Author: aidan.oneill

Politics, Markets, and Pandemics: Public Education’s Response to COVID-19

aidan.oneill Research
Michael Hartney

Michael Hartney, professor of Political Science, has recently put out a working paper examining school reopening policies across the country. Hartney and Leslie K. Finger, a political scientist at the University of North Texas, found that local political conditions, rather than public safety or COVID-19 severity, generally guided reopening decisions. According to the researchers, “Mass partisanship and teacher union strength best explain how school boards approached reopening.” The findings have been featured in The New York Times as well as BC News.

You can read the full working paper here.

Online Education in the COVID-19 Era: 3 Questions to Help You Define Your Strategy

aidan.oneill Teaching
Aleksandar (Sasha) Tomić

Sasha Tomić, Associate Dean for Strategy, Innovation, and Technology in the Woods College of Advancing Studies, has put forward three questions to help institutions of higher learning establish and maintain a COVID-19 response plan. He begins: “To say that COVID-19 is disrupting the economy in general and higher education in particular would be one of the biggest understatements of the century… whether the attitudes to online learning will change in the long run, and how [is still not clear]. Also, it is not clear how long the COVID-19 disruption will last and which institutions will survive it.”

Read the his questions and the full editorial in The Evolllution.

How Ready Are We to Support Kids Through This Trauma?

aidan.oneill Research
Heather Rowan-Kenyon

Heather Rowan-Kenyon, Associate Professor and Director of the Educational Leadership & Higher Education Program at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, has recently published a report on supporting students through trauma in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rowan-Kenyon and Mandy Savitz-Romer, at Harvard University, surveyed counselors to aggregate their needs in a time that is uniquely challenging to students’ mental health. In Education Weekly, they write: “It will be tempting for schools to direct resources and attention this fall to bolstering the instructional core, given well-founded fears of learning loss and the widening of academic inequities. But our research suggests that districts need to focus just as much on deploying staff and policies that promote students’ social and emotional development. School counselors have a critical but often overlooked role to play in meeting this urgent need.”

Read the full editorial in Education Weekly.

“Una salud”: la clave para evitar una próxima pandemia global

aidan.oneill Partnership

El covid-19 será sin duda el tema que marcará este año. Desde sus tratamientos y prevención hasta el desarrollo de vacunas. Sin embargo, ¿qué pasa si no prevenimos sus causas?

Generalmente, cuando sufrimos una enfermedad, lo primero que hacemos es ir al doctor, descifrar qué es lo que tenemos y ver un tratamiento oportuno. Sin embargo, generalmente este proceso no se queda ahí. Viene acompañado de una serie de exámenes que buscan analizar algo base: ¿por qué estamos enfermos? —Read more

COVID-19: The Internationalization Revolution That Isn’t

aidan.oneill Research
Hans de Wit
Phillip G. Altbach

Hans de Wit and Phillip Altbach recently authored an article on COVID-19’s effects on higher education: “The COVID-19 crisis will have major implications for global student mobility, with declines overall, most probably from China. Additional implications will be felt concerning internationalization generally. Universities and national systems relying on international student enrollments for income are likely to suffer a significant blow. However, overall, it is likely that the broader trends of recent years will continue, but only after considerable disruption.”

Read more in International Education’s special 2020 edition.

Association Between Universal Masking in a Health Care System and COVID-19 Spread Among Health Care Workers

aidan.oneill Research
Dean Hashimoto

Dean M. Hashimoto, Associate Professor at Boston College Law School, along with several other researchers recently authored an article discussing the effectiveness of masks in health care systems among health care workers. Studying an intervention within the Mass General Brigham health care system, they found universal masking substantially limited the spread of COVID-19.

Read the full article in Jama.

Studying the Experience and Sustainability of Work-From-Home

aidan.oneill Research
Wen Fan

“In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many in U.S. found themselves suddenly working from home and, with the closing of schools and childcare centers, working from home coupled with a change in family life.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Wen Fan has launched a research project, funded by the National Science Foundation, that will examine the experience of remote work from a variety of methodological angles as well as the potential sustainability of the work-from-home model post-COVID.

‘The pandemic resulted in a sea change in working conditions and family lives, effectively introducing a large-scale social experiment,’ explained Fan, the principal investigator for the ‘RAPID: Remote Work in the Time of COVID-19’ project.” — from BC News

Read more