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A few months ago, my colleague Jill Barshay wrote about a survey that found that many high school math teachers cobble together curriculum from the internet and other sources.
Readers reacted, particularly teachers who were angry about how researchers characterized them as going “rogue” for pulling together their own resources.
After reading Jill’s article, I decided to dig a little deeper and speak to some of those teachers. I wanted to know why they would willingly spend hours of their time to create a curriculum when one was already provided by their district. I was also curious if this was more widespread than just math teachers,
What I found was that this is a very common practice. In my article, which published recently with our partners at Chalkbeat, teachers argued that off-the-shelf curriculum often doesn’t meet the needs of their students — because it doesn’t engage students in a meaningful way; it isn’t culturally relevant and inclusive; or it’s not designed to support students with disabilities or English language learners. For some subjects, like history, teachers say it’s hard to find comprehensive curricula that not only includes histories of marginalized communities but also includes a state’s local communities.
Is deviating too far from a scripted curriculum provided by a school district really so bad?
The researchers and curriculum experts I spoke with said that for the most part, teachers should use a high-quality curriculum that is grade-appropriate and aligned to a state’s standards. But, they also acknowledge that some modification of a curriculum is “healthy.” In some cases, a school district might actually expect teachers to create their own curriculum, using state standards — and those teachers say they like having the freedom and flexibility to do so.
What do you think about a do-it-yourself approach to curriculum resources? Does it potentially cause more harm than good?
Delving into the downward trend in math scores around the world: When the Program for International Student Assessment released its results from 2022, it showed that math scores had fallen steeply. But for many countries, including some of the largest and wealthiest in the world, the slide in mathematics scores has been going on for years. My colleague Christina A. Samuels explores possible causes, and how countries are responding. If you’re interested in more in-depth math reporting, sign up for our new limited-run newsletter that will be devoted to mathematics teaching and learning.
In other news: I was struck by a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau showing how financial companies profit off of school lunches. Companies that contract with school districts to process lunch payments charge fees of $2.37, or 4.4 percent of the total transaction, on average, every time money is added to a student’s account. That’s costing families about $100 million collectively each year, the report found.
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.
Leading School Districts Implement Curriculum to Enhance Student Purpose, Belonging, and Future-Ready Skills
BEND, Ore., July 30, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Wayfinder, a leading provider of social-emotional and future-ready skills curriculum, is excited to announce its expansion into four prominent school districts across the U.S. for the upcoming school year.
“We believe that schools can play a pivotal role in nurturing each student’s sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging,” said Patrick Cook-Deegan, Founder and CEO of Wayfinder. “The 300% rise in teacher engagement with our lessons this year underscores the urgent need for purpose-driven education. Our partnerships with these exceptional school districts are a powerful response to the mental health challenges facing our youth. Together, we’re addressing critical issues like absenteeism and digital citizenship, ensuring every student feels valued and empowered to navigate their future.”
Wayfinder’s continued growth includes partnerships with the four school districts highlighted below.
Hawaiʻi Department of Education, HI — The Hawaiʻi DOE is sponsoring a statewide effort to provide a custom version of Wayfinder accessible to all of Hawaiʻi’s 55 middle schools and alternative learning programs. The DOE is also supporting schools that have existing Wayfinder implementations for various grade levels. Inspired by the traditional art, science, and practice of Polynesian wayfinding and developed in collaboration with Hawaiʻi nonprofit Education Incubator, Wayfinder is providing a Hawaiʻi-focusedversion of its curriculum that brings together purpose development, future-readiness, and local context. Wayfinder aligns to Nā Hopena A‘o, a statewide framework of six core values often abbreviated as BREATH: Belonging, Responsibility, Excellence, Aloha, Total Well-Being, and Hawaiʻi. Wayfinder is deeply proud to support Hawaiʻi educators as they preserve, honor, and elevate the unique qualities of Hawaiʻi.
Des Moines Public Schools, Des Moines, IA — Des Moines published a request for proposal and vetted many programs before ultimately choosing Wayfinder. District leadership cites the quality of ongoing support and resonance of the curriculum as significant factors in their selection of Wayfinder. Five thousand teachers and 33,000 students across the district’s 65 schools will experience Wayfinder in the coming school year. The district will also use Wayfinder’s Education on Purpose professional learning series to allow district leaders to focus on facilitation capacity and social-emotional learning skills.
Minneapolis Public Schools, Minneapolis, MN — Minneapolis is implementing Wayfinder’s comprehensive offerings across 80+ K-12 schools serving 30,000 students. The district chose Wayfinder because the curriculum aligns with its values—including emotional well-being, relationships, trust, communication, and evidence-based strategies. Flexibility and resonance were also cited as primary factors in the decision. All district counselors access Wayfinder’s assessment tools and lessons, especially for targeted and intensive student interventions. The district is planning a multiphase rollout strategy over two years to maximize student support and educator skill development, carefully monitor usage and assessment data, and provide targeted support for counselor caseloads.
Cumberland County Schools, Fayetteville, NC — Cumberland County Schools serves the world’s third-largest concentration of military-connected students. The district offers Military Family Life Counselors, Student-2-Student Programs, and Military Family and Youth Liaisons. Wayfinder’s comprehensive programming will reach 25,000 students across 51 elementary schools. All students will experience Wayfinder’s Core Curriculum, and counselors will use additional resources for small group and individual interventions. Two Cumberland high schools will also pilot Wayfinder.
Alyson Finley, Director of Student Services at Des Moines Public Schools, said, “Our district chose Wayfinder because we believe the curriculum ensures all students, regardless of background, feel seen and valued. The materials require minimal prep time and allow educators to focus on what matters most: our students. When meeting with Wayfinder staff, we could feel their genuine commitment to our district’s success. They are not just selling a product; they are true partners in our educational journey. They empowered us to tailor the scope and sequence to our diverse district’s needs, and they created a solution with us that truly and authentically serves our students and staff.”
The districts above are just a few of many additions to Wayfinder’s list of schools and districts. Wayfinder’s presence has grown significantly from coast to coast over the past two years. During the 2022-23 school year, 34 districts in Oregon used the curriculum—in 2023-24, this number more than doubled to 75 districts.
Dawn White, Ed.D., a Content Lead for Minneapolis Public Schools, shared why her district selected Wayfinder after a lengthy decision-making process: “Wayfinder ensures continuity of learning across all schools and grade levels in our district. In looking through different options, we appreciated that Wayfinder’s lessons are age-appropriate and relevant at every developmental stage. The tools meet the needs of our multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) structure, and we felt this was a culturally responsive social-emotional learning curriculum across K-12. Our students speak 100+ different languages and represent rich cultural backgrounds. This curriculum fosters student belonging and a sense of purpose through a culturally responsive lens.”
Kristy Newitt, Counselor Coordinator for Cumberland County Schools, stated that Cumberland is excited to move forward with Wayfinder. “We recognize the importance of social-emotional learning being utilized throughout the school and not just held within the Student Services departments. Wayfinder’s platform is allowing just that. Our teachers will now have direct delivery of tier 1 lessons through morning meetings, which will allow stronger relationships to be built between students and teachers, and students and students. Additionally, through the use of their Waypoints data, our school counselors and school social workers will be able to offer data-driven small groups.”
Wayfinder has served students from over 65 countries across the globe, including major U.S. districts such as Omaha Public Schools, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Portland Public Schools, and The School District of Philadelphia. This year, they received the highest possible program designation from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the highest possible Learning Rating from Common Sense Education.
The Wayfinder team looks forward to serving hundreds of thousands more students this school year.
Leaders have been lied to for decades about DEIA. We’ve been told there is a clean, clear way to integrate diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism into an organization and that simply making a statement, changing hiring demographics by a percentage point or investing in training is enough.
All of those things are positive; all are progress. However, human beings aren’t data points that can easily be changed and manipulated. We’re complex individuals with many layers and connecting identities. The equity we are hoping to see will not be reached by easy-to-achieve metrics alone.
That’s why we must push ourselves and our organizations to lead our DEIA work by accepting the mixed and unique nature of all our identities, so we can better serve our students, staff and families.
This sounds incredibly messy because it is.
The oppressive structure of systemic racism in this country is powerful, poisonous and must be explicitly combatted. Anti-racism must remain a core part of our DEIA work. We must talk about the hard things.
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As a Black man and leader in public education, I have grappled with the complexities of race and identity throughout my life. My entry into this topic was — and largely still is — grounded in my racial identity and my upbringing in Texas, something I’m reminded of every time I look at my birth certificate and see the word “Negro” on it.
Yet we are all more than our race. It’s all too easy to focus solely on the parts of who we are that are the most visible or important to us. I am Black, I am a cisgendered man, I am heterosexual, I am Texan, I am a father and so much more.
Inclusion and belonging work is more than race too. In addition to grappling with our own personal DEIA journeys, we must navigate the surrounding political environments of our schools. These contexts often lead teachers and leaders to cherry-pick aspects of DEIA that seem easier to address, or more palatable, while neglecting others.
For example, many teachers struggle to tell parents about books and materials that feature religious or sexual identities. Yet these same teachers find it easy to vocalize the needs of students with learning disabilities.
Schools nationwide celebrate Black History Month enthusiastically, yet voice concerns about whether Pride Month should be recognized. Staff members urge schools to prioritize hiring diverse educators, yet advocate against using school budgets to update school facilities for all bodies.
With such messy work, it’s natural to cling to what feels most achievable or comfortable. Educators are overwhelmed by challenges, from the pandemic’s impact on learning to resource gaps, safety concerns and a myriad of society’s ills.
Facing down systemic racism can feel impossible, as can dismantling overlapping systems of oppression. When we see DEIA as a singular objective to achieve or a single battle to win, we can feel defeated.
But when educators adopt DEIA as a mindset and approach, that discipline allows us to make slow but steady progress toward a more just future. This is forever, all-encompassing work. The growth and progress for each of us is never done and requires us to lean into productive struggle.
To make real gains in creating inclusive schools, we need to go beyond just meeting goals and instead commit to making sometimes difficult choices and confronting uncomfortable truths to create a new world of standards. As we approach decisions, we must ask ourselves not only what measurable outcomes our choices will achieve, but also how they will change our culture. Just as systemic racism is entrenched in American culture, we need to entrench DEIA in the work of schools.
At the charter network I lead, DEIA is everyone’s responsibility. This commitment is rooted as much in mindset as it is in accountability. It’s the lens we use to critically examine our systems, policies, programs and interactions as we aim to eliminate inequitable and exclusionary practices — without focusing solely on one identity, but instead considering how different identities interact with one another.
In the classroom, we introduced reading programs that acknowledge literacy as a key factor in creating an anti-racist education; our literacy efforts are complemented by classroom library selections for all grades that promote an inclusive learning environment for students of all identities.
We see the work as both immediate and ongoing. We name and embrace that complexity. More than 79 percent of our staff do not identify as white; 64 percent identify as Black. The majority of our school leaders and executive team reflect a similar mix of identities. Every staff member is required to engage deeply with our value of centering justice.
We’re actively working to increase religious and gender inclusion, such as with designated prayer spaces and more all-gender bathrooms, so students feel supported every time they enter our buildings.
Much more work remains to be done. We will hold ourselves to it and continue to move forward, and I remain hopeful that we’re moving in the right direction.
It’s time for all of us to dive into the mess.
Recy Benjamin Dunn is CEO of Ascend Public Charter Schools, a network of K-12 public charter schools serving nearly 6,000 students in 17 schools across Brooklyn.
This story about DEIA work was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
Related articles
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.
Young students require more learning support to remain on pace with historical academic growth trends, according to new research from Curriculum Associates, which unveils national data on the pandemic’s impact on academic growth and recovery for elementary school students.
Student Growth in the Post-COVID Era offers an assessment of student performance, tracking growth year over year and comparing it to historical trends. The report leverages three years of longitudinal data and is the first of its kind to look at impacts on younger learners who were not yet in formal schooling at the start of the pandemic. The research provides a temperature check on students’ academic growth, parsing aggregate data to determine where–and for whom–recovery may be occurring.
Key findings:
Young students require more support to keep pace with historical growth trends.
Older students (i.e., those in grade 4 in 2021) demonstrate signs of recovery in both reading and mathematics that in some cases align with their pre-pandemic growth trajectories.
Students who were well below grade level in both reading and mathematics at the beginning of the 2021–2022 school year are not keeping pace with pre-pandemic growth trends.
Some students who were at or near grade level are exceeding historical growth trends.
Students from schools in lower-income or minoritized communities demonstrate continued disparities in academic growth relative to pre-pandemic trends.
“We know the pandemic placed an enormous strain on our educators and school districts,” said Dr. Kristen Huff, vice president of research and assessment at Curriculum Associates. “The varied data and analytic approaches make it more challenging to assess the post-COVID recovery landscape. This research offers new insights into varying patterns of recovery, identifying where recovery is happening and where more support is needed.”
Uneven recovery trends indicate that in some instances, post-pandemic interventions were likely effective.
“While most young people who fall behind stay behind, there are diverse schools across the nation where students who started behind grade level are consistently catching up,” said Dr. Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP. “The first common factor is the intentional creation of environments where students feel a sense of belonging. The other two priorities that matter most are consistent access to grade-level instruction and the presence of a unified, coherent instructional program that gives both students and educators a clear path to success.”
These data underscore the need for educators, district leaders, and other stakeholders to carefully assess which interventions are most effective and how we can work together to change the course of learning outcomes for students who need support now.
“Even before the pandemic, many students in our district were not performing at their highest level of potential,” said Dr. Mark Sullivan, superintendent of Birmingham City Schools. “We were not pleased with the number of third graders reading on grade level, so we had to become intentional in everything we do. This included training our teachers on the Science of Reading, setting high expectations for educators and students, and actively involving families in their children’s learning.” This year, the district saw a 75- percent increase in the number of students reading at or above grade level.
The urgency of finding and implementing the right interventions is clear, especially when looking at this year’s Grade 2 students, who were not yet in school during the pandemic. If applied nationally, these data suggest more than 1.3 million Grade 2 students (out of the nation’s 3.5 million) are behind in reading compared to 1.1 million in 2019. More than half a million more Grade 2 students (up from 1.2 million to 1.7 million) are behind in mathematics.
Gaps in learning may be compounding for this group of students over time as they work to catch up on foundational skills while learning new content.
For Grade 2 students and all whose learning is not keeping pace with historical trends, this report will shape the conversation on how educators can help every student succeed.
This press release originally appeared online.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
As the use of artificial intelligence grows, teachers are trying to protect the integrity of their educational practices and systems. When we see what AI can do in the hands of our students, it’s hard to stay neutral about how and if to use it.
Of course, we worry about cheating; AI can be used to write essays and solve math problems.
But we also have deeper concerns regarding learning. When our students use AI, they may not be engaging as deeply with our assignments and coursework.
They have discovered ways AI can be used to create essay outlines and help with project organization and other such tasks that are key components of the learning process.
Some of this could be good. AI is a fabulous tool for getting started or unstuck. AI puts together old ideas in new ways and can do this at scale: It will make creativity easier for everyone.
But this very ease has teachers wondering how we can keep our students motivated to do the hard work when there are so many new shortcuts. Learning goals, curriculums, courses and the way we grade assignments will all need to be reevaluated.
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The new realities of work also must be considered. A shift in employers’ job postings rewards those with AI skills. Many companies report already adopting generative AI tools or anticipate incorporating them into their workflow in the near future.
A core tension has emerged: Many teachers want to keep AI out of our classrooms, but also know that future workplaces may demand AI literacy.
What we call cheating, business could see as efficiency and progress.
The complexities, opportunities and decisions that lie between banning AI and teaching AI are significant.
It is increasingly likely that using AI will emerge as an essential skill for students, regardless of their career ambitions, and that action is required of educational institutions as a result.
Integrating AI into the curriculum will require change. The best starting point is a better understanding of what AI literacy looks like in our current landscape.
In our new book, we make it clear that the specifics of AI literacy will vary somewhat from one subject to the next, but there are some AI capacities that everyone will now need.
Before even writing a prompt, the AI user should develop an understanding of the following:
the role of human / AI collaborations
how to navigate the ethical implications of using AI for a given purpose
which AI tool to use (when and why)
how to use their selected AI tool fully and successfully
the limitations of generative AI systems and how to work around them
prompt engineering and all of its nuances
This knowledge will help our students write successful prompts, but additional skills and AI literacy will be required once AI returns a response. These include the abilities to:
review and evaluate AI-produced content, including how to determine its accuracy and recognize bias
edit AI content for its intended audience and purpose
follow up with AI to refine the output
take responsibility for the quality of the final work
The development of AI literacy mirrors the development of other key skills, such as critical thinking. Teaching AI literacy begins by teaching the capacities above, as well as others specific to your own subject.
While the inclination may be to start teaching AI literacy by opening a browser, faculty should begin by providing an ethical and environmental context regarding the use of AI and the responsibilities each of us has when working with AI.
Amazon Web Services recently surveyed employers from all business sectors about what skills employees need to use AI well. In ranked order, their answers included the following:
critical thinking and problem solving
creative thinking and design competence
technical proficiency
ethics and risk management
communication
math
teamwork
management
writing
Higher education is quite adept at teaching such skills, and many of those noted are among the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) list of “essential learning outcomes” for higher education.
Faculty will need to improve their own AI literacy and explore the most advanced generative AI tools (currently ChatGPT 4o, Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3.5). A good way to begin is to ask AI to perform assignments and projects that you typically ask your students to complete — and then try to improve the AI’s response.
Understanding what AI can and cannot do well within the context of your course will be key as you contemplate revising your assignments and teaching.
Faculty should also find out if their college has an advisory board comprised of past students and/or employers. Reach out to them for firsthand insight on how AI is shifting the landscape — and keep that conversation going over time. That information will be essential as you think about AI literacy within your subjects and courses.
These actions will ultimately position you to be able to navigate the complexities and decisions that lie between ban and teach.
C. Edward Watson is vice president for digital innovation with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). José Antonio Bowen is a former president of Goucher College and co-author with Watson of “Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning.”
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.
When I first started teaching middle school, I did everything my university prep program told me to do in what’s known as the “workshop model.”
I let kids choose their books. I determined their independent reading levels and organized my classroom library according to reading difficulty.
I then modeled various reading skills, like noticing the details of the imagery in a text, and asked my students to practice doing likewise during independent reading time.
It was an utter failure.
Kids slipped their phones between the pages of the books they selected. Reading scores stagnated. I’m pretty sure my students learned nothing that year.
Yet one aspect of this model functioned seamlessly: when I sat on a desk in front of the room and read out loud from a shared classroom novel.
Kids listened, discussions arose naturally and everything seemed to click.
Slowly, the reason for these episodic successes became clear to me: Shared experiences and teacher direction are necessary for high-quality instruction and a well-run classroom.
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Over time, I pieced together the idea that my students would benefit most from a teaching model that emphasized shared readings of challenging works of literature; memorization of poetry; explicit grammar instruction; contextual knowledge, including history; and teacher direction — not time practicing skills.
But even as I made changes and saw improvements, doubts nagged at me. By abandoning student choice, and asking kids to dust off Chaucer, would I snuff out their joy of reading? Is Shakespearean English simply too difficult for middle schoolers?
To set my doubts aside, I surveyed the relevant research and found that many of the assumptions upon which the workshop model was founded are simply false — starting with the assumption that reading comprehension depends on “reading comprehension skills.”
There is evidence that teaching such skills has some benefit, but what students really need in order to read with understanding is knowledge about history, geography, science, music, the arts and the world more broadly.
Perhaps the most famous piece of evidence for this knowledge-centered theory of reading comprehension is the “baseball study,” in which researchers gave children an excerpt about baseball and then tested their comprehension. At the outset of the study, researchers noted the children’s reading levels and baseball knowledge; they varied considerably.
Ultimately, the researchers found that it was each child’s prior baseball knowledge and not their predetermined reading ability that predicted their comprehension and recall of the passage.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Embedded within any newspaper article or novel is a vast amount of assumed knowledge that authors take for granted — from the fall of the Soviet Union to the importance of 1776.
Just about any student can decode the words “Berlin Wall,” but they need a knowledge of basic geography (where is Berlin?), history (why was the Berlin wall built?) and political philosophy (what qualities of the Communist regime caused people to flee from East to West?) to grasp the full meaning of an essay or story involving the Berlin Wall.
Of course, students aren’t born with this knowledge, which is why effective teachers build students’ capacity for reading comprehension by relentlessly exposing them to content-rich texts.
My research confirmed what I had concluded from my classroom experiences: The workshop model’s text-leveling and independent reading have a weak evidence base.
Rather than obsessing over the difficulty of texts, educators would better serve students by asking themselves other questions, such as: Does our curriculum expose children to topics they might not encounter outside of school? Does it offer opportunities to discuss related historical events? Does it include significant works of literature or nonfiction that are important for understanding modern society?
In my classroom, I began to choose many books simply because of their historical significance or instructional opportunities. Reading the memoirs of Frederick Douglass with my students allowed me to discuss supplementary nonfiction texts about chattel slavery, fugitive slave laws and the Emancipation Proclamation.
Reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by C. S. Lewis prompted teaching about allusions to the Christian creation story and the myth of Narcissus, knowledge they could use to analyze future stories and characters.
Proponents of the workshop model claim that letting students choose the books they read will make them more motivated readers, increase the amount of time they spend reading and improve their literacy. The claim is widely believed.
However, it’s unclear to me why choice would necessarily foster a love of reading. To me, it seems more likely that a shared reading of a classic work with an impassioned teacher, engaged classmates and a thoughtfully designed final project are more motivating than reading a self-selected book in a lonely corner. That was certainly my experience.
After my classes acted out “Romeo and Juliet,” with rulers trimmed and painted to resemble swords, and read “To Kill a Mockingbird” aloud, countless students (and their parents) told me it was the first time they’d ever enjoyed reading.
They said these classics were the first books that made them think — and the first ones that they’d ever connected with.
Students don’t need hours wasted on finding a text’s main idea or noticing details. They don’t need time cloistered off with another book about basketball.
They need to experience art, literature and history that might not immediately interest them but will expand their perspective and knowledge of the world.
They need a teacher to guide them through and inspire a love and interest in this content. The workshop model doesn’t offer students what they need, but teachers still can.
Daniel Buck is an editorial and policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the author of “What Is Wrong with Our Schools?”
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.
Higher education has finally come around to the idea that college should better help prepare students for careers.
It’s about time: Recognizing that students do not always understand the connection between their coursework and potential careers is a long-standing problem that must be addressed.
Over 20 years ago, I co-authored the best-selling “Quarterlife Crisis,” one of the first books to explore the transition from college to the workforce. We found, anecdotally, that recent college graduates felt inadequately prepared to choose a career or transition to life in the workforce. At that time, liberal arts institutions in particular did not view career preparation as part of their role.
While some progress has been made since then, institutions can still do a better job connecting their educational and economic mobility missions; recent research indicates that college graduates are having a hard time putting their degrees to work.
Importantly, improving career preparation can help not only with employment but also with student retention and completion.
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I believe that if students have a career plan in mind, and if they better understand how coursework will help them succeed in the workforce, they will be more likely to complete that coursework, persist, graduate and succeed in their job search.
First-generation students, in particular, whose parents often lack college experience, may not understand why they need to take a course such as calculus, which, on the surface, does not appear to help prepare them for most jobs in the workforce.
They will benefit deeply from a clearer understanding of how such required courses connect to their career choices and skills.
Acknowledging the need for higher education to better demonstrate course-to-career linkages — and its role in workforce preparation — is an important first step.
Taking action to improve these connections will better position students and institutions. Better preparing students for the workforce will increase their success rates and, in turn, will improve college rankings on student success measures.
This might require a cultural shift in some cases, but given the soaring cost of tuition, it is necessary for institutions to think about return on investment for students and their parents, not only in intellectual terms but also monetarily.
Such a shift could help facilitate much-needed social and economic mobility, particularly for students who borrow money to attend college.
Recent articles and research about low job placement rates for college graduates often posit that internships provide the needed connection between college and careers. Real-world experience is important, but there are other ways to make a college degree more career relevant.
1. Spell out the connections for students. The class syllabus is one opportunity to make this connection for students. Faculty can explain how different coursework topics and texts translate to career skills and provide real-life examples of those skills at work. In some cases, however, this might be a tough sell for faculty who have spent their careers in the academy and do not see career counseling as part of their job.
But providing this additional information for students does not need to be a big lift and can be done in partnership with campus staff, such as career services counselors. These connections can also be made in course catalogs, on department websites and through student seminars.
2. Raise awareness of realistic careers. Many students start college with the goal of entering a commonly known profession — doctor, lawyer or teacher, to name a few. However, there are hundreds of jobs, such as public policy research and advocacy, with which students may not be as familiar. Colleges should provide more detailed information on a wide range of careers that students may never have thought of — and how coursework can help them enter those fields. Experiential learning can provide good opportunities to sample careers that match students’ interests, to help further determine the right fit.
Increased awareness of job options can also serve as motivation for students as they formulate their goals and plans. Jobs can be described through the same information avenues as the career-coursework connections listed above, along with examples of how coursework is used in each job.
3. Make coursework-career connections a campuswide priority. College leaders must stress to faculty the importance of better preparing students for careers. Economic mobility is of increasing importance to institutions and the general public, and consumers now rely on information about employment outcomes when selecting colleges (e.g., see College Scorecard).
Faculty can be assured that adding career preparation to a college degree does not diminish its educational value — quite the contrary; critical thinking and analytical skills, for example, are of utmost importance to liberal arts programs and prospective employers. Simply demonstrating those links does not change coursework content or objectives.
4. Help students translate their coursework for the job market. Beyond understanding the coursework-to-career linkages, students must know how to articulate them. Job interviews are unnatural for anyone, especially for students new to the workforce — and even more so for those who are the first in their families to graduate from college.
Career centers often provide interview tips to students — again, if the students seek out that help — but special emphasis should be placed on helping students reflect on their coursework and translate the skills and knowledge they have gained for employers.
A portfolio can help them accomplish this, and it can be developed at regular intervals throughout a student’s time on campus, since reflecting on several years of coursework all at once can be challenging. A Senior Year Seminar can further promote workforce readiness and tie together the career skills gained throughout one’s time on campus.
By making these simple changes, institutions can take the lead in making students and the public more aware of the benefits of higher education.
Abby Miller, founding partner at ASA Research, has been researching higher education and workforce development for over 20 years.
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.
There is a long overdue movement in states and districts across the country to update K-3 reading and math curricula to ensure they adhere to research-proven practices. However, this movement has a big blind spot: preschool.
Close to half of all four-year-olds in the U.S. now start their formal education in a public preschool classroom, and this share is steadily growing. States invested well over $10 billion in pre-K programs in 2022-23, and the federal government invested $11 billion in Head Start.
Most public preschool programs succeed in offering children well-organized classrooms in which they feel safe to learn and explore. But they fall short in building the critical early learning skills on which a child’s future literacy and math skills depend.
Strong preschool experiences matter. The seeds of the large, consequential learning gap between children from higher-income and lower-income families in language, literacy and math skills in middle and high school are already planted by the first day of kindergarten.
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Many studies in widely differing locales around the country have shown that attending preschool boosts children’s kindergarten readiness, and that its effects can — but don’t invariably — last beyond kindergarten and even into adulthood. This readiness includes the ability to follow teacher directions and get along with peers, a solid understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds, a strong vocabulary and a conceptual knowledge of the number line — all skills on which elementary school curricula can build and all eagerly learned by preschoolers.
But as with all education, some programs are more effective than others, and curriculum is a key active ingredient. Most preschool programs rely on curricula that do not match the current science of early learning and teaching. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch to do better. As a new National Academies report explains, we have ample research that points to what makes a preschool curriculum effective.
Three practical changes will help to move today’s curriculum reform efforts in the right direction.
First, public preschool programs need to update their lists of approved curricula, based on evidence, to clearly identify those that improve young children’s learning and development. In the 2021-22 school year (the most recent year for which figures are available), only 19 states maintained lists of approved curricula, and those lists included curricula that are not evidence-based.
Second, because the most effective preschool curricula tend to target only one or two learning areas (such as math and literacy), programs need to combine curricula to cover all vital areas. Fortunately, preschool programs in Boston and elsewhere have done precisely this.
Third, tightly linking curricula to teacher professional development and coaching is required for effective implementation. Too often, teacher professional development focuses on general best practices or is highly episodic, approaches that have not translated into preschool learning gains.
We can’t stop with these three changes, however. Children learn best when kindergarten and later elementary curricula build upon preschool curriculum.
None of these changes will solve the problem of the inadequate funding that affects many preschool programs and fuels high teacher turnover. But they can provide teachers with the best tools to support learning.
Getting preschool curricula right is crucial for society to receive the research-proven benefits of early education programs. Evidence shows a boost in learning when programs use more effective curricula.
What’s next is for policymakers to put this evidence into action.
Deborah A. Phillips and Christina Weiland are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on a New Vision for High-Quality Pre-K Curriculum, which recently released a report with a series of recommendations to improve preschool curriculum, as is Douglas H. Clements, who also contributed to this opinion piece.
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.
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — When Natalia Molina began teaching her second grade students word problems earlier this school year, every lesson felt difficult. Most students were stymied by problems such as: “Sally went shopping. She spent $86 on groceries and $39 on clothing. How much more did Sally spend on groceries than on clothing?”
Both Molina, a first-year teacher, and her students had been trained to tackle word problems by zeroing in on key words like “and,” “more” and “total” — a simplistic approach that Molina said too often led her students astray. After recognizing the word “and,” for instance, they might mistakenly assume that they needed to add two nearby numbers together to arrive at an answer.
Some weaker readers, lost in a sea of text, couldn’t recognize any words at all.
“I saw how overwhelmed they would get,” said Molina, who teaches at Segue Institute for Learning, a predominantly Hispanic charter school in this small city just north of Providence.
So, with the help of a trainer doing work in Rhode Island through a state grant, Molina and some of her colleagues revamped their approach to teaching word problems this winter — an effort that they said is already paying off in terms of increased student confidence and ability. “It has been a game changer for them,” Molina said.
Second grade teacher Natalia Molina circulates to help groups of students as they work on word problems. Credit: Phillip Keith for The Hechinger Report
Perhaps no single educational task encompasses as many different skills as the word problem. Between reading, executive functioning, problem solving, computation and vocabulary, there are a lot of ways for students to go wrong. And for that reason, students perform significantly worse overall on word problems compared to questions more narrowly focused on computation or shapes (for example: “Solve 7 + _ = 22” or “What is 64 x 3?”).
If a student excels at word problems, it’s a good sign that they’re generally excelling at school. “Word-problem solving in lower grades is one of the better indicators of overall school success in K-12,” said Lynn Fuchs, a research professor at Vanderbilt University. In a large national survey, for instance, algebra teachers rated word-problem solving as the most important among 15 skills required to excel in the subject.
Teacher takeaways
Don’t instruct students to focus mainly on “key words” in word problems such as “and” or “more”
Mix question types in any lesson so that students don’t assume they just apply the same operation (addition, subtraction) again and again
Teach students the underlying structure — or schema — of the word problem
Yet most experts and many educators agree that too many schools are doing it wrong, particularly in the elementary grades. And in a small but growing number of classrooms, teachers like Molina are working to change that. “With word problems, there are more struggling learners than non-struggling learners” because they are taught so poorly, said Nicole Bucka, who works with teachers throughout Rhode Island to provide strategies for struggling learners.
Too many teachers, particularly in the early grades, rely on key words to introduce math problems. Posters displaying the terms — sum, minus, fewer, etc. — tied to operations including addition and subtraction are a staple in elementary school classrooms across the country.
Key words can be a convenient crutch for both students and teachers, but they become virtually meaningless as the problems become harder, according to researchers. Key words can help first graders figure out whether to add or subtract more than half of the time, but the strategy rarely works for the multi-step problems students encounter starting in second and third grade. “With multi-step problems, key words don’t work 90 percent of the time,” said Sarah Powell, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies word problems and whose research has highlighted the inefficacy of key words. “But the average kindergarten teacher is not thinking about that; they are teaching 5-year-olds, not 9-year-olds.”
Many teachers in the youngest grades hand out worksheets featuring the same type of word problem repeated over and over again. That’s what Molina’s colleague, Cassandra Santiago, did sometimes last year when leading a classroom on her own for the first time. “It was a mistake,” the first grade teacher said. “It’s really important to mix them up. It makes them think more critically about the parts they have to solve.”
A second grader at Segue works through the steps of a word problem. Credit: Phillip Keith for The Hechinger Report
Another flaw with word problem instruction is that the overwhelming majority of questions are divorced from the actual problem-solving a child might have to do outside the classroom in their daily life — or ever, really. “I’ve seen questions about two trains going on the same track,” said William Schmidt, a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. “First, why would they be going on the same track and, second, who cares?”
“That is one of the reasons why children have problems with mathematics,” he said. “They don’t see the connection to the real world … We’re at this point in math right now where we are just teaching students how to manipulate numbers.”
He said a question, aimed at middle schoolers, that does have real world connections and involves more than manipulating numbers, might be: “Shopping at the new store in town includes a 43% discount on all items which are priced the same at $2. The state you live in has a 7% sales tax. You want to buy many things but only have a total of $52 to spend. Describe in words how many things you could buy.”
Schmidt added that relevancy of word problems is one area where few, if any, countries excel. “No one was a shining star leading the way,” he said.
***
In her brightly decorated classroom one Tuesday afternoon, Santiago, the first grade teacher, gave each student a set of animal-shaped objects and a sheet of blue paper (the water) and green (the grass). “We’re going to work on a number story,” she told them. “I want you to use your animals to tell me the story.”
“Once upon a time,” the story began. In this tale, three animals played in the water, and two animals played in the grass. Santiago allowed some time for the ducks, pigs and bears to frolic in the wilds of each student’s desk before she asked the children to write a number sentence that would tell them how many animals they have altogether.
Some of the students relied more on pictorial representations (three dots on one side of a line and two dots on the other) and others on the number sentence (3+2 = 5) but all of them eventually got to five. And Santiago made sure that her next question mixed up the order of operations (so students didn’t incorrectly assume that all they ever have to do is add): “Some more animals came and now there are seven. So how many more came?”
One approach to early elementary word problems that is taking off in some schools, including Segue Institute, has its origins in a special education intervention for struggling math students. Teachers avoid emphasizing key words and ask students instead to identify first the conceptual type of word problem (or schema, as many practitioners and researchers refer to it) they are dealing with: “Total problems,” for instance, involve combining two parts to find a new amount; “change problems” involve increasing or decreasing the amount of something. Total problems do not necessarily involve adding, however.
A first grader at Segue identifies the correct formula to solve a word problem. Credit: Phillip Keith for The Hechinger Report
“The schemas that students learn in kindergarten will continue with them throughout their whole career,” said Powell, the word-problem researcher, who regularly works with districts across the country to help implement the approach.
In Olathe, Kansas — a district inspired by Powell’s work — teachers had struggled for years with word problems, said Kelly Ulmer, a math support specialist whose goal is to assist in closing academic gaps that resulted from lost instruction time during the pandemic. “We’ve all tried these traditional approaches that weren’t working,” she said. “Sometimes you get pushback on new initiatives from veteran teachers and one of the things that showed us how badly this was needed is that the veteran teachers were the most excited and engaged — they have tried so many things” that haven’t worked.
In Rhode Island, many elementary schools initially used the strategy with students who required extra help, including those in special education, but expanded this use to make it part of the core instruction for all, said Bucka. In some respects, it’s similar to the recent, well publicized evolution of reading instruction in which some special education interventions for struggling readers — most notably, a greater reliance on phonics in the early grades — have gone mainstream.
There is an extensive research base showing that focusing on the different conceptual types of word problems is an effective way of teaching math, although much of the research focuses specifically on students experiencing difficulties in the subject.
Molina has found asking students to identify word problems by type to be a useful tool with nearly all of her second graders; next school year she hopes to introduce the strategy much earlier.
Working in groups, second graders in Natalia Molina’s classroom at Segue tackle a lesson on word problems. Credit: Phillip Keith for The Hechinger Report
One recent afternoon, a lesson on word problems started with everyone standing up and chanting in unison: “Part plus part equals total” (they brought two hands together). “Total minus part equals part” (they took one hand away).
It’s a way to help students remember different conceptual frameworks for word problems. And it’s especially effective for the students who learn well through listening and repeating. For visual learners, the different types of word problems were mapped out on individual dry erase mats.
The real work began when Molina passed out questions, and the students— organized into the Penguin, Flower Bloom, Red Panda and Marshmallow teams — had to figure out which framework they were dealing with on their own and then work toward an answer. A few months ago, many of them would have automatically shut down when they saw the text on the page, Molina said.
For the Red Pandas, the question under scrutiny was: “The clothing store had 47 shirts. They sold 21, how many do they have now?”
“It’s a total problem,” one student said.
“No, it’s not total,” responded another.
“I think it’s about change,” said a third.
None of the students seemed worried about their lack of consensus, however. And neither was Molina. A correct answer is always nice but those come more often now that most of the students have made a crucial leap. “I notice them thinking more and more,” she said, “about what the question is actually asking.”
This story about word problems 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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BETHESDA, Md.—EPS Learning, the leading provider of PreK-12 literacy solutions, is excited to announce that its recent SPIRE® study has earned Level 3 certification for alignment with Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) standards. SPIRE is a research-proven, comprehensive, structured literacy and multisensory reading intervention program that has supported reading success for all striving readers through an intensive and structured science-of-reading aligned curriculum for over 30 years.
LXD Research conducted a third-party study to determine the relationship between the usage of SPIRE and student reading outcomes in 13 schools in Martin County School District, Florida. The study’s positive, statistically significant findings support a relationship between SPIRE progress and improved literacy skills for special education students. The findings were robust across Grades 3, 4, and 5 after controlling for key predictors such as previous FAST (Florida’s statewide, standardized assessment) scale scores, gender, LEP status, grade level and race/ethnicity.
This study met the following criteria for ESSA Level 3 achievement:
Correlational design; students new to the program compared to students with more progress in the program
Proper design and implementation with at least two teachers and 30 students per group
Study uses a form of a program that could be replicated
Statistical controls through covariates
At least one statistically significant, positive finding
EPS Learning Chief Academic Officer Dr. Janine Walker-Caffrey spoke to the company’s recent rating, stating, “We are incredibly proud of the decades of impactful support SPIRE has provided for readers across the country and are elated about the recent ESSA rating! While this is a wonderful achievement, we are just beginning our bolstered efficacy research efforts. Upcoming research will re-demonstrate that this effective and evidence-based program for reading intervention is still positively impacting students in becoming fluent readers. We are excited to accomplish the next level of ESSA certification as studies continue to be released.”
SPIRE was developed by Orton-Gillingham (OG) Fellow, Sheila Clark-Edmands, and is based on structured literacy principles and the OG approach. The program incorporates evidence-based best practices for reading and language development. It also includes skills that are key to fluent reading acquisition: phonemic awareness, phonics, handwriting, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Each SPIRE lesson employs 10 steps that enhance student learning and memory by engaging multisensory pathways to the brain in rapid succession, ensuring orthographic mapping and automaticity.
About EPS Learning
EPS Learning has partnered with educators for more than 70 years to advance literacy as the springboard for lifelong learning and opportunity. The 20+ literacy solutions included in the EPS Literacy Framework are based on the science of reading and support grades PreK through 12, all tiers of instruction, and every pillar of reading. EPS Learning offers evidence-based intervention and customized professional learning to help move students toward growth, mastery, and success. Visit www.epslearning.com to learn more.
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Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, educators have pondered its implications for education. Some have leaned toward apocalyptic projections about the end of learning, while others remain cautiously optimistic.
My students took longer than I expected to discover generative AI. When I asked them about ChatGPT in February 2023, many had never heard of it.
But some caught up, and now our college’s academic integrity office is busier than ever dealing with AI-related cheating. The need for guidelines is discussed in every college meeting, but I’ve noticed a worrying reaction among students that educators are not considering: fear.
Students are bombarded with negative ideas about AI. Punitive policies heighten that fear while failing to recognize the potential educational benefits of these technologies — and that students will need to use them in their careers. Our role as educators is to cultivate critical thinking and equip students for a job market that will use AI, not to intimidate them.
Yet course descriptions include bans on the use of AI. Professors tell students they cannot use it. And students regularly read stories about their peers going on academic probation for using Grammarly. If students feel constantly under suspicion, it can create a hostile learning environment.
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Many of my students haven’t even played around with ChatGPT because they are scared of being accused of plagiarism. This avoidance creates a paradox in which students are expected to be adept with these modern tools post-graduation, yet are discouraged from engaging with them during their education.
I suspect the profile of my students makes them more prone to fear AI. Most are Hispanic and female, taking courses in translation and interpreting. They see that the overwhelmingly male and white “tech bros” in Silicon Valley shaping AI look nothing like them, and they internalize the idea that AI is not for them and not something they need to know about. I wasn’t surprised that the only male student I had in class this past semester was the only student excited about ChatGPT from the very beginning.
Failing to develop AI literacy among Hispanic students can diminish their confidence and interest in engaging with these technologies. Their fearful reactions will widen the already concerning inequities between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students; the degree completion gap between Latino and white students increased between 2018 and 2021.
The stakes are high. Similar to the internet boom, AI will revolutionize daily activities and, certainly, knowledge jobs. To prepare our students for these changes, we need to help them understand what AI is and encourage them to explore the functionalities of large language models like ChatGPT.
I decided to address the issue head-on. I asked my students to write speeches on a current affairs topic. But first, I asked for their thoughts on AI. I was shocked by the extent of their misunderstanding: Many believed that AI was an omniscient knowledge-producing machine connected to the internet.
After I gave a brief presentation on AI, they expressed surprise that large language models are based on prediction rather than direct knowledge. Their curiosity was piqued, and they wanted to learn how to use AI effectively.
After they drafted their speeches without AI, I asked them to use ChatGPT to proofread their drafts and then report back to me. Again, they were surprised — this time about how much ChatGPT could improve their writing. I was happy (even proud) to see they were also critical of the output, with comments such as “It didn’t sound like me” or “It made up parts of the story.”
Was the activity perfect? Of course not. Prompting was challenging. I noticed a clear correlation between literacy levels and the quality of their prompts.
Students who struggled with college-level writing couldn’t go beyond prompts such as “Make it sound smoother.” Nonetheless, this basic activity was enough to spark curiosity and critical thinking about AI.
Individual activities like these are great, but without institutional support and guidance, efforts toward fostering AI literacy will fall short.
The provost of my college established an AI committee to develop college guidelines. It included professors from a wide range of disciplines (myself included), other staff members and, importantly, students.
Through multiple meetings, we brainstormed the main issues that needed to be included and researched specific topics like AI literacy, data privacy and safety, AI detectors and bias.
We created a document divided into key points that everyone could understand. The draft document was then circulated among faculty and other committees for feedback.
Initially, we were concerned that circulating the guidelines among too many stakeholders might complicate the process, but this step proved crucial. Feedback from professors in areas such as history and philosophy strengthened the guidelines, adding valuable perspectives. This collaborative approach also helped increase institutional buy-in, as everyone’s contribution was valued.
Underfunded public institutions like mine face significant challenges integrating AI into education. While AI offers incredible opportunities for educators, realizing these opportunities requires substantial institutional investment.
Asking adjuncts in my department, who are grossly underpaid, to find time to learn how to use AI and incorporate it into their classes seems unethical. Yet, incorporating AI into our knowledge production activities can significantly boost student outcomes.
If this happens only at wealthy institutions, we will widen academic performance gaps.
Furthermore, if only students at wealthy institutions and companies get to use AI, the bias inherent in these large language models will continue to grow.
If we want our classes to ensure equitable educational opportunities for all students, minority-serving institutions cannot fall behind in AI adoption.
Cristina Lozano Argüelles is an assistant professor of interpreting and bilingualism at John Jay College, part of the City University of New York, where she researches the cognitive and social dimensions of language learning.
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.
This story was produced by The 19th and is reprinted with permission.
PASADENA, Calif. — After starting elementary school in the late 1960s, Naomi Hirahara and three other girls formed a clique called the C.L.A.N., an acronym that represented each of the girl’s first initials. Hirahara said she and her friends didn’t consider the racial implications of their group’s name until one of their fathers objected: “The Klan is very bad!”
The group consisted of Hirahara, who is Japanese-American, two Black girls and a White Jewish girl. They attended Loma Alta Elementary, a racially diverse school in Altadena, Calif., that stood out from many others in the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), especially its high schools, which were more racially homogenous.
“I really treasured the fact that we could form these interracial and intercultural relationships,” Hirahara said of her school, where, she recalled, students acknowledged racial differences, but weren’t fixated on them.
Seventy years after the Brown decision on May 17, 1954, PUSD is still rebounding from the white flight that followed its desegregation order. More than 27,700 school-age youth live in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, the communities served by the district, but only about half of them attend public school.
Pasadena High School. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
With 133,560 residents, Pasadena has one of the densest concentrations of private schools in the country, according to school officials. But the moms in the community who support public schools have organized to create a more equitable and diverse educational landscape.
They have teamed up with local educational organizations to advocate for the school district, and by extension, for racially and economically diverse schools. They have reached out to families with preschoolers, joined public school tours and gone door-to-door to reframe the narrative around PUSD. District officials, for their part, have expanded magnet and dual language immersion offerings, among other competitive programs, at schools to attract families from a wide range of backgrounds.
Families and officials have also worked together to educate realtors. It turns out that some of them dissuaded homeowners from enrolling children in PUSD, contributing to the exodus to private schools and, more recently, charter schools.
Changing negative perceptions that date back to school desegregation during the 1970s hasn’t been easy, they said. Back then, the backlash to the busing program occurred almost as soon as it started, with a recall campaign against school board members and a near 12-percentage-point drop in white student enrollment. Ronald Reagan, who was California’s governor at the time, stoked the fire when he signed legislation that prohibited busing without parental consent.
Today, advocating for Pasadena’s public schools is all the more challenging when considering that more than 40 private schools have been established in PUSD’s boundaries; the district has 23 public schools. In interviews, community members told The 19th that the proliferation of private schools has enabled white, middle- and upper-class families to evade public schools in the five decades since court-ordered desegregation.
“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,” said Brian McDonald, who served as PUSD’s superintendent for nine years before stepping down in 2023.
California is not usually a place associated with segregation, though segregation has historically been a problem in the state. A 1973 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that school segregation there and elsewhere in the West is frequently “as severe as in the South.” A report released last month by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA — “The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America – from Brown to Now” — ranked California as the top state in the country where Black and Latino students attend schools with the lowest percentages of white students.
“California has gone through a major racial transition,” said Gary Orfield, one of the authors of the report and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “It was an overwhelmingly White state in terms of school enrollment at the time of the Brown decision, but it’s now, of course, a state that is overwhelmingly non-White in terms of student enrollment. That’s basically caused by tanking birth rates and immigration.”
Fueling segregation, Orfield said, is the fact that California has largely lacked state policies designed to racially balance schools since the 1960s and 1970s, when court orders brought about change.
In Pasadena, some residents say that the school district’s reputation is improving and more people want to invest and enroll their children in public schools. Although white and Asian-American students remain underrepresented in PUSD, the White student population has slightly increased over the past 20 years despite the drop in the city’s White population during that period.
After failed attempts, Pasadena voters have approved ballot measures to increase funding for local schools in recent years, enabling the district to make millions of dollars in upgrades. The district has also received national recognition for its academic programs, school tours are packed and young parents now tend to view diversity as an asset, its supporters say.
“Most school districts across the country have given up on integration. It’s not on the radar screen,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who has authored studies on PUSD and is director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “Pasadena, along with a number of other forward-looking communities, is trying to do something about that. They haven’t reached all their goals, but I’m inspired that there is a critical mass of parents who recognize the benefits of diversity for all students.”
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Pasadena High School. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
During a recent information session for prospective public school parents, Nancy Dufford, executive director of the Pasadena Education Network (PEN), which works to get families involved in district schools, told the audience: “Probably, a lot of you were told when you moved here that you couldn’t send your kids to public school.”
She was stunned to find out that none of the families had actually heard such comments. It was the first time she had spoken to a group of parents who hadn’t been warned away. In Pasadena, Dufford said, it has been tradition for established families not to send their children to public schools. “So many people live here for long periods of time,” she said. “So you have generations of families here who have that message.”
The message ends up making its way to newer Pasadenans. Dufford said she heard it herself after becoming a mother in the 1990s, shortly after relocating to the city. In fact, PEN, the group she runs today, was started in 2006 by a group of preschool parents who had heard the same thing yet refused to listen.
They were among the parents who asked questions like, “Why do people say the schools aren’t good?”
Kimberly Kenne, president of the PUSD Board of Education and one of the founding members of PEN, said that she also wondered about this “pervasive narrative” when she moved to town in the early 1990s. She wasn’t aware of the bias against public schools in Pasadena, though her husband, who was raised in the city, attended private school when the desegregation order came down.
After their first child was born in 1997, Kenne considered enrolling him in the neighborhood public school — only to be admonished by fellow parents. “Are you sure you’re going to share the values of the other parents at public school?” she recalled them asking.
She enrolled her son in a private school, but changed her mind. One reason is that the school wasn’t equipped to meet his needs as a neurodivergent child. Another is that the private school lacked racial diversity in the student body, something that mattered to her.
Jennifer Hall Lee, vice president of PUSD’s Board of Education, also enrolled her daughter, who is now 20, in private school — regretting the decision when she realized her daughter didn’t seem comfortable interacting with people from a wide range of backgrounds.
Lee herself had gone to a public high school in Atlanta in the 1970s that had equal percentages of Black and White students. After switching her daughter to public school, Lee noticed that the child’s worldview changed.
“She would talk to me about the kids in the schools, from first-generation immigrant kids to foster youth,” Lee said. “She began to really understand the differences in socioeconomic status and understand that people lived in apartments and not everybody owned a home. She started understanding the full breadth of her community.”
In a city where the median home sale price is $1.1 million and the median household income is almost six figures, it’s confusing for newcomers to understand why the school system has a poor reputation since affluence in a community typically translates into quality in its public schools.
Pasadena, however, has become known as “a tale of two cities,” a place where the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened and the two groups don’t mingle socially or academically. At $97,818, the median household income is just above the state’s and $23,000 above the nation’s. At the same time, the city’s poverty rate of 13.4 percent is slightly higher than the state and national rate.
When the school district’s critics mention that its test scores are lower than those in surrounding school systems, supporters respond that the city has a wealth gap that’s largely absent from the more homogeneous neighboring suburbs. Many of the detractors, Dufford said, are also unaware that PUSD’s “bad” reputation coincided with the 1970 desegregation order that accelerated the departure of white, middle- and upper-income families from the district.
White flight out of Pasadena has been traced back as far as the 1940s. The reasons include lower birth rates among white families, an economic downturn in the aerospace industry that limited employment opportunities and the restructuring of neighborhoods to make way for freeways. By 1960, the racial demographics of the city were also changing, with communities of color expanding rapidly. The next year, PUSD lost about 400 students when the mostly white community of La Cañada broke away from the district to form its own separate school system, which to this day is ranked as one of the state’s best. In 1976, La Cañada Flintridge became its own city.
“The fact that people are willing to create whole new municipalities, so they don’t have to integrate — that should really wow people,” said Shannon Malone, PUSD’s senior director of principals, who added that her views were not the school district’s but her own. “You would rather create a whole new city than to let your child sit next to a person of color. I don’t think people have a full understanding of that at all.”
Having lived through the desegregation order, Hirahara, who is now an award-winning mystery writer, wishes more people knew about the history of the city’s schools. In 2016, she received a grant from the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division to present “Loma Alta: Tales of Desegregation,” a talk at a public library that featured her and two other district alumni sharing their experiences.
“So many people don’t even know that it was the first West Coast school district to get the order to desegregate, so it’s a very unique and telling experience of why we’re still dealing with issues of race today,” Hirahara said.
When Hirahara was enrolled in Loma Alta, about half of its students were Black. It was one of Pasadena’s top-performing elementary schools, which the 1973 report from the Civil Rights commission attributed to the fact that many of the students came from middle-class households. Other high-achieving schools in the district with large Black populations included Audubon Primary School and John Muir High School. Six students at John Muir were accepted into the elite California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1972, a rare feat that prompted Caltech’s then-president to write about the accomplishment in the local newspapers.
The Brown v. Board decision had the unintended consequence of costing tens of thousands of Black educators their jobs as many white schools did not want to employ these teachers and principals after integration. The consequences have endured for decades. In 2021, about 15 percent of public school students nationwide were Black, but only 6 percent of public school teachers nationwide were, according to a forthcoming report by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit that works to advance equitable education policies.
“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,”
Brian McDonald, the Pasadena Unified School District, former superintendent
Malone, who is Black and was bused to schools in Los Angeles, underscored the results of studies that show that students of color excel when they have Black teachers, demonstrating better academic and behavioral outcomes. But when Black children attend integrated schools, their support systems don’t usually accompany them, she said.
The achievements of students at racially diverse schools in the district didn’t stop the parents bent on leaving PUSD from doing so, administrators complained to federal officials in 1973. The biggest obstacle preventing the district from truly becoming integrated, the administrators said, was “white flight.” The Civil Rights commission’s report quoted one administrator making a remark that could have come from a PUSD supporter today: “White parents don’t take time to see whether the system is bad or not. They simply listen to people who criticize the district without foundation.”
What’s different is that now the district has an army of moms actively challenging these attitudes. Victoria Knapp is one of them, but it took time and trust in herself before she became a public school crusader.
Victoria Knapp, PUSD mom and volunteer and advocate for the community’s public schools through the Pasadena Education Network, poses for a portrait in the backyard of her home in Altadena on Monday, May 13, 2024. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
When Knapp entered grade school in Pasadena in the 1970s, she heard that children her age were being bused from one neighborhood to another, but she didn’t understand why it was being done or what it was like. Knapp did not attend the city’s public schools.
“My schools were predominantly white, predominantly Catholic and predominantly middle class or above,” she said.
She had some familiarity with public schools because her mother taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District, but she didn’t know that a contentious debate about integrating them had unfolded in her own community. Years later, after the birth of her older son, she felt pressure from fellow moms to send her children to private school. The aversion to public school in her moms’ group made her reflect on her city’s past. She thought to herself: “You mean to tell me that whatever was going on here 40 years ago is still going on?”
Still, her Catholic school upbringing and the nudging from the private school enthusiasts led Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council’s executive committee, to rule out PUSD. First, she and her husband enrolled their eldest son in a parochial school. Then they tried a nonsectarian private school. The couple felt that both schools exposed their children to experiences and behaviors they did not appreciate, like the sense of entitlement expressed by some of their classmates. Knapp, for the first time, began to consider an alternative.
“It did seem counterintuitive to me that I was going to have this relatively homogenous group of moms dictate what we were going to decide for our own kid,” she said.
After touring PUSD schools, Knapp questioned the idea that they were inferior to the city’s private schools. She wondered, “What’s not good? Is it that our public schools are predominantly Black and Brown children?”
When some parents raised safety concerns, she responded that elementary schools aren’t typically dangerous and that fights, gun violence and truancy occur at private and public schools alike. “They could never really articulate what safety meant,” Knapp said. “What safety meant was they didn’t want their child in an integrated, diverse school. They just didn’t. And that’s exactly where I wanted my privileged white sons to be.”
Both of her sons, a sixth grader and an 11th grader, have now attended public school for years. Her younger son attended Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson’s alma mater, Cleveland Elementary School.
Knapp became an active PUSD parent, serving as a PTA president at Altadena Arts Magnet, the school her younger son attended next, and an ambassador for the Pasadena Education Network, a role that has her regularly participate in school tours. Going on tours allows her to field questions from prospective parents. What the families see often surprises them, Knapp said.
“They think they’re going to see chaos and mayhem, then they come in,” she said. “Altadena Arts is an inclusion school, so kids of all neurodiversities are included in the same classroom. It’s socioeconomically diverse, it’s racially diverse, it’s gender diverse, it’s very integrated. You walk up there and it’s like, ‘This is what a school should look like.’”
Karina Montilla Edmonds is a PUSD parent and board member of the Pasadena Educational Foundation. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
Karina Montilla Edmonds, who moved to Pasadena in 1992 to attend Caltech, never doubted the city’s public school district. When her now 22-year-old daughter was entering kindergarten, Edmonds and her former husband turned down the chance to send her to the neighboring San Marino Unified School District (SMUSD), which ranks as one of the state’s top 10 school systems. Her then-husband taught for SMUSD, qualifying their eldest daughter for an interdistrict transfer to the suburb where the median household income is $174,253 and more than 85 percent of students are proficient in reading and math.
Edmonds wasn’t interested. “At the time, I was like, ‘That’s not my school. That’s not my community. I have a school two blocks away. Why wouldn’t I go there?’”
The decision appalled many of her fellow parents. “People thought I was nuts,” she said. “Luckily, I have a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech, so they knew I wasn’t stupid, but they definitely thought I was crazy.”
The mom of three from Rhode Island didn’t fear that her children wouldn’t get a good education in Pasadena’s public schools because she excelled in the public education system in her state while growing up in a household of few resources, raised by parents with limited formal education. “I thought I was rich because everybody around me was on public aid,” she said. When she attended a competitive public high school, she learned just how economically disadvantaged her family was. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I’m poor.’”
She now serves on the board of the Pasadena Educational Foundation, a nonprofit focused on developing community partnerships to help the city’s public schools excel. The organization also works with the Pasadena-Foothills Association of Realtors to educate real estate agents about the public schools since some realtors had a history of discouraging homebuyers from enrolling their children in PUSD. McDonald, the former superintendent, said that it happened to him when he was buying a home several years ago.
“She advised me to put my kids in every other school and district except for PUSD,” he said. “But I’m happy to say that through the efforts of the district and the Pasadena Educational Foundation, primarily utilizing the realtor initiative, we were able to change a few minds.”
Edmonds agrees that educating realtors is an important step. Her perspective on public schools and the surrounding communities, she added, also comes from the fact that her ex-husband taught in Pasadena before San Marino. Was he suddenly a better teacher because he moved from a less affluent school district to a more affluent one? She didn’t think so. She also didn’t compare the two district’s test scores because their populations are different. Pasadena Unified has significantly more low-income students, foster youth, English language learners and Black and Brown students than San Marino Unified, which is predominantly White and Asian American.
“To me, that’s part of the enrichment of getting to be with and learn from a broader part of our community,” she said, adding that children don’t suffer because they attend school in diverse environments.
The idea of seeking out or avoiding schools based on demographics concerns her.
“I feel like our democracy depends on an educated population,” she said. “I think every child should have access to excellent education and have an opportunity for success because I know the opportunities that I had given to me through the public school system.”
Dr. Brian McDonald, superintendent of Pasadena Unified School District from 2014 to 2023, stands in front of Pasadena High School on Monday, May 13, 2024. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
The year after McDonald became the PUSD superintendent in 2014, he wrote a column in the local paper describing the difficulties the district was experiencing because of the high percentage of parents sending their children to private school. He estimated that the district was losing out on about $14 million because of declining enrollment, money that could help PUSD prevent school closures, teacher layoffs and cuts to student services.
But he also touted the district’s variety of programs for students such as dual language immersion schools and International Baccalaureate, as well as the piloting of a dual enrollment program with the local community college. Since then, the district has expanded its initiatives and created new ones. In addition to Spanish and Mandarin, the district’s dual language immersion tracks now include French and Armenian. From 2013 to 2022, PUSD also received three federal magnet assistance program grants that allow it to bring more academic rigor to its schools.
“We lose enrollment because people have a negative perception of our schools, so I think the idea of a magnet theme, whether it’s arts or early college, or a dual-language program, can really get people excited about something that their students are really interested in or maybe a value that their family has, let’s say, around the arts,” said Shannon Mumolo, PUSD’s director of
magnet schools, enrollment, and community engagement. Schools with themed magnet programs, she added, can sway families who weren’t interested in PUSD to consider at least going on a school tour.
Enrollment at PUSD’s John Muir High School has increased since it became an Early College Magnet in 2019, Mumolo said. Across the board, enrollment of students from underrepresented groups — white and Asian American — have gone up since the school district expanded its academic programs over the past decade.
“But I also want to make sure to emphasize that the schools have maintained their enrollment of their Black and Latino students,” Mumolo said. “We want to make sure that we’re keeping our neighborhood students and maintaining enrollment for those groups.”
The former superintendent also touts PUSD’s Math Academy, which The Washington Post in 2021 lauded as “the nation’s most accelerated math program.” The course allows gifted middle school students to take classes, such as Advanced Placement Calculus BC, that are so rigorous that only a small percentage of high school seniors take them.
Kenne, the school board president, said that her children, now both in their 20s, were gifted math students. The Math Academy was not available when they were in grade school. She and her husband switched them out of PUSD in high school, in part, because at the time they had more opportunities to excel in math in private school, she said, acknowledging that it was a controversial choice for a parent who advocates for public education.
“People do have reasons,” Kenne said of some parents who choose private school. But she also said that private school overall wasn’t especially rigorous for her children. “My son calculated that he didn’t need to do homework for some classes to get a decent grade,” she said.
By introducing a wide variety of academic programs, including in math, PUSD has challenged the gap between what outsiders perceive it to be and what the district actually is, according to McDonald. “I think if we had not implemented those programs, the declining enrollment would have been much more acute,” he said.
Kahlenberg, the researcher, agrees. He said data suggests that when middle-class families get the right incentives to go to a public school, even one that’s outside their neighborhood, they do.
Since the busing integration program did not succeed in the district, Kahlenberg, in his studies of the school district, recommended that PUSD take creative approaches to lure in middle-income families. That includes introducing unique academic programs as well as developing or deepening partnerships with institutions in or around Pasadena — Caltech, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pasadena Playhouse, Art College Center of Design, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library.
But the focus on winning parents back has led to some tension, Kenne said.
“Sometimes a message that we’ve heard in the last 10, 20 years is, do we care more about marketing to the people who don’t come to our district, or working hard for the people who are already here?” Kenne said. “Because sometimes the public-facing message seems to be all about getting kids back, and it makes the people in the system go, ‘Am I not important to you? I’m already here.’”
Kahlenberg said schools nonetheless have a duty to continue trying to integrate — if not by race, then by class.
“The children of engineers and doctors bring resources to a school, but so do the children of recent immigrants or children whose parents have struggled,” Kahlenberg said. “The more affluent kids benefit as well from an integrated environment. When people have different life experiences they can bring to the discussion novel ideas and new ways of thinking, and that nicely integrated environment is possible in a place like Pasadena.”
Hirahara, for one, still cherishes her childhood in the school district, back when she befriended the girls in the C.L.A.N. As schools across the nation have largely re-segregated, she fears that too few young people get to experience what she did.
“I’m so glad that I had that kind of upbringing,” she said, “and I think it prepared me better for life.”
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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.
WASHINGTON, April 25, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– The Smithsonian Science Education Center’s elementary curriculum, Smithsonian Science for the Classroom, received an “all-green” rating for its K–2 instructional materials in a new report published by EdReports.org. Green ratings are highly coveted and demonstrate that a curriculum meets the expectations of High-Quality Instructional Materials set by EdReports. Smithsonian Science for the Classroom is designed from the ground up to meet the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and engages students in phenomenon- and problem-driven learning through hands-on investigations, collaborative discussions and digital interactives.
EdReports is an independent nonprofit that brings together expert educators to produce evidence-rich reviews of instructional materials. The rigorous evaluation sets a standard for identifying high-quality instructional materials, and the decisions made by EdReports are driven by what best informs the education field. EdReports found that the Smithsonian Science for the Classroom K–2 instructional materials earned a green rating in the three categories that they use to determine the quality and alignment of the curriculum with educational standards: Designed for NGSS, Coherence and Scope, and Usability.
The Smithsonian Science Education Center developed the Smithsonian Science for the Classroom curriculum in consultation with teachers and experts, and field tested the content in a range of schools with diverse populations. The curriculum draws on the latest findings and best practices from educational research with proven results.
“The outstanding evaluation we’ve received from EdReports not only emphasizes the quality of our curriculum but also underlines our commitment to creating authentic, integrated science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experiences for all students—and we know that districts and educators can feel confident about using our high-quality instructional materials,” said Carol O’Donnell, director of the Smithsonian Science Education Center.
“The Smithsonian is committed to creating the highest quality education experience for students and teachers, and upholding our belief that access to exceptional STEM education resources can change lives,” said Monique Chism, the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for Education.
BEAVER, Pa. and SUNNYVALE, Calif./PRNewswire/ — As artificial intelligence begins its disruption of curriculum development, Lincoln Learning Solutions and Prof Jim are positioning themselves at the forefront of the emerging educational space with the announcement today of their partnership and the release of two immediately available innovations.
“Our collaboration with Prof Jim has already shown promising results, improving the pace of creation and expanding our content offerings,” said Charles Thayer, Chief Academic Officer at Lincoln Learning Solutions. “We are excited to offer these innovative tools to our partner schools, enabling teachers to create more engaging and effective learning environments.”
The partnership introduces several key offerings:
AI Slide Assistant and AI Assessment Assistant: Customizable tools designed to align with the specific preferences and requirements of school districts, facilitating the creation of personalized slide decks and assessments.
AI Video Assistant: This tool revolutionizes how educators can deliver instruction, allowing for the creation of videos featuring either an AI version of the teacher, historical figures like Ben Franklin, or other characters to enhance lesson engagement and effectiveness.
“This AI technology enables educators to bring lessons to life in ways previously unimaginable,” Pranav Mehta, CTO and Co-Founder of Prof Jim, said. “Without having to own a studio, teachers can use their own AI avatar to teach their lessons, and they can include historical cameos — from the likes of Jane Austen or Pythagoras or George Washington Carver — to teach and serve as role models.”
Integral to this initiative is the Lincoln Content Bank, an award-winning, multi-modal, educational content library that equips teachers with nearly 110,000 highly vetted learning assets they can configure and assemble to meet the needs of their students. The team intends to use this as the curricular foundation for these AI tools; so, the co-offering is based on vetted, trusted content — unlike many other AI edtech offerings.
Lincoln Learning is also working with Prof Jim to create an AI tutor product. It is in development and slated to be launched at the start of the 2024-25 school year.
“As more and more studies reveal that tutoring is essential to elevating student confidence and success — especially in the wake of the pandemic — we believe this is a tool educators will welcome with open arms,” Chief Business and Development Officer at Lincoln Learning Solutions, Dr. Rachel Book, said.
The team expects to have the first wave of AI assisted tools in classrooms before the end of the 2023-24 school year.
About Lincoln Learning Solutions
Lincoln Learning Solutions is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to collaborating with educators and maximizing their talents to facilitate student success. Based in western Pennsylvania, it is the developer of Lincoln Empowered™, a digitally based curriculum that delivers engaging, standards-based, instruction in online and blended learning environments. Lincoln Empowered™offers a dynamic array of courses in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, physical education, and the creative and performing arts. Lincoln Learning Solutions currently serves more than 100 school districts in 14 states, and upward of 20,000 students.
About Prof Jim
Prof Jim Inc equips organizations with AI-powered instructional tools. In the next few years, AI is set to revolutionize learning, as it boosts quality, increases personalization, and taps into easy translations – all while slashing costs. However, technical hurdles and the high cost of expertise prevent many organizations from accessing AI’s benefits. Prof Jim partners with these organizations to create dynamic teaching materials, interactive videos, and assessments using its patented AI. Research indicates that Prof Jim’s AI increases content creation efficiency 3x-15x, improves learning outcomes by up to 15%, and elevates student engagement by 25%.
SOURCE Lincoln Learning Solutions
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
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.
There has been much talk and concern in recent months about making higher-level math more accessible to high schoolers, particularly low-income students from Black and Hispanic communities. Much of this discussion dwells on what is the best curriculum to use to teach Algebra I and other higher-level math courses.
The right curriculum is important, of course. A high-quality curriculum creates the foundation for success in math. A curriculum that values culturally responsive education enables teachers both to value the many kinds of experiences that students bring to classrooms and to push them academically while engaging them personally.
But properly implementing an Algebra I curriculum is at least as important as the curriculum itself. The core of implementation, meanwhile, is coaching each teacher for the specific challenges they will face in their classrooms. The key to success is ensuring that teachers understand the vision for how to implement the curriculum and are therefore motivated and prepared to use it to help children learn in ways that are relevant to them.
In a way, it’s like photography. The key to creating art with light and time is not the equipment. Although Hasselblad and Leica cameras and a metal case of Nikkor lenses are great in the hands of those who know how to use them, a great tool to create expressive photographic art can also be found in your purse or pocket. As with teaching algebra, the key is not the specific tool, but knowing the right approach and being trained well enough to be confident in using that approach.
I’ve seen a focus on implementation pay off in my own work as director of Algebra Success for the Urban Assembly. One of our coaches at the nonprofit, Latina Khalil-Hairston, encouraged teachers at Harry S Truman High School in the Bronx to tinker with their curriculum to encourage more student involvement.
They created a new lesson structure that focused more on getting students to help each other solve problems than on getting direction from teachers. While doing so, they were mindful of adopting this new structure within the challenging constraint of having only 45 minutes for each lesson. Teachers saw more participation and better results, which has been its own motivation.
Professionals in all fields need coaching and support — why would high school math be any different? We wouldn’t give a basketball playbook to a player and expect them to be LeBron James. Even LeBron James still practices and gets coaching feedback. Even the most accomplished among us need to see a vision of excellence.
Yet I have seen many schools fall into the trap of investing in a curriculum without giving teachers the most useful ways to implement it. Unsurprisingly, these schools fail to achieve the results they hoped for and then abandon one curriculum for another.
But the curriculum is just the camera. Training and coaching, personalized to each teacher, produce the art.
And that coaching should not only help teachers understand their tools, but also help them better understand the backgrounds of their students to ensure that their perspectives are part of the learning process. Knowing the nature of the student body can dramatically enhance understanding, retention and interest in math (or any subject).
I’ve seen the results. Just last year, we saw pass rates on the Algebra I Regents for schools participating in our Algebra Success program rise 13 percent over the previous year. College-readiness math results rose 14 percent.
It is time for schools and districts to abandon the search for the one perfect curriculum — it does not exist. Instead, they should focus on how to better implement the systems they have in an engaging, effective way. They should invest in the training and support of teachers to master the instruction of that curriculum. With these changes, we know students will find success in Algebra I, putting them on the path to higher-level math courses and postsecondary success.
Shantay Mobley is the director of Algebra Success for the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that promotes social and economic mobility by innovating in public education. She previously was a math teacher, school leader and instructional consultant.
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.
Supporters of a proposed November ballot initiative wanted the all-important title of their measure to reflect their beliefs, a name like “Protect Kids of California Act.” But Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta saw things differently when his office chose the name signature gatherers must use: “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth.”
Among its provisions, the initiative in question — which has not yet qualified for the ballot — would require schools to notify parents if a child changed gender identification unofficially or in schools records, such as a roll sheet.
With a May 28 deadline to submit signatures — and 25% of the way to the goal — initiative backers must use the state’s description, which they say is hindering their effort. They have sued the state, claiming the initiative was “branded with a misleading, false, and prejudicial title” A hearing is set for April 19.
The litigation is one of several high-profile legal jousts in California’s education culture wars over policies that have taken hold mostly in a few deep red, inland or rural areas. In addition to parent notification, activists and conservative school board members have approved restrictions on library books and curriculum. The Newsom administration and its allies — including the attorney general and the state education department — have pushed back aggressively. Now, opposing sides are facing off in courtrooms with broad implications for state and local school policies.
“There are long-standing questions about what’s the role of the school versus what’s the role of the parents, and that’s true with regard to parent notification but it’s also true with regard to curriculum like sex education, for instance, or talking about LGBT issues in the classroom,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education.
In addition to the court case over the ballot name, partisans have taken each other to court over locally approved parental notification policies — or the lack of them.
Supporters believe parents have a fundamental right to be involved in all aspects of their children’s lives, especially on matters as consequential as gender identification. More broadly, proponents hope to energize a Republican and conservative religious voting base while attracting centrist voters, especially parents, for electoral wins down the road.
Democratic officials contend that blanket parental notification policies violate student privacy and civil rights enshrined in state law and the education code and that the near universal outing of transgender students to parents would put some children at serious risk.
The Chino Valley and Temecula school districts, both led by conservative boards, are being sued to rescind their parent-notification policies. In Escondido and Chico, however, it’s conservatives who have filed the litigation against state and local policies they consider too liberal and even immoral — casting themselves as protectors of the long-term interests of students they see as at risk of being drawn into a transgender lifestyle.
Other Southern California school districts where such issues are playing out have included Orange Unified and Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified in Orange County and Murrieta Valley Unified in Riverside County. A similar scenario has unfolded in Rocklin Unified and Dry Creek Joint Elementary, north of Sacramento, and the Anderson Union High School District in Northern California.
Collectively, these school systems represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,000 in California, which is why a statewide initiative implanting their values in the state constitution could have such a sweeping effect.
What’s in a name?
Court battles over the names and descriptions of ballot measures occur periodically, with the law requiring that the attorney general affix a neutral title. At least 10 lawsuits sought changes to the descriptions of half a dozen ballot measures presented to voters in November 2020.
In the case of the proposed ballot measure related to transgender youth, supporters object not only to Bonta’s title but also a summary of the initiative that they contend in court documents is “inaccurate, blatantly argumentative, and prejudicial.” They said a title that includes “protecting students” could appeal to voters. One that focuses on limiting an individual’s rights might not.
The measure would also ban children‘s medical treatment or surgery to address gender dysphoria — distress caused when an individual’s biological sex does not match that person’s gender identity. It also would bar transgender students born as biological males from participating in girls sports, including at the college level. And it would delete an education code that allows students to participate in sports “irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.”
The current name, Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth, has made it harder to get signatures and attract donors to pay for signature-gathering, said lead proponent Jonathan Zachreson, who must collect 546,651 signatures from registered votes. He said he is reasonably confident the measure will qualify.
“Talking to our volunteers, we realized it did have a detrimental impact,” said Zachreson.
In a statement, the attorney general’s office defended its title and summary: “We take this responsibility seriously and stand by our title and summary for this measure. However, we cannot comment on pending litigation.”
Defenders of the attorney general’s language include parent and former teacher Kristi Hirst, leader of Our Schools USA, which is based in Chino and has attempted to counter the right-wing activists.
“The people screaming for ‘parental rights’ are trying to take rights away from my kids while telling me how to raise them,” Hirst said.
Chino Valley, a hot spot
Chino Valley Unified is at the center of litigation over its parent-notification policy, which resulted in a lawsuit led by Bonta. In a preliminary ruling, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Sachs said the policy was discriminatory because it specifically targeted students who identify as transgender.
Under it, for example, parents were to be notified of any request by a student “to use pronouns that do not align with the student’s biological sex or gender listed on the student’s birth certificate or other official records.” The same notification rules applied to the use of bathrooms or participation in sports.
Sachs wrote in his January rulingthat these policies “on their face, discriminate on the basis of sex.” In California, transgender individuals are a protected class against whom discrimination is not permitted. The judge noted that a straight male student who wanted to use a different name would not be subject to the policy.
In March, the Chino ValleyBoard of Education revised the policy, expanding it to all students. Under the revised policy, if any student “requests a change to their official or unofficial records, parents/guardians shall be notified to ensure that parents/guardians are informed and involved in all aspects of their child’s education.”
In other words, if a straight male student named William suddenly decided he wanted to be called Robert, his parents would be notified.
The revised notification rules apply to a potentially huge number of situations, requiring an alert to parents whenever their child “participates in school-sponsored extracurricular and cocurricular activities or team(s) immediately or as soon as reasonably possible.”
For instance, if a child joins a club, parents would be told. The policy, if followed, will keep administrators busy making many notifications to parents, a few of which would pertain to transgender students, the original aim of the policy.
“The updated policy maintains the district’s original requirement that school administrators notify parents within three days if their child requests changes to their official or unofficial records, but removed language from the policy requiring staff to notify parents when a student requests to use facilities or pronouns that differ from their sex at birth,” according to Liberty Justice Center, a firm with a national profile that has offered pro bono legal assistance and helped map out a legal strategy for Chino Valley and districts with like-minded school boards.
There’s a hearing to set a trial date in early May.
Different ruling in Temecula
The parent-notification policy approved by the Temecula Board of Education was essentially the same as the original version in Chino Valley. And Temecula also was sued — not by the state but by the local teachers union, individual teachers, students and parents.
But in this case, Riverside CountySuperior Court Judge Eric Keen did not stop the policy from going into effect. He concluded, at least preliminarily, that the rules applied equally to all students and were “gender neutral.”
That lawsuit also alleges the board majority is hostile toward LGBTQ+ topics and students — citing the board’s refusal to adopt state-approved curriculum for elementary schools that included a brief, optional passage in fourth grade about former San Francisco County Supervisor Harvey Milk, the state’s first openly gay elected official.
A threatened fine by Gov. Gavin Newsom prompted the board to approve the curriculum, which had been recommended by teachers and administrators and was in line with state learning standards.
The issue is not over. The board voted to move this fourth-grade lesson on California civil rights movements to the end of the year, to give time to find an “age-appropriate curriculum” that could be substituted in place of “sexualized topics of instruction.”
The lesson in question includes paragraphs noting that LGBTQ+ individuals and groups fought for civil rights, including the right to marry, but has no discussion of sex.
That Temecula teacher-led suit also seeks to overturn the district policy to restrict the teaching of critical race theory, which examines the extent to which racial inequality and racism have been systemically embedded in American institutions.
Critical race theory has been another culture-war flashpoint across the nation. The Temecula list of banned concepts embodies common conservative assertions, including that teachers use critical race theory to make white students feel guilty about being white. Many education experts consider this characterization of how teachers have been dealing with the topic of race to be inaccurate and incomplete.
Amanda Mangaser Savage, an attorney with the firm Public Counsel, which is pursuing the litigation against the Temecula school district, said she knows of no other California school system involved in litigation over critical race theory.
The lawyers who filed the case are preparing an appeal of the court’s ruling.
More to come
In a lawsuit involving the Escondido school district in San Diego County, a judge has issued a preliminary ruling allowing two teachers to opt out of a district student privacy policy, giving the teachers the freedom to notify parents about a change in their child’s gender identity. The case is ongoing.
In Chico, a parent lost a suit for damages over the school district not informing her about her child’s gender-identity issues. The ruling is being appealed.
Book restrictions also could be headed toward litigation, especially in light of a new state law limiting bans and censorship, according to advocates on both sides. So far, Chino Valley may be the only California school district to approve a policy that allows parents to flag books that contain “sexually obscene content considered unsuitable for students,” which would trigger the book’s immediate removal until the issue has been decided through a formal public hearing.
Conservatives say their goal is to remove sexually explicit and profane materials from school libraries, especially at the lower grade levels. Opponents portray these efforts as part of a campaign to enforce conservative religious beliefs in schools and to make LGBTQ+ students and their stories invisible within the school community.
One legal strategy used by conservative activists has been to submit public records requests to school systems — to search out policies and practices to which they object.
A Glendale teacher faced a death threat after records obtained this way indicated that she may have shown a gay pride video to students.
Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school system, is the subject of a lawsuit for failing to turn over public records in the time frame required by law.
The groupCenter for American Liberty said that, starting in 2022, it requested documents related to critical race theory, transgender ideology and Marxism, as well as “certain financial records” related to COVID-relief funds “to give parents greater insight into what LAUSD school officials are teaching their children.”
“Nearly two years later, the LAUSD has given us almost nothing,” the organization stated. “This is illegal.”
A school district spokesperson said the district would have no comment on this pending litigation.
The cursing came loud and fast from a nearby room, followed by a slamming sound. This was a few years back, and I immediately suspected the culprit: the dreaded FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, with all its glitches and complexities.
My husband was losing his cool while attempting to fill it out for the second time in two years. Across America right now, so are millions of parents, students and counselors, frustrated by a failed promise to finally streamline this unwieldy gatekeeper to college dreams.
It’s a terrible time for anyone who counted on that U.S. Department of Education promise, and many are calling for an urgent push for help, including through legislation and a marshalling of resources from institutions like libraries and groups such as AmeriCorps.
“I don’t think we’ve seen a full court press about FASFA completion yet,” said Bill DeBaun, a senior director at the National College Attainment Network. “This is an emergency. We need all-hands on deck: governors, state departments, agencies, influencers at the White House. We are kind of at the point where we need to stop nibbling and take a big bite.”
Anyone who has dealt with the FAFSA knows how needlessly complicated and unreliable it can be: In the midst of back-to-back college application season for my two kids, the site kept kicking us out, then losing the previous information we’d painstakingly provided.
Don’t worry, parents were told over and over, it will get easier, it’s being fixed. A bipartisan law passed in 2020 initiated a complete overhaul of the FAFSA. But after a problematic soft launch on Dec. 30, glitches and delays are inflicting pain on undocumented students, first-generation college goers and others who can’t decide how and if attending college will be possible without offers and aid packages.
The so-called shorter, simpler form so far has been anything but, although DeBaun said many families have submitted it swiftly without problems. Still, as of March 8, there have been roughly 33 percent fewer submissions by high school seniors than last year, NCAN data show.
The finger-pointing and blaming right now is understandable, but not helpful: It threatens years of efforts to get more Americans to and through college at a time when higher education faces both enrollment declines and a crisis of public confidence, in part due to spiraling prices.
This year’s FAFSA rollout is frustrating sudents, parents and counselors and prompting calls for immediate help. Credit: Mariam Zuhaib/ Associated Press
Fewer than 1 in 3 adults now say a degree is worth the cost, a survey by the Strada Education Network found, and many fear FASFA snafus could lead to more disillusionment about college.
“FAFSA is such a massive hurdle, and if they [students and parents] can’t get this first step done, they may say it’s too complicated, maybe college isn’t for me,” said Scott Del Rossi, vice president of college and career success at College Possible, which helps low-income students and those from underrepresented backgrounds go to and through college.
Del Rossi wonders why the form wasn’t user-tested before being rolled out, and is among those calling for urgent solutions, beyond band-aid fixes that are literally keeping Department of Education staffers up all night.
“As much staff as government has, it’s not enough for students right now,” said Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the national advocacy group Complete College America. She wants colleges to do more to directly help applicants still struggling to fill out the forms.
“They should be sharing webinars and workshops and talking about what’s happening and how [students] can begin in spite of the problems,” Watson Spiva said. “If we don’t have those conversations, parents will say this [college] isn’t worth it, and they will look for other opportunities and options.”
Even before the FAFSA fiasco, that’s been happening. In 2021, the proportion of high school graduates going directly to college fell to 62 percent from a high of 70 percent in 2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. At the same time, costs have more than doubled in the last 40 years, even when adjusted for inflation.
The task ahead is daunting: The Department of Education only started sending batches of student records this week to colleges that will determine aid offers, and about 200 have already extended the traditional May 1st deadline for students to accept offers.
No wonder parents and students are “stressing out and overwhelmed,” said Deborah Yanez, parent programs manager at TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.
“This is a special time for them; they have dreamed about sending their kids off to college, but now they are being held in this place of limbo, not knowing what the numbers are,” Yanez told me.
More colleges should extend deadlines for student decisions, Del Rossi said. Counselors that College Possible works with usually say it take at least three interactions, or sessions, with parents to conquer the FAFSA, but many are now reporting the recent form requires more than six – and many are still unsuccessful, Del Rossi said.
“We have to continue to encourage them not to give up and not to lose hope,” Del Rossi said. “We tell them it is not their fault, these are just glitches, but it’s a little heartbreaking.”
But turning to college counselors for help is not always a viable option for public school students, where public school counselors handle an average caseload of 430 students, well above the 1:250 ratio the American School Counselor Association suggests.
And this admissions year has the added complication of being the first since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision barring colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, along with being a time of rapidly changing rules around whether standardized test scores is required for admission.
That’s why the message about the importance of a college education must continue, and students must be told not to give up. Still, if they can’t fill out the form and the government can’t turn the forms over to schools in time, it’s game over.
This story about the FASFA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.
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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.
A growing chorus of education researchers, pundits and “science of reading” advocates are calling for young children to be taught more about the world around them. It’s an indirect way of teaching reading comprehension. The theory is that what we grasp from what we read depends on whether we can hook it to concepts and topics that we already know. Natalie Wexler’s 2019 best-selling book, The Knowledge Gap, championed knowledge-building curricula and more schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lesson plans to teach geography, astronomy and even art history.
Makers of knowledge-building curricula say their lessons are based on research, but the truth is that there is scant classroom evidence that building knowledge first increases future reading comprehension.
More importantly, the students at these charter schools were largely from middle and upper middle class families. And what we really want to know is whether knowledge building at school helps poorer children, who are less likely to be exposed to the world through travel, live performances, and other experiences that money can buy.
A new study, published online on Feb. 26, 2024, in the peer-reviewed journal Developmental Psychology, now provides stronger causal evidence that building background knowledge can translate into higher reading achievement for low-income children. The study took place in an unnamed, large urban school district in North Carolinawhere most of the students are Black and Hispanic and 40 percent are from low-income families.
In 2019, a group of researchers, led by James Kim, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, randomly selected 15 of the district’s 30 elementary schools to teach first graders special knowledge-building lessons for three years, through third grade. Kim, a reading specialist, and other researchers had developed two sets of multi-year lesson plans, one for science and one for social studies. Students were also given related books to read during the summer. (This research was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)
The remaining 15 elementary schools in the district continued to teach their students as usual, still delivering some social studies and science instruction, but not these special lessons. Regular reading class was untouched in the experiment. All 30 schools were using the same reading curriculum, Expeditionary Learning, which follows science of reading principles and teaches phonics.
Covid hit in the middle of the experiment. When schools shut down in the spring of 2020, the researchers scrapped the planned social studies units for second graders. In 2021, students were still not attending school in person. The researchers revised their science curriculum and decided to give an abridged online version to all 30 schools instead of just half. In the end, children in the original 15 schools received one year of social studies lessons and three years of science lessons compared to only one year of science in the comparison group.
Still, approximately 1,000 students who had received the special science and social studies lessons in first and second grades outperformed the 1,000 students who got only the abbreviated online science in third grade. Their reading and math scores on the North Carolina state tests were higher not only in third grade, but also in fourth grade, more than a year after the knowledge-building experiment ended.
It wasn’t a huge boost to reading achievement, but it was significant and long-lasting. It cost about $400 per student in instructional materials and teacher training.
Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in this research or the development of these science lessons, praised the study. “The study makes it very clear (as have a few others recently) that it is possible to combine reading with social studies and science curriculum in powerful ways that can improve both literacy and content knowledge,” he said by email.
Connecting background knowledge to reading comprehension is not a new idea. A famous 1987 experiment documented that children who were weaker readers but knowledgeable about baseball understood a reading passage about baseball better than children who were stronger readers but didn’t know much about the sport.
Obviously, it’s not realistic for schools to attempt to familiarize students with every topic they might encounter in a book. And there is disagreement among researchers about how general knowledge of the world translates into higher reading performance.
Kim thinks that a knowledge-building curriculum doesn’t need to teach many topics. Random facts, he says, are not important. He argues for depth instead of breadth. He says it’s important to construct a thoughtful sequence of lessons over the years, allowing students to see how the same patterns crop up in different ways. He calls these patterns “schemas.” In this experiment, for example, students learned about animal survival in first grade and dinosaur extinction in second grade. In third grade, that evolved into a more general understanding of how living systems function. By the end of third grade, many students were able to see how the idea of functioning systems can apply to inanimate objects, such as skyscrapers.
It’s the patterns that can be analogized to new circumstances, Kim explained. Once a student is familiar with the template, a new text on an unfamiliar topic can be easier to grasp.
Kim and his team also paired the science lessons with clusters of vocabulary words that were likely to come up again in the future – almost like wine pairings with a meal.
The full benefits of this kind of knowledge building didn’t materialize until after several years of coordinated instruction. In the first years, students were only able to transfer their ability to comprehend text on one topic to another if the topics were very similar. This study indicates that as their content knowledge deepened, their ability to generalize increased as well.
There’s a lot going on here: a spiraling curriculum that revisits and builds upon themes year after year; an explicit teaching of underlying patterns; new vocabulary words, and a progression from the simple to the complex.
There are many versions of knowledge-rich curricula and this one isn’t about exposing students to a classical canon. It remains unclear if all knowledge-building curricula work as well. Other programs sometimes replace the main reading class with knowledge-building lessons. This one didn’t tinker with regular reading class.
The biggest challenge with the approach used in the North Carolina experiment is that it requires schools to coordinate lessons across grades. That’s hard. Some teachers may want to keep their favorite units on, say, growing a bean plant, and may bristle at the idea of throwing away their old lesson plans.
It’s also worth noting that students’ math scores improved as much as their reading scores did in this North Carolina experiment. It might seem surprising that a literacy intervention would also boost math. But math also requires a lot of reading; the state’s math tests were full of word problems. Any successful effort to boost reading skills is also likely to have positive spillovers into math, researchers explained.
School leaders are under great pressure to boost test scores. To do that, they’ve often doubled time spent on reading and cut science and social studies classes. Studies like this one suggest that those cuts may have been costly, further undermining reading achievement instead of improving it. As researchers discover more about the science of reading, it may well turn out to be that more time on science itself is what kids need to become good readers.
This story about background knowledge was 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 Proof Points 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.”
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