National Council on Teacher Quality

Research consistently shows that having one or more teachers of color has a dramatic, positive impact on students of color, including higher academic achievement, better attendance and higher rates of high school graduation and college-going. Yet just 20% of teachers are people of color, compared with 50% of public school students.

With an eye toward changing this, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit focused on educator quality, has issued “State of the States 2023,” a report detailing the size of the gaps throughout the country and summarizing promising policies. To diversify the ranks of their teachers, the group’s researchers say, states need to attend to every aspect of training and hiring people from underrepresented communities and making the schools where they work more hospitable.

“Data suggests there is a profoundly leaky pipeline of potential teachers of color into the classroom, with candidates leaving the pipeline at every point from high school through teacher preparation,” the report states. “States can slow the leak by shoring up the pipeline at each point where potential teachers of color slip through.”

Here are five top takeaways from the report:

States should set explicit diversification goals and collect data tracking progress toward meeting those targets.

An appropriate goal might be increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce to match the population of students of color. Officials should collect and publish both district- and school-level data outlining progress — something only a handful of states currently do.

In the same spirit, states should use data to evaluate all their efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, with an eye toward identifying — and investing in — the most effective strategies. Nearly every state has created programs to encourage high school students to consider teaching careers, for example, yet little evidence has been published showing how well this strategy works.

The figure above shows changes in the diversity of enrollment in traditional teacher preparation programs over the last 10 years. Darker red indicates greater declines in the diversity of enrollment while darker blue indicates greater increases in the diversity of enrollment. In this time, enrollment appears to have increased across most states, with dramatic exceptions in several states, where enrollment has dropped precipitously. (NCTQ)

Unless education officials fund efforts to increase racial equity at every stage of teacher training, recruitment and retention, they are unlikely to reach their goals, the researchers warn.

Track how well early career teachers are faring using retention data disaggregated by race and ethnicity at the individual school level.

This should include surveying educators in their first five years on the job — a time when many struggle and leave — on working conditions and satisfaction. Currently, just one state, Delaware, collects information on how many new teachers of color stay at each school.

Surveys of working conditions are also important sources of information on teachers’ success and satisfaction. Understanding the factors that cause new educators to quit is important if school leaders are to address their challenges.

The report also recommends improving school climate and leadership and training human resources staff to respond to concerns raised by educators of color.

Every state and the District of Columbia has a higher percentage of students of color than teachers of color in public K-12 schools. In the above map, we show the relative gap (or percent difference) between teachers of color and students of color in each state, compared to the population of students of color, with darker blue colors indicating larger gaps. For example, in Maine, 4% of public school teachers identify as people of color and 13% of Maine’s public K-12 students identify as people of color. While the percentage point gap is -9 percentage points, the relative gap is 66.2%6, showing that Maine has three times more students of color than teachers of color. States with a larger relative gap often have a less diverse teacher workforce to start with and so may face greater challenges in building a more representative workforce, indicated by a darker blue color in the map. (NCTQ)

Pay teachers more to work in hard-to-staff schools.

Teachers of color are more likely than their white counterparts to work in schools that struggle to attract and retain top talent, and are more likely to serve large numbers of students who look like them and would benefit from more diverse staff. The NCTQ researchers pointed to a RAND Corp. study that found that for every $1,000 increase in pay for teachers working in these schools, attrition fell by 6%.

“While not specific to teachers of color, this policy would have an immediate impact on those educators (who are more likely to be people of color) already working in schools with the highest need,” the report notes.

Change layoff policies so teachers of color are no longer disproportionately impacted.

In many places, teachers of color are much more likely to have probationary status or to be at the bottom of seniority rolls, making them much more vulnerable to losing their jobs when budgets must be cut. States should make sure that decisions about educator layoffs incorporate multiple factors, rather than using seniority as the top or only criterion.

According to the report, research suggests that making decisions about layoff priorities locally, using information about a community’s needs, can be helpful.

Teachers of color should be at the policymaking table.

Educators of color have different ideas about what it will take to diversify teaching than white teachers and education experts do. When asked about barriers to diversification, non-white teachers named better pay, loan forgiveness and supportive administrators, for example, and were less likely to say they want “Grow Your Own” programs where schools and districts seek to train future staff.

Disclosure: Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, The Joyce Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide funding to the National Council on Teacher Quality and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

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In the survey, conducted in October and November by Morning Consult, 71% of 716 LGBTQ respondents ages 13 to 24 said rhetoric surrounding the legislation has had a negative or very negative affect on their mental health, as did 86% of transgender and nonbinary young people. Three-fourths of LGBTQ youth, and 82% of gender-nonconforming respondents, reported stress and anxiety over threats of violence at LGBTQ community centers or events.

At the time the findings were released, three weeks into 2023, more than 150 anti-LGBTQ bills — most of them targeting transgender and nonbinary children and youth — had been filed in state legislatures. As in the last few years, youth reports of bullying and harassment remain very high.

The new report includes student responses to a number of questions about aspects of LGBTQ youth well-being that are less commonly discussed, including the emotions evoked by various controversies as well as the distress caused by current events such as racism and police brutality. Rates of anxiety were highest among Latino students.

In the last year, as a result of anti-LGBTQ policies and debate, one fourth of the young people surveyed stopped speaking to a family member, a figure that rises to 42% for trans and nonbinary respondents. One fifth of LGBTQ youth and 29% of gender-nonconforming youth say a friend stopped speaking to them.

The survey also gauged students’ experiences in school over the last year, with 9% saying their schools removed pride flags and other LGBTQ symbols, 5% reporting their school outed them to their parents, and 4% of LGBTQ students and 7% of trans kids saying they were disciplined for expressing their identity.

Two percent said their family decided to change their school, while 2% of gender-nonconforming kids and 1% of LGBTQ youth overall reported their family moved to another state. Twenty-nine percent of trans and nonbinary youth said they do not feel safe going to a doctor or hospital, a rate more than seven times as high as for cisgender LGBQ young people.

While the youth reported experiencing a range of emotions, anger was the dominant response to current events in every category surveyed. Two-thirds reported being angry about school library book bans, a figure that rises to 80% among trans and nonbinary students.

Young people also report high levels of anger, sadness and feelings of hopelessness in response to bans on gender-affirming medical care and transgender sports bans, policies that require schools to out them to their parents and “Don’t Say Gay” laws that prohibit classroom discussion of LGBTQ topics. Four-fifths have heard of The Trevor Project.

The pollsters asked what popular media young people turn to for affirmation. The top response was the Netflix series Heartstopper, followed by The Owl House, Euphoria, RuPaul’s Drag Race and Queer Eye.

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NWEA

In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, researchers associated with NWEA made two jaw-dropping predictions. The first — that school closures would lead to lower math and reading scores — has been borne out over and over since then.

The second — that the already broad range of academic levels within classrooms would yawn wider — has now been confirmed.

Before the pandemic, the average fifth-grade class had students whose learning spanned seven grade levels. But in May 2020, NWEA, the nonprofit behind the widely used MAP Growth assessment, predicted that this variation would grow as the lowest-scoring students would fall two years behind. Because the exams are not given before third grade, the researchers warned then that their findings might not reflect students whose levels of understanding are even lower.

New NWEA research finds this range has increased by 5% to 10%, with the losses disproportionately affecting low-performing students. While all pupils made less progress than they would have without COVID-19’s interruptions to instruction, children who were already struggling academically have fallen much further behind.

The findings mirror the recently released dismal results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed that, collectively, U.S. students lost two decades of academic growth. That exam, too, showed widening gaps between affluent, advantaged students and low-income children, those learning English and students with disabilities.

Because the MAP is administered at least twice a year, researchers were also able to more precisely identify when learning stalled, and how quickly — and for whom — it rebounded. Across the board, drops in math and reading occurred during the 2020-21 school year, with high achievers losing less ground than their struggling peers.

In 2021-22, those who already performed in the highest 10% of students made more progress toward academic mastery than would have been expected absent COVID, while the lowest performers have languished.

“If we think of the range of test scores, we see that the ceiling has remained stable,” says Karyn Lewis, director of NWEA’s Center for School and Progress. “But the bottom has dropped out.”

Note: Average test scores for top decile students are shown in orange and bottom decile students are shown in blue. The lighter shade represents the pre-COVID sample and the darker shade represents the COVID sample. Decile group is determined by starting achievement status. The top decile includes students who scored at the 90th percentile or above and the bottom decile includes students who scored in the 10th percentile or below. Percentiles are calculated based on the 2020 MAP Growth norms (Thum & Kuhfeld, 2020). Spring 2020 means are asterisked because they are based on approximately 5% of the students relative to other terms due to testing interruptions during COVID school closures. Standardized mean differences between the COVID and the pre-COVID sample within achievement decile are shown below the COVID sample lines, with negative values indicating that the COVID sample scored lower than the pre-COVID sample. (NWEA)

To arrive at the findings, researchers crunched two sets of numbers. They compared scores from 8 million students in grades 3 to 8 from 2019 through 2022 with those of students who were tested in the three academic years before the pandemic. They also examined data on 1 million students who, pre-pandemic, scored in the top and the bottom 10%.

A secondary concern surfaced by the data is that the already inequitable process of identifying which students receive gifted and talented services and access to other higher-rigor academic opportunities will skew further in favor of affluent and white children, who backslid the least in the pandemic.

The widening array of mastery levels has profound implications for teachers. Pre-pandemic, most struggled to reach students at varying grade levels. As it became clear that NWEA’s first “COVID slide” warnings were, if anything, understated, debate arose about whether to continue grade-level instruction or drop back and remediate students who were far behind. Some researchers favor a strategy known as acceleration — teaching all students age-appropriate material while using data to identify specific missing skills.

To reach all children in a single class effectively, their teachers now must understand not just the academic standards for their grade, the researchers suggest, but the material for one to two grade levels above and below.

“I do think it begs the question of what do we expect each individual teacher to be able to do,” says Lewis. “I think we have to be honest that there’s a limit to teachers’ ability to be all things to all students.”

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The Trevor Project

LGBTQ students whose college or university provides mental health services had 84% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year than those who had no access, according to a new brief from The Trevor Project. And while the vast majority, 86%, reported that their college offers such services, a significant number of students cited barriers to access.

The data is drawn from the organization’s fourth annual survey of LGBTQ youth mental health, which reported steady increases in the number of respondents who report unique risk factors such as harassment, violence and the need to come out over and over in uncertain circumstances; problems finding and getting care; and negative impacts from both the pandemic and a wave of anti-transgender and “don’t say gay” legislation.

Overall, a third of LGBTQ college students seriously considered suicide last year and 7% attempted it, according to the nonprofit, which advocates for safe environments for queer youth. Both rates were significantly higher among LGBTQ students of color and transgender and nonbinary students.

LGBTQ youth aren’t inherently prone to suicide risk because of their identity, but rather because of mistreatment, says Hannah Rosen, a research associate with the organization. “The Trevor Project’s research has consistently shown that LGBTQ youth, unfortunately, deal with a significant amount of LGBTQ-based victimization, including bullying and discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Thirty-two percent of those who had access to mental health services seriously considered suicide, versus 46% of those who did not. Twenty-two percent of those with no access to college services attempted suicide, compared with 6% of those who had care available.

Yet, even though 86% reported their college provided mental health services to LGBTQ students, many also said there were barriers to getting care. One third said they did not feel comfortable going, 29% reported long wait lists and 17% had privacy concerns.

Queer students attending colleges with an LGBTQ center or other cultural resource also reported having fewer thoughts of suicide and making fewer attempts. More than six in 10, 63%, said their college offered these services. More than 40% of students at campuses that lacked an LGBTQ center said they had considered suicide in the past year, while 9% had attempted it. By contrast, rates dropped to 30% and 6%, respectively, on campuses with specific support services.

The number of LGBTQ youth overall who reported seriously considering suicide rose from 40% in 2020 to 45% in 2022, according to Trevor researchers. The number reporting depression rose from 55% to a peak of 62% in 2021, before dipping to 58% this year. Rates of anxiety rose from 68% to 73% during the same period, while the rate at which queer youth attempted suicide stayed relatively constant, at 15% versus 14%.

Virtually all transgender and nonbinary respondents to the 2022 survey reported worrying they would be denied gender-affirming medical care or access to bathrooms and sports teams.

In June, the college-ranking website BestColleges.com reported that one fourth of queer students have considered dropping out because of challenges to their psychological well-being, and 92% said their mental health has negatively impacted their college experience.

That study found LGBTQ students struggled to tap into new and supportive friend networks and to find counselors who understood their identities or who were queer themselves.

Meanwhile, the higher ed collaborative Proud and Thriving Project, which works to strengthen mental health services of LGBTQ students, found much higher rates of anxiety, loneliness, isolation among that population than their cisgender and heterosexual peers.

“No matter what amount of resources a college or university has, campus leaders can start by taking small steps to educate themselves on LGBTQ people and topics — and make their campus environment more inclusive,” says Rosen. “Even simple actions such as including gender-affirming language in materials, or self-educating about different LGBTQ identities and terminology, can make a huge difference in affirming LGBTQ college students.”

Mounting evidence supports an academic strategy known as acceleration, in which students who are behind are challenged with grade-level material while getting help with missing skills or knowledge. But new research finds its use in schools “is currently more talk than action.” 

Analyzing data from 3 million students assigned lessons through a widely used literacy program, the nonprofits ReadWorks and TNTP found that during the 2020-21 school year — the first full year after the start of the pandemic — students were assigned work below their grade level a third of the time. Children in high-poverty schools were given less challenging materials more often than their affluent peers — even when they had already mastered grade-level assignments.

“Our analysis reveals a stark disconnect between the extent of students’ unfinished learning during the pandemic and the opportunities they’re getting to engage with the grade-level work they need to catch up,” states a report outlining their findings. “It suggests that while many school systems are talking about learning acceleration, far fewer have implemented a successful learning acceleration strategy.” 

Formerly known as The New Teacher Project, TNTP focuses on improving instruction. ReadWorks provides free digital literacy materials. 

The report adds to a body of research that predates COVID. In 2018, TNTP found that overall, students spend some 500 hours a year — the equivalent of six months — doing work below their grade level. Teachers are often trained to provide materials that align with what they perceive to be students’ level of mastery in the hope that success will bolster their confidence. 

But in practice, instead of giving students a firmer academic footing, assigning earlier-grade material holds them back, the group reported. More worrisome, what is often referred to as remediation is not very effective at catching kids up and has a compounding effect as years go by with no exposure to challenging work.

The report comes on the heels of similar findings by Zearn Math, which recently released data covering 600,000 students in the first two years of pandemic-era schooling. Students taught with acceleration strategies completed twice as many grade-level lessons and struggled 17% less than when they were remediated, Zearn’s team found. Black, Latino and low-income students were more likely to be remediated in math — even when they had already mastered grade-level work. 

Last year, TNTP released research showing that acceleration using grade-level material is the best way to help students catch up in math — a case also made by Zearn and the assessment concern NWEA. The authors of the new report, which may be the first about acceleration in English language arts, say they hope the ReadWorks data will embolden teachers to assign work they anticipate students will struggle with. 

“The issue with not reading at grade level is that students get behind,” says Susanne Nobles, ReadWorks’ chief academic officer. “They’re not exposed to [grade-level] vocabulary and sentence structure.”

Now, she says, “we have this data to show it’ll be okay if you give students this grade-level material.” 

The analysis examined 75,000 schools serving 12 million children in all grades, focusing on students in classes of at least 10 who attempted ReadWorks assignments 10 times or more in the 2018-19 through 2020-21 school years.

The new report found that far from adopting acceleration, teachers gave students 5 percentage points more below-grade-level material than before the start of the pandemic. Children in high-poverty schools spent about 36% of their time on less challenging materials, compared with 23% in the most affluent schools. About a quarter of students, predominantly low-income children of color, were given below-grade-level work for the entire school year.

“In those schools, when students correctly answered more than 90% of the questions on their previous month’s grade-level assignments, almost 25% of their assignments were still below grade level the next month,” the report notes. “In fact, these students received less grade-level work than students in more affluent schools who consistently struggled with grade-level assignments. There seems to be nothing many students in high-poverty schools can do to break free of negative assumptions about their abilities and ‘earn’ access to the grade-level work they need to be successful.” 

Indeed, pupils in ReadWorks’ sample were just as successful on grade-level work as they were on remedial content, answering nearly two-thirds of questions correctly regardless of the difficulty of the assignment. 

“This builds on our findings in our past research that assigning students work below their grade level mainly just denies them important opportunities to engage with material they could master if given the chance,” the researchers state. 

The report contains one important caveat. Students missing the foundational reading skills to understand phonics and turn printed words into sounds will need different learning acceleration that prioritizes those elements. 

TNTP also has produced an acceleration “toolkit” with advice for teachers on putting the strategy into practice and for school system leaders hoping to make sure their COVID recovery efforts and relief funds support it. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to TNTP, ReadWorks, Zearn and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to TNTP and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74. 

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

Retired librarian Michael McConnell at home in Minneapolis holding a children’s book about his historic 1971 wedding. (Beth Hawkins)

In May 2021, as efforts to ban books on LGBTQ topics from school libraries were gaining political steam, “Two Grooms on a Cake: The Story of America’s First Gay Wedding” was published. It is a children’s story about Michael McConnell’s 1971 marriage to a man, which was upheld as legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.

But McConnell isn’t just a protagonist in a book; as a librarian, he was instrumental in transforming libraries into the kind of welcoming places for LGBTQ kids that he craved as a boy.

It’s largely because of him and a handful of colleagues that library shelves today have space for books like “Two Grooms” — a historic accomplishment that McConnell, now 80 and enjoying a quiet retirement in Minneapolis with his husband, worries is endangered.

Since the slender storybook’s release, some 1,600 books with LGBTQ and racial-equity themes have been challenged in dozens of states, according to the free speech advocacy organization PEN America. It’s the highest number of book challenges recorded by the American Library Association since it began tracking bans 20 years ago. 

“I suspect it’s probably by now been banned in Florida,” McConnell says. “I can see what’s coming. … We’ve got a fight on our hands.” 

Historically, LGBTQ-related books are among those most stolen from libraries — a metric that librarians, oddly or not, still use to gauge demand when ordering new volumes, despite decades-long efforts to reduce the stigma of browsing for books about queer people. In fact, while his status as one of the first gay grooms may be what most visibly enshrines McConnell in history, he played a pivotal role in creating library shelf space for “boy meets boy” tales such as his — as well as a wide array of LGBTQ fiction and books about queer history, culture, health care and other resources.

As a child, McConnell secretly visited the library looking to understand his same-sex attraction — and, finding no help, went on to a career as a librarian with a special interest in curating collections of LGBTQ books. 

Indeed, current-day librarians credit McConnell’s accomplishments — everything from convincing publishers that libraries would provide a market for positive portrayals of queer people to replacing pejorative subject headings in card catalogs — for helping to provide safety and privacy for youth and adults as they seek out information.

K-12 school librarians, for example, often receive regular training in how to accommodate LGBTQ students and are frequently the staff member who sponsors the school’s gay-straight alliance. This work is a direct outgrowth of advocacy by McConnell and a small group of colleagues who, in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall uprising in June 1969, organized the American Library Association as the first professional group with a queer committee formally advocating for LGBTQ rights.

McConnell’s story is a variation on a common one. In middle school, he walked from his home in Norman, Oklahoma, to the local library. While he was certain there was nothing wrong with him, he didn’t know why he was different or how to find other people like himself. It took some sleuthing, but he eventually found the right shelf at the nearby University of Oklahoma library — and, to his teenaged chagrin, a selection of titles that seemed designed to ruin his self-esteem.

Members of the American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation in 1971. Pictured in the upper right is Michael McConnell. Jack Baker leans across his lap. (Photo by Kay Tobin ©Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library)

“Most of it was negative and most of it psychological,” he recalls. “And — how shall I put this? — lies.”

Depictions of LGBTQ people living normal, fulfilling lives, he came to learn, mostly did not exist. “Publishers were afraid in those years to put out positive titles,” he says. “I knew during this time of great closetry for the community, and no information available except lies, that I was going to have a hard time — and the library was the answer.”

Library activist Barbara Gittings leads a protest in 1969. (Photo by Kay Tobin ©Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library)

Another Stonewall-era activist with the American Library Association, the late Barbara Gittings, made her own exploratory trip to the library as a college freshman in 1949. “When I speak to gay groups and mention ‘the lies in the libraries,’ listeners over 35 know instantly what I mean,” she wrote in “Gays in Libraryland: The Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Library Association: The First 16 Years.” “Most gays have at some point gone to books in an effort to understand about being gay or to get some help in living as gay.”

More than half a century later, despite current headlines, gay-related resources in any library — adult, university, K-12 — are plentiful. What was born as the association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation has evolved into the Rainbow Round Table, which screens LGBTQ-themed books and bestows awards on the best. This year, “Two Grooms” was named a top-10 title for younger readers. 

A division of the larger organization, the American Association of School Librarians, offers a wealth of resources for educators, librarians and families. In 2018, it published “Defending Intellectual Freedom: LGBTQ+ Materials in School Libraries,” which, among other guidance, helps school staff explain and defend standards for what youth media centers should offer. 

GLSEN, a national nonprofit that supports schools to be safe places for LGBTQ students, offers Rainbow Libraries, free, boxed sets of age-appropriate books. Now in 1,800 schools in 28 states, the 10-book collections include stickers with the group’s web address, posters and other classroom resources that let young readers know that the library offers even more. 

“We hear all the time that students can’t wait to get their hands on these books,” says Michael Rady, GLSEN’s Rainbow Library manager. “In Kansas, a librarian processed their new books on a Friday and shelved them immediately. By Monday, they were all checked out.”

Many of the ways in which present-day librarians try to ensure welcoming environments are outgrowths of strategies generated by Stonewall-era librarians. For instance, “Serving the Faithful Reader,” a 1976 series of skits, taught reference desk staff how to react to fearful visitors who might not be able or willing to say outright what they are after.

School librarians are urged to set out books that feature LGBTQ youth of different identities, races, ethnicities and backgrounds not just for Pride month, but for showcasing other holidays or themes, says Rachel Altobelli, director of library services and instructional materials for Albuquerque Public Schools and a member of the group that authored the intellectual freedom report.

That way, all kinds of kids see themselves without having to ask, or even necessarily be looking for LGBTQ information — they might be fantasy fiction fans or get sucked in by graphic novels, she says.

Librarians in Altobelli’s district are trained to understand that they may never know which books made a difference for which kids — and that’s a good thing. More children are coming out at younger ages than ever before, she notes, but lots still “want to be able to figure things out in their own time in their own way, and they don’t need any random grownups to know.”

“We tell our librarians, with some kids, ‘You’re not going to have that big, beautiful, magical  moment where they come in and thank you,” she adds. “But you nonetheless saved their life, and you might never know.”

Library privacy topped the 1970s Task Force on Gay Liberation agenda, too. Presentations for librarians included “Closet Keys,” which focused on good LGBTQ periodicals to subscribe to, and, “You Want to Look up WHAT?” covering how to index them. 

McConnell, Gittings and their contemporaries were determined to end the practice of forcing visitors to search through catalog cards bearing headings like “sexual deviance” and “sexual predation.” Along with librarians from other demographic groups demanding better representation, they pushed the Library of Congress to change a number of classifications.

“That put us into positive (shelving classification) numbers,” recalls McConnell, in turn enabling readers to be less secretive. 

Library activist Barbara Gittings reading about being a “healthy homosexual” in 1972. (Photo by Kay Tobin ©Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library)

The early task force also considered what it called “the stolen-book problem,” a phenomenon Altobelli and Rady say continues to this day. Whether LGBTQ-themed books disappear from a library’s inventory because students are embarrassed to check them out and simply take them, or don’t return them because they have no other sources of factual information, the rate at which the titles need to be reordered is something librarians see as a gauge of popularity.

As the current wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation has swept the country, demand for GLSEN’s Rainbow Libraries has increased, says Rady, who hopes to increase the number of schools with sets of books to 3,000 by the end of the year. The debate’s inflammatory tone, he says, has posed particular problems for youth in communities that have little LGBTQ visibility. 

“It’s really hard to be closeted. It’s really hard to come out. It’s really hard to be the only LGBT person in your community,” he says. “We’ve heard from librarians how it’s the first time [students] can dive into someone else’s story and see themselves.”

Helping people see a good life for themselves was, of course, McConnell’s goal when, freshly hired by the University of Minnesota to acquire books for its libraries, he wed Jack Baker. Baker had gone to law school specifically to find a legal path to marriage. In the face of the publicity that attended the nuptials, however, McConnell was fired.

(The university has since apologized, and houses McConnell’s work-in-progress archive in its Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies.) 

Using a license legally obtained in Blue Earth County, Minnesota, the two got married anyhow, in a 1971 ceremony with a hippie aesthetic faithfully depicted in “Two Grooms.” After, they fought for the validity of their union all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was dismissed in a single sentence.

When the court recognized marriage equality in Obergefell v Hodges in 2015, the justices made sure to reach back half a century and issue a new decision in McConnell’s case. “The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry,” the jurists wrote. “No longer may this liberty be denied to them. Baker v Nelson must be and now is overruled.”

“Two Grooms,” which uses a cake-baking metaphor to illustrate the process of nurturing a relationship, isn’t the only account of Baker’s and McConnell’s marriage that can be found in public libraries today. They would like to keep it that way.

“ ‘Don’t say gay,’ ” he scoffs. “Sweetheart, we got over that 50 years ago.”

So what would McConnell say to a student who goes into a school library where books like his have been removed?

“I would say talk to someone that you know loves you and that you feel safe with and tell them,” he says. “I know that that’s scary. But is there someone that you feel safe with you can do that?”

President Biden signed an Executive Order Advancing Equality for LGBTQI+ Individuals on June 15. (Getty Images)

With an unprecedented rise in the number of youth identifying as LGBTQ — and equally unprecedented efforts to curtail their rights — a leading national advocacy group is calling on the U.S. Department of Education to add the sexual orientation and gender identity of students and teachers to the data collected in the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The information would be voluntarily reported, anonymous and — notable at a time when some states are shunning data deemed politically unpalatable — collected nationwide. If implemented, the initiative would represent the largest-scale effort to date to document the experiences of the nation’s LGBTQ students.

The push got a boost earlier this week from the White House when President Joe Biden, acting in recognition of Pride month, announced an executive order creating a committee to oversee the expansion of LGBTQ data collection throughout the federal government and directing the department to form a working group to advance policies to protect gay, lesbian and gender nonconforming students and families.

The move comes after years of conversations among civil rights and education advocates who recognized both the need for the data and the complicated nature of collecting it in ways that are backed by scientific and medical best practices; invite LGBTQ participation; will generate information researchers need; and do not expose young people to the safety risks that coming out sometimes poses.

“Not having questions asked about sexual orientation and gender identity creates an invisibility and makes it really hard for lawmakers and policymakers to be able to determine what the actual needs of the community are and how best to address them,” says Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign. “If you don’t have the data, it makes it hard to argue to a policymaker that they have to change their policies in order to protect LGBTQ folks.”

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 300 bills targeting LGBTQ Americans have been introduced in state legislatures this year, many aimed at transgender youth.

In a formal request submitted in April, GLSEN, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ students, noted that NAEP results are used for scholarly research and to make crucial decisions about education policy and distribution of resources to schools. “To better determine how well our K-12 schools are serving the needs of all students, GLSEN urges the NAEP to add LGBTQ+ inclusive survey measures,” the organization wrote.

The change, civil rights groups say, would push schools to take note of the students’ unique challenges and inform solutions.

First administered more than 50 years ago, NAEP has always documented how well U.S. schools meet the needs of students of different races and ethnicities, those with disabilities, low-income children and other subgroups. The tests are administered to a representative sample of fourth and ninth graders, with the results used to identify unmet needs, illuminate disparities and highlight successes.

In a reply to GLSEN sent before Biden’s executive order, the department said it was considering changes to NAEP assessments that would allow for expanded gender categories. The National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the exams, “is actively working towards including more gender identity options in future NAEP data collections both from school records (where we get student gender information) and teacher self-reports via the teacher survey questionnaire,” the agency replied. “We are exploring ways to disaggregate student record data into binary and non-binary as a start.”

No timeline for either change was given. While silent on the topic of modifying NAEP to report sexual orientation, the reply letter noted that the center has been part of ongoing discussions within the federal government about the issue.

LGBTQ rights groups say it’s not enough — and is happening too slowly. According to a survey by The Trevor Project, 94% of LGBTQ youth in 2021 reported that politics were harming their mental health and that COVID-19 adversely affected their living situation, with just a third calling their home affirming. Forty-two percent said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year, a rate that rises to more than half for trans and non-binary students.

Particularly problematic: States can opt out of collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity when administering some existing surveys, such as the two main Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviews of youth welfare, Warbelow says. This can obscure bias in ways many people might not anticipate, especially as schools often have no formal record of a student’s orientation and young people are leery of outing themselves.

“We have some indication that LGBTQ students are overrepresented in disproportionate school discipline,” she says. “So one scenario [could be] where a straight student and an LGBT student are engaged in a disagreement. Oftentimes, it starts by that straight student engaging in bullying. And you see the teacher or the administration end up sending both kids down to the principal’s office. And then the penalty ends up being stiffer for the LGBTQ student.”

In recent years, scientifically and legally sound collection of data on LGBTQ individuals has gotten a major boost from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which in 2020 recommended that the federal government begin capturing more information and this past March followed up with specific guidance on how best to do so.

Last spring, in the wake of the National Academies’ reports, nearly 200 civil rights organizations came together to press federal agencies to adopt the recommendations. If they succeed, the government will, for the first time, collect data that could be used to draw apples-to-apples comparisons.

Often referred to as the nation’s report card, NAEP is uniquely suited for collecting sensitive demographic information, proponents of the change say. Because the exams don’t assess individual schools, the results can’t be misused by officials bent on finding gay teachers or trans student athletes, for example. People who are uncomfortable participating can opt out.

“We want the federal government to be required to collect data, but the individual participant to have the flexibility to be able to say that they’re not going to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity,” says Warbelow.

For reasons ranging from the well-intended to the political, LGBTQ people are poorly represented in official statistics. For example, an estimated 5 in 6 LGBTQ adults can’t be identified by federal surveys documenting everything from rates of disease to housing discrimination, largely because they rarely include pertinent questions. The experiences of LGBTQ youth in school and in their communities are even more poorly documented.

While education researchers and policymakers can talk about historically underserved students using deep, wide-ranging data about household income, race, disability, English learner status and experience with housing insecurity and the foster care system, what’s known about queer students is often drawn from small surveys or by extrapolating from those that tabulate information in different ways.

For two decades, GLSEN’s own surveys have consistently found that students subjected to in-school bullying and victimization have poorer educational outcomes, including lower attendance, grade-point averages and rates of college enrollment, than their heterosexual, cis-gendered peers. Students who experience both anti-LGBTQ victimization and racism are most likely to skip school out of fear, report feeling like they don’t belong and experience high levels of depression, the organization noted. Other surveys show that LGBTQ youth are disproportionately homeless and in foster care.

Meanwhile, CDC surveys show the number of teens identifying as LGBTQ is growing, adding urgency to the need for accurate information. Using two CDC surveys, researchers concluded that the percentage of youth who identify as “non-heterosexual” rose from 8% to almost 12% between 2015 and 2017.

Williams Institute

McKinsey & Company

Students in majority-Black schools are now a full 12 months behind those in mostly white schools, widening the achievement gap by a third, according to a new analysis by McKinsey & Co. Overall, students are four months behind in math and three in reading compared with years past, but those totals hide wide disparities.

At the same time, the range of students’ academic needs teachers must address within a single classroom has widened, with the share of children at or above grade level in math falling by 6 percentage points and the number two or more grade levels behind increasing by 9 points. As a result, the number of students far below grade level in a hypothetical math class of 30 fourth graders has risen from eight to 11.

The researchers based their conclusions on Curriculum Associates’s i-Ready assessments administered this fall in person to 3 million students in grades 1 to 6 in all 50 states. They compared the results with exam scores from a comparable set of schools in 2017, 2018 and 2019. In addition, they used data from Burbio and from McKinsey’s own parent surveys to show that while there is less disruption to learning than last spring, a variety of factors are limiting students’ time in class just when they need it the most.

Overall, students have made up about a month of unfinished learning compared with last spring, notes the report, “COVID-19 and Education: An Emerging K-Shaped Recovery.” But that rebound, too, is inequitable.

In schools where enrollment is 75 percent or more Black, students are 5.5 months behind in math and nearly as much in reading. In majority Latino schools, they are 4.5 months behind in math, and in white schools, 2.5 months. Low-income and urban schools are experiencing similar disparities.

Parents’ perceptions of their children’s well-being have rebounded somewhat since a June 2021 spike, but concerns remain. Compared with pre-pandemic surveys, the number of families with fears about academic achievement and student attendance and engagement is up 5 percent, with an increase of 7 percent in those reporting mental health concerns.

Parent reports of their own children’s absenteeism are up 2.7 times over pre-pandemic levels, which the researchers say is likely a dramatic underestimate. Up to one third of students may be chronically absent this year, defined as 15 or more days not in school.

“Nearly half of Cleveland’s students are on track to be chronically absent this school year,” the report notes. “Low-income students, who often lack access to resources to make up for lost instruction in the classroom and who are more likely to experience ongoing attendance barriers, are 1.6 times more likely to be missing multiple days of school than their high-income peers.”

According to Burbio, 9 percent of public-school students have been affected by a school closure this academic year, with 54 percent of U.S. students receiving some form of virtual instruction during the disruption. In its canvass of parents, McKinsey found that of students who chose to attend fully in-person learning this fall, only 83 percent attended 10 full days during the two weeks the survey was in the field.

Confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases account for just 12 percent of closure days, researchers found, with 50 percent of closures consisting primarily of single-day breaks school districts have taken to support student and staff mental health and another 13 percent caused by staff shortages. Parents of Black and Latino students were most likely to report that school closures were the cause of their children’s interrupted in-person learning.

Finally, researchers found gaps by income level in the likelihood a student has received academic or social-emotional pandemic recovery support and a disconnect between the services parents say they want for their children and those included in school districts’ plans for spending federal stimulus funds.

Districts are budgeting about a fifth of their third-round funding for summer school, while only 17 percent of parents are interested in this option. By contrast, 29 percent of parents want tutoring, but just 7 percent of academic recovery funds are directed to this option.

T

The results buoy a four-year-old effort by 13 states to push teachers to use higher-quality classroom materials. States belonging to the network, organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers, generally saw quicker adoption of curricula vetted for quality by the nonprofit ratings group EdReports.

By incentivizing the use of better materials, members of the network hope to influence what is taught, by extension increasing students’ academic achievement. Past research has shown that the mere existence of academic standards has little effect on what happens in classrooms, but early efforts to promote the use of curriculum that conforms to expectations of what students should know at any particular grade level appear promising.

Just 22 percent of a nationally representative sample of high school teachers surveyed in spring 2021 as a part of RAND’s American Instructional Resources Survey reported using aligned math and reading materials, with more than 70 percent using no curriculum at all or materials that did not conform to state academic standards or were unrated.

Forty-eight percent of elementary teachers reported using a high-quality math curriculum, with 25 percent using aligned materials in English language arts. Among middle school teachers, 47 percent used aligned math curriculum and 33 percent used high-quality reading materials. At the middle and high school levels, 81 percent of those using unrated materials created them themselves or adopted curricula created by their school or district.

Nationwide, the percentage of teachers regularly using fully aligned materials for mathematics or reading rose from 24 percent in 2018-19 to 35 percent the following year. The rate dropped to 33 percent in 2020-21, however.

Encouraged by early successes in Louisiana and other places, in 2017 the council formed a network of states that rate curricula, pay for schools to adopt the best and provide ongoing, free teacher training. It currently has 13 participants: Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

Comparing results from its new teacher survey to the two prior years, the RAND team saw particularly large increases in the use of quality math curricula in some states that have been in the network since its formation. Massachusetts and Mississippi, for example, each saw an increase of 15 points, while in Rhode Island, adoption of the materials jumped 31 points.

Increases in the use of aligned reading materials during the three years surveyed were even larger, rising 24 points in Delaware, 16 in Mississippi, 20 in Rhode Island and 29 in Tennessee. Curiously, the use of quality materials actually ticked down in Louisiana from the 2018-19 school year to 2020-21, but still far outpaced the rest of the country.

In 2016, RAND researchers found that most teachers developed or selected their own math and English language arts materials, with 94 percent relying on Google and 87 percent on Pinterest.

Founded in 2015, EdReports rates how well popular classroom materials conform to academic standards. Because the number of curricula rated by the organization has risen over time, some of the increase in use of high-quality materials picked up in the RAND survey may reflect the more comprehensive list of aligned items.

The researchers cautioned that just because teachers report using better materials, that does not necessarily mean they have changed their instruction accordingly. States should consider creative ways of increasing the amount of time teachers have to work together to master the curriculum, the report suggests.

Finally, states in the network where adoption of high-quality materials is rising should carefully document which policies may be driving the increases and whether student achievement goes up, the researchers said.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation provided financial support for RAND’s research and for EdReports and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74. The Carnegie Corporation of New York funds EdReports and The 74. 

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“The public seems tired of disruption, change and uncertainty,” the journal said. “All in all, the public appears to be calling for a return to the status quo.”

Education Next

The softening support this year spans the political spectrum, though — as in most years — respondents overwhelmingly looked more favorably on their own schools than on education at the national level. In its 15th year, the EdNext poll also found stronger support falling along lines of political affiliation among lawmakers.

Following up on a spring 2020 canvass of families, the journal also surveyed more than 2,000 parents among the 3,156 adult respondents to learn their views on student safety, the likelihood they will have their children vaccinated when they are able and their satisfaction with their children’s experience in the 2020-21 academic year. Slightly more than half, 51 percent, plan to have their kids inoculated, while 34 percent say they will probably or definitely not.

Black and Latino parents are more likely to seek vaccinations for their children than white families, Democrats more likely than Republicans and homeschoolers least likely, at just 32 percent.

Two-thirds of parents surveyed want an online option for their high school-aged child, as do 48 percent of families with elementary pupils. Mask-wearing is favored by 47 percent, while 35 percent are opposed.

On the policy issues, the pollsters posed questions in a variety of ways to probe whether the interviewer’s framing changed respondents’ answers. Writing in the journal’s winter 2022 issue, researchers Michael B. Henderson, David M. Houston, Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West found a change of 5 points or more to be statistically significant.

While overall support for increased school spending fell significantly, it plunged by 11 percentage points, from 50 to 39 percent, among respondents who were told their local district’s current per-pupil expenditure. Among those asked without that context, the number favoring increased spending fell from 62 to 57 percent.

Support for increased teacher pay fell from 56 to 53 percent among those informed of their state’s current average, and from 72 to 67 percent among those not told average pay.

Overall backing for charter schools fell 7 points, from 48 to 41 percent. As in past polls, support is much stronger among Republicans than Democrats, at 52 percent and 33 percent respectively.

Education Next

More than half, 55 percent, of respondents gave their local public schools a grade of A or B — down from a 2019 peak of almost 60 percent but well above the 40 percent who gave these high grades in 2008. In contrast, just 23 percent of those surveyed this year gave As or Bs to public schools across the country.

The number of Black respondents who rate schools in their community highly rose sharply, from 24 percent in 2008 to 46 percent in 2021. The number of whites assigning their schools As and Bs rose from 44 percent to 57 percent, while the number of Latinos rose from 39 percent to 60 percent.

All groups were much more likely to say the nation’s schools deserve neither an A or a B, with just 24 percent of Blacks and 18 percent of whites assigning top honors. At 59 percent, the number of Democrats giving local schools an A or a B remained the same between 2019 and 2021, while Republican support fell from 62 percent to 51 percent.

The number in favor of private school vouchers for all students fell sharply over 2019, from 55 percent to 45 percent, though less so for publicly funded scholarships for low-income students, which fell from 49 percent to 43 percent.

Education Next

Support for tax credit vouchers, where businesses and others receive tax credits for donating to private school scholarship programs, gained traction with Democrats, with support increasing from 56 to 61 percent between 2019 and 2021. The idea lost ground among Republicans, meanwhile, with backing declining from 65 to 53 percent. The researchers speculated that the partisan reversal might in part reflect President Joe Biden’s success at persuading Congress to pass expanded tax credits for families with children.

In terms of whether teacher unions helped or hindered efforts to reopening schools during the first 18 months of the pandemic, the public “seems reluctant to draw strong conclusions,” the pollsters say. Half of Americans say unions made it neither easier nor harder to reopen schools.

Still, just 15 percent of survey takers say that unions made it easier for local schools to reopen, while 35 percent say they made it harder. Nationwide, 48 percent of respondents say unions made school reopenings harder.

Teachers were more likely than parents to opine critically, with 43 percent saying unions made it harder for local schools to open, versus 34 percent of parents. Of parents, 22 percent said unions made it easier for schools to reopen, an opinion held by 18 percent of teachers.

Seventy-two percent of Democrats and Republicans alike back statewide testing of students in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school.

The differences in the public’s and policymakers’ appetites for change should give education advocates across the ideological spectrum food for thought, the researchers say. “In the political sphere, expectations for large-scale innovation are running high,” they note.

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(NWEA)

A new report from the assessment group NWEA underscores two findings that could inform how schools support children with disabilities going forward. Students receiving special education services often make more academic growth during a single school year than their typically abled peers, but are at substantially higher risk of losing ground during summer break.

If students with disabilities fell behind during the pandemic the same way they do between school years, they are particularly vulnerable to what researchers call COVID Slide. To help address this, the report’s authors, together with the National Center for Learning Disabilities, have a number of recommendations.

For the long term, they say, more research is needed to better understand the value of increased specialized summer programming — something many families must now fight to get. In the immediate future, however, they emphasize tutoring, high-quality curriculum and use of data to personalized instruction as schools welcome back children who may have received few specialized supports during the pandemic.

While a trove of evidence shows that students in special education overall score much lower than their peers on standardized tests, NWEA says the report is the first to examine growth during the school year and summer learning loss specifically among children with disabilities.

NWEA’s MAP test, formerly known as the Measures of Academic Progress, is typically given in the fall and spring, and sometimes more often. Administered online, it measures how far ahead or behind their grade level a student is, revealing which specific skills they have not mastered, as well as academic growth made in a single year.

In contrast, state exams given in the spring provide a snapshot showing where students score in relation to what is expected for their grade. Because these yearly tests capture neither the strong academic growth among children with disabilities nor its rapid loss, they may obscure an important element to making special education more effective.

The MAP scores student progress according to units NWEA calls RITs — the rough equivalent of inches or feet on a yardstick. During the summer, students with disabilities lose 1.2 to 2.1 RITs per month, compared with -0.4 to -0.8 for non-disabled students.

Researchers Elizabeth Barker and Angela Johnson drew their conclusions from data gathered between 2014 and 2019 from 4,228 students in kindergarten through fourth grade in 109 schools. They divided students into two groups — ever-SPED and never-SPED — based on whether each child had received any special education services at any point. The sample, they note, is not representative because the information came from schools that were willing to share their data.

In addition to finding that students with disabilities may both gain and lose academic skills more quickly than their classmates, the researchers found that children in special education start kindergarten at roughly the national mean but fall behind over the course of the year. The gap that opens between them and typically developing children widens between kindergarten and fourth grade.

In its accompanying set of recommendations, the National Center for Learning Disabilities notes that $3 billion of the $125 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief pandemic recovery funds is earmarked specifically for bolstering services for children with disabilities. Many of the strategies outlined are also being advanced by education advocacy groups as steps that will help all students catch up in the wake of COVID-19.

Among them: States, districts and schools should invest in high-quality curriculum backed by evidence of effectiveness — particularly for students with disabilities. They should consider offering more learning time and research-backed tutoring. Using good data to personalize instruction is key to serving children with disabilities, as is embracing universal design, a strategy of modifying lessons to make them accessible to any student.

Because of the trauma and mental health challenges families have experienced during the pandemic, it’s likely to be difficult for educators to discern the difference between an educational disability and an emotional or behavioral challenge, the center warns. Schools should strengthen both their capacity to perform good special ed evaluations and social-emotional supports for all children — especially those from systemically marginalized communities.

Finally, schools should step up family engagement and solicit input from parents of children with disabilities, possibly by partnering with organizations that are already deeply involved in their communities.

The report includes links to numerous resources to help with the implementation of each recommendation.

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If they are coached on missing skills required, students complete 27 percent more grade-level work than if teachers try to back up and fit in unfinished material from prior years, the researchers found. Yet the children who are likely to return to school in the fall with the biggest learning losses are twice as likely in many instances to get ineffectual remediation.

TNTP/Zearn

The researchers hope states and school districts will consider the new data as they decide how to spend their American Rescue Plan dollars, which come with a congressional mandate to use a portion of the money to address academic gaps, both for summer programs and for the 2021-22 academic year.

Teachers are trained that remediation, the practice of focusing on missing, below-grade-level material — covering all lessons in second grade before moving on to third, for example — is the chief method for helping students who are behind catch up. But past research by TNTP and others shows it’s not effective.

Teaching grade-level material, while stopping to supply missing, underlying skills as they become necessary — acceleration — is a strategy some researchers have found promising. TNTP and Zearn say the new data is the most concrete yet to support this notion.

“It’s a counterintuitive difference,” says Shalinee Sharma, Zearn CEO and co-founder. “The simple idea [behind] remediation would be that if a child is struggling, you go back all the way to where everything is easy again and you bring them back gradually.

“Acceleration says, ‘Nope, the human brain is plastic,’” she continues. “You start with something really specific, like how do you add fractions. You drop down and teach that skill and then pop right back up.”

Because it is an app, Zearn’s math platform automatically gathers data every time a student opens it. Because of this, it has drawn the attention of researchers at a number of organizations. The new report analyzed information gleaned from 2 million students in 100,000 classrooms during the current academic year. It’s possible to tell who, in socio-economic terms, the students in any given classroom are and whether they are working on grade-level materials or covering ground lost last year.

The same two-way flow of precise information, complete with demographic data, compelled the economists leading Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights team to incorporate Zearn into their interactive pandemic tracker. At the same time, the platform’s effectiveness has spurred education leaders in Louisiana, Delaware and other places to create incentives for schools to incorporate it in their plans to address learning losses.

Zearn and TNTP found that pupils in classrooms where acceleration was used for addressing early pandemic learning losses not only completed more grade-level lessons than their peers, they mostly regained their pre-pandemic success.

By contrast, students in classrooms where remediation took place struggled to complete lessons 10 times as often. And children of color and those in high-poverty schools were often twice as likely to be in classrooms where remediation was the primary strategy for closing academic gaps.

“This is in some ways a field-flipping idea,” says TNTP Vice President Bailey Cato Czupryk. “It feels counterintuitive because we are saying to teachers, ‘The thing we taught you to do isn’t working.’”

When students give an incorrect answer or otherwise show they don’t understand a concept, the Zearn app — without signaling to the students that they are failing — supplies another example or equation, or suggests an alternative means of solving a math problem. If this cycle repeats more than a couple of times, the app sends a “struggle alert” to the teacher, who then has the right information to provide what academic diagnostic experts sometimes refer to as “just-in-time” intervention.

The new research found that even when students of color and those from low-income backgrounds had been successful with grade-level academic content, they were more likely than their white, wealthier peers to experience remediation. In schools with mostly students of color, nearly one in six students were remediated, whether or not they previously had met grade-level standards. At the same time, acceleration was particularly effective for these disadvantaged students.

TNTP/Zearn

The new report bolsters existing TNTP research. In 2018, the nonprofit released The Opportunity Myth, a report on the experiences of 4,000 students in five public school systems that found they spent hundreds of hours each year doing work that wasn’t challenging enough for their grade level. The lower their exposure to lessons geared for their grade, the less likely the students were to master the academic material that was being presented, TNTP found.

The Zearn data, the new report notes, “reaffirms our finding from The Opportunity Myth that remediation can become a vicious cycle: as gaps accumulate year after year, students miss more and more grade-appropriate content in favor of review of content from previous grades and become increasingly less likely to ever make it back to grade-level mastery.”

The researchers say the pandemic year findings underscore the need for several fundamental shifts. Teachers need to be brought up to speed on the perils of remediation and trained to let go of longstanding perceptions that missing skills mean a student is not ready for challenging material.

Acceleration also calls for high-quality classroom materials, support for teachers in using those materials and, in some instances, for more instructional or tutoring time that’s closely tied to the strategy. Educators should expect truly catching students up to be a multi-year process, the researchers add.

“With the help of funding from the American Rescue Plan, school systems have an opportunity to invest in the tools, training and support necessary to successfully implement learning acceleration next school year and beyond,” the report notes.

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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 LA School Report’s parent company, The 74 Media. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

(Kara Cisco)

Long before sunrise the morning after Daunte Wright, a Black motorist, was killed by a white police officer outside Minneapolis, Kara Cisco made some quick posts to Facebook. She asked if anyone knew whether the previous night’s protests would affect her commute to work. She would need to traverse the part of Minneapolis where the uprisings that followed last summer’s killing of George Floyd began. The air in the city, she noted, “has been hanging heavy for days” as the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged in Floyd’s death, entered its third week.

Minnesota’s 2020 Social Studies Teacher of the Year, Cisco teaches ninth-grade civics at St. Louis Park High School, located just west of Minneapolis and not far from Brooklyn Center, where Wright was killed during a traffic stop.

Kara Cisco

Her next Facebook post was a lesson plan for the day, titled “Justice for Daunte Wright and the Red Summer of 1919,” and an open invitation for others to use it.

A slide describing the possible trauma of watching events unfold is followed by a brief, factual description of Wright’s shooting Sunday afternoon and then a lesson about “another time period in U.S. history immediately following a pandemic in which racial tensions had come to a boiling point, tempers were high, people were traumatized and the result was national unrest and a fight for racial justice.”

In the summer of 1919, the nation was coming out of the Spanish flu pandemic and a world war, and the Great Migration of Blacks from the South was underway. In a slide deck that makes up the lesson, Cisco outlines 30 race riots that took place around the country that year, the Black Wall Street massacre two years later in Tulsa and an overview of redlining — the practice of legally barring people of color from living in a neighborhood — in Minneapolis.

“This is what happens to a nation battered down by pandemic, loss and racial trauma that is suspended in an air so thick you could cut with a knife,” she wrote on Facebook. “Welcome to the Red Summer of 2021.”

The lesson plan, which asks students to apply their own critical lenses to the previous day’s deadly events, illustrates a point Cisco made in an interview with The 74 in the wake of the U.S. Capitol riot in January: while it is inappropriate for civics teachers to be partisan, it is important that they teach from a position “rooted in criticality.”

“To put that in layman’s terms, the questions that we pose as teachers are powerful in that they invite students to develop their own critical consciousness and their critical thinking skills in unique ways,” she said. “Our power lies not in telling, but in asking big questions, and inviting students to engage.”

The full lesson can be found here.

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National Parents Union

While many school leaders focus on bringing students back into in-person classrooms as they were, a majority of parents want them to develop new and better ways of teaching, prioritize high-quality distance learning now and continue to offer virtual instruction even after COVID-19 recedes, a new poll finds.

The survey, commissioned by the National Parents Union, also finds broad approval among parents for their own schools — but high numbers reporting that their children are receiving less learning than usual. Low-income parents and those whose children have disabilities are particularly likely to say their kids are losing ground.

Echelon Insights canvassed 1,000 parents of school-aged children from Oct. 19 to 27 on behalf of the parent union, which is conducting frequent polls to assess families’ experiences with education during the pandemic. The October survey included questions on attitudes about broader policy issues.

Nearly two-thirds of parents surveyed in the most recent poll want schools to focus on new ways to teach children moving forward as a result of COVID-19, while 32 percent say they want schools to try to get back as quickly as possible to how things were pre-pandemic.

Fifty-eight percent want schools to continue to provide online options for students after the pandemic has ended and a vaccine is widely available, while 34 percent of white parents, 37 percent of Black parents, 35 percent of Hispanic parents and 45 percent of Asian parents say their children are learning less than they usually would.

Four in 10 parents earning less than $50,000 a year and 44 percent of those whose children have a disability say their children are learning less.

In the new poll, 59 percent of parents say they would prefer schools to focus on improving online or remote learning, compared with 35 percent who favor a return to in-person schooling. The number who say improving distance learning should be the priority rose 5 percentage points over September.

Like other polls, the survey found families of color far less in favor of returning to full-time, in-person schooling than whites. Just 19 percent of Black families, 22 percent of Latinos and 30 percent of Asians want their children back in classrooms full time, versus 34 percent of whites.

(National Parents Union Survey Of K–12 Public School Parents)

About half of families of color want to remain in distance learning, compared with 42 percent of whites. Three-fourths of parents with children attending school in person favor finishing the school year that way, compared with 71 percent of families enrolled in online learning and 52 percent of those in some form of hybrid school.

(National Parents Union Survey Of K–12 Public School Parents)

Parents whose children are attending school in person are least likely to feel their school should be doing more to communicate, with 39 percent of those in distance learning and 37 percent of those in hybrid arrangements wanting more engagement.

Black and Latino parents are more likely to say their child’s school should be doing more to engage families. Thirty-eight percent of Black parents and 43 percent of Latinos said they wanted schools to do more to include them in making decisions about their children, versus 34 percent of white parents.

(National Parents Union Survey Of K–12 Public School Parents)

Seventeen percent of respondents say their children are participating in a learning “pod” with other families.

Among specific resources provided by schools, parents are least satisfied with the level of support for students’ mental health and emotional well-being.

Despite the concerns highlighted by the poll, more than four-fifths of those surveyed say the education offered by their child’s school is good or excellent — a seeming paradox that is nothing new.

Martin West, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and executive editor of the influential journal EducationNext, which publishes its own annual K-12 opinion poll, cautioned against portraying the new survey as either a rock-solid endorsement of schools’ current performance or a mandate for big change.

“It can be hard for parents to admit to themselves that their child’s school is not as good as it could be,” he said.

The findings, West added, echo other recent surveys. EducationNext’s most recent poll, conducted in May, found 71 percent of parents say their children are learning less, while 72 percent describe themselves as satisfied with instruction and activities provided by schools since the shutdowns began.

“We interpret that as generosity of spirit toward the obstacles teachers and schools are facing,” he said.

That survey also found rising support for online learning, with 73 percent of parents reporting a willingness for their child to take some high school courses digitally.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to the VELA Foundation, the National Parents Union and The 74. The City Fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to the National Parents Union and The 74. 

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NWEA Accessibility Scientist Elizabeth Barker (NWEA)

“Can you give an example of an online lesson that’s effective for students with disabilities?”

That’s the question Elizabeth Barker has fielded over and over as schools have prepared to reopen. But it’s the one question that Barker, a special education expert with NWEA, a nonprofit data and assessment provider, can’t answer.

Because students in special education, by definition, require individualized support, there is no such thing as a model lesson. She does, however, point to four ingredients for effective special education during in-person schooling that should guide educators as they look for ways to engage students with disabilities in distance learning.

1. Individual or small group instruction is crucial to successful in-person special education and will be key to making interventions effective in distance learning. Recommendations from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, part of the EdResearch for Recovery Project, include having paraprofessionals take over scoring exams and completing paperwork to free up special education teachers to use their specialized expertise in one-on-one settings.

Some states allow in-person supports for students with disabilities. In Maryland and California, some providers may visit children’s homes. In Washington state, some students can attend meetings and receive services in school buildings with proper social distancing.

2.  Schools should also consider Universal Design for Learning, a framework that reviews everything from technology to curriculum with an eye toward removing barriers for students with unique needs. This might mean providing an audio version of a text or allowing them to dictate, rather than type, an answer.

If a school or district is buying platforms or digital materials to use in distance learning, it’s crucial to push for materials that have features that make them accessible. This might include closed captioning for hearing-impaired students, magnification for students with visual impairments and the ability to navigate with a keyboard, versus a mouse or touchpad.

It will be interesting, Barker says, to see whether pandemic-era pressure for online lessons pushes vendors to make their materials accessible: “Prior to this, we looked and looked and looked” but found few.

Students with disabilities often take time — and quite a bit of it — to warm up to new technology. A student who can’t or won’t participate in a Zoom lesson may need to acclimate to a new device, “tour” the platform or get a preview of how a class or school day will take place.

“They need to get in front of a device and make it theirs,” says Barker. “Getting it a week before school starts is not going to do it.”

3. Teachers will need strategies for communicating clear learning goals to students, helping them to assess their own understanding, giving feedback and allowing time for students to redo assignments.

Some researchers fear that students with disabilities will lose more learning than their typically abled peers in the switch to remote schooling, but that has yet to be proven true. And even if it is true for some students, the urge to move as quickly as possible to shore up academic gaps is likely shortsighted, says Barker.

“We need to think about it as a marathon and have compassion,” she says. “The panic to catch up will actually put us behind.”

4. Teachers need some mechanism, formal or informal, of tracking student progress.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides funding for the EdResearch for Recovery Project and The 74.

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

New Orleans, October 2005 — A destroyed classroom at St. Dominic’s school in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left the school flooded. (Getty Images)

On the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the devastation wrought by the storm and subsequent flood is still hard to fathom. Within a day of the storm’s landfall Aug. 29, 2005, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. Tens of thousands of evacuees crowded into sports arenas and convention centers there and in Baton Rouge and Houston.

By the time engineers had pumped the last of the floodwaters out of the city on Oct. 11, some 1,200 lives had been lost and an estimated $106 billion in damage done. Vast areas had been destroyed.

As in the pandemic today, the reopening of schools was an urgent issue. Families could not rebuild without a safe place to leave their children. Kids needed to be with other kids to continue to develop socially and to process the trauma they were experiencing. And in one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, no student could afford lost learning.

Reams have been written about the unprecedented effort launched in the wake of the disaster to reform New Orleans’s schools. The state seized all but the top performers and contracted with nonprofit charter school operators to run them. No shortage of controversy still attends the experiment, but 15 years later, academic achievement, high school graduation and college attendance have all risen significantly.

Research by the Tulane University-based Education Research Alliance for New Orleans shows that students who returned to the city’s schools in 2006 and 2007 lagged behind where they had been before the storm, as measured on state standardized tests, but surpassed 2005 achievement levels within two years.

Overall, in the decade after the storm, test scores had risen from the 50th percentile to the 66th. According to a 2018 alliance report, high school graduation rates increased by as much as 9 percentage points and college graduation by up to 5 points.

Today, many people working in New Orleans schools are survivors of the storm, educators whose life trajectories were shaped by their experiences trying to keep learning or teaching in the years after the disaster. Here, we offer the stories of five individuals, all of whom have tapped the resilience they developed during Katrina to address schooling in the time of COVID-19.

‘Katrina planted a seed’

Raven Matthews was 11 when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, threatening the New Orleans East neighborhood where she lived. Her dad, a school bus driver, called friends and family when the evacuation order went out and offered transport to anyone who could get to his house. Every seat on the bus was occupied by the time he turned the engine over, the yard full of cars.

The first stop was Pineville, a small city halfway between Baton Rouge and Shreveport. “We’d never heard of it before,” says Matthews. “He was just driving.”

(Raven Matthews)

The mothballed factory where evacuees were being sheltered made her mother nervous. It was filthy, the floor littered with sewing needles, and people in prison uniforms were wandering around. So they drove a little further northeast to tiny Deville, where they slept in a church.

“That’s when I started thinking, ‘Oh, something’s wrong,’” she recalls. “We’re not going home.”

They didn’t, for two years.

Matthews’s father drove the bus from town to town, dropping off passengers and staying a while wherever there were relatives to bunk with. The family lived in a hotel in Tennessee for two months before settling in Houma, a small city near the gulf coast.

At every stop, Matthews’s mother enrolled her in school. She was a good student, and the fact that her older brother and sister and her cousins attended with her helped buffer the discomfort of perpetually being the new kid.

When the family moved home to New Orleans nearly two years later, Matthews was supposed to be in seventh grade. She tested out, however, and was placed in eighth-grade classes. The school system’s bureaucracy — one of the nation’s most dysfunctional before the storm — was still in chaos, and Matthews didn’t take the state’s mandatory end-of-year exam. So when the next school year began, she was forced to repeat eighth grade.

Matthews wanted to follow her best friend to Sci High School, but at a school fair, her mother unwittingly enrolled her in a new public charter school, Sci Academy. When they realized their mistake, they decided the new school, with its promise of challenging academics and a path to college, was the better option.

At Sci — since renamed Abramson Sci Academy — Matthews had a Spanish instructor who captured her imagination. Lisa Maria Rhodes was animated and passionate, and Matthews started thinking about becoming a teacher. But first, she had to get through college — a journey that would be as bumpy as middle school.

Matthews first enrolled in the University of Louisiana Monroe, but she was homesick her entire freshman year. She transferred to Delgado Community College, a New Orleans two-year school that she knew had a notoriously low graduation rate and little student support. She tapped Sci’s alumni support network to cobble together a group of fellow graduates who held each other accountable for finishing.

After earning an associate’s degree in elementary education at Delgado, Matthews enrolled in Southeastern University, which operates a lab school where its student teachers can work. “I visited, saw it and fell completely in love,” she says. “I can do everything here.”

Once again, her best-laid plans fell apart. Her community college credits did not transfer — a common hurdle for low-income students — so she was looking at three more years of college instead of two. And she was told she would not be able to do her student teaching in the lab school.

Exasperated, Matthews enrolled in the University of New Orleans, where she was able to graduate within a year — albeit without a teaching license. While she works toward a formal credential, she’s in her second year of teaching Spanish at Collegiate Baton Rouge, a high school in the same charter school network as her alma mater.

“Going through the hardship I went through with Katrina planted a seed,” she says. “Moving again and again, it set me up for college in a way it wouldn’t have otherwise. It trained me to get over the hurdles.”

The experience of being an evacuee, Matthews says, informs her teaching. “I want to be the teacher who says, ‘Keep going,’” she says. “I want them to keep looking for opportunities that will change their lives for the better.”

‘We were like lost boys’

Neil Williams had his senior year at Edna Karr High School planned out before it even started. In addition to prom and graduation, he and a friend had been tapped to do color commentary for the football season. He was on the student council and helped classmates raise money for a trip to China.

New Orleans’s academic year starts during hurricane season, but storms usually close schools for just a couple of days. When Katrina threatened, Williams packed up his homework and video games and headed to a friend’s house, imagining they’d barbecue and game all weekend.

“But then, all of a sudden, it turned into a monster storm,” he recalls. He and his friend Kevin ended up driving to Houston to stay with Kevin’s aunt. They watched and waited all weekend, finally getting word that back home, the levees had broken.

(Neil Williams)

“It started to sink in that we’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” Williams says. His siblings and parents were scattered in other parts of Houston, Dallas and Arkansas, without reliable means of communication. So Kevin’s aunt enrolled him in high school in Sugar Land, a Houston suburb. Williams had his New Orleans school schedule with him, so he tried to sign up for the classes he thought he would need to take to earn a Louisiana diploma.

The house where he was staying was crowded, so when federal emergency officials offered Williams a hotel room, he took it. He got a job in the adjacent mall and was trying to track down his family when, on Sept. 21, it became clear Hurricane Rita would force mass evacuations in Texas. “People were just terrified,” he recalls.

Williams was trying to figure out how to evacuate from Houston when he heard from the family that owned a California ranch and summer camp he had attended a few years before. The family bought Williams a plane ticket and set him up in one of the two gigantic ranch houses at the Jameson Ranch Camp in Bakersfield.

One of his summer counselors was also a teacher at nearby North High School, so Williams started a new school — again — three days after arriving in California.

“At that point, I was just emotionally beat down,” he says. “I went to school and everything, but I was checked out.”

Williams’s old New Orleans school, Edna Karr, had been damaged in the hurricane, but it reopened by Thanksgiving. So he flew back to Houston and hitched a ride home with an uncle.

The family’s house was in ruins. The first floor was covered with six inches of muck and mold, and the second floor had been looted. He moved in with a great-aunt and worked the overnight shift for a company that cleaned stores.

“Everything after Katrina was just uncertain,” he says. “Before, I had a plan. It was like, graduate, go to college, get a job and buy a house. And after the storm, that was all upended.

“A lot of us, our parents were working remotely or in another city. We were like lost boys — a lot of people living in their parents’ houses alone or with their friends … We all had to become some level of adult at that point.”

Williams was relieved to graduate from Edna Karr in the spring of 2006, alongside 100 of his classmates and 50 students from schools that had been destroyed. “That was a really big deal to me, because the other schools I was at, I just couldn’t see myself with their tassels or their colors. I thought if I have to be here” — in Houston or Bakersfield — “I’m just going to wear purple and gold.”

After graduation, Williams enrolled at Alabama A&M University, a historically Black college in Huntsville, on a full scholarship. He was a decent student, but unhappy, and bounced around over the next few years, from Southeastern University to the Army National Guard and finally the University of New Orleans.

One of his teachers had gone to work for what would become FirstLine Schools, now a five-school network of public charter schools. After he graduated, FirstLine offered him a job. Today, he is the director of facilities and transportation for the entire network.

Using the experience he gained keeping systems operating smoothly in the guard to ensure that kids will be transported, fed and supported at school is more satisfying, he says.

“I had a lot of people who knew me, and I had an opportunity to go from student to colleague, and it felt good. I get to work side by side with people who taught me.”

With his experience in Katrina and his stints in the military, Williams started thinking about the challenges a pandemic could pose in December, two months before the first U.S. case was documented. By the time schools were shut down in March, he had surveyed families about their technology needs and was figuring out how to keep custodians, bus drivers and cafeteria workers employed.

In an odd way, it has reinvigorated his passion for his work. Ever on the alert for potential future contingency plans, he’s looking for ways his schools’ distance learning experiences will enable FirstLine to better respond to future storms.

Managing upheaval, says Williams, is his superpower: “I went from being a pretty sure kid, who was confident where his life was going, to someone who just reacts to uncertainty.”

‘We have to keep moving’

The August that Katrina hit was showtime for Principal Sharon Clark. Her chronically underperforming city school had been taken over by the state-run Recovery School District, and on July 1, 2005, her middle school was granted permission to operate as a charter school.

Clark had argued that freed from the district’s notorious bureaucracy, her staff could turn Sophie B. Wright Middle School around. “It was now time to put our money where our mouth was,” she recalls. “Now we have no excuse for failure if we are responsible for every aspect of running our school, operating our school.”

By her lights, the timing of the switch to a charter was a blessing. Seeing that parents working on the city’s reconstruction needed a place to send their kids to school, she made a plan to enroll students in grades 4 to 8. She did not need to ask permission.

On Jan. 3, 2006, she was able to reopen Sophie B. Wright to 140 kids — many of them the children of first responders. Students were offered group counseling, and a pen-pal program was started so they could share their feelings in letters to kids in a school outside the state.

But Clark’s team stuck to their original school turnaround plan of rigorous academics. Even before the hurricane, the students were at risk, she says.

“As an educator, and as an African-American educator, I think it is important that we never dummy down curriculum or anything for our students,” she says. “We owe it to them to normalize the process of education no matter what, no matter if it’s a storm, if it’s COVID.”

The school had no fourth-graders in 2005, but on the 2007 test, 71 percent scored “basic” or higher in reading and 80 percent in math.

As she reopened school for distance learning last week, Clark had the same goals. “I’ve learned through both of these processes, both of these situations,” she says. “Two to three years from now people forget, and they want you to be like before. There’s very little allowance or understanding or forgiveness. In my mindset, we have to keep moving for when that time comes and this goes away.”

‘You have to lead with love’

One of a handful of charter schools that existed before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Charter Middle School was a success story — so much so that the state Recovery School District asked its leaders if they would be willing to take over Samuel J. Green, a struggling pre-K-8 school.

“We said, ‘Of course we can,’” recalls Sivi Domango, now executive director of culture for all five FirstLine Schools public charter school campuses.

The effort was barely underway when the storm forced Domango to flee to Baton Rouge. She had been there two weeks when her higher-ups called and asked whether she would be willing to partner with a charter school in that city to open a temporary school on the second floor of the downtown arena that was serving as a shelter for evacuees.

(Sivi Domango)

“Our goal was to provide a sense of normalcy for children,” Domango says. “But we quickly realized it was about allowing their parents some time to organize their business, to see what their next move was.”

Upwards of 100 kids attended the makeshift school at the River Center, arrayed around library tables set up to suggest classrooms. “They all would get up in the morning and ride the escalator up to school,” she says. “Clearly, nothing was normal. They were sleeping on cots next to people they did not know.”

Before the storm, Domango had been dean of students at New Orleans Charter Middle School, a job that entailed discipline, among other things. Setting up a makeshift school in the arena forced her to change her approach.

“They say educators are superheroes, but underneath that cape we had also gone through a traumatic experience with our students,” she says. Domango’s home in New Orleans East was so far underwater that just the top of the roof can be seen in aerial photos of the flood.

When students did not show up on time for class in the temporary school, Domango could take the escalator down to find them. “But I had to restructure the way I interacted with them,” she says. “There were parents at the River Center who did not want to see me coming, because they were already stressed.

“I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, why isn’t your son in school?’ I had to say, ‘Hello, good morning, how are you? How about we send this child up to school and I will sit with you and help you with whatever you are trying to figure out?’”

The storm destroyed New Orleans Charter Middle School and badly damaged Green. Domango was among a group of employees who made the trip home to see whether Green could be reopened. As they stood outside, a family came out of a house across the street to say neighbors were eager to move back but couldn’t until there was an open school.

The neighborhood association protested a plan to tear the building down, says Domango: “They said the neighborhood would not have come back if it weren’t for that school reopening.”

This past March, when the coronavirus forced FirstLine’s five schools to close, Domango herself was sick with the virus. When she recovered, her first goal was to plan ways to tend to students’ emotional needs in the new school year — to foster togetherness at a distance.

She can trace a direct line from her experiences in the River Center to the strategies she and FirstLine’s educators will use to nurture relationships in remote learning: “When a student is absent, I can’t go bang on their door right now, but I can use social media. I can go to a parent’s Facebook and say, ‘Hey, Ms. So-and-So, how can I help you?’

“You can have high expectations,” says Domango. “You can have high academic standards. But you have to lead with love. You have to show people you care.”

‘I was a refugee. That gives me certain soft skills’

Monday, Aug. 17, looked nothing like J’Remi Barnes imagined it would. It was the first day of his first year as the teacher in charge of a special education classroom at Collegiate Academies. He can still support students, virtually, in everything from money management to math, but he is acutely aware of the responsibility he now shoulders: “When it comes to this work, it’s all on me.”

Barnes was in third grade during Hurricane Katrina and has the disconnected memories of a child. He remembers his mother getting a call at the Texas hotel where they took shelter, informing her that his grandfather had had a heart attack in his flooded apartment building. He remembers that the way his grandmother hugged his mother at the airport was “just different,” but not which airport.

(J’Remi Barnes)

His family bounced around Georgia, where his stepfather had family. A quiet boy, Barnes worried that he was behind the other kids. “In third grade, they were talking about the difference between facts and opinions and doing multiplication,” he says. “If we did the tables right, we got to participate in a sundae party.”

He was relieved when his mother announced she was leaving his stepfather and they were moving back to New Orleans midway through sixth grade. Back home, his family dived back into church, where Barnes would spend entire weekends involved in activities, including competing with the drill team.

He taught himself to play piano, and then drums and guitar. On enrolling in Abramson Sci Academy, he started a club called Garage Band. He taught classmates to play various instruments, and the group would perform at school events.

Exposure to Georgia’s more challenging schools meant he was ahead when he got home, a fact he took pride in. “High school was tough, but I was grateful for it,” says Barnes. “I excelled. I was surrounded by teachers who were invested in my achievement. I was invested in my achievement.”

His success attracted the attention of the Posse Foundation, a national program that identifies students and veterans with leadership potential and supports them, with scholarships and mentoring, in small cohorts at four-year colleges. The program matched Barnes and 10 other New Orleans graduates with Grinnell College, located in an isolated pocket of Iowa.

“The culture shock was surreal,” he recalls. “I had interacted with white people. The vast majority of my teachers [at Sci] were white. But I was used to people at school looking like me.”

In a discussion about refugees, a classmate made a comment that was, to Barnes’s ears, so devoid of empathy he wanted to hide. “Someone brought up Katrina survivors, and it just got me,” he says. “I didn’t want to single myself out as ‘that person.’”

He thought about quitting during sophomore year. Of the 11 students in his cohort, six graduated.

His freshman year, Barnes took an education class that sparked his interest in teaching. As good as his teachers had been, he recalls thinking, students in New Orleans needed more educators who look like them.

“They still don’t have so many Black role models,” he says. “I would love to be that person for students, if I can.”

Starting his teaching career in a pandemic is more than Barnes imagined, but it’s something he feels uniquely positioned to do. “I was a refugee. That gives me certain soft skills,” he says. “It taught me to think in a way other people can’t. I can create relationships within my class that allow for conversation in a better way.”

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

Minnich is CEO of the nonprofit assessment and research organization NWEA, whose recent report predicts dramatic losses from the nation’s school closures. In some grades, students may end up an entire year behind where they would have been academically, absent COVID-19.

The research from NWEA’s Collaborative for Student Growth Research Center suggests that when students head back to school in the fall, overall they are likely to retain about 70 percent of this year’s gains in reading, compared with a typical school year, and less than 50 percent in math. Losses are likely to be more pronounced in the early grades, when students normally acquire many basic skills, and among those already facing steep inequities.

Districts, charter school networks and other schools, Minnich and his colleagues say, may want to consider bringing students back earlier, keeping them for longer school days or academic years, or otherwise increasing the amount of time pupils have with teachers. In turn, teachers will need more strategies for serving students with wildly varying needs in a single classroom.

NWEA administers the popular Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, assessment, which tracks student growth by probing for mastery and missing skills. Many districts use the exams to gather baseline data at the start of the year, followed by midyear and end-of-year assessments.

Researchers Beth Tarasawa and Megan Kuhfeld created the new models using MAP data generated by 5 million students in grades 3-8 during the 2017-18 school year and separate, existing research on summer slide — academic losses that occur during protracted school breaks.

The organization arrived at its new model by extending the slope of typical academic skill loss backward from June 15 to March 15, explains Tarasawa, NWEA’s executive vice president of research. The next step is to examine the slopes according to schools’ poverty levels, but researchers wanted their initial, dramatic findings out now, to nudge administrators to start thinking about the implications.

“There’s a moral imperative to get this data out,” says Tarasawa. “The real question is, what are we going to do about it? In many ways, we can liken it to the models of the disease itself.” She cites data being collected by the Center on Reinventing Public Education on schools’ and districts’ responses to the pandemic as a valuable resource.

“Seeing the research is startling, although something we expected,” he says. “My biggest worry is the kids who are already behind.

“We need to be bold. We need to take action,” he adds. “I think this data will shock our community.”

Before the pandemic, the district had seen increased academic growth at a number of schools that have longer days, lower student-teacher ratios and intensive intervention in English-learner support and literacy through its Zoom Initiative.

The district, which serves a number of Nevada cities, including Las Vegas, is scrambling to make sure students are safe and fed, Jara explains. But leaders are already looking at which academic standards are not going to be met this school year as teachers focus on student well-being and academic enrichment, and how to make sure missing academic material from this year is covered in the first weeks of the next school year.

He’s also trying to think through what that school calendar should look like: “Do we need to start the year early, particularly for our elementary students who will see the biggest slide?”

NWEA’s findings build on summer slide research by its own team and others, as well as the impact of other school closures on learning. Chad Aldeman, a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, says research suggests that if left unaddressed, any COVID-19 slide could have a lasting impact.

Aldeman cites a paper that found that teacher strikes in Argentina had a negative impact on the incomes of students, now in their 30s, who had lost 80 to 90 days of school as children. Those deficits extended as well to the children of those students. That research also suggests that lost learning in early grades has the biggest impact.

“In the long term, there’s pretty good evidence that how much people know translates to lost outcomes and earnings,” says Aldeman. “I think we can expect similar negative outcomes from coronavirus.”

The NWEA report points out that this impact is likely to be compounded for children whose families are reeling from the pandemic’s effect on multiple fronts, including housing, loss of income and food insecurity. COVID-19 learning losses, they project, will be steeper than summer slide.

“Districts ought to be thinking smartly about who is most impacted and how to address their needs,” says Aldeman. “The other thing about this research is it will help people understand how big this is and how important it is to have the resources to deal with it.”

To that end, Minnich and Tarasawa say school leaders would do well to replace traditional notions of what “back to school” looks like with plans for a very different restart.

“How do you help a second-grader missing half a year’s learning come back and also be expected to learn to third-grade standards?” says Minnich. “And what about the third-grade teacher who is going to have kids with a wider range of skills than normal?

“We think teachers are the absolute antidote to this,” he adds. “So how do districts think creatively about teacher time?”

(Screen Shot from Renaissance Arts Academy / Vimeo)

Over the next several weeks, LA School Report will be publishing stories reported and written before the coronavirus pandemic. Their publication was sidelined when schools across the country abruptly closed, but we are sharing them now because the information and innovations they highlight remain relevant to our understanding of education.

Author’s note: This school profile was written two weeks before Los Angeles-area schools shut down for in-person instruction. Renaissance Arts Academy — whose physical space is such an important part of its identity — has switched to distance learning.

You might expect, upon opening the front door of a performing arts school, to brace for a wave of sound and motion, the kinetic jolt generated by dozens of youthful bodies with raised voices and constant movement.

So it is a peculiar kind of sensory shock to walk into Renaissance Arts Academy, where 532 students ranging from preschool to 12th grade attend class in two enormous, open rooms, and encounter a cathedral-like quiet. Not even a rehearsal for the school’s student-choreographed winter production ruffles the calm.

Orchestra and dance are unusual in central Los Angeles schools, and for students with disabilities, the arts and other enrichment activities are frequently missing altogether. That makes Renaissance Arts a double rarity — a free arts school for underserved students and a place where children who need special education services are thriving.

Virtually no student arrives at this public charter school, located on a ridge overlooking downtown Los Angeles, with an arts background. Admission is by lottery, not audition. There are 10 times as many applicants as seats. Two-thirds of students come from impoverished households, and 20 percent have disabilities — significantly higher than California’s statewide 12.5 percent special education rate.

Though the school didn’t set out to focus on students with special needs, families of children with disabilities have flocked to Ren Arts, drawn by its collaborative model that embraces all children as full participants.

The school has been singled out in research from the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools and the Center on Reinventing Public Education as a program whose innovative practices are particularly helpful to students with disabilities. Providing these children with exactly the same social and academic activities as their classmates, the think tank suggested, is likely a major factor in the school’s success.

Every Renaissance Arts student either takes dance or learns a string instrument — enrichments typically available only to the wealthy — with all getting some exposure to both. In place of homework, there is free conservatory after school. Everybody takes Latin. Students build the stages and other elements of show production — as well as most of the school’s furniture.

Instructors have deep expertise in their subjects, which include astrophysics, filmmaking, environmental science, classics, economics, philosophy, psychology, composition and a range of fine and performing arts. Unlike conventional schools where specialized academics are offered only in later grades, these content experts teach all students.

Middle and high school students have eight class periods a day, including math, humanities and science, plus afterschool arts. Younger students have multiple teachers, too, albeit on a different schedule.

It is, in the words of school founders PK Candaux, a veteran prime-time television producer, and Sidnie Gallegos, a literacy and curriculum specialist, ensemble learning. Each artist contributes something to the whole, in the service of a common vision.

“Ensemble” is a fitting metaphor. In the absence of classrooms populated according to age and other expected touchpoints that signal “school,” the carefully thought-out choreography of commingled arts and academics is invisible. As with stagecraft, there is a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes planning and collaboration.

Since the current school year began, everyone at Ren Arts has been studying beginnings and time, collectively delving into creation myths from a diverse array of cultures, astrophysics and The Iliad. Indeed, the winter performance, titled All of Creation in a Teardrop, took its name and other inspirations from a schoolwide essay assignment exploring the tears shed by Achilles’ immortal horses, Xanthos and Balius.

Throughout the space, kids gather in small groups, general education students and children with individualized education programs together — using math and physics, for example, to figure out how to make tables that are both durable and lightweight or a raised stage that rotates without wobbling — and otherwise engaging in tasks that look nothing like conventional classes.

They work in multi-age teams: pre-K through second grade, third through fifth, and middle and high schoolers. Varied levels of mastery of both academics and arts are expected, in the belief that the range in understanding enriches everyone.

It’s a particularly radical version of inclusion, the practice of ensuring that children with special needs spend as much of the school day as possible with their typically abled peers. Candaux and Gallegos call it full inclusion, which almost but not quite captures the ethos of people on a continuum of ages and capacities all plugging into a common activity in their own way.

Currently, the concept of push-in services — sending specialists into the classroom to help meet a child’s disability needs — is considered a progressive alternative to sending the student to a resource room or other isolated setting. Research shows that students who receive special education services outside the regular classroom spend just 42 percent of their time in instruction. No surprise, then, that students with disabilities in general education classes experience much higher academic gains.

As recognition of the importance of inclusion has increased, educators have begun to talk about using the same principles to enable students with an array of complex needs, ranging from learning English to giftedness, in mainstream classrooms as much as possible.

As these students, who may also be homeless, in foster care or struggling with unmet mental health issues, become the rule and not the exception, advocates say, sending unconventional students out of the classroom is increasingly problematic.

At Ren Arts, it is impossible to send anyone anywhere. There’s a large room where students in pre-K through second grade are taught, glass-walled music rehearsal rooms and a small child care space — a benefit for staff. Outside of those enclosed areas, however, the school consists of two repurposed warehouse spaces, one with an open loft running along the back. Furniture can be reconfigured as often as student groupings change, or when a stage or set needs to be built.

“We are completely full inclusion,” says Gallegos. “There is no place, there is no bungalow” — the nickname some schools give to what’s commonly referred to as a special education resource room. “Our physical structure makes it possible to have support right in the general ed classroom.”

The absence of walls is meant to enable cross-pollination. Teachers, referred to at Ren Arts as advisers, move from group to group as their expertise or ability to assist individual students is warranted. Facilitating this collaboration: The entire faculty creates multidisciplinary lesson plans and student progress notes, kept in shared online files.

“They have an in-house database where they can make notes and share information about students,” says Sean Gill, one of two CRPE analysts who spent two days at the school observing its mechanics. “It’s not like each teacher has their own grade book.”

Students move fluidly as well. Walking through the building on a recent morning, Gallegos quietly tapped a teenage boy on the shoulder, asking him to help a younger student at a table a few feet away. As it turned out, the smaller child wasn’t struggling; the bigger one, experiencing serious hardship at home, was having trouble staying awake.

Ren Arts students generally get two rotations of “smath” — intertwined science and math — a day. In one of those periods, students learn broad theoretical concepts in groups of about 24. During a second rotation for groups of about 10 students, more fine-tuning takes place. Similarly, there are two rotations of humanities.

Two ‘orchestra moms,’ one vision 

In the loft one morning last semester, an astrophysicist and a group of students sat arrayed around a whiteboard, working through a formula that shows where two lines intersect. The goal: to find out, given the amount of money collected for one of the upcoming shows, how many adult tickets were sold and how many children’s tickets.

At the same time, in an open workshop behind the performance space, a handful of students fabricated horsehead masks built on frames resembling constellations, with triangular lines connecting imaginary stars. Wearing similar, angular costumes, two students, transformed into whooping cranes, performed a mating dance, intertwining in concert with a string ensemble playing Vivaldi.

Even with the strains of The Four Seasons swelling on a round, student-constructed stage, the school was peaceful. The concerti were no more intrusive than a classical soundtrack at a white-tablecloth restaurant. Throughout the space, class conversations went on at a similar volume.

“This would be untenable if they couldn’t work quietly,” says Gallegos. “Churches are quiet. Libraries are quiet. There’s no authority enforcing that. Human beings are capable of understanding that a space is quiet.”

As they move through the cavernous rooms, teachers enforce order, asking students to pick up bits of paper or straighten chairs. Staff work hard to anticipate flash points that could spark disruption by “child-proofing” the space — making sure that a student who is compelled to swing his legs as he sits has room to do so without kicking anyone, for example.

Gallegos had been toying with the idea of starting an arts school for some time when she got to know Candaux. Gallegos’s daughter played the violin and Candaux’s studied cello, and they ended up spending many Saturday mornings together.

“We were those orchestra moms who showed up and set up chairs,” says Candaux. They also talked — a lot — about how fortunate they were to be able to afford years of music lessons.

One day, Gallegos, whose dream of opening a school kept foundering in red tape, asked Candaux if she knew what a charter school was. At the following rehearsal, Candaux told Gallegos she’d done a little research and learned there were charter school startup grants.

From the start, Renaissance Arts’ mission was to provide historically underserved students with a combination of deep academic inquiry and professionally guided arts training. The founders wanted the long arc of study that string instruments require, and they wanted to expose small children to the same kinds of topics shared at dinner tables in families with generations of experience with higher ed.

“If you’re a family that loves books, you don’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t talk about that book because the 5-year-old is here,’” says Gallegos. “You adjust how you talk about it.”

In a conventional school, lessons go in a particular order, with progression dictated not by grade but by understanding and with classes moving on to new topics once old ones have been covered. By contrast, Candaux and Gallegos like to say, everyone arrives at Renaissance Arts with their “prerequisites,” their existing knowledge and skills.

As these increase, a student can return to a text or a mathematical concept — the multi-age lessons mean a student may read and reread the same book for several years — and gain deeper understanding. “The idea that every sixth-grader is reading the same way is absolute fiction,” says Gallegos. “The goal is to get the kids in the room, not to line them up in a particular order.”

Because this belief is so central to the school’s identity, a great deal of collective time is spent exploring it. The whole faculty read The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness, by Todd Rose, who heads Harvard University’s Mind, Brain and Education program.

A central tenet of the book is that people are “jagged” learners: All of us have stronger and weaker abilities, so designing instruction, among other things, for a supposed average is misguided. Students take mandated state proficiency tests every year, but teachers also track individual progress in the shared online files.

Because little attention is paid to students’ age-related grades, that hoped-for progress may not correlate to the kind of grade-level expectations used as benchmarks in other schools. The philosophy, says CRPE’s Gill, is, “Do as much as you can, and don’t worry if you don’t understand the rest yet.”

“They’re not a school that focuses on tests,” he adds. “They are a good example of what we hope happens.”

Together, staff have also read NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, which suggests that autism is both a disability and a valuable form of intelligence. The exercise, says Gallegos, reinforced Ren Arts’ embrace of the neurodiversity of both its faculty and students. Since there is no common conception of a “normal” or average student, there’s no standard from which to deviate.

‘I want our most confident minds in lower grades’

At one end of the long loft where the astrophysicist was holding math class, a group of middle and high school students wrote reflections on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case for Reparations— in sonnet form. A few feet away, a class studying the Constitution had a TV tuned to a live broadcast of an impeachment hearing.

“The professional culture is just very different from a traditional school,” says Michael DeArmond, a senior research analyst at CRPE. “Broadly, they look for people who are going to be a good fit and not worry about their teaching credentials.”

Here, too, the open floor plan is a boon: Because someone with a teaching license is always in proximity, not all faculty need formal education training.

The website’s staff page boasts an impressive array of conservatory alums, as well as teachers with advanced degrees and diplomas from universities in other countries. Ren Arts often pays for faculty to acquire special education expertise and other teaching credentials.

The school blurs the lines in both directions. Last year, Ren Arts enrolled a student who is deaf. Instead of having an aide come in to assist the student, it hired a full-time American Sign Language translator who teaches a number of hearing students to sign.

Nor are teachers assigned the way they are in typical schools, with generalists serving the youngest students and specialists seen only in higher grades. Candaux recalls that when the school served only grades 6-12, for example, students spent their first couple of years recuperating from their fear of math.

The school now concentrates on mathematical foundations, with experts teaching the youngest students. “I want our most confident math minds in lower grades,” says Candaux. “It’s the opposite of most schools, where you put the best math minds in the higher grades, where they only teach kids who made it through the gantlet.”

In addition to academics and art for art’s sake, all students participate in one or more of three arts and entertainment industry career technical education pathways, including music and dance for the creative economy. Besides building school furnishings, students are responsible for set lighting design, sound, production videography and numerous other tasks with career applications. The California Department of Education has designated the school a CTE model demonstration site.

Candaux and Gallegos are proudest of the school’s 100 percent high school graduation and college acceptance rates, noting that in 2018, 90 percent of students enrolled in higher education and 75 percent attended four-year colleges.

Every Ren Arts graduate also completes the stringent “A-G” coursework required for admission to University of California and California State University schools, compared with 60 percent overall in the Los Angeles Unified School District. More than half of the Class of 2019 was accepted to University of California schools, versus a statewide acceptance rate of 17 percent.

The school dramatically outpaces both state and district averages on annual state-mandated assessments. In 2018-19, 77 percent of Ren Arts students passed reading tests, compared with 51 percent statewide and 44 percent in the district. Fifty-six percent passed math tests, versus 40 percent statewide and 33 percent in the district.

Forty-three percent of Ren Arts students with disabilities score at or above grade level in reading, versus 16 percent statewide and 12 percent districtwide. Thirty-nine percent pass math exams, compared with 13 percent statewide and 9 percent in the district.

Performance is higher among the economically disadvantaged students who make up the majority of the student body, with 74 percent passing reading exams and 50 percent math. In the district overall, 38 percent of impoverished students scored at grade level in reading and 28 percent in math. Performance was similar statewide.

Gallegos and Candaux credit the school’s track record of getting special education students into and through college for some of the buzz Ren Arts has acquired in the disability community. They also hypothesize that among their autistic students — the second-largest special education category served, behind specific learning disabilities — there’s something particularly appealing about string instruments.

Mastering the violin, viola or cello requires hyperfocus and a willingness to repeat and continually refine precise movements. A disciplined ear can hear, and adjust for, minute distinctions.

‘What’s viewed as innovation in education is still very narrow’

As rehearsals for the midwinter production continued, an ensemble of seniors and seventh-graders lowered their bows from their instruments. The musicians had fallen out of sync 100 measures into their piece.

The adviser overseeing the rehearsal was busy helping a much larger group of puppeteers trying to get birds on long poles to dip and turn like a flock in flight. So the tallest of the ensemble members stepped in front of his classmates and started a conversation to figure out where they got lost.

Other ensembles, vocal and instrumental, were warming up to rehearse a set list that included spirituals, a Balkan beatbox number, Cher’s “Believe” and liberal helpings of Philip Glass. As in all creation stories, the show will start in darkness. Selected by students in a spoken word class, a vocal and percussion performance of René Aubry’s “Who Lights the Sun” brings the symbolic birth of light. The production will end with a vocal and string performance of Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World,” which, centering on loss, returns full circle to Achilles’ tearful horses.

What would happen if Candaux, with her writerly ability to interweave narrative threads, and Gallegos, with her deep roots in instructional design, left their jobs? Is Renaissance Arts simply too idiosyncratic to hold lessons for other schools?

Having heard this question many times, the founders smile. “It’s idiosyncratic because what’s viewed as innovation in education is still very narrow,” says Candaux. “There’s an orthodoxy that holds it in place, and it’s reinforced politically.

“Charter schools are supposed to be little ovens of innovation,” she adds. “In fact, most of it is a replication of the way school districts work: It has to be this way because it was this way.”

It is a singular place, they acknowledge. But there’s plenty of room for educators who admire their experiment to tear down walls of their own — literally or metaphorically — and write their own creation story.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools and Center on Reinventing Public Education’s research on Renaissance Arts Academy and provides financial support to The 74.

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

(John Chapple)

Over the next several weeks, LA School Report will be publishing stories reported and written before the coronavirus pandemic. Their publication was sidelined when schools across the country abruptly closed, but we are sharing them now because the information and innovations they highlight remain relevant to our understanding of education.

Author’s note: CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School has moved to distance learning, supplying an array of digital supports to students with needs ranging from keeping up with therapeutic services to gifted enrichment opportunities.

Making his way up the ramp that connects the first and second stories of his middle school, Erin Studer turns and gestures back at the long, gently sloped passage.

“You just walked up a quarter of a million dollars of philosophy,” he chortles, clearly having delivered this object lesson before at the school he leads, the CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School, located in Woodland Hills, California.

What Studer wants visitors to see from the top of the ramp is not just the campus’ collection of sunny brick bungalows, but evidence — literally concrete — of the school community’s core belief. Everyone at CHIME, whether walking or using a motorized chair or other mobility support, can move up and down the ramp together.

This may not seem particularly radical, unless you are a schoolchild with a disability eager to fit in with your typically developing peers. Then, every moment in which your differences don’t stand out — when you aren’t, say, receiving speech therapy in an isolated room while your friends are enjoying art, or wishing you got to read the same novel as the gifted kids — is a big deal.

Opened 19 years ago on the west side of the San Fernando Valley, the K-8 school is the outgrowth of an effort at nearby California State University-Northridge to find better ways of supporting children with disabilities. The program was started to find early interventions for preschoolers, but as the kids grew, their families wanted a school where they could enroll their children with special needs, their typically developing children, their gifted students or their children who fit more than one of those descriptions.

Unlike traditional special education, which is often literally a place to which children with special needs are sent, CHIME’s families and staff envisioned a school where every student was a full participant in the community. No student is pulled out of the classroom for special assistance. Everything from the furniture to the lesson plans has been designed to enable students of all capacities to thrive in the same classroom.

(Courtesy of CHIME)

This full-inclusion model is paying off. Despite having a higher-than-average special education population — and a much larger number of children with moderate to profound disabilities — CHIME’s students score 14 percentage points higher than state averages for all kids on math and reading exams.

Contrast this with the generally dismal state of special education. Nationwide, just 20 percent of students with disabilities pass state math and reading assessments, even though research estimates that given the right support, 90 percent are capable of performing at grade level.

The mere existence of a school where even children with profound disabilities are thriving is a game-changer, says Amy Hanreddy, a former CHIME teacher and administrator who is now a special education professor at Cal State.She oversees a partnership between the university and the school, which hosts student teachers and shares promising practices with other schools and teacher-training programs.

“One of our greatest challenges is we lack vision for individuals with disabilities and what they are capable of,” says Hanreddy. “That’s why CHIME is so important — especially for people who don’t work there. It’s a place they can go and see what’s possible.”

Built a few years ago as part of an addition as the school grew, the ramp was hotly debated. The architects counseled saving the money — after all, there would be both stairs and an elevator. But Studer was firm: “Inclusion is the lens through which we see our budget, how we decide our calendar, how we make decisions.”

The ramp is a prime example of universal design, a term coined by architects to describe the creation of an environment that’s accessible to all. An extension of that philosophy, universal design for learning, means creating flexible ways for students to access information and demonstrate their knowledge.

Currently, CHIME enrolls 790 students ranging from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, drawn from 44 zip codes in north Los Angeles via lottery. One fourth of students are economically disadvantaged, and 20 percent are learning English. Typically, the school receives 1,500 applications a year for about 150 spots.

Students with disabilities receive no special enrollment preference, but they are overrepresented in the applicant pool because of word of mouth about the school’s success. About 20 percent of students receive special education services. Sixty have moderate to severe disabilities, five times the rate statewide. Ten have Down syndrome.

“This is really one of a few places in Los Angeles where [families of students with disabilities] can have their children fully included in an environment where they are accessing the curriculum with their typically developing peers,” says Studer.

CHIME was born the Children’s Center Handicapped Integration Model Educational Project, a three-year, federally funded Cal State initiative. In 1990, two special education professors at the university turned the project into a standalone nonprofit, the CHIME Institute, which opened first a preschool and a year later a program for infants and toddlers.

What the project showed was that delivering early interventions in a center also attended by families of typically developing children wrought bigger gains than sending specialists to individual kids’ homes. As the original students grew older, their parents pushed the centers’ leaders to open a school.

“It was a unique joy to them to bring all of their kids to the same school and have common experiences among siblings that some families take for granted,” recalls Studer. “For some families with a child with a disability and one typically developing, they can both have ‘Mr. Thomas’ and both talk about ‘Mr. Thomas.’”

In 2001, the institute opened a public charter elementary school, which eventually grew into a K-8. Along the way, the name CHIME, originally the shorthand for the Cal State experiment, became a different acronym: Community Honoring Inclusive Model Education.

In a traditional school, students with disabilities have Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs, outlining academic and developmental goals and specifying the services that will be provided to meet them. Typically, an IEP quantifies these services by minutes of support a child must receive — an effort to hold schools accountable for delivering enough assistance.

Federal law says special-needs students must be served in the least restrictive environment, which means they are entitled to spend as much of the school day as possible with their peers in general education classrooms. Students’ special ed minutes, meanwhile, are frequently spent outside the regular classroom. The more pronounced the need, the more time a child spends in a segregated setting.

Further complicating matters, general education teachers typically receive meager training in special education and have little idea how to make their lessons and materials accessible to students with learning differences. To get appropriate support, students with IEPs often must leave class for some or all of the school day.

Often, this means missing electives and enrichment opportunities. Rarely does it allow students with IEPs the chance to participate in advanced lessons reserved for gifted and talented children.

The truth is, though, that strategies used in special ed can benefit other kids in general education classes. For example, there is growing awareness that most typically developing students need the type of literacy instruction that most schools reserve for children with dyslexia.

Finally and crucially, a special-needs student’s presence in a regular classroom does not guarantee that the classroom is inclusive, academically or socially.

“Mainstreaming is about having someone physically be somewhere,” says Studer. “But that doesn’t mean that participation is meaningful. Inclusion is meaningful participation in the school and classroom community.”

Participation is also a powerful motivator, he notes. A student who has trouble verbalizing, for instance, will get more out of speech therapy when it is delivered in an inclusive classroom, woven into the lesson the entire class is participating in.

“There will be 100 times a day where they will want so badly with their typically developing peers to speak,” says Studer. “A student who has a mean word utterance of two words will suddenly have seven.”

At CHIME, it’s common to see multiple adults in classrooms as general and special education teachers, therapists, specialists and special education paraprofessionals help students with an array of needs work together on the same lesson. Unlike some other schools that use co-teaching, here the special education teacher does not act as a support for the regular teacher or focus on one or more students who have been pulled aside.

If a class includes a child with a specific need — for occupational therapy, say — the support is built into the lesson or activity the whole class engages in. Far from burdening general education students, the services translate to extra skills.

Each staff team creates its curriculum, making accommodations and modifications its students will need. Adapted materials are kept either online in shared files or laminated and shelved, for repeated use. For example, CHIME has seven versions of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, which is required reading for California’s fourth-graders. In addition to the normal bound book, there are copies with large print, with words highlighted in different colors and with simple explanations of basic concepts. There may be as many — or more — options for students to demonstrate comprehension.

“At the heart of universal design is thinking about the students we are about to teach,” says Cal State’s Hanreddy. “Who are they and what are their needs?”

Students with disabilities or learning differences aren’t relegated to less challenging classes, she adds: “They don’t say, ‘We don’t include [those] students in algebra.’ They say, ‘We are going to problem-solve how to include them.’”

Gifted and talented students similarly receive tailored services in the regular classroom, rather than being pulled out. “We should look at you as an individual who needs their curriculum enriched and complexified,” says Studer. “That can really be used for anybody.”

This is the opposite of the popular conception of personalized learning. “Individualization in the classroom doesn’t mean I create 30 plans,” he says. “It means I create a plan that has enough flexibility that you can find your own pathway within it.”

Planning starts weeks in advance, with time built into teachers’ schedules and a mandatory daily 20-minute debrief. Team members are accountable to one another for the collaborative lesson plans — a major difference from traditional schools where special ed and general ed teachers work separately.

This joint responsibility for making sure materials and lessons are accessible to all students represents a major reorganization of how special ed and general education teachers typically divide their work. When a student with a disability spends most of the day in a conventional regular education classroom, frequently the general education teacher does not know what services the special education teacher may supply during the time the student is pulled out of class.

But when they work together, the special ed teacher can introduce the general ed teacher to techniques that are valuable for students who are struggling but not disabled, and accommodations become part of the curriculum.

It’s also a major shift away from the traditional means of gauging whether the needs of students with disabilities were met, which is to verify that they received the minutes of service called for in their IEP, not whether those minutes led to growth.

“We have let minutes become a proxy for quality, and that’s not good at all,” says Studer. “If we insist on staying within the box of checking minutes, we’re never going to drive quality in special education.”

In keeping with its goal of being a laboratory for innovations, every year CHIME hosts 15 to 20 student teachers and two dozen students doing fieldwork from its Cal State partner. This serves as a talent pipeline for the school and a mechanism for ensuring future teachers, in both special and general education, carry with them an understanding of how students with special needs can participate in regular classrooms.

“One of the most important things CHIME can give them is the vision of what’s possible,” says Hanreddy, acknowledging that those new teachers likely will have to serve as “agents of change” in the conventionally structured schools where most will go on to work. “We have a model of what [effective] practices are, what they look like, so we can talk about what that looks like in their own context.”

In addition to visitors from Southern California school districts, CHIME often hosts teams from teacher training programs and educators from other countries — at the core of the school’s mission.

Former CHIME teachers have opened two other Southern California schools using similar models: Tomorrow’s Leadership Collaborative in Orange and the WISH elementary, middle and high schools in Los Angeles. And Studer says his families would like to see CHIME open a high school — an expensive proposition.

But he doesn’t envision creating a network of schools, the path often taken by successful charter schools. “We don’t think the pathway to making more inclusive schools is to make more CHIMEs,” he says. “If we really want to move the needle, isn’t the goal to make other schools more inclusive?”

And, of course, each new student who enrolls in the school brings a particular blend of strengths and needs, creating fresh opportunities to find new ways of being inclusive, says Studer: “As much as we have grown, we’re still a collection of families who have come together to educate our kids in a way we believe in.”

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

482Forward / YouTube

In recent days, dozens of Detroit parents — quarantined in COVID hotspots with one of the nation’s widest digital divides — have taken to their phones to demand Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer settle a lawsuit that found the state violated their children’s right to learn to read.

Using the hashtags #RightToLiteracy and #settlethiscase, some are tweeting at her. Others text “READ313” — 313 being the city’s area code — to a number that routes their messages to the governor. And they’ve invited neighbors to live Facebook town halls, where they have explained how a settlement would, essentially, freeze the legal proceedings at a moment when the U.S. Constitution for the first time has been interpreted to guarantee their children a decent education.

"The fight is not done yet. We were fighting just to get into the ring. Now we're in the ring. Now the fight really starts." –@JamarriaHall

Courts Rule Detroit Students Have Constitutional Right to An Education: https://t.co/qxXXrCQrBd via @NPR @NPRCoryTurner​ #RighttoLiteracy

— Public Counsel (@PublicCounsel) April 27, 2020

The parents, many of them members of the grassroots advocacy network 482Forward, want Whitmer to settle so they can negotiate desperately needed improvements for their schools, by most measures the lowest-performing in the country. But they also want the governor to act so the case can’t move forward, effectively enshrining in law its unprecedented recognition that children have a fundamental right to read.

She has until May 7.

Historically, federal courts have rejected arguments that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to an education — something that is embedded in state constitutions in different ways. But in recent years, public interest lawyers have pushed a new legal theory: that reading is so fundamental to participation in society, there is a constitutional right to literacy.

In April, two members of a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit agreed with the young Detroiters whose names are on the complaint — Gary B., Jesse K., Christopher R. Esmeralda V., Paul M. and Jaime R. They issued a sweeping and unprecedented opinion that there is a right to reading — and that children of color have systematically been deprived of it.

“The history of education in the United States … demonstrates a substantial relationship between access to education and access to economic and political power, one in which race-based restrictions on education have been used to subjugate African Americans,” wrote United States Circuit Judge Eric Clay.

Laws outlawing teaching black children to read are no longer on the books, he continued, but the basic formula — that a person who is illiterate is unable to participate in society — persists.

“Slaveholders and segregationists used the deprivation of education as a weapon, preventing African Americans from obtaining the political power needed to achieve liberty and equality,” Clay wrote. “While most starkly displayed during the time of slavery, this history is one of evolution rather than paradigm shift, and so what began in the slave codes of the antebellum South transformed into separate-and-unequal education policies that persisted well after Brown v. Board of Education.”

And finally: “The exclusion of a child from a meaningful education by no fault of her own should be viewed as especially suspect.”

The suit was filed in 2016 in federal district court in Detroit on behalf of the five students, who attended both district and charter schools. The state, they argued, had violated their rights by creating policies and conditions that deprived the city’s schools of adequate facilities, certified teachers and basic materials, including textbooks.

The court dismissed the case in 2018, ruling that education, while “of incalculable importance,” was not a constitutional right. Most observers expected the appellate court, which heard arguments last fall, to agree.

Now, if Whitmer does not announce a settlement by May 7, one of three things happens: The case is sent back to the trial court to proceed; the defendants — including Whitmer — ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear it; or the 16 judges who sit on the 6th Circuit appeals court can take the highly unusual step of choosing to revisit the decision, hearing it en banc.

A spokesman for the governor’s office says Whitmer is reviewing the decision, noting that she has never challenged the merits of the case. Because of this, an appeal to the high court is unlikely. The case was originally filed against a Republican administration, and on the campaign trail, Whitmer — a Democrat elected in 2018 — expressed support for a right to literacy. In any case, it’s unlikely either side wants the Supreme Court to weigh in; if it overturned the Detroit decision, that could create a precedent foreclosing future suits based on the same legal theory.

If the full Circuit Court does not decide to rehear the issue, the opinion will stand. If it does, it would likely be because the full appellate court felt its three-judge panel had made a clear error, say legal scholars. In that situation, a rehearing could very well overturn the decision.

In lieu, then, of a trial — at which the governor and state attorney general would have to defend the status quo — the parents want a plan.

“What we are asking for in the settlement is to make sure our students get what they deserve,” says Wytrice Harris, 482Forward director and the mother of two Detroit Public Schools alums. “As a black mom, this case is about racial and economic justice for Detroit students, and the settlement needs to keep that in mind. That means things like decent facilities, well-paid teachers, small class sizes and resourced classrooms.”

Between unfilled teaching positions and high teacher absenteeism, students had subs in two classes a day. “In other circumstances, classes may be covered by administrators, security guards, paraprofessionals or no one at all,” the plaintiffs said in court papers. “When there is no adult available to staff a classroom, sometimes students are permitted to sit in classrooms or the gym unsupervised.”

“There are no textbooks for the earth science, physics, or research and development science classes at Osborn [Mathematics], so the teachers in each of those classes rely on a section of the biology textbook most closely related to the subject they are teaching,” according to the complaint.

The building needs at least $28 million in work to repair everything from broken windows to a heating system that fluctuates so erratically that some students must wear winter coats in class, while others suffer heat stroke.

Roquesha Oneal dropped out of Osborn as a special education student back when it was one program, only to go back as a parent advocate when the oldest of her three kids was there. Her son, now 24, graduated with honors but had to go to work instead of college. She pulled her other two children out, one because he couldn’t get special education.

“I know so many people who went to Osborn who now struggle to make ends meet because they have no education,” she says. “The [need for] literacy is so deep. If the parents aren’t literate, how can they know their rights?”

It’s not just Osborn — the entire district lags, with proficiency in varying subjects and grades on the National Assessment of Educational Progress routinely in the single digits. Of the 58 percent of students who graduate high school on time, just one in four enrolls in college. Half of city residents lack basic reading and writing skills.

Bipartisan, high-powered efforts to get the state to address the city’s educational slide repeatedly have been stymied by lawmakers and lobbyists. In 2016, during the last major push to overhaul Detroit’s K-12 landscape, Betsy DeVos, not yet tapped to be the U.S. education secretary but a major lobbying force in Michigan education policy, proposed simply shuttering the district.

Frustrated with lackluster political responses to widening achievement gaps in Michigan and elsewhere, education advocates have increasingly looked to the courts for solutions. Even though literacy figures prominently in legal history, they’ve had an uphill slog.

After the Civil War, Congress required former Confederate states to begin making meaningful public education available to blacks, who were also to be given the right to vote. To re-enter the Union, Southern states amended their constitutions to recognize a right to education as necessary for participation in democracy. The other states followed suit.

State lawsuits demanding an adequate education, however, have tended to focus on school funding and integration and often fail because few constitutions set a high bar. Public Counsel, which brought the Detroit suit, is one of a number of public interest law firms that have pushed cases using new theories that return to the nexus between literacy and citizenship.

Earlier this year, Public Counsel settled a state-court literacy case against California. Because, prior to the suit, the state had identified but failed to implement a number of specific practices that would dramatically ratchet up reading levels, the settlement is designed to prod districts to attempt evidence-backed strategies.

The California settlement could provide a model for Whitmer and the Detroiters, says Kristine Bowman, a professor of law and education at Michigan State University and the co-author of an amicus brief in the Detroit case. The 6th Circuit opinion, she notes, concluded that the right to literacy has three aspects: facilities, teachers and materials.

If Whitmer agrees to settle the case, the right to literacy will be the law in four states covered by the circuit court: Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. But attorneys can also use the decision, which she calls “perhaps strongly persuasive,” as precedent in cases elsewhere.

“Scholars have been theorizing for decades what a right to education could look like,” she says. “There are going to be countless questions that have to be asked in the wake of this decision.”

Director of Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law program, Mark Rosenbaum, has spearheaded the literacy litigation. He says he hopes the Detroit decision ushers in a new era of legal advocacy for education rights. “A good question is why, in 2020, we have to be in a courtroom to establish that a child has a right to a classroom and a teacher and books,” he says. “My hope is there is never another case filed with facts anything like this.”

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