COTTONWOOD, Idaho — Steven Hanson, 39, straddled Clyde the calf, ready to tag her ear. Clyde is a life-size model, and Hanson stood in a classroom, not a farmyard. Nevertheless, he rubbed her plush neck to soothe her nerves. He was restraining her, he explained, “just enough.”

Kevin Rehder, who teaches dairy science and math at the North Idaho Correctional Institution, practically jumped into the air with delight. “Dr. Grandin again! This is her study! The squeeze!” he said, reminding students in the class of Temple Grandin’s renowned work on calming cattle.

Hanson gave the ear-tagger a practice squeeze in the air, positioned it over the pliable ear and squeezed the handle. Pop! — Clyde had an identifying number.

Hanson has an identifying number of his own: his Idaho Department of Correction inmate ID number. And even after he gets out, he’ll bear a label that usually slams employers’ doors shut: felon.

But Hanson’s hoping it won’t have to be that way — that his ability to tag and label and care for Clyde will help erase the stigma, thanks to the career training he is getting in prison.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, at almost every U.S. prison, take federally funded career and technical education courses. And postsecondary education in prison, both vocational and more traditionally academic, will soon become more widespread: This perennially low-funded, essentially hidden part of the education world will be getting more money, thanks to three decisions in Washington: the First Step Act criminal justice reforms, the newest version of the federal Perkins Act for career and technical education and, most notably, the recent expansion of Second Chance Pell college grants for prisoners.

That’s good news, the evidence shows. Inmates who participate in correctional education — from GED certificates to college degrees and trade training and everything in between — are up to 43 percent less likely to return to prison, and such education provides a $5 return for every taxpayer dollar spent, according to the Rand Corp. And that’s just within three years of a prisoner’s release.

“Everything I’ve heard — jobs or employment are the No. 1 reason for recidivism,” said Tim Leigh, the Idaho Department of Correction re-entry manager.

And experts agree that one of the most important things career training in prison can provide is a credential that’s recognized on the outside.

“We have this population in our prisons that have a lot of skills … but no one will [hire] them because they’re felons.”

Tim Leigh, Idaho Department of Correction re-entry manager

A credential “plays a really important translation role,” said Ruth Delaney, associate initiative director for the Vera Institute of Justice. “We are a very credential-based society.” People who have worked or learned in prison but don’t have a way to prove it are “just at a really big disadvantage.”

So the more forward-thinking prison systems are ramping upcertificates and apprenticeships, with the imprimatur of local colleges and of trade groups such as the National Center for Construction Education and Research. And they include a state much of the country rarely thinks about: Idaho.

Idaho might seem like an outlier, and its state prison population — 8,775 people as of June 2020 – might look small. That population is 74 percent white, compared with a national average of 35 percent, according to The Sentencing Project. But its per-capita imprisonment rate is actually in the top 10, with roughly the same racial disparities as the rest of the country, according to the Sentencing Project, the Vera Project and the ACLU. And in 2017, 1 of every 24 Black men in Idaho were in prison.

Related: The next frontier for college programs for prisoners and ex-prisoners: Teaching them entrepreneurship

In recent years, according to state reports, prison was just plain warehousing for around 30 percent of Idaho inmates: They were back in custody within three years of release. And like other prison systems, Idaho’s has many people for whom education hasn’t worked: 29 percent to 35 percent come in without a high school diploma or equivalency, Leigh said.

Yet Idaho is making a difference, with classes like Rehder’s. It’s one of more than 30 career-technical options across the state’s nine prison campuses, and most are programs specifically designed to match up to real-world jobs such as welding, specialty construction and machining.

A short drive into the dusty hills outside Boise, the Idaho State Correctional Center’s cinderblock Vocational 4 classroom looks simultaneously spacious and crowded. It houses metal cabinets plastered with warning signs, a roof segment in cutaway, tools in a caged area, worktables, a computer numerical control (CNC) programmable wood-cutting machine and a stack of office chairs in various stages of repair. Four men — attendance is limited due to Covid — wrote, eyeballed levels and adjusted the design of a wood desk plaque featuring an elegant horse. These four have completed carpentry certification and now serve as teaching assistants, student coaches and repairmen.

Carpentry is one of five apprenticeships now offered at ISCC, along with electrical, masonry, janitorial and teacher’s assistant programs. All are registered with the federal government, which gives participants the freedom to move across state lines after release. ISCC started the programs in the last three years, and just got a grant to design more, Leigh said.

Greg Sanchez-Chavez Jr., 38, has been in prison for three years. He came in without a high school diploma and now is a carpentry teaching assistant. “It’s something that we can do to better ourselves when we get out,” he said of the training program. “We’ve seen it work.”

Like most prison career-training programs, these are postsecondary: Participants must have a GED certificate or be pursuing one. They also must have a good behavior record. Some state prisons, though not Idaho’s, require that inmates be close to release, so the skills they learn will be up to date. Other states make sure prisoners aren’t scheduled to leave too soon, because otherwise they won’t have time to finish a training program. (Women’s prisons, which tend to be smaller, have fewer programs than prisons for men.)

An even bigger, and longer-tenured, training program goes on down the street at a different prison, the Idaho State Correctional Institution, in its Correctional Industries shops, in what is elsewhere often a dead-end workplace.

“I wanted to show you the stereotype!” Matt DeTour, a job training specialist staffer, said as he walked to the license-plate machine in one corner of Idaho Correctional Industries’ one and a half acres of shop and classroom space. The wall is papered with extra copies of vanity plates the guys found inspiring or just funny: YEAR 1, DSCIPLE, GOD 1ST, FREEBRD, SUPBABY, GOT ELK.

License plates symbolize the bad reputation of prison shops: mindless chores paying inmates pennies per hour while the government entities that buy the plates pay market rates. Even when there’s no credential or formal educational component involved, prison jobs still improve post-prison employment rates. But they fall short where it matters the most: reducing recidivism, according to a 2018 report from the American Enterprise Institute.

That’s why Leigh and DeTour are so serious about having residents earn credentials. So even for the much-maligned license plate assembly line, Correctional Industries offers a 4,000-hour quality assurance apprenticeship, registered with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Yes, the license plate process is repetitive, zipping out 10,000 to 15,000 plates a week. Yes, its primary purpose is to make money for Correctional Industries, because the complex has to pay for itself. No, the skills involved aren’t as remunerative down the road as those from the metalworking or CNC shops. But it’s a production line, and overseeing a production line “is a marketable skill,” Leigh said. And now that Covid-19 means that the prison mails the plates directly to drivers instead of shipping stacks to the DMV, DeTour wants to add a fulfillment certification.

Most of Correctional Industries is dedicated to higher-paying professions, however. CNC operator Philip Walker, 45, sat at a desk unit that looks like it came from a mass-market office furniture supply company, except that Correctional Industries workers made it themselves, down to the decorative panel etched with an American flag. Walker has such a cheerful smile that it’s hard to imagine he’s been in prison since he was 18. At that time, he couldn’t read a tape measure and could barely read words. But once he started the CNC apprenticeship, “I found my niche,” he said. “We’re always given opportunities to come up with new ideas.” He has since completed two apprenticeships, in CNC operation and cabinetmaking, over a whopping 10,000 hours, the equivalent of almost five years of full-time effort.

Walker goes before the parole board around the end of 2022. “The last guy who got out from this position is making 28 bucks an hour,” he said. “I’m about to be successful! Hopefully, almost!”

Walker’s success depends on employers setting aside their longstanding fears and stereotypes, and seeing instead the assets that graduates of these programs offer. “We have this population in our prisons that have a lot of skills … but no one will [hire] them because they’re felons,” said Leigh, the re-entry manager. “There’s this whole untapped employment market.”

The tight job market helps by making employers more hungry for workers. Beyond that, the state’s corrections department takes several routes to attack stigma and improve released felons’ employability. Leigh educates employers through a website with success stories about former prisoners, employer tours and even job fairs at the prisons. While there, companies can see that the prison’s teachers and coordinators keep shop and training materials up to date.

Delaney of the Vera Institute said employer visits can reduce stigma. They “go in and see what people are doing, speak to them, realize that these are just people,” she said. “It’s much easier to see how you would hire this person, especially when they have the skills that you need as an employer.”

“We’re doing everything we can. [But] vocational training is expensive and you can only push it so far.”

Rich Hull, who teaches welding at Idaho Correctional Institution-Orofino

DeTour and Leigh brought a local manufacturer in to tour Correctional Industries in July. “They were very excited to see that we had people trained on this,” DeTour said, gesturing to a machine called a CNC press brake, a computer-programmed heavyweight that bends metal into custom shapes.

The company could also see the quality of the work. DeTour showed off a miniature motorcycle that one resident made entirely from metal scraps. “These guys are really talented,” he said.

The manufacturer has hired one former prisoner and is optimistic about his success, a spokeswoman said, asking that the company’s name not be shared since its experience with the program is still so limited.

And like any good workforce training program anywhere, the career-tech educators in Idaho’s correctional system try to align training programs to what local companies need. Hence the dairy class. The Idaho Dairymen’s Association “came to me,” Rehder said, begging for workers. (OK, he admitted: “I was putting feelers out there.”)

Images of potato fields aside, Idaho is the third-biggest dairy producing state in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With pay lower than in construction, the farms are thirsty for workers. By later this fall, 100 men will have completed the dairy course since Rehder started it in March 2019, he said. Even that’s nowhere near enough. “Idaho’s dairy farmers — they want 20 [men] a month from here. There’s no way we can give them that,” Rehder said.

If some people criticize taxpayers’ covering the cost to train inmates, others criticize the low wages inmates earn for prison jobs. Orofino prison residents earn as little as 20 cents an hour for some jobs.

Residents at the various prison campuses didn’t seem troubled — because they’re getting trained, not just slogging away. “The real value in this is when we get on the other side of the fences,” said Steven Parker, 47, who has completed an 8,000-hour drafting apprenticeship in Correctional Industries. “The greatest value is in the future.”

Inmate training is most controversial when  the jobs are dangerous. California is the state that has relied most prominently for years on prison labor to fight wildfires — even though state licensing, certification and parole requirements have made it essentially impossible for felons to work as firefighters after release. California  reduced those barriers last fall — only to announce soon afterward that it was consolidating its prison hotshot training programs.

Idaho has inmate fire crews, too. In Orofino, where the sky in July was winter-pale from the Snake River fire’s smoke, two crews stood ready to deploy. When asked whether it was right to pay men $1.25 an hour to risk their lives, Warden Terema Carlin seemed defensive. “Go to the beginning of that conversation, which is what are we paying our staff?” she said. “The pay that the residents are getting is probably comparable.” If the legislature could see the value of paying correctional staff, “I think that would trickle down” to what they allocate to pay the inmates, she said.

More generally, it’s the state legislature that sets the prison budget, which in turn pays prison workers, Carlin said. In other words, if Idahoans care about how much prisoners earn to risk their lives for the safety of the public they’re not allowed to live among, they should call their state representatives.

DeTour had his own answer to people who don’t want public funding of prisoners’ education, one that ties together the two criticisms. “These guys work for everything they have. And they work for everything I have,” he said. “Their work pays my salary. There’s no free lunches here.”

The bigger problem is that the best programs don’t serve many inmates. Michigan’s esteemed Vocational Village program is widely considered the national model. It not only provides certifications but also houses students in a separate wing so they can support one another. One of its sites features a 45-foot-high scaffold to teach tree-trimming for utility companies, a career with rising demand. To date, Vocational Village boasts an extraordinary 2 percent recidivism rate, said Chris Gautz, a Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman.

And yet at any given time it can serve only 450 of Michigan’s roughly 32,000 state prisoners, Gautz said. Why? It doesn’t have the space, and it doesn’t have the money to expand the education areas. It’s expensive to expand a prison, because along with walls you have to build fences and other security systems.

Moreover, prisons struggle to afford teachers. Many prison programs are run by community and technical colleges, which are subject to state budget cuts. (For that reason, the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola now has inmates teach career classes.) Career-tech instructors are hard to find even for conventional school classrooms, because they can earn far more as workers than as teachers.

“Being here is not like being in prison. Because we’re treated with respect. We’re not just a number.”

Philip Walker, an inmate in Idaho who has completed more than 10,000 hours’ worth of apprenticeships

The Idaho Correctional Institution-Orofino, a smaller prison in a small town, has little space or staff, with the equivalent of two and a half teachers who cover GED and re-entry as well as careers. The prison offers some informal programs that teach work skills, such as a dog-training wing and a large garden. One former inmate started a Linux Lab; now men gather there — unpaid, and full time when Covid restrictions are not in force — to teach one another how to code and create computer projects. Their successes include an educational intranet video website called O-Tube. The O stands for “Offender.”

Rich Hull teaches an 18-hour introductory welding class for inmates, the same one he teaches at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston. Lewis-Clark pays Hull’s salary, and he volunteers additional time to make the prison class happen. With the certificate from that course, you can get your foot in the door as a welding assistant, at $20 an hour, and if you show diligence “you will advance,” he said.

With the exception of Correctional Industries, which sells products, Idaho’s prison career-technical education programs always have to be “balancing cost and return for the taxpayer,” said Hull, standing at the welding booths. “We’re doing everything we can. [But] vocational training is expensive and you can only push it so far.”

Related: Propelling prisoners to bachelor’s degrees in California

He said he wished the public could understand the value of the training. “Same thing as preschool — a lot of return for a little bit of money,” he said. “It’s more than two plus two equals four. We’re getting seven.”

The morning was rapidly warming, and Hull’s sleeves were rolled up. The only place he could find for the welding booths at Orofino was outdoors, against a building that’s roofed like a lean-to. Hull runs some sessions of the class in February and March, when it’s 40 degrees. The inmates take them.

“It prepares the guys for outside welding!” Hull said.

To DeTour, the men he works with are his colleagues — whether they’re wearing an employee’s or a prisoner’s ID badge. He purposely doesn’t look up what crimes they’ve committed. “We just try to do everything we can to treat everybody with as much respect as humanly possible.”

Though Idaho prison administrators are trying to implement that respect across the system — they call inmates “residents,” for instance — the men repeatedly said they felt it most strongly in their classrooms, their escape from the drama, dreariness and dehumanization of prison life.

“Just coming here, sometimes, it doesn’t even feel like we’re in prison,” said Greg Sanchez-Chavez Jr. in Vocational 4. “It’s just like a regular workplace.” The teacher “treats you just like a normal person.”

Philip Walker, the CNC operator, said: “Being here is not like being in prison. Because we’re treated with respect. We’re not just a number.”

And the certifications help a person’s self-esteem.  The inmate-students who spoke to The Hechinger Report seemed beaten down by the experience of incarceration. Most had been addicted to drugs when they committed their crimes. They felt terrible about having failed their families. They wanted a job, which meant a chance at redemption.

Job training in prison “should be mandatory,” said Nicholas Linn, 30, an inmate at Idaho State Correctional Center. “I think it is essential to rehabilitation. Without the education piece, a lot of people, including myself, we’re dirtbags.”

Behind bars, Linn has taken carpentry, masonry, clerical skills — every class he can. “I’ve never liked myself before prison,” he said. “I was not the person I was meant to be. … This is the first time I’ve ever felt like I had a chance.”

Steven Parker, the drafting apprenticeship graduate, was calm and professional as he discussed his drafting and carpentry work, and showed off handsome beds he’d built for state park shelters. But when he was asked what the public should know about prison career education programs, his wide-set blue eyes suddenly filled with tears. “They’re important. They’re important,” the father of two grown children said. “We’re doing something productive. It’s made a change. It’s made a difference.”

Even if it sometimes looks like playing farmer. While tagging Clyde the training cow, Steven Hanson imagined going to college. Maybe he could start a cattle farm someday, he said. Maybe he could hire veterans with PTSD.

Yes, “there’s that stigma of being labeled a felon,” he said. But he’s using his prison time “to become a productive member of society.”

This story about prison education programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Additional funding was provided by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

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MOBILE, Ala. — MacKenzie Brackett, 14, held up a toothbrush ready for transformation. “We’re going to finish up our robotics badge by making a toothbrush robot,” she announced to four fellow members of Mobile, Alabama’s Girl Scout Troop 8274 in June. Under her khaki uniform vest MacKenzie wore a T-shirt featuring the periodic table, with the slogan “PERIODICALLY I’M SARCASTIC.”

MacKenzie’s mother began snipping the heads off toothbrushes while co-leader Evelyn Toler, 14, stood ready to demonstrate to three members on Zoom.

“I am He-Man, I have the power,” Alyssa Edwards muttered, looking at her battery. “Or She-Ra.” Switching sci-fi references, she looked at her battery’s V-splayed wires and held up her hand in the Spock sign. “Live long and prosper,” she said.

Girl Scouts of the USA has lived long, and it has prospered.* The organization dates back to the early years of the 20th century and boasts alumnae as groundbreaking as Sandra Day O’Connor, Mae Jemison, Queen Latifah, Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart and Condoleezza Rice. But now, it is threatened by multiple factors, including the Boy Scouts going coed, the Covid-19 pandemic and, ironically, the success of feminist movements that made the core Girl Scout mission of girls’ empowerment mainstream. Membership has been declining, and the organization’s efforts to increase diversity have not borne significant fruit: Girl Scouts remain disproportionately white.

Troop 8274 faced a more immediate challenge, imposed not from without but within. In second grade, MacKenzie and Evelyn hived off from a (to their minds) insufficiently ambitious Brownie troop because they wanted to earn every badge in the book. And it looked like they were on track to do so. But, as the core of the troop finished eighth grade, they still needed to earn 16 Cadette badges, and had only eight weeks to do it.

Their mothers felt nervous. The girls felt confident. “The positive wire is longer than the negative wire,” MacKenzie instructed her troop-mates as they stuck batteries onto their toothbrush heads, ready to motor.

As befits the grand dame of girls’ empowerment, what became the Girl Scouts has been standing up for itself from the start. The seeds for the organization were planted more than 100 years ago when a group of British girls showed up at a Boy Scouts event in the U.K. and staked their own claim to Scouting, according to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. Rather than include them, the founder of Scouting in the U.K., Robert Baden-Powell, created a separate organization. Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Georgia, introduced the group to the U.S. soon after.

Science was in the new organization’s DNA. The very first badges, in 1913, included Naturalist, Electrician and Health. The curriculum prepared girls for service to the country, not primarily to a husband and children. That may owe something to Low’s unhappy marriage: She was in the process of divorcing her husband when he died, according to biographer Stacy Cordery. The 1920 handbook presented homemaking as just one option for adulthood, along with working as a nurse or a naturalist or in defense. Before Girl Scouts sold cookies, they sold Liberty bonds.

Related: OPINION — How to get girls into science

To solve its current problems, the organization is drawing on its original strengths: leadership and STEM. These days, it’s not a great idea to join a badge-focused troop like 8274 if you’re notinto science: Close to half the Girl Scout badges focus on the subject. Next come outdoor adventures, entrepreneurship, civics and wellness, along with some art-focused badges. The national office says it updates badge options based on what girls want — Evelyn Toler is on a feedback panel — and evidently girls want science. From 2019 to 2020, close to 90,000 girls earned the new Think Like a Programmer, Coding for Good and Cybersecurity badges, Striegel said.

The Girl Scouts treats STEM its way: with an emphasis on changing the world. Along with following the organization’s longstanding commitment to public service, that stance aligns with research that shows that girls are more likely to stay involved in science when they see it as relevant to their own lives and as a way to improve their communities. (Or to become Hermione Granger, perhaps: One of the Gulfcoast Florida council’s most popular activities is “Mischief Managed,” in which girls program magic wands and brew potions.)

“No other organization matches the scope and variety of evidence-based, out-of-school educational and leadership opportunities.”

Eman El-Sheikh, University of West Florida

To compare, the Boy Scouts Programming badge, which Scouts may start as early as age 11, is impressively technical, requiring the writing of code in several languages. Girl Scouting offers three-badge Coding for Good sequences for all six of its age brackets, even kindergarten-level Daisies. At the middle-school level, Girl Scout Cadettes learn the grammar of coding — algorithms, arguments, functions and arrays— but they learn the basics of just one language, JavaScript, focusing instead on women computer science champions and conceptual design. “Every stage of the coding process offers girls opportunities to use their skills for good,” the Girl Scouts website says.

Even for the Space Scientist badge, a topic that is otherworldly by definition, Girl Scouts have to connect to their community, perhaps by presenting at a stargazing club, performing a “space show” for family and friends or teaching younger Scouts. The national organization makes a point of noting that almost every woman who has flown in space is a Girl Scouts alumna.

Though less technical than the Boy Scout badges, the science in the girls’ badges is not dumbed down. Curriculum partners include NASA, Dell, Raytheon, VEX Robotics and FIRST Robotics. The University of West Florida Center for Cybersecurity team put on a virtual Girl Scouts camp in June with a curriculum based on both the Girl Scout badges and the National Security Agency’s GenCyber standards, said Eman El-Sheikh, associate vice president for the Center for Cybersecurity.

El-Sheikh thinks it makes a difference when girls learn about science in Girl Scouts instead of through another kind of club or at school. “Absolutely!” she said. “No other organization matches the scope and variety of evidence-based, out-of-school educational and leadership opportunities, including those in STEM, specifically designed for girls.”

The overarching goal is to increase women’s leadership in the sciences, just as Girl Scouts has helped launch women into political leadership. There’s a brand-new Digital Leadership badge. The cybersecurity field will soon have millions of unfilled jobs, and “women are grossly underrepresented,” especially among its leaders, the Girl Scouts Research Institute reports.

Even now, the Girl Scouts are unique, said Jean Sinzdak, associate director for Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics. Year in and year out, no other organization has been as proactive as the Girl Scouts in reaching out to the center, or as focused on girls’ political leadership. A lot of women politicians are former Girl Scouts, and “they alwayswant to talk about their Girl Scout service,” she said. On National Girl Scout Day in 2018, Sen. Tammy Duckworth posted a photo of her badges on Instagram.

Peer support makes an enormous difference in promoting girls’ ambition, Sinzdak said. In Girl Scouts, just at the age that girls’ confidence begins to fall off a cliff, “they continue to get that focus on leadership,” she said. “It’s a place where they can unapologetically be girls and be leaders.”

Troop 8274 puts that into practice. With its members in middle and high school, the mothers who formerly planned activities have taken a back seat. The girls plan, prioritize, teach and execute; their mothers guide and remind, shop and drive.

Tori Marks, 16, enjoys it much more than her old troop, which did “very childish” things, like making “this turkey platefor Thanksgiving,” she said with scorn. “It wasn’t very creative.” Tori loves the science and math in Troop 8274, and spoke proudly of her community service awards. Girl Scouting “gives me a chance to work with other girls … to make the world a better place,” she said, echoing the Girl Scout Law.

And without boys around, “You can do whatever you want and you don’t have to worry about being judged,” Tori said.

Troop 8274 has done a lot. MacKenzie and Evelyn showed off photo album after photo album, badge after badge. The mega-badge commemorating Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low’s life, which they worked on one Sunday per month for a year. The book drive. The trip to Disney on Ice that they paid for by cookie sales. (“That’s when I went through my cat’s ears phase — remember?”) The signs they carved for a Scout camp using a wood router. The forensics badge, featuring disgustingly realistic spatter made from Crystal Light powder. The time Evelyn capsized her DIY recycled-material boat, and got the award for “best swimmer.”

All memorialized in embroidery thread on a vest.

Even so, igniting that excitement and loyalty among more girls has been a challenge in a changing nation. A decade ago, Girl Scouts raised its age range and created the Ambassadors category, so girls may Scout from kindergarten until college. But even so, membership numbers keep going down: from 2.3 million in 2010 to 1.7 million girls in 2019, according to annual reports. That’s not the case for afterschool activities in general, National AfterSchool Alliance president Gina Warner said; she theorized that some other extracurriculars offer “much-needed care for working parents,” whereas Scouting relies on parent volunteers.

Then there’s big brother elbowing in. The Boy Scouts made its core programs coed in 2018. More than 140,000 girls have joined since then, participating in all-girl dens, BSA spokeswoman Stephanie Lish said. This year, the organization inaugurated its first female Eagle Scouts. (It published a special edition of its 110-year-old youth magazine, newly renamed from Boys’ Life to Scout Life, honoring them.) Girl Scouts spokeswoman Julia Striegel declined to comment on whether the Girl Scouts viewed the Boy Scouts’ move as a threat — but the all-girls’ organization has sued for trademark infringement.

Nor has the Girl Scouts had significant success diversifying its membership. The organization had an ignoble early history of supporting white supremacy, a history it shares with other youth groups. The 1920 edition of “Scouting for Girls” included Robert Baden-Powell’s racist statements valorizing white dominance, and Southern councils were all-white until Josephine Groves Holloway pushed for the recognition of Black membership in the 1940s, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Fittingly, a local Girl Scout troop recently helped erect a historical marker for Holloway in Nashville.

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it.

The national organization now hails Holloway as a heroine and has made efforts to recruit a more diverse membership. There are already some areas that are more diverse than the organization as a whole, such as Spanish-speaking troops and council-organized empowerment summits featuring women of color. Even so, the Girl Scouts remained 71 percent white as of 2017, counting both adult volunteers and girls.

After George Floyd’s murder, the then-Girl Scouts president, Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, wrote, “Councils must, at a minimum, reflect the diversity of their respective communities.” Striegel, the spokeswoman, said GSUSA is committed “to becoming an antiracist organization.”

Finally, there’s the enrollment impact of the pandemic. Striegel would not say how many Scouts hit pause last school year. The Associated Press reported that Girl Scouts youth membership fell by 30 percent, and that Boy Scouts of America lost close to half its 2.2 million members said. Councils leaned on Zoom and YouTube, and created “Scouting at Home” options that spanned everything from local troops making videos in their kitchens to curriculum by companies such as Cabot Dairy to a Latina leadership panel to virtual summer camp. Zoom allowed Troop 8274 to hold on to members who moved out of state.

Even so, Girl Scouts of Gulfcoast Florida lost about 1,500 of its almost 5,000 girls, leaving insufficient numbers to staff the usual supermarket cookie sale tables, Kelly McGraw, Gulfcoast member experiences director, said. That meant the group “only had 2,000 girls selling cookies this year,” she said. “I had stores calling me, ‘Where are the girls?!’” Nationally, 15 million boxes of Girl Scout cookies went unsold this year, according to the Associated Press, even though bakeries decreased production.

“You can do whatever you want and you don’t have to worry about being judged.”

Tori Marks, Girl Scout, 16

Can Girl Scouts rebound from this latest blow? The national office is, naturally, optimistic. Almost all summer camps sold out this year, Striegel said, and 370,000 girls renewed their membership in April, the best month in some time. She did not clarify whether that number included girls returning after a pandemic pause.

Making Lemon-Ups out of lemons, the Gulfcoast council created a reconnection patch to encourage Scouts to lure back their friends with activities such as creating an elevator pitch and a commercial for Scouting. Along with regaining troopmates, the girls would learn entrepreneurship skills.

In Mobile, the reconnections were faulty — the electrical ones, that is. Evelyn, MacKenzie, Alyssa and her sister, Adrienne, looked perplexedly at Tori’s toothbrush-head robot, their lone success, which proudly lit up and vibrated. The other robots would do one or the other, but not both.

“Mine’s not working. It’s a disappointment,” Evelyn said.

“Mine starts when I touch it. I am the battery,” Alyssa said, taking the positive view.

No one seemed that let down, though. They had a rock-climbing trip to plan and a lawnmower robot to design, like a Roomba but for grass. Seven badges to go.

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

*Correction: An earlier version of this story did not include the full name of the Girl Scouts.

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April Wells grew up west of Chicago, a bright and avid bookworm in a low-income family. Her district, U-46, had gifted classes, but most of the students in them were white, and no one suggested that Wells, who is Black, might benefit from them.

Until middle school, when a U-46 administrator — Wells’ friend’s mother, also Black — noticed that April’s grasp exceeded her classes’ reach. She coached Wells on how to talk with her middle school counselor. Wells spoke up for herself and got into honors classes, where she remained through high school.

“I didn’t magically become gifted,” Wells said. “There was simply someone who had an ability to see my talents and provided a platform.”

Wells went on to college, became a teacher specializing in gifted education and eventually took on the gifted coordinator role for her hometown school district, aiming to give more students the opportunities she almost missed. “It would be the equivalent of education malpractice to have a gifted program that does not look like the students we serve,” she wrote in a book last year about how to make gifted education racially fair.

Defined that way, “education malpractice” describes almost every gifted classroom in the United States. Including, until recently, those in U-46.

Related: Why decades of trying to end racial segregation in gifted education haven’t worked

Gifted education has been trying to solve its racism problem for years. The National Association for Gifted Children, or NAGC, reaffirmed its commitment to the issue after the Black Lives Matter protests. The group pledged to review all its policies to prioritize equity.

Yet diversification efforts have borne little fruit. After analyzing the newest U.S. Education Department civil rights data, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor Scott Peters found that on a state level “equity got worse” in gifted education from 2016 to 2018, with underrepresentation of Hispanic children in a majority of states and of Black students in three-quarters of states, he wrote in an email.

“There’s always resistance from what I call the elite … who think that gifted children look a particular way.”

José Torres, former U-46 superintendent

U-46 is a bright point, a sign that change can happen. West of Chicago, it is Illinois’ second-largest district, with about 40,000 students. In 2009, Hispanic students made up 46 percent of the student body but just 26 percent of gifted students, according to federal data, whereas white students were about 20 points in the opposite direction, comprising 38 percent of the district but 57 percent of gifted students. By 2017-18, the most recent data available, the district was 54 percent Hispanic — and its gifted classes were 48 percent Hispanic. The percentage of white gifted students, 25, was actually a hair lower than their representation in the district.

What happened between 2009 and 2018? Hispanic parents sued, and a federal court decree gave Wells a cudgel.

Several Hispanic and Black families, represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed a federal class-action suit in 2005 that accused the district of discriminating against Hispanic students in school assignments, school closures and ELL services. They later added gifted education to the list of alleged discriminatory practices.

At that time, teachers recommended students for gifted classes.* Invited students had to apply for the gifted classes, come to school on a Saturday morning to take an achievement test that favored children with strong verbal skills and score in the top 8 percent of that test to gain entry, according to legal filings. In the 2006-07 school year, only five of the 231 students who entered the program were Hispanic, and only two were Black.

However, U-46 created a separate, 100 percent Hispanic, elementary program that allowed those students to study the gifted curriculum. That program was bilingual, with different entrance requirements, including an achievement test given in Spanish. The district said that these students weren’t fluent enough in English to succeed in ordinary gifted ed — even though none qualified as an English language learner.

Then-superintendent José Torres had not designed the bilingual gifted program, but he thought it was a great strategy to give Latino students access to advanced work. He grew up in a Spanish-speaking home, and “was in a special-ed classroom because I didn’t speak English,” he said.

“Anytime there’s been a perceived removal of privilege, there’s a challenge.”

April Wells, U-46 gifted coordinator

The lawsuit dragged on for eight years and included a 27-day trial. Judge Robert Gettleman, a Clinton appointee, didn’t buy the district’s contention that the Hispanic students needed a separate class. He ruled that the gifted program was discriminatory. “Segregating public school children on the basis of race or ethnicity is inherently suspect,” he wrote in his 2013 decision. He ordered the district to make its gifted admissions policies fair to students of all races and eliminate the separate class for Hispanic kids. If a child needed language support, he said, put them in the general gifted class with language support.

Related: Getting rid of gifted programs: Trying to teach students at all levels together in one class

The district settled without admitting guilt, paying the plaintiffs $2.5 million for legal costs, according to legal filings, and signed an agreement to follow through on the judge’s orders.

The case was the biggest legal development for gifted education in a generation, NAGC board president Jonathan Plucker says. Gettleman’s decision “sent shock waves through the field, because everyone thought these types of programs were the right thing to do to try to address equity problems,” Plucker, who is white, said of the bilingual gifted program.

Torres felt disgruntled about the lawsuit — gifted education in his district, he pointed out, was no more racially segregated than “99 percent of all districts.” However, he saw the legal challenge as an opportunity to make real change. He said that “there’s always resistance from what I call the elite … who think that gifted children look a particular way.” He hired Wells to overhaul the gifted program in November 2012 even before the judge issued his ruling. In fact, Wells helped write the legal settlement, hoping that it would begin to address not only the symptoms of inequality, but also the cause: centuries of white supremacy. Even well-meaning teachers had “thought patterns, values, and beliefs that interfere with identifying and serving diverse learners in gifted education,” she wrote in her book.

In 2006, of 231 students entering the U-46 school district gifted program, 5 were Hispanic and 2 were Black.

Nothing was wrong with the kids, in other words. The problem was with the system. And it required a multifaceted solution.

The district stripped away the barriers to entry that favored families with money and know-how. Now, rather than testing only those students that teachers recommended, the district considers every third and sixth grader for gifted classes. Students take the CogAT, a cognitive abilities test that measures reasoning ability, during the school day, so that parents don’t have to bring their children in on a weekend. The district triangulates those results with scores from the popular Measure of Academic Progress achievement test and a teacher checklist, the Teacher Inventory of Learning Strengths, and students are evaluated against other kids in their school, not the entire district or a national sample that’s heavy on privileged kids. Parents may still request that their children be considered to be allowed to skip a grade or sit in on particular subjects in higher grades, opportunities that are required by Illinois law, according to the Illinois Association for Gifted Children; to make those decisions, the district uses the Iowa Acceleration Scale, Wells said.

And because experts say that even tests that purport to measure native ability in fact measure exposure to learning opportunities —scores improve with practice, and savvy parents know to prepare their kids — the district also instituted weekly “talent development” lessons to cultivate all students’ creative and analytical thinking in second and third grade in all its low-income schools. While there’s still a Spanish-language gifted option, now it’s part of a two-way, dual-language immersion program, a practice that has become popular with white parents nationally.

Related: Should we screen kids’ genes to ‘predict’ how successful they’ll be in school?

Beyond the specific policy changes, the district realized that educating its employees and the public was also important. “Anytime there’s been a perceived removal of privilege, there’s a challenge,” Wells said. To preempt resistance to changes that will open up gifted seats to a more diverse group of students, she argues, you have to convince everyone, or just about everyone, that it is a good idea. “You’re moving the entire community.”

“Segregating public school children on the basis of race or ethnicity is inherently suspect.”

Judge Robert Gettleman

It helped that the district expanded the number of seats in gifted classes, so that it wasn’t a zero-sum game. “There’s not a single thing we’ve done that’s taken seats away,” Wells said. “We still serve the students who demonstrate the need for this kind of programming.”

U-46 also now trains teachers on anti-racism; requires all elementary gifted teachers to become certified in English as a second language; and has all teachers and administrators take an in-depth, 45-hour course on giftedness. The district invites parents and teachers to activities such as the annual conferences of two Illinois gifted education groups. This February, ten administrators, 19 teachers and four parents attended the Illinois Association for Gifted Children’s Equity and Inclusion virtual summit, U-46 spokeswoman Mary Fergus said. Presenters included Peters and Wells herself, who talked about moving people from “courageous conversations” to “courageous actions.”

One day last fall in U-46, Ed Chau’s Horizon Elementary gifted fifth graders met on Zoom to discuss their “Genius Hour” projects — investigations into topics of their own choosing. The children’s screen names were often fanciful, such as “Mr. cheese is back!!!,” and Chau, a former architect, addressed them as such: “What about you, Potato?” he asked.

The children’s topics included the extermination of the dinosaurs, helping parents around the house, the use of Legos to increase imagination and how cheetahs run so fast. “Mr. cheese” presented Google Slides on echolocation. “I haven’t finished dolphins,” he apologized.

The students encouraged each other to go beyond parroting research, to analyze and draw new conclusions. “Take it to the next level,” one student chimed in.

Chau is the child of Cambodian immigrants; like Wells, he grew up in U-46. Teachers always gave him accelerated work, but he was never identified as gifted. Diversity “really is a great advantage” in gifted classrooms, Chau said. It gives his students the ability to relate to each other and see things from different viewpoints. (Horizon’s gifted program is diverse, although not quite at the level of the rest of the district, federal data shows — the program is 47 percent white, 4 percent Black, and 18 percent Hispanic in a school that is 33 percent white, 10 percent Black and 35 percent Hispanic.)

U-46’s diversity work is not over. “We continue to push the bounds, we continue to try to innovate,” Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Josh Carpenter said in November.

Last summer’s racial justice protests jarred the district’s leaders, as did the results of a May survey in which one-fifth of responding students said that they had personally experienced discrimination or unequal treatment at school based on their ethnicity or culture. The board’s “Call to Action for Equity,” written in June, commits to “remedying any practices that lead to under-representation of students of color in programs such as gifted programs, honors academies, and advanced placement courses.”

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

That will include the reinvention of Elgin High’s Gifted and Talented Academy program, according to a September presentation to the school board. As of 2017-18, per federal data, Elgin High’s gifted students were 37 percent white, 28 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Black in an overall student body that was 10 percent white, 74 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Black. (The high school magnet was not connected to the elementary and middle school gifted classes.) Until this year, applicants to the program had to submit an essay and teacher recommendations and take what the district brochure called an “Elgin High Academy Test” — in fact, the CogAT. The program consisted largely of Advanced Placement classes, which other Elgin High students could take as well.

“Why would we perpetuate a system that we have identified as an artificial barrier for some children, particularly students of color?”

U-46 Superintendent Tony Sanders

Now the Gifted and Talented Academy is becoming the International Baccalaureate Academy. The new application requires only recommendations and a 2.0 GPA. Priority goes to low-income and homeless students as well as to people living nearby, siblings of those in the program and students who have taken advanced math, speech, engineering-like classes such as robotics or an array of extracurriculars including video game club.

“Will the demographics of our [high school magnet] programs change overnight? No, that is not likely. We need to work to provide more support and opportunities for students at earlier grades,” Superintendent Tony Sanders wrote on the district’s website. “However, if we all believe that all students in U-46 should have access … and if we believe that every child will rise to the level of our expectations, then why would we perpetuate a system that we have identified as an artificial barrier for some children, particularly students of color?”

Can other districts push the changes necessary to diversify gifted education without a lawsuit? “This is a really hard question,” Peters said. “When I think about places that have made big changes or have at least given this topic their attention, it’s been because of a state complaint, lawsuit, et cetera. It’s rarely been because it in itself has been a priority for a district.” That said, “there’s nothing about it that can’t be done absent a lawsuit, but I think schools just have so many other things that are demanding their attention that … equity within gifted ed doesn’t rise to the top.”

Any school system can fix gifted inequity if they believe “that all children deserve to learn in an environment that matches their talents and abilities,” Wells said. Just about every district has an equity plan, she pointed out, and gifted education should be part of that.

For example, the Baltimore City school district, twice as large as U-46, now also screens all kids for gifted services; measures kids against their peers, not against a white, privileged norm; and has nearly quadrupled its number of gifted seats. The district, which is 8 percent white, went from having 38 percent white gifted enrollment in 2015 to 28 percent in 2017, according to federal data. New York City has chosen to address inequity by simply ending testing for its gifted elementary school program altogether, and Seattle is considering phasing out gifted classes.

Torres is now president of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), a residential public magnet high school for grades 10 through 12. Applicants must have taken the SATs, but there are no minimum scores. “Absolutely,” districts can diversify gifted education without a lawsuit, he said. From 2017 to 2021, under his leadership, the school increased its percentage of Black and Latino students from 15 to 22 percent, and of students from culturally, linguistically and economically diverse backgrounds from 31 to 35 percent, he said.

His email signature says, “Have you experienced racism, microaggressions, or bias at IMSA? Report it here.”

Torres has a reminder for other superintendents who think diversifying gifted education is too hard to fix or not important enough to prioritize.

“Don’t wait to be sued,” he said.

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

*Correction: This story was corrected to more accurately describe how students were chosen for gifted testing before the lawsuit.

The post An Illinois district proved gifted programs can be racially diverse appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — On a crisp day in early March, two elementary school gifted and talented classes worked on activities in two schools, three miles and a world apart.

In airy PS 64 Frederick Law Olmsted, in affluent, white north Buffalo, 22 would-be Arctic explorers wrestled with how to build a shelter if their team leader had frostbite and snow blindness. Unusually for Buffalo’s public schools — where 20 percent of students are white and 46 percent are Black — about half of the fourth grade class was white.

In PS 61 Arthur O. Eve, on the city’s majority-Black East Side, 13 first graders, all of them Black, Latino or Asian American, folded paper airplanes in their basement classroom as part of an aerodynamics and problem-solving lesson. Unlike at Olmsted, the highest-scoring elementary school in the city, students at Eve scored around the dismal city average in math and English in 2019, when fewer than a quarter of students passed state tests.

The gifted program at Eve opened two years ago as a way to increase access to Buffalo’s disproportionately white, in-demand gifted and talented programs. Buffalo educators hoped Eve’s new program would give more children — particularly children of color — a chance at enrichment and advanced learning.

Yet two years in, Eve’s gifted classes are under-enrolled, while Olmsted always runs out of room — last year, more than 400 children applied for 65 gifted spots. And even though the district made it easier to apply for gifted classes, Olmsted gifted classrooms still don’t look like the rest of the district. White families flock to Olmsted, and eschew the new program at Eve, while families of color have come up against barriers, including an IQ test children take as young as 4, that experts say keep gifted education out of reach for kids who need it. 

Inequity is the norm. Wealthy schools identify more children as gifted than poor ones. Black, Latino and Indigenous groups are often left out.

Buffalo’s struggle to create an integrated, equitable gifted program demonstrates a longtime challenge that has recently gained attention: Gifted education in America has a race problem.

Nearly 60 percent of students in gifted education are white, according to the most recent federal data, compared to 50 percent of public school enrollment overall. Black students, in contrast, made up 9 percent of students in gifted education, although they were 15 percent of the overall student population.  

Many factors contribute to this disparity. Gifted education has racism in its roots: Lewis Terman, the psychologist who in the 1910s popularized the concept of “IQ” that became the foundation of gifted testing, was a eugenicist. And admissions for gifted programs tend to favor children with wealthy, educated parents, who are more likely to be white.

Though it took several decades for gifted education experts to raise concerns, they have been trying to diminish segregation for a generation. If it were easy, it would be done by now.

In a three-part series, The Hechinger Report and NBC News examined the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools; how some districts are trying to diversify gifted classes or get rid of them altogether; and how scientific progress in gene testing could boost — and complicate — efforts to make gifted programs fairer.

School administrators often see gifted education as a frill. Nationally, 3.3 million public school students were identified as gifted in 2015-16, about 6 percent of the total school population, according to the federal Department of Education. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many districts to cut budgets, pushes gifted education even farther down the priority list. However, addressing its continuing racial inequality could not be more urgent, education advocates say, especially after the summer’s civil rights protests.

It’s not just Buffalo. Purdue University’s Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute found in 2019 that inequity is the norm. Wealthy schools identify more children as gifted than do poor ones. Black, Latino and Indigenous students are often left out.

South Dakota and Alaska, for instance, have a combined 46,000 Native children, fewer than 300 of whom, 0.6 percent, were considered gifted in 2015-16. Black and Latino children fill 65 percent of New York City classrooms but just 22 percent of gifted seats.

The Hechinger Report’s analysis of U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights data suggested the problem is acute in some cities that also have high levels of racial segregation by neighborhood. In Cincinnati, for instance, Black students made up 63 percent of the student body but just 16 percent of the small gifted program, according to 2015 data from the Office for Civil Rights.

In Buffalo, administrators say they know that their district’s gifted education racial imbalance is a problem: The Office for Civil Rights investigated the district six years ago. In response, the district made it easier to apply for Olmsted’s gifted program, created the new program at Eve and began the process of infusing every classroom from pre-K through fourth grade with enriched lessons.

Other districts are also wrestling with the problem. The New York City and Seattle school districts have considered proposals to eliminate gifted education altogether. And even before June’s historic civil rights protests, the issue of racism permeated the National Association for Gifted Children’s (largely white) November 2019 conference in Albuquerque. In panel after panel, experts and educators wrung their hands and proffered solutions. Gifted education needs to diversify, they said — for racial and social justice, and because otherwise it might not survive.

But is it possible to make gifted education representative? Does letting more kids in fix the underlying inequities? Can we even agree on what “giftedness” is at all?

Despite a century of research, definitions of giftedness are fuzzy. People disagree over whether it should be measured in absolute or relative terms; whether there is a limit to the proportion of humanity that is gifted; whether giftedness can be cultivated; whether it must be backed up by achievement; and whether it should include athletic abilities.

Terman set the stage by writing in the 1910s that giftedness was very high intelligence, which he defined as the top 1 percent of scorers on his IQ exam, researcher Jennifer L. Jolly wrote in 2005. Psychologists later poked holes in that definition. They said that giftedness could also be creativity, and found that a high IQ score did not necessarily correspond with leadership, professional accomplishment or even success in school. There are gifted dropouts.

The National Association for Gifted Children defines its target group as kids whose “ability is significantly above the norm for their age.” Maria Valenti-Barone, a gifted and talented teacher at Olmsted, said that giftedness is “the potential to do great things in society.”

Related: Up to 3.6 million students should be labeled gifted, but aren’t

Psychologist Joseph Renzulli, probably the most influential person in gifted education today, views giftedness as dynamic, not as a fixed quality you either have or don’t. He proposed a Venn diagram: Giftedness is where creativity, above-average ability and commitment to completing a task meet. He speaks not of gifted peoplebut of gifted behaviors that can be developed and that show up “in certain people, at certain times, under certain circumstances.” Renzulli’s summer workshops for educators have trained more than 35,000 teachers over 40 years, including numerous Olmsted staff.

Then there’s the question of personality, of what a gifted person is like. A number of experts said that gifted kids come in all personality flavors — for every perfectionist, there’s a wild, messy kid whose backpack is a pit of despair. Yet the internet and reference books teem with professionally endorsed lists of so-called gifted traits. These lists are often proffered to general education teachers and to parents to help them look out for children who might be gifted. The traits are all over the map; NAGC’s list includes emotional oversensitivity, nonstop chattering, “feelings of being different,” “unconcern for social norms,” “high expectations of self and others” and “keen sense of humor.” It’s like reading a horoscope: You can always find something that fits.

“Every child has gifts. All kids do have special talents. But we only measure a very few.”

Gary Orfield, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project

Many teachers support Howard Gardner’s well-known theory of “multiple intelligences.” A standard textbook in the field, “Education of the Gifted and Talented,” says in the first pages of its latest edition that “We must recognize multiple forms of giftedness.”

Gary Orfield, co-director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, believes schools define giftedness too narrowly. “Every child has gifts,” he said. “All kids do have special talents. But we only measure a very few.”

Nowadays, many states build off the federal government’s kitchen-sink definition: Gifted and talented students are those who “give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”

But in practice, districts often still identify gifted children through IQ and other cognitive ability tests, and Terman’s attitude still lingers. Buried in the back, the “Education of the Gifted and Talented” textbook states that “basic intelligence … is best measured by IQ tests,” and that those scores, “whether we like it or not, and whether it appears elitist, racist, unfair, and/or undemocratic,” are the single best predictor of life outcomes as wide-ranging as “social competence, child abuse, delinquency, crime, poverty, accident proneness, death from auto accidents … smoking during pregnancy, health problems and Medicare claims, and getting a divorce within five years of marriage.”

A clear definition of giftedness is elitist while a broad definition is useless. But however Buffalo was defining giftedness, advocates for Black children knew that something must be wrong because their city couldn’t possibly have so few gifted Black kids.

Surrounded by portraits of creative thinkers such as Muppets creator Jim Henson, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the anthropologist Jane Goodall, four students in an Olmsted fourth grade gifted class debated an early step of the Arctic shelter challenge: phrasing the problem so that they could come up with a solution. “This is hard,” one muttered, bending over her paper.

“Black hat,” Valenti-Barone instructed them, “add a few more details.”

By that, the students knew, their teacher meant one of the psychologist Dr. Edward de Bono’s six “thinking hats,” specifically the one that called on thinkers to assess their ideas and look for potential flaws.

Olmsted’s program is based on Renzulli’s three-tiered whole-school enrichment model. The entire school learns about critical thinking and creativity, and gifted kids take most of their classes with their peers, except for the special gifted class, taught by Valenti-Barone, which meets every other day.

While gifted education generally took off in the U.S. after Russia launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it arrived in Buffalo only after a 1976 federal court ordered the highly segregated city to integrate its schools. Rather than force integration like in Boston, the district came up with an array of magnet programs to encourage white families to enroll their children in predominantly Black public schools. That included a gifted track housed at a largely Black campus near the city’s Delaware Park, the school that would later be renamed Olmsted.

Buffalo’s magnet programs, including Olmsted, integrated schools without Boston’s violence. White and middle-class students attracted to the magnets stayed in the school system, and mixed with Black and low-income students in the same schools. Test scores for all students went up across the board. “They were a national model,” the UCLA’s Orfield said.

To create racial balance, the district conducted outreach, expanded the attendance zone for the seats reserved for nongifted neighborhood kids and had a “prep program” for students who showed potential for giftedness but fell short of the admissions requirements, retired Olmsted middle school principal Michael Gruber said.

But Buffalo’s golden age of integration ebbed quickly. Federal court supervision of the city’s desegregation plan ended in 1995, and a white family whose child did not get into the academically selective middle-high school City Honors sued the district in 1997, alleging “reverse discrimination.” The district ceased efforts to balance race in gifted admissions, according to a report that UCLA’s Civil Rights Project produced for the district in 2015.

Without the outreach and prep program, the Olmsted gifted program began to grow whiter — from 55 percent Black and 30 percent white in 2004 to 32 percent Black and 46 percent white in 2013, according to federal data. People began raising concerns that the admissions process was onerous: Parents had to take their 4-year-olds to the school on a Saturday for a one-on-one IQ test with a psychologist. “I was stunned,” said Sally Krisel, a former president of the National Association for Gifted Children, who visited Buffalo in the late 1990s to advise on how to identify gifted students. “Low-income families, they are working on Saturday.”

The preschoolers also took math and reading readiness tests, and parents had to fill out “inventories” rating their children’s academic prowess, creativity and ability to stay on task. At one time, several people said, the district required a recommendation from a preschool teacher. The preschools that served lots of kids who went to Olmsted knew the sort of thing to write. Many of the parents who applied to Olmsted didn’t even necessarily want gifted services, said Kate Steilen, an education doctoral student and blogger who interviewed the families for a research project. They knew not all their children were especially brilliant — they just wanted to get into the best elementary school in the city.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

In 2014, a group of Buffalo parents filed a racial discrimination complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. They named Olmsted and several other magnet programs. The federal government found that the district discriminated against Black children, citing data that included Olmsted #64’s admissions numbers: Close to 1 in 5 white applicants were offered a spot at the school, compared to 1 in 10 Black applicants.

The district acknowledged the shortcomings. “Smart parents were using the system to their advantage,”  Will Keresztes, the acting superintendent during the investigation, said. The academic screening tools “were patently unfair.” The district hired Orfield’s UCLA group to recommend changes.

Rather than find a better way to slice the pie, UCLA recommended making the pie bigger. Olmsted should stop cordoning off one-third of its elementary seats for nongifted neighborhood students.  And Buffalo should create “a new high standards elementary school,” they wrote, with 10 percent of seats reserved for “students who have not been adequately prepared but show signs of strong potential.”

Buffalo Public Schools adopted many, though not all, of the recommendations. It streamlined the gifted admissions process, dropping the academic readiness tests and recommendations, but keeping the individually administered IQ test. And while the district did not duplicate Olmsted, it did expand Olmsted’s gifted program to a very different school.

At Eve #61, first grader Kaiden walked across the classroom in early March, looking for a buddy with whom to make paper airplanes. It was the second year of the gifted program at Eve. The school used to be racially integrated, but white families left after the federal court order ended. Educators have developed an arts-infused curriculum with full-time dance, theater, art, and violin teachers. The halls are dingy but lined with students’ Inuit sculptures and dreamcatchers.

Sarah Malczewski, who teaches gifted kids like Kaiden for a portion of each day, created her own curriculum for Eve, but she taught a lot of the same techniques as the Olmsted program, including the de Bono hats and other methods to think outside the box.

The 13 students in Kaiden’s gifted class, which meets daily, had started the project the day before, so they colored in their paper airplanes’ wings, practiced their tosses — and searched for even better designs. “My parents made me make five paper airplanes at home so I would win this,” Sharmin, browsing videos on an iPad with classmate Mariah, said.

“Lookit lookit lookit! Five hundred feet!” Mariah exclaimed to Sharmin, after finding a promising video. Kaiden sat down next to them and Mariah pushed the iPad closer so he could see. One boy accidentally bonked his classmate with a plane and apologized.

Finally, they lined up in the hallway for the official competition. Jumping up and down quietly in lieu of disruptive whooping, they were so excited to pitch the planes that they barely noticed how far they traveled. Malczewski praised not their airplanes but their attitudes, the way they kept working despite frustrations. “I was very happy with the way you guys handled it,” she said. That “is called ‘persistence.’ ”

Afterwards, Malczewski’s students described the gifted class with enthusiasm. Mariah said her favorite hat was the black one, “judgment. Because judgment means consequences, and when you have consequences it means you know you can’t do it and you won’t do it again,” she said. Keyon, from Malczewski’s second grade class, also preferred the black hat, because “it reminds me of the color of my skin.”

Their mouths full of egg-sausage biscuit later that day, Kaiden and his classmate King enthused about Fridays, when “Ms. M.” lets them play learning games on the computer and “sometimes she gives us her phone,” King said. “We get to do fun things,” Kaiden said, chewing.

“Kaiden is — he’s something different!” his mom, Shakeirra McDuffie, who is African American, said a couple weeks later, laughing. He used to wear costumes everywhere; he wouldn’t listen to the pediatrician until the doctor addressed him as “Batman.” For Christmas last year, he asked for a drone and a science kit. His preschool teacher told McDuffie, “You have to try to get him in a program” for advanced students, to ensure he was challenged.

McDuffie was living down the street from Olmsted at the time and applied to the school’s neighborhood program, not the gifted class, but Kaiden didn’t get in. So she chose Eve, hearing it was a good school, not knowing it was launching a gifted program.

Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms

Malczewski had only three formally gifted kids in kindergarten, two in first grade and four in second in the 2019-20 school year. So Eve has opted to include children such as Kaiden who seemed like they would benefit, not just those who passed the one-on-one IQ test.

“I don’t think there are explicit ill intentions, but I think people go with what they’re comfortable with.”

Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization co-chair Rachel Fix Dominguez, on white parents’ reluctance to send their kids to majority-Black schools

Principal Parette Walker, at one time the principal of Olmsted #64, said parents just didn’t know about Eve yet. “It’s a new program. So we have to advertise it,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll get the enrollment.”

Several parents, however, suggested another reason for the gifted enrollment shortfall at Eve: White parents didn’t want to send their kids to a majority-Black school. It wasn’t the gifted education they were interested in, but the high-performing, majority-white Olmsted. Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization co-chair Rachel Fix Dominguez, who is white, said she’d talked to white, middle-class parents who had turned down a spot in the gifted program at Eve. “They don’t know anyone whose kid has gone to 61, so they’re not going to be the vanguard,” she said. “I don’t think there are explicit ill intentions, but I think people go with what they’re comfortable with.”

That’s not unique to Buffalo. Harvard University researchers found that while white parents supported racially integrated schools in principle, they were uncomfortable with having their children be the minority and less likely to enroll their children in schools with large numbers of Black students.

Howard Thompson II, a Black substitute teacher at Eve whose son passed the gifted test and is in Malczewski’s class, put it plainly: “Racism will always play a factor in most people’s decision-making,” he said.

If the point is to give more Black children in Buffalo the chance to attend gifted programs, maybe Eve’s lack of white students is for the best. “They say some people’s loss is another person’s gain,” Thompson said. When white parents shy away, “more people of color will have the opportunity.”

Both he and McDuffie still considered Olmsted’s gifted program to be better: more robust, with more hours per day of advanced instruction — though it wasn’t clear that was accurate. They hoped to move their sons to Olmsted in the fall. At Olmsted, Kaiden would “be challenged more,” McDuffie said. “I can’t feel like I’m failing my child just because the school system is.”

Even some people who were uncomfortable with the selection standards chose the selective schools. Sam Radford, a Black past president of the District Parent Coordinating Council, put one of his own children in PS 156 Frederick Law Olmsted Middle-High School and another at City Honors School even though his group filed the Office for Civil Rights complaint. He felt uncomfortable about the decision. But “we had to put them in a place where they would get a good education,” he said.

Many of the changes districts make to solve the diversity problem end up making it worse. New York City families seeking gifted education used to wrestle with a panoply of individual school requirements and applications. Critics said it confused less-savvy parents and allowed favoritism. So, in 2007, then-Chancellor Joel Klein announced a uniform admissions process based on a single test with a citywide cutoff — and the inequities grew deeper.

There are many ways to go wrong when identifying gifted children, Ohio State professor Donna Ford said, ways that result in fewer disadvantaged children and more wealthy and white children passing the bar. For instance: Using achievement tests, which better measure a child’s schooling and home resources than their potential. Measuring disadvantaged kids against a national norm instead of against other kids like them. Testing too young — a 4-year-old can have a bad day, and the results don’t necessarily hold over time. And testing only students whose teachers or parents are aware of the program and request it; few teachers get trained in gifted education, so their recommendations are often based on stereotypes (studies find that Black students are more likely to get into gifted programs if they have teachers of the same race).

“Racism will always play a factor in most people’s decision-making.”

Howard Thompson II, a substitute teacher at Eve

Discrimination in gifted education is “intentional and it’s unintentional,” Ford said. But “if you are aware of reasonable alternatives and don’t use them, then it’s intentional.”

Though no one has found a way to identify kids with extraordinary potential that doesn’t map closely onto the privileges of birth, researchers and administrators at the NAGC conference last fall highlighted several promising tactics.

In Anchorage, Alaska, administrators now flag the top 4 percent of scorers in each school on a popular national test that measures academic progress, the MAP, and consider them for gifted services — no matter whether the parent has nudged or not. “We’re supposed to be finding talent and not using [the screening process] to keep people out,” gifted supervisor Peter Ljubicich. He hopes the program will help them create greater gifted equity. As of 2015, even after increasing outreach to communities of color, gifted programs remained close to 60 percent white in a 43 percent white district, according to U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights data.

Another tactic is to include promising students who have not passed an IQ test in gifted programs, a model called “talent development.” That’s what Eve is doing with students like Kaiden. The advantage of talent development is that kids who need a challenge don’t have to meet a potentially disqualifying entrance standard. One disadvantage is that — human nature being what it is — sometimes such programs get tagged as second-best. Another is that talent development is not a sure bet for getting more students past the gatekeepers.

St. Charles Parish outside New Orleans began talent development in 2012. At first it worked: The district increased the number and diversity of students who passed the gifted test after they spent time in gifted classes. “You need these kinds of talent development programs,” Ford told Hechinger’s Emmanuel Felton in 2015. Then the publisher of the test they were using, the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales, updated its scoring standards — and the pass rate went back down, gifted director Ginny Medina-Hamilton said. As of May 2019, only 26 of the district’s more than 3,200 Black students had been identified as gifted, according to data that Medina-Hamilton shared. (Additional Black kids were “talented,” which in Louisiana refers specifically to the arts.) St. Charles has switched to the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children in the hopes of having more students qualify.

Another way to diversify is to expand the number of gifted seats, which UCLA recommended for Buffalo. About 250 of Buffalo’s more than 30,000 students are in a gifted program. If Buffalo hewed to the national average, it would have about 2,000 gifted kids. But despite the high demand for Olmsted, administrators said that they didn’t need to significantly expand gifted education, beyond adding the program at Eve, because Buffalo has plenty of other academically stimulating options, including STEM and Montessori programs.

Instead, Buffalo got a $1 million grant in 2018 from the Kellogg Foundation to help teachers incorporate bits of gifted education into all pre-K to fourth grade classrooms, an effort that is still being rolled out. (The Kellogg Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) The goal is to offer enrichment to all students, whether or not they’ve formally tested as “gifted.” 

This is in line with a new theory that envisions gifted classes as a service, like special education: an array of personalized support for a child with learning needs outside the norm. Gifted students stay in their home schools and get extra activities or support — perhaps through extra components to an assignment, or by attending fifth grade math as third graders.

Orfield supports serving students where they are. “Offering opportunities and challenges is what a school should do. Whether it’s necessary to segregate kids to do that is another matter,” he said.

But all that enrichment can get expensive. The federal government does not supplement local funding for gifted programs as it does for special education. As of 2015–16, only four states, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Oklahoma, both mandated gifted education and fully funded the service, according to a report from Purdue University’s college of education.

New York is one of 20 states that don’t require that districts offer gifted education at all, or provide money for it. And Buffalo’s schools had no shortage of costly demands, even before the coronavirus created a budget crisis for the district. Attendees at a variety of parent group meetings in March voiced worries about safety, classrooms without books and 4-year-olds throwing desks.

Buffalo Superintendent Kriner Cash “probably believes philosophically that there should be a gifted and talented program in every school,” said Radford, the past president of the District Parent Coordinating Council. “The question is where the money would come from.”

The district did not answer questions about how much the gifted program costs.

Anne Botticelli, the district’s chief academic officer, said she hopes to be able to offer what she called “enrichment,” though not gifted and talented services, to more students in the future. “We know that we have gems in all of our schools,” she said.

On a March morning, third graders filed into class at PS 45 International School and opened their math composition books. They worked out their daily Think Tank problem to the soft strains of an instrumental version of “I Believe I Can Fly.” At home they speak 10 different languages, including Kinyamulenge and Mai-Mai, but here they focused as one on calculating the missing number that made a set of scales “balance” and writing a number sentence for the resulting equation. A sign on the wall said, “I CAN.”

“Anybody in the dip?” their teacher, Mary Anne Kulp, called out, using one of the catchphrases that encourage her kids to keep going when they’re struggling to understand.

Kulp was thrilled when the district made an off-the-shelf creative-thinking math program, Think Tanks math boxes, available to teachers. “Every student in here achieves. Every single one,” said Kulp, who flies planes and rides motorcycles in her spare time. “I want everybody growing.”

The kids said the math challenges were fun. “It starts our brain in the morning,” Aymir explained. “I just love them because it helps me a lot. And me and my friends discuss it.”

“I am so proud of you,” Kulp told the class in a circle time afterwards. “You are working so hard to get—”

“SMART!” the class yelled.

Kulp doubted whether any subset of students, no matter how gifted, needed a separate class or school. “Technology is a wonderful, wonderful thing. You can assign extra activities,” she said. “We do a lot of small groups, a lot of differentiation.” Students at her school who pass the gifted test tend to stay put instead of transferring to Olmsted, she said. It may be because there are so few seats, but she believes it’s “because they love it here and they feel at home and they feel that all of their needs are going to be met,” she said.

Buffalo administrators say they want to improve social and racial justice, especially in the area of discipline. They have an office dedicated to racial equity, hold regular professional development on racial diversity for teachers and infused The New York Times’ 1619 Project into middle and high school curriculum. They were open to talking about their stumbles.

However, the district’s efforts in gifted education have not moved the needle. For fall 2020, the parents of 403 children applied to Olmsted’s elementary gifted program and 39 to Eve’s, according to data the district provided. One quarter of the white students and the multiracial students were assigned seats. Only 11 percent of the Black and 10 percent of the Hispanic children got in.

Last year, parents asked the federal Office for Civil Rights to reopen the 2014 investigation. After they held a press conference, the New York state attorney general’s office sent Cash a letter, saying it had opened a separate “inquiry” and requesting information about racially disparate school discipline and admissions. Nathaniel Kuzma, the Buffalo district’s general counsel, wrote in response that the district would cooperate, but added that it “has become a national proof point for district transformation around issues of equity, justice, the mindset of high expectations for all children, and in forthright dialogue about race and discrimination.” The state attorney general’s investigation was still active; the office declined to comment.

Should Buffalo shutter gifted education because of its racial inequity? McDuffie and Thompson, African American parents of students at Eve, thought the opposite: that the district should expand. “Don’t shut it down,” said McDuffie, Kaiden’s mom. “Open up your doors and be wider.”

Thompson’s son, Howard III, was offered a gifted seat at Olmsted for third grade, his father said. But he and his wife decided to keep him at Eve. Howard III knew the school and had built good relationships with teachers and friends. The gifted program would expand and improve; anyway, “parental involvement plays a far more pivotal role in a child’s growth and development,” Thompson said. If anything in the classroom falls short, he will provide it. He and his wife want their child to “enjoy being a kid first, and then a wonderful student, second.”

And then attend highly selective City Honors for the rest of his school career, he said.

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

The post Why decades of trying to end racial segregation in gifted education haven’t worked appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As many as 3.6 million gifted children are being overlooked in school — more than the 3.3 million U.S. public school children already labeled as gifted.

That’s according to a report from Purdue University’s Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute, GER2I, released this month at the annual convention of the National Association for Gifted Children, or NAGC.

Four of 10 children attended public schools where not a single student was identified as gifted, even though most states legally require schools to find and serve gifted children and provide money to do so.

There’s “untapped potential around the country,” the report’s co-author Gilman Whiting of Vanderbilt University said.

The report comes at a time when New York City and Seattle are arguing over proposals to eliminate gifted education altogether due to racial discrimination and inequality in gifted programs.

Research has shown for many years that Asian, white and higher-income students are disproportionately likely to be classified as gifted.  The GER2I report paints a dismal picture of ongoing inequality in gifted education despite efforts to find more gifted children of color and gifted children from low-income families.

 [pullquote author=”” description=”” style=”new-pullquote”]As many as 3.6 million gifted children are being overlooked in school — more than the 3.3 million U.S. public school children already labeled as gifted.[/pullquote]

After analyzing public school civil rights data from the federal Education Department for the 2015-16 school year, the most recent available, researchers were startled to find very few bright spots.

“Nothing has actually changed,” GER2I director Marcia Gentry said to a room of educators at the conference. “You came here to be depressed, right?”

On average, in the six of 10 schools that have identified gifted children, 10 percent of students were classified as gifted. However, there was a wealth gap: Low-income schools identified 8 percent of their students as gifted, compared to 13 percent of students at wealthier schools, according to the report.

Gentry estimated that two- thirds to three-quarters of gifted African American students are overlooked. “We’re losing talent,” she said.

Gifted students typically get to jump ahead in lessons, take more challenging classes or participate in enrichment activities, such as engineering or drama. As with special education students, gifted children may attend separate programs, or they may receive services in an ordinary classroom. Some bright students who don’t get extra resources do fine on their own but lose the opportunity to, say, take college math in high school, experts at the conference said. However, some get bored, disengage, underperform and even drop out, or are simply never noticed or encouraged.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

A majority of states required schools to find gifted children at the time the data was collected. Most, Gentry said, based their definition of giftedness on federal guidelines: “Students, children, or youth who give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”

And yet, a child considered gifted at one school might not make the cut in the state next door, or even in a nearby district. State rules and oversight for identifying gifted students vary widely, and education departments generally don’t do a good job of communicating the parameters. This year, Ohio approved 27 different tests for identifying gifted students. The GER2I report measured access to special gifted services, not the quality of those services.

In some states, racial disparities are vast. In Virginia, black students make up one-quarter of public school students, but 11 percent of gifted students. Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire and Wyoming each identified fewer than 35 black children — statewide — as gifted. South Dakota has no state mandate to find or specially educate gifted students. The number of identified gifted students of color there is vanishingly small: Just 31 of the state’s almost 4,000 African American students and 56 of its 15,000 Native students were labeled as gifted. Alaska found only 241 of its almost 31,000 Native students to be gifted. The research team is currently calculating gifted identification among English language learners.

Across the board, the share of white and Asian students in gifted education was about the same as, or higher than, their presence in their overall student body. Gentry told the conference attendees that she preferred not to call them “overrepresented” in gifted education but instead to say “well-represented,” because “I don’t want to un-identify kids.”

To calculate the number of 3.6 million overlooked students, the researchers first applied the 10 percent average to the roughly 4 of 10 schools that had identified no gifted students at all, Gentry said. Then they adjusted that number for the thousands of Latinx, African American, Native American/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students who would have been included if they were found to be gifted at the same rate as their white and Asian peers.

The NAGC conference had an intense focus on remedying inequality in gifted education. “There is no question that there is a systemic bias within our system,” the association board president Jonathan Plucker said at the opening session, which was titled, “Giftedness Knows No Boundaries.” Dozens of sessions focused on “equity” or “cultural competency” or “underserved populations.”

Experts at the conference argued that screening all children for giftedness, not just those whose parents or teachers request it, can ameliorate inequality. They also advised erring on the side of helping more children, not fewer; using tasks and tests that don’t rely on children being good at math or English, to avoid mistaking early academic advantages for an overall ability to learn; and ranking low-income and minority children against their peers, not against an overall, national set of test scores.

Gentry said that the inequities are stark, and “I don’t want to whitewash it anymore.” But she believes that gifted education should be fixed, not eliminated, otherwise “maybe we hurt the underrepresented kids the most.”

This story about gifted students 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 Up to 3.6 million students should be labeled gifted, but aren’t appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CLARKSDALE, Miss. — It was a rainy February morning, but Clarksdale Collegiate Principal Amanda Johnson was fired up. “You know how Ms. Johnson feels about Friday,” she told the students as she paced around the cafeteria in an “I am black history” shirt. “If you didn’t get it all done … Friday’s the day you turn it around.”

The former church youth-group multipurpose room had become a shrine to academic achievement, the stained-glass window overshadowed by bold purple banners listing the students’ future college graduation years, the school’s values and the slogan “#RUReady.” The students were just in kindergarten, first and second grade, but Johnson was projecting far into the future.

“Raise your hand if you know your stretch goal,” Johnson said — referring to students’ personal better-than-best target score on their upcoming standardized tests. “I need you to know what you’re aiming at.”

Ricky Taylor, a skinny first grader with a gap between his front teeth, raised his hand way up until it practically lifted him off the bench. “My stretch goal in math is 191,” he said. Johnson hustled over and gave Ricky a dollar.

The 140 voices shrilled the morning chant, spelling out the school’s core rules: Work hard, be nice, stay safe, demonstrate urgency. “Because I matter. Because you matter. I am a scholar. And a future college graduate!”

Then they walked silently to their homerooms past a volunteer who was busy counting the crushed, damp bills students had brought from home for their college accounts.

Johnson opened the doors of Mississippi’s first rural charter school in this temporary space a year ago. Pulling students from Coahoma County and its county seat of Clarksdale, the school serves an area of the Mississippi Delta known for its rich blues heritage, low incomes and abysmal educational outcomes. For Johnson, the school was a bid to cultivate the greatness she saw in these local kids, including her own daughters. They were so bright, so eager, and yet if the current statistics held, 25 percent would not graduate from high school.

But Clarksdale Collegiate opened in the face of protest. The Clarksdale school board and Advocates for Public Education, a group of local parents and educators formed to oppose the charter, submitted an amicus brief in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit aiming to overturn the state’s entire charter law.

In a county with fewer than 27,000 residents, more than 1,300 people signed a petition opposing the school. They wanted a better education for all students, not just a few, Coahoma County lawmaker Johnny Newson told the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board. His comments at the 2017 meeting were ineffective: The board had already approved the charter’s application before they opened up public comment, according to MCSA’s minutes.

Nationally, controversy over opening a charter school is nothing new. But in Clarksdale, it had a particularly painful resonance. In 1970, when the courts ordered schools to desegregate and controversies over busing erupted across the country, white parents in Coahoma County fled the public system for private segregation academies, calling it “school choice.”

White abandonment of the public system impoverished the public schools that served Clarksdale’s African American majority. Fifty years later, the term “school choice” still evokes injustice to the elderly African American educators and NAACP civil rights activists who led the drive to stop Clarksdale Collegiate. They saw the charter school as a new way to create a free but essentially private education for the privileged.

Elsewhere in the Deep South, charters have lived up, or rather down, to that fear. In Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, dozens of taxpayer-funded public charters enroll far more white students than any of the traditional public schools in their areas. They don’t charge tuition, but they’ve become exclusive enclaves through other means — for example, by not providing a free or subsidized lunch or bus transportation. Southwest Georgia S.T.E.M. Charter School opened in 2016 on the former campus of the shuttered Randolph Southern School, a private school that had not enrolled a single Black student in 2012, the last year for which enrollment numbers are available. During its first year, the charter school’s student body was 70 percent white; enrollment in the local public schools was 4 percent white.

Related: Are rural charter schools viable in Mississippi?

Despite the chorus of opposition, parents came to Clarksdale Collegiate. Ricky’s foster parents, Sakenna and Keithan Dear, worked in public school systems, but they signed Ricky up anyway. They hoped this school would support the child they were trying to adopt, who had come to them at age 3 from the children’s hospital in Memphis barely speaking, and left kindergarten at a local public school unable to read basic sight words.

Ricky had his own hopes for his new school. He wanted his teachers to pay attention to him. He wanted them to build a playground. He wanted to learn how to fly an airplane, only not too far off the ground, because heights were scary.

Like the Dears, most families who came to the charter were Black, and they believed Johnson when she said her school would be different. It would, first and last, be better than the schools the area already had. Johnson was opening outside the traditional public system not to create some kind of segregated fiefdom but because that’s where she knew how to run a great school. But she faced an uphill battle against public sentiment strong enough to silence even supporters. She would have to convince them by following through on her promises, helping kids like Ricky learn to read.

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he Brown v. Board of Education decision requiring public schools to desegregate came down in 1955, but some 14 years later, in the fall of 1969, Clarksdale high schools were still separate and unequal. The African American students at Higgins High used white Clarksdale High’s ripped-up textbooks, nastily graffitied with vulgar words, former student Elnora Fondren Palmtag told a college newspaper reporter decades later. In the 1960s there wasn’t a single bathroom in downtown Clarksdale that African Americans were allowed to use — even at the doctor’s office Black patients had to hold it, she said. Palmtag was the only Black student to attend Clarksdale High in the 1960s, and it took an NAACP-funded taxi cab with decoys to get her there safely.

On Oct. 29, 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Alexander v Holmes County Board of Education, ruling against the “freedom of choice” plans school districts had maintained in Mississippi and elsewhere. The high court ordered all remaining segregated districts across the country to integrate “immediately.” Some big-city districts adopted busing plans, but in the rural South, mostly districts desegregated by closing and consolidating schools. On Feb. 1, 1970, Higgins and Clarksdale high schools were merged in the Clarksdale building, and Higgins became an integrated junior high. The surrounding Coahoma schools also began consolidating in March.

In the lead-up to desegregation, the Clarksdale Press-Register outlined how white parents could leave the districts. About 500 white parents attended the first meeting to discuss opening a private, segregated school; 115 registered on the spot for the future school, which would later be named Lee Academy. A junior high principal resigned from the public school to lead it. A Presbyterian church opened a private school, too, and the Baptist and Methodist schools added grades to accommodate the expected influx of white students, according to contemporaneous press coverage. St. Elizabeth Catholic dropped its expansion plan after the Jackson bishop blasted its board, saying he would go to Rome to stop them if he had to.

When the Clarksdale Public schools reopened Feb. 2, 1970, after a one-day integration reorganization break, 574 of Clarksdale Junior High’s 585 white students did not show up, the newspaper reported. White children vanished entirely from the public schools in nearby counties — Indianola lost almost 1,000 to private schools. Mississippi’s public school enrollment fell by 23,000 students that month, the Associated Press reported. The Press-Register editorial board wrung its hands at how “obdurate desegregation policies” were wrecking the public schools.

Lee Academy moved to a new campus that fall, built on a former cotton field. Courtney Shaffer, who graduated with Lee’s first senior class, wasn’t happy to be pulled from Coahoma High after dreaming about prom and yearbook and cheerleading. But, she said in an interview, you didn’t say no to your parents back then. Plus, Lee had air conditioning, the first school she’d ever attended that did. The education was no different: Lee’s teachers had fled the public schools along with the kids.

Related: Private academies keep students separate and unequal 40 years later

Even as white children left the public system, the white power structure remained. When Clarksdale and Higgins merged, the Clarksdale High principal kept his job; his Higgins counterpart was demoted to assistant. Josephine Rhymes, who is Black and who had taught at Higgins, ended up as the consolidated high school’s only French teacher, so some white kids switched to Spanish. High school teacher Donell Harrell said he was almost fired for staging a Black History Month program. About 25 years later, Harrell became the first African American schools superintendent, after applying repeated times.

“We never really integrated,” Rhymes said.

The racial divide between the private and public sector is still stark. As of fall 2015, Coahoma County’s three private schools collectively had 7 percent African American enrollment amid public school systems that are more than 90 percent Black. The Clarksdale public school system’s lawyer, John Cocke, who graduated from the white high school in 1965, hasn’t convinced his friends of the value of public schools. “Everybody I know goes there, frankly,” Cocke said, when asked about Lee Academy. “All the white people.”

The decades of disinvestment took their toll. It’s no secret now that the condition of the public schools is a roadblock to Clarksdale’s revitalization, residents said. While the city has capitalized on its history as “the birthplace of the blues” with festivals and artsy shops, many downtown sidewalks are littered with shattered glass and poverty remains at 36 percent. People say businesses don’t come to town because they can’t find educated employees. Ben Lewis, a white newcomer who runs a job-training program tied to a café, said he worried that he would have to move away when his children reached school age. (His son now attends Clarksdale Collegiate.)

Schools superintendent Dennis Dupree came to the city 12 years ago, promising innovation. He brought in more than $15 million in federal and state funding for Race to the Top projects, magnet elementary themes and preschool. Voters approved a bond issue for school construction. Dupree introduced literacy and social-emotional learning programs backed by major funders such as The Walton Family Foundation. Dupree’s initiatives were buttressed by community youth programs focused on creativity, employability and college readiness, such as the health sciences mentorship Rhymes now runs.

But the grants ran out, and any lingering positive effects were not visible in test scores. Both the Clarksdale and Coahoma systems were rated F on the state’s 2018 school report cards and are eligible for state takeover. Coahoma county schools have been under interim leadership for more than a year. Dupree, who retired from Clarksdale schools at the end of the 2018-19 school year, declined several requests for an interview.

Amanda Johnson had become an Arkansas charter school principal and made a home in Clarksdale. As she considered where to send her two daughters to school she was at first disheartened, and then inspired. She knew that she could find a way for them in the local district if she had to. But she wanted something better and different for them, and for her neighbors.

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ohnson, a Little Rock native, came to the Arkansas side of the Delta in 2003 with Teach For America. Like many corps members, she had no intention of staying; she planned to go on to law school. But in TFA summer training she met her future husband, who wanted to live in and help improve his home state of Mississippi. And she felt comfortable in the Delta in a way most of her TFA peers did not. Her father knew people in her district; she was close enough to her college in Memphis to drive back for church. Because she is African American, like most of the residents, “no one knew I was Teach For America,” she said. She liked the people and the culture and the history. “There’s a lot of greatness that’s here that I want to be a part of and help grow and support,” she said.

Johnson didn’t like what felt like apathy and inertia among some leaders in the Arkansas public district, or how higher-ups shut down her ideas. After TFA, she joined the KIPP charter network at KIPP Delta in Helena, Arkansas; when the network opened an elementary school, she became its leader. KIPP’s regimented ways aren’t for everyone, but Johnson fell in love with the organization’s college-prep focus and refusal to let poverty dictate outcomes. “They very much believe that kids should have options and all kids can achieve at high levels and that we should help kids do that,” she said.

As Johnson settled in Clarksdale in 2010, the reasons for her to do that work in her adopted hometown multiplied. Living 40 minutes away from the school she led, she felt less connected to the students. While some teachers don’t like running into families at Walmart, she said, “I love it and so wanted that again.” Johnson and her husband began thinking about where their older daughter, Lorelei, would go to kindergarten. Some of the local elementary schools fared well individually on state rankings, and Johnson had the know-how to identify the best teachers. However, she believed that high school failure rates showed that the lower schools weren’t getting it done. And she kept thinking about other kids, who didn’t have the benefit of parents who knew how to advocate for them. Her husband, Sanford Johnson, co-founded Mississippi First in 2008, advocating for better education, including pre-K, for a sexual health curriculum that went beyond abstinence — and charter schools. When Mississippi’s legislature voted in 2016 to let students cross district lines to attend charter schools, she was ready.

Johnson began working her connections, and her low-key magnetism worked wonders. First, she got a fellowship with Building Excellent Schools, a charter leadership incubator. Using the program’s resources, Johnson planned Clarksdale Collegiate down to the smallest detail as she tackled the Mississippi charter school application process.

Clarksdale Collegiate would be “unapologetically college preparatory,” she wrote in her application. She incorporated elements that were familiar in charter-heavy places like Detroit and Memphis but new in Clarksdale, such as decking the hallways with college pennants, illustrations of the school’s core values and graphs of scholars’ academic progress, including the number of words each grade had read as tracked by Accelerated Reader, one of the school’s educational software programs.

Related: Teacher shortages force districts to use online education programs

Johnson planned an extended, highly structured day, more than eight hours, with 75-minute blocks of math — even for kindergarteners — and literacy rotations for two hours at a stretch. The year ran almost three weeks longer than that of the district. Clarksdale Collegiate would be lightning-focused on metrics and testing even though the official state tests on which its renewal would hang didn’t start until the third grade.

Every child would have access to a laptop loaded with software for phonics and numeracy, because Johnson believed children needed a lot of practice in these areas. The computer time also let teachers spend more time working with small groups so they could see, precisely, which elements each student understood. They would have science and social studies, because you can’t read if you don’t know anything about the world, she said. Johnson wrapped all that hard work in co-curricular extras like recess, art, music and physical education, plus regular “field lessons” in which children — some of whom had never been past the Clarksdale Walmart — travelled as far as Memphis and Jackson. The uniforms would be purple and gold, connoting royalty (and avoiding duplicating the colors of city schools).

Her desk would be in the hall. Johnson had no intention of giving up retying kindergarteners’ shoes and ducking into classrooms just because she also had to manage federal programs and IT. And everything would be done with urgency — a trait she observed at the charter schools she thought were most successful, places like Nashville Classical. There was no time to waste. “Kids don’t do well K through fourth and then start failing in fifth grade,” Johnson said. “What we’re doing now matters.”

Halfway through the year, parents had embraced the intensity. At report card night in February, a kindergartener danced with a stuffed unicorn as her mother frowned at her data binder.

“I think this is great,” kindergarten teacher Latasha Capers said.

“It’s great, but it can be exceptional,” the mom said.

Capers pressed, pointing to the girl’s pre-reading scores: “She’s already scored a 50, and for kindergarten we want a 10 to 12.”

The mom looked unconvinced.

“Everything we’ve done in here she’s mastered,” Capers persisted.

Finally, the mom let her pride in her daughter show. “She’ll get home and she’ll read a book,” she said.

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ohnson’s vision for the school has it serving about 675 children. That size would let Clarksdale Collegiate “impact change outside of our own school,” she said.

Over the next decade, it also would amount to as much as a quarter of Coahoma and Clarksdale’s current public school enrollment, and siphon off a lot of money that might otherwise go to the regular public systems. The charter school pulled roughly $149,000 in local taxes from the Clarksdale district in its first year alone, Cocke said, “and each year it will go up.” During Clarksdale Collegiate’s first year, 29 students who chose to attend the school would have attended Coahoma County public schools, according to school data.

The charter may not be siphoning out white students as the old segregation academies did, but to many critics of the school, pulling resources from the traditional public schools is just as unforgivable. Retired former superintendent Harrell, sitting at McDonald’s where he meets with a group of retirees in the mornings, said he might have supported the charter school had the district been adequately funded. The Mississippi Legislature has fully funded the state’s public education system only twice in more than 20 years. “Ninety-and-something percent of your kids are going to have to go to public school, and [those schools] have to teach everybody,” he said. “I think at some point choice would be appropriate, but don’t shortchange public schools.”

In theory, as a public school, Clarksdale Collegiate’s finances should have been about the same as the local districts. In 2017-18, Coahoma spent $9,279 and Clarksdale $8,424 in state and local per-pupil funds. The charter school received $1.2 million in per-pupil funds for its 145 students for 2017-18, or about $8,200 per child, the school’s financial manager Stacie Landry said.

However, Johnson increased the amount she could spend on her students by raising a lot of private money. Clarksdale Collegiate recorded almost $820,000 in philanthropy for the past school year, Landry said. Funders have included the Louis Calder Foundation, the Charter School Growth Fund and the Walton Family Foundation, the last of which gave significant funds to the Clarksdale and Coahoma districts as well. The school is also getting $900,000 over three years from the federal Department of Education’s charter school grant program. In total, Clarksdale Collegiate had revenues of $2.5 million for 145 students in its first year, Landry said — roughly $17,000 per student.

Related: After years of inaction, Delta teacher shortage reaches ‘crisis’ levels

Johnson said that much of that money went to one-time startup costs, such as stocking the library. The largest slice went to personnel: She paid teachers about 5 percent more than the Coahoma County system average, and paid her instructional aides almost double the state minimum of $12,500 because, she said, “I can’t even fix my mouth to give someone that salary.” Her own salary was $90,000 during the school’s first year, she said.

Critics like Harrell and Rhymes said the money would be better spent supporting schools in the district. Even A-rated Kirkpatrick Elementary, next door to Clarksdale Collegiate, is hurting for funds. When the district’s magnet school grant came in, it brought Kirkpatrick a health sciences focus and a rush of excitement. Principal SuzAnne Walton said she hired a health instructor and instituted a health lab. Kids learned about medicine using CPR dummies on gurneys and “Little Organ Annie” medical-teaching dolls donated by the extension service. Walton bought workout equipment and installed a climbing wall; she paid health professionals to come in for “Fun Fridays” to lead classes in activities like karate, cheer, yoga, tumbling and dance. It motivated the kids to work harder during the week, she said.

Now, Principal Walton is fighting to keep her school afloat. When the magnet grant ended, she could no longer afford the health teacher and Fun Fridays staff. The school also couldn’t afford a full-time librarian. “There’s just no money available,” Walton said. Last year, the district spent $8,079 per student at Kirkpatrick, according to the state report card, more than $400 below the state average. The school still has the equipment, largely disused except for an occasional class. On a winter visit, a medical doll lolled on a gurney in the back hallway as if waiting in the world’s slowest emergency room.

Kirkpatrick kindergarten teacher Teresa Scheider implemented some of the same rules followed at Clarksdale Collegiate: Be nice, do your very best. She had the same high expectations: The state required that students write their numbers up to 30, she said, but her students furrowed their brows writing their numbers up to 100. Their classmates did math on iPads under clouds that were painted on the wall decades ago. “She’s the best teacher,” kindergartener Raniya Berry said. “We be doing rhyming words and we be doing compound words and we write stories.”

Still, Scheider seemed ground-down. Standardized examinations were something to be endured, not celebrated like across the street. “Education is not what I want it to be anymore,” she said — too much testing, not enough focus on kids’ social development, to their detriment. “You can’t expect anybody who comes from a chaos-filled, drama-filled house and expect them to succeed.” Scheider used to visit the homes of her students; she no longer does. “I’m afraid to now,” she said. In September 2019, the school office said she had retired.

Clarksdale Collegiate special education teacher Sakenna Dear knows the frustrations. She and her husband Keithan are Coahoma-born and -bred, and they want to stay in the area. “If you were born here, you want to succeed,” she said. “You CAN be something if you come from here. A lot of people think you have to go somewhere else to be someone.” Sakenna Dear said she became a teacher and did the best she could working at a traditional public school, even though the leadership rarely provided meaningful professional development or transparency. Then their foster son Ricky started kindergarten, and she saw how deep the problems went.

When Ricky first came to the Dears he sat alone in his room for hours, barely speaking. When he finally opened his mouth, it was to talk about things like airplanes: “He would just say, propeller, wings, tail,” Sakenna Dear said. In kindergarten, he had a substitute teacher all year, who sent home bad reports about Ricky’s academic progress. Yet at dinner, Ricky described days of coloring and watching movies.

Keithan Dear, the Coahoma system’s Web Developer and Computer Technician,* worried a bit about “the conflict of interest” when they applied for Clarksdale Collegiate. But “being a parent now, it’s whatever’s best for the kid,” he said. “Around here we need to try something different.”

When Sakenna Dear brought Ricky in to register, Johnson invited her to interview for a job. She did, and took it. She wanted something different for herself, too.

O

ne way that Clarksdale Collegiate is supposed to be different from the choice schools of the past is in the composition of its student body. But the fact that the charter’s racial demographics mirrored those of the district wasn’t enough to satisfy critics who worried it would repeat past inequities. Even though Clarksdale Collegiate is required by law to have open enrollment, Rhymes, the education activist and retired public school teacher, was convinced the school creamed off the most advantaged students, whose middle-class parents were savvy enough to apply for the school and help their children manage the high expectations there.

In its first year, Clarksdale Collegiate’s student body was 93 percent Black, according to data the school provided. The State of Mississippi reported that 63 percent of the charter’s students were eligible for free lunch, compared to 74 percent of students in the Clarksdale public school district and 77 percent of Coahoma students. All three figures are high enough for the charter school and districts to give free lunch to all their students under the federal government’s “community eligibility” provision.

Coahoma High graduate Adrienne Hudson, who runs the education-improvement group RISE MS, was also initially skeptical of charters. She feared cherry-picking and thought of charter administrators as “this outside force basically coming in trying to rescue this community from itself,” she said. “My answer would always be no, no, no, probably an expletive no.”

State lawmakers tried to build in preventive measures to keep the new schools of choice from exacerbating Mississippi’s stark educational disparities. Lisa Karmacharya, the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board’s executive director, said the purpose of the charter law was to help “the underserved population.” The law requires charters’ enrollment of special education, low-income and English-language learning students to be within 80 percent of that in the district in which the schools operate.

However, even the best law is nothing without enforcement. Penn State University education researcher Erica Frankenberg cautioned that it’s rare for states to make sure charters are following laws requiring them to enroll a representative proportion of students. “I’ve never seen a charter revoked for these reasons,” she said, noting that North Carolina has — but does not enforce — a provision in its law requiring a certain proportion of low-income students. It’s usually up to residents to raise a ruckus, and “that asks a lot of a community, to be vigilant and understand what’s going on,” she said.

The rubric by which Mississippi charters are evaluated puts significant weight on requirements that charters serve special education students and conduct non-discriminatory admissions, but the more general stipulation that a charter serve a representative percentage of “underserved” students ” counts for only 3 of 100 points. And even then, the charter board has the authority to renew a school’s contract even if it has organizational problems. Karmacharya said discussions were underway to revise the evaluation form to better reflect the law. The state board has not yet made any renewal decisions.

Karmacharya is adamant that she and her board are committed to ensuring that the state’s charter schools serve a student population that is similar to that of the district’s non-charter public schools. “Mississippi does not look like Georgia. Our law is not Georgia,” Karmacharya said.

Johnson felt just as strongly about reflecting the community. In contrast to the state teaching workforce as a whole, Johnson’s staff, like the students, is mostly African American; the school’s morning chant echoes the words of the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, at one of the local district schools, a white teacher talked about loving her Black students, but a breath later wondered if their occasional rowdiness was “a racial thing.”

After multiple meetings and visits with Johnson, Hudson — the Coahoma grad who had said “no, no, expletive no” to the charter — came to believe in Johnson’s commitment to creating a school that reflected and empowered the community. “She is working very hard to be a public charter school,” Hudson said. “Her passion plus her leadership skills are allowing them to build a strong foundation. … I would be remiss in not trying to support that.”

Nonetheless, she was watching. “It’s very important for us to be very cognizant of what’s going on, to be very vigilant,” Hudson said.

At Lee Academy, the school whose history spurred that caution, head of school Rone Walker wants to stop talking about the past. She thinks it is no longer relevant. “We’re an open school to everybody,” she said. National Center for Education Statistics data from 2015, before Lee discontinued its low-enrollment elementary grades, showed that 75 percent of its students were white, 3 percent were Asian, a fraction of a percent were biracial, 9 percent were Hispanic and 6 percent were Black.

Walker enumerated a long list of reasons for people to pay almost $6,900 in tuition and fees to send their children to Lee, including small classes, a tight-knit feel, individualized curriculum, a 100 percent college-going rate, Advanced Placement courses, safety and ACT scores in the 22-23 range, far above those of the local public schools. She said she cares about improving the public schools, too. “We should all be working together to make things the best for our kids,” she said. “Our community needs it.”

In that spirit, she had something to offer Clarksdale Collegiate: “I have a really nice, up-to-code, huge building,” Walker said. It had housed the elementary school that Lee Academy had closed when enrollment fell. “If I had known they were looking for a space, I would’ve called them,” she said.

Johnson was surprised by the offer, and not ready to take it. Clarksdale Collegiate is looking at buying the shuttered Myrtle Hall IV elementary campus in its current neighborhood, she said, and will make do for the next couple of years by adding some portable classrooms in the schoolyard.

A

s the school’s first year drew to a close, everyone at Clarksdale Collegiate was feeling good.

Ricky walked with his fellow Vanderbilt University homeroom students to library class with voices on “level zero” — silently. His achievements papered the walls around him. He had smoked the ST Math computer program and beamed from a Scholar of the Week photo. He had earned a popcorn party, a trampoline trip and a special recess.

Andrea Johnson, known for clarity’s sake as Ms. Library Johnson, greeted them at the door in a dictionary of languages, “Hola! Salut! Habari gani!” Despite the school’s generally strict rules, the library was a place they could relax a little, could sit on a chaise or take their turn lolling on a loft bed. The Common Core standards emphasize nonfiction, and Johnson had a humdinger of a book to read to the class, about chocolate.

The once-quiet Ricky had become a chatterbox, but he sat quietly as Johnson read aloud about pulp and fair-trade farms and Somalia. Sometimes the reading was followed by a quiz on one of the omnipresent laptops, but not today. Ricky, like the rest, wrote one thing in his class notebook that he had learned from the book. He was the second to finish, so he settled into a comfy chair with a book he chose, “Let’s Investigate Everyday Materials.”

Clarksdale Collegiate had lived up to his hopes. The night before, he vroomed around the Dears’ circular driveway on the bike he’d learned to ride, without training wheels, in three days. He paused briefly to gush about first grade. “My favorite thing to do in school is to play on the playground. We finally have one! Finally finally finally,” he said. He also loved science class, though “it’s not like real ones. I want to make potions and stuff. That’s what a real scientist does.”

But that was OK. “I love school so much I just want to hug the school,” Ricky said. He zoomed off again.

Sakenna Dear felt much the same way, both for the changes in Ricky and for herself. Johnson “really sets the tone and makes school fun,” she said. “It pushes me as a teacher and administrator to want to do more.”

Johnson rejoiced in May over the kindergarten scores: 78th percentile in reading and 81st in math on the nationally used Measures of Academic Progress test. Her vision was on track. Only one staffer was leaving, while 68 people had applied for the 15 jobs that would be available when the school reopened in July after a short summer break. Clarksdale Collegiate had a wait list at every grade, with 88 applications for kindergarten alone. “I hate telling people they’re on the wait list — which is a good problem to have,” Johnson said. Maybe, she thought, it meant the community was coming around.

Ricky Taylor, however, would not be coming back. His adoption was finalized in April, and he had a new name.

“Ricky Dear!” he said. “Dear, like the rest of my family.”

He had already begun to write it on his worksheets.

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

*Correction: Keithan Dear’s job title has been updated from an earlier version of this story.

The post A charter school faces the ugly history of school choice in the Deep South appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In Part 1 of this story, Hollygrove leaders chose a charter operator to run the school in their neighborhood, Paul L. Dunbar Elementary. Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas signed an agreement with that group, Choice Foundation, in 2010. But in December 2013, the Recovery district announced it had reassigned the building to the Knowledge Is Power Program. According to interviews with more than 20 people, archived emails, past press coverage and public records, here is how it went wrong.

In retrospect, there were signs that the Recovery School District‘s commitment to the Hollygrove neighborhood was weakening. In the fall of 2010, about six months after Superintendent Paul Vallas agreed to install Choice Foundation at Hollygrove’s Paul L. Dunbar Elementary campus, one of the school system’s siting plans listed Dunbar as “unassigned,” with the note, “Continue informal meetings with community around possible program for school.”

Panicked Hollygrove residents called Choice director Mickey Landry. Landry said he called Vallas and was told it was an error.

Then in 2011 or 2012, Landry said, he asked Vallas’ successor, John White, about formally applying for the Dunbar charter. He said he was told to wait until renovations on the campus started.

And the Recovery district’s December 2011 school siting plan assigned the Dunbar campus to Benjamin Banneker Elementary, a conventional school then operating in Black Pearl. Landry thought the understanding was that Choice would still move into Dunbar, and incorporate Banneker’s students there.

In early 2013, Dobard and his team turned their attention to KIPP Believe, one of New Orleans’ most successful and established charter schools. Since 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina and levee failures laid waste to New Orleans and its public schools, KIPP Believe’s older students had attended class in the Ronald McNair school campus on South Carrollton Avenue, closer to Riverbend than to Hollygrove.

The 2011 siting plan set KIPP Believe’s final location as Stuart Bradley Elementary in Gentilly. But Dobard’s staff decided to make a change.

Dobard said it didn’t make sense to move KIPP Believe that far away, seven miles, and the Bradley site itself was small. At the same time, officials had decided to close the Banneker program, opening up the Dunbar campus.

Voila: They could move KIPP Believe’s upper grades to Dunbar and put the younger children 1½ miles away in the James Weldon Johnson building.

View the Dunbar school timeline

In addition – though Dobard said this wasn’t a consideration – Orleans Parish school officials had started stumping to reclaim the Bradley property for use as one of their own elementary schools.

According to emails, the decision was made in the early summer. “I know we just gave you Dunbar,” capital projects director Lona Hankins wrote KIPP Believe advocacy director Jonathan Bertsch on June 4, 2013. From that point on, KIPP consulted on the Dunbar campus redesign at Hankins’ request.

Dobard and Deputy Superintendent Dana Peterson said they knew Landry wanted Dunbar. But they didn’t think there was any obligation. They said they had no idea that the Vallas memo existed. When they had assigned the building to Banneker in 2011, they meant it – and were puzzled why Landry hadn’t filed an application to charter Banneker. At any rate, the disposition of Dunbar was in their hands.

Did Recovery officials reach out before the decision about Dunbar, or in the six months that elapsed between the decision and the announcement? Landry said they didn’t call him. Nor did they call four Hollygrove leaders: Rev. Kevin Brown of Trinity Christian Community, Jarvain Bingmon of the Hollygrove-Carrollton Community Development Corporation and Shirley Butler and Chander James of the Hollygrove Education Committee, according to these people.

So it was a shock when the Recovery system announced its Dunbar decision in December 2013. Three months later, officials signed an agreement giving the Bradley campus to the Orleans Parish School Board in return for millions of dollars for citywide programs for troubled youth.

Landry said no one called him until shortly before Christmas. So in the early months of 2014, Landry met with Dobard and showed him the Vallas memo.

. . . . . . .

In Hollygrove, the sense of betrayal was fierce. Residents thought the disposition of the Dunbar campus was up to them.

“We made a decision already!” Butler said. “We already did this.”

Brown, of Trinity Christian Community, didn’t have any problems with KIPP, but that wasn’t the point. “All of us worked very hard to engage RSD, and we really believed that they had engaged to us,” he said. “Mickey has been a good community partner, Choice. Whereas KIPP – who are they?” Brown felt as though Recovery officials called only when they wanted something from him.

Landry was incensed. “They make such a big deal out of community input, and then they ignore it,” he said. “We have been serving the families of Hollygrove since 2006. They have chosen us to run that building, in partnership, as a neighborhood school, where the community can be involved. … As far as we’re concerned we have a promise.”

Brown and Landry suggested it was impossible that Recovery officials did not know what Hollygrove wanted. There was Vallas’ written agreement, after all, but there also were all the meetings over the years. And there were personal connections: Recovery’s Hankins grew up in Hollygrove, lives right across from Claiborne Avenue now, is friends with Brown and was invited to the 2009 Dunbar-Choice celebration, with a message from Landry thanking her for her support. Sombra Williams, another Hollygrove resident, worked for the Recovery district’s facilities team.

“I just don’t understand it. She never told me about KIPP,” Butler said of Hankins. After the announcement, she said, she called Hankins, who was surprised her colleagues hadn’t followed her advice to call Butler.

Dobard said Hankins and Williams weren’t involved in the school siting decisions, and that they kept their personal affiliations separate from their jobs. The women’s offices aren’t in the same building as his.

And he said Landry was equally at fault, because he never applied for a charter at Dunbar. Vallas’ memo was “not a guarantee,” Dobard said. It promised Dunbar “if he did certain things, which never was actualized upon by Choice Foundation.”

. . . . . . .

For its part, KIPP wasn’t about to give up the Dunbar assignment. The KIPP Believe program is well overdue for a new building; the old, crowded McNair site lacks science laboratories and a proper gymnasium, and its air-conditioning can’t keep up even in April.

Director Rhonda Kalifey-Aulise and Bertsch, the advocacy director, said they were blameless in the mix-up. They had no idea anyone had any claims on Dunbar, and they boasted equally strong connections along South Carrollton to the Hollygrove neighborhood.

“We believe that we also have a lot of deep community relationships,” Kalifey-Aulise said. “It probably feels just as organic to us to get this assignment as it does to” Landry. Across the KIPP network’s New Orleans schools, more than 600 students live in Hollygrove, Bertsch said.

As for not reaching out to neighborhood leaders, Bertsch said KIPP at first didn’t want to beat the Recovery district officials to the announcement and later decided to focus on talking with KIPP families. Now, he said, “I think we have a lot of meetings to have” in Hollygrove.

Kalifey-Aulise said she was “excited to connect and excited to have people come in.”

. . . . . . .

But Hollygrove didn’t lie down and take it. It roared back. Its leaders wrote to White and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, sometimes on Choice Foundation stationery.

“Construction of the new Dunbar is an important part of our revitalization, and one of the top requests of residents following our return after Hurricane Katrina,” wrote Carol Dotson of Hollygrove Neighbors. And yet, “there has been a haphazard way of doing things with this school from the start.”

“We were promised that Choice Foundation would run the school and were excited because of our enduring relationship with them,” Brown wrote. Employing a flourish, he continued, “It was to be a match made in heaven, a school that was responsive to the needs of the community and a community willing to serve the school.”

City Councilwoman Susan Guidry added her view in a letter to BESE: “When the discussions with regard to a (charter management group) were ongoing, the Hollygrove residents were involved and engaged in the process; they researched the available options and expressed a strong preference for Choice,” she wrote. “Crucially, this preference was recognized by then-Superintendent Paul Vallas in an agreement with Choice Foundation. When well-established community partners, neighborhood residents and citizen leaders speak so strongly, it is our responsibility to listen.”

. . . . . . .

So now the Recovery system is in a jam, stuck between two respected charter groups and at a turning point in its citywide rebuilding plan. Recent analysis shows New Orleans needs more elementary school seats, making it a good time for Choice’s Lafayette Academy to expand, perhaps to the Dunbar campus.

However, the Recovery system is short on buildings and short on cash. There are few campuses left to assign; citywide, about 50 schools are already in their “permanent” homes. Recent calculations showed the Recovery rebuilding budget might be as much as $200 million short.

In December, Landry said, the Recovery system offered him the McNair and Banneker buildings, instead of the Dunbar campus. No federal recovery money has been budgeted for renovating them, however, and besides, it’s not what Hollygrove wanted.

On Wednesday, Landry and Bertsch sat side-by-side before Dobard at a Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting in New Orleans. Each again made his organization’s case to get the building.

Though their views on that were incompatible, they shared a frustration and impatience with the Recovery system.

“We’re tired. We need an answer,” Landry said. “I know KIPP is as tired as we are.”

Said Bertsch, “Both of our school communities have been torn up over this.”

Dobard said he hoped to announce the final decision for Dunbar at the next BESE meeting, Aug. 12 in Baton Rouge. No matter what Hollygrove wants, the decision is in his system’s hands, as it always has been.

View full size

2008

August: New Orleans school facilities master plan published. Dunbar will be rebuilt.

Source: Times-Picayune staff research

This story appears courtesy of The Times-Picayune. Reproduction is not permitted.

The post How one New Orleans neighborhood worked to reopen its school — and lost appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians had to rebuild. There were neighborhoods to reknit. There were schools to reinvent and, it was hoped, to be lifted from failure.

In Hollygrove, the two efforts aligned. Here in a small and depressed quadrant bound by highways, fences and overflowing drainage canals, neighbors worked with the state Recovery School District for four years to restore the Paul L. Dunbar Elementary campus, and to install the charter school, Lafayette Academy, that Hollygrove wanted. The superintendent even signed off on the agreement, demonstrating that Recovery system officials could listen to a community and make a promise.

Four years later, neighbors say, they took it back. They decided to install a KIPP school in the Dunbar campus, and Hollygrove is aghast.

Based on archived emails, news articles, public records and interviews with more than 20 people, the story of what went wrong in Hollygrove illustrates how the complex, undemocratic state-run school system makes key decisions about what schools will grow in which neighborhoods — with the community’s desires literally tied for the lowest priority.

It has broad implications, too, as the Recovery School District determines what other schools will look like – including John McDonogh High in Treme and Sarah T. Reed High in eastern New Orleans — and as the communities there clamor to be heard, to have the new schools bring back neighborhoods.

. . . . . . .

Hollygrove is an isolated place. You don’t drive through it to get anywhere else, and in fact, mostly you can’t. Its few popular attractions are close to its Carrollton Avenue boundary: the farmers market and the Costco. It’s infamous for shootings and Lil Wayne.

It’s where Rev. Kevin Brown grew up. His father, a minister, moved the family here in the 1960s. They arrived as the neighborhood began to decline.

Brown remembered a childhood of routine and ritual with friends. Every Saturday, he said, “We’d walk down to the K&B and get a Charleston Chew … which is the biggest candy you could buy for the least money. And then we walked down to the Radio Shack and got a free battery, and then we came back and played football.” Why a battery? Who cared: It was free.

Joe Sherman’s memories go back even further, to the 1950s. He could stop into any house on the block and feel welcome. At the end of seven of those blocks was Paul L. Dunbar Elementary, a serious and even stern place focused on learning, tucked into the neighborhood like a snail in its shell. Sherman thought it was one of the best schools in the city.

“When the bell rang you came together: prayer, pledge allegiance to the flag,” he said. His grandfather was the school janitor. If he misbehaved, his fourth-grade teacher would spank his hand with a ruler, and his mother knew before he got home. His formative teacher, Mr. Thomas, became his model of manhood. Following in his footsteps, Sherman joined the Air Force and served in Vietnam.

Brown attended parochial schools, then left for college and Chicago. He moved back to Hollygrove in the 1990s and succeeded his father as director of Trinity Christian Community, a religiously oriented social center.

Sherman returned in 2003 and found many of the old families still there. But Hollygrove was riddled with decay and crime, “gunshots every day.” The Dunbar campus, a half-century older than Sherman remembered, was decrepit and out of space, mushrooming with drab trailer classrooms. It looked like what it was, a place where children had to struggle against the odds to learn.

By the spring of 2005, Dunbar had a school performance score of 49.5 on a 200-point scale and was labeled academically unacceptable. That fall, after Katrina, it became one of more than 100 public schools that were swept out of the Orleans Parish school system into control of the state Recovery School District.

To save their neighborhood after the hurricane, Hollygrove’s community groups confected a three-point plan. Two points were to stop the gunshots and to build a new senior center.

The third was to reopen Dunbar. For without it, families would not return.

. . . . . . .

With vast quantities of money pouring in after Katrina to fix New Orleans’ sorry public education system, many decisions had to be made, often quickly and not always popular. Most would be made by the Recovery School District, which had taken over four fifths of the city’s schools.

Inside the Recovery district offices, hired staff report to an appointed local superintendent, who reports to an appointed state superintendent in Baton Rouge, who reports to a statewide board that is only partially elected. As an institution, it is several layers removed from direct democracy. The Recovery district might ask forgiveness for its actions, but it need not ask permission.

It’s meant to focus on the schools at a macro level, the greatest good for the greatest number. And to the current set of Recovery officials, the Dunbar campus was just one of 82 that needed to be filled, none more important than another.

The survival of Dunbar was by no means assured. First, the building itself had to be saved, as urban planners embarked on a slash-and-burn of the city’s surplus school campuses. Public school enrollment had declined for 30 years, and many campuses were half empty even before Hurricane Katrina’s displacement.

The Recovery district, the Orleans Parish school system, demographers and planners scrutinized every one of the 120-plus school campuses, deciding which would stay and which vanish. When the two school systems completed their joint facilities master plan in 2008, one third of the campuses were eliminated.

Dunbar survived. Brown attributes it to neighbors meeting with Recovery Superintendent Paul Vallas in the years leading up to the decision and convincing him that Hollygrove needed its school.

They did not succeed in making the school a “Quick Start” project, one of the very first to be rebuilt from Katrina damage. But at least it was in the second phase of rebuilding, meaning it was guaranteed money; at phase 3, the money ran out.

Confident that their neighborhood would have a school again, Hollygrove leaders turned to the next question: Who would run it?

. . . . . . .

Though the facilities master plan was a major accomplishment, it did not address a conundrum unique to New Orleans: Which school program would operate in each building? That’s one of the strangest elements of post-Katrina public education, the disconnection of school buildings and the programs inside them.

In a typical school system, they are one and the same. If the school is failing, the school system’s leaders might replace the principal. Sure, there might be a special program with its own name housed in a larger school with another name, but there would not, however, be an entire school named Lafayette Academy housed in a building called Paul L. Dunbar Elementary.

Yet Recovery administrators were moving toward an all-charter school system, independent programs run by independent boards, with public funding and oversight and assigned to public school campuses. They might continue to operate, or they might fail and lose their charters, to be replaced on the same campus by another operator.

The buildings, such as Dunbar, would remain. It was like a game of Risk: The country lines would stay the same, but the occupying armies could change.

So each building had to be assigned to a program. The facilities plan didn’t make those decisions. Recovery system officials had to look at its 65 campuses, or sites, and match them up with its 57 programs, in what has been called the siting process.

That process didn’t start for several years. Basic services had to come first, said Ramsey Green, former Recovery deputy superintendent for operations. The state school system was constantly putting out fires, sometimes literally. One elementary school had multiple electrical fires in the middle of the night. At another building, students had to be moved out immediately when engineers discovered so much termite damage that one side of the floor was 8 inches lower than the other.

And though the Recovery system didn’t want to run schools long-term, it had to do so until it could find enough good charter operators. So in the early years after Katrina, it was hiring teachers and building temporary facilities for students flooding back into town.

Spending time on a long-term siting plan “would have been perceived by the public as a luxury,” Green said.

In August 2010, five years after the storm and with FEMA on the verge of sending $1.8 billion to rebuild schools, the Recovery officials finally concluded they could start on siting.

The task was dizzying. Six campuses were already finished — new or renovated — at a cost of $179 million, with school programs in them. Some other programs could be kept where they were, such as Lafayette Academy, with a building in good shape on Carrollton Avenue on the Gert Town-Hollygrove line.

The other campuses had to be assigned, but this was not as simple as labeling pieces on a game board. Parents and teachers cared. So did alumni and neighbors, the people who had attended the school or passed by it every day.

Each charter operator promised its own program and unique fillips. Would there be college pennants on the walls trumpeting the alma maters of the teachers and, by implication, the bright futures of the current students? Would every child learn an instrument or a foreign language? Would there be computer laboratories or a giant botany garden? Would they, the neighbors, be welcomed in to hold community meetings at night or sponsor tutoring sessions?

To guide the decisions, Vallas, the Recovery superintendent at the time, set down five principles. The top priority was moving children out of portable campuses, those drab, temporary structures reminiscent of refugee camps. Those programs would be paired with the school buildings that were rehabilitated first.

The second consideration was practical, matching up grade levels. Elementary programs would be assigned to buildings designed for younger children, with smaller lockers and lower bathroom sinks.

And even though school-attendance zones had been abolished — any student could now apply to any public school in the city, regardless where the student lived — the Recovery system wanted to make life convenient for families. So the third priority in siting a program was where the majority of the program’s students currently lived.

Fourth: What charter administrators wanted, and “community input.”  For Dunbar, then, what Hollygrove wanted was tied as the lowest priority.

In the fall and early winter of 2010, Recovery school system staffers assembled a rough draft of the siting plan and shopped it around at five public meetings and dozens of private ones. As people voiced their preferences, the staffers issued several revisions.

But just as the siting plan was being finalized, it was shelved. The Recovery system had to revisit the building plan, to account for changes in demographics and financing.

By the time that was done, 10 months had passed, 10 campuses had been added back to the map and five campuses had been deleted. That meant a mostly new team of Recovery system staffers had to revisit all those never-finalized siting assignments.

Some schools were already dreaming ahead, posting schematics of their future homes on the wall and getting families excited. For that reason, the Recovery staffers’ new top priority was to stick to the existing assignments whenever possible. When changes were necessary, they followed Vallas’ guiding principles, with one new factor added up high: the program’s academic track record. The Recovery system at last adopted the official siting plan in December 2011.

. . . . . . .

In Hollygrove, however, that process was long done. Before the Recovery system even set ink to paper for its siting plan, a network of community groups had gone out and chosen their own charter school program for the Dunbar campus. It would be Lafayette Academy, run by Choice Foundation. Lafayette, 2727 South Carrollton Ave., would expand into Dunbar and run it as a second site.

This might not make it a “neighborhood school,” serving Hollygrove kids only, for in the post-Katrina world New Orleans students could attend school anywhere they were admitted. The average student lives almost 3½ miles from his or her school.

Still, given Dunbar’s location, tucked away on a side street, Kevin Brown said there was no way it could exist in isolation; it had to be a resource after 3:30 p.m. He used to teach entrepreneurship classes at Dunbar. Organizations held meetings in the cafeteria.

Joe Sherman agreed that Dunbar could be a new kind of community school. “With sports programs at the playground. With mentoring programs at the senior center. There are ways to make this work,” he said. “That’s how it was before … just a big family.”

For such a small area, Hollygrove has a lot of organizations. The participants in the Dunbar search included representatives of Trinity Christian Community, Hollygrove Seniors, Hollygrove Neighbors, Nazareth Baptist Church, St. Peter A.M.E. Church and the Hollygrove-Carrollton Community Development Corporation.

Vallas sent Gary Robichaux, then the Recovery district’s executive director of elementary-level schools, to help the neighborhood leaders set a direction and choose a charter operator. The Hollygrove working group immediately thought of expanding Choice Foundation’s Lafayette Academy into Hollygrove. “It seemed natural. It’s right there,” Brown said. “We didn’t have much of a relationship with anyone else.”

In 2009, Lafayette’s test scores weren’t great. But Principal Mickey Landry, who doubled as Choice Foundation’s chief executive, had imbued the school with optimism since he arrived in the fall of 2007, pushing grades in the right direction.

And the Hollygrove-Lafayette connection went beyond As and Bs. Trinity Christian Community held meetings at Lafayette and organized volunteers. Tutors and mentors from Hollygrove volunteered in the school, and school staff volunteered in the neighborhood – exactly the vision Brown, Sherman and the other leaders shared.

On Oct. 16, 2009, after several months of conversations, Hollygrove leaders and Choice administrators celebrated the partnership. They held a meeting and party at St. Peter A.M.E. Church, with cake. Vallas himself attended, announcing the decision.

Vallas was famous for making promises. Landry wanted to ensure he delivered. He drafted a memo the following spring, and after some back and forth, on March 31, 2010, Vallas signed it: “RSD will support Choice Foundation’s charter application for Dunbar Elementary, provided Choice Foundation provides written documentation from Hollygrove residents that Choice Foundation is their choice to run Dunbar.”

In Brown and Landry’s minds, the “documentation” had already been written — in icing, on that cake from the previous fall. Its inscription welcomed Dunbar back to Hollygrove, and Choice to Dunbar.

Now, everyone just had to wait, because Dunbar would not be rebuilt for several years. Vallas left, to be replaced by John White. Lafayette increased its enrollment to more than 900, the idea being that a portion of its growing student body would soon be assigned to the Dunbar campus.

Finally, in late 2013, the reconstruction of Dunbar began, and Landry figured it was time to move. White by now was the state superintendent of education, so Landry wrote him of the Hollygrove party, when Vallas announced the Dunbar-Choice decision to the neighborhood. He added that “the largest percentage of Lafayette students live in that neighborhood.” Along with the Lafayette satellite at the Dunbar campus, Choice proposed to start a small program there for students with emotional disturbances.

He got no reply. What neither Landry nor Hollygrove knew was that the Recovery system officials had changed their mind. They were reassigning Dunbar to a different school operator, Knowledge Is Power Program. ­

COMING FRIDAY: The neighbors rise in outrage, and a look at what went wrong.

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Unless the Legislature changes its mind, next year Louisiana’s third through eighth graders in public schools will start taking new, national tests on the computer. And while that wasn’t the primary motivation for Success Prep Principal Niloy Gangopadhyay to explore broader online learning, it’s helped spur the process. After all, the school had to buy a bunch of new computers anyway, for the tests.

Gangopadhyay thought the increased familiarity with computers would improve students’ performance on the tests and make them more comfortable. The school’s seventh graders, “most of them are struggling with technology,” he said. Getting them started on tech earlier “is going to be a lot better.”

Principal Sabrina Pence at Arthur Ashe Charter Academy agreed. She said her school’s computer laboratories could “leave us with a certain level of advantage because our kids are pretty functional with the computer.” However, Ashe’s software programs generally require clicking and dragging, not the typing required to write compositions and explain math answers in the state-mandated Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests coming next year. Ashe has had to add typing lessons, in a pilot writing computer lab.

In this way, testing guides technology purchases. All the new computers bought at Success Prep and Arthur Ashe meet PARCC requirements. It means, for instance, that Success bought 10-inch tablets instead of 7-inch ones.

Louisiana schools may use a paper-and-pencil version of PARCC in 2015, but they must be computer-ready by 2016. The state tested the technology in March. High school end-of-course exams are already given on computers.

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The digital bell sounds, and students at Arthur Ashe Charter School in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood file into the classroom. They sit down and immediately get to work: Put on headphones, pull up the Internet browser, click into their program, choose “math.”

The program greets each student by name. “Hi, Romalice!” unfurls on the screen. “Here’s how you are doing!” Romalice has earned 3,442 of the 3,500 points needed to get to the next level.

Though they’re all in the fifth grade, the students in the Ashe computer laboratory are on three different math computer programs and an uncountable number of subjects: fractions, graphing, order of operations. The silence rivals that of a library; the concentration is total. Each child is locked into his or her own little world, that of the computer screen that takes students through math problems as quickly as they can click and drag.

Computers have been in classrooms for years, to be sure, and the conversation in Louisiana has most recently focused on little more than preparing for computerized tests. But with software improvements and lowered costs, more and more New Orleans public schools are looking at making computers not just a testing tool but a central part of year-round education, especially in math — seduced by promises of truly personalized education that reaches every child where they are, whether that be behind or ahead, and the stunning success of Ashe, a B-graded school where more than 95 percent of the 500 students come from what are considered impoverishes families.

Some schools in Washington D.C., California and New York got there first, but education consultant Cate Swinburn said New Orleans is rapidly catching up. There is little research examining long-term results, but many schools now combine conventional teaching with computer assists – a combination called “blended learning.” Last year, the Orleans Parish School Board approved a charter where students would come to the building only half the day, supplementing the time with online classes at home.

Brandon Phenix, who directs blended learning for the ReNEW charter network, sees three primary ways to integrate computers into a school:

Students may go to a lab, as at Ashe.

They may spend most of their day learning online, as at the Rocketship charters that plan a Louisiana expansion.

They may use computers in an ordinary classroom in “centers,” with a small group of students spending time on computers while other students do other tasks with a teacher. Then the groups rotate.

That’s at schools like ReNEW’s, at any rate, where the poverty rate in elementary grades is at least 95 percent. “We want to use the technology to catch kids up,” Phenix said. Wealthier public and private schools tend to have students using computers to explore media skills: They create videos, work on projects and blog.

Phenix said he doesn’t encounter any New Orleans school leaders who reject technology integration. “Everyone understands the potential of this and everyone’s hungry to learn more,” he said.

The leader: Arthur Ashe

The unquestioned New Orleans public school leader in blended learning, and a national model, is Arthur Ashe. So many educators from elsewhere want to watch the lab that administrators are considering setting aside one day per month for site visits.

Principal Sabrina Pence couldn’t say how much of Ashe’s progress was due to the technology program. But she couldn’t rave enough about the targeted schooling and the student engagement. The programs produce so much data about students’ strengths and weaknesses that teachers can’t use it all.

The way it works at Ashe now, three years into the project, is that two classes go into the lab at a time, accompanied by teachers. There are two labs, each with extra staff: a monitor plus City Year corps members. Special education teachers take students out halfway through for extra time together. It happens on top of a typical math class, which might be covering entirely different subjects.

The students find the lab projects more absorbing than a worksheet. “They’ve grown up with video games,” Pence said. “The programs have a lot of bells and whistles that make it fun,” including short games that pop up inside the program as a reward. The ability of the computer to customize levels means students can be challenged just enough. They have immediate reinforcement when they’re successful.

It’s a change from an ordinary class. And it makes students invested in their own learning, Pence said. They want to reach their goals.

That was evident in the Ashe lab on a recent Friday. Status charts hung on the walls, tracking kids’ progress. Children scratched notes on paper.

Keminie Jones, 10, said lab was fun. “We get to play games when we finish our own lesson,” she said. She didn’t find mistakes frustrating. “When you mess up, it lets you know,” she shrugged. “It tells you how to do it.”

When students can’t figure out something, they are taught to use the in-program help. If they’re still confused, they ask an adult. Lab coach Kimble Wright walked around the room looking for raised hands and eyeballing the screens.

In the front of the room, Justin Jordana, 11, was working on the program ST Math, where students solve problems to take a penguin character, “JiJi,” back home to the North Pole. The penguin has two “lives” per round, though Wright said that when the student makes two mistakes, “We don’t say JiJi dies. We say he’s taking a break.”

Justin’s screen showed rows of peanuts and elephants. To check the fifth grader’s understanding, Wright asked him to explain the question: “Mr. Jordana, I don’t understand the peanuts and the elephants!” the coach implored his student. “I don’t get it! I’m hungry! I want to go to the zoo.” Justin helped him out.

“I just went up (a level) because I keep passing decimals,” he boasted. “I’m on 76 percent.” If he gets tired of this subject, Justin can move around. “There’s other worlds,” he said, such as “fractions on the number line … rounding decimals.”

But then he got stuck. He wasn’t sure what the game was asking him to do. Wright was helping other students. Justin sat and frowned at the screen for a minute, then brightened.

“Now it makes sense,” he said. He had to divide the number of peanuts by the number of elephants so each elephant got “fed” its fair share. Click, click and the animated peanuts dropped into the elephants’ maws. Justin tore through the other questions in the round. JiJi was one step closer to getting back to the North Pole.

Wright and the other monitor are critical. Every week, they meet with students to review their results and goals, and they meet with teachers to conference about where the students are at and to see if they’re having the same problems in both settings.

“This is by no means a traditional form of education,” Wright said. But “these kids, they learn. They interact in a completely different way. … They love technology,” he said. “We have to structure their education around it because that gives them the best opportunity.”

The Ashe labs are constantly changing. The school is piloting a writing computer lab session. Recently it’s found major success bringing in families. “We are finding that kids who are using their programs at home are mastering literally years of content,” Pence said. The school has partnered with Cox Communications to offer home Internet connections for $10 a month.

Despite the peanuts, elephants and penguins, the technology is a means to an end, Pence said. “It’s a flexible structure to fill every gap and push kids forward,” she said. “For us, more than any of the software stuff, that’s the lesson.”

The all-in: alternative schools

In New Orleans’ three alternative high schools, online courses are already the norm. Students at Crescent Leadership Academy, The NET and ReNEW Accelerated use them to review material and pass tests they’re already failed once or more. Some mainstream high schools, such as Joseph S. Clark and Landry-Walker, use them as well.

These students are often older, less interested in a standard high school experience but motivated to get their diploma. Rather spending the whole semester or year retaking a class they almost passed, they can, via online classes, focus on the sections they failed.

Crescent Leadership Principal Chauncey Nash said online coursework was an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. His school takes in students who have been expelled from mainstream middle and high schools, for short stays or long. They come in and leave all the time, and might be far ahead or way behind.

“Being an alternative school, I get in kids who may need a course we just don’t have,” Nash said, and “our ultimate goal is not to punish them” educationally. With online classes, 30 different students “can all be having 30 different classes” – without the school needing to hire 30 different teachers it can’t afford.

In some cases, students need to take two classes that meet at the same time. Or it’s not age-appropriate; Nash doesn’t want a 20-year-old student sitting in an Algebra I class with 14-year-olds.

So far only about 30 of the school’s 230 students are using online credit recovery, but “our ultimate goal is to grow it,” he said.

Some of the students use Course Choice, the state-funded program that lets students take in-person or online classes outside their school. But mostly the school pays for a system called Plato, from the company Edmentum. Nash assigns teachers, during their planning period, to oversee the online course block. If students need help on a different subject, they’re allowed to check with another teacher. Students who don’t have computers at home are loaned portable computers so they may keep working after hours.

Nash tries to keep the online courses to review only, for he didn’t consider it a good idea for most students to encounter complex subjects the first time without a teacher. And he said some subjects aren’t suited for it.

As for the results, a lot “depends on how motivated the learner is, just like sitting in the classroom,” Nash said. One young woman knocked out Algebra I in four weeks.

The experimenter: Evan Stoudt, Sci Academy

Evan Stoudt is in his 20s, but the fifth-year math teacher was old-school in the classroom. Until recently.

He was practically evangelizing at an April seminar coordinated by Phenix, a blended learning fellowship for New Orleans teachers who want to bring tech into their classrooms on their own, without a comprehensive, full-school effort like the one at Ashe.

Stoudt suggested websites, programs and online tools to his fellow fellows. If most of the class is learning from an online video or working on computer programs, “you can work with a small group. That’s where you can coax out the misunderstanding and respond to it,” he told them.

His school, Sci Academy, is ramping up in ways often more seen in wealthy schools, such as its Seminar in Innovation and Change, where seniors use computer tools as part of a larger research project. Every Sci senior has a school-supplied portable computer, and more are on their way. Sci will start the 2014-15 academic year with probably twice as many computers as it started in 2013, Stoudt said.

Stoudt was inspired by the senior seminar, as well as a multimedia personal-goals project by the ninth graders in English class, where they interviewed relatives and created videos.

At Sci, Stoudt’s own classroom didn’t even have a computer. But he decided there were no excuses. He had a projector for the class, and many of the students had computers at home. Though he liked the packaged videos created by Khan Academy, the online sensation created by Metairie native Sal Khan, he decided to make his own.

On March 5, Stoudt posted a YouTube video of him explaining and demonstrating how to solve quadratic equations by factoring. Two months later, he’s recorded more than 20 how-to videos, some more than 30 minutes long. He bought a domain name, mrstoudt.com, to make the videos easier for students for find.

To be sure, some have fewer than 10 views. But Stoudt saw immediate success: The night before a May exam, a student emailed him asking which video to review.

“I see the videos as a great opportunity for me to be able to extend my classroom outside of the classroom,” Stoudt said. A student who missed a class or just wants to review can watch them. And Stoudt can play the video in class while pulling aside a small group to go over a topic they missed.

“We’re not doing blended learning because it’s exciting or it’s new, even though it is exciting and it is new,” he said. “People are saying that this is working to help kids in really cool ways.” It’s about “getting kids passionate and equipped with tools.”

The planner: Success Prep

Over in Treme-Lafitte, Success Prep is making progress. The school has 460 students in kindergarten through seventh grade, and it climbed above a failing grade just last year. It’s a stand-alone school, not part of a charter group with lots of resources. Principal Niloy Gangopadhyay takes pride in the low student-teacher ratio, 21.5 to 1. He wants his students to get into New Orleans’ top high schools.

But Ashe’s, well, success, was hard to ignore. “I’ve got to think why their scores are so high, especially in math,” is due to the blended-learning program, Gangopadhyay said. He was starting to think Success was behind the curve. Besides, his school had to upgrade its computers anyway, which dated back to just after Hurricane Katrina, for online tests in 2015.

Success has a small computer lab, but only the seventh graders use it, and scheduling is tough. There are a few desktop computers and tablets in the kindergarten through second grades.

So last summer, the staff started talking. Maybe Success they should try blended learning. They invested $80,000 in an initial tech upgrade and secured a grant to visit schools around the country.

Gangopadhyay liked the “top-notch facilities” at Summit High School in Fontana, Calif., though its demographics aren’t similar. He saw Rocketship schools, where children spend 90 minutes a day in a technology course, and concluded, “That was really powerful.” Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Calif., uses Khan Academy instructional videos to help children learn. Gangopadhyay liked that some schools had been able to reach more students with fewer staff.

But he was most impressed just four miles from his own school, at Ashe: the personalization, the increased teacher time for struggling students, the things software can do that teachers can’t. The computer is faster at creating questions that meet the student’s exact needs and can quickly “shoot out multiple questions for the same concept,” Gangopadhyay said, “getting that skill reinforced over and over again” – and all without hours of grading.

Success Prep has all but ruled out doing an in-class “centers” model. “In pretty much every school I visited, the centers rotations, it’s not clear to me that the four to six kids on computers are actually getting anything done,” said Kat Coneybear, Success’ director of data and innovation. “Some of them are clicking around on random things.”

Administrators at Success also gave up on the idea of shrinking the faculty. And they might still not do blended learning at all, Gangopadhyay said. Several top New York-New Jersey charter networks don’t use it, “They’re going old-school and posting really ridiculous results,” he said.

But that didn’t sound terribly likely. “We have a lot of room to play around and figure it out,” Gangopadhyay said. “I think once we can implement it, in the next few years, it’s going to be a game-changer for us.”

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