Alabama recently deployed math coaches to low-performing schools; New Jersey is creating new statewide civics and history assessments; and California leaders are planning major investments in professional development to turn around achievement declines. Those are all efforts fueled by data from the Nation’s Report Card to close learning gaps worsened by the pandemic.

It’s encouraging to see states take action to combat sweeping declines on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Congress established NAEP, the only nationally representative benchmark, to understand what students know and can do in subjects such as reading, math and civics. “Decisionmakers need to see the facts clearly. They must make sense of a storm of confusing data and help lead the way to better schools. The Nation’s Report Card — if it is well-designed, clear and usable — can be a rudder against the storm,” read a blue-ribbon group’s 1987 report. 

State leaders have responded to this call to use NAEP in varying ways.

Mississippi is among those most recognized for using NAEP as a lever for improvements; beginning in 2013, leaders there revamped state standards to meet the rigor of NAEP and overhauled literacy instruction. That led to major progress. What set Mississippi apart was its stance that NAEP wasn’t something to brush aside or hide from. Despite low scores and poor rankings, the state used NAEP as a tool to galvanize and empower leaders to make improvements for students.

As executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, I frequently talk with state and district leaders about their educational progress and recently conducted an informal review of how they’re using the NAEP data. There’s much to applaud.

Several states, like Mississippi, are using NAEP, to raise expectations. In addition to putting coaches in schools to spur math achievement, Alabama leaders are leveraging the Mississippi model, publicly citing low scores and setting bold new goals, to overhaul standards and improve policies. These changes have led to significant progress. Virginia’s leaders are also citing NAEP as they implement reforms designed to better inform the public and improve schools. As Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera recently wrote in The 74, “We are using data as a flashlight, not a hammer, to inform better decisions at kitchen tables, classrooms, school boards and the State Capitol.”

Some states also are using the Nation’s Report Card as a resource for improving and developing their own assessments. For example, my home state of New Jersey is creating statewide history and civics assessments based on items from NAEP. Oregon is doing the same for science, and South Carolina leaders have been using NAEP frameworks, which guide content development on the Nation’s Report Card assessments, to inform their state reading and math tests. 

Leaders in districts that participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment program also are using NAEP data in pivotal ways. In Philadelphia, Superintendent Tony Watlington has spotlighted the district’s NAEP data to describe challenges students face and set goals for improving achievement. In Baltimore, Superintendent Sonja Santelises cited NAEP data when establishing plans to create more out-of-school learning opportunities for students. 

The NAEP assessments also include rich student and teacher survey data. It’s an underutilized resource that can provide context around achievement results. 

Recent findings that struck a chord with me identified disturbing declines in independent reading. Just 14% of 13-year-olds say they read for fun almost daily, down 13 points from a decade ago. As a mother of three school-aged children, and someone who spent much of my childhood with a dog-eared book in hand, I hope state and district leaders consider ways to tackle this problem and foster a love of reading in all students.

I also hope policymakers take note of recent NAEP teacher survey data showing educators lack confidence when it comes to closing students’ knowledge and skill gaps. This breaks my heart. Teachers  work so hard every day and are hands-down my kids’ favorite superheroes — with Spider-Man and Wonder Woman as close seconds. Every time my daughter, now in kindergarten, sees her pre-K teacher in the hallway, she runs over and gives her a bear hug. It’s hard to remember not to run in the hall when Mrs. Dillon is there to greet you with a giant smile and warm embrace. She’s the same teacher who taught my daughter how to read by the end of pre-K, while coaching her on strategies for managing her feelings when things in class were upsetting or overwhelming. 

Although so many teachers, like Mrs. Dillon, exhibit extraordinary heroics to help their students, the magnitude of the learning gaps requires system-level changes and supports. Given the across-the-board achievement declines U.S. students are facing, more must be done.

By studying the data, openly discussing it and using it to drive much-needed progress, state education leaders and district administrators can go a long way toward ensuring all students get the world-class education they need to reach their goals and fulfill their ambitions — in school and in their lives.

Lesley Muldoon is executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent, nonpartisan panel created by Congress to set policy for the Nation’s Report Card. She previously helped launch and lead the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a multi-state consortium that developed K-12 assessments.

When K-12 schools closed their doors for in-person instruction in spring 2020, it had a variety of negative effects on students and teachers. It also shut off the training opportunities for future educators. 

In response, states instituted a variety of short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling their normal requirements. Those policies helped candidates who would have otherwise been prevented from teaching, while aiding school leaders in filling open positions.

Were teachers worse for this lack of training? 

New research from Massachusetts and New Jersey suggests maybe not. In both states, teachers who entered the profession without completing the full requirements performed no worse than their normally trained peers.

Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach. According to data compiled by a team of researchers at Boston University, roughly 5,800 individuals received one of these emergency licenses. 

Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. And, in fact, they had more such children in their classrooms. Even so, their students saw about the same rate of growth in math and reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators. Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.

When the Boston University team asked principals and administrators why they hired emergency-certified teachers, they reported using them to fill shortage areas, especially in special education. 

The teachers working under these licenses also helped diversify the state’s classrooms, as they were about twice as likely as other beginning educators to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.

New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training. Still, researchers Ben Backes and Dan Goldhaber found similar outcomes as in Massachusetts: Teachers without the normal training and testing were at least as effective in reading and math as other novices. 

One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training. 

Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers. 

The better question now is why these temporary waivers aren’t being made permanent. The New Jersey policy expired after one year, and Massachusetts is trying to phase its version out this year. But with such promising results, policymakers might want to reconsider.  

The results are, in fact,  part of a pendulum swing in teacher preparation. A decade ago, states were trying to raise the bar. The supply of new educators had risen steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and there was a regular surplus of teacher candidates. There were regional and subject-area shortages, of course, but in general, school districts could be choosy about whom they hired. 

Given this backdrop, policymakers of all stripes came together to focus on quality over quantity. 

National leaders like then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten pushed for higher barriers to entering the profession. At the same time, the national accrediting bodies charged with overseeing teacher preparation programs pushed new standards of quality. And states adopted tougher licensing exams. 

Did these policies work? That’s a mixed bag at best. 

There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children. 

What’s undoubtedly true is that making it harder to become a teacher reduced the supply. Researchers found that the adoption of a new teacher licensure test called the edTPA reduced the supply by 14%, disproportionately hitting minority candidates in less selective or minority-concentrated universities. Another new working paper finds that in 21 states and D.C., shifting to the Praxis Core as their licensure test in 2013-14 led to a 12.5% decrease in teacher preparation completions.

In other words, making it harder to become a teacher will reduce the supply but offers no guarantee that those who meet the bar will actually be effective in the classroom. The recent COVID-related waivers should cause policymakers to re-evaluate whether barriers into the teaching profession actually serve a meaningful purpose, or if they’re keeping potentially talented educators out of the classroom.

Each year, the ed tech company I work for, HMH, conducts a survey designed to understand the obstacles and opportunities teachers and administrators experience. This year’s Educator Confidence Report revealed new insights into how more than 1,200 K-12 teachers are feeling about the profession overall, as well as their attitudes toward generative artificial intelligence — which is not only a buzzword, but has rapidly become a practical and inescapable classroom technology.

Sentiment around the profession reached an all-time low in 2022, but this year’s survey shows that confidence about education is inching up, increasing from 40 (out of 100) in 2022 to 42 in 2023. While the current index score correlates to around a “C” grade, this rise could represent a stabilization following a particularly challenging period for educators across the country. It’s encouraging to see that teachers are beginning to transition out of survival mode and toward regaining confidence in their profession. I believe that last year marked the low point and that we are now turning the corner and will see teachers feeling more enthusiastic about staying in the industry or, in the case of new educators, joining the field.

In addition to this positive trend, teachers surveyed for this year’s report also identified a few key areas that they feel optimistic about and feel are making a positive impact on the state of education. These include the use of digital platforms to improve student engagement, which 31% of educators surveyed felt optimistic about, as well as increased attention to students’ social and emotional needs, which 50% of educators reported as a point of optimism.

Based on the annual survey, as well as our work with thousands of teachers and firsthand experience in schools, it is clear that teaching is an increasingly complex job, and these professionals are especially concerned about the well-being of their students, their colleagues and themselves.

A new piece of the technology puzzle is generative AI, which has come to the forefront of K-12 conversation in the past year. Our survey finds that educators are looking for guidance on using AI and recognize its transformative possibilities. More than half of the educators surveyed (57%) agreed that generative AI is inevitable and should be harnessed positively in the classroom, and 58% said they would be interested in professional development and coaching around this new technology.

AI represents the potential for a new era in education, one in which teachers are becoming learners again and driving change in their districts and schools. The majority of educators surveyed (90%) are not yet actively integrating AI in their classrooms. However, early adopters of AI (10%) are eager for more. For those who did use it in the 2022-23 school year, 74% said they expect to increase that this current school year.

The survey made clear that educators’ feelings about the new technology are mixed. But there is consensus about a few key activities where teachers feel that AI-generated content could accelerate achievement. More than half — 51% — said artificial intelligence could support worksheet creation, 48% identified assistance with lesson plans and 41% pointed to aid in coming up with prompts for writing assignments. Some 65% of teachers surveyed said that having more time for themselves would have an impact on their well-being, and AI is positioned to help with that. Creating writing prompts, lesson plans and worksheets takes time. By simplifying these tasks, AI can give teachers more time to focus on their own needs and foster relationships with students.

Educators are just starting to unpack the benefits of generative AI. With the proper supports, this new technology will allow them to do the things they do best – fostering deep learning, building relationships, counseling students, building communities of learners — and, in turn, improve the state of the profession.

Francie Alexander is senior vice president of e-research at HMH.

Public education is at an inflection point in the campaign for learning recovery. The average eighth grader is

In the first year of the pandemic, policymakers confronted an unprecedented national education crisis with an historic infusion of funding. Now, with those dollars set to expire and a crisis that may be deepening, I worry about the temptation to throw our hands up and say, “Oh well, we tried our best; it was just too hard.” And I worry that distractions — including divisive ideological debates — are diverting focus from students’ real and urgent needs. That must not happen. Instead, America must recommit to a learning recovery moonshot.  

High-dosage tutoring is one of the most powerful tools available to help kids recover missed learning. While many schools have launched tutoring initiatives, only 1 in 10 students gets the dosage — the duration and consistency — required to see the learning gains that research has shown is possible. Barriers to implementation continue to limit expansion and impact, risking premature declarations that this personalized learning approach simply doesn’t work.

In reality, schools have yet to implement high-dosage tutoring effectively enough to credibly measure outcomes at scale. 

Before joining Accelerate, I was a district leader in Tennessee’s Hamilton County and Georgia’s Gwinnett County schools during and after the pandemic. I witnessed COVID’s dramatic impact on educators and students. I understand how tough it is to get kids back on track. Teachers are constantly asked to do more with less, and they do. I continue to see their genuine effort in classrooms across the country in my current role.

A collective commitment by state and district leaders, policymakers and tutoring providers would make it easier for schools to implement effective learning recovery and avoid leaving a generation of students less prepared to succeed in life than their peers who happen to have the good fortune of graduating before the pandemic.

Accelerate has awarded grants to tutoring providers, states and districts implementing high-dosage tutoring. These grants have provided direct support to thousands of the students who need it most, and some of the recipients offer a roadmap toward our north star of scaling this successful approach. 

Baltimore City Public Schools, for example, served over 15,000 students last school year, achieving an increase in attendance and dosage of 18% over the year prior. In 2023-24, the district expects to serve nearly 1 in 4 students through partnerships with external tutoring providers and a district-run program utilizing paraprofessionals.

Guilford County Public Schools reached a scale approaching 12,000 students, or one-fifth of total, twice the number served in 2021-22. The district implemented a data platform this year to ensure that students across their portfolio of university, community and school-run programs are getting the amount and frequency of tutoring needed to make a difference. Accelerate is partnering with Mathematica to release a forthcoming report on lessons learned, highlighting the school conditions necessary for high-dosage tutoring to thrive.

Implementation is hard, but it is possible.

Early analysis shows that our first cohort of Call to Effective Action grantees are successfully implementing programs in 28 states. Using a variety of creative approaches to overcome challenges, they are reaching a diverse group of students with the right dosage of tutoring.

If public schools are going to address learning loss in the face of daunting challenges, America needs to embrace the growth mindset that educators bring into the classroom every day. When kids say, “I’m just not a math person,” teachers know better. They encourage their students to make the effort and believe they will achieve. It’s time for national policy and education leaders to embrace that same sense of possibility and persistence. 

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On Dec. 6, the Aspen Economic Strategy Group hosted a livestream event, “Overcoming Pandemic Learning Loss,” where I joined a panel of leading scholars to discuss our perspectives on concrete policies to overcome pandemic learning loss. 

Here’s are some critical points for state and district leaders and policymakers:

• Funding:  As ESSER funding sunsets, policymakers must identify long-term funding streams that support tutoring. This includes reallocating other federal resources, as well as appropriating state and local funding for high-dosage tutoring and other evidence-based strategies to accelerate student learning.

• Integration: State and district leaders need to help schools make high-dosage tutoring a standard daily feature for students who are furthest behind. Aligning high-dosage tutoring with high-quality instructional materials and connecting it to current guidance on multi-tiered support systems will allow schools to prioritize this proven intervention. State agencies should lead in developing implementation tools and vetting tutoring programs/providers that are evidence-based, classroom-ready and scalable.

• Accountability: Schools need help getting students the 50 hours of tutoring that can recover the average four-month learning loss in a single school year. Policymakers must drive the creation of better data infrastructure for reporting and transparency around student attendance and dosage for tutoring. Districts and states can also leverage outcomes-based contracts for mutual accountability between schools and providers for implementation and results.  

Educators know the stakes. Lifetime economic and health outcomes, particularly for the most vulnerable students, hang in the balance as the nation commits to a learning recovery moonshot. The challenges are real. But giving up on a whole generation of students is simply not acceptable. It’s up to all of us — families, business leaders, nonprofits, policymakers, educators and tutoring providers — to believe we can do it and then come together to make it happen. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

Dr. Nakia Towns is chief operating officer at Accelerate.

Many kids are not going to school. That’s the takeaway from the abundant headlines warning about the escalating epidemic of chronic absenteeism that has worsened since 2020. 

The 74’s Linda Jacobson reported earlier this fall on various efforts by school districts to address rising rates of chronic absenteeism. These include districts sending robocalls with the voice of an NFL player, educators bribing chronically absent children with rewards if they return to class, and schools activating “attendance clerks” to monitor students and conduct home visits. 

Millions of taxpayer dollars are funding these programs, including an injection of federal pandemic relief dollars.

But most coverage of the crisis has failed to ask the bigger, far more important question underpinning the attendance numbers: Why don’t kids want to go to school? 

“I think that school has long been perceived as meaningless by most kids,” said Michael Strong, longtime educator, author, and founder of the low-cost virtual school, The Socratic Experience. “COVID confirmed for many students that school is a meaningless waste of time.” 

It may also have confirmed the same for their parents, many of whom got a glimpse of classrooms and curriculum during prolonged school shutdowns and remote learning.

Parents of children who are disengaged from school and refusing to attend are regularly referred to The Socratic Experience, which serves students ages 8 to 19. Other parents are looking for a more individualized educational experience for their children that prioritizes personal agency, and are attracted to the online school’s emphasis on “purpose-driven education.”

“There are kids who reject schooling, but as soon as you put them in an environment where their learning is relevant and interesting, they learn rapidly,” said Strong. At The Socratic Experience, that involves a learning approach tailored to each student’s needs and interests, frequent Socractic discussions with peers and adults about relevant, engaging topics, and creative, entrepreneurial projects.

Educators like Strong, who have long worked in the alternative education space where learners’ needs and interests are centered, may help to unlock the root causes of chronic absenteeism and reveal solutions. 

The Socratic Experience is one example of an out-of-system solution that can help disengaged students rekindle their joy of learning, but there are other entrepreneurial educators who are partnering with school districts to offer in-system answers. 

The Field Academy in Denver, Colorado is one such program. It’s a traveling high school that this fall is collaborating with the Aurora Public Schools and the Englewood Public Schools to address chronic absenteeism and credit recovery in creative ways. High school students who are not showing up to school, and who have either been referred to the truancy court or are at risk of being referred, are picked up in The Field Academy van each day to learn throughout the community in an immersive, personalized environment. 

“I was attracted to the idea of disruption within the public system,” said co-founder and executive director, Anna Graves, who spent about a decade in outdoor and wilderness education before turning her attention to public schools. “The first school I tried to open was a charter school,” said Graves. “I thought, this is great, we can do some really amazing things in this work. And then I realized that, actually, we’re still inside four walls. We’re not at a place where this actually feels innovative to me, and it also does not feel applicable to most people’s lives.”

It was her search for out-of-the-box education solutions that would be more relevant and engaging for students that led Graves to see how The Field Academy could serve low-income, chronically absent students. Graves’s current students, who are still enrolled in district schools, are all about a year-and-a-half behind in credits due to absenteeism. Although they are in high school, they are reading at an elementary school level. 

Using creative, community-based credit recovery techniques, The Field Academy makes learning interesting and applicable to the teenagers’ lives. Daily learning may include rock climbing and related lessons around right angles and geometry. A trip to a bike shop resulted in a bike-building project that incorporated math and language arts. One student is really into cars, so the van stops at an auto body shop to allow for observation and hands-on experience. English class takes place at an art museum, with students writing and talking about pieces on the wall.

Graves explained that students who rarely attended school before this fall are happy and eager to be picked up by The Field Academy van each day. She said that her students grew disillusioned with conventional schooling, and especially its coercive, often punitive, environment. Last year, one student only went to school 14 days out of the entire school year. Now, he is excited to learn through The Field Academy. 

“I think the rise in chronic absenteeism is telling us that the system isn’t working for most students, and students are voting with their feet in the same way that we do with any product that we don’t like,” said Graves. “Honestly, I think that schools are getting really strong feedback, and that is why there’s a possibility for a lot of creativity in this moment.”

Kerry McDonald is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and host of the LiberatED podcast. She is also the Velinda Jonson Family education fellow at State Policy Network.

Countless words have been written about the tragedy of COVID-19: the millions of lives lost, the steep declines in student learning, the trauma of extended isolation, and much more. All true.

But equally true is that the pandemic had at least one silver lining. If nothing else, it taught us that long-intractable institutions—like universities and public school systems—can change. Immediately, if necessary.

For years, advocates have been begging institutions to do things differently. The invariable response: “We can’t. It’s too hard. Be patient. Give us time.” Then came COVID-19, and within 24 hours, everything changed. For example, online learning and work, long deemed challenging, became ubiquitous.

The secret was out. Even the most tradition-bound institutions could change when they had to. Let’s make sure to take advantage of the best of these emergency measures and make them the new normal. It is a choice.

From a deficit model to an asset model

Consider my institution, New York University. By listening to the disability community, we are working to change how we educate autistic and other neurodivergent students. We are trying to move from a deficit model to an asset-based model that is neurodiversity-affirming. We have a new Office of Disability Inclusive Culture that now works closely with our Moses Center for Student Accessibility, which provides accommodations and works to provide equal access to learning for students. The office is charged with looking beyond medical- or accommodations-based models toward faculty development, pedagogy, and organizational culture.

“Disability-inclusive culture” means that the work is community work. How do we impact and shift the attitudes of faculty, staff, and students? Instead of organizing our work around what students cannot do, we are working closely with staff and student self-advocates to show what students can do if we design universally for access and reduce stigma. We are collaborating so that our neurodivergent students can use their strengths and abilities on a path to future employment.

No one builds lives on their remediated weaknesses. We build our lives based on passions and strengths. Our job as educators is to make those journeys as joyous and productive as possible.

The old, and often still current, approach assumed autistic students needed to be “fixed.” Students registered with offices of disability services for accommodations deemed reasonable. Often these accommodations were implemented universally during the pandemic. Lectures were taped or recorded for all. Students had to have these reasonable accommodations to succeed in the classroom, but that was the minimum.

Looking ahead, how can universities go beyond the minimum to make access universal? How can they see students for who they are, work with them to identify their strengths, and use those as the foundation for continued learning? What if universities adopted a posture that said, “You don’t have to change. This is who you are. You are more than enough. How can we best support what you need to continue growing?”

A systemic approach

To that end, a group of NYU students, faculty, and staff from units across the university—from IT to instruction to campus safety—is meeting to systematically solve problems facing students, faculty, and staff. A starting place is making physical spaces more accessible, so our libraries now have sensory rooms that ensure quiet environments for studying. We are intentionally focusing on inclusive pedagogy and, in my former role as vice dean of academic affairs at NYU Steinhardt, have added mini-sessions at each monthly schoolwide meeting to reach as many faculty as possible.

I teach a course on inclusion and access for undergraduates that gives students the option to attend in person, online, or fully asynchronously. Many neurodiverse students preferred learning online during the pandemic; we must respect that, even if hybrid teaching is much more challenging for educators. It won’t be easy to figure out how to increase access, but the pandemic has taught us that it is possible. I can’t very well teach my radical inclusion and disability justice course and insist that all my students show up in person.

In addition to having multiple means to engage with the material, students in this course have myriad ways to show what they know, including written assignments, oral presentations or works, artistic and musical expression, and multimedia demonstrations. These universally designed assignments capitalize on students’ strengths and interests.

Small steps can make an impact

Many faculty members are thinking about access and their own teaching and policies. Even the simplest fixes can have a major impact. For instance, faculty wonder why few students show up when we post a notice: “Office hours, 9-10 a.m., Mondays and Thursdays.” Not surprisingly, many students would ask, “What’s an office hour? Am I in trouble?” Now, I’m careful to reframe the offer: “I care about you. I want to understand you better. What issues is this class bringing up for you?

Please come see me. I’m in my office from 9:00-10:00 every Monday and Thursday. Or set up an appointment online.” I use this language in my syllabus, the contract I have with students. I also start each class by letting students know they can move and do what they need to do to regulate their own attention.

We are taking advantage of more autistic peer-to-peer mentoring and support, which research finds is more valid and valuable (Buckley, Pellicano, and Remington 2021; Crompton et al., 2023). This includes a new NSF-funded project where I serve as co-principal investigator, through which several of our autistic college students at NYU are mentoring their autistic high school peers on STEM interests and pathways to college. This project just started, but already our autistic university mentors are enjoying being in leadership positions. They are using their strengths and abilities to guide their autistic peers and have indicated how they would have benefited from this type of mentorship as they struggled in the transition to college.

All of this work at NYU began a few years before COVID-19. But it gained momentum in the past few years and will continue to evolve. There is much work to do as universities think about access as well as student development. What it takes is the willingness to center the voice and expertise of students. Advocates can partner with institutions to identify innovative solutions and should be in more leadership positions to impact the change that needs to happen. But we must listen—students are the real experts in their own learning.

And universities must be bold. If COVID-19 taught higher education anything, it’s that we must be willing to take risks and do what was once considered unthinkable. The payoff is worth it: students will thrive and flourish as institutions make these changes.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its 2023 “State of the American Student” report.

Schools won’t change the schedule, they redeploy would-be tutors as aides making copies, etc. It’s troubling. And headlines like this and this and this also aren’t helping.

So what happens next?

In a March column in The 74, Kevin Huffman warned: “I worry that policymakers will pretend high-dosage tutoring is happening at scale and then, when student outcomes do not measurably improve, declare that it hasn’t worked.”

So what’s the answer for scaling up at quality? Proven good models need to become great, so when they scale and inevitably dilute, they “merely” retreat back to: good. We must make it easier to be a good or great tutor.  And that requires unusual “within program” research and development. In an essay published just last week, the Overdeck Foundation’s Pete Lavorini made that very case, noting there are “a number of exciting innovations underway to lessen the implementation burden without sacrificing effectiveness, by adjusting the high-impact tutoring ‘formula.’ ”

Let me describe what tutor innovation looks like in real life. First, you need decent scale. When I started Match Tutoring in 2004, we had 45 tutors (living literally inside the school, on our top floor). My friend, economist Matt Kraft, wrote in The74 how measuring that program’s impact launched his career studying tutoring. But 45 people is just not enough educators to easily A/B test “what works for individual tutors.”

Last year, I met a math educator, Manan Khurma, who founded a math tutoring company in India called Cuemath, with 3,300 tutors. I asked whether I could, with a few colleagues, (carefully) try new ideas, to see what works for his thousands students across the world? Manan said yes, he was interested in anything empirically valid that made tutoring better.

Scale, check.

Second, you need a “problem of practice.” We zoomed in on a common problem, familiar to many educators: student talk!  Some kids, especially if confused, are reluctant to speak up, to share what they’re thinking. Common Core and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics both emphasize the need for math discourse, but teacher training in this area hasn’t led to kids speaking up more.

How to change this?

My colleague Carol Yu wondered if a Fitbit type device — a “Talk Meter” — might help, or would it annoy kids, or teachers?

We started small, enlisting a few kids and tutors to try a prototype. An AI bot would patrol a tutorial, and then, roughly 20 minutes into a tutorial, a little box would pop up on the screen. It told teacher and student what the talk ratio was, just like a Fitbit offers your step count when you glance at it. If either party was talking too much, they’d adjust.

The early signals were promising! So we ran a rigorous randomized control trial with 742 Cuemath teachers, and enlisted some research help, from Stanford’s Dora Demszky. This is often a third step: Enlist a scholar to bolster your measurement efforts.

The results were strong. In a forthcoming journal article, Dr. Demszky will describe the full experiment, but the punchline is student reasoning increased by 24%, and the talk ratio converged on 50-50 between kid and tutor — exactly what we wanted. Tutors asked better questions, and “built” on what kids said.  Both students and tutors liked the Talk Meter (it led to lighthearted, warm interactions as well). Introverts particularly improved.

Fourth, you can layer experiments on top of one another. One we’re trying now is whether one-on-one coaching would build on TalkMeter success.

Should other programs build their own TalkMeters or tutor coaching efforts? That’s not our claim (though when I shared the TalkMeter result with friends leading other prominent tutoring organizations, several said “OMG — we should do this.”) There’s a key distinction that matters for scale. A technology intervention like TalkMeter is context specific. And a human intervention like coaching is talent specific.

I learned that lesson 14 years ago. We launched a teacher coaching program in New Orleans, with a wonderful educator named Erica. I enlisted Matt Kraft to measure it. He found large gains for teachers. Then we added coaches. The impact was diluted — a finding he wrote about here.

The point here is that high quality experiments, often in partnership with scholars, can help specific program models vault to greatness, as a way to counteract inevitable dilution at scale.

While we co-sign on the Guryan/Ludwig desire to “push” schools to do hard things, we also should make hard things easier, to have “good” impact by combining “great programs” with “merely solid” execution. (Of course, nothing can overcome shoddy execution).

That’s the only way this high-dosage tutoring movement will survive and expand.

Mike Goldstein is co-founder of the Math Learning Lab at Cuemath in India and the founder of Match Education in Boston.

These choices manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including how much money states provide for their public schools, how many people work in those schools and in what types of roles, and how teachers are recruited and trained. Here are five big differences:

1. Per-pupil spending

At the national level, public schools spent an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per student.

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, school spending nationally is 6% higher than it was a decade ago, and it’s up 28% over the last two decades. The gap between states is also growing over time. Over the last 20 years, the 10 lowest-spending states have increased their school funding by 16%, while the top-spending states have boosted theirs by 48%.

These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and it is clearly cheaper to live in Boise than in New York City. But other decisions are driving these spending differences as well.

2. Student-to-teacher ratios

According to the most recent data, Vermont has the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in the country, at 10.5 students for every teacher. Maine, D.C., New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York were all under 12 to 1. The data are in terms of full-time equivalent employees, or FTEs, which account for the number of hours an employee actually works.

In contrast, states in the South and West tend to have far more students per teacher. Oregon, Idaho, Louisiana, Florida, Alaska and Washington are all clustered together at just under 18 to 1. Alabama comes next, at 19 to 1, followed by California, Arizona and Utah at over 22 students per teacher.

To put it another way, in per-student terms, Vermont public schools employ more than twice as many teachers as California, Arizona or Utah schools do.

3. Total staffing levels

Nationally, teachers make up just under half of all public school employees. But that ranges from 31% in Ohio up to 60% in Idaho. That is, Idaho’s investments in education are more likely to go to teachers, whereas Ohio’s are more likely to go to other types of staff.

As with teachers, Vermont has the lowest student-to-staff ratio, with just 4.5 students for every full-time equivalent staff member. Maine, Connecticut, D.C., Ohio and New Hampshire are all below 5.5 students per school employee. Some of these states are among the most expensive places to live, but their staffing choices also make their schools more expensive.

On the other end, some states operate with much leaner staffing models. For example, public schools in Alabama, Arizona, Idaho and Washington schools all have 10 to 12 students per staff member. In other words, the typical public school in some states employs about half the staff as is common in other states.

4. Teacher preparation programs

States also get their teachers through very different pathways. According to the 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey, about 30% of educators in their first three years in the classroom came through an alternative certification program.

Midwestern and Northeastern states tend to rely less on alternative routes and more heavily on traditional training. Among states with reliable data, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Michigan, Connecticut and Kansas all have less than 20% of their new teachers coming through alternative programs.

On the higher end, more than half of all new teachers enter through nontraditional routes in Florida and Texas. New Mexico topped the list, with nearly two-thirds of all new teachers entering teaching in this way. These states may be making pragmatic decisions about local supply and demand, but relying more heavily on alternative programs also improves teacher diversity and likely lowers debt for teachers, while it may come at the cost of higher turnover.

5. Teacher credentials

Teachers are very well educated, and more than 60% have earned a master’s degree or higher by their third year in the profession (compared with only 14% of all American adults).

But those national trends mask wide variation across the states. Only 30% to 40% of teachers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota have earned a master’s, versus 87% in Massachusetts, 91% in Connecticut and 96% in New York.

In other words, the teaching profession looks very different depending on which state you happen to live in. What might appear weird to people in New York or Massachusetts may be standard practice for teachers, educators and schools in Florida or Arizona. As schools across the country work to re-engage students and get them back on track academically, it’s worth learning from these differences and understanding what can be ignored versus might be worth replicating.

Getty Images

Today, the Knowledge Matters Campaign is unveiling a new K-8 English language arts curriculum review tool to advance the understanding of truly high-quality, content-rich literacy instruction. It has felt like a necessary, even urgent, resource at this pivotal moment in time.

The last year has witnessed a surge in focus on the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension. Researchers, including Knowledge Matters’ Scientific Advisory Committee, have outlined the practices necessary to effectively cultivate content knowledge in literacy instruction, and policy analysts have lamented its absence in state legislation addressing the ‘Science of Reading’.

This has been a welcome shift in the national conversation about children’s literacy, and one we have been proud to advance.

Naturally, educators want to know how these key research insights and practices should be translated into curriculum design. In our estimation, this is where the conversation needs to be – and also where it has been coming up short. Emerging and evolving curriculum review efforts have not been precise enough in truly informing the field about what defines “knowledge building” in ELA curricula. Rubrics and guidelines that aren’t specific will only produce watered down results that confuse and disappoint. The stakes are too high not to get this right.

The new Knowledge Matters Review Tool identifies eight dimensions to high-quality, content-rich ELA curricula:

· Laser-like focus on what matters most for literacy

· Communal close reading of content-rich, challenging texts

· Systematic development of high-value academic language to support building knowledge

· A volume of reading organized around conceptually coherent texts to build knowledge

· Regular discussions grounded in texts and topics to build knowledge

· A volume of writing to build knowledge

· Targeted supports to ensure all students have access to challenging, grade-level content

· Ease of enacting curriculum

The Knowledge Matters Campaign recognizes eight K-8 ELA programs that have distinguished themselves across each of these eight dimensions. While they differ greatly in their details, all of them do a far better job of building content knowledge than the ELA programs in widest use across the country, including some that have received positive reviews for alignment to standards.

This new tool is a natural progression of the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s efforts to demonstrate what “good” looks like from the perspectives of leading experts and pioneering educators. The voices we’ve captured in our School Tour visits have shown that schools using these curricula are particularly special learning environments, characterized by high-levels of student engagement and support for teachers in making the shift to this way of teaching. By illuminating the design principles behind excellent reading and writing instruction, we hope to advance the pace at which this kind of learning experience, which is far more equitable to students, becomes the norm, rather than the exception, in US schools.

As we add transparency to our review approach, we also wanted to add transparency to our review process. In fact, this tool has a proud heritage.

Explore the new Knowledge Matters Review Tool at KnowledgeMattersCampaign.org/Review-Tool

The authors of the Knowledge Matters Review Tool, Susan Pimentel (StandardsWorks co-founder), David Liben, and Meredith Liben, have a long and storied history of illuminating for educators how standards and curriculum work together. This team served as lead and contributing authors on the Common Core English Language Arts standards, then as authors of the original Publisher’s Criteria and Instructional Shifts that drove the design and development of some of the highest quality ELA curriculum on the market today. For over a decade, these three individuals led important work to support the implementation of college and career-ready standards at Student Achievement Partners.

Sue, David, and Meredith’s work is marked by their careful analysis of research paired with a deep understanding of classroom instruction. This trio’s expertise has brought excellence to our work: first, in the thoughtful curation of leading curricula in the space, and now, in the development of a tool that can be used by the field to make their own assessments.

Our hope now is that more educators and decision makers use this tool to inform their curriculum choices and recognize that the highest-quality curriculum is the scalable, equitable path to ensure strong readers.

Education Resource Strategies

Objectively speaking, it’s a weird time to be talking about layoffs in schools. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021 had the fewest layoffs in public education in the last two decades. Last year was just a bit higher, and so far 2023 is tracking about the same.

There are still pockets of layoffs due to unique local circumstances, but they are by no means widespread.

Still, widespread staff reductions seem very likely to happen in the very near future. Marguerite Roza at the Georgetown Edunomics Lab has called the expiration of federal relief funds in September 2024, combined with unprecedented enrollment declines, a “perfect storm” for school budgets.

As a result, it’s likely that school districts will have to trim their staff in the next two to three years. No one knows exactly when the storm will hit or how bad it will be, but I estimate it could easily result in 136,000 fewer teacher jobs.

Where will layoffs hit the hardest? This question is easy to answer at a high level: The districts most at risk will be those that have lost the most students and those that got the most ESSER money. Those tend to be large, urban, high-poverty districts.

Education Resource Strategies took a more sophisticated look at which states are most at risk, starting with how much the ESSER money represented compared with their typical education budget. Assuming that districts spent the federal money evenly over the entire grant period, this figure ranged from 4% to 5% in states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado and Utah, and up to 12% to 17% in states like Alabama, New Mexico, Louisiana and, especially, Mississippi.

But state-level data are not sufficient to drill down to find districts most at risk. While some places received no ESSER funds at all, the highest-need districts saw influxes totaling up to 40% of their annual budgets.

So, to get a more precise estimate, I looked at staffing ratios and how they have changed over time. About three-quarters of school districts across the country have reduced their student-teacher ratios over the course of the pandemic. That is, they have more staff per student than they used to. For this analysis, I looked to see how many teachers a district would lose if they went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19.

Take Chicago as an example. According to the latest federal data, its student-teacher ratio shrunk from 16.5 students per teacher in 2018-19 to 14.5 in 2021-22. Over this three-year period, it added 5% more teaching staff even as student enrollment dropped 8%. For Chicago to go back to the same staffing ratio it had just a few years ago, it would need to shrink by 2,873 teachers.

All told, if every district in the country went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19, the nation would lose 136,000 teaching positions.

Districts wouldn’t have to lay off all those teachers; they could start by letting attrition and slower hiring rates reduce their employee headcount. If state budgets remain strong, that might allow many places to avoid, or at least limit, the number of layoffs.

But it’s also possible that my 136,000 estimate is on the low side. For one thing, districts tend to protect full-time classroom teachers from layoffs, especially higher-paid veterans. That means they would need to lay off many more junior teachers and other part-time employees to make up the difference. Given the makeup of the teacher workforce, that would have devastating effects on diversity efforts aimed at bringing more young Black and Hispanic educators into the workforce.

In one historical parallel, schools lost a similar number of teachers from 2009 to 2010 as the Great Recession began to hit school district budgets. When that happened, it wiped out a decade’s worth of staffing gains as schools shed a total of 364,000 jobs.

So, when might layoffs hit schools? At the moment, the economy looks quite strong. Inflation is falling, and the labor market is as strong as it’s ever been. But the last and biggest pot of federal relief money, $122 billion in ESSER III funds, expires at the end of September 2024, and Congress has given no signs that it will extend that deadline, let alone authorize additional funding to soften the decline.

So school districts mustn’t get complacent. Large urban districts with high concentrations of poverty will likely need to downsize. Districts that spent less of their COVID relief money on labor will be less at risk of needing to make big layoffs. Districts that are packing a higher share of their spending into this final year are especially vulnerable to hitting a big fiscal cliff.

There are a lot of uncertainties about the exact timing and magnitude of the impact, but districts will have to scale back their budgets in the coming years. By my estimates, that could mean as many as 136,000 fewer teachers.

From the outside, the headquarters of Alcove Learning looks like any small home in the largely Latino Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles. Flanked by similar houses and located among varied storefronts and restaurants, this self-directed learning center for teens and tweens offers young people the freedom to direct their own education. It is part of an expanding ecosystem of alternative educational models throughout the U.S. focused on individualized learning.

Alcove was co-founded in January 2020 by Alexis Burgess, a former philosophy professor who taught courses at Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Claremont McKenna College before turning his attention to alternative education.

“So many of the kids I was encountering when teaching Intro to Philosophy felt a little rudderless to me,” Burgess told me in a recent interview. “They didn’t really know why they were at college at all… I think it’s a failure of the system. I think one of my Alcove kids recently described it as a ‘people mover.’ ”

Burgess began thinking more critically about his own “people mover” educational experience and that of his college students, while considering what he wanted for his own children’s education. He started reading about creative learning models and discovered North Star, a self-directed learning center in Massachusetts founded in 1996 by former public school teacher Kenneth Danford.

Burgess was hooked. He connected with Danford, and launched Alcove as part of the Liberated Learners microschool network that Danford and his colleague Joel Hammon created in 2013 to scale the North Star model, which prioritizes non-coercive, self-directed education.

At Alcove and other Liberated Learner-affiliated microschools across the country, young people attend optional classes throughout the week, choosing from part-time and full-time enrollment offerings. Most Alcove learners are legally considered homeschoolers, although some students enrolled in California virtual charter schools also attend Alcove as a complement to their learning programs.

Tuition is typically a fraction of the cost of traditional private schools, making it more financially accessible to more families. Alcove uses a “pay-what-you-can” tuition model, with some families paying nothing while others pay the full $1,600 monthly rate. The average Alcove family pays between $500 and $600 a month.

Burgess describes his microschool as an “unschool,” referring to an educational philosophy that jettisons adult-imposed curriculum and traditional schooling practices in favor of emergent, bottom-up, out-of-system learning tied to a young person’s curiosity and interests.

“There is no set curriculum,” Burgess said. “You can pursue your strengths at Alcove. You can pursue your weaknesses or growth areas. You can do whatever it is that you feel like doing. We’re going to make it up as we go along every semester.”

Class offerings this semester include math, French, political science, magic, psychology, debate, art, and more. It’s “education as improv,” Burgess said.

While programs similar to Alcove have been around for decades, interest in these models has accelerated in recent years, as families look for the personalization in education that they enjoy in other areas of their lives.

“When we started North Star in 1996, there were a few pioneering homeschoolers and unschoolers, and there was the Sudbury Valley School,” Danford said. “Now, I am meeting people every day who are interested in creating alternatives to conventional schooling, and these people sometimes show up with partners, teams and resources.”

With the expansion of school choice policies enabling education funding to go directly to families rather than school systems, self-directed schooling alternatives are poised for further growth. Nine states have adopted universal school choice programs, including Arizona, Florida, Utah, and West Virginia, which have implemented flexible education savings account programs that include schooling alternatives like Alcove.

Danford is focusing his attention on finding and facilitating founders in these choice-friendly states.

“I have become very interested in exploring public funding for educational alternatives, and am deeply engaged with how we can identify and support these founders and their interested families to build sustainable programs,” he said.

He is currently broadening the training and development services that Liberated Learners offers to prospective founders. He’s also growing his team to provide greater support to these entrepreneurs — many of whom are former public school teachers.

“For the most part, the people I meet are not businesspeople seeking a clever way to make money; in fact, most are willing to work for lower wages than they could earn in public schools,” Danford said. “These people have initiative, vision, and a need to find a different way to work with youth.”

Even in states like California that don’t have robust school choice policies, entrepreneurial parents and teachers are working to offer low-cost, learner-centered education options.

Not far from Alcove Learning, former teacher and school librarian Lizette Valles founded Ellemercito Academy in 2021 as an independent microschool with a focus on experiential learning and trauma-informed education. Just outside of Los Angeles, Danelle Foltz-Smith runs Acton Academy Venice Beach, part of the fast-growing Acton Academy network that now includes over 300 learner-driven microschools.

There is a groundswell of demand for new and different educational options, and entrepreneurial parents and educators everywhere are stepping up to create them. Philanthropic nonprofits like the VELA Education Fund provide grant funding and community support to many of these everyday entrepreneurs to help catalyze and cultivate their efforts.

“I think it’s beautiful what’s happening,” Burgess said, noting that Alcove’s little yellow house is now at capacity with 30 learners. He’s wondering about the possibility of leasing the house next door to meet continuing demand, and is optimistic about the growth of decentralized educational models both in Los Angeles and across the country.

“We’re seeing a large scale reorientation away from a top down, federal organization of schooling in the country to something much more bottom up, that was expedited by COVID and by the failures of No Child Left Behind,” Burgess said, referring to federal education policy that has shaped American education for the past two decades.

“We need something better,” he added. “The kids need something better urgently. And so I’m not ashamed anymore to be offering an alternative to the public system. I think we need microschools.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Nai Hawkins (right) teaches students at Texas’ Leading Little Arrows homeschool co-op and microschool. (Zander Todd)

It’s back-to-school time across America, but millions of families have stepped away from a traditional classroom. Instead, they have chosen to stick with homeschooling, an option that grew in popularity during COVID school closures and has remained above pre-pandemic levels ever since.

“COVID put things under a microscope,” said Amber Okolo-Ebube, a Texas homeschooling mother. “Parents saw how far behind their children actually were and said I can do this better.” Okolo-Ebube has been homeschooling her children since 2011, but she has seen the local homeschooling population swell over the past three years, especially among families of color.

Okolo-Ebube is one of the hundreds of entrepreneurial parents and teachers I have interviewed over the past three years who are creating low-cost alternatives to conventional schooling. In 2022, she founded Leading Little Arrows, a weekly homeschool co-op that grew so quickly she decided to lease a building near the University of Texas at Arlington to accommodate weekly tutorials with hired educators and a part-time, drop-off microschool for homeschoolers.

With nearly 40 learners, three-quarters of whom are neurodiverse, Okolo-Ebube’s programs are already at capacity. She plans to open two additional microschool locations later this fall.

“The homeschooling movement is accelerating here, particularly among BIPOC families,” said Okolo-Ebube, referring to Black, Indigenous, and other students of color. “You see someone like you doing it and it becomes less scary.”

Angela Watson, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, theorizes that these network effects are contributing to the growth in homeschooling among families of color. “Minority families have begun to network as homeschoolers, something that white homeschoolers have done for decades. We think these grassroots support systems serve to expand homeschool participation in these populations,” she said, explaining that more research is needed.

Homeschooling surged in 2020, with Black homeschooling numbers rising five-fold that year, according to the US Census Bureau. Their May 2023 Household Pulse Survey results showed that the homeschooling rate dipped from its pandemic peak but remains elevated at over 5% of the U.S. school-age population, or more than 3.5 million students.

Watson is part of a team at Johns Hopkins that is creating a free hub for research and data on homeschooling. She sees many reasons for homeschooling’s continued popularity, including a greater openness among today’s younger parents to nontraditional learning options. “This generation of parents is more willing to try something new,” said Watson. “They grew up when homeschooling was more mainstream and is less stigmatized in their view than it may be to older parents. It could also be that younger parents are more tech-savvy and adept at online learning.”

Other reasons that families may choose homeschooling are disappointment with the academic or social environment in local public schools and a lack of accessible private school options, as well as concern over curriculum, including what content is or is not covered. Some parents say they are simply disillusioned with standardized, one-size-fits-all schooling and want an alternative.

“I think more parents are realizing that compelling their kids to sit still, memorize facts, and take tests is not the surest path to success for their children,” said Jenny Markus, a homeschooling mother of a four-year-old daughter in Brooklyn who is seeing more homeschoolers in New York City. “Modern challenges call for creative minds and resilient spirits, which conventional schools do not consistently foster.” Markus just launched a self-directed learning center for homeschoolers this fall.

New research reveals that New York’s homeschooling enrollment increased 65% during the first two academic years of the pandemic, while in Florida, homeschooling enrollment increased by 43%. Florida’s homeschooling population continued to climb last year as well, according to state data.

“This movement is just beginning,” said Okolo-Ebube, who believes that more families will flock to homeschooling and schooling alternatives, such as microschooling, over the coming years. With the national expansion of school choice policies that enable families to use education funds toward an assortment of approved expenses, including homeschooling program fees and microschool tuition in some states, access to these out-of-system models will become even greater.

Parents increasingly want a wider variety of education options from which to choose, including unconventional ones that are more tailored to their children’s specific needs and interests. More everyday entrepreneurs like Okolo-Ebube and Markus are responding to this parent demand by building innovative and affordable schooling alternatives that families want.

“Having gone through the New York City public school system myself, I never felt like I truly had enough time and space to pursue my curiosity and passions at my own pace,” said Markus. “For my own child, I knew I wanted something that provided more freedom and flexibility, and I am as excited as ever to continue on this path with other families who value the same kinds of experiences for their children.”

Kerry McDonald is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and host of the LiberatED podcast. She is also the Velinda Jonson Family education fellow at State Policy Network.

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Debates about education policy and the workplace are typically carried out by people far removed from high school classrooms. There’s good reason for that, since age and experience often bring clearer insights not visible to the young.

But education today is in a time of disruption and transition. In many respects, it’s not meeting the needs of young people as they enter a changing workforce.

Maybe it’s time to ask high school students what they need most.

The June 2023 “Question the Quo” nationally representative survey of high school students ages 14 to 18 does just that. It documents Gen Z high schoolers’ views and shifting priorities on education and work. It was conducted by the nonprofit ECMC Group in partnership with VICE Media, the seventh survey report since 2020.

It turns out that Gen Z high school students have new and sensible ideas about the relationship between their K-12 education, going to college and starting a career. They want K-12 to provide them with practical knowledge and skills that lead to more education, training and career options after graduation than they now have. Policymakers and educators can and should take these views into serious consideration as they map out new programs and reforms.

Here are four main questions Gen Z high schoolers have on their minds as they think about their futures.

Do we need a college degree?

Gen Z is skeptical about the value of a traditional four-year college degree. They question whether it delivers sufficient return on investment, having heard stories about student loans and debt. Around half (51%) are thinking about pursuing a college degree, down more than 10 percentage points since before the pandemic and 20 points since shortly after COVID began. Other surveys of young people and adults find similar skepticism about the value of a four-year degree.

On the other hand, 65% of Gen Z high schoolers who responded to “Question the Quo” believe education after high school is necessary. But they want options such as online courses, boot camps and apprenticeships.

What skills should K-12 schools teach us?

The practical mindset concerning college also applies to what young people want from high school. Gen Z places a priority on learning life skills along with academics — things like financial literacy, communication, problem-solving and understanding their own and others’ emotions, which are overlooked in the traditional K-12 curriculum. They value good grades and practical, real-world skills. They also have an entrepreneurial spirit, with a third wanting to start their own business.

Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) believe it is important to develop these practical skills before they graduate from high school, so they are better prepared to decide on career paths. These views are consistent with other national surveys of the American public and young people on these issues.

How can work and life coexist?

Gen Z high schoolers are not only interested in making money; they also want time for their personal lives. They see work-life balance as an important priority. In fact, two of the top factors that impact what they will decide to do after high school — long-term earning potential and physical and mental health — have remained consistent throughout ECMC’s seven surveys. In other words, young people yearn for meaningful work that leaves room for personal development and leisure. Their approach to careers echoes a holistic perspective on the need for a healthy balance between work and personal life, which was a key theme of the December 2021 report from the U.S. surgeon general on youth mental health.

How do I achieve my dreams?

Gen Z high schoolers want to learn on the job and over their lifetime. More than two-thirds say their ideal post-high school learning should be on the job through internships or apprenticeships (65%) or through hands-on learning in a lab or classroom (67%). Only a third say their ideal learning would be only through coursework. More than half (53%) want more formalized learning throughout their life. And 8 in 10 believe government and employers should subsidize, pay full tuition or provide direct training for students.

Gen Z high schoolers do not reject formal academic learning. Rather, they want a system that is more flexible and personalized in its approach to learning and work than what they have now. They are asking K-12 schools, colleges, employers and other stakeholders to think differently about how best to prepare them for jobs and careers.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

When the main character of a kids TV show can both listen and respond to viewers by using advances in artificial intelligence, youngsters learn more from the program. That’s what my colleagues and I found in a series of peer-reviewed studies.

We are partnering with PBS Kids to incorporate conversational AI like Siri or Alexa into a popular science show for preschool-aged children called “Elinor Wonders Why.”

In the interactive version we created, the main character, a curious bunny named Elinor, poses questions to children. She then listens to their responses and replies with feedback specific to their answers, or provides additional clues when needed.

For example, in an episode about liquid thickness – or viscosity – Elinor and her friends try to get ketchup out of a bottle by shaking and squeezing it, but the ketchup remains stuck inside. Elinor turns to the viewer and asks, “Why do you think the ketchup isn’t coming out?” Many of the kids in our study simply reiterated the problem by saying, “It’s stuck,” without answering why. In this case, Elinor follows up by asking, “Yeah, I wonder why the ketchup is stuck inside the bottle. Do you think it’s too goopy, or it’s too runny?”

We carried out several studies to test whether this interactive format indeed helps children learn more. In one study that we presented at the 2023 American Educational Research Association annual conference, we divided 240 children into three groups of 80. The first group watched the “Elinor Wonders Why” episodes in the interactive format we created. The second group watched the original broadcast without any questions or responses from Elinor. The third group watched a semi-interactive version similar to “Dora the Explorer,” where the main character asks a question, pauses as if she is listening and provides generic feedback. After the children watched the episodes, we assessed their understanding of the science concepts that were presented, including aerodynamics and reptile shedding.

We found that children who watched the fully interactive episodes answered 63% of the assessment questions correctly, compared with 56% for those who watched the noninteractive version. Children who watched the semi-interactive version performed in between, correctly answering 61% of the questions.

We also examined children’s responses to Elinor’s questions during video watching. We found that children watching the semi-interactive version quickly lost interest in responding to Elinor’s questions after they realized she could not comprehend their answers.

Why it matters

Children in the U.S. spend an average of nearly two hours per day watching TV or online videos, according to a national survey. While platforms like PBS Kids provide free educational TV programs, the educational benefits can be limited by the lack of interaction with the content. The semi-interactive technique currently used in shows like “Dora the Explorer” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” is still in wide use, but our evidence shows it is less effective than the AI-based interactive programs because of the absence of responsive feedback from characters.

Recent advances in AI, particularly in speech technologies and interpreting language spoken by real humans, make it possible to enable true interactions between child viewers and children’s TV show characters. This could make watching TV a more active and engaging way for kids to learn science.

What other research is being done

AI is being integrated into a range of media products, including e-books, smart toys and social robots. Meanwhile, advances in AI technology will likely increase its accuracy in processing children’s speech, and therefore enable more natural interactions between children and AI. At the same time, researchers are also studying the ethical use of AI in media for young children to ensure that content that is developed is both educational and safe.

What’s next

We are currently exploring the possibility of developing children’s TV show characters that can process bilingual children’s mixed usage of English and their native language during interactions. A study involving children who speak Spanish and English is in progress.

We also have plans to integrate AI into more PBS Kids shows, including an upcoming series called “Lyla in the Loop,” which highlights creative problem-solving for children ages 4-8.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

For several years there have been lots of available jobs in school districts. Employees could take a year off and, with all the openings, take comfort in the knowledge that districts would always be hiring if and when they wanted to come back.

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

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

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

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

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

Staffing-enrollment mismatch spells big financial trouble ahead

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

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

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

ESSER hangover

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

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

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

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

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

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Over the last decade, educators and administrators have often encountered lofty promises of technology revolutionizing learning, only to experience disappointment when reality failed to meet expectations. It’s understandable, then, that educators might view the current excitement around artificial intelligence with a measure of caution: Is this another overhyped fad, or are we on the cusp of a genuine breakthrough?

A new generation of sophisticated systems has emerged in the last year, including Open AI’s GPT-4. These so-called large-language models employ neutral networks trained on massive data sets to generate text that is extremely human-like. By understanding context and analyzing patterns, they can produce relevant, coherent and creative responses to prompts.

Based on my experiences using several of these systems over the past year, I believe that society may be in the early stages of a transformative moment, similar to the introduction of the web browser and the smartphone. These nascent iterations have flaws and limitations, but they provide a glimpse into what might be possible on the very near horizon, where AI assistants liberate educators from mundane and tedious tasks, allowing them to spend more time with students. And this may very well usher in an era of individualized learning, empowering all students to realize their full potential and fostering a more equitable and effective educational experience.

There are four reasons why this generation of AI tools is likely to succeed where other technologies have failed:

1. Smarter capabilities: These AI systems are now capable of passing many standardized tests, from high school to graduate- and professional-level exams that span mathematics, science, coding, history, law and literature. Google’s Med-PaLM performed at an “expert” doctor level on the medical licensing exam, not only correctly answering the questions but also providing a rationale for its responses. The rate of improvement with these systems is astonishing. For example, GPT-4 made significant progress in just four months, going from a failing grade on the bar exam to scoring in the 90th percentile. It scored in the 93rd percentile on the SAT reading and writing test and the 88th on the LSAT, and got a 5 — the top score — on several Advanced Placement exams.
2. Reasoning engines: AI models like GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, and Google’s Bard are advancing beyond simple knowledge repositories. They are developing into sophisticated reasoning engines that can contextualize, infer and deduce information in a manner strikingly similar to human thought. While traditional search engines functioned like librarians guiding users toward relevant resources, this new generation of AI tools acts as skilled graduate research assistants. They can be tasked with requests such as conducting literature reviews, analyzing data or text, synthesizing findings and generating content, stories and tailored lesson plans.
3. Language is the interface: One of the remarkable aspects of these systems is their ability to interpret and respond to natural language commands, eliminating the need to navigate confusing menus or create complicated formulas. These systems also explain concepts in ways people can easily understand using metaphors and analogies that they can relate to. If an answer is too confusing, you can ask it to rephrase the response or provide more examples.
4. Unprecedented scale: Innovations often catch on slowly, as start-ups must penetrate markets dominated by well-established companies. AI stands in stark contrast to this norm. With tech giants like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft leading the charge, the capabilities of large-language models are not only rapidly scaling, but becoming deeply integrated into a myriad of products, services and emerging companies.

These capabilities are finding their way into the classroom through early experiments providing a tantalizing sense of what might be possible.

• Tutoring assistants: The capability of these systems to understand and generate human-like text allows for providing individualized tutoring to students. They can offer explanations, guidance and real-time feedback tailored to each learner’s unique needs and interests. Khan Academy and DuoLingo are also piloting GPT-4 powered tutors that have been trained on their unique datasets.
• Teaching assistants: Teachers spend hours on tedious administrative tasks, from lesson planning to searching for instructional resources, often at the cost of less time for teaching. As capable reasoning engines, AI can assist teachers by automating many of these tasks — including quickly generating lesson plan ideas, developing worksheets, drafting quizzes and translating content for English learners.
• Student assistants: AI-based feedback systems have the capacity to offer constructive critiques on student writing, including feedback aligned to different assessments, which helps students elevate the quality of their work and fine-tune their writing skills. It also provides immediate help when students are stuck on a concept or project.

While these technologies are enormously promising, it is also important to recognize that they have limitations. They still struggle with some math calculations and at times offer inaccurate information. Rather than supplanting teachers’ expertise and judgment, they should be utilized as a supportive co-pilot, enhancing the overall educational experience. Many of these limitations are being addressed through integrations with other services, such as Wolfram for dramatically better math capabilities. Put another way, this is the worst these AI technologies will be. Whatever shortcomings they have now will likely be improved in future releases.

The unprecedented scale and rapid adoption of generative AI mean that these benefits are not distant possibilities, but realities within reach for students and educators worldwide. By harnessing the power of AI, it is possible to create a future where teaching and learning are not only more effective and equitable, but also deeply personalized, with students empowered to reach their full potential and teachers freed to focus on teaching and fostering meaningful connections with their students.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Most of the programs school districts have implemented to address COVID learning loss are doomed to fail. Despite well-intended and rapid responses, solutions such as tutoring or summer school will miss their goals. Existing policies have failed to consider the unique needs of the students these services seek to help, and thus are destined to waste vast sums of relief funding in pursuit of an impossible goal.

How do we know this? Recent research from our team at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University looked at learning patterns in 16 states to see how recovery efforts will affect students’ academic careers.

Our partnerships with state education departments provide the means to examine the experience of anonymous individual students as they move through public schools. Their scores on standardized state tests reveal what they know at the end of each school year and how that knowledge changes over time. This level of insight is both wide (covering all tested students in each state) and deep (the data illuminate students’ learning histories).

The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified existing learning disparities. If an average student typically gains a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s time, then those with greater-than-average learning progress more quickly. Conversely, those who do not learn as much as the average student gain less than what’s expected. Reviewing this data over multiple years yields a picture of the Pace of Learning (POL) for individual students.

The differences in POL are the missing factor in policy decisions about post-COVID efforts.

Our research assumes that the pre-pandemic pace of learning for individual students is the best that can be expected in the post-COVID years. Using longitudinal student data, we calculated each student’s historical POL and, based on those measures, projected outcomes under different learning loss scenarios. Here, we assume students have lost an average of 90 days of learning due to COVID-19, which other research has corroborated. We then considered the effects of additional time, measured in extra years of schooling.

The table below shows the percentage of students across the 16 states who would meet the benchmark of average knowledge in reading and math by the end of their senior year in high school.

Without additional learning time, fewer than two-thirds will attain that level in either subject. But more critically, even many years of additional instruction will yield only a small improvement. Even if schools offer an additional five years of education (assuming students would partake), only about 75% of students will hit that 12th-grade benchmark. One-quarter will remain undereducated.

Of course, these estimates are theoretical: No district in the country is capable of extending the years of schooling they offer by these amounts.

These findings reveal a lot about the future students face. Those who will reach the 12th-grade benchmark on time have POLs that are strong enough to keep them on track. They are not the ones to worry about. It is the students with smaller POLs who require the most attention and support. Currently, for every day of instruction, they gain less than a full day of learning. Even a full year of additional schooling may have little impact for them. Programs of shorter duration are even less likely to produce their desired aims.

Current remedies are insufficient to solve the learning gaps for low-POL students. High-dosage tutoring, for example, consists of four to six hours a week of extra learning time. For average learners, that leads to an increase of about eight percentile points on state achievement tests. But because students with low POLs receive less benefit from every hour or day of instruction offered, they will not progress to the same degree as the average student. At the end of a school year, the total number of hours cannot produce the sustained impacts needed for the low-POL population. Moreover, a large number of studies have found that the benefits from tutoring do not survive into the future for any students. Summer camps offer even less cause for optimism: They provide lower dosages, and for a shorter time.

Ultimately, the accounting does not add up.

Still, against these discouraging findings, there are promising options for addressing learning recovery. One is to allow students to progress at their own pace toward established benchmarks rather than holding everyone to a fixed timeline of learning. Shifting to a mastery-based approach, rather than maintaining the current system of organizing students by grade level, could achieve this. As long as students continue to progress and demonstrate growth, their schooling could continue. High achievers could reach the benchmarks faster than is usually allowed and move on to more advanced goals. Releasing students from the traditional school year would free up resources that could be devoted to helping lower-POL students.

Another option would be to change the pace of learning only for students with slower rates of progress. Children need higher-quality instruction to realize greater learning gains, and the evidence is clear that the best teachers get better results than average educators. Making sure each classroom has excellent instruction should be the ultimate goal.

Ways to find and deploy the most successful educators already exist. exist. By utilizing data from professional observations and student test scores, schools could identify the instructors who truly make a difference in their students’ learning and deploy those high-impact teachers in new ways. One approach would be to offer incentives — bonus pay, for example, or credit that could be put toward a sabbatical or other specialized training — to motivate higher-quality teachers to add students to their classes. Offering extra support to teachers who take on extra tasks, such as class aides or release from other duties, could also help. And placing lower-performing students in classes with a high-quality teacher and higher-performing peers can produce a jump in performance.

In places where the supply of high-need students outstrips the availability of high-impact teachers, an alternative could be to find the best educator in the state for a given subject, who would receive a substantial payment for recording an entire year’s worth of lessons. The videos and all supporting materials — lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, etc. — would be posted online for other teachers to use.

We call this approach the Instructional Commons. Building on the notion of Massive Open Online Courses, it offers significant benefits: peer-to-peer training, the opportunity for teachers to observe high-quality instruction in depth, a ready resource for their own lesson planning and a common standard for educators and administrators to employ for professional development. If adopted successfully, this approach can elevate the caliber of the existing teacher force at relatively modest cost and without political battles.

The country is at a pivotal moment in K-12 public education. It is time to decide whether we are willing to make the necessary changes to the current system for our students’ future. This will require deep alterations to the existing organization and practice of K-12 public education. The alternative: continued support of an institutional system that will almost certainly fail.

Disclosure: Margaret (Macke) Raymond is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which provides financial support to LA School Report’s parent company The 74.

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Los Angeles teachers have much to cheer about. Less than a month after the district’s school support workers received a contract with 30% salary increases, United Teachers Los Angeles came away with a mammoth deal of its own.

On April 13, the district made what it called a “historic offer” of 19% in pay hikes over three years. The union promptly rejected it as inadequate but five days later accepted what it called a “groundbreaking” agreement with increases of 21%.

By January 2025, it will bring the average Los Angeles teacher salary to an estimated $106,000 a year.

The post-deal reactions from the district and the union were a contrast in styles.

“Proud of what we can do with our labor partners when we negotiate in good faith and come to an agreement that serves our hardworking employees as well as our students and families,” tweeted Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

Update from Los Angeles Unified. To view the latest agreements with our labor partners, please visit https://t.co/w9y5Sd2yJh. pic.twitter.com/I2cX4q3dEx

— Los Angeles Unified (@LASchools) April 15, 2023

“While Carvalho and the district spent the past year ignoring and undermining educators, students and parents, UTLA members fought for a fair contract that meets the urgent needs of today and builds a strong foundation for public schools,” read the union statement.

Carvalho is sanguine about the district’s ability to bankroll these deals. “The state has provided two back-to-back, very solid budget years with a cost-of-living adjustment that allowed us to compose these offers,” he said. Nevertheless, he made a trip to Sacramento earlier this month to lobby for more school funding.

It has been widely reported that the district has $5 billion in reserves, which, for a total budget of $14.2 billion, is excessive. Less widely reported is that half of the reserve is already committed or is one-time federal COVID relief money. The district has yet to release data on the total cost of the new contracts.

Los Angeles also has 35,000 fewer students than it did two years ago, and the district forecasts the loss of another 121,000 by 2030. Since state funding is based on enrollment, that is going to make it difficult to sustain the district’s spending levels.

Carvalho may think he bought himself at least a year of labor peace, as the support employees’ contract expires in June 2024 and the teachers’ contract in June 2025. But the unions don’t seem eager to beat their swords into plowshares.

“We still have a long way to go,” said SEIU Local 99 steward Jennifer Torres. “This is the foundation.”

“We have maximum power right now, and it’s going to keep evolving from this point on even further,” said teachers union Secretary Arlene Inouye.

So did Carvalho get “schooled” by the unions, as Politico believes, or — to further the metaphor — is he planning to “graduate”?

Carvalho is flashy and at ease in front of the camera. He has often been rumored as a candidate for higher office, and if he has any aspirations in California, he must at least hold the public employees unions at bay. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Carvalho is somewhere else when the district’s bills come due.

The implications for Los Angeles are only part of the picture, since other teachers unions may now see the last few months as a model to follow.

The Oakland Education Association is currently holding a strike vote, which would be an “unfair labor practices” walkout similar to the one that shuttered Los Angeles schools for three days last month. The state labor board has still yet to determine whether that strike was legal, and a faction with the Oakland union is planning a wildcat strike if the authorization vote fails.

Intentionally or not, Carvalho and the Los Angeles school board have reset the market for public school employees. But if the enrollment figures are any indication, parents will continue to take their business elsewhere.

“Despite the increasing importance of mathematics to the progress of our economy and society, enrollment in mathematics programs has been declining at all levels of the American educational system,” Reagan wrote in his proclamation.

Nearly 40 years later, the problem that Reagan lamented during the first National Math Awareness Week – which has since evolved to become “Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month” – not only remains but has gotten worse.

Whereas 1.63%, or about 16,000, of the nearly 1 million bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S. in the 1985-1986 school year went to math majors, in 2020, just 1.4%, or about 27,000, of the 1.9 million bachelor’s degrees were awarded in the field of math – a small but significant decrease in the proportion.

Post-pandemic data suggests the number of students majoring in math in the U.S. is likely to decrease in the future.

A key factor is the dramatic decline in math learning that took place during the lockdown. For instance, whereas 34% of eighth graders were proficient in math in 2019, test data shows the percentage dropped to 26% after the pandemic.

These declines will undoubtedly affect how much math U.S. students can do at the college level. For instance, in 2022, only 31% of graduating high school seniors were ready for college-level math – down from 39% in 2019.

These declines will also affect how many U.S. students are able to take advantage of the growing number of high-paying math occupations, such as data scientists and actuaries. Employment in math occupations is projected to increase by 29% in the period from 2021 to 2031.

About 30,600 math jobs are expected to open up per year from growth and replacement needs. That exceeds the 27,000 or so math graduates being produced each year – and not all math degree holders go into math fields. Shortages will also arise in several other areas, since math is a gateway to many STEM fields.

For all of these reasons and more, as a mathematician who thinks deeply about the importance of math and what it means to our world – and even to our existence as human beings – I believe this year, and probably for the foreseeable future, educators, policymakers and employers need to take Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month more seriously than ever before.

Struggles with mastery

Subpar math achievement has been endemic in the U.S. for a long time.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that no more than 26% of 12th graders have been rated proficient in math since 2005.

The pandemic disproportionately affected racially and economically disadvantaged groups. During the lockdown, these groups had less access to the internet and quiet studying spaces than their peers. So securing Wi-Fi and places to study are key parts of the battle to improve math learning.

Some people believe math teaching techniques need to be revamped, as they were through the Common Core, a new set of educational standards that stressed alternative ways to solve math problems. Others want a return to more traditional methods. Advocates also argue there is a need for colleges to produce better-prepared teachers.

Other observers believe the problem lies with the “fixed mindset” many students have – where failure leads to the conviction that they can’t do math – and say the solution is to foster a “growth” mindset – by which failure spurs students to try harder.

Although all these factors are relevant, none address what in my opinion is a root cause of math underachievement: our nation’s ambivalent relationship with mathematics.

Low visibility

Many observers worry about how U.S. children fare in international rankings, even though math anxiety makes many adults in the U.S. steer clear of the subject themselves.

Mathematics is not like art or music, which people regularly enjoy all over the country by visiting museums or attending concerts. It’s true that there is a National Museum of Mathematics in New York, and some science centers in the U.S. devote exhibit space to mathematics, but these can be geographically inaccessible for many.

A 2020 study on media portrayals of math found an overall “invisibility of mathematics” in popular culture. Other findings were that math is presented as being irrelevant to the real world and of little interest to most people, while mathematicians are stereotyped to be singular geniuses or socially inept nerds, and white and male.

Math is tough and typically takes much discipline and perseverance to succeed in. It also calls for a cumulative learning approach – you need to master lessons at each level because you’re going to need them later.

While research in neuroscience shows almost everyone’s brain is equipped to take up the challenge, many students balk at putting in the effort when they don’t score well on tests. The myth that math is just about procedures and memorization can make it easier for students to give up. So can negative opinions about math ability conveyed by peers and parents, such as declarations of not being “a math person.”

A positive experience

Here’s the good news. A 2017 Pew poll found that despite the bad rap the subject gets, 58% of U.S. adults enjoyed their school math classes. It’s members of this legion who would make excellent recruits to help promote April’s math awareness. The initial charge is simple: Think of something you liked about math – a topic, a puzzle, a fun fact – and go over it with someone. It could be a child, a student, or just one of the many adults who have left school with a negative view of math.

Can something that sounds so simplistic make a difference? Based on my years of experience as a mathematician, I believe it can – if nothing else, for the person you talk to. The goal is to stimulate curiosity and convey that mathematics is much more about exhilarating ideas that inform our universe than it is about the school homework-type calculations so many dread.

Raising math awareness is a first step toward making sure people possess the basic math skills required not only for employment, but also to understand math-related issues – such as gerrymandering or climate change – well enough to be an informed and participating citizen. However, it’s not something that can be done in one month.

Given the decline in both math scores and the percentage of students studying math, it may take many years before America realizes the stronger relationship with math that President Reagan’s proclamation called for during the first National Math Awareness Week in 1986.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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April 3 and 4 marked the last two of four “acceleration days” for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The optional extra tutoring was designed to help make up for instruction lost during COVID school closures.

Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra days. Then, after negotiations, the district rescheduled them for winter and spring breaks, irking SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support workers. And whatever benefit the extra days might have brought was undone by the three-day walkout organized by both unions March 21 to 23.

One would think that, going forward, the district might try a different approach to adding instructional days, and that the teachers union might consider a different response.

But who are we kidding?

Last week, the L.A. school board approved the district calendar for the next three years. “The new instructional calendars address the need to mitigate learning loss by shortening the winter recess and extending options for summer programming,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. The plan is to shorten the three-week winter break to two weeks.

The seven-member school board unanimously approved the changes, and the press release includes positive comments from five of them. It also states that the district “undertook an extensive process of gathering input through surveys, focus groups and presentations from families, staff and labor partners.”

Unfortunately for Carvalho and the board, those surveys, focus groups and input from labor partners all indicated an overwhelming preference for a three-week winter break.

The district justified the change on the grounds that three weeks off “creates challenges for our neediest families that must be considered in decision-making.” Also, most large districts in other states have a two-week break, as do most districts in southern California.

Not one to overlook an opportunity for activism, the teachers union immediately filed an unfair labor practice charge, created a Twitter hashtag and ramped up an organizing drive against the change.

The district can't ignore the 70% of LAUSD families that oppose a two-week winter break.

Make your voice heard. Let the Board and @LAUSDSup that there is #NoCalendarWithoutUs https://t.co/TWPcZ6KXEK pic.twitter.com/mw3RckUB6w

— United Teachers Los Angeles (@UTLAnow) April 4, 2023

“School calendar changes are mandatory subjects of bargaining and UTLA leadership immediately sent a demand to bargain to the district,” reads a statement on the union website. “This calendar move exemplifies Carvalho’s refusal to bargain in good faith and his willful disdain of worker rights. By openly disregarding labor law and ignoring the voices of parents and staff, Carvalho continues to prove that he is not a leader. The school board’s approval demonstrates a failure to hold Carvalho accountable.”

A district representative told EdSource that calendar dates are “at the sole discretion of the superintendent and the Board of Education,” and that the district held two meetings to discuss the calendar with its unions — but UTLA sent a representative to only one.

Carvalho and the board seem to have learned nothing from their previous encounter on this issue and are blithely waving the red cape in front of the charging bull. The union will gore them again, but one wonders how often it can continue to place itself on the side of less school versus more.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays at The 74.