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.

Crisis. Fatalistic. Overwhelming.

That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.

They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.

One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.

Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.

These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.

“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”

What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?

Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.

“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”

Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.

“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.

But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.

“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”

Changing the Narrative

Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.

Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.

“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don't fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”

View From a School District

Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.

Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.

“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”

Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.

It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.

While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.

“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”

© mentalmind / Shutterstock

There are plenty of changes teachers say could help them do their jobs better, such as adequate planning time and support for their well-being.

Louisiana’s Department of Education decided to tackle some of these challenges by bringing together a group of teachers to recommend solutions — and they’re seeing change take shape.

The Let Teachers Teach workgroup released its list of recommendations in May, and their ideas span improvements for dealing with issues including professional development, student discipline and what one of the state’s top education leaders calls “the art of teaching.”

“To me, teaching is a pedagogical science, but it requires an artistic delivery,” Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley says. “Unfortunately, many teachers — due to bureaucracies or inadequacies of leadership — feel as if they're more of a robot than a professional.”

The 18 recommendations don’t mince words when describing the problems teachers face. Its section on training eschews “redundant professional learning sessions” in favor of strategies like individually tailored teacher growth plans and more time for better collaboration and planning.

One of the recommendations on discipline is titled “Trust us — don’t blame us,” calling for “excessively disruptive” students to be removed from the classroom and for “ungovernable students” to be assigned to attend alternative schools. This kind of “exclusionary discipline” practice has its critics, who argue it can be counterproductive and that it unfairly targets students who are racial minorities. However, post-pandemic, some teachers are looking for new solutions as they’ve struggled to manage what they call worsened student behaviors.

Brumley says that four recommendations became laws during the state’s spring legislative session. They include a law requiring disruptive students to be removed from class at a teacher’s request and prohibiting retaliation against the teacher.

Others will ban cellphone use in schools starting in the fall and require extra pay for teachers’ “non-academic” work, which Brumley says might include activities like working the concession stand at a school football game.

The legislature also tasked the Louisiana Department of Education and State Board of Education with devising a more effective plan for state-mandated training, Brumley explains. The Let Teachers Teach recommendations described these trainings as something teachers do “outside of the normal school day and without compensation.”

Brumley says he wanted the working group to come up with “real-world solutions to make the profession stronger while keeping in mind that student outcomes have to be paramount.” The concept was to address problems that teachers consistently told him hindered their ability to do their job.

“A very clear example is I will hear teachers say, ‘My school forces me to read a script,’” Brumley says. “We were very clear around that particular concept in the recommendations: Unless it is explicit, direct instructions or it's a novice teacher or a struggling teacher, effective teachers need the autonomy to deliver the content through the art of the profession and not simply reading from a script.”

While Brumley and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry have come out in strong support of the recommendations — they led a news conference announcing the document’s release — that’s not to say the education landscape there is without conflict.

Low earning potential has some Louisiana teachers wondering how much longer they can stay in the field, and the governor declined to back permanent pay raises. It’s also a place where culture wars are playing out, which teachers say are a mental strain — the governor is suing the federal government over expanded Title IX guidelines that protect transgender students from discrimination.

© eamesBot / Shutterstock

It’s no secret that high school students are looking at the prospect of college more skeptically, and a large part of their hesitation comes from worry about taking on thousands of dollars in student loans.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

It’s only natural that they would experience sticker shock after researching the annual cost of attendance at universities that have caught their eye — which might be equivalent to a parent’s annual salary.

But should students count on having to scrape together that full amount?

Not likely, based on EdSurge’s number crunching.

Students generally don’t pay the full cost of attendance at public universities, according to federal data from College Scorecard. While the data only tracks students who receive federal financial aid — be it grants or loans — it shows that students typically get some level of discount even at the priciest public institutions and regardless of income level.

Across 1,800 public colleges and universities, the average full-price cost of attendance clocked in about $17,300 per year. Factoring in students’ grants and scholarships, it fell to a net average cost $10,200.

Yet seeing the gross cost of attendance can be intimidating for college-minded high schoolers and their families, particularly for those who are low-income or who aspire to be the first in their families to graduate with an advanced degree.

Before dismissing a college or university based on sticker price, students should use an institution’s net price calculator to see what they might be paying after financial aid, says Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

“Like with all things in postsecondary education, there's no one size fits all. Some schools would have lots of students that don't pay full price, and some schools would have most that do,” she explains. But the full cost of attendance is “not what most students pay. So don't be turned off by the sticker price. Odds are good that what you'll pay will be discounted to some degree.”

How Family Income Affects Tuition Prices

There were extremes on either side of the net price spectrum, with a handful of colleges reporting that students got money back on average thanks to receiving financial aid, while at others, students saw little difference between the pre- and post-financial aid price tags.

The University of California, Berkeley, is one of the country’s most expensive public universities, with an annual average cost of attendance slightly more than $41,000, according to federal data. That includes tuition, fees, books, other supplies and living expenses.

After grants and scholarships are applied, however, that figure falls to an average net price of about $17,400. Students in the lowest income bracket — with a family income of $30,000 or less — are left with an average net price of $9,200. While not exactly cheap, it’s roughly one-fifth of the original price tag. Students in the data’s highest financial bracket — with a family income of more than $110,000 — saw an average net price of $36,200.

This tracks with an analysis for the Brookings Institution, which found that family income is a better indicator than the full sticker price of what a student can expect to pay for tuition. Nonresident senior fellow Phillip Levine found that, between the 1995 and 2019 academic years, the share of college students who pay the full cost of attendance fell from 53 percent to 26 percent for those enrolled in state at public colleges. It fell from 29 percent to 16 percent for those enrolled at private, nonprofit colleges.

“The typical net price increases with income,” he states in the report. “Every additional dollar of income translates to around a 16-cent increase in net price.”

The net cost of a higher education has gone up for students at all income levels, he writes.

Given all of the variables that go into calculating how much need-based financial aid a student will get — not just how much parents earn, but factors like family size and the cost of the university — Desjean says price can be a barrier to students of any income level. However, lower-income families are typically looking at tougher choices when it comes to covering college expenses.

“I think low-income students are maybe disproportionately impacted, even with financial aid, just with having less discretionary income,” Desjean says. “A higher-income family might say, ‘We can't take a vacation this year.’ Whereas a low-income family may never take a vacation, so the things they’d be looking at giving up would be cutting their already tight grocery budget.”

First-generation or low-income students may also be less aware of financial aid that’s available to them, she says, while other students may have people in their lives who can give advice on and encourage them to explore all the aid options available.

Even families with similar incomes can have widely different expenses making demands on their budgets, Desjean adds, or have different mindsets about whether they can cut back to pay for college.

Organizations like the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators

are trying to dispel myths about financial aid, namely that it’s too difficult to apply for or that students shouldn’t apply if they assume they’re ineligible.

The U.S. Department of Education did itself no favors when its chaotic rollout of the new FAFSA system during the 2023-2024 school year hit technical snags that caused some students to miss out on money.

That’s a shame, Desjean says, because the new system did deliver on its promise to make applying for federal aid faster and easier — if students could use it.

“This year should have been the year we could really celebrate those changes and say, ‘Look, everyone, it's easy to apply for financial aid. Go ahead and do it,’” she says. “Unfortunately it kept with the old narrative, or it may have even amplified the old narrative. So I think the work we all need to be doing in the college access space is trying to remind students, ‘This year was not great, but there have been improvements to the FAFSA. Next year is going to be even better. Don't be intimidated.’”

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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.”

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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.

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What do parents want from schools when it comes to support for their children’s mental health?

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

Mainly, it’s to feel safe.

That’s according to the most recent data from Action for Healthy Kids, a nonprofit that promotes physical and mental well-being for school-aged children. The report results come from a survey of about 1,000 parents with children in K-12 schools in December 2023.

Parents’ concerns about their kids’ mental health ranged from worries about stress — “The pressure that is put on kids to do well on tests is overwhelming sometimes,” one parent wrote — to fears about their children experiencing racism at school.

The goal of collecting data on parental views of mental health is to give them what they want, says ‬‭Rob Bisceglie, the organization’s executive officer and president. According to the survey responses, that means training and tools on how to talk to their children about issues that affect their well-being. Action for Healthy Kids is using the survey data to develop guides for parents on topics like overall mental health, racism, body positivity, setting body boundaries and suicide prevention.

“Our program is what you call a family-school partnership model, and so what the family thinks — parents and caregivers — that's of particular importance and interest to us,” Bisceglie says.

Strong Support for Services

Parents who were surveyed by and large agreed that having a school where their child feels a sense of belonging is important to supporting students’ mental health. They also wanted mental health services to be available at school.

Nearly 70 percent of parents say their child has “at least one adult at school that they trust or talk to.” Another 88 percent of parents said a welcoming classroom environment would help their child in particular feel safe and supported. Nearly the same percentage wanted teachers to try their best to create positive relationships between students.

Despite recent politicization of K-12 schools, a majority of parents said they want schools to include lessons about topics including “respect, cooperation, perseverance, empathy.”

“I don't think this is surprising, but [the report] reinforced something for me, that what parents really want for their kids in schools is that their kids are safe and feel a sense of love and belonging,” Bisceglie says. “We would love that nurturing relationship to be with a parent or a primary caregiver. The second most likely person to provide that kind of nurturing support for a child is in the school, and that's why this is so important.”

Feeling ‘Fine’

The barrier to accessing mental health services that parents cited most often was their child feeling that nothing is wrong despite a parent feeling otherwise — 38 percent of parents said this was a problem.

Anais Murphy is senior manager of Action for Healthy Kids’ Youth Mental Health and Social and Emotional Learning Program. She says that while parents might worry that kids are saying they feel fine when they don’t, it’s also important for parents to know which behaviors are normal for each age group.

“I think part of the goal of this campaign is to provide parents with the information they need to understand what ‘fine’ means,” Murphy explains. “We're certainly not trying to over-diagnose or to bring alarm bells that are not appropriate, but we absolutely do want parents to have an understanding of, what are the typical markers of development and mental health? A 14-year-old is really irritable. That's totally appropriate and sometimes a cause for concern, but sometimes exactly where they're supposed to be.”

The numbers also point to the fact that parents are paying more attention to youth mental health, Murphy says, and the organization wants to help parents learn where they can go for more help.

“We're in a phase of the reduction of stigma — I'm talking about mental health — at least among the younger generation,” she says. “I think that's a big part of it. It’s not something necessarily that came through in terms of this survey, but certainly something that's [confirmed] in other research.”

Racism at School

In addition to mental health concerns, 58 parents of Black parents and 45 parents of Hispanic parents are worried about their child experiencing racism at school.

Bisceglie says it’s the third year the survey has asked parents about concerns over racism.

Murphy says one of the tools the organization is working on as a result of the survey is a guide for how parents can talk to their children about racism at home and how teachers can do the same at school.

“I think one of the things that happened around the pandemic time and George Floyd was we started talking about racism and institutions like schools a lot more,” she says. “Not that people were not experiencing that before, but we weren’t necessarily bringing attention to it. So it didn't really surprise me, because schools are privy to the same kind of institutional forces that all of our other institutions are, and structural racism and institutional racism are one of those. I think it's really important that it's raised the level of collective consciousness so that we can start talking about it.”

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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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With digital education platforms generating data on how millions of students are learning, they are also sitting on veritable information gold mines for researchers who are trying to improve education.

An ethical and legal conundrum stands in the way: how to responsibly share that data without opening students up to the possibility of having their personal information exposed to outside parties.

Now a consortium of education researchers and learning platforms are developing what they hope is a solution — researchers will never see the actual data.

The project dubbed SafeInsights, helmed by OpenStax at Rice University, is supported by a $90 million grant from the National Science Foundation over five years.

The idea is for SafeInsights to serve as a bridge between its learning platform and research partners, alongside collaborators helping flesh out how the exchange will work to safeguard student privacy.

“In a normal situation, you end up taking data from learning websites and apps and giving it to researchers for them to study and for them to analyze it to learn from,” JP Slavinsky, SafeInsights executive director and OpenStax technical director, says. “Instead, we're taking the researchers’ questions to that data. This creates a safer environment for research that's easier for schools and platforms to participate in, because the data is staying where it is already.”

Deeper Insights on a Large Scale

Another way to think of SafeInsights is as a telescope, say Slavinsky and his colleague Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of OpenStax, which publishes open access course materials. It will allow researchers to peer into the vast amount of data from learning platforms like the University of Pennsylvania’s Massive Online Open Courses and Quill.org for districts that opt-in to the platform.

Researchers would develop questions — then transform those questions into computer code that can sift through the data — to be delivered to learning platforms. After the results are generated, they would be returned to researchers without the data ever having to be directly shared.

“It is really a partnership where we have researchers coming together with schools and platforms, and we're jointly trying to solve some problems of interest,” Slavinsky says. “We are providing that telescope for others to bring their research agenda and the questions they want to answer. So we're less involved on what specifically is going to be asked and more on making as many questions as possible answerable.”

Part of why this model would be so powerful is how it would increase the scale at which education research is done, Baraniuk says. There are plenty of studies that have small sample sizes of about 50 college students, he explains, who participate as part of a psychology class.

“A lot of the studies are about freshman college kids, right? Well, that's not representative of the huge breadth of different students,” Baraniuk says. “The only way you're gonna be able to see that breadth is by doing large studies, so really the first key behind SafeInsights is partnering with these digital education websites and apps who host literally millions of students every day.”

Another aspect where he sees the project opening new doors for researchers is the diversity of the student populations represented by the learning platform partners, which include education apps for reading, writing and science along with learning management systems.

“By putting together all of these puzzle pieces, the idea is that we can — at a very large scale — get to see a more complete picture of these students,” Baraniuk says. “The big goal of ours is to try to remove as much friction as possible so that more useful research can happen, and then more research-backed pedagogies and teaching techniques can actually get applied. But while removing that friction, how do we keep everything really safeguarded?”

Creating Trust, Protecting Privacy

Before any research takes place, SafeInsights partners at the Future of Privacy Forum are helping develop the policies that will shape how the program guards students’ data.

John Verdi, the Future of Privacy Forum’s senior vice president for policy, says the goal is to have privacy protections baked into how everything operates. Part of that is helping to develop what he calls the “data enclave,” or the process by which researchers can query a learning platform’s data without having direct access. Other aspects include helping develop the review process for how research projects are selected, training researchers on privacy and publishing lessons learned about operating with privacy at the forefront.

“Even if you have great technical safeguards in place, even if you do great ethical vetting,” he says about the training aspect, “at the end of the day, researchers themselves have decisions to make about how to responsibly use the system. They need to understand how the system works.”

The protection of student data privacy in education is generally “woefully under-funded,” he says, but it’s safeguarding that information that allows students to trust learning platforms — and ultimately create research opportunities like SafeInsights.

“Tasking students and parents to protect data is the wrong place to put that responsibility,” Verdi says. “Instead, what we need to do is build digital infrastructure that is privacy respectful by default, and [that] provides assurances that information will be kept confidential and used ethically.”

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In the two decades that Jennifer Merriman has been in education, she’s seen a tendency in the field to solve problems by piling more tasks onto teachers who are already straining under the weight of their workloads.

That ultimately works against what researchers say is one of the most important pillars of a school’s success: the well-being of its teachers. Findings from the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre are detailed in a new report commissioned by the International Baccalaureate Organization, where Merriman is the global director of research, policy and design.

“If workload is already the burden on teachers, I think schools will have to get creative,” Merriman says, “and hopefully the teachers themselves can help with the innovation of how to focus on well-being without it becoming yet another burdensome activity that they've got to check the box on.”

Researchers say that schools have a vested interest in improving teacher well-being, citing a 2022 Gallup poll that found 44 percent of K-12 workers in the United States “always” or “very often” feel burned out at work. Zooming in on only teachers, they had the highest rate of burnout among all school workers at 52 percent.

A Sparse Research Field

The International Baccalaureate decided to take a closer look at teacher well-being following the toll taken on schools by the COVID-19 pandemic, Merriman says, when it became apparent that little research existed on the topic. The paper is the second in a series of three that the organization commissioned, with the first covering student well-being.

“The pandemic hit, and everybody was suffering: students and their families and guardians and teachers and school administrators,” she says. “[The Wellbeing Research Centre] really are helping us to understand the science behind well-being. How do we define it? What are the drivers or determinants of well-being? And then what might we do at the IB or globally to really try and improve student and teacher well-being?”

Researchers developed what the report calls a framework that divides teacher well-being into three main factors: job satisfaction, individual elements like physical health, and school-level drivers like work-life balance and class size.

While the report cautions that the research field is in its infancy and the teacher well-being drivers it identifies may not be exhaustive, it offers the framework to start conversations at schools that want to better support teachers.

Researchers also identified school climate, salary satisfaction, supportive professional relationships, job security, continuous learning, and workplace recognition as school-level factors that drive teachers’ job satisfaction.

Researchers from the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre developed a framework that divides teacher well-being into three main factors: job satisfaction, individual elements like physical health, and school-level drivers like work-life balance and class size.

Well-being and Student Success

The ultimate goal is for schools to “have these conversations about what's really important to the teachers and to the staff, and for the school to understand the local context and what's driving strong or weaker levels of school satisfaction for those educators,” Merriman says.

Some poll data shows that more than half of teachers have considered quitting, and Merriman says it's important for the education field at large to improve workplace well-being before the declining number of teachers becomes a potential crisis. It may already feel that way in some parts of the country where teacher turnover rates hit as high as 24 percent in 2022.

“I think one thing that we all sort of felt intuitively but came through very clearly in the reports is the through line between teachers and students,” she says. “The most important factor, the thing that contributes the most to students' academic and well-being outcomes, are teachers within a school. There's nothing else in a school that contributes more to their outcomes, both non-academic and academic.”

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Texas is turning over some of the scoring process of its high-stakes standardized tests to robots.

News outlets have detailed the rollout by the Texas Education Agency of a natural language processing program, a form of artificial intelligence, to score the written portion of standardized tests administered to students in third grade and up.

Like many AI-related projects, the idea started as a way to cut the cost of hiring humans.

Texas found itself in need of a way to score exponentially more written responses on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, after a new law mandated that at least 25 percent of questions be open-ended — rather than multiple choice — starting in the 2022-23 school year.

Officials have said that the auto-scoring system will save the state millions of dollars that otherwise would have been spent on contractors hired to read and score written responses — with only 2,000 scorers needed this spring compared to 6,000 at the same time last year.

Using technology to score essays is nothing new. Written responses for the GRE, for example, have long been scored by computers. A 2019 investigation by Vice found that at least 21 states use natural language processing to grade students’ written responses on standardized tests.

Still, some educators and parents alike felt blindsided by the news about auto-grading essays for K-12 students. Clay Robison, a Texas State Teachers Association spokesperson, says that many teachers learned of the change through media coverage.

“I know the Texas Education Agency didn’t involve any of our members to ask what they thought about it,” he says, “and apparently they didn’t ask many parents either.”

Because of the consequences low test scores can have for students, schools and districts, the shift to use technology to grade standardized test responses raises concerns about equity and accuracy.

Officials have been eager to stress that the system does not use generative artificial intelligence like the widely-known ChatGPT. Rather, the natural language processing program was trained using 3,000 written responses submitted during past tests and has parameters it will use to assign scores. A quarter of the scores awarded will be reviewed by human scorers.

“The whole concept of formulaic writing being the only thing this engine can score for is not true,” Chris Rozunick, director of the assessment development division at the TEA, told the Houston Chronicle.

The Texas Education Agency did not respond to EdSurge’s request for comment.

Equity and Accuracy

One question is whether the new system will fairly grade the writing of children who are bilingual or who are learning English. About 20 percent of Texas public school students are English learners, according to federal data, although not all of them are yet old enough to sit for the standardized test.

Rocio Raña is the CEO and co-founder of LangInnov, a company that uses automated scoring for its language and literacy assessments for bilingual students and is working on another one for writing. She’s spent much of her career thinking about how education technology and assessments can be improved for bilingual children.

Raña is not against the idea of using natural language processing on student assessments. She recalls one of her own graduate school entrance exams was graded by a computer when she came to the U.S. 20 years ago as a student.

What raised a red flag for Raña is that, based on publicly available information, it doesn’t appear that Texas developed the program over what she would consider a reasonable timeline of two to five years — which she says would be ample time to test and fine-tune a program’s accuracy.

She also says that natural language processing and other AI programs tend to be trained with writing from people who are monolingual, white and middle-class — certainly not the profile of many students in Texas. More than half of students are Latino, according to state data, and 62 percent are considered economically disadvantaged.

“As an initiative, it’s a good thing, but maybe they went about it in the wrong way,” she says. “‘We want to save money’ — that should never be done with high-stakes assessments.”

Raña says the process should involve not just developing an automated grading system over time, but deploying it slowly to ensure it works for a diverse student population.

“[That] is challenging for an automated system,” she says. “What always happens is it's very discriminatory for populations that don't conform to the norm, which in Texas are probably the majority.”

Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, says a concern he’s heard from administrators is about the rubric the automated system will use for grading.

“If you have a human grader, it used to be in the rubric that was used in the writing assessment that originality in the voice benefitted the student,” he says. “Any writing that can be graded by a machine might incentivize machine-like writing.”

Rozunick of the TEA told the Texas Tribune that the system “does not penalize students who answer differently, who are really giving unique answers.”

In theory, any bilingual or English learner students who use Spanish could have their written responses flagged for human review, which would assuage fears that the system would give them lower scores.

Raña says that would be a form of discrimination, with bilingual children’s essays graded differently than those who write only in English.

It also struck Raña as odd that after adding more open-ended questions to the test, something that creates more room for creativity from students, Texas will have most of their responses read by a computer rather than a person.

The autograding program was first used to score essays from a smaller group of students who took the STAAR standardized test in December. Brown says that he’s heard from school administrators who told him they saw a spike in the number of students who were scored zero on their written responses.

“Some individual districts have been alarmed at the number of zeros that students are getting,” Brown says. “Whether it’s attributable to the machine grading, I think that’s too early to determine. The larger question is about how to accurately communicate to the families, where a child might have written an essay and gotten a zero on it, how to explain it. It's a difficult thing to try to explain to somebody.”

A TEA spokesperson confirmed to the Dallas Morning News that previous versions of the STAAR test only gave zeros to responses that were blank or nonsensical, and the new rubric allows for zeros based on content.

High Stakes

Concerns about the possible consequences of using AI to grade standardized tests in Texas can’t be understood without also understanding the state’s school accountability system, says Brown.

The Texas Education Agency distills a wide swath of data — including results from the STAAR test — into a single letter grade of A through F for each district and school. It’s a system that feels out of touch to many, Brown says, and the stakes are high. The exam and annual preparation for it was described by one writer as “an anxiety-ridden circus for kids.”

The TEA can take over any school district that has five consecutive Fs, as it did in the fall with the massive Houston Independent School District. The takeover was triggered by the failing letter grades of just one out of its 274 schools, and both the superintendent and elected board of directors were replaced with state appointees. Since the takeover, there’s been seemingly nonstop news of protests over controversial changes at the “low-performing” schools.

“The accountability system is a source of consternation for school districts and parents because it just doesn’t feel like it connects sometimes to what’s actually happening in the classroom,” Brown says. “So any time I think you make a change in the assessment, because accountability [system] is a blunt force, it makes people overly concerned about the change. Especially in the absence of clear communication about what it is.”

Robison says that his organization, which represents teachers and school staff, advocates abolishing the STAAR test altogether. The addition of an opaque, automated scoring system isn’t helping state education officials build trust.

“There’s already a lot of mistrust over the STAAR and what it purports to represent and accomplish,” Robison says. “It doesn't accurately measure student achievement, and there’s lots of suspicion that this will deepen the mistrust because of the way most of us were surprised by this.”

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