Hicks used to clean balconies and private suites at Busch Stadium just across the river in St. Louis. But she had to quit after complications related to pneumonia nearly killed her, and the doctors couldn’t rule out the industrial cleaning products she used at work as the cause. Losing that job meant that Hicks joined the ranks of the 50 percent of adults in this city who are out of the workforce.

Government and philanthropy have poured untold millions into the former industrial powerhouse with the worst-performing school district in the nation. East St. Louis also has one of the nation’s highest per-capita murder rates as well as some of the highest rates of childhood asthma and lead poisoning. One Illinois Republican went so far as to call it “the shithole of the universe.”

But Hicks and dozens of other locals say that these depressing facts hide a deeper story about the people in a Rust Belt city working together to pick themselves up from the postindustrial wreckage of disinvestment and population flight.

“People come to East St. Louis and say, ‘East St. Louis is so dirty, it’s so poor, they aren’t trying to do anything,’ ” she said. “What I’m trying to do is prove them wrong.”

Student performance in this last-place district is improving. Over the last three years, the proportion of students passing Common Core-aligned national math and reading tests has inched up, growing from 3 percent to 6 percent. School administrators note that from 2014-15 to 2016-17, pass rates more than doubled, from 10 percent to 21 percent, on NWEA, another set of exams used by districts across the country. Since 2013, the district’s four-year graduation rate is up from 65 percent to 71 percent; and since 2014, the proportion of its students enrolling in college within a year of graduating has climbed from 46 percent to 59 percent.

Locals are certain the numbers will only get better, thanks to an innovative but simple new approach that is lifting people out of poverty: Connect all the various services available to families, from housing to counseling to job training, and use the school district, the entity that touches the lives of almost every kid in town, to help parents tap into that network. The concept draws from a reform strategy called “collective impact” that many other struggling American cities are trying in different forms.

Related: Buffalo shows turnaround of urban schools is possible, but it takes a lot more than just money

Progress has eluded East St. Louis for generations; even as social service agencies flocked to the city to work diligently on their pet causes, the dial hardly moved.

Evan Krauss is the director of East Side Aligned, the initiative at the center of the city’s collective impact efforts. According to Krauss, “Several nonprofit executives who have been working here for twenty or thirty years got together and started reflecting. They could point to stories where they made impact, but when they looked at the city as a whole, outcomes weren’t changing and too many were actually getting worse, and so they began to ask, ‘How can we work better together?’ East Side Aligned provided a space to convene people who were literally a mile or less apart from each other, who had no idea what each other were doing.”

Now, after-school programs are connected to the school district’s data system, so kids can spend their time focused on the academic subjects in which they need the most help. The schools have opened their doors to Hoyleton Youth and Family Services, to provide student and family counseling. Another organization, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s East St. Louis Center, is working with parents and high school students to get them into workforce development programs that will lead to family-sustaining careers.

And this year the school district opened the Family and Community Engagement Center, which offers free uniforms and coats and a food pantry. The district is currently raising money to install a washer and dryer at the center. The idea is to draw in parents who need help with basic needs, and then get them thinking about higher-level needs, like job training.

Krauss says that East Side Aligned isn’t a new organization, but a new movement. He and a team of 10 backbone staff aren’t coordinating the services themselves, but instead are working to create “tables” where all of the city’s players come together to organize the services they’ve been providing for decades in isolation. There are several tables of teams working on different issues — one on reducing violence, one on early childhood education, another on after-school programs and others on improving how the city’s children navigate their schools and neighborhoods — all trying to reach a simple but ambitious goal in a city mired by profound generational poverty, “to create a place where kids can enjoy being kids.”

At Gordon Bush Elementary School, pass rates on state tests more than tripled last year. It’s a feat that Principal Brittany Green attributes both to work her teachers are doing and to the wider net that the district and its partners have created to uplift parents.

“We have been able to create this support system that surrounds the family so that when something happens we can refer them to the services they need,” said Green. “We tell them, all the time, this is their school. We aren’t just here for the students, but for the families too, whether it’s a sibling or the mother, father, we try to have wraparound services for everybody.”

Teenagers like Montez Holton, valedictorian of this year’s senior class at East St. Louis Senior High School, can personally attest to the benefits that come from different organizations working together. This May, Holton had two graduations. He not only received a high school diploma, but also an associate degree, thanks to a program called Running Start, a partnership between the school district and Southwestern Illinois College. The school district not only covered his tuition, but also gave him breakfast and lunch vouchers for the college’s dining hall.

Holton first got involved with East Side Aligned during the summer after his eighth grade, when the administrators at the after-school program he attended thought he’d be a good representative for the city’s youth. Today, he co-chairs East Side Aligned’s executive committee, working to get youth involved in decision-making. On top of his college schedule and East Side Aligned commitments, Holton usually works over 20 hours per week at a trampoline park in the suburbs.

“I thought this was a good opportunity for me to have a say-so in what was going on in the community and getting things implemented for future generations,” said Holton. Among his priorities, Holton argued for finding money to get more technology into the city’s schools. “We’ve actually started using iPads and Chromebooks in class,” he said. “That was pretty exciting.”

Related: Communities come together to increase college-going from the ground up

While Lettie Hicks sees promise in the new initiatives, she thinks more needs to be done to stabilize families. Her own family has struggled since she had to quit work. As hopeful as she is for her city, she gets emotional when she talks about the difficulties that residents like her have faced for as long as she can remember, and she worries about the future for her son and two daughters.

A city’s near death experience

From its founding in 1861, East St. Louis was designed explicitly to be pro-business — taxes were low and public health and safety regulations lax. The city’s first mayor, an attorney who represented the railroad companies whose tracks crisscross the city, pushed through a charter that lured industry to the flood-prone area just across the river from booming St. Louis, Missouri. The idea was to beckon the kind of noisy and dirty industries that St. Louis shunned. In its heyday during the first half of the twentieth century, the city hosted stockyards, steel mills, chemical and aluminum plants and oil refineries. These were labor-intensive industries and soon East St. Louis was known as a city where anyone could get a job. Despite the pollution, noise and filth, thousands of new residents arrived, including immigrants from central and eastern Europe and black migrants from the Deep South.

For years, companies used the threat of importing more black labor to dampen unionization efforts. That policy contributed to the racial tensions that fed a 1917 riot, one of the deadliest in the country’s history. In the aftermath, workers started to unionize, and the companies that built East St. Louis began to abandon it in search of cheaper labor. Scholars estimate that the city lost as many as 45,000 jobs in the decades after World War II; its unemployment rate skyrocketed. At the same time, white residents with access to credit began to pick up and head to newer, cleaner suburbs. Today, African-Americans comprise 97 percent of East St. Louis’ population, making it the blackest place in America with a population over 25,000.

In 1971, East St. Louis elected its first black mayor. Political scientist Andrew Theising said the milestone brought hope to the floundering city. But residents soon realized it was a hollow prize.

“Finally, African-Americans get in the seats of power and there’s nothing left,” said Theising, a professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. It is a common story. “We can point to Cleveland and Detroit and cities around the country that by the time African-American leaders step in, the industrial base has collapsed, the tax revenues are down and the bills haven’t been paid.”

Since 1971, a succession of black mayors has turned to aid from the state and federal government to keep the city afloat. It was rarely enough. The city still struggles to keep trash from piling up on the thousands of vacant lots that dot its streets. The local police force can’t keep enough cops on the streets to handle the city’s sky-high crime rates. And in 2011, the state took over the city’s schools.

Related: NYC’s bold gamble: Spend big on impoverished students’ social and emotional needs to get academic gains

The state hired Arthur Culver, a veteran school administrator with decades of experience turning around low-performing, high-poverty schools. Culver says that the conditions that he found in East St. Louis were the worst he’d seen. After first serving as a liaison between the state and local school board, both sides agreed to make him superintendent. To get the district’s finances in order, he closed several schools and cut the district’s employee count by half, laying off hundreds.

“We cut staff that we knew we needed, and so it was hard to make academic progress,” remembered Culver. “We cut librarians, social workers, counselors, music teachers, PE teachers; we had to get to the bare bones because we didn’t have money.”

Culver says that some of that huge financial deficit was due to poor planning at the district level, but he also points to Illinois’ school funding formula, which has often been named one of the very worst in the country for students in poor districts. While Culver has made strides in turning around the district’s finances, one-time grants and appropriations have been key to filling the gaps. He was able to get more than $30 million from the state legislature alone he said.

Emerging from the bunker mentality:

In the decades of distress that preceded Culver’s arrival, locals say school staff often kept their heads down.

“I’ve been working here for 32 years. When I came into this position, the schools were in a protective mode and thought they could handle everything from within the school system. That didn’t work very well,” says Renae Storey, a regional vice president at Children’s Home & Aid. “There was pressure to get test scores up, and so when we would come in to do counseling or crisis intervention, they felt it was taking away from that time.”

Ann Brown remembers feeling unwelcome at her children’s schools. She and her husband, who have three kids, are part of the city’s small middle class. Her husband was in the military, and Brown spent years working as an administrator at the region’s YMCA.

All three of Brown’s kids are now college graduates, and she believes East St. Louis’ schools prepared them well. But she also remembers being met with frowns and disapproval when she showed up at parent-teacher conferences, still dressed up from work, with a portfolio in which she furiously jotted down the teachers’ observations and read from notes to explain her own concerns

“I know how the parents feel when the teachers will just say, ‘Oh, we need the parents more involved,’ ” said Brown. But “when I come in, the way you’re talking to me, it seems like you don’t want me around. Everyone wants to be respected.”

Related: What can be done about failing U.S. high schools? A look back and ahead

The tenor started to change in 2012, when the school district discovered a new idea being pushed by the Obama administration — a grant program known as the Promise Neighborhoods initiative, which could bring millions in funding. But one of the grant’s prerequisites was that communities show a demonstrated history of collaboration between schools and social service providers to improve childhood outcomes.

When Culver gathered the city’s social service providers for a conversation about applying, he quickly realized they had no track record of working together; it was one of the first times they’d ever had such a meeting. But the group, including nonprofit leaders, university officials and government agency heads, realized the idea’s potential, and the seeds for East Side Aligned were planted.

After East Side Aligned launched in 2013, the school doors swung open for groups like Children’s Home and Aid, which provides counseling to students. Now, the group is embedding a social emotional specialist in the district to work with teachers and social workers to create spaces to help children and families cope with the adverse childhood experiences that often come with living in East St. Louis.

In 2017, the school district hired its first director of parent and student support services, Tiffany Gholson. In that role, Gholson doesn’t just manage dozens of school district employees, a mix of social workers, nurses and truancy workers, she’s also responsible for coordinating how her staff works with all of the community partners clamoring to work in the schools. And she oversees the new Family and Community Engagement Center.

“This center is a place where you can get help furthering your education to get you on your feet. We’re going to help you with financial aid, we’re going to answer all those miscellaneous questions and refer you out to our partners,” said Gholson. “There are so many hidden gems here in East St. Louis that just aren’t advertised enough.”

And Brown, who complained that some of her children’s teachers rebuffed her as a parent, was hired as the district’s new family and community engagement coordinator. One of her main roles is to provide a caring ear in the new parent-facing office.

Lettie Hicks says parents are as excited about the district’s new responsiveness as they are about the rise in test scores. The parent group she works with, Community Organizing and Family Issues, got the district to bus every kid to school. Before, many children had to make their own way through sometimes dangerous streets, which are often lined with litter and poorly lit.

Related: District says 24 credits and a D-minus average aren’t good enough

Now, “parents don’t have to stress or worry about how their kids are going to get to school or think, ‘Oh, I hope a car doesn’t hit my kid on the way to school,’ ” said Hicks. “We’ve had numerous victories, but that’s the victory that made people here actually see the work that we are doing and what was possible.”

Money isn’t enough, but it’s essential

Yet, just as East Side Aligned is hitting its stride, Republicans in Washington have slated many of the very programs it has connected for cuts. President Trump’s latest budget proposal included cuts to after-school and job training programs. And the proposed cuts to welfare programs like food stamps and Medicaid, for example, would fall hard on East St. Louis. More than 75 percent of children here use these programs, among the very highest rates in the country.

East St. Louis continues to pursue a Promise Neighborhoods grant, but is less hopeful of receiving one, although the city received a high score on its 2016 application. The Trump administration has shifted the program’s focus somewhat away from education and toward law and order. Culver has been able to land other grant funding, however, such as a federal School Improvement Grant for several of East St. Louis’ lowest-performing schools. But he worries that grants are not a sustainable source of funding.

Although the city has one of the highest tax rates in the state, the community’s meager tax base means that local funding represents just under 15 percent of the district’s revenue. In the average Illinois district, local dollars make up nearly 70 percent of the budget. “When you look at per-pupil wealth across communities, the state averages $225,000 per kid,” Culver said of Illinois. “We have about $18,000.” That means that East St. Louis schools are largely dependent on state dollars; and though Illinois passed a new school funding formula last year, Culver and other superintendents say it doesn’t address the needs of the state’s poorest communities quickly enough. As things stand, Culver says that the state money won’t be enough to sustain the district’s nascent progress.

Locals are the first to acknowledge that pouring more money into the city isn’t the only answer. For years, corruption and mismanagement meant much of the help they received was wasted or inefficient.

Evan Krauss, East Side Aligned’s director, struggles with how its work can transform the city without economic development. He said he’s been asked, “Are you working in a hospital or a hospice?”

“In a hospice, you’re trying to ensure that there is a quality of life until that end point,” he said. “Whereas in a hospital, you’re going to treat the problem, and it’s about improvement to sustain life. That’s a question I can’t answer. And I think people are split on which East Side Aligned is.”

Johanna Wharton, director of special projects at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s East St. Louis Center, is part of a team looking at matching East St. Louis residents to federally funded workforce training opportunities. Wharton says there has been a hesitation by some players in the area to reach out to East St. Louis residents. “They think they’re not going to finish the training program, they’re not to going pass the drug test, or they’re going to get one check and quit,” said Wharton.

She points to one county program, for instance, that works with the area’s laid-off steel workers, but not with the average East St. Louisan.

“They have money they can’t spend because they’re investing all of it in the laid-off, dislocated workers, and not on people on [welfare] or on food stamps,” said Wharton.

Related: Employers step in to help low-income students get through college

To address this, she says, her university has volunteered to do the recruiting and also “to hold hands with people who are ready and prepared to get certifications and work in living-wage jobs.” Wharton and her team are already working to connect Head Start parents and high school students with workforce development opportunities.

Montez Holton will be going away to college this fall. He plans to enroll as a junior at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he’ll study biology. He eventually wants to go to medical school and become a doctor.

While Holton isn’t sure if he wants to live in East St. Louis, he does want to support the community by opening up a practice in East St. Louis and giving jobs to youth interested in medicine. He thinks bringing jobs to East St. Louis is key. Like a lot of employed East St. Louisans, Holton has to leave the city to work: “It can be stressful thinking about how I’m going to get to work.”

Lettie Hicks doesn’t see a future for her city if jobs don’t return. In President Trump’s first State of the Union speech, he vowed to cut off programs to people who aren’t willing to do “a hard day’s work.” In fact, congressional Republicans just passed a bill that would include work requirements for food stamps. Hicks agrees that jobs and not a more expansive social safety net are the ultimate solution for her city and others like it. But she says before people in her community are thrown off the rolls, they need access to “decent jobs with real benefits like a 401k.”

“It’s like the system has it programmed where we will always need the system,” she said.

But Hicks believes that if anyone is going to come up with the solution, it’s going to be people like her who’ve lived it. Indeed, East Side Aligned, isn’t just about helping organizations work together, it’s also about giving residents like Hicks the tools to hold those institutions accountable.

“What we need is for the officials making decisions for us to listen to our stories,” said Hicks. “You can’t plan a strategy for me if you’re not asking me what my family needs. Include me in those decisions.”

<em>This story about collective impact was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Emmanuel Felton reported this story with the support of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, a program of the University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism.

The post Using Schools to Bring a Dying Rust Belt City Back to Life appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans schools were a bit of an anomaly. In 2003, just 15 percent of teachers in large urban districts across the country were black but in New Orleans, teaching was largely a job done by black women: 71 percent of teachers were black and 78 percent were women. The demographics of the city’s teacher workforce have changed drastically since: in 2014, black teachers comprised a little less than half of the city’s teacher corps.

Related: Building educational “success” on the backs of fired black teachers

In the years following Katrina, New Orleans became a mecca for new teachers. Before Katrina, the city’s teachers had an average of 15 years of classroom experience. Now the majority of teachers have less than five years of experience. Jane Arnold Lincove, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the study’s lead author, says that the study suggests that the prospects for those veteran teachers fired after Katrina only got worse over the years, as more schools went charter and those schools embraced younger teachers recruited through programs like Teach for America.

The study highlights two years of employment records to show how pre-Katrina teachers fared as the reforms took hold. In 2007, the second full school year after Katrina, those teachers made up a large share of the city’s educators, but they subsequently started to leave the city’s schools in large numbers.

“Some of that could be teachers retiring, but it could also be that even if they got hired they might not have been the kinds of teachers the charters wanted,” said Lincove. “Veteran teachers get paid more, they might have been cut to help schools meet their budgets. We don’t know if a teacher left a school voluntarily or because they were forced out, but what we do know is that when exiting teachers were replaced they were replaced with teachers who were paid less, had less experience, and were more likely to be white and from out of state.”

In the fall of 2007, about a third of the 4,300 teachers fired after Katrina were working in New Orleans public schools again. Another 18 percent were working elsewhere in the state. But by the fall of 2013, just 22 percent of those educators were still working in New Orleans. That’s a much larger drop than seen elsewhere in the state where 15 percent of the Katrina cohort was still employed by schools in other parishes. Some of the turnover can be explained by natural attrition. Nearly a third of the teachers fired in 2006 were already eligible for full retirement benefits. But when comparing pre-Katrina New Orleans teachers to similar educators in other parishes devastated by 2005 hurricanes, the researchers estimate that the attrition rate was at least 16 percentage points higher for the city’s teachers.

Related: The reason so many black teachers leave the job early

While the black community was hit harder by the firings because so many teachers were African American, the researchers did not find a racial disparity in who was rehired after the storm. In fact they found that black teachers were slightly more likely to return to New Orleans schools than their white peers. But the researchers found that white teachers fired after Katrina were more likely to be hired by charter schools than black teachers were. Returning black teachers were more likely to be hired by the few schools still run by the Orleans Parish School Board. Lincove says it’s unclear if this trend emerged due to hiring practices at charter schools or because teaching in the city just became less attractive to black teachers. One important difference Lincove points out between OPSB schools and charters is that the district still offers teachers a pension.

“A lot of people have been talking about the effects of these reforms on the black middle class,” said Lincove. “While we saw more rehiring than we expected, I think we need to look at the long term of effects of falling out of the pension system. Teachers now have to accept a job without a pension, so we are going to see a different type of teacher.”

Lincove added that charter leaders worried about teachers not viewing it as a long term career should “think systematically about what kinds of long term retirement benefits and long-term job security might need to be offered to avoid this.”

Brian Beabout, a professor at the University of New Orleans, says that it’s going to take more than changing benefits to make New Orleans a town for career teachers again.

“I think we want to fight this fight on two fronts,” said Beabout. “We want to make career teaching is a viable pathway. That’s good for our students, particularly for getting some consistency for students that have gone through a lot of trauma. But the pressure of accountability makes teaching a very different practice than it was, before.”

The use of standardized tests to evaluate schools and individual teachers has been harder for veterans to adapt to, Beabout argues. “ There’s a lot of pressure on teachers that wasn’t there before,” he said. “Charter leaders have to recognize they are not going to get 25 years from everyone, so the question is how do we get from four years to staying eight or 10 years.”

There is currently a concerted effort by several charter leaders to recruit teachers with local roots, particularly black educators, in large part because those teachers are more likely to stick around for the long haul. This local initiative is part of a larger national push that is responding to bevy of research showing that black kids benefit from having black teachers. Black students tend to be disciplined less, graduate at higher rates and get referred to advanced classes more when they have black teachers.

There are several limitations to the study. Researchers utilized Louisiana Department of Education employment records, so the study can only speak to whether or not fired teachers ever worked in a Louisiana public school again. Some of these teachers could now be working in private schools or in other states. The data also only runs through 2013, largely before the local hiring push, so it remains unclear of teachers fired after Katrina have benefited from that nascant emphasis.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about New Orleans.

The post What Happened When a City Full of Teachers, Most of Them Black, Was Fired appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Her nomination was controversial from the start, because DeVos and her husband have spent decades pushing to give families more of a say in where their children are educated. They have used their own wealth and a robust fundraising apparatus to push lawmakers to approve school choice proposals that even some proponents of choice question: namely, public charter schools run by for-profit companies, and the use of taxpayer funds to pay private school tuition through vouchers.

By appointing DeVos, President Donald Trump signaled that he was serious about his campaign promise to use $20 billion in federal funds to significantly expand school choice programs.

But that’s not all that worries DeVos’ critics. There is also widespread concern about the fate of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Her detractors particularly fear that she might roll back protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students and that the federal government may walk away from its recent regulations meant to stem sexual assaults on college campuses.

So far, DeVos has largely remained silent on her plans for any major policy shifts, but we asked a group of experts across the ideological spectrum to discuss what changes might be in store for federal school choice policy and for the Office for Civil Rights.

Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, said that advocates on the left side of the political spectrum can thank themselves for any major school choice push that does come down the pike.

“Secretary DeVos is, in a sense, the left’s Frankenstein’s monster,” McCluskey wrote in an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report. “They pushed for more and more federal involvement — though certainly with help from some conservatives such as President George W. Bush — and now their creation may be poised to turn on them. They fear Washington might impose school choice everywhere.”

But McCluskey doesn’t see Trump’s vision for a massive federal expansion of choice becoming a reality: “DeVos cannot impose choice herself, and it is hardly a slam-dunk proposition that Congress will pass broad choice legislation.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 27 states and the District of Columbia already have programs that provide financial assistance — often vouchers — for students to attend private schools. Those programs take several different forms: Some directly use state money to pay private school tuition, while others provide tax credits to individuals and businesses that donate to nongovernmental programs that cover the cost of private schools. If a federal program is coming, many suspect that instead of redirecting federal funds, President Trump will propose a tax credit program. On March 3, Trump and DeVos visited a parochial school that participates in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. But many conservative thinkers who support school vouchers, like McCluskey, would prefer to continue to leave school choice up to the states.

Even if states remain in the driver’s seat, Abe Feuerstein, a professor of education at Bucknell University who opposes the expansion of vouchers, still sees room for DeVos to use her new position to push state lawmakers to adopt robust school-choice laws.

“Her visible position as the head of the Department of Education provides her with an important platform (aka bully pulpit) to advance her agenda of privatization, but even if she can convince Congress, she will still need to make her case with the states,” wrote Feuerstein in an op-ed for The Hechinger Report. “Because education is a state-level responsibility, Secretary DeVos would need to get state legislatures and governors to support the changes she wants to make. The fact that many states have Republican administrations and legislatures gives her an advantage, but the outcome is far from certain.”

It is far easier for DeVos to make big changes to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which was particularly active during the Obama years. From 2009 through 2016, it handled 76,000 civil rights complaints and issued 34 policy documents to school districts and colleges. These documents addressed issues ranging from which bathrooms transgender students should use, to how to handle accusations of sexual assault on campus, to whether or not districts are violating black students’ rights when suspending them in higher numbers.

DeVos and other conservatives have signaled a desire to rein in the office. Critics of the Obama administration, like R. Shep Melnick, a professor of American politics at Boston College, say that’s a good thing. In an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report, he accused the Obama administration, in its zeal for civil rights enforcement, of using the office to run headlong into the “culture wars.”

Catherine E. Lhamon, who served as the head of OCR during President Obama’s second term, disputes that portrayal of her office’s work. Responding to a comment by DeVos that she couldn’t think of an ongoing civil rights issue that would warrant federal involvement, Lhamon, in an op-ed for The Hechinger Report, ran down the types of cases her office had worked on: a North Carolina University revoking a student’s acceptance after discovering he had cerebral palsy; a segregated Alabama school district offering advanced courses at its high schools that served primarily white students, but not at the high school that served virtually all of its black students; California district employees ignoring sexual assault cases because they considered them part of their Latino students’ “urban culture.”

Melnick doesn’t see that kind of work changing much under the new administration; instead, he thinks the big change will involve the practice of issuing “Dear Colleague” letters, which lay out the OCR’s position on civil rights issues, to school districts and institutions of higher education. One of those letters, which said that transgender students should be allowed to use the bathrooms for the gender with which they identify, even made it into the presidential election campaign, with then-candidate Trump promising to rescind that guidance — a promise the new president fulfilled in February.

“No matter what one thinks of the agency’s recent ‘Dear Colleague’ letters, it is hard to argue that the agency should stop investigating these complaints and seeking redress for those that have merit,” wrote Melnick. “So the big questions for the yet-to-be-named assistant secretary for civil rights are these: Which ’Dear Colleague‘ letters should be targeted for revision? What procedures should the civil rights office use to do so? How radical should these changes be?”

Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, is widely considered to be on the short list to replace Lhamon — a job that requires a Senate vote. Heriot has been one of OCR’s fiercest critics. In 2015, she co-wrote a letter with another commission member, Peter Kirsanow, coming out against a proposed 31 percent increase in OCR’s budget.

“Though OCR may claim to be under-funded, its resources are stretched thin largely because it has so often chosen to address violations it has made up out of thin air,” the pair wrote, citing as prime examples efforts to curb bullying, to reduce differences in how white and nonwhite students are disciplined and to get colleges to step up sexual assault investigations. “Increasing OCR’s budget would in effect reward the agency for frequently over-stepping the law. It also would provide OCR with additional resources to undertake more ill-considered initiatives for which it lacks authority.”

This has led some Democrats to worry that Trump’s proposed cuts to almost every federal agency will fall heavily on OCR. Shavar Jeffries, a civil rights attorney and the president of Democrats for Education Reform, says any such cuts are unthinkable.

“OCR’s Civil Rights Data Collection has uncovered that 1.6 million students go to a school where there is a sworn law enforcement officer but no school counselor; that in 22 states, physical consequences are still used as a tool for discipline; and that significant implicit bias exists in our schools where, for example, black students in preschool are 3.6 times as likely to be suspended as white students,” Jeffries wrote in an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report. “Without a strong federal role that guides states to report this information, we cannot address these critical disparities.”

One thing seems certain, a month into DeVos’ tenure: Any changes her administration does make to limit the work of the Office of Civil Rights or expand federal school choice programs will be closely followed and scrutinized by her allies and her detractors. But while DeVos and the president have been touting their school choice agenda, any changes to OCR will likely come without much fanfare.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Race and Equity.

The post What Can Betsy DeVos Really Do? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

School administrators will have to explicitly address the racial biases and stereotyping that stifle black educators’ professional growth, argue researchers Ashley Griffin and Hilary Tackie in a new report from The Education Trust, a national nonprofit advocacy organization.

As the nation’s classrooms become increasingly diverse, with non-white children now making up the majority of public school students, schools have made inroads in recruiting more teachers of color. But those educators tend to leave the profession at much higher rates than their white counterparts. Teachers of color currently represent only 18 percent of the nation’s teaching force and black teachers comprise just 7 percent of that workforce.

Increasing those numbers matters because research suggests students do better in school when exposed to teachers who share similar backgrounds and experiences.

Griffin and Tackie’s report explores why African-American teachers are more prone to abandoning the profession. The researchers used a focus group of 150 black teachers, choosing participants representative of the experience levels and teaching environments of the nation’s black teachers, and found several patterns.

Related: New Orleans’ uphill battle for more black and homegrown teachers

The very reasons schools were eager to hire black educators – that is, their perceived ability to work well with African-American students, particularly black students that other teachers were having trouble reaching – often morphed into career roadblocks. While other educators were allowed to advance and take on more challenging work like teaching Advanced Placement courses, black educators said they were often relegated to teaching low-performing students and taking on disciplinarian roles.

While many educators relished their roles acting as formal and informal mentors for their black students, and even pointed to those relationships as being a key reason for staying in the classroom, they also reported feeling pressure from administrators, fellow teachers and even students, to build and maintain relationships with every student of color.

“We become the representative for every child of color, I mean, whether we relate to them, whether our culture is the same or not,” one teacher told the researchers. “We become the representative for all of those children.”

Related: To increase teacher diversity, ignore selectivity of teacher education programs?

Many of the teachers reported that because of these relationships, they were often in a unique position to deal with students with behavioral challenges, a fact that often led to them taking on disciplinarian roles.

“[B]eing able to easily discipline students often led others to see them as enforcers rather than educators — a reductive stereotype that we heard throughout the focus groups,” the researchers wrote. “These teachers were assumed to be tough and strict instead of being able to connect to their students and use that connection to establish order and create a classroom environment conducive to learning.”

In fact, a recent study showed that African-American students are less likely to be suspended when they have a black teacher. But African-American educators reported that once they took on disciplinarian roles they were locked out of other opportunities to advance their careers. Instead of spending their free periods mastering new content knowledge or pedagogical techniques, they handle other educators’ discipline issues. Many black educators also told researchers that they were consistently assigned students who struggled academically and weren’t given opportunities to teach more rigorous content.

“‘You do it so well, let’s just keep you here.’ If I’m doing the ABCs every day, I never really get to do anything of a higher caliber,” a teacher reported. “I think a lot of times, as African-American teachers, we get stuck in a certain group, because you do it well.”

In addition to these education-specific challenges, the researchers found that black teachers reported many of the same challenges that face black workers across economic sectors. Black teachers told researchers that superiors, coworkers, and customers – in this case, parents – often viewed them as less competent than their white peers.

Related: How do we stop the exodus of minority teachers?

“I think one of the challenges I dealt with was convincing parents that our decisions are the right decisions,” a black educator told researchers. “And I say that because a lot of parents would look to the white teachers and whatever they say was golden. There was no questioning them.”

The report ends with a call on administrators to start the often-fraught work of addressing these “deep-seated” career impediments for black educators:“[I]t will take honest and critical examinations of school cultures and systemic processes in order for school and district leaders to develop the trust, support, and collegial working environments needed to recruit and retain teachers of color.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about teacher preparation.

The post The Reason So Many Black Teachers Leave the Job Early appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After playing defense for the better part of two decades, the presidents of the nation’s two teachers unions took the stage at the Democratic National Convention along with other union leaders to speak to Hillary Clinton’s labor bone fides. The two union presidents were some of the earliest and fiercest supporters of Clinton’s presidential bid, and in a speech on the opening night of the convention, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten talked about what she hopes they’ll get in return.

“She’ll reset education policy to focus on skills like creativity and critical thinking, not more testing,” said Weingarten at the July convention in Philadelphia.

While teachers unions have long been a key pillar in Democratic Party, they’ve been on the outs with President Barack Obama’s education department. The administration doubled down on Republican President George W. Bush’s educational agenda of holding schools accountable for students’ test scores. For struggling schools, if test scores didn’t increase, they could be either closed or converted into charter schools, the vast majority of which employ non-unionized staff.

These policies devastated some local teachers unions, including Philadelphia’s, which lost 10,000 members during the Obama and Bush administrations. Weingarten expects Clinton to totally upend this agenda, and hopes that she’ll remove Education Secretary John King, who was just confirmed by the senate in March.

The Hechinger Report sat down with Weingarten during the last night of the convention to go deeper into what she expects from the next president.

Question: There seems to be a lot more talk about early education and higher education during this convention. Why do you think that is? What are the K-12 policies you would hope to see from a President Clinton?

Answer: She’s actually done four major speeches on K-12 education. It hasn’t been covered. I think it’s because it’s not controversial because it’s rooted in the evidence of what works for kids. She calls it TLC: teaching, learning and community. It’s about how do we ensure we have a great teaching force, and how do we nurture them and how do we lift them up? How do we have high standards, but also make sure we meet the needs of individual kids, including kids with special needs and kids who are limited English proficient?

Related: Democrats speak up about tots and college students, but say less on K-12 issues

She’s talking about how we need to ensure that we address the needs of communities through community schools and wraparound programs. She wants to end the education wars and really roll up her sleeves and do what works in education. She has a plan Pre-k through college, but because of the controversies that have happened in the past, people focus on higher education and pre-K as opposed to her K-12 policy. If you look at the platform for the Democratic Party, it’s the most progressive in terms of education that we’ve seen for as long as I can remember. You get the controversies on the fringes, as opposed to what we need to do to ensure that public education is sacrosanct again.

Q: One area that has continued to come up is desegregation, though maybe more as a victory of the past, do teachers and unions have a role in desegregation?

A: It’s unbelievable that 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education, we are more highly segregated than desegregated. It has a lot to do with the economy, with the fact that our housing patterns are more and more segregated, it’s about transportation issues, affordable housing, and persistent poverty. So you see this increased segregation, and we need to bust that up. Look people are very leery of going back to busing but what if we had multiple opportunities within a public education system: magnet schools, early college, career tech education schools and other kinds of programs that capture children’s imagination. If parents have choices of great public school programs and particularly great neighborhood public schools, they will opt for that.

Q: I think we can all agree it’s been a tumultuous eight years for teachers and unions in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, do you see that changing under either a Clinton or Trump presidency?

A: Look, President Obama in the last year has had a mea culpa about the fixation on testing but we have really flawed policies. In the aftermath of the great recession, the worst recession in 80 years, it become an excuse to defund our schools, using austerity to not fund children. When times were tough places like Minnesota actually funded kids and you see how good their economy is compared to places like Wisconsin that defunded kids. So there was austerity, test fixation, and then closing of schools and privatizing instead of asking, how do we meet the needs of kids where they are? How do spark their creativity and critical thinking? How do we nurture a teaching force and treat it the way we talk about it? All of that takes investment. Part of it is local issues, part of it is national issues.

I so hope she is elected president because the other guy is a dangerous demagogue who would just cut education. He would actually just try to privatize it like with Trump University and try to fleece people up and down the line. So hopefully she’ll get there and if she does I think she’ll help end the education wars. I think she’ll help use the bully pulpit nationally to actually fix, not destabilize public schools in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit.

Related: Have Obama’s education policies weakened the Democratic Party?

Q: Would you like to see John King stay, or who would be your dream pick for education secretary?

A: There are several people who would be eminently qualified, who know education. John King should not stay on as education secretary. I mean, I think John has tried to really be a different kind of secretary than Arne Duncan, but you know, I think that what’s happening here is that she needs to pick somebody who is very much embedded in the ideas that she brings forward. Someone who is her pick, who she trusts, who she has a direct relationship with.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about the 2016 Election.

The post American Federation of Teachers President Calls for New Education Secretary appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In an event that could be called a love fest, Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton laid out her education priorities in a rollicking speech at the annual assembly of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union. Clinton profusely thanked teachers for doing the difficult job of educating the nation’s children, and the 7,500 educators in attendance responded with cascading chants of “Hillary, Hillary.”

There was, however, one moment of discord.

“When schools get it right, whether they are traditional public schools or public charter schools, let’s figure out what’s working,” said Clinton to loud boos over the mention of charter schools, which are publicly-funded, independently run public schools that often employ non-unionized teachers.

Clinton paused and continued: “We don’t have time for these education wars.”

In most policy areas the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign want to be seen as the inheritor of the popular sitting president’s legacy, but perhaps no area has divided the party more than K-12 education. While the Clinton campaign has focused on issues that unite the party—such as expanding access to pre-kindergarten programs, raising teacher pay and increasing school funding— a recent fight over the party’s platform, a document that lays out the party’s policy goals, underscores how difficult ending the party’s internal education wars could be.

Related: Poll: Voters agree, candidates should talk preschool

At a July meeting in Orlando, Florida to write the party’s platform, delegates appointed by Clinton’s main rival in the primaries, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, pushed through a slew of amendments to the original draft, which together represent a sharp turn away from the policies of the Obama administration which used federal funding to push states to raise academic standards and to tie test scores to teacher evaluations. The new language supports the rights of parents to opt their children out of standardized tests, demand more oversight of charters and oppose evaluating teachers using their students’ standardized test scores.

“We moved the debate and raised some issues that the party had ignored,” said Chuck Pascal, a Sanders delegate, former school board member and former mayor from Leechburg, Pennsylvania. “We introduced amendments that made the platform more reflective of the positions of rank-and-file Democrats in the field, educators and activists.”

“We needed to make clear that the party is not in lockstep behind what had become orthodoxy for a while, more charters and more testing and all of these things that have weakened public education,” added Pascal.

But the reformers who shifted the party away from its traditional stances, groups like Democrats for Education Reform, individual educators like Louisiana superintendent John White and President Obama himself, are still a potentially powerful force in the party, even if the platform, a non-binding proposal, includes rebuttals of their ideas.

Related: What do we invest in the country’s youngest? Little to nothing

For the last 15 years, many teachers have felt like they’ve consistently been losing the education policy wars even with a Democrat in the White House. The Obama administration embraced much of the testing and accountability policies of the George W. Bush-No Child Left Behind era. Teachers complained that they were being punished for factors beyond their control like poverty and that the federal government’s support for charter schools undermined their unions and their job security. Many were further alienated by the expanding practice of tying teacher evaluations to student test scores and the adoption of the new rigorous standards known as Common Core, all policies propelled by the Obama administration.

Clinton, who has historically been a supporter of both teachers unions and charter schools and testing, is trying to walk the line between the two factions. Teachers unions, who backed her early on in her drawn-out primary fight against Sanders, want a near complete reversal in tone and policies from the Obama administration.

However, education reformers, who are supportive of Obama’s policies, will still have sway with Clinton, though, and often note the civil rights roots of school accountability.

The platform changes to the Democratic platform left many of them livid.

“What they did in Orlando is clearly at odds with the balanced position Clinton has staked out over the course of the campaign,” said Charles Barone, the director of policy at Democrats for Education Reform. “She was trying to find common ground and they threw a temper tantrum, saying we want everything our way.”

Pascal says the amendments against testing passed without opposition, though the delegates negotiated the language around charter schools.

Related: Sanders’ free college plan would take from the rich to give to the rich

Already, the passage of a new federal education law last year may have made it easier for Clinton to move beyond the central fights within the party.

The Obama administration worked with the Republican-controlled Congress to update the widely loathed No Child Left Behind Act, replacing it with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). A bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats denounced the law’s emphasis on testing in particular. ESSA will continue to require students to test students annually in grades three through eight and once in high school. However, decisions about how those scores will be used are now largely left to the states, moving the battles over accountability to state capitols.

Members of the Obama administration have said they are working feverishly to complete the regulations that will spell out the details of how states must comply with the new law, before a new administration comes in.

With ESSA moving many of the most divisive battles of the education wars to the states, Laura Bornfreund, director of early and elementary education at New America, thinks that an education department in Hillary Clinton’s administration would push forward policies that most liberals agree on, namely, expanding access to pre-kindergarten as well as science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes for low-income students and reducing suspension and expulsion rates.

Peter Cunningham, the executive director of Education Post, a nonprofit communications firm focused on improving public education, and a former assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration, thinks that Clinton can ultimately unite the party by focusing on what both factions agree on.

“We all support higher funding, expanding early learning options, better pay for teachers,” said Cunningham. “I think she should be arguing that there are a lot of people on the other side who just want to defund education. The grand bargain with Republicans has always been accountability for more resources.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post Clinton Looks to Move Democrats Away from ‘Education Wars’ appeared first on Washington Monthly.

With assignments ranging from one or two-day stints to as much as two-week placements, both general education and career-and-technical-education instructors will be spending part of the summer in their communities’ offices and factories, under a state initiative.

The idea is that the teachers will get to see what industry actually looks like from the inside in their region, and they will return in the fall with curricular ideas that tap their increased understanding of what it really means to be career ready.

These paid externships are a component of Louisiana’s Jump Start program, which created a pathway for students to earn career diplomas. (Students pursuing those diplomas are required to attain industry credentials but are allowed to graduate with fewer foreign language, social studies and science credits.) The externships are part of a plan to have more high school teachers get the same industry credentials the state expects career-diploma students to earn, which is important because the state requires that educators hold the industry credential they are preparing their students to attain.

Related: A state embraces the idea that not everyone needs to go to college

The teacher-externship program currently only exist in select districts around the state. And while some of those districts have had programs in place for years, externships are new to others. The Louisiana Department of Education is currently working on expanding the number of externships available in the parts of the state that already have programs: Northwest Louisiana, Central Louisiana, South Louisiana, and around Baton Rouge.

The state hopes that participating teachers will return to schools in the fall able to tell students what their region’s jobs are actually like, with the ability to answer questions like: What skills are needed? Are there opportunities for advancement? What’s the hiring process?

‘A Different Perspective’

Last year, a coalition of ten districts in the northwest corner of the state sent 50 teachers into industry, 36 CTE and 14 core academic teachers. That was up from 40 participants the previous year. This year, the Northwest Louisiana Regional Jump Start Team hopes to again increase the number of overall participants, but are particularly interested in growing the number of general education teachers, counselors, and administrators. Whenever possible, the coalition is suggesting to districts that they send pairs of academic and CTE teachers, so the educators can work together to envision what career-readiness will look like across the curriculum.

Related: New Orleans student says school leaders sometimes underestimate the value of career education

Rosetta Boone, who is the CTE supervisor in Caddo Parish schools, fondly remembers her externships under a now-defunct state program called Teachers in the Working World.

“I spent two summers working in industry,” said Boone. “I worked for Libbey Glass and GE, back when they made transformers. Those experiences allowed me to see a different perspective, to see what the workplace was really like, and bring that information back into my classroom.”

Boone, a former CTE teacher herself, says that while externship programs for teachers aren’t a new idea, in the age of college-and-career readiness, administrators are taking the idea more seriously.

“In the past, everyone was just focused on that college path,” said Boone. “Now academic teachers are embracing CTE. That’s why we’re trying to pair a CTE teacher with a teacher in a traditional core curriculum area. We want them to go out together and come back and work out how math, English, science and CTE will come together to get our kids ready for the workforce.”

A group of districts in Central Louisiana is also looking to rejigger how teacher externships are happening in their part of the state. Last year, with help from the Orchard Foundation, a local education fund, 31 teachers spent three days touring ten businesses. That program will be offered again this year, but some teachers will be on weeklong placements.

“Our teachers wanted to stay longer,” said Jennifer Cowley, program manager at The Orchard Foundation. “So this year, we are making sure to give them more time to do actual job shadowing.”

“They are going to be able to go back to their students and talk about the real world, talk about how what they are learning is going to apply after high school,” added Cowley. “When I think back to college, I was always more receptive to what my professors had to say when they brought in their real world experiences.”

Related: Can we really prepare kids for both college and career?

The externships are being funded through philanthropic and state grants to districts, as well as through federal funds flowing from the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, which is currently up for reauthorization.

Academic Concerns

Louisiana isn’t the only state where teachers will be spending part of their summer working in industry. As of 2014, eight states were requiring districts to provide teachers with work-based learning opportunities if they wanted to access Perkins funding. Teachers in Tennessee can partake in weeklong summer externships in industries such as aerospace, energy, and healthcare. The state is encouraging districts to send two teachers, one from CTE and one from a core academic subject. And the University of Arizona’s College of Education offers a program called Teachers in Industry for STEM teachers. The participants take classes at the university and spend their summers working for Arizona STEM firms.

As states like Louisiana have strayed from college-for-all models, some educators have expressed concern that these new program could result in decreased academic rigor. What remains to be seen is how many Louisiana teachers and administrators will embrace the externships.

Lisa French, executive director of career and technical education at the Louisiana Department of Education, has some advice for administrators who may be encountering general education teachers who are skeptical of the program’s value.

“I think you start with the fundamental reason why a math teacher went into the profession in the first place, that is to help students learn and succeed,” said French. “You have to get that teacher to see that this will help make their lessons more relevant, and with that increased relevance they’ll see students more engaged and ultimately more successful.”

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post Louisiana Teachers to Swap Classrooms for Factory Floors and Office Cubicles appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Photo: AP Photo/Philadelphia Inquirer, Ed Hille

With the number of well-paying jobs open to those without college degrees becoming scarcer by the day, policymakers have adopted an ambitious goal to increase the number of Americans with college credentials to 60 percent by 2025. As of 2016, that rate stood at just 45 percent. To increase the number of Americans with degrees by 33 percent in less than a decade, colleges will have to get much better at serving the kinds of students who have historically fallen through the cracks, and they will have to do so fast to meet that target.

Graduation rates for poor students haven’t budged much in the past four decades. Students coming from the bottom half of the family-income scale, that is hailing from families with incomes below about $65,000 per year, make up just 23 percent of Americans who receive Bachelor’s degrees by their 25th birthday, according to analysis done by the Pell Institute and the University of Pennsylvania Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy. That figure is down from 28 percent in 1970, meaning that much of the gains in college completion rates in recent decades have come from increases in the numbers of middle- and upper-class students graduating. Peter R. Jones, senior vice provost for undergraduate studies at Temple University, and Paul Tough, author of the upcoming book, “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” presented some promising solutions this month during a session at the Education Writers Association’s National Seminar at Boston University.

Jones discussed programs at Temple that provide financial resources to students the university thinks are at risk of dropping out, while Tough discussed the power of just telling students they belong in college—a potentially far cheaper solution to the college dropout crisis.

Temple University, a public research university in Philadelphia, has bucked the national trends. Despite declining funding and an increase in the number of students receiving Pell grants (a federal program that assists undergraduates from low-income backgrounds) the school’s graduation rate is up. Jones attributes that success to a philosophical change among the university’s administrators.

“We had all of these high-impact programs, but there were no students in the library, or in the writing center, or in the career center,” said Jones. “We put a lot of effort into providing resources, and as a result we have everything every other institution has. But with the type of students we have, they don’t realize they are high-needs, high-risk. We used to sit and wait. That’s changed over the last decade; we now do intrusive, or even aggressive, advising.”

It’s a lot easier to provide that kind of advising at a small liberal-arts college, but simple math means that Temple couldn’t possibly provide that kind of service to all of its 28,000 undergraduates. Temple’s solution was to turn to big data. Jones, a former criminologist, used his background tapping large datasets to create predictive models that gauged the likelihood of a person reoffending, to help Temple build a statistical program that predicts which students are at the highest risk of dropping out. The university then provides those students with increased support.

Related: Like retailers tracking trends, colleges use data to predict grades, graduations

Temple’s initiative looks a lot like a highly praised program at Georgia State University, another large urban university, which is similarly crunching data to pinpoint and support students on the verge of quitting. As part of that effort, Georgia State hands out micro-grants to students to help with the kinds of minor financial impediments that have ended countless poor students’ college educations.

Through their modeling, the university has uncovered a few unexpected patterns. They learned that the students who were most likely to drop out aren’t the poorest, those who receive full Pell grants, but rather the middle class poor who only receive marginal Pell awards. They also found that in terms of predictive value, a mother’s education level matters far more than a father’s. Additionally, students with four years of foreign-language classes in high school are far less likely to drop out than their peers without that experience. Jones brought up those figures to show the power of colleges drilling down into reams of data they already possess to predict success among their students. While those trends drive Temple’s model, different factors might be at play on other campuses.

Temple has seen the proportion of its students who return for their sophomore year increase from 70 percent in 2001 to 82 percent in 2014. They’ve seen 4-year graduation rates climb from 20 percent to 44 percent and six-year rates up from 59 percent to 70 percent—that’s 11 points higher than the national average. But supporting these students doesn’t come cheap. Just one program, which offers students with the highest financial need $4,000 in exchange for promising not to work off campus for more than 15 hours a week, costs the university $8 million annually. Still, Jones said the investment is worth it because studies show students who work more than 15 hours a week are less likely to graduate.

While author Paul Tough, a two-time college dropout himself, acknowledges the role that surface-level problems like money and academic preparation play in students’ dropping out of college, he thinks that the science behind small psychological interventions – such as short surveys that have low-income, black or Latino students confront their anxieties or worries about their place on campus – is too often ignored.

“Giving college freshmen messages about belonging may not be the most intuitive answer, but it works,” said Tough. “Some worry that by suggesting this, we’re saying that the problems of low-income and first-generation students are all in their minds, and that just sitting them in front of a laptop will fix it. But that’s not what it means.”

“An earlier generation of programs and policies just said if students don’t have enough money, give them more money; if students aren’t being admitted to the right colleges, admit them,” he added. “But those programs ignored that these students are often living more complicated lives than higher-income teenagers. They are asking themselves, ‘What does this all mean? What’s my place in the world? How important is money? How do I square my place here? How does it relate to what I come from?’”

Related: Colleges offer microgrants to help low-income students pay bills that can derail them

Tough said questions like these often run through the minds of students who are part of demographic groups that are statistically less likely to succeed in college, particularly on campuses where more students hail from wealthier homes.

These psychological interventions, Tough contends, have the clearest positive effect on college retention. That’s not to say supporters of this research think other interventions aren’t needed, but rather that the complex psychologies of students attending college has been overlooked, many have said. And, they add the interventions they’re exploring cost much less than other efforts to boost completion rates among underrepresented student groups.

So, one might ask, why should Temple spend millions of dollars on their programs? Jones is convinced that the initiatives are paying for themselves.

“On balance, I think we are probably making money,” said Jones. “It depends how you calculate the value of preventing a student from dropping out. But we know there’s a financial benefit. Five years ago, we just retained 4,300 students from freshman to sophomore year. This year it was 5,000, and the revenue from 700 more students is covering those costs.”

Beyond dollars and cents, Jones says that urban universities owe it to their students.

“We are enrolling students who beat the odds at Philadelphia schools, Washington schools, New York schools. We have to do whatever we can to get them through this last leg.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Higher Education.

The post Temple University is Spending Millions to Get More Students Through College, But is There a Cheaper Way? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The standards and the tests designed based on them were, in part, a response to a growing sense that under the No Child Left Behind law – which penalized schools that weren’t making gains on annual state tests – states were making those tests easier so that schools would show progress. Stagnant scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation’s report card, were held up as proof that states weren’t being honest about how many of their students were truly on-track.

The Common Core, which is in place in more than 40 states and the District of Columbia, was designed to increase rigor by having teachers focus more on conceptual learning and critical thinking. When former Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced $330 million in funding for two new Common Core tests, he called the tests a game changer.

Related: The surprising initial results from a new Common Core exam

“For the first time, millions of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers will know if students are on-track for colleges and careers and if they are ready to enter college without the need for remedial instruction,” he said.

This week, two reports paint an entirely new picture using results from last year’s tests, which in many states were the first year of Common Core tests. The scores look a lot more like NAEP than in past years. The two reports – one by Education Next, a scholarly journal published by the conservative Hoover Institution, and another jointly released by Achieve, a nonprofit dedicated to working with states to raise standards, and the Collaborative for Student Success, a nonprofit that supports the Common Core – had similar findings that ding just five states for greatly over-reporting how many students are academically on-track: Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia (the Achieve/CSS report didn’t analyze Nebraska). Of those five states, only Iowa has Common Core on the books.

“States and policymakers are taking this problem seriously and now states are getting more honest and more transparent with students and parents,” said Karen Nussle, executive director of Collaborative for Student Success, during a conference call announcing the results of the study. “The news in some places hasn’t been easy. It’s hard to learn only a third of kids are proficient, but now knowing the truth parents and teachers are doing the hard work of getting kids prepared for success in life.”

Related: Why one Common Core test should match the national exam known as the Nation’s Report Card, and one might not

While Nussle says that their study wasn’t designed to evaluate the quality of new tests, an analysis by The Hechinger Report shows that there were some clear trends in the report. While 44 states have adopted the Common Core, the testing landscape is far more fractious: 10 states plus the District of Columbia used Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests, 18 states used Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests, two states used the new ACT Aspire tests, 21 states used their own tests and Massachusetts allowed districts to choose between PARCC and their old state tests.

By and large the states with the smallest “honesty gaps,” what the Achieve/CSS study calls the gap between NAEP and state tests, used one of the two federally funded tests, PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

Related: Lessons from New York: Don’t expect fast change under Common Core

Excluding Ohio, which decided that the top three of PARCC’s five score bands corresponded to proficient as opposed to the two bands PARCC recommended, states using PARCC actually reported lower proficiency rates than on NAEP.

On average, states using PARCC reported proficiency rates 2.3 points below NAEP on the fourth grade reading and eighth grade math tests (the tests the Achieve/CSS report highlights). South Carolina and Alabama, which used ACT’s new Aspire tests, reported proficiency rates 6.25 percentage points above NAEP. Smarter Balanced states came in at 8.6 above. States like Iowa, which used homemade tests, came at 13 points above. And finally states that didn’t adopt Common Core at all came in at 28 points, on average, above NAEP.

Not all states followed this trend. New York, which used its own tests, reported lower proficiency rates than NAEP, and Alaska, which never adopted the Common Core but did release a new test last year, reported rates comparable to the nation’s report card.

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post More State Tests are “Getting Honest” About How Few Kids are on Track for College, but There Are Outliers appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Downtown Crowley, Photo: Chris Litherland

CROWLEY, La. — Carla and Carl Hebert, with two daughters and a granddaughter in tow, made the hour-long drive from their home in Lake Charles in October to watch a panel of Louisiana educators transform the controversial national Common Core standards into “Louisiana standards.”

Like many, the Heberts’ anger over the Common Core began with homework assignments. Carla remembers days when the whole family grew frustrated trying to help her granddaughter with the new, Common Core-aligned homework questions. “When you have two teachers and a dad who has four college degrees all struggling to help out with elementary school homework, something’s wrong,” she said.

Related: Could you answer these Common Core test questions?

The two teachers she’s referring to are her daughters, Shawna Dufrene and Tiffany Guidry. Dufrene, a fourth-grade teacher at Moss Bluff Elementary School in the Lake Charles suburb of Moss Bluff, was serving on the review panel. Meanwhile, Guidry, a former teacher and mother of three, sat in the audience with their parents. They had all come looking for big changes to the standards. But by the end of the long day, the Heberts were divided on whether the review was living up to its promise.

Their frustration speaks to a tension felt across the country; with nearly two dozen states revising the Common Core standards, policymakers are grappling with what role, if any, parents should have in tweaking those standards.  Can teams of educators in states like Louisiana improve standards that were years in the making? And can the revision process serve both an educational and a political purpose — generating more buy-in for the standards while simultaneously improving them?

As in many states, Louisiana’s Common Core review is the result of years of pressure from parents and politicians. Last year, lawmakers — in an effort to neutralize the issue in the months leading up to this November’s gubernatorial election — charged a committee with coming up with “Louisiana standards” to take effect next August. But, as in other states, opponents say the process has been too rushed and unsuited to accepting parental input, and amounts to little more than a political show. The Crowley meeting only reinforced that belief for Carla and Carl Hebert and their daughter, former teacher Guidry.

The goal of the Crowley meeting was to pen a first draft of new math standards for grades three through 12 by the end of day. After a brief welcome statement from the committee chair — Charlotte Boothe, a middle school curriculum specialist from Rapides Parish — small groups of teachers divided by grade level spent two hours coming up with proposed changes for each grade. After lunch, the entire committee reconvened to debate the proposed changes. The members of the public who had come to provide input had to sit and wait. Public comment was not scheduled until after the debate.

Once the math content committee has finished its draft, the state’s process calls for proposed changes to go to the “standards committee”: another group of educators who will also hold public hearings and then send notes back to the original “review” committees. The math committee is one of three groups: Two other content committees will provide suggested revisions to the English standards for grades three to 12 and the Kindergarten through second grade standards. When the committees have hashed out a final draft, it will go before BESE for a final vote in March.

Related: Poll raises questions about the breadth of the opt-out movement

At the Crowley meeting, Dufrene suggested changes to the majority of the fourth grade math standards, leaving the committee no time to debate anything beyond the fourth-grade level at a meeting charged with examining standards for grades three to 12. As a result, it adjourned the meeting after 7 p.m., without taking much public comment, although, with the exception of a class visiting from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, there was very little public to take comment from: Fewer than two-dozen people showed up.

Dufrene’s changes focused on areas in which she felt the standards had crossed the line from telling teachers what they needed to teach to dictating how they needed to teach. For example, she called for removing language from a fourth-grade multiplication standard that suggested teachers should ask students to explain answers by using equations, arrays or area models. Arrays, where students use dots to represent numbers, and area models, in which students shade in parts of a rectangle, are visual tools used to show their work. While some of the educators agreed with Dufrene, others felt that the language was necessary to ensure teachers go beyond teaching the procedure and use techniques that encourage deeper, more conceptual learning. Those who opposed cutting the language eventually won out.

Stuffed animal unicorns are placed on the desks of lawmakers in the Louisiana House, distributed by a group supporting the Common Core education standards on Wednesday, April 15, 2015, in Baton Rouge, La. The organization suggests that many of the claims from opponents of Common Core are not real, just like unicorns. Photo: AP Photo/Melinda Desolate

But while the educators on the committee had their say, Carla Hebert felt completely shut out by the process. “If they really wanted to include us, they would have started with public comment,” she said late in the afternoon. “It’s after three o’clock, we’ve been just sitting here for six hours.”

As in other states, an online survey was designed to be the primary vehicle through which parents could weigh in on what changes should be made to the Common Core. The educator committees are supposed to use those comments when considering changes. But in state after state, this has proven to be a highly imperfect and fraught manner for soliciting parent feedback.

A New York survey, for instance, generated about a quarter of a million responses — 70 percent of which were positive — with parents contributing about a third of the responses. In Kentucky, which also got mostly positive feedback, about 20 percent of the respondents were parents. West Virginia received about 250,000 comments, over 96 percent of which were positive. Nearly 90 percent of the respondents were educators or administrators; just 5 percent were parents.

Related: New York was Common Core’s stronghold. What happens if the state backs down?

The results in Louisiana mirror the national trend: While public opinion polling has shown that the majority of Louisianans dislike the Common Core overall, the online survey was much more positive. Over 80 percent of the comments received were favorable. About a quarter of the 720 reviewers — who collectively contributed 30,000 comments through the online portal — were parents. Carla Hebert says a lot more parents would have used the portal if it provided lay people like her with the kind of information they needed to really evaluate the standards.

The portal was essentially just a link to all of the standards. Participants were given four options: keep the standard as is, move it to another grade, break it into multiple standards, or remove or rewrite it. Hebert says the site’s barebones nature made it difficult for most parents to really engage. To make a judgment on each standard, she felt she needed to know what the old Louisiana standards looked like and how the different standards affect tests and homework.

“We want to participate, give us the knowledge,” said Hebert. “If they really wanted us to have a part in this, they would be giving us all the information we needed.”

Her daughter, Guidry, says she felt that the survey was designed with the intent of keeping the Common Core largely intact.

“I’m an experienced educator and it took me two hours to comment on just one of the subject areas,” said Guidry. “They made the process so difficult that it was like you were getting penalized if you wanted to make a change to the standards.”

A team from the Southern Regional Education Board, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, reviewed the public comments and presented findings to the standards committee. Comments were also made available to committee members.

Holly Boffy, who represents Guidry’s corner of southwest Louisiana on the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), argues that the surveys were never intended to let parents weigh in on every single aspect of the standards.

“The advice I gave to parents was to pick the area they were most concerned about,” said Boffy, who supports the Common Core. “If [your] main complaint is that the Common Core is federal intrusion into local schools, the portal isn’t of use to you.”

Others say it’s disingenuous to suggest that parents have any kind of real voice in the Common Core state rewrites.

“With many of these reviews, parents have to specifically say each and every component of the Common Core they don’t like,” said Neal McCluskey, the director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, who opposes the standards. “It’s unrealistic to think you are going to have a huge groundswell of parents with lists of what they want changed and how they want it changed. What parents want is for it to feel like the Common Core wasn’t forced on them.”

That kind of public debate was definitely not taking place at Crowley, where the technical nature of standards writing was on full display. Dufrene recommended nearly 20 changes to the fourth-grade math standards alone.

Phil Daro, one of the three lead writers of the Common Core math standards, is worried all this tinkering will do more harm than good.

“The Common Core standards are not perfect, there are things that could be done to improve or tweak them, but it’s not likely the process that many of the states are going through is going to address the real issues,” said Daro. “I’m not saying they can’t be improved but you would have to go through the same painstaking process that we did. Just having politically engineered meetings of mathematicians and teachers for three days is not going to fix anything and will probably instead make things worse.”

The committee ultimately adopted some substantial changes, like adding a standard calling for teachers to instruct kids in the earlier grades how to count money. By the end of the night, Dufrene felt they were making headway in creating more teacher-friendly standards.

Related: Why are so many states replacing Common Core with carbon copies?

Heading to her car after a marathon 10-hour meeting, she said: “If the process continues like this … I’m happy.”

But it all just seemed like small tweaks to the other members of the Hebert family in the audience.

“I am very impressed with how hard all you educators are working on this, and my comments are not directed at you but the people above you,” said Guidry during the public comment period. “But you can’t do this kind of work in just two or three meetings.”

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

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