LINDSAY, Calif. — Una reciente mañana de otoño en Washington Elementary, un niño, sentado con cinco compañeros alrededor de una mesa, agarraba una tableta mientras construía un muñeco de nieve digital — una actividad refrescante dado que afuera de su aula con aire acondicionado hacía un calor de 85 grados. 

Su vecina, una niña con una cola de caballo amarrada con una cinta roja, usaba su dedo índice para manipular figuras en su pantalla. En otra mesa, una estudiante con una mascarilla de arcoíris miraba detenidamente su libro de tareas y coloreaba meticulosamente con un marcador verde.

En otra parte del salón, una instructora se arrodillaba para hablar con dos niños que jugaban con bloques, mientras otra maestra supervisaba a un grupo de cinco estudiantes que completaban hojas de ejercicios. 

Cada niño de 4 o 5 años en esa aula de kinder transicional estaba haciendo algo distinto e individualizado, de acuerdo a su desarrollo académico. Es una escena que se reproduce en las siete escuelas primarias y dos escuelas secundarias en esta comunidad agrícola de aproximadamente 13,500 habitantes en el Valle Central de California.

Hay pocas hileras de escritorios en las escuelas de este distrito, Lindsay Unified. Y son pocas las veces que un maestro se para al frente del aula. En lugar de ello, los estudiantes se enfocan en la tarea que sigue para ellos, que suele ser muy distinta a la que emprenden los otros niños en el mismo salón.

Los niños cuentan con acceso a dispositivos que pueden llevarse a casa y planes de aprendizaje individualizados que les permite avanzar con el material de la clase a su propio paso.

“Los maestros siempre llevan la clase a cierto paso, pero con el sitio Empower, los estudiantes pueden avanzar más en el curso trabajando independientemente y fuera del salón de clases”.

Connor Dunbar, estudiante de secundaria de último año

Es un modelo que ha rendido dividendos para el distrito. Desde que estableció un sistema basado en el rendimiento a mediados de los años 2000, Lindsay Unified ha visto grandes mejoras en los logros académicos, índices de graduación y en el número de estudiantes que se inscriben en la universidad. Dicho modelo también ha ayudado a los estudiantes y a los educadores a afrontar los altibajos de la pandemia con más facilidad que otros distritos escolares del país. Aunque aún así la pandemia causó estragos aquí, adaptarse al aprendizaje virtual fue menos difícil en Lindsay debido a la infraestructura preexistente e historial de adaptación.

Durante años, Lindsay ha experimentado con la educación basada en competencias, un método educativo más personalizado que permite que los niños aprendan con computadores por lo menos durante parte del día. A mediados de marzo del 2020, las escuelas en Lindsay Unified cerraron debido a la pandemia del coronavirus. Y, como sucedió con millones de estudiantes y maestros en todo el país, la enseñanza se trasladó en línea.

Pero al superintendente Tom Rooney le gusta decir que, aunque las escuelas cerraron en Lindsay, “el aprendizaje nunca paró”.

Ahora que se ha reanudado la enseñanza en persona en muchas partes del país, la experiencia de Lindsay a la hora de mantener a los niños encaminados, aun en los momentos más caóticos, ofrece lecciones para otros distritos. Los maestros en Lindsay están listos para cambiar de enseñanza en persona a enseñanza a distancia con poco tiempo de preparación, si hay un brote de coronavirus que requiere una cuarentena, por ejemplo, o un desastre natural obliga el cierre de las escuelas.

“Con aproximadamente un día de preparación, [los maestros] pueden hacer la transición a la enseñanza a distancia”, dijo Rooney.

Abriéndole camino a un nuevo modelo

Ubicado cerca de las faldas de los parques nacionales Sequoia y Kings Canyon, al pueblo de Lindsay se le conocía por dos cosas: aceitunas y naranjas. Pero la comunidad comenzó a sufrir económicamente tras el cierre de varios empleadores importantes a principios de la década de 1990, incluyendo lo que una vez fue la procesadora de aceitunas más grande del mundo. 

Hoy, más de un 90 por ciento de los 4,000 niños inscritos en el distrito Lindsay Unified están considerados socioeconómicamente desfavorecidos, y aproximadamente un 40 por ciento de los estudiantes están aprendiendo inglés. Un 95 por ciento de los estudiantes del distrito son de origen hispano.

En el 2007, los administradores estaban frustrados con los resultados del distrito y el bajo índice de graduación. Hasta sus alumnos más exitosos tenían dificultades: 8 de cada 10 de los estudiantes que se graduaron de la secundaria con las mejores calificaciones de su clase fueron colocados en cursos correctivos de inglés cuando llegaron a la universidad, según funcionarios del distrito.

El distrito convocó una serie de reuniones con maestros, líderes escolares, padres de familia, funcionarios municipales y miembros de la comunidad para hablar sobre la clase de sistema educativo que necesitaba la comunidad. El resultado fue la implementación de un método “personalizado y basado en competencias que gira alrededor del aprendiz” que le permite a los estudiantes alcanzar sus metas de aprendizaje en sus propios términos, dijo Rooney.

Relacionado: La ayuda a niños que se sienten aislados y ansiosos tras el cierre de las escuelas

El nuevo método eliminó muchos de los aspectos tradicionales de la educación, como las calificaciones con la escala de A-F y el aprendizaje basado en el tiempo, en el que los estudiantes avanzan a un nuevo grado todos los años. Junto con esos cambios ha surgido una nueva jerga: los maestros son “facilitadores de aprendizaje”, mientras que los estudiantes son “aprendices”, los grados son “niveles de contenido” y las escuelas son “ambientes de aprendizaje”.

A los estudiantes se les califica usando una escala del 1 al 4, y se necesita una calificación de 3 o más para demostrar dominio en una materia.  Los educadores dicen que una calificación de 1 o 2 no significa que un estudiante ha fracasado, sino que le queda más trabajo por hacer para avanzar al siguiente nivel.

Gaby León, estudiante de tercer año en Lindsay High School, contó que otros estudiantes que conoce quedan fascinados al enterarse de que ella jamás ha recibido una calificación de letra. “No estoy familiarizada con los ABCs, porque toda mi vida he recibido números”, dijo.

¿Qué es la educación basada en competencias?

Lindsay es un precursor entre un número creciente de escuelas y distritos en Estados Unidos que han adoptado una estrategia educativa basada en el desempeño o la competencia, dijo Susan Patrick, presidente y máxima ejecutiva del Aurora Institute, una organización sin fines de lucro que estudia y fomenta la educación basada en competencias. (El superintendente Rooney forma parte del consejo del Aurora Institute.)

Según Patrick, hace 10 años, solo un pequeño número de estados en EE.UU. utilizaban la educación basada en competencias. Su organización calcula que ahora, 6 de cada 10 distritos escolares públicos en el país están probando o planificando el uso de dichos métodos.

La ejecutiva cree que ese número va a seguir creciendo después de la pandemia.

“Vimos un cambio con el que, al eliminar las restricciones de tiempo y espacio, se desató mucha creatividad a la hora de proveerles más flexibilidad a los estudiantes”, dijo Patrick. “Después de la pandemia, está creciendo la demanda para que los sistemas escolares en EE.UU. aprendan a hacer el cambio de sistemas tradicionales basados en el tiempo … hacia uno que está más organizado alrededor del aprendiz”.

Entonces, ¿qué es exactamente la educación basada en competencias?

Tiene muchos nombres, dijo Patrick, pero fundamentalmente, es un método que permite que los estudiantes tomen control de su propio aprendizaje, a la vez que trabajan para lograr un grupo común de metas. Los estudiantes reciben evaluaciones valiosas sobre su progreso y apoyo, hasta cumplir esos objetivos. Demuestran su dominio de una materia presentando evidencia, como un trabajo o proyecto, que destaca lo que saben y lo que son capaces de hacer.

Relacionado: Lo que los estudiantes de inglés necesitan es enamorarse de la escuela otra vez

Una de las críticas más frecuentes de la educación basada en competencias es que consume mucho tiempo, dijo Patrick. También hay poca evidencia de que el aprendizaje personalizado mejora el aprendizaje estudiantil, en parte porque se utilizan muchos métodos distintos.

Pero los educadores en Lindsay afirman que, aunque hay más trabajo al principio, a la larga el modelo del distrito hace que la enseñanza sea más fácil.

“Cada maestro en el distrito crea lo que llamamos un plan de aprendizaje personalizado con cada uno de nuestros estudiantes, por lo menos dos veces al año”, dijo Maria Ernest, una maestra de teatro y de artes de lenguaje en inglés en Lindsay High School. “Sé que suena como mucho trabajo, pero en realidad te libera de gran parte de la planificación, porque estás haciendo pequeñas lecciones, en lugar de tener que llenar un espacio de 90 minutos”.

Matt Diggle se encuentra en su 28vo año como educador. Luego de asumir su cargo como nuevo director de Washington Elementary en agosto, ha quedado impresionado con lo mucho que necesitan saber los maestros sobre sus estudiantes bajo el modelo de Lindsay.

“Vine de un sistema basado en calificaciones”, dijo. “Esto requiere mucha más profundidad y conocimiento a la hora de explorar las metas de aprendizaje y entender realmente lo que el niño necesita lograr”.

El rol de la tecnología

La habilidad de Lindsay de hacer la transición rápidamente al aprendizaje a distancia en septiembre del 2020 fue gracias en gran parte a la infraestructura preexistente. A diferencia de muchos distritos en los cuales la falta de dispositivos y Wi-Fi irregular hicieron difícil adaptarse al aprendizaje virtual, casi todos los estudiantes de Lindsay ya tenían acceso a sus propias tabletas o computadores portátiles, las cuales son apropiadas para sus edades y reemplazadas cada tres años, y Wi-Fi comunitario.

Llegar a ese punto no fue fácil. En los primeros años del experimento de Lindsay, pocos estudiantes tenían acceso al internet en casa. “Llegaba al trabajo a las 7 de la mañana y había más de 60 niños en el césped frente a la oficina del distrito porque había un punto de acceso”, dijo Barry Sommer, director de la fundación del distrito.

Luego de intentos en vano por comunicarse con compañías grandes de internet, el distrito decidió tomar cartas en el asunto y le pidió permiso a la ciudad de Lindsay para instalar antenas en los edificios más altos de la comunidad. Luego se instalaron puntos de acceso en 500 hogares en Lindsay. Para finales del 2016, casi 90 por ciento de los estudiantes del distrito y sus familias tenían acceso gratis al internet en sus hogares.

Hoy, los estudiantes pueden acceder a sus tareas en sus dispositivos móviles. León, la estudiante de tercer año de secundaria, tendió su teléfono mientras demostraba cómo avanzó en su clase de matemática este año. “Puedes aprender donde sea,” dijo. “Puedes completar las tareas en carretera o en el aeropuerto”.

Pero los educadores dicen que no es solamente la tecnología lo que hace que el modelo de Lindsay funcione, sino la combinación de un método pedagógico personalizado con la tecnología.

El “sistema de gestión de aprendizaje”, Empower, es un portal virtual que les permite a los maestros subir, calificar y llevar un registro de las tareas de su clase. También contiene listas de reproducción que pueden incluir videos y tareas de lectura que los estudiantes completan a medida que van avanzando en la clase.

Relacionado: En una casa, dos hermanos con discapacidad tuvieron experiencias pandémicas opuestas.

Los estudiantes, padres de familia y maestros pueden entrar a Empower en cualquier momento para revisar el progreso en una clase. En cualquier momento, los estudiantes pueden ver lo que han completado y lo que les queda por hacer para terminar una materia. Los cursos siguen estando basados en los estándares estatales de California, y los estudiantes siguen completando evaluaciones externas como iReady.

Empower también les permite a los administradores escolares ver informes colectivos sobre el ritmo que llevan los estudiantes — es decir, si están progresando en sus respectivas materias y cuán rápido lo están haciendo.

“Podemos ver el ritmo en general para los facilitadores de aprendizaje y los aprendices, y luego podemos investigar más si es necesario, para ver los aprendices individuales y el progreso que están haciendo hacia completar antes de que termine el año”, dijo Jorge Ramos, director de enseñanza en Washington Elementary.

Entrenando a los maestros

La mayoría de los maestros no aprenden métodos basados en competencias en la universidad, por lo que hubo problemas de desarrollo cuando el distrito adoptó el modelo basado en desempeño a mediados de la década de los 2000, dijo Sommer.  Varios maestros se marcharon porque no pudieron adaptarse al nuevo sistema, agregó.

“Los programas de capacitación de maestros no preparan a los maestros para los modelos de enseñanza personalizados basados en competencias”, dijo Patrick, del Aurora Institute.

Como respuesta, el distrito estableció oportunidades para el desarrollo profesional y esos programas continuaron durante la pandemia. Los educadores usan Empower, la misma plataforma que utilizan los estudiantes, para su entrenamiento.

“Utilizan el método basado en desempeño con nosotros también”, dijo Guadalupe Álvarez, quien enseña octavo grado. A los maestros nuevos también se les acomoda en pares con maestros veteranos como Ernest, la maestra de inglés, que ayudan a instruirlos.

Ernest dijo que los maestros tienen que tener la mentalidad indicada para ser exitosos en Lindsay. “Tienes que contar con un personal que esté abierto al aprendizaje de por vida y realmente abierto a fluir con los cambios”, dijo Ernest. “Porque con este modelo, nada es fijo. Siempre estás buscando la mejor práctica. Como maestra, no puedes aferrarte a “así es como hago las cosas”.

La maestra de cuarto grado Nelly López dijo que antes pensaba que el salón de clases perfecto era uno en el que los estudiantes se mantenían callados, con sus manos dobladas, y la maestra era el centro de atención.

“Ahora es un cambio completo bajo el cual el enfoque está en ellos”, dijo. “Nada de que todo sea igual para todos”.

Estudiantes avanzan a su propio paso, con mucho apoyo

Una de las ventajas de la forma en que Lindsay afronta el aprendizaje y la tecnología es que se adapta a las necesidades de diferentes poblaciones, como los estudiantes con discapacidades y los que están aprendiendo inglés. El método también reduce el estigma para los estudiantes que quizás estén “atrasados” en un sistema tradicional, porque todos los estudiantes trabajan a su propio ritmo, sea que evolucionan rápidamente o necesiten ayuda adicional.

Sin embargo, una de las lecciones tempranas que aprendió el distrito fue que existe un balance delicado entre dejar que los niños hagan lo suyo y mantenerlos encaminados. Sigue siendo preciso que los maestros se aseguren de que los estudiantes no se estén quedando atrás.

John Woods, director de educación especial de Lindsay, dijo que es importante establecer fechas de entrega graduales para que los estudiantes no esperen hasta el último minuto para tratar de terminar todo. “Decimos que no estamos basados en el tiempo, [pero] hay que tener urgencia,” dijo. “Hay ciertos niños que son muy autodirigidos, pero hay otros que no lo son si los dejamos solos”.

Dependiendo de la materia, los estudiantes trabajan de manera independiente o se trasladan a otra clase con otra maestra. Dentro de cada clase, los estudiantes son colocados en grupos de acuerdo con en el objetivo de aprendizaje que intentan alcanzar y su progreso hacia la satisfacción de esos objetivos.

El sistema también permite tener en cuenta a los estudiantes que están progresando más rápido que sus compañeros. “Los maestros siempre llevan la clase a cierto paso, pero con el sitio Empower, los estudiantes pueden avanzar más en el curso trabajando independientemente y fuera del salón de clases”, dijo el estudiante de cuarto año Connor Dunbar.

Álvarez dice que cuando tiene estudiantes que “corren rápido”, se reúne con los administradores para elaborar el mejor plan para satisfacer las necesidades académicas del estudiante. “He tenido grupos de estudiantes de octavo grado que van a la escuela secundaria para matemática e inglés y luego simplemente regresan conmigo para su materia de historia como ciencia”, dijo. 

León pudo tomar cursos adicionales porque completó su curso de historia en un semestre. “Eso me permitió agregar un curso universitario a mi programa para el siguiente semestre”, dijo.

Ernest contó que enseña tres clases de inglés, cada una a un nivel distinto, en las que los estudiantes están agrupados de acuerdo con el progreso que han hecho hacia una meta de aprendizaje. Sigue dando lecciones de 15 o 20 minutos sobre temas relevantes para toda la clase, pero dedica el resto del tiempo a trabajar con estudiantes en grupos pequeños o de manera individual. 

“Sigo haciendo la misma cantidad de calificación que siempre he hecho”, dijo. “No crea más trabajo. Simplemente crea otros tipos de trabajo”.

Jennifer Keeton, una madre que trabaja en la división de servicios económicos del distrito, dijo que el modelo de Lindsay ha ayudado a satisfacer las necesidades de sus dos hijos. Su hijo, que se graduó en el 2020, se encuentra en el espectro autista. “Que todo el mundo [tuviera un plan] personalizado … ayudó a que no llamara la atención”, dijo.

La hija de Keeton es una estudiante de tercer año que está en camino de recibir su diplomado de College of the Sequoias, un colegio comunitario, antes de graduarse de la secundaria el próximo año. Keeton dijo que el sistema ayudó a su hija “porque no se vio obligada a esperar por los demás. Debido a que es una lectora ávida… Siempre terminaba las cosas rápidamente, pero podría trabajar en otros proyectos para darle un mayor entendimiento de los conceptos”.

¿Funciona?

Las calificaciones de exámenes en Lindsay Unified incrementaron bastante luego de que el distrito implementó el aprendizaje basado en competencias. El número de estudiantes considerados aptos bajo los estándares académicos de California aumentó de 26 por ciento en el 2014-15 a 47 por ciento en el 2018-19. Los índices de graduación aumentaron de 69 por ciento en el  2010-11 a 90 por ciento en el 2017-18. A la vez, los índices de estudiantes que van a la universidad aumentaron de 66 por ciento a 70 por ciento, y más estudiantes se están matriculando en universidades de cuatro años, según datos del distrito.

Durante la pandemia, los resultados fueron más mixtos. Los maestros y estudiantes sintieron el mismo agobio que enfrentaban todos los distritos, incluyendo grandes estragos en la salud social y emocional. Los estudiantes de Lindsay igual progresaron en matemáticas y lectura, aunque menos que durante un año escolar normal. 

En marzo del 2020, luego de que los expertos de currículo les dieran a los maestros un curso intensivo de fin de semana sobre la instrucción virtual, los estudiantes y maestros regresaron a la escuela a tiempo completo, en sus salones virtuales.  Rápidamente aprendieron a evitar clases virtuales de día entero a favor de trabajo en grupos pequeños y atención individual de los maestros, algo que ya venían haciendo en persona antes de la pandemia.

Y en las primeras semanas de la pandemia, el distrito tuvo que reforzar sus conexiones de Wi-Fi porque de repente más niños y padres estaban conectados las 24 horas, dijo Rooney.

Después de un año de pandemia, los estudiantes de Lindsay habían avanzado menos en la lectura que en años anteriores, pero aun así progresaron más que estudiantes en otros distritos del país con demográficas parecidas, especialmente entre los estudiantes más jóvenes, según un informe reciente de Learning Accelerator, una organización sin fines de lucro.

“Vimos mucho menos crecimiento para los niños en los grados más altos que en los de grados más bajos”, dijo Beth Rabbitt, máxima ejecutiva de Learning Accelerator y una de las autoras del informe.

Eso quizás se deba a que es más probable que los estudiantes de más edad tengan responsabilidades como trabajar o cuidar de hermanos pequeños, según el estudio.

El estudio también halló que los estudiantes clasificados como aprendices del idioma inglés, migrantes o sin hogar, y aquellos que reciben servicios de educación especial, demostraron una evolución positiva, gracias al contacto frecuente con consejeros, servicios de traducción, bancos de alimentos y servicios sociales y oportunidades para un “regreso temprano” a la escuela en el otoño del 2020.

“Después de la pandemia, está creciendo la demanda para que los sistemas escolares en EE.UU. aprendan a hacer el cambio de sistemas tradicionales basados en el tiempo … hacia uno que está más organizado alrededor del aprendiz”.

Susan Patrick, presidenta del Aurora Institute

Y a los estudiantes que volvieron en persona como parte del modelo de regreso temprano les fue mejor que los que permanecieron en casa, lo cual podría servir de lección en un futuro cuando haya interrupciones. Estos niños siguieron el mismo currículo virtual que sus compañeros estudiando en casa, pero trabajaron en la escuela en grupos pequeños con tutores que le podrían brindar apoyo adicional.

“Eso habla del poder de que los niños tengan adultos que, aunque no sean los maestros de contenido principales, los puedan ayudar a conectarse y a que se mantengan encaminados”, dijo Rabbitt.

Ernest señaló que la transición al aprendizaje a distancia fue más difícil para los inmigrantes recientes con los que trabaja. “Tratar de llegar al punto de que puedan seguir los pasos con una computadora cuando nunca han tenido una fue algo muy difícil durante los primeros meses”, dijo Ernest.

Pero una vez que los estudiantes se acostumbraron a la tecnología, dijo Ernest, el programa fue “el modelo perfecto para alguien que apenas comienza a aprender el idioma”. Algunas de sus estudiantes de secundaria comenzaron con un nivel de kinder en inglés, pero porque no estaban conscientes de que estaban empezando a un nivel tan básico, pudieron “avanzar al nivel indicado, progresar y no sentirse avergonzados”, dijo.

En general, en Lindsay la pandemia reafirmó el rol del aprendizaje basado en competencias y la enseñanza basada en tecnología, dijo Ernest. “Venimos haciendo enseñanza semipresencial bajo este modelo por tanto tiempo [que] la única diferencia para nosotros fue que los [estudiantes] no estaban en el aula con nosotros”.

Este reportaje sobre la adaptación al aprendizaje virtual fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

The post Como se hace bien el aprendizaje virtual? Un distrito en California ofrece algunas respuestas appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LINDSAY, Calif. — On a morning this fall at Washington Elementary, a young boy, sitting at a table with five of his peers, held a tablet while he built a digital snowman — a cool proposition given the 85-degree heat just outside his air-conditioned classroom.

His neighbor, a girl, whose ponytail was tied with a bright red bow, used her index finger to move shapes around her screen. At another table, a child wearing a rainbow mask bent studiously over her workbook, meticulously coloring with a green marker.

Elsewhere in the classroom, an instructor knelt to chat with two boys engrossed in playing with blocks, while a second teacher supervised a group of five students as they completed worksheets.

Every 4- and 5-year-old in this transitional kindergarten classroom was doing something different, tailored specially to their academic development. It’s a scene that is replicated across the seven elementary schools and two high schools in this agricultural community of around 13,500 in California’s Central Valley.

There are few straight rows of desks at schools in this district, Lindsay Unified. Teachers rarely stand at the front of the classroom. Students instead focus on whatever assignment is next for them — often a task that differs completely from the work being performed by the other kids in the room.

Kids are helped along by access to take-home devices and individualized learning plans that allow them to progress through class material at their own speed.

It’s a model that’s paid dividends for the district. Lindsay Unified has seen significant improvement in academic achievement, graduation rates and the number of students going to college since it created a performance-based system in the mid-2000s. The model also helped students and educators weather the pandemic’s ups and downs more easily than other districts in the country. While the pandemic still took its toll, adapting to online learning was smoother in Lindsay due to its preexisting infrastructure and history of adaptation.

For years, Lindsay has experimented with competency-based education, a more personalized approach to education that involves letting kids learn on computers for at least part of the day. In mid-March 2020, schools in Lindsay Unified shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. And, as it did for millions of other students and teachers around the country, instruction went fully online.

But superintendent Tom Rooney likes to say that while facilities closed in Lindsay, “the learning never stopped.”

Now, with learning back in person in many places in the country, Lindsay’s experience keeping kids mostly on track, even during the most chaotic of times, offers lessons to other districts. Teachers in Lindsay are ready to shift from in-person to remote learning with minimal prep time — if a coronavirus outbreak requires a quarantine, for example, or a natural disaster causes school closures.

“With about a day planning, [teachers] shift right into distance learning,” Rooney said.

Ushering in a new model

Located near the foothills of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, the town of Lindsay used to be known for two things: olives and oranges. But the community began to suffer economically after several major employers, including what was once the largest olive processer in the world, shut down in the early 1990s.

Today, more than 90 percent of the 4,000 children enrolled in Lindsay Unified are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and about 40 percent are English language learners. Ninety five percent of students in the district are Hispanic.

In 2007, administrators were frustrated by the district’s poor outcomes and low graduation rate. Even its most successful students had difficulties: 8 out of 10 high school valedictorians were placed in remedial English classes when they went to college, according to district officials.

The district convened a series of meetings with teachers, school leaders, parents, city officials and community members to discuss what kind of educational system the community needed. The result was the adoption of “a learner centered, personalized, competency-based” approach that allows students to meet learning goals on their own terms, Rooney said.

Related: Why a high-performing district is changing everything with competency-based learning

The new approach threw out many traditional facets of education such as the A-F grading scale and time-based learning in which students advance to a new grade level each year. Along with the changes came a new vernacular — teachers are “learning facilitators,” students are “learners,” grades are “content levels” and schools are “learning environments.”

Students are scored on a scale of 1-4, with a score of at least 3 needed to show proficiency in a subject. Educators say a 1 or a 2 doesn’t mean students have failed, only that they have more work to do to move on to the next level.

Lindsay High School junior Gaby León said that other students she meets are fascinated when she tells them she’s never received a letter grade. “I’m not familiar with the ABCs, because all my life I’ve gotten numbers,” she said.

What is competency-based education?

Lindsay is a forerunner among a growing number of schools and districts across the United States that have adopted a performance- or competency-based approach to education, said Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the Aurora Institute, a nonprofit that studies and promotes competency-based education. (Superintendent Rooney serves on the board of the Aurora Institute.)

Patrick said that 10 years ago, only a handful of states in the United States used competency-based education. Her organization estimates that now 6 to 10 percent of public school districts across the United States are piloting or planning competency-based approaches.

She expects that number will continue to grow in the wake of the pandemic.

“We just saw a shift where getting rid of time and space constraints unleashed a lot of creativity in helping to provide more flexibility for students,” Patrick said. “After the pandemic, the demand is really increasing for school systems around the U.S. to learn how to make the shift from traditional time-based systems … towards one that is truly organized around the learner.”

So, what is competency-based education, exactly?

It goes by many names, Patrick said, but at its core, the approach enables students to take charge of their own learning while they work towards a common set of learning goals. Students receive meaningful feedback on their progress and receive support until they achieve those goals. They show their mastery of a subject by presenting evidence, such as a paper or project, demonstrating what they know and are able to do.

One of the most frequent criticisms of competency-based education is that it is incredibly time consuming, Patrick said. There’s also little evidence that personalized learning improves student learning, in part because so many different approaches are used.

But educators in Lindsay say that, while there’s more work on the front end, the district’s model actually makes teaching easier in the long run.

Related: Does the future of schooling look like Candy Land?

“Every teacher in the district does what we call a personalized learning plan with each of our students at least twice a year,” said Marla Ernest, a drama and English language arts teacher at Lindsay High School. “I know that sounds like a lot of work, but it really frees up a lot of your planning, because you’re now really doing mini-lessons, instead of having to fill a 90-minute block.”

Matt Diggle is in his 28th year as an educator. After starting as the new principal of Washington Elementary in August, he’s been impressed by how much teachers have to know about their students in Lindsay’s model.

“I came from a grades-based system,” he said. “This requires a lot more depth and knowledge in terms of digging into the learning targets and really understanding [what] the child has to achieve.”

The role of technology

Lindsay’s ability to rapidly pivot to remote learning in spring 2020 was largely due to preexisting infrastructure. Unlike many districts where a lack of devices and spotty Wi-Fi made adapting to online learning difficult, almost all Lindsay students already had access to their own tablets or laptops — which are age-appropriate and replaced every three years — and community Wi-Fi.

Getting there wasn’t easy. In the early years of Lindsay’s experiment, few students had internet access at home. “I would come to work at 7 in the morning and there would be 60 kids on the front lawn of the district office because there was a hotspot,” said Barry Sommer, director of the district’s foundation.

After unsuccessfully approaching several major internet companies, the district decided to take matters into its own hands. The district asked the city of Lindsay if it could locate antennae on the community’s tallest buildings to expand the district’s network. Then they installed hotspots on 500 homes in Lindsay. By the end of 2016, almost 90 percent of the district’s students and their families had access to free internet at home.

“There’s always a certain pace that the teachers progress the class at, but with our Empower website, it allows students to progress further in the course by working independently and outside of the class.”

High school senior Connor Dunbar

Today, students are even able to access assignments on their mobile devices. León, the high school junior, held out her phone as she demonstrated how she’s moved through her math class this year. “You can learn anywhere,” she said. “You can complete assignments on road trips or at an airport.”

But educators say that technology by itself isn’t what makes Lindsay’s model work. It’s the combination of its personalized pedagogical approach combined with technology.

The district’s “learning management system,” Empower, is an online dashboard that allows teachers to upload, grade and keep track of assignments for their class. It also contains “playlists,” which might include videos or reading assignments, that students complete as they progress through a class.

Related: What lessons does special education hold for personalized learning?

Students, parents and teachers can log into Empower at any time to check on progress towards finishing a class. At any point, students can see what they’ve completed and what else they need to do to finish a subject. The courses are still based on California state standards, and students continue to complete external assessments such as iReady.

Empower also allows school administrators to pull aggregate reports on students’ pacing — whether and how quickly they are making progress in their respective subject areas.

“We’re able to look at the overall pacing for the learning facilitators and for learners, and then we’re able to dig in deeper if we needed to, to look at individual learners and see what progress they’re making towards completing by the end of the year,” said Jorge Ramos, learning director at Washington Elementary.

Training the teachers

Most teachers aren’t taught the competency-based approach in college, so there were growing pains when the district first adopted its performance-based model in the mid-2000s, Sommer said. Several teachers left because they could not adapt to the new system, he added.

“Teacher training programs are not preparing teachers for personalized competency-based learning models,” said Patrick, of the Aurora Institute.

In response, the district set up opportunities for professional development, programs that continued during the pandemic. Educators use Empower, the same platform the students use, for their training.

“They take that performance-based approach with us as well,” said Guadalupe Alvarez, who teaches eighth grade. New teachers are also paired with veteran teachers such as Ernest, the English teacher, who help show them the ropes.

Related: How one state’s teachers are sparking digital innovation

Ernest said that teachers have to have the right mindset to be successful in Lindsay. “You do have to have a staff that’s really open to lifelong learning and really open to flowing through change,” Ernest said. “Because in this model, nothing is static, you’re always looking for the best practice. You can’t as a teacher be stuck in ‘This is how I do it.’”

Fourth grade teacher Nelly Lopez said she used to think the perfect classroom was one in which students sat silently with their hands folded and the teacher was the center of attention.

“Now it’s like a full shift into where the focus is on them,” she said. “There’s no one size fits all.”

Students move at their own pace, with lots of support

One of the benefits of Lindsay’s approach to teaching and technology is that it accommodates different populations, such as students with disabilities and English language learners. The approach also reduces the stigma for students who might be “behind” in a traditional system because all students work at their own pace, whether they move ahead quickly or need extra help.

One of district’s early lessons, however, was that there is a delicate balance between letting kids do their own thing — and keeping them on track. Teachers still must make sure that students don’t fall behind.

John Woods, Lindsay’s director of special education, said it’s important to set incremental deadlines so students don’t wait until the last minute to try and finish everything. “We say we’re not time-based, [but] you have to have urgency,” he said. “There are certain kids that are very self-directed, but there are others that are not, if you just leave them to their own devices.”

Depending on the subject, students might work independently or move to another class with a different teacher. Within each class, students are grouped based on the learning targets they are trying to reach and their progress towards meeting those targets.

The system also helps accommodate students who are moving faster than their peers. “There’s always a certain pace that the teachers progress the class at, but with our Empower website, it allows students to progress further in the course by working independently and outside of the class,” said high school senior Connor Dunbar.

“After the pandemic, the demand is really increasing for school systems around the U.S. to learn how to make the shift from traditional time-based systems … towards one that is truly organized around the learner.”

Susan Patrick, president of the Aurora Institute

Alvarez said that whenever she has “fast runners,” she meets with administrators to come up with the best plan to meet students’ academic needs. “I have had groups of eighth graders that go to the high school for math and English and then they just come back to me for their subject matter in history as science,” she said.

León was able to take extra classes by completing her history class in one semester. “That allowed me to add a college class to my schedule for the following semester,” she said.

Ernest said she teaches three English classes, each at a different level, with students in each class grouped according to the progress they’ve made towards a learning target. She still gives short 15- to 20-minute lessons on topics that are applicable to the entire class, but then spends the rest of class period working with students in small groups or one-on-one.

“I’m still doing the same amount of grading that I’ve always done,” she said. “It doesn’t create more work. It just creates different work.”

Parent Jennifer Keeton, who works in the district’s financial services division, said that Lindsay’s model has helped meet the needs of both her children. Her son, who graduated in 2020, has autism. “With everybody being customized … it helped him not stick out,” she said.

Keeton’s daughter is a junior, currently on track to earn her associate’s degree from the College of the Sequoias, a community college, before she graduates from high school next year. Keeton said the system helped her daughter “because she didn’t get stuck waiting for everyone else to finish, because she was an avid reader … She was always finishing things fast, but she was allowed to work on other projects to give her a higher understanding of the concepts.”

Does it work?

Test scores leaped in Lindsay Unified after the district implemented competency-based learning. The number of students proficient on California’s academic standards increased from 26 percent in 2014-15 to 47 percent in 2018-19. Graduation rates rose from 69 percent in 2010-11 to 90 percent in 2017-18. College-going rates increased from 66 percent to 70 percent, and more students are going to four-year colleges, according to district data.

During the pandemic, the results were more mixed — teachers and students felt the same stresses that all districts faced, including a significant toll on social and emotional health. But Lindsay students still made progress in math and reading, although less than during a normal school year.

In March 2020, after curriculum experts gave teachers a weekend crash course in online instruction, students and teachers were back in school fulltime, in their virtual classrooms, within just a few days. They quickly learned to avoid all-day online classes in favor of small group work and one-on-one attention from teachers, something they’d already been doing in person before the pandemic.

And in the early weeks of the pandemic, the district had to boost its Wi-Fi connections as more kids and parents were suddenly online 24/7, Rooney said.

A year into the pandemic, Lindsay students had less growth in reading than in previous years, but — particularly among younger learners — still made more progress than their peers in other districts around the country with similar demographics, according to a recent report from the non-profit Learning Accelerator.

“We saw a lot less growth for kids in upper grade levels than we did for those in lower grade levels,” said Beth Rabbitt, CEO of the Learning Accelerator and one of the authors of the report. This could be because older students were more likely to have responsibilities such as working or taking care of younger siblings, according to the study.

The study also found that students classified as English learner, migrant, or homeless, and those receiving special education services, saw positive growth, thanks to frequent contact with counselors, translation services, access to a food pantry and social services and opportunities for an “early return” to school in fall 2020.

And students who came back in person as part of the early return model did better than their peers who remained at home, which could serve as a lesson when future disruptions occur. These kids continued with the same online curriculum as their peers studying from home, but worked at school in small groups with tutors who could give them extra support.

“That speaks to the power of kids having adults who, even if they’re not the primary content teachers, can be helping them connect and helping them stay on track.” Rabbitt said.

In Lindsay, “the learning never stopped.”

Superintendent Tom Rooney

Ernest said the switch to remote learning was especially hard for the recent immigrants she works with. “Trying to get them to a place where they can follow along with a computer when they’ve never had one, it was very difficult for the first few months,” Ernest said.

But after students got used to the technology, she said, the program was “the perfect model for someone who is just learning the language.” Some of her high school students started at a kindergarten level in English, but because they didn’t know they were beginning at such a basic level, they were able “to move at the right level, make progress and not feel ashamed about that,” she said.

Overall, the pandemic reinforced the role of competency-based learning and technology-based teaching in Lindsay, said Ernest. “We’ve been doing blended learning in this model for so long, the only difference for us was that [students] weren’t in a room with us.”

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

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When 18-year-old Ernesto Rubio graduated from high school in June, he knew what he wanted to do next: take a summer class in the basics of becoming an emergency medical technician, the first step toward his dream job as a paramedic.

The challenge? Getting to the class.

Rubio, the first in his family to go to college, couldn’t afford the $40 for a monthly bus pass, so he walked the three miles from his home in Whittier, California, to the fire academy where the course was held. It took nearly two hours for him to trudge through an industrial area with few sidewalks, a distance that would take just minutes in a car.

“All my courses are in-person and hands-on, so I need to be here every day, all day,” he said. “It was a struggle waking up three, four hours before class starts just to get here on time.”

Sometimes the weather was “brutal,” Rubio said, reaching as high as 110 degrees by the time he had to walk home. “It was just like being in a sauna but with a heavy backpack.”

At a time when colleges are increasingly focused on how to get and keep students enrolled and on a path to a degree, some of the most surprising challenges are not academic but logistical. Something as simple as affordable, reliable transportation can mean the difference between a student finishing college or not.

While students on residential campuses are figuring out the logistics of traveling home for the winter holidays — and when states and cities soon will be deciding what to do with their shares of the massive federal infrastructure bill — the vast majority of U.S. college students are commuters, many of whom struggle with getting to and from their classes on a daily basis.

Transportation can account for almost 20 percent of the cost of college for commuters, according to the College Board; 87 percent of all first-year students live off campus, the nonprofit Higher Learning Advocates estimates.

Related: Why white students are 250% more likely to graduate than Black students at public universities

Community college students will spend an average of $1,840 on transportation during the 2021-22 school year — more than their counterparts at public and private four-year colleges — the College Board reports.

There are four ways transportation poses barriers for students: because of the cost, because stops or stations aren’t close enough to where they live or work, because available routes and times don’t sync with college schedules and because it’s unreliable, one study found.

Transportation barriers disproportionately affect low-income students and Black, Hispanic, Native American and some Asian students. Hispanic students were 19 percent more likely to report transportation problems as creating a barrier to college completion than non-Hispanics, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UnidosUS.

“You feel like you’re being less productive to spend more time traveling versus being wherever you need to be. . . . It eats up a lot of your day.”

Preston Welborne, who spent six hours a day on buses getting to and from his community college

The study acknowledged that reliable transportation has not been widely cited as a key to education, but called it “often the single thread holding together a precarious balancing act that allows the student to attend school while juggling multiple other responsibilities.”

When he was a student at Oakland Community College in Michigan, Preston Welborne estimates that he spent six hours a day on the bus, making several transfers to get to and from the campus.

“You feel like you’re being less productive to spend more time traveling versus being wherever you need to be,” he said. “It eats up a lot of your day.”

Related: Most college students don’t graduate in four years, so college and the government count six years as “success”

Welborne — now a film, television and media major at the University of Michigan, to which he transferred in the spring — said he hesitated to tell professors why he was sometimes late to class. “It happened so often, you don’t want to sound like you’re making excuses,” he said.

He always had to give himself an extra hour as a buffer, Welborne said, “’cause you never know. I can’t even count how many times I was late for something because of the bus, outside of anything that had to do with something in my control. It’s impossible to go seven days without the bus affecting your time schedule in some type of way.”

Ernesto Rubio likely wouldn’t have been able to continue his education if his college, Rio Hondo, hadn’t offered a free transportation pass to all students this fall. With the GO RIO pass, “I’m able to get to school at a reasonable time,” he said. “And I’m able to stay later than usual and stay till dark if needed and get help because I still know I have safe and reliable transportation just a few blocks away.”

Some colleges are starting to respond. A few, like Rio Hondo, already fund transportation passes with student fees, while others are using federal pandemic relief dollars to cover the cost.

In September, Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee launched a pilot program in partnership with the local transportation authority that will let all students and college employees ride the bus for free through August 2022. The college spent about $35,000 of its federal coronavirus relief funding on the program, according to Amanda Bennett, interim vice president for student affairs.

Bennett said the college will collect data about how many students and employees use the service, in the hope of continuing it beyond next year. “We recognize that [as] we’re trying to recover from a pandemic, our students have more financial constraints now than ever before. And this was a way for us to try to address the transportation needs of our student body,” she said.

Los Angeles is also launching a pilot program this fall. Its K-12 and community college students will be able to take unlimited Metro bus and train rides without charge. The transit board for the neighboring city of Long Beach approved a similar program in November.

Related: Will that college degree pay off? Now you can finally see the numbers

In New Orleans, Dillard University, the University of New Orleans and Delgado Community College have started conversations and shared data with local economic development organizations and transit agencies to coordinate regional transportation solutions for students.

American University in Washington, D.C., has offered a transit pass since 2016. Students pay a mandatory fee of $136 per semester for unlimited rides on the city’s subways and buses.

Some community colleges have addressed the transportation barrier by bringing the education closer to students.

Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, operates several centers at which students can earn certifications in industries such as manufacturing, welding and construction. The college has located the centers in areas close to public transportation but where there are few educational opportunities.

Students in rural areas face different kinds of transportation barriers. Sophie Goodman is a senior studying sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, also known as SUNY New Paltz, about 85 miles north of New York City. She said that neither the local transportation system nor her 2004 Prius with 189,000 miles on it are reliable.

“I am a working-class student with some financial assistance from my parents,” she said. “We are not in a position to buy me a new car. That’s really been a huge handicap this semester, and I have missed classes due to my car not functioning properly.”

Transportation can account for almost 20 percent of the cost of college for commuters, and 87 percent of all students live off campus.

Goodman said she has spent around $2,000 on car repairs this year alone. Meanwhile, she’s had to move to the neighboring town of Rosendale because she’s been priced out of the rental market in New Paltz. It’s only about a 15-minute drive, but “in this type of rural area, if my car isn’t working, it’s really difficult to get a ride to school.”

And it’s not just about getting to school. Goodman also has a job and an internship, which are in opposite directions. “It’s a hard thing to maneuver,” she said. “There really is no system set up at my university for people who need to commute and don’t have cars.”

Transportation solutions for college students in rural areas don’t usually involve public transit “because they don’t have the infrastructure that they can leverage,” said Derek Price, founder of the research firm DVP-Praxis.

Instead, some colleges have their own vans or offer emergency grants to help students cover the cost of car repairs, new tires or rentals while their cars are in the shop.

Related: Women have been marginalized in the building trades. The infrastructure bill could change that

Students who get transportation assistance like the GO RIO pass are more likely to remain enrolled, complete a greater number of credits and earn a credential, according to a study of Rio Hondo by DVP-Praxis for the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University.

Providing reduced-fare transit passes can reduce the time it takes these students to graduate, Price said. That reduces the cost of their education, and “means they’re more quickly going to be able to get into the workforce to support their families.”

At a time when more strategies are needed to get students to and through colleges, “transportation ought to be one of those strategies,” he said.

Community college students will spend an average of $1,840 on transportation this year, more than their counterparts at both public and private four-year colleges.

As for Rubio, he now takes the bus to class every day and is wrapping up his training to become a certified EMT. The next step is working on his general education requirements for an associate degree in public safety while working the 1,500 hours as an EMT he needs to become a paramedic.

“I’m thriving in this career path,” he said. “And without this bus pass, guaranteed, I wouldn’t be able to be in the position I am at the moment.”

This story about helping college students graduate was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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When Shayna Medley worked as an admissions officer at Brandeis University nearly a decade ago, she said, the message from above was clear: Find more men.

After all, the number of men applying to college had already begun to fall below the number of women — a trend that would soon accelerate, worsening a growing nationwide decline in enrollment. But admissions officers still wanted to balance out the number of men and women on campus.

“Toward the end of filling out the class, there would definitely be a push to look for more men to admit,” said Medley, who was in her role at Brandeis from 2012 to 2014. “The standards were certainly lower for male students.”

As more women than men have continued to apply to college, data suggest that, at some private institutions, it’s gotten easier for male applicants to get in — and harder for female applicants.

Given a male student and a female student with a similar profile at Brandeis, for example, the university would potentially “admit the male student and wait-list the female student because of wanting to get closer to this sort of gender parity in terms of percentages in the class,” said Medley.

Brandeis accepted 44 percent of male applicants compared to 36 percent of female applicants in 2012-2013, according to data the university reports to the federal government. A spokesperson said that Brandeis does not currently use gender as a factor in its admissions process, and its acceptance rates were 31 percent for men and 35 percent for women for 2020.

“You can argue you’re not discriminating because you’re trying to get a balance, but there isn’t much else you can do besides make [gender] a factor.”

Charles Deacon, dean of admission, Georgetown University

While Brandeis has actually had higher acceptance rates for women than men the last three years — it says federal data showing it accepted 51 percent of men and 21 percent of women last year is incorrect — a noncomprehensive review of federal data shows that many other selective colleges have higher admission rates for men.

These include Boston, Bowdoin and Swarthmore colleges; Brown, Denison, Pepperdine, Pomona, Vanderbilt and Wesleyan universities; and the University of Miami. At each school, men were at least 2 percentage points more likely than women to be accepted in both 2019 and 2020.

Pitzer College admitted 20 percent of men last year compared to 15 percent of women, and Vassar College accepted 28 percent of men compared to 23 percent of women. Both had more than twice as many female applicants as male applicants.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide

Few admissions directors would talk about this trend. The Hechinger Report reached out to 28 selective institutions with higher acceptance rates for men; 25 declined or did not reply to requests for interviews.

“It really does sort of go counter to so much of the message that colleges want to send forth, which is, ‘Everyone is welcome … and everybody has a chance of getting in,’ ” said Patrick O’Connor, a former private school counselor.

Colleges “want to be careful,” said independent counselor and former admissions dean Sara Harberson. “They don’t want it to look like they are giving male students an advantage in this process.” But “whether they admit it or not, gender balance is almost always a pretty big institutional priority, because prospective families can see it on tours and students can feel it when they enroll.”

She said recruiters also want to be careful to not discourage women from applying. The bigger the applicant pool, the more selective the institution looks.

Sonya Smith, dean of admission and student financial services at Vassar, said in an email that it considers an applicant’s academic and personal interests and extracurricular activities in addition to grades and rigor of coursework. “Gender is taken into account in this context, along with many other factors,” she wrote.

Because so many more women than men apply to these liberal arts colleges, if an institution wants to have gender balance on campus, “there’s not a lot you can do other than discriminate,” said Charles Deacon, dean of admission at Georgetown University. “You can argue you’re not discriminating because you’re trying to get a balance, but there isn’t much else you can do besides make [gender] a factor.”

While Georgetown has a slightly higher acceptance rate for men than women, Deacon said that it does not consider gender in its review process.

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of enrollment in universities and colleges and men just over 40 percent, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports. Fifty years ago, the gender proportions were reversed.

This disparity grew wider when the pandemic descended. While enrollment in higher education overall fell 2.5 percent last fall, the decline among men was more than seven times as steep as the decline among women, the research center found. The number of men continued to fall this year more sharply than the number of women at public and for-profit universities. 

Now a lecturer at Harvard Law School, Medley said that gender balancing is akin to setting quotas for a particular group of students based on race — a practice the Supreme Court banned in a 1978 decision that otherwise allowed preference to be given to historically underrepresented groups.

“We might admit the male student and wait-list the female student because of wanting to get closer to this sort of gender parity in terms of percentages in the class.”

Shayna Medley, former admissions officer at Brandeis University and now a lecturer at Harvard Law School

She said arguments in favor of race-based affirmative action should not be interpreted to give men preference in the admissions process.

“These two things are just completely different given that race-based affirmative action is trying to combat historic discrimination and existing barriers to education for students of color and just furthering a general interest in racial diversity on campus,” Medley said. “Gender balancing, or having this sort of cap on the amount of female students on campus, is not grounded in [that kind] of rationale.”

Many public institutions aren’t allowed to consider gender or race at all, especially in the nine states with affirmative action bans: California, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and, most recently, Idaho. In states that do allow gender to be considered, “affirmative action jurisprudence says that schools can use these factors as a plus factor to advance diversity interest and combat discrimination, but can’t discriminate on those grounds,” Medley said.

Title IX legislation, passed in 1972, says that no one should be excluded on the basis of gender from participation in any education program receiving federal financial assistance. But private institutions have an exemption that allows them to use gender as a factor in admissions.

Related: The pandemic knocked many Native students off the college track

O’Connor said that gender is just one thing among many looked at by admissions officers. “There are so many other factors in any given year that sometimes make it less likely that somebody is going to get in,” he said.

Those could include major, geography or high school. “These can all prove to be factors in certain schools that require a balancing act,” O’Connor said.

Another consideration that can affect how many men or women are admitted by a college is who is more likely to enroll. If more women than men are expected to show up on campus, a school might admit more men.

It works the other way, too. Women have an admissions advantage at institutions focused on business and on science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, which have historically skewed to be more male. At MIT and the California Institute of Technology, women are twice as likely as men to get in, with acceptance rates for women at around 11 percent, compared to 5 percent for men. Both universities have twice as many men as women applying, but roughly the same numbers of men and women on campus.

Nevertheless, Harberson said the advantage for women applying to STEM or business schools has been waning as the number of women in those fields steadily increases. “I tell female students you can’t rely on listing a certain major anymore as a female to give you that boost. You have to rely on yourself for that,” she said.

Overall, women have higher acceptance rates than men, around 64 percent for women at public four-year institutions, compared with 60 percent for men. At private four-year universities, those figures are 51 percent and 47 percent, respectively, according to 2014-2018 data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Admissions officers often cite a 40/60 ratio as a sweet spot for the number of men and women on campus. If either gender goes over 60 percent, it has implications for recruitment. 

“At some point — whether that’s 60/40 or beyond — interest in enrolling at any institution could be impacted negatively for all students if that balance disappears,” Tim Wolfe, dean of admissions at the College of William & Mary, said in an email.

As a public institution, William & Mary is an outlier in its higher acceptance rates for men. The college, along with other Washington, D.C.-area schools, found itself under the microscope in 2009 when a federal civil rights probe investigated whether it was discriminating against women in the admissions process. The investigation was dismissed two years later, but its specter still looms.

Related: Foreign tech workers are getting fed up. Can better education for U.S. students fill the gap?

Last fall, the college admitted 46 percent of male applicants and 40 percent of female applicants. “In terms of the admission process, we don’t separate out, or review students differently, based on gender identification,” Wolfe wrote. “Gender is among the many factors that we consider in trying to best appreciate an applicant’s full context and personal story, and as we shape our overall entering class.”

No one wants to reject a student based on his or her gender, O’Connor said, but at the same time, admissions officers “know that if they tiptoe over that balanced ratio, that has lots of economic and academic implications for the college in the long run.”

Medley challenged the idea that a gender imbalance on a campus is a bad thing.

“We should get more comfortable with the idea that there’s not necessarily a problem just because more women are attending college,” Medley said. “White men have had access to education since higher education institutions were created.”

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

The post An unnoticed result of the decline of men in college: It’s harder for women to get in appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In high school, Cante Skuya Lonehill-Stover, who is Oglala Lakota, decorated her bedroom wall with a photo of her dad waving goodbye to his grandparents from below their porch as he left for college. Two days before she departed for Augustana University — a private liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, on the other side of South Dakota from her home on the Pine Ridge Reservation — Cante re-created the scene as she said goodbye to her own grandparents. 

It was one of her last moments with her grandfather, who died at the end of August 2020, just a week after she arrived on campus. Her grandmother discouraged Cante from returning home from college for his funeral. “She knew if I went home, I would stay,” Cante recalled.

At the beginning of August 2020, Nina Polk, who is Diné (Navajo), Sičangu Lakota, San Carlos Apache and Quechan, and her parents piled into their car to make the 20-plus hour drive from their home in Shakopee, Minnesota, to Durango, Colorado, where Nina had been recruited to play women’s lacrosse at Fort Lewis College. Her mom was hesitant to let her go, but the pandemic had sabotaged the end of Nina’s high school lacrosse career and she didn’t want to lose another season.

In early November, Nina’s lacrosse coach called an urgent team meeting. An on-campus party had been the source of a coronavirus outbreak. The team, gathered on the field, fell silent as their coach told them practice was suspended for the rest of the fall. Suddenly, Nina’s reason for being on campus was thrown into question, and she grew more despondent after the college announced all instruction would be remote until Christmas break.  

Last September, Tayah Running Hawk, who is Oglala Lakota, gathered at a social distance with 16 other classmates in a modified ballroom at St. Catherine University, an all-women’s college in St. Paul, Minnesota, during her first-year orientation. “What fears and anxieties do you have right now?” her professor asked.

One student shared that she was homesick. Others talked about feeling isolated and fearing the coronavirus. Tayah, who, like Cante, grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, didn’t say anything. “I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the fear that I have of not belonging here at the university,” she said.

Simply by getting to college, these three Native American women stood out from many of their peers. Just 24 percent of 18- to 24-year-old American Indian and Alaska Native students were enrolled in college in 2019, the lowest of any group, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Native American students are also more likely to drop out of college during or after their freshman year and second most likely, after Black students, to transfer to a different institution.

Related: The pandemic knocked many Native students off the college track

Then the pandemic hit, throwing up additional obstacles on the high school-to-college path. Last fall, the share of Native American students enrolled in college for the first time plummeted by almost a quarter, more than for any other racial or ethnic group, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The barriers that can derail Native American students in their pursuit of a college degree are numerous. These students are more likely to face financial difficulties than their white peers: During the pandemic, for example, three-quarters of students identifying as Indigenous reported experiencing insecurity in basic needs such as housing and food, compared with 54 percent of white students, according to a March 2021 study from the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice.

Native students are also more likely to face racism and microaggressions than white students, and there’s often a disconnect between their cultural identities and Western higher education institutions, according to Native American higher education experts. In part because they make up less than 1 percent of all undergraduates, Native American students often have trouble finding professors, peers and mentors who understand them and can help them create a sense of community on campus.

The pandemic made finding those connections even more difficult, said Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, the director of Native student services at the University of South Dakota, who is Oglala Lakota. Students also felt pulled home due to the loss of family and community members, she said. Indigenous students were twice as likely as white students to know someone who died of the coronavirus.

“Feeling responsibility towards your studies is deeply difficult if you have things that are extremely traumatic that are happening and you feel a call to that responsibility, too,” said Red Shirt-Shaw. “This generation of first-year students just went through something that is so deeply different than generations past.”

The Hechinger Report followed Cante, Nina and Tayah, all 19 now, through their freshman year to explore the pandemic’s toll on Native American young people and what it takes to get through college on campuses that, even in normal times, are not always set up to serve Indigenous students. While their experiences were highly individual, some common themes emerged.

Cante

When Cante arrived at Augustana University in fall 2020, she was one of just 11 undergraduates who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, out of 1,662 at the school.

She’d been drawn to what she described as the college’s stated commitment to cultural diversity and inclusion, but she didn’t see that reflected in the student body, which is 83 percent white. “It was a huge culture shock coming from … a close, tight-knit community, to a place where people aren’t as accepting,” she said. 

Jill Wilson, a college spokesperson, wrote in an email that Augustana is committed to recruiting and admitting more students from underrepresented groups, including by “establishing deep relationships with tribal colleges, universities and other networks to recruit more Native American students.” She also said the school runs a program to help first-year students of color navigate campus life (which Cante said she didn’t know about).

When Cante donned her purple ribbon skirt, a traditional garment worn by some Native women, to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day in October, another student approached her. Not realizing Cante was Native, the student accused her of cultural appropriation. “She’s like, ‘You’re white, you shouldn’t be wearing that,’ ” Cante recalled.

Cante just walked away. “Most of my life, I have gotten that I’m too white to be Native, or I don’t look Native,” she said. “My family has told me I need to turn a blind eye to that stuff. Because being Native is not what’s on the outside.”

Related: How one Minnesota university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Cante began to spend most of her time with her roommate, a Yankton Sioux student she’d met during the 7th Gen Summer Program, a college readiness program targeting Native American students. They took college classes through the University of South Dakota and completed an internship at the Crazy Horse Memorial.

A spike in coronavirus case counts on campus deepened their isolation as they tried to concentrate on their studies and stay healthy. After final exams in December, her roommate went home, with plans to transfer to another college, but Cante stayed on campus for her job at Runnings, a home, farm and outdoor store where she works 24 hours a week. She nearly spent her 19th birthday in December alone, until her dad showed up on campus for a surprise visit.

Cante Skuya Lonehill-Stover re-created a photo of her father leaving for college as she prepared to leave the Pine Ridge Reservation to attend Augustana University in Sioux Falls. Credit: Image provided by Alyssa Stover

The few days she did spend home at Christmas made her realize how much she was struggling to fit in. “I really adapted just to adjust to this school,” she said.  

Back on campus for the spring semester, Cante spent most of her time hunkered down in her dorm room, focusing on keeping her grades up, or at her job. “I’ve just been kind of riding it solo,” she said. “And just keeping to myself.”

In late February, Cante began working on her transfer application to South Dakota State University for fall 2021.

Nina

Fort Lewis College is situated on a mesa overlooking downtown Durango, a small city of 19,000 in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. The college is a decommissioned military base that became a Native American boarding school in the late 19th century. In 1911, the school was turned over to the state of Colorado on condition that Native American students wouldn’t pay tuition. Today, 46 percent of the college’s students are Native American. 

In addition to the tuition waiver, Fort Lewis offered everything Nina was looking for in a campus: Division II lacrosse, a strong fine arts program and gorgeous natural surroundings. “Fort Lewis was kind of like my dream school,” Nina said.  

Surrounded by other Native students, and as a member of her lacrosse team, Nina felt comfortable on campus. She’d moved a lot as a kid, living in several states before her family settled in Minnesota when she was 8. Her middle school was racially diverse, but Native American students were few, and her high school was predominantly white. At Fort Lewis, she said, “I don’t feel alone.”

Fort Lewis officials say that sense of community is intentional. The college runs programs such as Native Skyway to Success, a preorientation for incoming first-year and transfer students that allows them to connect with other Native students and staff at the college’s Native American Center.

In fall 2020 the college was able to buck national enrollment trends, increasing the number of first-year Native students by 11 percent, which was more than for all first-year students. It also boosted the retention rate — the share of students who continue from freshman to sophomore year — for Native students more than for the general student population, said Lauren Savage, a spokesperson for the college.

Related: How one Navajo Nation high school is trying to help students see a future that includes college

Still, having a lot of Native students on campus doesn’t eliminate prejudice, Nina said. At Fort Lewis, she overheard students complaining that Native students don’t deserve to “get in for free,” she said. It’s the kind of derogatory comment about Native people she’s heard her whole life, she said.

In middle school, Nina had almost abandoned athletics after some of her basketball teammates bullied her for her culture and physique, despite its advantages for the sport — she was tall and skinny. At 6 feet, 1 inch, she still stands a head taller than many of her teammates. 

It wasn’t until she picked up a traditional lacrosse stick in seventh grade through the Twin Cities Native Lacrosse league that Nina finally found her sport. She first played modern lacrosse when she tried out for her high school team as a ninth grader. Lacrosse quickly became a driving force as she started to look at colleges.

At Fort Lewis, before campus shut down, she’d enjoyed the classes held in person. “I was just grateful to be on campus and get that … first experience of college,” she said. But with her online classes, she struggled to stay motivated. Then, during the coronavirus outbreak that eventually closed the campus, she made the decision to return home to Minnesota and finish out the semester there. 

While Nina was disappointed to miss fall lacrosse training, being home was in many ways a relief from the stress of campus life during the pandemic. It also gave her an opportunity to spend precious time with her family, including her parents, three grandparents and her little sister, Tusweča, which means “dragonfly” in Lakota.

At 19, Nina is more than a decade older than Tusweča. Her parents were around her age when they met at Haskell Indian Nations University, a boarding school turned tribal college in Lawrence, Kansas. She said she got her love of art from her mom, a mixed media artist, and her athletic ability from her dad, a professional disc golf player. Her parents always expected her to go to college, she said, and now she sees herself as a role model for her little sister. 

In January, when campus reopened, Nina returned to Colorado and joined her fellow Skyhawks on the lacrosse field. Although the spring season was disrupted by frequent coronavirus testing, shin splints and canceled games, Nina was happy to spend many weekends on the road, doing homework on long bus rides and in hotel rooms in places such as Colorado Springs and Denver. 

Nina shared her culture with her teammates, too, by teaching them about the history of the game. Some of them even knew her through TikTok before they’d met her in person. Before coming to college, Nina had begun to record and share TikTok videos on the differences between modern and traditional lacrosse, which drew tens of thousands of views.

In the videos and to her teammates, she explained how tribes such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Ojibwe played traditional lacrosse before it was appropriated by European settlers, who adapted it to create modern lacrosse. She learned the Great Lakes version, called thakápsičapi or baaga’adowewin, played by the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes.

“We call it the Creator’s Game or the medicine game, because we believe it was gifted to us by the Creator,” Nina said. “It was a healing game because it connected us to the land, to animals, to water.”

Tayah

Not long after arriving on the campus of St. Catherine (referred to by the college community as St. Kate’s), Tayah logged into the virtual office hours organized by the office for multicultural and international programs and services. The office, designed to gather and provide support to students of color, had created a “virtual couch” via Zoom that students could drop into remotely.

Tayah immediately felt at ease. “I really liked the whole vibe of it,” she said in September 2020. “It’s just like a really nice sense of community. In the midst of all of this, it was really nice to feel that.”

At the college, about 42 percent of students identify as Black, Indigenous and people of color. Still, Tayah said she met only one other Native American student.

In October, emboldened by support from the students and staff she’d met, Tayah booked an appointment with the office of residence life to advocate for Native American students to “smudge” in the residence halls. Smudging is a spiritual and cultural practice of burning herbs such as sage, cedar and sweet grass. 

“I think that a non-Covid St. Kate’s would be a fit for me. It’s just so many things were limited and restricted and totally just knocked off because of Covid. And so that really, really changed my experience there.”

Tayah Running Hawk, a first-year student at St. Catherine University (also known as St. Kate’s) in 2020-21

Sitting before the office’s director, Tayah explained that she and other Native students might smudge to start their day or to cleanse their energy. She described the abalone shell bowl she uses to burn the herbs, which are rolled into a small ball and lit, and tried to allay the director’s concerns that smudging might pose a fire hazard.

Tayah said it was important to educate the campus about smudging and advocate for Native American students’ right to practice their cultural ceremonies, and she hoped to make a difference for other Native students who might attend St. Kate’s in the future.

While she felt listened to, the conversation didn’t result in a concrete policy change. Amanda Perrin, director of residence life at St. Catherine, said that because dorms are communal living spaces, there is a high standard for fire safety. Students who would like to smudge on campus can talk with staff about an exemption for the dorms or getting access to other spaces to do so, Perrin said.

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

Meanwhile, despite finding some support from staff and peers on campus, Tayah struggled with the isolation of studying remotely from her dorm room. The majority of her classes were online,  so her interactions with classmates were limited. She looked forward to Mondays, when her only in-person class, a first-year seminar, was held.

She also struggled with being a 10-hour drive from home. In October 2020, South Dakota had one of the highest per capita coronavirus infection and death rates in the United States. “With Covid … on the rise on my rez, the numbers keep climbing  — I’m just really worried about my family,” she said in an interview that month. 

During the fall, she lost several extended family members to the coronavirus. Being unable to travel home for the funeral services increased her anxiety. Distracted by worries, Tayah fell behind in her classes. She didn’t ask for help, she said, because she didn’t want to discuss details about her family with her professors.

She began to grapple with whether to stay at St. Kate’s. “I kept going back and forth,” she said.

In early November, Tayah’s mother called to let her know that her grandmother was sick due to underlying health issues. Tayah decided she wanted to withdraw and return home. Her mom tried to discourage her. But a few days later, on Nov. 12, she withdrew from classes, packed up her dorm room and drove back to South Dakota.

In January, Tayah tried to start her second semester at St. Kate’s remotely from South Dakota. But she struggled to get online from home. Her family also turned to her to care for her 1-year-old nephew, Junior. Within a few weeks of starting the semester, she dropped all her classes again.  

That would give her space to think about what she wanted to do in fall 2021, she reasoned. “I really just want to focus all my energy and efforts, everything, towards next school year,” she said in February. 

A sophomore year?

Family often plays a big role in shaping Native American students’ college paths, said Cheryl Crazy Bull,  president of the American Indian College Fund, who is Sičangu Lakota. Many students want to get an education, then return home to give back to their families and communities, but that same desire to help can keep them out of college altogether.

“There’s a lot of worry about whether or not their family is going to have sufficient resources to first, navigate the pandemic, and now, navigate the aftermath of that,” Crazy Bull said. “We still have a lot of economic fallout in our tribal communities.”

That economic fallout could depress college enrollment rates among Native American students even further. So, too, could the mental health toll of the pandemic: A February 2021 study from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health found that American Indian and Alaska Native students reported the highest rates of grief and loss of any group. They were also the most likely to withdraw or take a leave of absence from college due to the pandemic, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Native American women, though, were less affected than their male peers. In higher education overall, women earn the majority of four-year degrees. That’s true for Native American students,  too: Sixty percent of American Indian and Alaska Native undergraduates in fall 2016 were female, for example. During the pandemic, those gaps increased even more: Native American men saw the steepest enrollment declines of any group in fall 2020.

Back on the Augustana campus in the spring, Cante’s grades improved. She learned how to better manage her time and found ways to unwind. On Tuesdays, she took a break from her job at the store to play intramural volleyball. That was her day to do something for herself, she said. 

She also felt determined to finish college. The picture she’d re-created of her dad leaving for college represented something unfinished. He had dropped out of Dakota Wesleyan University, in Mitchell, South Dakota, after a few semesters.

But even as some things improved at Augustana, Cante became increasingly sure that her decision to transfer to South Dakota State was the right one. “I don’t think the pandemic had anything to do with the challenges I faced in the past year,” Cante said.

She’d never found the friend group she was looking for and got to know only a few faculty members. Most of the professors, she said, “weren’t very understanding about me being 500 miles away from home, being in a completely culturally different environment.”

“I tried to explain all this to them and that I had a really hard year, and they just kind of brushed it off,” she added. “They’re like, ‘Well, you’re a college student. Everybody goes through it. You got to just deal with it.’ ”

In late August, Cante started at South Dakota State University in Brookings, where she’s studying veterinary medicine. She hopes to eventually open her own veterinary practice. “I have come really far from where I was when I was at Augustana,” she said. 

Related: Photo essay — Leaving a reservation for college, but also staying close to home

After successfully finishing the spring semester at Fort Lewis, Nina returned to Minnesota for the summer. She picked up her traditional Great Lakes stick again and was invited to speak about the history of Native lacrosse at several professional lacrosse events.

Being an ambassador for traditional lacrosse prompted her to reflect on what she wanted to do with her life. She’d always been motivated by art, spending hours at a time in her mom’s studio as a child. But she struggled in her art classes during the pandemic.

Lacrosse, on the other hand, had become Nina’s lifeline. “That’s what kept me motivated, the game itself,” she said.

Then, in August, a knee injury prompted her to take the fall semester off to stay home and heal. She also wanted to give herself space to figure out her future career plans.

When she returns to Fort Lewis in the spring, Nina said she intends to switch her major from studio art to Native American and Indigenous studies “to learn more about my culture, my people” and find new ways to advocate for the sport she loves.

This fall, Tayah started over, pursuing an associate degree in business at Little Priest Tribal College in Winnebago, Nebraska. She is studying remotely from her home in South Dakota. Tribal colleges, which are operated by tribes, tend to provide more culturally responsive education for Native American students, although the schools often struggle with graduation rates. Around 10 percent of all Native American students attend one of the 35 accredited tribal colleges and universities in the U.S.

Tayah doesn’t regret her time at St. Kate’s. “I think that a non-Covid St. Kate’s would be a fit for me,” she said. “It’s just so many things were limited and restricted and totally just knocked off because of Covid. And so that really, really changed my experience there.”

Using federal pandemic emergency relief funds, Little Priest is providing four free classes to students this fall as well as a laptop for new students. Tayah said she worries about balancing her caregiving for her nephew, Junior, with her studies. But she has found a quiet place to study at her grandfather’s house. 

She eventually wants to pursue a career in social work or public health, she said. “I know that I don’t just want to hold one degree to my name, I want many degrees,” Tayah said. “That’s also knowledge that can help people out there, especially in our [tribal] communities.

“So something that just always keeps me going is that I think about the bigger picture and the hard times, and it reminds me that I am strong.”

Arlo Iron Cloud, who is Oglala Lakota, contributed reporting. Monica Braine, who is Assiniboine and Hunkpapa Lakota, produced the audio story. The story was supported by a grant from the Education Writers Association.

This story about Native American college students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a sophomore year?  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Marcus Jake, 18, first approached his teacher Guila Curley about taking her “college success” class last fall, she was hesitant. “Are you sure you want to do that?” she recalled thinking.

Jake, then a junior at Newcomb High School in Newcomb, New Mexico, was a good student, but Curley worried because the college-level class was online. Jake, who, like Curley, is Navajo, lived up a remote mountain road with no cell phone service.

Newcomb High School is a public school located in the Navajo Nation, around 70 miles south of the Four Corners Monument where New Mexico meets Arizona, Colorado and Utah, in a school district that spans almost 3,000 square miles. In addition to Newcomb itself, the high school serves seven different Navajo communities, the farthest of which is around 30 miles away, although some students travel even farther to get to the school. All of the 266 students enrolled at the high school are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of poverty.

Curley told Jake she’d love to have him in the class, which covered topics such as study skills, but he needed to promise to upload his assignments every week and come to the live Zoom session every Monday morning. Jake agreed. “I wanted to take [the class] just to like, push myself and to further my education, and also to get ready for college,” he said.

But halfway through the semester, Jake was failing. The house he lives in with his grandparents has no cell service. To get online, he drove half a mile down a rocky dirt road and tried logging in via a school-provided hotspot from the cab of his truck. But the connection was slow and Jake quickly grew frustrated.

Curley, Newcomb High’s college and career readiness coordinator, saw many stories like this in the past year. When education went online, she struggled to get into contact with students and help them meet college application and financial aid deadlines. College became less of a priority for students who were struggling just to log into class or who were worried about having their basic needs met, she said.

“We just weren’t prepared to handle the loss of the school as an Internet hub”

Guila Curley, college and career readiness coordinator, Newcomb High School

Prior to the pandemic Curley estimated that up to 40 percent of the school’s graduates enrolled in college. Curley, who attended the high school where she now teaches, said that number dropped significantly for both fall 2020 and fall 2021, as students struggled not only to get online but, in some cases, watched as their relatives lost jobs or became sick or even died from the coronavirus. Fears of contracting the virus on college campuses also kept some students from applying.

“We were all trying to survive, whether that was physically trying to not catch Covid, or mentally and emotionally,” Curley said. “We were just trying to get through.”

National figures tell a similar tale. Even before the pandemic, American Indian and Alaska Native students had the highest high school dropout rate and lowest college enrollment rate of any U.S. racial group. In 2018, just 24 percent of Native Americans age 18 to 24 were enrolled in college, compared to 41 percent of the overall population in that age group, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Then, in fall 2020, the number of Native students attending college for the first time fell by nearly a quarter, compared with a 13 percent drop for all first-year, first-time students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Experts worry about the long-term economic impact on Native communities if students continue to forgo college in large numbers.

“It is going to affect our tribal economies, it’s going to affect the health and wellness … of our tribal people,” said Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the nonprofit National Indian Education Association and a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe. Native college graduates often come back to their communities and work in schools and health clinics, which had trouble attracting enough people to fill these essential jobs even before this past year, she said. 

But while the pandemic exacerbated the barriers that Native students already faced in getting through high school and into college, it also demonstrated the lengths that some students, and their teachers, will go to learn with the hope of improving their lives and those of their families.

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

As soon as Covid hit in March 2020, Curley recognized how difficult it would be for her school district to transition to remote learning. She estimated that only around 10 to 15 percent of her students had internet at home. “We just weren’t prepared to handle the loss of the school as an internet hub,” she said.  

She spent last April trying to secure technology for students taking Advanced Placement exams. When hotspots and laptops weren’t available because of supply chain issues, the school broadcast its WiFi to the parking lot so kids could log on to take the AP tests on their phones while sitting in their cars. Early in the pandemic, school staff also printed out homework packets and delivered them by bus, or asked students to come to school once a week to pick them up. Some educators also dropped off packets at home for students who lacked transportation, said Bill McLaughlin, the Newcomb High School principal.

Curley said many of her best students failed dual enrollment classes at the local community college when it abruptly transitioned to remote learning. She received an alert from the college letting her know that she might want to check on a student who didn’t have electricity at home. That’s not uncommon: More than a quarter of the 55,000 homes in the Navajo Nation lack electricity. “What do you want me to do?” Curley recalled thinking. “I can’t give her electricity, but you can give her an extension.”

“At the end of the day, who cares about college if you don’t care about living?”

Guila Curley, college and career readiness coordinator, Newcomb High School

Many students used the school shutdown to spend more time working. Last fall, McLaughlin and other staff members started driving to the nearest McDonald’s, more than 30 miles away, to drop off homework packets because so many students got jobs there. “We would go through the drive thru,” McLaughlin said.

Eighteen-year-old Colby Benally, who is headed to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, in the fall, summed up his senior year at Newcomb succinctly. “It sucked,” he said, a sentiment shared by many of his peers. “We’re just trying to do our best to get through today without getting the symptoms of Covid.”

Benally said that most of his close friends aren’t thinking about college. “To them, it’s always been actually going to work right after high school,” he said.

Related: How one Minnesota university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Curley said the pandemic hampered her ability to keep students on task when it came to applying for college. Normally, she would have ensured that every graduating senior had, at a minimum, applied to the local community college to preserve the option of going to school in the fall. But this year, as she struggled to get in touch with students, “a lot fell on the kids’ shoulders,” she said. Fewer applied to college this spring; some of the students from last year’s graduating class who had applied, didn’t enroll, while others from the class of 2020 left college mid-semester.

For Jake, when learning went online, school started to recede from his mind. He lives with his grandparents, Juanita and Allen Bryant, who raised him because his parents weren’t ready to have kids, he said.

His grandmother works as a housekeeper at a casino more than an hour away, so Jake spends a lot of time alone with his grandfather, doing chores, cooking and feeding their 22 horses.

“When I was at home there was a lot of stuff that I had to do around the house to help my grandparents, so school wasn’t really on my mind,” Jake said. “I want to focus on home and help them out, so I can be there for them and help them out the way they helped me out when I was a kid.”

Like Jake, many Native students have family responsibilities – to help financially, or care for younger siblings or grandparents – that keep them close to home. The pandemic made some Native families even more reluctant to send their kids away to college, Curley said. In the past, she’s had parents get upset with her for suggesting their children apply to far-flung colleges.

“I have had a really hard time trying not to just be like, ‘Don’t listen to your mom and dad,’” she said. “It’s already scary to try to go out on your own.”

“It is going to affect our tribal economies, it’s going to affect the health and wellness … of our tribal people”

Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the nonprofit National Indian Education Association

Many of Curley’s students lost family members to the virus. At the beginning of last summer, she said she shared GoFundMe campaigns every other week to help cover funeral expenses for students’ relatives or other community members who had died from the coronavirus. At that time, the Navajo Nation had one of the highest per capita infection rates in the United States.

“It was just so scary and frustrating and sad,” she said. “Within the span of this year, we’ve had kids who have dealt with all of that, some of them who’ve dealt with it multiple times.”

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Newcomb staff started calling students to check on their wellbeing. “It really helped us stay connected with our kids,” McLaughlin said.

Before the pandemic, Native teens had the highest suicide rate of any population group in the United States, and experts worry the pandemic and social isolation of the last year could make it worse.

Curley said that mental health will always take priority for her. “At the end of the day, who cares about college if you don’t care about living?” she said.

But as hard as the last year has been, Curley said it has also demonstrated her community’s resilience. “I think the focus here with our [Native] students was on all of the bad things — how much our kids were suffering, how much our communities were suffering. And it was all true, but there [has been] no focus on how hard some of our kids were working,” she said.

As for Jake, he eventually found a way to get to Curley’s class. His aunt bought him a better hotspot, and he started logging in and salvaged his grade. Affording the $45-a-month fee for data was sometimes difficult, he said.

But, he added, “It made me feel good about myself that I could come back from F and bring it up to a C+ and pass the class.”

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

Monica Braine, who is Assiniboine and Hunkpapa Lakota, contributed reporting.

This story about Navajo Nation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from a grant from the Education Writers Association. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post The pandemic knocked many Native students off the college track appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Senior year didn’t turn out exactly how 18-year-old Monalie Bohannon had imagined it. Instead of playing basketball for Hamilton High School in Anza, California, or making new memories with her friends, she spent the year attending classes online, working at her tribe’s gas station and babysitting her younger cousins.

“I keep myself busy,” she said. “Not having a senior year has been kind of discouraging, like not physically being at school, because that’s what you look forward to as a high school student. But I found out that I’m capable of doing a lot more things than just school.”

Bohannon lives on the reservation of the Santa Rosa Band of Cahuilla Indians on the outskirts of Anza, a high desert town of 3,000 in Southern California. Bohannon’s community, Mountain Center, is even smaller with around 150 residents; she was the only student from her tribe to graduate from the high school this year; just 5 percent of the school’s 266 students are Native.

Even after her school reopened for in-person classes in April, Bohannon decided to finish the year online. That way it was easier to continue her 38-hour-a-week job at the Santa Rosa Pit Stop, where her mom and older sister also work.

“They’re tired when they come home,” she said. “Now when I come home, I’m tired with them.” 

Bohannon also spent much of the year watching her younger cousins during school hours. She would attend her classes while perched at a counter in her kitchen so she could keep an eye on them.

“We would all be in school together,” she said. “When we had … breaks during our class periods, I would sit there with them and listen to their teachers with them, to see if they understand what they’re talking about.”

If all goes as planned, Bohannon will be the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. Her mom earned an associate degree, and her older sister took a break after high school and then chose not to attend college. That led Bohannon to prioritize her college applications. “I know that if I take a break, I’m not gonna want to go back, cause I’m already finding a new way of life,” Bohannon said.

Her busy schedule did make it difficult to schedule appointments with her high school counselor, but Bohannon said she got the help she needed when it came to college.

She spent the spring weighing where she wanted to go to college. One morning in mid-April, she was getting ready in the bathroom when her phone pinged with an email from La Sierra University, a private liberal arts college in Riverside, California. She was elated by the news that she’d been accepted to study nursing.

But just a few weeks later, Bohannon changed her mind. She decided instead to attend College of the Desert, a community college in Palm Desert, California, about 40 miles from her home. There, she can play basketball, and perhaps more importantly, it’s closer to her family. After getting her associate degree in nursing, she plans to transfer to a four-year school to continue her studies in the field.

“I’m excited to get away from the reservation, but also to be able to come home,” she said.

A highlight of Bohannon’s senior year was her grandmother presenting her with an eagle feather at a tribal ceremony in May. “We’re all women in my family,” she said. “So all of my big inspirations, my role models, they all got to see me receive my eagle feather.”

When she wore the feather at her graduation on June 2, she says she felt the support of her family and community.

“What we’re taught is when you earn your eagle feather, that means you’re an adult, that means you’ve accomplished something big,” she said. “I know a lot of people on our reservation didn’t graduate. And so when they see us graduating, they really try to let us know [that] they appreciate us and they’re proud of us.”

Bohannon is looking forward to starting classes at College of the Desert in August, but she’s also glad to be staying close to home. “When you grow up on a reservation, it’s not like you’re trapped or anything,” she said. “It’s just … home is always going to be home.”

Her family has suggested she could leave the reservation for college and still return later. But Bohannon said she’d prefer not to go too far away: “I just feel like I have so much to do here still … I just know that whatever I decide to do, they’re going to support me,” she said of her family. “I know that whatever I do, I’m going to help our people.”

Monica Braine, who is Assiniboine and Hunkpapa Lakota, produced the audio story. The story was supported by a grant from the Education Writers Association.

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Eighteen-year-old Nyché Andrew stepped on stage to take the podium in front of her classmates and their families on an overcast afternoon last month. “We would like to take this moment to acknowledge the Dena’ina Athabascan people and the wisdom that has allowed them to steward the land on which Anchorage and Service High School reside,” the high school senior said.

It was a moment she’d been waiting for since her freshman year — not just to graduate from high school, but also to wear her traditional Yup’ik headdress and mukluks. As a 10th grader, Andrew, who is Yup’ik and Iñupiaq, testified in front of the Anchorage school board, advocating for Alaska Native and American Indian students’ right to wear their traditional regalia. That year, 2019, the district changed its policies to allow Indigenous students to wear cultural items along with their caps and gowns.

Schools have a long history of policing Native students’ graduation attire, often citing longstanding policies that all students must look alike and that deviations from the standard cap and gown are distracting. And even in school districts like Anchorage that have recently enacted policies allowing Native students to wear regalia, implementation has been uneven due to a lack of understanding of Native history and ways of life, advocates say. They argue that the practice of policing Indigenous students’ graduation attire is symptomatic of an education system woefully ignorant of, and insensitive to, Native culture.

Related: How one Minnesota university more than doubled its graduation rate

Two days before Andrew wore her headdress and mukluks to her graduation, another Anchorage student, David Paoli, who is Iñupiaq from Uŋalaqłiq, was getting ready to graduate from West High School. He planned to wear a mortarboard his mother had sewn with sealskin and black beads — the same cap she’d worn to her own graduation from University of Alaska Fairbanks last year.

When a line of students marched out to take their seats, his mother, Ayyu Qassataq, who is also Iñupiaq from Uŋalaqłiq, couldn’t spot her son. She finally saw him, wearing a plain mortarboard.

“After the ceremony, I went out onto the field to meet my son, and he gave me a big hug,” Qassataq recalled last month. “And I was holding him and crying. And when we pulled away, the first thing he said to me was, ‘They took my sealskin cap, Mom.’”

A staff member who was unaware of the new policy had confiscated Paoli’s cap.

“I felt completely violated. And it immediately brought to mind what our peoples have endured at the hands of the education system,” Qassataq said.

Upon learning of the incident, the Anchorage school district superintendent, as well as the school’s principal, reached out to Paoli’s family the next day to apologize. But stories like Paoli’s occur somewhere in the United States every graduation season. Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the nonprofit National Indian Education Association, said that every year she has to write a letter to some superintendent in a district that prohibits Native students from embracing their culture at graduation.

Traditional regalia, such as an eagle feather, is often given to Native students by family members or other loved ones to celebrate their personal achievements as well as their heritage. “This is a way of showing our cultural identity and our appreciation, our honoring of our Native men or women that are graduating,” said Cournoyer, who is Oglala Sioux. 

The traditional Yup’ik headdress Andrew wore at graduation is made of sealskin, beaver and wolf fur and trimmed with black and gold beads. Her mukluks are adorned with a beaded design with splashes of turquoise and pink, based on a pattern her great grandmother created. 

“My Yup’ik headdress is important to me since it makes me feel connected to my family and culture,” she said.

Andrew, who will be going to Yale this fall, said that she was often bullied at school for her Native identity. At first she felt ashamed. But as she grew up she began to see her culture, embodied in her Native regalia, as a source of strength.

“For Native students to be proud of their culture, during graduation and beyond in their lives, means resilience,” she said. “It means the government failed in their effort to ‘kill the Indian and save the man’ … Our family ties, cultural ties, ties to our land are strong.”

Related: As coronavirus ravaged Indian Country, the federal government failed its schools

Preventing Native students from wearing their traditional regalia as they exit the education system reinforces the same messages they’ve often received throughout their education, said Cournoyer.

“You have to look at what the education system is about. And it’s about assimilation. And it’s about acculturation,” she said. “It is not a place that allows us to embrace who we are.”

Across the country, some state lawmakers have begun to respond to the demands of student activists and Native advocacy organizations. In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the Clovis Unified School District, after officials told graduating senior Christian Titman, a member of the Pit River Tribe, that he could not wear an eagle feather at his commencement. While Titman was eventually allowed to wear the feather after the case was settled out of court, that incident spurred state legislation in 2018 allowing students to wear Native regalia.

But James Ramos, who is the first Native American to serve in the California legislature, doesn’t think the law goes far enough.

He’s introduced a new bill to ensure compliance with the law and establish a taskforce that engages tribes and school districts around the issue. The bill recently passed the state assembly and is on its way to the senate.

Ramos, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe and former chairman of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, said that school districts are often unaware of the law or ignore it. “When it comes to California’s First People, we have to educate the educators on what traditional regalia is, and why it should not be questioned,” he said.

California’s 2018 law followed on the heels of similar legislation in Montana, which in 2017 became the first state in the nation to protect Native students’ right to wear regalia. Since then, Washington, North Dakota, South Dakota and Kansas have followed suit. This spring, Arizona and Oregon passed similar laws.

Cournoyer said that state legislation can help local districts craft more inclusive graduation policies. Local officials are often reluctant to change policies prohibiting cultural attire without state guidance, she said.

In 2017, Montana became the first state in the nation to protect Native students’ right to wear regalia

In Anchorage, after Qassataq’s son was denied his right to graduate in his Native regalia, the principal asked Qassataq how the school district could make amends. She asked him to begin advocating on behalf of Native students in multiple ways, including by educating school district staff about students’ right to wear their regalia. 

“We need to make sure that that doesn’t happen again,” Qassataq said. “There’s really nothing you can do to make it right. But the very least we can do is make sure this doesn’t happen to any other families.”

Monica Braine, who is Assiniboine and Hunkpapa Lakota, and Sol Traverso, who is of Athabaskan descent, contributed reporting for this story. The photography for this story was supported by a grant from the Education Writers Association.

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Samantha Palu, a high school government teacher in South Dakota, came to school on Jan. 7, 2021, armed with a plan to talk to all of her classes about the attack on the U.S. Capitol the previous day. When she started at the school in August, she was told not to say anything “political” in class — a difficult mandate for an educator whose job it is to teach about politics.

But for Palu, not addressing the Capitol violence would have been a dereliction of her duty as an educator. “I just knew that I couldn’t stay silent, because that would just add to the problem,” she said. “This stopped being Republicans versus Democrats. These were domestic terrorists that did this and that’s what I told my students.”

During the discussion, a student walked out of her class. The school’s administration later received a phone call from the student’s family expressing concern that Palu was advancing a “political agenda,” she said. Palu’s principal backed her up, but she worries about backlash when she tackles controversial topics in the future.

Across the country, teachers like Palu have grappled with how — and whether — to discuss the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and other seismic events with their students. While some districts instructed teachers to address the insurrection in class, others did not provide any guidance at all or asked that their educators remain silent on the issue, teachers said.

There is a longstanding principle that public school teachers, as representatives of the state, must not attempt to influence their students’ political beliefs, according to Wayne Journell, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While that basic stance is relatively uncontroversial, he said, it has gradually morphed into a belief that teachers should be apolitical and refrain from sharing their personal views with students.

“Education itself is political — who chooses the textbooks, who funds schools, how schools are funded.”

Alyssa Dunn, an education professor at Michigan State University

This has contributed to school and district policies requiring teachers to remain politically neutral in the classroom. Educators often hear cautionary tales in the media of colleagues who were disciplined for being “too political.” Parents, meanwhile, are increasingly pushing back when they hear of teachers discussing current events with students.

As a result, teachers are sometimes reluctant to discuss any controversial topics at all — especially in the current climate when the legitimacy of science and facts has been called into question.

Political neutrality “is really difficult to navigate, because it seems like as a country, we can’t even agree on some of the basic facts,” said Isabel Morales, a high school social studies teacher in Los Angeles. “One of my colleagues said, ‘I never thought that saying that we have to count the votes would be considered partisan or that I’m indoctrinating students.’”

Related: Last week was tough, teachers say. But it wasn’t the first difficult ‘day after’ they’ve faced.  

Yet experts say that it’s impossible to remove politics from the classroom because teaching itself is a political act. “Education itself is political — who chooses the textbooks, who funds schools, how schools are funded,” said Alyssa Dunn, an education professor at Michigan State University. “So to say that curriculum has to be apolitical is a misunderstanding of the fact that education is a political space to begin with.”

“It’s no secret that I dislike Trump. But I don’t place my dislike at the forefront of my discussion of the events of the day. The kids also know that I’m going to be fair about the information that I share with them and that I’m very particular about my facts.”

Duane Moore, teacher, Ohio

Studies, meanwhile, show that teachers disclosing their beliefs has little influence on a student’s own political views. “It’s not synonymous with indoctrination,” Dunn said. “You’re not requiring students to share your belief, you’re just sharing yours with them.”

In his research, Journell found that students don’t care where their teachers stand politically as long as they feel like they aren’t being pressured to think a certain way. “They actually like knowing where their teachers stand,” he said. “It’s the district administrators and parents who cause the problems.”

In fact, teachers disclosing their beliefs can help students learn to think critically, Journell said. Being introduced early on to the idea that adults have individual viewpoints helps young people understand the concept of bias and better distinguish between fact and opinion, he said. But while teachers should share their own views, they should never tell students how they or their family members should vote. “Teachers should help students understand what they believe and why they believe it,” he said.

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

Yet many teachers say they feel uncomfortable simply discussing topics that might be perceived as political. In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey, 86 percent of teachers reported that they did not talk about former President Trump’s claims of voter fraud with students. Most said they didn’t because it was outside their discipline, but 18 percent said that the topic could lead to parent complaints and 14 percent said that they feared being accused of indoctrinating students.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey, 86 percent of teachers said they did not talk about former President Trump’s claims about voter fraud with students. Most said they didn’t because it was outside their discipline, but 18 percent said that the topic could lead to parent complaints and 14 percent said that they feared being accused of indoctrinating students.

While there hasn’t been any systematic study of how many teachers have lost their jobs because they expressed their political opinions in the classroom, educators sometimes have an outsized view of how often such discipline occurs because of the incidents that garner public attention, said Dunn. “All we see are the major stories that make the news, not the many hundreds of thousands of teachers who engage in issues of justice in their classrooms every day,” she said.

Last fall, for example, an English teacher in Texas made headlines after being placed on paid leave because she had Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ posters on the walls of her virtual classroom. The teacher was reinstated but then declined to return to her classroom and instead called for the introduction of explicit anti-racist policies in the district.

Teachers who do not feel they have the support of their administration, or hold political beliefs at odds with the prevailing views in their community, tend to feel less inclined to talk frankly with students about current events and other issues, say teachers and experts. Educators teaching remotely during the pandemic may also be more reluctant to engage in controversial topics because parents are often present for virtual instruction.

Teachers in schools with a progressive curriculum backed up by state standards about what students should learn, and those with the support of a strong teachers’ union, are often more comfortable having these conversations, according to educators and experts.

Mark Gomez, a history and social studies curriculum specialist for the Salinas Union High School District, works in Monterey, a predominantly blue county in California. He said that liberal and conservative educators alike feel they are silenced by notions of political neutrality. “I’ve had teachers express how they feel like they’ve been targeted and called out for having unpopular conservative views in our school spaces,” he said.

“I’ve had teachers express how they feel like they’ve been targeted and called out for having unpopular conservative views in our school spaces.”

Mark Gomez, a history and social studies curriculum specialist for the Salinas Union High School District

His district, which is majority Latino, has adopted a social studies curriculum that includes ethnic studies and critical race theory. But even though talking about race is built into the curriculum, teachers still sometimes get mixed messages from school leaders about what they can and cannot say on that and other issues, he said.

Other teachers say they’ve found ways to navigate potentially explosive conversations — with a lot of practice. Duane Moore, a 20-year veteran in the classroom, teaches U.S. government and African American history in right-leaning Hamilton, Ohio. He says he’s not shy about letting students know his political views because he builds a strong foundation based on facts and mutual trust. “It’s no secret that I dislike Trump,” he said. “But I don’t place my dislike at the forefront of my discussion of the events of the day. The kids also know that I’m going to be fair about the information that I share with them and that I’m very particular about my facts.”

When Terrance Lewis, a social studies teacher in Columbus, Georgia, first started teaching four years ago, he invited representatives of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit providing legal representation to wrongly convicted individuals, to come to his ninth grade government class to discuss racial disparities in sentencing. The topic is outlined in Georgia’s state social studies standards.

Soon after the classroom visit, a parent complained about it on a community Facebook page, arguing that talking about race is divisive and it’s time to move on, Lewis recalled. Some parents defended Lewis, he said, but most “were calling for my job.”

Lewis’s principal supported him, though, and emailed the parent who made the original Facebook post, which was eventually removed.

Now, before any discussions that could be considered controversial, Lewis emails parents and describes how the topics fit into state social studies standards. “I think a lot of times parents think you force their children to think one way or the other,” said Lewis. “And I just do that just to be proactive and to ensure that parents are [informed].”

“The heart of the work I do is based on inquiry. So I’m really more focused on question-asking than I am on answer-giving.”

Shari Conditt, a government teacher in Vancouver, Washington

Some educators, though, say that sharing their thoughts on an issue can impede students’ ability to form their own opinions. “The heart of the work I do is based on inquiry,” said Shari Conditt, a government teacher in Vancouver, Washington. “So I’m really more focused on question-asking than I am on answer-giving.”

“I can’t divorce who I am and how I think about the world all the time from how I teach,” Conditt acknowledged. “The best I can do is try to cover it up as much as possible.” She does that by paying attention to her words.

When a video of former President Donald Trump making vulgar remarks about women was released just weeks before the 2016 election, Conditt said she “talked around it,” rather than directly criticizing Trump’s conduct. She told her students that one of the candidates had made a comment that angered people. And she focused the conversation on one question.

“This is how I put it: ‘You have to ask yourself, are you comfortable with how the candidate has spoken about women?’ ” she said. “The minute I use the word ‘misogynistic’ in my classroom, I know that I’m going to be hearing from my conservative parents.”

The social studies teachers at Morales’ school in Los Angeles have focused on media literacy in the aftermath of the Capitol attacks. She showed a clip from PBS stating that pro-Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol, and also noted claims that the rioters were antifa, a far-left activist group. Morales then discussed how to think critically about those statements and discern which was accurate.  

“This is something we’re seeing in our society that we cannot agree on,” she told her students. “And so the skill that we need to build as a classroom is really knowing what the truth is. And so if we are hearing people say different things, how can we find out the truth?”

Going forward, said Gomez, the educator in Monterey County, California, schools ought to be encouraging students to have more conversations about politics and other controversial topics — not less. That’s how youth will encounter different perspectives, and help refine their own.

“These are young people who are still formulating their own civic identities, so to deprive them of that, I think that’s a disservice,” he said.

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OAKLAND, Calif. — It was 3:30 a.m. on a Monday during a typical all-night cram session, full of procrastination and random life stories.

Her long, dark hair pulled back into a messy bun, Josie Chen worked alongside her classmates on a chemistry lab report that was due in 2½  hours.

What wasn’t typical was that, instead of hanging out in a common area of a dorm, she was perched at a table in her childhood bedroom, trying not to disturb her parents and two siblings who were asleep on the other side of the cardboard-thin walls.

Chen, 18, is a first-year student at Harvard, even though she’s never set foot there. The others in her study group were cloistered in their rooms on campus.

Given how odd this semester has been for her, Chen said, “That was the moment I think was the closest that I got to what I thought my freshman year of college would be like.”

College isn’t normal for anyone this fall. Uncounted numbers of students like Chen have chosen to forgo the typical first-year experience to stay closer to home, whether to help out their families or to safeguard their own health. Their first impressions of college are turning out to be challenging, isolating, frustrating and confusing, with a few bright spots.

Harvard gave freshmen the option to start their college careers in residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Chen and 250 other first-year students chose to stay at home — in Chen’s case, with her family in Oakland. She worried about leaving her father, a home care worker, and her mother, who was a waitress until she suffered a knee injury, in the middle of a pandemic.

“There are a lot more considerations that I have to take into account aside from just what is the classic college experience I want for myself,” said Chen, who plans to major in the history of science and East Asian studies.

Related: Covid has been bad for college enrollment — but awful for community college students

When she first made the decision to stay home, Chen was disheartened about it. But in the ensuing months, her perspective changed — mainly because she saw that the semester has been equally challenging for her classmates who opted to be on campus.

“There’s definitely some disappointment that my first college experience is going to be through a screen,” she said at the end of July.

As the semester went along, however, Chen said she had made the right choice.

When she talks to her classmates at Harvard and friends at other colleges, she said, “they don’t seem like they’re having too great a time either” because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some have pushed the boundaries enough that Harvard has sent home at least three students for partying.

Meanwhile, Chen has kept very busy. During her first week of class, she reported spending eight hours doing problem sets for calculus. “It just went from doing nothing this summer to having to work constantly again,” she said.

The rigor of her high school classes dropped off significantly when her school switched to remote learning in the spring, she said, and coursework now takes longer than it would “if my brain had been active.”

Many prospective first-year students are skipping college altogether in this pandemic fall. The number of first-time students who showed up either in person or online declined by more than 16 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. At Harvard, more than 20 percent of the incoming class opted to defer admission until fall 2021.

“Right now I wouldn’t say I belong at Harvard,” Chen said. “I’ve never seen the campus. It’s kind of hard to feel like a sense of ownership, or any sense of loyalty even, to a place where I’ve never been.”

The number of first-time students who showed up for college either in person or online this fall is down by more than 16 percent from last fall.

She knows she most likely won’t see the campus in person until the fall of 2021, since Harvard is giving priority in the spring to seniors returning for their final semester.

Chen’s desk at home is a jumble of tangled cords from her iPad, laptop and phone chargers, along with a red Thermoflask water bottle, AirPod earbuds, scrunchies, a scientific calculator and lip balm. Her walls are bare of the posters and other childhood memorabilia she stripped off before classes started so her personal effects wouldn’t be on display on Zoom. Her classmates can’t see the rumpled green comforter on her unmade bed when she logs into Zoom at 7:30 a.m. for her Medicine and Conflict class.

Related: As the world goes virtual, big education technology players tighten their grip

“It feels like my life essentially has gone static,” Chen said at the end of the first week of classes as her enthusiasm about starting college began to wear off. “I’m rolling out of the bed that I’ve rolled out of for the last 10 years. The environment is too familiar and too comfortable.”

She shares her ground-floor, two-bedroom apartment two blocks from the I-580 freeway in East Oakland with her parents, younger brother and older sister, Janie, 21, who is a senior at the University of California, Berkeley.

The sisters initially shared their childhood bedroom when Janie came home in the spring after the pandemic shut down her campus.  That was until they started having simultaneous Zoom classes. “Um, it’s a situation,” Josie Chen said.

So her father built a metal frame that her mother hung with bed sheets, tied back with a gold sash, to curtain off a corner of the living room, giving Janie her own space to sleep and study. It’s steps away from the kitchen, which is often filled with the peppery aroma of her parents’ fried rice or the smokiness of barbecue pork. A whiteboard with Josie Chen’s class schedule hangs on the fridge, and the sisters communicate by text although they’re only feet apart.

 “I’m really loud when I talk, apparently,” Josie Chen said. “She’s always texting me to be quiet.”

“Yeah, because I can still hear her with the doors closed,” Janie Chen interjected. “I need peace.”

Their 15-year-old brother, Andy, a high school sophomore whose classes are also online, tries to stay out of it. “My brother is taking the same classes that I did in high school,” said Josie Chen. “So every time I pop my head into his Zoom, I get to see all my old teachers.”

Related: While focus is on fall, students’ choices about college will have a far longer impact

Though bickering often takes them back to their childhood, Josie Chen acknowledges she’s had an easier path through higher education thanks to her big sister. “Janie was the first to do everything in the family,” Josie Chen said. “As much as I don’t know what questions to ask, she didn’t know anything at all. … Everything that I know how to do largely came from the fact that she did it first. So I have the privilege of an example.”

Their parents don’t mind having all three of their children back under the same roof. “I was expecting the two older kids to be off in college,” Yu Sheng Chen, 53, Josie’s father, said in Taishanese, a dialect of Yue Chinese; he and his wife, Chun Ling Chen, 55, immigrated to the United States from rural China in the 1990s. “The silver lining for me is that I can spend a little more time with them.”

Yu Sheng Chen is grateful that his children have been able to attend top universities, even if they are temporarily online. “If I was still in China, no matter how bright my children are, I would have no way of supporting them through good schools,” he said.

In addition to Harvard, Josie Chen was admitted to Berkeley and several other universities. “My parents … came here so that I [could] have a choice,” she said.

Her parents are also the reason she wants to go into medicine, though they are not pressuring her to do so. She has witnessed firsthand how her parents aren’t always able to get what they need from medical professionals. “The whole world of medicine is really daunting,” she said. “It seems really inaccessible to a lot of people from immigrant communities, communities of color, communities with low socioeconomic status. I want to pursue medicine for the sake of changing that dynamic.”

“It feels like my life essentially has gone static. I’m rolling out of the bed that I’ve rolled out of for the last 10 years. The environment is too familiar and too comfortable.”

Josie Chen, who is spending her first year of college taking courses virtually

College Track, a nonprofit that runs a college completion program, is helping Chen begin her college experience from afar while balancing her studies with her family responsibilities. She checks in with her college completion advisor, Tomás Rodriguez, several times a month by text and Zoom.

Being at home has made her feel guilty about spending so much time studying instead of with her family. At a check-in with Rodriguez in late September, Chen got emotional when talking about not living up to her own expectations as a daughter.

Related: Students who counted on work-study jobs now struggle to pay their bills

“I’m so weighed down by school that I don’t have a chance to interact with them, even at home,” she said. “It’s a constant feeling of, ‘You should be more on top of it so that you can actually do what you stayed home to do, which is interact with your family during a freakin’ pandemic.’ ”

Rodriguez replied: “Just because they struggled, does that mean you have to?  There is this pressure that … particularly the children of immigrants put on ourselves that there is this need to do right by them. And the fact that you’re already in college, you are doing right by them.”

Chen’s first-year advisor at Harvard, who checks in with her occasionally, has also encouraged her to “learn to learn and not to get the A,” Chen said.      

“If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to enjoy that mindset that I can actually take the time to learn  and not worry about failure,” Chen said. “Because the whole world is plummeting right now.”

So much has she taken that lesson to heart that Chen was “bouncing off the walls” with giddiness when she got a 79 on a math midterm she had been worried about failing.

Five weeks into the semester, Chen told her advisor that she was also reaching out for help from instructors and teaching assistants. “It just takes me so long to understand everything,” she said.

“If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to enjoy that mindset that I can actually take the time to learn and not worry about failure. Because the whole world is plummeting right now.”

Josie Chen, who is spending her first year of college taking courses virtually

Zoom lectures haven’t been as bad as she thought they would be, though the upstairs neighbor’s vacuuming is distracting when she’s trying to pay attention. It’s actually easier to ask questions in large lectures online than it would be in person, she said.

A bigger challenge has been the time difference.  Her 9 a.m. class on the East Coast is at 6 a.m. in California. Sometimes she watches “alternative viewing sessions” later in the day.      

“It knocks me out for the rest of the day,” Chen said. “It’s like I’m in a constant state of jet lag.”

She said she has to subtract three hours every time she gets an email about a meeting, and work a little harder to figure out the best time to schedule study groups with her classmates.

Related: How higher education’s own choices left it vulnerable to the pandemic crisis

Chen has settled into her academics, but she’s still trying to figure out the social side. She met a few other first-generation students through a pre-orientation program and has gotten involved with an undergraduate science journal — all virtually — but still doesn’t have a real sense of what it means to be part of Harvard.

“I can’t just meet people by chance who have common interests … and get that human-to-human feedback that I crave so much because I’m an extrovert,” Chen said.

One of her professors teaching a small seminar class recently invited everyone out for socially distanced pizza at a popular joint in Harvard Square. “Sure, I’ll do that from California,” Chen joked.

“I’m basically going to go to college as a sophomore. I don’t know anything about the campus. … I don’t know where all the good food places are,” she said. “And I’m going to have to learn all that my sophomore year.”

Still, there are occasional moments when remote learning and living almost feel normal. Her chemistry professor cracks corny jokes during his lectures, and she’s been to more than one surprise Zoom birthday party.

“When we’re up at 2 a.m. and we’re just half-hysterical and some of us are hopped up on caffeine — funny things happen on Zoom,” she said. “It’s not all drudgery.”

This story about college and Covid-19 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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