Chalkbeat

Chicago Public Schools recover from pandemic declines more than other districts, study shows

2024-02-19T11:00:00+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools students’ reading scores are recovering faster since the pandemic than most school districts across the country, according to a new national report.

The district’s surprising rebound, documented by researchers at Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, also found the state of Illinois led the nation in reading growth between 2022 and 2023 and is one of just four states to return to pre-pandemic achievement levels.

However, the bounce back has not been as strong in math. Both Illinois and Chicago were in the middle of the pack for math score recovery compared to other states and districts.

Chicago Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova attributed the growth to how the district spent its federal COVID money.

“The federal pandemic aid actually has allowed us to invest fully in the day-to-day what I call the bread and butter of education,” Chkoumbova said.

Chicago spent a large portion of its $2.8 billion allocation on existing staff. Documents obtained by Chalkbeat in 2021 showed the district planned to use the money to cover salaries and benefits for roughly 30% of its workforce. Expenditure data obtained by Chalkbeat late last year indicates $1.4 billion of the $2.4 billion spent so far went to staff salaries and benefits.

CPS employed just over 38,000 people on the eve of the pandemic, and staffing records show that number has grown to more than 43,500 as of Dec. 31, 2023. The district’s overall budget grew from $7.7 billion the year the pandemic hit to $9.4 billion this school year.

A lot of the district’s increased staff costs were tethered to specific initiatives aimed at helping students recover from two years of disrupted learning:

The district tapped hundreds of mostly existing staff within schools to become academic interventionists, who worked one-on-one or in small group settings with struggling students.
CPS also hired hundreds of tutors across the school system and worked with an outside company to do high-dosage tutoring. According to a district spokesperson, 600 tutors in 230 schools provide tutoring in reading and math during the school day.
Summer school and after-school programs expanded significantly over the past few summers — spending between $20 million and $40 million each summer. However, tracking student participation has proved difficult.
Chkoumbova said the district has also hired more than 180 “instructional coaches” dedicated to supporting teachers and school staff in schools with the highest needs.

The growth in CPS between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school year documented by researchers at Harvard and Stanford on their Education Recovery Scorecard bucks a broader trend of widening inequity between high-poverty and wealthier districts.

According to the data, Black student scores in CPS grew even more than the district average in reading. District officials said their improvement meant they “emerged from the pandemic two-thirds of a year ahead of where they were in reading than before the pandemic.”

“Our teachers, our staff, our principals, assistant principals, they also have experienced the effects of the pandemic, but they really stepped in a big way and I think it has to be celebrated,” Chkoumbova said.

State test score data released last fall showed more Chicago students were catching up, but still remained below pre-pandemic achievement levels. Gaps between Black and Latino students and their white and Asian counterparts remain and there’s more work to be done to help students with disabilities and immigrant students, Chkoumbova said.

With federal COVID money running out later this year, Chicago Public Schools is projecting a $391 million dollar shortfall. Officials have been urging the state to increase funding.

“We have a good plane that we can fly. We just need a lot more fuel to sustain the speed with which our students are recovering and also to gain some altitude,” Chkoumbova said.

Governor J.B. Pritzker is set to release his budget proposal next week and state education officials have proposed increasing overall education funding by more than $650 million next year, which includes increases for both K-12 and early childhood education. Lawmakers will have the final say over how much is ultimately allocated.

Pre-pandemic progress may have helped rebound

This is not the first time Stanford researchers have found promising academic growth in Chicago Public Schools.

A report released in 2017 that looked at test scores between 2009 and 2014 found Chicago students saw six years of growth in five and were improving faster than 100 of the nation’s largest school districts.

Paul Zavitkovsky, an assessment specialist at the Center for Urban Education Leadership at the University of Illinois Chicago, did a similar study that same year looking at 15 years of data and found the often negative perception of Chicago Public Schools did not match reality. In his study at the time, CPS students in every demographic group were outscoring their counterparts in the rest of the state.

He said that the latest pandemic recovery identified by national researchers could be due to the “carry-over impact” of high reading achievement levels of students in second, third, and fourth grades at the end of 2019. These students, Zavitkovsky said, “entered the pandemic better prepared than any comparable cohort in CPS history.” He likened their academic bounce back to a sponge.

“If you have a sponge, and it hasn’t had water for a long time, it tends to shrivel up a little bit,” he said. “When you pour water on it, it immediately soaks up that water because it’s got all this sort of latent capacity to absorb it.”

He cautioned that the promising growth may not last forever and raised concerns about students who may have missed key early literacy instruction.

Chkoumbova, who also worked as a teacher and principal in CPS, said the district has been focused on early literacy for decades. On the eve of the pandemic, the district released a new literacy framework and when schools returned in-person, she said they emphasized the importance of strong foundational reading skills in kindergarten through fifth grade.

“We have been getting a little bit more specific about the need for this explicit teaching of foundational skills, phonics, phonemic awareness,” she said. “Our schools are really embracing this effort.”

She added that many schools have been using early literacy curriculum that is part of the district’s universal curriculum bank Skyline, which launched during the pandemic, or a curriculum from Wilson Reading. A district spokesperson said Skyline has been adopted on a voluntary basis by nearly half of CPS schools.

Cautious optimism as other indicators lag

Elaine Allensworth, Lewis-Sebring Director of the UChicago Consortium, said the findings were “exciting and surprising,” but also a little puzzling because attendance is still low and absenteeism is still high.

“Maybe there’s just a lot of focus on math and English language arts instruction right now because people are so worried about pandemic learning loss,” Allensworth said. “I know a lot of teachers feel under pressure to increase students’ test scores… which makes me nervous, honestly, because then I start to wonder, ‘Well, what are they not doing?’”

Chkoumbova said for the past two years, her message from the top has been to keep challenging students with grade-level work and “resist that urge” to do too much remediation on basic skills.

“If it is kill and drill and remediation, kids will not love coming to school,” Chkoumbova said.

She said she is “paying very close attention” to rates of chronic absenteeism. In Illinois, a student is considered chronically absent if they miss 10 percent – or roughly 18 days — in a school year, regardless of whether the absence was excused or not.

The percentage of chronically absent students in Illinois shot up in the 2020-21 school year and got even worse in 2021-22. In CPS, 39.8% of students were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year, down from 44.6% the previous year.

But Allensworth said Chicago schools use data and research more and collaborate more frequently across teacher teams and networks – both of which are associated with school improvement.

“I think there’s just a lot of different things that are going on in Chicago that are different than other places,” Allensworth said. “It’s not glamorous or scandalous or whatever. And so locally people don’t know but people outside of Chicago look at Chicago as a place that’s kind of an exemplar in a lot of ways.”

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Amid a surprising pandemic recovery, academic inequality grew. What now?

2024-02-02T18:26:37+00:00

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Academic gaps between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers have widened, even as American students as a whole are making a surprising recovery from the pandemic’s disruptions.

And in contrast to the initial sharp decline in test scores during the pandemic, when differences among districts drove much of the decrease for low-income students, gaps have widened in the last year between students from different income levels within the same district.

Those are the findings of a new analysis of student progress between spring 2022 and spring 2023 from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and a team of researchers that includes Stanford’s Sean Reardon, who studies inequality, and Harvard University’s Thomas Kane, an education professor and economist.

The analysis defies some of the direst predictions about pandemic learning loss even as it confirms others — such as the fear that students who already face the most challenges would fall much further behind and not get what they need to catch up.

The new analysis presents a sunnier picture than a previous one from the testing group NWEA that found that students learned at a similar rate or slower during the 2022-23 school year than in pre-pandemic years, meaning they weren’t making up lost learning.

The analysis relies on federal and state reading and math test data from 30 states accounting for roughly 8,000 school districts and some 15 million students. Because states use different tests and have different thresholds for proficiency, the researchers used a method to put the state test scores onto a common scale and to convert proficiency rates to grade levels, allowing comparisons among school districts in all 30 states. Some states, including New York and Colorado, were excluded because too few students took state tests, while others changed tests.

Most students are still behind their 2019 counterparts, the analysis found, and likely will be for years. But they’re also making greater year-over-year gains than researchers had seen in decades of administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.

The report’s authors called on state and local leaders to make the most of remaining pandemic relief dollars and do more to make sure tutoring, summer school, and other help reaches the students who need it.

“Recovery really is possible, but let’s focus in particular on the communities that have the furthest to go to catch up,” Reardon said in an interview. “And we should worry that the federal money is running out and some of the resources will not be there and states will have to step in.”

Here are three key takeaways from the analysis.

Many students made remarkable gains, but recovery incomplete

Between 2019 and 2022, the study estimates students missed the equivalent of half a year of typical learning in math and a third of a year of reading.

By spring 2023, the average student had recovered about a third of the loss in math — or a sixth of a grade level — and about a quarter of the original loss in reading — roughly one-twelfth of a grade level, the analysis found.

That might not seem like much, Reardon said, but in the decade before the pandemic, students “almost never” made this much additional academic progress in a year. When it did happen, it happened in small affluent districts.

“It’s pretty impressive,” Reardon said. “You moved an entire ship, not just a little dinghy. That’s the good news.”

Students in Pennsylvania and Mississippi made up more ground than the national average in math after experiencing larger-than-average declines between 2019 and 2022. Tennessee students also made up more learning in math, while Illinois students made more progress in reading — and actually did better than their 2019 counterparts.

But even with the growth students seem to be showing in the new analysis, researchers estimate the average student needs at least another year of recovery in math and another two years in reading. In math, only Alabama students scored better than their 2019 counterparts, and Oregon students actually did worse in both reading and math in 2023 than in 2022.

Academic inequality has widened between districts, within districts

One of the most striking findings from the analysis is that gaps between low-income students and those who are better-off have widened, with some of the largest gaps found in Massachusetts and Michigan.

Racial and ethnic gaps are widening too. Black students’ scores on average improved more than white students’ scores between 2022 and 2023, but because Black students’ scores declined so much during the pandemic, the gap remains slightly larger than in 2019. Hispanic students showed relatively little improvement from 2022 to 2023.

An analysis last year by many of the same researchers found that students in the same district experienced similar academic setbacks, regardless of their background. Scores for students from less-affluent backgrounds dropped more on average because they were more likely to live in high-poverty school districts where people experienced more negative effects of the pandemic.

This new analysis finds that many high-poverty districts are helping students make up for learning loss. Overall, they made similar progress to their more affluent neighbors — and the highest-poverty districts actually showed larger-than-average improvements.

But because districts serving lots of students in poverty were further behind to begin with, gaps with higher-income districts grew even when they made similar progress. And in some states, notably Massachusetts, affluent districts made big gains between 2022 and 2023 while high-poverty districts actually lost ground.

And now gaps are opening up between less-affluent students and better-off students within districts. Students’ test scores fell by similar amounts, but some fell onto a trampoline, Reardon said, while others seem to have fallen into a pit of sand.

“We do not know the reason for this, but it is troubling,” the report notes. “Even as student achievement has improved rapidly since 2022, those gains have not been equally shared, even within the same school district.”

As community-wide stresses recede for some families, Reardon said, “the ways that kids in the same places have access to different resources seem to be playing more of a role.”

Students from low-income households often are segregated in very high-needs schools, where the staff is overworked, Reardon said. Some districts may not be targeting help to those who need it most.

Of all the gaps that opened between students from different economic backgrounds, researchers estimate 60% to 70% is due to differences between districts, while the rest is due to differences within districts.

Urgency needed to help student recovery, close gaps

As of this fall, the lowest-income districts still had about 40% of the federal pandemic relief they received. States and school districts have until September to commit that money — and making the best use of it is essential, Reardon said.

The report makes four recommendations:

Schools should tell parents early in the spring if their children are below grade level.
Districts should expand summer school seats to accept anyone who signs up.
Districts should extend the recovery effort throughout the 2024-25 school year by signing tutoring contracts before the September deadline.
Communities should work together to reduce absenteeism.

States and districts should use all the data at their disposal to ensure the right help — tutoring, counseling, or attendance help — reaches the students who need it most, Reardon said.

The new analysis is accompanied by an interactive map that allows leaders and community members to identify districts making more progress and learn from them.

Districts have had a lot of leeway to decide how to spend pandemic money. States should use incentives to ensure remaining funds go toward academic recovery. And they “may need to complete the final leg of the recovery on their own resources,” the report says.

With advocates pushing states to keep paying for tutoring, those conversations are already starting in many places.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

A math problem with no easy solution: Regents scores plummeted during pandemic

2024-01-23T17:58:15+00:00

New York City high-schoolers’ scores on math Regents exams plummeted during the pandemic and have yet to bounce back, according to recently released state data.

Performance on the Regents tests, which serve as graduation requirements in New York, fell in every subject with the exception of U.S. History between 2019, the last year before the pandemic, and 2023, the data shows.

But the decline was steepest for city students in higher-level math courses. In Algebra II, proficiency rates for city students fell from 69% in 2019 to just 44% last year. In Geometry, 56% of city students passed the Regents test in 2019, but just 38% passed last school year.

The sharp decline is a stark indicator of the ongoing challenges the city faces in helping students recover from the academic impacts of the pandemic. Those challenges are particularly acute in math, where one course builds directly on the last and interrupted instruction can have ripple effects.

City officials are betting big on a new curriculum overhaul, where high schools for the first time are required to use a shared math curriculum for Algebra I.

“Math Regents scores have been unacceptably low for the last several years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein. “We launched our rollout of the Algebra 1 Illustrative Math curriculum to address dropping test scores.”

The curriculum mandate is currently in place only for Algebra I, but city officials have raised the possibility of standardizing curriculum for higher-level math courses as well. Illustrative Math, the mandated Algebra I curriculum, has drawn mixed responses from educators.

The Algebra I Regents exam is also undergoing a change this year to align with a new set of standards, and similar changes are on the way for the Algebra II and Geometry exams.

Brownstein said the Algebra I curriculum mandate is “just the first stage” of the Education Department’s work to improve high school math instruction and that “we are confident we will see rising Regents scores as a result.”

Pandemic Regents waivers help explain drops

There are likely several factors that drove the unusually steep decline in higher-level math scores.

In general, math scores fell more dramatically than reading scores across grade levels and districts. That pattern held true for New York City on the state’s third-to-eighth-grade state tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests fourth and eighth graders.

Bobson Wong, a veteran high school math teacher in Queens, said basic academic skills like knowing how to study, remember things, and ask for help – skills that are particularly important in memorization-heavy subjects like math – all took a hit during the pandemic.

But educators also pointed to specific features of New York’s high school Regents tests and the state’s pandemic policies that may help explain the size of the drops.

High school math, to a greater degree than other subjects, is cumulative – meaning it’s extremely difficult to perform well in Algebra II without having mastered Algebra I, said Wong.

Prior to the pandemic, many schools didn’t enroll students in Algebra II or Geometry courses unless they’d passed the Algebra I Regents exam. But during the pandemic school years of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, when schools were partially or fully remote, Regents tests were mostly canceled and students could earn waivers by passing the course linked to the test.

As a result, when in-person instruction returned, educators said they noticed an unusual number of students enrolled in higher-level math courses who’d never really mastered Algebra I.

“I saw a lot of students in my Algebra II class waived through Algebra I and they didn’t know any algebra,” said Wong. “We didn’t really do anything to prepare them for a course like Algebra II. It requires so much knowledge of algebra and so much prior skill.”

During the pandemic, there were few good options to fairly assess students. State officials concluded that trying to hold Regents exams during the height of the pandemic, with schools offering varying levels of in-person instruction and students often struggling to engage in remote learning, would exacerbate inequality and unfairly block some students from graduating. Students in New York typically need to score a 65 or higher on five Regents exams to earn a diploma, and can receive an “advanced” diploma by passing more of the exams.

More than 80% of New York City’s high school graduates in 2020, and nearly three-quarters of graduates in 2021, had at least one Regents exam exemption counted towards graduation requirements, a 2022 analysis from Education Trust-New York found.

But while many educators supported the additional flexibility during the pandemic, some have expressed concerns that students granted Regents exemptions or who passed courses because of added pandemic grading flexibility didn’t get the support they needed to catch up, and were instead moved into higher-level courses for which they were unprepared.

“We had to make some really important and responsive decisions,” said Tracy Fray-Oliver, the vice president at Bank Street Education Center and a former math official in the city Education Department. “But without ensuring the mastery in these courses that came before, you’re going to see these kinds of results.”

Passing the Algebra II and Geometry Regents tests isn’t a requirement for graduation because students can satisfy the math Regents requirement by passing only Algebra I. But the tests are required for an advanced diploma, and passing them can be an indicator of whether students are on track to take and pass pre-calculus and calculus.

Gaps between racial groups grew

Across the state, the Regents exam declines were also largest on the Algebra II and Geometry tests, although the drops in New York City were larger in both cases.

The gaps between racial groups also grew. The share of Latino students in New York City scoring proficient on the Algebra II exam, for example, was more than cut in half, from 58% in 2019 to 28% last year. Just 26% of Black students passed the Algebra II test last year, down from 55% in 2019.

The proportion of Asian American students passing the exam fell from 87% in 2019 to 74% this year, while the share of white students scoring proficient fell from 82% to 63%.

Fray-Oliver said she applauded the city’s efforts to overhaul high school math curriculum, but added that many of the skills students need to succeed in higher-level high school math courses are first taught as early as elementary.

Critics have long argued that the Regents exams aren’t effective ways of assessing what kids know and encourage rote learning at the expense of deeper understanding. That’s part of why a Blue Ribbon Commission recently recommended to the state’s Board of Regents that New York offer more pathways outside of the exams for students to earn graduation credit.

Wong said he expects the scores on the higher-level Regents tests to slowly bounce back on their own as the effects of the pandemic fade.

“I wouldn’t push the panic button and say we have to do all these interventions,” he said. “If the drop-off continues, that could be more of an issue.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Blizzard of state test scores shows some progress in math, divergence in reading

2023-10-02T09:00:00+00:00

This story was co-published with USA Today.

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When it comes to how American students are recovering from the pandemic, it’s a tale of two subjects.

States across the country have made some progress in math over the last two years, while in English language arts some states made gains while others fell further behind.

“In math, almost every state looks pretty similar. There was a large decline between 2019 and 2021. And then everybody is kind of crawling it back,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist. “In ELA, it’s all over the map.”

That’s according to recently released results from over 20 state tests, encompassing millions of students, compiled by Oster and colleagues. The scores offer among the most comprehensive national pictures of student learning, pointing to some progress but persistent challenges. With just a handful of exceptions, students in 2023 are less likely to be proficient than in 2019, the year before the pandemic jolted American schools and society.

“Schools are getting back to normal, but kids still have a ways to go,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit that works with states to develop tests. “We’re not getting out of this in two years.”

Oster’s analysis of test data tracks the share of students who were proficient on grades 3-8 math and reading exams before, during, and after the pandemic. Every state showed a significant drop in proficiency between 2019 and 2021, a fact that has been documented on a variety of tests. (Testing was canceled in 2020.)

Prior studies from Oster and others have found that while schools of all stripes saw test scores decline during the pandemic, those that remained virtual for longer experienced deeper setbacks.

The recent state test data offers some good news, though: 2021 was, for the most part, the bottom of the learning loss hole.

In math, all but a couple states experienced improvements between 2021 and 2023. Only two — Iowa and Mississippi — were at or above 2019 levels, though.

In reading, a majority of states have made some progress since 2021 and four have caught up to pre-pandemic levels. However, numerous states experienced no improvement. A handful even continued to regress.

It’s not clear why state trends in math versus reading have differed. After the pandemic hit and closed down schools, math scores fell more quickly and sharply than reading, but now appear to have been faster to recover.

Testing experts say that standardized tests may be better at measuring the discrete skills that students are taught in math. Reading — especially the comprehension of texts — comes through the development of more cumulative knowledge and skills. “Is the test insensitive to what’s really going on in classrooms or are kids just not learning to read better?” said Marion. “That’s the part I can’t quite figure out.”

Oster suspects the adoption of research-aligned reading practices, including phonics, may explain why some states have made a quicker comeback. Mississippi, well known for its early adoption of these practices, is one of four states to have fully recovered in ELA. But more research is needed to understand why some states appear to have bounced back more quickly than others.

“Some people are doing a good job. Some people are not doing as good a job,” said Oster. “Understanding that would tell us something about which kind of policies we might want to favor.”

Some schools look to phonics to boost stagnant reading scores.

In Indiana, which made gains in math but not reading, officials are hoping a suite of recent laws embracing the science of reading will boost scores. In Michigan, which also saw no progress in reading, lawmakers pointed to recent investments in early literacy efforts and tutoring.

At Sherlock Elementary, part of the Cicero 99 school district in Illinois, just west of Chicago, Principal Joanna Lago saw how the pandemic set students back. Students are still climbing out of those holes, she said.

“Our scores are somewhat stagnant,” she said.

But Lago is hopeful a series of new initiatives will lead to gains for her students. This year, her district is adding an extra 30 minutes to every school day so staff can zero in on reading and math skills. This is the second year that teachers within the same grade level are working together more closely to plan lessons and review student performance data.

The district has also adopted a new reading curriculum aligned with the science of reading. Over the last two years, Lago, a former reading teacher herself, and her team got training on using decodable texts to emphasize phonics. Teachers visited each other’s classrooms to observe as they tried out new lessons. Pictures of mouths forming letter sounds now hang on classroom walls, instead of pictures of words.

It’s “a more strategic approach to help reach kids and fill some of the gaps of what they need,” Lago said. “How could this not lead to results? How could this not lead to more kids reading more fluently, having better reading comprehension?”

Educators are confronting persistent learning loss going into the last full school year to spend federal COVID relief money, a chunk of which is earmarked for learning recovery. Some school districts have already begun to wind down tutoring and other support as the money dwindles.

Marion of the Center for Assessment fears this extra programming will vanish too soon. “I’m pessimistic because I’m pessimistic about politicians,” he said.

The state test scores offer a slightly different picture of learning loss than a recent analysis by the testing company NWEA. While NWEA found little evidence of recovery last school year, most state tests showed gains in math proficiency last year.

There could be a number of reasons for this discrepancy, including the fact that some large states — including California and New York — have not released state test data yet, so the picture is still incomplete.

The new test score data comes with a few other caveats. Because states administer their own exams and create different benchmarks for proficiency, results from different states are not directly comparable to each other. Experts also warn that proficiency is an imprecise gauge of learning since it captures only whether a student meets a certain threshold, without considering how far above or below they are.

Plus, each year’s scores are based on different groups of students since regular testing ends in eighth grade. That means students fall out of the data as they progress into high school and some may never have fully recovered academically, even if state average scores have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

“There are kids who will forever be behind,” said Oster.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

As families struggle to find housing, more schools are hiring staff to help. The clock is ticking.

2023-12-21T10:00:00+00:00

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CINCINNATI — It was late September when Latoya Singley got the eviction notice saying she and her 6-year-old had seven days to clear out of their apartment.

Singley called Cincinnati’s shelter hotline repeatedly for weeks, but there were no beds available. Singley and her son couldn’t stay long with Singley’s sister, because having guests would jeopardize her sister’s subsidized housing.

Singley worried about her son, who’s autistic and needs specialized support. “It would be different if it was just me,” Singley said. “But I have a child — I can’t be outside.”

Her frequent calls to the hotline yielded results. An intake worker referred Singley’s case to Megan Rahill, a shelter and housing specialist for Cincinnati Public Schools. Rahill flagged the family with a bright orange “EXTREMELY HIGH” priority label and pushed them to the top of shelter waitlists. Just in time, space opened up at Bethany House, the city’s main family shelter.

“It changed so much for us,” Singley said in early December. They felt safe, instead of scared. Her son enrolled in an elementary school where Singley liked the teachers and therapists. And she landed an appointment to check out a two-bedroom apartment.

Latoya Singley at Bethany House, Cincinnati's main family shelter. She's one of many parents who received housing help from Cincinnati Public Schools this year.

Rahill is part of a growing contingent of school staffers whose primary job is to help students and their families navigate housing systems. Many districts have used their share of an unprecedented $800 million in COVID relief funding for homeless students to shrink gaping holes in the social safety net, providing services that didn’t used to be schools’ responsibilities.

Schools have leaned into this type of work in part because research shows housing instability affects everything from attendance to test scores to graduation rates.

Project Connect, Cincinnati Public Schools’ program that supports students and families experiencing homelessness, used to provide mostly educational support. Now, with $1.5 million in COVID aid and more staff, Project Connect ensures fewer families have to sort through a complex web of housing and social service agencies alone.

Against a rising tide of family homelessness, Cincinnati’s housing systems navigators are on track to provide help to twice as many students this school year as last year.

But the looming expiration of pandemic funding means this help could be going away. Rahill’s shelter and housing position, for example, is only funded through June.

“We won’t have the staff, we won’t have the same level of services — unless we find some miracle funding,” said Rebeka Beach, who manages Project Connect.

How housing systems navigators help homeless students

The idea of hiring a navigator started in the health care industry in the 1990s. The American Cancer Society was an early pioneer, deploying navigators who helped patients get screenings, treatment, and family support.

Schools picked up the model at the urging of federal education officials and advocates for homeless youth, who said it made sense for schools because staff were already in contact with families, and often had their trust.

Having a person who specializes in housing has allowed the Cincinnati school district to form closer relationships with local shelters and housing agencies, Rahill said. That’s helped families with kids get priority access to a limited supply of shelter beds and housing vouchers.

Megan Rahill, a shelter and housing specialist for Cincinnati Public Schools, calls a family in her office at Project Connect.

When Rahill was a homeless student liaison supporting 20 Cincinnati elementary schools, she often wished she could do more for families. Parents would tell her, “OK, thank you for the uniforms and transportation, but can you refer me for housing?” she said.

Rahill’s work means more families get help faster. So far this school year, she’s referred 522 children and teens to a shelter, a housing voucher, or another kind of housing support. That’s nearly as many as the district helped all of last school year.

That extra help is coming as student homelessness in Cincinnati is rising. Project Connect has identified nearly 2,700 children and teens as homeless so far this year, an increase of more than 20% compared with this time last year.

School staff say there’s a few reasons for that. The average stay at the main family shelter has stretched to over two months as families struggle to find housing. That creates longer waitlists. Rent has risen in Cincinnati much faster than in other cities, and evictions are up, following the end of pandemic-era protections. And families lucky enough to obtain a housing choice voucher are finding it increasingly difficult to find landlords who will accept the rental subsidy.

Rahill sees how that housing crunch has affected families.

On a Friday in early December, she spoke on the phone with the mother of five elementary-age children who had a month to leave their home of six years. Their heat was broken and a city inspection turned up faulty wiring — a “death trap,” the mother had been told. The landlord wasn’t returning her calls. As the stress mounted, she could tell it was affecting one of her children’s behavior at school.

Rahill made sure the parent knew about her rights to relocation assistance, and shared a list of apartments that may accept housing vouchers. Then she offered to refer her to an agency that could help pay for a security deposit and first month’s rent — a step the mother had tried on her own without success.

“If it comes through me, then you are more likely to hear from them,” Rahill explained. She urged the mother to hang on to her number: “We would definitely make sure that you guys weren’t out on the street.”

Before she hung up, Rahill had one more thing to say. “You were mentioning that you guys weren’t going to be able to have Christmas,” she began. The district was hosting a toy drive, but was at capacity. “Do you mind if I put you on the waiting list and I’ll give you a call if we have leftover toys?”

Later that Friday, Rahill got a message from another mother who was sleeping in her car with her four kids, including a preschooler. She’d applied for a housing voucher with the district’s help, but hadn’t heard back from the housing authority yet.

“I’m really desperate at this point,” the mother said in her voicemail. “I just need somewhere for me and my kids to go.”

Rahill caught her breath as she listened, then dialed the parent’s number. She offered to make a priority shelter referral that would expedite the process.

After she hung up, she highlighted the family in bright orange. Extremely high priority.

Project Connect provides jackets, shoes, uniforms, backpacks, and more for Cincinnati students in need.

Schools can’t clear all the housing hurdles

As part of her work, Rahill made a 10-page guide for families. It has everything from how to apply for a housing voucher to where kids can get a free haircut. She knows a kennel that is willing to take a pet so that a family can move into shelter. And her shelter connections stretch to Indiana.

When the local shelters are full, Rahill can book families a few free nights at a local Quality Inn using COVID relief funds. The hotel owners charge Project Connect a discounted $75 a night, and sometimes extend that rate to families so they can stay longer.

“Our community needs help, and if we can’t step up, who will?” said co-owner Kevin Patel.

Related: Schools may lose access to emergency hotel stays, a critical strategy to help homeless students

But Rahill can’t solve all problems. Perhaps most importantly, Project Connect is still limited by a dearth of affordable housing — a problem that plagues communities nationwide.

Rahill can usually only get families into a shelter when they are sleeping outside or in their car. Yet that situation has become more common in recent months.

Charity Tyne works part time with Project Connect to assist Spanish-speaking families.

Many immigrant families, especially newly arrived families from Venezuela and Nicaragua, don’t qualify for widely used public programs. And without Spanish-speaking case workers, they struggled to access the help that was available.

To address that gap, Project Connect used COVID aid to hire Charity Tyne to work part time with Spanish-speaking families. Before Tyne, Project Connect used interpretation services or Google Translate, but that often failed to detect when families were in need.

“There have been many instances where someone has called a family and has said: ‘Are you OK with housing?’ And they’ll be like ‘Yes, yes.’” Tyne said. “And then if they’re called by someone who speaks Spanish you hear the whole story.”

Because many immigrant families don’t qualify for benefits, Tyne orders them groceries and delivers them herself. She has built up a list of landlords who charge low rents and are willing to be flexible on rental history and employment.

It’s labor-intensive work. Recently, it took Tyne 50 calls to help one family with four children rent an apartment.

More than 100 Spanish-speaking families have Tyne’s cell phone number now.

‘There should be more of a safety net’

As schools across the country have expanded their work to meet students’ basic needs — from providing food to shelter to mental health care — one downside is that families and outside organizations may think schools have the ability to do more than they can.

Rahill distributes housing voucher applications from Cincinnati’s housing authority to families who don’t have a stable mailing address. Now, some parents call Rahill frustrated, mistakenly believing she — and not the housing authority — is processing their application.

“It just shows the gap,” she said. “There should be more of a safety net around people that’s not just some COVID funding through the school district.”

Student homelessness has risen in Cincinnati this year, and school staff say more families are sleeping outside or in their cars.

Many school districts, like Cincinnati, are weighing whether they can afford to keep the staff they hired with one-time COVID relief, said Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab, a research center at Georgetown University that studies school finance.

“That’s the tricky question,” she said. “Are we saying, basically, that when the housing system is supposed to meet the needs of kids first, it’s up to the school system to hold their feet to the fire?”

Some educators say housing and education are too closely linked for schools to just sit back and let someone else handle it.

When Cincinnati teacher Clarice Williams tutors kids in the evenings at Bethany House through Project Connect, she often meets students who have attended three or four elementary schools. Others missed large chunks of school.

Clarice Williams, a reading specialist for Cincinnati Public Schools, tutors children staying at the city's main family shelter through Project Connect.

She’s seen elementary students struggle to understand what they’re reading because they’re sounding out words so slowly, and middle schoolers who never learned crucial grammar and spelling rules.

“They are missing those foundational skills,” she said.

If schools see this work as critical, Roza said, then they have to figure out how to make it sustainable, possibly by training other existing staff to do the work.

Beach has been talking with a county agency and other organizations to see if there is a way to cobble together ongoing funding for the housing and shelter position.

For some families, like the mother and son who faced an eviction in September, a shelter stay is a bridge to permanent housing.

On a Friday in mid-December, Singley watched as her 6-year-old explored the apartment she’d just leased.

After several weeks of sleeping on an unfamiliar bunk bed at the shelter, her son had his own bedroom again. Already, Singley could see where she’d hang posters on his wall and PAW Patrol curtains in his window.

Her son is set to start at his new school after winter break. Singley feels confident about the plan they’ve put together for him, with one-on-one help in his classroom and time with a speech therapist. He’s started to learn a few words: no, shoe, and “eat eat.”

There was just one thing left to do: Call the school district to let them know they’d found an apartment, so they could send the bus.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Nine education stories that defined 2023

2023-12-22T13:00:00+00:00

Three years after the COVID pandemic began, schools across America are still finding their new normal.

School communities are desperately trying to reduce chronically absent students, struggling with how to spend waning federal COVID relief dollars, implementing new “science of reading” laws, and waffling on how ChatGPT should (or should not) be a part of classrooms.

Below are nine storylines from Chalkbeat reporters across the country that dove into those topics. What education stories mattered most to you this year? We would love to hear from you at community@chalkbeat.org.

Jan. 3: NYC education department blocks ChatGPT, but later reverses course

AI is here to stay, so how will America’s schools respond? At the beginning of 2023, New York City opted to run far away, blocking access to the program and citing “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.” But a few months later, the city reversed course, with schools Chancellor David Banks proclaiming the city’s schools were “determined to embrace its potential.”

Now, just over a year after the tech group OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public, some students at New York City high schools report widespread use of AI-powered chatbots among their peers. The same patterns appear elsewhere. In one national survey from July, 44% of teenagers said they were likely to use AI-powered tools to complete their schoolwork, even though a majority considered it cheating.

March 10: Tutoring help reaches few students despite nationwide push

As America’s schools confront dramatic learning setbacks caused by the pandemic, experts have held up intensive tutoring as the single best antidote. Yet even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.

In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall. The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.

Library at Southport Elementary School in Perry Township in Southport, In. Indiana has joined a growing number of states that require schools to use curriculum materials that emphasize phonetic instruction when teaching children how to read.

May 25: Indiana’s new ‘science of reading’ law requires districts to adopt research-backed curriculum

Indiana joined a growing number of states that require schools to use curriculum materials that emphasize phonetic instruction when teaching children how to read. The new law came amid concern from lawmakers and education officials in Indiana and nationwide about elementary school students’ reading ability — an issue exacerbated by the pandemic.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to another critical component of reading: background knowledge, or the idea that students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement.

June 16: The ‘Tennessee 3′ created a historic teachable moment. Will schools be allowed to teach it?

Tennessee is at the front of a conservative-driven wave of censorship about what can and cannot be taught in K-12 schools. A 2021 state law restricts classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and slavery’s ongoing legacy.

This had real effects in Tennessee classrooms, students and teachers said, when two young Black Democrats were ousted by the House’s all-white GOP supermajority for staging a protest on the House floor urging gun reforms after a mass school shooting in Nashville. Rep. Justin Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones were later reinstated.

“We definitely have noticed that a silencing is happening in our schools,” said Ava Buxton, also a senior at Hume-Fogg, when asked whether the expulsions of Jones and Pearson had been discussed in her classes.

Emerging state data compiled by Chalkbeat suggests rises in students missing school did not come close to returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year.

August 31: One Detroit school’s multilayered effort to get absent students back to school

At one elementary-middle school in Detroit, a staggering 82% of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days. So, school leadership started a mentorship program, dispatched staff to students’ homes to help families solve problems contributing to absenteeism, and used data to track attendance patterns.

This school isn’t alone in battling poor student attendance. Emerging state data compiled by Chalkbeat suggests that the stunning rise in students missing school did not come close to returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year.

September 20: The pandemic is over. But American schools still aren’t the same.

Many students and educators say school is feeling more normal than it has in over three years. COVID health precautions have all but vanished. There’s less social awkwardness. Students say they’re over the novelty of seeing their classmates in person.

But beneath the surface, profound pandemic-era consequences persist. More students are missing school, and educators are scrambling to keep kids engaged in class. Nationally, many students remain far behind in math and reading where they would have been if not for the pandemic. There have been especially steep learning drops at schools that taught virtually for most of the 2020-21 school year. Learning loss is even more pressing for older students, who have less time to fill in those holes.

September 27: Roxborough High remembers Nicolas Elizalde, killed one year ago

One Philadelphia high school planted crocuses on the first anniversary of one of the most devastating events in the history of Roxborough High: a brutal shooting mere steps from the school that took the life of 14-year-old Nicolas Elizalde as he walked home from a football scrimmage at the field nearby.

During the last school year, 199 Philadelphia students were shot, and 33 of those died, district officials said. Nationwide, data confirms that school gun violence is pervasive — and spreading. The number of guns seized in schools and fired on school property has skyrocketed since before the pandemic, according to gun violence databases.

Nov. 21: Students want to talk about Israel and Gaza. Schools are struggling to keep up.

Both Muslim and Jewish students told Chalkbeat they’ve noticed an uptick in hurtful and derogatory comments from classmates at school or over social media, echoing a recent New York state review that found Islamophobic and antisemitic rhetoric have each jumped by more than 400% on social media since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliation.

Classrooms can feel like one of the few safe places to make sense of the Israel-Hamas war, learn about the historical underpinnings of the crisis, and try in some small way to take action, teens said. But schools are taking divergent approaches to navigating conversations about the war and in some cases largely avoiding it, according to interviews with educators and students at six high schools.

Graduates line up to receive their degrees during the graduation from Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Dec. 15: Is college worth it? A Colorado report aims to answer that question.

Is college worth it? It can be, but students need to have better information about what a college education can lead to. According to a recent Colorado report, residents who complete college fare much better than their counterparts. In fact, those who finish a bachelor’s degree greatly outearn residents with only a high school diploma by several hundred dollars a week.

The information in the report is crucial to help students make a decision about whether they should go to college, advocates said. They also say the state can go a step further by displaying more information that students can use, including which college programs benefit them the most.

Caroline Bauman is the deputy managing editor for engagement at Chalkbeat.

School funding, mayoral control, class sizes: Education issues to watch in Albany’s new session

2023-12-22T18:52:09+00:00

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With New York state’s legislative session set to begin in January, lawmakers are preparing to tackle a slate of contentious issues that could hold serious ramifications for New York City students.

The fate of the city’s school governance structure will once again be up for renewal, pushing Mayor Eric Adams to make his case in Albany for continuing mayoral control.

School funding may also play a major role in lawmakers’ discussions, as some education officials have called to overhaul the state’s school funding formula — and as New York City and other districts grapple with a looming fiscal cliff, with federal COVID relief funds expiring in the fall.

School safety initiatives, updates to the state’s learning standards, and other legislation likely appearing during the next session may also impact New York City students.

Here’s a look at some of the biggest education issues lawmakers could tackle:

Mayoral control in the hot seat again

After a two-year extension, mayoral control is set to expire on June 30, and legislators will need to decide whether and how New York City’s school governance structure should change.

Mayoral control — which consolidates power over the city’s school system in the hands of its mayor — has been regularly extended over the past two decades, but has faced some tweaks along the way. Under it, the mayor has the power to choose the schools chancellor and appoint a majority of people to the city’s Panel on Educational Policy, or PEP, a city board that votes on major policy proposals and contracts.

A forthcoming state Education Department analysis of mayoral control, which solicited public comments as part of its review process, will be key to discussions of how the city should move forward, said state Sen. John Liu, a Queens Democrat who chairs the senate’s New York City education committee.

Whether lawmakers seek to continue mayoral control or adopt a new school governance structure, Liu said the city needs a more permanent system, noting that reevaluating it at two- or four-year intervals is “destabilizing for the school system.”

“There needs to be more certainty in the eyes of educators as well as families,” he said. Another critical consideration, he added: “Mayoral control should transcend whoever the mayor happens to be.”

Though public hearings have featured fierce criticism of the current system, some observers aren’t expecting sweeping changes.

David Bloomfield, a professor of education, law, and public policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, expects mayoral control to largely continue, with possible changes to lessen the mayor’s degree of control, like potentially granting additional oversight or power to City Council members or the city’s elected parent councils.

“It’s hard to imagine at this point what a radical change would look like,” Bloomfield said.

Other large cities have also grappled with their school governance structures in recent years. In Chicago, where mayoral control of schools was established in 1995, the city will transition to a fully elected school board by 2027.

Debate continues over school funding formula

Several years ago, in a major victory for state education officials and advocates, lawmakers committed to fully funding Foundation Aid, the formula that sends extra money to high-needs districts such as New York City. Since then, the conversation has shifted toward how to update the formula itself.

While the state already sends more money for schools with high-need students, the Board of Regents recently called for more than $250 million to revise the formula, proposing to update how students in poverty are counted, among other changes. The Regents have also called for $1 million to conduct a longer term study on how the formula can be improved.

State Sen. Shelley Mayer, a Democrat who chairs the senate’s general education committee, said she supports a cautious approach. She is in favor of funding further study, but hopes to better understand what potential changes would mean for school districts across the state before taking more definitive action.

“We have to know both how much it would cost the state, and also who would get less money than they currently get,” she said.

Expiring federal relief funds will dominate discussions

Both Liu and Mayer expect the looming fiscal cliff to play a major role in budget discussions during the next legislative session.

In recent years, about $7.7 billion in one-time federal pandemic aid has padded the city Education Department’s budget, helping to maintain critical initiatives like expanded preschool and summer enrichment programs. The funds have also helped schools hire social workers, psychologists, bilingual educators, and shelter coordinators, who have helped newly arrived migrants navigate the city’s school system.

But that money will expire in September, leaving many of those initiatives in jeopardy.

(Separately, Adams has directed the city’s Education Department to cut nearly $550 million from its budget, with further budget cuts still expected.).

Advocating for additional education funding as the state develops its budget will be her organization’s top priority, said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children, a group that supports the city’s most vulnerable students.

“We need the state to step up and help to save some of these important programs,” she said. “All options need to be on the table.”

Liu said, “It may not be possible for the state alone to make up the entire altitude of that cliff. But maybe we can make it a more gradual downhill, instead of a sudden drop.”

Class size law remains a sticking point

The state law to reduce class sizes at schools across the five boroughs, which will phase in smaller class sizes each year up to 2027, garnered praise from teachers and education advocates. But Adams and other local officials have expressed concern over the city’s ability to meet the requirements.

At a recent town hall in Brooklyn, First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said the city would comply with the law, but warned that it would “require very painful tradeoffs.”

When asked whether lawmakers will consider amendments to the law if petitioned by city officials during the next legislative session, Liu said, “We will continue to watch this closely.

“It’s lamentable that they continue to hem and haw about this,” he said, adding it was “absolutely essential” for the city to meet the class size mandate.

Other legislative priorities:

An effort by some lawmakers last spring to reduce the number of school lockdown drills mandated under state law is expected to resurface. Parents have argued the drills harm student mental health without clearly proven safety benefits.
As the state’s Education Department seeks to further update learning standards, Mayer hopes to tackle how to educate students about the history behind modern-day conflicts. She’s alarmed that many students have learned about the Israel-Hamas war largely through social media and is deeply troubled by reports of rising antisemitism and Islamophobia. She believes schools need more support to robustly address these and other instances of discriminatory behavior. “We cannot have students afraid to go to school because they wear a yarmulke or they wear a headscarf,” she said. “I don’t have the answers, but we’re going to have to have answers.”
Other efforts — like a universal free after-school pilot program, potential shifts to literacy instruction, the state’s ongoing transition to zero-emission buses, and more — are also expected to arise in the next session.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

New leaders, COVID spending, bus troubles: 6 Chalkbeat Chicago stories that defined 2023

2023-12-21T22:45:44+00:00

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This year brought big shifts for education in Chicago and Illinois. As schools continued to return to normal and recover from the COVID pandemic’s impact on learning, the city elected a new mayor who appointed a new school board.

Schools grappled with a wave of migrants, who partly helped stave off continued enrollment declines, and the district entered a third straight year of transportation troubles.

As we approach the end of 2023 and look ahead to 2024, here are six of the biggest education stories we covered this past year:

New leadership to shape a new era

If the 2023 education beat had a theme, it might be leadership transitions. The state of Illinois got a new superintendent in Tony Sanders and Chicago got a new mayor and a new school board.

When Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher, union organizer, and public school parent, made it into the runoff in February, he unexpectedly dashed incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s hopes for a second term. He would face Paul Vallas, a former CPS CEO who made a career as an education consultant and “fixer” turning around urban school districts.

Johnson’s victory over Vallas reflected, in part, ongoing shifts in local and national education policy. By July, he replaced six of seven school board members — a common act of new mayors — with more public school parents, community activists, and the leader of the parent group Raise Your Hand. The new board has already signaled some significant policy shifts, including moving away from a system of school choice and redoubling efforts to boost neighborhood schools.

What’s to come in 2024? Chicagoans will soon elect school board members, though state lawmakers are still working out the details of how that will happen. Before the legislature wrapped up its veto session, they did appear to agree on how the city would be divided into 20 districts after releasing their third draft of a district map.

Teresa Przybyslawski, an interventionist at Chicago’s Brunson Elementary School, works with a student on multiplication and division using flashcards. Przybyslawski, a former classroom teacher, took on the interventionist role this school year to help catch up struggling students.

COVID recovery money fuels interventionists, tutors

Federal COVID recovery money is dwindling and set to run out in 2024. But districts across the country have continued to spend millions on everything from tutoring to summer school to existing staff. In Chicago, more than $2 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds have already been spent.

After months of questions and public records requests, Chalkbeat found a complicated picture of summer school spending in Chicago in February of this year. Many schools reported strong success in offering students robust programs, but tracking participation and attendance proved difficult. Data obtained six months after an initial request showed repeat sign ups or unusually high enrollments, raising questions about accuracy.

Chicago also continues to spend a large amount of its federal funds on existing staff, including a cadre of academic interventionists. These are mostly classroom teachers already on the district’s payroll who were tapped to help struggling students catch up. The district also spent $25 million to create a Tutor Corps to support students who may have gaps in their learning from when schools switched to virtual learning during the pandemic.

But the district is not only spending its money on staff. It also used some of the money to pay vendors to help develop a new $135 universal curriculum bank known as Skyline. In partnership with WBEZ, Chalkbeat took a closer look at how Skyline is being implemented and what teachers think of it.

Outside of Chicago, one south suburban school district is moving ahead with an uncommon technology plan to keep hybrid learning at the ready.

What’s to come in 2024? Chicago is planning to spend the final $300 million of the $2.8 billion it got in the 2024-25 school year and Illinois’ education budget could see some belt-tightening as districts set about spending roughly $1.9 billion of the $7 billion.

Migrant support group at Brighton Park Elementary in 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.

Schools see influx of migrant students

Chicago has seen an estimated 4,000 migrant students coming to the city from the southern border, most of them via bus from Texas. Among the many people stepping up to help families, especially children, adjust to a new country are teachers. During summer, we featured a few teachers volunteering at a south side police station to help refugee youth navigate a new language, a new culture, and in the fall, new schools. We also spent time at one school trying to help newcomer students navigate trauma.

Amid back-to-school season, it was not clear if schools would be ready to welcome waves of newcomers. A Chalkbeat analysis of staffing data obtained through records requests found the number of bilingual teachers had declined in recent years, but teachers with endorsements to teach in a bilingual program had grown.

What’s to come in 2024? Chicago continues to struggle to manage the influx of new arrivals, which has slowed in recent weeks. Plans to construct temporary tents in two locations have been put on ice. But the city instituted a 60-day limit on how long people can stay in temporary shelters just before Thanksgiving. However, migrant students do have a right to remain in the same school and receive transportation if they’re forced to move. (Leer en español.)

Joshua Long is the new Chicago Public School District district's department leader for students with disabilities on Mon., Dec. 11, 2023.

Special education sees shakeup

Chicago Public Schools has struggled to provide services to students with disabilities for several years and the COVID pandemic only exacerbated the issue.

In June, Chalkbeat obtained documents that found the district was violating state law on the use of restraint, timeout, and seclusion in school. Two days later, the top official overseeing the department that serves students with disabilities stepped down.

After that departure and after Johnson appointed a new school board, the district asked the public for input in hiring a new special education chief. In December, officials announced it had found a new special education leader from among its own ranks. Joshua Long, the longtime principal of a school for students with disabilities, was approved by the school board and will start his new role in January.

What’s to come in 2024? Long inherits a troubled department that remains under state watch for use of restraint, timeout, and seclusion in school. It also continues to face challenges providing students with disabilities with transportation, which they’re entitled to under federal law. Last year, hundreds of students with disabilities were on the bus for longer than 90 minutes each way, but that has declined significantly. Just over 100 were riding the bus longer than an hour, as of the end of November.

School bus at the front of North-Grand High School in Chicago. Photo by Stacey Rupolo/Chalkbeat �May, 2019 photo�

Transportation troubles continue

Amid state oversight, Chicago Public Schools announced in late July it would only provide bus transportation to homeless students and those with disabilities. Both groups are entitled to transportation under federal law.

Citing a bus driver shortage, district officials also offered families of students with disabilities and those in temporary housing a $500/month stipend to cover their own transportation, which nearly 4,000 families have taken as of late November. But those payments were initially delayed and the first checks weren’t mailed until late September.

By late September, district officials also confirmed that general education students attending schools outside their neighborhood, most of them selective or magnet options, would not get busing for the rest of the semester, leaving some parents grasping for help or switching schools.

What’s to come in 2024? CPS officials announced this week that the district would not provide busing to general education students for the rest of this school year. At a City Council meeting last month, officials outlined possible solutions for next school year, including having students picked up at a regional site rather than their home and working with schools to adjust bell schedules.

A Haugan Elementary classroom on Thursday, August 4, 2022 Chicago. | Christian K. Lee for Chalkbeat

Preschool expansion goes statewide

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is promising to expand preschool and make child care more accessible in his second term. He said he hopes to make Illinois one of the best states to raise a family.

A longtime supporter of early childhood education, Pritzker’s push to boost the sector in his first term started off with a $100 million increase in 2019, but got sidelined by the COVID pandemic. Now, he’s making moves with a plan to increase early childhood by $250 million over the next four years and the creation of a standalone agency to bring together programs that are now housed across three separate departments. He also signed a bill requiring school districts to get up to speed by offering full-day kindergarten by 2027.

Chicago started rolling out universal preschool for all 4-year-olds in 2018, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel made it a re-election promise before bowing out of the 2019 mayoral election. Now, full-day preschool is a reality in every neighborhood, officials say, and enrollment figures from this fall show pre-K helped, in part, stabilize enrollment in CPS.

What’s to come in 2024? The governor typically gives a speech and releases a budget in early February. It’s likely he’ll continue increasing early education funding, but also could begin to detail the shape and scope of the new early childhood agency.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

For some kids, returning to school post-pandemic means a daunting wall of administrative obstacles

2023-12-19T05:01:00+00:00

ATLANTA – It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.

After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.

Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could consistently wear masks.

After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.

Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule.

Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.

Obstacles on the road back to school

Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty — a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car — is in many cases preventing those children from going back.

“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,” says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. “I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”

In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children — twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents — a complicated certificate evaluating a child’s dental health, vision, hearing, and nutrition — is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta’s doing, including students’ Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.

The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.

“They make it so damned hard,” says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.

During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children’s school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.

The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. “When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,” Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.

Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)

Illustration depicting Tameka. A corrosive combination of re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty is keeping children out of schools.

Echoes of a partner’s death

Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.

His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says.

Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.

Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.

Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)

When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in Spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.

The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.”

When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.

The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.

After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.

When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.

“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.”

She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.

She shakes her head. “It’s a lot.”

Calls from the school — to a disconnected phone

Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.

Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.

The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren’t enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: “Discussed students’ attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.”

The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. “Mom given enrollment paperwork,” the entry ends.

The school’s logs don’t record any further attempts to contact Tameka.

“Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,” wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson.

Inconsistent cell phone access isn’t uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka’s family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with them becomes impossible.

So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers, and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.

Tameka says she’s unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she’s spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.

The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in Spring 2021. A staff member went to the family’s home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don’t mention further attempts.

The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka’s children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate, and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.

Tameka and her 8-year-old daughter talk on their porch in Atlanta on Dec. 5, 2023, about when she might start school. The little girl should be in second grade but has never attended school.

One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.

The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn’t see the point.

The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for “educational neglect.”

A complex history works against parents

To many observers, Tameka’s troubles stem from Atlanta’s rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country’s largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.

“It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside, you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia — and no one wants to talk about it,” says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.

Atlanta’s school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of “overcrowding,” while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn’t fill all of their seats.

The board cracked down on “residency fraud” to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.

“This was about balancing the number of students in schools,” says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. “But it was also about race and class.”

Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett, and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones.

But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies’ disruption of children’s educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.

The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools — especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress.

Other Atlanta parents face similar battles

The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.

Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn’t get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in Spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn’t have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.

“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared,” said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate.

Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don’t own their homes, Atlanta’s policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters.

Shawndrea Gay was told by her children’s school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. “They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,” she says. “It was no joke.”

Then, in Summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes’ help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started.

Tameka's 8-year-old daughter ties her shoe before running out to play. (AP Photo/Bianca Vázquez Toness)

Tameka hasn’t reached out for help getting her kids back in school. She doesn’t feel comfortable asking and doesn’t trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she says. “I’m a private person.”

On a typical school day, Tameka’s four children — now 14, 12, 9, and 8 — sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest — the girl who’s never been to school — has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.

The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m.

The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for “playing school” with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.

But even at 8, she understands that it’s not the real thing.

“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.”

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A broken system delays payments to nonprofits working in NYC schools. Kids lose out.

2023-12-15T14:52:25+00:00

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For the bulk of last year, Jahlil Younger barely attended his Bedford-Stuyvesant high school.

The 18-year-old fell in with the wrong crowd and was struggling at his “second chance,” or transfer, school serving over-age and under-credited students that couldn’t make a go of it at other schools.

Things changed in the spring.

During the last few months of the academic year, Brooklyn High School for Leadership and Community Service started offering an after-school program run by Inspiring Minds NYC. The local nonprofit began the program late in the year because of a broken bureaucratic contracting system. But as soon as the program launched, it tapped into Younger’s interests. He took music, cooking, and a class about politics. Younger felt understood by the adults from the organization. He opened up about things that he never felt comfortable sharing before, like his recent decision to donate a kidney to his mom.

Suddenly, he felt like he had a reason to show up.

“I’m not gonna lie: Before this program started, I wasn’t coming to school. I’d be in the school every other day or every two days,” said Younger. “I was hanging out with … people who are gang-affiliated, who just came home from jail and are going back.”

For years, nonprofits like Inspiring Minds have been hurt by the city’s notoriously complicated and lengthy contract and procurement process. Several organizations, however, said things have gotten worse recently. The delays especially hurt businesses owned by women and people of color, like Inspiring Minds, which don’t have deep cash reserves to stay afloat. These are the same organizations that the city is trying to encourage to vie for more Education Department contracts.

Mayor Eric Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander created a joint task force that issued recommendations last year to tackle the contract backlog. But nonprofits have yet to see results. New York state Rep. Stephani Zinerman, of Brooklyn, told Chalkbeat she’s exploring legislation to address “our obligations to pay people in real time.”

According to an Education Department flow chart obtained by Chalkbeat, there’s a 15-step process that can take nine months to a year from when an organization learns it’s won a contract until the contract is registered with the comptroller’s office before payments can be made. But that timeline has stretched out, many organizations say. Contracts have been arriving late to the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, which must approve them before they can be registered for payment, officials in the comptroller’s office said.

If Inspiring Minds had been in place at the start of the year, how much more could the organization have helped Younger, wonders Katrena Perou, its executive director and a former basketball star at Penn State who has lived in Bed-Stuy for 20 years.

She also wonders how much it could have helped Brooklyn Leadership, which is currently in the state’s receivership program, giving the state control over the school until it meets specific benchmarks around its low graduation rates, high dropout rates, and behavioral challenges.

Inspiring Minds leads My Brothers Keeper for 47 Brooklyn high schools, holding monthly gatherings and providing professional development for teachers. Here, Katrena Perou (center) and others are at a field day event at Brooklyn Boys and Girls High School in June 2023.

Some organizations are hurting more than others

Brooklyn Leadership is part of the city’s “community school” program, where nonprofits are embedded on campus to offer an array of services to students, their families, and educators during and after the school day. This full-service model has proven effective in New York City, according to research, and the federal government has ramped up support of such programs across the nation.

Perou’s organization was awarded an annual grant of $377,000 for two years to be the school’s lead community partner. The grant was supposed to take effect in July 2022, but Perou didn’t learn that she won it until March 2023 — nearly a year later. And the money could not be carried over to the following year.

Perou’s organization won grants to work with two other community schools, Manhattan’s Quest to Learn ($237,000 a year) and Brooklyn Collaborative Studies ($220,000 a year), but has not received the funds for more than a year and a half, she said. She finally received an interest-free bridge loan through a city program for nonprofits on Wednesday, which is supposed to help cover up to three months of payroll, rent, and other critical expenses.

And Perou has yet to receive this year’s money for Brooklyn Leadership. She had to turn to a local foundation as a stopgap measure.

Perou worries that organizations like hers, which are often from the communities they want to help, are at a breaking point. Her organization’s reserves are tapped. She’s looked into traditional loans, but high interest rates and other requirements often make things more difficult for many local programs run by women and people of color, she said.

Because of the payment delay, Inspiring Minds is offering fewer services than promised, fewer field trips, less mental health support and tutoring. Families at the schools often don’t even realize that their kids are missing out, she said.

“I’ve always been a big advocate for the organizations from and of the community having a chance to receive community school contracts,” said Perou, who started Inspiring Minds in 2019. “There’s a certain level of connection we can make [with the students] because we’re from the same space.”

She continued, “But the system needs to change so that more BIPOC organizations can compete for these contracts. It’s an equity issue and contradicts the mission of community schools.”

Many programs are struggling. Nearly 115 community schools, including Brooklyn Leadership, are funded through a $45 million pot of federal relief funds. The other two schools that Inspiring Minds won contracts for were through a federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant program, which is distributing $15 million to about 78 community schools working with 41 lead community organizations, according to city figures.

The Education Department has been working with community organizations to complete outstanding contract registrations and “disburse funds as quickly as possible,” said spokesperson Jenna Lyle, noting that the state’s notification of 21st Century grant recipients had been delayed, throwing off the timeline.

“Where possible, we have worked to expedite the process,” Lyle said. “We are working to ensure continuity of service despite delays.”

Contract system’s ‘glacial pace’ forces some to close doors

Some organization leaders told Chalkbeat they’ve had to take themselves off of payroll to ensure their employees get paid. One nonprofit leader said her organization bowed out after the first year of the community schools contract because of the payment delays.

“I’d rather walk away than put my company in that situation,” the organization’s head said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Because of the passion we have for the work, we allow certain things to be done. But passion doesn’t pay the bills and keep the lights on.”

The time it takes — from the submission to a request for proposal to contract approval to invoice — is “a glacial process,” said Terrance Winston, the executive director of the Coalition for Community Schools Excellence.

Contract delays have similarly hurt the prekindergarten sector, which is also largely run by women of color.

City officials have tried to make it “more nimble,” Winston said. “It’s just extremely challenging.”

Larger, more established nonprofits tend to be better situated to withstand the delayed payments and can “marshall their networks” for help, he said.

“For smaller organizations — those that more accurately reflect the population they serve — it’s more of a crisis situation.”

Moreover, many nonprofit organizations are dealing with problems on multiple fronts, he said. As they’re fighting to get paid, they’re facing wage increases to keep pace with the market and inflation as well as overhead cost increases. Meanwhile, they’re dealing with children whose issues, related to the trauma and grief from the pandemic, are more complicated than ever.

“Young people are still dealing with lost loved ones, learning loss, and other challenges of developing adolescents,” he said.

Inspiring Minds interns from Research and Service High School surround Katrena Perou, the organization's executive director Student interns provide feedback, support program design, co-plan events, and mentor their peers.

Brooklyn Leadership students see a change in their hallways

Perou estimated that last year’s contract delay for Brooklyn Leadership translated into the school’s community losing about $300,000 that would have gone to extended learning time for students, professional development for teachers on culturally responsive practices, and other services for families.

The program’s delay has real consequences for a school under scrutiny and with such a high-needs population. Many of its students live in temporary housing and many have been involved with the criminal justice system.

“I feel like there would have been less fights, less drama, less chaos,” said Emerald Carrion, 19, who has found a space through the program where she can express her emotions. She felt angrier last year, she said. She would slam doors around the school and hurl epithets at teachers, security guards, and other students.

Younger also said he was “constantly” getting in trouble last year.

“There was so much rage and violence. You could feel the negative energy in the hallways,” he said.

“This year, I’m a better me,” he added, crediting Inspiring Minds with not only transforming himself but the school community. Now, he’s looking forward to screening a documentary about his neighborhood of Brownsville that students filmed during an Inspiring Minds class. It focuses on positive aspects of the area to counter negative stereotypes. The music class he’s taking has also transformed his lyrics from negative to positive.

“I feel like we shouldn’t have had to wait so long,” Younger said.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Estos estudiantes tuvieron más retrasos académicos durante COVID. ¿Cómo están respondiendo las escuelas en Colorado?

2023-11-08T19:00:00+00:00

Read in English.

Los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés quizás hayan enfrentado mayores obstáculos durante la pandemia y necesitan apoyo adicional, según dicen expertos y defensores en el campo de la educación.

Los resultados de las pruebas estatales en 2023 muestran que los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés se encuentran más rezagados en comparación con otros grupos de estudiantes que sus pares en 2019, y están teniendo más dificultades para retomar el camino. Tuvieron la reducción más grande en sus habilidades en las principales pruebas estatales de artes del idioma inglés y matemáticas y también mostraron menor crecimiento que sus pares en 2019.

Los resultados de las pruebas no son la única señal de alarma. El 40 por ciento de los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés faltaron tanto a la escuela el año pasado que se los identificó como ausentes crónicos, comparado con solo un tercio de otros estudiantes de Colorado.

Se han establecido dos métodos notables para ayudar a los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés con su desempeño académico a raíz de COVID.

Un puñado de distritos escolares observaron a sus estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés avanzar más del promedio, o demostrar un mayor crecimiento que el resto de los estudiantes. Líderes en esos distritos dijeron que priorizaron la enseñanza conjunta en lugar de sacar a los estudiantes de clases generales para recibir enseñanza específica sobre el desarrollo del idioma inglés. Por lo menos un distrito usó fondos federales por COVID para proporcionarles servicios de tutoría a esos estudiantes.

Pero algunos otros distritos dicen que no han asignado recursos ni estrategias específicas para ayudar a los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés. De hecho, sin importar datos recientes y lo que los analistas del estado digan sobre el tema, niegan que la pandemia haya afectado desproporcionadamente a estos estudiantes. Dicen que la composición demográfica de los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés ha cambiado y ahora incluye a más estudiantes recién llegados al país.

“Hay distritos que no parecen estar muy preocupados con los estudiantes bilingües emergentes”, dijo Cynthia Trinidad-Sheahan, presidenta de la Asociación de Educación Bilingüe de Colorado.

Representantes del estado en el campo de la educación dicen que no pueden darles más dinero a los distritos para ayudarlos con los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés a menos que los legisladores autoricen más gastos o nuevos programas. “Eso lo deberá contestar la Asamblea General”, dijo Floyd Cobb, comisionado de la Asociación de Educación de Colorado, al preguntarle cómo la agencia espera cerrar la brecha entre los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés y estudiantes[AC1] que hablan inglés como primer idioma.

La mayoría de los datos sobre calificaciones de pruebas muestran una tendencia negativa

Cuando las escuelas implementaron la enseñanza virtual al principio de la pandemia, algunas escuelas enfrentaron dificultades para ofrecer apoyo con el desarrollo del idioma inglés. Los estudiantes no tenían un entorno para practicar su nuevo idioma, y en sus hogares muchas familias no podían apoyarlos con el aprendizaje virtual. Y cuando las escuelas regresaron a la enseñanza presencial, algunas familias de estudiantes que estaban aprendiendo inglés titubearon más que otras familias para enviar nuevamente a sus hijos de inmediato al salón de clases.

Las desigualdades en las calificaciones de las pruebas entre los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés y quienes hablan inglés como primer idioma no son nuevas. Una razón es que la gran mayoría de los estudiantes del inglés están tomando pruebas en inglés antes de entender totalmente el idioma. Una cantidad limitada de estudiantes puede tomar pruebas de artes del idioma en español, pero esos resultados también reflejan calificaciones mucho más bajas que los estudiantes en 2019, mientras que los que hablan inglés como primer idioma en los mismos niveles de grado casi ya se recuperaron.

Las calificaciones de este año en la prueba ACCESS, la cual evalúa la habilidad de los estudiantes para dominar el idioma inglés, muestran que una porción más pequeña de estudiantes lo dominan en 2023 comparado con 2019. Y hace cuatro años, el 9.4 por ciento de estudiantes de primer grado obtuvieron una calificación de nivel 1, el nivel más bajo. Pero en 2023, casi un cuarto de los estudiantes de primer grado obtuvieron el nivel más bajo.

Cuando el estado publicó las calificaciones de CMAS en agosto, los representantes estatales dijeron que la mayoría de los grupos de estudiantes históricamente desventajados había regresado a los niveles de crecimiento prepandemia, excepto los estudiantes multilingües en la materia de artes del idioma inglés. Dijeron que sin acelerar su aprendizaje, esos estudiantes “continuarán retrasándose aún más”.

“Creo que tenemos una cantidad creíble de evidencia para poder decir que nuestros estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés se vieron afectados por COVID—y afectados desproporcionadamente”, dijo Joyce Zurkowski, directora ejecutiva de evaluaciones en el Departamento de Educación de Colorado.

Algunos distritos minimizan las tendencias negativas de los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés

A pesar de lo que los datos significan para personas como Zurkwoski, los líderes de algunos distritos piensan que los datos de los estudiantes que estaban aprendiendo inglés en 2019 no son comparables con los datos de estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés en 2023 debido a recientes llegadas de inmigrantes de Afganistán, Ucrania y América del Sur, quienes han cambiado la composición demográfica de esos grupos.

Representantes del estado dicen que aunque eso ha afectado a muchos distritos, las cantidades de recién llegados no son suficientes como para explicar todas las reducciones en los datos de logros.

En Cherry Creek, líderes del distrito dicen que están monitoreando cuántos estudiantes están logrando dominar el inglés. En Colorado, para que un estudiante deje de ser identificado como estudiante del inglés, los maestros usan datos de las calificaciones de ACCESS y pruebas estatales. Pero también pueden usar sus propias observaciones y datos internos para probar que un estudiante ya no necesita ciertas clases y servicios en inglés.

Holly Porter, directora de apoyos para el idioma en Cherry Creek, dijo que usualmente alrededor del 85 por ciento de los estudiantes se consideran como competentes en el idioma inglés a tres años de haber ingresado al distrito, y el 95 por ciento alcanza esa designación en cinco años.

Aunque las cantidades más recientes todavía no están disponibles, Porter dijo que la tendencia se ha mantenido constante.

Porter también dijo que los estudiantes que dejan de recibir servicios para el inglés siguen desempeñándose bien en la escuela y muestran un crecimiento por arriba del promedio en pruebas estatales, lo cual confirma los avances.

“Encontramos que muchos estudiantes estaban rezagados, no solo los estudiantes multilingües”, dijo.

En el distrito escolar de Harrison en Colorado Springs, Rachel Laufer, asistente del superintendente de enseñanza y aprendizaje, dijo que los desafíos que surgen con estudiantes recién llegados es que “las escuelas están trabajando para apoyar no solo las necesidades del lenguaje y académicas de las familias, sino también los otros obstáculos que existen para las familias que acaban de llegar al país”. Las familias necesitan ayuda con el transporte, la vivienda y otras cosas para que los estudiantes puedan ir a la escuela a aprender, dijo.

Aunque no les preocupan los datos, los líderes del distrito de Harrison dijeron que han realizado algunos cambios en cómo ayudan a los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés y a los recién llegados en particular.

En los últimos años, el distrito ha intentado aumentar el personal para asegurar que haya por lo menos un maestro certificado para trabajar con estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés en cada escuela, en lugar de tener que dividir su tiempo en diferentes escuelas. El distrito también está probando lentamente la enseñanza conjunta.

Laufer dijo que Harrison priorizó que los estudiantes del inglés y con discapacidades regresaran al aprendizaje presencial. Pero cuando el distrito usó el aprendizaje híbrido y los padres pudieron decidir si enviar o no a sus hijos a la escuela, fue más probable que los estudiantes que estaban aprendiendo inglés se quedaran en casa.

“Fue una mayor preocupación para ellos”, Laufer dijo. “Creo que podrías conectar eso con algunos de los datos”.

Aumentando el entusiasmo entre los maestros para ayudar a los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés

Hay algunos distritos en Colorado donde algunos de los datos entre los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés son más positivos.

En Pueblo 60, por ejemplo, la calificación del crecimiento este año en la prueba de CMAS en artes del idioma de los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés ahora es más alta que para los estudiantes que hablan inglés como primer idioma. En el distrito escolar 3J del Condado de Weld, la calificación del crecimiento en matemáticas mejoró entre 2019 y 2023.

La mejora no es uniforme en los distritos. En 3J, por ejemplo, a pesar de mejoras significativas en el crecimiento de las pruebas de matemáticas de CMS, el crecimiento en la prueba de ACCESS disminuyó.

Mientras tanto, los estudiantes de Adams 14 mostraron un crecimiento significativo en las pruebas ACCESS para ver si dominan el inglés—el crecimiento más alto entre distritos grandes—pero no mostraron mejoras en otras pruebas estatales.

En Pueblo, los líderes del distrito dijeron que ya estaban trabajando para renovar la educación de los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés antes de la pandemia.

La high school abrió un centro para estudiantes recién llegados hace siete años. En los últimos cinco años, el distrito ha trabajado en su filosofía de enseñanza y en que la enseñanza concuerde con los estándares de contenido.

Tanto Pueblo como 3J también han trabajado para reducir la cantidad de tiempo que a los estudiantes los sacan del salón de clases para recibir enseñanza sobre el idioma inglés, una estrategia que también se está usando en otros distritos como Harrison y Boulder donde los datos son menos positivos.

En escuelas primarias de Pueblo 60, la enseñanza donde se saca a los estudiantes del salón general ya no ocurre durante matemáticas ni lectura. En la escuela media, los maestros van a las clases de los estudiantes en lugar de sacarlos.

Ese fue un cambio que los maestros mismos sugirieron.

“Realmente estaban en sintonía con lo que sus estudiantes necesitaban así que aceptamos su sugerencia y dijimos: ‘bueno, intentemos eso y veamos si marca una diferencia’”, dijo Lisa Casarez, la especialista en adquisición del idioma inglés del distrito escolar de Pueblo. Ahora, en las escuelas de educación media, piensa que eso ha sucedido.

Los datos del estado muestran que los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés en las escuelas medias de Pueblo 60 obtuvieron calificaciones más altas de crecimiento en las pruebas de CMAS sobre las artes del idioma que los estudiantes en escuelas primarias y sus pares que ya dominan el inglés en escuelas de educación media.

Tanto en 3J como en Pueblo, líderes dijeron que han observado más entusiasmo entre todos los maestros para aprender cómo ayudar a los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés.

El departamento de educación del estado ahora obliga que todos los maestros reciban capacitación en Educación Cultural y Lingüísticamente Diversa cuando renuevan sus licencias. Eso significa que aprender cómo ayudar a esos estudiantes ya no es responsabilidad de unos pocos educadores con licencias especiales.

“Hemos observado mucho interés entre los maestros de educación general para apoyar a los estudiantes multilingües”, dijo Jenny Wakeman, asistente del superintendente en 3J. “Eso es algo que han hecho naturalmente”.

También ayudaron fondos adicionales. Wakeman dijo que su distrito usó algunos fondos federales por la pandemia para proporcionar intervenciones adicionales, incluida más tutoría, específicamente para estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés.

Mientras tanto, dijo que los maestros ahora están haciendo sus propios estudios de libros para aprender aún más sobre cómo ayudar a los estudiantes que están aprendiendo inglés. Ese es el tipo de actitud que Zurkowski con el departamento de educación de Colorado dice que se necesita para ayudar a esos estudiantes a ponerse a la par.

“Sabemos que esas brechas eran grandes antes de la pandemia, [y] son grandes después de la pandemia”, Zurkowski dijo. “Justifican esfuerzos intensivos de intervención”.

Yesenia Robles es una reportera para Chalkbeat Colorado, cubriendo distritos escolares de kindergarten a 12º grado y la educación multilingüe. Comunícate con Yesenia por correo electrónico a yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Not every Chicago school offers algebra in middle school. CPS is working to change that.

2023-11-30T19:15:00+00:00

Every school day at 10:30 a.m., two dozen middle schoolers shuffle into a classroom at Warren Elementary on Chicago’s far south side. One by one, they boot up a Chromebook at their desks.

Fourteen miles north, another nine students log in from their classroom at STEM Magnet Academy just west of downtown.

They are all taking the same course: Middle School Algebra with Raluca Borbath, who teaches virtually.

On a recent November morning, Borbath shared her screen to begin Lesson 13: Introduction to Two-Variable Inequalities. The students, who log in through Google Meet, dove into a problem about making bracelets with two different kinds of beads — one kind cost $1 and the other cost $2.

The class spent the next hour solving and graphing: 2x+y ≥ 10.

Classes like Borbath’s, in which middle school students learn algebra partly online, have been critical to Chicago Public Schools’ efforts to reduce long-standing inequities in access to the course, which is seen as a gateway to better high schools, better colleges, and ultimately, better careers.

Put simply: Mastering algebra in middle school can give kids an advantage for the rest of their educational trajectory. But in Chicago, access to the course before high school has long been inequitable.

Schools without algebra in the middle grades have been largely located in predominantly Black and lower income neighborhoods on the south and west sides. For students who do take algebra in eighth grade, state data shows white and Asian American students in Chicago Public Schools are more than twice as likely to pass than Black and Latino students.

But the district says it is trying to address the inequity and has found some success.

In addition to the Virtual Academy, which was created during the COVID-19 pandemic and has offered middle school algebra for the past two years, the district also partners with three local universities to get more middle school teachers certified to teach the course.

Data obtained by Chalkbeat shows:

Over the last decade, the number of CPS elementary and middle schools offering algebra grew from 209 to 366.
The number of middle grade teachers with algebra credentials increased in the past two years from 428 to 489.
A decade ago, roughly 10% of the city’s eighth graders took the district’s Algebra Exit Exam. Last May, nearly 25% did.
There are still 85 district-run schools and 35 charters where no students took the Algebra Exit Exam last year.

Other cities have tried expanding middle school algebra with varying success. In New York City, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio promised in 2015 to get algebra in every middle school and saw rates of students taking and passing the course go up. But that district’s focus has shifted back to improving freshmen algebra. Similarly, the state of California recently considered recommending all eighth graders take algebra, but decided to leave the decision to local school districts.

Corey Morrison, director of mathematics at Chicago Public Schools, said the district is focused on equity, not a one-size-fits-all approach.

“It’s algebra choice for all,” Morrison said. “We want to get to a place where every eighth grader has a choice and can choose – as much as an eighth grader can without their parents making them.”

Algebra skills ‘build from the bottom up’

Algebra has long been a core requirement for high school freshmen in Chicago and the rest of the country. But for decades, it’s also been offered to advanced middle school students. Those who took it early would be on a fast track to taking calculus senior year, giving them a leg up on college applications and a strong foundation once enrolled in university.

“If you’re spending three years on your mandatory classes, you only have one more year to look for AP classes, or dual credit classes, or anything else that you want to do,” said Borbath, the teacher of the hybrid class. By taking algebra early, students are able to free up their high school schedules.

But in Chicago, data shows stark disparities in who has historically had access to algebra in middle school. Chalkbeat Chicago obtained and analyzed the number of students who took and passed the district’s Algebra Exit Exam. The two-hour test, taken at the end of each school year, consists of 34 multiple choice questions and six short answer problems. Students who pass can move on to geometry.

Ten years ago, roughly 200 of the district’s 500-plus schools serving middle schoolers had students who took the exam. Now, more than 350 do.

At Warren, no students took the district’s Algebra Exit Exam in 2018, data shows.

The small school sits in the heart of Chicago’s Pill Hill neighborhood, a South Side enclave once home to many doctors and pharmacists who lived in the spacious homes down the street from the nearby hospital. It serves 271 students; 99% are Black and 80% come from low-income families.

STEM Magnet Academy, which shares a section of Borbath’s algebra class with Warren, is in the city’s more affluent West Loop and serves 403 students; 38% are Black, 34% are Asian American, 18% are Latino, and 6% are white. About 43% come from low-income families. In 2018, 14 students at STEM Magnet took the Algebra Exit Exam and 7 passed. But no students have taken it since then.

Borbath also teaches a morning section of algebra to middle school students at three other predominantly Black south and west side schools — Daley, Sumner, and Brown — all of which had no students taking the Algebra Exit Exam as recently as 2019, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat.

Morrison said the pandemic was terrible in a lot of ways, but the way the district is using the Virtual Academy to close gaps in access to algebra is a “silver lining.”

Students at Brentano Elementary in Logan Square work on graphing equations during an algebra class.

At Brentano Elementary in Logan Square, no students were taking the Algebra Exit Exam in 2018, district data show. Seth Lavin became principal nine years ago and said adding the course took time and planning.

“The wrong way to do this is just to change your eighth grade course and say, ‘Now we do algebra,’” Lavin said. “The right way to do it is to build from the bottom up so that the kids can be ready for it.”

Lavin said Brentano teachers led the effort to rework how math was taught in order to offer the course.

“This required, for us, changing what sixth graders were doing, and then changing what seventh graders were doing before, eventually, we could change what eighth graders were doing,” Lavin said.

Now, all eighth graders take algebra in school, Lavin said. And starting last year, Brentano started offering a before-school algebra course to any interested seventh grader.

Lavin said he’s able to pay one of Brentano’s teachers to teach the early morning algebra using federal COVID recovery money. Once that money runs out, the offering could be at risk.

Staffing middle school algebra can be a complicated equation

There are logistical and budget hurdles to overcome in order to offer algebra to middle schoolers, Lavin said.

“A teacher in your building has to have an algebra certification, or a high school math endorsement,” he said. “That requires some groundwork.”

Teacher Martin Lenthe teaches algebra to seventh grade students at Brentano Elementary before the regular school day begins.

Chicago Public Schools launched an effort 20 years ago, known as the Chicago Algebra Initiative, to boost the number of middle school students taking algebra. In partnership with three local universities, the school board pays tuition for up to 90 middle school teachers to earn a credential to teach algebra each year.

Morrison, with the district, said the goal is to eventually have at least one certified teacher in every school, but the math hasn’t always worked out.

“How do you pull a handful of kids out to give them a robust algebra course when there’s only one eighth grade teacher?” Morrison said.

For the past couple of years, the Virtual Academy has been able to step in to serve those schools.

Last school year, 777 middle schoolers across 120 schools took the virtual course and this school year, the number climbed to 1,140 middle school students across 142 schools, according to the district. Roughly 300 take the class during the school day and 800 take it before or after school.

Morrison said the virtual courses are also showing teachers and administrators that offering in-person algebra is possible.

“It changes the mindset of teachers and administrators,” he said. “There are enough students in your school, in your community, where we can work towards putting an in-person course in your building, because that’s the ultimate goal.”

District data obtained by Chalkbeat shows that 489 teachers working at 287 schools have an active credential to teach algebra to middle school students. That’s up slightly from 2020 when 428 teachers at 248 schools had them. A district spokesperson said data on algebra credentials was not available prior to 2020.

Warren is hoping to offer in-person algebra next school year. Veteran teacher Tracey Kidd is working toward getting credentialed through the University of Chicago as part of the Chicago Algebra Initiative. Last school year, she was the teacher in the room where middle schoolers logged into virtual algebra.

“It’s kind of hard to do (algebra) virtually sometimes, because kids, they wander off a little,” she said. “But if you’re in the room with them, then they’re gonna focus more, and they get that one on one attention from you.”

Kidd currently teaches intermediate math and knows many students are ready to handle the rigor of algebra.

Younger students get a jump start in algebra

In Sandra Shorter’s classroom at Warren, a group of sixth grade students are starting pre-algebra with the goal of taking algebra next school year as seventh graders.

“We’re doing ratios, unit rates, and then we’re gonna graph them and write them as equations,” Shorter explained.

A classroom wall at Warren Elementary helps middle schoolers at all levels prepare for success in algebra.

Morrison, with the district, said algebra is not just for certain students who want to be scientists or engineers. It teaches important skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking.

“Math is for everybody. But do you need to get on the accelerated track in eighth grade? Not necessarily,” Morrison said. “Do you still need to learn algebra? Yes.”

Algebra is a graduation requirement in CPS, but the stakes for taking it before high school can feel high.

Last week, 13- and 14-year-olds across Chicago found out their scores on the district’s High School Admissions Test — a one-hour exam that partly determines whether they can go to the city’s top high schools. Though the content of the test is not public, many parents and students say taking algebra in middle school gives students a leg up.

“It will help us with a test to get into high school,” said Brentano student Liam Dolik. “That is something that’s so huge in eighth graders’ life, especially in Chicago. It’s not the best but we have to do it so we might as well prepare for it.”

Teacher Martin Lenthe helps a seventh grade student with algebra at Brentano Elementary before the regular school day begins.

Dolik is one of nearly 30 seventh graders who come to school at 7:45 a.m. every weekday to take algebra. They spread out across nine tables as the morning sun streams through the towering windows in classroom 306.

Lavin said all seventh graders were offered the option to take algebra before school, and about half of them decided to do it. But Lavin wrestles with whether the morning section for seventh graders is creating a new inequity.

“Sometimes there’s this temptation to go ahead instead of going deeper,” Lavin said. “At the same time, our kids are in the CPS reality where everybody’s trying to figure out how to get as high a score as they can in the high school admissions test.”

At the end of the day, Brentano is still a neighborhood public school in a diverse neighborhood, offering advanced math to everybody, Lavin said. “That’s increasing equity in the district.”

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Eric Adams axes $547 million from NYC Education Department budget, more cuts on the way

2023-11-16T22:35:09+00:00

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New York City’s Education Department will cut nearly $550 million from its budget this year as part of a sweeping round of citywide reductions ordered by Mayor Eric Adams.

Many of the cuts are expected to take effect immediately. They will touch a wide range of programs and positions that directly affect students, from the city’s massive free preschool program, to community schools that support families with out-of-school needs, to the popular pandemic-era Summer Rising program.

A big chunk of this year’s savings will come through a hiring slowdown and the elimination of 432 vacant non-classroom positions, which officials said on Thursday will lead to a combined $157 million in savings.

Budget officials didn’t specify which roles would be eliminated but emphasized cuts to central offices and other roles that support schools. A hiring freeze has been in place since earlier this fall, but has not applied to teaching positions. Education Department officials didn’t immediately say whether the agency would continue to spare teaching positions from the freeze.

A mandate to rein in spending on “supplemental pay for administrative staff” is expected to save another $86 million this year, but officials didn’t immediately provide details on what that means.

In September, Adams directed all city agencies to find cuts equal to at least 5% of the city’s contribution to their annual budgets by November, in response to what he described as unsustainable levels of spending on the ongoing influx of asylum seekers. Additional cuts of 5% are expected in January and again in spring 2024.

In all, that means the Education Department could face up to $2.1 billion in cuts. The department’s overall budget is roughly $37.5 billion this school year.

Starting next fiscal year, the department will cut $120 million from the Universal Pre-K program, which enrolled about 100,000 3- and 4-year-old this year and is the signature legacy of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. The program has been beset by payment delays to child care operators and enrollment declines during the pandemic.

Officials said they’re reducing the size of the program because there are about 37,000 vacant seats, but did not specify how many of those slots they plan to eliminate.

“While we don’t know many details yet, there is no way a cut this large would not hurt the services available to children and families,” said Gregory Brender, the chief of policy and innovation at the Day Care Council of New York, a membership organization of child care providers.

A range of longstanding programs with a direct presence in schools are also facing small cuts.

An initiative to expand the teaching of computer science is losing $3.5 million this year, while the budget for community schools will be cut by $10 million this year. Community schools were another major educational priority of de Blasio’s administration, and have continued to grow under Adams.

Separately, nearly $20 million in funding for Summer Rising, the pandemic-era free summer school program that served roughly 110,000 students last year, is being slashed from the budget of the city’s Youth and Community Development Department, which jointly operates the program with the Education Department. The cuts will mean reduced hours and no Friday programs for some middle-schoolers, officials said.

The program has proved immensely popular with families and had about 45,000 more applicants than slots last year.

“For months, we have warned New Yorkers about the challenging fiscal situation our city faces,” Adams said in a Thursday statement. “To balance the budget as the law requires, every city agency dug into their own budget to find savings, with minimal disruption to services. And while we pulled it off this time, make no mistake: Migrant costs are going up, tax revenue growth is slowing, and COVID stimulus funding is drying up.”

Budget analysts have pointed out that the cuts ordered by Adams are far greater than the expected costs of serving the asylum seekers. The city also collected nearly $8 billion more in revenue last fiscal year than anticipated, according to a recent analysis from Comptroller Brad Lander.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, called the cuts “unnecessary” and “driven by City Hall’s false political narrative that New York City is about to fall off a fiscal cliff.”

“Revenues are higher than expected, investment from Albany is up, and reserves are at a near-record high,” he added.

Other groups warned that the city’s hiring and budget freeze is already affecting services for vulnerable children, and that further cuts could threaten their legal rights.

Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group, said the city has been unable to hire 15 additional staffers to help families living in shelters navigate the education system, an urgent concern given the influx of migrant families.

The organization also said short staffing appeared to be causing delays in providing preschool special education evaluations and services in the Bronx.

“We are particularly concerned that these budget plans will result in even more egregious violations of the rights of students with disabilities, English Language Learners, and students in temporary housing or foster care,” Advocates for Children executive director Kim Sweet said in a statement.

More cuts ahead for NYC schools

The city-directed budget cuts are part of a perfect storm of fiscal trouble facing city schools.

About $7.7 billion in one-time pandemic aid from the federal government has padded the Education Department’s budget in recent years and funded critical initiatives, including expanded preschool and summer enrichment programs. That money will dry up next September, and the looming expiration of that aid has already prompted some painful cuts.

For the first time in four years, the Education Department clawed back money this week from schools where enrollment numbers fell short of projections.

Because enrollment went up overall across the city, the majority of schools didn’t have to return money, and instead got extra funding because of higher-than projected enrollment. But there were still more than 650 schools that saw a total of $109 million in midyear cuts, according to a United Federation of Teachers analysis.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Test scores say COVID was especially rough on English learners. Not all school districts agree.

2023-11-08T19:00:00+00:00

Leer en español.

English learners might have been hit especially hard during the pandemic and need extra targeted support, experts and advocates say. But some school district leaders aren’t yet concerned about the data.

Results from 2023 state tests show English learners are further behind their peers from 2019 compared with other student groups, and they’re struggling more to get back on track.

On the main state tests in English language arts and math, the biggest falloff in proficiency between 2019 and this year is for English learners. They also showed less growth. Of those taking the SAT and PSAT for example, only students with disabilities showed less growth.

Helping English learners recover from the pandemic has been a complex problem nationwide. And test scores aren’t the only warning sign about how English learners in Colorado schools are faring: While nearly a third of Colorado students were chronically absent last year, for example, 40% of English learners missed enough school to get that label. In Colorado, English learners make up 12% of all K-12 students. Some districts have much higher concentrations than others.

There have been two notable approaches to English learners in COVID’s wake when it comes to academics.

A handful of school districts where English learners made up more ground than the average, or had better growth than non-English learners, said they prioritized co-teaching instead of pulling students out of mainstream classes to receive specific instruction on English language development. At least one district used federal COVID aid to give those students tutoring. And some district leaders also said they’ve noticed more teachers are now interested in learning strategies that specifically help English learners.

But in other districts, leaders say they haven’t devoted specific resources or strategies to help English learners. In fact, regardless of recent data and what state analysts say about it, they deny that the pandemic had an outsized impact on these students. They point to the changing makeup of English learners, among other factors.

“There are districts that don’t seem to be very concerned with emerging bilingual students,” said Cynthia Trinidad-Sheahan, president of the Colorado Association for Bilingual Education,

Whether these students get extra resources and support could depend on Colorado politics. After the Colorado Department of Education published the Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS) scores in August, Associate Commissioner Floyd Cobb answered a question about how the agency would help close the gap between English learners and their peers by saying: “That’ll need to be answered by the General Assembly.”

Most test score data shows negative trend

When schools instituted remote learning at the start of the pandemic, some schools struggled to keep offering English language development. Students didn’t have an environment in which to practice their new language, and at home many of their families struggled to support them in accessing remote learning. And when schools resumed in-person instruction, some families of English learners were more reluctant than others to immediately send their children back to classrooms.

Test score disparities between English learners and native English speakers aren’t new. One reason is that the vast majority of English learners are testing in English before they have a full grasp of the language.

A limited number of students can take the test in Spanish for a couple of years. But results show those students did much worse than their 2019 counterparts, while native English speakers in the same grade levels have nearly recovered.

This year’s scores on the ACCESS test, which measures students’ English fluency, show that a smaller share of students are proficient in 2023 than in 2019. And four years ago, 9.4% of first graders scored at a level 1, the lowest level. But in 2023, 23.3% of first graders scored at the lowest level.

In some cases, the decline in the share of English learners achieving proficiency is just a handful of percentage points. But that doesn’t necessarily capture the pandemic’s impact.

For example, out of every 100 English learners in the fourth grade who took the CMAS language arts test for reading and writing, roughly eight met expectations, down from about 12 out of 100 in 2019. For every 100 students who aren’t English learners, about 49 met expectations this year, where 54 out of 100 met expectations in 2019.

Both groups’ proficiency rates dropped by around four to five percentage points. But four fewer English learners achieving proficiency means their share of who met expectations has dropped by roughly a third — far more proportionally than the decline for non-English learners.

Separately, CMAS growth scores, in which students’ performance is compared to peers who performed similarly in the past, also show English learners aren’t making the same growth as other student groups now, or as English learners did in the past. Students who are behind need a growth score above 50, on a scale of 0-100, to catch up.

When the state released CMAS scores in August, state officials said that groups of historically disadvantaged students were back to growth levels from before the pandemic, except for multilingual learners on English language arts. They said that without accelerating their learning, those students “will continue to fall further behind.”

“I believe we have a credible amount of evidence to be able to say that our English learners were impacted by COVID — and impacted disproportionately,” said Joyce Zurkowski, chief assessment officer for the Colorado Department of Education.

Some districts downplay negative trends for English learners

Despite what the data tells people like Zurkwoski, some district leaders think that the data for English learners in 2019 isn’t comparable to data for English learners in 2023 because of the recent waves of immigrants from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and South America, changing the demographics and make up of those groups.

State officials say that while that has impacted many districts, the numbers of new arrivals aren’t enough to completely account for all of the drops in achievement data.

District leaders have had access to state test data for months but have focused on different data points.

In Cherry Creek, district leaders say they’re monitoring how many students are becoming proficient in English. In Colorado, to move a student out of the English learner designation, teachers use ACCESS scores and state test score data. But they can also use their own observations and internal data to make the case that a student no longer requires specific English classes and services.

Holly Porter, director of language supports for Cherry Creek, said that typically about 85% of students are deemed English proficient within three years of entering the district, and 95% reach that status within five years.

Although the most recent numbers aren’t available yet, Porter said that trend has remained consistent.

When she looks at CMAS scores and other state data, Porter points out that participation dropped, including among English learners. One reason is that in 2018, the federal government asked states to allow some newcomer students to not take state language arts tests for the first year they’re enrolled.

These students tended to show very high growth because they were starting from a point of knowing no English. Porter said excluding these students made data for English learners look worse.

But that change was already in effect before the pandemic struck.

Still, for Porter, when comparing the pre-pandemic environment to what followed, she says “it’s just not the same kids, not the same data, not the same experiences. For me there’s too many variables there to say this is a definite issue until I can look at it for a couple years out of COVID.”

From 2019 to 2023, the growth score of Cherry Creek’s English learners fell from 48 to 45. Growth scores for non-English learners went up from 46 to 50 over the same time span.

Porter said, however, that growth scores for students who have reached English proficiency have held steady at 53. Students remain monitored as former English learners for two years after they stop receiving language services. Seeing that these students do well on state tests, and that the percentage of students exiting services is still high, Porter said, is additional reassurance that students are getting the English instruction they need to do well in school after they stop getting services.

Porter said the district isn’t necessarily doing anything to target the recovery of English learners, though 350 newcomer students are getting tutoring through a grant.

“We found that a lot of students were behind, not just multilingual learners,” she said.

In the Harrison school district, leaders also are slightly skeptical about comparing this year’s data with pre-pandemic scores. English learners in Harrison showed above average growth on ACCESS tests in 2019, with a score of 61, but that dropped rapidly to 51 in 2023. On CMAS language arts and math tests, student growth scores showed that English learners made less progress than other students.

While Cherry Creek attributes lower scores to excluding data from newcomer students, leaders in Harrison say a large influx of newcomers has contributed to lower scores. Both say the population of students has changed from from 2019 to 2023.

District leaders say that’s because starting in January 2021, they saw a dramatic increase in the number of refugees from Afghanistan, Guatemala, and Honduras who aren’t native English speakers.

Rachel Laufer, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said the challenges that come with more newcomers is that “schools are working to support not only the language and academic needs of families, but also the other barriers that exist for families that are new to the county.” That includes helping with transportation, housing, and other resources.

While they aren’t worried about the data, Harrison district leaders said they have made some changes to how they help English learners and newcomers in particular.

In the last few years, the district has tried to increase staffing to ensure there is at least one licensed teacher working with English learners at each school, instead of having to have them split their time across sites. The district is also slowly trying more co-teaching.

Laufer said Harrison prioritized bringing back groups like English learners and students with disabilities to in-person classes. But when the district used hybrid learning and parents could decide whether to send their children to school, English learners were more likely to stay home.

“It was a bigger concern for them,” Laufer said. “I think you could connect that to some of the data.”

Getting teachers enthusiastic about helping English learners

There are a few Colorado districts where some of the data was more positive for English learners.

In Pueblo 60, for example, the growth score this year for English learners on the CMAS language arts test is now higher than it is for non-English learners. In Weld County 3J, their growth score in math improved from 2019 to 2023.

The improvement isn’t uniform within districts. In 3J, for example, despite the significant growth improvements on CMAS math tests, growth scores for ACCESS tests dropped from 56 in 2019 to 41.5 in 2023.

Adams 14 students, meanwhile, showed significant growth on ACCESS tests for English fluency — the highest among large districts — but they didn’t show improvement on other state tests.

In Pueblo, district leaders said that they were working on revamping education for English learners even before the pandemic.

The high school opened a center for newcomer students seven years ago. For the last five years, the district has worked on its philosophy of teaching and on aligning instruction to content standards.

Both Pueblo and 3J have also worked to reduce the extent to which students are pulled out of classes to receive English language instruction, a strategy also happening in other districts like Harrison and Boulder where the data is less positive.

In Pueblo 60 elementary schools, pull-out instruction no longer occurs during math or reading classes. In middle school, teachers are going into students’ classes instead of pulling them out.

That was a change suggested by teachers themselves.

“They really were in tune with what their students needed and so we took a cue from them and said ‘well lets go ahead and try that and see if that made a difference,’” said Lisa Casarez, Pueblo’s English language acquisition specialist. Now, for the middle schools, she thinks it has.

State data show English learners in Pueblo 60 middle schools had higher growth scores on language arts CMAS tests than elementary students or non-English learner middle school peers.

In both 3J and Pueblo, leaders said they’ve seen more enthusiasm from all teachers to learn how to help their English learners.

3J leaders traced that shift to a few years ago when the district rolled out state-mandated rules requiring many teachers to receive training in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education when they renewed their licenses.

That meant that learning how to help these students didn’t just fall to the dedicated staff member licensed to work with English learners.

“We’ve seen a lot of interest from general education teachers to support multilingual learners,” said Jenny Wakeman, assistant superintendent for 3J. “That’s something they’ve done naturally.”

Additional funding also helped. Wakeman said her district used some federal pandemic aid — known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER — to provide additional interventions specifically for English learners, including before- and after-school tutoring.

In the meantime, she said teachers started a book club to learn even more about how to help students who are learning English. That’s the kind of attitude that Zurkowski of the Colorado education department says is necessary to help those students catch up.

“We know that those gaps were large pre-pandemic, they are large post-pandemic,” Zurkowski said. “They warrant intensive intervention efforts.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Influx of asylum seekers pushes NYC’s homeless student population to record high

2023-11-01T10:00:00+00:00

The number of homeless students attending New York City schools reached a record high last year after thousands of asylum-seeking families entered the city’s shelter system, a new analysis shows.

Roughly 1 in 9 students were living in shelters, “doubled up” with relatives or friends, or otherwise without permanent housing at some point in the school year, according to state data compiled by Advocates for Children, a group that supports the city’s most vulnerable students.

The city’s population of homeless students was astronomical even before the recent influx, with the number of kids lacking permanent housing exceeding 100,000 for each of the past eight years – a stark indication of the city’s ongoing housing crisis.

But the sudden arrival of thousands of families fleeing dire conditions in Latin America and other parts of the world pushed the figure to nearly 120,000 last school year — a 14% increase over the previous school year. It’s an all-time high, even as the city’s overall student enrollment has plummeted, according to Advocates for Children, which has been crunching this number annually for more than a decade.

The number is likely to be even higher by the end of this school year. Roughly 12,500 new students in temporary housing have enrolled in city schools since July, according to an Education Department spokesperson.

“Our young people experiencing homelessness are some of our most vulnerable students, and it is our on-going priority to provide them with every support and resource at our disposal,” spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement.

The increase has profound implications for city schools.

Homeless students face significant educational roadblocks, from the added logistical challenges of getting to school from distant shelters to the trauma that comes with losing permanent housing.

An astounding 72% of students living in homeless shelters were marked chronically absent last year — meaning they missed at least 18 days of school, according to data compiled by Advocates for Children. For all students in temporary housing, including those living doubled up, the rate was 54%, and for kids in permanent housing, it was 39%.

Students living in shelters were also more than four times as likely as kids with permanent housing to transfer schools last year, and less than half as likely to score proficient on state reading exams, according to the data.

Advocates fear the number of school transfers will spike even higher this year due to a new city rule that requires families in some shelters to exit the system every 60 days and either find alternative housing or re-apply for shelter. Families that re-apply would have no guarantee of ending up in the same shelter or even the same borough.

Mayor Eric Adams said the new policy is necessary to relieve severe overcrowding in shelters and free up space for new arrivals. He promised the city would work to ensure that students don’t have to transfer schools whenever possible.

Students who end up in homeless shelters far from their schools are entitled under federal law to transportation so they don’t have to transfer, but given the difficulty of coordinating the rides and the stress of the long commutes on families, that often amounts to “a right in name only,” said Jennifer Pringle, the director of Advocates for Children’s Learners in Temporary Housing project.

An Education Department spokesperson said district superintendents will ensure that transportation requests from homeless students are prioritized.

Schools go all out to help homeless students

Schools often devote considerable resources to supporting families in temporary housing with everything from transportation to basic needs like laundry.

At VOICE charter school in Long Island City, Queens, a sudden explosion of enrollment of students in shelters transformed educators’ approach to working with families.

Historically, the K-8 school enrolled no more than 20 homeless students in a year, said Principal Franklin Headley. But last year, given the school’s proximity to a cluster of recently converted shelters housing asylum-seeking families and an effective outreach strategy, the school enrolled hundreds of newly arrived families. It now serves roughly 270 students in temporary housing, Headley said.

The school’s 15-person operations team pivoted to focus almost exclusively on supporting the newly arrived families, fanning out to shelters to survey families’ needs and establish relationships with shelter staff, said Director of Operations Karina Chalas.

That work yielded several new school initiatives, including an after-school program to help parents who needed child care (because of shelter rules prohibiting them from leaving kids alone) and a laundry room for families without washers and dryers in their shelters.

Staff worked hard to keep attendance tabs on the new arrivals, even as families moved to new cities and states or transferred to shelters in other parts of the city. The school helped arrange bus or train transportation when possible for families who moved to different neighborhoods so kids didn’t have to transfer schools.

“They built a community here already,” Chalas said. “We try as hard as we can to give them any option of ‘here’s what we can do.’ After a while, if it becomes too much, we know as a school we tried everything we can do.”

Budget woes could unleash more instability for homeless students

All that support requires additional resources and expertise – and advocates say the city is still not providing enough help.

A city Education Department initiative last year that hired 100 new staffers, called community coordinators, to work directly in shelters to support families with educational needs is funded by one-time federal pandemic aid that expires at the end of this year.

Meanwhile, a plan to hire an additional 12 staffers this year to support homeless students is on hold because of a hiring freeze related to city budget cuts, advocates said.

“Losing the shelter-based Community Coordinators would almost certainly increase the already sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism and make it even more difficult for students in shelter to succeed in school,” said Kim Sweet, the executive director of Advocates for Children, said in a statement.

City officials have rolled out some new investments, including revamping the Education Department’s school funding formula to give extra dollars to schools for every student in temporary housing. The Education Department also employs 100 school-based social workers devoted to supporting homeless students.

Lyle, the Department spokesperson, said the agency plans to “work with our partners at the city and state levels to identify and establish supports for our students in temporary housing, while contending with the city’s financial reality.”

Staffers at schools serving large numbers of asylum-seekers remain worried about how the new 60-day shelter rules will affect their families. Chalas, the staffer at the Queens charter school, said she’s heard many families at her school talking about cramming into shared apartments together rather than re-enter the shelter system.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Datos muestran que más de 90,000 estudiantes de NYC no han usado los recientes beneficios alimentarios por la pandemia

2023-10-30T12:08:35+00:00

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Las familias de más de 90,000 niños elegibles en la ciudad de Nueva York no han canjeado los últimos beneficios alimentarios por la pandemia, según datos obtenidos por Chalkbeat.

Esto significa que por lo menos $35 millones en beneficios potenciales siguen sin utilizarse y podrían caducar a principios del año que viene, haciendo que los neoyorquinos pierdan los fondos federales.

Los fondos, conocidos como Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT), se han otorgado en varios pagos desde 2020 para ayudar a cubrir el costo de las comidas para las familias cuyos estudiantes usualmente recibir comidas gratis en la escuela. Como las escuelas públicas de la ciudad de Nueva York ofrecen comidas universales, todas las familias son elegibles sin que importen los ingresos familiares.

Este año, el estado distribuyó múltiples rondas de fondos, incluyendo $120 por niño para el verano de 2023, así como al menos $391 por niño para el verano de 2022 y el año escolar 2021-22. (Pero los fondos de este último pago podrían ser de hasta $1,671 por niño según las ausencias relacionadas con el COVID o los días de aprendizaje remoto durante el año.)

En total, el estado ha emitido otorgado unos $5,400 millones en beneficios P-EBT desde 2020, con alrededor de un 60% de los beneficios otorgados directamente a familias de bajos ingresos que reciben beneficios federales a través del Programa de Asistencia Nutricional Suplementaria, o SNAP.

Los defensores han elogiado el programa por proporcionar un apoyo fundamental en todo Nueva York, especialmente cuando los efectos de la pandemia fueron una carga adicional para las familias en dificultad económica.

Pero entre las familias que no reciben SNAP, más de 90,000 estudiantes de la ciudad no habían usado los fondos del año escolar 2021-22 ni la asignación del verano 2022, de acuerdo con los datos estatales compartidos por el consultor educativo David Rubel y confirmados por la Oficina de Asistencia Temporal y por Discapacidad del estado (OTDA).

De las familias que recibieron tarjetas P-EBT por primera vez, 41,271 no habían gastado nada de los fondos. En cuanto a los que ya tenían tarjetas P-EBT, 49,465 tampoco habían usado los beneficios todavía.

Liz Accles, directora ejecutiva de Community Food Advocates, expresó su preocupación por la alta cifra de familias que aún no habían usado los fondos. A ella le preocupa que algunas hayan encontrado dificultades para usarlos, mientras que otras tal vez no sepan que los tienen o decidieron no usarlos.

Para muchos habitantes de la ciudad, el programa P-EBT ha sido un “salvavidas”, añadió.

“La gran mayoría de las familias de las escuelas públicas de Nueva York tienen dificultades económicas, y el costo de los alimentos es alto para todos”, dijo Accles. “Nuestra esperanza es que todos usen los beneficios”.

Rubel obtuvo los datos a principios de este mes solicitándolos en virtud de la ley Freedom of Information del estado, ya que le preocupaba que muchas familias podrían no saber que hubo pagos recientes, especialmente las no dominan bien el inglés. Él dice que ha seguido de cerca las noticias del P-EBT, pero que no estaba al tanto de pago del verano de 2022 hasta que se topó con un artículo de Chalkbeat al respecto.

“Si yo no lo sabía, ¿qué tal las familias del otro millón de niños de nuestro sistema escolar público?”, dijo él, y añadió que le preocupaba que muchas familias hayan perdido o tirado a la basura sus tarjetas P-EBT. “Hay mucho dinero sobre la mesa”.

Todos los hogares con números de teléfono en los archivos de su distrito escolar debieron recibir notificación por SMS cuando los beneficios estuvieron disponibles, según la OTDA. Las personas que estaban recibiendo los beneficios por primera vez recibieron instrucciones adicionales sobre cómo activar y usar sus tarjetas P-EBT. Las familias reciben otro texto si los beneficios todavía no se han usado seis meses después de recibirlos, según los funcionarios estatales.

El Departamento de Educación del estado también envió mensajes sobre los beneficios a todos los distritos escolares de Nueva York, añadieron los funcionarios.

De todos modos, las familias que no se hayan enterado de las ayudas, las hayan olvidado o aún no las han usado, todavía están a tiempo de usar los fondos de las asignaciones recientes.

Esto es lo que las familias necesitan saber:

¿Quién es elegible?

Todas las familias con hijos de K-12 que asistieron a las escuelas públicas de la ciudad durante el año escolar 2021-22 fueron elegibles para los beneficios de alimentos de ese año y el verano de 2022. Los que asistieron a la escuela el año pasado también fueron elegibles para recibir el beneficio del verano de 2023. También fueron elegibles las familias de los estudiantes en escuelas chárter, privadas, de otro tipo y programas de Pre-Kinder, que también reciben de comidas gratis a través del programa federal de almuerzos.

Las familias fueron elegibles sin importar su estatus migratorio.

¿Cómo se distribuyeron los beneficios?

Las familias que reciben beneficios del programa SNAP, de la Asistencia Temporal estatal o de Medicaid, recibieron sus pagos directamente en esas cuentas.

Todas las demás familias elegibles recibieron los fondos en una tarjeta P-EBT, que se expidió con su primer pago de beneficios.

¿Cómo puedes conseguir un reemplazo de tu tarjeta P-EBT estatal?

Los que hayan perdido su tarjeta P-EBT pueden obtener una de reemplazo llamando al 1-888-328-6399.

No hay fecha límite para solicitar una tarjeta de reemplazo, según los funcionarios estatales. Pero si necesitas una, los funcionarios sugieren pedirla lo antes posible.

¿Para qué sirve la P-EBT?

Los beneficios solamente se pueden usar para comprar alimentos.

¿Cuándo caducan los beneficios?

Los fondos P-EBT están disponibles para las familias por 274 días después de recibirlos, o aproximadamente unos nueve meses.

Cada vez que una familia gasta parte de los fondos, el saldo restante es válido durante otros 274 días, según las autoridades estatales.

¿Por qué deberías usar los beneficios?

Todas las familias deben usar los beneficios, no importa su situación económica, dijo Accles.

Los beneficios P-EBT, al igual que los cheques federales de estímulo que se distribuyeron durante la pandemia, le proporcionan beneficios a la comunidad que van más allá de los alimentos que compran, añadió. Aunque los fondos pueden ayudar a cubrir las compras del supermercado y otro gastos para comer, usarlos también es un estímulo para la economía local.

“Esto tiene un doble propósito”, dijo Accles. “Usar esos dólares nos ayudará a todos.”

Julian Shen-Berro es un reportero que cubre la ciudad de Nueva York. Para comunicarte con él, envíale un email a jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia schools consider remote learning if SEPTA workers strike

2023-10-27T14:57:05+00:00

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Update: As of Friday afternoon, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported SEPTA and its collective bargaining unit, Transit Workers Union 234, reached a tentative contract deal to avert a strike. This deal will have to be put to a vote of the union’s more than 5,000 members.

A looming public transit worker strike could leave thousands of Philadelphia students without reliable school transportation, meaning that more than three years after the pandemic began, remote learning may be coming back.

If members of Transit Workers Union 234 walk out when their contract expires at midnight on Tuesday, Oct. 31, several highly-trafficked train, bus, and trolley routes would be suspended, city officials have warned.

Nearly 55,000 students use SEPTA to get to and from school. In the event of a transit workers strike, the district would be unable to find suitable transportation for those students, Superintendent Tony Watlington said in a Friday statement.

“We are fully committed to ensuring that learning continues for all students in the event of a SEPTA strike,” Watlington said. “While the ideal would be to maintain in-person learning for all students, please know that staffing challenges or other conditions that may result from a strike could require some or all of our schools to shift to hybrid or 100% virtual learning.”

Because of an ongoing national shortage of drivers, “providing transportation support to all students who would need it during a strike would not be an option,” Watlington said.

As a result, Watlington said the district is also “considering relaxing absence and attendance policies such that students who are late or absent due to SEPTA-related travel challenges will not be marked late, or will be excused upon receipt of a note from the parent or guardian.”

Noting that school staff also rely on SEPTA to get to work, Watlington said the district is also considering “temporary reassignments, extended overtime and relaxation of start and end times” for educators and other school employees.

“The District will monitor staffing at each school daily and deploy educator and Central Office staffing supports for specific schools that may need additional coverage,” Watlingon said.

The district provides free transportation via yellow buses for students in grades 1-6 living at least a mile and a half from the school they attend. Older students in grades 7-12 ride SEPTA. Students with disabilities may have different accommodations through their individualized education program, or IEP.

Students in district, charter, and private schools ride for free on SEPTA buses, trains, and trolleys. The district subsidizes the cost and pays SEPTA directly, and then is reimbursed by the state.

This isn’t the first time a potential transit worker strike has threatened to disrupt Philly students’ learning. In 2021, a deal was reached narrowly avoiding a strike. The last SEPTA strike was in 2016 and lasted six days. SEPTA has been called “the most-strike prone transit agency in the nation.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools with enrollment shortfalls face cuts; more budget losses loom

2023-10-25T23:00:06+00:00

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New York City schools with lower than projected enrollments will see their budgets slashed midyear for the first time in four years.

School and Education Department staffers said the move comes as little surprise given the city’s bleak fiscal situation and dwindling federal COVID relief funds. City officials had used federal funding the past three school years to avert the midyear cuts and hold schools “harmless” if their student rosters fell short of the Education Department’s estimates.

“As NYCPS navigates the current fiscal landscape, we’ve made the necessary decision to revert to our pre-COVID-19 budgeting process,” said Education Department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer.

Schools get money in the summer based on the city’s projections of how many students are expected to fill their seats. After the final tallies are taken on Oct. 31, the Education Department adjusts school budgets, clawing back money from schools that enroll fewer students than anticipated. Schools with higher than projected enrollment will still get additional money, similar to past years, though administrators have said it can be difficult to spend the sudden influx of cash effectively in the middle of the school year.

Calee Prindle, an assistant principal at the Facing History School in Manhattan, said her school stands to lose about $160,000 if no more students enroll before Oct. 31.

“Losing that money, it sucks, but for us it’s not going to be wildly detrimental,” she said. “For me, it’s always about the communication, and I’m glad we know now.”

Still, the return to midyear cuts deals a significant blow to schools that may already be reeling from years of shrinking budgets due to enrollment losses and heightened needs in the wake of the pandemic.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew argued that the increase in state funding in recent years should be enough to continue the policy of propping budgets up even if schools miss their enrollment projections.

“It is unacceptable for NYC to cut funding to its public schools especially when the state has made such a strong financial commitment to our students,” he said in a statement.

Education Department faces major budget strain

Even with an increase in state aid, it’s a particularly precarious financial moment for the Education Department and the city as a whole.

More than $7 billion in federal relief funds that the Education Department has received since the beginning of the pandemic expires next September. The city has used that money to fund summer programming and social workers, along with propping up school budgets amid enrollment losses.

On top of that, Mayor Eric Adams earlier this fall ordered all city agencies to cut 5% of their budgets in November, an additional 5% in January, and another 5% in April in response to rising costs as the city faces an influx of asylum-seekers.

The three rounds of cuts would slash a total of $2.1 billion from the Education Department’s budget, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. It’s an enormous sum that schools Chancellor David Banks has said will likely “affect every aspect of what we do.”

The Education Department has not made final decisions about what to cut in the first round, and the decision to reinstate the midyear adjustment was not related to the budget cut mandate, Styer said.

Officials didn’t say how much the Education Department will save in the cost-cutting move. Last year, the Education Department spent $200 million to avert the midyear cut.

Fiscal belt-tightening plays out in other ways

As part of the Adams administration’s budget cut mandate, the city’s Office of Management and Budget imposed a hiring freeze, according to Education Department staffers and budget documents.

The hiring freeze doesn’t apply to school-based staff, but affects many other positions, including central personnel tasked with supporting schools and specific student populations, such as those who live in temporary housing and children with disabilities, according to staffers and advocates.

“Hiring for each position is going under a lot more scrutiny, and we realize that some may end up getting delayed for some period of time — and we don’t know for how long,” said one central staffer familiar with the budget, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

A plan to hire more than a dozen temporary staffers to support kids in shelters with educational needs was delayed because of the freeze, and vacant positions on the teams that ensure students with disabilities get necessary services have gone unfilled, according to Advocates for Children, a group that supports vulnerable students.

“We have seen significant delays in students in shelter receiving the school placements and transportation they need,” said Randi Levine, the policy director at Advocates for Children. She noted that some of the Education Department’s federal relief money is earmarked to support students in temporary housing and can’t be spent on other things.

“We don’t want the DOE to squander the resources it has available given the huge need we’re seeing on the ground,” she added.

The worst is likely yet to come. Another central staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity said teams in central offices have been asked to start preparing for significant cuts – far deeper than in past years.

And while the cuts to the Education Department’s central offices are likely to be the steepest, that division only accounts for between 1-2 % of the Education Department’s overall budget, meaning cuts outside of central offices will almost certainly be necessary.

Two areas likely to get spared: Banks’s signature NYC Reads initiative, which seeks to revamp elementary school literacy instruction by forcing districts to adopt one of three pre-selected reading curricula, and his FutureReadyNYC program, which funds schools to expand career-connected learning, according to the chancellor.

“The reading work that we’re doing and the pathways work that we’re doing is going to be prioritized,” Banks recently told reporters. “That’s where we’re going to be making sure that the investments are still there.”

Alex Zimmerman contributed.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

IPS to tap state vouchers to fund prekindergarten as it weighs whether to charge tuition

2023-10-24T11:00:00+00:00

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Indianapolis Public Schools will rely on state-funded vouchers for its expanded prekindergarten offerings once federal pandemic relief expires in 2024, as officials weigh whether to charge for prekindergarten in the future.

Beginning next year, all families will be required to submit an application for the state’s On My Way Pre-K voucher if they want to enroll their children at any one of the 22 IPS prekindergarten sites, even if they don’t qualify for the voucher. The vouchers are offered to families who earn a gross monthly income of less than 150% of the designated federal poverty level — or about $45,000 for a family of four, according to the state Family and Social Services Administration

IPS families do not need to be eligible for the voucher in order to secure one of roughly 700 prekindergarten seats next year, IPS officials say. All families will be eligible for matching with a prekindergarten program in the district-wide lottery, according to IPS. Those who qualify for vouchers will not get preference, but other preferences do apply.

The switch to state voucher funding for the district’s prekindergarten program is one of several changes that IPS and other school districts will have to make as federal pandemic relief funds expire. It comes as officials consider whether to charge for prekindergarten for families who can afford it. IPS is one of few districts that offer free prekindergarten. Across Marion County, charging tuition is the norm.

“This is a first step that I believe will lead to us likely taking on a charge for families, because the reality is even in the districts who offer it, it is at a cost,” except for those using On My Way vouchers, Superintendent Aleesia Johnson told school board members at a work session earlier this month.

IPS anticipates receiving enough funding from the On My Way Pre-K vouchers to cover prekindergarten programming expenses, the district said in a statement.

Vouchers should bring in roughly $4.2 million to the district next year to offset a program cost projected at roughly $3.8 million, Chief Financial Officer Weston Young told school board members last week.

If voucher funding is not enough to cover the cost, the district said it will supplement it with an alternative funding source, such as its main education fund or other federal funding.

The district’s reorganization plan, known as Rebuilding Stronger, increased the number of sites offering prekindergarten, from 29 classrooms at 20 sites last school year to 30 classrooms in 21 sites this year. Next year, the district will add one more site for a total of 31 classrooms.

Source: Indianapolis Public Schools

How to apply for IPS pre-K for 2024-25

Families can apply for prekindergarten for the 2024-25 school year online through Enroll Indy when the first enrollment period opens Nov. 1. To be eligible, students must be 4 years old by Aug. 1. Enrollment decisions will be released on Feb. 22.

A second enrollment period opens on Jan. 25, with decisions released on May 16.

The application period for the On My Way Pre-K vouchers opens in March. IPS will retroactively verify with the state whether families applied for the voucher.

The enrollment lottery will give priority placement to families who live in the IPS district, IPS employees, students who have a sibling already attending the designated school, and families who live in the new enrollment zone that the school serves.

After that, remaining seats will be given out on a first-come, first-served basis, according to the district.

Families who received a prekindergarten seat next school year are guaranteed a seat in kindergarten at the same school for 2025-26.

Additional early childhood seats offered at new Howe site

IPS has also partnered with Early Learning Indiana to open another early childhood education site at the future Howe Middle School, which opens next school year. This site is separate from the 22 prekindergarten sites and offers classes for even younger ages.

Families tour the new Day Early Learning center on Oct. 19, 2023. The center offers 79 seats for toddlers, infants, preschoolers, and prekindergarten students.

This site will offer 79 seats across two infant rooms, two toddler rooms, one preschool room, and one prekindergarten room. Priority is given to IPS employees and IPS students with children.

The Day Early Learning Center at Howe opened this week with three initial infant, toddler, and preschool classes totaling 20 students, all of whom were students of IPS employees. The district offered scholarships to families enrolled this year, paid for through federal pandemic relief funds. Families had to apply for available state or federal assistance in order to qualify.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Absenteeism remains high, with 31% of Colorado students missing too much school last year

2023-10-04T23:30:50+00:00

Nearly a third of Colorado students were chronically absent last year, missing 10% or more of the days they were supposed to be in school, according to new state data released Wednesday.

That’s slightly better than the 2021-22 school year — when COVID’s omicron variant ripped through schools — but far worse than any year before the pandemic.

Colorado education leaders are sounding the alarm about the missed days, as student academic performance still hasn’t recovered to prepandemic levels.

“Every day a student is in school is an opportunity for them to learn, build relationships and access support,” Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said in a press release. “We know districts are working hard to ensure students attend school regularly. But we need everyone, including educators, parents, students and community members, to make a renewed effort on this important matter.”

“The surest way to make improvements in our recovery from the disruptions of the pandemic is for kids to be in school,” Córdova added.

Colorado’s chronic absenteeism rate was 31% last year, representing 269,582 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Before COVID, rates ranged from 18% to 24%. Colorado is not alone, with most states reporting more students missing school.

Some groups had a greater share of students who were chronically absent. Kindergartners and 10th, 11th, and 12th graders all had chronic absenteeism rates above 35%. Roughly 40% of English learners missed too many days of school, as did 43% of low-income students and 60% of homeless students.

And the majority of absences — 62% — were excused.

Johann Liljengren, director of the dropout prevention and student re-engagement office in the Colorado Department of Education, said schools report a wide range of reasons students aren’t showing up to school. Expectations around health and wellness are different in the wake of COVID, and there’s more concern about not spreading illness to others. State education officials point to “how sick is too sick” guidance for when kids should stay home.

Some students report that they feel anxious or that they don’t feel safe at school. Others are disengaged or bored, and much of their schoolwork is now available online, even if instruction is supposed to happen in person.

School-based attendance workers and others who work with youth missing school describe teenagers sleeping in after working overnight shifts and elementary students who don’t make it to school because a parent is depressed or overwhelmed.

A few absences a month that don’t feel like much to a parent can add up over time.

And missing school can be a warning sign for future problems. Students who are chronically absent in middle school are more likely to drop out of high school, he said.

Liljengren said more schools are beginning to use attendance teams that go over data, reach out to families, and make home visits. The state, meanwhile, has some grants available to support that work and also points schools to organizations like Attendance Works, which provides free resources. The state has also convened a cohort of school district leaders to share information and learn from each other.

Liljengren stressed that schools need to give students a reason to show up.

“What are we really valuing about in-person or live lessons?” he said. “We are thinking about how we really draw students in.”

See district level attendance data here.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Public Schools’ state test scores show slow gains as post pandemic recovery efforts continue

2023-10-03T15:36:46+00:00

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Newark Public Schools’ state test scores went up 2 percentage points in both math and English language arts this year, according to data released by the district.

On average, 15% of Newark students in grades 3 to 9 passed math assessments while about 29% passed English language arts tests, spring 2023 New Jersey Student Learning Assessment preliminary scores show. Additionally, English language arts scores did not increase this year for Newark third graders, a grade considered critical for long-term success in literacy.

This year’s new state scores, only the second since 2019, highlight Newark students’ slow recovery from the disruption of remote learning. Last year, district officials implemented tutoring and other academic recovery measures after 2022 state scores showed dismal drops that Superintendent Roger León called “horrible” at the time — passing rates of 13% in math and 27% in English language arts.

The state’s Department of Education has not yet released statewide scores.

“We’re coming out of a unique and historic window caused by the pandemic. And students have been seen to have lost a lot of ground in regard to their achievement,” said Rochanda Jackson, executive director of the Office of Policy, Planning, Evaluation, and Testing, who presented the scores at a school board meeting last week.

Many of the trends in Newark — such as a large decline in math scores — are on par with national trends. Test scores in 2022 and this year show results were still behind pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, about 26% of Newark students passed the math test and roughly 36% passed English language arts.

And as schools across the country continue to reel from the effects of the pandemic, marginalized students, such as those from low-income families and different ethnic and racial groups, are among the hardest hit and remain the furthest from recovery.

“I want everyone to understand that the impacts of the pandemic are very real,” said León during last week’s presentation.

Third-grade reading levels remain stagnant

While about 29% of Newark Public School students passed their English language arts tests, only 19% of third graders passed the assessment this year, the lowest of any grade in the city for a second year in a row.

Experts say reading is part of a developmental process that starts at a young age and impacts a child’s likelihood of graduating high school, pursuing college, and ultimately a career. Reading proficiency levels among Black third graders in public schools started to decline in 2019, even before the pandemic, according to a report by The Racial Equity Initiative.

Last year’s initial drop prompted local groups like JerseyCAN, a statewide organization advocating for high-quality public school education, to urge state leaders to develop a plan to improve literacy in public schools. In July, Mayor Ras Baraka launched a 10-point Youth Literacy Action Plan that called on the city’s community partners and programs to get young children reading and writing amid low state test scores.

This year’s scores are “unacceptable,” said Paula White, executive director of JerseyCAN.

“The warnings that began shortly after the pandemic have now escalated to real-time results, with Newark children being deeply affected,” White said.

Among all grade levels, seventh and eighth graders had the highest English language arts scores, each at about 37%, and the greatest increases, surpassing the district’s passing rate. Seventh grade scores increased this year by about 4 percentage points and eight grade scores by roughly 5 percentage points.

In grades 3, 4, and 6 the passing rates remained the same at about 19%, 22%, and 26% respectively.

“Any effort short of overhauling the district’s literacy infrastructure will not work. Newark is in crisis, and we owe it to our children to review every area of the learning process, from teacher training to actually developing a new curriculum,” White added.

Among the district’s 41 elementary schools, 26 increased their proficiency rates in English language arts in comparison to last year’s results. Ten high schools also increased their passing rates in the same subject from last year with five schools increasing their scores by at least 5 percentage points or more.

Of more than 39,000 students across 41 elementary schools, 3,538 students across 41 schools increased their English language arts proficiency levels since 2022, according to Jackson.

Newark Public Schools’ state test scores increased by 2 percentage points, according to spring 2023 results.

Math scores are “the biggest lift” ahead

Newark public school officials have “the biggest lift” in helping students refine their math skills, said León during last week’s presentation.

The overall math passing rate increased from 13% to 15% with grades 3, 4, 7, and 9 surpassing the district average this year by 1 to 8 percentage points.

“The increase in math performance, overall nominal, is there,” Jackson added.

This year, third and fourth graders increased their scores by 4 and 5 percentage points respectively, and sixth and seventh grades each by around 2 percentage points.

Among the district’s 41 elementary schools, 27 increased their math passing rates. Of those, six increased their proficiency levels by at least 5 percentage points. Eight high schools also increased their passing rates this year and of those, three did by at least 5 percentage points.

Jackson said it is important to track student recovery and proficiency increases from one level to another as the district continues to work to address learning loss.

Of more than 39,000 students, 3,146 moved up in math levels since 2022.

District works to address student learning loss

In an effort to improve student achievement, the district has created new curriculums, placed an emphasis on student attendance, and pushed for tutoring at least three times a week.

“It’s extremely important that students are taking advantage of tutoring opportunities,” León added during Thursday’s school board meeting when the results were presented.

Last year, León emphasized the district’s Excel after-school program for grades K-8 as a way to address student trouble areas in reading, writing, math, and other subjects. This year the district also mandated roughly 10,000 public school students attend summer school in an effort to refine critical skills amid low state test scores.

After Jackson’s presentation, board member Crystal Williams was the only member to ask a question about the district’s strategy to improve student performance. León said the district’s program and instruction committee would discuss plans and goals for the year for English language arts when the committee meets in October.

Also in response to William’s question, board member A’Dorian Murray-Thomas said the district aims to reach a “30%” passing rate in the math test by next year, double the number of this year’s 15% math passing rate.

Williams called this year’s results “alarming” on Thursday.

“I would be upset if my child didn’t rank proficient. I just want to know what the plan is,” Williams added.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Many schools went all in to fight chronic absenteeism. Why are kids still missing so much class?

2023-09-28T11:00:00+00:00

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Last year, Santa Fe schools put in a lot of work to try to get students to show up to school consistently. It was a priority after chronic absenteeism doubled during the 2021-22 school year, compared to before the pandemic.

The New Mexico district hired two additional attendance coaches, for a total of five, to help every school form a team focused on boosting attendance. Those staffers got extra pay and training. And schools used COVID relief funds to reward students who improved their attendance with incentives like a pop-up science exhibit hosted by a local children’s museum.

But despite those efforts, the share of students who missed 10% or more of their school year, the threshold New Mexico and most other states use to define chronic absenteeism, didn’t budge. Just over half were chronically absent — the same as the prior year.

“We know we still have work to do,” said Crystal Ybarra, the district’s chief equity, diversity, and engagement officer, who is overseeing the attendance initiative. “We’re still trying to figure out the steps post-pandemic. Everybody wants to see a quick fix, and that’s just not how initiatives work.”

What happened in Santa Fe highlights multiple challenges schools nationwide are encountering as they try to drive down stubbornly high absence rates. Students’ mindsets about attending school in person every day have shifted, staff say. Families are more likely to keep sick kids home. In some places, more families are experiencing economic hardships and housing instability.

Emerging state data, compiled by Chalkbeat, suggests that the stunning rise in students missing school did not come close to returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year.

Chronic absenteeism worsened in at least 40 states during the 2021-22 school year, according to data compiled by Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor, in partnership with the Associated Press. The needle hasn’t moved much in the handful of states that have released data for last school year so far.

In New Mexico, for example, chronic absenteeism shot up to 40% two school years ago and remained at 39% last year, compared to 18% the year before the pandemic. Similar trends have emerged in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia.

“The consequences of kids being sporadically in school and not fully engaging take a while to really shift,” said Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that focuses on raising school attendance. “It’s definitely not something that happens overnight, and may take longer than we would like.”

Illnesses other than COVID, such as RSV, as well as confusion over when to send sick children to school, likely played a role, school staff and attendance experts said. Many families got in the habit of keeping kids home if they had any symptom of illness. When Los Angeles Unified school officials talked with 9,000 families last year as part of an effort to reduce chronic absenteeism, non-COVID illness was one of the three major themes that came up.

“We went from this place of requiring students to be out for certain symptoms that they might have in the 2021-22 school year,” Ybarra said, “to trying to navigate what was appropriate and what wasn’t this past school year.”

Elevated mental health struggles also likely contributed. Some students feel a lingering disconnect from their school and peers. School refusal seems to have intensified following the pandemic, some parents and educators say. In Santa Fe, many students who missed class or asked to transfer to the GED program last year reported feeling anxious about coming to school, Ybarra said.

Now that more schools provide devices to every student and post assignments online, some students have also come to believe that they can take a few days off and still stay on top of their work.

Greg Moody, a school official in Florida’s Orange County district who oversees attendance, said the ability to do assignments remotely had contributed to a “shift in mindset” about the importance of showing up to class every day. In his district, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 21% the year before the pandemic to 40% in the 2021-22 school year.

Amana Levi, who helps Orange County schools address truancy issues, said parents report a variety of reasons their kids stay home. But last year she frequently heard: “Well, my child needed a day off.” Sometimes that stemmed from a mental health issue, she said, and sometimes it didn’t.

In response, Levi is hosting an online training for parents that will talk about why attendance matters — for academic and other reasons — and what parents can do if they get a letter saying their child has missed a lot of school.

“It’s important that we impress upon parents: We get it, we’re all here, we’re all experiencing similar types of things,” Levi said. But her message is: “You’ve got to come to school. We are here to help as much as we can.”

Schools seek more input on attendance struggles

Schools that started attendance initiatives last year that haven’t gotten the results they wanted should try to figure out why that may be, Chang of Attendance Works said. Staff can look at how many students were directly affected by such efforts, and talk with students and families about what worked and what didn’t.

In Santa Fe, Ybarra is hoping to build on some of the positive changes in school culture that she observed last year, while making adjustments to the district’s overall strategy.

Attendance coaches realized that they previously hadn’t taught many staff members to reach out to students about attendance. So this year, they trained entire schools to do it.

With the help of a $500,000 state grant, Santa Fe is sending home letters to recognize students for good attendance and remind families to return after longer school breaks. The district also hired an organization to train high school teams to watch ninth grade attendance — a challenging transition year for many teens — and will pay staff extra to make home visits to freshmen.

School staff are prioritizing chronically absent kids for evaluations to see if they need extra academic help, or support for a disability. The goal is to “try to make them more successful so they feel like they can return,” Ybarra said. In the past, those students were often overlooked.

And last month, school officials met with students from two schools struggling with attendance to listen to some of the barriers that keep them from going to school regularly and what has been helpful to get them back on track.

Students reported getting sick, lacking transportation to school, having family problems, facing mental health issues, and caring for siblings. One middle schooler pointed to the benefits of having a day to do catch-up work when they returned from a long period of absence.

“I didn’t feel so behind when I went back into the classroom,” the student told school staff.

Orange County schools tried something similar this summer by paying a dozen social workers to call the families of students who missed 20 or more days of school last year.

The goal was to figure out what had kept students from attending and offer support “so we could start with a fresh slate,” said Juliane Cross, a senior administrator in the district’s social services department.

Social workers heard many of those families were moving around a lot, struggling to afford stable housing — a common issue in the Orlando area that has intensified in recent years. Other parents worked nights and couldn’t wake their kids up in time for class.

Social workers connected families to housing resources and made sure they knew about the federal program that offers help to students experiencing homelessness. It’s an initiative Cross hopes to repeat.

“Several of the parents were just like ‘Wow, thank you for calling,’ as if they were really surprised that this effort was made to just check on them and try to address that attendance situation,” she said. “They appreciated having that interaction.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

The pandemic is over. But American schools still aren’t the same.

2023-09-20T20:17:22+00:00

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On a recent Friday at Gary Comer Middle School in Chicago, you had to squint to see signs of the pandemic that upended American education just a few years ago.

Only a handful of students wore face masks, and even then, some put them on to cover up pimples, staff said. The hand sanitizer stations outside every classroom mostly went unused, and some were empty. Students stopped to hug in the hallway and ate lunch side by side in the cafeteria.

“I don’t think it’s a big deal as much as it was before,” said 12-year-old Evelyn Harris, an eighth grader at Comer, whose lasting memory of pandemic schooling is that online classes were easier, so she got better grades. “The pandemic didn’t really affect me in a big way.”

Students are released from classes to attend a club sign-up event at Comer Middle School.

But inside Nikhil Bhatia’s classroom, the evidence was on the whiteboard, where the math teacher was shading in slices of a pie to illustrate how to find a common denominator. That day, his seventh graders were working to add and subtract fractions — a skill students usually learn in fourth grade.

Maybe you learned this before, Bhatia began. “Or, during the pandemic, you might have been on Zoom,” — a few students laughed as he dragged out the words — “put your screen on black, went to go play a couple video games. Snap if that sounds familiar?”

Clicking fingers filled the room. “That’s OK!” Bhatia responded. “That’s why we’re going to do the review.”

As the new school year begins at Comer and elsewhere, many students and educators say school is feeling more normal than it has in over three years. COVID health precautions have all but vanished. There’s less social awkwardness. Students say they’re over the novelty of seeing their classmates in person.

But beneath the surface, profound pandemic-era consequences persist. More students are missing school, and educators are scrambling to keep kids engaged in class. Many students remain behind academically, leaving teachers like Bhatia to fill in gaps even while trying to move students forward. Rebuilding students’ shaken confidence in their abilities is especially important right now.

“It’s OK that you don’t know this,” Bhatia tells his students. “It’s normal right now.”

Hands are raised as Nikhil Bhatia teaches a math lesson at Comer Middle School.

Nationally, many students remain far behind in math and reading where they would have been if not for the pandemic. There have been especially steep learning drops at schools that taught virtually for most of the 2020-21 school year, as schools did across Chicago and within the Noble charter network, which includes Comer. It’s an issue that’s even more pressing for older students, who have less time to fill in those holes.

At Comer, 28% of eighth graders met or exceeded Illinois math standards the year before the pandemic, not far off from the state’s average of 33%. But by spring 2022, that had fallen to just 2%, compared with 23% for the state.

In reading, meanwhile, 9% of Comer eighth graders met or exceeded state standards pre-pandemic, and that dipped to 4% in spring 2022, when the state’s average was 30%.

The school made gains they’re proud of last school year, with 10% of eighth graders hitting the state’s bar for math and 22% hitting it for reading, though school leaders say they know there is still work to be done.

“If you don’t have some foundational skills and basic skills, it will be almost impossible to keep up with the curriculum as the kids get older,” said Mary Avalos, a research professor of teaching and learning at the University of Miami, who has studied how COVID affected middle school teachers. “That’s a big issue that needs to be addressed.”

How teachers are addressing pandemic learning gaps

Most of Bhatia’s students missed key skills in fourth and fifth grades — the years that school was remote, then interrupted by waves of COVID — but they mastered more advanced concepts in sixth grade last year.

That’s left Bhatia, like many teachers across the country, with the tricky task of coming up with mini lessons to fill in those elementary gaps, without spending so much time on prior concepts that students fall behind in middle school.

Ja’liyah Pope, 12, listens during a math lesson in Nikhil Bhatia’s class at Comer Middle School.

On a day like Friday, that meant to get students ready to add negative fractions, a seventh grade skill, Bhatia first had to teach a short lesson on adding fractions, a fourth grade skill. At first, some students mistakenly thought they should use the technique for dividing fractions they learned last year.

“They’ll say: ‘Oh is this keep, change, flip’?” Bhatia said. “The gap isn’t exactly what you would expect it to be.”

This kind of teaching happened “once in a while” pre-pandemic, Bhatia said, but “now it’s like day by day I have to be really critical in thinking about: ‘OK what might be the gap that surfaces today?’”

Aubria Myers, who teaches sixth grade English at Comer, sees ways the familiar rhythms of school are just now returning, four months after federal health officials declared an official end to the COVID-19 emergency.

“This year, for me, feels the most normal,” Myers said. Students are saying: “Oh wait, what’s the homework again, can I get another copy?” she said. Last year when she mentioned homework, “they were like: ‘What is that?’”

On that recent Friday, Myers led an activity in her multicultural literature class that would have been impossible two years ago when students had to stay seated in pods of color-coded desks.

Her sixth graders huddled close to one another as they tried to hop across the classroom, an exercise designed to give her fidgety students a chance to move around, while exemplifying the communication and teamwork skills that would be at the center of Seedfolks, the novel they were about to read in class.

Still, Myers had chosen the book, with its short chapters and lines full of metaphors and irony, to meet the needs of this crop of sixth graders, who spent all of third grade learning online. Many, Myers knows, never logged on. They have shorter attention spans and doubts about their reading skills but love class discussions, she said.

“They remember that time in their life when they were stuck talking to only people in their house,” Myers said. “They’re in class wanting to engage with each other.”

Aubria Myers teaches an English lesson at Comer Middle School.

Myers has tried to prevent her students from getting discouraged by their learning gaps. At the start of this school year, for example, she’s pointing out spelling and punctuation errors, but not docking points yet. She wants to make sure her students first have time to learn some of the key skills they missed in earlier grades.

“We have kids who don’t understand how to put a period somewhere in your sentence, or how to put spaces between their words,” Myers said. “I see these very beautifully strung together ideas, these really well thought-out explanations, but they’re missing some of those key mechanics.”

Student mental health and engagement still top of mind

Comer has responded to students’ post-pandemic needs in other ways, too. The school expanded its team of social workers and other staff who work with students to resolve conflicts and address mental health needs, a trend that’s been observed nationwide.

The school has long felt the effects of neighborhood gun violence and student trauma, but staff say having more adults focused on those issues has helped students open up and seek help. Now, more students are requesting verbal mediations to head off physical fights, staff say.

“If you follow us through the building, you’ll see,” said Stephanie Williams, a former reading teacher who now directs Comer’s social and emotional learning team. “Kids will seek you out, or find you, and let you know: ‘Hey, I need this.’”

On left, a student plays chess during a club sign-up event at Comer Middle School. On right, students start their English class with Aubria Myers by reading.

And this is the second year the school has scheduled all core classes earlier in the week, so that students can spend part of Friday practicing math and reading skills on the computer, and the rest of the day taking two special electives. It’s a strategy meant to keep students engaged — and showing up to school.

The school offers classes that pique students’ interests, such as the history of hip hop, hair braiding, and creative writing. Brandon Hall, a seventh grader at Comer, blended his first smoothie in a “foodies” class and bonded with his basketball coach through chess. He came to see similarities between making plays on the court and moving pawns across the board.

“I learned a lot from him,” he said.

On “Freedom Fridays,” attendance is higher and student conflicts are rarer, school officials say. That’s been important as the school, like many others, has seen higher chronic absenteeism rates over the last two years. At Comer, 1 in 3 sixth graders missed 18 or more days of school last year. Before the pandemic, that number sat closer to 1 in 5.

The approach runs counter to the calls some education experts have made for schools to double down on academics and add more instructional time — not take it away.

A recent report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, for example, spells out the numerous ways students are still struggling, and calls for “a greater urgency to address learning gaps before students graduate.” Harvard education researcher Thomas Kane noted that few districts have lengthened the school day or year and warned that, “The academic recovery effort following the pandemic has been undersized from the beginning.”

But JuDonne Hemingway, the principal of Comer, said devoting time to enrichment activities during the school day is worth it to ensure all students have access to them. These classes, she added, are helping students develop interests they may pursue in college or as part of a career.

“They’re not just random experiences for kids,” Hemingway said. “We think they are just as important as any traditional academic class.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Newark schools receive $8.9 million federal grant to implement mental health programs

2023-09-14T16:36:12+00:00

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New Jersey’s largest school district was awarded an $8.9 million federal grant to boost mental health support as the district continues to address the mental and emotional effects of the pandemic on students.

Newark Public Schools is one of two districts in New Jersey to receive the Project AWARE grant funding, awarded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Through the grant, Newark will receive $1,799,924 a year for the next five years to implement programs, practices, and policies that are “recovery-oriented, trauma-informed, and equity-based.”

School districts previously awarded the grant used the funds to hire mental health coordinators, counselors, and social workers. Others used the money to provide professional development training or expand existing school-based social-emotional programs.

Newark plans to create new policies and programs to support student wellness and create healthy learning environments.

“Included in the goals of AWARE is to increase and improve access to culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate, and trauma-informed school and community-based activities and services,” wrote Dani Bennett, spokesperson for SAMHSA.

Mental health problems among young people were on the rise before COVID, but spiked during the pandemic. Teens also reported feeling disconnected as the pandemic disrupted student learning and limited access to their friends, school-based social services, and after-school activities such as sports and clubs.

As a result, the need for mental health and behavioral support intensified after the pandemic. But a study released last year found that Black and Latinx students in New Jersey have less access to school mental health staff today than they did a decade ago. In 2008, public schools across New Jersey had 8.2 mental health staff per 1,000 students on average, which increased to 8.6 staff per 1,000 students in 2020, according to the New Jersey Policy Perspective.

In Newark, where more than 90% of public school students identify as Black or Hispanic, youth and families experience inequities in accessing mental health and behavioral resources, an issue the school district aims to tackle through Project AWARE - Newark. This is the first time the district has received this funding.

Newark plans to boost mental health support

As part of the initiative, Newark will work to meet 18 goals so all students in the district get better access to mental health support and services tailored to their needs, according to the district’s strategy. Newark will work with the New Jersey Department of Education, the state’s mental health agency, and the city’s community mental health agencies to establish a tiered system of mental health support over the next five years.

Among its goals, Newark will develop “a culturally aligned, affirming socio-emotional universal curriculum” for all students, according to the district’s strategy. The district will also develop positive messaging to motivate students and safe spaces in schools such as after-school clubs “that promote affinity spaces for historically marginalized youth.”

The district must also create a suicide awareness training policy, implement prevention programs for suicide and substance use, train staff on mental health awareness, and develop a school safety and violence prevention program, among other goals to promote healthy learning environments for students and staff.

Bennett, the spokesperson for SAMHSA, said Newark must also develop a “Disparity Impact Statement,” a report that identifies racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender minority populations at the highest risk for experiencing behavioral health disparities. The district must also track and collect data about its new programs and report to SAMHSA on a quarterly basis.

Since the return to in-person learning, Newark schools have worked to create more mental support for students. In the district’s 2022-23 school year budget, Newark allocated funds to boost social workers and counselors for the district’s 39,000 students. The budget covered salaries for 45 new social worker positions, for a total of 164 social workers, and one new counselor position, for a total of 89 counselors.

In 2022, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy also announced extra support for mental health services through a regional model, known as the New Jersey Statewide Student Support Service Network. The model aims to provide mental health services to more students across the state, according to Murphy’s administration last year.

Between 2018 and 2022, 205,874 students across the country have been referred for mental health or related services under Project AWARE. Additionally, 796 policy changes across the country have occurred at the state and local levels to improve mental health-related programs and services as a result of the grant.

The Jersey City Board of Education was also awarded this grant in New Jersey.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Schools face a funding cliff. How bad will the fall be?

2023-09-13T15:13:30+00:00

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It’s an ominous phrase that is top of mind for many school district officials: the “funding cliff.”

This refers to the imminent end of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief money that schools have been relying on during the pandemic. “The feds pushed a lot of money into the K-12 system,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University. “Now the districts are being weaned off of that funding — they’re losing that shock absorber, that cushion.”

This has educators and experts nervous: the money might be gone before students have fully recovered academically and could lead to painful layoffs and other budget cuts. Some schools have already begun cutting back on recovery programs including tutoring, summer school, and extra staff, like college advisors.

But what is not yet clear is how steep the fall from the funding cliff will be. That’s because there are many other factors that will shape school budgets, including money from other sources. Plus, schools are making spending choices now that could lead to bigger or smaller cuts later.

What we do know is that high-poverty schools face a bigger cliff, that more federal money won’t be forthcoming, and that school budgets will be shaped both by districts’ own financial decisions and those made by state politicians. How precisely this plays out could affect classrooms and students for years to come.

Here, Chalkbeat offers a guide to the federal school funding cliff and what factors will make or break school budgets after the federal money runs out.

Schools got a lot of federal money, but it’s running out — and no more is coming

Schools have received a large infusion of federal money since the pandemic: roughly $190 billion or close to $4,000 per student.

The money was meant to address the consequences of the pandemic on schools, including learning loss. In practice, local officials had wide discretion over how to spend it. Money from the final pot has to be earmarked by the end of September 2024 (though schools can seek an extension for when that money is actually spent). The latest data shows that schools still have funding left, but are on track to use it all by the deadline.

Some advocates had hoped that even more federal dollars would be on the way. For instance, the Los Angeles teachers union had sought to make federal relief permanent. But this is not going to happen. The recent deal that President Joe Biden struck with Congressional Republicans limits new federal spending on education for the next couple years.

In sum, the infusion of temporary federal money really will be temporary. Once it’s spent, it’s gone.

High-poverty schools got more federal money, so face a steeper cliff

The COVID relief was not spread evenly across schools. Nationally, districts in more affluent areas received just over $1,000 per student, with some getting even less. High-poverty districts, on the other hand, got over $6,000 per student. A handful of very high poverty districts, like Detroit, received massive sums of money. There was also variation from state to state, with schools in the South getting more federal money as a percent of their total budgets.

This means that some schools will face little or no funding cliff while others will face steep cliffs. “Districts serving our neediest kids have further to fall,” noted a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution.

The scope of cuts will depend on how schools have chosen to spend federal money

“A lot depends on how prudent they were in their use of the federal funds,” said Taylor. “Federal funds should have been interpreted as one-time money.”

It’s clear that a good chunk of the funding was indeed used for one-time expenses: HVAC and other building upgrades, personal-protective equipment for COVID, bonuses for staff.

Detroit, for instance, earmarked over half of its COVID relief for long-deferred facilities upgrades. “One thing that I’ve tried to do as superintendent is be disciplined with finances,” superintendent Nikolai Vitti recently told Chalkbeat. “I always think about recurring revenue with recurring expenditures, and one-time revenue with one-time expenditures.”

On the other hand, at least some districts have used COVID money for ongoing operating costs like paying teachers’ salaries and maintaining buildings. State data show that schools have been adding staff in recent years. As federal aid runs out, layoffs might follow.

There’s also a third, mushier category: supplementary expenses that schools have added to try to make up for learning loss or address other needs. Those might include expanded summer school programming, after-school tutoring time, vendor contracts, temporary new staff. Some have already begun cutting. Detroit eliminated some positions like college transition advisors. Districts in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Reno, Nevada have cut back on tutoring.

As the funding cliff approaches, these recovery add-ons may start to vanish even more rapidly. This programming may be easier to cut because it’s not part of core instruction, but could still be painful to lose, especially when students remain behind academically.

Generous state or local funding could cushion the fall

The biggest chunk of education funding comes from states, and they have been increasing spending on schools of late. One recent analysis found that most states have increased education spending in their budgets this year, often by substantial amounts. Last year, California passed a record state budget, which included a one-time $7.9 billion learning-recovery grant to schools, on top of the one-time federal aid.

If state funding continues to increase, districts could be protected from major cuts even as federal money dwindles.

David Lauck, CFO of Alliance College-Ready, a charter network in Los Angeles, says he’s not expecting immediate cutbacks thanks to funding increases from California. “We do not anticipate any major dropoff in programming,” he said.

More local funding could also help cushion schools. Officials in Kansas City are planning to use higher property tax revenue to keep some of the staff they added with federal aid. “We’ve done the work so we can retain them,” said Jennifer Collier, the superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools. “The cuts were not as deep as we originally thought.”

But states could soon face budget challenges, limiting their ability to help schools

States governments also received a separate $195 billion worth of temporary federal money. This has supported the generous education funding for schools, but it also means states face their own funding cliff. Moreover, many states are projecting that revenue from state taxes will decline next year.

“With more fiscal data coming in, the long-term health of state budgets looks murky,” concluded Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate with the Urban Institute.

That could create a double whammy for schools: federal funds run out and states don’t have the ability to provide an additional buffer. Once again, high poverty schools are more at risk because they tend to be most reliant on state funds. Local funding is also not a guaranteed backstop. The higher-poverty schools that face the greatest fiscal cliff typically have less property wealth to draw from.

The budget situation will likely vary by state. A number of Republican-leaning states have adopted tax cuts and private school choice programs, which could strain state budgets.

But there is some good news for public schools. States have built up substantial “rainy day” funds that could bolster budgets. Plus the broader economy, contrary to some predictions, is looking relatively strong. That’s a more promising indicator for state revenue, since a strong economy tends to mean higher funding from sales and income taxes.

Bruce Baker, a University of Miami professor and school finance researcher, says he suspects the upcoming funding cliff won’t be as bad as what happened after the Great Recession, when schools made deep cuts after federal aid runs out. But he said this will vary from place to place and that schools are to some extent at the mercy of state politicians.

“A lot of these cliffs are going to be a function of state choices,” said Baker.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia school leaders celebrate small gains in standardized test scores

2023-09-07T22:48:37+00:00

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Some Philadelphia students are making minor gains in math, English, and science and are catching up to their pre-pandemic scores, according to preliminary standardized test data the district released Thursday.

While the increases are incremental — only a few percentage points in each category — and many students still have not reached proficiency, school leaders said they are hopeful they can keep up the momentum this school year and in the years to come.

According to early data from the 2022-23 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, students scoring “proficient” in math in grades 3-8, English in grade 3, and science in grades 4 and 8 increased from 2021-22, and students who scored “below basic” declined in those grades and subject levels.

“Students may not have reached … proficiency [yet] but they are moving in the right direction,” Jermaine Dawson, the district’s new deputy superintendent of academic services, told board members on Thursday. “We are catching up and we are closing the achievement gap in those areas.”

Superintendent Tony Watlington cautioned the final data — including a deeper look into disaggregated data sorted by race, gender, and grade level — would be coming in the late fall or early winter.

Board members expressed optimism that Philadelphia students may be making progress.

“Knowing that there are thousands of more students who are now proficient at math … that excites me,” Board President Reginald Streater said.

English Language performance

Third grade students — who have been under the national microscope as districts across the country confront the way they teach reading in their classrooms — were given special attention in the district’s presentation on Thursday.

The percentage of grade 3 students who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the English PSSA rose from 28.1% in 2021-22 to 31.3% in 2022-23 — an increase of 3.2 percentage points.

The percentage of grade 3 students who scored “below basic” on the PSSA ELA declined during that time period, from 38.2% to 30.3%.

According to the district’s data, the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the English PSSA “remained stable,” dropping 0.3 percentage points from 34.4% in 2021-22 to 34.1% in 2022-23.

The percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored “below basic” in ELA dropped from 28.2% to 25.4% between 2021-22 and 2022-23 — a decline of 2.8 percentage points.

Watlington said the district has committed to shifting schools towards implementing structured literacy, sometimes known as “the science of reading,” to students in the years to come and are looking to implement new curriculum in that vein next school year.

“We’re not saying that teachers have to take away academic creativity and freedom … but we have to draw the line in the sand and say all kids will have a rigorous and guaranteed viable curriculum,” Watlington said. “The best available in the United States.”

Math performance

Watlington also highlighted the new math curriculum that’s already being rolled out in classrooms citywide this week. He said he hopes those new materials will build on the gains reflected in the PSSA scores.

The percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the math PSSA rose from 16.5% in 2021-22 to 20.1% in 2022-23 — up 3.6 percentage points.

In 2022-23, 57.3% of students in grades 3-8 scored “below basic” on the math PSSA, down from 61.7% in 2021-22 — a decrease of 4.4 percentage points.

The percentage of grade 3 students who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the math PSSA rose from 20.8% in 2021-22 to 26.0% in 2022-23 — a gain of 5.2 percentage points.

In 2022-23, 52.1% of grade 3 students were “below basic” on the math PSSA, down from 58.9% the previous year — 6.8 percentage points.

Science performance

The science portion of the PSSA is only given to students in grades 4 and 8. The district reported from 2021-22 to 2022-23, the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or “advanced” on that test increased from 37.1% to 40.5% — an increase of 3.4 percentage points.

Still a long way to go

To be sure, even with the gains, last year’s scores remain well below levels school officials said they’d like to see.

“We know we’re not where we need to be. We’re not even close to where we know the kids deserve to be,” Board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez said.

Tonya Wolford, the district’s chief of evaluation, research, and accountability, told board members it’s important to keep in mind, “students likely are not going from below basic to proficient in one year.” They’ll need more time, resources, and attention to catch up to their peers.

Philadelphia also didn’t see the drastic “drop in performance” during the pandemic from 2018-19 to 2021-22 that districts saw across the country and across the state, Wolford said. “But we’re still not back to pre pandemic levels.”

What are they doing about it

Dawson, Wolford and Watlington all pointed to their efforts to increase student attendance and implement some high-dosage tutoring through a pilot at six to eight schools this year.

Board member Joyce Wilkerson said the board would need to know more details about specific efforts that are working or not in schools across the city, especially as federal covid relief funding comes to an end and dollars may need to be stretched.

“We’re going have to make some budget decisions in the next couple of months, and we’re going to need to know and in fairly specific ways what are we going to fund and what are we going to cut out,” Wilkerson said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Schools are cutting recovery programs as U.S. aid money dries up. Students are still struggling.

2023-09-06T04:01:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to get essential education news delivered to your inbox.

DETROIT – Davion Williams wants to go to college. A counselor at his Detroit charter school last year helped him visualize that goal, but he knows he’ll need more help to navigate the application process.

So he was discouraged to learn the high school where he just began his sophomore year had laid off its college transition adviser — a staff member who provided extra help coordinating financial aid applications, transcript requests, campus visits, and more.

The advisers had been hired at 19 schools with federal pandemic relief money. In June, when Detroit’s budget was finalized, their jobs were among nearly 300 that were eliminated.

“Not being able to do it at this school is kind of disappointing,” Williams said in August at a back-to-school event at Mumford High School.

An unprecedented infusion of aid money the U.S. government provided to schools during the pandemic has begun to dwindle. Like Williams’ school, some districts are already winding down programming like expanded summer school and after-school tutoring. Some teachers and support staff brought on to help kids through the crisis are being let go.

The relief money, totaling roughly $190 billion, was meant to help schools address needs arising from COVID-19, including making up for learning loss during the pandemic. But the latest national data shows large swaths of American students remain behind academically compared with where they would have been if not for the pandemic.

Montgomery County schools, the largest district in Maryland, is reducing or eliminating tutoring, summer school, and other programs that were covered by federal pandemic aid. Facing a budget gap, the district opted for those cuts instead of increasing class sizes, said Robert Reilly, associate superintendent of finance. The district will focus instead on providing math and reading support in the classroom, he said.

But among parents, there’s a sense that there remains “a lot of work to be done” to help students catch up, said Laura Mitchell, a vice president of a districtwide parent-teacher council.

Mitchell, whose granddaughter attends high school in the district, said tutoring has been a blessing for struggling students. The district’s cuts will scale back tutoring by more than half this year.

“If we take that away, who’s going to help those who are falling behind?” she said.

Districts have through September 2024 to earmark the last of the money provided by Congress in three COVID relief packages. Some schools have already started pulling back programming to soften the blow, and the next budget year is likely to be even more painful, with the arrival of what some describe as a “funding cliff.”

In a June survey of hundreds of school system leaders by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, half said they would need to decrease staffing of specialists, such as tutors and reading coaches, for the new school year. Half also said they were cutting summer-learning programs.

As the spending deadline looms, the scope of the cuts is not yet clear. The impact in each district will depend on how school officials have planned for the aid’s end and how much money they receive from other sources.

State funding for education across the country has been generous of late. But states may soon face their own budget challenges: They also received temporary federal aid that is running out.

Many school officials are bracing for the budget hit to come. In Shreveport, Louisiana, officials say that next year they might have to cut some of the 50 math teachers they added to double up on math instruction for middle schoolers.

Schools there added the teachers after identifying deep learning gaps in middle school math, and there’s evidence it helped, with a 4-point increase in math scores, officials say. But at a cost of $4 million, the program will be in jeopardy.

“Our money practically is gone,” Superintendent T. Lamar Goree said.

Some researchers have questioned whether the money was sufficient or sustained enough to address the deep declines in learning. But with a recent deal limiting federal spending increases in education, more money from Congress will not be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers and commentators have pointed to anemic academic recovery to suggest schools didn’t spend the COVID relief money wisely in the first place.

Experts note that district officials had wide discretion over how to spend the money, and their decisions have varied widely, from HVAC upgrades to professional development. “Some of the spending was very wise, and some of it looks, in hindsight, to have been somewhat foolish,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University.

To date, there is limited research on whether the federal money has helped address learning loss. One recent study of eight districts’ summer school programs found no impact on reading scores but improvements in math. Since only a fraction of students in each district attended, this made only a small contribution to learning recovery, though.

School officials insist the money has made a difference.

“I wonder what the counterfactual would have been if we didn’t have the money,” said Adriana Publico, the project manager for COVID relief funds at Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada. “Would students have been even worse off? I think so.“

The Washoe system has cut hours for after-school tutoring in half this year and eliminated teacher coaches from many elementary schools. The district just finished a dramatically expanded summer school program, but officials aren’t sure if they’ll be able to afford to continue it next summer.

Some school systems are trying to maintain COVID-era additions. In Kansas City, Missouri, district officials say they’re planning to keep a number of the positions that were added with federal money, including intervention teachers and clinicians who work with students who have experienced trauma. The district will be able to do so, said CFO Erin Thompson, because of higher property tax revenue.

“This might not be as bad as what we thought,” she said. “We’re optimistic at this point.”

In Detroit, which received a windfall of federal COVID money, district officials say they budgeted carefully to avoid steep cuts when the money runs out. This included earmarking more than half of their federal relief — some $700 million — for one-time building renovations to aging campuses across the city.

But ultimately, officials said some reductions were necessary. Expanded summer and after-school programs have been phased out, in addition to the hundreds of staff positions, like the college advisers.

“In an ideal world, I would rather have college transition advisers,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. “But it’s another example of making hard decisions.”

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Barnum reported from New York and Binkley reported from Washington, D.C.

Pandemic-era summer school boosts math scores, but barely makes a dent in steep learning loss

2023-08-15T20:26:31+00:00

Summer school might be more popular than ever — at least among educators trying to address unprecedented declines in student learning.

With the help of COVID relief money — some of which was earmarked for this very purpose — schools across the country have expanded learning opportunities over multiple summers. Officials say summer school is no longer just for kids who need to make up classes to move up a grade, but for a broader swath of students who have fallen behind since the pandemic began.

So has summer school worked as a learning loss recovery strategy?

A new study, the most comprehensive analysis to date of pandemic-era summer learning, says the answer is: kind of.

Students who attended school over the summer of 2022 saw their math scores improve, according to the research. This offers some of the first concrete evidence that a key learning loss strategy is working. However, those gains were modest, and there were no improvements in reading. And since only a fraction of students went to summer school, it barely made a dent in total learning loss.

Overall, the latest research suggests that some catch-up efforts are paying off, but may be insufficient to return students to their pre-pandemic trajectories.

“It’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty story,” said Dan Goldhaber, coauthor of the study and a professor at the University of Washington. While summer school had a positive impact, he said, “only a small slice of the damage that was done from the pandemic is recovered from summer school.”

Summer learning helps, but benefits are modest

The new research, released by a team of scholars with the education research group CALDER, examines the impact of summer school last year in eight districts, including those in Dallas, Portland, and Tulsa.

Summer programs varied from place to place, but they typically ran between 15 to 20 days, with an hour to two of academic instruction each day. Districts usually allowed anyone to participate, but also targeted invites to struggling students. Summer school was open to students in elementary and middle grades, and, in a few places, high school.

Somewhere between 5% and 20% of students participated in summer school, depending on the district. Goldhaber noted that some districts had open spots, perhaps indicating low demand among families or insufficient recruitment efforts. Participating students attended about two thirds of the time — highlighting the perennial problem of absenteeism in summer school.

On the more encouraging side: Summer school students were more likely to be struggling academically, suggesting that officials were successful in recruiting kids who were most in need of extra learning time.

Researchers compared test scores of summer school students versus similar kids who didn’t attend over the summer. To start the next school year, summer school students had slightly higher scores in math, though not reading. There was clear evidence of math gains in five of the eight districts.

“The simple takeaway is something’s working,” said Goldhaber.

The researchers note that it’s possible that those students made more gains not because of summer programming, but because their families were more motivated to help them catch up.

Still, the new research offers some support for one of the most common learning-loss recovery strategies since the pandemic began, including over this most recent summer.

Newark Public Schools, for instance, required 10,000 struggling students to attend summer school this year, double that of last year. The district is selling it as an extension of regular schooling. “We’re working to engage parents and make sure they understand that their kids aren’t done just because it’s summer,” a summer school principal previously told Chalkbeat. “If you miss school, we make calls.”

Denver launched a “summer connections” program which focused on “accelerating” students by providing instruction for their incoming grade level, rather than reviewing material. An internal analysis found, unlike the CALDER study, that participating students did not make noticeable test score improvements compared to those who didn’t go to summer school. (Teachers and parents did say that students had made social growth, and nearly all students said they had made friends in the program.)

But even when it is effective, summer school can only go so far in making up pandemic-era learning loss.

The CALDER researchers estimate that summer learning closed only 2% to 3% of the pandemic-induced learning gap in math. In other words, the impact, relative to the size of the problem, was tiny. This reflects the fact that summer school is, by its nature, limited in scope. Summer learning added only a small bit of time for a small fraction of students.

The researchers say that summer school could close the math gap only if every student attended over multiple years. This would amount to extending the school year — an idea that has not proven popular with school officials or parents.

Schools have also added staff, tutoring programs, and after-school time, among other catch-up efforts. To date there is limited research on the efficacy of these approaches. Some of them, particularly online tutoring, have faced challenges reaching struggling students.

Data from the testing company NWEA through the end of last school year found that students remain substantially behind where they would be if not for the pandemic. Results from a handful of state tests also show that students remain behind, but suggest that students in some states have been catching up to pre-pandemic levels.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Newark’s state test scores dropped last spring. What’s helping students get back on track?

2023-08-03T11:30:08+00:00

In Newark’s North Ward, students in Ms. Murphy’s second grade class at Park Elementary School sat quietly on a colorful rug at the front of the classroom in mid-July, listening to their teacher read a book.

The summer school class was practicing reading comprehension skills by answering questions about the story and summarizing the main ideas.

“Look at the sun, the rain,” said Kathleen Murphy as she showed students the drawings in the book. “Where is our setting?”

Two students quickly raised their hands.

“Outside by a tree!” one student.

“What kind of tree?” Murphy asked the class.

“Oak!” several students shout out, eager to answer.

Murphy’s class is part of Newark Public Schools’ five-week summer school program, one of many efforts across city schools to help students get back on grade level after spring 2022 state test scores showed dismal drops in English language arts and math.

As Newark students get ready to return to class in five weeks, officials are hoping that such initiatives aimed at helping those who have fallen behind will pay off.

Some of those interventions began last spring with high-dosage tutoring during the day at KIPP New Jersey schools. Others – such as Murphy’s class – took place during summer school programs.

About 10,000 public school students were required to attend summer school this year – double the number from last year – with more scattered throughout city charter schools.

In Newark Public Schools, students are required to attend summer school based on attendance, grades, and state test scores. Those who did not attend within the first three days were at risk of losing their seats and high schoolers enrolled in the summer accelerated program needed to attend every day to keep their spots, according to the district.

“The effort to close the achievement gap and accelerate learning is a collective effort,” said Newark Public Schools Assistant Superintendent José Fuentes. “And hopefully we’ll see robust gains from this summer.”

New Jersey students took the state’s standardized test last spring – the first time since 2019 – providing a glimpse into students’ slow recovery after COVID-19 disruptions. The scores pointed to the severity of the pandemic’s toll on student learning and the efforts Newark leaders must take to recover from it.

In spring 2022, only 49% of New Jersey students passed the state’s English language arts test, 27% of Newark public school students, and 47% of the city’s charter school students reached proficiency levels in the same subject.

Newark’s younger students suffered the biggest declines from pre-pandemic levels, with only 19% of Newark Public School third graders and 40% of the city’s charter school third graders reaching proficiency levels on the state’s English language arts test. Third grade is widely viewed as a critical age for reading and a measure of a student’s future academic success. The scores also showed that Newark’s struggles with achieving math proficiency have only grown since the pandemic.

In July, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka declared an “urgent” literacy crisis throughout the city and launched a 10-point Youth Literacy Action plan that calls on local schools, parents, community partners, and programs to get young children reading and writing.

Rising second grade students work on math problems in Kelly Stern’s class on Thursday, July 20, 2023, at Achieve Community Charter School in Newark, New Jersey.

The sobering test scores are part of the crisis that led city educators to develop strategies to refine students’ skills in reading, writing, and math this summer. In the classroom, teachers are working with students who need help practicing handwriting and strengthening reading comprehension skills, while others implement group work that challenges students to discuss different ways to solve math problems.

For public school leaders, home to roughly 38,000 students, federal COVID relief dollars have been the district’s “saving grace” in expanding summer programs to 14 schools this year, said Superintendent Roger León during a press conference in June.

Part of the district’s strategy is ensuring those dollars “last a long time” so they continue to offer tutoring and other recovery support during the school year, León added.

‘Learning happens when students are having fun’

Park Elementary’s summer school principal, Ladylaura Bueno, is responsible for making sure her 127 students required to attend summer classes are there.

The program “moves very quickly,” Bueno said, and missing one week of summer school “is like missing one marking period.”

The goal is for the summer school experience to mirror that of the academic year, Fuentes added. On day one, students are tested in either reading or math and then tested again at the end “to see the efficacy of the program,” Bueno said. Instruction is tailored to each student’s need, making participation a key component of the program.

School leaders like Bueno, normally a vice principal at Salomé Ureña Elementary school, say summer school planning takes months, and ensuring that parents understand the importance of it is part of the work to help students succeed.

“We’re working to engage parents and make sure they understand that their kids aren’t done just because it’s summer,” Fuentes said. “If you miss school, we make calls.”

Developed by Newark Board of Education curriculum experts, the district’s Summer Plus program combines academic and enrichment activities into a full-day summer program for students who will be entering grades one through eight. In the morning, students work on improving math and literacy skills, and in the afternoon, students are free to join extracurricular activities led by partnering organizations in Newark.

“The teacher is the facilitator here and that places the onus on students to solve the problem and find different ways to reach a solution,” Fuentes said.

In one fifth grade class at Park, for example, 12 students who need extra support in math focus on collaborative work and finding ways to solve problems on their own. Then they discuss different solutions with their peers. Students are also pulled from class at different times of the day and placed in smaller groups with teachers who provide more targeted support in reading and math.

During the regular academic year, León said they plan to implement a similar structure and provide tutoring for students throughout the school day – a requirement under Baraka’s 10-Point Action Plan.

Ultimately, “learning happens when students are having fun and are engaging in hands-on activity,” Fuentes said.

Newark charter looks for ways to refine student learning

Overall, Newark’s trends showed that students performed lower in math state tests than in English language arts. That’s one reason Achieve Community Charter School is focusing on improving student performance in math as part of its summer program.

Achieve students entering grades one through seven are tested during the first week of school to assess their needs, said Tina Leake, Achieve’s summer school site director. Based on that data, students are placed in tutoring groups that target specific skills in math and literacy.

Rising fifth grade students work in small groups with an “All Star” tutor in Vanessa Simon’s class on Thursday, July 20, 2023, at Achieve Community Charter School in Newark, New Jersey.

Summer tutoring can include group instruction or one-on-one learning during the school day, in addition to instruction in the classroom in the morning, said summer school principal Patrice Norwood. School leaders and teachers then evaluate their tutoring strategy on a daily basis as students move through the program.

“They’re not going to stay in the same group for the whole program, or the whole week or even daily,” Norwood added. “It might change based on what we’re seeing.”

Keeping Achieve’s 184 summer school students engaged is also part of the work to support student learning, Norwood said.

Through a partnership with After School All Stars, a nonprofit organization working with low-income youth, students are spread throughout 10 classrooms with one instructor and an “All Star” tutor who helps out during the small group hour built into the day. In their classrooms, students rotate among three different groups: instruction with a teacher, iReady lessons in math or reading on their Chromebooks, and group work specific to students’ needs.

Students may also need extra support in skills not usually worked on during the school day such as handwriting or adding and subtracting. Small groups and tutoring are a way to build those skills, Norwood said.

School leaders also keep a close eye on students’ emotional and mental health and work with community partners to support children and their families. Recently, for example, one of Achieve’s students was dealing with the loss of a family member and school leaders offered to provide therapy and support services for the family.

“We’re here to help both students and their families,” Norwood said.

Their approach to supporting students and evaluating and reassessing their program is part of “the love students get,” she added.

KIPP schools maximize impact of tutoring

For KIPP New Jersey Schools, which serves students in Newark and Camden, the work to boost student performance began this spring with two new partnerships that helped provide high-dosage tutoring in math and reading. That goes along with recent research that shows intensive tutoring can be effective in helping students improve in problem areas.

Two of the charter school network’s elementary schools partnered with the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, a statewide nonprofit created to address academic recovery needs post pandemic, to provide in-person tutoring to 100 students. The preliminary data for elementary student outcomes is “promising” and reflects on the efforts of the corps to provide targeted tutoring, said Joe Hejlek, director of wraparound services at KIPP New Jersey.

Overall, the state’s Tutoring Corps served 500 students across New Jersey schools during the 2022-23 pilot. The percentage performing at grade level in math improved from 16% to 40%, and from 23% to 40% in literacy across all grade levels, the Tutoring Corps reported.

But Hejlek says the program’s success in KIPP New Jersey schools is in part linked to student attendance.

“There’s a very direct correlation between the number of sessions students participate in and the amount of growth that they make,” he said.

At the middle school level, three KIPP New Jersey schools partnered with Tutored by Teachers, an organization that provides personalized virtual tutoring for students. Nikeya Stuart is a school leader at TEAM Academy working with students from fifth through eighth grade. At TEAM, 20 students worked with Tutored by Teachers instructors this spring and received virtual tutoring in math twice a week during the school day.

Achieve Community Charter School student’s work on adding and subtracting during the school’s 2023 summer program.

Students were chosen to participate in the program if they were within 10 points of passing the state’s math test and had 95% daily attendance or higher during the academic year, Stuart said. The goal was to choose students who would commit to tutoring “so the program could really yield the results that we were hoping that it would,” Stuart added.

She found sixth and seventh graders were more engaged than students in fifth and eighth grade but noted the importance of finding “a program that works for each student.”

Not all students will benefit from online learning after the pandemic and “if a student did not like learning behind the computer, they may not be the ideal student” for virtual tutoring, Stuart said.

By learning about the impact the tutoring efforts had on students, the charter network is looking to scale up its tutoring program by expanding it to five more schools this year. But it remains unclear whether there will be funding to continue such high-dosage tutoring and other avenues for student academic recovery.

”It’s just a question of making sure we have enough tutors to meet demand,” Hejlek said, “and then making sure we’re being thoughtful about how we select the students and how we set our schools up to maximize the impact of the tutoring.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark student reading scores are low. Will the city’s new literacy action plan help?

2023-07-18T21:58:09+00:00

Surrounded by books at the Newark Public Library on Tuesday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka announced a 10-point Youth Literacy Action Plan that calls on the city’s schools, parents, community partners, and programs to get young children reading and writing amid low state test scores.

The plan focuses on developing literacy opportunities in all city programs, improving access to books that reflect cultural and ethnic backgrounds, encouraging expectant parents to read to their unborn children, and providing tutoring for students during the school day, among other points.

City, community, and local partners will work to pool their resources to promote the plan, host events and giveaways, and teach parents how to create reading opportunities for their children, city leaders said during a press conference on Tuesday.

“It is all our responsibility to make sure that our kids are reading on grade level,” Baraka said on Tuesday. “I want everybody to feel the same heaviness and weight that I feel. We believe that this is urgent for all of us to be engaged in immediately.”

Last spring, only 49% of New Jersey students passed the state’s English language arts test and only 27% of Newark public school students reached proficiency levels. Among Newark’s third graders, only 19% passed the state’s test, the lowest of any grade in the city.

Experts say being able to read fluently impacts a child’s likelihood to graduate high school, pursue college, and ultimately a career. From kindergarten to third grade students are learning to read and by fourth grade, students are using reading skills to learn, said Newark’s Chief Education Officer Sharnee Brown during Tuesday’s press conference.

Baraka’s plan “emphasizes prenatal to third grade” children to ensure the literacy work begins early and sets students up for long-term success, Brown added. The plan also encourages expectant mothers to seek prenatal care in clinics throughout the city to build healthy brain development and recommends that parents read to their unborn children.

The city’s action plan also calls on parents to enroll young children in free pre-K3 and pre-K4 programs in district or charter schools or programs led by community-based providers. The goal is to motivate families to incorporate reading activities for their children at an early age and continue them outside of the school day by reading to them and helping build their vocabulary.

“I look at literacy as building a house and ensuring a good, solid foundation,” Brown added. “When we teach young people how to read well, we’re really teaching them how to excel.”

The action plan encourages Newark parents to develop a home library and provide children with access to books. Research shows that children growing up in a home with a 500-book library helps them stay in school for 3.2 years longer compared to homes that have little to no books.

Brown said the city and local community partners are working together to host book giveaways and reading events throughout Newark this summer. In August, the city will host its annual “Reading Under the Stars” event to teach families how to read together. The plan is to “incentivize and celebrate reading” and “make it a Newark culture” to read, Brown added.

Newark Chief Education Officer Sharnee Brown explains the importance of promoting reading and developing literacy skills for young children during a press conference.

“We’re creating these literacy events where parents come and get free books but we’re also teaching parents how to do some of this work,” Brown said.

The Newark Public Library also offers programming for children year-round including reading activities, and reading challenges for kindergartners, elementary, middle, and high school students.

“You really want to incorporate literacy and reading into everything,” said Asha Mobiley, youth services supervisor at the Newark Public Library. “We really want to meet our young readers where they are so that we can help them get to where we want them to be.”

Baraka is also calling on city schools to implement one-on-one high-dosage tutoring during, before, and after the school day to help grow in reading and writing skills.

Research shows that high-dosage tutoring, or 30-minute tutoring for two to three days a week, provides the most impactful results. Newark Public Schools will continue to host its after-school Excel program this coming school year to provide tutoring, but will create more tutoring opportunities while students are in school, Superintendent Roger León said during a June press conference.

Currently, the district utilizes skills from an evidence-based reading approach known as the science of reading to teach students how to read, said León in June. This coming school year, the district will be using the “Fundations” program to help students learn the foundational skills of reading such as phonics, spelling, and writing, Mary Ann Reilly, Newark Public Schools assistant superintendent and director of the Office of Teaching and Learning, said on Tuesday.

“We also want to make sure that children are building important knowledge and they’re using reading in order to do that,” Reilly added.

Additionally, Newark’s plan calls on community-based and after-school programs to incorporate a literacy component into their programming and mandate funding to programs and sports that incorporate some level of reading and literacy. All city programs must provide a literacy program and if they don’t, Baraka wants parents to hold those programs accountable.

The 10-point plan was developed through research-informed data on literacy and in collaboration with Baraka’s Brain Trust, a group of community organizations focused on improving reading levels in Newark.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring help reaches few students despite nationwide push

2023-03-10T11:30:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

David Daniel knows his son needs help.

The 8-year-old spent first grade in remote learning and several weeks of second grade in quarantine. The best way to catch him up, research suggests, is to tutor him several times a week during school.

But his Indianapolis school offers Saturday or after-school tutoring — programs that don’t work for Daniel, a single father. The upshot is his son, now in third grade, isn’t getting the tutoring he needs.

“I want him to have the help,” Daniel said. Without it, “next year is going to be really hard on him.”

In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall.

A new tutoring corps in Chicago has served about 3% of students, officials said. The figure was less than 1% in three districts: Georgia’s Gwinnett County, Florida’s Miami-Dade County, and Philadelphia, where the district reported only about 800 students were tutored. In those three systems alone, there were more than 600,000 students who spent no time in a district tutoring program this fall.

The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.

Whatever the reason, the impact is clear: At a crucial time for students’ recovery, millions of children have not received the academic equivalent of powerful medication.

“It works, it’s effective, it gets students to improve in their learning and catch up,” said Amie Rapaport, a University of Southern California researcher who has analyzed students’ access to intensive tutoring. “So why isn’t it reaching them?”

The Indianapolis school district last year launched two tutoring programs that connect students with certified teachers over video. One is available to all students after school, while the other is offered during the day at certain low-performing schools.

District officials say a trial run boosted student test scores. Parents give it high marks.

“The progress that he made in just a couple months last semester working with his tutor was kind of far beyond what he was grasping and doing at school,” said Jessica Blalack, whose 7-year-old, Phoenix, opted in to after-school tutoring.

Jessica Blalack watches as her son Phoenix, 7, works with a tutor on his laptop in his Indianapolis home.

Still, the two programs combined served only about 3,200 students last fall, or roughly 17% of students in district-run schools. Two additional tutoring programs operate at a handful of schools.

Only 35% of the students who registered for after-school tutoring last fall attended more than one session, according to district data.

Indianapolis Public Schools spokesperson Marc Ransford said the district is working to improve attendance and hopes to enroll more students in tutoring next school year. It’s also trying to accelerate student learning in other ways, including with a new curriculum and summer school.

Shaan Akbar, co-founder of the firm Tutored by Teachers, which runs the video tutoring programs, said his team is focused on maintaining quality.

“Trying to shoot for scale quickly is a recipe for disaster,” he said.

Nationwide, schools report that about 10% of students are receiving “high-dosage” tutoring multiple days a week, according to a federal survey from December. The real number could be even lower: Just 2% of U.S. households say their children are getting that kind of intensive tutoring, according to the USC analysis of a different nationally representative survey.

Schools trying to ramp up tutoring have run into roadblocks, including staffing and scheduling. Experts say tutoring is most effective when provided three times a week for at least 30 minutes during school hours. Offering after-school or weekend tutoring is simpler, but turnout is often low.

Harrison Tran, a 10th grader in Savannah, Georgia, struggled to make sense of algebra during remote learning. Last year, his high school offered after-school help. But that wasn’t feasible for Harrison, who lives 30 minutes from school and couldn’t afford to miss his ride home.

Without tutoring help, he started this school year with gaps in his learning.

“When I got into my Algebra II class, I was entirely lost,” he said.

Relatively low family interest has been another challenge. Though test scores plunged during the pandemic, many parents do not believe their children experienced learning loss, or simply are unaware. The disconnect makes it more important to offer tutoring during school, experts say.

“Parents just aren’t as concerned as we need them to be,” said USC education professor Morgan Polikoff, “if we’re going to have to rely on parents opting their kids into interventions.”

Even when students want the help, some have been let down.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County, 12th-grader Talia Bradley recently sought calculus help from a virtual tutoring company hired by the district. But the problem she was struggling with also stumped the tutor. After an hour trying to sort it out, Talia walked away frustrated.

“My daughter was no farther along,” said Leah Bradley, her mother. “Having an option for online tutoring makes sense, but it can’t be the primary option if you’re looking for good results.”

Repeated in-person tutoring tends to be more effective than on-demand online help, but it’s also harder to manage. District rules add complexity, with safeguards like tutor background checks and vendor bidding rules slowing the process.

In Wake County, North Carolina, the school district began planning a reading tutoring program last summer. The program did not launch until November, and district officials said last month that volunteers are tutoring fewer than 140 students — far fewer than the 1,000 students the program was designed to reach.

“We’re always looking to serve more students,” said Amy Mattingly, director of K-12 programs at Helps Education Fund, the nonprofit managing that program and another serving about 400 students. But, she added, it’s important to “see what’s working and make tweaks before trying to scale up and serve everyone.”

Sixteen states have established their own tutoring programs using a collective $470 million in federal COVID aid, according to an analysis by the Council of Chief State School Officers. But even those statewide programs have reached a limited number of students.

Ohio awarded $14 million in grants to more than 30 colleges and universities to provide tutoring in local schools. They served just 2,000 students statewide last fall, according to a state spokesperson, who said the goal is to eventually reach 10,000 students.

Some districts defended their participation numbers, saying tutoring is most effective when well targeted.

In Georgia’s Fulton County, 3% of the district’s 90,000 students participated in tutoring programs this fall. Most of the tutoring was offered by paraprofessionals during the school day, with one hired to give intense support in each elementary school.

The district says time and staffing limits how many students can get frequent, intensive tutoring.

“We don’t want to water it down, because then you don’t get the impact that the research says is beneficial for kids,” said Cliff Jones, chief academic officer for the system.

Others worry too few are getting the help they need even as programs continue to grow.

This school year, about 3,500 students are getting reading tutoring from the North Carolina Education Corps. Meanwhile, in fourth grade alone, more than 41,000 students statewide scored in the bottom level on a national reading test last year.

“Who we are serving,” said Laura Bilbro-Berry, the program’s senior director, “is just a drop in the bucket.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Sweeping research effort tackles big question: How to get tutoring that works to more kids

2022-10-27T18:05:14+00:00

Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.

A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.

“It feels like out in the education ecosphere people are sort of yelling at districts and saying: ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’” said Kevin Huffman, the head of Accelerate, a nonprofit that awarded the grants. Districts are trying, he said, but it’s been complicated to staff in-person programs and difficult to vet tutoring services run by outside companies.

The research has the potential to help schools know which tutoring efforts are worth their time and money — before their COVID relief funding runs out.

“I think we’ve delivered the message collectively to the field that tutoring benefits all students, which is true based on the research, but it’s not a useful message when it comes to implementation,” Huffman added. “It’s just too broad and overwhelming, and I think the more we can help people narrow the scope on how to get started, the more likely we are to get traction.”

The research will look at tutoring efforts that are in-person, virtual, and a combination of the two. Accelerate expects some of the research will be available as early as next summer, while other studies will take more time.

Some of the research efforts are large, high-profile initiatives, such as the partnership between Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, which is studying the effects of tutoring and other academic recovery strategies on some 700,000 students across six states. Other studies will look at smaller efforts, like a student-launched virtual tutoring program called Tutor Teens that will partner with four high schools in the Cincinnati area.

Accelerate was launched earlier this year by the nonprofit America Achieves, which initially raised $65 million for the effort from private philanthropy — Arnold Ventures; the head of Citadel, Kenneth C. Griffin; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the Overdeck Family Foundation. (Chalkbeat also receives funding from the Gates Foundation.)

The nonprofit received more than 200 interested applicants, and tried to choose initiatives that were different from each other so the research would cover lots of ground. Accelerate also looked for efforts that zeroed in on specific student groups, such as English learners and struggling readers.

Some winners already have a proven track record, while others are start-ups that showed promise, Huffman said. The grants range in size from $100,000 to $800,000.

“A lot of these groups and organizations are taking first stabs at things that will need to be studied more,” Huffman said. “But our hope is that we’re starting down this path where instead of simply asking the question of whether tutoring works, we’re getting at the question of what are practical solutions” for getting that help to many more students.

The programs being studied include:

Amira Learning, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help students with literacy. The research will look at the effectiveness of pairing Amira’s virtual platform with in-person reading tutoring provided by young adults in California’s Central Valley to struggling elementary schoolers.
Amplify, a literacy tutoring company. The research will look at how a student’s race, gender, and language can affect the quality of a student-tutor match.
Deans for Impact, a nonprofit focused on teacher training, which will work with teacher prep programs to train and pair aspiring teachers with students who need tutoring, with a focus on math.
Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, which has an in-person tutoring program that targets high-need students in math, reading, and science. The research will look at how providing extra support to tutors can affect their relationships with students and student performance.
Great Oaks Foundation, which will recruit and train young people to be placed in schools for a year to tutor students in math and reading through AmeriCorps.
Green Dot Public Schools, a charter network in California, which will expand its math tutoring program for middle and early high schoolers and work with the company Saga Education to provide tutors with more feedback on their work.
Matheka, a math tutoring company, which will recruit and train bilingual tutors from Latin America to provide English learners who speak Spanish with virtual tutoring in elementary school. The research will look at the effects on their math scores.
OnYourMarkEducation, a virtual literacy tutoring program, will work with the National Student Support Accelerator to conduct randomized control trial studies looking at whether different tutor-to-student ratios affect student performance.
Reading Partners, a nonprofit that’s been shown to provide effective literacy tutoring, will conduct a randomized control trial of the virtual version of its in-person program.
Teach for America will look at the effects of its program that uses college students to provide virtual tutoring to elementary schoolers in reading and middle schoolers in math.
Zearn, a virtual math tutoring company being used by the Tennessee education department to offer tutoring to half the state’s elementary and middle school students, will use preliminary data to look at student outcomes.

Huffman hopes the research will help show whether it’s possible to train high schoolers, parents, college students, and pre-service teachers to effectively tutor students in large numbers. Many schools would prefer to offer tutoring in person, but have faced major challenges finding enough staff locally.

There are a few other trends, too. As more schools look to put programs in place that follow the science of reading, several grantees are looking at the effectiveness of virtual early literacy tutoring.

Other research efforts aim to determine the right balance between in-person and virtual support.

“Broadly, we don’t have a great handle across the country yet on: What happens if you go from in person to Zoom?” Huffman said. “What are the ways that reduce the lift on in-person? Can you find those things without reducing the statistically significant impacts that tutoring in-person shows?”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.