Coming out of the pandemic, students had a hard time returning to in-person classes, and they found themselves struggling to tread water academically as declining test scores made many in the country worry that students were drowning.

For school districts desperate to find a life vest for students, one response was to rely on tutoring services. These services — particularly high-dose tutoring, an evidence-backed form of small group, intensive tutoring — had been identified as a way to fight against declining student performance. But at first, in the rush to jump-start tutoring programs, schools plunked federal relief dollars down on less-researched tutoring models and created a cash-grab for companies in the tutoring space. Since then, educators have reputedly gotten more sophisticated when evaluating tutoring programs, focusing their attention on evidence-backed options like high-dose services.

Yet, it’s also unclear that the ample spending of federal funds on tutors has effectively countered learning declines. Plus, schools have had to turn to alternative funding sources to pay for tutors as relief funding fizzles out. Some programs, for instance, have started creatively using federal work placement dollars to grow their tutoring forces, even conscripting college students in the hopes that it would both bolster the outcomes for K-12 students and create the next generation of teachers from today’s college cohort at the same time.

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Some hoped that presidential involvement would help. During the 2022 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden called for hundreds of thousands of new tutors, coaches and mentors for programs around the country. And seemingly, this use of the bully pulpit was a success. Now, two years later, an analysis from Johns Hopkins and the RAND Corporation suggests that schools and organizations around the country have surpassed that goal a year early. The Biden plea asked for an additional 250,000 tutors by the summer of 2025. In all, around 323,000 new tutors, mentors or coaches have already joined.

At an event for the White House this month — only weeks before an election where education has seemed a relatively quiet campaign issue — the administration pitched it as a coup for their “laser-focus” on student success. Student support organizations also took it as an encouraging sign for students. “The surpassing of President Biden’s call is a clear indicator of the strength of the American spirit and our collective dedication to the future of our youth,” said Michael D. Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, one of the organizations involved, in a written statement.

Those volunteers will provide extra muscle for districts trying to support students. But given slumping test scores and vanishing federal relief dollars, is a surge in volunteers enough to stabilize learning?

A Small Victory?

The administration was able to steer a lot of volunteers to tutoring organizations, says Antonio Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education, a nonprofit organization focused on high-dose tutoring. It’s a big part of meeting the urgent need of schools post-pandemic and it’s encouraging, he adds.

But what have been the outcomes?

The Johns Hopkins report notes that 12,700 schools increased high-intensity tutoring, suggesting that the administration’s plea helped. Thousands of schools also reported an increase in other support for students. What’s more, 34 percent of principals surveyed reported that more students had access to tutoring in 2023-2024 than in the previous year. Relatedly, 24 percent reported that more students had access to mentors.

But how much of a dent does that actually make in the country? It’s hard to say, according to Gutierrez. But there has been recent evidence concerning “high-impact” tutoring in general, which he thinks might speak to how useful this approach could be for supporting students.

For instance: Preliminary findings from the University of Chicago “Personalized Learning Initiative,” meant to stimulate attempts to expand tutoring in the country, found that high-dose tutoring is effective. According to the study, which inspected a couple thousand K-12 students in Chicago and Fulton County, these tutoring programs inspired gains in math learning. The study was meant to assess how effective tutoring programs are when schools design them on their own, in Gutierrez’s summary. Gutierrez’s organization, Saga Education, has tried to support schools in those efforts by spelling out the best practices districts should follow. The study also found that making sure tutoring occurs during the school day, rather than “on demand” after school or on weekends, was important for getting large increases in student performance.

But there are reasons to slightly tamper that enthusiasm. A meta-analysis from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute looked at 265 randomized controlled trials and found that as tutoring programs get larger, they get notably less effective. While they still helped lift student learning, the benefits of tutoring appeared smaller in large-scale programs, according to this study. To Gutierrez, who notes that the study still noted a positive effect, that’s not really surprising. In other words, because schools are experimenting with these programs themselves, how well any particular program boosts student achievement will vary.

For the movement to make personalized learning a permanent feature of American education, there have been other developments as well.

The most flashy has been AI. This year, the Los Angeles School District, the second largest in the country, launched a high-profile $6 million chatbot called “Ed,” a talking sun that was supposed to boost personalized instruction. But the company behind that chatbot collapsed this summer, raising concerns about what would happen to the student data it collected. Some have suggested the project had been simply too ambitious, and the company has become a cautionary tale.

That’s a good example of what not to do with these programs, according to observers like Gutierrez. But more promising, he says, are efforts like Khanmigo, the personalized instruction tool from Sal Khan, and other chat-based tutoring programs. Those sorts of chatbots should be developed because they could add value, Gutierrez says.

They likely won’t replace human tutors, Gutierrez says. Because of how students learn, tutoring is highly reliant on the relationship between tutor and student, he adds. That’s how tutors can nudge students in the right direction, pushing them to learn. Still, these tech products hold the promise of translating into any language and also fine-tuning to a district’s needs, though there are questions about engagement from students with these tools, he says. But so long as districts don’t depend entirely on these technologies for personalized instruction, it’s probably useful to explore how human and bot tutors can work together to assist students, Gutierrez says.

Ultimately, the drove of tutors from the Biden-Harris administration push was a step in the right direction, but there’s a lot more work ahead, Gutierrez admits.

© Photo By fast-stock/Shutterstock

When Eve, a mother in Colorado, received a legal settlement, she found herself suddenly flush.

She drove over to the office of Eric Dearing, who was working with her as a family advocate for Head Start, and she gave him a shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style, and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times that he’d seen a family, through “pure luck,” get a spike in income.

The change in Eve, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “She was so excited and proud and suddenly full of this hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.

Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, with income inequality rising. Plus, the ability of people to move up in the world seems to decline with age, as their status gets set. It can cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students to have good lives and raise questions about whether the country is a poverty-sustaining machine.

This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes isn’t so much money itself, but the number of supportive learning chances that a person gets.

But rare or not, that experience with Eve stuck with Dearing like it was pinned somewhere in his brain. How much does it matter when families gain income if they've been living in poverty, Dearing wondered. And why do all the high-quality programs out there seem to make such a little dent in boosting education achievement for students from low-income backgrounds?

It Adds Up

Years later, Dearing tried to tackle these questions. His answer? Some students just receive much fewer chances to thrive.

That’s what a new study, published in the journal Educational Researcher, suggests. The study aimed to figure out how access to opportunities accrued over time for students, and whether they explain the link between how much money their parents made — when the students were in early childhood — and how their lives turned out. To do this, the researchers pulled federal data that followed 814 students from birth until the age of 26. Those students lived in 10 cities from around the U.S.

What did they find? It’s about “opportunity gaps.” For example, from birth through the end of high school, children from high-income families had six-to-seven times as many chances to learn than those from low-income families. Middle-income families had four times as many chances as low-income families.

According to an author of the study, that means family income is indirectly related to how far a student pursues education or how much money they make in their mid-20s. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities,” or how often they find themselves in supportive learning environments, whether that’s in high-quality child care when they are young, in a home that has toys, puzzles and caregivers to support learning, or in high-quality school and after-school programs. So income helps, but primarily because it leads to greater access to good learning opportunities.

The study was descriptive, Dearing notes, so it can’t technically prove that the accumulation of opportunities “caused” higher educational achievement. But that story is consistent with their research, he adds. The paper also didn’t look into how the timing of learning opportunities — say, whether they occurred in early childhood or in high school — might make a difference.

But from the perspective of the researchers, what matters is the cumulative effect of those chances over time.

Some children are experiencing opportunities throughout their lives, in each of the settings in which they're living and growing — at home, in child care, at the school — and other children are, if they're lucky, experiencing an opportunity to be in a highly enriching context in one of those settings, Dearing says. And that has tremendous implications for solving achievement differences between children growing up poor and children growing up in higher-income families, he adds.

Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that positively powerful programs such as high-quality preschool make only a small dent in how those children's lives turn out, Dearing says.

Translating these insights into more chances for students to thrive is tough.

“The inequity is extreme, and so it's going to take extreme measures to end that,” Dearing adds. And by extreme, he means structural. Success in education requires high-quality instruction, but that alone is not enough, he says. What matters when it comes to changing students’ lives is sustained quality. The sum is greater than the parts.

A consequence: Teachers alone, while crucial, can’t control all the factors here. The answer may lie more in support systems for students, Dearing says, pointing toward the community school model and support programs such as City Connects at Boston College. These models claim to support the “whole child” by building a network that can assist with needs outside of the classroom, such as connecting families to food banks when a child might be hungry or to a free eyeglasses clinic. In some sense, these models use the schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments while letting teachers focus on the education component, Dearing says.

The Land of Opportunity?

Efforts to staunch inequality could also soon see a political push: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has outlined a plan for “economic opportunity,” including expansions of earned income tax credits, which it argues will breathe new life into the American middle class.

But in the meantime, circumstances may be getting starker.

Since 1991, when the students trailed by the study were born, the country has seen rising inequality and, in some sectors, stagnant wages. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects noted in the study. It’s entirely possible that we have underestimated how big the opportunity gaps are today, Dearing says. Had the children been born a decade later, it’s possible the students they studied would have had a wider chasm between opportunities, even between middle-class and upper-income families, he says.

There have also been some positive developments, though. There’s more public preschool these days, and there’s been an increase in the earned income tax credit, he says.

What’s more, there are still research questions to answer.

A previous study authored by Dearing showed that early childhood “opportunities” could compensate for poverty, lifting students’ educational attainment.

But if the research were being conducted today, Dearing says he would pay closer attention to cultural differences that might boost students’ life outcomes in the absence of money. For instance, in some Black communities caregiver roles often extend beyond the parents, with other family members like grandmothers playing a big role in childrens’ home lives and what learning opportunities they have there. But researchers have overfocused on “nuclear family” roles, and therefore may have a slightly misleading picture, Dearing says.

© Photo By Rido/ Shutterstock

The need was becoming dire.

A school district in Brighton, in the Denver metro area of Colorado, was having a hard time keeping teachers. The salaries in the district, 27J Schools, were low for the region. And in Colorado, voters have to approve higher property taxes to send additional dollars to schools, including for salary bumps, but by 2018 voters had refused six straight times.

So, strapped for cash, the district decided to switch to a four-day school week.

Chris Fiedler, then the superintendent of 27J Schools, had previously worked in a rural district on a shortened schedule, and he hoped it would help attract teachers in the absence of better pay. Frustrated and eager for solutions, everyone seemed ready to try a new approach, Fiedler says.

“You just get tired of being kind of the minor league team in the Denver metro area, in terms of teacher and adult talent, working with kids — and not just teachers, but administrators as well. So how do you find a way to encourage them to stay and encourage them to join you in the first place?” he says.

In his eyes, the experiment was a success. The district now punches above its weight in teacher retention and the policy has proven consistently popular with students and teachers in the years since it was introduced, he argues.

Fiedler isn’t solitary in his enthusiasm for this model of schooling, and the four-day school week has, in some ways, taken off. When many schools are suffering staffing shortages and tight budgets, districts like 27J Schools have turned to shorter school weeks to attract and retain teachers. As many as 900 districts have embraced these abridged weeks, according to a 2023 estimate from the Associated Press. (There are about 13,000 districts in the country.) Colorado, where 27J is located, has proven a particularly fertile ground for four-day school weeks, and more districts in the state have moved to a four-day school week than any other state except Missouri, according to one estimate.

But though educators like Fiedler trumpet these shortened weeks, others worry that they do little to attract teachers — and may even harm students and voters.

‘Slightly Negative’

Interest in four-day weeks usually stems from the need to recruit or retain teachers in the absence of funding. Supporters also value it for giving students and teachers time that enables a better school-life balance. But the evidence paints an ambiguous to slightly negative picture, according to researchers like Van Schoales, senior policy director for the nonprofit Keystone Policy Center, which published a recent report on the four-day school week in Colorado. In fact, the data from the state doesn’t give supporters or detractors a clear victory, according to the report.

Schoales says he became interested in four-day weeks after noting that his colleagues from within Colorado were talking about it more post-pandemic. While there was some national research, there wasn’t much within the state yet, he says.

Some national studies link four-day school weeks to slumping academic performance for students. For instance, one analysis from the Annenberg Institute found that the available data shows a “relatively small, negative average” in standardized test scores for reading and math in districts that adopt four-day policies. The Annenberg analysis also noted that the negative effects of four-day weeks are disproportionately larger in non-rural schools and may compound over time.

Still, the Colorado Department of Education was “rubber-stamping” all of the proposals from districts looking to change over to a four-day school week, even though some superintendents and school board members were “quietly raising concerns,” Schoales says.

What did the Keystone researchers learn? Universally, superintendents report that they are motivated to try this because they don't have enough money to pay teachers, Schoales says. But even if some districts were bullish on the policy, the Keystone study found that truncated school weeks were not effective for keeping teachers. It may have worked for some districts, Schoales says, but overall the districts that adopted these policies had higher turnover rates.

Previous studies show the effect of this policy ranges from neutral to negative on students, with most national studies showing it has a small but negative impact on learning, he says. If true, the differences could stack up over time academically, and many of the districts adopting these policies, at least within Colorado, are far from reaching state standards already, he adds.

So, he asks, why not figure out how to solve the pay issue rather than cut days of instruction?

What Are Students Doing?

Plus, there’s another possible problem. How are students spending that fifth day, if not in school?

By one estimate, more than 60 percent of districts in Colorado have a four-day schedule, though these tend to be small and rural districts, meaning they only account for around 14 percent of the state’s students. But four-day school weeks are spreading to larger and more urban areas. It’s not clear how well-attended after-school programs are in these regions, Schoales says, adding that it was difficult to perform a thorough analysis on attendance because these programs are being run outside of the district. But, he says, at least one person they interviewed for the report suggested they were having a hard time engaging lower-income families on the fifth day.

When asked, Schoales identified Brighton, which has more than 22,000 students and is comparatively large and urban, as the place with some of the most robust outside-of-school programming.

So what does it look like there?

Since adopting the four-day week, there are no classes on Mondays in the district, and the remaining days were lengthened to avoid lost instruction time. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t students at school even on Mondays, Fiedler, the former superintendent of 27J Schools, says: Extracurriculars such as athletics, students council meetings and choir practices still happen on Mondays. City and community programs including the Boys & Girls Club also pitched in when the district made the switch, beefing up staff to make programs more available on those days, he adds. An orchestra program started up as well.

But after the first year, the city stepped back from its expanded programs, in part because they were not being used, Fiedler says.

The district also expanded a preexisting program — where parents pay a fee for day care — to cover Mondays, he says. Initially, around 1,000 parents expressed interest in the program. But when it actually started, there were more like 300 to 400 students enrolled, he says. Fiedler suspects that many families who had expressed interest in the program didn’t end up using it because they figured out ways to “share caregiver duties” — relying on neighborhood members, or older siblings or family members to step in and watch younger students on Mondays.

Because of the lower-than-expected interest, the district had to pivot from its plan to run these care programs in all elementary schools, instead running them in regional "centers" around the city.

‘The Second-Best Option’

When compared to other methods of attracting teachers, policy analysts recommend districts weigh their options for shortened school weeks carefully.

Some have suggested the practice may even be counterproductive for taxpayers reluctant to increase school budgets. For instance, voters in Brighton had shot down additional funding for schools repeatedly. But by denying the school district enough funding to adequately compensate teachers, voters ended up lowering their own property values, says Frank James Perrone, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Education. That’s because the district felt backed into a corner, as if it really didn't have a choice but to embrace four-day school weeks, he says. An analysis, coauthored by Perrone, found that the four-day school week policy actually lowered property values there by 2 to 4 percent, purportedly showing that homebuyers preferred to avoid the area.

But 27J Schools, the Brighton school district, is one of the largest districts in Colorado to adopt a four-day week. And Fiedler, the superintendent of the district who retired this year, isn’t swayed by the arguments against the four-day school week.

The district lost staff the first year it moved over to the four-day schedule. But in the years since, Fiedler says, it hasn’t had the turnover rate one would expect for one of the lowest-paying districts in the area. Data that Fiedler sent to EdSurge suggests that 27J had a 13.61 percent turnover rate in 2023 to 2024 with a $52,002 base teacher salary. That puts it in the lower third for teacher turnover in the area, despite offering the sixth-lowest base salary.

Plus, Fiedler adds, the graduation rates have lifted, including for disadvantaged students. Data from Fiedler shows a steady incline in graduation rates for the district between 2017 and 2022. That increase may not be because of the shortened weeks specifically, but he says that it happened at the same time, meaning that the policy didn’t prevent the district from improving academically.

Twice per month, the district also uses those free Mondays for teacher training, which has been good for morale, he adds.

But even if he isn’t convinced shortened weeks are a bad policy, Fiedler seems to agree that it’s not the ideal situation.

And he rejects the notion that four-day weeks save substantial money. It saved the district around $800,000 or so during the first year, Fiedler estimates, mostly in transportation costs but also in salaries for food service and electricity. In his view, that's such a small amount when compared to the overall budget that it's "not worth the heartache."

The “mill levy” override — that would provide additional money to boost teacher salaries — finally passed for 27J Schools in 2022. They still offer salaries at the lower end of the range, and the district likely won’t transition back. “Nobody called my office and said, ‘Now that you have money, you have to go back to a five-day school week,’” Fiedler says.

Even so, he says it feels “like the second-best option.” If the district had been able to find enough money to pay teachers what they are worth, it would have never tried the four-day school week, he says: “But absent that, you've got to try something new and different to be competitive.”

Now, when other districts ask about four-day school weeks, he tells them that he doesn’t want them to change over, because he doesn’t want the district to lose its “competitive edge.”

© Photo By wavebreakmedia/ Shutterstock

Sometimes, it takes an unlikely friendship to change the world.

For American education, one of those alliances started in the early 20th century. That’s when a ludicrously successful retailer-turned-philanthropist, Julius Rosenwald, met the prominent educator Booker T. Washington. The pair decided to work together, hoping to improve education for Black students in the segregated South. Their collaboration created nearly 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” — across 15 Southern and border states — between 1917 and 1937.

By some accounts, this was a massive success.

These schools caused a “sharp narrowing” of the difference in educational achievement of white and Black students in the South.

But it was a “watershed moment,” according to a recent book published about the schools, “A Better Life for Their Children,” for another reason, too: Those who attended the schools would later actively participate in the Civil Rights Movement, overturning segregation as an official American policy. The list of notable alumni includes longtime U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP who was assassinated in 1963.

Today, most of those schools have dissolved into history, and only around 500 still exist, in varying states of upkeep.

Andrew Feiler, a Georgia-born photographer, visited and photographed 105 of the extant schools and spoke with those connected to the schools and their legacy to publish “A Better Life for Their Children.” His book, released in 2021, is currently the basis of a traveling exhibition.

These days, race and educational opportunity still seem troublingly linked. NAEP data shows a consistent, three-decade-long gap in student performance in categories like 12th grade math and reading for Black students when compared to white ones. These gaps are often blamed on racial and economic segregation.

Perhaps that’s why some observers have connected Feiler’s exhibition about the past to the racial-educational gap of today, particularly noting the contemporary lack of adequate resources for public schools and the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

So EdSurge pulled Feiler aside to ask him what, if any, lesson he thinks the Rosenwald Schools might have for educators today.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: When and why did you decide to take on the project?

Andrew Feiler: I've been a serious photographer most of my life, and about a dozen years ago, I started down this path of taking my work more seriously and, mercifully, being taken more seriously, and I had to figure out what my voice was as a photographer.

I've been very involved in the civic life of my community — I've been very involved in the nonprofit world and the political world — and when I thought about my voice as a photographer, I found myself drawn to topics that were of interest in the course of my civic life.

And so I had done my first photography book, which came out in 2015 — just a portrait of an abandoned college campus. And it uses this emotional disconnect between these familiar education spaces, classrooms and hallways and locker rooms, but they have this veneer of abandonment…

That body of work ended up being about the importance of historically Black colleges and the importance of education as the on-ramp to the American middle class.

And I was thinking about what I was going to do next, and I found myself at lunch with an African American preservationist, and she was the first person to tell me about Rosenwald Schools. And the story shocked me.

I'm a fifth-generation, Jewish Georgian. I've been a civic activist my entire life. The pillars of the Rosenwald Schools’ story — Southern, education, civic, progressive — these are the pillars of my life. How could I have never heard of Rosenwald Schools?

And so I came home and I Googled it, and I found that while there were a number of more academic books on the subject, there was not a comprehensive photographic account of the program, and so I set out to do exactly that. Over the next three and a half years, I drove 25,000 miles across all 15 of the program states. Of the original 4,978 schools, only about 500 survive. Only half of those have been restored, about 105 schools, and the result is this book and this traveling exhibition.

Can I introduce the characters?

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, Quilt Celebrating Restoration. Photo by Andrew Feiler.

Sure. Introduce away.

At the heart of the story are two men.

Julius Rosenwald was born to Jewish immigrants who had fled religious persecution in Germany. He grows up in Springfield, Illinois, across the street from Abraham Lincoln's home. And he rises to become president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, and with innovations like “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back,” he turns Sears into the world's largest retailer in its era, and he becomes one of the earliest and greatest philanthropists in American history.

And his cause is what only later becomes known as “civil rights.”

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia, attends Hampton College and becomes an educator. He is the founder of the historically Black college Tuskegee Institute, originally in Alabama.

These two men met in 1911.

And you have to remember, 1911 was before the Great Migration [the period between the 1910s and the 1970s when millions of Black people poured out of the South and moved to the North, Midwest and West fleeing racial violence and seeking opportunity].

Ninety percent of African Americans live in the South. And public schools for African Americans are mostly shacks, with a fraction of the funding that was afforded public schools for white children.

And that is the need, that's the environment that they find. And these two men like each other, form partnerships, work together, and in 1912 they create this program that becomes known as “Rosenwald Schools.” And over the next 25 years, from 1912 to 1937, they built 4,978 schools across 15 Southern and border states, and the results are transformative.

Having visited so many of the remaining schools, what impression did they leave on you?

... These places, are the locus of history and memory in a community, [and when] we lose places and spaces like this, we lose a piece of the American soul.

— Andrew Feiler

Well, the structures have an austere beauty. Their architecture is very vernacular and very local to the region in which they arise. Whether they are restored — or even having a veneer of abandonment — I find them beautiful.

But I think there's another important component.

I knew this was an extraordinary story. It was not clear to me from the beginning, how do you tell it visually? And I started out shooting exteriors of these buildings: One-teacher schools, two-teacher schools, three-teacher schools. These small structures. By the end of the program, they're building one-, two- and three-story red brick buildings.

There's an interesting architectural narrative, but when I found out that only 10 percent of the schools survive — only half of those have been restored — I realized that the historic preservation imperative is a huge, important part of the story, because these spaces, these places, are the locus of history and memory in a community, [and when] we lose places and spaces like this, we lose a piece of the American soul.

And once I realized that the preservation narrative was important, then I had to get inside, and suddenly I needed permission. And that's when I meet all of these extraordinary people — former students, former teachers, preservationists, civic leaders — and I bring their connections to this broader Rosenwald School story into this narrative with portraits.

How much of your project’s timing relies on a recently intensified desire to place greater emphasis on preserving Black history? How much of that explains why it’s resonating now?

Let me say a couple things about Rosenwald Schools as a program. First of all, the Rosenwald Schools are one of the most transformative developments in the first half of the 20th century in America. They dramatically reshaped the African American experience, and that dramatically reshapes the American experience.

There are two economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who have done five studies of Rosenwald Schools, and what their data shows is that prior to Rosenwald Schools, there was a large and persistent Black-white education gap in the South. That gap closes precipitously between World War I and World War II, and the single greatest driver of that achievement is growth from all schools. In addition, many of the leaders and foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement come through these schools: Medgar Evers, Maya Angelou, multiple members of the Little Rock Nine who integrate Little Rock Central High, Congressman John Lewis who wrote this extraordinary introduction to my book, all went to Rosenwald Schools, and so the results of this program are transformative.

But to go back to the heart of your question, I think what resonates about this story today is that we live in a divided America, and we often feel that our problems are so intractable, especially those related to race.

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, in 1912, in deeply segregated, deeply Jim Crow America, were reaching across divides, of race, of religion, of region, and they fundamentally transformed this country for the better. And I think the heart of this story speaks to everybody today, driving for social change in America. And individual actions still matter, and that individual actions change the world.

Bay Springs School, Forrest County, Mississippi, 1925-1958. Photo by Andrew Feiler.

So if we take the sweep of your recent projects — I’m thinking of this one and the other book you mentioned, “Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color,” which looked at Morris Brown College — has how you think about education changed in any tangible ways?

I have come out of this work with appreciation for the role that education has played throughout the sweep of American history.

The first taxpayer-funded school was created in America — done in Massachusetts in 1644; that is, 380 years ago. And there's a direct connection between that early commitment to education; the Land Grant College Act, which passed in 1862 and funds colleges all across America; HBCUs, predominantly created in the decades after the Civil War; Rosenwald Schools in the early decades of the 20th century; the educational provisions of the GI Bill, which transform America from relatively poor to relatively prosperous; [and] Brown v. Board of Education, one of the high watermarks of the Civil Rights Movement.

What are we talking about today? College affordability, banning books, circumscribing curriculum.

We have a 380-year tradition in which education has been the backbone of the American Dream, the on-ramp to the American middle class. And then today, that is a tradition at risk, and I think we need to understand and protect the importance of this tradition in our country.

Any parting lessons that educators can learn from this work?

I think what I said earlier is really in the spirit of what you're asking about, which is that the levels of division currently across our country are troubling. And I think it's important for us as Americans to reflect on our history and how we have come together to make America a better place. And the relationship between Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, this is one of the earliest collaborations between Blacks and Jews and a cause that only later becomes known as “civil rights.” Their collaboration, their work together, their friendship is a model for how we as individuals can make a difference in our culture. They are reaching across divides of race. They are reaching across divides of religion. They are reaching across divides into a greater region, all of which remain divides in our culture today.

They're reaching across those divides, and they're creating a transformative impact on the country. And I think this is a model for all of us to remember, that we are the change that we seek. We have the capacity to make a difference, and we need to follow in the footsteps of this story to reshape this country for all of us.

© Photo by Andrew Feiler

For the past couple of years, unrelenting change has come fast.

Even while schools are stuck dealing with deep challenges, COVID-19 pandemic relief funding is running its course. Meanwhile, new technologies seem to flow out in an unstoppable stream. These often have consequences in education, from an increase in cheating on assignments enabled by prose-spewing chatbots, to experiments that bring AI into classrooms as teaching assistants or even as students.

For some teachers and school leaders, it can feel like an onslaught.

Some educators connect AI to broader changes that they perceive have been harmful to students, says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Through interviews, she’s found that some educators link AI to social media and cellphones. So they’re having an understandably emotional response, she adds: “It’s kinda scary if you think about it too long.”

But in this ever-shifting stream of change, Lake is among those who believe new technology can be steered in a way that navigates schools to a more promising channel for reducing disparities in education in the U.S.

However, if that’s going to happen, it’s imperative that education leaders start pushing AI to transform teaching and learning in ways that are beneficial, particularly for low-income and historically disadvantaged students, observers like Lake argue.

If artificial intelligence doesn’t help solve disparities, advocates worry, it will worsen them.

Hazard Lights

AI has been used in education since at least the 1970s. But the recent barrage of technology has coincided with a more intense spotlight on disparities in student outcomes, fueled by the pandemic and social movements such as protests over the killing of George Floyd. AI has fed hopes of reaching more equality thanks to its promise to increase personalized learning and to boost efficiency and sustainability for an overworked teaching force.

In late 2022, the White House released a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” hoping that it would strengthen privacy rights. And last year, the U.S. Department of Education, along with the nonprofit Digital Promise, weighed in with recommendations for making sure this technology can be used “responsibly” in education to increase equity and support overburdened teachers.

If you ask some researchers, though, it’s not enough.

There have been fears that AI will accidentally magnify biases either by relying on algorithms that are trained on biased data, or by other methods such as automating assessments that ignore student experiences even while sorting them into different learning paths.

Now, some early data suggests that AI could indeed widen disparities. For instance: Lake’s organization, a national research and policy center that’s associated with Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, released a report this spring that looked at K-12 teachers’ use of virtual learning platforms, adaptive learning systems and chatbots. The report, a collaboration with the RAND Corporation, found that educators working in suburban schools already profess to having more experience with and training for AI than those in urban or rural schools.

The report also found that teachers in schools where more than half of students are Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander or Native American had more experience using the tools — but less training — than teachers who work in majority-white schools.

If suburban students — on average, wealthier than urban or rural students — are receiving more preparation for the complexities of an AI-influenced world, it opens up really big existential questions, Lake says.

Big Promises — or Problems

So how can advocates push AI to deliver on its promise of serving all students?

It wouldn’t be responsible to lean on AI as the quick fix for all our economic shortages in schooling.

— Rina Bliss

It’s all about strategy right now, making smart investments and setting down smart policy, Lake says.

Another report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education calls for more work to engage states on effective testing and implementation in their schools, and for the federal government to put more detailed guardrails and guidance in place. The report, “Wicked Opportunities,” also calls for more investment into research and development. From its perspective, the worst outcome would be to leave districts to fend for themselves when it comes to AI.

Part of the reason urban districts are less prepared for AI may be complexity and the sheer number of issues they are facing, observers speculate. Superintendents in urban districts say they are overwhelmed, Lake says. She explains that while they may be excited by the opportunities of AI, superintendents are busy handling immediate problems: pandemic recovery, the end of federal relief funding, enrollment declines and potential school closures, mental health crises among students and absenteeism. What these leaders want is evidence that suggests which tools actually work, as well as help navigating edtech tools and training their teachers, she adds.

But other observers worry about whether AI is truly the answer for solving structural problems in schools broadly.

Introducing more AI to classrooms, at least in the short term, implies teaching students using screens and virtual learning, argues Rina Bliss, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University. But many students are already getting too much screen and online time at home, she says. It degrades their mental health and their ability to work through assignments, and educators should be cautious about adding more screen time or virtual learning, Bliss says.

Bliss also points to a “print advantage,” a bump in how much is learned from print materials compared to screens, which has to do with factors like engagement with the text and how quickly a student’s eyes can lock onto and stay focused on material. In her view, digital texts, especially when they are connected to the internet, are “pots of distractions,” and increasing screen-based instruction can actually disadvantage students.

Ultimately, she adds, an approach to instruction that overrelies on AI could reinforce inequality. It’s possible that these tools are setting up a tiered system, where affluent students attend schools that emphasize hands-on learning experiences while other schools increasingly depend on screens and virtual learning. These tools shouldn’t replace real-world learning, particularly in under-resourced schools, she adds. She worries that excessive reliance on this technology could create an “underclass of students” who are given artificial stopgaps to big problems like school understaffing and underfunding. It wouldn’t be responsible to lean on AI as the quick fix for all our economic shortages in schooling, Bliss argues.

So how should educators approach AI? Perhaps the correct posture is cautious hope and deliberate planning.

Nobody knows precisely how AI will impact education yet, argues Lake, of CRPE. It is not a panacea, but in her estimation there’s a real opportunity to use it to close learning gaps. So it’s important to craft plans to deliver on the potential: “A lot of people freeze when it comes to AI, and if they can instead think about what they want for their kids, their schools, and whether AI can help, that seems like a productive path to me, and a much more manageable one,” Lake says.

There’s nothing wrong with being hopeful, she adds.

© Photo By Ground Picture/ Shutterstock

It was announced by sweeping statements.

When the New York City Public Schools chancellor, David Banks, caused the largest district in the country to change how it taught students to read last year, it was with a sense of alarm. Statistics showed that many of the city’s students in third through eighth grades couldn’t read proficiently, which Banks blamed on the city embracing a “fundamentally flawed” approach to reading instruction. Per reporting from The New York Times, he told parents: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault.” Reforming, Banks said, was “the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

The sentiment wasn’t isolated to New York, with almost all states having passed some legislation in the last few years to correct course on how reading is taught. These changes, called a “decisive victory” in the long-standing “reading wars,” have pitted education research favoring phonics-based instruction against other ways of teaching students to read, including word recognition. In the wake of the shift, a prominent curriculum group dissolved and the educational publisher Heinemann reportedly experienced sagging curriculum sales. Meanwhile, students still struggle to read.

But these recent education scraps in reading have also caused fresh uneasiness, as some observers begin hunting for the next education reform effort to go bust — perhaps in math next time.

There’s an unvoiced assumption behind this — that education is prone to “fads.” So where does this perception come from? And is it accurate?

The Reform Merry-Go-Round

Fad is the wrong word, says Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who writes a blog about school reforms.

For Cuban, reform movements appear to be caught in a loop, attempting similar changes “again and again.” But it’s not that schools are constantly being burned by the latest craze. It’s that they’re suffering from deep structural problems, and they seem not to learn from the long history of school reforms.

The lesson? Public schools are particularly vulnerable to pressure, Cuban said on a call with EdSurge. That’s because national problems tend to become school ones, Cuban says. Schools have to walk a “tightrope,” striking a balance that is both stable for students and able to adapt to changes in the broader society, he says.

Pressure on schools to respond to new issues often ends up altering curricula or introducing new courses, because that’s the easiest part of the public education system to change, Cuban argues. But classrooms are isolated from the superintendent’s office, the school board and other “policy elites” who push change, he says.

For example, he adds, when it became known that teenage driving was causing road deaths, driving became part of public school curricula. When drugs became a national concern, schools added anti-drug curricula. “When the nation has a cold, schools sneeze,” Cuban says, adding that it’s an old cliche that turns out to be true.

That focus — the classroom, where abstract ideas about school meet real students — is a common sticking point, according to other observers as well.

It's not that specific reform ideas are fads, argues James Stigler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's that schools seem susceptible to fads because people don't understand what it means to take an idea seriously, he says.

In reality, many ideas out there haven’t been properly tried out, because that would mean focusing largely on how they are put into practice in classrooms, he adds. There are probably a lot of ideas out there that are effective, he says — but nobody knows what they are.

To Ronald Gallimore, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, these efforts are sincere. Reform advocates believe they are on the cusp of something that will really work this time, he says. But they may not be aware of the history of instruction. It also doesn’t help that the U.S. has a highly decentralized school system, with schools being locally controlled, making it hard to make uniform sweeping changes to how students learn, he adds.

So how would teachers know if a proposed reform is effective?

Can You Prove It?

Evidence is the magic word, says Adrian Simpson, principal of St. Mary's College at Durham University in England and professor of mathematics education.

It’s also the source of part of the problem.

Those questing for evidence-based education approaches tend to rely on randomized controlled trials, a robust form of study widely used in medicine to establish causation, Simpson notes. In education, that can mean field experiments that show a practice worked in a particular context or laboratory experiments in cognitive science, he says.

“But what [these] tell you is very powerful, but very narrow,” Simpson says.

These studies are taken to show that certain approaches work. But, Simpson says, they only really establish that the sum of all the differences in interventions caused learning for some participants. Which specific intervention worked, and whether it would work for other students, is hard to determine, Simpson says.

That also puts pressure on how changes are carried out in the classroom.

Imagine the best teacher. How much time goes into designing his or her lessons, refining them, and adjusting to individual differences? asks Gallimore, the retired professor. That's what makes implementation of any reform effort so difficult, he says: to go from a general idea down into the details of making it work for a specific group of students, often across a range of different learning contexts.

So it’s tricky to translate the lessons of these experiments into learning.

Researchers also understand less about the mechanisms of how people think about, say, fractions than how kidneys function, according to Simpson, of St. Mary's College. So the evidence provided by experiments about specific practices in education is weaker than in other areas like medicine where it tends to be similar from person to person: “You can’t establish laws of the classroom that will apply everywhere,” Simpson says.

Ultimately, there’s no quick fix for the reform cycle, Simpson says. But he thinks teachers could learn from public health medicine, which is striving to make its interventions more attuned to personal peculiarities. Teachers should bring together insights from a number of sources — from research about memory capacity to tips from the teacher next door — to inform how they unlock learning for their students, he suggests. Rather than asking what they can do to make a student better with fractions, a teacher might ask: “What’s causing this child to handle fractions poorly?” That could provide an insight that isn’t solely focused on teacher interventions which could, nonetheless, help the student learn, Simpson says.

To Stigler, of UCLA, it’s hard to know what works in education right now.

Reform movements need to focus more on getting disciplined plans for moving from the idea phase to the implementation phase, he says. Teachers also need the time to make sure ideas have been effectively put in place, he adds.

Without that, Stigler says, nobody knows what’s truly effective.

© Photo By GoodStudio/Shutterstock

When Jacob, a 10th grader with vision impairment, signed up for an AP class, it made him feel like a castaway.

His ambitions to learn were thwarted because his teacher had assigned handouts and a three-week-long lesson plan that relied on a website that wasn’t easy for him to navigate. So he felt frustrated, isolated: “I am stranded on this desert island because that site doesn't work [with my screen reader],” Jacob later told a researcher, also adding, “You can't just re-change your whole teaching plan, especially when you've distributed it.”

Like Jacob, many students with disabilities are forced to work extra, advocates argue. They have to learn just like other students, but they can also have to deal with assignments they can’t access and other digital hurdles. That’s particularly the case in K-12 classes, where teaching materials may be hard to parse, according to the preprint of a research article that argues that many of these students have to figure out how to access basic documents on their own, outside of school. (The article cites Jacob’s story, though the author declined to provide further details to EdSurge, citing ethical concerns.)

But there’s a push to change that.

In April, the U.S. Department of Justice published its final rule for web and mobile accessibility. It updated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the law that requires state and local governments to supply equal opportunity — including in services like public schools, community colleges and public universities — for people with disabilities. The update is meant to expand access by spelling out specific technical standards government entities must follow.

This latest update was crucial because it set a clock for when schools' digital materials have to be accessible and specifies standards for how to measure whether they are, according to some observers.

Ticking Clock

Under the new guidelines, digital text, images, audio, videos, documents, controls and animations must meet a series of “success criteria.” Per reporting from Community College Daily, these include:

• “Content should not be limited to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape.
• Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media.
• Captions are provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media.
• Audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media.
• Non-text content should have an equivalent text alternative.
• Colors used are bold enough to be seen on the screen.”

It’s historic that the law now clearly signals the way for public institutions to measure digital accessibility, says Glenda Sims, the chief information accessibility officer for Deque Systems, a company focused on digital accessibility. These sort of requirements have been known about for years, she adds, but now there’s a “ruler” in law for measuring if they’ve been met.

Some disability advocates say they appreciate that the Justice Department shifted the burden away from students. Until now, students — and sometimes teachers — have had to work to make digital content accessible, says Natalie Shaheen, an assistant professor of blind education at Illinois State University’s College of Education.

But under the rule, educational institutions are responsible for the websites and materials they use for education. So now, schools have to worry about purchasing inaccessible materials, according to Elizabeth Barker, a senior technical assistant and project director for CAST, a nonprofit that created the Universal Design for Learning framework.

While not new, the obligations in the rule have become pressing.

Depending on their population size, school districts and state and local governments have until April 2026 or April 2027 to ensure their web content and mobile apps comply with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

It will mean they have to act fast.

“Most public colleges and universities are facing a two-year compliance clock that started ticking a few months ago,” wrote Jarret Cummings, a senior advisor for policy and government relations at Educause, in an email to EdSurge. It’s vital that they “quickly engage their corporate providers” to figure out how they will meet these standards in time, Cummings wrote.

That applies to K-12 as well: Districts should be vetting accessibility as part of their procurement process, says Barker, of CAST.

For private edtech companies, it’s slightly more complicated. Vendors are “indirectly responsible” for these rules, according to experts. The weight of the rule falls on public institutions themselves — K-12 schools, colleges and universities — but if vendors want to keep working with these educational institutions, they also need to become compliant, according to Sims, of Deque Systems.

Right now, it seems like families can’t sue the vendors directly, she says. But that doesn’t mean they can ignore this. In fact, she adds, contracts with schools can mean there could be “legal pressure” on vendors if they don’t also follow the guidelines. Eventually, they could even face lawsuits from families. For example, in California, there’s a proposal for a law that would allow people to directly sue companies whose websites aren’t accessible. Sims says she is closely watching the bill.

There’s also a “business case” for considering accessibility during the design of products, Sims says. As it dawns on schools that they are responsible for the digital accessibility of the companies they purchase from, companies that can prove accessibility will benefit. What’s more, the cost of fixing accessibility issues is significantly higher once a product is released rather than in the design phase, argues Sims, stressing the need to carefully consider these issues early on. Cost can climb quickly, she says, especially when some reviews have detected multiple accessibility problems across home pages.

On the Hook

Accessibility has become a major focus area in education policy. The revised national edtech plan from the U.S. Department of Education flagged “access” as one of three major technological divides — access, design and use — that can prevent students from fully engaging with education. At the time it was released, experts said they hoped the revision would move the national conversation beyond mere access to edtech and into how effective tech is for learning. But funding lapses this year have threatened to reduce access, including the end of the Federal Communications Commission’s “Affordable Connectivity Program,” which was key in connecting many families to the internet.

Will all this translate to greater access for disabled students? Advocates are optimistic, especially in the wider context of pro-accessibility legislation.

“This is certainly the most we’ve seen — ever,” says Shaheen, of Illinois State. There may be more to come. The Education Department is planning an update to its IT accessibility regulations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, for which these latest changes provide a template, according to Cummings, of Educause. That rule would apply to private institutions, he wrote, adding: “So, private colleges and universities should consider getting a head start on the accessibility requirements most likely heading their way.”

To Shaheen, removing barriers for disabled students in reality relies on schools grabbing for the obvious. Schools aren’t taking full advantage of what's known about building digital interfaces that are easier for disabled students to use, she says. But, she adds, the most common barriers to disabled K-12 students are the easiest to fix. For example: One common hurdle is that images don’t have “alternative text,” she adds. This is an alternative representation of the image for blind and low-vision people, and it can usually be added without special expertise in programming because many content creation platforms already have the capability as a built-in feature, she says. So whoever is creating the content simply would need to right-click on the image and add the alternative text.

Still, to really help disabled students, schools need to be more “proactive,” Shaheen argues. That involves devoting resources and people to delivering greater accessibility, she says.

Yet resources may be hard to come by, since the K-12 and college sectors are under enormous pressure right now. They are facing a number of stark challenges that include slumping student academic scores coming back from the pandemic, declining enrollments and the end of ESSER funding.

Another wrinkle: Unless they’ve been following it, K-12 schools might not even know that they are on the hook for their vendors, says Barker, of CAST. It hasn’t received enough attention, she adds.

Still, for advocates like Shaheen, there are many teachers and families around the country dedicated to increasing accessibility, and the formal rule gives them extra muscle, she says: “Sometimes it’s hard to make social justice things happen. But it's pretty amazing what some teachers can get done.”

© Photo By Reshetnikov_art/Shutterstock

When Sheresa Boone Blanchard, a mother of three in North Carolina, started homeschooling her son during the pandemic, it might actually have saved her time.

Isaiah, her middle child, had finished fifth grade in June 2020. With the health crisis going on, Blanchard switched him to virtual lessons when he started sixth grade. But he has ADHD and just couldn't focus without someone with him, she says. So Blanchard, who was working remotely as a college professor, and her mother, Loretta Boone, who was retired, were spending a lot of time every day trying to help Isaiah with his virtual school assignments.

Blanchard felt like the school wasn’t able to accommodate her son, despite his 504 plan. After he fell behind on some assignments, it felt like he’d dug a hole from which he couldn’t get out: While the school would let him turn in the assignments, he would only get partial credit for them, and all the while new assignments kept coming. The school was unwilling to really compromise to help him catch up, Blanchard says. “It was an almost overly punitive environment,” she reflects.

Since they were spending so much time with him anyway, the family figured that homeschool would give them control over curriculum and the style of teaching. So they decided to withdraw him. The homeschool curriculum — BookShark, a four-day-per-week literature-focused package — arrived near Isaiah’s birthday. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, like, that's amazing that everything's aligning. Like, this is the way we're supposed to do things,’” she recalls.

Sheresa Boone Blanchard and her family. Photo courtesy of Blanchard.

A professor, Blanchard says she “triaged” her schedule. That meant devoting several hours in the mornings to homeschooling her son and then teaching courses and taking meetings online.

While it took energy and time, it wasn’t more than she was already devoting to “trying to make the system work.” The curriculum also let Blanchard tailor the lessons to Isaiah, focusing on the subjects where he needed extra help and zipping through the ones where he didn’t. “And it ended up being a really positive experience overall, for him and for our family,” says Blanchard, who currently works as an associate professor at East Carolina University.

Blanchard isn’t alone. During the pandemic, the number of students struggling climbed, increasing the interest in alternatives to public school. Now, homeschools and microschools — two categories that overlap — are booming. About 5 to 6 percent of all K-12 students are homeschooled, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, a collection of homeschooling research and resources. Blanchard’s state, North Carolina, has the second highest percentage of homeschooled students in the country: at about 9 percent, according to the Homeschool Hub.

The lack of oversight for these alternatives means that curricula and rigor vary widely, and that students don’t experience some of the protections of public school. But recent attention and federal dollars have also spurred attempts to increase regulations. Still, there’s a tendency for people to remove some of the nuance when talking about the uptick in homeschooling and microschools, Angela Watson, an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, told EdSurge in May. But in reality, there’s a sweep of reasons parents are attracted to these types of schools. Even within a state, she added, the level of interest in non-public schools can vary, perhaps due to the available options.

For some Black families, she said, interest shot up due to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some families, particularly ones whose children need learning accommodations, also feel like those students are being pushed out, she said.

For some of these families, the need for these types of alternative schools seems urgent.

Dismantling the ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’

Black families are turning to microschools for “safety,” says Janelle Wood, founder of Black Mothers Forum, a network of nine microschools in Arizona, a state considered friendly to the “school choice” movement.

These families are perhaps drawn to alternative schooling for different reasons than conservative, white families, she adds.

In 2016, Wood and other Black mothers were looking for a place to voice their rage and sadness over police killings, including of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. So she called a meeting to discuss how to safeguard their children from systemic racism. “I’m a reverend,” Wood says, adding, she felt a religious calling to “be a voice for those without a voice.” Her platform, she elaborates, put her in a position to articulate the needs of her community.

But before long, the group had focused its attention on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” They had identified education as the beginning of a chain of events that fed into poor life outcomes. In education, Black students are over-disciplined, “criminalizing” normal behavior from an early age, Wood says. Around the same time, Wood also noticed that classrooms seem crowded with too many students, so that teachers can’t give adequate attention to those who are struggling, especially across racial divides, which she believes reinforces the problem.

The result? These families don’t feel supported by schools, Wood says.

Black Mothers Forum opened a microschool four years ago. Wood argues that keeping schools small and rooted in the community enables deeper relationships between the teachers and students. It means that when students make a mistake or need correction because they are acting out, Wood says, they know it’s coming from a place of support. “And so the milestones provide a space for them to grow, a space for them to be seen as human, as validated,” she says.

These days, Black Mothers Forum microschools are educating about 60 students spread over nine schools, ranging from five to 10 students each. The less established of those schools have two adults overseeing the classes. More established ones are overseen by one adult, often a former teacher or a parent with an advanced degree related to education, and students and parents play an active role in setting school culture, according to Wood. Almost all of the students and teachers are Black.

In part, Wood views the schools as an answer to the continued fallout of the pandemic. For her, microschools allow students to have social lives — in a less intimidating learning environment than large schools — hopefully speeding their recovery from the negative effects of school closures. “Some children need a smaller environment, and microschools seem to be doing the job for a lot of these kids,” Wood says.

Initially, a lot of parents were interested in microschools as a way to build up their students’ capacity to go back to public school, she says. But increasingly, she claims, there’s interest in staying in microschools. Recently, the network expanded to include high school options.

A Potential Lifeline

For Blanchard, the homeschool experiment was useful. Her son’s academic performance improved.

Still, when Blanchard’s job became less flexible — in addition to her worries about what limited interactions with other students might mean for Isaiah’s social development — it felt like time to change again. Local homeschool groups weren’t very diverse, she says. They tried a private school, but found that Isaiah struggled there. He felt alienated, she says, because he was being singled out for punishment. So now, Isaiah is back in public school for ninth grade.

Although they never quite found the perfect situation for Isaiah, Blanchard says, the homeschool trial served as a “reset year.” She and most of the other families she knows who are homeschooling are reacting to an ecosystem that they don’t feel is nurturing or supporting their kids, she says. His home proved a more affirming environment, and that let his family build Isaiah up to prepare him to re-enter public school.

Other advocates of education alternatives believe that microschools are a chance to assist public schools, either by trying out new methods for learning — which could then be reimported back into public schools if they work — or, in some cases, by providing community assistance.

For Wood, of the Black Mothers Forum, microschools could represent a way to relieve pressure from public schools. Public schools should bring microschools onto their campuses, Wood argues. That way, they don’t lose students and can bring in assistance for overworked teachers, she says. It’s a way of bringing the community further into schools, Wood adds.

“Let someone who actually understands [the students who are struggling] and looks like them be the ones that work with them, and watch the difference in these children. Now you don't lose children, you're now helping children,” Wood says.

She says she’s been looking for a public school to partner with her own organization. But so far she hasn’t found one.

© Photo by Juan Crum

One California family had a tough choice to make.

Julie Lynem’s son had taken algebra in eighth grade, but hadn’t comprehended some of the core concepts. That left the family to decide whether to make him repeat the class in ninth grade — and potentially disadvantage him by preventing him from taking calculus later in high school — or to have him push through.

“After a family discussion, we decided he would repeat Algebra 1 in ninth grade,” Lynem, a journalism lecturer, wrote in CalMatters. They hoped it would increase his confidence and mastery, she wrote. When he later won an achievement award in math, Lynem determined that the decision had been a good one.

The state around her is grappling with similar questions.

Last July, California adopted a new K-12 math framework. Proponents believe that the framework provides greater flexibility in math paths, while also stressing an inquiry-based approach that will encourage more students to go further in math. California’s framework has also been fiercely criticized for placing a “reform agenda” over rigorous standards.

Perhaps most controversial was its treatment of algebra. In the final version, the framework recommends starting algebra in ninth grade for most students, which many worry will make students less competitive for college or push some students away from science careers. The move was partly based on San Francisco public schools, which had delayed algebra until high school for all students in a high-profile experiment. Recently, though, the city has changed course amid parental pressure.

California is trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Algebra has long been considered a "gateway" to higher math. But there's a lot of variation in how schools decide who’s ready for algebra, leading to fewer low-income students, rural students or English learners taking this course in middle school. This pattern has left districts searching for new models.

For some researchers, California misstepped. And at least one researcher hopes that a shift toward a “more nuanced” model built on proven student aptitude will win out.

Stuck in Reverse

The old way of slotting students into algebra has reinforced disparities. Relying on teacher recommendations or parent advocacy to decide which students are ready, many schools have not been able to get enough talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds into seats in algebra classrooms. That’s why low-income, Black, Hispanic, Native American and rural students — and growing populations such as English learners — have less, or just slower, access to algebra. Getting into algebra early is thought to improve college attractiveness, and the course is often a high school graduation requirement.

It’s a phenomenon researchers are painfully aware of.

The current system is working disproportionately well for an increasingly shrinking portion of the population, says Scott Peters, the director of research consulting partnerships at NWEA. In other words, math placements most often fail for the parts of the American population that are growing the fastest. It’s an inefficiency in the education system, leaving talent on the table, he says, adding: “Doing nothing is going backward.”

The assessment and research organization NWEA, Peters’ organization, recently released guidance for schools to better identify when students are prepared to take algebra, in the hopes of encouraging schools to use “universally administered” data points when making math placements. Using data points that limit subjective factors — such as teacher impression or parental advocacy — when deciding whether a student is prepared for algebra lowers the likelihood that a student will be put into algebra too soon or too late, according to this argument. The guidance is connected to MAP Growth, one of the organization’s assessments.

The Right to Perform Algebra

The idea of standardizing aspects of American math education has been floating around.

When the latest scores for the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, seemed to show Utah had outperformed other U.S. states, Lindsey Henderson, a secondary mathematics specialist for the Utah State Board of Education, credited the state’s scores in part to the state’s integrated secondary math curriculum mandate. Others, in interpreting the results, highlighted the lack of a national math curriculum as a reason for the country’s lagging performance internationally.

That might have some relevance to algebra readiness, according to Peters. But tackling these problems requires nuance and the ability to strike a balance in how states are standardized, he says.

Districts that try to flatten the racial disparities by having all eighth graders take algebra are applying standardization in the wrong direction, Peters argues. Not all students are ready for algebra in middle school, and so this can lead to “massive failure rates,” he says.

But then, there are districts that go the other way, only allowing the highest-achieving students to take early algebra. In these, “you have to be Albert Einstein to get placed in slightly advanced math, like so overkill that it's ridiculous,” Peters says.

These approaches both seek to force students into algebra or out of it. “Both have been tried and both are stupid,” he adds.

Peters’ proposed better models of standardization: automatic enrollments based on demonstrated aptitude, also known as “opt-out” policies. In these systems, students are automatically enrolled in algebra — unless they choose to opt out — after they achieve high scores on standard tests. That’s where Peters hopes his guidelines will help, pointing districts to embrace broad standards.

There are some examples of this model in practice now. In 2018, Ohio adopted one such policy. So now, when a student in the state scores higher than the 95 percentile on standardized achievement tests like the TerraNova, they are automatically labeled as “gifted.” These students can access advanced math classes, and schools also have to send reports about who they are classifying as “gifted” to the state’s department of education.

In the last five years, other states — including Colorado, Nevada, Washington, Illinois and Texas — have adopted some version of automatic enrollment policies. The legislatures in these states have elected to force schools to make algebra available to students who have demonstrated readiness by scoring highly on state tests.

Some view it as a stealth “bipartisan” option for recalculating algebra, reducing disparities without relying on contentious reform approaches. North Carolina, which passed a version of this in 2018, released a review of its program that suggested it’s had some success. While it didn’t fully eliminate disparities, the state’s review of the program’s effect reported that: “Most of North Carolina’s mathematically talented students are taking advanced math courses in their public schools, and the percentage of such students has increased each year.”

Ultimately, for Peters, that’s the path with the most promise. It removes the kind of discretion that tends to correlate with resources and segregation, Peters argues. Yet, it also doesn’t just fling students who might not be ready into difficult math.

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