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  • PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision

    PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision

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    It was one of the most significant days in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 17, 1954, the nine justices unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that schools segregated by race did not provide an equal education. Students could no longer be barred from a school because of the color of their skin. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, I wanted to look at how far we’ve come in integrating our schools and how far we still have to go. 

    Two sociologists, Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California, have teamed up to analyze both historical and recent trends. Reardon and Owens were slated to present their analysis at a Stanford University conference on May 6, and they shared their presentation with me in advance. They also expect to launch a new website to display segregation trends for individual school districts around the country. 

    Here are five takeaways from their work:

    1. The long view shows progress but a worrying uptick, especially in big cities
    Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years after Brown,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

    Not much changed for almost 15 years after the Brown decision. Although Black students had the right to attend another school, the onus was on their families to demand a seat and figure out how to get their child to the school. Many schools remained entirely Black or entirely white. 

    Desegregation began in earnest in 1968 with a series of court orders, beginning with Virginia’s New Kent County schools. That year, the Supreme Court required the county to abolish its separate Black and white schools and students were reassigned to different schools to integrate them.

    This graph above, produced by Reardon and Owens, shows how segregation plummeted across the country between 1968 and 1973. The researchers focused on roughly 500 larger school districts where there were at least 2,500 Black students. That captures nearly two-thirds of all Black students in the nation and avoids clouding the analysis with thousands of small districts of mostly white residents. 

    Reardon’s and Owens’s measurement of segregation compares classmates of the average white student with the classmates of the average Black student. For example, in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenberg district, the average white student in 1968 attended a school where 90 percent of his peers were white and only 10 percent were Black. The average Black student attended a school where 76 percent of his peers were Black and 24 percent were white. Reardon and Owens then calculated the gap in exposure to each race. White students had 90 percent white classmates while Black students had 24 percent white classmates. The difference was 66 percentage points. On the flip side, Black students had 76 percent Black classmates while white students had 10 percent Black classmates. Again, the difference was 66 percentage points, which translates to 0.66 on the segregation index.

    But in 1973, after court-ordered desegregation went into effect, the average white student attended a school that was 69 percent white and 31 percent Black. The average Black student attended a school that was 34 percent Black and 66 percent white. In five short years, the racial exposure gap fell from 66 percentage points to 3 percentage points. Schools reflected Charlotte-Mecklenberg’s demographics. In the graph above, Reardon and Owens averaged the segregation index figures for all 533 districts with substantial Black populations. That’s what each dot represents.

    In the early 1990s, this measure of segregation began to creep up again, as depicted by the red tail in the graph above. Owens calls it a “slow and steady uptick” in contrast to the drastic decline in segregation after 1968. Segregation has not bounced back or returned to pre-Brown levels. “There’s a misconception that segregation is worse than ever,” Reardon said.

    Although the red line from 1990 to the present looks nearly flat, when you zoom in on it, you can see that Black-white segregation grew by 25 percent between 1991 and 2019. During the pandemic, segregation declined slightly again.

    Detailed view of the red line segment in the chart above, “Average White-Black Segregation, 1968-2022.” Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years after Brown,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

    It’s important to emphasize that these Black-white segregation levels are tiny compared with the degree of segregation in the late 1960s. A 25 percent increase can seem like a lot, but it’s less than 4 percentage points. 

    “It’s big enough that it makes me worried,” said Owens. “Now is the moment to keep an eye on this. If it continues in this direction, it would take a long time to get back up to Brown. But let’s not let it keep going up.”

    Even more troubling is the fact that segregation increased substantially if you zero in on the nation’s biggest cities. White-Black segregation in the largest 100 school districts increased by 64 percent from 1988 to 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated.

    Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years after Brown,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.
    1. School choice plays a role in recent segregation

    Why is segregation creeping back up again? 

    The expiration of court orders that mandated school integration and the expansion of school choice policies, including the rapid growth of charter schools, explains all of the increase in segregation from 2000 onward, said Reardon. Over 200 medium-sized and large districts were released from desegregation court orders from 1991 to 2009, and racial school segregation in these districts gradually increased in the years afterward. 

    School choice, however, appears to be the dominant force. More than half of the increase in segregation in the 2000s can be attributed to the rise of charter schools, whose numbers began to increase rapidly in the late 1990s. In many cases, either white or Black families flocked to different charter schools, leaving behind a less diverse student body in traditional public schools. 

    The reason for the rise in segregation in the 1990s before the number of charter schools soared is harder to understand. Owens speculates that other school choice policies, such as the option to attend any public school within a district or the creation of new magnet schools, may have played a role, but she doesn’t have the data to prove that. White gentrification of cities in the 1990s could also be a factor, she said, as the white newcomers favored a small set of schools or sent their children to private schools. 

    “We might just be catching a moment where there’s been an influx of one group before the other group leaves,” said Owens. “It’s hard to say how the numbers will look 10 years from now.”

    1. It’s important to disentangle demographic shifts from segregation increases

    There’s a popular narrative that segregation has increased because Black students are more likely to attend school with other students who are not white, especially Hispanic students. But Reardon and Owens say this analysis conflates demographic shifts in the U.S. population with segregation. The share of Hispanic students in U.S. schools now approaches 30 percent and everyone is attending schools with more Hispanic classmates. White students, who used to represent 85 percent of the U.S. student population in 1970, now make up less than half. 

    Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years after Brown,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

    The blue line in the graph above shows how the classmates of the average Black, Hispanic or Native American student have increased from about 55 percent Black, Hispanic and Native American students in the early 1970s to nearly 80 percent Black, Hispanic and Native American students today. That means that the average student who is not white is attending a school that is overwhelmingly made up of students who are not white.

    But look at how the red line, which depicts white students, is following the same path. The average white student is attending a school that moved from 35 percent students who are not white in the 1970s to nearly 70 percent students who are not white today. “It’s entirely driven by Hispanic students,” said Owens. “Even the ‘white’ schools in L.A. are 40 percent Hispanic.” 

    I dug into U.S. Department of Education data to show how extremely segregated schools have become less common. The percentage of Black students attending a school that is 90 percent or more Black fell from 23 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2022. Only 1 in 10 Black students attends an all-Black or a nearly all-Black school. Meanwhile, the percentage of white students attending a school that is 90 percent or more white fell from 44 percent to 14 percent during this same time period. That’s 1 in 7. Far fewer Black or white students are learning in schools that are almost entirely made up of students of their same race.

    At the same time, the percentage of Black students attending a school where 90 percent of students are not white grew from 37 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2022. But notice the sharp growth of Hispanic students during this period. They went from 7.6 million (fewer than the number of Black students) to more than 13.9 million (almost double the number of Black students). 

    1. Most segregation falls across school district boundaries
    Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years after Brown,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

    This bar chart shows how schools are segregated for two reasons. One is that people of different races live on opposite sides of school district lines. Detroit is an extreme example. The city schools are dominated by Black students. Meanwhile, the Detroit suburbs, which operate independent school systems, are dominated by white students. Almost all the segregation is because people of different races live in different districts. Meanwhile, in the Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan area, over half of the segregation reflects the uneven distribution of students within school districts.

    Nationally, 60 percent of the segregation occurs because of the Detroit scenario: people live across administrative borders, Reardon and Owens calculated. Still, 40 percent of current segregation is within administrative borders that policymakers can control. 

    1. Residential segregation is decreasing

    People often say there’s little that can be done about school segregation until we integrate neighborhoods. I was surprised to learn that residential segregation has been declining over the past 30 years, according to Reardon’s and Owens’s analysis of census tracts. More Black and white people live in proximity to each other. And yet, at the same time, school segregation is getting worse.

    All this matters, Reardon said, because kids are learning at different rates in more segregated systems. “We know that more integrated schools provide more equal educational opportunities,” he said. “The things we’re doing with our school systems are making segregation worse.”

    Reardon recommends more reforms to housing policy to integrate neighborhoods and more “guard rails” on school choice systems so that they cannot be allowed to produce highly segregated schools. 

    This story about segregation in schools today 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 Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

    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.

    Join us today.

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    Jill Barshay

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  • Which colleges offer child care for student-parents? – The Hechinger Report

    Which colleges offer child care for student-parents? – The Hechinger Report

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    Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than 4 in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared with more than 6 in 10 other students.

    Search to learn more about childcare availability at colleges and universities nationwide. Enter an institution name to see if child care is available and how many students are over the age of 24.

    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.

    Join us today.

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    Sarah Butrymowicz and Jon Marcus

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  • Students with disabilities often snared by subjective discipline rules

    Students with disabilities often snared by subjective discipline rules

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    For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.

    Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip. 

    Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor  experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice. 

    But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school. 

    “OK, maybe she said some bad words, but it’s not enough to suspend her,” Rice said. 

    The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance. 

    Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, a Hechinger Report investigation found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.

    For example, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, Rhode Island students with disabilities were, on average, two and a half times more likely than their peers to be suspended for any reason, but nearly three times more likely to be suspended for insubordination and almost four times more likely to be suspended for disorderly conduct. Similar patterns played out in other states with available data including Massachusetts, Montana and Vermont. 

    Federal law should offer students protections from being suspended for behavior that results from their disability, even if they are being disruptive or insubordinate. But those protections have significant limitations. At the same time, these subjective categories are almost tailor-made to trap students with disabilities, who might have trouble expressing or regulating themselves appropriately.

    Districts have wide discretion in setting their own rules and many students with disabilities quickly earn reputations at school as troublemakers. “Unfortunately, who gets caught up in a lot of the vagueness in the codes of conduct are students with disabilities,” said attorney Robert Tudisco, an expert with Understood.org, a nonprofit that provides resources and support to people with learning and attention disabilities.

    Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

    Students on the autism spectrum often have a hard time communicating with words and might yell or become aggressive if something upsets them. A student with oppositional defiant disorder is likely to be openly insubordinate to authority, while one with dyslexia might act out when frustrated with schoolwork. Students with ADHD typically have a hard time controlling their impulses.

    Kyra’s disability created challenges throughout her school career in the Bend-La Pine School District. “Nobody really understood her,” Rice said. “She’s a big personality and she’s very impulsive. And impulsivity is what gets kids in trouble and gets kids suspended.” 

    Suspended for…what?

    Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed. 

    Kyra, now 17, said that too few teachers cared about her individualized education program, or IEP, a document that details the accommodations a student in special education is granted. She’d regularly butt heads with teachers or skip class altogether to avoid them. Her favorite teacher was her special ed teacher. 

    “She understood my ADHD and my other special needs,” Kyra said. “My other teachers didn’t.”

    Scott Maben, district spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on specific disciplinary matters because of privacy concerns, but that the district had a range of responses to deal with student misconduct and that administrators “carefully consider a response that is commensurate with the violation.” 

    In Oregon, “disruptive conduct” accounted for more than half of all suspensions from 2017-18 to 2021-22. The state department of education includes in that category insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations. 

    Disruptive behavior is the leading cause of suspensions because of its “inherently subjective nature,” the state department of education’s spokesperson, Marc Siegal, said in an email. He added that the department monitors discipline data for special education disparities and works with school districts on the issue. 

    The primary protections for students with disabilities come from the federal government, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But that law only requires districts to examine whether a student’s behavior stems from their disability after they have missed 10 total days of school through suspension. 

    At that point, districts are required to hold a manifestation hearing, in which officials must determine whether a student’s behavior was the result of their disability. “That’s where it gets very gray,” Tudisco said. “What happens in the determination of manifestation is very subjective.”

    In his experience, he added, the behavior is almost always connected to a student’s disability, but school districts often don’t see it that way. 

    “Manifestation is not about giving Johnny or Susie a free pass because they have a disability,” Tudisco said. “It’s a process to understand why this behavior occurred so we can do something to prevent it tomorrow.” 

    Related: Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions

    The connections are often much clearer to parents. 

    A Rhode Island mother, Pearl, said her daughter was easily overwhelmed in her elementary school classroom in the Bristol Warren Regional School District. (Pearl is being referred to by her middle name because she is still a district parent and fears retaliation.) 

    Her child has autism and easily experiences a sensory overload. If the classroom was too loud or someone new walked in, she might start screaming and get out of her seat, Pearl said. Teachers struggled to calm her down, as other students were escorted out of the room. 

    Sometimes, Pearl was called to pick up her daughter early, in an unrecorded informal removal. A few times, though, she was suspended for disorderly conduct, Pearl recalled. 

    Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, students with disabilities in the Bristol Warren Regional School District made up about 13 percent of the student body, but accounted for 21 percent of suspensions for insubordination and 30 percent of all disorderly conduct suspensions. 

    The district did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

    The Rhode Island Department of Education collects data on school discipline from districts, but special education and discipline reform advocates in the state say that the agency rarely acts on these numbers. 

    Department spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency monitors discipline data and is “very clear that suspension should be the last option considered.” He added that the department has published resources about alternatives to suspension and discipline specifically for students with disabilities. 

    A 2016 state law that limits the overall use of out-of-school suspensions also requires that districts examine their data for inequities. Districts that find such disparities are supposed to submit a report to the department of education, said Hannah Stern, a policy associate at the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union.

    Her group submits public records requests for copies of their reports every year, but has never received one, she said, “even though almost every single school district exhibits disparities.”

    Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

    Pearl said that her daughter needed one-on-one support in the classroom instead of punishment. “She’s autistic. She’s not going to learn her lesson by suspending her,” Pearl said. “She actually got more scared to go back. She actually felt very unwelcome and very sad.”

    Students with autism often have a hard time connecting their actions to the punishment, said Joanne Quinn, executive director of The Autism Project, a Rhode Island-based group that offers support to family members of people with autism. With suspension, “there’s no learning going on and they’re going to do the same thing incorrectly.”

    Quinn’s group provides training for schools throughout Rhode Island and beyond, aimed at helping teachers understand how the brain functions in people with autism and offering strategies on how to effectively respond to behavior challenges that could easily be labeled disobedient or disorderly. 

    Federal law provides a road map for schools to improve how they respond to misconduct related to a student’s disability. Schools should identify a student’s triggers and create a behavior intervention plan aimed at preventing problems before they start, it says. 

    Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

    But, doing these things well requires time, resources and training that can be in short supply, leaving teachers feeling alone, struggling to maintain order in their classrooms, said Christine Levy, a former special education teacher and administrator who works as an advocate for individual special education students in the Northeast, including Rhode Island. 

    Levy recently worked with a student with disabilities who was suspended after he tickled a peer at a locker on five straight days. But, she said, the situation should have never reached the point of suspension: Educators should have quickly identified what the boy was struggling with and set a plan in motion to help him, including modeling appropriate locker conduct. 

    Had this boy’s teachers done that, the suspension could have been avoided. “The repair of that is so much longer and so much harder to do versus, let’s catch it right away,” she said.

    Cranston Public School officials would regularly call Michelle Gomes and tell her to come get her daughter for misbehaving in class, she said. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report

    Many parents described similar situations, though, in which a child routinely got in trouble for repeated behavior. When Michelle Gomes’s daughter became upset in her kindergarten classroom, she’d often run out and refuse to come back in. Sometimes, she’d tear things off the walls.

    “Whenever she gets like that, it’s hard to see,” Gomes said. “I hurt for her. It’s like she’s not in control.”

    Gomes received regular calls from Cranston Public School officials to come pick her daughter up. A couple of times, the child was formally suspended, Gomes said. The school described her as a safety risk, Gomes recalled.

    “She obviously doesn’t feel safe herself,” she said. 

    Cranston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment. 

    Gomes’s daughter had a speech delay and anxiety and qualified for special education services. A private neurological evaluation concluded that she was compensating for that delay with her physical responses, Gomes said. 

    This can be a common cause of behavior challenges for students with disabilities, experts say.

    “Behavior is communication,” said Julian Saavandra, an assistant principal and an expert at Understood.org. “The behavior is trying to tell us something. We as the IEP team, the school team, have to dig deeper.” 

    On her own, Gomes found strategies that helped. Gomes’ child struggled with transitions, so they’d go over her day in advance to prepare her for what to expect. A play therapist taught both her and her daughter breathing exercises. 

    Her daughter was switched to another district school where a social worker would sometimes walk the girl to class. When the child got worked up, she’d sometimes be allowed to sit with that social worker or in the nurse’s office to calm down. That helped, but sometimes, those staff members weren’t available. 

    In the end, Gomes moved her daughter to a school outside the district that was better equipped to help the girl deescalate. Her behavior problems lessened and she started enjoying going to school, Gomes said.

    But Gomes still can’t understand why more teachers weren’t able to help her child regulate herself. “Do we need retraining or do we need new training?” she said. “Because this is mindblowing to me, not one of you can do that.”

    Note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

    This story about suspension of students with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Sarah Butrymowicz, Fazil Khan and Sara Hutchinson

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  • Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions

    Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions

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    A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. 

    A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language. 

    Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

    Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful. 

    At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found. 

    Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons. 

    Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)

    Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.  

    “Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice. 

    The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing. 

    Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

    These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct. 

    Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer. 

    Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”

    Suspended for…what?

    Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed. 

    Read the series

    In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third. 

    In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent. 

    Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:

    • Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
    • Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
    • Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
    • Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
    • Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
    • Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.

    Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

    Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.” 

    The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”

    Related: In New York state, students can be suspended for up to an entire school year

    Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found. 

    For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”

    Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.” 

    Officials in several other states said the same.

    The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules. 

    In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately. 

    “What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”

    But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.

    Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said. 

    Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012. 

    Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students. 

    But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.

    Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”

    “We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the director of the California Policy Lab, a group that partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.” 

    Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

    This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.

    On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.

    “Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”

    In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions. 

    District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”

    Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers. 

    Following a suspension, Yousef Munir founded the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools. Credit: Albert Cesare/ Cincinnati Enquirer

    At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.

    Munir left anyway.

    That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”

    The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct. 

    The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.

    Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said. 

    In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in Maryland’s Dorchester County Public Schools were assigned for disrespect and disruption. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report

    Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives. 

    Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.

    In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it. 

    To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct. 

    “There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.

    Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

    Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return. 

    “It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.” 

    In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior. 

    Records from Maryland’s Dorchester County Public Schools show that the main goal for some students who were suspended for defiance and disruption was getting sent home Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report

    On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads. 

    By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.

    Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.

    Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.

    Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.

    “Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”

    Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.” 

    Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

    Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings. 

    And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs. 

    And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher. 

    Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students. 

    “Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.” 

    She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class. 

    Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”

    In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension. 

    In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.

    Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support. 

    Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”  

    In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships. 

    It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key. 

    “You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”

    Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report. 

    Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

    This story about classroom discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • OPINION: With financial aid processes more broken than ever, here’s what families can do – The Hechinger Report

    OPINION: With financial aid processes more broken than ever, here’s what families can do – The Hechinger Report

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    The federal government’s financial aid application, known as the FAFSA, has been plagued with problems since its new version launched December 30, three months late. This is a major problem for the more than 70 percent of undergraduates who rely on some type of financial aid to pay for their education, because they’ll have less time than ever to make a decision about one of the biggest expenses of their lives.

    What can parents do? The best first step is one that’s often the hardest for parents: Start a conversation about what you can afford. Research has shown that middle-class families rarely discuss the trade-offs and uncertainties related to paying for college, even though an honest conversation may prevent future financial headaches and relational heartache. The biggest reason? Parents may not want to burden their children with financial worries.

    As a researcher at uAspire, a nonprofit that tries to help students learn about and access financial aid, I find that concerning. But I know how hard these discussions can be.

    My own family didn’t talk about how we’d pay for college more than 25 years ago. I remember when the promissory notes arrived at my house, on green postcards, written in a tiny font size. I didn’t ask a single person what they meant, and no one in my family explained them to me — I just signed and mailed them back. Loans appeared to offer a bridge from my high school reality to an independent, adult life far from home. What I didn’t realize is how many of my future choices would be limited for the next 21 years, until those loans were finally paid off. Making room in my postcollege budget for loan payments affected where I could afford to live, how many hours I had to work, how often I could eat out, whether I could afford to travel to a friend’s wedding and whether I could donate to charities, among other choices.

    Related: ‘Simpler’ FAFSA complicates college plans for students, families

    Of course, the amount of financial damage I could do to myself back then was more limited than it would be now. Tuition charges alone have more than tripled at my alma mater, Northwestern University, since I was a student, rising from less than $20,000 a year in 1998 to nearly $65,000 this past fall.

    FAFSA Fiasco

    This op-ed is part of a package of opinion pieces The Hechinger Report is running that focus on solutions to the new FAFSA’s troubled rollout.

    To muster the bravery for a financial talk, it may help parents to know that this process is complicated for every family. The FAFSA — the first step in a lengthy process to unlock grants, loans, work-study and other forms of financial aid — has been imperfect since its inception in 1992. This new version promises to be simpler and award Pell Grants to over 600,000 more students from low-income families — major policy wins. Yet families largely have not found FAFSA to be simpler. It’s improving, but the growing pains are being felt by students and parents everywhere.

    That’s why it is so imperative for families to talk now, while there is still time to listen, share and make a plan, before placing a deposit somewhere.

    Once you do start talking, the conversation with your child should cover a few things: What can our family afford to pay up front to start college? What sources — savings, or a part-time job, for example — can your child rely on for day-to-day expenses during college? And what can they comfortably pay back later based on their expected employment earnings?

    Related: OPINION: I’m a college access professional. I had no idea filling out the new FAFSA would be so tough

    There are other things you can do, too. First, complete the FAFSA as soon as possible. Second, review the financial aid offers once they arrive — even though they will likely arrive later than usual this year — and make sure you understand the different types of aid being offered.

    My organization offers a free tool — a college cost calculator — to compare notoriously confusing aid offers. Since fewer than half of the students who begin a bachelor’s degree will graduate within four years, choose an institution with the most sustainable financing plan, one you could manage for up to six years. Browse government websites like Federal Student Aid and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or industry sites like NerdWallet, to learn about the pros and cons of different types of education loans before accepting any. The Institute of Student Loan Advisors can offer advice if you have questions about loan repayment, including forgiveness and consolidation. Appeal your aid offer if your financial situation has changed dramatically since what was captured by your 2022 tax return; resources on the SwiftStudent website can help you get started.

    Of course, these are all individual actions to mitigate the effects of our broken system. Until there’s true change in how we pay for college, students and their families must be vigilant and proactive — starting now.

    Jonathan Lewis is the senior director of research at uAspire, a nonprofit group that works to ensure students have the necessary financial information and resources to complete college.

    This story about parents and FAFSA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: How Covid narrowed the STEM pipeline

    PROOF POINTS: How Covid narrowed the STEM pipeline

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    The STEM pipeline –  a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers –  likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era. Credit: CSA Images via Getty Images

    Universities, philanthropies, and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM,  an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with shortages of workers with technical skills. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with advertisements carrying the message that STEM fields pay well. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.

    That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty.  Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline –  a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers –  likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.

    The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.

    The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as 38 percent of eighth graders  – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.

    Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math. 

    We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs. 

    NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than 400,000 students are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation. 

    Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop.  Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader  But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled. 

    Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.

    Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.

    Let’s walk through the numbers together.

    Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math

    Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022

    This chart shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10 percent and the top 25 percent, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.

    Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels

    Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022

    This bar chart shows that before the pandemic 10 percent of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7 percent. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24 percent to 20 percent. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34 percent of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27 percent were well prepared.

    Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms. 

    Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped 

    Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022

    This chart shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade. 

    Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where 9 percent of students are enrolled, according to the most recently available data from 2019. 

    I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.

    “Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”

    Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.

    Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently. 

    The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.

    This story about math scores 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Only a quarter of federally funded education innovations benefited students, report says

    PROOF POINTS: Only a quarter of federally funded education innovations benefited students, report says

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    An early warning and intervention system, called BARR, pictured above, was one of the most successful education interventions to come out of the Department of Education’s research and development program that issued $1.4 billion in grants between 2010 and 2016. Credit: Staff/ The Hechinger Report

    Education journalism is chock full of stories touting some brand new idea that could fix schools. Artificial intelligence is the current obsession. Philanthropic funders often say they want to see fewer stories about problems and more stories about solutions. But the truth is that lifting student achievement is really hard and the vast majority of innovations don’t end up working. 

    A February 2024 report about a research-and-development program inside the Department of Education makes this truth crystal clear. The failure rate was 74 percent. Under this program, called Investing in Innovation or i3, the federal government gave out $1.4 billion between 2010 and 2016 to education nonprofits and researchers for the purpose of developing and testing new ideas in the classroom. But only 26 percent of the innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms, according to the program’s final report. 

    Most of the 172 grants tested ideas about improving instruction or turning around low-performing schools. Almost 150 of them reported results with more than 20 still unfinished. Of the completed ones, a quarter of the innovations hadn’t been properly tested. Doing rigorous research isn’t easy; you need to set up a group of comparison students who don’t get the intervention and track everyone’s progress. Of the 112 properly evaluated grants, the most common result was a null finding, meaning that the intervention didn’t make a difference. Only a small handful left students worse off. The results for each program are hidden in pages 55 through 64 of a separate appendices document, but I have created a pdf of them for you.

    The low success rate for new ideas is “psychologically disappointing,” said Barbara Goodson, lead author of the report and an expert in educational research at the consulting firm Abt Global. “You would hope that all this [innovation] would pan out for students and that we would know better how to make education.”

    A 26 percent success rate

    Twenty-six percent of i3 evaluations found at least one positive effect and no negative effects on student academic outcomes (39 grants). WWC refers to the What Works Clearinghouse, a library of evidence-based teaching practices. Source: IES, February 2024.

    The original ideas all showed promise and outside reviewers rated applications. But when you try new things and put them to a rigorous test in real classrooms, human behavior and students achievement are influenced by so many things that you cannot control, from struggles at home and poverty to health issues and psychological stress. And it can be difficult to generate downstream results for students on a year-end achievement test when an intervention is targeting something else, such parent engagement.

    Some innovations did work well.  Building Assets, Reducing Risks or BARR is the poster child for what this grant program had hoped to produce. The idea was an early warning system that detects when children are starting to stumble at school. Teachers, administrators or counselors intervene in this early stage and build relationships with students to get them back on track. It received a seed grant to develop the idea and implement it in schools. The results were good enough for BARR to receive a bigger federal grant from this R&D program three years later. Again it worked with different types of students in different parts of the country, and BARR received a third grant to scale it up across the nation in 2017. Now BARR is in more than 300 schools and Maine is adopting it statewide.

    Related: The ‘dirty secret’ about educational innovation

    Some ideas that were proven to work in the short term didn’t yield long-term benefits or backfired completely.  One example is Reading Recovery, a tutoring program for struggling readers in first grade that costs $10,000 per student and was a recipient of one of these grants. A randomized control trial that began in 2011 produced a giant boost in reading achievement for first graders. However, three years later, Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by fourth grade were far worse readers than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a follow-up study. The tutoring seemed to harm them.

    It can be hard to understand these contradictions. Henry May, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who conducted both the short-term and long-term Reading Recovery studies, explained that the assessment used in the first grade study was full of simple one-syllable words. The tutoring sessions likely exposed children to these words so many times that the students memorized them. But Reading Recovery hadn’t taught the phonics necessary to read more complex words in later grades, May said. Reading Recovery disputes the long-term study results, pointing out that three-fourths of the study participants had departed so data was collected for only 25 percent of them. A spokesperson for the nonprofit organization also says it does teach phonics in its tutoring program.

    I asked Abt’s Goodson to summarize the lessons learned from the federal program: 

    • More students. It might seem like common sense to try a new idea on only a small group of students at first, but the Department of Education learned over time that it needed to increase the number of students in order to produce statistically significant results. There are two reasons that a study can end with a null result. One is because the intervention didn’t work, but it can also be a methodological quirk. When the achievement benefits are small, you need a large number of students to be sure that the result wasn’t a fluke. There were too many fluke signals in these evaluation studies. Over the years, sample sizes were increased even for ideas that were in the early development stage.
    • Implementation. Goodson still believes in the importance of randomized control trials to create credible evidence for what works, but she says one of the big lessons is that these trials alone are not enough. Documenting and studying the implementation are just as important as evaluating the results, she said. Understanding the barriers in the classroom can help developers tweak programs and make them more effective. They might be too expensive or require too many weeks of teacher training. The disappointing results of the i3 program have helped spawn a new “science of implementation” to learn more about these obstacles.
    • National scale up. Too much money was spent on expanding new ideas to more students across the nation, and some of these ideas ended up not panning out in research evaluations. In the successor program to i3, the scale up grants are much smaller. Instead of using the money to directly implement the intervention nationwide, the funds help innovators make practical adjustments so that it can be replicated. For example, instead of using expensive outside coaches, a program might experiment with training existing teachers at a school to run it. 

    Though the original i3 program no longer exists, its successor program, Education Innovation and Research (EIR), continues with the same mission of developing and evaluating new ideas. Currently, it is ramping up funding to deal with the post-pandemic crises of learning loss, mental health and teacher attrition.

    Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grants 2017-2023

    Data source: Barbara Goodson, Abt Global

    It’s easy to feel discouraged that the federal government has invested around $3 billion in the last dozen years on educational innovation with so little to show for it. But we are slowly building a good evidence database of some things that do work – ideas that are not just based on gut instincts and whim, but are scientifically proven with a relatively small investment compared to what the government spends on research in other areas.  By contrast, defense research gets over $90 billion a year. Health research receives nearly $50 billion. I wonder how much further we might be in helping students become proficient in reading and math if we invested even a little bit more.

    This story about education R&D 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Learning science might help kids read better

    PROOF POINTS: Learning science might help kids read better

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    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. 

    In 2023, University of Virginia researchers promoted a study of Colorado charter schools that had adopted E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. Children who had won lotteries to attend these charter schools had higher reading scores than students who lost the lotteries. But it was impossible to tell whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if the boost to reading scores could be attributed to other things that these charter schools were doing, such as hiring great teachers and training them well. 

    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 Carolina where 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Controversies within the science of reading

    PROOF POINTS: Controversies within the science of reading

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    Four meta-analyses conclude that it’s more effective to teach phonemic awareness with letters, not as an oral-only exercise. Credit: Allison Shelley for EDU

    Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness. 

    That’s the technical name for showing children how to break down words into their component letter sounds and then fuse the sounds together. In a phonemic awareness lesson, a teacher might ask how many sounds are in the word cat.  The answer is three: “k,” “a,” and “t.” Then the class blends the sounds back into the familiar sounding word: from “kuh-aah-tuh” to “kat.” The 26 letters of the English alphabet produce 44 phonemes, which include unique sounds made from combinations of letters, such as “ch” and “oo.” 

    Many schools have purchased scripted oral phonemic awareness lessons that do not include the visual display of letters. The oral lessons are popular because they are easy to teach and fun for students. And that’s the source of the current debate. Should kids in kindergarten or first grade be spending so much time on sounds without understanding how those sounds correspond to letters? 

    A new meta-analysis confirms that the answer is no. In January 2024, five researchers from Texas A&M University published their findings online in the journal Scientific Studies of Reading. They found that struggling readers, ages 4 to 6, no longer benefited after 10.2 hours of auditory instruction in small group or tutoring sessions, but continued to make progress if visual displays of the letters were combined with the sounds. That means that instead of just asking students to repeat sounds, a teacher might hold up cards with the letters C, A and T printed on them as students isolate and blend the sounds.

    Meta-analyses sweep up all the best research on a topic and use statistics to tell us where the preponderance of the evidence lies. This newest 2024 synthesis follows three previous meta-analyses on phonemic awareness in the past 25 years. While there are sometimes shortcomings in the underlying studies, the conclusions from all the phonemic meta-analyses appear to be pointing in the same direction. 

    “If you teach phonemic awareness, students will learn phonemic awareness,” which isn’t the goal, said Tiffany Peltier, a learning scientist who consults on literacy training for teachers at NWEA, an assessment company. “If you teach blending and segmenting using letters, students are learning to read and spell.” 

    Phonemic awareness has a complicated history. In the 1970s, researchers discovered that good readers also had a good sense of the sounds that constitute words. This sound awareness helps students map the written alphabet to the sounds, an important step in learning to read and write. Researchers proved that these auditory skills could be taught and early studies showed that they could be taught as a purely oral exercise without letters.

    But science evolved. In 2000, the National Reading Panel outlined the five pillars of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This has come to be known as the science of reading. By then, more studies on phonemic awareness had been conducted and oral lessons alone were not as successful. The reading panel’s meta-analysis of 52 studies showed that phonemic awareness instruction was almost twice as effective when letters were presented along with the sounds. 

    Many schools ignored the reading panel’s recommendations and chose different approaches that didn’t systematically teach phonics or phonemic awareness. But as the science of reading grew in popularity in the past decade, phonemic awareness lessons also exploded. Teacher training programs in the science of reading emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness. Companies sold phonemic programs to schools and told teachers to teach it every day. Many of these lessons were auditory, including chants and songs without letters.

    Researchers worried that educators were overemphasizing auditory training. A 2021 article, “They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction ‘In the Dark’, But Should You?” by nine prominent reading researchers criticized how phonemic awareness was being taught in schools. 

    Twenty years after the reading panel’s report, a second meta-analysis came out in 2022 with even fresher studies but arrived at the same conclusion. Researchers from Baylor University analyzed over 130 studies and found twice the benefits for phonemic awareness when it was taught with letters. A third meta-analysis was presented at a poster session of the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.  It also found that instruction was more effective when sounds and letters were combined.

    On the surface, adding letters to sounds might seem identical to teaching phonics. But some reading experts say phonemic awareness with letters still emphasizes the auditory skills of segmenting words into sounds and blending the sounds together. The visual display of the letter is almost like a subliminal teaching of phonics without explicitly saying, “This alphabetic symbol ‘a’ makes the sound ‘ah’.” Others explain that there isn’t a bright line between phonemic awareness and phonics and they can be taught in tandem.

    The authors of the latest 2024 meta-analysis had hoped to give teachers more guidance on how much classroom time to invest on phonemic awareness. But unfortunately, the classroom studies they found didn’t keep track of the minutes. The researchers were left with only 16 high-quality studies, all of which were interventions with struggling students. These were small group or individual tutoring sessions on top of whatever phonemic awareness lessons children may also have been receiving in their regular classrooms, which was not documented. So it’s impossible to say from this meta-analysis exactly how much sound training students need. 

    The lead author of the 2024 meta-analysis, Florina Erbeli, an education psychologist at Texas A&M, said that the 10.2 hours number in her paper isn’t a “magic number.” It’s just an average of the results of the 16 studies that met her criteria for being included in the meta-analysis. The right amount of phonemic awareness might be more or less, depending on the child. 

    Erbeli said the bigger point for teachers to understand is that there are diminishing returns to auditory-only instruction and that students learn much more when auditory skills are combined with visible letters.

    I corresponded with Heggerty, the market leader in phoneme awareness lessons, which says its programs are in 70 percent of U.S. school districts. The company acknowledged that the science of reading has evolved and that’s why it revised its phonemic awareness program in 2022 to incorporate letters and introduced a new program in 2023 to pair it with phonics. The company says it is working with outside researchers to keep improving the instructional materials it sells to schools. Because many schools cannot afford to buy a new instructional program, Heggerty says it also explains how teachers can modify older auditory lessons.

    The company still recommends that teachers spend eight to 12 minutes a day on phonemic awareness through the end of first grade. This recommendation contrasts with the advice of many reading researchers who say the average kid doesn’t need this much. Many researchers say that phonemic awareness continues to develop automatically as the child’s reading skills improve without advanced auditory training. 

    NWEA literacy consultant Peltier, whom I quoted earlier, suggests that phonemic awareness can be tapered off by the fall of first grade. More phonemic awareness isn’t necessarily harmful, but there’s only so much instructional time in the day. She thinks that precious minutes currently devoted to oral phonemic awareness could be better spent on phonics, building vocabulary and content knowledge through reading books aloud, classroom discussions and writing.

    Another developer of a phonemic awareness program aimed at older, struggling readers is David Kilpatrick, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Cortland. He told me that five minutes a day might be enough for the average student in a classroom, but some struggling students need a lot more. Kilpatrick disagrees with the conclusions of the meta-analyses because they lump different types of students together. He says severely dyslexic students need more auditory training. He explained that extra time is needed for advanced auditory work that helps these students build long-term memories, he said, and the meta-analyses didn’t measure that outcome.

    Another reading expert, Susan Brady, professor emerita at the University of Rhode Island, concurs that some of the more advanced manipulations can help some students. Moving a sound in and out of a word can heighten awareness of a consonant cluster, such as taking the “r” out of the word “first” to get “fist,” and then inserting it back in again. But she says this kind of sound subtraction should only be done with visible letters. Doing all the sound manipulations in your head is too taxing for young children, she said.

    Brady’s concern is the misunderstanding that teachers need to teach all the phonemes before moving on to phonics. It’s not a precursor or a prerequisite to reading and writing, she says. Instead, sound training should be taught at the same time as new groups of letters are introduced. “The letters reinforce the phoneme awareness and the phoneme awareness reinforces the letters,” said Brady, speaking at a 2022 teacher training session. She said that researchers and teacher trainers need to help educators shift to integrating letters into their early reading instruction. “It’s going to take a while to penetrate the belief system that’s out there,” she said.

    I once thought that the reading wars were about whether to teach phonics. But there are fierce debates even among those who support a phonics-heavy science of reading. I’ve come to understand that the research hasn’t yet answered all our questions about the best way to teach all the steps. Schools might be over-teaching phonemic awareness. And children with dyslexia might need more than other children. More importantly, the science of reading is the same as any other scientific inquiry. Every new answer may also raise new questions as we get closer to the truth. 

    This story about phonemic awareness 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.

    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.

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  • OPINION: Federal pandemic learning loss funds should not disappear

    OPINION: Federal pandemic learning loss funds should not disappear

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    It can be easy to think of school closures, remote learning and masked classrooms as part of the pandemic past.

    But educators across the country know better. They see the learning loss that persists, despite their best efforts to provide some measure of consistency amid all the disruption.

    While new data suggest students are making a “ ‘surprising’ rebound,” findings also show math and reading levels for elementary and middle school students are nowhere near pre-pandemic levels.

    Worse yet, systemic inequality has actually worsened, with students in the poorest communities falling even further behind their more affluent peers.

    Recognizing near the start of the pandemic that U.S. public schools required vast support, federal and state government officials appropriated historic levels of help via elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds.

    They must continue this funding.

    Educators are just beginning to deeply experience and understand the pandemic’s ongoing seismic effects on children and staff. Learning loss remains one of the most challenging hurdles educators must overcome to ensure that an entire generation of students does not fall off track.

    Related: PROOF POINTS: Three views of pandemic learning loss and recovery

    As a recently retired superintendent of schools, I’ve watched, with immense frustration, as state and federal officials followed up their initial funding with blindly conceived appropriations tied to inflexible and short-sighted deadlines.

    Now that funding is drying up at precisely the wrong time; districts will be left trying to fund nascent positions and programs on top of their normal operational costs.

    In the aftermath of the pandemic, educators have been switching focus from acute short-term challenges to the chronic and stubborn ones poised to become generational pain points. Novel educational impacts of the pandemic are still emerging while others persist.

    Classroom teachers and school administrators are seeing more challenging student behaviors and family distress on top of the learning gaps.

    That’s why federal funding must not end. We would never ask doctors to treat their patients before they began exhibiting symptoms. So why would we ask our educators to essentially do the same?

    As deadlines for the expenditure of federal dollars loom and intersect with next year’s budget development, school districts once again face the uncertainty of not having sufficient resources for challenges that they do not yet fully understand.

    Related: OPINION: Historically underserved school districts in Mississippi were hit hard in the pandemic and need immediate help

    Short-term funding will not be sufficient for navigating out of a once-in-a-century global public health problem that fundamentally changed the way the U.S. educates our youth.

    We need a more logical, reasonable and, most importantly, sustainable approach to combat pandemic-induced learning loss, in whatever form it appears. Although federal and state funding is typically allocated yearly, future funding should be targeted and guaranteed for multiple years.

    Without taking a different funding approach, we will only guarantee that the impacts linger or worsen. Right now, well-intentioned federal funding may actually be widening the achievement gap. We are seeing economically disadvantaged communities starting to lag in their rate of learning as measured by standardized testing.

    Leaders holding the power of the purse will need to recognize that the new playing field is still unequal, and that economic disparities among communities will continue to yield different learning outcomes. Leveling the playing field means better distribution of funds.

    The federal funding that is set to expire in 2024 cannot wipe away the adverse learning impacts of the pandemic. While it can be tempting and politically expedient to declare the pandemic over, turning the page prematurely leaves students and teachers behind and potentially exacerbates existing challenges.

    We can and must do better.

    Hamlet Michael Hernandez is an assistant teaching professor of education and director of the Educational Leadership program at Quinnipiac University.

    This story about pandemic learning loss was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • STUDENT VOICE: Teachers assign us work that relies on rote memorization, then tell us not to use artificial intelligence – The Hechinger Report

    STUDENT VOICE: Teachers assign us work that relies on rote memorization, then tell us not to use artificial intelligence – The Hechinger Report

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    At the beginning of the school year, each of my 11th grade teachers stated that they would not tolerate students using AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, to complete assignments. They explained that any use of AI would be considered plagiarism and could result in a failing grade.

    Despite these warnings, I regularly hear my classmates laugh about how they used ChatGPT for the prior night’s homework. Their gloats are often accompanied by comments along the lines of “Work smarter, not harder” and “Teachers literally make it so easy to use AI.”

    My classmates at the public high school I attend in New York City are not unusual: In a recent survey, 89 percent of students who responded said they had used ChatGPT for homework.

    It’s easy for teachers to admonish students not to use ChatGPT and then blame them when they do. But educators must realize that the work they are assigning, which largely relies on rote memorization, is a perfect fit for artificial intelligence.

    Rather than browbeat students for using AI, maybe educators should outsmart AI by reimagining education so that it requires more creativity and critical thought, the aspects that separate people from robots.

    Related: ‘We’re going to have to be a little more nimble’: How school districts are responding to AI

    Since third grade, I have been taking standardized tests. Now that I’m older, these include Regents exams, New York State tests and Advanced Placement assessments. My teachers say that our scores on these tests are a reflection of our academic proficiency, as well as a predictor of our future academic and professional success.

    Yet, in my experience, all standardized tests do is reduce nearly every class, even the most interesting, to regurgitation.

    Take AP Psychology. I signed up for this class because I am fascinated by the subject, especially the philosophical and open-ended aspects that require thoughtful discussion and analysis. But rather than encouraging us to engage with psychology’s intellectual premises, the class requires us to memorize roughly 400 terms.

    If I can remember each term and its definition, I will have set myself up for success in the class and on the final AP exam.

    Sounds fascinating and enlightening, right? Not to me. Unfortunately, this is the current state of education. Exams and teaching to the test have become so ingrained in education that little to no room is left for creative learning, rich discussion, critical thought or the development of emotional intelligence.

    These are the very skills and activities that separate people from robots, yet instead of developing them, students are told to act like robots and simply spit back information on exams.

    Ironically, AI is, of course, much better at being a robot than a typical student is; systems like ChatGPT can access and spit back large swaths of information better than any person.

    Thus, it is no surprise that GPT-4 clocks high scores on the bar exam, SAT and multiple AP exams, including a 5 (the highest possible score) on AP Psychology.

    These results show that the modern student is susceptible to AI takeover. If educators wish to effectively prevent AI from entering classrooms, they must reimagine the way students are taught.

    Rethinking education in America should include a move away from teaching to the test and a push toward project-based learning, which encourages students to collaborate, examine and analyze real-world issues and apply scientific research to solve problems.

    Related: OPINION: Banning tech that will become a critical part of life is the wrong answer for education

    This approach might even drive test scores higher. A 2021 study estimated that students whose curricula included KIA, a project-based learning approach, would be 8 percent more likely to earn a passing score on AP exams.

    While project-based learning may help lift standardized test scores, its real power lies in improving problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. These skills are vital for current students who are preparing for a world with AI.

    According to one report, AI could eventually replace 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. The jobs that AI is currently unlikely to be able to replace are the ones that require problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as those that require complex communication, decision-making, creativity and emotional intelligence.

    Education is a means to getting a job and being successful. Simply put, for my generation and future generations to succeed, we are going to need much more than rote memorization skills. The good news is that the skills we need are the ones that make learning fun, challenging and exciting.

    We are at a crossroads. Educators, policymakers and everyone with an interest in the future of work has a decision to make: They can either continue supporting an education system that teaches students to think in ways that AI can clearly do better, or they can decide to reform education to prepare students for the not-to-distant world of the future.

    Benjamin Weiss is a junior at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, N.Y.

    This story about ChatGPT and high school was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Tracking student data falls short in combating absenteeism at school

    PROOF POINTS: Tracking student data falls short in combating absenteeism at school

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    Chronic absenteeism has surged across the country since the pandemic, with more than one out of four students missing at least 18 days of school a year. That’s more than three lost weeks of instruction a year for more than 10 million school children. An even higher percentage of poor students, more than one out of three, are chronically absent. 

    Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, calls chronic absenteeism – not learning loss – “the greatest challenge for public schools.” At a Feb. 8, 2024 panel discussion, Malkus said, “It’s the primary problem because until we do something about that, academic recovery from the pandemic, which is significant, is a pipe dream.” 

    The number of students who have missed at least 18 days or 10 percent of the school year remained stubbornly high after schools reopened. More than one out of three students in high poverty schools were chronically absent in 2022.

    One district in the Southeast tried to tackle its post-pandemic surge in absenteeism with a computer dashboard that tracks student data and highlights which students are in trouble or heading toward trouble. Called an early warning system, tracking student data this way has become common at schools around the country.  (I’m not identifying the district because a researcher who studied its efforts to boost attendance agreed to keep it anonymous in exchange for sharing the outcomes with the public.) 

    The district’s schools had re-opened in the fall of 2020 and were operating fully in person, but students could opt for remote learning upon request. Yet nearly half of the district’s students weren’t attending school regularly during the 2020-21 year, either in person or remotely. One out of six students had crossed the “chronically absent” threshold of 18 or more missed days. That doesn’t count quarantine days at home because the student contracted or was exposed to Covid. 

    The early warning system color coded each student for absences. Green designated an “on track” student who regularly came to school. Yellow highlighted an “at risk” student who had missed more than four percent of the school year. And red identified  “off track”  students who had not come to school 10 percent or more of the time. During the summer of 2021, school staff pored over the colored dots and came up with battle plans to help students return. 

    A fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research studied what happened the following 2021-22 school year. The results, published online in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis on Feb. 5, 2024, were woefully disappointing:  the attendance rates of low-income students didn’t improve at all. Low-income students with a track record of missing school continued to miss as much school the next year, despite efforts to help them return. 

    The only students to improve their attendance rates were higher income students, whose families earned too much to qualify for the free or reduced price lunch program. The attendance of more advantaged students who had been flagged red for “off track” (chronically absent) improved by 1 to 2 percentage points. That’s good, but four out of five of the red “off track” students came from low-income families. Only 20 percent of the pool of chronically absent students had been helped … a bit.

    The selling point for early warning systems is that they can help identify students before they’re derailed, when it’s easier to get back into the routine of going to school. But, distressingly, neither rich nor poor students who had been flagged yellow for being “at risk” saw an improvement in attendance.

    Yusuf Canbolat, the Harvard fellow, explained to me that early warning systems only flag students. They don’t tell educators how to help students. Every child’s reason for not coming to school is unique. Some are bullied. Others have asthma and their parents are worried about their health. Still others have fallen so behind in their schoolwork that they cannot follow what’s going on in the classroom. 

    Common approaches, such as calling parents and mailing letters, tend to be more effective with higher-income families, Canbolat explained to me. They are more likely to have the resources to follow through with counseling or tutoring, for example, and help their child return to school. 

    Low-income families, by contrast, often have larger problems that require assistance schools cannot provide. Many low-income children lost a parent or a guardian to Covid and are still grieving. Many families in poverty need housing, food, employment, healthcare, transportation or even help with laundry. That often requires partnerships with community organizations and social service agencies. 

    Canbolat said that school staff in this district tried to come up with solutions that were tailored to a child’s circumstances, but giving a family the name of a counseling center isn’t the same as making sure the family is getting the counseling it needs. And there were so many kids flagged for being at risk that the schools could not begin to address their needs at all. Instead, they focused on the most severe chronic absence cases, Canbolat said.

    Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that is working with schools to improve attendance, said that a case management approach to absenteeism isn’t practical when so many students aren’t coming to school. Many schools, she said, might have only one or two social workers focusing on attendance and their caseloads quickly become overloaded.  When nearly half of the students in a school have an attendance problem, system-wide approaches are needed, Chang said.

    One systematic approach, she said, is to stop taking an adversarial tone with families — threatening parents with fines or going to court, or students with suspensions for truancy violations. “That doesn’t work,” Chang said. 

    She recommends that schools create more ways for students to build relationships with adults and classmates at school so that they look forward to being there. That can range from after-school programs and sports to advisory periods and paying high schoolers to mentor elementary school students. 

    “The most important thing is kids need to know that when they walk into school, there’s someone who cares about them,” said Chang.

    Despite the disappointing results of using an early warning system to combat absenteeism, both researchers and experts say the dashboards should not be jettisoned. Chang explained that they still help schools understand the size and the scope of their attendance problem, see patterns and learn if their solutions are working. 

    I was shocked to read in a recent School Pulse Panel survey conducted by the Department of Education in November 2023 that only 15 percent of school leaders said they were “extremely concerned” about student absences. In high-poverty neighborhoods, there was more concern, but still only 26 percent. Given that the number of students who are chronically absent from schools has almost doubled to 28 percent from around 15 percent before the pandemic, everyone should be very concerned. If we don’t find a solution soon, millions of children will be unable to get the education they need to live a productive life. And we will all pay the price.

    This story about school early warning systems 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • States bet big on career education, but struggle to show it works – The Hechinger Report

    States bet big on career education, but struggle to show it works – The Hechinger Report

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    When Kim Rider and her team contact a former student, they aren’t just checking in — they’re also gathering data.

    Rider oversees career and technical education in Allen Parish, a region of rural Louisiana known for pine forests and the state’s largest casino. The 4,000-student school district offers classes in agriculture and health sciences, courses in coding and welding, and internships at the local hospital and the district offices.

    Yet Rider can’t be sure that her program steers students toward successful careers. That’s because Louisiana, like many states, lacks a system for tracking students once they enter the workforce. To follow students’ career paths, Rider and her colleagues must ask the graduates themselves for updates.

    “That’s about what we can do right now because we don’t have the tracking system,” she said. Without one, “How accurately can we see if these programs are truly leading to viable careers?”

    As college costs soar and demand for skilled labor rises, programs that prepare students for well-paid work are gaining popularity. About 85 percent of high school graduates in 2019 had taken at least one course in career and technical education, or CTE. In 2018, Congress increased annual funding for CTE, which now exceeds $1.4 billion. And in 2022, 36 states enacted policies promoting career training for high schoolers, college students, and adults, according to Advance CTE, a professional organization for state CTE leaders.

    Yet many states struggle to answer a basic question: Is career education working?

    Their inability to answer stems from disconnected data. Due to student privacy concerns, a number of states fail to connect their K-12 school and workforce data sets. In effect, students fall off the states’ radar when they start working.

    Students suit up for medical assistant class at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report

    Now, Louisiana is one of a few states seeking to combine its data sets in order to track students from preschool into college and careers. Until then, students’ post-high school employment outcomes remain a mystery. Do former CTE students find jobs in the industries they studied? Do they earn good wages? Prospective CTE students and policymakers have no way of knowing.

    “You can’t see that in most places,” said Daniel Kreisman, an economics professor at Georgia State University who helped launch an effort to inform CTE policymakers by compiling data and producing research. “Without that, they’re making decisions in the dark.”

    Louisiana bet big on career education. Beginning in 2014, the state sought to improve CTE instruction, better align course offerings with the job market and increase funding. By 2018, the number of industry-recognized credentials students earned, signaling they attained specific job skills, had grown fivefold.

    Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions

    Yet nearly a decade since starting the overhaul, the state still hasn’t shown that CTE gives students a career boost. Officials can’t study the long-term outcomes because in 2014 Louisiana lawmakers passed one of the nation’s strictest student-data privacy laws, which blocked state agencies from sharing student data.

    One upshot is that policymakers cannot see where public school graduates work or how much they earn. Another consequence: Louisiana is one of just five states that do not report to the federal government exactly how many CTE students find jobs soon after high school, a U.S. Education Department spokeswoman said — despite a law requiring states to report students’ post-CTE outcomes. (Louisiana does report on other outcomes, such as college enrollment.)

    At a legislative hearing in 2020, a Louisiana education department official said the reporting lapse could cost the state $21 million in annual federal funding for career education. (A department spokesman recently said no funding was lost.) Another agency official said she had been “begging” for years to see former CTE students’ employment records, but the privacy law forbade it.

    “Are we preparing them for a career in the fields that we say we are?” Jill Prather-Cowart, then an assistant superintendent, asked lawmakers. “I think we’re doing a great job, but I have no data or research.”

    A student puts the final touches on a steel fire pit during his welding class at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report

    Louisiana’s blind spot is not unique. Only 27 states maintain data systems that connect education and employment information, according to a 2021 analysis by the Education Commission of the States. The rest keep school and work data separate.

    “The information is collected, but right now it’s not serving anyone,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit that pushes for preschool-to-career data tracking. She added that, even in states with connected data systems, the information is often inaccessible to school districts and the public.

    Put to better use, data showing how CTE graduates fare in the labor market could provide valuable insights, advocates say. Policymakers could troubleshoot CTE programs whose graduates struggle to find jobs, while schools could use positive outcomes to attract business partners and students could review data about graduates’ employment rates and earnings before deciding on a CTE program.

    “It would give students more of an option to see how it could affect their future,” said Madison Badeaux, a 12th grader at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, where she took a medical assistant course this fall.

    Lacking longitudinal data, some states survey high school graduates about their careers, but the responses often are scant and unrepresentative. School districts sometimes try to collect their own data by contacting former students and local employers or scouring LinkedIn, but the method isn’t feasible for larger districts.

    Brandi Desselle, the CTE coordinator for Livingston Parish Public Schools in Louisiana, said she’s looking forward to changes that will allow her to more easily track student job outcomes. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report

    “That is something I would love to be able to do, but we don’t have the manpower,” said Brandi Desselle, CTE coordinator for Livingston Parish Public Schools, which enrolls some 27,000 students.

    States that don’t track graduates’ careers still must report short-term outcomes. The federal career education law, called the Perkins Act, requires states to choose at least one measure of CTE quality: the share of high school CTE students who earn job-skill credentials, attain college credits, or participate in work-based learning, such as internships or apprenticeships.

    But achieving those benchmarks is no guarantee of career success. For example, a 2020 analysis found that only 18 percent of the credentials CTE students earn are sought by employers in job postings. And a 2022 study, focused on Texas, found that most former CTE students work in industries or choose college majors unrelated to the credentials they earned.

    Related: What happened when a South Carolina city embraced career education for all its students

    Although credentials vary widely — from Microsoft Office specialist to emergency medical technician — states’ reported data can mask differences in students’ career preparation. For example, Louisiana reported that about 54 percent of CTE students in 2022 earned industry-recognized credentials, but a state task force found that only 6 percent of CTE graduates that year earned advanced credentials, which are more likely to help students secure high-wage jobs.

    “The attainment of a credential, in and of itself, is not success,” said Erin Bendily, vice president for policy and strategy at the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a Louisiana think tank.

    A firefighter training class at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana has students climbing ladders and rolling hoses. Several graduates are now working as firefighters, according to their training officer. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report

    The U.S. Department of Education has long promoted school-to-workforce data tracking. Since 2006, it has awarded states more than $900 million to create data systems that can track students over time, and is working on an effort to help states share employment data. Still, as of 2020, only 35 percent of states and territories included workforce data in their student tracking systems, according to a department survey.

    States that do connect school and work data, such as Florida and Maryland, have found that taking career courses in high school can lead some students to earn higher wages after graduation. (Maryland’s data, in line with other research, suggests that CTE training in skilled trades like construction produces the biggest wage boost.) California has spent years developing its own Cradle-to-Career Data System, set to launch this year, which should shed light on students’ long-term outcomes.

    Emily Passias, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, said she expects more states to follow suit as lawmakers seek evidence that career education warrants the investment.

    Students practice drawing blood in a Walker High School class that trains medical assistants. Programs such as these are popular in the Livingston Parish, Louisiana high school, but school leaders say they have a hard time determining if they are leading to jobs in the field. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report

    “Our state legislators are asking the right questions,” she said. “How does X program affect Y labor market outcomes?”

    In Louisiana, lawmakers might soon get some answers.

    In 2022, Louisiana enacted a law requiring the state workforce commission to share high school graduates’ employment data with the education department. To comply with the privacy law, parents must consent to the tracking, which ends when students turn 26, and the employment records must omit social security numbers. Data-sharing was set to begin in December.

    Related: Beer making for credit: Liberal arts colleges add career tech

    Under a separate law enacted last June, Louisiana is building a new system called LA FIRST that will combine data from multiple state agencies, including education and workforce. The data will inform annual reports, including one on students’ college and career outcomes.

    Knowing how each CTE program’s graduates fare in the labor market will help the state identify which programs to expand or improve and give other districts models to emulate, said Ernise Singleton, who oversees college and career readiness for the Louisiana education department.

    “Hopefully this data will allow a lot more transparency across the state in seeing what others are doing that’s leading to success,” she said.

    A student prepares to take a blood pressure reading in a medical assistant class at Walker High School in Louisiana. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report

    As of December, the participating agencies were still finalizing data-sharing agreements, said Stephen Barnes, director of the Kathleen Babineaux Blanco Public Policy Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which is managing the system. Due to privacy concerns, it is not yet clear whether the system will report on each school districts’ student outcomes or only statewide trends, Barnes added.

    “We want the insights to be actionable,” he said. “But certainly one of the broad concerns we have is protecting confidentiality.”

    On a recent afternoon, Desselle, the CTE coordinator in Livingston Parish, gave a tour of the career programs at Walker High School. In the welding shop, students put the final touches on steel fire pits that will sell for $200 each. One senior was scheduled to begin working for a welding company the day after he graduates.

    In a medical assistant class, where students demonstrated how to draw blood and measure blood pressure, a 12th grader said she planned to become a labor and delivery nurse. And in a firefighter class, while students climbed ladders and rolled up hoses, a training officer said several of last year’s graduates now work for fire departments.

    The anecdotes suggested the school was putting students on a path to successful careers. But exactly how many students land good jobs and keep them? The school won’t know until the state shares its data.

    This story about career and technical education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Overscheduling kids’ lives causes depression and anxiety, study finds

    PROOF POINTS: Overscheduling kids’ lives causes depression and anxiety, study finds

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    Psychologists have long warned that children’s lives are overscheduled, which undermines their ability to develop non-academic skills that they’ll need in adulthood, from coping with setbacks to building strong relationships. Now a trio of economists say they’ve been able to calculate some of these psychological costs.

    In a new data analysis published in the February 2024 issue of the Economics of Education Review, three economists from the University of Georgia and the Federal Reserve Board found that students are assigned so much homework and signed up for so many extracurricular activities that the “last hour” was no longer helping to build their academic skills. Instead, the activities were actually harming their mental well-being, making students more anxious, depressed or angry. 

    “We’re not saying that all these activities are bad, but that the total is bad,” said Carolina Caetano, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of economics at the University of Georgia. Homework and scheduled activities, she said, were eating away at time for sleep and socializing, which are also important. 

    The downsides of homework and scheduled activities were most pronounced during the high school years, when students are feeling pressure to earn high grades and load up on extracurriculars for their college applications, the researchers found.

    Unfortunately, the researchers weren’t able to put a precise number on how many hours is too much, and Caetano explained to me that the number might not be the same for everyone.

    Parents who worry that their children might be overscheduled should ask themselves whether they feel their days are so busy that their children don’t even have time for spontaneous play dates, Caetano said. “If you feel stretched, you’re probably on the too-much side of this,” she said.

    Caetano and her research team analyzed the time diaries of 4,300 children and teens, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The diaries had been collected over the years, dating back to 1997, as part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a large nationally representative household survey overseen by the University of Michigan. Children, parents and survey workers kept track of a random weekday and a random weekend day for each child, allowing the researchers to see how children spent every minute.

    The researchers described a wide assortment of activities intended to improve children’s skills as “enrichment.” Homework was the largest component, adding up to two thirds of the total enrichment hours. The remainder of the enrichment time was occupied by reading (14 percent of the enrichment time), followed by before- and after-school programs (7 percent). In the diaries, relatively little time was spent being read to by parents, tutoring and other academic lessons, and on non-academic lessons, such as piano, soccer or driver’s ed. On average, children spent 45 minutes a day on all of them, ranging from zero to four hours a day.

    The researchers then compared time spent on these enrichment activities with academic test scores along with non-cognitive psychological measures, which were based on parent surveys of their children’s behaviors, such as being withdrawn, anxious or angry. 

    At first, there seemed to be a strong association between time spent on enrichment and academic skills and positive behaviors. That is, students who were more scheduled also had higher test scores and better behaviors. 

    But scheduled students also tend to be wealthier. Their families have the resources for tutors, after-school activities, or nannies who enforce homework time. It’s hard to tell how much the activities were responsible for boosting students’ skills or whether these highly resourced children would have done just as well on the tests and non-cognitive measures without the activities. After adjusting for family income and other demographic characteristics, some of these benefits melted away. Still, some association between scheduled activities and academic skills remained. In other words, even between two children with the same demographics and family income, the one that was more scheduled and spent more time on homework scored higher.

    However, these scheduled children of the same income and demographics still differ from each other in important ways. Some are more motivated or conscientious. Some have photographic memories or are hard working. Some have a gift for math or music. The children who choose to do more homework and participate in after-school activities are exactly the ones who are more likely to score higher anyway. It’s a thorny knot to disentangle how much the homework and scheduled activities are driving the improvement in skills.

    In this study, the researchers used a new statistical technique for large datasets to disentangle it. And once they adjusted for the effects of the students’ unobservable or inner differences, all the academic benefits melted away, and well-being turned negative. That is, the final or marginal hour of homework and activities didn’t raise a student’s test scores at all and lowered a child’s non-cognitive behaviors.

    The researchers also noticed a dilemma in the data. The psychological downsides of overscheduling hit before students’ cognitive skills were maximized. There’s a point where a child could still boost his academic skills by doing another hour of homework or tutoring, for example, but it would come at the expense of mental well-being. With more time spent on these activities, the academic returns eventually fall to zero, but by that time, there’s been a considerable hit to well-being.

    A lot more research is needed to understand if some activities are harming students more than others. One question Caetano has concerns timing. She wonders what would happen if little kids were less scheduled in elementary school. Would they then have more resilience to deal with the time pressures in high school? 

    The statistical techniques in this study are new and researchers debate about how and when to use them. Josh Goodman, an education economist at Boston University who was not involved in the study, commented that the causal claims between overscheduling and academic skills and mental well-being aren’t “perfect,” but called them “good enough.”  He said on X (formerly Twitter) that “the paper raises some very uncomfortable questions (including about my own parenting decisions!)” 

    Of course, parents aren’t entirely to blame. Schools assign the homework and their children’s grades will suffer if it isn’t done. College admissions departments value applicants with high grades and activities. Caetano sympathizes with parents who find it hard to individually push back against the current system.

    It’s similarly difficult for one school to unilaterally change homework policies when colleges could penalize their students. Indeed, schools that have tried reducing the pressure have sometimes felt the wrath of parents who are worried that less homework will cause their children to fall behind the competition. Ultimately, Caetano says that education policymakers on the state or federal level need to set policies to ratchet down the pressure for all.

    This story about extracurricular activities 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.

    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.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Most college kids are taking at least one class online, even long after campuses reopened

    PROOF POINTS: Most college kids are taking at least one class online, even long after campuses reopened

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    The pandemic not only disrupted education temporarily; it also triggered permanent changes. One that is quietly taking place at colleges and universities is a major, expedited shift to online learning. Even after campuses reopened and the health threat diminished, colleges and universities continued to offer more online courses and added more online degrees and programs. Some brick-and-mortar schools even switched to online only. 

    To be sure, far fewer college students are learning online today than during the peak of the pandemic, when online instruction was an emergency response. But there are far more students regularly logging into their computers for their classes now than in 2019, according to the latest federal data. In fact, there are so many more that online enrollment hit a new post-pandemic milestone in the fall of 2022 when a majority – 54 percent – of college students took one or more of their classes online, a nearly 50 percent increase from the fall of 2019 when 37 percent of college students took at least one online class. 

    Hill’s chart shows how online learning at college has jumped to a new plateau. The green line represents the percentage of students who are taking at least one class online in the fall of each academic year. This includes both students who are in online programs and taking all of their classes online as well as students who are studying in brick-and-mortar campuses and taking only some of their classes online. It also includes both undergraduate and graduate students at all kinds of institutions, two-year community colleges and four-year universities, both private and public. 

    The green line of online course taking was growing steadily before the pandemic. It spiked in the fall of 2020, when three quarters of all students were taking classes online. It’s not 100 percent, as it might have been in the spring of 2020, because some states and campuses had reopened by the fall. A year later, in the fall of 2021, online learning had fallen to 60 percent of college students, but many schools had not yet resumed normal operations. By the fall of 2022, online learning had settled to 54 percent of students. Hill calls it the “new normal” and predicts that online learning will continue to grow in future years.

    The sheer numbers are staggering: more than 10 million college students were learning online in the fall of 2022. Compared to before the pandemic, an additional 1.5 million students were taking all of their courses online and 1.35 million more students were taking at least one course online — even as the total number of college students fell by more than a million between 2019 and 2022. 

    “Online has become more the norm,” said Phil Hill, a consultant and market analyst of education technology in higher education, whose newsletter alerted me to the new milestone. “It’s almost like exclusive face-to-face instruction is becoming the exception.”

    The numbers come from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as IPEDS, which released fresh data for 2022-23 in January 2024. (Colleges are required to report masses of figures to the Education Department every year in order for their students to be eligible for federal student loans.) Hill extracted the online learning figures from the database and wrote about them in a Jan. 21, 2024  newsletter, “Fall 2022 IPEDS Data: Profile of US Higher Ed Online Education.” 

    This column is largely based on Hill’s analysis, but buttressing the evidence for continued growth in online learning is newer fall 2023 data, released after the IPEDS data was made public and Hill’s report, from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the research arm of a nonprofit that assists colleges with their data reporting requirements. The Clearinghouse reported that student enrollment growth for the category covering primarily online institutions was twice as large as enrollment growth overall (2.2 percent versus 1.1 percent) between fall 2022 and fall 2023. It didn’t track online course taking at traditional colleges and universities.

    At first glance, it might seem strange that both online classes and degree programs are growing while college enrollment has been declining for more than a decade. But Hill explained to me that lost tuition revenue is driving the online shift. Online classes and programs are a way for colleges to reach students who live far from their area. They also appeal to older working adults who cannot come to campus every day. The quest for new students (and their tuition payments) has become more critical for many colleges as there are fewer college-age students in many regions of the country – a population drop that’s spreading throughout the country and will soon affect colleges nationwide. In higher education, it’s called the “demographic cliff.”

    “It’s starting to come down to schools saying, ‘If we’re gonna stay alive as an institution, we’re going to be a lot more aggressive in finding ways to reach students,” said Hill. “It’s an existential issue.”

    In recent months, several colleges have announced that they’re transforming into purely online institutions to avoid closure. Goddard College in Vermont said it will end on-campus residency programs beginning in the fall of 2024. It had been faced with declining enrollment and tuition revenue, combined with rising operating costs. Three University of Wisconsin campuses are also ending in-person instruction:  UW Milwaukee – Washington County, UW Oshkosh – Fond du Lac,  and UW Green Bay – Marinette.

    Four-year public colleges and universities are behind the large post-pandemic increases in online learning, according to Hill. In the past, for-profit colleges, primarily online nonprofits and community colleges had been large drivers of the online trend. 

    The pandemic expedited the shift, Hill said, because many colleges hemorrhaged students during the public health crisis and got an early taste of the demographic cliff ahead. Colleges are restructuring for the future. At the same time, nearly all faculty tried teaching online in 2020 and that experience chipped away at their previous resistance, said Hill. Professors may still not be fans of online learning, but they’re not protesting it as much.

    Hill’s second chart shows the numbers of students learning online. The gray line represents all college students and shows how the total number of college students has been falling for a decade. The blue line represents students who take all of their courses online. That spiked at the beginning of the pandemic. The red line represents students who were taking at least one but not all of their courses online. Combined together, the red and blue lines surpass the number of college students who take all of their classes in person, as represented by the orange line.

    Another phenomenon is that colleges are banding together to offer online classes that individual campuses, especially ones in rural areas, cannot afford to teach on their own. It’s a bit like airline code sharing. Hill said the Colorado Community College System, one of his clients, is developing online courses that all 13 colleges can share with their students.

    For students, the online shift is a mixed bag. In some cases, it means they can still take classes that otherwise might not be offered, or they can finish their degrees at an institution that might otherwise have shut down. But there’s a large body of research showing that students don’t learn as much from an online course and are more likely to fail or drop out.

    One change from pre-pandemic times, according to Hill, is that more online instruction is now scheduled. Lectures still tend to be recorded for viewing at one’s convenience, but students are often required to log in for a discussion or an activity over Zoom. In entirely “asynchronous” courses, students can log in whenever they want. Often that means that they don’t log in at all.

    Keeping students motivated online remains a challenge for community colleges, Hill said. “If you’re going to teach online, you still need comprehensive student support, but community colleges are resource constrained,”  he said, explaining that they don’t have enough advisers and counselors to make sure students are logging in and keeping up with their work.  Often, financial, work and family responsibilities interfere with school.

    It’s worth noting that far fewer students are learning online at the most selective colleges. Fewer than 20 percent of students are taking an online course at Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, Williams and a handful of other elite colleges, according to Hill’s analysis. It’s yet another example of how schooling is changing between the haves and the have-nots.

    This story about online college classes 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • OPINION: Our college students are struggling emotionally. We need to understand how to help them – The Hechinger Report

    OPINION: Our college students are struggling emotionally. We need to understand how to help them – The Hechinger Report

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    Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.

    Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.

    This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.

    I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.

    But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.

    Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.

    In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.

    It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.

    Related: Congress is starting to tackle student mental health

    Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.

    In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).

    Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.

    This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.

    Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.

    This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.

    But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.

    Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

    Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.

    They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.

    That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.

    Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.

    The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.

    Related: OPINION: One college president uses board games, bedtime stories, horses and ice-cream sundaes to help students cope

    We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.

    Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.

    But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.

    When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.

    Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.

    This story about college students and resilience was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan

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  • PROOF POINTS: How to get teachers to talk less and students more

    PROOF POINTS: How to get teachers to talk less and students more

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    Silence may be golden, but when it comes to learning with a tutor, talking is pure gold. It’s audible proof that a student is paying attention and not drifting off, research suggests. More importantly, the more a student articulates his or her reasoning, the easier it is for a tutor to correct misunderstandings or praise a breakthrough. Those are the moments when learning happens.

    One India-based tutoring company, Cuemath, trains its tutors to encourage students to talk more. Its tutors are in India, but many of its clients are American families with elementary school children. The tutoring takes place at home via online video, like a Zoom meeting with a whiteboard, where both tutor and student can work on math problems together. 

    The company wanted to see if it could boost student participation so it collaborated with researchers at Stanford University to develop a “talk meter,” sort of a Fitbit for the voice, for its tutoring site. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the researchers could separate the audio of the tutors from that of the students and calculate the ratio of tutor-to-student speech.

    In initial pilot tests, the talk meter was posted on the tutor’s video screen for the entire one-hour tutoring session, but tutors found that too distracting. The study was revised so that the meter pops up every 20 minutes or three times during the session. When the student is talking less than 25 percent of the time, the meter goes red, indicating that improvement is needed. When the student is talking more than half the time, the meter turns green. In between, it’s yellow. 

    Example of the talk meter shown to tutors every 20 minutes during the tutoring session. Source: Figure 2 of Demszky et. al. “Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform.”

    More than 700 tutors and 1,200 of their students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one where the tutors were shown the talk meter, another where both tutors and students were shown the talk meter, and a third “control” group which wasn’t shown the talk meter at all for comparison.

    When just the tutors saw the talk meter, they tended to curtail their explanations and talk much less. But despite their efforts to prod their tutees to talk more, students increased their talking only by 7 percent. 

    When students were also shown the talk meter, the dynamic changed. Students increased their talking by 18 percent. Introverts especially started speaking up, according to interviews with the tutors. 

    The results show how teaching and learning is a two-way street. It’s not just about coaching teachers to be better at their craft. We also need to coach students to be better learners. 

    “It’s not all the teacher’s responsibility to change student behavior,” said Dorottya Demszky, an assistant professor in education data science at Stanford University and lead author of the study. “I think it’s genuinely, super transformative to think of the student as part of it as well.”

    The study hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is currently a draft paper, “Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform,” so it may still be revised. It is slated to be presented at the March 2024 annual conference of the Society of Learning Analytics in Kyoto, Japan. 

    In analyzing the sound files, Demszky noticed that students tended to work on their practice problems with the tutor more silently in both the control and tutor-only talk meter groups. But students started to verbalize their steps aloud once they saw the talk meter. Students were filling more of the silences.

    In interviews with the researchers, students said the meter made the tutoring session feel like a game.  One student said, “It’s like a competition. So if you talk more, it’s like, I think you’re better at it.” Another noted:  “When I see that it’s red, I get a little bit sad and then I keep on talking, then I see it yellow, and then I keep on talking more. Then I see it green and then I’m super happy.” 

    Some students found the meter distracting.  “It can get annoying because sometimes when I’m trying to look at a question, it just appears, and then sometimes I can’t get rid of it,” one said.

    Tutors had mixed reactions, too. For many, the talk meter was a helpful reminder not to be long-winded in their explanations and to ask more probing, open-ended questions. Some tutors said they felt pressured to reach a 50-50 ratio and that they were unnaturally holding back from speaking. One tutor pointed out that it’s not always desirable for a student to talk so much. When you’re introducing a new concept or the student is really lost and struggling, it may be better for the teacher to speak more. 

    Surprisingly, kids didn’t just fill the air with silly talk to move the gauge. Demszky’s team analyzed the transcripts in a subset of the tutoring sessions and found that students were genuinely talking about their math work and expressing their reasoning. The use of math terms increased by 42 percent.

    Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks to the study design. We don’t know if students’ math achievement improved from the talk meter. The problem was that students of different ages were learning different things in different grades and different countries and there was no single, standardized test to give them all. 

    Another confounding factor is that students who saw the talk meter were also given extra information sessions and worksheets about the benefits of talking more. So we can’t tell from this experiment if the talk meter made the difference or if the information on the value of talking aloud would have been enough to get them to talk more.

    Excerpts from transcribed tutoring sessions in which students are talking about the talk meter. Source: Table 4 of Demszky et. al. “Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform.”

    Demszky is working on developing a talk meter app that can be used in traditional classrooms to encourage more student participation. She hopes teachers will share talk meter results with their students. “I think you could involve the students a little more: ‘It seems like some of you weren’t participating. Or it seems like my questions were very closed ended? How can we work on this together?’”

    But she said she’s treading carefully because she is aware that there can be unintended consequences with measurement apps. She wants to give feedback not only on how much students are talking but also on the quality of what they are talking about. And natural language processing still has trouble with English in foreign accents and background noise. Beyond the technological hurdles, there are psychological ones too.

     “Not everyone wants a Fitbit or a tool that gives them metrics and feedback,” Demszky acknowledges.

    This story about student participation 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Four lessons from post-pandemic tutoring research

    PROOF POINTS: Four lessons from post-pandemic tutoring research

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    Research points to intensive daily tutoring as one of the most effective ways to help academically struggling children catch up. There have been a hundred randomized control trials, but one of the most cited is of a tutoring program in Chicago high schools, where ninth and 10th graders learned an extra year or two of math from a daily dose of tutoring. That’s the kind of result that could offset pandemic learning losses, which have remained devastating and stubborn nearly four years after Covid first erupted, and it’s why the Biden Administration  has recommended that schools use their $190 billion in federal recovery funds on tutoring.

    This tutoring evidence, however, was generated before the pandemic, and I was curious about what post-pandemic research says about how tutoring is going now that almost 40 percent of U.S. public schools say they’re offering high-dosage tutoring and more than one out of 10 students (11 percent) are receiving it this 2023-24 school year. Here are four lessons. 

    1. Why timing matters

    Scheduling tutoring time during normal school hours and finding classroom space to conduct it are huge challenges for school leaders. The schedule is already packed with other classes and there aren’t enough empty classrooms. The easiest option is to tack tutoring on to the end of the school day as an after-school program.

    New Mexico did just that and offered high school students free 45-minute online video sessions three times a week in the evenings and weekends. The tutors were from Saga Education, the same tutoring organization that had produced spectacular results in Chicago. Only about 500 students signed up out of more than 34,000 who were eligible, according to a June 2023 report from MDRC, an outside research organization. Researchers concluded that after-school tutoring wasn’t a “viable solution for making a sizable and lasting impact.” The state has since switched to scheduling tutoring during the school day.

    Attendance is spotty too. Many after-school tutoring programs around the country report that even students who sign up don’t attend regularly.

    1. A hiring dilemma 

    The job of tutor is now the fastest-growing position in the K–12 sector, but 40 percent of schools say they’re struggling to hire tutors. That’s not surprising in a red-hot job market, where many companies say it’s tough to find employees. 

    Researchers at MDRC in a December 2023 report wrote about different hiring strategies that schools around the country are using. I was flabbergasted to read that New Mexico was paying online tutors $50 an hour to tutor from their homes. Hourly rates of $20 to $30 are fairly common in my reporting. But at least the state was able to offer tutoring to students in remote, rural areas where it would otherwise be impossible to find qualified tutors.

    Tutoring companies are a booming business. Schools are using them because they take away the burden of hiring, training and supervising tutors. However, Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, found that a tutoring company’s curriculum might have nothing to do with what children are learning in their classrooms and that there’s too little communication between tutors and classroom teachers. Tutors were quitting at high rates and replaced with new ones; students weren’t able to form long-term relationships with their tutors, which researchers say is critical to the success of tutoring. 

    When Fulton County schools hired tutors directly, they were more integrated into the school community. However, schools considered them to be “paraprofessionals” and felt there were more urgent duties than tutoring that they needed to do, from substitute teaching and covering lunch duty to assisting teachers. 

    Chicago took the burden off schools and hired the tutors from the central office. But schools preferred tutors who were from the neighborhood because they could potentially become future teachers. The MDRC report described a sort of catch-22. Schools don’t have the capacity to hire and train tutors, but the tutors that are sent to them from outside vendors or a central office aren’t ideal either. 

    Oakland, Calif., experienced many of the obstacles that schools are facing when trying to deliver tutoring at a large scale to thousands of students. The district attempted to give kindergarten through second grade students a half hour of reading tutoring a day. As described by a December 2023 case study of tutoring by researchers at the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Oakland struggled with hiring, scheduling and real estate. It hired an outside tutoring organization to help, but it too had trouble recruiting tutors, who complained of low pay. Finding space was difficult. Some tutors had to work in the hallways with children. 

    The good news is that students who worked with trained tutors made the same gains in reading as those who were given extra reading help by teachers. But the reading gains for students were inconsistent. Some students progressed less in reading than students typically do in a year without tutoring. Others gained almost an additional year’s worth of reading instruction – 88 percent more.

    1. The effectiveness of video tutoring 

    Bringing armies of tutors into school buildings is a logistical and security nightmare. Online tutoring solves that problem. Many vendors have been trying to mimic the model of successful high dosage tutoring by scheduling video conferencing sessions many times a week with the same well-trained tutor, who is using a good curriculum with step-by-step methods. But it remains a question whether students are as motivated to work as hard with video tutoring as they are in person. Everyone knows that 30 hours of Zoom instruction during school closures was a disaster. It’s unclear whether small, regular doses of video tutoring can be effective. 

    In 2020 and 2021, there were two studies of online video tutoring. A randomized control trial in Italy produced good results, especially when the students received tutoring four times a week. The tutoring was less than half as potent when the sessions fell to twice a week, according to a paper published in September 2023. Another study in Chicago found zero results from video tutoring. But the tutors were unpaid volunteers and many students missed out on sessions. Both tutors and tutees often failed to show up.

    The first randomized controlled trial of a virtual tutoring program for reading was conducted during the 2022-23 school year at a large charter school network in Texas. Kindergarten, first and second graders received 20 minutes of video tutoring four times a week, from September through May, with an early reading tutoring organization called OnYourMark. Despite the logistical challenges of setting up little children on computers with headphones, the tutored children ended the year with higher DIBELS scores, a measure of reading proficiency for young children, than students who didn’t receive the tutoring. One-to-one video tutoring sometimes produced double the reading gains as video tutoring in pairs, demonstrating a difference between online and in-person tutoring, where larger groups of two and three students can be very effective too. That study was published in October 2023. 

    Video tutoring hasn’t always been a success. A tutoring program by Intervene K-12, a tutoring company, received high marks from reviewers at Johns Hopkins University, but outside evaluators didn’t find benefits when it was tested on students in Texas. In an unpublished study, the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University organization that is promoting and studying tutoring, found no difference in year-end state test scores between students who received the tutoring and those who received other small group support. Study results can depend greatly on whether the comparison control group is getting nothing or another extra-help alternative.

    Matthew Kraft, a Brown University economist who studies tutoring, says there hasn’t been an ideal study that pits online video tutoring directly against in-person tutoring to measure the difference between the two. Existing studies, he said, show some “encouraging signs.” 

    The most important thing for researchers to sort out is how many students a tutor can work with online at once. It’s unclear if groups of three or four, which can be effective in person, are as effective online. “The comments we’re getting from tutors are that it’s significantly different to tutor three students online than it is to tutor three students in person,” Kraft said.

    In my observations of video tutoring, I have seen several students in groups of three angle their computers away from their faces. I’ve watched tutors call students’ names over and over again, trying to get their attention. To me, students appear far more focused and energetic in one-to-one video tutoring.

    1. How humans and machines could take turns

    A major downside to every kind of tutoring, both in-person and online, is its cost. The tutoring that worked so well in Chicago can run $4,000 per student. It’s expensive because students are getting over a hundred hours of tutoring and schools need to pay the tutors’ hourly wages. Several researchers are studying how to lower the costs of tutoring by combining human tutoring with online practice work. 

    In one pre-pandemic study that was described in a March 2023 research brief by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, students worked in groups of four with an in-person tutor. The tutors worked closely with two students at a time while the other two students worked on practice problems independently on ALEKS, a widely used computerized tutoring system developed by academic researchers and owned by McGraw-Hill. Each day the students switched:  the ALEKS kids worked with the tutor and the tutored kids turned to ALEKS. The tutor sat with all four students together, monitoring the ALEKS kids to make sure they were doing their math on the computer.

    The math gains nearly matched what the researchers had found in a prior study of human tutoring alone, where tutors worked with only two students at a time and required twice as many tutors. The cost was $2,000 per student, much less than the usual $3,000-$4,000 per student price tag of the human tutoring program.

    Researchers at the University of Chicago have been testing the same model with online video tutoring, instead of in-person, and said they are seeing “encouraging initial indications.” Currently, the research team is studying how many students one tutor can handle at a time, from four to as many as eight students, alternating between humans and ed tech, in order to find out if the sessions are still effective.

    Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a similar study of swapping between human tutoring and practicing math on computers. Instead of ALEKS, this pilot study used Mathia, another computerized tutoring system developed by academic researchers and owned by Carnegie Learning. This was not a randomized control trial, but it did take place during the pandemic in 2020-21. Middle school students doubled the amount of math they learned compared to similar students who didn’t receive the tutoring, according to Ken Koedinger, a Carnegie Mellon professor who was part of the research team. 

    “AI tutors work when students use them,” said Koedinger. “But if students aren’t using them, they obviously don’t work.” The human tutors are better at motivating the students to keep practicing, he said. The computer system gives each student personalized practice work, targeted to their needs, instant feedback and hints.

    Technology can also guide the tutors. With one early reading program, called Chapter One, in-person tutors work with young elementary school children in the classroom. Chapter One’s website keeps track of every child’s progress. The tutor’s screen indicates which student to work with next and what skills that student needs to work on.  It also suggests phonics lessons and activities that the tutor can use during the session.  A two-year randomized control trial, published in December 2023, found that the tutored children – many of whom received short five-minute bursts of tutoring at a time – outperformed children who didn’t receive the tutoring. 

    The next frontier in tutoring, of course, is generative AI, such as Chat GPT. Researchers are studying how students learn directly from Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, which gives step-by-step, personalized guidance, like a tutor, on how to solve problems. Other researchers are using this technology to help coach human tutors so that they can better respond to students’ misunderstandings and confusion. I’ll be looking out for these studies and will share the results with you.

    This story about video tutoring 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 Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • PROOF POINTS: Two studies find scattergrams reduce applications to elite colleges

    PROOF POINTS: Two studies find scattergrams reduce applications to elite colleges

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    Example of a hypothetical scattergram showing test scores and grades of past applicants to a college. The dotted lines highlight the average grades and test scores of accepted students. Source: Figure 1 in Tomkins et al, “Showing high-achieving college applicants past admissions outcomes increases undermatching,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Oct 2023

    Many high school students struggle to figure out which of the nation’s 2,600 four-year colleges and universities should be on their lists of reach, target and safety schools. To help with that decision, schools across the country have paid many millions to private companies that display data on the fate of past students. But two recent studies have found that this information could discourage students who might have a shot at the most elite schools.

    One of the most popular data displays in the college application process is a scattergram, which shows the grades and test scores of admitted and rejected students from a student’s own high school at each college. Scattergrams are a bit like looking at horse race results for each school except the names of former classmates aren’t displayed.

    Academic researchers have been trying to find out how these scattergrams, which have been widely adopted by U.S. high schools over the past two decades, are influencing students. Two separate studies indicate that these information displays are discouraging some teens from applying to the most competitive schools, such as Harvard and Stanford. The researchers found that applications to these schools plummet after students see the scattergrams. At the same time, the researchers note that lower-achieving students tend to benefit from the scattergrams because the data encourages them to aim higher. 

    The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2023, tracked the college applications of 70,000 students at 220 public high schools over five application cycles, from 2014-15 to 2019-20. In the years immediately after a school purchased Naviance, the market leader in scattergrams, 17,000 high achieving students with test scores above 1310 on the SAT (out of 1600 points) or above 29 on the ACT (out of 36 points), were 50 percent less likely to apply to the most competitive universities and colleges. Consider 100 high-achieving students applying to college: 24 applied to the most competitive schools before the scattergrams, but only 16 of them did afterward.

    Among high-achieving students, an unidentified college that had received the third-most applications dropped out of the top 10 after Naviance was introduced. High-achieving students became much more likely to apply to local colleges, which were relatively unpopular choices before Naviance.

    Sabina Tomkins, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and lead author of the study, doesn’t know exactly why students were deterred, but she said there are two likely explanations. One is that students are intimidated when they see that their scores are slightly below the average of previously admitted students. Some kids might want to avoid the risk of rejection altogether and play it safe, applying only to places where they’re more likely to be accepted. 

    Another possibility is that the scattergrams have an unintended marketing or advertising effect. Students may feel more motivated to apply to the most popular schools where they see masses of green checks, showing that many previous peers have been admitted. Students can’t see the scattergrams for the least popular schools. To preserve student privacy, high schools commonly suppress scattergrams for schools to which fewer than five or 10 alumni have applied. Small or far-away elite schools can often fall into this suppressed category. “When the school doesn’t show up as a scattergram, it might not cross their mind in the same way it would have before,” said Tomkins. 

    Tomkins only had application data and doesn’t know where students enrolled in college. But if students are applying to fewer elite schools, they’re likely getting into and matriculating at fewer of them too, Tomkins said.

    An earlier study, published in 2021 in the Journal of Labor Economics, also found that Naviance’s scattergrams deterred students from applying to and enrolling in the most selective colleges. That study looked at only 8,000 students at one unidentified school district in the mid-Atlantic region. At the time that study was released, some critics questioned whether the unintended consequences of scattergrams were true nationwide. The larger 2023 study bolsters the evidence that more information isn’t always a good thing for all students.

    Importantly, both studies also found that the scattergrams encouraged lower-achieving students. They were more likely to apply to four-year colleges after seeing that their grades and test scores were similar to those of previous students who had been accepted. Before their schools purchased Naviance, more of these students avoided four-year colleges and opted for two-year community colleges instead. A separate body of research has generally found that starting at a four-year college, while more expensive, increases the likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree and higher wages after graduation. 

    Whether we should care about students attending the most prestigious and elite colleges is a matter of debate. Authors of the 2023 study pointed me to Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s research, which has found that going to an Ivy League university or four other elite colleges, instead of a top flagship public college, increases the likelihood of becoming a CEO or a U.S. senator and substantially increases a graduate’s chances of earning in the top 1 percent. However, attending an Ivy instead of a top public flagship didn’t increase a graduate’s income on average. 

    The scattergram studies looked only at high schools that had purchased Naviance’s product. The company was the first to market scattergrams to schools in 2002 and says its product reaches nine million of the nation’s 15 million high school students. According to GovSpend, which tracks government contracts, public high schools have spent well over $100 million on Naviance, which, in addition to scattergrams, also allows high school counselors to manage their students’ college applications and send transcripts to colleges. Competitors include Scoir, Ciaflo and MaiaLearning, which all offer similar scattergrams. 

    PowerSchool, the company that owns Naviance, points out that analyzing small slices of its customer base, as the academic researchers have, can be misleading. According to the data PowerSchool shared with me, 38 percent of the six million college applications that flow through its platform each year were sent to “reach” schools, schools where it would be challenging for a student to gain acceptance based on their grades and test scores. A spokesperson said that applications to reach schools have been increasing annually, proof that its product “does not discourage students from applying to their reach or target schools.” 

    The company also highlighted the benefits for lower-achieving students, asserting that the scattergrams “increase equity.”  Indeed, the earlier 2021 study found that Black, Hispanic and low-income students were especially more likely to apply to and enroll in four-year colleges after using Naviance.

    I talked with a half dozen college counselors who work with high school students and they said they generally didn’t see high-achieving students getting discouraged after seeing scattergrams. “If anything, I see the opposite,” said Scott White, an independent college counselor in New Jersey and a former high school guidance counselor for over 30 years. “Students are over-applying, not under-applying. They throw in dream applications. If you look at the Naviance scattergrams, they are not in profile. ‘I know I’m not gonna get in there, but I’m gonna apply there anyway.’  That is incredibly common.” 

    Amy Thompson, a college counselor at York High School outside of Chicago, told me that the scattergrams are a “big hit” with high school students and get students engaged in the college process because clicking on the data can be fun and even addicting. 

    Only one counselor told me he had seen a case where a student was discouraged after seeing scattergrams, but he said it was an unusual experience. That doesn’t mean the researchers’ data analysis is wrong. It’s common for data to point out things that we’re not aware of or that we cannot readily see. 

    The biggest drawback to scattergrams, according to veteran college counselors, is that the information is incomplete and can give students the false sense that admissions decisions at elite schools are primarily based on grades and test scores. The scattergrams don’t show whether a student was an athlete, a musician or from a wealthy family with many generations of alumni. Students might see a green check with a low test score and not appreciate that the student had other factors weighing in his or her favor. 

    Counselors told me the scattergrams are most useful and accurate for large state schools, where there is a lot of data and the academic range of past admittees helps students identify safety and target schools. The more competitive the college, and the more the college looks at factors other than grades and test scores, the less useful the scattergrams. 

    And just like the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Schools fall in and out of favor. What was a safety school one year can unexpectedly rise in selectivity. A school that was once hard to get into can lower its standards in an effort to fill seats.

    I don’t know that I care so much about kids not applying to enough Ivy League schools. But it’s fascinating how the information age changes our behavior for better and for worse, and how kids are influenced by spending hours and hours clicking on websites and absorbing masses of data.

    This story about scattergrams 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.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • OPINION: Why artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving student outcomes – The Hechinger Report

    OPINION: Why artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving student outcomes – The Hechinger Report

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    The recent rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools has inspired growing anxiety on college campuses while fueling a national conversation about faculty attempts to thwart students from using the tools to cheat.

    But that prevalent narrative around AI and cheating is overshadowing the technology’s true potential: Artificial intelligence holds great promise for dramatically enhancing the reach and impact of postsecondary institutions and improving outcomes for all students.

    Last month, President Biden issued a sweeping executive order aimed at better mitigating the risks and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, while also arguing for the need to “shape AI’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying AI-enabled educational tools.”

    Biden’s call to action could not have been more timely.

    The question now is not whether generative AI can positively transform educational access and attainment, but whether higher education is ready to truly democratize and personalize learning with these tools.

    Related: Future of Learning: Teaching with AI, part 1

    AI’s transformational potential is perhaps greatest at community colleges, minority-serving institutions and open-access universities. These schools’ diversity necessitates a broader set of supports. Dedicated faculty and staff not only serve a very broad range of students — including first-generation and low-income learners, returning adults, those for whom English is a second language and those balancing academic pursuits with family and work responsibilities — but they do so with fewer resources than instructors at elite and flagship institutions. Generative AI tools can augment critically needed services such as advisers, tutors and coaches.

    Exploring the possibilities of AI is not cheap, however. While some low-cost or free tools can make a difference, the largest impacts will be achieved through more advanced — and costly — tools that are developed with specific learner populations in mind and blend academic material with students’ sociocultural and language contexts rather than providing generic solutions.

    Challenges around cost and availability could further disenfranchise the very learners who could gain the most from AI tools by denying them access to the experts, resources and development opportunities they need to benefit from them. Institutions may struggle to bring the true power of AI to bear on addressing their students’ needs.

    Similarly, too often, the datasets and algorithms behind AI tools reflect historical inaccuracies and intrinsic biases that only further disenfranchise learners. This will continue to be the case until we collectively confront the inequitable ways that AI systems are designed and resources are distributed.

    That’s why we need to think about AI differently, shifting our focus from debates about academic integrity and concerns about cheating to how we can leverage artificial intelligence in equitable ways that will boost college completion for all students.

    Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom

    Let’s focus on how AI advances could provide all learners with the kinds of high-touch support already offered to students who attend wealthier institutions. AI tools could have a transformative effect on access, progression and completion for learners who were previously constrained by limitations of time, space and resources.

    Imagine if generative AI tutors could provide 24/7 individualized support, along with AI-powered virtual reality tools that would widen access to experiential learning opportunities. What about having adaptive learning tools enabling students to learn at a pace that best suits their level of preparation? And personalized learning materials that reflect their backgrounds and lived experiences?

    A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.

    Such steps could augment engagement and outreach efforts to lower the barriers that prevent students from underserved communities from earning degrees.

    This is not a speculative vision of a not-too-distant future, but an emerging reality on some campuses. Arizona State University, for example, has assembled a team of engineers and data scientists to develop AI tools to enhance learning and improve student outcomes.

    For now, such experimentation is limited to colleges and universities with the resources for scaling the benefits of the technology and developing the guardrails necessary for mitigating risks to learners.

    Related: OPINION: The world is changing fast. Students need data science instruction ASAP

    According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, many of the nation’s most selective and affluent colleges and universities are clustered in the same coastal metro areas long home to Big Tech — and now to AI innovation and job growth.

    That’s unfortunate. Access to new technology — and the ability to play a role in shaping its design — should not be limited by geography or institutional type. A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.

    That’s why the newly convened Complete College America Council on Equitable AI plans to bring together organizations representing over 1,000 access-focused two-year and four-year colleges and universities in January. We hope to influence and initiate policies and practices to encourage equitable engagement of AI technologies.

    We hope that college leaders, policymakers and technologists will join us to make sure that AI helps to realize, rather than hinder, higher education’s promise as an engine of equity, prosperity and hope.

    Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America.

    Vistasp M. Karbhari is a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also served as president from 2013 to 2020, and is a fellow and board member of Complete College America.

    This story about AI in higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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    Yolanda Watson Spiva and Vistasp Karbhari

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