The Hechinger Report weekly newsletter

View in browser Weekly Update A newsletter from The Hechinger Report Sponsored by: In this week's edition: Providers who care for children in a family home offer flexible options for parents, but their numbers are dropping. A forensic audit of meta-analyses has found serious conceptual and statistical flaws in research on AI in education. Plus, one state closed more than half of its public two-year colleges, which had helped students access learning beyond job training. Sylvia Crews has spent the last decade running her own home-based child care center in Washington, D.C. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report Most home-based child care is run by people over 50. Who is going to replace them? For over 20 years, Sylvia Crews has worked in early childhood education, spending the last decade running her own home-based center. After buying a home in Washington, D.C., in 2015, she launched LTH Infants and Toddlers Center — an abbreviation for “loving, tender home” — shortly after. She is licensed to care for up to nine children ranging from 6 weeks to 3 1/2 years old, overseeing four employees. Crews said she wants to work “as long as the Lord will allow me to,” but she does worry about the likelihood of younger workers entering the sector. “At a point, I know I’ll have to stop,” said Crews, 67. But as for the next generation, “How do we get them involved? We need to bring them in,” she said. More than half of licensed or registered home-based child care providers are over the age of 50, according to federal survey data of child care workers, while only 4 percent are 29 years old or younger. In contrast, at larger child care centers, about a third of employees are 29 or younger. The numbers are more balanced at home-based settings that aren’t registered or licensed. About 30 percent of these so-called “unlisted” providers are over 50, and a roughly equal percentage are 29 or younger. “The aging part of the story, on its own, is not the problem,” said Katharine Sadowski, assistant professor of education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. “But when you combine it with all the other pieces, about the composition of the workforce, of who we’ve relied on, it spells trouble.” Child care centers, which include preschools, Head Start and prekindergarten, are the most frequently used option for nonparental care. Federal surveys found about 66 percent of children in nonparental care attend such programs. That compares to about 17 percent of children in a child care arrangement who were in home-based care. But for many parents, home-based care is a vital alternative. This week's newsletter is sponsored by: Navigating current events in the classroom just got easier. CFR Education, the educational arm of the Council on Foreign Relations, offers a free guide on best practices for sparking thoughtful, informed student discussions about global affairs in a nonpartisan manner throughout the year. Explore the guide An audit finds serious flaws in research on AI in education Does artificial intelligence help students learn? That’s a question many teachers and parents want answered, as the new educational technology is rapidly spreading in classrooms. Normally, meta-analyses would be the right place to look, since they’re supposed to gather a scattered body of research and make sense of it by pointing to where the preponderance of evidence lies. And indeed, there are 39 of them, all reporting substantial benefits for AI in education. But it appears that the studies synthesizing that evidence are themselves unreliable — and the peer-review process failed to catch the problems. “This is not trustworthy evidence,” said Justin Reich, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab, who hosted a webinar on Oct. 20 to discuss the problem of the growing number of positive AI meta-analyses. “All of these meta-analyses are flawed.” A forensic au