Illias Gomez thought he was doing pretty well for himself when he got a part-time job as a host at a local Olive Garden during his sophomore year in high school.

“It was my first job, so I thought I was making a lot of money,” Gomez recalls of the position, which paid $10 an hour.

His perspective changed when—in the summer of 2021, before his senior year—he landed an internship at IBM making $21.50 an hour, working on media and entertainment projects for the company. The higher wage not only more than doubled his salary, but also proved life-changing for Illias and his family, who reside in Mesquite, Texas, just outside of Dallas.

For starters, the job came with a $750 stipend for home office equipment. Gomez used the stipend and his salary to buy an L-shaped desk and two computers to create a home studio. The studio serves as a sanctuary where he can pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a video game developer—a dream that goes back to when he was a four-year-old playing God of War on his uncle’s PlayStation 2.

He also saved up to buy himself a car—a blue 2004 Honda Civic EX. He bought his stepdad a heat press machine for their fledgling custom T-shirt business. And he bought his mom a manicure nail table so instead of shelling out money to local nail salons, she could do her nails at home, as well as those of her family and friends.

At 32 hours a week, the IBM internship essentially made Illias a breadwinner for his family overnight, even if only for that summer.

“I never expected this early in my life to be paid that much,” Gomez told me during an interview in a second-floor conference room at Emmett J. Conrad High School, located in the city’s Vickery Meadow neighborhood, a densely populated area that is home to many immigrants and refugees from around the world.

“That money really helped out,” he said. When his mother, a building code officer for the city of Dallas, heard how much his salary was, “she was surprised, because she was like, ‘You’re close to making as much as I’m making.’ ”

Gomez landed his lucrative IBM internship through a program called P-TECH, which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Not only does P-TECH connect high school students to employment opportunities in promising fields, it also offers them the chance to take college courses while in high school and to earn credits toward both—a concept called dual enrollment. For Gomez it meant that, when he graduated this past May from Conrad High at the age of 18, he also had an associate’s degree in applied science in interactive simulation and game technology. He didn’t have to pay a dime. His mother was so inspired by Illias’s example that she decided to go back to college herself.

Dual enrollment is one of the most encouraging trends in higher education. Such programs have been shown to boost college attendance and reduce the time it takes for students to earn postsecondary degrees and vocational certificates. One of the abiding problems, however, is that students of color and from lower-income families tend to be underrepresented. Historically, dual enrollees have typically been whiter, wealthier, and already high achievers academically.

What makes P-TECH different is that, as a nonselective program, it serves lower-income minority students, many of whom weren’t doing well in school—like Gomez. The program does that in various innovative ways: by giving the high school students a new identity as college students capable of doing college work, by providing them with jobs in a field they’re passionate about, and by connecting them with businesses in search of an educated workforce. 

The success P-TECH has shown with students like Gomez has helped it spread rapidly—from a single school in Brooklyn, where it was launched in 2011, to 210 today throughout the United States (and many others in several countries, from Morocco to Singapore to Australia). 

But that growth pales in comparison to the potential interest. There are more than 21,000 public high schools in the United States, meaning that only about 1 percent of America’s high schools have the program. Even in Dallas, where 18 high schools participate in P-TECH, demand far outstrips supply. At Conrad High, for instance, there were twice as many applicants as there are spots at the school in the fall of 2022. 

One limiting factor, not surprisingly, is cost. High schools and colleges foot the bill for administering the program, and employers have to be persuaded to see the value in student interns’ work enough to come up with the money for their salaries. For the program to become available to all students, a national-level investment would help tremendously.

The program’s first school, known simply as P-TECH High School, launched in 2011 in Brooklyn as a collaboration between IBM, the New York City Department of Education, and the City University of New York (CUNY). It was the brainchild of Stanley Litow, then an executive at IBM, who designed P-TECH as a special education project for the company. Litow says he wanted to help improve students’ lifetime earnings and to address the “skills gap”—that is, the gulf between available jobs that require certain skills and the people who have the education necessary to fill those jobs.

“Those who go into the workforce with a postsecondary degree will earn $1 million more over their lives than those with only a high school diploma,” Litow says, using an oft-cited statistic about the value of a college degree.

From the beginning, Litow aimed to create a model that could be broadly replicated everywhere. Seeing that some similar programs had limited their own growth by restricting admissions to high-achieving students, Litow decided to avoid that pitfall with P-TECH. “For that reason we resisted suggestions to restrict admissions to only the highest-achieving students and made admissions open to all,” Litow told me recently. “Had that not been done, its success would have been marginalized because it only worked for high achievers.”

In fall 2011, 104 students dual enrolled at P-TECH High in Brooklyn and the New York City College of Technology, better known as City Tech, which is part of CUNY. Among those students, 16 became the first to take a college course in summer 2012. They took math and computer science classes and worked toward associate’s degrees in computer systems and electromechanical engineering. 

By fall 2013, there were 82 students dual enrolled and in an average of five college courses.

President Barack Obama gave P-TECH a shout-out in his 2013 State of the Union address and visited the high school later that year, praising it as “a ticket into the middle class [that’s] available to everybody who’s willing to work for it.” He added, “And that’s the way it should be.”

Another world leader toured Brooklyn P-TECH the following year: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who became the first to expand the program outside the U.S. Since then, 26 nations have followed. 

The discussion to implement P-TECH in the Dallas Independent School District began in 2015 on the sixth floor of a Bank of America building in the city’s downtown. It was Michael Hinojosa’s second stint as superintendent of schools in Dallas. Two high schools that had previously been in danger of being taken over by the state had found success by adopting an early college model, but the district hadn’t seen fit to take up P-TECH—at least not yet.

Gathered around the table with Hinojosa were representatives from the county government, the rail system, the county hospital, and the Dallas County Community College District. As Hinojosa recalls, Joe May, now chancellor emeritus of the community college district, said, “Hey, we’ve heard of this P-TECH model and we’d like to see if you’d be interested in taking this thing to scale to put it at all your high schools.” 

“And I said, ‘Well, sounds interesting. Absolutely, let me do a little investigating,’ ” Hinojosa told me. “ ‘Let me talk to my team.’ ”

Hinojosa consulted with his central office staff and had them organize a trip to New York City to learn more about the original P-TECH. Based on their research, they altered the program slightly to fit Dallas students’ needs, adopting a four-year model rather than the six-year plan used in New York. Six months later, the Dallas school district launched eight P-TECH schools for the 2016–17 school year. It launched another 10 the following year. The school district set aside $25.5 million each year to set up the infrastructure for the program, and the community college ponied up the rest through tuition waivers totaling roughly $24 million a year. 

Since 2016, the program has grown from eight schools to 18. In the 2020–21 school year, 5,835 students were on one of 36 “career pathways” that include health sciences, business administration and management, information technology, engineering, and hospitality management.

In 2021, 12th-grade Dallas P-TECH students had earned an average of roughly 56 dual credit hours apiece, along with good money from a growing roster of industry partners. “It just took off,” Hinojosa said. “It’s been nothing short of phenomenal.”

In order to become a success, Dallas P-TECH needed to build strong ties to business. Corporate partners don’t make financial contributions to P-TECH beyond paying interns’ wages. Instead, they offer mentoring and internships—or, as Hinojosa likes to say, some “love.” The Dallas school district started with about 25 industry partners, including AT&T and Microsoft, and now has close to 100, from Cisco Systems Inc. to PepsiCo/Frito-Lay. The roster includes several airlines and big banks and tech giants, a list that stands out for both the sheer number of industry partners and their diversity, which offers opportunities to kids with a wide range of interests.

Hinojosa told me students are landing great jobs at major U.S. companies. “American Airlines just hired 11 kids out of one high school making $58,000 a year with a 401k and free flights all over America,” he said. “And every one of them [is] Latino or African American.” 

So what’s the case for businesses to get involved?

In 2016, Ed Magnin, director of development at Magnin & Associates, a Dallas-based video game developer and a Conrad High School partner, joined Dallas P-TECH, motivated by the chance to help prepare and shape the workforce he needed. (Dallas College officials, for their part, say employers routinely make suggestions about what courses will benefit new hires.)

“If we can turn out students that have skills that are in demand in industry, that’s one reason for [companies] to volunteer to work with the schools,” Magnin told me. “It’s also something the Chamber of Commerce can sell to companies as to why they should move here: We have good schools and our students are earning college credit while they’re still in high school.”

Beyond that, Magnin said, businesses like his can better afford to pay fair wages when they’re hiring entry-level workers straight out of high school. Magnin & Associates takes on two interns per semester. One such intern was Gomez, who worked for Magnin as a tester finding bugs and glitches in video games before he landed the internship at IBM. 

Hinojosa observes that not all jobs require a four-year degree. P-TECH gives an advantage to high school graduates who might struggle to earn an associate’s degree if they had to do it on their own as adults rather than during high school.

“These industry partners are so happy with this because now they see a ready workforce,” Hinojosa said. “And now they’re thinking about, ‘Do you really need a full bachelor’s degree to work at American Airlines or Accenture?’ Because these kids can do all these things that they never had any idea they could do.”

Remarkably, in 2021, about a third of students who earned an associate’s degree that year in Dallas had failed their eighth-grade exam. “They shouldn’t have even been in high school,” said Hinojosa, who completed his last year with the district in June 2022. According to a recent study of the program, such turnaround stories are typical for P-TECH students. An April 2022 evaluation by MDRC—a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization—found that P-TECH schools in New York City were “particularly successful at helping students at risk of underperforming in high school achieve important academic milestones.”

The evaluation found that, “in particular, [P-TECH] increased dual enrollment for this group of students, which may be significant since prior research has found that students who take college courses while in high school are more likely to both enroll in college and complete postsecondary education degrees.” MDRC plans to release a final report on P-TECH in New York, including a cost study, in 2023.

Statistics show that Illias Gomez has plenty of company among his fellow high schoolers who benefited from P-TECH. Of all the Dallas high school students who got two-year degrees or earned 60 dual credit hours in 2020–21, 71 percent were P-TECH students. 

“This past year in the pandemic, 910 kids—actually 910 is 10 percent of our senior class—graduated from high school with an associate’s degree for free,” Hinojosa told me. “No debt.”

Today, much like Gomez, not only are Dallas high school students earning college degrees along with their high school diplomas, but they’re also making good money while still in high school. In summer 2021, more than 400 Dallas public high school students got internships in which they earned an average of $17.50 per hour. Collectively, they earned more than $1.6 million, Dallas school data shows.

“The cool thing about this is our students are saying, ‘I’m earning more than my mom. I don’t know what to do with this money,’ ” says Sibu McNeal, director of workplace learning at Dallas ISD P-TECH and Early College Programs. “These are good problems that we’re having now.”

Other school districts are looking at these results and following suit. In May 2022, on a visit to Conrad High, I met a group of education leaders from Chicago who had come to learn more about how they could implement P-TECH back in the Windy City. The group included Pedro Martinez, the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools. Martinez told me he sees P-TECH in Dallas as a “very, very strong model” and he hopes to soon pilot the program at 10 to 20 schools in Chicago. The city already has one P-TECH school, Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy, but Chicago’s educational leaders are thinking of greatly expanding the program. Martinez said, “I think this is the future of education.”

Despite the interest from Chicago, P-TECH is still a relatively rare model on the American educational landscape. Of the nation’s 15.3 million high school students, only about 1.5 million are in dual enrollment programs, according to researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University. Less than 10 percent of those students are in P-TECH. Of those 1.5 million dual enrollment students, the vast majority—particularly Black, Hispanic, and low-income students—do not earn anywhere near enough credits to graduate from high school with an associate’s degree the way Gomez did.

“In every state where we’ve looked at this, the average number of dual enrollment credits students take before they graduate is small—usually around 6 to 9 credits or 2 to 3 courses,” says Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. There aren’t reliable statistics for the average number of credits earned by P-TECH students—in part because the length of the program varies across the country—but in P-TECH’s birthplace, New York City, students are earning an average of 32 credits from State University of New York branches as they move from high school to college.

In fact, Litow said P-TECH should have become more prevalent in Chicago years ago. It’s not for lack of trying—this won’t be the city’s first attempt at implementing the program. A district official says five early college high schools were established to “emulate” P-TECH in 2012, but Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy—a school that Time magazine praised in 2014 as “The School That Will Get You a Job”—was the only one that managed to stay true to the model. 

Different factors, such as changes in leadership, can sometimes make it difficult to bring even successful programs to scale, Litow said. But more than that, P-TECH could use federal support. Right now, a patchwork of local school systems have adopted the model, each figuring out on their own how to find funding and adapt the program to the needs of their communities. One idea Litow would like to see: Expand eligibility for Pell Grants so they cover dual enrolled students, not just traditional college students. That move alone would “immediately” lead to more schools opening because it would take the tuition cost burden away from states and localities, Litow said. Another, similar, move would be to open up federal work study grants, which currently pay 70 to 75 percent of the wages that employers pay to students. That would bring in more industry partners to P-TECH programs. Another would be for the U.S. Labor Department to fund apprenticeships for more high school students. 

All three of those changes would not eliminate costs for states and school districts, Litow said, but they would introduce a more efficient cost-sharing model that would help the program to expand. And over the long term, he predicted, it would save money by reducing the need for remedial courses, increasing college completion, and saving tax dollars by keeping graduates out of the social safety net.

During their first two years, P-TECH students at Conrad High attend classes at their school that are taught by professors from the nearby Dallas College Richland Campus. Illias Gomez said one of his most memorable classes was a project development class taught by the adjunct game design professor Paul Lachowicz, who taught students the ins and outs of using Unreal Engine, an open 3D creation tool that people can use to make video games and movies. Gomez spent hours playing around in the engine under Lachowicz’s eye, building worlds—and problem-solving skills—in the classroom.

Conrad’s upper-level students spend more and more time independently taking college courses. Gomez told me the experience taught him important lessons about time management. “No one’s telling you, ‘You have to go to this class. You have to go to that class,’ ” he said. “It’s like, you know what time your class starts. You have to be there for your grade, your attendance, because even though you’re not paying for it, you’re having that opportunity to have that class for free that could cost thousands of dollars as an adult.” The IBM job, meanwhile, was a sweet deal for reasons that transcend how much it paid. Unlike his restaurant host job or the days when he did yard work in his neighborhood to make money, Gomez didn’t have to leave home.

“It was like working a real office job, but from the comfort of our own home,” he said. “Like it was almost a workshop. It’s like a giant workshop where we just learned different things about how it is to be a consultant, as well as problem solving for a company.”

Gomez plans to take his studies in gaming beyond the next two years at the University of North Texas. He has his eyes on Southern Methodist University. There, he hopes to join the Guildhall, which bills itself as a “premier graduate-level video game development education program in the United States.”

Gomez has a keen sense of the role that P-TECH played in positioning him where he is today.

“P-TECH is one of those things where you look at it now and it may not be so big to you, but later on it means pretty much the world, because that’s when you realize that you not only saved yourself and your family a lot of money, you saved yourself a lot of time,” he told me. “And so it’s one of the things where there’s going to be some sacrifices, but those sacrifices are what help you become the grown young adult that you will be.”  

The post A Job and a College Degree Before You Graduate High School  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Throughout the pandemic, Donna Martin’s lunches have been a lifeline for the public school students in rural Burke County, Georgia, where she serves as nutrition director. One in five citizens lives in poverty in this east Georgia county of roughly 25,000, half an hour south of Augusta. Nearly two-thirds of the district’s 4,100 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (meaning that family incomes fall below 185 percent of the federal poverty line).

Martin says the meals her staff prepares (breakfast, lunch, and even dinner) are often the healthiest—and sometimes the only—food her students see each day. “Our kids are food insecure, and they’re hungry,” she said. “But we offer amazing food, and we offer a lot of choices every day.” On the Monday we spoke, the menu included turkey tetrazzini, broccoli, and carrot sticks with homemade ranch dressing, and made-from-scratch strawberry muffins. “And we have ‘fruit-mallow,’ which is one of my favorites,” Martin said. “It’s fruit cocktail, but it’s got extra cherries and marshmallows, which the kids really like.” 

But providing nutritious, tasty meals like these could soon get a lot harder for Martin and her staff, who’ve already been scrambling to manage supply chain disruptions and soaring costs as the pandemic has worn on. “Our food prices have gone up 25 percent,” Martin says.

The $1.5 trillion spending bill working its way to President Joe Biden’s desk that funds the federal government through September fails to extend crucial funding and flexibility provided by Congress to school meal programs last year. The coronavirus relief packages passed in 2020 and 2021 added $8.8 billion to the government’s budget for child nutrition programs and authorized the Department of Agriculture to issue “waivers“ relaxing program requirements and boosting reimbursements to schools for meals served—which, in Martin’s case, is an increase to about $3.50 per lunch. Importantly, these waivers also enabled universal access to free lunch for most of the past two years, a boon for families who abruptly lost jobs or income due to the pandemic. 

Despite an avalanche of bipartisan appeals from child nutrition advocates, school districts, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly blocked the extension of these provisions. In fact, according to Politico, he was “forcefully opposing” them because of the $11 billion price tag. It’s not the first time McConnell has shortchanged poor children. Last fall, he attacked the expanded child tax credit included in the COVID relief package as “monthly welfare deposits” and led the charge to let the credits lapse in January. 

The school meal provisions expire June 30, and the consequences could be dire. “Millions of kids are going to lose access to summer meals on July 1,” says Crystal FitzSimons, director of School and Out of School Time Programs for the Food Research and Action Center.

The funds and flexibility provided by the school nutrition waivers have been critical for school districts during the pandemic. One such waiver, for instance, suspended the requirement that meals be served in “congregate” settings—i.e., to groups in school cafeterias. Burke County’s Martin used this flexibility to send home meal boxes to needy students over the summer and while schools were closed last year. 

Other waivers relaxed the rules regarding when meals must be served and allowed parents to pick up food. This allowed districts to send food home to kids in quarantine and to distribute meals at pop-up sites or along bus routes (as Fairfax County and other districts did during lockdown). Districts were also allowed to receive the higher summer meal reimbursement rate during the school year, and they haven’t faced penalties for running short of milk or other foods required under current regulations. During the 2020–21 school year, schools fed an average of 19.8 million children every day for lunch and nearly 14 million children for breakfast. Summer meal programs, many of which are also school based, served 4.7 million children.

Though schools are now shedding mask requirements and resolutely heading toward “normal,” districts’ meal programs are still very much on pandemic footing, facing rising costs for food, fuel, and labor and supply disruptions to boot. As a result, the waivers are still essential. 

According to a recent USDA study, 92 percent of school meal programs have had trouble securing food, drinks, or supplies this school year, and 67 percent reported higher operations costs. Ninety percent also rely on the higher reimbursements provided by the waivers to compensate for these extra expenses. The average school district will, however, lose 40 percent of its funding for school lunches once the waivers expire, according to a USDA estimate provided to The Washington Post.

Galloping inflation is also squeezing household finances, which means that more families will be looking to school meals to keep their children fed. One recent survey found that 64 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, including nearly half (48 percent) of families earning six figures. The expiration of the waivers, however, means the end of universal free lunch next fall. For families on the cusp of eligibility when the rules return to the status quo ante, school lunch might be one more thing they can no longer afford. 

The pandemic has been particularly cruel to children, many of whom have suffered the isolation of school closures and the loss of caregivers to the virus. More than 200,000 children in the U.S. have lost a primary caregiver, according to one estimate. Low-income children have borne the heaviest burden, living in communities disproportionately impacted by COVID. Now congressional Republicans are stripping poor children of an exceedingly modest palliative—access to school meals. 

In Burke County, Martin worries that half of her students won’t eat this summer if Congress doesn’t act. “If we don’t get these waivers, it is just going to be a catastrophe,” she said.

The post Once a Pandemic Lifeline, Universal Access to Free School Lunch to End appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Candace Spencer, a literacy tutor in Washington, D.C., logs onto her computer each weekday morning, opens recording software, smiles at the camera, and begins sounding out phonetics. The response is silence; in fact, there’s no one on the other end at all.

“Mentally, you picture your student in your head,” said Spencer, who works for The Literacy Lab, a non-profit focused on tutoring low-income students. “Maybe even some of the things that they would say in return.”

Before the pandemic, Spencer would arrive at one of the organization’s partner schools every morning to tutor kids one-on-one all day. Now, she pre-records literacy lessons for more than fifteen K-3 students. Spencer conducts live virtual sessions too, but the recorded videos are crucial; many of her students have parents who work two jobs, and the video lessons can be viewed whenever fits the family schedule.

“The students that are going to fare best throughout all of this are coming from households that have access to a lot of learning resources,” said Sarah Rose Dorton, Literacy Lab’s D.C. regional director. Most parents can’t afford the private tutors or live-in nannies that affluent families are splashing out for.

But that means that many of the students most in need are being left behind. NWEA, an education non-profit focused on learning assessments, estimated that reading gains would drop by 30 percent after about a semester of remote-only learning. According to an AP analysis of U.S. Census data, about one in five schoolchildren in D.C. live in households without internet access. Almost 30 percent lack a computer in their household, making it the worst in the nation for student technology access. The students who need literacy tutoring the most often lack the resources to learn remotely.

The long-term consequences could be stark. Poor literacy keeps people from graduating from high school and prevents them from studying at college. As many as 43 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills, according to a 2019 report from the National Center for Education Statistics. This cohort suffers a raft of ostracizing repercussions—from low-confidence to difficulty finding work. Adults with low literacy are over-represented within incarcerated populations and among those receiving public assistance.

Many literacy tutoring organizations follow a similar model: tutors design weekly, individualized lessons for students who are behind their grade level in reading and comprehension. Tutors often meet with students at their schools and work with them until they are back on track. With many schools transitioning to virtual teaching, the in-person tutoring so important for building a rapport with students has become infeasible. Tutors spoke of the “terrifying” divide between those with and without access to technology. “These kids were behind to begin with, so you could be talking about a year’s slide in some cases,” said Lois Fingerhut, board chair and tutor at Reading Partners D.C. “It’s horrifying to me.”

Yet resourceful tutors are finding ways to keep their students learning. By developing virtual teaching techniques and adapting to new platforms, literacy tutors can coach the next generation of readers.

The good news is, it seems to be working for the kids who get it. The bad news is, not many do.

Some of the technical innovations for literacy tutoring during the pandemic have taken place in New York City, the one-time epicenter of the virus. When Katherine Stahl got notice from New York University she would have to close the NYU Literacy Clinic, which she leads, she was thankful the directive came on March 12, the day before spring break. Her tutors are members of NYU’s Literacy Specialist master’s program, and, through the clinic, they teach between six and ten children with complex reading needs for free every spring semester. Traditionally, each student would come to Washington Square Park for hour-long sessions twice a week. But this spring, the typical gains of 1-1.5 reading years during the semester of coaching felt impossible.

Stahl and her tutors spent spring break pivoting to online learning—calling parents, designing PowerPoints, diagramming on whiteboards, photographing book pages, sourcing and arranging various technologies, troubleshooting buggy apps, and crafting Zoom backgrounds. It was worth it. For many of these children, Stahl said, “the only instruction they were getting—period—was the hour of tutoring from us.”

One of the first things third-graders saw when they logged onto a lesson with Skye Russell, a tutor at NYU Literacy Clinic last semester, was a roadmap of the lesson decorated with cheerful photographs of rabbits. Then, students might move onto some animal-themed exercise passages: “Stinky Skunks, Millipedes and Beetles,” or “Smelly Goo Helps Opossums Play Dead.” Attention is a scarce commodity over video call; Russell often caught students’ eyes wandering off the screen.

“Sometimes students have a harder time focusing or, you know, maybe they’re hungry,” she said. The trick is to gamify the teaching. Russell might cycle through nine activities in an hour, broken up by quick phonetics games. The aim is to teach children the tools to decipher the words for themselves.

Without literacy, it’s difficult to be an active citizen. “Literacy permeates everything. We read a lot in a day—whether it’s street signs or menus,” said Russell. “Language is so powerful. Not only in reading, but in feeling like we can express ourselves and represent ourselves.”

Utilizing new digital teaching methods has been critical. Russell’s fiancé, a software engineer, helped her design an interactive portal for two-way phonetics activities, allowing Russell to simultaneously video chat and play interactive word games like jeopardy or bingo. “I will be using this when and if I go back in person,” said Russell, who adapts every lesson based on the child’s technology access.

The pandemic has threatened the progress of adult literacy learners, too. “Not everybody even has internet, or has a computer, or knows how to use those things,” said Amy Goodman, executive director of Washtenaw Literacy, a non-profit in Michigan offering tutoring for adults. Around 90 percent of learners who come to the organization live below the poverty line, Goodman explained. Some are native English speakers who never learned to read; others are learning English as a second language.

Goodman’s lessons look different now. Tutors work with whatever technology the learner has access to. “In some cases that’s a cell phone, in some cases that’s WhatsApp, in some cases that’s—God bless it—U.S. mail,” she said. Goodman’s organization developed technology training sessions to bridge the digital skills divide. “Anything from ‘What is a mouse?’ to ‘How do I use my cell phone for Zoom?’”

Like many literacy tutoring non-profits across the country, Reading Partners D.C. fast-tracked new digital resources to aid virtual tutoring. The organization offers free instruction for students in under-resourced schools, 79 percent of whom are low-income, and 90 percent of whom are students of color. The hope is that remote learning innovations, with the right investment, could enable tutors to coach more kids with fewer resources—“to expand our reach and work quickly to close the literacy divide,” said Shukurat Adamoh-Faniyan, executive director of Reading Partners D.C. But that dream is a long way off.

At the end of the semester, Stahl usually hosts a celebration event at NYU for the students, who bring along parents, grandparents, and siblings to celebrate their achievements with pizza and lemonade. Coinciding with national poetry month, the party is an opportunity for the children to show off their new reading skills, reciting poems from writers including Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky.

This April, the party went ahead virtually. Stahl was delighted to share the news that—against the odds—the class had gained, on average, 1.5 reading years from the semester of online tutoring, as measured by a rigorous exit assessment. Every student achieved at least a year of growth, the same as last year. “I was shocked,” she told me.

The final poem of the celebration was read by a fourth-grade boy who, over the last two years, had struggled with text comprehension. His mother had called Stahl crying, desperate for support.

After the semester of virtual tutoring, he’d not only chosen an adult-level poem, Maya Angelou’s “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” but he had the courage to read it in front of everyone.

He started to read: “Shadows on the wall / Noises down the hall / Life doesn’t frighten me at all / Bad dogs barking loud / Big ghosts in a cloud / Life doesn’t frighten me at all…”

Several parents and tutors teared up hearing him read with ease. Stahl got emotional too. “What a perfect poem for the pandemic,” she thought. For Russell, it was evidence all their virtual planning and teaching had paid off.

But these students are the lucky ones. The country is not even close to universal student access to laptops and broadband. For cities, investing in broadband infrastructure tends to be cost effective so it usually gets the green light, said Morgan Ames, assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies technological inequality. Expanding broadband to more rural areas requires a change in thinking. “There would have to be a pretty major tone shift in the very market-oriented approach the U.S. generally takes towards necessary infrastructure,” Ames told me. Broadband should be treated as a public good, like landlines or the postal service, she said. In July, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Moving Forward Act, which includes $100 billion to expand broadband access in underserved and low-income areas. Still, it’s unlikely to pass the Senate if it remains Republican-controlled.

Local policies that could close the digital divide include public library or school technology-lending programs—enacted in Goodman’s district in Michigan and funded by the CARES Act—as well digital skills training in schools and more one-on-one literacy tutoring.

“It only works if students have access to reliable technology, reliable internet access,” said Jade Okunlola, senior program manager at Reading Partners D.C. Many low-income readers are at risk of being left behind if technology isn’t in their hands this year. “The students that we work with, they absolutely need intervention.”

The post What Happens to Students Who Were Already Behind? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

But several communities in California have tried to buck the trend by developing innovative preschools, especially for children who are dual-language learners, live in low-income home or have faced adversity. A recently released report by New America highlights the work in these three communities, San Jose, Oakland, and Fresno, and explains how other areas can adopt these strategies.

1. Helping parents: In San Jose, the Educare California child care center has a family resource center where adults can attend parent education workshops, bring children for developmental screenings and receive referrals for medical care. In Oakland, the district is working with the Lotus Bloom family resource center to host playgroups where children can play while adults attend workshops, receive support the center’s staff members and learn about social services. In Fresno, the Helm Home Play & Learn Center supports families by providing a book and toy library, workshops for parents and caregivers and playgroups. The center is located in a public housing building and tries to educate adults about teaching children at an early age.

2. Teaching the teachers: Research shows that the training that early childhood teachers receive in preparation programs is often inadequate, and teacher qualification levels vary. The Fresno Language Project, a partnership between the local school district and educational organization is helping teachers work with children learning English. The collaborative hosts professional development sessions on Saturday mornings for teachers, administrators, and home care providers to boost teachers’ abilities to support home language, choose books and promote oral language development. The Franklin-McKinley School District in San Jose has launched sessions that help teachers learn to teach social-emotional skills followed up by coaching and opportunities to meet with other teachers. In Oakland, a pilot program teaches preschool teachers about classroom practices to support children with traumatic experiences.

3. Improving data collection to determine need: San Jose, Fresno, and Oakland have all adopted the Early Development Instrument, which is completed by kindergarten teachers and measures child health, development, and kindergarten readiness. Juan Cruz, the superintendent of the Franklin-McKinley School District, said in the report the results of a recent survey of need in his district were “eye-opening” and helped the district determine where to provide resources. Some districts have also surveyed parents and are training teachers to collect data and use this in their classrooms.

Although these districts have seen some success in rolling out these new initiatives, the authors of the New America report caution that several key ingredients are needed for other districts to replicate these strategies. Administrators are needed to support and coordinate programs, and coaches must be available to help teachers as they change or adapt their teaching. Partners are often needed to work with school districts and funding is needed to pay for substitutes for teachers to attend trainings during the week, as well as for classroom supplies and venues.

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

The post How Three California Communities Are Trying to Improve Preschool for Vulnerable Students appeared first on Washington Monthly.

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.

Laura Bornfreund was asked to review the series’ most recent five blogs and identify emerging themes along with their policy implications. She lifts up three issues too often masked, and consequently by-passed, in discussions about the three primary threads comprising ECE’s thorny knot: early childhood educators’ preparation and education, compensation and status, and diversity and inclusion. 

Moving Beyond False Choices‘ second author cohort appears largely to agree that early childhood educators play an important role in young children’s learning and development. Yet these authors also raise issues needing increased attention if early childhood education (ECE) is to unify around more rigorous expectations for higher education degrees and credentials.

Three issues in particular are worth further exploration:

●      the role of family child care providers in the ECE ecosystem,

●      how well higher education programs equip early educators with what they need, and

●      systemic barriers related to race, gender, and class.

Family child care providers: The need for a sector-specific solution

Child Trends recently reported that 97 percent of child care settings are homes, not centers. Of those homes, 27.5 percent are family child care providers who receive payment for their services. This represents approximately 1,037,000 family child care providers as compared to 129,000 child care centers. Yet paradoxically, much of the field’s current discussions and efforts to advance ECE’s workforce are focused on child care centers and public schools.

Jessica Sanger stated in her post that “limited recognition (is) accorded family child care providers given their contribution to ECE’s delivery system,” an assessement confirmed by the above findings. Since family child care providers have responsibility for deepening — and sometimes even providing — the foundation for many children’s future learning, not unlike their colleagues in center- and school-based settings, they are receiving too little recognition for their important role.

It’s no easy task to assist center-based child care educators acquire the knowledge and competencies necessary for meeting young children’s needs. Doing so for family child care providers presents an entirely different scenario given their unique challenges. As Josephine Queen notes for us,

The family child care providers I know tend to be working or lower class, living paycheck to paycheck. This makes attaining a formal education degree financially out of reach for most of us. Some also are single parents and lack resources to pay for child care while attending classes. Plus, running a home-based business means few of us can carve out time to gain the required practical experience and requisite hours needed for degrees since, typically, working in one’s own home child care under one’s own supervision and tutelage is not credit-bearing.

Naming these issues, as Maurice Sykes cautions us, mustn’t be used to cast  blame. Instead, they should alert us to the fact that real challenges exist and underscore that acknowledging them is essential to forging viable solutions for increasing this sector‘s level of education and credentials.

Beyond a Unitary Focus on Higher Education Degrees and Credentials

Once we set the right standards for educational and credential requirements and find effective strategies to assist current and future educators meet them, we’re done, right?

Not so fast.

It’s no secret that too many ECE degree programs leave early childhood educators without the knowledge and competencies for effectively interacting with young children. Amy Rothschild explains that she sought out a non-traditional teacher preparation program because it provided extensive practical experiences linked to observations and insights from experienced early childhood educators. To earn her masters degree, she also took courses at a university, and recounts that, “…the university courses were too often rote. I felt like I was paying the piper, rather than learning the art of teaching or even the nuts and bolts of practice. Everyone seemingly passed with flying colors just by showing up.”

Setting preparation and education requirements and extending supports for those seeking to meet ECE’s expanding expectations clearly is insufficient by itself. In fact, these investments may even be detrimental if not linked with educator preparation programs capable of ensuring

·      early childhood educators know the latest science of child development and early learning, including their connections to practice;

·      are immersed in content areas such as early math and science;

·      have ample opportunities to develop practice skills in a range of settings; and

·      engage in meaningful discussions about challenges children confront as learners.

Systemic Barriers Related to Race, Gender, and Class

Finally, Maurice Sykes calls on us to shift our conversational focus from adults to children when it comes to teacher degrees and compensation. He contends that “Every child needs and deserves a highly qualified, highly effective, and highly competent early childhood educator.” He also reminds us that throughout U.S. history low-income men and women and people of color have successfully attained degrees, leading him to ask, “what’s all the hullabaloo?”

I agree. ECE — and society at large — have obligations to address systemic barriers related to race, gender, and class that promulgate negative assumptions about what early childhood educators and the children whose learning and development they foster can and cannot accomplish. The challenges too many people face when attempting to advance their education need to be alleviated.

Acting on What We’re Learning

And then there’s the ever-present policy question of who’s going to pay for it?

Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education  proposes a price tag of $140 billion, which as Luis Hernandez noted in his post, is a number politicians are unlikely to embrace. Still, this figure at last gives us an estimation of what is needed to develop a competent workforce, inclusive of costs for transforming higher education, supporting degree attainment by ECE’s current workforce, and providing an appropriate level of compensation.

However, while an important part of the equation, increased financing alone won’t ensure every child has well-prepared and highly effective early childhood educators. First, ECE as a field of practice, policymakers, and other stakeholders must learn to value the abiliites of early childhood educators to co-create  innovative, sustainable solutions for attaining more rigorous education and credentials — a viewpoint also articulated by Sherri Killins in an earlier post.

Second, still more effort needs to be directed toward strengthening and aligning early childhood educators’ preparation and education with the field’s expanding knowledge base, growing understanding of essential practitioner competencies, and increasing need for viable clinical experiences. This outcome, though, depends on finding unified agreement for the knowledge and competencies required of early childhood educators, as well as state incentives — including funding —to incentivize preparation programs to change. Additionally, strategies must be developed for overcoming barriers of race, gender, and class that have limited past progress and will inhibit future possibilities.

Only if these three oft-overlooked threads are addressed will ECE be able to unify around more rigorous expectations for higher education degrees and credentials and give every child access to the educators they need and deserve.

* Updated 6/28/18 at 9:48am to correct the number of children in home-based child care settings versus child care centers. The following line was deleted: “This means a majority of children in formal ECE arrangements are in homes, not child care centers.” While there are more family child care settings, the majority of children in formal care are in center-based settings.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Oft-Overlooked Threads Woven into ECE’s Thorny Knot appeared first on Washington Monthly.

To facilitate interaction among ideas presented in Moving Beyond False Choices for Early Childhood Educators, Series Editor Stacie G. Goffin offers opening comments. For readers new to the Series, her introduction explains the series’ intent.

Maurice Sykes urges us to delve deeper to understand why the issues of preparation and education, compensation and status, and diversity and inclusion have become so pronounced and entangled with one another that they form a thorny knot. According to Sykes, we need to be more forthright with one another about the causes — by not doing so, we are blocking our ability to have honest conversations, lift up new possibilities, and effect meaningful change.

To avoid being misinterpreted or perceived as resisting efforts to raise the academic bar for early childhood educators, let me state from the onset that I support efforts to elevate early childhood educators’ competencies prior to entry into the early childhood education (ECE) workforce. And yes, equal pay should be in place for equal work. But if we want to reach this end point, we have to be willing to confront the real barriers blocking attempts to create a well educated, compensated, and diversified workforce.

I designed and operated a program known as “Project Headway” for 15 years. It assisted early childhood educators make headway in their careers by moving from the CDA Credential® to the AA degree and beyond. Its enrollees were similar to those typically referenced in conversations as the “diverse workforce” when discussing early childhood education workforce development.

Yet, contrary to routinely cited  statistics, we boasted 80% workforce retention and graduation rates. Our success can be credited to our not viewing or profiling participants as “first generation, minority, low income females dependent on a monthly wage close to or below the poverty line supporting families” — or by extension, as too tired and too poor to go to night college, which to this day remains the predominant higher education approach for women in the ECE workforce.

Rather than using a lens of pathology, we viewed enrollees as capable, competent, resourceful learners, some of whom, by dint of the birth lottery, had lived in poor neighborhoods, attended inferior schools and, consequently, needed a good practitioner- based ECE higher education program.

Like others whose  blogs  have preceded mine, we recognized that advancing these women’s formal education required attention not only to their academic lives but also to their work and personal lives. But here’s how we differed: We engaged with their plight as an issue of social justice. While we saw increasing their academic preparation as a way of improving their work and personal life circumstances, we, more importantly, saw it as improving their abilities to change the life trajectory of the children they taught.

The time has come to alter the narrative we hold regarding teacher credentialing and teacher compensation that presumes adults’ career advancement is our end goal. To the contrary: our focus should be on improving young children’s schooling and life outcomes.

Every child needs and deserves a highly qualified, highly effective, and highly competent early childhood educator. This is the reason why we should care about early childhood educators’ competencies and compensation.

So, now a cautionary note is needed as we continue exploring issues of teacher preparation, teacher compensation, and a diverse and inclusive workforce: Views that verge, at best, on paternalistic, and, at worst, racist overtones must be shunned.  And if we want to avoid this unsavory impulse, two essential questions have to be probed:

1) Why should we encourage women of color to enhance their educational portfolio only to be consigned to a low-wage, low-status job where they will be paid  84 cents for every dollar their white, female counterparts earn?

2) Remember my reference to night colleges? This venerable American institution historically has catapulted low-income men and women out of poverty and their working class standing and into middle class professional status. People of color have successfully moved from sharecropper to PhDs. So what is all of the hullabaloo surrounding recommendations to move people of color from CDA to AA to BA and beyond?

The change literature is replete with references to  three types of “messes” that motivate an organization to change. There is the Hot Mess and the Holy Mess—both of which can be addressed through a solid, strategic planning process. The third is the Wicked Mess. It requires a systems thinking approach.

ECE has a wicked mess on its hands. Demanding immediate attention are answers to still two more questions: “Who’s going to fix this conundrum?” and “Who’s going to pay for it?”

Initiating a systems change approach requires dives below ECE’s systemic façade to detect trends, patterns, and behaviors that can help explain ECE’s present performance. We also should be probing what prevents the ECE system from changing. After all, it’s not as if the issues we’re exploring are newly identified.

By diving beneath the surface of ECE’s issues re teacher preparation and education, and status and compensation, I suspect we’d find lurking below sexism, classism, and racism. If honest with ourselves and with each other, we’d acknowledge that these three realities are integral to mapping and addressing barriers blocking development of a diverse and professionalized ECE workforce. Frankly, it’s our only hope for addressing this wicked mess.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Let’s Be Honest: It’s About Sexism, Classism, and Racism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

With a flurry of touch-screen taps, she explored the “energy dashboard” of Discovery Elementary in Arlington, Virginia. She swiped through 360-degree views of her school, inside and out. She clicked on icons embedded in the virtual classroom to learn about energy-saving features such as LED lights and super-insulated exterior walls made of concrete-filled foam blocks. Exploring the virtual school kitchen, she could read that the lack of a deep fryer means less energy is needed for venting grease from the air. Another swipe whisked her up to the school’s roof, where about 1,700 solar panels spread out before her.

After a few minutes, she looked up from her computer to explain her progress in a confident voice that rose above the second-grade din.  “I learned that our solar panels rotate,” she said. “So, wherever the sun moves, the panels go, too.”

In addition to this virtual tour, Discovery’s dashboard displays, in real time, the school’s energy generation. And in colorful bar graphs and pie charts, it tracks energy use – broken down by lighting, plug load, kitchen and HVAC. The tally reveals that Discovery generates more energy through its solar array than it uses over the course of the year.

Buildings that make at least as much energy as they use are called “net-zero” (and “net positive” if they make more than they need). Nationwide, K-12 schools are leading a fledgling “net-zero” building boom that has grown from a few proof-of-concept structures a decade ago to hundreds of buildings completed or under construction.

Dozens of these ultra-green schools are going up in every sort of district – urban and rural, affluent and lower income, blue state and red state. Much of the advocacy for net-zero buildings has focused on environmental and economic incentives. K-12 schools run up a $6 billion energy tab every year, the Department of Energy reports – more than they spend on textbooks and computers combined, and second only to the cost of teacher salaries.

But the K-12 schools leading the net-zero charge are uncovering major educational benefits as well.

While Discovery’s second-graders scoured their school for light and heat energy, a group of third-graders huddled around a table to brainstorm fraction “story problems” using the school’s energy data, pulling their numerators and denominators from the dashboard.

They suggested using fractions to find out how much of yesterday’s solar energy was used up by the school, to compare one hour’s solar energy to the whole day, and to show how much of the school’s energy use came from lighting. On other days, they brainstorm math problems using information from the many placards lining Discovery’s hallways, offering scientific facts about native songbirds, the ecology of Virginia’s forests, the ocean or the galaxy.

“Everywhere you walk through this building, you can learn from it,” said Discovery’s principal, Erin Russo. There’s a large-screen energy dashboard by the school’s main entrance, and the building’s mechanical systems, including the geothermal pumps and the solar inverters that change direct current to alternating current, are prominently displayed behind large glass windows in the hallway.

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Learning about the behavior of light, Discovery’s fifth-graders have visited the schools’ rooftop solar lab (a handful of adjustable panels that are metered separately) to see how angling the panels changes their power production.

“Energy is normally so invisible,” said a fifth-grade science teacher, Andrew Bridges. “But the kids can see these solar panels right outside their window. They can see the energy production dipping on cloudy days.”

Bridges’ students also looked for patterns of electricity use and tried to deduce why it was so much heavier on Saturdays than Sundays or why it spiked at 5 a.m.

“I didn’t give them energy-dashboard tests, because that’s not what we’re after,” said Bridges. “My goal as a teacher is to grow good critical thinkers, and I think the energy dashboard opens their eyes to something most people don’t think too much about.”

Still, Discovery’s teachers do need to cover the Virginia state learning standards, and matching these standards with dashboard lessons can be tricky. At one point, third-graders were set to learn graphing with the school’s daily energy tally, but the plan was scrapped because the dashboard gives that data in bar graphs. Virginia’s third-grade standards call for using line graphs to track change over time.

Discovery’s math coach, Angela Torpy, and technology coach, Keith Reeves, help teachers weave the building’s data into standards-based lessons. Students learn the statistical measures of mean, median, and mode using the school’s energy consumption numbers, or demonstrate transparency, translucency, and opacity by covering solar panels with different materials and predicting the energy production.

Besides aligning with state standards, Discovery teachers must also contend with the dashboard’s occasional technical glitches – it tends to conk out due to server strain if too many kids are working on it. Teachers usually have students team up or rotate, so one group hops on the dashboard while the rest of the class works on other tasks. Or they simply distribute screen grabs of dashboard data.

Still, according to Torpy, the upside of students learning from their own building outweighs these challenges. “You can see their level of excitement when they bring up the energy dashboard, and they’re making their own word problems with real data about their own school,” Torpy said of the students. “It’s empowering to them.”

The authenticity of these lessons is reinforced by a schoolwide focus on sustainability. In lieu of a student council, Discovery has an Eco-Action club whose members do annual audits of the school’s energy use, trash, food waste, water consumption and other metrics. They did the school energy audit early in the school year, explained a fifth-grade Eco-Action member named Charlie Dantzker. “Basically, we walked into every classroom, counted the lights, checked to see what was plugged in, and looked for vampires,” Dantzker said. A vampire, he explained, is a device that draws power even when it’s turned off but still plugged into the wall.

But the students didn’t find a lot of waste in the audit: Discovery is already ultra-energy efficient. The school’s “energy use index,” a measure of power use per square foot, is about a third of the average for district elementary schools. The district plans to build on that success.

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Arlington is a fast-growing district, and Discovery Elementary opened in 2015 as part of an ongoing school-building program (it shares a campus with a middle school with a trailer park to accommodate its overflowing student population). Below the schools’ shared athletic fields are geothermal wells that use a groundwater loop to provide cooling in summer and heat in winter.

The district had not set out to build a net-zero school, but the Charlottesville architecture firm VMDO told them it could be done below their budget. Cathy Lin, the energy manager for Arlington Public Schools, regularly leads tours of Discovery, including a rooftop viewing of its 500-kilowatt solar array (1,700 panels). Another net-zero elementary school, also designed by VMDO, is to open in 2019. And as the district keeps growing, Lin is pushing for more.

“I tell the board [of education] if I had all Discoveries, I would spend less than $1 million [a year] on utilities. Now, we spend close to $7 million a year,” she said.

This calculus increasingly makes sense to growing public school districts, according to Ralph DiNola, CEO of the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that promotes and verifies net-zero buildings. Because schools are designed to be used by the same owner over many decades, there is plenty of time for energy savings to surpass the extra upfront expenditures, which in any case have plummeted in the past decade. The cost of solar power is way down, and, according to DiNola, the necessary energy efficiency “doesn’t require bleeding-edge technology. You can use standard building materials that are commonplace in the market today.”

Comparing the initial cost of building a net-zero school to that of a standard school is tough, because construction costs vary widely, as do the energy-efficiency challenges between climates. One constant, though, is that the priciest piece of a net-zero building is the solar array. For instance, Discovery’s construction cost for the building and the solar array came to about $316 per square foot, but the building alone cost $262 per square foot, according to VMDO architect Wyck Knox, who led the project design team (numbers don’t include the cost of the school’s two turf soccer fields). Often, districts will opt to build ultra-energy-efficient “net-zero-ready” schools that could become net-zero if and when the municipality raises additional money to add the solar power.

According to a March 2018 NBI report, there are 89 verified or “emerging” net-zero schools (emerging means under construction or too new to have been verified yet). And school buildings are the leading type of non-residential net-zero building, representing 37 percent of all projects tracked by NBI. Supporting these efforts, the Department of Energy published a how-to report on building net-zero K-12 schools in 2016 and created a “Zero-Energy Schools Accelerator” program to give districts technical guidance.

While the net-zero school trend is still relatively small, it has taken hold in districts of every geographic and socioeconomic description.  The school district of Horry County, South Carolina, which counts the majority of its 43,800 students as impoverished, opened three net-zero schools in 2017, one in 2018 and has one more under construction. In San Francisco Unified, where half the students receive free and reduced-price lunch and a quarter are English language learners, the district is building three net-zero schools, including one retrofit of an existing elementary school. At Sandy Grove Middle School, a net-positive building in Hoke County, North Carolina, where nearly 60 percent of students are low-income, the grade levels face off in friendly energy-saving competitions. Meanwhile, at New York City’s first net-zero school, the Kathleen Grimm School for Leadership and Sustainability (P.S. 62) on Staten Island, rows of yellow stationary bikes, both indoors and on the playground, generate pedal power displayed on a big screen.

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Although online energy dashboards are a popular way to turn these buildings into teaching tools, they’re not necessary. Oregon’s Hood River Middle Schoolcreated a food and conservation science program several years ago after it added a net-zero science and music building that includes a 1,000-square-foot greenhouse. Hood River students engineer and build net-zero heating and cooling systems for the greenhouse, such as solar heat collectors made of foam boxes lined with soda cans spray-painted black, and a solar-powered “climate battery” that pulls super-heated summer air into layers of dense rocks that gradually radiate the heat back into the greenhouse as the weather cools.

In addition to maintaining an aquaculture system and growing fruit trees, grapes, tea and other crops, the Hood River students have a perennial challenge from their teacher Michael Becker: to grow tomatoes year-round. They haven’t quite succeeded, but they’re getting close. Last year, they had tomatoes ripening on the vine well into December.

“My lesson plan is: Here’s a problem. Solve it,” said Becker. “We are hyper-aware of our net-zero energy budget, so the kids have to become super-sharp engineers and find nontraditional solutions.”

Back at Discovery, educational strategies are expanding, too. Last year’s school management plan included the expectation that teachers give at least one sustainability-focused lesson every quarter—but several teachers described that as a low bar.

“We’re shooting for sustainability to be taught every day,” said Bridges, the fifth-grade teacher. To bolster those efforts, Reeves is making changes to the energy dashboard, trying to add in student-collected data on the school’s trash production, water use and transportation. The teachers would also like to make it easier for students to get the raw data that feeds the existing dashboard, so that they could make their own, customized dashboards, possibly in conjunction with Virginia’s new K-12 computer science standards.

In the spring of 2018, Discovery staff began a more comprehensive effort to craft standards-based sustainability lessons, by working with Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network (GSNN). Discovery will join its recently-formed “Catalyst Network” – about 100 schools that are meant to showcase the best practices in sustainability education and to jump-start studies into how it stacks up against traditional schooling for student learning.

“Right now, we have a lot of anecdotes,” said Seydel, “but the gold-standard research is not there.”

Starting in 2019, the plan is for all Discovery students to do sustainability audits, not just the Eco-Action club. Each grade level will use their audits to identify problems and issues they can confront with collaborative mastery projects using the problem-solving steps of “design thinking.”

Discovery art teacher Maria Burke has already led her students through several design-thinking projects, such as creating outdoor sculptures with the right mix of shapes and colors to attract pollinators back to a school garden that fell victim to overzealous pruning.

“We want to give students the skills to be innovators, to find solutions,” said Burke. “We want to them to be thinkers for the future and to collaborate and innovate with the world in mind.”

This story about environmental education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

The post Schools Lead the Way to Zero-Energy Buildings, and Use Them for Student Learning appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Across a variety of domains, states need better data to more equitably serve dual language learners (DLLs) in early care and education (ECE). When leaders cannot access high-quality, complete information about these children, they will struggle to make policy decisions and investments in ECE in strategic, effective ways.

To foster better insights in supporting policy-making for young DLLs, most states need to improve their policies for data collection in three key areas:

1. DLL Enrollment. 

Within state-funded pre-K programs, many states do not have a mechanism to identify and track the participation of DLLs, or the number of children speaking a language other than English at home. At the point of enrollment, states would also benefit from gauging the abilities of potential DLLs across the languages they use to better understand these children’s needs and assets.

States should:

• Adopt a uniform protocol, such as conducting a family interview and language screening, to identify DLLs and collect this data across state ECE programs.
• When identifying DLLs, screen for language abilities in both English and a child’s home language to collect more complete data.

2. ECE program quality for DLLs. 

In recent years, many states have implemented quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) that help shine a light on the quality of a state’s ECE services for all children. However, most states are failing to include any criteria that specifically evaluate how providers are responsive to DLLs’ unique needs. Moreover, there are concerns related to barriers to participation in QRIS for immigrant and multilingual providers serving DLLs. The accessibility and clarity of public QRIS data for DLL families is also lacking.

States should:

• Adopt and prioritize DLL-related indicators in QRIS.
• Provide technical assistance and outreach to linguistically diverse providers to encourage their participation in QRIS.
• Translate state websites that publish QRIS ratings to increase accessibility for DLL parents.
• Publicly report a DLL subscore that bundles all DLL-related indicators into one rating.

3. DLLs’ kindergarten readiness.

The majority of states are now using or developing tools to assess children’s school readiness when they enter kindergarten. These kindergarten readiness assessments (KRAs) measure a child’s knowledge and abilities across multiple domains, including math, literacy, social skills, and physical development. However, most states currently test only in English, which creates major validity concerns for DLLs whose development is spread across two or more languages. More generally, leaders also need to clarify appropriate testing accommodations for DLLs on current tests and expand trainings to assist educators with the implementation of KRAs with DLLs.

States should:

• Assess DLLs bilingually on kindergarten readiness assessments (KRAs).
  – Invest in the development of valid bilingual assessment tools in home languages.
  – Invest in expanding access to bilingual assessors.
• Improve and increase professional development and guidance for teachers on administering KRAs with DLLs.
• If publicly reporting data by DLL status for KRAs, provide guidance and explain limitations of these data to users.

Through policy changes in these three areas, states can develop more equitable, inclusive data systems for DLLs in the early years. Better, more complete DLL data equips states leaders with more meaningful insights to drive public investments and supports. With one out of every four preschool-aged children considered a DLL, it is important—now more than ever—to design policies that work for this growing population of learners.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Dual Language Learner Data Gaps: Takeaways for State Policy Leaders appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Our new report, Extracting Success in Pre-K Teaching: Approaches to Effective Professional Learning Across Five States, identifies the following components associated with effective professional learning based on the research:

• Ongoing
• Reflective Practice
• Classroom-Focused
• Job-Embedded
• Educator Buy-In
• Data-Driven
• Continuous Improvement
• In-Classroom Coaching
• Collaborative
• Scalable

Unfortunately, with varying requirements, limited capacity, and often insufficient funding, this caliber of professional learning can be difficult for pre-K teachers to come by.

Shayna Cook, Sarah Jackson, and I profile five promising in-service programs that are incorporating most, if not all, of these aspects of high-quality professional learning. We visited Passaic, New Jersey, where SciMath-DLL is strengthening pre-K teachers’ STEM instruction, with a focus on serving the community’s high dual language learner population. In Illinois, we saw how the Erikson Institute is empowering pre-K through third grade teachers in the Archdiocese of Chicago to incorporate technology into their classrooms. In Nashville, Tennessee, we met with researchers from Vanderbilt’s Peabody Research Institute and district pre-K coaches who are together using teacher and student data to tailor professional learning to individual teachers’ needs. In San Jose, California we heard from leaders and teachers about how Franklin-McKinley School District is responding to teachers’ requests for help managing challenging classroom behavior. And in Texas, we learned about a literacy program that has been scaled to reach pre-K teachers across the state working in various settings.

Each program covers different content, though all is specific to early educators. Some of the professional learning is offered in the evenings or on weekends, others during paid planning time, and some online. While all incorporate aspects of quality, such as being ongoing, encouraging reflective practice, and providing coaching, their program designs are unique to fit the needs of their community. Our profiles illustrate that high-quality professional learning is not one-size-fits-all.

Like most policies and programs, success rests in the implementation. And having teachers and leaders who are invested in the professional learning program helps ensure successful implementation. Teachers who have agency in their professional learning –whether that be in helping to design the program, choosing to participate, or being offered leadership opportunities– are often more responsive and willing to change their practice. When leaders (school principals or center directors) are invested in the program they can support teacher growth and development accordingly.

More states and local school districts should invest in professional learning that is of the intensity and quality necessary to move the needle on how pre-K teachers interact with their students. But policymakers should keep in mind that teacher practice will not change over night, and changes in student outcomes may take even longer to see. Adequate funding is needed, especially to cover staffing costs, like coaches or part-time teachers who can cover a teacher’s classroom while they participate in professional learning during the paid workday. Sufficient funding should also be set aside for evaluation tools. A rigorous evaluation component allows programs to monitor outcomes and tailor components of the program to better serve their community.

Find out more about what high-quality professional learning looks like in these five innovative programs and what lessons they can offer other states and districts in our full report.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Extracting Success in Pre-K Teaching appeared first on Washington Monthly.