While students don’t typically attend these meetings, this one was different: students were present and at the center of the conversation. Scholars spoke candidly about their experiences with the school’s evolving model for clubs and internships — what was working, what could be improved and what they hoped would come next. The students were reflecting on a program called “Worldview Wednesday,” which allows them to explore academic and career interests during the school day. The goal of the staff meeting was to identify implementation trends, including those raised by students, and improve structures for the following school year’s programming.  

What‘s remarkable about CHEC’s approach to staff meetings is not just the clarity of the students’ insights or their sincerity in wanting to help improve programming; it‘s the way the adults lean in, quite literally. Teachers nod, take notes and ask follow-up questions, resembling a co-design session more than a traditional staff meeting. 

That was the CHEC leadership team’s goal. During school year 2024-2025, Principal Maria Tukeva and her staff had set the ambitious target to engage 20% of their learners in traditional adult decision-making spaces. They exceeded that aim, with 30% of their scholars participating over the course of the school year. That also led to student sense of belonging increasing by 7%, according to a school climate survey. 

I see members of the CHEC team modeling a monumental shift in power as staff members center student voice and revamp school culture. Across the country, pockets of school innovation and improvement have historically gained traction in one classroom or school, but their impact is often isolated. Innovative teachers and school leaders are busy people. Districts rarely have the resources, capacity, and system-level enablers to codify and diffuse promising school-level practice widely.  

Codifying and scaling school-level practice can look like curating resource libraries, developing blueprints or playbooks, or even establishing demonstration sites and hosting visits from other school teams so they can see promising practices in action. Districts play a key role in this process, from monitoring and elevating bright spots to providing added capacity and resources to invest in codification. 

They can also create enabling conditions for school innovation through flexible policies and infrastructure that allow promising practices to take root and grow. The , in partnership with the , has implemented some of these strategies to overcome challenges that districts have faced nationwide. The district  is fortunate to have dedicated Design Lab staff members who work with schools to design and evaluate programs, facilitate cohort-based development initiatives, and shape infrastructure and policy through collaboration with other district leaders. 

At CHEC, the student-centered, decision-making model during the school’s meeting in their cafeteria has become an exemplar for youth voice across the district. It has shaped district guidance for key planning processes — such as how stakeholders are engaged in the development of annual comprehensive school plans. I have even heard high schoolers from across DCPS present their own solutions to address chronic absenteeism at our Student Design Days. Some of our schools adopted these student-led ideas, resulting in an increase in-seat attendance by as much as 20%.  

Not far from CHEC is Paul Laurence Dunbar High School — America’s first public high school for Black students — where every eligible senior participates in an off-campus internship with a local nonprofit, government agency or business. The school’s “City as Classroom” model has contributed to an 18% increase in students on track for promotion and graduation. Driven by Dunbar’s pioneering efforts, DCPS codified processes for off-campus learning — clarifying site approvals and attendance tracking — making it easier for other schools to replicate the model. 

Just down the road at Cardozo Education Campus — every ninth grader engages in structured career exploration before selecting a pathway during a celebratory “Declaration Day.” Since launching this model, Career and Technical Education pass rates for the first course in chosen pathways have climbed to 93%. Encouraged, DCPS is expanding support for exploratory CTE opportunities districtwide. 

If we want innovation to scale beyond isolated stories of success, districts can invest in the infrastructure to help support and amplify promising innovations. That can mean creating dedicated roles and teams to provide capacity for codifying and disseminating best practices or building systems to capture and share these practices across campuses.  

But first, it means fundamentally recognizing school-level innovators as leaders for the future of learning. Treating local brilliance as the starting point for system-wide change unlocks the full potential of our schools and the communities they serve. The future of learning is already unfolding in our schools, and I am proud of our young people and our staff for leading the way. 

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

In our roles as deputy mayor for education and state superintendent, we see something remarkable taking shape — a citywide education system leading the nation in how to reimagine what’s possible for every child.

This year’s statewide assessment results tell a clear story of momentum. On the , students made the largest gains in English Language Arts and math proficiency since the pandemic. Forty percent of schools raised proficiency by at least 5 points in one of these subjects, and more than 60% showed measurable progress in both. Across the city, 137 of 223 tested schools boosted English scores, while 141 schools improved in math.

ELA proficiency has now surpassed pre-COVID levels, increasing from 37.5% in 2019 to 37.6% in 2025. Math proficiency reached a record high since COVID, rising from 19.4% in 2022 to 26.4% this year. This is evidence that students are not only recovering, but moving forward at a faster pace than before the pandemic.

National data confirms this progress. The Harvard Center for Education Policy and Research’s ranked D.C. first in the nation for learning recovery in both math and reading for grades 3 to 8 between 2022 and 2024. In that two-year period, D.C. students gained back the equivalent of half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. Just a few years ago, D.C. ranked 32nd in math recovery since 2019; today, it leads the country.

Federal relief dollars helped make this possible. D.C. received more than $600 million in K-12 pandemic recovery funds, about $6,800 per student — nearly double the national average of $3,700. shows that targeting these dollars toward , summer learning and other evidence-based strategies contributed directly to the rebound.

Together, these results demonstrate what families and educators across the city already feel in classrooms: Students are making meaningful, historic gains in learning.

Several factors are driving this progress. Since 2015, local per-student funding has increased from $16,032 to $28,040 — a 75% rise — with more money provided for serving students with the greatest needs.

D.C.’s early education stands above national enrollment levels, with 95% of 4-year-olds and 82% of 3-year-olds citywide enrolled in pre-K. At the high school level, more students are than in 2010-11, with nearly a 20- point increase since 2010-11, growing from 58.6% to 76.1%. These students now graduate with college credits, industry certifications and real-world experience in high-demand fields through , and our growing network of citywide preparing them for .

The initiative enables the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to connect data from pre-K-12 with postsecondary outcomes to better identify which programs propel students forward in college and careers, helping D.C. make future investments accordingly.

Teachers are a cornerstone of this progress. Thanks to big investments in recent years, D.C. Public School educators now earn an average salary of $109,000, among the highest in the nation, with comparable pay in charter schools. Investments in professional development, coaching, structured literacy training, high-quality instructional materials in literacy and math and high-impact tutoring have also helped to strengthen classroom instruction, so students feel challenged, supported and inspired. At the same time, D.C. is tackling barriers outside the classroom, securing school-based mental health supports, providing safe passage to schools and expanding the District’s programming. As a result, chronic absenteeism overall has declined 18.3% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while profound chronic absenteeism — a student missing 30% or more of school days — is down 34.2% over the same time period. 

The vast majority of families receive one of their top choices of district and charter schools through a universal enrollment lottery, helping drive D.C.’s . This system, combined with investments in quality and variety, has helped drive the city’s sustained since the 2008-09 school year and added more than 5,000 students . This is at a time when many large districts across the country experienced declines.

D.C.’s education success isn’t just about test scores. It’s about the child who now walks into class with confidence because tutoring makes reading click. It’s about the high schooler graduating with a resume that includes a paid internship and college credits already earned. It’s about showing the nation that D.C. students — no matter their background or income — can succeed at the highest levels.

D.C.’s experience shows how large urban education systems can rebound and thrive when funding is deep and sustained, resources meet student needs, teachers are well supported and compensated, and learning starts early.

While challenges remain, the data show encouraging momentum that is worth studying nationally. D.C.’s educational vision invariably focuses on ensuring every child is prepared for higher education and a family-sustaining career, while making certain that the city continues to be the nation’s talent capital.

D.C.’s public education leaders can keep proving to the nation what happens when a city dreams big for every student, invests strategically and stays the course: Students and schools will surpass expectations.

Paul Kihn is deputy mayor for education in the District of Columbia. Dr. Antoinette Mitchell is state superintendent of education for the District of Columbia.

Last December, after a year and a half of blind alleys, impenetrable paperwork and bureaucratic stonewalling, it seemed like the complaints Sierra Rios had filed against her fifth-grader’s elementary school were finally getting a proper investigation. A lawyer in the Dallas office of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was asking hard questions of the school where Rios said her daughter, Nevaeh, was repeatedly denied special education services. 

But then, a few weeks into the probe, the San Antonio mother got a bounce-back email informing her that the attorney working on her case was no longer employed by the agency. As part of its plan to shutter the department, the Trump administration had fired 40% of the civil rights division’s staff and closed half of its regional offices. 

The March email did not say what would happen to Rios’ case. In May, she got a message asking for a form that had somehow not been transferred from Texas to the agency’s office in Kansas City, Missouri. Rios re-sent the document, but it no longer mattered. During the churn, she was told, the complaint had become too old to pursue. 

The saga is a vivid illustration of the awaits families of students with disabilities. For decades, the federal government has been a key avenue of relief for parents unable to get services for their children through complaints filed with their state, mediation, administrative hearings or due process cases. Now, with the department lurching toward closure, state-level officials may increasingly have the final word. And a 74 analysis shows that those systems, intended to help desperate parents like Rios, have never delivered on their promise. 

A ‘parent-friendly’ process that’s anything but simple 

Fifty years ago, under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, Congress created three ways parents could appeal to their state education departments if they felt their children were being denied accommodations in school. These mechanisms vary in complexity and effectiveness, but all were supposed to be simple enough for any parent to navigate. 

Families, or school administrators seeking help in resolving a disagreement, can file a complaint with their state in hopes that education officials will intervene if they find a district’s efforts lacking or improper. Parents can also ask the state to appoint a mediator who will try to bring both sides to an agreement. Most complicated, but potentially most effective, families can file a due process complaint, which kicks off a legal process that usually requires an attorney or skilled advocate. The complaint may start with a mediator but can progress to a formal hearing before an administrative law judge. If the dispute isn’t resolved there, the case can turn into a federal lawsuit.   

Some states pursue complaints quickly, with an eye toward resolving issues before they become intensely adversarial and expensive. Others lag or throw up procedural roadblocks, presumably trying to reduce the number of cases filed. 

Complaints can run aground at . The length of time a family has to file after the event they’re disputing differs depending on where they live and which mechanism they’re trying to use. If an email or letter doesn’t get a reply within a certain number of days, the case can be closed. Things must be done in a precise order, spelled out in legalese. 

In Rios’ case, she initially tried to open a state complaint against the principal of Nevaeh’s school in 2023. The Texas Education Agency rejected her request in a letter that she read as saying complaints cannot be filed against individuals, just schools and districts. (The agency says complaints can be filed against individuals.)

Rios assumed her complaint was dead in the water. A year later, with Nevaeh’s situation deteriorating as school staff, Rios says, grew tired of the family’s continued complaints, she did more research and opened a case at the Office for Civil Rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

The law that created the state complaint processes, the IDEA, guarantees disabled students’ educational rights. By contrast, the ADA, passed in 1990, outlaws discrimination against people who need accommodations to access public facilities and programs — including schools. 

Families of children denied special education services can assert their rights under either law. When states fail to enforce a student’s educational rights under IDEA, families often file a discrimination complaint via the ADA.

In the 2022-23 school year, more than 54,000 state were filed in the U.S. and its territories, including due process complaints, written state complaints and mediation requests. The Office for Civil Rights had — half of them involving disability discrimination — when its staff was . For fiscal year 2026, which started July 1, the White House’s proposed OCR budget is $91 million, a 35% drop. 

At the same time, the administration wants to move $33 million that currently funds state advocacy clearinghouses into block grants that states — cash-strapped as their federal pandemic funds run out — can use for other things. This means families risk losing a second source of leverage: free assistance from experts.

If enacted, both budget cuts would also exacerbate socioeconomic and racial disparities in the services kids with disabilities receive, says Carrie Gillispie, a senior policy analyst at New America. This is because families in states where there’s little appetite for local enforcement depend on OCR to investigate discrimination.

“Those discrepancies that exist if these budget changes happen,” Gillispie says. “It’s a choice to continue to underinvest.”            

With the federal office a hollow shell of what it was six months ago, advocates say, families are likely to rely more heavily on their states. And how — and how well — each state helps students with disabilities varies widely. 

In fact, our analysis found great geographic disparities in the kinds of appeals families pursue and how far they make it in the multi-step processes. In the few places that have more than a handful of special education lawyers, primarily on the East and West coasts, due process cases often dominate. In the Midwest, where there are few or even no special ed attorneys or advocates, families must go it alone, and public officials frequently put up roadblocks to impede complaints parents file with their states. Here, there are fewer disputes — likely because parents often depend on schools to apprise them of their rights — and complaints are less likely to end in a written agreement. 

Rate of due process complaints per 10,000 children receiving special education services

Rate of due process complaints per 10,000 children receiving special education services for each state from 2014-15 to 2021-22 and how it compares with the national average. Hover over each state to see the year-by-year breakdown. Source: U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (Eamonn Fitzmaurice)

Information collected by the U.S. Education Department does not record whether outcomes are favorable for students. But attorneys and advocates say that for those who have access to expert help — either for a fee or pro bono, through an advocacy group — a due process complaint can yield a quick settlement from a district looking to end a family’s case and move on. 

Using state data submitted to the department from the 2014-15 academic year through 2022-23, the most recent available, we created the interactive map above showing how many cases are filed in each state and how they compare with the national average. To account for population differences, we have tabulated the rate of due process complaints per 10,000 children identified as qualifying for special education services in each state. 

In addition to national averages, we focused on four localities  — California, Texas, Nebraska and the District of Columbia — that illustrate different approaches to resolving disputes and how far in the process they proceed, and included an interactive chart for each.  

The process was , and to allow parents and schools to start with the least contentious, simplest and most inexpensive options. With some exceptions, a family can begin by filing a written state complaint or by requesting mediation, and, if no agreement is reached, open a due process case later on. If one side disagrees with the decision in a due process hearing, it can file a federal suit. In some circumstances, the losing party will be ordered to reimburse the other side’s attorney fees. 

In our analysis, we have excluded two statistical outliers: New York, where, because of a tangled legal history, two-thirds of recent complaints in the U.S. were filed; and Puerto Rico, where students are protected by federal law but the special education system is unique.

Finally, we look at trends in Texas, where advocates are cautiously optimistic that a decade-old federal intervention has nudged the process closer to Congress’ original vision. Advocates say changes made by Texas officials are getting families what they need faster, and with less red tape, all with an eye to heading off the most contentious options.     

Barring similar efforts by districts and state education officials to help families before disagreements become adversarial, advocates predict the system will become more litigious. By definition, that will make it more expensive for everyone involved, as districts and families are forced to spend money on attorneys and experts instead of the services children need. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision making it easier for families to file federal discrimination suits. 

The upshot, advocates say, could be an even more inequitable playing field, where families with access to attorneys and the ability to pay them have leverage and those who don’t are at the mercy of their states’ willingness to enforce their rights.    

Each process for resolving special education disagreements comes with major trade-offs — which are typically unclear for families trying to figure out where to start. 

A written state complaint is usually the easiest route for a parent going it alone. It’s free. The information needed to start is comparatively straightforward. The law requires states to finish investigations within 60 days, which is months or years faster than the alternatives. 

If, at any point, a parent and district come to an agreement, they can simply stop the process. If the state probe goes forward, a finding is issued. published in 2018 in the Journal of Special Education Leadership, district leaders surveyed the year before said 62% of state investigations that played all the way out concluded that a district was not compliant with the law. 

Caveats abound, however. In many places, state complaints can’t be appealed. A mediator or state investigator can determine that a student is owed compensatory services — academic or therapeutic time to make up for interventions they were improperly denied or money to pay for private services. But in practice, they rarely result in financial compensation for a student’s family. 

Though these agreements are often supposed to be legally binding, they don’t always carry the weight of a legal judgment, so schools can feel little pressure to make meaningful changes.

Finally, in order to get what their child was denied, families often must sign a non-disclosure agreement. This makes it hard for parents to compare notes about what services are available from their school and what they can reasonably ask for.  

In , families told the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates — a network of state and local professionals partly funded by IDEA — that the corrective actions called for in state findings are often inadequate and ignored by schools, with no state follow-up to ensure compliance. Parents also complained that state investigators are sometimes quicker to believe districts’ stories than families’, even in the absence of evidence. Mediators may fail to help parents and schools reach an agreement.      

By contrast, filing a due process complaint is not unlike filing a lawsuit. Indeed, if a disagreement isn’t resolved at a negotiation called a resolution meeting or by a mediator, an administrative law judge takes testimony, considers evidence and issues a ruling. If that does not end the dispute, either party may — provided it has the resources — continue the case in federal court.

But parents often don’t have the money to hire an attorney or advocate to take the case. Some states have just one lawyer who will accept special education cases. In part, this is because a family must win to have just its attorney’s fees covered. In addition, in most instances, plaintiffs can’t hire experts to counter testimony given by district witnesses.   

Until recently, anyway, lodging a complaint with the OCR instead of the state was often parents’ most attractive option.

Families in rural areas rely on state complaints for solutions 

In many rural states, such as Nebraska, families rely on written state complaints when their kids’ needs aren’t being met. Dispute resolution filings are rare because advocates and attorneys are few and far between, and the number of due process cases is low.

State complaints are supposed to be the fast, easy, least costly and least adversarial path to getting kids services without the expenses of hiring an attorney. But outcomes are often poor. 

“They are especially good for clear procedural violations that may impact the student,” says Amy Bonn, an Omaha-area attorney. “It’s basically saying, ‘Here’s where the district did something that did not comport with the actual law.’ ”

When IDEA was created, Congress envisioned the state complaint system to be the “most powerful and accessible option for parents,” but it often falls short in resolving noncompliance issues, according to a from the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. 

The organization stated in its that the system is “an often ineffective process that lacks transparency, impartiality and accountability by state educational agencies charged with administering the dispute resolution process.”

Once a complaint is filed, the investigation is in the state’s hands — and out of the parents’. Any decisions, including corrective actions, are made by the state within a 60-day timeline, and they usually can’t be appealed. 

“[Families] might get relief or they might not, but there are no judges or a hearing,” says Kathy Zeisel of the Children’s Law Center, an agency that takes cases and connects families with pro bono lawyers to file complaints. “You get systemic change, such as a district having to change policies,” instead of an accommodation to help a particular student.

But debates between families and school districts about special ed services that were not delivered during the COVID pandemic have begun to change the landscape, Bonn says. An increase in the number of parent advocates and lawyers who take special education cases has led to more filings in recent years.

“I think the culture is changing a little bit,” Bonn says. 

Due process comes with steep costs and barriers

With the federal backstop of the Office for Civil Rights disappearing, even more due process complaints are likely. They are expensive for both families and districts but effective — when the process is accessible to parents. 

Here are two examples of how this is playing out in states where the number of these complaints is rising quickly:     

In California, the dispute resolution process is available to financially stable, highly educated families confident enough to speak out about their child’s services, says Cheryl Theis, who worked as a parent advocate in Oakland for 18 years at the Disability Rights Education Defense Fund.

“IDEA is built on one fundamental premise: that every child has a parent who can advocate for them,” Theis says. “But there’s always been some power imbalance around how effectively a parent can participate and how hard they’re willing to push, and that’s been an ongoing problem.”

Over the past several years, California has received roughly the same number of mediations and due process complaints — which make up about 90% of filings, according to data from . The state had nearly 55 due process complaints and 56 mediation requests per 10,000 children in 2022-23.

Excluding the outliers not included in this analysis — New York and Puerto Rico — California’s due process case rate is the second highest in the country. But the number that proceed to the ultimate stage is miniscule. Less than 1% of the 4,401 cases filed in 2022-23 were heard by a judge, while 3,254 were resolved before the hearing stage. 

Advocates say this reflects a trend they expect to play out in other places: With large numbers of private law firms and nonprofits able to file pro bono cases, increasingly school districts are choosing to settle due process complaints quickly. Many California school systems now routinely purchase commercial insurance, which picks up most of the cost. This may seem like an inexpensive way to shorten what can be months of expensive arguments, but attorneys and disability advocates note that the insurance premiums come out of the district’s budget, which could be paying for needed services. 

Some families end up with better agreements for their children than they would using the state complaint process, advocates say. But even when families view a settlement as a win, Theis says, compensatory education often requires the parent to pay upfront for private services and get reimbursed from the district — another barrier for those who are low-income.

In the past two school years, Oakland Unified School District shelled out $579,588 in attorney fees and paid $823,964 to families to cover their legal costs in settlement cases, according to district financial records. The settlements forced the district to spend roughly $3.5 million on student services.

Oakland in previous years for IDEA violations. Systemic problems uncovered by investigations in 2007 and 2013 included staffing shortages, lack of special education curricula, deficient budgets and the placement of students in segregated special ed classrooms, according to Disability Rights California. 

The nonprofit filed a on the behalf of all special education students in the district. 

“If you look at those millions of dollars in settlements, like, how many teachers could you train, how many adaptive tricycles could you buy? What specialized summer programs could you create?” Theis asks. “It’s like this squeaky-wheel system where 10 people might need it, but only one parent is going to have the knowledge, the time and the finances to maybe get an attorney.”

In a statement the district said that since the pandemic, it has expanded its alternative dispute resolution program, which provides a neutral representative who can conduct IEP meetings or resolve issues with families without an attorney or legal fees.

“Additionally, we offer open office hours monthly for any family who wants to speak with a neutral special education attorney about their questions or concerns about their child’s IEP,” the district said.

In 2024-25, 31 cases went through the alternative dispute resolution program, and 29 were resolved with no attorney fees, the district said.

Our second example, Washington, D.C., has one of the highest rates of due process complaints in the nation, behind New York and Puerto Rico. In 2022-23, roughly 151 complaints were filed per 10,000 children. These numbers prompted a federal probe in March to investigate claims that D.C.’s traditional public school system is not meeting the needs of students with disabilities.

Advocates say D.C.’s special education issues are similar to those in the rest of the nation, but an oversaturation of disability lawyers and agencies has educated families about their children’s school services — and taught them to use litigation to get what they are entitled to under federal law. This, they say, contributes to the high filing numbers.

A from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that D.C. has the highest rate in the nation of due process complaints resolved without a hearing, which could indicate a “sue and settle approach” — which favors those who can afford attorneys. 

“It’s really a national problem that we are just disregarding kids with disabilities and not putting the resources into them,” says Zeisel, whose Children’s Law Center has roughly 250 cases at any given time, one-third involving families going through due process. “Parents have to sue, and kids lose almost a whole school year to try to get what [they need]. We would love to put ourselves out of a job and not not be litigating this stuff and go do something else.”

While advocates say the number of cases is still too high, D.C.’s filing numbers have plummeted over the last decade. In the 2011-12 school year, 805 due process complaints per 10,000 children were reported. The latest data available shows that D.C. had 151 complaints per 10,000 children in 2022-23.

The credits the drop to D.C. improving its capacity in handling cases and creating a student hearing office.

In 2023, the city paid more than $3.1 million to attorneys as a result of due process complaints against D.C. Public Schools, according to a 2023 inspector general .

Donovan Anderson represented the district in special education cases until he opened his own firm doing the same work more than 25 years ago. 

“Parents will reach out to me because they are searching for answers,” he says. “They are in disbelief with the quality of education that their child is receiving.”

Once Anderson files a on behalf of a family, the district has 15 days to hold a resolution meeting as a way to discuss the issues and potentially resolve them. He says almost all his cases end at this stage because continuing with due process is usually time-consuming and too costly for families. 

If nothing is agreed upon during the resolution meeting and a parent wants to continue to a due process hearing, the timeline can stretch to 75 days before any decision is made. Then there’s also more of a chance that families will lose their case and come out with nothing but debt after a long fight. 

Anderson says resolving a case during the resolution meeting makes the school district pay the family’s attorney fees — usually a few thousand dollars — but parents who lose due process are on the hook for the thousands more spent on lawyers and experts to testify during the hearing.

“If I settle the case in 15 days, the child [and] the parent can see tangible results in 30 to 45 days after meeting me,” he says. “I can make a lot more money if I have to go to a due process hearing, but it doesn’t necessarily benefit the child, because the parent has to wait that much longer to have tangible solutions.”

‘The therapist said it was self-defense’

Even the most cut-and-dried due process case — the kind likely to be resolved quickly and in a student’s  favor — can be prohibitively expensive just to file. Texas parent N.G.’s son, A.G., is autistic, nonverbal and very bright. (Because the family signed a nondisclosure agreement at the conclusion of the case — a common district demand — N.G. asked that they be identified by their initials.) 

A.G. could add and subtract in kindergarten, but his first grade teacher conflated his lack of speech with academic incompetence and gave him a picture of the number 1 to color. Bored, A.G. acted up, his mother says. A few weeks into the year, he wandered off and got lost in the school.

In February, he came home with a hand-shaped bruise on his arm following an occupational therapy session in school. “The therapist said it was self-defense,” N.G. says. “I said, ‘He’s 6 and he has low muscle tone.’ ”

It took her a month to find an attorney, hundreds of miles away. The lawyer charged a flat fee of $6,000 for his first three months of work. The family’s due process complaint was so stark and well-documented — N.G. had logged every interaction on a spreadsheet — that a mediator quickly negotiated a good settlement.      

Had the mediator failed, however, the family would have had to drop the complaint. After 90 days, the attorney would have needed to be paid by the hour — money N.G. would not necessarily have been entitled to recover.

Perhaps the best proof of the value of federal oversight of special education is to be found in Texas, where state officials have spent seven years overhauling how schools are held accountable for serving children with disabilities. Attorneys and advocates now routinely advise families to avoid due process altogether and file state complaints — the route Congress originally envisioned as the quickest path to securing help for kids.    

In 2016, a revealed that for years, the state had improperly denied services to hundreds of thousands of children by capping the number of special ed students districts could serve. In response, the U.S. Education Department ordered state officials to take a series of steps to find and evaluate children with disabilities.  

Since then, the number of special education students has increased by 67%, rising from 463,000 to 775,000. Meeting their needs has stretched Texas schools, which couldn’t simply conjure the staff — or funding — to beef up special education overnight. 

In 2022, Texas lawmakers lengthened the amount of time families have to file due process claims from one year after an episode to a more standard two years.

Conventional wisdom would hold that a tsunami of families seeking support and a longer window to complain when they don’t get it would send caseloads skyrocketing. But due process complaints have instead fallen, from 8 per 10,000 students in 2014-15 to 5.5 in 2021-22.

Meanwhile, the number of state complaints nearly quadrupled between the 2020-21 and 2022-23 academic years, rising from 261 to 979. The number of resulting reports — the documents that say what state investigators found — tripled, from 164 to 549. Also on the rise is the number of complaints withdrawn before the formal process begins — likely as a result of districts resolving disagreements quickly.    

Colleen Potts, supervising attorney for Disability Rights Texas, says the organization’s lawyers now see state complaints as the most effective way to get quick relief for students and families. 

“I’ve been doing this for 19 years, and the last two or three years we are getting consistently good outcomes in non-adversarial ‘meeting of the minds’ meetings, with resolutions that are acceptable to everyone,” she says. 

Indeed, districts often are quick to try to resolve disagreements before the state investigates. Potts encourages the attorneys she works with to list proposed remedies in their complaints even if they ˛š°ůąđ˛Ô’t things a state typically requires a lagging district to do. 

In practical terms, this document can serve as a road map to getting a child’s needs met, she explains: “Anything is on the table.” 

In 2018, in response to the U.S. Education Department’s intervention, the Texas Education Agency drew up an for overhauling special education statewide. A key goal was making resources available to families and districts to help them resolve disagreements early. According to Jennifer Alexander, Texas’ deputy commissioner for special populations and student supports, 10% of state complaints are now resolved this way, even if investigators have already begun work on the case.     

As the state officials made the changes outlined in the strategic plan, they examined data on disputes to find out where things go awry, says Alexander: “Where it often breaks down is the family does not know the process and so can’t express to the district what they need.” 

To that end, in 2023 the state began offering to pay for trained facilitators to participate in the initial meetings where families and educators negotiate a child’s individualized education program — the legally required document that spells out how the student’s needs will be met. The cost to the state is $1,500 per negotiation.

Of the 20 facilitated IEP meetings that took place in 2024, 40% resulted in an agreement, Alexander says. During the first half of 2025, there have been 25 meetings, and 56% have resulted in agreements. Two negotiations are pending.

The state also created a parent-friendly special education online portal, , where a relatively simple automatically collects the information that is legally required to make a case pursuable, to head off situations like Rios’. 

When the form is submitted, the district immediately gets a copy. This, Alexander says, often prompts school staff to begin trying to resolve the disagreement. Any agreement is legally binding.     

The changes Texas has made are having an impact for students, advocates agree. And, they say, there is reason to hope that the new strategies for ironing out disagreements before they become heated will show other states that better, quicker communication can head off the costs faced by places like Oakland and Washington, D.C.

But without the possibility that federal officials will compel states to do better, any improvement will be piecemeal, says Robyn Linscott, director of family and education policy at The Arc of the United States.   

“You might have some states that try to step in and create or beef up a state-level backstop, whether it’s a special agency or ombudsman or something they already have in place,” she says. “And then you’ll have other states that are not necessarily going to see the value in trying to provide more stable resources for families to have recourse.

“This will leave us with this state-by-state patchwork.” 

Uncertainty remains for parents who fight for their child’s services

According to documents filed in a court case challenging the Trump administration’s mass firings, the U.S. Education Department said it dismissed more than 3,400 complaints between March 11 and June 27, . That’s more than 28% of the OCR’s caseload.   

Rios has yet to learn whether hers is one of them. After the May email informing her the case had been closed because it was too old, an advocate helped her compile a paper trail showing she had met every deadline. In the past, that has often convinced the agency to make an exception. 

Rios says all she wants is what she’s been fighting for this entire time — accountability from the school and a plan to make it right for Nevaeh. 

“She goes to school and she learns, but then she comes home and I’m reteaching the material,” Rios says. “On top of all of that, I’m now having to file complaints, follow up on complaints, send angry emails, follow up on those angry emails, make phone calls — like, I’m basically my daughter’s teacher, lawyer, advocate, I’m everything. 

“It’s a lot. I feel like there [are] programs and there are laws around these things for a reason.”

Clarification: An earlier version of this story misstated how a complaint against an individual in Texas was handled. Families are allowed to file special education complaints against individuals with the Texas Education Agency.

In New York City, America’s largest school district, the birthday cut-off is even later: Dec. 31. One-third of children are . This is a cause of concern for many families.

The city Department of Education doesn’t see it as a problem. In an email, a spokesperson told me its official stance is, “We work to provide all families access to a world-class education, and we work closely with families to ensure students’ placements are academically and developmentally appropriate, in alignment with state guidelines. Our policies allow for flexibility, our kindergarten curriculum is responsive to the needs of our younger learners, and our dedicated educators are prepared to support every student.”

Not all are appeased.

“I have a 4-year-old who will start kindergarten this fall but doesn’t turn 5 until after Thanksgiving,” worried mom CK told me. “I think it’s a big disservice to these kids. The amount of sitting isn’t developmentally appropriate, and the lack of free play is concerning.”

Parents are justified in their concerns. As the summarized in June:

Several studies have concluded that kids who are youngest in their class are disproportionately diagnosed with ADHD. A Michigan study found that kindergartners who are the youngest in their grade are 60% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest in their grade. And it doesn’t affect just kindergarteners: A North Carolina study found that in fifth and eighth grade, the youngest children were almost twice as likely as the oldest to be prescribed medication for ADHD.

The research didn’t sit well with some teachers. One blasted my social media inquiry seeking views on redshirting by writing, “ADHD is a very serious IEP (Individualized Education Plan) and we don’t hand them out like candy.”

Others, however, agreed.

“My daughter was one of the youngest in her class,” wrote an anonymous mother. “The teacher and school counselor mislabeled her with psychological disorders that both NY special education testing and private neurological tests did not support.”

“More of my students with an IEP have a birthday in the second half of the calendar year,” confirmed Mary C., who has been a special ed teacher for 12 years. “I understand where an incoming K parent would be concerned that their December baby is much younger than a June baby.”

That was the case with Upper West Side parent KE’s son. “He is the youngest and smallest boy in the grade,” she wrote. “He started kindergarten at 4 years old, still sucking his thumb. The physical, emotional, social, psychological and other developmental differences between a 5-year-old born in January and a 4-year-old born in December impacts everything from holding a pencil to kicking a ball, to the length of time one can sit and concentrate. It was too early, too soon and too young, but we literally had no choice in the matter in order to enroll him.”

The problems that pop up with younger students can reverberate .

Pree Kaur lamented that her daughter “is always the younger one and is not as mentally developed as her peers, so she always feels as if something is wrong with her.”

The Riverdale dad of a son born in November wrote, “He had some difficulty following his teacher’s instructions in first grade, and his teacher repeatedly pointed out that he has difficulty sitting still, staying focused, etc. We had him evaluated by a pediatric developmental specialist and he was diagnosed with ADHD. I really struggle with the whole situation, as I believe if we were able to get him to go to school a year later, matters may have been different.”

“My daughter attended a citywide gifted program. She was doing great, but it came with a price,” confessed Annie Tate. “She was high-functioning until high school, where she was overwhelmed and was diagnosed with ADHD, a diagnosis I believe she wouldn’t have received if I didn’t send her to school at 4 years, 8 months. She would have matured emotionally and physically to be a healthier, happier child.”

Pediatric occupational therapist KJL sees this situation frequently: “Children with ADHD have a 30% delay in executive function compared to their peers. Combine that with young ages, and these children are set up to fail.”

When I posed the question of allowing parents to hold back their children on my , the most frequent response I received was, “SOMEONE has to be the youngest.”

That’s true. But the situation can still be ameliorated.

Grades with multiple classes can be broken up into three- or four-month bands, so students are learning with a narrower-aged peer group.

Repeating a year should be a more acceptable option, unlike the situation faced by mom Heather Hooks: “My son was very behind academically in first grade. The school refused to hold him back and cited studies on ‘retention’ being not good for kids in the long run. I found these didn’t take into consideration that this was not straight retention, but redshirting an ADHD kid. Other studies were significantly different, and suggested these kids have better outcomes and are less likely to be medicated.”

Another mom was told her daughter “wasn’t behind enough,” despite the child’s pleas that “it’s too much for my head.”

Any steps taken to help New York City’s youngest learners would provide the largest experimental sample size in the country, making those results potentially beneficial for students across America.

Based on what happens in NYC, the educational system can stop treating children as developmentally identical and schools as one-size-fits-all, giving families more options.

As Maureen Yusuf-Morales, who has worked at public, charter and independent schools, suggests, “Parents with children born after September should be allowed choice with guidance based on developmental milestones, as opposed to birthdays being the only hard-and-fast rule.”

Yet there are pockets of progress. Our new report, “),” identified 260 school districts in which early reading proficiency rates have grown by 3 to 4 percentage points a year for the last three years. What are they doing differently that the rest might learn from?

Three districts in particular merited a closer look, as they represent a mix of sizes and starting points: Marietta City in the Atlanta suburbs; Allegany County, at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland; and DC Prep, a K-8 public charter school network.

The project to identify dynamic districts across the country began with this goal: To reignite growth, districts are going to need to move past generic advice about what makes “effective schools” and understand more about specific strategies to improve literacy. All three districts profiled had been deeply dissatisfied with their students’ performance in reading and writing, diagnosed their internal challenges and began implementing coherent responses over several years.

Leaders in these districts did not start their literacy initiatives by creating a vision. Instead, they asked themselves and their teachers a version of this question: “What’s our most important problem, and how do we solve it?” The answer: through no fault of their own, was that most teachers don’t have a deep enough grasp of all elements of evidence-based reading instruction.  

The districts launched deep, extended professional learning for all elementary teachers over two to three years.  Marietta City trained teachers with , a set of mini-courses on core elements of literacy and how to teach them, then added a year of training with , a set of courses on teaching expository writing. In 2020, Allegany County began a two-year engagement with , to help teachers master the basics of reading and writing instruction — phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.  

All three districts reconfigured and expanded time for literacy instruction. DC Prep extended its literacy period to 1 hour and 45 minutes and added a second teacher who provides targeted help at students’ desks instead of pulling them out of class for separate instruction. Allegany extended instruction to two hours and added 30 minutes for small-group interventions and enrichment. 

Marietta redesigned its daily schedule so every student now receives roughly two to three hours of literacy instruction every day. Ninety minutes is dedicated to whole-class reading that weaves in grade-level science and social studies texts. There’s also 20 to 30 minutes of explicit phonics and word-study practice, and 30 to 60 minutes of small-group work where teachers target the skills individual students still need to develop.  

The districts also changed how they staff schools. Marietta hired reading specialists who work with students in small groups of 10 across eight schools. Allegany redefined the role of literacy coach to provide teachers with more direct feedback about how well they deliver instruction to their classes. DC Prep converted the assistant principal position into a full-time instructional-coaching role. These leaders now run collaborative planning sessions and provide teachers with ongoing, in-class feedback.

Both Marietta and Allegany improved the quality of their K-5 language arts curricula.  Marietta dropped giving students books they could already read — a popular practice that — and switched to and a skills-based foundational class. Allegany stopped using and switched to . Both are and are designed to build a deep and wide knowledge base using grade-level texts in science, history, literature and the arts.  

Finally, they’ve refined assessments and how they use the results. While they dedicate time to phonics every day, these districts were clear that not every problem is a phonics problem. DC Prep’s data showed some small groups overemphasized foundational skills and needed more close reading, a technique of carefully analyzing a passage to understand what it means. In Allegany, test data pointed to a need to work more carefully on students’ reading fluency, not decoding.  

This summer, Upswing Labs will begin more intensive case study research in eight more of the dynamic districts. The actions summarized here — engaging educators in deep professional learning, expanding the amount of time for teaching reading, changing what literacy coaches do and improving the quality of curricula and diagnostic testing — clarify what to do. District instructional leaders also need insight on how to do it. 

The research will also examine three types of rural districts more closely, as they make up a large share of the 260 districts identified in the report. Researchers will focus on communities of African-American students in the South, Hispanic students in agricultural communities in California and Texas and evangelical churchgoers in Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Finally, the case studies will explore whether the best tactics shift as a district climbs the performance ladder — echoing that the moves that lift proficiency for students near the bottom are often different from those that propel midrange improvement.

With sharper insight into both what works and how to implement it, more districts will be able to chart a path to improved literacy achievement.

D.C. has built a thriving system of public school choice, with strong options for parents at both D.C. Public Schools and public charter schools. The city was ahead of the curve in adopting universal pre-kindergarten in 2008, providing parents with free public education for their 3- and 4-year-olds long before it was widely accepted. Last year, D.C. continued to see steady student enrollment growth, defying national and regional declines. With half of students identified as economically disadvantaged and the vast majority being children of color, D.C. leads the nation in academic recovery, in math and reading gains from 2022 to 2024. While challenges remain, D.C.’s public education system is delivering results and making significant progress. 

Yet, in the last few weeks, D.C. students have faced a series of devastating setbacks. District leaders sounded the alarm Feb. 28 about driven by the recent layoffs of thousands of federal workers. Days later, the , jeopardizing essential student services and research and shifting agency priorities away from protecting vulnerable children — many of whom live in the District. Then, Congress passed a that included to D.C.’s fiscal year 2025 budget, gutting local government support mid-year to its schools and students. 

While the Senate passed a to protect current-year funding, that measure is in the House, .

These spending cuts would have a devastating impact, slashing $192 million from D.C. Public Schools and $166 million from public charter schools’ . Some schools could see mid-year budget cuts of over $1 million, affecting staff salaries and education programs. In some cases, schools could have to close, laying off teachers and exploding class sizes in buildings that remain. Schools and educators have worked hard to to address pandemic learning loss, but schools need stable funding to build on the recent academic gains.

On top of the harm to schools, students and educators would also feel the effects of simultaneous cuts to services for individuals and families experiencing homelessness, and first responders like Fire and Emergency Medical Services and the Metropolitan Police Department.

These proposed cuts follow at the Department of Education, jeopardizing federal student aid, the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences. These rollbacks weaken federal protections for vulnerable students in D.C. and across the nation who now face an uncertain future. It’s the students who need the most help who will suffer the most.

I see firsthand the impact of policy decisions on students, parents and educators every day. As executive director of an advocacy organization fighting for an equitable public education system for all students in Washington, D.C., my work is grounded in listening to families and communities to inform our advocacy to secure the resources students need to succeed. We’re fighting for funding equity across schools, full support for science of reading instruction, a comprehensive math plan to ensure all students have access to high-quality instruction and stronger pathways to college and career. 

But when Congress interferes with the District’s local decision-making, it pulls the focus of elected leaders away from the real work of ensuring all children have access to the programs and services they need to compete in today’s world. Teachers fear losing their jobs. Students become afraid they’ll lose their favorite teacher. Schools plan for worst-case scenarios like closure, knowing D.C. is uniquely vulnerable to Congress’s whims. 

D.C. has more residents than two states, yet its people pay federal taxes without having voting representation in Congress. That means lawmakers with no accountability to D.C. voters can slash funding for the schools — without residents’ consent.

Yet, in an inspiring act of community strength, D.C. residents have shown that when they organize, they can win. Members of the education reform community all over D.C. and the country have taken action, sending 15,000 letters to Congress and meeting with key senators and staffers to explain the impact of the spending bill on D.C. schools and essential services. Thanks to the leadership of Mayor Muriel Bowser, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the many D.C. leaders who flagged this issue and ensured the city made its voice heard and the hundreds of courageous students and advocates who mobilized, the Senate responded, passing a standalone bill to protect D.C.’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget. This was a victory, but a fragile one. 

The fight moves now to the House. With schools making real progress, D.C. students need stability, not setbacks. D.C. residents urge the House of Representatives to follow the Senate’s lead and protect D.C. students, educators, schools and the essential services that support academic excellence, teacher stability and student success. Will Congress stand by and let this progress be undone, or will it protect D.C. students? 

While the nation’s college-educated workforce overall is diversifying more quickly than the teaching pool, the NCTQ found that California, Texas, and Washington, D.C., are following the opposite trajectory. But the nonprofit questions some of the methods used to increase diversity, such as alternative pathways or lower standards for teacher certification, said Ron Noble, the council’s chief of teacher preparation. 

“We found that places like Texas are achieving [more teacher diversity], but with policies that have us concerned about the long-term health of the teacher pipeline,” Noble said. “California and Washington, D.C., offer potential bright spots that might not have that same pitfall.”

NCTQ’s report follows its December launch of a that tracks the racial makeup of U.S. educator corps from 2014 to 2022. Noble said the organization is focusing on educator workforce diversity because employing teachers of color academic, social, emotional and behavior outcomes for students.

“We really want states to be deliberate and intentional in — and careful how they go about — achieving the goal of a diverse workforce,” Noble said.

Teachers from historically disadvantaged groups in the U.S. make up nearly 23% of working-age adults with degrees but 21% of the teacher workforce, according to the dashboard.

In Texas, 35% of college-educated adults are from historically disadvantaged groups, compared with 43% of teachers. But researchers found that behind the high diversity number were flawed alternative certification programs and uncertified teachers — both of which became more common with educator shortages during the pandemic.

In the 2021-22 school year, 51% of Texas teachers completed alternative certification programs, compared with an average of 19% in other states, according to NCTQ. Alternative pathways are than traditional programs: found that Black Texas teachers were more than three times as likely to pursue alternative certification than a more common route like a bachelor’s degree.

Noble said researchers found that the majority of alternative programs in Texas are fully online and that graduates can become teachers with little to no classroom experience. A found that online alternative pathways have a higher turnover rate than other teacher preparation programs.

“They are thrown right into a high-stakes environment,” he said. “It’s not surprising that there are people leaving the profession.”

The number of uncertified teachers is also growing in Texas classrooms. Last year, that 34% of newly hired teachers in Texas were uncertified. The NCTQ report says racial demographics of uncertified teachers ˛š°ůąđ˛Ô’t tracked, making it hard for policymakers to understand the impact on the future diversity of the educator workforce.

In California, nearly 33% of the teachers come from historically disadvantaged groups, compared with 27% of college-educated adults.

The NCTQ report says California’s effort to prioritize teacher diversity, invest in educator training and track industry data are reasons why diversity rates are higher than the norm. The state has in recent years to strengthen the teacher workforce. Advocates have built a and plan to launch a later this year to track demographic and employment data.

NCTQ said in its report that California has lowered standards for teacher candidates to enter the profession. A allows for a bachelor’s degree in any subject to be the sole qualifier for admission into most teacher preparation programs. 

NCTQ also cited Washington, D.C., for its high diversity rates, though its trendlines are not on the same trajectory as California’s and Texas’s. In 2022, 69% of educators came from historically disadvantaged groups, a drop from 77% in 2020. Adults with college degrees from these groups were reported at 35% in 2022.

“It would be easy to explain away D.C.’s teacher diversity by pointing out that it is a city, not a state, and cities are typically more diverse than states,” the report says. “However, comparing D.C.’s teacher and student demographics to those in other large cities in the United States suggests D.C.’s approach to diversifying the teacher workforce is yielding results.”

The NCTQ report shows that the teacher workforce in Washington, D.C., more closely mirrored its student population than those of other districts of similar size and student demographics. 

About 87% of the district’s student population are people of color, as is 74% of the teacher workforce. Researchers found that Atlanta Public Schools was the only demographically similar district that had a smaller student-to-teacher diversity gap.

The report credits consistent prioritization of educator diversity and innovative teacher preparation pathways for the high percentages in Washington, D.C. The region established with university partners and has implemented a centralized hiring process that yields more diverse candidates.

Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on ľţ°ů´ÇˇÉ˛Ô’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to ľţ°ů´ÇˇÉ˛Ô’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations … in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian. 

It was in the nation’s capital that I first met Ramona. I was in the process of opening Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, named for my mother, who was a teacher and is an inspiration to me. I alighted upon Ramona, with her considerable advocacy, activism and academic expertise, as well as strong leadership skills, as a potential board member.

Back then, Ramona was president and chief executive of the National Urban Coalition, a position she held from 1988 to 1998, presiding over many initiatives, including one promoting math and science education among children of color. Ramona and I were extremely concerned about the state of the District of Columbia’s public school system, especially how it failed children growing up in the city’s most underserved neighborhoods. Families with means were fleeing for suburban schools, leaving behind those parents and guardians who lacked such options.

The D.C. Council had just passed the 1995 School Reform Act, allowing charter schools — tuition-free public schools run independently of the city system — to open. In those days, public charter schools were a novel concept. While D.C. law had established equal per-student local funding for students at charter and traditional public schools, payments were often delayed — a cause of many sleepless nights for public charter school pioneers.

In the end, Ramona did not join our board. She did, however, become a powerful voice for equality in per-student funding and access for charters to surplus city school buildings, which came to be enshrined in D.C. law. These issues required Ramona’s persistence and hard work throughout this part of her career, as the District continued to divert public money outside the per-student funding formula to traditional schools. The city also continued to sell or lease school buildings that it couldn’t fill to private developers for condominiums.

In all these struggles, Ramona stood by our side, at one point even leading a lawsuit against the city with two public charter school co-defendants. She championed the cause of children whose families would otherwise have lacked choice, and worked with public charter schools as our enrollments grew.

Today, the charters educate nearly half of D.C.’s public school children and have raised student performance and graduation rates. This has prompted reform of the traditional system and given families choices that are a world away from what was available in the mid-1990s. Without the support of stalwarts such as Ramona, the charter reform would not have blossomed as fully.

Our pre-K-6 school, which started with a class of 35 children in 1998, now has over 500 on two campuses. Our bilingual immersion school has a mission of community service and teaches students to be global citizens, assisted by study tours to Martinique for those studying French and to Panama for those studying Spanish. We also have an International Baccalaureate program and are a feeder school for D.C. International Public Charter School, which specializes in French, Spanish and Mandarin immersion.  

All this progress owes much to Ramona’s rock-solid support for the charter movement, a commitment that clearly traces back through the influences on her life. This began with her teacher and librarian mother, the first woman to earn a doctorate in library science from Columbia University, after graduating from Atlanta’s Fisk University, a historically black college. Ramona followed in her footsteps, graduating from Fisk as well.

Foreshadowing a lifetime of activism, Ramona was taken on her first demonstration — protesting racially discriminatory hiring practices — at age 3. She was profoundly affected by attending a segregated school and by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision integrating the nation’s public schools. At age 17, Ramona attended the 1963 March on Washington, later recalling how she had saved up her money over the summer to take the bus from Atlanta to D.C.

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1967, Ramona moved to England with her U.S. Air Force husband and continued her education by obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of East Anglia in 1969. Returning to the States, she earned her doctorate at Boston University with a dissertation making the case that famed scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois should be considered a philosopher as well as an economist and historian.

Ramona took Du Bois’s activist-academic tradition into her professional life, teaching at Emerson College and establishing the nation’s first African-American studies department, at Northeastern University, in 1973. However, it was after moving to Washington, D.C. to begin a career at the National Urban Coalition that activism became the focus of her professional life. Other roles included executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and President Bill Clinton’s appointee to the Presidential Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.  She was CEO and president of the coalition when I met her.

It was while leading the coalition that Ramona was instrumental in coining the term “African-American” in 1988. And it was in her work as executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools that she helped shape the educational landscape that we know in the District today.

Ramona liked to quote Du Bois’s prescient prediction that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line,” adding, “It’s up to us to be sure that’s not the problem of the 21st century.”  

Inspired by Ramona’s legacy of fighting for social justice, our school has created the Founder’s Award for Excellence and Community Service. The first of these will be awarded to Ramona posthumously at this year’s graduation ceremony.

But while reading scores have improved somewhat, 73% of and 78% of still score below proficient on national reading tests. And the yawning gaps between groups of students have stayed the same or even expanded.

In 2022, Black fourth-graders 69 points lower than their white peers, a gap that hasn’t budged significantly since 1998. The disparity between children poor enough to qualify for free school meals and those who are not is now 56 points, 14 points larger than in 1998. The trend for eighth grade is .

Like , D.C. has taken steps to address this reading crisis. In 2020, the D.C. Council adopted requiring measures like teacher training, and in September, a literacy recommended additional reforms.

These efforts are a good start, and the task force’s recommendations should be implemented and funded. But, like most other jurisdictions, D.C. has focused on ensuring that children receive systematic instruction in foundational skills like phonics. Important as phonics is, it’s just one ingredient in proficient reading. In addition to being able to decipher or decode words, students need to be able to comprehend text.

making this possible are background knowledge and vocabulary. If schools improve phonics instruction without also systematically building knowledge, many students will reach higher grades able to decode complex texts but unable to understand them. That explains why, when states adopt early literacy policies focused on phonics, gains on elementary school reading tests by or .

For both aspects of reading instruction — decoding and comprehension — a good curriculum is crucial. Teachers should receive training in the science related to reading, including the evidence showing that it’s vital to building students’ academic knowledge beginning in the early grades. And to help them translate their understanding into effective practice, they need a coherent curriculum that is grounded in that science. Unfortunately, most widely used literacy curricula are not, so district and school leaders need reliable guidance.

  tries to address this need by requiring that all schools adopt a “science-based reading program” beginning with the 2024-25 school year. But the law doesn’t instruct the state superintendent’s office or any other entity to identify those that are effective. In fact, it defines a “science-based” program as one that covers foundational reading skills and “comprehension strategies” — with no specific mention of the need to build knowledge.

An increasing number of states are issuing lists of approved literacy curricula that districts are either encouraged or required to choose from. Some also incentivize districts to train teachers — and, ideally, school leaders — in how to use the curricula. 

D.C. should develop its own list, relying on evaluation tools created by The Reading League, for foundational skills like phonics, and the Knowledge Matters Campaign, for knowledge-building.

One complicating factor is that the district developed its own English language arts curriculum, which states that it includes the “build[ing] of background knowledge through reading and experiences.” For example, a first-grade unit covers “the different forms of money and how it is made and earned.” From the limited material we’ve seen, it’s hard to tell whether this home-grown curriculum builds knowledge as effectively as those created by trained experts (the Knowledge Matters Campaign, for example, has identified ). The district’s curriculum also has not been subjected to rigorous review, as far as we know.

In any event, according to several reading instructors, there has been little or no training in how to use the curriculum. Nor is it clear how many schools are in fact using it.

One of us accidentally learned, from a staff member, that a district elementary school was using a curriculum called Core Knowledge Language Arts — one of those identified as effective by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. That’s good news, but how many other schools are still using curricula focused on comprehension skills? And what curricula are D.C.’s many charter schools using — if they’re using any at all? At this point, no one seems to know.

The district should at least collect and publish information on which literacy curricula are being used, as the literacy task force has recommended. If school choice is to be meaningful, parents deserve to know what curriculum a school is using. And armed with this information, officials could gain a clearer picture of what is working.

As D.C. moves forward with implementing science-of-reading reforms, it has the opportunity to provide much-needed guidance to schools in finding curricula that pair effective phonics instruction with effective knowledge-building — and to encourage professional learning grounded in the specifics of those curricula. By doing so, D.C. could narrow achievement gaps that haven’t budged since 1998 and provide a true success story that could be a model for the nation.

By March 20, I’d realized that this was one of Those Moments, a historical signpost when your choices and behavior will echo back at you later, whenever someone asks, “Where were you when?” By the middle of that summer, though, as my social world filled with people shocked that their vacations and family reunions had become superspreader events, I’d also realized that we were collectively going to spend most of this catastrophe it away. 

The rest, as they sort of say, became history. The pandemic’s consequences were — are — too dire to ignore, but also too inconvenient to fully acknowledge. Four years later, we’re also at an awkward remove from its most dramatic moments: The pandemic is largely concluded as an historical event, yet we’re not yet far enough out to have anything like a clear view of what’s happened. Most of us are still too battered from the burdens we carried to pause and genuinely reflect. We’ve all spent so many hours of the past four years jabbering into webcams at screenfuls of tiled faces. March 2020 was so many pixels ago. 

That’s why this anniversary should also be an invitation to extend a modicum of grace to ourselves, our peers and our schools. These were four punishing years. Pretending they can be quickly shaken off is . Both individually and collectively, Americans have not yet accepted the scope of the tragedy and we’re taking it out on our schools. 

This odd unwillingness to recognize the pandemic as an unavoidable calamity is part of why we’re still endlessly relitigating pandemic mitigation measures in schools — closures, masks, quarantine policies, and the like. If, in 2019, we’d conducted a thought experiment, asking folks to predict the educational impact of a then-hypothetical viral pandemic that would be transmitted via breathing and , most of us would agree that kids wouldn’t steam forth making the usual academic progress. 

And indeed, the real pandemic unquestionably U.S. students’ academic trajectories, even if they appear to . Yet here on the other side of that disaster, we’re determined to assign blame for dips in U.S. students’ academic achievement, as if learning loss could have — should have — been avoided in a moment of . Say it plain: There was no educational and public health playbook that could have wholly averted the pandemic’s impacts on kids., “[T]he declines, all told, strike me as relatively small, given the context: a brutal pandemic that terrified the country and killed more than a million of its citizens, upending nearly every aspect of our lives along the way.”

But because we can’t face that, we’re now in an educational “One Weird Trick” era, as the field floods with quick-fix solutions to reversing the pandemic’s impacts (particularly with federal pandemic recovery ESSER funds sunsetting). While it’s always appropriate to prioritize high-quality learning opportunities for children, it’s a short step from “let’s help kids accelerate their learning” to “if we do enough now, we can — yet again — banish the pandemic’s impacts from kids’ lives” (particularly if we just buy the right new ed tech product). 

The reality is much harsher. Researchers have known for years that it’s much tougher to shift students’ academic trajectories later in their careers. That’s why children who miss early literacy benchmarks . It’s also why investments in high-quality early learning — like universal pre-K programs — . Now, we have a country of children who, again, , faced . that closures contributed to lost learning, but only as one of many, interrelated variables, and — as noted above — students’ academic achievement in the U.S. appears to have suffered less than it did for students in peer countries that reopened on different timelines and with different COVID mitigation strategies.

Furthermore, the educational story of the past few years is far more complicated and painful than we’d like to admit and its aftereffects won’t vanish because we invest in some limited tutoring programs. Nor could they have been averted if only schools had found some magic mitigations formula to maintain normalcy for kids even as a whole lot of us repeatedly exempted ourselves from responsibility for flattening the curve. 

Why are we so resistant to facing this fact of the pandemic, even now that it’s mostly receded from daily life? It’s flatly impossible to look back at these four years without seeing how national leaders’ rhetoric drove this attitude: real and massive suffering coupled with willful self-deception and disinformation. The Trump administration flailed through COVID’s early stages, insisting it would be over in a few days or weeks, then dabbling in pseudoscience — remember , , and light and/or disinfectant “” into people’s lungs? 

That deadly unseriousness was contagious and collectively punishing. We’ll never know how the country would have behaved under less erratic leadership, but this band of feckless incompetents convinced masses of Americans that the pandemic could be largely ignored if we just wanted it badly enough. Their glib irresponsibility built the narrative that still plagues U.S. public education today — this notion that schools could somehow persist as normal when absolutely nothing around them was. It seems obvious that the ungainly federal response damaged Americans’ trust in public institutions and the social strains it caused ripped deeper holes in our shared social fabric. 

American pandemic flounderings were also personally crushing for many of us. Looking back, I feel a flat, dull, full-body weight settle back into my spine, that familiar 2020-vintage exhaustion. And that’s why, I know this for certain: whatever we all think now about the precise sequence of school closures, reopenings, mitigations, learning loss, and so forth, the past four years ripped a chunk out of the well-being of U.S. , and . 

That’s probably the clearest reason that the country’s still so determined to shift the pandemic out of mind and/or erase its impacts. No one wants to accept how far it knocked us — and our children — off the trajectories we hoped we were following. I remember reaching a point in the endless work-life-kids-panic pandemic juggle where I developed this yearning to just sit quietly on a rocky beach somewhere and watch the waves roll in. To just meditate and let my mind unspool from the tension of masks and ambulances. 

I kept telling my wife, “I bet I could sit there and stare for days before my head finally got back to something like normal.”

That would be Linda Brown, who tried very hard to remain private, and succeeded. To date, there has been just a single that does not truly capture her far-reaching impact.

Why argue that Brown was such a major figure in the American education sphere? 

Because Brown and the fellow educators in her tight circle demonstrated that demography does not have to determine destiny. That’s not what we hear from most school superintendents and teachers union leaders, who maintain that while they do their best to counter the headwinds of poverty, success is impossible.

When viewing education data on a macro level, the traditional educators are right: Poverty does drive outcomes. But on a more modest scale, where Brown operated, the many high-performing charter schools she helped launch around the country through her Boston-based Building Excellent Schools, known as BES, showed the opposite.

Just a quick example: At Uncommon Schools, which operates 53 schools in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, 58% of their graduates earn bachelor’s degrees within six years. That is just than the college graduation rate for students from families in the top income quartile. (Before the pandemic, Uncommon’s college graduation rate reached 72%.)

Yes, it is possible. That kind of success requires relentless innovation and persistence. But it’s possible.

If Brown hadn’t been an advocate for charter schools, which are despised by teachers unions and disliked by many progressives, her passing would have been front page news.

Among charter insiders, she was called the godfather of the top charters, a nickname she both hated and loved. The first time I profiled Brown I called her the grandmother of the elite charters. She hated that and let me know! Clearly, godfather was the better fit.

(You can see and hear Brown in a previous interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ)

The BES fellowships designed by Brown started with a year touring top charters and designing your own school, followed by a second year preparing to open that school. Often BES would invest directly in the new school.

“There are so many people who say Linda changed the direction of their lives,” said Brett Peiser, now Uncommon’s co-chief executive officer. “I was one of those people.”

Peiser’s first charter school, which eventually led him to Uncommon, never would have happened without ľţ°ů´ÇˇÉ˛Ô’s tough-minded assistance, he says.

Uncommon is just one charter network of many that Brown had a hand in. And then there are all the high-performing “sister” charter schools that fellows visit to learn their secrets. In that way, they become part of the BES network.

Finally, there are the education leaders who rose to national prominence out of that Linda Brown world. Just two examples: former Education Secretary John King (Roxbury Prep) and Teach Like a Champion author Doug Lemov, a pioneer of several charter schools.

“It’s so easy to let school formation be about the ornaments on the tree and not the tree itself,” Lemov wrote when asked about Brown. “Linda was always about the things that mattered — real achievement and learning — and she never accepted cheap substitutes.” 

Added Lemov: “It’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to introduce school choice to a place and to make sure there is the proof point of a school with real quality — radically, not just marginally, better â€” to reset people’s expectations for what is possible. And she did that over and over again.”

At a little more than 5 feet tall, she had furious energy and famous impatience. Each day, after arising around 3 a.m., she would check her phone to see if any new applications for fellowships had arrived. 

Immediately, or just after opening a Diet Coke, Brown would devour the application, still in her PJs. 

“If she wanted someone, she would look at her watch and see it was only 4:30 in the morning,” said her BES partner Susan Walsh. “But by 6 a.m. she would call them, even though they might have submitted the application at 11 p.m. the night before. She would tell me, ‘If they are people who do things, they should be up.’ And then, when she talked to them, if she liked what she was hearing, she was simultaneously checking flights to Boston, and would say, ‘I see a 1:30 flight; let’s meet today at 3 p.m.’ She moved!”

Just for context, this was for a fellowship that at the time was hyper-exclusive: the acceptance ratio for the dozen awarded each year was 2 in 100.

One of those applicants surprised by an early morning call was Shantelle Wright. She had never heard of a BES fellowship until reading about it in a brochure and was astonished. You mean they pay you to do what I desperately want to do, she thought. She finished her application at 5 p.m. and, with a prayer, pushed the send button.

Brown read it first thing the next morning. It was a 13-page, single-spaced essay on what Wright wanted to achieve with a Washington, D.C.-based school. “This essay was on fire,” Brown told me in an earlier interview. “She talked about how the vast Black/white school achievement gap is not only a Black person’s problem; this is also a white person’s problem. Why can’t we have decent schools east of the Anacostia (the poorest neighborhoods in the District)?”

At 7 a.m. the next morning, Brown phoned Wright at home. Says she woke her up: When can you be here?

Wright: When do you want me?

Brown: Can you be on the next shuttle to Boston?

Wright made the 9 a.m. shuttle and sat down with Brown for a long talk. At the end, she was offered a fellowship. To complete a long story in a few words, Wright founded the successful Achievement Prep charter in Washington, ended up on the BES board of directors and went on to other education achievements.

“This woman single-handedly changed the trajectory of my life,” Wright posted after ľţ°ů´ÇˇÉ˛Ô’s death. “I do what I do and fight like I fight because of her. Her belief in what was possible made it reality for me!”

Wright’s story is one of scores like it: fellows who spread out across states to launch their own schools after visiting and studying the best charters in the country.

There are many charter schools around the U.S. that are mediocre, hardly better than nearby traditional schools. And there are some that are worse than the traditional schools and warrant closing. And then there are the charters launched by Brown and BES that usually show what’s possible when true innovation is allowed to blossom.

Said Brown in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ:

“Some folks from the West Coast would use terms such as ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’ We looked around after a year and a half and saw that a thousand flowers had bloomed there and, in fact, they weren’t all good. And we thought there it was. If you let a thousand flowers bloom, you’re going to have some bad ones, some good ones, some moderate ones and a few great ones.” 

It was in Massachusetts that we were able to say we weren’t going to have a thousand flowers blooming. That being able to start a charter school by meeting Sunday after church, putting together a kind of helter skelter application, getting authorized, and then saying, ‘What do we do now?’ wasn’t enough. Because we were in the business of changing people’s lives, young people’s lives, and in some instances, very young people’s lives. We took that as our mission.

“The other thing we took as our mission was that we could be the people who chose the people to start charter schools. And that was really the birth of Building Excellent Schools.”

Since 2001, BES has selected and who went on to found more than 200 schools in 50 cities and 20 states.

Some examples by region (a long, if still incomplete, list):

• In Massachusetts, BES fellow-founded schools include Salem Academy Charter School, Excel Academy Charter Schools, Phoenix Charter Academy and Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School.

• Sister schools in Massachusetts (schools that fellows visit to study) include Brooke Charter Schools (“Linda always said we should be a BES school,” said founder Jon Clark), KIPP Lynn Academy and Roxbury Prep.

• In Rhode Island, RISE Prep Mayoral Academy.

• In New York City, there’s South Bronx Classical Charter School, Democracy Prep, Leadership Prep, Forte Preparatory Charter School, Legacy College Prep, Creo College Prep, Valence College Prep Charter School, Brooklyn RISE Charter School and BOLD Charter School. 

• In Buffalo, there’s Buffalo Creek Academy Charter School, Persistence Preparatory Charter School and Primary Hall Preparatory Charter School.

• In Washington, D.C., there’s Achievement Preparatory Academy.

• In Ohio, the United Schools Network.

• In Nashville, Tennessee, there’s Purpose Preparatory Academy, Nashville Classical Charter School, Intrepid College Prep Schools, Liberty Collegiate Academy and Nashville Prep, which merged to form RePublic Schools. In Memphis, there’s Freedom Preparatory Academy, Memphis Rise Academy, Beacon College Preparatory, Memphis Merit Academy Charter School and Aurora Collegiate Academy.

• In Texas, there’s Compass Rose Academy, Houston Classical Charter School and Etoile Academy Charter School.

• In Chicago, there’s Great Lakes Academy Charter School.

• In Louisiana, Laureate Academy Charter School and Elan Academy Charter School.

• In Indiana, Circle City Prep and Allegiant Preparatory Academy.

• In Nevada, Nevada Rise Academy and Nevada Prep Charter School.

• In California, Equitas Academy Charter School, Mission Preparatory School, Valor Academy (joined Bright Star Schools) and Cornerstone Academy (joined Alpha Public Schools).

• In Colorado, University Prep.

Did ľţ°ů´ÇˇÉ˛Ô’s remarkable achievements reform American public education? Sadly, no.

Despite the consistent gains demonstrated by charter networks such as Uncommon — pushing up students’ college graduation rates to match their high-income peers — traditional education leaders focus more on driving charters out of business than adopting their hard-learned lessons for success.

Even in Massachusetts, which boasts , the powerful teachers unions there have easily beaten back charter expansion.

But those setbacks would never phase the indomitable Brown, whose feisty disposition, sharp wit and bright red fingernails — freshened regularly by a manicurist who visited her home in her last days — made her someone you never forget meeting. She was too busy hurrying along trying to achieve her lifelong mission: proving that when it comes to educating children, zip codes shouldn’t matter.

“Winning is about academic achievement,” Brown told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. And by that standard, Brown, whose family is planning a celebration of her life in August on her birthday, emerged the winner.

Chris Riback: Kamren, thanks so much for coming by the studio.

Kamren Rollins: It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Chris Riback: So you wear a couple of different hats around the early learning, community development, advancement areas. Let’s talk first about BCDI DC and your role there. Tell me about the community and what’s your key mission in that role?

Kamren Rollins: Yes, so I serve as the President of the Black Child Development Institute of District of Columbia. It’s actually a new role. We just reestablished the affiliate. So the main goal of BCDI DC ties into the mission of NBCDI, which is to create communities and enhance the development opportunities, whether that’s in education, health for Black children in the area.

Chris Riback: What inspired the revitalization of the affiliate?

Kamren Rollins: I had the pleasure of being in the policy fellowship with NBCDI, which was an amazing transformative leadership opportunity for me, and being so integrally, connected with NBCDI at the time, and then knowing that the affiliate had not been active for a few years, I think it was really important for me and some others to work together to reestablish it, just to make sure there’s a level of advocacy, programming, and policy work that’s being done in the District.

Chris Riback: What are some of the key issues going on? Tell me about the community. What makes now a particularly important moment to restart the NBCDI division in DC?

Kamren Rollins: Definitely, so there’s a few things. One, when we look at what’s going on nationally as it relates to education for children across the spectrum, but specifically Black children, there’s a great need for the affiliate in DC to be able to speak on behalf of the national organization, but also with that local perspective. But then also when we look at the advocacy that’s happening for the workforce, for early childhood educators and ensuring pay equity, it’s really important. I think DC continues to lead the way and ensure what’s happening here doesn’t just stay here, and it expands to states and other cities.

Chris Riback: Obviously you are in the District, you are in an environment where getting your message out, there’s the potential that it could reach federal policymakers.

Kamren Rollins: That’s the goal. I think what DC Council and so many other stakeholders in Washington DC have been able to do on behalf of early childhood education has been incredible, from mentioning the pay equity to ensuring that early childhood educators have full tuition scholarships to obtain their associate’s, bachelor’s, and even higher education degrees is extremely important that everywhere else, every other city, every other community has those same opportunities.

Chris Riback: Yes, pay equity is a topic I’m hearing a lot about at the conference, and we say it’s something important then that’s something that perhaps needs to be addressed, doesn’t it?

Kamren Rollins: Certainly. We have to make the investment into not only the children, but when we talk about the children, I think individuals oftentimes forget about people that are day-to-day working to ensure that the children have a better quality of life, have a better educational experience. What I’ve found is it’s really difficult or it’s challenging when we center conversations around the children, which we should, but the educators, the individuals that have families as well are oftentimes forgotten.

Chris Riback: Yes. They’re the ones we put our children in their hands every day.

Kamren Rollins: Exactly.

Chris Riback: Now, this is not your only role. You’re also Chief Operating Officer of the Southeast Children’s Fund.

Kamren Rollins: Yes, sir.

Chris Riback: What is that organization?

Kamren Rollins: Southeast Children’s Fund is a nonprofit organization. It was founded by Ms. Frances Jay Rollins in 1994 and since then, it has been one of the largest providers of workforce development opportunities, such as the Child Development Associate Program in the district, and then also have had several childcare facilities in the southeast area, but also in other areas of Washington DC.

Chris Riback: What are you hearing from parents? What do they need most?

Kamren Rollins: They need support. They need guidance. When looking at the development of young children, we can’t just look at what it looks like while they’re in the center or when they’re in the classroom, but it’s so important for them to have wraparound services. The reason why I’m so connected to the organization, but also it’s important for us to continue to expand the work that we do because we focus not just on the child while they’re in the classroom, but also ensuring that parents and families have those wraparound services.

Chris Riback: Well, there’s a lot of work to be done. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Kamren Rollins: Thank you. I appreciate it.

In 2004, when he was 17, Michael Jeffery stole a patrolman’s badge out of a police cruiser in Plano, Texas. He admits it was a “dumb decision.” He’d dropped out of school in ninth grade and was in the habit of “car hopping” — breaking into vehicles to look for valuables. 

Police arrested him quickly.

“They left me in jail,” he said. “And all I know [is] I went to court nine months later. I had a felony charge for something — I didn’t know what was going on.”

Nearly 20 years later, at 36, he’s about to enroll at Catholic University, where he plans to study law, saying, “I want to fight for myself.”

On July 14, he finally graduated from high school — as valedictorian, no less, a feat that seems all the more amazing because Jeffery has spent virtually all of his time in D.C., nearly two years, living in a tent near the city’s Navy Yard, showering at a neighborhood pool and riding a city bus 15 minutes to class. 

He graduated thanks to an unusual program housed in a two-campus school with one mission: to help adults get their high school diploma, sometimes decades after they dropped out. 

Its oldest graduate is 72 and the youngest 15. The average student, if there is one, is 28 years old.

The school gets its name and startup funding from the place where most of us shop for castoff Pyrex pans, old vinyl LPs and vintage T-shirts.

The Goodwill Excel Center Adult Charter High School is the only adult charter in the district that awards a real high school diploma rather than a GED. After seven years in operation, it boasts about 500 graduates, all of them searching for a second chance to prove to the world — and themselves — that they can succeed in school.

Excel does it by front-loading essential services and personalizing everything it can. Among its features: on-site childcare, free transportation to and from school and classes that meet just four days a week — Fridays are devoted almost exclusively to tutoring. And each student has an academic coach. 

The typical class size is just 10 to 12 students, with many even smaller. It does all this, its leaders say, with the same level of funding that other D.C. charter high schools get: about $16,000 to $21,000 per student.

“People know your name, know your story — and then your coach is your main person,” said Chelsea Kirk, the schools’ executive director, who calls the approach “curated” to the students it serves.

The individualized approach is intentional, designed to reframe the task of high school completion. 

“We like to put high school dropouts into a box and say, ‘This is why they’re a dropout,’” Kirk said. “But we don’t ever think about what structures caused that. We don’t ever think about ‘How could a school change its structures to embrace people?’”

Like Jeffery, many graduates push to get their diplomas because they want to work as attorneys, social workers and the like, devoting their lives to changing the “poor service and broken systems” they’ve experienced in school and elsewhere as they looked for help.

Doing it for someone

Many Excel students push for their high school diploma because not having it is holding them back from promotions and higher salaries. One alumnus told the school he worked as a paralegal at the same law firm for 18 years, earning minimum wage. A diploma bumped his salary by $20,000.

But for others, the reasons are highly personal. Carla Thompson, 41, said she made her way to Excel after one of her four children, ages 9 to 21, began asking about the point of finishing high school instead of dropping out and getting a job.

“My 14-year-old is questioning that part,” she said. “I can’t be a hypocrite and say, ‘You have to,’ and I don’t have it.”

Brendan Hurley, who handles public affairs for the D.C.-area Goodwill region, said messaging for the school has adjusted to this reality. When the school opened in 2016, recruiting materials were “very data driven,” with statistics on how much more high school graduates earn and how they’re more likely to find sustainable employment. Two years in, an alumni focus group found that message paled in comparison to the blush of pride students felt from simply getting the diploma and sharing the accomplishment with their loved ones. 

“It’s the diploma itself that’s important,” said Hurley. “They want that piece of paper. They want the high school experience that they did not have when they were 16, 17, 18 years old.”

The big prize, Kirk added, is the external validation they get, the ability to hold their head up among their children and grandchildren. She calls it a “two-generation” approach. “It’s not just about you. It’s about the next generation and a generation after that.”

‘Small wins‘

The originated in Indiana in 2010, when Goodwill centers there struggled to find high school graduates to be front-line store workers. It has since spread to five states and D.C. 

The approach takes hold at a moment when U.S. high school graduation rates, while at 86%, are unequally distributed. In fact, D.C. has the worst graduation rate in the nation, at 69%, far below even the worst two states, New Mexico and Arizona.

In D.C., enrollment in the two campuses now sits at 405, with a planned, separately privately funded campus in Baltimore this fall as well. The student body is overwhelmingly Black and about 70% female. For these students, the schools maintain a full-time staff of 49 — many of them younger than the students they serve.

Discussions with Goodwill about opening the center began in 2014, when it got a grant from D.C. to train employees at a planned Marriott hotel. But they found that the No. 1 barrier to jobs at the hotel was a lack of high school diploma. The school opened two years later among the corporate and government highrise canyons just north of The White House. Another campus opened last year near D.C.’s National Mall.

Though most Excel students come from the poorest neighborhoods in the city, miles from downtown, the schools’ geography is intentional, Kirk said: Students wanted safe locations away from the crime and violent schools of their neighborhoods. But they also wanted a place that brought them into contact each morning with professional opportunities. As it is, the original school lies squarely between the World Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations.

One key to the school’s success is its prioritization of “small wins” for students who may have had few of them in school until now. For instance, a big difference between Excel and virtually every other school model is its academic calendar. No matter what their education or skill level when they enter, every student starts as a ninth-grader and proceeds at her own pace, without a cohort of classmates on the same track.

Students ideally can complete their entire high school education in just two years, with individualized education plans and tutoring for every student that allow them to maintain work and family duties. In reality, many students complete the program more slowly, coming and going as life allows — a few who graduated this July first enrolled in 2016, when the center’s doors opened. 

The school licenses with the local YMCA to run a full-time, licensed daycare and child development center upstairs from the classrooms.

And instead of 20-week semesters, as in most high schools, Excel offers all its courses in five compact eight-week terms, all of them based on competency, not seat time. Four assessments over the course of each term keep students on track.

But if they lose the thread of a course and tutoring doesn’t help, they can simply start over again at the end of eight weeks, without having to wait months or even a year for a “re-do,” a major pain point for many students who drop out.

For students with heavy work or family commitments, the school offers a nearly unheard-of accommodation: Staying enrolled requires taking just one class per term.

Jeffery, the valedictorian, showed up to the school in the spring of 2022, after years of bouncing between jobs: dental assistant, tax preparer, fast-food restaurant manager. 

“I can get a job without a high school diploma,” he said. “I have experience. I know I could have probably come out here and got a job that pays well with my resume. But that wasn’t my plan. My plan was to do more with myself because I know I can do more.”

He was ready to get on with his schoolwork: “I told them just to fill my schedule up, give me all the classes I can take.” He graduated barely a year after he started. 

With the school’s help, he’s close to moving into his own place, if a background check clears. But he acknowledges that he’s spent a lot of time “lost, trying to find my way.” 

By Jeffery’s telling, upon his arrest in Texas in 2004, authorities offered this deal: Plead guilty to felony assault stemming from a fight at a nearby high school and walk away with time served plus probation. Or risk going to trial for the fight and serve as much as eight years in prison. Because he was a juvenile, the records remain sealed.

He’d been at the school the night of the fight, but nowhere near the clash, he said — and he hadn’t even been questioned about it while sitting in jail for months. But he soon realized he had no choice: With a public defender who did little to stand up for him, Jeffery said, he took the plea deal and earned his release shortly after his 18th birthday. 

“I didn’t know how the system worked,” he recalled, the ordeal still stinging nearly two decades later. “The lawyer that I had, and the judge, they didn’t fight for me. They didn’t care. They just wanted to get a conviction and call it a day.” 

For the past year or so, Jeffery’s been known to spend more time than most at the school’s downtown campus, arriving early and leaving late, ferreting out the teachers who can offer a bit of extra tutoring. He made a point to get to know every teacher and administrator, lingering over conversations before heading back to his tent.

“Those cold nights and those hot summers and those rainy days and those rats, those people who are under the influence of all kinds, they’re not fun to live around,” he said. The school was “my escape from that world.”

‘I came in like a sour lemon‘ 

The school follows 12 accountability goals set by D.C.’s Public Charter School Board. One of them requires Excel to graduate 20% to 25% of its students each year, which it typically does. According to its 2019 , it graduated 31.7% and exceeded the board’s reading and math proficiency goals. In 2022, ; this year that dropped to 22%, still meeting the board’s goals.

Its annual attendance goal: 60%, but the school adjusts to students’ lives if they show a willingness to persevere and be honest when they can’t make it to class. If students have two consecutive absences, the school requests that they create an attendance plan with their academic coach. Students can be kicked out if they don’t meet the requirements, but can easily reapply.

Many students, Kirk said, work overnight jobs and care for children and grandchildren, as well as parents. And many, approaching and in some cases exceeding middle age, have health issues that keep them away.

“We don’t take it lightly that you show up,” she said.

Cheryl Smith, 49, enrolled at Excel 33 years after leaving her D.C. middle school at the end of eighth grade — and a year after beating a lifelong PCP addiction, one that began around the time she dropped out of school. An adoptee who never met her biological parents, Smith had children of her own very young. She eventually had three kids, all before turning 20. 

She can count the number of times she tried to quit PCP: 35. Her addiction tore her family apart. Her two sons would eventually be put up for adoption, but she stayed connected to them through a friend and has once more become a steady presence in their lives. Her kids all grew up, and she’s now a grandmother of eight.

She enrolled in 2021, recalling, “When I came here, they opened up their arms to me. I came in like a sour lemon, but rose to be an apple.”

For Smith, getting her diploma amounts to a kind of redemption and face-saving for her grandkids, the oldest of which is now 16, who spent their lives seeing their grandmother get high.

“The older ones knew,” she said. Though she never used drugs around her grandkids, they all saw the aftermath: “sitting there, looking stupid.”

She tried to get clean one last time, saying to herself: “I’m just tired of it. It’s not a good look.”

She had extra motivation: The birth of her youngest grandson Dontae, now 3. Born premature, at just 2 lbs. 11 oz., the size of your hand, “he came out eating,” Smith said, thus earning the nickname Munchy.

Now in her care much of the time, he’d come to school with her most mornings, spending his days in the YMCA childcare center upstairs. Growing up in D.C., she said, he’ll undoubtedly see drug use around him. But not from his grandma.

Positive affirmation

In the end, the secret of the school’s success may boil down to the simplest of principles: It believes in its students. Ask any Excel student what they missed in their high school career and they’ll easily tell you: a sense of possibility, of success.

“That’s the piece that a lot of our students have missed, that affirmation piece, that ‘Atta boy,’” said Vershaun Terry, who heads special education for the schools. “They want to be seen.”

Many observers might mistakenly believe that positive affirmations are only for small children. Even prospective staffers at the school believe they’re walking into a space where adults can succeed without a lot of affirmation, Terry said.

“They don’t. They come in chronologically at a higher age, but socially, emotionally, they’re youth,” he said. Many still need that guidance, those affirmations, that structure. “They have a whole world out there to take care of, but they still need it here. They need to get refilled here, too.”

As for Cheryl Smith, she graduated alongside Jeffery and 54 others, 35 years after she finished middle school. She has told Kirk she wants to mentor students at Excel, but for now she’s grateful for the opportunity to be a role model after all these years. Next she wants to get off disability and find a home that’s not Section 8 public housing.

“I’ll be 50 next year,” she said. “When I get older, I want to be able to sit back in my rocking chair with my great-grandkids and be able to tell the story: ‘Yeah, Grandma was a pistol, but she turned out to be a winner.’ ”

]]> /article/sxsw-interview-friendship-school-ceo-patricia-brantley-on-why-virtual-learning-will-thrive-long-after-the-pandemic/ Sun, 05 Mar 2023 14:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=705387 During the pandemic, K-12 schools endured for their inability to effectively educate students remotely, with many parents and lawmakers to in-person learning.

In October 2020, for instance, a found that parents whose kids attended school in-person were far more likely to say they were “very satisfied” with the way school was handling instruction: 54% vs. just 30% whose kids received online instruction only.

But Patricia Brantley, who leads the 15-school network of Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., said developing and maintaining virtual learning systems will be critical to public schools going forward. Friendship began investing in virtual learning before the pandemic and has actually expanded its virtual offerings since 2021. 

The move is largely driven by parents, she said, who see the value of virtual learning for their kids. She noted one parent who wrote that her child requires a wheelchair to attend “a fair amount of medical appointments.” Online learning works in large part because classes are recorded for later viewing. The woman’s son, once an average student, is “now above grade” level, she wrote. Brantley also said the move has fostered “incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.”

Three years after the first pandemic closures, Brantley said virtual learning will also be key to attracting young teachers to the profession as other white-collar industries offer the option to work remotely. She’ll be talking about her experiences this week at South by Southwest Edu, part of a panel that . 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Greg Toppo, who will be moderating the session, caught up with Brantley by email in advance of the session. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: The panel at South by Southwest Edu asks “Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?” What’s your short answer to this question?

Patricia Brantley: Virtual learning is the solution teaching needs. There’s an age-old question: How do we best educate our young and prepare them for the world? Assuming that we can do it in the same way that it’s been done for 100 years or more, when the world has changed, is worse than naive. It is failing generations of students in ways that we may not recover. 

In my opinion, the true disruptor isn’t the availability of virtual learning, it’s the convergence of factors illuminated by the pandemic. Those factors include the rise of parent-driven schooling through pods and micro schools that often rely partially on online delivery; the decline of traditional enrollment and rise in private, homeschool, online and charter options, and the flexibility now being given in other professions that make them more attractive to young college graduates than teaching. I see these factors converging in a way that is ultimately forcing changes in the way we historically have approached schooling, especially in traditional settings. Virtual learning isn’t the disruptor. It is a critical tool to support the way education must adapt to a changing world. 

Friendship is D.C.’s first public, tuition-free online education provider. Can you talk a little about what you’ve built and what your enrollment trends are?

We began investing in online education years before the pandemic, opening in 2015 for grades K to 8 and expanding to high school in 2019. Our original families knew that traditional settings weren’t serving their children well. The truth is we followed them to online learning as the solution. We were proud of our very specialized, small virtual community that featured incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.

“You can’t lose human relationships in the shift to online learning. Despite what some may think, a high-quality online learning environment is still centered on people and relationships, not technology.”

Patricia Brantley 

Then, as many families were hesitant or unable to return to in-person schooling during the 2021-2022 academic year, our enrollment exploded. We went from barely 200 students to 700. Our staff grew from four full-time teachers to a staff of 40, with a faculty that includes master teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, parent liaisons and resident artists that are leading students through deep experiences in the fine arts. Our growth is an indication of the effectiveness and appeal of online learning environments.

Part of our success here is likely due to our intentional approach to design. Since 2015, our priority has been to design an online program with the learner at the center. Interestingly, by centering the learner, we also designed a new experience for the teacher, one that creates flexibility and evolves the profession. By doing this, we saw significant interest from teachers to take on this role and high satisfaction rates from those who did. This experience gives us reason to question the prevailing idea that there is a shortage of people who want to teach. Rather, what we see is that many teachers want the freedom and flexibility to evolve. In that way, virtual learning can be as attractive and impactful for educators as it is for students and families.

What have some of your early successes been?

While our enrollment trends are strong indicators of our program’s success, I’m even more pleased with the academic results we continue to achieve. Ensuring access to effective small learning environments and robust online options for students and families are absolute priorities for us. That’s why we are so proud to see results like those from the from (educational consultants) EmpowerK12, which found that Friendship Online students previously deemed “at-risk” for academic failure outpaced citywide growth in both English and Math during the pandemic.

I also consider it a success that we haven’t gotten locked into one way to meet families’ needs. As we’ve continued to grow and learn, we’re piloting other learning environments that push the limits on traditional school. Our microschools and hubs, which also emerged as part of the need created by the pandemic, were a game changer for many of our families. When we looked at the data, kids who were in those pods achieved larger academic gains than their peers who were not. Some even progressed faster than they did before the pandemic.  

I understand you’re using an AI system that listens to kids’ reading and reports back to teachers. What other innovations are you able to bring to the table?

We are constantly driven by the question: “What do families, students, and teachers need right now, today?” We are always asking ourselves this question and we push ourselves to remain open-minded about where the answers might lead us. Over the course of the past few years, this has certainly included expanding our online options and microschools, but it’s also included innovations that ˛š°ůąđ˛Ô’t necessarily connected to technology.

For example, since the pandemic taught us that learning can happen anywhere, we’ve made investments in more experiential learning for our students. Partnering with at Friendship Blow Pierce Academy has made the entire city part of our students’ learning journey. We’ve also developed a career coaching program for students to help them prepare for the future and discover career paths they never knew existed. In addition to their teachers and peers, our students are also learning from members of their community.

During the pandemic, we heard so much about how online learning was problematic. Yet your work suggests there’s huge interest from families. What does the conventional wisdom miss about online learning in 2023?

The first thing that’s missed is the idea that you can paint family and student needs with a broad brush. Does online learning work for everyone? Certainly not. But for those families and students who gravitate towards online learning, it can be a game changer. The pandemic forced all of us to adopt online learning, so of course there were going to be plenty of situations where that wasn’t the ideal learning environment. Now that we can integrate choice into the equation, you start to see that those families and students who opt in to this kind of learning are usually the ones who have great success with it. The idea here is that families need to be empowered to choose the best learning environment for them and we need to be prepared with diverse options to meet their needs.

“Does online learning work for everyone? Certainly not. But for those families and students who gravitate towards online learning, it can be a game changer.”

Patricia Brantley

The other thing that was missed in the urgency created by the pandemic is that you can’t lose human relationships in the shift to online learning. Despite what some may think, a high-quality online learning environment is still centered on people and relationships, not technology. If you leverage technology — and the flexibility it affords — to allow the student-teacher relationship to thrive, that’s when you see the kind of success we’ve been able to achieve over time.

]]> /article/school-improvement-guru-justin-cohen-on-teacher-led-school-innovation/ Mon, 24 Oct 2022 17:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=698633 For most of the past 20 years, Justin Cohen has been a clarion voice for equity in public education. Since joining D.C. Public Schools as its director of school innovation in 2007, Cohen has focused much of his time on school improvement — exploring how to change schools so that they deliver excellent learning opportunities for all kids. Though he’s broadened his aperture over the years — campaigning for and — schools have always stayed on his mind. 

This fall, on the heels of six months interviewing “about 100 teachers in 15 cities” who were working on substantial improvement efforts, Cohen is publishing his first book, . It’s an effort to answer a question he asks at the outset: “What would it actually look like for teachers to be at the center of discussions about school transformation?” 

Change Agents comes out tomorrow (Oct. 25). I sat down with Cohen last month to talk about the book — and about what’s next for public education as leaders move past the pandemic. 

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: The book is built around profiles of Partners in School Innovation—tell me about them and how you came across them. 

Justin Cohen: About 15 years ago I was working for the D.C. Public Schools, and we were exploring a multi-district collaborative around early identification of young people who were on track to not finish high school. It never really went anywhere, but I got to meet a man named Derek Mitchell, in Prince George’s County, and he went on to Partners in School Innovation (PSI) years later, doing improvement science and continuous improvement in schools. 

At PSI, Derek introduced a notion that you know, continuously improving an unfair system isn’t enough. put it this way: “making incremental improvements at the margins of a system originally designed to sort children by race, class and language will only make inequitable sorting more efficient.” And so Derek insisted that continuous school improvement needed to have a racial equity lens—and PSI has been working on that for the last 13 years. 

He recently reached out to me, saying, “I’m really excited about what we’ve been able to do. What about telling this story at a broader level?”

A chance to capture their approach, codify it and make it replicable in more schools.

Right. Totally. From the outset, I envisioned something like Atul Gawande’s , which took some of the lessons of improvement science and showed how to do incremental change in health care on a day-to-day basis…but for education. I was especially interested in writing something for teachers. Something for educators to pick up and read during the very limited time that they have, that’s practical, teacher-friendly, and — hopefully — inspiring without indulging in what my editor likes to call ‘toxic positivity.’ 

I particularly enjoyed the part focused on conditional reasoning — that is, the “if/then” statements at the heart of almost any attempt to shift human behavior. It’s at the core of pragmatic, realistic change thinking. Every school improvement — every self-improvement — starts with a commitment to trying something new (“if I do this…”) in the hopes of seeing different results (“then we’ll see this outcome…”). But that doesn’t mean that humans naturally start their problem-solving that way. It’s an acquired pattern of thinking. What are some tips for teachers trying to get themselves and their colleagues into thinking about improvement more constructively? 

There’s one acronym in the book. ROCI: Results-Oriented Cycles of Inquiry. The foundational idea is that you get together with a group of your peers every week for collaboration. During those meetings, you set a target: some sort of process improvement. And whatever that thing is — a 15-minute check for understanding at the end of each lesson or whatever — you’re all going to commit to doing it together. You make time in the subsequent week to watch each other try this thing out. And then, the next week, you talk it over. 

A big part of this is that it’s not top-down school reform, right? It’s not a principal calling everyone in a room and dictating The Plan. It’s ground-up, teacher-led inquiry. 

Yes. That’s the core thing that differentiates it from a lot of the last generation of reform. This is about asking teachers at the classroom level, “What do you want to try differently tomorrow?” And then, let their judgments and expertise guide next steps. The inquiry process is just as important as the resulting improvements. It’s about building that habit, building that muscle of trying something new, seeing whether it works, observing each other to give feedback on whether or not it works, and then doing more if it continues to deliver results, and stopping doing it if it doesn’t. 

I mean, I know that sounds really basic, but people spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on gym membership they don’t use. Habit-building is hard!

You know, it’s the flip side of , this notion that If you invest heavily in early childhood education, you get better results overall for marginalized and underserved communities, because in the early years, kids’ habits haven’t been formed, their long-term trajectories remain fluid, they’re at a point of . Most people get that. But nobody talks about the flip side: Shifting adult behavior is super hard. I mean, anybody who’s ever tried to lose weight or shift their TV habits knows this. 

Yes. In the book, I take great pains to avoid a cheerleading, “it’s easy, you can do it!” kind of mentality. Because it’s actually hard, even if it’s rewarding. One of the things that really comes through is the joy people experience when they get to see the results of shifting their practice on their own terms versus shifting practice because somebody told them to or because the state, said “We’re gonna shut your school down if you don’t change.” For the last 25-30 years, it’s been all stick, no carrot. 

But in this teacher-led approach, there’s at least a sense that you can control some of the destiny, and some of what you decide to do.

Meaningful teacher agency … that’s clearly not what we, the country, have been doing. 

It’s not. And one of the key things about this, right, is that when school improvement is driven by teachers, it’s more durable. Even when funding dries up and top-down pressure for reform goes away, when improvement consultants’ PowerPoints go away … those habits don’t. Teachers don’t just stop meeting with their peers to talk through the new things they’re trying. Once they get used to that, they keep doing it. 

Also: part of giving teachers agency is about giving them the opportunity to fail. I know that failure has been rhetorically weaponized against teachers — and families and children, in some cases — like, “failure is not an option anymore.” 

And as a person who’s indulged in this language at times, I think we have to admit that that’s not helpful and is even psychologically jarring in some cases. We have to create enough room for people to try things and maybe not succeed the first time, particularly when we’re talking about institutions like schools. We have millions of teachers operating in tens of thousands of schools and districts. 

This is a good segue. Because you’re clear, in the book, that there are good reasons that we wound up in the place we’ve been in, that we tried the reforms we’ve been trying. The absence of data on student outcomes, on student achievement, meant that, for example, kids were assigned to English as a Second Language classrooms because their last names sounded Hispanic, not because they necessarily needed those services. Educational inequities and civil rights violations thrive when we don’t keep track of what kids know and can do. So maybe we need to modify the policies imposing these consequences on schools, but … can you say more about a policy agenda that leaves more room for teacher-led inquiry and improvement? That leaves room for teachers to fail?

I’m gonna do this in a roundabout way. 

I remember, after the financial crash of 2008, thinking that it’s really nice that economic policy and monetary policy has some very clear available mechanisms. A new president shows up, appoints you to the Federal Reserve Board, and when you walk into the building, figuratively speaking, there’s a big lever labeled, “Interest Rates Down—Borrowing Up.” That’s just what happens. We know how these forces work. 

But we do not have that in education. There isn’t a “Student Achievement” lever to pull when a new administration arrives in the White House. It doesn’t exist. I think we have to acknowledge that. 

I’m not allergic to accountability. In fact, I think my book offers a very deep, very intense form of accountability at the individual practitioner level — a level of accountability that is more or less ignored by today’s policy regimes. 

And look, I’m not saying this to level a judgment on the people who crafted those policies or on the people who’ve spent decades earnestly trying to implement them. But the exact measurements that those regimes insisted upon — academic tests — haven’t shown good results. And we’re not talking one or two years. We’re talking about a generation here. That’s just a fact. 

So I think we need to let go. We need to admit that this test-and-sanctions approach didn’t work. 

I mean, policymakers will have to institutionalize the work of continuous improvement at the practitioner level. Things like, at the more local level, creating time for collaboration or relaxing some of the annual test-based accountability, and creating multi-year, more robust accountability around different longitudinal measures. Think of things like civic participation, graduation, and post-secondary attainment, all the things that we know test scores were supposed to be a proxy for.

Are things moving in the right direction, then? We replaced No Child Left Behind with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which significantly weakened federal school accountability systems, but retained some transparency mechanisms whereby schools were still publishing data on students’ progress? After all, the last administration wasn’t really interested in implementing the law, and then the pandemic . 

I think a weakened and watered-down system that we know is not working … I mean, let’s just put it out of its misery. I mean, there are a lot of people who believe that fully erasing federal testing and accountability policy would return us to some educational policy Eden. I mean, the era before this one wasn’t some perfectly equitable moment in public schools. 

My view is that we need to, you know, erase the whiteboard and start over with some core principles in mind: transparency around outcomes, equity, ensuring that no school gets to go too long getting the same results over and over again without being prompted to rethink what they’re doing. 

So we still need and should want accountability. But we need to get away from these punitive regimes and focus on doing the real improvement work that we know actually works. 

You could make the case that, operationally speaking, we’re kind of moving that direction, right? There’s just so little appetite for top-down accountability right now. 

We need to think of accountability as starting with the inquiry cycle at the practitioner level. Plan to assess. Pick a target. Meet as a grade-level team to discuss the target. Watch each other try new things. See if it had an impact. Lather, rinse, repeat. Just keep doing that. 

So: I think that at each level out from the school — district, state, federal — needs to set up somewhat longer cycles of inquiry that look at whether these short-cycle returns are adding up into meaningful, long-term, equitable improvement. 

It’s going to be extremely hard. It opens up big questions of autonomy, empowerment, who decides what and where, but it beats sticking with the ineffective accountability approaches we’re currently using. 

There are 3 million teachers in the country. It’s one of the biggest professions in the country, and if we think that the education profession and the schools in general are going to get better without a deep investment in making sure those millions of people get better and better every day, we’re kidding ourselves. 

Sure. Part of the whole systemic education reform argument is that you can build policy structures that create conditions for success, that reduce the importance of individual teacher quality as a variable, right. And while I get that, as a project, it’s obviously nonsense to skip past teachers, to treat them like plug-and-play widgets. So I’m wondering, then, in rethinking teachers’ agency, in broadening their roles as agents of change … does the book have a message for their trainers? For schools of education? 

I mean, yes. Schools of education, in many cases, teach people completely wrong things about the processes of teaching and learning and the history of racial equity in this country. If you show up as a new teacher with no awareness of the history of racial exclusion here and no knowledge of why systematic inequities manifest in your community and building, and without, say, awareness of the cognitive neuroscience of how children learn how to decode, you are not prepared to be a teacher. A lot is going to need to happen on campus to prepare you to be truly ready to lead a classroom. 

I did not write this book to solve this problem, but fortunately, the cycles of teacher-led inquiry can help bring those folks up to speed. 

Those cycles provide accountability that’s about learning opportunities, right, which, I think, is an extension of the analogy above. If you sign up for a gym alone, you maybe waste that membership. But if you’re part of a running group that meets on the corner at 6 a.m. every two days, you’ve got accountability to one another—and a commitment to improvement. 

Yes. The more you collaborate, the more you can observe, the more you can unearth things. It’s all about opening “the closed door” of each American classroom. So often, teachers operate in relative isolation from each other, with no idea about what’s going on in other classrooms. 

And then, frustratingly, observation has gotten too tightly wound up with evaluation. We need to undo that. You’re not gonna like your job if every time someone shows up to observe you, it’s all negative and you’re anxious about how they’re gonna hurt you. 

If nothing else from this book gets through, I hope this does: most of the time, when you open your classroom door for a peer or a superior, it should be a rich learning experience. You should learn interesting things about your practice as an educator.

]]> /article/williams-replacing-mayoral-control-with-elected-school-boards-is-not-the-best-way-to-shore-up-our-fragile-democracy-or-run-schools/ Mon, 15 Nov 2021 17:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=580536 For years, a number of researchers and analysts — myself included — have been sounding the alarm that American democracy is facing a foundational crisis. If this warning seemed overanxious in 2016 (or , or 2000), it’s now ubiquitous.

From top to bottom, our governing institutions have been significantly eroded by on the of our , the growing influence of , conservative , of governing norms, legislative processes, and a bevy of other worrying trends. 

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The depth and breadth of the problem are most visible at the elemental level, where the American democratic spirit is ostensibly most fervent: our thousands of school boards. These little local legislatures have been revered as cornerstones of American democracy . In theory, they provide local schools with democratically elected leadership that is maximally responsive to local needs and the public interest.

And yet, the has brought where local school board have into screaming matches with threats of violence over issues both (e.g. ) and/or (e.g. over or ). Things have gotten that the National School Boards Association , asking for the federal government to do more to protect elected local leaders from . Rather than calming the waters, this just prompted further outrage — particularly from conservative politicians in Washington, D.C. who cast it as an assault on parents’ free speech — and from the NSBA. 

https://twitter.com/allinwithchris/status/1445555425416384518

Problems like these are why, in recent decades, some major cities — places like Washington, D.C., Chicago, , and New York City — moved away from elected school boards. The idea had a three-part theory of action: 1) it makes school governance more coherent by unifying control of city schools under mayoral leadership, 2) it insulates education decision-makers from political pressure and 3) it gives mayors a reason to prioritize school funding and improvement. 

The returns from this experiment have been largely encouraging. According to , Chicago schools are “dramatically outperforming not just the other big poor districts, but almost every district in the country, at scale.” Research on public schools in D.C. — — has also found . 

And yet, , the mayoral control in cities has faced from a cacophony of claiming that returning public education to school board control would an elemental part of U.S. democracy — representative government at its most profoundly local level. 

As the country wrestles with a national crisis of democracy, it seems odd to focus outrage and energy towards shifting local school governance from the control of elected mayors to elected school boards — precisely at a moment when school boards across the country are providing daily proof of their weaknesses as institutions. 

Aside from the novelty of , there is nothing particularly exceptional about this latest spate of outrage. Remember the furor a few years ago over how the Common Core State Standards were ostensibly going to push schools to conduct mass retinal scans, promote student promiscuity and advance the cause of global communism? Sure, school board meetings are often sleepy for months — even years — but whether it’s or or or or , periodic eruptions of dysfunction are pretty much a given.

And those are just recent examples. . School boards have long been complicit, for instance, at designing and maintaining racist, inequitable structures in public education — including decades of segregated schooling. Who did Oliver Brown and his fellow plaintiffs have to sue to begin the long, slow, difficult, haphazard work of integrating American schools? . It was the same in Washington, D.C., where Spottswood Thomas Bolling . Indeed, over and over again, the required (and still regularly requires) — and appealing to a higher authority over — local school boards.

It’s a reliable rule of education politics: elected school boards are almost always most responsive to vested and/or interests in their communities. Consider, for instance, the Los Angeles Unified School District. For most of the last decade, their school board has faced criticism from experts, from community groups, and pressure from the to focus more resources on historically marginalized communities. And yet, nonetheless, the board has to away from those communities. School boards ˛š°ůąđ˛Ô’t designed to prioritize the less powerful, organized and noisy.

So … why, in light of significant educational progress in places that have experimented with other forms of school governance, is it suddenly so important to shift more power to local school boards? Notably, pushes in this direction in Chicago and . have sparked as are . In , at least, a move away from mayoral control would almost assuredly strengthen the voices of white, privileged voters — who would have a better chance of swaying the outcomes of a handful of , ward-by-ward school board elections than the citywide mayoral race.

Indeed, what constitutes a democracy? Can it really be reduced to whether the public elects a mayor or a board to run the schools? Of course not. Institutionally speaking, modern democratic governance requires choosing leaders through regular, free, and fair elections … but it also requires the expertise of civil servants and other experts chosen by those leaders. That’s why, for instance, we don’t hold a national referendum every time the Mine Safety and Health Administration wants to adjust its regulations, nor do we establish elected panels to determine how much radium is safe to drink in our water supply. 

So: you should absolutely be concerned about the state of U.S. democracy. It cannot long sustain when voting rights are selectively narrowed to grant partisan advantage, or when bills with majority support in both houses of Congress are regularly filibustered dead, or when lawmakers efforts to a on the .

But if you’re looking for a way to ensure that our schools have elected leadership that’s fair, equitable and democratically accountable, school boards pretty obviously ˛š°ůąđ˛Ô’t the way to go. 

]]> /article/drool-worthy-as-biden-urges-more-covid-tests-quick-and-inexpensive-saliva-screening-is-raising-hopes-for-a-less-disruptive-school-year/ Wed, 15 Sep 2021 11:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=577666 A new breed of fast, cheap, and, in most cases, accurate new COVID-19 tests could remake the fraught debate over virus outbreaks at school this fall. Using subjects’ saliva instead of invasive nasal probes, they promise to help schools test more people, quickly find and isolate positive cases, and return students to the classroom once they test negative.

Whether schools can roll tests out effectively — and get cooperation from those who screen positive for the virus — remains to be seen.

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The promise of quicker, more accurate results could bring a welcome reprieve for school districts across the country that are sending large groups of students home with suspected COVID exposure. Last month, six days into the school year in Florida’s Palm Beach County, one in 50 students was . In California, state guidelines call for unvaccinated students who are “close contacts” of a person with a positive COVID test to , forcing thousands of students too young to get a vaccine to miss critical days of in-person instruction.

While the tests’ use in schools has only recently begun to rise, the technology has been in development, in many cases, for more than a year. One of the new tests, developed by , is available through a network of nationwide and counts the National Basketball Association among its users. Another test, developed at , has been championed by New Jersey , who last year called it a potential “game-changer.”

In the K-12 world, the saliva test with arguably the most traction is one developed by the University of Illinois — it is in use by about 45 percent of the state’s 3,859 K-12 schools, covering more than 877,000 students, the university . School health officials elsewhere, including and Washington, D.C., are also piloting it, with more districts likely to follow.

The field will likely get a huge boost after President Biden last week nearly $2 billion for schools, community health centers, and food banks to buy about 300 million rapid tests. Biden said he’d use the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacturing of rapid tests, including those that families can use at home.

‘A very promising platform’

Researchers developed the Illinois test in June 2020, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted for the so-called covidSHIELD test in February. One reason researchers say saliva tests is that virus found in the saliva is more likely to have passed into patients’ lungs, where it can do serious damage. Viral load in saliva, they say, is also significantly higher in patients with known COVID-19 risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

Because the new saliva tests are polymerase chain reaction or PCR tests, they can detect both the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, as well as fragments of the virus after a test subject is no longer infected.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, a University of Illinois infectious disease epidemiologist, developed the studies that earned their test its emergency authorization. She said PCR tests are not only reliable, but very sensitive. And they’re better early-warning indicators of infection.

“Our data show that saliva is one of the best ways to find people early because the virus replicates in saliva before it moves to the nasal tissues,” she said.

But saliva tests ˛š°ůąđ˛Ô’t without controversy. In one case earlier this year, the FDA warned that a saliva swab test developed by the California startup ​​Curative some later-stage infections. It said Curative’s tests should only be used on people who showed COVID symptoms within the prior two weeks.

In January, health agencies in Colorado, citing concerns over false negatives, said they the Curative tests. Other purveyors have tried to distance themselves from these results.

Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious diseases physician and head of ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center, said he’d research with a small sample of patients on the Yale test, as well as a for other saliva tests. Research on the Yale test, he said, found that saliva in the samples was as accurate as nasal swabs. And the meta-analysis, he said, “showed basically the same thing for various saliva testing approaches including the one developed at Yale.”

But he cautioned that he hadn’t seen detailed analyses of “how well the saliva technology performs in people with mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.”

And the Yale sample was small — just nine patients. How well the test performs in larger groups “is still an open question.” But he said it’s “a very promising platform” and he’s looking forward to seeing more data.

Lower cost, faster turnaround

Pinpointing exactly how many K-12 schools regularly test students for COVID-19 is difficult, but a few indicators suggest that testing isn’t widespread. A recent found that the largest group of schools implementing testing last fall were using rapid tests mostly for symptomatic students and staff, “since they often lacked enough tests to conduct screening testing.” Private schools were more likely to be conducting routine screenings, they found. One survey noted that about 20 percent of private K-12 schools conducted regular screenings at school.

The Illinois test costs just $20 to $30 per dose, a fraction of the typical $100 cost for a standard nasal swab test, according to SHIELD Illinois, the nonprofit that manages testing in the state. The organization is making it available for free to districts across the state, mostly thanks to in federal COVID test funding for schools.

Beth Heller, a spokesperson for , said the organization operates seven labs statewide, which cuts test turnaround time from as much as three days to less than one, on average.

A shorter turnaround time matters, especially now: With the earlier COVID-19 variants, Smith said, about 30 percent of infections happened before subjects showed symptoms. “With Delta, it’s more like 75 percent.”

In Baltimore, where school health officials have been using the Illinois-developed test since March, weekly saliva testing has “made parents feel comfortable sending their children back” to school, said James Dendinger, interim director of COVID testing.

In most of the district’s middle and high schools, students now submit to weekly saliva tests. In most elementary schools, health officials test classroom groups with nasal swabs. If any group of swabs delivers a positive result, they test each student again. Only those who test positive or who had close contact with those who test positive must quarantine.

These protocols kept Baltimore’s positivity rate extremely low last spring: from March 1 to June 15, it was 0.6 percent in middle schools and high schools, and less than 0.3 percent in pre-K-8 schools.

The new tests also bring a certain comfort factor, Illinois’ Smith said. “It’s a lot easier to than to have a swab stuck up your nose, especially if you’re going to be testing regularly.”

Laura Wand, an advisor for SHIELD T3, the for-profit that administers the tests outside of Illinois, said that ease allows users to make testing part of their routine. “The key to containing the virus is to be able to test often, isolate, and track,” she said. “And the gold standard for testing often is everybody, twice a week. Now, people are not going to do a nasal swab twice a week.”

For the SHIELD test, subjects let saliva pool in their mouth and simply raise a small funnel to their lips, then “let the saliva fall out, push it out with your tongue,” Smith said. “Once people get the hang of it, most people can complete the process in one to two minutes.”

One drawback: Test subjects can’t have anything in their mouth for at least an hour before the test, “which requires planning and logistics,” especially in K-12 schools. Students can’t eat or drink, chew gum, use mouthwash, or brush their teeth for at least an hour prior to the test. For adults, that means no smoking or chewing tobacco either.

Smith said the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the system’s flagship campus, relied on the test for the entire academic year, at least for the more than 35,000 students attending class in person. “We did have some outbreaks, but they came in back under control,” she said.

The biggest one came early, between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15, 2020, as students returned to campus. In early September, the university even imposed a brief lockdown, The New York Times , after an unexpectedly high number of students with positive results continued to socialize and attend parties. One official called the phenomenon “willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” and top officials circulated a , saying the irresponsible students “have created the very real possibility of ending an in-person semester for all of us.”

The letter concluded, “We stay together. Or we go home.”

Behind the scenes, though, the university was testing so often, Smith said, that “we didn’t have to have a long-term lockdown” like .

Willful noncompliance notwithstanding, the university’s seven-day average positivity rate never rose above 1.21 percent, according to data on its .

Once the twice-weekly testing got underway, Smith said, this “just brought everything back under control. We saw outbreaks within dorms or within apartment buildings, and we would increase the frequency of testing to every other day. And within a week we would bring the case numbers in that location down to zero.”

SHIELD Illinois’ Heller said the testing regimen has allowed Champaign County, where the flagship campus is located, to keep its COVID positivity rate under 1 percent since September 2020. Elsewhere in Illinois, she said, positivity rates jumped as high as 12 percent last fall. Nationwide, positivity rates climbed to about .

The state health department in August said it would for free to any school district outside of Chicago that wanted it (The city receives a separate federal funding stream that other districts don’t.) The department also said schools could use it to take advantage of a so-called “Test-to-Stay” protocol, rather than quarantine.

Under the protocol, students and teachers who have close contact with someone who tests positive can stay in school if they agree to be tested four times: one, three, five, and seven days after exposure. If their tests remain negative, they don’t have to quarantine.

Quick results bring ‘an extra layer of comfort’

One of the first public school systems to take up the SHIELD tests was the tiny Hillside District 93, a pre-K-through-8 district in Cook County, about 20 minutes west of Chicago.

Superintendent Kevin Suchinski said the quick test “allowed us to make sure that we kept our doors open” and avoid shutting down, even as other districts took to control outbreaks.

And as in many areas, COVID cases there are rising — last week, the average daily new case count per 100,000 people, but the county’s infection rate remains among the lowest statewide.

The ease of testing students’ saliva, he said, meant “we were testing early-childhood kids all the way up to 8th grade,” ages 3 to 13. The quick results, even with asymptomatic students, “gave us an extra layer of comfort to say, ‘Is it spreading within our community? Is it spreading within our school?’ And we could then react.”

Suchinski made the tests voluntary for students and staff, but the ease of testing and the district’s 0.5 percent positivity rate encouraged more people, including students’ family members, to submit to it. In August, the district was testing 55 to 60 percent of families.

“Nothing’s 100 percent,” he said. “We cannot guarantee that we’re going to stop [COVID]. We’re not going to stop cases. What we’re going to do is prevent the spread.”

]]> /article/3-d-c-charter-networks-seek-permission-to-continue-offering-all-virtual-learning-as-city-and-other-urban-districts-large-move-to-fully-reopen-schools/ Thu, 15 Jul 2021 18:01:13 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=574622

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Updated July 28

The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted Monday to approve KIPP DC’s virtual program proposal for grades K-12. It held off, however, on approving its request for creating an all-virtual campus in SY 2022-23, wanting to see how the virtual option works in the next school year. The two other charter networks that submitted all-virtual proposals did not get greenlighted: The board denied Howard University PCS’ request to continue its simulcasting model, determining the network had not shown its virtual program will result in improved performance or that there would be demand after the  pandemic ends. AppleTree withdrew its application.  

With school districts around the country increasingly adding virtual learning for the fall, three D.C. charter networks are seeking approval for their own all-virtual options, citing parent demand amid pandemic safety concerns.

, and are asking the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the city’s charter authorizer, to allow them to permanently offer all-virtual learning to a limited number of students.

“We know in-person is ideal,” said Andhra Lutz, KIPP DC’s managing director of secondary schools. But “we [also] have so much respect and so much love for our families. And our families have asked us for this.”

The plans range from launching all-new programming with virtual staff to sticking to last year’s learning models. Officials say there would be various safeguards — such as mentorship programs, attendance eligibility requirements and parent check-ins— to assure a high-quality experience rivaling in-person learning.

Projected capacity ranges from 20 students at AppleTree to nearly 300 students at KIPP DC, or about 4 percent of its student population. KIPP DC is also requesting approval to transition its virtual program into what would be the city’s second free, all-virtual public school in SY 2022-23.

A fourth school, , is requesting to permanently offer hybrid learning.

Without the PCSB’s approval, these schools could only offer all-virtual learning starting next year to students such as severe asthma, in line with from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

A virtual hearing and vote are scheduled for Monday.

“Khamal won’t even go to the grocery store with me,” KIPP DC mom KyShawn Route-Crowder said of her seventh grade son, who’s stressed about returning to school and wants to stay virtual. His father had a heart attack in 2016, is immunocompromised and can’t get a COVID vaccine.

Route-Crowder added that her son, who attends KIPP DC’s KEY Academy, has flourished in virtual learning without classroom distractions. “You have to know what type of student you have. And I know my child specifically, and I know he can excel online right now.”

While most students nationwide are expected to head back to the classroom full-time this fall, virtual learning is sticking around. A estimated 56 percent of schools will offer a remote learning option this fall, including in , , and Cleveland. Another report found nearly two-thirds of the country’s largest school systems will provide students an option to learn in stand-alone, remote academies.

Currently, D.C. Public Schools — which serves about 53 percent of the city’s public school kids — is only allowing those with a “documented medical condition” to learn virtually next year. , and have made similar calls.

This wouldn’t be the first time the PCSB considered changes that ran counter to local guidance, experts noted. It broadly a by the Deputy Mayor for Education cautioning against adding more charter high schools, for example. Any backlash to these plans, they surmised, would be less about regulations and more about concerns with program quality.

For most, distance learning last year was an inadequate substitute for in-person class. Slow Internet, digital literacy challenges, competing family obligations and distracting home environments upended many students’ progress — especially students of color from under-resourced neighborhoods. Numerous reports point to that districts now flush with recent federal stimulus aid are rushing to address.

For some families in D.C., though, online school has been working. In a sample parent survey Howard University PCS conducted last month, about 94 percent said it was “extremely” or “very” important that they at least had the option of all-virtual schooling this fall.

Ward 4 mom Keisha, whose eighth grade son attends Howard University PCS, hopes her son goes back to in-person class — just not next year. She’s holding off on vaccinating him — the vaccine for kids is still new, she said — and developments have her wary of him resuming his Metrobus commutes to school.

“Keeping him safe and healthy is my main priority,” she said. “I’m not rushing him back.”

A PCSB spokesperson said while the “goal is for schools to return to in-person learning as the primary mode of instruction,” the board is open to the conversation, wanting “to be responsive to the questions and concerns that we have heard from schools and students.”

KIPP DC: A new model in the making

Virtual programming this fall would look “vastly different” from last year, said Caitlin Maxwell, KIPP DC’s director of virtual learning programs.

On a typical day, kids would log on to in the morning, watch a seven-to 10-minute video for each of their class subjects and complete class work testing comprehension of the material.

KIPP DC’s “learning coordinators,” who are certified teachers, would then take about two hours to review students’ submissions, crafting their lesson plan for small group instruction that afternoon based on the concepts students struggled with most that morning.

During that two-hour period, students would have a break to eat lunch and take an “enrichment” class — like a foreign language or cooking — via a partnership with .

Spokesman Adam Rupe confirmed KIPP DC is poised to hire 20 to 25 all-virtual staff members using recent federal stimulus funding. If the all-virtual campus is approved, “we’d use our per-pupil dollars” to pay for the program long-term, he added.

So far, KIPP DC has identified 66 medically eligible students for this program. Broader polling of the school community informed the estimate that around 280 students in total may opt-in if able.

Not every student would be eligible to participate, though, Lutz clarified. A student would need to have had at least 90 percent daily attendance in remote learning last year. Staff would also review the student’s academic records and have a conversation with the parents “where we’re really upfront about what’s different [from last year],” she said.

If a family changed their mind after the school year began, KIPP DC would allow that student to return to in-person during one of its quarter breaks.

Lutz and Maxwell feel confident in students’ ability to succeed virtually; recently compiled data shows 76 percent of KIPP DC middle schoolers saw growth in math over the 2020-21 school year. (ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ asked for that same data pre-pandemic, but comparable data wasn’t available). They confirmed virtual learners would take “the same assessments” as students learning in-person.

While these students wouldn’t be working alongside their peers, Maxwell said KIPP DC’s virtual student clubs and monthly outdoor field trips would provide opportunities to socialize.

“That creates a sense of belonging for kids, and that’s often what they look forward to the most,” Maxwell said.

Howard University PCS: Sticking to what it knows

As of last week, there were about 18 Howard University PCS families with some 25 students interested in staying virtual, Principal Kathryn Procope said.

If approved, the school would stick to the model it’s used since late January: Simulcasting, where the teacher is physically in the classroom with some students and streaming the lesson live via Microsoft Teams for others tuning in virtually.

All classrooms are already equipped with — 360° camera, mic and speaker devices — for an immersive virtual experience, Procope said. Students at home could use the platform’s raised hand function to ask their teacher a question in the middle of the lesson.

No new staff hires would be needed under this model, Procope said. If a student decided to come back in-person during the school year, they wouldn’t need to change teachers.

Procope acknowledged the network overall saw “some slight dips in math and reading” performance last year, “but they weren’t significant.” Virtual students’ academic growth, she added, would be monitored with fidelity: The network’s learning platform, , is full of practice assignments to gauge students’ mastery of the content.And online quizzes and tests would only be released at specific times when a teacher is available to monitor the students on camera.

The school’s existing mentoring program is another safeguard to ensure students would have what they need to succeed, Procope said. Every student has an established relationship with a mentor who checks in at least weekly.

“It gives us an opportunity to know, ‘Hey, Mary’s family is experiencing homelessness, they may need X,'” she explained. “It allows us several touch points.”

“If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic,” Procope said, “it’s that we’re going to adjust and shift the way we educate them to make sure we reach them.”

The virtual public hearing and vote will be on Monday starting at 6:30 p.m. Information on registering to attend will be posted on www.dcpcsb.org.

]]> /article/williams-lets-keep-the-innovations-the-pandemic-brought-to-teaching-english-learners-and-reaching-their-families/ Sun, 09 May 2021 19:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=571788 Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s daily newsletter.

Here, in the wrenching 13th — or perhaps 14th, depending on how you mark the tragedies — month of the pandemic, so many American families are frayed. Even with vaccines bringing us nearer to something like its end , the strains of the long lockdown are weighing on pretty much every parent, caregiver and kid.

And while data are scarce, English learners are being particularly excluded from COVID-era educational opportunities. In many communities, there have been worrying gaps in access to distance learning, of pandemic have surfaced in , and some early data on academic achievement suggest that the pandemic is hitting ELs especially hard.

But these challenges are layered atop generations of pre-pandemic inequities that have defined ELs’s educational opportunities across the country. What can schools learn from the pandemic to confront and close these gaps in the future?

Addressing the digital divide

Even before schools closed last year, English learners and their families were significantly less likely to have to technological devices, internet connectivity, and sufficient data and/or bandwidth for downloading information that impacted their ability to do homework and engage fully in school. The pandemic converted this challenge into a crisis.

As schools suddenly moved to virtual learning in the spring, surveys and polls from the and showed that large shares of ELs were unable to access their schools’ learning offerings.

“When we did close schools, we knew there was going to be a digital divide,” says Alicia Passante, ESL program manager at , a Washington, D.C.-based network of schools where roughly one-third of students are current or former ELs. “[We] spent all summer making sure that every family, every kid, had a device. We surveyed our families and made sure that if they didn’t have internet, we knew, we invested in hotspots, and got those to families.”

While schools like Center City spent the spring in emergency mode, targeting basic infrastructure elements — like getting devices to ELs’ families and connecting them to the internet — many realized handing out resources only solved part of the problem. As pandemic learning has continued, some schools have pivoted from purchasing and distributing tablets or laptops to holding trainings to building the necessary digital literacy skills to use them.

Center City language access coordinator Hannah Groff says that the network’s outreach efforts have “boosted up” the technological skills of their school community — particularly parents. School leaders also prioritized training teachers to support ELs through online instruction, including paying for some to get Google Classroom certifications.

Similarly, at in Concord, California, where , veteran teacher and EL coordinator Lorie Johnson scrambled to learn tech tools on the go, “playing catch up and a lot of trial and error in terms of finding what’s gonna work.”

Now, as Johnson and her students have grown more comfortable with different virtual learning tools, she says that they’re completing work faster and turning it in more efficiently, which has “forc[ed] them to be independent learners.” She’s also finding she is able to monitor their progress on assignments more comprehensively when they work online.

Perhaps even more valuable, the digital environment is also helping her students improve other so-called “soft skills,” like taking turns in group conversations or presenting their work to their classmates.

Engaging families

English learner advocates have long pushed schools to improve and engage with ELs’ families. This can be difficult, given U.S. schools are predominantly monolingual, English-only settings. Indeed, around the turn of the 21st century, voters in Massachusetts, Arizona, and California even went so far as to pass statewide referenda that largely prohibited schools from teaching ELs in languages other than English.

that is . Indeed, , the federal government released guidance indicating that, for young ELs, known as dual language learners, approaches “that do not provide home language support do not optimally promote the language and cognitive development of children who are DLLs.”

This structural problem often creates real divisions between schools and ELs’ linguistically and culturally diverse families. Will the pandemic catalyze a change after of these and their ?

So far, that have a long way to go.

Until schools reopen, ELs’ family members are where these students are learning. In many cases, this means that they have had to take on new responsibilities for their children’s learning.

“Parents have to be more engaged than they were before,” said Groff, emphasizing the need to communicate with families from her D.C. charter school network, about distance learning assignments and expectations, as well as EL students’ progress.

To ensure that information about ELs’ distance learning is accessible to their caregivers, schools like Groff’s are working harder than ever to translate communications and share them with families through multiple mediums. Some are using apps like or , which use machine translation to allow teachers to communicate directly with ELs’ linguistically diverse families.

Groff says that it’s become much easier to schedule meetings and connect with families over Zoom now that the school has helped most open and navigate the use of email accounts. The network has also grown its efforts to hire multilingual members from their schools’ community to translate documents and other school communications and interpret meetings into Spanish and Amharic, which is the native language of many of Center City’s Ethiopian immigrant families.

Centering language development in distance learning

Teachers across the country are struggling and get them to speak up during distance learning.

In response, some educators are holding classes outdoors or launching bilingual learning pods. Others are like Flipgrid, Kami, or Nearpod to spark ELs’ interest. Still others are setting up non-academic online meetings for small groups of their EL students to connect and talk with classmates.

And yet, many teachers, including Johnson, of California’s Mount Diablo High, report that their EL students are often reticent to turn on their cameras during live instructional time, highlighting an ongoing debate among educators. To break the ice, Johnson has turned to fun activities, like sending students on scavenger hunts — “go find something red and bring it back,” she says — that require the cameras. She also meets with students in smaller groups during intervention periods to work on specific areas for growth.

Passante and Groff say that, by shuffling class schedules, the pandemic prompted more collaboration among Center City teachers and students. In the network’s distance learning models, teachers are more likely to share students across classes, so they have had to learn to plan and work together, sharing newfound best practices.

“When they’re in small groups with kids,” says Passante, “they design activities that align to the language goals…[and] really give kids access to content.”

While the pandemic has forced schools to make some encouraging, if incomplete, changes in how they interact with ELs, it’s not yet clear whether these will stick when campuses reopen. Ideally, since the pandemic forced schools to rapidly close digital divides, in-person educators will be able to rely upon these new devices and digital literacy skills to extend learning in creative ways.

Similarly, schools’ necessary improvements in reaching out to linguistically diverse families could provide a foundation of stronger relationships and communication to support ELs’ learning when schools reopen. And finally, educators’ creative pandemic thinking about how to get ELs to use language — speaking, listening, reading, and writing — could remain at the center of more ambitious pandemic recovery efforts when students come back to classrooms.

Or, as Johnson puts it, the pandemic has taught her that “we’ve been underestimating these kids for years.”

Dr. Conor P. Williams is the founder of the EL Virtual Learning Forum, a free discussion community where educators working with ELs can share questions, ideas, and resources for supporting these students during the pandemic. . 

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