Across the U.S., public school districts are panicking over test scores.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the Nation’s Report Card, as it is known, revealed that students are underperforming in reading, with the most recent scores being the lowest overall since the test was first given in 1992.
The latest scores for Black children have been especially low. In Pittsburgh, for example, only 26 percent of Black third- through fifth-grade public school students are reading at advanced or proficient levels compared to 67 percent of white children.
This opportunity gap should challenge us to think differently about how we educate Black children. Too often, Black children are labeled as needing “skills development.” The problem is that such labels lead to educational practices that dim their curiosity and enthusiasm for school — and overlook their capacity to actually enjoy learning.
As a result, without that enjoyment and the encouragement that often accompanies it, too many Black students grow up never feeling supported in the pursuit of their dreams.
Narrowly defining children based on their test scores is a big mistake. We, as educators, must see children as advanced dreamers who have the potential to overcome any academic barrier with our support and encouragement.
As a co-founder of a bookstore, I believe there are many ways we can do better. I often use books and personal experiences to illustrate some of the pressing problems impacting Black children and families.
One of my favorites is “Abdul’s Story” by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow.
It tells the tale of a gifted young Black boy who is embarrassed by his messy handwriting and frequent misspellings, so much so that, in erasing his mistakes, he gouges a hole in his paper.
He tries to hide it under his desk. Instead of chastening him, his teacher, Mr. Muhammad, does something powerful: He sits beside Abdul under the desk.
Mr. Muhammad shows his own messy notebook to Abdul, who realizes “He’s messy just like me.”
In that moment, Abdul learns that his dream of becoming a writer is possible; he just has to work in a way that suits his learning style. But he also needs an educator who supports him along the way.
It is something I understand: In my own life, I have been both Abdul and Mr. Muhammad, and it was a teacher named Mrs. Lee who changed my life.
One day after I got into a fight, she pulled me out of the classroom and said, “I am not going to let you fail.” At that point, I was consistently performing at or below basic in reading and writing, but she didn’t define me by my test scores.
Instead, she asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Because he’s smart and he always interviews famous people and presidents,” I said.
Mrs. Lee explained that Mr. Gumbel was a journalist and encouraged me to start a school newspaper.
So I did. I interviewed people and wrote articles, revising them until they were ready for publication. I did it because Mrs. Lee believed in me and saw me for who I wanted to be — not just my test scores.
If more teachers across the country were like Mrs. Lee and Mr. Muhammad, more Black children would develop the confidence to pursue their dreams. Black children would realize that even if they have to work harder to acquire certain skills, doing so can help them accomplish their dreams.
Years ago, I organized a reading tour in four libraries across the city of Pittsburgh. At that time, I was a volunteer at the Carnegie Library, connecting book reading to children’s dreams.
I remember working with a young Black boy who was playing video games on the computer with his friends. I asked him if he wanted to read, and he shook his head no.
So I asked, “Who wants to build the city of the future?” and he raised his hand.
He and I walked over to a table and began building with magnetic tiles. As we began building, I asked the same question Mrs. Lee had asked me: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“An architect,” he replied.
I jumped up and grabbed a picture book about Frank Lloyd Wright. We began reading the book, and I noticed that he struggled to pronounce many of the words. I supported him, and we got through it. I later wrote about it.
Each week after that experience, this young man would come up to me ready to read about his dream. He did so because I saw him just as Mr. Muhammad saw Abdul, and just like Mrs. Lee saw me — as an advanced dreamer.
Consider that when inventor Lonnie Johnson was a kid, he took a test and the results declared that he could not be an engineer. Imagine if he’d accepted that fate. Kids around the world would not have the joy of playing with the Super Soaker water gun.
When illustrator Jerry Pinkney was a kid, he struggled with reading just like Freelon. If he had defined himself as “basic” and “below average,” children across America would not have been inspired by his powerful picture book illustrations.
Narrowly defining children based on their test scores is a big mistake.
Each child is a solution to a problem in the world, whether it is big or small. So let us create conditions that inspire Black children to walk boldly in the pursuit of their dreams.
Nosakhere Griffin-EL is the co-founder of The Young Dreamers’ Bookstore. He is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
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LUBBOCK, Texas — The meeting of the local NAACP chapter began with a prayer — and then the litany of injustices came pouring out.
A Black high school football player was called a “b—h-ass” n-word during a game by white players in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a white girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a white teacher of having a vape (it was a pencil sharpener) and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this fall, her mom said.
“They’re breaking people,” said Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader of the NAACP chapter in this northwest Texas city, referring to local schools’ treatment of Black children. “It’s just open season on our students.”
Just last year, there was hope that the racial climate at Lubbock-area schools might improve. The federal government had launched civil rights investigations after several alleged incidents of racial bullying shocked the community and made nationalheadlines. In fall 2024, a resolution seemed to be in sight: An investigator from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was planning to visit the area, community members said, for what they hoped would be a final round of interviews before the agency put in place a set of protections negotiated with the Lubbock-Cooper school district.
Then the 2024 presidential election happened — and the visit didn’t. In March, the Trump administration closed seven of the Education Department’s 12 regional civil rights enforcement offices, including the one in Dallas, which had been investigating complaints about Lubbock. Emails from the lawyer representing the families to the federal investigator bounced back — like hundreds of other OCR employees, she had been terminated.
Since then, race relations in school districts in and around Lubbock have taken a turn for the worse, many parents and educators say. Black residents — who make up about 8 percent of Lubbock County — didn’t expect the federal government to bring a halt to racist incidents, but the possibility of an agreement between the government and school districts provided a sense of accountability. Now, parents and students say racial epithets are more common in public, and Black teachers fear drawing attention to themselves. Gant says the NAACP chapter fields frequent calls from parents seeking help in addressing racial incidents they no longer bother to report to the Education Department.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the agency has not publicly announced a single investigation into racial discrimination against Black students, instead prioritizing investigations into allegedanti-whitediscrimination, antisemitism complaints and policies regarding transgender students.
All told this year, the Education Department under Trump has dismissed thousands of civil rights investigations. During the first six months of this year, OCR required schools to make changes and agree to federal monitoring in just 59 cases, compared with 336 during the same period last year, a Washington Post analysis found.
“In many of our communities where people feel isolated and like they didn’t have anyone to turn to, OCR mattered and gave people a sense of hope,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, a lawyer at the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education policy and legal advocacy group that helped file some of the OCR complaints against Lubbock schools. “And it matters that they’ve essentially destroyed it.”
In an email, Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs for the Department of Education, wrote, “These complaints of racial bullying were filed in 2022 and 2023, meaning that the Biden Administration had more time to investigate this than the Trump Administration has even been in office. The Trump Administration’s OCR will continue vigorously enforcing the law to uphold all Americans’ civil rights.” She did not respond to a question about whether the agency had opened any investigations into discrimination against Black students.
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Some white residents have noticed the change too. Lubbock County, located at the bottom of the Panhandle, is home to more than a quarter million people. It is the urban seat for a sprawling county that encompasses several suburban and rural school districts and hosts Texas Tech University at its center.
Tracey Benefield — who has two children in Hutchinson Middle School in the Lubbock Independent School District, which borders the Lubbock-Cooper district — is from a family that has lived in the area for generations. She says her son has witnessed multiple incidents of racial bullying over the past year.
“My son was walking down the hall with his friend who’s Black, and some kid shoulder-checked him and called him the n-word. That’s been one of many,” she said. “Things have absolutely gotten worse. The attitudes have always been there, but people acting on their attitudes is completely different.” Lubbock district officials did not directly respond to questions about Benefield’s assertions.
She thinks OCR’s retreat, among other changes within the federal government, has had an impact. “People are more emboldened,” she said. “People have always had racist ideas, but now there’s no consequences for being racist.”
Prior to Trump’s election, the concerns of parents and civil rights groups were quite different: Many were frustrated that Office for Civil Rights cases could linger for years as overworked investigators tracked down details and testimonies. Some were starting to advocate for more OCR staff and speedier resolutions. The outcry from residents, along with the media attention, prompted the Lubbock-Cooper and nearby Slaton school districts — where Black students make up about 3 percent and 5 percent of the student bodies, respectively — to adopt policies of mandatory in-school suspension for students caught making racial slurs and spurred training for staff.
But for many, the changes weren’t coming quickly enough.
Black parents and teachers in Slaton, Texas, say there has been no decrease in racial bullying incidents and mistreatment of Black staff since complaints were made several years ago to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Credit: Mark Umstot for The Hechinger Report
In 2022, Tracy Kemp’s eldest son, Brady, then an eighth grader, was one of nine Black students whose pictures were put on an Instagram page called “LBMS Monkeys,” which stood for “Laura Bush Middle School Monkeys.” (Brady is being referred to by his nickname and his last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) Kemp was part of a group of parents in the Lubbock-Cooper school district who filed OCR complaints that August over what they said was a toxic racial atmosphere that subjected their children to repeated racial bullying. White students would sometimes play whipping noises on their phones when Black students walked through the halls, according to the complaints. Despite a school district investigation that included reaching out to the FBI, those responsible were never caught.
Lubbock-Cooper officials said via email that they “responded swiftly and appropriately” to the 2022 incident at Laura Bush Middle School. “Efforts of the district to ensure all students feel valued, supported, and a sense of belonging have contributed to the positive, nurturing environment our campuses strive to maintain,” wrote Sadie Alderson, the district’s executive director of public information.
Kemp stayed in the Lubbock-Cooper district for another year, but even though the page was taken down, the taunting and bullying didn’t let up, she says. Her middle son was in sixth grade at LBMS that year and was called racial epithets on the school bus and in the hallways. (His name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) When Brady, who had graduated from the middle school and started at Lubbock-Cooper High School, tried to start a Black Student Union there, she says, a white student ripped the page with signatures from his notebook. Kemp says the principal told her there was nothing he could do. The final straw came one day when the ninth grader didn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher told him he was a criminal who was breaking the law, Kemp says, and the harassment started up again, this time on Snapchat, with the same language as the “monkeys” Instagram page.
In July 2023, Kemp moved with her family to New Mexico and commuted 75 miles each way until she found a job closer to her new home. Leaving Lubbock-Cooper, she said, was life-changing for her kids’ mental health.
“In eighth grade, you’re going through puberty, you’re learning about yourself, you’re growing and you have all these different feelings. And now you add into the mix, ‘These people don’t like me because of my color’ — that’s a whole different type of aspect to have to deal with,” said Kemp. “And on the flip side of that, I also have to encourage my child that not every white person feels this way, because I don’t want to teach my child hate either.”
Brady, now a 12th grader, also says he’s happy the family moved. “Honestly, it’s a lot easier,” he said. “There’s no arguments, there’s nothing to worry about, really. I just focus on school more than anything.”
Ja’Maury was 12 years old when he was accused last year of touching a white girl’s breast at school, something he denies. He was interrogated alone by police and assigned to the detention school in Lubbock, Texas, for 30 days. Credit: Mark Umstot for The Hechinger Report
Others who have stayed say they’ve paid a price. Last December, Ja’Maury, a then-12-year-old whose last name is being withheld to protect his privacy, learned of rumors that he’d touched a white girl’s breast during school. He went straight to administrators at the school, Commander William C. McCool Academy, to tell them the truth. But the assistant principal believed the girl’s story and radioed a police officer, who interrogated him and threatened him with jail unless he confessed, according to Ja’Maury and his grandfather, Mike Anzley. Alone in a room of adults, Ja’Maury broke down and admitted to something he says never happened.
“He was yelling and threatening to send me to juvie if I didn’t say I did it. I was scared,” Ja’Maury recalled in an interview. “It was a white person’s word against a Black person’s word.”
Ja’Maury was assigned 30 days at Priority Intervention Academy, Lubbock Independent School District’s detention school, where children are sent for offenses determined to be too severe for in-school suspension. Constantly anxious, he reverted to sleeping in his grandfather’s bed like he did as a toddler. At the detention school, he said, he was so afraid of defying adults that he twice wet his pants rather than challenge a teacher who said he couldn’t leave class to use the bathroom.
“He had never been in trouble before,” said Anzley. He’d always taught Ja’Maury to trust adults, and said he was devastated by the adults at McCool betraying that trust. “I had to make him distinguish right from wrong in a whole new way.”
Anzley filed a formal grievance with the district and, according to a copy of the findings shared with The Hechinger Report, administrators agreed to wipe the incident from his discipline file, issue a formal apology and provide training in discipline and due process to both McCool administrators and the officer who interrogated him.
McCool administrators did not respond to requests for comment. Amanda Castro-Crist, executive director of communications and community relations for Lubbock ISD, wrote in an email that the district could not discuss individual students because of federal laws protecting student privacy, but that it “is proud to serve a diverse student body.”
Raised in the church, Ja’Maury was taught to trust and respect his elders. But his grandfather says that adults at his school in Lubbock, Texas, let him down and he was punished for something he didn’t do. Credit: Mark Umstot for The Hechinger Report
Gant, the 62-year-old NAACP leader, says that growing up in Lubbock she never experienced the kind of racism she sees now. An accountant who runs her own business, she got involved in community activism about 20 years ago after enduring identity theft and a costly, time-consuming effort to clear her name. “I’m a strong, faith-based woman,” said Gant. “Who else will someone call? Who will go to their meetings for free, come with the facts and the research and not make them feel like they owe anything?”
Gant noted changes the districts have made in the wake of the OCR investigation and parent activism, including the new suspension policies. Administrators in Lubbock-Cooper sometimes even proactively contact her about a parent concern, she said. In Lubbock ISD, Gant credits the director of student and parent resolution, Brian Ellyson, with listening to parents and helping them resolve conflicts in a principled manner.
Ellyson was one of two Lubbock school officials at the September NAACP meeting, held in an independent living center on the south side of town equidistant between Laura Bush Middle School and McCool Academy. Parent after parent described their children’s mistreatment.
Leshai Whitfield said her son was sent to a detention school after a teacher complained that he’d pushed her; she said her son was only trying to leave the classroom because of a fight between two other students. Naquelia Edwards said her son has been repeatedly called the n-word and disciplined for fights while white students went unpunished. Jessika Ogden, mother of the 11th grade honors student who was wrongly accused of having a vape, said she believes her daughter was racially profiled. She filed a grievance against Lubbock Independent School District’s Coronado High School to keep her daughter from being sent to the district’s detention school, which she says she eventually won. But her daughter missed school while the case was being resolved, Ogden said, as she refused to send her to the detention school. “Had I not fought for my daughter, she would have suffered that punishment, missing more class, more credits,” Ogden said.
In interviews, more than a dozen Black high school students in Lubbock said they regularly heard other students use the n-word. “Slurs happen all the time – it don’t matter what time of day it is,” said a 10th grader from Coronado High School, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy.
Gant says the absence of an actual agreement between the federal government and any of the districts means the environment in schools hasn’t fundamentally changed. Those agreements come with teacher training, data collection and penalties for failing to comply. In-school suspension for racist behavior may keep some of it in check, but the changes are cosmetic, she and parents say.
Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader in the Lubbock NAACP, says she has been fielding more parent complaints about racist incidents in schools in and around the Texas city this year. Credit: Mark Umstot for The Hechinger Report
Emails obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests show that Kulsoom Naqvi, the OCR investigator based in the Dallas office, conducted staff surveys, data requests and several rounds of interviews throughout much of 2024, but the work came to a halt that fall. Naqvi, who is not technically separated from the Education Department because of ongoing litigation over the mass firings at the Education Department, said she could not comment on the case.
“Given the pace that things were moving, I felt confident that we were going to get a resolution before the end of the year,” said Duggins-Clay, the lawyer who helped file some of the complaints. “Had the election not happened, we would have gotten to a negotiated resolution.”
Alderson, the spokesperson for Lubbock-Cooper, said that the investigation is still open, but the current superintendent, hired in June, was not aware of any communication from an OCR investigator. She said the district had sought mediation with OCR in spring 2024, but Naqvi had denied that request and had not given Lubbock-Cooper a timeline for resolving the complaints.
Just over 20 miles away from downtown Lubbock, in the neighboring town of Slaton, which had its own series of racist incidents and ensuing complaints to OCR, residents say the racial atmosphere has deteriorated even further this year and the school administration has been completely unresponsive. School officials promised to work with local authorities to paint over part of a mural in the center of town that depicts Black men picking cotton under the watch of a white farmer, teachers say. But that never happened. Parents say the n-word is used regularly by white students without consequence in the district, where just 5 percent of students are Black.
“I’ve witnessed kids on my campus calling Black kids ‘monkeys,’” said a Slaton teacher who grew up in the town and spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for her job. “I’m sorry to say that it’s gotten worse. I feel like more of the extremists have come out.”
Parents say their children continued to be bullied because of their race even after Slaton administrators pledged in 2022 to discipline students for slurs. One mom said her second grader was called an “African monkey” the next year by other kids in his class at Cathelene Thomas Elementary. She says she told the principal, who said, “‘Would you be offended if they called him a cat or something different?’” the mother recalled. “I got up and left. I didn’t even know what to say.”
After a series of racist incidents in schools in Slaton, Texas, in 2022, Black residents had hoped a mural at the center of town depicting of Black men picking cotton would be painted over. The mural is still in place. Credit: Mark Umstot for The Hechinger Report
After that she started homeschooling her kids. She asked to remain anonymous because her children still participate in community events and she is worried they will face retribution.
Cathelene Thomas Principal Margaret Francis did not respond to requests for comment. Superintendent Shelli Conkin said in an email that federal law prevented the district from discussing student-related matters and did not respond to additional questions. “Since I became superintendent in 2023, Slaton ISD has experienced many positive developments that highlight our commitment to students and staff,” she wrote, including facility upgrades, a district fundraising effort and a four-day school week.
Anzley, meanwhile, is still fighting for justice for his grandson. After the district declined to discipline the girl for making the accusation, he said, and with OCR no longer seeming like an option for redress, he’s hoping to find a lawyer to file a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of his grandson.
The district’s apology and commitment to better train administrators did not undo the damage to Ja’Maury, he and his grandfather said. “People kept on messing with me about it, saying I was a pedophile, saying I was a pervert,” said the middle schooler. “After that I almost hated life, I didn’t even want to live no more after that. That was horrible.”
Last spring, four months after Ja’Maury had been back at McCool, he got into a fight with a boy who called him the n-word on the school bus, he said. This fall, Anzley decided to transfer Ja’Maury from the top-rated school he once loved — which is 9 percent Black — to Dunbar College Preparatory Academy, which is 45 percent Black and received an F rating this year from the Texas Education Agency. Ja’Maury says he feels safer there; Anzley says the move was necessary for his grandson’s mental health but that he preferred the learning opportunities at McCool.
“None of this is new, because the very name Lubbock is the name of a Confederate soldier,” said Gant. “It’s heartbreaking, but it doesn’t surprise me. The aggression of it has been heightened under the Trump administration.”
She added, “The districts know that OCR has been dismantled so there’s no urgency to fix these issues. It’s on the community, and it’s on the parents to be factual, vocal and not quit.”
Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask.
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The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education this week provides a rare opportunity to rethink our current top-down approach to school governance.
We should jump on it. It’s not sexy to talk about governance, but we can’t fix K-12 education until we do so, no matter how we feel about the latest changes.
Since the Department of Education opened in 1980, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending, and now spend about twice as much per student as does the average country in the European Union. Yet despite that funding — and the reforms, reports and technologies introduced over the past 45 years — U.S. students consistently underperform on international benchmarks. And people are opting out: 22 percent of U.S. district students are now chronically absent, while record numbers of families are opting out of those schools, choosing charters, private schools and homeschooling.
Most federal and state reform approaches have been focused on curricular standards and have accomplished little. The many billions spent on the Common Core standards coincided with — or triggered — a 13-year decline in academic performance. The underlying principles of the standards movement — that every student should learn the same things at the same time, that we know what those things are and that they don’t change over time — have made our schools even less compelling while narrowing instruction to what gets tested.
We need to address the real problem: how federal, state and district rules combine to create a dense fog of regulations and directives that often conflict or constrain one another. Educators are losing a rigged game: It’s not that they’re doing the wrong things, it’s that governance makes them unresponsive, bureaucratic, ineffective and paralyzed — can you name an industry that spends less on research and development?
Fixing governance won’t be simple, but it shouldn’t take more than 13 years to do it: three years to design a better system of state governance and 10 more to thoroughly test and debug it.
I would start by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, ideally at a new “Center for K-12 Governance” at a university’s school of education or school of public policy, and give them three years to think through a comprehensive set of state laws and regulations to manage schools.
The center would convene experts from inside and outside of education, in small groups focused on topics including labor, funding, data, evaluation, transportation, construction, athletics, counseling, technology, curricula and connections to higher education and the workforce. Its frameworks would address various educational and funding alternatives currently in use, including independent, charter and parochial schools, home schooling and Education Savings Accounts, all of which speak to the role of parents in making choices about their children’s education.
Each group would start with the questions and not the answers, and there are hundreds of really interesting questions to be considered: What are the various goals of our K-12 schools and how do we authentically measure schools against them? What choices do we give parents, and what information might help them make the right decisions for their kids? How do we allow for new approaches to attract, support and pay great teachers and administrators? How does money follow each student? What data do we collect and how do we use it?
After careful consideration, the center would hand its proposed statutes to a governor committed to running a long-term pilot to fully test the model. He or she would create a small alternative department of education, which would oversee a few hundred volunteer schools matched to a control group of similar schools running under the state’s legacy regime; both groups would include schools with a range of demographic and performance profiles. The two systems could run side by side for up to a decade.
Each year, the state would assess the two departments’ performance against metrics like graduation and college-completion rates, teacher retention, income trajectories, civic participation, student and parent satisfaction, and, yes, NAEP scores. Under intense scrutiny by interested parties, both groups would be free to tweak their playbooks and evaluate solutions against a range of real-world outcomes. Once definitive longitudinal data comes in, the state would shutter one department and move the governance of its schools over to the other, perhaps launching a new test with an even better system.
This all may seem like a lot of work, but it’s a patient approach to a root problem. Schools remain the nation’s most local public square; they determine income mobility, civic health and democratic resilience. If we fail to rewire the system now to support them properly, we guarantee their continued decline, to the detriment of students and society. Instead of celebrating students, teachers and principals who succeed despite the odds, we should address why we made those odds so steep.
That’s why we should use this moment to draft and test something audacious, and give the next Supreme Court a happier education case to decide: how to retire a legacy system that finally lost a fair fight.
John Katzman has founded and run three large ed tech companies: The Princeton Review, 2U and Noodle. He has worked closely with many large school districts and has served on the boards of NAPCS and NAIS.
This story about fixing K-12 education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’sweekly newsletter.
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As a teacher, I heard it all the time: “I’m not a math person.”
I would be in line at the grocery store, wearing a math T-shirt one of my students got for me, and I’d hear it: “Algebra? Who needs it?”
I would ask the person if they’d shopped with a coupon, bought a cheaper store brand, looked at the unit price on toilet paper or if they’d mentally calculated their total before heading to the checkout line.
I’d smile and say — “All of that is algebraic thinking.”
Despite my assurances, the idea that “I am just not into math” was, and still is, pervasive. Sometimes the thought comes from students, often from parents or colleagues, and more often than not it is said with a kind of resignation — as if math were a club you either got into early or missed forever.
That mindset has never been more insidious than it is now, when mathematics knowledge is needed more than ever. Every day we rely on math to interpret data, whether it’s tracking public health trends, forecasting weather, making financial decisions or navigating technology.
The ability to reason quantitatively, spot patterns and make decisions based on evidence has become integral to how we all navigate the world. Yet recent national data shows we’re falling short. Fewer than one in three eighth graders are on grade level in math, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.
Across nearly every industry, from agriculture to aerospace, mathematical reasoning is becoming more essential. Employers across sectors increasingly need people who can interpret data, test ideas and solve unfamiliar problems.
If we want more young people to access these growing opportunities, we need to rapidly expand access to the after-school and summer programs that help them develop the confidence and curiosity to build math skills.
Right now, too many young people are missing out. After-school and summer learning programs are rarely included in state or federal improvement plans, even though research shows that they are proven to reinforce classroom learning and build student confidence.
In addition, educators in these programs could benefit from training and resources to help young people connect more fully with math.
With the right support from funders and policymakers, these challenges can be addressed, and millions more students can build the math skills they’ll need. Every student deserves the chance to build confidence in math, not just those who excel early.
The stakes are far too high to keep throwing the same solutions at the problem. We need to think differently — not just about how we teach math, but how and where young people experience it.
After-school and summer programs give young people a chance to engage with math in low-pressure settings that don’t feel like an extension of school. They aren’t bound by curriculum or high-stakes test prep.
In these programs, educators can naturally bring math into real-life experiences — budgeting for a community project, designing a video game, planning the route for a field trip or understanding the data behind a favorite sport or song.
These programs also create opportunities to engage families in everyday math and to elevate older youth as peer mentors or tutors — making math feel more personal, social and relevant.
Out-of-school experiences mean students aren’t expected to memorize a formula before they can explore an idea. They’re encouraged to ask questions, try things out and see what happens.
And, importantly, they can take time to try, reflect and try again, without fear of being wrong.
When mistakes are treated as part of the mathematical reasoning process, students start to take more risks. They begin trusting themselves to navigate challenges, which builds their confidence.
That shift is especially important for students who have internalized the message that math isn’t for them, and it will carry them much further than an emphasis on better test scores and grades.
At STEM Next, we’re working to foster that shift by supporting after-school and summer programs, training informal educators and strengthening the learning environments where math confidence takes root.
Our recent publication offers a closer look at how after-school and summer programs are helping students experience math differently, and why that shift matters now more than ever.
Expanding access to these programs isn’t just to help kids grow math skills today, it’s a long-term investment in our workforce and our future.
Camsie McAdams is director of the Institute for a STEM Ready America at STEM Next Opportunity Fund.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
County Executive Marc Elrich said $6 million of the funding is coming from the federal government for its Head Start program, while the Maryland county is adding $4 million to expand its child care centers.
Marc Elrich speaks in a classroom(WTOP/Jimmy Alexander)
Marc Elrich speaks in a classroom(WTOP/Jimmy Alexander)
As their classroom was packed with standing adults, students at the Academy Child Development Center at Stone Mill Elementary School in North Potomac, Maryland, sat quietly at tables barely noticing the press conference that was taking place around them.
While parents would have been incredibly happy with their children’s behavior, they would also be thrilled hearing that Montgomery County is investing $10 million in early childhood education.
As soon as Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich walked through the door, a big smile came over his face. Elrich, who spent 17 years teaching elementary school, told WTOP that it felt good being back in a classroom.
“We got $6 million from the federal government for Head Start,” Elrich said. “And we’ve got $4 million we’re putting in for capital projects so people can expand their existing child care centers.”
During the announcement, Elrich said he was speaking as a former elementary school teacher, adding they knew that far too many kids were entering kindergarten two years behind.
“That means they are entering socially, emotionally and cognitively as 3-year-olds,” Elrich said. “At a time when they need to be 5-year-olds.”
Once a student starts behind, Elrich said it’s tough to catch up. There is research, he said, that shows that you’ll be able to predict if a student will be successful by third grade.
That is why Elrich believes this investment is as important as when all-day kindergarten became mandatory.
Montgomery County says this three-prong initiative will strengthen its early childhood education, or ECE, system. There is a new loan fund and federal grants, thanks to new programs and partnerships. There is a collaborative initiative for child care educators, which the county says is a response to a recent study that identified major gaps in child care access, especially for children in underserved communities.
Among the speakers at the announcement on Wednesday along with Elrich was Thomas Taylor, the superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, and Kate Stewart, the president of the Montgomery County Council.
“The funding is going to our Head Start programs and also our early childhood providers, creating more seats for families,” Stewart said. “To help families to make sure that they are prepared when they enter our school system in kindergarten is so essential.”
Another one of the adults in the room who was thrilled by this announcement has over 35 years experience working with the age group this initiative would benefit.
Leslie Walsh, the chief executive director of Academy Child Development Center, said the exposure to classrooms that children have from a very young age “and the teacher child relationships are critical to the child’s success.”
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What if improving children’s mental health — and life outcomes — could be done by teaching kids how their brains work?
That’s a key idea behind the approach of teachers at Momentous School in Dallas, a private elementary school that serves 225 students, most of whom come from low-income families. Each day, educators present lessons on neuroscience and mindfulness, from the youngest learners all the way up to fifth graders.
Preschoolers in the school’s 3-year-old classroom learn about the brain by singing “The Brain Song” to the tune of “Bingo” (“I have a brain in my head/And it’s for thinking”). They practice mindfulness by lying down with stuffed animals on their stomachs and watching them move up and down as they breathe.
Older students learn calming strategies like slowly counting each finger on their hands while breathing in and out. Classrooms offer tactile models of the brain to help students learn about different parts such as the prefrontal cortex, which controls such processes as executive function and problem solving, and the brain stem, which regulates breathing and blood pressure.
This focus on mindfulness is happening in schools across the country, according to the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit focused on children’s mental health. Experts say the goal is teaching self-awareness and regulation.
“Once the kids feel they can calm themselves, even just through breathing it’s like the ‘wow’ moment,” said Rick Kinder, creator of a mindfulness program called “Wellness Works in Schools,” in an article by the Child Mind Institute.
At Momentous School, conversations about the brain continue throughout the day, as teachers can be heard encouraging students to identify their emotions or asking, “What’s your amygdala saying to you in this moment?” according to Jessica Gomez, a psychologist and executive director of Momentous Institute, the Dallas-based mental health nonprofit that operates the school. (The amygdala processes emotions in the brain.)
Through these frequent discussions and additional lessons on mental health and healthy relationships, teachers are “trying to normalize these things as part of the human condition versus something that is stigmatizing,” Gomez said. The school also holds regular parent nights to educate families on how the brain works and teach emotional regulation strategies that families can practice together at home.
Momentous School, which launched in 1997 and is funded by philanthropic donations, was developed to put into practice mental health and brain science research from Momentous Institute*. A recent study by Momentous Institute and the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas found this approach may be contributing to positive outcomes for graduates of the school. Of the 73 Momentous School students who went on to graduate from high school in 2016 through 2018, 97 percent earned a high school diploma and 48 percent earned a college degree.
These findings come at a time when lessons on emotions, relationships and social awareness, often referred to as social and emotional learning, have become a flashpoint in education and culture wars. Studies show such lessons can improve academic performance: Other researchers unaffiliated with Momentous School have also found that teaching about the brain can provide motivation for students and improve academic and social development.
As teachers and students head back to school and face new routines and social situations, now is a good time to build relationships and introduce even young students to ideas about how their brain works, Gomez said. Although many students at Momentous deal with challenges such as poverty, she believes that the school’s emphasis on mental health and brain science has helped families to better cope with those pressures.
“The point isn’t to never have stress in your life, it’s to know what to do with it,” Gomez said. “Children and parents having agency and tools helps them know how to navigate life stressors, which has a buffering effect on their brain.”
*Clarification: This story has been updated toclarify that Momentous School was developed based on research by Momentous Institute.
Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.
This story about neuroscience in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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IRVING, Texas — Crowded around a workshop table, four girls at de Zavala Middle School puzzled over a Lego machine they had built. As they flashed a purple card in front of a light sensor, nothing happened.
The teacher at the Dallas-area school had emphasized that in the building process, there are no such thing as mistakes. Only iterations. So the girls dug back into the box of blocks and pulled out an orange card. They held it over the sensor and the machine kicked into motion.
“Oh! Oh, it reacts differently to different colors,” said sixth grader Sofia Cruz.
In de Zavala’s first year as a choice school focused on science, technology, engineering and math, the school recruited a sixth grade class that’s half girls. School leaders are hoping the girls will stick with STEM fields. In de Zavala’s higher grades — whose students joined before it was a STEM school — some elective STEM classes have just one girl enrolled.
Efforts to close the gap between boys and girls in STEM classes are picking up after losing steam nationwide during the chaos of the Covid pandemic. Schools have extensive work ahead to make up for the ground girls lost, in both interest and performance.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, the gender gap nearly closed. But within a few years, girls lost all the ground they had gained in math test scores over the previous decade, according to an Associated Press analysis. While boys’ scores also suffered during Covid, they have recovered faster than girls, widening the gender gap.
As learning went online, special programs to engage girls lapsed — and schools were slow to restart them. Zoom school also emphasized rote learning, a technique based on repetition that some experts believe may favor boys, instead of teaching students to solve problems in different ways, which may benefit girls.
Old practices and biases likely reemerged during the pandemic, said Michelle Stie, a vice president at the National Math and Science Initiative.
“Let’s just call it what it is,” Stie said. “When society is disrupted, you fall back into bad patterns.”
In most school districts in the 2008-09 school year, boys had higher average math scores on standardized tests than girls, according to AP’s analysis, which looked at scores across 15 years in over 5,000 school districts. It was based on average test scores for third through eighth graders in 33 states, compiled by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
A decade later, girls had not only caught up, they were ahead: Slightly more than half of districts had higher math averages for girls.
Within a few years of the pandemic, the parity disappeared. In 2023-24, boys on average outscored girls in math in nearly 9 out of 10 districts.
A separate study by NWEA, an education research company, found gaps between boys and girls in science and math on national assessments went from being practically non-existent in 2019 to favoring boys around 2022.
Studies have indicated girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression during the pandemic, plus more caretaking burdens than boys, but the dip in academic performance did not appear outside STEM. Girls outperformed boys in reading in nearly every district nationwide before the pandemic and continued to do so afterward.
“It wasn’t something like Covid happened and girls just fell apart,” said Megan Kuhfeld, one of the authors of the NWEA study.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, teaching practices shifted to deemphasize speed, competition and rote memorization. Through new curriculum standards, schools moved toward research-backed methods that emphasized how to think flexibly to solve problems and how to tackle numeric problems conceptually.
Educators also promoted participation in STEM subjects and programs that boosted girls’ confidence, including extracurriculars that emphasized hands-on learning and connected abstract concepts to real-life applications.
When STEM courses had large male enrollment, Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez noticed girls losing interest as boys dominated classroom discussions at his schools in Grandview C-4 District outside Kansas City. Girls were significantly more engaged after the district moved some of its introductory hands-on STEM curriculum to the lower grade levels and balanced classes by gender, he said.
When schools closed for the pandemic, the district had to focus on making remote learning work. When in-person classes resumed, some of the teachers had left, and new ones had to be trained in the curriculum, Rodrequez said.
“Whenever there’s crisis, we go back to what we knew,” Rodrequez said.
Despite shifts in societal perceptions, a bias against girls persists in science and math subjects, according to teachers, administrators and advocates. It becomes a message girls can internalize about their own abilities, they say, even at a very young age.
In his third grade classroom in Washington, D.C., teacher Raphael Bonhomme starts the year with an exercise where students break down what makes up their identity. Rarely do the girls describe themselves as good at math. Already, some say they are “not a math person.”
“I’m like, you’re 8 years old,” he said. “What are you talking about, ‘I’m not a math person?’”
Girls also may have been more sensitive to changes in instructional methods spurred by the pandemic, said Janine Remillard, a math education professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Research has found girls tend to prefer learning things that are connected to real-life examples, while boys generally do better in a competitive environment.
“What teachers told me during Covid is the first thing to go were all of these sense-making processes,” she said.
At de Zavala Middle School in Irving, the STEM program is part of a push that aims to build curiosity, resilience and problem-solving across subjects.
Coming out of the pandemic, Irving schools had to make a renewed investment in training for teachers, said Erin O’Connor, a STEM and innovation specialist there.
The district last year also piloted a new science curriculum from Lego Education. The lesson involving the machine at de Zavala, for example, had students learn about kinetic energy. Fifth graders learned about genetics by building dinosaurs and their offspring with Lego blocks, identifying shared traits.
“It is just rebuilding the culture of, we want to build critical thinkers and problem solvers,” O’Connor said.
Teacher Tenisha Willis recently led second graders at Irving’s Townley Elementary School through building a machine that would push blocks into a container. She knelt next to three girls who were struggling.
They tried to add a plank to the wheeled body of the machine, but the blocks didn’t move enough. One girl grew frustrated, but Willis was patient. She asked what else they could try, whether they could flip some parts around. The girls ran the machine again. This time, it worked.
“Sometimes we can’t give up,” Willis said. “Sometimes we already have a solution. We just have to adjust it a little bit.”
Lurye reported from Philadelphia. Todd Feathers contributed reporting from New York.
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
UNION CITY, N.J.— By 7:30 a.m., Jackson had started rushing his father, José Bernard, to leave their house. “Dad, we’re going! We’re going, come on, let’s go.”
The 4-year-old was itching to return to his favorite place: Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center for Early Childhood Education, a burst of orange and blue on the corner of Union City’s bustling Kennedy Boulevard.
These small moments stick out for Jackson’s father. A year and a half earlier, as a young toddler coming out of daycare, Jackson was nonverbal.
“It’s life-changing, I’ll be honest with you,” said Bernard, who grew up in Union City in Hudson County. The city is home to one of the urban districts in New Jersey with universal and free preschool, created as part of a slate of remedies meant to make up for uneven funding between rich and poor districts in the state.
At the center, young voices try out vowel sounds in Spanish, English and Mandarin, present projects about fish and sea turtles, count plastic ice cream scoops and learn rules of the classroom through song.
“They are the absolute best school that I’ve ever known,” Bernard said. “It’s a chain reaction from the principal all the way down … I made the best decision for my son, 100 percent.”
Starting in the 1980s, courts hearing the landmark school funding case Abbott v. Burke sought to equalize spending across New Jersey’s schools. Districts located in areas with higher property values were able to spend more on their schools than poor urban districts could — a disparity that was found to violate the state’s constitutional requirement to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all of New Jersey’s schoolchildren.
The Abbott litigation spawned several decisions by the state Supreme Court, one of which was a 1998 ruling that mandated free preschool for 3- and 4-year-old children in 28 of its highest-poverty urban school districts. That number has since grown to 31.
Children at Maria de Hostos Center practice fine motor skills with fingerpainting. Credit: Marianna McMurdock/The Hechinger Report
The state department of education set an ambitious goal of enrolling 90 percent of eligible children in each district, and opened classrooms in private, nonprofit and public settings in the 1999-2000 school year. At that time, New Jersey was the only state to mandate preschool, starting at age 3, for children facing social and academic risk.
“The court recognized that to get kids caught up they need to start off by somehow leveling the playing field from the very beginning, and the best way to do that was with early childhood education,” said Danielle Farrie, research director at the Newark-based Education Law Center, which represented districts for decades in the long-running case.
Related: Young children have unique needs, and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
As the program continued into its 25th year, researchers have found that the endeavor worked to reduce learning gaps and special education rates between rich and poor children — for those it has reached.
However, over 10,000 children eligible for the program are not enrolled, particularly 3-year-olds, according to a recent assessment of the program by The Education Law Center.
Supporters worry that the state’s recently established focus on expanding preschool throughout the state could draw attention and resources away from the early-learning program created by the Abbott litigation.
When it comes to reaching at least 90 percent of the low-income children in the 31 districts targeted by the lawsuit, “we haven’t come anywhere close to meeting those goals,” Farrie said. “To us it’s a question of priorities.”
Adriana Birne, the principal of Maria de Hostos Center and director of early childhood programs for Union City schools in Hudson County, said her program collaborates closely with parents. Credit: Marianna McMurdock/The Hechinger Report
Designed by early learning experts, the preschools were intended from the start to offer a high-quality program. Class sizes are limited to no more than 15 students, and each class has a certified teacher and an assistant. The school day is six hours, and transportation and health services are offered as needed. Teachers are paid on par with K-3 teachers in their district, and the program’s curriculum conforms to New Jersey’s standards of quality in early education.
“Our special sauce is that we provide opportunities for the families,” said Adriana Birne, director of Union City’s early childhood offerings and principal at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center, where parents are invited in as jurors for special class projects, readers for storytime, or as guests for school plays. “We enforce the idea that it’s a collaborative effort — moms, dads, teachers, children all working together for success for their little ones.”
The preschool programs have tried to serve as many eligible kids as possible by providing slots at public schools as well as private childcare providers, Head Start programs, YMCAs and nonprofits that agree to meet the state’s standards.
By many measures, the targeted preschool program has been successful in boosting long-term academic gains for their students. The state ranks in the nation’s top 10 for child well-being and second for education after Massachusetts, based on fourth grade test scores and high school graduation rates.
However, in the 2024-25 school year the program enrolled only 34,082 kids, about 78 percent of those eligible, across public, private and nonprofit providers. Last year, only five of the 31 districts reached the 90 percent target for enrolling eligible children, compared to 18 districts in 2009-10. Enrollment has been steadily declining, a trend accelerated by the pandemic, the Education Law Center report states.
Experts say it can be difficult to find eligible kids because many have only recently moved into the state and their parents haven’t yet heard of the program through word of mouth. Some families believe 3 is too young for school, or are immigrants fearful of raids now being conducted at school sites.
A few district-run programs like Perth Amboy’s require parents to show a government-issued ID or Social Security number to enroll their children. The district enrolled only 63 percent of its eligible 3-year-olds in the 2023-24 school year. The ACLU of New Jersey has previously challenged such requirements, saying they are unconstitutional.
Programs also aren’t recruiting as aggressively as they did when the program began. Cindy Shields, who led a preschool site in Perth Amboy from 2004 to 2013 and is now a senior policy analyst for Advocates for Children of New Jersey, said she used to recruit at playgrounds, churches, laundromats, supermarkets and nail salons — anywhere families were.
Districts once advertised preschool in the plastic table settings of local restaurants, said Ellen Frede, who helped design the Abbott preschool program and ran the state’s implementation team. Frede is now co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, or NIEER, based at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In its heyday, the large team of experts that formed the state pre-K office could also enforce corrective action plans for failing to reach enrollment targets, Frede said.
But during Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s administration from 2010 to 2018, pre-K was reduced to barebone levels. In 2011, New Jersey’s early childhood budget — already only a small fraction of overall education dollars in the state — was slashed 20 percent, causing recruitment efforts to dwindle.
Though funding and political support for preschool was restored under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy — who recently signed a budget that invests about $1.3 billion in statewide preschool over the next fiscal year — funding for the state department of education’s early childhood arm overseeing the endeavor hasn’t grown in tandem.
Today, “we have a much smaller early childhood office that is actually attempting to expand this program across the entire state without that same kind of attention to detail,” said Farrie, with the Education Law Center.
While New Jersey stands out in an early childhood landscape that can be grim in terms of quality and pay, investing roughly $16,000 per pupil, high quality preschool is very costly to operate. The state-funded preschools in the districts named in the Abbott litigation require pay parity with public school teachers, yet many districts and private providers operate on low wages and razor thin profit margins. Increases in liability insurance costs for child care providers and preschools is another strain.
The state has also cut back on incentives like bonuses and college scholarships for teachers to enter the program. Such incentives were common in the early years of the state-funded program, resulting in a teaching population that is more diverse and reflective of the student body than K-12 teachers at large. In the 2024-25 school year, 22 and 25 percent of preschool teachers in the 31 districts with universal preschool were Black and Hispanic, compared to just 6 and 9 percent of K-12 educators in New Jersey, respectively.
A teacher and children play at Noah’s Ark Preschool. Credit: Marianna McMurdock/The Hechinger Report
State board of education scholarships helped pay college costs for Euridice Correa, a teacher at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center. Correa, affectionately called “La Reina” or “queen” by some parents, is Jackson’s teacher. She’s now in her 18th year as an early childhood educator.
Correa, who moved to New Jersey from Colombia at nine years old, earned degrees from New Jersey City University thanks to incentives offered in the early years of the court-mandated preschool program.
“I was very poor. I was still working as a cleaner and helping in the daycare,” she said. The state “paid for my whole B.A. and for half of my Master’s with bilingual certification.”
New Jersey, said Shields, the analyst with Advocates for Children of New Jersey, used to offer “college money, they had incentives, they had sign-on bonuses. They were giving teachers laptops, and we know that it worked. They created this beautiful diverse workforce of teachers that looked just like the children. But we don’t have that anymore.”
A spokesperson for the state department of education said that paths to bring teachers into the profession “remain a priority in New Jersey to support early childhood educators, particularly in community-based settings.” They cited the Grow NJ Kids scholarship program, which offers scholarships for family care providers and preschool teachers to get additional training.
Despite expansion and sustainability challenges, research shows the preschools created through the Abbott litigation have helped close the educational gaps that Black, Latino and low-income children were facing.
Researchers found double the impact on scores for kids like Jackson who are enrolled for two years — enough to make up for a third of the achievement gap between Black and white children. Thousands of kids have entered K-12 more prepared. As a result, Union City moved its algebra offerings from ninth to seventh grade.
Karen Marino, the founder of Noah’s Ark Preschool in Highland Park, contracts with New Brunswick schools in Middlesex County to provide seats for children through the state-funded Abbott program. The state provides money to public and private providers in 31 districts to offer a full-day program for 3- and 4-year-olds. Credit: Marianna McMurdock/The Hechinger Report
“It gives a baseline. You can change things all the way up,” said Steven Barnett, NIEER’s co-director and founder, who is now researching higher education outcomes for Abbott preschoolers. There’s evidence from other communities that quality preschools can affect children into adulthood: Oklahoma’s universal pre-K for 4-year-olds, one of the nation’s oldest, is linked to a 12 percent increase in college enrollment.
The programs have also been able to offer enrichment for their students that would otherwise be impossible to fund.
At Noah’s Ark Preschool, a private provider in Highland Park in Middlesex County, 3-year-olds hold full conversations, sharing about their trips to see family out of state or weekend plans to go to local pools. They’ve learned to write their names and read signs.
Early learning years are so much more than just learning ABCs or shapes, said founder Karen Marino. “It’s really about their independence,” she said, adding that she started Noah’s Ark after looking for affordable care for her own three children years ago, one of whom now runs the site. Her school has contracted with New Brunswick schools in Middlesex County to offer seats since the program began.
Farther north in Passaic, the nonprofit Children’s Day Preschool serves over 120 kids learning social and fine motor skills through play. With fundraising, the school, in Passaic County, was able to afford renovations, a full-time art therapist and a nurse for their community of mostly Mexican, Peruvian, Colombian, Puerto Rican and Dominican families.
Children’s Day feels for many like an extension of home, with family recipes lining the walls and bilingual instructions for parents on how to ask about their child’s day at school: “Did you learn something new? Who made you smile today? Did you help someone today or did someone help you?”
Many of their educators have been teaching at the site for 15 to 20 years. James Acosta, who attended the center as a child and is now is not a digital media assistant, said returning to work was “like seeing like aunts and uncles saying, ‘you’re so big now!’”
A child runs through the playground at Children’s Day Preschool in Passaic County. Credit: Marianna McMurdock/The Hechinger Report
Two preschoolers at Children’s Day Preschool in Passaic, N.J., play on the monkey bars during recess. Passaic is one of 31 New Jersey districts receiving state support to provide preschool for local children. Credit: Marianna McMurdock/The Hechinger Report
Abbott supporters hope more families will join the program. Parent Candy Vitale’s 6-year-old son, Mateo, is reading at a second-grade level and learning how to solve for an unknown “x” in math equations.
Vitale spent the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment so her older daughter could attend a comparable half-day pre-K at the Jersey Shore. She learned of the offerings in Union City from her partner, whose older children had attended.
“This is the foundation of loving learning, and loving school, and feeling loved at school,” Vitale said. “Knowing that I was dropping him off every day, and he was in a place that he absolutely was enamored by — I think that there’s no price tag you can put on that.”
Contact the editor of this story, Christina Samuels, at 212-678-3635, via Signal at cas.37 or samuels@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Abbott districts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, almost 100 studies pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans.
Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing $4,000 a year per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.
On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. Forty-six percent of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it.
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Even with ample money, schools immediately reported problems in ramping up high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.
New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results.Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.
Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a June report by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.
The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.
Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.
Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.
“For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose 2020 review of tutoring evidence influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.
“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.
Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.
The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.
Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.
That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.
Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Almost every day at the public elementary school she attended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Stephanie heard comments about her weight. Kids in her fifth grade class called her “fatty” instead of her name, she recalled; others whispered, “Do you want a cupcake?” as she walked by. One classmate spread a rumor that she had diabetes. Stephanie was so incensed by his teasing that she hit him and got suspended, she said.
But nothing the kids did upset her as much as the conduct of her teachers.
For years teachers ignored her in class, even when she was the only one raising her hand, said Stephanie, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. “I was like, ‘Do you not like me or something?” she recalled.
She felt invisible. “They would sit me in the back. I couldn’t see the board,” she said. When Stephanie spoke up once in middle school, a teacher told her, “I can’t put you anywhere else because you’re going to block other students.” She burned with embarrassment when her classmates laughed.
Nearly 20 percent of children in the U.S. — almost 15 million kids — were considered obese as of the 2020 school year, a number that has likely increased since the pandemic (new data is expected next year). The medical conditions associated with obesity, such as asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea, are well known. Children with obesity are also more likely to have depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.
Researchers have suggested different reasons for this “obesity achievement gap,” including biological causes (such as reduced cortical thickness in the brain in children with obesity, which is linked to compromised executive functioning, and higher levels of the hormone cortisol, linked to poorer academic performance). Researchers have also examined indirect causes of poor performance, such as that kids with obesity might miss school more often because of medical appointments or bullying.
But a relatively new area of research has shifted attention to educator bias. Studies have found that teachers often perceive children with obesity as emotional, unmotivated, less competent and non-compliant. That can lead to teachers giving these students fewer opportunities to participate in class, less positive feedback and lower grades.
Weight bias is part of American culture, said Rebecca Puhl,deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, who has studied childhood obesity and bias. “Teachers are not immune to those attitudes,” she said. While many school districts have tried in the last 20 years to reduce childhood obesity through more nutritious meals and increased exercise, Puhl and other experts say schools also need to train teachers and students to recognize and confront the weight bias they say is hampering the education of an increasing number of children.
Some advocates argue that childhood obesity, which has steadily risen over the last 40 years, should be seen as an “academic risk factor” because of its lasting effects on educational and economic mobility. “There’s certainly been a big push for racial and ethnic diversity, for gender identity diversity, that’s so important,” said Puhl. “But weight is often left off the radar, it’s often not getting addressed.”
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Stephanie, now 18, has struggled with obesity her whole life. Within her family, being overweight never felt like a problem. But school was different.
Beginning in kindergarten, her classmates told her she looked like a Teletubby, she said. Even teachers made comments related to her weight. “If someone brought pastries for a birthday, they would ask, ‘Are you sure you want to eat that? Why don’t you try carrots and hummus?’” Stephanie recalled. Once Stephanie listened as an educator told her mother to put her on a diet. She stopped eating lunch at school after that. “When I was home, I ran to food because it was like the only place I would feel comfortable eating,” she said.
There were a handful of occasions teachers noticed her for something besides her weight. Stephanie smiled as she recalled a time when an English teacher praised an essay she wrote; when she won second place prize in a coding camp; when she was named ‘cadet of the year’ in JROTC during remote school during the pandemic. In elementary school, she received the President’s Award for Educational Achievement, designed to reward students who work hard, often in the face of obstacles to learning.
Stephanie, 18, holds an old photo of her taken in the sixth grade. Credit: Moriah Ratner for The Hechinger Report
It wasn’t enough to make her feel like she had educators on her side. “In school, they want you to confide in teachers, they made us believe that we can go to teachers for anything,” she said. “If you have no friends or if there’s no one to trust — you can always find a teacher who you can feel safe with, you can always trust them. So, I would try, but they always pushed me away.”
One interaction in particular shattered her confidence. Toward the end of seventh grade, Stephanie stayed to ask a question after class. Her teacher asked if she was a new student. “‘How did you not notice I was in your class and the entire year I turned in work?” Stephanie wondered. “That’s when I started to feel like I’m a shadow.” From that point on she stopped caring about getting good grades.
Liliana López, a spokesperson for Montgomery County Public Schools, said that teachers are not “expressly trained on weight bias,” but they “elevate all the identities individuals hold as valuable and we work with staff to identify ways they can create spaces full of affirmation, validation and significance for those identities.” Celeste Fernandez, spokesperson for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, said her organization does not offer specific training or information on weight bias.
Researchers are increasingly identifying links between poor outcomes for students with obesity and teacher’s attitudes toward kids. In 2015, Erica Kenney, an associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard University, helped lead a team that analyzed data from a representative sample of children from across the nation. The researchers examined, among other things, whether the kids’ weight gain influenced teachers’ perceptions of their abilities and their standardized test scores.
Gaining weight didn’t change a child’s test scores, the researchers found, but, based on surveys, it was significantly linked to teachers having lower perceptions of students’ ability, for both girls and boys. In other words, kids who gained weight faced a small but significant“academic penalty” from their teachers, Kenney said.
A separate study, involving 130 teachers, found that educators were more likely to give lower grades to essays if they believed a child who was obese had written them. For the study, Kristin Finn, a professor in the school of education at Canisius University, in Buffalo, New York, took four essays written at a sixth grade level and paired them with stock photographs of students who looked similar but some had been digitally altered to appear overweight. The overweight students received moderately lower scores.
As an elementary schooler, Stephanie heard comments about her weight almost every day. Credit: Moriah Ratner for The Hechinger Report
Finn found that the teachers were more likely to view the students with obesity as academically inferior, “messy” and more likely to need tutoring. In surveys, teachers also predicted that students with obesity weren’t good in other subjects such as math and social studies.
“To be able to make a judgment about somebody’s mathematical abilities based on a short essay seemed pretty remarkable,” said Finn. Yet, teachers maintained that they were personally unbiased in their evaluations. “They all think that they’re treating these children fairly,” she said.
Teachers’ perceptions of children’s academic potential matters: Their recommendations can affect not only students’ grades, but also their access to higher level courses, competitive programs, specialized camps and post-secondary opportunities including college.
Girls are at particular risk of being stigmatized for being obese, research has found. In one study, nearly a third of women who were overweight said they had had a teacher who was biased against them because of their weight. Students who face other barriers including poverty are also more likely to be penalized for being overweight, what is called a “double disadvantage.”
Covid, which hit during the spring of Stephanie’s eighth grade year, was a welcome interruption. She loved learning in the privacy of her home and not being “judged for my body,” she said.
When schools reopened in the fall of 10th grade, Stephanie couldn’t bear the thought of returning. She had gained weight during remote learning, some 100 pounds. Citing her asthma and her father’s diabetes, she applied for a waiver that would permit her to attend classes virtually. But “the real reason was because I was ashamed of what I look like,” she said.
She received the waiver and continued her high school studies at home.
After a 2022 diagnosis of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which had made her body resistant to insulin, Stephanie decided to undergo bariatric surgery. Following the operation, Stephanie lost more than half her body weight. When she returned to her high school to take exams, people were suddenly nice to her, she said. It frustrated her, she said: “I’m the same person.”
Negative perceptions of people with obesity start early. In one study, children as young as 3 who were shown drawings of people of varying weights perceived the obese people as “mean” more often than “nice.” In another study, when 5- and 6-year-olds were shown images of children of different body sizes, most said they did not want to invite the heavier children to their birthday party.
Experts argue that administrators and teachers must become more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the challenges facing children with obesity. Yolandra Hancock, a pediatrician who specializes in patients with obesity and a former teacher, said she frequently intervenes with educators on behalf of her patients with obesity. One 7-year-old boy was often late to class because he found it difficult to climb the three flights of stairs to get there.
“The assistant principal actually told him if he wasn’t so fat, he would be able to get up the stairs faster,” Hancock said. She explained that the student wasn’t walking slowly because of “laziness” but because obesity can cause a bowing of the leg bones, making it hard to navigate steps. Giving the student more time between classes or arranging for his classes to be on the same floor would have been simple fixes, she said.
In another case, an elementary school student with obesity was getting into trouble for requesting frequent bathroom breaks, a result of his large abdomen putting pressure on his bladder, similar to what happens during pregnancy. “He came close to having an accident,” Hancock said. “His teachers wouldn’t allow him to go to the restroom and would call his mother to complain that he wasn’t focusing.” She wrote to the school requesting that he be allowed to go to the restroom whenever he needed. “If you don’t allow them to do what it is that their body needs,” Hancock said, “you’re creating more barriers to them being able to learn.”
Research has found that teachers can play an important “buffering role” in reducing bullying for children with obesity. In one study, children who believed educators would step in to prevent future bullying did better in school than those who didn’t share this conviction.
But often teachers don’t intervene, said Puhl, the University of Connecticut researcher, because they believe that if students “want the teasing to stop, they need to lose weight.” Yet “body weight is not a simple issue of eating less and exercising more,” she added, but is instead a highly complex condition influenced by genetics, hormones, culture, environment and economics.Bullying and mistreatment don’t motivate people to lose weight, Puhl said, but often contribute to binge eating, reduced physical activity and weight gain.
One way to help, would be for schools to include body weight in their anti-bullying policies, Puhl said. At present, most schools’ anti-bullying policies protect children on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability and religious beliefs, “but very few mention body weight.” That lack is really shocking, she added, “because body weight is one of the most prevalent reasons that kids are bullied today.”
This spring, Stephanie went back to school to attend her graduation ceremony and receive her diploma. She still struggles with body image but is determined to put her negative experiences behind her and start fresh in college this fall, she says.
She plans to study psychology. “I want to understand people better, because I didn’t feel heard and there were a lot of things I didn’t speak about,” she said. “I just want to help people.”
This story about childhood obesity awareness was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Last April, an email went out to families in the Troy School District outside Detroit. Signed by unnamed “concerned Troy parents,” it said that a district proposal to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders was part of a longer-term district plan to completely abolish honors classes in all of its schools.
Superintendent Richard Machesky and his team were stunned. The district was indeed proposing to merge separate sixth- and seventh-grade math tracks into what it said would be a single, rigorous pathway emphasizing pre-algebra skills. In eighth grade, students could opt for Eighth Grade Math or Algebra I. But the district had no plans for changes to other grades, much less to do away with high school honors classes.
Earlier that month, Machesky and a district team of curriculum specialists and math teachers had unveiled the plan during a series of meetings with parents of current and incoming middle schoolers. Parents had largely expressed support, said Machesky: “We thought we were hitting the mark.”
Boulan Park Middle School math teacher Jordan Baines gives tips to help her students figure out a mathematics problem in Troy, Michigan. Credit: Amanda J. Cain for The Hechinger Report
No matter. The email blast spurred opponents to show up at a board workshop and a town hall, and a petition demanding that the middle-school plan be scrapped got more than 3,000 signatures. At a packed board meeting that May, more than 40 people spoke, nearly all opposed to the plan, and the comments got personal. “Are you all on drugs?” parent Andrew Sosnoski asked the members.
It’s part of the skirmish over “detracking,” or eliminating the sorting of kids by perceived ability into separate math classes. Since the mid-1980s, some education experts have supported such moves, citing researchshowing that tracking primarily serves as a marker of race or class, as Black and Hispanic students, and those from lower-income families, are steered into lower-track classes at disproportionate rates. In the last 15 years, a handful of school districts around the country have eliminated some tracked math classes.
While there’s been ample research on tracking’s negative effects, studies of positive effects resulting from detracking are scant. In perhaps the only attempt to summarize the detracking literature, a 2009 summary of 15 studies from 1972 to 2006 concluded that detracking improved academic outcomes for lower-ability students, but had no effect on average and high-ability students.
Proposals to curtail tracking often draw fiery opposition, sometimes scuttling the efforts. The Portland school district in Oregon planned to compress two levels of middle school math into one starting in 2023, but after criticism, said the issue needed more study. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, won office in 2021 on an education platform that included protecting tracking, after an outcry over a state department of education plan that included language about “improving math equity,” which some interpreted as limiting tracking. The San Francisco Unified School District, which in 2014 detracked math through ninthgrade, recently announced that it’s testing the reintroduction of a tracked system, following a lawsuit from a group of parents who alleged that detracking hurt student achievement.
The pushback, often from parents of high-track students with the time and resources to attend school board meetings, is part of why tracking, especially in math, remains common. In a 2023 survey of middle-school principals by the Rand Corporation, 39 percent said their schools group students into separate classes based on achievement.
But some places have changed their math classes with minimal backlash, and also ensured course rigor and improved academic outcomes. That’s often because they moved slowly.
Math teacher Jordan Baines of Troy, Michigan, with students at Boulan Park Middle School.
Credit: Amanda J. Cain for The Hechinger Report
Evanston Township High School, in Illinois, started detracking in 2010, collapsing several levels in two freshman-year subjects — humanities and biology — into one.
Then, for six years, the school made no other changes. That allowed leaders to work out the kinks and look at the data to make sure there were no negative effects on achievement, said Pete Bavis, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
Teachers liked the mixed-ability classes and asked to expand them to other subjects, so in 2017 the school began detracking sophomore and junior English, Geometry and Algebra II.
At South Side Middle School and High School on Long Island, detracking went even slower, taking 17 years to fully roll out. The district started in 1989 with middle-school English and social studies, and progressed to high school math and chemistry by 2006.
The pace let parents see it wasn’t hurting their children’s achievement, said former South Side High Principal Carol Burris. During that period, the proportion of students earning New York’s higher-level Regents diploma climbed from 58 percent in 1989 to 97 percent by 2005. “I always told parents, when we started moving this through the high school, ‘Look, if this isn’t working, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to hurt your kid,’” she said.
Those slow rollouts contrast with what happened in the Shaker Heights City School District in Ohio in 2020. That summer, school leaders needed to simplify schedules to accommodate a mix of online and onsite students because of the pandemic. They saw an opening to do something that had long been in the district’s strategic plan: end tracking in most fifth- through ninth-grade subjects.
But teachers complained last spring that it had gone too quickly, saying that they didn’t get enough training on teaching mixed classrooms, and that course rigor has suffered. Even supporters of detracking suggested it had happened so fast that the district couldn’t lay the groundwork with parents.
Shaker Heights Superintendent David Glasner said he understands those concerns. But he said he also heard from parents, students and instructional leaders in the district who say they’re glad the district “ripped the Band-Aid off.”
A math class at Boulan Park Middle School in Troy, Michigan, which has detracked some of its math classes. Credit: Amanda J. Cain for The Hechinger Report
In Troy, despite the pushback from parents, the school board ultimately voted 6-1 for the change, noting that the district had spent four years studying options and that teachers and outside experts largely supported the plan.
Machesky said if he had it to do over, he’d communicate with parents earlier. The anonymous email took advantage of an information void: The district had communicated the proposal only to parents of current and upcoming middle schoolers. Most who turned out to oppose it had younger kids and hadn’t been told, he said.
Leaders in Evanston and South Side both say they also framed detracking as a way to create more opportunities for all students. As part of getting rid of tracks, Evanston created an “earned honors” system. All students enroll in the same classes, but they can opt into honors credit — which boosts their class grade by a half-point, akin to extra credit — if they take and do well on additional assessments or complete additional projects.
School leaders in South Side also ensured that detracked classes remained as challenging as the higher-level classes had been previously, Burris said. To make sure students succeeded, the school arranged for teachers to tutor struggling students in a support class held two or three times a week and in a half-hour period before school, changing the bus schedules to make that work. Teachers also created optional activities for each lesson that would push higher-achieving students if they mastered the material being covered.
“You have to make sure you’re not taking something away from anyone,” said Burris.
To prepare for pushback, Evanston also formed a “rapid-response team” that answered parent questions about the new system within 24 hours and developed dozens of pages of frequently updated FAQs. That took the pressure off teachers, letting them focus on the classroom, said math department chair Dale Leibforth. By the end of the first year of detracking, the school had gotten just three complaints, all requests for fixes to narrow technical problems rather than wholesale critiques, said Bavis.
“We imagined a catastrophe,” he said. “We asked, ‘what could go wrong?’” and mapped how to handle each scenario.
In response to continued critiques of its detracking effort, last fall Shaker Heights pioneered another idea: an evening immersion experience that lets parents sit through detracked classes. The four mock sessions — two in literature and two in math — were followed by questions and answers.
Parents were respectful but probing: How do teachers work together to make the new system work? Do kids know when they’re grouped with others who are struggling in a skill? Are the books we worked with really at sixth-grade level? While there’s no data on the session’s effects, Glasner says they “absolutely did move the needle” on community opinion.
Research from the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, suggests that districts should focus on how detracking helps all students, rather than emphasizing that the efforts are aimed to advance equity and benefit students in lower tracks, said senior fellow Halley Potter. That approach gives parents of higher-track kids the idea that their own child’s academics are being sacrificed to help others.
The Troy district, in Michigan, has moved to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders. Credit: Amanda J. Cain for The Hechinger Report
That fits with what Machesky thinks happened last spring in Troy. “We kind of got caught up with the equity arguments that were raging in districts nationally at the time,” he said.
After last May’s board vote, opponents launched a recall petition against three board members who’d voted in favor of the change. To get on the ballot, it needed 8,000 signatures but got fewer than half that.
Since then, the opposition there has gone silent.
Last fall the district held “math nights” to talk about the new system and let parents ask questions. The students have settled in. “I have received zero negative communication from parents — no emails, no phone calls — zero,” said Machesky.
Whether detracking spreads may depend on the experience of parents and students. Back on Long Island, parent Mindy Roman’s three children graduated from South Side High in 2009, 2012 and 2018, and she said she’s glad they were in classes with diverse groups of students. Her children didn’t have classes with a Black student until middle school because of the way elementary school lines were drawn, she said. And all three did well in the district’s detracked courses.
But Roman said she’s heard from current parents with the opposite experience. “It’s not ‘oh my God, my child is getting access to these unbelievable opportunities,’ but more like, ‘my kid is gonna get a 70 in a class when they could get a 90. I don’t want them to be put under that much pressure.’”
John Murphy, who was principal at South Side High from 2015 to 2023, said he started hearing around 2018 from people worried about the effects of the workload on their children’s mental health, and the school responded by giving less homework. Even so, “students are working way harder than they did 20 years ago,” said Murphy, now an assistant for human resources to Superintendent Matthew Gaven.
Still, academic outcomes at South Side have improved since the district eliminated tracking. In 2021-22, 89 percent of South Side graduates earned the highest-level diploma the state offers — the advanced Regents diploma — compared with 42 percent in New York state as a whole. Another 9 percent earned the Regents diploma.
That said, the district recently made an accommodation. Post-Covid, a small group of parents of middle schoolers told the district they didn’t think their children were ready for Algebra I because of the pandemic-era learning interruptions. So South Side Middle School retracked eighth-grade math starting in the 2023-24 school year, offering parents the choice of Algebra I or a grade-level math course. Gaven said that only around 7 percent of parents of eighth graders asked for that option, and that demand for it might taper as schools return to normal.
It’s an opt-in model far different from those that direct students into lower-level courses because of test scores or teacher recommendations, said Gaven. “We know our kids can handle algebra, but we respect our parents as partners and wanted to give them a voice and an option.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
LOS ANGELES — When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.
Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat.
Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”
Being listened to and treated with empathy, Valladares said, “makes me feel better.” Better enough to put himself in his teacher’s shoes, consider what he could have done differently — and offer an apology.
This new way of responding to disrespectful behavior doesn’t always work, according to van der Fluit. But “overall,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”
In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.
A state law prohibiting willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3 went into effect in 2015; five years later, the ban was extended through eighth grade. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law adding high schoolers to the prohibition. It takes effect this July.
A Hechinger Report investigation reveals that the national picture is quite different. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.
As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.
From 2011-12 to 2021-22, as suspensions for willful defiance fell from 4,500 to near zero, suspensions across all categories fell too, to 1,633, a more than 90 percent drop, according to state data. Those numbers, plus in-depth research on the ban, show that educators in LAUSD didn’t simply find different justifications for suspending kids once willful defiance was off limits. Racial disparities in discipline remain, but they have been reduced.
Meanwhile, according to state survey data, students were less likely to report feeling unsafe in school. During the 2021-22 school year for example, 5 percent of LAUSD freshmen said they felt unsafe in school, compared with more than three times that nine years earlier. As for academics, state and federal data suggest that the district’s performance didn’t fall after the disciplinary shift, although the state switched tests over that decade, making precise comparison difficult.
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
“It really points out that we can do this differently, and do it better,” said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.
A pile of research demonstrates that losing class time negatively affects students. Suspensions are tied to lower grades, lower odds of graduating high school and a higher risk of being arrested or unemployed as an adult. Losen said this is in part because students who are suspended not only miss out on educational opportunities, but also lose access to the web of services many schools offer, including mental health treatment and meals.
That harm is less justifiable for minor transgressions, he added. And “what makes it even less justifiable is that there are alternative responses that work better and involve more adult interface for the student, not less.”
In part because of this research, Los Angeles, and then California, increasingly focused on disciplinary alternatives as they eliminated or narrowed the use of suspensions for willful defiance.
A “restorative rounds” poster on the wall of Brooklyn Avenue School in East L.A. creates a protocol with steps and “sentence-starters” that teachers and students can use to process conflict, reconnect and be heard. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.
The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.
All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.
That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.
At William Tell Aggeler High School, Robert Hill, the school’s dean, calmly shadows an angry, upset student, prepared to help restore calm rather than impose a punishment. His response is part of LAUSD’s transition to a more positive, relational form of discipline meant to keep students from losing educational minutes. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.
The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.
Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.
And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance.
LAUSD’s office of Positive Behavior Interventions & Support/Restorative Practices works with schools to develop and implement behavioral expectations. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Now, most days, van der Fluit sees things differently — but not always.
Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”
That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”
Critics warned that eliminating suspensions for “willful defiance” would render schools more chaotic and less effective, but Maywood Academy High School is calmer than it used to be, according to teachers and principal Maricella Garcia. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”
In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”
Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.
“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.
District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.
Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”
When restorative justice coordinator Marcus Van approached a student who was out of class without permission, he led with curiosity rather than threatening suspension. Maywood is a calmer school more than a decade after LAUSD shifted to restorative practices and positive behavior interventions and supports, teachers and administrators say. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”
Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”
Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”
Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”
Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.
LAUSD’s office of Positive Behavior Interventions & Support/Restorative Practices falls under the “joy and wellness” pillar of the district’s strategic plan. Information pushed out by the PBIS/RP office aims to help students and staff connect in a positive, forward-looking manner. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”
The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.
Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.
In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.
“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”
This story about PBIS was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for theHechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
OXNARD, Calif. — On a Wednesday morning this December, Dale Perizzolo’s math class at Adolfo Camarillo High School is anything but quiet. Students chat about the data analysis they’ve performed on their cellphone usage over a week, while Perizzolo walks around the room fielding their questions.
The students came up with the project themselves and designed a Google form to track their phone time, including which apps they used most. They also determined the research questions they’d ask of the data — such as whether social media use during class reduces comprehension and retention.
“It’s more real-world math,” said Nicolas Garcia, a senior in Perizzolo’s class. “We have the chance and freedom to choose what we’re doing our datasets on, and he teaches us how we’re going to work and complement it [in] our daily lives.”
Nicolas Garcia, a senior at Adolfo Camarillo High School, analyzes data that he gathered on his cellphone use during the school day. He said he plans to use the skills he learned in the class when in college. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Across town, students in Ruben Jacquez’s class at Rio Mesa High School use coding software to compile and clean data they’ve collected on student stress levels. A few miles away at Channel Islands High School, Miguel Hernandez’s students use pie and bar charts to analyze a dataset about how social media influences people’s shopping habits.
Perizzolo, Jacquez and Hernandez are among the eight math teachers of an increasingly popular data science course offered at most schools in the Oxnard Union High School district, an economically diverse school system northwest of Los Angeles, where 80 percent of students identify as Hispanic. The district rolled out the class in fall 2020, in an attempt to offer an alternative math course to students who might struggle in traditional junior and senior math courses such as Algebra II, Pre-Calculus and Calculus.
California has been at the center of a heated debate over what math knowledge students really need to succeed in college and careers. With math scores falling nationwide, some educators have argued that the standard algebra-intensive math pathway is outdated and needs a revamp, both to engage more students and to help them develop relevant skills in a world increasingly reliant on data. At least 17 states now offer data science (an interdisciplinary field that combines computer programming, math and statistics) as a high school math option, according to the group Data Science for Everyone. Two states — Oregon and Ohio — offer it as an alternative to Algebra II.
But other math educators have decried a move away from Algebra II, which they argue remains core to math instruction and necessary for students to succeed in STEM careers and beyond. In California, that disagreement erupted in October 2020, after the group that sets admission requirements for the state’s public university system (known as A-G) announced it would allow students to substitute data science for Algebra II to help more students qualify for college. Math professors, advocates and even some high school educators argued that the state was watering down standards and setting students up for failure in college.
Then, in July last year, the group reversed its earlier decision, and in February released new recommendations reiterating that data science courses (and, to the surprise of some experts, even long-approved statistics classes) cannot be used as an alternative to Algebra II. It remains unclear how the decision will reshape college admissions; additional guidance is expected in May.
Ruben Jacquez helps his students in a data science class at Rio Mesa High School as they work on their project on student stress levels. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
In Oxnard, educators say they have been left in the dark about how these decisions affect course offerings for their students. They argue that, more than ever, students need real-world math to help them succeed in the subject, and that the expansion of data science — some 500 Oxnard district students have taken it to date — has reoriented teachers’ and students’ approach to math.
“Data science is changing their view of math,” said Jay Sorensen, Oxnard’s educational technology coordinator, who helped design the class. “It changed their perspective, or their view of what math is, because they maybe didn’t enjoy math or were frustrated with math or hated math before.”
Many kids in Oxnard stop taking any math after junior year of high school and the district has been trying to fix this for almost a decade. In 2015, Tom McCoy, then the assistant superintendent of education services, jokingly asked Sonny Sajor, the district’s math instructional specialist, “Can I get some math for poets?”
That started a conversation on what math classes might benefit and engage high schoolers who struggled in the subject and who didn’t plan to pursue science or math fields or attend a four-year college, said McCoy, who became Oxnard’s superintendent in 2020.
Stefanie Davison, the district’s first teacher to teach data science, helps senior Emma-Dai Valenzuela (left) at Pacific High School. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
“Too many kids that dislike math would stop taking math the minute they could,” said Sajor, who co-designed the course at Oxnard. In the year before the district launched Data Science, only about 45 percent of students who took Math I in ninth grade made it to Math III by their junior year.
Inspired by a University of California, Los Angeles, seminar they attended on data science for high schoolers, Sajor and Sorensen designed the new course and partnered on it with the ed tech vendor Bootstrap World. Oxnard’s first data science classes generated enough student interest that the district expanded the course to more schools, and its popularity has continued to grow. Perizzolo’s class, for example, was meant to have 30 students but enrolls 39; he says he won’t turn away a student who signs up for a math class.
But not all educators in Oxnard were on board. Some math teachers, for example, questioned whether the Data Science course — which had been approved as an advanced statistics course equivalent to Advanced Placement statistics courses — was really equivalent to an advanced math course. They noted that the statistics content in the course was at a ninth-grade level, Sajor said.
Oxnard Union’s data science teachers, though, say they’ve seen benefits.
“It’s giving kids exposure to really practical math, and it’s also creative,” said Allison Ottie Halstead, who teaches Data Science along with Honors Pre-Calculus and A.P. Statistics at Rancho Campana High School.
Alicia Bettencourt, a data science teacher at Hueneme High School, walks her students through a Bootstrap World workbook lesson on functions. Bettencourt says teaching the course has made her rethink how she teaches her other math classes, including Algebra II. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Alicia Bettencourt, who teaches Data Science at Hueneme High School, said the course has helped her to “incorporate more real-world problems, more authentic assessments, when I’m teaching” other math classes including Algebra II.
Most of Oxnard’s Data Science classes enroll a mix of students who are using the course to fulfill their required third year of math and those who’ve already taken Algebra II. According to district data, students who took Data Science as juniors in the 2022-2023 year were more likely to sign up for a math class their senior year. (Only about 10 percent of those students enrolled in Math III, an integrated math class that’s equivalent to Algebra II; larger shares enrolled in Statistics, Math for Finance Literacy and other classes). Meanwhile, the share of students receiving a D or F in Math III has dropped slightly since the Data Science course was introduced in 2020, the district said.
Nizcialey Dimapilis, a senior in Hernandez’s class at Channel Islands High School, said she is taking Data Science and A.P. Calculus simultaneously to prepare for computer engineering courses in college. “I thought this class would be more useful because it involves coding, which is completely kind of new to me,” Dimapilis said. The course has helped her understand graphs and create and read data in her other classes as well, she said.
Aaron Lira, a senior at Hueneme High School, said he finds data science interesting because he is learning skills that many companies use. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Some students said it helped them grasp math concepts they’d been introduced to in past classes and made them more interested in pursuing math in the future. Jaya Richardson, a senior taking Data Science at Oxnard High School, said she doesn’t consider herself “a math person.” As a junior, she took Math III and barely passed with a D.
Richardson considered repeating the class for a higher grade, but her counselor suggested Data Science instead. She said she’s happy with the decision, and even plans to pursue a degree in biology at a UC or CSU.
“This is way better,” she said of the Data Science course. “It’s still stressful, it’s still hard, but it’s more beneficial. We still do math in here, but it breaks it down in a way where I’m able to understand it without being overwhelmed.”
But many STEM professors are worried about the consequences of experiments like Oxnard’s.
Jelani Nelson, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that most data science courses offered in high schools are low level and don’t comply with UC and CSU college admission criteria that alternatives to Algebra II build on students’ earlier math coursework.
Without an understanding of what he calls “foundational math” — Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II — he says students won’t succeed in college courses in computer science, math, technology, economics and even art (perspective drawing, for example, uses geometry and algebra). Introductory college classes in data science also build on those math concepts, he said, so students who’ve taken data science in high school but not Algebra II are unlikely to succeed in the subject.
Using what’s known as the “question formulation technique,” or QFT, students wrote inquiry-based questions at the start of their data analysis project in Dale Perizzolo’s data science class at Adolfo Camarillo High School. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Many four-year colleges don’t teach Algebra II, Nelson said, so there’s little opportunity to make up that work later. “If you want to get back on track,” he said, “how are you going to do it?”
Adrian Mims, founder of the Calculus Project, a nonprofit that works to increase the number of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and low-income students in advanced mathematics, said swapping out data science for Algebra II has unintended consequences.
Standardized tests including the SAT and college math placement exams cover Algebra II, he said. He said he worries that students who opt for data science instead will be stuck in remedial math courses “not because they can’t learn the math, but because they made decisions in high school that deprive them of the opportunity to learn the content for them to do well.”
Rather than replacing Algebra II, data science concepts could be infused into Algebra II courses, and data science courses that include some Algebra II and geometry could be offered as electives to students who’ve already completed Algebra II, Nelson and others argue.
Others, though, don’t share those concerns. Pamela Burdman, founder of Just Equations, a nonprofit rethinking the role of traditional math pathways in high school, points to data showing that many students who take Algebra II in high school struggle through the subject and learn little. She said emerging research suggests that courses like data science could have “more potential for bringing students into STEM” than the traditional preparatory math courses.
Despite the recent focus on the UC admissions requirements, only about 400 applicants out of roughly 206,000 in the last admissions cycle listed that they’d taken data science or statistics in lieu of Algebra II, she noted.
“I do worry that the debate over data science versus Algebra II is sort of a distraction,” she said.
Zarek Drozda, director of Data Science for Everyone, the national initiative based at the University of Chicago, agreed. “In the 21st century, if we can’t find opportunities to teach students about data, data science and AI basics, that is a huge problem,” he said.
Teachers and school guidance counselors in Oxnard are wary of wading into the math debate with their higher ed peers. But they aren’t afraid to voice their discontent with what they view as a disconnect between students’ needs and higher education.
“They’ve always moved the goal posts and I don’t know if they ever think about the students,” Hugo Tapia, a guidance counselor at Adolfo Camarillo High School, said about the state’s A-G university system.
Hugo Tapia is a guidance counselor at Adolfo Camarillo High School. “They’ve always moved the goal posts and I don’t know if they ever think about the students,” he said about the state’s four-year university system. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Daniel Cook, a learning, instruction and technology coach at Camarillo, said that students come into high school behind in math and that the pandemic only made the problem worse. Yet colleges still expect students to have mastered Algebra II concepts and shut the door on those who haven’t.
“If one A-G math is the only reason why a kid doesn’t get into college, we’re robbing those kids,” he said.
Cook said that at Camarillo High School, some 44 percent of sophomores are not on track to be A-G eligible because of math, so they’re getting a message early on that they’re not college material. By senior year, the figure is about 25 percent.
Traditional math curriculum “is essentially focused on preparing students for STEM pathways in college,” Cook said. The July vote and subsequent policy recommendations to nix data science as an option for college applicants, he said, are a “slap in the face to students who have interests that are not STEM related.”
Educators in Oxnard are trying to cope with the uncertainty created by the state’s higher education system. With data science no longer counting toward college admission, Oxnard will eventually limit the course to students who’ve already taken, or are taking, Algebra II, according to Sajor. The district is also considering a pilot course that would integrate Algebra II and Data Science.
Such a course might ultimately be better for the district, Sajor said, because it would help more students engage with Algebra II concepts while also introducing them to coding and data science. “It’s maybe a step back, but it also might be two steps forward,” he said.
Still, current data science students, like Emma-Dai Valenzuela, say the class in its current form has been invaluable. A senior in teacher Stefanie Davison’s class at Pacifica High School, Valenzuela said it has allowed her to fulfill her graduation requirements while actually succeeding in a math class.
She transferred into the class after struggling in Math III, the integrated Algebra II course, she said. Valenzuela plans to join the Navy before attending college, and said her recruiters told her this course would offer a basic understanding of coding and math she can build on later.
“This is more hands-on,” she said. “We’re constantly doing new things.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Durante años, se sentó en las reuniones con los docentes de educación especial de su hijo, luchando por mantener una sonrisa mientras entendía poco de lo que decían. En las ocasiones poco comunes en que se pedía ayuda a otros docentes que hablaban el idioma de Barrera, el español, las conversaciones seguían siendo vacilantes porque no eran intérpretes calificados.
Pero cuando su hijo Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, Barrera decidió invitar a un voluntario bilingüe de una organización local sin ánimo de lucro para que se sentara con ella y recordara sus derechos al equipo escolar.
“Quería a alguien de mi lado”, dijo Barrera, cuyo hijo tiene autismo, a través de un intérprete. “Durante todo este tiempo, no nos estaban facilitando las cosas. Eso provocó muchas lágrimas”.
Independientemente del idioma que hablen los padres en casa, tienen el derecho civil de recibir información importante de los educadores de sus hijos en un idioma que entiendan. En el caso de los estudiantes con discapacidad, la ley federal es aún más clara: las escuelas “deben tomar todas las medidas necesarias”, incluidos los servicios de interpretación y traducción, para que los padres puedan participar de forma significativa en la educación de sus hijos.
Pero, a veces, las escuelas de todo el país no prestan esos servicios.
Ian, de 18 años, en el centro, con su madre, Mireya Barrera, y su padre, Enrique Chavez, en Seattle el 8 de octubre. Barrera dijo que, a menudo, se sentía excluida del aprendizaje de Ian. Credit: Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times
Las familias que no hablan inglés se ven obligadas a asistir a las reuniones sobre el progreso de sus hijos sin poder opinar ni preguntar a los educadores cómo pueden ayudar. Las diferencias culturales y lingüísticas pueden convencer a algunos padres de no cuestionar lo que ocurre en la escuela, un desequilibrio de poder que, según los defensores, hace que algunos niños se queden sin un apoyo fundamental. En caso de ser necesario, no es infrecuente que las escuelas encarguen a los estudiantes bilingües la interpretación para sus familias, poniéndolos en la posición de describir sus propios defectos a sus padres y tutores.
“Eso es totalmente inapropiado, en todos los sentidos posibles, y poco realista”, dice Diane Smith Howard, abogada principal de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Si al niño no le va especialmente bien en una asignatura académica, ¿por qué confiaría en que su hijo adolescente se lo contara?”.
Los distritos escolares culpan a la falta de recursos. Dicen que no tienen dinero para contratar a más intérpretes o a agencias de servicios lingüísticos y que, aunque lo tuvieran, no hay suficientes intérpretes calificados para hacer el trabajo.
En Washington y en algunos otros estados, la cuestión ha empezado a recibir más atención. Los legisladores estatales de Olympia presentaron este año una ley bipartidista para reforzar los derechos civiles federales en el código estatal. Los sindicatos de docentes de Seattle y Chicago negociaron recientemente, y consiguieron, servicios de interpretación durante las reuniones de educación especial. Y los distritos escolares se enfrentan a una creciente amenaza de demandas de los padres, o incluso a una investigación federal, si no se toman en serio el acceso lingüístico.
Aun así, los esfuerzos por ampliar el acceso lingüístico en la educación especial se enfrentan a una ardua batalla, debido al escaso número de intérpretes capacitados, la falta de cumplimiento a nivel estatal y el escaso financiamiento del Congreso (a pesar de que en 1974 prometió cubrir casi la mitad del costo adicional que supone para las escuelas proporcionar servicios de educación especial, el gobierno federal nunca lo ha hecho). El proyecto de ley bipartidista de Washington para ofrecer más protecciones a las familias fracasó repentinamente, después de que los legisladores estatales lo despojaran de disposiciones clave y los defensores retiraran su apoyo.
El sistema de educación especial puede ser “increíblemente difícil para todos”, dijo Ramona Hattendorf, directora de defensa de The Arc of King County, que promueve los derechos de las personas con discapacidad. “Luego todo se agrava cuando se introduce el idioma en la mezcla”. En todo el país, aproximadamente 1 de cada 10 estudiantes que califican para recibir servicios de educación especial también se identifican como estudiantes de inglés, según datos federales de educación, y esa proporción está creciendo. Cerca de 791,000 estudiantes de inglés participaron en educación especial en 2020, un aumento de casi el 30 % desde 2012. En más de una docena de estados, incluido Washington, el aumento fue aún mayor.
A medida que crece su número, también aumenta la frustración de sus padres con los servicios lingüísticos.
Ian sostiene la mano de su madre, Mireya Barrera, mientras su padre, Enrique Chavez, los sigue mientras los tres llegan a un evento de voluntariado de la fraternidad de la Universidad de Washington para personas con. Credit: Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times
Durante el año escolar 2021-22, la defensora del pueblo en materia educación del estado de Washington recibió casi 1,200 quejas de los padres sobre las escuelas. Su principal preocupación, en todos los grupos raciales y demográficos, fue el acceso y la inclusión en la educación especial. La defensora del pueblo principal en materia de educación, Jinju Park, calcula que entre el 50 % y el 70 % de las llamadas que recibe la agencia son sobre educación especial, y que el 80 % de ellas son de clientes que necesitan servicios de interpretación.
Mientras que la mayoría de los estados conceden a las escuelas un máximo de 60 días desde que se remite a un estudiante a los servicios de educación especial para determinar si califica, las escuelas de Washington pueden tardar hasta medio año escolar. Y si un padre necesita servicios de interpretación o traducción, la espera puede durar aún más.
“Las leyes actuales no apoyan la participación plena de los padres”, escribió Park a los legisladores estatales en apoyo a la primera versión del proyecto de ley 1305 de la Cámara de Representantes, propuesta que finalmente fracasó. “Los padres para los que el inglés puede que no sea su lengua materna”, añadió, “a menudo, se ven abrumados por la información e incapaces de participar de forma significativa en el proceso”.
Barrera, cuyo hijo asistió al distrito escolar de Auburn, al sur de Seattle, dijo que, a menudo, se sentía excluida de su aprendizaje.
Mireya Barrera sostiene la mano de su hijo Ian, el 8 de octubre. La familia ha estado luchando por conseguir servicios de educación especial para Ian, al tiempo que lidia con la barrera lingüística Credit: Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times
En el kínder, tras el diagnóstico de autismo de Ian, su equipo de educación especial llegó a la conclusión de que necesitaba un paraeducador asignado a tiempo completo, dijo Barrera. Recurrió a Google Translate y a otros padres para que la ayudaran a redactar correos electrónicos preguntando por qué no recibió ese apoyo hasta tercer grado. Sus solicitudes de copias traducidas de documentos legales quedaron en gran parte sin respuesta, mencionó, hasta que un director le dijo que la traducción era demasiado costosa.
Cuando Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, el acoso escolar y su seguridad se convirtieron en la principal preocupación de Barrera. Una vez llegó a casa sin un mechón de pelo, cuenta. A pesar de las repetidas llamadas y correos electrónicos a sus docentes, Barrera dijo que nunca recibió una explicación.
Además, cuando pidió ir a la escuela para observar, un docente le dijo: “Ni siquiera habla inglés. ¿Qué sentido tiene?”. Vicki Alonzo, portavoz del distrito de Auburn, afirma que el auge de la población inmigrante en la región en los últimos años ha llevado al distrito a destinar más recursos a ayudar a las familias cuya lengua materna no es el inglés. Casi un tercio de sus estudiantes son multilingües, dijo, y hablan alrededor de 85 idiomas diferentes en casa.
En el año 2019-20, el distrito gastó alrededor de $175,000 en servicios de interpretación y traducción, dijo; el año escolar pasado, esa cifra fue de más de $450,000.
Alonzo señaló que el distrito no recibió financiamiento adicional para esos servicios, que incluyeron alrededor de 1,500 reuniones con intérpretes y la traducción de más de 3,000 páginas de documentos.
El problema del acceso lingüístico es “un fenómeno nacional”, dijo Smith Howard, de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Es un problema de recursos y también una cuestión de respeto, dignidad y comprensión, que todos los padres deberían recibir”.
Los docentes también están frustrados.
El sindicato de docentes de Seattle protestó y retrasó el inicio de las clases el año pasado por unas demandas que incluían servicios de interpretación y traducción en educación especial. El contrato final, que dura hasta 2025, exige que los miembros del personal tengan acceso a diversos servicios que proporcionen traducción telefónica (un intérprete en directo) o de texto (en el caso de documentos escritos). El objetivo de esta disposición es garantizar que no se pida al personal bilingüe que traduzca si no forma parte de su trabajo.
Los docentes dicen que estas herramientas han sido útiles, pero solo en cierta medida: en ocasiones poco comunes hay intérpretes telefónicos disponibles para los idiomas menos comunes, como el amárico, y son frecuentes los problemas técnicos, como la interrupción de las llamadas.
La disponibilidad de intérpretes “no es tan constante como nos gustaría”, afirma Ibi Holiday, docente de educación especial de la escuela primaria Rising Star de Seattle.
También hay una cuestión de contexto. Es posible que los traductores no tengan experiencia en educación especial, por lo que las familias pueden salir de una reunión sin entender todas las opciones, lo cual puede ralentizar el proceso significativamente.
“Para muchas familias, la escuela de su país funciona de forma completamente diferente”, explica Mari Rico, directora del Centro de Desarrollo Infantil Jose Marti de El Centro de la Raza, un programa bilingüe de educación temprana. “Traducir no bastaba; tenía que enseñarles el sistema”.
Muchas escuelas del distrito de Seattle cuentan con personal multilingüe, pero el número y la diversidad de idiomas hablados no es constante, afirma Rico. Y existe un mayor riesgo de que el caso de un estudiante se pase por alto o se estanque debido a las barreras lingüísticas. Dijo que ha tenido que intervenir cuando las familias han pasado meses sin una reunión del programa de educación individualizada, incluso cuando su hijo estaba recibiendo servicios.
Hattendorf, de The Arc del condado de King, dijo que las soluciones tecnológicas más económicas, como las que utiliza Seattle, ofrecen cierta ayuda, pero su calidad varía mucho. Y los servicios pueden no ofrecer a los padres tiempo suficiente para procesar información complicada y hacer preguntas de seguimiento, explicó.
Al sur de Seattle, los Barrera decidieron cambiar a Ian de escuela secundaria.
Se graduó este año, pero la ley federal garantiza sus servicios de educación especial tres años más. Ian asiste ahora a un programa de transición para estudiantes con discapacidad, donde aprenderá habilidades para la vida, como conseguir un trabajo.
“Sabemos que, con ayuda, puede hacer lo que quiera”, dijo Barrera.
Ya, añadió, “todo es diferente. Los docentes intentan encontrar la mejor manera de comunicarse conmigo”.
Este artículo sobre los servicios de interpretación fue elaborado por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin ánimo de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, en colaboración con The Seattle Times.
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Blue dots represent the 75 schools that were eligible for the right-to-read settlement program of training and funds. (Source: Sarah Novicoff and Thomas Dee, Figure A1 of “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms” working paper.)
In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low- income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, before the courts resolved that legal question, the litigants settled the case in 2020.
The settlement itself was noteworthy. The state initially agreed to give an extra $50 million to 75 elementary schools with the worst reading scores in the state to improve how they were teaching reading. Targeted at children who were just learning to read in kindergarten through third grade, the settlement amounted to a little more than $1,000 extra per student. Teachers were trained in evidence-based ways of teaching reading, including an emphasis on phonics and vocabulary, and encouraged to use them. (A few of the 75 original schools didn’t participate for various reasons.)
A pair of Stanford University education researchers studied whether the settlement made a difference, and their conclusion was that yes, it did. Third graders’ reading scores rose in 2022 and 2023, equivalent to an extra 25 percent of a year of learning, compared to students in schools that weren’t eligible for the settlement payments. Roughly 36 percent of the third graders in these schools reached Level 2 or higher on the California state reading tests, up from about 30 percent before the settlement. (Level 2 equates to slightly below grade-level proficiency with “standard nearly met” but is above the lowest Level 1 “standard not met.”) It’s noteworthy that reading achievement in these schools rose during the post-pandemic period even as reading achievement suffered nationwide. (State testing of all students doesn’t begin until third grade and so there was no standard measure for younger kindergarten, first and second graders.)
The test score gains might seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 60 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test. But these reading gains are meaningful for a real-life classroom experience, not a laboratory experiment or a small pilot program, which involved more than 7,000 third graders over two years. The researchers characterized the reading improvements as larger than those seen in 90 percent of large-scale classroom interventions, according to a 2023 study. They also conducted a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the $50 million literacy program created by the settlement was 13 times more effective than a typical dollar spent at schools.
“I wouldn’t call the results super large. I would call them cost effective,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, but attended a presentation of the working paper in November.
The working paper, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.
Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who conducted the analysis with doctoral student Sarah Novicoff, says that the reading improvements at the weakest schools in California bolster the evidence for the so-called “science of reading” approach, which has become associated with phonics instruction, but also includes pre-phonics sound awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary building and comprehension skills. Thus far, the best real-world evidence for the science of reading comes from Mississippi, where reading scores dramatically improved after schools changed how they taught reading. But there’s also been a debate over whether the state’s policy to hold weak readers back in third grade has been a bigger driver of the test score gains than the instructional changes.
The structure of the right-to-read settlement offers a possible blueprint for how to bring evidence-based teaching practices into more classrooms, says Stanford’s Dee. School administrators and teachers both received training in the science of reading approach, but then schools were given the freedom to create their own plans and spend their share of the settlement funds as they saw fit within certain guidelines. The Sacramento County Office of Education served as an outside administrator, approving plans and overseeing them.
“How to drive research to inform practice within schools and within classrooms is the central problem we face in education policy,” said Dee. “When I look at this program, it’s an interesting push and pull of how to do that. Schools were encouraged to do their own planning and tailor what they were doing to their own circumstances. But they also had oversight from a state-designated agency that made sure the money was getting where it was supposed to, that they were doing things in a well-conceived way.”
Some schools hired reading coaches to work with teachers on a regular basis. Others hired more aides to tutor children in small groups. Schools generally elected to spend most of the settlement money on salaries for new staff and extra compensation for current teachers to undergo retraining and less on new instructional materials, such as books or curriculums. By contrast, New York City’s current effort to reform reading instruction began with new curriculum requirements and teachers are complaining that they haven’t received the training to make the new curriculum work.
It’s unclear if this combination of retraining and money would be as effective in typical schools. The lowest performing schools that received the money tended to be staffed by many younger, rookie teachers who were still learning their craft. These new teachers may have been more open to adopting a new science of reading approach than veteran teachers who have years of experience teaching another way.
That teacher retraining victory may foretell a short-lived success story for the students in these schools. The reason that there were so many new teachers is because teachers quickly burn out and quit high-poverty schools. The newly trained teachers in the science of reading may soon quit too. There’s a risk that all the investment in better teaching could soon evaporate. I’ll be curious to see their reading scores a few years from now.
This story abouttheright to read settlementwas written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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It pains Tim Odegard that four decades after a misguided approach to diagnosing dyslexia kept him from getting help in school, thousands of children across the U.S. are needlessly suffering for the same reason.
During the initial weeks of first grade, Odegard’s struggles with reading went undetected as he memorized words that classmates read aloud before him. The strategy worked so well that his teacher moved him to the position of “first reader.” It then became apparent that the six-year-old not only wasn’t the strongest reader in the class—he couldn’t read at all. The teacher dispatched him to a low-skill group. “It just kind of went downhill from there,” Odegard, now 47, recalled.
Through sheer determination and reliance on his prodigious memory, Odegard eventually memorized enough words to get by and earned decent grades, although they would never come easily. “I compensated for my reading and spelling problems by staying up until 1 or 2 a.m. to get things done,” he said. He never received extra help or special education services from his Houston-area school district. Instead, a couple of teachers seemed to doubt his intelligence. When Odegard was the first student in his school to solve a complex murder mystery puzzle, one of them said he must have guessed.
It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that Odegard came to understand why his teachers thought so poorly of his abilities. In 2004, as a new Ph.D., he told his mother that the National Institutes of Health had awarded him a postdoctoral fellowship to study dyslexia, a condition he’d long suspected he had. She shared that when he was in third grade, school officials had used a so-called discrepancy model that compared intelligence quotient (IQ) with reading performance to rule that he didn’t have a learning disability.
“I was thought to be too stupid to be dyslexic,” said Odegard, now editor in chief of the Annals of Dyslexia and chair of excellence in dyslexic studies at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Up to around 20 percent of the U.S. population has dyslexia, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to decipher and spell written words. Someone with the disability might omit short words such as “and” and “the” while reading aloud, for example, or read “dog” as “god”—even if they speak normally in conversation. The condition impedes a person’s ability to process written information and can negatively affect their career and well-being. Yet only a fraction of affected students get a dyslexia diagnosis or the specialized assistance that can help them manage their difficulty reading.
One reason so many diagnoses are missed is that thousands of schools in the U.S. continue to use an iteration of the discrepancy model to test children for learning disabilities. Moreover, for a multitude of reasons, including biases in IQ tests, a disproportionate number of those diagnosed—and helped—have been white and middle- to upper-class.
“It’s unfair, it’s discriminatory, and it disadvantages already economically disadvantaged kids,” said Jack Fletcher, co-founder of the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities in Houston and one of the first scientists to question the discrepancy model’s validity.
The model has shaped decades of policy regarding whose literacy is considered vital and worthy of extra help and investment—and whose is not. It is rooted in long-standing misconceptions about dyslexia. Reforming how the condition is defined and diagnosed could help many more children learn to read.
A cross-section of a brain scan sits on the desk of Tim Odegard, a professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Dyslexia is now understood to be related to the way the brain handles the connection between letters and sounds, not IQ. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
Speaking comes naturally to most children, being a gift of human evolution, but reading and writing are inventions that must be consciously and painstakingly learned. No one is born with neural circuits for connecting the sounds of speech to squiggles on paper. Instead, when someone learns to read, their brain improvises, splicing and joining sections of preexisting circuits for processing vision and speech to form a new “reading circuit.” To read the (written) word “dog,” for example, a typical brain will disaggregate the word into its constituent letters, “d,” “o” and “g,” and then summon from memory the sound fragments, or phonemes, associated with each letter. It aggregates these phonemes into the sound “dog” and retrieves the meaning of the word that matches that sound. Most brains eventually learn to do all these steps so fast that the action seems automatic. Some written words become so familiar that the speech circuit eventually gets bypassed, so that there is a direct association between the word as seen on paper or on a screen and its meaning.
Because human brains are organized in diverse ways, some people’s reading circuits end up being inefficient. Dyslexia is the most common reading disability. People with the condition, which is partly linked to genetics, often have less gray matter and brain activity in the parietotemporal region of the brain’s left hemisphere, associated with connecting the sounds of speech to the shapes of printed text.
The severity and manifestations of dyslexia can vary from person to person, but children with the learning disability benefit most from early help with explications of the sound structures underlying words. For those who continue to struggle in school, the ideal instruction is one-on-one or in a small group with a trained teacher who provides intensive and systematic assistance in making connections between written words and sounds. Learning the rules—and the many, many exceptions—of the English language is particularly important, because children with dyslexia are typically unable to pick them up through mere exposure to text. The letter “a” can be pronounced five different ways in English, whereas in Spanish, for instance, vowels almost always have the same pronunciation.
With the right kind of instruction, most children with dyslexia can learn how to read. In part because of an accident of scientific history, however, this essential assistance has been far more available to kids who score higher on IQ and other cognitive tests. An early case report of dyslexia, published in the British Medical Journal in 1896, helped to define the disorder as an unexpected deficit in otherwise “bright” children. The study described a 14-year-old referred to as Percy F. “He has always been a bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others,” wrote the doctor who examined Percy, “yet in writing from dictation he comes to grief over any but the simplest words.”
That incipient definition characterized a lot of early thinking about dyslexia. It was inadvertently codified in school systems through influential studies led by British psychiatrists Michael Rutter and William Yule on the Isle of Wight in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Rutter and Yule are well regarded for being among the first in the field to focus deeply on children and for their groundbreaking work in autism and post-traumatic stress disorder. When devising a definition of “reading disability” based on the population of nine- to 11-year-olds on the island, the researchers distinguished between poor readers who read at levels predicted by their IQs and those who did not, looking for evidence of dyslexia only in those in the latter group.
The studies came just as the U.S. was creating its own special education categories and definitions to prepare for the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975. When it came to learning disabilities, experts relied heavily on the idea that for a learning disability to be present, reading performance had to fall short of IQ.
Guidelines put out by the U.S. government in 1977 asked that schools look for a “severe discrepancy between levels of ability and achievement” when screening children for learning disabilities. Thus, a child’s IQ scores, which rank cognitive abilities such as reasoning, began to play an outsize role in determining countless students’ educational fates. Specifically, if the IQ score wasn’t high enough and, in consequence, the gap wasn’t big enough, the child wasn’t diagnosed with a reading disability. Despite the fact that most youngsters can learn to read regardless of their IQ score, those with lower scores were often assumed to lack the “smarts” to read well.
An IQ test kept Sandra Chittenden’s daughter from getting the right help for years. The girl learned new words slowly and struggled to pronounce them correctly, mixing up similar-sounding words. In kindergarten she had no interest in letters and sounds, and she couldn’t easily see the similarities and differences across words on a page. Having a mild form of dyslexia herself and with an older son who is severely dyslexic, Chittenden, who is a special education advocate in Vermont, asked the school district to evaluate the girl for a reading disability.
The five-year-old was promptly given an IQ test. She posted an average overall score and a below-average score on a reading achievement test. but the gap between the two scores didn’t meet the cutoff of 15 points, so the girl was not given appropriate reading services in her school. The same thing happened when Chittenden requested another evaluation when her daughter was in first grade.
For the child, the results were wounding. During her first couple of years of elementary school “her nervous system was like a pressure cooker because she wasn’t being given appropriate help,” Chittenden said. “She held it together all day at school and then would explode.”
In third grade, the girl was diagnosed with a learning disability in math, and the school added a dyslexia diagnosis because of her continued struggles with both arithmetic and reading. But for years, Chittenden says, “I remember it being really frustrating knowing my child had dyslexia and not being able to get the right help.” As of this year, partly in response to parental concerns, Vermont is no longer using the discrepancy model to diagnose learning disabilities.
Texas mother Kodie Bates had to fight her local school district to get dyslexia services for her two sons, shown here. The district at first said they didn’t qualify because their cognitive skills were low. While the district eventually relented, Bates has continued to homeschool them. Credit: Image provided by Kodie Bates
Researchers pointed out problems with the discrepancy model even before its use became prevalent in the U.S. Fletcher, an early critic, noted a methodological issue in the Isle of Wight studies: they did not exclude children with intellectual disabilities or brain injuries. Yet by some accounts there was an unusually large number of neurologically impaired subjects on the island at the time, resulting in a skewed sample.
It has also long been clear that IQ tests can be biased against Black or low-income students, as well as many others, because they contain language and content that is more familiar to white middle- and upper-income students. Researchers began to observe inequitable results in the late 1970s as American public schools began evaluating more children to comply with the mandates of the federal special education law, since renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
As a research assistant at the University of Minnesota, Mark Shinn said he saw how the discrepancy model disproportionately prevented children from low-income families, English learners and students of color from getting help. “You had all these kids in high-poverty schools with [below average] cognitive ability of 90 and 80, and the schools could throw up their hands and say, ‘They are too “slow” to benefit [from services],’” recalled Shinn, now a professor emeritus of school psychology at National Louis University in Chicago. Yet “it was well known that poor kids…earned low scores on cognitive tests largely because of a lack of opportunities and experiences.”
In the 1980s, educational psychologist Linda Siegel, now an emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia, began investigating some of these anecdotal suspicions. In an influential 1994 publication, she noted that the main distinction between children with a reading disability and those without was not their IQs, but the way their minds processed written words.
“The basic assumption that underlies decades of classification in research and educational practice regarding reading disabilities is becoming increasingly untenable,” she and her co-author wrote. In the same issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, Fletcher and his colleagues observed that the “cognitive profiles” of poor readers who met the discrepancy definition and of those who didn’t were more similar than different. The key to diagnosing reading disabilities, they wrote, would be to instead measure “deficiencies in phonological awareness,” the ability to recognize and work with phonemes in spoken language.
Since then, the scientific consensus against the discrepancy model has grown. One study found that regardless of their IQ, poor readers benefit from specialized reading instruction and support at statistically identical levels. Another used magnetic resonance imaging to show the same reduced brain-activation patterns in the left hemisphere (compared with those of typical readers) in weak school-age readers who were asked whether two written words rhymed—regardless of whether the weak readers met discrepancy criteria. Neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft, who supervised the study at Stanford University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, says it bolsters the idea that the discrepancy method makes an arbitrary distinction among different groups of poor readers. In fact, “dyslexia can occur in people of high, middle and low cognitive abilities,” noted Nadine Gaab, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
By the 2000s, ample scientific evidence indicated the arbitrariness of IQ’s use as a basis for a dyslexia diagnosis. And there were mounting concerns that the discrepancy model was fundamentally racist and classist: it disproportionately prevented low-income children and children of color from getting help with learning disabilities. In 2004, the federal government reversed course on its 1970s guidance, strongly recommending that states consider alternatives.
“I would…encourage this commission to drive a stake through the heart of this overreliance on the discrepancy model for determining the kinds of children that need services,” psychologist Wade Horn, then U.S. assistant secretary for children and families, told a panel of experts tasked with revising special education law in the early 2000s. “I’ve wondered for 25 years why it is that we continue to use it.”
But a 2018 study found that about one third of school psychologists were still using the discrepancy model to screen students for learning disabilities. And although most contemporary specialists concur that dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence, many of the most widely used definitions still refer to it as an “unexpected” disorder.
“These definitional issues are not trivial, because they drive research, they drive funding, they drive assessment, they drive everything,” said Julie Washington, a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, whose research focuses on the intersection of language, literacy and poverty in African American children.
Even as more states and school districts move away from the discrepancy model, many researchers are concerned that they too often are replacing it with an equally problematic system. Often referred to as patterns of strengths and weaknesses or by Odegard as “discrepancy 2.0,” this method continues to rely heavily on cognitive tests and still calls for significant gaps between ability and performance for a student to qualify as having a learning disability. “Schools still want simple formulas and put way too much emphasis on the testing,” Fletcher said.
Tim Odegard leads the Tennessee Center for the Study and Treatment of Dyslexia, based at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
Twice in elementary school, Texas student Marcelo Ruiz, who lives just north of Houston, was denied a dyslexia diagnosis because of “discrepancy 2.0.” He had high cognitive scores, but evaluators said he did not show skill gaps in the areas he needed to qualify as dyslexic. School got harder and harder for Ruiz, and in high school he was still inverting letters and having trouble with reading. In the fall of 2022, his senior year, the teenager finally got a dyslexia diagnosis, but by then it was far too late to give him the help he had long craved. Because of his mediocre grades, Ruiz says, he had difficulty getting admitted into four-year colleges; he is currently at a community college and hoping to transfer. “Growing up, I felt stupid,” the 18-year-old says. “My grades kept going down, and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. It was really demotivating not knowing what I had and what you could do for it, not being able to get help.”
Texas mother Kodie Bates fought a similar battle on behalf of her sons—with the district reversing its opinion on whether the children had dyslexia. Both boys were diagnosed at the age of 7 with dyslexia using a method that still relied on testing and principles similar to the discrepancy model. However, the district did not provide any special education services. So in 2019, Bates began to push for an individualized education program, or IEP, that would delineate specific reading supports for her older son.
The district fought back, and a year ago, when her older son was 12, tried to reverse its own dyslexia diagnoses.
In a 34-page report provided by Bates and a special education advocate, the diagnostician for the Hooks Independent School District in northeastern Texas cited low cognitive scores in most areas for the older boy, arguing that the family’s decision to homeschool him may have impaired his cognitive abilities. “He does not have an unexpected (deficit)… Everything is in the below average range—to have dyslexia there has to be an unexpected (deficit) and I did not find one,” the diagnostician said, according to a transcript of a meeting held to discuss the report.”
“First they didn’t want to give him the services, and now they want to say that he is not even dyslexic—he’s just not smart,” Bates says. “It’s just not fair to take away a disability.” Last spring, an independent evaluator paid for by the district determined that her sons were, in fact, dyslexic as the district originally had found. Bates said she was grateful that the school is now offering services but has decided to keep homeschooling her sons with the support of online reading specialists.
“The boys are old enough now to be uncomfortable in such an environment and I don’t blame them one bit,” she said in an email.
They “are hesitant,” she added, “and let down.”
According to several researchers, a better—though hardly perfect—approach to assessing children for learning disabilities is “response to intervention,” or RTI. In this method, teachers intervene early with struggling readers and monitor how they respond to help, making a referral for special education services after what one research paper dubbed a “student’s failure to respond to treatment.”
Some states already require exclusive use of RTI, although it can be hard to implement because teachers have to be well trained in what interventions to administer and how to determine whether they are working. When teachers do make a referral for special education services, there’s often still a question of how—and whether—to make a learning disability determination.
For this reason, some experts in the field say they would like to see more no-cost or low-cost access to the kind of testing that qualified neuropsychologists do: assessing a child’s capacity for and speed at the many components that make up successful reading. (One bill pending in New York State would mandate that private health-care plans pay for neuropsychological exams focused on dyslexia.) The specifics can look quite different for a seven-year-old than for a high school student, Gaab explained. But generally, experts say testing should be used to gauge such skills as a child’s ability to recognize “sight words” (common words that often come up in reading), to sound out “nonsense” words that follow the rules of the English language but are not actual words, and to read under timed conditions and spell words correctly in their writing.
It isn’t out of the question for school districts to do this type of testing on their own—and some of the best-resourced ones already do, or they contract with an outside neuropsychologist. But for most school psychologists, it would represent a departure from decades of training and practice focused on the administration of IQ and cognitive tests. The discrepancy model is “easier” because a child either meets the cutoff or doesn’t.
“It reminds me of leeching blood,” said Tiffany Hogan, a professor and director of the Speech & Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston. “They did that for a long time knowing it wasn’t the best way, but there was no replacement.”
Another largely overlooked reason for the continued prevalence of discrepancy-based testing may be that the families most hurt by it are the least powerful in terms of their influence over public school practice and policy. Many schools feel pressure, both covert and overt, to not identify children with dyslexia because there aren’t enough specialists or teachers trained to work with them. Families with money, power and privilege can negotiate with the district more effectively to meet their child’s needs or hire an advocate or lawyer to lobby on their behalf. If diagnosis and help still remain elusive, they can pay for private neuropsychological exams, which can cost thousands of dollars. They also can, and often do, circumvent the public system entirely by hiring private reading tutors or sending their children to private schools focused on reading remediation. (Often these schools also use the discrepancy model to determine whom to admit.) For all these reasons, as well as the discrepancy model’s bias favoring high IQ scores, dyslexia has long had a reputation as a “privileged” diagnosis.
The dyslexia advocacy community has in some states also been predominantly white and financially privileged, with low-income families and parents of color more likely to fear the stigma of a disability diagnosis. “Historically, we don’t talk about learning disabilities and mental health in the Black community because there’s a stigma and shame attached to it,” said Winifred Winston, a Baltimore mother who hosts the Black and Dyslexic podcast. “Enslaved people could not show any sign of weakness or perceived weakness. So we have a history of being ‘okay’…(even) when we are in fact not okay or do require assistance.”
Partly through the leadership of parents such as Winston, that’s changing as more families learn about reading disabilities and the extra support a diagnosis can bring.
Now 71 and 81, respectively, Jack Fletcher and Linda Siegel are still fighting to get children equal access to essential help in learning how to read. They are part of a broad-based effort seeking to strengthen access to general reading instruction for all so that fewer students get held back by learning disabilities or need intensive reading remediation. Many states are doing just that, with a growing number passing legislation promoting the “science of reading,” which emphasizes explicit and systematic instruction in phonics. Early screening for language challenges in the youngest grades is also key.
Still, Odegard said he regularly hears from families frustrated that their kids were disqualified from reading services for the same reason he was testing determined that they are not “smart” enough to be dyslexic. Odegard isn’t surprised that his own IQ was below average, given the correlation to socioeconomic status. His parents had modest-paying jobs in retail and neither had a college education.
The idea of distributing limited, extra help to students with high cognitive scores has deep roots in an American psyche “built off a mindset that somehow there are people who are chosen to move forward and some that are not,” Odegard added. It’s not dissimilar to “gifted” programs for children with high IQs or dual language programs that are only accessible to students with above average reading abilities. It’s the early, often irreversible, accrual of opportunity based on a limited, highly fallible notion of human potential.
Over the years, Odegard says, some colleagues and friends have remarked that, given his success, the experience must have made him stronger—a characterization he resents. “It wasn’t a gift,” he said. “I don’t see any of those challenges of having to stay up later and work five times harder as helpful.” Growing up, “I had a huge chip on my shoulder.”
On reflection, though, Odegard says there was perhaps one benefit to his early educational struggles. “If there was any gift I got from dyslexia, it was to have a lot of compassion and empathy,” he asserted, “because I could never hide in school that I couldn’t read and spell.”
Reporting on this piece was supported by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University and the Russell Sage Visiting Journalist Fellowship.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation.
After an elder passed away recently in their community, the students at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Dzántik’i Héeni, the Tlingit name for Juneau, Alaska, got to work creating a special gift.
Using skills they’d learned in their computer science lessons, the students designed a traditional button blanket on a laser cutting machine. “They found a meaningful way to apply all of that skill and knowledge that they have learned and in such a way that it was authentic,” said Luke Fortier, the school librarian and math teacher.
Fortier’s school participates in a program operated by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society to expand access to computer science and science, technology engineering and math, or STEM, among Native American, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students. The program trains educators at K-12 schools whose students include Native children on different ways they can introduce young people to programming, robotics and coding.
But computer science lessons like the ones at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School are relatively rare. Despite calls from major employers and education leaders to expand K-12 computer science instruction in response to the workforce’s increasing reliance on digital technology, access to the subject remains low — particularly for Native American students.
Only 67 percent of Native American students attend a school that offers a computer science course, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to a new study from the nonprofit Code.org. A recent report from the Kapor Foundation and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES, takes a deep look at why Native students’ access to computer and technology courses in K-12 is so low, and examines the consequences.
Director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor Frieda McAlear, who is Native Alaskan of the Inupiaq tribe, said the study “forefronts the context of the violence of centuries of colonization and its continuing impacts on Native people and tribal communities as the driver of disparities in Native representation in tech and computing.”
Schools serving higher proportions of Native students are more likely to be small institutions that lack space, funding and teachers trained in computer science, according to the report. In addition, many Native students attend schools that may lack the hardware, software and high-speed internet needed for these classes.
Even when the instruction is available, courses often lack cultural relevance that would allow Native students to authentically engage with the material, the report says.
Given the history of settler colonialism and the use of Native boarding schools that sought to erase Native identity, making sure that students’ tribal knowledge and traditions are celebrated and integrated into the curriculum will allow students to succeed, the report’s authors say.
“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities,” McAlear said.
“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities.”
Frieda McAlear, director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor
The situation isn’t much better at the post-secondary level, according to report co-author and director of research and career support for AISES, Tiffany Smith, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Since 2020, Native student enrollment in computer science courses has declined at most two-year and four-year institutions, she said, even as more students overall have received degrees in the subject. Part of the reason is that Native students don’t necessarily see a place for themselves and their culture in tech classes and spaces at predominantly white institutions, Smith said.
But the relatively few Native students who do graduate with these degrees are making significant contributions to their communities, according to Smith. She noted that graduates are using their computer science knowledge and emerging technologies to help revitalize Native languages and alleviate other issues tribal nation communities face, including climate change, biases in data collection and poverty.
Because tribal nations are at the forefront of job growth and development in their communities, they “should be considered critical partners in the future of the technology sector,” the report’s authors write.
The report calls for more investment in training Native educators to teach computer science and related fields, and integrating Indigenous culture, traditions and languages into those classes.
A 4-year-old program run jointly by the Kapor Foundation and AISES, for example, partners with school districts and Native-serving schools to develop tribe-specific culturally relevant computer science curriculum. That instruction doesn’t only happen in computer science class, said McAlear. The program’s staff work with schools to develop project-based, culturally relevant computer science lessons that are woven into other classes including science, language and history.
In Fortier’s district, students in science classes were recently tasked with using robots to code the life cycle of a salmon. Through that activity they gained knowledge of their local tribal economies while being introduced to new tech, he said.
Before the pandemic, Fortier’s school had eliminated some computer science and technology courses due to budget cuts. But with federal Covid relief funding, along with grants from Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit arm of a regional Native corporation, and programmatic support from AISES, the school was able to restore some of that instruction.*
Fortier said he believes these courses are essential for his students — not necessarily because they’ll have to learn all the latest cutting-edge technology for their future careers, but so they can use contemporary methods to share Native practices, knowledge and skills with the wider community.
“We can learn a lot from the elders in the traditional knowledge,” he said. “But our kids need to apply it in a new, modern, meaningful way. They need to be able to communicate to and within the world.”
*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct version of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s name.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — El año escolar de la escuela primaria Washington concluyó a las 2:35 pm de un caluroso martes de mayo. Aun así, Malaysia Robertson, de 9 años, permaneció afuera del plantel.
Ella había pasado la mayor parte de su vida en la pequeña escuela pública de este suburbio de Nuevo Orleans, donde vive con su abuela. Su escuela no volvería a abrir sus puertas al comienzo del nuevo año escolar en septiembre. Al igual que miles de otros estudiantes del distrito escolar más grande de Luisiana, a ella se le asignó a un nuevo colegio como parte de un plan de consolidación que afecta a casi uno de cada 10 estudiantes afroamericanos como Malaysia. Esta es una cifra desproporcionada.
En ese último día de clases, ella no quería despedirse.
“Íbamos corriendo por los pasillos llorando y todo eso”, dijo Malaysia, recordando su último día en tercer grado. El estacionamiento seguía lleno de estudiantes, familias y maestros mucho después de la 4 p.m., todos abrazándose antes de salir de la escuela por última vez.
Malaysia Robertson, de 9 años, afuera de la cerrada escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el viernes 28 de julio de 2023 por la tarde. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
La decisión de la junta escolar de cerrar 6 escuelas permanentemente ha estremecido a Jefferson Parish, donde la inscripción de estudiantes en escuelas públicas disminuyó casi un 10% desde el inicio de la pandemia.
Esta disminución empeoró casi una década de avances en el distrito, en la que se buscó revitalizar la inscripción escolar después del huracán Katrina. Los funcionarios del distrito han dicho que los cierres de escuelas son una respuesta necesaria a la disminución de la población estudiantil. Datos del distrito muestran que aproximadamente 1 de 3 cupos permanecieron vacantes el año escolar pasado y varios edificios albergaron a menos de la mitad de los estudiantes para los cuales fueron diseñados.
“Tenemos escuelas poco utilizadas — eso es un hecho”, explicó el vicepresidente de la junta escolar Derrick Shepherd durante una votación en abril. “Las cifras no se pueden cambiar”.
El distrito volvió a dibujar su mapa para distribuir a los alumnos en una manera que requiere que muchos estudiantes deban viajar fuera de sus vecindarios y más lejos de casa. Los oficiales explicaron que los nuevos mapas hacen que las rutas de transporte por autobús sean más estables y que ninguno de sus maestros se quedará sin empleo. Pero la decisión ha enfurecido a los líderes comunitarios y abogados de derechos civiles, quienes dicen que los cierres no son solo dañinos para familias como la de Malasia, sino además son discriminatorios.
La escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el domingo 23 de julio de 2023 por la noche. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger ReportUn cartel de “esté atento a los niños” afuera de la cerrada escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el domingo 23 de julio de 2023 por la noche. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
A pesar de que los estudiantes blancos representan casi un cuarto de los estudiantes del distrito, según los datos estatales de inscripción escolar estos solo representan al 12% de los estudiantes afectados por los cierres de escuelas. El plan que la junta escolar aprobó, el cual se diseñó teniendo en cuenta cuáles instalaciones escolares tenían más espacio sin usar y su estado, cerró dos escuelas secundarias con alto rendimiento escolar en las cuales la mayoría de los estudiantes eran hispanos y afroamericanos.
Como resultado cientos de estudiantes hispanos y afroamericanos serán asignados a escuelas de rendimiento más bajo el próximo año escolar, repitiendo para algunas familias el pasado de racismo y segregación del distrito.
“¿Quién se va beneficiar de todo este proceso? No serán los niños afromericanos y latinos”, dijo Debra Houston Edwards, de 77 años, quien se graduó de Washington hace más de sesenta años y comenzó a trabajar para el distrito en la década de los ochenta y fue una de las pocas administradoras afroamericanas en aquel entonces. “No hay equidad en lo que está pasando.”
Shepherd y el presidente de la junta escolar, Ralph Brandt, no respondieron a las solicitudes de comentario para esta nota. En un correo electrónico, la persona encargada de comunicaciones del distrito señaló a una página en línea sobre los cierres pero no respondió a preguntas.
La organización sin ánimo de lucro, El Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC (por sus siglas en inglés), presentó una denuncia por incumplimiento a los derechos civiles al departamento de educación, donde alegan que los cierres discriminan a los estudiantes basados en su raza y que el distrito falló en compartir información sobre los cierres con familias que tienen un dominio limitado de inglés. En una segunda denuncia, SPLC alega que los cierres son parte de una tendencia de discriminación racial generalizada, y de otros tipos , contra algunos estudiantes.
El departamento no ha anunciado una investigación a raíz de estas denuncias.
El vestíbulo de la escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Luisiana, la tarde del domingo 23 de julio. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
Mientras tanto, a los expertos les preocupa que los distritos escolares en todo el país pronto enfrenten problemas parecidos. A nivel nacional, más de un millón de alumnos no regresaron a escuelas públicas después de la pandemia. Algunos se matricularon en colegios privados, otros comenzaron a recibir educación en su hogar y otros simplemente desaparecieron, dijo Thomas S. Dee, profesor en la escuela de posgrado en educación de la Universidad Standford. Dado la disminución de tasas de nacimiento, el departamento de educación estima que la inscripción a nivel nacional en escuelas públicas va a bajar un 5% o más para el 2031. Este es un descenso drástico después de décadas en las que la matrícula ha sido creciente.
“Va a haber un ajuste de cuentas para muchos distritos escolares que no han reconocido su nueva realidad”, agrega Dee, quien estudia el éxodo de las escuelas públicas. Él anticipa que muchos distritos se verán obligados a considerar el cierre de escuelas.
Este debate sobre el cierre de escuelas y cómo hacerlo, también es sobre para identificar cuáles cuáles estudiantes tendrán que asumir las cargas. Hasta ahora los estudiantes hispanos y afroamercanos se han visto afectados de forma desproporcionada. Investigadores académicos y defensores les preocupa que la decreciente inscripción en las escuelas públicas, y los cierres que probablemente seguirán, intensifican la desigualdad académica en la educación pública.
“Los siguientes 10 años van a estar repletos de este tipo de historias”, dijo Douglas N. Harris, presidente del departamento de economía en la Universidad Tulane y director del Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre Acceso y Elección en Educación. Al analizar cierres de escuelas y tendencias de reestructuración en todo el país durante los últimos 30 años, Harris encontró que escuelas con altos porcentajes de estudiantes de color tenian una probablidad mas alta de cerrarr que las que tienen una mayoría de estudiantes blancos.
Harris explicó que esto a veces ocurre por desigualdades históricas, como cuando colegios donde asisten más estudiantes de color reciben menos inversión a largo plazo y terminan con resultados bajos en los exámenes y edificios deteriorados. Eso puede empeorar la baja inscripción, y al considerar el rendimiento escolar y el panorama financiero, puede hacer parecer que cerrar la escuela es una opción sensata.
Pero incluso cuando Harris y sus co-investigadores compararon escuelas con niveles de inscripción y rendimiento parecido, las de mayor cantidad de estudiantes de color y de bajos ingresos seguían siendo las más propensas a cerrar. Investigaciones previamente realizadas por el Centro de Investigación sobre Resultados en la Educación de Stanford revelaron hallazgos similares al observar que de entre las escuelas con bajo rendimiento académico, las que tienen una mayor proporción de estudiantes hispanos y afroamericanos tienen mayor probabilidad de cerrar cuando se las compara con las que tienen más alumnos blancos, aunque tengan una clasificación similar.
Ce’Vanne Ursin, de 12 años, derecha, y su hermana Canyon Sunday Ursin, de 7 años, frente a la cerrada escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el domingo 23 de julio de 2023 por la noche. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
Para la tía de Malaysia, Cheryl Earl, la decisión de la junta ha sido devastadora. Su hija mayor se mudó a Washington hace dos años y su hija menor comenzó el primer grado en esa escuela el año pasado. Igual que Malaysia, sus niñas prosperaron en la escuela comunitaria de 240 estudiantes.
Antes de transferirse a Washington para el cuarto grado, la niña mayor de Earl, Ce’Vanne Ursin, le había dicho a su mamá que odiaba la escuela. “No podía esperar llegar al doceavo grado para abandonar la escuela”, recordó Earl. Pero Ce’Vanne cambió de opinión en Washington. Para el quinto grado fue seleccionada para el programa de estudiantes dotados y talentosos. Al finalizar el año escolar, fue nombrada maestra de ceremonias para la graduación final, un puesto codiciado entre los estudiantes.
“Antes pensaba que era tonta, pero realmente no lo soy”, dijo Ce’Vanne, de 12 años. “Washington me hizo sentir cómoda. Me hizo sentir que todos en la escuela eran mis amigos y familiares”.
Ce’Vanne dijo sentirse afortunada de formar parte de la última generación que se graduará en Washington. Pero el cierre significa que su hermana de ocho años, Canyon Sunday, no tendrá la misma experiencia. En cambio, el distrito asignó a Canyon a cursos el segundo grado en el mismo colegio donde Ce’Vanne tuvo malas experiencias, antes de ir a Washington. Su madre dijo que está demasiado cicatrizada por el tiempo de Ce’Vanne en esa escuela como para enviar a su hermana menor allí, por lo cual decidió inscribir a ambas niñas en una escuela privada católica cercana.
Cheryl Earl, centro, con sus hijas Ce’Vanne Ursin, de 12 años, izquierda, y Canyon Sunday Ursin, de 8 años, afuera de la cerrada Escuela Primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el domingo 23 de julio de 2023 por la noche. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
Cuando las escuelas cierran, el efecto dominó dura años, explica Molly F. Gordon, quien fue científica investigadora del Consorcio de Investigación Escolar en la Universidad de Chicago. El rendimiento académico de los estudiantes sufre, algunas familias optan por mudarse a medida que sus vecindarios se vuelven menos deseables, y como consecuencia se borran historias importantes.
Después de que Chicago cerró casi 50 escuelas públicas en el 2013, Gordon y su equipo siguieron los resultados de los estudiantes afectados. Incluso antes de que ocurrieran los cierres, durante el año que se anunciaron, la lectura y matemáticas de los estudiantes afectados sufrieron y los estudiantes quedaron retrasados por meses comparados con los estudiantes de escuelas que permanecieron abiertas.
“Los estudiantes que venían de las escuelas cerradas sentían que habían perdido algo, porque lo perdieron”, dijo Gordon, ahora científica investigadora senior en el Centro Nacional de Investigación de Opinión en la Universidad de Chicago. “Ellos estaban viviendo un duelo”.
Los cierres en Chicago tenían el objetivo de ahorrarle dinero al distrito y cerrar escuelas con bajo rendimiento, donde casi exclusivamente asistían estudiantes hispanos y afromericanos. Los funcionarios prometieron que el cambio resultaría en colocar a esos estudiantes en escuelas con mejor rendimiento académico. Una investigación del periódico The Chicago Sun Times y la estación local de radio WBEZ descubrió que una década después muchos de los beneficios anunciados con el cierre masivo, hasta la fecha, nunca se materializaron.
Los estudiantes de las escuelas cerradas no mostraron mejor rendimiento académico que los alumnos de escuelas parecidas que permanecieron abiertas, y su índice de graduación era ligeramente más bajo que el de estudiantes de las escuelas comparadas, por debajo del promedio del distrito escolar. Y, a pesar de que el cambio recortó costos, los ahorros probablemente fueron mucho menores de lo que originalmente habían calculado los funcionarios.
La pregunta que permanece es una que le plantean frecuentemente a Marguerite Roza, directora del Edunomics Lab en la Universidad de Georgetown: ¿Con pocos recursos y la disminución cifras de inscripción, que deben hacer los distritos escolares?
Canyon Sunday Ursin, de 8 años, en la cerca fuera de la cerrada escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el domingo 23 de julio de 2023 por la noche. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
Roza enfatiza dos factores esenciales para limitar la interrupción: planear con anticipación y darle prioridad al rendimiento. Esencialmente, al cerrar escuelas se debe beneficiar a todos los estudiantes del distrito; y liberar recursos para usarlos en personal y programas. Pero para asegurarse de eso, los distritos deben prestar atención especial a los estudiantes a los que reubican, cambiándolos a escuelas de mejor rendimiento y siendo transparentes al explicarle a las familias el razonamiento tras el cambio.
Pero en Jefferson Parish, los datos estatales del rendimiento muestran que este no ha sido el caso. Mientras los estudiantes de primaria serán incorporados a escuelas de alta clasificación, los de secundaria enfrentan una realidad distinta. El nuevo plan cerrará las escuelas secundarias que ocupaban el segundo y tercer lugar de rendimiento en el distrito -un paso que “desafía la lógica” dijo Roza. .
Una de esas escuelas es la secundaria Grace King, donde los dos nietos de Lillie Magee, residente por largo tiempo de Jefferson Parish, completaron el décimo y undécimo grado en mayo. La escuela estaba compuesta en su mayoría por estudiantes hispanos y afroamericanos, como los nietos de Magee, y todos parecían llevarse bien, dijo ella.
Magee siente que sus nietos, a quienes cuidaba, estaban seguros dentro de las paredes de la escuela. Ella conocía a sus profesores y entrenadores y había asistido a juegos de fútbol americano, llena de pasión y orgullo escolar. Ahora, ella se preocupa de que al reasignar a muchos estudiantes de Grace King a su antigua escuela secundaria rival resulte en violencia y peleas. Sus chicos han perdido la escuela que conocían, y ella ha perdido la comunidad en la que confiaba para mantenerlos a salvo.
“La forma en que nos trataron, fue simplemente muy injusta”, dijo Magee. La escuela a la que asistirá su nieto mayor el próximo año está clasificada como la segunda peor del distrito en términos de rendimiento.
Mientras tanto, en la primaria Washington, los edificios están oscuros y vacíos, el césped exterior está descuidado y lleno de basura. Un mes después del cierre, un incendio arrasó el edificio que albergaba el gimnasio y la cafetería, dejando escombros esparcidos sobre las largas mesas donde los maestros habían organizado un desayuno de graduación semanas antes. Ahora, las ventanas siguen cubiertas con madera y las puertas exteriores están cerradas con llave.
El momento del incendio, que la policía dijo que parecía haberse originado como un incendio eléctrico, dejó a muchos miembros de la comunidad con sospechas. El distrito ahora planea vender el terreno, permitiendo que el futuro comprador restaure o derribe la escuela.
Debra Houston Edwards, la anterior administradora del distrito, espera que al menos los edificios puedan ser salvados, dado su importancia histórica y para que puedan seguir sirviendo como centro para la comunidad.
A principios de la década de 1930, el abuelo de Edwards y otros cinco hombres del condado que vivían en la ribera Este del río Mississippi pidieron a la junta escolar que abriera una escuela secundaria para estudiantes afroamericanos en la zona. Pero la junta les dijo que era su responsabilidad: tendrían que comprar el terreno y cubrir parte de los costos de construcción. En respuesta, la comunidad recaudó fondos de puerta en puerta. En 1936, se convirtió en la primera escuela en la ribera este donde los niños afroamericanos podían recibir una educación superior al octavo grado.
“Nadie más tuvo que hacerlo excepto nosotros”, dijo Edwards, quien ha conservado la historia de la escuela en recortes de periódico antiguos y fotografías que se desvanecen. “Y aquí estamos de nuevo, pasando por el mismo proceso”.
A principios del mes pasado, Edwards y un grupo de miembros de la comunidad ofrecieron comprar la escuela por un dólar, esencialmente solicitando a la junta escolar donara el terreno, un sitio “por el que nuestros antepasados ya han pagado”, escribió el grupo en una carta a Brandt, el presidente de la junta.
Pero el grupo dijo que no ha recibido una respuesta formal. En una declaración a los medios de comunicación locales Brandt dijo que la junta está “legalmente obligada a buscar el valor justo de mercado” por cualquier propiedad que tenga la intención de vender.
Angie Robertson afuera de la cerrada escuela primaria Washington en Kenner, Louisiana, el viernes 28 de julio de 2023 por la tarde. Credit: Christiana Botic para The Hechinger Report
Cuando Malaysia se imagina el nuevo año escolar ella dice que siente esperanza. Varios de sus profesores se van a mudar con ella al nuevo colegio y ella espera que varios de sus compañeros de clase la acompañen en el nuevo edificio desconocido.
Pero para su abuela, Angie Robertson, es un mundo diferente – un vecindario en el cual no viven y una comunidad a la cual no pertenecen.
“Tenía profesores allá,” en Washington, “que era como parte de la familia”, dijo Robertson, quien también va a enseñar en el programa de aprendizaje temprano del Head Strart de la escuela. “Para mí, yo siento que ese era el hogar fuera del hogar de los niños”.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Hope Reed saw stark disparities in math classes at Blythewood High School about a decade ago.
At the school, in suburban Columbia, South Carolina, nearly half of students were white. In the freshman remedial math classes, however, almost all the students were Black. Many of those in the remedial classes came from lower-income families.
Reed, then chair of the school’s math department, intervened. She wanted to experiment with detracking, or eliminating classes that separated students by level.
She started with a small test.
In 2013, she took on leading a ninth-grade remedial class and taught nearly 50 students the regular Algebra 1 curriculum.
“You’re in honors class, so you’re gonna do honors work,” she recalled telling them.
At the end of the year, about 90 percent of the students passed.
Sluggish growth in math scores for U.S. students began long before the pandemic, but the problem has snowballed into an education crisis. This back-to-school season, the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, will be documenting the enormous challenge facing our schools and highlighting examples of progress. The three-year-old Reporting Collaborative includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
The success of that single class spurred Reed to expand the program. Rather than sorting ninth graders with high test scores into Algebra 1 and giving those with lower test scores remedial instruction, the school enrolled everyone into Algebra 1 classes.
That year, 90 percent of Blythewood students passed the Algebra 1 end-of-course exam, an increase from the previous year’s passage rate of 87 percent. The average score for Black students on the exam was 80, up two points from the year prior. Meanwhile, the average for white students was 83, an increase by less than one point from the year prior.
The experiment convinced Reed that detracking math classes could be a key component in narrowing achievement gaps between student groups.
Recently, the gaps have worsened in the wake of the pandemic and its disruptions to learning.
“It’s like ironing a shirt. When you run the iron over one time, some wrinkles fall out but when you run it back over the second time, it’s crisp. That’s what it did for them.”
Hope Reed, former chair of Blythewood High School math department
Math scores for Black 13-year-olds had dropped by 13 points between the 2019-20 school year and the 2022-23 school year, shows the latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. White students had a six-point decrease between the three years.
As a result, the difference between Black and white students’ scores widened from 35 points in 2020 to 42 points in 2023.
Addressing those disparities is more critical than ever then, for both strengthening students’ understanding of math and increasing their opportunities to higher-paying jobs in STEM fields. And nearly a decade ago, Reed’s experiment with detracking showed some promise as an aid.
Step into any American school and you’ll most likely find tracked classes, especially for math.
Tracking students took root during the 20th century. Following immigration waves, desegregation orders and the inclusion of special education students in classes, tracking grew in use and separated those students deemed fit for higher learning at college from those who were viewed as less intelligent and only capable of learning a trade or craft, said Kevin Welner, an educational policy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
As a result, tracking reflected the country’s larger societal inequalities then and it continues to do so today given some students, often from marginalized backgrounds, come to kindergarten or first grade already with measured achievement gaps.
While offering students more support in a separate class may sound ideal, lower-level classes often linger on remediation and watered down curricula. That exacerbates opportunity and achievement gaps, Welner said.
Tracked systems are also fairly rigid, he added. Students placed in higher tracks have the flexibility to move down to a lower track if necessary, but few students in lower tracks have the opportunity to advance to the higher track.
Detracking, in theory, then aims to level the playing field by exposing students to the same higher concepts and standards.
“If you have kids who are really struggling at mathematics, they really need to be identified and probably treated differently in terms of curriculum and instruction than kids who are just sailing through math courses.”
Tom Loveless, an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
Welner said studies of schools that have detracked classes show that achievement gaps have been narrowed to varying levels of success. Students who would have been otherwise placed in lower-track classes improve academically, while students who would have been in a higher track see no significant differences in their performances, he added.
Welner pointed to the Rockville Centre school district on Long Island, N.Y., as the gold standard for detracking. In the ‘90s, the district got rid of many tracked classes in its middle school and high school, and provided significant professional development for teachers so they could properly handle students of varying levels in the same classroom. As a result, the district has seen more students take more advanced classes later in high school.
Ultimately, Welner views tracking as a structural tool that places obstacles in the way of learning for kids in lower-track classes. Detracking alone doesn’t improve student achievement, but it addresses those obstacles.
When Reed expanded detracking across ninth-grade math classes in the 2014-15 school year at Blythewood High, the effort involved more than just bringing all students together into several Algebra 1 courses.
One key component to Reed’s detracking program was the math seminar, an additional class period required for students who would have otherwise been placed in lower-level math classes. Students took the seminar in the morning, where they would pre-learn Algebra 1 lessons, as Reed said, and then they took their Algebra 1 class later in the day with the other students.
The additional learning time offered yet another boost in confidence for students, Reed said. By the time they arrived in their Algebra 1 class, she joked those students thought they were geniuses. Teachers would ask questions during lessons and students would eagerly answer.
“It’s like ironing a shirt. When you run the iron over one time, some wrinkles fall out but when you run it back over the second time, it’s crisp. That’s what it did for them,” Reed said. “They didn’t go in there just blindsided, lost.”
The goal was always to keep the students focused on progressing ahead in concepts rather than pausing and slowing down to remediate.
The math seminar also ensured that, for students who would have regularly been placed in a higher-level class, lessons did not slow down their learning.
Kianna Livingston was one of the ninth-graders enrolled in the math seminar and detracked Algebra 1 in 2014-15. She initially believed she wasn’t good at math, but saw her skills grow through the two classes.
Livingston, who is Black, also said she saw how the class instilled confidence in herself and other Black ninth-graders at the school; the classes gave the students attention and access to support many hadn’t had previously. Livingston recalled feeling so assured of her knowledge that she would help other students during the Algebra 1 course.
“It really allowed me to really own my leadership skills,” she said.
By the end of the school year — and to her surprise — she had been recommended for Honors Geometry for the following year.
Still, tracking seeped back into Blythewood’s math classes, partially out of necessity.
Despite the support from the math seminar, a small group of students continued to struggle with the material, Reed said. By the middle of the 2014-15 school year, she realized they might fail and not receive math credit.
That struggle highlights what some education experts, such as Tom Loveless, believe is one troubling aspect of detracking: The approach lacks flexibility for when some students genuinely need more support.
Loveless, an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has been studying detracking for three decades. He cited San Francisco as an example where detracking hasn’t helped. When the school district eliminated tracks in middle and high schools starting in 2014, middle school students could no longer take Algebra 1. Instead, all students would take the course in ninth grade.
But Loveless said his analysis of assessment data indicates gaps between Black and Latino students and their white peers in San Francisco have only widened since the district detracked math.
“If you have kids who are really struggling at mathematics, they really need to be identified and probably treated differently in terms of curriculum and instruction than kids who are just sailing through math courses,” Loveless said.
At Blythewood, Reed decided to act after realizing several students were falling further behind.
She and the nine other teachers leading the detracked classes identified four students from each class who needed the most support. Those 40 students were then dropped down to a remedial math class starting in January 2015 for the rest of the school year.
Despite having to group some students into a lower-track class, Reed, who now works with just freshmen at Blythewood, said she still believes in the promise of detracking. She highlights the school’s 90-percent passing rate on the Algebra 1 exam in 2014-15 as proof. And while 40 students had to drop down to a lower-level class, she emphasizes that they were still a fraction of the nearly 400 students who had been in the detracked Algebra 1 classes.
More detailed end-of-course data also showed more signs of progress. While the percentage of Blythewood’s Black students who scored within the “A” range on Algebra 1 stayed the same as the year prior, the percentage of students who scored in the “B” range increased from 14 percent in 2013-14 to 25 percent in 2014-15.
But after that first year of Algebra 1 detracking, Blythewood approached the set-up differently. Rather than dropping struggling students down to a lower-level math class midyear, teachers started the school year with two lower-level math classes, each with 20 students.
In 2015-16, Blythewood’s passing rate on the Algebra 1 end-of-course exam dropped back to 87 percent.
Still, with teachers concerned about struggling students falling through the cracks, the school stuck with offering some lower-level math classes, and continues to do so, Reed said.
The school’s end-of-course passing rate has never been as high as it was in 2014-15, when for at least half a year the school had completely detracked Algebra 1. Reed believes that all students being exposed to the regular Algebra 1 curriculum, even for just half a year, made a difference.
The last remnant of her program, the math seminar, ended with the 2022-23 school year. Due to a scheduling change with class length, the school no longer offers the seminar to be taken concurrently with Algebra 1.
Reed isn’t critical of the school’s changes. Students’ scores still might improve this year, she said. But she’s keen on seeing this year’s end-of-course data. Then maybe she and school leaders could have a conversation about detracking and the seminar again.
At the core of Reed’s efforts is creating equity for all students.
“They just need to know they matter,” she said.
This story about detracking was produced by The Post and Courier as part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series about math instruction. The series is a collaboration with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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