Last year, the landscape of K-12 education transformed as a record-breaking 20 states expanded school choice options. However, that is not the only school choice story to come out of 2023. As the nation steps into 2024, a fresh emphasis on innovation has emerged, along with new options for families. This is particularly true within the realm of microschooling.

Microschooling is an education model that is small by design — typically with 15 or fewer students of varying ages per class. It fosters a personalized and community-centric approach to learning that is especially effective in addressing the unique educational needs of diverse student populations. Programs like Education Savings Accounts are helping to fuel these microschools.

ESAs are instrumental in democratizing education. By providing direct funding to parents, they empower families with the financial means to make educational decisions that best suit their children while helping schools outside the conventional system truly flourish.

For example Black Mothers Forum Microschools, a growing network in Arizona that focuses on culturally nuanced and inclusive education, is thriving in large part because of the state’s ESA program. It serves over 70,000 students statewide in nearly 400 learning environments and makes innovative schools like Black Mothers Forum Microschools far more accessible to families, while inspiring parents to explore the full breadth of education options available for their children.

Opening doors for such exploration is at the heart of the school choice ethos. Whether for a microschool, traditional public school, public magnet school, public charter school, private school, online school or home school, the more options a family can pursue, the better. These will be on full display during National School Choice Week, an annual nationwide celebration hosted by the National School Choice Awareness Foundation in collaboration with Navigate — The National School Choice Resource Center.

For National School Choice Week, our team is partnering with microschools and organizations across the country to celebrate these new options. For example, Positively Arts Microschool will host a school fair in Nevada to showcase microschools and other choice options. Meanwhile, Microschool Florida will host a fun-filled microschool/hybrid/homeschool showcase event with guest speakers, vendors and activities. And in Georgia, Black Microschools ATL will recognize the work parents and volunteers do to make these options possible.

National School Choice Week is, however, far more than just a packed calendar of unique events and activities. The week serves a vital dual purpose: raising awareness about the critical need for increased educational options and providing practical, jargon-free online resources for parents. With 57% of families saying they will likely be searching for new schools for their children in 2024 and 64% wanting more information about how to exercise their choices, the week acts as a crucial juncture for empowering parents with the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions.

A fundamental shift is taking place in education, and National School Choice Week is shining light on every possible option. As more than 27,000 schools and organizations celebrate all that has been accomplished in school choice this past year and embrace this new era of educational innovation in microschooling, ESAs and other school choice programs, the future beams bright with promise. Everyone who supports greater opportunity in education – –from parents to grandparents, educators, advocates, organizational and community leaders to state policymakers– – should recommit to doing all they can to keep this momentum going in 2024 so that, one day, all families will have the full breadth of educational freedom they so rightfully deserve.

Andrew Campanella is chairman of the National School Choice Awareness Foundation and Navigate — The National School Choice Resource Center.

A November 2023 report debunking “The Myth of the Quick Learner” prompted an outcry of disbelief online and led to a closer look at the original paper, “An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate,” published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal.

The March 2023 paper asserted:

We found students to be astonishingly similar in estimated learning rate…. One may be tempted by everyday experience to suggest there is obvious wide variability in how fast different people learn…. Such differences may be alternatively explained not as differences in learning rate but as differences in the number of quality learning opportunities individuals experience…. Thus we can gain insight into whether student competence differences derive more from environmental opportunity differences or student-inherent learning-rate differences.

When I first read the above, I instantly thought of one of my own “everyday experiences.” When my sons were 8 and 12 years old, I won a private coding tutorial at my daughter’s preschool auction. I had intended it for my oldest son, a budding artist. I thought he might enjoy creating computer animations. At the last minute, I asked if my second grader could sit in.

The lesson lasted an hour. At the end, the instructor called me over and whispered, “Your older son understood everything I said. Your younger one really got it!”

My impression, as a result, was that in this particular field, my younger child had greater aptitude and thus learned faster. (He went on to teach himself multiple programming languages and began working professionally as a programmer in middle school.)

Yet, according to the study, having a “knack for math” or a “gift for language” is a myth.

To prove this, the researchers employed a methodology that included teaching a cross-section of students a new skill via “educational technologies (which) provide favorable learning conditions … including intelligent tutoring systems, educational games and online courses.”

Their conclusion was that learning is not a matter of faster cognition on the part of some students, but “differences in the number of quality learning opportunities individuals experience.”

This ran counter to my aforementioned “everyday experience.” My sons lived in the same household, suggesting few “environmental opportunity differences,” not to mention the same exposure to “quality learning opportunities.” Furthermore, if our household was indeed privileged to include an above-average number of “quality learning opportunities” that enabled my younger son to pick up coding at an accelerated rate, shouldn’t my first child — being four years older — have been exposed to a higher number of them and thus able to learn coding faster than his little brother? 

To answer such a question for any parent who has raised more than one child, the study’s authors clarify:

This debate comes down to whether learning rate per practice opportunity is relatively constant across individuals or whether it varies substantially…. Bloom suggested that “most students become very similar with regard to … rate of learning … when provided with favorable learning conditions”…. 

In other words:

Learners in more favorable conditions learn at a more rapid rate than those in less favorable conditions.

Perhaps, even though we thought we had raised our two sons in a very similar manner, our oldest — rather than benefiting from an extra four years of “quality learning opportunities” — had instead been the victim of our four years of amateur parenting. His younger brother, on the other hand, reaped the benefits not only of having more experienced parents, but also of being exposed to our interactions with the oldest, thus only appearing to be more advanced because, at age 8, he’d been adjacent to learning opportunities meant for a 12-year-old.

On the one hand, as someone who has spent decades insisting that all American children are capable of doing much more complex work than the system currently offers them, I am thrilled that this study agreed:

Our evidence suggests that given favorable learning conditions for deliberate practice and given the learner invests effort in sufficient learning opportunities, indeed, anyone can learn anything they want. This implication is good news for educational equity — as long as our educational systems can provide the needed favorable conditions and can motivate students to engage in them. 

On the other hand, as someone who has spent decades advocating to unshackle grade level from a child’s age and allow all students to learn at their own pace, I am terrified that the wrong lesson will be drawn from this study. That those who seek to shut down, or, at least, water down, gifted-and-talented classes and accelerated education will use it as proof that there is no such thing as a quick learner; ergo, there is no need for programs that meet their needs. 

When I mentioned my fears to my husband, a math and physics teacher and alum of such NYC “gifted” schools as Hunter College Elementary and Stuyvesant High, he reframed my concerns.

“No,” he said. “This is actually good news. This study proves that students come into a classroom with different levels of background knowledge.”

And differences in “background knowledge,” as the study confirms, is precisely what produces the “differences in learning rate.”

“Background knowledge is something that can be measured,” my husband went on. “Which means it can be used to place students in the appropriate learning level for them.”

If this report is accurate and learning speed is determined purely by what a student already knew coming into a fresh task, then we can ditch labels like “gifted” and “slow” and focus solely on what any individual needs in order to learn. We can provide everyone with the “needed favorable conditions.” We can ensure that all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, can learn the same material. Good news, indeed!

But will that be the lesson that those who make education policy draw? Or will they simply see the headline dismissing the concept of a “quick learner” and double down on the current “one size fits all” schooling model? Will they continue teaching each student in exactly the same way, not taking into consideration “background knowledge”… or anything else? That would be bad news. For everybody.

Building Excellent Schools founder Linda Brown (Jim Fields)

The woman who was arguably one of the most influential U.S. educators in decades died on Christmas day in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 81, with her fingernails freshly painted bright red — as always.

That would be Linda Brown, who tried very hard to remain private, and succeeded. To date, there has been just a single obituary that does not truly capture her far-reaching impact.

Why argue that Brown was such a major figure in the American education sphere?

Because Brown and the fellow educators in her tight circle demonstrated that demography does not have to determine destiny. That’s not what we hear from most school superintendents and teachers union leaders, who maintain that while they do their best to counter the headwinds of poverty, success is impossible.

When viewing education data on a macro level, the traditional educators are right: Poverty does drive outcomes. But on a more modest scale, where Brown operated, the many high-performing charter schools she helped launch around the country through her Boston-based Building Excellent Schools, known as BES, showed the opposite.

Just a quick example: At Uncommon Schools, which operates 53 schools in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, 58% of their graduates earn bachelor’s degrees within six years. That is just one percentage point lower than the college graduation rate for students from families in the top income quartile. (Before the pandemic, Uncommon’s college graduation rate reached 72%.)

Yes, it is possible. That kind of success requires relentless innovation and persistence. But it’s possible.

If Brown hadn’t been an advocate for charter schools, which are despised by teachers unions and disliked by many progressives, her passing would have been front page news.

Among charter insiders, she was called the godfather of the top charters, a nickname she both hated and loved. The first time I profiled Brown I called her the grandmother of the elite charters. She hated that and let me know! Clearly, godfather was the better fit.

(You can see and hear Brown talk about her work in a previous interview with The 74)

The BES fellowships designed by Brown started with a year touring top charters and designing your own school, followed by a second year preparing to open that school. Often BES would invest directly in the new school.

“There are so many people who say Linda changed the direction of their lives,” said Brett Peiser, now Uncommon’s co-chief executive officer. “I was one of those people.”

Peiser’s first charter school, which eventually led him to Uncommon, never would have happened without Brown’s tough-minded assistance, he says.

Uncommon is just one charter network of many that Brown had a hand in. And then there are all the high-performing “sister” charter schools that fellows visit to learn their secrets. In that way, they become part of the BES network.

Doug Lemov

Finally, there are the education leaders who rose to national prominence out of that Linda Brown world. Just two examples: former Education Secretary John King (Roxbury Prep) and Teach Like a Champion author Doug Lemov, a pioneer of several charter schools.

“It’s so easy to let school formation be about the ornaments on the tree and not the tree itself,” Lemov wrote when asked about Brown. “Linda was always about the things that mattered — real achievement and learning — and she never accepted cheap substitutes.”

Added Lemov: “It’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to introduce school choice to a place and to make sure there is the proof point of a school with real quality — radically, not just marginally, better — to reset people’s expectations for what is possible. And she did that over and over again.”

At a little more than 5 feet tall, she had furious energy and famous impatience. Each day, after arising around 3 a.m., she would check her phone to see if any new applications for fellowships had arrived.

Linda Brown, founder and executive director of Building Excellent Schools, and David Brown, founder of University Preparatory School in Denver, Colo. at a gathering of charter school leaders at BES’ headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo courtesy of Building Excellent Schools)

Immediately, or just after opening a Diet Coke, Brown would devour the application, still in her PJs.

“If she wanted someone, she would look at her watch and see it was only 4:30 in the morning,” said her BES partner Susan Walsh. “But by 6 a.m. she would call them, even though they might have submitted the application at 11 p.m. the night before. She would tell me, ‘If they are people who do things, they should be up.’ And then, when she talked to them, if she liked what she was hearing, she was simultaneously checking flights to Boston, and would say, ‘I see a 1:30 flight; let’s meet today at 3 p.m.’ She moved!”

Just for context, this was for a fellowship that at the time was hyper-exclusive: the acceptance ratio for the dozen awarded each year was 2 in 100.

One of those applicants surprised by an early morning call was Shantelle Wright. She had never heard of a BES fellowship until reading about it in a brochure and was astonished. You mean they pay you to do what I desperately want to do, she thought. She finished her application at 5 p.m. and, with a prayer, pushed the send button.

Brown read it first thing the next morning. It was a 13-page, single-spaced essay on what Wright wanted to achieve with a Washington, D.C.-based school. “This essay was on fire,” Brown told me in an earlier interview. “She talked about how the vast Black/white school achievement gap is not only a Black person’s problem; this is also a white person’s problem. Why can’t we have decent schools east of the Anacostia (the poorest neighborhoods in the District)?”

At 7 a.m. the next morning, Brown phoned Wright at home. Says she woke her up: When can you be here?

Wright: When do you want me?

Brown: Can you be on the next shuttle to Boston?

Wright made the 9 a.m. shuttle and sat down with Brown for a long talk. At the end, she was offered a fellowship. To complete a long story in a few words, Wright founded the successful Achievement Prep charter in Washington, ended up on the BES board of directors and went on to other education achievements.

Shantelle Wright, founder of Achievement Prep (District of Columbia Public Charter School Board)  

“This woman single-handedly changed the trajectory of my life,” Wright posted after Brown’s death. “I do what I do and fight like I fight because of her. Her belief in what was possible made it reality for me!”

Wright’s story is one of scores like it: fellows who spread out across states to launch their own schools after visiting and studying the best charters in the country.

There are many charter schools around the U.S. that are mediocre, hardly better than nearby traditional schools. And there are some that are worse than the traditional schools and warrant closing. And then there are the charters launched by Brown and BES that usually show what’s possible when true innovation is allowed to blossom.

Said Brown in an interview with The 74:

“Some folks from the West Coast would use terms such as ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’ We looked around after a year and a half and saw that a thousand flowers had bloomed there and, in fact, they weren’t all good. And we thought there it was. If you let a thousand flowers bloom, you’re going to have some bad ones, some good ones, some moderate ones and a few great ones.”

It was in Massachusetts that we were able to say we weren’t going to have a thousand flowers blooming. That being able to start a charter school by meeting Sunday after church, putting together a kind of helter skelter application, getting authorized, and then saying, ‘What do we do now?’ wasn’t enough. Because we were in the business of changing people’s lives, young people’s lives, and in some instances, very young people’s lives. We took that as our mission.

“The other thing we took as our mission was that we could be the people who chose the people to start charter schools. And that was really the birth of Building Excellent Schools.”

Since 2001, BES has selected and prepared more than 2,500 educators who went on to found more than 200 schools in 50 cities and 20 states.

Some examples by region (a long, if still incomplete, list):

• In Massachusetts, BES fellow-founded schools include Salem Academy Charter School, Excel Academy Charter Schools, Phoenix Charter Academy and Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School.

• Sister schools in Massachusetts (schools that fellows visit to study) include Brooke Charter Schools (“Linda always said we should be a BES school,” said founder Jon Clark), KIPP Lynn Academy and Roxbury Prep.

• In Rhode Island, RISE Prep Mayoral Academy.

• In New York City, there’s South Bronx Classical Charter School, Democracy Prep, Leadership Prep, Forte Preparatory Charter School, Legacy College Prep, Creo College Prep, Valence College Prep Charter School, Brooklyn RISE Charter School and BOLD Charter School.

• In Buffalo, there’s Buffalo Creek Academy Charter School, Persistence Preparatory Charter School and Primary Hall Preparatory Charter School.

• In Washington, D.C., there’s Achievement Preparatory Academy.

• In Ohio, the United Schools Network.

• In Nashville, Tennessee, there’s Purpose Preparatory Academy, Nashville Classical Charter School, Intrepid College Prep Schools, Liberty Collegiate Academy and Nashville Prep, which merged to form RePublic Schools. In Memphis, there’s Freedom Preparatory Academy, Memphis Rise Academy, Beacon College Preparatory, Memphis Merit Academy Charter School and Aurora Collegiate Academy.

• In Texas, there’s Compass Rose Academy, Houston Classical Charter School and Etoile Academy Charter School.

• In Chicago, there’s Great Lakes Academy Charter School.

• In Louisiana, Laureate Academy Charter School and Elan Academy Charter School.

• In Indiana, Circle City Prep and Allegiant Preparatory Academy.

• In Nevada, Nevada Rise Academy and Nevada Prep Charter School.

• In California, Equitas Academy Charter School, Mission Preparatory School, Valor Academy (joined Bright Star Schools) and Cornerstone Academy (joined Alpha Public Schools).

• In Colorado, University Prep.

Did Brown’s remarkable achievements reform American public education? Sadly, no.

Despite the consistent gains demonstrated by charter networks such as Uncommon — pushing up students’ college graduation rates to match their high-income peers — traditional education leaders focus more on driving charters out of business than adopting their hard-learned lessons for success.

Even in Massachusetts, which boasts several of the nation’s highest-performing charter schools, the powerful teachers unions there have easily beaten back charter expansion.

But those setbacks would never phase the indomitable Brown, whose feisty disposition, sharp wit and bright red fingernails — freshened regularly by a manicurist who visited her home in her last days — made her someone you never forget meeting. She was too busy hurrying along trying to achieve her lifelong mission: proving that when it comes to educating children, zip codes shouldn’t matter.

“Winning is about academic achievement,” Brown told The 74. And by that standard, Brown, whose family is planning a celebration of her life in August on her birthday, emerged the winner.

The future of education has never looked more creative and promising.

Since making its public debut last year, ChatGPT has profoundly impacted my perspective on generative AI in education. As a writer and former high school English teacher, I experienced an existential crisis watching the chatbot effortlessly generate lesson plans and rubrics — tasks that would have taken me hours to accomplish.

Generative AI allows educators to move beyond traditional learning systems and provide a more responsive, personalized learning experience in which students demonstrate mastery, not just passing grades.

“The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve,” XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. He also formerly worked in the education, business and technology sectors. Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit — a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes.

Changing that rigid system is our mission at XQ. We work with schools and communities to transform high school learning so it’s more relevant and engaging while also preparing students to succeed in college, career and real life. We recently co-convened a two-day summit with the Emerson Collective, in partnership with MeshEd and Betaworks, to bring educators and innovators together in a collaborative space — envisioning ways to use AI technology for transforming high school redesign. Those ideas and insights are available to explore on this beta wiki page.

After a year’s worth of conversations and observations with educators, our AI convening and EdTech Week 2023, there is much to share with educators to help them make the most of the rapidly evolving ecosystem of artificial intelligence. Here are seven AI in education trends to be aware of next year.

1. Professional Development

Throughout 2023, demand for AI professional development for educators remained high. In 2024, we should see an avalanche of districts and schools providing their educators with AI professional development materials to integrate these tools into their teaching practices.

At PSI High, an XQ school in Sanford, Florida, MIT’s STEP Lab’s Sarah Wharton visited to present interesting ways to think about AI in the context of the school.

“We looked at ChatGPT as a possible tutor, personal assistant, creative tool and research assistant,” said PSI High School Coordinator Angela Daniel. “In our PD session, we considered how these cool applications could be used in classrooms as learning tools that accelerate learning and teach the tool simultaneously.”

Daniel explained that teaching students how to use AI is a first step that will change things for students going forward.“But to really get at the heart of that question, we need to understand how generative AI can change our processes and resources right now,” she added. For the team at PSI, that means learning how to use generative AI effectively with ongoing support as the application continues to evolve.

Workshops, online courses and collaborative learning communities are also increasingly popular for providing educators with hands-on experience in AI.

2. Formal AI Policy

Integrating AI in classrooms is no longer a matter of “if” but “how,” making it imperative for educators and policymakers to navigate this terrain with informed and responsible strategies. However, the landscape of AI policy development — especially regarding education — has been dynamic, if not lagging.

The Council of Europe has continued providing critical insights for equitable policy and practice, an area where U.S. schools have been seeking guidance. New York City Public Schools, after initially banning ChatGPT, is now collaborating with academics, experts and school districts in the AI Policy Lab, focusing on issues such as privacy and cybersecurity. Recently, the Biden administration issued an executive order to guide the U.S. in leveraging artificial intelligence. This directive emphasized AI safety, privacy, equity and responsible use, signaling a shift in how AI is integrated into sectors like education. However, it is likely that AI policy in education will develop on a location-by-location basis first.

3. Open-Source Tool Development

Concerns about AI’s ethical implications and biases are sure to shape policy goals. One way to alleviate those pressures is the expansion and increased use of open-sourced tools — programs where the code is accessible and can be modified. The potential for AI to perpetuate biases is significant, however, expect the conversation to focus less on the output of AI tools and more on the kind of data it’s trained on.

Ensuring AI tools are equitable and inclusive goes beyond technical challenges — it requires continuous dialogue among educators, technologists and policymakers. This conversation is essential for addressing data privacy, surveillance and ethical use of student data. With a democratized, open-source marketplace, we could see the market promote open-sourced tools as they grow in popularity.

4. Frameworks for Teaching AI

Before the start of the 2023-24 academic year, educators and schools were waiting for a framework to guide their integration of AI tools. As policy moves forward in 2024 and more institutions develop professional development materials to train and support educators, expect AI curricula frameworks to finally emerge. Frameworks like TeachAI are being developed to guide the integration of AI in education. These frameworks focus on aligning AI applications with educational goals and promoting equitable access to technology, ensuring that AI complements and enhances student learning experiences.

5. AI Literacy, Competencies and Standards

With AI becoming more prevalent in various sectors, including education, there’s a growing need to integrate AI literacy goals and specific learning outcomes into school curricula. This involves teaching students how to use AI tools and understand the basics of AI technology, its applications and its implications.

At the Purdue Polytechnic High School network, an XQ partner with three campuses in Indiana, CEO Keeanna Warren explained how equipping staff and students with the knowledge and skills to harness AI’s potential promotes effective and responsible use of AI to enhance learning experiences.

“We firmly believe that our students’ innate curiosity drives their desire to learn, and we trust their integrity,” she said. “If AI can be used for cheating, it reflects a flaw in the assessment, not in our students’ character.”

The challenge lies in integrating AI literacy into an already packed curriculum. However, the opportunity to foster critical thinking, problem-solving and ethical reasoning skills through AI education is entirely possible.

6. AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Systems

One of the more exciting pathways with AI is that student learning experiences will become more uniquely adaptive and personalized with a quicker turnaround. But creating effective programs requires training these systems on some level of student data -– a delicate balance.

As policy formalizes how student data gets implemented into these programs, AI-driven adaptive learning systems will emerge to shift instructional practice. Expect these programs to appear prominently in assessments and curriculum packages before evolving into real-time feedback systems that can inform teachers even during a lesson.

7. Custom GPTs Built By Educators

While all these advancements are promising and exciting, the marketplace for AI-driven ed tech tools will become incredibly crowded quickly. Recently, OpenAI’s maker space for building and using custom GPTs, which both use and are built by ChatGPT, is guaranteed to be a massive disruptor.

Ty Boyland, school-based enterprise coordinator and music production teacher at Crosstown High, designed a custom GPT. (Crosstown High is another XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee.) Boyland’s students use Dall-E, an AI system for generating images, with GPT-4 to create designs and prints for student-driven projects.

“But how do you create a project combining culinary and music production?” Boyland wondered. His customized GPT pairs XQ’s competencies with Tennessee State Standards to build a new project.

It will be interesting to see what educators create in this space to resolve pain points teachers and schools are intimately familiar with and what gets made to help schools achieve their vision and mission.

The Bottom Line for Educators

From policy shifts emphasizing equity and privacy to the emergence of AI-driven curricula, the transformation is palpable. We’ve seen how AI can revolutionize and disrupt classroom practices, empower educators through professional development, and create inclusive, personalized student learning experiences. But the burgeoning AI ed tech market demands discernment. Educators must navigate this space wisely, choosing tools that genuinely enhance learning and align with ethical standards.

As we enter 2024, educators and stakeholders face a challenge: keeping pace with AI and engaging with it thoughtfully to catalyze educational excellence instead of just putting a new face on old practices. It’s the primary reason we at XQ convened so many educators and innovators into one space— to rethink high school by harnessing the potential of our AI-powered future. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming year.

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. Sign up here.

Edward Montalvo is the senior education writer at The XQ Institute. He was previously Dean of Students at PSI High in Sanford, Florida. (Disclosure: The XQ Institute is a financial supporter of The 74, LA School Report’s parent organization.)

I’m a math guy. I love math, and I teach it to my preschooler every day. At a recent parent-teacher conference, his teachers told me he didn’t recognize numbers and was having a hard time counting. I pointed to the number 20, and he said, “That’s 20.” I pointed at the number 7, and he said, “That’s seven.” Then I pointed to the number 9, and he said, “That’s nine, but if you flip it upside down it could be a six.”

They had given him a test to see how well he recognized numbers, but it hadn’t taken into account the fact that he’s shy. It was a matter of quantitative data versus qualitative data. 

Teachers need to know both about their students, and they gather both types of information every day in their classrooms. But there’s a way to get them even more of this essential data.

Around the country, districts and states are turning to high-impact tutoring, whether as part of the school day or afterschool, to reverse severe declines in reading and math scores since the pandemic. Tennessee has invested a lot of money and resources into this effort, and Illinois is marching down the same path. 

What makes tutoring high-impact? According to the National Student Support Accelerator, it involves substantial time each week, sustained and strong relationships between students and tutors, close monitoring of student knowledge and skills alignment to school curriculum, and oversight to ensure quality interactions.

With feedback from a tutor, teacher/student conversations are more productive because the teacher can speak directly to what the student did well or struggled with during tutoring. Having a tutor’s feedback also means teachers spend less time teasing insights out of data. For example, a single note from a tutor is a much more efficient way of discovering students’ misconceptions than asking a teacher to dig through pages of data.

That’s the quantitative part. But there are also insights into how students are learning, feeling and doing — the qualitative piece — that tutors can gain insight to, and that can help teachers understand their students better.

If a tutor writes a paragraph of observations about each student at the end of every session, the teacher will have useful information to act on in real time. A note such as, “Jimmy struggles to answer questions in front of his peers, but one-on-one he gets nearly every question right” allows a teacher to respond immediately and provides a reason as to why Jimmy might be struggling. A test score doesn’t do either one.

Students who are distracted by something they don’t feel comfortable talking about in class might be willing to share it with a tutor in a small group or one-on-one setting. That information, which a teacher otherwise wouldn’t know about, can be quietly shared.

This sort of feedback is also critically important for the students who are being tutored. Imagine playing basketball, but every time you shoot, your eyes are covered up so you can’t see where your shot goes. You’d probably come to hate basketball pretty quickly, because you wouldn’t know when you were successful. When you failed, you wouldn’t know if you shot an air ball or just got an unlucky bounce off the rim.

That difference between an airball and an unlucky bounce is crucial to becoming better. An airball tells you that you need to make a large adjustment, while the bad bounce tells you you’re right on track and maybe need to adjust only slightly. Students need the same kind of feedback to help them make their academic struggles productive and begin closing in on successful solutions in math.

To provide that feedback, tutors need insight into how students are thinking. For example, a tutor might ask elementary school students different types of questions about this image of animals missing legs.

One of the simplest, which a tutor might ask a kindergartner, is, “How many legs are missing?” Another approach is asking a student to skip-count and get two plus two plus two plus four plus four, which is a second-grade question and answer. A student working at a third-grade level might answer with an expression: three times two plus two times four.

These answers provide insight into how the students are thinking. If they touch every leg, the tutor knows they’re counting. If they touch the animals, they’re skip-counting. This difference gives tutors valuable information that they can share with teachers, who then know what skills students need to work on. Having this clear direction allows teachers more time to focus on building rapport with students. 

Tutors, armed with appropriate curriculum, can not only help students make academic progress; they can offer teachers more of the kind of data that helps them build strong relationships with their class. Students, like all humans, are motivated to work hard for someone they have a connection with, so any solution for improving academic outcomes needs to have relationships at its center.

Dan Tracy is a senior solutions strategist at Mind Education and a former high school math teacher.

Gary Friedman/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students in the City View Community High School ecosystem in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, work on an engineering project at Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance. (Sam Chaltain and Jordan Danelz/Education Reimagined)

The American education system is stuck in an out-moded design for learning. The change the world is going through is accelerating, and we need to radically redesign how we support children and youth. Whether it’s the infusion of artificial intelligence into our world, or the need to solve the existential problems facing our society, our education system needs to address the real question: What do our learners need to succeed today and in the future?

With paradigms shifting all around us, we must reimagine and build a modern, equitable public education system that unleashes the creativity, confidence and compassion of young people to adapt and contribute to a fast-changing, interconnected world.

Real and meaningful change is possible, but it requires a public education system that makes learning relevant and enlivening, supports students’ discovery and pursuit of their purpose, and integrates learning throughout the community.

A 2021 survey of youth by Transcend shows that they aren’t engaged or enthusiastic about school. Only 31 percent reported that what they learn in school is connected to life outside the classroom, and just 35 percent said they are learning about things that interest them. Only 18% of adults considered themselves very career-ready after high school in a 2019 Visions of the Future report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The time to reimagine American education is now.

Our team at Education Reimagined is working with educators, communities, and researchers to reconceive a modern public education system that shifts the brick-and-mortar model of schooling to one built on community-based ecosystems of learning that offer deeply personalized opportunities to all students.

Community-based, learner-centered education is an approach that promises to forge more equitable, meaningful and successful futures for our young people—and, consequently, our society.

To help this vision become reality, we recently launched a research and development acceleration initiative. This effort is designed to catalyze the work of innovative sites, and crystallize the requirements for developing a forward-thinking public education system. This proactive step promises to expedite the evolution of public education, ensuring it meets the needs of the future. Education Reimagined aims to raise more than $20 million by the end of 2024, with the goal of creating five demonstrations of community-based public education systems over the next five years.

At the core of these learning environments is a safe and nurturing home base, where learners develop relationships with advisors and peers who help guide them through their learning process. Learners also access learning hubs that offer vibrant, rich experiences centered on academic learning and skill-building within the context of interests and actual experiences. At field sites, they engage in real-world projects through internships and apprenticeships, allowing them to pursue their interests in a real-world setting.

In this system, children will learn everywhere — in parks, museums, libraries, businesses, homes, schools and civic centers. Learning is tangible, rooted in context, and intrinsically tied to each young person’s interests, aspirations and identity.

This is not a fantasy. Community-based learning ecosystems are already creating new and exciting opportunities for hundreds of students in communities across the nation. A diverse group of learning communities are now leveraging this approach to transform the learning environment. Students in these sites are finding and pursuing passions that have the potential to last a lifetime.

At the brand new City View Community High School ecosystem in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, students’ home base is at the local Chamber of Commerce. They create personalized learning activities, connected to standards, through learning hubs that allow them to dive deeply into subjects that matter to them. Educators and advisors guide these community-based projects and allow students to explore topics at partnering local businesses, which are the field sites. This collaborative approach prepares them for their future, with direct access to careers in robotics, business ownership, fashion and video game programming.

As core to the Columbus Learning Ecosystem Initiative, educators, business executives and community leaders have created interconnected learning opportunities for students to solve real-world problems in ways that prepare them for Ohio’s burgeoning economy. The state’s adoption of 5G has attracted a host of global giants like AWS, Google, Intel and others opening operations there — including manufacturing, data centers and more. Through home bases, learning hubs, and field sites, learners are granted the autonomy to identify problems and work alongside industry professionals to devise solutions.

These schools engage students directly in their interests and provide opportunities to solve real-world problems and create artistic projects they may be doing when they join the workforce. The possibilities are as endless as our imaginations. The enthusiasm and results of this approach are promising, but we need to learn more, which is what our R&D initiative is designed to do.

We have a bold vision. Many may argue it is too ambitious. Still, hundreds of educators and learners are listening and engaging in visionary conversations about the future of U.S. public education. Most exciting, however, is the growing number of educators, policymakers, parents, community leaders and others already making community-based learning ecosystems a reality for more students.

We are at a pivotal moment in public education. If we want the best futures for our students and the world, community-based learning ecosystems must be the path forward. It is in our nature as humans to learn and grow. By supporting our young people in their educational journey, we enable them to transcend our wildest imaginations. This progressive step forward bodes well for all of us.

We know from decades of reform efforts that our education system needs a reboot with a fundamental redesign. It’s time to move forward in partnership beyond school reform to an education revolution. How exciting is that?

Too often, the things that get kids most excited about learning have been stripped out of the school curriculum. No wonder when asked: “how was school”, so many students kids respond “boring.” 

It shouldn’t be that way, and wouldn’t be if arts and music education were more widely available. However, over the past few decades, the curriculum in many schools has been narrowed to focus on core academic subjects – principally math and English language arts, the subjects that are assessed on state exams.  

How did we let this happen, when it was once commonplace for every kindergarten teacher to have a piano in the classroom that she (more often than not) played to get kids engaged? 

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), the narrowing of the curriculum has produced a “state of crisis” in arts education. The AAAS established a Commission for the Arts co-chaired by John Lithgow, the renowned actor. It issued a report entitled Arts for Life’s Sake, to alert the public to the growing absence of arts of education. Sadly, the commission found that the pandemic has “intensified the crisis exponentially.” 

Now, as schools bounce back from the pandemic, research shows that access to arts education could help combat the rise in chronic absenteeism over the past year or two. As John Lithgow told us for our just launched Sparking Equity podcast, arts education “makes students more eager to go to school, it just makes them more educable.”

Distressingly, students of color – and notably Black and Latino students – have been most affected by the evisceration of arts and music education as an integral part of the school curriculum. Schools serving large numbers of these students often have fewer resources, and are more likely to be under pressure to improve test scores in math and literacy. As a result, they are even more likely to eliminate parts of the curriculum that are viewed as an add-on or as a superfluous extra, like the arts. In many cases, they don’t even have arts teachers, and may provide no arts education at all.

The decline has occurred over many years, but many observers attribute much of it to the No Child Left Behind law of 2001. The law required that schools assess students in 3rd – 8th grades in math and literacy, and at least once in high school. 

Unfortunately, what isn’t tested usually isn’t taught. 

Concerns about improving performance in math and literacy are understandable. But cutting the arts may actually have the opposite effect. Researchers at Rice University, for example, found through a large-scale, randomized controlled study that increasing exposure to arts in school has “remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social and emotional outcomes.”  

Backing up that up is a recent study by the USC Brain and Creativity Institute which found that “children who learn a musical instrument have enhanced cognitive function … improved creativity and confidence, better mental health and emotional stability.”

The Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, which replaced the No Child Left Behind law in 2015, for the first time lists music as a separate stand-alone subject that schools are expected to provide as part of a “well rounded education.” That means that schools can now use Title 1 and other federal funds for both music and arts education.   

When we talked with “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs recently, he attributes at least some of his theatrical success – and in life — to his intensive involvement in Berkeley High’s drama and jazz programs, “Learning through the arts fosters a kind of engagement that you can’t get out of textbooks.” 

Arts education is not just fun, although it should be that as well. It yields enormous educational dividends and can help advance equitable outcomes as well. With the help of both federal and state support, California now has an opportunity to bring it back into the classroom where it should have been all along.

Pedro Noguera is the Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, and host of the “Sparking Equity” podcast. Louis Freedberg is director of the Advancing Education Success Initiative, and former executive director of EdSource.

In the 2017-2018 school year, approximately 100,000 teacher jobs in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics – went unfilled at the high school level. At the middle school level, there were about 150,000 unfilled STEM educator jobs.

The situation has been getting progressively worse over the past decade or so. For instance, in the 2011-2012 school year, 19% of public schools were unable to fill a teaching position for biology or life sciences. By the 2020-2021 school year, that number had grown to 31%. The situation was similar for other subjects, going from 19% to 32% for mathematics, and 26% to 47% for physical sciences, such as physics, geology and engineering.

Science shortages were a problem even before Sputnik, but the launch served as a wake-up call. Three months afterward, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated during his Special Message to the Congress on Education that federal action was necessary to educate more science and mathematics teachers.

As a professor of education policy – and also as a former state secretary of education in Virginia – I have examined the STEM teacher shortage from multiple vantage points. In a September 2023 policy paper, a colleague and I recommend that in order to solve America’s STEM educator shortage, elected officials and education leaders should adopt something that is widely used in higher education – an endowed chair position for STEM teachers.

We think endowed chairs have the potential to retain and attract more STEM educators at the K-12 level, but it requires a willingness to rethink the ways that schools employ STEM educators.

What’s behind the gap?

Two factors contribute to so many unfilled vacancies in STEM education:

1. There are fewer college students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education that ever before.

Between 1959-1976, bachelor’s degrees in education were the most popular college major in the United States, and they accounted for about 20% of all degrees. Between 1975-2021, the percentage of students majoring in education fell from 17% to 4%.

2. STEM graduates can earn more money outside of education.

When STEM majors go into a STEM career, they will earn, on average, US$101,100. When STEM graduates become a math, computer science or science teacher, they will earn, on average, only a fraction of that amount – roughly $60,000.

This salary gap between STEM professionals and STEM educators is what is known as the STEM teacher “wage penalty.”

According to a national survey of teacher salaries in 2017-18, average teacher salaries never exceeded $100,000,, regardless of years of experience.

But this only tells a portion of the STEM teacher salary story. In 2021, K-12 teachers’ weekly salary was only $1,348 – about $660 less than the $2,009 earned weekly by other college graduates.

Prior efforts to close the gap

Since developing a strong STEM workforce is vital to the nation’s security and economic well-being, several U.S. presidents have used their position to advance a STEM education agenda.

For example, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Eisenhower
and Congress came to realize that the nation needed to focus on what takes place in the classroom space – not just outer space.

The Senate and House passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and Eisenhower signed it into law on Sept. 2, 1958.

This set in motion a national STEM education agenda for American colleges and K-12 schools for decades to come.

Fifty-three years later, President Barack Obama utilized his 2011 State of the Union address to advance the national STEM agenda. “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. “And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”

Through the leadership of 100Kin10, now named Beyond100K, the initiative exceeded the goal in 2021.

But the goal of the 100,000 STEM teacher campaign was to narrow the gap, not end it.

A shortage of STEM teachers remains. According to a survey of 53 states and territories, 39 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands had teacher vacancies in all subjects, STEM disciplines included, as of Feb 9, 2023. One additional reason for the current shortage is that public schools lost approximately 7% of their teachers – 233,000 instructors – between 2019-2021, which included STEM teachers.

Currently, President Joe Biden is promoting STEM education programs for teachers, the Department of Education has dedicated $120 billion to support STEM, and the National Science Foundation is supporting teacher fellowships.

The endowed chair as a potential solution

Federal investments in programs and fellowships to produce more STEM teachers are good. But those alone will not be enough to retain and attract the quality STEM educators we need.

That’s why a colleague and I recommend endowed chairs for K-12 educators.

Traditionally, an endowed chair is a prestigious faculty position funded through annual spending from a university’s endowment fund.

The interest earned on the endowment will partially or fully fund the salary of the position for as long as the university exists. Endowed chairs are awarded to those who are the best in their field.

The benefit of an endowed chair is that it will be paid for decades to come by the interest on investment. In our paper, we suggest that K-12 schools could use endowed chairs to support a K-12 STEM teacher’s salary, benefits and professional development, all the while saving money for the district and state.

If structured right, the interest on the endowment will pay a teacher’s salary and benefits, something the district would subsequently not have to pay. The endowment can be used to purchase STEM supplies. The money saved by the district can be used to invest in another teacher. The money could come from private individuals, corporations or foundations.

An endowed chair could also provide funding for teachers and students to have access to state-of-the-art learning technology. As part of the endowed chair contract, a teacher can participate in a fully paid externship at a STEM-focused public or private sector company during the summer months. The goal would be to bring to the classroom the experiences and insights the teacher learned from the externship.

An endowed STEM chair salary may never outpace what educators could earn if they entered the private market. But it can potentially help elevate their position and, perhaps, enable educators to make a salary that would be higher than what it would otherwise be.

Gerard Robinson is a professor of practice in public policy and law at the University of Virginia.

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

Getty ImagesCuriosity is king. Students start their educational journey curious, creative and thirsty for knowledge. This is what drives STEM, particularly science. Our job is to cultivate that and not let a standardized approach to education quash those highly valued traits of a learner.

The world is dependent on innovations, systems and equipment that are designed and sustained using science, engineering, technology and mathematics. This means the nurturing of STEM talent cannot be reserved for a slice of our student population but, instead, an essential component of every student’s educational journey.

It turns out, industry agrees.

Our colleagues in the semiconductor community report the need for curious and creative professionals who can work in teams to solve the toughest problems encountered in the fabs and labs of our most advanced workplaces.

Because innovation is happening at a quickening pace, readying students through the curriculum for every workplace scenario will be impossible. The ability to design solutions from scratch, in real time, is necessary to the innovation enterprise.

Whether this is perceived as an issue of equity or economics, the goal is the same: To value STEM knowledge in the same way we value reading.

K-12 needs to be rethought and redesigned or it will not only fail to meet the needs of a STEM-dependent world, it will fail to meet the needs of a unique generation of students who learns, thinks and engages with the world around them differently than any before.

Millennial and Gen Z parents are tech-integrated and experience-driven. Their children are hard-wired to be the same. Practically, this means they innately use technology to learn anytime, anywhere. But it also means they want to learn by doing. They consider technology their guide but want in-person engagement for connection, collaboration and support.

These were the trends and challenges we had to consider when designing ASU Prep. ASU Prep is a P-20 system of schools and educational services embedded in a larger learning enterprise at Arizona State University. The needs and preferences of our student body is what drives our iterative design. Students become masters in various learning domains from home, at a K-12 campus, on a university campus, at their parent’s workplace or even with peers at a coffee shop.

Thanks to the innovative K-12 policy environment in Arizona, students who can do a day’s worth of school work in less time can fill the remaining hours getting ahead in courses, catching up on concepts where they struggle, working, pursuing an interest in music, theater, Olympic sport or even launching their own small business.

Online learning should not be remote from people. We pair students with Learning Success Coaches to help students build personalized educational pathways into their desired future career. From kindergarten on, ASU Prep students build their own learning plans in concert with a guide and present it to their parents.

Our students are exposed to ASU courses as soon as they are ready and can take any of the 4,000-plus courses on the ASU catalog: in person, online or through our Universal Learner Platform. High school students at ASU Prep are applying their learning via paid internships and hybrid high school/university schedules.

It’s working. With graduation and college-going rates that exceed the averages and large numbers of students matriculating to STEM careers, we believe that we are the school system of the future. As part of ASU’s New American University, ASU Prep is wired like no other K12 system in the country and is poised to design and open access to a K12 model fit for the future of work.

We do all these things not to simply grow enrollment but to develop a knowledge base of what works to share with the broader community and the ASU teams that are increasing university enrollment in underrepresented communities.

Stakes are high for both our country and the families striving within. We embrace the efforts laid out in the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act to evaluate what is happening right now in the most innovative systems in the United States and apply those lessons rapidly for the benefit of all students.

There is brilliance in every household. We believe it’s our job to design new educational models that value curiosity and show every student that they do, in fact, have a path to a successful future.

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

Getty Images

COVID-19 impacted every aspect of life, and schools are still dealing with its residual effects. Many teachers blame the pandemic for low achievement and isolation from peers as the root cause of student conflicts in schools. But are there more positive narratives to tell? In doing research for my Ph.D. program, I sought out the perspectives of five teachers through informal conversations about how schools have improved since the pandemic. Four themes emerged.

1. Technology

The first thing most teachers bring up is the improvement in technology. Not only has overall access gotten better, with many districts achieving a one-to-one ratio of devices to students, but both teachers and students have become more technologically fluent. This is especially true for educators and classrooms. According to one teacher I spoke to, schools took a five- to six-year technology jump in one year. Teachers had to adapt to online learning and were forced to learn modern instructional practices. The pandemic caused them to change their approaches to teaching in ways they might never have done if it had not been for the pandemic. Online platforms that were developed because of COVID have given teachers valuable tools for engaging students in instruction and evaluating their progress efficiently. One teacher highlighted the fact that online platforms allow educators to be more interactive with their students and more aware of their progress.

2. Nurturing

Every school district, teacher and administrator knows that the pandemic has caused students to struggle with conflict resolution and appropriate social relationships. Students were isolated from their peers, and although they were interacting online, it was easy for them to turn the camera off, mute themselves and withdraw from interactions with others. But that same technology provided educators with a window into the homes of students and a glimpse into their lives. This gave teachers a new way to truly understand what students were going through and be cognizant of their family circumstances.

Because of this newfound understanding, teachers say they have become more nurturing. Teachers realized that they had to be more aware of students’ needs, be patient with them and seek ways to support them.

3. Mental Health Needs

COVID made clear how important it is to prioritize mental health needs for both students and adults. One teacher told me how, before the pandemic, she felt it was offensive to ask parents if their child was in counseling or if they were interested in services. But now, it isn’t taboo to ask. There is a shared understanding that it is okay to not be okay, and families are more open to resources to support their children’s social-emotional needs. One teacher said he incorporates social-emotional strategies in his classroom now that he didn’t think were necessary pre-pandemic.

Another teacher said he was taking the practices he incorporates with his students and using them for himself. And as an assistant principal, I am aware of the social-emotional needs of my staff as well as the demands on them to develop each student. After the pandemic, my academic team has been more cognizant of teachers’ needs and has prioritized initiatives in order to focus on what is important.

4. Solutions-Oriented

The last significant theme that emerged is that schools have become more solutions-oriented. The teachers I spoke with agreed to stop putting the focus on the past. What is done is done. The question now needs to be, what are the solutions? The needs of students are evident, so schools must work on identifying resources to support them both academically and social-emotionally. It takes a collective effort to find solutions and make changes. Having a positive attitude and looking for good in circumstances is essential. The pandemic has given the world an opportunity to prove how resilient individuals can be.

COVID-19 posed challenges that no one in this lifetime had experienced. Returning to in-person learning and getting back to normal has proved to be difficult; however, for all the darkness of the pandemic, there are some positive effects in the nation’s schools.

Cory Beets is an assistant principal in an urban pre-K-8 school in northeast Ohio, a former eighth-grade math teacher and a doctoral student at Cleveland State University, studying urban education with a focus in administration.

Out Teach

This nation’s economic security will be won or lost based on the ability of elementary schools to energize science education.

That is because the country is at the start of a massive effort intended to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the Southwest, battery research and development to rural upstate New York and more. It’s an effort that promises to spread good-paying jobs to parts of the country that haven’t benefited from them in recent decades.

More semiconductor manufacturing, more engineering jobs, more tech jobs — over the next 10 years, these and other jobs in STEM fields are projected to grow faster than all others combined, with twice the median salary. More STEM jobs means the country needs more STEM-ready students, and that means helping elementary schools engage children with a rich and energetic brand of science before sixth grade, when children often start forming career aspirations.

This is particularly critical in rural areas, because if children in these communities don’t have a science-rich education, they will be less likely to be interested in or qualified for the STEM jobs coming to their regions. And if that’s the case, the purpose of locating these jobs there will be undermined, as employers will have to recruit qualified workers from other parts of the nation or world.

Getting young Americans involved in science now in a way that captivates them early in their education will prepare them to fill the STEM jobs of the near future and build the foundation for a strong and prosperous economy.

When children from all backgrounds see themselves as scientists, society reaps the benefits. But researchers estimate this country has missed out on generations of “lost Einsteins” because many lack a relevant and relatable science education starting in elementary school, and kids cannot be what they cannot see.

The 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education found that students in kindergarten to third grade learned science for an average of just 18 minutes a day – less time than many of them spend on the school bus. The results of that are clear: Only 36% of fourth graders tested as proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress science exam.

If the new approach to industrial policy and STEM jobs is going to succeed, that has to change. Science education must start early, because children develop their interests and passions early. And it must attract all kids, no matter their backgrounds, resources or experiences.

The way to do that is to move students from learning about science from behind a classroom desk to exploring the world outside and around them — whether that’s studying drainage and flooding in an urban area or finding the angle of the sun to determine the best placement of solar panels in a rural community. Children’s minds come alive to science when they see it in every part of their world. They respond to active learning environments that offer the opportunity to collect data, test and solve problems in real time. The organization I lead, Out Teach, transforms school grounds into real-world labs. Last year, we brought science to life for 53,000 students and 188 schools in 77 communities, starting in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and now extended to historically underserved areas of Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Washington, D.C.

These learning stations take teachers and students out of the classroom and into the outdoors, where they can study the growth of plants or crops, build landforms to gauge erosion by pouring water on it or use plastic bags to find hidden water through leaf transpiration.

Children make the connection between the science they see in their schoolyards and the relevance of it to their own communities.

As a Mississippi native who now lives, works and parents in Washington, D.C., I know that kids in rural areas grow up, get educated, work and live differently than those in cities or suburbs. High-speed internet, for example, is not a given. Technology and office work are not the norm. Some schools don’t have the funding, facilities, teaching staff, labs, even textbooks that are taken for granted in many parts of the country. Almost 1 in 5 public school students attend a rural school, yet policymakers rarely address rural needs. Nonprofits and social service agencies often fill gaps in urban and suburban areas, but less so for rural schools. Indeed, the most robust voice for rural schools, the Rural School and Community Trust, no longer has an active website — a metaphor for the isolating lack of broadband internet or reliable cell service that confronts many rural schools.

For generations, those differences did not affect the nation economically. But now, they matter a lot. Modern society and the modern economy rely more on strong scientific readiness in places like the Southwest and rural upstate New York than ever.

The $80 billion in investments that Congress and President Joe Biden have made are designed to share the wealth of economic growth in every part of the country, not just Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Mining that wealth can’t happen, however, unless every school — rural, suburban and urban — has the facilities and a plan to get young children involved in science.

If this new industrial policy is to succeed in making this country economically sound and secure in the wake of the pandemic, engaging all citizens is critical. Making science real and relevant is, in that sense, a national economic security initiative. This opportunity is too crucial to miss.

Jeanne McCarty is CEO of Out Teach, a national nonprofit that brings outdoor science education to students, and a 30-year veteran educator.

YouthTruth

The back-to-school scene as I dropped my daughter off for her first day of school today was delightfully, if unnervingly, normal. For parents around the country, this is the first back-to-school season since the end of COVID-19 as a public health emergency, and that is something to celebrate. As the country emerges from a pandemic that upended schools and students’ lives, educators and policymakers are lamenting widespread learning losses. But the narrow focus on academic performance is obscuring a larger crisis and missing the bigger picture about how young people are faring and what they need moving forward.

As students head back to school this fall, how are they really doing in the aftermath of COVID-19?

My organization, YouthTruth, a nonprofit that elevates student voices to help schools improve, set out to answer this question by consulting the experts: students themselves. We analyzed quantitative and qualitative feedback data from over 500,000 middle and high school students gathered before, during and after the pandemic. From that data, we learned that student perceptions of learning and belonging in the 2022-23 school year returned to pre-pandemic levels — though troubling differences across student demographic groups remain, with LGBTQ+ students and students of color rating their sense of belonging less positively than their peers. Concerningly, however, students’ experiences with mental health and support from adults in school that worsened during COVID-19 have not recovered.

The most positive of the findings: Young people’s perceptions of learning and belonging followed similar patterns over the course of the pandemic, and both have bounced back to pre-COVID levels, according to the students.

Nonetheless, there remains much room for improvement. Only 42% of students say they feel like a real part of their school’s community. This matters both because of its intrinsic value – young people deserve to feel like they belong — and because belonging is foundational to learning and can catalyze students’ motivation to learn.

Nearly half of all students surveyed in the 2022-23 school year reported that depression, stress or anxiety makes it hard for them to do their best in school. This proportion had increased steadily over the course of the pandemic, from 39% in spring 2020 to 48% in 2022-23. Meanwhile, the proportion of students saying there is an adult at school they can talk to when feeling upset, stressed or having problems decreased to just 41% in the 2022-23 school year from 46% pre-COVID.

This support gap, created by the simultaneous rise in students’ mental health as an obstacle to learning and decline in support from adults at school, emerged in fall 2020. It has since widened, despite significant attention to COVID’s impact on youth depression, anxiety and mental health. Students in our surveys say there are not enough counselors and ask that their schools increase their efforts to reach out to students, to make the help they need “more accessible and clear” rather than just “pushing it under the surface.” The bottom line is that young people’s challenges with mental health and insufficient support are not getting better — not yet, anyway. And these challenges directly impact students’ ability to learn.

Amid this alarming mental health crisis and plummeting NAEP scores, the national narrative on learning loss is limited. The obsession with test scores, the pressure to catch up and one-dimensional accountability systems crowd out other integral sources of feedback about how students are doing. The world is taking shape around this younger generation, and decisions are being made about their future. Yet, far too often, their voices are ignored.

Students are telling the country in no uncertain terms that education doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Social, emotional and academic learning are intrinsically linked, and it can progress only so far when these pieces are separated. This has always been true but is especially so now.
Students are imploring adults in and around schools not to go back to business as usual. In some of their own words: “Put us before test scores.” “Work alongside us.” “Actually listen to us.” As educators, administrators and policymakers move forward in this next chapter, they should remember that students are whole people who need whole solutions to succeed in school and in life. Part of the solution must be truly listening to them.

Jen Vorse Wilka is executive director of YouthTruth Student Survey.

Instagram/@onceuponourtimecapsule

The vibe in education these days is dark. Test scores are falling, students’ mental health needs are growing and educators are becoming more and more exasperated.

Perhaps schools should focus on fun.

This isn’t a fanciful wish that’s out of touch with the stark challenges facing many communities. Rather, it’s a strategy, a means to an end, a practical way to help students — especially those who are most disconnected from school — re-engage with learning and mitigate some of the harmful effects of the pandemic.

COVID-19 took bad problems and made them worse. Even before the pandemic struck in March 2020, only 32% of 11th-graders said they felt engaged in school and some 8 million students were absent for 10% or more of the academic year.

Then, COVID hit, and students were stuck at home, learning from screens.

As a mom, I wasn’t familiar with all the developmentally appropriate material for my three children, who were then 2, 4 and 6 years old. But I knew it was critical for them to keep growing, academically, socially and emotionally. I had read so much about the importance of a child’s first five years, and here I was, like many other parents, trying to figure out how to help them learn and keep us all sane. Partly as a way to avoid doomscrolling, I started spending my nights planning “trips” we would take around the world and back in time.

Each week, we chose a place to “visit” from our home. On our trip to Peru, we turned dozens of grocery boxes into Machu Picchu. The next weekend, we traveled back to the Jurassic period, turning those boxes into a massive dinosaur in our backyard. We went to the “Wild West” and slept in a tent in our backyard; traveled to “Greece,” where we competed in our own Olympics; and visited the “Sahara Desert” in “Morocco” (more commonly known as nearby Indiana Dunes National Park).

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My most basic aim was to stave off boredom (for my children and for me). My more ambitious goal was to not just keep my kids learning, but to help nurture the flame — so bright early in life — of children’s natural curiosity.

Eventually, I told another mom about my family’s simulated trips, and the two of us started brainstorming whether there was another mechanism that could engage children all across my hometown of Chicago in learning in a fun and experiential way — but be more convenient than working with dozens of grocery store boxes. We wanted all students to have access, whether from well-to-do zip codes or neighborhoods beset by high poverty rates.

We landed on time capsules, where kids could contribute their stories of living through the pandemic. Within a few months, my mom-friend and I found a financial sponsor and enlisted the partnership of City Hall, schools, summer camps, after-school programs, public libraries, children’s hospitals, museums and other organizations. With the generous support of philanthropic and corporate partners offering pro bono services, we built a website, developed a curriculum and distributed materials all across the city. Our partner organizations helped children gather objects, write letters to kids of the future and illustrate the good and the hard moments, all while sharing what they were learning about themselves and their communities. They then submitted their materials into a time capsule — a simple cardboard mailing tube. We collected those mailing tubes and placed them in huge barrels at cultural sites around the city, like the Chicago Public Library. They won’t be opened until 2026.

We focused primarily on ages 9 to 14, the developmental stage when kids are becoming more independent, beginning to see the point of others more clearly and encountering a range of significant — and often challenging — emotional and social changes.

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The act of developing a story, sharing it and learning about peers’ experiences provided a fun and very important opportunity. At in-person events and through our partner organizations, kids told us the activity helped them feel like they mattered. Engaging with peers made them feel less burdened and more connected to themselves and to one another.

Over time, we realized that using time capsules as a way to access students’ feelings and experiences, and to help them learn about the perspectives of others, had benefits that extended well beyond the pandemic. We founded a nonprofit, Once Upon Our Time Capsule, that today guides children across the country in making time capsules of their own, as a way to recognize and honor what they, and others, value.

Students creating physical time capsules practice their writing and storytelling skills, learn about history and culture, use the arts to express themselves, develop critical thinking skills and connect with others. They can also use their video and social media skills to upload and add to our digital time capsule, which allows children from across the country to participate and share their stories in their own voices. But this isn’t just about time capsules. It’s about finding ways to engage kids in learning, to make it fun to read and write, to build children’s sense of self and their sense of belonging by focusing on sharing what really matters to them and their peers: their goals, their community traditions and values, and their views on the world.

Too often, I look at what children are assigned at school and I think of the late, great British educator Sir Ken Robinson and his TED Talk warning that “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” This is not a knock on teachers — they’re doing the best they can with what they have. Rather, it is an encouragement to administrators and policymakers to let students have fun.

Ultimately, children need to feel connected to school, to one another and to themselves. When kids feel linked to and accepted by others, they experience better physical and mental well-being — and when those feelings occur at school, they perform better academically. The pandemic severed feelings of connectedness. Now, it’s the job of schools to rebuild these bonds and focus on fun to unlock learning.

Italian Family Seeking Lost Baggage, Ellis Island (Lewis Wickes Hine)

There is a 1905 photograph taken by Lewis Hine titled “Italian Family Seeking Lost Baggage, Ellis Island.” It shows a mother, with a scarf covering her hair and a baby in her arms, and two children: a boy, about 11 or 12 years old, with what looks like a laundry bag over his shoulder, and a younger girl, sucking her thumb. They all are looking out from the scene, toward the viewer.

The youngsters in the picture were among hundreds of thousands of immigrant children in the early 20th century whose presence would lead to the expansion and improvement of the New York City Public School system. Those young people — immigrants — and the children of immigrants would help New York become the great metropolis it is today. And many of them graduated from the city’s public schools.

Now, the city, and the country, are in another such moment. Over the last two years, 20,000 migrant students have registered for school in New York City. They are part of a national trend. For the first time in several years, the foreign-born population of the U.S. grew, to slightly more than 46 million.

But instead of learning from the past, online peddlers of hate are stoking fear of an “immigrant invasion.” Far-right media figures are using images of immigrant families registering for school to build support for their cause, accompanied by headlines making the absurd claim that 21,000 New York students had been kicked out to make space for migrants.

The reality is that K-12 enrollment in New York City schools has decreased by more than 120,000 over the past five years — and until the last few months, some experts worried that declining immigration might make it difficult for the city to recover those losses. Despite this reality, the narrative of a migrant panic centered around New York schools is taking root.

But, as in the past, there is another story to tell. In contrast to stereotypes, immigrant youth come to school eager to belong, make new friends, speak English and succeed. While learning a new language takes time, these students bring with them social, emotional and cognitive assets that help set them up for long-term success. It is no coincidence that nearly half of Fortune 500 companies, many of which are headquartered in Manhattan, were founded by immigrants or their children.

Much of what schools do to help newcomers succeed is good for their U.S.-born classmates as well. It starts with relationships with educators who understand them; rigorous and relevant curriculum with appropriate support to help make the content accessible; and a school culture focused on building a true sense of belonging.

At Re-Imagining Migration, we’ve seen the dedication of educators in New York firsthand through a multi-year partnership with New York City Public Schools’ Division of Multilingual Learners. Last year, we worked with ninth- and 10th-grade teachers in 13 schools on teaching a pilot unit called “The Words We Use,” focused on migration past and present. The project culminated in an event at the Museum of the City of New York that included 50 students — many of them recent arrivals and English learners — from across the city who came together to build community while sharing their stories through poetry. For students, one of the most powerful takeaways was not simply to see how they connected with their peers, but to reflect upon the similarities and differences between their experiences and those of immigrants who came before them.

In our work with educators around the country, we use the Hine photo to make the point. Instead of sharing the context with students at first, we encourage them to view it closely and to note what they see, think and wonder about. Then we layer in information about where and when the picture was taken, and what is known about the subjects. This deceptively simple thinking routine, developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, helps students focus on the subjects as humans before narratives and expectations shape their perceptions. Indeed, that was the point Hine was trying to make: In a period of high migration, newcomers from new places were subjected to skepticism and prejudices. He wanted viewers to see immigrants arriving at Ellis Island not as stereotypes, but as who they were: humans on the move.

The ability to understand migration, both the challenges and opportunities that come with it, is vital in a world of demographic change. That work begins in schools. It begins with seeking to understand the world from someone else’s point of view, engaging with others whose experiences are different from our own and developing the habit of stepping back to inquire and understand instead of relying on narratives fueled by fear.

We are proud to be working with educators and leaders in New York who recognize that migration is a throughline of the city’s history. You can’t walk down New York’s streets without seeing how generations of migrants make the city what it is today. When immigrant students succeed, all New Yorkers, and all Americans, benefit.

The children in the Lewis Hine photo are not that different from those registering for school today; their names and means of arrival might be different, but what brought them is the same: they are seeking safety and opportunity. With access to education, resources and opportunity, today’s newcomers will do what those in the photo and others like them have done for generations: contribute to the city’s, and the country’s, vitality and resilience.

I’ve been working on these questions for years together with a group of colleagues since long before the advent of ChatGPT. After working with hundreds of data scientists from around the globe, we have found that the answer is clear: Artificial intelligence is now as good as a human at evaluating a standard five-paragraph essay and giving feedback on its logic and persuasion.

But our work also revealed that AI alone is not enough, and that perhaps some of the best uses of this technology in writing are helping teachers, not giving students a shortcut in drafting essays.

Since 2019, our team of experts from The Learning Agency Lab, Georgia State University and Vanderbilt University has been working on this issue, overseeing competitions that challenged data scientists to build models that could label argumentative elements in pieces of writing and then evaluate the quality of these elements in thousands of student essays.

The best-performing algorithms did just as well as humans, achieving an accuracy rate of 75%. That’s comparable to the human readers who annotated the data. In short, these AI models can identify and evaluate the lead, position statement, supporting claims and evidence as well as a human. They also were able to evaluate how well a student organized an essay and developed arguments.

This technological advance is important because becoming a good writer requires a lot of practice and some expert coaching. It’s not unlike learning to play the piano or to shoot a jump shot. Young writers need to put in the work in order to improve.

However, research shows that too many students do not get the instruction or opportunities needed to master this most important skill. National Assessment of Educational Progress surveys of students have revealed that only 25% spend more than 30 minutes of their school day writing, the minimum recommended by the Institute of Education Sciences’s What Works Clearinghouse.

One big reason why teachers assign so little writing is that grading and coaching are labor-intensive. Even if a teacher spends just 10 minutes reviewing a two-page writing assignment, it would still take nearly 21 hours to grade them all, assuming the teacher sees 125 students over the course of a week. And that’s just one relatively minor assignment.

This is where new writing tools and technologies like AI can make a huge difference. In some research, these tools have been shown to reduce the amount of time teachers spend on grading by half. Other studies suggest they can raise student outcomes well above state averages.

These findings demonstrate that there are real upsides to bringing artificial intelligence into the classroom.

AI’s biggest potential when it comes to the writing classroom is in helping educators better identify areas where students struggle. Practically speaking, that means AI could help a teacher identify common mistakes made by students across all classes, which indicate a weakness in instruction or the curriculum. Such information is also helpful when identifying students in need of a specific intervention or remediation.

The algorithm could also be used to push students who are close to mastering a concept by giving them feedback, for example, on their argumentation and prodding them to go deeper or to think more about their thinking — an effective learning strategy called metacognition.

Still, as exciting as this is, even the best AI-powered writing tools cannot meet all the complex needs of students. Technology, no matter how precise and fine-tuned, will never be as effective as an engaged teacher at motivating students or mitigating a classroom’s social dynamics. That’s why I believe that all classroom-level AI tools need to be developed and introduced in close partnership with teachers, from start to finish.

For example, our project included focus groups with more than 70 teachers. We learned that they found the AI tools exhibited bias toward students with non-standard English dialects, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. The teachers wanted developers to mitigate that bias and ensure tools were culturally sensitive so students would see their experiences reflected in the AI results. When developers hear from educators early in the development phase, their products are better able to give teachers what they want and students what they need: targeted, relevant writing support.

Isn’t that what most parents want for their children as well? Personalized assistance from teachers who strive to make learning both personal and stimulating? When done right, AI can help educators deliver on that ideal.

Perpetual Baffour is research director at The Learning Agency Lab.

The problem isn’t that the U.S. lacks the universities to train future scientists or an economy capable of encouraging innovation. Rather, the problem originates much earlier in the supply chain. It starts in our elementary and secondary schools.

In 2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report Card, presented evidence that American students are struggling in the sciences. Over a quarter of fourth graders earned a score below basic; by 12th grade, that proportion grows to over 40%. A similar pattern is evident in NAEP math scores. Indeed, recent 2022 NAEP test scores for math show declining scores and increasing percentage of students below basic. While overall patterns are discouraging, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students falling below basic in science and math is even higher.

Congress has a chance to help turn this around, by passing the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act. This groundbreaking legislation aims to establish the National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE) within the Institute of Education Sciences, a center that would be modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

NCADE would bring promising practices directly into classrooms, leveraging the extensive research investments made by the institute over the past two decades. This is essential, because unless the nation does something radical to transform education sciences research and translate the basic research in which the institute has traditionally invested into applied, practical and scalable products and interventions, the already eroding U.S. lead in STEM will fade even further.

This is not just a problem in schools and with tests. Educational outcomes affect just about every aspect of American lives, including national security. A recent Aspen Strategy Group report concludes that the “U.S. needs the national security community to weigh in on education as a national security priority.” The report further highlights how the newest STEM skills, like data science, are far too often neglected in favor of traditional math subjects such as trigonometry and calculus. These concerns are widespread. Teachers themselves are highly concerned. In a recent national poll released by the Walton Family Foundation, around 40% of teachers say schools are not preparing young people for future careers.

There is also the disturbing fact that less than a quarter of the nation’s young adults qualify for military service, based in part on poor academic performance. Furthermore, the gaps in qualified applicants for STEM jobs are even more pronounced between genders and ethnicities, and while STEM jobs and degrees have steadily increased since 2000, the diversity of the workforce has not. The U.S. simply cannot compete in the global economy with so many Black, Hispanic, and female students not mastering needed STEM skills and aptitudes.

NCADE would bring promising practices directly into classrooms, leveraging the extensive research investments made by the institute over the past two decades. It would represent a transformative step toward addressing learning recovery and providing unwavering support to students throughout their educational journey and into the workforce — and it couldn’t come at a more critical time.

The education workforce pipeline foundation is on thin ice. Without significant intervention and added resources, the United States education system risks plunging into a crisis of unrecoverable proportions in STEM.

The nation can’t spend the next decade diagnosing this problem and letting students fall further behind. We need to develop the tools to act with urgency and creativity. NCADE is our chance to show that we take learning seriously and that we aren’t willing to shrug off the last few years of declining educational progress as a tragedy that will be fixed by employing business-as-usual methods.

The NEED Act will help build a better, faster, more efficient education R&D that can transform the learning environment so students can prosper in the global economy they face today and will for decades to come.

Mark Schneider is director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the United States Department of Education. Before assuming that role, he was a vice president and Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research and the president of College Measures. He previously served as the U.S. commissioner of education statistics from 2005 to 2008 and is a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Last week, I sat down and read the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, the landmark case that overturned many affirmative action policies at the nation’s elite universities.

The case has generated significant outrage. The right was outraged that Harvard wants to use (and did use) race as a factor in its admissions decisions. The left is outraged that the court has now prohibited colleges from righting the wrongs of the past. And admissions officers are outraged that the justices have gotten all up in their business.

I, too, felt a bubbling anger as I read the decision — but for a different reason. It seems to me Harvard’s admissions policies just aren’t that important in the big picture. While all colleges must comply with the court’s ruling, the main impact will fall on highly selective universities, both private and public, affecting perhaps tens of thousands of students, all of whom (no matter their race) are well-positioned to become productive citizens and workers regardless.

But another type of admissions policy surely does deserve our attention as Americans, one that affects tens of millions of kids every year. And the stakes are much higher, for these unexamined policies often determine whether a child will have a realistic chance at success and leave school with the basic skills necessary to enter community college or succeed at an entry-level job.

What am I talking about? The selective admissions criteria of the top public elementary schools.

You might think public schools are open to everyone. Unfortunately, they’re not. I’ve spent the last five years looking at the admissions criteria and enrollment procedures for America’s top public elementary schools, and they operate under an archaic and discriminatory assignment system that sorts kids into schools based on government-drawn maps.

In theory, it’s supposed to ensure that kids get to attend the public school nearest their home. That’s often not the case, as powerful parents push for assignment to better public schools in wealthier parts of town.

More importantly, the policy empowers public elementary schools — under the cover of law — to turn children away because of where they live. The most coveted public schools have zones that cover the more expensive parts of town: those with large single-family homes on large lots. Then, because of the attendance zone, everybody bids up the real estate even further, inflating home prices by as much as $300,000. The inequalities of access then become insurmountable. The vast majority of American families are priced out of these homes, and out of these coveted schools.

In my old neighborhood in Los Angeles, living on one side of the street or the other can determine whether a child attends a public school with 75% reading proficiency or 16%. Of course, test scores aren’t everything, and I don’t believe any parent should rely solely on them when judging a school’s quality. But we should all be skeptical of someone who pays $300,000 so their kids can attend a specific public school and then turns around and argues the school isn’t actually any better than the one down the street. (This is the argument that I heard from some of my old neighbors when I suggested that the elite public elementary school in the neighborhood, Mount Washington Elementary, should be opened up to some of the working-class Hispanic families who live just blocks away.)

The great irony is that selectivity is built into Harvard’s mission and value proposition. For Harvard and other elite universities, it is a critical component of the educational experience that they offer — not to mention a key selling point — that less than 5% of applicants are offered a seat.

But that’s not how it’s supposed to work in the public schools. Being “open to all” is essential to their very nature. Many states have written it into their state constitutions. And Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, pledged that the public schools would have to be “available to all on equal terms.” Public schools betray their sacred mission when they implement selective, discriminatory enrollment policies that benefit the wealthy and powerful.

Tragically, public schools’ selective admissions criteria have not generated the outrage or judicial scrutiny that they deserve, despite the harm they’ve done to the nation’s children and the country. It’s time to end geography-based school assignments and all the other ways public elementary schools cherry-pick their students.

If you’re grasping for hope, look to the community college system in California. Once upon a time, this system was based on strict geographic assignment. But enrollment started declining in the 1970s and 1980s (much as it recently has in the K-12 system), and the state had to

consider major reforms. In 1987, the legislature finally ended the archaic geographic system with a law that created true open enrollment in the community colleges. Enrollment rebounded, and the community colleges are now regarded as one of the jewels of the state. The language of the law could serve as a model today:

“It is not in the best interests of the people of the State of California that attendance at a community college be restricted to a person’s district of residence. It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this article to provide for the unrestricted enrollment and attendance of students at community colleges, thereby providing each resident of the state an equal opportunity to attend the community college of his or her choice.”

Someday, perhaps, our political leaders will have the courage to pass similar laws providing for true open enrollment in K-12 schools.

Members of the POINT residential community put on a production of “Shrek.” (Alex Lynford)

As the mother of a 37-year-old son with special needs who is living a full and independent life, I often think about what it took to get here. Alex was one of the original members of the POINT (Pursuing our INdependence Together) residential community in White Plains, New York, which was founded in 2008 by families of disabled individuals who fell through the cracks — too high-functioning for group homes, not ready to live totally without supports.

Once school or other development programs end, so much is gone all at once — structured days, weeks and years; regular social interaction with peers; non-parental authority figures; speech, occupational and physical therapy; and, critically, the sense that the young adult has a place that belongs to them outside their family. We designed the community to provide some of the components of what was no longer available, with scheduled voluntary activities, support from staff social workers, a 24/7 emergency phone line and, most important, peers with whom they could build independent lives.

We chose White Plains because it is a small city with a range of housing in a central core, robust public transportation, and a lively retail and business environment that provides opportunities for work, recreation and shopping — all accessible on foot or by bus/train. We partnered with two nonsectarian human services agencies to manage the operation and growth of the community.

We began with 15 members, some local and others whose families were as far away as California and Kentucky. The community now has more than 55 members, with close to a 50:50 ratio of men and women, representing 10 states.

POINT members live in apartment buildings across White Plains, some with roommates and others alone. Families pay for the POINT program fee, housing, food, etc., supplemented by members’ earnings and federal and local programs including SSI/SSD. All participants are expected to work, do internships, go to school and/or attend day programs. There are planned social activities, and members can create their own. There is a “clubhouse” space for classes, parties, movie nights, etc., within walking distance of the apartments.

We see our son living a life that is far beyond anything we could have envisioned for him when he was a child. He is independent, he works, he manages his calendar, he seeks appropriate recreation and entertainment, and he is a member of a small, comfortable community that interacts with the broader neighborhood.

How did a third grader with limited social skills, significant learning disabilities and very little interest in doing things for himself get here? Here are some key lessons that we learned:

• Maximize independence whenever possible: Early on, we heard the expression “the dignity of risk.” Overprotecting special-needs kids, while a natural inclination, will limit their abilities and possibilities more than doing so with a neurotypical child. For example, we sent our son to camp from ages 9 to 17, first for one week, then for four, and then for the full summer. He loved being with peers and counselors, and began developing leadership skills while figuring things out without mom and dad hovering. To see our son embrace his independence today is wonderful payback for all those situations when our hearts were in our mouths as he set off on adventures for which he was only marginally ready.
• Be flexible: No one answer is right for everyone, or for every time. In elementary and middle school, we placed our son in an inclusion setting, in classes with both neurotypical and learning-disabled students. This provided an environment that had a range of academic achievement and staff to meet students where they were and help them grow. But when it came to high school, we reversed course and placed him at a boarding school for youngsters with special needs. We were able to partially defray the cost with funding from New York State. In this environment, Alex learned some independent living skills, like managing his laundry, organizing his belongings and getting where he needed to be without us overseeing every action he took. At each transition, we evaluated our options and found what was best for him and for at that time. At several points, the correct program didn’t exist — so we joined forces with other parents and created it.
• Find professionals with the vision, expertise and flexibility to help your child grow: For Alex, these included an elementary school principal who focused on his potential rather than his deficits; a camp director who pushed all kids to explore their interests and challenge themselves in athletics, performing arts and socialization; and human services agencies committed to building an enviable life for individuals with social and cognitive challenges.
• Collect other families: More than once, it took the power of the group to form programs or nudge them in a more positive direction — things individual parents could not accomplish on their own. Just as developmentally disabled children and adults need a community of peers, so, too, do their families. From Alex’s camp and schools, we formed friendships with other parents who became the core of what it took to create POINT.
• Stay involved: After high school, we chose a postsecondary residential program to build Alex’s vocational skills, social network and independence (although, frequently, independent skills were left on the doorstep when he returned home for visits). Being active in schools, and supporting them through fundraising and advocacy, created a partnership with school leaders that allowed us a voice in how Alex could best be served. Now that he is part of the POINT Community, we continue the same supports with the organizations that are administering the program. We are seen as partners, not just consumers.
• Enjoy the successes: It’s easy to focus on gaps and shortcomings. We’ve learned to take great pleasure in seeing our son blossom into a self-assured young man who has found a comfortable place in the world. He is productive, has friends and enjoys his interactions both inside and outside the group. Some steps were small and some were huge, such as traveling by mass transit and flying cross-country alone. Some went backward. But we have much to be thankful for.

Marion Morgenthal is a former teacher and corporate vice president who currently does leadership coaching and facilitation. She is the mother of two sons, one of whom was a special education student throughout his school years, which led her to work with other parents to create POINT, an independent living community for people with disabilities.

Teacher satisfaction has

Unsurprisingly, our 2023 “Voices from the Classroom” survey showed that higher salaries and elevated compensation would be the top way to retain more teachers. The good news is that many teachers’ contracts across the country, including educators at LAUSD, are increasing pay beyond mere cost of living adjustments, raising the average teacher salary 21% by 2025. 

But salary is not the only issue. 

I often hear from educators they are being asked to perform work beyond their allotted hours or to manage duties that fall outside the scope of their job. For example, some schools are cutting non-academic programs, and asking classroom teachers to take on teaching art, music, dance or physical education. One educator told me even though her high school is fully staffed, teachers are still asked to take on auxiliary classes, and sacrificing needed prep periods. As a former classroom teacher, I can attest to the frustrations caused by losing planning time and being spread too thin. 

If we want our educators to succeed, these issues need to be addressed.

In LAUSD, as well as across the country, we are hearing from teachers that they need more from their districts to feel valued in the classroom. Nationally, 87% of teachers agree the role of the classroom teacher has too many responsibilities. Teachers are being asked to do it all. This is not conducive to the teachers’ best performance or the best learning environment for students, and by piling these responsibilities onto an increasingly stressed teacher workforce, our schools are only hurting future retention rates.

In order to feel less overwhelmed and overworked, our educators need to have manageable workloads. They need to not be working on weekends, taking time away from their families, or spending evenings stressed out about the next school day. With decreased stress levels, teachers may be more inclined to stay in their LAUSD schools, ultimately creating more stable environments for all students and staff.

There are things we can do in the meantime to help support our educators and encourage the leaders in LAUSD to make necessary changes. We can bring teachers together to develop solutions to problems most commonly cited by educators in LAUSD; we can create more professional development opportunities, like the ”anti-racist teaching practices” micro-credential Educators for Excellence members championed and co-created last school year, to help teachers grow. 

We are at our strongest when we are working together in the best interests of our students and our teachers. We need to stand together in support of policies and practices that positively and equitably serve all students and educators throughout LAUSD. 

Our educators do so much, and they deserve to feel recognized and appreciated.

Sarina Sande is the Executive Director for Educators for Excellence — Los Angeles