Once upon a time, educators worried about the dangers of CliffsNotes — study guides that rendered great works of literature as a series of bullet points that many students used as a replacement for actually doing the reading.
Today, that sure seems quaint.
Suddenly, new consumer AI tools have hit the market that can take any piece of text, audio or video and provide that same kind of simplified summary. And those summaries aren’t just a series of quippy text in bullet points. These days students can have tools like Google’s NotebookLM turn their lecture notes into a podcast, where sunny-sounding AI bots banter and riff on key points. Most of the tools are free, and do their work in seconds with the click of a button.
Naturally, all this is causing concern among some educators, who see students off-loading the hard work of synthesizing information to AI at a pace never before possible.
But the overall picture is more complicated, especially as these tools become more mainstream and their use starts to become standard in business and other contexts beyond the classroom.
And the tools serve as a particular lifeline for neurodivergent students, who suddenly have access to services that can help them get organized and support their reading comprehension, teaching experts say.
“There’s no universal answer,” says Alexis Peirce Caudell, a lecturer in informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington who recently did an assignment where many students shared their experience and concerns about AI tools. “Students in biology are going to be using it in one way, chemistry students are going to be using it in another. My students are all using it in different ways.”
It’s not as simple as assuming that students are all cheaters, the instructor stresses.
“Some students were concerned about pressure to engage with tools — if all of their peers were doing it that they should be doing it even if they felt it was getting in the way of their authentically learning,” she says. They are asking themselves questions like, “Is this helping me get through this specific assignment or this specific test because I’m trying to navigate five classes and applications for internships” — but at the cost of learning?
It all adds new challenges to schools and colleges as they attempt to set boundaries and policies for AI use in their classrooms.
Need for ‘Friction’
It seems like just about every week -— or even every day — tech companies announce new features that students are adopting in their studies.
Just last week, for instance, Apple released Apple Intelligence features for iPhones, and one of the features can recraft any piece of text to different tones, such as casual or professional. And last month ChatGPT-maker OpenAI released a feature called Canvas that includes slider bars for users to instantly change the reading level of a text.
Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, says he is worried that students are lured by the time-saving promises of these tools and may not realize that using them can mean skipping the actual work it takes to internalize and remember the material.
“From a teaching, learning standpoint, that's pretty concerning to me,” he says. “Because we want our students to struggle a little bit, to have a little bit of friction, because that's important for their learning.”
And he says new features are making it harder for teachers to encourage students to use AI in helpful ways — like teaching them how to craft prompts to change the writing level of something: “It removes that last level of desirable difficulty when they can just button mash and get a final draft and get feedback on the final draft, too.”
Even professors and colleges that have adopted AI policies may need to rethink them in light of these new types of capabilities.
As two professors put it in a recent op-ed, “Your AI Policy Is Already Obsolete.”
“A student who reads an article you uploaded, but who cannot remember a key point, uses the AI assistant to summarize or remind them where they read something. Has this person used AI when there was a ban in the class?” ask the authors, Zach Justus, director of faculty development at California State University, Chico, and Nik Janos, a professor of sociology there. They note that popular tools like Adobe Acrobat now have “AI assistant” features that can summarize documents with the push of a button. “Even when we are evaluating our colleagues in tenure and promotion files,” the professors write, “do you need to promise not to hit the button when you are plowing through hundreds of pages of student evaluations of teaching?”
Instead of drafting and redrafting AI policies, the professors argue that educators should work out broad frameworks for what is acceptable help from chatbots.
But Watkins calls on the makers of AI tools to do more to mitigate the misuse of their systems in academic settings, or as he put it when EdSurge talked with him, “to make sure that this tool that is being used so prominently by students [is] actually effective for their learning and not just as a tool to offload it.”
Uneven Accuracy
These new AI tools raise a host of new challenges beyond those at play when printed CliffsNotes were the study tool du jour.
One is that AI summarizing tools don’t always provide accurate information, due to a phenomenon of large language models known as “hallucinations,” when chatbots guess at facts but present them to users as sure things.
When Bonni Stachowiak first tried the podcast feature on Google’s NotebookLM, for instance, she said she was blown away by how lifelike the robot voices sounded and how well they seemed to summarize the documents she fed it. Stachowiak is the host of the long-running podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California, and she regularly experiments with new AI tools in her teaching.
But as she tried the tool more, and put in documents on complex subjects that she knew well, she noticed occasional errors or misunderstandings. “It just flattens it — it misses all of this nuance,” she says. “It sounds so intimate because it’s a voice and audio is such an intimate medium. But as soon as it was something that you knew a lot about it’s going to fall flat.”
Even so, she says she has found the podcasting feature of NotebookLM useful in helping her understand and communicate bureaucratic issues at her university — such as turning part of the faculty handbook into a podcast summary. When she checked it with colleagues who knew the policies well, she says they felt it did a “perfectly good job.” “It is very good at making two-dimensional bureaucracy more approachable,” she says.
Peirce Caudell, of Indiana University, says her students have raised ethical issues with using AI tools as well.
Others, she adds, worry about how much data users end up giving AI companies, especially when students use free versions of the tools.
“We're not having that conversation,” she says. “We're not having conversations about what does it mean to actively resist the use of generative AI?”
Even so, the instructor is seeing positive impacts for students, such as when they use a tool to help make flashcards to study.
And she heard about a student with ADHD who had always found reading a large text “overwhelming,” but was using ChatGPT “to get over the hurdle of that initial engagement with the reading and then they were checking their understanding with the use of ChatGPT.”
And Stachowiak says she has heard of other AI tools that students with intellectual disabilities are using, such as one that helps users break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable sub-tasks.
“This is not cheating,” she stresses. “It’s breaking things down and estimating how long something is going to take. That is not something that comes naturally for a lot of people.”
It is the weekend before my students arrive for the new school year. I am in my classroom listening to Lofi beats, pondering what has been and what is to come. All around my room are reminders of my identity as a 6’2, 280-pound Black and Puerto Rican man, husband, father, math teacher and basketball coach. I have come to find solace here; yes, these are part of my identity, which I hold dear to my heart — but as I have grown older, I have learned that few people ever see beyond them, including those who I call colleagues and peers in this education system.
In these moments, I frequently return to my favorite book, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. The novel’s exploration of invisibility, identity and the struggle for recognition resonates deeply with my experiences in education. Much like Ellison’s protagonist, I feel I have only been viewed as other people's definition of who I am supposed to be. When my students arrive, I feel I am expected to perform certain duties outside my job description simply because of my identity. My ability as a leader is hardly recognized. The struggles of being a husband and father are ignored. My existence as a person feels like an afterthought. These are the challenges I’ve faced. I want to feel seen for the many contributions I make in my classroom, school and community. This work is not easy, and feeling invisible at the same time is exhausting.
Ellison’s “Invisible Man” resonates deeply with my experiences and those of many teachers of color face in education. The novel’s themes of invisibility and identity crisis mirror the struggles I have faced in a system that frequently fails to properly acknowledge my presence and contributions. I hope that making my story of invisibility visible to those who may understand my struggle will help fellow educators of color feel seen, heard, valued, and, more importantly, retained in the classroom.
Who Am I in Education?
My career in teaching began in the fall of 2017, right after I completed the first summer semester of my graduate program. Soon after, I began my first summer professional development at a school in the neighborhood I grew up in. One of the first things I noticed was that all the students had to abide by a strict uniform policy, including shoes, belts and school colors, and middle school-aged children were walking in straight lines through silent hallways. I don’t remember middle school ever being like this, and the fact that it was mostly students of color gave me pause.
After my first three months as a teaching resident, the master teacher I shadowed went on maternity leave and never returned. Our principal also left a couple of months into the year, which prompted a takeover by central office leadership — all of whom were unfamiliar white faces in a school full of Black and Latino children. Before I knew it, I was teaching a seventh grade math class with little support on a tiny salary and barely any teaching experience.
Needless to say, I was not prepared for the unrealized stress. I quickly learned that teachers needed to play many different roles, wear numerous hats and complete far too many additional duties. I would be pulled from teaching almost routinely to address students with whom leadership in the building could not reach; that is when I earned the nickname child whisperer. Instead of a badge of honor, it felt like another invisible tax associated with being a Black teacher. It felt like my value was dependent on my ability to maintain order. From fist fights to classroom struggles, I felt limited and held within a box of preconceived notions about my role as the enforcer of system norms, the very things I despise about discipline-first school systems. It was as though I was a puppet and Geppetto at the same time. I felt like I was upholding a lie, having my students believe this is how things should be. I questioned my place inside the school, wondering what role I was really playing in students' lives.
I pressed on, hoping to still unlock our children's brilliance. Still, the beginning of my teaching career indicated that sometimes you need more than hope to make it in this profession as a person of color and education leader.
The Journey to Inspire Change
In the last five years of my career, the pandemic put a spotlight on the needs of our schools, teachers and students as conversations around what and how our children deserve to learn became divisive and critical race theory, and DEI became the debates of the time. Motivated to change this conversation and influence policy at the state and local levels, I ran for school board in 2021. It seemed like a great opportunity to try and create true change for our children while also creating an identity for myself in education that didn’t just center on how I enforce school policy for children who look like me.
Before I decided to run, I spoke with a few close advisors and the amount of immediate support was validating; however, I quickly learned that politics are not for the faint of heart. Narratives about my values and who I was were being established by everyone else. I was being accused of becoming Puerto Rican for the sake of the campaign, completely ignoring my upbringing and familial ties. The feeling I had when my wife was cropped out of an advertisement outside my campaign was infuriating. The lies about my allegiances and intentions were draining. It did not take very long for me to feel like I was just a name and face — and everyone created their idea of who I was behind it.
The campaign became draining for my family and tested the values that I chose to uphold and run on. Still, I hoped that being the only teacher on the ballot and having a commitment to my community through service would push me to victory, regardless. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and I would lose the race by a very slim margin.
A crushing defeat in many ways that made me feel like a failure. Watching others — white men, in particular — get the same opportunity after achieving less than me made me not only question my ability but also further reinforced the role the system wants me to uphold. At that moment, it all made sense. People see me how they want to see me. They prefer to keep me in a box. So, I choose to stay in the box that I’m most comfortable in —my classroom.
Making Peace with Reality
It is here in my classroom that I contemplate how to fight against a system that upholds injustice, a system that fights against the brilliance of diversity. This system does not allow everyone a seat at the table.
Nearly a decade in education, and I still wonder if I’ve truly existed. Does anyone see past my physical appearance? Do my titles of husband, father, teacher or coach even matter? Have I left an impact on anyone or anything? Am I invisible? I just maybe, and over the years, I’ve become ok with that feeling of invisibility.
Like the protagonist in Invisible Man, I may have been “looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.” It took me a long time and a painful adjustment of my expectations to realize that I am nobody but myself.
I do not need your eyes in order to be seen, and I do not need your validation to continue fighting for what I believe. I am everything and nothing of what you think I am, and I will move as I see fit.
New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started.
The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack of qualified candidates and too few applicants. Special education, physical science and English as a second language were some of the most difficult areas to fill.
NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release that while the percentage of schools saying it was difficult to fill positions decreased — down 5 percentage points from 79 percent last year — “there’s still room for improvement.” Nearly 1,400 public K-12 schools from across the country responded to the survey.
While the comparison to previous years suggests that hiring is getting a bit easier, Megan Boren of the Southern Regional Education Board says the country is still mired in a teacher shortage.
Boren, who leads the organization’s teacher workforce data and policy work, says it would be a mistake to think of teacher shortages only in terms of positions filled versus vacant. Other factors to consider include the geographic regions of schools, academic subjects and student age groups where shortages are prevalent.
The organization also takes into account teacher demographics, the number of candidates graduating from teacher prep programs, alternative certification programs and their level of preparedness.
“When we think of it as merely a body count, we are not looking at the whole entire problem and to be honest, we're doing a disservice to our students and our educators themselves,” Boren says. “Of the utmost importance is the quality and the preparedness with which we are filling some of these vacancies, or that we have leading our classrooms, and the distribution of that talent.”
Boren expressed concern over schools turning to uncertified teachers to fill the staffing gaps, be they candidates with emergency certifications or long-term substitute teachers. Their inexperience can put strain on the more experienced teachers and administrators who support them, she explains, at a time when both administrators and traditional teacher prep graduates say even new fully certified teachers feel less prepared than those in years past.
Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods or with a student body that is mostly — 75 percent or more — students of color filled a lower percentage of their vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to the NCES data.
“It's a firestorm where folks are going, ‘What can we do to put out the fire and then rebuild?’” Boren says, “and unfortunately, we're seeing in some cases that the measures and strategies being taken to put out the fire are actually making it worse, and causing an exacerbation of the issues for our educators and leaders.”
She says there’s no single factor that has led to teacher shortages, but rather interplaying issues that include pandemic-related mental health strain, the pressure of filling in for vacant staff positions, and a lack of time for collaboration and planning.
Teacher shortages didn’t start with the pandemic, Boren explains, as her organization tracked a teacher turnover rate that hovered between 7 percent and 9 percent prior to 2020. But she says the pandemic did accelerate turnover, with some regions of the South now experiencing 18 percent turnover among teachers.
“Certain regions of states started to stem the tide, but by and large the turnover is increasing,” Boren says.
In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at the impact of college ‘deserts’ — sometimes defined as an area where people live more than a 30-minute drive to a campus — and found that those residing close to a college are more likely to attend. But a new study shows that these higher education deserts affect some groups of students much differently than others.
The study, which looked at a rich set of high school and college data in Texas, found that Black and Hispanic students and those in low-income families who lived more than 30 miles from a public two-year college were significantly less likely to attend college. But white and Asian students in those same communities were slightly more likely than other students in the state to complete four-year degrees, meaning that the lack of a nearby two-year option seemed to increase the likelihood of moving away to attend college.
“While all students who live in a community college desert are less likely to complete an associate’s degree, their alternative enrollment and degree completion outcomes vary sharply by race-ethnicity and [socioeconomic status],” the study finds. In other words, for low-income and underrepresented minority groups, living near a community college can be a crucial way to gain access to any higher education. Meanwhile, such proximity might lead students in other groups to attend two-year college rather than pursue a four-year degree.
The results are particularly important at a time when more colleges are struggling to remain open, says Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio and one of the researchers who worked on the new study.
“If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help.
— Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio
“If a public institution in particular, let's say a public community college, is thinking about closing, or is thinking about merging, or is thinking about opening a new campus or consolidating campuses,” she says, “they should be mindful about who the students are that live near those different campuses.”
The researchers also suggest that colleges should consider providing transportation options or credits to students living in college deserts. “If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help, Acton notes.
Novel Finding
Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those in other groups to live in a college desert, according to research by Nicholas Hillman, a professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was one of the first researchers to draw attention to the effects of college location on educational attainment, back in 2016.
In an interview with EdSurge, Hillman says that the implications of Acton’s new study are “really interesting,” adding that it is probably the largest quantitative study to take on the question of how college deserts affect different groups differently.
“It makes clear that, ‘Wait a minute, distance is different for different groups of students,’” Hillman says.
One takeaway for Hillman is the importance of making the transfer process from two-year colleges to four-year institutions more frictionless, so that students who live near two-year colleges who are more likely to start there have ample opportunity to go on to get a four-year degree.
Hillman says that he began looking at geography out of frustration with an emphasis during the Obama administration on providing consumer information about higher education as a solution to college access. For instance, one major initiative started during that time was the College Scorecard, which provides information on college options based on various government datasets.
“The dominant narrative was, ‘If students just have better info about where to go to college, more would go,’” he says. “I said, ‘This is bananas. This is not how it works.’”
He grew up in northern Indiana, where the nearest college is 40 miles away. For people he knew there, information about college was not what was keeping them from enrolling. “If you don’t have a job, you’re not going to be spending all this money on gas to go to college,” he says.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a primary focus in many school’s strategic plans. Fortunately, there is a long list of literature, articles and research that outline the importance of SEL and the positive impact that it can have on student development. Knowing this, teachers try to fit these lessons into their morning meetings, projects, special classes, birthday celebrations, snack times and lunch hours. They are attempting to adapt to both learn about and create space for SEL, but SEL requires more time and consistency, with a heavy emphasis on time.
As an early childhood counselor and educator, I work with children in their beginning years of development and the families that care for them. Knowing that SEL is valuable and requires dedicated time, my school has taken the approach of allowing me and my colleagues to stay with the same caseload of children for five years, which is a rare opportunity for counselors and educators to have in this field. During this time, it takes students about two years to understand my role as a “feelings teacher.” They go from asking me, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” to telling me about their feelings the moment I step into their classroom. By the time they are in kindergarten, they are fully accustomed to my presence. Some of them introduce me to caregivers I have yet to meet, while others greet me with a hug as they enter the building on their own or hand in hand with friends. They have grown physically, but also emotionally as they are able to notice and deal with their emotions more readily.
As I’ve built these foundational skills with my students, my school has also given me enough time to build an expectation that students discuss their identities as a valuable component within the SEL curriculum. My teachers and administrators understand that this is imperative to the work that I do in creating systemic change and in building relationships with my students where they can feel comfortable discussing identity in an authentic, holistic and vulnerable way. The time I have been given to incorporate identity into SEL has allowed me to explore, experiment, and, most importantly, give my students new tools to navigate the world and their identities and grow and mature in their learning.
Bringing Identity to the Forefront
In her book “Unearthing Joy,” author Gholdy Muhammad speaks on the importance and impact of taking the time to get to know your students deeply. Specifically, Muhammad says, “It is important to get to know children in authentic, loving, and meaningful ways so that you learn who they are, who they’re not, and who they are destined to become on this earth.” I have learned that it is important to center identity as I learn more about my students. Acknowledging and affirming their identities creates opportunities to teach SEL on a deeper and more impactful level.
Although I work in a predominantly white institution, I work to focus on uplifting each child’s experience in the world while simultaneously acknowledging the role of prejudice, racism and oppression in our schools. My experiences over the years, when I have had the time to work with and collaborate with a diverse group of teachers, have taught me that teaching SEL without discussing these topics is often the easier and quicker route to take, but it also creates more opportunities for harm. Instead of settling for this, I challenge myself and my colleagues to lean into discomfort and expand our understanding of SEL. In doing so, I find joy in the incremental and marginal change we have created within our school because it creates an opportunity for continued growth.
As I enter first grade with my students, I notice that as much as I have learned about them, they have learned about me. They expect to hear my jokes and know that as a Black woman, my hair will look different almost every time they see me. We have developed a consistent and trusting relationship where they are holistically seen and valued, and it shows in their engagement with SEL lessons and their ability to problem-solve and express themselves.
One day, during our fourth year together, I was preparing to read the book "What Do You Do With a Problem?” for my SEL lesson, and I began by asking, “What problems do you see in your world?” Students began speaking about gun violence, robberies and people being treated unfairly. When one student spoke, another would add to their idea and tell the story from their perspective. Students also spoke about their families in India, experiencing harm and the effects of racism in America.
One child expressed grave concern that “Black and white people would always fight.” This became a focus of the conversation for a while until one of my students noted that the injustices Asian Americans experience are rarely discussed. He challenged me directly, telling me that we don’t talk about these things enough. Instead of reacting negatively or quickly moving on as we ran well over time, I listened, made time and space for the student to discuss his experience, and respectfully validated him as this conversation continued. I was unprepared for this conversation and looked to my teacher colleagues for help; they stayed present for the conversation, which went on for 45 minutes. We never even read the book.
The True Power of SEL
As I left that conversation, I felt many emotions. Mainly, I was proud of them for being capable of a conversation that was so dynamic and important. Using their self-advocacy skills, they were able to speak up and challenge me, centering experiences that matter the most to them and their families. In learning their personalities over the years, I created a safe space where they knew their voices would be heard, valued and amplified. I could get to know my students for who they are as individuals, and they understood that not only did I know them, but I also had a relationship with their teachers, which created a village of care they could lean on when needed.
Giving SEL the time and space it deserves allows children to become more self-aware and connected to their peers and adults in the school setting. This feeling of safety allows for learning environments that encourage challenging and expansive conversations and community building that values and respects the identity of all students. Doing this while also building consistent and real relationships with students creates the foundation for a uniquely safe educational environment. It creates opportunities for students to learn to be better citizens to one another. When our students are regulated, able to think critically, and encouraged to speak up about the things that are important to them, educators can better navigate students' concerns while honoring the identities and feelings that come along with them.
SEL is and should always be a part of our work as educators. However, to have a positive and lasting effect on our students' lives and relationships, we must create environments where more purposeful and intentional time is dedicated to SEL and understanding the role of identity.
One of Shane Woods’ favorite memories as executive director of Girlstart, a nonprofit that aims to empower girls in the sciences, was as a participant taking her own goddaughter to the organization’s back-to-school extravaganza.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
They zipped through activities with rockets and robots, and Woods asked her goddaughter — named Sailor — what she thought of it all when they were heading home.
“She said, ‘I always liked science. Now I know I can do science,’” Woods recalls. “Unprompted — I didn't ask about careers. For her to have that connection lets us know that her perception is already there of, ‘I can do it.’”
The question for the adults who care about girls like Sailor, Woods says, then becomes: How do we sustain that interest?
That is one of the questions and challenges at the center of a recently released report based on the Girls’ Index, a survey of 17,500 girls in fifth through 12th grades that includes questions about their goals for the future and perception of science, technology, engineering and mathematics as potential careers.
While women are not just outpacing men in degrees — girls are doing better academically and completing high school on time more frequently than boys — the push for parity has been moving at a glacial pace in STEM. Though on the rise, women are still underrepresented in both degrees and employment in the sciences and technology.
Ruling Our Experiences — a nonprofit that studies the aspirations, behaviors and opinions of girls — compares results from the 2023 survey to those similarly gleaned in 2017.
Their researchers found that while girls who say they’re interested in STEM grew by 10 percentage points to 55 percent, compared to survey results five years prior, the number of girls who describe themselves as confident or smart enough to earn their dream job has plummeted.
“I want everybody who has a girl in their sphere of influence to be aware of this data, because I think that we all have a role in creating a generation of more confident, competent, and capable girls,” Lisa Hinkelman, founder and CEO of Ruling Our Experiences, says, “whether it's in the STEM arena, or in other spaces where girls’ voices and opinions are needed.”
High Interest, Lower Participation
Girls are interested in science and math. More than half of girls in every age group surveyed said they were considering a STEM career, according to the report, and overall interest is up by 10 percent since 2017 — something that holds steady among grade levels, income levels and ethnicities. Interest increased the most among the youngest girls, those in fifth and sixth grade, by 20 percent.
That doesn’t mean that girls are ready to dive into the field.
The report found a myriad of outside factors and social pressures that may be keeping girls from taking STEM classes or seeing themselves in science jobs.
The share of girls who say they are good at math and science fell sharply from 73 percent in 2017 to 59 percent in 2023, and that includes girls whose grades show they excel in those subjects.
“I think that should be especially concerning when we're thinking about the need to ensure that girls have increased representation in the STEM field, in that it's more than just exposing them to STEM opportunities,” Hinkelman says. “We also have to be simultaneously addressing these confidence challenges and their perceptions of their abilities that are simultaneously impacting what they might do next.”
Researchers also expressed concern that gender stereotypes and misconceptions about math and science could be deterring girls from taking those classes as they advance through school. About 28 percent of high school girls reported that they avoid classes with low female enrollment.
Overall, 56 percent of girls say they have felt excluded from an activity because of their gender, and the majority report feeling “pressured to fit into the specific stereotypes that are thought to be appropriate and expected for girls and women.” About the same amount said they avoided taking on leadership roles for fear of being seen as bossy.
In Girlstart’s work introducing girls in 24 school districts across three states to the world of STEM, which includes after-school programs, summer camps and an annual conference, Woods says that the organization strives to both provide role models and foster kinship. Girls already hear the message that there aren’t enough women in science and technology, she adds, and being the first or only girl in a science class isn’t necessarily attractive to them.
“Our girls like community, our girls like relationships, so what Girlstart does is provide that support network of peers who are like-minded,” Woods says. “You may be the only girl in your physics class at that high school, but hopefully through us you know of other girls in physics classes throughout the city, that you all have a network of support, that you are not doing this alone.”
STEM fields also have a messaging problem.
About 89 percent of girls said they want a career where they can help others, but they don’t necessarily see that happening in the sciences. Less than half of girls responded that they wanted both a service career and a STEM career.
“This gap may exist partly because of the stereotype that women are natural caregivers, steering girls towards traditional helping professions,” the report states. “However, STEM fields offer numerous ways to make a positive impact — from developing new medicines to solving environmental issues. By showing girls how STEM careers align with their desire to help, more diverse talent could be attracted to these fields.”
Crisis of Confidence
The data shows a troubling trend when it comes to how girls reported feeling about their abilities and potential.
The percentage of girls who consider themselves confident in 2023 dipped for nearly every grade level compared to 2017, with the largest drop among fifth and sixth graders. The share of girls who say they are not sure if they are smart enough for their dream career increased in every age group.
The confidence issues girls face extend beyond their perceptions of math and science. About 57 percent said they don’t feel cared for at school, and only 39 percent said they feel a sense of belonging at school.
Hinkelman says she was surprised by the particularly sharp drop in confidence reported by girls in fifth through seventh grades.
“I think girls are internalizing a lot of messages from the world that are telling them that they're not good enough, or they're not smart enough, or that there's certain kinds of jobs or careers that aren't really for them,” Hinkelman says. “For many girls, they have an overall low opinion of themselves and their opportunities and their abilities. I think we see that reflected when it comes to their perceptions of their abilities in STEM-specific areas as well.”
The education system on the whole needs to start building confidence in the sciences at the same time students are gaining competence in STEM subjects, she adds.
Woods says that in a digital world built on a system of “likes,” girls need environments where they know where they don’t have to be perfect so long as they are proud of what they’re doing.
The numbers support what Woods sees in her work. The study found that confident girls were 20 percent more likely than their peers to say they wanted a STEM career. The report found among girls who feel supported and accepted at school also showed more interest in STEM — 50 percent more than their peers.
Girls need to know “that they can take risks in that space, that it is safe to learn from one another, to fail in front of each other to get back up and take it as a lesson or a success,” Woods explains. “That is really what's critical in changing how girls see themselves in these careers and what they can do, so we have to reinforce that STEM will allow them to change the world.”
When Eve, a mother in Colorado, received a legal settlement, she found herself suddenly flush.
She drove over to the office of Eric Dearing, who was working with her as a family advocate for Head Start, and she gave him a shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style, and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times that he’d seen a family, through “pure luck,” get a spike in income.
The change in Eve, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “She was so excited and proud and suddenly full of this hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.
Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, with income inequality rising. Plus, the ability of people to move up in the world seems to decline with age, as their status gets set. It can cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students to have good lives and raise questions about whether the country is a poverty-sustaining machine.
This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes isn’t so much money itself, but the number of supportive learning chances that a person gets.
But rare or not, that experience with Eve stuck with Dearing like it was pinned somewhere in his brain. How much does it matter when families gain income if they've been living in poverty, Dearing wondered. And why do all the high-quality programs out there seem to make such a little dent in boosting education achievement for students from low-income backgrounds?
It Adds Up
Years later, Dearing tried to tackle these questions. His answer? Some students just receive much fewer chances to thrive.
That’s what a new study, published in the journal Educational Researcher, suggests. The study aimed to figure out how access to opportunities accrued over time for students, and whether they explain the link between how much money their parents made — when the students were in early childhood — and how their lives turned out. To do this, the researchers pulled federal data that followed 814 students from birth until the age of 26. Those students lived in 10 cities from around the U.S.
What did they find? It’s about “opportunity gaps.” For example, from birth through the end of high school, children from high-income families had six-to-seven times as many chances to learn than those from low-income families. Middle-income families had four times as many chances as low-income families.
According to an author of the study, that means family income is indirectly related to how far a student pursues education or how much money they make in their mid-20s. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities,” or how often they find themselves in supportive learning environments, whether that’s in high-quality child care when they are young, in a home that has toys, puzzles and caregivers to support learning, or in high-quality school and after-school programs. So income helps, but primarily because it leads to greater access to good learning opportunities.
The study was descriptive, Dearing notes, so it can’t technically prove that the accumulation of opportunities “caused” higher educational achievement. But that story is consistent with their research, he adds. The paper also didn’t look into how the timing of learning opportunities — say, whether they occurred in early childhood or in high school — might make a difference.
But from the perspective of the researchers, what matters is the cumulative effect of those chances over time.
Some children are experiencing opportunities throughout their lives, in each of the settings in which they're living and growing — at home, in child care, at the school — and other children are, if they're lucky, experiencing an opportunity to be in a highly enriching context in one of those settings, Dearing says. And that has tremendous implications for solving achievement differences between children growing up poor and children growing up in higher-income families, he adds.
Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that positively powerful programs such as high-quality preschool make only a small dent in how those children's lives turn out, Dearing says.
Translating these insights into more chances for students to thrive is tough.
“The inequity is extreme, and so it's going to take extreme measures to end that,” Dearing adds. And by extreme, he means structural. Success in education requires high-quality instruction, but that alone is not enough, he says. What matters when it comes to changing students’ lives is sustained quality. The sum is greater than the parts.
A consequence: Teachers alone, while crucial, can’t control all the factors here. The answer may lie more in support systems for students, Dearing says, pointing toward the community school model and support programs such as City Connects at Boston College. These models claim to support the “whole child” by building a network that can assist with needs outside of the classroom, such as connecting families to food banks when a child might be hungry or to a free eyeglasses clinic. In some sense, these models use the schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments while letting teachers focus on the education component, Dearing says.
The Land of Opportunity?
Efforts to staunch inequality could also soon see a political push: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has outlined a plan for “economic opportunity,” including expansions of earned income tax credits, which it argues will breathe new life into the American middle class.
But in the meantime, circumstances may be getting starker.
Since 1991, when the students trailed by the study were born, the country has seen rising inequality and, in some sectors, stagnant wages. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects noted in the study. It’s entirely possible that we have underestimated how big the opportunity gaps are today, Dearing says. Had the children been born a decade later, it’s possible the students they studied would have had a wider chasm between opportunities, even between middle-class and upper-income families, he says.
There have also been some positive developments, though. There’s more public preschool these days, and there’s been an increase in the earned income tax credit, he says.
What’s more, there are still research questions to answer.
A previous study authored by Dearing showed that early childhood “opportunities” could compensate for poverty, lifting students’ educational attainment.
But if the research were being conducted today, Dearing says he would pay closer attention to cultural differences that might boost students’ life outcomes in the absence of money. For instance, in some Black communities caregiver roles often extend beyond the parents, with other family members like grandmothers playing a big role in childrens’ home lives and what learning opportunities they have there. But researchers have overfocused on “nuclear family” roles, and therefore may have a slightly misleading picture, Dearing says.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lewis Ferebee, chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, stands at the top of a staircase at John Lewis Elementary when he’s approached by a couple of his constituents for handshakes. He has to reach down a bit — the third-grade boys only stand about waist-high to Ferebee.
The school got a face-lift three years ago. The renovations transformed the noisy, open-concept hallways — relics of the Open Education Movement from the ’60s and ’70s — into individual classrooms. Teachers can now talk to their students without the distracting din of chatter from other classrooms, but the garage doors that double as windows can be opened when teachers want to do activities that involve getting students from multiple classrooms working together.
The work that went into John Lewis Elementary highlights something unique about DC Public Schools. Since 2007, its Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization has kept and systematically worked through a schedule for upgrading schools. At the time, the district reportedly had a backlog of 20,000 work orders.
That level of overwhelm may sound familiar to educators at school districts nationwide who work in school buildings that are “in dire need of renovation,” as described in a recent brief from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.
The average age of school buildings is 49 years — just shy of the end of their lifespan — according to the brief, and more than half have “never undergone any major renovations” since they were built around the time of the Vietnam War.
The Biden administration has pumped a uniquely large amount of money into school infrastructure, according to experts who spoke with EdSurge, perhaps most well-known through ESSER funds in response to the pandemic. The issue of crumbling and outdated school buildings has generally been “orphaned” at the federal level, as one expert put it.
One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic was that many families didn’t have reliable internet access at home. As schools closed and classes moved online, educators rushed to improvise solutions for families without robust connections, setting up mobile Wi-Fi access points in school buses, sending home portable hot spots to those who needed it and more.
And even before the pandemic, educators were working to close the “homework gap,” the divide between students who can easily log on at home to access critical school materials and those who lack reliable home internet.
Now that schools are back open and pandemic relief funds are expiring, there’s a risk this gap will quickly widen unless policymakers take a fresh look at the nation’s connectivity. And it’s one that disproportionately affects students of color and those in underserved communities.
“The truth is that most of these programs created during the pandemic relied on philanthropic and private sector support and continue to do so,” she writes of efforts to make sure students have online access for schoolwork. She calls for new federal legislation to “make these programs less vulnerable to political changes.”
The largest federal program offering support for school districts and libraries for internet connections, the E-rate, was created nearly 30 years ago. Back then much of today’s crucial technology for living and learning had not yet been invented — including smartphones, social media and AI chatbots. “It's been too long that we've kept these same policies in place,” Turner Lee told EdSurge. “We need ways we can guarantee support to schools for the type of infrastructure they need.”
EdSurge connected with Turner Lee for this week’s EdSurge Podcast. The sociologist shared her experiences traveling around the country — to stops including Marion, Alabama, West Phoenix, Arizona, and Hartford, Connecticut — asking people to share how they get connected and the challenges to digital access they face.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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:
Who writes the stories?
Who is missing from the stories?
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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