Charter schools will be barred from hundreds of Los Angeles Unified District school campuses under a new policy that is among the most restrictive of its kind.

The new rules, presented at a school board meeting Tuesday, prevent charters from being sited in campuses that have been identified as serving vulnerable students, accounting for roughly 350 of about 770 school buildings in the district. Charter schools would still be offered space to operate in other LAUSD district school buildings. 

The regulations prevent co-locations in low-performing schools, community schools that provide social services, and schools in the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan — immediately impacting about 21 charter schools — now co-located in those buildings — enrolling thousands of students who may need to move to new LA Unified campuses in the fall.

“This is one of those situations that, no matter what, we’re going to have some people dissatisfied on either side,” said L.A. school superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who created the new regulations at the direction of the district school board. 

Carvalho said the new regulations are within the bounds of a 2000 state law compelling California districts to provide classroom space for charter schools. There are currently 50 charter schools co-located in 52 LAUSD school campuses, serving roughly 11,000 students. Thirteen additional charters have requested space for the upcoming school year. 

“I believe that what has been presented may in many ways alleviate some of the issues,” he added. “However, we need to be vigilant and honest about unintended consequences of well intentioned policies.”

The new rules are a reversal for a city that historically has been friendly to charter schools and was immediately opposed by charter advocates, who threatened legal action in a letter to the school board as soon as the new policy was announced. 

California Charter School Association president Myrna Casterajón said the rules violate state law compelling the district to give space to charter schools, by keeping them out of entire neighborhoods served by schools in the three categories. 

“In the worst case scenario, of course, the schools are literally evicted from campuses,” said Casterajón.

A letter sent to the board by the association said the policy violates a portion of the state law requiring that public school facilities be shared fairly among all public school pupils, including those in charter schools. Casterajón said the policy could create “charter school deserts” in underserved parts of the district.

The long-simmering conflict over charter schools in Los Angeles reached a flashpoint in September when the board issued a resolution compelling Carvalho to create the policy and spelled out many of the specific components it should contain. 

The resolution, which was crafted by board president Jackie Goldberg and board member Rocio Rivas, called for the policy preventing charters from being co-located in school buildings that enrolled vulnerable students in the three groups. 

“Schools that are struggling the most to educate our students should not be added, continuously, more things to do,” said Goldberg, “like figure out a bell schedule, and how to share the cafeteria and how to share the playground.” 

Districts that provide classroom space to charter schools, such as Los Angeles, often decline to offer charters their choice of locations, said Fordham Institute President Mike Petrilli. 

But it’s uncommon for a city to delete such a large chunk of schools from eligibility for co-locations, he said. “It’s unusual for the district to be so flagrant, and put it down in writing, rather than to just find myriad ways to make life difficult,” Petrilli said. “It seems very in-your-face.” 

The new regulations earned generally positive reactions from board members who backed the changes. The board will vote next month to adopt the policy. 

While Rivas and Goldberg spoke in favor of the proposed rules, board member Nick Melvoin, who voted in September against the resolution, spoke against them.

Melvoin said the new policy is unneeded because the district is facing enrollment declines. The rules presented by Carvalho, he said, neglect potential solutions, such as the use of private buildings or more strategic school sitings, to mitigate the negative impacts of co-location.

“We definitely have enough space for everyone,” Melvoin said Tuesday. “We just don’t allocate it properly.”

Those are among the top findings of an analysis across 34 states of 100 current microschools and 100 more that were largely aiming to open this school year.

“Microschools can be organized as learning centers supporting homeschoolers, private schools (accredited and unaccredited) and other ways,” the National Microschooling Center states in its report. “What many people feel offers microschooling its transformative potential is that these can be created around the needs of the particular learners they serve.”

Families’ ongoing, pandemic-driven movement away from district public schools has been well-documented and in 2022, the number of children attending a microschool full time was estimated between 1.1 and 2.2 million by EdChoice.

Here are six key findings from the Microschooling Center’s analysis of where the sector is now and where it’s headed:

1. Prospective microschool leaders are more racially diverse than current founders — and many are not teachers

Of the 100 current microschool leaders surveyed, 64% are white, 13% are Black and 5% are Latino/Hispanic. The group of prospective founders included were 55% white, 27% Black and 5% Latino/Hispanic. The remaining percentages of leaders surveyed didn’t disclose their ethnicity.

Don Soifer, chief executive officer of the National Microschooling Center, said it’s a positive shift for microschools to be led by more people of color who more accurately reflect student diversity. A study from AASA, The School Superintendents Association, found that 89% of nearly 2,500 U.S. public school district chiefs surveyed identified as white while only 45% of U.S. students do.

Prospective leaders also have more varied professional backgrounds than current microschool leaders. About 70% of present founders are either current or former licensed educators while only 52% of prospective founders have a licensed education background.

Soifer said many people who are launching microschools aren’t going to be the ones teaching children on a normal basis, so they don’t necessarily need a license in education. The increase of leaders with fewer education degrees also tracks with the trend of parents creating their own microschools following COVID-19.

“There was sort of an all-hands-on-deck mentality that came out of the pandemic. We don’t talk about the pandemic that much because I think we’ve moved past that, but it opened up a lot of people’s eyes to what was going on,” Soifer told The 74. “So the professional background of the non-educators that we see leading microschools really does vary, and it really does tend to be people with some sort of entrepreneurial streak in them, who aren’t afraid of taking on something new.”

2. Prospective microshool leaders are relying less on tuition and more on institutional sources and fundraising

Charging tuition is still the main way microschools fund their operations, but those dollars are becoming less dominant.

About 88% of the current founders surveyed said their schools were primarily tuition-based while only 62% of prospective schools said they will derive most of their revenue from tuition. Many microschools draw from multiple funding sources.

While state-funded school choice options have expanded in the last few years, the use of that funding source for microschools has increased only slightly — from 17.8% to 19.8% — between current and prospective leaders.

Instead, nearly a quarter of prospective microschool leaders expect to access their funding from institutional sources, such as an employer or house of worship, or ongoing fundraising. That’s a steep hike from the 12% of microschools currently receiving money from that revenue stream.

3. The biggest motivator for creating a microschool is to help increase success for underserved students

When asked why they want to create a microschool, 53% of prospective leaders said it’s to provide opportunities to marginalized students and communities.

The second most common answer was to help struggling children thrive in a different learning environment. Microschools, which generally educate 15 students or fewer, offer a lot of flexibility for families because they can be housed anywhere while creating their own schedule and offering their own curriculum.

“We talk about them as entrepreneurs, and that’s fine, because in some ways they are entrepreneurs,” Soifer said. “But those motivations really tell a story about a sector that’s just not like any other sector that I know. We like to talk about them as entrepreneurs, but it’s really not a profit motive that drives them.”

4. Microschools use different learning styles than traditional public schools

About half of current microschool leaders are using “specialized learning philosophies” as their curriculum framework. This means they use various teaching methods like Montessori, Waldorf or child-centered learning.

Montessori learning is based on student-led and -paced work, while Waldorf learning is a holistic approach to education that focuses more on students’ intellectual and artistic skills.

Nearly 47% of current microschool leaders administer standardized norm-referenced assessments, which are tests that are used to compare students’ progress to other students in a predetermined peer group.

Soifer said some microschools, including the national franchise Acton Academy, make these assessments optional.

“It’s interesting. I would say generally speaking, about half the families like it and use it as a metric for their own understanding and about half of them don’t,” Soifer said. “We have microschools that simply don’t believe in norm-referenced (assessments). We have others that simply reject state academic content standards and prefer things like social and emotional growth metrics or academic writing metrics.”

5. A common challenge for current and prospective microschool founders are state regulations

The regulation framework of the education system can get complicated. It’s something microschool leaders are having a hard time with, according to the survey.

About a third of current microschool leaders expressed that they still need help with understanding statutory and regulatory requirements. This is also a problem for 88% of the people were hoping to start their own microschool this school year.

Don Soifer (Don Soifer)

Soifer, whose Las Vegas-based organization was started in 2022 to help microschool founders navigate these challenges, said guidelines can vary widely among states that support school choice and those that don’t. Each state has its own requirements for school regulation — a microschool might have to become licensed, which might require teachers to have a specific level of education in order to teach. Microschools in other states might be required to register as a child care facility, which comes with its own regulations.

“I think it’s going to be sort of an increasing priority for policy decision makers to understand microschooling, whether it be a home-based microschool or microschool that is located in a commercial space or in a space that’s not zoned for a school,” Soifer said. “This can be allowed without putting good pupils and people in harm’s way while they’re trying to serve needs that families want.”

6. The most important student outcomes for future leaders are academic growth, proficiency and happiness

More than two-thirds of prospective microschool owners said in the survey that the most important outcome for students is academic growth.

About 61% said they also consider academic proficiency as an essential outcome of a child attending a microschool. That a child is happy and thriving in a new microschool setting is crucial, nearly 48% said.

“(Microschooling) is becoming more normal and more accepted by mainstream families,” Soifer said. “Charter schools never really got to a point where they could truly be ‘outside of the box’ because they were always measured by the state test and only the state tests. So the ways that microschools are measuring their impact — in different ways that are relevant to their mission — is a fascinating trendline. And I think that is one that’s really starting to take off.”

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to the National Microschooling Center and to LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

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

Deputy Greg Everhart of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department checks to make sure doors are locked in May 2014 at a middle school in Littleton, Colorado. (RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

More than 1 in 10 schools with a regular police presence removed officers from their roles in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis cop, new federal data on campus crime and safety suggest.

Nearly 44% of public K-12 schools were staffed with school resource officers at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year, according to a national survey released Wednesday by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and June 2022, more than 50 school districts nationwide ended their school resource officer programs or cut their budgets following widespread Black Lives Matter protests and concerns that campus policing has detrimental effects on students — and Black youth in particular.

The data reflect an 11% decrease in school policing from the 2019-20 school year, when more than 49% of schools had a regular police presence, according to the nationally representative federal survey. That year, schools underwent an increase in campus policing after the 2018 mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted a surge in new security funding and mandates, a pattern that could repeat itself when future federal numbers capture the nation’s reaction to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with The 74 and crunched the federal survey data against a tally of districts that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students.

“It’s not seismic, but I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s the reversal of a trend in a fairly dramatic way,” said Bushway, a University at Albany in New York professor. “It’s been going up quite a bit and now it’s dropped.”

The new federal data were published the same week as Thursday’s release of a damning U.S. Department of Justice report that cited “critical failures” by police during the May 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. During the shooting, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old shooter, a botched reaction that disregarded established police protocols and, investigators said, cost lives.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a Thursday afternoon press conference in Uvalde.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said.

Chris Chapman, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday that the survey data didn’t make clear a definitive reason for the decline in school-based officers. Experts said that several other factors, including campus closures during the pandemic, budget constraints and a national police officer shortage, may have also contributed.

New federal survey data show the number of school resource officers regularly stationed on K-12 campuses declined by about five percentage points — or roughly 11% — between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. (National Center for Education Statistics)

Either way, the downward trend may be short-lived.

Multiple districts that cut their school resource officer programs after Floyd’s murder, including those in Denver, Colorado, and Arlington, Virginia, reversed course after educators reported an uptick in classroom disorder after COVID-era remote learning. Mass school shootings have long driven efforts to bolster campus policing, a reality that has played out in the last several years as the nation experienced an unprecedented number of such attacks.

Despite officers’ grievously mishandled response in Uvalde, the shooting led to renewed efforts in Texas and elsewhere to strengthen police presence in schools. A similar situation played out after the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal data show national growth in campus policing even after the school resource officer assigned to the Broward County campus failed to confront the gunman, who killed 17 people.

Former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School School Resource Officer Scot Peterson participates in a media interview after he was acquitted of criminal charges in June 2023. (Getty Images)

The now-former officer, Scot Peterson, was acquitted of criminal negligence and perjury charges but faces a new trial in a civil lawsuit by shooting victims’ families, who allege his failure to intervene during the six-minute attack displayed a “wanton and willful disregard” for students’ and teachers’ safety. Qualified immunity generally protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job.

After Parkland, a new Florida law required an armed security presence on every K-12 campus. The Uvalde shooting led to similar mandates in Texas and Kentucky. In both states, a police officer labor shortage, which experts said may have contributed to the 2021-22 decline in schools, has hindered officials’ efforts to comply. In Kentucky, more than 40% of schools lack school resource officers, a reality that school officials have blamed on a lack of funding and a depleted applicant pool.

Tyler Whittenberg

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, when that data comes back out, we see that spike go back up,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers a training program for campus cops. “It’s not the way I want to gain business, but some of the busiest years we’ve had training wise are 18 months after a school massacre. I can tell you that 2019 was the biggest year in our association’s history by far — and that’s coming right off the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.”

Advocates for police-free schools recognize the headwinds they face. Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director of the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn initiative, said that while advocates “are proud of the victories that were won” after George Floyd’s murder, educators who removed police from schools “are fighting really hard to hold onto those gains,” some of which face state efforts to place police in districts that don’t want them.

“We’re not really rushing to a conclusion that this represents an overall reduction in police in schools, especially because for many of our partners on the ground this is not their day-to-day experience,” he said. “They’re having to fight back — especially at the state level — against efforts to increase the number of police in their schools.”

Law enforcement officers stand watch near a memorial dedicated to the 19 children and two adults murdered on May 24, 2022 during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Safety threats on the decline

In the 1970s, just 1% of schools were staffed by police. Decades of efforts since then to swell their ranks have coincided with a marked improvement in campus safety.

During the 2021-22 school year, 67% of schools reported at least one violent crime on campus, totaling some 857,500 violent incidents. Federal data show the nation’s schools experienced a violent crime rate of 18 incidents per 1,000 students in 2021-22. That’s a steep decline from 1999-00, when schools recorded a violent crime rate of 32 incidents per 1,000, and 2009-10, when the violent crime rate was 25 per 1,000.

Police officers’ contributions to making schools safer over the past two decades, however, remain the subject of ongoing research and heated debate. In a study last year, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Bushway and his colleagues found that placing school resource officers on campuses led to a marginal decline in some forms of school violence. And although researchers were unable to analyze officers’ effects on mass school shootings because such tragedies are statistically rare, they were associated with an uptick in reported firearm offenses — suggesting an increased detection of guns. The officers were also associated with a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, including suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students and those with disabilities.

“There’s a cost-benefit here and everybody’s calculus on how you weigh these different things is going to be different,” Bushway said. “There’s no pure answer to that question, different people are going to answer that question differently.”

Previous research suggests that suspensions do not lead to improved student behaviors or improve school safety, but have detrimental effects on punished students’ academic performance, attendance and behavior. Their effects on non-misbehaving students remain unclear.

Other researchers have reached a much more critical conclusion about the effects of school-based police on students. In a meta-analysis published in November on the existing literature into school officers’ efficacy, researchers failed to identify evidence that school-based law enforcement promoted safety in schools but reinforced concerns that their presence “criminalizes students and schools.”

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The 74. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.”

New federal survey data show that school resource officers in urban districts are less likely to be armed than those in rural and suburban areas. (National Center for Education Statistics) 

The federal survey, which was conducted between Feb. 15 and July 19, 2022, also found large geographical differences in the types of tools that school-based police use on the job. Across the board, officers in urban areas were less likely than their rural and suburban counterparts to carry guns and pepper spray or to be equipped with body-worn cameras.

Beyond data on campus policing, the new federal survey offers a comprehensive look at the state of campus safety and security, reflecting school leaders’ responses to the pandemic and record numbers of mass school shootings. Other findings include:

• In 2021-22, about 49% of schools provided diagnostic mental health assessments to evaluate students for mental health disorders. This is a decline from 2019-20, when 55% conducted assessments. Meanwhile, 38% provided students with treatments for mental health disorders in 2021-22, down from 42% in 2019-20.

• Restorative justice, a conflict resolution technique, was used in 59% of schools in 2021-22, which was similar to 2019-20 but an increase from the 42% that used the approach in 2017-18.
• The latest data indicate a decline in campus drug and alcohol incidents. In 2021-22, 71% of schools reported at least one incident involving the distribution, possession or use of illegal drugs, down from 77% in 2019-20. Meanwhile, 34% reported at least one alcohol-related incident in 2021-22, down from 41% in 2019-20.

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

Jon and Sam Bastianelli looked on patiently as their oldest son, the “history buff,” examined the axes, shovels and old farming tools displayed in a blacksmith shop at the Coachella Valley History Museum.

His younger siblings crushed pumpkin seeds with a mortar and pestle in an exhibit honoring the Cahuilla tribe, the first inhabitants of the region. Then they all listened as a volunteer explained the inner workings of a washing machine from 1910.

This wasn’t just a quick detour during their family vacation. You could call it homeschooling, but home in this case is a customized Country Coach RV with a bunk room for the kids — and school is wherever they choose to go next.

The Bastianellis are among a growing number of families who don’t let having school-age children get in the way of seeing the U.S. — or even the world. These “roadschoolers” say their well-traveled kids are getting far more knowledge and real-life experience than they ever could from a book, a computer or even a typical classroom teacher.

“You get sights, sounds and smells — all the things your memory works on at the same time,” Jon said. Cultural visits like this one typically lead to a “rabbit hole of questions” later, Sam added.

Nine-year-old Jonathan Bastianelli listened as Roberta Jonnet, a docent at the Coachella Valley History Museum, explained how families in the early 1900s used a sign to indicate how much ice they needed for the icebox. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

Led by remote workers who took social distancing to the extreme, RV sales soared during the height of the pandemic. But these buyers differed from the empty-nesters and retirees that long defined this subculture. The newbees are younger — by about 20 years — and more racially diverse. These mobile families include a mix of traditional homeschoolers and newcomers who pulled up stakes during COVID. In fact, with RV sales returning to pre-pandemic levels, industry leaders are counting on this budding customer base for future growth.

“This has always been an older generation, and now it’s become our generation,” said Christian Axness, 37, who left Sarasota, Florida, behind in 2017 with her husband and two children, 2 and 4 at the time. Last year, she co-founded Republic of Nomads with Stephanie Simpson, a former private school teacher from Indiana, where the majority of RVs are manufactured. They plan group outings like the museum visit so parents don’t have to do it on their own.

The Republic of Nomads held a “Noon Year’s Eve” party for kids on Dec. 31 at the Thousand Trails campground in Palm Desert, California (Republic of Nomads)

Over the past year, they’ve organized trips to the Black Hills of South Dakota to study Native American culture and to Bend, Oregon, to hike around the cinder cone of an ancient volcano where lava flowed a thousand years ago.

With a combined 18 years as “fulltimers” — as those who live out of their vehicles call themselves — Axness and Simpson negotiate reduced homeschooling rates for participants at national parks and museums. Some of their events are free, while a weeklong camping adventure under the stars might run around $300. In 2022, they rented an observatory in Joshua Tree where students talked to local astronomers. In January, they took off for Baja, California, to pack in Spanish lessons, oceanography and windsurfing.

“These are not just surface-level experiences,” Axness said, “but immersive events because of the nature of our lifestyles.”

While a non-stop road trip might sound lavish, it doesn’t have to be. Full-time RVers range from families who aim to live debt free to those who drive six-figure luxury vehicles. For many families, monthly living expenses are about the same as if they lived at home, said Tiffany Johnsrud, a mom of three from Dubuque, Iowa.

“We’re not spending money on soccer and softball,” she said. “We’re spending it on experiences.”

Tiffany Johnsrud showed her daughter, Lia, where their family would be traveling in Mexico as part of a Republic of Nomads gathering. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

‘Lifestyle change’

The RV Industry Association started to pay more attention to roadschoolers in the fall of 2020, when more than half of the nation’s schools offered only remote learning. Its biannual survey showed that 45% of RVers were also educating children.

Drawing on this growing segment of the RV population, Fulltime Families, a membership organization, has a Facebook group for roadschoolers. And Kay Akpan, a Black roadschooling mom with a large Instagram following, founded a nonprofit and launched a Facebook page to connect Black families trading daily carpool lines for interstate rest areas. RV Industry Association data shows that among new buyers, 14% are Black, more than double the rate before COVID.

“There are people who are making more of this lifestyle change,” said Monika Geraci, spokeswoman for the association. “It’s not just a pandemic thing.”

When Dubuque schools shut down because of COVID, Johnsrud called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to tour the country. Fourteen-year-old Miley, the oldest kid in the family, was a bit skeptical.

“I thought it was a joke at first,” she said.

But their family of five had previously discussed moving into a tiny house, so getting one with wheels wasn’t a stretch.

Miley had no qualms about leaving. “I hated online school.” She said she learns more from books than virtual programs. But as a roadschooler, she gains much of her knowledge first hand.

The Johnsrud kids — Lia, Miley and Brady — have been “roadschooled” since 2020 when schools in Dubuque, Iowa, shut down for the pandemic. (Tiffany Johnsrud)

“I can tell you facts about the cities, what there is to do there and the campground names,” she said. Her favorite excursion so far was to Oregon, where she tried “cold plunging” in freezing rivers. “We’ve seen so many waterfalls. The forests they have are just really pretty.”

Other families took to the road long before COVID. Victor and Robyn Robledo ran a gymnastics studio near San Diego, but sensed that many of the parents and children they served were stressed out. In 2015, they escaped that world and moved into their 30-foot class C rig. The family traveled through Europe and the U.S. — hiking, skiing, blogging and nurturing an adventurous spirit in their five children, who at the time ranged from 3 to 14.

Robyn, who has always homeschooled, covers core subjects, but mostly takes a “free-flowing” approach to her children’s education. One son wanted to learn everything he could about dogs. Her more entrepreneurial daughter helps run their “adventure travel brand,” offering apparel, virtual coaching and wellness courses. The middle daughter is a charcoal artist and teaches a mindfulness class for kids.

“The big hurdle for me was overcoming this fear that if my child doesn’t do traditional curriculum, how will they get into college,” Robyn said. She said her two youngest, now 12 and 15, “can’t do algebra” — a missing skill that would alarm traditionalists. But she doesn’t care. What’s important to her is that they work as part of a team and develop communication and problem-solving skills. “The ability to learn is more important than what you’re learning.”

Others take a more conventional approach. Axness estimated that about half the students in Republic of Nomads are also enrolled in online public schools.

Erica Pickett, a former Hartford County, Maryland, elementary school teacher, “launched out” with her family in 2022. She purchased a literature-based curriculum for her son and twin daughters that features some of the same books she used as a teacher. But they’re also regulars of the National Park Service’s free Junior Ranger program, where students earn badges based on activities at the park or historical site they’re visiting.

“If I have to put them in public schools, I don’t want them to be blown out of the water,” she said. “I know for sure my kids aren’t missing anything.”

Erica Pickett’s twins Kinsley, left, and Adelyn completed a science project at the Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park. (Erica Pickett)

Leaving the road

Most roadschoolers say they periodically check in to see whether their children still prefer the itinerant lifestyle. Some make it obvious they’re ready for a change.

After trekking through the nation’s wide-open spaces for the past seven years, 11-year-old Eloise Ridley longed for the four walls of a traditional classroom. Her father, Kevin, persuaded her to spend another year traveling by offering a winter at Disney World. But last year, they permanently parked their RV and enrolled Eloise and her 7-year-old sister Eliza at Pagosa Elementary in southwest Colorado.

After years on the road, Eloise Ridley, right, convinced her parents to enroll her and her sister Eliza in a traditional public school. They entered a Colorado elementary school last fall. (Emma Ridley)

“We don’t run a totalitarian dictatorship,” Kevin joked. “We let them participate in the family decisions.”

Prior to ending their travels, The Ridleys didn’t just go from one campground to the next. They were “boondockers,” living off-grid and relying on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network to work online and connect their daughters to Florida Virtual School. Now the girls ride a school bus and bring classmates home for sleepovers.

For their parents, settling down was a sacrifice. They were “ambassadors” for Republic of Nomads and hosted an event for a couple dozen families in Baja last winter.

“Would Kevin and I rather be sitting on a beach right now? Probably,” said Emma. “But our kids come home everyday with big smiles on their faces.”

The Ridleys spent a lot of time “boondocking” instead of staying in campgrounds. (Emma Ridley)

Others who left the road behind said it took just a few months before RV living — and the friendships they’d formed — called them back.

Those tight bonds were apparent on a recent evening at the Thousand Trails campground just off I-10 in Palm Springs. In a large clubhouse, several Republic of Nomad families gathered for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck. Parents sampled vegetable side dishes and pumpkin pie while children chased each other, played dominoes and jumped in the pool.

Many of these families travel together, creating a community of friends that’s not unlike what their children would enjoy in a normal neighborhood. Miley, the Iowa ninth-grader, also earns money babysitting and tutoring younger children from another family.

Charlotte Bastianelli and Brady Johnsrud checked out the 1909 schoolhouse at the Coachella Valley History Museum. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

She’s still in touch with friends back home, but isn’t longing to return. Unless you count the one-room schoolhouse from 1909 at the Coachella museum, she and her siblings haven’t been in a traditional classroom since 2020. She even has plans to “move out” into her own van at 18 and keep traveling. She marveled at how much of the country she’s seen in four years.

“Until fifth grade,” she said, “I didn’t know there was any other state than Iowa.”

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

When the prestigious California Institute of Technology announced in August it would drop calculus as an admissions requirement — students must prove mastery of the subject but don’t have to take it in high school — observers of an ongoing education equity debate might have thought it was the last holdout.

According to a recent survey the answer is more complex, that while some schools have revised their acceptance criteria based on the availability of rigorous courses, including calculus, others have not.

Queries sent to 20 top-tier colleges and universities, many of which are recognized for their strong engineering programs, found that 11 do not require it while six strongly recommend or encourage it.

Calculus may not be a must, but it is still expected at many institutions.

Princeton looks for some applicants to complete the class if they have access to it. Likewise, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Purdue strongly recommend or encourage at least some applicants to take the course in high school.

Cornell was alone among the 20 in still mandating calculus. In fact, the Ivy League school tells incoming freshmen that at least one of their two letters of recommendation must be from a math teacher and they are “strongly encouraged” to make that person their precalculus or calculus teacher.

Caltech dropped calculus, physics and chemistry from a list of required courses while widening students’ opportunity to showcase their abilities through other means, including the completion of online courses through the free Khan Academy.

Ashley Pallie, Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate admissions, noted it was a significant shift for the STEM-intensive titan. The school had required a calculus course for decades, she said, despite pushback from applicants.

“Every year, we would get lots of students who would write in and say, ‘I was on track to take it, but the teacher isn’t able to teach us here,’ or, ‘Not enough students signed up for the class,’ or, ‘The class isn’t offered at my high school,’” she said. “And the answer was always, ‘No. We need to have the course requirement.’ ”

But that changed when Pallie and two faculty members, who set admissions criteria, learned at a February conference on equity and college acceptance the extent to which the course is not available, particularly to low-income applicants, students of color and those living in rural areas.

Pallie credited Melodie Baker, national policy director at Just Equations, an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, for sharing the information at that gathering. Calculus still has merit, Caltech faculty concluded, but should no longer be mandated.

“So now it’s less about having taken the course and more about, ‘Can you showcase to us that you have proficiency and mastery?’” Pallie said.

MIT follows a similar model; it wants incoming freshmen to have two semesters of calculus but allows them to place out of the requirement either through outside credits or by taking an Advanced Standing Examination.

Calculus is not required for admission to any University of Michigan school or college, including the College of Engineering and the Ross School of Business.

And the same holds true at Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, Rice and Johns Hopkins. 

The explanation is simple, according to one school’s spokesperson. 

“We recognize not all high schools have a calculus course available to students, so it is not required for admission to Johns Hopkins University,” said Jill Rosen.

Baker, of Just Equations, said colleges and universities should always seek to widen the opportunities for bright applicants so they can one day help solve the world’s most complex and enduring problems.

“When math is used as it was intended, to cultivate and develop talent rather than rank and sort students, the future of STEM looks like a microcosm of the larger society,” she said. “It looks very different from what it looks like today: It looks well-represented.”

The University of Minnesota doesn’t demand calculus for entry to any of its undergraduate programs. However, the school does prefer that students study the topic at some stage: It’s mandatory for some majors, though it can be taken at the college level.

Still, a spokesperson for the five-college system said, “Anyone can get in without it.”

For other colleges, the answer is nuanced. Neither calculus nor precalculus is a requirement for first-year admissions at the University of California, a spokesperson said.

The vast U.C. system, which encompasses 10 campuses and some 280,000 students, does, however, note that those interested in STEM, data science and the social sciences are “strongly encouraged” to consider a math course sequence that prepares them for calculus — either during high school or in their first year at the university.

Sharon Veatch, school counseling department chair at the rural Housatonic Valley Regional High School in northwest Connecticut, follows college admissions criteria closely. Two of her former graduates are now at Harvard and a couple of others have recently graduated from Cornell.

She said universities have become less focused on calculus in recent years: Their decision to largely drop SAT and ACT admissions tests from consideration means they are looking at students more holistically, placing less emphasis on any one class.

But, Veatch said, many top-ranked universities urge students to take the most rigorous course available. For those at her high school, that means Advanced Placement calculus. The campus hasn’t offered AP Statistics for years.

“In general, when I advise students, I say, ‘You need to max out on the curriculum,’” she said. “Because that’s what I’m being told.”

Maxing out, of course, means something different from one state to another as several are reassessing their mathematics offerings.

California has tried to broaden high school students’ opportunities by providing other academic pathways, not just those that lead to calculus.

But there’s been a push and pull between equity and rigor, with the state recently backtracking on a key issue for college applicants: The faculty committee that sets admissions requirements for the U.C. system decided in July that data science could no longer be a substitute for Algebra II. The state Board of Education, which oversees K-12 and is looking at reframing math statewide, soon after removed its endorsement of data science as a substitute for that subject.

Stanford, a crown jewel in higher education in that state, recommends four years of rigorous mathematics — including algebra, geometry and trigonometry.

“We also welcome additional mathematical preparation, including calculus and statistics,” its website advises.

Calculus is not necessary for entry to the University of Wisconsin. But spokesman John Lucas said direct admittance to the engineering program is highly selective, “so, it’s rare for a student to not have taken calculus.”

Georgia Tech is a bit more explicit. Laura Simmons, an admissions counselor there, said in an online video, that students should take the most challenging courses available to them. If that means seeking out a dual enrollment math class at the local college, they should choose wisely.

“We’re never going to pretend that college algebra is the same as a calculus class,” she said.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Most states have revised their strategies for teaching children to read over the last half-decade, a reflection of both long-held frustration with slow academic progress and newer concerns around COVID-related learning loss. An attempt to incorporate evidence-based insights into everyday school practice, the nationwide campaign has been touted as a promising development for student achievement.

But many states don’t adequately train or help teachers to carry out those ambitious plans, according to a new analysis.

The report, released today by the nonprofit National Center on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), identifies five key areas where education authorities can arm teachers with better skills to teach the fundamentals of literacy — from establishing strict training and licensure standards for trainees to funding meaningful professional development to classroom veterans. While a handful of states were singled out for praise, others were criticized for inaction or half-measures.

Dozens of states use licensure tests with little or no content related to the “science of reading,” the extensive body of research into how people understand written language (including one, Iowa, that administers no licensure test that deals with reading whatsoever.) The vast majority do not require districts to choose reading curricula that reflect the science of reading.

NCTQ President Heather Peske, a former high-ranking K–12 official in Massachusetts, applauded recent changes in state law as “well-intentioned,” but cautioned that they could only meet with success if executed with care.

“Passing state policy is the very beginning stage of doing this work,” Peske said. “It’s really the implementation that we need to focus on now.”

Though it has germinated in academic and policy circles for years, the legislative push around early literacy first gained public prominence in Mississippi, which enacted a rash of new laws around reading instruction a decade ago. That dramatic overhaul included changes to public pre-K offerings, new resources provided to districts (including special coaches assigned to underperforming schools), and even the controversial practice of holding back third graders who failed an end-of-year exam.

Mississippi was identified in the report as one of the national leaders implementing necessary reading reforms, along with Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. By contrast, Maine, Montana, and South Dakota were rated “unacceptable” across the five recommended action items.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

Even as aspiring teachers are being trained, the authors argue, many are being set up to fall short in their first assignments. Just 26 states provide detailed standards for what teaching candidates need to know about the science of reading, including critical aspects like phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency. Twenty-one states don’t establish any standards for the specific instruction of English learners, who account for as much as 20 percent of all K–12 students in places like Texas.

In spite of the clear signs that thousands of teachers are minted each year with incomplete or inaccurate notions of the science of reading, a majority of state education departments allow outside entities and accreditors to approve literacy offerings in schools of education and other teacher preparation programs. Just 23 states administer their own process of approval, and only 10 consult literacy experts in the decision of whether to approve individual programs.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

Once those new teachers enter the classroom, many will be stuck using materials that are poorly aligned with the best research on how to improve reading outcomes, the study concludes. Only nine states — Nevada, Arkansas, Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina — require that districts use high-quality reading curricula, such as those approved by vetting organizations like EdReports. The remaining states, accounting for 40 million K–12 students, make no such requirement; 20 states don’t even collect data on which curricula districts are using, so families must make their own inquiries into whether their children have access to effective instruction.

Even while popular early literacy approaches, such as “guided reading” and “balanced literacy,” have fallen out of favor with education experts in recent years, hundreds of school districts still spend millions of dollars each year to access them. Some include wealthy suburban districts in high-achieving areas like Greater Boston, where high average reading scores are complicated by large disparities between high- and low-performing students.

Peske said that while the report did not delve into regulatory questions like whether to introduce universal dyslexia screening or to retain low-scoring elementary students for extra reading instruction, those issues were also important parts of state rules around foundational literacy. But teacher preparation and support stood above the rest, she concluded.

“We know teachers matter most; they’re the most important in-school factor in impacting student outcomes,” she said. “So if we’re actually going to see improvement in student reading rates, we need to make sure teachers are prepared and supported to implement and sustain scientifically based reading instruction.”

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

White House Domestic Policy Adviser Neera Tanden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona led Wednesday’s event on President Joe Biden’s agenda for improving student achievement. (U.S. Department of Education)

The Biden administration received high marks for elevating key strategies to help students rebound from pandemic learning loss — addressing chronic absenteeism, offering high-impact tutoring and extending learning afterschool and during the summer.

“These three strategies have one central goal — giving students more time and more support to succeed,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Wednesday at a White House gathering to outline the president’s K-12 agenda. “We’ll use all the tools at our disposal to advance these three pillars.”

The event, featuring three governors and three state chiefs, highlighted successful efforts to spend pandemic relief funds on proven models, like home visits in Connecticut to improve student attendance and the New Jersey Tutoring Corps that now reaches 245 of the state’s 600 districts. The administration aims to make sure more states and districts are implementing effective programs.

But some feel there was scant attention to the role of families in such efforts.

“Amidst all the happy talk, there was no mention that far too many families seem unconvinced that they need to send students to school regularly, or to engage in additional learning opportunities,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The “supply side” of the equation — offering extra opportunities for learning — won’t make any difference if parents don’t see the value, he said.

Since the pandemic, researchers have documented a disconnect between parents and educators over pandemic learning loss. A University of Southern California study released in December documented what some have called an “urgency gap,” with parents expressing little alarm over long-term effects of school closures.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said there are other reasons why students aren’t in class everyday or aren’t taking advantage of tutoring opportunities. Schools, she said, aren’t giving students enough reasons to be there.

“Kids are watching movies and listening to people read books on YouTube in the classroom,” she said. And studies conducted in the wake of the pandemic show schools are requiring less effort from students. “Grade inflation will get you a C without even showing up.”

An analysis of federal data from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University shows that roughly 14 million students were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year, with significant increases among Latino students and those in suburban and rural districts.

The administration hopes to reverse those trends by encouraging more states to regularly track chronic absenteeism and plans to publish examples from districts using strategies such as text messages and home visits. The White House urged more states to include chronic absenteeism as an indicator in their state accountability plans. Currently, 14 states don’t, according to the department.

Officials also outlined ways to use the department’s existing accountability structure under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act to push research-based tutoring programs. A growing body of research points to models that connect students with the same tutor at least three times a week.

The department plans to monitor whether states with tutoring programs ensure that low-performing schools use high-dosage models. And the White House said states should target resources to districts where test scores still trail pre-COVID performance.

“My guess is they have seen states sign contracts for large-scale online homework help, which isn’t evidence-driven,” said Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, which last year awarded $1 million each to five states to support high-dosage tutoring.

To Phillip Lovell, associate executive director at All4Ed, a nonprofit advocacy group, Biden’s agenda signals a shift from using federal relief funds effectively to ensuring successful programs continue to reach students in the lowest-performing schools. While the department is offering states the chance to apply for an extension, the pandemic aid officially expires later this year.

“The reality is that it is going to take much longer than the amount of time states and districts have to spend [relief] dollars to recover academically,” Lovell said.

The White House said it plans to run grant competitions supporting a long list of programs — not just tutoring, but also afterschool programs, and math and literacy coaching for teachers. But funding those programs is still up to Congress, which has not yet reached agreement on the budget for this fiscal year.

Beyond monitoring districts’ use of Title I funds and promoting best practices, the administration was unclear about what other “tools” it might use to get districts to implement evidence-based programs. But some state leaders wish the department could do more to hold districts accountable.

“I could use some help getting schools to really understand the value,” said New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishamsaid, joining the event remotely. She said “far too many” districts in her state weren’t offering extended learning programs or high-dosage tutoring. “It has been harder than it ought to be to get everybody on the same page dedicated to improved outcomes and well-being for New Mexico students.”

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

Supporters of Israel exchange insults with supporters of Palestine during a rally on Nov. 16 at New York University. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images)

Amid reports of heightened antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools and colleges since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a senior Education Department official said the agency has received a “huge, huge influx” of civil rights complaints that have led to a surge in federal investigations.

Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel and the subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened 29 investigations into schools’ and colleges’ responses to complaints of discrimination based on shared ancestry, which includes antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Of the new investigations, the senior official told The 74, 19 are in response to conduct that unfolded in schools in the last two months alone. Of the incidents since Oct. 7 that are now under investigation, 17 took place on college campuses.

Last fiscal year, by contrast, the office opened 28 shared ancestry investigations over the entire 12-month period. The year before, there were just 15. Such inquiries seek to determine whether schools adequately respond to incidents that create hostile learning environments in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, ethnicity or national origin.

“We are deeply concerned about the incidents that we’ve seen reported in schools all over the country, and about the safety of students, and the protection of non-discrimination rights for students in P-12 schools as well as in institutions of higher education,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an interview Wednesday with The 74. “We’re very, very concerned about what we’re seeing in schools.”

Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said the agency is “deeply concerned” about antisemitic and islamophobic incidents that have riled campuses nationwide since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Though officials declined to comment on the specifics of active federal investigations, a spike in reported antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in and outside of schools have convulsed the nation and elevated student safety concerns.

Near Louisiana’s Tulane University, a clash between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters turned violent and police are investigating a hit-and-run at Stanford University as a potential hate crime targeting an Arab Muslim student. At Rutgers University, officials suspended its “Students for Justice in Palestine” chapter following claims the group disrupted classes and vandalized campus. At Harvard University, a rabbi said he was instructed by administrators to hide the campus menorah each night of Hanukkah due to vandalism fears. In California, a college professor was charged with involuntary manslaughter and battery after an alleged physical altercation broke out at a demonstration that led to the death of a Jewish protester.

Outside of schools, police said a 6-year-old Chicago boy was stabbed to death and his mother seriously injured by their landlord in an alleged anti-Muslim attack, and in Burlington, Vermont, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot while walking down a sidewalk over Thanksgiving weekend.

The escalating confrontations have embroiled school leaders, who have been criticized for failing to clamp down on hate speech and discrimination. Just days after a tense Dec. 5 House committee hearing in Washington about rising antisemitism on college campuses, Elizabeth Magill resigned as University of Pennsylvania president. She and the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were accused of being equivocating and evasive after giving carefully worded replies to repeated questions about whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ code of conduct. Magill responded that it’s “a context-dependent decision,” underscoring school leaders’ obligations to ensure safe learning environments while protecting people’s free speech rights.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay announced her resignation Tuesday after facing similar scrutiny for her testimony at the congressional hearing and unrelated plagiarism allegations.

Of the 29 active federal Title VI investigations opened since Oct. 7, just eight are focused on incidents in K-12 schools — including at three of the nation’s 10 largest districts. Among them are the New York City Department of Education, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Hillsborough County Schools in Tampa, Florida, and the Cobb County School District in suburban Atlanta.

A pro-Israel counter protestor wrapped in the flag of Israel is escorted away from a vigil organized by New York University students in support of Palestinians in New York City on October 17. (Alex Kent/Getty Images)

Though the circumstances prompting the investigations remain unknown, many of the institutions included on the Education Department’s list of active investigations have experienced high-profile incidents involving discrimination.

In New York City, a raucous, pro-Palestinian protest broke out at a Queens high school and prompted a lockdown after a teacher posted a picture of herself at a pro-Israel rally on social media. Also turning to social media, one student said the teacher “is going to be executed in the town square,” and another promoted “a riot” against her.

In suburban Atlanta, the Cobb County School District sparked controversy following the Hamas attack when it sent an email to the school community that warned of an “international threat,” noting that “while there is no reason to believe this threat has anything to do with our schools, parents can expect both law enforcement and school staff to take every step to keep your children safe.” Because of the message, several Muslim parents said their children had become the targets of Islamophobic bullying.

In a January fact sheet, the civil rights office highlighted hypothetical instances that put school districts at odds with their Title VI obligations. Among them: A Jewish student is targeted by his peers with swastikas and Nazi salutes but his teacher tells him to “just ignore it” without taking steps to address the harassment. Another example involves school officials failing to remedy a Muslim student’s complaints that she was called a “terrorist” and told “you started 9/11.”

Bucknell University students march in a “Shut it Down for Palestine” demonstration, where participants called for a ceasefire in Gaza and cutting U.S. aid to Israel. (Paul Weaver/Getty Images)

Even before the most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported an uptick in hate crimes over the last several years, including on campuses.

Reported hate crimes surged 7% between 2021 and 2022, according to federal data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in October, including a 36% increase in anti-Jewish incidents — which accounted for more than half of incidents based on religion. Among all reported hate crimes, 10% occurred at K-12 schools and colleges.

The Education Department last month released its most recent Civil Rights Data Collection, the first since the pandemic. Students reported 42,500 harassment allegations during the 2020-21 school year, including bullying on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, disability and religion. Of those, 29% involved harassment or bullying on the basis of race while only a sliver — 3% — involved students saying they were targeted because of their religion.

The current climate has put Jewish college students on edge, according to a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit focused on eradicating antisemitism. Since the beginning of the academic year, 73% of Jewish college students said they’ve been witness to antisemitism. Prior to this school year, 70% reported experiencing antisemitism throughout their entire college experience. Yet just 30% of Jewish college students said their college administration has taken sufficient steps to address anti-Jewish prejudice.

During a televised interview on MSNBC Friday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said he thought conditions would improve on college campuses for Jewish students because the Title VI investigations now being launched by the Education Department would force college administrators to take action.

Muslim Americans of all ages have similarly reported an uptick in hateful rhetoric. In a two-week period between Oct. 7 and Oct. 24, reports of bias incidents and requests for help at the Council on American-Islamic Relations surged 182% from the average 16-day period in 2022.

As lawmakers call on school leaders to take a stronger stance against hate speech, they’ve faced pushback from free speech advocates. Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned university presidents of “aggressive enforcement action” if they failed to discipline students “calling for the genocide of any group of people.” In a statement, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a right-leaning nonprofit focused on students’ free speech rights, said Hochul’s admonition “cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”

“Colleges and universities can and should punish ‘calls for genocide’ when such speech falls into one of the narrowly defined categories of unprotected speech, including true threats, incitement and discriminatory harassment,” the group said in the statement. “But broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

The senior Education Department official said that schools must “navigate carefully” their obligations under Title VI and the First Amendment. Even if a student’s speech is protected, the official said, school leaders still have an obligation to uphold all students’ nondiscrimination rights.

“What concerns me is when a school community throws up its hands and says, ‘This speech is protected and so there’s nothing more for us here,’” said Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights. “That may be true, but that’s only true where a hostile environment isn’t created that the school needs to respond to.”

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

Last week, as leading education experts gathered — again —to ponder the nation’s sluggish recovery from pandemic learning loss, one speaker put the issue in stark relief. 

“This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by the Aspen Institute, a think tank, “We do not have our hair on fire the way it needs to be.”

That disconnect is the subject of a new paper released Monday that further explores what many have labeled an “urgency gap.” To pinpoint the extent of the gap, the authors talked to parents about the signals they’re getting from teachers and schools about their children’s progress. Parents expressed little concern about lasting damage from the pandemic and typically thought their children were doing well in school — a view that researchers say is belied by dismal state and national test scores. 

The issue is “genuinely vexing,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate education professor at the University of Southern California and the paper’s lead author.  

“Parents are overwhelmingly getting the message from grades and teachers that kids are doing fine-to-great,” he said. He attributes that upbeat outlook to how little parents pay attention to standardized test scores — the “external measures” that matter most to researchers. “We just never heard anything about standardized tests from the folks we interviewed.”

The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed historic declines in math and flat performance in reading. According to this year’s spring test results, pandemic recovery remains elusive for some states. Several have continued to lose ground in reading and most have not surpassed pre-COVID performance in math. Last week’s release of international scores show U.S. students dropped 13 points in math between 2018 and 2022. 

Ludwig argues that U.S. students have made such little progress that the $190 billion Congress appropriated to address the COVID crisis is insufficient and lawmakers should find another $75 billion to fund high-dosage tutoring.  

“If we don’t remediate this pandemic learning loss, this cohort of 50 million kids will experience reduced lifetime earnings of something like $900 billion,” he said.

Those messages, however, don’t always get to parents. 

Given the gauntlet of tests schools administer, it’s easy for parents to get lost, said Meredith Dodson, executive director of San Francisco Parent Action, a group that advocated for schools to reopen and has recently pushed for improvements in the district’s reading program.

For many parents, “​​it’s hard to understand all the acronyms — this test versus that test, the state versus the national,” she said. “Parents just really want to trust their teachers. Is my kid on grade level or not?”

Even some parents who knew their children’s standardized test scores tended to put more stock in grades, Polikoff found. One parent interviewed for the study knew that a majority of students scored higher than her son on the NWEA MAP test in math. But, she said, “his knowledge is much greater than that” because he received a 3 on a scale of 1-3 on his report card, which “means they’ve achieved the mastery or whatever.” 

Researchers have documented a growing discrepancy  between grade point averages and standardized test scores, especially since the pandemic. One report from three organizations — EdNavigator, Learning Heroes and TNTP — showed an increase in B grades since the pandemic even among students who performed below grade level and were chronically absent.

‘Kids are not stupid’

Schools have also made it easier to do well, a vestige of pandemic-era incentives to get students to complete their work. Dan Goldhaber, director of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research — and the father of two school-age children — said he’s increasingly “astounded” at how many chances students get to bring up their grades.

“Kids are not stupid,” he said. “They’re going to learn that, ‘No, I don’t need to study real hard for this test because I can just correct it after the fact.’”

It’s not a surprise, he added, that there’s been a lackluster response to some academic recovery efforts. A lot of districts have spent relief funds on less-effective remediation efforts, such as optional on-demand tutoring. And those companies typically get paid whether or not students improve or even use the service, according to a recent CALDER paper. 

In response to disappointing results, some states and districts have shifted course. A few have canceled agreements with large online tutoring companies. Some have turned to “outcomes-based” contracts — in which tutors earn more money for better results. But others are sticking with virtual providers. 

If districts are going to spend funds on tutoring, Goldhaber said, officials should “have some control over” which students receive the help and when it’s delivered.

He and Polikoff are among the experts urging educators to make test score data a much larger focus of their conversations with parents. And there’s some evidence that hard facts about students’ scores can be a wake-up call.

A November Gallup-Learning Heroes poll showed that among parents who knew their children were below grade level in math, improving those skills became their number one concern, more important than curbing the effects of social media and protecting them from bullies.

Being honest with parents starts at the top, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

“Superintendents should not say, ‘We’re chugging along. We’re going to get there.’ They should say this is a huge problem,” he said at the Aspen event. Teachers, he added, need “political cover” to tell parents their children are behind. “It’s the truth and we need to deliver it.” 

But the news doesn’t always go over well. When Precious Allen, who teaches second grade at Betty Shabazz Academy, a charter school in Chicago, showed parents test results that indicated their children were a year or more behind, she said they grew “flustered” and complained about doing extra review sheets with their children after work. 

It was tough, she said, for them to “wrap their minds around” the data. She shared passages from a book that explains where children should be for their age to help parents understand how the pandemic threw their kids off track. “I had to bring a lot of science and research into it because sometimes the voice of a teacher is not enough.”

‘Worst possible time’

But not all educators believe assessments provide valuable or reliable information. Polikoff sees the separation between parents and the nation’s education scholars as part of a larger anti-testing movement that started brewing long before the pandemic. The pandemic pause on state assessments and accountability sparked a renewed push to limit the number of tests and try different models.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, for example, is leading a 2024 ballot initiative to remove the state test as a graduation requirement, calling it “harmful.” The proposal drew sharp criticism from National Parents Association President Keri Rodrigues, whose organization trains parents to advocate for quality education.

“This is the dawn of a new era, where high school diplomas now become participation trophies,” she wrote in an op-ed. 

Testing critics complain that assessments take up too much instructional time and that the results rarely benefit teachers because they arrive after students have already moved on to the next grade. Others say high-stakes tests are racially biased against Black and Hispanic students. 

“There’s just very close to zero constituencies advocating for tests or that they matter,” Polikoff said. Republicans, he said, “want only unfettered choice” while the left is not defending the usefulness of tests “to ensure educational quality or equity.”

’The backlash against testing, he said, has come “at the worst possible time given the damage that’s actually been done.”

Thomas B. Fordham Institute

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the charter school movement has run its course. Abandoned by an increasingly progressive Democratic Party for being “neo-liberal” and by an increasingly populist Republican Party for being “technocratic,” charter schools (the story goes) are falling into the chasm that has opened up in the political center of our ultra-polarized country.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Yes, the politics around public charter schools have become more challenging, especially in the blue-hued cities where most of the media lives and works. But across vast expanses of urban and semi-urban America, and especially in Black and brown communities where charter schools have proven most popular and effective, there’s still plenty of room to grow, and few policy barriers standing in the way.

That’s one key takeaway from a new analysis by my colleagues David Griffith and Jeanette Luna at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, The Education Competition Index: Quantifying competitive pressure in America’s 125 largest school districts. The median large district in the U.S. still serves upward of 80% of its resident students, with the other kids attending charter schools, private schools or home schools. That means that most large districts, including highly urban ones, are far from being saturated with options — especially for families of color, who generally are poorly served by traditional public schools. This makes them promising locales for further charter expansion.

I say “charter expansion” for several reasons. First, of the many alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools have by far the strongest track record when it comes to boosting student achievement, especially for low-income children and students of color. A growing body of research, including a recent study from CREDO at Stanford University, shows charter school students outpacing their traditional public school peers both on test scores and on long-term outcomes such as college completion, especially in urban areas. In contrast, private school choice programs have been markedly less effective in boosting student outcomes, at least as judged by test scores. Recent studies of large-scale voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana and Louisiana all show recipients trailing their public school peers on test score growth, sometimes significantly.

Second, compared with private-school choice initiatives, the charter movement has proven much more capable of growing its market share. Whereas only about 770,000 students currently receive publicly funded scholarships or savings accounts — many of which cover just part of the price of schooling — more than 3.6 million pupils attend charter schools. And as the study found, during the 2010s, the rising tide of competition that most large school districts faced was almost entirely attributable to charters.

Another recent analysis, this one from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, supplies further evidence of charters’ staying power and potential for growth. Whereas enrollment in traditional public schools shrank by 3.5% during the pandemic era, charter school enrollment grew by 9%. The increase was particularly explosive among Latinos.

So where do charters have the most growth potential in the years ahead? Our analysis shows that most likely hotspots are in urbanized or rapidly urbanizing areas that are home to many students of color, who tend to be best served by these high-impact schools. More specifically, we believe that moving forward, philanthropists, national charter networks and advocates should consider three key factors:

• Policy. It’s hard to open charter schools in hostile environments, such as those with paltry funding or strict charter caps. Conversely, new investments in equitable per-pupil funding or facilities are akin to placing a big “we’re open” sign at state (or municipal) borders.
• Room to grow. In the handful of places where more than half of students already exercise school choice, the market for educational alternatives is arguably saturated. But these are exceptions.
• Momentum. While past results are no guarantee of future performance (as mutual funds are required to say), states where charters are growing are likely to see further growth in the coming years — provided the movement can avoid legislative setbacks.

Put those variables together, and the following states emerge as especially promising places where investments in continued charter growth might do the most good:

• Texas. The Lone Star State has enjoyed strong charter growth, with enrollment up 7% from a year ago and 20% since before the pandemic. Yet there’s still plenty of room to run. While Houston, Dallas and Austin have long hosted lots of great charter schools, it’s still the case that 70% to 75% of children living in those cities attend district schools. And there’s even less school choice in smaller districts like Fort Worth, El Paso and Northside, in San Antonio, all of which have significant and growing Hispanic populations.
• North Carolina. The Tarheel State boasts a 19% charter growth rate since 2019 and shows no signs of slowing down, thanks to a new statewide charter authorizer. Yet 85% to 90% of students in the counties that are home to Winston-Salem, Fayetteville and Greensboro attend district schools.
• Nevada. The Silver State’s two large districts, Clark County (Las Vegas) and Washoe (Reno), are among the biggest prizes on the map. Together, they serve almost 400,000 kids, yet just 16% (in Vegas) and 12% (in Reno) attend non-district schools. The legislature just created a new independent charter authorizer, which should supercharge Nevada’s charter growth, which is already up 19% since before the pandemic.

Those are just the standouts. Plenty of other states and local communities are good bets, too. Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin all recently enacted major funding increases for charter schools, and have hospitable environments. The suburbs around Denver and Atlanta serve a growing number of students of color and yet offer limited educational options. Population booms and strong charter policies in Florida and Tennessee make them welcoming jurisdictions.

So, to potential supporters who think the charter opportunity has passed them by, I say: Think again. There are lots of students, families and communities that are still in dire need of great educational options. Let’s make sure they get them.

But what if schools didn’t wait until students fell behind? What if all kindergartners got a reading tutor from the start?

That’s what the early-literacy tutoring company Once is testing out. They have a hunch the results will look good.

By contracting with schools and tracking outcomes, the company hopes to convince more schools and districts to invest in early literacy tutoring, according to Matt Pasternack, Once’s chief executive and co-founder.

“It sounds crazy, but why couldn’t you just teach every kid in America to read one-on-one?” Pasternack said.

The program includes daily, 15-minute sessions during school, but is flexible, according to Pasternack.

Pasternack said the curriculum is informed by the science of reading, a growing movement to change literacy instruction and re-emphasize phonics. Alone with a tutor, students are taught to recognize letters, the sounds that they make and how they blend to form words.

By the end of the year, Pasternack hopes all students can decode fluently, which he thinks will enable them to learn “more autonomously in every grade afterward.”

The two-time grantee received roughly half-a-million dollars from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given roughly $21 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Once worked with “hundreds” of students during the 2022-2023 school year and will work with over 1,000 during the upcoming school year, according to Pasternack. The program has been offered at public, charter and private schools in states including California, Hawaii, Texas, New York, and Ohio, and in Washington, D.C.

The program costs schools about $400 per student and has been given to entire classes and as an intervention for selected students.

Schools are required to provide personnel to be tutors, such as paraprofessionals or other existing school staff. Once provides a scripted curriculum and ongoing coaching. Pasternack said school staff are generally not compensated for the additional tutoring duties, but the program is working to partner with local universities so they can get course credit.

One-on-one key to teaching phonics

Pasternack said “one-on-one instruction simplifies the implementation of the science of reading.”

He said phonics is challenging to execute in large classrooms because it requires “near- perfect classroom management.”

“In order to teach those types of skills, you need to hear what every single child is saying,” Pasternack said.

“Master teachers” excel at large-group instruction, but many others struggle, Pasternack said.

Rebecca Kette, an intervention specialist at Orchard STEM School in Cleveland and a former Once tutor and coordinator, said one-on-one time was beneficial to meet her students’ needs.

“I think a constant struggle for classroom teachers is that individualized attention for children,” Kette said.

Patrick Proctor, the education department chair at Boston College and a professor focused on bilingual education and literacy, said without individualized attention, teachers can’t meet students’ phonic needs.

“A whole-group phonic program is not designed to meet every student where they are at, but rather is focused at on-average expectations of where students should be,” Proctor said in an email.

‘Everything in package’

Once tutors get two half-days of training upfront followed by weekly sessions with Once coaches. All tutor sessions are recorded and viewed by the coaches, who provide feedback during weekly meetings.

“The way that they tutor and train people, you understand the curriculum and are able to deliver it,” said Joseph Salazar, a Once tutor and coordinator and an English as a Second Language teacher at Seaton Elementary in Washington, D.C.

Salazar said he knows how much goes into designing lessons, so he appreciates Once’s script and curriculum. Even if he didn’t have teaching experience, he said he’d feel confident.

“Once provides everything in a package,” Salazar said.

Empowering school employees, like paraprofessionals who may not have prior experience in literacy instruction, is important for scalability, according to Matthew Kraft, an education and economics professor at Brown University who has studied tutoring expansion models.

“Scaling tutoring requires expanding the pool of tutors,” Kraft said in an email. “Paraprofessionals offer an attractive pool of labor for tutoring because they have lots of experience working with students and they are already employed by school districts.”

Early results and criticism

Pasternack said research about Once is “extremely preliminary.” He’s “hopeful” more results will be available “by the middle of this year.”

A report by LXD Research highlighting the impact of the Once program on students at seven schools last academic year concluded there was a positive correlation between Once lessons and students’ scores on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment.

“Overall, the more lesson cycles students completed in Once, the higher their scores,” Rachel Schechter, the report’s author, writes.

Salazar said that of the six students he tutored last year, all started below benchmark and five met or exceeded reading-level benchmarks by the end.

Kette said her students showed “big gains” in oral-reading fluency.

Laura Justice, a distinguished professor at Ohio State’s Department of Educational Studies and the executive director of its Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, agreed there is “strong evidence” for the efficacy of small-group lessons on decoding and comprehension skills. But before scaling a program like Once, it’s important for claims to be “assessed using experimental methods,” she said.

Justice said there isn’t evidence supporting the idea that one-on-one is more effective than small-group tutoring.

Pasternack said he’s open to exploring small groups, but that it would pose several challenges for the program.

“All the kids need to say the exact same sound at the same moment otherwise they’re going to listen to each other, rather than reading,” Pasternack said.

Justice also said it should be tested whether daily sessions really boost outcomes more than sessions two or three times per week.

“There is a threshold of additional instruction that is needed to help children advance, but instruction above that threshold does not necessarily pay off,” she said in an email.

Pasternack said that Once has “documented cases” of students that missed sessions and attended approximately two or three sessions per week.

“The kid just moves half as quickly,” Pasternack said. “You can’t move faster in less time.”

Proctor said he’s skeptical about the logistics of scaling Once. Tutoring a class of 16 students one-on-one for 15 minutes each amounts to four hours of instructional time a day. But, since school days are complicated, he said it would take longer.

“Likely it wouldn’t happen every day for every child because schedules are challenging,” Proctor wrote. “Multiply that by every day of the school year and you get a lot of slippage.”

Pasternack responded by saying schools aren’t required to use Once programming everyday.

“We work with each school to create a schedule that works for that school,” Pasternack said.

Proctor also challenged the belief that schools “need to be going so heavy on phonics and decoding in kindergarten.”

“The point of kindergarten is to develop social skills, introduce children to literacy, language, and numeracy, explore music, play,” he said.

But Pasternack said declining kindergarten enrollment makes him think current standards may not be working.

Additionally, Pasternack said Once isn’t just about decoding. Each lesson emphasizes phonemic awareness, includes comprehension questions, and revolves around reading an episode, he said, “in a suspenseful and engaging epic journey of a group of animals searching for safety, wisdom and connection.”

Ultimately, Pasternack said he hopes Once can build on existing research and “broaden the conversation.”

“We don’t want to play games with the data,” he said. “We are truly curious. Does scripted, explicit, one-on-one instruction in foundational literacy change the trajectories of the students who receive it in kindergarten?”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to both Accelerate and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

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

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

For K–12 education, 2023 was a year spent over a threshold.

Schools had one foot in the shutdown era, still struggling to restore a sense of normalcy that disappeared in 2020. A steep rise in behavioral and disciplinary issues, which many teachers hoped would be only the temporary product of COVID’s generational disruption to routines, stayed with us. Millions of kids have remained separated from their local schools — not because they’re prevented by public health measures from entering the building, but because they’re simply choosing not to attend classes. And across a whole range of academic subjects, actual student learning is lower and slower than it was before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, school systems are adapting to trends and technologies that have arisen just over the past few years. Districts are spending billions of dollars to establish or expand tutoring programs, which may be America’s best tool to combat learning loss, while AI platforms like ChatGPT are transforming the way instruction can be delivered (and challenging schools’ ability to keep ahead of cheating).

And researchers continue to ask all the questions that have traditionally set the parameters of America’s K–12 agenda: Why do student populations self-segregate? Is it better for kids to be assigned to tough or easy graders? How much do teacher training programs really help? Have charters caught up to traditional public schools?

As we do every year, The 74 has compiled a year-end inventory of the most fascinating discoveries, insights, and ambiguities that came out of education research in 2023.

Welcome to the year in charts.

1. Student absenteeism is out of control

You could spend a lot of time simply tallying the aspects of student life that COVID made worse: significantly diminished achievement, lower odds of graduating on time, escalating behavioral challenges, and fewer applications to college. But the most dangerous consequence might be its effects on how often children came to school.

According to data collected by Stanford University Professor Thomas Dee, the proportion of K–12 students who were chronically absent — i.e., who missed 10 percent or more of the school year — nearly doubled during the pandemic, vaulting from 14.8 percent in 2019 to 28.3 percent in 2022. Extrapolated across all schools, that means an additional 6.5 million kids became chronically absent following COVID. Every state Dee studied saw an increase of at least 4 percentage points, but those with higher pre-pandemic rates of absence experienced the largest jumps.

The findings jibe with those of other alarming research on attendance. An analysis from Johns Hopkins University’s Everybody Graduates Center and the advocacy group Attendance Works, covered by The 74’s Linda Jacobson in October, showed that in 2021–22, two-thirds of American students attended a school where at least 20 percent of students were chronically absent. In over half of all high schools, chronic absenteeism rates topped 30 percent that year.

2. Catch-up learning hit a wall last year

But are kids (at least, the ones actually showing up) regaining the ground they lost since 2020? According to much of the testing data that emerged this year, the answer is no — or at least, nowhere near quickly enough.

In a July report, researchers from the nonprofit testing organization NWEA combed through nearly seven million children’s scores on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is administered both in the fall and the spring to measure how much students learn during the year. But test takers in the 2022–23 academic year made markedly less progress in key subjects than comparable elementary and middle schoolers who sat for the exam before the pandemic, with growth in reading and math falling by as much as 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively. Only third-graders exceeded the pre-COVID learning averages.

The stalled momentum was directly cited in the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s dispatch on “State of the American Student,” which distilled a host of worrying trends and warned that America has little time left to reset the trajectory for millions of adolescents. According to ongoing indicators like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which released long-run scores for 13-year-olds this spring, average performance in math and reading has been set back to levels last seen decades ago.

Even if schools and families feel like they’re through with the pandemic, the pandemic — and the harsh blow it has dealt to kids — isn’t done with us.

3. Virtual tutoring can work

Thankfully, states and districts aren’t sitting on their hands in the face of learning loss. Supported by billions of dollars of federal funds, many have invested heavily in tutoring programs that promise to help struggling children overcome the challenges imposed by past school closures and virtual instruction. The question is whether those efforts work for enough students to justify their cost — and according to data generated by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford initiative devoted to studying the effects of tutoring, there is reason for hope.

In October, the Accelerator circulated a paper showing impressive results from OnYourMark, a fully virtual program provided to developing readers. The study found that among 1,000 students enrolled in Texas charter schools, participating in OnYourMark resulted in kindergartners gaining the equivalent of 26 extra days of learning in letter sounds and first graders receiving 55 additional days of sound decoding. The news is particularly encouraging in that it shows a path to success for virtual tutoring, which has often been shown to be far less effective than in-person instruction.

4. Grade inflation got worse during the pandemic

As the chaotic transition to online learning got underway in 2020, schools had to decide how they would judge the work of students cut off from their teachers and classmates. Many opted for more lenient policies, including eliminating F grades and granting credit for late or incomplete work, out of a desire to avoid more punitive measures during a crisis.

It’s difficult to chart the average impact of the shift across thousands of school districts, but the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) recently released a brief focusing on a decade of student records in Washington State. The picture was stark: While the average middle and high school GPA for math rose by 0.11 points between 2011 and 2019, it got a boost three times that size — one-third of a GPA point, or about the difference between a C-plus and a B-minus — between 2019 and 2021.

In general, wrote CALDER director and American Institutes for Research vice president Dan Goldhaber, the relationship between student grades and their scores on state standardized tests “has diminished over time,” particularly in math. A similar pattern is suggested by the annual release of ACT results, which show scores remaining largely flat in recent years even as students’ self-reported high school grades have climbed. And just like with price inflation, GPAs that soared during the pandemic still haven’t fully come back to earth.

5. Tough grading has its advantages

So what are the effects of higher course marks? Several papers released this year indicate that they can be surprisingly negative.

In a paper circulated this fall, a trio of researchers explored the consequences of a statewide switch to more lenient grading standards undertaken in North Carolina  in 2014. The policy was meant to make grades more comparable between school districts, but in effect, it also lowered the threshold for each letter grade in high schools. It also seemed to affect various student groups quite differently. As expected, the highest-achieving kids received higher grades (though only in their freshman year), but disturbingly, struggling students didn’t receive a similar bump. They also seemed to disengage from school, accruing substantially more absences than students who weren’t exposed to the looser standards; over time, those absences likely hurt their learning, as measured by relatively lower scores on the ACT.

If easier grading holds the potential to hurt attendance and widen achievement gaps, the opposite may also be true. In a study that also focused on North Carolina schools, American University Professor Seth Gershenson discovered that eighth and ninth graders assigned to math teachers with relatively tougher grading standards later saw higher math scores throughout high school. And far from validating fears that hard classes make kids tune out, those students were also less likely to be absent from class than their peers.

6. COVID hit social studies too

Much of the concern over learning loss is focused on weakened performance on the core disciplines of math and reading. In fact, the academic harm was widely dispersed.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federal standardized test often called the Nation’s Report Card — only measures proficiency in social studies every four years. The exam’s latest results, revealed in May, showed that eighth graders’ average history scores fell by five points; civics scores fell by two points, the first decline in the history of the test. All told, the results for both have fallen to levels last seen in the early 1990s, the latest evidence that COVID has triggered a generational reversal in knowledge acquisition.

The swoon came amid a national debate over how to teach about American history and government, with states like Virginia initiating significant overhauls of their academic standards. But the phenomenon appears to be international in scope: Results from the International Civic and Citizenship Education study, which tests over 80,000 eighth graders across 22 industrialized countries on civic knowledge, showed that large numbers of test takers couldn’t answer questions about election fairness or democratic governance. Only 55 percent of respondents said they felt their nation’s governmental system “works well.”

7. Choice might be good for public schools

The explosive growth of school vouchers and education savings accounts, which allow families to spend public funds on private education, has dominated the school choice debate this year. Public school choice (i.e., charters and open enrollment policies), while also controversial, has receded somewhat from conversation.

But a working paper released this summer indicates that, in addition to providing more instructional options to families that want them, intra-choice can improve learning throughout wider communities. University of Chicago economist Christopher Campos and data scientist Caitlin Kearns scrutinized Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice initiative, which allows families within designated neighborhoods to select among multiple high schools rather than send their children to the one nearest their home. Participation in the program, they learned, significantly increases students’ English exam scores and boosts their enrollment rate at four-year colleges by 25 percent. Those gains were concentrated among schools exposed to the most competition and those that previously performed the worst, strongly hinting that inclusion in the Zones pushed them to hold onto students by improving their offerings.

A different study of choice in North Carolina yielded broadly similar results, though with caveats. Focusing on the state’s decision to lift its cap on charter schools in 2012, the paper’s authors revealed that the move incrementally improved public schools’ value-added scores as measured by state standardized tests; that improvement, while small in scale, generated huge value in the aggregate, as the study concluded that the average public high schooler’s lifetime wages were lifted by $1,500 by allowing more charters to open. As in the Los Angeles study, the promising effects seem to have come about through competition for students.

Dispiritingly, however, the impact on pupils who actually enrolled in the charter schools after the cap was lifted was negative, perhaps because the newly established schools tended to employ more “non-traditional” models (e.g., project-based or experiential learning, such as Montessori) that weren’t as successful as existing charter options.

No one said this stuff was simple.

8. Charters aren’t underperforming anymore

Charter schools have been around for over 30 years. For most of that time, their advocates and detractors have argued passionately over just how effective they really are at improving academic achievement. The primary arbiter of those disputes, most often, has been Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which has released a series of studies over more than a decade comparing the performance of charter students with those enrolled at district public schools.

In the first few editions, those reports showed the newer schools lagging behind their traditional counterparts — evidence that the sector’s opponents’ cited frequently throughout the fierce school reform battles of the Obama era. But the latest iteration — CREDO’s first national evaluation in a decade, including data on 1.8 million students across 31 states and cities — calculated that charter students receive the equivalent of 16 extra days of learning in literacy, and six extra days of math, than students at the local public schools they would have otherwise attended. The edge, while decidedly slight, masks larger variation among subgroups: Black students gained an average of 35 extra days of reading growth and 29 extra days of math, equal to more than a month of supplemental instruction.

Not all charters are created equal, however. An article published last month in the journal Education Next, and covered by The 74’s Greg Toppo, compared the performance of charter sectors in each state based on their students’ performance on NAEP. Somewhat surprisingly, the state with the top showing was Alaska, where charter students score an average of 32 points higher on the test than the national average for charter school students. Their peers in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, Tennessee, and Hawaii weren’t so fortunate, with each scoring at least 21 points lower than the national average.

9. Teacher prep can be rethought on the fly

Starting in spring 2020, Massachusetts launched a grand experiment: Concerned that the tumultuous working conditions of the pandemic would discourage young people from becoming teachers, the state began issuing emergency credentials to teaching candidates even if they hadn’t completed the necessary coursework to be licensed. Over the next three years, almost 20,000 such licenses were granted to instructors who worked full-time while simultaneously working to meet their licensure requirements.

Boston University’s Wheelock Education Policy Center has followed the progress of those early-career teachers. Their analysis, laid out in multiple reports, presents a quietly stunning observation: As measured through a combination of school-level performance evaluations, principal questionnaires, and student scores on standardized tests, the emergency-licensed teachers perform similarly to their colleagues who completed traditional teacher preparation programs. Students assigned to them were not disadvantaged in learning in spite of their unconventional path to the classroom. What’s more, by the program’s second year, one-quarter of emergency licensees were non-white — vastly more than the statewide average in Massachusetts.

The notion that aspiring educators can thrive in the profession without reaching it through the traditional channels isn’t a new one; Teach for America and other alternative credentialing programs have existed for decades, yielding some real successes during that period. But the Massachusetts experience illustrates some of the specific benefits of dropping licensure requirements during a crisis. Namely, making entry more flexible (and shaving off the years of study and thousands of dollars in tuition that often act as a deterrent to otherwise qualified candidates) can produce a more diverse and no less effective workforce.

10. More good news on third-grade retention

Legislation around the science of reading has swept through dozens of states over the last decade. In part, the political success of the new literacy agenda is due to the popularity of most of its planks: evidence-backed curricula, teacher coaching, and additional resources for kids and schools that need them.

By contrast, third-grade retention — holding back students for a year if they’re not on track to succeed by the end of that crucial threshold — plays the role of the bad cop. In spite of the existing evidence that struggling elementary schoolers in states like Florida and Indiana can see large benefits from repeating a grade, many parents and teachers still consider that step too punitive.

But according to a paper circulated in June, the upsides of the approach extend in some unexpected directions. In a study of 12 large school districts in Florida, which has had a retention policy related to reading scores for over 20 years, researchers found that third graders made significant gains in scores for both math and reading after being held back. Even more promising, targeted students’ younger siblings also saw larger learning gains than the brothers and sisters of comparable students who weren’t retained.

It’s unclear what feature of Florida’s law led to the positive “spillover effects,” but study co-author Umut Özek told The 74 that families might be responding in an advantageous way to the experience of their older children. “When you get a signal that says, ‘Your kid is not performing at a level that will allow them to be promoted to fourth grade,’ that’s a very clear signal that will likely induce a response from parents.”

11. Asian students in, white families out

“White flight,” as it’s usually understood, refers to the phenomenon of working- and middle-class white families decamping from inner cities in the 1960s and ‘70s as a response to increased crime, deteriorating local economies, and growing numbers of African American residents. It’s a hotly contested phenomenon, but many in the education policy world blame it for contributing to school segregation and shrinking the tax base of urban school districts.

This year, superstar researcher Leah Boustan applied the concept to a different setting. A student of prior racial migrations at the city level, the Princeton economist studied the movement of Asian-American students into 152 California school districts, all of them suburban and relatively affluent. The sizable growth over the decades of the early 21st century appeared to generate its own version of white flight — more specifically, for every Asian student who enrolled in local schools, 1.5 white students left.

The departures weren’t correlated with any other demographic changes. But accompanying survey evidence convinced Boustan and her collaborators that they also likely weren’t triggered by racial animus. Instead, they pointed to white parents’ wariness of academic competition with Asian-American kids, who out-achieve other student categories in virtually every academic metric.

“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do,” Boustan said in an interview with The 74. “In relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”

12. Extracurricular activities show large racial gaps

The most significant education development of 2023 may well have been the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case that prohibited the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The end of affirmative action as we’ve known it, occurring just as colleges move en masse away from the use of entrance exams like the SAT and ACT, means that admissions decisions will increasingly be made on the basis of other parts of the application package.

One of those will undoubtedly be extracurricular activities — the menu of clubs, productions, athletics, and volunteer opportunities that high schoolers have learned to embrace in order to be considered well-rounded. But if their aim is to foster diversity while adhering to new legal constraints, colleges might think twice before relying on them too heavily. According to an April study drawing on nearly 6 million college applications from the 2018–19 and 2019–20 admissions cycles, participation in extracurriculars is surprisingly race-specific. White, Asian-American, and wealthy students, along with those attending private high schools, reported engaging in many more activities than their African American, Latino, American Indian, and low-income classmates. The activities they choose also tend to feature more leadership roles and confer more honors, both of which could help win a university slot.

If race, test scores, and extracurriculars are reduced in prominence, however, it’s difficult to say what will take their place. Separate campaigns have been waged against the use of admissions essays, which have been found to favor wealthier students, and undergraduate letters of admission, which often leverage social capital that disadvantaged kids don’t have. In the end, admissions officers might be left throwing darts at the wall.

13. Flexible pay has unintended consequences

The Act 10 legislation, passed in 2011 by Wisconsin Republicans, ignited one of the most furious school reform controversies of its era. By stripping teachers of the right to collectively bargain over salary schedules and benefits, then-Gov. Scott Walker dealt a massive blow to teachers’ unions, perhaps the most influential progressive force in state politics. It was also a provocation that some credit with catalyzing the revived organizing movement of the last half-decade, which has seen a rash of teacher strikes and renewed hostility to other planks of the reform agenda.

In a study published in the education journal Education Next, Yale economist Barbara Biasi looked at the transformative effects of Act 10 on teacher labor markets, which suddenly became much more flexible as schools could opt to pay different salaries to teachers on the basis of either career tenure or classroom performance. That had some positive effects for individual districts: Younger, more effective teachers were able to win large pay increases by moving to areas where their lack of seniority wasn’t held against them.

But the state also saw an unpalatable side effect. In part because younger female teachers are more reluctant than their male counterparts to negotiate aggressively for higher pay, flexible-pay districts also saw a newfound gender wage gap begin to open. Though small on average, Biasi found that the cumulative effect over a teacher’s career could amount to an entire year’s pay.

14. Gifted education does little to increase segregation

The last few years have brought a clash between advocates for educational equity and proponents of gifted education. That battle — over gifted programs’ place in the K–12 portfolio, and whether all kids truly have access to them — has largely played out in major urban districts like New York and San Francisco, where both prestigious exam schools and accelerated learning more generally have been criticized for their disproportionately tiny number of seats offered to Hispanic and African American pupils.

But several studies recently emerged that tell a different story. One, published in Education Next by Williams College economist Owen Thompson, examines the effect of K–6 gifted programs on the racial makeup of kindergarten and elementary classrooms. Examining enrollment information for nearly 47,000 public schools around the United States, Thompson found that the special sections are disproportionately made up of white and Asian students. But because they are so small in scope, they make a negligible impact on the overall demographics of the schools in which they are housed. In fact, eliminating every such program would not significantly change the exposure of different student groups to one another.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that gifted learning opportunities can’t be made available to more kids, however. And a separate paper, by NWEA researchers, suggests that the key to welcoming more English learners and students with disabilities into accelerated classrooms is for states to enact formal mandates related to the provision of gifted services, require districts to maintain their own formal gifted plans, and regularly audit them for compliance. 

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

Being bullied can make your life miserable, and decades of research prove it: Bullied children and teens are at risk for anxiety, depression, dropping out of school, peer rejection, social isolation and self-harm.

Adults can be bullied too, often at a job, and they may suffer just as much as kids do.

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First, let’s define what bullying is: It’s mean-spirited, harmful behavior by someone with more power or status – like a popular kid at school or a supervisor at work – who repeatedly picks on, harasses, irritates or injures a person with less power or status.

Bullying can take many forms – physical, like pushing, shoving and hitting; relational, such as spreading rumors, keeping somebody out of a friend group or just rude remarks; or sexual harassment and stalking behavior.

Sometimes, bullies target someone because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or appearance. People from the LGBTQ+ community, or who are overweight, or with a physical or developmental disability are more likely to be bullied. As a result, they may develop mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and self-harming behavior.

So why do bullies do it?

People learn how to bully others early on through what psychologists call modeling and social learning. This means bullies see other people bullying and they essentially model, or copy, this aggressive behavior.

Media is a big culprit here. When mean or violent conduct is glamorized and gamified in music, video games, TV and movies, bullies will imitate what they see and hear, especially if it seems cool or if it’s rewarded.

Family is also an influence. If children grow up in a home without kindness and closeness, but with plenty of physical punishment and heavy conflict – including parents fighting with each other – then children view this behavior as acceptable. They can go on to treat their peers this way.

A similar thing happens when a kid falls into a group of friends who are bullies; they become more likely to bully others themselves. To say it another way, they bully because they think it makes them look cool in front of their friends.

And bullies bully for lots of other reasons. Some do it because it makes them feel better about themselves when they put other people down. Other bullies discovered that force and intimidation worked for them in the past, so it’s a go-to strategy to get what they want. Still others simply have difficulty controlling themselves and can’t calm down when they’re angry.

And with some bullies, it’s just a way to get ahead. For instance, an adult bully in the workplace may spread an embarrassing rumor about a co-worker to keep a rival from being promoted.

How to handle bullies

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to stop a bully.

If you’re a child or teenager, talk about what has happened with a trusted adult – a parent, teacher, principal or counselor. They will help you figure out your next move. Schools are familiar with this sort of problem; they have policies in place to protect victims of bullying.

If you’re an adult who has been bullied in the workplace, talk to your human resources department or a neutral supervisor who can advise you on next steps. You are also legally protected – employment laws prohibit harassment and discriminatory behavior.

Whatever your age, it’s a good idea to talk to friends or family members who may not be involved in the incident but who will offer support. Engaging in coping activities – like exercising, or relaxing with a walk – may also help.

You can also use the Crisis Text Line, available 24/7, by texting 741741. Or call the Stop Bullying Now Hotline at 1-800-273-8255; the link also provides international numbers. Or call 988 to reach the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

And a final word: Bullying is not acceptable. It’s not just “kids being kids,” or that you’re “too sensitive.” If a bully is bothering you, don’t try to handle it alone – getting help is the way to get through.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sara Goldstein is a professor of Human Development at University of Delaware.

2023 continued to be a tumultuous time for the nation’s second largest school district, as enrollment, transportation and other issues continued to disrupt Los Angeles Unified post-pandemic.

The year began with a heated battle at LAUSD for special needs services, with parents and advocates slamming the district’s regressive rollout plan. 

LA School Report also talked to parents, teachers and students as Los Angeles district schools saw declining enrollment and growing chronic absenteeism.

Over the past 12 months, our readers learned more about the state of the district through in-depth interviews with accomplished educators.

As Los Angeles schools experienced an eventful 2023, here are our top stories for the year:

Services denied: LAUSD parents and advocates slam weak rollout of plan for students with disabilities – January 10

Special Needs: Los Angeles parent Clenisha Cargin routinely made a round of phone calls to LAUSD school officials trying to get help for her son. Legally entitled to speech therapy and an aide, her son hadn’t gotten these services. Under an April 2022 agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, LAUSD must assess whether Cargin’s son and each of the roughly 66,000 LAUSD students with disabilities are eligible for “compensatory education” to make up for services many were illegally denied during remote schooling. In January, parents and advocates told LA School Report the plan’s rollout has been uneven and confusing. Will Callan reports.

Coliseum Street Elementary teacher named 2023 California Teacher of the Year – April 18

Q&A: Bridgette Donald-Blue, one of California’s Teachers of the Year, has been an educator for over 30 years. After graduating from Howard University and joining Teach for America, she thought she would go on to law school, but found herself falling in love with teaching. She’s not only proud of what the award says about her life’s passion, but her school too. Read Cari Spencer’s full interview.

LAUSD magnet school establishes new identity through inspiring mural – August 8

Los Angeles: Valley Oaks Center for Enriched Studies opened in the midst of the pandemic on an old campus in the Sun Valley area. In an effort to foster a more welcoming environment and establish the school’s presence in the community, VOCES unveiled a new mural to inspire students to pursue their dreams through a variety of programs and resources. In August, Principal Ivania Holodnak shared with LA School Report the importance of the mural and what it meant for the film and television focused school. Bryan Sarabia had the story.

Enrollment continues to decline in LAUSD, a trend many large public school districts are also experiencing – September 12

Enrollment: Between the harsh winds of a hurricane and the hectic second week of school, LAUSD officials were hoping for one thing this school year — higher enrollment. Declining enrollment has been a trend that extends from San Diego to Chicago to New York City, and can spell big financial trouble for school districts. Nova Blanco-Rico and Balin Schneider took a closer look at the numbers.

As the new school year begins, hopes are high for LAUSD pre-K for four-year-olds – September 26

Pre-Kindergarten: With the post-pandemic effects on learning now fully realized, LAUSD put its faith in a new universal transitional kindergarten program for 4-year-olds, attracting thousands of young learners to the system. But was it enough to address what’s really at stake for young learners in the future? Charles Hastings had the story.

LAUSD school bus GPS tracking a great idea but not always accurate, parents and drivers say – October 3

Transportation: LAUSD launched a new GPS feature this spring for parents to track children’s school bus routes, in hopes of sharing real-time updates — but there have been glitches. In October, parents and bus drivers told LA School Report the inaccuracies caused confusion. Corinne Smith took a deeper look at the issue.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho visits homes of chronically absent students – October 24

Chronic Absenteeism: With a high rate of chronically absent students, LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho visited families struggling with the problem during the district’s fifth iAttend event. “They don’t like to catch the bus in the morning because of their anxiety,” said Daisy Morales, a mother of four whose kids averaged 64 absences. In October, Morales told LA School Report how she struggled to get her kids to school after they missed the bus, but after the district intervened, began attending classes more regularly. Here’s what they told Erick Trevino.

Q&A: LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin talks about his Congressional run – November 7

Q&A: Nick Melvoin has accomplished much in his 38 years of public service. Now he is one of 16 candidates running in the March 4, 2024, to represent California’s 30th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. “There are a few things that set me apart, one is my age … and I think it is important for the next generation to take the helm,” Melvoin told LA School Report. “I think we are more inclined to work together to solve problems because we have seen the consequences of the failure to solve problems.” Read Katie VanArnam’s full interview.

The fight over charters in LAUSD school buildings: What’s really happening – November 13

Charter Schools: LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho is on the verge of issuing a new policy that could ban charters from nearly half the district’s school buildings. But experts told LA School Report the fight is really about dwindling enrollment and the budget challenges facing the city. “If the district passes a policy that makes it more difficult to operate for charter schools…That’s good for the district,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. Ben Chapman reports.

The results of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are out, and the United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills. Across the globe, math performance declined significantly.

Unfortunately, these low scores mask a more troubling fact: Our country’s math performance has been mediocre for 40 years — a failure to mathematically thrive across much of the U.S. The nation will, if the past is a predicate for the future, continue to lag behind the rest of the world in the understanding and application of math, skills that are critical for citizens and employees.

But none of this is inevitable. Consider one aspect of the recent PISA exam, which illustrates why tangible math learning is so crucial. In contrast to other tests, PISA assesses math in the context of real-world problems and situations. Students must demonstrate an ability to use mathematical reasoning to make purchasing decisions, plan routes around a city and interpret data about smartphone use. Math is grounded in practical applications, and the test itself underscores why math matters to most students and adults. These are skills that parents want schools to focus on, but PISA suggests they are not.

The stakes are exceptionally high. As education leaders, if we turn away from these results, we become complicit in casting away a generation of children who lack the math foundation necessary to function in and contribute to society. All students can learn math; now is the time for policymakers, district leaders and curriculum developers to work together to make math more relevant, engaging and rigorous for all U.S. students.

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we’re investing over $1 billion working with our partners over the next 10 years to transform K-12 math classrooms. One of the key areas we’re focusing on is improving instructional materials. We believe that there are tools at our disposal — right now! — to reverse the disheartening trend made so clear in the PISA results.

Strong, research-based curriculum, for example, is one of the most important tools an educator has at her disposal. But it too often is of low quality and fails to ask students to apply math to complex, real-world problems, as PISA does. In places like California and Texas, which each will undergo a statewide process within the next two years to determine which curriculum schools can select, only 33% and 19% of teachers, respectively, report using high-quality curricula once a week. Nationally, according to the Center for Education Market Dynamics, a foundation partner, only 36% of sampled districts selected exclusively high-quality math curriculum for elementary school, and about 22% for middle school. As they said in an op-ed in The 74, “this means roughly 7.6 million K-8 students live in districts where the math curriculum is not high-quality, not rated or not known publicly.” States and districts can adopt better curricula and aligned supplemental materials.

Math can be more relevant and motivating. A whopping 45% of teachers responding to a RAND survey this year indicated that their students fail to create any real-world math assignments or projects that are valued by people outside their classroom. Math for math’s sake is important and indeed beautiful. But, at the same time, materials can and should encourage students to use math in real-world situations, such as designing a budget, planning a trip and exploring issues like income inequality. Materials should help students see that math is critical for their future employment, citizenship and broader life in a global ecosystem.

Fixing this is within our control.

In fact, it is already happening. One of our longtime partners, Illustrative Mathematics, provides openly licensed K-12 core curriculum and aligned professional learning that engages students with real-world problems to help them learn math. Every lesson incorporates instructional routines in which students learn concepts and procedures by sharing their thinking. For example, Math Talks build fluency by encouraging students to rely on what they know about structure, patterns and other math concepts and talk out their reasoning as they solve practical problems — whether that’s identifying the nutritional value of foods or computing how many tiles are needed to cover a bathroom floor. This and other high-quality curriculum should be the norm across the country. 

Much has been made of the possibilities of artificial intelligence for students, but it has real power to help math teachers. Teaching Lab, a leading provider of educator coaching, created IMScaffold, an AI-powered tool that math teachers can use to create grade-level prompts and tasks unique to a student’s needs. For example, if a student requires a refresher lesson on adding fractions, the teacher can ask IMScaffold to design a 15-minute lesson that is aligned with, and maintains the rigor of, the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. It appears instantly for the teacher to use in real time. In this way, AI can provide teachers insight into the right next step, tailoring the student experience and saving the educator time. 

All students can and must learn math. But stagnant and declining outcomes on PISA and other assessments emphasize the need for urgency and action from education leaders to transform the math classroom to one where students are motivated and engaged and teachers are supported. Without this transformation, their future success and the nation’s economy is in real jeopardy. Everyone has a role to play. Let’s get to work. 

Correction: The United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills.

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

Bob Hughes is K-12 director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Los Angeles Unified has enacted a targeted hiring freeze and is considering closing or consolidating schools as it faces the loss of federal pandemic aid and declining enrollment, superintendent Alberto Carvalho said in an interview last week.

Carvalho, who nearly two years ago assumed leadership of the nation’s second largest school district, said LAUSD is in relatively good financial standing and that enrollment declines are slowing.  

But, he said, California’s most populous city “is not out of the woods yet” when it comes to tight budgets and closing schools.

The headwinds facing Los Angeles public schools are by no means unique to that city. Districts around the country are facing the expiration next year of more than $190 billion in federal funds meant to help schools remain open during the pandemic and aid in the recovery of students.

Carvalho, who previously served as Miami’s superintendent, said LA Unified has avoided the fiscal “Armageddon” he warned of more than a year ago. 

He said a reorganization of the district conducted over the past two years, to streamline school support services has netted LAUSD “dozens of millions” in savings, putting the system in good financial shape. 

But the district is still developing a plan for roughly 1,800 teachers, counselors and other staffers hired during the pandemic whose salaries have been paid for using the one-time federal aid. Carvalho said “strategically essential positions” will be kept. “We need to ask the question,” he said. “Is the need still there and is this the right position? 

To make up for the end of federal aid, he said, LAUSD has imposed a targeted hiring freeze, deciding on a case-by-case basis which of the employees who leave their jobs to replace.  

It will use the funds from jobs that are not filled to pay for those federally funded jobs it decides to keep. 

“We’re going to bank on [attrition] as a key solution” to make up for the loss of federal aid, he said.

A more complicated challenge now facing Los Angeles schools is a historic enrollment decline which has been ongoing for decades but was exacerbated by the pandemic.

While many school districts have experienced large enrollment declines since the pandemic began, several factors make the declines in Los Angeles more dramatic.  

First, Carvalho said, rising housing costs have forced many families to leave Los Angeles. The average price of a single-family home there is now nearly $1 million, according to Zillow, up by more than a third from five years ago. Local incomes have not kept up with rising costs.  

“The high cost of living has, over the years, pushed a lot of families out,” said Carvalho. “It’s not a function of individuals leaving the school system going to private schools or going to charter schools.”

Enrollment in LA schools for pre-K through twelfth grade has fallen from 566,604 in the 2012-2013 school year to 422,276 in the 2022-2023 academic year.

But Carvalho said the exodus may be slowing. Figures kept by the district show the number of students enrolled this year was down about two percent from the previous year.

The city’s new Universal Transitional Kindergarten program has helped bolster enrollment, Carvalho said. LAUSD stats show 6,471 students are now enrolled in the district’s pre-K programs, up from 5,687 in 2021.  

Whether this is enough students to keep each of the city’s schools in operation, the superintendent said, remains an open question. 

The district is not “making decisions specific to consolidation or closure of schools based on a dire financial position,” said Carvalho.

But, at some point, shrinking schools may become too small to function, he said.   

“It has nothing to do with the finances,” Carvalho said. “It’s actually something to do with the type of offerings we provide our students. At a certain point a very small, secondary schools cannot offer the elective programs that kids need.”

“It certainly is a tool in the toolbox,” Carvalho said of closing or consolidating schools. “But it’s one that is used as a measure of last resort, and we are nowhere near that point.”    

Still the district is looking at high schools with less than 300 students as possible candidates for closure or consolidation, he said.  

High schools that enroll fewer than 300 students struggle to muster a variety of classes and extracurricular activities to adequately serve their communities, said Carvalho, adding that LAUSD has few schools of that size, and is still developing a plan for them.   

Decisions to close or consolidate schools are almost always unpopular. But for Los Angeles, it’s not a question of if, but when, said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education.

“People have these traditional attachments, but schools that serve 1,000 kids do much better than two schools serving 500 kids a piece,” Noguera said. “The challenge will be, not just to shrink, but to shrink and get better simultaneously, so people don’t feel like they’re losing.”

Noguera said he’s encouraged by steps he’s seen Carvalho take, but declining enrollments and the need to make academic progress systemwide are still the big issues facing the district.   

On the academic front, Carvalho said gains in math scores on state and national exams show the district is making progress. He also pointed to rising attendance rates as a sign LAUSD is on the upswing. The system’s average daily attendance has risen from 83% to 93% during his tenure, Carvalho said. 

The superintendent also provided a few additional updates on the district in his exclusive interview with LA School Report:

• Carvalho said he has created a draft version of a controversial, new policy to limit the colocation of charter schools in certain buildings, and that next month he will present the policy as a recommendation to the district’s board.  
  
• He said LAUSD is working on a plan to reinforce its efforts to promote literacy after state test scores released this fall showed a third straight year of declining rates of reading proficiency. 
  
• Carvalho, who previously turned down an offer to lead New York City’s school system, said he intends to stay on as LA’s education boss for the foreseeable future. “There will be no additional superintendency for me… beyond Los Angeles,” he said.“There’s something to be said about stable, sustainable leadership.”

The Portuguese immigrant, who worked his way up from washing dishes and stints of homelessness to become one of the nation’s most celebrated educators, has already done much to earn the gratitude of his adopted home on the west coast, said Ana Ponce, executive director of GPSN, a local advocacy group.

“He’s earned the respect of educators and families,” said Ponce. “We’re all rooting for his success.”

High-achieving Black, Hispanic and low-income students who pass algebra in the 8th grade — a feat that can set children up for success in college and beyond — still end up taking far fewer advanced high school math courses than their white, Asian and more affluent peers, new research shows.

Outcomes are starkly different for those who have that opportunity. High-achieving Black, Hispanic and lower-income students who do gain access to advanced math classes in high school have better academic outcomes across multiple measures: stronger high school graduation rates, higher GPAs and greater college admission and persistence rates. They were also more likely to attend a highly selective college and earn more STEM credits there, a pathway to landing lucrative jobs in those fields.

Just Equations and The Education Trust released their report Thursday. Together, they analyzed eight years of data following 23,000 ninth graders from 900 private and public schools throughout the country, information collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. The study group was tracked through high school and college starting in 2009. 

Both Ed Trust and Just Equations advocate for educational equality with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved. Earlier research cited in the report shows Black, Hispanic and impoverished students, regardless of their capabilities, are less likely to be assigned AP math courses, enroll in STEM majors or attend top-tier colleges than their wealthier, white or Asian peers.

“This study challenges the notion that access to advanced math courses is purely the byproduct of talent and academic achievement,” said Melodie Baker, national policy director at Just Equations. “Our analysis confirmed that all too often, factors such as race, wealth and privilege — rather than students’ aptitude and proficiency — can be hidden prerequisites for access to courses that lead to STEM and college opportunity.”

While 46% of high-achieving Asian students, 19% of white students, and 29% of students from high socio-economic backgrounds took college-level AP/International Baccalaureate calculus by the end of high school, just 10% of Black, 15% of Latino and 11% of lower-income high-achievers did the same. 

For this high-achieving, underrepresented group, taking advanced math courses in high school also appears to level out racial and income disparities in high school graduation rates: 99% of Asian and white students, 98% of Black students, and 96% of Latino and lower-income students graduated in four years. Four-year high school graduation rates declined among all high-achievers who did not take advanced math classes and gaps opened up along racial and socioeconomic lines, although the drop in graduation rates was starkest for Asian students and least-felt by affluent students.

“We know that it is so important for students to feel engaged and that their learning experiences are relevant,” said Ivy Smith Morgan, EdTrust’s director for P12 research and data analytics. “What this conjures for me is the anecdotes about students who are so smart but stop paying attention in class because they are not challenged. They are not getting the opportunities that align with their ability.”

Smith Morgan noted U.S. students’ performance in mathematics as compared to their peers in other countries has been a highly scrutinized topic for years, with last week’s release of the latest PISA scores showing unprecedented 13-point declines for American students and an average 15-point loss globally. The U.S. now ranks 26th in its math scores and Smith Morgan said a failure to mine students’ talents will have dire implications for the economy. 

“What we are talking about is losing a future workforce with the skills, training and technical knowledge we need to fill all of the STEM jobs that will exist — not the ones we have right now, but the ones we have not even thought of yet,” she said. “We are shooting ourselves in the foot.”

The study notes the disparity in opportunity starts well before students enter high school: Just 24% of Black students, 34% of Latino students, and 25% of students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds took Algebra I or higher in eighth grade, compared with 39% of white children, 64% of their Asian peers and 57% of students from higher income backgrounds. 

“Anyone who is paying attention knows that our mathematics education systems are deeply inequitable,” said David Kung, director of strategic partnerships at The Charles A. Dana Center in Austin. “Black, brown and poor students get shafted when it comes to access, teaching and advising.”

The Dana Center, which seeks to ensure all students have equitable access to excellent math and science education, has been working with several states across the nation as part of its Launch Years Initiative to revamp mathematics curriculum, making equity and student interest a top priority.  

“This report is another reminder that whenever there are decisions to be made —  to take algebra in 8th grade, to enroll in an advanced math class, to apply to college, to choose a STEM path — equity gaps open,” Kung said. “We must reform our systems so those critical transitions are smoother, especially for students from groups we have historically under-supported.”

The new study found, too, that high-achieving underserved students who took more challenging high school mathematics coursework often had math teachers who established clear goals and school counselors who set high standards. Such positive influences may have aided in their success. 

Researchers say 74% of Black and 81% of Latino high-achieving students who were enrolled in advanced high school mathematics courses went on to follow a standard process of getting into and staying enrolled at college after high school. 

Not so for those who did not: Only 58% of Black students and 53% of Latino high-achieving students who did not take these classes had that same outcome. Results were similar for students from lower-income backgrounds: 77% of those who took advanced math courses experienced standard college enrollment and persistence versus 53% who did not take more challenging courses.  

The study showed Black and Latino high-achieving students who took advanced math courses in high school had better first-year GPAs in college: roughly 0.5 points higher. Lower income students had a 0.6-point gain. 

EdTrust and Just Equations recommends Congress support and incentivize state and district leaders to greatly expand access to challenging coursework in all topics, including math. 

They said, too, that the government should increase funding for whole-child support services that would allow districts to hire an appropriate number of well-trained restorative justice coordinators, school counselors, psychologists and nurses. 

States and districts should also boost professional development efforts and coaching with the goal of reducing bias and incorporating anti-racist mindsets. 

They can also automatically enroll students in higher-level math courses, like the Dallas school system, which moved from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. The entire state of Texas followed that example: Gov. Abbott, earlier this year, signed a bill that requires the automatic enrollment of children in advanced math based on their test scores, not on a recommendation. 

The Commit Partnership, a Dallas-based nonprofit focused on education, applauded the move. Chelsea Jeffery, its chief regional impact officer, said she looks forward to other districts doing the same, not only changing their policies but providing students with the support necessary to graduate high school ready for college and the workforce. 

“We celebrate Dallas ISD for their innovative approach to this critical subject area and to policymakers for passing legislation that will benefit our students and community,” she said.

The study classified a student as high-achieving if they passed — with an A, B, or C — Algebra I or higher in middle school. Others who made the cut scored in the highest one-fifth on a math assessment given to students in ninth grade. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations, The Education Trust, The Charles A. Dana Center and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

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

A new report finds that a parent-led tutoring effort in Oakland produced similar gains in reading for young students as instruction from classroom teachers — a nod that could fuel similar efforts in other districts. 

“The more the children know you and trust you, the more they’re willing to engage in what you’re trying to teach them,” said Susana Aguilar, one of The Oakland REACH’s “literacy liberators.” 

The evaluation, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, calls community members “untapped pools of talent” in the effort to improve student achievement.

Oakland Unified’s model, said researcher and lead author Ashley Jochim, also has broader implications for how schools teach basic skills in reading and math. For too long, she said, one teacher has been responsible for modifying lessons to meet the needs of 25 or more students. 

“This model is clearly failing students and puts extraordinary demands on educators, especially coming out of the pandemic,” she said. “Oakland’s tutoring model shows what’s possible when we create the conditions needed to individualize instruction based on students’ learning needs.”

‘How far could they go?’ 

The Oakland REACH mobilized to improve literacy instruction before the pandemic and joined with the local NAACP to push the district to adopt a research-based reading program.

The group criticized the quality of remote learning during COVID. But then it created its own online “hub” to focus on structured reading skills and saw promising results. After five weeks of virtual summer learning, some students gained as much as they would from two months of in-person reading instruction, data showed. 

“We saw these big gains. You can’t ignore that,” said Lakisha Young, the organization’s CEO. “We had to ask, ‘What does this look like for a paraprofessional who is appropriately trained, trusted and coached? How far could they go?’ ”

The group expanded to serve students during the school year, and last year, received a significant boost from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who donated $3 million to the organization. Its work, and its relationship with the district, has evolved, Young said, from “demanding to building.”

In statement to The 74, a district spokesman said its literacy efforts “have only been amplified and supported by partnering with a dedicated organization such as The Oakland REACH.”

As a bridge between the district and the predominantly Black and Hispanic community it serves, The Oakland REACH played a key role in finding a diverse mix of tutors that included a retired educator, a former security guard and several stay-at-home moms. 

“It’s personal to me because my daughter had to go through the process of long-distance learning,” Aguilar said in a video released with the report. “I completely relate to all the challenges that parents had.”

The prospective tutors completed an eight-week fellowship in which FluentSeeds, a nonprofit trainer, taught them how to implement the district’s phonics-based early reading curriculum. But their preparation — the topic of a separate report  — was carefully designed to address the challenges facing Black, Hispanic and lower-income job candidates who are juggling work and family life. The sessions included child care, meals, transportation and a $1,675 stipend.

The fellowship also gave tutors space to discuss personal experiences with literacy instruction — their own and their children’s.

“Their personal struggles,” according to the paper, “deepened their sense of commitment to students’ literacy needs.” 

In total, The Oakland REACH recruited 46 parents and other community members to tutor small groups of K-2 students who were reading below grade level. In a survey, about a third of the tutors said they felt somewhat or very unprepared to teach young children when they started, but grew more skilled with the help of ongoing coaching from FluentSeeds.

Aguilar now works at Manzanita Community School, where her daughter Aliah is in fourth grade. She described the school, which has a mostly low-income Black, Hispanic and Asian student population, as a “melting pot.”

“When you’re serving underprivileged communities,” she said, “kids are more receptive if they see people who look like them.” 

Uneven results, ‘budget challenges’ 

The program has made its greatest impact in kindergarten. From fall 2022 to spring 2023, tutored students gained nearly a full extra year of learning on the widely used iReady assessment, compared to those who did not receive tutoring, according to the report. But there was little to no difference in outcomes between tutored and non-tutored students in first and second grade.

Those results are not unique to Oakland. Another recent study on a virtual early literacy tutoring model called OnYourMark found minimal impact in second grade. The lack of growth could be due to a mismatch between tutoring and testing, said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University professor who leads a nationwide tutoring research center and conducted the OnYourMark research.

If tutors are focusing on skills that an assessment doesn’t measure, “we won’t see learning gains, even if they have them,” she said.

Overall, however, she described Oakland’s tutoring effort as a “proof point” that shows how well-trained community members with credibility among families “can meaningfully improve student learning.”

But there’s still room for improvement. Many tutors were drawn to the position because they care about Oakland students. But the current $16- to $18-per-hour pay rate is a barrier to recruiting more tutors and keeping them, Jochim wrote. 

Aguilar, a single mother, said that while being a tutor is “meaningful work,” it doesn’t pay enough to replace the salary she used to make at her previous human resources job in  Silicon Valley. She makes ends meet by delivering groceries for Instacart and recruiting students for a local college.

The district’s “ongoing budget challenges” make the tutoring initiative a “promising, yet still-fragile set of reforms,” Jochim wrote. In March, the board considered cutting the positions, but rejected the plan. The district has relied on federal relief funds to help pay the tutors and is “working out funding for these important positions” once those funds expire next year, a spokesman said.

The recent results should prompt Oakland to stop funding “less effective approaches” to tutoring and invest in what works, Loeb said. “This model is a good example of how community groups can provide these resources.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

Math achievement tumbled for American 15-year-olds between 2018 and 2022, according to the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam comparing academic performance in the U.S. against that of dozens of other countries. In a pleasant surprise, however, their reading and science skills appear to be undiminished over the last four years. 

Announced Tuesday morning, the scores represent more proof of steep learning loss in math during the pandemic and its aftermath. But they also provide the first international context for COVID’s impact on American students, indicating that many students abroad — including in countries that have often ranked among the world’s top performers — may have experienced even worse setbacks.

Eighty-one countries participated in PISA in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the intergovernmental authority that administers the test. Among that group, average scores fell by 15 points in math and 10 points in reading since 2018, while science scores were not significantly changed. 

As in several other standardized tests conducted since COVID’s emergence in 2020, those declines are unprecedented; over 20 years of PISA testing, average math and literacy scores have never moved by more than four or five points between consecutive assessments. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters on Monday that many developed countries across Europe and Asia “suffered tremendously” from the learning disruptions triggered by the pandemic. 

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” Carr said. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

But while American students’ 13-point drop in math fell within the international average, their relative stasis in PISA’s other testing domains of reading and science (minus-one and minus-three points since 2018, neither of which is considered statistically significant) provide surprisingly positive news. Indeed, while U.S. scores slumped across all three subjects, our rankings among PISA participants actually improved since 2018: From 29th in mathematics to 26th, from eighth in reading to sixth, and from 11th in science to 10th.

Those shifts in relative performance result from even greater COVID-era slides in other countries. Among those seeing especially large reversals in math were Iceland (minus-36 points), Norway (minus-33 points), Poland (minus-27 points), and Slovenia (minus-24 points). Fifteen-year-olds in Finland, which has built an international reputation for top performance on exams like PISA, saw a 30-point drop in reading skills over the last four years. 

In a somewhat curious development, the index of four Chinese provinces where students have traditionally taken the PISA (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang) did not report scores for the 2022 round. In previous administrations of the test, those students yielded the top scores on all three subjects — although those results were also criticized by international observers for allegedly being “cherry-picked” from China’s wealthiest and highest-achieving areas.

According to the OECD, the four provinces participated in the 2022 test, but their performance couldn’t be measured because schools were closed during the intended data collection period. Impressive scores were posted by students in the Chinese jurisdictions of Hong Kong and Macau, though these will likely also be considered atypical of learning across that country’s vast mainland. 

Among PISA’s top-scoring nations in math were the East Asian participants like Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Korea. Singapore, Ireland, Estonia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan boasted the strongest readers.

The scores will undoubtedly be used as an indicator of how learning was affected by COVID. Two-thirds of participating countries reported that they closed schools for longer than three months for the majority of their students during the pandemic. Students in countries that experienced briefer periods of closure did see smaller drops in math scores, the OECD reported, but Carr said the statistical correlation was “weak.”

A wealth of research conducted since 2020 has drawn close connections between virtual learning and academic damage. But prior standardized testing releases, such as that of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have shown that states that kept schools open also endured significant learning damage, muddying the argument over the ultimate impact of shuttered schools.

Tom Loveless, a researcher who previously headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that America students’ math decline, while significant, was not “enormous.”

“Compared with the other OECD countries, we definitely had schools closed for a longer period of time,” Loveless said. “If you take this as a pre- and post-pandemic indicator, I would have expected a larger drop.”

Other learning observers were more bearish on the Americans’ showing, especially compared with comparable youths in countries far poorer than the U.S. Sal Khan, founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, argued that the international averages concealed significant disparities between the highest- and lowest-achieving test takers.

“The results are disappointing, but not surprising, and consistent with all of the other data we’ve seen post-COVID,” Khan added in an email. “In general, I think the state of math education is pretty bad globally — but there is less of an excuse in wealthy countries like the United States.”

The findings also raise the question of how school leaders in the United States and other countries will boost student performance in the long run. Local and state test data in the U.S. confirm that many students are still performing substantially worse than children of the same age four years ago. And with the imminent expiration of federal emergency funds that have underwritten extra staffing and programs over the last several years, authorities will need to move fast to effect a turnaround.

Bob Hughes is the director of K–12 learning programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has funded school reform and improvement programs in the U.S. for over two decades. Last year, the organization announced that it would commit over $1 billion to improve math instruction across the country by making the subject more engaging and relevant to students.

While calling the PISA scores “upsetting news,” Hughes added that schools and school districts could jump-start significant progress in math by employing a host of evidence-based strategies: high-impact tutoring for struggling students, improved professional learning for teachers, and more rigorous curricular materials (the “Singapore math” approach, which has shaped elementary math instruction in that country since the 1980s, has spawned a legion of fans in the U.S. as well). 

“We actually have much better data than we’ve had in the past, and we have a clearer view of what the interventions need to be,” Hughes said. “We just need to get to the business of doing it rather than spending a lot of time wringing our hands.”

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

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Edwin Markham Middle School in the Watts community opened one of LAUSD’s first parent centers last month, part of a larger plan to add over 300 centers in schools across the district. 

The center offers services to help parents support children through school, along with  career workshops and financial stipends.

As the district introduces more digital tools and platforms, such as the parent portal and the AI chatbot program “Ed,” it can be challenging for parents to adjust to new technologies. The centers, especially in elementary schools, will target struggling parents early. 

“We like to explain the resources we have for parents early to get them involved,” said LA Unified’s chief facilities officer Krisztina Tokes. “It just makes sense.”

At the new center’s opening, parents were assured they had a “home” at the school and were encouraged to take advantage of the resources offered. Besides workshops to help promote career, financial, and child-rearing success, parents will also have access to laptops on loan as well as Change Reaction, a new program helping struggling families make ends meet with charitable donations.

“This is a safe place for students, but the support of parents matters,” said Lenya Crowell who helped found the parent center. “We have got to keep our parents updated.”

LAUSD engagement officer Antonio Plascencia Jr. said bilingual programs are offered through parent centers across the district; and that remote sessions would also be offered. 

“Every research study that we have seen from over 50 years shows that when we engage and empower our students and our families we accelerate outcomes,” said Plascencia. 

Mexican-born Markham Middle School principal Juana “Yumi” Kawasaki described how a parent center in the community where she grew up helped her parents acclimate to life in the United States and acquire the know-how to help Kawasaki be successful later in life. 

“I am who I am because of the parent center,” Kawasaki said. 

Charles Hastings is an exchange student from Trinity College Dublin. He is currently a junior at USC; and has written for the University Times, Get a Grip Magazine, and his college publication, Trinity News.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.