Across the country, teachers like you are decorating classrooms, creating lesson plans, and preparing for new students. You have invested numerous hours planning how to help students learn and thrive. While teachers know how to prepare to help their students succeed, too often we forget to focus on what we need to prioritize our overall well-being so we can hold on to the joy of teaching. This back-to-school season is the perfect time to commit to you.
I recently gave a presentation for Utah-based teachers called The Joy of Teaching: How to Sustain Your Professional Passion. I spent time talking with teachers about the importance of creating practical strategies that were centered on them, their well-being, and how to cultivate joy.
As teachers, putting everyone else first and caring for yourself last is going to make it hard to sustain your passion for the teaching profession, much less sustain your mental health and overall well-being. The work that teachers do touches every profession and impacts every community.
You matter. So, talking about educator well-being and cultivating the joy of teaching must matter too.
Joy matters not just because it feels good. That’s a bonus. It matters because it is good for you. There is ample research that shows us joy can increase our emotional resiliency, it can increase job satisfaction, can help protect our body from the effects of stress and pain, and can have an overflow factor where it spreads to other people and aspects of our lives.
But how do we find and embrace joy in our busy worlds?
We choose to cultivate a mindset that endures over time. In order to do this, we need practical strategies that we can apply no matter the season of life or how many years we have been in the classroom.
To get started, be clear about your core values. Core values can be our guide and help us be our best selves. Ask yourself these questions:
What matters to you?
What is your lived experience?
Who are your role models and why do you look up to them?
What gets you up in the morning?
Intentionally make time to build community with other educators. Communal care is integral to cultivating joy in teaching. Having a mentor, being a mentor, and getting connected to professional organizations can help you sustain your joy in teaching. We need safe professional relationships that make space for us to grow and ask for help.
Cultivating joy requires self-reflection and self-regulation, in addition to sharing experiences with your community. Make it a point to pause to recognize and understand your emotions to nurture your emotional intelligence. Pausing helps you to see the good, even on the hard days. It will make you resilient and is like a sponge for integrating joy into your life and your work.
One question that I often ask teachers is what drains them and what fills them up throughout the day. It’s amazing how many people have not taken the time to reflect on this. Asking yourself this is like putting Google Maps on your mental health journey. You’ll have directions.
We all have different answers. For me, I get filled up with meaningful connections, seeing students and teachers thrive, and practicing gratitude. I quickly lose energy and mindfulness when I’m in a cluttered workspace, working in isolation, or when I find myself very overcommitted to activities that prevent me from prioritizing my well-being.
Do some reflection and try to decide each week how you can do more of what fills you and less of what drains you. It’s also useful to ask yourself what your unique contribution is to the teaching space. Pause to reflect on how your voice, knowledge, and experience benefit you as a teacher. For some of us, it helps to take some time to remember your “why” for getting into this profession. What motivated you to become a teacher? Or maybe who motivated you to step into education? It’s time to get excited about that part again. And the great news is, teacher-leader joy helps your students succeed.
Another way to hold on to your joy is to know your capacity. Have a plan for when you feel overwhelmed. You’re human. It’s going to happen. Knowing your capacity helps you to identify where to put your time and your focus when life is hard. Think about what you need to do, delegate, and delete. Take some time to ask yourself if you have what you need to thrive. As flight attendants always say, put your oxygen mask on first before helping others. Focusing on taking care of you doesn’t make you selfish–it helps you be healthy.
And with all of that, you’ll be ready for the parade of smiling faces coming your way. Thank you for being part of one of the most important professions in our country. Your work has a lasting impact. We respect you and we appreciate you. Be well.
Dr. Mamie L. Pack, Western Governors University
Dr. Mamie L. Pack is Manager for Healthy Learning at Western Governors University. With over twenty years of experience, Dr. Pack is an innovative and transformational leader with a proven history of building safe spaces for faculty and students to thrive. As a thought leader and educator promoting holistic support for teachers and students, Dr. Pack is committed to amplifying diverse voices in education centering her work in restorative and trauma-informed practices to improve equitable outcomes for all learners. Learn more about her work here.
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The pandemic disrupted education in previously unimaginable ways. It limited testing and pushed schools toward remote learning and easier assignments, along with softer grading and a more relaxed attitude around attendance.
These accommodations were supposed to be short-term, but most are still with us and are having a negative impact on students. This needs to change.
That’s why, as parents nationwide help their children settle into school this fall, they may want to ask questions about whether their kids are ready to dive into grade-level work — and, if not, find out what is being done to address that.
Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it’s time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement. Newly released data show that student growth in 2023-24 lagged behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in nearly every grade. That data follows the big declines in reading and math scores on the most recent Nation’s Report Card and the release of a study showing that high-needs districts have been recovering from the pandemic more slowly than their wealthier counterparts, worsening long-standing achievement gaps.
The pandemic also led to an explosion inchronic absenteeism, and we’ve seen only modest improvements. Arecent study by USC researchers found a lack of concern about the issue among parents. School leaders also aren’t as worried as you’d expect, with only 15 percent saying they were “extremely concerned” about student absences in asurvey released by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
At the same time, we can see clear evidence of grade inflation in rising GPAs coupled with falling or flat test scores. And while I know that teachers are trying to be supportive, lowering expectations is harmful; recent research shows that students learn more from teachers who have higher grading standards.
However, the need to raise standards doesn’t just rest on the shoulders of teachers. Education leaders and policymakers are also making things too easy. After decades of raising the bar for what’s considered grade-level performance, several states have lowered their “cut scores,” or what it means to be deemed proficient on end-of-year achievement tests.
Many states are alsocutting back on K-12 assessments and graduation requirements, despite the fact that they are critical to holding education systems accountable.
Even students don’t like the go-easy-on-them approach. In anop-ed for the Baltimore Sun, recent high school graduate Benjamin Handelman notes that what is more helpful is for teachers to show enthusiasm for the subjects they teach and offer rigorous and engaging learning opportunities.
That’s important for all students, but especially for those from historically marginalized groups, who areleast likely to get interesting, high-level learning opportunities.
Related: PROOF POINTS: Why are kids still struggling in school four years after the pandemic?
Keeping the bar low is going to make our kids less competitive when they leave school. It shocks me every time I hear people say, “Well, if everyone is behind, then no one is really behind.”
Eventually, young people will compete for jobs that aren’t going to have lower standards. In fact, employers will likely have higher expectations than a decade ago given advances in generative AI, the impact of technological advances on the world of work and a growing demand for employees with strong analytical, problem-solving and interpersonal skills.
Progress over time is central to our lives. When I was growing up, my competitive swimming coach was a former world record holder and Olympian. The time she had needed to be the fastest in the world in the 200-meter butterfly in 1963 was just barely fast enough for her daughter to qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials 30 years later.
We cannot be complacent about the fact thatmath achievement for 13-year-olds has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s. That’s why I’m glad there are states and systems holding kids to high expectations. We can learn from them.
In Maryland, Superintendent of Schools Carey Wright has pledged to raise rigor, much like she did in Mississippi, which mademajor achievement gains under her stewardship. Her strategy, emulated by others, centers around raising standards and implementing evidence-based instructional strategies, most notably in reading. Mississippi is among three states, along with Illinois and Louisiana, where research shows that students have returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading. Additional strategies adopted by Illinois and Louisiana include tutoring and interventions for struggling learners and professional development for educators.
These states show us that all students can succeed when challenged and supported with high expectations and opportunities to learn. That must be what we strive for to help all kids finally put the pandemic behind them.
Lesley Muldoon is the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card. She previously served as chief operating officer of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
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.
As the start of the school year approaches, high schools, colleges and universities across the country are figuring out how to help young people navigate the 2024 elections during these highly polarized and contentious times.
Here’s a way we can help students become informed and active participants in our democracy, while potentially avoiding fights in classrooms and on playing fields: Provide them with free, digital access to their community’s local newspaper so they can read it on their phones.
Engaging young people in democracy — getting them to follow the news and to vote — has always been a concern for educators and has always been a challenge. Young people pay less attention to the news and participate less than older people. This was the case fifty years ago and remains the case today.
That’s why in Oneonta, New York, Hartwick College’s newly launched Institute of Public Service is offering students a free digital subscription to the local paper, The Daily Star. This new initiative has emerged from the institute’s mission to help young people become more informed about and engaged with local government and the issues affecting the community where they go to school.
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It’s no surprise that the vast majority of teens report spending a lot of time on social media, especially YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram; a growing share say that they are on social media “almost constantly,” a recent report by the Pew Research Center shows.
Young people also say that social media is the most common way that they get news; many add that they do not actively seek out news, but are only exposed to it incidentally as part of their curated social media feeds.
Reliance on social media for information about candidates, policies and the actions of our government is a serious problem since much of the news content on social media is not the product of authentic, verified journalism. Inaccurate, misleading and conspiratorial information is common.
Moreover, the way social media algorithms work, readers with certain political leanings will increasingly be exposed only to content reflecting those leanings. This dynamic makes it hard for young people to find any common ground across partisan divides.
Providing young people with barrier-free access to a local newspaper is a concrete way for educational institutions to counter that trend and foster engaged citizenship.
This works because local politics is much less partisan than national politics, as New York Timescolumnist Ezra Klein pointed out in “Why We’re Polarized.” In most localities, we still see Democrats and Republicans working together to solve problems. The work of local government directly affects the lives of those in their communities.
Furthermore, Pew Research shows that Americans of both parties see value in local newspapers. Views about local news are not as starkly divided as opinions about the national media. As a result, local government and local news provide a good entry point to democracy for young people.
I’m heartened by new partnerships between local news outlets and academic institutions across the country, such as the one at the University of Vermont, through which the school is providing journalism students with the opportunity to write for local newspapers and get hands-on civic experience while also helping provide professional news coverage for their communities.
By investing in local news, schools and colleges can invest both in their communities and in democracy. Due to the changing news media environment, local newspapers have been in serious decline. Over the past several decades, we have seen hundreds close down. Currently, the majority of counties in America have only one local newspaper or, even more problematically, none at all.
Without local news, it is very difficult for people and communities to know what their local elected officials are doing and to hold power to account.
Many high school and college libraries have databases that allow students to search and access stories from a range of newspapers, and these are wonderful services. But they also take time and work to access, requiring students to log in and wade through multiple portals to get to news stories. And often the content in these databases is not updated throughout the day.
Giving students subscriptions to their local newspapers enables them to simply click the app on their phones and start reading.
Moreover, research shows that, like many other democratic behaviors, including voting, reading a newspaper and following the news is a habit: Once you start doing it, you are likely to continue.
At Hartwick, we hope that providing free, easy access to our local newspaper will result in more students consuming verified, objective news and lead to more informed and thoughtful discussions on campus and in our classrooms.
We encourage other schools to do the same. Nudging even a handful of students to become lifelong newspaper readers is a way for educational institutions to transform the lives of those students while strengthening our democracy — and our local newspapers.
Laurel Elder is professor and chair of political science at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and is co-director of the Hartwick Institute of Public Service.
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.
MILWAUKEE — On a muggy afternoon in late June, about 20 kindergarten through second-grade teachers sat in a classroom on the third floor of Milwaukee’s North Division High School. The air conditioning wasn’t working properly, but the heat didn’t seem to bother the teachers, who were absorbed in a math lesson.
Danielle Robinson and Alicia Socha, two teachers in the district, led the lesson.
“I went to the store to buy some fruit. I bought five apples and four bananas. How many pieces of fruit did I buy?” Socha asked.
The elementary teachers in the room solved the problem quickly. But the solution wasn’t the point. The teachers spent more time discussing what type of problem this was. Describing and deconstructing it helped the teachers reach a deeper understanding of not only how it works but how to explain it to their youngest learners.
“Put yourself into the mind of a child,” Robinson said.
Teaching counting and basic arithmetic sounds like a simple task. But early-childhood and elementary teachers have the daunting task of introducing abstraction to their students: What is a number? What does it mean for a number to be bigger? What does it mean to be a part of a whole?
Across the hall, Beth Schefelker and Claire Madden, two other math education specialists, led a group of teachers and principals in adding fractions. Since 2022, the district has spent close to a million dollars in Covid-19 relief funds to pay the coaches, principals and teachers to attend these sessions.
Many of these teachers never saw themselves as “math people.” Today, they were surprising themselves. Kayla Thuemler, a first grade teacher, added some fractions using a number line, where fractions are visually arranged along a horizontal line, similar to using a ruler. Thuemler had never seen fractions taught using a number line. But seeing fractions with different denominators on the same number line helped her see fractions as a more coherent system.
“Why am I enjoying myself right now?” she asked colleagues. “I hate math.”
Melissa Hedges, the math curriculum director for Milwaukee schools, shows teachers at a professional development seminar how folded paper can be used to demonstrate the solution to a fractions problem. Credit: Abby J. McFarland for The Hechinger Report
Melissa Hedges and DeAnn Huinker strolled back and forth between the two classrooms. They shared giddy glances when they saw the teachers get excited about math. Hedges oversees all things math for the Milwaukee district’s elementary and middle schools. Huinker, a professor who advised Hedges’ doctorate in math education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a legend among Milwaukee’s math teachers.
Huinker led a math education revolution in the district when, between 2004 and 2014, almost every teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools received this type of training. Veteran teachers refer to this era as the golden years of math instruction. New district leaders abruptly ended that work. Ten years later, the teachers gathered on this balmy afternoon are the inheritors of Huinker’s legacy, tasked with preserving a vibrant culture of collaboration and a commitment to helping teachers master math.
“Every teacher wants to learn and do a better job teaching,” Huinker said. “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”
Early in her career, Huinker dedicated herself to solving the problem of inequitable achievement in math, whether measured by test scores, grades or more qualitative surveys about students’ attitudes toward the subject. In the early 2000s, she saw a grant from the National Science Foundation as a possible solution for Milwaukee’s public schools.
The NSF, an independent federal agency, offers funding for math, science and engineering education in all 50 states. In 2003, the NSF awarded Huinker $20 million, the largest amount ever awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to establish a partnership between the university and the local school district.
Huinker’s proposal was to have math education experts teach teachers more math while getting constant feedback from teachers on obstacles in the classroom. In 2002, a coalition of teachers, professors and administrators led by Huinker announced the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership.
“It’s like all the stars aligned,” she said. “You had the university professors from education and mathematics, as well as the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, who was very supportive.”
A Milwaukee teacher uses a number line to demonstrate adding and subtracting fractions during a summer professional development session. The district is trying to revive a successful math partnership it had more than a decade ago that was discontinued for lack of funding and resources. Credit: Abby J. McFarland for The Hechinger Report
The $20 million allowed the district to hire 120 math teacher leaders who would serve as a crucial piece to the system Huinker had imagined. Each of the 120 schools had a teacher leader, who would serve as the liaison between Huinker and her university colleagues and the classroom teachers across the district.
Beth Schefelker was one of those teacher leaders. She was “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” about the partnership when it started, but she said she quickly ran into roadblocks. While some district administrators were on board, others were less enthused.
Schefelker recalled one meeting with a principal who leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk and said, “Convince me why I need to be a part of this.” Another principal told her, “You’re just another woman asking me to take a leap of faith.”
Schefelker responded, “What we’re doing is not working.”
Before the partnership, the district’s approach to math resembled what math instruction looks like today in many schools across the nation — a patchwork of different methods and approaches. The partnership sought to bring more consistency among educators in a way that reflected the conceptual cohesion of mathematics as a discipline. But none of this would be possible if teachers themselves didn’t understand the math.
While teacher leaders like Schefelker worked in individual schools and Huinker managed the partnership from the university, Henry Kranendonk mediated from the district office. He helped develop a “spectrum” that became the centerpiece of the program.
Melissa Hedges, the math curriculum director for Milwaukee schools, leads a professional development session for kindergarten through second-grade teachers in the district. Credit: Abby J. McFarland for The Hechinger Report
First, the district’s teachers agreed what students in each grade should learn in math and made sure these learning goals met state standards. Second, teachers and university professors helped develop standardized assessments for each grade level. Teachers within individual schools would then meet to discuss where students were weak and report these findings to Huinker and her colleagues, who would then develop teacher training sessions.
“At the end of the day, it was gratifying,” Kranendonk said. “We weren’t giving them orders. We were collectively trying to figure out the best form of instruction.”
In the classroom, teachers pushed students to reach a conceptual understanding of mathematics, a departure from the “drill and kill” methods of timed tests and memorizing procedures. The goal was to help students understand how different topics within math, everything from whole numbers and fractions to algebraic functions and areas of shapes, are interconnected. Students could then confidently solve unfamiliar problems without relying on formulas or by following the same step-by-step procedures. They would understand that individual problems are just expressions of concepts.
The partnership also gave teachers a say in how the district taught math. The training sessions went over state standards in detail and helped teachers unlearn their own bad math habits, while dispelling any false ideas a teacher might have about not being a “math person.” The training sessions were designed and improved based on the feedback classroom teachers gave to Kranendonk.
Through this ecosystem, teachers discovered just how fragmented math instruction had been in the district. For example, they realized early on that some students didn’t understand the “equals” sign. Schefelker recalled how some students thought the symbol stood for “the answer is” rather than a symbol that represents balance. They had seen the equal sign only in the context of solving problems, and not as one critical component of the language of math.
“The kids didn’t understand equality,” Schefelker said. “All they were doing was going through the process and not really understanding what they were doing.”
Once Huinker and her colleagues intervened through training sessions, teachers started to teach the equal sign differently, using problems like “5+7=__+6” to show how both sides of the equation need to be the same value.
Once the partnership gained momentum, the benefits became obvious, especially in test score data. According to one University of Wisconsin report, test scores rose by 10 percentage points for some groups. According to a report by Huinker’s team in 2011, one school in the district, 98 percent of whose students lived in low-income households, increased its mathematics proficiency by 40 percentage points. Milwaukee Public Schools became a beacon for math instruction across the country.
Milwaukee teacher Kayla Thuemler, a first grade teacher, works on a fraction problem during a summer professional development program. Credit: Abby J. McFarland for The Hechinger Report
A long-term look at the data, however, paints a more complicated picture. In 2004, when the partnership fully launched, about 30 percent of the district’s eighth graders were either proficient or advanced in math, according to Wisconsin standardized test score data. But in the 2005-06 school year, the state created a new standardized test, and scores plummeted for students: That year, only about 10 percent of eighth graders in Milwaukee were either proficient or advanced. That rate for eighth graders peaked in 2012, with about 16 percent reaching proficiency or advanced status. During the partnership, fourth graders saw about an 8 percentage point gain in the rate of students who scored proficient or advanced.
According to Huinker and Schefelker, however, test scores were only the most public-facing sign of improvement. Grades, student interest and teacher satisfaction skyrocketed during those years.
Buy-in from teachers was one reason the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership worked, Huinker said. The second reason for the partnership’s success was more bureaucratic. Huinker, not the district, controlled the purse strings. Leaders at financially strapped districts like Milwaukee Public Schools constantly juggle competing priorities, and, according to Huinker and Kranendonk, district leaders were tempted to allocate some of the money to other areas of need. Huinker ensured that the money would be spent only on math instruction.
“The external funding really gave us a leverage point,” Huinker said. “We were accountable to the National Science Foundation for keeping track of how the money was spent towards the clear goals of the project.”
All this created a tight accountability structure that allowed everyone involved to stay focused on the goal of improving math achievement in Milwaukee.
The NSF money lasted nearly a decade, and the successes continued. When the federal money ran out, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction funded the partnership for two years.
Despite receiving national and statewide praise, the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership ended in 2014, when a new superintendent and curriculum director decided to terminate the district’s relationship with the University of Wisconsin.
Huinker, Kranendonk and Schefelker recalled that the new district officials wanted to have complete district control over math instruction. The end was sudden, a contrast to the amount of time that had been invested into making the partnership work.
“They broke it,” Schefelker said. “It took years of work to thread that needle. It took months to unravel.”
Today, about 12 percent of students in the district, compared to 41 percent statewide, are proficient in math, according to standardized test score data. Wisconsin administers its state tests to students in grades three to eight and grade 10. Hedges, the current math curriculum director for the district who held several positions during the partnership, recalled a colleague who had once called math the “crown jewel” of Milwaukee Public Schools. “If you look at our test scores now, we might not be able to say that,” Hedges said.
After the partnership ended in 2014, standardized test scores in math continued to rise incrementally. From 2016 to 2019, overall math proficiency in Milwaukee rose about 1 percentage point, to reach 16.2 percent. Hedges said some teachers remained committed to the partnership’s methods.
“We had such a strong leadership base,” she said. When the partnership ended, “there were 120 math teacher leaders out in the district, and some of them went back into classrooms.”
Huinker continues to train teachers for the district. Since the partnership ended in 2014, district leadership changed again, and there’s been more openness to collaborating with the university. The sessions for early-childhood educators, which meet for four hours a day for about two weeks, include both lessons in math and open forums for teachers to air grievances. The format of these meetings reflect the structure of the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership, with its focus on math content and fostering collaboration between teachers who need more help teaching math.
Today, Milwaukee Public Schools is reckoning with fiscal mismanagement, changes to leadership, clashes with the state and tension between administrators and teachers. On top of all that, the district will implement a new math curriculum across its schools this fall. Teachers feel unprepared and lament that they’ll only see it a week before the school year starts.
Although another systemic overhaul is unlikely in the near future, the people who were around during the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership are trying to pass down everything they’ve learned to the next generation of educators. The focus on the youngest learners is encouraging for newer teachers who got into the profession partly to avoid math.
Danielle Robinson was one of the teachers in the district who helped lead the sessions for early-childhood teachers. She wasn’t around during the partnership, but she adheres to the same goals and methods. Her job, she said, is to translate research in education and childhood development for teachers.
“I felt like I never really learned math, until I was able to learn” from Huinker and Hedges, Robinson said. “I always thought that social studies and literacy were more of my thing. These ladies really did change my life.”
Phoebe Goebels contributed reporting for this story.
This story about teaching math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
There’s drama in the classroom, ya’ll! A parent bought their child favors to throw in a school parade, but found out their child’s teacher took away a portion of those favors to give to another student who ran out.
Here’s the full story in u/United-Gain1839′s own words: “My son is in second grade and I make sure he has everything he needs for school. Recently, they had a Mardi Gras parade, and I bought him $80 worth of throws for the parade so he will have stuff to throw throughout the whole ride, but that wasn’t the case.”
“A girl in his class threw all her stuff at once at the beginning of the parade and the teacher made my son share his stuff with her, and she threw his stuff all at once, leaving my son with nothing for the rest of the parade.”
“So I contacted the teacher and asked her why this happened and she said with a nasty attitude, ‘Well the girl had nothing left, so I was not going to let her go without, it’s not fair.’”
“Me: ‘But my son deserves to go without!’”
“Shouldn’t she buy extra instead of taking away from other children or am I overreacting?”
“She could’ve asked for donations. I do not know how to feel about the situation because I believe in sharing, but this wasn’t sharing this was taking away from my son.”
People in the comments were unanimously PISSED at the teacher. “This is unfair and unacceptable,” user Michmkjl wrote. “The teacher’s actions deprived your son of his belongings without consent.”
“Sharing should be voluntary and equitable, not forced. You’re right to be upset, and it’s important to address this matter to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Agreeing, user RetreadRoadRocket wrote: “It doesn’t matter if it was $5 or $500, it wasn’t the teacher’s place to steal the kid’s stuff and give it to somebody else’s kid.”
Slightly disagreeing, user InformalNobody5409 said: “I think accusing the teacher of stealing and asking for the money back as many have suggested might feel good, but would likely impact your son’s success at his school for years to come. No teacher’s going to want to see you coming. Just a thought.”
“As a fellow teacher, I would never do something like that,” user Shadowtirs wrote. “Teacher should have bought extra beads for the class if they were so concerned. You can ask the student if he wants to share some, but you can’t force him to surrender his own for another student like that.”
“Ex-teacher here. Your next step is to contact the principal to make sure this never happens again,” user Over-Marionberry-686 agreed. “If it does and maybe even in this time, I would also take it to the school board. This is unacceptable behavior on the teachers part. This was a teachable moment.”
“She could easily have taught the young lady that she needs to take her time to throw things. Instead, she taught the young lady that there’s no consequences for her actions, I am sorry for your son. Not the asshole.”
“Shit like this is why me and my mom always wrote my name in my stuff after school shopping,” user NovaStar92 wrote. “Teachers were pissed when they couldn’t add it to the box to be mixed up and distributed to others.”
What do ya’ll think about this situation? Was the teacher justified by making the child share their supplies? Or did she completely overstep? Let us know in the comments.
DURANGO, Colo. — For three dozen high schoolers, summer break in this southwest Colorado city kicked off with some rock climbing, mountain biking and fly-fishing.
Then, the work began.
As part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment, mountain researchers taught the students how to mix clumps of grass seed, clay, compost and sand for seedballs that they threw into burned areas of the Hermosa Creek watershed to help with native plant recovery. The students upturned rocks — and splashed each other — along the banks of the Animas River, searching for signs of aquatic life after a disastrous mine spill. They later waded through a wetland and scouted for beaver dams as part of a lesson on how humans can support water restoration.
Each task was designed to prepare them for potential careers connected to the natural world — forest ecologist, aquatic biologist, conservationist. Many of the students had already taken college-level environmental science courses, on subjects such as pollution mitigation and water quality, at local high schools and Fort Lewis College.
Other students in and around Durango were taking a summer crash course in the health sciences, and this fall can earn college credit in classes like emergency medical services and nursing. Still others were participating in similar programs for early childhood education and for teacher preparation.
“I like the let-me-work-outside model,” said Autumn Schulz, a rising sophomore at Ignacio High School. Every day this past school year, she rode a public transit bus, passing miles of high desert terrain, to take an ecology class at Bayfield High School, in another district. She’d already completed internships at a mountain research nonprofit and a public utility to explore environmental and municipal jobs in her preferred field.
“It’s my favorite subject,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things.”
None of this would have been possible before 2020. Back then, the Bayfield, Durango and Ignacio school districts operated largely independently. But as the pandemic took hold and communities debated whether to reopen schools after lockdown, a newly formed alliance of nine rural districts in southwest Colorado attempted to extinguish their attendance boundaries and pooled staff and financial resources to help more students get into college and high-paying careers.
Across the United States, rural schools often struggle to provide the kinds of academic opportunities that students in more populous areas might take for granted. Although often the hub of their communities, rural schools tend to struggle with a shrinking teaching force, budgets spread too thin and limited access to employers who can help. Rural students have fewer options for advanced courses or career and technical education, or CTE, before entering the workforce.
Gracie Vaughn and BreAnna Bennet, right, attend different high schools in different school districts. The teenagers roomed together during a summer program at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
But clustered near the Four Corners in Colorado, the coalition of nine rural districts has partnered with higher education and business leaders to successfully expand career and college pathways for their students. A nonprofit formed by the districts conducts job market analysis and surveys teenagers about their interests. Armed with that data, academic counselors can advise students on the array of new CTE and college-level classes in high-wage positions in the building trades, hospitality and tourism, health sciences, education and the environment.
Teachers working in classrooms separated by 100 miles or more regularly meet in-person and online to share curriculum and industry-grade equipment. More than five dozen employers in the region have created ways for students to explore careers in new fields, such as apprenticeships, job shadows and internships. And some students earn a job offer, workforce certificate or associate degree before they finish high school.
Collectively, the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative has raised more than $7 million in private and public money to pay for these programs, and its work has inspired similar rural alliances across the state. The collaborative’s future, however, is uncertain, as federal pandemic relief funds that supported its creation soon expire. Advocates have started to campaign for a permanent funding fix and changes in state policy that would make it easier for rural schools to continue partnering with one another.
Jess Morrison, who stepped down at the end of July as the collaborative’s founding executive director, said the group — and others like it in Indiana and South Texas — demonstrates the strength of regional neighbors creating solutions of their own, together.
“It’s about our region not waiting on people to save us,” she said.
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Nationally, more than 9.5 million U.S. students — or about 1 in 5 students — attend a rural school. The National Center for Education Statistics has found that, compared with the U.S. average, students in rural schools finish high school at higher rates and even outperform their peers in cities and suburbs. But only 55 percent of rural high schoolers enroll in college, a much lower share than their urban and suburban counterparts. Rural students make less money as adults and, compared to suburban students, are more likely to grow up in poverty.
In this part of southwest Colorado, where about half of students qualify for subsidized meals at school, employers have struggled to find enough workers but also to provide a liveable wage. Hoping to steer more high schoolers into high-skill and high-wage jobs, educators and superintendents from five school districts — Archuleta, Bayfield, Durango, Ignacio and Silverton — started to meet with representatives from Fort Lewis College and Pueblo Community College. In early 2019, they began working with the nonprofits Empower Schools and Lyra Colorado to formally create a regional collaborative and visited a similar project in South Texas.
Covid briefly disrupted much of that work, but in June 2020, tapping federal relief dollars for education, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced a nearly $33 million fund to close equity gaps and support students affected by the pandemic. Already poised to work together, the collaborative secured the largest award — $3.6 million — from the governor’s fund to help students explore environmental science and the building trades, two areas in which the number of jobs was projected to increase.
Waylon Kiddoo, left, and fellow Dolores Secondary School student Gus Vaughn, classify insects they discovered in the Animas River for an environmental climate institute offered every summer to high schoolers in southwest Colorado. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
Despite that demand for workers, none of the school districts offered a single class in HVAC, electrical or plumbing, according to Morrison, nor did any of the nearby higher ed institutions. “We were a complete desert,” she said.
In 2022, the collaborative began piloting summer institutes, employers started hiring students directly from those programs and Pueblo Community College began offering electrical certification at its southwest campus. Woodworking instructors from different districts started to gather monthly, comparing lesson plans and creating wish lists for new classes and equipment. New CNC routers, laser cutters and electric planers arrived at teachers’ classrooms. Soon, teachers will pilot an HVAC course for high schoolers.
Over time, the collaborative added four additional school districts: Dolores, Dove Creek, Mancos and Montezuma Cortez. It also formally partnered with two tribal nations, Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute, while expanding its college and career tracks to include education, the health sciences and hospitality/tourism.
As of 2023, nearly 900 students across the nine districts — of about 13,000 total for the region — had participated in environmental, agriculture and outdoor recreation courses, according to the collaborative’s annual report. Approximately 325 students have completed a building trades course, with 40 so far earning industry certificates. Another 199 students finished a welding course, and 77 students also took college-level classes in that field.
Joshua Walton just finished his 11th year teaching science at Bayfield High School. He’s seen the changes firsthand: His classroom today has clinometers, game cameras and soil-testing equipment on its shelves. Walton often reserves the collaborative’s mobile learning unit, a 14-passenger van converted into a traveling science lab, so students can run experiments along the Animas River. He also prepares students to get their certification in water science.
“We’re giving students the opportunity where they can be an aquatic biologist or get a job doing water testing pretty much right after they graduate,” said Walton.
Ari Zimmerman-Bergin and James Folsom, right, use peat moss, scrubbing pads and rocks to build an experimental wetland. They studied water restoration in Silverton, Colo., as part of a field trip for students interested in environmental studies. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
Tiffany Aspromonte, who works as academic advisor at Mancos High School, grew up in town and has raised her two children there. Her oldest son, a rising senior at Mancos High, regularly changes his mind about his future, she said.
He already earned a mini-certification in welding, and he’s taken courses in drones and — when he wanted to become an eye doctor — medical terminology. Now, he’s in love with hands-on engineering classes, but hates the bookwork, Aspromonte said. This fall, her son will spend Friday nights at Pueblo Community College for a wildland fire class.
“He’s not the exception,” Aspromonte said. “Just in our small school, a lot of kids can go really in-depth so they can get an idea of what they do or don’t want to do.”
And, she added, the rural brain drain — of ambitious students leaving a small town for college or better jobs — seems less pressing.
“There’s no pressure to leave home, unless you really want to,” Aspromonte said.
Along the way there have been challenges. Since 2020, all but one of the founding five superintendents left their positions, reflecting the nationwide churn of school leaders during the pandemic. Deciding how to divide money among districts hasn’t always been easy, said Morrison, the collaborative’s former director.
Student enrollment in shared courses never reached a point that would justify added costs, such as transportation. This fall, the alliance will limit the classes that high schoolers can take across district lines to education and health sciences. (Students can still take the courses in the building trades, environment and hospitality/tourism in their own high schools and at the local colleges. Each track will continue to include work-based learning.)
“We needed to simplify our approach,” Morrison said. “We started grand with all five pathways across all nine districts.”
And working with local business leaders has at times been challenging too, said Patrick Fredricks, the collaborative’s deputy director. Employers often want to give students tours of their businesses but, with the collaborative’s nudging, they can create real-world lessons: A popular bar and grill in Cortez reopened on a day off so students could host a pop-up restaurant. Dove Creek schools sent 20 kids to practice with staple guns and X-ray machines in the paramedic wing of the regional hospital.
Today, the collaborative regularly hosts career fairs with local businesses, matches students with employers to shadow on half-day visits to the workplace and helps arrange longer-term internships as well. Last school year, more than 200 students shadowed business leaders at 16 different job sites, including the local hospital, ski resorts and a cattle ranch.
The Colorado Education Initiative, a Denver-based nonprofit, has studied the impact of the pandemic relief money on students and plans to release initial findings this fall. In an early review of the data, released last November, the nonprofit found that projects funded by the governor’s office, including those of the collaborative, generally improved academic and social emotional outcomes.
Hailey Perez, right, an education coordinator with the Mountain Studies Institute, leads an outdoor classroom as part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
The collaborative model has started to spread. Three remote districts in eastern Indiana recently created a “rural alliance zone” to get students into IT, advanced manufacturing, marketing and other career clusters. Last year, the Texas legislature overwhelmingly approved the creation of an annual $5 million pot of money to incentivize the creation of rural alliances in that state.
Back in Colorado, political allies of the collaborative have pitched the idea of dedicating state money for such partnerships or reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork needed to share funds among school districts. Eric Maruyama, spokesman for Gov. Polis, said in a statement that the Colorado governor “is committed to creating educational opportunities that give students the skills needed to thrive and fill in-demand jobs” but declined to say if he would take specific action.
Taylor McCabe-Juhnke, executive director of the Rural Schools Collaborative, a national network that operates in more than 30 states, said she’s optimistic that successful partnerships in rural communities like southwest Colorado will convince philanthropic and public funders to invest.
“It’s not very sexy to fund or make time and space for relationship building,” she said. “It’s also the right thing to do to benefit broader rural community vitality.”
In Silverton, an old mining town near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, kayakers called to the students sitting on rocks along banks of the Animas River. The teenagers circled around ice trays brimming with river water and tried to classify the swimming macroinvertebrates.
“Is that one squiggly like a worm?” BreAnna Bennet, a rising senior from Durango High School, asked her group.
At the start of the summer program, Bennet said she had no desire to do any job in the outdoors. By the third day, she often tailed the instructor and supplied a stream of questions about wetland restoration efforts and wildlife in the backcountry.
“This is fun. I like this,” Bennet said, looking up from the ice tray. “Your activity is my favorite so far.”
This story about Colorado rural schools alliances was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
When people learn that I have a doctorate in educational psychology and quantitative methods, they often assume that I love math. And the truth is, I do now, although that wasn’t always the case.
Like many Black students, I faced challenges throughout my academic journey, with math tracking being the primary one. Despite high math scores in earlier grades and a passion for the subject, I was placed into lower-level math courses in middle school.
All students deserve to benefit from enriching math learning experiences and the promising future those experiences can unlock.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
When I was in elementary school, my father, a master carpenter and math enthusiast, played a significant role in shaping my love and curiosity for math. He believed that no concept was too complex to learn, and he used carpentry to help me understand the interconnectedness of math and the world around me.
I learned about fractions, angles, precision and spatial awareness using wooden blocks and puzzle pieces I helped my dad create. By the age of 11, I could read a floor plan and calculate the length of a diagonal roofline using the Pythagorean theorem.
My dad taught me that math makes the world better, and that learning math is key to understanding the world.
But in middle school, being tracked into lower-level courses contradicted my math identity and eroded my confidence to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: I became a lower-level math student, which marked the beginning of a full-blown math identity crisis.
Frequent learning disruptions — a result of the lower-level classes also being used for students with behavioral challenges — combined with a curriculum without meaningful content facilitated a swift shift in my relationship with math.
Tracking also limited my access to advanced high school courses such as statistics and calculus that would have further developed my math skills and opened up numerous postsecondary opportunities.
Sadly, I was learning to hate math, despite my early love for it.
The tracked classes did, however, improve my social skills and popularity. Through regular exchanges of humorous insults with fellow classmates on various topics — such as who was the least intelligent or most economically disadvantaged — I developed a well-curated arsenal of diss material.
The joke-telling also became a great defense mechanism against the stigma of having been placed in lower-level classes. So instead of practicing math during study hall, I worked on refining my repertoire of jokes. I didn’t learn much math, but I did learn how to be funny.
Unfortunately, my story is far too common. Indeed, more than half of U.S. states have recognized that their traditional approaches, including placement policies and limited math course options, often advantage an elite few while overlooking the needs of the broader student population.
While a lack of resources in underserved schools is a real issue, the most damage to students’ math identities and success can be attributed to dated perspectives on the type of math courses that should be offered and systemic racism dictating who they should be offered to.
I was fortunate to discover applied statistics in graduate school. This discovery marked a pivotal turning point in my post-elementary school relationship with math, which had, up until then, been more a “situationship” — a noncommittal and sporadic interest driven by prerequisite requirements.
For the first time since learning with my dad, I was engaged and sufficiently challenged while learning mathematics. Unlike my previous math classes, the statistics courses weren’t focused on rote memorization or problems that lack any relevance to the real world.
And since earning my Ph.D., I’ve used these skills across various professional domains.
I’ve used structural equation modeling to predict STEM access for underserved students and to make recommendations to broaden pathways to STEM. As a United Way director of education, I used statistical methods, such as linear regression, to make investment and funding decisions. During my 2019 run for Congress, my statistical expertise proved invaluable in analyzing trends, guiding campaign messaging and optimizing resource allocation. I felt empowered like never before, having the ability to make more accurate interpretations and informed decisions.
I recently co-authored a report addressing the equity dimensions of math education, delving into past policies and emerging strategies to better engage and prepare students for college and career in a data-driven society.
The report sheds light on the need to enrich students’ math experiences with challenging and relevant content that offers opportunities for deeper learning. This content should provide pathways for students to make connections between theoretical concepts and practical solutions, such as building sustainable communities in underresourced regions.
The most valuable lesson I learned throughout this journey was the inextricable link between math identity and math experiences. In other words, when people say they don’t like math, they really mean that they didn’t like their experiences learning math.
Students learn more than just mathematics in math class; they are affirming their abilities and math identities and discovering that they can have a place in shaping an advanced technological society. We owe it to our students to ensure that they have better math learning experiences than those I received decades ago.
Melodie K. Baker is national policy director for Just Equations, a nonprofit organization reconceptualizing the role of math to ensure educational equity.
This story about math tracking was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes. Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more. When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students. Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign. Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said. Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes. Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day. “One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said. Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents. “It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come. “Who knows what will come next!” he said.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes.
Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.
Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more.
When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students.
Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign.
Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.
“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said.
Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes.
Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day.
“One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”
He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.
“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”
On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.
However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.
“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said.
Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.
“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”
Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents.
“It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”
He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes. Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more. When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students. Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign. Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said. Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes. Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day. “One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said. Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents. “It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come. “Who knows what will come next!” he said.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes.
Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.
Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more.
When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students.
Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign.
Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.
“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said.
Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes.
Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day.
“One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”
He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.
“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”
On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.
However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.
“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said.
Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.
“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”
Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents.
“It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”
He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come.
Education vaulted to the forefront of conversations about the presidential race when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked for roughly two decades in public schools, as a geography teacher and football coach. He has championed investments in public education: For example, in March 2023, he signed a bill to make school meals free to all students in public schools.
Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general in California, has less experience in education than her running mate. But her record suggests that she would back policies to make child care more affordable, protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and promote broader access to higher education through free community college and loan forgiveness. Like Walz, she has defended schools and teachers against Republican charges that they are “indoctrinating” young people; she has also spoken about her own experience of being bused in Berkeley, California, as part of a program to desegregate the city’s schools.
Harris and Walz have been endorsed by both the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which tend to support Democratic candidates.
We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Republican ticket’s education ideas.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
Early childhood
Child care
Harris has been a vocal supporter of child care legislation during her time in the Biden administration, though the proposals have had a mixed record of success.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided $39 billion in child care aid to help keep programs afloat.
The administration lowered the cost of child care for some military families and supported raising pay for federally funded Head Start teachers to create parity with public school teachers.
Earlier this year, Harris announced a new federal rule that would reduce lower child care costs for low-income families that receive child care assistance through a federally funded program. That same rule also requires states to pay child care providers on a more reliable basis.
Walz has also supported child care programs as governor of Minnesota. Earlier this year, he announced a new $6 million child care grant program aimed at expanding child care capacity, which followed a 2023 grant program that cemented pandemic-era support so programs could increase wages for child care workers. — Jackie Mader
Family leave and tax benefits
As soon as she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris reaffirmed her support for paid family leave, which also was part of the platform she proposed as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Harris provided the tie-breaking Senate vote that temporarily increased the child tax credit during the pandemic and has proposed making that tax credit permanent.
In 2021, the Biden administration proposed a universal preschool program as part of a multi-trillion-dollar social spending plan called Build Back Better. The plan ultimately failed to win backing from the Senate.
Harris has played a key role in leading the Biden administration’s AI initiatives, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT. Biden signed an executive order on AI in October 2023, which directed the Education Department to develop within a year resources, policies and guidance on AI and to create an “AI toolkit” for schools.
While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed education technology, in the Biden administration, the Education Department earlier this year released the National Education Technology Plan to serve as a blueprint for schools on how to implement technology in education, how to address inequities in the use and design of ed tech and how to offer ways to bridge the country’s digital divide.
In 2023, the current administration announced several new initiatives to tackle cybersecurity threats in K-12 schools, including a three-year pilot program through the Federal Communications Commission thatwill provide up to $200 million to help school districts that are eligible for FCC’s E-Rate program cover the cost of cybersecurity services and equipment. — Javeria Salman
Immigrant students
Harris has vowed to protect those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delays deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Biden administration has also used its bully pulpit to remind states and school districts that all children regardless of immigration status have a constitutional right to a free public education. As a senator in 2018, Harris sponsored legislation designed to reunite migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, although family separation has continued on a much smaller scale in the Biden administration. In Minnesota, Walz signed legislation that starting next year will provide free public college tuition to undocumented students from low-income families. — Neal Morton
LGBTQ+ students and Title IX
Harris and Walz have both expressed support for LGBTQ+ students and teachers. As a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act in 2019, which would have expanded protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in education, among other areas. In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Harris decried the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed by Florida and other states in recent years. Walz has a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ students in Minnesota, where he was the faculty adviser of Mankato West High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in the 1990s. In 2021, Walz signed an executive order restricting insurance coverage for so-called conversion therapy for minors and directing a state agency to investigate potential “discriminatory practice related to conversion therapy.” Walz signed an executive order in 2023 protecting gender-affirming health care. Earlier this year, he signed a law barring libraries from banning books based on ideology; book bans nationwide have largely targeted LGTBQ+-themed books.
The Biden administration announced significant rule changes to Title IX in 2024 that undid some of the changes the Trump administration made, including removing a mandate for colleges to have live hearings and cross-examinations when investigating sexual assaults on campus. The current administration also expanded protections for students based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which had been temporarily blocked in more than two dozen states and in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. — Ariel Gilreath
Native students
As vice president, Harris worked in an administration that promised to improve education for Native Americans, including a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages. The president’s infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, created a $3 billion program to broaden access to high-speed internet on tribal lands — a major barrier for students trying to learn at home during the pandemic. During his time as governor, Walz signed legislation last year to make college tuition-free for Native American students in Minnesota and required K-12 teachers to complete training on Native American history. Walz also required every state agency, including the department of education, to appoint tribal-state liaisons and formally consult with tribal governments.
Walz spent part of his early career teaching in small rural schools, including on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. — N.M.
School choice
Harris, who was endorsed by the nation’s largest public school teachers unions, has voiced support for public schools, but has said little about school vouchers or school choice. Walz does not support private-school vouchers, opposing statewide private-school voucher legislation introduced in 2021 by Republicans in Minnesota. — A.G.
School meals
One of Walz’s signature legislative achievements was supporting a bill that provides free school breakfasts and lunches to public and charter school students in Minnesota, regardless of household income. Walz, who signed the law in 2023, made Minnesota one of only eight states to have a universal school meal policy. The new law is expected to cost about $480 million over the next two years.
The Biden administration also expanded access to free school lunch by making it easier for schools to provide food without collecting eligibility information on every child’s family. — Christina A. Samuels
School prayer
The Biden administration has sought to protect students from feeling pressured into praying in schools. Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal Education Department published updated guidance saying that while the Constitution permits school employees to pray during the workday, they may not “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee’s prayer or other religious activity.” — Caroline Preston
Special education
As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris released a “children’s agenda” in 2019 that, among other provisions, called for a large boost in special education spending.
When Congress first passed the federal law that is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it authorized spending to cover up to 40 percent of the “excess costs” of educating students with disabilities compared to their peers. But Congress has never come close to meeting that goal, and today the federal government distributes only about 15 percent of the total cost of educating students with disabilities. The shortfall is “immoral,” Harris told members of the National Education Association at a 2019 candidates forum.
The Biden administration also has proposed large increases in special education spending, but proposals for full funding of special education have not made it through Congress. — C.A.S.
Student mental health, school safety
As California attorney general, Harris created a Bureau of Children’s Justice to address childhood trauma, among other issues. She has spoken out about the mental health toll of trauma, including from poverty, and the need for more resources and “culturally competent” mental health providers. But a 2011 law she pushed for as attorney general allowing parents of chronically absent students to be criminally charged later drew criticism for its toll on families, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic. Harris has said she regrets the law’s “unintended consequences.”
As vice president, Harris leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was created after lobbying by survivors of school shootings to support gun safety regulations. She has touted the administration’s efforts to prevent school shootings, including a grant program that has awarded roughly $500 million to schools for “evidence-based solutions,” including anonymous reporting systems for threats and training for school employees on preventing school violence.
In Minnesota, Walz’s 2022 budget called for $210 million in spending to help schools support students experiencing mental health challenges. “As a former classroom teacher, I know that students carry everything that happens outside the classroom into the classroom every day, and this is why it is imperative that our students get the resources they deserve,” he said. — C.P.
Teachers unions, pandemic recovery
The Biden administration has close ties to the nations’ largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the latter of which is the largest labor union of any kind in the country. First lady Jill Biden, who teaches community college courses, is a member of the NEA. Walz, a former teacher, is also an NEA member.
The administration was criticized for discussing with the AFT what kinds of safety measures should accompany the reopening of public schools after the pandemic.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has poured billions into helping public schools recover from the pandemic in various ways: to pay for more staff and tutors and upgrade facilities to improve air conditioning and ventilation, among other things. However, academic performance has yet to rebound, and the recovery has been uneven, with wealthier white students more likely to have made up ground lost during remote classes and Black and Latino students less likely to have done so.
The two unions, which had supported reelecting Biden, quickly threw their support to Harris and Walz. “Educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket,” NEA President Becky Pringle said after Harris named Walz as her running mate. “We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe.” — Nirvi Shah
Teaching about U.S. history and race
Both Harris and Walz have pushed back against Republican-led attacks on K-12 history instruction and efforts to minimize classroom conversations around slavery and race. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration dissolved President Donald Trump’s 1776 commission. In July 2023, Harris criticized a new history standard in Florida that said the experience of being enslaved had given people skills “for their personal benefit.”
As governor, Walz released an education plan calling for more “inclusive” instruction that is “reflective of students of color and Indigenous students.” It also called for anti-bias training for school staff, the establishment of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education, and the expansion of efforts to recruit Indigenous teachers and teachers of color. Walz also has advocated for educating students about the Holocaust and other genocides; state bans on teaching about “divisive concepts” in some Republican-led states have chilled such instruction. — C.P.
Title I
Harris’ 2019 “children’s agenda,” from when she was angling to be the Democratic nominee for president, proposed “significantly increasing” Title I, the federal program aimed at educating children from low-income families. The Biden administration also has proposed major increases to Title I spending, but Congress has not enacted those proposals. — C.A.S.
Higher Education
Accreditation
As California attorney general, Harrisurged the federal government in 2016 to revoke federal recognition for the accrediting agency of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which she hadsuccessfully sued for misleading students and using predatory recruiting practices. The accreditor’s recognition ultimately was removed in 2022.
As vice president, Harris has said little about the accreditation system, which is independently run and federally regulated and acts as a gatekeeper to billions of dollars in federal student aid. But the Biden administration has sought to require accreditors to createminimum standards on student outcomes such as graduation rates and licensure-exam pass rates. —Sarah Butrymowicz
Affirmative action
Harris has long supported affirmative action in college admissions. As California attorney general, she criticized the impact of the state’s 1996 ban at its public colleges. She also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy when the Supreme Court heard challenges to it in 2012 and 2015.
Last June, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action the same day it was handed down, calling the decision a “denial of opportunity.” Walz, referring to the decision, wrote on X, “In Minnesota, we know that diversity in our schools and businesses reflects a strong and diverse state.” — Meredith Kolodner
DEI
Harris has not shied away from supporting DEI initiatives, even as they became a focus of attack for Republicans. “Extremist so-called leaders are trying to erase America’s history and dare suggest that studying and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad thing. They’re wrong,” she wrote on X.
As governor, Walz has taken steps to increase access to higher education across racial groups, including offering tuition-free enrollment at state colleges for residents who are members of a tribal nation. This spring, Walz signed a budget that increased funding for scholarships for students from underrepresented racial groups to teach in Minnesota schools. — M.K.
For-profit colleges
Harris has long been a critic of for-profit colleges. In 2013, as California state attorney general, she sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., eventually obtaining a more than $1.1 billion settlement against the defunct company. “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” she said in a press release. As senator, she signed a letter in the summer of 2020 calling for the exclusion of for-profit colleges from Covid-era emergency funding. — M.K.
Free college
The Biden administration repeatedly has proposed making community college free for students regardless of family income. The administration also proposed making college free for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year if the students attend a historically Black college, tribal college or another minority-serving institution.
In 2023, Walz signed a bill that made two- and four-year public colleges in Minnesota free for students whose families make less than $80,000 per year. The North Star Promise Program works by paying the remaining tuition after scholarships and grants have been applied, so that students don’t have to take out loans to pay for school. — Olivia Sanchez
Free/hate speech
Following nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza, Biden said, “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, where it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.” His Education Department is investigating dozens of complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia on K-12 and college campuses, a number that has spiraled since the start of the war. — O.S.
Pell grants
The Pell grant individual maximum award has increased by $900 to $7,395 since the beginning of the Biden administration, part of its goal to double the maximum award by 2029. Education experts say that when the Pell grant program began in the 1970s, it covered roughly 75 percent of the average tuition bill but today covers only about one-third. They say doubling the Pell grant would make it easier for low-income students to earn a degree. The administration tried several times to make Pell grants available to undocumented students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but has been unsuccessful. — O.S.
Student loan forgiveness
In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harrisproposed forgiving loans for Pell grant recipients who operated businesses in disadvantaged communities for a minimum of three years. As vice president, she was reportedly instrumental in pushing Biden to announce a sweeping debt cancelation policy.
The policy, which would have eliminated up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers under a certain income level, ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court. Since then, the Biden administration has used other existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, to cancel more than $168 billion in federal student debt.
Harris has regularly championed these moves. In April, for instance, she participated in a round-table discussion on debt relief, touting what the administration had done. “That’s more money in their pocket to pay for things like child care, more money in their pocket to get through the month in terms of rent or a mortgage,” she said of those who had loans forgiven.
But challenges remain. In August, a federal appeals court issued a stay on a Biden plan, known as the SAVE plan, which aimed to allow enrolled borrowers to cut their monthly payments and have their debts forgiven more quickly than they currently can. — S.B.
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.
Sarah Butrymowicz, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jackie Mader, Neal Morton, Caroline Preston, Javeria Salman, Christina A. Samuels, Olivia Sanchez and Nirvi Shah
Daly City, in California, is looking out for its local teachers in a major way! On August 6, San Mateo County opened an affordable housing complex for its teachers on the grounds of an elementary school.
Details About Daly City’s Affordable Housing Complex
According to CBS News, a parking lot sits between the school itself and the affordable housing complex, which means walkable travel for work. Additionally, there are 56 units and access to multiple amenities, including a laundry facility, a community room, a courtyard, and a play area for children.
Daly City Mayor Juslyn Manalo spoke on the opening of Eastmoor Heights :
“The school is right there; their home is right here!” I mean, it’s really wonderful to have our teachers, our staff, rooted in our community, and not living two hours away.”
Daly City Is Not New But True To Aiding Teachers
District voters approved a $33 million bond measure for the housing complex in 2018. At the time, there was reportedly a 25% employee turnover rate.
In recent years, teachers and school staff have reportedly begun moving away from Daly City, looking for housing. For some who have kept their school roles, the commute can be as far as two hours.
The new housing units have also drawn interest and applications to the district from out-of-state applicants. Rent for the approved teachers will be capped at 50% less than the market rate at the time of occupancy.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, the city opened another affordable housing complex on the grounds of Jefferson Union High School District. It features 122 units.
Realtor.com reports that the median listing home price in San Mateo County, California, was $1.6 million in June 2024.
One teacher, Priscilla Patalinghug, was faced with the decision to leave the city but ultimately got accepted into the new complex. She and her two children live in the unit now, meaning they get to stay in a city they “love,” along with its “weather” and “people.”
Teachers on social media have been sharing their excitement online after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walzas her running mate on Tuesday morning.
Walz, a veteran of the Army National Guard who represented southern Minnesota in the U.S. House from 2007 to 2019, is a former high school social studies teacher.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association teachers union, said in a statement shortly after the announcement that “educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket.”
“Gov. Walz is known as the ‘Education Governor’ because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators, and an ally for working families and unions,” she said, adding that the Democratic governor “has a track record of getting things done to make people’s lives better.”
After graduating from Chadron State College in Nebraska in 1989, Walz, a Nebraska native, taught high school in China for a year before returning home.
Walz and his wife, Gwen Walz, both began teaching at Mankato West High School in southern Minnesota in the 1990s. Walz, who’s currently serving his second term as governor, coached the school’s football team and helped the squad win its first state championship in 1999.
Walz’s background as an educator has garnered more national attention in recent weeks after it was reported that he was on the short list of vice presidential picks.
Ann Vote, a former student of Walz’s, told The Washington Post in an article published Friday that it was “wild” for her and her classmates to think their former teacher could become the vice president.
“But I don’t get the sense that everyone is completely shocked,” she said. “It’s sort of like, ‘Darn right he’s on that list. Absolutely he should be!’
Vice President Kamala Harris introduces her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at a campaign event Tuesday in Philadelphia.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Supporters have touted his gubernatorial record of increasing funding for public K-12 schools in Minnesota, as well as signing laws providing free school meals to Minnesota students, implementing a paid family and medical leave program and granting free tuition at public colleges for students whose families earn less than $80,000 a year.
Nevada state Assemblywoman Selena Torres, a Democrat and teacher, celebrated Harris’ choice of Walz.
“Teachers are leaders who deliver results everyday,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I couldn’t be any more excited to cheer on [Walz] as our next VP!!!”
“Teachers are going to turn out in record numbers!” another teacher wrote on X. “I am so excited to get back to the environmental science classroom this fall with a sense of optimism for future US policy!”
Check out more reactions from teachers and educators on X below:
We couldn’t be more proud of our former member and Teacher Governor @Tim_Walz.
From the classroom to the state Capitol, he’s impacted the lives of countless Minnesotans. We’re excited to help him impact the lives of Americans in the White House. #HarrisWalz2024pic.twitter.com/8fFVlswL3Y
Teachers are going to turn out in record numbers! I am so excited to get back to the environmental science classroom this fall with a sense of optimism for future US policy! pic.twitter.com/6SCXOg82Yg
LOVE love love the celebrations of (and by) social studies teachers going on rn. Love that Gov. Walz brings his life as a longtime public school teacher to this campaign.
— Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz (@laughschultz) August 6, 2024
This doesn’t usually happen after breaking political news, but teachers have been blowing up my phone this morning.
They definitely have that first day of school energy about Tim Walz.
Can you imagine if the other side tries any nonsense during a debate? He’ll whip out that teacher stare. This retired history teacher is THRILLED.
— Sparkles B.A.H.A., M.A.T. 🇺🇦 (@Read_Art_Garden) August 6, 2024
Governor Tim Walz taught for over 20 years. All my fellow teachers out there know that you don’t mess with teachers. Watch out GOP! pic.twitter.com/9Zy5ToQPaS
In my opinion, this country would be in a much better place if we had had more social studies teachers running things. #walz
— Dr.MacLeodCartoons FB.COM/MACLEODCARTOONS (@MacLtoons) August 6, 2024
This might be the most excited I’ve been about a ticket since I began voting in 1988, but it’s because there’s a teacher on the ticket. A TEACHER! Someone who knows first hand what teachers go thru. Maybe we can get serious work done on education!
Nota de la editora: Este reportaje sobre las escuelas de Russellville fue producido por palabra, una iniciativa de la Asociación Nacional de Periodistas Hispanos, The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin fines de lucro que se enfoca en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, y AL.com.
RUSSELLVILLE, Alabama — Lindsey Johnson y Yesenia de la Rosa estaban usando estrategias diferentes para impartir la misma lección de inglés sobre letras mudas, sentadas en extremos opuestos de ese salón de clases de primer grado en la Escuela Primaria West. En esa tarde de marzo, Johnson, la maestra del aula, estaba leyendo un cuento con niños de 6 y 7 años que dominaban el inglés. Los estudiantes de la asistente bilingüe, De la Rosa, aún estaban aprendiendo el idioma, así que, aunque les estaba leyendo el mismo cuento, iba más lento, traduciendo palabras, actuando emociones y mostrándoles fotos en su iPhone.
Valentina, de 6 años, que llevaba puesta una camiseta negra con un logo de Nike en dorado y mallas, había llegado hacía menos de dos semanas desde Guatemala. Sentada en el suelo, cerca de la silla de De la Rosa, su mejilla casi tocaba la pierna de su maestra. De la Rosa solía trabajar con ella de forma individual, ya que la niña no sabía letras ni números, ni en español ni en inglés. Cuando Valentina fue al kínder en su país natal, lo único que hacía era colorear. “Así que cuando llegó aquí, eso es lo que pensaba que iba a hacer. Solo dibujar”, dijo De la Rosa. “Pero aquí es distinto”.
El distrito escolar de la ciudad de Russellville creó el puesto de De la Rosa a principios de 2021, como parte de un esfuerzo más amplio por ayudar a educar a su creciente población de alumnos que hablan inglés como segundo idioma. Muchos de los estudiantes de inglés, como se les llama, tienen padres provenientes de México o Guatemala que trabajan en una planta avícola cercana y en empleos locales en la industria y la construcción. Hoy, el 60% de los niños del distrito son hispanos/latinos y aproximadamente un tercio son estudiantes de inglés.
Johnson dijo que, sin De la Rosa, no podría comunicarse con más de la mitad de sus alumnos, ni entender los desafíos a los que se enfrentan. Johnson sabía que Yeferson, un estudiante de inglés de Guatemala, era uno de los niños más inteligentes en la clase, ya que leía más de 100 palabras, muy por encima de la meta de 60. “Es una esponja. Lo absorbe todo”, dijo Johnson. Pero ella supo gracias a De la Rosa que Yeferson se estaba destacando a pesar de sus muchas responsabilidades en casa: su mamá trabajaba turnos nocturnos, por lo que Yeferson lavaba la ropa, fregaba los platos y cuidaba de sus hermanos menores. Dijo Johnson: “Tener un asistente bilingüe hace una gran diferencia”.
Russellville quizás no dé la impresión de ser una comunidad que va a invertir e innovar a favor de los estudiantes inmigrantes. Es una ciudad políticamente conservadora del noroeste de Alabama, con una población aproximada de 11.000 habitantes, y en la que un 72% de los votantes optó por Donald Trump en las últimas elecciones presidenciales.
Cuando la planta de procesamiento avícola abrió, en 1989, la población hispana de Russellville era aproximadamente el 0,5% del total de habitantes. En 2000, había aumentado al 13% y, en 2020, era casi del 40%. Al principio, al distrito escolar, como a muchos otros del país, se le hizo difícil dar cabida al creciente número de estudiantes de inglés, que abandonaban los estudios en altos porcentajes, estos eran empujados a clases de educación especial y después mostraban escasos progresos académicos. Sin embargo, sus logros importan: hoy en Estados Unidos, más de uno de cada 10 estudiantes es un estudiante de inglés como segundo idioma y, en una época en la que la matrícula en los centros públicos en general está disminuyendo, se encuentran entre los grupos de estudiantes que más rápido están creciendo del país.
A principios de 2015, cuando el entonces superintendente anunció su retiro, el distrito reclutó para el puesto a Heath Grimes, que en aquel momento era el superintendente del sistema escolar del cercano condado de Lawrence. Grimes, de 48 años, quien se autodenomina sureño conservador y hombre de fe de la Alabama rural, se propuso abordar la reforma de la enseñanza para los estudiantes de inglés por completo, estableciendo actividades extracurriculares culturalmente relevantes y conectando con la comunidad hispana. Se sintió el impacto de dichos esfuerzos: la porción de estudiantes hispanos que tomaron clases de nivel avanzado (AP, por sus siglas en inglés), así como cursos de doble matrícula en el colegio comunitario local, aumentó. También lo hizo la participación de los padres. Y Grimes lideró un esfuerzo para convencer a los legisladores de que cambiaran la fórmula de financiación del estado de Alabama para los estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma, multiplicando por más de ocho la asignación estatal, hasta llegar a los $18,5 millones. El distrito y Grimes recibieron el reconocimiento estatal y nacional por su labor con los estudiantes de inglés.
Heath Grimes lideró el distrito escolar de la ciudad de Russellville, en Alabama, de 2015 a 2024. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
“Cualquier distrito con una población significativa de estudiantes de inglés ha acudido a Heath (Grimes) porque él se adelantó a los acontecimientos ”, dijo Ryan Hollingsworth, director ejecutivo de los Superintendentes Escolares de Alabama, que representa a los 150 distritos escolares del estado. “Es simplemente increíble ver lo que ha podido lograr en un distrito pequeño sin muchos recursos”.
Pero a medida que la figura de Grimes ascendía a nivel estatal, según los educadores y residentes locales, su relación con los dirigentes de la ciudad comenzó a desmoronarse. Luego, a mediados de mayo de 2023, un miembro de la junta escolar le informó a Grimes que su contrato, que terminaba en junio de 2024, no sería renovado. Grimes aceptó retirarse cuando terminara su contrato al año siguiente, a cambio de un aumento en el salario de su último año. A partir de noviembre, intenté hablar con miembros de la junta escolar, con el alcalde y con miembros del ayuntamiento acerca del distrito escolar y de Grimes, y en un principio no respondieron a mis reiteradas solicitudes de entrevistas. (Cuando me presenté ante al alcalde, David Grissom, sobre la calle en Russellville, me dijo “sin comentarios” y se marchó). Pero a lo largo de los meses, sin embargo, pude hablar con más de 60 funcionarios estatales, administradores locales, docentes, exmiembros de la junta escolar, líderes comunitarios y residentes, incluyendo personas que conocí en negocios y en la calle, en Russellville. Dichas entrevistas indican que la decisión de forzar a Grimes a dejar el cargo como superintendente surgió de una maraña de políticas de pueblo pequeño, una antipatía profundamente arraigada hacia los inmigrantes y una añoranza de la ciudad que Russellville solía ser.
“Heath Grimes puso a los estudiantes primero. Y esto al final pudo haberlo perjudicado”, dijo Jason Barnett, superintendente del Consejo de Educación de la ciudad de Guntersville, en el norte de Alabama, y uno de las docenas de líderes de distrito en el estado que trabajaron de cerca con Grimes. Aproximadamente, 18 educadores y líderes comunitarios en Russellville, muchos de ellos con conocimiento de los acontecimientos, me dijeron que el apoyo de Grimes a la creciente población de estudiantes que aprenden inglés fue clave para que perdiera el apoyo entre los principales dirigentes de la ciudad. Muchos de los líderes pidieron no ser citados por temor a represalias o a tensar las relaciones en esta pequeña comunidad. Un administrador escolar, que no quiso ser identificado por miedo a perder su empleo, dijo de Grimes: “Muchas personas dijeron que el aumento en la población indocumentada se debía a que él hizo de las escuelas de Russellville (y por ende la ciudad) un lugar acogedor en el que los inmigrantes querían vivir. A la gente no le gustó eso”.
A principios de julio volví a buscar a Grissom; a Daniel McDowell, al abogado de la junta escolar, y a Greg Trapp, quien fue hasta hace poco el presidente de esa misma junta. Les compartí mis hallazgos tras meses de reportajes, junto con una lista detallada de preguntas para ellos. McDowell y Grissom respondieron con declaraciones por escrito en las que afirmaron que los estudiantes de habla hispana habían prosperado en el distrito mucho antes de que llegara el superintendente Grimes, y negaron que su dedicación a los estudiantes de inglés hubiera propiciado su partida. “Los inmigrantes de los países latinoamericanos han venido mudándose a Russellville durante los últimos 25 años y siempre han sido bienvenidos en la ciudad y al cuerpo estudiantil”, escribió Grissom. “Mirando hacia atrás, nuestra escuela preparatoria ha coronado a una reina latina de baile de bienvenida, votada por el cuerpo estudiantil, y ha reconocido al primer estudiante latino graduado con las mejores calificaciones. Esos eventos ocurrieron mucho antes de que el Dr. Grimes llegara a Russellville”.
Credit: Illustration by Pepa Ilustradora for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Inmigrantes no bienvenidos
Antes de que Grimes llegara a Russellville, los legisladores estatales aprobaron, en 2011, la ley HB 56, considerada ampliamente como la ley antiinmigrante más severa del país. Dicha ley daba a la policía la autoridad para detener a las personas que creían que no tenían documentos legales para vivir en Estados Unidos, y tipificaba como delito que las empresas contrataran a estas personas a sabiendas y que los propietarios alquilaran a quienes carecían de documentación. Además, las universidades públicas no podían admitir estudiantes sin documentos de inmigración y, aunque, según la ley federal, las escuelas K-12 están obligadas a acoger a los estudiantes sin importar su estatus de ciudadanía, la legislación de Alabama también exigía que los distritos escolares recopilaran información sobre el estatus de ciudadanía de sus estudiantes. Aunque partes de la ley fueron posteriormente anuladas por un tribunal federal, el mensaje era claro: los inmigrantes no eran bienvenidos.
Por todo eso, cuando Greg Batchelor, entonces presidente de la junta escolar de la ciudad de Russellville, buscaba un nuevo superintendente escolar, en el 2015, sabía que las cosas se volverían controversiales. La población hispana de la ciudad era del 22% y seguía creciendo. Algunos antiguos residentes “anglo”, como se autodenominaban los miembros de la población de raza blanca, se referían despectivamente al centro de la ciudad como “Pequeño México”, y se quejaban de oír hablar español y de ver las casas coloridas que asociaban con la comunidad hispana.
La población hispana de Russellville ha pasado de representar casi el cero, a fines de la década de 1980, a constituir casi un 40%, en 2020. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Batchelor y otro exmiembro de la junta escolar, Bret Gist, recordaron haber oído a antiguos residentes decir que estaban inscribiendo a sus hijos en escuelas privadas o marchándose de Russellville porque no querían que sus hijos fueran “la minoría”. A otros les preocupaba que los estudiantes de inglés hicieran bajar las calificaciones de los exámenes y dañaran la reputación de su distrito escolar. En aquel entonces, apenas cinco distritos del estado tenían una población de estudiantes de inglés superior al 10%; la de Russellville era la segunda más alta, con un 16%.
Batchelor, que también es presidente de la junta directiva de CB&S, uno de los bancos comunitarios más grandes de Alabama, dijo que sabía que la futura economía de la ciudad dependía del próximo líder escolar: “Si nuestra comunidad sobrevive y le va bien, solo podrá ser tan buena como eduquemos a nuestros niños”. También expresó que creía que los estudiantes hispanos de la ciudad merecían las mismas oportunidades que sus compañeros de clase, y que estaba profundamente influenciado por su padre, quien fue miembro de la junta escolar de Russellville durante 20 años. “Mi papá solía decir que todos se ponen los pantalones de la misma manera, una pierna a la vez”, recordó Batchelor.
En ese momento, Grimes, un exmaestro de educación especial y entrenador de fútbol americano, se encontraba en su sexto año como superintendente del condado de Lawrence. En su primer mandato de cuatro años, había cerrado tres escuelas secundarias debido a una caída de la matrícula y a un déficit presupuestario que heredó. “Es muy inusual en Alabama que un superintendente cierre escuelas en un condado y luego sea reelecto, y él fue reelecto”, dijo Batchelor. “Sentí como que él no temía tomar decisiones difíciles”. Gist, el exmiembro de la junta escolar, recuerda la emoción que sintieron los integrantes de la junta tras la entrevista con Grimes. “Yo estaba listo para que llegara y tuviera un gran impacto”, dijo Gist.
El 11 de mayo de 2015, Grimes fue votado por unanimidad como el nuevo superintendente escolar de Russellville.
Credit: Illustration by Pepa Ilustradora for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Nuevas estrategias
Kristie Ezzell, quien se jubiló de las escuelas de Russellville en 2022 después de 31 años en los que trabajó bajo cuatro superintendentes, presenció la transformación de primera mano. Como maestra de segundo grado en la década de 1990, enseñó a una de las primeras estudiantes de inglés del distrito. Ezzell recordó a una niña pequeña que intentaba una y otra vez comunicarse, pero a quien Ezzell no podía entender. “Comenzó a llorar y luego comencé a llorar yo, y las dos nos quedamos paradas ahí y nos abrazamos y lloramos”, recordó Ezzell. “La barrera idiomática entre nosotras era simplemente desgarradora”.
El crecimiento rápido de la población de estudiantes de inglés había tomado por sorpresa a los educadores de Russellville. En todo el distrito, había apenas un maestro titulado para enseñar inglés como segundo idioma, ningún intérprete y muy poco desarrollo profesional. “Nos llegaban estudiantes que no hablan una pizca de inglés, sus padres no hablan una pizca de inglés, y se espera que nosotros los eduquemos”, me dijo una maestra, quien pidió no ser identificada para evitar consecuencias. “Y yo ni siquiera sabía si están pidiendo ir al baño o si tienen hambre”. La situación también era injusta para los estudiantes angloparlantes, que perdían tiempo de aprendizaje porque sus maestros tenían la mente en otras cosas, dijo . “Simplemente era un desorden en todos los sentidos”.
Grimes, que no habla español y tenía poca experiencia con estudiantes de inglés en sus roles anteriores, dijo que lo primero que escuchó fue: “¿Cómo vas a solucionar esto?”. “Creo que pensaban que yo iba a hacer, de alguna manera, que la población de estudiantes de inglés desapareciera”, me dijo. “Y mi actitud fue: ‘No, no vamos a hacer eso’”. En lugar de ello, les pidió a los educadores: “Aceptar, Acoger, Celebrar”. “Primero, tienen que aceptar que su distrito está cambiando. Y, cuando abracemos ese cambio, vamos a ver algunos cambios muy positivos que vamos a poder celebrar”, recuerda que les dijo. “Y todo eso se ha hecho realidad”.
Para entonces, Ezzell era directora de la Escuela Primaria de Russellville. Recordó la primera reunión que tuvo Grimes con maestros, en la que presentó las calificaciones de los exámenes de los estudiantes, desglosados por escuelas. “Me hundí en mi asiento y vinieron lágrimas a mis ojos porque nuestros resultados no eran muy buenos”, me dijo.
Su mensaje, según Ezzell, fue simple: “No más excusas. Nuestros maestros ya no van a decir: ‘Bueno, son estudiantes de inglés’. Eso no está bien. (Estos estudiantes) van a crecer igual que todos los demás”. Mientras exponía sus expectativas, los maestros comenzaron a mirar nerviosos a su alrededor, recordó. Algunos lloraron y uno tuvo que dejar el salón. A algunos les preocupaba que Grimes estuviera criticando sus competencias; otros lo desestimaron por forastero, dijo Ezzell. Pero, ella recordó, una cosa estaba clara: “Sabíamos que hablaba en serio”, dijo. “Era muy empático con todo lo que estábamos enfrentando, pero afirmó: ‘Esto no puede continuar’”.
Cuando comenzaron a llegar más estudiantes hispanos a las escuelas de Russellville, en la década de 1990, el distrito tenía pocos recursos para atenderlos. Con el superintendente Heath Grimes, el distrito invirtió en esos alumnos. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Cuando Ezzell se fue a casa esa noche, no podía dejar de pensar en la reunión. Era consciente de lo duro que trabajaban sus maestros. “Nunca dejaron de enseñar”, dijo. Pero las pésimas estadísticas le demostraron que no se estaban enfocando en las cosas indicadas. Ezzell me dijo que, desde ese momento, ha comenzado una misión para encontrar mejores formas de educar a sus estudiantes: “Dediqué mi vida a ello”.
Grimes dijo que la actitud predominante era que los estudiantes de inglés eran una carga, una percepción similar a la que se tenía de los estudiantes de educación especial a los que él una vez enseñó. Entonces trajo a una profesora y asesora educativa, Tery Medina, que explicó que los niños inmigrantes eran estudiantes del distrito bajo la ley federal. Siendo ella misma refugiada cubana, dirigió debates con los docentes sobre las similitudes entre la cultura hispana y la sureña. “Aman a la familia. Son trabajadores y muchos tienen fe en Cristo. Eran todas esas cosas con las que todos se podían identificar”, recordó Grimes. Por su parte, Medina dijo que estaba impresionada con la apertura que Russellville tuvo con estos estudiantes. Durante el mandato de Grimes, “Russellville fue una pequeña joya”, dijo, “allí no se veía a los estudiantes de inglés como una carga”.
El distrito también invirtió en el desarrollo profesional de los maestros, asegurándose de que tuviera lugar durante las horas de trabajo, dijo Ezzell. Expertos, libros, videos, planes de lecciones detallados… para los maestros, en ese momento, era como una maraña de aprendizaje continuo. Lentamente, los educadores comenzaron a compartir estrategias y a impartir clases juntos. “¿Conoces el dicho, ‘Cuando sabes más, haces mejor?’”, me preguntó Ezzell. “Eso fue lo que sucedió”. Los maestros experimentaron, hicieron sus lecciones más interactivas y se guiaron por las más recientes investigaciones. Algunos maestros incluso crearon lo que se convirtió en una premiada clase de ciencia en tres idiomas: inglés, español y q’anjob’al, un dialecto guatemalteco. “Les dedicábamos tiempo para que fueran a aprender las mejores prácticas. Y eso benefició a todos los estudiantes, no solamente a los estudiantes de inglés”, dijo Ezzell.
No todos en el distrito aceptaron el cambio. Grimes recordó haberse reunido con una maestra que estaba a cargo de una clase en la que el 30% de los estudiantes estaba reprobando. Ella no lo veía como un problema, dijo Grimes. “(Su actitud) era como: ‘Vengo haciendo esto durante 20 años y no vas a decirme lo contrario’”. Según Grimes, dicha maestra se jubiló poco después; algunos otros maestros renunciaron.
Pero los maestros que se quedaron dijeron que podían ver que los estudiantes empezaban a responder a los nuevos enfoques. Los estudiantes de inglés comenzaban a participar más en clase; ya no se sentaban al fondo del salón. Muchos más de ellos comenzaron a tomar clases AP, de nivel avanzado, así como también clases de doble inscripción en el Colegio Comunitario Northwest College. “Los motivamos. Y cuando motivas con amor, vas a tener éxito”, dijo Ezzell.
El distrito comenzó a acumular galardones. Varias de sus escuelas recibieron el codiciado Blue Ribbon School of Excellence (un premio a la excelencia). Desde 2021, la escuela secundaria Russellville ha sido nombrada una de las mejores 25 escuelas en Alabama por U.S. News & World Report. En 2022, fue el único distrito de Alabama en el que predominan las minorías que recibió una nota “A” en el boletín de calificaciones del estado; en 2023, Russellville fue uno de los dos únicos en el estado nombrado como “Spotlight District” (Distrito destacado) en lectura y alfabetización, y su escuela secundaria fue reconocida como Escuela de Excelencia A+ College Ready, designación otorgada por una organización sin fines de lucro contratada por el departamento de educación estatal para maximizar la preparación para la universidad.
El núcleo de las estrategias de Grimes, además del fomento del conocimiento cultural y del desarrollo profesional, eran los educadores bilingües. En un principio, Grimes colocó intérpretes en cada escuela para ayudar con las traducciones cotidianas, pero sabía que los maestros necesitaban aún más ayuda en los salones de clases. Sin embargo, una escasez nacional de educadores bilingües exigía creatividad. Grimes decidió enfocarse en contratar asistentes bilingües, que ganaban la mitad del sueldo de un maestro. Se comunicó con el reverendo Vincent Bresowar, de la Iglesia Católica del Buen Pastor de Russellville, para que lo ayudara a correr la voz sobre los puestos que se ofrecían.
El tamaño de la congregación de Bresowar había crecido a medida que habían ido llegando familias inmigrantes a Russellville; su iglesia había construido recientemente un nuevo edificio de $4,5 millones para adaptarse a ese aumento.
Sus feligreses, mientras tanto, trabajaban largas e irregulares jornadas, tenían problemas económicos y a menudo cargaban con traumas. “El sufrimiento es muy intenso y puede ser muy difícil”, me dijo Bresowar. Además, sabía cómo la barrera idiomática podía exacerbarlos malos entendidos. El reverendo dijo que su propia comprensión y aprecio por la comunidad hispana cambió una vez que aprendió a hablar español y compartió tiempo con ellos. “Creo que mucha gente tiene miedo porque no puede comunicarse y eso hace más difícil acortar la brecha”, dijo Bresowar.
Él puso a Grimes en contacto con feligreses y, en 2021, usando fondos destinados a la pandemia, Grimes contrató a una docena de asistentes bilingües de esa comunidad. Al mismo tiempo, puso a esos asistentes en contacto con un programa de aprendizaje, gestionado por la organización sin fines de lucro Reach University, para que ellos pudieran simultáneamente formarse como docentes. “Fue un punto de inflexión”, dijo Grimes sobre esa ayuda adicional en las escuelas.
Elizabeth Alonzo fue una de esas asistentes bilingües. Se incorporó al plantel de la Escuela Primaria West, de Russellville, (la escuela de la maestra Johnson y de la asistente bilingüe De la Rosa), en 2021, donde trabajaba mayormente con estudiantes de segundo grado en pequeños grupos y también servía de intérprete durante actividades escolares y para comunicarse con los padres. Mientras caminaba por un pasillo en una reciente jornada escolar, niñas hispanas de otras clases dejaron sus filas y corrieron a darle un abrazo rápido. “Al principio era como: “Oh, ¿tú hablas español? Sus rostros se iluminan, ¿sabes?”, dijo Alonzo, quien nació en Alabama y fue criada allí por padres inmigrantes. En el pasado mes de diciembre de 2023, completó los cursos para convertirse en maestra y espera quedarse en West.
Si lo consigue, será la sexta maestra hispana del distrito, mientras que, cuando llegó Grimes, había solo una. El nivel de recursos para los estudiantes de inglés es muy distinto del que había cuando ella iba a la escuela. Cuando Alonzo estaba en el kinder de una escuela del condado, su prima fue retirada de su clase de primer grado para hacer de intérprete para ella, recordó. “Y, luego, cuando yo estaba en primer grado, me sacaban de clase para ayudar a mi hermano menor”. Alonzo asistió a las escuelas de Russellville de 2008 a 2013.
Otro maestro de Russellville, Edmund Preciado Martínez, también recordó haberse sentido aislado cuando era estudiante en Alabama a fines de la década de 1990. A veces, confundía palabras en español y en inglés, dijo, por lo que a menudo se sentía demasiado avergonzado como para hablar en clase. “Eso me llevó a educación especial porque pensaban que algo andaba mal conmigo”, recordó.
Era maestro en un distrito cercano cuando se enteró de los cambios que Grimes estaba implementando en Russellville y decidió solicitar un empleo. Hace seis años, fue contratado para trabajar con estudiantes de inglés en la escuela secundaria de Russellville.
Cada año, dijo Preciado Martínez, los docentes eligen un lema alrededor del cual unirse, como #whateverittakes (lo que sea necesario) or #allin (completamente comprometidos). La camaradería allí es muy diferente a las historias que ha escuchado de sus colegas en otras partes del estado, quienes hablan de compañeros que se quejan de los estudiantes de inglés e incluso se refieren a ellos de manera despectiva y con insultos.
“Siempre que necesitamos algo, simplemente lo pedimos y ellos hacen su mayor esfuerzo por conseguírnoslo”, dijo Martínez refiriéndose a los líderes de su distrito. “E incluso, si no pueden, buscan alternativas que podemos utilizar”.
Credit: Illustration by Pepa Ilustradora for palabra/The Hechinger Report
“Hay espacio para todos nosotros”
Grimes también se enfocó en involucrar a los padres hispanos en la educación de sus hijos. Se dio cuenta de que muchos de ellos se sentían demasiado intimidados o avergonzados para hablar con los educadores; en sus países natales, a veces se consideraba una falta de respeto cuestionar a un docente o incluso preguntarle sobre el progreso de su hijo. Así que se dedicó a entablar relaciones, frecuentando comercios hispanos, reuniéndose con líderes comunitarios y traduciendo al español todos los anuncios en la página web y Facebook del distrito escolar.
Dichos esfuerzos cambiaron la experiencia escolar de la madre Analine Mederos. Ella había abandonado la escuela en México en séptimo grado y deseaba con desesperación que sus hijos recibieran una buena educación. Pero, dijo Mederos, cuando su hija mayor se inscribió en las escuelas del distrito de Russellville, en 2006, ella no estaba involucrada en su educación en absoluto. “No interactuaba con los maestros porque no hablaba mucho inglés. La mayor parte del tiempo me daba miedo hablar”, me contó. Sentía que los empleados de la escuela la miraban por encima del hombro por la barrera idiomática, y no le veía sentido a hablar. “Si tienes preguntas, ¿quién te va a ayudar?”, dijo. “Así que, dijeran lo que dijeran, yo decía: ‘Bueno, está bien’”.
Muchos de los estudiantes hispanos de Russellville hicieron lobby por un programa de fútbol, que Grimes puso en marcha en 2017. No tenía los fondos para una nueva cancha de fútbol, así que reemplazó el césped del campo de fútbol americano. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Pero con su segundo hijo, que ahora está en el décimo grado, ha tenido una experiencia completamente distinta. “Grimes ha hecho un gran… no sé ni cómo decirlo… un gran impacto. Especialmente con la comunidad hispana”, me dijo. Y agregó que a su hija le encanta la escuela, y que a su hijo, que está en la enseñanza media, no ve la hora de hacer la prueba para el equipo de fútbol. Cuando ve a Grimes en la comunidad, dice que se siente lo suficientemente cómoda como para hablarle de sus hijos: “Te va a escuchar. No va a fingir que te está escuchando. No; realmente escucha”.
Ahora, a Mederos se le hace más fácil seguir las reuniones escolares. Hace apenas unos años, en la escuela primaria, había apenas un intérprete para 600 niños, por lo que la escuela solamente podía programar reuniones con los padres cuando un niño estaba en problemas o reprobaba. Ahora, con seis asistentes bilingües, el personal de la escuela puede tener reuniones individuales con cada familia al menos una vez al año, y también ofrecen dos días completos de actividades para padres en inglés y en español. Los padres saben que habrá un intérprete presente y eso manda un mensaje claro. “Nuestros padres saben que los estamos acogiendo y que los valoramos”, me dijo la directora Alicia Stanford.
El evento Mes de la Herencia Hispana que Grimes inició en la escuela secundaria Russellville se ha convertido en una gran celebración para todo el distrito, en la que los estudiantes aprenden sobre distintas culturas y tradiciones, hacen presentaciones de baile, leen a autores célebres e investigan sobre figuras históricas. Pero quizás sea el programa de fútbol, que Grimes puso en marcha, el que ha obtenido la mayor respuesta. Antes de la llegada de Grimes, los estudiantes habían hecho lobby por el programa, sin éxito, pero él comprendió que era una parte querida e importante de la cultura latinoamericana. “Querían algo que fuera suyo”, dijo Grimes.
Bajo Heath Grimes, la escuela secundaria Russellville inició una celebración del Mes de la Herencia Hispana que se ha convertido en una tradición para todo el distrito. Credit: Rebecca Griesbach / AL.com
Grimes no tenía fondos para una nueva cancha de fútbol, por lo que mandó a reemplazar el césped del campo de fútbol americano, y los estudiantes comenzaron a jugar allí en 2017. En 2021, cuando el equipo de fútbol de Russellville, los Golden Tigers, jugó en las semifinales estatales, tanto familias hispanas como no hispanas acudieron en masa. “Todos estaban animando, ‘Sí, se puede’, ‘Yes, we can‘”, recordó Grimes cuando nos reunimos en su oficina en marzo. El logo de la escuela es una antorcha como la de la Estatua de la Libertad, y hay una tradición escolar de levantar los puños cerrados para mostrar unidad y orgullo. “Toda la comunidad latina se pone de pie con sus antorchas en alto ―añadió―, y están cantando: ‘Russ-ell-ville, Russ-ell-ville’. Eso fue muy, muy poderoso”.
La pared de la oficina de Grimes estaba adornada con trofeos deportivos de eventos como este, junto con credenciales académicas enmarcadas, incluido su título de doctorado. Fue el primer miembro de su familia en ir a la universidad. También había fotos familiares y de antiguos alumnos, junto con una Biblia desgastada en su escritorio.
Batchelor, el expresidente de la junta escolar, dijo que, aunque en algunas ocasiones el proceso fue difícil, gracias a los esfuerzos sostenidos de Grimes y a su ejemplo, familias de todos los orígenes poco a poco vieron que mejorar los resultados de los estudiantes de inglés significaba que todo el sistema escolar mejorara. “Creo que la comunidad ha aceptado que hay espacio para todos nosotros”, dijo Batchelor.
No todas las ideas de Grimes funcionaron. Al principio, separó a los estudiantes de inglés del resto de los alumnos durante las clases curriculares, pero luego abandonó la idea cuando los maestros le dijeron que no estaba funcionando. Ahora, las escuelas combinan la enseñanza a los alumnos de inglés en grupos pequeños, por un lado, y por otro, con lecciones junto a toda la clase. Luego de que un acto de “vuelta a clases” demorara más de lo previsto, porque Grimes pidió que cada frase fuera traducida, él decidió realizar reuniones escolares simultáneas donde los padres podían elegir entre escuchar en inglés o en español.
Y no ha sido fácil sostener todo lo conseguido. Entre 2019 (cuando los asistentes de educación bilingües fueron contratados) y 2021, los estudiantes de inglés de algunos grados registraron grandes avances en los exámenes para medir su nivel de dominio del idioma inglés. Por ejemplo, los niveles de desempeño de los estudiantes de segundo grado pasaron del 46% al 84% y, los estudiantes de tercer grado, del 44% al 71%. Pero el progreso desde entonces no ha sido consistente; los porcentajes de estudiantes que dominan el idioma en algunos grados cayeron en 2023 por debajo de las cifras de 2019. Los administradores dicen que se debe a que la cantidad de estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma sigue aumentando mientras que el número de educadores no, lo que significa que los niños reciben menos atención individualizada.
Bajo Heath Grimes, la escuela secundaria Russellville inició una celebración del Mes de la Herencia Hispana que se ha convertido en una tradición para todo el distrito. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Pero la buena disposición que Grimes género al abrazar a las familias hispanas dio sus frutos de maneras inesperadas. En 2018, el distrito necesitaba reparar los techos de los edificios escolares pero no tenía los fondos para completarlos, dijo Grimes. Alguien de la comunidad hispana llamó a Grimes, ofreciendo hacer el trabajo gratis, dijo. “Ofrecieron voluntariamente su tiempo, sus esfuerzos, su energía y sus materiales, y completaron esos edificios”, él me dijo.
Hoy en día, los comercios hispanos dominan el centro de la ciudad, un área de unas pocas manzanas que hasta hace poco estaba llena de edificios deteriorados y vacíos. Hay tres panaderías mexicanas, dos tiendas de comestibles atinas, tres barberías, salones de manicura y una carnicería. Los dueños de los comercios se esfuerzan por apoyar al sistema escolar, dijo Yaneli Bahena, quien hace cuatro años se graduó en el distrito escolar de Russellville y ahora es propietaria de un negocio llamado The Ville Nutrition.
Un restaurante mexicano se encargó del catering para un evento de “vuelta a clases” de 200 personas, las panaderías suelen donar pan y dulces, y algunas peluquerías ofrecen cortes de pelo gratuitos antes del comienzo del año escolar. El campo de fútbol está rodeado de carteles de negocios hispanos locales que han patrocinado al equipo. La propia Bahena patrocina comidas para eventos escolares, y dona mochilas y material escolar. “La escuela me dio un sentimiento de esperanza”, dijo. “Tuve muy buenos maestros. Todos se preocupaban por mi”. En la escuela secundaria, notó que, a diferencia de años anteriores, se incluía a los estudiantes en las excursiones y se los animaba a cursar materias optativas. Bahena dijo que algunos de sus compañeros de clase se quedaron en la escuela en lugar de abandonar los estudios para irse a trabajar gracias al “empuje de ayuda” de los educadores. Ella también le dio crédito a Grimes: “Todo lo que han puesto para estos niños no sería posible sin el superintendente”.
Abogando a nivel estatal
En 2019, ansioso por encontrar socios y apoyo para su labor con los estudiantes de inglés, Grimes comenzó a hablar con otros líderes del distrito que enfrentaban desafíos parecidos, y a intercambiar sobre cómo sería abogar por esos estudiantes en todo el estado. A nivel nacional, aproximadamente cinco millones de niños son estudiantes de inglés y la mayoría de ellos hablan español en casa. Pero, aunque la mayoría son ciudadanos estadounidenses, rara vez reciben el apoyo que necesitan, en parte porque su educación ha sido politizada, según Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, una exsuperintendente y secretaria auxiliar de educación K-12 de Estados Unidos en la administración de Barack Obama. “La gente ve el mundo (en términos de) una cantidad de recursos limitada. Entonces siente que, ‘si les estás dando tal cantidad a ellos, entonces me la estás quitando a mi’”, dijo.
En parte como consecuencia de dicha actitud, dicen los expertos, las calificaciones de lectura y matemática de estudiantes de aprendizaje de inglés a nivel nacional se encuentran entre las más bajas de todos los subgrupos de estudiantes, sus índices de graduación de la escuela secundaria van a la zaga y tienen menos probabilidades de ir a la universidad. “Necesitamos a estos niños, y los necesitamos que se eduquen”, dijo Patricia Gándara, codirectora del Proyecto de Derechos Civiles en la UCLA y experta en estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma. “Representan una parte muy grande del futuro de este país”.
Al año siguiente, en 2020, Grimes fundó una coalición de superintendentes llamada Alabama Leaders Advocating for English Learners (Líderes de Alabama abogando por los estudiantes de inglés), bajo el paraguas de una operación estatal, el Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools (Consejo de líderes de escuelas de Alabama). “Su pasión era evidente y no se iba a detener”, dijo Hollingsworth, de Superintendentes Escolares de Alabama. “Si sigues tocando la puerta, tocando la puerta, eventualmente alguien va a abrir la puerta. Y eso fue más o menos lo que pasó”.
La coalición de superintendentes encabezada por Grimes logró presionar a la legislatura para obtener más fondos para los estudiantes de inglés, hasta $150 por estudiante, frente a los $50 a $75 de 2015. Los distritos con una población de estudiantes de inglés superior al 10% reciben $300 por estudiante. Para Russellville, eso significó un aumento cuadruplicado de los fondos dedicados a los estudiantes de inglés, llegando a $400.000, en un momento en el que los fondos de la ciudad disminuyeron. Grimes recibió un premio estatal por sus “excepcionales aportes y defensa incansable de la financiación para los estudiantes de inglés en las escuelas de Alabama”. Gracias, en parte, a sus esfuerzos, el estado ahora tiene apoyo educativo para los distritos, 12 instructores y un director estatal de aprendizaje de inglés. Grimes también abogó por que las calificaciones de los estudiantes de inglés en los exámenes solo se tuvieran en cuenta en el boletín estatal de notas después de que hubieran estado matriculados por cinco años (aproximadamente lo que tardan los estudiantes en aprender un nuevo idioma). Esa ley, que tiene sus críticos, entró en vigor el año pasado.
Barnett, del Consejo de Educación de la ciudad de Guntersville, dijo que los esfuerzos de Grimes por los estudiantes de inglés ayudaron a persuadir a otros líderes de distrito de que ellos también podían hacer ese trabajo. “Russellville es un gran lugar, pero no hay nada especial allí que no pueda suceder en cualquier otro lugar”, dijo. “No hay nada en el agua. Definitivamente se puede replicar”.
En el distrito escolar de la ciudad de Russellville, el 60% de los niños son hispanos/latinos y aproximadamente un tercio son estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma. Los porcentajes son aun mayores en algunas clases de la Escuela Primaria West del distrito. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Durante siete años, Grimes y la junta escolar de Russellville trabajaron bien juntos, dijeron tanto él como exmiembros de la junta. Pero el disgusto de otros líderes de la ciudad surgió pronto, me dijeron varias personas. Grimes había comenzado a chocar por cuestiones de financiamiento con el alcalde de la ciudad, David Grissom, quien fue electo por primera vez en 2012. Un residente de Russellville cercando al funcionamiento del gobierno de la ciudad ―que pidió no ser identificado por temor a represalias― dijo que Grimes había hecho enojar a Grissom y a algunos miembros del ayuntamiento desde el principio, cuando señaló públicamente que su presupuesto para las escuelas era de $200.000 menos que el de su predecesor. (McDowell, escribió un correo electrónico en el que me decía que antes de ocupar el puesto se le informó a Grimes sobre el recorte y que había estado de acuerdo con el mismo). Los miembros del ayuntamiento “no tomaron bien que se les pusiera contra la pared o que se les hiciera quedar mal. Así que, desde ese momento, Grimes estuvo marcado”, me dijo el residente. Grimes también enfureció a Grissom cuando se negó a apoyar públicamente al candidato preferido del alcalde para un puesto en el ayuntamiento, en 2020, prefiriendo mantenerse neutral, me dijeron varias personas.
Al responderme, Grissom no hizo comentarios sobre esos detalles específicos, pero escribió que “había entrevistado y había sido entrevistado por varias cientos de personas de todas las razas y etnias” sobre el desempeño de Grimes y que algunas de las personas con las que habló estaban insatisfechas con el superintendente. Planteó preguntas sobre si Grimes había estado en su oficina a diario, si trataba a los empleados de manera diferente y si gastaba demasiados fondos del distrito en conferencias. Grimes dijo que a veces viajaba por todo el estado por su trabajo, que las conferencias eran para el desarrollo profesional y (estaban) aprobadas por la junta, y que, como líder, a veces tenía que tomar decisiones que desagradaban a la gente, porque estaba sopesando diferentes perspectivas y necesidades. Dijo que estaba asombrado por las declaraciones del alcalde, porque ni el alcalde ni nadie más le había mencionado tales preocupaciones anteriormente. Gist y Batchelor, antiguos miembros de la junta escolar, dijeron que nunca habían escuchado semejantes quejas de nadie en los casi ocho años que llevaban trabajando con Grimes. “Ni una sola palabra”, dijo Gist. El expediente laboral de Grimes no contenía información alguna que indicara que había preocupaciones con el desempeño del superintendente. Ni el alcalde ni el abogado de la junta escolar ofrecieron aclaraciones sobre por qué, si existían tales quejas, no fueron comunicadas a Grimes.
Mientras tanto, a medida que Grimes seguía invirtiendo esfuerzos para ayudar a los estudiantes de inglés, sus números aumentaban todos los años, duplicándose durante su mandato, hasta alcanzar el 33% de los estudiantes.
Russellville es una ciudad políticamente conservadora del noroeste de Alabama, de unos 11.000 habitantes. Credit: Charity Rochelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
Después de aquella elección para miembros del ayuntamiento de 2020, en un esfuerzo ampliamente visto como destinado a destituir a Grimes como superintendente, Grissom e integrantes del ayuntamiento comenzaron a reemplazar a los cinco miembros de la designada junta escolar que había apoyado a Grimes. (En su correo electrónico, el alcalde Grissom escribió que los miembros del ayuntamiento tienen el derecho a reemplazar a los integrantes de la junta escolar y que lo habían hecho también previo al mandato de Grimes). En mayo de 2023, Greg Trapp, el miembro de la junta escolar, le informó al superintendente que no iban a renovar su contrato al expirar el año siguiente.
Gist, el exmiembro de la junta escolar, dijo que, aunque en un principio quedó sorprendido por la decisión del Ayuntamiento de reemplazarlo a él y a otros, tenía lógica dada la antipatía que tenía dicho organismo hacia Grimes. “Así es la política en un pueblo pequeño. Para que ellos pudieran controlar el sistema, tenían que deshacerse de los miembros de la junta escolar que estaban haciendo las cosas bien”, dijo. Y agregó: “Esa era la única manera en la que podían sacarlo”. Lo que les disgustó fue saber que la decisión no estaba motivada por lo que era mejor para los estudiantes. “Si hubieran querido reemplazarme por alguien mejor, eso está bien”, me dijo Gist. “Pero cuando lo hicieron por razones personales, eso me molestó”. (Intenté comunicarme con Trapp por lo menos tres veces, y también traté de contactar a otros miembros de la junta, y no respondieron a mis solicitudes de comentarios.) Batchelor, quien fue reemplazado poco después de que votó a favor de mantener a Grimes, también dijo que la decisión mayoritaria de la junta fue un error: “Creo que es el mejor superintendente en el estado de Alabama”.
En marzo de 2024, el distrito nombró a un nuevo superintendente, Tim Guinn, un exdirector de la Preparatoria de Russellville, quien también había sido candidato a superintendente cuando Grimes fue electo. Más recientemente, había trabajado como superintendente del distrito de Satsuma. Guinn no respondió a repetidas solicitudes de entrevista.
Programas se desmoronan
Algunos de los programas y las prácticas que Grimes implementó parecen estarse desmoronando. A partir de junio, la mayoría de los asistentes bilingües, cuyos salarios se pagan con dinero de la asistencia por la pandemia y expira en septiembre de 2024, no habían sido contratados de nuevo. Además, los contratos de algunos docentes bilingües no fueron renovados. La junta escolar no ha dicho si tiene previsto seguir adelante con las mejoras que Grimes había planificado para los estudiantes de inglés de secundaria y preparatoria. Una escuela chárter de inmersión en dos idiomas, por la que Grimes había abogado y la junta había aprobado, estaba programada para abrir en 2025. Sin embargo, el proyecto ha sido descartado. (McDowell no comentó en un correo electrónico sobre los planes del distrito para los estudiantes de inglés. En cuanto a los asistentes bilingües, escribió que algunos de ellos no habían sido recontratados de nuevo porque los subsidios federales habían expirado. Grimes dijo que tenía previsto pagar por sus salarios mediante una combinación de fondos de las reservas del distrito escolar y fondos resultantes de la jubilación de algunos docentes: “Tomas decisiones con base a tus prioridades”, comentó.
Grimes y la junta escolar habían acordado que él permanecería en su cargo hasta el final del año escolar de 2023-2024, mientras el distrito buscaba un reemplazo. Pero una semana después de mi visita a Russellville, McDowell acusó a Grimes de intimidar a la gente que hablara conmigo, según Grimes, y le dijo al superintendente que no podía pisar propiedad escolar o hablar con empleados del distrito fuera de su papel de padre, según Grimes. En ese momento, Grimes dejó las responsabilidades cotidianas de su cargo, pero seguirá en la comunidad hasta que su hija de 14 años termine la secundaria. Su esposa también sigue siendo maestra en el distrito. (En un correo electrónico y en una entrevista, McDowell dijo que nunca había acusado a Grimes de intimidar a nadie y que tampoco le prohibió al superintendente pisar terreno escolar.) Fue también después de mi visita que más de una docena de educadores con los que hablé en Russellville me dijeron que ya no se sentían cómodos siendo identificados, por temor a perder sus empleos. The Hechinger Report y palabra acordaron retrasar la publicación de este artículo hasta que Grimes recibiera su último sueldo el 30 de junio.
Heath Grimes led the Russellville City school district, in Alabama, from 2015 to 2024. Credit: Charity Rachelle for palabra/The Hechinger Report
En julio de 2024, Grimes empezó a trabajar a tiempo completo en Reach University, la organización sin fines de lucro que forma a asistentes bilingües para que se conviertan en docentes, como su director regional de asociaciones en Alabama, Misisipi y Tennessee.
Los últimos seis meses han pasado factura. Grimes ha dicho poco públicamente sobre su partida y le ha dicho a la mayoría de las personas de la comunidad que se está jubilando. Cuando estuvimos almorzando juntos en un restaurante local, El Patrón, otros comensales se acercaron una y otra vez para desearle lo mejor. Dos de ellos le dijeron en broma que se veía demasiado joven para jubilarse. Grimes se rió y les siguió la corriente pero, una vez que se fueron, sus hombros se hundieron y parpadeó para contener las lágrimas.
“He pasado mi carrera muy entregado, muy comprometido en hacer lo que era mejor para los niños”, me dijo en voz baja. “No sentía que yo mereciera acabar de esta manera”.
Afirmó que no se arrepiente de los cambios que hizo por los estudiantes de inglés de la ciudad. “Jesús amaba a la gente que los demás no amaban. Y ese fue parte de su mensaje: amas a tus enemigos, amas a tus vecinos, amas a los extranjeros y amas al pecador”, dijo. “Yo veo a Dios en esos niños”.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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A few months ago, my colleague Jill Barshay wrote about a survey that found that many high school math teachers cobble together curriculum from the internet and other sources.
Readers reacted, particularly teachers who were angry about how researchers characterized them as going “rogue” for pulling together their own resources.
After reading Jill’s article, I decided to dig a little deeper and speak to some of those teachers. I wanted to know why they would willingly spend hours of their time to create a curriculum when one was already provided by their district. I was also curious if this was more widespread than just math teachers,
What I found was that this is a very common practice. In my article, which published recently with our partners at Chalkbeat, teachers argued that off-the-shelf curriculum often doesn’t meet the needs of their students — because it doesn’t engage students in a meaningful way; it isn’t culturally relevant and inclusive; or it’s not designed to support students with disabilities or English language learners. For some subjects, like history, teachers say it’s hard to find comprehensive curricula that not only includes histories of marginalized communities but also includes a state’s local communities.
Is deviating too far from a scripted curriculum provided by a school district really so bad?
The researchers and curriculum experts I spoke with said that for the most part, teachers should use a high-quality curriculum that is grade-appropriate and aligned to a state’s standards. But, they also acknowledge that some modification of a curriculum is “healthy.” In some cases, a school district might actually expect teachers to create their own curriculum, using state standards — and those teachers say they like having the freedom and flexibility to do so.
What do you think about a do-it-yourself approach to curriculum resources? Does it potentially cause more harm than good?
Delving into the downward trend in math scores around the world: When the Program for International Student Assessment released its results from 2022, it showed that math scores had fallen steeply. But for many countries, including some of the largest and wealthiest in the world, the slide in mathematics scores has been going on for years. My colleague Christina A. Samuels explores possible causes, and how countries are responding. If you’re interested in more in-depth math reporting, sign up for our new limited-run newsletter that will be devoted to mathematics teaching and learning.
In other news: I was struck by a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau showing how financial companies profit off of school lunches. Companies that contract with school districts to process lunch payments charge fees of $2.37, or 4.4 percent of the total transaction, on average, every time money is added to a student’s account. That’s costing families about $100 million collectively each year, the report found.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Urban school districts are in crisis. Student and teacher absenteeism, special education referrals, mental health complications and violence within and outside schools are all on the rise as student enrollment and state funding are in free fall. Morale is low for teachers, principals and district leaders.
Compounding these challenges, federal pandemic relief education funding (known as ESSER) ends in September 2024. Recent in-depth case studies of Chicago and Baltimore City Public Schools and my own research, including candid conversations with current and former big-city superintendents, have convinced me of a stark reality: States and cities must either empower bold leaders to make dramatic changes or step in to make those changes themselves.
It was impossible not to be moved by the courage the school leaders I spoke with displayed. Yet it was also obvious that the powers these district leaders possess are narrower than the challenges they face — and that they will need support from governors, state school chiefs, mayors and other leaders.
One superintendent lamented the incessant political scrutiny and media criticism he’s encountered, noting, “You can’t make an error without it being spread all over social media.”
Meanwhile, principals are also under pressure; many are now serving not only as instructional leaders but also as food bank organizers and mental health crisis counselors. “This job is becoming unsustainable for people to be able to have a healthy life,” one superintendent said.
Another superintendent emphasized the challenge of finding math teachers proficient enough to teach their subject, a problem exacerbated by state hiring regulations and union rules that prevent the assessment of candidates’ knowledge. “Most teachers are not even two grade levels above students in their math content knowledge,” she said.
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The best big-city district leaders know that their jobs now include resetting how public education operates. “What’s happening in schools is not just incompatible with what we want kids to do but also with the outside workforce,” a former superintendent said. “Everything outside of schools is getting more modern, hybrid, etc. Yet schools are still the same.”
These district leaders believe that learning must now be a 12-month enterprise, especially for the kids who fell behind during the pandemic.
Several leaders pointed to data showing that advances in teaching strategies are starting to work and noted that innovations in generative AI and team-based staffing could make teachers’ jobs easier, and partnerships with community services could help students with mental health challenges.
But superintendents cannot make these changes alone: Their only route to survival is with support from their cities and states.
When the fiscal cliff collides with enrollment declines, many states may be forced to put urban districts into receivership. Here are five ways state and city leaders can help urban superintendents and students now:
1. Provide political protection and regulatory relief for bold leaders.
States should provide financial relief, political cover and regulatory flexibility for districts that demonstrate solid plans and strong leadership. Superintendents must not be hamstrung by local rules preventing them from, for example, screening new teachers for math knowledge or insisting that teachers use evidence-based instructional materials.
2. Update old policies to meet new challenges.
States can help by updating their assessment and accountability systems so they better measure and incentivize career-linked skills and credentials. As one leader said, “I do see a lot of potential” for more “paid apprenticeships, etc., but none of them fit in the state and federal accountability systems.”
3. Stay in the game.
State leaders cannot expect to intervene briefly and then return to serene detachment. Improving urban districts takes fortitude, vision and a willingness to persist through objections from entrenched interest groups. New York City and New Orleans demonstrated significant gains under state and city intervention, but status quo forces and flagging state support upended their progress.
4. Help districts forge new alliances to adopt new strategies.
States can facilitate partnerships with employers, social services and higher education institutions by providing tax incentives and grants. They can encourage new, more sustainable staffing models, such as working in teams, and the use of AI to ease teacher workloads. They can bring in nonprofit transformation experts.
5. Have a Plan B.
Not all urban school districts have bold leadership that can help them overcome the odds, even with strong state-level support. State leaders must be willing to make alternative provisions for students, such as authorizing the establishment of high-performing public charter schools, mandating tutoring and supporting community-led initiatives to address student needs.
Millions of young people are leaving high school without being ready for college. Generational poverty and its accompanying social ills are being hardwired into our cities. Inaction is not an option. State and city leaders must recognize that urban districts can and must be transformed — and it will not happen without their help.
Governors, mayors, state legislators and state school chiefs must back courageous urban district leadership. And they must prepare to intervene when urban district leaders cannot overcome the overwhelming odds stacked against them.
Robin J. Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research and policy center at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.
This story about urban school districts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This is an edition of our Future of Learning newsletter. Sign up today to get it delivered straight to your inbox.
There’s little doubt that artificial intelligence will fundamentally alter how classrooms operate. But just how much bot-fueled instruction is too much? I chatted with Hechinger contributor Chris Berdik about his recent story, co-published with Wired, that explores these themes and how some schools are deploying AI assistants in the classroom.
Q: Why did you want to explore this question of how, and in what ways, AI can replace teachers?
From the first exploratory interviews I did on this topic, I was surprised to learn how deep the history of AI trying to teach went. There’s so much hype (and doom) currently around generative AI, and it really is remarkable and powerful, but it puts things into perspective to learn that people have tried to harness AI to teach for many decades, with pretty limited results in the end. So, then I heard the story of Watson, an AI engine that quickly and easily dispatched Jeopardy! champions, but couldn’t hack it as a tutor. It clearly had the necessary knowledge at its beck and call. What didn’t it have? If we got beyond the hype of the latest generative AI, could it muster that critical pedagogic component that Watson lacked? And, finally, if the answer was no, what then was its best classroom use? Those were my starting points.
Q: How hesitant or eager were teachers like Daniel Thompson, whose classroom you visited, to use AI assistants?
Thompson was cautiously optimistic. In fact, he was pretty eager to use the tool, precisely because it could make the other apps and multimedia he used less cumbersome, and navigating them less onerous. But Thompson did a few quick stress tests of the assistant, by asking it to answer questions about the local Atlanta sports teams that had nothing to do with his curriculum, checking the guardrails by asking it to compose a fake message firing a colleague. The assistant declined those requests, showing once again that occasionally the most useful thing AI can do is gently tell us we’ve asked too much of it.
Q: You wrote that students weren’t interested in engaging with IBM Watson. Why not?
As more than one source explained to me, the process of learning includes moments of challenge and friction, which can be “busy work” drudgery, but is often times at the heart of what it means to learn, to puzzle over ideas, to truly create, to find one’s own way through to understanding. And I think that students (like a lot of us) see AI as a tool that can take care of some onerous, time consuming, or tedious task on our behalf. So, it’s going to take a lot more for AI to engage students when its job is to guide them through the friction of learning rather than just be an escape hatch from it.
Q: As more of these tools enter the classroom this school year, what will you be watching for?
I may have a somewhat esoteric interest in what’s next with AI in classrooms. I’m personally really interested in how schools will handle critical AI literacy, where both students and educators devote the time and resources to think critically about what AI is, the wonderful things it can do, and just as importantly what it can’t, or shouldn’t do on our behalf.
Here are a few key stories to bring you up to speed:
My colleague Jill Barshay wrote about two recent surveys on how teens are using AI to brainstorm ideas, study for tests or get answers for questions they might be too embarrassed to ask their parents or friends. Barshay pointed out that both surveys indicate that Black, Hispanic and Asian American youth are often quick to adopt this new technology.
Back in the spring, my colleague Caroline Preston and I explored what AI advancements means for the future of assessments and standardized testing. Many experts believe that AI has the potential to better evaluate a students’ true knowledge and personalize tests to individual students. However, experts also warn that schools and test designers should proceed cautiously, keeping in mind the disparities in access to AI and technology and concerns of biases embedded into tools.
Last year, as part of a series on math instruction, we published a story by Seattle Times writer Claire Bryan about how some math and computer science teachers are embracing AI. Teachers say that AI can help them plan math lessons and write a variety of math problems geared toward different levels of instruction. The story was produced in partnership with The Education Reporting Collaborative, an eight-newsroom effort.
This story about ai in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
As the use of artificial intelligence grows, teachers are trying to protect the integrity of their educational practices and systems. When we see what AI can do in the hands of our students, it’s hard to stay neutral about how and if to use it.
Of course, we worry about cheating; AI can be used to write essays and solve math problems.
But we also have deeper concerns regarding learning. When our students use AI, they may not be engaging as deeply with our assignments and coursework.
They have discovered ways AI can be used to create essay outlines and help with project organization and other such tasks that are key components of the learning process.
Some of this could be good. AI is a fabulous tool for getting started or unstuck. AI puts together old ideas in new ways and can do this at scale: It will make creativity easier for everyone.
But this very ease has teachers wondering how we can keep our students motivated to do the hard work when there are so many new shortcuts. Learning goals, curriculums, courses and the way we grade assignments will all need to be reevaluated.
Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.
The new realities of work also must be considered. A shift in employers’ job postings rewards those with AI skills. Many companies report already adopting generative AI tools or anticipate incorporating them into their workflow in the near future.
A core tension has emerged: Many teachers want to keep AI out of our classrooms, but also know that future workplaces may demand AI literacy.
What we call cheating, business could see as efficiency and progress.
The complexities, opportunities and decisions that lie between banning AI and teaching AI are significant.
It is increasingly likely that using AI will emerge as an essential skill for students, regardless of their career ambitions, and that action is required of educational institutions as a result.
Integrating AI into the curriculum will require change. The best starting point is a better understanding of what AI literacy looks like in our current landscape.
In our new book, we make it clear that the specifics of AI literacy will vary somewhat from one subject to the next, but there are some AI capacities that everyone will now need.
Before even writing a prompt, the AI user should develop an understanding of the following:
the role of human / AI collaborations
how to navigate the ethical implications of using AI for a given purpose
which AI tool to use (when and why)
how to use their selected AI tool fully and successfully
the limitations of generative AI systems and how to work around them
prompt engineering and all of its nuances
This knowledge will help our students write successful prompts, but additional skills and AI literacy will be required once AI returns a response. These include the abilities to:
review and evaluate AI-produced content, including how to determine its accuracy and recognize bias
edit AI content for its intended audience and purpose
follow up with AI to refine the output
take responsibility for the quality of the final work
The development of AI literacy mirrors the development of other key skills, such as critical thinking. Teaching AI literacy begins by teaching the capacities above, as well as others specific to your own subject.
While the inclination may be to start teaching AI literacy by opening a browser, faculty should begin by providing an ethical and environmental context regarding the use of AI and the responsibilities each of us has when working with AI.
Amazon Web Services recently surveyed employers from all business sectors about what skills employees need to use AI well. In ranked order, their answers included the following:
critical thinking and problem solving
creative thinking and design competence
technical proficiency
ethics and risk management
communication
math
teamwork
management
writing
Higher education is quite adept at teaching such skills, and many of those noted are among the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) list of “essential learning outcomes” for higher education.
Faculty will need to improve their own AI literacy and explore the most advanced generative AI tools (currently ChatGPT 4o, Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3.5). A good way to begin is to ask AI to perform assignments and projects that you typically ask your students to complete — and then try to improve the AI’s response.
Understanding what AI can and cannot do well within the context of your course will be key as you contemplate revising your assignments and teaching.
Faculty should also find out if their college has an advisory board comprised of past students and/or employers. Reach out to them for firsthand insight on how AI is shifting the landscape — and keep that conversation going over time. That information will be essential as you think about AI literacy within your subjects and courses.
These actions will ultimately position you to be able to navigate the complexities and decisions that lie between ban and teach.
C. Edward Watson is vice president for digital innovation with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). José Antonio Bowen is a former president of Goucher College and co-author with Watson of “Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In the realm of education, the integration of technology–and particularly artificial intelligence (AI)–with traditional human-led instruction is a topic of increasing relevance and debate. As educators and technologists, we must critically assess the strengths and limitations of both AI and human educators to optimize educational outcomes.
In exploring the pros and cons of AI instruction versus human educator instruction, a hybrid model emerges that leverages the strengths of both to maximize learning and knowledge retention.
The advantages and limitations of AI in education
AI in education brings numerous advantages, such as personalization, accessibility, and scalability. AI excels at delivering personalized learning experiences by analyzing extensive data on a student’s performance to tailor educational content to individual learning paces and styles, potentially boosting engagement and efficacy.
One of the most transformative aspects of integrating AI into education is its potential to improve educational equity. AI can bridge the gap between diverse educational environments, including students in remote areas or those with specific needs who may otherwise lack access to human educators, by providing resources that were traditionally available only to students in well-funded schools.
For instance, AI-driven platforms can offer personalized tutoring sessions, language translation services, and adaptive learning paths that cater to students from various backgrounds and with different learning abilities. This democratization of access can significantly level the playing field, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to succeed regardless of their socio-economic status or geographic location. Moreover, AI can assist thousands of students simultaneously, offering consistent educational quality across various subjects without suffering from fatigue.
However, AI instruction also has its limitations. AI lacks emotional intelligence, often struggling to engage in empathetic interactions, motivate students during challenging periods, or adapt its teaching style based on emotional cues. Its content generation, while informative, typically lacks the creativity and nuanced explanations that skilled educators provide, which are crucial for teaching complex or abstract concepts. Additionally, the use of AI in education raises significant ethical issues, including concerns about data privacy and the potential for algorithmic bias.
The strengths of human educators and cheir Challenges
Human educators are unparalleled in their ability to provide emotional support and foster an environment conducive to social learning. They excel at motivating students, managing classroom dynamics, and offering personalized feedback based on nuanced observations. Teachers’ adaptability and creativity allow them to modify their instructional strategies dynamically, providing creative and contextually rich explanations that resonate with diverse student groups. Furthermore, human interaction plays a vital role in instilling values and ethics in students, an area where AI cannot contribute effectively.
Despite these strengths, human educators face several challenges, including scalability issues and variability in teaching quality. Human resources are finite, and educators can only engage with a limited number of students at a time, which may affect the consistency and reach of educational delivery. Moreover, the quality of instruction can vary significantly between educators, influenced by factors such as training, experience, and personal attributes.
Proposing a hybrid model
To maximize the benefits of both AI and human educators, a hybrid approach is recommended. AI should be used as a support tool to handle administrative tasks such as grading and scheduling, and to provide supplementary personalized learning aids like simulations and adaptive quizzes. Human educators should remain the primary facilitators of learning, using their unique skills to deliver complex content, inspiring students, and building relationships. The curriculum should be designed to integrate AI tools seamlessly with human-led sessions, enhancing interactivity and engagement through multimedia resources and real-time analytics. This hybrid model aims to create a more inclusive, efficient, and effective educational system that not only imparts knowledge but also fosters a holistic developmental environment.
The future of education lies not in choosing between AI and human educators but in effectively integrating both to serve the diverse needs of students. By embracing a balanced approach, we can create a more inclusive, efficient, and effective educational system that not only imparts knowledge but also fosters a holistic developmental environment that prepares students to succeed in an increasingly complex world.
Nhon Ma, Numerade
Nhon Ma is the CEO of Numerade, a company dedicated to transforming education through technology. Under his leadership, Numerade has developed innovative educational tools that blend AI and human expertise to provide high-quality educational experiences to students globally.
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This story about word problems was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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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.
ATLANTA — Science teacher Daniel Thompson circulated among his sixth graders at Ron Clark Academy on a recent spring morning, spot checking their work and leading them into discussions about the day’s lessons on weather and water. He had a helper: As Thompson paced around the class, peppering them with questions, he frequently turned to a voice-activated AI to summon apps and educational videos onto large-screen smartboards.
When a student asked, “Are there any animals that don’t need water?” Thompson put the question to the AI. Within seconds, an illustrated blurb about kangaroo rats appeared before the class.
Thompson’s voice-activated assistant is the brainchild of computer scientist Satya Nitta, who founded a company called Merlyn Mind after many years at IBM where he had tried, and failed, to create an AI tool that could teach students directly. The foundation of that earlier, ill-fated project was IBM Watson, the AI that famously crushed several “Jeopardy!” champions. Despite Watson’s gameshow success, however, it wasn’t much good at teaching students. After plowing five years and $100 million into the effort, the IBM team admitted defeat in 2017.
“We realized the technology wasn’t there,” said Nitta, “and it’s still not there.”
Daniel Thompson teaches science to middle schoolers at Ron Clark Academy, in Atlanta. Credit: Chris Berdik for The Hechinger Report
Since the November 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an expanding cast of AI tutors and helpers have entered the learning landscape. Most of these tools are chatbots that tap large language models — or LLMs — trained on troves of data to understand student inquiries and respond conversationally with a range of flexible and targeted learning assistance. These bots can generate quizzes, summarize key points in a complex reading, offer step-by-step graphing of algebraic equations, or provide feedback on the first draft of an essay, among other tasks. Some tools are subject-specific, such as Writable and Photomath, while others offer more all-purpose tutoring, such as Socratic (created by Google) and Khanmigo, a collaboration of OpenAI and Khan Academy, a nonprofit provider of online lessons covering an array of academic subjects.
As AI tools proliferate and their capabilities keep improving, relatively few observers believe education can remain AI free. At the same time, even the staunchest techno optimists hesitate to say that teaching is best left to the bots. The debate is about the best mix — what are AI’s most effective roles in helping students learn, and what aspects of teaching should remain indelibly human no matter how powerful AI becomes?
Skepticism about AI’s place in the classroom often centers on students using the technology to cut corners or on AI’s tendency to hallucinate, i.e. make stuff up, in an eagerness to answer every query. The latter concern can be mitigated (albeit not eliminated) by programming bots to base responses on vetted curricular materials, among other steps. Less attention, however, is paid to an even thornier challenge for AI at the heart of effective teaching: engaging and motivating students.
Nitta said there’s something “deeply profound” about human communication that allows flesh-and-blood teachers to quickly spot and address things like confusion and flagging interest in real time.
He joins other experts in technology and education who believe AI’s best use is to augment and extend the reach of human teachers, a vision that takes different forms. For example, the goal of Merlyn Mind’s voice assistant is to make it easier for teachers to engage with students while also navigating apps and other digital teaching materials. Instead of being stationed by the computer, they can move around the class and interact with students, even the ones hoping to disappear in the back.
Others in education are trying to achieve this vision by using AI to help train human tutors to have more productive student interactions, or by multiplying the number of students a human instructor can engage with by delegating specific tasks to AI that play to the technology’s strengths. Ultimately, these experts envision a partnership in which AI is not called on to be a teacher but to supercharge the power of humans already doing the job.
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Merlyn Mind’s AI assistant, Origin, was piloted by thousands of teachers nationwide this past school year, including Thompson and three other teachers at the Ron Clark Academy. The South Atlanta private school, where tuition is heavily subsidized for a majority low-income student body, is in a brick warehouse renovated to look like a low-slung Hogwarts, replete with an elaborate clocktower and a winged dragon perched above the main entrance.
As Thompson moved among his students, he wielded a slim remote control with a button-activated microphone he uses to command the AI software. At first, Thompson told the AI to start a three-minute timer that popped up on the smartboard, then he began asking rapid-fire review questions from a previous lesson, such as what causes wind. When students couldn’t remember the details, Thompson asked the AI to display an illustration of airflow caused by uneven heating of the Earth’s surface.
The voice-activated AI assistant by Merlyn Mind is designed to help teachers navigate apps and materials on their computer while moving around the classroom, interacting with students. Credit: Chris Berdik for The Hechinger Report
At one point, he clambered up on a student worktable while discussing the stratosphere, claiming (inaccurately) that it was the atmospheric layer where most weather happens, just to see if any students caught his mistake (several students reminded him that weather happens in the troposphere). Then he conjured a new timer and launched into a lesson on water by asking the AI assistant to find a short educational movie about fresh and saltwater ecosystems. As Thompson moved through the class, he occasionally paused the video and quizzed students about the new content.
Study after study has shown the importance of student engagement for academic success. A strong connection between teachers and students is especially important when learners feel challenged or discouraged, according to Nitta. While AI has many strengths, he said, “it’s not very good at motivating you to keep doing something you’re not very interested in doing.”
“The elephant in the room with all these chatbots is how long will anyone engage with them?” he said.
The answer for Watson was not long at all, Nitta recalled. In trial runs, some students just ignored Watson’s attempts to probe their understanding of a topic, and the engagement level of those who initially did respond to the bot dropped off precipitously. Despite all Watson’s knowledge and facility with natural language, students just weren’t interested in chatting with it.
Khan envisioned a world where AI tutors filled that gap. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”
One of Khanmigo’s architects, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, Kristen DiCerbo, was the vice president of learning research and design for education publisher Pearson in 2016 when it partnered with IBM on the Watson tutor project.
“It was a different technology,” said DiCerbo, recalling the laborious task of scripting Watson’s responses to students.
The Ron Clark Academy, in Atlanta, piloted a voice-activated teaching assistant this school year. Credit: Chris Berdik for The Hechinger Report
Since Watson’s heyday, AI has become a lot more engaging. One of the breakthroughs of generative AI powered by LLMs is its ability to give unscripted, human-like responses to user prompts.
To spur engagement, Khanmigo doesn’t answer student questions directly, but starts with questions of its own, such as asking if the student has any ideas about how to find an answer. Then it guides them to a solution, step by step, with hints and encouragement (a positive tone is assured by its programmers). Another feature for stoking engagement allows students to ask the bot to assume the identity of historical or literary figures for chats about their life and times. Teachers, meanwhile, can tap the bot for help planning lessons and formulating assessments.
Notwithstanding Khan’s expansive vision of “amazing” personal tutors for every student on the planet, DiCerbo assigns Khanmigo a more limited teaching role. When students are working independently on a skill or concept but get hung up or caught in a cognitive rut, she said, “we want to help students get unstuck.”
Some 100,000 students and teachers piloted Khanmigo this past academic year in schools nationwide, helping to flag any hallucinations the bot makes and providing tons of student-bot conversations for DiCerbo and her team to analyze.
“We look for things like summarizing, providing hints and encouraging,” she explained. “Does [Khanmigo] do the motivational things that human tutors do?”
The degree to which Khanmigo has closed AI’s engagement gap is not yet known. Khan Academy plans to release some summary data on student-bot interactions later this summer, according to DiCerbo. Plans for third-party researchers to assess the tutor’s impact on learning will take longer.
Nevertheless, many tutoring experts stress the importance of building a strong relationship between tutors and students to achieve significant learning boosts. “If a student is not motivated, or if they don’t see themselves as a math person, then they’re not going to have a deep conversation with an AI bot,” said Brent Milne, the vice president of product research and development at Saga Education, a nonprofit provider of in-person tutoring.
Since 2021, Saga has been a partner in the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), run by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, to help scale high-dosage tutoring — generally defined as one-on-one or small group sessions for at least 30 minutes every day. The PLI team sees a big and growing role for AI in tutoring, one that augments but doesn’t replicate human efforts.
For instance, Saga has been experimenting with AI feedback to help tutors better engage and motivate students. Working with researchers from the University of Memphis and the University of Colorado, the Saga team fed transcripts of their math tutoring sessions into an AI model trained to recognize when the tutor was prompting students to explain their reasoning, refine their answers or initiate a deeper discussion. The AI analyzed how often each tutor took these steps.
When Saga piloted this AI tool in 2023, the nonprofit provided the feedback to their tutor coaches, who worked with four to eight tutors each. Tracking some 2,300 tutoring sessions over several weeks, they found that tutors whose coaches used the AI feedback peppered their sessions with significantly more of these prompts to encourage student engagement.
While Saga is looking into having AI deliver some feedback directly to tutors, it’s doing so cautiously, because, according to Milne, “having a human coach in the loop is really valuable to us.”
In addition to using AI to help train tutors, the Saga team wondered if they could offload certain tutor tasks to a machine without compromising the strong relationship between tutors and students. Specifically, they understood that tutoring sessions were typically a mix of teaching concepts and practicing them, according to Milne. A tutor might spend some time explaining the why and how of factoring algebraic equations, for example, and then guide a student through practice problems. But what if the tutor could delegate the latter task to AI, which excels at providing precisely targeted adaptive practice problems and hints?
The Saga team tested the idea in their algebra tutoring sessions during the 2023-24 school year. They found that students who were tutored daily in a group of two had about the same gains in math scores as students who were tutored in a group of four with assistance from ALEKS, an AI-powered learning software by McGraw Hill. In the group of four, two students worked directly with the tutor and two with the AI, switching each day. In other words, the AI assistance effectively doubled the reach of the tutor.
Experts expect that AI’s role in education is bound to grow, and its interactions will continue to seem more and more human. Earlier this year, OpenAI and the startup Hume AI separately launched “emotionally intelligent” AI that analyzes tone of voice and facial expressions to infer a user’s mood and respond with calibrated “empathy.” Nevertheless, even emotionally intelligent AI will likely fall short on the student engagement front, according to Brown University computer science professor Michael Littman, who is also the National Science Foundation’s division director for information and intelligent systems.
No matter how human-like the conversation, he said, students understand at a fundamental level that AI doesn’t really care about them, what they have to say in their writing or whether they pass or fail algebra. In turn, students will never really care about the bot and what it thinks. A June study in the journal “Learning and Instruction” found that AI can already provide decent feedback on student essays. What is not clear is whether student writers will put in care and effort — rather than offloading the task to a bot — if AI becomes the primary audience for their work.
“There’s incredible value in the human relationship component of learning,” Littman said, “and when you just take humans out of the equation, something is lost.”
This story about AI tutors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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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.
