Candace Spencer, a literacy tutor in Washington, D.C., logs onto her computer each weekday morning, opens recording software, smiles at the camera, and begins sounding out phonetics. The response is silence; in fact, there’s no one on the other end at all.

“Mentally, you picture your student in your head,” said Spencer, who works for The Literacy Lab, a non-profit focused on tutoring low-income students. “Maybe even some of the things that they would say in return.”

Before the pandemic, Spencer would arrive at one of the organization’s partner schools every morning to tutor kids one-on-one all day. Now, she pre-records literacy lessons for more than fifteen K-3 students. Spencer conducts live virtual sessions too, but the recorded videos are crucial; many of her students have parents who work two jobs, and the video lessons can be viewed whenever fits the family schedule.

“The students that are going to fare best throughout all of this are coming from households that have access to a lot of learning resources,” said Sarah Rose Dorton, Literacy Lab’s D.C. regional director. Most parents can’t afford the private tutors or live-in nannies that affluent families are splashing out for.

But that means that many of the students most in need are being left behind. NWEA, an education non-profit focused on learning assessments, estimated that reading gains would drop by 30 percent after about a semester of remote-only learning. According to an AP analysis of U.S. Census data, about one in five schoolchildren in D.C. live in households without internet access. Almost 30 percent lack a computer in their household, making it the worst in the nation for student technology access. The students who need literacy tutoring the most often lack the resources to learn remotely.

The long-term consequences could be stark. Poor literacy keeps people from graduating from high school and prevents them from studying at college. As many as 43 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills, according to a 2019 report from the National Center for Education Statistics. This cohort suffers a raft of ostracizing repercussions—from low-confidence to difficulty finding work. Adults with low literacy are over-represented within incarcerated populations and among those receiving public assistance.

Many literacy tutoring organizations follow a similar model: tutors design weekly, individualized lessons for students who are behind their grade level in reading and comprehension. Tutors often meet with students at their schools and work with them until they are back on track. With many schools transitioning to virtual teaching, the in-person tutoring so important for building a rapport with students has become infeasible. Tutors spoke of the “terrifying” divide between those with and without access to technology. “These kids were behind to begin with, so you could be talking about a year’s slide in some cases,” said Lois Fingerhut, board chair and tutor at Reading Partners D.C. “It’s horrifying to me.”

Yet resourceful tutors are finding ways to keep their students learning. By developing virtual teaching techniques and adapting to new platforms, literacy tutors can coach the next generation of readers.

The good news is, it seems to be working for the kids who get it. The bad news is, not many do.

Some of the technical innovations for literacy tutoring during the pandemic have taken place in New York City, the one-time epicenter of the virus. When Katherine Stahl got notice from New York University she would have to close the NYU Literacy Clinic, which she leads, she was thankful the directive came on March 12, the day before spring break. Her tutors are members of NYU’s Literacy Specialist master’s program, and, through the clinic, they teach between six and ten children with complex reading needs for free every spring semester. Traditionally, each student would come to Washington Square Park for hour-long sessions twice a week. But this spring, the typical gains of 1-1.5 reading years during the semester of coaching felt impossible.

Stahl and her tutors spent spring break pivoting to online learning—calling parents, designing PowerPoints, diagramming on whiteboards, photographing book pages, sourcing and arranging various technologies, troubleshooting buggy apps, and crafting Zoom backgrounds. It was worth it. For many of these children, Stahl said, “the only instruction they were getting—period—was the hour of tutoring from us.”

One of the first things third-graders saw when they logged onto a lesson with Skye Russell, a tutor at NYU Literacy Clinic last semester, was a roadmap of the lesson decorated with cheerful photographs of rabbits. Then, students might move onto some animal-themed exercise passages: “Stinky Skunks, Millipedes and Beetles,” or “Smelly Goo Helps Opossums Play Dead.” Attention is a scarce commodity over video call; Russell often caught students’ eyes wandering off the screen.

“Sometimes students have a harder time focusing or, you know, maybe they’re hungry,” she said. The trick is to gamify the teaching. Russell might cycle through nine activities in an hour, broken up by quick phonetics games. The aim is to teach children the tools to decipher the words for themselves.

Without literacy, it’s difficult to be an active citizen. “Literacy permeates everything. We read a lot in a day—whether it’s street signs or menus,” said Russell. “Language is so powerful. Not only in reading, but in feeling like we can express ourselves and represent ourselves.”

Utilizing new digital teaching methods has been critical. Russell’s fiancé, a software engineer, helped her design an interactive portal for two-way phonetics activities, allowing Russell to simultaneously video chat and play interactive word games like jeopardy or bingo. “I will be using this when and if I go back in person,” said Russell, who adapts every lesson based on the child’s technology access.

The pandemic has threatened the progress of adult literacy learners, too. “Not everybody even has internet, or has a computer, or knows how to use those things,” said Amy Goodman, executive director of Washtenaw Literacy, a non-profit in Michigan offering tutoring for adults. Around 90 percent of learners who come to the organization live below the poverty line, Goodman explained. Some are native English speakers who never learned to read; others are learning English as a second language.

Goodman’s lessons look different now. Tutors work with whatever technology the learner has access to. “In some cases that’s a cell phone, in some cases that’s WhatsApp, in some cases that’s—God bless it—U.S. mail,” she said. Goodman’s organization developed technology training sessions to bridge the digital skills divide. “Anything from ‘What is a mouse?’ to ‘How do I use my cell phone for Zoom?’”

Like many literacy tutoring non-profits across the country, Reading Partners D.C. fast-tracked new digital resources to aid virtual tutoring. The organization offers free instruction for students in under-resourced schools, 79 percent of whom are low-income, and 90 percent of whom are students of color. The hope is that remote learning innovations, with the right investment, could enable tutors to coach more kids with fewer resources—“to expand our reach and work quickly to close the literacy divide,” said Shukurat Adamoh-Faniyan, executive director of Reading Partners D.C. But that dream is a long way off.

At the end of the semester, Stahl usually hosts a celebration event at NYU for the students, who bring along parents, grandparents, and siblings to celebrate their achievements with pizza and lemonade. Coinciding with national poetry month, the party is an opportunity for the children to show off their new reading skills, reciting poems from writers including Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky.

This April, the party went ahead virtually. Stahl was delighted to share the news that—against the odds—the class had gained, on average, 1.5 reading years from the semester of online tutoring, as measured by a rigorous exit assessment. Every student achieved at least a year of growth, the same as last year. “I was shocked,” she told me.

The final poem of the celebration was read by a fourth-grade boy who, over the last two years, had struggled with text comprehension. His mother had called Stahl crying, desperate for support.

After the semester of virtual tutoring, he’d not only chosen an adult-level poem, Maya Angelou’s “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” but he had the courage to read it in front of everyone.

He started to read: “Shadows on the wall / Noises down the hall / Life doesn’t frighten me at all / Bad dogs barking loud / Big ghosts in a cloud / Life doesn’t frighten me at all…”

Several parents and tutors teared up hearing him read with ease. Stahl got emotional too. “What a perfect poem for the pandemic,” she thought. For Russell, it was evidence all their virtual planning and teaching had paid off.

But these students are the lucky ones. The country is not even close to universal student access to laptops and broadband. For cities, investing in broadband infrastructure tends to be cost effective so it usually gets the green light, said Morgan Ames, assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies technological inequality. Expanding broadband to more rural areas requires a change in thinking. “There would have to be a pretty major tone shift in the very market-oriented approach the U.S. generally takes towards necessary infrastructure,” Ames told me. Broadband should be treated as a public good, like landlines or the postal service, she said. In July, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Moving Forward Act, which includes $100 billion to expand broadband access in underserved and low-income areas. Still, it’s unlikely to pass the Senate if it remains Republican-controlled.

Local policies that could close the digital divide include public library or school technology-lending programs—enacted in Goodman’s district in Michigan and funded by the CARES Act—as well digital skills training in schools and more one-on-one literacy tutoring.

“It only works if students have access to reliable technology, reliable internet access,” said Jade Okunlola, senior program manager at Reading Partners D.C. Many low-income readers are at risk of being left behind if technology isn’t in their hands this year. “The students that we work with, they absolutely need intervention.”

The post What Happens to Students Who Were Already Behind? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On June 7, Bristol protestors yanked down a bronze statue of famous slave trader Edward Colston, rolled it through the streets, and dumped it into the harbor where Colston’s slave ships had once docked. Colston had surveyed the city since 1895. But his imposing monument was no match for the roughly 10,000 Black Lives Matter demonstrators who were marching through Bristol’s streets in solidarity with Americans protesting George Floyd’s killing.

That evening, city mayor Marvin Rees labeled Colston’s fall a piece of “historical poetry” in an interview with Channel 4 News.  That the statue fell under Rees was itself poetic. Rees is the United Kingdom’s first directly elected Black mayor. Born in 1972 to a Black Jamaican father and a white British mother, raised in an impoverished Bristol neighborhood, his ascent has been improbable. But after a successful career in progressive journalism, and a stint researching racial inequality, Rees became the Labour Party’s Bristol mayoral candidate. In May 2016, Rees swept to victory and now governs a city of almost half a million people.

In office, Rees has tried to make racism and inequality central to his administration. In 2016, he promised to build 2,000 houses a year—forty percent at affordable rates—by the end of his term. In 2018, Rees launched the Commission on Race Equality (CORE), to look for and fight against racism within the city limits, and Stepping Up, a program to create a corps of minority civic leaders.

But it wasn’t Rees’s administration that toppled the statue and, after it fell, activists and politicians to the mayor’s left wanted to know why it still towered above the city four years into his term. “We have campaigned for this for years without success, been fobbed off and ignored,” said Cleo Lake, a prominent Green Party city councilor. It wasn’t just the statue. In Bristol, people drink beers at the Colston Arms, children study at Colston School, and, if you follow Colston Avenue, you’ll arrive at the concert venue Colston Hall. The city is peppered with the legacy of the slave trader who bequeathed his riches to the city when he died in 1721. Shawn Sobers, a Black filmmaker and professor at the University of the West of England, told me it causes daily “psychological damage.”

It’s also not just Colston’s name. Colston Hall has an annual budget of roughly £500,000, which dwarfs the £20,000 allotted for St Paul’s Carnival, the yearly African Caribbean celebration whose organizers request £80,000. “If Black lives matter, you need to support Black cultural institutions,” Lake told me. Under pressure from the national government’s budget cuts, Rees has also reduced funding for social care and community centers, which disproportionately hurts Black families. It’s a severe hit for a city with the third-worst educational inequality—measured by the disparity in high school achievement between Black and white students—out of 348 districts in England and Wales. Another burden for Black people in Bristol is that they are five times more likely to be unemployed than the white British population.

Rees argues he’s doing what’s possible at the mercy of a Conservative national government. But he’s also been critical of some Black Lives Matter protestors for, in his view, prioritizing style over substance. “No memo [of demands] arrived on my desk the day after Colston got pulled down,” Rees told me. “At the Selma march, they didn’t just provoke a confrontation, chucking loads of dust in the air to see what happened. They had specific policy outcomes.” He has earned plaudits from national commentators for working alongside the business community and government ministers. Many see him as a future Labour leader, and perhaps even a future prime minister. But in his compromising style, Rees risks alienating the progressive community from which he came.

Marvin Johnathan Rees grew up on a public housing estate in Easton, Bristol. Life as a Black kid in the 1980s was challenging. “I felt vulnerable constantly,” he told me. He would often receive racist threats and other verbal abuse on the way home from school.

As a student, Rees suffered from low self-esteem. His teachers flagged him for his potential, but his fear of failure paralyzed him from trying in class. “What if I start to do some work and they find out I’m not as clever as they think I am?” he recalled worrying. Rees gravitated to kids like him—underachievers who were smart but distrusted the system. Most were students of color.

But when Rees was fourteen, two lines on his school report card swiveled his future in a whole new direction. “Marvin, the world could be your oyster. But the way you’re behaving, you’re not going anywhere,” his geography teacher wrote. For many students, it would have been an admonishment. For Rees, it confirmed that he had potential after all. “I took that home and read it and read it and read it,” he said.

Rees began to change his habits. He started boxing regularly, studying for the exams needed for college, and slowly building up his low self-esteem. But it came at a cost. He began to live what he described as a “parallel reality” from his Black peers, who couldn’t understand why he set his sights on going to a university rather than earning money straight from high school. “Yo, Marv, you’re behaving like a white man!” Rees remembers a friend telling him. “That’s what white men do.”

He argued back. “No, that’s wrong,” Rees recalled saying. “How you gonna make money putting tires on someone’s car in a garage all day?”

Rees eventually left Bristol for Swansea University in Wales, graduating with a bachelor’s in economic history and politics in 1993 and a master’s in political theory and government in 1995. In August 1998, he flew to the U.S. to work for the Christian social justice magazine, Sojourners. Afterwards, he attended Eastern University, a private Christian college in Pennsylvania, graduating in 2001 with a second master’s degree in global economic development.

From there, his career took off. He spent five years reporting for the BBC after returning to the U.K. In 2010, he was named a Yale World Fellow—part of a competitive program for future leaders run by Yale University.

Rees said he still struggled with low self-esteem. When he arrived in New Haven, Rees remembers the World Fellows director, Michael Cappello, mentioning something to the class about how the application process can yield surprising results because it’s conducted entirely online. “I thought they were talking about me,” Rees said. “I thought, ‘Oh, they’ve realized they made a mistake.’”

In reality, Cappello told me the opposite was true. “He never felt like he was a worthy choice,” he said. But as the months rolled on, Rees “really emerged as a leader among the leadership group.” Eliot Abel, another fellow, said Rees’s personality was mediating—“he had an interest in bringing people together”—but that he was never afraid to challenge anyone, including prominent guest speakers like former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair.

Rees’s trajectory contrasted wildly with his teenage peers, and it did so in ways he considered structurally unfair. He’d regarded many of his friends as cleverer, smarter, and more confident than him. “The people I was at school with—intellectually—were the equal of anyone,” he said. Years later, some had gone to prison, a couple had passed away, and others were still in unfulfilling jobs—all were underachievers. He attributed his success in no small part to luck: a short note from his teacher containing needed affirmation, which his peers never got.

In 2011, Rees again returned to the U.K. to work for the National Health Service on improving racial equality in mental healthcare. Not too long after, Bristol voted in a referendum to introduce the city’s first-ever elected mayor. He won the Labour Party’s nomination and ran in 2012 against George Ferguson, a flamboyant Liberal Democrat-turned-independent. Ferguson campaigned as an anti-establishment populist despite his immense personal wealth. He “assumed he should be mayor,” Rees said.

Ferguson won, but by a small margin. Rees remained a rising Labour Party star, and he was again chosen to run in 2016 against Ferguson. Rees campaigned on a platform of building homes and reducing inequality. As much as 15% of the Bristol population—70,000 people—live in the most run-down areas of the U.K., according to last year’s city government data. It was a compelling campaign message. This time, Rees won.

Since assuming office, his style has been careful, conciliatory, and pragmatic. Following the £106 million in local budget cuts, Rees has worked closely with the predominantly white business community to pursue his policy goals on housing, poverty reduction, and inequality. It has delivered results. Public records show he exceed his goal of building 2,000 homes—40 percent affordable—by 2020. His administration has also received plaudits from progressive campaigners. Sado Jirde, director of Black South West Network, a racial justice charity, said it was impossible to get a seat at the table before Rees was mayor.

But for some on the left, the reforms lack a radical edge. “I’m not sure they go far enough,” Lake, of the Green Party, said. Labour leftists are disappointed that he paired back city services in response to national budget cuts, rather than fighting to pass a “no cuts” budget by tapping into Bristol’s monetary reserves or extending city borrowing

His policies have also earned him critics on the right. As part of his One City Plan, Rees encouraged local private businesses to invest 25 percent of their corporate responsibility budgets into “CityFunds” to alleviate poverty and achieve other sustainable growth goals. That helped him raise cash while offering 4 percent returns to investors. But not everyone is convinced he has local companies’ best interests at heart. The “job of people like Marvin should be to remove barriers [to business],” Heather Macdonald Tait, who runs Why, a local communications business, told the Financial Times, criticizing his CityFunds advocacy.

Jidre told me that behind his back, Rees is subject to more abrasive criticisms. “I’ve had people say, ‘Marvin cares too much about poor people,’” Jirde said. “They call him ‘the Black mayor’ or ‘the inner-city mayor.’”

For Rees, the varying criticisms cut to the heart of what it means to be a Black politician. “The irony is, more is expected of you on issues of race and poverty, and yet you have less space to maneuver,” Rees told me. Figures like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson can criticize the establishment all they like, he said, “because they are the establishment, right? If a Black person did that or a person from a working-class background, you’d be accused of having a chip on your shoulder or being an angry Black man.”

However, Rees’s initial response to the toppling of Colston kept most of Bristol’s communities on board. He dredged up the statue from Bristol harbor with the intention of sticking it in a museum and began a citywide discussion on what should replace him. “I think the moment found him,” said Cappello, of Yale. “There aren’t a lot of people who’ve come out of this recent chaos looking better than before.” Many locals I spoke to saw him as a future top-table Labour politician. The Times of London editorial board wrote, in July, “If Mr. Rees continues to lead his city with such consummate skill, one day he may even merit a statue of his own.”

Colston’s stone plinth sat empty in the center of Bristol for 38 days and nights. Then, at dawn on July 15, the artist Marc Quinn erected a resin statue of a local Black Lives Matter protestor with her fist raised.

Rees got a text right after the statue went up. He had spoken to Quinn four weeks beforehand and declined his bid to build a new statue. “It’s a fantastic offer, and I really appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think now is the right time to do that,” Rees recalled telling him. Rees wanted the whole of Bristol to decide what replaced Colston. After Quinn built it anyway, Rees ordered it down. “We don’t just stick a wet finger in the air [and] see which way the wind is blowing and go with it,” he said. Twenty-four hours later, the plinth was once again empty.

For Rees, it was just in time. He had received reports far-right counter-protestors were planning to vandalize the statue. “If a statue of a black woman is attacked and dragged through the streets, that’s a whole different piece of imagery that we don’t need,” Rees said. But many on the left were unhappy that the statue couldn’t stay even temporarily. “What a shame this wonderful statue wasn’t kept there” while the city decided on an alternative to Colston, said Diane Abbott, a senior Labour Party politician and the first Black woman ever elected to parliament.

This friction—between a progressive politician committed to incrementalism and bolder liberals—is somewhat reminiscent of Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama’s central achievement, the Affordable Care Act, helped minority communities by increasing the poor’s access to health care. But his overtures to Republicans, his willingness to compromise in negotiations, and his reluctance to address race head on drove more progressive Democrats mad. It was under Obama’s administration, after all, that the Black Lives Matter movement erupted.

But for Rees, like Obama, economic issues are race issues, and careful compromise with other political actors is necessary to accomplish these ends.

This wasn’t always Rees’s view. As a young progressive, he was influenced by Tony Benn, a long-serving leftist Labour politician. Benn retired from parliament in 2001, in part to protest the policies of Blair, who had moved Labour decidedly to the center. “I left parliament to devote more time to politics,” Benn famously declared. Rees told me that while the phrase once inspired him, he has come to view it as counterproductive—and even irresponsible. “Now I look back, I think it was unforgivable to make a statement like that without thinking about the impact it would have on people like me. Because where else are people like me going to go and get power?”

The post The Improbable Rise of Britain’s First Elected Black Mayor appeared first on Washington Monthly.