Since the mid-20th century, the town of Highland Park has resisted annexation and today operates a separate, roughly 6,700-student school district that is surrounded on all sides by the 139,723-student Dallas Independent School District. Student demographics between the two school systems — and the services they’re able to offer — are markedly different, from New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative, which explores how school district borders across the U.S. create racial and economic segregation — often intentionally. 

Included in the report is that allows users to explore school district segregation by race and class in their own communities. 

In Dallas, students of color comprise 94% of enrollment and in Highland Park,  just 18%. Such segregation extends beyond race. In Highland Park, less than 4% of students live in poverty. In the Dallas school system, a quarter of kids are impoverished, with some of the city’s most underserved neighborhoods just a stone’s throw from Highland Park. 

Such jarring school district disparities, which create real-world gaps in learning opportunities for students, exist across the country. America’s patchwork school district borders carry serious consequences for communities and children’s academic outcomes, according to the report by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C. Nationally, about 30% of school funding is generated by local property taxes, a reality that creates haves and have-nots between property-wealthy districts and those that serve predominantly low-income families. 

Much of the disparities can be blamed on inequitable housing policies, such as redlining and , which were explicitly implemented to segregate neighborhoods along race and class lines, ultimately showing up “not just in residential patterns but also in school budgets,” said Zahava Stadler, a project director at New America who shared the findings of her research during a workshop last week at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas. 

“These are policy choices that are being made not just in the way we’ve designed school funding systems, but also in the way we actively maintain school funding systems year to year,” she said. “All of those things are policy choices that are being made by state policymakers every single year.”  

In total, researchers analyzed more than 13,000 school districts across the country, along with more than 25,000 pairs of neighboring school district borders, to identify how such arbitrary divisions work to generate inequality. Nationwide, they found that, on average, enrollment of students of color fluctuated by 14 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Along the 100 most racially segregated school district borders, however, the average difference was 78 percentage points. In other words, in one school district, students of color comprised 2% of the total enrollment while, in a district directly next door, they accounted for 80% of the student body. 

Economic segregation was similarly stark. On average, the enrollment of impoverished students fluctuated by 5.2 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Yet along the 100 most economically segregated school district borders, researchers found the average divide was roughly six times that, at 31 percentage points. One example, the Utica, New York, school district where 33% of students live in poverty, compared to the neighboring New Hartford district where 5% do. 

While school district border changes have been used by communities interested in concentrating their affluence, Stadler said the opposite — district consolidation — should be viewed as “a tool in the toolbox of creating more equitable school districts,” establishing schools that are more diverse while ensuring that all students have fairer access to educational resources. 

But local context matters. Simply merging school districts to eliminate racial and economic segregation isn’t always the most equitable solution, the report argues, as each area has its own individual policies and contexts. In South Dakota, for example, researchers observed striking racial and economic segregation between the predominantly white Custer School District and the neighboring Oglala Lakota School District, located on the high-poverty Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Indigenous students represent 96% of enrollment on the reservation and less than 4% in Custer. 

An influx of federal and state dollars has left the Oglala Lakota County Schools among South Dakota’s best-funded, but they remain among its lowest-performing. These high levels of funding “do not ensure our children a rich education,” Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, argues in the report. Along with historical challenges and the scars of trauma and colonialism, Cournoyer said, the reservation’s schools also have to contend with bureaucracy and limitations on how they can spend those government dollars. That creates barriers in how they can use funds “to address the unique needs of Native students, which results in inequitable access to opportunities.” 

Despite the imbalance in school resources, Cournoyer notes that students on the reservation benefit from cultural and language support — something they could miss if they attended schools in Custer, even with its “nicer facilities and more advanced technology.” The city and its school district were named for George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. commander who fought and killed Indigenous people on the Great Plains before his defeat at Little Bighorn. 

“They would not be in a school environment that reflects or values their native culture,” Cournoyer wrote. “They would be isolated, away from the protection of their family and tribal leadership. They would be more likely to encounter racism and stereotyping, making them less comfortable with expressing their Native identity.”

When her husband recently retired after 22 years, Andujar began to rethink her own career path and recalled her years volunteering in her children’s schools. She became an educational assistant in a Spanish dual-immersion program in the Clarksville-Montgomery schools, northwest of Nashville.

“I wasn’t planning to become a teacher, but I noticed how a teacher could transform a student’s life,” she said.

Now she’s part of an effort to transform educator preparation with the nation’s first apprenticeship in teaching approved by the U.S. Department of Labor. A partnership between the school district and Austin-Peay State University, the is a “grow-your-own” model in which districts recruit candidates from within their communities and give them extensive on-the-job experience before they take over their own classrooms. With the nation’s teachers far less racially diverse than the public school students they instruct, many consider the approach an effective way to recruit more Black and Hispanic educators. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted grow-your-own programs in a visit to Tennessee State University last week. He was instrumental in getting Labor Secretary Martin Walsh’s support for the apprenticeship, according to Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn.

He visited Tennessee State University to learn more about its own with Metro Nashville Public Schools and told that it’s important to “make sure that teachers aren’t working three jobs to make ends meet.”

With the nation currently fixed on staffing shortages and the persistent challenges of hard-to-fill positions, efforts to strengthen the teacher “pipeline” are among policymakers. Over 20 years ago, a major study of a grow-your-own program for paraprofessionals showed that participants were more likely than new teachers to still be teaching after three years. But the model lacks long-term evidence of effectiveness. Experts say the federal government’s support — and potential funding — should help spread the concept.

“Let’s get rid of this idea of a first-year teacher,” Schwinn told ����Ӱ�� last month when she announced the new Teacher Occupation Apprenticeship. 

By the time candidates finish the three-year program, she said they’ll not only have a bachelor’s degree and teacher certification but also experience working under the supervision of a master educator. While the concept isn’t new, funding for such programs has been inconsistent, according to a from New America, a center-left think tank. The American Rescue Plan offers a new source of support for the model, but that too will run out, Schwinn said.

Access to state and federal funding for apprenticeships, however “is a game changer,” Schwinn said. “It is that permanent, recurring source of funding.”

Putting ‘dreams on hold’

The awarded more than $130 million in grants to 15 states last year for apprenticeships to meet workforce needs across multiple industries. Becoming a with the labor department — which requires programs to meet specific quality standards — puts Tennessee’s program in position to receive funding that would cover both pay and the cost of education for participants, removing a barrier that often keeps lower-income and non-white candidates from pursuing teaching. 

For now, the state is using $20 million in federal relief funds to support 65 grow-your-own programs across the state, including the one in Clarksville-Montgomery, where Scottie Bonecutter is working in a first-grade classroom while earning a degree and certification in special education. 

She grew up in Clarksville, graduated from the district in 2006 and was doing the “whole traditional college thing” she said. Just as she began taking core courses to become a teacher, she got pregnant and had her first son.

“I ended up putting my dreams on hold,” she said. 

She became an educational assistant in the district in 2018. By the time she applied for the residency program last year, she felt more equipped to take advantage of her mentors’ expertise.

“Now that I’m an adult, I’m not scared to raise my hand and say, ‘I have a struggle with this,’” she said, adding that the supervising teachers “are willing to literally walk us through every single step of every single decision they make. They are willing to explain every single standard that we use in class.”

Sean Impeartice, the district’s chief academic officer, said sending candidates to college without the support to balance work, education and family life responsibilities is “educational malpractice.” He hires staff members to work as “facilitators,” who Bonecutter said, provide “emotional support, if you have a lot going on at home, at school or in any aspect of life.”

‘Improving practice’

But it’s a challenging time to become a teacher. Entering the field during the pandemic has been a “baptism by fire,” said Impeartice.

Because of staff shortages, some residents have already led classes on their own. Learning to teach for the first time in a remote arrangement was an additional hurdle. Andujar spent much of her first year in the program teaching Spanish grammar remotely.

“I highly dislike Zoom,” she said. “I’m not a techie person.”

Growing efforts among conservative lawmakers to restrict curriculum also feel out of “touch with the realities of being a teacher,” said Amaya Garcia, the deputy director of New America’s Pre-K to 12 program. 

That’s why incentives, such as full tuition and mentoring support, are important for addressing teacher shortages, she said, adding that recruiting paraprofessionals, like Andujar and Bonecutter, is a “logical and sound investment” for policymakers because many already have some college credit, classroom experience and often hail from the communities they’re serving. 

Apprenticeships generally receive . Governors of both parties have highlighted the model during this year.

But researchers don’t know enough about whether participants in grow-your-own programs stay in teaching or improve student learning, Garcia said. In 2001, the Wallace Foundation its $50 million Pathways to Teaching Careers program for paraprofessionals and other non-certified staff and found that 81 percent of participants remained in teaching for at least three years after completing the program, compared to 71 percent for new teachers in general.

There’s even less data on whether students in high school pathway programs ultimately enter and stay in teaching, even though such programs are growing in popularity.

Just last week, the Chicago Public Schools announced that it wants to expand the number of graduates it hires through its program from about 140 annually to over 500. 

One program that Garcia considers “” is the two-year Bilingual Teacher Fellow program in the Highline Public Schools, near Seattle — a partnership that began in 2016 with Western Washington University to address a specific need for bilingual teachers.

Sandra Ruiz Kim, formerly a manager in a dental office, was among the first to finish the program in 2018. Now a sixth-grade Spanish teacher at Glacier Middle School, she noticed a difference between those who completed the fellowship and those without such experience. 

“We were able — even as first-year teachers — to have meaningful conversations about improving practice,” she said, adding that the experience also gave her access to a network of colleagues, “which can be vital for career progression in an industry that often depends on professional relationships and word-of-mouth reputation.”

A recent showed that “homegrown” teachers — those who teach in the districts where they graduated — contribute to small improvements in student performance in English language arts.

That confirms why recruiting teachers from the community can be “an impactful strategy,” Garcia said, adding, “We’re going to be getting more proof points because we’re going to have more districts like Highline that have been doing this for several years.”

As in most pre-K classrooms, Geneva Gadsden’s students — known as the All Stars — rotate through different stations, from dress-up corners to building block areas.

But the All Stars, the Happy Owls and other groups of preschoolers at the Whitted School in Durham, North Carolina, also take turns with Chromebooks, spending 15 minutes a day clicking through early literacy activities from , a nonprofit software provider.

When COVID-19 shut down schools, many pre-K programs across the country saw participation drop or sent home paper materials for at-home learning. Not so at Whitted, where students kept rolling along with the Waterford Reading Academy at home.

“It really was a lifesaver,” said Suzanne Cotterman, early education director for the Durham Public Schools. The district adopted the program three years ago as a pilot, but expanded access to all pre-K families when schools closed. Some families, Cotterman said, couldn’t participate in scheduled Zoom classes, but “the bonus with Waterford is that it allows you to do it any time.”

More than a year after COVID-19 forced preschool programs to shift online, Waterford hopes schools continue to employ virtual models like theirs to help young children prepare for kindergarten. Waterford designed its program to work in classrooms like Gadsden’s or to be used directly by families at home. Waterford Upstart, the organization’s signature early learning program, can reach children in rural areas and other communities that don’t have access to pre-K, said spokeswoman Kim Fischer. But many early education experts oppose spending public funds on computer-based models, saying they can’t match the experience children get in a high-quality classroom. And they interpret the huge enrollment declines in pre-K and kindergarten this year as evidence that most parents agree.

“It’s important to understand the limits of digital technology in early education,” said Aaron Loewenberg, an education policy analyst at New America, a center-left think tank. “So much of pre-K is about the social-emotional learning that happens via student interaction with peers and well-trained educators, and that sort of learning can’t be replicated by interacting with a computer program.”

While there are other widely used online early learning resources that parents can purchase or find for free, including and , Waterford has been especially successful at garnering public funds for preschoolers’ at-home learning.

In 2014, the nonprofit received a $14.2 million to start pilot programs in five more states. And they view President Joe Biden’s $200 billion universal pre-K proposal as an opportunity for further expansion.

It’s been a relatively quick ascend for Upstart — an acronym, now discarded, for “Utah Preparing Students Today for a Rewarding Tomorrow” — which received its first grants from the state in 2009 to reach families in rural areas. A 2018 from the Utah Department of Education showed 77 percent of Upstart children had average or above average literacy scores at the end of the program, compared with 71 percent of children in high-quality public preschools and 69 percent in private programs. In math, Upstart children demonstrated no advantage.

‘Children that you know are behind’

Public funds support Upstart in five states, with most targeting the program to low-income children. Wisconsin made the program available in districts with significant achievement gaps. South Carolina spends about $3 million to serve 1,400 4-year-olds in 17 high-poverty districts. As in Durham, children complete activities with parents at home in addition to attending state-funded pre-K.

“The big draw … was the family engagement piece,” said Quincie Moore, director of the state education department’s Office of Early Learning and Literacy. Upstart provides family liaisons who monitor children’s progress and answer parents’ questions.

She added if additional funds were available, she would consider expanding the program to children not enrolled in a center. “It’s additional instruction for children that you know are behind,” Moore said.

That’s precisely what worries early-childhood education advocates — that policymakers might see Upstart as a way to do pre-K on the cheap. The program costs about $2,000 per child, well under the average $5,500 per child states spend on pre-K.

“Our biggest concern is that using public [money] will interfere with efforts to provide real publicly funded preschool to children,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, formerly the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. In a 2018 statement, the organization and another nonprofit, Defending the Early Years, about Upstart, calling it part of a “larger set of trends to further digitize and privatize public services.”

Rhian Evans Allvin, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, expressed in 2020, and said in a recent email that regardless of the pandemic, her views haven’t changed.

But Fischer, with Waterford, described Upstart as a catalyst that has convinced Utah lawmakers of the importance of early learning. Until 2019, the state didn’t even have a public pre-K program, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual “yearbook.” But in the 2019-20 school year, the state spent almost $7 million on two grant programs supporting preschool centers.

“We do not see ourselves as competition to any other form of early learning,” said Fischer. “We try to fill the gaps wherever there are.”

In New Hampshire, young English learners often fall into those gaps. that if young children are not proficient in English by kindergarten, they can trail their peers in academic outcomes throughout elementary and middle school. That’s the population the state education department was hoping to reach when it awarded a $440,000 grant to the Greater Nashua Smart Start Coalition, an early learning initiative within the local United Way, to offer Upstart. The program was funded with a federal Preschool Development Grant aimed at better preparing children in low-income families for kindergarten.

Five-year-old Alice Wang, whose home language is Mandarin, would have attended the local Nashua school district’s pre-K if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.

“Waterford Upstart kind of became her school,” said Zixin Lou, her mother, who doesn’t think Alice is any less prepared for kindergarten this fall. “She told me, “I know how to spell ‘mom.’ I know how to spell ‘water,’ and ‘Mom, do you know chickens hatch from eggs?’”

Between the beginning of the pandemic and April of this year, the number of Upstart users quadrupled, from 20,719 to over 82,600, according to Waterford data. And now, with Biden pledging to offer universal pre-K, the organization sees the potential for Upstart to help meet demand.

“We have to focus on how we can achieve universal kindergarten readiness as quickly as possible,” Fischer said, adding that it “could take decades” to add enough classrooms to serve all 3- and 4-year-olds. Existing state-funded pre-K programs serve just over a third of the nation’s 4-year-olds and about 6 percent of the 3-year-olds, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. “To be truly universal, the country has to meet children where they are. There are always going to be kids who don’t have access.”

The question is whether an online program is a sufficient replacement for in-person pre-K. At the start of the pandemic, preschool participation fell by half, and those children who stayed in remote programs didn’t participate consistently, according to the institute’s surveys of families.

“Parents have been frustrated and dissatisfied with remote pre-K this last year, and I think they will make that clear,” said Steve Barnett, the institute’s senior director.

‘Deepen their learning’

Much of the skepticism relates to screen time. that young children just don’t learn as well from screens as they do in a face-to-face setting, and too much screen time can interfere with development, research has shown. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than an hour of screen time for 2- to 5-year-olds, but from Ohio showed that during the pandemic, kindergartners’ daily average time online had reached more than six hours.

The AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation, a nonprofit that works with charter schools to implement their preschool model, ran into these concerns when it joined with , Nick Jr.’s educational streaming service, and , an early learning app, to offer free, online content — called Ready Grow — for children in 100 classrooms. Families in the program also received iPads.

In focus groups, parents said the digital materials filled a void when they were “feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what to do,” said Chavaughn Brown, who leads Appletree’s research efforts. Some teachers worked hard to incorporate characters from Nick Jr. programs like “Blue’s Clues” and “Paw Patrol” into their lessons so children would see the connection to Ready Grow. But some parents didn’t want their children to have any more screen time beyond virtual Zoom classes.

Even so, Appletree will continue to offer a remote option for families this fall. Brown said while she sees ed tech as a supplement to high-quality preschool, there are ways “you can leverage children’s love for those characters to deepen their learning in other ways.”

Fischer, with Waterford, said there’s a false assumption that children using Upstart are spending hours in front of screens. The literacy component takes just 15 minutes, she said. Adding math and science would stretch the time to half an hour, and family liaisons are trained to intervene if they think children are spending too much time on the program.

As use of Upstart grows in other states, Waterford’s largest footprint remains in Utah. State funding for the program continues to grow, with the organization slated to receive over $24 million in 2022. Upstart is available to any preschooler in Utah.

But educators aren’t necessarily advertising that fact.

The Granite School District in Salt Lake City, for example, is focused on its own, in-person preschool classes for 3- and 4-year-olds. Spokesman Benjamin Horsley said leaders haven’t worked directly with Waterford to recruit preschoolers for Upstart.

“We do feel like there is some value in utilizing digital programming,” he said. “The concern has always been, will parents think that an online program is sufficient over in-person instruction.”

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to and ����Ӱ��.