There are few topics in college access and higher education that inspire as much conviction from opposing sides as standardized tests.

Over the last few years, many people have come to believe that such tests are at the root of education inequity.

Opponents of tests have argued that removing tests from college admissions is the primary way to expand access.

Those beliefs, combined with the banal reality that few people like the tests — whether it’s the students studying for them, the parents paying for test prep or institutions being called out for using them in admissions — have made tests a perfect target.

But tests are not the single source of inequity, their elimination is not the cure and likability is not the criterion upon which the future of American education should rest. While I did not like taking a Covid test or the unmistakably pink line it summoned right before my planned vacation, the test was a meaningful predictor of what was to come, as well as where I had been.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Test-optional policies didn’t do much to diversify college student populations

Today, because many colleges and universities across the country no longer require students to include SAT or ACT scores in their applications, there’s a perception among some students that including test scores adds no additional value.

And yet, in the class of 2023, 1.9 million students took the SAT at least once, while 1.4 million took the ACT. Millions of students still take the SAT and ACT and choose to include their scores as one more way to stand out in admissions.

However, fewer students from lower-income backgrounds are taking these tests than in years past. The College Board reported that in 2022 only 22 percent of test-takers were from families earning less than $67,084 annually — a steep decline from 43 percent six years earlier. In contrast, from 2016 to 2022, the percentage of test-takers from wealthy households grew slightly or stayed about the same.

A clear pattern has emerged in which two groups — one wealthy and one not — have responded to test-optional policies in disparate ways. The middle and upper class opt in, and the others opt out. Publicly available information from various colleges compiled by Compass Education Group shows that students who submit scores have a higher rate of acceptance than those who don’t.

If these tests supposedly no longer matter, why are privileged students using them as a competitive advantage — while underrepresented students opt out?

We now have evidence that standardized tests in fact may help — not hurt — students from low-income families and underrepresented minority groups get into and persist in college. The latest research shows that not only are test scores as predictive or even more predictive than high school grades of college performance, they are also strong predictors of post-college outcomes.

Therefore, earning and reporting high test scores should boost acceptance odds for students from under-resourced high schools and communities, since admissions officers seek data that indicates a student can keep up with the academic rigor at their institutions. Reporting higher scores can be the difference between attending a two- or a four-year college, where chances of persistence and graduation are exponentially higher.

Furthermore, for thousands of high-schoolers, these tests are not optional — and this has nothing to do with the admission policies of colleges and universities.

Many states and school districts in the U.S. use the SAT and ACT tests as part of their high school graduation requirements, accountability and evaluation systems.

These states and systems rely on the tests because they are a standardized way to tell whether students across a variety of districts — rich, poor; big, small; urban, rural — are ready for postsecondary success.

Many educators believe that standardized tests flatten such variables by placing everyone on the same scale — that they are, in fact, more equitable than the alternatives.

Yes, there are score gaps by race and class. However, standardized tests did not cause these realities — the unfairness associated with them is symptomatic of the broader inequalities that permeate education and all aspects of our society.

Related: OPINION: The charade of ‘test-optional’ admissions

The SAT and ACT measure a student’s mastery of fundamentals, including the English and math skills they should be learning in K-12. The unfairness lies in the fact that wealthier students often attend better schools and can afford to pay for extracurricular test preparation, which reinforces their schoolwork and often comes with valuable counseling. In doing so, they increase their confidence as well their motivation. All these things also help prepare students for life, not simply a test.

Rather than target our rage at tests that consistently deliver bad news, let’s focus our energies on preparing all students to do well on these tests so that they know that college is within their reach, and they are prepared to succeed when they get there.

We must embed test preparation in the school day for all students, not just a select few, all across America. We should work with teachers to ensure they are prepared to deliver high-quality instruction that reinforces what students learn in class and enables them to achieve scores that will unlock a myriad of opportunities.

There are models for this. Advanced Placement classes, for example, prepare students for tests that specifically help them become more competitive in admissions and earn college credit, allowing them to save time and money in college. (Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, this advantage, too, is often unavailable in many under-resourced schools and districts.) We can and should create a similar but more equitable model for college entrance exams.

As we begin 2024, let’s adopt a fresh and nuanced perspective on standardized tests so that all students can use them to their advantage — to be prepared for and succeed on the tests and, ultimately, in college and beyond.

Yoon S. Choi is CEO of CollegeSpring, a national nonprofit that provides in-school test preparation to districts in high-poverty neighborhoods, working with and through teachers to ensure they can deliver high-quality instruction that prepares students for standardized tests.

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

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I cried the day I gained acceptance to Wesleyan University in 2018. My tears signified relief, joy and excitement. I viewed my acceptance into this elite private institution as a dooropening, a new opportunity for young Black students like me.

As a Sierra Leonean American, I had felt constrained by my public education in the United States. I had to fight against low expectations and conditions that devalued my potential, including “accidentally” being placed into English as a Second Language in elementary school, even though English is my first language. I then had to fight for a spot in upper-level classes when I got into high school.

I was fortunate to become a part of TeenSHARP, a college access program for marginalized students that exposed me to schools like Wesleyan and taught me how to advocate for myself while paving the way for others.

Little did I know that my acceptance to Wesleyan was opening a portal to an academic and corporate world in which I would see even fewer people who looked like me. While many college students experience their first semester as an exhilarating time filled with joining student groups, I spent a lot of my time grappling with what it meant to be the only Black woman in predominantly white classes. With the end of affirmative action, more students will experience what I felt: being the only or one of a few Black students.

I remember exploring Wesleyan for the first time. The halls were filled with pictures of alumni, mostly white men, that sent me on a trip down the institution’s memory lane where, as a Black woman, I didn’t exist.

No matter how much I told myself that I belonged, the insidious history of Wesleyan, from its pictures to its architecture to its racial makeup, was a haunting reminder that while I may have gained entry into this world, Black people generally do not.

I would have loved to go to a historically Black college or university, but the lack of funding for HBCUs means they can’t be as generous with financial aid,leaving me, and many other Black students, with the options of taking on unsustainable debt or trying to get in somewhere else.

My acceptance to Wesleyan came at a time when race could still be considered in college admissions, before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, effectively ending an avenue of hope for Black and Latino groups.

Related: Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action?

However, the gap between the numbers of Black and white college graduates was growing even before the court ruled on affirmative action.

Affirmative action was a meager attempt at leveling the playing field. The Supreme Court’s decision to get rid of it will only continue the caste system in which people with marginalized identities are barred from reaching self-determination because we simply can’t get into spaces that will allow us to thrive.

Ending affirmative action is not only an attack on the benefits of diversity in education, but a direct way to end the mobility of students like me by closing the door to opportunities that were already hard to access.

Historically, race has been a social determinant. Race determined which jobs you could get and which schools you could attend. To ignore race in college admissions will not erase the race problem that plagues our nation. It will only exasperate it.

As long as America refuses to look in the mirror and face the social barriers that necessitated the creation of affirmative action in the first place, brilliant students of color will be overlooked in the admissions process.

Related: OPINION: Legacy admissions are unnecessary, raise moral concerns and exclude deserving students

As I build my career, I often find myself in situations similar to those I experienced as an undergraduate: One of just a handful ofBlack people, or even the only one, in professional settings.

The Supreme Court’s decision has now set a precedent such that initiatives like the Fearless Fund, a nonprofit that provides funding for Black women entrepreneurs, are under attack. And many companies have halted diversity, equity and inclusion programs due to fear of being sued.

Now is the time not to be complacent but to educate ourselves, stay informed and mobilize. The court’s decision is a reminder that the rights and opportunities we have fought for are not a given, and only stay firm when we are.

Alphina Kamara is a development associate at The World Justice Project and a previous Fulbright fellow.

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

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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.

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Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation ends the shortest tenure in the university’s history — six months. It’s not a coincidence that the record is set by the school’s first Black woman president. We were headed for this moment since she started in July.

Some pundits are blaming antisemitism and plagiarism, ignoring the white supremacist politics at the center of her ouster: the same politics shaping higher education at schools like Harvard since the creation of higher education in the United States.

Less than a month before Gay’s resignation, these politics were on display as Ivy League early admissions decisions sparked the annual accusations of reverse racism, with non-Black students and parents blaming Black students for stealing their spots in the class of 2028.

Such accusations are perpetual fallacies in a long narrative about Black people that claims we undeservedly get jobs, opportunities and admittance to the country’s most selective colleges and universities that “should” go to white people.

Gay’s appointment was both applauded as a sign of Harvard’s racial progress and derided as a “diversity hire.”

However, in December, Gay’s controversial testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s hearing on antisemitism on college campuses and, in particular, her repeated defense of free speech on campus, opened the door to calls for her removal. Widely reported accusations of plagiarism against her led to additional scrutiny which facilitated her resignation. On closer inspection, that alleged plagiarism amounted to a relatively small number of “citation errors” in her 1997 dissertation and a few other academic papers. Similar comments on free speech also felled University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill, yet she managed to resign without the racialized questioning of her entire professional career that Gay has had to face.

Related: Students have reacted strongly to university presidents’ Congressional testimony about antisemitism 

After her resignation, Gay noted that she was a victim of a campaign against Black faculty, one that “recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament.”

It is not a coincidence that Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were targeted for those House Committee hearing. They are representative of the cultural zeitgeist at many prestigious institutions — and a political battleground for those seeking control over American ideology.

Harvard, in particular, has been at the center of these battleground narratives — one about “unqualified” Black leadership and the other by students who believe below-average Blacks have taken their spots.

Established in 1636, Harvard is an institution that prides itself on its lack of access. Initially, Harvard, and schools fashioned after it, were institutions for upper-class white men only; it has always existed at the nexus of white supremacy in the United States.

The goalposts for Black people to display merit keep changing; seemingly no matter our credentials, we are perceived as gaming entrance where we don’t belong.

Harvard’s mission has facilitated the creation of a constant supply of wealthy white politicians and businessmen from the so-called right families and with the “right” education to lead this country. It would be over 300 years until Black people were regularly admitted — and another 70 years before a Black woman would be appointed president of the university.

This was by design. As discussed in my book, “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” Ivy League schools are meant to be exclusionary. Attending Harvard has always been a dream to strive for, a way to perpetuate race and class-based hierarchies — to effectively define who belongs at the “top” of society and who doesn’t.

 As a symbol of a well-working meritocracy, though, Harvard fails. Instead, the goalposts for Black people to display merit keep changing; seemingly, no matter our credentials, we are perceived as gaming entrance where we don’t belong.

Gay’s resignation signals the embeddedness of racism at these prestigious schools. She had to go because she didn’t belong. And the political pressure that was used to get her to resign without just cause provides another opportunity to show Black people they don’t belong, regardless of their professional achievements, and to keep schools like Harvard white. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban effectively ensures that they will stay that way.

All of this tells us that the presence of any Black people in prestigious institutions is still a problem for many people. Even when affirmative action was in place, Black students made up less than 7 percent of Harvard’s overall campus population. Harvard accepts less than 4 percent of all applicants.

With those numbers, it is empirically impossible to claim that Black people are inundating Harvard and schools like it; yet there’s still this clear illogic focused squarely on us to explain Harvard’s elusiveness to white people more broadly.

Without Black people to blame, the more than 96 percent of applicants who are not admitted must face the reality of higher ed in America — that schools like Harvard were never likely to admit them, because these schools are meant to perpetuate not only whiteness but also wealth and power.

Admissions offices at Harvard, Princeton and Yale were created in response to concerns about high percentages of Jewish students starting in the 1910s. New admissions policies set quotas on Jewish students in a given class and created checklists of desirable characteristics, including racial and ethnic identities, to more specifically shape the makeup of the student body.

Admissions policies became even more important in the 1940s when the potential for Black student applicants returning from war to use the GI bill to cover tuition again threatened the white wealth culture these schools had established.

Hierarchical ranking systems and the introduction of the “Ivy League” in 1954 further stratified schools by race and class.

Affirmative action policies that came later only slightly increased the percentage of Black students at these schools in any given year.

Related: COLUMN: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity

A similar fate to Gay’s will likely befall the next Black woman Harvard president, should it ever appoint another, just as every year, nameless, faceless Black students are erroneously accused of taking the spot of “more deserving” white students to assuage those white students’ feelings of failure.

Ivy League schools, the most important gatekeepers of higher education, are institutionally racist. And Harvard is the blueprint.

Black people will never belong there because we weren’t meant to — not then, not now, not ever.

Jasmine Harris, is the author of “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” and an associate professor of African American Studies and coordinator of the African American Studies program at the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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Dear Reader, 

Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all. 

The first half of the year felt like we were all collectively holding our breath, waiting for the United States Supreme Court to rule on two massive cases, one on student loan forgiveness and another on affirmative action in college admissions. As we waited, I wrote about the poster child of the anti-affirmative action movement, Jon Marcus broke down federal data that shows the gap between Black and white Americans with college degrees is widening, and Meredith Kolodner reported, as she has before, about the fact that many flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s Black or Latino high school graduates. 

The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions. 

Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it  clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is. 

All the while, we continued covering the country’s community colleges. Jill Barshay wrote about how much it costs to produce a community college graduate, and why some community colleges are choosing to drop remedial math. Jon covered the continuing enrollment struggles at these institutions. I reported on a new initiative to target job training for students at rural community colleges, as well as a guide to help community colleges make this kind of training more effective. 

We also examined some of the many routes people choose to take instead of going to college. I reported on what happens when universities get into unregulated partnerships with for-profit tech boot camps, and Meredith and Sarah Butrymowicz reported on risky, short-term career training programs that exist in a “no man’s land of accountability.” Tara García Mathewson exposed the tricky system that formerly incarcerated people have to navigate if they want to get job training and professional licenses once they’re out of prison. 

And though we love to dig deep into subjects and understand exactly how these big issues affect the lives of regular people, we also zoomed out this year. Meredith, working alongside Matthew Haag from The New York Times, discovered that Columbia University and New York University benefit massively from property tax breaks allowed for nonprofits (they saved $327 million last year alone). After their story was published, New York state legislators proposed a bill that would require these two institutions to pay those taxes and  funnel that money to the City University of New York system, the largest urban public university system in the country.

In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.

For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year. 

Olivia

P.S. As a nonprofit news outlet, The Hechinger Report relies on readers like you to support our journalism. If you want to ensure our coverage in 2024 is as extensive and deeply reported as possible, please consider donating.

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WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”

Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.

Another“moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.

The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.

It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.

Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.

Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.

Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.

The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.

“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne

But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.

About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.

For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.

College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.

She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.

Related: College advisors vow to kick the door open for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling

Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.

“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”

Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.

Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.

This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.

That makes her angry.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”

Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University

Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.

“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”

That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.

“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”

Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.

Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.

Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.

Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”

Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.

Related: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity

The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.

Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.

Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”

Margarita Rodriguez, mother

Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.

Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.

Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide

“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”

HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.

Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.

Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily Rodriguez, high school senior

“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.

At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.

Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.

Related: A poster child for protesting affirmative action now says he never meant for it to be abolished

For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.

For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”

Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Rafael said as they huddled together in front of Emily’s laptop. Emily wore a white t-shirt with “Cornell” emblazoned in bold red letters on the front, for good luck. She wavered, then clicked.

“Congratulations, you have been admitted to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: College major: Animal Science at Cornell University for the fall of 2024. Welcome to the Cornell community!” said the email on her screen, adorned with red confetti.Annual estimated costs for next year would be $92,682 – but Cornell pledged to meet all of it.

Emily screamed, and the room erupted in cheers. Every member of the family began sobbing. Cinnamon, the family’s three-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, barked wildly.

Emily jumped up and down. “Ivy League!” she shouted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I did it.”

Brianna, a sixth grader who will work with TeenSHARP once she’s in high school, hugged both of her sisters.

It will be her turn next.

Additional reporting was contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz.

This story about the end of affirmative action is the second in a series of articles accompanying a documentary produced by The Hechinger Report in partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action. Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Everyone and their mother seems to have an opinion on the three college presidents who testified before Congress last week on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Yes, I’m talking about the hearing that resulted in one university president losing her job and investigations into three elite universities.

Did the university leaders speak out strongly enough? Where is the line between free speech and hate speech, and at what point should someone be disciplined?

Congressmembers, faculty, alumni and donors have all weighed in. But how do the students feel? Based on reports in their student newspapers and statements from different campus groups, they seem to be just as divided as everyone else. 

During the hearing, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Sally A. Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they opposed antisemitism and supported the existence of Israel, but when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews constitute harassment and bullying, they said it depended on the context. Since then, Gay and Magill have issued apologies and Magill has resigned.

Many students see this as a free speech issue, raising the question of whether calling for a genocide is free speech or hate speech.  Others say that such questions are quibbling compared to the hatred and fear created by both antisemitic and anti-Islamic rhetoric. 

Harvard Hillel students wrote that “President Gay’s failure to properly condemn this speech calls into question her ability to protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus,” adding that they would like to work with the university administration on ways to educate the community on “the history of the Jewish people and the evolution of antisemitism.” At Penn, students and community members rallied in support of the protection of Jewish students. And Jewish MIT students told ABC News that they felt there was institutional support for students who support Palestine but not for Jewish students, and that they felt Jewish and Muslim students had been pitted against each other.

Here are some excerpts of students’ thoughts. 

Harvard University

The editorial board of The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, published an editorial in which they strongly opposed both antisemitism and calls for President Gay to resign. They wrote that antisemitism has “been treated as a prop in political theater.” 

“Recent rhetoric has portrayed non-Jewish Harvard students — and Harvard more broadly — as deeply antisemitic. We reject this careless characterization. We believe the vast majority of our peers do not harbor hate toward Jewish people.

“This perspective has been obscured as Congress has portrayed Jewish and pro-Palestinian students as diametrically opposed monoliths with uniform sets of beliefs and emotions. In reality, our campus is home to Jewish students who advocate for a free Palestine, Arab students who endorse a Jewish right to self-determination, and many more individuals whose experiences have shaped complex, well-reasoned beliefs.”

“Recent rhetoric has portrayed non-Jewish Harvard students — and Harvard more broadly — as deeply antisemitic. We reject this careless characterization.” 

The Harvard Crimson

The editorial board urged students not to let snippets of the Congressional hearing define what is happening at Harvard. Having witnessed the vitriol of the past few months, the students said, they wanted to set the record straight. 

“Gay’s response about context dependence may seem unsatisfying, but there is — equally unsatisfyingly — no University policy that unequivocally answers Stefanik’s question. These policies do warrant more robust discussion and clarification, but a truthful answer about their ambiguity does not merit such opprobrium.”

Read more about Harvard student perspectives in Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson.

The University of Pennsylvania

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s editorial board opted not to weigh in on Magill’s resignation. Instead, it published an editorial urging students to speak for themselves about their experiences at Penn. 

“As global and local events continue to converge on this campus now and into the future, we should not let voices that are prominent, but distant, speak for us,” the editorial board wrote. “The path forward for Penn must be paved with more, not less, speech. As members of the Penn community, we have a special opportunity, and some may even say responsibility, to speak up about our experiences here.”

The publication has published a series of opinion pieces on Magill’s resignation from a range of viewpoints.

One student writer, Mritika Senthil, wrote that pressure from media attention and donor demands could lead to performative changes, rather than substantive ones. 

“The path forward for Penn must be paved with more, not less, speech. As members of the Penn community, we have a special opportunity, and some may even say responsibility, to speak up about our experiences here.”

The Daily Pennsylvanian

Senthil wrote that there are administrators and faculty making decisions every day that do not involve the president. She questioned how much difference the president’s departure could make without a “comprehensive restructuring of campus standards.”

“Our leadership needs to recognize that their speech can contribute to student discomfort and fear of open dialogue. I’m sure that most of Penn’s community not only accepts but actively seeks the exploration and debate of differing ideas. But when students and faculty cease to maintain mutual respect, the ethics of the academic community are ironically ignored,” Senthil wrote. 

Mia Vesely, an opinion writer for the Daily Pennsylvanian, expressed fear that Magill’s resignation could lead to censorship for faculty and students. 

“I ask you: what is next? If university presidents can be bullied into stepping down for allegations that serve as a contrast for actual policies they’re implementing, where do we go from here? Do we censor free speech and punish students for saying political statements that don’t align with major donors? Do we cast aside the First Amendment and live on a campus that doesn’t allow free expression?” Vesely wrote. 

Read more student perspectives in Penn’s student publication, The Daily Pennsylvanian. 

M.I.T. 

The Tech, M.I.T.’s student newspaper, hasn’t published any news story or opinion piece since the university leaders testified before Congress. But the student body appears to have been divided on these issues before the hearing. 

On Nov. 1, The Tech published an opinion column by Avi Balsam, who detailed the distress he experienced hearing chants of “intifada,” on campus during a demonstration outside M.I.T.’s Hillel. He wrote, “Words gain meaning from the historical context in which they are used. In this case, the historical context is violence and terrorism in the name of resistance. Claims to the contrary are either misinformed or dishonest.”

Balsam, a sophomore who serves as vice president of the student board of M.I.T.’s Hillel, called on Kornbluth to condemn calls for “intifada.” 

On Nov. 30, The Tech published an opinion column by a group of graduate students requesting several things from the university administration, including that it “make clear what students’ legal and institutional rights are in demonstrating on and off campus, and how to seek protection if needed.”

“We ask the MIT administration to support all students whose safety and well-being are adversely impacted by the decades-long violence in Israel and Palestine and who are expressing their views on campus,” the students wrote.

“Above all, we ask that MIT be an institution true to its values as a place where rights to freedom of expression are upheld, and where commitments toward making a better world are driven by the desire for human flourishing—not the interests of donors, the net gain of financial holdings, or US foreign policy agendas.”

This story about antisemitism on campus was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Check out our College Welcome Guide.

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As a former public-school teacher, I know that my students sometimes acted out when they didn’t receive the additional educational supports they needed. Too often they then faced a choice: Get your licks or go home.

 “Licks” meant an assistant principal beat their backsides with a paddle. “Go home” meant suspension. Those who chose the former would come back to class dejected, disengaged and depressed.

Many people may assume that what I saw is an outlier, but the latest Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) shows that at least 19,395 students experienced corporal punishment during the 2020-21 school year. Every time the CRDC data is released, I am reminded that corporal punishment continues in our schools today, and I am convinced it can be put to an end tomorrow.

To make this change, advocates must demand that their education leaders end this inhumane practice.

Corporal punishment has been banned in a majority of states since the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, during the 2017-18 school year, the CRDC reported, 69,492 students received corporal punishment, on top of 92,479 students in 2015-16. The most recent number is much lower mainly because in-person instruction and data reporting were disrupted during the pandemic.

Corporal punishment remains expressly legal in 16 states. Banning the practice in just 10 of those states, including the one I taught in, Alabama, along with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, would reduce the number of schools using corporal punishment by over 99 percent. Despite the small number of cases in the remaining six states where it is legal — Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Wyoming — it is still important to ban corporal punishment there to prevent individual schools from continuing the practice.

Additionally, explicitly prohibiting corporal punishment in states that have not yet done so (Connecticut, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and South Dakota) would protect future generations.

Related: State-sanctioned violence: Inside one of the thousands of schools that still paddles students

Corporal punishment needs to end because there is no evidence that retaining it decreases misbehavior. In other words, in the states that allow it, corporal punishment is not helping students control their behavior.

Instead, corporal punishment is associated with unintended negative consequences. These include higher rates of mental health problems, more negative parent-child relationships, lower cognitive ability, lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem and higher risk for physical abuse.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now.

Ending corporal punishment is also a civil rights issue: It is disproportionately used against Black students, students with disabilities and male students. News reports have highlighted that Black students receive physical punishment at twice the rate of white students nationwide; research shows that educators’ perceptions of student behavior are based on the students’ race — rather than the actual behavior — and that these perceptions contribute to the disproportionate rates in school discipline.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now that millions of students have not returned or are continuing to miss school since pandemic-based disruptions.

While states revisit their discipline policies, they should also reduce the “go home” exclusionary discipline practices (suspensions and expulsions), which can undermine children’s attachment to school. Such harsh punishments increase the chances of students dropping out and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to those punishments increasing the number of school days students miss, research shows that exclusionary discipline can decrease students’ likelihood of accumulating course credits, reduce their likelihood of graduating and lower their chances of earning a postsecondary credential.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

In my experience observing its impacts, corporal punishment has a similar distancing effect on students as suspensions and expulsions — making school feel like a place where they do not belong.

Schools still need to address misbehavior, of course, but there are better ways to do this. They can replace corporal punishment with evidence-based practices that help create safe and inclusive learning environments for all students. Such practices — including advisory systems, in which students meet regularly with a staff member about academic challenges, and “looping,” in which students have the same teacher for multiple years — build positive school-student relationships. These positive relationships can help prevent physical violence and bullying.

Restorative practices, also backed by research, typically foster dialogue in “circles” or “conferences” in which educators help students listen to each other and to teachers in order to resolve conflict and build community. For me, this often meant chatting with students in a hallway about why they acted out, giving them a chance to share their side of the story, regroup and refocus on school.

Recent research shows that investing in student supports, including social and emotional learning and mental health, is a better way to make schools truly safe, along with professional development for teachers and school staff. States should act quickly to make these alternatives more widely available and make schools less like prisons and more like everywhere else.

Corporal punishment is prohibited in almost every facet of life in the U.S. except schools. It is banned in military training centers, child care centers and juvenile detention facilities, and cannot be carried out as a sentence for a juvenile crime. The vast majority of children (76 percent) across the globe are protected by law from corporal punishment. Let’s use this current round of CRDC data to spur action to give our students better choices than the one my students faced.

Stephen Kostyo is an Impact Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Before working in education policy, Kostyo taught middle and high school math and science — and was recognized as a high school Teacher of the Year by his peers in 2015.

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

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WILMINGTON, Del. — Striding into a packed community center filled with high school seniors, Atnre Alleyne has a few words of advice for the crowd, members of the first class of college applicants to be shaped by June’s Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions.

“You have to get good grades, you have to find a way to do the academics, but also become leaders,” said Alleyne, the energetic co-founder and CEO of TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education. “In your schools, do something! Fight for social justice.”

Many of the TeenSHARP participants gathered here, who are predominantly Black or Hispanic, worry that their chances of getting into top-tier schools have diminished with the court’s decision. They wonder what to say in their admissions essays and how comfortable they’ll feel on campuses that could become increasingly less diverse.

On this autumn night, Alleyne and his team are fielding questions from the dozens of students they advise, on everything from early decision deadlines to which schools are most likely to give generous financial aid and scholarships. The changed admissions landscape has only increased the team’s determination to develop a new generation of leaders, students who will fight to have their voices represented on campuses and later on in the workplace.

“I want them to kick the door open to these places, so they will go back and open more doors,” Alleyne said.

That goal is shared by successful alumni of the program Alleyne and his wife, Tatiana Poladko, started in a church basement 14 years ago. Several are on hand tonight recounting their own educational journeys, culminating in full scholarships to schools such as the University of Chicago and Wesleyan University, where annual estimated costs approach $90,000.

Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, highly selective colleges served as a beacon of hope and economic mobility for students like those TeenSHARP advise. Many are first in their families to attend college and lack legacy connections or access to the private counselors who’ve long given a boost to wealthier students.

Related: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible records on diversity

But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.

“I felt really upset about it,” Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, said about the affirmative action ruling. “This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”

While the full impact of the ruling on student demographics remains unknown, representatives of 33 colleges wrote in an amicus brief filed in the case that the share of Black students on their campuses would drop from roughly 7.1 percent to 2.1 percent if affirmative action were banned.

The uncertainty of what the decision means is taking a toll on students and school counselors nationally, said Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. As colleges sort through how they can meet commitments to diversity while complying with the law, students wonder if mentioning race in their essays will help or hurt them.

In his majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, making essays the one opportunity for students to discuss their race and ethnicity. But since then, Edward Blum, the conservative activist who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits, promising to challenge any essay topic that is “nothing more than a back-channel subterfuge for divulging a student’s race.”

The Department of Education has published guidelines saying that while schools cannot put a thumb on the scale for students based on their race, they “remain free” to consider characteristics tied to individual students’ life experiences, including race. The National Association of College Admission Counseling issued similar guidance, while the Common App introduced new essay prompts that include one about students’ “identity” and “background.”

Because of the uncertainty,school counselors need specific training on crafting essays and how or whether to talk about race, Savitz-Romer said during a Harvard webinar last month on college admissions after affirmative action. “We need counselors and teachers to make students understand that college is still for them,” she said.

It’s a tall order: On average, public school counselors serve more than 400 students each, which offers little time for one-on-one advising.

Related: Why aren’t more school counselors trained in helping students apply to college?

That reality is why nonprofit advising groups like TeenSHARP toil alongside students, guiding them through an increasingly confounding admissions system. TeenSHARP’s team of three advisers works intensively with roughly 140 students at a time, including 50 seniors who often apply to as many as 20 colleges to maximize their chances.

That’s a fraction of those who need help, another reason why the group’s leaders rely on their network of more than 500 “Sharpies,” as alums are known.

Emily Rodriguez, a TeenSHARP senior who attends Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington, decided to address race head on in her college essays: She wrote about her determination that she would not “play the role of the poor submissive Mexican woman.”

“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed. But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”

Tatiana Poladko, co-founder, TeenSHARP

Hamza Parker, a senior at Delaware’s Smyrna High School who moved to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia as a sixth grader, said he was against writing about his identity at first. “I feel like it puts you in a position where you have to have a sob story for your essay instead of talking about something good, like, that happened in your life,” he told Alleyne and Poladko during a counseling session over Zoom.

But in the session Alleyne and Poladko encouraged him to draw from his own story, one they know something about from working with his older sister Hasana, now a junior at Pomona College. The family had a difficult move from Saudi Arabia to New York City and later Delaware, where Hamza joined the Delaware Black Student Coalition.

Hamza decided to revise his essay from one focused on linguistics to describe experiencing racism and then embracing his Muslim heritage.

“I am my normal social self and my Muslim faith and garb are widely known and respected at my school,” he wrote. “My school even now has a dedicated space for prayer during Ramadan.”

Related: The newest benefit at top companies: Private college admissions counseling

Alleyne and Poladko typically work with students who are beginning their first year of high school, so the pair can guide the entire college application process, much as some pricey private counselors do — although TeenSHARP’s services are free; as a nonprofit it relies on an array of donors for support.

Neither Poladko nor Alleyne attended elite schools. They met as graduate students at Rutgers University and became committed to starting TeenSHARP after helping Alleyne’s niece apply to colleges from a large New York City public high school.

Astonished by how complicated and inaccessible college admissions could be, the two decided to make it their life’s work, writing grants and getting donations from local banks and foundations so they could serve more students.

“I felt really upset about it. This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”

Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, about the affirmative action ruling.

Their work is now largely remote: During the pandemic, the couple relocated from Wilmington to Poladko’s native Ukraine to be closer to her family, leading to a dramatic escape to Poland with their three young children when war broke out. Poladko is taking a sabbatical from TeenSHARP this year, although she still helps some students via Zoom. Alleyne flies from Warsaw to Wilmington to meet with students in person, often at the community center downtown that once housed their offices.

They also rely on relationships they’ve built over the years with college presidents and admissions officers at schools like Boston College, Pomona College and Wesleyan, along with both Carleton and Macalester Colleges in Minnesota, many of whom have welcomed TeenSHARP applicants.

“We need more ‘Sharpies’ on our campus,” said Suzanne Rivera, president of Macalester College, in Minnesota, and a member of TeenSHARP’s advisory board. “Their questions are always so smart and so insightful.”

Sharpies also tend to become campus leaders, in part because TeenSHARP requires that its students develop leadership skills. That’s something William Garcia, who graduated from the University of Chicago last spring, told seniors in Wilmington.

“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll even if they are offered admission.”

Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta

At first, he felt isolated in Chicago, reticent to talk about his experiences as a Hispanic man. “I was in your shoes five years ago,” Garcia said. He later realized his background could be an asset, and drew on it to turn an ingredient for one of Mexico’s most popular liquors into a business venture for his own agave beverage company.

“Embrace your story; tell your story,” Garcia said. “I would tell my story and people would be really interested and would start to help me.”

Alphina Kamara, a 2022 graduate of Wesleyan University, urged seniors to aim high and look beyond state schools and local community colleges that have lower graduation rates and fewer resources — campuses she might have ended up at it not for TeenSHARP.

“I would have never have known that schools like Wesleyan existed, and that I, as a first-generation Black woman, had a place in them,” said Kamara, the child of immigrant parents from Sierra Leone.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide

Still, there will always be some TeenSHARP students who don’t want to be on campuses that had terrible track records for diversity, even before the court’s decision.

Tariah Hyland, who in high school co-founded the Delaware Black Student Coalition, knew she’d be more comfortable at one of the country’s more than 100 historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. She told the Delaware audience that she’s thriving in her junior year at Howard University, where she is studying political science.

Powell, the New Jersey junior, is eyeing both Howard and Atlanta’s Morehouse College and said he’ll likely only apply to HBCUs.

“When I was in public school, I was the only Black boy in my classes,” said Powell, who now attends Acelus Academy, an online school. “I was always the minority, and so by going to an HBCU, I would likely see more people who look like me.” 

That’s no surprise to Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, who said she’s expecting “more interest from Black and Brown students, now that the Supreme Court has made what I believe to be a regressive political decision.”

HBCUs like Spelman — whose graduates include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman and author Alice Walker — are already seeing more applications and are becoming even more competitive.

“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll, even if they are offered admission,” Holley said, adding that students may be worried about further assaults on diversity and inclusion on college campuses and believe they will be more comfortable at an HBCU.

Still, not everyone predicts the court ruling will precipitate a permanent drop in Black and Hispanic students at predominantly white, selective colleges. Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University predicts the drop will be temporary, and that the affirmative action ban will eventually lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students of all races.

Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, said he wants to see an end to legacy preferences as well as athletic recruiting, so that colleges can give “a meaningful boost” to “disadvantaged students of all races” and “you can get racial diversity without racial preferences.” Challenges to legacy admissions are mounting: The Education Department has opened an investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice, and a recent bipartisan bill calls for colleges to end it.

As mid-December approaches, Alleyne and Poladko are anxiously waiting to see how the handful of TeenSHARP students who applied for early decision will fare.

“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed,” Poladko said. “But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”

Until that time, both Poladko and Alleyne will continue pushing students to help those who come after them.

“Our goal is to figure out the game of admissions and give our students an advantage,” Alleyne said. “And our job is to teach them how to play the game.”

This story about TeenSHARP is the first in a series of articles, produced by The Hechinger Report in partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action. Stay tuned for an upcoming documentary and part II. Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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SALISBURY, Md. — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.

Over the past eight years, the process has been used more than 750 times on children. Some are as young as 5 years old.

The state law that allows for these removals, which are known as emergency petitions, intended their use to be limited to people with severe mental illness, those who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. The removals are supposed to be the first step in getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of the students’ needs not being met.

In most places, information about how often this happens is hidden from the public, but in districts where data has been made available, it’s clear that Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers. Advocates for students with disabilities say that they, too, are being removed at higher rates.

“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”

In 2017, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice intended to address widespread racial disparities in how students were disciplined, schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.

Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room from Wicomico schools at least 117 times — about once per every 100 students — according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.

At least 40 percent of those children were age 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though only a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.

In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said that a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some of the schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.

One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when she got the phone call saying that her son’s school was going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.

“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the boy’s mom said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”

The use of psychiatric evaluations to remove children from school isn’t just happening in Wicomico. Recent data shows that New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.

A Kentucky school district was found to have used a forced psychiatric assessment on kids more than a thousand times in a year.

In Florida, thousands of school-aged children are subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.

In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, , the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.

In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available. Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore City’s student population is five times as large.

‘Trying to get him out of school’

Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support from the schools when their children fall behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors that are challenging for teachers to manage.

The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.

She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. The student swiped at his desk and knocked a laptop to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.

“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”

A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said that emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”

“[Emergency petitions] are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler, the spokeswoman, said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”

Schools did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.

Educators stretched thin

By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Schools are required to publicly report suspensions, expulsions and arrests — and the data reveals racial disparities in discipline. Those statistics are what state and federal oversight agencies typically use to judge a school, and they often serve as triggers for oversight and investigations.

But with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect data on removals from schools for psychiatric assessments. That means oversight agencies don’t have access to the information.

Without insight into how often schools are using psychiatric removals on children, there is no way to hold them accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.

Families who have experienced emergency petitions say that the educators who can best communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day that her son was sent to the hospital, the Wicomico mother who requested anonymity recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.

In another instance, a middle schooler said that the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included being allowed to take a walk with an educator he trusted. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. When he tried to leave the building to take a walk on his own, an administrator blocked him from leaving. The student began yelling and spat at the staffer. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he was examined and released a few hours later.

Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences — they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation on whether they are receiving the support they need.

“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. With emergency petitions, the same rules do not apply.

In many places around the county, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.

“‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Wicomico, Maryland, mother whose autistic son was sent to hospital in handcuffs

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example. 

“If it’s a resource-rich school system, you can provide services and supports,” said Maureen van Stone, director of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute. “If you need a walk, if you need a sensory work break, if you need to go see the school counselor, those kinds of things can prevent some of this escalation of getting to the point that you’re … emergency petitioning.”

When children need targeted services that are unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.

Last year, only one student was placed in a private day school, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.

ER trips increased after settlement

The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.

The district agreed not to use emergency petitions when “less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern,” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”

But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.

“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity.”

Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law

Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”

Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.

“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount, and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”

But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.

“The teachers, when they said they wanted more discipline, really what they’re saying is they want more support,” she said.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree.”

Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services

Under the terms of the settlement, Wicomico was under federal monitoring for two years. Since then, the number of suspensions and expulsions has declined markedly — for both Black and white students.

But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics and are often only revealed through FOIA requests, has edged up. And other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests — the second-highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black, and 80 percent were students with disabilities; 37 percent of Wicomico students are Black, and 10 percent of Wicomico students have disabilities.

“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. “If you’re going to a district where they’re resistant, and they have sort of draconian policies that they can’t justify educationally and there are large racial disparities, the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Black parents point to culture problem

Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.

They are frustrated, for example, that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.

Many Black parents say they believe their children are more often viewed as threats than as children who need support.

Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said that teachers and school staff often do not know how to empathize with and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior. 

Last year, among children sent to the hospital on emergency petitions by Wicomico schools, at least 40 percent were age 12 or younger and more than half were Black children..

“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”

Studies have found that Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores. Such educator diversity is lacking in Wicomico County: Its schools have the largest gap in the state between the percentages of students of color and teachers of color .

Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.

A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.

The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him onto the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned to school, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.

“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”

This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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