-based mobile-first platform to enable efficient management of their Families First program and support an accelerated timetable for transformation of every component of K–12 during and post-pandemic.

At a minimum for Families First, SEC could provide new efficiencies in all aspects of communications, student management, enrollment, utilization or federal and nonprofit funds and fundraising. For school districts, networks of schools, and schools, SEC is the ideal platform not only for managing implementation of Families First but also for managing transformation of K–12 to the personalization of all learning experiences. Using SEC and its AI capabilities, all of the real-time data and insights from each student’s learning and other experiences in schools, and collectively from all from all K–12 schools, will be fed back into and harnessed in a data-driven national K–12 transformation process. (See https://www.salesforce.org/k-12-education/)

In response to COVID-19, school districts, schools, and child care facilities have extremely challenging operational responsibilities for providing educational resources as they try to prevent disease transmission and ensure access to food for children who rely on the federal nutrition resources. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, and Child and Adult Care Food Program serve more than 30 million children daily, delivering both nutrition and financial assistance to families in need.

For these more than 30 million children, meals and snacks from schools or child-care centers fulfill up to two-thirds of children’s daily nutritional needs. In addition to the short-term health effects of missed meals, including the risk of contracting communicable diseases, research tells us that periods of food insecurity for children can cause long-term developmental, psychological, physical, and emotional harms. Children from low-income households, who are already at higher risk of poorer health and academic performance, are likely to be further disadvantaged by nutrition shortfalls.

The USDA hasn’t mandated that schools offer food service during closures. Instead, local education authorities are being permitted to apply approaches from the USDA’s summer feeding programs for low-income children. However many schools lack experience with summer feeding programs. These programs reach only one in seven children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals during the school year. School districts in various states are using different solutions for providing meals that also are designed to prevent disease transmission.

There is no way, however, for the federal government or anyone involved to ensure, in real-time, that food is distributed cost-effectively and equitably during school closures or which mode for food distribution best meets nutritional, health, and disease prevention needs. In addition, government agencies do not know the impacts of changes in policies or rules that discourage enrollment or reduce access to nutrition-assistance programs, for example, exclusion of migrant families.

It is very tempting to suggest that school gardens on a sufficiently large scale, managed well at various bureaucratic and school levels, could help to fill the huge nutrition gap for school children across the nation. School gardens have cropped up all across the US. According to the USDA Farm to School Census, there more than 7,000 school gardens in the U.S. (https://farmtoschoolcensus.fns.usda.gov/) School gardens are connected with subjects from culinary arts to math and science. There’s even a National Farm to School Network (NFSN) that serves as an information hub for communities trying to bring food, agriculture and nutrition education into school systems. NFSN says that it has more than 42,000 member schools. But an NFSN needs a SAAS technology platform like Salesforce’s SEC to develop and manage a successful national school garden program effectively integrated with the nation’s K–12 school systems.

Support for the HEROES Act:
Protecting educators’ jobs at risk

As we write about the potential value of adaptive and personalized learning for children and also teachers, we’re mindful of the staggering number of public school personnel across the United States who have lost their jobs in the wake of school closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In April alone, 469,000 public school district personnel nationally lost their jobs. That is more than the nearly 300,000 who lost their jobs during the entire 2008 Great Recession. We’re hearing from school district administrators, public officials and researchers that the current school personnel job loss probably will last for years.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated inequities facing our nation’s most vulnerable students. According to a recent NEA survey, more than 80% of NEA members say that “providing the same level of education to all students” has become a very serious problem. Educators in high-poverty schools report lower class attendance, feel distance learning is less effective for their students, and believe that closing the K–12 digital divide needs to be a top priority. Funding to ensure that schools can close the digital divide is essential to reduce educational disparities between have- and have-not children.

Organizations like the National Education Association (NEA) are doing their best to support Congressional passage of the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act or “HEROES” Act. The bill passed by the House of Representatives includes $100 billion specifically for K–12 and higher education of which about 65 percent or $58 billion would go through states to local school districts. Many of the beneficiaries of the bill would be schools with large enrollments of low income and minority students. Saint James Church and the Saint James Faith Lab voice their support for this critical legislation.

McKinsey Report: The hurt from
COVID-19 could last a lifetime

Serious educational achievement disparities for Black people probably will continue and grow when schools reopen. Remote instruction/distance learning is not working for most low-income kids, African Americans (and Hispanics) in the U.S. The McKinsey report needs to be required reading, especially in the midst of Black Lives Matter. Significantly increased federal funding for schools across the nation is not a panacea, but is imperative.

The nation faces a worsening situation for Black families that are not sharing in any economic recovery and are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. In addition to the fact that recently announced improvement in unemployed stats include a big statistical mistake, Blacks who have given up looking for work or have a part-time job are not included in unemployment stats. Underemployment for Blacks is over 30%! (I said basically the same thing in my books published in 1968 and 1970 and while working for Rep. Conyers in 1977–80 in connection with lobbying for Congressional action on the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment & Balanced Growth Act.)