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California always seems to be ahead of the curve. Huge numbers of you are reading this column on Apple devices designed in Cupertino — and you got here by clicking a link on one of the social media companies with headquarters just down the road from there in Silicon Valley.

The Golden State: it’s where America looks for progress.

But leading the curve isn’t an unalloyed good. Various booms powered by its tech sector have brought California a dynamic labor market and simultaneously made it a national leader in economic inequality. California is pioneering aggressive policies for slowing the pace of climate change even as escalating wildfires and water use uncertainties leave it ahead of most states in facing climate change’s consequences.

Perhaps most of all, California is the American vanguard when it comes to demographics. America’s future is moving towards racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity—versions of those trends have already arrived in California’s present. As my co-author Jonathan Zabala and I put it in our recent Century Foundation report, Moving from Vision to Reality: Establishing California as a National Bilingual Education and Dual-Language Immersion Leader:

In 2021–22, the state’s schools were 56 percent Latino/a/x, 10 percent Asian, 5 percent African-American, 4 percent multiracial, and 2 percent Filipino. Just 21 percent of California students identify as white. In 2022, roughly 40 percent of California K–12 students spoke a non-English language at home. California schools enroll nearly 1.1 million students who are classified as English learners (ELs)—meaning that the state’s ELs constitute more than 21 percent of the U.S.’ 5 million ELs.

California leans global: its leaders never tire of comparing the state’s economic output to other countries’. But when it comes to its genuinely international-grade linguistic diversity, California has long been ambivalent. In 1998, the state’s voters passed Proposition 227, mandating monolingual, English-only instruction across its schools. It took nearly two decades — and piles of research showing that this approach is ineffective — before the state reversed course in a 2016 referendum and embraced the value of its burgeoning multilingualism in California classrooms.

Our report charts California’s progress in the seven years since then. The state has done much to align its vision for ELs’ success with research on these children’s linguistic and academic development—in particular, by prioritizing access to bilingual instruction. After the 2016 referendum, state leaders launched initiatives setting ambitious goals for improving ELs’ educational opportunities in the state’s schools—the English Learners Roadmap and Global California 2030. In the latter, for instance, the state pledged to “quadrupl[e] the number of [dual-language immersion] programs from 407 in 2017 to 1,600 in 2030,” and have “three out of four students [be] proficient in two or more languages, earning them a State Seal of Biliteracy.”

State legislators have backed these — and related — objectives with some modest resources, including $10 million in state grants to launch 55 new dual-language programs in coming years. It has also provided funding for several programs aimed at increasing the diversity of California teachers and/or filling teacher shortages that include efforts to grow the state’s bilingual teacher corps.

And yet, much remains to be done. That $10 million in grants reached 27 local education agencies, leaving 991 without any funding incentive to convert their English-only programs to bilingual campuses. That’s nowhere near enough to reach the Global California goals. As of 2019–20, California enrolled roughly 1 in 6 of its more than 1 million ELs in some form of bilingual education or dual-language immersion—the models that research suggests are best for these students. This ranks California well behind its peers—both EL-rich states like Texas and Illinois and less linguistically diverse states like Wisconsin and Alaska.

As we note in the report, this is partly driven by a shortage of state funding for bilingual and dual-language programs. California’s single $10 million dual-language immersion grants competition is nowhere near large enough to keep pace with other states:

Utah—a state that enrolled just over 54,000 ELs in 2020 and has an annual K–12 education state budget of just over $8 billion—still committed more than $5 million to its dual-language immersion program in 2023, and has appropriated more than $7.3 million to the program for 2024. Since 2012, Delaware—a state with fewer than 15,000 ELs in 2020 and an annual K–12 education budget of not quite $2 billion—has annually spent between $1.6 million and $1.9 million on dual-language immersion expansion…California, by comparison, enrolled 1.1 million ELs in 2020 and has an annual K–12 [state education]budget of nearly $130 billion.

Forget international comparisons—when it comes to building a genuinely multilingual public education system suited to the 21^st century’s global economy, California isn’t even atop the U.S.’s interstate leaderboard. The state simply has not yet made it a priority to invest proportional resources into programs that meaningfully extend ELs’ access to bilingual and/or dual language opportunities.

Indeed, support for ELs’ bilingualism has not been a priority even in other new statewide education reforms. As we outline in the report, though California has invested major new public resources in trying to achieve universal access to early education programs for 4-year-olds and growing the state’s roster of community schools — ELs’ unique strengths and needs have not been central to these initiatives’ designs.

This is equal parts frustrating and surprising for a state with California’s political climate and demographic advantages. An overwhelmingly progressive state that publicly proclaims the value of its students’ remarkable linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity cannot celebrate these very modest bilingualism investments as sufficient.

Conor P. Williams is a fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.

If you’re raising your child, hypothetically speaking, to be trilingual in Spanish, English, and Welsh; play a musical instrument; make varsity track by their freshman year in high school; secure admission to a top-flight college; and publish a peer-reviewed article by graduation … you’ve got a lot to worry about. And you’re all but guaranteeing that you’re going to feel terrible about yourself — and maybe about your kid.

But that’s the sort of insight that’s appropriate to a time of relative normalcy, a time when families can count on some basic social stability and standard functioning of things. It’s not as helpful in a moment when families are coming off a punishing global health catastrophe in a country with worsening political dysfunction.

Families in 2023 are juggling post-pandemic anxieties about their kids’ academic progress and their social and emotional well-being, health and safety. That’s more than most of us can carry with easy equanimity.

Now, instead of worrying about the various projects we’ve chosen for our parenting, we’re grinding ourselves just to get our kids back on some kind of recognizable track. As author Stephanie Malia Krauss puts it in her new book, Whole Child, Whole Life: 10 Ways to Help Kids Live, Learn, and Thrive, families are asking, “Will the kids be ok? What do they need? What can I do?”

I sat down with Krauss because I need answers to all three of those questions.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

First of all, I have three kids, which makes five kids between us, right? 

Yes!

OK. So we know what we’re talking about. I’ll put it plain: It’s a really, really hard time to be raising kids. I think we — individually and collectively — need to say that out loud until more people realize it. How are you doing now, as a human in this moment, as we dig out from the worst of the pandemic?

​​Parenting is extremely tricky right now, I think in large part because our kids are facing an onslaught of challenges and stresses and pressures that are either historic, but now feel intensified, or are legitimately new.

Right now, the livability and lovability of young people’s lives are more on the line than we have seen in recent history. There is a level of volatility and uncertainty that has been building over the past 20 years in the U.S. that we really saw come to a head during the pandemic — from global health issues, but also racial violence and economic recession. I would bring in increasingly extreme weather as another thing to think about.

Young people are living in the midst of so much unpredictability and it just feels deeply insecure, and it feels like their lives are on the line.

So how is this parenting experiment going? I’m trying to figure out ways to protect childhood while empowering my kids to be resourceful and skilled and capable in the world as it is and also giving them the kinds of resources and opportunities where it’s possible to thrive, including being able to thrive when times are really challenging.

I think you’re right. It’s a combination of old pressures that we’re maybe only sort of now attending to more thoroughly or noticing even … and this feeling of new challenges with heightened stakes. It drives more attention to how systems do or don’t meet kids’ usual — and new, in these stressful times — needs, right?

That’s also a conflict in the parenting experiment: I’m constantly aware of when I am complicit in signing my kid up for something that was designed for him to be a part of, but not designed with his learning and well-being in mind.

Some of this is simple. For example, as kids get older, they go to sleep later, and they need to sleep longer. When the school year comes around, I’m going to be waking my middle-schooler up every day at 5:30 a.m., when I know it’s bad for his brain and it’s bad for his body. He needs more sleep.

And he’s gonna struggle to go to bed at night when I know he really needs to sleep for his mental and physical health. And I’m going to do that every single morning, knowing that’s actually not good for him, but because it’s just a part of how he needs to go to school. So I think that there are so many moments like that, and you think, ‘Oh, in an ideal world, this is what you could do to support the development and the well-being of my kid.’

So it’s about figuring out how to negotiate and live in that mess.

Is that where Whole Child, Whole Life came from? 

About 10 years ago, when my younger son was born, I left school leadership, where I had a number of questions about what young people actually need to be ready for the real world versus completing high school. So I go into national work, and soon realized that there are really smart people who are talking about these questions, they’re just not including a lot of people in the field.

So I decided to write a book as my love letter back to people raising and working with kids: Here’s what readiness really requires.

The [readiness] book came out at the height of the pandemic, just right in the middle. I’m doing a pandemic book tour from my basement, talking to educators, counselors, parents, social workers, anyone. I’m talking all about how the future is changing, what young people need to be ready for the world as it is, what they need to be ready for the future.

But every single time, somebody would ask the same version of this question at the end: ‘We really need to know what our kids need to be ready, but they are not well, and we are afraid that they could give up or burn out before they get to this future you’re talking about. What do our kids need to be well right now?’

I felt that question in the deepest parts of my bones. It was the question I was asking myself as a mom. So I put together this concept for what became Whole Child, Whole Life: 10 Ways to Help Kids Live, Learn, and Thrive.

Any concrete tips for staying sane? 

Whole Child, Whole Life aims to explain what we need to know about young people’s physical, mental, cognitive, social, emotional, and even spiritual development. It tries to explain the practices that promote thriving, and why they matter, and puts it together in a way that is accessible and actionable.

There’s a set of practices that make up the bulk of the book. These 10 practices we need to practice as adults for kids. And eventually, as they get older, we need to practice it with them.

Eventually, kids internalize these 10 practices as self-care strategies, which means we, the adults, need to practice these things, too. We need to build community and belonging. We need to nurture healthy relationships. We need to attend to our past and present circumstances — all the same practices apply to us that apply to them.

When kids are with us, regardless of our title, we have a responsibility for them. They are in our care. And I tend to think about it as like: What is lifesaving? What is life extending and what is life giving for kids? What are my responsibilities at this particular moment?

Our kids are growing up in so many situations where danger is implicit. Imagine being a child, showing up to school every single day knowing that you might get shot, or you might get Covid and pass it to somebody vulnerable, like your grandmother, who lives in your house. And yet you just keep doing that every day and it’s normalized. It’s a part of what today’s kids are incorporating into their childhoods. So we have to think of the lifesaving techniques that kids need now.

And then there are the big questions that I think young people grapple with from a practical level all the way to an existential level. Am I going to live a long life? Is there a future for me? Can I even imagine what this world is going to look like? Are we all going to make it? Am I going to make it? Is my family going to make it?

How do we support them with life-extending techniques that help them imagine a long life and a good life. What do they need to imagine and secure that?

And then the life-giving pieces: How do we make sure that kids can actually enjoy their childhoods without constantly feeling like they’re at risk of something bad happening? A lot of them go through life with just a real and pending sense of doom that has been brought on by their lived experience and is totally reasonable to me.

What does it look like for us structurally and systemically to help kids get back to well? 

First, we should do a very honest appraisal of what the risks and realities truly are for our kids so that we understand. We can then get about the business of figuring out: OK, so then what? Then what will it take for them to learn, to grow, to thrive? And what does that require then, of me, perhaps that I may not have been prepared to do before?

But we also have to look bigger. Our kids have the potential to live longer than anybody else with the right resources and opportunities. Science has advanced enough that we can keep people alive for a much longer time. Some people are projecting that our kids, as an expectation rather than an exception, could live a 100-year life.

Put that in the context of work. You and I were raised in a generation where hustle culture and putting in the hours and putting in the work was a matter of pride. It was what you did. But the idea of my children having to do that level of work over a 60- or 70- or even 80-year working life — that is not the life that I want for them, and I don’t think they could sustain it.

When I think about the prospect, the possibility of my kids having a 100-plus year life and then I think about the likelihood that in that 100 years there will continue to be volatility and uncertainty, acceleration, innovation, change, AI, and other advances and disruptions, it changes my view about what is important and why.

A first credential might matter less in the context of a longer life. We know that a degree is going to get you a better-paying job, that there are real economic benefits. But in the potential of a 100-year life, that is one step of many in a working journey.

What are some tangible ways we could refocus schools on children’s needs and development? 

One of the things that I was so hopeful about as I wrote the book was that there are these 10 timeless practices that will always, no matter what is happening, support the health and well-being of young people. We know that learning is highly social and emotional. and that when young people are well, not only are they healthy, happy and whole, but they’re better learners and one day, workers.

In schools, we have all of these frameworks and prescriptive programs. We have tiered interventions. We have positive behavioral interventions and supports. We have discipline strategies, we have academic remediation. We have skills to prepare for the future. We have all of these pieces and requirements.

But we don’t actually have explicit, named frameworks for the art and science of taking care of children and human development. Schools need policies and practices that explicitly name and prioritize child well-being and development. I would love to see our schools commit to the whole child with a whole life orientation. Imagine schools answering the question: How do we help young people build lives and futures that they love?

We can focus on the everyday interactions that teachers and principals have full agency and decision-making power over. How are we building consideration of children’s development into the decisions that we’re making in the school culture, the commitments and the discipline decisions that we make? Our content and curricular choices? How are we setting up classroom learning? There are things like project-based learning and experiential learning that can light up all of the aspects of a kid’s well-being.

I would love for readers to look at Whole Child, Whole Life as kind of a sifter they can take their practices and policies through, and ask each time: What lights of well-being and thriving come on when we do this practice, when we implement this policy at home or at school? Is this helpful, or is this actually harmful to a young person’s well-being?’

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

The video game Kerbal Space Program is one of countless online programs that have made their way into U.S. classrooms. This one teaches students how to design, build and launch their own rockets. (Kerbal Space Program)

The rocket’s engine roars to life, and moments later, it slides up, up and up and away from the launchpad. An embedded video of the flight deck shows a worried, bug-eyed face behind the helmet visor — the astronaut’s pulling some G’s. He’s gone positively green. But wait — because this is a launch in Kerbal Space Program, a rocketry video game — the color isn’t a function of his stomach. No, he’s a Kerbal, and he’s literally green.

He’s also a star in Ben Adler’s 8th-grade science unit on gravity and kinetic energy at Oakland, California’s Downtown Charter Academy, a middle school in the city’s East Peralta neighborhood. Students are designing, building and launching rockets on Macbook Air laptops around their classroom — and trying to keep their “Kerbonauts” on track (and intact) for various space missions.

It’s clever, engaging and far more typical in 2023 than it was before the pandemic. Lessons like these mark a genuine shift in American schools. Indeed, though many campuses reopened in part during the pandemic because they concluded that children were not learning enough using digital tools during virtual learning, late pandemic schooling today is positively saturated with these devices.

Americans have spent huge chunks of the past three years thinking and talking about schools in binary terms — open or closed, in-person or virtual. But with schools all but universally open and back to a normal state (however imperfect), though, these dichotomies have gotten somewhat blurrier.

Truth is, we didn’t reopen schools back to “normal” in-person learning over the past few years … so much as we brought daily virtual learning into real-world classrooms.

Kerbal Space Program

It’s the new normal in U.S. public education — and it’s complicated. I’ve visited nearly 100 public school classrooms across three states in the past six months. I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room. Lessons reliably include videos from curriculum vendors and/or the internet. On several occasions, I watched early elementary schoolers hold up badges hanging from lanyards around their necks to unlock laptops to play. Written assignments and quizzes — including Adler’s on rocketry — are often conducted on laptops and submitted online. As students type, teachers frequently project online timer videos with animated graphics and sound effects.

There’s no question that the pandemic shifted schools’ digital infrastructure. The extraordinary pressures of the past three years of crises forced significant new public investments in closing digital divides. Policymakers and schools poured emergency funding into purchasing devices like laptops, tablets, Chromebooks and internet hotspots so that all students would be able to access online lessons — so much so that supply chains couldn’t keep up. This made a real dent in longstanding digital divides, even if it didn’t wholly close them. Indeed, in January 2021, a survey of teachers still found 35% reporting that few of their English-learning students had reliable internet access.

It’s far from clear what this means for the present and future of U.S. public education. Teachers I’ve spoken with express ambivalence about the degree to which digital technology has permeated campus. Most say that it’s created both exciting skills and pernicious challenges.

When Downtown Charter Academy closed on March 13, 2020, it sent students home with two weeks of assigned work. As it became clear that the crisis was serious, DCA acquired digital devices and hotspots to ensure that all families could access distance learning. Within a few weeks, the school had moved its pre-pandemic schedule online. “It was 20 hours per day at first,” says Director Claudia Lee. “But it got easier.”

But closing device and internet access gaps was just a first step. Many DCA students and families lacked the digital literacy to use and manage these new tools. This was also true across the state. A fall 2020 survey of linguistically diverse California families found that nearly one-third of participants did not understand the pandemic learning instructions they received from their children’s schools. Further, fully one-third of participants responded that they did not have email accounts they could use.

DCA teachers say that the logistics of the transition were relatively smooth. They also confirmed that they faced many of the problems that plagued virtual learning across the country. Student engagement was a struggle, with some students attending only sporadically and others switching off their cameras under the pretense that their connection was too slow to bear the video. “We visited some homes,” says Lee, “and found some situations that were hard. Kids were trying to learn in kitchens, for example, or other places with lots of noise and distractions around. So we brought a small number of kids back to campus to log on virtually — but socially distanced.”

The school reopened for full-time in-person learning in fall 2021, but it was hardly a return to normalcy. By the end of that school year, DCA students’ academic outcomes were significantly stronger than peers in the surrounding school district, but that was only part of the story. In discussions during a daylong professional development session this January, many teachers noted that students were prone to online distractions and — worse yet — had become increasingly adept at using digital tools and resources to avoid doing their classwork themselves. Students brought these virtual learning habits back to their in-person classrooms.

“We need to help them understand that your choices become your identity,” said one teacher who asked not to be quoted by name. “Like, ‘If you always lie, you’re gonna eventually be known as a liar. If you always cheat, you’re gonna eventually be known as a cheater.’ George Santos is a great example of why you shouldn’t make lying a habit.”

And yet, these costs have attached benefits. Teachers are wrangling with new digitally infused questions around academic integrity, yes, but that’s also because they have continued to use Google Classroom and other platforms as part of their courses. These streamline student assignments, teacher grading and subsequent data analysis — and offer the potential for more effective and timely communication with students’ families. Indeed, teachers reported that, at this stage of the pandemic, many more of their families have and can use online communication tools like email, school communication apps (for example), and video conferencing to stay linked up to what’s happening on campus. In particular, Zoom parent-teacher conferences are much easier and more equitable than the old in-person-only model.

As such, teachers spent much of the family engagement part of the January professional development session discussing how to unlock families’ new digital literacy abilities. Members of the 8th-grade team admit to one another that they aren’t meeting their initial goal of reaching out to at least five families each week through the school’s official communication app — and brainstorm ways to reset and hold one another accountable to that expectation. The 7th-grade team agrees that they could do more to engage students’ families, and devises a process for making and sending a two-minute Friday video explaining what 7th graders will learn in the coming week. Almost everyone agrees that the school needs a meeting to help get families familiar with — and logged on to — the school’s different digital platforms.

Kerbal Space Program

As for the little green Kerbals in their spaceships, Adler emails, “Across all three days, no students were caught running any other program or browsing. A notoriously disengaged student became enraptured, and even turned in good marks on the follow-up assessment.” Students scored reasonably well on a subsequent quiz, with — for example — majorities of the 8th graders correctly identifying “apoapsis” as “the highest point in an orbit,” even though the term did not appear in any of the instructional materials other than the Kerbal Space Program missions.

So: is digital literacy a key skill (or a skill set)? Or are digital tools a crutch for students? Or some murky mixture of both? These are potent questions for this moment, as worsened teenage mental health, public launches of artificial intelligence tools and concerns about the state of the humanities are creating a national discussion about technology and education.

I truly don’t know. But I think we’re long overdue for a collective rethinking of just what we want from education technology. As we clamber out of three years of pandemic-steeped K–12 education, it presently feels like we’re drifting to a sleepy acquiescence of any and all digital learning tools without regard for their actual purpose. It’s time for educators, policymakers and families to adopt a more intentional, active stance when making education technology choices — with an eye to avoiding unreflective reliance on these tools.

There’s an old conversational set piece in the lively world of early education policy that goes something like this: a study comes out showing that pre-K programs do a solid job of raising children’s knowledge and skills, and even improve kindergarten readiness, but seem to be less effective at producing higher third-grade reading scores or some other longer-term academic metric. 

As critics pounce, advocates for greater pre-K investments grumble, “Look, the study showed that pre-K was solidly effective at preparing kids for kindergarten. Why are we measuring its value in terms of metrics that come way later? By that logic, we shouldn’t just end pre-K investments … we should also cancel 2nd grade (and maybe the rest of early elementary school).”

To be sure, there’s a huge research base showing that early education programs are effective. They’re among the most efficient educational investments we can make! But that doesn’t stop us replaying the aforementioned pattern. 

It’s a weird tendency in education debates: we blame good, tested, and effective ideas for not solving the full extent of U.S. inequities. Even the best ideas — the ones that help students succeed, the ones that close divisions in schools and society — rarely get credit for their efficacy. So pre-K debates have less to do with whether pre-K works at preparing kids for kindergarten, and more with whether it “works” on some other array of distant metrics.

Folks in education do this all the time. Take charter schools, for example. Over the past several decades, a bevy of studies have shown that when charters are opened and overseen by rigorous authorizers, they can significantly improve academic achievement, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. In the 2010s, researchers at Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released several studies showing that well-regulated charters tend to be particularly effective for raising the test scores of English learners, students from low-income families, and African-American students. A 2021 analysis of charter schools’ academic performance found similarly encouraging results across the country. 

But as a policy idea, charter schools are besieged with criticism for “failing” to fully close achievement gaps in all places and at all times. It’s not that there’s no room for criticism of charter schools; indeed, studies have shown that charter schools with weak quality and oversight provisions tend to generally be less effective than comparable public schools. It’s just that, too often, even successful charter school sectors are regularly blamed for not yet having defeated the full breadth of systemic racism and economic inequality in American life. 

Why is this? The blame cuts in two directions, but both have to do with how we define effectiveness of particular programs. First: advocates for certain education reforms often set up their ideas for failure. Pre-K advocates spent many years promising that universal pre-K could close achievement gaps before they begin to widen, obviate the need for controversial K-12 reforms by raising academic achievement, increase participants’ future incomes and lower their chances of incarceration as adults, and etc, etc, etc. Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that pre-K programs that simply prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten feel like flops? 

This kind of overpromising can be useful for drawing attention to a policy idea, but advocates ought to recognize that inflated rhetoric comes with the cost of raising expectations well beyond what they can likely deliver. (Note: there is some evidence that pre-K programs with modest short-term academic impacts may still improve participants’ long-term life outcomes.)

Second: policy critiques are almost always driven more by prior political preferences than the facts on the ground. Sure, when new ideas arrive in public education, critics justifiably warn against “experimenting on schools and kids.” But as the evidentiary base gets better for a particular idea over time, critics shift to less honest work—muddying the measurement waters. If pre-K seems to be really effective at improving children’s school readiness and long-term outcomes, critics who loathe public investment in education and pine for traditional one-income households with stay-at-home mothers caring for kids … find it easy to redefine successful pre-K as something else (e.g. elementary school test scores). 

If, with sufficient public oversight, charter schools produce strong academic outcomes for historically marginalized children, critics who worry that charter schools divert resources and attention from traditional school districts … find it easy to frame those successes out of the picture by measuring charters against other benchmarks (even those that also also elude traditional public schools). For instance, it’s frustrating to see charter schools attacked for allegedly refusing to enroll hard-to-serve students who might be at risk of failing to graduate on time, absent evidence that this is systemically happening (and in the presence of evidence that such “creaming” also occurs in traditional public schools).

To be sure, the design, implementation, and defense of new education policies are always going to be plagued by politics. That’s a basic element of living in a democracy. But we really need to stop blaming good-faith efforts to improve schools for failing to solve American racism, economic inequality, etc. 

Instead, we ought to think of education reforms as stackable. Nearly every study shows that developmentally appropriate, well-funded pre-K is good for kids—but it’s not enough to eliminate all American social inequities. Indeed, a system of high-quality pre-K that feeds into an equitably funded system of effective K-12 schools…is also likely to fall short. (Add in paid family leave, affordable high-quality child care, and a monthly child allowance, though, and we might really be getting somewhere.) 

But that’s no excuse for doing nothing. The roots of racist inequities against communities of color are centuries deep and systemically wide; undoing them requires sustained reforms at all levels.

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A clammy, sniffling toddler in the Washington, D.C. park near my house would have looked and sounded pretty normal — back in January 2020. But now, folks were giving the maskless toddler and her parents a wide berth as the two had an animated argument about their community’s right to know about those sniffles.

Did they really have to get a COVID test for the kid? Sure, she seemed sick, but maybe if they just made up some other reason to keep her home from child care for a day or two, she’d get better? Because if they did get that test, and if it were to come back positive, the child care center’s COVID policy would require them to keep her home for more than a week to quarantine.

It was a masterclass in the motivated reasoning that has prolonged the pandemic. They avoided getting key information, framed some consequences out of the picture — accurately diagnosing their child’s illness, infecting others, etc. — and then picked a course of action around what would be easiest for them. In our new normal, this is as horrifying as it is predictable. But, as anyone who’s ever groaned at their car’s “Check Engine” light or wondered if that mole on their elbow is growing knows, problems don’t evaporate just because we refuse to find out.

That’s why, as the pandemic finally allows schools to get back to safe, universal, uninterrupted in-person instruction, it’s important that they administer the full battery of annual federally-mandated assessments. These tests make up a relatively small part of the assessment footprint in U.S. schools: annual math and English Language Arts tests in elementary and middle school (and once more in high school); one science test in elementary, middle, and high school; and annual assessments of English learners’ progress learning English. And yet, they provide critical data points for measuring the depths of the pandemic’s effects on students’ learning.

“This is controversial, and not everybody loves it, but I think we have to assess where kids are,” former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explained why this matters on a panel at the end of last summer. “Let’s figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are, where they are, and then hold ourselves accountable as educators: can we help accelerate them? Can we help them move? To somehow think that we can just guess, or just assume by looking at kids that we know where they are today, for me, that’s education malpractice.”

Sure, in general and as a concept, almost no one loves tests. But after two pandemic-disrupted school years, teachers, school leaders and policymakers are starving for better information about how pandemic learning models have — and haven’t — worked for different groups of students.

Notwithstanding the widespread consensus that the pandemic widened long standing opportunity and achievement gaps in American schools, data on the details remain limited. As The 74 reported this year, existing evidence on the pandemic’s impacts is piecemeal: “The most disadvantaged children were also much less likely to take last spring’s assessments, suggesting that educators don’t yet have any idea how much learning loss their students have suffered.” This is particularly true for English learners (ELs). A recent report from WIDA — the English language proficiency testing consortium serving a majority of U.S. states — found that the number of ELs tested last school year was far below normal levels.

However tempting it may be to insist that schools should simply rush past measuring students’ learning in favor of accelerating instruction, there’s an incontrovertible need for a comprehensive picture of what the pandemic stole from students and schools.

To be sure, many teachers also want more information. On the online discussion forum I run for educators working with English learners during the pandemic, one of the most frequently asked questions is, “How can we get data on students’ English language progress right now?” This challenge has been exacerbated by the difficulty of getting valid and reliable data on language learning via virtual versions of these tests.

Some critics complain that the annual math and ELA assessments are not primarily designed to guide instruction. This is true. However, they are a critical way to focus policymakers’ and the public’s attention on the ways that U.S. public education remains systemically biased against persistently marginalized communities — families of color, English learners, low-income students and others. For instance, these assessments also provide advocates for these children with a key data point to demonstrate how funding inequities affect their communities and schools.

Others warn that the tests are imperfect measures of achievement, growth and — in a deeper sense — what really matters in any kid’s education. This is also true, but, as above, only to a degree. Standardized tests can’t measure the totality of a child’s academic progress, the depth of their character or the beauty of their poetry. Still, these assessments provide a baseline of transparency about systemic inequities and a critical signal to schools: that the public wants to know whether all kids are meeting a series of core academic benchmarks, and that persistent, glaring, too-big-to-attribute-to-test-design racial and socioeconomic gaps in academic performance are unacceptable.

Finally, because these tests launched under the gaudy rhetoric accompanying No Child Left Behind, critics also insist — fairly enough — that reliance on these tests haven’t closed those gaps. And yet, this begs all the questions. Whatever the limits of test-based transparency and accountability for U.S. schools, the approach has one major advantage: it provides a record of American educational inequities.

The pre-testing era in U.S. schools wasn’t a utopia of equitable allocation of resources and highly-effective pedagogy. To the contrary: we have decades of experience showing that, absent data and accompanying pressure, the U.S. public education system defaults to reinforcing racial and socioeconomic inequities. Like the maskless family in my neighborhood, they’re more likely to do what’s easiest for them if no one’s watching.

Tests that document the persistence of these gaps don’t have to be perfect to be critically useful. As schools face an array of challenges, distractions, and pressures this fall, data from these assessments can provide critical leverage for focusing their attention — and policymakers’ — on prioritizing the needs of persistently marginalized students most harmed by the pandemic. Or, you know, we could just skip the tests again under some pretense and assume that we know the resources schools need and the priorities they should set in the coming years. It might not be equitable, efficient, or safe, but it would sure be (politically) convenient!

I

Last March according to the National Center for Education Statistics, just short of 40 percent of U.S. students were still learning entirely remotely. Roughly the same percentage were back attending full-time in-person learning (another 23 percent of students were enrolled in hybrid learning).

Thanks to a steady stream of vaccines and some sorely overdue national public health leadership, it finally seemed like schools might be safe enough to push towards in-person reopening for most students this school year. And yet, the new Delta variant of the novel coronavirus has left the United States with uncertain prospects for in-person schooling this fall.

One thing is clear: families with young children are going to be stuck with mostly bad options this fall. Reopen schools even as pediatric infectious disease specialists warn us that the new variant of COVID-19 is a threat to our children? Keep schools mostly virtual as our collective mental health continues degrading? There’s stress, anxiety, suffering, and trauma down either route. The only certainty is that families and their kids are going to get another drubbing.

Think of it as a universal form of long COVID. Most of us, maybe all of us, whether or not we ever contracted the coronavirus, will carry some of this collective trauma along with us for years — perhaps for the rest of our lives. For our house, it’s the aches of aging parental bodies worn down by 18 (and counting) months of juggling two full-time jobs and full-time child care for three young kids. I’m also staggering into the post-pandemic period with a shattered sense of social trust after months of navigating our repeated collective failures to treat a generational crisis seriously.

I’m also carrying the solitary echoes of children shouting at one another from windows and porches last spring, pealing voices that bounced off the line of houses and down our block in a city frozen silent by the lockdown. Even when they were cheerful, the enveloping solitude was terrifying — a dystopian backdrop for an angry, anxious season.

The months wore on. These same kids would come up to me when I was out for furtive walks with our infant. They’d run over from lonely games and distracted, exhausted caregivers to ask about the kid in my stroller, and whether I knew about the school they attended before the virus, and had I noticed the stick tent they’d been building?

As you rush to jettison your masks, as you charge off on vacations, know that the kids are not alright. Some are traumatized, most are bearing significant daily stress, and almost all are lonely. Last fall, in a Parent Institute for Quality Education survey of Spanish-speaking families in California nearly two-thirds of respondents said that they were “concerned about their children’s emotional needs.” Food instability significantly increased for American kids during the pandemic, particularly children of color. Research on children and social isolation suggests that the impacts of this prolonged catastrophe won’t simply vanish with the end of lockdowns and the full reopening of schools.

That’s why educators must make children’s social and emotional well-being the lodestar this summer and fall — whether or not they can reopen safely. This won’t be easy in every community. Many administrators will, understandably, want to focus all of their energies towards academics. Data suggest that various pandemic learning models were not particularly effective for most kids: many schools will feel the pressure to reorganize their schedules around launching remediation programs or instructional strategies targeted at identifying the math (or reading, or science, or etc) skills kids missed last year … and then hurl their teachers into addressing these posthaste.

But in most cases, this will be a mistake both conceptual and tactical. First, it mistakes teaching and learning for simple, cumulative processes. High-quality instruction isn’t a matter of simply pouring knowledge into kids like water into a bucket. It’s a process of conversing and connecting, of working out what a child knows and what they don’t, determining what they care about and what they’re afraid of — and then drawing them from that place into new material. Kids learn best when they feel safe enough in their classroom and school communities to explore and take risks. In essence: all learning is both social and emotional.

Second, schools who scramble their pandemic recovery efforts around chasing students’ “learning loss” risk ignoring the depths of social and emotional challenges kids are likely to be carrying back to campus. A narrow focus on triaging students’ academic needs is unlikely to be as efficient as it might seem.

Whenever schools bring back their full student bodies for in-person learning, most will find that kids won’t come back fully whole. They won’t be immediately prepared to launch into aggressive, intensive academic instruction. They’ll return out of practice in, well … everything. They’ll need time to get used to focusing on learning in the presence of friends, spending whole days indoors around crowds, working within the educational structures of schedules and authority. Students need practice learning to be in communities with their teachers and peers.

Educators need to start there: to help kids reacclimate to the basics of spending their days living and learning in groups with their peers. This means giving children time to reconnect in organic, authentic ways with both kids and adults. It means making space to nudge kids into talking about how they’re feeling, about the struggles and challenges of the pandemic so that they don’t carry all of those stresses with them through the school year. And it means starting with informal activities that make reopening feel like the celebration and slow path back to normalcy that it should be. Critically, as they ease kids back into the routines of daily school, educators and administrators should be watching for red flags from those who may be suffering from trauma and other adverse childhood experiences.

This is one more instance of a pandemic lesson that’s worth carrying into the future: for more than a year, so many of us have repeatedly had to learn the hard way that we can’t set the terms for rushing back to normal. Over and over, we’ve tried to hurry past the serious work of leaving the crisis behind, and we’ve kept finding that there are consequences for skipping steps. School reopening is no different: we can take kids out of pandemic lockdown and back to school, but that doesn’t mean that the pandemic is done affecting kids.

Students and teachers at Center City Public Charter Schools in Washington, D.C. have fun on Zoom (Instagram)

Here, in the wrenching 13th — or perhaps 14th, depending on how you mark the tragedies — month of the pandemic, so many American families are frayed. Even with vaccines bringing us nearer to something like its end, the strains of the long lockdown are weighing on pretty much every parent, caregiver and kid.

And while data are scarce, it appears that English learners are being particularly excluded from COVID-era educational opportunities. In many communities, there have been worrying gaps in access to distance learning, examples of these students’ pandemic struggles have surfaced in national news coverage, and some early data on academic achievement suggest that the pandemic is hitting ELs especially hard.

But these challenges are layered atop generations of pre-pandemic inequities that have defined ELs’s educational opportunities across the country. What can schools learn from the pandemic to confront and close these gaps in the future?

Addressing the digital divide

Even before schools closed last year, English learners and their families were significantly less likely to have access to technological devices, internet connectivity, and sufficient data and/or bandwidth for downloading information that impacted their ability to do homework and engage fully in school. The pandemic converted this challenge into a crisis.

As schools suddenly moved to virtual learning in the spring, surveys and polls from the Parent Institute for Quality Education and Latino Decisions showed that large shares of ELs were unable to access their schools’ learning offerings.

“When we did close schools, we knew there was going to be a digital divide,” says Alicia Passante, ESL program manager at Center City Public Charter Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based network of schools where roughly one-third of students are current or former ELs. “[We] spent all summer making sure that every family, every kid, had a device. We surveyed our families and made sure that if they didn’t have internet, we knew, we invested in hotspots, and got those to families.”

While schools like Center City spent the spring in emergency mode, targeting basic infrastructure elements — like getting devices to ELs’ families and connecting them to the internet — many realized handing out resources only solved part of the problem. As pandemic learning has continued, some schools have pivoted from purchasing and distributing tablets or laptops to holding trainings to building the necessary digital literacy skills to use them.

Center City language access coordinator Hannah Groff says that the network’s outreach efforts have “boosted up” the technological skills of their school community — particularly parents. School leaders also prioritized training teachers to support ELs through online instruction, including paying for some to get Google Classroom certifications.

Similarly, at Mount Diablo High School in Concord, California, where nearly one-third of students are ELs, veteran teacher and EL coordinator Lorie Johnson scrambled to learn tech tools on the go, “playing catch up and a lot of trial and error in terms of finding what’s gonna work.”

Now, as Johnson and her students have grown more comfortable with different virtual learning tools, she says that they’re completing work faster and turning it in more efficiently, which has “forc[ed] them to be independent learners.” She’s also finding she is able to monitor their progress on assignments more comprehensively when they work online.

Perhaps even more valuable, the digital environment is also helping her students improve other so-called “soft skills,” like taking turns in group conversations or presenting their work to their classmates.

Engaging families

English learner advocates have long pushed schools to improve how they connect and engage with ELs’ families. This can be difficult, given U.S. schools are predominantly monolingual, English-only settings. Indeed, around the turn of the 21st century, voters in Massachusetts, Arizona, and California even went so far as to pass statewide referenda that largely prohibited schools from teaching ELs in languages other than English.

Research suggests that this approach is not particularly effective. Indeed, in 2016, the federal government released guidance indicating that, for young ELs, known as dual language learners, approaches “that do not provide home language support do not optimally promote the language and cognitive development of children who are DLLs.”

This structural problem often creates real divisions between schools and ELs’ linguistically and culturally diverse families. Will the pandemic catalyze a change after decades of stigmatizing these children and marginalizing their communities?

So far, data suggest that many schools have a long way to go.

Until schools reopen, ELs’ family members are the only adults who can reliably be in the rooms where these students are learning. In many cases, this means that they have had to take on new responsibilities for their children’s learning.

“Parents have to be more engaged than they were before,” said Groff, emphasizing the need to communicate with families from her D.C. charter school network, about distance learning assignments and expectations, as well as EL students’ progress.

To ensure that information about ELs’ distance learning is accessible to their caregivers, schools like Groff’s are working harder than ever to translate communications and share them with families through multiple mediums. Some are using apps like Talking Points or ClassDojo, which use machine translation to allow teachers to communicate directly with ELs’ linguistically diverse families.

Groff says that it’s become much easier to schedule meetings and connect with families over Zoom now that the school has helped most open and navigate the use of email accounts. The network has also grown its efforts to hire multilingual members from their schools’ community to translate documents and other school communications and interpret meetings into Spanish and Amharic, which is the native language of many of Center City’s Ethiopian immigrant families.

Centering language development in distance learning

Teachers across the country are struggling to engage ELs and get them to speak up during distance learning.

In response, some educators are holding classes outdoors or launching bilingual learning pods. Others are leveraging technology like Flipgrid, Kami, or Nearpod to spark ELs’ interest. Still others are setting up non-academic online meetings for small groups of their EL students to connect and talk with classmates.

And yet, many teachers, including Johnson, of California’s Mount Diablo High, report that their EL students are often reticent to turn on their cameras during live instructional time, highlighting an ongoing debate among educators. To break the ice, Johnson has turned to fun activities, like sending students on scavenger hunts — “go find something red and bring it back,” she says — that require the cameras. She also meets with students in smaller groups during intervention periods to work on specific areas for growth.

Passante and Groff say that, by shuffling class schedules, the pandemic prompted more collaboration among Center City teachers and students. In the network’s distance learning models, teachers are more likely to share students across classes, so they have had to learn to plan and work together, sharing newfound best practices.

“When they’re in small groups with kids,” says Passante, “they design activities that align to the language goals…[and] really give kids access to content.”

While the pandemic has forced schools to make some encouraging, if incomplete, changes in how they interact with ELs, it’s not yet clear whether these will stick when campuses reopen. Ideally, since the pandemic forced schools to rapidly close digital divides, in-person educators will be able to rely upon these new devices and digital literacy skills to extend learning in creative ways.

Similarly, schools’ necessary improvements in reaching out to linguistically diverse families could provide a foundation of stronger relationships and communication to support ELs’ learning when schools reopen. And finally, educators’ creative pandemic thinking about how to get ELs to use language — speaking, listening, reading, and writing — could remain at the center of more ambitious pandemic recovery efforts when students come back to classrooms.

Or, as Johnson puts it, the pandemic has taught her that “we’ve been underestimating these kids for years.”

Dr. Conor P. Williams is the founder of the EL Virtual Learning Forum, a free discussion community where educators working with ELs can share questions, ideas, and resources for supporting these students during the pandemic. Teachers can join here. 

Fairfax Public Schools increase food distribution sites to provide breakfast and lunch to students in need during school closures (Getty Images)

What’s a school for in the 21st century? Start with the bedrock: they’re for helping children develop academic skills and access core content, right? Those famous R’s: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, you know the deal. We also count on them to grow democratic citizens — informed, aware, civic-minded community members.

But that’s just the beginning. Public school mandates have expanded significantly over the years. In many places, schools are also medical centers and food distribution hubs and more. This approach aims at combining an array of services to meet as many family needs as possible at a single community location.

As the country grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally released guidelines on Friday indicating that even those districts that had already closed might not be shutting down for long enough. Education leaders are finding that such extended closures — with some talking for the rest of the academic year — are more complicated that ever, partly because schools have become the delivery mechanism for additional social services.

Concerns about keeping schools open aren’t idle chatter. While children appear to be somewhat less likely than adults to suffer from severe COVID-19 infection, they can still serve as disease vectors, carrying microbes to friends, family, and the broader community. To that end, sometimes in response to a reported local case of the virus, sometimes as a preventative measure, campuses and even entire school districts are shut down in communities from Seattle to Arlington, VA. As of Sunday, public schools in 33 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had all been shuttered, according to Education Week.

In response, the U.S. Department of Education is signaling that it would be open to granting states flexibility on federal academic assessment mandates. That’s a no-brainer—and a good sign that the current administration may finally be catching up on the gravity of this public health crisis. No one wants to see students lose out on weeks or months of academic instruction. That’s the sort of sacrifice that only makes sense in the face of a truly serious public health emergency that threatens human life.

Logistically speaking, though, it’s not a simple trade of academics for public health. Debates in New York City highlight the range of non-educational challenges that come with shutting down schools. For much of the past few weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio argued that widespread school closures would harm families counting on schools to provide food, child care, and health services. NYC’s health care workers union agreed, arguing that such a move would limit their members’ ability to “protect the health of their families, their patients, and the general public … Closing New York City’s public schools with no care plan for these children would place a dire strain on our social infrastructure by reducing the healthcare workforce.”

It’s basic Economics 101: schools provide convenient care and a reliable schedule that allow children’s caretakers to get to and contribute at their jobs (especially if they work in health care) and earn money to keep their families healthy and the economy chugging along.

Cuomo: "Public education is also this state's child care system. It is this nation's child care system."

— Joe Mahoney (@TipMahoney) March 16, 2020

Late Sunday, when de Blasio announced that NYC’s schools would, in fact, be closing, public reactions suggested that he may have been correct to be reticent about the move: solutions to these problems are still in development. As the city works to provide free meals and technology to allow children to connect to online academic materials and open special enrichment centers for particularly vulnerable students and so on and so forth, it’s clear that schools have expanded well beyond math and reading instruction.

After the mayor’s Sunday announcement, New York Times education reporter Eliza Shapiro tweeted, “Public school principals and teachers make sure parents in domestic violence situations can get to safety, they help connect families to employment, they check in every day, multiple times a day on the most vulnerable kids. There is no substitute for what schools do.”

It’s not just New York. In Washington, D.C. (where I live), similar issues are arising. The school district is slated to be closed for at least several weeks, and is offering free meals on campuses across the city, but community members are still worried about the impact on schools’ broader social missions.

Similar cost-benefit calculations are playing out across the country as communities weigh their public health options. But they’re particularly live in NYC, where Mayor de Blasio has enthusiastically embraced the “community schools” model that provides mentoring, tutoring, dental services, adult education programs, and much more.

The novel coronavirus outbreak reveals a risk of combining a host of public priorities — education, child development, adult learning, nutrition, medical care, into a single community institution. It’s almost a paradox: hunger, poor health, and other adverse poverty-related experiences affect how children learn, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that schools are the best mechanism to host the delivery of services to address them. Kids learn best when they get reliable dental care, dental care may not always be best delivered down the hall from math class.

So: on one hand, our current national health emergency shows the extraordinary value of public schools. They are central to families’ and communities’ lives— perhaps more than ever before.

And yet, on the other hand, the coronavirus outbreak illuminates just how much we now ask of our public education system. That’s the real question. As Americans spend the next few weeks managing their isolated, individual anxieties, it’s worth asking whether the cancellation of classes should mean that large numbers of children go without food. It’s worth asking, in a country as wealthy as ours, if it’s acceptable that more than half of public school children qualify for subsidized lunches from the federal government.

In other words, their precarity — and our collective responsibility for it — will be sharpened in the current crisis, but it won’t fully recede when schools reopen their doors.

Courtney Everts Mykytyn in a 2008 photo with her children (Facebook)

The first time Courtney Everts Mykytyn and I spoke, we almost didn’t get around to talking about schools. I was trying to interview her for an Atlantic Monthly article I was writing about privileged families hoarding access to dual language immersion programs. But we couldn’t stop talking about our kids. Hers were about a decade older than mine; at one point, she described them as too old to be any good at being children, but not yet mature enough to be any good at being adults.

It was all of adolescence’s rough, raw effervescence captured in a single sentence. I was stunned. I’ve used it in countless conversations since.

It was just the first of many such moments. Courtney contained multitudes. Just before we met, she founded Integrated Schools, an organization that recruits and connects networks of mostly privileged, mostly white families committing to integrating schools in their communities. She got her doctorate in medical anthropology from the University of Southern California. Above all, however, Courtney was an amaranthine font of insights on all things parenting.

But Courtney died last week, reportedly the final Los Angeles pedestrian killed by a car in 2019. Somehow — inconceivably, awfully, heart-breakingly — we’d talked about this. I asked her how she’d decided when her kids could walk to her neighborhood playground alone. She said she’d never worried about the adults regularly hanging out in the park, but she’d still waited to let her kids make the walk until she was sure they could handle crossing a busy nearby street.

That conversation was part of an interview I did with her a year later, for The 74. We had pages of extra material, because it happened again — we spent much of our time swapping photos of our kids before only eventually edging into talking about the daily work of integration. Something else she said stuck with me, even though it wound up on the cutting room floor.

• Related: An interview with Courtney Everts Mykytyn on her quiet movement to integrate schools in L.A. & beyond

“You really love your kid,” she said to me, to all the progressive parents checking GreatSchools ratings against their mortgage budgets. “They’ve thrown up on you so, so many times. You’re already in deep. Buckets of deep. You just love this kid and you want to do everything you can.”

Perhaps that seems obvious. And yet, so many educational equity efforts stumble at that point. Reforms to improve opportunities for the historically underserved are all well and good until they trip over privileged parents’ ability (their right? their duty?) to “do what’s best for their kids.” This personal trump card is inequity’s last, best defense. Fortunately, Courtney had a knack for capturing the tensions in privileged progressive parents’ heads, and how they accumulate into the hypocrisies we live.

I didn’t known Courtney well — we met a handful of times in person and spoke another handful of times on the phone. But we shared a demographic — white PhDs parenting in cities and concerned about what that meant. How to live our progressive values? How to raise our children intentionally without hoarding opportunities? How to do our best for our kids while also doing what was best for other kids in our communities?

Courtney’s answers to those questions were wholly unique. I’d come to admire, even revere, her example. Because she was emphatically unexpected, the sort of person who had cracked some parenting code that insulated her against the tendency of so many other people like us to seek out tony, privileged enclaves of segregation: private schools, lily-white suburban districts, neighborhood schools where the price tag for entry was at least a $1 million mortgage. We both knew — and talked about, and rolled our eyes at — countless families like ours who fled diversity of every type at every opportunity.

And yet, a confession: I kept grinding my anxiety gears anyway. I still do. I fight those anxieties each day, swearing up and down to myself that I AM doing the right thing, that it IS going to be OK, even as I fret and sweat and wonder if I maybe ought to follow my privileged peers over the redline and through the woods, into the segregation they’ve purchased. Courtney had a gift for collecting and channeling anxieties like these, instead of challenging them and raising people’s defenses.

So I listened to her Conversations About Integration podcast. I connected with members of the Integrated Schools parent network in Washington, D.C., and around the country. Each day, I keep working on believing in my new mantra — my kids will be OK, they don’t need to be cushioned in a bubble of wealth at school, they’re actually going to be better and happier for it.

This was how it was supposed to work. This was her theory of how to approach the thorniest problem in American public education. She believed that systemic oppression was woven deeply into U.S. schools, and that that would only change if privileged white people changed.

This became a joke for us: Each time we spoke, I pushed her to tell me which policies she thought we needed to change and how. Each time I asked, she demurred with a laugh. School integration mandates, systems, strategies, reforms, and the like? We’ve tried those, she’d say. We know what happens. First, white people fight, and then, they flee. That’s not just a historical claim, it’s a thesis constantly being confirmed by current events.

In just the past month, white families in Queens, New York and Montgomery County, Maryland have responded to preliminary conversations about new integration plans with outrage. Others will do so next month. Meanwhile, millions of white families will make quiet, private, respectable choices that lead to the same result — they’ll find excuses to push their kids into selective magnet programs and/or trade up on the value of their gentrifying home to move into a securely wealthy neighborhood school zone.

Further, Courtney warned, white families too often desegregate a campus without fully integrating themselves. We sometimes talk about school integration as if it were a magic formula, as if schools with a nicely curated demographic balance will somehow inevitably produce an equitable educational environment. And yet, left to our own devices, privileged white families are prone to elbowing our children’s needs into the forefront. In newly diverse schools, this often looks like taking over the PTA, establishing segregated academic programs, and so forth. This isn’t integration. It’s colonization.

That’s why Courtney believed in changing white narratives, in roughing up those well-worn behavioral grooves, by the force of example. So when I asked about changing policies, she’d twist the conversation back to changing the culture — white, privileged culture.

It’s no small thing to change a culture, which is, by definition, big and vague and baggy. How should you begin? How will you measure success? Fortunately, Courtney was audacious enough to take on a big project and wise enough to recognize that those were entirely the wrong questions.

Her equation was deceptively simple. Courtney lived her daily life as if the consequences mattered for both her kids and the public. She also managed to remain generous towards those who struggled to do the same. This came of her thoroughgoing honesty; Courtney didn’t pretend that her family’s school integration experience was an obvious, easy path to choose or follow. She spoke about it as a complicated process that involved real sacrifices, but that was also immeasurably valuable for her kids.

To put it bluntly, Courtney didn’t, like many public education activists, observers, and analysts, just talk about educational equity and school integration from their own securely privileged perches in segregated suburban school districts. Hers was a clarion voice for equity in a field that frequently cloaks parental selfishness under cover of respectability. She walked the walk, which soon inspired a compounding network of parents exploring a more just, fair, integrated public education system.

Paradoxically, Courtney’s most brilliant act was to launch a group and a theory of change that didn’t require her individual brilliance. Narratives don’t shift because of one, inspired person. They shift because an idea sparks a group of people to change their behavior and inspire a cascade of other people to change and pave the way for still others to change. White people like me benefit from knowing that other white parents are also sending their kids to schools where the majority of students are children of color.

Even still, even as this approach ensures that her work at Integrated Schools will continue to ripple out across the country, her death is impossibly devastating — for her family, for her community, for our current, nascent iteration of the school integration movement. Courtney was irreplaceable in her public work, a goodhearted soul whose faith in her progressive convictions was powerful enough to catalyze the courage of so many of the rest of us. For those she inspired, there is no sense or justice or meaning to be found in losing her now. Our only recourse is to take up her cause more clearly and confidently than before, to grieve her by living her example as best we can.

Voices Academies, a network of high-performing dual-language immersion charter schools, serves about 1,100 students across three elementary campuses and one K-8 campus. (Photo: Facebook)

“Video games are bad for you; they’re distracting,” says one kid. “They’re too violent,” says another. It’s jarring to hear middle-schoolers talk down on-screen entertainment, but the boys in this Bay Area classroom are doing their level best — and in Spanish, no less.

To be sure, they’re practicing taking positions and marshaling evidence as part of a unit on persuasive essay writing. “Are you guys serious about this?” I ask. “Oh yes, sir, we’re good kids,” says one — and he winks.

Sixth-grade eye twinkles aside, he’s right. English learner students here at Voices College-Bound Language Academies significantly outperform their peers across the state in reading and math. The same is true for the dual-language immersion school’s Hispanic students and students from low-income families. Whether or not those guys still play FIFA 20 on the sly, it’s clear that Voices runs an excellent network of schools.

As charter schools, Voices use their public funding — and flexibility on staffing, curricula and scheduling — to provide academic instruction in Spanish and English. This helps them tailor their school model for their students, nearly three-quarters of whom come from low-income families. In addition, 92 percent are Hispanic and 42 percent are classified as English learners.

But success hasn’t protected charter schools like Voices from a growing wave of criticism. Ask founder Frances Teso about the future, and she says, “You’re catching me in this place where it’s pretty depressing and pretty pessimistic, at least from my sort of view … maybe I need to retire.”

Teso’s attitude is understandable. After years of relatively uncomplicated bipartisan support, charters like Voices are under fire in national progressive discourse. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign recently released a long list of education ideas, but his proposals to ban (relatively rare) for-profit charter schools and cut off federal grants supporting charter school growth attracted by far the most attention. Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently faced a cascade of criticism for the sin of simply being introduced at an event by a teacher who once worked for a charter school.

These national dynamics are feeding — and feeding on — similar political trends in California. New governor Gavin Newsom has moved quickly to shift regulations governing charters, and state legislators are exploring ways to slow, or cap, the growth of charter schools in the state. For the moment, Teso says that Voices’s plans to expand to serve more of “the kids who need us the most” have largely been shelved. At present, the school serves just over 1,100 students across three elementary campuses and one K-8 campus.

• Read more: Controversial bill that would make local districts sole authorizers of charter schools moves to a public hearing in the California Senate

Schools like Voices weren’t always so controversial on the left. For years, many progressives saw charters as a means of giving historically underserved families options outside of the neighborhood schools they could afford to purchase through the real estate market. They also worked to make that possibility real. Charter school performance varies across the country, but research suggests they tend to do best in places defined by progressive politics — the District of Columbia, Boston and Newark, for example — where these schools face strong oversight and accountability for student outcomes.

To that end, Teso launched the first Voices school in the same school district that she attended as a student — and where she worked as a teacher — because she was frustrated that students like her were not being served well. She’d arrived in college feeling betrayed. “I was so unprepared, I was not set up for success, I had moments of resentment,” she says. “Why wasn’t I prepared, why was I tricked? Why was I told that I was a good student and here I am in remedial classes and struggling?”

As an English language learner from a low-income family, Teso had a slim margin for error. Her mother was a teenager who’d dropped out of high school, and her father was a Mexican immigrant who’d left school in third grade. “We checked all the boxes,” she says. “I went into kindergarten, I spoke only Spanish.”

Teso’s narrative, her schools, her life’s work — they’re suddenly out of fashion with progressives. Critics argue that, unlike charter schools, district schools have little control over which students enroll at their campuses; districts simply receive the students who happen to live nearby.

This critique is concerning, but charters are the wrong target. No single district school is required to serve all students in its community; unlike charters, district schools’ enrollments are usually filtered by race and/or socioeconomic class through the real estate market. Traditional public schools regularly engage in additional efforts to curate their student bodies. They frequently establish academic “tracking” systems and/or launch selective school programs that sort struggling students from their peers. These initiatives often exacerbate existing patterns of racial and socioeconomic segregation.

What’s going on? Teacher strikes in Oakland, Los Angeles and Sacramento focused attention on charters in California. Teachers union leaders have argued that charter schools, which are generally not unionized, use education funding that would otherwise go to (generally unionized) district schools.

And yet, this zero-sum framing isn’t just empirically suspect. It also brings up the most important question: Why do families leave district schools in the first place? Juan Carlos Villaseñor, principal at Voices’ Morgan Hill campus, says that Voices appeals to different families for different reasons: Many first-generation immigrants send their children because the Spanish-language instruction makes it easier for them to connect with the school and community. Many second- or third-generation immigrant parents who lost their Spanish during California’s two decades as an English-only state see the school as a way to give their children access to Spanish language and Hispanic culture.

I asked a few Spanish-speaking parents at Voices about this. They agreed to speak with me, but they asked me not to use their full names, after referencing the present state of immigration politics. Luis says, in Spanish, that he sends his children to Voices because they’ll have more opportunities: “[they’ll have] more jobs, better careers, more money. But it’s also the culture, the connections to our culture.” Voices understands children better than other schools, he says. “They treat them like they’re important, and they also expect more of them.”

Diana and Natalí each have a first-grader at Voices. Diana says, in Spanish, that she chose it “because it was our only bilingual option here.” Natalí jumps in: “Oh, and the schedule! They are here a few hours more each day, and it helps them progress.” Charter parents across the country frequently make similar arguments — they see their children’s schools as opportunities, as lifelines.

“These big debates, charter versus non-charter, I sometimes lose track,” says Villaseñor. “I became an educator because I like being around kids and seeing people learn.” Working at Voices, he said, was an “opportunity to keep learning and keep growing. If something doesn’t work, we change it. That’s the mentality in this school. Our communities deserve that.”

Various campaigns now see policies targeting charter schools as a political opportunity. But it’s also clear that Democratic criticism of charters splits along racial lines — majorities of Democrats of color support them. A party that increasingly relies upon a diverse base of voters should be careful about catering to white Democrats who oppose charters. After all, what could be more progressive than successful, hardworking schools led by educators of color and organized around affirming students’ language and cultures?

Meanwhile: Will Teso retire? She pauses, then says she plans to continue doing the same work for students while trying to “stay under the radar.”

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

Her four-year-old group describes itself and its mission this way: “Integrated Schools is growing a grassroots movement of, by and for parents who are intentionally, joyfully and humbly enrolling their children in integrating schools … Because school segregation is as much a story of failed public policy as it is one of white/privileged families thwarting it, our hearts-and-minds campaign offers a new model for integration in which this undertaking falls not on the backs of marginalized communities, but on white and/or privileged families who care about equity.”

I first encountered Mykytyn’s work while writing an article about gentrification’s effects on bilingual education. She’s also been featured in Mother Jones and CityLab. I sat down with her during a trip to Los Angeles.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve said that you kind of ignited around school integration at a meeting about middle school feeder patterns for dual language programs, right?

Mykytyn: Yeah. I attended this meeting as a parent of a kid in a middle school that had just opened up dual language, and to see if we could potentially draw in this other dual language elementary school as well. And the way that those privileged parents were talking and cheering on others about what they expected and demanded from the district … “If you don’t give me X, Y, Z, I’m taking my kid to a charter school! I’m leaving tomorrow!” WOOOOO! Cheers, cheers, foot stamping. It wasn’t pretty.

No self-awareness.

I mean, I’m sure there was a little. There must have been someone who was quiet. I knew a couple of people who were unhappy with how it went down. But the loud ones in the dual language program [were] so far from what I had hoped that program could be. It wasn’t about integration. It wasn’t about equity. It wasn’t about coming together as a community. It was entirely about “This is really great, what I get for my kid. I’d like more.” I don’t know how else to say it other than “opportunity hoarding.”

And it really just became utterly clear that, as long as we’re not talking about integration, we’re not talking about integration.

We’ve seen this a lot lately, right? Places like the Upper West Side, where some white families got caught letting their privilege flags fly free. They were yelling about what their kids needed —

And “deserved”!

When rich, white kids “need” something, we act as though they “deserve” it. So, in places like New York, L.A., and D.C., there’s this influx of young, upwardly mobile, highly educated, often white families. They live in neighborhoods both because of price and by choice.

Yeah, I think there’s a rejection of sterility. I don’t — they don’t — want to live in a cookie-cutter suburb.

Right. They’re well off, but not so much that they can afford to buy segregation outright with real estate. But there’s also a cultural part. So you’ve got these diversity-curious families who still blanche at the step of sending their kids to schools that look like their neighborhood. Why?

You know why. You know exactly why. I mean, there’s a lot of racism and classism. And it’s often racism talked about like classism.

We’ve been steeped in this broken-schools narrative, this Nation at Risk stuff. It’s easy to point at any government institution and say that it’s broken, to point out the broken pieces, but there’s also a disconnect between who it’s broken for. When you’re looking at the white kids, the privileged kids, it’s actually not broken. These stories are building up and kind of creating the air we’re breathing.

So … take that, and add anxious parents leveraged to the gills to afford a house in a gentrifying neighborhood, and here we are.

I’ve been thinking about parenting and our risk culture. If you don’t give your kids the right foods in the right order when they’re young, then they’re only going to eat butter noodles until they’re 10 and they won’t have the right nutrition, so their metabolism will predispose them to obesity. If they don’t get this many hours of play, if they don’t feel heard by adults this many times a day …“BAM! BAM! You are going to screw all of this up! You know you will!”

We need to be clear: these aren’t the actual risks of having police target your kids, right, just for being a 12-year-old walking home in a hoodie. But you really love your kid. They’ve thrown up on you so, so many times. You just love this kid and you want to do everything you can.

So: why the disconnect between living in the community and sending your kids to school in the community? It’s about how we define good parenting, and how we define good schools. Those two narratives outweigh narratives around what a good citizen or community member is.

What does it mean to have good schools? Does it have to have a fancy program like dual language? Great test scores? An organic garden? Is that the definition?

Or is it that there are kids. In a building. With teachers. Could that be OK? Is there some value, actually, in other things that aren’t quite as easily measured? I’m not saying data is crap. But it’s hard to think healthily about it in terms of your kid.

Today’s parents are under a lot of pressure. Of course school enrollment feels high-stakes. And they’re — we’re — cushioned by plenty of privilege!

I mean, it’s part of the smog that we’re breathing. We’ve really moved from a narrative of childhood as a time of resilience to a time of vulnerability. Combine that with our narrative of failing schools. If you think your kid is really crushable, if you think that his creativity is that vulnerable, it matters a lot. If you want to get into such and such private school, you have to get into such and such preschool. That tends to be a really big counterpoint: “I’m just worried that these schools that have low test scores are just going to be teaching to the test and that therefore they’re not going to be interesting, and therefore my kid’s not going to be enchanted by learning and they’re going to live in my basement.”

Folks get defensive when you ask them about why they’re choosing the segregated district school across town. [Groan.] Enough. Let’s talk about hope.

I mean, I think there’s an opportunity now to talk about segregation in ways that don’t necessarily bring busing into the center of the conversation. So the mechanics of it in a gentrifying neighborhood — I’m not talking about a 45-minute bus ride. I’m talking about a mile this way or two miles in the other. That opens up space to have the discussion.

Are they ready?

I mean, it might be stretching it to say that people are ready, but some are ready-adjacent. It was a lot harder 10 years ago, when my kids were starting school, than it is now. If we can tie all of these things together into a different kind of package of what integration means for parenting, for ideas of what school can be in your walkable, public-transport-y neighborhood, I think that there’s a good chance for optimism.

Maybe we’re not always having the conversation yet. We’re certainly not landing on integration every time, but we’re at least ready to talk.

And you hear people get defensive. That’s the other cool part. You have to explain why you’re not choosing an integrated school. So we’re developing talking points about all the usual reasons people give for why they can’t do it. “My kid is a really kinesthetic learner.” You’ve heard it.

I have.

You know, “I don’t want my kid to be the only white kid.” “I don’t want my kid to be a social experiment.” You know, “play-based models are so much better,” all those progressive pedagogical arguments. If someone says to me, “I really love Sir Ken Robinson” [best-selling British author and education expert who espouses greater creativity in schools], I know that this conversation is going to be difficult. “We’ve been pushing our kids too hard, so we really need a social-emotionally progressive curriculum or else …”

Or else what? Your kid’s going to live in your basement when they’re 40? They’re going to be in and out of rehab?

What sorts of families seek you out at Integrated Schools?

Lots of people who live in a diverse neighborhood think, “Hey, I like it here, I have a certain amount of privilege of time and resources, and I should be involved in my neighborhood school. If I bought a house here and the housing prices were good enough for me, then shouldn’t the schools be too?”

But the largest categories are 1) white and/or privileged parents who went to integrated schools and are like, “What the hell? Why aren’t there any integrated schools for my kid? I really value that.” Or 2) white and/or privileged parents are showing up and saying, “I’ve been thinking a lot about race and ethnicity in education and I need to think through this more,” or 3) they’re coming in with “I live in a gentrifying neighborhood and I kind of want to fix my neighborhood school! Integration!”

Lots of paths in.

Yeah, but it’s really a competition with that urge to “get what’s best for your kid.” And neighborhood schools, as you know, have been a rallying cry for segregation as frequently as — or more frequently than — a rallying cry for integration.

Neighborhood schools are school choice! They’re the original school choice program!

Right! So when people are saying that we can’t deal with school integration because we have residential segregation, well — chicken and the egg. We had a lot of integrated communities before Brown v. Board, actually. But even in integrated communities, we have really segregated schools. So we have to start somewhere. Does that mean we shouldn’t do work on zoning or affordable housing? No. Of course not. Of course we need to deal with that too. But we can’t use it as an excuse not to do the school piece.

How do you get families to consider integration?

Integrated Schools’ job is to allow for different kinds of conversations to be had. And even more specifically, different kinds of questions to be asked. We’re trying to set up an integration ecosystem from a parent perspective.

Policy is important, but there’s so much that happens before and after policy that very few people are playing with. If we’re not talking about this at kids’ birthday parties, it might not matter that we’re at the state legislature. Because white, privileged people can get out of your damn policies.

So much hinges on calculations around white anxieties. How much pressure will they bear? Integrated Schools excavates those.

Right! We’re talking it through. In a really basic way, we’re building a constituency for brave policy. We’re building a noisy counter to the people who are going to say no to busing. We’re building people who can tell different stories loudly and proudly. Who have lived those stories. Who have built relationships in their communities by being in schools there.

Cajoling school board members to change policies is a heavy lift, but it’s nothing compared to being at every one of these damn birthday parties and preschool forums and soccer practices, you know, all of the places.

Also, I believe very strongly that we can’t just unleash white folks into global majority schools willy-nilly. You have to get folks who are willing to do the work of integration, not just opportunity-hoarding desegregation or gentrification. If we’re really talking about what true integration could mean — it’s revolutionary. It might not cure all of the world’s problems, but I think it would get at a lot of them.

Which is why it’s hard, right?

Right! These problems are millennia in the making! This is a deep hole!

So we have to do it well. And that’s 50 times harder than just doing it. But the damage from doing integration poorly might, in fact, be worse than not doing it at all. So we’re trying to be pointed about asking parents who are thinking about sending their kids to integrated schools: Tell us not just about your intent, but about what you want your impact to be. Think about what kinds of things are going to get you to that place. Do you need to be the president of the PTA? These are often well-meaning people who really do care. How do they show up and get involved and be engaged? What does that look like if you’re giving up the part about getting your kid into the “best” school? Does it look like raising a ton of money for an organic garden?

Or perhaps you need to cut that off a little bit. Perhaps your job is just to show up and listen and build relationships — be a part of something at the school as opposed to trying to “fix” it.

• Read more:

In Texas, School Integration That Celebrates Family Heritage

Segregated Classrooms in Segregated Neighborhoods: New Report Argues That Efforts to Integrate Schools Must Also Address Our Divided Cities

WATCH — A Family’s Perspective on How Their Public Montessori School Led Them to Think Differently About School Integration, Special Education, and Inclusion

78207: America’s Most Radical School Integration Experiment

Conor P. Williams is a fellow at The Century Foundation. His interview with Mykytyn was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

See previous 74 interviews: Sen. Cory Booker talks about the success of Newark’s school reforms, civil rights activist Dr. Howard Fuller talks equity in education, Harvard professor Karen Mapp talks family engagement, former U.S. Department of Education secretary John King talks the Trump administration, and more. The full archive is right here.

While Jonathan Raymond was superintendent of the Sacramento school district, he became convinced of the value of what’s known as the “whole child” approach to education, which is the focus of his new book, “Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America.” (Courtesy: Jonathan Raymond)

The present erosion of American democratic institutions has a range of ugly consequences — anxiety, distrust, polarization, etc. But most concretely, our current political catastrophe has produced heavy gridlock. Creative, productive policymaking is at an all-time low — including in education.

The 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act ended the No Child Left Behind era of education policymaking, and the staggering struggles of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have largely stalled national education policy discourse.

Jonathan Raymond’s Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America, offers an opening bid on where we might turn next for that thoughtful policymaking. Raymond is currently president of the Stuart Foundation, a family foundation dedicated to improving children’s lives through education. But Wildflowers draws heavily on his prior work as the school superintendent in Sacramento. The book explores a holistic way of thinking about children’s learning and development — known as whole child education — and how our current education system can discourage that approach.

What drove you to write the book?

It started with my journey, my story, and particularly people from my time in Sacramento. In some ways, it’s context-specific. But my journey to find whole child education and to see its value for children, adults, and the community was really powerful.

I knew that I needed to do something else. I was seeing some of the frustrations at the systems level — the ups and downs of funding, the throwing down of mandates to the district level — I knew what that caused. I knew there was another way. I knew that I had a story to share and to tell.

I hoped it could inspire people. It’s a story about leadership, about how educating and developing children and putting children at the middle requires leaders to have a sense of purpose, a sense of what their beliefs and values are, and the courage to be able to act on those.

I wanted to provide a manifesto for how to lead whole child education systems. This work is hard, and sometimes it is exhausting, but it can also be exhilarating. And it will change you. It takes understanding that there will always be realities trying to knock you off course, but when you have a vision and you can mobilize and inspire people to join you on this journey, that it can live beyond you.

Sketch the journey for us — how has your view of education changed?

I didn’t learn whole child education in school. I didn’t take a class on it. I didn’t write a thesis on it. I learned about whole child education through my own three children and their experiences in the public education system. I learned from the children that I had the fortune to serve. My own journey through public education also helped to shape and grow how I think about education today. I was — and am — a wildflower myself.

And you’re right — I did change. When I finished my training and started in district administration, I think that I was very much in that reform mode. My eyes had, in some ways, been trained to see education through that reformer lens. And certainly there were things that I did that would probably be fairly consistent with that playbook.

But, along the way, I was also very mindful. So a lot of the things that I talk about in the book are those moments when I saw things and was confronted with challenges that made me realize my ability to make changes, as a superintendent.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

For instance, in the book, I talk about how I didn’t come to Sacramento to “green” schools or to change the ways kids ate, but when your kids come home and say, “Dad, did you know that our school serves corn dogs for breakfast?”

My point is that children have a way of seeing things as they really are — often without the lenses that adults use. They can teach us a lot if we’re willing to listen and come at things with fresh eyes. To be humble. To be curious.

When you realize that 75 percent of the children who come to school every day [in Sacramento] come from homes that live in poverty, then you realize that what we feed them in school is what they eat. It doesn’t take too long to figure out that if we really want to meet kids where they are, then we have to address that need. So that’s food. But then it’s making sure they have access to health care and glasses and summer programs and afterschool opportunities and relevant experiences to see how and what their learning matters in the world.

When you talk about whole child education, about kids’ “heads, hearts, and hands,” what do you mean?

If we think about educating children holistically, we really do want to stimulate their heads, their minds. We want to give them access and exposure to rich curriculum and academic learning and knowledge. We want to give them the skills and tools to be prepared, competent, curious, and active in today’s world.

We also want to make sure that learning is real and relevant in the context of their world today. So students can get their hands in it and it engages, inspires, and connects with them. That’s what I mean: learning they can touch, feel, use — it comes alive for them.

Finally, true learning does come from the heart. Ideas and thoughts come from what we feel. Engaging the heart really does open up the student and the child to give them the full dimensions of learning. By engaging the heart, we teach empathy, we teach that people learn differently, and that that diversity is really the way the world is.

So that’s what I mean. It’s that integration. What I came to see — and why I wrote the book — is what Carrie Wilson at Mills Teachers College shared, “the road to improving public education lies at the intersection of empathy and academic learning.” That’s where change happens.

In Wildflowers, you cite John Dewey, one of my intellectual heroes, to illustrate whole child thinking about education. Dewey’s sometimes presented as an alternative to education reform — holistic thinking about child development and student achievement is sometimes counterpoised as incompatible with reforms focused on measuring and raising student achievement.

Dewey provided an overall frame for how children learn and develop. The heart of his approach was really the purpose of education: to produce successful and engaged community members and citizens who could engage with democracy. What I find fascinating about the whole reform effort is, it’s really forgotten that we live in a very large, complex system. Advocating one reform over another causes ripples that impact other parts across that system.

We’ve lost that holistic lens. We’ve also lost the true purpose of learning and education. It shouldn’t have to come down to a supposed difference between using data to drive improvement and authentically and warmly greeting children as they come to school every day. It doesn’t have to be an either/or. But reformers have framed it that way.

Dewey and others, like Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori, who had a grounding in child development, understood that the ecosystem in which children learn is a key part of how education becomes successful.

What’s the big vision that we hold now?

You tell me. How should we advance the whole child approach in public education?

It starts with a broad vision, a North Star. Sir Ken Robinson talks about it as the responsibility of the adults at all levels in the system to create the conditions in which all children can thrive. Start by putting children at the center of every question. What is it going to take for every child to succeed? What does he or she need?

The answer starts with giving children a voice.

The best example: high schools in America today. High schools are really hard places — when you look at the traditional reform or turnaround models, they often avoid high schools because they’re so hard. The reason? We don’t give children a voice. I don’t think we really bother to ask students what inspires them, what excites them, how do they want to learn, when do they want to learn, where do they want to learn.

If we asked, if we gave students — and, by extension, teachers — more of a say, we’d start to create a system that’s really about meeting all of children’s needs.

We need school-based leaders that understand that, that cultivate the kinds of learning cultures where this kind of learning and voice can thrive. And they need the support of superintendents who understand that their job is about providing supports so that the climate and cultures in schools reflect needs defined by those communities.

This is what it means to lead a system that’s about educating and developing the whole child: I’m setting the conditions. Deputy superintendents are helping build them. Principals are cultivating those conditions for their teachers and community. Teachers are creating them for their students and their families. And we keep going back up to the state policymaker levels and to folks like myself, now, in philanthropy. We all have a role in helping to create the conditions that can advance whole child education.

And that advancement, again, can look very different, depending on the needs of different communities. That’s OK! It’s not about a one-size-fits-all playbook.

What are some of the least productive parts of our thinking about public education in the United States? Most productive?

We don’t do a good job at engaging and empowering our communities. In general, large bureaucracies aren’t good at that. That’s taken a toll.

If, like Dewey, you see public education’s purpose as to produce a class of individuals able to be active citizens who can help advance democracy, this disengagement has had a spiraling downward effect. That lack of engagement and connection has fostered a lack of investment, support, and pressure back from the community. That’s led to a systemic erosion of public education.

For instance, in places where you have — as in California — divested funding from the local communities, where the vast majority of public education dollars come from state revenues, it’s further disconnected community ownership of schools. That’s had a negative effect.

Schools’ higher purpose has gotten more and more clouded. Take No Child Left Behind’s well-intended, but also misguided, focus on academic standards and high-stakes testing. That resulted in the erosion of other subjects like history, arts, and even some of the natural sciences. That created further disengagement of students, families, and communities, which further eroded public support for education.

But the trend line in progressive circles is to push up from the local level for equity reasons, right? Local funding tends to mirror and exacerbate the structural and financial inequities between communities.

No question it’s one of the tensions. I think we’re seeing it here in California with the big movement towards more local control of state education funding. Three to five years in now, we’re seeing that the biggest impediment is districts’ ability to authentically engage their families and their communities around their planning work.

It’s largely an effort that’s controlled by bureaucracies, which have more of a compliance mentality than a curious, creative, collaborative mentality.

Wildflowers is full of reminders from earlier iterations of public education. Where should we look for inspiration?

Ted Dintersmith’s book, What School Could Be, is full of examples of places where you find really engaged, connected, passionate young people learning with committed adults who treat their jobs like they’re craftspeople learning to perfect their craft. There’s a lot of places like that, where learning is on fire and kids are engulfed in learning. I don’t know that we have to point to one specific model.

Whole child education isn’t something new. It isn’t that we have to invent something else or launch another quick reform piece — e.g., if we just get rid of seniority, if we only paid teachers more.

There are holistic models and pockets and examples of where you have adults setting the conditions for learning. This idea of heads, hands, and hearts emanated from Waldorf and Montessori, models that were built around a child and/or youth developmental lens, that truly understood how children learn.

Do we believe that all children can learn? If we do, what are we going to do about that? This is where the whole equity frame comes in. Certain children face more challenges and have other needs. To meet those needs sometimes requires more resources, more attention from adults, and different approaches. Wildflowers provides some examples.

In many ways it is a “back to the future” conversation. Which makes it a lot easier for people to understand. We’ve done this. We’ve been there. We can absolutely do it again.

See previous 74 interviews: Civil rights activist Dr. Howard Fuller talks equity in education, Harvard professor Karen Mapp talks family engagement, former U.S. Department of Education secretary John King talks the Trump administration, and more. The full archive is right here.

Conor P. Williams is a fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. His two children attend a public charter school in Washington, D.C.

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

Fittingly, California communicates the quality of its schools through a veritable panoply of colors. I dunno about you, but whenever I look at it, I think Trivial Pursuit. There’s a bunch of circles broken into colorful wedges, each round whole broken into a bunch of important component parts. Anyway, that polychromatic data explosion is designed to give parents a view of how their family’s school is performing. (For comparison’s sake, here are a few examples from Louisiana’s and Georgia’s school report card systems.)

Sure, education is complex. Lots of things do matter for school quality. A school’s dashboard should keep that in mind, even when they’re also trying to showcase it in a clear, simple way. That’s the balance that transparency and accountability systems need to strike.

Last week, the land of good news got a dose of the other blend. California’s Department of Education announced a significant increase in the number of state schools falling into the bottom tier of the state’s accountability system. From 2016 to 2017, the number of bottom-tier schools for math and ELA performance approximately doubled (page 8 here). Schools appear to be especially struggling at showing academic improvements over time.

Yikes. Twice as many schools in the red — the bottom of California’s five tiers. That sure reads like a wakeup call, like a signal that California needs to do a whole lot more to improve how its schools serve students.

Well, that’s not quite how the state sees it. On Wednesday, the state Board of Education voted unanimously to tweak the numbers so more schools will show up in the orange category instead of red. They called the change a technical matter.

• Read more: ‘Why do the state and the district not want us to know the truth about our kids’ schools?’ — What a ‘technical’ tweak to the California School Dashboard means

Trouble is, slicing the numbers differently so that fewer schools appear to fall short of the state’s education goals doesn’t actually mean that fewer schools are falling short. It just means that the state changed the definition of its bottom tier of schools.

Civil rights advocates expressed concerns in a letter: “We have serious reservations [about] the lowering of Math cut scores and the re-labeling of color cells in the ELA and Math 5×5 grades to qualify more schools as Green and Blue and fewer as Red. … It appears to subvert the accountability system and risks undermining public confidence when, after test scores issue that are disappointing, the State so significantly alters the rubric by which performance is judged.”

“It’s like that Office Space moment,” says Bellwether Education Partners’ Chad Aldeman. “You know, where the consultants say, ‘Nah, we didn’t fire [the laid-off employee who continues to accidentally receive paychecks], we just ‘fixed the glitch’ giving him the paychecks.”

Fix the schools or fix the benchmarks they’re expected to meet?

Sure, as California’s Department of Education notes, the state established these expectations based on just two years of achievement data from the state’s new math and ELA assessments. And sure, the system’s color-coding was — like any system of rating schools — arbitrary from the start, always and already contingent upon a bunch of human decisions about what to measure and how much each should matter.

Trouble is, California schools have priors on moves like this. Some of the state’s largest districts recently saw increases in their high school graduation rates — not because of jumps in student skills and knowledge, but because leaders lowered the requirements to get a diploma.

So perhaps California leaders should be more careful when monkeying around with their already-complicated, already-multicolored system of school tiers. “That dashboard makes a great case for GreatSchools,” says Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the Data Quality Campaign, referring to a popular school rating website.

Perhaps the clearest lesson here is that systems like this are artificial. What does “red” mean anyhow, as far as school quality is concerned? What if we renamed the bottom tier “mauve” or “ochre,” or assigned each tier a representative animal instead of a color? What if we made the tiers three-, four-, or 10-dimensional?

As a matter of substance, it wouldn’t matter. If we change the calculations or the system so that a school lands in the “red” tier, the “ochre” tier, or the “penguin” tier, it doesn’t change the underlying data. All of these are just proxies for actual skills and knowledge measured (as well as possible) on assessments.

Take the government’s old “food pyramid,” replace that with a color-coded “MyPyramid,” and then a circular “MyPlate.” Doesn’t matter how you shuffle the depiction, the nutritional effects of eating cake for breakfast, steak for lunch, and two bags of tortilla chips for dinner remain unchanged. Change the proxy, fine, but don’t expect it to protect your waistline.

And yet, proxies like this communicate to the public what a state defines as inadequate school performance. If that definition moves around whenever it gets uncomfortable, expensive, or politically inconvenient, pretty soon the system looks like a wholly trivial pursuit.

Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. 

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

Education is full of priorities: getting kids ready for kindergarten, getting children reading on grade level, developing students’ STEM skills, building social-emotional skills, addressing nature deficit disorder (children spending too little time outdoors), developing thoughtful citizens, training future workers to compete in a global marketplace, and so on and so forth.

They’re all interlocked to a certain degree. A child with high-quality early learning opportunities is more likely to read on grade level and be able to access rigorous STEM content, and so forth. This is part of why high school graduation often serves as the one education goal to rule them all. A high school diploma is supposed to wrap up all these other goals, to signal that a graduate has the requisite skills to continue her education in college or begin her professional career in the workplace.

That’s why so many advocates focus on raising the number of kids who reach that milestone. But there are dangers to treating high school graduation rates as an isolated educational goal. For instance, in April, LA School Report’s Sarah Favot showed that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) appears to be raising its graduation rates by adjusting the criteria for getting a diploma. After a 2015 school board decision to allow students getting D’s in core coursework to still earn a high school diploma, 53 percent of the district’s 2016 graduating class did just that.

Los Angeles isn’t alone. Voice of San Diego journalist Mario Koran found a similar situation in the San Diego Unified School District this year, where over 40 percent of graduates logged a D in at least one of their core classes.

Let me be clear: It’s good to raise high school graduation rates. But that doesn’t mean it’s good to raise them by any means — by lowering standards or turning a blind eye to quality.

Should a student be prevented from graduating high school simply because he or she got a D in visual arts (for example)? In isolation, that seems nuts.

But, like every educational goal, high school diplomas aren’t an isolated priority. For instance, California’s public colleges require incoming students to have C’s in all core high school courses. LAUSD’s (and San Diego’s) weaker graduation requirements do not align with the state’s college entry requirements.

Sadly, this situation isn’t particularly uncommon across the country.

I think there’s a conceptual problem lurking behind all this. The push to raise graduation rates can get myopic and lose sight of the fact that credentials are proxies. They represent a bunch of things that their possessors supposedly have. If you have a driver’s license, we generally expect that it means you have at least baseline mastery of the skills and knowledge involved in driving a car. If a kindergartner has a vaccine record showing that she’s gotten all the shots for school, we treat her as if she is unlikely to be a disease vector for measles or chicken pox. If a person has a Ph.D., we assume that he has an expert-level understanding of his field (as well as below-average social skills).

When it comes to education, there’s a real danger in letting battles over proxy credentials like high school graduation rates screw up our thinking. We care about low high school graduation rates because they correlate with lots of bad long-term life outcomes. No problem. But then we use that proxy as a target, as a good thing in itself: “Fix high school graduation rates and you’ll fix a bunch of other educational, social, economic, and political problems!” Trouble is, correlations like these usually oversimplify the process of education.

What’s the lesson? Consequential benchmarks need to be real. If we smooth the path to high school graduation only to find that a growing number of high school graduates lack key skills for success in college and/or their careers, we should wonder if that consequential credential still matters as much as it used to.

Jason Tyszko, the executive director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Education and Workforce, put it well in a 74 Million article earlier this spring: “You can up your completion rates for high school, but not increase the number of students who are proficient in reading and math and ready to go on to the workforce.”

You get the picture. Credentials are supposed to consolidate a bunch of useful information into a single data point. That’s why a high school diploma is a goal, but it’s not really an end in itself. It’s both a culmination and a means to the graduate’s next step: college or the workforce. They call it a commencement ceremony for a reason.

This story was published in partnership with The74Million.org

(Photo: Getty Images)

Yolie Flores is one of 24 candidates who will compete in the April 4 special primary election for the 34th Congressional District seat which includes downtown LA, Koreatown and the city’s northeast region. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes, a runoff election will be held on June 6. 

When longtime representative Xavier Becerra was nominated in December to serve as California’s attorney general (he was confirmed in January), it set off a political scramble in his district, California’s 34th. Labor organizers, career political operatives, and a host of others announced their intentions to run.

For education watchers, one candidate is particularly interesting. Yolie Flores is a longtime education activist, a former Los Angeles Unified School Board member, and a current senior fellow at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. She sat down with The 74 to discuss how her convictions about education drive her politics.

The interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.

How’s the race so far? Why did you decide to run?

A number of reasons. One, and the most important, is my passion and conviction around more needing to be done in this nation for children and families. Better policies, greater investments, higher priority, especially for the most vulnerable kids and families. I think that we’ve made a lot of progress in 50 years, whether it’s with Head Start, and WIC, and home visiting, and certainly in the last eight years, lots more attention to the early years. But as a nation, I think we fall short on really prioritizing children and families. For me, this is about investing in human capital. It’s the most important thing we can do for our economy and national security, and I don’t think we do that enough.

Obviously, with this administration, I’m concerned that the gains we’ve made in the past 50 years are going to be lost. We already see the writing on the wall, and so, to have the opportunity to be a stronger, louder voice for kids, protect as much as we can, but also take the long view, and be a leader in Congress that can move the nation to a higher prioritization of children and families, would be a phenomenal opportunity.

And secondly, my congressman is stepping down, and the opportunity became available at the most important time in history. With the kind of calling and commitment and conviction that I just described, it just felt to me like what I needed to do. Having this opportunity, I couldn’t not do it.

And then, I want to build on my 30-year history of being an advocate and a supporter for what’s right for children, what’s right for families, especially the most vulnerable.

It’s telling that you’ve made references only to children and families. You’ve said nothing about Iraq, about tax cuts, about the EPA — about the things politicians usually talk about. Your résumé stands out in politics, where education isn’t always a top-line issue and educational experience isn’t particularly common. Why have you made it a professional focus?

It’s a multiple-reason answer. One is, as a social worker, I understand that the well-being of kids and families translates into the well-being of communities, which translates into the well-being of the nation. If we don’t invest in the human potential of people starting at the earliest years, we will not be the democracy and cannot be the democracy that we say that we want to be. It’s the basis of, like I said, a strong economy, the kind of national security that we need to have in the times that we are in. It’s the basis for everything. A clean environment, global influence, sound policy related to infrastructure. I happen to have the background and understanding that that’s where it all starts.

I do oftentimes need to remind people that I will lead comprehensively on all the issues: immigration, health care, infrastructure, jobs, jobs, jobs! I know that serving in Congress requires all of that, and I’m prepared to be a learner on these that I’m not as familiar with, but I will always come at the job in Congress with a lens on children and families, because I believe — and I think I’m right — that that’s where it starts.

One thing that makes education unique: Everyone argues about it through a personal lens. Some people think as former students, they’re thinking as parents, or as teachers, taxpayers, employers, or researchers. How does your educational experience inform your work?

I’m a product of public K-12 education. I’m also a product of bilingual education and being an English learner. I am, like so many kids that I’m talking about, in terms of parents who never went beyond a third- and sixth-grade education, from an immigrant experience, not speaking the language, struggling to make ends meet. For me, public education clearly was my way out of poverty, and it is the pathway to helping any child achieve their American dream.

I really dedicate my success to the teachers that I had, who believed in me, who had high expectations for me, who knew how to inspire me — along with my parents. I come at public education with, it’s not just the school and the teacher, but it’s also your family, and your parents in particular. So my lens is the powerful relationship and connection between families and schools. The role that parents play as their children’s first and most important teacher, and then the handoff to either Head Start or preschool and then the handoff to K-12, with parents always being involved, and being part, being co-creators of good educational outcomes for kids. But schools have to be, and teachers in particular have to be, supported and prepared to inspire and believe in all kids, and I happen to have had that.

But I also know that I didn’t go to the best schools. So even though I had a handful of great teachers, I was not in a great educational system — LA Unified. So it took more from me — I was severely underprepared to go to college. And I had to work really hard to get to where other students were that had been better prepared.
Even though I was an “A” student, and I had a handful of great teachers who put me on the path to go to college, I also know that there was significant lacking in my educational quality. So when I was on the school board, I really fought hard for focusing on quality, for ensuring that kids had the most effective, strong teachers, and making sure that parents — so that we had a robust parent relationship, so that we could see better outcomes for kids and families.

That’s my personal experience with public education. I believe in it. I think it’s an important thing that, with the Trump administration, we’re going to have to fight hard to protect, because it’s moving in a very dangerous direction toward privatization and vouchers. I will fight hard against that. I don’t think that is good for a democracy.

You’ve worked throughout the field of education and in ways and places that are pretty rare for a congressional candidate. What do you believe are the three most important things the country needs to do today to improve equity and opportunity for all kids?

First and foremost: greater investment earlier for children. We’ve got research and science up the wazoo about what really matters for better educational outcomes and life outcomes — and that’s better, stronger investment in the early years. Even with the brain science and the neuroscience that we’re all familiar with, it’s not yet how we make the policies. It’s not where we’re making our investment. We do have the data, we do have the research, we have advocates that understand this and have been pushing this, but it’s not yet penetrated into the highest levels of government in terms of investment.

So, first and foremost, it’s making sure that our investments start much earlier, and that those investments begin with parents. There was a time in which advocates for children focused just on children and we thought we were going to save children, and we had lots of work around children’s advocacy, a big movement. We’ve realized as a field that has delivered very little for us. Just focusing on the child is insufficient. This is very important: We have to support parents, and we have to support families, and we have to start earlier.

Second is, we know that what makes strong and stable families are a number of things, especially jobs, their economic well-being, and their health. We all know that the [Affordable Care Act] is on the chopping block, and we don’t know what the heck is going to happen with that, but in addition to starting earlier and focusing on families, we have to focus on making sure that families have what they need for them to be successful, and that’s jobs, that’s housing, and that’s health care.

Third is to really lift up what needs to happen in pre–K-12. Even though there’s a lot more devolution now to the states, I do think that the federal government will have to continue to play a role to ensure equity and to think differently and help states think differently about the system of public education. It’s still a mess. It still has a long way to go. We want to encourage states to innovate and to lift up kids state by state, but I think there’s an important role for the federal government to play around innovation, around better applying the research and the science. There’s still so much to do to innovate and move public education into the 21st century, [like] the stronger, more intentional integration of pre-K and K-12, which, as you know, have been two worlds. We’ve got to have a more seamless system. I love the P-3 approach.

Who are some of your guiding lights on education? Whose work do you read to spark your thinking?

I’ve been reading Ruby Takanishi’s book First Things First, so this is where I’m getting the added inspiration for investing early. Her book really makes the case, in probably the strongest way I’ve read in a long time, for the importance of starting early.

I met Lee Schorr when I was a Casey [Foundation] fellow 20 years ago. She continues to do really phenomenal work around greater supports for families. It’s not specific to education, but I’ve been pulling out her work — Common Purpose was one of her books. She writes about the supports for families in sort of the way that Robert Putnam wrote recently on also putting kids first (in Our Kids).

Paul Tough’s book from five or six years ago, I like how he really focuses on results and outcomes for kids. He also talks about some things that I don’t necessarily gravitate toward, even though I understand it, maybe his little bit of overemphasis on grit. And grit is important, but if you don’t have the conditions for kids to succeed, grit will only get you so far. But I love his book’s strong focus on results.

I think that in K-12 education, we tend to get stuck in the polarizing politics of K-12 and less around getting to results. This is what I would always really push on as a school board member: What is in the best interests of children? What is it that we know works and that will get us, for example, to make sure that more kids are proficient readers by the end of third grade?

That’s what should be driving us: the research and the data that tell us if we’re moving in the right direction and whether we have the right interventions and supports.

Mark Friedman’s book Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough. That really speaks to my concern that we don’t make decisions based on what will get us the best results for kids, rather than political agendas. I’m interested in seeing and moving toward what it is that will get us results for kids and families.

Today’s schools are more diverse than the last decade’s schools. The next decade’s schools will be even more diverse. You don’t change expectations because the color or the home languages of students change. But what should be changing in our approach to education, and what should be staying the same?

I think the expectations have not been the same, actually. I think we’ve had high expectations for high-income and middle-class kids, who are generally not kids of color. So I think what has to change is our belief that all kids can learn. I think that that is sorely missing across all sectors, but especially in education. If you’re poor, black, or brown, or even if you’re poor and white in Appalachia, we don’t really believe that you are smart enough, capable enough, that you can succeed. So for me, what has to change is our belief and the expectation that all children can learn and succeed. The only thing getting in the way is whether we’re willing to invest in these children. By invest, I mean not only having the belief, but understanding their background, understanding the challenges that get in the way of their ability to succeed, and then a commitment to addressing those barriers and challenges.

So for me, what has to change is our belief and the expectation that all children can learn and succeed. The only thing getting in the way is whether we’re willing to invest in these children. By invest, I mean not only having the belief, but understanding their background, understanding the challenges that get in the way of their ability to succeed, and then a commitment to addressing those barriers and challenges.

Second is a real investment in what it takes to have quality education. We so underinvest in public education, starting from how we pay teachers, which continues to be a national shame. If we really believe that education is the gateway out of poverty and it’s the most important thing for a strong economy and a strong nation, then just like we invest in national security, we ought to invest in education: teachers, professional development, adequate facilities, adequate resources. And we just simply don’t. Every school district in this nation has suffered deep budget cuts because of the last recession, and no district, I think, has recovered from that, nor have we seen significant gains in per-pupil spending for all children.

So we have a long way to go as a nation to really walk the walk on our belief in public education for all kids. And it is a more diverse nation. We have more kids that speak other languages, that come from other nations, and we need to come to grips with that is who America is, and will be, and in order for those kids to succeed, we need to meet their needs and better understand their needs from the moment they’re born to the time that they get through K-12 education and beyond — because we also have to consider higher ed!

What do you make of the gulf between older, whiter voters and the young, increasingly nonwhite children in our schools? How do we solve the politics that come out of that?

I am very worried, very concerned, very upset. It calls for us who are feeling that way to step up, to better coalesce, to find ways to find common ground, especially for those voters who felt themselves left behind and not cared for in terms of their own well-being in this country. What I would like to see, and what my commitment is, is to pay greater attention to those families in areas where there was a lot of concern about their own economic well-being, their own ability to progress in a way that we had promised every person in America, that from one generation to the next, you would be better off.

We’ve got to learn to be a more cohesive America that pays attention to all the needs of the people of this nation. Of course, for all the right reasons, we were focused on urban communities. There’s still a lot to do. There’s a lot of racial inequity and bias, and we can’t not address that. But we also can’t not address the needs of, say, white rural families, because the needs are exactly the same. They are no different. It’s about jobs, it’s about housing, it’s about adequate, quality education. Everybody wants to reach their own American dream, and we need to make it possible for that to happen for all families and for all children.

That’s a better message than a message of fear and hate. We don’t need to go to fear and hate to be able to solve the problems of America in terms of opportunity for all.

Much of this new diversity is linked to immigration trends. It’s increasingly difficult to talk about immigration without talking about education, and vice versa, isn’t it?

That’s going to be one of the biggest battles: immigration. Are we going to, as a nation, really target people, split families up? Imagine what that will do to children’s ability to learn if their parents are deported, and now they’re here [alone]. It’s going to have a huge impact beyond what’s inside of the school, to their own sense of well-being and security.

California has long been an innovator and/or early adopter when it comes to education policy. What Golden State education ideas do you want to bring to Congress?

During the time I was on the school board, we finally moved kids out of overcrowded schools and built new schools. It was a great example of the investment that voters understood they needed to make for public education to work more effectively for all kids. We built 150 new schools. When I would talk to people around the nation about that, they were like, “How did you do that? We’ve got overcrowded schools everywhere.” So I think this established [LAUSD] as a leader in understanding that you needed to make, at the local level, the kind of investment that kids need.

At the state level, what I’m most optimistic about, in terms of being a leader and a trendsetter, is the recent move toward dual language. Not just bilingual but multilingual education. That is the future. It’s actually one of my proud moments on the school board that I passed a resolution on multilingual education for all kids, starting in preschool. Given the diversity of our nation, I think that what California did just a few months ago is promising.

Those are the two things I can point to. I’m not necessarily proud of California. We’re still, like, 48th in the nation in per-pupil spending. The governor has not wanted to reinvest to the level where we were before the recession in early childhood education. It has been very frustrating to me that California has been so behind. The only reason that we have some semblance of an early education agenda in California is because of the First 5 that we have. But that is so inadequate. It is not enough to reach all the families that need good early childhood support and education.

So, I think we have a long way to go. But again, I am proud of Proposition 58, and I am proud of the direction we have taken in the last few years in some places in California, but I would not say that California is a trendsetter.

I notice you didn’t mention the Local Control Funding Formula.

For me, the jury is still out on that. The Local Control Funding Formula is good in name and in intention, but I’ve not yet seen the local plans that are coming from school districts be meaningful and robust in terms of serving the needs of the kids that the formula is intended to serve: poor kids, foster kids, and limited-English-proficiency kids. So, I think it could be a game-changer, but it’s too soon to tell. A lot of it will depend on how much support, encouragement, and accountability we’re willing to place on school districts to be true to the values of the formula.

In theory, it could be a lot; in practice, it’s not much yet.

Absolutely! In theory, it could be beautiful. It is absolutely the right policy direction. So let’s see if the results — again, back to results — are the results that were intended with this particular policy around our financial investments in kids in California.

You want to “Make Congress Work For Kids and Families.” What do you mean by that? Got any tips for making Congress work, period, let alone for kids and families?

I mean that, as a legislative body, we would, through policy and through investment, prioritize the needs of children and families to ensure that they succeed. Because, again, if they succeed, our communities succeed and our nation succeeds.

But, you know, since George Miller and Ted Kennedy, we don’t really have that voice in Congress right now. And I hope that it’s not just me when I get to Congress. I want to be able to lead and collaborate with other members of Congress to help bring along this value and this commitment about making children and families a priority. Anything that we do as a nation is about priorities. What are we going to prioritize, and are we willing to put our money where our mouth is?

So I want to lead on that. I want to lead on children and families. That’s what I mean. Let’s invest in the most important thing, in the human potential that we have. Let’s show that we really are a strong nation, and that’s by making our nation work for kids and families.

See previous 74 interviews, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senate Education Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, former education secretary Arne Duncan, former LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy, and former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Full archive here.

Californians know this better than anyone else. By the time the rest of the country is discovering a new cuisine, restaurants in California have already gotten bored and fused it with a few others. Want to know what Welsh-Ethiopian seaweed injera tacos taste like? Los Angeles probably has (at least) a couple of food trucks working on it.

But look, food is just a placeholder for a deeper cultural dynamic: Diversity is cool. It’s not a coincidence that the U.S.’s most vibrant places are effervescent, freewheeling, multicultural hubs. California is cool for the same reason that it’s delicious: It’s always found ways to attract, celebrate, and integrate the broadest possible array of people. In other words, the state is interesting — a self-contained civilization in its own right — because it embraces the myriad cultures attracted to its dynamism.

Multilingualism is the bedrock of this positive cultural feedback loop. What would San Francisco’s Chinatown be without Chinese — a theme park masquerading as a neighborhood? And that brings us back to the election and November 8, when California voters will weigh in on Proposition 58. If the measure passes, it would allow the state’s K–12 schools to significantly expand their bilingual education programs.

(The 74: California Voters to Decide Future of Bilingual Education for Country’s Largest ELL Population)

Nothing sets California apart from the rest of the country — and from most of the world — like its multilingualism. The state already has more young, emerging bilingual students than any other — around 1 million more than Texas, for instance. The bilingual education programs that Proposition 58 would enable could help the state build on these considerable linguistic and cultural advantages. A politically diverse range of states is certainly trying to catch up: Texas’s bilingual education program is the largest in the nation, and New York, Utah, North Carolina and Delaware have state initiatives to expand these programs to more students.

In the near term, bilingual education helps kids of all backgrounds in a host of ways. The balance of the data suggests that these programs are actually the most effective way to help English-language learners reach English proficiency. And all students in these programs develop a more sophisticated understanding of language in general by simultaneously learningEnglish and the program’s partner language.

In addition, the best of these programs enroll classes that mix native speakers of English with native speakers of the program’s partner language. That way, students develop their language skills through class instruction and interactions with their diverse peers. These programs build linguistic and cultural bridges between communities and prepare students to participate in an exciting, multicultural society like California’s.

There are lots of good long-term reasons to make bilingualism a priority for California students. It’s in keeping with the state’s (and, to a lesser extent, the country’s) history of celebrating diversity and integrating immigrants into society. It’s also in our economic interest, given new Americans’ remarkable entrepreneurialism and the value of a multilingual workforce in the global marketplace. Finally, there are useful cognitive advantages to acquiring a second language: Bilingualism strengthens our brains.

(Williams: Linguistic Politics, and What’s at Stake in November with California’s ‘Multilingual Education Act’)

But while those are all real benefits of diversity and good reasons to support bilingual education, they’re also abstract. They’re not part of the cluttered muddle of concerns that make up our hourly or daily lives. Do Americans want more prosperity and innovation in their country’s future — and longer attention spans for their potentially bilingual young children? Yes and yes.

But on any given Tuesday, most of us are more concerned with the actual work of living. Many of us are feeding, shepherding, chauffeuring and entertaining our kids. We’re trying to come up with ways to expand our kids’ abilities and horizons so that they’re set up to succeed at school and in their lives. That’s why, given the option, most of us — I hope — would rather live and parent in multilingual, multicultural communities. When it comes to parenting — shoot, when it comes to living — interesting beats boring.

Or, to bring the whole discussion back to dinner: Cheeseburgers taste great. So do empanadas, sushi, pho, poké, borscht and fajitas. Given the option, most of us would rather live in communities where we could choose from as many of these as possible.

Similarly, English is great! Students need strong English skills to participate in American society. Other languages are great too! Strong speaking and reading skills in an additional language, whether Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hmong or some other, help students to contribute fully to the wonderfully diverse communities around them. They’re multilingual, multicultural feasts full of interesting choices and opportunities.

But those cool communities don’t usually spark forth on their own. States need to cook them up by attracting new, interesting people and celebrating their newly arriving cultural contributions. By giving more schools the choice to build bilingual education programs, Proposition 58 would make California tastier, cooler and — yes — more economically dynamic than it already is.

The views expressed here are Conor Williams’s alone.

Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. He has two young children and an extremely patient wife.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

One of the corollaries of this general dynamic is that the country’s education leaders also struggle to respond rapidly to changes in their schools.

This is particularly clear when it comes to multilingual students. These dual language learners (DLLs) are amongst the fastest-growing demographic groups in U.S. schools, but schools—and policymakers—have generally been slow to react.

It’s easy to see this as a failure, and push for reforms that might help. We know, for instance, that these DLLs do better when schools support the development of their native languages while teaching them English. Research shows that various forms of multilingual education work better than English-immersion for these kids. Stands to reason that we should update “English-only” laws to provide more multilingual instruction, right?

Well, yes. But as my co-authors and I argue in a just-published paper, Multilingual Paraprofessionals: An Untapped Resource for Supporting American Pluralism,

(It) is no simple matter to switch large numbers of classrooms from monolingual (“English-only”) to multilingual instruction (sometimes called “English Plus”). It is essentially impossible to expand access to multilingual instruction without training and hiring more multilingual teachers. As noted above, just one in eight Pre-K–12 teachers speaks a non-English language at home. Over half of states (and half of major urban districts) report shortages of bilingual or English as a Second Language teachers. The overwhelmingly monolingual language profile of the teaching force means that American schools are similarly English-dominant. In short, the U.S. needs more multilingual adults to decide to become teachers.

This isn’t a complicated principle. Laws without means to implement them are just outlines of wishes, dreams, and priorities. Say we wanted each U.S. high school to launch no fewer than two satellites into geosynchronous orbit each year. We’d write that into the law, but we’d also send some rocket fuel, aluminum, and some microchips (at least). Otherwise, we’d just end up with a bunch of glorified bottle rockets spluttering around on thousands of plywood launchpads.

Say we wanted every elementary school to teach students to ride a bicycle by second grade. We’d buy some bikes (as the D.C. Public Schools did). Otherwise, we might as well just mandate jogging around the school parking lot. Or games of Duck-Duck-Goose.

It’s no different with bilingual education. While it’s a good thing to change laws to allow more languages into U.S. classrooms, that’s just a start. We also need to recruit, prepare, and retain more multilingual teachers. These teachers are a scarce resource. While more than 1-in-5 U.S. students speaks a non-English language at home, fewer than 1-in-10 U.S. teachers say the same.

If only we had a pool of multilingual adults with instructional experience and the language skills necessary to support DLLs’ native language development! If only…

And hey, it just so happens that we might! Around 1-in-5 U.S. paraprofessionals — the classroom assistants or teacher’s aides who give students specialized instruction or support — speak a non-English language at home. Our paper surveys research showing that many of these educators have most—or all—of the credentials that they need to become full-time U.S. teachers.

Many have appropriate credentials, strong literacy and speaking skills in their native tongues, confident English abilities, unique cultural connections to DLLs’ families, and—most importantly—considerable experience as classroom instructors.

Unfortunately, some of these paraprofessionals can’t make it to the front of their schools’ classrooms as lead teachers because they lack a handful of required higher education courses that they can’t access or afford. Others have the requisite degrees, but can’t get licensed because their educational experience is predominantly developed in their native languages, and they struggle to demonstrate their expertise on their state’s teacher licensure exams. Others have trouble navigating complicated bureaucratic requirements that impose undue time or resource barriers on them.

So look, remember what I said at the outset: folks all over the education debate overestimate the power—and importance—of policy wins. Because of local control, states’ rights, and various other aspects of U.S. federalism, most policy changes don’t actually matter for most American classrooms.

It’s difficult to pass big and effective education legislation here, but it’s even tougher to follow up a hard-won policy victory with a coordinated strategy for ensuring that a law’s new goals actually translate into changes at the classroom and school levels.

My team is going to continue looking into this. Our paper is the first in a series of publications on multilingual teacher pathways that New America will be releasing over the next several years. And data on multilingual paraprofessionals suggest that the country absolutely can meet this challenge—and thereby improve DLLs’ educational opportunities—but it’s going to take serious, intentional efforts to help these educators become fully licensed teachers.

The number of dual language learners in U.S. schools will continue growing for many years yet — the best way to help these future workers, homebuyers, taxpayers, veterans, and citizens succeed is to support their development in English and their native languages. But as policymakers, educators, and voters weigh the merits of policies that would expand access to multilingual instruction, they should also be thinking about how we can find and develop the teachers we’ll need to make those policies meaningful for kids.

It turns out that they might not have to look any further than the paraprofessionals waiting in the “wings” of their own classrooms.

Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a Master of Science for Teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. He has two young children and an extremely patient wife.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

It’s early days to know how ESSA — and decisions based on these ongoing conversations — will affect America’s dual language learners (DLLs). But we might be able to get a sense of the new law’s strengths and weaknesses by looking to California’s “Local Control Accountability Plans” (LCAPs), which some see as a conceptual model for ESSA’s decentralized approach. Like ESSA, California’s LCAPs maintain centralized sources of funding, but push decisionmaking and accountability attached to those dollars as locally as possible. (Note: the funding side of LCAPs is knowns as the LCFF — the Local Control Funding Formula.)

So: how’s California’s new model going?

Last month, Californians Together, Public Advocates, and The Education Trust-West put out reports that suggest that the local plans are not working well for dual language learners. (For EdSource’s deeper coverage of the three reports, click here) The policy’s basic idea is something like this: California provides increased “supplemental” funding for supporting underserved students — including DLLs — and allows districts considerable latitude to decide how to serve those students. The funds are still intended for serving these particular students, but districts have control over how they’ll use them. That is, instead of prescribing that all funds for DLLs be used to fund one of a handful state-specified school activities, the LCAP system requires districts to work with educators and members of the community to develop strategies suited to their students’ needs.

Yet Californians Together’s report found that “the vast majority of LCAPs lack specific attention to strengthening or providing coherent programs, services, and supports for [DLLs], and fail to address issues of access to program and curriculum.” This appears to be a problem beyond just dual language learners. Education Trust-West concluded that “it is impossible in most cases to trace whether supplemental/concentration funds followed the high-need students who generated them.”

We’ll see how the regulations play out, but if states have an appetite (or even just tolerance) for a little confrontation, they can almost assuredly get away with maximal flexibility. Think about that: is ED really going to pull Title I dollars over whether a state wants to weight DLLs’ academic achievement scores against their English language proficiency levels? I bet they won’t.

As I’ve recently written

The usual case for early education is already well established in American public discourse. Research shows that low-income children fall behind their wealthier peers’ language development almost from birth. By age three, the children from the poorest American families have heard an average of 30 million fewer words than children from the wealthiest families. These gaps only grow in the years before elementary school.

Fortunately, early education programs can help. The dollars we spend on pre-K and quality care for infants and toddlers can save us lots of money and energy down the line. If we get kids on track by kindergarten, we spend less on later gap-closing efforts — and those kids are more likely to grow up healthy, wealthy, and wise. Research suggests that they’ll generate more tax revenue through their increased incomes, cost less in public assistance dollars, and generally be better citizens. (The Upjohn Institute’s Tim Bartik is among the best resources for the research behind these programs’ returns on public investment.)

Done right, early education programs work just about as intuitively as they sound. But building a broader system that can deliver on those promises is no simple thing: pre-K’s not like some sort of cream you apply to achievement gaps and, whoosh, they’re gone in two days!

Here’s why: those early word gaps can’t just be closed by rattling off a number of words. Quality matters. Rich, robust language use builds vocabulary and literacy. But pre-K programs’ capacity to deliver that sort of language varies considerably. This should be relatively intuitive: these programs work by exposing children with low linguistic development to the speech of highly-literate adults. So a program’s effectiveness fluctuates along with the literacy levels of its teachers.

“We know the child’s word-gap risk increases his/her lifelong academic, social and income disparities,” e-mailed Elizabeth A. Gilbert, director of the University of Massachusetts’ Learn at Work Early Childhood Educator Program. “The low-literacy early childhood educator’s word gap is one of the results of such disparity.”

No surprise, then, that staffing is the biggest challenge preventing new early education proposals from becoming high-quality early education programs. Whenever a political candidate announces a new pre-K program, your first question should be: who will teach in these classrooms?

It’s not enough to be great with kids, or have loads of charisma. Early educators need to build emotional connections with children, yes, and that can help students develop social skills and perseverance. But they also need to help students develop linguistically. This requires proficient literacy and the careful usage of scaffolded vocabulary. It requires strong conversation and meaningful interactions that are about more than just signs and gestures.

“States require that our public school teachers test and pass literacy tests prior to hire and teacher-certification,” wrote Gilbert. “States never require adult literacy screening of early educators as part of: 1) hiring protocols, 2) teacher-licensure requirements, 3) Quality Rating Information Systems standards, or 4) early education professional development.”

People in the early education world are aware of the problem. In response, many suggest that early education programs should require educators to have more formal training. But these are usually low-rigor credentials, such as: a Child Development Associates (CDA), an Associate of Arts (A.A.), or even a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.). Those additional letters carry no magic. They’re irrelevant, unless they actually impart higher literacy and language to the teachers who get them. Credentials are only proxies for the level of skill development they require. If they don’t translate into improvements in instruction that actually improve student achievement, they’re the policy equivalent of soda: just empty calories.

And yet, lots of policy thinking has been going that way for some time. The 2007 reforms to Head Start required that at least half of its teachers obtain a B.A. by 2013. In response, the number of Head Start teachers with that credential has been steadily rising. A 2015 National Academy of Sciences committee report on the early education workforce recommended moving all early educators towards a B.A. requirement, even though it acknowledged that “empirical evidence about the effects of a bachelor’s degree is inconclusive”

Think, for a moment, what this sort of policy is supposed to achieve. It’s aimed at improving student achievement by raising instructional quality by means of increasing the literacy levels and technical competence of the Head Start workforce. But again, the value of “having a B.A.” isn’t constant for pre-K classrooms. Given that the average hourly wage of Head Start instructors with an A.A. was $12.20 in 2012 (those with just a high school diploma made an average of just $10.40 per hour), it’s likely that many of these B.A.s come from the weaker end of the higher education landscape (see also).

Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences report cites research suggesting that “more than half of the faculty in early childhood programs across 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education were employed part time…In addition, faculty with prior experience working directly with children in early childhood settings are found less often in 4-year than in 2-year institutions.”

Programs like this are unlikely to provide comprehensive support and training to move early educators very far along in their skills and knowledge. Money isn’t everything in higher education, of course, but it tells part of the story, and we should be wary of seeing low-cost B.A. degrees as an important piece in improving the early education workforce’s abilities.

There are other big obstacles sure to be glossed over in the presidential early education rhetoric: how will new early education programs be funded? Will they be linked to — or operated in — schools? High-quality early education can start closing gaps, but weak elementary school instruction can undo that work — how will candidates ensure that the public school system builds on the gains? How will programs serve the growing number of dual language learners in U.S. schools?

But the workforce question is definitely the biggest, and candidates (as would-be policymakers) have options for addressing it. Here, in rough order of efficiency, are several: 1) raising early educators’ salaries to attract candidates with stronger literacy skills to the profession, 2) raising the standards for entry into early educator preparation programs (be they B.A., A.A., or other), and/or 3) improving the quality of early educator preparation programs. Really effective proposals will need to do all three.

Big American elections are always, at base, about the future. They’re an opportunity for candidates and voters to engage in (sometimes) civil debates over what sort of a country we’d like to become. New early education proposals fit nicely into that basic framework — they promise that investing early in children will help us avoid later uncomfortable problems with controversial solutions. Who could oppose giving better opportunities to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers?

Not me. Not most Americans. But if candidates want to convert early education’s promise into something more than political positioning, their pre-K proposals need to start with a plan for professionalizing the early education workforce.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org. 

Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a Master of Science for Teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. He has two young children and an extremely patient wife.