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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post OPINION: Standardized tests can be great predictors of college success and should not be seen as a cause of inequity appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In recent years, division over how social studies should be taught has plagued school districts around the country.

The irony, according to Lawrence Paska, executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, is that in many places, the subject is “not being taught, period.”

Social studies is sometimes seen as an afterthought, left out of daily instruction, he said. But instead of strengthening social studies or helping more students engage with the subject, the focus in recent years has been on undermining or attacking it, he said.

The increasing politicization of social studies was a concern shared by many educators, education leaders, researchers and advocates at last week’s annual NCSS conference in Nashville. Sessions examined ways educators can navigate state laws that limit conversations on race and other difficult topics, as well as how they can develop the high quality materials and instruction those attending said was vital to preparing students for civic life.

About 3,500 people attended the conference, among them K-12 and higher ed educators who teach the subjects that constitute social studies — including history, civics, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law and religious studies.

Last month, NCSS updated its definition of social studies as the “study of individuals, communities, systems, and their interactions across time and place that prepares students for local, national, and global civic life.” The revised definition is meant to emphasize an inquiry-based approach, in which students start by asking questions, then learn to analyze credible sources, said Wesley Hedgepeth, NCSS president.

The group also chose to set out guidance for elementary and secondary school social studies instruction, to emphasize that education in the topic must begin in the early grades, Hedgepeth said.

The inquiry-based approach is defined within the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, a set of decade-old, Common Core-like guidance for social studies. The approach has received pushback from conservative politicians who want to see more “patriotic” social studies curriculums, experts at the conference said.

Critics say revisions, or attempted revisions, to social studies standards by policy makers in states such as Virginia and South Dakota remove inquiry-based learning. The new standards instead emphasize “rote memorization of facts that are deemed to help children become more patriotic,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. Educators and researchers say these efforts are part of a pattern — deliberate or not — of flooding state standards and curriculums with so much content that it becomes impossible for teachers to spend the time needed to go in-depth on topics and for students to engage in critical thinking or questioning.

While it isn’t new for state legislatures and boards to step in to dictate what’s taught, what’s different now is that laws prohibit teaching certain histories rather than requiring them to be taught, according to Grossman.

While many educators at the conference seemed to want to avoid politics and focus on their instruction, they recognized that simply choosing to be a social studies teacher can be seen as taking a political side. Conservative politicians today increasingly see social studies teachers as targets, attendees said. Educators from Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Kentucky, among other states, said fights over social studies standards or anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been bruising. Some talked about receiving death threats and being doxxed, while others said they were increasingly fearful of losing their jobs.

In a workshop on how educators can get involved in advocacy efforts surrounding state revisions of history and social studies standards, Virginia teachers shared how they organized to fight a controversial social studies standards revision under the administration of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Sam Futrell, a middle school social studies teacher and president of the Virginia Council for the Social Studies, said educators organized their state professional organizations and local unions to push back against a draft revision that she said included several errors and omissions such as referring to Native Americans as “America’s first immigrants.”

Sessions at the conference also focused on how to strengthen and improve social studies materials and instruction. Educators from several states, including Maryland, Iowa and Kentucky, spoke about the need for curriculum and resources that don’t simply cater to big states like Florida, California and Texas. Social studies curriculum publishers from Imagine Learning, Core Knowledge and Pearson also talked about their efforts to update materials to make them relevant to kids from diverse backgrounds and to work more closely with educators in different states to meet their needs.

Some school leaders said they need high-quality resources that can help teachers who aren’t specialists in a particular subject or area of history to fill gaps in their knowledge. Others said the absence of a national approach to social studies instruction is an obstacle to ensuring that all students have a common framework for understanding the country and its history and participating in civic life.

Bruce Lesh, supervisor of elementary social studies for Carroll County Public schools in Maryland, said that while math, science and English have national frameworks for instruction, nothing equivalent exists in social studies. The C3 Framework discusses how to teach social studies, but it’s not like the Next-Gen science standards or Common Core English and math standards that lay the groundwork for what to teach and help all students gather a common set of knowledge and skills.

In those other disciplines, said Lesh, “There was an effort to take the inequity out of what was taught to students.”

This story about social studies was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post Teaching social studies in a polarized world appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind Dearborn Park International School.

One by one, they raced to a table where a tutor watched them scribble down the answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills they lost during the pandemic. There are 25 students in the program hosted at the elementary school, and all of them are one to three grades behind.

James, 11, couldn’t do two-digit subtraction last week. Thanks to the program and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up.

“I don’t really like math but I kind of do,” James said. “It’s challenging but I like it.”

Across the country, schools are scrambling to get students caught up in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of kids’ missing skills. On average students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.

Children lost ground on reading tests, too, but the math declines were particularly striking. Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in their problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.

The result: Students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance that existed before the pandemic. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare as they enter high school and college-level math courses that rely on strong foundational knowledge.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the ‘Nation’s Report Card,’ showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to levels not seen in about 20 years. 

Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years.

“Another way to put it is that it’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” said Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Related: How can we improve math education in America? Help us count the ways

At Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jennifer Matthews has seen the pandemic fallout in her eighth grade classes.

Some days this past academic year, for example, only half of her students in a given class did their homework.

Matthews, who is entering her 34th year of teaching, said in the last few years, students seem indifferent to understanding her pre-Algebra and Algebra I lessons.

“They don’t allow themselves to process the material. They don’t allow themselves to think, ‘This might take a day to understand or learn,’” she said. “They’re much more instantaneous.”

And recently students have been coming to her classes with gaps in their understanding of math concepts. Working with basic fractions, for instance, continues to stump many of them, she said.

Because math builds on itself more than other subjects each year, students have struggled to catch up, said Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. For example, if students had a hard time mastering fractions in third grade, they will likely find it hard to learn percentages in fourth grade.

Math teachers will play a crucial role in helping students catch up, but finding those teachers in this tight labor market is a challenge for many districts.

“We’re struggling to find highly qualified people to put in the classrooms,” Dykema said.

Like other districts across the country, Jefferson County Schools in Birmingham, Alabama, saw students’ math skills take a nosedive from 2019 to 2021, when students not only dealt with the pandemic and its fallout, but also a new, tougher math test. Math scores plunged 20 percentage points or more across 11 schools that serve middle school students.

The district’s International Baccalaureate school had higher scores — about 30 percent of students were proficient — but that was a far cry from having 90 percent of students proficient in 2019.

It raised the inevitable question: What now?

Using federal pandemic relief money, some schools have added tutors, offered extended learning programs, made staffing changes or piloted new curriculum approaches in the name of academic recovery. But that money has a looming expiration date: The September 2024 deadline for allocating funds will arrive before many children have caught up.

Progress is possible in upper grades, said Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on teaching math. But she said it’s easy for students to feel frustrated and lean into the idea that they’re not a “math person.”

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle,” she said. “And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Jefferson County educators took that approach and, leveraging pandemic funds, placed math coaches in all of their middle schools starting in the 2021-2022 school year.

The math coaches work with teachers to help them learn new and better ways to teach students, while math specialists oversee those coaches. About 1 in 5 public schools in the United States have a math coach, according to federal data.

Jefferson County math specialist Jessica Silas — who oversees middle school math coaches — said she and her colleagues weren’t sure what to expect. But efforts appear to be paying off: State testing shows math scores have started to inch back up for most of the district’s middle schools.

Silas is confident they’re headed in the right direction in boosting middle school math achievement, which was a challenge even before the pandemic. “It exacerbated a problem that already existed,” she said.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization.”

Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council for the Teachers of Mathematics

Ebonie Lamb, a special education teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, said it’s “emotionally exhausting” to see the inequities between student groups and try to close those academic gaps. Her district, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, serves a student population that is 53 percent African American and 33 percent white.

But she believes those gaps can be closed through culturally relevant and differentiated teaching. Lamb said she typically asks students to do a “walk a mile in my shoes” project in which they design shoes and describe their lives. It’s a way she can learn more about them as individuals.

“We have to continue that throughout the school year — not just the first week or the second week,” she said.

Ultimately, Lamb said those personal connections help on the academic front. Last year, she and a co-teacher taught math in a small group format that allowed students to master skills at their own pace. By February, Lamb said she observed an increase in math self-esteem among her students who have individualized education plans. They were participating and asking questions more often.

“All students in the class cannot follow the same, scripted curriculum and be on the same problem all the time,” she said.

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

Adding to the complexity of the math catch-up challenge is debate over how the subject should be taught. Over the years, experts say, the pendulum has swung between procedural learning, such as teaching kids to memorize how to solve problems step-by-step, and conceptual understanding, in which students grasp underlying math relationships, sometimes making these discoveries on their own.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization. You had to memorize exactly what to do, and there wasn’t as much focus on understanding the material,” said Dykema, of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “And I believe that when people start to understand what’s going on, in whatever you’re learning but especially in math, you develop a new appreciation for it.”

Powell, the University of Texas professor, said teaching math should not be an either-or situation. A shift too far in the conceptual direction, she said, risks alienating students who haven’t mastered the foundational skills.

“We actually do have to teach, and it is less sexy and it’s not as interesting,” she said.

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle. And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin 

Diane Manahan, a mother from Summit, New Jersey, said she watched the pandemic chip away at her daughter’s math confidence and abilities. Her daughter, a rising sophomore, has dyscalculia, a math learning disability characterized by difficulties understanding number concepts and logic.

For years, Manahan paid tutors to work with her daughter, a privilege she acknowledges many families could not afford. But, Manahan said, the problems in math instruction are not limited to students with learning disabilities. She often hears parents complain that their children lack basic math skills, or are unable to calculate time or money exchanges.

Manahan wants to see school districts overhaul their curriculum and approach to emphasize those foundational skills.

“If you do not have math fluency, it will affect you all the way through school,” she said.

Related: Proof points: How a debate over the science of math could ignite the math wars

Halfway across the country in Spring, Texas, parent Aggie Gambino has often found herself searching YouTube for math videos. Giada, one of her twin 10-year-old daughters, has dyslexia and also struggles with math, especially the word problems. Gambino says she has strong math skills, but helping her daughter has proved challenging, given instructional approaches that differ from the way she was taught.

She wishes her daughter’s school would send home information to walk parents through how students are being taught to solve problems.

“The more parents understand how they’re being taught, the better participant they can be in their child’s learning,” she said.

It doesn’t take high-level calculations to realize that schools could run out of time and pandemic aid before math skills recover. With schools typically operating on nine-month calendars, some districts are adding learning hours elsewhere.

Lance Barasch recently looked out at two dozen incoming freshmen and knew he had some explaining to do. The students were part of a summer camp designed to help acclimate them to high school.

The math teacher works at the Townview School of Science and Engineering, a Dallas magnet school. It’s a nationally recognized school with selective entrance criteria, but even here, the lingering impact of Covid on students’ math skills is apparent.

“There’s just been more gaps,” Barasch said.

When he tried to lead students through an exercise in factoring polynomials — something he’s used to being able to do with freshmen — he found that his current group of teenagers had misconceptions about basic math terminology.

He had to stop to teach a vocabulary lesson, leading the class through the meaning of words like “term” and “coefficient.”

“Then you can go back to what you’re really trying to teach,” he said.

Barasch wasn’t surprised that the teens were missing some skills after their chaotic middle school years. His expectations have shifted since the pandemic: He knows he has to do more direct teaching so that he can rebuild a solid math foundation for his students.

Filling those gaps won’t happen overnight. For teachers, moving on from the pandemic will require a lot of rewinding and repeating. But the hope is that by taking a step back, students can begin to move forward.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

The post How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — When J.D. Davis, the department chair of English at Twin Falls High School, was told last year that half of the committee he was leading to pick new texts and materials for the district’s English Language Arts classrooms would be parents and community members, he objected. 

“I said, ‘I’m not going to have parents involved! They don’t know what we’re doing. They don’t know what we need in a textbook as far as curriculum.’ I kind of scoffed at it,” said Davis, who also teaches journalism, oversees the school newspaper and advises the Gay-Straight Alliance.

A new Idaho law gave him no choice.

Across the U.S., educators typically lead textbook selections, although many districts, like Twin Falls, have long included parents in the process. Idaho’s “District Curricular Adoption Committees” law makes parent involvement mandatory — and then some — demanding districts form committees of at least 50 percent non-educators, including parents of current students, to review and recommend new texts and materials.

A year in, the law is reshaping what is or isn’t in the curriculum in many counties in this Western state, including how subjects like climate change or social movements are discussed in some courses. 

It has spurred tough but positive parent-school discussions in Twin Falls where parents and educators say the conversations have forced them to consider one another’s concerns and perspectives. In other districts, however, it’s poised to harden divisions and keep students from getting learning tools they need.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right policies

Around the country, curricula — books and materials that guide but don’t define lessons — have become a political target of conservatives who fear conflict with values they want to instill in their children. Over the past two years, 147 “parental rights” bills were introduced in state legislatures, according to a legal tracker by the education think tank FutureEd.

Only a handful passed. Many restrict discussions around race and gender. Several enforce parents’ ability to review texts and materials. A 2022 Georgia “Parents’ Bill of Rights” requires that schools provide parents access to classroom and assigned materials within three days of a request. The Idaho curriculum law, embraced by the state’s conservative legislature, went into effect in July 2022.

The curriculum law is noteworthy because it gives non-educators more power not just to inspect curriculum, but to help choose it.

Some educators view it as a political move to undercut their professional role. “The parent partnership is important,” said Peggy Hoy, an instructional coach in the Twin Falls district and the National Education Association director for Idaho. “The problem is when you make a rule like they did and there is this requirement, it feels as an educator that the underlying reason is to drive a wedge between the classroom and parents.”

Sally Toone, a recently retired state representative and veteran teacher who opposed the law, sees it as a legislative move by conservatives “to have parents be a driver, instead of a partner, in the educational process.” 

Educators also voiced practical considerations. It can be tough for districts to find parents to devote time to curriculum review. Many have had to scramble, Hoy and others said. Only three non-educators agreed to serve on a math curriculum committee in Twin Falls, which meant that only three educators could participate — fewer than half the optimal number, said the educator who led the committee. Ditto for a science curriculum committee in Coeur D’Alene.

“My family and I are very religious. My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’ ”

Chris Reid, a father of seven who served on the committee to select a new English Language Arts curriculum for the Twin Falls School District

Having many non-educators involved also changes how materials are judged. Educators want to know, for example, if lessons are clear and organized, and whether they connect to prior learning and support students of differing levels. By contrast, “parents don’t understand the pedagogy of what happens in a curriculum,” said Hoy. They “look at the stories, the word problems, the way they are explaining it.”

Rep. Judy Boyle, a Republican state legislator who sponsored the law, initially agreed to an interview but did not respond to several requests to arrange it.

Related: Population booms overwhelm schools in the West: ‘Someone’s going to get left behind’

During the review process in Twin Falls, a district with 9,300 students in southern Idaho, parents objected to a theme around peaceful protests, the tone of questions around climate change and lessons that included social emotional learning. 

The curriculum with social emotional learning “got nixed pretty quickly,” said Davis, the English teacher leading the committee. Social emotional learning (SEL) — tools and strategies that research shows can help students better grasp academic content — has become a new lightning rod for the far-right across and is often conflated with Critical Race Theory or CRT.

Chris Reid, a banker and vice mayor of Twin Falls and father with seven children in the public schools, said he was eager to help select the new English Language Arts curriculum and make sure materials were “age-appropriate” and not include “revisionist history,” LGBTQ themes or sexuality introduced “to younger-age children.”

“My family and I are very religious,” said Reid, sitting one afternoon in his mezzanine office at First Federal Bank. “My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’”

Despite some tense conversations, Davis, the teacher, said the process was overall “not threatening.” He also liked the curriculum choice, the myPerspectives textbooks by Savvas Learning Company. He does, however, see risks with the new mandate, including that a parent or community member with an agenda “could hamstring the district from getting the best textbook,” he said. “It could literally be one member of the committee.”

Committee member Anna Rill, a teacher at Canyon Ridge High School, said the difficult conversations about content “made us think a little more about the community you are living in and that you are serving.” Twin Falls, named for the waterfalls formed by the Snake River Canyon dam, which in the early 1900s turned the area from desert into a rich agricultural region now called “The Magic Valley,” is politically conservative (70 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020). L.T. Erickson, director of secondary programs for the school district, said he thought the curriculum “should meet the values and ideals of your community.”*

Increasing public involvement makes good sense because schools must be responsive to parent views, said Erickson. “Parents give us their children for several hours a day and a lot of trust and we want to make sure to earn and keep that trust.” 

Reid, the father of seven, liked being able to share his. “I got to hear other perspectives; they got to understand my side on the content,” he said. The experience led him to conclude that, “teachers are not evil. They are not trying to indoctrinate my child.”

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

The new law may help to build bridges in Twin Falls and some other communities. But in West Bonner County, which serves about 1,000 students in rural north Idaho, a year-old dispute over an English Language Arts curriculum continues to fuel division. 

The blow-up began last summer. In June, before the new law went into effect, the curriculum review committee, which included a few parents, chose the Wonders English Language Arts curriculum from McGraw-Hill. The school board approved it quickly and unanimously. The materials were purchased and delivered. “They were stacked in the hallways,” one parent said.

Then, some local conservative activists loudly objected, saying the materials contained social emotional learning components. In developing the curriculum, McGraw-Hill had partnered with Sesame Workshop to include SEL skills that language on the Wonders site said included “a focus on self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior.” At a meeting on Aug. 24, 2022, the school board voted 3-1 to rescind the curriculum. 

Because the existing curriculum is out of print, the district lacked a reading program last year. 

“We had no spelling lists, no word work. The first unit was on the desert and we live in north Idaho,” said Whitney Urmann, who taught fourth grade last year at West Bonner County School District’s Priest Lake Elementary School. “Very early on, I stopped using the curriculum,” Urmann said. 

She had two workbooks for her entire class and few books leveled to her students’ abilities. Other materials were incomplete or irrelevant, she said. From mid-October on, she said, she purchased materials herself, spending $2,000 of her $47,000 salary to be able to teach reading. 

The board’s decision, said Margaret Hall, the board member who cast the dissenting vote, “has created some ill feelings.” Indeed: Two board members who voted to rescind the curriculum now face a recall after parents gathered enough signatures on petitions to force a vote. 

Shouting at one school board meeting in June went on for nearly four hours. 

The dispute, and the subsequent absence of teaching materials, has upset some local parents. 

Hailey Scott, a mother of three, said she worries that her child entering first grade, an advanced reader, won’t “be challenged.” Meanwhile, her third grader is behind in reading, said Scott, “and I fear she will be set back even more by not having a state-approved curriculum in her classroom.”

Whitney Hutchins, who grew up in the district and works at the Priest Lake resort her family has owned and operated for generations, recently decided with her husband to move across the state line to Spokane, Washington.

“This is not the environment I want to raise my child in,” said Hutchins, mother of an 18-month-old. She said the curriculum law is part of a larger problem of extremists gaining control and destroying civic institutions.

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers,” she said. “It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Hutchins doesn’t see things improving. The school board, on a 3-2 vote, chose Branden Durst — who was previously a senior analyst at the far-right Idaho Freedom Foundation and has no educational experience — as the district’s new superintendent over Susie Luckey, the interim superintendent and a veteran educator in the district. 

Durst said that he wanted the job because of the district’s challenges, including around curriculum. “I have a lot of ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education. I needed to prove to myself that those things are right,” he said. Those ideas could include using a curriculum developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College, he said. 

Durst is currently assembling a new committee with plans to quickly adopt a new English Language Arts curriculum, but declined to share details. 

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers. It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Whitney Hutchins, mother who recently decided to leave Twin Falls for Spokane, Washington

Jessica Rogers, who served on the committee that picked the Wonders curriculum, said she saw hints of trouble long before the vote to reject the curriculum. She said the curriculum adoption committee anticipated political attacks, including over images that showed racial diversity. “One of the things we did was go through the curriculum and see where the first blond-haired, blue-eyed boy was,” she recalled, adding that they noted pages to use as a defense. 

It was, she said, “bizarre.”

Rogers and her husband recently built a home atop a hill with a broad view of Chase Lake. As her three daughters had a water fight on the patio, she hoped aloud that building in the West Bonner County School District was not a mistake.

*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct first initials for L.T. Erickson.

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Many educators probably weren’t surprised by today’s announcement of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results for civics and history. The scores tell an all-too-familiar story.

In past years, the scores for civics have been flat, which is hardly encouraging. Add learning loss stemming from the pandemic, and scores this year actually went down: Only 22 percent of eighth graders demonstrated proficiency in the topic, compared with 24 percent the last time the subject was tested in 2018.

Other findings from the national exam, known as the Nation’s ‘Report Card,’ show that dedicated resources for teaching civics results in better student performance, but that those resources are sorely lacking: 

• Only 49 percent of students who took the NAEP test said they have a class that is mainly focused on civics or U.S. government, and only 29 percent said they had a teacher whose primary responsibility is teaching civics.
• Eighth graders who learned about civics in a designated class outperformed those where it was embedded in another class (157 to 153 average scale score), while those with no civics instruction scored just 143.

As a country, we have not invested enough in teaching the very fundamental knowledge, skills and dispositions young people need to be informed and engaged participants in our bold experiment in self-government. Yet for the first time since the NAEP began testing students on civics some 35 years ago, the country has a clear path forward to improving civics and history education.

The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy — released in spring 2021 by our group, iCivics, in partnership with Arizona State, Harvard and Tufts universities — provides states and school districts guidance for creating learning plans for civics and history that meet their own communities’ needs. Developed with input from more than 300 experts from across the viewpoint spectrum, the roadmap promotes a student-centric model of teaching that prioritizes inquiry and project-based learning. It encourages students to answer even the most challenging questions about our country’s past and present by engaging with primary sources to learn a more complete history of the United States and its constitutional democracy from multiple perspectives.

The roadmap is now being put into practice in school districts across the country. And what we’re seeing in these classrooms is far more heartening than the NAEP results:

• In Santa Fe, New Mexico, district officials say students in classrooms participating in an iCivics pilot of a curriculum aligned with the roadmap are showing much deeper knowledge of the subject. This depth of learning is demonstrated through projects in which students develop a thesis and support their arguments with evidence, using self-created documentaries, curated exhibits of resources, art and op-eds to communicate their findings.

• In Oklahoma City Public Schools, teachers say they are able to tackle topics such as Manifest Destiny by presenting information to students and having students drive discussion in a way that lets them see a complicated philosophy from different perspectives.

Far from telling students what to think, this kind of inquiry-based learning encourages students to develop independent thinking skills, engage more deeply in their learning together with their peers, and arrive at their own conclusions.

As the nation nears its 250th birthday, the release of the NAEP scores should serve as a clarion call to commit to providing each and every student in our country with the kind of high-quality civic education necessary for informed, effective and lifelong civic engagement.

This will not be easy, but recent developments hint at the possibility for real change.

At the end of 2022, Congress grew the federal allocation for civic education from $7.75 million to $23 million. The Biden administration’s current proposed budget would triple that investment, increasing the federal spend on civic education from less than 5 cents per student annually in fiscal year 2022 to almost $1.50 in only a few short years. The advancement of STEM fields in recent decades has shown us the kind of progress that can happen as a result of sustained investment.

Only 22 percent of eighth graders demonstrated proficiency in the topic, compared with 24 percent the last time the subject was tested in 2018.

Likewise, state legislatures are starting to turn the tide. In the last biennium, 16 states adopted 17 bipartisan policies advancing civic education. The 2023 spring legislative session shows continued promise, with more than 65 bills to advance civic education filed in 24 states.

Parents and voters across the political spectrum support more money for civic education. We should heed their calls and ensure funding is in place to implement high-quality civic instruction. We must make civic education a centerpiece of K–12 education in the United States, giving our next generations the tools to be successful as they inherit this country’s constitutional democracy.

Louise Dubé is the executive director of iCivics, the country’s leading civic education nonprofit, which was founded by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Emma Humphries is iCivics’ chief education officer.

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

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PENNINGTON, N.J. — There was one minute left on Suzanne Horsley’s stopwatch and the atmosphere remained thick with carbon dioxide, despite the energetic efforts of her class of third graders to clear the air.

Horsley, a wellness teacher at Toll Gate Grammar School, in Pennington, New Jersey, had tasked the kids with tossing balls of yarn representing carbon dioxide molecules to their peers stationed at plastic disks representing forests. The first round of the game was set in the 1700s, and the kids had cleared the field in under four minutes. But this third round took place in the present day, after the advent of cars, factories and electricity, and massive deforestation. With fewer forests to catch the balls, and longer distances to throw, the kids couldn’t keep up.

“That was hard,” said Horsley after the round ended. “In this time period versus the 1700s, way more challenging right?

“Yeah,” the students chimed in.

“In 2022, we got a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Horsley. “What’s the problem with it, what is it causing?”

“Global warming,” volunteered one girl.

Two years ago, New Jersey became the first state in the country to adopt learning standards obligating teachers to instruct kids about climate change across grade levels and subjects. The standards, which went into effect this fall, introduce students as young as kindergarteners to the subject, not just in science class but in the arts, world languages, social studies and physical education. Supporters say the instruction is necessary to prepare younger generations for a world — and labor market — increasingly reshaped by climate change.

“There’s no way we can expect our children to have the solutions and the innovations to these challenges if we’re not giving them the tools and resources needed here and now,” said Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and a founding member of former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Action Fund, who pushed to get the standards into schools. Just as students must be able to add and subtract before learning calculus, she said, kids need to understand the basics of climate change — the vocabulary, the logic behind it — before they can tackle the climate crisis.

Related: Teaching global warming in a charged political climate

Historically, climate change has not been comprehensively taught in U.S. schools, largely because of the partisanship surrounding climate change and many teachers’ limited grasp of the science behind it. That started to change in 2013, with the release of new national science standards, which instructed science teachers to introduce students to climate change and its human causes starting in middle school. Still, only 20 states have adopted the standards. A 2020 report from the National Center for Science Education and Texas Freedom Network Education Fund found that many states that didn’t follow the new guidance weren’t explicit in their standards about the human causes of climate change, and a few even promoted falsehoods about its causes and degree of seriousness. Meanwhile, discussion of climate change outside of science class remains relatively rare, educators and experts say.

New Jersey is trying to change that, but it’s not a simple task. Like teachers around the country, educators here are exhausted after years of Covid disruptions, and, as elsewhere, some schools face dire teacher shortages. On top of this, many educators don’t feel prepared to teach climate change: A 2021 survey of 164 New Jersey teachers found that many lacked confidence in their knowledge of the subject, and some held misconceptions about it, confusing the problem with other environmental issues such as plastic pollution.

For now, the climate instruction requirements haven’t faced much pushback from climate deniers and conservatives, who’ve trained their attacks instead on the state’s new sex-education standards. But state officials anticipate some criticism as the lessons begin to roll out in classrooms.

A more pressing concern — and one that plagues any education initiative because of local control of schools — is that the lessons are rolling out unevenly across the state. Schools in affluent towns like Pennington tend to have more time and resources to introduce new instruction; schools in poorer communities, like Camden, that are often the most vulnerable to climate disasters, may lack the resources to do so.

“I am happy to see New Jersey as a pioneer of climate change standards,” said Maria Santiago-Valentin, co-founder of the Atlantic Climate Justice Alliance, a group that works to mitigate the disproportionate harm of climate change on marginalized communities. But, she said, the standards will need to be revised if they fail to adequately emphasize the unequal impact of climate change on Black and Hispanic communities or ensure that students in those communities receive the instruction.

Related: Are we ready? How we are teaching — and not teaching — kids about climate change

New Jersey is making some effort to help teachers adopt the standards, setting aside $5 million for lesson plans and professional development, and enlisting teachers like Horsley, who holds a master’s degree in outdoor education and has a passion for the environment, to develop model lessons.

Supporters are trying to ensure that teachers have plenty of examples for teaching the standards in age-appropriate ways, with racial and environmental justice as one of the key features of the instruction.

“It’s not like we’re asking kindergarteners to look at the Keeling Curve,” said Lauren Madden, a professor of education at the College of New Jersey who prepared a report on the standards, referring to a graph showing daily carbon dioxide concentrations. “We’re trying to point out areas where we can build some of those foundational blocks so that by the time students are in upper elementary or middle school, they really have that solid foundation.”

On a recent weekday, Cari Gallagher, a third grade teacher at Lawrenceville Elementary School in central New Jersey, was reading to her students the book “No Sand in the House!” which tells the story of a grandfather whose Jersey Shore home is devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Later, the students sat down to write about what they’d heard, drawing connections between the book and their own lives, world events or other books they’d read.

After the writing exercise, Gallagher directed the students to split into small groups to build structures that would help provide protection against climate change calamities. The kids used Legos, blocks, Play-Doh and straws to create carports, walls and other barriers.

That same morning, a kindergarten class at the elementary school listened as their teacher, Jeffrey Berry, held up a globe and discussed how different parts of the world have different climates.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students — and it’s only going to get worse

At Hopewell Valley Central High School, in Pennington, art teacher Carolyn McGrath piloted a lesson on climate change this summer with a handful of students. The results of the class — four paintings featuring climate activists — sat on the windowsill of her classroom. 

“It felt empowering to see people like me, who reflect me and my identities,” said Mackenzie Harsell, an 11th grader who’d created a portrait of 24-year-old climate activist Daphne Frias, who, like Mackenzie, is young, and is disabled. “This project told me I could do anything.”

Research suggests education does have an impact on how people understand climate change and their willingness to take action to stop it. One study found that college students who took a class that discussed reducing their carbon footprint tended to adopt environment-friendly practices and stick with them over many years. Another found that educating middle schoolers about climate change resulted in their parents expressing greater concern about the problem.

“Education is certainly a way that we could have perhaps slowed down where we are right now in terms of the climate crisis,” said Margaret Wang, chief operating officer with SubjectToClimate, a nonprofit that is helping teachers develop and share climate lessons. More jobs related to climate change are already opening up, said Wang, and kids will need skills not just to discover scientific innovations but to tell stories, advocate, inspire and make public policy.

Back at Toll Gate elementary, Horsley, the wellness teacher, was getting ready to hand off the third graders to their classroom teacher. Before filing back into the school, a handsome brick building that suffered flooding last year during Hurricane Ida, students reflected on the lesson.

Ayla, a third grader dressed in jeans and tie-dye sneakers, said it made her want to “do something” about climate change because “I don’t want it to get so hot.”

Wes, another third grader, said adults could have done more to protect the environment. “I think they’ve done a medium job because they’re still producing a lot of carbon dioxide and a lot of people are littering still.”

“I feel bad for the other animals because they don’t know about it, so they don’t know what to do,” added his classmate, Hunter.

“We know about it,” said Abby, who was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words “Girl Power.” She said it was up to humans to drive less and recycle and protect other species from climate disaster.

“When I first found out we were going to learn about climate change in gym, I was like, that’s surprising, because normally we learn that in class,” Abby added. “But I’m glad we did it in gym,” she continued. “It was really fun.”

This story about climate change 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.

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As schools across the South grapple with vacancies, many turn to those without teaching certificates or formal training to serve students. 

Alabama administrators increasingly hire educators with emergency certifications, often in low-income and majority Black neighborhoods. Texas, meanwhile, allowed about 1 in 5 new teachers to sidestep certification last school year.

In Oklahoma, lawmakers expanded an “adjunct” program that enables schools to hire applicants without teacher training if they meet a local board’s qualifications. And then there’s Florida, where military veterans without a bachelor’s degree can teach for up to five years using temporary certificates.

These states provide a window into the patchwork approach across the South that allows those without traditional training to lead a classroom. Officials must determine if it’s better to hire these adults, even if they aren’t fully prepared, or let children end up in crowded classes or with substitutes.

“I’ve seen what happens when you don’t have teachers in the classroom. I’ve seen the struggle,” Dallas trustee Maxie Johnson said just before the school board approved expanding that district’s reliance on uncertified teachers. He added, “I’d rather have someone that my principal has vetted, that my principal believes in, that can get the job done.”

A Southern Regional Education Board analysis of 2019-20 data in 11 states found roughly 4 percent of teachers — which could be up to 56,000 educators –  were uncertified or teaching with an emergency certification. In addition, 10 percent were teaching out of field, which means, for example, they may be certified to teach high school English but assigned to a middle school math class. 

By 2030, as many as 16 million K-12 students in the region may be taught by an unprepared or inexperienced teacher, the Southern Regional Education Board projects.

“Lowering standards and lowering the preparedness, the training and the supports for teachers has been happening for at least a decade, if not longer,” said the nonprofit’s Megan Boren. “The shortages are getting worse and morale is continuing to fall for teachers.”

Districts need immediate fixes to plug holes.

The trustees in Dallas, for example, leaned into a state program that allows districts to bypass certification requirements, often to hire industry professionals for career-related classes. But Texas’ second-largest district had to fill elementary classrooms and core subjects in middle and high schools. DISD hired 335 teachers through the exemption as of mid-September. 

Texas’ reliance on uncertified new hires ballooned over the last decade. In the 2011-12 school year, fewer than 7 percent of the state’s new teachers – roughly 1,600 – didn’t have a certification. By last year, about 8,400 of the state’s nearly 43,000 new hires were uncertified.

In Alabama, nearly 2,000 of the state’s 47,500 teachers — 4 percent — didn’t hold a full certificate in 2020-21, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s double the state’s reliance on such educators from five years earlier. 

And almost 7 percent of Alabama teachers were in classrooms outside of their certification fields, with the highest percentages in rural areas with high rates of poverty.

Related: To fight teacher shortages, some states are looking to community colleges

Many states have loosened requirements since the pandemic hit, but relying on uncertified teachers isn’t new.

Nearly all states have emergency or provisional licenses that allow a person who has not met requirements for certification to teach. Such licenses can often be used for multiple years, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The rush to get more bodies into classrooms only delays the inevitable as such teachers don’t tend to stay as long as others, said Shannon Holston, the nonprofit’s policy chief. Meanwhile, student learning suffers because the quality of education takes a hit, she added.

“It has some unintended consequences down the road that in the immediacy of us trying to perhaps fix a staffing challenge for the 22-23 school year has greater or more taxable consequences down the line potentially,” she said.

In a 2016 study, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 1.7 percent of all teachers did not have a full certification. It went up to roughly 3 percent in schools that served many students of color or children learning English as well as schools in urban and high-poverty areas.

The use of such educators can be concentrated in certain fields and content areas. One example: Alabama’s middle schools.

Rural Bullock County, for example, had no certified math teachers last year in its middle school. Nearly 80 percent of students are Black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and 7 in 10 of all students are in poverty.

Christopher Blair, the county’s former schools superintendent, long struggled to recruit teachers. Poorer counties can’t compete with higher salaries in neighboring districts, and statewide recruiting initiatives often aren’t enough to increase the teacher pools when fewer and fewer educators are graduating from traditional programs. 

Blair, who resigned from his post last spring, had launched a program in Bullock County to help certify its math and science teachers.

“But that’s slowly changing as the teacher pool for all content areas diminishes,” he said. 

In Montgomery, seven of the 10 middle schools had rates higher than 10 percent, and three of those exceeded 20 percent. Birmingham had three middle schools where more than 20% of teachers had emergency certification. 

Birmingham spokeswoman Sherrel Stewart said district officials seek good candidates for emergency certifications and then give them the support needed through robust mentoring. 

“We have to think outside of the box,” she said. “Because realistically, you know, that pool of candidates in education schools has drastically reduced but the demand for high quality educators is still there.”

Prior to 2019, an emergency certificate in Alabama could only be used for one year. But after a teacher shortage task force recommended changes, lawmakers changed to a two-year certification and gave educators the option to extend an additional two years. 

The prohibition against using such certificates in elementary school was lifted, too.

Texas allowed about 1 in 5 new teachers to sidestep certification last school year.

Since then, the number of teachers holding emergency certificates increased dramatically in rural, urban, and low-income schools across the state. 

The highest percentage of teachers on such status in Alabama during the 2020-21 school year was in rural Lowndes County in an elementary school where seven of 16 teachers — 42% of the teaching force — had an emergency certificate, up from three the previous year. 

Most of the school’s 200 students, about 70%, are from low-income families. Only 1% of students tested reached proficiency in math that year.

The National Council on Teacher Quality recommends states not offer emergency certifications, but if they do, they should only be good for one year and nonrenewable. 

Related: Teacher shortages are real, but not for the reasons you’ve heard

Dallas principals look for “highly-qualified” individuals committed to teaching who have strong academic backgrounds, said Robert Abel, the district’s human capital management chief. “For us, it’s about the passion, not about the paper.”

Dallas’ uncertified hires — who must have a college degree — participate in ongoing district-specific training on classroom management and effective teaching practices. 

Abel said the district is getting positive reports so far as many who came in through this pathway have achieved academic distinctions with their students. 

Texas lawmakers have embraced policies that give public schools flexibility in hiring uncertified teachers.

In 2015, the state loosened teacher certification requirements under a program called Districts of Innovation.

More than 800 public school districts — out of over 1,000 — have the flexibility to allow non-certified people to teach in specific areas. 

Charters, a growing sector of public schools that operate independently from traditional districts, also have leeway in certification requirements. 

Some teacher groups worry about inconsistent expectations for teacher candidates. 

“You’re dealing with children’s lives, and you have very extreme and important responsibilities related to children,” said Andrea Chevalier, a former lobbyist with the Association of Texas Professional Educators. “Having the certification demonstrates the professionalism that is required for that.”

Texas officials didn’t provide information on where these teachers are concentrated and what subject areas they’re teaching. It’s unknown how the influx of uncertified teachers impacts students. 

A great teacher needs sensitivity and empathy to understand how a child is motivated and what could interfere with learning, said Lee Vartanian, a dean at Athens State University. 

By 2030, 16 million K-12 students in the region may be taught by an unprepared or inexperienced teacher, the Southern Regional Education Board predicts.

They must know how to keep a child’s attention, engage them, and ensure the information sticks, he said. 

A certification helps set professional standards to ensure teachers have those qualities as well as content expertise, said Vartanian, who oversees the Alabama university’s College of Education.

Uncertified teachers may have some of that knowledge, he said, but not the full range. 

“They’re just less prepared systematically,” he said, “and so chances are they’re not going to have the background and understanding where kids are developmentally and emotionally.”

The Alabama Education Lab’s Rebecca Griesbach contributed to this report.

The Alabama Education Lab team at AL.com is supported through a partnership with Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.

This story on uncertified teachers was produced by the Dallas Morning News and AL.com as part of Tackling Teacher Shortages, an ongoing series revealing critical areas of school staffing with an eye toward the gaps that most affect kids and families. The series is part of an eight-newsroom collaboration between AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Fresno Bee in California, The Hechinger Report, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

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Families with young children — who are still not permitted to receive any of the Covid-19 vaccines — remain pretty squarely in the pandemic gloom. This situation has driven policymakers to focus their pandemic recovery policies on families’ needs — most notably with the Biden administration’s American Families Plan. In particular, that plan includes a proposal to make high-quality pre-K universally accessible. This makes sense for frazzled families in our post-pandemic moment. Early learning programs can improve children’s academic, social and (eventual) career trajectories while also supporting parents and caregivers’ ability to put food on the table.

But it’s one thing to pass a bill providing resources to establish universal pre-K across the country. It’s quite another to rapidly construct high-quality nationwide universal pre-K atop the country’s piecemeal, patchwork early education system. So, as Congress works to deliver on the American Families Plan’s promises, the plan should build around Head Start, the country’s largest and longest-running early education program, with the highest quality standards.

As we argued in a report published this summer, expanding Head Start would help address some of the challenges between our present and a universal, high-quality early education future.

First, current U.S. early learning programs are uneven in quality. Regulations and standards vary widely between programs and across state lines. As a result, in some settings, class sizes are too large to give young learners the dedicated attention they need to thrive. Some states require teachers to have a bachelor’s degree and/or specialized training, while others don’t. Screening, data and quality improvement systems differ greatly by program and location. 

The American Families Plan should build around Head Start, the country’s largest and longest-running early education program, with the highest quality standards.

To expand access while maintaining quality, any new universal pre-K system will have to connect and align existing state and local preschool systems. The easiest way to do this is to apply Head Start’s standards — or equivalent — across the entirety of the system (while providing supplemental funding to help programs upgrade to meet those standards). Head Start’s performance standards provide a comprehensive quality and equity framework for early education settings, covering curricula, instructional approaches, program enrollment, safety and much more. They have served as the gold standard for defining — and supporting — quality in early education settings in the nearly half a century since they were published. Now, they should serve as the foundational infrastructure for building a high-quality, universal early education system for the country.

Indeed, it’s encouraging to see Congress so far insisting that new pre-K seats funded by the American Families Plan be governed by standards that are aligned with many of Head Start’s. This would raise early education quality to a higher level across the country while also supporting increased access to pre-K.

Related: Creating better post-pandemic education for English learners

Second, logistically speaking, it is no simple matter to find safe facilities and hire early educators to provide millions of new high-quality pre-K seats. It makes sense to start by building out from Head Start providers who have space and staff that would allow them to grow within their current programs. Policymakers should prioritize funding additional Head Start seats, especially in places with low public pre-K supply, including rural communities.

Third, expanding Head Start could enable greater socioeconomic integration in early learning programs. In our current system, the funding streams that support pre-K, Head Start and child care programs all have different eligibility criteria, which often result in socioeconomically and, in some cases, racially segregated classrooms. Harmonizing these standards would make it easier for local leaders to enroll diverse classrooms of children.

This hints at the best consequence of centering Head Start in the push for universal pre-K: A much broader group of children would benefit from the program’s equity-focused standards. More children with disabilities would be fully included and supported in preschool programs alongside their peers without disabilities. More young dual-language learners would have access to bilingual learning. All children would gain protections against expulsion, a protection that is especially important for Black children who are consistently and unfairly the victims of harsh discipline.

None of this means that Head Start is already perfect. These expansion efforts should also include a focus on improvement. Targeted efforts to raise staff wages and expand staff access to coaching and higher levels of education and training are important to ensure that programs can fully meet Head Start’s quality standards. The federal government should also hold programs accountable for advancing equity and ensuring individualized support for all children.

There is one other way that Head Start is particularly suited to be the foundation for current efforts to build toward universal pre-K: Its comprehensive model is designed for supporting children and families in tandem. This is more important now than ever. These last 18 grueling months have steamrolled U.S. families. With most schools, early education programs and child care programs closed, working parents and caregivers have juggled health risks, economic precarity and anxieties about the pandemic’s impacts on their children’s development. Sadly, predictably, historically marginalized families faced — and face —great challenges, such as unemployment, underemployment, food insecurity, housing instability, higher risks of serious infection and much more.

Fortunately, every year, Head Start gives about a million young American children early learning opportunities while also helping their families meet a wide range of educational, health, housing, nutrition and professional needs. Head Start programs offer holistic community supports that can dramatically change children’s (and their families’) lives.

Universal early childhood education programs will almost certainly be good for kids and ease some of the pandemic stresses on families. But we can do better than good. This moment demands it. For preschool, that means building up from what we already have and know works: a comprehensive, family-centered early education model like Head Start’s.

The views expressed in this piece are the authors’ alone.

Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a partner at the Children’s Equity Project.

Dr. Shantel Meek is a professor of practice and the founding director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University.

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

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MANCHESTER, N.H. — At first glance, the binders incorporating a whole year of learning at the Parker-Varney elementary school in Manchester look a little like Candy Land, the beloved game of chance where players navigate a colorful route past delicious landmarks to arrive at a  Candy Castle.

The pathway for kindergarten math displayed on the cover of one binder, for example, begins on a lower left square featuring a giant “20” and the statement, “I can count to 20.” It ends on the upper right with a drawing of a child sporting a humongous smile: “I can fluently add and subtract to 5!” In between are 14 squares representing other essential learning standards.

Last year, like many schools, Parker-Varney navigated months of remote learning, in which standardized tests were disrupted and absences soared. Unlike many, however, Parker-Varney had no need to guess what its students had missed. Teachers used those colorful pathways in a competency-based system to track what each student had learned — and hadn’t learned — in real time.

By the last day of school in June, roughly 70 percent of students had mastered 75 percent or more of the math and literacy standards for their grade level, according to the school principal, Kelly Espinola. This fall, students will take up the pathways again, picking up wherever they left off.

As educators reflect on the disruptions of the past two academic years, they’re increasingly gravitating toward the kind of personalized, “move on when you’re ready” learning being practiced at Parker-Varney.

Once considered a boutique form of education overly reliant on technology, competency-based education is increasingly seen as a way to solve a host of problems with traditional schooling, problems that became more apparent when learning went virtual. Traditional school metrics —  based on attendance (“seat time”) and meeting a minimal standard in order to move to the next grade —  often lead to arbitrary grading practices, uninspiring lessons and a lack of flexibility to support students socially and emotionally, critics say.  They argue that challenging students to demonstrate competency on critical concepts only after they are prepared is a better and more motivating way to measure learning, and allows educators to address gaps before they grow over time.

It’s a view that’s catching on.

“Pre-pandemic, we saw a lot more interest in one-off pilot programs. The pandemic really changed the policy conversation to more systemic shifts.”

Lillian Pace, vice president of policy and advocacy, KnowledgeWorks
 
 

The pandemic unleashed “tremendous interest” in revisiting assessments, said Jean-Claude Brizard, president and chief executive officer of Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization that promotes innovation in education. In particular, the suspension of mandated state testing in K-12 schools in 2020 “accelerated the conversation” about alternative assessments that would help educators personalize learning and focus on students’ long-term success rather than year-to-year progress, as measured by current end-of-year tests.

“There is real appetite for something more whole-child, more comprehensive, more longitudinal, that really informs [teacher] practice,” he said, adding, “Competency-based assessment does a much better job, frankly, of really informing practice.”

And Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the 13,000-member American Association of School Administrators, said he had seen “absolutely a significant increase in interest in competency-based personalized learning that has been driven by the pandemic.”

Related: Vermont’s ‘all over the map’ effort to switch schools to proficiency-based learning

Advocates of competency-based education say they believe public opinion is also shifting their way. They point to a recent national poll showing that 74 percent of voters think the lack of personalized learning in schools is “a problem.”

It’s hard to be sure how voters understand that term, and there’s been little evidence to show that personalized learning improves student learning, in part because of how varied the methods are.

Competency-based education usually goes hand in hand with personalized instruction to ensure that students meet their learning objectives.

At KnowledgeWorks, a nonprofit organization that works with district leaders, policymakers and others interested in moving to personalized and competency-based education, inquiries from state and district leaders have increased, according to Lillian Pace, vice president of policy and advocacy.

“Pre-pandemic, we saw a lot more interest in one-off pilot programs,” said Pace. “The pandemic really changed the policy conversation to more systemic shifts.”

State leaders from Utah to Michigan to North Carolina are getting more involved in figuring out how to support the expansion of personalized, competency-based learning, she said, although it’s too early to decipher how much of the stimulus money flowing to school districts will go toward these efforts.

Factors driving the uptick in interest include a desire for greater transparency about “where students are” in their understanding of important concepts and for finding ways to engage students in accelerating their learning, said Pace. 

“CBE could be the hardest undertaking that any district or school could attempt to do.”

Shawn Rubin, interim executive director of the Highlander Institute

Such was the case in Manchester, with Parker-Varney’s pioneering use of competency methods being the exception.

Home to the state’s largest school district, with nearly 60 percent of students considered economically disadvantaged, Manchester has consistently performed well below average on state achievement tests. And within a month after COVID sent students home, district leaders realized they couldn’t get a handle on the scope of learning loss that students might be experiencing in its 22 schools.

“It became evident right in April, when we were looking to see ‘What are the competencies, what are the standards that the students missed?’  And we were unable to identify them,” said Amy Allen, assistant superintendent for teaching, learning and leading. They could identify what the teachers had assigned but not what students had learned, she said.

Related: A school where you can’t fail — it just takes you longer to learn

To help, district leaders turned to Daniel Joseph, a veteran educator and national consultant who has led the design of Parker-Varney’s competency system, and asked him to adapt it for the rest of the district’s K-12 schools. So far, they’ve committed $400,000 in federal stimulus funds to the multiyear effort.

Beginning in 2018, Parker-Varney teachers met weekly with Joseph to construct the new system. Together, they decided which math and literacy standards to prioritize. For each standard, they created “kid-friendly” performance scales with a series of four learning goals or steps for making progress toward proficiency. 

Scales in hand, students confer weekly with their teachers to demonstrate their emerging knowledge in a process called “leveling up.”  Teachers record their progress on the scales — ranging from 1 to 4 — in a database that provides a color-coded snapshot of where each student is along the pathways.

Reaching Level 3, or proficiency, on a standard is cause for celebration. Students choose from a menu of rewards, including a call home from the principal, an “I Kissed My Brain at Parker-Varney” sticker or — popular among fourth graders — a pajama party.

If a student is not yet at Level 3 — “yet” is an important word in this school — there is time during the rest of the week to work alone, in groups or with the teacher on “just-right” activities designed to get them there, activities drawn from the district curriculum and other resources. 

Sometimes there are tears, admits Joseph.  “It’s okay to experience failure,” he said. “We say, ‘Oh, you were soooo close,’ then ask, ‘What’s your goal? What’s your strategy?’ We need to teach resilience.”

“The vehicle that drives this is student engagement, not ‘Learn or I’ll hurt you,’ ” he added.  

Elissa DeLacey, who has taught at the school for six years, said: “The kids volunteer to assess. They say, ‘I’m ready to level up; I want to level up!’ ”

Rather than compete, students cheer one another on, staffers say.

Related: What’s school without grade levels?

Competency-based education requires such dramatic shifts in the way schools typically operate, however, that even advocates see huge challenges to widespread adoption. Carving out time during the day for teachers to collaborate on new practices, working with parents to understand them and sustaining the momentum over the years it takes to implement them rank among the top challenges.

“CBE could be the hardest undertaking that any district or school could attempt to do,” said Shawn Rubin, interim executive director of the Highlander Institute, which has specialized in training educators to implement blended and personalized learning since 2011.

Rubin thinks the pandemic has increased interest, “but overall the work of CBE is still too difficult and the resources/supports still leave too much onus on overworked [administrators] and teachers,” he wrote in an email.

Joseph concedes that the work is hard, but his mantra to teachers is to work “smarter, not harder.” 

Teachers are motivated to make a change, he said, when they see students taking the initiative to set their own learning goals and see the progress being made weekly.

A morning spent in Jill Tiner’s kindergarten classroom at Parker-Varney just before the school year ended offered a glimpse into the skills required.

First, Tiner led the students, masked and sitting in socially distanced rows, in a series of whole-group activities including an introductory lesson on the “magic e”  — which, when added at the end of a word, “tells the vowel in front to say its name, and not its sound.”  

Then she divided the class into small groups for practice. Sprawled on the floor, students matched “magic e” words to pictures, identified opposites and found words that rhyme. Tiner pivoted between keeping the groups on task and helping others at her desk, one on one. With her laptop open to the literacy dashboard for her class, she quizzed one student on letter sounds,  then another on letter recognition.

For the most part, teachers have rallied around the new system, although some chose to retire rather than make the switch, according to Espinola, the principal. Behavioral incidents, unlike in some years past, have been “nil.” Parents are more engaged as well, she said.

The pathways are sent home each trimester, and teachers make a note of which standard they are currently introducing, and where the student is on the pathway.

“We don’t say, ‘Your child isn’t on grade level.’ What does that mean?” Espinola explained, saying the aim is to give parents more specifics. “We can say, ‘He’s one standard behind, but very close. He’s having a hard time telling time, but is great with skip counting.’ ”

The response? “They want to help,” said Espinola. “They ask, ‘What kind of activities can we do to support you?’ ”

This story about competency-based learning  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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Dawn Lineberry, a sixth grade math teacher at Jackson Middle School in Guilford County, North Carolina, noticed that some of her students were struggling with long division.

Principal Angela McNeill of Eastern Guilford Middle School said that students had lost ground in multiplication, division and problem solving.

And Shayla Savage, a middle school principal, said that when her students returned to in-person learning this spring, she noticed differences beyond just their math and reading progress compared to previous years.

“We go to PE now and they can barely run a lap,” she said. “Even with the physical aspect of school, the learning loss is real all across the board.”

Thousands of American students were able to return to class in person during the last weeks of spring, after a year of remote or hybrid learning. When the kids showed up, educators could see even more clearly how uneven their learning has been during the pandemic.

“It’s not something we’re going to make up in a summer or in a year. It’s a long road of recovery.”

Whitney Oakley, Guilford County Schools

Last year, researchers at NWEA, an independent nonprofit assessment company, published an analysis of data from the autumn 2020 MAP Growth tests of more than 4 million public school students. They found that students’ reading scores were mainly on track compared to the previous year, but their math scores were five to 10 percentage points lower on average.

“Frankly, students didn’t lose anything, they just never had the opportunity to learn it,” said Allison Socol, an assistant director at The Education Trust, a nonprofit education research and advocacy organization. “When given the opportunity, then they will succeed. And so we always talk about it as ‘unfinished learning.’ ”

Now, as schools launch summer programs and plan for the fall, they’re left with a tremendous responsibility (and a windfall of federal money) to try to fill in the gaps for students who have spent a year trying to learn through a computer screen.

Related: The simple intervention that could lift kids out of ‘Covid slide’

Researchers and educators are considering various methods to fill these gaps, including small-group instruction, extended school hours and summer programs. But, while the results of research on what might work to catch kids up is not always clear-cut, many education experts point to tutoring as a tried-and-true method.

One-to-one and small group tutoring are “by far the most effective things we have that are practical to use in schools that scale,” said Robert Slavin, an education researcher and director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education, in an interview before his death this spring. “We compared tutoring to summer school, after school, extended day, technology and other things. And it’s [a] night and day difference.”

Guilford County Schools turned to tutors early in the pandemic to confront unfinished learning. The district, with 126 schools (including two virtual academies) and nearly 70,000 K-12 students, created an ambitious districtwide tutoring program using a combination of graduate, undergraduate and high school students to serve as math tutors. Now, over the next few months, the district hopes to expand their program to include English language arts and other subject areas and plans to continue it for at least the next several years.

“What we know is that learning loss is going to look different from student to student,” said Dr. Whitney Oakley, the chief academic officer for the district. “And that it’s not something we’re going to make up in a summer or in a year. It’s a long road of recovery.”

Devanhi, 12, recently finished sixth grade at Jackson Middle School in the Guilford County district. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her two parents and two younger siblings.

She learned remotely either full time or part time for more than a year. Although math is one of her favorite subjects, she found some parts of her coursework challenging when she was learning online. For example, she had trouble finding the area of a triangle and other math involving shapes.

Devanhi got an email this spring asking if she wanted to sign up for tutoring, and she quickly replied.

“I’d just get frustrated because I’m just like, OK, I don’t get this problem,” Devanhi said. “But then with my tutor, Natalia, she would help me with breaking it down and helping me, actually being there.”

Devanhi said that her math teacher, Ms. Lineberry, often asked how her tutoring was going.

“She saw how much I improved in math with the shapes and stuff,” said Devanhi. “She would ask a question, and I would be the first one to raise my hand.”

“Students didn’t lose anything, they just never had the opportunity to learn it.”

Allison Socol, The Education Trust

Research suggests that intensive tutoring is one of the most effective ways for kids to catch up on learning. A Harvard study from 2016  sorted through almost 200 well-designed experiments in improving education, and found that frequent one-to-one tutoring with research-proven instruction was especially effective in increasing the learning rates of low-performing students. But less frequent tutoring, such as having sessions once a week, was not. A 2020 review of  nearly 100 tutoring programs found that intensive tutoring was particularly helpful in reading during the early elementary years, and most effective in math for slightly older children. And another study found that intensive tutoring had major positive impacts on math gains among high school students.

“Research is emerging that says, if you can provide a high-quality but achievable level of support … you can start to get them accelerating learning,” said David Rosenberg, a partner at Education Resource Strategies, an education nonprofit that assists school districts. “So systems are really trying to figure out, ‘How do we do that?’ ”

“The biggest bang for your buck is tutoring. It’s a little hard to map out an exact perfect scenario, but ensure that those kids have a tutor, ideally, a certified and experienced teacher, and if not, someone who’s getting a lot of training and support, and that those tutors are meeting with those kids from day one of the school year, if not before, to help them catch up,” said Socol.

Rosenberg and others are quick to point out, however, that the other conditions that must go along with that kind of tutoring, like a good curriculum, tailored instruction and teacher support, are crucial.

Related: Takeaways from research on tutoring to address coronavirus learning loss

Guilford County Schools started recruiting their first tutors from local colleges and universities in September 2020 and got them started with the students by November. They focused on recruiting engineering, math and education majors from local schools, including historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

“A&T State University graduates more Black engineers than any other HBCU in the world,” said Oakley. “We are about 70 percent Black and brown in our district, and so it’s very powerful to have tutors serving students who look like them.”

The district decided to focus on math because “research has shown that middle school and high school math … that’s where the greatest learning loss has been,” said Dr. Faith Freeman, the director of STEM at Guilford County Schools, and the head of their tutoring initiative. “Kids were falling behind in math before the pandemic. It’s just gotten worse.”

The first group of tutors was placed in Title I middle schools, in which low-income families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment. The district prioritized students who were English language learners, students with disabilities, students with a history of chronic absenteeism and students who were struggling in coursework before the pandemic.

Data from the autumn 2020 MAP Growth tests of more than 4 million public school students showed that their reading scores were mainly on track compared to the previous year, but their math scores were five to 10 percentage points lower on average.

On average, Guilford students in the tutoring program received two hours of tutoring each week.

In January, the district expanded the tutoring program by hiring high-achieving high school students to work with the middle school students. Guilford administrators did not disclose their total budget for the program, but it is funded through federal ESSER legislation passed earlier this year to address the impact of Covid-19 in schools. When the district started their program in 2020, they were able to use Title I funding because they focused on Title I schools. Over the course of the 2020-21 school year, 15 graduate students worked up to 20 hours a week, with some earning $14.70 per hour and others nearly $20,000 per semester. The district also had 35 undergraduates, paid $14.70 an hour, and about 140 high school students, paid $10 an hour.

In February, students at Eastern Guilford Middle School took a test, created by NWEA and used by schools across the country, to see where their learning gaps were.

“They took it again in April,” said Principal McNeill. “That showed teachers exactly where students need the most help, because it was able to pinpoint down to skill and standard. So teachers were able to diagnose what was going on with that student in order to prescribe what is needed to make this student more successful and to address those learning gaps.”

After the tutoring, 12-year-old Devanhi said, “I don’t really second-guess myself a lot like I did before. And that’s something that I’ve noticed about myself, because I remember I used to second-guess myself a lot with math or with other subjects. I got more confident with my answers.”

Although there have been early positive signs from Guilford’s tutoring program, historically, not all tutoring efforts have been successful. After the No Child Left Behind law was first passed in 2001, schools got extra money to tutor struggling students, but several frauds and fiascos led to concerns about lax oversight. There were disappointments in other years, too. A 2018 report about a randomized control trial of math tutoring for fourth through eighth grade students in Minnesota found no significant effect on state test scores.

Alexis Obimma, 17, recently finished her junior year at Dudley High School in Guilford County. She took an AP statistics class and also worked about 12 to 15 hours a week at the restaurant chain Papa John’s. She plans to one day go to medical school.

Obimma said that she returned to school in person this spring, but found that she preferred learning online, so finished up the school year online.

Her mom got an email from her high school last December asking if any students were interested in becoming math tutors. When Obimma found out that her ninth grade math teacher was running the program, she applied and was accepted to work as a tutor. She had three students: two sixth graders and a seventh grader.

“I love math. I always was good at math. So it’s easy for me to show them how to do it, show them my way,” said Obimma. “And they usually understand it more easily.”

She spent about two hours a week with each student one-on-one, over the course of two different tutoring sessions, usually during evenings or weekends. One student is studying surface area and three-digit multiplication. Another is studying inequalities.

“What I found easy about it is, when you get to know them, it’s really easier to communicate with the student,” Obimma said. “You’re able to have one-on-one sessions, able to talk about what you like about math, what you don’t like about math, so you can make it interesting for them.” 

Koen VonSeggen, 17, just finished his junior year at Page High School. He was in honors precalculus and tutored math through Guilford’s tutoring program. His previous jobs included lifeguarding and working yard service during the summers.

VonSeggen said he did well in his own remote learning studies and described himself as someone who’s “never really struggled with procrastination.” Though he didn’t describe his junior year as easy, he said he got all A’s in his fourth quarter, and added that AP psychology kept him interested.

He started tutoring four students in April: two seventh grade girls and two eighth grade boys.

Like other tutors, he debriefed with his students’ teacher at the beginning and end of each week.

“It’s usually like, ‘They did good, everything is all well.’ Or, if a student has a problem, such as, like, isn’t understanding the material as well, I can like, talk to [the students’ teacher] Ms. Magee and say, ‘Hey, you know, so and so might have had a problem with this math problem. So if you see them struggling in your class, maybe they might need to go a little bit slower.’

“It doesn’t usually come to that,” he added.

Related: Research evidence increases for intensive tutoring

Both Obimma and VonSeggen tutored remotely, but some tutors have come back into the classroom along with the students. Dawn Lineberry, the sixth grade math teacher, has a tutor who does both remote and in-person tutoring four days a week.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better person. The kids see her as a teacher,” said Lineberry. “They don’t see her as, you know, as an assistant, they don’t see her as just a tutor. It’s somebody that they know they can trust and get their education from.”

Guilford educators think of the tutoring program as a long-term endeavor for a pandemic that created long-term learning impacts. Administrators hope to triple their current number of trained tutors to serve more students and plan to hire 500 more tutors within the next year with federal funding that will last through 2024.

“The biggest bang for your buck is tutoring.”

Allison Socol, The Education Trust

The district’s summer school programs, which are voluntary, are taking place at each individual school and include one tutor at each school site.

Some administrators have noticed a difference already.

Freeman said that some math teachers have told her that the performance of students who are in tutoring has increased significantly. Principal McNeill said that a teacher told her that students who had been working with tutors for several weeks scored higher on their NWEA math assessments.

“You know, we haven’t been doing this for that long, right? So I think that we’ll really see even greater growth, not just I think toward the end of the school year, but also the summer and going into this fall,” said Freeman.

One tutor, Kingsley Esezobor, 38, is a graduate student in computational data science and engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. He’s been working with “about 15” students. He says three just need to be reminded about what they already know, three are really struggling, and the rest fall somewhere in the middle — they understand a concept after about two sessions, after which they can solve those questions by themselves.

“Out of the 15 students that I have, I can say confidently that I saw improvements in about 10 students after working with them week on week,” he said.

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

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