NEW YORK — On a sunny Friday in early November, four 10- and 11-year-old boys stand on the corner of 26th Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, holding homemade clipboards and signs that read “Take our food equity survey.”

A young man rushes past the group, headphones on, eyes on his phone. Susan Tenner, executive director of the Brooklyn Urban Garden Charter School, or BUGS, where the boys are sixth graders, suggests they let him pass. The next passerby is a runner — even more unpromising.

When a guy in his 20s or 30s in a puffer coat with fur trim comes along a half a minute later, Elias, a 10-year-old, remarks that he looks busy too. But Tenner urges the students to pounce.

“Everyone in New York City looks busy,” she tells them. “You guys are cute; people are going to want to help you.”

And the man does. After the boys call out as he passes, the man doubles back to take the student-made survey. Their first success.

Over the next half hour, the boys and a group of girls positioned a block up will interview a postman, a construction worker, a pair of teenage girls in fleece Snoopy pants, and several others about their access to healthy, affordable food.  

BUGS, one of hundreds of “themed” middle schools spread across New York City and the nation, fully embodies the “Green” school concept. There are gardens out front and hydroponic produce growing inside, an indoor tank for raising trout and recycled furniture in the classrooms. Students take a weekly sustainability class and participate in monthly field study days that send them into the community to conduct research on topics like land use, pollution and food equity.

Adopting a theme like sustainability, the arts, or math and science can cement a middle school’s culture, give coherence to its curricula, and boost student engagement at a time when many students are losing interest in school. Done well, proponents say, a theme can help students connect what they’re learning in the classroom to some larger purpose or vision of their future.

But not all themed schools are as distinctive as BUGS, and some aren’t all that different from mainstream middles. It can be hard to tell, based on a name alone, whether a self-proclaimed “Green” school offers a fully integrated sustainability curriculum, or is simply located in a net zero building.

Attending a themed school offers no guarantee of success in the focus subject, either. At some STEM-themed schools in New York City, students score below the citywide average on the state standardized math test.

Meanwhile, some high-performing themed schools remain out of reach to many low-income students, due to screenings — such as tests or auditions — that favor families who can afford private lessons and tutors.

This variation in scope, access and outcomes means that students and parents need to do their research before choosing a school with a catchy name, said Joyce Szuflita, a longtime school consultant to Brooklyn families. “Buyer beware,” she advised. “Sometimes there will be a name on a school that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the building. It’s more like branding.”

Related: The path to a career could start in middle school

There’s no national count of the number of themed middle schools, which are less common than themed high schools. But they’re cropping up across the country, particularly in places where families aren’t limited to their neighborhood school zone, according to Andrew Maxey, a member of the board of trustees of the Association for Middle Level Education, or AMLE, an organization that supports middle school educators.

In cities like New York, where students can choose among public schools, public charters and private schools, a theme can be a way for a program to stand out from the competition. It can also help convince some middle-class parents to stick with city public schools for the middle grades, instead of fleeing for private schools or the suburbs.

A theme, said Maud Abeel, a director in the education practice at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, “is a signal to families and educators that you’re trying to make school relevant and engaging.”

It’s also a signal to business leaders, said David Adams, the CEO of the Urban Assembly, a school support organization that has opened more than 20 career-themed public middle and high schools in New York City since 1997.

When the Urban Assembly’s founder was looking for ways to get industry more involved in public education, back in the early 90s, he settled on themes as a way “to mobilize the private sector to invest in schools,” Adams said.

But there are downsides to proclaiming a specialty. Doing so can scare away parents who worry — sometimes needlessly — that their child will be pigeonholed or miss out on opportunities to explore other areas, Szuflita said. And claiming a theme creates real pressure to “live up to the moniker,” added Abeel.

“If you’re going to put it in your name, you have to show why it’s there,” she said.

In New York City, where there are schools with straightforward names (the Middle School for Art and Philosophy), schools with clever or cute nicknames (BUGS), and schools that combine concepts in head-scratching ways (the Collegiate Academy for Mathematics and Personal Awareness), that “why” is more obvious in some cases than others.

On one end of the spectrum are schools like Ballet Tech, where middle schoolers dance five days a week, and Harbor Middle, where students pursue projects like boat-building and oyster reef monitoring.

“I would want to make sure that while there may be specialization, it’s not cutting off potential pathways.”

Nancy Deutsch, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and an editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research

On the other are schools that no longer fit their names, due to mission drift, leadership turnover or curricular change. A prime example is Brooklyn’s Math & Science Exploratory School, where leaders have asked the Department of Education for permission to drop the “Math & Science” from the name because “the curriculum has evolved” and the current name is “limiting and misaligned with the school’s value and goals,” according to a resolution in support of the change.

In between are dozens of schools that are implementing their themes in different ways and to varying degrees. Some, like the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, offer an additional period or two in the theme, along with extras, like hydroponics and coding.

Others focus their electives on the theme. At New Voices, in Brooklyn, students sample six arts forms in sixth grade, then pick a major for the last two years. But parents whose children attended the school said the arts theme isn’t infused into the core subjects.

Broadly speaking, themed middle schools set aside less time for their target subject than their high school counterparts. That’s mostly because the school day is “too full to pile things on,” said Maxey, who, in addition to his work as a board member for AMLE, is director of strategic initiatives at Tuscaloosa City Schools, where there is a performing arts middle school.  

Maxey said the most successful schools take an integrative, rather than an additive approach, weaving the theme across all subjects.

“You don’t carve out time for the arts,” he said. “You make them the essence of the school.”

Related: A hidden divide: How NYC’s high school system separates students by gender

The research on the effectiveness of themed schools is thin; experts on middle school teaching say they aren’t aware of any rigorous studies comparing themed and mainstream middles.

But a pair of studies by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools — one on turnaround middle schools and another on small high schools — suggest that themes can lend cohesion to the curriculum and facilitate collaboration across disciplines, said Cheri Fancsali, the Alliance’s executive director. They can attract students, as well as teachers, to a school.

Yet the studies also showed that themes sometimes lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and alienate students who aren’t interested in the theme, Fancsali said.

Nancy Deutsch, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and an editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, said she has mixed feelings about themed middles.

On the one hand, Deutsch said, letting students select schools that align with their interests might prevent some of the drop-off in motivation and engagement that often begins in middle school. On the flip side, attending a themed school might limit students’ future options, if they can’t take courses — Algebra I, for example — that would allow them to pursue different interests in high school.

“I would want to make sure that while there may be specialization, it’s not cutting off potential pathways,” she said.

“Operating in a public school system, you can’t go as deep or be as innovative as BUGS.”

Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network

Equity can be a concern as well. Some themed schools admit students based on factors like test scores or grade point averages, or require them to submit a portfolio or undergo an audition. Ohers have moved away from such screening methods, in an effort to build more racially and socioeconomically balanced classes.

Brooklyn’s District 15, where almost half the middle schools have themes, switched to a lottery system a few years ago. The change has reduced segregation in the district’s schools, but it has also coincided with a sharp drop in test scores at some themed schools, including the Math & Science Exploratory School, which had historically drawn a disproportionate number of white and higher-income families. This has led to speculation that the move to change the school’s name was motivated by declining test scores — a charge the school has denied.

Even so, the school’s pass rate on the state math exam — 64 percent in 2021-22 — was still twice the citywide average for middle schools of 32 percent (and climbed back to 80 percent during the last academic year, recently released data show). Several STEM-themed schools weren’t even meeting that low bar.

BUGS, which shares a building with a District 15 public themed middle school, the Carroll Gardens School for Innovation, is required under state charter law to admit students by lottery, with preference given to students in the district. The school is fairly diverse — roughly half the students are white — and a quarter qualify for free and reduced lunch. Close to a third have disabilities.

Last year, according to data from the New York State Department of Education, two-thirds of BUGS students passed the state math exam, though pass rates were significantly lower for students with disabilities (48 percent), and economically disadvantaged students (32 percent). The citywide average for all middle schoolers was 46.3 percent.

Related: Can you fix middle school by getting rid of it?

When BUGS opened a little over a decade ago, its focus was squarely on environmental sustainability. But over the years, it has expanded its purview to social and economic sustainability, too, said Tenner, the executive director.

The school’s all-in embrace of the sustainability theme is fairly unusual, said Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network. The Network’s members include schools with a couple courses in environmental studies, those with after-school “green teams,” and schools with net-zero emissions, among others.

“Operating in a public school system, you can’t go as deep or be as innovative as BUGS,” she said.

Still, given the school’s name, Tenner sometimes has to correct parents’ misperception that it’s all about planting and harvesting.

“Buyer beware. Sometimes there will be a name on a school that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the building. It’s more like branding.”

Joyce Szuflita, educational consultant to Brooklyn, New York, families

“The garden is a great outdoor classroom, but it’s only one of many in the city,” she tells families.

Their confusion may not matter much, anyway. In interviews, parents whose children attend or attended themed middle schools in Brooklyn said they made their choice for a variety of reasons, often unrelated to the theme: a school’s location, academic reputation or small size.

Parents whose kids attended the Math & Science Exploratory School said it was an open secret among affluent families living near the school that the emphasis was on exploration, and not on math and science. They wondered whether families from poorer parts of the district, whose children now make up a large share of the school’s enrollment, would know that.

Sarah Russo, whose son is a seventh grader at BUGS, said it was the school’s co-teaching approach and nurturing environment that sold her. Her son has an Individualized Education Program (a plan for students with disabilities) and she worried he’d get lost in a big, competitive school.

The BUGS survey-taking sixth graders, meanwhile, had other reasons to like the school. Elias was really excited about the lockers, while Sophia, whose group had interviewed passersby on a different corner, was thrilled that they’d get released for lunch. Sena picked BUGS over New Voices, the school her two best friends planned to attend, after realizing that the arts “aren’t my thing.”

Back in the classroom after completing their survey, the students get a refresher lesson on converting ratios into percentages and tally their responses. They find that roughly half of respondents have more restaurants and fast-food chains than grocery stores in their neighborhood, and forty percent don’t know what food equity is. Three quarters spend more than $50 per person on groceries each week.

Armed with these statistics, the students take action, writing letters to Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso to urge him to bring more grocery stores to Brooklyn neighborhoods and install more community fridges in the district.

In his letter, Elias asks Reynoso to tackle inflation and add lessons on food inequity to the city’s curricula.

“Please, Mr. Reynoso, we must do something!” he concludes, and adds his signature: a smiley face giving a thumbs up.

This story about theme schools 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 Middle schools are experimenting with ‘themes’ like math, sustainability and the arts. But is it all just branding? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SODUS, N.Y. — Daniel Bennett’s office at Sodus Intermediate School is a haven for kids in crisis.

When fourth, fifth or sixth graders here are fed up, ready to fight, or exhausting their teacher with their unfocused energy, they can visit Bennett’s office to jump on the mini trampoline, bounce on the balance ball chairs, or strum out their frustration on one of the guitars that hang on one wall.

Sometimes, the kids arrive angry, outraged at how they’ve been treated by a classmate or teacher; other times they show up sad, or overwhelmed. This spring morning, a boy came in crying, complaining he’d been treated unfairly during a game in gym class. He told Bennett he didn’t understand the game’s rules and was punished for breaking them.

Bennett, a doctoral student at Roberts Wesleyan University here on a year-long internship, helps each student identify their feelings, and validates them. While the student calms down, they might play a board game, shoot darts or mess with fidget toys.

On this day, though, the boy wasn’t interested in toys or games. He just wanted to talk — and be listened to.

“Sometimes you need to sit and be quiet,” Bennett said later.

Besides Bennett, Sodus Intermediate has two licensed psychologists on staff. But one functions as a school counselor, responsible for academic advising in addition to mental health counseling. Even with Bennett on board, it can be hard to meet the needs of all the kids and teachers in this low-income, rural district — especially since the pandemic.

“There’s a lot of trauma, and there are only so many hours in a day to meet with kids,” Bennett said.

Rates of anxiety and depression among youth and adolescents have reached record highs across the country, with the surgeon general calling kids’ declining mental health the “defining public health crisis of our time.” Yet, nationwide, there was just one school psychologist for every 1,127 K-12 students in 2020-21, a ratio well below the 500 students to one psychologist recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists. The shortages of school social workers and counselors are just as bad.

These deficits are due both to a lack of funding and a lack of providers. Some schools know they need more mental health providers, but they can’t afford to hire them. Others have the budget to hire, but can’t find a qualified provider. Colleges just aren’t producing enough of them, and low pay pushes some would-be school counselors into private practice or other specialties.

Now, spurred by an influx of federal funds, schools and colleges are undertaking an unprecedented effort to recruit and retain more school mental health providers. Districts are offering stipends to grad student interns, providing mentors to new hires, and creating online communities for isolated rural providers. Colleges are creating new programs to introduce high schoolers to school mental-health careers and launching virtual graduate degrees to attract busy professionals and far-flung students.

Bennett’s position at Sodus Intermediate, a 45-minute drive from Rochester, is funded through one of a pair of federal grant programs that received a huge funding increase in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed last year in response to the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, in Uvalde, Texas. The grant programs are also part of President Joe Biden’s effort to double the number of school-based mental health professionals.

Since December, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded $286 million to 264 grantees in nearly every state to boost the training and hiring of school mental health professionals, particularly those from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds. The agency estimates that the infusion of cash will prepare more than 14,000 new providers. And that’s just a portion of the $1 billion funding increase, with the remaining grants to be doled out over the next five years.

Schools also spent an estimated $2 billion in federal pandemic recovery dollars to hire mental health professionals — an investment that helped increase the number of social workers by nearly 50 percent, and the number of school counselors and psychologists by 10 percent, according to the education department.

Nationwide, there is just one school psychologist for every 1,127 K-12 students, a ratio well below the 500 students to one psychologist recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists

Bennett, the son of a school psychologist, said he feels drawn to the mental health field. He briefly considered a career in law, but settled on psychology after working in an inpatient clinic for children and adolescents after college.

“There were cases that would break your heart,” Bennett said. “But it kept pulling me back.”

But with one week remaining on his internship, he’s not yet sold on a career in school counseling. He’s worked in several settings since starting his program in clinical and school psychology in 2020, and found interest in them all.

“I’m open to seeing where the wind takes me,” he said.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

At lunchtime, Bennett hurries to the cafeteria to collect four rambunctious fifth grade boys for a skills group. Trays in hand, they race down the hall to Bennett’s office, scarfing up tater tots directly into their mouths.

The topic today is listening. The group starts with a silly song about being a “whole body listener,” drawing or coloring what they hear or think as they listen.

When the song ends, Bennett asks the students to describe their drawings and then share which classmate did the best job of listening while they spoke.

Josh holds up a picture of a guy playing with his ears, and Bennett asks what it represents.

“Hear teachers talk,” Josh answers.

“And who was the best listener?” Bennett asks.

“You,” Josh says. “Your eyes were on me, and you weren’t tapping the floor.”

Matt, who is dressed head-to-toe in Spider-man attire, jumps in to defend himself. “The way I focus and calm down is by fidgeting,” he explains.

Tim goes next. Licking a red popsicle, he holds a drawing of an all-green face in front of his own. “I drew me a new face so I can make more friends,” he says.

The phone rings, interrupting the sharing. It’s a teacher who wants to know if she can send a student who is in crisis. Bennett says he has five minutes after the skills group ends — after that he’s got to meet with another teacher.

He hangs up the phone and turns back to Tim. “What about this face will help you make friends?” he asks.

“It’s green,” Tim responds.

“And who was the best listener?” Bennett asks.

“Apollo — he was listening with his ears,” Tim says.

When the session ends, Bennett returns the boys to their classrooms, and picks up the student who the teacher had called about. As they walk to Bennett’s office, the student says that he accidentally squirted water on his teacher’s phone, and she smacked him on the arm. “Now I’m mad all day,” the student says.

They head back to Bennett’s office, where the student calms down by strumming on a guitar. Bennett asks the boy what type of music is his favorite (country, he says), and tells him he used to play bass in a high school band; he had hair down to his shoulders. They talk about the recent evaluation the student received for special education services, and the boy confides that he’s started a new medication.

When five minutes are up, Bennett tells the student it’s time to go. As the boy leaves, Bennett asks what one thing he could do to get through class.

“Ignore my teacher,” the student says.

“Let it wash off you like water,” Bennett says, encouragingly, before rushing to meet another teacher.

Related: School counselors keep kids on track. Why are they first to be cut?

Rural districts tend to have a harder time recruiting school psychologists, said Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists. There are fewer training programs near rural districts than near urban ones, and graduates often look for work close to where they’re trained, she said.

But even if more graduates were willing to relocate, the number of students graduating from programs in psychology, counseling and social work isn’t keeping pace with districts’ growing demand for mental health services. Opening up the programs to more students isn’t really an option, either — there aren’t enough faculty or site supervisors to train them, according to Strobach.

Another reason schools struggle to recruit and retain mental health providers is in part because of the low pay. (The average salary for a school psychologist is about $88,000; for clinical and counseling psychologists it’s $103,000; industrial psychologists, who work in businesses and organizations, earn an average of $145,000.)

Since December, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded $286 million to 264 grantees in nearly every state to boost the training and hiring of school mental health professionals, particularly those from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In addition, schools often ask providers, especially school counselors, to take on administrative duties, like test proctoring and cafeteria and bathroom monitoring.

While counselors expect to perform some duties beyond their professional specialty, asking them to do too much “pulls them away from the work they’re passionate about” and contributes to counselor turnover, said Eric Sparks, deputy executive director of the American School Counselor Association.

New York is doing better than some states in hiring and retaining school psychologists: Its ratio is 1:662. But before the six districts received the grant, only 5 of 19 schools had a social worker on staff, Lustica said.

With the help of the federal dollars, the districts have been able to hire roughly 20 interns in psychology, social work and counseling each year for the past four years. They pay them a stipend and mileage — a rarity in graduate internships — and place them in interdisciplinary groups that meet twice a month to review cases and share ideas on how to approach them.

By paying their interns, and nurturing a spirit of collaboration among them, the districts hope to convince them to return to work in a school when they graduate. So far, that strategy seems to be working: More than three-quarters of former interns have been hired into high-need districts in New York, Lustica said.

Boston Public Schools is also using stipends to attract potential job candidates — particularly those that match the district’s demographics. Though Boston has had more success recruiting than many districts, it’s struggled to hire bilingual providers and those from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, said Andria Amador, the district’s senior director of behavioral health services.

“Trying to enter a field that makes you work for free for two years is impossible for some of our economically disadvantaged populations,” Amador said.

“Trying to enter a field that makes you work for free for two years is impossible for some of our economically disadvantaged populations.”

Andria Amador, senior director of behavioral health services, Boston Public Schools

Other recipients of the federal grants are trying different approaches. In Texas, a “grow your own” program is paying teachers to pursue degrees in counseling; in Wisconsin, a new virtual master’s program is reaching Native students on reservations located hours from a college campus.

Leah M. Rouse, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee who is helping lead the effort to recruit Indigenous students, said that colleges used to be reluctant to offer online programs, worrying quality would suffer. But “the pandemic showed we can do quality training and supervision with remote instruction,” she said.

Nevada, which in 2021 had just one school psychologist for every 2,000 students, has started recruiting in high school, offering a course on school mental health professions that lets high schoolers earn college credit. Its colleges have begun training “school psychology assistants” to take over some of the administrative duties placed on licensed school psychologists, freeing them to spend more time with students.

And in Virginia, educators are tackling high turnover among isolated rural providers through an online professional development program that connects the providers to colleagues in other schools.

Related: Campus religious groups step into a new realm: mental health counseling

Back at Sodus Intermediate, Bennett is running late for his meeting with Jennifer Gibson, a longtime special education teacher with a challenging class. But when he arrives in the cafeteria, Gibson isn’t there. She shows up a minute later, saying she got caught up disciplining kids.

Bennett and Gibson meet fairly often to discuss strategies for dealing with difficult student behaviors, he says. Their sessions typically start with venting, and this day is no exception.

“I love the community in schools — getting to eat lunch with colleagues, being surrounded by youngsters. But it would be very hard to support myself on the entry level salaries in this setting.”

Daniel Bennett, doctoral student on a year-long internship as a school counselor

Gibson tells Bennett she’s relieved that a particularly disruptive student has left her class, and frustrated that he was put there to begin with.

“He would have been better served elsewhere, don’t you think?” she asks Bennett.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I hear your frustration.”

Then, they move on to problem-solving. Bennett asks Gibson what she was disciplining students for.

“Just kids being sassy,” she says. One student, in particular, wouldn’t settle down after lunch.

“What do you think was the reason?” Bennett asks.

Gibson speculates that it might have been the change in seasons — the warmer weather always makes transitions harder.

Then Gibson remembers that the student hadn’t eaten; he’d hit a kid on the bus and spent the lunch period in suspension. She’d forgotten to give him his usual “brain break” after lunch, too.

“So that’s my fault,” she says, guiltily.

“There’s no blaming or shaming here,” Bennett reminds her. They discuss how Gibson can ensure the student gets his energy out before returning to class after lunch.

At one point in the meeting, Gibson asks Bennett when his last day is. Next Thursday, he tells her.

“That’s awful,” she says. “I wish we could pay to hire you.”

More than three-quarters of former interns have been hired into high-need districts in New York via a federal grant program.

Stephen Humbert, Bennett’s supervisor and the school’s practicing psychologist, said having interns in the building two days a week helps him support more students and teachers. It also exposes staff to fresh ideas and theories, he said.

But Bennett, who starts a new internship at a healthcare organization in Pennsylvania later this month, now doubts he’ll settle in a school when he finishes his doctoral program next spring. With $150,000 in student debt, he’ll need to find something a little more lucrative.

“I love the community in schools — getting to eat lunch with colleagues, being surrounded by youngsters,” Bennett wrote in an e-mail on the last day of his internship. “But it would be very hard to support myself on the entry level salaries in this setting.”

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

The post The school psychologist pipeline is broken. Can new federal money fix it? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

DALLAS — In Levar Dobbins’ eighth grade classroom, a dozen students were learning about workforce trends.

“What do you think the future job market will look like?” Dobbins asked the class, at Piedmont GLOBAL Academy, a majority-Hispanic middle school in southeastern Dallas.

“A whole bunch of robots,” one boy suggested.

“More social media platforms,” a girl said.

Dobbins then led his students in a discussion about how current events like the pandemic are shaping the nation’s workforce, and why Dallas’ economy is booming (a fact that surprised some students).

“Jobs will continue to evolve,” Dobbins told them. “If you told someone a decade ago that you could have a career as a social media influencer, they wouldn’t have believed you.”

Preparing students for a changing workforce is one of the goals behind a movement to get kids thinking about their career plans at a younger age. A growing number of states and school districts now require students to take career exploration classes in middle school. Others offer introductory courses in specific careers, like engineering or robotics.

Dallas Independent School District, the second-largest district in the nation’s second-largest state, has long offered career exploration courses to its seventh and eighth graders. But this year it expanded one of the classes, based on a curriculum from the nonprofit Education Opens Doors, to every middle school in the district. Brian Lusk, the district’s chief of strategic initiatives, said school leaders wanted to ensure that all students were prepared to make informed decisions about their paths in high school and beyond. “Equity is important to us,” he said.

Advocates argue that exposing students to potential careers in middle school, rather than waiting until high school, gives them time to take the classes and extracurriculars that will get them to their goals — and the opportunity to change course while the stakes are still low.

“Students are less stressed out in the middle grades,” said Stephanie Simpson, CEO of the Association for Middle Level Education, a nonprofit that supports middle school educators. “They can explore and take some risks, with fewer immediate consequences.”

Showing students a route to their dreams in early adolescence — a time when many begin to lose interest in school — can also boost middle schoolers’ motivation, advocates say.

But the effort to push career exploration down into the middle grades faces several challenges, including a lack of funding, a shortage of school counselors and packed school schedules that leave little time for “extras” like career exploration. The work has also raised concerns about “tracking,” the now-discredited practice of steering certain students, particularly those who are low-income and Black or Hispanic, into vocational tracks that lead to low-wage jobs.

Proponents of career exploration in middle school say they’re not out to narrow students’ options, but to broaden them. The aim is to introduce young people to careers they might not otherwise hear of, and arm them with the tools to pursue college, if they want to.

“We’re not pushing them onto a path so much as giving them the ability to choose which path they go down,” said Roscoe Compton-Kelly, CEO of Education Opens Doors. A recent evaluation of its program found that students who participated were more likely to take the ACT and AP exams than their peers who did not. “We’re giving them the knowledge to make the decisions for themselves,” he added.        

Related: Middle school’s moment: What the science tells us about improving the middle grades

When Education Opens Doors began pitching its program to Texas schools a decade ago, the biggest question from school leaders was, “Is it too soon?” said Jeff McGuire, the group’s director of communications. Were early adolescents, with their raging hormones and still-developing frontal lobes, really ready to plan for a future that may feel light-years away?

Nancy Deutsch, a University of Virginia professor who is leading an effort to remake middle schools, thinks they are. The early teen years may even be the ideal time to start, she said.

“Early adolescence is such a huge time for identity development, when young people are asking, ‘Who am I, and who do I want to be?’ “ said Deutsch, the director of Youth-Nex: The UVA Center to Promote Effective Youth Development. Career exploration capitalizes on this innate drive, encouraging students to try on possible future selves, she said.

The early teen years are also a stage when students are especially vulnerable to “identity foreclosure,” or the walling off of certain options, such as a STEM career, as not for them, Deutsch said. By catching students before they foreclose, schools may be able to convince more female students to consider computer science, for example.

There are practical reasons to start sooner, too. With the growth of specialized high schools and the expansion of career-focused programs in comprehensive schools, students today are being asked as early as 13 or 14 to make decisions that could shape their future careers. In Dallas, eighth graders must choose one of five “endorsements” to focus on in high school — among them, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math); business and industry; and the arts and humanities.

“High school is far too late to begin this conversation with young people,” said Kyle Hartung, an associate vice president with Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit that offers a career exploration curriculum for schools and after-school programs.

Students seem to agree. In a pair of recent surveys by American Student Assistance, a nonprofit focused on career readiness, roughly two-thirds of high school graduates said they would have benefited from more career exploration in middle or high school, and 80 percent of high school guidance counselors said their students were “overwhelmed” by decisions about college and career. (American Student Assistance is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)

“Students are less stressed out in the middle grades. They can explore and take some risks, with fewer immediate consequences.”

Stephanie Simpson, CEO of the Association for Middle Level Education

Some states are getting the message. Indiana now requires all eighth graders to take a series of self-assessments through the state’s online career explorer or a similar web  tool. The results are shared with guidance counselors, who help students match their interests, strengths and values with one of three paths: employment, enrollment or enlistment.

Delaware, meanwhile, is in the process of writing standards for career and technical education in the middle grades, after finding that middle schoolers are often making uninformed decisions about which high school to attend. And Virginia has kids begin work on an “academic and career plan portfolio,” which includes information about their interests, values and skills, as early as elementary school.

Related: COLUMN — Helping middle schoolers think about a future beyond the pandemic

Education Opens Doors was created by Jayda Batchelder, an eighth grade science teacher who grew up not knowing much about the road to college herself. A first-generation student, she had landed at Tulane with a scholarship “by pure luck,” she recalled in an interview: The elite college’s recruiters wanted someone from South Dakota, and she fit the bill.

As a first-year Teach for America corps member in Dallas, in the 2009-10 school year, Batchelder had been named a teacher of the year. Her students had shone on the state standardized test, and she “really felt I’d changed their trajectory,” she said.

But when she visited some of her former students the next fall, at a high school football game, she found many of them were making choices that could limit their futures. The brightest students were enrolling in the lowest-level courses, while students who had excelled in her science class weren’t taking STEM courses. It was, for Batchelder, a moment of epiphany.

“We’re telling our kids they can be anything, do anything, but no one is teaching them how,” she said.

That weekend, in October 2010, she sent an e-mail to all the Teach for America members in Dallas with a proposal to create a “roadmap for success” for middle schoolers. Four teachers agreed to help. After two years of piloting the curricula in Dallas schools, Batchelder received a $5,000 prize for being named science teacher of the year and used the money to launch a nonprofit.

At first, the organization struggled to secure funding. Foundation leaders said they’d support the nonprofit if it focused on high school, and funders and some school leaders worried about the potential for tracking. Some teachers were skeptical, too, wondering, “How much work is this going to be for me on top of the work I already have?” McGuire said.

Batchelder turned down the grants pegged to high school, and reassured skeptics that all students would be educated about all potential pathways to a career. If anything, the early curricula was probably biased in favor of a four-year education, Batchelder said: “We probably overcompensated.”

“We’re telling our kids they can be anything, do anything, but no one is teaching them how.”

Jayda Batchelder, founder, Education Opens Doors

In the years since, the program has undergone multiple revisions; its workbook has been fully digitized and made more engaging, with online games and quizzes. There’s less “sage on the stage” — teacher lecture — and more discussion and debate. And there’s more information about alternative pathways, including the military, apprenticeships and technical school.

“We don’t want kids who have goals other than a traditional college to feel like ‘this has nothing to do with me,’ ” said Kristen Pereira, the group’s senior curriculum specialist.

In a recent class at The Young Men’s Leadership Academy at Fred F. Florence Middle School in southeastern Dallas, Katherine Coney, a teacher, showed students a slide reminding them that “you don’t have to attend college to have a career.” Industry-based certification and licensure is another route, it read.

“I want you to go to college, if that’s what you want, but you have other options,” Coney said. “What we don’t want is for you to work at Burger King for 30 years, trying to support your family.”

Related: What does ‘career readiness’ look like in middle school?

Levar Dobbins, the Piedmont middle school teacher, said he learned about college by watching “A Different World,” a spinoff of ”The Cosby Show” that focused on the life of students at a fictional historically Black college. When he was growing up, “college was a big abstract thing — a pennant, or a football team,” said Dobbins, now 42. “A Different World” made it concrete, imaginable.

While today’s students have access to much more information about college and careers via the Internet, many still have limited notions about what they can become, Dobbins said.

To expand their horizons, Dobbins and other teachers have students research careers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website — looking up information about job duties, education requirements, starting salaries and job outlook.

“Early adolescence is such a huge time for identity development, when young people are asking, ‘Who am I, and who do I want to be?’ “

Nancy Deutsch, a University of Virginia professor and director of Youth-Nex: The UVA Center to Promote Effective Youth Development

Students also spend time conducting inventories of their own skills and strengths. In a recent seventh grade class at Eduardo Mata Montessori School, students wrote down three skills they would stress to an employer in a job interview. Daniel Gonzalez wrote that he is brave, creative and has a strong mindset.

Daniel said he really wants to be a professional basketball player, but engineering is his back-up plan. “I’ll probably go to college, because after a while, I’ll be too old to play,” he said.

Lusk said the district hasn’t gotten much pushback from teachers about the program, in part because it doesn’t add to their workload. When Dallas took the program districtwide, it made it a stand-alone course, and assigned teachers to teach it. “It’s their course,” he said. “It’s not an add-on.”

Related: Middle school is often difficult. Try experiencing it under quarantine

The district paid for the program — which costs schools $50 to $100 per student, depending on the level of support teachers receive — using federal economic recovery dollars, and will cover the costs once those funds run out, Lusk said. 

In other districts, though, a lack of funding and “initiative fatigue” have sometimes thwarted efforts to extend career exploration to the middle grades, said Simpson of the Association for Middle Level Education. “We’re asking so much of our educators, this feels like one more thing,” she said.

School counselors, who might also be tapped to teach the material, are similarly stretched, with the average public school counselor overseeing 415 students, far more than the 250 maximum recommended by the American School Counselor Association.

“The Achilles’ heel of this work is that it’s early preparation for young people without a system to advance through.”

Kyle Hartung, an associate vice president with Jobs for the Future

At the same time, pressures to improve test scores have led some schools to spend more of the day on core academic subjects, and less on “specials,” like career exploration.

All these factors have led Jean Eddy, the CEO of American Student Assistance, to conclude that while career exploration in the classroom works, it can’t be scaled nationally.  The nonprofit, which has funded successful school-based programs in the past, is now shifting its resources to apps it has developed to help kids explore careers on their own.

“This generation wants agency — they want to be able to direct their own learning,” Eddy said.

Hartung, of Jobs for the Future, said efforts to educate students about their options won’t succeed without improvements in the school-to-workforce pipeline.

“We don’t want kids who have goals other than a traditional college to feel like ‘this has nothing to do with me.’ ”

Kristen Pereira, senior curriculum specialist with Education Opens Doors

“Right now, the systems are very siloed,” he said. “The Achilles’ heel of this work is that it’s early preparation for young people without a system to advance through.”

But in Dallas, at least, the push to start career exploration sooner seems to be making a difference.

Bianca Escobar, a high school senior who took the Education Opens Doors course in middle school, said she still turns to her student guidebook when she’s feeling lost or scared about the future. She wants to study engineering in California, and recently returned from a road trip to the state, where she visited four colleges. Her favorite was the University of San Francisco.

“I feel really confident in my choices and the things I need to do to prepare,” she said.  

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

The post The path to a career could start in middle school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Michael Woods doesn’t tell his high school students that he is gay. He doesn’t bring up gay marriage or any other topic that might court controversy, either.

“I am very cautious about a lot of things,” said Woods, a special education teacher in Palm Beach County, Florida, who teaches science. “I enjoy keeping my job.”

But when LGBTQ students take note of the “I’m Here” sticker on the back of his school ID, or his “We are ALL HUMAN” T-shirt, and come to him for advice or guidance, Woods is happy to provide it. He grew up in the county where he now works and remembers what it was like to be bullied.

“For many of these young people, teachers are the safe space,” said Woods.

Woods said he won’t stop having those conversations when Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which limits classroom discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity, takes effect this summer. But he worries that students won’t feel comfortable turning to him for help. Already, some students are asking teachers what they’ll be allowed to talk about, Woods said.

Supporters of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, officially titled “Parental Rights in Education,” say they’re seeking to protect parents’ rights to decide how their children are raised and prevent teachers from “indoctrinating” students into liberal beliefs. Lawmakers in at least 20 states have introduced similar bills.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the governor has directed schools to report students who are receiving gender-affirming care, such as hormone blockers, as cases of child abuse. In Alabama, the governor signed a law last month requiring schools to notify parents if their child is questioning their gender identity. 

In each case, teachers are being deputized as culture war cops, called upon to police their own behavior, and that of their students. It’s a role that many are reluctant to take on, and one that has left them feeling confused, scared and uncertain of their relationships with some of their most vulnerable students.

Related: What do classroom conversations around race, identity and history really look like?

Florida, where the new law will prohibit schools from teaching students about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and require lessons for older grades to be “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate,” parents can sue the district to compel compliance. If they win, the district will have to cover their attorney fees and court costs, and may be liable for damages.

But the law doesn’t define key terms like “classroom instruction” or “age appropriate,” and it gives the state Department of Education until June 30, 2023 to issue guidance on complying with the law — a full year after the law takes effect.

Until then, teachers will be flying blind, unsure if they’re opening their district up to legal risk. Is it still OK to talk to first graders about families, if one student has two moms? Can teachers read second graders a picture book with two dads? What about a book featuring heterosexual romance?

In Volusia County, Florida, third grade teacher Michelle Polgar worries she may have to stop reading aloud the book “Mouse in Love,” a story about a male mouse who falls for his female neighbor. Romantic love in any form feels verboten. She wonders what will happen in share time, too — if a kid mentions that his uncles got married over the weekend, and another kid asks what that means, does she need to shut down the discussion?

“Am I going to have to police kids’ expression?” she asked. “Am I violating their First Amendment rights?”

The law’s sponsors have said that it will not prevent students or teachers from talking about their LGTBQ families or stifle student-led discussion or questions. But critics say the bill’s language is so vague that it will lead many schools and teachers to over-correct, avoiding anything that might anger a parent.

“With the possibility of lawsuits, or someone getting upset, I’m going to be walking on eggshells,” said Polgar.

Anita Carson, a middle school science teacher in Lake Alfred, Florida, said she’ll keep talking to the LGBTQ students who come to her for support, even if it costs her a job. She points to a survey that found that LGBTQ students who can identify several supportive staff members had higher GPAs, better attendance and were less likely to feel unsafe in school than their peers who could name fewer supportive staff. Still, Carson said, the threat of a lawsuit is “one more worry on my head.”

“If a kid comes out to their parents and says, ‘Ms. Carson helped me figure out how to tell you,’ then I’m possibly going to be sued,” she said.

In Texas, where the governor’s order is being challenged in court, Adrian Reyna, an eighth grade history teacher in San Antonio, said he won’t be “intimidated” into reporting his transgender students to state authorities.

“They feel like they’ve been carrying the weight of the community for two years. To then be used as pawns in a political game speaks to a lack of respect for teachers.”

Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel.

“The one thing I can control is the space I create in the classroom, and I will do everything I can to create a safe and inclusive space,” he said.

But he understands why many teachers, particularly sole breadwinners, won’t want to risk losing their jobs or teaching certificates. “The threat is real,” he said.

“Mandatory reporting” laws in Texas and most other states have long required teachers to report suspected cases of child abuse to authorities, or face potential fines or imprisonment. But the governor’s directive breaks new ground, classifying “gender-affirming care” — a spectrum of services that includes hormone blockers and surgery — as child abuse.

“Teachers don’t want to be Gov. Greg Abbott’s transgender police,” said Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association.

Related: Social emotional learning is the latest flashpoint in the education wars

The past two years have been grueling for many teachers, as they coped with a pandemic that forced them to toggle between remote and in-person learning — and sometimes do both at once — and staffing shortages that have added to their workloads. In Florida alone, there are close to 4,500 teacher vacancies.

To some stressed teachers, the barrage of bills questioning their professional judgment feels like piling on, said Alejandra Lopez, the president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel.

“They feel like they’ve been carrying the weight of the community for two years,” Lopez said. “To then be used as pawns in a political game speaks to a lack of respect for teachers.”

Lawmakers in at least 20 states have introduced bill similar to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Indeed, in a survey conducted earlier this year by the nonprofit EdWeek Research Center, fewer than half of teachers said they feel the public respects them as professionals, down from more than three quarters of teachers a decade ago, and barely half said they’re satisfied with their jobs. Another survey, by the National Education Association, found that 55 percent of respondents were considering leaving their jobs early. Neither poll asked specifically about culture war issues.

Carson, the Florida middle school teacher, said it feels like schools are lurching from one manufactured controversy to another, as conservative politicians and activists seek new ways to score points with parents.

“These groups are outraged about one thing for a month, and then it’s another thing, and it seems they all shift at the same time,” she said. “We gear up to talk about one controversy, and we get to the meeting, and they’re upset about something else.”

For gay teachers like Woods, the attacks can feel personal. “It seems,” he said, “like an intent to erase an entire population of people, as if they don’t exist.”

Jacqueline Rodriguez, vice president of research, policy and advocacy at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said she worries the bills will discourage LGBTQ individuals from pursuing teaching careers by sending the message that “this is not the profession to pursue if you want to bring your whole self to work every day.”

Enrollment in traditional teacher-preparation programs dropped 35 percent in the decade between 2008-09 and 2018-19, and fell further during the pandemic.

Elana Yaron Fishbein, the founder and president of No Left Turn in Education, a conservative parents’ rights group, said most teachers support efforts like the one in Florida, but are afraid to speak up.

“Unfortunately, the harsh cancel culture silences many of the teachers who oppose the radical indoctrination in schools, or leads them to quit their jobs,” she wrote in an e-mail.

“I guess you have spoken to the same teachers who support sexualizing children in K-12 schools,” she said.

Related: CRT debate repeats past battles about state history textbooks

Concerns that schools are sexualizing children go back at least 100 years, to conflicts over the teaching of evolution, according to Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University. That fight took aim at atheism, but its subtext was that teaching students the science of evolution would cause them to “act like animals and have animal sex,” Laats said. Some preachers even warned it would promote bestiality.

The targeting of gay teachers, in particular, dates to at least the 1950s, when the Florida legislature created the Johns Committee to root out communists and homosexuals from public schools and colleges. The attacks peaked in the ‘70s, with Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, which popularized the notion that LGBTQ teachers were preying on students, Laats said.

Echoes of that 50-year-old campaign can be heard in the Florida bill, which supporters have described as an “anti-grooming” measure, designed to prevent pedophiles from exploiting children

“I am very cautious about a lot of things. I enjoy keeping my job.”

Michael Woods, teacher, Palm Beach County, Florida

Still, a lot has changed since the 1970s. Public opinion polls show that 8 out of 10 Americans support schools hiring gay and lesbian teachers to work in elementary schools, up from a quarter of Americans in 1977, and close to 60 percent would be “somewhat or very” comfortable with a transgender individual teaching at their own elementary school.

But Americans remain divided over whether elementary school library books should include gay and lesbian characters, with about half of parents saying it would make them somewhat or very uncomfortable. And fully two-thirds of voters — and 88 percent of Republicans — believe it’s inappropriate for teachers or staff to discuss gender identity with children in kindergarten through third grade, another survey, by the conservative Republican polling company Public Opinion Strategies, found.

Woods and other Florida teachers say the new state law is a “solution in search of a problem,” since Florida, like most states, does not include sexual orientation and gender identity in its teaching standards for the early grades. Still, the law, which takes effect in July, is already having an impact, with some districts, including Woods’, preemptively pulling books with gay and transgender characters from school libraries.

That’s happening around the country. In the nine months between July 2021 and March 2022, 86 districts and close to 3,000 schools issued book bans, many of them in response to complaints at public meetings, according to an analysis by PEN America, an organization that advocates for free expression. A third of the banned books included LGBTQ themes or characters, the study found.

Even before the bans, LGBTQ characters were underrepresented in curricula and lesson plans, according to a 2019 survey by GLSEN, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. It found that less than half of LGBTQ respondents between the ages of 13 and 21 could find information about LGBTQ issues in their school libraries, and fewer than one in five were taught positive representations of LGBTQ people, history and events.

“What gets left behind is a sense of teachers being attacked, and that leads to a narrowing, a stunting of what goes on in schools.”

Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University

Such representation matters, according to a research brief by the Trevor Project, which focuses on suicide prevention among LGBTQ students. It found that LGBTQ middle and high-schoolers who were taught about LGBTQ people or issues were less likely to report a suicide attempt than those who hadn’t been taught.

Laats, the historian, said he expects the latest “moral panic” over LGTBTQ instruction to fade over time, fizzling as past panics have. But that doesn’t mean it won’t leave a mark on the nation’s schools and teachers, who will make “a million tiny decisions” to drop books or censor classroom discussion “just to avoid the issue,” he said.

“What gets left behind is a sense of teachers being attacked,” he said, “and that leads to a narrowing, a stunting of what goes on in schools.”

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

The post Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Heidi Schmitt, a therapist at the University of Iowa, sat in her swivel chair and pulled on her snow boots: Time to move.

It was just after lunch on a gray day this spring, but already Schmitt had seen one student suffering from panic attacks; another struggling to connect with peers after two years of pandemic-induced isolation; and a third who was having a hard time adjusting to college.

She’d just finished preparing for a workshop on tolerating distress scheduled for the evening and was about to cross campus for another workshop she leads, on mindfulness.

Such is the life of a campus counselor, at a time when the demand for mental health care seems limitless, and colleges are stretching to meet it.

On college campuses nationwide, the number of students seeking services increased by an average of 30 percent between 2009 and 2015 — more than five times the average rate of enrollment growth — and has continued to climb since then. At the University of Iowa, the number of clinical service hours provided by its counselors rose by nearly 90 percent in the 10 years preceding the pandemic.

Caseloads dipped in 2020 as students scattered to their homes and colleges struggled to serve them across state lines. But on many campuses they’re already starting to spike again, as the stress, grief and isolation that many students have experienced over the past two years rise to the surface.

In an effort to keep up, colleges have hired more therapists, contracted with networks of telehealth providers and sent more students to off-campus counselors and group therapy. They’ve spaced out appointments, set session limits and added students to waitlists.

They’ve innovated, too, subscribing to self-help apps and online peer-to-peer mental health communities, and started teaching resilience and coping skills to stressed-out students.

“Access to health care is not equitable in this country. It just isn’t. We’re always in conversations about how far we can stretch and make sure our clinicians stay well.”

Holly Davis, one of the University of Iowa’s two interim co-directors of counseling

But the rise in demand feels relentless, and a growing number of counselors say they’re burned out. Roughly 60 percent of college counseling centers experienced turnover in their staff last year, an increase of nearly 10 percentage points over 2018, according to an annual survey by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, and 70 percent of centers had difficulty filling open positions.

In the survey, counseling center directors said the Covid-19 pandemic had added to counselors’ stress and workload, while eroding staff morale and cohesion.

The question, said Marcus Hotaling, president of the association, is “Who is helping the caregivers? “Who is helping us?”

Related: College students to administrators: Let’s talk about mental health

Once upon a time, college counselors functioned more like life and career coaches than therapists, supporting students through the often-tricky transitions to college and the workforce. They dealt mostly with coming-of-age challenges: loneliness, academic stress, uncertainty about the future.

No longer. These days, counselors are as likely to see a student with a severe eating disorder or crippling panic attacks as one who is homesick or worried about schoolwork. A growing number of students — 13 percent, in one survey — report having suicidal thoughts.

Rates of mental illness among college students have been climbing for years, reaching what some consider crisis proportions. In a 2021 survey by the Healthy Minds Network, nearly half of students screened positive for clinically significant symptoms of depression, anxiety or both.

That increase is partly due to advances in treatment that have made it possible for more students to enroll in college, said Hotaling, who directs the counseling center at Union College in New York. It also reflects the pressures of modern society, in which young people can witness traumatic and disturbing events unfolding worldwide on social media and 24-hour news channels, other counselors said.

“We’re all so much more aware of the beauty and ugliness that exists in the world,” said Holly Davis, interim co-director of Iowa’s University Counseling Service. “It was always there, but now, at the tap of a finger, you can see it.”

But colleges see an ever-expanding number of students with less serious concerns, too — students who in the past might not have considered their problems big enough for therapy. Pre-pandemic, the typical campus counseling center saw 13 percent of its student body for at least one appointment; on some smaller campuses, the number approached 40 percent or more.

Ben Locke, a psychologist who founded the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, sees this opening up of campus counseling to a much broader swath of students as an unintended consequence of widespread efforts to prevent suicide and destigmatize therapy.

For the past two decades, colleges, aided by millions of dollars from the federal government and foundations, have been telling students to seek help, that it’s “OK to not be OK,” he said. They’ve trained faculty and peers to identify students in distress and refer them to counseling, and urged students not to suffer in silence.

Now, as a result of that well-intentioned and often helpful push, students are seeking therapy for even routine challenges, said Locke, who is now the chief clinical officer for Togetherall, an online mental health community.

“It’s bottomless demand, and finite resources, and that begins to erode on people’s feelings of efficacy.”

Barry Schreier, Iowa Center for School Mental Health

Schmitt, who has been a counselor for a decade, said she’s seen a shift in cultural attitudes towards emotional well-being, with schools now teaching kids coping skills as early as preschool. “My 2-year-old son will come home from school and say: ‘I’m sad. I have a big feeling. I need a break,’ ” she said.

 Schmitt said she was drawn to counseling work because she enjoys “being present with people,” supporting them through highs and lows.

“I see my role as a facilitator. They’re doing all the hard work,” she said. “I love being there to see that growth.”  

But it’s not always easy to be present in her own life. She tries to practice self-care, going for walks with her toddler, or hitting the elliptical trainer after he and his baby brother are in bed. But sometimes a thought or worry about a client will creep into her head when she’s at home.

“The most challenging thing is being able to sit and be present and be as kind and compassionate towards ourselves as we are to everyone else,” she said.

Related: Rethinking campus mental health to better serve LGBTQ+ students and others

At 1:15, heading for her mindfulness session, Schmitt left her office in the University Capitol Center, a shopping mall at the edge of the university’s sprawling downtown campus. The counseling center opened a second location here, around the corner from a tanning salon and next door to Candy Nails, in 2017, after it outgrew its other office, an aging brick building on the opposite side of the Iowa River.

She hurried through the midday gloom to the Campus Recreation and Wellness Center and climbed three flights of stairs to a yoga studio, where she settled onto a mat in the front.

“Do you ever feel like your thoughts are racing or are all over the place?” she asked the students.

“All the time,” answered one.

Schmitt instructed the students to sit silently, breathing slowly while they visualized their negative thoughts settling to the bottom of a snow globe, an exercise she called “emotional blizzard.”

Wellness workshops like this one, called “Mindfulness Matters,” have become common on college campuses, part of an effort to confront student stress before it becomes severe. The University of Iowa increased the number of hours it spends on outreach to students by 123 percent between fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2021, according to Kelly Clougher, the other interim co-director of Iowa’s University Counseling Service.

It’s not clear, though, if the programs are easing the pressure on counseling centers. For some students, a handful of coping strategies may be all they need to manage on their own. But for students with more serious concerns, outreach programs can serve as a soft entry to the counseling center, driving up demand.

Though the stigma surrounding mental health has diminished in recent years, some communities remain skeptical, or even dismissive, of therapy, and students of color are less likely to seek treatment than their white peers, research shows.

To reach students who might not seek help on their own, many colleges have begun “embedding” counselors in dorms and academic buildings, where they can build trust with students, on their turf.

At the University of Iowa, five counselors spend eight hours a day meeting with students in offices located in dorms and professional schools. The effort has been so successful that some of the embedded counselors are struggling to keep up with demand.

“We’re at a place where it feels unsustainable,” said Clougher.

Related: Simulating student mental health for teachers

After Mindfulness Matters, Schmitt hustled to the Iowa Memorial Union, where a group of students was hosting a suicide awareness event called “Send Silence Packing.” Backpacks with photos and heartbreaking stories of students lost to suicide nationwide lined the stairs and filled the ballroom, where the song “Just Keep Breathing” by We the Kings played over a loudspeaker, reminding listeners that they weren’t alone.

Annamaria Iarrapino, the president of Iowa’s chapter of Active Minds, a national student organization that sponsors the traveling exhibit, said the group was “trying to change the conversation around mental health, reducing the stigma.”

Iarrapino said her group isn’t pushing for major policy changes on campus, as some students at other schools have. But she would like to see colleges devote more resources to mental health.

“There need to be more mental health professionals, because so many students need help,” she said.

 In fact, many colleges have ramped up their hiring in recent years. The University of Iowa doubled the size of its counseling center staff, to a couple dozen individuals, between roughly 2016 and 2019.

But they still couldn’t keep up with demand.

“We saw more students, but nobody waited any less,” said Barry Schreier, the former director of the University Counseling Service who spearheaded the expansion. “We figured out that we couldn’t hire ourselves out of the problem.”

Counselor caseloads vary widely among universities, ranging from 12 to 314 clients a year, with an average of 90, according to the latest numbers from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. The University of Iowa’s caseload per counselor is 120.

Centers with larger caseloads tend to require clinicians to take on new cases even if they don’t have time available — what’s known as an absorption model. To accommodate everyone, they often set session limits and space out appointments, scheduling students on a biweekly basis.

Centers with smaller caseloads are more apt to use a “treatment” model, assigning students a counselor when a spot opens up. Though this can mean a wait for treatment, staff members get more predictable schedules, and students are more likely to attend therapy weekly, achieving better outcomes.

The University of Iowa tends towards an absorption model with its embedded counselors but uses a treatment model in its main counseling center.

To reduce wait times, the center uses a “stepped care” approach, directing students with less serious concerns to lower tiers of service — support groups and workshops, among them.

Still, during busy periods, wait times for individual therapy can stretch up to six weeks — particularly if a student has a specialized need, such as an eating disorder, or limited availability.

Though Iowa doesn’t have a strict session cap, it informs students that therapy will be brief, and focused on specific goals.

“It’s not ‘Let’s work on everything in your life,’ but ‘Let’s prioritize,’ ” said Davis.  

Students who want or need longer-term therapy are typically referred to community-based providers, though students without private insurance are sometimes allowed to stay on longer. Staff will also help students sign up for Medicaid and connect them with free clinics in town.

But that doesn’t mean poorer students will get the same access to long-term treatment as their wealthier peers with private insurance, Davis said. As co-director of counseling, her job is not just to help students, but to protect her staff, too — and that can mean upholding boundaries.  

“Access to health care is not equitable in this country. It just isn’t,” she said. “We’re always in conversations about how far we can stretch and make sure our clinicians stay well.”

Related: We know how to help young kids cope with the trauma of the last year – but will we do it?

At the University of Iowa, students without the financial resources, or transportation, to attend off-campus counseling can join a therapy group like one Schmitt led after the Send Silence Packing event.

The university offered more than 5,500 hours of group therapy in fiscal 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, more than quadruple the amount it offered in fiscal 2009. On this Thursday, in the small group of students gathered via Zoom, the focus was on managing and coping with emotions. Schmitt talked about how people choose to respond to situations, reminding students of a skill she calls “My Friend CARL,” an acronym for “Change It; Accept It; Reframe It; Leave It.”

Later, Schmitt would lead a support group for students seeking a healthier relationship with drugs and alcohol, followed by a workshop on tolerating distress. Her workday wouldn’t end until 8 p.m., more than 12 hours after it started.

College counseling was never a cushy job, but it used to be less consuming than it is today. Applicant pools were large, and hires tended to stay put for years, said Schreier, who has been in the field for 30 years.

“There need to be more mental health professionals, because so many students need help.”

Annamaria Iarrapino, the president of Iowa’s chapter of Active Minds

Today, few counselors are applying for the jobs, and some who planned to stay forever are fleeing for private practice, where they can work fewer hours and make more money, he said. The University of Iowa currently has three open positions, including the director’s job.

“It’s bottomless demand, and finite resources, and that begins to erode on people’s feelings of efficacy,” said Schreier, who left the job in February to join the university’s newly formed Iowa Center for School Mental Health, where he’s focusing on staff and faculty well-being.

Schmitt, who came to the university from a community mental health center in 2019, said she’s learned that it’s “OK to say no to some things,” to turn down some of the requests to serve on committees or present to student groups after hours. She has no plans to leave; some days are exhausting, but she’s not burned out, she said.

And so, on this Thursday, she got into her car a little after 8 p.m. and drove 45 minutes to her home in rural Iowa to say goodnight to her 2-year-old, feed the baby one last bottle, and lay out everyone’s clothes for the next day. She ended the night quietly and purposefully with her husband, watching the Food Network and sipping one last cup of tea.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) and the Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 — are free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

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

The post Inside a college counseling center struggling with the student mental health crisis appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When a middle school teacher resigned over their district’s social and emotional learning curriculum, Lisa and Stacie wanted to understand why. So, the two moms from Sandy, Utah, spent 30 hours combing through the district’s eighth grade curriculum. What they found alarmed them.

Together, they produced a 25-page report on their conclusions, along with a petition calling for the removal of the Second Step Curricula, one of the most popular programs in schools today. After they collected 700 signatures, the Canyons School District agreed to abandon the program.

“Parents are unaware that concepts like Critical Race Theory and Comprehensive Sex Education are being taught under the guise of Social Emotional Learning programs,” Lisa said in a press release sent to multiple reporters, “and that has to change.” (The parents asked that their last names not be used to protect their children’s privacy.)*

Some educators were dismayed by the district’s decision. Allie Teller, an elementary school counselor, said she’d seen a reduction in behavior issues and incidents in the several years since her school started using the curriculum. Cancelling it, just as schools are trying to help kids recover from the pandemic, “has left educators with fewer tools and resources when they desperately need more,” she said.

“We’ve all been through a collective traumatic event,” she said. “Kids need social-emotional support more than ever.”

“Parents are unaware that concepts like Critical Race Theory and Comprehensive Sex Education are being taught under the guise of Social Emotional Learning programs.”

Lisa, a parent in the Canyons School District, Utah

Committee for Children, which produces Second Step, says the curricula does not include sex education or critical race theory, an academic framework that maintains that racism is embedded in American institutions.

The fight in Utah is one of several skirmishes roiling the field of social and emotional learning —SEL, for short — as schools spend record amounts of money on curricula, assessments and training aimed at strengthening students’ empathy and resilience.

Nationwide, school and district spending on SEL grew roughly 45 percent between November 2019 and April 2021, according to a report by Tyton Partners, an education consulting and investment firm. The increase was driven by concerns about student well-being amid a global pandemic and a national reckoning on race, and enabled by a massive infusion of federal recovery funds.

Roughly a third of local educational agencies say they plan to spend some of their federal relief money on SEL, with an average per student spend of nearly $100, according to an analysis of state spending plans by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University.

This surge in spending has brought heightened scrutiny to the field, with parents pushing back against curricula and screeners in places as politically and geographically diverse as Brooklyn, New York, and West Bend, Wisconsin. Conservatives have accused schools of hijacking SEL to promote progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality, while liberals have warned of threats to student privacy.

Some members of both parties say that after two years of disrupted schooling, schools should spend their time and money on academic catch-up, not on SEL. In a recent survey of parents by the Fordham Institute, close to two-thirds of Republicans and more than half of Democrats said there is not enough time in the day to teach both academics and SEL.

But fans of SEL, including many teachers, argue that tending to students’ social and emotional needs now will accelerate academic recovery, by increasing students’ capacity to cope with stress and strengthening their relationships with teachers. They say that critics who conflate SEL with CRT are misconstruing the field — sometimes willfully so.

Still, advocates for SEL say they recognize the risks that come with being the latest front in the classroom culture wars. When faced with parental and political pushback to programs, schools often scale back or eliminate them, just as the Canyons district did. If the backlash continues, it’s likely more schools will follow.

At the heart of the fights over SEL are disagreements over the part schools should play in developing well-rounded individuals and advancing equity.

Parents of all political stripes see SEL as primarily a family responsibility, and nearly half of all parents strongly or somewhat agree that schools should focus on academics and leave SEL to parents, the Fordham survey found. Among Republican parents, that percentage rises to nearly two thirds.

Yet a majority of parents from both political parties agree with the statement that “learning life skills and social skills at school is just as important as academics,” and say they support schools teaching specific SEL skills, such as empathy, self-control and a positive mindset.

This contradiction may reflect confusion about what SEL is, as well as discomfort with the jargon. Presented with a list of a dozen potential labels for SEL, parents ranked “social and emotional learning” next to last. Their top choice was “life skills.”

“Kids need social-emotional support more than ever.”

Allie Teller, an elementary school counselor in the Canyons School District

So is the solution to the current conflict to simply rebrand SEL as “life skills?” Not so fast, said Adam Tyner, the author of a report on the Fordham survey, titled “How to Sell SEL.” While there’s overlap between the terms, they’re not synonyms; rebranding now — when the field is already in the spotlight — may strike some as evasive and dishonest, he warned.

A better option, Tyner said, is to focus on specifics of the program the school is using, so parents can evaluate it on its merits.

Aaliyah Samuel, the new president of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), said schools need to “clarify what SEL is” and ditch the jargon.

“When I talk to my parent community — friends with elementary-aged kids — they have not a clue what SEL is,” she said. “They’re not steeped in the educational acronyms.”

“When you talk to parents, and they understand what it is, they absolutely want it for their kids,” she said.

Related: 10 ways for schools to gain traction with social-emotional learning programs

Yet not all parents trust schools to do a good job cultivating social and emotional skills in their children, and some believe schools are actively undermining their own, often more conservative, teachings.

Their distrust has deepened in the months since CASEL updated its definition of SEL to include language about identity development, collective goal-setting and equity, and introduced a new form of SEL, “Transformative SEL,” that focuses on civic action and social change.

Under the revised definition, SEL is not just a way to develop individual competencies, but a tool to “address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools.” “Transformative SEL” takes that idea a step further, focusing on “interrogating social norms, disrupting and resisting inequities, and co-constructing equitable and just solutions.”

To Samuel, the new emphasis on equity reflects the changing demographics of public schools, where more than half the students are kids of color, along with a recognition that the existing system isn’t serving many of these students well.

“It’s natural to take a step back and say, ‘How can we make sure the work we’re doing is meeting the needs of this generation of students?’” she said.

But Tyner said linking SEL to equity may lead some parents to lose interest in it, concluding that it’s meant for disadvantaged students, not their own children.

It also appears to be animating parents who were already suspicious of SEL. In school board meetings across the country, parents protesting SEL curricula and screeners have cited CASEL’s new definitions as proof that SEL is CRT in disguise. Conservative commentators have fueled the fire, with one calling Transformative SEL “a tool to develop little community organizers for leftist causes.”

“Forget teaching kids to play nice — today’s SEL intends to propel them into Antifa,” wrote Jane Robbins for The Federalist, a conservative online magazine.

The divisions over the SEL curricula in the Canyons School District began after a middle school teacher resigned, saying he was uncomfortable teaching the material. In a letter explaining his decision, the teacher said some lessons encouraged students to become activists and had “distinct anti-family undertones.”

Ultimately, though, it was not concerns about liberal indoctrination that led the district to cancel the curricula, but a link to a website with information about intimate relationships that officials concluded violated Utah’s sex education laws, which permit only abstinence-based instruction.

The Committee for Children, which produces the Second Step curricula, has since removed the link to the website, loveisrespect.org, from its materials, according to Tia Kim, vice president of education, research and impact. Kim said the company rarely includes third-party resources in its materials “because we can’t control what is going on in the content.”

Second Step is used in roughly 30,000 schools, reaching over 20 million kids a year, Kim said.

“When you talk to parents, and they understand what it is, they absolutely want it for their kids.”

Aaliyah Samuel, Collaborative on Academic, Social and Emotional Learning

A similar battle over the Second Step curricula played out recently in West Bend, Wisconsin, but with a different outcome. There, the school board voted to keep the curricula, but removed lessons encouraging collective action against bullying and harassment.

Meanwhile, at least one Florida district has purged all materials labeled “SEL” from its curricula, following guidance from the state Department of Education that called them “extraneous.”

“Social emotional learning is an unsolicited strategy that is not aligned to subject-specific standards,” the department’s press secretary wrote in an email.

Related: A school district wades through a deluge of social-emotional curricula to find one that works

Elsewhere, the controversy has centered on social-emotional “screeners” being used to guide school-wide programming and identify students who may need extra support.

In New York City, left-leaning parent groups, and some school leaders, have urged families to opt out of one such screening, calling it invasive. They warn that sensitive student information could be exposed through a data breach or sale.

“My children are not the raw material for your Edu business,” said Maud Maron, vice president of PLACE NYC, a parent group focused on accelerated education. “You don’t get to mine their mental health so you can sell us stuff.”

Aperture Education, the company that created the screener being used in New York City, said it doesn’t share data outside the school system, and is rigorous about data security. Fewer than 4 percent of students were opted out of the survey, according to Kristin Hinton, Aperture’s vice president of sales and marketing.

Delia Veve, the principal at Urban Assembly Media High School who has used the screener for six years, said it has created a “shared language” around SEL, so teachers, parents and students all know what a given competency looks like in practice.

“SEL is a big, amorphous mass that people can interpret a lot of ways, and this screener gets down to nuts and bolts,” she said.

In Fairfax, Virginia, the pushback is coming from the right, with conservatives protesting a screener that asks students how often they think about the experiences of individuals from different races and cultures and whether they’re confident that students at their school can have honest conversations about race.

Fairfax County Public Schools declined to comment, but in an online Q&A, the district wrote that the questions about race aim to address core competencies of SEL, such as social awareness and relationship skills. The district said it adopted the screener after a survey showed elevated levels of stress in students.

It’s too soon to say if the politics surrounding SEL represent a long-term threat to the field, said Andrea Mainelli, senior advisor to Tyton Partners and the co-author of a report on the rise of social emotional learning during the pandemic.

“It’s a disruption, there’s no doubt about it,” she said.

City districts have been much more likely than their rural counterparts to set aside Covid relief funds for SEL, a FutureEd analysis found — yet another example of the rural-urban divide.

Gwinnett County, Georgia, outside Atlanta, is using $28 million to hire 19 additional social workers and to staff a new office focused squarely on SEL.

“Even before Covid, there was an uptick in students reporting anxiety and depression,” said Tinisha Parker, executive director of student services for Gwinnett County public schools. “When the pandemic hit, we knew we had a lot of students who would need support.”

It remains to be seen if the social-emotional spending spree will continue once federal funds dry up. Most schools haven’t yet identified long-term funding streams.

To some extent, the continued growth of SEL will depend on whether districts are able to disentangle SEL from CRT and include parents — who are pushing for more curricular transparency — in the process of choosing programs. Asked if some of the current controversies might have been averted if parents had been involved up front, Samuel, the president of CASEL, says yes.

“We need to be intentional about making sure parents are at the table,” she added in a recent webinar on the state of social-emotional learning.

Schools will also need to better integrate SEL across the curricula, so it’s not seen as an “add-on” that’s crowding out academics, she said.

For now, though, the backlash shows no signs of slowing. In a video on the website for Utah Parents United, Lisa, the Canyons School District mom, issued a call to action to other parents, saying, “We need to be involved and know what our children are learning.”

“If we can do it, other parent groups can too,” she said in a press release. “Reach out, and we can help you.”

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

*Correction: This story has been updated to remove the last names of Canyons School District parents, who do not want their last names shared publicly to protect their children’s privacy. A previous version of the story included last names they provided that were not their own.

The post Social and emotional learning is the latest flashpoint in the education wars appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Amanda Amtmanis, an elementary physical education instructor in Middletown, Connecticut, handed out cards with QR codes to a class of third graders, and told them to start running.

The kids sprinted off around the baseball field in a light drizzle, but by the end of the first lap, a fifth of a mile, many were winded and walking. They paused to scan the cards, which track their mileage, on their teacher’s iPad and got some encouragement from an electronic coach — “Way to run your socks off!” or “Leave it all on the track!”

A boy in a red Nike shirt surged ahead, telling Amtmanis his goal was to run 5 miles. “Whoa, look at Dominic!” another boy exclaimed.

“We don’t need to compare ourselves to others,” Amtmanis reminded him.

The third graders finished a third lap, alternating running and walking, and were about to start on a scavenger hunt when the rain picked up, forcing them inside. Amtmanis thanked her students for their willingness to adjust — a skill many of them have practiced far more often than running these past 18 months.

The full impact of the pandemic on kids’ health and fitness won’t be known for some time. But it’s already caused at least a short-term spike in childhood obesity. Rates of overweight and obesity in 5- through 11-year-olds rose nearly 10 percentage points in the first few months of 2020.

Related: Kids are shooting hoops with rolled up socks, but pandemic phys ed is not cancelled

Amtmanis’ “mileage club,” which tracks students’ running, both in and out of school, and rewards them with Pokémon cards when they hit certain targets, is an example of how PE teachers around the country are trying to get kids back in shape.

But inclement weather isn’t the only thing PE teachers are up against as they confront what might be called “physical learning loss.” Physical education as a discipline has long fought to be taken as seriously as its academic counterparts. Even before the pandemic, fewer than half the states set any minimum amount of time for students to participate in physical education, according to the Society of Health and Physical Educators (SHAPE), which represents PE and health instructors.

Now, as schools scramble to help kids catch up academically, there are signs that PE is taking a back seat to the core subjects yet again. In some California schools, administrators are shifting instructional minutes from PE to academic subjects — or canceling class altogether so PE teachers can sub for classroom teachers; in others, they’re growing class sizes in the gym, so they can shrink them in the classroom.

Meanwhile, innovative instructors like Amtmanis, who has worked in her district for more than 20 years, are struggling to get their ideas off the ground. Over the summer, the principal of Macdonough Elementary, one of two schools where Amtmanis teaches, approved her request to participate in another running program called The Daily Mile, in which kids walk or run 15 minutes a day during school hours.

Daily running breaks “boost attentiveness, which has positive effects on academics,” Amtmanis argued.

But two weeks into the school year, not a single teacher had bought into the idea.

“The issue is their packed schedule,” Amtmanis said.

Last year, many schools conducted gym class remotely, with students joining in from their bedrooms and living rooms.

The online format presented several challenges. Many students lacked the equipment, space, or parental support to participate fully. And many instructors grappled with how to teach and assess motor skills and teamwork online.

Though instructors found creative ways to keep students moving — substituting rolled-up socks for balls, and “disguising fitness” in scavenger hunts and beat-the-teacher challenges — they still fretted that online gym wasn’t giving students the same benefits as in-person classes.

Compounding their concern was the fact that many students were also missing out on recess and extracurricular sports.

Rates of overweight and obesity in 5- through 11-year-olds rose nearly 10 percentage points in the first few months of 2020.

In a March 2021 survey conducted by the Cooper Institute, maker of the popular FitnessGram assessments, close to half the PE teachers and school and district administrators responding said their students were “significantly less” physically active during their schools’ closure than before it.

Related: The science of catching up

Schools that reopened last year faced their own set of challenges, including bans on shared equipment that made even a simple game of catch impossible. Schools that were open for in-person learning were also much more likely to cut back on PE instructional time, or eliminate it altogether, the survey found.

The consequences of these reductions in physical activity are hard to quantify, especially since many schools suspended fitness testing during the pandemic and have yet to resume it, but some PE teachers say they’re seeing more kids with locomotor delays and weaker stamina than normal.

“The second graders are like first graders, and some are even like kindergarteners,” said Robin Richardson, an elementary PE instructor in Kentucky. They can jump and hop, she said, but they can’t leap. They’re exhausted after 20 seconds of jumping jacks.

An unusually high number of Richardson’s first graders can’t skip or do windmills. Some lack the spatial awareness that’s essential to group games.

“They don’t know how to move without running into each other,” she said.

Other instructors are seeing an increase in cognitive issues, such as difficulty paying attention or following directions, particularly among kids who remained remote for most or all of last year.

“They don’t know how to move without running into each other,”

Robin Richardson, an elementary PE instructor in Kentucky, on the impact of remote and hybrid learning on students’ locomotor skills

Kyle Bragg, an elementary PE instructor in Arizona, has seen kids sitting with their backs to him, staring off into space when he’s talking. “I say ‘Knees, please,’ so they spin around to face me,” he said.

And some PE teachers say their students’ social-emotional skills have suffered more than their gross motor skills. “They forgot how to share; how to be nice to each other; how to relate to each other,” said Donn Tobin, an elementary PE instructor in New York.

PE has a key role to play in boosting those skills, which affect how kids interact in other classes, said Will Potter, an elementary PE teacher in California.

“We’re uniquely situated to handle the social-emotional needs that came out of the pandemic, in a way classroom teachers are not,” Potter said.

Amtmanis, for her part, worries about her students’ mental health. She sees the little signs of strain daily — the kid who got upset because he couldn’t pick his group, for example, and the one who was distressed that his Mileage Club card had gotten mixed up in the front office.

“Their emotional reserves are low,” she said.

Yet not all instructors are reporting drops in their students’ fitness and skill development. Teachers in some middle- and upper-income districts said they haven’t noticed much of a change at all. In some communities, families seemed to spend more time outdoors.

“We saw the skyrocketing sale of bicycles, we saw families going for walks,” said Dianne Wilson-Graham, executive director of the California Physical Education and Health Project.

“My goal was to get through it without ever using the words ‘fitness” or ‘testing,’”

Amanda Amtmanis, a PE teacher in Connecticut, on her approach to giving elementary school students a required fitness test after months without any in-person physical education

But in Title I schools like Macdonough, where more than half the students are low-income, some kids didn’t even have access to a safe place to exercise or play during school closures.

“Not only are they not in soccer leagues, but sometimes they don’t even have a park,” Amtmanis said.

Amtmanis came up with the idea of doing the Daily Mile after spring fitness tests revealed drops in her students’ strength, flexibility and endurance.

But many schools still aren’t sure how much physical learning loss their students have experienced as a result of the pandemic. Most schools pressed pause on fitness testing last year, and some elementary-school instructors are reluctant to restart it. They say the tests aren’t valid with young children, even in ordinary times, and argue the time they take could be better spent on Covid catch-up.

Andjelka Pavlovic, director of research and education for the Cooper Institute, said its tests are scientifically proven to be valid for students who are 10 and up, or roughly starting in fourth grade.

Fitness testing requirements vary by state, county or even district. Some states specify how often students must be tested; others leave it largely to the teacher.

Bragg, the Arizona teacher, said he has put testing “on the backburner” because “right now it’s not at the forefront of what’s important.”

Richardson said she is avoiding testing because she doesn’t want to use up precious instructional time or demoralize her students. “I want my kids to enjoy movement,” she said. If they perform poorly on the tests, “they may not feel as strong.”

In Connecticut, where schools are required to test fourth graders’ fitness annually, Amtmanis approached testing cautiously last year. She didn’t want to embarrass her students, so she made it into a series of games.

Instead of Sit-and-Reach, they had a “flexibility contest,” in which kids broke into teams for tag then had to perform stretches if they were tagged. She measured the distances stretched with curling ribbon, tied the ribbons together, and attached a balloon to the end. The team whose balloon soared the highest won fidget putty.

Pushups became a Bingo game, with the center space representing pushups.

“My goal was to get through it without ever using the words ‘fitness” or ‘testing,’” she said.

As the pandemic drags on, some instructors are taking a similar approach to fitness remediation and acceleration.

Bragg likes a warmup called “Touch Spots,” in which first graders listen as the instructor reads off the name of a color, then run and touch a corresponding dot on the floor. It works on reaction time, cardiovascular endurance, spatial awareness and sequencing — but the kids don’t know that.

“Students are having so much fun that they don’t realize how much fitness they are doing,” Bragg said.

Differentiation — tailoring instruction to meet individual students’ needs — has become even more essential, with former remote learners often lagging behind their in-person peers, Bragg said.

Related: A video game makes math and English classes a full-body experience

When playing catch, for example, he offers his students different sized balls — the smaller ones are more challenging.

Potter, the California teacher, spent the first two weeks of school teaching his students how to connect with their partners, stressing the importance of eye contact and body language.

“When you’re on Zoom, you look at the camera to make eye contact,” he said. “It’s a very different environment.”

Bragg reminds his students how to include kids who are standing on the sidelines, modeling excited body language and tone of voice. Lately, he’s noticed that kids who were remote last year are being excluded from groups.

“Social interaction needs to be practiced, just like how to throw a ball,” he said.

Richardson, the Kentucky PE teacher, is trying to build up her students’ stamina gradually, through progressively longer intervals of exercise.

But she works in a school with pods, so she sees each group of kids for five consecutive days, every third week. The two weeks in between, she has to hope that teachers will provide recess and “movement breaks.” She’s trying to get them to give kids breaks “when they get glassy-eyed and frustrated.”

Recently, Richardson was at a staff training session at which depleted teachers were “popping candy in the back.” When she raised her hand and requested a break in the training, her colleagues cheered. She told them to remember how they felt when their students return to the building.

“I always say, ‘If your bum is numb, your brain is the same,’” she said.

Convincing classroom teachers to set aside more time for movement can be challenging, though. As students return from months of online learning, teachers are under enormous pressure to get them caught up academically. 

Kate Cox, an elementary and middle-school PE teacher in California, wishes schools would “realize what they’re missing when they cut PE because of learning loss in other areas.” Physical education is “readying their minds and bodies to be more successful in other areas,” Cox said.

Terri Drain, the president of SHAPE, argued that schools fail students when they treat physical learning loss as less serious than its academic counterpart.

“In the primary grades, children develop fundamental motor skills, such as throwing, catching, running, kicking and jumping,” she said. Unless schools commit to helping kids catch up, “the impacts of this ‘missed learning’ will be lifelong.”

In Connecticut, Amtmanis hasn’t given up on convincing teachers to carve out time for the Daily Mile. She recently sent them a list of suggestions on how to fit 15 minutes of running into the day, including by incorporating it as an active transition between academic blocks.

“While it may seem like there aren’t minutes to spare,” she wrote, “the energizing effect of the active transition should result in more on-task behavior and more efficient working.”

In the meantime, Amtmanis plans to keep using the mileage club to motivate her students to run and to monitor their progress.

“I don’t want to call attention to the fact that not everyone is fit,” she said. “This is an unobtrusive way to keep the data.”

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

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In a middle school hallway in Charlottesville, Virginia, a pair of sixth grade girls sat shoulder to shoulder on a lime-green settee, creating comic strips that chronicled a year of pandemic schooling. 

Using a computer program called Pixton, they built cartoon panels, one of a girl waving goodbye to her teacher, clueless that it would be months before they were back in the classroom; another of two friends standing six feet apart from one another, looking sad. 

“We have to social distance,” explained Ashlee. Then, as if remembering, she scooted a few inches away from her friend, Anna. 

In classrooms off the hallway, clusters of kids from grades 6 to 8 worked on wood carvings, scrapbooks, paintings and podcasts, while their teachers stood by to answer questions or offer suggestions. For two hours, the students roamed freely among rooms named for their purpose — the maker space, the study, the hub — pausing for a 15-minute “brain break” at the midway point of the session. 

Welcome to Community Lab School, a tiny public charter that is trying to transform the way middle schoolers are taught in the Albemarle School District — and eventually the nation.  

“Traditional middle schools are very authoritarian, controlling environments.”

Chad Ratliff, principal of Community Lab School

Here, learning is project-based, multi-grade and interdisciplinary. There are no stand-alone subjects, other than math; even in that subject, students are grouped not by grade, but by their areas of strength and weakness. In the mornings, students work independently on their projects; in the afternoons, they practice math skills and take electives.  

“Our day revolves around giving students choice,” said Stephanie Passman, the head teacher. “We want kids to feel a sense of agency and that this is a place where their ideas will be heard.” 

As a laboratory for the Albemarle district, Community Lab School is charged with testing new approaches to middle school that could be scaled to the district’s five comprehensive middle schools. The school has been held up as a national model by researchers at MIT and the University of Virginia, which is studying how to better align middle school with the developmental needs of adolescents. 

Over the last 20 years, scientists have learned a lot about how the adolescent brain works and what motivates middle schoolers. Yet a lot of their findings aren’t making it into classroom practice. That’s partly because teacher prep programs haven’t kept pace with the research, and partly because overburdened teachers don’t have the time to study and implement it.  

Today, some 70 years after reformers launched a movement to make the middle grades more responsive to the needs of early adolescents, too many middle schools continue to operate like mini high schools, on a “cells and bells” model, said Chad Ratliff, the principal of Community Lab School. 

“Traditional middle schools are very authoritarian, controlling environments,” said Ratliff. “A bell rings, and you have three minutes to shuffle to the next thing.” 

For many early adolescents — and not a few of their teachers — middle school isn’t about choice and agency, “it’s about surviving,” said Melissa Wantz, a former educator from California, with more than 20 years’ experience.  

Now, as schools nationwide emerge from a pandemic that upended educational norms, and caused rates of depression and anxiety to increase among teenagers, reformers hope educators will use this moment to remake middle school, turning it into a place where early adolescents not only survive, but thrive.  

“This is an opportunity to think about what we want middle school to look like, rather than just going back to the status quo,” said Nancy L. Deutsche, the director of Youth-Nex: The UVA Center to Promote Effective Youth Development. 

The Adolescent Brain 

Scientists have long known that the human brain develops more rapidly between birth and the age of 3 than at any other time in life. But recent advances in brain imaging have revealed that a second spurt occurs during early adolescence, a phase generally defined as spanning ages 11 to 14.  

Though the brain’s physical structures are fully developed by age 6, the connections among them take longer to form. Early adolescence is when much of this wiring takes place. The middle school years are also what scientists call a “sensitive period” for social and emotional learning, when the brain is primed to learn from social cues.  

While the plasticity of the teenage brain makes it vulnerable to addiction, it also makes it resilient, capable of overcoming childhood trauma and adversity, according to a report recently published by the National Academies of Science. This makes early adolescence “a window of opportunity,” a chance to set students on a solid path for the remainder of their education, said Ronald Dahl, director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley.  

Meanwhile, new findings in developmental psychology are shedding a fresh light on what motivates middle schoolers.  

Related: Four new studies bolster the case for project-based learning 

Adolescents, everyone knows, crave connections to their peers and independence from their parents. But they also care deeply about what adults think. They want to be taken seriously and feel their opinions count. And though they’re often seen as selfish, middle schoolers are driven to contribute to the common good, psychologists say. 

“They’re paying attention to the social world and one way to learn about the social world is to do things for others,” said Andrew Fuligni, a professor-in-residence in UCLA’s psychology department. “It’s one way you figure out your role in it.” 

So, what does this evolving understanding of early adolescence say about how middle schools should be designed? 

First, it suggests that schools should “capitalize on kids’ interest in their peers” through peer-assisted and cooperative learning, said Elise Capella, an associate professor of applied psychology and vice dean of research at New York University. “Activating positive peer influence is really important,” she said.  

Experts say students should also be given “voice and choice” — allowed to pick projects and partners, when appropriate.  

“Kids have deeper cognitive conversations when they’re with their friends than when they’re not,” said Lydia Denworth, a science writer who wrote a book on friendship, in a recent radio interview. 

Schools should also take advantage of the “sensitive period” for social and emotional learning, setting aside time to teach students the skills and mindsets that will help them succeed in high school and beyond, researchers say. 

“You don’t suddenly outgrow the need for play when you’re 11 years old.”

Peter Gray, Boston College

Yet many schools are doing the opposite of what the research recommends. Though many teachers make use of group learning, they often avoid grouping friends together, fearing they’ll goof off, said Denworth. And middle schools often spend less time on social and emotional learning than elementary schools, sometimes seeing it as a distraction from academics. 

Meanwhile, many middle schools have abolished recess, according to Phyllis Fagell, author of the book “Middle School Matters”, leaving students with little unstructured time to work on social skills. 

“When you think about the science of adolescence, the traditional model of middle school runs exactly counter to what students at that age really need,” said Ratliff. 

A Developmental “Mismatch” 

The notion that middle schools are misaligned with the needs and drives of early adolescents is hardly a new one. Efforts to reimagine education for grades 6 to 8 dates back to the 1960s, when an education professor, William Alexander, called for replacing junior highs with middle schools that would cater to the age group. 

Alexander’s “Middle School Movement” gained steam in the 1980s, when Jacquelynne Eccles, a research scientist, posited that declines in academic achievement and engagement in middle school were the result of a mismatch between adolescents and their schools — a poor “stage-environment fit.” 

Propelled by Eccles’ theory, reformers coalesced around a “middle school concept” that included interdisciplinary team teaching, cooperative learning, block scheduling and advisory programs. 

But while a number of schools adopted at least some of the proposed reforms, many did so only superficially. By the late ’90s, policymakers’ attention had shifted to early childhood education and the transition to college, leaving middle school as “the proverbial middle child — the neglected, forgotten middle child,” said Fagell. 

For many students, the transition from elementary to middle school is a jarring one, Fagell said. Sixth graders go from having one teacher and a single set of classmates to seven or eight teachers and a shifting set of peers. 

“At the very point where they most need a sense of belonging, that is exactly when we take them out of school, put them on a bus, and send them to a massive feeder school,” said Fagell. 

And at a time when their circadian rhythms are shifting to later sleep and wake times, sixth graders often have to start school earlier than they did in elementary school. 

No wonder test scores and engagement slump. 

Related: Later school start time gave small boost to grades but big boost to sleep, new study finds 

In an effort to recapture some of the “community” feel of an elementary school, many schools have created “advisory” programs, in which students start their day with a homeroom teacher and small group of peers.  

Some schools are trying a “teams” approach, dividing grades into smaller groups that work with their own group of instructors. And some are doing away with departmentalization altogether. 

At White Oak Middle School, in Silver Spring, Maryland, roughly a third of sixth graders spend half their day with one teacher, who covers four subjects. Peter Crable, the school’s assistant principal until recently, said the approach deepens relationships among students and between students and teachers.  

“It can be a lot to ask kids to navigate different dynamics from one class to the next,” said Crable, who is currently a principal intern in another school. When their classmates are held constant, “students have each other’s backs more,” he said. 

“Don’t go back to the old normal.”

Denise Pope, the co-founder of Challenge Success

A study of the program now being used at White Oak, dubbed “Project Success,” found that it had a positive effect on literacy and eliminated the achievement gap between poorer students and their better-off peers.  

But scaling the program up has proven difficult, in part because it goes against so many established norms. Most middle school teachers were trained as content-area specialists and see themselves in that role. It can take a dramatic mind shift — and hours of planning — for teachers to adjust to teaching multiple subjects.  

Robert Dodd, who came up with Project Success when he was principal of Argyle Middle School, also in Silver Spring, said he’d hoped to expand it district-wide. So far, though, only White Oak has embraced it. (Dodd is now principal of the district’s Walt Whitman High School.) 

“Large school systems have a way of snuffing out innovation,” he said. 

Even Argyle Middle, where the program started, has pressed pause on Project Success. 

“Teachers felt like it was elementary school,” said James Allrich, the school’s current principal. “I found myself forcing them to do it, and it doesn’t work if it’s forced.” 

Restoring recess, and other pandemic-era innovations 

But Argyle is continuing to experiment, in other ways. This fall, when students were studying online, the district instituted an hour-and-a-half “wellness break” in the middle of the day. Allrich kept it when 300 of the students returned in the spring, rotating them between lunch, recess and “choice time” every 30 minutes. 

During one sixth grade recess at the end of the school year, clusters of students played basketball and soccer, while one girl sat quietly under a tree, gazing at a cicada that had landed on her hand. Only three students were scrolling on their phones. 

“I thought when we got back, students would be all over their cellphones,” said Allrich, over the loud hum of cicadas. “But we see little of that. Kids really want to engage each other in person.” 

Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who has found a relationship between the decline of free play and the rise of mental illness in children and teens, wishes more middle schools would bring back recess. 

“You don’t suddenly outgrow the need for play when you’re 11 years old,” he said. 

Allrich said he plans to continue recess in the fall, when all 1,000 students are back in person, but acknowledges the scheduling will be tricky. 

Related:  How four middle schoolers are struggling through the pandemic 

Denise Pope, the co-founder of Challenge Success, a school reform nonprofit, hopes schools will stick with some of the other changes they made to their schedules during the pandemic, including later start times. “Don’t go back to the old normal,” Pope implored educators during a recent conference. “The old normal wasn’t healthy.” 

Prior to the pandemic, barely a fifth of middle schools followed the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. (Community Lab School started at 10 during the shutdown, but plans to return to a 9:30 a.m. start.) 

But if the pandemic ushered in some potentially positive changes to middle schools, it also disrupted some of the key developmental milestones of early adolescence, such as autonomy-building and exploring the world. Stuck at home with their parents and cut off from their peers, teens suffered increased rates of anxiety and depression.  

When students return to middle schools en masse this fall, they may need help processing the stress and trauma of the prior year and a half, said author Fagell, who is a counselor in a private school in Washington, D.C. 

Fagell suggests schools survey students to find out what they need, or try the “iceberg exercise,” in which they are asked what others don’t see about them, what they keep submerged.  

“We’re going to have to dive beneath the surface,” she said. 

Deutsche, of Youth-Nex in Virginia, said teachers will play a key role in “helping students trust the world again.” 

“Relationships with teachers will be even more important,” she said. 

Fortunately, there are more evidence-based social-emotional programs for middle schoolers than there used to be, according to Justina Schlund, senior director of Content and Field Learning for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. A growing number of states are adopting Pre-K through12 social and emotional learning standards or guidelines and many districts and schools are implementing social and emotional learning throughout all grades, she said. 

At Community Lab School, middle school students typically score above average on measures of emotional well-being and belonging, according to Shereen El Mallah, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia who tracks the school’s outcomes. Though the Community Lab students experienced an increase in perceived stress during the pandemic, they generally fared better than their peers at demographically similar schools, she said.   

Anna and Ashlee, the sixth graders on the settee, said the school’s close-knit community and project-based approach set it apart. 

“We’re still learning as much as anyone else, they just make it fun, rather than making us read from textbooks all the time,” Ashlee said.  

This story about early adolescents 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 Middle school’s moment: What the science tells us about improving the middle grades appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It was the end of the school day at Ashley Park PreK-8, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the yellow buses were just pulling up in front of the red brick building. The kindergartners, with their cartoon backpacks and cornrows, filed out first, followed by the first through fifth graders.  

Then, from the side of the school, the “big kids” came running, spilling from their modular middle school in headphones and hoodies to line up behind the younger children. 

When Ashley Park was converted from an elementary school to a K-8 a decade ago, over the objections of the community, it was the bus ride, with its noisy, chaotic comingling of kids, that many parents feared the most. They worried that their younger children might be corrupted, bullied or worse. 

But now the bus ritual has become routine, and many families here have come to embrace the K-8 model, with its smaller cohorts and sense of community. Four years ago, when district leaders asked Ashley Park parents and teachers if they wanted to go back to being an elementary school, their answer was an emphatic no. 

“They said, ‘don’t do this to us again. Let us stay a family,’ ” said Meaghan Loftus, the principal at the time. “ ’Listen to us this time.’ ” 

“The pendulum swings on K-8 versus middle schools. The research goes back and forth, and the districts go back and forth, but they’re not always thinking about how to create the conditions for success.”

David Rosenberg, Education Resource Strategies

Ashley Park’s experience is not unusual. Over the past two decades, several urban school districts, including Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City and Philadelphia, have shuttered some middle schools and converted elementary schools into K-8s.  

Proponents of K-8 schools, or “elemiddles” as they’re sometimes called, say they promote strong relationships between not only teachers and students but also teachers and parents and offer stability to young teens during a tumultuous time in their lives. They argue that early adolescence — a period marked by more rapid physical and cognitive development than any stage other than the first two years of life — is a terrible time to transition to a new school.  

The recent conversions represent a return to old ways of educating early adolescents. Up until about 1900, the American education system operated on a two-tier structure, with eight years of primary school followed by four years of secondary school. More than a century of experimentation with the middle grades hasn’t provided much clarity about which configuration works best.  

The research comparing outcomes of students at K-8 and middle schools remains inconclusive. While some studies have shown that students who move to a middle school experience steeper declines in academic achievement than those who stay put, other research has found few differences between the groups.  

For many districts — Charlotte included — the decision to merge elementary and middle schools has been more expedient than philosophical, driven by space constraints and budget shortfalls rather than what’s best for students. 

“The pendulum swings,” said David Rosenberg, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that advises school leaders on resource use, the “research goes back and forth, and the districts go back and forth, but they’re not always thinking about how to create the conditions for success.” 

Arguments over how to create the best learning environment for young adolescents go back decades. One pair of researchers called it “the longest-running debate in middle level educational research” — and that was nearly thirty years ago.  

Around the turn of the century, educators and psychologists started advocating for a reorganization away from the old primary school system. College presidents complained that the later years of primary school were wasted, and the National Educational Association published a report that called for college prep to start in the seventh grade.  

The NEA argued that the seventh grade was a more natural turning point in a child’s life, according to a 2004 book by The RAND Corporation, “Focus on the Wonder Years,” and that moving students more gradually from a single teacher to a system of special teachers would help prevent “the violent shock now commonly felt on entering the high school.” 

About the same time, the prominent psychologist Stanley Hall was arguing that puberty was a distinct developmental phase that demanded new educational approaches. “The pupil in the age of spontaneous variation … suffers from mental ennui and dyspepsia, and this is why so many and an increasing number refuse some of the best prepared courses,” he wrote.  

These concerns, coupled with crowding in primary schools — the result of an influx of new immigrants — led to the creation, starting around 1910, of standalone “junior high schools” for seventh through ninth graders.  

But it quickly became clear that the junior highs weren’t living up to their promise. Instead of serving as a bridge to high school, they were operating as mini-high schools, with little attention paid to adolescents’ unique needs. Dissatisfaction with junior highs peaked in the 1960s, when William Alexander, chairman of the department of education at George Peabody College, proposed the creation of schools that would specifically cater to adolescents.  

Related: What does ‘career readiness’ look like in middle school? 

Meanwhile, secondary school enrollment numbers were shrinking, while elementary enrollments were exploding, due to the postwar baby boom. The resulting shortage of space in elementary schools led to sixth grade being pushed up into what would become known as “middle schools.” The new schools multiplied rapidly, displacing junior high schools. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of middle schools tripled, while the number of junior highs shrank by a quarter.  

Yet, because many of the new middle schools had been built for pragmatic reasons, rather than ideological ones, they tended to resemble the junior highs they’d replaced. They were “middle schools in name only,” said Mary Beth Schaefer, an associate professor of adolescent education at St. John’s University.  

“We don’t have enough research yet to say everyone should go to one model. Neither is perfect. The jury is still out.”

Jonah Rockoff, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University  

By the 1980s, however, the middle school movement that Alexander started had solidified, coalescing around a set of practices, said Schaefer, who has studied the movement. These included interdisciplinary team teaching, flexible scheduling and the provision of regular academic and social-emotional advising to groups of students. Proponents argued that freestanding middle schools were the ideal setting for implementing such practices.  

Then, in the 1990s, standardized testing revealed that most eighth graders weren’t proficient in math and reading and were falling behind their peers in other countries. Whether due to teacher resistance, or a lack of institutional support, middle schools had adopted the adolescent-focused reforms “at only superficial levels,” according to the RAND book. Critics once again declared middle school “a floundering ground,” “the wasteland of our primary and secondary landscape” and “holding pens for preadolescent children.”  

If middle school is a time of tremendous turmoil, it’s also a time of tremendous opportunity. Phyllis Fagell, a school counselor and the author of “Middle School Matters,” calls it “the last best chance” to transform the trajectory of students.  

“This is the age when they are the most malleable,” said Neodria Brown, the principal of Ranson Middle School, in West Charlotte, which serves grades 6-8. “This is the age when you can help them chart their course.” 

While the transition to middle school can be tough on kids — “you’re not the head honcho anymore,” Brown explained — she doesn’t see much of a difference in the way adolescents are educated in a K-8 versus a standalone 6-8 school. 

“There’s more opportunity to interact with younger children in K-8,” she said. “But middle school is middle school.”  

“It’s not at all about what grades are in the school building. It’s about making sure that the programs and practices are developmentally responsive to the needs of young adolescents.”

April Tibbles, National Middle School Association

Brown, who came home to Charlotte in 2018 after leading a school in Hilton Head, belies the idea that large middle schools must be more impersonal than smaller K-8s. Though her demeanor is no-nonsense and reserved, there’s a warmth underneath. The tattoo on her arm reads “Warrior,” but the notebook that she scribbles in has a kitten on the cover. In one corner of her office, there’s a decorated cart that she used to deliver donuts to her students on Valentine’s Day, with a sign reading “love train” affixed to it. 

Walking the halls of her school, she stopped a pair of boys who were swearing. “Uh-uh, not today, not using profanity,’” she admonished them.  

A few steps later, she stopped a girl to ask her if her mother was going to call.  

She turned a corner and bent to collect a candy wrapper, handing it to another student to throw out. 

A few more steps, and she picked up a pencil, asking a passing girl if she needed one. The girl took it.  

Outside, some boys were goofing off. Brown got on her walkie talkie: “10-4, they should be in class. And can we get a sweep in the hallway?” The students had eaten lunch in class, and there were crunchy bits of Cheetos on the floor.  

In the cafeteria, she talked to a girl who wanted to switch classes. At a table nearby, a girl with dreadlocks and a pink “Save Animal” sweatshirt sat alone, looking sad. 

“Are you having a better day?” Brown asked. 

“No,” the girl told her. 

“Why?” asked Brown. 

“People,” the girl responded. 

“Some days are like that,” Brown said.  

The girl came over to the principal, rested her head on her shoulder, and whispered in her ear.  

Even with the recent resurgence of K-8s, middle schools outnumber “elemiddles” in the United States 2:1, federal data shows. Ten times as many eighth graders attend a middle school as attend a K-8. 

In Charlotte, middle schools remain the most common configuration after a decade of experimentation. 

A decade ago, the school board decided to close three struggling middle schools in predominantly black West Charlotte and send their students to eight new K-8s. In an effort to sell the plan, supporters pointed to research on the benefits of the K-8 configuration. The new model, they argued, could raise achievement at the poorly performing West Charlotte schools. 

Related: Why the preteen years are a critical period for brain development 

But in reality, the decision was driven by financial considerations, not research on adolescent learning and development. The superintendent and his supporters on the school board said the move was necessary to save teacher jobs in the face of massive budget cuts.  

“We were in the depths of a recession,” recalled Eric Davis, then the chairman of the board. “We were trying to do everything we could to avoid laying off hundreds of teachers.”  

But not everyone on the board was convinced that the change would benefit the schools. 

“If it was good for the one part of town, why wouldn’t it be good for the others?,” wondered Joyce Waddell, one of four members of the nine-member board who voted to block the closures. “It seemed a bit discriminatory. Why was this happening only to these inner-city schools?”  

Denise Watts, who was a top administrator for the district at the time and now works for the University of Virginia advising districts on school reform, believes the board picked the West Charlotte schools over others on its initial list because “it didn’t want to risk social capital” closing schools in more affluent communities. The parents whose schools were closed reacted in fury, crying racism. They demanded to know why their schools were targeted, while undersubscribed and aging facilities in wealthier and whiter parts of the city were spared.  

“It was very racialized,” said Watts. “It was the district doing unto the communities.” 

To understand the uproar that surrounded the school board’s decision to close the West Charlotte middle schools, it helps to know a little bit about the district’s history. 

In the mid-1960s, less than five percent of black children in Charlotte attended integrated schools. Then, a 1971 Supreme Court decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education led to a citywide busing plan that became a model for districts nationwide. By 1980, the district’s schools were mostly integrated, and Charlotte was being called “the city that made desegregation work.” 

“The reason none of these reforms is effective is because they don’t address the underlying causes of low performance, and that is concentrated poverty.”

Roslyn Mickelson, a researcher who has studied Charlotte’s schools

But the plan didn’t hold. In the late 1990s, a white parent sued the district because he believed his daughter was rejected from a local magnet school because of her race. The district ended up adopting a “Family Choice” plan that was heavily based on neighborhood schools. Because most neighborhoods in Charlotte are segregated — the result of decades of housing discrimination — the schools resegregated.  

When the district redrew its student assignment boundaries in 2017, the new superintendent proposed a do-over, asking the eight West Charlotte elementary schools that had been converted into K-8s to decide their futures. Three schools went back to being K-5, while five remained K-8. 

But in Charlotte, at least, the switch to K-8 — and back, in those few cases — has had little impact on student achievement. Ashley Park and the other affected elementary and middle schools had low test scores and poor attendance rates before the 2010 decision, and they still do today. All but one is rated either “D” or “F” by the state. 

Roslyn Mickelson, a researcher who has studied the impact of desegregation and resegregation on Charlotte’s schools, believes those outcomes say more about the demographics of the schools than the merits of either model. Even as they toggled between grade-span configurations, the West Charlotte schools remained segregated by race and income, populated almost exclusively by students who were Black and low income.  

“The reason none of these reforms is effective is because they don’t address the underlying causes of low performance, and that is concentrated poverty,” she said.  

Today, Black and Hispanic students in Charlotte are half as likely as white students to earn a college degree or credential within six years of enrolling, according to a recent report by WestEd. But the most discouraging statistic is this: Charlotte has the worst “intergenerational,” or socioeconomic, mobility of 

America’s 50 largest cities, according to an influential analysis by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley. Compared to children in other cities, kids born poor in Charlotte have the lowest odds of reaching the top quintile of earners in their lifetimes. 

Educators on both sides of the K-8 vs. middle school debate agree that the sixth through eighth grades are a pivotal time for kids, a phase in their education when self-concepts are formed and habits are established that can set students up for either success or failure in high school and beyond. 

Yet for many students, they’re a time of growing alienation from school, of disengagement and declining achievement. 

While there are probably many reasons for this drop, one prominent theory holds that it is due to a mismatch between the social and emotional needs of 11- to-14-year-olds and the structure of their schools. Young adolescents crave connection and autonomy. Yet when they enter the middle grades, they are suddenly held to a rigid schedule, rotating among a cast of teachers unfamiliar with their backgrounds and learning styles. Recess is taken from them, leaving students with little unstructured time to work on their social skills.  

“We micromanage them,” said Fagell, the author of “Middle School Matters.” “They are like salmon swimming upstream in the hallways, with maybe two minutes to go to the bathroom.”  

Porscher Enoch, the former head of the parent teacher association at Ranson Middle School, in Charlotte, believes many students aren’t ready for the newfound responsibilities. “They go from being coddled to being thrown out there,” she said.  

Switching schools before the sixth or seventh grade can compound the challenges students face in the middle grades, leaving them feeling “untethered from everything they know,” said Fagel, who is a counselor in a private school in Washington, D.C. 

Yet staying put in a K-8 doesn’t eliminate the drama and angst of the middle grades. Just ask the high schoolers on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Youth Council.  

Calvin Duong, a tenth grader who attended a K-8 STEM-oriented school, said there were drawbacks to being with the same small group of peers all the time. “Sometimes, it’s like a dysfunctional family,” he said at a pre-pandemic meeting of the group.  

Juliette Palacios Perez, an 11th grader who attended Waddell Language Academy through eighth grade, said she could have benefited from a fresh start in middle school. “I was bullied a lot in elementary school,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I could have gone to another school to start over.” 

Students on the youth council who attended middle schools said the transition to a new school was rough – but ultimately worth it. “Sixth grade was like shock therapy,” said Gabe Schuhl, an 11th grader who attended Community House Middle School. “But by seventh grade, I made some of my best friends.” 

Jean Rivera, a 12th grader who attended Mint Hill Middle, said advancing to a larger, more diverse school in sixth grade “was intimidating at first,” but taught him “how to get along with different types of people, to make new connections.”  

He added, “If you never move, you won’t learn how to do that.”  

Related: How to unlock students’ internal drive for learning 

Those who argue for a return to K-8 schools often point to the studies showing that students who attend such schools have higher test scores, better attendance rates and more self-esteem and feelings of competence than their middle school peers. 

Researchers have attributed those findings, in large part, to the fact that students in K-8s aren’t asked to change schools when they’re at their most vulnerable. They can stick to a comfortable, familiar environment, remain “top dog” for longer, and continue relationships with teachers from the lower grades.  

But many of the studies supporting K-8 schools have failed to control for student variables that could impact student achievement, such as poverty, or for families’ self-selection into certain types of schools. Other research has found that the achievement dips some students experience when they transition to middle school are temporary, and that attending a K-8 can have negative effects on elementary-aged students.  

“I was bullied a lot in elementary school. Sometimes I wish I could have gone to another school to start over.”

Juliette Palacios Perez, an 11th grader who attended a K-8 school

“We don’t have enough research yet to say everyone should go to one model,” said Jonah Rockoff, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University whose own research has found that transitioning to middle school puts students on a downward path. “Neither is perfect. The jury is still out.” 

Now, even the staunchest supporters of middle schools say that the movement’s best practices can work in any configuration. That acknowledgement led the National Middle School Association to change its name, in 2011, to the Association for Middle Level Education, Schaefer said. 

“It’s not at all about what grades are in the school building,” said April Tibbles, the association’s chief communications officer. “It’s about making sure the programs and practices are developmentally responsive to the needs of the young adolescent students.” 

Surveys of parents find that a majority favor K-8 schools, believing they foster stronger bonds. They like that they’re located close to home and allow families with multiple children to remain in the same school for longer.  

Yet principals prefer separate middle schools, seeing them as better suited to address the physical, intellectual and social needs of adolescents, a national survey found.  

Related: “Kids who have less, need more”: The fight over school funding 

When Charlotte was debating the switch to K-8, in 2010, district leaders circulated a study that showed that students who attended Philadelphia’s established K-8 schools outperformed students at the city’s middle schools. 

But that study contained a caveat: The established K-8s had fewer low-income and minority students and more experienced teachers than the middle schools. Students who attended the city’s newer K-8s, which were more similar demographically to the city’s middle schools, performed about the same as their middle school peers on math, and only slightly better on reading. The researchers concluded that “much of the old K-8 advantage clearly resides in the different student populations that are served by the old K-8 schools and middle schools,” and warned that “a district is not likely to replicate the K–8 advantage based upon size and school transition alone if its student population remains unchanged.” 

That summed up the situation in Charlotte in 2010, where the schools that merged in 2011 were comprised almost entirely of low-income Black students. 

“You’re putting low-performing schools together,” warned Waddell, who is now a state senator, at a 2010 school board meeting.  

When the board reviewed outcomes at the eight merged schools in 2017, it found that the results were uneven. While some schools had seen proficiency gains in some subjects and grade spans, others had slipped in some areas, and all continued to perform well below the district average. The buildings, which were well below capacity in 2010, were now almost all overcrowded, with utilization rates ranging from 99 to 175 percent. 

That troubled board member Ericka Ellis-Stewart, who urged the board to “look at this through the lens of a parent. Is this good enough for your child?” 

She said, “If these schools were not full of children of color, our community would never stand for this, not in a million years.”  

Davis, the board chair, agreed that the results were unacceptable, but said he wasn’t sure that changing the configuration of the schools would make a difference. “I think we all know the effect of poverty on our children’s education,” he said. “How do we know if we change the grade-level configuration, we’ll get different results?” 

When then-Superintendent Ann Clark asked the eight K-8 schools whether they wanted to go back to a K-5 configuration, their answers — and the board’s response — differed. At Bruns Academy, located in a gentrifying neighborhood, a small but vocal coalition of newcomers argued that restoring the school to an elementary would encourage more affluent families to send their kids to the school.  

The board agreed, and Bruns became an elementary school again last year. But when a similarly small and vocal group of parents — predominantly Black, in this case — fought to keep Reid Park Academy K-8, the board split the school anyway.  

At Ashley Park, where parents pushed for the school to remain K-8, the transition in 2011 from an elementary school had been rough. The first day of school, one middle schooler got off the bus with “RIP Spaugh,” scrawled on his arm in marker, a tribute to his shuttered school, Loftus recalled. There was no gym for the middle schoolers, and few sports teams and extracurriculars. Spanish and other electives were limited, due to the small size of the middle school classes.  

But by the time the board revisited its decision, six years later, things were looking up. The district had created some composite sports teams by combining interested students from separate schools, and voters had approved a bond for a middle school gym. Students were traveling to the high school to participate in band, and the school was sharing a middle school Spanish teacher with another K-8. 

So when the board asked parents and teachers at Ashley Park for their preferences, they said they didn’t want another change.  

Still, Ashley Park, like many K-8 schools, tries to keep the “little kids” and “big kids” as separate as possible. Middle schoolers aren’t allowed in the hallways dedicated to the lower grades, and they are never in the section of the school reserved for “specials” like health and music at the same time as the younger kids. For most of the day, they’re confined to the modular structures on the side of the school. 

“Sixth grade was like shock therapy. But by seventh grade, I made some of my best friends.”

Gabe Schuhl, an 11th grader who attended a middle school

On a Wednesday in early March 2019, before the schools closed due to the coronavirus, a class of kindergartners practiced phonics inside the main building. “Say hop,” the teacher told the class gathered on a blue rug with lighter blue dots. “Hop,” the students dutifully repeated back.  

“Now chop it, said the teacher, making a chopping motion with her hand. “huh-op.”  

“Huh-op,” the kids echoed, mimicking the movement.  

Meanwhile, in the middle school modular building, a class of seventh graders sat in clusters of four desks, studying geometry. “What did we find yesterday?” the teacher asked. “The diameter,” said one student. 

“And that’s the distance from…?” the teacher prompted.  

“Side to side,” replied another student. 

Today, only five of the eight middle schools that the district opened in 2011 remain. But former top administrator Denise Watts doesn’t think that Charlotte — or any other city for that matter — is done experimenting with grade-span configurations. “One of the things I’ve learned is that change is the only constant,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever reach a place of stability.” 

Brown, the middle school principal, said she doesn’t believe there is a right or wrong configuration for kids. “It’s about the adults in the building,” she said.  

“Kids do better with adults who care about them,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter what setting they’re in.”  

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Peyton Amaral, a Morton Middle-schooler with a pale pink suit jacket and a swath of blue and purple hair, stood before the Fall River City Council this April, arguing for a ban on plastic bags.

“Pollution is making our community dirty and unlivable,” said Peyton, in a voice that came through clearly, despite the mask covering the lower half of her face. “We, the youth of Fall River, want to stay here, but we can’t bear to stay in a city that is dirty.”

Peyton’s testimony is an example of “action civics,” a growing, if controversial, trend in American education of which Massachusetts is the undisputed leader. Under a first-in-the-nation law that took full effect this year, students from across the state must take part in at least two “student-led, nonpartisan civics projects” — one in eighth grade, and another in high school. 

Proponents of action civics, an outgrowth of service learning that has students lobby for change in their communities, see it as a way to engage and empower students, preparing them for a lifetime of civic involvement. They liken it to a laboratory in science class, where students learn civics by doing civics.

“Students need to interact with the issues to understand the complexity of them, and the complexity of making change in their communities,” said Arielle Jennings, the New England executive director of Generation Citizen, whose action civics curriculum is used by 25,000 students nationwide, including 10,000 in Massachusetts.

But skeptics say students lack the foundational knowledge to be effective advocates. They point to dismal scores on national history and civics exams — less than 25 percent scored as proficient — as proof that schools need to spend more time teaching students core facts about our system of government, and warn that civics projects are displacing that instruction.

“I’m not opposed to civic action, but we can’t let the cart get ahead of the horse,” said David Davenport, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. “In science, you don’t run around doing a bunch of experiments — you start with knowledge and develop a hypothesis first.”

Related: Can patriotism and criticism coexist in social studies?

Others worry that students with more conservative views are being pressured to lobby for liberal causes —particularly in programs, like Generation Citizen’s, that require classes to reach a consensus on an issue to focus on. In March, the National Association of Scholars, an organization focused on higher education, created a coalition dedicated to defending American Civics against “sustained assault by radical activists.”

“Students need to interact with the issues to understand the complexity of them, and the complexity of making change in their communities.”

Arielle Jennings, New England executive director of Generation Citizen

“The New Civics threatens to replace traditional civics education with Neo-Marxist ‘social justice’ propaganda, vocational training for left-wing activism, and Alinsky-style community organizing techniques,” the head of the association, Peter Wood, wrote in a blog announcing the coalition. 

Larry Paska, the executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, challenges this characterization of action civics, saying it’s far broader than political protest. In Fall River, for example, eighth graders surveyed students, put out a petition, and conducted a social media campaign before presenting before the City Council. Along the way, they sought strategic advice from state and national lawmakers, including former congressman Joe Kennedy III.

“It’s not about raising junior boycotters or junior activists, but about being an active, engaged citizen,” Paska said.

Related: Can we teach our way out of political polarization?

Brian Brady, the former longtime CEO of The Mikva Challenge, which coined the term “action civics” in 2007, and runs programs in a dozen states, said the vast majority of projects tackle “hyper-local” issues, such as students petitioning for a stop sign in a location where a classmate was killed by a car.

Brady said he was, on the one hand, “dumbfounded and mystified” by the attacks.  “On the other, I’m not naïve — I understand there is a culture war happening and there are political points to be scored by attacking action civics,” he added.

In a study published last year, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which promotes “free enterprise, liberty and personal responsibility,”  argued there is a “progressive bias in the assumptions underlying many of the projects” listed on the websites of Generation Citizen and its allies. And even some advocates of action civics acknowledge that existing curricula and training programs lean to the left. 

The fight over action civics playing out in Massachusetts and other parts of the country is part of a larger battle over whether social studies instruction should prioritize civic knowledge or civic skills and dispositions.

“I learned that if you present the facts, and show genuine concern, people will take you seriously, even if you’re young.”

Peyton Amaral, a middle schooler

Conservatives tend to believe that there are key facts and dates that all students must learn. Roughly 20 states require students to take or pass the test foreign nationals must take to attain U.S. citizenship before graduating. Liberals don’t dismiss civic knowledge, but many believe it’s equally important for students to learn the skills necessary to navigate the political process.

Teachers, for their part, tend to side with the liberals. In a 2019 survey conducted by The Rand Corporation, less than a third of public high school social studies teachers said it was “absolutely essential” that schools teach students facts and dates, a smaller percentage than said students should be prepared to be “activists who challenge the status quo of our political system and seek to remedy injustice.” About two-thirds of teachers said students must be able to identify the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but less than half said they must be knowledgeable about periods such as the American Founding, the Civil War, and the Cold War.

“It’s not about raising junior boycotters or junior activists, but about being an active, engaged citizen.”

Larry Paska, the National Council for the Social Studies

To be sure, there are many on both sides of the spectrum who believe civics education can — and should — teach both knowledge and skills. 

“It’s a false choice between whether we should teach students in a traditional way, through direct instruction and rote facts, or through the opportunity to practice skills through service learning,” said Shawn Healy, senior director of policy and advocacy for iCivics, a nonprofit that “champions equitable, non-partisan civic education.”

Related: Slightly higher reading scores when students delve into social studies, study finds

Action civics differs from traditional “service learning” in that students are taught to tackle the root causes of a problem, rather than simply responding to it. Instead of conducting a community clean-up, for example, students might seek to stop the garbage (i.e. plastic bags) from accumulating in the first place. 

Middle school, a time when many students lose interest in formal education, is an ideal time to introduce action civics, advocates say. Choosing a cause to fight for gives students a sense of agency and aids in identity formation, a key developmental milestone.

In Fall River, the response to the middle schoolers’ petition has been swift. City councilmembers have drafted an ordinance banning single-use plastic bags, and plan to vote on it soon.

Peyton, an aspiring actress, said testifying before the City Council was “a little nerve-wracking” but ultimately rewarding.

“I learned that if you present the facts, and show genuine concern, people will take you seriously, even if you’re young,” she said. 

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

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