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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

HOUSTON — On a Saturday morning in August 2023, a crowd gathered outside the Houston Independent School District administration building with protest signs in hand. The brutal, sticky heat of Texas summer already had people wiping sweat from their brows and handing out bottled water from ice-filled coolers.

Teachers, parents and politicians took turns at the microphone, united in their criticism of the controversial state takeover of Texas’ largest school district. One fear expressed was about how the mostly Black and Latino students at 28 schools would fare under a plan created by new Superintendent Mike Miles that would require school libraries to cease, in essence, functioning as libraries.

Demonstrators gather in August 2023 in protest of Houston ISD's plan to close libraries in schools. Photo by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.

Instead, they would become “team centers,” where teachers would send disruptive students to work independently. The most high-achieving students would be funneled there, too, where they could do worksheets at their own pace and free up teachers to focus on everyone else.

Taylor Hill, a student at Wheatley High School, would experience the change firsthand. Her school is located in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood and serves a student body that is nearly 100 percent classified as economically disadvantaged.

The Texas Education Agency awards letter grades to schools and districts based on test scores and other student performance metrics. When Wheatley High received a seventh “F” rating from the Texas Education Agency in 2019, it triggered the state takeover of the district. A Houston lawmaker championed the 2015 law that created the mandatory takeover process, something he saw as a way to hold the district accountable for continually low-performing schools.

At the protest, Hill stepped up to the podium and spoke into the microphone, talking over a crescendo of buzzing cicadas. The library at her school is a refuge, she said.

“I live in Fifth Ward. There's not a lot there, but what is there should not be turned into a detention center, especially when I am constantly there,” Hill told the crowd. “I read a lot, and I just feel like that is not what needs to happen.”

Unfortunately for Hill, the new state-appointed superintendent went through with his plan. A year later, the early consequences are becoming clear. School librarians have lost their jobs. Teachers have adopted a district-approved curriculum that some feel is rote and uninspiring. And children are receiving different educations depending on which part of the city they call home — a divide that maps onto Houston’s income and racial disparities.

Man With a Plan for ‘Differentiation’

Mike Miles was appointed superintendent in June 2023, brought in to lead the state takeover and improve academic performance in Houston.

In addition to districts, schools in Texas are individually given A through F grades based partially on standardized test scores. Miles quickly created big and controversial plans to improve scores. One strategy among his planned overhaul — called the New Education System, or NES — was to close libraries at 28 schools out of the district’s 274 total and turn them into “team centers.” It would accomplish two goals, he said: create a place to send “disruptive” students after removing them from class as well as an environment to send high-achieving students for enrichment.

School principals were also given the option to voluntarily adopt the new system, becoming what the district referred to as “NES-aligned.” After adding in those campuses, a total of 85 schools would start fall 2023 under the program.

The problem? Myriad parents and teachers alike hated the idea of closing down libraries and isolating students, especially considering these schools — and the entire school district — serves a student population that’s overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

The map below shows Houston schools that are part of the New Education System with each neighborhood color-coded based on median income. Click on the map to see more information about income in each neighborhood. Areas become more green as income increases and more blue as income decreases.

Map by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.

One was Melissa Yarborough, a teacher at Navarro Middle School in Houston’s East End, which is home to one of the city’s historically Latino neighborhoods. While not targeted as a failing school or assigned to the New Education System, her campus leaders adopted much of district's new curriculum, according to Yarborough. Navarro Middle officially became an NES school in 2024.

Her two children, however, were students at one of the targeted schools, Pugh Elementary in the city’s northeastern Denver Harbor neighborhood. Although, it wasn’t labeled as “failing” when Miles was appointed superintendent. It had an A rating from the state in 2022. Even by Houston ISD’s own calculations, the school is expected to earn a B rating when 2023 and 2024 school “report cards” are released. It was a tougher scoring formula released last year that makes earning high “grades” harder. A lawsuit by Texas school districts over the change has halted the release of 2023 ratings for now, and a second lawsuit is similarly blocking the state from releasing 2024 ratings.

As demonstrators hung back and talked after the protest, Yarborough said she was horrified by the way Miles described his plan to move disruptive students to the library-turned-team-center and tune into lessons via Zoom.

“He said, ‘Imagine. I'm walking in with 150 kids. All the children are working on their own little assignment or whatever, individually or in pairs,’” Yarborough recalled. “He said it to me like it's a beautiful thing.”

Screenshot of teacher and parent Melissa Yarborough speaking during the public comment portion of a board meeting in February. Video courtesy of Houston ISD.

She said Miles sold the idea as “differentiation,” a principle that all teachers learn during their undergraduate training. In essence, it’s the idea that teachers should adjust their lessons to each student’s needs, whether they’re struggling or grasping a concept quickly.

Yarborough said Miles’ plan isn’t effective differentiation, though. Disruptive students will receive a worse education, if the results of pandemic-era Zoom classes are any indicator, she said. And doing worksheets in the library isn’t a reward for high-achievers, she added.

Duncan Klussmann agreed with Yarborough’s assessment. A former superintendent of nearby Spring Branch Independent School District, he is now a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Houston. Ultimately, Klussmann said, Miles’ model is designed to produce higher test scores. But Klussmann is more interested to know what the student experience is in these schools.

“Just because you have higher state test schools, do more students go off to higher ed?” he asked. “Are they successful when they go off to higher ed? Do more students get a technical certification? Do more students go into the military, you know? Do they have a better life after high school? We don't know. We won't know for four, six, 10 years what the effect is of NES schools on students.”

Officials from Houston ISD did not respond to interview or information requests from EdSurge.

Displaced Librarians

When Brandie Dowda was hired at Burrus Elementary, a campus home to mostly Black and Hispanic students, she was the first librarian employed by the school in a decade.

Her tenure wouldn’t last long.

During summer 2023 — the same one during which Houstonians like student Hill and parent Yarborough protested outside the district administration building — Dowda was on vacation when the principal at Burrus informed her that the librarian position was being eliminated. The campus was going to be part of the inaugural New Education System cohort of schools, and the library would be closed.

Dowda found another librarian position in the district at Almeda Elementary and said she was happy at her new school. The library had long been central to life at the campus, and Dowda said students were rarely seen without a book in hand.

But again, her tenure would be short-lived.

Librarian Brandie Dowda poses in front of knitted protest signs before speaking at a board of managers meeting in August 2024. Photo courtesy of Dowda.

Dowda was leaving for work one morning in January 2024 and quickly scrolled through the news feed on her phone before heading out the door when she saw it — a news article announcing that 26 more schools would join the New Education System in the fall of 2024.

Dowda’s school was on the list. “I went, ‘Oh, I get to do this again,’” she recalled. “I found out from the regular news, which if I remember correctly, is also how my principal found out. It's kind of how everybody found out.”

Dowda said that her former library at Burrus wasn’t turned into a team center — a classroom was used instead — but students still weren’t allowed to access the books. Then, in May 2024 at Almeda, she was in the middle of a lesson when movers arrived to begin disassembling the library, she said. As the school year ended, the carpet was left with bald spots where shelves had been removed and the concrete floor underneath showed through. Her students were upset to learn that their library would be closed when they returned in the fall.

The library at Almeda Elementary after bookshelves were removed. Photo courtesy of Brandie Dowda.

Dowda’s story mirrors that of Cheryl Hensley, the former librarian at Lockhart Elementary. Hensley had been retired from her 38-year career in Houston ISD when a friend coaxed her into applying for the librarian position at the campus, which is in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of Third Ward.

Like Dowda at Almeda Elementary, she was at Lockhart for one year before her job was eliminated. Her principal opted into the NES standards believing that, in doing so, decisions about the school would still ultimately be made at the campus level. Hensley found out she lost her job in summer 2023.

“The principal is a super supporter of libraries and books and literature and reading, all over, I mean 100 percent,” Hensley said, “and so she was thinking I would be OK. They told [the principal] they could keep everybody, that everything would be the same and nothing would change.”

Cheryl Hensley poses in the library at Lockhart Elementary, where she was formerly a librarian and where she now volunteers monthly. She says that while the books have not been removed, they are not checked out to students. Photo courtesy of Hensley.

But then Hensley heard from the principal: “She called me in and just said, ‘No, I can't keep you. They told me that I have to turn my library into a team center.’”

Beyond the professional upheaval, Hensley and Dowda worry about what the absence of a school library will mean for students’ success in elementary school and beyond. Third grade is widely noted as a critical time for children to achieve reading proficiency, otherwise putting them at risk of falling behind academically during each subsequent year.

“I teach them to love to read,” Hensley said. “If you're invested so much in reading and math, then you're missing a major component [by closing libraries]. Because if a kid loves to read, they will read more. If a kid loves to read, he will comprehend more. We are part of that solution.”

Hensley said she visited her former colleagues and students at Lockhart monthly during the 2023-24 school year, and students asked her if she was back to reopen the library each time. It has been turned into a team center with about 50 desks, she says, where students are sent if they finish their classwork early.

Hensley said the school’s library, even if it’s not operating as one, still has books thanks to the principal’s actions in 2023. A work crew arrived to remove the shelves — making way for the team center desks — when the principal was at an off-campus meeting, Hensley recalled. The principal returned just in time to tell the crew that nothing was to be taken.

“She said, ‘We'll work that out, because you're not taking the books,’” Hensley says. “She pushed back, and I appreciate her 100 percent because still the library itself at Lockhart is basically intact.”

Houston ISD told Houston Landing that some schools allow students to informally check out books on an “honor system.”

The NES approach might fix the problem of low test scores, she said, “but it's not going to give you a lifetime learner or lifetime reader that will read and comprehend and think for themselves.”

While the district is moving forward with bringing more schools in its New Education System — and closing more libraries in the process — Dowda said that there aren’t any parents or community members she’s heard from who see library closures as a smart move.

“Why are you closing the libraries when you want to improve literacy and reading scores? They have not yet explained to us how that makes sense,” Dowda said. “I'm not the only one who has pointed out that this is not happening in the schools in the west side of Houston, which are the affluent schools that are mostly white. It is happening in the Title I schools with high poverty rates that are populated mostly by African American and Hispanic students.”

Dowda won’t be looking for yet another librarian job within Houston ISD. Instead, she found one in a different school district nearby. She predicts other educators who work at NES schools will do the same.

“I'm going to go to another district that values libraries,” she said, “and where I can have stability in a library and go about my librarian business of helping children find books that they enjoy reading.”

‘It’s Segregation’

It was last November that Yarborough, the Houston teacher and parent, stepped outside the bounds of the new NES curriculum for the final time.

After the summer protest, Yarborough started the 2023-24 school year using the district’s mandated materials. But three months in, she had had enough of watching students in her English language arts class mentally check out from the monotony of the new structure: She read off district-created slides, and then students answered a multiple-choice question by holding up a markerboard where they scribbled an A, B, C or D. For short-answer questions, they wrote on an index card. Over and over, until it was time for a five-question quiz.

Would Miles or any of those board members send their child to an NES school? They would say, 'Oh, no. My kids need to be more challenged.'

— Melissa Yarborough

“By November I was like, ‘I'm done with this,’” Yarborough recalls. “They're not learning. I know they can. I'm going to go back to a great lesson.”

For Native American Heritage Month, Yarborough decided to introduce her sixth graders to stories, poems and songs that fit the theme, despite them not being approved for use. Each time she rebelled by using a story or activity in class, even if an observing school administrator had liked the lesson, her supervisor would remind Yarborough the next day not to stray from the slides that were sent over by the district.

Eventually, an assistant principal called Yarborough into her office. She reminded Yarborough that the district’s orders barred teachers at NES-aligned schools like Navarro Middle from giving students quizzes, tests or any assessment outside of what was part of district-provided slideshows.

“It sounded kind of like a threat where she said, ‘I'm telling you before the [executive director] comes and tells you herself,’” Yarborough recalls. “‘You're going to be in big trouble with the ED herself if you don't start doing this now.’”

Yarborough quit her teaching job in January. She now works as a teacher in a nearby district, outside of the NES program. She couldn’t be part of a system that was forcing her to, as Yarborough puts it, treat students like machines.

“I knew they weren't learning. I knew I wasn't preparing them for anything in life besides a STAAR test,” Yarborough says, referencing the state’s annual standardized test, “and I was having to deny their humanity while we did that. I was so stressed, and my stomach was always a knot. I was like, ‘This is horrible. I can't keep doing this.’”

The slideshow model didn’t give her time to help students understand concepts before moving on, or for students to practice a skill on their own. The timed, jam-packed schedule didn’t even leave most kids with time to go to the bathroom, she says.

“They've just been holding up the whiteboard on the multiple-choice question slides, so they haven't been able to read a story and think through it and make mistakes and get feedback on their own,” Yarborough says. “So you have kids who will give up, and they just write any letter on their whiteboard, and it doesn't matter to them. And Mike Miles calls this engagement, but that's just obedience — because when a student is really engaged, it's their mind that's engaged, not their hand with a marker.”

Despite educators’ concerns, district leaders are riding high on data showing that some campuses made huge improvements in their overall accountability ratings — rising by 30 or more points, in some cases — during Miles’ first year at the helm. The district called the increases “remarkable” in a news release, noting the changes made under the New Education System.

While the state has been blocked from releasing annual school accountability scores, Houston ISD crunched the numbers itself and released its campuses’ preliminary scores. Wheatley High School, the source of low scores that triggered the state takeover, will increase from a “D” rating in 2023 to a “B” at the end of the 2024 academic year. The number of schools rated “A” and “B” will more than double during the same period, according to the district, while “D” and “F” campuses will fall to 41 schools in 2024 compared to 121 the previous year.

“We are incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to achieve in one year,” Miles said in the news release. “Together with our dedicated teachers, principals, and everyone at HISD, we will continue to provide high-quality instruction that builds on this growth.”

The first year of NES was turbulent, with a seemingly constant stream of new reforms. Protesters spoke out against the overhaul at public meetings, with plans for massive layoffs angering parents. Employee turnover during Miles’ tenure was 33 percent higher than the previous year.

Miles has remained cool under the barrage of criticism — including from a panel of graduating seniors who had firsthand experience under his New Education System. He brushed off the idea that a 9,000-student drop in enrollment was worrisome, telling the Houston Chronicle that the “numbers are changing every day ... but we feel confident that we’re going to keep growing in our enrollment until September.”

In the same article, a parent said her children had “hollow zombie faces” due to the stressful environment at their Houston ISD school. She opted to have them do virtual schooling this year.

As a parent, Yarborough wasn’t only troubled by how the superintendent’s test-centered plan changed school for the students she taught. Both of her children attended Pugh Elementary, part of the original cohort of NES schools, during the 2023-24 school year. She said her daughter’s fourth-grade class operated much like Yarborough was expected to run her sixth-grade class. Her son’s first-grade class wasn’t much different.

“My younger one would say, ‘Today's the same as every day,’” she recalls. “He said there wasn't the best part or the worst part. It wasn't good and it wasn't bad. It was just a flat line, like blah, every day.”

Yarborough found another school for her children — her son has specifically asked not to go back to Pugh Elementary for second grade. But to ensure she chose a school that’s beyond the reach of the New Education System, it meant looking at areas of the city that are wealthier.

Earlier this year, the district brought the total number of NES schools to 130 — nearly half of schools in the district — when it added 45 campuses to the NES roster.

“Miles is not going to target the schools where the parents have wealth and power, and that's concentrated in the schools with higher white populations,” Yarborough says. “And that's due to a legacy of racism.”

She feels bad about searching for schools based on the income level of their students’ families. But she doesn’t feel like she has a choice.

“Would Miles or any of those board members send their child to an NES school? They would say, ‘Oh, no. My kids need to be more challenged. My kids need a better social environment. My kids,’” Yarborough said. “They're giving our kids less. They're treating our kids differently. It's segregation.”

© Photo courtesy of Brandie Dowda.

This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder.

Throughout rural America, non-native English speakers are less likely than their urban peers to get proper support in school, sometimes leading to a lifetime of lower educational attainment. But some rural schools are developing multilingual education strategies to rival those found in urban and suburban districts.

In general, it’s easier to fund more diverse course offerings in bigger schools. From Advanced Placement U.S. History to Spanish immersion, more students means more funding. But in rural DuBois County, Indiana, administrators are prioritizing English-learner education. There, students have access to “gold standard” multilingual programming, a hard-won achievement for any U.S. school, but especially for such a small district.

“We are the only school in the region who started a dual language program,” said Rossina Sandoval, Southwest DuBois County School District’s director of community engagement, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

To meet the gold standard, students in the dual language immersion program receive 50 percent of their instruction in English and 50 percent of their instruction in Spanish. Fifty percent of the program is made up of students whose native language is Spanish and the other half is made up of native English speakers. The program is currently offered from kindergarten through third grade, with plans to expand to fourth and fifth grade.

By developing a program with 50/50 language instruction and 50/50 student enrollment, students are able to not only learn both their native and target language from their teachers, but they are also able to learn from each other, Sandoval said.

“That has proven to be the most effective way to develop language skills,” she said.

When the program was first introduced, the school received pushback from both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking families. Spanish-speaking families felt the school should prioritize English learning, given that their children already speak Spanish at home. And English-speaking families worried that they wouldn’t be able to help their children with Spanish homework.

To address family concerns on both sides, the school shared information about the benefits of formal bilingual education. In addition to maintaining their conversational skills, Spanish-speaking students receive instruction in grammar, spelling and reading in their native language. This approach helps students who already speak another language read and write in another language, too.

Learning two languages does not hurt a student’s ability to master either one. Bilingual children are shown to have better focus and logical reasoning, and — according to Sandoval — will be suited to a wider range of opportunities in the workforce.

“It’s natural, we want the best for our kids,” she said. “The best we can do is educate the community as a whole that this is the best method to develop multilingualism, this is the best method to enhance global skills and produce global citizens.”

Intersecting Problems

The Latino population in DuBois County has been expanding for decades. Today it sits at 9.5 percent, which is approximately half the national percentage. But in Southwest DuBois County schools, more than a third of students identify as Latino. (The disparity in those numbers reflects higher birth rates within the Latino population and the uneven distribution of those families within the county.)

The demographics of rural schools have been changing nationwide. According to a recent report from the National Rural Education Association, 80,000 more English-learner and multilingual students were enrolled in rural districts in the 2021 school year than in 2013.

Historically, rural school districts have struggled to provide high-quality education to non-native English speakers. When English-learner populations are small, it can be difficult to fund robust bilingual programming and easy to overlook their necessity.

Rural English learners sit at the intersection of overlapping structural problems in public education. The national teacher shortage is worse in nonmetropolitan places, and it’s most problematic in racially diverse and high-poverty rural schools. Nationally, there aren’t enough bilingual educators, or educators certified to teach English as a second language (ESL).

According to recent research, while English-learner populations are growing in rural places, rural multilingual learners are less likely to receive instruction in their native languages. And while federal guidelines require that all non-native English speakers receive specialized instruction, in rural places only a little more than 60 percent actually do.

DuBois County’s top-tier bilingual education program should be used as a model in other rural school districts, Sandoval said: “As an immigrant, as a U.S. citizen, I feel very proud … because this can be replicated in communities that look like ours.”

Support for these programs must be built inside and outside the schoolhouse, Sandoval said: “There has to be a degree of openness toward bilingualism or multilingualism. This is an effort that’s not just made by me, it’s made by the school and by the community.”

Programs that increase accessibility and trust with parents include “Cafe en el Parque,” a parent meeting held in Spanish that draws in more than100 families each month, and the “Emergent Bilingual” program, which meets after school and on weekends helps new immigrant students and families learn more about how the American education system works.

Programs that help establish community support and participation include “Fuertes Together,” a partnership with the public library where families can hear stories in Spanish and English and engage with cultural music, dance and art. And a new program, “Bilingual Village,” helps bilingual students identify speaking partners in the community who can converse in the student’s new language.

A Wide Range of Strategies

When Esmeralda Cruz was a child in the 1990s, she immigrated with her family from Mexico to rural Clinton County, Indiana, where she lives and works today. “Back then,” she said, “there were not a lot of Latino families in the area. In my first grade classroom I only had one classmate that was bilingual.” This posed major challenges to her education: Esmeralda said that, instead of receiving proper language instruction, she was placed in classes meant to address learning disabilities.

Cruz’s experience is not unique, according to Maria Coady, professor of multilingual education at North Carolina State University. In places that aren’t accustomed to supporting immigrant populations, she’s seen English learners sent to speech therapy in place of proper ESL classes. “Schools might think that all these kids have special learning needs because it looks like they’re not learning,” she said, “when in fact, they’re just learning the language.”

As immigrant populations grow throughout the rural U.S., newcomers often find themselves in Cruz’s childhood position — navigating school districts unaccustomed to educating non-native English speakers.

Today, Cruz works as a Hispanic community engagement director for Purdue Extension. Prior to that, she was the health and human sciences educator at Purdue Extension office in Clinton County, Indiana.

According to scholars of rural multilingual education, schools that do have ESL or bilingual systems in place exist across a broad spectrum, from gold-standard bilingual education programs like the one in DuBois County to ESL sessions that require students to miss part of the school day and provide no native-language instruction.

In places with very small English-learner populations, Coady said, schools might pool resources and “bring in an itinerant teacher — that is, a teacher who might travel between several rural schools to provide ESL services.”

This is the least effective method of multilingual education for two reasons, Coady said: It’s disruptive to pull students out of class, and ESL teachers are only able to offer very limited amounts of time to individual students.

Where to Begin?

In rural places, small expansions in local industries that rely heavily on immigrant and migrant labor can create major shifts in student populations, said Holly Hansen-Thomas, professor of bilingual education at Texas Woman’s University: “And these teachers may not have the experience or the background to serve these emergent bilingual families that keep coming to work and to support the industry.”

For rural school districts inexperienced in providing multilingual education, said Hansen-Thomas, professional development is the place to begin.

Federal grants are available to support multilingual certifications for teachers and administrators. For instance, the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition offers a National Professional Development Program, which makes grants to colleges and universities to fund work on multilingual teaching skills for local educators. Hansen-Thomas also points to the U.S. Department of Education’s “Newcomer Tool Kit,” a resource for rural educators looking to support recent-immigrant students and families.

In Indiana, colleges and universities are attempting to build manageable pathways for multilingual educators who might not be formally trained as teachers. “Our pre-service teachers tend to be white and monolingual,” said Stephanie Oudghiri, clinical associate professor at Purdue’s College of Education. “Especially in the Midwest, as our demographics are changing, we need folks that are multilingual.”

Experts like Cruz stress the importance of listening to non-native English speakers themselves when building out these programs. “We’ve had a lot of focus groups and community conversations and I can’t tell you how many times people at the table have said, ‘Thank you for including me,’” Cruz said.

“I think oftentimes they do want to be at the table, they just don’t know how, and so we’re making sure that we’re listening to them and then going from there, rather than the other way around.”

© Rido / Shutterstock

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.

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Of the nearly 10,000 students enrolled at Brookdale Community College in central New Jersey, about 17 percent are still in high school.

Some of them travel to the campus during the school day to take courses in introductory English, history, psychology and sociology. Others stay right at their own secondary schools and learn from high school teachers who deliver college-course lessons.

They’re part of a practice, increasingly popular nationwide, that sees teenagers complete advanced classes — mostly offered through community colleges — while juggling typical high school activities like sports practices, part-time jobs and dances.

“One of the reasons why we put a lot of time and effort into the high school programs, to get students started on the college pathway in high school, is it’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner,” says Sarah McElroy, dean of pathways and partnerships at Brookdale Community College.

Called dual enrollment, the phenomenon grew for the third year in a row this year. And the growth is steep — up 10 percent compared to last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s significant in an era when college leaders are concerned about attracting and retaining students who may be skeptical about the value of a degree and also worried about the impending “enrollment cliff” resulting from fewer Americans of traditional college age coming up in the next few years.

It’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner.

— Sarah McElroy

Nationally, about a fifth of students who take community college courses these days are still in high school, according to John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. In some parts of the country, the share is even higher — it’s almost 40 percent in Iowa and Indiana, for example.

Among people who started ninth grade in 2009, about a third took some type of dual enrollment course, Fink says, adding, “That’s a big penetration into the high school market.”

The trend is catching on with policymakers and educators as they look for ways to spur college-going while also ameliorating high tuition prices.

“People are concerned about the costs of higher education: state legislators and governors, families and students,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “The idea of getting college credit while you’re in high school is appealing as a way of holding the cost of college down.”

Brookdale Community College is in a state that has named dual enrollment as a priority. By 2028, New Jersey aims to double the number of high school students enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, ensure all high schools provide dual enrollment options, and close access gaps to these programs for different groups of students.

That push is evident at Brookdale. From 2018 to 2023, the college recorded a 39 percent increase in Monmouth County high school students enrolling in its college-level courses. The institution hopes to increase enrollment among high school students by 50 percent more by 2028.

“We are trying to reach every high schooler in some way,” McElroy says.

Yet Brookdale, other community colleges, and their K-12 school partners face a few challenges in order for dual enrollment to “live up to its potential as a lever of access and equity to college and careers,” Fink says.

Good for Everyone?

Dual enrollment takes many forms and goes by many names. Some programs are run through well-organized early-college high schools that help students earn a full associate degree by the time they graduate. Others are more free-form, allowing students to take one or two courses as they please — a style some observers have critiqued as “random acts of dual enrollment.” Brookdale offers several different models through its high school partnerships.

Across these varied formats, dual enrollment seems to have become popular because it’s beneficial for all parties involved, according to education experts.

It’s good for students, Fink says, citing two decades of research that shows it leads to better high school and college completion rates. It’s good for community colleges, which advance their missions to serve their surrounding area — and also possibly create “a larger pool of students coming back to you” for additional classes after high school, too, he adds.

In fact, dual enrollment is “the most consistent source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the past decade,” says Nick Mathern, director of K-12 partnerships for Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that supports a network of community colleges. “Depending on how you break down the age cohort, there is a way in which you see it’s the only source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the last decade.”

Especially in states that provide extra public funds to support dual enrollment, it’s good for school districts and public schools, proponents argue, since they can use those programs as a selling point for attracting families and students who might otherwise look to private schools, or public schools elsewhere.

These dual-enrollment programs are not replacing Advanced Placement courses, which have been a mainstay at high schools for decades and remain popular, Wyner says. Among the three-quarters of high schools that offer advanced coursework, about 78 percent offer dual enrollment compared to 76 percent that offer AP classes. But one advantage dual enrollment may have over the AP program is that it offers a much wider catalog of options, including some career and technical courses, which may appeal to a broader set of students.

“For a lot of students who are not eager to take more purely academic courses — or about test-taking and writing papers — this is an enormous opportunity to get excited about higher education through fields of study not offered in high schools,” Wyner says.

Some of the high schools that feed into Brookdale offer dual enrollment, AP courses and the advanced International Baccalaureate curriculum all at once, McElroy says: “We are finding students are taking a menu of options.”

One bonus she sees regarding the dual enrollment courses: Students know they’ll earn college credit for taking them, whereas they’ll only get college credit for AP classes if they score high enough on standardized exams.

“It transfers so widely. Four-year colleges are taking those credits,” McElroy says. “That’s helped to elevate dual enrollment across the state.”

Addressing Inequality

Yet data on dual enrollment reveals that not all student groups participate at the same rate.

Racial minorities, men and students who would be the first in their families to go to college are underrepresented in these programs. In the county that feeds into Brookdale Community College, for example, “our Black and Hispanic students are not finishing at the same rate white students are,” McElroy says.

Comparing the percent of high school dual enrollment students by race and ethnicity statewide (orange) and at Brookdale (blue.) Data courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

There are a few factors that contribute to this inequality, Fink says. For instance, some schools use standardized test scores to determine which students are eligible to participate, creating barriers since some groups of students consistently score lower than others. Many dual enrollment courses are taught by high school teachers who have the credentials needed to instruct at the community college level — typically a master’s degree in a relevant discipline — and at some high schools, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. And while some states have arrangements that make dual enrollment courses free for students, in other regions, families have to pay.

“If you have to pay extra to take college courses in high school, you’re going to get wealthier, whiter families taking advantage,” Fink says.

Then there is an older mindset to contend with, one that views dual enrollment primarily as an option for academically advanced students who are looking for enrichment.

It is true that some students choose dual enrollment through Brookdale to improve their chances of being accepted into a selective four-year university, McElroy says.

“We know from the research that dual enrollment courses are more rigorous than the standard- issue high school course,” Wyner says. “And so for a lot of parents and students who are eager to be challenged, they see dual enrollment as an opportunity to get exposure to college-level work and get challenged in their coursework.”

But some educators and researchers hope dual enrollment can serve as an opportunity to broaden access to higher education for “students on the margins of going to college,” Fink says, by boosting their confidence, by introducing them to topics they won’t learn about in high school that might inspire them to consider going to college, and by creating momentum for possible postsecondary studies.

“I don’t begrudge middle-class students and college-bound students the opportunity to take classes in high school,” Mathern says. “But if we are not intentional about how we deploy these programs, we are not actually changing how many students in any given community earn a college credential.”

To that end, Brookdale offers college readiness courses to its high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs, designed to teach them skills they need to succeed in advanced classes.

It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising. ... Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.

— John Fink

“It shows students they can do it,” McElroy says. “College could be for them.”

For more high school students to succeed in dual enrollment, experts stress that schools and colleges have to specifically look out for them and guide them through the process.

“We think colleges should be establishing a shared vision with their local school districts about what they want to achieve for dual enrollment,” Mathern says. “As we open the door wider, we can’t just give more students access to college classes and call it good.”

After all, if a student tries a dual enrollment class and doesn’t succeed in it, the experience can leave them worse off than if they hadn’t attempted it all, either by wasting their tuition dollars, leaving them with a low grade that will follow them on a transcript or by discouraging them from pursuing more higher education.

“It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising,” Fink says. “Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.”

To that end, Brookdale has a dedicated team of support staff for its dual enrollment programs, McElroy says, explaining, “We want to serve the students as much as possible.”

Despite the flaws that remain in many dual enrollment programs, Fink is optimistic that, with fine-tuning, they can serve as a promising pathway to better college and career-training options for more young people.

“There are a lot of reasons we would want to do things differently in the college-to-career transition. It’s largely producing poor and inequitable outcomes,” he says. “What do we do with senior year of high school? Students are checked out. By bringing more career and postsecondary training into high school, you’re blurring the line, and that’s a positive thing for students.”

© Photo courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

The premise of “free college” programs popping up around the country in recent years is that bringing the price of higher education down to nearly nothing will spur more students to enroll and earn degrees.

But is that what actually happens?

David Monaghan, an associate professor of sociology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, has been digging into that question in a series of recent research studies. And the results indicate that not all of these free college programs have the intended effect — and that how a program is set up can make a big difference.

In a working paper the professor co-authored that was released last month, for instance, Monaghan compared two free college programs in Pennsylvania to dig into their outcomes.

One of the programs is the Morgan Success Scholarship at Lehigh Carbon Community College, which is available to students at Tamaqua Area High School who enroll right after completing their high school degree. Qualifying students are guaranteed fully paid tuition, with the program paying any gap left after the student applies for other financial aid and scholarships (a model known as a “last dollar, tuition-only guarantee.”)

The other is the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars Program, which is available to students who graduate from a high school in Philadelphia and meet other merit criteria. It is also a “last dollar” program that covers any tuition and fees not paid from other sources. The students must enroll immediately after high school graduation, have a low enough income to qualify for a federal Pell scholarship, file their application for federal financial aid by a set date and enroll in at least six credits at the college.

The Morgan Success Scholarship seemed to work largely as its designers hoped. The year after the program started, the rate of college-going at Tamaqua Area High School jumped from 86 percent to 94 percent, and college-going increased another percentage point the following year. And the number of students graduating from Lehigh Carbon Community College with a two-year degree increased after the program was created.

But something else happened that wasn’t by design. The free-college program appears to have led some students who would have enrolled in a four-year college to instead start at the two-year college — where they may or may not end up going on to a four-year institution. There is a chance, then, that the program may end up keeping some students from finishing a four-year degree. “On balance, the program expands access to postsecondary education more than it diverts students away from four-year degrees, though it does appear to do this as well,” the paper asserts.

The free-college program at Community College of Philadelphia, meanwhile, didn’t seem to move the needle much at all.

“I expected to see an enrollment boost, and I didn’t even see that,” says Monaghan.

In other words, it isn’t even clear from the data that the free college effort sparked any increase in enrollment at the college.

The reason, he says, may be that the leaders of the program did not do enough to spread awareness about the option, and about what it takes to apply. Since the program was open to all high schools in the city, doing that communication was more difficult than in the case of the other program they studied.

“Our analyses suggest that a tuition guarantee, by itself, will not necessarily have any impact,” he and his co-author wrote in their paper. “If a program falls in the forest and no one hears it, it will not shift enrollment patterns.”

Monaghan says that the findings show that more attention should be paid to the details of how free college programs work — especially since many of them are full of restrictions and require students to jump through a series of hoops to take advantage of them. That can be a lot to ask a 17- or 18-year-old finishing high school to navigate.

“We really overestimate what people are like at the end of high school,” and how savvy they’ll be about weighing the costs and benefits of higher education, he argues. “There hasn’t been enough research on free college programs in terms of how they are implemented and communicated,” he adds.

It’s worth noting, of course, that some free college programs do significantly increase enrollment. And that can create another unintended side effect: straining resources at two-year colleges.

That was the case in Massachusetts, where the MassReconnect program that launched in 2023 led more than 5,000 new students to enroll the first semester it was available, according to a report from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

As a result, the state’s 15 community colleges have struggled to hire enough staff — including adjunct instructors — to keep up with the new demand.

What did that program do to spark so much interest? Unlike the programs studied in Pennsylvania, MassReconnect is available to not just people freshly graduating high school, but to anyone over 25 years old — a much larger pool of possible takers.

Another working paper by Monaghan, which looked at as much available research as he could find on free college programs, found a large variety of impact.

And that may be the biggest lesson: For free college programs, the devil really is in the details of how they are set up and communicated.

© Robert Reppert / Shutterstock

Recently, I found myself in Barnes and Noble, captivated by a "Read with Pride" display in the Young Adult section. Holding several new books, I was transported back to my high school years, a time before smartphones and social media, when I would cautiously approach the gay and lesbian section of my local bookstore.

Each visit was an anxious yet defiant act of self-discovery as I sought validation and visibility in the pages of books that I curated for myself. Here, titles like “Giovanni’s Room,” “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,” and “At Swim, Two Boys” were pivotal in queering my perspective and made me think more about who I was, who I was becoming and who I wanted to be.

In retrospect, retreating to self-selected literature was probably the queerest, most radical thing I could do at the time. In those days, my reading experiences at school stalled my understanding of my emerging queer identity and limited my knowledge of others that might have shared my experiences. I never fully saw this part of who I was becoming reflected back to me.

In “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding-Glass Doors,” Rudine Sims Bishop proposes that educators consider the relationship between reader and texts as possible "mirrors" and "windows," highlighting reader identities and experiences through critical discovery. Specifically, she wrote that:

“Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”

Today, during a time of increased attempts at book censorship and curriculum challenges, Bishop’s words remind me of one of the reasons why I entered the teaching profession: to nurture the type of English class that my high school self needed by building a community with students where they have space to explore and engage with literature that validates and affirms their identities — moving from a place of survival where LGBTQ+ youth are denied their humanity to one of thriving where they are affirmed and celebrated is a critical and necessary shift.

Creating Mirrors and Windows

In my English classroom, I strive to offer texts that serve as both mirrors and windows for my students, empowering them to see their own lives reflected in the narratives we read and to gain insights into the experiences of others. Over the last five years, I built a dual-enrollment English language arts program, incorporating the critical work of Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Kimberly Parker and Julia Torres, the educator team behind #DisruptTexts.

During this program, I invite my students to complete a reflective survey, focusing on previous experiences in their English coursework and identifying perceived gaps. Then, I ask students the following questions:

1. Who writes the stories?
2. Who is missing from the stories?
3. Who benefits from the stories?

This exercise is meant to help them reflect on and express the missing parts of their reading experiences in school, name issues directly and engage in conversations that frame our inquiry together. We then use these responses to solidify the course syllabus as a living document that prioritizes the voices and narratives absent from their previous experiences in the English department.

Every year, student responses reveal that students are troubled by the absence of reading materials in school that reflect and include marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ books and authors. In the weeks and months that follow, I curate reading lists for students based on their survey responses. In this way, I strengthen and personalize our purpose for reading and let students chart their own learning path in more critical and creative ways.

As students engage in these texts, we revisit Dr. Bishop’s framework to explore how mirrors and windows appear for them and reflect on the selected literature. Sometimes, they encounter clear and accurate representations, noting that they have never read something that revealed such parts of themselves or their experiences. Most significant was the role of windows, where students developed a language to make sense of their own experiences and identities, as well as others.

By the end of the year, thoughtful conversations and college-level projects emerged in our classroom community. Students explored important aspects of genre and the author’s craft and made connections to other literary and media-based texts. They also posed lingering and emerging questions and identified critical links to current social, cultural and political realities.

As a culminating experience at the conclusion of the course, students design a two-week unit of study to address further gaps and silences through mirrors and windows in literature. Drawing from primary and secondary resources, students curate a project of their choice to integrate into the syllabus for incoming students in the subsequent year.

These learning experiences in the English classroom not only provide students with meaningful representation in their book choices but also cultivate deeper intellectual and emotional practices. They learn to engage critically, embrace curiosity and wonder and imagine new possibilities for themselves, their peers and their communities.

Affirming Identities Through Literature

Given the wide range of texts available today, students' identities should be validated through engagement with meaningful mirrors and windows of their choice. Providing ample mirrors and windows means that teachers understand the importance of students having access points in the curriculum to see themselves and understand others, fostering a more inclusive and affirming learning community.

Browsing the shelves in Barnes and Noble that afternoon, I remembered my students by remembering myself. My journey from anxious bookstore visits in high school to becoming an educator who advocates for more inclusive literature underscores the importance of culturally responsive teaching.

These experiences continue to shape my commitments in the classroom, emphasizing that teachers must recognize the full humanity of their students. By prioritizing literature that reflects a full spectrum of identities, students are empowered to embrace their most authentic selves and envision life-affirming possibilities through the transformative power of stories.

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During her first semester at Southern Methodist University, Savannah Hunsucker went on a retreat with the other students enrolled in her leadership scholars program. The event took them away from the Dallas campus and into the Texas countryside.

“I remember everybody looking up and being surprised to see stars in the night sky, and I thought that was so odd,” Hunsucker says.

Stars were a familiar sight for her, having grown up in a small town 30 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. Yet seeing her classmates’ awe at an experience she took for granted made her realize that her rural upbringing set her apart.

Savannah Hunsucker, student at Southern Methodist University. Photo courtesy of Hunsucker.

Helping more students like Hunsucker feel that they belong at selective colleges is the goal of the STARS College Network. The initiative launched in April 2023 with a group of 16 public and private institutions that committed to improving their efforts at attracting and retaining students who grew up in rural communities. Programs at member colleges include hosting summer learning opportunities and on-campus recruitment events for high schoolers, sending more admissions staff out to high schools in small towns, and tapping current college students to serve as peer mentors to freshmen arriving from places with sparse populations or low density.

This week, the consortium announced that it is doubling its membership — to include 32 colleges and universities (see full list below) — and that its initial benefactor, Trott Family Philanthropies, has committed more than $150 million over 10 years to programs designed to support students from more remote locales.

This story also appeared in The Daily Yonder.

This growing interest is a recognition of the fact that although federal data shows 90 percent of students from rural regions graduate from high school, only about half go directly to college, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

There are many reasons for this, explains Marjorie Betley, executive director of the STARS College Network and deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students at rural high schools may lack access to adequate counseling about college options and financial aid, or they may not be offered classes that selective institutions look for among applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may never visit their communities. And unlike students in many urban and suburban areas who occasionally walk or drive by universities and see advertisements for degree programs, students living far away from campuses are “not getting these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.

“They are not seeing the full range of what is available to them,” she explains. “It causes ‘undermatching’; it causes students to prioritize what they know and what their families know as opposed to what is the best fit for them.”

On top of all that, leaders of some colleges and universities may not even realize they are missing students from rural regions, Betley says, since there are varied definitions of what counts as “rural,” making this demographic difficult to track. But it’s a population that may become more of a priority on campuses as higher education grapples with predictions that demographic changes and skepticism about the value of a degree may lead to declining enrollment in the coming years.

Will Gruen, a student at the University of Chicago who grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t necessarily see it as a problem that there is no easy way to categorize students from more-remote areas.

“Sometimes people have a very clear picture in their head of what it means to be ‘rural,’” he says. But to him, “it’s important to realize there are a lot of different types of communities” in rural places.

Will Gruen, student at the University of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Gruen.

Rather than sort students from diverse geographic regions into tidy boxes, he argues, for education programs “what it should be most about is extending opportunities to communities that don’t have the information and the resources compared to other school districts. Places that are less population-dense often don’t have the same resources that you would see in the city.”

To start to bridge that resource gap, staff at colleges that have joined the STARS network were busy during the consortium’s first year of operations. For example, they visited 1,100 rural high schools in 49 states, with many trips including a dozen or so admissions officers carpooling in minivans.

The work is already paying off. Betley reports that STARS schools extended more than 11,000 offers of admission to the Class of 2028, which was a 12.9 percent increase over the number of admissions offers made to rural students in their applicant pools last year.

Hunsucker, Gruen and two other students from rural areas explained to EdSurge what challenges they faced getting to college and described the efforts they found helpful in overcoming obstacles.

Information Gaps and the Intimidation Factor

An early difficulty in the college selection process for some students is getting access to helpful information about all the options out there.

As a teenager, Hunsucker worried about how she’d measure up in a college classroom. She wanted to enroll at an “academically rigorous” institution, she says, but also knew that “I didn’t want to waste my time applying to schools I couldn’t get into.”

“I really did not know where I stood academically,” she says.

Hunsucker’s teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students to think only about in-state colleges, she recalls. But she suspected that a private school or public school outside of Kansas might work well for her. So she did her own research, watching videos other students had posted to YouTube explaining where they’d been accepted and sharing their grades and standardized test scores to get a sense of where she might apply. That led her to apply to Southern Methodist University.

Even after she got in — and was accepted to the university’s leadership scholarship program — she wasn’t sure if she was ready for the coursework.

“I was incredibly, incredibly nervous to get to SMU and start classes,” she remembers.

She did struggle early on in a macroeconomics course. But then she started going to office hours and the tutoring center, which bolstered her confidence.

“You’re going to be nervous because you don’t know where you stand,” she says. “But if you take advantage of resources, you will do just fine.”

For students from rural areas, the very size of a university can feel intimidating. For Blaise Koda, going from a 500-student high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to Auburn University, which has more than 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, felt like “a big shock.”

“It can be overwhelming sometimes,” he says. “The biggest class I ever had in high school had maybe 30 people in it. I walked into my first chemistry class here at Auburn and there were 230 students in it.”

In high school, Koda adds, “I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class. I could tell you their name and we’d had a conversation at some point. That is simply not the case here. You see a new person every time you walk on campus. You could see someone one time and never see them again. That’s definitely very, very different.”

Blaise Koda, student at Auburn University. Photo courtesy of Koda.

What helped Koda adjust was realizing eventually that “in the end, you’re going to find your group of people, and you’re going to hang out with them a lot,” he says. “You can make your own little community, and it feels the same, almost, as in high school.”

Recruitment Efforts and Peer Mentors

What would have helped students like these transition from rural high schools to college campuses? Members of the STARS College Network are testing strategies to improve the odds of students feeling comfortable and thriving.

For Gruen, a big help came in the mail one day when he was a junior in high school. He received a flyer inviting him to apply for the Emerging Rural Leaders summer program for students, held both online and on campus at the University of Chicago — an institution he’d never heard of before. The prospect felt overwhelming, he recalls, and he didn’t apply until the last minute.

Turns out, he says, “it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. I met so many people who had such diverse backgrounds and interesting perspectives, while being very down-to-earth, nice people. That’s what made me realize I wanted to go to the University of Chicago.”

Participating in the program — which was supported by the STARS College Network — gave Gruen the opportunity to apply early to the university during his senior year. He was accepted and claimed a spot.

Chicago has a faster pace of life than he was used to, he says, but adds that people in the city aren’t so different from those back home.

“People often say there is a rural-urban divide, but I think that’s not as true as people make it out to be,” Gruen says.

As a rising senior, Avery Simpson is now doing her part to intentionally welcome more students from remote regions to her campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Having enrolled at the institution after growing up on what she calls a “farmette” — complete with chickens, acres of flower gardens and her own beehives — she spent her first semester of college feeling like, she says, “I’m really unsure if this is right for me, if I’m going to be able to do this.”

In the city, she missed her family. She missed how she had known most of the teachers in high school, as well as the students and even their parents. She had an early public transportation mishap where she ended up far from campus and had to walk all the way back. She couldn’t relate to classmates whose parents and grandparents had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I felt like I had all of these little obstacles I was overcoming freshman year that other people were already used to,” she says.

So when Simpson was searching the student jobs portal during her junior year and spotted an opportunity to work as a rural peer ambassador through a new campus program, she jumped at the chance. Now she’s part of a small team of students who make free resources to distribute to high schools throughout Wisconsin, participate in a free texting service where they answer student questions about college, and go in person to visit high schools and inform teenagers about postsecondary options.

She finds meaning in serving as a role model for them.

“Coming from a rural community, sometimes we forget we’re capable of doing what other people are able to do,” she says. “When I’m at the schools, I can see the impact I’m making on these students, and I can see myself in these students.”

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© Photos courtesy of Simpson.

During my first two years of teaching, I dealt with many situations that left me feeling downtrodden, broken and totally drained. For example, one day, I was sitting in my classroom in full panic mode as I tried to figure out how to create a graphic organizer for my students’ first essay. When an idea finally crossed my mind, and as I was about to write down my thoughts, a student stormed in and refused to leave. The more I told them they had to leave and head back to their class, the more their voice rose as they declared they, “hate their teacher.”

Another incident that I remember was when students came into my class at a time when I didn’t teach them. When these students arrived, they told me this teacher “sucks” and how mean that teacher was to them. Later, I saw a message from that same teacher whose class they had left saying, “______ are on their way to your class.”

The common denominator in each of these situations is that every student who came to me was a student of color. The demographics at this school were approximately 60 percent Latino, 20 percent Pacific Islander and 20 percent Black. All the teachers they were trying to avoid were white.

Over the course of my first year back from the “Zoom Year,” the pattern became clear to me: Students of color did not feel safe with their white teachers. All of these teachers — and I mean all — seemed more invested in shirking the responsibility of supporting these students onto the teachers these students felt safer around instead of figuring out how to become the safe space these students needed. This harmed me as much as the students.

White teachers have been avoiding the work of loving students of color for so long, and when that work disproportionately falls on teachers of color, they are more likely to leave education, creating a less diverse workplace that increasingly denies students accurate reflections of themselves.

People like myself deserve safe schools so we can last in this profession and be the best versions of ourselves in service of our students, and this is what I want white teachers to do in order for us teachers of color to thrive in this profession.

Seek Consent

When that teacher messaged me about their students, I would have loved it if they'd waited until I responded so I could ask, “Why?” What I would have loved here is consent, an ardent agreement between both of us that this student can come into my space. I would have loved transparency on the part of that teacher.

In my classroom, I treat students as humans first, not obstacles to classroom management. I am clear and honest when I know I am wrong, and I say sorry. What if, instead, I was given an opportunity to share my approach to student relationships with that teacher so they could work on their practice? What if that teacher, the student in question and I sat down together and had a consensual conversation with the student to better understand their needs? What had they done or said in their classroom that day that made this student feel unsafe? I would have felt like my autonomy and humanity were being honored because I would get to advocate for not only the student but myself.

This would require a school culture rooted in these kinds of consensual conversations, from consent over a quick hallway conversation to consent to unpack and work through the most egregious harm. Consent would have to be introduced and studied beyond the typical conversations about health and integrated into every aspect of our social interactions with each other as professionals.

Build Empathy

No one is going to get it right all the time in education. Even when we share the same identities as students, every single one of us will let many students down over the course of our time as educators. We will also let each other down, but we are in the work of being openly human all the time, and that’s okay. What matters most is how much empathy we have when we’re faced with the impact of our actions.

I want white teachers to treat me as a human being and to remember that I am just as tired as they are, if not more. I want white teachers to know I am also struggling to figure out how to help our students with the highest needs.

I remember one time I had a student who watched a neighbor get shot and killed over winter break. I was heartbroken for the student, whose return to school after the incident was incredibly rocky; his externalizing behaviors were disruptive and supporting him required the help of multiple adults. I did not know how to help a lot of the time, and yet, white teachers would let him walk out of his classroom to me as if I had more answers than they did. All I did was remember that he had been through a lot when I talked to him.

In all the situations where white teachers have pushed their work on me, what hurt the most was I genuinely felt they had no empathy for me. Had they ever wondered what it would be like for me, a first-year teacher of color, to take on so much when I was still trying to figure this job out — when I was also deeply hurting for my students experiencing trauma — the same way mine was at their age?

This would require a school culture where regular perspective-taking is happening so we can understand each other. In building this school culture, I reflect on the following questions:

• What factors did I neglect to consider when I committed this harm?
• What might this person be experiencing that I can’t understand because of my identity?
• What is this experience teaching me about myself right now?

This, too, requires a culture of empathy and acceptance of our humanity.

Show Humility

Finally, I want white teachers to say sorry. So many white teachers are so invested in their image of being “nice” in an attempt to field off their power that they forget our humanity. Their focus on overcompensating for their power by being polite results in a disproportionate emphasis on their self-image as opposed to the impact of their actions. I believe this misplaced energy results in a loss of humanity as they consequently cannot be present and empathetic enough to acknowledge the impact of their negligence.

I want white teachers to admit this to themselves. Instead of denying their power, I want them to recognize its enormity. I want them to sit with this power, to admit to themselves that they did not leverage it in an empathetic manner and, as a result, caused extraordinary harm. Then, I want them to apologize for all the harm they’ve caused. Specifically, I would want their sorry to sound like this:

“I was racist. I pushed this student on to you because I didn’t and still don’t know how to support them. I wasn’t thinking about how hard this would be for you. I am ready to do the work to regain their trust and yours. How can I do that?”

I believe this would require a top-down culture where the administration is the first to model this level of humility during staff-wide meetings and one-on-one interactions. We need to see leadership where humility is modeled and expected from every staff member.

Building a Future for Teachers of Color

How much can I really take on? I reckon with this every day because the reality is that if I care about students of color, I have to be willing to encourage the betterment of all the people they interface with, including my white counterparts. Knowing this, I want to offer what I’ve seen work with white teachers who haven’t made me feel small or dehumanized.

I’ve seen regular meetings for white teachers in affinity spaces to work on their racial identities. I’ve seen teachers who have successfully created self-sufficient classrooms and can afford to step outside with one student and have authentic restorative conversations when harm is caused. I’ve seen white teachers who recognize their racial power by positioning themselves between security and students when conflicts escalate.

I’ve also had white teachers who have recognized the imbalance of responsibilities placed on me and the power they hold compared to me. They’ve used that power to advocate for me with admin and colleagues. This has made me feel seen and has allowed me to preserve my energy for my students as opposed to defending myself against coworkers.

In all these situations, my white colleagues did not pretend to have less power than they had. In fact, they recognized it and leveraged this power so the work of loving and supporting our students in all their humanity is as equitably distributed as possible.

Because of all these positive experiences, I know it is possible — with consent, humility and empathy — to create a dynamic between teachers rooted in mutual love and care. Students of color know when their teachers of color aren’t loved. They can see it in our weariness, frustration and impatience in the same way we can see their pain on their hard days.

Imagine a world where a teacher of color feels safe going to work, and, as a result, can give her best to her students. In that world, our retention is possible. In that world, students see a future for themselves where they, too, are loved and honored. When teachers support each other by truly caring for each other, that future is possible.

© Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock

Being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as a child hasn’t hindered computer engineer Roberto Moreno from reaching his goals. ASD, a neurodevelopmental disorder, impacts how a person behaves, learns, perceives the world, and socializes with others. Moreno, an IEEE member, is a technical leader for AgenciaSur, a Chilean company that develops tools to help businesses digitize their operations. He manages six employees at the Santiago location.

Although Moreno didn’t have a mentor, he says, many people throughout his life assisted him, whether it was with schoolwork or navigating social situations. They also helped him with the mental health issues the struggles prompted.

“The people who made an impact on me,” he says, “helped me fight for the vision I had for my life so as to not fall into the depths of depression and anxiety.”

Roberto Moreno

Employer

AgenciaSur, in Santiago, Chile

Title

Technical leader

Member grade

Member

Alma mater

Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago

He says that’s why he wants to build a support system for neurodivergent engineers and students, especially those living in South America. The term neurodivergent is used to describe people whose brains process information atypically, including those with ASD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia. There is a stigma surrounding such conditions in many countries, Moreno says, leading to discrimination at school, work, and professional organizations.

Moreno helps engineering students and young professionals learn how to overcome challenges so they don’t leave the profession. He participates in mentorship programs including the one on IEEE Collabratec, sharing his experiences and helping his mentees navigate challenging situations.

Facing his biggest challenges

Moreno’s success didn’t come easily. Growing up, he faced quite a few challenges including learning how to read, write, and speak English. Moreno is extremely literal and finds it hard to understand sarcasm, as is common among people with ASD.

That made learning a new language more challenging.

In Spanish, he notes, “the graphemes and phonemes differ greatly from Germanic ones.” Graphemes are individual letters or groups of letters that represent speech sounds. Phonemes are the speech sounds that make up words. The difference in graphemes and phonemes makes it difficult to quickly make the connection between words and their meaning in Germanic languages, Moreno says.

He also struggles with the “go with the flow” attitude. He prefers to follow the rules and social norms at all times.

“This caused people to treat me differently,” he says.

When Moreno didn’t know or recognize what was causing his discomfort, it would drain him emotionally, he says. But if he never tried to understand the causes, he says, he wouldn’t have achieved his goals.

“Experiencing things that are out of my comfort zone has led to a lot of personal growth,” he says. “For example, if I had been influenced by people who discriminated against me, I would not feel comfortable being interviewed by The Institute.”

Tips for staying organized and mentally healthy

Having difficulty with being organized is common in people with autism, Moreno says.

Students especially find it difficult to manage their time. Moreno suggests they use programs such as Kanban and Pomofocus to create to-do lists and track the status of their homework and other projects.

Making time for oneself—to play a video game, say, or exercise—is necessary, he says. It’s especially important for students who are easily overwhelmed by their environment, such as bright lights in a classroom, a room that’s too hot or cold, or a place with many loud noises. Setting aside time for hobbies also can help prevent meltdowns, which are common for people with ASD when their nervous system is overloaded.

Recognizing employees’ needs

It’s important for employers to understand that some neurodivergent employees can become intensely focused on activities, causing them to lose track of time and their surroundings, Moreno says. He suggests that managers split large projects into multiple tasks. So-called atomic tasks can make an assignment more manageable and less overwhelming. The method also allows employees to better manage their time.

Managers should also accommodate their employees’ needs, Moreno says.

“For example, one of my team members was having personal difficulties, and because of this he often completed his tasks late at night,” he says. “When assigning him a project, I needed to take this into consideration and estimate how long it would take him to complete it so as to not cause him more stress.”

How IEEE can support neurodivergent members

Being part of IEEE’s technical communities has been invaluable to Moreno’s professional success, he says. As an IEEE Computer Society member, he learned how to be more positive, see the humor in difficult situations, and not be as emotionally affected.

“I have learned a lot from more experienced technical professionals,” he says, “and I continue to grow as an engineer.”

There are ways IEEE can better support neurodivergent members, he says, including creating programs in collaboration with neurodivergent people. For example, he says, IEEE Women in Engineering could expand its Student-Teacher and Research Engineer/Scientist (STAR) program, which connects preuniversity girls with an engineer or scientist to encourage them to pursue a STEM career. The initiative, he says, could add a category specifically for neurodivergent students, enabling them to be mentored by a neurodivergent engineer or scientist.

Moreno suggests that IEEE streamline its proposal process for new projects, including keeping a record of what proposals were accepted or rejected and why. The feedback would help IEEE volunteers replicate successful proposals when writing their own, he says.

IEEE also could update the wording of its bylaws to prevent arbitrary interpretations. Neurodivergent people are likely to miss linguistic subtleties, sarcasm, and irony, he notes. They need regulations to be clear and direct so they can better comply with the rules and use the appropriate terms with other members. The wording in the IEEE Code of Ethics, he says, is a good example of a document that avoids arbitrary discriminatory language.

The benefits of an IEEE membership

The most important member benefit is the networking opportunities, Moreno says. “Without IEEE I would not have been able to meet and work with talented engineers and members such as Tania Quiel, Fernando Boucher, Nita Patel, and others,” he says.

Another benefit is the leadership training he received from participating in the IEEE Volunteer Leadership Training Program. The IEEE Member and Geographic Activities program provides members with resources and an overview of the organization, including its culture and mission.

“VoLT strengthened my soft skills and encouraged me to continue to work towards achieving my professional goals,” he says.

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

A couple of years ago, as schools that had been forced to go virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic began to bring students back on campus, Pedro Olvera noticed that his phone started ringing more.

Olvera spent much of his career as a school psychologist in Santa Ana Unified School District, just a stone’s throw from Disneyland, where about 40 percent of students are English learners who speak Spanish.

He’s now a school psychology clinical manager at the staffing agency BlazerWorks, where he works with school districts to advise school psychologists in the district. That’s a task that’s getting harder for districts everywhere, he says, as the demand for student mental health support increases while the pipeline of qualified clinicians remains bottlenecked.

But the school districts that are reaching out to Olvera for help need an even rarer creature — bilingual school psychologists who can evaluate Spanish-speaking children for special education needs.

That’s because, leaders tell Olvera, schools that never needed this type of professional before are seeing an influx of English learners, in districts in states like Louisiana, Iowa and Colorado.

Beyond that, it’s inherently high stakes to determine whether a child needs special education services or more language support. Schools don’t want to misclassify a student with special needs as one who needs more help learning English, or for a child who simply needs support with English to be placed in special education.

Adding a language barrier between a child and school psychologist makes the evaluation more complex, Olvera says.

“It’s always been a challenge. Are learning difficulties due to differences, meaning due to language, or disorder?” Olvera says. “That’s always been a challenge, given that when you look at these nationwide scores, kids who are English learners tend to have these gaps in achievement.”

What Makes The Job Different?

While school psychologists have standard tests they can use to determine if a child needs special education services, Olvera says there’s a lot more to the process than one assessment. They need to know how language affects learning — or how trauma does, if the child is a refugee. The psychologist will also talk to a student’s parent about the child’s behavior at home.

“If we were to add another layer, it’s that cultural variable,” Olvera says. “Dealing with children that may be from Central America, South America, Asia, and understanding how that culture also comes into play with your assessments. What if there’s items on the assessment that are not familiar with the kid’s culture? How do you take account of that?”

Monica Oganes is a licensed school psychologist with 20 years in the field and has worked with the National Association of School Psychologists on trainings about evaluating multilingual learners for special needs.

She says the dearth of bilingual school psychologists has long been a problem, and it resurfaces each time the U.S. experiences an increase in immigration.

That’s why she’s a proponent of school psychologists, regardless of their own language abilities, getting trained to evaluate multilingual children. Even professionals who are bilingual in English and Spanish will face a language barrier if they are called to evaluate a child who speaks one of the hundreds of other languages spoken by families in the U.S.

Like Olvera, Oganes says there are simply more intricacies when it comes to evaluating an English learner for possible special needs. It starts with how the child arrived in the country.

“Basically all immigrant children have stress, but some have significant trauma because, in their home country, maybe they were exposed to traumatic events that caused them to leave their country,” Oganes explains, such as gang violence or the death of a parent. “Sometimes trauma creates behaviors. We’ve had children referred for autism evaluations, and when I got to evaluation, they’re severely traumatized by their situation. [That’s why] they’re not socializing.”

Immigrant children may have had fewer opportunities to attend school or come from countries where public education is lower quality than in the U.S., she adds.

“Not only are they learning in a second language, but their literacy may not be up to par, their math may not be up to par,” Oganes says. “If the quality of education is not up to par, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have a learning disability or a disability period.”

School psychologists working with multilingual learners have to be well-versed in how trauma affects brain development, she adds, namely in the hippocampus that regulates emotions and memory. But simply being bilingual and learning in multiple languages affects the brain, too.

“There are some languages that do not have plurals, so now they’re making errors in reading and writing,” Oganes offers as an example. “Does that have to do with orthography differences? Because your brain processes with your native language manifesting first, and the brain has to suppress the native language to produce the second language. That could take five to seven years from the time they enter the school.”

© Paul Craft/ Shutterstock

Something crucial was missing from classrooms over the past school year: millions of students who were part of the chronic absenteeism crisis that plagued districts large and small.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

Could better communication between schools and parents alleviate the problem?

That’s the theory one nonprofit has. It partnered with Google for a massive, AI-powered analysis of 40 million messages in its app to find how parents and teachers are exchanging information.

The organization, called TalkingPoints, is betting that helping parents — especially those who are immigrants or are low-income — feel engaged with schools will increase both attendance and students’ academic performance.

Through its new analysis, TalkingPoints set out to find what educators and parents were most commonly talking about via messaging and the tone of those conversations. The messages analyzed were sent through the TalkingPoints app by administrators, teachers and parents over 15 months.

The results found that 44 percent of the messages were around logistics — things like school closures on snow days, says Heejae Lim, TalkingPoints founder and CEO. The next largest class of messages was what the report calls standard replies — responses like “thank you” or “have a good day” — at 34 percent.

Only 8 percent of messages were about academics, followed by homework at 5 percent.

To Lim, that means there’s a lot of room for improvement in how educators and parents are communicating. In an ideal world, she explains, most of those electronic conversations would center on learning.

“We know that research shows that there needs to be more conversations about student learning, behaviors, engagement,” Lim says. “All the other higher-quality conversation topics that we think should happen comes back to: there might be a lot of quantity [of] the conversations. But are they quality conversations? Not necessarily.”

Part of why Lim wants to change how educators and parents talk to each other is because TalkingPoints is turning its attention to how communication can potentially lower chronic absenteeism. The app’s use for that purpose is being piloted in 29 districts with a collective 89,000 students.

The hope is this creates a digital trail of an absent student so that the principal or other specialists can figure out the root cause for why they’re missing.

“We see ourselves as being in this really critical moment, where education inequities are rising,” says Laila Brenner, TalkingPoints’ head of philanthropy. “We have chronic absenteeism, we have decades of learning loss, and then we have this wave of advances in technology and AI that are giving us the potential to really scale, personalize and customize communications in a way that was never possible before. So how do we bring these two things together and really drive the impact?”

Past research that TalkingPoints undertook on its app use in a large urban school suggests that the approach can work, Lim says.

And other research has pointed to the importance of improving parent-teacher communication. For instance, a report from the Carnegie Corporation called engaging with immigrant families essential to students’ academic success.

“Given that students spend far more time at home and in the community than they do at school, building strong connections between diverse families and educators is essential to supporting student learning, especially as immigrants and children of immigrants are some of the fastest-growing populations in the country,” the report says.

What Does ‘Best Practices’ Mean?

One of TalkingPoints’ guiding principles is that opening up the lines of communication with parents — and what Lim calls “high-quality” communication that focuses on academics — ultimately benefits students. Those conversations should be centered on learning, generally keep a positive tone and start early in the year.

According to the analysis, only 31 percent of messages sent by educators and parents of secondary school students met those guidelines. At the elementary level, it was 19 percent.

The roots of the nonprofit were seeded when Lim was growing up in a London suburb, where her Korean immigrant mother worked hard to overcome the language barrier to ask teachers what she could do to support her daughter’s education. Other Korean parents who were likewise eager to help their children do well in class flocked to Lim’s mother to ask what teachers had said.

“My mom became like a parent spokesperson, interpreter, kind of a communications person for the school’s Korean parents, and that I think it really impacted my academic career trajectory and my sisters’ at the time,” Lim says.

It left an impression on Lim, how those parents separated from the school by language still sought ways to be involved.

“Later, I found out that family engagement truly has so much potential to drive and impact student outcomes — there's a ton of academic research that shows this,” Lim explains. “But the blueprint of how to do that well, in terms of best practices, doesn't quite exist, and families and schools face a lot of barriers in engaging and building relationships with each other in ways that can really support the student.”

In some cases, teachers may feel nervous or avoid interactions with parents, worried that it could be too time-consuming or contentious, Crystal Frommert, a middle school math teacher who wrote a book on the topic, told EdSurge in a podcast interview earlier this year.

© Alphavector / Shutterstock

Huong, 15, competes at the Golden Gate Science Olympiad in Air Trajectory, which requires a build that uses the gravitational potential energy of a falling weight to launch a ping pong ball at a bucket some distance away. She is the only girl in a crew with three older male teammates.

Huong says she has learned much from them, especially applying physics and math theory to their builds. At first, however, “it was walking into a room with guys and their hammers and drills doing all the engineering, like girls aren’t meant for this,” she says. “But then I went home and designed the weight system that we now use. Solving the problem that men are supposed to do motivated me.”

Huong is a member of the Milpitas High School Science Olympiad team outside of San Jose, California. It was founded in 2008 by Letta Meyer, the school's AP chemistry and forensics teacher. Meyer had heard about the competition along with one of her students, and they decided to start up a team from scratch. Since then, more than 300 students have been Milpitas High Science Olympians.

Science Olympiad is an extracurricular science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competition involving some 7,800 high and middle school teams across the United States. Tournaments are organized like track meets, where a team of up to 15 students compete, mostly in pairs, across 23 science events like Astronomy, Microbe Mission, Flight, Codebusters and Robot Tour. These events are written tests, physical labs, engineered builds and hybrid activities combining these different elements. The competitions are only a small part of the overall activity, as team members spend an average of between six and 10 hours a week throughout the year studying, soldering, prototyping, logging, catalyzing, memorizing, constructing, programming, analyzing or whatever it takes to succeed in their events.

One of Meyer’s aims with the team is to attract more girls into STEM. A first-generation college graduate, she remembers roadblocks to girls growing up in the 1990s, like being urged to prioritize getting married and having kids over seeking education. She was good at math and was planning to study accounting like her older sister. Then she took a general science class for non-majors. There, seeing a demonstration of igniting hydrogen and oxygen in a balloon to form water led to a fascination with science that she continues to share with her students today.

In 2023, noting the persistent underrepresentation of women in STEM fields overall, especially engineering and technology, Meyer published a case study on the impact of Science Olympiad on female team members’ STEM identity as her doctoral dissertation at the University of San Francisco. She found that participating in this kind of program, which is more collaborative than competitive, allows girls “a safe space to develop STEM identity and personal specific STEM interests.”

These photographs follow the Milpitas High School team through the 2024 Science Olympiad season, with a focus on female students. Their images, views and experiences touch on a number of observations Meyer makes in her dissertation as key to sustaining young women’s sense of belonging in STEM, including:

• participation in a safe space where perfection is not expected
• support for exploring areas outside of one’s comfort zone
• girls and boys collaborating in a community of teammates, partners and role models
• growing competence leading to deeper interest and internal motivation
• confidence and competition readying students for the outside STEM world.

The Milpitas High School Science Olympiad team's season ended in March, when it came in fifth in the Santa Clara County Regionals, missing qualification for NorCal State Finals by one place. Monta Vista High (Cupertino), the team that won Regionals, went on to win NorCal, and at the end of May won the 40th Annual Science Olympiad National Tournament at Michigan State University.

Brianna, 14, and Darren, 16, set up for Scrambler, where the energy from a falling mass drives an egg-laden vehicle as close to a barrier as possible without cracking the eggshell.

Before middle school, Brianna never thought about science; she was into princesses and unicorns. She was bored by a programming course her software engineer father made her take, and didn’t like the idea of studying for competitive tests outside of school. She did enjoy making things — clay, painting, origami — so on this year’s team she became known as the freshman girl who does builds: Flight, Tower and Scrambler.

“In Sci Oly, you and your partner are on your own, hands-on, no teacher,” she says. “It’s all the test runs and failed trials that make you better. YOLO, right?”

For Tower, Saga, 15, and her partner Sukhad, 18, build a wood and glue structure required to be at least 60 centimeters tall and able to span a 20 by 20 centimeter opening. Points are awarded by dividing the weight the tower can bear (sand in a bucket suspended by a chain) by the weight of the tower itself. Using lightweight balsa, their best tower weighed just 6.2 grams and held over the maximum 15 kilograms of sand. Over three months of testing and competing in the 2024 season, the pair built and destroyed 15 towers.

Saga says, “I had never been extremely competitive. But when I was a freshman, at one tournament in Forestry, we ended up just 0.5 points from sixth place, which is where the medals start. That was it. We started studying like crazy. And the next competition we got third.”

An, 17, studies with her partner, Roman, 17, for Disease Detectives, where competitors apply epidemiology principles to come to conclusions about real-life outbreaks and other public health situations. She compares being part of Science Olympiad to her experience on the school swim team.

“I’m one of the faster girls, so I often train with the guys,” she says. “For a long time, they acted like I didn’t deserve to swim with them. I was on the edge. I felt I had to prove myself.”

The Science Olympiad team, on the other hand, is a “safe, happy, welcoming place,” she says, where she has worked well with male teammates, including a three-year partnership with Roman in multiple events. “Collaboration makes me more confident.”

Isabella (right), 14, and Vanessa (left), 16, compete in Forensics at the Golden Gate Science Olympiad at the University of California, Berkeley.

In addition to Science Olympiad, Isabella also competes in basketball, volleyball and track.

“In sports, guys have the biological advantage,” she says. “They are stronger and faster. But intelligence isn’t based on gender. I want to show the world I’m just as smart as any guy. Look at Dr. Meyer. She’s so knowledgeable. If she’s in STEM, I can be in STEM, too.”

When Vanessa joined the team last year, her first feeling was, “oh, these are the smart people.” She doesn’t see herself as a competitive person, but as a relative latecomer to Sci Oly, she was eager to catch up with her teammates. “They are elite, but also down to earth, overcoming the same struggles. So I think, maybe in the future I will be like that.”

She says her father and mother used to be “tiger parents,” strictly managing her and her younger sister to meet high expectations for academic success. Going into COVID-19 lockdown just after moving from Taiwan to the U.S. five years ago, however, changed things. “Spending a lot of time together, we figured out each other’s boundaries.”

Vanessa’s father, a software engineer, has an optimistic practical viewpoint. She says, “He wants me to go into STEM. He says I will have an easier time getting a job because companies are starting to look for more women.”

Meyer’s AP chemistry classroom also serves as the Milpitas High School Science Olympiad headquarters. She loves teaching but sees Sci Oly as an opportunity for students to explore and compete.

In her dissertation, she discusses research about girls’ conditioned aversion to competition as a roadblock to success in STEM. She adds, “If there’s no competition, there’s no reason to push further. Without stress, there’s no drive. With too much, though, it’s paralyzing, and we see impostor syndrome, like they don’t belong. So there’s a sweet spot that is different for different girls.”

As a Milpitas freshman, Annabelle, 19, wasn’t familiar with Science Olympiad, but she was interested in marine biology and the team “had the word ‘science’ in it,” she says. She started as one of two girls among 15 older boys in Detector Building, where students engineer electronic sensor devices. “I got to see the STEM gap in real life. The guys gathered together and left us out. That experience steered me away from electronics,” she says.

She felt a better fit in lab and test events, where more girls were involved than in the builds. But then she added Bridge (similar to Tower but emphasizing length over height) as a junior. She saw an older female student succeeding there, so she felt less intimidated, and medalled in a number of competitions.

In 2022, she was named a senior captain on a team that reached NorCal State Finals. “Dr. Meyer prepared us to diversify and make everyone feel included. We decided to encourage more girls to participate in the builds, to show that they can do very well and also help males learn how to collaborate with females,” Annabelle says.

Bridge pushed Annabelle out of her comfort zone and, along with a growing interest in environmental sustainability, made her decide to major in civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also learning to machine and weld parts for a much larger structure as part of the university’s Steel Bridge Team. In engineering, she feels women often have to be more extroverted and aggressive to be heard. But she says, “I am glad I made this choice.”

Brianna, 14 and Darren, 16, practice with their rubber band-powered, mylar-winged airplane for the Flight event, where teams place higher the longer their aircraft stays aloft.

Meyer sits nearby, but the students cover virtually all of the design, planning and decisions. They don’t get to practice much because Flight requires a big indoor space, and the gym is usually in use by the sports teams.

The partners decided to work together on both Flight and Scrambler because each of them could take charge of building one thing: Brianna the plane and Darren the vehicle. He says, “I am most interested in everyone having an equal amount of responsibility. Yes there is systemic sexism, but I’m not looking at gender. I just want to see what my teammates can do.”

Trophies the team has won in competitions get stashed in various corners of Meyer’s chemistry classroom, including the laboratory fume hood. This reflects the way students view the awards: in the moment, they affirm their abilities, serving as extra confidence boosters and a means of measuring effort and accomplishment. In the end, however, they become a minor part of the team experience. Saga says “The joy of medalling lasts about 15 minutes, but the whole thing is so much fun.”

Between events at the Santa Clara County Regionals, team members prepare, eat, do homework, rest and socialize. Brianna jumps over the table while Vanessa (facing camera) has lunch while chatting with a teammate.

Vanessa says, “We bond over science, and that becomes friendship. Being partnered with males starts out differently than with females. It’s a little awkward, a bit more formal. The turning point is after we’ve taken one official test together. When we come out, we just feel relief and all the tension is gone. We look at each other and say ‘It’s over. Let’s go eat.’”

At the Santa Clara County Regionals (which were hosted this March by Milpitas High), Meyer grabs a quick bite at the team table, run by parent volunteers supporting the students. There are 40 high school and 27 middle school teams in the competition. Milpitas has 60 students present: three teams plus alternates.

An and Roman practice scenarios for Optics, where they use mirrors to guide a laser beam through a box-field of obstacles.

Ananya, 16, shows devices she engineered with her partners for Detector Building and Robot Tour. She enjoys the hands-on approach to specific problems. She also enjoys improvising solutions. Discussing their Detector, an electronic probe that measures concentration and voltage of salt solutions, she says, “At Regionals we had one minute to do the last reading. But the piece of zinc that goes into the solution came unsoldered from the wire, so the reaction wasn’t happening and we were kind of screwed. Then I told my partner to put his finger in there to complete the circuit and it worked. We even medalled!”

Working with circuits has overlapped in other interests, such as building an electric guitar to play in her indy band. She sees a lot of similarities as a girl in music and STEM: “It’s OK to be wrong. Everyone’s on the same footing. It’s OK to take up space — speak up and be heard.”

Ava, 18, and her partner Andrew, 17, wait for the beginning of Chem Lab at the Santa Clara County Regionals, where they ultimately took first place in the event.

When Ava started high school, she didn’t consider herself a science or math person — she was a creative writer. She joined Sci Oly because Meyer was previously her piano teacher and “she was always talking about the team.” This year she served as one of three senior captains. She still writes — long-form adventure and fantasy — but after four years on the team, she says, “you realize you are also a STEM person, using a broad, very powerful span of knowledge that covers more than one discipline.”

Thomas Russell Middle School is one of two middle schools that feed into Milpitas High — their Science Olympiad team wears green team shirts instead of the blue of the older students. Middle school is an important place for young people to start getting into STEM, but high school is where it really starts to lock in for most.

The team takes a selfie together during the awards ceremony at the end of Santa Clara County Regionals. Many of the students say the group feels like a close-knit family. In Meyer’s dissertation, she notes charter buses as a crucial, underrated item in the budget, because the long rides to competitions help bond the teammates as a community.

After the season ended in a fifth place finish, Meyer says, “I told them that results — good or bad — don’t define us. It’s how we perform over the entire season. And it’s not like things end. We are hosting an elementary tournament and choosing new captains. A lot of them are already talking about what they want to do next year.”

Brianna, 14, shows medals she won in Flight and Tower at the Santa Clara County Regionals as her mother, Liya Yang, takes a photo. Yang, a biology lab lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, feels that pursuing specific research left her own career path very narrow, so she is glad that Brianna is getting wider, more practical experience in Science Olympiad.

In a Zoom interview, Yang says she would like her daughter to study medicine, but Yang’s husband is pushing for engineering. Yang says, “Engineering is a male field. I’m not sure how comfortable she will be.”

Off-screen, Brianna’s voice cuts in: “I will be fine!” ⚡

As educators, we understand that true learning happens when barriers are removed and diverse voices are amplified. Recently, we took the stage at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference to share our experiences designing accessible conferences and events. This wasn't a one-way lecture; it was a collaborative exploration, inviting the audience to contribute their insights and perspectives. Our goal? To inspire a shift in how we approach conference planning, moving beyond mere compliance to foster environments where every attendee can fully engage, learn and thrive.

Conferences serve as focal points for exchanging ideas, networking and professional growth. However, amidst the hustle and bustle of logistical planning and content curation, it is important not to overlook the crucial aspect of accessibility. Accessible conferences ensure that all attendees, regardless of physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities, can participate fully and engage with the content and networking opportunities. This inclusivity fosters a richer exchange of ideas and knowledge, contributing to the overall success of the conference.

Creating accessible conferences goes beyond simply meeting standards; it reflects a deep commitment to fostering equity and inclusivity in every aspect of the event.

Plan Purposefully and Proactively

The journey toward inclusivity begins with a proactive mindset, one that acknowledges and anticipates the diverse needs of attendees. Institutions and companies must embed accessibility considerations into every stage of the conference planning process. This involves engaging with disabled individuals directly, seeking their insights and perspectives to inform decision-making.

As a product accessibility lead at Anthology and someone with a personal stake in accessibility, Lomellini has been deeply involved in the planning of Anthology Together 24, alongside other disabled colleagues. Our firsthand experiences and insights are critical in shaping the event. By sharing our feedback, we help the organizers identify potential barriers that might not be obvious to someone without similar experiences. This collaborative approach is essential for implementing effective solutions and enhancing the overall accessibility of the conference.

Forming an accessibility committee stands as a cornerstone of this endeavor. This committee comprises individuals with disabilities, advocates and experts in accessibility and serves as a dedicated entity tasked with ensuring that accessibility remains a focal point throughout the planning process. Their role extends beyond mere oversight; they actively contribute insights, review plans and propose innovative solutions to address accessibility challenges comprehensively.

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Image credit: Rebecca M. Reese

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Ensure Physical Accessibility

Physical accessibility encompasses a spectrum of considerations, ranging from Braille signage, wheelchair access to restroom facilities, ensuring ample spaces for wheelchairs in sessions, providing accessible routes and elevators, and checking the functionality of automatic door openers. Additionally, designated quiet spaces offer respite for individuals who may require a break from the sensory stimuli of the conference environment. For Anthology Together 24, Anthology has people walk through the conference spaces to identify areas for improvement. During the conference, requiring speakers to use microphones and keeping pathways clear of barriers are just a few measures that can significantly enhance inclusivity within physical spaces. Incorporating features such as picture-in-picture sign language interpretation during main-stage presentations exemplifies a commitment to inclusivity on the physical front.

Don’t Forget About Digital Accessibility

Recommended Resources:

• Anthology Together
• American Educational Research Association (AERA) Disabilities Studies in Education Special Interest Group (SIG)
• Accessible Conference Guide by Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing
• Anthology Together 2024: Accessibility Frequently Asked Questions
• Anthology Celebrates Global Accessibility Awareness Month

In the digital dimension, accessibility extends to the design of conference materials and platforms. Mobile accessibility, for instance, supports individuals in navigating conference resources seamlessly using their smartphones or tablets. At Anthology, we have worked closely with our mobile vendor to improve the accessibility of the platform. Additionally, providing options for sign language interpretation, both in person and via virtual platforms, enhances the accessibility of presentations and discussions for individuals who are Deaf or hard of hearing.

Beyond infrastructure and technology, fostering a culture of inclusivity involves providing support mechanisms. Having knowledgeable staff or volunteers available to answer questions and offer assistance ensures that attendees can navigate the conference with ease. Establishing avenues for individuals to request specific accommodations, such as sign language interpretation or assistance navigating the venue, demonstrates a commitment to meeting diverse needs effectively. Anthology provides an online frequently asked questions page to help answer accessibility questions and empower participants to make informed decisions. We also encourage people to note any accessibility needs they would like us to consider on the registration form. However, we still anticipate diversity and plan for accessibility proactively.

Continuously Commit to Accessibility

Creating accessible conferences goes beyond simply meeting standards; it reflects a deep commitment to fostering equity and inclusivity in every aspect of the event. By proactively involving disabled individuals throughout the planning process, institutions and companies can create environments where all participants can engage, learn and contribute fully. At Anthology, we continue to strive to build more inclusive spaces; prioritizing accessibility in conference design serves as a testament to our collective commitment to diversity and equality in all facets of society.

© Image Credit: Lomb / Shutterstock

PUEBLO, Colorado — Standing in her living room, Isabel Valencia sets up her makeshift tennis serve with the materials on hand: a green balloon for a ball and a ruler affixed to a paper plate for a racket.

She bats the balloon to her home visitor, Mayra Ocampo, and they pass it back and forth, counting each return, offering encouragement and laughing at their mistakes.

The moment is light and playful, as it likely will be later in the week, when Valencia tries the same activity with her 4-year-old daughter Celeste. But Ocampo takes care to explain what’s happening beneath the surface: They’re not just playing tennis. They’re building social skills. They’re working on hand-eye coordination. And they’re practicing numeracy.

Home visitor Mayra Ocampo, left, and parent Isabel Valencia practice social and motor skills during a makeshift game of tennis. Photo by Eric Lars Bakke for AP.

Valencia, who came to the U.S. from Colombia a few years ago, found Ocampo through a free home visiting program that supports families with their children's early learning and development.

The model — and others like it — has provided a lifeline for families, especially those for whom access to quality early education is scarce or out of reach financially. These programs, which are set to expand with new federal support, are proven to help prepare children for school but have reached relatively few families.

It was during a trip to the grocery store in 2022 with her two young kids that somebody told Valencia about the home visiting program. She had moved to Pueblo, Colorado, only a few months earlier and was feeling isolated. She hadn’t met anyone else who spoke Spanish.

“I didn’t leave my house,” she says through an interpreter, “so I thought I was the only one.”

This story was published in collaboration with The Associated Press.

The Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program, known as HIPPY, provides families with a trained support person — in Valencia’s case, Ocampo — who visits their home every week, showing them how to engage their children with fun, high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities.

The HIPPY program is unique for its two-generation approach. Through regular home visits and monthly group meetings, parents learn how to promote early literacy and social-emotional skills from staff who went through the program themselves and often share the same language and background as the families they serve.

The program is primarily implemented in low-income neighborhoods, as well as through school districts and organizations reaching immigrant and refugee families, says Miriam Westheimer, chief program officer for HIPPY International, which operates in 15 countries and 20 U.S. states.

Many other home visiting models exist, each with distinct features. Some employ registered nurses as home visitors, focusing on maternal and child health; others send social workers or early childhood specialists. They can begin as early as pregnancy or, as in the case of HIPPY, serve families with toddlers and preschool-aged children.

In the U.S., two dozen home visiting models have received a stamp of approval — and with it, access to funding — from the federal government’s Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program.

Dr. Michael Warren, associate administrator of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau at the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the MIECHV program, has seen first-hand the way home visiting can strengthen families but says that, right now, its scope is too limited.

An estimated 17 million families nationwide stand to benefit from the type of voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services that Valencia receives. Yet in 2022, only about 270,000 did.

“That is purely because of resources,” notes Warren. “If more resources exist, more families can be served.”

Fortunately, he says, reinforcements are on the way.

The federal investment in the MIECHV program is set to double from $400 million to $800 million annually, by 2027. Beginning this year, the federal government will match $3 for every $1 in non-federal funds spent on home visiting programs, up to a certain amount. Since many states already have funding mechanisms in place — through a combination of public, nonprofit and private contributions — it is expected to be an easy win.

In interviews with more than 20 individuals who conduct, receive or research home visits, and in observation of two home visits in Colorado and Texas, the extent of this service’s impact on families and communities became clear.

Now in her second year of the HIPPY program, Valencia is a more confident parent. She says the structured curriculum she follows, paired with Ocampo’s support, have helped her prepare her daughter to thrive in preschool.

© Photo by Eric Lars Bakke for AP

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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Thinking back to her days as a bilingual teacher to fourth graders, Crystal Gonzales recalls that some of the suggestions offered by curriculum materials to adapt lessons for English learners were downright insulting.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

“They were very simplified,” she says. “They were like, ‘Show them a picture.’ Not very rigorous at all.”

Instead, Gonzales stayed for hours after school translating and developing her own materials for her students. Now as executive director for the English Learners Success Forum, she’s part of the growing push for the creation and adoption of learning materials that are inclusive of multilingual students.

But federal data on the academic outcomes of English learners reveals how Gonzales says they have long been considered: an afterthought.

While the education field continues to grapple with how to reverse test score slides that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, results from the National Assessment of Education Progress — also called the Nation’s Report Card — show that an alarming rate of English learners have been performing below the basic mastery level in reading and math. In some cases, the numbers have hardly budged in the last 20 years.

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