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

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

By some accounts, this was a massive success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I introduce the characters?

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

Sure. Introduce away.

At the heart of the story are two men.

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

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

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

These two men met in 1911.

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

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

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

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

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

— Andrew Feiler

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

But I think there's another important component.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any parting lessons that educators can learn from this work?

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

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

© Photo by Andrew Feiler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hazard Lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Promises — or Problems

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

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

— Rina Bliss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Photo By Ground Picture/ Shutterstock

It was announced by sweeping statements.

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

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

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

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

The Reform Merry-Go-Round

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can You Prove It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Photo By GoodStudio/Shutterstock

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

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

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

But there’s a push to change that.

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

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

Ticking Clock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will mean they have to act fast.

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

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

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

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

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

On the Hook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Photo By Reshetnikov_art/Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dismantling the ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Potential Lifeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Photo by Juan Crum

One California family had a tough choice to make.

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

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

The state around her is grappling with similar questions.

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

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

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

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

Stuck in Reverse

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

It’s a phenomenon researchers are painfully aware of.

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

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

The Right to Perform Algebra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Photo By cybermagician/Shutterstock

When Mysa School started about eight years ago, the microschool movement was new.

A school with about 40 students in Washington, D.C., and with a second location in Vermont, Mysa stresses mastery-based learning, where students have to show comprehension before advancing. The idea is that having smaller school sizes enables students to develop much deeper relationships at school, says Siri Fiske, founder of Mysa School.

Mysa’s tuition costs parents who don’t receive aid around $20,000 a year, comparable to what it costs the government to educate a student in a public school. Mysa’s curriculum relies on Common Core, the same national standards as public schools, Fiske says. “But we're just doing it in really, really different ways,” she adds.

The “mastery” focus means that students are grouped by ability, and so a single student can be in one group for reading level and a different group for writing level. Students tend to get grouped in at least three different levels at once, Fiske says.

Ultimately, Fiske says, the goal is personalized learning. The school doesn’t have grades, and it tries to give students a way to really pursue their educational interests. After the poet Amanda Gorman read a poem during President Joe Biden’s inauguration, for instance, lots of Mysa’s fifth and sixth grade students wanted to learn poetry. They spent much of the year on it. In the end it meant that the students had an advanced grasp of poetry, but lagged in other English standards like grammar, Fiske says. But the school kept track of it and circled back later, and the parents went along because they could see the students were learning, she adds. It’s the sort of flexibility she hopes will eventually be taken back to public schools, allowing students more control of their education.

When it started, Fiske claims Mysa was the first school to call itself a microschool. But these days, microschools — loosely defined as schools with relatively few students that function as private schools or learning centers for homeschool students — seem to be everywhere.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove a big increase in homeschooled students, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, a collection of homeschooling research and resources. Afterward, people expected it to return to pre-pandemic levels, but it seems to be growing in many states, says Angela Watson, an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

But for Fiske, of Mysa, the popularity of alternatives to public school actually raises a concern: She fears that her approach to microschooling could be eclipsed by politics and cultural war clashes.

And she isn’t the only one with that worry. As public schools are burdened by nasty political scraps and enrollment declines, these alternative options will play a larger role in offering educational experiences for more students and families. But for thoughtful proponents, the politics of it all can threaten to undermine the promise that attracted them to these alternatives in the first place.

Small Is the New Big

Public school enrollments have dipped since the pandemic, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. And projections show a slow but steady decline in the next few years.

In contrast, many alternatives to public school are blossoming.

From homeschooling to charters to microschools, they are becoming more common ways for American students to learn. For example: Analysis from The Washington Post suggests that homeschools have seen a more than 50 percent increase in students since the pandemic, making it the type of school with the most explosive growth, during a time when it is estimated that public schools lost about 4 percent of their enrollment.

There isn’t reliable data that tracks distinctions between some of these alternatives, such as homeschools and microschools, says Watson, of Johns Hopkins. But these days, about 5 to 6 percent of all K-12 students are homeschooled, which means that model has received very little attention compared to charter schools, considering that about 7 percent of students attend those, she adds. Often, she says, students are really attending something that looks like a private school, or a “microschool,” and those schools are classifying themselves as “homeschools.” Regardless, microschools are increasingly accessing public dollars through education savings accounts and vouchers, which Watson thinks will focus attention on them.

To some observers, these are part of the same trend.

Fiske says she suspects homeschool and microschool growth is related. The reason there are so many homeschoolers now, she speculates, is that many microschools around the country register their students as “homeschooled,” often because these schools are in places that aren’t zoned for school and are being taught by unlicensed instructors.

It’s perhaps reflective of an ideological change regarding these sorts of schools.

Always, for Fiske, the point of microschools was to find “small tweaks” to education. Microschooling was an experiment whose insights she meant to transpose into public schools. Fiske had been previously employed by an independent school in California, while in a doctoral program for education psychology, researching how people learn, she says. She had also worked in public schools before launching Mysa.

But just before the pandemic, she says she was approached by FreedomWorks, an advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers, big political donors, and associated with the “tea party” movement in favor of libertarian ideas. They were interested in building “alternative chains of schools,” Fiske says. For them, it seemed more crucial to divert students from public schools than to experiment and eventually reimport lessons back to public schools that would benefit others.

These days, it seems to Fiske like her commitment to public school puts her in the minority among fellow leaders of microschools. A lot of people are doing this less out of interest in, say, personalized learning and more because they want to get children away from public school, Fiske says.

In states where the “school choice” movement has made strides, there may soon be more public cash available for these alternatives. Some lawmakers in Indiana, for instance, want to expand the use of Education Scholarship Accounts to divert public funds toward microschools, and the state already has private school vouchers that directly provide money to parents. This has raised the thorny issue of whether alternative options want to accept government funding and the oversight that comes with it, or whether that might spoil the reason parents are flocking toward these alternatives.

But, for Fiske, the issue with these ideological interests is primarily a lack of transparency. Without accreditation or licensing, it’s all very murky. Moreover, political connections at a particular institution aren’t always obvious, she says. It’s not necessarily clear that groups like the National Microschooling Center, a popular source of information on these schools, receive funding from groups like Stand Together Trust, a Koch-funded organization, Fiske says.

And Fiske isn’t alone in wondering whether her vision for her educational experiment might be swept away amid larger political shifts.

Value-Add

There are other criticisms of public school, of course.

One is that schools don’t really do enough to intentionally instill good “character” into students, says Brandon McCoy, a former researcher for the right-leaning think tank Manhattan Institute. Our institutions tend to take the view that it’s the parents’ responsibility to do that, he says. But because schools play such a huge role in a child's development, when students are outside of parents’ supervision, schools should make it their responsibility to promote character development as well, McCoy says.

That’s partly why he’s interested in classical learning, a form of education that often emphasizes the “classics” of Western heritage. McCoy published a survey of classical learning schools in 2021 for Manhattan Institute, which painted it as an “attractive option for parents.”

McCoy says he prizes them primarily for instilling moral and civic virtues in students. But McCoy’s argument for classical learning also includes a “practical case,” which points to these institutions providing better outcomes for racial minority students who live in cities, a kind of subtle equity argument. In looking at a few classical learning schools, McCoy pointed to higher results — especially for Black students at one school, South Bronx Classical, a free public charter for K-8 students in New York. Its students are mostly Black and Hispanic, coming from around the South Bronx, a poor area, McCoy notes. “South Bronx Classical probably just has my heart,” he says, adding that its students’ scores in math and reading assessments showed it to be a “diamond in the rough.”

For McCoy, the school’s rigorous focus on debate and confronting texts that have “stood the test of time” accounts for some of this improved academic performance.

While popular in some conservative circles, classical learning isn’t traditionally a byword for culture war politics.

Nevertheless, classical learning does periodically pop up in reactionary contexts. Most recently, Florida turned to it as an “anti-woke” alternative. The state started to permit the “Classical Learning Test” as a substitute for the SAT. In place of the usual subjects, the test was developed to probe knowledge of timeless ideas. However, its developer has complained of being drawn in by culture war fights. Perhaps surprisingly, Florida's adoption won some sparse support from the other side of the political spectrum, including from the progressive scholar and presidential candidate Cornel West, who wrote in 2023 that it’s wrong to construe Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ elevation of classical learning as conservative. DeSantis’ move “transcends partisanship,” West wrote, because seminal ideas are always “revolutionary.”

But those aligned with DeSantis, including networks of classical schools like Hillsdale College’s, have looked to grow classical charters.

Nowadays, one of the biggest criticisms of the classical education movement is that it’s been co-opted by “hyperpartisan” right-wing groups, McCoy says. Some of these movements have been accused of amounting to a conservative “Trojan horse” attempting to sneak in ideology under the guise of liberal arts. That’s potentially unsettling because McCoy thinks that the movement can be beneficial regardless of political leanings. He doesn’t want to see the movement taken over by partisanship, he says. It’s not a problem that’s unique to classical learning models, he adds.

In the end, he can’t dwell too much on that, he says, adding that all he can do is defend his positions. Civic learning is just too important an issue to abandon because of “bad actors,” McCoy says.

Rebranding

The changing agenda of alternative schools has left Fiske, the founder of Mysa School, wondering whether to even use the term “microschool,” she says.

She’s concerned that big, politically motivated funders and polarization could lead more thoughtful expressions of microschools to be drowned out or falsely branded as conservative, rather than just educational.

It’s confusing. Many parents are clearly feeling a need for smaller, more personalized and more flexible schools, Fiske says. But right now, the term doesn’t distinguish much between what she considers to be legitimate, fully licensed schools like hers and “kids in a basement in Kentucky,” she says.

There are going to need to be new labels, Fiske argues. For now, she says, what philosophies these schools truly promote may not be clear.

© Photo By cybermagician/ Shutterstock

Nikita Dutt, a second-year student at the University of California, Davis, didn’t come to college to work with young children.

But since September, she’s spent a couple of hours per day as a tutor through the California Volunteers College Corps, a state-funded partnership program that places college students into paid internships.

She earns $700 per month, provided she tutors elementary students for at least 20 hours per two weeks. She works on math with students in Los Angeles and San Francisco, beamed in through a host program that uses virtual-first tutoring.

Sometimes, Dutt says, it can be hard to keep the students engaged, especially when they are receiving the tutoring from a busy classroom, which often happens. But she recalls one student, a sixth grader with a learning disability. He was struggling to grasp multiplication. She worked with him, diligently, for about five weeks. One day, it just clicked. It was a big deal for the family and the student, and his teacher later told her that whatever she was doing was working.

“And I realized, like, how much difference I made in the student’s learning, and so I really want to help other students as well,” Dutt says.

Dutt is one of the college students being conscripted as high-dose tutors for struggling schools. Pandemic relief funds allowed many schools to set up these programs. But with ESSER funding nearly lapsed, schools have to find other sources to keep the programs going.

Finding a steady pool of affordable tutors has proven tough, and that’s where these college students come in: Leaders of some organizations say that college students and community members help swell the number of tutors available to K-12 classrooms and may also allow schools to more sustainably fund them.

Dutt is also the beneficiary of a new high-dose tutoring training program that hopes to boost the quality of tutors, something researchers have flagged as a challenge for schools.

A Closing Window

Much of the pandemic relief funding made available to schools went to tutoring. The Biden Administration identified high-dose tutoring — usually defined as regular, intensive, small-group tutoring — as a plausible way to give a jolt to student learning after the pandemic.

But now, with federal funds dwindling, schools have to rely on states or other sources to keep tutoring programs going.

Funding is the biggest barrier to tutoring in schools, says Alvin Makori, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. Makori co-authored a research paper about the challenges to schools offering tutor services at scale. The paper — based on surveys of teachers at charter and public schools in California — also noted concerns about tutor quality and trouble finding the space and time to work tutoring into the school day as problem areas for the schools it inspected. (The study did not look at virtual high-dose tutoring, of the kind provided by some of the organizations discussed here.)

The report also recommends that schools partner with outside organizations to provide tutoring services.

That’s where a coalition behind a new tutor training program thinks it can help.

A couple of high-dose tutoring-specific collections of “nanocourses,” bite-sized lessons under 15 minutes each meant to train tutors, were recently released on Arizona State University’s Community Educator Learning Hub platform. The collections were the result of a collaboration between Annenberg Learner, Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Step Up Tutoring, aimed at providing tutors to beleaguered schools. Starting in the fall, the partnership will also offer a microcredential in high-dose tutoring competency.

These tutoring resources have the opportunity to build a corps of tutors across the country, because training is a big hurdle to getting willing volunteers and college students in place and to be effective, says Korbi Adams, a senior program manager affiliated with ASU.

Step Up Tutoring has had about 170 tutors go through the program to pick up instructional skills.

During the pandemic, investment into broadband and internet in low-income areas in places like Los Angeles made it possible to connect volunteers to work one-on-one with students, says Sam Olivieri, CEO of Step Up Tutoring.

The need for high-dose tutoring is still really significant, Olivieri says. But there are questions around sustainability.

College students are a promising source of tutors, she argues. They come with relationship- building skills, she says, and tend to have an easier time connecting with younger students who often want to know what it’s like to be in college.

There’s another reason schools might be eager to embrace the model of harnessing the power of college student-tutors, Olivieri says: Step Up is an approved federal work-study provider on 16 college campuses, meaning that the students’ pay comes from a sustainable source. They also work with California’s College Corps program. From those two sources, they’ve gotten about 350 tutors, she says, making it the main pool from which they draw tutors these days.

For the schools that work with Step Up, that provides the benefits of mentorship, with their children connecting to college students, and financial stability, Olivieri says. Not all of those students are education majors. But a lot of them show potential interest in or a proclivity for exploring the education field, Olivieri says.

Dutt, the UC Davis student, is glad for the opportunity.

She’s worked with six students, all between third and sixth grade. Right now, she tutors two students who take lessons from home and two who take them from school. She is also a substitute tutor, filling in when others can’t make it in the mornings.

A computer science major, she says she previously had no interest in education as a profession. “But then when I started tutoring, I realized how much I liked it, and how rewarding it felt to help students grow academically and instill confidence in them,” she says. “And so I think it kind of found like a newfound passion in teaching and tutoring and the education field.”

© Photo By Ground Picture/ Shutterstock

When pueblos in New Mexico looked into running fiber into Jemez Day School, a K-6 school run by the Bureau of Indian Education, they were launching a complicated process.

Upgrading the school’s connection meant jumping through hoops, even though there was fiber across the street. Early on, the U.S. federal government’s E-Rate program, which provides “universal service” funding to schools and libraries for telecommunications and internet, also said it wouldn’t pay for another project. The program didn’t want to spend to bring fiber along the same path to tribal schools and libraries and the local school district, says John Chadwick, the digital equity coordinator for the New Mexico Department of Education.

So Chadwick passed along what he’d been told: If the pueblos were eager to provide internet for their students, they’d have to partner with the local public school district. But some pueblo leaders balked at this idea, according to Chadwick. “I thought I’d stepped in it big time,” he says. Some leaders of the Santo Domingo, San Felipe and Cochiti pueblos viewed it as further encroachment on their rights to self-rule.

This story also appeared in The Daily Yonder

Nevertheless, for Chadwick, this was clearly a situation where he needed to step aside. The negotiation would have to occur between the pueblos — which are sovereign nations — and the districts. Until a former governor of Santo Domingo stepped in to argue in favor of the idea, it looked like it might not happen. But in that leader’s view, it was the tribe’s obligation to get the internet to their students, even if that meant working with the district.

This started a three-year process trying to get the school connected. But it was well-timed, and the school successfully upgraded to a 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) fiber connection right at the start of the pandemic. Slower speeds are considered “underserved” in federal infrastructure legislation.

Broadband — high-speed internet — is critical for learning. Without it, students can struggle to turn in or even access school assignments. And the pandemic focused attention on inequitable access to broadband services in education. While for some students and public schools that’s largely due to affordability issues, for people and schools in rural areas, it’s also due to inadequate internet infrastructure.

That’s especially a problem on tribal lands. In 2020, by one federal estimate, 18 percent of people living on tribal lands were unable to access broadband (outside of tribal areas, that number was closer to 4 percent). In rural tribal areas, about 30 percent of people were unable to access broadband. Federal reports blame, among other challenges, fragmented bureaucratic processes and a lack of funds to cover upfront costs.

The result is that whether Native American students have enough internet for modern learning depends on where they live.

While the majority of Native American students attend school through the public education system, those who attend schools controlled by tribal governments or the Bureau of Indian Education may have less access to the internet at school or home, due to terrain where it’s difficult to lay fiber, community poverty and historical land ownership patterns that create hurdles.

The situation differs drastically from place to place, tribe to tribe and even within chapters of tribes. So how are some of them handling it?

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

In South Dakota, some members of the Oglala Sioux found broadband difficult to acquire.

There are nine federally recognized tribes in the state, and the Oglala Sioux are one of the biggest. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is rural and large, stretching over land roughly the size of Connecticut. About 19,000 people live there, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. So the cost of running broadband across the reservation is steep, says Nakina Mills, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge.

Mills was elected as an official of the tribe during the COVID-19 crisis. In her current job, she works as tribal ed specialist for National Indian Education Association, a national nonprofit focused on Native American education. She usually spends her time trying to support the “educational sovereignty” of tribes who run schools, working on policy or programming. So she wasn’t used to working on broadband, she says.

During the pandemic, students at Pine Ridge’s 23 K-12 schools relied on hot spots. With students out of school, assessment scores declined, Mills says. So with minimal internet, students still performed worse academically. But the pandemic provided a persuasive example of why broadband is a worthy investment.

That wasn’t always obvious, she says.

The reservation has a high poverty rate, affecting about 70 percent of students in the area by Mills’ estimate. When there’s that much poverty, people must sacrifice to have the basic necessities like shelter, food and electricity, Mills says. Consequently, Wi-Fi and broadband have been less of a priority. And so, at home, getting the internet is still a challenge for many families, Mill says.

Bringing broadband to the region means pursuing federal funds. But tribal leaders are sometimes wary of doing that: “Making sure there's the true intent of helping build our infrastructure” matters, Mills says, “just because of the historical trauma and federal government and those kinds of things that have happened to our people.”

Recently, there has been federal investment. For instance, a $35 million federal grant, announced in March, is providing funds for fiber in Bennett and Oglala Lakota counties, where the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is located. The funding is meant to help connect seven educational facilities, along with 3,300 people and a number of businesses and farms, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation

When the pandemic hit, the majority of students at Pine Hill School, a tribal school on the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation, didn’t have access to the internet at home.

With forced closures, the school needed to increase internet access, for which it had received CARES Act funding. Leaders called Margaret Merrill, a former teacher and owner of Oso Internet Solutions, an internet service provider for the Ramah Navajo Chapter in New Mexico, part of the Navajo Nation.

Merrill felt she had to move fast. Working closely with the tribal government and community, her company put up hot spots to allow K-12 students and students returning home from college a chance to complete assignments.

It was an immense challenge that required creativity, Merrill says. The landscape itself makes internet access difficult. This region, the High Desert, is marked by canyons, mesas and mountains. A volcanic crater is perched on the reservation.

It wasn’t just for school purposes either. Merrill says she was committed to building the infrastructure in part because she knew that the community was losing elders. School staff and elders also live in the southernmost parts of the reservation, sometimes in multi-sided hogans, sacred dwellings in Diné culture (which in some cases, Merrill says, are constructed to look like a woman’s fingers interlaced together with her hands over her pregnant belly). In recent years, the community has invested in Indian Health Service projects to get water and electricity to those areas. Even still, only a couple of years ago they were in a true dead zone, Merrill says. No internet. No cell phone signals. No way to call out if an emergency happened.

But the company successfully ran fiber to Pine Hill School, a health clinic and the tribal government buildings. In 2022, enabled by the FCC’s emergency connectivity fund, they were able to start running it to homes. Those funds are limited to only schools, so the company paid out of pocket to run fiber out to the homes of 26 elders, building on fiber they’d run out to get the school connected, Merrill adds.

Within about five months, almost everyone had internet access, Merrill says. Chadwick, of the New Mexico Department of Education, pointed to Pine Hill School as one of the only schools nationwide to apply for and receive emergency connectivity funding for fiber.

However, there were a few families who still couldn’t connect to the internet. Some didn’t have electricity in their houses. The terrain means that they rely on radio signals for internet, and there was one family that lived so remotely on the other side of the volcanic crater that the signals couldn’t reach them, Merrill says.

For Merrill, fixing this is part of a fierce vision of digital equity that’s not complete, one that’s deeply connected to a sense of community. Anyone should be able to move back to their home and still be able to work and learn, she says.

Now, the company is working on a project through the Navajo Nation — relying on funding from the American Rescue Plan Act — which will connect another 600 Ramah Navajo family homes to fiber. By the time the work finishes, in 2025, around 85 percent of families there will be connected, Merrill estimates.

That will allow them to work on the other components of digital equity, like education regarding how to use digital tools, she adds. Merrill hopes the investments will spur further attempts to double down. Unemployment is high, and many people reside on the reservation only on the weekends, finding work in large metropolitans like Albuquerque or Phoenix. Better internet connectivity could lead to better economic development, allowing people who have expressed interest in moving back to the reservation system to work remotely and to attend telehealth appointments, she argues.

20/20 Foresight

Ultimately, the process for improving broadband can be slow.

For example, Tse Yi Gai High School, in New Mexico, started the process of connecting to internet five years ago and is just getting up this summer, says Chadwick, of the New Mexico Department of Education.

There’s “checkerboarding” to contend with, the result of a historical process that broke up Native land grants, mixing up private and tribal ownership. Today, that means that running fiber into a region can involve crossing over land owned by the federal government, state governments, tribal government and private owners. It complicates the permit process, Chadwick says.

There are barriers for those building broadband infrastructure for tribes, and making sure tribal students can log on to the internet can require advocates who can help overcome obstacles like cost and availability, Chadwick says.

“It takes champions who really recognize this is a valuable tool for their future,” Chadwick says, adding: “If there’s a will to do it, there’s a way to make it happen. It takes a lot of efficacy and it takes a lot of patience.”

© Photo courtesy of Margaret Merrill