And bedrock attitudes about attendance seem to be changing. A recent noted that one in four students now doesn’t think being chronically absent from school “is a problem.” The study found that about 40% of school districts consider reducing chronic absenteeism among their top three most pressing challenges. One in 12 ranks it as their biggest challenge. 

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company , which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. 

In a , it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways:

1: Early intervention works

Contacting families before students become chronically absent is crucial. Once a student crosses the 10% threshold, fixing their attendance becomes much harder, so intervening when students register just three to five absences is most effective. Contacting parents early with a letter improved attendance dramatically, reducing absence rates by 28%.

Researchers found that 51% of students whose families receive just one letter don’t need a second one. The “save rate” for these students suggests that many families simply don’t realize how quickly absences accumulate. 

2: Timing and communication methods matter

Parents are highly responsive to text messages, researchers found, with 73% of texts garnering a response from parents in just 11 minutes. They’ll engage with schools when communication is “accessible, timely and specific.”

“The method does matter,” said Joy Smithson, a SchoolStatus data scientist. “We get a lot higher rates of response with text messages.” Placing a phone call, on the other hand, is “for those more critical conversations,” she said.

Kara Stern, the company’s director of education, agreed. “Not every parent is in a position where they can pick up a phone call during the day. For many people, it might jeopardize your work situation, and so to assume that that’s the best way to reach a parent is not necessarily to be in tune with the actual realities of the parents in your community.”

The best times to text families, the data suggests, are either around 8 a.m., when parents and students are preparing for school, or 2-4 p.m., typically during pickup times. These align with natural breaks in parents’ daily routines, when they’re most likely to check their phones.

The best time of year to engage families is August or September. Parents who hear from schools early maintain higher response rates throughout the year — 77% vs. 71% — and respond, on average, one minute faster. By January, 33% of these parents are still engaging with schools, compared to just 16% of parents who first heard from schools later in the fall term. 

That suggests that early conversations “do extra work,” researchers maintain, establishing trust, opening communication channels and signaling to families that working together matters.

“It’s important to reach out at the beginning of the year, so that you’re not waiting for a crisis,” said Smithson, “because it’s too late to build a relationship at that point.”

3. Plain language outperforms edu-jargon

Researchers found that being specific about how much school a student has missed outperforms vague messages such as, “We’ve noticed some absences.” 

Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” also outperform lengthy explanations of attendance policy.

And when students are older, direct messages can be very effective.

“What this data shows us is that connection is really driving so much of a student’s experience,” said Stern. “When a school is able to reach out to the kid and say, ‘Hey, Greg, we missed you today, what’s going on? What do you need to help you come to school?’ that’s a really different experience than having a form letter appear at your house saying, ‘Greg has missed school six days.’” 

She added, “What I hope districts will take away from this report is that communication is intervention,” she said. “It’s not extra work. It’s the work that makes everything else stick.”

4: Three key moments merit extra attention

Students at three moments in their school careers are more likely to be chronically absent: in pre-K, sixth grade and high school. Stern called them “high alert moments.”

Surprisingly, pre-K students have the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any group, mostly due to the high frequency of illness and families underestimating the impact of missing school. 

Sixth grade is “the tipping point,” said Stern, with chronic absenteeism spiking by 3.3 percentage points from fifth to sixth grade, the sharpest increase across all grades.

Smithson said middle-schoolers typically have more autonomy. They’re often getting their first mobile phones. And current sixth-graders, she said, were in kindergarten when COVID hit in 2020. “So just imagine knowing that patterns get established in kindergarten,” she said. For those kindergartners in 2020, school “really got disrupted,” with their baseline experience of school being “categorically different” from what it should have been.

And for many students, the transition from elementary school to middle school represents a shift from a safe, contained environment, where both students and parents are highly engaged, to a less personal one, with less consistency and connectivity, said Stern. Students “don’t know that there is someone who’s really paying attention, who cares that they’re there, who knows what’s happening with them, and so maybe it doesn’t really matter if they’re there or not.”

And middle school can also be the place where many students first experience bullying, which also worsens attendance.

In high school, chronic absence rates more than double, and students have lower response rates to traditional methods like letters, suggesting that schools should contact students directly — actually, they found that direct student messaging could work for students as young as 11. 

A text message to a high school freshman can start a conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Pairing these messages with notes to parents can improve response rates in these critical years, researchers found.

“The chronic absenteeism numbers in high school suggest that kids are really voting with their feet,” said Stern. “And so one way to get them back would be to invite them in to be part of the solution, to say, ‘What is it that is not meeting your needs? How can we include your voice in the process of making high school what you want it to be?’”

In many ways, the new findings echo what researchers like Johns Hopkins University’s and have long suggested. Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit , said Wednesday’s report “reflects what we know from common sense and research. Improving attendance is possible when we use data to take early action as well as determine where we should invest in building relationships so we can partner with students and families to encourage showing up, monitor absences, and address barriers to getting to school.”

But Chang said that while timely, data-informed engagement of families is essential, “it is not always sufficient and should be combined with other strategies for identifying and addressing barriers to getting to school.” Those barriers could exist in the community or in schools and should be addressed in “a comprehensive, systemic approach.”

She suggested that of interventions is sometimes necessary, including “intensive interventions” for students who miss more than 20% of school days. It could include housing supports, a student attendance review board, a community-based, non-criminal truancy court, individualized learning and success plans and even, as a last resort, legal intervention.

Stern and Smithson said the findings boil down, in a larger sense, to the importance of what they call “active noticing” about attendance. 

“I really think that it would be a big plus for faculties to actively notice every week and go through their rosters,” said Stern. “‘Who do we not know? Who can’t speak about this child? Who doesn’t know anything about this student’s life after school? We have someone that we need to actually pay attention to learning more about — who’s suddenly not coming to school, who’s turned it around and suddenly being there?’ ” 

Smithson said the biggest takeaway for educators is that “Timing is everything. Do not wait. Act with urgency. It’s about building those relationships, and it’s just so important — and it’s so important to start right away.”

Five years after the start of the pandemic, young Indiana students have made great leaps in their reading skills, but the state’s middle school students are floundering and sinking.

State tests taken this spring have touched off celebrations of progress with third graders, whose reading proficiency rates had their biggest jump in 12 years, mostly through a state program to train and coach more teachers in the science of reading.

But sagging English scores on state ILEARN tests for middle school students — scores that match results in other states and the decline in 8th grade reading scores from 2022 to 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — have Indiana education officials searching for a way to help older students so their struggles don’t persist into high school and affect their lives. 

“The third, fourth, fifth grade (scores) are moving,” state education secretary Katie Jenner told the state school board this summer. “Where we’re seeing the major lag in data are our late middle schoolers, seventh and eighth grade.”

These students, who were in second and third grade when the pandemic hit in spring 2020 — grades in which students learn key reading skills like sounding out and “decoding” what words mean — simply haven’t caught up from schools being closed and most classes forced online for a year. Those grades had a big drop in reading scores from the pandemic and have only fallen further behind since.

The pandemic knocked down the state’s 7th grade English proficiency rate from just under 50% in 2019 to just over 41% in 2021, for example. The decline has continued, with just under 38% of 7th graders scoring as proficient in English this spring.

“We have to remember, these are our students who intermittently came to school during the pandemic,” said state board member Pat Mapes. “We have still not caught up the skill set that they’ve lost during that time. This is kind of just what we’re going to see for a while, until we can get their skills developed.”

The answers won’t be easy. The state has a tight budget, so it may need to seek grants from donors who have already invested heavily in reading for young students. And while there are theories about why older students are having trouble — including the pandemic blocking them from learning to decode and understand words — experts nationally say there are no great examples of schools or states that have helped these students catch up to use as models.

States such as Florida and Virginia are trying to help struggling middle schoolers by creating individualized reading plans, said Casey Taylor, senior policy director of early literacy for ExcelInEd, the education advocacy organization founded by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. She also praised Alabama for piloting more coaching in reading for middle school teachers, but said the efforts haven’t produced enough data to trumpet them as solutions.

“Those are a few of the examples that we’re looking at, but we don’t have a model to point to as a successful approach in full yet,” Taylor said.

Indiana’s education secretary Jenner, though, still pledges to offer a plan soon to help these students, using what limited evidence she can find.

“There’s not a state we can copy and paste, who has figured it out,” she told the state board, while promising, “Our eye’s on that ball. Stay tuned.”

Reading scores in Indiana have been controversial for several years, after they started declining in 2015. Improving reading skills has been a major focus of state officials who required schools to shift to using science of reading strategies in 2023. 

The state’s Republican supermajority reinstated in 2024 a requirement to have third graders with poor reading scores repeat third grade that Democrats removed in 2017.

The state also started requiring more second graders to take IREAD exams — the state’s reading-only tests for young students — instead of just in third grade, to give early warning of struggles.

The Lilly Endowment, the charitable foundation created by the founders of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, gave the state $60 million in 2022 to help schools shift to the science of reading for kindergarten through second grade, donations that are still paying for ongoing work.

The Lilly donations and tax dollars are paying for one effort that Jenner and others are crediting for a jump in third grade IREAD scores this year — the Literacy Cadre program that launched in 2022 to help teachers learn and then improve their skills with science of reading.��

Marian University and the University of Indianapolis have staffers that help schools with reading strategies and train school staff to then train teachers. The cadre started with 41 schools in 2022 and has grown to 564 today.

All the efforts combined boosted reading proficiency among third graders from 82.5% in 2024 to 87.3% in 2025, a jump the state school board said was the largest since IREAD started in 2013.��

Schools in the cadre saw a seven percentage point jump in reading proficiency from 2024 to 2025, nearly twice the 3.6-point increase for non-Cadre schools.

School districts that have received help from the cadre credit the guidance with helping them focus on ways to improve.

“They basically trained us,” said India Williams, a reading coach with the Evansville Vanderburgh school district. “They came and trained myself and the principals, then we went and trained the teachers, and the teachers worked with the students, and the students learned. ”

But the cadre and Lilly’s donations were all focused on young readers — students who mostly started school after the pandemic — not students who had lost time in class when they would typically master reading skills.

Several national experts say many students never learned to “decode” words — to use phonics to figure out what a written word sounds like — a skill that science of reading lessons focus on. They refer to a “decoding threshold” in which students can make sense of words easily enough that their brains can focus on learning from what they read instead of just deciphering the words.

It’s what some call a shift from learning to read to reading to learn.

“If a student is unable to decode longer, more complicated text, all of their attention will be devoted to decoding text, and they won’t be able to comprehend what they’re trying to read,” researcher Rebecca Sutherland said when releasing a study on the issue last fall. “The findings give us a clearer understanding of what supports many older students need to read on grade-level.”

If that’s the issue in Indiana or elsewhere, there’s no quick fix.

“As persuasive as the decoding threshold thesis might be, the wish for a magic wand to wave at curriculum and standards hints at a serious problem: There is no immediate or obvious solution at hand to address the issue,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote for ����Ӱ�� in March.

Middle school teachers don’t always know how to teach skills like decoding, since they are often more focused on teaching higher level reading skills like comprehension and interpreting literature, Pondiscio and others noted.

ExcelInEd’s Taylor said bringing some strategies being used for young readers to middle schools could help.

“For most kids, more time and repetition is really what they need, but they need that from equipped educators who are trained in how to identify, how to plan instruction and intervention to fill those gaps,” Taylor said. “We need to carry some of those supports that are present in early literacy policy into secondary or into the middle grades.”

It’s why states, including Indiana, are having teachers at all levels train in the science of reading. 

More support for middle school teachers might be needed, however, said Robert Behning, chairman of the Indiana House education committee. 

Behning, who also helps lead Marian University’s Center for Vibrant Schools, one of the two organizations helping to train and coach teachers as part of the Literacy Cadre, is working on a reduced version of the Cadre efforts — a “Cadre light” — aimed at middle schools, where students typically have different teachers for each subject, rather than a single teacher.��

He cautioned that the state may not have the money for a major effort for middle schoolers, on top of its early grades work. It already had to trim money for schools to buy science of reading materials from the last state budget.

Behning said there may be ways that money Lilly has already committed to literacy efforts, plus another $86 million Lilly is already offering in grants to schools in and around Indianapolis, that can include work with the middle grades.

Whether Lilly would pay for more middle school help is unclear. The organization’s officials say they are encouraged by progress in the younger grades so far, but would not commit to offering more money.

Jenner, however, told the state board last month that she is seeking money to help middle schoolers, as it has younger students.

“We believe wholeheartedly that we’ve solved multiple other challenges and that we are up for the challenge there,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the Lilly Endowment’s name.

Like their peers nationwide, students at Crawford County Middle School in southern Indiana struggled academically in the pandemic’s wake. Principal Tarra Carothers knew her students needed help to get back on track.

So two years ago, she decided to double instructional time for math and English. Students now spend two periods per day in these critical subjects. Carothers believes the change has been a success, and a key trend backs her up: Crawford’s ILEARN scores in English language arts increased by over 8 percentage points from 2024 to 2025.

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But overall, Indiana middle schools are heading in the opposite direction when it comes to English. In fact, despite gains in math, middle schoolers are struggling more than students in other grade levels in English, state test scores show. Since 2021, ILEARN English proficiency rates in seventh and eighth grades have fallen, with the dip particularly pronounced for seventh graders. And while their scores are up slightly compared with four years ago, sixth graders’ performance fell over the past year.

Indiana has made significant and much-publicized investments in early literacy, relying heavily on the science of reading, as many states have in the last few years. But that instructional transformation has come too late for current middle schoolers. Meanwhile, ILEARN English scores for third and fourth graders , although this improvement has been uneven.

The Board of Education expressed specific concerns about middle schoolers’ performance at a . “We’ve gotta pick it up and make sure all of our middle school kids are reading, provide those additional supports,” said Secretary of Education Katie Jenner.

Some middle school leaders say strategies they’ve used can turn things around. In addition to increasing instructional time for key subjects, they point to participation in a pilot that allows students to take ILEARN at several points over the school year, instead of just once in the spring. Educators say relying on these checkpoints can provide data-driven reflection and remediation for students that shows up in better test scores.

Middle school an ‘optimum time’ for students’ recovery

Katie Powell, director for middle level programs at the Association for Middle Level Education, said she often asks teachers if middle schoolers seem different since the pandemic and “heads nod,” she said. These post-pandemic middle schoolers are harder to motivate and engage, self-report more stress, and are less likely to take risks academically, Powell said.

When the pandemic hit, “they were young, at the age of school where they’re developing basic reading fluency and math fact fluency,” she said. Current eighth graders, for example, were in second grade when the pandemic shut down schools and many learned online for much of their third grade year. Third grade is when students are supposed to stop learning to read and start “reading to learn,” Powell said.

Powell noted that middle schoolers are in the stage of rapid development with the most changes for the brain and body outside of infancy.

“This is actually an optimum time to step in and step up for them,” she said. “It is not too late. But it’s critical that we pay attention to them now.”

Crawford County Middle School has nine periods every day, and students spend two periods each in both math and English. While many schools have some version of block scheduling, many have a model in which students only go to each class every other day. But at Crawford, students attend every class every day. Their version of block scheduling results in double the amount of instructional time in math and English.

To make this switch, sacrifices had to be made. Periods were shortened, resulting in less time for other subjects. Carothers worried that student scores in subjects like science and social studies would decrease. But the opposite occurred, she said. Sixth grade science scores increased, for example, even though students were spending less time in the science classroom, according to Carothers.

“If they have better math skills and better reading skills, then they’re gonna perform better in social studies and science,” she said.

Meanwhile, at Cannelton Jr. Sr. High School, on the state line with Kentucky, the first three periods of the day are 90 minutes, rather than the typical 45. Every student has English or math during these first three periods, allowing for double the normal class time.

Cannelton’s sixth through eighth grade English language arts ILEARN scores increased by nearly nine percentage points last year.

Schools use more data to track student performance

Cannelton Principal Brian Garrett believes his school’s reliance on data, and its new approach to getting it, is also part of their secret.

Students take benchmark assessments early, in the first two or three weeks of school, so that teachers can track their progress and find gaps in knowledge.

This year, the state is adopting that strategy for schools statewide. Rather than taking ILEARN once near the end of the year, students will take versions of the test three separate times, with a shortened final assessment in the spring. The state ran a pilot for ILEARN checkpoints last school year, with over 70% of Indiana schools taking part.

The Indiana Department of Education hopes checkpoints will make the data from the test more actionable and help families and teachers ensure a student is on track throughout the year.

Kim Davis, principal of Indian Creek Middle School in rural Trafalgar, said she believes ILEARN checkpoints, paired with reflection and targeted remediation efforts by teachers, “helped us inform instruction throughout the year instead of waiting until the end of the year to see did they actually master it according to the state test.”

The checkpoints identified what standards students were struggling with, allowing Indian Creek teachers to tailor their instruction. Students also benefitted from an added familiarity with the test; they could see how questions would be presented when it was time for the final assessment in the spring.

“It felt very pressure-free, but very informative for the teachers,” Davis said.

The type of data gathered matters too. In the past, Washington Township middle schools used an assessment called NWEA, taken multiple times throughout the year, to measure student learning, said Eastwood Middle School Principal James Tutin. While NWEA was a good metric for measuring growth, it didn’t align with Indiana state standards, so the scores didn’t necessarily match how a student would ultimately score on a test like ILEARN.

Last year, the district adopted ILEARN checkpoints instead, and used a service called Otis to collect weekly data.

It took approximately six minutes for students to answer a few questions during a class period with information that educators could then put into Otis. That data allowed teachers to target instruction during gaps between ILEARN checkpoints.

“Not only were they getting the practice through the checkpoints, but they were getting really targeted feedback at the daily and weekly level, to make sure that we’re not waiting until the checkpoint to know how our students are likely going to do,” Tutin said.

Both Davis and Tutin stressed that simply having students take the checkpoint ILEARN tests was not enough; it had to be paired with reflection and collaboration between teachers, pushing each other to ask the tough questions and evaluate their own teaching.

“We still have a fire in us to grow further, we’re not content with where we are,” Davis said. “But we’re headed in the right direction and that’s very exciting.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .��

We saw this play out at Boston Collegiate Charter School, which serves a socio-economically and racially diverse population of 700 students in grades 5 through 12, as more and more students struggled to stay afloat in their English Language Arts classes. Many students were entering our school without foundational reading skills, and our typical approaches — leveraging rigorous curriculum and scaffolding grade-level texts — weren’t yielding the usual results.

We needed something new, and the strategies we tried and refined this year revealed a lot about our students, our instruction, and what could work for other schools grappling with the same challenges.

The issues with reading have become most acute in our upper grades. We accept new students every year through grade 10, and we’ve found that older students tend to be even further behind in their reading than those entering in fifth or sixth grade. For example, in our 10th grade English class, we have some students reading Antigone, forming thesis statements about the nature of power and loyalty, while others are struggling to decode the meaning of most of the words on each page. 

In response, last year we launched a Literacy Working Group made up of interested teachers and school leaders. Our goal was to figure out how to meet the needs of our adolescent students, especially those significantly behind grade-level. As we explored existing research and strategies, we found plenty of literature on how to teach reading to elementary schoolers but saw substantial gaps when it came to older students. 

We started by diving into frameworks like the , Scarborough’s , and materials from . These models emphasize that literacy is multi-faceted: Phonics, background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, and comprehension all work together to create strong readers. We identified the key areas we should be working on with students and then pulled in the broader school community to help. 

During our annual, all-staff orientation before students arrive, we spent a significant amount of time laying the groundwork for why this literacy work matters, and how every teacher, regardless of subject, can contribute. We shared tools and strategies like visual maps and categorization of word meanings, word preview exercises, and vocabulary deep-dives. 

We also looked beyond individual lessons to consider school-wide initiatives like a “word of the week” to help celebrate academic language and keep literacy front and center. Throughout the year, we revisited and reinforced effective strategies through biannual teacher-led best practice showcases integrated into our regular schedule of professional development. These sessions provided practical tools for teachers to leverage immediately in their classrooms, while also building consistency across content areas and grade levels.

For students who needed more intensive help with decoding and fluency, we adopted the , a structured, research-based intervention specifically designed for older students. It focuses on multisyllabic word recognition, affixes, fluency, and comprehension strategies. 

While not every student was excited about joining at first, many began to see real progress. A ninth grader who struggled with multisyllabic words had trained herself to essentially skip them as she read, making meaningful comprehension almost impossible and limiting her to a fifth-grade reading level. Strategies she learned during REWARDS intervention enabled her to start decoding longer words; within months, she was reading nearly on grade level. Her whole outlook on reading transformed, as did her confidence. While not typical of every student, we are nevertheless seeing the greatest gains from students like this, who started the year furthest behind. 

To track progress, we’ve been using i-Ready, a diagnostic assessment given to students three times a year. Unlike more-frequent, shorter assessments we’d used in the past, i-Ready has provided more reliable data about where students are starting and how far they’re progressing. There is a strong correlation between students’ scores and their performance on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, which the state’s students are required to take in grades 3 through 8, as well as grade 10. 

On average, i-Ready testing shows that students two or more grade levels behind were making more than a year’s worth of growth in just a few months. While some students are still behind benchmark, the chasm has closed significantly, and they are now within striking distance of grade-level proficiency, giving them a renewed sense of confidence and a real shot at long-term academic success. 

Literacy development is not a one-year fix, but by investing in the right resources and supporting teachers to address students’ reading deficits, we’re making the small but steady gains that show genuine advancement. The progress we’ve seen is a testament to what’s possible when schools take a collective, research-based approach to adolescent literacy. 

While much funding and attention focuses on early childhood literacy skills, we are committed to serving our students, adolescent learners who still need fundamental literacy support.  They also deserve the targeted, thoughtful intervention that empowers them to be fluent readers and full participants in their own learning. 

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

By 2:45 p.m. the regular school day at August Boeger Middle School had already ended, but one class is about to start. More than 20 eighth graders drop their backpacks and settle into desks — not for extra credit but for college credit.

These 13- and 14-year-old students in East San Jose are taking their first college course, an entry-level class on career planning. This middle school is one of the first in the state to offer a college-level course. In the coming years, the San Jose Evergreen Community College District wants all middle school students in this school district to be able to complete three college courses before they start high school, and soon, the district plans to offer other courses, such as sociology and ethnic studies, said Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor for the community college district.

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Middle schoolers have long been eligible to enroll in college classes in California, though only a few, high-achieving students actually do it. By offering a college class at a middle school — especially one in a high-poverty area — the community college district is looking to make that enrollment easier. The class is taught by a middle school staff member, and it’s reserved exclusively for middle school students.

But with so few programs, there is little research about whether students are benefitting, and the local faculty union is worried middle school students might not be ready.

Chaidez disagrees. “Navigating (college) as early as middle school is unheard of in their community,” she said. “So when they experience success, it really motivates them to continue.”

California is increasingly pushing high schools to offer community college classes directly to students during the regular school day, a set-up known as “dual enrollment.” Unlike AP classes, which include expensive exams and are limited to certain subjects and high-performing students, these community college classes cover a range of topics and are open to all students. By 2030, California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Chiristian wants all high school students to graduate with

Chaidez wants to go further. She wants every local high school student to be able to complete about 20 college courses by the time they graduate — enough to earn an associate’s degree.

CalMatters reached out to the college district’s faculty union, which was surprised to learn the district is offering classes at a middle school.

“This opens up some problems,” said Jessica Breheny, an English professor and the union’s vice president. “I’m sure there are 12-year-olds that are college-ready, but there are just less of them and it’s less likely. Developmentally, they have other things going on.”

Research that high schoolers who take college classes are more likely to attend college and graduate, but there’s little research on how middle school students fare, said John Fink, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. “Nationally, and in most states, this is very, very rare, and in many states this is not allowed.” Instead, he said the focus is typically on enrolling more 10th, 11th and 12th graders in college courses.

A college-level course, with a few middle school games

About 10% of California’s high school students took a community college class in the 2021-22 school year, according to by professors at UC Davis using the most recent data. California’s community college system doesn’t track how many middle school students take college courses.

So far, the Mount Pleasant Elementary School District, which includes August Boeger Middle School, offers only one college course, called “Career Planning,” and it’s almost indistinguishable from any other class on its campus. The college course is taught in a regular middle school classroom, and the professor, Oscar Lamas, already works at the middle school, where he’s a counselor. Perhaps the only noticeable difference is the timing: The middle school day ends at 2:30 p.m. and Lamas’ course starts at 2:45. He’s paid separately by the community college to teach the course.

Career Planning helps students learn about , practice resume-writing and learn psychological theories related to professional success. A governing board of college district professors, known as the Academic Senate, sets the objectives for each college course, but Lamas has broad discretion in teaching it. The Academic Senate responsible for setting the parameters of Lamas’ course did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The dean of the community college’s counseling department, Victor Garza, refused an interview request from CalMatters but issued a written statement. Garza said the middle school class is akin to other dual enrollment courses, which maintain the college’s “academic rigor.”

“Some adjustments might be needed to cater to the unique needs and experiences” of students, he added.

On a Thursday before spring break, Lamas tries to make his class more fun by breaking the students into five teams to play a Jeopardy-style quiz game on the topic of the day, .

Natalie Mendoza, 14, becomes the default spokesperson of her team, named the “Tacos R Us Club,” but she answers the first question wrong, putting her team back 300 points and prompting her classmates to burst into chatter and analyze their mistakes.

As part of the class, she has to study a career, write a short essay about it and present it at a career fair. She picked intellectual property law. “A lot of people say I’m assertive,” she said. “I think that’s a really good trait for a lawyer, and I think it’d be fun to fight for people who have created stuff.”

Natalie said she’d be the first in her family to attend college but she’s already planning to go and has a few schools in mind, including UC Berkeley and San Jose State. If she does attend one of those schools, her grade in this counseling class would be part of her official college transcript.

Breheny, with the union, said she’s concerned about the quality of the classes, especially once the college district begins teaching other subjects, such as ethnic studies.

“Faculty designed their courses for adult learners,” Breheny said. An ethnic studies class may cover topics such as sexual violence and genocide, she added — topics that may be difficult to convey to a middle schooler. “Some of the material assumes a certain knowledge about the world, about politics, which you may not have at 11, 12, 13 years old.”

High schools offer few dual enrollment classes

August Boeger Middle School sits at the base of the Diablo Range mountains, tucked between the ranch-style homes and strip malls that color East San Jose. Teachers and staff greet each other with mucho gusto instead of hello. All around the open-air campus, murals tell the story of the region’s multi-cultural heritage, especially its Mexican and Chicano roots.

That celebration of culture is a direct response to a history of adversity, Lamas said. “East San Jose has always been a marginalized, disadvantaged environment.” As a result, schools in the community contend with education disparities, he said, such as a high dropout rate and a high teen pregnancy rate.

Offering a college class to these middle school students allows them to “see a possibility for their future that doesn’t exist within these walls here” and can inspire them to reach for a higher goal, said Marisa Peña, a school advisor.

Male students, Black and Latino students and students from rural areas in the community college courses offered at California’s school districts. California lawmakers have signed numerous bills in the hopes of expanding access but certain regions in the state, such as Los Angeles, enroll a higher percentage of students.

Natalie said she hopes to continue taking college courses when she starts at Mount Pleasant High School this fall, which is just around the corner from her middle school. But her options are limited.

Mount Pleasant High School offers just three community college courses, which serve about 10% of the school’s roughly 1,000 students, said Kyle Kleckner, the school district’s director of instructional services. All of the classes are in “multimedia” studies, he said, which teaches students how to create their own podcasts or YouTube channels, along with other digital marketing skills.��

Although Mount Pleasant High School’s dual enrollment is about on par with the state average, it trails other districts in the region. Less than 20 miles away, at high schools in the Milpitas Unified School District, roughly 25% of students enrolled in a community college class in 2021-22, according to the UC Davis analysis.

Finding professors to teach middle school

Part of the dual enrollment challenge is finding qualified college professors who are willing and able to work at a high school or middle school. Existing middle and high school teachers are allowed to teach college courses but they have to meet the qualifications, which usually include a master’s degree in the area of instruction. Most of California’s high school and middle school instructors a master’s degree, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“We have graduation requirements that students have to accomplish,” Kleckner said. “The trick is finding that community college course that also fulfills those requirements and also finding a teacher who can teach it.” He said Mount Pleasant High School is committed to expanding the number of college courses but noted that it’s smaller and therefore has fewer teachers who meet the requirements to teach a college course.

In turn, many college professors lack experience teaching children, said Breheny, who teaches at San Jose City College. “We have had some problems already with dual enrollment where faculty have gone to different (high schools) to teach and have dealt with classroom management issues that they wouldn’t have in a college course.” In one case, she said a college faculty member saw bullying in a high school classroom but didn’t feel equipped to respond.

Lamas has a master’s degree, which is required for most . He’s gentle with the middle school students in his class, occasionally awarding points in the Jeopardy game even when the answer isn’t perfect. Lamas had two quiz games planned that day, each one covering a different topic, but the first game took up almost all of the class time.

He ends class by taking questions about the upcoming final project. Although spring break is minutes away, the students sit still through the final minutes, except for the occasional joke and bursts of laughter. Not a single phone was in sight.

Once class ends, however, chatter ensues, the students pull out their phones, and staff escort them to the parking lot. While they may be taking a college course, they still must wait for their parents to pick them up.

This article was and was republished under the license.

PETERSBURG – Vernon Johns Middle School eighth grader Jonathan Phillips already knows he’s interested in a career in physics. With his interest in science, he was especially happy to witness the unveiling of his school’s new medical-focused classroom on Wednesday, a space made possible through a unique partnership between a Virginia health care system, an education nonprofit and Petersburg Public Schools.

“It seems like a very interesting learning opportunity,” he said.

Phillips was one of a handful of middle school students to attend a formal ribbon cutting for the classroom opening where they  were able to physically interact with various medical instruments and models. As he lingered near a model used for CPR practice, he noted how he’d taken a course and was excited at the prospect of “brushing up” on the life skill. Some other students expressed interest in phlebotamy, the specialty of drawing blood for testing or delivering intravenous medicines, while exploring the room.

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Phillips said the classroom may stir up his classmates’ curiosity about working in medical fields.

“I think some other people might have their interest piqued,” he said.

Petersburg superintendent Yolanda Brown said that the lab will be part of Vernon Johns Middle School’s “career investigation” courses, offering hands-on experience that will encourage students to further their studies in health care. The school also aims to include guest lecturers in the classroom from different healthcare specialties.

Next door, Petersburg High School,offers a curriculum for certified nursing assistant career paths, which students could explore and plan to pursue or that might inspire interest in other medical professions. As Virginia mirrors national trends in a of workers for critical health professions like various types of nurses and primary care providers, Petersburg’s new medical classroom can help inspire future professionals who could stem the tide.

“We thought that starting early, at least at middle school, introducing them to those careers, those tracks and what they might need for their ninth grade start of high school, would be a place to start,” said Communities in Schools Petersburg president Wanda Stewart.

Stewart’s organization is part of a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting local schools and students around the country. Communities in Schools Petersburg facilitated conversations with HCA Virginia Health System and the school division that led to a $25,000 grant that helped set up the classroom.

“We are excited about our students being able to learn in a way that is a little different from just normal classroom settings,” Stewart  said.

HCA awarded the grant to the school in order to inspire future health care workers, HCA associate vice president of academic affairs Yvette Dorsey explained at the unveiling.

A CPR training for students at Petersburg High added to the health-related learning Wednesday morning. The training stemmed from a collaboration between Petersburg schools, the local emergency services and health departments, and HCA.

With requiring public elementary and secondary schools to develop cardiac emergency response plans, the training was timely. The legislation was carried by Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virignia Beach, in this year’s General Assembly session and, after passing the legislature, was signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin March 24.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.

All New York City middle schools will be required to use city-approved curriculums for reading and math by fall 2027, Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos announced Monday.

As the mandates are phased in, 102 middle schools across eight districts will be required this September to use a city-approved reading program selected by their superintendent, building on a in elementary schools.

And in math, officials are continuing a planned , adding 84 schools in six local districts this fall. Just over 100 middle schools are already part of the math curriculum requirement. (There are 529 middle schools across the city’s 32 local districts.)

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Adams’ education agenda has been defined by curriculum mandates to improve reading and math proficiency. Monday’s announcement indicates Adams is following through on plans to deepen those efforts. Proponents of the curriculum overhaul contend that it can take years for the changes to bear fruit, likely leaving it up to Adams’ successor to see the effort through as the mayor faces an .

Adams and his first chancellor, David Banks, argued that schools have had too much leeway to pick their own curriculums, leading to uneven academic results. Under half of students in grades 3-8 are proficient in reading while about 53% are proficient in math, .

“We can’t continue to do the same things that we have been always doing and expecting to get better results,” Adams said during a press conference at Brooklyn’s Dock Street School for STEAM Studies.

The reading and math curriculum mandates, known respectively as NYC Reads and NYC Solves, are meant to guarantee that schools are using high-quality programs. Principals have traditionally been allowed to cobble together their own approaches. Many about how children learn to read. Additionally, using one curriculum in each district makes it easier to scale up teacher training and may be less disruptive for students who switch schools.

The mandates have won mixed reactions from parents and educators. Some have raised concerns about the specific curriculums city officials chose and others said the city’s . All of the city’s elementary schools are now required to use one of three reading programs, and nearly all high schools have .

Teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew, a key supporter of the literacy mandate and , did not appear at Monday’s press conference. Alison Gendar, a union spokesperson, criticized the decision to expand the math mandate to middle schools.

“The DOE rollout of the new math curriculum in the high schools was dreadful,” she wrote. “It makes no sense for the DOE to expand the math curriculum to middle schools when its work in high schools is unfinished.”

The principals union has been more concerned about curriculum mandates, and a spokesperson did not say whether the union supports the addition of middle schools. Both unions have .

The city has not yet seen clear-cut gains from the new curriculums. State reading scores dropped last school year, with , though officials pointed to other assessment data that they said is more encouraging.

Aviles-Ramos said some test score drops are expected as teachers learn how to use the new programs. “We are truly listening to what’s happening on the ground so we can address any issues,” she said. She also predicted gains in student proficiency.

“I’m super confident as we embark on sthat we are going to see improvements,” Aviles-Ramos said. City officials have inor students at the cusp of passing the reading tests.

Educators at schools covered by the expanded reading and math curriculum mandates will begin to receive training this spring in addition to 12 days of “job-embedded coaching” this fall.

All but one of the districts in the first wave of the middle school reading curriculum mandate will use a program called , including Manhattan Districts 1 and 3; Districts 7, 9, 11, and 12 in the Bronx; and District 13 in Brooklyn. District 19 in Brooklyn will use a curriculum called .

In three of those districts — 3, 9, and 12 — the superintendents chose to mandate different reading programs in their middle and elementary schools. Education Department officials said superintendents made choices about which program to mandate based in part on how many schools were already using them. They did not immediately say how many middle schools are already using the curriculums mandated by their superintendent.

Notably, none of the superintendents in the initial wave chose the middle school version of Into Reading, the . That program has who contend that it is not culturally responsive, is too reliant on text excerpts rather than full books, and is not focused enough on building students’ content knowledge. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the company behind the program, has previously disputed those claims.

A different set of districts are mandating middle school math programs for the first time. Four districts — District 8 in the Bronx, District 17 in Brooklyn, District 25 in Queens, and Staten Island’s District 31 — will all use a curriculum called Amplify Desmos. District 5 in Manhattan will use i-Ready Mathematics, and District 6 selected Illustrative Mathematics.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

“I used to be pretty suicidal last summer and I tried to commit suicide about two times.”

Since 2018, more than 36,000 students across the Seattle region have shared their hopes, fears and family secrets in an online questionnaire called Check Yourself. 

“My dog has … untreatable cancer and my great grandma died a week ago.”

“Some time i harm my self by not eating cause i don’t really like my body.”

Questions peer into students’ sexual preferences and romantic lives — even which gender they’re “most likely to have a crush on.” It’s the kind of information a 12-year-old might not tell their best friend.

“Do my parents see this survey?”

Districts promise students their answers to over 50 personal questions will be kept confidential. But a group of parents has been able to obtain reams of sensitive survey data from multiple districts through the state’s .

One of them, Stephanie Hager, is on a six-year crusade to expose what she considers to be the program’s lack of privacy safeguards. To prove her point, the former Microsoft program manager said she correctly identified six students based on nothing more than details they provided in the survey and a simple Google or social media search. 

“We know their school, gender, age on a certain date, grade level, language they speak, their dogs’ names, friends’ names, race, their unique interests, what sports they play, if they are religious, and anything else they feel like writing in — plus their whole mental health record,” said the Snoqualmie Valley mother of four, whose son took the survey in 2019.

 “I can’t imagine any parent saying OK to that.”

Researchers at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington developed the Check Yourself program to better identify students in middle and high school silently suffering from depression, substance abuse or suicidal thoughts. 

Supported by a voter-approved encompasses Seattle, more than $21 million since 2018. The funds help pay for mental health counseling for students and to track trends across the 13 districts that participate. Seven schools in Spokane County, in eastern Washington, and a few districts in Oregon also use Check Yourself.

Backers of the survey have a simple defense: It saves lives.

Valerie Allen, director of social services and mental health in the Highline district, told ����Ӱ�� of a student who jumped into a pond at a city park in 2022 carrying a backpack laden with weights. The boy went missing after an argument with his dad. The family, Allen said, turned to a school counselor who had started meeting with the student after Check Yourself responses showed he was suicidal. The counselor tipped off police to the pond, the kid’s favorite spot, where they arrived just in time to save him.

The question of whether results like this justify the potential pitfalls have mired the program in controversy since its inception.

“The ultimate protection” against privacy risks is not to do the survey, said Evan Elkin, who helped adapt it for schools and serves as executive director of Reclaiming Futures, a project at Portland State University. But, he asks, is ending the program “worth the lives that you lose?” Officials said they could not determine the number of suicides prevented due to the survey.

For Hapsa Ali, a 2023 Highline district graduate, Check Yourself came at the right time. She suffered from “really bad social anxiety” and wasn’t getting along with her mom. Based on her answers, the school connected her to a counselor who regularly checked in on her, texting once a week.

“She was my safe space,” Ali said.

The clash over Check Yourself falls at the intersection of social forces that have only intensified since the pandemic. are experiencing extreme emotional and psychological stress. While show some improvement since 2021, 30% of 10th graders still say they have persistent feelings of depression and 15% reported thoughts of suicide, according to . 

At the same time, school districts house massive amounts of sensitive personal data and rely heavily on ed tech, making them prime targets for hackers. The Highline district, for example, closed for three days in September because of a . Nationally, more than doubled in 2023. Online mental health surveys also face backlash from activists and , who find them frequently intrusive, inappropriate and removed from school’s main purpose. 

“Schools are really under a huge amount of pressure to address student mental health,” said Isabelle Barbour, a consultant who developed a school-based mental health program for the state of Oregon. “But when they try to adopt something that can work in their setting, it brings up all of these other pressure points around privacy.”

‘I shouldn’t be seeing this’

The survey, which takes about 12 minutes to complete, leads students through a series of prompts, from simple tasks such as listing their top goals for the year to deeply personal queries like, “During the past year, did you ever seriously think about ending your life?”

Parents get two chances to opt their children out of the screener, and students can also decline to complete it on the day of the survey. But districts reveal nothing that would alert anyone to its potential risks. Quite the contrary. promotes it as a “successful, proactive approach to providing support to students.” “personalized feedback and strategies for staying healthy.”

In fact, assure parents that only counselors or other “relevant” staff can view individual students’ responses, which are stored on a “secure” platform by Tickit Health, a Canadian company. To participate in the county-led program, districts must sign an agreement saying they will remove all “potentially identifying” student data before submitting records to the county, which uses the information to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and respond to students’ needs. Districts promise that county officials and researchers only see.

But an investigation by county ombudsman Jon Stier, triggered by parents’ concerns, suggests this hasn’t always been the case. A report released last summer revealed that in the program’s early years, county officials were able to connect student names to their responses, although Stier said that practice has ended.

The issue of the survey’s confidentiality first emerged publicly in 2022, when 10 districts released spreadsheets of student answers in response to a public records request from a . Snoqualmie Valley parents asked districts for additional information, released as recently as February 2024, which they shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��. 

A handful of districts concealed some personal details. But several redacted little, if anything.

This could put districts in violation of federal , which require districts to gain parental consent or remove all identifying information from records before releasing them publicly. 

Privacy experts say that wiping information such as race, home language and favorite activities from a document in order to make it is no easy task. But without such measures, a combination of answers could identify a student, in the language of the law, “with reasonable certainty.”

Sometimes, just a simple data point can expose a student’s identity.

During the 2021-22 school year, for example, only one student in the Kent district who took the survey identified as being part of the Muckleshoot tribe, which has about statewide.

Most survey questions are multiple choice. But 13 allow students to write open-ended responses — and it is these answers that experts say vastly increase the chances of identifying potential students. 

At ����Ӱ��’s request, Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, reviewed an Excel document with answers from more than 900 students in the Auburn district from the 2021-22 school year — details that included random factoids like a preference for techno music and proficiency in math, as well as very private revelations such as conflicts at home and incidents of self-harm. 

“I shouldn’t be seeing this spreadsheet,” Vance said. “It feels like everybody’s sticking their head in the sand about what the consequences could be.” 

Districts ‘caught off guard’

Marc Seligson, a King County spokesman, insisted that “student data security is paramount,” but that responsibility for interpreting privacy laws falls to the districts.

“We can’t give them legal advice. Each district has their own lawyer,” said Margaret Soukup, the county’s youth, family and prevention manager, who oversees the program.

She said she was shocked districts released records to parents. “I was very upset because I didn’t even think that that was a possibility.”

����Ӱ�� reached out to the nine King County districts that released records to the public and still use Check Yourself.

Five didn’t respond, and a spokeswoman for Auburn declined to comment. Conor Laffey, a spokesman for the Snoqualmie Valley district, said officials there worked with the county to “safeguard confidential student information” and consulted the district’s legal counsel before releasing spreadsheets. He declined to elaborate.

Tahoma School District Superintendent Ginger Callison, a former Snoqualmie Valley official, said she didn’t remember details about past disclosures and is “confident” that in the future, “nothing will get released that isn’t allowed or required.”

A Seattle spokeswoman noted that records went through “multiple layers of review to remove potentially identifiable comments within student responses.” But the district didn’t redact very specific details about some students, like the one obsessed with reptiles who wanted a pet frog and another who speaks English, Russian, Spanish and sometimes Samoan. The district did not comment on why it included such information in the spreadsheet of students’ answers.

����Ӱ�� also contacted , a University of Washington researcher who helped develop the survey and now evaluates the King County program. She said districts are obligated to protect “the confidentiality of student information,” but directed further questions to the county.

Parents say the county also bears responsibility for students potentially being exposed. 

Hager, Check Yourself’s most outspoken parent critic, obtained an email thread through an open records request that shows officials were well aware of the survey’s potential privacy pitfalls. In one email, a former Tickit Health executive warns county officials that if a student “were to enter identifiable information in the free-text sections, theoretically this would be accessible.”

One wrinkle in King County’s privacy dispute is that Washington has one of the strongest. In 2016, for example, the state Supreme Court upheld over half a million dollars in in a case against a state agency that was slow to turn over records. 

Elkin, from Portland State University, said districts were “caught off guard and panicked” when they received the open records requests. 

But the Washington districts are no different than many others nationally that currently find themselves fielding more public record requests than ever before — often from watchdogs like Hager or activists investigating curriculum materials they believe to be inappropriate. Spurred on by conservative groups like Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty, repeat filers dig for lesson plans, teacher training materials and financial records — particularly those relating to transgender issues and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Allen Miedema, executive director of the Northshore district’s technology department, said the districts that use Check Yourself could “do a better job of letting parents know” about the purpose of the survey.

If staff members failed to conceal student identities, he said, it’s often because they’re “swamped” with requests for documents and lack clear guidance from state or county officials on what’s allowed to be included.   

‘Survey gets dark very fast’

School leaders insist the danger is largely hypothetical.

Officials in King County, and from six districts that responded to a request from ����Ӱ��, said they’ve received no reports of cyberthieves or child predators gaining access to Check Yourself and using results to target students.

They point to internal  showing that students feel more connected to school when they’re referred to an “intervention” after taking the survey. In focus groups, students expressed “favorable opinions” about the screener. In  of almost 400 students referred to a staff member after completing Check Yourself, the percentage saying that an adult at school listens, cares and tells them they do a good job increased. 

“The tool has been indispensable in pinpointing students who would benefit from urgent extra help — some of whom we never would have known were struggling,” said Laffey, the Snoqualmie Valley district spokesman.

But that doesn’t satisfy Hager.

She is among more than 20 Snoqualmie Valley parents who started asking questions about the program after the warned in 2018 that “malicious use” of sensitive student data could lead to identity theft and “help child predators identify new targets.”

Hager, who attended school in King County, doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to be preyed on by a trusted adult. In seventh grade, she said she was a victim of sexual misconduct involving a male teacher. 

“I know the FBI’s scenarios are real,” she said.

She points to students’ written reflections on the survey as proof that some find the questions disturbing.

“This survey gets dark very fast especially for a child.”

“Why does it act like I’m constantly breaking the law? I’m 12.” 

Many students expressed particular concern about questions related to sex and gender. One 12-year-old wrote:

“Female but kinda non binary sorta questioning but not? (Don’t tell my parents).”

Seligson, the King County spokesman, said the survey asks such questions because LGBTQ kids “are one of our most vulnerable populations.” State data released in 2023 showed that were nearly twice as likely as other students to report “depressive feelings.” 

The unease some students expressed about Check Yourself was echoed by several district staffers.

In 2019, an official in the Tukwila district, south of Seattle, wrote in that the survey was “causing considerable angst” and that with many “vulnerable” and “traditionally marginalized” families, educators didn’t want to “create unnecessary harm.”

That same year, a Seattle school counselor called it a “super personal survey,” according to an email ����Ӱ�� obtained through a public records request. She questioned why the district needed the information and whether it would be able to keep it confidential.

‘Absolute data privacy is a fantasy’

To be sure, not all King County parents have a problem with Check Yourself.

Erica Thomson, who works for a cloud communications company, said the notion of “absolute data privacy is a fantasy.”

She has two boys in the Seattle schools, one who is transgender and the other who has ADHD, and appreciates that the program gets her children to open up.

“Kids do not tell parents everything,” Thomson said. “Sometimes it is because they love their parents too much and do not want them to worry or suffer.”

Some students write that they appreciate the survey experience, which includes targeted recommendations based on their answers. A student who reports using marijuana, for example, will get facts about how it negatively affects memory and mental and physical health.

Ali, the former student who found Check Yourself beneficial to her well-being, had a distinctly nuanced take on her experience.

While praising the personal attention she received from a counselor,  Ali described a “rowdy” atmosphere in the sixth-period history classroom where she took the survey, with classmates buried in their phones and chatting with friends. It made it difficult to express some of the conflicts she was experiencing at the time. 

“It was a bunch of juniors just goofing off. I was sitting next to my friend, and she would just ask me, ‘Oh, what did you answer?’” she said. The atmosphere, she added, “felt like it wasn’t as serious as it should have been.”

The information is ‘too valuable’

As King County parents and school officials debate the merits and risks of Check Yourself, other districts have managed to use the program with relative ease.

In Oregon’s Hillsboro district, students’ responses stay on the Tickit platform — unavailable to outside evaluators or the public at large.

Spokane County officials not only eliminated questions about sexual orientation and romantic attractions, but also removed open-response fields.

“Why is it necessary for us to have that information?” asked Justin Johnson, who leads community services for Spokane. Additionally, clinicians monitor the administration of the survey in classrooms, allowing the results to be covered by . 

But Soukup, the King County official who oversees the program, said districts there find the write-in answers “too valuable” to do without because students often use them to open up about their problems.

For some King County districts, however, Check Yourself simply proved to be too much.

The Lake Washington district pulled out of the program three years ago and instead contracts with full-time mental health specialists to respond to students’ needs.

The intensely personal questions — and the resulting risk of privacy violations — also helped push the Bellevue school system to drop it in 2019. 

Officials opted for , and because of their sensitive nature, results are “considered some of the most privileged data the district has,” said Naomi Calvo, who served as Bellevue’s director of research, evaluation and assessment until 2023. “I didn’t even have access to it.”

Calvo understands why districts jumped to implement Check Yourself and most continue to use it. “Students have needs that were going unaddressed and there is a dearth of options available,” she said. 

But as a mental health professional with a young son at the time, she felt skeptical. 

“As a researcher, I believe in surveys,” she said. “But I would not have let my child take that survey.”

This story was co-published with .

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at . For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

Free, confidential treatment referral and information is available in English and Spanish at 800-662-4357, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Helpline.

After he um’d and uh’d his way through a picture book about starting kindergarten, “My youngest said, ‘Mama, C.J. can’t read,’ ” Mitchell said. “Somewhere a ball had been dropped, and as much as I’ve been trying to be an advocate for him, something was missed.” 

Now in ninth grade at Whites Creek High School in Nashville, C.J. is among many teens who lack the skills to sound out and understand challenging vocabulary. In class, he often struggles to pronounce longer words. 

“When I get to them, I’ll stop, and I’ll wait on the teacher to say it,” he said. In middle school, he was determined to figure out words on his own because teachers told him it would only get harder in high school.

New research shows older students like C.J. hit a “decoding threshold.” Over 20% of students in fifth through seventh grade stumble over words they don’t recognize or can’t sound out, often preventing them from grasping the main idea of reading materials for school, according to the study released Wednesday from the Educational Testing Service and the .

Falling literacy rates following the pandemic have drawn more attention to adolescents’ reading proficiency. National tests from 2022 showed alarming declines in .

But experts have long recognized that many older students lack a strong foundation in reading. “A lot of kids could very well have their basic K-2 foundational skills down pat, but they still need decoding support,” said Rebecca Sutherland, a co-author of the report and the associate director of research for Reading Reimagined, a project of the research and development fund. “There’s an assumption … that kids can self-teach.”

A nationwide push to strengthen students’ reading performance has centered on the early grades. Over the past decade, have enacted legislation calling for research-backed reading instruction that emphasizes phonics. Sutherland said the new data points toward the need for a similar agenda for older readers. 

The report on over 167,000 students in grades three through 12 is based on the results of a screening assessment called , developed by ETS. The project was inspired by a showing that students who fall below the decoding threshold material as it grows more complex and abstract in the higher grades. 

“If decoding a sentence is consuming all of your cognitive capacity, then you’re not going to have anything left for comprehension,” Sutherland said. 

As an example of how students’ skills drop off as they reach the upper elementary and middle grades, she said those who can easily read “tree” or “tricky” have no problem with similar one- or two-syllable words. But when they encounter words that don’t follow typical patterns — like “tripartite” in an American government class — those skills don’t necessarily transfer. 

The findings don’t explain why students fail to transition to more challenging vocabulary. C.J., for example, wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until fifth grade. Others may have been in a school with a approach to early literacy that didn’t emphasize phonics.

The study sheds light on why upper elementary and middle school teachers estimate that 44% of their students frequently struggle to read materials for class — a top finding from a Sutherland conducted with the Rand Corp.

Almost three-quarters of the roughly 1,500 teachers who responded said they need more resources to identify and support students with reading problems. The conundrum is that middle and high school educators, who strive to be subject matter experts, don’t spend much time on basic reading skills, and state standards typically don’t expect them to.

“The demands on teachers are enormous, and the preparation is so minimal,” said Julie Burtscher Brown, a literacy specialist for the Mountain Views Supervisory Union in Woodstock, Vermont. “In the higher grades, students can be multiple years apart, sitting together in one class.”

She’s part of a steering committee leading the new , which will release the results of its own teacher survey . 

Brown led a course to introduce teachers in her own 1,000-student district to some of those practices. 

“We had AP Physics teachers learning alongside preschool teachers. It was really quite special,” she said. The course covered, for example, how studying the structure and origin of words in class can contribute to comprehension. Brown urged teachers to give all students the opportunity to write and read aloud throughout the day. “So many students need support reading multisyllabic words accurately, and we’re not going to do that with picture books.”

Avoidance strategies

As students get older, their struggles with reading often show up in or a pattern of avoidance in class.

“When it’s time to read, they have to go to the bathroom,” said Christina Cover, a special education teacher in the Bronx, New York, and a member of the steering committee for the Project for Adolescent Literacy. “They might sit there and refuse to read, refuse to discuss. Everybody else is annotating their books with tons of sticky notes.”

But in middle and especially high school, teachers often think it’s not their responsibility to spend time on the basics. Many are already of books instead of full chapters.

Diane Kung teaches an honors English class at Berkeley High School in California and another course focused on Asian American-Pacific Islander literature. Her students are working on “big projects” based on nearly college-level texts dealing with race and bias. 

“With basic vocabulary, you assume that most kids will just know it or look it up,” she said. The school, she said, also has a “vast network of support,” including case managers for special education students and afterschool programs for low-income students. 

Her views on what classroom teachers should do for students who lack strong reading skills have shifted over time. Last year, she taught a small intervention class for English learners that allowed for “deep diving” into fundamentals and basic grammar. She plans to offer warm-up vocabulary exercises in her other classes to help students who might need extra support.

She also has a 7-year-old daughter who is learning to read.

“As I watch her develop, I’m thinking about my own students who are 14, 15, 16,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe this is what they missed when they were her age.’ ”

New ‘frontiers’ 

That’s why Sutherland recommends that districts extend screening to students in later grades. ReadBasix, offered by Buffalo-based Capti, starts at for multiple licenses. Stanford University developed the , or ROAR, which is free. 

Getting curriculum companies to offer foundational materials for students in the upper grades, like they do for younger readers, is the next step, experts say. 

Curriculum designers “often make the assumption that students in upper grades have already mastered decoding,” said Eric Hirsch, executive director of EdReports, a nonprofit that reviews how well curriculum follows Common Core standards.   

While educators are directing more attention to older students’ reading challenges, parents who watched their children struggle during the pandemic have also brought the issue to the forefront.

“Suddenly you have a lot of families who are feeling super powerless, seeing their kids at home on screens and saying, ‘Oh my goodness. My child can’t access their education for a multitude of reasons,’ ” said Rachel Manandhar, a special education teacher who works with Kung at Berkeley High. “Literacy became paramount.” 

Mitchell was one of those parents. She went through a literacy fellowship program this past summer offered by Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy group. The experience, she said, boosted her confidence when asking teachers about the services C.J receives at school and opened her eyes to his reading problems.

“This is why work was not being completed,” she said. “He can’t do it on his own because he doesn’t understand what he’s being asked to do.”

At school, almost every assignment includes reading material. In a wellness class, he recently had to answer questions based on articles about video games, stress and mental health. 

Mitchell has always signed C.J. up for tutoring at school, but now someone also works with him specifically on reading skills. PROPEL connected Mitchell with a specialist that hemeets with virtually once a week. Together they’ve been reading “Clean Getaway,” a middle school-level book in which an 11-year-old learns about racial history in the South while taking a road trip with his grandmother. C.J. said it’s the type of book he wants to be able to read independently. 

“I struggle doing it on my own,” he said. “I try it a little, and then I come home to get help.”

According to , that’s the reality facing millions of middle-schoolers in reading. Confounding hopes for a quick recovery from COVID’s disruptions to learning, sixth- through eighth-graders are to need from five to nine additional months of school to catch up to pre-pandemic achievement levels. Many middle-schoolers were struggling to read even before COVID, and because most foundational reading instruction takes place in elementary school, if a student is not a proficient reader by the end of fifth grade, catching up becomes nearly impossible. Now, the larger-than-usual number of students struggling to read effectively is placing an immense strain on middle schools.

But there is hope and a path forward. Reading science points to several solutions, and it’s imperative that education leaders and policymakers make them a priority to help middle schools support students who are struggling to read. This must happen in and beyond the language arts classroom, specifically in terms of data, vocabulary and writing.

First, schools and districts must ensure that teachers have access to individualized, reliable and timely data on their students’ reading skills, especially from assessments that screen all students for potential difficulties. This key data, alongside consistent monitoring of academic growth to track student progress during the school year and frequent checks inside the classroom, provide teachers with vital information as they plan their next instructional steps. 

Second, there must be an emphasis on vocabulary. Words do not exist in a vacuum; vocabulary is part of a complex system that includes words’ explicit and figurative meanings and their relationship to other words. Middle school teachers — and not just English teachers — can elevate their vocabulary instruction by including morphology instruction, in which students learn to dissect words into their prefixes and suffixes to help get at the word’s meaning, and — using phonics to break apart long words. Middle school texts are longer and have more complex vocabulary than what elementary school students encounter. Understanding how to break down a word into its key parts helps middle schoolers navigate new words they encounter in science, social studies, even math.

Third, students must be given dedicated instructional time set aside to practice reading out loud, so they can strengthen their reading fluency skills. is the ability to read with accuracy, speed and expression, and is tied to comprehension. Students who have a large vocabulary can read without conscious effort or attention, which frees up working memory to focus on comprehension instead of word recognition or definition. A found that sixth-graders who were below grade level in reading showed significant improvements in literacy after receiving targeted fluency intervention.

Lastly, writing is the unsung hero of reading development. When students , they deepen their comprehension of the text and illuminate areas they are still wrestling through. Writing provides important, real-time data for teachers, offering insight into students’ thoughts, highlighting areas that require additional instruction and showcasing new, fresh ways of thinking about content. Middle school teachers can rethink their instructional approach by considering that writing is both a process and a product. Daily practices like quick writes are good for capturing students’ initial grasp of a text, while complex writing assignments developed over time lean into the most , allowing students to wrestle with ideas and gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding. In addition, an assignment may ask students to pay attention to the specific purpose for writing and the audience they are writing for.

Longer writing tasks can also give teachers an opportunity to model the writing and revision process, for example, explaining out loud how to edit a section of text for word choice, tone or grammar. And they allow teachers to give detailed feedback, so students learn how to revise their own writing when the teacher is not around.

The data make it clear: Middle school students need ongoing literacy instruction throughout the school day if they are going to overcome COVID’s lingering effects and meet the reading and writing demands of science, social studies and other interdisciplinary subjects. It must be rooted in useful assessment data, so educators have a clear and ongoing understanding of student strengths and areas of growth. It must provide many opportunities for students to practice reading fluently, so their working memory frees up space for deeper comprehension and thinking. And a new vision for literacy must rethink writing, too, as a tool to teach reading.

, released Tuesday by the nonprofit testing group NWEA, serve as more evidence of a trend that has stood out in earlier data: Students who were still in elementary school when the pandemic began are experiencing particularly worrisome setbacks as schools try to chart a path to academic recovery. Meanwhile, today’s elementary schoolers have nearly returned to the levels of learning last seen in 2019.

This summer, NWEA circulated scores from their widely used of math and reading. The results, which included the performance of nearly eight million American students from grades 3–8, revealed that today’s eighth graders were a full year behind 2019 learning in both subjects. By contrast, learning delays for third graders were only about one-quarter that size. 

In general, learning loss in science has been less significant than for core disciplines like math and reading because STEM instruction is comparatively limited in the early grades. In a 2018 survey, elementary teachers said they spent only 18 minutes each day focusing on science, compared with about an hour on math and 1.5 hours on reading. 

Susan Kowalski, an NWEA senior researcher who worked on the report, said the scores showed that students who experienced their foundational years of STEM instruction in 2020 and 2021 were now struggling to cope.

“If science is taught at all in elementary school, it’s in the fourth and fifth grades,” Kowalski reflected. “So in 2021, those were the kids who were hardest hit in science, and they are now seventh and eighth graders who have never really rebounded.”

The latest data is drawn from 621 public schools that consistently administered the MAP Growth Science test to the same grade levels between 2017 and 2024. This ongoing sample allowed the research team to measure students this spring against not only those in the pre-COVID period, but also during the initial phases of the pandemic, when tens of millions of students were receiving virtual instruction. 

Those results show that, by the spring of 2021, students across all tested grades had fallen significantly behind in science, with especially sizable learning losses mounting in grades 4 and 5. But elementary schoolers have since recovered the most ground compared with their same-age predecessors of three years ago, with learning gaps reduced by 50% for third graders, 82% for fifth graders, and 33% for sixth graders. Fourth graders, whose performance dropped the furthest during the early stages of the pandemic, have now fully returned to their 2019-era achievement levels in science.

But the gaps for older students — essentially, those who saw the biggest dips three years ago — have grown with time. In 2021, NWEA estimated that seventh and eighth graders would require 0.9 and 1.7 months of additional science instruction, respectively, to catch up to where similar students had been in 2019; by 2024, the projection for students in that grade had grown to 1.7 and 3.2 months of supplemental learning, respectively. 

In other words, kids’ whose initial encounters with science were thwarted by the COVID shock appear to be falling further behind, even as state and federal leaders have provided school districts with billions of dollars to lead recovery efforts. 

Heidi Schweingruber, the director of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s , said that students’ halting progress in science could constrain their life chances in the future. Adolescents begin to develop aspirations for college and career only a few years after they receive their first lessons in science.

“If they’re missing that foundation and can’t follow a strong pathway into high school science, are we closing doors for them in terms of what they might consider after graduation?” Schweingruber asked. “Middle school is the time when kids are starting to develop an identity of who they want to be.”

As other testing data have indicated previously, the pandemic also significantly widened achievement gaps separating students along racial lines. While middle schoolers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds had fallen behind in science by the spring of 2021, Hispanic students lost more ground than their white classmates. Among eighth graders, Hispanics required a projected 3.4 months of academic recovery in 2021 and 6.3 months in 2024; whites in the same age cohort needed 0.5 months of recovery in 2021 and 1.6 months now.

Black students, who have mostly bounced back from the science losses sustained in 2020 and 2021, are still, on average, between 10 and 15 months behind the average achievement levels for children in their grades. Hispanic students, whose progress has only stalled further since 2021, are almost as badly off. 

Erika Shugart, CEO of the , said in a statement that she wasn’t surprised to see negative impacts concentrated among middle schoolers, though she added that persistent gaps in STEM instruction could prove economically and socially destructive in the long run.

“The U.S. is already facing significant challenges producing a STEM-ready workforce,” Shugart wrote. “Science literacy is crucial for making informed decisions about health, the environment, and technology. Falling behind in science education can impair individuals’ ability to engage with and understand complex issues, affecting personal and societal well-being.”

To combat lost science learning, NWEA’s authors recommended different strategies to curb chronic absenteeism, entice students to participate in summer learning opportunities, and weave science instruction into middle school reading instruction, which could improve performance in both subjects.

Kowalski said that, more than any particular approach, educators needed to embrace a “mentality shift” away from remediation and toward learning acceleration. A former high school physics instructor, she argued that schools can’t get their pupils back on track simply by offering them what they missed four years ago.

“They can’t succumb to low expectations and say, ‘These students are behind, so I need to slow down.’ It’s more like, ‘These students are behind, so I need to accelerate.’”

IPS wants to make sure more of its students are exposed to college sooner.

That’s why district officials are setting a new expectation that every  student completes at least one college visit each of their three years in middle school.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that if a middle school-aged child is able to have access or get onto a college campus, then there is a significant increase in them feeling like it’s an attainable option,” said Lori Hart, IPS’ K-8 elementary and middle school counseling coordinator.

IPS hopes to achieve this through a new .

More than 200 students from the district’s  visited the IUPUI campus April 19 as part of a pilot of the program. The students were met with hands-on activities, such as creating their own zine with Herron School of Art & Design staff or examining organ dissections with pathology lab interns.

Longfellow student Melissa Austin was among about a dozen eighth graders who nodded along to Music and Arts Technology department adjunct instructor Michael Reynolds’ upbeat club remix of “Pump Up The Jam.”

Hart said students were chosen from the activities, which also included a Q&A with School of Education students, based on career interests they expressed to their teachers before the visit.

The visit comes as IPS  as a part of the district’s reconfiguration plan and as the state grapples with .

Indiana hit its lowest college-going rate in a generation in 2020 with just 53% of graduating high schoolers choosing to go straight to college, according to . The rate has stayed flat since then.

Monica Medina, a clinical associate professor in IUPUI’s School of Education, said waiting until high school is often too late to introduce students to college experiences, especially for students who will be the first in their family to complete education beyond high school.

“Introducing them to the opportunities, to the different options they may have, can help them think about what they’re doing in high school and the significance of high school,” Medina said. 

More than 1,000 middle schoolers are expected to participate in this spring’s pilot of the college visits program.Longfellow, Northwest, William Penn and Clarence Farrington schools are included in the spring pilot. The program is expected to expand to all other IPS middle schools next year and comes as the district shifts to a middle school model for sixth through eighth grades this fall under Rebuilding Stronger.

IPS has budgeted $25,200 for the program in the coming school year, according to . That includes funding for more than 80 field trips, reaching more than 5,200 students.

Partners in the effort include Butler University, IU Indianapolis, Ivy Tech Community College, Marian University, Martin University, the University of Indianapolis and Vincennes University’s Indianapolis Aviation Technology Center.

Hart said she hopes students take these experiences home with them to spark conversations in their families about what it means to go to college and how to prepare as a family for opportunities beyond high school.

“They will have that core memory to take in the culture and just that feel of being on a college campus,” Hart said. “I hope they take away really exciting conversations to have with their family.”

This was originally published at Mirror Indy.

Districts that have faced historic enrollment losses could lose even more families if they don’t respond to student needs, according to the report, released Thursday and provided exclusively to ����Ӱ�� by Tyton Partners, a consulting firm that has the shifting education landscape since the pandemic. 

Based on a survey of what the researchers call “open-minded parents” — those who show interest in school choice options — 46% said their children’s mental health drove them to find something different. Among middle school parents, the rate was 54%, followed by 48% of high school parents and 44% of parents with elementary school children.

Adam Newman, founding partner at Tyton, said he was “dismayed — but not surprised — by how mental health concerns color parents’ choices.”

“For many parents, there’s a sense that ‘school’ isn’t working, and alternatives might provide a much-needed spark,” he said.

The survey results offer a different look at the youth that escalated in the wake of pandemic school closures. It comes as federal relief funds — and many of the mental health investments that went with them — are set to expire later this year. Many districts used the money for and for students experiencing anxiety or acting out in class.

With students, the is the lowest it’s been since the mid 1980s, according to the American School Counselor Association. But it still doesn’t reach the organization’s recommended ratio of 250-to-1. Jill Cook, executive director of the association, said some districts might not be able to keep the additional counselors, social workers and school psychologists they’ve hired. 

“The hope is … that districts would choose to keep these positions because [they] contribute to student success,” Cook said. “Students who have access to a school counselor often have improved attendance, improved achievement and fewer disciplinary issues.” 

Due to staff shortages, schools have also expanded the use of .  The federal government aims to of mental health professionals through grant programs to districts, states and universities.

‘A big reason people leave’

But some students crying for help can’t find it. Erin Goldman’s daughter reached out to a counselor at her Houston middle school in the fall of 2022 when she received harassing messages on social media, like “KYS,” an acronym for kill yourself. But the counselor couldn’t fit her in.

“She couldn’t get on the calendar. Then the guidance counselor was just supposed to come find her when she had availability, but that never happened,” Goldman said. The cyberbullying was affecting all areas of her daughter’s life. “She would not get up in the morning. It was a constant battle, like screaming matches. Her grades were suffering.”

In the middle of the school year, her parents transferred her to Dietrich Bonhoeffer Academy, a small private middle school. 

“In less than two weeks, she was happy,” she said. “The person who I thought would never like school again likes going to school.”

Consultants who help families navigate school choice options aren’t surprised that emotional health concerns are prompting some parents to change schools.

“If your child is being bullied, that to me is a mental health issue,” said Colleen Dippel, CEO of Families Empowered, a Texas-based nonprofit. “It’s a big reason people leave their schools. Their child says things like ‘I hate school. I don’t want to go to school.’ That’s pretty common.”

Tasha Tarpley, a single mother in Texas, pulled her son Preston out of the Red Oak Independent School District, south of Dallas, after a series of confrontations he had with other students. After one fight, he was suspended.

“My child was afraid to go to school,” she said. “I have a tall 10-year-old. He’s a big guy, and quite naturally [they’re] going to blame everything on the big one.”

On the way to school, she said his mood would drop, and his face “looked like he’d just had a very emotionally, psychologically rough day.” A year ago, she joined , a network supporting homeschool families with curriculum and online or in-person classes. 

“We’ve got our lives back,” she said. “He has healthy friendships, and I’m in a healthier state as a mom.” 

A ‘new arena of competition’

But sometimes, simply moving to another public school in  the same district, instead of leaving the system, can solve the problem, said Whitney Oakley, superintendent of the Guilford County Schools, which includes Greensboro, North Carolina.

The district offers 66 choice options and this year saw at least an 11% increase in applications for choice schools, compared with last year. Oakley took advantage of the system for her own son, who struggles with anxiety.

“I knew that he would probably benefit from a smaller middle school,” she said. “Every family deserves access to that kind of option.”

In addition to the relief funds, the district has received $20 million in grants for mental health services, and last school year, students and teachers participated in more than 10,000 , she said. While the district has seen in enrollment over the past three years, Oakley said some families who’d left the system have returned. 

“I think all public school systems are going to find themselves in this new arena of competition,” she said. “What can we offer here to make sure that choice doesn’t mean us or them? Choice means what best fits the needs of this particular student.” 

According to the Tyton report, the “enduring attraction of a traditional school environment” is what keeps some parents from pursuing other options. Among those who said they would consider switching schools, 41% said the “benefits of school culture and extracurriculars” are holding them back. 

Parent comments cited in the report also reflect concerns that students would miss out on “foundational experiences” if they cut ties to public schools. 

The report is the first in a three-part series about the “evolving landscape of parents’ K-12 education options.” In addition to holding focus groups, the researchers surveyed more than 2,000 parents last August. Almost two-thirds said they were only looking to supplement their children’s existing education through extracurricular programs, including tutoring or enrichment activities. 

Ten percent indicated they would transfer their child to a private school or even an alternative model like a microschool. And more than a quarter of the respondents said they would consider piecing together multiple options to provide their child a customized experience.

Following mental health, academic performance ranked second among the reasons parents said they would choose another schooling option. Forty-four percent of parents open to making a change cited academics as a driving factor.

Tarpley said her son was in fourth grade before she learned he was missing some basic math skills. 

“I needed to know way back in kindergarten that they were seeing some challenges with addition and subtraction — even if it’s just adding doughnuts and cookies,” she said.

Choice options certainly haven’t worked for everyone. For some families, the new arrangements didn’t meet their children’s needs. In other cases, their kids.

Pamela Lang pulled her son, who has ADHD, out of the Kyrene School District, near Phoenix, when he was in fourth grade. She used Arizona’s education savings account program. But most independent and religious schools turned him away. 

Arizona also allows families to transfer outside of their district, but for her son, “schools are always magically full,” she said. Now 16, he attends a private school for students with disabilities, but she’s considered returning to the public system. “At this point, our options are so limited.”

Newman, at Tyton, said the researchers have not yet followed up with parents to see if those who changed schools are satisfied with their decision. But they plan to in the future. 

The second paper in the series will examine why parents decide not to switch, and the third will look at the rise of organizations like Dippel’s that advise families on their options.

Most of the parents that seek her group’s help are “making really good parenting decisions,” she said. “By and large, they’re not hysterical. They don’t want to rip down the [traditional] system. They’re just like, ‘I want to pack up my stuff and get my kid out of this toxic situation.’ ”  

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Tyton Partners and ����Ӱ��.

UPchieve, an ed tech nonprofit, is bringing on volunteer tutors to offer free, on-demand academic and college application support to any U.S. middle or high school student attending a Title I school or living in a low-income neighborhood.

The platform is a game changer for students of color living in poverty, disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and unable to access costly individualized tutoring. Often working jobs or tending to family responsibilities, many are prevented from utilizing traditional offerings afterschool.

Through a mobile app or website, students are matched with one of 20,000 trained, volunteer tutors worldwide within five minutes. Sessions are typically 40 minutes, but can extend beyond an hour until students feel confident with the task at hand. 

“Right now in the United States, that sort of extra support is not available to the majority of low-income students,” said founder Aly Murray. “That’s where we come in. We think that every student, regardless of their family’s income, should be able to get support with their classes and applying to college when they need it.” 

Murray, who grew up low-income to an immigrant single mother, launched UPchieve in 2017 looking to build the platform she wished she had as a child. Of the more than 37,000 students who have completed over 100,000 sessions since, 64% are first-generation college-bound and 81% are students of color.

More than half are not enrolled in any other academic or college access program, and many start programming with very low motivation or in the lower third percentiles in terms of academic performance — sometimes grade levels behind. 

“We’re reaching kids — and this is exactly what we wanted,” Murray added. “UPchieve is especially valuable and high impact in cases where kids have nothing else,” especially those whose college and career trajectory could be changed by this level of support.

That was the case for Michael Lyons, a rising 11th grader who works at a Bloomington, Illinois grocery store three days a week and usually starts schoolwork at about 10 p.m. Having used the platform since finding it in an internet search for writing help in 7th grade, Lyons now has dreams of becoming an elementary school teacher. 

“I need help on demand,” Lyons said. “I think of [UPchieve] as a teacher away from school … I could participate more, because I know what I’m doing.” 

After just nine sessions, students scored an average of nine percentile points higher on the national Star math assessment, gains equivalent to 8 months of additional learning, according to policy research firm Mathematica, which studied 9th and 10th graders in the 2021-22 school year. Students also showed increased academic motivation, confidence, and engagement in class. 

Mathematica’s report was the first to show the effectiveness of on-demand tutoring — findings “useful for the field of math tutoring because they are examples of preliminary evidence that on-demand, online tutoring drawing on unpaid, volunteer tutors improves math achievement and motivation.”

Math, particularly algebra and geometry, is UPchieve’s most commonly requested subject, accounting for about 56% of 2022’s sessions, followed by humanities and writing support at 22%, science at 17% and college prep at 5%.��

Because the model draws on volunteer labor, the operational cost to provide one student with a year’s worth of unlimited tutoring is only $5. In comparison, other tutoring programs with similar impact can cost thousands per student. 

UPchieve’s international tutor base ranges from college students and retired teachers to business professionals looking to make an impact. The majority have prior tutor experience, but all have to complete an introductory training to learn best practices and demonstrate content mastery. 

David Seides, director of finance and customer experience at AT&T, began volunteering nearly three years ago, encouraged to put some hours in as a corporate sponsor.��To date, he’s logged over 400 sessions.��

He sets the times he is available each week, and gets alerts when students request help. When he has an extra hour, Seides pops online to see if there’s any students waiting. The setup is ideal, he said, because his work schedule is unpredictable.

For students who are struggling in class but don’t want to let on to the teacher or their peers, UPchieve provides a level of needed distance, too.

“This online platform, it’s anonymous enough that I think we get people coming with the real problems that they can’t figure out how to solve,” Seides said. 

Confidence was a struggle for Stacy, a rising 11th grader from Ghana now in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her math grades pre-tutoring were in the 70s. Today, she regularly earns As and sees a future at one of the University of Massachusetts campuses. 

“I was surprised because I didn’t expect the tutors to help me so well. I started crying and screaming when I got it,” she told the nonprofit.

“They don’t just help me do [homework], but also make sure I understand,” Stacy said. “They also give me similar problems just like the ones on my homework or what I’m learning in school … My math teacher is really impressed with my grades and understanding in class now. I am very grateful for that.”

Like other programs, UPchieve is still working on how to get students to regularly return. While some students log on far above average, up to 400 hours in a single year, only about 12% of new students log 10 or more sessions — about 6 hours, the threshold for seeing large academic gains.

In comparison to the popular Khan Academy, UPchieve does seem to be striking a chord with students. Only about 7% of Khan’s new users complete two or more hours of sessions, according to a .

Adding an audio or video connection would be a welcome change, or being able to “favorite” past tutors, students told ����Ӱ��. 

The current text-based communication is preferred by most — especially because many use the platform late at night, or have slow or limited internet access. A predominantly text-based platform also streamlines student safety, Murray said, as chat logs are stored and reviewed, and filters in place prevent emails or social media accounts from being shared.

UPchieve does plan to develop voice capabilities, with safety measures, for students and tutors who both opt-in in future versions of the app, for times when a concept is particularly confusing. One of Seides student’s, for example, once had difficulty understanding which way to flip their paper to understand reflection and rotations on a quadrant plane.

Still, in its current iteration, the platform is filling a gap for students who need it most. 

“It has given me a support system in stressful times. Without the comfort of private tutors that my peers had, I knew I would have to work even harder,” Xin, a high school student in Queens, NY, told the nonprofit. “Having UPchieve meant that I wouldn’t have to work alone or live with the constant anxiety of falling behind.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to and ����Ӱ��.

, which relies largely on recent findings from outside research groups and the federal government, warns that on just about every indicator that matters — basic skills, college going, mental health and more — the pandemic has set older students back.

“Time is running out for these kids,” said Robin Lake, director of , a research organization at Arizona State University. “Many have already exited the K-12 system, either by graduating or essentially disappearing on us. Too many kids still are missing — we don’t know if they’ve dropped out or where they’ve gone.”

Outside researchers who study these students said the fears are justified. In response, Lake and others are proposing a raft of reforms, including extending “gap years” to any high school graduates who need time to catch up — as well as a new commitment to reforming high school so it works for more students. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona acknowledged the slow pace of academic turnaround, calling it “appalling and unacceptable.”

“It’s like as a country we’ve normalized those gaps,” he said in separate remarks to reporters Tuesday,

Cardona spoke just before the department unveiled new efforts to spur pandemic recovery, including $50 million in competitive grants for literacy and higher expectations on districts to track and reverse chronic absenteeism. The department also released new data showing that roughly 187,000 tutors and mentors have signed up through its National Partnership for Student Success — bringing it closer to its goal of recruiting 250,000 adults to help students get back on track by 2025.

‘Insidious and hidden’

As of this fall, researchers said, about 13.5 million students in four high school graduating classes have been affected by the pandemic.

CRPE first issued its “State of the American Student” report in September 2022, saying pandemic school closures in 2020 and 2021 led to “unprecedented academic setbacks” for American students that made pre-existing inequalities and the nation’s youth mental health crisis worse.

A year later, CRPE says, students are still struggling in many areas. They point to record-low math and reading scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress for fourth- and eighth-grade students — in both grades, one in three can’t read at even the “basic” achievement level.

And missed more than 10% of school days during the 2021-22 school year, twice as many as in previous years. More than reported “stunted behavioral and social-emotional development” in students because of the pandemic, researchers note.

But they say schools should pay extra attention to older students, many of whom lost critical instruction time during the pandemic. 

The pandemic, Lake said, “is continuing to derail learning throughout K-12. But what we came away with was that the derailment is looking a little bit more insidious and hidden, in some ways. That is true especially for older students.”

The , for instance, needs 7.4 months of schooling to catch up to pre-pandemic levels in reading, and 9.1 months of schooling in math, according to recent assessments.

Last year’s NAEP scores showed that 30% of eighth graders performed “” in reading; 38% were in math. At the same time, just 2% of students received at school, which Lake called “a massive missed opportunity.” 

In a few places, researchers noted, the pandemic knocked older students off track, as in Washington state, where 14 percent of public high school students received at least during the 2020-2021 school year.

Even college-bound high school students are underperforming: The on the ACT college admission test last year was 19.8, they noted, the lowest since 1991.

Researchers also noted that, overall, college going is down: Between 2019 and 2023, the U.S. higher education system lost an estimated .

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in advance of the report’s release, Lake said recent data on college are “extremely concerning.”

She called for the development of what she calls a “New American High School” that abandons academic tracking and standardized diplomas for a system that helps each student “understand their own conception of a good life” through knowledge and skills. It would also help them more easily change course if needed.

In the report, Lake noted several promising new models, including Colorado’s , designed to help rural districts create career-relevant learning experiences aligned to the needs and aspirations of local economies.

She also highlighted Seckinger High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a planned artificial intelligence-themed high school that will offer a college prep curriculum “taught through the lens of artificial intelligence.” Students will also be able to pursue an education in developing AI, she said. 

A gap year for struggling students

Lake proposed that high schools and community colleges consider a new kind of post-high school “gap year” designed to help struggling high school graduates get back on track academically and prepare for college and careers. 

“Gap years are oftentimes known for serving as a time for exploration for more advantaged kids,” she said. “Let’s change that.”

The idea is still in development, she said, but could be developed quickly.

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to get going,” she said.

While high school graduation rates are rising, the researchers said, so is grade inflation — 90% of parents believe their child is actually above grade level in reading and math, according to a March 2023 , making it likely that many students are exiting the K-12 system unprepared for college and careers.

Outside experts who study education systems and secondary education said CRPE’s alarm over the data is justified.

“There’s going to be a long tail of the pandemic,” said Robert Balfanz, a scholar who studies high school as co-director of the at Johns Hopkins University.

He said a key problem from the pandemic is that many students were forced into virtual learning at key points in their education: while making the leap to more challenging reading, for instance, or diving into Algebra or calculus. “Kids that miss core transitional learning, I think, are almost hit twice,” he said. “They have that same amount of learning loss. But you could argue in some ways it was even more strategic of a loss because those are such key building blocks.”

He noted that the best predictor of whether a student will earn a college degree is if they earned “decent grades in challenging courses.” But if they don’t get access to these or don’t learn foundational material, “that’s a problem.”

Unequal access to such coursework, Balfanz said, can push students out of advanced classes.��

He is concerned that during the pandemic, many students who “officially took calculus” or other advanced courses virtually may not have gotten all of the material required. “And those kids are probably already in college.”

In the paper, researchers lamented that our K-12 system “leaves to chance” nearly every aspect of the transition from high school to college and careers, from students discovering their interests and talents to selecting a career pathway aligned to them. 

And few students ever get guidance on how to change careers and find new training or postsecondary opportunities when their interests and priorities shift.

Balfanz said the decline in “postsecondary momentum” could be the result of many factors, including the high cost of college, students who don’t feel well-prepared and a labor market that holds many opportunities for high wages without a college degree.

“I think a combination of those factors is going to push some kids to delay post-secondary,” he said. “And the more you delay it, the odds of success are less.”

Trying to go back to school at that point, he said, is “always challenging.” 

A new kind of report card

Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research () at the American Institutes for Research, said COVID recovery “has not fully happened” in many schools.��

“I’m not feeling super optimistic about pandemic recovery writ large right now,” he said. 

The new CRPE report, he said, demonstrates the “real conundrum” that schools face in communicating with parents: “I think that schools need to convey in more plain English where kids are at,” he said. 

But he said results from large-scale standardized exams “don’t resonate the way that information about their own students would resonate. What we need is for school systems to just be really clear with individual families about when their students are struggling. And I don’t think that school systems typically do that.”

Educators, he said, are typically optimistic about students’ chances of bouncing back — and fearful of being blamed for kids’ academic problems. 

“Schools don’t have a ton of incentive to communicate in ways that might negatively bounce back to them,” he said.

Lake, the CRPE director, said one good way to fix this problem is simply to rethink report cards.

“Parents look to report cards first,” she said. “And report cards need to be able to say how the kids are actually doing — not just that they’re getting a particular grade. Are they mastering the skills that they need to graduate? Are they on track? And so that’s where I’d focus my efforts.”

Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.

Here’s a typical scenario — a student thrives in elementary math, enjoying manipulatives, games and kid-friendly word problems. Then, the tides change. When more abstract thought enters the equation, the student’s once-favorite class becomes a source of anxiety and defeat.

In middle school, students also can hit a learning wall due to unaddressed learning gaps. Even before the pandemic, students were arriving in middle school with learning gaps in basic math concepts, according to Shelly Burr, who supports 42 Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, school districts through the Allegheny Intermediate Unit and serves as a certified coach through Harvard. Those basics that weren’t create barriers to learning new, more complex skills.

Filling those skill gaps while moving through grade-level content is tough.  “It’s challenging for teachers to be able to be teaching grade-level content,” Burr says, noting that sometimes they are having to reteach skills from two or three grade levels prior. Middle school math timelines typically involve learning a new skill daily, which doesn’t account for the progression of skill acquisition, she says.

 While a fresh approach to teacher training is part of the solution, innovative classroom teachers are already making strides in the right direction. Their strategies include using concrete tools to help young minds grasp abstract concepts, giving students choices and shifting mindsets to see mistakes as part of the process.

Teachers Need Guidance to Focus on Key Skills

Burr points out that teachers aren’t necessarily trained to identify the must-have skills at each grade level to remain math-proficient later. If teachers must prioritize mastery of certain skills over others, knowing which are most essential is key.

 A by the Regional Educational Laboratory Program alongside some Missouri education leaders identified five broad categories: ratios and proportional relationships, the number system, expressions and equations, geometry and statistics/probability. Mastery in these areas was most associated with Algebra I success. 

Burr says, “The biggest predictor of algebra success is all the way in terms of their number sense.” 

Concrete tools build abstract understanding

It’s less likely you’ll see students in middle school playing with tiles, making art and working with their hands, but students at this age still need such activities to succeed in math. Burr encourages teachers to use manipulatives, even during middle school, to help students transition from concrete to abstract understanding. She points to tools like base 10 blocks through fifth grade, a fraction manipulative to help kids “see it in different ways” and . 

If a school could choose only one hands-on tool for middle school, she says, algebra tiles are a must-have for everything from helping to visualize integers to solving multi-step equations. The pandemic also showed educators that virtual algebra tiles could work too.  

Classroom Snapshots Light the Way

We took a look at top practices in middle schools around the country, where teachers are actively working to engage students in math and close learning gaps. Here are some of their go-to strategies for reaching middle-schoolers:

Give Gen Z the immediate feedback they’re used to — mistakes and all

Kat Abe, eighth-grade math teacher, Northbrook Middle School, Houston

Using tech tools without direction is like using a Tesla without knowing your destination, Abe jokes. Instead, intentional and immediate feedback through tools like NearPod and Socrative increases engagement and timely improvement in her classroom. She anonymously displays multiple students’ work at once with these tools, working with students to identify what went wrong.

“They’re used to being stimulated by technology and wanting that instant feedback, that immediate gratification that comes from some of these tech tools I’m using,” she says. For Nearpod, she uploads all her lessons, giving feedback in real time. “That’s a lot different from pen and paper … where I’m not reaching all 30 students in the classroom.” She says catching mistakes immediately leads to “intentional discourse” around their work, rather than presenting her own. 

Building a culture where “Mistakes Are Totally Hot,” a math acronym she uses, is normalized because every day students see both mistakes and exemplars. The tech tools she uses lend themselves to naturally catching mistakes as they happen, so students are used to both making them and getting that immediate feedback. She also doesn’t use homework, as students get so much practice and feedback during class.

Drawing from non-math subjects to make the abstract concrete 

Elisa Murphy, director of teaching and learning, New York City Charter School of the Arts

Negative numbers can be challenging for middle-schoolers, Murphy says. “It’s really hard to understand why when you subtract a negative number, it becomes positive … that doesn’t make any sense.” But it’s easier when kids have concrete analogies like submarines going underwater, or making soup hotter or colder with ice cubes. 

Kids also are encouraged to create their own real-life examples of math in action, often with a music or art connection. For example, seventh-grade math teachers wanted students to use proportions in a project. Some used scale factors to enlarge their own drawings. Others played a piece of music to demonstrate  intervals, or the ratio of frequencies in the pitches that make up a musical chord. In a third option, students scaled up a recipe to feed the entire class and then cooked it for everyone to enjoy.

In eighth grade, math teachers used an art project to cement students’ understanding of transversals, lines that intersect two parallel lines, and the angles they create. Students had to look outside the classroom to find examples of transversals in their home or neighborhood. After photographing their example, they used an online protractor to measure the angles formed, observing whether they were complementary or supplementary to each other.

Solving real-world problems 

Jeanne Huybrechts, chief academic office, Stratford School, with multiple California locations

According to a 2022 student poll conducted by Gradient Learning, over usually don’t see the relevance of what they are learning in school. 

“When Stratford middle school students ask their math teachers, ‘Why do we have to learn this?’  we think they deserve an answer,” Huybrechts says. “Teachers regularly integrate real-world problems that illustrate the usefulness of the principles, thus making the math courses seem much more relevant.”

For example, one popular exercise is to design a smartphone and calculate the amount of storage needed.  In another unit, students design a solar panel-covered roof, calculating the pitch necessary to optimize energy capture. She says this helps to alleviate the abstractness of both algebra and geometry courses in middle school.

Setting goals and tracking mastery

Sarah Breslin, assistant principal, Brooklyn Lab Middle School, New York

When Breslin saw a discrepancy between students’ classroom “exit tickets” and their interim assessment performance, she worked with teachers to build a professional development plan. The program, called Shift the Lift, refers to moving the mental load of solving the problems from the teacher to the student. It’s designed to help teachers spot the specific standards that stump students most often and to help them embrace a growth mindset as they work to master them.

Teachers set “hyper-specific goals” for each student, push independent practice and use exit tickets two to three times a week to measure progress toward those goals, she says. The exit tickets measure how well students master the topic at hand and evaluate their work habits. Breslin says that when students begin Shift the Lift, on average, only about 55% meet expectations. Just five weeks later, that number routinely grows to 89%.

Letting students decide how to demonstrate their understanding

Ashley Barattini and April Regan, eighth-grade co-teachers, The Urban Assembly School for Leadership & Empowerment, Brooklyn

It’s not every day you see a summative assessment in the form of a podcast, brochure, Tik Tok or sewing project. But that’s the norm for Barattini and Regan’s students, where choice is a fundamental aspect of increasing engagement in middle school math. Barattini recalls a student last year who looked at the options for testing and instead proposed an embroidery project demonstrating her new math knowledge. The teachers were more than happy to oblige. 

From scavenger hunts to stations, mini-lessons with the whole group to smaller learning groups, “giving them options to show their knowledge and show the way they’re learning math and making sense of it” is key, Regan says. Lessons in their classroom last a maximum of 10 minutes, and they give homework only every few weeks, around five to six questions, one from each lesson they’ve recently taught for extra practice. 

Says Regan, “I love hearing at the end of an activity, a student being like, ‘Actually, this was really fun today.’”

This piece originally appeared on .

A new middle school civics class was approved by the Indiana State Board of Education one year after state lawmakers required the government and citizenship standards to be taught to younger students.

Some, like Joshua Oh, who started sixth grade in 2019-20, never experienced a full year free from virus worry at the campus they’re now leaving. To mark the occasion, we invited a few members of ����Ӱ��’s Student Council who are graduating, including Oh, to take stock of the current moment, reflect on the highs and lows of pandemic schooling and share what they’ve learned along the way.

Joshua Oh, graduating from Crofton Middle School in Gambrills, Maryland

My views on life and school have drastically changed from the start of middle school to my graduation. I was excited about a new school and new people when I first started middle school in sixth grade. I remember being sad that there was no recess and having a completely different group of friends.

That first week is always the most nerve-racking but fun, meeting new people and fitting into groups. As the year went on, I realized how diverse the people were, unlike in elementary school. The kids were racially different and there was less teasing. I found friends that I connected more with and started to drift away from my original friend group. I met new people and got to talk to them every day until the pandemic started. 

At the time, everyone was happy getting a break from school, not knowing how long this break would be. Those two weeks increased from weeks to months until the lockdown started. I would watch the news and be scared that people I know could get COVID and die. I felt like I would be stuck inside forever and the world was falling apart. I had peers around me losing family members and it really scared me when a close friend’s uncle passed away. I was afraid the same thing could happen to the people I care about.

I was happy playing video games and doing nothing, but virtual school started a short time later. It felt like the first day of school again, but communication with everyone had stopped. The rest of the year was easy, with little teaching and easy assignments. 

The school system used summer break to fix virtual learning, and when the new school year started, we got actual work. There were no requirements for camera use during class, so nobody used them. Nobody knew what each other looked like, making it difficult to break the ice. At the time, I didn’t have much communication with my friends except through video games. I lost a couple and gained a few friends, but this was a low point in my middle school career. 

Things started to get easier when hybrid learning was introduced, although optional. I was one of the few to pick this and got to make new friends. I didn’t learn much from this year, but it is something I will never forget. Restrictions started to decrease during that summer, and I hung out with my friends more. When the new school year started, in-person learning was required, along with masks. School started to feel normal again, and masks became optional. As the year went on, COVID faded from the news. It felt like COVID was gone and as if a dark cloud was lifted from everyone’s head.

I’m now in the last month of middle school, and it feels surreal that it’s all ending. In sixth grade, I thought middle school would be fun and would last a while, but it is almost over. I have changed a lot from the start of sixth grade to the end of eighth grade. I skipped a year where many things changed, including me, and I don’t get excited about the same things. I used to be insanely happy about things like Christmas and Halloween, but COVID has made me care about other things like time with friends and family. 

I hope in high school COVID won’t cloud my thoughts and I want to spend more time having fun with friends. It feels like COVID is attached to middle school and high school will be a fresh start. COVID will affect my future challenges by helping me realize that these problems are small. I know that I have overcome a huge obstacle and am much stronger and more resilient than I was before. The pandemic has taught me how to adapt when situations like these occur and changed who I am.

Diego Camacho, graduating from Collegiate Charter High School in Los Angeles, California

There is a strange connection between journalism and physics. At their very best, both subjects seek to expose an objective, unyielding truth. That concept, the search for reality, has motivated all my academic endeavors. 

But, unfortunately, COVID limited my high school’s ability to offer avenues for exploring the two subjects I love so much.

Whatever underlying issues were present at my school were exacerbated by the pandemic. With a small campus and student body of 200, certain problems can become more prominent than in larger schools. The resignation of a teacher, for example, may mean the loss of an entire class for the remainder of the year. Course offerings one year may be very different from the previous years. 

My school once had a physics class. After talking with the school about the possibility of taking AP Physics for my junior year, I learned the school no longer offered it and only allowed two AP classes per student, per year, assigned based on grade. Thankfully, dual-enrollment at East Los Angeles Community College allowed me to take classes the school was unable to offer.

Many educators I had the pleasure of meeting my sophomore year left the following year. We lost our PE/biology teacher, an English teacher, our enrichment coordinator and a mathematics teacher, among quite a few others. For a small school, this was incredibly difficult. On top of that, our principal resigned that summer. Since then, the school has had many temporary principals. That looming, hectic uncertainty affected students’ ability to plan ahead.

Without a mathematics teacher, the school had to combine their pre-algebra and pre-calculus courses. Seniors and juniors shared a Zoom call, relying on Khan Academy’s free online courses rather than live teaching. 

With in-person learning for senior year, I asked for an exemption to my school’s two AP class policy, hoping to stuff my senior schedule full. My school counselor was unable to grant me the exemption.

Although I did not have many STEM opportunities at my high school, my passion for physics and journalism never waivered. COVID, teacher shortages, and strict policies were stepping stones to greater things. There are countless avenues for discovery, learning and growth outside of school. From dual enrollment at your local community college, to student research, to internship opportunities at the L.A. Times, genuine passions can’t be quelled. 

Currently, I am preparing for a gap year of learning, project-finishing and internship-taking before I make a college commitment. Now, with the conclusion of my senior year, I am optimistic that future graduating classes at my former school will not face the COVID-related challenges I did.

Kota Babcock, graduate of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado

After eight jam-packed semesters at CSU, I walked across the stage and received my diploma on May 13. It’s only been about a month since then, but already, leaving behind my identity as a student has been harder than I expected. 

With each exam, I found myself craving the freedom from homework, on-campus jobs and the stress of student life. As I now walk away, it’s strange to think that for the first time since I was 5  years old, I cannot call myself a student.

While in undergrad, I was deeply involved in HIV and LGBTQ activism. As the chair of All The T.E.A. (Teach, Empower, Advocate), I drove over an hour from Fort Collins to Denver to coordinate workshops, attend local community conferences and to meet with the activists who taught me everything I know. My efforts with All The T.E.A. shaped my interest in fighting antisemitism on campus and in advocating for the full inclusion of minority students at Colorado State. 

I also worked as KCSU-FM’s news director and as the Rocky Mountain Collegian’s arts and culture director, interviewing a variety of musicians, small business owners and other notable locals. 

I’m fortunate enough to have found a job right away as a general assignment reporter at a local Wyoming newspaper, the Laramie Boomerang. But striking the balance with continuing my activism work now presents a new challenge. 

I still make my way to Denver each month (sometimes virtually) to work toward the same goal All The T.E.A. has worked toward since I was in middle school: empowering people living with HIV and advocating for a better future for all people impacted by HIV. A difficulty we faced since 2020 continues to plague the organization, as COVID-19 made it nearly impossible for people to consider HIV an urgent enough public health and social justice issue to volunteer their time to. As our organization moves toward the future, we’re building partnerships to continue offering educational resources, free HIV testing, a shared community and more. 

As for life in Laramie, it’s much different than the experiences I had growing up in Denver, although somewhat similar to the college town I spent the last four years in. Shopping options are a bit scarce, as are easy-to-find LGBTQ spaces for non-students compared to any city in Colorado. Despite Wyoming not having a single gay bar, the aftermath of pushed forward intense change in the small city. When Shepard attended the University of Wyoming in Laramie in 1998, two men from the city beat Shepard and left him for dead outside of town, and Shepard later died in a Fort Collins hospital. Now, most of downtown Laramie is covered in gay or transgender pride flags, and the city recently celebrated its sixth annual pride festival. The story of Shepard haunted me in my youth, especially as my friends and I dealt with anti-gay bullies throughout middle school just over 100 miles south. His death deeply impacted the local communities in both Colorado and Wyoming, and it served as a warning to openly LGBTQ people throughout my pre-teen and teenage years. Fort Collins, it seems to me, has largely moved on while Laramie remains mournful. 

Looking back on my career as a student, I sometimes grieve what the pandemic took from me — my study abroad plans were canceled twice — but I also reflect on what I’ve learned. Student media taught me to stand up as loudly as possible for change. From my coursework to my two on-campus jobs and my work with the Hillel Jewish Center at CSU, I learned that to survive as a minority in any space that marginalizes your experiences, you must be as loud as you can be. 

While I never went into journalism with the intent of uncovering secrets or exposing corruption, I did go into it knowing that people in powerful places don’t typically want social change or transparency, and fighting back against that is my goal in everything I do. As I move into my adult life, I won’t forget this lesson and I hope that incoming college students can understand this as well.

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

For 60 seconds, 19 middle and early high school students remained relatively silent apart from the crinkling of popsicle wrappers. They awaited the verdict of a peer’s model rocket after a failed launch at Danehy Park just outside of Boston.

As the minute ended and it was safe to inspect the engine and try anew, the culprit was revealed — a finicky starter and an igniter, which had likely slipped off in the summer wind.

Cheers and chatter quickly resumed for the participants of a free Summer Rocketry Program hosted by the Science Club for Girls, a Boston-area nonprofit that offers STEM learning opportunities year-round for K-8 girls, nonbinary youth, and those that identify with girlhood. For over 25 years, their focus has been fostering excitement and confidence for communities underrepresented in STEM fields by income, race, or first-generation college-bound status.

In a hybrid learning model, summer students explored the science behind model rockets, aspects of living in space and astronaut training, and participated in a STEM career panel over Zoom, ultimately coming together on July 16 for the in-person rocket launch. The two-week program is sponsored by the and .

Science Club for Girls hosted one in-person launch in 2020, per pandemic safety regulations to limit the group, and this summer expanded it to two longer in-person launching sessions in Somerville, Massachusetts. The Club is hosting two groups in this year’s Rocketry Camp, with 19 students in July and 23 in August, and — reflecting an uptick in interest — 17 students on a waitlist.

“It’s all inquiry-based learning, hands-on through doing, where everything’s an activity. The girls are engaging with materials and actually learning from what they do,” said Hannah Weinstock, program manager for the Club and a former middle school STEM teacher in Chelsea, just northeast of Boston.

Executive Director Dr. Bonnie Bertolaet says that while the organization focuses on STEM content delivery, they are attune to the “context of the whole child and social-emotional learning, the relationships, the mentors — that kind of support makes children more open to learning and feel like they’re in a trusting environment where they can make mistakes and ask questions.”

Particularly as students gear up to return to school after a turbulent hybrid or fully remote year, Massachusetts education leaders and Gov. Charlie Baker are stressing the impact that opportunities to be curious and learn from each other in-person may have for young children this summer. In April, the to address the pandemic’s negative impact on learning.

While the Club did not receive that funding specifically, Bertolaet said, “Our entire organization, and all of our programs, have been squarely centered around offsetting the loss of learning.”

The program’s virtual aspect “has allowed students from the broader community to join,” Weinstock said, with campers hailing from all over eastern Massachusetts, including Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Revere, Lexington, Sudbury and Melrose.

Sonali Fiorillo, a rising junior at Wellesley High School and mentor for younger youth in the program, joined the Club’s in-person launch this year with her rockets from 2020 and 2021 in-hand. Her interests are aerospace engineering, astronomy, education and sustainability.

“One of my favorite things about rockets in real life right now is that I’ve been seeing has been doing some launches and been re-landing the boosters back on the ground,” Fiorillo said. “I know that rocketry has a negative impact on the environment with all of the fuel emissions and also the trash that we usually leave in the ocean, or in space just as , which can be harmful to satellites and other objects orbiting the earth.”

This summer provides plenty of opportunity to witness rockets hurtling toward space, with billionaires . SpaceX, founded and run by billionaire Elon Musk, is also .

The Club’s model rockets, barring any launch-related damage, can and are reused. After July’s group successfully launched their rockets and marked landings on the field, students offered up their models to Weinstock and Evelyn Gonzalez, the Club’s program recruitment manager, giving them a chance to see the science in action.

Rashida Santos, mother to a rising Boston Public Schools 6th-grader and Club camper, watched as one rocket made its descent above parents’ heads, ultimately touching down in a nearby baseball field. The summer program came recommended from her daughter’s school in a larger packet of available programs, and one of her daughter’s teachers pointed out this group specifically.

“I’m a total science geek and want all my children to be, too,” Santos said.

Lucy Stone Roxbury Prep sent an email to Tracie Laroche, another mother, with the Science Club for Girls’s information during last school year. Her daughter got involved with after-school and weekend programming in the fall of 2020. “She’s kind of my science nerd, she likes it all,” Laroche says.

While all of the youth express a growing interest in STEM fields, some participate and come back as mentors for the social-emotional engagement.

“I really like the community — I have so much in common with these girls,” said Tamar Etienne, a teacher/mentor for this summer’s program and rising 10th-grader at Cambridge’s Prospect Hill Academy Charter School. “We all like science obviously, and are super positive, sweet, and kind.”

Given that the program is almost completely virtual and students don’t attend the same schools, the Science Club for Girls is keen on fostering relationships in remote programming. Gonzalez, the recruitment manager, highlights that the moments where they bonded over favorite TV shows and musical instruments were critical to the July launch’s success.

“Being out here in person, it really reflects how in Zoom they were able to connect,” Gonzalez said.

The Club also helped their campers’ families, supporting them with digital literacy, computer access and staying connected to their children’s schools.

“We’re going to the tech help desks at schools for our families, and by helping them register for our programs, that helps get those families back engaged with the public schools for remote learning,” said Bertolaet.

In the fall, the Science Club for Girls will continue hybrid instruction for about 100 in-person and 250-plus virtual students, citing parent demand for both opportunities. Youth will turn their focus from space matter to human matter, learning a different bodily system each week. In the final eighth week, they’ll diagnose a model patient.

The organization has plans to expand learning opportunities throughout Massachusetts, at a time when common narratives push that .

On launch day, Bertolaet noticed students “were so excited to meet each other, even girls who had been off camera the whole time,” she said. “There was no self consciousness, which is great. I mean this is about being yourself, feeling comfortable, feeling safe and exploring.”

To learn the geometric concept of transformations this year, Crystal Watson’s eighth-graders drew up blueprints of apartments. As they worked, she asked them to imagine designing affordable housing for Black and Hispanic families like theirs in Cincinnati who have been priced out of their neighborhoods.

But when she had them add a hallway down the middle of their floor plans, with apartments on either side, some struggled with the idea of reflection — flipping a figure to create a mirror image.

“There are still kids who mix up their x and y axis,” said Watson, who teaches at Hartwell School.

At that point, she pulled students aside individually to explain the difference and offered tips for remembering. Her strategy — connecting math to socio-economic issues in the community and letting students proceed even if they haven’t mastered the skills — is captured in that gives teachers steps for “dismantling racism” in math instruction.

But the book’s claim that a focus on producing the right answer promotes “white supremacy culture” alarmed some who question how inaccuracy in math could benefit students. And, partly in response to the controversy, California state board members recently recommended against incorporating the resource into a redesign of the state’s math program.

While history and literature seem like obvious battlegrounds for schools to address the effects of racial discrimination, some might question whether math — where achievement depends on precise calculations — is the appropriate venue for such fights. Those devoted to greater equity say the middle grades are a period when many Black and Hispanic students begin to turn off of math, only to continue struggling through high school. But the suggestion that answers to math problems are subjective became easy fodder for culture war conservatives.

“Math enjoyed this notion that it was somehow above the influence of the cultural and political issues of our time,” said Rachel Ruffalo, the director of educator engagement at The Education Trust-West, the Oakland-based advocacy group that created the workbook.

Now, that is changing. The workbook is part of the organization’s larger — one that seeks to address persistent racial disparities in achievement. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the $1 million initiative last spring as part of focused on making algebra more accessible to students of color, partly in response to learning disruptions caused by the pandemic. Districts in Georgia, Ohio and California are among those using the workbook in teacher training.

Conservative Fox News lampooned, sometimes out of context, a handful of the book’s ideas — for example, the notion that key teaching practices such as requiring students to show their work and complete assignments individually are based in racism. appeared in mid-February after the Oregon Department of Education teachers to a training featuring the book. The Fox piece sparked in other outlets and from columnists, most of whom neglected to mention that the authors later say, “Of course, most math problems have correct answers.”

Erec Smith, a professor of rhetoric and composition at York College of Pennsylvania and co-founder of , is among those who accuse the book’s authors of their own form of bigotry.

“The workbook’s ultimate message is clear: Black kids are bad at math, so why don’t we just excuse them from really learning it,” said Smith, who is Black.

Even leaders of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have reservations about the guide — though their reasons differ.

“Are we building bridges or throwing grenades?” asked David Barnes, associate executive director of the council. “When you get to page two and what’s bolded is ‘dismantling white supremacy,’ there are some people that cannot read past that.”

Other groups came to Oregon’s defense, offering positive reactions to the book and its broader effort to make math more culturally relevant for students of color.

“You and I were taught that everything happened in Greece,” said Kristopher Childs, director of Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit focusing on academic success for historically underserved students. “Every culture and civilization contributed to mathematics. Students need to know that.”

The authors, for example, prompt teachers to have students explore the Egyptian and Babylonian roots of the Pythagorean Theorem, before Pythagoras identified it in Greece during the 6th century B.C.

The guide draws inspiration from another document titled which includes what some scholars on race argue are characteristics of “white supremacy culture” — ideals such as perfectionism, individualism and a sense of urgency they say allowed early American colonists to dominate over African slaves and Native Americans.

‘Room for creativity’

Samuel Rhodes, an assistant professor of elementary math education at Georgia Southern University, said focusing only on the right answer can at times be counterproductive. In a course last year for future K-8 teachers, he called on a student who gave a wrong answer to a problem.

He said he could have done what he’s observed in countless public school classrooms — go on to the next student until someone answered correctly, or repeat the steps.

But with that strategy, a “student … just immediately shuts down,” Rhodes said. “Now they have to ignore everything they were thinking with the goal of trying to understand how the other students did it.”

Instead, he asked the student how she arrived at that answer and learned she had a “creative, brilliant process” for finding the solution, but got derailed by a small computation mistake.

“There’s no room for creativity when there is a fixation on the answer,” he said.

But knowing whether a student is “wildly wrong” or “off by just a hair” takes deep expertise in math — something teachers, especially those at the elementary level — don’t always have, said Jay Wamsted, a longtime Atlanta math teacher working in high schools serving predominantly Black and HIspanic students.

He added, “It’s not obvious to the layperson why ‘the right answer’ isn’t always preferable and the workbook needs to be clear about why that is.”

While the workbook discourages teachers from asking students to “’show their work’ in … prescribed ways,” it does recommend that students have multiple options for demonstrating what they understand.

That’s a shift Lisa Owens, another Cincinnati math teacher, is still trying to make.

“For me, that was letting go of control. For a lot of teachers, that is where the issue is,” said Owens. But she said she’s learned to spot shallow attempts at cultural relevance. “You can’t just put an ethnic name into a word problem.”

Beginning her career in a Chicago suburb, she said she “was raised that you don’t see color.” But now Owens, who is white, teaches at Roberts Academy, which serves a predominantly Black and Hispanic population. She helped start a school equity coalition and opposed the school’s former practice of tracking fourth graders into low and high classes based on math scores.

She recognizes the hurdles involved in meeting the guide’s definition of an “antiracist math educator.” Allowing students to arrive at mistakes on their own can take up valuable class time, and a lot of teachers, she said, still take a “tough love” approach and question whether such methods would improve test scores. According to state data, less than 10 percent of the eighth graders in the school score proficient in math.

‘The role of education’

Teaching practices like those in the workbook have been part of the San Francisco Unified School District’s shift in math instruction since 2014. That’s when the district stopped separating students into basic or Algebra I classes in middle school — a controversial policy that California is now considering statewide. The state will continue to collect public comments over the summer, and the state board will make a final decision in November. Advocates for gifted students are the proposed changes.

So far, administrators using the workbook have had a receptive audience of educators committed to “social justice math.” But when they try to spread those ideas among colleagues at their schools, they often face resistance.

“Challenging the status quo is not easy for a lot of teachers,” said Bernadette Andres-Salgarino, math coordinator for the Santa Clara County Office of Education in California.

The guide caused enough of a storm in California that members of the state board advised its Instructional Quality Commission, which is drafting the to remove references to it.

While Barnes, with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, thought the guide used “words that immediately divide,” he appreciates the intent behind it — an effort to make math more accessible for students of color and give them a strong foundation when they enter high school.

It complements, he said, the push in California and to de-track math by keeping students in the same courses at least through the eighth grade. Virginia is considering changes.

less than 20 percent of Black students take Algebra 1 by eighth grade, compared to 67 percent of Asian students and 45 percent of white students. And even if they take higher-level math in middle school, Black students are less likely than white and Asian students to stay on an accelerated track in high school.

The pandemic has set students of color even further behind. from testing provider Renaissance showed that while all students performed below pre-pandemic levels in math, the decline was greatest among Black and Hispanic students. And on a national scale, the between Black and white eighth-graders hasn’t budged in years.

Williamson Evers, a former U.S. Department of Education official during the second Bush administration and a senior fellow at the conservative Independent Institute, suggested the social justice approach to math will put U.S. students further behind those in other countries.

“Our kids are going to be competing in a world with kids that have this in their heads. They’re doing better. They have the material under their belt,” he said during a . His in the Wall Street Journal ran before California state board members turned their back on the workbook.

Josie McSpadden, a spokeswoman at the Gates Foundation, defended the project.

“At times, research has shown that racial bias and student mindsets can affect student academic achievement,” she said, adding the workbook, “highlights a critical discussion — how students arrive at answers and demonstrate their understanding and conceptual grasp of important math concepts.”

This fall in Cincinnati, math teachers throughout the district will walk through the practices recommended in the guide. Watson — who plays clean versions of rap songs in her class when students finish an assessment — said math is usually “so cut and dried.” The resource gives teachers ways to incorporate students’ opinions and family stories into her lessons.

“I don’t have to be an anti-racism and anti-bias guru,” she said, “to pick this up and do what’s good for kids.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to and ����Ӱ��.

Lead Art: A math teacher works with a student at Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School in San Francisco. The district is among those working to address racial disparities in math achievement.  (Lea Suzuki / The San Francisco Chronicle / Getty Images)