Since the pandemic, the urgency of designing and scaling evidence-based products to support learning recovery has become more pronounced. Educational institutions are grappling with unprecedented disruptions and widening achievement gaps, making the need for effective, research-backed interventions critical. The focus is not only on creating these products but also ensuring they are adopted and effectively implemented in schools and classrooms across the country.
The Leveraging Evidence to Accelerate Recovery Nationwide (LEARN) Network, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, is at the forefront of this effort. Led by SRI International, a nonprofit with a strong track record of bringing innovations to market, the LEARN Network focuses on promoting learning growth by enhancing the use of evidence-based educational products.
The Network also comprises four product teams dedicated to adapting and positioning evidence-based products that boost literacy and math learning to make them more useful and accessible for educators. By providing learning and coaching opportunities, the LEARN Network aims to build the capacity of these teams and others in the field to equitably and sustainably scale educational products. This involves understanding educators’ problems of practice and needs and systems decision-making processes in product procurement, and developing tools for researchers, developers and educators to support the widespread adoption of effective solutions.
Jessica Mislevy Director of Digital Learning and Technology Policy, SRI Education
Recently, EdSurge spoke with education researchers Kerry Friedman and Jessica Mislevy about the importance of integrating evidence-based practices, educator input and a systems lens from the earliest stages of product development. Friedman, a former teacher with 12 years of experience in research and technical assistance, focuses on strengthening educators' and system leaders' ability to use evidence in practice. As the project director for the LEARN Network, she works with researchers and developers on capacity building and design of evidence-based products and programs. Mislevy is the director of digital learning and technology policy at SRI Education, specializing in mixed-methods evaluations of products designed to improve student outcomes in K-12 and post-secondary education. She is a co-principal investigator with the LEARN Network, focusing on educators’ effective adoption and scaling of evidence-based practices and programs.
EdSurge: Why are evidence-based products and programs so vital, especially at this point in time in America’s schools?
Mislevy: We've all seen how the COVID-19 pandemic upended education systems across the country, interrupting learning for students and exacerbating existing inequalities in education. We're seeing this reflected in the 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress with the first-ever decline recorded in mathematics and the largest average score decline in reading in decades. Research shows that the quality of learning products and programs matters for student outcomes. Now more than ever, it's important to get those products that can improve education outcomes for all learners and eliminate persistent achievement gaps in districts and schools. Unfortunately, many effective products don't reach educators due to an overwhelming supply of products. It can be hard to select products that are effective and well-matched to students' needs and contexts, as well as affordable and easy to use.
What key considerations should researchers and developers keep in mind while designing and scaling products and programs?
Friedman: When considering scale, researchers often view it as the final step. However, designing a scalable innovation begins with the initial idea. This is where our framework for the LEARN Network starts. We adapted SRI International's Invent-Apply-Transition (I-A-T) framework to better fit the education sector, incorporating Liberatory Design principles focused on equity and systems thinking.
Kerry Friedman Senior Researcher, SRI Education
Both the I-A-T framework and Liberatory Design emphasize the importance of understanding users' needs from the start. This understanding forms the foundation of the Invent stage of the I-A-T framework. In the Apply stage, you assess the broader market, identifying key players, infrastructure, policies, and competition to refine your innovation. Finally, in the Transition phase, you consider how to scale your product, envisioning it at a systems level and exploring pathways to create a financially viable approach.
We created the Learn to Scale Toolkit to guide researchers through these stages and support the scaling process. We also profiled various products on their journeys from development to scale in our Stories of Scaling.
How is the Network working to increase the use of evidence-based products and programs in schools?
Mislevy: We're coming at it from both the supply and the demand side. On the supply side, the LEARN Network provides capacity building to researchers and developers in scaling their evidence-based products. So we support them in adapting their products while considering educator context, decision-making processes and usability. This has included a mix of one-on-one and cross-team coaching and consultation sessions to provide tools and training while also supporting and promoting team building and collaboration. In addition to SRI scaling experts, we also bring together other expert voices to contribute to these conversations. Then on the demand side, we're working to better understand the needs and barriers that educators face in adopting and scaling evidence-based products. We translate these findings into actionable takeaways for developers to ensure their products are more likely to be adopted and scaled.
Does the Network have any insights into school and district needs or how they select programs and products?
Free LEARN Network resources for researchers, developers and educators:
The LEARN to Scale Toolkit: a comprehensive resource for researchers and developers based on the Invent-Apply-Transition framework
Stories of Scaling: a profile series highlighting impactful researchers, entrepreneurs and evidence-based products
The LEARN Network Blog: articles, podcasts and Q&As featuring experts and thought leaders from across the U.S.
LEARN Network Research: action-oriented research briefs focused on product development, procurement and more
Mislevy: The LEARN Network conducted a focused study on K-12 education procurement practices to better understand how decision-makers determine which products to adopt in their schools and districts and how evidence is used in those decisions. We conducted in-depth interviews with a broad array of education leaders and other education stakeholders, and also conducted nationally representative surveys of public school and district leaders through the RAND American Educator Panels. We examined what motivates schools and districts to procure products, who is involved in the decision-making process and what sources of information leaders look to when selecting products. For example, we found that routine curriculum review cycles often motivated educators to procure core curriculum materials, whereas reviews of student outcome data more often led to the procurement of supplemental materials.
We also saw that teachers are reported as most involved in identifying and evaluating prospective products for their schools and districts, while school and district leaders are more involved in making final decisions about which products to select. In terms of usage, research and evidence were amongst the more influential sources for informing procurement decisions, though we found that recommendations from fellow education leaders and end users actually ranked higher. Our research has important implications for product developers so they really understand the systemic forces that influence when and why products are procured, as well as who is involved throughout that procurement process to increase the likelihood of product uptake and scale. We recently published on the LEARN Network website the first of several planned research briefs, which features lessons for developers ready to bring their products to market or scale to broader audiences.
The information reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N220012 to SRI International. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
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.
One of the country’s richest nonprofits focused on online education has been giving out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly — and pretty quietly.
“There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They are not absent from the conversation, but their name is not raised very often.”
Late last month, an article in the online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the promise of the nonprofit “hollow.” The op-ed, by longtime online education watcher Dhawal Shah, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax return, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in tax year 2023, with $15 million in revenue from investment income. “Instead of being an innovator, Axim Collaborative seems to be a non-entity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and equity advancement largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.
The group was formed with the money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time many online learning leaders criticized the move, since edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase did not end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer filed for bankruptcy.
So what is Axim investing in? And what are its future plans?
EdSurge reached out to Axim’s CEO, Stephanie Khurana, to get an update.
Not surprisingly, she pushed back on the idea that the group is not doing much.
“We’ve launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” she says, noting that many grants Axim has awarded were issued since its most recent tax return was filed. “It’s a start, and it’s seeding a lot of innovations. And that to me is very powerful.”
One of the projects she says she is most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration by several historically Black colleges to create a shared technology platform and framework to share online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she is also proud of the work her group did helping set up a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “incorporating student success metrics in the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they might be able to support students with different kinds of advising and different kinds of student supports.”
The example embodies the group’s philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just cash, to help promising ideas scale to support underserved learners in higher education.
Listening Tour
When EdSurge talked with Khurana last year, she stressed that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could best make a difference.
One thing that struck her as she did that, she says, is “hearing what barriers students are facing, and what's keeping them from persisting through their programs and finding jobs that match with their skills and being able to actually realize better outcomes.”
Grant amounts the group has given out so far range from around $500,000 for what she called “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Axim’s work, though Khurana says the group is treading gingerly.
“We are looking very carefully at how and where AI is beneficial, and where it might be problematic, especially for these underserved learners,” she says. “And so trying to be clear-eyed about what those possibilities are, and then bring to bear the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions that we're supporting.”
One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, University of Central Florida and Indiana Tech to explore research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They're developing an AI tool to have a student-facing approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?,’” she says. “A lot of times those are hard to discern.”
Another key work of Axim involves keeping up an old system rather than starting new ones. The Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX platform, the open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the tech know-how and the computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of colleges and organizations around the world, including a growing number of governments, who use it to offer online courses.
Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now works at 2U to coordinate its use, is also on a technical committee for Open edX.
He says the structure of supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on the way the Linux open-source operating system is managed.
While edX continues to rely on the platform, the software is community-run. “There has to be somebody that maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.
When the war in Ukraine broke out, Agarwal says, the country “turned on a dime and the universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”
Poulin, of WCET, says that it’s too early to say whether Axim’s model is working.
“While their profile and impact may not be great to this point, I am willing to give startups some runway time to determine if they will take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”
His advice: “A creative, philanthropic organization should take some risks if they are working in the ‘innovation’ sphere. We learn as much from failures as successes.”
For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal is not to find a magic answer to deep-seated problems facing higher education.
“I know some people want something that will be a silver bullet,” she says. “And I think it's just hard to come by in a space where there's a lot of different ways to solve problems. Starting with people on the ground who are doing the work — [with] humility — is probably one of the best ways to seed innovations and to start.”
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, her campus became “NES-aligned,” meaning her principal opted into the New Education System.
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.”
State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) just released The 2024 State EdTech Trends. The survey and report tracks insights on the top edtech priorities as identified in SETDA’s survey of state policy-makers including state edtech directors, state superintendents and commissioners of education and CIOs. “With every new report, it’s more evident that state education agencies are evolving to meet the demands of a digital, modern world while navigating the uncertainty created by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,” says Julia Fallon, Executive Director of SETDA. Like its predecessors, the report catalogs ways state education agencies are adjusting to a world where technology is ubiquitous and where new and emerging innovations create never-before-seen opportunities and risks. Conducted in collaboration with Whiteboard Advisors, the report includes responses from 46 states and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). The report complements the survey data with state spotlights that showcase the work states are leading to support cybersecurity efforts, the effective and equitable use of edtech tools, and the development of policy to guide the use of AI in K-12 classrooms. Learn more.
Integrating technology into the classroom involves more than just adding gadgets and software; it’s about creating a dynamic learning environment where students are actively engaged and teachers can teach more effectively. This journey requires collaboration among technology teams, instructional coaches and educators.
Recently, EdSurge spoke with three educational leaders from Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53 in Illinois about their experiences with and strategies for using technology to enrich classroom environments. Caitlin Smith, the director of technology, has been in the K-12 educational technology space for 10 years. As the technology integration and support specialist, Kari Moulton brings 18 years of education experience to her work with teachers and staff to support technology integration. Amber Skeate, starting her 20th year in the classroom, serves on the technology committee and as technology leader at Alan B. Shepard Elementary School.
Caitlin Smith Director of Technology, Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53, Illinois
A District Perspective: Evaluating and Implementing New Technology
Technology plays a crucial role in classroom success, but integrating new tools can be challenging. Smith emphasizes the importance of addressing the big picture. "Being at the district level, I have to look at the challenges that hinder more than just one user," she explains. "I start by looking at where we have had the most issues coming from the end users (staff and students) or if the administration notices gaps in student growth." Smith’s approach ensures that the technology chosen benefits the entire district.
When evaluating new technology, Smith places a priority on solutions that are both easy to implement and cost-effective. "We discuss this in our technology leadership meetings and set up trials for each tech leader to test the technology," she says. This thorough vetting process ensures that the selected tools will effectively address the district’s needs. "Having both a technology integration specialist and a technology leadership committee allows the district to implement new technology throughout the year with the input of teachers along with my own staff’s recommendations," Smith adds, highlighting the importance of collaborative decision-making in tech integration.
Kari Moulton Technology Integration and Support Specialist, Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53, Illinois
A School Perspective: Rolling Out Technology to Teachers
Once new technology is selected, rolling it out successfully is the next challenge. Moulton plays a key role in this phase. "We do whatever it takes to support our teachers," Moulton shares. Her team provides a monthly newsletter with information about new tools, creates instructional videos and offers one-on-one training sessions. Her proactive support helps teachers feel confident and prepared to use new technology in their classrooms. Additionally, Moulton meets with new teachers at the start of the school year to give them an overview of the technology they will be using, ensuring that they are ready to integrate it into their teaching from day one.
“Having a supportive edtech company ensures that the adoption of the new tools is smooth,” Moulton adds, underscoring the importance of reliable vendor support in the tech adoption process. She points to Bourbonnais' implementation of Vivi, the classroom engagement and campus communications solution as an example. “Vivi made [our technology] rollout unique because they sent us two boxes to demo for eight weeks. This allowed us to have various teachers at all grade levels test out the solution and give us feedback.”
“One beneficial way that edtech companies have supported the tools that we have adopted is great communication and support,” shares Moulton. She highlights Vivi's exemplary support: “I have monthly meetings with my [customer success manager] to check in on how things are going, what is working and what we might need to troubleshoot. They also give out [usage] data. With budgets affecting a majority of schools, having the data to back up the usage of the tool is very important and beneficial in determining the future use of the tool.”
Amber Skeate Classroom Teacher, Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53, Illinois
A Classroom Perspective: Transforming Classroom Experiences
In the classroom, technology can transform instruction and student engagement. "Technology is a huge part of my classroom atmosphere,” says Skeate. The students each have a laptop and can use approved apps for independent work during math and reading, allowing them to work at their instructional level while Skeate meets with small groups. Technology is also used to present concepts to the class. "The way I project my slide presentations, lessons and videos wouldn't happen without Vivi,” shares Skeate.
The ability to actively participate in lessons through technology fosters a more engaging and interactive classroom environment. “The students ask me every day if they are going to use the Vivi App so that they can be the teacher for the lesson,” Skeate excitedly states. Vivi's wireless screen mirroring allows the teacher to pass control of the classroom display to the students to share how they answer problems or write a word.
And engagement is not the only benefit. “Technology has been a lifesaver when it comes to honing in on instructional levels of all students through particular reading and math apps,” explains Skeate. In addition, technology can be a time-saver for teachers. "Vivi's Play Content feature allows me to line up all the videos I need for the day,” notes Skeate, which saves her time she would otherwise spend searching for materials. This efficiency enables her to focus more on teaching and less on administrative tasks, ultimately benefiting her students.
Recommended Resources:
Tech Tips for Teachers: Find quick tech tips to enhance classroom engagement and efficiency.
Customer Stories: See how school districts are using Vivi to enhance learning and reach their goals.
Teacher Self-Care Checklist: Discover practical self-care tips to help teachers reduce stress and avoid burnout.
The collaboration between district leaders, tech coaches and teachers at Bourbonnais showcases how technology can be seamlessly integrated to create engaging and efficient classroom environments. By focusing on comprehensive training and ongoing support while implementing interactive tools like Vivi, these educators are transforming their teaching and enhancing student learning experiences. The positive impact of technology on the instructional experience and classroom dynamics is evident, demonstrating that when implemented thoughtfully, technology can be a powerful tool in education.
Strategies for collaborative technology integration
For district-level staff: Carry out a proactive needs assessment / Carry out multi-level evaluations
For school-level staff: Provide multifaceted teacher support / Provide training geared toward new teachers / Seek edtech partner collaboration
For classroom-level staff: Provide tech-infused instruction / Offer student choice and control
See for yourself how Vivi transforms communication, boosts classroom engagement and simplifies IT management. Learn more at Vivi.io.
The choices we make today will have lasting impacts.
GUEST COLUMN | by Jeff Faust and Melissa Loble
AI is dominating conversations in public education and is all but certain to be a key theme at education conferences for the foreseeable future. The choices we make today will have lasting impacts on our profession, our institutions, our leaders, our teachers, and most importantly, our students. While it’s important to avoid hype and futurism, doing nothing is risky. The rapid development of AI requires action, as we are already experiencing economic and professional impacts across industries with a rate of change almost certain to further accelerate.
‘The rapid development of AI requires action, as we are already experiencing economic and professional impacts across industries with a rate of change almost certain to further accelerate.’
‘We’ve Opened Up the Gate’
In a recent Instructure-hosted webinar focused on the role of AI schools, high school teacher Paul Satchwill explained the changing technological landscape succinctly: “We’ve opened up this gate…and there’s not a lot of direction.” While the potential of AI is immense, the lack of clear guidance and understanding poses significant challenges. As with any edtech, districts are worried about data privacy protections for both their teachers and students. The information provided by AI can’t always be trusted. Algorithms can perpetuate the biases of the humans who created them. Faulty models can also lead to data hallucinations –incorrect or misleading results generated by the AI. But as the saying goes, “knowledge is power”, and with the increase in knowledge, comes the ability to overcome these issues.
Vendors need to be open with administrators regarding many data privacy concerns. Instructure, for example, is providing its clients with “nutrition fact sheets” that highlight the imperative information about its products. Districts can also use products, such as LearnPlatform by Instructure, to assess whether these AI products meet evidence-backed standards. With increased AI literacy, users will also know the best use cases for AI and how it applies to their classroom experience.
Crucial Role of Schools
Schools play a crucial role in addressing this by providing comprehensive education and training around AI for both teachers and students. This includes developing AI literacy programs, establishing clear expectations for AI use, and fostering open communication about its implications. Schools are uniquely equipped to foster open communication and collaboration with their communities through community conversations focused on AI.
Schools can highlight the steps they are taking to responsibly incorporate AI, including the development of AI literacy programs, the establishment of clear guidelines for AI use, and ongoing professional development for staff.
By proactively engaging parents, educators, and community members in these conversations, schools can build trust, address concerns, and ensure that AI integration aligns with the values and goals of the community. This collaborative approach not only promotes transparency but also empowers stakeholders to actively participate in shaping the future of AI in education.
Immense Promise
The integration of AI in education holds immense promise for transforming teaching and learning experiences. AI has the potential to revolutionize education by offering personalized learning journeys, optimizing efficiency, and sparking creativity. By leveraging AI’s capabilities, schools can create a dynamic environment where each student receives tailored support, teachers can dedicate more time to inspiring students, and learning becomes an engaging and immersive adventure. AI-powered feedback enables educators to provide real-time insights, nurturing students’ abilities to think critically and become self-directed learners.
AI has the potential to be a valuable tool for overcoming writer’s block and creativity challenges, enabling users to quickly generate ideas and content, save time, and “visually bring things to life” even without prior graphical expertise. However, it should be used as an aid rather than a replacement for human creativity. Through this practice, we can prioritize critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability in education and empower learners to excel in a world alongside AI.
Embracing the Potential
AI will have lasting impacts on education, and its potential to enhance teaching and learning is vast. We should accept that leveraging AI to increase efficacy or to be the best educator possible is not cheating; rather, it’s a strategic move toward preparing ourselves and our students for the future. Schools must embrace this reality and begin exploring, training, and integrating AI tools purposefully and strategically.
By leveraging industry partners, experts, and thought leaders in the field, schools can navigate this complex landscape with confidence, ensuring that AI is both effective and responsible. As we embark on this journey, let us embrace the potential of AI to create an education system that empowers every learner to reach their full potential in a future world that is all but guaranteedto look vastly different from the world we know today.
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Jeff Faust is Chief Technology Officer for Chesapeake Public Schools. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn. Melissa Loble is Chief Academic Officer at Instructure. Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn.
A growing number of high school students are looking for opportunities to do academic research, hoping to add ‘published author’ to their list of achievements when they apply to colleges.
Just look on popular Facebook groups and Reddit threads for tips on getting into selective colleges, and you’ll likely find posts recommending that students participate in intensive research or compete in science competitions as a way to stand out on college applications. It seems that many aspiring applicants and their parents have fixed on the idea that getting research published in an academic journal as a high school student has arisen as a new trophy to strive for in an escalating race to try to stand out as an applicant, especially after more selective colleges have dropped requiring the SAT or other admissions tests.
But experts say that the trend of high school research, while well-intentioned, has plenty of pitfalls. After all, academic research often requires deeper knowledge of a field than is typical in high school, and it involves carefully following ethical guidelines to protect research subjects from potential harm that students may not be aware of without expert guidance.
“A piece of research, even a basic piece of research, can take years to produce,” says Bob Malkin, the executive director at the International Research Institutes of North Carolina. “High school students have classes they need to worry about. They may be playing sports. They might be pursuing other hobbies or interests. So mixing this in with all the other things they need to do can definitely be a bad idea, just because it takes so much time.”
Pushing students to get involved in research early can also amplify inequities among those who don’t have access to expensive research programs or opportunities at elite institutions. That’s because many students can’t afford to participate in summer programs to hone research skills, or they aren’t taught important research skills in high school, says Bethany Usher, the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Radford University. As a result, they don’t have the same experiences that will help them find a job in a lab or conduct their own project when they get to college freshman year, she says.
That’s not to say that teaching research skills in high school is bad, though. In fact, Malkin recently co-wrote a book about how to help young students along the path, called “A Guide to Academic Research for High School Students.”
The hope, experts say, is that teaching research skills becomes a more mainstream affair, making its way into high schools and undergraduate courses outside of elite private schools. That could help build basic skills without chasing publication at too young an age.
Building Skills
Bonnie Hale, an independent counselor advising high school students on their college applications, says that she sees students whose attempts to do research to enhance their resume does them more harm than good.
One student, for instance, asked Hale to help her send out a survey to parents across California, a task that would’ve required the oversight of an institutional review board.
Other students will try to submit their work for publication without the proper elements of an academic paper, such as a background literature review or a methods section. One student hoped to submit a paper that didn’t even include a research question, Hale says. No peer reviewed journal would publish this work, she adds.
"Students may not have seen themselves as being interested in doing something like that, but if they're taught inquiry and research opportunities in high schools, that doesn't require a university to be nearby."
— Bethany Usher, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Radford University.
Some journals cater toward research from high schoolers, but they often require high fees, are run by other high school or undergraduate students or aren’t reputable journals, Hale says. Plus, publishing in these journals likely won’t impress college admissions officials, she adds. For students looking to get research published, Malkin suggests they work with a college faculty member, though that can be difficult to pull off.
Publishing research without proper mentorship or oversight can also have major consequences for the student, says Hale, who co-wrote the book on student research with Malkin. She’s worked with some students who say they participated in a study, only for Hale to find out they overstated their role in the paper. If students get caught conducting research unethically or mis-representing themselves on an application, a college could rescind its offer or put that student on probation, she says.
“That’s what students don’t understand,” Hale says. “That the pressure makes them go in a direction that they ought not to go.”
To Hale and Malkin, improving the environment starts with changing parent attitudes. Parents need to lower the pressure and understand that their child will learn and be happy in college even if they don’t get into their dream school, Malkin says. If they’re interested in research, encourage them, but if they’re not, don’t force it, he says. “Somehow somebody's got to convince these parents that your kid's going to be okay,” he adds.
Usher, of Radford, says more high schools around the country should also help teach research skills — without pushing too hard too soon. She says high school teachers could encourage their students to participate in community-based projects, for example, such as surveys or other outreach in their local area. Often the skills young students learn through doing research, like critical thinking, are what help them later on rather than the research itself, she says.
“If we want to reach a greater majority of students, being able to have those teachers well-equipped to be taking advantage of research opportunities from communities and making them relevant to students” is essential, Usher says.
Early exposure to core research skills could also help with college readiness and retention, she adds. “Students may not have seen themselves as being interested in doing something like that, but if they're taught inquiry and research opportunities in high schools, that doesn't require a university to be nearby,” she adds.
Some colleges have also begun incorporating research skills into courses. Throughout a student’s time in college, classes will continue to build on those skills, which students can use when they enter the workforce or graduate school, says Lindsay Currie, executive officer for the Council on Undergraduate Research.
Most graduate programs now require some level of research, Malkin says, and students need to start as early as possible. Working research into classes encourages students to sign up for additional opportunities outside of the classroom once they build their confidence in the subject, Currie adds.
“If you just have a flyer that says, ‘hey, do you want to participate in my lab,’ you might not, as a college freshman, really understand what that means if you don't have any context for it,” she says. These courses “make it so students understand the value and can test out whether it's the right fit for them.”
In one biology class at Radford, students conducted research on a specific fungus among bees. After a semester of trapping bees and testing them using various methods, the students presented their original findings at a research fair. These types of projects can be conducted in any type of course, says Usher, who was the previous president of the Council on Undergraduate Research. She suggests that students could each choreograph their own routines in a dance class rather than just all learning the same steps.
“They don't have to step out of their comfort zone, everybody's going to class so there's not a ‘you get selected for a thing’” type of process, Usher says. “Sometimes students do research and they don't even know they've done it,” she adds “You need to be like, ‘this thing that you thought was really cool and exciting, that was research.’”
That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.
They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.
One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.
Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.
These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.
“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”
What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?
Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.
“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”
Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.
“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.
But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.
“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”
Changing the Narrative
Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.
Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.
“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don't fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”
View From a School District
Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.
Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.
“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”
Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.
It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.
While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.
“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”
Two instructors at Vilnius University in Lithuania brought in some unusual teaching assistants earlier this year: AI chatbot versions of themselves.
The instructors — Paul Jurcys and Goda Strikaitė-Latušinskaja — created AI chatbots trained only on academic publications, PowerPoint slides and other teaching materials that they had created over the years. And they called these chatbots “AI Knowledge Twins,” dubbing one Paul AI and the other Goda AI.
They told their students to take any questions they had during class or while doing their homework to the bots first before approaching the human instructors. The idea wasn’t to discourage asking questions, but rather to nudge students to try out the chatbot doubles.
“We introduced them as our assistants — as our research assistants that help people interact with our knowledge in a new and unique way,” says Jurcys.
Experts in artificial intelligence have for years experimented with the idea of creating chatbots that can fill this support role in classrooms. With the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, there’s a new push to try robot TAs.
“From a faculty perspective, especially someone who is overwhelmed with teaching and needs a teaching assistant, that's very attractive to them — then they can focus on research and not focus on teaching,” says Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s AI Summer Institute for Teachers of Writing.
But just because Watkins thought some faculty would like it doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a good idea.
“That's exactly why it's so dangerous too, because it basically offloads this sort of human relationships that we're trying to develop with our students and between teachers and students to an algorithm,” he says.
On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we hear from these professors about how the experiment went — how it changed classroom discussion but sometimes caused distraction. A student in the class, Maria Ignacia, also shares her view on what it was like to have chatbot TAs.
And we listen in as Jurcys asks his chatbot questions — and admits the bot puts things a bit differently than he would.
When Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate earlier this month, his ascendancy helped to elevate the idea of educators serving in public office.
Walz, who served several terms in Congress before becoming the governor of Minnesota in 2018, is a former high school social studies teacher and football coach who, to this day, holds those identities close. Come January 2025, depending on the outcome of the election, he could be moving to Washington, D.C., to serve as vice president of the United States.
Though Walz is squarely in the spotlight during this election, a number of other educators are seeking public office this year, many for the first time.
In many ways, politics is an obvious and natural progression for educators, teacher-candidates and political scientists say.
This summer, EdSurge spoke with five individuals running for election — three classroom teachers, one superintendent and an early childhood advocate — about their motivations and the skills and experiences that would set them up for success in office, if elected in November.
Once a Public Servant, Always a Public Servant
Plenty of former educators hold public office today, including at the federal level, such as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, a former preschool teacher, and Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, a former high school history and government teacher.
“They’re already public servants,” Siegel-Stechler points out. “They have a lot of insight and experience in how to navigate some of the challenges that go along with large public institutions and the processes that make government happen.”
Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, adds that individuals who prioritize public service and volunteerism are more likely to engage with civic and political organizations.
Arguably the highest form of service is to teach every day.
— Jonathan Collins
“It’s the involvement in those networks that tends to catapult people into the process of running for office,” Collins says. “Think about teachers and teachers’ unions, about what a teacher does on an everyday basis. Arguably the highest form of service is to teach every day.”
Chad King Wilson Sr. is a high school alternative education and social studies teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. He’s running for a seat on the Frederick County Board of Education this November.
Teachers, Wilson says, understand that their role — with students, with families, in a community — has a certain power and, with it, demands a certain responsibility.
“In politics today, the decisions our elected officials make affect our lives — sometimes in small ways, sometimes big,” he says. “Educators have a service mindset and a duty of care in everything they do. That serves you well in any elected position, because you’re already serving. You’re a public servant, [asking], ‘How can I uplift you? How can I get you where you need to be?’”
Education Is Inherently Political — Even More So Today
Between the pandemic, which led to divisive and prolonged school closures, and the increasing politicization of education — from book bans to discussions of gender identity and legislation about what can be taught or said in a classroom — many teachers feel vilified.
“Teachers have found themselves under intense scrutiny in recent years, and that has really made them staunch advocates,” says Siegel-Stechler of Tufts. “When you feel like you are asked to justify and asked to uphold your values, that can lead you to want to make big changes.”
A few conditions must be in place for someone to run for office, adds Collins of Columbia. Once you account for access to resources and connections, the most important factor is being energized.
“You could argue no professional has had reasons to be as fired up over the last few years as teachers,” he says. “Teachers have been showing that they are fed up for quite a while. It’s the people who get fed up who tend to see politics as that next step as well.”
Especially when teachers feel that the conversations being had and decisions being made about them and their students don’t reflect reality, that can inspire some to run.
Numerous candidates noted that their school boards and state legislatures lack representation from people who have knowledge and understanding about schools today.
“You don’t have a lot of people [in office] who are still in front of students, working inside of schools, who know this because they live it every day,” says Wilson. “That gave me the nudge to go over the line: ‘I’ve gotta step up.’”
Sarah Marzilli is an elementary school art teacher who was running for a seat on the school board in Volusia County, Florida, but recently lost her primary. She feels that, with the pace of change in schools today — from social media and cellphone use to the growing challenges around mental health — school boards need representation from current educators.
“We need to make sure we have someone who’s in the trenches, so to speak,” Marzilli says, “not an outsider looking in on it.”
Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, a longtime Spanish teacher and current substitute teacher who is running for a seat in the Kentucky state legislature, notes that because a lot of legislators are lawyers, they can have unrealistic expectations about how quickly change happens in education.
“When they talk about education, they talk as if you can snap your fingers and have something done,” Cottrell says. “As teachers, we know the amount of time it takes. We know more about the initiatives that look good on paper but won’t actually move the needle. … We’re results-driven.”
While tuning in to a recent public committee hearing about the growing population of English language learners in Kentucky schools, Cottrell was appalled by committee members’ ignorance about basic education codes. “I wanted to jump through the screen,” she recalls. “No one knows what they’re talking about. … They’re not even asking the right questions.”
Susie Hedalen is currently the superintendent of Montana’s Townsend Public School District and running to be Montana’s next superintendent of public instruction. Hedalen has worked as a teacher, a principal and a superintendent at districts of varying sizes in Montana.
“I’m living it every day,” Hedalen says. “I know what our challenges are. I know what school leaders feel like they need and how the state could support leaders as well as teachers. I get to work with students and families every day and really have a pulse on what’s happening in education in Montana right now.”
A Bevy of Transferable Skills
Educators tend to possess a set of skills that lend themselves well to public office, many people pointed out.
For one, teachers are often effective communicators to different audiences, be it students, families or administrators. They can communicate well one-on-one but also to large groups.
Teachers are practiced decision-makers, too.
“They make a lot of hard decisions every single day,” Siegel-Stechler says. “Alone in a class with 20 to 30 kids, they have to be able to make good decisions on the fly.”
Educators are often good listeners. They are trusted members in their communities. They get along well with people who have a range of personalities and opinions. They have a certain comfort level with public speaking. And they tend to be disciplined. Those are all qualities that came up during interviews.
Educators are usually empathetic too, Collins says, noting that empathy is a quality missing from our politics today.
“In order to be an effective teacher, you have to be able to empathize with students — not judge them based on preconceived ideas, understand the humanity and dignity of each child and how to maximize their potential,” he says.
Educators Take a Seat at the Table
The two candidates who are running for seats in their state legislatures — Cottrell from Kentucky and Safiyah Jackson from North Carolina — both noted that the electoral system is stacked against people like them.
“If you’re an educator with educator friends, or a Black woman with Black friends, it makes fundraising very difficult,” says Jackson, an early childhood advocate and chief strategy officer at the North Carolina Partnership for Children. “If you’re a lawyer with lawyer friends, bam. It’s a system designed to deliver exactly as it’s delivering.”
It takes a lot of time and money and social connections to run and win a campaign, Cottrell says. That’s not very practical if you’re a full-time employee earning regular wages.
“I would love to see more teachers run for office and be empowered to do that,” Cottrell says, “but that’s really, really difficult under the work burden they have.” (Cottrell is not teaching full-time right now.)
The result, she says, is a body of legislators that does not include many people with “boots on the ground, who are getting their hands dirty in the work.”
Cottrell understands that not every educator can or wants to run for office. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be involved in the process of politics in some way. They might consider alternatives like asking to testify before a committee or offering to work with their representatives on legislation pertaining to education.
“The more teachers are involved in the process, the better relationship there will be between the statehouse and schools,” Cottrell says. “That can only benefit the kids.”
Here’s a great communication tool for learners with autism. Pyramid Educational Consultants, the pioneers behind the Picture Exchange Communication System® (PECS®), recently launched PECSTalk™, an innovative communication app designed for learners with autism and other complex communication needs. Available now for Android tablet users, PECSTalk™ merges decades of proven strategies with modern technology, offering an intuitive, user-friendly experience; redefining how non-speaking individuals communicate.
The cool factor of this tool lies in its simplicity and versatility. With fewer steps required to build and speak a message, users experience less frustration and more successful communication. The app’s streamlined interface mirrors a traditional PECS Communication Book, yet it supports a much broader vocabulary, thanks to its Speech-Generating Device (SGD) capabilities.
Customization is at the core of the tool. Users can access the extensive Pics for PECS® image library, choose from 14 languages, and tailor voice outputs, creating a truly personalized communication experience. The app also allows caregivers and educators to back up data, transfer information, and share books across devices, making it easier to support learners in various environments.
Whether making requests, asking questions, or expressing feelings, PECSTalk™ empowers non-speaking individuals to fully participate in their world. A free version with limited functionality is available, making this essential tool accessible to more learners. Learn more.
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.”
“You go into your own world for a moment. Like, if someone's talking to me and I'm reading a book, I wouldn't hear them,” says Aylynn, an eighth grader in Pendergast Elementary District in Phoenix, Arizona. “You can understand someone else's culture, what they celebrate, what they honor and what they believe in, without personally asking. It makes me empathize with other people.”
I spoke to Aylynn as part of a visit to Pendergast with my colleagues from Imagine Learning to hear about educators’ and students’ experiences using the Imagine Learning EL Education curriculum. Her words describe the transformative power of reading — a skill that, unlike spoken language, humans are not naturally hardwired to master. Reading requires building connections in the brain that wouldn’t exist without explicit instruction. As a result, teaching students how to read is a complex and challenging endeavor — that’s why it takes years.
Imagine Learning EL Education aligns with the concept of high-quality instructional materials (HQIMs).
The Science of Reading
Over the past several decades, research in educational psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience has converged to form the science of reading, providing clear, evidence-based guidelines on effective reading instruction. The science of reading distills vast knowledge into practical strategies to help all students become proficient readers, emphasizing a comprehensive approach that includes word recognition, language comprehension and bridging skills.
Word recognition encompasses complex skills such as phonological awareness (recognizing and manipulating sounds in spoken words), phonics (understanding how letters and sounds correspond), and decoding (applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships to pronounce written words). With practice, sight word recognition allows instant recognition of common words.
Language comprehension involves developing background knowledge for context and mastering language structures, such as grammar and syntax, to make sense of sentences and larger texts.
Bridging skills connect these processes. Print awareness helps with the organization of texts, vocabulary knowledge enables the use of a wide range of words and self-regulation helps students manage their reading, maintain focus and apply strategies effectively.
Imagine Learning EL Education is science-backed and heart-driven.
Content-Based Literacy
Recommended Resources
Imagine Learning EL Education: Discover ELA with heart — Imagine Learning EL Education is the content-based English language arts program rooted in the science of reading for grades K–8.
Addressing the Science of Reading: An Imagine Learning EL Education white paper on how 35 years of peer-reviewed research from the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience have contributed to our understanding of the science of reading.
The Science of Reading: Imagine Learning's core, supplemental and intervention products that bridge the gap between pedagogy and classroom instruction.
To address potential breakdowns in reading abilities, schools increasingly turn to digital and blended learning programs that align their curricula with the science of reading. The Imagine Learning EL Education curriculum is deeply rooted in the science of reading, focusing on explicit instruction in the areas outlined above. It offers a content-based approach that combines structured phonics instruction with the use of compelling, real-world texts to engage and excite K-8 learners. In doing so, it aligns with the concept of high-quality instructional materials (HQIMs), a term that an increasing number of school districts use when identifying materials that fulfill criteria such as being aligned to learning standards, offering best-practice pedagogy and delivering a user-friendly experience for both teachers and students.
At Pendergast, the educators I chatted with spoke at length about how helpful they find the program in applying the science of reading principles to practical contexts. “It's nice with Imagine Learning EL Education that the children have explicit phonics instruction,” says Corina, an instructional coach. “But also, there are opportunities in labs for verbal reasoning and vocabulary development and background building, and the children have those hands-on opportunities to apply what they are learning in the module to their lab's time.”
One effective content-based approach to literacy involves students exploring long-form, cross-curricular content. “I love the fact that students are actually reading and spending time in books,” says seventh grade ELA teacher Kathryn. “Not just basals, not just snippets of a story, but actual novels and books.” Every teacher I spoke to at Pendergast echoed that same sentiment — the books bring the curriculum to life for the students.
School principal Abraham agrees: “Having the students have the ability to really dive deep within that text and read the text multiple times is so important for comprehension, especially with our students that are English language learners or that might have a learning disability. [It has] really helped us in closing that achievement gap.”
“When we're looking for those high-quality instructional materials, we're looking for standard alignment,” says Kelsie, assistant director of interdisciplinary literacy, as we talked about the selection process for a new curriculum. “We're also looking for materials that the students can see themselves in. Are they culturally relevant for our kids? We also want them to be able to take that deep knowledge of learning into other aspects of their life and be ready for the future.”
A teacher uses Imagine Learning EL Education digital products at Pendergast, AZ.
A Passport to Achievement
What I love is seeing my students get to be their authentic selves while they're growing in their learning spaces with teachers who are excited to show them how far they can stretch themselves.
— Kelsie, Assistant Director of Interdisciplinary Literacy at Pendergast, AZ
As I spent time with Kelsie, we talked about the impact for teachers and students, of going on a journey with a curriculum with a holistic pedagogical approach through the grades. “Imagine Learning EL Education is definitely a full gamut of resources that meets all of the different literacy needs,” she says. “Within the program, you will build the foundational skills necessary in K-2. When we go into third through fifth grade, we get to work toward mastery, and then our sixth, seventh and eighth graders take that, and they get to fly. What I love is seeing my students get to be their authentic selves while they're growing in their learning spaces with teachers who are excited to show them how far they can stretch themselves.”
“Reading is like your access to the rest of the world. You have to be able to read," reflects Akin, a school counselor. Imagine Learning EL Education exemplifies how, when the science of reading is brought to life in the classroom, it not only addresses the complexities of learning to read but also prepares students for a future where they can confidently navigate the world through the power of literacy. As Aylynn's experience shows, reading opens doors to understanding, empathy and knowledge, making it a passport to anything students aspire to achieve.
This essay was adapted from a piece posted on Medium.
About nine months ago, Dara told me she was interested in bringing her mother and nephew from Syria to the United States, and she needed assistance. She had immigrated to Evanston, Illinois from Syria five years ago, along with her husband and five children and had a goal of reuniting with her family.
I wanted to help but had no idea where to start. As a home visitor with the federally funded Head Start/Early Head Start program, my goal is to help families create and achieve goals related to parenting their young children. I work with Dara’s 4-year-old daughter, Naya, but I support her whole family. (I have changed their names in this essay to protect their privacy and they’ve agreed to have their story shared.) As their home visitor, I provide resources, connection and experiences to her family and the other families I serve.
Over the years, in addition to bringing lessons and activities for the children I work with, I’ve supported families in accessing food and diapers, filling out school enrollment forms and securing affordable housing — but this was a new request for me.
I decided to start by doing some research on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website. I learned a bit about the process, then I printed out the necessary documents and contacted my organization’s Arabic interpreter to get translation support.
Dara needed to fill out an I-730, Refugee/Asylee Relative Petition form. I looked at the form myself, and even as a native English speaker, it felt daunting. I knew that Dara was even more in the dark. We worked for months, assembling the information she needed. A few weeks ago, when we had finally completed the extensive document, I handed Dara two huge envelopes and explained that she would need to take them to the post office, have them weighed for postage and sent.
“I don’t know how to do that,” she told me.
Dara had never been to the U.S. post office. We decided that we’d plan a trip together, along with her children, so they could learn about the experience of sending mail. I prepared them as best I could by sharing what we would encounter. I couldn’t anticipate everything, but that conversation helped set us up for success. On the day of the trip, Dara and her children shared a new experience — one that helped them all grow. It takes a lot of courage to go outside your comfort zone, and the best part was that her children were there to see their mother trying something new as she was advocating for her family.
I’ve been an early childhood educator for 25 years. In that time, I’ve been a teacher, the owner and director of a preschool and, now, a home visitor. My professional background in early childhood has given me insight into the critical nature of this work. So, too, does my personal experience as a mother who navigated a difficult entry into parenthood, breastfeeding an infant with colic and settling into the reality that taking maternity leave reduced our family’s income. Reflecting back, I would have loved to have the reassurance and support of a home visitor.
How Home Visiting Programs Support Families
Through my work as a home visitor, I serve 11 children and their families, including Naya’s. All of these families speak a language other than English in their home, and eight of the families are immigrants to the U.S. During my weekly visits with each family, I provide parents with resources as well as opportunities to learn and practice skills that will help their young children thrive. The idea is that parents and caregivers are a child’s first teacher and I support them in being the best teachers they can be. Participation in home visiting programs can support families with health and well-being, and based on my experience, these programs are especially effective with immigrant families.
During my visits, I bring developmentally appropriate lessons for Naya, who is fluent in Arabic and English. Just like many kids who are learning two languages, she is a little behind on learning the names of letters and numbers, but as I have assured many parents, being bilingual is so beneficial to brain development, and she will catch up with her monolingual classmates.
Over the past year, in addition to bringing these activities for Naya and moving forward on the travel documents, I have helped Dara and her family make a lot of progress on other goals. By working with one of our partner resource groups, the family of seven was able to secure new housing, moving out of a two-bedroom apartment and into a five-bedroom house. Once they moved, I was able to help Dara in registering her older children in a new school system. The process was almost as difficult as completing the I-730 form, but together, we got through it.
Every family has their own unique goals and needs, so my work differs depending on who I’m supporting. Sometimes I educate parents on child development and safety; other times I provide resources for engaging with their children. And in some cases, I help them navigate challenges they’re facing as a family, whether it’s finding emergency funding when their SNAP benefits are delayed, learning a new bus route to school or, most recently, visiting the post office.
Expanding Access Is Key
Research has shown that investing in early childhood education has significant benefits for children and families. And there’s evidence that home visiting programs are invaluable for parents like Dara. Yet these programs are perpetually underfunded and understaffed. The impact that home visitors make on a child’s development and a family’s well-being is huge, but access is limited. There’s not enough funding to make them available to every child that needs and qualifies for them.
We can increase access for children and their families by developing a stronger awareness of the benefits these programs offer to children, families and society. We can advocate for more federal dollars and consistent funding to enable every family that wants to benefit from this service to have immediate access, rather than being put on a wait list, which can be years long.
In the vein of empowering families, a solution was suggested during a focus group I recently participated in for home visitors in Illinois. The idea was to create a pathway for parents who participate in home visiting programs to receive training in child development, goal setting and documentation skills, so they could become home visitors themselves. This kind of approach would require supervision, support and funding, but it’s something that could boost the original family’s well-being by providing training, improving financial stability and increasing connections throughout the community — and it could exponentially help others.
Imagine Dara guiding people through the process of registering children for school or taking children to the post office. Would she need some guidance and support in doing this? Of course, we all do. But she would offer families, especially those who are new to this country, her invaluable experience, and it would bring her closer to her own personal goals.
As someone who views cooking and baking as hobbies, not chores, I follow a lot of food bloggers and recipe developers on social media. I subscribe to many of their newsletters. I, well, make and eat a lot of their food.
Yet I’ve only come across one who devotes back-to-school season to easing the financial burden on educators.
Deb Perelman, the best-selling author and food blogger behind Smitten Kitchen, has been running the Classroom Wishlist Project for three years now. Each summer, she creates a post on her Instagram account (1.8 million followers) welcoming teachers to share their school supply lists, along with a bit of humanizing information like where they live and what they teach, in a Google form.
Then Perelman puts their responses in a spreadsheet, which as of mid-August has over 730 entries for the 2024-25 school year, and invites her expansive reader community to visit a teacher’s wish list and purchase what they can so that these educators don’t have to pay out of their pockets.
The average teacher, according to the nonprofit DonorsChoose, spends close to $700 of their own money on classroom supplies in a given year — a reality that “feels all wrong and makes me sad,” Perelman says in the Classroom Wishlist Project description.
The famous food writer lives in Manhattan and has children entering fourth and 10th grade this year. There are all sorts of causes and issues she could support. Why, I wondered, did she choose this one?
I recently got to ask Perelman that myself, along with other questions — like what has most surprised her about the endeavor and what recipe on her site most says “back to school.”
She is quick to note that the wish list project, which she finds gratifying and heartening, does not require major sacrifice on her part.
“I almost feel guilty, sometimes, about what a low lift this project is for me,” she admits. “I would do it if it was harder, [but] I feel like I have to be honest — I'm not sweating over this.”
She adds: “It's more a reflection of the generosity of the community, and the kindness. This is not about me doing anything special. I'm really just using a space I've already created to bounce the light back to people who need it.”
The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: When and how did the Classroom Wishlist Project first begin?
Deb Perelman: This is the third summer, so I guess that means that it began in — what year is this? — 2022.
A reader messaged me, and she said her daughter was a school teacher, and [the school] had given her no budget for classroom supplies. She asked: Would I mind sharing her classroom wish list with my readers and getting the word out?
It feels good. I think everybody wins. I love the idea of supporting teachers.
— Deb Perelman
And when I did, they wiped out her wish list in, I feel like, under a day. The generosity was just staggering. And I heard from a lot of other teachers who asked if I could help them, too. I thought, ‘Yes, why not? Let's just do this.’
The first summer, it was not the most organized. Like, people would [direct message] me their list, and I would share it in a spreadsheet. By the second summer, which was last summer, I knew I was going to do this as a project, hopefully every year.
I created a Google Form where teachers could submit their list, and asked them to tell us a little bit about their classroom and to tell us what city they’re in. I think that helps a lot because sometimes you might read, like, ‘Oh, it's a music classroom. I love music,’ or, ‘Oh, that's my town.’ So it's more meaningful for people to have a little more information when there are so many [lists].
Doing it that way, we got a lot, a lot, a lot more submissions — like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And I worried — and I still worry — that we get too many submissions to make any meaningful difference. If it's 20 lists, we're going to wipe them out. But I can't promise that for 900 lists at all — or even close.
But the thing I forget is that, if you need stuff and a stranger sends you even a quarter of it or one [item], it still just completely makes your day. Whether you just got the crayons or just got 10 books, it doesn't matter. There's no way it's not well received, even if it's not everything people need.
Photo courtesy of Deb Perelman
I imagine people receiving and giving appreciate the humanity of it.
Yeah, I think it feels good on both sides. And I think it feels really fun to buy books and crayons for classrooms. I love buying school supplies.
I have two kids, and they're both in public school. When they first started in their elementary school, we would get [a list] from the teachers at the beginning of the year, ‘Here's some stuff we could use for the classroom, bring it in if you can.’ And then, as the fundraising improved at the public school, the PTA was able to bring in more money. We no longer have to buy any school supplies at all, and it really is such a privilege. I mean, we don't even buy a single box of crayons. It's just — it's crazy.
We got very lucky. … And like I said, I think it's so fun to buy crayons and books and whatever for a classroom. It feels really good.
That's a very organic start. Do you often get reader emails of people asking for you to support a cause?
Not as often as I would expect, but maybe I'm not that on top of my email.
Photo courtesy of Deb Perelman
One of the dark Smitten Kitchen secrets is that I have no staff, just sort of a very, very, very part-time assistant. I'm just like a do-it-myself person, which is good and bad. So I wouldn't say this happens a ton, but I liked this one. It feels good. I think everybody wins. I love the idea of supporting teachers.
The things that these teachers need are often so basic. These are small, inexpensive purchases that can really make somebody’s day. And then I get these lovely notes back from them. It’s just the joy, the incandescent joy, from people who walk into their classroom and find that a complete stranger bought all the glue they needed for the year. Or somebody sent me this picture of — it must be 50 books for her classroom. Somebody bought basically every book on her list, and she walked into her classroom and it was there.
How do the teachers find you? Are they often readers in your online community?
Usually. I mostly do the shoutout through Instagram, where I have my largest social community. I have a website too, but I almost try to funnel it down a little bit. It's either somebody who reads the site, or it might be their kid or their friend. I was trying to keep it from being too wide and too open on the internet, because otherwise we'll just get 10,000 wish lists and nothing will get filled.
But I also like the idea, if I can get a part-time staff person next summer, of trying to expand it a little bit more. Like maybe I can get some people to sponsor or match wish list clearing. I just don't have, personally, the bandwidth to dig into that right now.
Is there any teacher this year or in past years whose story stands out to you?
Oh, my goodness, there have been so many.
I remember last summer, after the wildfires in Hawaii, there were people who were looking specifically for the lists from those teachers [on Maui].
Especially when there's been some sort of tragedy or weather disaster, and it's been in the news and teachers don't even know how they're going to start their school year, I think there's definitely a lot of focus on that. There's definitely an interest in helping in such a specific way — where what you're doing is going to directly affect a kid's education and how their year goes. It feels like the most satisfying giving in that way.
Is there a request that has been especially frequent or something that surprises you when you look through these wish lists?
I think the thing that [is most surprising] is just that so much of how a school thrives depends on the way we do funding. And I am not a national expert on education in any way … but so much of it comes from crowdsourced fundraising and not out of the money schools get from the state for students.
In a lot of places, parents don't have extra money to give. And then there's other places where parents are writing $500 checks or more to the PTA every year, and it's just crazy how much that changes a kid's education.
If you're in an area where parents don't have deep pockets and a lot of spare change, why should the kids' classrooms not have what they need? Why should that affect whether they have enough crayons? It's wild when you think of it that way.
That's what's been eye-opening for me. I've also heard from so many retired teachers and older teachers who are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I must have spent $2,000 a year from my own paycheck. This is so nice that people want to help out.’ People don't see this money that the teachers are spending. It's invisible.
Do you measure success by dollars raised or wish lists cleared, or are you measuring it at all?
I'm actually not measuring it at all. … I do use the thank you notes as a good measure of how it's being received and the joy. You can always just see the joy.
Final question: What recipe on your website is the most quintessential ‘back to school’ recipe?
I think homemade Oreos have got to be it, right? I mean, of course. It's either going to be grilled cheese and tomato soup — a kid-friendly meal — or it's going to be homemade Oreos. They’re really easy: It’s like two chocolate sugar cookies with vanilla in them. They’re really fun.
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For the past couple of years, unrelenting change has come fast.
Even while schools are stuck dealing with deep challenges, COVID-19 pandemic relief funding is running its course. Meanwhile, new technologies seem to flow out in an unstoppable stream. These often have consequences in education, from an increase in cheating on assignments enabled by prose-spewing chatbots, to experiments that bring AI into classrooms as teaching assistants or even as students.
For some teachers and school leaders, it can feel like an onslaught.
Some educators connect AI to broader changes that they perceive have been harmful to students, says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Through interviews, she’s found that some educators link AI to social media and cellphones. So they’re having an understandably emotional response, she adds: “It’s kinda scary if you think about it too long.”
But in this ever-shifting stream of change, Lake is among those who believe new technology can be steered in a way that navigates schools to a more promising channel for reducing disparities in education in the U.S.
However, if that’s going to happen, it’s imperative that education leaders start pushing AI to transform teaching and learning in ways that are beneficial, particularly for low-income and historically disadvantaged students, observers like Lake argue.
If artificial intelligence doesn’t help solve disparities, advocates worry, it will worsen them.
Hazard Lights
AI has been used in education since at least the 1970s. But the recent barrage of technology has coincided with a more intense spotlight on disparities in student outcomes, fueled by the pandemic and social movements such as protests over the killing of George Floyd. AI has fed hopes of reaching more equality thanks to its promise to increase personalized learning and to boost efficiency and sustainability for an overworked teaching force.
In late 2022, the White House released a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” hoping that it would strengthen privacy rights. And last year, the U.S. Department of Education, along with the nonprofit Digital Promise, weighed in with recommendations for making sure this technology can be used “responsibly” in education to increase equity and support overburdened teachers.
If you ask some researchers, though, it’s not enough.
There have been fears that AI will accidentally magnify biases either by relying on algorithms that are trained on biased data, or by other methods such as automating assessments that ignore student experiences even while sorting them into different learning paths.
Now, some early data suggests that AI could indeed widen disparities. For instance: Lake’s organization, a national research and policy center that’s associated with Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, released a report this spring that looked at K-12 teachers’ use of virtual learning platforms, adaptive learning systems and chatbots. The report, a collaboration with the RAND Corporation, found that educators working in suburban schools already profess to having more experience with and training for AI than those in urban or rural schools.
The report also found that teachers in schools where more than half of students are Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander or Native American had more experience using the tools — but less training — than teachers who work in majority-white schools.
If suburban students — on average, wealthier than urban or rural students — are receiving more preparation for the complexities of an AI-influenced world, it opens up really big existential questions, Lake says.
Big Promises — or Problems
So how can advocates push AI to deliver on its promise of serving all students?
It wouldn’t be responsible to lean on AI as the quick fix for all our economic shortages in schooling.
— Rina Bliss
It’s all about strategy right now, making smart investments and setting down smart policy, Lake says.
Another report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education calls for more work to engage states on effective testing and implementation in their schools, and for the federal government to put more detailed guardrails and guidance in place. The report, “Wicked Opportunities,” also calls for more investment into research and development. From its perspective, the worst outcome would be to leave districts to fend for themselves when it comes to AI.
Part of the reason urban districts are less prepared for AI may be complexity and the sheer number of issues they are facing, observers speculate. Superintendents in urban districts say they are overwhelmed, Lake says. She explains that while they may be excited by the opportunities of AI, superintendents are busy handling immediate problems: pandemic recovery, the end of federal relief funding, enrollment declines and potential school closures, mental health crises among students and absenteeism. What these leaders want is evidence that suggests which tools actually work, as well as help navigating edtech tools and training their teachers, she adds.
But other observers worry about whether AI is truly the answer for solving structural problems in schools broadly.
Introducing more AI to classrooms, at least in the short term, implies teaching students using screens and virtual learning, argues Rina Bliss, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University. But many students are already getting too much screen and online time at home, she says. It degrades their mental health and their ability to work through assignments, and educators should be cautious about adding more screen time or virtual learning, Bliss says.
Bliss also points to a “print advantage,” a bump in how much is learned from print materials compared to screens, which has to do with factors like engagement with the text and how quickly a student’s eyes can lock onto and stay focused on material. In her view, digital texts, especially when they are connected to the internet, are “pots of distractions,” and increasing screen-based instruction can actually disadvantage students.
Ultimately, she adds, an approach to instruction that overrelies on AI could reinforce inequality. It’s possible that these tools are setting up a tiered system, where affluent students attend schools that emphasize hands-on learning experiences while other schools increasingly depend on screens and virtual learning. These tools shouldn’t replace real-world learning, particularly in under-resourced schools, she adds. She worries that excessive reliance on this technology could create an “underclass of students” who are given artificial stopgaps to big problems like school understaffing and underfunding. It wouldn’t be responsible to lean on AI as the quick fix for all our economic shortages in schooling, Bliss argues.
So how should educators approach AI? Perhaps the correct posture is cautious hope and deliberate planning.
Nobody knows precisely how AI will impact education yet, argues Lake, of CRPE. It is not a panacea, but in her estimation there’s a real opportunity to use it to close learning gaps. So it’s important to craft plans to deliver on the potential: “A lot of people freeze when it comes to AI, and if they can instead think about what they want for their kids, their schools, and whether AI can help, that seems like a productive path to me, and a much more manageable one,” Lake says.
There’s nothing wrong with being hopeful, she adds.
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