Educators have long debated the best way to teach, especially the subjects of science and math. One side favors direct instruction, where teachers tell students what they need to know or students read it from textbooks. Some call it explicit or traditional instruction. The other side favors inquiry, where students conduct experiments and figure out the answers themselves like a scientist would. It’s also known as exploration, discovery learning or simply “scientific practices.”

The debate reignited among university professors during the pandemic with the 2021 online publication of a commentary in the journal Educational Psychology Review. Combatively titled “There is an Evidence Crisis in Science Educational Policy,” four experts in science education argued that the evidence for inquiry instruction is weak and that proponents of inquiry “exclude” or “mark as irrelevant” high-quality studies, particularly controlled trials, that “overwhelmingly show minimal support” for inquiry learning.  

One of the authors is the prominent Australian psychologist John Sweller, who formulated cognitive load theory, the widely accepted idea that our working memory can process only so much information at once. Other academics took notice. Traditionalists applauded it.

Sweller and his co-authors’ complaints date back to an influential 1996 report of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Sciences that shapes science education policy. The report encouraged science teachers to adopt an inquiry-based approach, and it was followed by similar calls from other policymakers. But the authors of the 2021 article said the council’s references for this policy change were “theoretical ideas packaged in conceptual articles rather than empirical evidence.”

The critics say that much of the positive evidence for inquiry comes from classroom studies where there are no control or comparison groups, making it impossible to know if inquiry is really better than alternatives. And they say that this research frequently lumps together inquiry instruction with other teaching practices and interventions, making it hard to disentangle how much the use of inquiry is making a difference. 

Soon after, another group of prominent education researchers issued a rebuttal. In March 2023, 13 scholars led by a Dutch researcher, Ton de Jong, took on the debate in the academic journal Educational Research Review. Titled “Let’s talk evidence – The case for combining inquiry-based and direct instruction,” their article acknowledged that the research is complicated and doesn’t unequivocally point to the superiority of inquiry-based learning. Some studies show inquiry is better. Some studies show direct instruction is better. Many show that students learn the same amount either way.  (As they walked through a series of meta-analyses that summarized hundreds of studies, they pointedly noted that inquiry critics also ignored or mischaracterized some of the research.) 

Their bottom line: “Inquiry-based instruction produces better overall results for acquiring conceptual knowledge than does direct instruction.” 

How could two groups of scholars look at the same body of research and come to opposite conclusions?

The first thing to notice is that the two groups of scholars are arguing about two different things. The inquiry critics pointed out that inquiry wasn’t great at helping students learn content and skills. The inquiry defenders emphasize that inquiry is better at helping students develop conceptual understandings. Different teaching methods may be better for different learning goals.

The second takeaway is that even this group of 13 inquiry defenders argue that teachers should use both approaches, inquiry and direct instruction. That’s because students also need to learn content and procedural skills, which are best taught through direct instruction, and in part because it would be boring to learn only one way all the time. 

Indeed, even the critics of inquiry instruction noted that inquiry lessons and exercises may be better at sparking a love of science. Students often say they enjoy science more or become more interested in the field after an inquiry lesson. Changing students’ attitudes about science is certainly not a compelling reason to teach this way all the time, as students need to learn content too, but even traditionalists admit there’s something to be gained from fun exploration. 

My third observation is that the inquiry defenders listed a bunch of caveats about when inquiry learning has proven to be most effective. Unstructured inquiry lessons where students groped in the dark weren’t successful in building any kind of understanding.

Caveat 1: Students need a strong foundation of knowledge and skills in order for inquiry learning to be successful. In other words, students need some facts and the ability to calculate things in different ways to take advantage of inquiry learning and arrive at deeper conceptual understandings. Complete mastery isn’t a prerequisite, but some familiarity is. The authors suggested, for example, that it can be beneficial to start with some direct instruction before launching into an inquiry lesson. 

Caveat 2: Inquiry learning is far more effective when students receive a lot of guidance and feedback from their teacher during an inquiry lesson. Sometimes the most appropriate guidance is a clear explanation, the authors said, which is the same as direct instruction. (My brain started to hurt, thinking about how direct instruction could be woven into inquiry-based learning. Is it really inquiry learning if you’re also telling students what they need to do or know? At some point, shouldn’t we be labeling it direct instruction with hands-on activities?) 

The 13 authors admitted that each student needs different amounts and types of guidance during an inquiry lesson. Low-achieving students appear to benefit more from guidance than middle- or high-achieving students. But low-achieving students also need more of it. And that can be tough, if not impossible for a single teacher to manage. I began to wonder if effective inquiry teaching is humanly possible.

Not only can inquiry include a lot of direct instruction, but sometimes direct instruction can resemble an inquiry classroom. While many people may imagine that direct instruction means that students are passively absorbing information through lectures or books, the inquiry defenders explained that students can and should be engaged in activities even when a teacher is practicing direct instruction. Students still solve problems, practice new things independently, build projects and conduct experiments. The core difference can be a subtle one and hinge upon whether the teacher explains the theory to the students first or shows examples before students try it themselves (direct), or if the teacher asks students to figure out the theories and the procedures themselves, but gives them explicit guidance along the way (inquiry).

Like all long-standing academic debates, this one is far from resolved. Some educators prefer inquiry; some prefer direct instruction.  Depending upon your biases, you’re likely to see a complicated, mixed body of research as glass half full or glass half empty.

In December 2023, Sweller and the inquiry critics wrote a response to the rebuttal in the same Educational Research Review journal.  Beyond the academic sniping and nitpicking, the two sides seem to have found some common ground.

“Our view… is that explicit instruction is essential for novices” but that as students gain knowledge, there should be “an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving practice,” Sweller and his camp wrote.  “To the extent that De Jong et al. (2023) agree that explicit instruction can be important, we appear to have reached some level of agreement.”

The real test will be watching to see whether that consensus makes it to the classroom.

This story about teaching strategies was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Two groups of scholars revive the debate over inquiry vs. direct instruction appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, said Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.

But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.

Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”

Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).

Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”

When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.

“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.

Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.

But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”

Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers. 

Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.

“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”

This column about the ‘communiversity’ was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post COLUMN: Colleges must give communities a seat at the table alongside scientists if we want real environmental justice appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, educators have been considering the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) on education. Different approaches to AI codes of conduct are emerging, based on geography, school size and administrators’ willingness to embrace new technology.

With ChatGPT barely one year old and generative AI developing rapidly, a universally accepted approach to integrating AI has not yet emerged.

Still, the rise of GAI is offering a rare glimpse of hope and promise amid K-12’s historic achievement lows and unprecedented teacher shortages. That’s why many educators are contemplating how to manage and monitor student AI use. You can see a wide range of opinions, including some who would like to see AI tools outright banned.

There is a fine line between “using AI as a tool” and “using AI to cheat,” and many educators are still determining where that line is.

Related: How AI can teach kids to write – not just cheat

In my view, banning tech that will become a critical part of everyday life is not the answer. AI tools can be valuable classroom companions, and educators should write their codes of conduct in a way that encourages learners to adapt.

Administrators should respect teachers’ hesitation about adopting AI, but also create policies that allow tech-forward educators and students to experiment.

A number of districts have publicly discussed their approaches to AI. Early policies seem to fall into three camps:

Zero Tolerance: Some schools have instructed their students that use of AI tools will not be tolerated. For example, Oklahoma’s Tomball ISD updated its code of conduct to include a brief sentence on AI-enhanced work, stating that any work submitted by a student that has been completed using AI “will be considered plagiarism” and penalized as such.

Active Encouragement: Some schools encourage teachers to use AI tools in their classrooms. Michigan’s Hemlock Public School District provides its teachers with a list of AI tools and suggests that teachers explore which tools work best with their existing curriculum and lessons.

Wait-and-See: Many schools are taking a wait-and-see approach to drafting policies. In the meantime, they are allowing teachers and students to freely explore the capabilities and applications of the current crop of tools and providing guidance as issues and questions arise. They will use the data collected during this time to inform policies drafted in the future.

A recent Brookings report highlighted the confusion around policies for these new tools. For example, Los Angeles Public Schools blocked ChatGPT from all school computers while simultaneously rolling out an AI companion for parents. Because there isn’t yet clear guidance on how AI tools should be used, educators are receiving conflicting advice on both how to use AI themselves and how to guide their students’ use.

New York City public schools banned ChatGPT, then rolled back the ban, noting that their initial decision was hasty, based on “knee-jerk fear,” and didn’t take into account the good that AI tools could do in supporting teachers and students. They also noted that students will need to function and work in a world in which AI tools are a part of daily life and banning them outright could be doing students a disservice. They’ve since vowed to provide educators with “resources and real-life examples” of how AI tools have been successfully implemented in schools to support a variety of tasks across the spectrum of planning, instruction and analysis.

AI codes of conduct that encourage both smart and responsible use of these tools will be in the best interest of teachers and students.

This response is a good indication that the “Zero Tolerance” approach is waning in larger districts as notable guiding bodies, such as ISTE, actively promote AI exploration.

In addition, the federal government’s Office of Educational Technology is working on policies to ensure safe and effective AI use, noting that “Everyone in education has a responsibility to harness the good to serve educational priorities” while safeguarding against potential risks.

Educators must understand how to use these tools, and how they can help students be better equipped to navigate both the digital and real world.

Related: AI might disrupt math and computer science classes – in a good way

Already, teachers and entrepreneurs are experimenting with ways that GAI can make an impact on teacher practice and training, from lesson planning and instructional coaching to personalized feedback.

District leaders must consider that AI can assist teachers in crafting activity-specific handouts, customizing reading materials and formulating assessment, assignment and in-class discussion questions. They should also note how AI can deter cheating by generating unique assessments for each test-taker.

As with many educational innovations, it’s fair to assume that the emergence of student conduct cases within higher education will help guide the development of GAI use policy generally.

All this underscores both the importance and the complication of drafting such GAI policies, leading districts to ask, “Should we create guidelines just for students or for students and teachers?”

Earlier this year, Stanford’s Board on Conduct Affairs addressed the issue and its policies, clarifying that generative AI cannot be used to “substantially” complete an assignment and that its use must be disclosed.

But Stanford also gave individual instructors the latitude to provide guidelines on the acceptable use of GAI in their coursework. Given the relative murkiness of that policy, I predict clearer guidelines are still to come and will have an impact on those being drafted for K-12 districts.

Ultimately, AI codes of conduct that encourage both smart and responsible use of these tools will be in the best interest of teachers and students.

It will, however, not be enough for schools just to write codes of conduct for AI tools. They’ll need to think through how the presence of AI technology changes the way students are assessed, use problem-solving skills and develop competencies.

Questions like “How did you creatively leverage this new technology?” can become part of the rubric.

Their exploration will help identify best practices and debunk myths, championing AI’s responsible use. Developing AI policies for K-12 schools is an ongoing conversation.

Embracing experimentation, raising awareness and reforming assessments can help schools ensure that GAI becomes a positive force in supporting student learning responsibly.

Ted Mo Chen is vice president of globalization for the education technology company ClassIn.

This story about AI tools in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Banning tech that will become a critical part of life is the wrong answer for education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Researchers have found kindergarten through third grade classes spend, on average, 89 minutes a day on English language arts, 57 minutes a day on math — and just 18 minutes a day on science.

One way advocates are trying to encourage more science time? Adding outdoor classrooms to elementary schools.

Such efforts can only improve current practices. According to the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, which compiled the information on minutes spent learning science, only 17 percent of early elementary classes had science lessons most days of the week.

“We think the best kind of science that happens at that level is real-world based,” said Jeanne McCarty, CEO of Out Teach, a national nonprofit that promotes new approaches to science education and builds outdoor learning labs at schools. “We work with schools to engage kids in much more hands-on science learning outdoors, that not only gives them that foundational knowledge they need early on, but it also helps inspire them to see themselves as scientist and think about science as a future career path.”

Schools that get an outdoor learning lab also get coaching on teaching science in the lab. The outdoor lessons are tailored to where students live — a school in Texas, for example, uses a section of their lab to grow a salsa garden and native yucca plants. The labs vary, but typically include garden beds, weather stations, earth science stations and signs to reinforce concepts students are learning.

One goal of installing the labs, McCarty said, is to give teachers an outdoor space where they can not only teach science, but also embed science instruction into other subjects. The hope is these lessons will also spark students’ interest in science at a young age.

Some research seems to back this idea up — a study from 2017 found that, after an innate interest in science, women in STEM-related fields were more likely to point to playing or spending time outdoors as the spark for their initial interest in STEM than other activities. Most respondents said they became interested in STEM prior to sixth grade.

“Anything we can do to help get kids to see science and STEM as things that are useful to them and things they can interact with and they can do, or recognize things around them in the world that are happening — that’s going to be really valuable,” said Adam Maltese, one of the study’s authors and a professor of science education at Indiana University.

With a set amount of instructional time each day, elementary schools are less likely to significantly shift class time to science because most states do not have accountability measures tied to science as they do for reading and math. But embedding science instruction into other subjects has had positive results, said Jenny Sarna, director of director of the NextGenScience project of nonpartisan research agency WestEd. The project is a multi-state effort to create common teaching standards for science from kindergarten through 12th grade.

“Students who have positive science identities are more likely to see themselves as a science person, or good at science, and then they’re more likely to pursue STEM careers,” Sarna said.

A study of first grade students whose classroom used a curriculum that embedded science into language arts found that the students performed higher than their peers on standardized science tests at the end of the school year, and their reading performance was the same.

“Those students learn more science and the same amount of literacy, so if you could pick between your kid having science and reading every day, or just reading, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” Sarna said.

This story about outdoor learning labs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post When your classroom is a garden appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW YORK — On a sunny Friday in early November, four 10- and 11-year-old boys stand on the corner of 26th Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, holding homemade clipboards and signs that read “Take our food equity survey.”

A young man rushes past the group, headphones on, eyes on his phone. Susan Tenner, executive director of the Brooklyn Urban Garden Charter School, or BUGS, where the boys are sixth graders, suggests they let him pass. The next passerby is a runner — even more unpromising.

When a guy in his 20s or 30s in a puffer coat with fur trim comes along a half a minute later, Elias, a 10-year-old, remarks that he looks busy too. But Tenner urges the students to pounce.

“Everyone in New York City looks busy,” she tells them. “You guys are cute; people are going to want to help you.”

And the man does. After the boys call out as he passes, the man doubles back to take the student-made survey. Their first success.

Over the next half hour, the boys and a group of girls positioned a block up will interview a postman, a construction worker, a pair of teenage girls in fleece Snoopy pants, and several others about their access to healthy, affordable food.  

BUGS, one of hundreds of “themed” middle schools spread across New York City and the nation, fully embodies the “Green” school concept. There are gardens out front and hydroponic produce growing inside, an indoor tank for raising trout and recycled furniture in the classrooms. Students take a weekly sustainability class and participate in monthly field study days that send them into the community to conduct research on topics like land use, pollution and food equity.

Adopting a theme like sustainability, the arts, or math and science can cement a middle school’s culture, give coherence to its curricula, and boost student engagement at a time when many students are losing interest in school. Done well, proponents say, a theme can help students connect what they’re learning in the classroom to some larger purpose or vision of their future.

But not all themed schools are as distinctive as BUGS, and some aren’t all that different from mainstream middles. It can be hard to tell, based on a name alone, whether a self-proclaimed “Green” school offers a fully integrated sustainability curriculum, or is simply located in a net zero building.

Attending a themed school offers no guarantee of success in the focus subject, either. At some STEM-themed schools in New York City, students score below the citywide average on the state standardized math test.

Meanwhile, some high-performing themed schools remain out of reach to many low-income students, due to screenings — such as tests or auditions — that favor families who can afford private lessons and tutors.

This variation in scope, access and outcomes means that students and parents need to do their research before choosing a school with a catchy name, said Joyce Szuflita, a longtime school consultant to Brooklyn families. “Buyer beware,” she advised. “Sometimes there will be a name on a school that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the building. It’s more like branding.”

Related: The path to a career could start in middle school

There’s no national count of the number of themed middle schools, which are less common than themed high schools. But they’re cropping up across the country, particularly in places where families aren’t limited to their neighborhood school zone, according to Andrew Maxey, a member of the board of trustees of the Association for Middle Level Education, or AMLE, an organization that supports middle school educators.

In cities like New York, where students can choose among public schools, public charters and private schools, a theme can be a way for a program to stand out from the competition. It can also help convince some middle-class parents to stick with city public schools for the middle grades, instead of fleeing for private schools or the suburbs.

A theme, said Maud Abeel, a director in the education practice at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, “is a signal to families and educators that you’re trying to make school relevant and engaging.”

It’s also a signal to business leaders, said David Adams, the CEO of the Urban Assembly, a school support organization that has opened more than 20 career-themed public middle and high schools in New York City since 1997.

When the Urban Assembly’s founder was looking for ways to get industry more involved in public education, back in the early 90s, he settled on themes as a way “to mobilize the private sector to invest in schools,” Adams said.

But there are downsides to proclaiming a specialty. Doing so can scare away parents who worry — sometimes needlessly — that their child will be pigeonholed or miss out on opportunities to explore other areas, Szuflita said. And claiming a theme creates real pressure to “live up to the moniker,” added Abeel.

“If you’re going to put it in your name, you have to show why it’s there,” she said.

In New York City, where there are schools with straightforward names (the Middle School for Art and Philosophy), schools with clever or cute nicknames (BUGS), and schools that combine concepts in head-scratching ways (the Collegiate Academy for Mathematics and Personal Awareness), that “why” is more obvious in some cases than others.

On one end of the spectrum are schools like Ballet Tech, where middle schoolers dance five days a week, and Harbor Middle, where students pursue projects like boat-building and oyster reef monitoring.

“I would want to make sure that while there may be specialization, it’s not cutting off potential pathways.”

Nancy Deutsch, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and an editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research

On the other are schools that no longer fit their names, due to mission drift, leadership turnover or curricular change. A prime example is Brooklyn’s Math & Science Exploratory School, where leaders have asked the Department of Education for permission to drop the “Math & Science” from the name because “the curriculum has evolved” and the current name is “limiting and misaligned with the school’s value and goals,” according to a resolution in support of the change.

In between are dozens of schools that are implementing their themes in different ways and to varying degrees. Some, like the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, offer an additional period or two in the theme, along with extras, like hydroponics and coding.

Others focus their electives on the theme. At New Voices, in Brooklyn, students sample six arts forms in sixth grade, then pick a major for the last two years. But parents whose children attended the school said the arts theme isn’t infused into the core subjects.

Broadly speaking, themed middle schools set aside less time for their target subject than their high school counterparts. That’s mostly because the school day is “too full to pile things on,” said Maxey, who, in addition to his work as a board member for AMLE, is director of strategic initiatives at Tuscaloosa City Schools, where there is a performing arts middle school.  

Maxey said the most successful schools take an integrative, rather than an additive approach, weaving the theme across all subjects.

“You don’t carve out time for the arts,” he said. “You make them the essence of the school.”

Related: A hidden divide: How NYC’s high school system separates students by gender

The research on the effectiveness of themed schools is thin; experts on middle school teaching say they aren’t aware of any rigorous studies comparing themed and mainstream middles.

But a pair of studies by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools — one on turnaround middle schools and another on small high schools — suggest that themes can lend cohesion to the curriculum and facilitate collaboration across disciplines, said Cheri Fancsali, the Alliance’s executive director. They can attract students, as well as teachers, to a school.

Yet the studies also showed that themes sometimes lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and alienate students who aren’t interested in the theme, Fancsali said.

Nancy Deutsch, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and an editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, said she has mixed feelings about themed middles.

On the one hand, Deutsch said, letting students select schools that align with their interests might prevent some of the drop-off in motivation and engagement that often begins in middle school. On the flip side, attending a themed school might limit students’ future options, if they can’t take courses — Algebra I, for example — that would allow them to pursue different interests in high school.

“I would want to make sure that while there may be specialization, it’s not cutting off potential pathways,” she said.

“Operating in a public school system, you can’t go as deep or be as innovative as BUGS.”

Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network

Equity can be a concern as well. Some themed schools admit students based on factors like test scores or grade point averages, or require them to submit a portfolio or undergo an audition. Ohers have moved away from such screening methods, in an effort to build more racially and socioeconomically balanced classes.

Brooklyn’s District 15, where almost half the middle schools have themes, switched to a lottery system a few years ago. The change has reduced segregation in the district’s schools, but it has also coincided with a sharp drop in test scores at some themed schools, including the Math & Science Exploratory School, which had historically drawn a disproportionate number of white and higher-income families. This has led to speculation that the move to change the school’s name was motivated by declining test scores — a charge the school has denied.

Even so, the school’s pass rate on the state math exam — 64 percent in 2021-22 — was still twice the citywide average for middle schools of 32 percent (and climbed back to 80 percent during the last academic year, recently released data show). Several STEM-themed schools weren’t even meeting that low bar.

BUGS, which shares a building with a District 15 public themed middle school, the Carroll Gardens School for Innovation, is required under state charter law to admit students by lottery, with preference given to students in the district. The school is fairly diverse — roughly half the students are white — and a quarter qualify for free and reduced lunch. Close to a third have disabilities.

Last year, according to data from the New York State Department of Education, two-thirds of BUGS students passed the state math exam, though pass rates were significantly lower for students with disabilities (48 percent), and economically disadvantaged students (32 percent). The citywide average for all middle schoolers was 46.3 percent.

Related: Can you fix middle school by getting rid of it?

When BUGS opened a little over a decade ago, its focus was squarely on environmental sustainability. But over the years, it has expanded its purview to social and economic sustainability, too, said Tenner, the executive director.

The school’s all-in embrace of the sustainability theme is fairly unusual, said Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network. The Network’s members include schools with a couple courses in environmental studies, those with after-school “green teams,” and schools with net-zero emissions, among others.

“Operating in a public school system, you can’t go as deep or be as innovative as BUGS,” she said.

Still, given the school’s name, Tenner sometimes has to correct parents’ misperception that it’s all about planting and harvesting.

“Buyer beware. Sometimes there will be a name on a school that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the building. It’s more like branding.”

Joyce Szuflita, educational consultant to Brooklyn, New York, families

“The garden is a great outdoor classroom, but it’s only one of many in the city,” she tells families.

Their confusion may not matter much, anyway. In interviews, parents whose children attend or attended themed middle schools in Brooklyn said they made their choice for a variety of reasons, often unrelated to the theme: a school’s location, academic reputation or small size.

Parents whose kids attended the Math & Science Exploratory School said it was an open secret among affluent families living near the school that the emphasis was on exploration, and not on math and science. They wondered whether families from poorer parts of the district, whose children now make up a large share of the school’s enrollment, would know that.

Sarah Russo, whose son is a seventh grader at BUGS, said it was the school’s co-teaching approach and nurturing environment that sold her. Her son has an Individualized Education Program (a plan for students with disabilities) and she worried he’d get lost in a big, competitive school.

The BUGS survey-taking sixth graders, meanwhile, had other reasons to like the school. Elias was really excited about the lockers, while Sophia, whose group had interviewed passersby on a different corner, was thrilled that they’d get released for lunch. Sena picked BUGS over New Voices, the school her two best friends planned to attend, after realizing that the arts “aren’t my thing.”

Back in the classroom after completing their survey, the students get a refresher lesson on converting ratios into percentages and tally their responses. They find that roughly half of respondents have more restaurants and fast-food chains than grocery stores in their neighborhood, and forty percent don’t know what food equity is. Three quarters spend more than $50 per person on groceries each week.

Armed with these statistics, the students take action, writing letters to Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso to urge him to bring more grocery stores to Brooklyn neighborhoods and install more community fridges in the district.

In his letter, Elias asks Reynoso to tackle inflation and add lessons on food inequity to the city’s curricula.

“Please, Mr. Reynoso, we must do something!” he concludes, and adds his signature: a smiley face giving a thumbs up.

This story about theme schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post Middle schools are experimenting with ‘themes’ like math, sustainability and the arts. But is it all just branding? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert.

“All the way into October they can fish in the pond with a net,” said Monie Corona, an environmental education resource teacher for the district. “There’s cattails, dragonflies. For the kids to feel like they’re playing, but they’re actually learning — that to me is the key thing.”

The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state.

Research on the physical, psychological and academic benefits of outdoor learning for kids is well-established, and is now informing the development of climate education. What’s also becoming well-known is the essential role of traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge in the effort to cope with the climate crisis. Authorities as disparate as UNESCO and the U.S. Forest Service, have underlined the value, not only of specific place-based and historical knowledge of flora and fauna, but of traditional ways of relating to and understanding humans’ place in the natural world as we seek to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

And, as recently noted in a review of the potential impact the education sector can have on U.S. cities’ climate plans by This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor), Albuquerque Public Schools is among those pioneering the attempt to connect outdoor learning with local and Indigenous knowledge.

During Los Padillas field trips, the children spend time with Indigenous educators like Jered Lee, whose ancestral roots are in the Naschitti Region of the Navajo reservation in the northwest corner of the state.

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important,” he said. “Even though I don’t live in a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, their values can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Related: For preschoolers after the pandemic, more states say: Learn outdoors

Perhaps surprisingly, Lee doesn’t much care for the term “climate change”; he finds it too political. “We hear that we live in unprecedented times; well, when was it ever precedented? As far as I have understood, as far as our traditional stories, the world has always been changing,”

he said.What he seeks to instill in his brief time with the children is a sense of gratitude for being alive, and connection to other living things.

“They sit on the grass, and I sit on the earth with them, and try to see things from their eyes … I ask them to name their five senses, which they all know, and then I say, ‘Who taught you how to use them?’ And they might say ‘My mom,’ and then they think about it … and it’s almost like they refer to a divine source. They didn’t have to be instructed, and it’s in line with other growth processes in the natural world.”

Lee shares with the children a version of the Navajo creation story, and another one about horses, but he won’t tell them to a reporter on tape: They are part of an oral tradition passed down to him from his elders. He will say that he talks to the children about the rhythms of nature, and humans’ place in the world.

“The movement of nature, the rising of the dawn, the daytime sky, the evening light and the darkness of night, and how that process regenerates itself and the elongation of that process creates the spring, summer, fall, winter, and creates our being, our livelihood … for many it’s like we’re separate from that, we’re above that and we’re more intelligent than that. But the most intelligent people I know adhere to nature and know there isn’t a knowledge that surpasses that. It’s a humbling realization for people but it’s also good.” 

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important. Even though I don’t live on a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, the values associated can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Jered Lee, a Navajo nation member who participates in Albuquerque Public Schools’ outdoor learning program

Some 80 percent of the students enrolled in Albuquerque Public Schools are people of color. Around 5.3 percent are American Indian, and are served by the district’s Indian Education Department.

Monie Corona works within that department in a newly created position, supporting Los Padillas and other outdoor programming. Her watchwords are “cultural humility, cultural relevance and the cultural landscape.” She said this collaboration, bringing Indigenous learning to all students in an outdoor setting, “has been a long time coming, let’s put it that way. As a [white] teacher coming in 30 years ago, I was not prepared for working with Native American students and their culture. There’s a lot of things we have to understand and be able to respect as well.”

She said her focus and that of her colleagues sharpened in 2018, after a state court’s decision in Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico found that the state wasn’t doing enough to meet its obligation to help all students become college and career ready, especially low-income students, Native Americans, English language learners and students with disabilities. New Mexico’s high school graduation rate is consistently among the lowest in the nation; Albuquerque’s is even lower, at 69 percent in 2022.

Corona hopes that the Los Padillas program, as well as aligned efforts to bring Indigenous traditions into the school garden program and into outdoor learning opportunities at all grade levels, will enhance student engagement, particularly for those with Native heritage.

“Making sure the kids know their culture — it’s not easy,” she said. “We want to build up their self esteem, their motivation to be at school.”  

Lee said that just about every time he speaks to a class, one or two children will raise their hand and say, “I’m Navajo, too!” or name another tribe. But his aim is to share his culture and language and find commonalities with students, no matter their background. “Here in Albuquerque there’s different cultures. And I’ve realized this about many cultures around the world, the more you talk to them, our language, our customs may be different but the root of our cultural values are very similar.”

This story about outdoor learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post COLUMN: A creation story for Indigenous and nature-based learning appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

After an elder passed away recently in their community, the students at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Dzántik’i Héeni, the Tlingit name for Juneau, Alaska, got to work creating a special gift.

Using skills they’d learned in their computer science lessons, the students designed a traditional button blanket on a laser cutting machine. “They found a meaningful way to apply all of that skill and knowledge that they have learned and in such a way that it was authentic,” said Luke Fortier, the school librarian and math teacher.

Fortier’s school participates in a program operated by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society to expand access to computer science and science, technology engineering and math, or STEM, among Native American, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students. The program trains educators at K-12 schools whose students include Native children on different ways they can introduce young people to programming, robotics and coding.

But computer science lessons like the ones at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School are relatively rare. Despite calls from major employers and education leaders to expand K-12 computer science instruction in response to the workforce’s increasing reliance on digital technology, access to the subject remains low — particularly for Native American students. 

Only 67 percent of Native American students attend a school that offers a computer science course, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to a new study from the nonprofit Code.org. A recent report from the Kapor Foundation and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES, takes a deep look at why Native students’ access to computer and technology courses in K-12 is so low, and examines the consequences.

Director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor Frieda McAlear, who is Native Alaskan of the Inupiaq tribe, said the study “forefronts the context of the violence of centuries of colonization and its continuing impacts on Native people and tribal communities as the driver of disparities in Native representation in tech and computing.” 

Schools serving higher proportions of Native students are more likely to be small institutions that lack space, funding and teachers trained in computer science, according to the report. In addition, many Native students attend schools that may lack the hardware, software and high-speed internet needed for these classes.

Even when the instruction is available, courses often lack cultural relevance that would allow Native students to authentically engage with the material, the report says.

Given the history of settler colonialism and the use of Native boarding schools that sought to erase Native identity, making sure that students’ tribal knowledge and traditions are celebrated and integrated into the curriculum will allow students to succeed, the report’s authors say.

“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities,” McAlear said.

“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities.”

Frieda McAlear, director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor

The situation isn’t much better at the post-secondary level, according to report co-author and director of research and career support for AISES, Tiffany Smith, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Since 2020, Native student enrollment in computer science courses has declined at most two-year and four-year institutions, she said, even as more students overall have received degrees in the subject. Part of the reason is that Native students don’t necessarily see a place for themselves and their culture in tech classes and spaces at predominantly white institutions, Smith said.

But the relatively few Native students who do graduate with these degrees are making significant contributions to their communities, according to Smith. She noted that graduates are using their computer science knowledge and emerging technologies to help revitalize Native languages and alleviate other issues tribal nation communities face, including climate change, biases in data collection and poverty. 

Because tribal nations are at the forefront of job growth and development in their communities, they “should be considered critical partners in the future of the technology sector,” the report’s authors write.

The report calls for more investment in training Native educators to teach computer science and related fields, and integrating Indigenous culture, traditions and languages into those classes.

A 4-year-old program run jointly by the Kapor Foundation and AISES, for example, partners with school districts and Native-serving schools to develop tribe-specific culturally relevant computer science curriculum. That instruction doesn’t only happen in computer science class, said McAlear. The program’s staff work with schools to develop project-based, culturally relevant computer science lessons that are woven into other classes including science, language and history.

In Fortier’s district, students in science classes were recently tasked with using robots to code the life cycle of a salmon. Through that activity they gained knowledge of their local tribal economies while being introduced to new tech, he said.

Before the pandemic, Fortier’s school had eliminated some computer science and technology courses due to budget cuts. But with federal Covid relief funding, along with grants from Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit arm of a regional Native corporation, and programmatic support from AISES, the school was able to restore some of that instruction.*

Fortier said he believes these courses are essential for his students — not necessarily because they’ll have to learn all the latest cutting-edge technology for their future careers, but so they can use contemporary methods to share Native practices, knowledge and skills with the wider community.

“We can learn a lot from the elders in the traditional knowledge,” he said. “But our kids need to apply it in a new, modern, meaningful way. They need to be able to communicate to and within the world.”

*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct version of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s name.

This story about computer science access was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter

The post Native American students have the least access to computer science appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

For as long as Jake Price has been a teacher, Wolfram Alpha — a website that solves algebraic problems online — has threatened to make algebra homework obsolete. 

Teachers learned to work around and with it, said Price, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. But now, they have a new homework helper to contend with: generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT.

Price doesn’t see ChatGPT as a threat,and he’s not alone. Some math professors believe AI, when used correctly, could help strengthen math instruction. And it’s arriving on the scene at a time when math scores are at a national historic low and educators are questioning if math should be taught differently. 

“Computers are really good at doing tedious things. We don’t have to do all the tedious stuff. We can let the computer do it. And then we can interpret the answer and think about what it tells us about the decisions we need to make.”

Jake Price, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington

AI can serve as a tutor, giving a student who is floundering with a problem immediate feedback. It can help a teacher plan math lessons, or write a variety of math problems geared toward different levels of instruction. It can even show new computer programmers sample code, allowing them to skip over the boring chore of learning how to write basic code. 

As schools across the country debate banning AI tools, some math and computer science teachers are embracing the change because of the nature of their discipline.

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

“Math has always been evolving as technology evolves,” said Price. A hundred years ago, people were using slide rules and doing all of their multiplication with logarithmic tables. Then, along came calculators.

Price teaches with human-capable technologies in mind, making sure to give students the skills in class by hand. Then, he discusses with them the limitations of the technologies they might be tempted to use when they get home. 

“Computers are really good at doing tedious things,” Price said. “We don’t have to do all the tedious stuff. We can let the computer do it. And then we can interpret the answer and think about what it tells us about the decisions we need to make.”

He wants his students to enjoy looking for patterns, seeing how different methods can give different or the same answers and how to translate those answers into decisions about the world. 

“ChatGPT, just like the calculator and just like the slide rule and all the technology before, just helps us get at that core, real part of math,” Price said.

Conversely, ChatGPT has its limits. It can show the right steps to solving a math problem — and then give the wrong answer.

This is because it’s “not actually doing the math,” Price said. It’s just pulling together pieces of the sentences where other people have described how to solve similar problems.

Min Sun, a University of Washington education professor, thinks students should use ChatGPT like a personal tutor. If students get lost in class and don’t understand a mathematical operation, they can ask ChatGPT to explain it and give them a few examples.

The Khan Academy, an educational nonprofit that provides a collection of online learning tools and videos and has long been a go-to for math homework, has created exactly that.  

The tutor is called Khanmigo. Students can open it while completing math problems and tell it that they are stuck. 

They can have a conversation with the AI tutor, telling it what they don’t understand, and the AI tutor helps to explain, said Kristen DiCerbo, the chief learning officer at Khan Academy.

“Instead of saying, ‘Here’s the answer for you,’ it says things like, ‘What’s the next step?’ or ‘What do you think might be the next thing to do?’” DiCerbo said.

Related: The ‘science of reading’ swept reforms into classrooms nationwide. What about math?

Sun, the UW education professor, wants teachers to use ChatGPT as their own assistant: to plan math lessons, give students good feedback and communicate with parents.

Teachers can ask AI, “What is the best way to teach this concept?” Or “What are the kinds of mistakes students tend to make when learning this math concept?” Or, “What kinds of questions will students have about this concept?”

Teachers can also ask ChatGPT to recommend different levels of math problems for students with different mastery of the concept, she said. This is particularly helpful for teachers who are new to the profession or have students with diverse needs — special education or English language learners, Sun said. 

“I’m amazed by the details that sometimes ChatGPT can offer,” Sun said. “It gives you some initial ideas and possible problem areas for students so I can get myself more prepared before walking into the classroom.”

And, if a teacher already has a high-quality lesson plan, they could feed that to ChatGPT and ask it to create another lesson in a similar teaching style, but for a different concept.

Sun hopes ChatGPT can also help teachers write more culturally appropriate word-problem questions to make all their students feel included. 

“The current technology is really a technical assistant to support them, empower them, amplify their creative abilities,” Sun said. “It is really not a substitute to their own agency, their own creativity, their own professionalism. They really need to keep that in mind.”

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

A year ago, if you asked Daniel Zingaro how he assesses his introductory computer science students, he would say: “We ask them to write code.” 

But if you ask him today, the answer would be far more complex, said Zingaro, an associate professor at the University of Toronto.

Zingaro and Leo Porter, a computer science professor at University of California San Diego, authored the book Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming with GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. They believe AI will allow introductory computer science classes to tackle big-picture concepts. 

A lot of beginner students get stuck writing very simple code, Porter and Zingaro said. They never move on to more advanced questions — and many still can’t write simple code after they complete the course.

“It’s not just uninteresting, it is frustrating,” Porter added. “They are trying to build something and they forgot a semicolon and they’ll lose three hours trying to find that missing semicolon” or some other bit of syntax that prevents a code from running properly.

AI doesn’t make those mistakes, and allows computer science professors to spend more of their time teaching higher-level skills.

The professors now ask their students to take a big problem and break it down to smaller questions or tasks the code needs to do. They also ask students to test and debug code once it is already written.

“If we think bigger picture about what we want our students to do, we want them to write software that is meaningful to them,” Porter said. “And this process of writing software is taking this fairly big, often not-well-defined problem and figuring out, how do I break them into pieces?” 

Magdalena Balazinska, director of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, embraces the progress AI has made.

“With the support of AI, human software engineers get to focus on the most interesting part of computer science: answering big software design questions,” Balazinska said. “AI allows humans to focus on the creative work.”

Not all professors in the field think AI should be integrated into the curriculum. Some interviewed for a UC San Diego research paper and in an Education Week survey prefer blocking or negating the use of ChatGPT or similar tools like Photomath, at least in the short term.

Zingaro and Porter argue that reading a lot of code generated by AI doesn’t feel like cheating. Rather, it’s how a student is going to learn.

“I think a lot of programmers read a lot of code, just like how I believe the best writers read a lot of writing,” Zingaro said. “I think that is a very powerful way to learn.”

This story about AI and math was produced by The Seattle Times in cooperation with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. 

The post AI might disrupt math and computer science classes – in a good way appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

More than 40 million Americans — roughly one out of every seven adults — have earned college credit but have no degree to show for their time and money.

Florida native Alix Petkov is one of them. He enrolled in college right after high school with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. Unaware that this career choice required medical school — and unable to afford college, much less a graduate education — Petkov changed majors twice and found himself making only halting progress toward a bachelor’s degree.

An on-campus job in information technology rekindled his interest in computers, but the gig paid just $10 per hour, and his computer science classes covered the same things he had already picked up at work.

So Petkov quit college roughly 30 credits short of a degree, with $16,000 in student loans and a credit card balance of $4,000 from paying living expenses.

He burnished his tech portfolio with freelance computer work, applied for IT jobs, worked in restaurants and stewed over his frustrating experience, later saying that “College only destroyed me.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Like millions of other learners, Petkov was forced into an outdated and bureaucratic model of higher education that’s not designed for how people navigate learning and work today.

Far too many learners are pausing their education long before they earn a credential because they run out of money, time or patience. Or they wind up in a program that lacks the support and structure to meet their individualized needs and goals.

Related: The college degree gap between Black and white Americans was always bad. It’s getting worse

Learners need better access to lower-cost, shorter-term programs that help them achieve their career goals.

Federal and state governments and postsecondary institutions can and should adopt policies and practices that will help students build career pathways and make alternatives to a college degree more accessible, affordable and practical.

To achieve this, federal and state policymakers must ease some of the guardrails meant to protect learners from making “bad” decisions — after all, some of these guardrails have stifled postsecondary innovation and limited competition between college and noncollege options, ultimately restricting learners’ choices. Students must also receive better information about college and noncollege pathways and outcomes both before they begin a program and while they are enrolled.

College isn’t always the best option for every learner.

Petkov said he received little — and often incorrect — information in high school and college about higher education and potential alternatives. No one advised him, for example, that he could save thousands of dollars by completing university-required general education classes at a local community college.

Looking back, Petkov admits he would have pursued a different path altogether if he had a better up-front understanding of the costs and courses required to complete a degree.

His story, which he shared with me this summer over a video call after I requested an introduction, illustrates why students need more transparent financial counseling and more options for using financial aid beyond the limited college options currently afforded by student aid programs.

Giving high school students information about program costs and financial aid well before they apply to college will aid their decision-making. Students should be able to use Pell Grants for noncollege alternative programs that have proven track records of moving students into jobs that pay family-sustaining wages.

Petkov said it didn’t become apparent until later that his financial aid and campus job wouldn’t cover all of his college expenses. Because he was awarded Pell Grants, he borrowed less than other students.

But Pell Grants can be used in just one setting: college. Had Petkov been allowed to use the federal subsidy to pursue a college alternative — like an accelerated tech or healthcare upskilling program from a noncollege provider — he would have done that instead.

Related: OPINION: Often overlooked vocational-tech schools provide great solutions to student debt, labor shortages

Because of time and expense, college isn’t always the best option for every learner. Mounting evidence on program-level outcomes shows that far too many of the options that the government deems “safe” simply because they are accredited have failed learners and left them no better off than if they had not pursued college at all.

Petkov didn’t find his true path until more than a year after he quit college. While searching online for IT jobs, he stumbled on information about Merit America, a nonprofit offering low-cost programs that prepare people for tech careers. (Merit America is a grantee of the Charles Koch Foundation, part of the Stand Together philanthropic community, where the author is a senior fellow.)

Merit America built on Petkov’s existing IT knowledge to give him new tech skills that allowed him to push past self-doubt and launch a successful career. After completing the program, Petkov landed a tech coordinator’s job at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that started him at $45,000 — more than twice what he was making in food service.

Two jobs later, he’s currently the IT director of an executive coaching firm and makes a little more than $100,000 per year. A University of Virginia analysis shows that Merit America completers see an average annual wage increase of $24,000 three or more months after finishing the program.

Merit America is among the growing number of providers preparing students for placement into high-demand tech and healthcare careers. Yet students from low-income backgrounds who rely on financial aid and loans often get little guidance about such college alternatives and may instead be advised to pursue a college degree.

It’s time to open more doors to short-term, noncollege options, so that students like Petkov can access more personalized options to help them thrive.

Steven Taylor is a senior fellow on postsecondary education at Stand Together Trust. He leads the postsecondary education and workforce policy portfolio and partnership strategy.

This story about debt but no degree was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Here’s why a costly college education should not be the only path to career success appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Tha Cung looked over his sixth-grade class schedule, he took notice of the math block. He had been placed in an advanced class. 

“I didn’t know ‘honors’ even existed,” he said.

Tha was little when his family immigrated from Myanmar, and, for much of his time in Dallas schools, he took courses designed for children who are learning English. In fifth grade, his standardized test scores showed he was a strong math student – someone who should be challenged with honors classes in middle school.

Under Dallas Independent School District policy, Tha’s parents didn’t need to sign him up for advanced math. A teacher or counselor didn’t have to recommend him, either. In many schools, those are the hoops a student must get through to join honors classes. But Tha was automatically placed in the advanced course because of his scores on Texas’ STAAR test.

A version of this approach will soon be replicated statewide as part of an effort to remove systemic barriers that can stand between bright students and rigorous courses. It sounds simple: Instead of having families opt-in to advanced math, they are instead given the choice to opt-out. 

During its regular session, the Legislature passed a bipartisan bill mandating every student who performed in the top 40 percent on a fifth-grade math assessment automatically be enrolled in advanced math for sixth grade. 

“We’re setting up a structure that uses an objective measure to ensure that students who are already showing that they are capable are being put on that advanced math pathway,” said Jennifer Saenz, a policy director with the E3 Alliance, an education collaborative based in Austin, which advocated for the new Texas law. 

How the approach rolls out in Texas could provide lessons for other states. 

Leaders across the country are confronting the need to prepare a new, diverse generation of STEM workers. And after COVID-19, it’s been particularly challenging for students to bounce back from widespread learning loss in math. Eighth graders in Texas scored roughly in line with the national average on the test referred to as the Nation’s Report Card in 2022, seeing a similar dip since 2019.

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Before the pandemic, E3 Alliance’s research found that Black and Hispanic students in Texas were routinely left out of advanced classes – even if they earned high test scores. The group hopes the new state law will build pathways for students who have been historically excluded.

Enrolling in advanced math in sixth grade clears the way for a student to take Algebra I in eighth grade. That opens up the possibility of courses such as calculus or statistics during high school. And that can then set a stronger foundation for a STEM major in college and a high-paying career after graduation. 

Advocates for the opt-out policy say it’s a workforce issue in addition to an equity issue.

“Especially in today’s rapidly changing and technology-driven economy, math matters more than ever – for individual students and for the larger Texas workforce to remain competitive,” said Jonathan Feinstein, a state director at The Education Trust, a national nonprofit promoting equity.

On a recent morning at Vickery Meadow’s Sam Tasby Middle School, Principal Nesha Maston observed dozens of students in Room 304 calculating the area of parallelograms and trapezoids. 

In that class was Alexis Grant, an 11-year-old who thinks her year in sixth-grade honors math will pave the way for achieving one of her goals: Studying at Harvard. 

“I knew it would be challenging,” Alexis said of her math class.“We push each other to get the work done.”

Many of her Tasby classmates – including Tha – are immigrants. Families who send their children to the school collectively speak more than a dozen languages, and the vast majority are low-income. 

When Maston looks in on those honors classes, she sees the population of her school is reflected.  

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

Maston’s observations are backed up by Dallas ISD data. 

Not only are far more DISD students enrolling in advanced math, but those classrooms are more diverse.

In 2018, prior to the opt-out policy, roughly 3,500 sixth graders enrolled in honors math classes. About 17 percent of Black students in that grade and one-third of Hispanic students were in those classes, compared to half of white students. 

“My mom told me that I could be anything. So I chose engineer.”

Tha Cung, student, Dallas Independent School District

Last year, more than 5,100 sixth graders took honors math. And now, 43 percent of Black students are in honors math when they enter middle school and nearly six in 10 Hispanic students are. The percentage of white sixth graders in honors math has also gone up, to roughly 82 percent. 

Meanwhile, the number of Dallas ISD eighth-grade students enrolled in Algebra I nearly doubled between 2018 and last year. 

Texas is home to more than 1,000 school districts, which means vastly different ways students could end up in advanced courses. The decisions were often subjective.

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

Teacher recommendations are a big factor in some districts. But those decisions can be swayed by implicit biases around what an “honors students” looks or acts like, education advocates say. 

In other places, parents must request advanced classes for their children – but that can leave out students whose parents may not be aware of the option. Students themselves also may not want to opt-in because they don’t see themselves as good at math or don’t want the extra workload. 

The number of Dallas ISD eighth-grade students enrolled in Algebra I nearly doubled between 2018 and last year. 

Some Central Texas districts also already have an opt-out policy, with the help of the E3 Alliance. Those schools have seen far more Black and Hispanic students complete Algebra I in eighth grade, as well as a huge jump among children who are learning English.

In Hays ISD, curriculum officer Derek McDaniel watched as the number of students in advanced math ballooned over the past three years since implementing the new policy. 

As more districts move in this direction under the new law, McDaniel urges school administrators to prioritize parent communication. Explaining to families why their child is placed into honors math is critical, he said, adding that parents should know the benefit of this more challenging course load.

Communication with teachers is also key, McDaniel said. Some honors-level teachers are accustomed to a certain student profile. They expect limited behavior problems and for students to always complete homework assignments on time. 

With an opt-out policy, he said, some students will be new to the advanced track and not have developed uniform study skills in the lower grades. 

“The easy solution is to give up,” McDaniel said. “We’re gonna stick with the kid.” 

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

A handful of other states have embraced opt-out or automatic enrollment policies.

In North Carolina, for example, a 2017 News & Observer/Charlotte Observer investigation found students from low-income families were placed in advanced coursework at lower rates than their affluent peers who demonstrated the same levels of achievement.

Lawmakers later passed an “automatic enrollment” law. According to a 2022 state report, 92 percent of North Carolina middle and high school students who scored at the highest level on their end-of-grade math test were placed in an advanced math course.

Texas’ strategy is unique in its focus on sixth-grade math as a gateway for more advanced courses.

Now, 43 percent of Black students are in honors math when they enter middle school and nearly six in 10 Hispanic students are. The percentage of white sixth graders in honors math has also gone up, to roughly 82 percent. 

Recognizing the change could be a heavy lift, the Texas Education Agency has given administrators until the 2024 school year to comply with the law. 

Among the potential challenges: schools may need to strengthen their pipeline of advanced math teachers. Administrators may also have to build out more time for tutoring or host summer camps to bring more students up to speed on key math skills.

Dallas ISD chief academic officer Shannon Trejo said some students might begin middle school fuzzy on various math ideas. Or, because of the COVID disruption, they may have some gaps in their understanding of foundational concepts. 

“We need to be ready to build those little gaps and not make that be the cause for students to say, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore,’” she said.

The payoff may be years away, when current Dallas students begin earning high-paying jobs in science, technology, engineering or math fields.

Tha Cung was placed in that sixth-grade honors math class two years ago. Now he’s an eighth grader enrolled in Algebra I. He thinks that will give him a leg up in the future.

“My mom told me that I could be anything,” Tha, 13, said. “So I chose engineer.”

This story is part of The Math Problem, a series by The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas. The Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.

The post How Texas plans to make access to advanced math more equitable  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.