Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
California’s educators are drowning in a sea of well-intentioned but fragmented statewide initiatives. It’s time for a unified approach.
In California, we often hear that our education system is designed to “support the whole child.” This language is found in the California Department of Education’s organizing framework and sprinkled throughout the state’s many education initiatives, including Community Schools, Expanded Learning, and Multi-Tiered System of Support. This commitment to whole-child development ought to come as good news, but because the state and its agents haven’t been clear or consistent about what they mean by “whole child,” or what an educator needs to do to support the whole child, it often leads to confusion and frustration instead.
This lack of clarity means that educators in classrooms, schools and districts feel overwhelmed…
