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.

Nearly one year ago, Tennessee school districts warned thousands of parents that because of a new state law, third grade students could be held back a year if they are not reading on grade level by spring.

The law — which created “a little bit of a firestorm” according to one of its legislative co-sponsors — was seen by supporters as a necessary step to address lagging literacy rates in the state. Concerned parents and school staff flocked to community meetings and legislative sessions to speak out against it.

But of the roughly 44,000 third grade students who scored low enough to be at risk of retention, just under 900 students, or 1.2 percent of all third graders who took the test, were actually held back because of their reading scores. That’s similar to retention rates in previous years — a report from the Tennessee Education Research Alliance shows that around 1 percent of third graders were held back each school year between 2010 to 2020.

Tennessee’s law was modeled after a much-praised literacy program in neighboring Mississippi that includes tutoring, improved literacy training for teachers and a retention policy for third graders who don’t pass its state test. Mississippi held back 8 percent of third graders in 2015, the first year its retention policy was in place. That includes some students held back for other reasons.  

So, what happened in Tennessee?

By the end of spring 2023, about 40 percent of third graders achieved a “met expectations” or “exceeded expectations” score on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP. That was a higher passing rate than previous years, but 60 percent of third grade students were still set to be held back because they scored in the “below expectations” or “approaching expectations” range.

However, the law was written to offer several escape hatches for students with low scores.

About 24 percent of all third graders who took the test this spring were exempt from retention because they either had a disability, were an English language learner with less than two years of English instruction, were previously retained or “met other exemptions determined locally,” according to the state’s report.

An additional 10 percent of students were granted a waiver because their parents appealed.

Related: Tennessee law could hold back thousands of third graders in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic

Just under 5 percent of students re-took the test and earned a passing grade. About 2 percent of students scored “approaching expectations” on the test, attended summer school and showed “adequate growth” by the end of the summer.

That leaves more than 12,000 students, or just under 17 percent, who were promoted to fourth grade but are required to receive high-dosage tutoring throughout the year. For these students, the threat of retention still looms.

The law says students who are promoted but required to attend tutoring could still be held back in fourth grade if they do not pass the reading portion of the test or show “adequate growth” by the end of the year.

“For those 12,000 students, the story is not over,” said Breanna Sommers, a policy analyst with The Education Trust in Tennessee.

The definition of “adequate growth” is a complicated formula that includes student’s TCAP scores and the probability that they’ll reach proficiency by 10th grade. During a recent meeting of the Tennessee Board of Education, the department said they are projecting 5,000 to 6,000 fourth grade students will be held back this year.

In Metro Nashville Public Schools, 77 third graders — or 1.4 percent — were held back last school year when the law went into effect. In the five prior years, the district only held back between one and 10 third graders a year. Nearly 1,200 fourth grade students in the district are required to get tutoring interventions this year.

To fill the demand, the district is providing teachers with a stipend to tutor students during their planning periods. Metro Nashville Public Schools has also hired full- and part-time tutors and contracted with an online tutoring service called Varsity Tutors.

Sonya Thomas, co-founder of the parent advocacy group Nashville PROPEL and a supporter of the law, said Tennessee’s renewed focus on reading was a long time coming, though her own children are now too old to benefit from it.

“It’s one of the strongest literacy packages that this state has ever put into place,” Thomas said. “I’m excited about the momentum that it’s going to create in the state.”

Related: Third graders struggling the most to recover in reading after the pandemic

But she’s still concerned that most children did not pass the reading portion of the third grade test this spring.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going in the right direction, it’s just a matter of the quality of instruction and the quality of interventions that need to be given to children with a sense of urgency. We should not have to wait until third grade to know whether a child is going to pass or fail,” Thomas said.

Studies on the impact of retaining students are generally mixed, but the practice is more successful with younger students and when it is coupled with resources and support aimed at helping students catch up.

Education analysts are still studying the effects of Tennessee’s law — the state has not released demographic data on who makes up the 1.2 percent of third graders held back or the more than 12,000 fourth graders who could be held back this spring. Research on retention laws in other states indicates Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to be retained.

“We all share a common goal of wanting our kids to read on grade level. We definitely want to maintain high expectations and know that our students can exceed and reach those. And we still believe that retention is a high-stakes intervention that should only be used in very limited cases in which it’s paired with extensive support,” said Sommers, the Education Trust analyst. “We’re looking forward to more long-term outcome impact data to see. We’ll be really excited if the tutoring was impactful or if summer camp was impactful.”

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

The post Parents feared Tennessee’s new reading law would hold back thousands of students. That didn’t happen appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In education circles, it’s popular to rail against testing, especially timed exams. Tests are stressful and not the best way to measure knowledge, wrote Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in a Sept. 20, 2023 New York Times essay.  “You wouldn’t want a surgeon who rushes through a craniectomy, or an accountant who dashes through your taxes.” 

It’s tempting to agree. But there’s another side to the testing story, with a lot of evidence behind it. 

Cognitive scientists argue that testing improves learning. They call it “practice retrieval” or “test-enhanced learning.” In layman’s language, that means that the brain learns new information and skills by being forced to recall them periodically. Remembering consolidates information and helps the brain form long-term memories.  Of course, testing is not the only way to accomplish this, but it’s easy and efficient in a classroom. 

Several meta-analyses, which summarize the evidence from many studies, have found higher achievement when students take quizzes instead of, say, reviewing notes or rereading a book chapter. “There’s decades and decades of research showing that taking practice tests will actually improve your learning,” said David Shanks, a professor of psychology and deputy dean of the Faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London. 

Still, many students get overwhelmed during tests. Shanks and a team of four researchers wanted to find out whether quizzes exacerbate test anxiety.  The team collected 24 studies that measured students’ test anxiety and found that, on average, practice tests and quizzes not only improved academic achievement, but also ended up reducing test anxiety. Their meta-analysis was published in Educational Psychology Review in August 2023. 

Shanks says quizzes can be a “gentle” way to help students face challenges. 

“It’s not like being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool,” said Shanks. “It’s like being put very gently into the shallow end. And then the next time a little bit deeper, and then a little bit deeper. And so the possibility of becoming properly afraid just never arises.”

Why test anxiety diminishes is unclear. It could be because students are learning to tolerate testing conditions through repeated exposure, as Shanks described. Or it could be because quizzes are helping students master the material and perform better on the final exam. We tend to be less anxious about things we’re good at. Unfortunately, the underlying studies didn’t collect the data that could resolve this academic debate.

Shanks doesn’t think competency alone reduces test anxiety. “We know that many high achieving students get very anxious,” he said. “So it can’t just be that your anxiety goes down as your performance goes up.” 

To minimize test anxiety, Shanks advises that practice tests be low stakes, either ungraded or ones that students can retake multiple times. He also suggests gamified quizzes to make tests more fun and entertaining. 

Some of this advice is controversial.  Many education experts argue against timed spelling tests or multiplication quizzes, but Shanks recommends both. “We would strongly speculate that there is both a learning benefit from those tests and a beneficial impact on anxiety,” he said. 

Shanks said a lot more research is needed. Many of the 24 existing studies were small experiments and of uneven quality, and measuring test anxiety through surveys is an inexact science. The underlying studies covered a range of school subjects, from math and science to foreign languages, and took place in both classrooms and laboratory settings, studying students as young as third grade and as old as college. Nearly half the studies took place in the United States with the remainder in the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Nigeria, Iran, Brazil, the Netherlands, China, Singapore and Pakistan. 

Shanks cautioned that this meta-analysis should not be seen as a “definitive” pronouncement that tests reduce anxiety, but rather as a summary of early research in a field that is still in its “infancy.” One big issue is that the studies measured average test anxiety for students. There may be a small minority of students who are particularly sensitive to test anxiety and who may be harmed by practice tests. These differences could be the subject of future research. 

Another issue is the tradeoff between boosting achievement and reducing anxiety. The harder the practice test, the more beneficial it is for learning. But the lower the stakes for a quiz, the better it is for reducing anxiety. 

Shanks dreams of finding a Goldilocks “sweet spot” where “the stakes are not so high that the test begins to provoke anxiety, but the stakes are just high enough to get the full benefit of the testing effect. We’re miles away from having firm answers to subtle questions like that.” 

This story about test anxiety was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: Lowering test anxiety in the classroom appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The calculator has replaced the slide rule. Latin is rarely offered in high school. Sentence diagramming has disappeared from most English classes.

Academic disciplines continually evolve to reflect the latest culture and technology. Why, then, are recent attempts to tinker with the high school math canon eliciting such a backlash? Students deserve a chance to learn up-to-date topics that reflect how mathematics is being used in many fields and industries.

Case in point: the debate over including data science courses as high school math options. Data science courses teach the use of statistical concepts and computer programming to investigate contemporary problems using real-world data sets.

The courses have been gaining in popularity, particularly with high school math teachers. They say the more relevant content offers a highly engaging entry point to STEM, especially for students who have been turned off by traditional math courses.

Others say that the courses are in fact detours away from STEM.

The high school teachers remain unconvinced. “It’s just been a pleasure to have an absence of hearing, ‘How am I going to use this?’ or ‘Why do I need to learn this?’ ” Lee Spivey, a math teacher from Merced County, told members of the California State Board of Education at their July meeting, before they voted to make California the 17th state to add data science to its curriculum.

“This course transformed my teaching practices and transformed the lives of many students.Special education, English learners and calculus students worked side by side,” Joy Straub, who taught a data science course in Oceanside for six years, told the board. “Students who had a dislike for math suddenly were transformed into math lovers . . . skilled in statistical analysis, computer programming and critical thinking. I saw many students who never would have taken an AP math course take AP Statistics.”

Despite the enthusiasm from teachers, some university STEM professors in California objected. Their vehement criticism focused on the fact that data science courses were proposed in the state’s math framework as alternatives to Algebra II. Faculty from both of the state’s public university systems went on record opposing the idea that students could take data science or statistics courses to meet university eligibility requirements instead of Algebra II. (They seemingly didn’t realize that a 10-year-old policy already permitted students to take data science or statistics in lieu of Algebra II — though that route is rarely utilized, at least among applicants to the University of California.)

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

Algebra II, which covers topics such as exponential and logarithmic functions, is a typical university admission requirement. Twenty states consider Algebra II a high school graduation requirement, but about half of those allow for exceptions or alternative courses, according to a 2019 report, the most recent available.

Algebra II is traditionally considered a stepping-stone to calculus, which remains the key to the STEM kingdom. Many believe that bypassing the course risks prematurely closing off doors to STEM.

Critics, however, complain that the course is jammed with topics that are hard to justify as essential. How often do we use conic sections or synthetic division? Even content that is more important — take exponential growth and the very concept of a function — is often weighed down by tedious classroom teaching and rote learning.

At the same time, statistical reasoning and data fluency are becoming indispensable in the 21st century, regardless of profession. Digital technologies are changing everything from fitness training to personal investing. But many students are missing out on this essential learning because so many teachers feel ill-equipped to teach these topics, simply run out of time or bow to the perceived preferences of colleges.

“It’s just been a pleasure to have an absence of hearing, ‘How am I going to use this?’ or ‘Why do I need to learn this?’ ”

Lee Spivey, data science math teacher, Merced County

Interestingly, both sides of the debate cite the importance of expanding access to STEM fields. The standoff reflects differing perspectives about how math is learned, including a tension between content coverage and conceptual understanding.

Algebra II defenders emphasize that the topics are foundational for STEM fields.

However, many students who take Algebra II don’t learn much of the content. And even if students gain proficiency in Algebra II procedural skills, it doesn’t necessarily improve their performance in subsequent college math courses. In college, two-thirds of high school calculus students retake calculus or take a prerequisite course.

Proponents of data science courses say not only is data competency essential to everyone’s future (and to STEM fields themselves) but that the greater relevance the courses provide can actually keep students interested and invested in STEM — including in algebra.

Of course, good content and comprehension are both key to math learning. Ultimately, empirical research is needed to validate how well various paths prepare students for college and STEM success.

That is, states must analyze actual longitudinal data on student progress through different sequences to solve this math dilemma. Surely, both data science and algebra will have some role in the future — likely with some archaic Algebra II content dropped, as proposed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Though press coverage — including of California’s recently approved math framework — has emphasized the extremes of the debate, much work happening around the country exists in the more ambiguous middle.

Numerous efforts are underway to update Algebra II. Georgia’s modernized Algebra II course, for instance, incorporates data science concepts. The University of Texas’ Charles A. Dana Center also provides a model for such a course.

Related: TEACHER VOICE: Calculus is a roadblock for too many students; let’s teach statistics instead

Other efforts focus on ensuring that data science courses teach some algebraic concepts. CourseKata’s founders promote using data science courses to teach some basics of Algebra II. So does Bootstrap, a curriculum development project based at Brown University.

Even in California, where friction over how to fit data science into the mathematical canon has been especially public, most students who take the courses also take Algebra II. So do at least 99.8 percent of applicants to the UC system — which may rise to 100 percent, if some faculty have their way in blocking statistics and data science courses from replacing Algebra II.

Such a decision might preserve coverage of traditional math content. But it would dodge the question of how to ensure that the next generation of students has the statistical and data fluency the 21st century demands. The California teachers are right: We can’t defend teaching techniques like synthetic division when students finish high school unable to use data to understand the world around them.

Pamela Burdman is executive director of Just Equations, a California-based policy institute focused on the role of mathematics in education equity.

This story about data science courses 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: Our students need up-to-date approaches to math education for a quickly changing 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.

As schools and testing centers shut down in spring 2020, it seemed only fair for colleges and universities to suspend ACT and SAT admissions requirements. A pandemic is as good a reason as any to change the rules.

Three years later, and months after the Covid-19 national emergency was declared over, 80 percent of colleges and universities are still following “test-optional” protocols. This trend has generally been celebrated by critics of the tests, who argue that the exams are inherently unfair due to the disproportionately large share of high scores among affluent test takers. However, in practice, the test-optional system is far more exclusionary than mandatory testing requirements ever were.

As the number of students applying to college has been increasing each year since 2019, college admittance is more competitive now than ever. Students with access to college counselors and test tutors (read: wealthier students) know this, and many are still using ACT and SAT exams to stand out.

Students with access to test tutors are aware that the eye of the admissions needle has narrowed, and they are being coached to use their test scores to thread it. As an SAT/ACT tutor in New York City for a tutoring company that charges over $200 an hour, I have worked with multiple students who are encouraged to retest even after scoring in the upper 1500s on the SAT or above a 34 on the ACT. Their parents can afford to give them that extra boost.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Research on increasing diversity in college admissions

Meanwhile, with admission tests voluntary, low-income students tend to opt out. In its 2022 SAT annual report, the College Board reported that students from families earning less than $67,083 annually made up only 27 percent of test takers who reported their family income. Six years earlier, while tests were still mandatory for most college applications, students from families earning less than $60,001 made up a far-larger share: 43 percent of test takers. While the percentage of low-income test takers has radically fallen off, the opposite is true for wealthy students: In 2022, 57 percent of test takers who reported their families’ earnings were from households earning $83,766 or more. This is a jump from 46 percent of student test takers whose families earned $80,001 or more in 2016.

While teaching high school English at a Title III public school in Northern California after the SAT/ACT requirements had just been lifted in 2020, I noticed the morning prep period dedicated to SAT administration was known around campus as a great day to sleep in. There was little to no test prep offered to students, either.

Today, many of the students I tutor are brought to me via partnerships with some of New York City’s most elite and expensive private schools. They are prioritizing test prep as a method of differentiating their students in an overly competitive admissions field.

The glaringly unfair aspect of “test-optional” guidelines is that wealthy students know it’s a meaningless distinction; lower-income students with less access to college counselors, however, do not.

The biggest question here in terms of equity is whether colleges are following through on their pledges to deprioritize test scores in admissions. Are colleges being true to their word and not weighing test scores as highly as other metrics? Or are these tests more significant than schools are letting on?

It turns out that the “test-optional” stamp on most College Board applications may be extremely misleading. A 2019 pre-pandemic survey (the most recent available) reported in the National Association for College Admission Counseling State of College Admissions found that 83 percent of colleges considered admission test scores to be of “considerable” or “moderate” importance. This was only a hair shy of the 90 percent of schools that considered grades influential toward admittance, and significantly higher than the 56 percent of universities that considered writing samples important. While the post-pandemic test-optional guidelines may have diminished the relevance of scores, the question is whether or not that diminished relevancy is more policy than practice.

The bottom line is: Colleges are looking at ACT and SAT scores. Opting out of the tests in a “requirement-free” admissions process could be the difference between denial or admission to a dream school. It could alter student scholarship opportunities as well.

The 2022 acceptance rate at Fordham University was 63 percent among students who submitted scores, compared with 49 percent among those who did not. Similarly, Boston College’s 2022 incoming class recorded an acceptance rate of 25 percent among those who submitted scores and 10 percent among students who did not. This admittance discrepancy holds true for other big name schools, including Barnard, the University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, Amherst, and many more. The glaringly unfair aspect of test-optional guidelines is that wealthy students know it’s a meaningless distinction; lower-income students with less access to college counselors, however, do not.

The percentage of students taking the SAT from high-income families jumped from 46 percent in 2016 to 57 percent in 2022.

The test-optional system is in dire need of restructuring. In order to promote true equity, schools should completely eliminate SAT/ACT scores from the college application process. There’s precedent: As of 2021, none of the University of California schools accept or even consider score reports of any kind. If all universities were to follow suit, it would level the playing field by negating the expenses of tests, tutors and studying time.

Unfortunately, many schools are moving in the opposite direction. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a school focused on science and mathematics, will once again require test scores beginning in fall 2023. The university administration argues that test scores help predict students’ success at MIT and aid the school in identifying promising students who may not have had access in high school to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities.

While I disagree with this decision, it is still more equitable than labelling test scores “optional.” At least in the case of MIT, all students will be aware of the requirement and can at least attempt to study accordingly. The deceptively exclusionary message of “test-optional,” however, is often only correctly deciphered by expensive tutors and guidance counselors.

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

Disregarding test scores and requiring them are both far more transparent than the current system at many schools. With the Supreme Court affirmative action decision injecting some chaos into the college application process, it’s important for colleges to be as straightforward with applicants as possible. The misleading “test-optional” label only complicates the path to college for many low-income students.

Maggie Bigelow is a former public high school teacher and current MFA nonfiction writing candidate at Columbia University.

This story about test-optional admissions 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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America has pulled back from the brink of denying science in education. About 30,000 students in Florida were set to lose out this fall because Advanced Placement psychology classes were “effectively banned” due to a state prohibition against discussing certain gender and sexuality topics in high schools; fortunately, the state education department reversed course at the last minute in a game of Public Relations Chicken.

The College Board, which administers the AP classes, had planned to remove the course, arguing that obeying the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law would weaken it.

We have to place facts, history and science at the heart of our education systems.

The College Board was right to insist on maintaining its standards, and yet the cost to students could have been extremely high. AP Psychology is a popular course, and rigorous AP classes help prepare students for college and demonstrate their skills for college admissions.

As the leader of an organization for women’s political empowerment, I am keenly aware how this latest spat — on the heels of the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision — could serve to shrink the pool of young women who get to college and thus deal another blow to the political talent pipeline.

The study of psychology is particularly important in this regard because it is a field led by women. I majored in psychology before forging a political career. Excluding tens of thousands of Florida students from this subject and opportunity could have stifled them.

The ins-and-outs of all this warrant explanation. Last year, Florida lawmakers outlawed instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. The initial ban was on instruction through third grade; that’s the “Don’t Say Gay” law. This spring, they expanded the ban through 12th grade. (I took AP Psychology as a 16-year-old, in 10th grade, and it changed my life.)

The AP Psychology course has a unit that includes definitions of gender, sexuality, gender roles and stereotypes and discusses socialization factors. Dropping such instruction from the course would mean that AP Psychology wouldn’t be “AP,” the College Board said. It stood firm in defense of the unit.

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

Florida’s state board of education then accused the College Board of “playing games with Florida students.” But it’s the state board that was asking teachers to ignore a key part of basic psychology.

Eventually, Florida’s education commissioner backed down, writing a letter to school district superintendents saying that the state believed the AP Psychology course could be taught “in its entirety.”

It’s still unclear how that fits with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The College Board issued a statement responding to the state’s new guidance with a mixture of optimism and skepticism, noting: “We hope now that Florida teachers will be able to teach the full course, including content on gender and sexual orientation, without fear of punishment in the upcoming school year.”

My own AP Psychology class in Contra Costa County, California, paved the way for my career in which I encourage young women to run for office. I was one of the youngest students in the class, and we learned everything about human behavior.

There should be nothing partisan about teaching young people the truth.

I’m still connected with my AP Psychology teacher, Jacki Della Rosa Carron, and she remains one of my favorite humans. She shaped my entire understanding of how I wanted to live and work.

My high school, like so many public schools today, offered very few AP classes. Jackie’s class was special. She helped me understand how to channel anger and prompted me to ask questions like, “How do you impact the world at a larger scale?” Focusing on psychology and later pursuing my masters in social work helped me kickstart my career, impact my community and teach young women how to do the same through political leadership.

Jackie also covered sexuality in the course. In conservative Contra Costa, I remember conversations about being gay. For many students this was their first opportunity to really think about gender and identity. This was controversial for some, but gay people are a part of American history and life, and California is where Harvey Milk did his activism.

You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach American history without covering racism.

The most infuriating thing about these latest attacks on education is that young women, especially young women of color, along with young queer and gay people, are the ones who are seeing themselves erased and further marginalized.

The timing couldn’t be worse; the mental health crisis amongst teen girls is very real.

The AP Psychology situation has created confusion and frustration for many students, teachers and parents. Some school districts decided to drop the course altogether. Others are still looking for alternative options or waiting for more guidance.

Meantime, we should commend the College Board for standing up for the integrity of the course. We should highlight the importance of psychology and AP classes. And we should continue to advocate for academic freedom and the teaching of facts.

Related: COLUMN: Pop quiz: What state just banned an AP African American studies course?

It is remarkable that to say so in America in 2023 is to risk sounding partisan. There should be nothing partisan about teaching young people the truth.

If a firestorm like this can erupt in Florida, it can catch light across the country. The stakes are too high for it to be ignored. We should learn valuable lessons from the risks exposed.

Sara Guillermo is chief executive of IGNITE, a young women’s political empowerment organization.

This story about AP Psychology and “Don’t Say Gay” 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: You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach history without covering racism appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

JACKSON, Miss. —  Each year, more than 30,000 third graders in Mississippi gear up to take a statewide reading test, part of the state’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act.

A little more than 75 percent of students passed the test on their first try earlier this year, according to the Mississippi Department of Education. They are among the thousands of children who started fourth grade this month.

But for Issiah and Tyler, two 9-year-olds from Jackson who did not pass the reading test either the first time around or during a retest, the question of what grade they would attend was a little more complicated. 

“Tyler did not enjoy reading at first. So, when he took the test the first time, he got tired of reading and just started clicking answers so he could finish,” said his mother, Kawanda Caldwell. Tyler did better when he took the test a second time, but still needed to work on his reading speed and comprehension, his mother said.

Tynisha Sumrall’s son, Issiah, who was diagnosed with autism, also took the test two times. Sumrall said she wishes her child’s school had done more to prepare him.

“Going into this test, I knew Issiah would need help because he has autism and some things are harder for him to process — instead of him writing the answers, he uses illustrations,” she said.

That need for help is where organizations like the Mississippi Children’s Museum step in.

The state allows students to take the test up to three times before school officials decide if they can be promoted to fourth grade with a “good cause exemption,” or held back for a year of intensive reading instruction. Two of those tests are given during the school year. The second retest is offered during the summer break.

To prepare students for that last chance to take the test, the museum, in partnership with Jackson Public Schools, held a Read to Succeed summer reading camp this June — the eighth time it has held the now-annual event.

The camp was held in the large open room of the museum’s education center, where excited children, separated into groups, called out answers to their teachers. Some of their activities included read-alouds, vocabulary reviews, and identifying parts of speech, such as verbs and adverbs.

One of the teachers was Connie Williams-May, a veteran reading and language arts teacher with Jackson Public Schools.

“I transitioned from the corporate world to use my talents to cater to students who looked like my children — who were receiving their education in that school district at the time,” said Williams-May, who is Black. During the camp, she uses all of her teaching skills to keep the students focused.

“I try to keep my students engaged in ways that they will remember,” Williams-May said. “The first day, we worked on ‘multiple meaning words’, so I brought them M&Ms candy. I might sing, rap or even do a cartwheel if that’s what it would take for them to comprehend what I teach.”

Related: Mississippi made the biggest leap in national test scores this year. Is this controversial law the reason why?

Mississippi’s elementary reading policies, signed into law in 2013, have drawn national attention. They include improved literacy training for elementary teachers and reading coaches for the state’s lowest performing elementary schools.

For decades, the state trailed the national average in reading scores, but by 2022, 63 percent of the state’s fourth graders scored at or above basic in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. That beat the national average of 61 percent last year.

But one of the more controversial aspects of the state’s reading initiative is its retention policy. In Jackson, a third of students did not pass the test during its initial administration this spring, compared to about 24 percent statewide.

Monique Ealey, the director of programs and education for the Mississippi Children’s Museum, co-founder of the reading camp, and a former first grade teacher, said that as a teacher in Jackson’s Public Schools she saw the struggles children experienced when the mandatory reading test started in 2015.

Ealey and other educators created the curriculum for the camp, aligning their materials with the state’s standards. Since the program began, the camp has added an interventionist and five additional teachers/support staff to provide more one-on-one help for the students, Ealey said. The students are also provided resources like take-home literacy kits which cover comprehension, vocabulary, and phonics. All the teachers in the museum’s program are licensed and have at least five years’ experience.

“After noticing the low scores and the number of students who didn’t pass, we as educators knew we had to come together and help,” Ealey said. “One way of doing that was partnering with our local school district and bringing in some of those third graders and just seeing if having them here for a week would make a difference,” she said.

In early 2020, Mississippi’s students switched to virtual learning and state testing was paused. That summer, the museum camp changed its focus from third-grade reading and became an in-person academic camp for reading and math for K-5 Jackson students.

“Even during the pandemic when the test wasn’t mandatory, we still held the camp, just in a different way,” Ealey said.

This year, students were referred to the summer camp by the principals of three nearby Jackson elementary schools — Boyd, Spann and McLeod.

The children chosen to participate were in need of just a little boost, said Delacy Bridges, the principal of McLeod Elementary, which both Tyler and Issiah attend.

“We wish that we could help and send all students; however, we don’t have that ability at the moment,” said Bridges.

Bridges said the reading coaches at her school have assisted teachers with hands-on tools and resources to improve their teaching abilities.

“The coaches that I had the privilege of working with have been very personable and have come into the school and have gone all in with our scholars and staff — they’re in the fight with us,” Bridges said. “They’ll come into the classrooms and teach or co-teach, perform pull-outs with teachers for specific training, and/or teach whole groups for the greater good.”

But, even with extra assistance through the school and through programs like the museum camp, some students will still be retained. Bridges said retaining students should not be looked at as failure but as an opportunity for them to excel and succeed.

“Retention gives us educators an opportunity to see what are the true deficits to fill those gaps,” she said. “Obviously sending them to the next grade level while they’re underperforming can harm the child and hinder their growth, and we don’t want that,” she said.

Related: How Mississippi made some of the biggest leaps in national test scores

Recent research suggests that Mississippi students who were held back end up outperforming their peers in language arts in later grades.

Researchers Kirsten Slungaard Mumma and Marcus Winters examined the progress of third graders in 2014-15 who came close to passing the test but fell short and were retained, and compared this to students that year who barely passed the test and were permitted to move on to fourth grade.

By sixth grade, the retained students scored higher on reading tests than their classmates who had just managed to pass the test. Being retained had no effect on absentee rates and retained students were no more likely than their non-retained peers to be referred for special education.

The retained students, however, showed no improvement in math. Even though the retention policy is intended to boost student literacy, Winters said that studies in other states have shown retained students improve in both areas, so the fact that Mississippi students did not is worth further research.

“Often kids that are struggling in reading are kids who are really struggling in math,” Winters said. “We’d expect to see some positive effects in math.”

The results of the study suggest that retention can be a tool for boosting reading achievement, but it has to be considered in the context of other state efforts, Winters said. Even the prospect of retention may have effects that researchers are still working to measure, he said — for example, by prompting educators to work harder so that fewer children will get to the point where holding them back is a possibility.

“It’s important for people to keep in mind that this is one piece of a broader set of efforts,” Winters said.

Related: This Mississippi district says these four strategies are helping their struggling readers

Such efforts include initiatives like the reading camp, which both Tyler and Issiah found fun and educational, according to their mothers.

Each day after camp, Tyler showed his mom all the new skills he learned — especially on homework that included vocabulary and other language learning, she said.

“The camp helped grow his confidence and made learning fun for him. He learned how to break down words and their meanings and when he asked questions, he got immediate answers and encouragement,” Caldwell said.

The camp also helped Tyler with his testing anxiety, his mother said. He was less anxious and more confident ahead of the final exam.

“My son felt like he could ask questions without the embarrassment that can come from asking questions during school,” Caldwell said. “He gained his confidence back.”

Issiah’s mother said the teachers were considerate and adjusted the lessons to accommodate his autism.

“Issiah would get upset at little mistakes, but they were able to calm him down and help him to understand what he was doing wrong and they worked with him through that,” Sumrall said.

After the reading camp, both boys took the comprehensive exam one last time before the 2023-24 school year. Tyler passed the exam and started fourth grade August 7.

“We’re super excited for the new school year; he has developed new study skills, thanks to the reading camp. We’re praying for an awesome school year!” Caldwell said.

Issiah, on the other hand, fell just short of passing the test on his third try. His mother is still happy he attended the camp.

“I know he tried his best because it was only by a few points that he missed it,” Sumrall said. “We plan on making sure he has all the help he needs to succeed for this following school year.”

This story about Mississippi reading tests 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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The phrase “Mississippi Miracle” trips off the tongue. Who doesn’t like alliteration? More pointedly, who doesn’t like rising test scores?

In recent months, the phrase has been associated with Mississippi’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the Nation’s Report Card.

In 2022, Mississippi’s fourth graders eligible for free lunch (a marker used to estimate poverty) performed significantly higher on the NAEP reading test than similarly low-income children in 43 other states and the District of Columbia.

A mere nine years earlier, Mississippi’s fourth grade students living in poverty had NAEP reading scores near the bottom of the state scores list.

Although there have been skirmishes about whether or not these test score gains in Mississippi are real, and what they mean, we believe that they indicate genuine, although modest, progress in the literacy skills of young Mississippi schoolchildren.

The gains are due to the steps Mississippi took to support the teaching of literacy skills in early elementary classrooms and not, as some have suggested, due to the manipulation of the student population taking the test or to aligning Mississippi’s learning standards specifically to the NAEP standards.

NAEP is the only assessment used in all states and territories — a small subset of schools from each state participate — and the test’s design allows for state-by-state comparisons in a way no other assessment can.

Mississippi’s NAEP performance gains accompanied new policies that began at roughly the same time: The Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), passed by the Mississippi legislature in 2013, is primarily known as a policy to hold back third graders who have not demonstrated basic reading proficiency on a state assessment.

Related:  Tennessee law could hold back thousands of third graders in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic

But the law is more complex than that one policy, as it focuses on capacity-building as well as mandates for K-3 reading instruction.

A big component of the LBPA and the substantial private investment that preceded it was a new vision for reading instruction. Some commentators call it “The Science of Reading” and highlight a narrow emphasis on phonics instruction. But, as is true for any complex phenomena, teaching reading and learning to read require knowledgeable practitioners able to adapt instruction to students’ needs.

Literacy is about making meaning of the world, and that meaning emerges through the study of content as much as from using knowledge of letter patterns to sound out unfamiliar words.

In Mississippi, there has been a push, backed by private funding through the Barksdale Reading Institute, to build greater understanding of the importance of code-based instruction and word recognition, including phonics and phonemic awareness (the ability to hear individual sounds within spoken words), alongside other components of reading that the Barksdale Reading Institute calls “The Reading Universe” — language comprehension (including background knowledge and vocabulary), reading comprehension and writing.

The LBPA provided numerous resources to support all of these aspects of better reading instruction.

The act included state funding for assistant teachers in grades K-3, access to literacy coaches and additional training. Reading Universe, for example, provided online classroom videos, interviews with teachers and detailed guides to support the teaching of specific literacy skills, such as identifying phonemes and drawing on background knowledge to make meaning of a text.

It would be a tragedy if policymakers in other states were to take away a surface lesson like “retention works” without a deeper understanding of the supports needed to bring about change.

Additionally, for many years leading up to and following passage of the LPBA, the literacy faculty at teacher preparation institutions discussed how to prepare teachers to teach reading in the early grades.

These supports, we suspect, have been influential in better preparing Mississippi elementary school teachers and changing instruction in K-3 classrooms. But they have also been hit or miss, with some schools and educators deeply understanding multiple facets of literacy instruction and others more exclusively relying on curriculum packages emphasizing the decoding of words.

Recognizing this hit or miss aspect is important. In Mississippi, there are geographic and demographic disparities in school funding, teacher availability and access to advanced coursework.

Schools in the Mississippi Delta underperform most schools. We can celebrate the literacy gains across the state, but we must also seek solutions to address disparities and uneven policy implementation.

We are not persuaded that the third grade retention policy has been a magic bullet; retention effects vary across contexts. Even in Mississippi, the evidence that retention boosts achievement is ambiguous.

A recent working paper by economists Kirsten Slungaard Mumma and Marcus Winters compared students who scored just below the threshold for third grade retention on the Mississippi ELA test in 2014-15 with those who scored just a bit above that threshold, tracing the students’ performance for several years.

They found that retained students outscored similar students who were not retained on the state ELA test. But this difference did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance, even with a sample of over 4,000 students.

Mumma and Winters acknowledge, however, that it is not possible to discern which features of the retention policy account for the upswing in subsequent ELA scores.

Students retained under the policy receive close monitoring and intensive reading interventions. This enhanced instruction, supported by intensive teacher coaching, may be what really matters.

Related: NAACP targets a new civil rights issue—reading

All we know for sure is that scores on a single, high-profile ELA test have gone up, and it’s worth taking time to understand why.

It would be a tragedy if policymakers in other states were to take away a surface lesson like “retention works” without a deeper understanding of the supports needed to bring about change, and the challenges still facing students in Mississippi — and similar states.

In education, miracles are often mirages; demographic inequalities in resources and achievement are stubborn; and quick-fix policies are no substitute for steady hard work.

Devon Brenner is the director of Social Science Research Center and a professor in the department of Teacher Education and Leadership at Mississippi State University.

Aaron M. Pallas is the Arthur I. Gates Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

This story about Mississippi reading scores 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: Lessons from Mississippi: Is there really a miracle here we can all learn from? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

At the end of her first day as a full-time teacher, Caitlin Mercado logged out of Zoom and turned off her computer in her parents’ basement.

Then she cried.

Mercado had wanted to be a teacher ever since she’d spent time in high school working with preschool kids.

But the remote lessons she was teaching to second graders at a Silver Spring, Maryland, elementary school didn’t resemble the in-person classes where she learned her craft in college as a student teacher. Preparing for each day required creating an elaborate set of slides that would encompass more than six straight hours of lessons she’d never taught before, with contingencies for any moment a child struggled with technology or school supplies.

“I’d stay up late, wake back up, keep going,” Mercado said, telling herself, “‘I’m just going to push through and do what I have to do for these kids.’”

Still, her second graders would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day, tired of staring at the screen or, she guessed, from having stayed up at night playing games or watching videos on their new, school-provided Chromebooks.

On social media, Mercado glimpsed videos of other teachers who were quitting their jobs, including educators with far more experience than she had. A deluge of similar clips ended up in her feed.

She found herself, at moments, wondering whether she had made the right career choice. “This is really not what I thought it would be,” she remembers thinking.

Related: Tackling teacher shortages

The number of people studying for careers in education has been declining for years. At the same time, schools have struggled to hold on to new teachers: Studies indicate that about 44 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

Then the pandemic came along, hammering teachers and the profession as a whole. Surveys from the National Education Association and the nonprofit research organization RAND Corporation found teachers, both new and experienced, contemplating quitting in greater numbers than in the past. Research from Chalkbeat found that, in eight states, more teachers than usual made good on those feelings and left their jobs during the pandemic. Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show a higher rate of people working in education quitting as of February this year than in the same month in 2020. And results from a study released late last year found that teachers were 40 percent more likely to report anxiety during the pandemic than health and other workers.

“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. So for teachers who entered the teaching profession at any point during the pandemic, “this has been a helluva ride.”

To learn more about the difficulties facing new teachers in the aftermath of the pandemic, and what’s needed to retain them, The Hechinger Report contacted a half-dozen schools of education to access lists of or data about graduates to see how many remain in the field. Most declined to share the information or said they didn’t keep those records, but Hechinger identified a list of 2020 graduates from the University of Maryland College of Education and attempted to track them all down. Of the 120 teachers who earned bachelor’s degrees in education that year, The Hechinger Report was able to verify that at least 77, or roughly two-thirds, are teaching now.

Hechinger spent the past year following four of those graduates: Mercado, 25; Miriam Marks, 26; Sydonne Ignacio, 26; and Tia Ouyang, 25. The reporting revealed how unprepared they felt at times, showed their feelings of anxiety and depression, and explored their thoughts about quitting as well as the moments of joy they experienced — and whether they see themselves teaching for the long term.

Of the 120 teachers who earned bachelor’s degrees in education that year, The Hechinger Report was able to verify that at least 77 are teaching now.

Yet even with teachers, new and veteran, so rattled by pandemic teaching and concurrent culture wars, districts may not be adapting. The effort put into supporting and retaining newly hired teachers rarely matches the lengths districts go with hiring in the first place, experts say. The constant churn in the teaching workforce can be destructive for students — leading to bigger class sizes, fewer class offerings and less-qualified, less-experienced candidates filling vacancies.

Yet teachers are considered the most important factor in students’ success at school.

“That new teacher is in front of our students. That person has the most power to change the trajectory,” said Sharif el-Mekki, the CEO of the nonprofit Center for Black Educator Development. These teachers require a lot of support: additional training, a sense of belonging and the right mentoring.

Many don’t get even some of that.

“If we’re too busy to do that,” el-Mekki said, “we’re too busy with the wrong things.”

Some Sunday afternoons, fifth grade math and science teacher Miriam Marks scours Amazon looking for goodies — squishy animals, sticky toys, slime — to put in her classroom prize box at Weller Road Elementary in Silver Spring. All week long, kids who participate and complete their assignments might snag a popsicle stick from Marks. She tallies them up at the end of the week, and those who have shown the right amount of effort can rake through the box of trinkets.

This is all part of a new routine for Marks.

Because Covid hijacked her final months of college, she missed key experiences before starting a full-time job. After a few months of working closely with another teacher during her senior year, Marks was supposed to take over the class for the final weeks of the semester.

“We never got to that end point,” she said. “I went from teaching the occasional lesson or two a day to Covid to, ‘Here: You’re hired.’”

After the end of the term, and a virtual graduation ceremony, she moved into her own apartment, too afraid of harming her asthmatic father’s health if she moved home. It would mean spending a lot of time alone, with occasional visits with her sister and outdoor walks with a friend before the remote teaching of the 2020-21 school year would kick off.

Once it did, she found herself laboring to make math exciting via Zoom to a group of fifth graders at a high-poverty school, some of whom sometimes failed to log on at all.

Alone in her apartment, she couldn’t simply pop into the classroom next door for quick advice. While she did meet regularly with a supportive mentor teacher assigned to her by the school, Marks struggled to gauge if she was floundering or simply facing similar hurdles as fellow teachers.

The experience stirred up anxiety and depression that she suspects she’d long had. She started to have suicidal thoughts.

“I had to start therapy,” Marks said. “It was that bad — my mental health.”

She added, “If I’m not mentally healthy, how can I be a good teacher?”

Related: What happens when teachers run the school

In addition to regular visits with a counselor, once in-person teaching resumed Marks was able to build a connection with another, more experienced coworker who was also new to the school. His support, she said, along with near-daily kickboxing sessions, have been integral to her persistence.

On a Tuesday in April, in her Weller Road classroom classroom, Marks launches into a lesson on the parts of a plant and photosynthesis, gliding through the classroom in black slip-on sneakers, her hair woven into a side braid that nearly reaches her waist. When students chatter or stop paying attention, Marks quickly steers them back on course.

“You just need to listen,” she tells Re’Niyah James, 11, who is looking down and scribbling. “If you’re too busy writing, you can’t listen.”

Then it’s time for students to label a diagram of a plant and explain how its parts work.

Dozens of clear plastic cups cover the top of bookshelves under the windows in her room. Each is stuffed with seeds nestled in damp paper towels. They are labeled — bush bean, peas, popcorn — along with students’ names.

Ivana Miranda, 10, hands in her assignment, then peers at the cups.

“Ms. Marks,” she exclaims, “the bean sprouted.”

Next it’s time for a math lesson on quadrilaterals. It’s where Marks wants to be especially sure the kids follow along, given how difficult she once found math to be.

In high school, she despised the subject. But one year, after being placed in a class for lower-performing students led by a teacher who wasn’t particularly engaged, Marks surprised herself by discovering that she had just enough of a grasp on the material to assist her classmates.

That experience catalyzed her interest in teaching. Marks said she summons her recollections of distaste for school when she teaches.

“How can I prevent that from happening?” she said later. “I relate so much more to my kids who struggle than my A+ students. I understand, and can, on a more personal level, be more real with those kids.”

The students, she said, show resilience. Many lived through countless Covid-related traumas, but “they’re still coming to school, sometimes with a smile on their face.”

Marks, too, is still finding her way. “When a kid is yelling about how much they hate your class, that’s really hard.”

She’s working on developing her skills dealing with that kind of behavior and communicating with families. 

“You do your best to build empathy,” she said, “your best to build kindness and respect. It doesn’t go through to everybody.”

Since Covid, teaching has become more challenging, in part because the troubles students bring to school have grown more intense. Misbehavior in class is on the rise, according to surveys of teachers. Tens of thousands of school-age children lost parents or other family members to Covid. National test scores show that students have backslid in many subjects. Classroom teachers at all levels of experience are under enormous pressure to make up that ground.

Despite those difficulties, and the challenges many districts have faced in filling open teaching positions, there’s been little investment in hanging on to the teachers already on staff, said el-Mekki, a veteran principal and teacher himself.

“Speaking to school and district leaders around the country who recruit, recruit, recruit, when we ask about their retention plans,” el-Mekki said, “we get blank stares.”

He said that, too often, new teachers spend little or no time with their principals, lack effective mentors, or have no feeling of community at their jobs.

They may also need help with practical skills — organization, managing students’ behavior, and communicating with parents. “It’s one thing to have it from a theoretical perspective” in college, el-Mekki said. It’s quite another to suddenly contend with the grading and family interaction for say, more than 100 students.

While the teachers in the program at Maryland noted that they started spending time in classrooms as college sophomores, “most people don’t have a whole lot of student teaching,” Weingarten said.

The quality of those experiences vary widely, but when student teaching is done right, research shows it can give a novice teacher the same kind of effectiveness as someone with far more experience.

Most new teachers, however,even those whose degrees required a lot of in-person teaching experience, which is usually unpaid, haven’t communicated with families while in training. That’s left to the teacher supervising them.

Related: Why a team approach to teaching is taking hold

And despite federal laws ensuring that employers treat mental health conditions just as they do physical health concerns, many state and local government workers, including teachers, have health plans that limit treatment or have strict preauthorization policies. A bill passed by the U.S. House last year was intended to bolster access to mental health care for educators and students, but it wasn’t taken up in the Senate.

With roughly 1,200 U.S. teacher preparation programs, more than any other country, it’s difficult to assess whether or how they are adapting to a new era of teaching. The National Council on Teacher Quality concluded in a 2022 report that undergraduate elementary preparation programs were spending 19 percent more time on math content even ahead of the pandemic and the bite it took out of students’ math skills.

“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers

And at Maryland, there are other types of shifts. For instance, the College of Education’s avatar lab is used far more regularly, said Ebony Terrell Shockley, an associate clinical professor and executive director of educator preparation. It simulates a classroom and exposes students to situations they’ll face as full-time teachers, both common situations and the outliers they may face but may not be exposed to as part of their student teaching.

One of those is how to interact with families or work through a meeting about a plan for a student with disabilities — things they might experience when they are the primary teacher in their own classroom, Terrell Shockley said. Real actors play the role of students in real time, said Brentt Brown, vice president of sales for education for the company behind the technology, Mursion. Using the virtual classroom, teachers in training can work through situations that might be difficult, but in a psychologically safe environment.

Training like that might help teachers like Marks, the fifth grade teacher. “Fifth grade, they like to be the class clowns,” she said. “They don’t teach you this in college.”

Nothing will keep all teachers, or graduates with teaching degrees, in the classroom, however.

Maryland graduate Tia Ouyang loved her early experiences with a program aimed at recruiting more science and math teachers by drawing in students majoring in those fields.

Ouyang was a sophomore chemistry major when she added education as a second degree to ensure she would get a job after graduation. After working with middle school students, she felt high school would be a better fit.

In the classroom, she enjoyed talking about science and answering students’ questions — even planning her lessons. But Ouyang felt that the high school students were reluctant to trust her, an accented Asian woman. Her science instinct kicked in as she recalled this though, noting she had no real evidence that this was the case.

When public schools switched to remote instruction, and there were no more of those engaging conversations about science with students, she lost motivation.

With online instruction, “All you are doing is talking,” Ouyang said.

At home, disconnected from her own schooling and the high school students, she ended up applying as her final semester ended to a program at the University of Delaware Lewes in chemical oceanography.

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes in schools across the South

Ouyang, now enjoying her doctoral program, said she never let go of the idea of being a teacher. She wants to encourage young people to study chemistry and nurture future scientists and environmental leaders — but as a college professor.

“I feel happy about my life.”

Ouyang’s choice is especially painful for the profession: Losing science and math teachers to other work is a longstanding problem for districts across the country, making these some of the hardest roles to fill. And just 2 percent of the U.S. teaching workforce is Asian.

Other Maryland College of Education grads The Hechinger Report tracked down left science and math teaching jobs too, in one case to work for an international science and medical equipment company.  Another member of the class of 2020 works as a customer service specialist for a Miami-based financial services company. One chose to work at her family’s bakery. Yet another owns a dance studio. One calls herself a former educator who left teaching after two years in search of “a remote position to pursue a more healthy work-life balance.”

Sydonne Ignacio, like Ouyang, never intended to be a teacher. When she enrolled at the University of Maryland, she was an aerospace engineering major embracing her love of science and math. But by the end of sophomore year, she was limping along.

“I was completely miserable,” said Ignacio, who also worked two jobs for much of college.

Although her advisers tried to persuade her to stick it out, Ignacio said she wasn’t sure it was worth sacrificing her mental health for her major. She chose education instead, with many of her credits neatly aligning with a middle school math and science degree.

Ignacio said she chose middle school in part because it’s such a pivotal time in children’s lives. And because she loathes the refrain “I hate math.”

“I love math. I love science. I love learning,” said Ignacio, who eventually wants to return to school and complete her engineering degree. “I want to instill that passion in my students — so maybe math sucks a little bit less.”

Ignacio, who’d wanted to teach math after graduation, ended up with an offer to teach science at the school where she student taught, Buck Lodge Middle in Adelphi, Maryland. She considered working elsewhere but said she valued the familiarity, given how much the pandemic upended everything else in her life.

Nevertheless, remote teaching that in her district dragged on for essentially all 10 months of the school year drained her. Her classes included two sessions that were a mix of students with disabilities and lower-performing students, a group with more average skills and an honors science course. Each class required a distinct set of lesson plans.

Even though she was familiar with Buck Lodge staff, Ignacio’s mentor taught math, not science, so she couldn’t go to her for lesson planning help. In addition, Buck Lodge is a Title I school, meaning many students are from low-income families. With that in mind, Ignacio tried to devise experiments that involved items almost any family would already have at home.

“I didn’t want them to have to go out and buy anything,” she said, but crafting those lessons took a lot of time-consuming research. And as a new teacher, she had no old lesson plans to fall back on or adapt from.

Related: Two campaigns are trying to keep teachers in the classroom

Most of the week, she was exhausted, and at times it was hard for her simply to get out of bed. “Sometimes I would teach from my bed,” Ignacio said. “I would have my camera off, just going through the motions.”

Even when the work day was over, she couldn’t unwind. “You couldn’t go out anywhere,” she said, without risking getting herself or her family sick.

“Thinking back on it, the only relief I felt was when the year was over: We’re finally done,” she said.

Ignacio also experienced the kind of heartbreak that often comes with teaching, pandemic or not. She powered through teaching the day her grandmother was admitted to the hospital; her grandmother died a few months later. (“I don’t want my students to ever see me in a moment of weakness.”) And when one of her former students discovered that his father had died by suicide, his attendance plunged, despite Ignacio and other teachers pressing him to come to school and checking on him as much as possible. He wound up arrested along with his older brother on an armed robbery charge. The student rarely attended after that.

“Sometimes I would feel so helpless: I can’t follow him after school and make sure he’s doing the right thing,” she said. Other students have chaotic home lives, she said. One is homeless. “If I could buy them a house, I would.”

“That’s one of the downsides. You want to do everything for the kids, but you can’t.”

Ignacio herself still lives with family, unable to afford to move out.

Still, she finds room in her budget to stock her room with Takis, granola bars and Cup Noodles, rewards for attending school all week. 

In addition to traveling and practicing yoga, one of the ways she copes is blasting R&B, dancehall reggae or as she described it, “really vulgar rap music” on the drive home.

“It depends on what comes on in the shuffle.”

Ignacio said she’s unsure teaching is what she will do forever. “The mental wear and tear is a little bit too much for me,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do this for 20 years.”

But for now, she’s tried to turn her difficult experiences into a positive: This fall, she’s set to be the Buck Lodge science department chair. And she still gets a thrill when her teaching results in a concept clicking in her students’ minds.

One lesson this spring for her sixth graders during a unit on states of matter — solids, liquids and gases — dealt with condensation. At first they didn’t understand.

When they finally did, they regaled Ignacio with their discoveries.

“When I come in from outside, my glasses get foggy,” one of them told her. “This is the water vapor in the air that is cooling into liquid.”

Exactly.

For Mercado, there have likewise been small moments as a teacher when she thought, “‘this is really not what I thought it would be.” But she said she now believes she’s found what she’s meant to do.

She too turned to therapy, in the fall of 2021, to help manage her stress. The therapist offered concrete ways to keep from getting overwhelmed. For instance, if five students swarm her desk, she asks them to take a seat and tells them she will come to their desks to answer questions instead. She started taking lunch breaks instead of working right through them. A diffuser pipes the scent of lavender into her room. Bright fabric that mimics the clouds and sky covers the fluorescent rectangles of light on her classroom ceiling.

During her second year of teaching, Mercado also recognized she needed to take another dramatic step to survive: work at a different school with fewer low-income, high-needs students. She requested a transfer and got her wish for the upcoming school year. Mercado said it is a prime reason she has stuck with teaching.

Historically, new teachers are more likely to get jobs in high-poverty schools than low-poverty ones, which also tend to have more turnover.

At her old school, “the students need a lot of support. I didn’t feel like I had enough experience to do that,” she said.

Related: How one university is creatively tackling the rural teacher shortage

Now, she is in her element in a second-grade classroom at Ritchie Park Elementary in Rockville, Maryland, but she also makes time for her boyfriend and dance — Mercado was on the college dance team — in addition to preparing her lessons each day.

For a recent assignment, her students – preschoolers when the pandemic hit – had to reflect on each year of their schooling so far. They take turns sharing their experiences about trying to learn online as kindergartners and getting to be together, sort of, as socially distant first graders.

Chris DiFrancesco, 8, stands up to share how things are going this school year.

“I feel like Covid is gone,” he says.

“Maybe put an emotion in there,” Mercado replies. “Do you feel hopeful?”

“I feel hopeful.”

Mercado does too.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or reach the Crisis Text Line by texting HELLO to 741741.

Juana Castillo contributed research to this story.

This story about new teacher retention 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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