New York state lawmakers will unveil legislation on Tuesday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners.

The bills would require the private universities to start paying full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country.   

Columbia and N.Y.U. collectively saved $327 million on property taxes this year. The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased.

Repealing the tax breaks would face substantial obstacles. The exemptions — which apply to universities, museums and other nonprofits — are nearly 200 years old and part of the state constitution. Overriding them would mean lawmakers would have to adopt the changes in consecutive legislative sessions. Then, voters would have to approve them on a statewide ballot.

“When the constitution of the state was written, there was no idea that such an exemption could apply to two of the top landlords in New York City,” said Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly. “This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

The proposed constitutional amendment follows an investigation by The Hechinger Report and The New York Times in September that revealed that the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, with vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget – and that as Columbia has grown to become the city’s largest private landowner, it has enrolled fewer students from New York City.

Related: ‘The Untouchables’: How Columbia and N.Y.U. benefit from property tax breaks

A Columbia spokeswoman said university officials were reviewing the legislation. But she added that Columbia was a driver of the city’s economy through its research, faculty and students, and its capital projects, including $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009.

A spokesman for N.Y.U. said that repealing the tax exemptions would be “extraordinarily disruptive” and that the university “would be forced to rethink much of the way we operate.”

“To choose two charitable, nonprofit organizations out of the thousands in the state and compel them to be treated like for-profits certainly strikes us as misguided and unfair,” the spokesman, John Beckman, said in a statement. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, which have been in place for two centuries, but we also take some modest pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

All 50 states offer property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters argue are crucial so that these organizations can provide social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. But in some cities, officials have pressured private universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or similar annual donations. Private universities often have billion-dollar endowments and charge annual tuition in the high five figures.

The legislation would only apply to Columbia and N.Y.U. and not other large private universities that own significant land, such as Cornell University in Ithaca. Lawmakers said that other universities would be excluded because their tax breaks are far lower than those of Columbia and N.Y.U.; the annual real estate tax exemption threshold would be $100 million.

“This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly.

“I don’t fault these institutions for pursuing their tax breaks and using the tax breaks to greatly expand their empires,” said State Senator John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the legislation in the Senate. “But this is a point where we have to look where all revenues are coming from and where all revenues are leaking. We have to stop those leaks.”

The city is facing a series of budget cuts to K-12 schools, libraries and police, among other programs, in part, Mayor Eric Adams has said, because of rising costs to care for an influx of homeless migrants.

CUNY, which is made up of 25 campuses throughout the city and which serves 225,000 students, has also been eyed for city cuts. Most of the university’s $4.3 billion budget is provided by the state, but earlier this year, the mayor proposed a 3 percent cut to the funding the city provides.

Related: Activists question whether wealthy univdersities should be exempt from property taxes

If the constitutional amendment were approved, the property tax payments would be directed every year to CUNY. That would make a significant difference in the quality of education students receive, said James C. Davis, the president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff.

“Would an additional infusion of operating funding affect retention and graduation rates?” Mr. Davis said. “Clearly the answer is yes. Even a relatively small amount of money would make a big difference.”

He noted that 80 percent of first-year CUNY students are graduates of New York City public schools, and a majority are students of color. Half come from families with incomes under $30,000 a year.

“If you’re talking about the city making a commitment to economic equity and social mobility,” Mr. Davis added, “there really is not a wiser investment than CUNY.”

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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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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When Sarah Anderson travels to Texas middle schools to teach sex education, she brings props: a toy baby to represent unplanned pregnancy, a snake for bacterial infections, a pregnancy test for infertility, a skeleton for AIDS and cancer. 

The students are told that if they have sex before marriage, emotional risks include depression, guilt and anxiety. They’re taught that condoms — while often labeled as a method for “safe sex” — do not keep them safe from pregnancy or sometimes-incurable sexually transmitted infections. 

Her curriculum for high schoolers, meanwhile, says that people who “go from sex partner to sex partner are causing their brains to mold and gel so that it eventually begins accepting that sexual pattern as normal.” This, the curriculum says, could “interfere with the development of the neurological circuits” needed for a long-term relationship.

Anderson isn’t a school district employee. She works for the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, Texas, a group founded in 2001 to counsel women against getting abortions. The organization is one of dozens of crisis pregnancy centers across the state that send employees into schools to talk to students and, in some cases, teach sex education classes.

These groups, also known as pregnancy resource centers, began to sprout around the country in the late 1960s as states passed laws legalizing abortion. Sex education has sometimes been a feature of their work. But in Texas, which has among the most crisis pregnancy centers of any state and where state health standards dictate that sex education classes emphasize abstinence, those sex ed efforts are particularly widespread. A Hechinger Report investigation identified more than 35 examples of these centers involved in dozens of school districts across Texas, and the actual number is likely higher.

With the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last summer and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers are poised to play an even bigger role going forward. In April, the Texas state legislature approved $165 million over two years for the organizations through its Alternatives to Abortion program (recently rebranded as Thriving Texas Families), more than double the 2019 budgeted amount. The money funds the groups’ overall work, not sex ed, but went to at least 14 of the centers identified by Hechinger as working in schools.* 

“I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies.”

Texas state representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico

The growing school-based work of some centers comes despite scant evidence that the sex ed they provide helps reduce teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. According to public health experts, the approaches many of these groups take — such as emphasizing risks, inundating students with statistics and showing graphic pictures of STIs — aren’t effective in preventing or changing behavior. Instead, they can cause students to stop absorbing information that might help them make informed decisions about sex in the future. 

“You’ll tend to see that kind of overload on facts [that] steer into fear,” said Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, in New Jersey. “We know very very well across many many health issues this is not what changes human behavior.”

Related: If more students become pregnant post-Roe, are we prepared to support them? 

Staff of crisis pregnancy centers argue that their approach works: Their students report directly to them or in internal surveys that they’ve changed their minds about having sex. Staff also say that their connections with schools grew out of a desire to teach young people how to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, intervening before teens need their services. They say abstinence is the best, most effective way to prevent any risks associated with having sex and that they also teach students about healthy relationships and planning for their futures.

“We deal with unexpected pregnancies,” said Jennifer Shelton, the executive director of Real Options, a pregnancy resource center in Allen, which has taught sex ed in more than a dozen public school districts. “The best way to deal with that is at the beginning of the decision-making process.”

In Texas, sex education typically takes up just a few hours of instruction a year in a handful of grades, and many school districts use outside groups and online providers rather than hiring experts in-house or training their own staff. Sex ed curricula are recommended by councils made up primarily of parents and community members. Many pregnancy center programs, which tend to follow a “sexual risk avoidance” approach that in addition to stressing abstinence also includes discussion of birth control and the signs and symptoms of STIs, are offered for free and align with the Texas state standards requiring that abstinence be promoted as the “preferred choice.”

But some health experts, legislators and students say crisis pregnancy centers, which have been accused of offering women misleading or inaccurate information about abortion risks, have no place in public schools. They view the sex ed courses as a stealth way for the organizations to develop connections to teens so the young people will turn to crisis pregnancy centers if they do become pregnant later. 

State representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico has repeatedly introduced legislation to require all Texas districts to teach medically accurate sex education. “I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies,” said Talarico, a Democrat who serves north Austin and surrounding areas. “If they are withholding information or emphasizing certain information to push an agenda on our kids, then that’s inappropriate.”

For three years as a student in Lewisville Independent School District, near Dallas, Nimisha Srikanth was taught by staffers of 180 Degrees, the education arm of Real Options. 

When she was in eighth grade, the group gave each student a cup and had them pour water back and forth, she said. The exercise was supposed to represent how easily they could become infected with an STI. Srikanth, who graduated from high school in 2019, said the classmates treated it as a joke and purposefully tried to maximize “infections.” 

In ninth grade, a lesson quickly derailed when the presenter started talking about how abstinence was best, and someone quipped, “I guess it’s too late for me.” The room erupted in laughter. The teacher “lost everybody’s attention after that,” Srikanth recalled.

Each year, she said, the message was always the same: “Don’t have sex before marriage. If you do, bad things will happen,” Srikanth said. “It’s so much fear-based, very opinion-based.” 

180 Degrees is among the state’s most widespread crisis pregnancy center-affiliated sex ed programs, noting on its website that it has sent presenters to 14 districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 2019, Real Options reached 18,329 students “with education presentations about sexual purity,” according to its federal tax filing.

In an emailed statement, Amanda Brim, the Lewisville district’s chief communications officer, said that 180 Degrees was never adopted districtwide, but individual schools could choose to use the program. In 2022, she wrote, Lewisville adopted a new sex ed program to meet updated state standards, which went into effect that year. 

Shelton, who taught for 180 Degrees for many years, said that her program avoids scare tactics, even if some of the statistics they share may be alarming, and that they are truthful with students about the risks associated with having sex. The program, she noted, covers many different topics beyond abstinence, including birth control, STIs and the emotional side to sex and relationships. 

Shelton said she believes that “no matter what side” people are on, they should agree abstinence is the best choice to prevent pregnancy and STIs. “We believe in raising the standard for young people,” she said. “They can and most likely will rise to that occasion.”

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the US

The sex ed curriculum of 180 Degrees was one of six obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests and reviews of school and center websites. All of the pregnancy center curricula emphasize the potential harms of having sex and advocate waiting until marriage, suggesting that doing so will eliminate all risk. 

Seventh graders in 180 Degrees classes, according to a presentation for parents, are taught that there are 27 different STIs and that, with their various strains, the total number of sexually transmitted diseases nears 1,000. The curriculum used by South Texas Pregnancy Care Center, called SHARE, lists the potential consequences of STIs as pain and suffering, damage to organs, damage to babies, death, embarrassment and rejection.

LifeGuard, the sex ed program affiliated with the crisis pregnancy center The Source, in Austin and Houston, includes a series of graphic photos to give “a medically accurate understanding of how these STIs can impact a person’s health.” 

LifeGuard, whose curriculum says that it reaches 15,000 students annually, declined to comment for this article. Staff instructed two school districts not to provide copies of the group’s curriculum in response to Hechinger’s public records request. They also wrote to the attorney general seeking an exemption to the records law on the grounds that release of the material would “cause competitive harm” and that the curriculum contained trade secrets. The exemption was denied.

Alicia Westcot, Leander’s senior director of math, science and humanities, wrote in an email that the district uses LifeGuard because the program follows state health standards and has “created engaging content for our students at all grade levels.” She added that teachers have given positive feedback about having content experts come in to teach the courses.

Four public health experts who reviewed portions of the crisis pregnancy center curricula at the request of The Hechinger Report said the programs frequently fail to provide important context for students to assess the likelihood of various risks and that some parts were biased or misleading, including messaging on contraception effectiveness. 

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE script, for example, instructs educators to tell students that teens don’t use condoms consistently because their brain is not fully developed. A copy of LifeGuard’s eighth grade curriculum instructs the presenter to read quickly through a list of bullet points about correct condom use to emphasize their number and then say, “Are you getting the idea of how consistent and correct use could be challenging?” 

While research on the effectiveness of sex ed is difficult to conduct, major  medical  organizations recommend comprehensive sex education — which typically discusses the benefits of delaying sexual intercourse along with information on methods for preventing pregnancy and STIs, gender identity and consent. They note that studies suggest such courses are more effective than abstinence-only programs at reducing teen pregnancy rates and increasing condom use if young people do choose to have sex, and that comprehensive sex ed produces other benefits, including improved interpersonal skills.

The sexual risk-avoidance approach that many crisis pregnancy centers use covers some content beyond abstinence. But health experts say the programs’ focus on the negative consequences of having sex before marriage echo strict abstinence-only approaches. 

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible. This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a pregnancy resource center in Cisco and Breckenridge  

They say this focus misses the chance to impart useful information and skills. Rather than presenting statistic after statistic about the ubiquitousness of STIs, for example, educators should make sure students feel equipped to talk with potential partners about protection, said Kantor. 

“If I have limited time with a young person, am I going to spend that time giving them a bunch of facts that are not very relevant to them in that moment, that frankly, if they were interested, they could look up on their phone?” Kantor said. Instructors “are making an unfortunate decision to spend precious time with a young person who really needs skills giving out what are probably going to be useless pieces of information.” 

In 2020, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center in Cisco and Breckenridge, tried something new. Its staff brought a mobile ultrasound unit and a volunteer pregnant woman to a school to perform a live ultrasound in front of students. 

Today, the center works with middle and high schoolers in 15 school districts in central Texas, providing education on sexuality and relationships and in some cases incorporating live ultrasounds into the instruction.

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible,” said Shannon Thompson, The Open Door’s executive director. “This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.” 

The live ultrasounds are part of a larger effort led by Thompson to “change the culture” beyond her organization’s walls, she said, rather than simply waiting for clients to come to them. Her staff tries to reach community members before they engage in “risky behavior,” teaching young people to feel empowered to “say no and mean it,” while also introducing her group as a safe place for people to turn to if they do get in trouble or become pregnant.

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us. They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.”

Samuel Ingram, graduate of the Leander Independent School District and Texas A&M Corpus Christi student 

To that end, The Open Door acquired a curriculum and hired an education liaison to teach sex ed in schools. Staffers have built relationships with school counselors, juvenile departments and camps, and they participate in an annual back-to-school bash.* This year, they adopted an additional curriculum to reach more grade levels and added a second education liaison to their staff, Thompson said. 

Under her leadership, Open Doors’ state funding is rising: In 2022, it received nearly $380,000 via the Alternatives to Abortion program, compared with approximately $102,000 in 2019.

Thompson said her group doesn’t engage in scare tactics, but rather focuses on “empowering” students to make smart decisions and recognize their self-worth by postponing sex.

“Student education has become a very, very important part of our focus,” Thompson said in April during a panel on her organization’s work at the annual meeting of Heartbeat International, a national network of pregnancy resource centers. “It’s a great way for us to begin to instill and teach and to educate these individuals on the pro-life message.”

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Other pregnancy center sex ed programs also use talking points associated with the anti-abortion movement and encourage students to visit their clinics.

The LifeGuard eighth grade curriculum, for instance, includes a game about fetal development in which students guess whether certain developmental milestones — such as the heart starting to beat and the brain beginning to function — occur at four, six or eight weeks. 

LifeGuard programs direct students to the affiliated clinic, The Source, if they need pregnancy tests or STI testing. “There are places like The Source that can provide all the information needed to make an informed decision about an unexpected pregnancy,” the curriculum reads. 

The Source received nearly $1.4 million in Alternatives to Abortion funding in 2022. Yet LifeGuard describes itself to parents and students as an “apolitical” program that doesn’t take a stance on controversial issues. Indeed, none of the crisis pregnancy center school curricula reviewed by The Hechinger Report contained explicit religious or anti-abortion content. 

But the groups do emphasize their religious values in other aspects of their operations, sometimes stipulating that job applicants be Christian and hold certain values. A LifeGuard job ad for a curriculum specialist noted that the new hire must have a “strong commitment and dedication to the sanctity of human life and sexual abstinence.” A job posting for an abstinence educator from 180 Degrees listed the top qualification as: “Pro-Life, Christ follower, and believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.”

“There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs. The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

James Talarico, Texas state representative and former middle school teacher 

Shelton of 180 Degrees said that while religion is “very important to us personally,” staff never bring “religious rhetoric” to the classroom or discuss abortion pros and cons, out of respect for students and a recognition that many come from different backgrounds. Similarly, Thompson said her group shares the “pro-life” message as “one option” but doesn’t take a “political stance” in schools. 

Speaking at the Heartbeat International conference, Thompson noted that it was, in fact, important for organizations like hers to avoid alienating young people with an anti-abortion, religious message. 

“If young women who could be your clients see you waving the pro-life flag loud and proud, remember they could feel like they can’t come to you,” said Thompson. “They are more likely to open up with you when they have a relationship with you, when they feel comfortable with you and feel like they can trust you.” 

Talarico, meanwhile, says it’s not enough for organizations to simply say that they are unbiased in the classroom. “There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs,” he said. “The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center assures parents and educators that the religious beliefs that drive the group’s work do not influence its education program, SHARE.

“There is overlap between the message of abstinence from a health standpoint and the message of abstinence from a faith standpoint,” Anderson, the program’s lead teacher, said in a presentation to the Yorktown school district’s School Health Advisory Council, or SHAC, in spring 2022. “But that doesn’t discredit its value as the best message to give young people when it comes to their health,” she added. (Anderson declined interview requests for this story, but wrote in an email that many school districts had vetted and were happy with the SHARE curriculum and that it complied with state health standards.)

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the U.S.

Part of Anderson’s job is to travel across central Texas attending SHAC meetings and pitching members, most of whom are district parents, on the advantages of choosing her sex ed program. The councils then make official recommendations to their school boards. 

And she’s been successful. South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE program started in three schools in 2016; by the 2021-22 school year, two years after Anderson joined, its teachers were presenting in 10 schools.

After the 2022 meeting in Yorktown, she convinced the district to use SHARE, and this year added Seguin to the program’s growing list of districts. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals. They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people.” 

Molly Davis, student, Texas A&M Corpus Christi

In that school district, Anderson plays an additional role — she serves on the SHAC. In April, at the group’s regular meeting, she encouraged its members to vote to endorse her SHARE curriculum, noting that it was one of just two under the council’s review that aligned with the state health standards. Moments later, council members voted to winnow their choices to those two, and a month later decided to officially recommend Anderson’s program. 

The case was one of two identified by The Hechinger Report of a pregnancy center employee who serves on a SHAC voting in favor of her own course, in what Talarico said appeared to be a “clear conflict of interest.” He said he plans to raise the issue with his colleagues to explore whether it needs to be addressed legislatively. 

Sean Hoffman, communications officer for the Seguin district, said that there was no evidence that Anderson had undue influence on the decision. 

“School districts and school boards have to rely on the pulse of their communities,” he said, adding that it can be difficult to find enough people to serve on SHACs and that the process of evaluating sex ed curricula took more than a year. “When folks come forward and say they want to serve, we’re going to accept them with the knowledge that the intent is to come on and do what’s best.” 

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen moms in school 

Like many pregnancy resource centers, the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center has been expanding its work in the wake of the fall of Roe. This spring, it started construction on a new building, supported, in part, by donations from Seguin nonprofits and agencies. A construction class at Seguin High School is building the interior walls. 

Demand for its services is rising too. The center previously averaged around 20 pregnancy tests a month. In January 2023, it administered 41 tests, Janice Weaver, the group’s executive director, said at a city council meeting in February. “There is a big need in Seguin, and we are so excited about the possibility of a new building,” she said.

Other groups, including The Open Door, are starting prenatal care units, to position themselves as a resource for more women who need medical help. Open Door’s Thompson said the group is located in a medical desert, and it will help provide transportation for pregnant women to prenatal appointments and other support. “Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like,” said Thompson. “If anything, it’s increased the need.” 

“Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like. If anything, it’s increased the need.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center that works with 15 school districts

Molly Davis is a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and president of the college’s Islander Feminists club, which is leading a campaign against a crisis pregnancy center that’s expanding near campus. She said she’s troubled by the growing role of the groups in Texas and sees their work in schools as being of a piece with their larger efforts to persuade people, sometimes through misinformation, to carry pregnancies to term. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals,” said Davis, who has classmates who were taught by the groups. “They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people. … They are teaching young people things to specifically lead them down roads they want them to walk down.” 

Related: Overturning Roe created new barriers, not just to abortion, but to OBGYN training

Texas has the ninth-highest teen birth rate of any state, 20.3 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19. And while teen birthrates have been falling in the U.S. as a whole since 1991, they remain among the highest in the developed world. 

Ingram, the student from Leander, recalls that several of his classmates went on to become pregnant in high school. 

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us,” Ingram, now a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi where he is also a member of the Islander Feminists, said of the sex ed he received. “They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.” 

Srikanth, meanwhile, says she didn’t learn useful information until she got to college at Texas A&M University and joined the campus group FREE (Feminists for Reproductive Equity And Education) Aggies. 

On a Monday morning in May, Srikanth spent two hours giving out free condoms, dental dams, pregnancy tests and Plan B in the student center. She assured people stopping by the table that they were in a “no judgment zone,” mindful that some of them likely had also had years of messages that sex was dirty and would give them a disease. 

Those middle and high school experiences helped shape her career plans: This fall, she began a master’s program at Yale University and hopes to work in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and justice.

She said, “I want people to have better information than I did growing up.” 

*Correction: This story has been updated with correct information on the Alternatives to Abortion program’s funding details and rebranded name. It has also been updated to clarify The Open Door’s involvement with the back-to-school event.

This story about sex education curriculum 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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Jesse Wiese spent seven years in prison; when he left the Iowa facility in 2006, he thought his debt to society had been paid. While inside, Wiese had earned an undergraduate degree and puzzled over how he might do right in the world. He started studying for the law school admissions test, thinking he could become a lawyer and maybe, one day, a judge.

In 2008, Wiese moved to Virginia to attend Regent University School of Law. He loved it, and he did well. Three years and $150,000 in federal and private student loans later, he graduated, and turned his attention to passing the bar. Like the majority of his classmates, he spent the summer foregoing gainful employment to study full-time for the two-day exam. Except, unlike his peers, passing the bar would not be Wiese’s biggest hurdle to becoming a lawyer. Indeed, he could pass the difficult exam and still be denied a license to practice law by the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners.  Before it considers awarding a law license for any otherwise eligible candidate with a felony conviction, the board holds a character and fitness screening.

For Wiese, it was all a big, expensive gamble — and, in one form or another, is one millions of people with criminal records take every year as they pursue education and workforce training on their way to jobs that require a license. Yet that effort might be wasted thanks to the nearly 14,000 laws and regulations that can restrict individuals with arrest and conviction histories from getting licensed in a given field.

The rules that govern these barriers to entry are patchwork, scattered across federal, state and regulatory codes, and they can vary from field to field within a state. That means some people are inadvertently steered toward training programs that, for them, are dead ends. At other times, as in Wiese’s case, people have no choice but go through time-consuming and often expensive courses before discovering whether they can work in their chosen field. Advocates say these barriers keep people from good jobs, not only reducing their chances of staying out of prison but robbing the nation of their productive labor.

“The focus should be on rehabilitation and putting people back out in the community so they can participate and be productive and thrive in their communities,” said Caitlin Dawkins, co-director for the national re-entry resource center at the American Institutes for Research.

Related: ‘Wasted money’: How career training companies scoop up federal funds with little oversight

Although licensing requirements vary from state to state, about one in five people in this country need occupational licenses to do their jobs — licenses they get only after completing a designated amount of training and education in their fields. In addition to lawyers, professional drivers must be licensed, along with health professionals, public accountants, teachers, electricians, firefighters, social workers, realtors and security guards.

According to a 2020 study by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm, 31 states allow licensing boards to deny applicants based on their character alone for at least some occupations, leaving room for denials based on any criminal behavior, no matter how minor or how far in the past. Advocates say it’s not uncommon for people to pursue training programs and submit their licensing applications without recognizing the risk. Just 21 states allow people with criminal records to ask licensing boards whether their records will disqualify them from getting a license before enrolling in any required training.

Yet the case for education as a counter to recidivism is so convincing the federal education department earlier this month announced a massive expansion of Pell grants for people pursuing higher education from behind bars. About 30,000 of these individuals are expected to get $130 million worth of the federal aid each year, a cost that researchers have found is far less than detaining reoffenders.

Higher educational attainment is directly correlated with a lower likelihood of being reincarcerated, as is stable employment. Both pieces of evidence have swayed policymakers nationwide. The Institute for Justice found 40 states have eased or eliminated some of their laws keeping people with criminal records from getting employment licenses since 2015. Yet with every type of license bearing its own local, state or federal limitations, many thousands of collateral consequences remain.

Wiese, now 45, went to prison for armed robbery of a bank. He passed the bar on his first try and moved on to the character and fitness screening required because of his prior conviction.

“It was like a mini trial,” Wiese said. He flew people in to serve as character witnesses in front of an initial committee, which ultimately recommended he be licensed. “I was like, ‘Awesome! This is amazing.’ Then their decision was unanimously overturned.”

The Virginia Board of Bar Examiners wasn’t convinced Wiese should be allowed to practice law, considering his criminal history. It told him to reapply in two years. He did, but the same thing happened — there was an initial committee recommendation for licensure followed by a state board denial.

“They said it may be impossible to prove rehabilitation,” Wiese remembered. He appealed to the state supreme court, but it ruled against him, too.

The Virginia Board of Bar Examiners did not comment on Wiese’s case or how the agency considers prior criminal history in its licensing decisions.

Related: ‘Revolutionary’ housing: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

Many of the county’s laws seem to dictate that the lives of people with criminal records are governed by two competing beliefs — that crimes are proof of character flaws that can never be outgrown and that a criminal sentence should be the full extent of any punishment.

The view that crime is proof of character, which can never be reformed, has received legal support for at least 125 years. The U.S. Supreme Court first affirmed the right to discriminate against people with criminal records in an 1898 decision in Hawker v New York, which held that “character is as important a qualification as knowledge.”

Ronald Day came across this court decision while writing his dissertation as a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the City University of New York. Day has been involved in prisoner re-entry work for about 15 years, since he finished his own sentence and found himself navigating life on the outside. He received his doctorate in 2019 and now serves as vice president of programs for The Fortune Society, an education, service and advocacy organization focused on criminal justice and re-entry.

“The focus should be on rehabilitation and putting people back out in the community so they can participate and be productive and thrive in their communities.”

Caitlin Dawkins, co-director for the national re-entry resource center at the American Institutes for Research.

Day’s time in the archives introduced him to the ongoing legal dispute over the rights of those who are incarcerated, or who used to be incarcerated, taking him on a journey from the Supreme Court’s views in 1898 to the fallout from a 2015 decision by New York District Court Judge John Gleeson. Gleeson ruled in favor of expunging the conviction of a woman who had committed healthcare fraud and, after serving her sentence, found her record a constant barrier to getting and keeping jobs as a home health aide. In approving the expungement, Gleeson wrote, “I sentenced her to five years of probation supervision, not to a lifetime of unemployment.” But even support from the district court judge who sentenced her wasn’t enough. A Federal Court of Appeals overruled Gleeson.

According to the Institute for Justice study, in five states, including Arizona, Tennessee and Virginia, any licensing board can deny an applicant based on a felony, even if it’s completely unrelated to the license. In 30 states, an arrest alone can disqualify applicants. In seven states, there’s no right to appeal after a license is denied.

When the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners denied Wiese’s license a second time, he was told he could try again in two years, but that he would have to re-take the bar because so much time had passed. With the support of his wife, Wiese took time off to study, and passed the test a second time. Once more, he applied for a license, jumped through the hoops at his hearing and was recommended for a license.

But for the third time, the state board denied his application.

Related: Prisons are training inmates for the next generation of in-demand jobs

Wiese appealed the decision of the state licensing board, again taking his case to the Virginia State Supreme Court. This time, it ruled in his favor. Ten years after graduating from law school, Wiese got his license to practice.

Looking back, it didn’t seem like a triumph.

“In my younger days, I would say you can overcome anything. You can outwork it,” Wiese said. He doesn’t believe that anymore. “This is called the second prison. Literally, you walk out of one and you walk into another one.”

Sometimes people with criminal records reach out to him and say they heard about his case and they want to go to law school too, but Wiese doesn’t think he opened any doors. “I feel bad for the next person that’s coming in line behind me,” he said.

31 states allow licensing boards to deny applicants based on their character alone, leaving room for denials based on any criminal behavior, no matter how minor or how far in the past.

Because the laws and regulations are so scattered, they can be difficult for anyone, not just those exiting prison, to navigate. Every field has its own state-level licensing board and related policies. “Just because of the lack of coordination, they’re often unknown for even the people who are responsible for administering and enforcing them,” said Dawkins, of the American Institutes for Research. 

In some states, people serving time can fight fires as part of a prison work crew but can’t get licenses to work as firefighters in local fire departments after they get out. They can cut hair in prison but can’t get cosmetology licenses on the outside. They can do landscaping on city property through a prison work crew, but — with a criminal record — can’t get a government job.

Cosmetology, in many states, is considered “second-chance friendly” and a good path for people coming out of prison. In Virginia, by contrast, applicants can be denied cosmetology licenses for having specific misdemeanor convictions or any felony.

Related: Propelling prisoners to bachelor’s degrees in California

A number of organizations across the country have stepped up to advocate for policy change and to support those with criminal records as they seek to rebuild their lives outside of prison. Jobs for the Future this year put out a framework called “Normalizing Opportunity,” calling on policymakers to remove barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated individuals.

“There’s a multiplying effect there,” said Brandi Mandato, a senior director at Jobs for the Future who helped write the framework. “If we don’t have access to good jobs, we don’t have access to health care, housing, all of these things that are important to launching a life and building community and keeping people safe.”

Such advocacy has bipartisan support. John Koufos, who has led criminal justice advocacy work at organizations across the political spectrum and himself navigated re-entry, said the effort to eliminate employment barriers has galvanized one of the most diverse coalitions in criminal justice.

Just 21 states allow people with criminal records to ask licensing boards whether their records will disqualify them from getting a license before enrolling in any required training.

“[Occupational licensing] serves as an exclusionary barrier to people and to prosperity,” Koufos said.

At a time with very low unemployment and major demand for skilled employees, advocates say the business case for eliminating these barriers is as strong as the humanitarian one.

Wiese is now the vice president for research and innovation at Prison Fellowship, an organization that helps individuals and families affected by incarceration and which gave him his own sense of purpose and possibility while he was in prison. Early in his career with the organization, Wiese managed a caseload of about 70 men who were navigating re-entry. Over and over again, he saw them stop chasing their dreams, confounded by barriers to stable employment. The message they got, he said, was “don’t take the initiative.”

“It really limits people’s ability to make a difference and to contribute,” Wiese said, “and we miss out.”

This story about career licenses 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.

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A bill that would have stopped Arizona schools from issuing out-of-school suspensions to students who miss class failed to make it out of the Legislature this year, despite bipartisan support.

Rep. Laura Terech, a Democrat, crafted House Bill 2748 in response to a nearly yearlong investigation by AZCIR and The Hechinger Report, which revealed for the first time the scope of the controversial disciplinary practice of suspending Arizona students for tardiness and truancy.

The Hechinger/AZCIR analysis — which relied on data from 150-plus districts and charter networks that enroll about 61 percent of the state’s public school students — identified more than 47,000 suspensions for attendance violations over a five-year period. Students reported feeling even more disengaged and academically lost after serving these suspensions. Black, Latino and Native American students received a disproportionate share of the punishments.

“Being an educator in the field, you often see that students are not coming to school for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have to watch younger siblings at home, or there’s something happening at school — there’s a bullying issue or they’re particularly stressed out about one of their classes,” Terech, a former elementary school teacher, told lawmakers at a House Education Committee hearing this year.

Rather than suspending students, Terech said she believes such problems “are better addressed through working with the student, supporting the student, learning what they need so we can keep them in school.”

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Terech found a handful of allies across the aisle: Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, for instance, told AZCIR he signed on as a bill cosponsor because he found blocking students from class for missing class “ridiculous on its face.” But Republican leadership never brought the measure to the House floor for a vote, after other members of the party expressed concern that lawmakers would be removing a tool schools rely on to give parents a “wake-up call.” Terech has vowed to revive it next year.

The debate comes as the larger issue of keeping students in school is receiving renewed attention statewide. Read On Arizona convened a task force this spring to address a spike in chronic absenteeism, which state law defines as students missing more than 10 percent, or about 18 days, of school in an academic year.

Chronic absence has long been an issue in Arizona, but the pandemic led to dramatic increases across the state. According to data from the Arizona Department of Education, 14 percent of K-12 students were chronically absent in 2019. By 2022, that portion had jumped to 34 percent, and some schools responded to the rising absenteeism with even more attendance-related suspensions, the AZCIR/Hechinger investigation found.

The Read On Arizona task force brings together members of the governor’s office, school districts, state agencies, community organizations and the legislature. Together, they will parse state and local data about attendance, chronic absenteeism and student performance, gather advice from national experts and develop recommendations and resources to help school districts prevent continued absenteeism.

Members of the task force say the AZCIR/Hechinger investigation illuminated the connection between suspensions and absenteeism in Arizona, something that had never before been made public. A key idea discussed at the group’s first meeting was the need to move away from punitive responses to absenteeism and instead focus on supports.

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions

“We have the right players at the right table at the right time to begin to have that conversation,” said Read On Arizona’s Lori Masseur, who is overseeing the task force.

The shift away from punishing absenteeism has already begun at the local level. The Valley of the Sun United Way has helped districts in Maricopa County address chronic absenteeism for several years, focusing on supportive approaches that address the reasons students miss school as part of a wider effort to meet students’ social-emotional needs.

The organization will expand this work in the coming years and Read On Arizona will launch its own professional development for schools, in collaboration with the national nonprofit Attendance Works. Both efforts aim to help teachers and school leaders move away from punitive responses to absenteeism.

“Sometimes, the suspension will actually get their attention, bring them to the table. And that, I think, would be a justification or at least the reason for some of these suspensions in those cases.”

Eric Patten, Yuma Union High School District spokesman

Dawn Gerundo, community development and engagement director for education at the Valley of the Sun United Way, said avoiding suspensions as a response to absenteeism is a central recommendation. A growing body of research has tied missing just two days of school per month to concrete consequences, including lower reading proficiency in third grade, lower math scores in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school.

“Suspensions are absenteeism,” Gerundo said. “If a student is suspended, they are absent.”

Among districts in the AZCIR/Hechinger sample that suspended for attendance, missing class led to 10 percent of all suspensions, resulting in tens of thousands of additional missed days of school. Students served about 1 in 5 of those suspensions out of school, which the U.S. departments of Justice and Education highlighted as particularly concerning.

Presented with the findings last fall, then-Arizona Department of Education spokesman Richie Taylor suggested the state should reexamine its policies around discipline for attendance-related issues.

But that was before the state superintendent’s office changed hands, coming under the direction of Republican Tom Horne in January. Though Horne’s opinion on the prospective legislation is unclear — his administration declined to comment to “respect the legislative process” — he historically has supported schools taking a hard-line approach to discipline.

If Arizona lawmakers move to ban suspensions for absenteeism next year, the state would join at least 17 others that have already limited or removed school districts’ ability to punish attendance issues with suspensions.

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Though school districts across the state largely declined to take a position on the proposed ban, some educators told AZCIR they felt attendance-related suspensions had a place as a “last resort.”

In Yuma Union High School District, spokesman and former teacher Eric Patten said that in cases where “the communication is there about what’s going on” — such as when barriers to attendance or punctuality include students working to support their families or being responsible for younger siblings — staff “can work on a solution rather than a suspension.”

But when parents haven’t been responsive to phone calls, emails or home visits, officials may turn to out-of-school suspensions to jolt them into action. Yuma Union was among the five districts that issued out-of-school suspensions for attendance problems most frequently over the five years reviewed by AZCIR and The Hechinger Report.

“Sometimes, the suspension will actually get their attention, bring them to the table,” Patten said. “And that, I think, would be a justification or at least the reason for some of these suspensions in those cases.”

School officials elsewhere in the state disagreed. Interviews with those administrators pointed to an appetite for state leaders to intervene to limit attendance-related suspensions, something Lupita Hightower, Arizona’s Superintendent of the Year and head of the Tolleson Elementary School District, acknowledged as unusual.

“Being an educator in the field, you often see that students are not coming to school for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have to watch younger siblings at home, or there’s something happening at school — there’s a bullying issue or they’re particularly stressed out about one of their classes.” 

Rep. Laura Terech, an Arizona Democrat

Hightower, whose district issued just three out-of-school suspensions for attendance from 2017-22, is among those willing to give up some local control of student discipline to support a statewide ban on suspensions for tardiness and truancy, which can push students over the chronic absenteeism threshold.

“If we’re contributing to that problem as administrators, that’s not good for kids,” she said. “If it has to be legislated, I would agree with that.”

For Ernest Rose, superintendent of the Phoenix-based Wilson Elementary District, the issue is similarly cut and dry. During suspensions, students don’t get support to change bad habits, and they don’t get help with barriers that might keep them from school, such as family and work commitments or school-based bullying.

“I don’t want to say it’s common sense, because if it was common sense, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Rose said. But “when we’re looking at overall academic attainment of our students, if they’re not in school, then they’re not able to partake in the instruction.”

Early last year, after noticing what he described as an overreliance on suspensions in general, Rose introduced a new code of conduct that discourages attendance-related suspensions. The Wilson district had issued eight out-of-school suspensions and 26 in-school suspensions to its youngest students for missing school between September and December of 2021, according to AZCIR/Hechinger data.

Rose noted the district continues to employ in-school suspensions in certain cases when ongoing attendance issues “escalate.” But he supports Arizona eliminating out-of-school suspensions for attendance problems.

Even when students are habitually truant, he believes educators’ focus should be on bringing those students back into the fold rather than issuing blanket punishments. “To suspend them defeats the purpose,” he said.

Terech cited the same logic in discussing her plans to revive her bill next session.

“Yes, it’s a tool,” she said of attendance-related suspensions. “But it’s not a good one.”

This story about House Bill 2148 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

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BOSTON — After María Mejía’s son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in preschool, the question of where he should go to kindergarten focused entirely on his special education needs.

Mejía and her husband, Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Dominican Republic, only later learned that Joangel, now 7, would have been an ideal candidate for one of the four elementary schools in Boston that teach students in both English and Spanish, Joangel’s first language. Experts say such programs offer English learners the best chance at academic success. BPS has pledged to start dozens more.

But kids like Joangel, who have individualized education plans, are often left out,their families unwittingly forced to place them into English-only special education programs to help meet their learning needs. Mejía said she was shocked when she learned there was an alternative.

“They didn’t tell me there was a bilingual school,” Mejía said in Spanish, “only a school that would take a child with an IEP.”

District enrollment data obtained by The Hechinger Report through a public records request shows students with disabilities — who make up 22 percent of the student population —are starkly underrepresented in the district’s seven dual-language programs. They make up between 8 and 14 percent of the enrollment in each of the district’s five Spanish-English programs. None are enrolled in the two-year-old Vietnamese-English program at Mather Elementary School. And in the district’s Haitian Creole-English program, so few students with disabilities are enrolled, the district can’t reveal the total without risking student privacy.

Related: Rising popularity of dual-language education could leave Latinos behind

Experts and advocates say the disparities stem partly from a staffing issue — there are simply not enough bilingual special education teachers — but are also the result of overt discrimination and cultural misconceptions about whether students with disabilities can handle bilingual education. The district has pledged to add 25 more bilingual programs in the next two years. But both advocates and state officials question whether BPS can move that quickly, and early signs suggest the district may struggle to include students with disabilities as it opens new programs: The bilingual program at Mather Elementary, now in its second year, will only be ready to serve students with disabilities in its fourth year, according to the principal.

BPS plays a large role in determining placement for English Learners, who make up nearly a third of the district, as well as students with disabilities. Families in Boston get to select their preferred schools, but if students need English language or special education services, their registrations are routed through the Newcomers Assessment and Counseling Center or the Special Education department. Language testers make school recommendations based on students’ English proficiency, and special education department staff identify specific schools for kids with IEPs.

BPS spokesman Max Baker said in a statement the district is “devoted to becoming a fully inclusive district, providing full access to a continuum of services to all students,” but declined to answer questions about the reasons students with disabilities might be underrepresented in the dual-language programs, or state what specific steps the district intends to take to remedy the lack of representation.

Bilingual special education experts say the underrepresentation of students with disabilities is more than a missed opportunity — it’s discrimination. They say there’s no reason schools can’t serve students with disabilities. And equal opportunity law suggests they have to.

“Kids with disabilities need dual-language education more than anyone else.”

Maria Serpa, BPS English Language Learner Task Force member

Maria Serpa, a pioneer in the field and a member of the district’s English Language Learner Task Force, said the enrollment data is shocking. “Kids with disabilities need dual-language education more than anyone else,” Serpa said.

BPS has long been criticized for failing its students with disabilities and those who don’t speak English fluently — only narrowly avoiding a state takeover last year in part by pledging to improve services to these two groups. A cornerstone of its plan is an ambitious expansion of dual-language programs.

These programs, which bring together students who are learning English and native English speakers in a joint quest to become academically proficient in both languages, are considered one of the only ways to close the achievement gap between the two groups. English learners who go through these programs outperform their English learner peers on reading and math tests and graduate at higher rates.

Why dual-language instruction works so well is multifaceted. Research has found it’s better for kids whose dominant language is Spanish, for example, to spend part of their day getting academic instruction in their native language. Researchers and educators also highlight the benefits to self-esteem and belonging when kids who are traditionally seen as lacking because of their language background get to be the “experts” in front of their peers. And as English-speaking families across the socioeconomic spectrum flock to these programs, dual-language education has also been heralded as a method of school integration.

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

Because students with disabilities and those dubbed English learners have among the lowest test scores and graduation rates in the district, advocates like Serpa believe they could benefit the most from a “gold standard” program.

Yet, so far, BPS has not followed that logic.

More than 14,600 BPS students are English learners. One in four has a disability. Yet just 6 percent of these students attend a dual-language school.

Dania Vázquez, headmaster of the Margarita Muñiz Academy dual-language high school, started her career in bilingual special education in the 1980s just as the twin specialties coalesced into a field. At her school, nearly 14 percent of students receive special education services, more than in Boston’s other dual-language programs, yet still below the district average.

She doesn’t know exactly why her school enrolls students with disabilities at higher rates than other dual language schools but noted the school coordinates its outreach to inform all families about its program.

“We are not choosing students,” Vázquez said. “Students are choosing us.”

At the Muñiz Academy, Vázquez said special education teachers spend time in classrooms supporting students with disabilities as they learn from core subject teachers.* The teachers also provide small group support in the school’s “resource room.”

“I don’t see the urgency for them to serve these kids.”

Suleika Soto, BPS mother and director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance

Historically, few English learners with disabilities in BPS have had access to both bilingual and special education.

“I don’t see the urgency for them to serve these kids,” said Suleika Soto, a BPS mother and director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance. Soto ranked two of the district’s dual-language programs at the top of her list of schools when she was registering her daughter for kindergarten but her child didn’t get into either program.

Soto enrolled in BPS after moving from the Dominican Republic when she was 7 and took bilingual classes until she became fluent in English. By the time she graduated, the state had banned bilingual education for immigrant students.

That ban, which lasted from 2002 to 2017, when the state Legislature offered districts renewed flexibility in language acquisition programs through the LOOK Act, continues to affect schools, both in staffing challenges and cultural perceptions around bilingual education.

Serpa said both English-speaking district administrators and non-English-speaking families need to be educated about the potential of dual-language programs.

“BPS has told a lot of families that the best thing for their kids is to learn only English,” Serpa said.

Related: How can being bilingual be an asset for white students and a deficit for immigrants?

Hai Son, principal of Mather Elementary School, sees the state ban’s continued impact on the teacher pipeline. A whole generation of bilingual students and young teachers who might have gone into bilingual education never did.

Students in Mather Elementary’s dual-language classrooms cannot receive special education services, according to Son, who said his team is already stretched thin creating a Vietnamese-language curriculum. Son said the district rushed the program’s opening last year, which pre-empted adequate planning time, leaving his team to design the program as they implement it.

Son said he expects to submit a plan for serving students with disabilities in his bilingual classrooms next year. If it is approved, the school could begin enrolling such students in 2024, he said.

How he will staff those classrooms, however, is an open question.

In a sweeping 2022 evaluation, the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation’s 78 largest school systems, criticized BPS for relying on teachers with multiple certifications to serve students with disabilities and those still learning English. While dual licensing technically complies with state and federal laws, critics say it stretches teacher capacity. In the district’s latest teacher contract, BPS committed to decreasing the practice.

Bilingual special education experts say the district can find more teachers by looking abroad or creating pipelines within the city’s immigrant communities.

Meanwhile, parents, teachers and community advocates report families are counseled to leave dual-language programs when it becomes clear their children need special education supports, or they’re told to enroll elsewhere from the start.

And mothers like Mejía see the high price of going down such a path. After Joangel entered elementary school and began spending the majority of his waking hours in an English-only classroom, Mejía said he quickly started losing his ability to communicate with his family in his native Spanish.

“There are parents paying so their children can learn another language,” Mejía said. Meanwhile, she is watching her son’s bilingualism slip away.

Although the district has pledged to open more bilingual programs, many remain skeptical. While the district plans to open 25 new bilingual programs by the end of the 2024-25 school year, it has yet to even announce when those programs will launch or where those programs will be located.*

Every year’s delay means a new class of kindergartners misses out on bilingual education, starting off their elementary school careers on a monolingual track. If the district cannot provide more dual-language programs and address why students with disabilities are underrepresented in those that are offered, families will continue to face frustration and regret.

Sonia Medina is the mother of two boys, 13-year-old Luis and 15-year-old Michael. Both have IEPs: Luis for ADD and Michael for ADHD and autism. When Medina, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was considering kindergartens, she wanted her eldest son to enter the dual-language program at the Hurley K-8 School but the district placed him in an English-only program elsewhere.

She wishes things had gone differently. Both children understand a decent amount of Spanish, but her younger son, in particular, speaks less fluently. In Santo Domingo, with family, language barriers prevent flowing conversations. And even when the boys can get their point across, Medina knows speaking is only part of the battle.

“It is one thing to speak [the language],” Medina said. “It’s another thing to write it, and another thing to read it.” In this aspect, Medina said her sons lost out. “The damage is done.”

* Clarification: This story was updated to clarify the nature of the Muñiz Academy’s services for kids with disabilities.

Correction: This article has been corrected to reflect the timing of when BPS will have 25 new bilingual programs in place.

This story about bilingual special education 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 Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON, Mass.– Después de que el hijo de María Mejía fuera diagnosticado con un trastorno del espectro autista en el preescolar, el tema de a cuál kínder debería ir se centró completamente en sus necesidades de educación especial.

Mejía y su esposo, inmigrantes hispanohablantes de la República Dominicana, supieron más tarde que Joangel, quien ahora tiene 7 años, habría sido un candidato ideal para una de las cuatro escuelas primarias de Boston que enseñan a los estudiantes tanto en inglés como en español, el idioma materno de Joangel. Los expertos dicen que tales programas ofrecen a los estudiantes de inglés la mejor oportunidad de éxito académico y las Escuelas Públicas de Boston (BPS, por sus siglas en inglés) se han comprometido a comenzar unas docenas más.

Pero los niños como Joangel a menudo quedan fuera. Sus familias, sin saberlo, se ven obligadas a participar en programas de educación especial únicamente en inglés para recibir servicios de sus programas de educación individualizados (IEP, por sus siglas en inglés) que ayuden a satisfacer sus necesidades de aprendizaje. Mejía dijo que se sorprendió cuando supo que había una alternativa.

“No me dijeron que era una escuela bilingüe”, dijo Mejía, “simplemente una escuela que aceptaron a un niño que tiene IEP”.

Los datos de inscripción del distrito, obtenidos por The Hechinger Report a través de una solicitud de registros públicos, muestran que los estudiantes con discapacidades —que representan el 22 por ciento de la población — están claramente subrepresentados en los siete programas de lenguaje dual del distrito. Representan entre el 8 y el 14 por ciento de la inscripción en los cinco programas de español e inglés. Ninguno está inscrito en el programa vietnamita-inglés de dos años en la Escuela Primaria Mather. Y en el programa de creole haitiano-inglés, hay tan pocos estudiantes con discapacidades inscritos que el distrito no puede revelar el total sin poner en riesgo la privacidad de los estudiantes.

Los expertos y defensores dicen que las disparidades se deben en parte a un problema de personal — simplemente no hay suficientes maestros de educación especial bilingüe — pero también son el resultado de una discriminación abierta y de conceptos culturales erróneos sobre si los estudiantes con discapacidades pueden manejar la educación bilingüe. El distrito se ha comprometido a agregar 25 programas bilingües más en los próximos dos años. Pero tanto los defensores como los funcionarios estatales cuestionan si BPS puede avanzar tan rápido, y las primeras señales sugieren que el distrito puede tener dificultades para incluir a los estudiantes con discapacidades a medida que abre nuevos programas: el programa bilingüe en la escuela Mather, ahora en su segundo año, solo estará listo para atender a estudiantes con discapacidades en su cuarto año, según el director.

BPS juega un papel importante en la determinación de la ubicación de los estudiantes de inglés, que constituyen casi un tercio del distrito, así como de los estudiantes con discapacidades. Las familias en Boston seleccionan sus escuelas preferidas, pero si necesitan servicios de inglés o educación especial, sus inscripciones están mandados al Centro de Evaluación y Orientación para los Recién Llegados o el Departamento de Educación Especial. Asesores de lenguaje hace recomendaciones basadas en el dominio del inglés y personal del departamento de educación especial identifica escuelas específicas para niños con IEP.

El portavoz de BPS, Max Baker, dijo en un comunicado que el distrito está “dedicado a convertirse en uno totalmente inclusivo, brindando acceso completo a una serie de servicios para todos los estudiantes”, pero se negó a responder a preguntas sobre por qué los estudiantes con discapacidades están subrepresentados en los programas de lenguaje dual o qué va a hacer para cambiar eso.

Los expertos de educación especial bilingüe dicen que la subrepresentación de los estudiantes con discapacidades es más que una oportunidad perdida: es discriminación. Dicen que no hay razón para que las escuelas no puedan atender a estudiantes con discapacidades. Y la ley de igualdad de oportunidades sugiere que tienen que hacerlo.

María Serpa, una pionera en el campo y miembro de la Fuerza Especial para Aprendices de Inglés del distrito, dijo que los datos de inscripción son increíbles.

“Los niños con discapacidades necesitan educación bilingüe más que nadie”.

María Serpa, miembro de la Fuerza Especial para Aprendices de Inglés de BPS

“Los niños con discapacidades necesitan educación bilingüe más que nadie”, dijo Serpa en inglés.

BPS ha sido criticado durante mucho tiempo por reprobar a sus estudiantes con discapacidades y a aquellos que no dominan el inglés — evitando una toma de control del estado el año pasado en parte al comprometerse a mejorar los servicios para estos dos grupos. Una piedra angular de su plan es la ambiciosa expansión de los programas bilingües.

Los programas de “lenguaje dual”, cuyos se unen los aprendices de inglés y los hablantes nativos intentando dominar los dos idiomas a nivel académico, se consideran una de las únicas vías para cerrar la brecha de rendimiento entre los dos grupos. Aprendices de inglés que toman estas clases superan a sus compañeros que también están aprendiendo el inglés en las pruebas de lectura y matemáticas y a graduarse en tasas más altas.

Por qué funcionan tan bien se debe a varias razones. La investigación ha encontrado que es mejor para los niños cuyo idioma dominante es el español, por ejemplo, pasar parte del día recibiendo instrucción académica en su idioma nativo. Los investigadores y educadores también destacan los beneficios para la autoestima y la pertenencia cuando los niños que tradicionalmente se consideran deficientes debido a su origen lingüístico se convierten en “expertos” frente a sus pares. Y a medida que las familias de habla inglesa de todo el espectro socioeconómico acuden en masa a los programas de lenguaje dual, también han sido anunciados como un método de integración escolar.

Hasta ahora, BPS no ha seguido esa lógica.

Más de 14.600 estudiantes de BPS son aprendices de inglés. Uno de cada cuatro de ellos tiene una discapacidad. Sin embargo, solo el 6 por ciento de ellos asisten a una escuela bilingüe.

Dania Vázquez, directora de la Academia Margarita Muñiz, la comenzó su carrera en educación especial bilingüe en la década de 1980 justo cuando las especialidades se fusionaron en un solo campo. En su escuela, casi el 14 por ciento de los estudiantes reciben servicios de educación especial, más que en otros programas bilingües de Boston, pero todavía por debajo del promedio del distrito.

Vázquez dijo que no sabe exactamente por qué su escuela inscribe a estudiantes con discapacidades a tasas más altas, pero señaló que la escuela hace un esfuerzo coordinado para informar a todas las familias acerca de su programa.

“No estamos eligiendo estudiantes”, dijo en inglés. “Los estudiantes nos eligen a nosotros”.

En la Academia Muñiz, Vázquez contó que los maestros de educación especial pasan tiempo en los salones de clases apoyando a los estudiantes con discapacidades mientras estos aprenden de los maestros de las materias en español o inglés.* También brindan apoyo en grupos pequeños en la “sala de recursos” de la escuela.

Históricamente, pocos aprendices de inglés con discapacidades en BPS han tenido estas oportunidades.

“No veo en ellos la urgencia de servir a estos niños”.

Suleika Soto, una madre y organizadora con la Alianza de Justicia Educativa de Boston

“No veo en ellos la urgencia de servir a estos niños”, dijo Suleika Soto, una madre en BPS y organizadora con la Alianza de Justicia Educativa de Boston. Soto trató de que su hija ingresara a una escuela bilingüe pero la niña no estaba elegida para ninguno de los dos programas que clasificó en la parte superior de su lista.

Soto se mudó a Boston desde la República Dominicana cuando tenía 7 años y tomó clases bilingües hasta que aprendió inglés con fluidez. Cuando se graduó de la escuela secundaria, el estado había prohibido la educación bilingüe para estudiantes inmigrantes.

Esa prohibición, que duró de 2002 a 2017 — cuando la legislatura estatal ofreció a los distritos una flexibilidad renovada en los programas de adquisición de inglés a través de la Ley LOOK — continúa afectando a las escuelas, tanto en desafíos de dotación de personal como en las percepciones culturales en torno a la educación bilingüe.

María Serpa dijo que tanto los administradores distritales como las familias inmigrantes deben ser educados sobre el potencial de los programas bilingües.

“BPS les ha dicho a muchas familias que lo mejor para sus hijos es aprender solo inglés”, dijo Serpa en inglés.

Hai Son, director de la Escuela Primaria Mather, lamenta la interrupción en el flujo de educadores bilingües. Toda una generación de estudiantes bilingües y jóvenes maestros que podrían haber ingresado a la educación bilingüe nunca lo hicieron.

Los estudiantes en las aulas bilingües de Mather no pueden recibir servicios de educación especial, según Son, quien dijo que su equipo ya está al límite creando un plan de estudios en idioma vietnamita. Son dijo que el distrito apresuró la apertura del programa el año pasado, lo que anuló el tiempo de planificación adecuado, obligando a que su equipo tuviera que diseñar un programa a medida que lo implementaban.

Son dijo que espera presentar un plan para atender a estudiantes con discapacidades en sus aulas bilingües el próximo año. Si se aprueba, la escuela podría comenzar a inscribir a esos estudiantes en 2024, dijo.

Sin embargo, la forma en que dotará de personal a esas aulas es una pregunta abierta.

En una amplia evaluación de 2022, el Consejo de Escuelas de Grandes Ciudades, una coalición de los 78 sistemas escolares más grandes del país, criticó a BPS por depender de maestros con múltiples certificaciones para atender a estudiantes con discapacidades y aquellos que aún están aprendiendo inglés. Si bien la licencia dual técnicamente cumple con las leyes estatales y federales, los críticos dicen que fuerza la capacidad de los maestros. En el último contrato de maestros del distrito, se hizo el compromiso de reducir la práctica.

Los expertos de educación especial bilingüe dicen que el distrito puede buscar maestros de otros países o crear canales dentro de las comunidades de inmigrantes de la ciudad.

Mientras tanto, padres, maestros y defensores comunitarios dicen que se aconseja a las familias que abandonen los programas bilingües cuando queda claro que sus hijos necesitan apoyo de educación especial, o se les dice que se inscriban en otro lugar desde el principio.

En el caso de Mejía, después de que Joangel ingresó a la primaria y comenzó a pasar la mayor parte de su tiempo en un salón de clases en el que solo se hablaba inglés, rápidamente comenzó a perder la capacidad de comunicarse con su familia en su español nativo.

“Hay padres que pagan para que sus hijos aprendan otro idioma”, dijo Mejía. Mientras tanto, ella ve cómo se desvanece la oportunidad de su hijo de ser bilingüe.

Aunque el distrito se ha comprometido a abrir más programas bilingües, muchos siguen siendo escépticos. Si bien el distrito planea abrir 25 nuevos programas bilingües para fines del año escolar 2024-25, aún tiene que anunciar cuándo se lanzarán esos programas o dónde se ubicarán esos programas.*

Cada año de retraso significa que una nueva clase de niños de kínder se perderá la educación bilingüe, comenzando sus carreras en la escuela primaria en un entorno monolingüe. Sin más programas ni un cálculo de por qué los estudiantes con discapacidades están subrepresentados en los que existen, las familias seguirán enfrentándose a la frustración y al arrepentimiento.

Sonia Medina es madre de dos niños: Luis, de 13 años y Michael, de 15 años. Ambos tienen IEP: Luis para desorden de déficit de atención y Michael para el autismo y desorden hiperactivo y déficit de atención. Cuando Medina, una inmigrante de la República Dominicana, estaba escogiendo un kínder, quería que su hijo mayor ingresara al programa de lenguaje dual del Hurley, pero el distrito lo colocó en otra escuela sin la educación bilingüe.

Ella desearía que las cosas hubieran sido de otra manera. Ambos niños entienden bien el español, pero su hijo menor, en particular, habla con menos fluidez. En Santo Domingo, en familia, las barreras del idioma impiden que las conversaciones fluyan. Incluso cuando pueden expresar su punto de vista, Medina sabe que hablar es solo una parte de conocer un idioma.

“Una cosa es tu hablarlo”, dijo Medina. “Otra cosa escribirlo, y otra cosa es leerlo”. En ese aspecto, Medina dijo que sus hijos se han perdido. “El daño está hecho”.

*Aclaración: Este artículo se actualizó para aclarar como funcionan los servicios de educación especial en la Academia Muñiz.

Este artículo ha sido corregida para reflejar el momento en que BPS tendrá 25 nuevos programas bilingües en funcionamiento.

Este artículo acerca de la educación especial bilingüe fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lee sus artículos en español.

The post Estudiantes con discapacidades a menudo son excluidos de populares programas de ‘lenguaje dual’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Dos veces por semana, Ricky Carmona, de 16 años, sale de su casa en La Verne para asistir a la escuela que se encuentra a pocos pasos del Boot Barn en un centro comercial cercano.

Terminó en la escuela chárter Options for Youth en Upland después de que fuera suspendido de Bonita High al comienzo del año escolar 2022-23 por fumar en el baño. Menos de una semana después de la suspensión, Stephanie Carmona, su tía y tutora, recibió una carta: El director había recomendado a Ricky para un “traslado involuntario” fuera de Bonita High.

Técnicamente, Ricky no había sido expulsado. Pero todo indicaba que sí.

“Un traslado es algo que se hace voluntariamente”, dijo.

Los traslados como el de Ricky representan una parte importante pero oculta de la disciplina excluyente de California, que impide a los estudiantes asistir a sus escuelas y los empuja a nuevos campus o a escuelas alternativas más pequeñas, según una investigación del Hechinger Report.

Mientras que algunos educadores defienden los traslados como una alternativa más suave a la expulsión, los críticos dicen que estos movimientos tienen protecciones limitadas o nulas del debido proceso y pueden acarrear los mismos problemas asociados con la expulsión al interrumpir la educación de un estudiante.

A pesar de las políticas que requieren que los distritos escolares de California informen sobre el número de estudiantes transferidos, los requisitos de información del Departamento de Educación del estado, superpuestos y vagos, significan que frecuentemente no está claro por qué un estudiante fue cambiado de escuela.

Los funcionarios de California se negaron a proporcionar datos a nivel estatal sobre las transferencias, diciendo que la base de datos en la que mantienen la información está exenta de divulgación, ya que contiene información que identifica a los estudiantes.

Un análisis de Hechinger de los informes a nivel de distrito — obtenidos a través de solicitudes de registros públicos a 23 de los distritos más grandes del estado — reveló una visión más profunda de las prácticas locales de transferencia que existen con poca responsabilidad pública o políticas claras de divulgación.

Durante cinco años académicos, de 2016-17 a 2020-21, estos distritos registraron 5.800 transferencias por “razones disciplinarias específicas”. Hasta 3.700 de estas transferencias podrían haber sido expulsiones. Los distritos escolares están obligados a informar de las expulsiones al estado y al público. Pero la categoría de “razones disciplinarias específicas” también incluye traslados involuntarios como el de Ricky y traslados por orden judicial a escuelas de centros de justicia juvenil.

Los distritos — que atienden a casi 1 millón, o alrededor del 17 por ciento, de los 5,9 millones de alumnos del estado — también registraron más de 16.300 traslados a escuelas alternativas. Los defensores de los alumnos y los educadores afirman que estos traslados se producen con frecuencia tras problemas de conducta. Pero el estado no exige a los distritos que especifiquen la razón por la que un estudiante es trasladado a una escuela alternativa.

Los estudiantes pueden inscribirse en escuelas alternativas para satisfacer sus necesidades: campus más pequeños, apoyo conductual o académico o una jornada escolar más flexible. Los educadores y otras personas afirman que puede ser beneficioso para algunos alumnos cambiar de escuela y empezar de cero.

Pero los defensores dicen que la transparencia es necesaria en los datos del estado para garantizar que los distritos no están ocultando las transferencias por motivos disciplinarios a las escuelas alternativas, especialmente cuando eso campus pueden tener menor rigor académico, bajas tasas de graduación y el absentismo crónico más alto.

“Los traslados se están utilizando como una forma encubierta de sacar a los niños de las escuelas”, dijo Chelsea Helena, abogada de educación de Neighborhood Legal Services del condado de Los Ángeles. “Y está afectando más a los niños afroamericanos y latinos”.

En la mayoría de los distritos, incluyendo San Bernardino City Unified, Long Beach Unified y Oakland Unified, los estudiantes afroamericanos estaban desproporcionadamente representados entre los estudiantes transferidos por razones disciplinarias, según los datos de los distritos. Aunque los estudiantes latinos no estaban sobrerrepresentados en la mayoría de los distritos, su considerable proporción de matriculación significa que fueron transferidos con mayor frecuencia.

Relacionado: Derechos civiles en riesgo: Estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos son suspendidos más por faltar a clase

Es probable que se produzcan aún más traslados disciplinarios cuando se aconseja a los alumnos que cambien voluntariamente de una escuela tradicional a otra.

Victor Leung, director de equidad educativa de la ACLU del Sur de California, afirma que este tipo de traslados son “uno de los problemas más comunes e insidiosos” que ve su equipo. A menudo se presiona a los padres para que acepten un traslado voluntario a fin de evitar una expulsión formal, a pesar de que la expulsión conlleva garantías procesales y derechos de apelación, afirma Leung. Una capa adicional de supervisión requiere la aprobación de las expulsiones por parte del consejo escolar.

A diferencia de las expulsiones, generalmente asignadas por causar lesiones físicas graves o poseer drogas o armas, los traslados carecen en gran medida de regulación. Los distritos elaboran sus propias políticas sobre traslados, con normas variables — si las hay — para realizar apelaciones.

“Los traslados se están utilizando como una forma encubierta de sacar a los niños de las escuelas. Y está afectando más a los niños afroamericanos y latinos”.

Chelsea Helena, abogada, Neighborhood Legal Services del Condado de Los Ángeles.

En 2014, una ley estatal prohibió a los distritos obligar a los estudiantes a trasladarse si se recomendaba su expulsión, pero ganaron su audiencia de expulsión. Sin embargo, sigue existiendo un vacío legal que permite a los distritos trasladar a los estudiantes en lugar de expulsarlos y enfrentar un escrutinio mínimo.

A raíz de las preguntas de una periodista al Departamento de Educación sobre sus normas de supervisión e información del proceso de traslado, el superintendente estatal Tony Thurmond reconoció en un comunicado de prensa “que algunos distritos han empujado a las familias hacia el traslado voluntario o involuntario para evitar informar de las expulsiones”.

El mes pasado anunció la creación de una línea de denuncia pública para identificar los distritos que hacen exactamente esto.

“No se tolerará que los distritos escolares intenten ocultar los índices reales de disciplina mediante prácticas de enmascarar las expulsiones como traslados”, dijo Thurmond.

Una de las razones por las que las expulsiones han sido objeto de controversia en California y en todo el país, es por el trastorno que causan en las vidas y trayectorias académicas de los estudiantes. California tiene una de las tasas de expulsión más bajas del país.

Cambiar de escuela, sea cual sea el motivo, suele ser malo para los niños, ya que perjudica su desarrollo, altera sus relaciones y, lo que es más grave y constante, reduce sus resultados en los exámenes y sus probabilidades de graduarse.

En el caso de Ricky, va más retrasado en Options for Youth y apenas acumula créditos. Pasó más de la mitad del año escolar completando paquetes en su mayoría de forma independiente — y la familia está explorando un diploma de GED como un objetivo alternativo.

Ni el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Bonita ni Options for Youth comentaron su situación.

“Cualquier interrupción en el programa educativo de un niño es un problema”, dijo Helena, de Neighborhood Legal Services. “Especialmente siguiendo dos años de interrupción catastrófica en la educación de los niños”.

Relacionado: ​​Por qué los estudiantes blancos tienen 250% más probabilidad de graduación en universidades públicas en comparación a los estudiantes afroamericanos   

En los 23 distritos que proporcionaron datos, las cifras de traslados variaron mucho.

Por ejemplo, el distrito unificado de San Diego, con 114.500 alumnos, el segundo más grande del estado, expulsó a 335 estudiantes, trasladó a 288 por razones disciplinarias específicas y envió a 94 a escuelas alternativas.

Pero Sacramento City Unified, que atiende a casi 44.000 alumnos, expulsó a 52, trasladó a 511 por razones disciplinarias específicas y registró 3.281 traslados a escuelas alternativas.

Stephan Brown, director de audiencias y colocación de alumnos en Sacramento City Unified, dijo que las familias suelen apoyar los traslados.

La mayoría de las transferencias a escuelas alternativas en Sacramento City Unified son por razones distintas de la disciplina, como estar atrasado en las clases, dijo. El distrito se ha asociado con organizaciones comunitarias que ayudan a mediar en los conflictos y a minimizar la necesidad de aplicar medidas como la exclusión. Brown considera que los traslados son una alternativa positiva a la expulsión.

Los administradores de Riverside Unified y San Bernardino City Unified también describieron sus escuelas alternativas como opciones educativas complementarias y de apoyo para los estudiantes que han tenido dificultades en las escuelas tradicionales.

Los datos de transferencia no son claros para el Unificado de Los Ángeles, que ha pasado años trabajando para reducir el número de expulsiones. El distrito superó al estado por casi una década en la prohibición de las suspensiones por rebeldía intencionada, incluidas acciones como mascar chicle, jugar con el teléfono, dar golpecitos con los pies y quedarse dormido en clase.

A pesar de sus iniciativas de reforma disciplinaria, el mayor distrito no parece seguir las instrucciones del estado para registrar sus traslados.

En los datos que L.A. Unified presentó al estado, obtenidos a través de una solicitud de registros públicos, el distrito registró cero transferencias por razones disciplinarias y cero transferencias a escuelas alternativas en los años académicos de 2016-17 a 2020-21.

El distrito opera un programa que llama “transferencias de oportunidad” para estudiantes que son trasladados a una nueva escuela “para abordar la mala conducta de los estudiantes después de que las intervenciones anteriores han fallado”. El distrito registra dichas transferencias internamente.

“Cualquier interrupción en el programa educativo de un niño es un problema. Especialmente siguiendo dos años de interrupción catastrófica en la educación de los niños”.

Chelsea Helena, abogada, Neighborhood Legal Services del Condado de Los Ángeles.

Un portavoz del distrito describió por escrito los traslados de oportunidad como una respuesta menos rígida a un problema de mala conducta que no llega a justificar la expulsión. Estos traslados suelen ser voluntarios, es decir, propuestos por la escuela o el distrito pero aceptados por la familia del alumno. Los padres pueden apelar el traslado, y la decisión del comité de apelaciones es definitiva.

Los registros internos de L.A. Unified muestran que realizó 138 transferencias de oportunidad desde el año escolar 2017-18 hasta 2021-22.

El distrito registra las transferencias de oportunidad con el estado como “transferencias regulares, no disciplinarias” porque son voluntarias, dijo el portavoz. Pero tal clasificación entra en conflicto con la propia definición del distrito relacionada con la disciplina y con la política estatal.

L.A. Unified sirvió a casi 35,000 estudiantes a través de 53 de sus escuelas alternativas en 2021-22, según los datos de inscripción del estado. Los funcionarios no contestaron preguntas sobre cómo se registran las transferencias a las escuelas alternativas.

Relacionado: Cuando el castigo es el mismo que el delito: Suspendido por faltar a clase

Los esfuerzos disciplinarios se han centrado en ampliar los programas que fomentan el comportamiento positivo de los estudiantes y mejoran la cultura escolar, incluido un enfoque diario en la atención plena y las prácticas informadas sobre traumas.

“Realmente tenemos una serie de prácticas que están trabajando para abordar el clima escolar y la cultura positiva en todas las escuelas”, dijo Pia Escudero, director ejecutivo del distrito de salud estudiantil y servicios humanos.

Megan Stanton-Trehan, directora de la Clínica de Educación sobre Justicia Juvenil de la Facultad de Derecho de Loyola, reconoce que el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Los Ángeles ha tomado medidas para reducir la disciplina excluyente, pero cuestiona la exactitud de los datos sobre traslados comunicados por el distrito.

Sin una distinción clara entre los traslados que están relacionados con la disciplina y los que no lo están, “se hace difícil para la comunidad entender cuáles son los verdaderos problemas”, dijo Stanton-Trehan. “¿Se trata realmente de disciplina? ¿Se trata de asistencia? ¿Necesita el alumno educación especial u otro tipo de apoyo que no está recibiendo?”.

En octubre de 2021, Neighborhood Legal Services del condado de Los Ángeles demandó al Departamento de Educación de California, alegando que los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos se ven desproporcionadamente perjudicados por las políticas disciplinarias de algunos distritos y que el estado no ha supervisado ni tomado medidas contra los traslados que funcionan como disciplina excluyente.

El estado está violando el derecho a la igualdad de protección de los estudiantes al no salvaguardar su derecho a una educación igualitaria, alega la demanda. Los abogados se preparan para ir a juicio.

Ha habido otros llamados a la acción legislativa, incluida la exigencia de información pública clara de las transferencias relacionadas con la disciplina y de las categorías que identifican por qué un estudiante es transferido. La senadora estatal Nancy Skinner (demócrata de Berkeley), que ha presentado una serie de medidas sobre disciplina escolar, dijo que está estudiando cómo podría actuar la legislatura tras conocer las conclusiones del Hechinger Report.

El Departamento de Educación de California está trabajando en una guía para asesorar a los distritos sobre el uso de los traslados disciplinarios, dijo un portavoz.

El reciente impulso para abordar las transferencias se produce cuando las escuelas han informado de problemas más graves con el comportamiento de los estudiantes desde la pandemia.

Los expertos afirman que los distritos deben ser proactivos, lo que exige capacitar a los profesores en desarrollo infantil y adolescente, establecimiento de relaciones y gestión del comportamiento, así como dotar a los centros de un número adecuado de orientadores y trabajadores sociales.

Aun así, los responsables de los centros escolares se enfrentan a lo que pueden parecer prioridades contrapuestas: atender a todos los alumnos, incluidos los que se portan mal y requieren disciplina, y mantener un entorno ordenado. Los defensores dicen que entender los traslados es clave para comprender cómo se está imponiendo la disciplina a los estudiantes de California.

Cuando Ricky habla de su situación, se le escapa decir que fue expulsado.

“Podría ser [una expulsión]”, dice. “No puedo regresar”.

Este artículo acerca de expulsión escolar fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

The post ¿Expulsiones disfrazadas? Las escuelas expulsan a los alumnos, pero dicen que son ‘traslados’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

It seemed like a match made in heaven.

Dominican University of California needed something fresh. The college wanted to offer students a hands-on learning experience in a lucrative tech field blooming in the Bay Area. Make School, a San Francisco-based gaming company turned for-profit educational institution, was already offering a short-term tech boot camp, designed to meet that same goal.

Together, they envisioned a set-up through which Dominican students could take computer science classes and earn a minor, and Make School students could take a few classes from Dominican faculty and earn a bachelor’s in applied computer science in only two years.

The partnership, established in 2018, would be the first of its kind. Though it had special approval from Dominican’s accreditor, Make School’s program received little oversight or regulation. No one was watching out for warning signs, financial or otherwise, of issues at Make School.

When Make School suddenly closed in 2021, Dominican leaders were in uncharted territory, left to figure out how to help 167 students continue their education, a spokesperson said. The majority left the program without any credential to show for their time and effort.

Nicola Pitchford, Dominican’s vice president for academic affairs at the time and now its president, said the university did everything they could to help the students, but acknowledged it was “a really lumpy ride.”

“There’s not yet a regulatory framework that provides clear guidance and boundaries for institutions trying to do this,” Pitchford said. “We would have been very grateful for not having to pioneer quite so much.”

“What you have is trusted brand-name schools, from community colleges to state universities, knowing that they have these valuable brands, and literally renting them out to for-profit companies.”

Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center

Make School’s disastrous downfall, as documented by a Student Borrower Protection Center report provided to The Hechinger Report, should sound alarm bells about partnerships like this, advocates for students warn.

When colleges and boot camps team up, the colleges typically just put their name on the programs while the boot camp companies recruit students, develop curricula and teach classes. Such arrangements are quietly proliferating with few, if any, quality controls or assurances in place to protect students. At least 75 such partnerships exist between colleges and three of the country’s top boot camp provider companies: edX, ThriveDX and Fullstack Academy.

When students enroll in a traditional college, they know they are attending an institution that has met certain standards set by the federal and state governments and accrediting agencies. If their education doesn’t meet those standards, or if their school lies to them or closes, they are entitled to certain protections, including, in some cases, debt cancelation. There is quality oversight and transparency about student outcomes.

When students enroll in a tech boot camp, however — even if it has the name of a college pasted all over it — they have none of those assurances. This kind of program, which typically takes two years or less to complete and does not offer academic credit, is unregulated and is often marketed as an alternative to traditional colleges and an accelerated pathway to high-paying tech jobs.

No one collects any information on how many former boot camp students end up with the jobs they trained for or whether the many students who take out private loans to pay for these programs are able to make their payments.

For the colleges and the boot camp providers, however, partnering is a win-win. The programs grow but remain unregulated while bearing the crests of the accredited and respected colleges and universities. The colleges can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars without having to do much work, according to reviews of the contracts obtained through public records requests.

“What you have is trusted brand-name schools, from community colleges to state universities, knowing that they have these valuable brands, and literally renting them out to for-profit companies,” said Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The students will take on the debt because they trust the school, then go to a program that is usually very superficial.”

The rise and fall of Make School

After starting in 2012 and pivoting from gaming to education in 2014, Make School operated for years as an unlicensed educational institution.

It received a citation in 2018 from California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education for operating without approval. Nevertheless, later that year, it joined forces with Dominican, a nonprofit college in San Rafael, California. A spokesperson from Dominican said that, when they signed the contract, college leaders were unaware that Make School was operating as an unapproved educational institution.

The partnership was approved by Dominican’s accreditor, Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, or WSCUC, through a special set-up that allowed Dominican to essentially sponsor Make School and help it be fast-tracked toward independent accreditation. This set-up allowed Make School students to access federal aid dollars.

Colleges that receive federal funding must uphold certain standards of “program integrity,” including accurate representations of the nature of their educational programs, financial charges and graduates’ employability.

Colleges typically receive about 20 percent of partner boot camp revenue

Dominican’s accreditor did not review Make School’s curriculum. WSCUC collected some financial information from Make School, but only at the onset of the partnership to make sure that Dominican would be able to sustain it, according to Jamienne Studley, president of WSCUC. Make School didn’t have to disclose any ongoing information about its financials to the federal government or the accreditor.

As for employability, the Student Borrower Protection Center report says that Make School made what appear to be “misrepresentations” about the employability of its graduates, as well as about the price and academic nature of its program.

Related: It’s a shell game’: How under-the-radar companies help for-profit colleges stay in business

The SBPC now says that Dominican is liable for misrepresentations made by Make School and that the partnership violated required standards of “program integrity.” That contention is “vigorously disputed” by Dominican, according to a statement provided by its spokesperson. The statement added that the applied computer science program was developed in full compliance with the accreditor’s standards and is certified by the Department of Education. Dominican also said that, before being contacted by The Hechinger Report, they were not aware of SBPC’s allegations.

SBPC’s Kaufman said they had not contacted Dominican “because we didn’t think there was anything in our investigation that would have been a revelation to the school.”

Ashutosh Desai, one of the co-founders of Make School, declined to comment for this story. Jeremy Rossmann, the other co-founder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

One student, Andrea Graziosi, learned about Make School in early 2020. She badly needed a job. She was recently divorced and desperate for income to support herself and her two children. But with a decade-long gap in her resume, she struggled to lock down anything beyond a gig at a local yoga studio and occasional substitute teaching jobs.

She had earned a bachelor’s degree in finance two decades earlier, but Make School promised that it could help her land a good job, and she became convinced it represented the best shot at supporting her family. So, for an entire year, Graziosi spent 10 hours a day at her computer, listening to instructors. She found most of them to be inadequate at explaining the material. In order to complete her homework assignments, she spent hours each night re-teaching herself the material, with help from Coursera and YouTube tutorials.

In the spring of 2021, Make School’s finances were in disarray. On July 1, 2021, dozens of students who attended Make School before its partnership with Dominican filed a lawsuit against Make School alleging predatory and deceptive marketing and lending practices.

Shortly after the student lawsuit was filed, Make School leaders learned that they would not receive independent accreditation from WSCUC. On July 13, 2021, they told Dominican they planned to close, Pitchford, the university president, said.

Without warning, Graziosi found that she was unable to enroll in classes for the fall. Several instructors announced leaves of absence. In a private Slack channel, students began to panic.

“Is it just that the universities are getting money that they wouldn’t otherwise get if they didn’t take these deals with these boot camps?”

Jonathan Hammond, former UNH boot camp student

Days later, they learned via email that Make School, which Graziosi had trusted to resurrect her professional life, was closing. She said students received mere days to download projects they’d spent months on, projects the school told them would help them get high-paying tech jobs. But without the server to host and display the projects, Graziosi said, they were rendered virtually meaningless.

The news devastated Graziosi. She experienced anxiety so severe, she said, that she sought medical care for heart problems.

“I was holding on to it as my way to be OK, you know, to have a job and to sustain myself,” Graziosi said. “And the way that they did it was so wrong.”

Related: Left in the lurch by for-profit college direct loans

Exactly three weeks after the lawsuit was filed against Make School, Dominican announced that it was absorbing the applied computer science program.

“We really worked as hard as we could, once that transition happened, to support the transitioning students in every way that we could,” Pitchford said.

According to figures provided by the university, of 167 students enrolled in Make School at the time, 57 percent opted to continue their studies at Dominican, about 20 miles away; only 40 percent of the Make School students who were enrolled in the summer of 2021 went on to earn a degree from Dominican.

Graziosi was not among them. She already had a bachelor’s degree, and, feeling that she’d wasted her time and money on the short-term program, she had zero trust in either institution.

No one knows how well boot camp students fare

Some experts say that Make School’s case is an extreme example. Most boot camp partnerships end up being a positive for students, said Jim Fong, chief research officer at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. He sees the fact that colleges lend their brand names to these companies as an indication that the colleges believe in their quality.

But boot camp student success rates are typically self-reported and rarely externally vetted. Much of the data that boot camps provide comes only from the students who reply to surveys. Such results are unlikely to reflect overall outcomes.

For instance, the company edX, which offers more than 200 boot camps at about 50 colleges, partnered with Gallup to study the outcomes of its boot camp students. They sent a survey to more than 40,000 people who had gone through the boot camps, and about 4,000 responded. Of those respondents, the study reported that 17 percent had jobs in STEM before attending a boot camp, and after attending, 48 percent had jobs in STEM. They reported median salary increases of between $5,000 and $15,000. But what about the 36,000 students who did not respond?

The federal government collects vast amounts of data from accredited schools, including graduation rates, and tracks earnings data for student loan borrowers. But colleges are not required to report any information on non-credit-bearing boot camps to the Department of Education, according to a spokesperson.

“There’s not yet a regulatory framework that provides clear guidance and boundaries for institutions trying to do this.”

Nicola Pitchford, president, Dominican University of California

The department recently released guidance that would allow the government to review contracts between colleges and third-party providers, but only when their programs are eligible for academic credit. Most boot camps would still be exempt.

Similarly, none of the six regional accrediting agencies, responsible for overseeing most two- and four-year institutions, monitor boot camps, according to officials at each agency.

“There really is not yet a sort of rigorous or uniform way of assuring students of the quality of these programs, what kinds of outcomes they have,” said Lawrence M. Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education. “There is a need for some quality assurance in that world, but we are not there yet.”

The lack of oversight of these boot camps is dangerous for prospective students, said Stephanie Hall, a senior fellow at the think tank Center for American Progress. “A lot of trust is placed on the idea that universities are approved by federal and state governments and accreditors,” she said. “It’s a bit misleading and deceptive on the part of both the university and the boot camp.”

And the attendance costs for these unregulated boot camps are often immense.

“Effective and accessible programs are necessary opportunities for workers, particularly those underserved by traditional 2- and 4-year pathways.”

Anant Agarwal, edX founder

A review of contracts shows that short-term boot camps can cost students up to $18,000, depending on program length; and because these programs typically aren’t eligible for federal aid, students must pay out of pocket or take out private loans.

At Make School, tuition was advertised as $90,000 for the two-year program, but some of that could be paid with federal student loans and grants due to the program’s unique arrangement with Dominican, the Student Borrowers Protection Center found.

The federal aid could be combined with income-share agreements, or ISAs. Under those agreements, students paid nothing up front, but as soon as they landed a job making at least $60,000 a year, they were on the hook to repay their entire tuition in monthly installments. Some students signed multiple ISA agreements, and after they finished paying one back, had to begin paying off another; they could be stuck paying back up to $250,000 for up to a decade, the Student Borrower Protection Center found.

The payout for colleges

The financial benefits of these boot camp agreements for the colleges can be large. A review of seven contracts, including at least one each from edX, ThriveDX and Fullstack Academy, shows that colleges typically receive about 20 percent of the boot camp revenue, while the for-profit companies collect the rest. (Ohio State University redacted the revenue split details from its contract, saying they were “trade secrets.”)

Up until September 2020, the University of Central Florida could get up to 40 percent of the net profits for its boot camp run by ThriveDX (known as HackerU at the time), according to their contract. Students paid $13,000 for courses in ethical hacking, $16,000 for cybersecurity or $25,000 for a bundled version of the two.

If there were four cybersecurity cohorts, each filled with a maximum of 40 students, UCF would be due roughly $1 million per year (minus expenses) from the cybersecurity program alone. In September 2020, the contract was amended so that the college receives 16 percent of all revenue.

Meanwhile, as noted, colleges are not responsible for much. They often just approve access to their brand name logos and alumni databases, which give the boot-camp companies a captive audience for recruiting.

“The third-party provider is doing all the work, the marketing work, all the education, they employ the teachers,” said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at the think tank New America. “So it’s 20 percent in exchange for, basically, just selling access to their alumni network and their brands.”

No boot camp providers agreed to be interviewed for this story. A statement from edX founder Anant Agarwal provided by an edX spokesperson emphasized the quality of their programs and said that their boot camps are supported by top engineering faculty from colleges across the country.

“With the labor market the tightest it’s been in a generation, and with the rapid pace of technology projected to displace millions of jobs over the next decade, effective and accessible programs are necessary opportunities for workers, particularly those underserved by traditional 2- and 4-year pathways,” Agarwal wrote.

Related: Could the online for-profit college industry be ‘a winner in this crisis’?  

But not all students see the value of these boot camps.Jonathan Hammond, who took out a private loan for $10,000 for a coding boot camp at the University of New Hampshire run by edX, said he had no idea that the boot camp wasn’t run by the university until after he’d enrolled.

Emails reviewed by The Hechinger Report show that the person he messaged back and forth with about financing used the email address coding.bootcamp@unh.edu and had an email signature that referred to the correspondent as an admissions coordinator for the “UNH coding boot camp.”

Hammond said that since edX “disguised themselves” as UNH, “I don’t know if I have ever spoken to someone from UNH directly.”

Thespokesperson from edX said that they take measures to ensure students are aware of the partnership between the university and the company, including training staff to answer phones by saying they are calling from the university “in partnership with edX.”

But murkiness about who runs a partner boot camp is common. At UCF, for instance, the name ThriveDX only shows up on a page answering frequently asked questions about one of the university’s boot camps. The university also partners with edX to provide boot camps in UX/UI, digital marketing, data analytics and coding.

UCF officials declined to be interviewed for this story, but provided some data on student outcomes. That data shows that about half of the students who complete the programs opt to receive career support, and about 85 percent of those students get jobs.

One student, Andrew Rodriguez, said that one of the university’s edX boot camps helped him get out of the service industry and into developer jobs building websites for causes he cares about. He said it was worth taking out a private loan to finance his boot camp education.

“My associate degree, I haven’t been able to do anything with it,” Rodriguez said. “Getting a bachelor’s degree gives you more options, but I got pretty good options with just the boot camp.”

He said he understood that the program wasn’t entirely run by the University of Central Florida, but the endorsement of the college helped him trust it.

Hammond, the UNH student, had a different experience. Although he totally immersed himself in his studies each night after work, he said, he still felt the program was not worth the money. He said he still had to take free online courses to fill in the gaps left by the course.

The career support from the UNH boot camp also left a lot to be desired, Hammond said. He recalled that the school’s online job fairs often featured people who worked in tech fields different from the focus of the boot camp or people who had no control over hiring at their companies.

Another student helped Hammond connect with a recruiter about six months after the boot camp ended, he said, and he was hired as a web developer. He said he could have done the same job before attending.

“Is there anything that the students are getting from the colleges?” he said. “Or is it just that the universities are getting money that they wouldn’t otherwise get if they didn’t take these deals with these boot camps?”

This story coding boot camp programs 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.

The post When universities slap their names on for-profit coding boot camps appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BRENTWOOD, N.Y. — Steven Martinez’s life was turned upside down by an ill-conceived joke. He was a sophomore at Long Island’s Brentwood High School, a few days before Thanksgiving in 2019, when he made a post on Snapchat late one night about hiding an AK-47 at Area 51 in Nevada.

The police arrived around 2 a.m. looking for him. Martinez spent the morning at the station being questioned, he recalled. He was then handcuffed and taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

Doctors determined he wasn’t a threat. The police didn’t press charges.

Yet the Brentwood Union Free School District suspended Martinez for more than six months. He wouldn’t be allowed back until the next school year. In the meantime, he’d get a few hours of tutoring a week.

New York state allows students to be suspended for up to 180 days — an entire school year. As a result, thousands of students across the state have been kept out of school for a month or more, cut off from their peers and receiving just an hour or two of instruction per day. The New York State Education Department does not collect data on suspension lengths, but public records requests to 17 of the state’s largest school districts uncovered more than 6,200 suspensions of more than 20 days from 2017-18 to 2021-22. (These numbers don’t include New York City, which prohibited most long-term suspensions in 2019.)

A bill recently introduced for the fifth consecutive state legislative session would ban suspensions of more than 20 school days under most circumstances. At least 15 states already have similar laws in place. A recent report from a State Education Department task force recommends such a limit in all but the rarest of circumstances. New York’s proposed legislation, called the Solutions not Suspensions bill, is co-sponsored by more than a third of state senators and has been co-sponsored by nearly half the members of the state assembly. Yet the legislation has never made it out of committee.

“A suspension doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker. You could have learned your lesson.”

Steven Martinez, a Brentwood, NY, student who was suspended for more than half a school year

New York educators, concerned about school safety and wary of being restricted by legislators, have pushed back on the idea of a cap. With misbehavior surging in the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns, district leaders say there are times when removal from school for more than a month is warranted, particularly when a student’s behavior harms or interferes with other students.

Advocates pushing for the bill argue that keeping students out of school for more than 20 days does not address any of the underlying issues that led to the suspensions but creates new ones by fomenting disengagement and forcing students to fall significantly behind in class.

“New York state has an obligation for every child. It does not say in our state constitution, ‘every child except for those who may have been seen as disruptive to others,’ ” said Jamaica Miles, a Schenectady City school board member and co-founder of the community organizing group All Of Us. “Since the inception of this country, the model of removing someone from society to teach them a lesson has not worked.”

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

In 2021-22 alone, the 17 school districts that provided data issued more than 1,600 long-term suspensions, an average of nine per school day. From 2017-18 to 2021-22, districts with more economically disadvantaged students and Black and Latino students gave out more such suspensions per capita than their more affluent, whiter counterparts.

Buffalo Public Schools assigned more than 2,200 long-term suspensions over those five years, the highest of any district that provided data. Rochester City School District recorded the second most, with 854. City School District of Albany meted out 280. In Brentwood, Steven Martinez’s district, where nearly 90 percent of the 18,000 students are Hispanic and a similar proportion are economically disadvantaged, the district reported 466 long-term suspensions over the five years.

Brentwood and Rochester officials did not respond to requests for comment, but district officials elsewhere in the state stressed that they have been working to address student behavior and reduce suspensions. In Albany, for instance, administrators said that they have focused on putting a variety of strategies in place, such as training teachers on trauma-informed care and de-escalation and putting counselors, nurses and psychologists in each school building.

“Our mission is really to educate our kiddos, and in order to do that we need them in school,” said Lori McKenna, Albany’s assistant superintendent for secondary instruction. “Our first go-to is not suspension. However, when we have pretty severe incidents that are happening, there may be a need for extended periods of suspension.”

Indeed, several district officials said that they reserve long-term suspensions for only the most serious violations that disrupt the school day and threaten safety. Among the 14 school districts that provided information on specific violations, a significant amount were for such issues, including fighting and bringing a weapon to campus. (In the proposed legislation, suspensions that exceed 20 days would still be permitted under federal law for certain offenses, such as possessing a firearm on school grounds.)

“It’s usually those cases where it really resulted in bodily harm or a threat of a really serious nature,” said Sharon Brown, chief of student support services for Buffalo Public Schools. “There are many times when we have to look at the safety and welfare of all the students.”

But advocates and lawyers say that even for severe offenses, a month out of school should be enough time to address the behavior. And they point out that there may sometimes be a mismatch between how a school district records an incident and a student’s actual behavior.

In Martinez’s case, for instance, Brentwood administrators wrote in the official record that he was suspended because he “threatened to shoot up the school with an AK47 on Snapchat” — something his post, a copy of which was reviewed by The Hechinger Report, did not say.

In 2021-22 alone, the 17 school districts that provided data issued more than 1,600 long-term suspensions, an average of nine per school day.

Complicating the issue is the fact that misbehavior in school is on the rise across the country as students continue to struggle with readjusting to in-person classes. A third of school leaders reported an increase in fights among students, and 56 percent said there had been an uptick in classroom disruptions that they attributed to Covid disruptions, according to a federal survey released in May 2022. Suspensions have long been considered an important tool for dealing with misbehavior, and most teachers support their use; a 2019 survey found that 43 percent of teachers thought out-of-school suspensions were used too little, with just 9 percent saying they were used too much.

New York state’s teachers and administrators unions, as well as its school boards association, all raised concerns about the Solutions not Suspensions legislation, which would mandate several other discipline reforms in addition to the suspension cap.

“Where you have the well-intentioned decision of legislators imposing their view upon trained professionals and thereby impairing their exercise of professional judgment that, I think, is the basis of our hesitation,” said Kevin Casey, executive director of the School Administrators Association of New York State. “This defies a one-size-fits-all solution, in my mind.”

State records show that all three groups have lobbied on the bill (in reporting their activities to the state, lobbyists are not required to specify a position). New York State United Teachers and the New York State School Boards Association provided statements to The Hechinger Report that did not address the question of suspension length but invoked the need for consideration of school safety.

Related: How the pandemic has altered school discipline — perhaps forever

Safety is also a concern for legislators. Assemblymember Patricia Fahy, who represents Albany and surrounding towns, is a co-sponsor of the Solutions not Suspensions bill, but says she doesn’t endorse all of it.

“I’m on the bill because I support the intent, but we probably have to have a little bit of flexibility built in because we can’t predict every situation,” she said. “Parents, children, teachers — everyone needs to have that fundamental feeling of safety. You can’t learn if you’re not feeling safe or nurtured.”

Proponents of the legislation question whether removing students from their classes for months makes schools any safer in the long term, while pointing to the damage that can be done to individual students.

“The idea that a student can be out for 30 or 60 days and still receive the academic instruction for them to receive a quality education, I think some people are fooling themselves,” Schenectady’s Miles said. “We are punishing them without giving them the support to learn.”

Prior to his suspension, Martinez enjoyed school. He liked getting to see friends every day. He had a passion for drawing that made art class his favorite, followed by math and history. As a history buff, he liked sharing what he already knew from videos he had watched on his own.

And then, just like that, he was cut off. A tutor began coming to his home for a few hours a week, but Martinez says he learned very little. At the end of the school year, he was informed that he was on track to fail the semester because he hadn’t handed in work that he was unaware was owed.

“It really hurt,” he said. “How do you expect me to do well in school? It just tortures a person’s mind.”

Martinez scrambled to finish the missing assignments and ended up barely avoiding failing.

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

The educational options available to suspended students often pale in comparison to what they would get in the classroom. The state requires that alternative instruction must be “substantially equivalent” to what the student would get in a regular classroom. Yet suspended elementary school students typically get one hour per day of academics and suspended middle and high school students get two, compared to five and five and a half hours, respectively, for students in school. Depending on the district, suspended students can be taught through remote instruction or in person at an alternative school, a tutoring center or their home.

“All I knew was people were giving up on me, and they didn’t want me in class.”

Isaiah Santiago, who was often suspended from his Rochester, NY, middle school

Despite the legal requirements, some students get no instruction, advocates and lawyers said. And even if a district meets the number of mandatory hours, many students still fall behind, as Martinez did. “The only way you could get the same level of instruction would be an alternative school that was as vast and resourced as your original school,” said Eamonn Scanlon, education policy director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Children’s Agenda. “That’s not what happens.”

One study found that New York City students suspended for more than 20 days (prior to the district putting its cap in place) faced significant long-term consequences. These students were less likely than those who had received shorter suspensions to earn credit in math and English classes in succeeding years and were the least likely to graduate.

The same study, however, didn’t find any positive effects on attendance rates or test scores for the suspended students’ peers. Nor was there any evidence that school climate was improved by long-term suspensions, as measured by teacher and student surveys.

And the consequences of long-term suspensions can extend beyond the academic and beyond the student. When younger kids are kept home for weeks on end, parents might have to face the choice of losing their job or leaving their child alone for hours each day.

Isaiah Santiago was suspended so often from his Rochester middle school, typically for not following directions, that he got kicked out of his regular classes for an entire marking period. Santiago says he is not sure how the punishment was recorded in his file, but described a program that functioned largely as a long-term suspension. He and other students spent a couple of hours every morning in the in-school suspension room, occasionally muddling through work on their own, but often not doing anything at all.

“All I knew was people were giving up on me, and they didn’t want me in class,” he said.

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Santiago and the other students would be let out around 11 a.m. with a bus pass to get home. Sometimes they’d take the bus. But sometimes they’d hang out in a park at the back of the school or play basketball. And sometimes some students would do drugs. “It was just a lot of getting into the wrong things,” Santiago said, adding that a couple of those peers are now gang members or drug dealers. Another was killed last year by gun violence.

His mother worked during the day, but after a few weeks, Santiago’s godmother stepped in and began picking him up at school. He began helping her with some construction work at a church in the afternoons. “That’s part of the reason why I think I’m on this end, where my friends who also went through it are on the other end,” he said. Now 18, he’s a freshman at St. John Fisher University and running for Rochester school board.

Unlike Santiago, Martinez was mostly alone during his suspension. He had no way of talking to his friends during school hours. His main social contacts during the week became the people around the globe he would talk to while gaming and the therapist he began seeing, set up with the help of a nonprofit.

He doesn’t recall much communication from the school after being told he wouldn’t be allowed back for the remainder of the year. Halfway through Martinez’s suspension, in March 2020, Brentwood, like all school districts in the nation, went virtual because of the pandemic. He still wasn’t allowed to rejoin his classes, even though they were online.

“I felt so isolated,” Martinez said. “It really broke me.”

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

The New York State Education Department task force recommendations on discipline call for school districts to work with families during a long-term suspension to “establish conditions to repair the harm and ensure the safe return of the student to the school community.”

This is rarely done, advocates and lawyers across the state say. School districts fail to use the time to work with suspended students on the behavior that led to suspension or help them grapple with the anxiety that might come about facing their peers and teachers after being kicked out. And, they say, 20 days should be long enough to address any underlying issues.

“A 20-day suspension is a month,” said state senator Robert Jackson, the current sponsor of the Solutions not Suspensions legislation. And, he added, keeping students out of school for longer doesn’t necessarily mean the original problems will be addressed.

“New York state has an obligation for every child. It does not say in our state constitution, ‘every child except for those who may have been seen as disruptive to others.’ ”

Jamaica Miles, Schenectady City school board member

Jackson would like to see the bill move forward this year, after eight years of stagnation, but acknowledged that the legislature is facing a busy session, including sorting out a $2.7 billion funding increase for schools. He hopes some of that money will go to beefing up support teams in schools that could help prevent behavior problems in the first place.

Martinez has spoken out in favor of the Solutions not Suspensions legislation, including at a 2022 Capitol rally, hoping to prevent other students from dealing with long-term suspensions. When he was finally able to rejoin his peers in the fall of 2020, as a junior, he immediately realized how far behind he’d fallen. He spent the semester teaching himself the things that he’d missed. By his senior year, Martinez was back on track in his classes and looking toward college.

But he worried that his sophomore grades would hurt his chances of being accepted somewhere. And then there was the question on his applications: “Have you ever been suspended?”

The thought of having to share details of his experience with college administrators was enough to make Martinez shut down. Employees of Make the Road New York, a nonprofit that had been helping him, had to step in and craft an answer. He was eventually accepted to Farmingdale State College, but not before a lot of anxiety about being turned away for being a “troublemaker.”

“A suspension doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker,” Martinez said. “You could have learned your lesson.”

But, he clarified, the punishment didn’t teach him anything: “By suspending someone, they don’t learn. I had to learn my own way.”

This story about long-term suspensions 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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