YouthTruth

COVID-19 is changing what students plan to do after high school, with those more affected by the pandemic more likely to have altered their post-graduation expectations, a new student survey reveals.

One in four high school seniors said their postsecondary plans had changed since the start of the pandemic, an increase from 18 percent of seniors during a previous survey in spring 2020. Thirty percent of non-white students said their plans had changed, compared to 18 percent of white students, according to the survey conducted in fall 2020 by the nonprofit YouthTruth. Those who said they were personally affected by the pandemic and who report receiving free and reduced-price lunch were more likely to report alerting their plans when compared to their peers.

The share of students surveyed who said they plan to attend a four-year college or university was 51 percent, which is about the same as in pre-pandemic YouthTruth surveys. However, bigger gaps emerge for other options. The latest results show a significant decline in students expecting to attend a two-year college, 16 percent, compared to 22 percent before COVID-19. The share of students who are unsure about their plans after high school graduation also increased, and there was a slight rise in those expecting to work full time.

Other data back up the YouthTruth findings. Completion of the federal financial aid application — which is correlated to college enrollment — is down more than 9 percent compared to this time last year, according to a tracker maintained by the National College Attainment Network. Meanwhile, enrollment for low-income high school students declined by nearly 30 percent in fall 2020, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports.

Mental health is also a challenge. Students reported feeling depressed, stressed or anxious as the top obstacle to learning, with 46 percent of students saying it’s affecting them.

The findings on mental health and changing postsecondary plans are “heartbreaking but maybe not surprising” given what’s already known about how the pandemic is affecting kids, said Jen Wilka, YouthTruth’s executive director.

“Not all students are experiencing this time equally, and students are going to need different kinds of supports now and in the coming months and year,” she added.

(YouthTruth)

YouthTruth surveyed about 85,000 students in grades 3 through 12 from 14 states in the fall and used previous results to compare responses. The survey was conducted online in English and Spanish.

The report revealed some bright spots, too. While just 39 percent of students said they were learning “a lot almost every day” in the spring, 61 percent now say that is the case, slightly more than before the pandemic. Students who earn high grades are more likely to say they’re learning a lot, and slightly more students learning in person agreed with the statement, compared to those who are in remote and hybrid environments. Of note, hybrid ranked last, behind in-person and fully remote, in the percentage of students reporting they were learning a lot.

Additionally, students’ sense of belonging in their schools has rebounded, with 49 percent saying they “feel like part of [their] school’s community,” compared to 30 percent last spring and 43 percent pre-pandemic.

(YouthTruth)

Some other findings from the most recent YouthTruth report:

• Male students reported better health and well-being than female students and students who identify in another way. About a third of boys said “feeling depressed, stressed or anxious” is an obstacle to learning, compared to 57 percent of girls and 79 percent who identify in another day.
• The second most commonly cited obstacle to learning was “distractions at home and family responsibilities,” affecting 44 percent of students.
• Forty-one percent of remote learners said their “virtual classes are interesting” and 35 percent said “someone usually notices if I’m not paying attention.” Nearly half said they can take breaks as needed during online classes.
• Sixty-six percent of students agreed with the statement “Most of my teachers are willing to give extra help on schoolwork if I need it,” compared with 58 percent before the pandemic.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to YouthTruth and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74 Media. 

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Elizabeth Englander

As schools continue to grapple with coronavirus outbreaks, displaced students and classroom reopening decisions, much of the focus has been on how educators can help students catch up academically after months of virtual learning and, in many cases, limited interactions with their teachers. But what about students’ social-emotional growth, which could be stunted after months of limited time with peers and stress over the pandemic, economic difficulties and racism?

That question is at the center of work by Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor and executive director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University. Her project, “When the Kids Come Back,” offers free resources and advice to help educators meet the challenges of this pandemic school year, with an eye toward social-emotional learning. (She has also co-authored a new book on the topic: The Insanely Awesome Pandemic Playbook: A Humorous Mental Health Guide For Kids)

Laura Fay spoke with Englander — via Zoom — about how socialization looks different online, what teachers should know about trauma and cyberbullying, and how parents should set limits on screen time.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Fay: I’ve heard you speak about how kids can distinguish between connecting with someone online and building up a relationship over time with someone in person. I imagine that’s going to be a really big challenge for teachers this year, both in building relationships with children and in kids connecting with each other. Can you share more about that research and what that means for education right now?

To understand what social media’s good for and what it’s not so good for, you have to be aware of that [difference]. A large part of our work in social and emotional learning is raising that awareness. It’s important to draw a distinction between how social media is advertised in the marketplace versus what it actually is good for. And I think it’s promoted as a way of connecting people, and it does, but there are limits to that connection, and in order to be smart and savvy consumers of it, we have to understand what those limits are and teach them to kids.

Do you think there are the same limitations with online learning tools? Is there something similar where you’re connected with your teacher in the moment talking on Google Classroom or another tool, or she’s giving you feedback in an email — but that’s different than seeing a teacher in person every day?

I’m not sure, because with the exception of really small children, I don’t think there’s an expectation with teachers that you’re going to have a really strong personal relationship with students. But there’s sort of a qualitative difference that I haven’t really put my finger on yet. There is something very different about talking to somebody when you’re physically near them than when you’re not.

Right now, if you and I were meeting in a coffee shop, talking at a table, it would feel different. I do a lot of speaking and training in schools, and it feels quite different having somebody who comes in person versus somebody who does it virtually, even though from an objective point of view, you might say, “Why would it feel different? You’re conveying the same information. You can still see each other’s faces.” And yet, there is something different about it. That’s one of the things we’re trying to understand because we want to be able to teach kids about this difference so they can understand it for themselves. To a certain extent, I think they know it, but it’s obviously complicated, or we would have a really easy time with it, which we don’t.

What does this distinction mean for teachers and parents going through the new school year, when there’s a lot more virtual learning than there was before, and there isn’t a close proximity between children and teachers?

School is going to be quite different, and it may be more difficult for students to connect on an emotional level with their teachers. That does have an impact. Children learn best from adults who they’re emotionally attached to. Attachment is not a bad thing in education, even though there has been some movement away from it in recent decades. It’s actually a healthy thing. And the fact that it’s going to be more difficult to achieve in this environment is going to impact how children learn.

I don’t know what it means. Maybe it means we’re going to have to lower our expectations, which I hate the thought of, but it’s possible we’re just not going to make as much progress. I think everybody’s kind of knocking themselves out trying to figure ways around this, but it’s very difficult to teach children online 100 percent of the time.

The good news is that I think parents and students appreciate school and teachers in a way that they haven’t for quite a long time. So, that’s the silver lining, but it’s a pretty tough situation.

What do you mean by lowering expectations?

It’s hard to see how children are going to achieve the same level of social-emotional growth that they would in person. Children are very resilient, and we may find that when kids go back to school, they sort of snap back into shape. We really don’t know. This is a unique situation, and there’s almost no research on this. There’s a little bit of research out of Louisiana on kids who had extended absences following repeated hurricanes. But even that, I think, was three or four months. Now, we’re looking at kids who may be out of school for six months or a year.

It’s really a mess.

You’ve said you haven’t seen much media attention paid to how adults can mitigate the risks of children having been isolated because of the virus. How should we be thinking and talking about those risks, and what should parents and teachers do to mitigate them?

To mitigate the effects of social isolation, we have to seize upon every opportunity for in-person interactions in a way we normally wouldn’t have to. For example, as long as the weather is even a little bit decent, we have got to get kids playing with peers outside, where it’s safe to do that. We’re going to have to teach them to wear masks and socially distance, but they can play outside and be with other kids.

There are also opportunities at home, such as eating dinner together, eating breakfast together, playing board games together, cooking together, cleaning together — anything you can do, you need to bake it into the routine. This can be hard, because in social isolation and in situations where parents are very stressed, because they’re trying to do their job and their kids are trying to do the schoolwork, it’s very stressful and the impulse is to just say, “If I have any flexibility at all, what I want to do is run away. So, if I have any chance to do anything on my own, I’m going to go to my bedroom and do it because I’ve got to have some breathing space.”

But it actually lowers stress a little bit to do things that aren’t high-pressure. For example, eating dinner together is not a high-pressure activity. And in our research, we find kids have better social outcomes when their families eat dinner together. They have more peaceful and better social relationships with their peers if their families eat dinner together. This is true both online and in school. And it was also true, although less so, even if their families didn’t get along.

Now, interacting with family members isn’t the same as interacting with peers. Think back to when you were a kid: Interacting with your family’s relatively easy. They love you. No matter what you do, they like you. With peers, it’s much more challenging. So, family is not the same as peers, but it’s a lot better than nothing. The point is, we have to think about this. We have to say, “Any opportunity I have to have my kids interact with another human being in person, including me, I have to seize on, because they’re getting so little of that.”

We’re hearing so much about what schools should do academically to catch students up when they get back. Are there things that teachers and parents should be doing to catch kids up in social and emotional ways?

There are some teaching techniques that can help and can kill two birds with one stone — that can help the kids academically but also help them socially. For example, assigning the kids to small-group work. When you ask about small-group work, a lot of kids say they hate it. Small-group work with peers is challenging. There’s no doubt about it. But sometimes, that challenge is good for you. It hones your skills. So, while it might not be always fun, it is an academic technique that can help kids socially as well. So, teachers should be thinking about doing things like that or having projects that involve social interactions, such as having students interview people. You want to look for opportunities to give kids that face time as much as possible.

Parents are worrying about academic and social-emotional effects of screen time at a time when even mental health supports might have moved online. What advice do you have?

It’s a very, very hard thing right now. It was hard before, wasn’t it? And the fact that all our interactions have gone online has made it even harder.

I think there are limits to what we can do. Nobody is going to keep up in school on an hour of screen time a day. So, there are practical and functional limits.

What I’ve always thought, even before the pandemic, is that the most productive thing would be to carve out either situations or pockets of time where all agree that you don’t use screens. For example, you could say, “Every day at 5 o’clock, we’re going to cook dinner together, and then we’re going to sit down and eat it together. And that’s going to be a scope of an hour and a half to two hours where we’re not going to use any screens. We’re not going to answer cell phones.” Some people say, “No recreational screen time during the week, or not on weekends, or not on Sundays, or none before 10 a.m., or none after 3 p.m.”

However you want to structure it, it seems like it causes fewer arguments to carve out non-screen time than it does to try to say something like, “Okay, two hours of screen a day, and that’s it.” Because then you sort of get into an endless loop of, what counts? What doesn’t count? Does schoolwork count? If your 12-year-old says, “Mom, I’m reading The New York Times online,” does that count? What about texting? Every text message is about 10 seconds. Are you going to add them all up? It feels like you’re getting yourself into this thing where it requires constant monitoring, constant quarrels.

As a general rule of thumb, I don’t like policies or approaches that increase conflict in families. I think conflict is very damaging for children and families, and for parents too, so I prefer to look for approaches that minimize conflict, even if that means that you might end up doing a little bit more screen time.

But in general, there need to be pockets of time where you’re away from it, where you’re relaxing with a book before you go to sleep or eating dinner with somebody or taking a bike ride or walk. We found generally that kids are very receptive to the idea that screen time is a health issue. They’re a little bit more skeptical about the whole idea of safety. Adults push safety a lot online, and kids feel like they’re savvy and adults are exaggerating dangers. The general approach of saying, “This is an issue of how healthy you want to live” does seem to work better than saying, “There are terrible dangers. And I’m going to warn you about them.”

Are you seeing or hearing about increases in cyberbullying during this time?

I’ve heard anecdotally of it. I don’t think anybody’s published any research on it, so I don’t think we actually know. But anecdotally, we’ve heard, and it kind of makes sense when you have more screen time that you would expect everything to move online a little bit more in that regard. I would be very surprised if we didn’t see some increase. Of course, we’ll see a decrease in bullying in person.

Do you have advice for teachers and parents on handling that and looking out for bullying online?

The ultimate source of information about this are the kids. And if you want to hear from the kids, you can’t just say, “Report, report, report.” What you have to do is build a relationship with them. You have to be interested in their lives. You have to ask them how things are going. And if you build a relationship with them, then you hope that they’ll come and describe to you what’s happening or let you know if they’re in some distress. That’s the goal. But there’s not really a shortcut on this.

Lots of events in the past several months have potentially caused trauma for children, from a deadly virus to an economic crisis to very public violence that we’re seeing against African Americans in the news. Plus, there are personal things like child abuse. What should adults be thinking about going into a new school year to make sure classrooms are trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive?

As part of the “When the Kids Come Back” project, we recommend that a couple of steps should be taken. We have a handout for teachers on trauma — understanding the symptoms, the symptoms that are probable and those that are not very probable. School counselors can send notices to parents saying, “Let me know if your child is struggling emotionally. Let me know if they’re having problems sleeping, problems eating, that kind of thing.” That way, if I’m the school counselor and I know I have this list, say, of 35 kids whose parents say they’re really struggling, I can keep an eye on those kids. I can check in with them. I can make sure they know me and where my office is. They know that they can come see me anytime they want, and that really can really help smooth it.

Also, you want teachers to know how to handle these issues because they are very likely to come up in the classroom. One of the things we did in the project is pull on the research from Louisiana, which suggested that when kids come out of these situations, some of them tend to be talkers. They feel anxious about it, and they want to talk about it. Other kids are completely withdrawn, and talking about it makes them more anxious. So, how do you handle it when you have a class of 25 kids and some of them are talkers and some of them are freaked at the idea of talking?

The answer is you don’t force non-talkers to sit through a classroom discussion. You give talkers other ways that they can express what they’re thinking. You might say to them, for example, “We’re going to journal about what we’ve all been through or what we’re thinking about. And you can go write in your journal, or you can go see the school counselor, or you can hang on knowing that the school counselor’s going to come to our class and we might have a chance to talk about it this afternoon,” something like that. You want to give them an outlet.

It’s really important. There are some kids who are coming back to school, and they have seen people get sick. Some kids have seen people who they know die. Some kids have had parents who’ve lost their jobs. Some kids have had parents who’ve lost their homes. There’s a lot of potential trauma here, and it’s really, really important to be sensitive to that and to understand that. The social-emotional stuff was always important, but this year, it’s really front and center.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

A student receives an immunization at the drive-thru clinic Thursday. (West Costa Contra Unified School District)

More than 200 students in one California district received turkeys, groceries and their required school immunizations at a drive-thru clinic last week.

With Thanksgiving looming, the event for West Contra Costa Unified School District families in Richmond, California, on Thursday attempted to solve two problems at once — many families in the district are vulnerable to food insecurity, and more than 700 students still hadn’t formally registered for school because they were missing their regular immunizations, said Tony Wold, the district’s associate superintendent of business services. Those students have been participating in online classes, but can now officially enroll.

During the drive-thru event at district headquarters, 244 students received immunizations, and hundreds more are expected to take advantage of the program in the coming days at the El Cerrito Safeway supermarket, which partnered with the district on the event. Families also picked up a turkey and a week’s worth of food as part of the district’s ongoing meal program for students.

The district will also draw names to give 200 families $50 gift cards for Safeway, paid for by the West Contra Costa Public Education Fund, a nonprofit that supports families in the district.

Students could get any of the shots in the series of immunizations required to enroll in school in California, which protect them from measles, mumps, chickenpox and other illnesses.Children and the family member who brought them could also get a flu shot during the event, Wold said. Many students fell behind on their immunizations this year as clinics became overwhelmed dealing with COVID-19, he added.

Wold hopes to have nearly all students caught up on their shots by Thanksgiving, and the district will continue to work with families until everyone has met state requirements.

Safeway pharmacists provided and administered the vaccines. The cost will be covered by insurance for families who have it, and the district will use CARES Act funding, the one-time aid Congress set aside for schools earlier this year, for those who do not.

“I can’t think of a better use of those dollars than to support these students,” Wold said.

Cars lined up for the drive-thru clinic and food giveaway (West Contra Costa Unified School District)

Safeway also gave out coupons for 10 percent off at their stores to every student who participated. Another partner, the school bus company First Student, which provides transportation for West Contra Costa special education students, picked up families who needed a ride and brought them home after the event for free. Hill Physicians Medical Group, a local network of doctors, also helped with the project.

The district, located just north of Berkeley, serves almost 29,000 students, more than half of whom are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, a common indicator of poverty.

Blue Shield of California, an insurance company, brought the partners together and helped organize the event.

“On the most basic level you want [kids] to be as healthy as possible and not be getting sick or being vulnerable in any way, and so something like this is right up Blue Shield of California’s alley, trying to make sure that we lift all boats when it comes to health of citizens here in California,” said Mark Seelig, a spokesman for the company.

The collaboration was “fortuitous,” Wold said: It started with an email from someone at Blue Shield looking to help children vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic in West Contra Costa Unified, and the event came together in less than two weeks.

“I’ve been in public education for almost 30 years. Today is probably one of the proudest events of my life, my professional career,” Wold said Thursday. “Getting these kids the simplest of things — the immunization that keeps them safe, and getting them back into school — I cannot tell you how proud I am of the team and our district that put this together and the partners that came to our aid. It’s heartwarming.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Incumbent Scott Schmerelson from District 3 and newcomer Tanya Ortiz Franklin from District 7 (scott4lausd.com and tanyaforlausd.com)

Updated Nov. 9

Charter school supporters and teachers union backers each won a seat on Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board Tuesday after a campaign that again set records for spending.

Incumbent Scott Schmerelson, who was endorsed by United Teachers Los Angeles, is expected to hold on to his seat representing District 3 despite big spending by charter advocates who backed his opponent Marilyn Koziatek. Schmerelson was ahead by roughly 7.5 percentage points Monday when Koziatek conceded in a Facebook post.

In District 7, newcomer Tanya Ortiz Franklin was well ahead of union-endorsed candidate Patricia Castellanos. Franklin led 57.97 percent to 42.03 percent as of Thursday morning. Castellanos conceded in a Facebook post.

Los Angeles Unified is America’s second-largest district, serving more than 600,000 students, most of them low-income students of color whose families have felt the brunt of the pandemic and the hardships of distance learning. The sprawling district is the largest in the country with an elected school board.

The seven-member board is a battleground for a long-running fight between L.A. charter school advocates and the teachers union, which opposes charter school growth. The 280 charter schools in the district serve 138,000 K-12 students. Of the other five members, two are strong union supporters.

Franklin won the seat vacated by the termed-out board President Richard Vladovic, who was seen as a swing vote but “more frequently allied with unions than charters” in his third and final term, the L.A. Times reported. Franklin is expected to give a “subtle” edge to charter supporters, but her background is in district schools, the paper said.

Read more: Board candidate Tanya Ortiz Franklin: With less than a month to go before school reopens for remote-only learning, LA Unified needs to act now to prioritize students’ needs

Charter school supporters spent millions of dollars on behalf of Franklin and Koziatek and attacking their opponents, dramatically outspending the union in this week’s election as well as the March primary. Total combined spending from both sides was almost $17.5 million.

“This election has turned out to be a very expensive jump-ball,” Dan Schnur, a political science professor in California told the L.A. Times.

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk

Schmerelson, 69, is a retired teacher and principal first elected to the board in 2015. Franklin, 36, is a former educator and attorney who now works at Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that oversees some district schools.

The Los Angeles Times endorsed Schmerelson and Franklin.

Voters in Los Angeles also passed Measure RR, a $7-billion bond to update and improve school infrastructure and technology, according to projections by the Los Angeles Times and others. The measure had about 71 percent support in “semiofficial” results posted Wednesday.

Read More: LA school officials cheer passage of $7B bond to improve facilities and tech

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

(Getty Images)

Voters in Los Angeles passed Measure RR, a $7 billion bond to update and improve school infrastructure and technology, according to projections by the Los Angeles Times and others. The measure had about 71 percent voter support in “semiofficial” results posted Wednesday.

The measure will raise property taxes on residents of Los Angeles Unified School District, with the money going to buy buses, air conditioners, computers and other technology and make improvements to school buildings.

.@LASchools’ MEASURE RR, which maintains existing taxes to pay for facilities improvements, is headed for passage with >70% of the vote. #LAUSD Supt. @AustinLASchools has released a statement thanking voters: pic.twitter.com/nWPYvTlpYN

— Kyle Stokes (@kystokes) November 4, 2020

“The students are the real winners today, this victory is theirs,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said in a statement. “Because of voter support, and the support of labor, business and community leaders, more students will get access to safe and updated schools and learning technology.”

Approval for the $7 billion borrowing reversed a string of defeated attempts by LA Unified to raise additional revenue, including a $500 million parcel tax overwhelmingly rejected by voters in 2019.

The new bond measure is structured to keep residents’ school tax rate about the same as it is now as they pay for Measure RR and previously passed bonds, according to the L.A. Times. The annual payment will be $140 per $100,000 of assessed property value, which will start to taper off in 2034.

(Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk)

Supporters of the measure were optimistic in the runup to Election Day because the last time a similar proposition passed was in 2008 — when Democrats were energized to turn out for presidential candidate Barack Obama, according to the Los Angeles Times. Democrat Joe Biden captured 71.4 percent of the vote in L.A. County vs. Donald Trump’s 26.7 percent in the still-undecided presidential race, according to the county clerk’s office.

The proposition needed 55 percent support to pass.

Read More: After a costly campaign, charter- and union-backed candidates each win seat on L.A. Unified school board

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Opportunity Insights

The pandemic may be exacerbating achievement gaps not only by leaving some students behind but by propelling more privileged children even farther ahead academically, new data suggest.

Participation and mastery rates in Zearn Math, an online math program for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, offer a glimpse into the crisis: When schools shut down in mid-March, participation and progress dropped off for students from low- and middle-income communities but rose to levels higher than before the shutdown for those from high-income areas. Still, the numbers also show some communities overcame the barriers, keeping engagement strong for all students regardless of income.

Nationally, higher-income students slightly increased their participation in Zearn Math, while middle- and low-income children’s participation levels decreased. (Opportunity Insights)

The data track participation and progress through online lessons from Zearn, a nonprofit that offers free online math lessons and curriculum, which more than 2.5 million students in more than half the country’s school districts were using in class before school buildings closed in March. Researchers used a representative national sample of about 800,000 students from district public, charter and parochial schools.

The anonymous student data is publicly available as part of a new tracker from Opportunity Insights, a nonpartisan research group based at Harvard University’s economics department that is focused on studying economic inequality and improving upward mobility for American children.

The tracker uses Census Bureau data to categorize schools as low-, middle- or high-income according to the median household income of the zip code where they’re located.

Zearn co-founder and CEO Shalinee Sharma said she “flipped out” when she saw student use diverging by income. That would suggest a critical step backward in Zearn’s results, which, over the past four years, Sharma said showed participation and progress have typically been about the same for students across income levels, countering the usual correlation between wealth and achievement.

Nationally, high-income students increased their progress through Zearn Math lessons significantly compared to their rates while school buildings were open. Low-income students’ progress slowed by 36 percent at the same time. (Opportunity Insights)

“We could see certainly by early April that there was a pattern where high-income students were holding their participation rates and increasing their math progress and low-income students, many of them had disappeared, and if they were around, they were doing far less math,” Sharma told The 74.

In most states, Zearn Math participation declined. At the same time, in many states, progress in Zearn Math — which was measured only for students who signed on to use the program at least once after their school building shut down — held steady or increased. In other words, while many students “disappeared,” those who didn’t “did a ton of math” in many states, Sharma said.

Overall, the data suggest school closures are not continuing existing learning gaps but are widening them, said David Williams, policy outreach director at Opportunity Insights.

“We’re really seeing something new in the data (from Zearn Math after schools closed), that this crisis is really impacting low-income kids and low-income communities in a real way that could spell trouble down the road,” Williams told The 74.

The data do not show why students dropped off or slowed their progress, though the digital divide and teacher or district expectations likely played a role. In 2018, 17 percent of teens said they could not complete homework assignments because they lacked a reliable internet connection or computer at home, and the share is even higher among low-income families, according to the Pew Research Center.

In a report about the first wave of findings from the tracker, the Opportunity Insights economists note that the Zearn data “raise the concern that COVID-19 may reduce social mobility and ultimately further amplify inequality by having particularly negative effects on human capital development for lower-income children.”

The numbers add to mounting research that distance learning was a poor substitute for in-person schooling in the spring, particularly for already vulnerable students. Researchers at NWEA, a nonprofit assessment organization, have warned that a steep “COVID slide” looms, estimating that students are likely to retain about 70 percent of this past year’s gains in reading compared with a typical year and less than 50 percent in math. The range of student achievement levels within individual classrooms — which could be as many as seven years of difference among kids before the pandemic — could also expand, researchers say.

• Read more: Researchers warn educators about a precipitous ‘COVID Slide,’ say schools will need to confront widening learning gaps this fall
  

Keeping kids ‘on the hook’ for learning 

However, the data also “was showing that it didn’t have to be that way,” said Sharma, Zearn’s CEO. In seven states and several individual counties across the country, average participation increased despite the disruptions and socioeconomic differences.

One of the regions that maintained strong engagement and progress across income groups was Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.

Jefferson Parish outperformed much of Louisiana in both student participation and student progress on Zearn Math lessons during the school building shutdowns. (Opportunity Insights)

Jefferson Parish Schools used a number of interventions to keep students engaged in academics after school buildings shut down. A call center staffed by central office employees and educators answered questions about logistics, student lessons and technology from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day. Paper packets handed out to students with their grab-and-go lunches had stickers with an email address families could contact for help. The district also trained teachers in Google Classroom and partnered with an internet company to provide low-cost service to families.

The district also put a grading policy in place that allowed students to receive grades for work they completed in the final nine weeks of the school year (though their average for the year wouldn’t be hurt if they didn’t have access to paper packets or online learning), even though Gov. John Bel Edwards waived many state accountability measures, including state testing and requirements for instructional time.

That policy helped keep kids “on the hook” for continuing to learn during the fourth quarter of the academic year, said Jenna Chiasson, who was executive director of teaching and learning in Jefferson Parish schools at the time. Chiasson is now assistant superintendent of academics for the Louisiana state Department of Education and is applying some of the lessons learned in her former post to plans for the upcoming school year across the state. Louisiana districts are making reopening decisions locally with guidance from the state education agency. Jefferson Parish Schools opened Aug. 31 with in-person classes for younger students and a hybrid approach for middle and high school students, though anyone can sign up to start completely online.

“I think we need to consider policies that hold the bar and expectations for teaching and learning this school year while showing grace and understanding for the current situation,” she told The 74. That includes keeping accountability measures like state tests and a minimum required number of instructional minutes for the year, even if school buildings remain closed, she said.

Chiasson said she’s encouraging districts to make and execute strong, intentional plans for communication with families and to think as seriously about teaching and learning as they are about health and safety. While safety is always a priority, “teaching and learning is why we have schools, and so it’s equally as important,” she said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support to Zearn and The 74. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

University of Tennessee

Timari Ray, who recently finished her first year at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, says she probably wouldn’t be able to afford higher education without the Tennessee Promise, which in 2014 made community college free for most students in the state.

Thanks to the Promise, she’s planning to transfer to the University of Tennessee after her second year and eventually open her own public relations firm.

“I at least would have tried [to go to college without the Promise], but I just know that my chances would have been kind of slim because you can only get so many scholarships for tuition, especially at [the University of Tennessee] — it’s a pretty expensive school and it’s kind of difficult to get into,” she said. “So I probably would just be working or maybe going into a trade … I honestly don’t know.”

Timari Ray at her high school graduation. (Courtesy Timari Ray)

Ray is currently enrolled in two online summer classes because TNAchieves, the nonprofit organization that administers the Tennessee Promise, is allowing students to use their scholarship money for summer courses this year because of the coronavirus.

The Tennessee Promise is one of a patchwork of more than 400 programs across the country that make college free or more affordable, each designed to serve different students and meet local goals. It’s funded by state and federal grants and an endowment, but the initiatives have different funding strategies, with some relying on philanthropy and others completely dependent on state and local budgets.

Many of these programs could be at risk in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, as mounting unemployment and business closures starve state and local budgets of tax revenue. Without help from the federal government, the programs are “going to be shells of their former selves,” said Douglas Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane University and fellow at the Brookings Institution. Whether that help comes “depends on the outcome of the election” in November, he said.

“Free college” is a popular idea among Democrats, though, and if they win big this year, it could get a major boost.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recently expanded his college affordability proposal in an effort to court progressive voters. He now promises to make community college free and waive tuition at four-year public colleges and universities for those from families making up to $125,000 per year. The Biden campaign also says he will expand access to Pell Grants, the federal aid given to low-income students, and double their value.

“If it becomes a unified Democratic government [at the federal level], then I think that the prospect of free college with federal funding increases a lot. It’s clearly a priority: Biden just upped his commitment, in part to unify the party going into the convention, so he’s now fully committed to that,” Harris told The 74 in an interview.

If Biden wins but Congress is split, with Republicans keeping the Senate, a “watered-down” version might still be feasible, he added, because there is bipartisan support for making some higher education more accessible.

Without federal help, it’s unclear how college promise programs will fare.

The initiatives could continue to operate with less or different funding, Harris pointed out. The programs might force colleges to “accept a smaller amount of money for eligible students” and make up the additional costs themselves. If they receive money from the CARES Act, the $2 trillion relief package passed in March, colleges could use it to meet that need, but if they have to continue the programs without the extra cash, “college quality will suffer,” he said in an email after the interview. The CARES Act sets aside nearly $14 billion for higher education.

At the same time, many colleges are worried about declining enrollment as students consider a gap year or are reluctant to pay steep tuition costs only to take courses online at home. The California State University system, the country’s largest four-year college system, announced in mid-May that most of its fall classes will be online this year. As of early June, ABC News reported that reopening college remained “a big experiment.” Of the more than 870 colleges tracked by The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67 percent said they were planning for in-person classes, 7 percent were preparing for online classes, 8 percent were proposing a hybrid model, 8 percent were waiting to decide and the other 9 percent were considering a range of scenarios.

The average cost of one year at a four-year public college or university was $9,037 for in-state students in 2017-18, the latest year available from the National Center for Education Statistics, though the price varies widely from state to state. Average in-state community college tuition was $3,243 that year.

Free college was one of the issues in the Democratic presidential primary that divided the more progressive candidates from the moderates, including Biden, but the former vice president veered left as the race winnowed. The move was an appeal to Biden’s former rivals in the race, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who said they would make tuition free for all students, regardless of income, at all two- and four-year public institutions.

Biden’s current plan echoes that of former candidate Pete Buttigieg, who wanted to make tuition free for 80 percent of students — those from households making less than $100,000 a year — and subsidize tuition for the next 10 percent by income, or those making $100,000 to $150,000. Mike Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar vowed to make tuition free at public two-year colleges only.

Most of these plans borrowed from existing promise programs that states and communities have already created for local students.

Four years free for all

The most generous programs cover tuition for four-year colleges and universities.

One of the most comprehensive and best known is the Kalamazoo Promise, started in 2005 when anonymous donors created an endowment to pay for local students to attend college. The Promise pays the full cost of tuition for students who attend Kalamazoo Public Schools for kindergarten through high school graduation. With the scholarship, students can attend any of 56 two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities in Michigan. Students who graduate from a Kalamazoo high school but only attended for a fraction of their school years can benefit from partial scholarships, proportionate to how long they were in the district.

Its reliance on philanthropy also means the Kalamazoo Promise isn’t subject to the whims or budget cuts of legislators. Von Washington, one of the program’s executive directors, said he has been given “reasonable assurance” from the donors that the scholarships are not at risk at this time. A bigger concern, Washington said, is that students might be reconsidering their higher education plans because of the pandemic, though it’s too soon to say what the effect will be.

“We know that we’re in an extremely unique position, never taking it for granted, but it does allow us to continue to focus on what we can do to try to help students feel comfortable about pursuing their postsecondary education no matter what the situation,” Washington said.

Part of what makes Kalamazoo’s initiative so generous is that it’s a “first-dollar scholarship,” which means it pays for students’ tuition outright, regardless of whether students are eligible for financial assistance such as Pell Grants. That means students can use that other financial aid for expenses like books and housing.

Third- and fourth-grade students drew portraits of themselves with their career goals at Arcadia Elementary School in 2016 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. (Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)

Many other promise programs are “last-dollar” scholarships, meaning they cover remaining tuition costs after other financial aid is used. Experts point out that last-dollar scholarships can disproportionately benefit better-off students, who aren’t eligible for need-based aid, because those students receive more money from the program.

Considered an exemplar for free college, the Kalamazoo Promise has now been in place long enough for some data to exist about student outcomes. The Promise, which students have 10 years to use, has meaningfully increased the number of students entering college and graduating, but fewer than half have earned bachelor’s degrees, according to research released in 2017. There’s also a racial gap in degree completion, with about 50 percent of white students graduating, compared with about 15 percent for African-American and Latino students, Michigan Public Radio has reported. About 7,000 have taken advantage of the scholarship so far, program administrators told Michigan Public Radio last year.

Free college for most

Some college affordability programs restrict eligibility by income, as the Biden plan would.

New York state’s Excelsior scholarship, for example, also offers free tuition to two- and four-year public schools to residents from households making up to $125,000 per year.

Going even farther than free tuition, Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat representing Hawaii, last year introduced a proposal in Congress that would make all college costs debt free, requiring that federal and state dollars be provided to students to cover tuition as well as living expenses.

Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, introduced the bill in the House as well.

Warren is a co-sponsor of the Schatz bill, as are Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, who all dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“Covering tuition for everybody is not a bad idea — it’s just that tuition is only 45 percent of the cost of college,” Schatz told Vox last year. “And I also believe that we ought to cover the full cost of college for people who can’t afford it before we cover tuition for people who can.”

Free community college

Some promise programs offer “free community college” — waived tuition at two-year colleges — so students can earn an associate’s degree and then either transfer to a four-year institution or enter the workforce. As president, Barack Obama pushed for free community college, a program that back then was expected to come in at around $13 billion a year in the long run. In 2015, Obama created an advisory board led by Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, a community college professor, to work on the issue.

The Tennessee Promise, a last-dollar program, provides two years of tuition-free community college or technical school for adults in the state. In addition to financial assistance, it includes a mentoring component that matches students with volunteers who provide encouragement and advice about navigating the transition to college. The program also employs full-time coaches who support Promise recipients throughout college.

Ray, the student from Pellissippi State Community College and a Tennessee Promise recipient, said the coaching component has been critical to her success so far. Her coach, Sumner Deason, meets with her monthly and often sends emails reminding her of things like financial aid deadlines. Ray said Deason, who was a first-generation college student herself, is a valuable mentor who cares about her as a person and encourages her when managing school — and life — gets tough.

“Especially if you’re a first-generation college student, you don’t know what you’re going into, you don’t have your family there who’s been through it to tell you, ‘This is exactly what I did and this is how I got through that,’” Ray said. A mentor or coach can be “someone there to tell you, ‘Oh, I’m proud of you,’ and someone to motivate you to keep going — that’s really big.”

The Tennessee Promise is open to all students who graduate from high school or earn a GED in the state before age 19, though some programs have more restrictive academic criteria.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden introduces President Barack Obama at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, ahead of the president’s formal announcement of his proposal to make community college free. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Hybrid: Free tuition or work experience 

In a Democratic debate in January, Klobuchar said leaders should not narrow their focus to college degrees alone.

“I actually think that some of our colleagues who want free college for all aren’t actually thinking big enough,” she said, adding that they should be considering where job openings will be in the future. Research indicates that many of America’s unfilled jobs require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.

“We’re not going to have a shortage of MBAs. We’re going to have a shortage of plumbers. So when we look at that … Where should our money go? It should go into K through 12. It should go into free one- and two-year degrees, like my dad got, like my sister got,” she said. She added that she would expand Pell Grants “so the money goes where it should go, instead of to rich kids going to college.”

Klobuchar and most of the other former Democratic candidates also expressed support for expanding investment in apprenticeship programs that allow people to earn money while they learn a trade or job.

Under the leadership of Mayor Randall Woodfin, Birmingham, Alabama, is rolling out a promise program this year that includes both higher education and an apprenticeship option. Under the Promise, which is funded by a public-private partnership, students who attend Birmingham City Schools from first to 12th grade can attend a public two- or four-year college for free; students who transfer into the district midway through their education and then graduate can receive a partial scholarship.

Another restriction is that students who choose to attend community college cannot then receive free tuition if they move on to four-year institutions. The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced in mid-January that it will partner with the Promise to help pay tuition for all Birmingham City Schools graduates who are eligible to attend.

In an unusual move, Birmingham has included an apprenticeship component for students who want to earn money while getting work experience. Typically about 50 percent of Birmingham high school grads move on to higher education.

Through the apprenticeship component, high school seniors can work at a local company while earning academic credit and $15 per hour, half paid by Birmingham Promise and half by the employer. Birmingham Promise, Inc., the organization managing the program, has moved some of its student support online to accommodate the pandemic shutdown, and the apprenticeships are currently suspended because schools are closed, a spokesperson said.

In recent weeks, new sponsors have signed on to the program, and Birmingham Promise is planning to begin an official fundraising campaign in late summer or early fall, officials said. They recognize that they “will be contending with the economic consequences of the current health crisis, but are confident the most severe and immediate financial consequences will have passed by that time,” a Birmingham Promise Inc. representative said.

Mayor Randall Woodfin (center) greets a graduate of Birmingham City Schools in 2019. (Daniel Roth, City of Birmingham, Alabama)

“I wanted to include [the apprenticeship component] because I think about the young people I meet all the time. I know they have career interests. I know they have passions. I know they have these things they want to do,” Woodfin said. “And then I realized they have no exposure, I realized they have no opportunity, and I realized they have no experience to connect that dream they have with a tangible opportunity.”

Fulfilling local needs

An advantage of local promise programs — for the communities themselves, at least — is that they can take local needs into account.

“One of the reasons that I am interested in these programs is that they have the potential to recognize the characteristics of the local context that matter to educational attainment,” such as the “college-going norms” there, the academic readiness of the students and the colleges and universities in the region, said Laura Perna, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who has spearheaded the effort to create a database of promise programs.

But local communities vary widely in the resources they have, Perna said. That raises concerns about college affordability generally and the sustainability of those programs that rely on state and local appropriations, which can be more “volatile” than philanthropy or other funding streams, she said. For example, the Oregon Promise, started in 2016, had to temporarily scale back who is eligible for community college scholarships because of “high turnout and limited funding,” CNN reported.

“It seems like it would be a more effective use of resources if we could figure out how to have federal, state, local, institutions [and] students’ funds all coming together, oriented toward this goal of ensuring that all academically qualified people can go to college regardless of their own resources,” she told The 74. “But I don’t know whether this will happen.”

Birmingham’s Woodfin told The 74 one of the reasons he decided to include apprenticeships in his initiative was because the local business community told him they were having trouble finding workers in industries including health care, manufacturing, technology and energy.

In an attempt to maximize the benefit to the state, New York requires students who use the Excelsior scholarship to reside and work in the state after graduation for the same amount of time that they received the money. Those who do not stay in the state have the award converted to a zero-interest loan.

The small city of Neodesha, Kansas — population 2,400 — has lost more than 1,000 residents over the past 40 years. Ben Cutler, a retired health care company CEO who grew up in Neodesha, last year donated enough money to create a college promise program to last for at least 25 years, The Kansas City Star reports.

He said he wanted to give back to the community that raised him and help it thrive again by attracting young families.

“I probably explored half a dozen different ways that I might use some of my capital resources to improve that community,” Cutler told the Star. “The more I studied it, the more I was convinced that the best bang for the buck I could create was through the Promise program.”

Residents of the city say the announcement has already sparked interest among potential home buyers.

“If there was ever a possibility for something to build Neodesha back up, there’s no doubt that this is the opportunity,” city native Jennifer Marler told the Star. “This is absolutely it.”

What the research says

One drawback to the free-community-college model is that community colleges tend to have lower graduation rates than four-year institutions, as well as smaller budgets.

An economic analysis released by the Brookings Institution in 2019 examined multiple interventions for promoting higher education and found that free community college “increases the proportion of high school graduates who complete a postsecondary degree, but does so at the expense of BA degrees.” That’s because, while some students who would not have pursued higher education do go to community college, some who would have gone to four-year schools switch to community college instead.

On the other hand, community colleges provide the middle skills training required for the open jobs in many communities. Harris, the Tulane economist, noted that this aspect makes community college programs attractive to Republicans.

Before Democrats made higher education affordability a campaign issue, versions of free college had bipartisan support. The Tennessee Promise was largely driven by former governor Bill Haslam, a Republican. The statewide program grew out of Knox Achieves, a privately funded initiative that paid for Knox County students to attend Pellissippi State Community College that started while Haslam was mayor of Knoxville, the county seat.

Another challenge is the tradition of state control in higher education. Researcher Matthew Chingos has argued in The New York Times that the sheer variation among the 50 state college systems, including who is eligible and how much tuition schools collect, would be a major barrier to a federal free college program.

When it comes to public opinion, how a program is structured matters. A study published in January found that people were more likely to perceive as “fair” free college programs that have a merit component, such as a minimum high school GPA, for eligibility. Conducted in 2017, the survey also found that respondents had a more positive view of programs that were available to all students regardless of need compared with those that used an income cap to target families making less than $50,000 per year.

In early February, a Progressive Policy Institute poll of swing voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania found that 69 percent preferred to “spend more to help Americans who don’t go to college get higher skills and better jobs” rather than spending more to make college free for everyone.

‘It’s pretty big’

Meanwhile, in communities around the country, college promise programs are opening doors for students.

For Ray, the Pellissippi State student, the opportunity to go to community college for free has been a game changer. She hopes not only to earn a bachelor’s degree and start her own PR business but also to encourage her younger siblings to do the same.

“It’s pretty big,” she said. “I go home and see my family [and] they just tell me how proud they are of me and how they want me to just keep going even though sometimes it gets tough … I’m the only one being a role model for my younger siblings so they can go to college.”

She plans to stay in Knoxville for years to come in part because of how the community has invested in her education.

“If I was somewhere else and they didn’t have anything like that, I wouldn’t want to stay there,” she said. “If I wasn’t able to get free education, then that wouldn’t be the best place for me.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

(Getty Images)

A new research effort underway at Tulane University aims to track how every K-12 school in the United States — district, charter and private — responded to the coronavirus pandemic and the abrupt shift to remote learning that came with it.

Led by economist and education researcher Douglas Harris, the project is part of REACH, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, based at the university in New Orleans. The center received a $100,000 grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, in April to gather information from school and district websites across the country and analyze the findings.

“Our primary purpose is just, how can we be helpful?” Harris said. “When the crisis first started, we said, ‘Alright, let’s forget about what we’re working on right now, so if we were to take a blank slate, what would we do?’” REACH already had a relationship with the Institute of Education Sciences and with Tulane’s computer science department, making it “well-situated” to take on this particular project, he added.

The first report is expected to be published soon as early July so policymakers and education leaders making decisions about the fall can use it.

“We’re going to try to do this quickly and in a live environment, where people are making decisions now,” Harris said. “Being informed about what’s actually happening seems to be pretty critical to that. If we don’t know what schools have done … we’re not going to be able to predict very well where this is going or to think very carefully about what can be done at different levels of government, down to the school and district level, to respond well as we go forward with the crisis.”

Researchers will look for patterns such as whether responses differed by type of school — district, charter or private — and whether there’s any correlation between student demographics and how schools reacted to the crisis, Harris said.

Douglas Harris

A point of contention between public and private schools has arisen around Education Secretary Betsy DeVos directing  public school districts to share federal CARES Act money meant to help them through the coronavirus crisis with private schools. The law sets aside $13.5 billion for K-12 education and comes as both private and public school leaders are worried about budgets for next year.

Harris said DeVos’s guidance regarding private schools “seems dubious to say the least.”

“I think there’s a legal question in that, it seems like a creative interpretation of the law. Even Sen. [Lamar] Alexander said that it was an incorrect interpretation, and he’s the one who essentially wrote the law,” he said.

Devos later issued a ruling saying public school districts could either distribute CARES Act money to private schools based on the percentage of students they enroll or they could restrict the aid to only those private school students who are low income, but only as long as the federal funds are also solely directed to low-income public school students.

The first part of the Tulane project involved researchers examining websites for about 3,500 randomly selected schools. The team is also partnering with the Tulane computer science department to use artificial intelligence to gather data from most of the rest of America’s approximately 150,000 schools to identify more trends.

The researchers are looking at six categories of information: how quickly schools and districts responded to school closures; personalization and engagement in instruction; non-academic engagement, such as morning meetings and office hours; academic expectations, including grading policies and time spent on subjects; whether other services like free lunch and counseling continued; and “equity of access” for English learners, students with disabilities and students who needed internet connectivity or devices.

Harris said he expects a “fairly long series” of reports to follow, possibly including another full website review when school resumes in the fall.

Having hard numbers available could help policymakers and advocates make informed decisions, said Lynn Jennings, senior director of national and state partnerships at The Education Trust, an advocacy organization focused on equity.

“Often when we talk about how are you going to actually make a real policy change, you need the data first,” she said. “You need solid data in order to make … real policy change and effective policy change. And so that is what’s promising about having this kind of data.”

The Tulane project is one of several aiming to inform educators and policymakers about the state of remote learning following the pandemic’s unprecedented disruption to K-12 education.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education, a research center at the University of Washington Bothell, has been tracking remote learning efforts for months as well. In a survey of 477 school systems, researchers there found that 85 percent “made sure their students received some form of grade- and subject- specific curriculum in packets” but less than a third were tracking student attendance. The nonprofit assessment company NWEA is projecting steep learning loss and widening achievement gaps. Parents, too, are worried their children are falling behind while school buildings are closed, according to surveys.

Morgan Polikoff, a researcher who’s not involved with any of these projects, said he’s been impressed by how quickly education researchers have responded to the coronavirus crisis and “turned on a dime” to make sure their work is meaningful and useful.

The REACH project is “an important contribution” to that, and could help policymakers who feel they don’t have much information to help them make decisions right now, said Polikoff, associate professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education and fellow at the think tank FutureED.

Still, he said, data collection on its own doesn’t mean much without analysis that’s shared publicly in usable formats. Additionally, Polikoff said that while he trusts the Tulane team is “full of super smart and savvy researchers,” he has concerns about the quality of information gleaned from school websites — and whether schools are really doing what their sites say.

“Historically, my experience spending time on school and district websites is they stink, and they’re not up to date or they’re hard to navigate or they don’t contain the information that you want or that you think they should, or maybe even that they’re legally required to,” he said. That means it will be important for researchers to use the REACH data in conjunction with other information, like survey results, to draw conclusions, he said.

Harris said he’s been in touch with other researchers already and that the project will adapt based on what researchers find and what’s happening on the ground in schools.

“We don’t know what we’re going to find,” he said, “so I think what we do next depends on what we find in this first report.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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As remote learning ramps up and more states announce that school closures will last through the end of the academic year, a new teacher survey suggests many students are still missing from their virtual classrooms during the coronavirus pandemic.

Fifty-five percent of teachers said more than half of their students have not been tuning in to remote classes in the informal survey conducted by the social media app Fishbowl.

From April 6 through April 9, the app asked teachers “How many of your students are attending your remote classes?” Educators could choose from four responses: 0-25 percent, 26-50 percent, 51-75 percent, or more than 75 percent.

Of the 5,659 who responded, 35 percent said the attendance rate was 25 percent or less, while just 17 percent reported at least 75 percent of students were attending class. The survey is not scientific and not much information is available about where the teachers work. Fishbowl said nearly 97 percent of the self-selecting respondents teach in district schools.

Fishbowl

The Fishbowl team created the poll after seeing that educators using the app were discussing obstacles related to student engagement, including lack of technology and the hurdles faced by working parents, spokesperson Becky Graham said.

“It really was just based upon some of the conversations that were happening on the platform and some of the challenges we were witnessing [teachers] dealing with firsthand,” she said.

Fishbowl is an app-based social network that allows people to anonymously discuss their workplace with others from their industry or company. The app first opened in 2017 to consultants and later allowed people who work in select fields, including education in 2019, to join, according to the magazine Ad Age. The app verifies that users work in a certain field before they are added to its discussion page, which is called a bowl. Graham said tens of thousands of teachers use the app.

With more than 55 million students out of class, many for the remainder of the academic year, schools and districts across the country have taken a range of approaches to distance learning, with some teachers offering real-time lessons via video platforms like Zoom and others simply handing out paper packets for kids to complete. About 70 percent of schools had a plan in place for remote learning as of April 7, according to data collected by the American Enterprise Institute. How districts track attendance also differs, with some looking for students to sign in to a learning management platform each weekday and others relying on teachers to reach students by phone regularly.

A number of issues can disconnect students from school, from homelessness to lacking internet service or not having enough devices for every child in a family. Moreover, chronic absenteeism — missing a significant portion of the school year — is an issue even when traditional classes are in session, with millions of kids often missing school every year.

Research indicates frequent absences are associated with lower test scores and increased risk of dropping out of school. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who studies student attendance and graduation patterns, said he has two levels of concern about students who are not engaged with remote learning. First, those students are missing out on learning opportunities and may fall behind academically. Second, they’re losing their connection to school, which could make it harder to get reengage next year.

“There’s sort of a double hit,” Balfanz said. If students are losing both learning time and their relationship with the school community, the two will reinforce each other next year, causing those students to struggle more and, if they are older, putting them at risk for dropping out. To improve attendance, Balfanz said educators should try to keep the nonacademic parts of school going, such as by having clubs continue to stay connected or asking students to work on projects together outside of their regular lessons.

“We’re already hearing a lot that kids can only be online learning for so many hours of the day, but there’s a lot of other hours in the day,” he said.

Of the nine states where at least 100 teachers responded to the Fishbowl survey, Michigan had the lowest reported attendance, with nearly 62 percent of teachers saying their attendance rate was 25 percent or less. New Jersey educators reported the highest student participation among that group, with two-thirds of teachers saying that more than half of their students were logging on.

New York, which includes New York City, America’s largest district with 1.1 million students, was in the middle of the pack, with about 43 percent of teachers reporting that more than half of students were attending remote classes. Other states that had at least 100 teachers responding were California, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

Education Week posed a similar question to teachers April 7 and 8, asking “What percentage of your students are essentially ‘truant’ during coronavirus closures?” Public school educators reported an average of 22 percent of students were missing class; those in schools with more students from low-income backgrounds said they were seeing higher absence rates.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

A sign displays the message that Glen Rock High School in New Jersey will transition to virtual learning starting March 17 as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States on March 15, 2020. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

When she read in late February that the coronavirus could infect as many as 70 percent of Americans, Emily Freitag was “primed” to prepare for its effect on schools. She grew up near New Rochelle, New York, one of the first U.S. hotspots of the virus, and her husband, who analyzes international hotel data, saw the effects of the looming pandemic early.

Freitag is cofounder and CEO of Instruction Partners, a nonprofit that works with 106 school systems around the country to ensure “equitable access to great instruction for students in poverty, students of color, students learning English, and students with disabilities.” Under normal circumstances, the organization helps small school systems, where teachers and staff are often stretched thin, deal with what the organization calls “the unglamorous stuff that is often overlooked” — coaching models, curriculum design and professional development.

Back in February, Freitag remembers thinking, “If this [pandemic] actually happens, this is just going to be so seismic for schools.”

As schools consider distance learning options amid growing COVID-19 concerns, we created a hub of resources to support school and system leaders in planning for school closures. #EduLeaders #EduChat https://t.co/U900Z3mX5E

— Instruction Partners (@InstructUP) March 13, 2020

Freitag and her team began preparing their response Feb. 27, starting with a blog post with guidance for school leaders bracing for school closures.

“It is time for schools to seriously think about their learning resiliency plans to guarantee that illness closures do not prevent them from fulfilling the mission of advancing student learning,” Freitag wrote.

In the following days, Instruction Partners created a COVID-19 Resource Hub on its website that offers guidance on best practices for transitioning to distance learning and specific resources for schools to use when teaching students.” Instruction Partners is updating and adding to the hub as districts experiment with distance learning.

Since then, 47 states have shut down all public schools, leaving more than 55 million students out of class, according to a rolling count by Education Week. For many educators, the first step was to make sure students were safe and had access to food. Meanwhile, Instruction Partners was working to make sure schools would have relevant resources for remote learning available when they were ready to focus on academics. Some districts launched online learning programs right away while others took a week or longer to make plans.

To help districts plot a path forward, the organization created a “school hierarchy of needs” that ranges from getting organized and making a plan for distributing student meals to helping students learn from home and planning for regular school to begin again.

See a more detailed version. (Instruction Partners)

Here are some of Freitag’s tips for educators trying to make distance learning work during the pandemic:

• Make sure every student has a point of contact — a go-to adult who can act as a “virtual homeroom teacher” — and try to keep caseloads for those adults as small as possible.
• Establish a system of daily communication between students and teachers.
• Create weekly routines for teachers, who might be working remotely for the first time
• Send the message, “We’re doing school in a different way,” rather than “School is closed.”
• If you have devices at school, get them home to students who need them to access online learning.
• Take it one week at a time: Plan for one week, then readjust for the next week
• Design solutions for the most vulnerable students, such as those in special education, first — and then apply them to all students.
• Project calm and be solutions-oriented. Focus on health, safety, wellness and learning for all students.

Freitag said there are three general ways school systems are doing distance learning: digital, analog and hybrid. The digital model, which is likely most common in high school and in classes where all students already had their own devices, resembles an online course where students log in to digital classes and receive and submit assignments through an internet learning platform. Some school systems might choose to go analog, relying on hardcopy packets and textbooks with teachers making regular phone calls to check in on students and collecting all the work when school reopens. Finally, a hybrid model combines the two, perhaps with teachers holding class on a video platform like Zoom or Google Hangouts and students submitting work using a range of tools from Google Docs to text message.

The hub includes various resources, including templates for meeting notes for educators gathering — virtually or in person — to plan for distance learning, sample student schedules for specific grade levels for each type of distance learning, and a template for educators to use to evaluate online lessons and worksheets. The hub also links to specific ready-to-use resources, such as Curriculum Associates, which offers free printable math and reading worksheets for students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The support from Instruction Partners proved valuable for Allison Leslie, chief academic officer at Compass Community Schools, a charter network in Memphis, Tennessee. Leslie, whose school system has been an Instruction Partners client since it opened last year, first spoke with Freitag about potential closures March 11 and has used the Resource Hub to guide the network’s response to school closures.

Instruction Partners “really anticipated this in a great way and put together lots of tools and resources that we pulled from the website,” she said. Additionally, Instruction Partners helped network leaders plan professional development sessions about remote teaching and choose which of their existing resources they should use.

Like many educators and leaders, Freitag is worried about learning loss among those who are already vulnerable, particularly students with disabilities. Many parents and educators are still figuring out how to meet these students’ needs, and the issue has become a barrier to distance learning in some places. For example, Philadelphia district officials worried remote schooling might not be accessible for all students, so they instructed principals not to attempt it at all.

“This is absolutely an urgent and significant threat for lots and lots of kids,” Freitag said. “I also believe educators are capable of doing a lot. And I think everyone is reeling right now, but I think if we take this one step at a time together we will find solutions.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to Instruction Partners and LA School Report. 

Placards posted above water fountains warn against drinking the water at Flint Northwestern High School in Flint, Michigan, May 4, 2016. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

As Newark, New Jersey, Flint, Michigan, and other cities continue to grapple with lead in their water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency is mulling changes to the decades-old regulation meant to protect Americans from the highly damaging contaminant.

Among the proposed changes to the Lead and Copper Rule are a first-time national requirement to test water in schools and child care facilities for lead and an extension to the amount of time water companies have to replace lead pipes. Lead is a known toxin that can cause irreversible developmental and physical problems, especially in those who ingest it as children.

The changes are part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to reduce childhood lead exposure, but advocates say the proposal could actually weaken water protections while creating a false sense of security about how much lead is seeping into the system and whether it poses a danger. The agency is taking public comment on the proposal until Feb. 12.

“EPA actually committed back in 2005 that it needed to revise the Lead and Copper Rule because it was inadequate for dealing with these lead crises,” said Elin Betanzo, a water engineer who was instrumental in uncovering the Flint water contamination. “There are a few provisions in there that do improve [the rule] a little bit, but then there are other provisions that I see as really weakening overall our protections for lead in drinking water. So far, I don’t see the huge improvement in public health protection that I was hoping to see in a Lead and Copper Rule revision.”

At an elementary school in Clark County, Nevada, EPA officials on Oct. 10 announced the proposed changes to the regulations. EPA Pacific Southwest administrator Mike Stoker said Clark County is a “role model,” the Las Vegas Sun reported, because it has already been testing water for lead even though federal law does not currently require it. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler also announced the proposal at an event in Green Bay, Wisconsin around the same time.

While some states and localities like Clark County have already taken action on their own, Stoker touted the proposed change to the law that would mandate for the first time that the water in schools and child care facilities nationwide be tested for lead. The additional testing requirement is one potential change among many to a complicated regulation created in 1991 that falls under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The revisions would require water utility companies to test 20 percent of the schools and child care facilities they serve every year, checking the water at all of them over a five-year period. The changes would mandate water samples be taken and tested from five taps at each school and two at each child care facility.

Erik Olson, a senior strategic director at the Natural Resource Defense Council, a nonprofit focused on environmental issues, sees potential pitfalls. The new testing requirement could produce misleading results because lead levels in water can fluctuate depending on numerous factors, he said. The levels can also vary within a building, so samples from a handful of taps aren’t representative of the untested faucets.

“If you do more frequent monitoring, you’re going to find more problems because, by its nature, lead contamination varies from time to time and even with how the water’s turned on and off, how long the water sits, all those kinds of things, so we are concerned that people may say, ‘Oh, well, our water was tested in our school and there’s no problem,’ when all they did was test five taps once every five years and may overlook the problem,” Olson told The 74.

The testing requirements could also add new burdens to schools and states without adding much public health benefit, Betanzo, the water engineer who also worked at the EPA from 2000 to 2008, told The 74. Most states are responsible for making sure water systems comply with the federal Lead and Copper Rule.

Despite requiring testing, the proposed revisions to the federal rule do not order states or schools to take action to remove lead if they find it in any amount.

Water systems, which are responsible for testing under the revisions, would be required to alert school officials, leaving the decision about whether to act in their hands. The EPA recommends schools take the the “3Ts” approach — training, testing and taking action on lead — but that guidance is optional.

Betanzo said she is also worried teachers and families could receive information without the appropriate context. The federal action level for lead — the level of lead at which a water system has to do something to reduce contamination in its water supply — is 15 parts per billion. That’s a measure of corrosion control for the water system, though, not an indication that water is safe to drink if lead is present at levels less than 15 parts per billion. The American Academy of Pediatrics and other experts say the only safe level of lead in water is none at all.

“I’m concerned that without very clear information about what to do with those sampling results, it will be very easy for schools and parents and families and staff to not understand the sampling data — to think that something that’s 15 parts per billion is OK for people to be drinking in schools, when it’s actually not,” Betanzo said. Moreover, even if schools or child care facilities are found to have more than 15 parts per billion of lead in the water, there’s no federal trigger for anyone to act to reduce or eliminate it.

The EPA’s stated goal with the revisions is to “reduce lead exposure in drinking water where it is needed the most,” according to an online fact sheet. An EPA spokesperson said in an email that the proposed rule changes take “a proactive and holistic approach to improving the current rule — from testing to treatment to telling the public about the levels and risks of lead in drinking water.”

Asked why the agency is not adding a mandate for schools to take action when lead is found in water at any level, a spokesperson said in an email that the EPA is authorized to regulate public water systems under the Safe Drinking Water Act and “recommends that the school or child care facility use the 3Ts guidance to help make decisions about communicating sampling results to the parents and occupants of the facility as well as any follow-up remedial actions.”

One advocate expressed concern, but said the EPA is limited in what it can do to regulate what goes on inside schools and child care centers.

“What I sense from reading [the proposal] is a sincere desire to try to address the gap in the current Lead and Copper Rule regarding schools and child care facilities because lead exposure is so significant for children, especially in child care where the younger children are exposed,” said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit working to protect the environment. “I think it was their attempt to try to fill that gap with the tools they had, but the law isn’t designed to really deal with this.”

There is no safe level of lead exposure for children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Academy of Pediatrics and World Health Organization. In addition to water, children can be exposed to lead through contaminated paint, dust and soil.

The consequences of lead exposure can be dire. In addition to lower IQ and behavioral problems, lead exposure has been linked to a higher likelihood of perpetrating violence as an adult. It can also cause anemia, hypertension, and problems with the kidneys, immune system and reproductive organs, according to the World Health Organization. Lead exposure for pregnant women can also cause miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight and premature birth, the WHO reports.

Since the water crisis began in Flint, the share of students needing special education services has nearly doubled there, The New York Times reported in November.

Replacing lead pipes could take more than 30 years

The proposed revisions weaken at least one key component of the current rule. The new rule would require water utility companies to replace at least 3 percent of lead pipes per year, effectively giving them 33 years to replace an entire lead-containing line. That’s a decrease from the current requirement to replace 7 percent per year, equivalent to about 14 years to replace a lead pipe.

Asked about this change, an EPA spokesperson said the existing 7 percent rate “is rarely occurring due to weaknesses in the current rule” and that the revisions, if enacted, would lead to more replacements “by closing these loopholes, propelling early action, and strengthening replacement requirements.” Advocates said that while the proposal does close some loopholes, they would like to see the agency go further in pressing for lead pipes to be removed from the ground.

The revisions include a “few modest tweaks in the rule that would be somewhat helpful, but I think overall the small tweaks … are swallowed up by this very problematic 20-year extension in how long it takes to pull the lead pipes out of the ground,” Olson of the Natural Resource Defense Council said.

There are some bright spots in the proposed revisions as well. For example, Neltner said, though the testing requirement could be better, putting schools and child care facilities in contact with their water utilities to identify problems is a positive step.

School chiefs call for complete removal of lead pipes

Lead-contaminated water was found in America’s two largest school systems, New York City and Los Angeles in 2018, and since 2016, the metal has been found in school water in Atlanta; Baltimore; Chicago; Detroit and Portland, Oregon.

Although schools are unlikely to have lead pipes, the metal can get into water from fixtures and solder, even those that are billed as lead free. Until 2014, fixtures could contain up to 8 percent lead by weight and be labeled lead free; today the maximum is 0.25 percent lead for something to be classified as lead free, but even that is a high enough amount that it could leech into the water, experts say.

Child care facilities, which tend to be smaller, are more likely to have lead pipes, especially those based in private homes, said Lindsay McCormick, a program manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. This is a concern because children under age 6 are most vulnerable to lead, especially babies fed with formula using water containing lead.

A 2019 analysis of policies in 31 states and Washington, D.C., from Environment America, an environmental advocacy group, gave more than half of the states it studied a failing grade for protecting children from lead at school.

For schools, lead in water is one in a list of infrastructure challenges. The average school building in the United States is more than 40 years old, and in 2019 schools dealt with problems stemming from asbestos and lead paint as well as failing heat and air conditioning systems.

Some states are taking initiative on their own. Michigan has a state Lead and Copper Rule, adopted in June 2018, that requires all pipes containing lead to be replaced by 2041, expands water testing and tightens other regulations. Lawmakers in the state have also introduced legislation that takes a “filter-first” approach, requiring schools and child care centers to provide filtered water for children and staff; a similar bill was introduced but died in committee in the Florida state Senate last year. Advocates tend to support the filter-first approach because it’s cheaper and more convenient than replacing pipes and fixtures, and it can be implemented sooner.

A water filter that complies with the filter-first proposal in Michigan. (Courtesy Elin Betanzo)

As of Feb. 3—a little more than one week before the close of the comment period — 138 comments have been filed on the proposed revisions. Several commenters asked the EPA to extend the time allowed for input because of the complexity of the rule, which the agency did, adding 30 days to the original comment period. Some commenters urged the EPA to take a stronger stance on replacing lead service lines, while others seemed generally supportive of the changes, including many anonymous filers who said they thought the changes would strengthen public health protections.

At least six school district superintendents wrote letters to express concern about a potential lack of funding for schools and water systems to conduct the sampling and reduce lead if it is found. AASA, the professional organization for district superintendents, provided a sample letter for district leaders to use, and a spokesperson said the group planned to submit comments on behalf of several education organizations expressing worry that the proposal doesn’t go far enough to protect students from lead.

“It is time that the EPA acknowledges that we are past the point of addressing this problem through band-aid solutions in the form of new drinking water testing provisions, and instead, recognizes that our children are not safe without the complete removal of all lead service lines where kids live, learn, and play,” the letter says. The proposal makes some progress by adding testing in schools, AASA writes, but “still falls short of creating meaningful change.”

In fact, Betanzo, who founded and now runs her own consulting firm, Safe Water Engineering LLC, said the proposal could have a negative impact by diverting funds, which are already in short supply for schools, water systems and oversight agencies, to projects like school sampling that are limited in what they can accomplish.

“It won’t be a good scene,” said Betanzo. “It’s not going to be an improvement, and it’s going to take resources away from the important work that our water utilities and state oversight programs are already doing … I don’t see this being a positive moving us in the right direction.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Massachusetts report cards show how the district data compare to the state’s, as shown here in the Boston report card. The comparison adds context, which is crucial for families, according to a new report. (Source: Massachusetts State Report Card)

Who should own education data?

If you ask the Data Quality Campaign’s Brennan McMahon Parton, it’s the community — students and their families have the right to know how their schools are doing for all students, she says. But some states are making that pretty difficult.

That’s why her organization partnered with two other parent empowerment groups to create a resource outlining advice and best practices for creating community-friendly state report cards. The Campaign worked with the National PTA and Learning Heroes to release Disaggregated Data: Not Just a Box Checking Exercise in late October.

An analysis of state report cards earlier this year by the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit focused on improving education data and making it more accessible, found that most states were not breaking out data for all of the student groups as required by federal law.

The analysis found that just 10 states separated out data for all of the required student groups in their state report cards: Delaware, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Wyoming. The others — plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico — were missing one or more student groups in their reports. Florida and Massachusetts have released new report cards since the analysis that show data for all groups from the 2018-2019 school year. Some other states may have also updated their report cards since Data Quality Campaign checked in January. The law’s flexibility and waivers make it difficult to track exactly which states are meeting the requirements.

“People deserve this data,” Parton told The 74. “It’s not the state’s data. It’s our data — it’s that community’s data. They deserve to have it in a way that’s easy to find, use and understand.”

Having access to state- and school-level data helps parents “do the math” about academic performance, Parton said. Parents are “pretty adept” at figuring out how well their students are doing in school by looking at the individual report cards their kids bring home and how the school is performing overall, she added. Clearer, easier to navigate school, district and state report cards help parents answer the bigger questions they have about their children’s schools and district, Parton said.

“Families and communities need a way to piece together that picture and understand, how are the adults, how are the leaders, how are the elected school board members in my school or district really supporting my student? Do I think they’re getting the best possible suite of opportunities?” Parton said. “A [state] report card is really the entry point for that conversation.”

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal education law passed in 2015, states must break out academic performance data for nine categories: gender, race and ethnicity, students with disabilities, students from low-income families, students learning English, students in foster care, students experiencing homelessness, students from military families, and students from migrant families.

Gathering and verifying all the numbers takes time, but states are working to make their data public, said Kirsten Carr, senior program director for student expectations at the Council of Chief State School Officers.

“States are deeply committed to getting all of the information out there as quickly as they can [while] making sure that it’s accurate,” she told The 74, noting that in some cases, education departments have to work across agencies to get the data they need.

State leaders are also working to make the information “meaningful” for parents and stakeholders, she said.

Several of the required groups, such as students experiencing homelessness and black and Latino students, have been historically underserved by schools and often land on the wrong side of achievement gaps.

Some of the state report cards that already display all of the groups may still lack key data.

Although New York is reporting statewide data for all of the groups, recent reporting from The 74 revealed that New York City, the nation’s largest school district with more than 1.1 million students, is not yet reporting broken out performance data for students in foster care. Proficiency rates for military-connected students and migrant students in New York City schools are also missing. The scores on the state report card reflect only the districts that have submitted detailed data to the state, meaning it is incomplete.

Having access to the data broken out for these cohorts can help families see how well schools are serving them. For example, the latest report card for New York City schools shows that 46 percent of students in third through eighth grade were proficient in math on the state test. But when the data is broken down by race, a gap appears: 67 percent of white students were proficient, compared to 28 percent of their black peers and 33 percent of Hispanic and Latino students.

In another example, the Chicago Public Schools district report card shows that 24 percent of all students were proficient on the state math test, but a closer look reveals that just 6 percent of English language learners passed the test in eighth grade.

Source: Illinois State Report Card

The reporting requirements are meant to push states toward accountability and transparency, but there are no hard deadlines or consequences at this time. Parton said she and her team are “flummoxed” about why so many data points are missing from the report cards, especially because some of the missing student group requirements — such as reporting scores by gender — were also required under No Child Left Behind, the prior K-12 education law.

The organizations urge state leaders to do two things to improve their report cards: Make the data easier to find and help families understand the information. The second step has two parts:

1. Put the data in context: For example, show school data side by side with another school or with the overall state numbers for easy comparison or include a simple sentence that gives context.

2. Explain what the numbers mean and why they’re there: “Without context, the data appears to make a statement about students’ abilities when really it is a statement about how the school is serving its students,” the authors write. In other words, report cards should explain that breaking out student data is a judgment of the adults in schools rather than the kids.

The report also notes that report cards should be at an eighth-grade reading level to be accessible and to ensure accurate translations. An analysis by DQC found that the average reading level for state report cards was 14th grade, equivalent to “some college.”

Just adding a sentence or two about what the numbers mean and why they matter can make a big difference for parents, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit focused on improving parent access to education data. Additionally, she said, state report cards should prioritize the data that parents want. Parents are more interested in school performance than student attendance rates, for example, according to Learning Heroes research.

“Start with what they care most about because then you’ll get their attention,” she said. “If you start with the stuff that they don’t care about, you’ll lose them right away.”

Disclosure: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to Learning Heroes and The 74. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Data Quality Campaign and The 74.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Reports released this summer offer new insight into America’s school principals, from their racial diversity to how turnover affects student achievement.

The new papers add to a growing body of research about principals but also raise new questions, said Brendan Bartanen, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of recent reports on principal diversity and principal turnover.

“We know that principals matter,” Bartanen told The 74. “We still don’t have a great understanding of the specifics of that — how do they matter, what are the specific things that they do, what are the ways that we could train them better and provide them better development?”

Amid growing concern about teacher diversity — America’s teachers are about 80 percent white — Bartanen’s research shows that black principals are more likely to hire black teachers to work in their schools. Having just one black teacher in elementary school can improve a number of outcomes for black students. But federal data show that principals are overwhelmingly white.

Here are six things we learned about America’s principals this summer.

1. Principals are overwhelmingly white, despite increasingly diverse students.

Although more than half of U.S. students are racial minorities, about 78 percent of public school principals are white, according to 2017-18 survey data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics and released in August. That mirrors the makeup of the American teaching corps, which is about 80 percent white.

The remaining principals were about 8.9 percent Hispanic, 10.5 percent black and 2.9 percent other races. Urban districts were more likely to have principals of color than their rural, town and suburban counterparts.

Most nonwhite principals were in high-poverty schools. At schools where 75 percent or more of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, almost 60 percent of teachers were white while 16.5 percent were Hispanic and 21 percent were black, the NCES data show. (NCES did not break down responses in the “other” category, which includes American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and two or more races.)

2. Charter school leadership was slightly more diverse than principals in traditional public schools.

In charter schools, 66.5 percent of principals were white, while 12.3 percent were Hispanic and 16.3 percent were black, according to the NCES numbers.

A recent study by the Fordham Institute found that charters also tend to employ more black teachers than district schools do.

3. Black principals are more likely to hire and retain black teachers.

When a school gains a black principal, black teachers are more likely to be hired and retained, according to a working paper written by Bartanen and Jason A. Grissom of Vanderbilt University and released in May by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Schools that changed from a white to a black principal saw an average increase in black teachers of about 3 percentage points because black teachers were more likely to be hired and to stay in their positions.

Bartanen and Grissom used teacher data from Missouri and Tennessee, where there was not enough information to gauge the effects of switching from white to Latino principals. The working paper has not been peer-reviewed and is subject to change.

4. Most principals say their training left them well prepared.

A report released by RAND used survey data to look at teachers’ attitudes about their preparation programs.

Overall, principals reported that their training prepared them well to lead a school, with more than 80 percent responding that they could see a connection between their coursework and practice as school leaders.

Additionally, the RAND researchers found a positive relationship between the amount of field experience educators had and how they rated their training programs. Both teachers and principals who had more field experience reported feeling more prepared for their work in schools.

Credit: RAND

5 But 39 percent of white principals say they were not well prepared to support black, Latino and low-income students. 

When asked whether their preservice training prepared them to support black, Latino and low-income students, 62 percent of white principals agreed, compared with 76 percent of nonwhite principals, according to the RAND report. The leaves about 2 in 5 white principals who said they were “mostly” or “completely” unprepared to work with poor and minority students.

There was a similar gap among teachers.

Credit: RAND

6. Principal turnover tends to hurt student achievement — but not always.

The average rate of principal turnover is around 18 percent, according to NCES data. The schools principals left typically saw declines in math and reading scores, but the reason for the leadership change affected the outcomes, according to a new report published in June in Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis. For example, in cases in which the principal was demoted, student achievement stayed the same or improved. Meanwhile, students whose principals moved to other schools or to district-level positions saw a decrease in their math and reading scores.

The takeaway is that districts should be strategic about retaining strong principals but not afraid to remove low-performing ones, said Bartanen, who wrote the paper with Grissom and Laura K. Rogers.

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation support both RAND and The 74.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

California enacted some of the strictest vaccination laws in the country in 2015 following a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland. Now, some lawmakers are looking to make the policy even more restrictive. (Getty Images)

Confronting a national measles outbreak, California lawmakers this week are mulling how to tighten the state’s already-strict vaccine policy for students while balancing parental rights.

State Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician representing Sacramento, on Tuesday announced changes to legislation he previously unveiled intending to stop unnecessary exemptions from mandatory immunizations. According to a statement from Pan’s office, the senator crafted the changes with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who previously expressed concern that the bill would give the state health department purview over medical exemptions from vaccinations.

“I’m a parent, I don’t want someone that the governor of California appointed to make a decision for my family,” Newsom said in early June.

Senate Bill 276 would require government oversight of exemptions for children who attend schools where the vaccination rate falls below 95 percent. Under the bill, a doctor in the state health department would also review all rejected applications for medical exemptions, a safeguard that was not included in the initial draft.

The earlier version of the bill would have required health department oversight in all cases, not just those in schools with low vaccination rates. The revised proposal also standardizes the exemption form and allows a wider range of reasons for students to skip their shots. For example, family medical history can now be considered, The Los Angeles Times reports.

The California Assembly Health Committee is expected to vote on the bill Thursday, and protesters, who object to any government involvement in granting medical exemptions, are expected to show up to oppose it, The L.A. Times reports.

Additionally, the revised bill includes a provision that will trigger a review if an individual doctor issues more than five exemptions in a year because “medical exemptions should be rare,” Pan’s office said in a statement. Certain allergies or autoimmune disorders could qualify a child for a medical exemption.

Research published last year in Pediatrics indicated some doctors in California were granting medical exemptions for children who did not need them, sometimes charging parents a fee in exchange for the exemption form. Pan’s amended bill would not allow doctors to charge patients for the forms, the L.A. Times reported.

Newsom has expressed support for the updated bill.

UPDATED: California lawmakers make big changes to vaccine bill, earning support from @GavinNewsom https://t.co/natgTDXuXu

— Melody Gutierrez (@MelodyGutierrez) June 18, 2019

Vaccinate California, the California Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, California are co-sponsoring the bill.

“I want to thank Gov. Newsom for his leadership on children’s health and standing up for science and the importance of vaccination by supporting SB 276,” Pan said in a statement. “I appreciate that the governor has worked with me in crafting a California solution to halting the abuse of medical exemptions that endanger our children. The governor recognizes that we need to ensure that children who truly need medical exemptions get them and they will be safe in their schools with community immunity.”

Spurred by the measles outbreak unfolding around the country, New York, Maine and Washington state have all taken steps this year to restrict vaccine exemptions based on religious beliefs, a type of exemption that California had already banned.

Since Jan. 1, 1,044 cases of measles have been reported in the United States. The disease was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, but the Centers for Disease Control warned in May that if the outbreaks continue through the summer and fall, the United States could lose its status as a country that has eradicated measles.

California has reported 52 cases of measles so far in 2019; 10 were in Los Angeles county.

The most recent measles death in the U.S. occurred in 2015, but before the vaccine was common, the disease killed hundreds of children each year, according to the CDC.

Credit: Centers for Disease Control

New York lawmakers voted last week to end religious exemptions for all required vaccines. The state does not allow for personal or philosophical exemptions, so now all children must receive the mandatory vaccinations to attend school unless they have a medical reason they cannot receive them. The law went into effect immediately but gives students 30 days to catch up on immunizations after they enroll in school.

New York has seen the worst of the current measles outbreak, with New York City alone reporting 588 cases since September.

Democratic Assemblyman Nader Sayegh voted against the measure, saying he was concerned about taking away parental freedom and children potential missing class because of their immunization record.

“Having my educator hat on, having kids out of school really is upsetting for me,” said Sayegh, a former principal and school board member.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill ending religious exemptions as soon as it reached his desk. The New York outbreak has largely been concentrated in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, where misinformation has spread rapidly and some see vaccine refusal as a religious freedom issue.

“The science is crystal clear: Vaccines are safe, effective and the best way to keep our children safe,” Cuomo said in a statement. “This administration has taken aggressive action to contain the measles outbreak, but given its scale, additional steps are needed to end this public health crisis.”

All 50 states and Washington, D.C., have vaccine requirements for children to attend school, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1905 case Jacobson v. Massachusetts that states have the authority to make vaccines mandatory. That ruling was reaffirmed in a 1922 case that allowed the San Antonio, Texas, school district to exclude unvaccinated children from school.

All states allow medical exemptions and most allow exemptions for philosophical or religious reasons as well.

In Maine, where the vaccine opt-out rate is above the national average, lawmakers voted to end all nonmedical exemptions earlier this month.

A Massachusetts lawmaker has also introduced a bill to end religious exemptions there.

Credit: National Conference of State Legislatures

Lawmakers in Washington state have also reacted to the measles outbreak. They were not able to get enough support to fully end nonmedical exemptions, but they did pass a law that ends the personal and philosophical exemptions from the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) shot. Washington was an early epicenter of the measles outbreak, prompting Gov. Jay Inslee to declare a state of emergency in January.

“We would have preferred removing the personal exemption for all vaccines, but we weren’t able to — there was so much political pushback,” said Washington state Rep. Monica Stonier, a Democrat. “We just wanted to get something done.”

After a 2014 measles outbreak originated at Disneyland, California enacted some of the country’s strictest vaccine policies, requiring students to have a doctor’s form citing a medical reason if they are not vaccinated.

The proposed changes gained national attention last week when actress Jessica Biel appeared in Sacramento to lobby against them.

Biel said that she is in favor of vaccines generally but thinks the proposal goes too far.

“I support children getting vaccinations and I also support families having the right to make educated medical decisions for their children alongside their physicians,” she wrote on Instagram.

• Read more: Commentary: What state and local education leaders can do to stop the spread of measles

Students in Michael Danielson’s media literacy class with storyboards for public service announcements. (Photo: Michael Danielson)

Michael Danielson gives students in his ninth-grade media literacy class a simple piece of homework each night: Pay attention.

The assignment is meant to prod them into thinking critically about the countless messages that bombard them every day. They report back to their teacher and classmates at the start of each class with “media literacy moments,” explaining how they discovered hidden motives and attempts to manipulate them or sell them products.

Seeing his students apply five core concepts about media to what they see on Netflix, at the movies and online is Danielson’s favorite part of his job. It’s how he knows he has altered the way they consume media.

“I’ve changed them for life,” he said.

Danielson teaches at Seattle Preparatory School, a private Catholic high school. In addition to the required one-semester media literacy class, he teaches yearbook and theology classes and advocates for media literacy as chair of Action 4 Media Education, a Washington state-based group.

Media literacy is a broad term that encompasses a wide set of skills ranging from thinking critically about news and opinion articles to dealing with cyberbullying to creating and sharing content online. The idea of media literacy is not new, but experts say it gained new momentum following the 2016 presidential election.

Across the country, lawmakers, educators and advocates are working to elevate the issue of media literacy in legislatures and schools. Washington state has been at the forefront of the movement.

In 2016, lawmakers in Washington state passed a bill with bipartisan support that created an advisory council to study media literacy and make recommendations to the legislature based on its research. The following year, legislators passed a law — based on the council’s recommendations — requiring the state superintendent’s office to survey educators and district officials about the state of media literacy in schools across Washington. Now, lawmakers are considering a bill that would provide grants for educators to create curriculum for media literacy and to allocate money for the state Department of Education to hold two conferences on the subject.

The initial Washington measure to create the advisory council is now the basis of a model bill used by Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit organization that advocates for media literacy, to help lawmakers get the topic on the agenda in their states.

Other states have taken their own approaches to making media literacy a priority, some more forcefully than others. For example, California lawmakers passed a law that requires the state Department of Education to provide a list of media literacy resources on its website by July 1. In a stronger move, Minnesota in 2017 added “digital and information literacy” to its required K-12 education standards.

Why now

Media Literacy Now is currently tracking 15 bills in 12 states. The bills range from advisory council proposals to measures that would create grant programs for media literacy specialists or add media literacy to state curriculum guidelines.

Research indicates students need help evaluating the information they find online.

In 2015 and 2016, researchers at Stanford tested more than 7,000 K-12 and college students on media literacy and found that, although they spend lots of time online, students were not as proficient in media literacy as the researchers expected or hoped.

One of the activities assessed whether middle school students could distinguish between news articles, sponsored content and advertisements on a website’s homepage and how they evaluate the credibility of social media posts.

“In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” the authors wrote.

One of the researchers, Joel Breakstone, told The 74 that increased concern about fake news is part of the reason for the rising interest in media literacy.

“I think that the last two election cycles have suggested the dangers, the substantial dangers of problematic information being spread online,” Breakstone said. “And it has potentially really negative consequences for the way in which our democracy functions.”

Breakstone and his team’s research and subsequent creation of classroom materials have focused on the civic aspect of media literacy and how it affects people’s decisions related to social and political issues.

“This is not a partisan issue,” he said, adding that neither side “has a monopoly on spreading problematic content.”

Students seem to be lacking the skills they need to navigate the vast amount of information online, but many adults need help, too. A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that younger people were better able to distinguish facts from opinion statements than older people. A separate study in 2016 found that people over 65 were far more likely to share fake news on Facebook than younger age groups.

• Read more: Teaching democracy: How one school network has baked civics & activism into its DNA — and produced graduates who are more likely to vote

What states are doing

Rep. Lisa Cutter, a Democrat elected to the Colorado state legislature in November, was on vacation in Mexico late last year thinking through what her legislative priorities would be.

“It popped into my brain: media literacy,” she told The 74.

Cutter, who previously worked as a public relations consultant, said she has always valued the media.

“I’ve always been idealistic about the power of communications,” Cutter said. “I’ve been a big fan of the media, truly, and the benefit [it brings] to a democracy and to our society.”

Cutter has introduced a bill that would create an advisory council similar to the one in Washington.

It met some resistance in the education committee, of which Cutter is a member, over who would be on the committee. Cutter wanted the council to include teachers and librarians who are members of professional organizations, which might include teachers unions, but Republican members said having union members on the council could create a conflict of interest. Cutter tweaked the language of the bill to address this concern, and the bill advanced out of the committee and is now being considered by the appropriations committee.

Cutter hopes this will eventually lead lawmakers to add media literacy to state education standards, which provide guidance for school districts.

Similar laws have been passed previously in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and lawmakers are considering comparable measures in seven other states. The New Mexico legislature this year passed a version of the bill, which is now awaiting the governor’s signature.

The main goal of the model bill is to get media literacy on the policy agenda at the state level, said Media Literacy Now’s founder and president, Erin McNeill.

“It’s a good first step,” McNeill said. “It’s a structure that allows the state and experts and stakeholders to work together to figure out solutions.”

Breakstone agreed that the advisory council model is a good first step but said it should be just that — a first step.

“I think that we can’t delay too long,” he said. “The consequences are too dire to put it off with years of committees. So there’s a balance to strike there, of a need to be deliberate in making a well thought-out and manageable plan. On the other hand, we can’t dither given the stakes at play.”

• Read more: How Democracy Prep is drawing upon civics to challenge its students to ‘change the world’ — before they graduate

‘Media literacy is literacy’

Some advocates and educators are working on more direct ways to reach teachers and children and invest in media literacy.

The Knight Foundation, which supports journalism, recently gave a $5 million grant to the News Literacy Project, started in 2008 by journalist Alan Miller, to expand its online course for middle and high school students and increase its professional development opportunities for librarians and teachers. The grant is part of a broader $300 million effort by Knight to bolster local news over the next five years.

The public radio station KQED in March rolled out a new microcredential program open to teachers across the country that will provide teacher training in media literacy. In partnership with PBS, KQED will grant a media literacy certification to teachers who complete the free, competency-based online program.

KQED already supports media literacy with two websites, KQED Teach and KQED Learn, but Randy Depew, the San Francisco-based station’s managing director of education, said he and his team realized many teachers needed to sharpen their own media literacy skills.

“The certification was born out of this idea of being able to provide a roadmap for teachers so that they could see, What are those skills that I need in order to be able to call myself media literate?” he told The 74. “And then at that point our belief is that if we can level up teachers, then the classroom activity will follow.”

Depew added that he expects that what’s now known as media literacy — consuming and creating blogs, podcasts and other digital content — will eventually be “folded into” literacy itself and considered essential skills for all students.

“If we want what’s best for our students, then we have to make sure they can read and write with media,” he said.

Experts agreed that adults and students both need help learning to navigate the information landscape online.

“Media literacy is literacy in the 21st century,” McNeill said.

Justice Paraiso-Caceres presents his semester-long action civics project to community members and elected officials on Generation Citizen’s Civics Day in San Francisco. (Photo: Generation Citizen)

Scott Warren wants civics to be the most exciting class in school.

That’s why his organization Generation Citizen helps schools adopt action civics, a school-based approach to civics education that empowers students to find a problem in their community and work together to solve it.

Warren started Generation Citizen in 2009 when he was a senior at Brown University and now serves as its CEO, but his interest in what it takes to keep a democracy alive started long before that. He spent most of his childhood traveling the world with his family after his dad got a job in the foreign service.

Generation Citizen “was really started as a way to figure out, how do we get civics back in classrooms, how do we transform and revolutionize the subject, and how do we make it the most exciting class in school?” he said. “How do we see democracy as this vibrant, alive concept that we don’t take for granted but we’re constantly molding and cultivating?”

Scott Warren (Rashidah De Vore)

Warren, who recently published a book about youth political engagement, also sees civics education as a way to combat inequality in the United States. Generation Citizen works mostly with schools where a majority of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty, to reach historically disenfranchised groups and close the civic participation gaps.

Countries that have higher levels of engagement tend to have less economic and political inequality, Warren noted, which is why he wants students to learn how to be good citizens early.

“I would argue that, given the extreme stratification and extreme polarity that is occurring right now, this is a necessary reform and shift that needs to occur.”

• Read more: Teaching democracy: How one school network has baked civics & activism into its DNA — and produced graduates who are more likely to vote

While growing up, Warren was an eyewitness to major world events like Kenya’s first democratic elections in 2002 and a 2005 coup in Ecuador, which clued him into what it takes to keep a democracy thriving.

“The citizens in these countries were willing to put everything on the line for democracy,” he said.

When he returned to the United States for college, Warren got involved in local politics, mostly focused on getting his university, the city of Providence and the state of Rhode Island to divest from companies doing business in Sudan because of the conflict in Darfur. He noticed that the young people around him wanted to make the world a better place, but they didn’t believe that local or state government was a good way to effect change.

• Read more: David Hogg wants to knock NRA-backed candidates out of office. His biggest obstacle? The lackluster voting habits of his young peers

Youth civic engagement and trust in government hasn’t changed much since then: A 2016 poll revealed that less than half of millennials — ages 18 to 34 — believed people like themselves “have a legitimate voice in the political process.” There are also disparities in the quality of civics lessons students receive — white, affluent students perform better on civics assessments than their poorer, non-white peers.

Generation Citizen is working to close that education gap and to empower historically disenfranchised students, Warren said. Strong civics education correlates to students being more engaged in political processes, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a research center based at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life.

Generation Citizen expects to reach 30,000 students next year, up from 18,000 this year. The nonprofit is focused on the six states where it has staff — California, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Texas — but is also working remotely with educators across the United States and around the world.

Generation Citizen reaches out to school and district leaders in those states directly, but educators can also contact the organization if they are interested in learning more and getting their schools involved. Schools have to pay a fee to partner with Generation Citizen, but the amount depends on location and what they can afford. Warren said that because the organization partners mostly with schools serving low-income students, Generation Citizen tries to find an affordable cost that works for both sides; the organization also receives funding from foundations and corporations.

Source: GenerationCitizen.org

Intended for middle and high school classrooms, the Generation Citizen curriculum walks students and teachers through the “advocacy hourglass” model, which involves starting with a big idea about a problem in the community, investigating its root causes, identifying ways to solve the problem and working to make those solutions happen. The organization provides the curriculum and training for teachers and pairs some classrooms with college volunteers for added support during the semester-long projects.

For example, Warren cited a group of students in Berkeley, California, who noticed that their local youth homeless shelter was only open part of the year because it lacked funding to stay open longer. The students successfully pressed their city council to give the shelter enough money to stay open year round. A bill to update HIV education currently winding its way through the Oklahoma statehouse originated in a middle school class working with Generation Citizen.

Abby Kiesa, director of impact at Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, said the action civics approach builds a sense of agency in young people.

“Part of the action civics model that is particularly notable is that it’s not telling young people what to think, it’s not telling young people specifically what to do, but it’s all about doing that with young people, and it’s all about what they think and care about,” she said. “It centers young people and their experiences … in a way that helps to build efficacy and agency, which is a critical component to ongoing engagement.”

Meredith Norris, executive director of the central Texas division of Generation Citizen, said she realized civics education needed a serious boost when she was working as a middle school social studies teacher in the Bay Area. She talked to students who thought Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. worked together to bring about civil rights, she said.

Generation Citizen is designed to help students learn about their community and cooperate with one another to make it better. Norris said she has seen students lobby their city council to get a sidewalk added near the elementary school their younger siblings attend and watched a class from a rural Texas school lobby their local government to create a youth advisory council.

“What I love about Generation Citizen is it’s allowing students to bring something real from their community into the classroom,” Norris said.

• Read more: How Democracy Prep is drawing upon civics to challenge its students to ‘change the world’ — before they graduate

During an action civics semester, teachers are largely working as project managers while their students take ownership of the project, Norris said. Generation Citizen gives teachers professional development before the semester begins so they are prepared to both give students information they might need about how their local government works and be a “guide on the side” who lets students take the lead.

“It definitely is a shift for teachers,” she said. “But once they make that shift, there’s just so much joy and power in that and in seeing what their students are able to do with that individualized coaching support.”

The end goal of Generation Citizen, though, is not sparking one-time community service projects but developing citizens who will stay politically active throughout their lives.

“Our theory of change is all about young people becoming engaged and effective citizens in the long-term,” Warren said. “It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, so we want to convince [students] that they should stay engaged and involved, knowing that the work is going to take a lot of time.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

(Getty Images)

*Updated April 8

Maeve Sanford-Kelly was in middle school in 2016 when Bill Cosby, Brock Turner and the Access Hollywood tape associated with then-candidate Donald Trump dominated headlines. Distraught but motivated, she worked with her mom, Maryland state lawmaker Ariana Kelly, to write and pass legislation requiring students to learn about consent in middle and high school.

“Why don’t our schools teach us that this is not how we treat people?” she asked lawmakers at a hearing for her bill last year, which initially failed but went into effect last summer. “We cannot spend one more day allowing people to grow up and continue this culture of predatory behavior.”

Since 2016, the #MeToo movement has exploded, toppling dozens of powerful people for allegations of sexual harassment and assault. That movement is affecting classrooms too, as lawmakers and educators look to teach students about consent and how to refuse unwanted sexual advances. However, what students learn varies widely across the country, and adults disagree about what sex education should include.

Experts say that more comprehensive sex education could change the culture in the United States by preparing students for healthy relationships and preventing sexual violence. A new study shows that learning refusal skills can protect students from later sexual assaults, which researchers say indicates that improving sex ed should be the next step for the #MeToo movement — a way to both protect students from being victimized and prevent them from perpetrating assaults.

“If administered properly, sex education that’s comprehensive has a unique power to really create a culture shift in this country,” said Jennifer Driver, state policy director at Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a nonprofit that advocates for comprehensive sex education.

• Read more: Just 24 states mandate sex education for K-12 students, and only 9 require any discussion of consent. See how California compares
  

Sex education’s ‘revolutionary’ power

Because it differs so widely from classroom to classroom, the power of sex education is largely going untapped, said Nora Gelperin, director of sexuality education and training at Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit organization that presses for comprehensive sex ed.

“These days, kids are really lucky if they receive good quality sex education, because so many do not,” Gelperin said.

Her organization defines quality sex education as “information about sex, sexuality, relationships, contraception and condoms, and how to protect yourself and plan your future.”

“Sex education done well, high-quality sex education, is really pretty revolutionary in terms of helping people feel good about their bodies, understanding how to have healthy intimate relationships,” Gelperin said.

Research backs her up.

In a recent study one expert called “hugely significant,” researchers at Columbia University found that students who had received refusal skills training were about 50 percent less likely to experience penetrative sexual assault when they got to a college campus. Abstinence-only education did not have the same effect, according to their survey results published in November.

It just makes sense that better sex ed would result in better outcomes for students, said John Santelli, the lead author on the study.

For example, learning refusal skills “before you’re in a charged situation” — such as a college dorm room after a night of drinking — will help students know how to react, Santelli said. “Getting prepared ahead of time always makes sense.”

About 54 percent of students surveyed said they had learned refusal skills before they arrived on campus, most of them as part of comprehensive sex education in middle and high school. However, the researchers note that students “generally described sex ed as awkward and focused on STIs, HIV, and pregnancy and contraception (mostly condoms).” Experts say sex ed varies widely across the country and truly comprehensive programs are rare.

The Columbia study was the first to analyze a possible relationship between sex education and sexual violence. The researchers concluded that explicitly learning refusal skills was a protective factor. Other factors like adverse childhood experiences, gender and sexual orientation also affect risk of assault.

Abstinence-only education, often called sexual risk avoidance, did not have the same effect in the Columbia study.

However, Mary Anne Mosack, an advocate for sexual risk avoidance, said that approach has included consent and refusal skills for decades. Mosack is president of Ascend, an organization that advocates for sexual risk avoidance education and trains educators to teach it.

“It’s actually not a new concept, but it’s a very useful one and one that we’ve employed for many years,” Mosack said about refusal skills.

Culture shift

Paired with the growing #MeToo movement, the Columbia report could shift the culture around sex education.

“We just recently really started to move into a culture where we’re identifying that sexual assault and violence prevention should be a part of sex education,” said Driver of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

The way adults view teen sexuality could also change as a result of the study, historian Jonathan Zimmerman said.

Although the survey was limited to current students at Columbia University and Barnard College ages 18 to 29, the findings are “hugely significant” and “incredibly promising” in part because the existing research on sex ed is narrow, according to Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education who has written a book about the global history of sex education.

“There is obviously much more attention to the question of consent, and I think that could have some very dramatic consequences, because it could … signal a new acceptance of young people as sexual beings, as sexual actors,” he said. “You can’t talk about somebody sexually consenting really unless you imagine them as a sexual actor. I think consent implies that.”

Previous iterations of sex ed mostly focused on telling students what to do and what not to do, rather than giving them information to make their own decisions, Zimmerman said.

#MeToo could change that.

Sex education frameworks that mostly focus on risk avoidance and preventing things like pregnancy and HIV do not consider students as having much agency in their sex lives, Zimmerman said.

“On the one hand, the #MeToo moment and everything that attaches to it has honestly led to more demand for instruction about that subject, about consent, about boundaries, about sexual autonomy, and so what that suggests is … more attention on the question of teens as sexual actors,” he said.

On the other hand, Zimmerman added, increasing diversity can make it more difficult for communities to come to a consensus about what school discussions of sex should look like for their kids.

“So I do expect there to be more attention to this issue,” Zimmerman said, “but I also expect there to be more pushback.”

• Read more: With an Eye Toward Consent, Students Seize the Moment to Overhaul Sex Ed

Competing approaches to sex ed

While a growing movement for more comprehensive sex education is taking hold in the #MeToo era, its impact is spotty around the nation. States and communities take wildly different approaches.

“Sex education still remains a real patchwork with really big variability not only from state to state but also district building down to the classroom level,” Gelperin said.

Only 24 states require sex education. Of those, just 10 require that instruction be medically accurate, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research center focused on advancing reproductive rights. Twenty-six states don’t mandate sex education at all, though three require that sex education be medically accurate if it is taught.

“What the research shows pretty clearly is abstinence-only [education] doesn’t result in lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of teen sexual activity — it’s not effective in promoting abstinence. In fact, a more comprehensive approach achieves those goals,” said Catherine Brown, a researcher at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

A report published in 2017 by the Journal of Adolescent Health states that “abstinence-only-until-marriage programs” are “scientifically and ethically flawed” and urges the United States to end them in favor of “medically accurate, evidence-based, and scientifically justified approaches to sexuality education for young people.” (One of the authors of the report was John Santelli, the lead investigator on the Columbia study.)

On the other side of the debate, advocates for sexual risk avoidance education, sometimes called abstinence-only, argue that their approach mirrors that used to discourage students from underage drinking and using illegal drugs and point to “success sequencing” — completing education, getting a full-time job, getting married and only then having children — as a proven way to guard against poverty.

Brown said the evidence is clear that comprehensive sex ed programs are more effective than abstinence-only ones at delaying teen sex and preventing unwanted pregnancy. But, she added, the goals of both types of programs are usually the same — delay sexual activity and prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections among teens.

Still, the question of how to teach kids about sex remains controversial.

“It shouldn’t bring out such hot feelings because there really are evidence-based answers to these questions, but sometimes it does,” Brown said.

Both camps claim parent support for their ideas. A majority of American adults have consistently supported comprehensive sex ed in schools, according to polling data compiled by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. However, a survey commissioned by Ascend found in 2016 that 71 percent of Americans think sex education should give students “a message that uses practical skills to reinforce waiting for sex.” Support for a focus on abstinence increased when respondents were informed that “a majority of teens are not sexually active.”

What states are doing

At the opening of April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, lawmakers in a handful of states are working to make sex education more inclusive and wide-ranging in their schools.

Legislators in Colorado are considering a bill that would require schools to use a comprehensive sex education curriculum that is objective and medically accurate or abstain from teaching sex education at all. The bill would prohibit abstinence-only sex education, which is currently taught in some charter and rural schools. If the bill passes, schools will be allowed to teach abstinence, but only as part of a broader sex ed curriculum.

The bill has gotten backlash from some religious groups who say it “stigmatizes” their beliefs. Some Republicans have also said the bill is wrong to not require schools to inform students about “safe haven” laws that allow people to leave newborn babies at a fire station or hospital, “no questions asked,” the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. (Lawmakers have since taken up a separate bill that addresses the safe haven issue.)

The bill also requires that students learn “how to communicate consent, recognize communication of consent, and recognize withdrawal of consent” and how to avoid making unwanted “verbal, physical, and sexual advances.” One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Susan Lontine, brought a formal sexual harassment complaint against another Colorado state lawmaker last year; an investigation found her complaint was credible.

The bill passed the Democrat-controlled Colorado House of Representatives on a party-line vote. Democrats also control the state Senate, and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is a Democrat.

In Oklahoma, where decisions about sex education are left up to local school boards, two bills were introduced this year. One, known as Lauren’s Law in honor of a student who shared her experience with sexual assault and helped write the bill, would have required teachers to be trained in how to teach students about consent and healthy relationships. That bill ultimately failed.

Another bill being considered there would require districts to offer parents training in communication to help them talk to their kids about sex. The Oklahoma House also recently passed a bill that would modernize HIV and AIDS education in the state; the state Senate is now considering that bill.

“It’s been exciting,” said Brown, who has analyzed state-level sex education standards. “There have been some student-led movements to improve sex education standards at the state level, and we’ve seen a number of bills introduced in legislatures around the country, and there definitely is momentum to try to improve sex ed.”

Brown said she expects to see more bills introduced in state legislatures addressing issues such as consent and refusal skills in the coming months.

“I think the #MeToo movement is helping communities, young people and parents realize that students need more education in order to understand their responsibilities and how to advocate for what they want and how they feel safe,” she added. “But I do think it’s going to take time and it’s going to be an evolution in norms and understandings about how we ought to help young people understand intimate relationships.”

Objections from some parents and lawmakers

Some states that have moved to take a strong stance on comprehensive sex education have seen backlash as a result.

In California, school districts have begun implementing a new sex ed law called the Healthy Youth Act passed in 2015 that requires “integrated, comprehensive, accurate, and inclusive comprehensive sexual health education and HIV prevention education” for middle and high school students. The law also mandates that schools teach about gender identity, sexual orientation and the harm of negative stereotypes. The Healthy Youth Act also requires students to learn negotiation skills during sex education. (It does not explicitly require lessons on consent, but a different law about health education includes it.)

Some parents have objected to the new framework and protested at local meetings, in part because it does not allow parents to opt their children out of the lessons on LGBTQ issues. The conservative group Informed Parents of California has also organized protests to argue that the new framework is not age-appropriate for students and to demand more parent input into what their children learn at school. Last week the group rallied at the state capitol and spoke out during a Department of Education committee meeting about sex education guidance for school districts.

One Idaho lawmaker tried this year to restrict her state’s sex ed policies as well. Republican Rep. Barbara Ehardt introduced a bill in the state House of Representatives that would require parents to opt in to sex education and any other instruction related to sexuality in school, which would have changed the current policy of allowing parents to opt out if they choose. The bill, which ultimately failed, would also have required materials be available for parents to review ahead of the lesson. Critics said the change would make information less accessible for students and could be especially harmful for students who are being abused.

The bill passed the Idaho House of Representatives with Republican support in early March even though a number of students testified against it at a hearing. Ultimately, the state Senate education committee voted to kill the bill for this session because of the potential cost to schools and possible effects on other academic disciplines.

• Read more: California sprints to the head of the class on sex education, as all students this year will be taught about consent

‘Positive change’

Sanford-Kelly, the student activist from Maryland, has already seen a change among friends and classmates since her law went into effect at the start of the school year.

Now in ninth grade, she told NPR in September that her friends and classmates were posting online about affirmative consent during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings last fall, which included hours of testimony about an alleged sexual assault.

“It brings me joy to see that all of the kids who are my age, even the ones who could be seen as comparable to [Kavanaugh], go to the same schools, living in the same environment, are different,” she told NPR. “And I think that is positive change that we have seen.”

*This article has been updated to reflect that Lauren’s Law did not pass the Oklahoma House this year. A version of this article linked to a news story from a previous legislative session.

What students learn about sex and sexuality during school varies widely from state to state and even from classroom to classroom. But this spring lawmakers in a handful of states are trying to pass bills to update their sex education policies to help students become more informed and better prepared to make good decisions.

Just 24 states mandate sex education in schools. Of those, only 10 require that it be medically accurate. Only nine require that it include consent.

One college professor in New Jersey estimates that 90 percent of her students arrive on campus poorly prepared and uninformed about their sexual health. Only one in 10 come having had “decent sex education,” said Eva Goldfarb, professor of public health at Montclair State University.

Goldfarb said her students are at risk for a range of social and health problems because of what they didn’t learn in sex education.

“They come really having a lot more physical experience than knowledge or understanding” about sex and sexuality, she said. That leaves them at risk not only for issues such as unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, she added, but also for “things we don’t talk about that are just as important as those things, like not-good relationships, not-good sex.”

More than 90 percent of Montclair students are from New Jersey, a state that’s considered to have one of the most progressive sex education laws in the country, requiring medically accurate sex education that is “free of bias” and includes information about multiple means of contraception, healthy relationships and sexual orientation. Still, the New Jersey standards only mention consent one time and require teachers to stress abstinence.

“Sex education still remains a real patchwork with really big variability not only from state to state but also district building down to the classroom level,” said Nora Gelperin, director of sexuality education and training at Advocates for Youth, an organization that pushes for “honest sex education” that covers “sex, sexuality, relationships, contraception and condoms, and how to protect yourself and plan your future.”

That variability is one of the reasons lawmakers and activists are looking to update state policies.

At the opening of April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, lawmakers in at least three states are considering bills related to sex education for K-12 students. Some would strengthen sex education requirements or make courses more comprehensive, while others intend to restrict what students can learn.

In Colorado, where sex education is not mandated, legislators have introduced a bill that would require that sex ed is medically accurate and include information about contraception in schools where it is taught — effectively banning the abstinence-only approach.

Oklahoma lawmakers are mulling a bill that would require districts to provide annual trainings to help parents learn how to talk to their children about sex.

Legislators in Alaska, where sex education is not mandated, have introduced a bill that would require sex education to focus on abstinence if it is taught and prohibit teachers from talking about contraception, sexual activity outside of marriage, homosexuality or gender expression.

Some sex ed bills are meeting resistance, however.

A bill known as Lauren’s Law that would have added instruction about healthy relationships failed in Oklahoma earlier this year. The Colorado bill also met resistance from Republicans.

Parents have been protesting this year in California, which passed a law requiring comprehensive sex ed in 2015. The law went into effect in 2016, and conservative groups argue that the new standards promote a political agenda and are not age-appropriate. As recently as last week the parent activist group Informed Parents of California rallied at the state capitol and spoke out against the new framework during a public committee meeting at the state education department.

Malachi Willis, a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas who has analyzed sex education policy, said lawmakers can be reluctant to pass bills requiring consent education because there’s not much research on how to teach it effectively.

“It’s clear why we should include consent, but it’s not clear how,” he said. Other researchers have started to look into the effectiveness of some consent programs, Willis added.

While early research indicates that teaching students refusal skills can have a protective effect when it comes to sexual assault, Goldfarb said consent is just one part of a larger conversation that should also address how to deal with a partner saying “no.”

As the maps above show, students in many states are not required to receive sex education in their schools at all — and some adults aren’t in a hurry to change that, Goldfarb added.

“If you talk about refusal skills and negotiation skills,” she said, “then you have to acknowledge that sex is a possibility among adolescents.”

Read more: 

Rethinking sex ed for the #MeToo moment: A ‘hugely significant’ study shows that strengthening education on relationships & consent can change the culture

California sprints to the head of the class on sex education, as all students this year will be taught about consent

Teen students take a tour of the University of Southern California. (Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/UIG via Getty Images)

School safety and college affordability are the most pressing issues in education, California voters said in a new poll.

The top priority overall was reducing gun violence in schools, with more than half of respondents saying it was “very important.” But voters with children as well as those ages 18-49 and those earning less than $35,000 a year rated college affordability as more important. The annual poll, conducted since 2012, was led by researchers at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education and the independent research group Policy Analysis for California Education.

“This poll sends an unmistakable message from voters to policymakers: Do something about gun violence,” Karen Symms Gallagher, USC Rossier’s dean, said in a statement. “We have the means and the expertise to prevent future tragedies, including through the improvement of social and emotional health. This is some of the most important work that policymakers can do, if they can put in the time and energy the public wants them to.”

1. Overall, reducing gun violence in schools is the key issue for the most Californians.

Although the chances of a student being shot at school are extremely small, 56 percent of people polled rated reducing gun violence at schools as a 10 on a 10-point scale, meaning “very important.” The next most important item was college affordability, which 45 percent rated a 10. (The survey asked voters to rate each issue by importance, not rank them.)

Since last February’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, school violence and how to prevent it have dominated headlines. Some observers have said the emotional pull of such events causes them to play an outsized role in policymaking.

• Read more: Lessons From Our Year Tracking School Shootings: Students More Likely to Be Hit by Lightning Than Shot in Class, Yet Fear of Mass Violence Is Driving Policy

Respondents overwhelmingly support increasing public mental health options, having more active shooter drills in schools and installing metal detectors in schools.

Generally, voters oppose arming teachers, with 63 percent saying they somewhat oppose or strongly oppose the idea, though opinion was split on party lines — 55 percent of Republicans and just 19 percent of Democrats support the idea. Democrats were more likely to support banning and confiscating assault rifles or other high-capacity firearms (81 percent vs. 50 percent of Republicans).

2. With strikes looming large, most Californians support teachers’ right to strike.

The poll was conducted Jan. 3-9, a few days before Los Angeles teachers launched a six-day strike. A majority (64 percent) of Californians polled said they support teachers’ right to strike, while 24 percent said they opposed it. Support was slightly higher (67 percent) when the question included the idea that teachers strike “to demand better compensation and benefits.”

Source: Tulchin Research

Teachers in Oakland, California, voted this week to authorize a strike if their union does not reach an agreement with the district soon. Oakland teachers have been working without a contract since 2017, and pay is a central part of the negotiation.

3. Voters are more concerned about holding charter schools accountable than expanding them.

The survey asked about expanding charter schools in two different ways, asking some voters about the importance of “Expanding school choice through public charter schools” and others about “Increasing the number of public charter schools.” Regardless of the wording of the question, respondents rated it as the least important priority.

Moreover, holding public charter schools accountable was sixth on the list of priorities, ahead of improving school discipline, increasing early education access and improving services for English language learners.

The findings come as state leaders vow to take a closer look at charters. Earlier this week Gov. Gavin Newsom asked state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond to convene a panel of experts to evaluate the effects of charter schools in the state, in response to demands from United Teachers Los Angeles during negotiations to end the strike in the state’s largest district.

Results of the survey show that voters were most concerned about gun violence and college affordability. School choice was least likely to be viewed as important. (Source: Tulchin Research)

• Read More: After Thousands Rally for Charter Schools in Downtown Los Angeles, School Board Asks State for Temporary Moratorium

4. A majority support changing the property tax law to benefit schools and local government.

Overall, 55 percent of respondents said they support a change in the state’s property tax law that would reassess business property values every year in order to increase tax revenue to support local government and schools. The proposal could be on the ballot in 2020.

The increase in revenue from that change could be especially beneficial to Los Angeles Unified, which is searching for sustainable funding sources after approving an $840 million contract with its teachers union. The district already faces skyrocketing long-term debt.

5. Voters are divided on the new governor’s pre-K agenda.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he will prioritize early education for California children. When asked about Newsom’s “cradle to college” priorities, just 10 percent of voters said expanding preschool programs for children ages 3 to 5 was their top priority, and 12 percent said providing prenatal care and programs for children 0 to 3 was most important. On the other hand, 31 percent said their top priority was improving K-12 education and 25 percent said keeping higher education affordable was most important.

Source: Tulchin Research

Voters were more inclined to say they support universal preschool in the state (48 percent) than targeted programs that would benefit only children from “families who are struggling” (37 percent).

The poll included 2,000 California voters in a survey conducted online from Jan. 3-9, led by researchers at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education (Julie A. Marsh and Morgan Polikoff) and Policy Analysis for California Education (Heather J. Hough and David Plank), and was conducted by Tulchin Research.

Denver teachers picket outside South High School before the school day begins on Jan. 15. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

*Updated Jan. 25

Teachers around the country were watching closely as their Los Angeles counterparts took to the streets, and now teachers throughout Virginia plan to march on their capital Monday and Denver educators are poised to strike next.

In California, teachers in Oakland are voting next week on whether to authorize a strike. And in the capital, Sacramento, union members are clamoring for their own strike vote.

Los Angeles educators, who ended their strike Wednesday, wanted more funding for public schools, higher salaries, more support staff, and smaller class sizes. Virginia educators, who are making their demands at the state level, have similar concerns; they plan to lobby for increases to education funding and higher teacher salaries, plus other measures to improve conditions for teachers and students. The demands in Los Angeles and Virginia echo those of teachers in red states who walked off the job last year in the first wave of #RedForEd teacher demonstrations.

But Denver is a different story. There, the union wants to reduce incentives that teachers in the district can earn for working in hard-to-fill positions, being part of high-performing schools, teaching in high-poverty schools, or taking professional development courses. Instead, the union wants higher base salaries for all teachers.

The Denver teachers voted overwhelmingly to approve a strike during sessions Saturday and Tuesday after talks broke down between district and union leaders over ProComp, Denver’s compensation system for teachers. The union and the district announced late Thursday they will continue to negotiate until the state intervenes, which could postpone a strike for as long as 24 days. If the governor decides to get involved, he could delay a strike for up to 180 days.

The two sides missed a deadline last Friday to renegotiate the system, which involves a complex system of bonuses.

The union argues that the system is too complex, making it difficult for teachers to predict their income from year to year. The district’s proposal simplifies the framework to some extent, but district officials say the incentives are necessary to recruit and retain teachers, especially in high-poverty schools.

The district says its latest offer could make Denver teachers among the highest paid in the region and removes salary caps while keeping incentives for teachers in hard-to-fill positions.

Developed through a collaboration between the union and the district, ProComp has been in place since 2005 when voters approved a tax to fund incentives for teachers. Even then, there were concerns that the system was too complex.

The two sides are about $8 million apart in their latest offers, and they’ve been negotiating for about 14 months. This dispute is separate from routine contract negotiations; the union and the district agreed to a master contract in 2017.

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Because the funding for ProComp comes from a designated revenue stream approved by taxpayers, the money cannot be used for anything else. Rolling back ProComp too far could result in a legal challenge and the district having to return the money to residents, said Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.

“In terms of ProComp, it seems to me they need to thread the needle, where they keep the incentives that keep the ProComp money flowing in from the taxpayers” but reduce the amounts of the incentives to satisfy the union, said Teske, who has evaluated ProComp and co-written a book about the system.

Even factoring in the incentives as they exist now, Denver teachers have a valid argument that their pay is lagging, Teske said.

“It’s legitimately true that teacher pay is low in Colorado, including in Denver,” he said.

The district has said schools will remain open if teachers walk off the job, staffed with highly paid substitutes. In recent days, officials have been recruiting furloughed federal employees to work as substitutes. Denver Public Schools include about 5,300 educators and 71,000 students.

California and Virginia

Teacher pay is a key factor in Oakland, where negotiations between the union and the district echo those in Los Angeles. Oakland’s teachers union is demanding a higher pay raise than the district has offered as well as smaller class sizes and more counselors and nurses. Teachers, students, and community members confronted the school board about looming budget cuts and possible school closures during an intense meeting Wednesday, and teachers have staged two sickouts in recent months to draw attention to their demands.

Members will vote starting Tuesday on whether to authorize a strike if contract talks break down, with the voting going from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1, the East Bay Times reported. The most recent contract there expired in July 2017.

Sacramento, California, may also be on the path to a strike.

A union official from Sacramento told NBC News this week that his members were asking for a strike vote, saying the district isn’t meeting its commitments on class size.

The Virginia Education Association and a grassroots group called Virginia Educators United are organizing teachers throughout the state to attend a march, rally, and lobby day at the state capitol Monday to demand more education funding from state lawmakers. One Virginia Educators United organizer told The 74 the group is not ruling out a future strike if lawmakers do not meet their demands.

Some schools are off Monday for professional development days, so the impact on classrooms could be limited.

Pedro Noguera, a UCLA education professor, told NBC News that the apparent victory in Los Angeles will “inspire teachers around the country to focus beyond salary and benefits and think about the conditions they work under.”

*This article was updated to reflect that state intervention in Denver postponed a possible strike.