Next year will mark seven decades since the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Even the current Supreme Court’s conservatives have embraced that Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

Yet, 70 years after Brown, a key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance to racial integration and to adequate funding for the education of Black and Latino children.

In the 1950s and 1960s, white resistance took the form of a revolt against integration and busing.

Private “white academies” — also known as segregation academies — sprang up to preserve the advantages held by the previously white-only public schools.

Today, one form of ongoing resistance is what scholars label “hoarding opportunities.” By using zoning and districting to create and perpetuate overwhelmingly white spaces and declining to share resources with Black and Latino children, white Americans limit the reach of integration and perpetuate inequality.

Related: Reckoning with Mississippi’s ‘segregation academies’

Not surprisingly, in 2022, the Government Accountability Office declared that school segregation continues unabated. The agency reported that even as the nation’s student population has diversified, 43 percent of its schools are segregated, and 18.5 million students, more than one-third of all the students in the country, are enrolled in highly segregated schools (75 percent or more of the students identify as a single race or ethnicity).

The Midwest — with 59 percent of all schools classified as segregated — is the leader in segregation.

The same GAO study showed that when new school districts are formed, they tend to be far more racially homogeneous than the districts they replace.

A key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance.

Direct evidence of white resistance to racial equity in education can be seen in a survey experiment my co-authors and I conducted in 2021 that closely replicated findings from earlier periods. The study shows that white Americans continue to be reluctant to support increased funding for schools for Black children.

In our experiment, 552 white Americans were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked: “Do you favor or oppose expanding funding for pre-kindergarten programs so that it is available for poor children nationwide? The $24 billion a year cost would be paid for by higher taxes.”

The second group was asked the same question, except that “poor children” was replaced by “poor Black children.”

About 75 percent of respondents in the first group said they favor spending tax dollars for such a program. However, in the group asked about “poor Black children,” just 68 percent were in favor. This is a significant gap in support.

The experiment suggests that among white Americans, support for public education funding for poor children is robust. But less so for poor Black children.

White resistance to desegregation and school funding for Black students has severe consequences for racial equality and the economy.

Related: OPINION: Our education system is not setting up students for success

Research published this month shows that Black students who attended Southern desegregated schools in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s experienced positive lifelong cognitive effects.

And data from the U.S. Department of Education still shows “substantial” racial gaps in reading and math competencies, high school graduation rates and, inevitably, college entry.

A recent Brookings report estimated that if the racial gap in education and employment had been eliminated, the U.S. GDP from 1990 to 2019 would have been $22.9 trillion larger. This would benefit us all.

The great promise of Brown was one of equal access to high-quality education. The hope was that income and other social disparities among white, Black and Latino people would dissipate over time. White resistance contributed to America not keeping this promise.

Policymakers, funders and education advocates must overcome white resistance to strengthen support for programs geared toward Black and Latino children.

This will help America’s quest to fulfill the promise of Brown. It’s time.

Alexandra Filindra is an associate professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. She is also the author of “Race, Rights and Rifles.”

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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.”

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The thing that surprised me most about my teacher preparation program was that we never talked about how kids learn.

Instead, we were taught how to structure a lesson and given tips on classroom management. I took “methods” classes that gave me strategies for discussions and activities.

I assumed that I would eventually learn how the brain worked because I thought that studying education meant studying how learning happens.

But in my training in the late ’90s, the closest I got to cognitive science was the concept of “practitioner inquiry.” I was told to study my own students and investigate what worked best. That sounded hollow to me; surely more-experienced hands knew better.

But discussions around teacher effectiveness — what methods are scientifically proven to support cognitive development — were painfully rare. Eventually, I concluded that I never learned, and we never talked about, how the brain processes information because scientists didn’t know much about it.

I was wrong. If you are a mid-career educator like me, perhaps this sounds familiar. Maybe you have also been surprised to find out that cognitive scientists actually know quite a bit about how we learn. Over the last several years, many of us have had the uncomfortable realization that there is a gap between how we teach and how scientific findings suggest we should teach.

Many of us first felt this uneasiness when we heard about the “science of reading” in a series of podcasts by Emily Hanford. Since it aired, reading educators have engaged in a great national conversation about the discrepancy between what science understands about how students learn to read and how we often teach it in schools.

The discovery of the science of reading has led to the larger, more practice-shattering realization that educators know very little about the science of learning itself.

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

Just as scientists have made great gains in understanding how students read, they have also made tremendous gains in understanding how students learn. Although some educators are familiar with this research, most of us are not. It is time to know and do better.

A 2019 survey of teachers uncovered some of these gaps. In answering one question, only 31 percent endorsed a scientifically backed strategy over less effective ones. In other answers, the vast majority of respondents voiced faith in scientifically disproven concepts – such as “learning styles” and the “left-brain, right-brain” myth.

Over the last several years, many of us have had an uncomfortable realization that there is a gap between how we teach and how scientific findings suggest we should teach.

Much of the disinformation stems from training like my own. A 2016 study found that not one textbook in commonly used teacher-training programs adequately covered the science of learning.

Delving into that science is beyond the reach of this editorial but here is a quick check to see where you stand. If any of the following six terms — central to what cognitive scientists have discovered about learning — are unfamiliar, you probably had a teacher training program like mine: retrieval practice, elaboration, spacing, interleaving, dual coding and metacognition.

If these concepts are part of your current practice as an educator, nice work. But if you are among the majority of us who have not fully encountered or employed these ideas, I humbly suggest that you have some urgent reading to do. All these ideas are established learning science.

Related: Student teachers fail test about how kids learn, nonprofit finds

One of the first principal syntheses of these findings with clear recommendations for the classroom was a 2007 federal report, “ Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning.” The seven recommendations in the report represent, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the “most important concrete and applicable principles to emerge from research on learning and memory.”

Sixteen years later, we have no one to blame but ourselves for these ideas not taking hold in every classroom.

Scientists are trying. The 2014 bestseller “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning,” by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, made an urgent case for these ideas. Psychology professor Daniel Willingham and middle school teacher Paul Bruno, working with the organization Deans for Impact, summarized these concepts in a concise 2015 report, “The Science of Learning.” Willingham’s books are also tremendous primers for educators who want to know more about cognitive science.

Yet the simple fact remains that these concepts remain tangential to most of us when they should be central.

Now that we are being bombarded by headlines about students’ pandemic learning loss, perhaps we should focus on what we educators never learned. If we are to overcome these recent setbacks, we need to do so with the most effective tools.

M-J Mercanti-Anthony is the principal of Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Academy, a public school for grades 6-12 in the Castle Hill neighborhood of New York City, and a member of the Board of Education of Greenwich, Connecticut.

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While the reading and math “wars” have gotten a lot of attention in education in recent years, writing instruction has not received that same focus. That is, until the release of ChatGPT last year.

There isn’t really an agreed-upon approach to teaching writing, according to Sarah Levine, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. But now that ChatGPT is here to stay, experts like Levine are trying to figure how to teach writing to K-12 students in an age of AI.

“The question that teachers are having to ask themselves is, what’s writing for?” she said.

ChatGPT can produce a perfectly serviceable writing “product,” she said. But writing isn’t a product per se — it’s a tool for thinking, for organizing ideas, she said.

“ChatGPT and other text-based tools can’t think for us,” she said. “There’s still things to learn when it comes to writing because writing is a form of figuring out what you think.”

Earlier this year, Levine and her team conducted a pilot study at a high school in San Francisco. Students in an English class were given access to ChatGPT to see how they engaged with the tool.

Some were given prompts that asked them to create an argument based on directions, such as, “Some people say we should have a new mascot at our school. Some people say we should keep our old mascot. What do you think?” Other prompts were more creative, such as asking students to write an outline for a movie script about a new superhero based at their school.

Levine and her team found that students looked to ChatGPT, primarily, for help in two categories: Ideas or inspiration to get started on the prompt questions (for example, “What kind of mascots do other schools have?”) and guidance on the writing process (“How do you write a good ghost story?”).

“What the kids are now getting from this AI is what expert writers already have: a big bank of examples that they can draw from when they’re creating,” Levine said. Using ChatGPT as a sounding board for specific questions like these can help students learn to be stronger writers, she added.

Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom

While the study is ongoing, the early findings revealed something surprising: Kids weren’t excited about ChatGPT’s writing. “They thought it was ‘too perfect.’ Or ‘like a robot,’” Levine said. “One team that was writing said, ‘We asked ChatGPT to edit our work, and it took out all of our jokes so we put them back.’”

Levine said that, to her, that was the big takeaway of the pilot. She’s heard teachers say they struggle to help students find their voice in writing. When students could contrast their own writing to ChatGPT’s more generic version, Levine said, they were able to “understand what their own voice is and what it does.”

Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, has spent years studying how technology can change writing instruction and the nature of writing itself. When ChatGPT was released, he decided to tailor some of his research to study ways generative AI could help students and teachers, particularly English language learners and bilingual learners.

Like Levine, Warschauer, director of the university’s Digital Learning Lab, said he believes ChatGPT can help students who struggle with writing to organize their ideas, and edit and revise their writing. Essentially, it could be used as an early feedback tool to supplement the work of a teacher, he said.

As part of a project on the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a tool for giving students feedback on their writing, his team at the Digital Learning Lab placed student essays that had already been evaluated by teachers into ChatGPT and asked the AI to provide its own feedback. Then experts blindly graded both the human and AI feedback. While the experts found the human feedback was a little better overall, the AI feedback was good enough to provide value in the classroom. It could help guide students as they progressed on an assignment, allowing teachers to spend more time with students who need extra support, Warschauer said.

Warschauer’s team has also partnered with UC Irvine’s school of engineering to create an intelligent writing coach, to be called PapyrusAI. The tool, which the teams plan to release next year, would be tailored to help middle school and high school students improve their writing through intensive coaching, he said.

In addition, he said, the tool is being designed to provide a safe and protected way to use AI, to address parents’ and educators’ concerns about student data and privacy on ChatGPT, which stores students’ data.

Stanford’s Levine also sees value in using ChatGPT to coach students on writing. 

“A lot of teachers feel intimidated when it comes to teaching writing, because they themselves don’t necessarily feel like they’re the best writers,” Levine said. ChatGPT can help teachers fill in gaps in writing instruction by working as students’ debate partner or coach she said.

ChatGPT could also help teachers more quickly analyze trends in student writing, identifying areas of success or struggle. If students “don’t understand how to connect one idea to another,” Levine said, Chat GPT could provide this feedback instead of teachers having to write, “Try connecting these ideas using a transition,” on every paper. Teachers could then devote more time to developing lessons that focus on that skill.  

“Writing should be and is a human experience,” Levine said. Teachers can retain that experience, even when using AI. If they help students learn how to use the new tool effectively — much as they now use spellcheck or Grammarly — students will understand that ChatGPT is “more or less a giant autocomplete machine, as opposed to a place that has facts,” she said.

“If we think that clarifying your own thinking is something worth doing, then we need to teach writing,” Levine said. “In other words, writing is a way of learning. It’s not just a way of showing your learning.”

This story about AI writing 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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School libraries should be places where students can learn independently and think creatively outside the traditional classroom. But that won’t happen under a new plan proposed for Houston, the largest school district in Texas. Instead, spaces once reserved for quiet contemplation of books will now be transformed into disciplinary spaces for troubled students.

This summer, the Houston Independent School District decided to close school libraries and replace them with discipline centers. Parents and educators are concerned that this might harm struggling students in a state with the country’s fourth-lowest literacy rate, and fear that the new policy will do nothing to address some of the root causes of student misbehavior, which often include difficulties with literacy.

Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to lead the district after it was taken over by the state, is pushing the policy. In an NPR interview, Miles explained that disruptive students will be sent to these discipline centers and then rejoin their classmates virtually.

Schools have attempted to address misbehavior with stricter discipline practices for years, but resorting to virtual participation — and virtual problem solving — is not the answer.

Districts should examine why a student chooses to communicate an unmet need by disrupting the classroom. All behaviors are a form of communication; misbehavior specifically is sometimes the only form of expression available to a student at the time.

More times than not, misbehavior is a response to a perceived stressor in the child’s environment hindering them from making more “appropriate” choices in the moment. Learning how to read, write, speak and listen — communication — requires more than understanding phonemic awareness, spelling or vocabulary. It requires the activation of the frontal lobe, which is responsible for reading fluency, speech, grammatical usage and comprehension.

Related: The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning

In their book “The Whole-Brain Child,” Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson refer to this area as the “upstairs brain.” They explain that the lower and mid parts of the brain (the “downstairs,” or survival, brain), must feel cool, calm and collected before access is granted upstairs. Many things can contribute to the downstairs brain hijacking everything and revoking access to the part our students need to control their impulses, problem solve and excel in communication.

Traumatic experiences are the main culprit. They include not only the difficult childhood events we often hear about but also detrimental community and environmental experiences, such as structural racism, low pay, a global pandemic and climate crises. All can have negative effects on growing and learning. If Houston’s plan is truly a systemic reform, as its proponents claim, why aren’t we also holding these larger systems responsible for the impact they have on student behavior?

Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors.

Feelings of anger, frustration or stress, which can be caused by struggles with reading or other comprehension, can also lead to the downstairs brain hijacking the upstairs brain. When this hijacking happens, it can look like students are highly anxious or behaving aggressively toward themselves or others. Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors, many of which could get a student sent to the proposed “team centers.” A library and supportive librarian would benefit them more.

Not every misbehavior is the result of an issue with literacy, but every misbehavior communicates a need. While discipline is necessary, it should not end there.

Districts and school administrators need to recognize that a student’s behavior might be a trauma or stress response, and they need to learn how to respond constructively. This is known as a trauma-informed approach. Concurrently, restorative discipline practices focus on repairing any harm caused, while sparing the dignity of the student without excluding them from their community.

Not only does student behavior deserve to be fully understood and supported, but our educators, including our librarians, deserve to be allowed to work in their areas of expertise. When students are feeling unmotivated or defeated and communicate this through disruption, they should be met by individuals who not only understand the function of that behavior but also use their unique skills to quiet the downstairs brain to better attend to the upstairs brain, putting students in the best place to learn and grow. This is true system reform.

Related: OPINION: Teachers and students are not okay right now. More mental health training would help

Educators cannot do this alone. Caregivers can also integrate trauma-informed and restorative practices at home. Parents know their children better than anyone and have a responsibility to advocate and assist schools in understanding the child behind the behavior.

Infusing trauma-Informed and restorative practices into schoolwide policies and procedures will help schools attend to the root causes of misbehaviors without the risk of re-traumatization.

Protecting learning, literacy and libraries and addressing discipline issues are not mutually exclusive. Our school systems can and should do both.

Stephanie F. McGary is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor, registered play therapist and a Public Voices fellow with The OpEd Project. She is the director of clinical programming at Communities in Schools of the Dallas Region.

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This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Related: Reading Matters: See more Hechinger coverage of reading instruction

Bonus Episode 1: Your words

APM Reports heard from more than 1,000 people in response to its Sold a Story podcast. Nearly 40 percent were teachers. Most teach elementary school, though the podcast team heard from many teachers in upper grades, too. After teachers, the largest group was parents. Three quarters of the parents who wrote in said they were worried about their own child’s reading progress. For many families, thinking about reading instruction was new. Listeners in 47 states and Washington, D.C. called or wrote in, as did people in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Ecuador, Poland and Switzerland.

This podcast was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

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A few months before the pandemic erupted, I agreed to teach a course called Zen. As an anthropologist of Japan, the topic excited me — until an odd thought emerged:

How do you teach a course on Zen and assign grades? Grading is the antithesis of the ideas I wanted to convey in the class, particularly the anti-conformity and anti-authoritarian threads that run through Zen philosophy.

After some pondering, I decided to drop the whole idea of grading assignments. Grades have always seemed to me more a measure of the ability of students to conform to demands of authority than of learning.

I also dropped attendance requirements and reduced the number of assignments, doing away with busywork. Thus began a yearlong, successful experiment in bucking the system.

If you are skeptical of learning conventions and the neoliberal emphasis on quantifying learning, this approach is worth a try.

In my Zen class, assignments receive credit for completion. Essay exams get extensive comments. After each exam, students attend individual conferences, in which we discuss how the semester has been going. They write short self-evaluations assessing their attendance, contribution to class discussions and work on readings.

At the end of the self-evaluation, students assign themselves a score they believe reflects their performance in the class, then justify it in writing.

On anonymous course surveys, comments have been surprisingly uniform and positive: “I believe Professor Traphagan’s experimental grading model in this class was a great boon,” said one student. “I felt like I was actually learning the material rather than just getting a meaningless score on an assignment.”

Students also reacted positively to the lack of attendance mandates. In the past, when I’d taught in a more traditional manner, but not required attendance, there were usually several students who rarely showed up for class after the second week. I expected this to happen with my Zen experiment.

Instead, during the four classes I’ve taught using this new approach, attendance rates have consistently held at between 90 and 95 percent. Our discussions of attendance and involvement in the class during the conferences allow students to talk about problems they are facing at home or issues like anxiety — with an eye toward finding an accommodation, rather than concern over a lower grade being attached to their behavior.

Last fall, one student missed most of the classes during the first half of the term. We discussed this and he indicated that he felt uncomfortable talking in class and had been feeling anxious after missing a few sessions early.

After our conversation, he missed no further classes. By our second meeting, he said that the stress had “melted off.” Clearly, having the opportunity to talk about attendance rather than being punished for missing classes gave him a basis for improving his attendance — and his learning.

Grades have always seemed to me more a measure of the ability of students to conform to demands of authority than of learning.

One downside of my approach: the potential for grade inflation. This has been the main question raised when I talk with colleagues.

I often hear, “So you’re giving out all A’s, right?”

Nope. On their self-evaluations, students often significantly underrate their performance. In one case, a student had missed a few classes early in the semester and was not talkative in class. However, her essay was excellent. She gave herself a D for the first half of the term.

We talked about the balance of different aspects of the class and that she was being hard on herself. I then asked if she would agree to a B+ up to that point, which not only made her happy, but also made sense based on our conversation and her overall class performance.

She responded that she felt encouraged and was looking forward to working on the second exam.

Related: Momentum builds for helping students adapt to college by nixing freshman grades

This experiment has led me to draw some conclusions about education.

First, I often hear that students are apathetic about learning these days. This is inaccurate. Students are, in fact, excited about learning.

However, they’re indifferent to or even bothered by the educational system’s incessant emphasis on quantitative measures and assignments that seem to have little or no value. Most students want to learn, but don’t see the conventional educational approach as providing a particularly good framework for learning.

Second, many students have experienced enormous stress and anxiety. High school can be a pressure cooker focused on grades, test scores, GPAs and getting into the right college. As a result, learning seems like a side effect of education rather than the goal.

My students consistently note that when they don’t have to anticipate the expectations of their professor, they can focus on taking chances in their writing and thinking. And taking chances often leads to true learning and mastery of a topic.

Finally, this experiment has forced me to think about intellectual rigor in the classroom. Is a system designed to generate stress through piling on work and being “hard” — whatever that means — rigorous?

Or is rigor about creating an environment where students enjoy the learning process and, as a result, willingly engage in broadening their horizons and thinking about their lives?

I think it’s the latter.

An ultracompetitive emphasis on grades accomplishes little more than generating high levels of stress, which in turn lowers the quality of education. In traditional classrooms, students are rarely encouraged to think creatively and critically, and good grades are given to those who are experts at conforming to the expectations of those in authority.

In short, the current approach to education is not producing graduates well-prepared for life as citizens in a diverse society. Perhaps one way to change this is to ditch the grades.

J. W. Traphagan is a professor in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin. He co-hosts the podcast How To Be Wrong on the New Books Network and his most recent book is “Embracing Uncertainty: Future Jazz, That 13th Century Buddhist Monk, and the Invention of Cultures.”

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Here is the seemingly reasonable expectation that President Biden and his administration laid out at the start of the school year to address ongoing learning gaps in math and reading: for schools to hire “250,000 more tutors and mentors for our kids” with the help of American Rescue Plan funds.

With recent declines in National Assessment of Education Progress scores and growing teacher shortages, there is no more urgent time for such an investment in high-impact tutors.

Yet, we are more than halfway through the semester and many schools continue to struggle tosource enough tutors.

They are asking: Where are we supposed to find them? And, how can we ensure that the tutors we hire — and trust with our students — are truly prepared and capable of accelerating student learning?

The answer to these questions is one for which my colleagues and I at Deans for Impact have advocated since the early days of the pandemic. We believe that education leaders, including Biden, must mobilize the 600,000 individuals enrolled in teacher training programs.

Right now, too many communities faced with low rates of unemployment, rising inflation and teacher shortages are enlisting inexperienced tutors. Many have been hired by fly-by-night, (often) for-profit, virtual programs with negligible track records for supporting student success. This not only wastes resources, it borders on educational malpractice.

Meanwhile, candidates training to become teachers need experience working with students as part of their training. What’s more, many of these potential tutors are in college and seeking part-time employment. They can be trained and supervised by the programs they are already part of. It’s a win-win-win.

Tutoring is one of the few federal education issues with bipartisan support in Congress. The proposed PATHS to Tutors Act would establish a $500 million program to support tutoring partnerships among educator-preparation programs, school districts and nonprofit organizations in underserved communities.

It’s co-sponsored by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), John Cornyn (R-Tex.), Chris Murphy (D-Del.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine), and would provide critical investments and infrastructure to create and scale high-quality partnerships.

Many communities are already actively mobilizing future teachers as tutors. Through a recent grant, Deans for Impact launched a national network of 21 high-impact tutoring initiatives working together to increase the number of aspiring teachers serving as tutors for thousands of students across 13 states.

Related: States’ urgent push to overhaul reading instruction

Our new network convenes programs to address local and collective challenges. We share local practices that hold promise for fostering policies that will embed high-impact tutoring as a regular experience for aspiring teachers and K-12 students.

The New Jersey Tutoring Corps, for example, is a statewide, high-impact tutoring initiative that recruits tutors from multiple sources, including the ranks of current teachers and substitutes, retired teachers and aspiring teachers from educator-preparation programs. The program trains and places tutors in local schools and community organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Tutoring happens 2-4 times each week during and after school, and also takes place over the summer.

The corps requires rigorous, mandatory pre- and on-the-job training. Among several areas of focus, tutors are expected to implement research-based, content-specific instructional skills; support their students’ social and emotional learning and development; recognize signs in students of neglect and abuse; and routinely engage in coaching sessions where they receive feedback to improve their practice.

The people we trust to tutor our students should be the same as the ones we trust to teach them — it’s that simple.

The importance of this training was evident during my recent visit to one of the corps’ partner sites, where each tutor deliberately reviewed student assessment data to inform the day’s lesson. Comprehensive program data is regularly collected and shared with external evaluators, and results are used to strengthen the overall program and individual tutoring sessions.

During the state’s last legislative session, lawmakers allocated $1 million for the corps in the state budget, celebrating and codifying the impressive learning acceleration the program has helped students make.

This is an incredible win for students and future teachers in New Jersey. In particular, aspiring teachers in the corps spoke of how the joy, learning and confidence these tutoring sessions fostered solidified their decision to become teachers.

Typical practice experiences often place candidates in classrooms with 20 or more students. The corps allows more one-on-ones and small groups of no more than four. When we visited last fall, one candidate said that “an opportunity like this … [provides] more practice and a different, more intimate version of teaching.”

Similar efforts in other states are also taking hold and creating greater access to high-quality, practice-based teacher training for the next generation of American teachers, especially those currently underrepresented in the workforce.

Related: Plunging NAEP scores make clear the long and difficult road ahead to pandemic recovery

We know these aren’t the only programs committed to this work. Across our network and beyond, promising tutoring initiatives are researching best practices, seeking to scale what’s worked and looking for ways to sustain local efforts once federal relief funding ultimately expires.

These are among the initiatives the Biden administration and Congress should be working together to make commonplace. One action they can take right now is to pass the PATHS to Tutors Act.

The way ahead is to mobilize future teachers as tutors. The people we trust to tutor our students should be the same as the ones we trust to teach them — it’s that simple.

Patrick Steck is senior director of policy at Deans for Impact, a national nonprofit committed to ensuring that every child is taught by a well-prepared teacher.

This story about high-impact tutoring 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: American classrooms urgently need more tutors, so why not mobilize teachers in training? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In the debate over Emily Hanford’s podcast “Sold a Story,” two groups have been vocal: those who agree that teachers have been conned into believing most children learn to read without systematic phonics instruction; and those who, like the 58 educators who signed a letter to the editor of the Hechinger Report, respond that Hanford has “reduce[d] the teaching of reading to phonics.”

But there’s a third perspective that needs to be heard if all children are to become fully literate.

Related: Reading Matters: Read Hechinger’s reporting on literacy

I disagree with the contention that Hanford has reduced reading instruction to phonics. She’s acknowledged that comprehension is important. And she deserves enormous credit for revealing that standard instructional methods have left many children unable to decode words.

But I agree with the letter writers that there’s more to the story than Hanford’s podcasts cover. I just don’t think we agree on what that is.

Those who signed the letter ask for “stories of school districts and educators who have seen incredible success using comprehensive approaches to reading instruction.” Given that Lucy Calkins is one of the letter’s signatories, I suspect they mean approaches that include methods of teaching reading comprehension and writing that Calkins herself has long promoted. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College, Columbia University, where Calkins and several other signatories to the letter serve as professors.)

My view is that those approaches have failed, leaving untold numbers of children not only unable to decode but also unable to understand complex text or express themselves coherently in writing. I believe we need to hear more about that part of the story, which is inextricably connected to schools’ failure to teach decoding.

For students to become fully literate, we need to be informed about all the fundamental flaws in a tightly woven system of literacy instruction. If schools get the idea that all they need to do is switch to a new phonics program, they’re going to be in for a shock when it becomes apparent that students at higher grade levels still can’t understand what they’re expected to read or write well about it.

Related: Inside the podcast that reignited the reading wars

Given that Hanford has now devoted about eight hours of audio to reading — counting her four previous hour-long documentaries, including one ostensibly on comprehension — it’s surprising she hasn’t at least mentioned problems with comprehension instruction that have long been identified by reading experts.

The standard approach, which Calkins’ materials support, is to have students spend hours every day practicing reading comprehension “skills and strategies,” like “making inferences” or “visualizing,” using books on random topics that are easy enough for them to read independently. The theory is that if children master comprehension skills, they can eventually use them to glean knowledge from any text they encounter.

But, as scientists have long known, the key factor in comprehension is knowledge, either of the topic or of general academic vocabulary. The best way to build that knowledge, beginning in the early elementary grades, is to immerse children in social studies, science, and the arts — the very subjects that have been marginalized to make more time for comprehension skill practice.

As for writing, the usual approach — which Calkins pioneered — is to have children write freely at length beginning in kindergarten, either about their personal experience or topics in a separate writing curriculum. But if students aren’t writing about the content of the core curriculum, they’re missing an opportunity to cement new knowledge — the kind of knowledge that fuels reading comprehension. Research has shown that writing about content in any subject boosts learning.

And if students aren’t explicitly taught how to construct complex sentences, the syntax of written language can also be a serious barrier to comprehension. Once they learn to use a word like “despite” or a construction like a subordinating conjunction in their own writing, they’re far more likely to understand it when they encounter it in text.

One reason for our flawed system of literacy instruction is that we’ve used “reading” to cover two very different things: decoding and comprehension. Professor Alan Kamhi has proposed redefining the word to simply mean decoding. That, he argues, would “focus attention on the true crisis in American education: knowledge deficits.”

If standardized reading tests were limited to measuring decoding ability, schools might abandon the futile attempt to teach reading comprehension as an abstract skill and spend more time on subjects like history and science—and help students understand the texts they read in those classes.

Alternatively, we could start talking about the “science of literacy” instead of the science of reading, signaling a broader focus. Before students are fluent readers, the most efficient way for them to acquire the knowledge that fuels reading comprehension is through listening and speaking.

It’s been found that, on average, students’ listening comprehension exceeds their reading comprehension through about age 13. If teachers read aloud from a series of texts on the same topic, ideally as part of a content-rich curriculum designed to build knowledge, students will hear the same concepts and vocabulary repeatedly, enabling them to retain the information.

Studies indicate that they’ll then be able to read about that topic at a higher level — and presumably write better about it too.

Educators have indeed been “sold a story,” but not just a story about how children learn to read words. There’s less research on comprehension and writing instruction than on phonics, but if we cast the net beyond “reading” research, it’s clear that what schools are doing in those other areas also conflicts with science — and leaves many high school graduates functionally illiterate.

Natalie Wexler is the author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System” and co-author of “The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades.”

The post OPINION: Why problems with literacy instruction go beyond phonics appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Re OPINION: “A call for rejecting the newest reading war” (Nov. 18, 2022)

For decades, parents like us have witnessed how our children were not successfully taught to read or write within education systems using curriculums written and supported by signers of the Nov. 18 letter to the editor.

Our cries for content-rich curriculum firmly seated in how the brain learns to read and write, as evidenced by decades of scientific research, fell on deaf ears.

After the parent outcries were finally acknowledged in Emily Hanford’s reporting, as part of her “Sold a Story” podcast, proponents of these methods responded by stating that their research was ignored. Yet these so-called literacy experts do not provide links to any scientific studies; instead, what they present is emotional blustering that their work, and the work of people like Marie Clay, an originator of the now-debunked “three-cueing” method, is ignored and defamed.

In their dismissal of the evidence, they choose, yet again, to dismiss our pleas as misinformed, misdirected, divisive and irresponsible.

We are forced to send our children to schools where these faulty products and methods are imposed on them. When our children do not learn, we are forced to seek alternative solutions, but few of us can afford tutors or private schools with curriculums seated in the science of reading, and fewer still can afford to homeschool. 

Yet the authors of the letter to the editor choose to focus on the age-old strawman argument that this is solely about phonics. They not only dismiss us, they blame us for creating a pretend war between those who believe in phonics and those who do not. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve either missed the entire point or are blatantly choosing to ignore the cries of parents who are begging you to do better.

This has never been just about phonics. “Science of reading” proponents have never claimed this “pretend” war is just about phonics; neither have the neuroscientists who have mapped how the brain learns to read. Rather, we have simply asked for the balanced literacy advocates to willingly align their thinking to what science has empirically proven.

The signatories to the letter proclaim that teaching phonics is a settled issue, yet their curriculums only have a smattering of phonics instruction while still promoting three-cueing. They claim to support comprehension strategy instruction, knowledge building, vocabulary acquisition, language development, writing process, culturally responsive teaching, emotional well-being and attention to educational equity, but they fail to understand that we are advocating for those things as well, but done sequentially and with explicit instruction, aligned to the science at all times. By dismissing our dissension as being purely about phonics, these authors place themselves in an ivory tower, claiming they are the only ones invested in the entire reading process.

Further, they throw educators under the bus by claiming that Hanford’s reporting reveals that educators are naively inadequate. Parents have always supported educators, but the pedagogy of these curriculum authors encourages educators to dismiss parents as hapless and unknowing while defending the righteousness of their work.

So-called literacy experts like Lucy Calkins have held sway for decades. They’ve had more than ample opportunity to prove their research. Their side of the story has been heard, and the evidence of their failure is overwhelming. The 2022 NAEP scores are out and reading in fourth and eighth graders fell since 2019 by three points; some 68 percent of public school fourth graders can’t read at a proficient level. This is evidence that their curriculum failure is not being oversimplified or polarized. 

Parents care about coming together and moving forward in a productive way, but these literacy experts have proven they are not invested in change or admitting that their curriculums are damaging. Their continued efforts to dismiss parents begging for change is the real waste of time. We are here to focus on what matters most – our children.

Don’t brush us aside as “just parents.” That dismissal isn’t going to work anymore. We all possess Ph.D.s in our children, and we see their struggle. We are raising our voices so that these curriculum supporters can see with their own eyes that parents are the ones demanding change for the sake of all children. We are not going to let them off the hook as they attempt to PR spin their way out of this. We are informed, we are watching, invested, and paying attention to what they do next. We are also openly advocating for change at our school boards, and in our state legislatures.

Prove to us that you are collectively dedicated to the hard work of change for the sake of all children’s ability to read and write, or do us all a favor and retire.

(Disclosure: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College, Columbia University, where Lucy Calkins and several other signatories to the Nov. 18 letter to the editor serve as professors.)

Ashley Roberts, MBA

Parent of a dyslexic & dysgraphic child, advocate, founder of The Dyslexia Initiative, on behalf of more than 1300 parents, educators and children

The post OPINION: Parents say enough with the strawmen, fix reading education based on the science appeared first on The Hechinger Report.