The percentage of Alabama third graders reading on grade level decreased 2% between 2022 and 2023, according to Alabama Comprehensive Assessment Program (ACAP) scores released by the Alabama State Department of Education on Thursday.

76% of Alabama third graders read on third-grade level this year, compared with 78% last year.  In 2021, 77% of third graders read on grade level.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey said there are reasons that the numbers might not have changed as they hoped. The test has changed since last year to focus more on the science of reading, so the test includes components that were not previously tested.

The superintendent also suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic might have had an effect. This year’s third graders were kindergarteners in the 2019-20 school year. After the first COVID-19 case in Alabama was confirmed that March, Alabama schools went to distance learning about two months before classes ended.

“Obviously, it’s not going the direction we want,” he said.

Alabama rose in rankings for the National Assessment of Education Progress, or “The Nation’s Report Card,” after many states lost ground due to the pandemic. However, the state still lags the country. Most recently, 28% of Alabama fourth graders were deemed proficient or higher on the NAEP in comparison to the national average of 32%.

Second graders saw a smaller year-to-year decline. In 2023, 79% of second graders read at grade level, compared to 80% in 2022. In 2021, 78% of second graders read on grade level.

The third graders who make up these numbers are not going to be retained under the Literacy Act. Retention begins this upcoming school year.

Mackey said they are also planning to evaluate which textbooks were used in classrooms. He also said that some classrooms did not get textbooks until last November.

Bonnie Short, Alabama Reading Initiative director, said that the districts that had the greatest growth had used the LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) training. LETRS is a professional training course that offers instruction for teaching the science of reading.

Not all LETRS trained districts did well, however, so she stressed that it was about implementation. She said that many districts with growth had varied instructional programming.

“What was not varied was professional learning,” she said.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

Interim assessments are big business. The term covers a wide range of designs and purposes, but broadly, these are exams administered at different points in the school year to gauge student progress. Usage is widespread, with the heaviest reliance in urban districts — those that serve the most marginalized and vulnerable students. Many educators make instructional changes based on the results, decisions that can have profound and lasting effects on the trajectories of countless learners.

According to the RAND Corporation, three-quarters of English language arts and math teachers reported that their students had taken an interim assessment in the 2021-22 school year, and demand in this $1 billion-plus market is growing. But while states’ end-of-year exams are thoroughly peer-reviewed, no such process exists for interim assessments. Further, publishers share very little evidence to show that their products are standards-aligned or can improve student learning. For educators, this means interim assessments are a black box, with no third-party reviews of publishers’ marketing claims.

This was the very problem our organizations — EdReports, a nonprofit providing free reviews of instructional materials, and the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (Center for Assessment), an organization focused on improving the quality of educational assessment and accountability systems — sought to solve when we announced our plan to review commercial interim assessment products last year. 

Unlike EdReports’ reviews of K-12 instructional materials, for which products can be purchased independently, access to interim assessments requires publisher consent, because their test questions, reports and other tools are proprietary. Most publishers declined our invitation to participate in our new reviews. Two did agree, but then one pulled out. It simply wouldn’t have been meaningful to release a single review without context, so we had to bring the process to a halt. 

Particularly in the current moment, with districts making high-stakes instructional and budgetary decisions to try to accelerate post-COVID student learning, publicly available, independent reviews of interim assessments could have been a powerful resource. The impossibility of moving our reviews forward should be cause for concern. But by sharing what we’ve learned, we hope to inspire educators to demand greater transparency from publishers. Even without independent reviews, there’s a lot that districts can do to become critical consumers before purchasing interim assessments.

First, determine their needs:

• What are their instructional vision and overall goals for student learning in the relevant content area, and what should students therefore experience on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?
  
• What will assessments look like over the course of the school year? How will they work coherently with other instructional components to help educators understand and improve student learning?
  
• Based on the above, what do districts need in a commercial assessment product? What specific gap should it fill? If the district already has high-quality instructional materials, to what extent do their own assessments meet those needs?

Districts that do need a commercial product should get clear on what they want before looking at options:

• What is their main goal for the product? Do they want to evaluate school or district-level trends or help educators understand student progress in a specific learning area? While a publisher may claim that a product can do both these things equally well, in practice, that’s very challenging to achieve.
  
• What questions does the district expect the product to help answer, and what information is needed to answer those questions?
  
• How will the product meet the needs of its primary user? If it’s for teachers, how will the district know if it provides accurate information that educators can use to help students? What professional learning will users need in order to use the product in conjunction with instructional materials to support student learning effectively?
  
• How will the district know if the product is well-aligned to standards? What type of test questions should educators expect to see, and what evidence will confirm that the exams genuinely assess students’ understanding of the full depth of each standard? Districts should communicate their needs and ask for evidence. Equipped with a clear picture of their requirements, they can leverage their role as a current or potential customer to get the information and evidence they need.

Questions publishers should be able to answer include:

• What are the intended uses of your product, and what research supports those uses?
  
• How should assessment scores be interpreted, and what decisions can they inform? What evidence supports the idea that using the data in this way helps improve student outcomes?
  
• How were the product’s test questions evaluated, and were educators involved?
  
• Are all the test questions standards-aligned? If so, what evidence supports that claim?

In the absence of independent reviews, we encourage districts to take up the baton and exercise their purchasing power to press the assessment market for greater transparency. Students are counting on their teachers, administrators and educational leaders — they deserve evidence-based support to help them learn and grow.

Yet in Florida, the community is still grappling with fallout from its own deadly attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Just last week, a first-of-its-kind criminal negligence trial got underway for a former campus police officer who failed to confront the shooter. It wasn’t until November 2022 that the now 24-year-old gunman was sentenced to life in prison and in April, a judge dismissed a criminal perjury charge related to the shooting against the former Broward County schools superintendent. 

All these events force Parkland residents to revisit the fatal day. For Ty Thompson, who was the principal of Stoneman Douglas on Feb. 14, 2018, the most pressing issue now is the need for robust campus mental health services, particularly as mass shootings become deadlier and more common. 

“You shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center,” he told The 74. “Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early.” 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, Thompson and other school leaders who confronted mass shootings and their devastating aftermath visited lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill to advocate for additional help in long-term recovery efforts. Their appearance coincides with June being Gun Violence Prevention Month. 

Even after the national attention fizzles away and disaster relief funding dries up, Thompson told The 74, trauma remains omnipresent. Founded in 2019 and supported by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the Principal Recovery Network works to help guide education leaders immediately after campus shootings and to promote policies that help school communities regain stability. 

The 74 talked to Thompson, now the district’s assistant director of athletics and student activities, about a range of issues, from the practical advice he offers school leaders reeling from a shooting to his support for school-based police officers, so long as they aren’t monitoring hallways with AR-15s. The conversation was edited for length and clarity. 

It’s been five years since the Parkland shooting. In what ways is that tragedy present in your community today? 

One of the things we talked about in Washington, D.C., is that while we got a large influx of resources right away, after a year or so people started to disappear as far as the resources. And so that’s one of the things that we’ve been advocating for is the fact that it doesn’t go away. It just continues. 

Even though we’re five years out, there are still things that the school needs. Trauma after an event like this comes in different forms, it hits people at different times over the course of their trauma. For some, it’s right away;  for some, it’s a few years later. For some, it’s many years later. We continue to battle that with the recovery pieces in making sure we’re providing the resources needed, not only to former students and to the staff who are still there, but also our community members as well. 

Can you provide any specific examples of how that trauma from an event five years ago manifests in your community today?

Unfortunately, we see it almost daily on the news. With new shootings, whether it’s at schools or in communities, that brings everything back. So as those things continue to happen in our country and we are constantly reminded of some of the violence happening in our country, that just brings back that day and they think about what took place with their families, friends or community members around our incident. 

It just continues to regurgitate that back up as they go through trying to heal and they are moving toward healing, but as you continue to see this stuff in the news and the daily shootings, it slows down the process.

It’s almost like you take one step forward and two steps back just because of the current environment of things that are going on within our country. 

What tangible policy changes did you present to lawmakers in Washington? What do you think are the most critical steps that we need to take right now to combat this issue?

A lot of our stance with the Principal Recovery Network is exactly that: The recovery. While gun control and all of these things are very pressing factors that are going on right now, that is obviously not our expertise. 

When you’re a leader of a school and you face a tragedy —  it doesn’t have to be a shooting, it could be a tornado taking down a building or suicides and things like that — it’s up to the school leader to be able to help move that school forward. 

Our biggest part is the recovery effort, and a big part of that is wellness and mental health. We are really pushing that part because Congress is moving in that direction, with the importance of mental health. We wanted to advocate for some additional funds in that area because we also feel that’s important not only after a tragedy, but at any time for a school. 

At Stoneman Douglas, after our event, we instituted a wellness center at our school. We had two portables brought in and we had mental health experts who were staffed in those portables and they were able to serve students, staff and community members. Even to this day, five years later, that wellness center is still on campus and it’s still servicing our community. 

One of the things that I brought to Congress was the fact you shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center. Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early. 

When we look at some of the past shooters, not necessarily mine in some cases but in others, there were red flags along the way. There’s got to be a way for us to get the proper help to students that we see early on that may need some help. I think that having wellness centers on campuses would help that scenario. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a cure-all, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have that. 

The Parkland shooter did present multiple missed warning signs prior to the attack. What lessons did you and your colleagues learn about threat assessments and early intervention efforts?

Hindsight is always 20/20. In the case of my school, he was only with me for less than a year, and so a lot of these things that we found out after the fact were prior to him being a student at Stoneman Douglas. I’m not passing the blame on anybody, I’m just saying that there are certain things that take place in a student’s educational record that we need to be sure is moving forward through their careers so that people are aware of what’s happening. 

And we’ve made strides in that since our tragedy. With behavioral threat assessments now becoming more digitized and there’s less chance of things falling through the cracks, we definitely have our lessons learned not only from our tragedy, but all of the different tragedies. 

The shooting divided the community. How did you navigate that?

That was probably the toughest part of my job for those 18 months after the tragedy was trying to make sure I put student and staff interests first. Right away, the community rallied behind everyone, they wanted to provide support. Then, after time went by, that’s when the fingers started to point. And that’s not uncommon in any situation like this, where they’re going to start to put blame and figure out who did what wrong. 

The politics are difficult, don’t get me wrong, but I also understand that’s just what happens. It can’t necessarily be avoided though I would like it to be avoided. With a tragedy like this, everyone has their emotions. Emotions get exponentially kind of out there. Someone that may have already been feeling negative about a situation, now they’re feeling that much more negative.

Following the Uvalde shooting, Texas politicians approved legislation to place armed guards at every K-12 school. Florida took a similar approach after Parkland. How do you think this move played out in your state, and how did it affect the overall safety of kids in your schools?

Look, any time you can have extra security on campus is always a good thing. In our case, in Florida, they want every school to have an armed guard or a school resource officer. 

I definitely think that it helps. It’s definitely a good thing, anytime we can increase security and having people feel safe about coming to school is definitely a positive. For the little ones in elementary, when they see people walking around with guns, I’m not quite sure how that could affect their psyche. I just know that when it came to the high school kids, when we got back to school after the tragedy, we had a mini-army on our campus walking around with the same weapon that took out some of our kids. That did not go over well. 

It’s a delicate balance between making sure you’re feeling safe versus feeling scared quite frankly. That’s something that we were able to circumvent after our tragedy, to still have this presence but not have to have people walking around with AR-15s because that really was not the best course of action. 

As far as legislation, SROs are important. It’s good to have someone on campus, at a minimum, to be able to call in resources in the event of a tragedy. There’s so much tension in the country right now when it comes to violence and how to protect kids without making them feel like they’re in jail. I mean, the school is supposed to be a school and not a prison and it’s definitely a delicate balance, but the more people you can have with eyes and ears out there, it definitely makes it a better situation for all of us.

The former school resource officer at your school was criminally charged and put on trial for failing to confront the gunman and stop the shooting. What lessons from Scot Peterson’s response can we learn about the roles and limitations of police in schools? 

Any time there’s an investigation into these kinds of things, they review all those types of policies. I remember after Columbine, they redid how they handle active shooters. Then something else took place and they readjusted policies. That’s the same scenario here. I’m not going to speculate on what he did or didn’t do wrong. I am by no means a law enforcement person, that’s not my expertise and I’m not going to pretend to know what they are supposed to do or not do. But they do review policies after things take place, whether it’s a shooting or it’s some other incident in the community, to determine what could have been done better. 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, have you had to make any calls with school leaders after they experienced shootings? What kind of advice do you offer? 

Unfortunately, I’ve had to make a few phone calls. First, I usually send them an email because trying to get ahold of someone on the phone is nearly impossible. So I usually send an email pretty quickly, within 24 hours of when we hear about it. I just let them know who I am and that I kind of know what you may be feeling right now and, ‘Please, give me a call when you can.’ 

Sometimes that call comes quickly. Sometimes the call never comes because I’ve reached out to a couple of principals and never heard back from them. 

And really, it’s just for me to be a listening ear to them to understand. ‘Look, these are some of the things that may start to come up that you may not be aware of.’ Something very logical like your mail is going to start to increase, so you might want to think about getting some extra staff in there just to handle mail. The phones are going to start ringing off the hook, you need to make sure you have some staff for that. You need to think about getting some additional substitutes because some teachers may not be able to come back right away, depending on the size of their school and the tragedy itself. Make sure you don’t try to get back to school before funerals have taken place.

We have a guide to recovery. It’s not like a playbook because not every tragedy is going to be the same exact scenario. But there are some commonalities across all of these things to just keep in mind. You know, you should be meeting with your staff before you bring students back so that you make sure that they’re ready to come back. You want to make sure you have mental health practitioners on campus and ready to go because there’s no way for you to predict how people are going to react.

The main goal is to let them know that I’m here to listen to them. They can call me at any time, no matter what time of day it is. We want them to feel like they’re not alone. 

In his reelection bid, President Joe Biden has made gun violence prevention efforts part of his appeal to young voters. Youth activists from Parkland became leading voices in the gun control movement. Beyond the most outspoken advocates, how do young people in your community view gun violence today and how has the shooting affected their worldviews? 

Our kids rallied very quickly and had the March for Our Lives happen in D.C. within six weeks after our tragedy. I really thought that was going to be a momentum changer, and there were a lot of people involved with that. I was hoping that was really going to make some change. 

I’m not saying that maybe there weren’t some thought processes changed in Washington, but obviously it remains a hot topic. I do know that many of my kids that were involved from Stoneman Douglas still have those thoughts in mind of changing the world, which is what we teach in high school is getting out there to debate the right way and present yourself in a positive light and try to move the country forward. 

A lot of these kids now, five years later, are out of college and some of them are just wrapping up their college careers. It’s going to be interesting to see if they are going to be able to keep the momentum and move it forward with gun control. I’m hoping that continues. 

Any time these things do come up in the news, hopefully it re-sparks them to want to try to do something, to move that legislation and those policies forward. 

What didn’t I ask that you’d like to discuss? 

It’s important that these conversations continue to stay at the forefront. That was the big thing we talked to legislators about because we know that after tragedies take place there’s a lot of attention and then it dies off. It’s like, why do we only talk about this when stuff happens? Why can’t we be a little more proactive on some of these things to make sure we’re moving forward and looking to the future versus being reactionary all the time?

That’s what I was most encouraged by in D.C. is the fact that they’re trying to move not only with the gun stuff, but also with mental health support.

In 2012, it began with a vision in the head of a fellow at The Duke Endowment. What would happen if churches got involved with improving reading proficiency for young people?

A little over 10 years later, the results look promising for both student outcomes and parental choice, organizers say. The Duke Endowment is now investing substantially in studying what exactly is working and why – in the hopes that they may have discovered something that can be scaled across the state.

“There’s an element of whatever we’ve been doing, or we’ve been allowing to happen, that has worked,” said Kristen Richardson-Frick, an associate director at The Duke Endowment. “We want to continue that, but we also want to figure out exactly why that is.”

What is the Summer Literacy Initiative?

The nonprofit’s summer literacy initiative started at two sites and has grown to 21. Each site provides small classes – with a 6-to-1 ratio of students to teachers, and 80 to 90 hours of literacy instruction during camps. The camps range from four to six weeks long.

It is modeled on a framework of six principles. In its infancy, the summer programs focused on hiring the highest-performing teachers, training everyone working with students in literacy instruction. That instruction meant balanced literacy until a couple of years ago, when the state shifted to instruction grounded in the science of reading and The Duke Endowment followed suit.

The principles break down into two primary goals, and The Duke Endowment enlists the help of Harvard literacy researcher Helen Chen for support. Chen came on board in 2016, when there were only two sites.

“Helen will be coaching all of the sites on principles four, five and six,” Richardson-Frick said. “Those are the things that really we think drive the student outcomes. And one, two and three are kind of the building of the environment.”

Offering an option for the youngest learners, and choice for others

The reading camps run by school districts, as mandated under the original Read to Achieve law in 2012, are offered to students in first, second, and third grades. The Duke Endowment hopes to fill a need for kindergartners who are striving readers, or whose families want to avoid a summer slide.

The setting in a church offers some other things, too. Some parents don’t want to send their kids to school for the summer and are more likely to choose to send their kids to church. The church sites have pastors and volunteers that feed the kids and, as Chen puts it, “love on them constantly.” 

The choice of a non-school setting, Duke Endowment leaders say, could get more students help over the summer. Students who complete first, second, or third grade behind benchmark in reading are given priority eligibility for district-run reading camps. Last year, only 21.9% of those first-graders, 36.1% of those second-graders, and 42.9% of those third-graders attended the district-run summer reading camps. 

“So you have all of these kids who need it out there who aren’t showing up at the school,” Richardson-Frick said. “And this, again, provides a choice for those families that would be open to sending their kids to a non-school-based, but a community-based, site – more like a summer camp.”

How churches are chosen, and why the church might be the X-factor

The Duke Endowment holds fast to its values of cultural humility and trauma-informed approaches when it chooses church sites. 

“What I love about (our) first two principles is, we start with that thriving and engaged church community,” she said. “We enlist strong community investment. And we’re pushing for racial concordance explicitly with the churches.”

Given the population they serve, the summer literacy programs focus on wraparound services — which make the church setting seem just as important.

The churches work creatively to resolve transportation challenges. Sometimes that means use of the church bus or van, while other times it means engaging with a community partner.

The churches also have families who volunteer to cook breakfast and lunch, and prepare snacks. And not just a USDA-approved meal, Chen said, which can be full of sugar and lack some nutrition.

“And then you wonder why the kids are bouncing off the wall,” Chen said. “(The church sites) are saying no, I’m making eggs and making sausages. They can have as much as they want until they’re full because our kids come hungry.”

That’s part of what Richardson-Frick and Chen mean when they say the churches love on these kids. The love is shown through acknowledging student needs holistically, they say.

“You have to go this fine line in churches between being faith-based versus faith-placed,” Chen said. “This is faith-placed, which means it’s in a church and we think that is part of the special sauce.”

The church setting, Chen said, puts the mission of teaching kids to read under a broader mission: To do God’s work.

“We all love the kids – I’m a teacher, I know I love my kids,” Chen said. “But what does that mean here [at the churches]? That means it’s incumbent on the church to overcome barriers that the schools might not have the resources to do.”

Gains suggest there may be something to it

Folks at The Duke Endowment believe they’ve found something that’s working. Now, they’re trying to measure what that is.

The data they collected using pre-camp and post-camp assessment results show that reading growth is happening. Last year, these sites served 429 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students. Of these, the families for 342 students consented to collection of assessment data. 

That data showed gains for students. One of the measures they use is DIBELS progress-monitoring rapid assessment across six skills – including letter naming fluency, nonsense word fluency, oral reading fluency, and accuracy.

Why is it working? Organizers say it could be the ratio of one teacher to six students, or perhaps the social-emotional attention that comes with being in the church setting with spiritual leaders and volunteers. But, they say, they hear pretty consistent feedback from teachers that leads them to suspect another key factor.

“They’ll say there’s something about teaching here that’s special,” Chen said. “They get to love on the kids in a different way. It’s smaller classroom sizes, so obviously they can devote more attention. And then it’s like all the wraparound services. We always hear from teachers that, not only do we get to love on the kids, but there’s an entire community loving on the kids, and that impacts the church volunteers as much as it impacts the students.”

The Duke Endowment wants to understand what seems to be working and why. For that, this year they are working with an outside evaluator. 

What TDE hopes to learn from the evaluation process

Chen remembers the surprise and hope in organizers’ voices when she joined the literacy institute initiative in 2016.

“We think we have something,” they told her. “We think we are doing something that’s really special. Our teachers are telling us their students are making huge gains. We want to know if we have a thing and, if so, what’s its impact on kids.”

“And I was struck, from the beginning, about the integrity with which they wanted to do this,” Chen said. “They didn’t want to just say, oh, everybody loves it. They wanted to actually identify the factors that contributed to it, and to learn how to scale it so that it could be this great thing for many, many more kids.”

At the time, The Duke Endowment wanted Chen to help put in more systematic processes, as well as develop an overall vision, in order to better measure what was happening. As time went on, Chen told them they needed something else: an outside evaluator.

The team brought in the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in 2020 to fill that neeed. AIR is collecting data on setting, teachers at each of the sites, services offered, family engagement, and – of course – instruction. The plan is to use both observational and analytical data to parse out practices that lead to better outcomes, and then share that out to the public.

“The research has to be absolutely accessible and valuable to the practitioners – and that means DPI, that means district leaders, school leaders, and teachers,” Chen said. “What they’re doing, I think, it’s telling the story of not just what this is and who it’s serving, but why we think it works and why we think you could do it.”

Editor’s note: The Duke Endowment supports the work of EdNC.

This article first appeared on EducationNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

One likely effect is obvious. “There is going to be some closing of doors,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “It’s going to be a landscape in which it’s harder to secure access in most competitive schools.” 

But further down the line, a ruling against schools that factor race in admissions could affect a host of other academic mainstays, from scholarships to the centrality of tests like the SAT and ACT.

The ruling might not end diversity efforts outright. Granting preferential admission to low-income students, children of single parents or those from communities where students often don’t go to college could achieve similar results, experts say, without courting legal trouble. 

“Most Americans don’t want race used in admissions, but Americans do want selective institutions to be racially diverse,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and an expert on integration. He thinks the court’s decision could reflect that paradox. “They don’t want to be seen as simply dismissive of the aspiration of racial diversity.”

The court is expected to issue decisions in two lawsuits — brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — later this month. The plaintiff in both cases argues that the weight universities place on race in admissions violates anti-discrimination laws and puts Asian American students at a disadvantage. 

‘Next generation’

While the cases don’t deal directly with K-12 schools, the high court’s decision could elevate the importance of a recent lower court ruling rejecting a legal challenge to diversity efforts at an elite Virginia high school. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., removed a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case, called the revised admissions criteria discriminatory against Asian American students. 

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that view. “The policy challenged here is not just race-neutral: It is race blind,” Fourth Circuit of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the May 23 opinion. 

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said board members’ desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students at the school motivated the new policy. They plan to ask the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit. 

Kahlenberg, who testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions about race-neutral alternatives, called the TJ case a “next generation issue.”

If the Supreme Court rules that universities can no longer ask applicants to identify their race, they might see the Fairfax case as a chance to “spell out in further detail the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable,” he said. “I think the answer will be that the TJ program is perfectly fine.” 

‘Formative experiences’

The college admissions industry, meanwhile, has been preparing for the end of affirmative action for months. Beginning in August, for example, colleges can hide a student’s race if it’s included in the Common App, a uniform application for undergraduate admissions accepted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.  

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Counselors advised institutions earlier this year to review all of their policies and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to examine any area, such as mission statements and recruitment efforts, where race is a factor — “no matter how minor” — to determine if changes are needed.

Organizations that focus on high school graduation and college enrollment say they plan to continue to identify students who would be the first in their families to attend college, regardless of race. 

“In some ways for us, it will be business as usual — to serve underserved students. That’s been really the heart of our work long before this became a hot-button issue,” said Pam Johnson Davis, director of fellow support for OneGoal, a nonprofit that works in eight states to increase graduation and college enrollment rates. Eighty-six percent of the students served by the organization are Black or Hispanic. She supports 400 “fellows” in the Chicago area who are already in college or another postsecondary program.

If students are barred from bringing up their race even in their admissions essays — a hypothetical scenario that came up during Supreme Court oral arguments — teachers at OneGoal schools would still encourage students to write about barriers they overcame to pursue education, Davis said.

Facing discrimination, raising younger siblings, translating for parents who don’t speak English — “these are really formative experiences in students’ lives,” she said. “Their stories will be shaped by their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Stephen Barker, a spokesman for the organization, added that opportunities for Black and Hispanic high school students to earn college credit could become more important for colleges and universities if the court strikes down affirmative action in admissions. 

“Institutions need to double down on those partnerships [with districts] if they want to keep that diversity going in a race-neutral way,” he said.

But he said it’s hard to predict what importance universities might place on other aspects of a student’s application, including GPAs, honors classes, and SAT and Advanced Placement exam scores if race no longer factors into the equation.

The potential end of affirmative action in admissions could further accelerate a growing movement away from requiring the SAT or ACT for admission, with some researchers and advocates for educational equity arguing the tests are biased against Black and Hispanic students and reinforce racial inequities. According to FairTest, an advocacy group, 1,900 institutions are now test-optional or don’t even accept the exams.

But others say that criticism of the tests is misguided and that they still serve as a good predictor of how well students will perform in college. Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said the tests are “deeply vetted” to remove content that might disadvantage minority students. GPAs, he added, are less controversial, but large racial gaps remain.

He doesn’t think the test-optional trend is only about removing barriers for Black and Hispanic applicants. Admissions officers may have other motivations, he said.

“Either [universities]think that the exams aren’t so important or … they, for financial reasons, desire an excuse for admitting more affluent students with less academic preparation,” he said.

With or without admissions exams, the end of race-conscious admissions would put more pressure on K-12 counselors serving Black and Hispanic students, Kahlenberg said.

“For years, the [private] prep school kids have had the upper hand. There are fewer students per counselor and they can put time into writing impressive letters [of recommendation],” he said. “Here’s an opportunity for public school counselors to paint a picture of students who have done remarkably well despite the barriers.”

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee joined nine other Democratic state and territorial governors Friday in signing a letter to nine school textbook publishers calling on them to resist censorship, especially when it comes to U.S. history.

The effort was led by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who is head of the Democratic Governors Association.

“We are deeply troubled by the news of some textbook publishers yielding to the unreasonable demands of certain government representatives calling for the censorship of school educational materials, specifically textbooks,” the letter begins.

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“We write to you out of concern that those who are charged with supporting the education of this country’s students, such as yourselves, may be tempted to water down critical information to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We urge any company who has not yet given in to this pressure to hold the line for our democracy.”

McKee’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The move came a little less than a month after Florida authorities worked with textbook companies to “correct” 66 social studies textbooks previously declared to contain “inaccurate material, errors and other information that was not aligned with Florida Law,” according to a statement from the Florida Department of Education.

The scrubbing came after only 19 of 101 submitted textbooks were approved by the state education department for use in Florida schools. The objections from the department included:

• One textbook encouraged critical discussions at home around athletes “taking a knee” during performances of the National Anthem.
• The removal of a passage from a middle school textbook calling regarding the murder of Geroge Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, calling it an “unsolicited topic.”
• Removal of the word “socialism” from a section on economics where the system was described as a way to keep things “nice and even.”

Other governors who signed the letter included: Maura Healey, of Massachusetts; John Carney, of Delaware; J.B. Pritzker, of Illinois; Wes Moore, of Maryland; Michelle Lujan Grisham, of New Mexico; Jay Inslee, of Washington; Albert Bryan, of the U.S. Virgin Islands; and Kathy Hochul, of New York.

The letter was sent to the Association of American Publishers, which represents the leading book, journal, and education publishers in the United States and the following publishers:

Cengage Learning, Goodheart-Wilcox, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill Education, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Savvas Learning Co., Scholastic, and Teachers Curriculum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Pearson declined to comment.

Rhode Island Current is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on Facebook and Twitter.

Many teenagers who’ve spent time in California’s juvenile detention facilities get high school diplomas with grade-school reading skills.

During a five-year span beginning in 2018, 85% of these students who graduated from high school and took a 12th-grade reading assessment did not pass it, according to data from the Division of Juvenile Justice, the agency operating state youth facilities.

What’s more, over a fifth of all students tested at lower grade levels, signaling how far behind these students are. And not a single student during those five years was below eighth grade, yet nearly a third of all assessments were for grades K-6, data show.

“You have kids getting their high school diplomas who aren’t able to even read and write, and that to me is a tragedy,” said Crystal Anthony, co-founder of Underground Grit, which helps youth in Orange County as they leave facilities.

The average age of DJJ youth is 19, but they can range from 14 to 25. And while the majority are boys and young men, these numbers also include girls and young women.

Being awarded a high school diploma while lacking grade-level reading skills is not a new phenomenon in California’s juvenile justice system. Los Angeles County was sued for it in 2010. This reading lag exists in both state and county youth facilities, officials confirmed. Experts indicate the issue is multifaceted, including an online credit recovery system that has drawn criticism for allowing students to earn fewer than 160 credits to graduate, incomplete assessment data, and prisonlike facilities that house youths for varying periods.

Anthony and five others interviewed statewide for this story expressed frustration with the disconnect between graduation and low reading skills. The lament was repeated throughout the system from the juvenile justice program’s new director to researchers, social workers and youth educators.

Cycle of drugs and arrests

For years, Adam Solorzano was caught in a cycle of drugs and arrest. Growing up in agricultural Westmorland, in Southern California’s Imperial County, he stopped attending school regularly in middle school and was addicted to drugs by 15. He was in and out of county jails on drug charges until about age 21.

Eventually, following a friend’s suggestion, he got his high school diploma at a local adult school. “I went from being a high school dropout and feeling like I wasn’t going to amount to anything, and then getting my high school diploma at 22 — but nothing changed,” said Solorzano. Like a crucial fact: He read at a sixth grade level, and at no point during his time cycling through the juvenile justice system, public schools, or the adult school were his low literacy skills addressed.

It all changed when he enrolled in Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District. Even enrolling was a hurdle: He didn’t read well enough to complete the online forms. Months later, he finally worked up the courage to ask for help. “She hit a couple of buttons, and I was a student,” he said.

It was only then, at age 25, that he was advised to enroll in remedial English, writing, and math — courses that he progressed through so quickly that he was soon offered a job tutoring other beginning students.

Some family members questioned his academic pursuits, but he pushed forward, eventually connecting with Underground Scholars, an organization that supports students navigating higher education post-incarceration.

Today, Solorzano is 30 and enrolled in the journalism graduate program at the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his undergraduate degree in comparative literature. “It’s been a long journey,” said Solorzano, referring to his academic experience as “crazy” for taking him to UC Berkeley, a college he had never heard of.

‘Shame on us…’

His story is not uncommon, according to experts.

Katherine Lucero, director of the Office of Youth and Community Restoration, the new state office leading the juvenile justice system, knows the challenges. “One of the things we want to know from each facility is: If it’s discovered a youth can’t read, are there resources to help them read?” she said. “It’s horrible that a young person has to be incarcerated for any amount of time — but if it happens that a judge commits a youth for multiple years, shame on us if we haven’t done everything we can to have that youth leave with as much education as they could possibly desire.”

Students at DJJ facilities who have not completed high school read on average at a sixth-grade level, according to Lucero, quoting data reported to her by the state.

Kim Rigg, superintendent of education for the Division of Juvenile Justice schools, acknowledged that despite an average minimum stay of two years, youth rarely improve to their grade level. “One to three grade year improvement is typical,” Rigg wrote in an email.

“The reality is that we do get a lot of troubled youth that were not in the best situation socially, and it impacted them academically,” she said. “DJJ youth are sensitive to incentives, and generally not motivated to score well on standardized tests for which there is no reward.”

Another problem is the sketchy test score data. Education data for incarcerated students is generally difficult to access, in part due to privacy concerns, incomplete data entry and a lack of assessments created for the needs of incarcerated students.

The focus on the reading education of incarcerated youth comes at a critical time for California, which in July is shifting the operation of youth facilities from the state to the counties. Youths in state facilities will be assigned to one of 36 newly designated secure units inside existing juvenile facilities across the state’s 56 counties.

While officials say education is a priority, details are not outlined in the state law mandating the change or in the plans for the switch. In the end, each county office of education will decide how the curriculum for youths will meet the state’s education requirements.

“As the Office of Youth and Community Restoration guides the state’s transition to county-led youth justice, improving educational outcomes for youth is a top priority,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “When youth have access to educational opportunities, they are better prepared for a successful transition into adulthood. OYCR is optimistic about counties’ efforts to improve educational outcomes for youth who are court-involved, and will continue to share best practices, resources, and technical assistance in support of those goals.”

The transition of incarcerated youth education to the counties also comes at a time when parents and teachers nationwide and in California are demanding a focus for all students on improving low test scores by embracing phonics and “the science of reading.”

At DJJ, which has operated high schools inside four juvenile facilities, educators have relied on phonics assessments plus structured literacy programs, such as the Wilson Just Words Reading Program. County curriculums vary, though Los Angeles County offers an example: It relies on two programs, Read 180 and System44, which focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension and decoding through systematic, explicit instruction and individualized practice.

Decades-old problem

In the juvenile justice system, warnings that youth lack reading skills date back decades.

A 1978 national study found that more than a third of youth in the justice system were reading below the fourth-grade level. Other statistics have shown that 85% of youth in the country’s justice system have difficulty reading and that about 40% of 10th grade students in the system read below a fourth-grade level.

“Considering that reading competence is a critical factor for academic success … providing intensive reading instruction to detained and incarcerated youth has the potential to improve a successful return to school after release and reduce the likelihood to re-offend,” wrote the authors of a 2013 study that found race, age and learning disabilities play a significant role in incarcerated students’ reading skills.

A 2010 class-action lawsuit revealed that some Los Angeles County youths were granted diplomas despite being illiterate. A settlement resulted in the county implementing reading assessments and intervention programs, among other reforms.

Currently, youth typically arrive with a fourth-grade reading level, according to Diana Velasquez, executive director for educational programs at the L.A. County Office of Education.

Students receive a reading assessment upon arrival and then every 90 days. Those testing below grade level are assigned a literacy specialist for daily one-to-one work.

Yet, some say the juvenile justice system’s credit recovery program, in part implemented due to the settlement, incentivized youth to avoid taking catch-up classes that may increase their reading skills because they are excited about the prospect of graduating faster. This process, signed into law in Assembly Bill 216 in 2016, allows certain youth — such as those who are incarcerated, in foster care, or newly immigrated — to graduate with fewer academic credits. The bill’s intent is to remove graduation barriers for youth with unstable access to education.

“I understand the intent … but those are the kids who have left this place without knowing how to read,” said Florence Avognon, an educator in L.A. County juvenile facilities.

Velasquez said her team works to ensure that students do not leave without knowing how to read, even if they graduate with fewer credits.

“There were some safeguards that needed to be placed at the advent of AB216 as students were being provided that opportunity for graduation,” said Velasquez. “And for us, that … became really looking at those test scores before saying we’re signing off on a diploma.”

An analysis of L.A. County’s reading assessment data shows that checking for reading proficiency did not occur countywide, however. Many students did not get the initial assessment or the follow-up within the required times, according to a recent study from the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools.

The data also uncovered unexplained patterns in students’ reading ability. Some students first tested at a second grade reading level and improved to 11th grade by the second test, or vice versa.

“That’s a massive difference, which tells you that the kid was traumatized as hell when they came in, or resistant and didn’t want to do it,” said Angela James, director of research at the center and lead author of the study.

The dramatic changes suggest they’re negatively impacted by learning in a prisonlike environment, she said. The cases where this happened weren’t the norm, but there were enough to move the data averages. “The fact of the matter is, the kids that are incarcerated are in a very traumatic circumstance,” said James. “Most of them have unmet educational needs before they arrive.”

Transforming juvenile justice

California incarcerated over 4,100 youth in 2019. While the rate of youth incarceration has declined in recent decades, the number of Black and Latino youth remains disproportionately high, accounting for roughly 90% of the population. Between 30% and 35% of youth in state facilities are “designated special education,” according to the DJJ. About 95% of all incarcerated youth are boys and young men.

In 2017, the DJJ reported that 74.2% of youth released during the 2012-13 fiscal year were re-arrested, over 50% were convicted for new offenses, and nearly 40% returned to state custody within three years of release from a DJJ facility.

Access to education has long been established as crucial to lowering recidivism rates — by 43%, according to a 2013 study that conducted a comprehensive analysis of studies on the subject released during a 31-year period starting in 1980.

“It will be our responsibility at the end of the day to say: Did we do a good job? And we can no longer blame DJJ for that recidivism rate,” said Lucero.

While the shift of responsibility for incarcerated youth from the state to the counties is meant to reform the justice system, some advocates say they are concerned it won’t address access to accurate education data or the need for increased focus on high-quality education. It’s a concern that Lucero, director of the state agency, says is being prioritized.

“That’s why it’s even more important for counties to care about this, because there’s not going to be any place really to hide and to pass the buck to and to say it’s somebody else’s job,” she said. “What I do know for sure is government-trained folks are going to be raising these kids, so we have to make this a priority.”

This story was originally published at EdSource.

A new state civics textbook is one step closer to reaching the desks of New Hampshire students after the Senate Finance Committee approved a budget provision of $1 million last week for its creation.

The provision would fund the Commission on New Hampshire Civics, which would contract with outside experts to develop the textbook content. The initiative was initially introduced by Gov. Chris Sununu in February as part of his proposed budget and is one of two efforts the legislature has made to bolster civics education this year. In May, the House passed a bill which could expand civics education to K-8 classrooms.

New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said during a Senate Finance Committee meeting that the funding would allow the commission to update civics materials for a new generation of students.

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“Students today are used to engaging in video content, multimedia content,” he said. “So what will happen is we’ll take the rich content from our history and be able to bring it into a pedagogy that will be more effective in our current environment.”

Sen. Lou D’Allesandro, a Manchester Democrat and former public high school teacher, was skeptical regarding the necessity of the funding. He quipped that he would even advise on new materials for free if the Senate scrapped the provision.

“I just don’t believe we need to spend a million dollars to get a new book,” he said. “We can save a million dollars – a million dollars we can spend someplace else.”

D’Allesandro suggested the work of non-profit NH Civics already adequately supports civics education with free classroom materials. The nonpartisan organization leads programs for educators and students, as well as providing free civics curriculum resources.

However, it was a NH Civics trustee, former state Supreme Court justice and congressman Chuck Douglas, who helped the budget amendment move forward.

“[Chuck Douglas] approached me maybe three weeks ago and said that if we funded it for a million dollars we would be able to create a new civics textbook,” said Senate President and Wolfeboro Republican Jeb Bradley during the Senate Finance Committee meeting.

In a May opinion column in the Concord Monitor, Douglas expressed concern over U.S. Department of Education data released earlier this month that placed eighth grade U.S. history and civics scores at record lows.

Maria Painchaud, interim executive director of NH Civics, agreed that more priority must be given to civics education. She described the cause of its decline as complex, but highlighted the unintended consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Painchaud sees the act as having pressured teachers to ‘teach to the test,’ which assesses students’ knowledge in English and math.

“Something had to go,” she said. “So any extra focus that was put on what was perceived as non-core, got the backseat, and now we’re experiencing… the pitfall of that decision.”

NH Civics has played a significant role in greater engagement by the Legislature on civics education. The non-profit advocated for Senate Bill 216, which passed the Legislature in early May. The bill, which is heading to Gov. Chris Sununu’s desk, would make changes to the state’s civics education, outlining requirements for both public and nonpublic schools.

The bill requires civics education for New Hampshire students beginning in elementary school, and continuing through middle and high school. Previously, civics education requirements only applied to high school students. The bill defines civics as nonpartisan educational programming that covers civic knowledge of the state and national government, understanding of founding documents, and the acquisition of analytical skills.

Under SB 216, high school graduation requirements would remain the same: a half-year of instruction in civics and a full year of instruction in history and government. Students would also need to obtain a passing grade on a competency exam developed by their institution and a grade of 70 percent or better on the 128-question naturalization examination developed in 2020 by United States Citizen and Immigration Services.

If the bill is signed, schools will be expected to meet the new curriculum requirements by fall of 2024 with no additional funding from the state.

“For some teachers, the first reaction is okay, how am I going to fit this in?” Painchaud said.

She emphasized that as a proponent of the bill, NH Civics has committed to providing free professional development programs and curriculum materials over the next year to ease the transition process.

New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on Facebook and Twitter.

Despite overwhelming support from the Rhode Island Senate, free lunch and breakfast for all public school children will likely not be available, according to state legislators.

The Rhode Island Senate voted 31 to 4 on May 16 in favor of funding school meals the federal government doesn’t already cover — with opposition coming from Senate Republicans.

Rhode Island Democratic senator Jonathan Acosta said momentum to offer the meals will likely end once the bill is presented to the House of Representatives.

“Nobody wants to be the asshole to say ‘no we’re not going to feed kids at school’ so my guess would be that the House will protect itself by avoiding a public vote,” Acosta told The 74.

LeeAnn Sennick, communications director for the Rhode Island Senate minority office, declined The 74’s request for comment on Acosta’s remarks.

According to the Rhode Island Department of Education, of the state’s 137,452 public school students, more than 70,000 receive a free or reduced-price lunch; and around 29,000 receive a free or reduced-price breakfast.

During the pandemic, the federal government funded free school meal programs for children throughout the country. The program expired at the start of the 2022-23 school year, leaving state governments to decide whether to pick up the cost. 

Rhode Island House of Representatives communications director Larry Berman told The 74 in an emailed statement “there is no money in the budget that just passed the House Finance Committee in regards to free lunch and breakfast” for all public school children.

The House of Representatives began to vote on the state budget Friday and will adjourn on June 30th.

Acosta said the House of Representatives has other spending priorities, such as funding housing. 

According to the Center for American Progress, California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have funded universal school meals after federal funds ran out.

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Nevada have passed temporary legislation in the absence of continued federal investment.

“Hunger is one of the very first things that needs to be addressed. It’s one of the biggest barriers to learning and one that’s honestly pretty easy to solve,” Allie Pearce, a K-12 education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, told The 74.

Under federal guidelines set for the 2023-24 academic year, a student from a household of three is eligible for free lunch if they made $32,318 or less in annual income and for reduced-price lunch if they made $45,991 or less. A student from a household of six is eligible for free meals at $52,364 or less in annual income.

“Those are just students that we know have filled out applications or that have been directly certified,” Pearce said. “There are probably so many more students that have not been able to fill out those applications or their families are in difficult or uncertain financial situations and may not qualify.”

The bill, sponsored by Acosta, would require Rhode Island public schools to provide free lunch and breakfast to all students instead of requiring them to only provide meals for those covered by the federal government.

“With the pandemic we saw a rise in economic and food insecurity across our state,” Acosta said. “We’ve started moving back to this world where we saw the issue of lunch shaming…so in light of that we picked up where some of these folks left off and introduced this legislation.”

Pearce noted that deprioritizing free school meals will do a disservice to all Rhode Island public school students, especially those who receive reduced-price meals.

“Those students will continue to have to pay a lesser amount but one that adds up for sure,” Peace said. “It also doesn’t work to address the stigma a lot of students go through when it comes to the meal debt that they may accrue.”

Rhode Island Republican senator Jessica de la Cruz has argued this bill is unnecessary because children from low-income families already receive free school meals.

“What you are doing is financing free lunches for the affluent,” Cruz told The Providence Journal. “I would be in favor of widening the eligibility, but I cannot support the lunches of the affluent.” 

Rhode Island Republican senator Gordon Rogers agreed with Cruz.

“I’m not against feeding children and kids that need it in school,” Rogers told The Providence Journal. “This will cost the state of Rhode Island [up to] $40 million, not just one time, but continuing, escalating forward.”

In the meantime, Acosta is hopeful conversations around free school meals will be revived in the coming year.

“The people in our state are our most valuable asset and the more that we develop them the better the returns are going to be for all of us,” Acosta said.

Massachusetts’ sexual health curriculum remains stuck, at least on paper, in the Wild West educational landscape of 1999. But after some 24 years, and with more than a decade of pressure from advocates and a cohort of legislators, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is getting ready to make some changes.

What those changes are remains a mystery. There are broad state standards for health education, promulgated through the department, but they were last updated decades ago and allow for a wide amount of leeway in school-by-school choice in what curriculum and materials to use. 

A 2018 review from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Office of Sexual Health & Youth Development found 43 percent of high school students were not taught about condoms at school and 61 percent reported not talking with a parent about preventing HIV, sexually transmitted infections, or pregnancy. While the state teen birth rate declined along with the rest of the country, the 2018 report found that sexually transmitted infections rose across age groups and especially in the 15- to 24-year-old range.

“Governor Healey supports efforts to make sure that sex education offered in Massachusetts schools is comprehensive, inclusive, medically accurate, and age appropriate,” spokesperson Karissa Hand said in a statement. “Our administration is also working with DESE to put forward a health education framework that achieves these goals.”

A DESE spokesperson confirmed the agency is at work on the framework, but did not say what the timeline is for the update. Efforts to revamp the state health standards were in progress before the global COVID-19 pandemic hit, which paused the process until recently. 

“Following stakeholder engagement, revisions are being reviewed by the new administration,” said education department spokesperson Jacqueline Reis. These stakeholders included experts within particular topic areas, colleagues from other state agencies that focus on public health and mental health, and advisory councils to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Reis said.

With little to no visible movement on the DESE side for years and frustration mounting, lawmakers have been pushing for a plan B: setting requirements for new standards through legislation and making sure that the education department moves more quickly in the future. But that effort has also been slow going on Beacon Hill.

For a dozen years, a consistently re-filed sex education bill requiring schools that offer sexual health programming to “provide a medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sexual health education” with an emphasis on consent and acknowledging LGBTQ+ identities stalled out on Beacon Hill. For the past four years, the “Healthy Youth Act” passed the Senate only to fizzle in the House. It would not require any school to offer such a course, just ensure a baseline for the content covered.

“We would be saying that we believe in the right of young people to receive fact-based information in their sexual health education,” said Jennifer Hart of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. The erratic landscape of sex ed programs across the state currently leaves some young people “getting incorrect information that is based in fear and stigma and shame” in their public institutions, Hart said.

Supporters say the bill is “common sense” updating to reflect a healthy and informed approach to sex education.

“Really, in my mind, I don’t understand why it’s taken this long,” said Sen. Sal DiDomenico, of Everett, who refiled the bill in the state Senate this term. “There’s no mandate here. It just says if they are teaching sex education, it has to be appropriate, medically accurate, and inclusive. I’m sometimes confused about where this controversy comes from.”

Parents, he notes, would still have the choice to opt out as they do now, receiving a letter at the start of the year giving them notice. 

Opponents of the bill and similar policies argue that exposure to these curricula will encourage sexual activity among young people and disempower parents from determining the best time and manner to educate their children about sex.

“Parents could still opt out their children. But what good would it do?” asked Mary Ellen Siegler in a post for the Massachusetts Family Institute, a non-partisan public policy organization that emphasizes Judeo-Christian values, during a prior attempt to pass the act. “With the amount of sexually explicit (and gross) material included in the curriculum, children everywhere in school would still be exposed to Comprehensive Sexuality Education material. Conversations among students are bound to sink to the level the scenarios suggest.”

The opt-out has become a friction point for LGBTQ+ advocates. Tanya Neslusan, executive director of MassEquality, said the organization is no longer part of the Healthy Youth Act coalition because the bill would allow individuals and schools to opt out.

“We’ve been dealing with anti-LGBTQ battles across the state and seen a real increase over these last few years in coordinated opt-out campaigns,” she said. The campaigns have been focused on individual parents pulling their children out of programming that discusses LGBTQ+ identities in particular, she said.

“We really are afraid that to push through the Healthy Youth Act legislation – even though it’s great legislation and it’s what we need – without a mandate in place to have sex education, that some districts will end up with no sex education at all,” she said.

MassEquality is now backing a bill put forward by Rep. Marjorie Decker, of Cambridge, which mandates statewide age-appropriate and medically accurate sex education, though parents are still permitted to opt their children out of any portion of the curriculum. Though the Decker bill’s “wording around health education is a bit vaguer” and does not specifically touch on LGBTQ+ orientations or consent, it does require that sex education adhere to national standards, which covers much of the Healthy Youth Act’s priorities, Neslusan said.

Of the opt-out provision, DiDomenico said, “it’s just a matter of trying to get something passed in this space right now, and that option is important for some folks.” He added, “I would be okay with a mandate, but I have to get my colleagues to agree.”

The act would make sure the state avoids 25-year gaps between updates, at least. It requires DESE to review and update its standards to be consistent with the Healthy Youth Act at the passage of the law and then at least every 10 years afterward.

Out-of-date standards are one thing to tackle, Healthy Youth Act supporters say, but current regulations also leave a lot of discretion up to the individual schools as to the content of the health curriculum. Under the act, DESE must collect information on the sexual health programs offered by schools across the state.

Jamie Klufts, a co-chair of the Healthy Youth Act Coalition, wrote in an opinion article that new data on youth risk behavior from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underline the need for consistent and comprehensive sex education programming.

While reported sexual assault of young women is up to almost one in five nationally, condom usage among youths is down from 60 percent in 2011 to 52 percent in 2021. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual young people experience more sexual violence than their heterosexual peers and are nearly four times more likely to report suicide attempts.

Over the decade covered by the report, the Healthy Youth Act has not come to the Massachusetts House floor for a vote.

“This means that an entire generation of young people has gone through our school system without the assurance of quality sex and relationship education that the Healthy Youth Act would provide,” Klufts and her co-authors wrote.

The state of the Commonwealth’s sex ed standards is particularly disheartening, advocates say, because in a post-Roe United States, prominent Massachusetts politicians have taken a particular pride in codifying reproductive care protections into state law but left sexual health by the wayside. 

Planned Parenthood reviewed all 50 states plus Washington D.C. and ranked their sexual health curriculum and their level of abortion protections. Massachusetts is somewhat of an outlier among states that are “protective” or “very protective” of abortion care, Hart said, because the state standards for sex ed do not require education to be medically accurate, cover birth control options, include LGBTQ+ identities, or affirm abortion access.

“Sex education is comprehensive,” Hart said, “and still there is shame and stigma around sex ed, around abortion. In Massachusetts, we have such protections for sexual reproductive health, and this is just another area where Massachusetts can grow in being a leader.”

DiDomenico said he is hopeful about the coalition’s chances this year because of Healey’s commitments to inclusive sex education, his conversations with House co-filers Rep. Jim O’Day of West Boylston and Rep. Vanna Howard of Lowell, as well as recent state action taken to shore up access to medication abortion imperiled by recent Supreme Court rulings.

House Speaker Ron Mariano is “going through the details and having conversations with members,” a spokesperson said. Mariano stood outside the State House with other elected leaders and reproductive health organizations to express support for moves to protect access to medication abortion earlier this year.

Senate leadership has been enthusiastically on board with the act for years. Senate President Karen Spilka said in 2020, “There has never been a more important time to teach our youth about the benefits of having healthy relationships — and that begins with inclusive and accurate sex education. Sadly, we know all too well the consequences of unhealthy relationships, which is why it is so important we prepare our students so that they can make informed decisions.”

The Legislature’s joint Education Committee has not yet scheduled hearings for the House and Senate versions of the Healthy Youth Act or Decker’s bill.

This story was originally published at CommonWealth.

This Week’s Top Story

Worldwide, Learning Loss and Pandemic School Closures Were Directly Connected

• Via Jeff Murray at Fordham, based on a new working paper from Harry Patrinos at the World Bank 
• “Patrinos looks at 11 factors potentially increasing or mitigating learning loss, which is defined using test score data via country-specific instruments that were standardized for comparison.”
• “There is a clear link between school closure duration and learning loss. Closures as part of government-imposed lockdowns averaged 21 weeks’ duration and resulted in an average learning loss of 0.23 standard deviations across the countries studied (representing two-thirds of the world’s population). Testing for mitigating factors or other means to explain learning loss produced no significant findings, meaning that school closures appear to be directly responsible for student learning loss.”
• “Patrinos finds that each additional week of school closure increased learning loss by a further 1% of a standard deviation.”
• “In short: The longer schools stayed closed, the less students learned, no matter what else was done to blunt the losses.”

The Big Three

More than 70% of Household COVID Spread Started With a Child 

• Via CIDRAP: “A study published [June 1]  in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 U.S. household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.”
• “Of all household transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%.”
• “Once U.S. schools reopened in fall 2020, children contributed more to inferred within-household transmission when they were in school, and less during summer and winter breaks, a pattern consistent for two consecutive school years.”

Schools Received Billions in Stimulus Funds. It May Not Be Doing Enough

• Via The New York Times: “While most schools have since deployed various forms of interventions and some have spent more on academic recovery than others, there are ample signs that the money has not been spent in a way that has substantially helped all of the nation’s students lagging behind.”
• “Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the impact of the funding has been a ‘bit of a black box,’ and she expected to see different recovery rates across districts.”
• “Early reports show that schools have had difficulty setting up academic recovery programs.”

The Programs Most Likely to Go Away When Stimulus Funding Ends

• Via EdWeek
• “Areas high on the list for reduction are much more classroom-focused: summer learning programs (30%), computing devices, such as Chromebooks (29%) and tutoring (26%).”
• “Relatively large districts, meaning those with 10,000 or more students, are relatively likely to scale back tutoring (33% said they would), as were those with enrollments of between 2,500 and 9,999 students (34%), as opposed to those from systems with fewer than 2,500 students (20%).”
• “The survey also reveals that K-12 officials from suburban districts are much less likely to scale back stimulus-funded programs focused on student mental health/wellness resources (9% indicated they would) compared to those from districts in rural areas or towns (20%) and urban areas (28%).”
• “Relatively few of those surveyed see core academic subjects as likely to receive cuts, such as elementary English/language arts (just 17%), science (13%), elementary math (12%) and social-studies (11%).”

Federal Updates

Institute for Education Statistics: Director Mark Schneider on education research and the future of schools.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Dr. Deborah L. Birx: “Now that the COVID-19 national public health emergency is over, it’s time to fix the CDC.”

Debt Ceiling: Education spared from severe cuts with the signing of debt ceiling deal.

Education Department: New Office of Educational Technology and Digital Promise report: U.S. Department of Education Shares Insights and Recommendations for Artificial Intelligence.

City & State News

California: Thousands of California families are still homeschooling their children. What’s keeping them from the classroom?

Colorado: The state Board of Education voted unanimously to select Susana Cordova as the sole finalist for the position of commissioner of education.

Missouri: Pandemic led to drop in special education services for young kids in Missouri and nationwide.

New Jersey: 10,000 Newark public school students need summer school this year, district says.

Pennsylvania: Teachers are leaving their jobs at an accelerating rate in Pennsylvania, new study finds.

• Less than 1% of Philadelphia students are using the district’s tutoring programs.

COVID-19 Research

Pfizer Vaccine Tracking Confirms Safety in Kids, With Myocarditis, Pericarditis Rare

• Via CIDRAP: “Monitoring of Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine safety among more than 3 million U.S. children aged 5 to 17 years flagged just 2 of 20 health outcomes among 12- to 17-year-olds — myocarditis and pericarditis, which were rare.”
• “ ‘Myocarditis or pericarditis is a rare event, with an average incidence of 39.4 cases per million doses administered in children aged 5 to 17 years within seven days after BNT162b2 [Pfizer] COVID-19 vaccination,’ the authors wrote. Previous studies have noted that the incidence of the two conditions is much higher after COVID-19 infection.”

COVID-19 Catch Up

• Via Katelyn Jetelina: “SARS-CoV-2 is nosediving across all metrics in all regions of the U.S.: hospitalizations, deaths, emergency room departments, and wastewater. Wastewater is still higher than in 2020 and 2021, though.”
• “We’ve been hitting new lows in death counts, too. In fact, excess deaths are hovering at only ~1% above pre-pandemic rates (at the height of the pandemic we were at 47%). In other words, things are looking good right now.”
• “Up until now, the CDC recommended that we ‘improve ventilation’ to reduce transmission. But by how much? Well, for the first time, CDC set minimum ventilation targets for indoor spaces: five air changes per hour. This may sound like boring news, but it’s huge for public health. Not just for viruses but health overall. While this standard isn’t mandatory, you should follow up with your business, school, place of worship, etc., to ensure it’s being met now.”

Viewpoints and Analyses

Moving from “Reform” to “Rethinking”

• Via Rick Hess: “The COVID-19 pandemic stressed and stretched schooling in unprecedented ways. Routines that had been in place for generations came to a crashing halt.”
• “During the pandemic, new routines took hold. Parents expressed frustration and an appetite for new options. The visibility into the curriculum and students’ work that came with remote learning led many parents to become newly engaged. … The pandemic fueled an explosion in homeschooling, greater familiarity with virtual learning and unprecedented declines in district enrollments.”
• “From my research and work with educators, I’ve learned that leaders who want to … meet this moment as open-minded ‘rethinkers’ rather than self-assured reformers, should take to heart five habits.”
  • Ask why … a lot!
  • Be precise and specific.
  • Be deliberate.
  • Know that new problems may call for new solutions.
  • Reject change for change’s sake.

5 Steps Districts Can Take to Prepare for a Big Financial Reckoning: 

• Noah Wepman, the former chief financial officer for the District of Columbia Public Schools, shares five things districts should consider doing to keep students and their successes at the center of discussions about budget reductions:
  • Inventory district-funded programs, then examine student data.
  • Engage in strategic abandonment discussions.
  • Set your district’s priorities and create (or update) your five-year financial plan.
  • Budget for equity.
  • Innovate and experiment with new school models or staffing approaches.
    

The Pandemic Is Over, But the Education Emergency Continues

• Via Bruno Manno
• “There is a divide between the reality of student learning loss and parents’ perceptions of learning loss.”
• “Learning loss is related not only to what happened in schools, but also to what happened in communities.”
• “Learning loss will become permanent unless learning time — student time on task — is increased.”
  

…And on a Lighter Note

• The Oscar for Best Drama Goes to: This flying squirrel faked his own death and created a whole crime scene…for attention. Make sure to wait until the end.

For even more COVID policy and education news, subscribe to John Bailey’s briefing via Substack.

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to The 74.

“I do think it would be appropriate … if Congress is willing to provide the legislative or regulatory authority to put that label on, then I’d certainly be willing to partner,” Murthy said in response to questioning from Republican Sen. Roger Marshall during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on youth mental health. 

Murthy’s response was one of many showcasing the urgency of soaring suicidality, addiction, depression and anxiety among young people, particularly those who are LGBTQ, Black and brown. 

One in five high schoolers made a suicide plan in 2021, Murthy said. 

The average young American uses social media for about 3 ½ hours each day, making them  doubly at risk for disrupted sleep and clinical depression or anxiety. 

“This is not just a crisis. It’s an emergency. This is probably the biggest problem we have in this country,” said Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville. “The number one commodity that we have in this country is not gold and silver, it’s our young people. And we’re destroying them.”

Tuberville added in his work with young people as a coach, he has seen prescription drugs take over communities, particularly fentanyl. Several other senators voiced concerns about young people accessing fentanyl-laced counterfeit medications on social media. 

Beyond social media, Murthy identified three other drivers of the youth mental health crisis: loneliness; trauma from loss of loved ones, violence, abuse or incarceration; and declining confidence in the future, due to surging economic inequality, racism, gun violence and climate change. 

The amount of time young people aged 15-24 spent with friends declined by more than 50% even before the pandemic, Murthy said of the loneliness epidemic, urging for community, faith and local organizations to help rebuild social connection and places of belonging. 

Social media age and safety standards should be revamped and in-school programs to teach children tools to manage emotions should be expanded, said Murthy and Katherine Neas, the Department of Education’s deputy assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services.

“Simply put, schools are a gateway to needed services that otherwise might be inaccessible to many young people,” Neas said. 

Colleges and universities can increase mental health services on-campus, continue public talks on mental health to decrease stigma, and boost support for communities on-campus like clubs, religious organizations, and support networks for marginalized students, the Surgeon General said. 

Murthy added parents should establish safety standards on their children’s devices, a necessity given the “utter lack” of accountability when it comes to social media companies’ impact on young people, though they’ve been around for about 20 years. 

In a comparison between the auto and tech industries, Murthy told senators they would not expect parents to have the expertise to inspect whether tires or a car’s frame would keep their children safe – a government’s responsibility. 

“They rely on us establishing standards and then enforcing those with manufacturers. These are incredibly complex platforms … and parents need help here to interpret and understand their safety.” 

The Senate HELP committee has nine healthcare reauthorizations expiring in September that, if not renewed, may impact future access to mental health support across the country. The Support Act, for instance, supports people with substance abuse disorders and children suffering from trauma, and prohibits children in juvenile incarceration from being denied Medicaid.

Sen. Tim Kaine used his time not for questioning but for a heartfelt address to the nation’s young people. Kaine’s children both attended the Richmond, Virginia high school where two died in a graduation ceremony mass shooting this week. 

He acknowledged the feeling of hopelessness many feel, that they cannot change the social conditions they find depressing, cannot yet vote. 

“Our history shows the opposite. Things get better when young people do engage,” he said. “The therapeutic value of linking arms with colleagues to battle for improvements in climate or reductions in gun violence, that very act … has a positive impact not only on society, but on one’s sense of well being.”

WARWICK — Head Start programs in Rhode Island need more funding to tackle a staffing shortage in the fiscal year 2024 budget, or face imminent collapse.

That was the message program leaders, advocates, and parents gathered Tuesday at CHILD, Inc.’s Centerville Road location to send to the General Assembly as it prepares to vote on the budget later this week.

“We’re going to see a breakdown of the early childhood education system in Rhode Island in the next couple of years,” Mary Varr, the executive director of Woonsocket Head Start Child Development Association, Inc., said at the press conference.

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About 30 advocates gathered to call on policymakers to increase the current allocation of $8 million for early childhood programs by an additional $6.5 million in Gov. Dan McKee’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal. The budget is scheduled for a debate and vote on the House floor June 9 and June 10.

The advocates said policymakers need to increase funding to insure access to all Rhode Island children to early childhood programs like Head Start, a free federal preschool program for low-income toddlers and pre-school age children launched as one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s.

“I don’t know what it’s going to take to make our littlest children our top priority,” Khadija Lewis Khan, executive director of Beautiful Beginnings Childcare Center, a Head Start provider in Providence. “It’s very shortsighted your state to de-invest in early childhood education.”

The group called on the General Assembly to invest the following:

$3 million in state general revenue money to Head Start and Early Head Start programs to help programs compensate teachers and staff and reopen classrooms.
$2 million in federal or state funding to raise the family income required for Head Start programs from 200% to 225% of the federal poverty level. Currently, Rhode Island’s family income cutoff is $49,720 for a family of three.
$1.5 million put towards increased pay for workers in early childhood education.

When asked for comment, Speaker of the House K. Joseph Shekarchi, a Warwick Democrat, said the House of Representatives was looking into the funding.

“There are always issues that need to be evaluated after the passage of the budget by the House Finance Committee,” Shekarchi said in an email. “This is one of them.”

Senate President Sen. Dominick Ruggerio, a North Providence Democrat, and Gov. Dan McKee did not respond to requests for comment.

Staffing crisis

A major motivator behind the call is a staffing shortage, leading to the closure of 30 of the 108 Head Start programs in Rhode Island since 2020 and 11 of the 40 total Early Head Start programs.

“Seeing the staff crisis and classes having to close,” Roshana Perry, a teacher at Joyful Noise Child Care, a West Warwick pre-school, said, “it’s really sad.”

Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island Association Education of Young Children, said there are currently about 6,000 child care workers in Rhode Island, though there currently is no central database.

Though numbers are hard to come by, child care facility operators noted that low wages in the industry have led to an exodus forcing the classroom closures.

“It’s a crisis,” Khan said. “We need money to elevate the level of income of our employees.

“We are behind other states in our area and I don’t think that’s what we want to be known for.”

David Caprio, president and chief executive officer of Children’s Friend, said his staff shrank since their pre-pandemic number of 450 to 405 presently.

“I’m not going to say all,” he said, “but many did cite the wage as reason for their leaving.”

The median hourly wage for a child care educator in Rhode Island was $13.26 in 2021, according to the Rhode Island Kids Count 2023 Factbook. That rate increased by slightly more than a dollar for preschool educators. Hildebrand said the requested budget increase could go towards increasing that pay.

“You’re getting paid to work more at Target,” Varr, the director of a Woonsocket Head Start program, said. “Is it really that difficult to find the dollars?

“We can’t spend less than 1% [of the budget] on our children?”

Hildebrand, the association director, said advocates could only pray that policy makers live up to Rhode Island’s motto.

“Hope,” she said. “That’s all we have for the next two days.”

Rhode Island Current is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on Facebook and Twitter.

The lion’s share of Hoosier schools that qualify for a federal free meal service program don’t take advantage of it, according to a new national report.

Across the country, 6,419 school districts — 67.5 percent of those eligible — adopted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) in one or more schools for the 2022– 2023 school year, the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) reported in a new analysis.

But in Indiana, only 40.6% of eligible school districts — and 51.7% of eligible schools overall —  adopted CEP in the most recent academic year.

Although Indiana was among the 39 states that saw an increase in the number of schools adopting community eligibility, the Hoosier state still ranks 47th in the nation for CEP participation.

The program allows schools with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of their economic status. Child health advocates and education experts laud the federal provision as a benefit to both students and school administrators.

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No Kid Hungry, a non-profit organization that focuses on increasing access to healthy meals for children and alleviating childhood hunger, emphasized that kids are more attentive in class, have better attendance and are less likely to have disciplinary problems when their nutritional needs are met.

With CEP, families with tight food budgets are also ensured that their child is getting two balanced meals at school, reducing financial strain at home.

The program works for schools, as well, by eliminating school meals applications and unpaid meal charges that often create administrative burdens.

Some schools have recently adopted CEP as a way to continue offering healthy meals to all students — free of charge — after the expiration of the pandemic child nutrition waivers last year, according to FRAC.

But researchers said that many schools, including some in Indiana, choose not to participate out of fear that losing data from school meal applications may also result in the loss of Title 1 funding.

Indiana schools and districts have until June 30 to submit a CEP application for the 2023-24 school year. It’s not clear how many new applications have been submitted so far.

By the numbers

During the 2022–23 school year, there was a significant increase in the number of schools and districts nationwide participating in community eligibility, according to FRAC’s latest report.

While the number of participating schools in Indiana increased, too, the take-up rate among eligible schools overall decreased slightly.

Of the 1,148 schools eligible for CEP in the last school year, 593 participated, according to federal data collected by FARC. That’s up from 506 participating schools in the 2021-22 academic year, when 957 schools qualified.

Among those to join were Pike Township schools in Indianapolis, which serves nearly 11,000 students.

Of the 469 eligible Indiana schools where more than 60% of students qualify as high-need under CEP guidelines, 311 participated in the federal program in the 2022-23 school year — a 66.3% adoption rate.

About 52% of Hoosier schools with 50-60% high-need students — 200 of the 356 eligible schools — signed up. Participation dropped to 24.5% for those schools with high-need student enrollment at or below 50%; of the 323 schools that were eligible, only 77 took advantage of the program.

The Indiana Department of Education estimates that at least 1,100 schools will qualify for CEP in the 2023-24 academic year.

How CEP works — and why it helps

Families are not required to submit an application for the community provision like they would for the free and reduced meals program. That guarantees free breakfast and lunch for any student at a participating school.

Indianapolis Public Schools, as well as the surrounding Perry, Warren and Wayne school districts, are continuing to offer free meals – both lunches and breakfasts – to students through CEP for the 2023-24 school year. Certain MSD of Lawrence Township schools are also participating in CEP to provide free meals.

Thousands of students at other Indianapolis-area schools — in the Decatur, Franklin, Speedway and Washington school districts — will not automatically get free food, though.

Some district officials previously told the Indiana Capital Chronicle they do not participate in CEP because of the federal program’s “complexity,” while others noted that their schools do not qualify for complete meal reimbursement, meaning districts have to pay out-of-pocket to cover the rest.

For a school to qualify for the CEP, at least 40% of the individual school’s enrolled population must already participate in another means-tested program or are part of a protected group, such as students experiencing homelessness, in foster care, or migrant students.

Schools that meet the minimum threshold to qualify for the community provision receive reimbursement for 62.5% of meals served, according to federal guidelines. Schools with enrolled populations over 62.5%, where nearly two-thirds of students fall into the above categories, get fully reimbursed for students’ meals.

Schools with higher numbers of students in need receive a near or total reimbursement for meals, which makes community eligibility a more financially viable option. That also makes them more likely to participate in community eligibility, according to FRAC.

While any school with an enrolled population of 40% or more can participate, many schools on the lower end of the scale “fear participating” because the level of reimbursement from the federal government would not fully cover the cost of all meals served to students, said Allyson Pérez, a child nutrition policy analyst with FRAC.

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Twitter.

Amid a crush of late-breaking business in Austin, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s proposal to grant education savings accounts (ESAs) to every family in Texas ran out of steam before the May 30 deadline. Months of wrangling had yielded enough twists to both encourage and dismay the policy’s backers: an early passage out of the state Senate; a 16-hour hearing in the more moderate, skeptical House; and even a compromise measure, quashed after a veto threat from Abbott. 

But in the end, the hope of instituting universal school choice didn’t advance nearly far enough, even under unified Republican control over both the legislature and executive. An effort that could have transformed Texas, virtually overnight, into the biggest school choice marketplace in the country — and potentially bolstered its governor’s conservative bona fides — instead faltered before the goal line. And while the chances of a statewide voucher offering haven’t been extinguished entirely, the greatest prize for voucher proponents appears to be slipping away.

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while Abbott is “not inclined to back off” of his conservative policy instincts, he still hasn’t won over the allies he needs after spending considerable political capital.

“At the most mundane level, the governor has found himself in a position where he’s very publicly committed” to vouchers, Henson said. “But he may have overestimated his ability to turn votes in the House.”

The fight isn’t quite over, as Abbott has already announced that he will call legislators back for a special session dedicated to the question of ESAs. Whether that move will be announced in the coming months, the fall or even later is still unknown, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, one of the state’s loudest voucher advocates, has candidly said that he isn’t sure what tradeoffs the bill’s passage might necessitate.

It could make for a puzzling endgame to what had been a conservative breakthrough in statehouses around the country. Fueled by activist calls for greater parental rights and fierce battles over the teaching of subjects like race, gender and sexuality, the movement for private school choice has proceeded from strength to strength this year, with Iowa, Utah, Arkansas and Florida all instituting voucher-like initiatives for every student. But Texas, the nation’s biggest red state, couldn’t close the deal.

Some of the state’s leading players in education say that the halting progress shouldn’t be seen as a surprise. Going back nearly two decades, Republicans have tried to establish school voucher systems — only to be thwarted by members of their own party. No matter the ideological currents, GOP members from rural areas have consistently proven hostile to programs they believe would unsettle the finances of local school districts, which are often the biggest employers and social anchors in their communities. Their support, in Texas and other states, could determine the path forward for perhaps the most controversial K–12 idea today.

“There is a group of Republican lawmakers who are otherwise very conservative in the ways that they vote, but who see this as a measure that would take money away from their communities’ public schools,” said Christy Rome, executive director of the anti-voucher Texas Schools Coalition. “Largely, they don’t have private school options in those communities, so they feel that this is a way in which the state invests in education without benefiting their schools.”

The rural factor

For all the new momentum behind school choice — often born of parents’ dissatisfaction with COVID-era policies or their suspicion of teachings on race and gender — this year’s push for ESAs in Texas carried unmistakable echoes of earlier, similarly unsuccessful efforts.

In 2017, rural Republicans joined forces with urban Democrats to sink a Senate-passed voucher bill, even after Abbott and Patrick signaled their forceful support for the measure. In 2013, 2009 and 2007, House members passed budgetary amendments expressly forbidding the use of public funds to pay for private schools. Even in 2005, with arch-Texan George W. Bush occupying the Oval Office and the education reform era in its ascendancy, a Republican-led voucher proposal was narrowly defeated by a similar coalition.

This year’s model, dubbed Senate Bill 8, was carefully devised to circumvent common objections to private school choice, with $8,000 ESAs made available only to students who hadn’t attended private school the previous year; temporary subsidies were even offered to smaller districts that saw students leave for private alternatives. 

Nevertheless, the law was huge in scope. An analysis from the state’s Legislative Budget Board suggested that its cost would increase to $1 billion by 2028. 

That price tag bred resistance from the start. Although the state overhauled its education finance mechanism just before the pandemic began, K–12 schools are still funded to a large degree through local property taxes. Given the challenging economic and demographic trends facing many communities in the more remote stretches of Texas — 86 of the state’s 254 counties lost population between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent tabulation by the Texas Association of School Boards — many state representatives jealously guard resources for public institutions like schools, hospitals and fire departments.

“Nobody has been able to come up with a deal that persuades enough rural school districts, and rural members, that this is not going to hurt them,” Henson said. “If there’s a structural factor, it’s the size and geography of Texas — it’s hard to change the situation in these very small, far-flung districts where the economics of keepings schools in business are just very difficult.”

Abbott got a taste of public disapproval for his plan while traveling the state to persuade families. The tour, which took him to churches and parochial schools around Texas, was repeatedly met with protests by local educators and community members. 

Judge Scott Brister, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Texas appointed by Abbott to chair a statewide school finance commission, said that schools “are what hold these small communities together. They’re frequently the main business in town, the thing keeping people there. And if those schools die, the towns will die.” 

But while he wasn’t involved in this session’s ESA debate, Brister is bullish on the ability of tiny communities like Penelope, TX — a Central Texas town with a population of 207, where his mother worked as a school counselor — to adapt to changes in how educational services are delivered. 

Supporters even see the policy as a means of arresting years of flight from small towns. Michael Barba, K–12 policy director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said vouchers held the promise of attracting parents who might otherwise give up on rural life.

“A number of the rural counties have a declining population of school-aged kids because young families aren’t dropping roots in their hometowns,” Barba said. “They’re moving to the big cities because they don’t have the educational opportunities, the workforce opportunities, in their hometowns.”

Doubts about special session

Barba said he was encouraged by Abbott’s focus on vouchers, calling it the governor’s “number-one issue.” The commitment was evidenced last month by Abbott’s pledge to call a special session if SB 8 wasn’t brought to his desk.

But that legislative maneuver comes with peril as well as promise. Already, a special session called in late May to deal with property taxation produced dueling measures from the House and Senate, which have been divided this year on a number of issues besides school choice. Hyper-focused on a narrower set of priorities than are typically debated, such sessions offer fewer opportunities to horse-trade in pursuit of a compromise. They also tend to catch the eye of the local political press, making it harder for quiet deals to be struck.

One question on the minds of local education observers is why the conservatives — including Abbott and Patrick, but also their allies in the state Senate — didn’t aim for a narrower victory, perhaps by launching a voucher system solely for low-income or special needs students. Similar, small-bore programs were established in states like Arizona and Florida before incrementally being expanded statewide.

Rome, of the Texas Schools Coalition, suggested that a recent round of legislative redistricting, wherein four rural House districts were either eliminated or merged with other jurisdictions, partially diluted the strength of the rural anti-voucher bloc. That may have led the governor’s team to think they could dispense with more marginal steps, she argued. 

“The shift in membership of the Texas legislature made state leaders believe they had the votes to pass a voucher proposal without starting small,” Rome said. “There was some thinking that the coalition would disband or not have the votes to prevent full vouchers, but that hasn’t proven to be the case.”

A special session would offer the opportunity to rethink that strategy, and existing legislation could point the way forward. A last-ditch bill offered by the Senate late in the regular session, for instance, linked vouchers with a $50 increase in per-pupil allotments from the state. Another version, originated in the House, would have provided vouchers only for the roughly 800,000 Texas students either attending a failing school or diagnosed with a disability; that idea met with the threat of a veto from the governor’s office.

Whatever the details, Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said that Abbott would have to be willing to accept something less than his ideal package. Without paring back the voucher footprint, or adding additional sweeteners to financially strapped districts, he said, the effort was likely doomed.

“I can’t imagine why you would bring this up in a special session in the same form, because you’re just offering to get beat again,” Jillson said. “Unless you’re going to change the offer, there’s no reason at all to bring it up.”

But those days are over. Thinking of quitting in the next few months or years? Think twice. Because odds are you’ll have a tough time finding another education job in the next several years.

That’s because the job market for teachers is about to do a U-turn with the hiring spree of the last few years set to stall out before coming to a screeching halt at the start of the 2024 school year. 

In some areas, the reversal has already started and districts are pulling down their “help wanted” signs. Portland and Auburn, Maine issued a hiring freeze this spring. Hartford, San Francisco, and Baltimore County are eliminating unfilled positions. Fort Worth and Seattle are already doing layoffs. And this is just the beginning. Last month, at an education finance training we conducted at Georgetown University, we heard from dozens of school officials from all over the country whose districts were already making similar moves or are poised to in the next year.

What’s behind the flip? In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.

​​To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.

Staffing-enrollment mismatch spells big financial trouble ahead

With all these extra staff in schools and declining enrollment, a rightsizing is coming. These trends aren’t just afflicting large urban districts, either. Rather, in states where we have the data, the patterns are playing out statewide. Over the last decade, Michigan districts have grown staffing rolls by 9%, all while student enrollment fell by 8%.

In Connecticut, staffing is up by 8%, while enrollment is down 7%. Same trend in Pennsylvania. Even in Washington State, where there’s been enrollment growth of 3%, it won’t be enough to sustain the 20% jump in staffing over the same time period.

True, some states, like Texas and Florida, are seeing school enrollments grow. So, job seekers might find more opportunities there (though both states offer notoriously low teacher salaries). And just as staffing and enrollment patterns can vary by state, same goes for districts within states, too. Even so, when job openings are down statewide, it means the available candidates are vying for a smaller number of positions. (States or districts wanting to better understand their own staffing and enrollment patterns can use this template.)

ESSER hangover 

Federal COVID relief funds fed a hiring habit that can’t be sustained. The dreaded fiscal cliff predicted to hit when the ESSER spigot dries up was once treated as some abstract future threat. But we’re now watching that threat play out in real time as districts work to finalize next year’s budgets this month. It’s all right there in the budget financials released by schools this spring. 

With last week’s debt limit deal, it’s clear that more federal funding won’t come to districts’ rescue. And states aren’t likely to fill the hole either, as many of their revenue forecasts are sliding downward, too. 

Georgia recently reported a one-year drop of 16.5% in net tax collections. Massachusetts had a whopping 31% year-over-year decline in tax revenue. And California’s state revenue forecast just keeps getting gloomier.

For educators in high-demand roles, like math, science or special education, there will still be jobs. But for others, it’s likely to get much tougher as districts start to shrink their labor force to align with their new enrollment numbers.

The public discourse about widespread teacher shortages may be confusing to some, particularly when the data show we’ve just finished a period of staffing up our schools. In most regions, however, the new reality is this: Those seeking jobs in schools will soon be facing a job market quite different than what we’ve seen for several years.The upside for districts that are hiring? When there are fewer jobs and more job seekers, districts can afford to be choosier, and the quality of new hires rises.

ESSER funds should be analyzed without regard to partisanship. The nation’s education system, especially in underresourced rural and urban areas, has long needed additional funding to update classrooms and school buildings, integrate technology into teaching and learning, and refresh curriculum and materials. But funding alone does not yield meaningful progress for students, as seen with past government-funded programs like Investing in Innovation (i3) or Race to the Top, 

At this critical moment, when children have experienced learning deficits that amounted to approximately a third of a school year’s worth of knowledge, evidence of impact is particularly important. This makes now the ideal time for nonprofits to invest in developing evidence that shows their product works, and for districts to make such impact nonnegotiable when deciding what to bring into their schools.

It may come as a surprise that evidence of impact and standards alignment is not a primary decision-making factor for many districts. A 2017 survey of over 500 school and district leaders found that only 11% required peer-reviewed research when making ed tech purchasing decisions. A 2022 teacher survey by Educators for Excellence found that just 43% of educators agreed that their current curricula was high quality and well aligned to learning standards.

One reason is that evidence is hard to come by. A 2020 report found that just 7% of ed tech companies used randomized controlled trials to understand the impact of their products. Another reason is inertia: Based on the decades-long use of non-evidence-based literacy curricula, it is clear that once a decision is made, it’s hard for districts to pivot. 

Yet as the sector faces budgetary constraints, evidence-informed decision-making, both before and after procurement, becomes even more crucial. The issue is timely in several ways. 

First, learning gaps compound when they go unaddressed. That means there is limited time to help students not only catch up to grade level, but accelerate beyond. For example, 1 in 6 children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers. With limited in-classroom time available to help students catch up, evidence of impact should play a key role when districts decide what programs, models and interventions to buy. Many evidence-focused resources can help them guide decision-making, including EdResearch for Recovery and the National Student Support Accelerator. 

Second, with ESSER funding set to end in 2024, states and school districts have a limited amount of time to spend the $190 billion they have collectively been allocated. Besides risking student progress by spending funds on programs or services that do not lead to meaningful outcomes, districts face growing accountability from local constituents and taxpayers, who expect to see results when programs are bought with public funds. Districts should request evidence that a program is effective before making a procurement decision, and be prepared to explain that evidence to parents and others. If none is available, districts should find a different product.

Lastly, it’s only a matter of time before districts will need to decide what to keep and what to remove from their budgets. A recent EdNext analysis showed that 20% to 30% of ESSER funds have been used to purchase services, ranging from curriculum and supplies to one-time-projects and technology upgrades. Assessing the efficacy of each of these products will be critical in helping districts decide what to keep. For example, New Mexico’s Department of Education recently canceled its contract with a virtual tutoring provider because the program fell short of expectations. This shows the importance of measuring both short- and long-term impact. Districts should ensure that any contract they sign allows them to work with the provider to measure and understand student data, and make decisions based on the results. Doing so will provide a clear understanding of the financial and human resources needed to generate a specific outcome for students or teachers, ensuring that purchases are both effective and financially sustainable.

I’ve seen firsthand the benefits that a focus on evidence has for students and organizations. Nonprofits funded by Overdeck Family Foundation, such as Leading Educators, Saga Education, Springboard Collaborative, TalkingPoints and Zearn, have made evidence building and continuous improvement a priority over the past several years, conducting rigorous evaluations to ensure the product they offer districts improve student outcomes and are affordable. All these organizations have found that evidence of impact, while expensive to develop, has not only helped them expand, but has also increased demand. 

Due to the crisis nature of COVID, ESSER funding allocation favored speed over efficacy, limiting evidence requirements. But as rapid-relief dollars expire, the pressure on programs that lack evidence of student impact will grow. This may be just the impetus the education sector needs to prioritize evidence, improving the chances that all students receive the best possible education going forward, regardless of budgetary constraints.

Confronted with that startling reality, the new study from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab has identified a cost-effective, school-based model that can support young girls: group counseling and mentorship. 

Attending weekly in-school counseling for just four months through the Working on Womanhood program decreased PTSD symptoms brought on by witnessing or experiencing violent attacks or or losing a loved one by 22%, depression by 14% and anxiety by about 10%, according to the randomized control trial, considered the gold standard of research.

The program is currently offered to groups of 10 teen girls in about 30 Chicago Public Schools and more in Dallas, Kansas City and Boston.

“[Because of] the violence we see, and there’s violence everywhere, not just in Chicago… they are experiencing a lot of loss,” said Christine Diaz Luna, a senior counselor at Hancock College Prep which serves mostly Latino students on the city’s southwest side. “I’ve seen in my experience that loss, that grief, that longing for connection.” 

The high prevalence of PTSD shocked lead researcher Monica Bhatt, whose team studied over 3,700 9th- through 11th-grade girls across 10 high schools from 2017-19. 

“These are girls who, despite the very, very high levels of trauma that they were experiencing, are coming to school. We see a B average … We don’t see a lot of externalizing behaviors,” Bhatt said. 

“It really adds evidence to this notion … of having a set of latent mental health challenges that do surface later in life, but aren’t apparent early on.” Research has shown that leaving depression and PTSD unchecked can affect girls’ future ability to succeed in their careers and family. 

Earlier this year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shed some light into just how pervasive traumatic experiences are for young girls: 1 in 5 nationwide experienced sexual violence in 2021.

The Chicago research is the first large-scale study to look at effective mental health interventions specifically for Black and Latino girls — who are more likely than their peers to experience traumatic childhood experiences and have higher rates of depression and anxiety. 

“Usually, we sort of study program effectiveness on a large sample, and then we try to understand, does this vary for particular student groups?” Bhatt added. “This is a program that was designed particularly with Black and Latino girls in mind … We’re starting to develop a body of evidence where there wasn’t a lot prior.”

Students who are actively suicidal, have learning disabilities or are absent more than 75% of the year were excluded from the Chicago sample. More research is needed to understand how a program like WOW might impact those student groups. 

Researchers believe results would be even greater for girls attending for the designed length, two school years. According to Youth Guidance, the local nonprofit that launched the model in 2011, girls who start within clinical range for PTSD and depression have even more success: decreasing symptoms by 62% and 71%, respectively. 

WOW in Action

After her freshman year, whenever TK Nowlin was overwhelmed by family, school and friend stress, she’d get frustrated, and get into arguments, or stop communicating. 

Now a junior at Fenger Academy High School in her second year of WOW programming, she feels more calm and sure of herself. 

“[WOW] helped me work on my healthy relationships … It’s very important to listen to understand instead of listening to respond, and I know that played a big factor in my life, because it was like I always had a rebuttal to something,” Nowlin said. 

Fellow junior Yazmin Hunter told The 74 she now has a system when she’s reaching the point of frustration: take a break, sit down, breathe, listen to music, take a walk. 

Once a week, TK, Yazmin and peers across Chicago leave their elective or physical education classes to head to their WOW room. They start with a check-in, sharing a rose, bud, thorn from their week or comparing their mood to songs and colors. 

Her counselor facilitates either full group discussions or individual journaling. Surrounded by colorful walls, affirmations and mirrors, they sometimes pull cards from a container: Who is the most important person in your life? What does success or a support system look like to you? What are your views on parenting? 

Informed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the sessions get girls to reframe or question negative thoughts, reflect on how their day-day actions align with their personal values and listen openly to each others’ stories. 

“Our thoughts are powerful. And sometimes we think thoughts that aren’t necessarily true. As an example, you look in the mirror, ‘Oh my God, I’m ugly,’” Diaz Luna explained. “Let’s take that thought and break it down. What’s going on there? Where’s that coming from? Have you been told this before by someone else?”

Having the group offered during the school day is critical to reach students who work or have family commitments after school that would prevent them from attending otherwise. Students are never pulled out of core classes or lunch, only electives or physical education. 

Students can volunteer for the program, pending a parent’s permission. School staff can also refer students to the program if they notice someone struggling. 

Cost and space are typically the biggest barriers for potential school partners, Youth Guidance’s chief program officer Nacole Milbrook told The 74. 

At about $115,000 per school for one counselor, who works with four to five groups of students, WOW is still about $40,000 cheaper to run than the accepted threshold for similar services.

But those membership losses didn’t have a commensurate effect on the unions’ bottom line. On the contrary, the National Education Association and its state affiliates experienced significant boosts to revenue during the shutdown year.

The combined income of NEA and its state unions reached almost $1.75 billion in 2020-21, an increase of $49 million (2.9%) from the previous year. Almost all union revenue is exempt from income and capital gains taxes.

This financial information is derived from the unions’ annual disclosure reports for the Internal Revenue Service, detailing their income and expenditures. These are public records, but delays in reporting and availability mean a long wait before it is possible to gather comprehensive data from unions in all 50 states.

NEA national headquarters collected almost $397 million in revenue. Its richest affiliates were California ($222 million), New York ($167 million) and New Jersey ($153 million).

These large-membership states are self-sufficient, but many affiliates require national subsidies to pay the costs of union offices’ professional staff. Nine state affiliates received more than 20% of their total revenue directly from NEA. The Mississippi Association of Educators and NEA New Mexico were the most reliant on national funds.

Union employees are the primary beneficiaries of the bigger bankroll. NEA employed 513 staffers in Washington, D.C., of whom 396 earned six-figure salaries. Across the country, more than 2,300 NEA affiliate employees made more than $100,000 in salary.

Member dues supply most income, although periodically some unions receive a cash windfall through other means.

Both the North Carolina Association of Educators and the South Carolina Education Association saw dramatic growth in revenue due to the sale of properties. The North Carolina union sold land it owned in Raleigh to a real estate developer for an estimated $20 million, while the South Carolina union sold its headquarters building to the state for a highway widening project.

That union also benefited from $112,624 due to the forgiveness of a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the federal government’s Small Business Administration.

Higher interest rates are a burden, but they did increase the value of the unions’ cash investments and greatly aided their financial ledgers in another way: by reducing pension and retiree health care liabilities.

Just like school districts and state governments, unions must be able to cover the future costs of their retired employees. These liabilities can grow to such a significant degree that in 2020, eight NEA state affiliates had a negative net worth. They were a combined $606.5 million in the red.

But the increase in interest rates allowed pension systems everywhere to recompute the discount rate, which is a method of expressing future liabilities in today’s dollars. Put simply, a higher discount rate means lower pension liabilities.

The change in the discount rate was large enough to push NEA affiliates in Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada and West Virginia into the black. Georgia, Illinois, New York and Washington reduced their liabilities by large amounts but remained in the red.

Any union that can add $49 million to its coffers while losing 70,000 members amid the near-total shutdown of work sites is not one that needs to fear diminished power and influence. NEA is too big to fail.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Vanessa’s first two years of high school passed in a haze.

Some days she attended classes at her high school in East El Paso. Other days she ditched school to smoke or vape cannabis with her friends at a park. Then there were days she would arrive at school, walk straight back home and sleep all day after getting high alone in an empty house.

“There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t get high,” Vanessa said. “It made me forget the reason why I was alone. It was just a way to escape from reality, to dissociate.”

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Looking back, Vanessa realizes she was still in mourning from her sexual assault years prior and the rift it caused in her family.

When school counselor Alice Gardea felt concerned about why Vanessa was missing so many classes, she referred her to Project Vida, an El Paso-based nonprofit that offers therapy on campus.

Vanessa, who’s now 17 and heading toward her senior year of high school, described that conversation as the moment that “set everything in place.” Weekly therapy sessions helped her navigate her grief and take back control of her life, she said.

As teenagers struggle with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, organizations in El Paso are partnering with school districts to make mental health care more accessible. Local mental health providers say that cost, scheduling conflicts and lack of reliable transportation are among the barriers that prevent students from accessing therapy, especially if they live in rural areas.

Emergence Health Network, a local agency that provides mental health services, offers on-campus therapy and case management in 10 different schools in El Paso County. This month, the organization added the middle school and high school in Fabens, a community about 30 miles southeast of El Paso along the border.

Project Vida, which introduced its first on-campus therapist in 2017, spans 21 schools across El Paso and Hudspeth counties. In some schools, it’s not uncommon to see students who are raising themselves in non-traditional households, said Pamela Ponce, co-chief of school-based integrated health at Project Vida.

Early intervention can be life changing for not only children and teenagers – but also for the family and community they grow up in, Ponce said.

“Many of these people who are having crises in their adult years, those crises could have been prevented if they started getting services early during school age,” Ponce said. “It gives them the ability to learn coping skills, learn more about themselves, how to care for their mental health, then teach that to their parents and siblings.”

Mental health providers on school campus build trust

Project Vida began seeing the need for mental health services on campus in 2015, while its staff was in schools for the organization’s teenage pregnancy prevention program. Facilitators noticed that students were coming into Project Vida’s school offices to ask about topics besides sexual health, such as how to manage their anxiety, Ponce said.

Since Project Vida team members were visible on campus, showing up to lunch and school events, students began seeing them as trusted adults that they could talk to about any health issue, she said.

In 2017, Project Vida piloted its first on-campus, mental health care team at Eastlake High School, located on the outskirts of El Paso in Socorro Independent School District. The suicides of at least two students, linked to possible bullying, stunned the district that year.

Project Vida has since expanded to Clint, Canutillo and Fort Hancock, concentrating in middle and high schools and seeing about 300 students a year. Each mental health team, which typically rotates between two campuses, includes a licensed professional counselor or licensed clinical social worker. Availability tends to fill up within the first three months of the school year, although clinicians can take new students in the middle of the school year if their clients finish their treatment plan early, Ponce said.

Ponce said they see students who are grieving the loss of loved ones, experiencing panic attacks or struggling with depression. Students also showed signs of social anxiety when they returned to the classroom after back-to-back tragedies: The 2019 mass shooting at Walmart, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 3,600 people in El Paso.

Without on-campus services, students in small and rural communities may have to travel half an hour to an hour into El Paso for mental health care. That means a parent might have to miss work – and lose part of their income – to drive their child to their appointment, while the child may have to miss school.

A shortage of mental health care providers means people can face long wait times for appointments in El Paso to open up, or can only get monthly appointments rather than weekly or biweekly, Ponce said. Parents can also find it challenging to find a provider that takes their health insurance.

Project Vida’s program is funded by a combination of federal and state grants, as well reimbursements from Medicaid, CHIP and private insurance. The organization works with uninsured people on a sliding scale and won’t turn away anyone who can’t pay for services, Ponce said.

Vanessa described the day her counselor referred her to therapy as the day that changed her life. She thinks she’s better at not letting the painful events she couldn’t control, control her, she said. She’s begun catching up on her academics, quit her habitual vaping and looks forward to homecoming, prom and graduation next year – activities that used to not excite her.

It feels good to have the motivation to live again, she said.

“I recently wrote a poem for English class about my sexual assault and the emotions I was experiencing,” Vanessa said. “As I was writing and reading other poems about assault, it helped me feel it’s OK to not be OK.”

Small communities overcome mental health care stigma

When 18-year-old Ariana Bañez told her parents last year she wanted to see a professional mental health care provider, they didn’t believe her at first, she said.

Bañez, now a senior at Fabens High School, said she probably seemed like the typical overachiever. She was on the student council and competing to become the class valedictorian. She was involved with the school theater program and played French horn in the school band.

But Bañez said she had a hard time adjusting to her school load after returning to campus during the pandemic, after more than a year of virtual classes and canceled extracurricular activities. Bañez remembered trying to hide how overwhelmed she felt, but the pressure manifested in physical ways. She would get headaches and stomachaches. Sometimes she forgot to eat.

Searching for a therapist only brought more stress. The clinics in El Paso that Bañez called were booked and couldn’t take on new clients.

It also seemed taboo at the time to admit she needed help, Bañez said. Fabens has a population of less than 8,000 people – and gossip spreads fast, she described. Some of her peers feel they can’t speak up about anxiety, depression or family problems because “everyone will say, well, get over it.”

“We’re a really close-knit community,” Bañez said. “But when it’s like that, when family issues come up, it gets harder to deal with. It’s hard to really express that without everyone judging you.”

Natalie Mendez, a qualified mental health professional from Emergence Health Network, said educating parents and destigmatizing mental health are a major part of her job. Mendez supervises the network’s team at Canutillo ISD. About 6,200 people live in Canutillo, a census-designated place on the northwest side of El Paso County.

If a parent is receiving services for a child, they don’t necessarily want the staff at the school to know because staff might know their friend and then word gets around, Mendez explained.

Sometimes parents are initially open to mental health services, but opposed once a provider explains treatment options, Mendez said. Other times parents mistake services as a quick fix that will immediately change their child’s behavior, grades and attendance. Ultimately, students should have a direct say in their mental health care and forcing them to get treatment before they’re ready can re-open trauma, Mendez said.

“When a child is not on board, we don’t recommend services because the child has to be in charge,” Mendez said. “Regardless of their age, they need to be the one to set their own goal. … The child and parent are equal partners. Our job is to bridge that partnership so we are working together for the benefit of the whole family.”

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission funds Emergence Health Network’s operation, which includes three schools in Canutillo ISD and five schools in El Paso ISD. Emergence Health Network has seen about 350 students for on-campus services since 2020.

Along with therapy, the organization provides case management and informal youth mentorship. A therapist can help a student trace why they feel anxious in crowded hallways while a case manager can help a student develop grounding techniques, like counting tiles on a ceiling, when they’re in a situation that triggers their anxiety, Mendez explained.

“They’re both tackling the same problem,” Mendez said. “One is understanding the reason, the other piece is, ‘OK, what are we going to do about it?’”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The boy is dyslexic and has a disorder that prevents his eyes from working together — a combination that requires intensive and specialized therapy and instruction. Since kindergarten, Garcia has toted medical records and other documentation of Vincent’s needs to meeting after meeting. But the district never found him an appropriate school, so eventually Garcia did that herself. 

Now, here was an anonymous auditor confirming that despite a fistful of favorable decisions from the people who preside over special education disputes — known as independent hearing officers — the district had all but entirely failed to reimburse her thousands of dollars for Vincent’s private school tuition. 

Garcia, whose name and the name of her son have been changed to protect the child’s privacy, says that at first she thought the email was fake. “It was the first time anybody ever said anything that had happened was wrong,” she says. “Everyone up until then had just been like, ‘Oh, well.’ ”

She felt a glimmer of optimism, Garcia says, but also steeled for it to be one more episode of false hope.

Special education is notoriously fraught in many school systems, but the magnitude of the problem in the nation’s largest district, New York City, boggles. The department is supposed to educate nearly a quarter of a million children with disabilities — a population that in 2019 was larger than the entire student body of all but seven U.S. school districts. In 2020-21, nearly 21% of New York City’s roughly 1 million schoolchildren received special education services, compared to a national average of 15%. 

By all accounts, the Department of Education every year fails to meet even basic obligations to tens of thousands of children with disabilities. Stretching back two decades, numerous lawsuits and state audits have flagged the same problems over and over. Just this week, it was reported that 9,800 children — or close to 37% of NYC preschoolers with disabilities — did not receive all of their required services, and in March, it was revealed that 64% of bilingual special education students did not.

Because very little has changed, parents are forced — typically after years of neglect — to seek out everything from specialized instruction to intensive therapies on their own. They and their service providers are entitled to reimbursement.

The Garcias are just one of thousands of families stuck in a narrow Sisyphean outgrowth of the dysfunction. Even with fat files of documentation and legal orders in their favor, they can’t get the department to actually cut the requisite checks. The more families who, denied services, flood into the due process system, the more bogged down it gets.

Currently, there are some 2,000 families who won their cases in front of an independent hearing officer only to have the Department of Education fail to comply with the resulting decisions. 

The NYC Department of Education did not respond to The 74’s multiple requests for comment for this story. Lawyers and advocates who have followed the district’s attempts to improve its due process pipeline say it recently has added staff in an effort to clear the backlog, but basic failings persist.

The system was already at a standstill, say critics. But now, a reservoir of children whose confirmed or suspected disabilities went unevaluated and unserved during the pandemic threatens to overwhelm it completely. The department struggles to find, heat and cool, and staff enough rooms to hear waiting families’ cases, much less process their reimbursements.

Vincent was years from being born when a court first ordered the district to revamp its handling of the hearing officers’ orders. In 2003, Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that works on behalf of disadvantaged NYC children, filed a class-action lawsuit, L.V. v Department of Education, over the problems with the hearing officer system. The suit originally encompassed nine students and now includes the thousands who are essentially in the same predicament as Vincent.

“All I can say is that I have been doing this since 2012 and there’s a new problem every year,” says Bonnie Spiro Schinagle, the special education attorney who represents Garcia. “It doesn’t seem like anyone has really put organized thought into this, identified problems, identified solutions and then figured out a pathway to implementing them. They just haven’t.” 

The litigation was supposed to force the DOE to begin complying more promptly with orders issued by hearing officers. There has been little progress though and in March, a special master — a court-appointed overseer tasked with tracking the district’s compliance — issued a 127-page report containing 75 recommendations and a warning: The overhaul still would take years to complete. 

Unstopping the bottleneck will require such wholesale transformations, the report says, as the department moving a process that now often involves handwritten documents online and making itself a more attractive, competitive employer — not just to the special educators and therapists who are in desperately short supply — but to the administrative staff who process hearing orders and invoices.

It’s the latest in a long line of attempts to impose timeliness, responsiveness and efficacy on a system with a protracted history of being resistant to all three.

‘The reality is people have been waiting for years’

Garcia knew very little of this context when she received the December email that seemed too good to be true. The auditor, whose appointment was part of the 20-year-old class-action lawsuit, suggested that she ask her attorney to file a federal lawsuit. The email included an attachment the auditor said would serve as evidence substantiating her claim. Garcia called Spiro Schinagle, who said she was already preparing civil complaints for a number of families who had received similar emails. The lawyer added the Garcias to her list.

Well-worn federal civil rights law is clear regarding situations like theirs: If a school system can’t serve a child with disabilities, it must pay for a program that can. Vincent’s mother enrolled him at a private school in Queens serving a small number of children with learning disabilities like her son’s.

His tuition changes from year to year, but has hovered around $44,000 a year, according to court documents. If that sounds steep, it includes the cost of services school districts frequently struggle to provide in a cost-effective manner.

So far, in each school year the family has been forced to pay some or all of the tuition, pending a response from the DOE bureaucracy. Not including the 2022-23 school year, the Garcias are owed at least $27,324, plus attorney fees, according to court filings 

As the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act requires, the district is supposed to serve children who need special education services along a continuum ranging from individualized help in a regular classroom to the kind of specialized placement Vincent requires. NYC students whose needs can’t be met in a typical school are often referred to District 75, a portfolio of separate DOE schools created to offer more intensive support. 

When there is a disagreement about a student’s proposed Individualized Education Program — the legal document spelling out their required services — the dispute goes before a neutral arbiter. An impartial hearing officer — someone trained and paid by New York state — must be assigned within two days and the case heard in two weeks or less. 

The entire process should take no more than 75 days. But Garcia’s experience of having it drag on is common. 

“The reality is that people have been waiting for years to get the orders to get the services their children need,” says Rebecca Shore, director of litigation at Advocates for Children. “It’s not an issue of resources being available. It’s an issue of kids getting the services they need.”

Advocates and attorneys who represent special education families in New York City are quick to assert that the bottleneck — getting the DOE to comply with orders issued as the result of a single type of due process hearing — is a symptom of the much bigger problem. 

In 1979, a group of families sued the department, alleging that it failed to obey federal laws requiring the evaluation of all children with suspected disabilities and to provide them with appropriate services. Because the system has never been able to keep up with the need, pressure from that lawsuit resulted in a decision ordering the district to pay for a private school for the children it can’t serve. 

One outcome, according to Michael Rebell, a professor and the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has been enough demand to fuel the creation of a large number of private schools offering specialized programs for children with disabilities.

“Because we have this gargantuan system, for years the department has had problems hiring enough teachers and offering enough programs,” he says. “There’s a paucity of services. And there’s also a large number of middle-class families who would prefer their kids go to private schools.” 

Recognizing that indeed some parents might try to game the system, the rules say families must prove to an independent hearing officer that the district has left them no alternative. Unless the department appeals and wins, the hearing officer’s decision goes into effect. 

There are two massive, resulting problems: A backlog of cases needing to be heard and the department’s inability to pay the parents, schools and providers who the hearing officers determine are owed money. 

In 2007, Advocates for Children and the department settled L.V., which took aim only at the issues involving the hearing officer process, with the district agreeing to take a series of steps to speed things up. For the next decade-plus, an outside auditor — the same progress monitor who flagged the Garcias’ numerous unfulfilled hearing orders — periodically reported middling progress to the court. 

Twelve years later, with her son entering third grade and three years of fruitless attempts to secure an accurate diagnosis and an appropriate school placement for him, Garcia asked for her first impartial hearing. She would leave one frustrating part of the special education system only to enter another.

For Garcia, the last straw

From kindergarten through second grade, Vincent bounced from school to school. Like lots of bright kids who struggle to read, he was initially dismissed as lazy, his mother says. 

“He’s always been able to participate verbally and in presentations, but not able to read a paragraph,” recalls Garcia. “People kept telling me, ‘Oh, he’s not trying hard enough. He’s so articulate.’”

The boy confounded the evaluators, his mother said. The first time Garcia had him assessed, the psychologist doing the testing came out to the waiting room to say she was ending the session because Vincent could not stop crying. “She’s like, ‘This isn’t good for him.’”

He was diagnosed as dyslexic, but it quickly became apparent that specialized literacy instruction wasn’t enough to address his needs, says Garcia. Extensive testing revealed that despite 20/20 vision with glasses, Vincent was literally not seeing the right letters in the right sequence. 

He had a condition called ocular motor dysfunction, which means his eyes do not track the same things. Because of this, he literally could not see lines of text. Letters appeared out of sequence and above or below the line. 

His eyes needed training to work together, rather than presenting him with different, jumbled images. And he needed assistive technology — chiefly simple text-to-speech apps — to make sense of written words. 

In response, his mother said the district placed Vincent in a school it operates for children with intellectual impairments, such as Down’s and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The program sent him back, pointing out that the DOE had misclassified the boy, placing him in a category of student the school did not serve.

But despite several months of back and forth over whether the district would accept its own diagnoses and come up with what it thought was an appropriate school, nothing happened.

For Garcia, it was the last straw. That’s when she hired her attorney, Spiro Schinagle, and started the process of having Vincent referred to a private school. In January 2020, the family sent the city education department a legal document saying that, because the district had failed to offer the child an appropriate placement, they were enrolling him in the Queens school they had found themselves. 

At a cost of almost $21,000 for the spring semester — which Garcia, who works for another part of the NYC schools, paid from savings — Vincent spent the rest of the year starting to catch up at his new school. In May 2020, an independent hearing officer ordered the district to reimburse the family. But it wasn’t until this spring that Garcia got reimbursed for the 2019-20 school year.

With the district failing to come up with an alternative, Vincent has remained at the private school ever since. Each year, Garcia has had to demand a new impartial hearing and then wait months for it to take place. After every favorable decision, the family waits for the district to comply with the new order.

In August 2021, facing the prospect of fronting more tuition payments, Garcia agreed to a $12,500 settlement for the 2020-21 academic year — money she has yet to see.

As the orders requiring the district to pay stacked up, Vincent was placed in a category where the city was no longer disputing his placement and now owed the tuition money directly to his school. It’s unclear from court documents how much of that money the school has been paid. The school did not respond to a request for comment.

The advent of the 2021-22 school year meant the opening of yet another case. This round took until mid-April for the hearing officer to issue an order obligating the district to pay — directly to the school this time — for the year that was then about to conclude. In turn, Garcia said the school was supposed to reimburse her $4,400 she had gone ahead and paid, but said it could not because the district did not supply the school with some required paperwork. 

“They knew that this child belonged in this particular school,” says Spiro Schinagle. “And the district time and time again refused to listen to its own [evaluator]…. So the parent had to lay out money year after year, and had to retain me, year after year, and go to a hearing, year after year. That, in and of itself, is outrageous.” 

‘The goal of this lawsuit was to change the system’

The bottleneck that’s trapped the Garcia family is growing, according to the 2021-22 annual report of the New York Citywide Council on Special Education. In November 2021, it reported, there were more than 16,000 pending impartial hearing cases, a 34% increase from the year before. Some 9,000 cases had not even been assigned to a hearing officer. 

New York City, a separate analysis found, is responsible for 96% of all of the impartial hearings requested in the state. The number of pending cases had not budged by January 2022. Attorneys and advocates predict that the COVID backlog will further overwhelm the system, as the parents of children who may not have gotten needed therapies for years file cases. 

The council’s summary of the problems is straightforward: Because families still aren’t getting the services their children are entitled to, cases continue to be filed. Beyond that, there are not enough hearing officers and those that exist get delayed pay. 

Some officers have untenable caseloads; one had a docket of more than 1,000 pending cases, as of January 2022. The Brooklyn facility where the hearings are held has no heat or air conditioning and no waiting areas or photocopiers. 

The “next steps” identified by the special master hint at how far from resolution those basic problems may be. The department, its report to the court suggests, should form a steering committee and appoint people to oversee “the areas of people, process and technology.”

Two pages of acronyms for various parts of the DOE bureaucracy precede 75 recommendations ranging from figuring out how to put accounts payable online so outside service providers can get paid to streamlining onerous civil service rules that complicate hiring enough people to handle the payments. 

The document is in fact so complicated that Advocates for Children, which represents the plaintiffs in the 20-year-old case, translated those recommendations it agrees with into plain English and put them onto a simple chart along with suggested timelines for implementation. 

The judge must now decide which recommendations to adopt, and how to hold the department accountable for progress. There is no deadline for that decision.

“We need this to happen in an expeditious manner,” says Shore, Advocates for Children’s litigation director. “The goal of this lawsuit was to change the system so that families whose children were not getting services could get their needs met.”

As it stands, Spiro Schinagle says, the amount the district is spending to pay for due process proceedings just continues to climb. “I don’t know how much it would cost to really assess different categories of kids who really need to be served and to put together credible programs,” she says. “They’re hemorrhaging money… that they could have been spending on all sorts of things.” 

The ongoing wrangling over the class-action suit isn’t likely to help the Garcias anytime soon. Vincent’s 2022-23 academic year started the same way as the three before it: with the DOE not paying its bills. 

With the auditor’s email as evidence, the family’s lawsuit finally seemed to get the district’s attention. In May, the DOE emailed Spiro Schinagle a document agreeing to pay the school directly for the academic year that just finished and to pay for Vincent to return in the fall. 

Garcia says she is still waiting on reimbursement for the settlement she agreed to for the money she laid out for the boy’s fourth-grade tuition, as well as some other payments. If the district pays everything she is owed, Spiro Schinagle says she will withdraw the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Vincent is thriving, his mother said. He started at his new school at age 8 reading at a kindergarten level and, now finishing sixth grade, has mastered third-grade literacy. He gets occupational therapy for his eyes at school, which means he and his mother no longer have to make a weekly trip to Manhattan from the Bronx for private care. 

Far from being lazy, as his past teachers suggested, Vincent works hard, his mother says, diligently doing his homework and signing himself up to be in the school play and serve on the student council. 

“He’s thriving. He has friends,” Garcia says. “His school loves him.”

In this week’s episode, Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner grapple with a concept that pushes their understanding of the test-and-learn approach in education innovation and see the beauty of embracing a child-like mind in learning and exploring boundaries to understand where new ideas work — and maybe more importantly, where they break.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Horn: Hey, Diane.

Tavenner: Michael, this is our penultimate episode of Season 4. Which is just a word I love, so I always have to use it when I can. It has me feeling a little bit like, where has this year gone? I’ll admit that’s a bit of a welcome change to the last few years that have been pandemic years. I’m pretty sure each of those years, by this time, I was like, can school please just end as fast as possible? You’ll keep me honest about that one, but I think this is different.

Horn: Well, and I suspect you’re not alone on that. I think a lot of folks felt that way. But it feels like the rhythms are returning more and more to what they are, and what they were, rather. That any scar tissue, shall we say, of past years, for better and for worse, frankly, is fading more and more into people’s memories it seems, Diane.

Tavenner: Yeah. Which is why, among other reasons, I think it’s only fair that we share with our listeners that this time of year has us wondering a bit. We started Class Disrupted shortly after the pandemic began, as a way to make sense of what was happening in the world and education and in our schools. Honestly, in hope of turning that really horrible time into an opportunity for the change in our schools that we both advocate for and believe in, and think is imperative. Now the pandemic is officially over, and I’m almost officially finished with my 20 years of leading a school system. I mean, I guess the big question that’s coming up for us is, where do we go next, if at all, with our conversations?

Horn: Wow. That, if at all, sort of lands with a thud for me, Diane. But we’re being transparent here with our listeners. We always are, but we’re especially being so right now. Because frankly, I don’t think we’d be credible, Diane, if we weren’t asking ourselves first, should we continue doing Class Disrupted? Second, if we do continue it, and hopefully people are listening right now and being like, “No, keep on it.” I think the question then becomes, if we do, how might we iterate on it? I’ll be the first to say, selfishly, I really enjoy working together on this project with you. I love learning from you. I feel like every episode I come out a better human. 

So I’m not ready to end this. I also want what we’re doing to be relevant and purposeful and helpful to those that we’re trying to reach, our listeners. I would love it, again, selfish request, but for all you listening, drop us a note. Get us on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever you’re connected to us. Email us. What are the big questions on your mind, where we can be helpful? What would you like to see from us, if we continue this? You can tell us to stop, also, that’s OK. Any and all suggestions, ideas, feedback, advice, all frankly welcome as we figure out what’s next here, Diane.

Tavenner: Yeah, Michael, we definitely would love to hear from folks. It’s one of the highlights when we hear from people. Certainly, we always take the feedback to heart and try to incorporate it. I think it’s made us better. This concept of being purposeful is really important. There’s got to be meaning and intent in what we’re doing. Everyone’s time is extraordinarily valuable, and we know that there’s a ton of things to listen to out there. What do you need? What do you want? What do you wish from us? I’m really curious to hear. Speaking of curiosity, Michael, yours is going to lead us into the topic we’re going to talk about today. 

All this year, we’ve been getting into the weeds and tracking the details of a pilot we’ve been running at Summit, which has helped us really think about innovation and continuous improvement and all of that. As we wrap up the year, we’ve both been reflecting on what we’ve learned. It’s taking a big step back around that. You got curious about a concept from your co-author of Choosing College, Bob Moesta, and how it might be useful in my reflections on the year. So we’re going to dig in to red lines and green lines today.

Horn: I suspect people are like, what the heck is a red line, and what the heck is a green line? I thought red lines were things you saw on papers. First, to give folks a bit of context. Bob, along with Clay Christensen, they’re the originators of this jobs-to-be-done theory, which has kind of taken on a life of its own. It’s actually, I think, googled more than disruptive innovation at this point. It’s basically a theory that says, people buy things or switch behavior because they have a struggling moment in their lives, and they want to make progress. They aren’t so much buying what you offer, as they’re looking to make progress. So the focus is really on what is that progress, and designing around that. If you’re lucky enough to have designed your product to match the progress they want, then you could get hired. That’s sort of the simplistic way. It’s more complex than that.

I’m not actually sure, Diane, I’ve ever described it the way I just did, but I think it’s a really powerful window into product or service development. Bob had frankly a couple other unbelievable mentors besides Clay. I feel like if you step back and you’re like, “You got mentored by Clay Christensen,” I pinch myself. Bob also had Edwards Deming, of continuous improvement fame, that you know well. He also had Genichi Taguchi in his corner, who was a Japanese engineer and statistician famous for developing the Taguchi methods for design and statistics. He sort of had an embarrassment of riches around him in that way. Diane, Bob for years has been telling me that the real key in innovation is not to test and learn from what works, but to learn when something fails. This has felt like a Yoda-like statement to me. 

Tavenner: That’s what people say all the time. People are always talking about learning from failure. I’m so glad we’re digging in, because it is Yoda-like. What’s he talking about?

Horn: Exactly. Frankly, I never fully understood. I’m like, you test and learn to figure out success. I would push him a couple times, and not get it. I’d just feel really dumb, and then I’d forget about it. He has his own podcast called The Circuit Breaker. In a recent episode, he was talking about this concept again. It finally clicked for me, while I was at a gym at ASU+GSV, of all places, the education conference. We’ll link to the episode, which is titled “Red Line Green Line Development.” Essentially, what Bob learned from Taguchi stemmed from what he observed when he was helping build cars for Ford, and comparing it to how Toyota and the other Japanese automakers designed cars. I’ll do my best to summarize, because I suspect people didn’t come in for an automotive lesson.

In essence, the Japanese at the time were doing far more prototypes early in the process of design than the Americans were. Whereas the Americans were basically just trying to figure out the one “best process” that worked, and then just codify it, and do it again and again. The purpose of the prototypes in Japan was in essence to learn, where were the boundaries of the things they were building, where things would actually break? They would basically create something that worked, but then they would start to tweak it to see, where won’t it work? They would build lots of prototypes. It was all about learning a lot early, early on in the beginning stages of development. Now, we talked a lot about failure here on the podcast this year, but this was like they were intentionally in some ways trying to fail early on, so that they could learn. 

It almost flips it on its head a little bit, so that you didn’t have failure at the end of this process. It was really to understand, I also think, of like causality and theory building. What led to what, and in what circumstances and where didn’t it work? In essence, the green line was that approach that Bob observed in Japan. Where there’s a lot of frenetic activity in the beginning. No one’s waiting on anyone else. Everyone’s working in parallel, doing lots of experiments and prototypes. You’re working on something. I say, “Gee, what are the variables you’re playing with, so I can learn about how it might impact my part of the project?” As you get closer and closer to launch, things actually start to calm down. It’s sort of a, explore, explore, explore upfront, and then settle down. 

Whereas, the red line approach is the opposite. It’s all about, just make it work. Projects start slowly. They’re done in series. I wait for you to design your part, and then I get started on mine, which is sequential. All the tests are around verifying that stuff worked, rather than learn about how they didn’t work. Then as launch approached, things would get super frenetic, which I suspect people are familiar with. The deadline’s looming. Stuff’s breaking, we’ve got to fix it. Lots of changes, and changes are a lot more expensive toward the end of a project than they are at the beginning. There’d be a lot of fixes then, even once we’ve launched. 

The big philosophical differences I think from this green line versus red line is that, in the red line, we’re designing experiments to prove our hypotheses. Whereas with Taguchi and the green line, we’re doing experiments with no sense of what will happen. We’re just learning and finding limits, and we have a certain humility around it. The way I created something on a past project, it might inform what I’m doing, but I don’t take that as ground truth. I’m using it to learn more, and what may or may not be relevant. It’s all about discovering the boundaries. Once I’ve built something, where does it break, Diane? Let me stop there. I’ll give some maybe examples later to make it more concrete, but I’m curious how that lands. 

Tavenner: Well, so much is coming up for me. We’ve been talking about this for several days now. As you were talking this time, I was like, oh, click, click, click. A whole bunch of ideas were sparking for me. The first one, and I’ll be quick about this. I always want to bring it back to students. As you were talking, Michael, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. You’re describing the green line is what it looks like when a project that students are doing is really well designed and working really well.” Because at the beginning, there’s like this frenetic energy where they’re trying things, trying things, getting feedback, getting feedback. A lot of it’s wrong and not good, because the learning’s happening, they’re building the skills.

But by the time you literally get to the end of the project, there’s essentially nothing to “grade,” if you will. Because as a teacher, you’ve seen everything all along. You’ve seen the growth, you’ve seen it come together. It’s calmer at the end. Versus the reverse, which is what I think we see most in schools. Which is nothing, nothing, nothing. It’s very linear, very ordered, very slow. Then the night before something’s due, it’s like this cramming of trying to put things together. Then we wonder why it’s not good, and the learning is not there when you do that.

Horn: Wow. The focus is all on process on the latter one, versus the learning on the front one. Wow.

Tavenner: Exactly. I mean we’ve been talking for days, and that was the first time it clicked for me. I was trying to really get a visual in my head of the difference between these two lines, when you were talking. Clearly I think what’s at the root of these two things is mindset. It’s so key. On the green line, you really have a growth mindset, or a childlike mind. It’s filled with wonder. It’s filled with curiosity. It’s absent of ego and certainty. You’re really just front-loading the work. Here’s the key. It’s going to be messy. It’s going to look messy, it’s going to seem confusing. I think we tend to try to get away from that in schools, and in life. 

But that’s actually where you trace the outlines of the absolute limits of what’s going to be possible, for both how you’re going to build the thing, or your process, but also what it is you’re building. I do think there’s two parts there that are important. That’s really what you’re doing first, is figuring out that boundary. People often use this analogy of the sandbox. We play in a sandbox. When I think about a sandbox, I’m like, “Yeah, you’re pushing the walls of the sandbox, and making it as big as you possibly can.” Then what you can do sort of fits within those boundaries. After you’ve done that, then you can figure that out. This brings up something for me that I’m curious about. 

Instinctually, I am a leader, and I think people who work around me would say this, who really likes to be involved heavily upfront. I know they would say it, because I know they talk to each other and say, “Hey, whatever you do, make sure you get Diane involved upfront.” Don’t get too far down the line when we’re designing a new program or a project, because that’s where I really like to mix it up. As I think about that process, it’s very quick and messy, and there’s a lot going on. I, in my mind, always call it alignment. Once we then get aligned after a little bit, then I’m like, “Good, run with it.” We can check in. I’m very hands-off at that point. I’m thinking about those instincts I have now, and they feel green line-ish? I don’t know. Yeah, I’m thinking they feel green line-ish.

Horn: Fascinating, fascinating. I’d be curious… I’m so curious to have Bob listen to this afterwards, because I think he’s similar, by the way. He’s very upfront. Then once the idea is sort of understood, other people bring it into the world. I want to move it into education a little bit more, another step, because you just went there with how children might approach something. I thought that was fascinating. Diane, I had also those several ahas as I listened to this podcast of Bob’s, of how it applies to education. I’m going to get to one of them in a bit. But the first one I had was, frankly… I was at ASU+GSV. There’s a lot of ed tech companies around, and I kind of think that ed tech companies don’t really do this green line work at all. Almost everything you get, at least in the market, seems like it has to be implemented under perfect conditions to get these results. 

Almost all the research I see is very like, “Hey, the process works like this. If you don’t get the dosage, you don’t get the impact. It has to be in this model with this rotation, interacting with this curriculum, blah, blah, blah.” The real world just doesn’t work like that. I kind of think, the ed tech companies, are they spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to break what they create? The curriculum and stuff like that, to figure out, “Hey, these are the meaningful boundaries,” so that they could stretch beyond the one way to do it, the one dosage. Instead, maybe get a deeper understanding of causality, what really causes the learning outcomes that they see. What’s the most important thing? What truly are the non-negotiables that you have to have? Because they’ve looked at it through a lot of different circumstances, and developed accordingly. 

I kind of think if they did that, we might see a much more robust set of products out in the market. The word robust I use there, meaning it’d be resilient to a lot of different learning models and conditions and school types and so forth. As you know, I’m working on a book right now, again with Bob and with Ethan Bernstein at Harvard Business School. It’s actually adjacent to education. It’s about helping people find their next job, so career switching. We built a process actually to help people switch jobs, and it started working really well. It was a several-week-long process. It was different reflection exercises and so forth. There was a coach. Then we wanted to learn, how do we make it simpler? How do we make it so, when you’re reading it in a book, you can keep doing it? 

Then, where does it break? We did one sprint where we did it in two weeks, so we knew it was going to be too fast. We knew there was no way they were really going to get the impact out of it, but we wanted to understand how it broke. Then, when is it too long? When is it too self-guided? On and on. So we had all these questions just to understand, how do the results change in different ways of manifesting it? So we really can understand how to stretch it out, and build something more resilient, frankly, that has a better understanding of cause and effect ultimately. Can you imagine if ed tech companies did this?

Instead of coming into your schools and saying, “Gee, Diane. We’ve got this great math product, but you can only use it if you dedicate this many days and this many hours. And you have to change how your teachers do this thing over here.” I know you. You literally throw these folks out and say, “Sorry, it doesn’t work for our model.” Because I think you’ve known instinctively. I guess if companies came to you with a heartier set of products, that actually worked in a range of circumstances. And handled the “real world” better, so it could work in a Summit model, but also work in a traditional school model. Maybe it’s not possible, but I don’t think they’re even testing it to see. How does that land?

Tavenner: Yeah, a couple things coming up for me. One, guilty as charged in terms of being not very tolerant for a lot of products that are on the market. Also simultaneously feeling a little, I want to be humble here. We weren’t an ed tech company for sure, but we did build a technology platform to support our school model. I’m now thinking about that work with the lens of the green line. It took me back to like 2010-11 when we were developing what would become the Summit learning model and platform. I think we had a lot of the green line mindset, Michael, but I’m not sure we did it the way you’re describing there. I mean, here’s what we had. We literally didn’t know what would work, so we just started trying things. 

At first, we were a little bit timid and slow, but honestly we just started going and picking up speed. Since education is pretty complex, and it was a whole school model, there were lots of different people trying lots of different things, all at the same time, which seems very green line to me, and very fast at the beginning. We had week-long cycles in the beginning. We were constantly watching how students and teachers would respond to different things we tried, and we were in continual dialogue with them through focus groups and surveys and feedback. I mean, you remember those days. I would walk through the room, and students would come up to me and give me feedback, and be like, “This isn’t working, and this is what we need.”

We actually developed a system for this, because things were moving so fast. It was literally posters. We had these posters on the wall, and they would change each week. They would say like, “Here’s the feedback we got from last week. Here’s the input you all got. Here’s what we’ve done to address it.” Then there was a space to gather more feedback and input. It was literally gathering all this data, and moving really quickly. So many fails, so many fails, but we were super transparent about it. Everyone could track all of the information. I feel like we were at least mostly on the green line. I remember simultaneously feeling totally exhilarated. 

I look back to that time, and it’s still some of the most fun, best learning. It felt like we were all learning together, all at once. Each day was driven by curiosity and discovery. It felt like we were making progress, and we were doing it together. At the same time, I always felt uneasy. It never felt comfortable, or like a place that we could stay, or even take a breath, really. We were really testing the boundaries of what might be possible, so we could figure out where they were and then design within them. These are the boundaries of a personalized learning model that we were really testing. One of the boundaries that we pushed really hard on was attendance. 

Specifically taking attendance, which has a whole lot of legal requirements and financial implications. It’s also a big time suck, and as we often talk about, really misaligned with the ways personalized and real world learning work. We really, really pushed on that one. We went so far as to trying to install chip readers at the doors of the building, that would mark a student present when they detected the chip that we had adhered to each of their computers. That was just one of many things we tried. For the record, that was a step too far, and it didn’t work for a ton of reasons. But that’s the type of thing you do on the green line, I think.

Horn: Yeah. I mean this strikes me as exactly right. I won’t say like pull it into the product that got developed, but the model that you all built. I remember when you were doing all that prototyping, and you had literally numerous experiments going on in the same building sometimes. I’d go one place to the next, and see two totally different things going on. I think your description matches exactly what I saw. I guess if we take that and then extend it into what we’ve shared with the audience this year. Say the prototype you’ve done around better supporting your novice, you call them executive directors, EDs, or most people call them school principals. People might remember the basic idea, that you had the expert long-standing principals or EDs supporting the novice ones, and helping them understand the resources that were available to them and so forth. 

Part of this was these regular meetings between these people, sort of buddying them up, if you will. You started out with a hypothesis that maybe it’d be an hour long meeting. What ultimately came out of it was the time was less important. It was more the regularity and the content of it. I guess on the one hand, someone who’s listening might say, “Well, did you start saying, ‘Can we stretch out that to two months instead of monthly,’ or, ‘Can we do it in 30 minutes instead of an ad hoc?’” I guess I want to hear your reflections there. Before you do, my other gut is that maybe what really happened is we left out a stage in the design process in describing what you did for our listeners that we may not have shared.

I don’t know this, some of the upfront iterations you did before you had a design you were really ready to roll out and test. So let me ask the question maybe in a more open-ended way. When I listened to this, like I said, I had one reaction. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is why so much ed tech companies don’t hit the mark.” Then the other one was like, “I just really want to know what Diane has to say on this, because I’m super curious.” It feels very different from a lot of the test-and-learn stuff we talked about in the beginning of the year. I guess, how might this concept change how you would design the pilots we talked about, this ED pilot throughout the year? Maybe that’s the open-ended question. 

Tavenner: You ask. Yeah, it’s good to think about. I think what you’re surfacing, Michael, is that it can be hard to make transparent or be metacognitive about the things we do sometimes. In this case, I think you’re right. I think we probably left out a whole beginning of our work out of our conversations, mostly because I just probably took them for granted. I’m so glad we’re getting into it now. I appreciate the framework for really triggering me to think about what we did in helpful ways. What’s coming to mind when I hear your question about what we would’ve done differently is actually something that Malia, who was our project lead, did instinctually that I think represents the green line. It wasn’t planned, but it’s what she did. There was this point early on in the pilot when our cooperating EDs and the onboarding EDs were meeting and using… You talked about the timing. 

That’s one thing we were testing at that time. Also, we had a template agenda for those meetings. We agreed on an agenda that they would use, that we thought would help surface the things we wanted to surface. Malia just kept getting a lot of folks saying, “Hey, we think the agenda needs revision. We think this should change, or that should change.” They had all these various inputs that they were giving her. Their mindset initially was a little bit I think red line, like, “Hey, Malia. You change the agenda, and then we can continue having meetings.” Malia was like, “Oh, heck no. You’re welcome to adjust the agenda. Just document what you’re doing, so we can learn. But this can totally be happening simultaneously with all the other things we’re testing.”

As I reflect on that moment, it feels more green line to me in mindset and approach. Certainly we didn’t have this language, and it was just a thing that Malia did. I remember the conversation with her after. She was like, “Hey, I did this. Do you think that’s fine? Do you think I messed up the pilot?” I was grateful that she had comfort with a bunch of people working on different parts at the same time. And that she wasn’t managing the project in a way that was so linear that people had to wait on each other. Which just conjures up these true assembly line ideas to me, which is like, I’m waiting for the person before me, and the person after me is waiting for me, and we’re handing these things off.

Horn: Yeah, I love it. Bob uses that language even, right? He’s like, “You might be the UX person doing the website, or something like that. You think you have to wait for the person who’s doing the programming on the frontend. Instead be like, ‘OK, what are the variables you’re playing with? Let me just design a bunch of prototypes off of what that could look like, so I can learn. Then when we’re ready to snap them together, I already know so much more.’” I do think it flips some of these test-and-learn ideas on its head a bit in interesting ways. Maybe it’s just what we both have reflected on, that it’d be more of like a, let’s try a bunch of upfront stuff as part of our learning agenda. Then as we start to understand the boundaries, as we start to understand what works and why, let’s start to lock down into something. 

At which point, we actually start to… We’re no longer, as Bob might say, hypothesis seeking. We start to actually really have some hypotheses. Now we’re testing and learning through those hypotheses as we get nearer and nearer to launch. We also, by the way, have probably a lot more knowledge upfront, so those hypotheses are really grounded in something. Compared to when we’re really designing something from scratch, but we haven’t prototyped it yet. I guess that’s the last piece of it. When you were reinventing the Summit model in 2010-11, there’s some things that stayed constant, but you were really, all first principles were on the table, right?

Tavenner: On the table. Yeah.

Horn: Yeah. Whereas in some ways there’s a difference, that continuous improvement brings you into a different zone, I think.

Tavenner: I think that makes sense to me, and helps me reconcile something that I was having a hard time holding while I was thinking through this. Specifically, it’s our use of if-then hypotheses, which you’ve just been referencing. Obviously they’re a part of continuous improvement. Bob trained with Deming, so I know he believes in continuous improvement, but I was not sure if they’re a part of the green line. In if-then hypotheses, you really are declaring what you think is going to happen. So it does feel a little bit different from this learning, trying to push failure in order to learn. As we’ve talked through this today, though, I think we are just really zeroed in on an early phase in the design, and a true sort of whiteboarding design. It’s not continuous improvements, when you’re really designing as we were a decade ago. 

That’s very new products, versus continuous improvement. In the beginning, I’m using the word product there loosely, obviously. In the beginning, you’re really just trying to establish boundaries and rule out what won’t work. It doesn’t make much sense to have if-then hypotheses. You don’t know enough for that. As you do this early work, and get the boundaries and the clarity, then you can get to them later. It’s funny, I’m thinking back now. After we did a bunch of that early work, I remember sort of beating myself up for not having the if-then hypotheses. I flag that just because, as much as I know and have practiced this and done this, sometimes I listen to something or read something, and I’m like, “Oh, I forgot that again.” There’s a little bit of maybe giving ourselves a break and saying, “Oh, you use different things at different times.”

Before we wrap, I do want to surface one tension that I think is real. I don’t want people to leave this thinking we’re totally Pollyannaish. Part of the green line concept is that you move from theory to reality really in these testings. You’ve brought it up, like what will really work and what won’t in all these circumstances. But I get this sense that most of the things that this theory is addressing are still reality in a lab setting versus, for example, with real kids and real schools. They’re simulating a variety of conditions that aren’t optimal, but they aren’t testing in real life. Now, I could be making that up, but that’s my sense. I think this is one of the huge tensions in education. No one wants to be tested on, but I just don’t know what the “lab setting” looks like in education.

I have a really hard time imagining one. For those ed tech companies that we just beat up a little bit on, what would that actually look like for them to do this? Maybe that’s why you get these products that have really only been very theoretical. As I say that, the field’s reverence for RCTs, which I think you loosely referred to earlier, is also a contributing factor here. Those being random controlled trial studies to prove that something works. Which sounds good in theory. Of course we’d want things that work. But in practice, almost everything we do in education that is effective is nearly impossible to prove via an RCT. Because to isolate variables in the way that are required, it doesn’t make sense, to me anyway. I could go on and on for a long time about RCTs. 

The reason I bring all of this up is I have personally experienced the pushback from parents and community activists, who get very angry if they feel their children are being experimented on, which makes doing innovation well and right and super hard. I’ve talked extensively in the past about that theory. The same time I was just describing as being so exhilarating, and one of the worst nights of my life with a group of parents, who were really upset about what we were doing. I just think it’s important that we point out the tensions that are very real here and the challenge of this. It’s a set of constraints that I think help lock in what we’ve always done in schools, because somehow that feels safe.

Horn: Yeah. I mean look, it’s a great point. Obviously unfortunately the truth is, though, that doing the same old thing itself is a risky and unfair advantage, because it doesn’t work for so many. In many ways, I think it’s worse than experimenting. Knowingly, to use the language, “We know it’s not going to work for your child, but we’re still putting you in it.” Which is itself an experiment that I think is unfair. It goes back to, I think we need to figure out places in education where we can do that kind of prototyping that you were describing when you created that Summit model. Where it’s rapid, it’s a lot of things, we’re playing with it. Frankly, I mean this gets to the randomized control trial thing as well, we need to be finding those anomalies. 

Where does it not work? The thing that you just designed that you’re sure is gold standard, where does it break? Instead of seeing that as failure, which researchers often, you know this, they try to do a million things to show, “Oh, that doesn’t apply because of this.” Or, “We’re going to take it out of our dataset because…” Instead realize, no, that’s really, that’s showing us that there’s a different circumstance here that requires a different approach. What a cool thing, because we can now say this approach works in this circumstance, and we’re trying to understand what will work for this other one. I just don’t think… We’ve got to be more real with parents about that as well, I think, and bring them into it. 

Look, it’s another reason prototyping is the word. We’re not saying turnover everything tomorrow. So many superintendents, they want that headline. Five years from now, they can say, “We transformed all our schools.” Well, maybe you’ll get that headline, but maybe you’ll get a bunch of small things that teach you a lot, and help you serve 20% of your kids better than they otherwise would’ve. The others will sort of be the status quo, but at least it’s better than you were. I don’t want to say that as in a down way. I just think we have to find these opportunities, because we are not going to better serve kids otherwise.

Tavenner: Yeah. It’s almost like, right now, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Perfection is expected. If this doesn’t work for every single student in every single circumstance, then forget it. Write it off. Versus, how can we get to 20% of the kids with this? Yeah. I think that the middle ground here is collaboration, Michael. Students, parents, communities, educators, how do we all work together on innovation, so we aren’t doing to people, but with people? That’s much easier said than done, but it’s definitely worth it. Honestly, now I’m getting curious about how radical collaboration could evolve and improve these theories, because I don’t think any of them are really grounded in that type of collaborative-

Horn: Before you jump where you’re going to go after that, just to stay on that for half a beat. I think that’s right. You actually, all these micro school experiments right now, where educators are leaving the public school districts and starting their own schools. And families are opting into designs that look very different, because they do not want the status quo. These are all your chances. Because there, parents have actively said, “No, we want to be part of something that’s different.” These are your opportunities, I think, to prototype. We’ve got to take advantage of them, because they’re the ones that are demanding the prototypes. They’re not scared of them.

Tavenner: Right, right. Willing participants actively engaged with us. I mean, I think that’s probably the place to leave it today. Otherwise, I’ll open a whole new can of worms. I’m just leaving with so much to think about, as always. Before we go, I want you to give me one more thing to think about. What are you reading, watching, listening to?

Horn: Oh gosh. More Harry Potter in our House, Diane. We’re going down that road. We’ve finished Chamber of Secrets. We’re now in Azkaban, or however you pronounce it. You’ll tell me afterwards. I finished Rick Hess’ new book, The Great School Rethink, which I really enjoyed. It’s a very grounds-up thing. What I liked about it is, he’s not like, there’s one thing that’s right. You’ve really got to figure it out for your community. I really enjoyed that. Then frankly, a lot of my nights are… By the time this comes out, my agony of the Boston Celtics is probably going to be over. But right now, it’s been an aggravating NBA Playoffs over here, Diane. What about you?

Tavenner: Well I’m not following that, so I’m not feeling that. I’m sticking with fiction for a little bit here. I just picked up Deepen Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Michael, several of her novels have arrived in my life at moments when I felt like I needed them, and they really resonated. In this moment, when I’m feeling compelled to not look away from what many of our children still suffer on a daily basis, I’m going to give this one a go. Dig into what I hear is a pretty amazing novel, but a little bit challenging. Anything inspired by Dickens is probably a little bit hard on the heart, right?

Horn: Very much so, and report back when you’re done for us. Until then, I hope you all have gotten as much as we selfishly have gotten out of this conversation. We’ll see you all next time on Class Disrupted.

Plans to discontinue the Iowa Youth Risk Behavior Survey and a new barrier for surveying Iowa students pose a threat to data collected on youth behaviors, advocates say, specifically young transgender Iowans.

The Iowa Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has no plans to administer the Youth Risk Behavior Survey this academic year, the first time since the survey started in 1991.

In a letter sent to Youth Risk Behavior Survey advisory committee members, Robert Kruse, the state medical director for the Iowa Department of HHS, announced Iowa will not participate in the 2023 Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) youth risk behavior survey.

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“The Iowa Department of HHS will not be participating in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey in 2023 in order to focus our efforts on maximizing the state administered Iowa Youth Survey (IYS) and improving survey participation,” Kruse’s Jan. 27 letter to YRBS advisory committee members said.

The nationwide survey overseen by the CDC is administered every two years and asks students about their behaviors and relationships with authority figures, drugs, alcohol, sexual activity and gambling, to name a few.

Although students in Iowa will still be offered the IYS, they can not take it unless a parent has seen the survey in advance and given permission for their student to take it.

Parental permission

Senate File 496, signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds on May 26, requires that students must receive permission from their parents before taking a survey at school. The law prevents students from taking surveys “designed to assess the student’s mental, emotional or physical health that is not required by state or federal law” without first acquiring the written consent of the student’s parent or guardian.

Parents must receive at least seven days notice of the survey, as well as a copy of the survey.

The law also bans school library books containing written or visual sex acts, prohibits schools from teaching about “gender identity” or “sexual orientation” before sixth grade, prohibits a student from using a name or pronoun than they were given at birth and prevents teachers from knowingly providing “false or misleading” information on a child’s gender identity to their parents.

Jenn Turner, chapter chair for the Polk County Moms For Liberty, sees student surveys as a way for young people to get ideas about things they may not have thought about before.

“We have found that many parents are not aware of what questions are being asked,” Turner said. “It ranges from what vegetables you eat to how many sexual partners to if you have considered suicide for children as young as 11. Some parents may determine that these questions are too mature, or cover topics their children are not ready for or do not understand.”

Turner and Moms For Liberty support the recent law change, saying that it gives control to parents and allows for more transparency about what is going on in school.

“Parents are the number one advocates for their children,” Turner said. “They should ultimately be making these decisions for their children. This law provides another tool to help parents understand what is presented to their children in school.”

Advocates of the IYS say this law will limit participation and usable data. The extra step of taking home a permission slip and having it signed and returned to a classroom will keep some students from taking the survey, in addition to parents who do not permit their children to take the survey.

Anne Discher, executive director of Common Good Iowa and member of the Iowa YRBS advisory committee, acknowledges permission from parents during school registration as reasonable but believes useful data could be harder to collect with permission required for individual surveys throughout the year.

Parental permission could skew results in another way, according to Discher.

“Certainly one might assume that the types of parents who would opt out might have things in common,” Discher said. “It could skew the survey and I think generally speaking the concern would be that participation would be so low you might not get useful data anyway.”

In a Feb. 23 committee meeting for Senate File 496, State Sen. Herman Quirmbach raised a potential unintended consequence he sees with parental permission.

“The unintended consequence of that may be to protect child molesters,” Quirmbach, D-Ames, said. “If a survey to a student asking about that student’s mental state or their social state, if the parent can deny their student the ability to participate in that survey, then an abusive parent can use that denial to help shield them from any consequence of their child abuse.”

The surveys are anonymous, but survey data could skew if Quirmbach’s speculation is correct, ultimately affecting future legislation and policy decisions.

Data disaggregation

Surveys like the risk behavior survey and the IYS are used by health departments, educators, lawmakers, doctors and community organizations to make policy decisions, direct campaigns and give direction to research.

The most recent risk behavior survey asked students about their gender identity; the IYS did not.

According to Discher, one of the goals of the Department of HHS in the past was to increase participation in student surveys to allow for the disaggregation of data.

“It was a strong goal to be able to disaggregate it by race and ethnicity, for example, or by LGBTQ+ status,” Discher said. “The conversations we had always had were how can we get more schools to participate so we can have better data for subgroups.”

Eventually, there was a sense of pushback contrary to the former beliefs and goals of the department, Discher says.

“I find that this pushback which came from somewhere in the department or maybe not in the department,” Discher said. “I don’t know where the push for all of this came from, but it is very much counter to all of the work that we had seen the department do up to this point, which was try to get more data, better data, to disaggregate the data so they could really understand what was happening with youth in Iowa.”

According to Kruse’s letter to the committee, the Iowa Youth Survey will be revised, but the revisions are not currently public, if finished. It is unclear if the IYS will enable disaggregation of data for students who identify as transgender.

“In advance of IYS in the fall of 2023, HHS will conduct a comprehensive review of survey administration,” Kruse said. “Most importantly, we are reviewing the analysis-to-action strategy and how HHS can tailor the data collection to inform how we meet the needs of Iowa youth, families, schools and communities.”

Without the Iowa youth risk behavior survey, and if the IYS is not revised to include a question about gender identity, disaggregating data for trans youth will not be possible.

“I find it sad that that’s a piece of data that we are going to lose,” Discher said. “I find it kind of cynical that the state Legislature took all of these moves to make life worse, in particular for trans kids. To deny them gender-affirming care, to make them feel less like they’re an important member of their community and now we aren’t going to collect data on mental health for that group.”

Although the letter sent to YRBS committee members stated Iowa would not participate in the risk behavior survey to focus efforts on maximizing the IYS participation, the survey switch-up feels more intentional than maximizing efforts, according to Discher.

“It is very hard for me to look at it and not understand it as part of a larger anti-trans push in our state,” Discher said. “In the Legislature, we passed a lot of very punitive, harmful bills and now we’re going to stop collecting data on the well-being of the kids that they’re harming. Did anyone sit and think of it in that exact way? I don’t know, but it’s very hard to not interpret it that way.”

The 2021, IYS did include a question asking students their sexual orientation, with answer options of straight, gay or lesbian, bisexual, another identity or not sure.

Explaining the examinations

The survey was first administered in 1991, with 26 states participating. Survey participation peaked at 47 four times; 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. 

Iowa will be one of seven states not participating in the survey in 2023, joining Colorado, Idaho, Florida, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.

The reasoning for participation varies from state to state and many states have their own survey as a replacement or in addition to the CDC’s survey.

According to CDC.gov, the youth risk behavior data helps health departments, educators, lawmakers, doctors and community organizations to inform school and community programs, communications campaigns and other efforts. The survey measures health-related behaviors and experiences that may lead to death and disability among youth and adults.

Although the IYS asks similar questions as the risk behavior survey, IYS is only taken statewide, so results cannot be easily compared among other states. Data from the IYS, though, can be broken up into smaller regions of Iowa, compared to the risk behavior survey, which gives data for youth in the state as a whole.

“The national survey only reports state-level data which makes it impossible to identify areas of the state with the greatest needs,” Alex Carfrae, public information officer for the Iowa Department of HHS said in an email response to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

IYS data is reported and analyzed at multiple jurisdiction levels, allowing more specific, targeted decisions to be made for specific areas such as counties, judicial districts and Area Education Agencies.

The two surveys have a history in Iowa, with the youth risk behavior survey taken every other year since 1991 and the Iowa youth survey taken every other year since 1999.

The IYS is answered by students in grades 6, 8 and 11, where the youth risk behavior survey has only been offered to students in grades 9-12. The CDC does offer a middle school version of the youth risk behavior survey, but Iowa has never participated.

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter.

It dramatized what has become increasingly apparent over the past few years: Students are in the midst of a mental health crisis. The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has warned of this repeatedly. “Mental health challenges in children, adolescents and young adults are real and widespread,” he said in this advisory. “Even before the pandemic, an alarming number of young people struggled with feelings of helplessness, depression and thoughts of suicide — and rates have increased over the past decade.” 

He is not being overly dramatic. In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011-2021, highlighting trends and experiences of U.S. high school students. The findings are sobering. Twenty-two percent, including 30% of girls, seriously considered suicide during the past year, and 10% actually made an attempt. 

Depression and anxiety are also on the rise among young people: according to recent CDC data, 42% of high school students reported feeling so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped their usual activities. Sadly, many young people turn to drugs and alcohol to cope.  

Now is the time to change this pattern.

The Cook Center partnered with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), the JED Foundation and the Huntsman Mental Health Institute to host the mental health summit because school leaders bear much of the weight of mental health concerns among young people. In fact, some 80% of families rely on schools for their child’s mental health.

During the summit — the first time AASA had sponsored a conference specifically to address student mental health — educators explored the crisis in depth and collaborated with superintendents from rural, urban, low-income and affluent schools to map out possible solutions. They learned how to discuss mental health in a productive way with teachers, students and parents, using data and language supplied by experts from the foundation and the institute. Since the summit, superintendents have returned to their communities with the knowledge and tools to approach problems more analytically.

Importantly, the AASA Mental Health Cohort was established to help implement real solutions for all students. There are more than 40 members who regularly connect with one another to develop strategic plans, increase support options for all members of their school communities and work toward solutions that can be built into schools’ routines and their existing state, local or Title I funding.

In one member’s district, school staff meet with students and their families following a mental health hospitalization under a new school reintegration initiative. The team partners with local behavioral health providers, such as hospitals or inpatient treatment centers, to make sure the school understands the struggling student’s medical needs and can support the behavioral health treatment. The goal is to ease the transition back into a typical school routine without sacrificing the positive effects of the treatment. The program is new, but the district leader is collecting data to improve and expand it. The Jed Foundation has a curriculum available that aims to eliminate suicide among young adults, and Mental Health America’s free toolkit for schools offers tips to students, teachers and even businesses to support the mental health of young people. 

The Cook Center has developed two resources that are available at no cost. My Life is Worth Living is an animated series that models how the human connection can protect against suicide. The series tells stories of characters who face some of the most difficult issues that young people deal with and shows how they come to the key decision that life is worth living. 

ParentGuidance.org is a free online resource where families can access courses and find answers from therapists. Districts can partner with the site to get additional resources for families, including mental health seminars tailored to local needs.

There has never been a better time to invest in children’s mental health. Unprecedented funding is available: The Department of Health and Human Services has allocated $35 million for mental health services and suicide prevention programs for youth. Congress increased appropriations for the Mental Health Block Grant by $100 million to help state and local governments fill gaps in services. And the Department of Education now has $144 million each year for the next five years to award to state education agencies and districts for mental health support.

Whether that funding is made available long term depends on how well schools implement programs and get feedback quickly. Districts have tremendous leeway in how they gather data and measure their effectiveness of their mental health support programs. Legislators will likely reward initiative and initially fund new programs. But they will also demand accountability, that school leaders gather data and develop improvement cycles. The good news is that fathering data and developing improvement cycles are already institutional skills that education systems do really well.

New coalitions like the AASA Mental Health Cohort and nonprofit groups like the Cook Center for Human Connection and JED are ready to help schools and districts take action to alleviate the mental health crisis among the youth they serve. Time is of the essence. The well-being of millions of young people is on the line.

The report, released Tuesday morning by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, provides perhaps the most thorough perspective available of the landscape of charter schooling, which has grown significantly in recent years.

Macke Raymond, CREDO’s founder and director, said that the report sketched a picture of continuous improvement for the charter sector over the last 15 years. The center’s first national analysis, issued in 2009, showed charters under-performing traditional schools in both core subjects; in a 2013 follow-up, they slightly bested traditional schools in English while still lagging in math. That movement represents a modest silver lining for American education, she said, after a prolonged period during which learning — as measured by standardized tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress — largely stagnated even before the pandemic. 

“When you compare [our findings with] the results of NAEP — which, over an equivalent period, have completely flatlined — what you’re looking at is really the only story in U.S. education policy where we’ve been able to create a set of conditions such that schools actually do get better,” Raymond argued.

The new study focuses on charter school performance in 29 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York City, incorporating standardized test scores between 2015 and 2019. All told, over 80 percent of tested public school students were included in CREDO’s data set. More than 1.8 million charter students were each paired with a “virtual twin” (i.e., a nearby pupil possessing similar demographic traits and prior test scores) enrolled at the district school that the charter student otherwise would have attended.

The research team calculated that charter school students gained the equivalent of an additional 16 days of learning (based on a traditional 180-day school calendar) in English compared with similar kids at district schools. Their six-day edge in math was smaller, though still considered statistically significant.

But even those averages, comprising millions of student measurements across the country, contain significant variation. Black students attending charter schools gained 35 days of growth in reading and 29 days in math — as if they’d attended school for an extra 1.5 months over a single school year. Hispanics enjoyed 30 extra days of reading and 19 in math. By comparison, white and multiracial students lost the equivalent 24 days of annual math learning in charter schools. 

Smaller sub-groups experienced similar divergences. Poor students saw much higher gains in charters than in traditional public schools (23 extra days of reading growth, 17 extra days in math), as did English learners (six extra days of reading, eight in math); students with overlapping designations (such as both African American and low-income, or both Hispanic and English learner), also made considerable strides

By contrast, special education students were seriously stymied, losing 13 days of reading growth and 14 days of math at charter schools relative to kids receiving special education outside of charters. Raymond called that inequity one of the few sore spots revealed by the study, adding that charter schools should be “taken to task” for the collective failure.

“With the exception of very few charter schools that specialize in particular kinds of special education, the sector has basically thrown up their hands and said, ‘This isn’t our job,’” she said.

Even among charters, some types tend to yield better results than others. Specifically, those grouped within a charter management organization (CMO) — a network, either non- or for-profit, that operates multiple schools, such as the well-known KIPP or Success Academy organizations — provide 27 extra days of instruction in reading, and 23 extra days in math, than traditional schools. Stand-alone charters, which encompass roughly two-thirds of all charter schools, generate 10 extra days of reading growth and negative-three days of growth in math.

Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University who has previously studied the impact of charter schools on surrounding public school districts, said that the results of the CREDO report largely dovetailed with those of his own research on school choice in New Orleans and elsewhere. He also said that the especially impressive findings from CMO-affiliated schools were somewhat predictable given that many cities and states only consider top-performing charter schools as candidates for replication.

“Some of this is kind of mechanical — not in a bad way, it’s just how the sector operates. If you’re a stand-alone, and you do well, you can open another school,” Harris said. “Then you become a CMO, and they’re better because they were selected to build on their own success. That’s a positive aspect of the charter model.”

Even more distinctive was the dividing line between what might be deemed “traditional” charters and those offering instruction virtually, which had already earned an ugly reputation for low academic quality even before the pandemic began. The popularity of the virtual charter sector has grown substantially since the emergence of COVID — one analysis by the Network for Public Education found that fully or mostly online programs enrolled 13 percent of all charter students during the 2020–21 school year — even as they delivered a staggering 124 fewer days of math growth than traditional public schools, along with 58 fewer days of growth in English.

If virtual initiatives were excluded from the national sample, the average charter school advantage would jump from 16 extra days of reading instruction to 21, and from 6 extra days of math instruction to 14. 

Martin West, the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called the report “easily the most comprehensive analysis of charter school performance to date” and echoed concerns about the performance of virtual charter schools.

“The results continue to raise questions about the regulatory environment for virtual charter schools, whose results drag down the overall performance of the broader sector,” West said. “These schools may provide an essential option for students for whom in-person learning truly isn’t possible, but state policymakers should look carefully at who is attending these schools and how well they are being served.”

An additional state-by-state analysis showed that individual jurisdictions have built particularly effective charter school sectors. Across New York State, charter students receive the equivalent of 75 extra days of growth in reading, and 73 extra days in math, compared with demographically similar students at district schools. Massachusetts (41 extra days in both subjects), Maryland (37 extra days in both subjects), Tennessee (34 extra days of reading and 39 in math), and Rhode Island (90 extra days of reading and 88 in math) offered similarly impressive statewide results. Charter school students only experienced significantly weaker reading growth in one state, Oregon.

An additional lesson came with respect to new charter entrants versus existing options. New schools opened by existing CMOs tended to outpace their district competitors, but also to be out-performed themselves by older schools within their own CMO.

“The new schools that have come in since the second study are strong, but they’re not as strong,” Raymond observed. “So it’s not that new schools are coming in and kicking butt and dragging the sector along with them. It’s that, over this period, individual schools around the country are making incremental changes that lead to this trajectory of upward performance.”