Once a teacher… – KMZ Digest

5 ways schools have shifted in 5 years since COVID-19

itsme — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:48:10 +0000

Students sit in pop-up tents during wind ensemble class at Wenatchee High School on Feb. 26, 2021 in Wenatchee, Wash.. David Ryder/Getty Images

The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago.

Access to high-quality teachers and curriculum developed by teachers is shrinking, for example. Likewise, there has been a loss of emotional support for students and a decline in the school use of technology and social media.

As education scholars focused on literacy practices in schools, we’ve identified five ways we believe the COVID-19 pandemic – and the rapid shift to remote learning and back – has transformed education:The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago.

1. Teachers are leaving, and those staying are stressed

At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, 82% of U.S. public schools had teaching vacancies.

Schools have tried to adapt by expanding class sizes and hiring substitute teachers. They have also increased use of video conferencing to Zoom teachers into classrooms.

A teacher works from her home due to the COVID-19 outbreak on April 1, 2020, in Arlington, Va.
Olivier Doulier/AFP via Getty Images

Teacher retention has been a problem for at least a decade. But after the pandemic, there was an increase in the number of teachers who considered leaving the profession earlier than expected.

When teachers leave, often in the middle of the school year, it can require their colleagues to step in and cover extra classes. This means teachers who stay are overworked and possibly not teaching in their area of certification.

This, in turn, leads to burnout. It also increases the likelihood that students will not have highly qualified teachers in some hard-to-fill positions like physical science and English.

2. Increase in scripted curriculum

As of fall 2024, 40 states and Washington had passed science of reading laws, which mandate evidence-based reading instruction rooted in phonics and other foundational skills.

While the laws don’t necessarily lead to scripted curriculum, most states have chosen to mandate reading programs that require teachers to adhere to strict pacing. They also instruct teachers not to deviate from the teachers’ manual.

Many of these reading programs came under scrutiny by curricular evaluators from New York University in 2022. They found the most common elementary reading programs were culturally destructive or culturally insufficient – meaning they reinforce stereotypes and portray people of color in inferior and destructive ways that reinforce stereotypes.

This leaves teachers to try to navigate the mandated curriculum alongside the needs of their students, many of whom are culturally and linguistically diverse. They either have to ignore the mandated script or ignore their students. Neither method allows teachers to be effective.

When teachers are positioned as implementers of curriculum instead of professionals who can be trusted to make decisions, it can lead to student disengagement and a lack of student responsiveness.

This form of de-professionalization is a leading cause of teacher shortages. Teachers are most effective, research shows, when they feel a sense of agency, something that is undermined by scripted teaching.

3. Improvements in teen mental health, but there’s more to do

Many of the narratives surrounding adolescent mental health, particularly since the pandemic, paint a doomscape of mindless social media use and isolation.

However, data published in 2024 shows improvements in teen reports of persistent sadness and hopelessness. Though the trend is promising in terms of mental health, in-school incidences of violence and bullying rose in 2021-22, and many teens report feeling unsafe at school.

Other reports have shown an increase in feelings of loneliness and isolation among teens since the pandemic.

4. Crackdown on students’ technology use in schools

COVID-19 prompted schools to make an abrupt switch to educational technology, and many schools have kept many of these policies in place.

For example, Google Classroom and other learning management systems are commonly used in many schools, particularly in middle school and high school.

These platforms can help parents engage with their children’s coursework. That facilitates conversations and parental awareness.

But this reliance on screens has also come under fire for privacy issues – the sharing of personal information and sensitive photos – and increasing screen time.

And with academia’s use of technology on the rise, cellphone usage has also increased among U.S. teens, garnering support for school cellphone bans.

A student attends an online class at the Crenshaw Family YMCA on Feb. 17, 2021, in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

But banning these devices in schools may not help teens, as smartphone use is nearly universal in the U.S. Teens need support from educators to support them as they learn to navigate the complex digital world safely, efficiently and with balance.

In light of data surrounding adolescent mental health and online isolation – and the potential for connection through digital spaces – it’s also important that teens are aware of positive support networks that are available online.

Though these spaces can provide social supports, it is important for teens to understand the strengths and limitations of technology and receive authentic guidance from adults that a technology ban may prohibit.

5. Students and adults need social emotional support

Students returned to in-person schooling with a mix of skill levels and with a variety of social and emotional needs.

Social and emotional learning includes self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relational skills and decision-making.

These skills are vital for academic success and social relationships.

Teachers reported higher student needs for social and emotional learning after they returned to in-person instruction.

While some of this social and emotional teaching came under fire from lawmakers and parents, this was due to confusion about what it actually entailed. These skills do not constitute a set of values or beliefs that parents may not agree with. Rather, they allow students to self-regulate and navigate social situations by explicitly teaching students about feelings and behaviors.

A teacher provides instruction to a student at Freedom Preparatory Academy on Feb. 10, 2021, in Provo, Utah. George Frey/Getty Images

One area where students may need support is with cognitive flexibility, or the ability to adapt to current situations and keep an open mind. Classroom instruction that engages students in varied tasks and authentic teaching strategies rooted in real-life scenarios can strengthen this ability in students.

Besides allowing students to be engaged members of a school community, cognitive flexibility is important because it supports the skill development that is part of many state English language arts and social studies standards.

Social and emotional learning and cognitive flexibility are key components that allow students to learn.

Due to vague or confusing state policies, many schools have stopped teaching social and emotional learning skills, or minimized their use.

This, coupled with teacher stress and burnout, means that both adults and children in schools are often not getting their social and emotional needs met.

Message of mistrust

While we described five shifts since the start of the pandemic, the overall trend in K-12 schools is one of mistrust.

We feel that the message – from districts, state legislators and parents – is that teachers cannot be trusted to make choices.

This represents a massive shift. During the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown, teachers were revered and thanked for their service.

We believe in teacher autonomy and professionalism, and we hope this list can help Americans reflect on the direction of the past five years. If society wants a different outcome in the next five years, it starts with trust.

Rachel Besharat Mann Assistant Professor in Education Studies, Wesleyan University

Gravity Goldberg Visiting Assistant Professor in Education Studies, Wesleyan Universityy

theconversation.com/5-ways-schools-have-shifted-in-5-years-since-covid-19-246449

Marion Joseph’s literacy crusade for teaching

itsme — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:24:44 +0000

phonics in California is paying off

Students at Stege Elementary School in Richmond on Feb. 6, 2023.
Photo by Shelby Knowles for CalMatters

Dan Walters

March 19, 2023

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – one person can have a life-changing impact on the wellbeing of millions of people.

Marion Joseph, who died nearly a year ago at age 95, was one of those people. She impacted millions of California schoolchildren present and future who struggle with reading comprehension, the vital skill that underlies all of education.

Marion Joseph
https://www.corelearn.com/

The pandemic underscored that too many of California’s elementary school students lack effective reading ability. EdSource noted that, prior to the pandemic, fewer than 50% of the state’s third-graders were reading at the expected level for their age. Three years later, after students had suffered through school closures and haphazard Zoom school, that had dropped to 42%.

It’s evident that one factor in the state’s reading crisis was that too many students were being subjected to a trendy form of reading instruction called “whole language,” which largely left them struggling on their own to decipher the words in their books.

_Shutterstock

For decades, California educators and politicians had been waging what were dubbed “reading wars” over whether that approach or the rival phonics method was more effective. School districts were left to decide for themselves which to use.

Joseph was one of the fiercest reading warriors. She had retired in 1982 after a long career in the state Department of Education, but became a tireless advocate for phonics after discovering that her granddaughter was struggling in reading.

Appalled to learn that the majority of California’s elementary students could not read well enough to learn from textbooks, Joseph started pestering state officials to do something. In the 1990s, then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed her to the state Board of Education, which gave her a platform for the phonics crusade.

Joseph had some success in advancing the phonics cause, which stresses fundamental instruction in the letters and letter combinations that make up sounds, thus allowing children to sound out words and eventually whole sentences and passages.

In 2005, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy research group, honored her, saying, “Her relentless, research-based advocacy – for which the retired grandma didn’t earn a dime – is still a sterling example of what a citizen-activist and lone individual can accomplish in reforming U.S. schools.”

https://firstbook.org/

Alas, after Joseph retired for a second time, the advocates of whole language, which assumes that reading is a naturally learned skill, much like speaking, recouped and reading scores once again stagnated. However it now appears that phonics, now dubbed the “science of reading,” will become the state’s preferred method.

Phonics have a new champion in Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has struggled with dyslexia and thus has a strong personal interest in improving reading skills.

Buried on Page 123 of a trailer bill attached to Newsom’s proposed 2023-24 state budget is a $1 million appropriation to the Department of Education for creation of a “Literacy Roadmap” aimed at improving reading and other language skills using “evidence-based literacy instruction in the classroom, including explicit instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, and other decoding skills.”

_{Logo-The California Reading & Literature Project (CRLP) UC San Diego}

Newsom’s support isn’t the only indication that Joseph’s long struggle is paying off. Beginning next year, credentialing of teacher preparation programs will require reading standards aligned with phonics.

Perhaps most importantly, 14 leading figures in California education research and advocacy, including those who have fought in reading wars on both sides, have issued a joint paper that calls for more vigorous and targeted instruction in basic reading skills, including phonics.

It’s unfortunate Joseph is not alive to see what’s finally happening to address California’s literacy crisis.

calmatters.org/commentary/2023/03/reading-instruction-phonics-california

Can learning cursive help kids read better?

itsme — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 20:14:57 +0000

Pennsylvania is considering legislation that mandates cursive instruction in public schools.
Angela Guthrie/iStock via Getty Images

Some policymakers think it’s worth a try

Shawn Datchuk

May 6, 2025

Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.”

Image: Cartoonstock

Then he handed it to me to read.

If you have a child in the Philadelphia School District, chances are they have not been taught how to read or write cursive either.

But cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States. Several states in recent years passed legislation mandating instruction in cursive handwriting, including California, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as are other states.

I’m an associate professor of special education and the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. At the center, we’re conducting a systematic review of prior research to improve cursive handwriting instruction.

We also want to know how learning cursive affects the development of reading and writing skills.

Cursive instruction sidelined

In cursive handwriting, the individual letters of a word are joined with connecting strokes, such as in a person’s signature.

Cursive fell out of favor in U.S. schools over a decade ago. In 2010, most states adopted Common Core academic standards which omitted cursive handwriting from expected academic skills to be learned by K-8 students. In fact, the standards only briefly mention print handwriting, a writing style in which the individual letters of a word are unconnected, as a skill to be taught in early elementary grades.

Educators often have trouble finding enough time in the school day to teach all the expected writing skills, let alone something that’s not mandated such as cursive handwriting.

In several national surveys, teachers have reported limited amounts of time for writing instruction and that they have found it difficult to address both the basic skills of writing, such as handwriting, and more advanced skills, such as essay composition.

Benefits of handwriting

The increased interest in cursive handwriting likely stems from effort by policymakers to improve the literacy performance of K-12 students across the country.

Ode to Cursive
Amy DiGi

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment, a measure of nationwide reading progress, only 31% of fourth grade students scored proficient or above. Philadelphia’s numbers were worse, with just 19% of fourth grade students scoring proficient or above.

Research suggests it may be possible to improve overall writing and reading through handwriting instruction.

The benefits have been more closely studied with print handwriting, but preliminary evidence suggests cursive handwriting instruction may also be beneficial. Some studies have found cursive handwriting instruction can improve handwriting legibility, writing length and select reading skills. In a 2020 study, researchers found cursive handwriting instruction can also improve spelling accuracy and storytelling ability.

Why might cursive make a difference? On the surface, it seems like a simple motor skill. But under the surface, cursive handwriting draws upon deep reading knowledge and requires the coordination of multiple cognitive and physical processes.

To handwrite letters or spell words in print or cursive, students need to commit multiple aspects of each letter to memory. For example, if students handwrite the word “cat,” they need to know the overall shape of each letter, as well as its name and sound.

After drawing upon this reading knowledge from memory, students use a combination of motor and vision systems to write each letter and the entire word. Gross motor movements are used to adjust the body and arm to the writing surface. Fine motor movements are used to manipulate the pencil with one’s fingers. And visual-motor coordination is used to write each letter and adjust movements as needed.

A skill with staying power?

Besides potential benefits to overall writing and reading development, cursive handwriting continues to have social importance.

It is often used to sign formal documents via a cursive signature, or to communicate with close friends or loved ones. Furthermore, understanding cursive is needed to read important historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Even in the digital age, touch-screen tablets and other devices often come with the ability to handwrite text with an electronic pencil. I teach courses at the University of Iowa, and many of my students handwrite their notes on electronic tablets.

For schools, low-tech options such as paper and pencils remain more cost-efficient than high-tech options. For example, it can be time-consuming and expensive to replace a broken laptop but relatively cheap to sharpen a broken pencil or get a new piece of paper.

Although it may be difficult for educators to find sufficient time for writing instruction, students will likely benefit from developing the capacity to express their ideas in a variety of ways, including cursive handwriting.

For anyone interested in learning about cursive handwriting and teaching it to their children or students, the Iowa Reading Research Center will release a free online course and curricula called CLIFTER on June 2, 2025.

theconversation.com/can-learning-cursive-help-kids-read-better-some-policymakers-think-its-worth-a-try-253610

‘Number sense’ is one of the building blocks of math

itsme — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:23:48 +0000

By Holly Korbey

February 19, 2025

The building blocks of math that students need to excel — but aren’t always getting

ATLANTA — Students gathered around a bright blue number board in Melissa Williams’ kindergarten class at the Westminster School, gazing at the bank of 100 blank squares, organized in rows and columns of 10. Their assignment was to pick a numbered tile and figure out where it should go on the board.

The task seems simple, but Williams’ goal was to bolster students’ “number sense” — a difficult-to-define skill, but one that is nevertheless essential for more advanced mathematics.

_{www.beginlearning.com}

One student with a “42” tile carefully counted the squares in each row. “Ten!” he said. Counting each row by tens — 10, 20, 30 — he came to 40, then moved his finger to the next row and counted the next two to arrive at 42.

The fact that the student was able to count by tens and then add two, rather than counting each square up to 42, is an example of number sense.

Other examples include understanding the size of numbers in relation to one another, finding missing numbers in a sequence, understanding that written numbers like “100” represent 100 items, and counting by ones, twos, fives and tens. Each of these skills is critical to understanding math, just like grasping the connection between letters and the sounds they represent is a must-have skill for fluent reading.

Number sense is so innate to many adults that they may not remember being taught such skills. It is crucial to mastering more complex math skills like manipulating fractions and decimals, or solving equations with unknown variables, experts say. Research shows that a flexible understanding of numbers is strongly correlated to later math achievement and the ability to solve problems presented in different ways.

Unlike the recent surge of evidence on science-based reading instruction, research and emphasis on number sense isn’t making its way into schools and classrooms in the same way. Students spend less time on foundational numeracy compared with what they spend on reading; elementary teachers often receive less training in how to teach math effectively; and schools use fewer interventions for students who need extra math support.

https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/

Many American students struggle in math. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, nearly 1 in 4 fourth graders and 39 percent of eighth graders scored “below basic,” the test’s lowest category. An analysis of state tests shows that few states have recovered students from pandemic math losses, with disadvantaged students from low-income neighborhoods hit especially hard.

For those struggling students — including those diagnosed with dyscalculia and related learning challenges — lack of number sense often plays a significant role.

“For kids that have a fundamental weakness in mathematics, 80 percent or 90 percent of the time that’s going to be linked to a lack of understanding numbers,” said Ben Clarke, an early math researcher and department head of special education and clinical sciences at the University of Oregon. “If we want students to be able to access other pieces of mathematics that are really important, then they need to build this foundational understanding of numbers.”

_{For the Love of Teaching}

Doug Clements, the Kennedy endowed chair in early childhood learning at the University of Denver, said many American students struggle with seeing relationships between numbers. “Children who see 98 plus 99 and line them up vertically, draw a bar underneath with an addition sign, then sum the eight and the nine, carry the one and so forth — they are not showing relational thinking,” Clements said. “Children who immediately say, ‘That’s 200 take away three, so 197,’ are showing number sense.”

Even in the early years of school, researchers can spot students who can make connections between numbers and use more sophisticated strategies to solve problems, just as there are some students who start school already reading.

Also as with reading, gaps between students are present on the first day of kindergarten. Students from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds arrive at school with less math knowledge than high-income students. Boston College psychologist and early math researcher Elida Laski said research has found income-based differences in how families talk about math with children before they ever reach school.

“Lower-income families are more likely to think about math as narrow, it’s counting and numbers,” Laski said. “Whereas higher-income families tend to think about math as more conceptual and around in everyday life.”

These differences in thinking play out in how flexible students are with numbers in early elementary school. In one study, Laski and her team found that higher-income kindergarten and first grade students used more sophisticated problem-solving strategies than lower-income students, who more often relied on counting. The higher-income students also had more basic math facts committed to memory, like the answer to one plus two.

The memory recall and relatively advanced strategies used by higher-income students produced more efficient problem-solving and more correct answers than counting did. Also, when students from high-income families produced a wrong answer, it was often less wrong than students who were relying on strategies like counting.

Solving math education

Laski said many of the low-income students in the study struggled with addition because they didn’t have a firm understanding of how basic concepts of numbers work. For example, “When we’d ask, ‘What’s three plus four,’ we’d get answers like ‘34,’” Laski said. “Whatever ways they’re practicing arithmetic, they don’t have the conceptual basis to make sense of it. They didn’t have the number sense, really.”

Laski said early childhood classrooms could be “far more direct” with students in teaching number sense, weaving it in explicitly when working on more concrete skills like addition.

PBS Learning Media

Clarke, the early math researcher at University of Oregon, agreed.

“Our understanding has drastically grown in the last 20, 25 years about effective instructional approaches” to help students learn number sense, said Clarke. “If you are only going to get X number of minutes in kindergarten or first grade to support student development in mathematics, kids that are not responding to the core instruction — you have to be pretty focused on what you do and what you offer.”

But elementary school teachers often aren’t trained well on the evidence base for best practices in teaching number sense. A 2022 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality highlights that while teacher training programs have improved in the last decade, they still have a long way to go. By their standard, only 15 percent of undergraduate elementary education programs earned an A for adequately covering both math content and pedagogy.

Teachers aren’t often taught to look at math learning as a whole, a progression of skills that takes students through elementary math, beginning with learning to count and ending up in fractions and decimals — something that some instructional coaches say would help emphasize the importance of how early number sense connects to advanced math. Grade-level standards are the focus that can leave out the bigger picture.

Both the Common Core State Standards and Clements, who served on the 2008 National Mathematics Advisory Panel and helped create a resource of early math learning trajectories, outline those skills progressions. But many teachers are unaware of them.

https://us.sofatutor.com

Instructional coach and math consultant Neily Boyd, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, said she often works with teachers on understanding how one skill builds on another in sequence, how skills are connected, using the progressions as a jumping-off point.

“When teachers have been trained on both the whole math concept and how the pieces progress from year to year, they’re able to teach their grade-level piece in a way that builds from the previous pieces and towards the future pieces,” she said. “Learning math becomes about widening and refining understandings you’ve already built, rather than a never-ending list of seemingly disconnected components.”

Young students also spend less time with numbers, which often only appear during “math time,” than they do with letters, reading and literacy.

“Often I’ll go into classrooms with literacy stuff all over the walls, but nothing in terms of number,” said Nancy Jordan, professor of learning sciences at the University of Delaware and author of “Number Sense Interventions.” “In the early grades, there are so many ways to build number sense outside of instructional time as well — playing games, number lines in the classroom. Teachers can think of other ways to build these informal understandings of math and relate them to formal understanding.”

On a recent fall day at Nashville Classical Charter School, in Nashville, Tennessee, fourth grade math teacher Catherine Schwartz was walking students through a complicated subtraction problem with big numbers: “Lyle has 2,302 dog treats, but he needs 13,400. How many more treats does Lyle need?”

To solve it, students had to “subtract across zeros,” regrouping from one place value to the next. Subtraction’s standard algorithm is an important skill to learn, Schwartz said, but can’t be done well without strong number sense.

Number sense for older students has some of the same ideas of magnitude and relationships, Schwartz said, but the numbers get bigger. Students began the subtraction problem using 13 thousands and four hundreds to recognize the magnitude of the numbers in each place value, for example, but slowly simplified it into the classic stack-and-subtract method.

Schwartz, who has taught for seven years, said at first she didn’t realize how big a role number sense played in calculations like subtraction with big numbers. ”Number sense or number flexibility, it’s never truly named” in the curriculum, Schwartz said. “We try to practice it.”

Even something as simple as counting big numbers, including hundred thousands and millions, some educators say, can help develop number sense. Counting might seem simple, but for young children it’s foundational and essential. “These are really big ideas for little kids,” Jordan said.

hechingerreport.org/the-building-blocks-of-math-students-need-to-excel

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_{^{This story also appeared Mind/Shift}}

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Contact the editor of this story, Christina Samuels, at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org

Why it matters that Americans are comparatively bad at math

itsme — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:55:56 +0000

by JON MARCUS

September 26, 2023

Desola Lanre-Ologundisruptxn

Employers, experts raise new alarms about competitiveness and national security

Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.

“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, who is 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”

Tran also loves math. He was speaking during a break in a Boston city program for promising local high school students to study calculus for five hours a day throughout the summer at Northeastern University. And his observation was surprisingly apt.

At a time when Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further, employers and others say the nation needs people who are good at math in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes.

They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny anymore. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

“The advances in technology that are going to drive where the world goes in the next 50 years are going to come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don’t,” said Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the process of teaching and learning subjects including math.

There’s already ample and dramatic evidence of this.

Several largely overlooked reports, including from the Department of Defense, raise alarms about how Americans’ disdain for math is a threat to national security.

One, issued in July by the think tank The Aspen Institute, warns that international adversaries are challenging America’s longtime technological dominance. “We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China,” it says, calling this a “dangerous” failure and urging decisionmakers to make education a national security priority.

“There are major national and international challenges that will require better math skills,” said Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute and founder and executive director of its College Excellence Program.

“This is not an educational question alone,” said Wyner. “It’s about knowledge development, environmental protection, better cures for diseases. Resolving the fundamental challenges facing our time require math.”

The Defense Department, in a separate study, calls for an initiative akin to the 1958 Eisenhower National Defense Act to support education in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. It reports that there are now eight times as many college graduates in these disciplines in China and four times as many engineers in Russia than in the United States. China has also surpassed the United States in the number of doctoral degrees in engineering, according to the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — which “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data, and solve problems” — will have increased by 29 percent in the 10 years ending in 2031, or by more than 30,000 per year, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. That’s much faster than most other kinds of jobs.

America’s poor math performance is a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

Tennessee Tech runs a summer camp teaching cybersecurity, which requires math, to high school students. “That lightbulb goes off and they say, ‘That’s why I need to know that,’” Allen said.

There are deep shortages of workers in information technology fields, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast, which says that there were more than 4 million job postings over the last year in the United States for software developers, database administrators and computer user support specialists.

With billions being spent to beef up U.S. production of semiconductors, Deloitte reports a projected shortage in that industry, too, of from 70,000 to 90,000 workers over the next few years.

All of these careers require math. Yet math scores among American students — which had been stagnant for more than a decade, according to the National Science Foundation — are now getting worse.

Math performance among elementary and middle-school students has fallen by 6 to 15 percent below pre-pandemic growth rates, depending on the students’ age, since before the pandemic, according to the Northwest Evaluation Association, which administers standardized tests nationwide. Math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell by 9 points last year, the largest drop ever recorded, to their lowest levels in more than three decades.

In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest.

Even before the pandemic, only one in five college-bound American high school students were prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council. Among the students who decide to study STEM in college, more than a third end up changing their majors, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

“And these are the students who have done well in maths,” said Jo Boaler, who studies the teaching of math as a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. “That’s a huge loss for the U.S.”

One result of this exodus is that, in the fast-growing field of artificial intelligence, two-thirds of U.S. university graduate students and more than half the U.S. workforce in AI and AI-related fields are foreign born, according to the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Only around one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports, and the rest come from abroad. Most will leave when they finish their programs; many are being aggressively recruited by other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom.

The economic ramifications of this in the United States are twofold: first, on individuals’ job prospects and earnings potential; and second, on the country’s productivity and competitiveness.

Every one of the 25 highest-paying college majors are in STEM fields, the financial advising website Bankrate found.

Ten years after graduating, math majors out-earn graduates in other fields by about 17 percent, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute using the education and job histories of more than 50 million workers. That premium would be even higher if it wasn’t for the fact that 16 percent of math majors become teachers.

Knowing math “is a huge part of how successful people are in their lives and what jobs are open to them, what promotions they can get,” Boaler said.

Only around one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American.

A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2 to 9 percent less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic. The states themselves will suffer a decline in gross domestic product of from 0.6 to 2.9 percent per year, or a collective $28 trillion over the remainder of this century.

Countries whose students scored higher on math tests have experienced greater economic growth than countries whose students tested lower, one study found. It calculated that had the U.S. improved its math scores on the PISA test as promised by President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors in 1989, it would have resulted in a 4.5 percent bump in the U.S. gross domestic product by 2015. That increase did not occur.

“Math matters to economic growth for our country,” Wyner said.

This is among the reasons that it isn’t only schools that have been pushing for more students to learn math. It’s economic development agencies such as the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which is trying to get more students into STEM so they can fill jobs in fields such as semiconductor production and electric vehicle design, in which the state projects a need for up to 300,000 workers by 2030.

“Math just underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s MiSTEM initiative to improve STEM education. “It’s extremely important for the future prosperity of our students and communities, but also our entire state.”

The top reason young people ages 13 to 18 say they wouldn’t consider a career in technology is that it requires math and science skills, a survey by the information technology industry association and certification provider CompTIA finds. Forty-six percent fear they aren’t good enough in math and science to work in tech, a higher proportion than their counterparts in Australia, Belgium, India, the Middle East, and the U.K.

In Massachusetts, which is particularly dependent on technology industries, employers are anticipating a shortage over the next five years of 11,000 workers in the life sciences alone.

“It’s not a small problem,” said Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “We’re just not starting students, particularly students of color and from lower-resourced families, on career paths related to math and computer science and those things in which we need to stay competitive, or starting them early enough.”

The Bridge to Calculus program at Northeastern where Kevin Tran spent his summer is a response to that. The 113 participating students were paid $15 an hour, most of it from the city and its public schools, the program’s coordinator, Bindu Veetel, said; the university provided the classroom space and some of the teachers.

The students’ days began at 7:30 a.m., when teacher Jeremy Howland roused his sleepy-looking charges by having them run exercises in their heads, such as calculating 20 percent of various figures he’d written on the whiteboard.

_{Bridge to Calculus was founded by Northeastern professor Dr. Robert Case to empower children from Boston’s underserved communities to succeed in advanced math classes.}

He wasn’t doing it to show them how to leave a tip. He wanted them to explain their thought processes.

“I can see the wheels turning in your head,” Howland told the sea of faces in front of him one early morning as knees bobbed and pens drummed on pages of paper notebooks crowded with equations.

The students’ daily two-hour daily calculus class got only tougher after that. Slowly the numbers yielded their secrets, like a mystery being solved. One of the students even corrected the teacher.

“Bada-bing,” Howland said whenever they were right. “Okay, now you’re talking math.”

Students used some of the rest of their time learning how to apply that knowledge, trying their hands at coding, data analysis, robotics, and elementary electrical engineering under the watchful supervision of mentors including previous graduates of the program.

“We show them how this leads to a career,” said Veetel, who said the program’s alumni have gone on to software, electrical and civil engineering, math research, teaching, medical, and other careers.

“They have so many options with math. Slowly that spark comes on, that this is something they can do.”

It’s not just a good deed that Northeastern is doing. Some of the graduates of Bridge to Calculus end up enrolling there and proceeding to its highly ranked computer science and engineering programs, which — like those at other U.S. universities — struggle to attract homegrown talent.

More than half of the graduate students in all disciplines at Northeastern, including those that require math, are foreign born, university statistics show. In his field of engineering management, “80 percent of us are Indian,” Suuraj Narayanan Raghunathan, a graduate student serving as a Bridge to Calculus mentor, said with a laugh.

The American high school students said they get why their classmates don’t like math.

“It’s a struggle. It’s constant thinking,” said one, Steven Ramos, 16, who said he plans to become a computer or electrical engineer instead of following his brother and other relatives into construction work.

Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.

But with time, the answers come into focus, said Wintana Tewolde, also 16, who wants to be a doctor. “It’s not easy to understand, but once you do, you see it.”

Peter St. Louis-Severe, 17, said math, to him, is fun. “It’s the only subject I can truly understand, because most of the time it has only one answer,” said St. Louis-Severe, who hopes to be a mechanical or chemical engineer and whose gamer name is Mathematics Boss. “Who wouldn’t like math?”

Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.

_{https://www.freepik.com/}

“We push so many kids away from computer science when we tell them you have to be good at math to do computer science, which isn’t true at all,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA.

What employers really want, Thibodeaux said, “is trainability, the aptitude of people being able to learn the systems and solve problems.” Other countries, he said, “are dying for the way our kids learn creativity.”

Back in their classroom at Northeastern, students spent a brief break exchanging math jokes, then returned to class, where even Howland’s hardest questions generally failed to stump them.

They confidently answered as he grilled them on polynomial functions. And after an occasional stumble, they got all the exercises right.

“Bada-bing,” their teacher happily responded.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

Jon Marcus

Jon Marcus writes and edits stories about, and helps plan coverage of, higher education. A former magazine editor, he has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wired, Medium.com and the Times (U.K.) Higher Education magazine, among others. His work has been honored by the National Headliner Awards, Mirror Awards, National Awards for Education Reporting, City and Regional Magazine Association, Deadline Club of New York City and others. Marcus holds a bachelor’s degree from Bates College and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, attended Oxford University, and teaches journalism at Boston College and Northeastern University.

Jon Marcus is the higher education editor at The Hechinger Report.

How the ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ Fable Reveals the Folly of Student Loan Forgiveness

itsme — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 21:12:37 +0000

Today, instead of Aesop Fables, we have Government Fables.

Michael Heberling

Michael Heberling is the Chair of Leadership Studies in the Baker College MBA program in Flint, Michigan. Prior to this, he was President of Baker’s Center for Graduate Studies for 16 years. Before Baker, Dr. Heberling was a Senior Policy & Business Analyst with the Anteon Corporation. He also had a career in the Air Force retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. Dr. Heberling has over 75 business and public policy publications. His research interests focus on leadership, military history and the impact of public policy on the business community. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network

Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you

itsme — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 20:32:48 +0000

Julie Boland, Robin Queen

I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all.

We were curious: what makes our reactions so different?

We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others.

What prior research tells us

Writing errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types of informal electronic communication. In fact, these errors have interested other scholars as well.

Analysis of the world, from experts

Several years before our study, Jane Vignovic and Lori Foster Thompson, who are psychologists at North Carolina State University, conducted an experiment about vetting a potential new colleague, based only on an email message.

College students who read the email messages perceived the writer to be less conscientious, intelligent and trustworthy when the message contained many grammatical errors, compared to the same message without any errors.

And at our own University of Michigan, Randall J. Hucks, a doctoral student in business administration, was studying how spelling errors in online peer-to-peer loan requests at LendingTree.com affected the likelihood of funding. He found that spelling errors led to worse outcomes on multiple dimensions.

In both of these studies, readers judged strangers harshly simply because of writing errors.

Typos vs. grammos

Over the last several years, we conducted a series of experiments to investigate how written errors change a reader’s interpretation of the message, including the inferences that the reader makes about the writer.

For our original experiments, we recruited college students to be our readers, and for our most recent experiment, we recruited people from across the country who differed widely in terms of age and level of education.

In all of our experiments, we asked our participants for information about themselves (e.g., age, gender), literacy behaviors (e.g., time spent pleasure reading, texts per day), and attitudes (e.g., How important is good grammar?). In the most recent experiment, we also gave participants a personality test.

In each experiment, we told our participants to pretend that they had posted an ad for a housemate and gotten 12 email responses. After reading each email, the participants rated the writer as a potential housemate, and on other factors like intelligence, friendliness, laziness, etc.

In fact, we had created three versions of each email. One version had no mistakes. One version included a few typos, e.g. abuot for about. Another version had errors involving words that people often mix up, such as there for their (we called these grammos).

Everyone read four normal messages, four with “typos,” and four with “grammos.” Different people read the other versions of each message, so that we could separate responses to the errors from responses to the message content.

Errors matter – but to whom?

In all of our experiments, readers rated the writers as less desirable if the emails included either typos or grammos. We expected this based on the earlier research, described above. In addition, people differed in their sensitivity to the two types of errors.

For example, college students who reported higher use of electronic media were less sensitive to the errors, though time spent pleasure reading had no effect. Prior research on writing errors had not compared types of errors, nor collected information about the readers, in order to see which reader characteristics influenced interpretation.

Both of these strategies for understanding how errors impact interpretation are unique to our research.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is from the experiment in which we gave participants the personality test. It measured the five traits considered to be important in personality research: extraversion (i.e. how outgoing or social a person is), agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism (prone to anxiety, fear, moodiness).

This experiment involved adults who varied a lot in age and education, but those differences didn’t affect their interpretation of the writing errors.

Unlike the initial study with college students, use of electronic media had no effect. What mattered were the personality traits: people responded to the writing errors based on their personality type.

Responses to errors in emails depend on personality types.
Pesky Librarians, CC BY-NC-ND

People who scored high in conscientiousness or low on the “open-to-experience” trait were more bothered by the typos. People who scored low on agreeability were more bothered by the grammos. And people who scored low on “extraversion” were more bothered by both types of errors. In contrast, how people scored on neuroticism did not alter the impact of either type of error.

Remember, by being bothered we mean that the reader gave lower ratings on the housemate questionnaire to writers who made that type of error.

Why a short email could matter

Our findings – that our personality influences our interpretation of a message – complement other research that has found that our personality influences what we say and how we say it.

In 2015, Gregory Park and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge analyzed Facebook posts from more than 66,000 users who had also completed a personality test based on the same five personality traits that we measured in our study. They found the use of words like love, party and amazing are correlated with extraversion, while the words sick, hate and anymore are correlated with neuroticism.

This research built upon earlier work by researchers Tal Yarkoni and James W. Pennebaker.

Personality traits that influence reactions to writing errors.
Julie Boland, CC BY

While reading our research, two key points need to be kept in mind. First, we think that errors influenced readers’ perception of the writer mainly because the writer was otherwise unknown – the short email was the only basis for judgment. Second, we didn’t ask the readers how likely they were to point out errors to the people who make them.

So, it doesn’t necessarily follow from our study that your friends will view you more negatively if you don’t proofread your email messages, or that you can predict which people will call you on it based on their personality.

But, you might want to keep these findings in mind when you write for an unknown audience or when you read something from someone you don’t know.

theconversation.com/why-grammar-mistakes-in-a-short-email-could-make-some-people-judge-you-57168

itsme — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:07:50 +0000

Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you

Julie Boland, Robin Queen

We were curious: what makes our reactions so different?

We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others.

What prior research tells us

Writing errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types of informal electronic communication. In fact, these errors have interested other scholars as well.

Analysis of the world, from experts

In both of these studies, readers judged strangers harshly simply because of writing errors.

Typos vs. grammos

Responses to errors in emails depend on personality types.
Pesky Librarians, CC BY-NC-ND

Errors matter – but to whom?

Both of these strategies for understanding how errors impact interpretation are unique to our research.

This experiment involved adults who varied a lot in age and education, but those differences didn’t affect their interpretation of the writing errors.

Personality traits that influence reactions to writing errors. Julie Boland, CC BY

Remember, by being bothered we mean that the reader gave lower ratings on the housemate questionnaire to writers who made that type of error.

Why a short email could matter

Our findings – that our personality influences our interpretation of a message – complement other research that has found that our personality influences what we say and how we say it.

This research built upon earlier work by researchers Tal Yarkoni and James W. Pennebaker.

But, you might want to keep these findings in mind when you write for an unknown audience or when you read something from someone you don’t know.

A Teachers Union Shaped CDC School Guidance. Is That a Problem?

itsme — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 20:31:31 +0000

The influence of the union has prompted debate over its role in scientific decision making.

BY HANNAH THOMASY June 10, 2021

WHEN THE U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued much-anticipated guidelines for school reopening in February, some critics argued that the nation’s premier health agency had set unreasonably strict standards for schools to follow.

But the two largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, long hesitant about reopening schools amid the Covid-19 pandemic, rallied in support of the document. “For the first time since the start of this pandemic, we have a rigorous road map, based on science, that our members can use to fight for a safe reopening,” AFT president Randi Weingarten wrote in a statement released that day.

One detail not disclosed at the time: The AFT had a hand in crafting the guidelines. On May 1, The New York Post broke the news of emails between the union and the CDC, obtained by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust, showing that the CDC had consulted with the teachers union, and that two suggestions from the AFT had been incorporated, almost verbatim, into the final document.

Debates over school reopening have pitted the unions against some advocates and parents clamoring for reopening, and the revelation sparked accusations of undue political influence over CDC decision-making.

The mingling of politics and science has been a heated issue during a pandemic that has, so far, claimed the lives of around 600,000 Americans. On dozens of occasions, the Trump administration attempted to silence scientists and influence health policy, preventing an effective pandemic response, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

But the Biden administration assured Americans that it would be different, promising that policies would be based on evidence and that science would be separated from political influence. In early May, the administration announced a panel to investigate past political meddling in government science.

Now, some Republicans are claiming that the AFT emails show that even under the new administration, the CDC is subject to political influence. These emails, wrote Republican Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Morgan Griffith, and Brett Guthrie in a joint letter to CDC director Rochelle Walensky, “raise significant concerns about whether you, as the Director of the CDC, are putting politics over science and Biden-Harris campaign donors over children.”

The issue has sparked an inquiry into the CDC from Congressional Republicans. And it has raised pointed questions about political pressures at an agency that, since the beginning of the pandemic, has been subject to heightened national scrutiny.

But divisions remain over whether the union exercised undue influence — or if, as several policy experts told Undark, the CDC was simply doing the routine work of consulting stakeholders.

“What we saw last year were clear examples” of “politicians or people on the political level changing the interpretation of science,” said Richard Besser, who served as acting director of the CDC in 2009. “And that is very different than affected parties being able to provide input.”

WHEN THE CDC’S guidelines arrived in February, less than half of U.S. public school students were attending full-time in-person school. At the time, there was substantial disagreement about whether the benefits of in-person schooling outweighed the risks of reopening. Some parents and pediatricians argued that the evidence showed reopening could be done safely, and cited concerns about children’s development and mental health. Teachers unions argued that many schools did not have the resources to safely control transmission.

The CDC’s guidance was mixed. The agency recommended reopening schools. But it also set standards that placed more than 90 percent of counties in the “high community transmission category,” meaning that schools there would have to implement strict — some said prohibitively strict — measures if they wanted to hold in-person classes. For all schools, the CDC recommended maintaining a distance of 6 feet between students.

Some researchers thought the February guidelines were too strict, and that the available scientific evidence indicated that schools could be safely reopened with less prohibitive measures.

“The fact that they said that students needed to be 6 feet apart from each other — there was no evidence showing that that was necessary,” said Tracy Høeg, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician at Northern California Orthopaedic Associates, and co-author of an often-referenced study of Covid-19 transmission in Wisconsin public schools. Six feet, she added, “was just not achievable for really any school district.”

Daniel Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Duke University, also questioned the science behind the guidelines. “There’s a lot of stuff in that February guidance that’s entirely made up, and written as though it’s factual, when in fact it’s opinion, or is a hypothesis,” he said in a recent interview with Undark.

For example, Benjamin questioned the logic of recommending stricter measures or remote learning in areas with high community transmission rates. “If you mask, and community transmission rates are high or low, people do not give each other Covid at school,” he said. In a February interview with CNN, Walensky stated that unreliable masking “is among the reasons that we have transmission within schools when it happens.”

Benjamin’s own research on 11 North Carolina school districts found that transmission within schools was “extremely limited,” and that instances of Covid-19 in schools seemed to have little to do with rates of community transmission. (Those schools maintained 6 feet of distancing.)

“There’s a lot of stuff in that February guidance that’s entirely made up, and written as though it’s factual, when in fact it’s opinion, or is a hypothesis,” Benjamin said.

Not all epidemiologists agree, though, that the February guidelines departed from the science — or even that the science is especially clear. Sten Vermund, a pediatrician and infectious disease epidemiologist at Yale University, said the guidelines were reasonable, if a bit on the conservative side. “There you were, in the middle of respiratory virus season, with school outbreaks all over the country,” Vermund said. At that time, he added, it did not seem that “CDC felt comfortable radically altering guidelines.”

Justin Lessler, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, said he thinks there is still uncertainty in the debate over school distancing guidelines and whether students should be 3 feet or 6 feet apart. “I do think it is an area where we are maybe not on the strongest evidentiary footing either way,” he said.

In a recent paper, Lessler and several colleagues found that the parents of children participating in in-person schooling had an increased risk of testing positive for Covid-19. For the CDC guidelines, Lessler said, it was “perfectly reasonable” to implement stricter measures in areas of high community spread. The evidence, he said, suggests schools “can play a role and help drive a wider community epidemic.”

THE THORNIER POINT, perhaps, is how those guidelines came about — and whether the AFT’s involvement crossed some line.

In the press release for the February guidelines, Walensky stated that, in addition to reviewing scientific evidence, “we have also engaged with many education and public health partners, to hear firsthand from parents and teachers directly about their experiences and concerns. These sessions were so informative, and direct changes to the guidance were made as a result of them.” The statement didn’t offer specifics.

In May, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the CDC engaged with about 50 different organizations while drawing up the guidelines. CDC spokesperson Jasmine Reed sent Undark this list, which includes the Department of Education, as well as other education groups and public health organizations. (The AFT did not respond to requests for comment from Undark.)

The emails obtained by Americans for Public Trust reference meetings between individuals from the AFT, the CDC, and the White House Covid-19 response team shortly before the school reopening guidelines were released. In the emails, Kelly Trautner, the AFT’s senior director of health issues, thanked Walensky for her “continued openness to our suggestions and input.” The New York Post reported that two elements discussed in the emails were incorporated “nearly verbatim” into the guidelines: First, that guidelines might need to be updated in the case of high community transmission of variants; and, second, that remote work concessions be made for teachers with high-risk conditions.

The evidence, Lesser said, suggests schools “can play a role and help drive a wider community epidemic.”

Not everyone found those suggestions especially controversial. But the AFT gives millions of dollars to Democratic candidates each election cycle, and, for some researchers skeptical of the guidelines, the emails seemed to confirm that the process had been murky. “I think it would be important to know more details about that, like who did they consult, and what was the timing of it, and which group did they give more weight to, and preference to, in terms of rewriting it?” said Høeg.

Asked why he thought the CDC chose these more conservative guidelines, Benjamin, the Duke epidemiologist said, “The CDC tends to look at research, and they listen to stakeholders, and sometimes they listen to some stakeholders more closely than others.”

Some experts, including Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, say that all CDC guidance should be based solely on the science. “You do want to get feedback from stakeholders,” he said. “But you want the feedback to be based upon what are the relevant considerations for health and safety. Not pure political pressure.”

Others say that guidance like this, where the health and well-being of different groups may be at odds, is inherently political. “I think what made the school opening guidelines difficult was, it wasn’t just about science,” said Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “Unfortunately, at the time until now, some of the science remains unsettled. It really got into the policy space of balancing competing demands and competing interests.”

After the CDC guidelines came out, Kogan co-authored an influential op-ed accusing the agency of failing “to follow the science” that suggested reopenings could be done safely.

In an interview with Undark, Kogan suggested that the teachers union involvement had some parallels to other cases in which special interest groups shaped government legislation. “I think the concern here is very similar to the concerns that people had during the Trump era, like coal interests writing environmental regulations, right?” Kogan said. “That it’s not obvious that the people involved have broader society’s interests at heart.

“I think that one thing that rubs people the wrong way is the extent of AFT involvement,” said Kogan. “I think, it’s one thing to consult with somebody. I think it’s another thing to copy and paste their preferred language.”

THOSE KINDS OF CLAIMS have been swiftly weaponized by Congressional Republicans and conservative groups. Walensky was questioned about the involvement of the teachers union in Congress on May 11. A week later, Americans for Public Trust, the group that acquired the emails via Freedom of Information Act requests, launched a $1 million advertising campaign criticizing Biden and the CDC for working with teachers unions. The campaign accuses policymakers of “sacrificing kids, keeping them out of school, to pay back liberal dark money groups.” Just a few days later, Republican senators wrote a letter to the leaders of the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services asking for more details about the CDC’s communications with the AFT and other non-governmental organizations.

But, in interviews, several public policy experts and former CDC officials said that soliciting and incorporating feedback from various stakeholders was an essential part of making useful public health recommendations amid a crisis, and that AFT’s involvement seemed to fall within those boundaries.

“I would have been surprised, and frankly disappointed, if in drafting guidance that affects schools, CDC wasn’t engaging with teacher groups, parent groups, local public health,” said Besser, the former CDC acting director, who now runs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “One of the challenges in emergency response when you’re dealing with an emerging infectious agent,” like the U.S. did with the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, “is that you’re always making guidance based on limited science,” he said.

“I think, it’s one thing to consult with somebody. I think it’s another thing to copy and paste their preferred language,” Kogan said.

Erin Sauber-Schatz, a CDC injury prevention specialist, said consulting with many different organizations is routine. In her work with the CDC’s transportation safety team, she said, she regularly consults both governmental and non-governmental groups. “We really try to pull in information from all different groups when we’re thinking about any public health problem,” she said, “because that allows us to provide the best answers and the best guidance regardless of the public health topic.”

Lloyd Kolbe, who ran the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health from 1985 to 2003, described using a similar process when designing school-based education programs to prevent the spread of HIV. During that process, Kolbe said, they were advised by various groups, including a major teachers union.

Public health experts outside the CDC, including Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association, and David Michaels, an epidemiologist at the George Washington University School of Public Health, didn’t find the AFT emails surprising, either.

“I think agencies do have to rely on stakeholders to understand,” said Michaels, who is also the former assistant secretary of labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The CDC, he added, should judge those outside comments with a critical eye. But, he said, “that doesn’t mean that they should reject them.”

Hannah Thomasy is a freelance science writer splitting time between Toronto and Seattle. Her work has appeared in Hakai Magazine, OneZero, and NPR.

Held Back: Inside a Lost School Year

kim zolotar — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 21:02:45 +0000

Thompson converted her daughters’ bedroom into a teaching space.

Credit:Cydni Elledge, special to ProPublica Elledge, special to ProPublica

Teacher Ashlee Thompson had a lot to worry about this year: A deadly virus. A poor district under threat by the state. And now, a new mandate for her students: Learn to read or flunk the third grade.

Editor’s note: ProPublica obtained parents’ consent to feature their children in this story.

Ashlee Thompson turned on her camera.

At the other end of the screen one morning last September was a third grader she’d never taught. To assess his reading, Thompson showed the boy a string of letters.

He made a few guesses, but seemed to only recognize the ones in his first name.

Unsettled, Thompson shifted to words that most 8-year-old children can recognize, if only by sight. She enlarged the text and held her pointer on the screen.

And

The boy’s mother sat behind him, encouraging him to read. He grimaced and shook his head. He had never learned how, he told his mother. He had transferred in from a charter school, but like many of Thompson’s students who’d been in the district for years, he was arriving in her class as though he was starting kindergarten. As his mother began to cry, Thompson turned off her camera so they wouldn’t see her own eyes glaze over with tears.

At the start of the 2020 school year, teachers across the country entered their classrooms riddled with anxiety over how much their students could possibly learn amid a pandemic, between the glitch-prone experiments with remote learning and in-person classes that could be interrupted by a single positive coronavirus test.

Thompson, at 32, had a lot more hanging over her.

The Michigan legislature had chosen this year, of all years, to enforce a strict new literacy law: Any third grader who could not read proficiently by May could flunk and be held back.

For Benton Harbor, a small, majority-Black city halfway between Chicago and Detroit, the implications were immense. As Thompson screened her 35 students that fall, she realized 19 were not at grade level. She worried that holding them back could do more harm than good, and studies supported this fear; it could bruise their confidence, lead them to act out and even decrease their odds of graduating from high school.

As if Thompson did not have enough to worry about, there was this: The existence of her entire school district hung in the balance, and with it, the very fabric of her hometown.

For the last quarter century, schools in Benton Harbor had struggled to survive as students fled for charters and majority-white districts in neighboring towns. Because a district’s funding is tied to its number of students, Benton Harbor’s budget shrank. It cut academic offerings, froze teacher pay, closed school buildings and consolidated students into crowded classrooms. As its resources eroded, so did students’ performance on tests.

Michigan had found a remedy for such ailing districts: dissolving them. It had happened eight years ago to two other majority-Black cities, Inkster and Buena Vista. Students were absorbed into surrounding districts without a guarantee they would be attending better schools. Inkster residents, who feared losing their sense of identity, scrambled to start a museum so that their children would know they had once rallied at homecoming games around the Vikings football team.

This existential threat has loomed over Benton Harbor since 2011, when former Gov. Rick Snyder began to consider whether the state should install an emergency manager to run the city’s schools, a takeover Inkster once faced before it was ultimately dissolved. In January 2017, his administration listed several of Benton Harbor’s schools among the least proficient in the state and slated them for closure. The state offered the district a temporary reprieve if it entered into a partnership agreement that mandated that the schools improve. But in May 2019, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a plan to dissolve Benton Harbor’s high school. To illustrate the dire state of education in the district, she cited the poor test scores of students in the third grade, a crucial year in which kids traditionally pivot from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

The district ran six schools: one for preschool and kindergarten, one for first through third grade, one for fourth and fifth grade, a middle school, a high school and an alternative program. Thompson feared that if the high school was dissolved, it was only a matter of time before parents stopped enrolling younger students and the entire district evaporated. What parent would want to send a child down a path that dead-ended after the eighth grade?

Thompson, a wide-eyed learner who tackled problems with an analytical mind, sent community leaders a six-page letter, complete with a color-coded data table she assembled, arguing that transferring Benton Harbor’s students outside the city wouldn’t necessarily bring them success. Proficiency is not contagious, she wrote, but comes from years of effective educational support, practice and preparation, which the lack thereof is why our students are behind.

Amid public outcry, the state backed down from threats to close the high school and began to work with the district to address its crisis. Part of the plan was new leadership, and in February 2020, the district brought on Andraé Townsel, an energetic superintendent who grew up in Detroit and had a singular mission to turn the schools around. A month later, though, the pandemic interrupted all plans, leaving the fate of the schools once again in question.

Thompson didn’t want to think about what would happen if most of her students were held back. Any failure, she worried, would be cast as theirs.

She was regarded by many Benton Harbor parents as a miracle teacher. She had attended school with some of them and lived in the community; she cared for their children like they were her own. They were not on equal footing with their peers for reasons outside of their control. It was on her to bridge the gap, one that would widen even further amid a pandemic.

“Even if I had magic,” she said, “I couldn’t do this.”

When Thompson was a third grader in Benton Harbor, her brick schoolhouse glowed burnt orange in the afternoon, with classrooms bathed in light among trimmed, green lawns. The schools were the pride of the city, one of the poorest in Michigan, depressed for decades by discriminatory housing policies and deindustrialization; as manufacturing jobs began to vanish in the 1960s and ’70s, white families fled in droves.

Benton Harbor’s Black families won a critical court ruling in 1977, after white neighborhoods drew up plans to peel off from the city and join communities with fewer Black families. These were “transparent attempts” to dismantle Benton Harbor into “separate and unequal White and Black school districts,” concluded U.S. District Judge Noel Fox. The court mandated integration between Benton Harbor and its surrounding communities through a voluntary busing plan, allowing students to choose where to attend school. Anticipating the financial impact of an exodus, the court ordered the state to pay Benton Harbor for each child who lived within its boundaries, regardless of where they chose to attend school.

For decades, funding from the desegregation case buoyed Benton Harbor and brought national recognition to its schools. Creative Arts Academy and McCord Renaissance Center, two of the magnet programs set up under the order, were named Blue Ribbon schools by the U.S. Department of Education, one of its highest academic honors.

Thompson, who attended McCord, thrived in Benton Harbor’s schools. A self-professed bookworm, she spent hours in the library reading The Baby-Sitters Club and Goosebumps books and writing in her journal. Her teachers, many of whom lived in the community, pushed her to excel, and in high school, she volunteered as a library aide, learned Spanish, French, physics, psychology and creative writing, and took advanced placement courses. “I didn’t know that kids had to struggle to attain an education because I never witnessed that growing up,” she said.

Even so, it had become common for parents to consider sending their children to schools outside the district. She was in 10th grade when her mother decided she would be better served by transferring to a nearby town. “I hated it,” Thompson said. “The teachers were all white and they didn’t have an individual interest in me. Some of the teachers, I don’t even think they even cared to get to know my name.” After a few months, she begged her mother to let her return to Benton Harbor High School, where she graduated among the top 10 students in her class.

She and many others were unaware of a radical change that was underway. Michigan’s then-governor, Republican John Engler, had pushed to end the desegregation order, citing the cost and insisting the state had done everything it was supposed to do to ensure Benton Harbor’s success. Any shortcomings in student performance, the state argued, had nothing to do with intentional segregation. In 2002, a federal judge dismissed the case. The payments were phased out by 2006, Thompson’s final year of high school.

The following school year, the district faced a $3 million shortfall, roughly the amount of money it had received annually from the state under the desegregation order. To offset the loss, the district began to cut its academic offerings, which prompted students to leave for other schools. “It was a spiral effect,” said Sheletha Bobo, the district’s assistant superintendent for business and finance from 1999 to 2011. While critics and state officials have long attributed the district’s financial troubles to mismanagement or accounting errors, administrators contended that enrollment and funding losses played a central role. The fewer students Benton Harbor had, the less money it was allocated by a state formula that distributed school funding based largely on student head count. School finance experts have argued the math shortchanges districts that serve a higher percentage of low-income and at-risk students, who are more expensive to teach.

Recognizing that it needed to increase enrollment to climb out of its financial turmoil, the district brought in Michigan native Magic Johnson for an advertising campaign. “I’m Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson,” he said in a 2010 radio spot. “[I’m] encouraging parents and students to find out why people are rediscovering Benton Harbor Area Schools. … Quality learning, every student, every day.” But even a basketball legend couldn’t bring students back. By 2011, the district’s annual budget deficit had risen to $16.4 million.

To keep its bills paid, Benton Harbor took on more than $10 million in emergency loans from the state. The weight of the debt led to even more cuts in the district, which hemorrhaged students and money. Enrollment plunged from 3,500 students in 2010 to fewer than 1,800 in 2020. More than two-thirds of the city’s children attend schools outside the district, amounting to a staggering loss of $24 million in funding each year.

The magnet programs, including Thompson’s former school, were shuttered. The cosmetology and health care tracks were cut. The high school no longer offered calculus or advanced placement courses. In 2019, for a student body of nearly 600, only one instructor was certified to teach mathematics. And that year, about half of the district’s teachers were long-term substitutes, many lacking the credentials or experience to manage classrooms sometimes crammed with 30 students or more.

Test scores declined. During the 2007-2008 school year, 64% of Benton Harbor’s third graders were deemed proficient readers, compared with 81% across Michigan. During the 2018-2019 school year, according to a different test the state had switched to using, less than 6% could read proficiently, compared with 45% across the state.

And the buildings, all constructed before 1961, bore signs of disrepair. The school where all of the district’s third graders learned, International Academy at Hull, was plagued by toxic mold. A musty smell often wafted through the hallways, and mildew rings stained ceiling tiles. For years, teachers had noted the building’s crumbling state, filing maintenance orders that were rarely filled. They trapped mice in the classrooms, and on stormy days, they caught rainwater in buckets, carefully positioned between children’s desks.

A dozen other school buildings sat abandoned, haunting the city like ghosts. Their windows were boarded up and their playground equipment was corroded. In one building, parts of the ceiling were strewn across the floor.

Thompson had never planned to be a teacher. After high school, she enrolled in Wayne State University but dropped out after her first year, given the high cost and her uncertainty about which career direction to take. She found work in a hotel and later cared for elderly patients in a residential home as a certified nursing assistant. But after the birth of her first three children, she decided to try college again. She had a natural talent for extracting lessons from ordinary moments, showing her kids how caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies and sliding magnets near metallic pipes to explain polarity. She enrolled at Western Michigan University to pursue an education degree.

For an assignment, she compared the learning outcomes of Benton Harbor’s students to those in St. Joseph, a wealthy town across the district border, where less than a third of the schoolchildren qualified for free lunch and three-quarters of its students were white. Over decades, the waterway between the towns, the St. Joseph River, has come to mark one of the most segregated school boundaries in America. In St. Joseph, more than 63% of third graders could read proficiently, compared with less than 6% in Benton Harbor, where more than 90% of students are Black and live in low-income households.

The starkness of the inequality stunned her, but it echoed the persistent national reality that students of color were demonstrating a lower proficiency in reading and math than their white counterparts, with similar gaps between students living in poverty and those who were not.

And while Benton Harbor’s schools are in high-poverty areas, and thus receive more federal funding and have higher general revenue than St. Joseph, Benton Harbor spent $1,000 less per student on basic instructional programs in 2019, in part because of its high debt load, on which the state was collecting with about 2% interest. That year, the district was $16 million in debt and spending $700 per student on annual repayments, according to the state.

Even though teachers across the river made $17,000 more, on average, Thompson started in Benton Harbor’s schools in 2018 and took over a third grade class midway through the school year. “Our students needed somebody that could help, somebody that could believe in them,” she said. In May 2019, she was certified to teach. But the following spring, just as her students were making the leap from robotically reciting words to fluent reading, the coronavirus ground the school year to a halt.

While the pandemic caught everyone off guard, disadvantaged districts were less ready to adapt to school shutdowns. Most of the students in St. Joseph had access to computers at home, in part thanks to an initiative supported by the district’s philanthropic foundation. Within about a month, 97% of elementary students were learning online. In Benton Harbor, however, more than 40% of homes lacked broadband internet access and 25% did not have a computer. Thompson and her colleagues huddled around copy machines printing out assignments and spent days tracking down families and checking on their welfare. They finished distributing laptops and tablets, the majority of which were more than six years old, by the end of the summer.

This divide was playing out across the country, as captured in a national teacher survey that spring. Teachers in majority-Black schools said 34% of the students didn’t have the necessary technology to engage in remote learning, compared with 19% of kids in schools with few Black students. The gap was even wider between poor and wealthy schools.

The pandemic also brought new urgency to the country’s quiet crisis of dilapidated school facilities. Benton Harbor administrators had more to worry about than the average district when it came to planning for in-person instruction in the fall. In addition to wrestling with social distancing requirements, they had to figure out how to safely teach kids at Hull Elementary, where, in the spring, specialists had found levels of mold so toxic that they recommended shutting down the building. The new location— a shuttered school they were cleaning out — was not yet ready, so administrators relied on portable classrooms and white wedding tents, along with a plastic tarp they put up to cordon off the remediated classrooms from the toxic wing of the school.

Not many parents knew about the mold, but a majority still insisted on a virtual option when the district surveyed them on their preferred mode of instruction for the fall. The coronavirus had surged through the county’s nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities, and reports from Detroit on the disproportionate number of deaths among African Americans had trickled into Benton Harbor, prompting many to stay home out of fear. Nationally, Black students were disproportionately more likely to have lost a parent to COVID-19 and substantially less likely to have enrolled in in-person school, even as late as April 202

Roberta Taylor wished her two third graders could learn in a classroom that year; for them, every minute of personalized instruction made a difference. Her son, Calvin, had been held back once already, in the first grade. She feared the same would happen to her daughter, Na’Kiyrah, who had finished the previous school year behind grade level. But Taylor had congestive heart failure so severe that she’d had to quit her strenuous job as a certified nursing assistant two years earlier and live on disability payments. “If I caught COVID, I might not make it out,” she said.

Tina Lash also chose virtual school. One of her three sons was asthmatic and had landed in intensive care a few years earlier. She knew a digital classroom was not an ideal learning environment for her youngest boy, Michael, whose brain ping-ponged from thought to thought. And her shifts at the local Bob Evans restaurant, where she was a manager, frequently overlapped with class hours. Her mother stopped working at Family Dollar and planned to sit with Michael to make sure he wouldn’t wander off.

Thompson, too, learned she had no choice but to teach virtually. That summer, her breathing grew labored and her chest throbbed so much she couldn’t eat. She rushed to the emergency room, where tests revealed that her own congestive heart failure, a condition she’d had for nearly a decade, had flared up. During her nine-day hospital stay, she asked her doctor whether it would be safe for her to teach in person. He adamantly counseled against it.

The month before school started, she converted her daughters’ bedroom into a third grade classroom. A shiny, plastic banner of letters lined the walls. A world map made of vibrant blue fabric dangled in front of the window. Stacks of books surrounded her, filled with tales of inspiring young protagonists: Leo the Late Bloomer. Zoey and Sassafras. Harry Potter.

Hull Elementary had assigned only Thompson to handle all virtual third graders. She tried not to panic when she got the roster; it listed 48 names. Over the last days of summer break, she split her class into two waves of students and, like a telemarketer, called dozens of parents, walking them through how to log in.

She was ready, or so she thought.

“The sound is eh eh eh, E as in elephant, E as in echo, E as in red,” Thompson said on a Wednesday morning in early March, her eyes scanning her classroom grid of 15 fidgety third graders. “I want everybody to say the sound, and if you have low background noise, you can unmute.”

Na’Kiyrah, a bubbly 8-year-old, always eager to speak even without knowing all the answers, bobbed around next to her brother Calvin. She unmuted her computer and their distorted voices echoed through the class, filling the virtual room with a static buzz.

“Na’Kiyrah, I’m going to put you on mute because it seems like you have a lot going on,” said Thompson. “You guys, if you have a place that you have absolute quiet, please go to that place.”

It had gone like this for months. Thompson’s students often forgot to mute themselves, talking over each other. Sometimes the internet wavered and they unexpectedly vanished. Sometimes their connection was so weak that their camera could not turn on, leaving Thompson to wonder if a child was actually at the other end. At times, only a handful would log in at all.

Thompson had gotten off to a rough start when, after the first day of school, 53 kids showed up on her classroom roster; by the second week, it had ballooned to 79 kids. It turned out that some parents hadn’t answered the district survey about how they wanted their children to learn.

At the same time, she was supervising the virtual education of three of her own children, including her son who was in her third grade class. One day, when she couldn’t help her 7-year-old daughter with a computer problem because she was in the middle of a lesson, her daughter grew so frustrated that she broke down in tears.

How will I get through this? Thompson had wondered, doubting not only her choice to teach virtually, but also her decision to teach at all.

After the first two weeks and Thompson’s plea to human resources for help, her principal brought in another teacher, cutting Thompson’s class size down to about 35 children; she split them into two sections, each meeting for three hours a day, four times a week. In a normal school year, they would have had at least double that time to learn.

Thompson tried to make the best of the time she had. Even when she contracted COVID-19 in March, her head pounding and body weak, she worked through most of her illness, aware that for the three days she took off, her students would have to work on assignments on their own.

During her lesson on the short sound of the letter E, she switched her screen to a slide with the name Ben printed in thick black and red letters.

Her students repeated the word in an unruly refrain. Michael, an effusive 8-year-old who often provided his classmates with updates on his morning, was the last to respond.

“Sorry,” he announced. “I was talking to my mom.”

Diagnosed with attention deficits, Michael had been suspended so frequently in second grade that he was more than a year behind on his reading. That year, his mother had tried in vain to procure a special education plan for him.

For months, Thompson worked with him one-on-one and in small groups, cultivating a close bond. He reveled in multiplication drills and superhero tales, and for his own superpower, wished he could save those who died of COVID-19.

“I want freeze breath, heat breath and healing, so I could have healed my uncle,” he said. “I wish I could heal everyone that had the virus.”

By late winter, Thompson marveled at his growth: He was paying more attention and participating frequently, and his reading was slowly improving. But she worried that wouldn’t be enough progress for him or many of her other students, especially with the retention law looming.

Passed in 2016 through the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and signed by then-Gov. Snyder, the retention law, which required third graders to be held back if they were more than a year behind in reading by May, was supposed to go into effect in 2020, but it was suspended that year due to the pandemic. Both Republicans and Democrats introduced legislation to suspend retention again in 2021, but Republicans have attempted to make the law even more aggressive by mandating that both third and fourth graders would face being held back next year. The bill has yet to be voted on by the state Senate and House.

State Sen. Ken Horn, a Republican who sponsored the latest retention requirement, said it is intended to serve as a consequence for parents who might not pay attention to their children’s academic progress without it. “They don’t want their kids to have to go through this, their teachers don’t want to have their kids to go through this, then they will double down, and they will go to work,” he said. “If there are no consequences, then parents will go on doing what they’re doing.”

Thompson has heard the argument. “Personally, I’m sick of hearing that,” she said. “That’s somebody that doesn’t understand the economic disparities … doesn’t understand poverty.” Her own mother worked nearly nonstop to support her and relied on the school system, including trained teachers, to help her achieve success. “If our communities could do this ourselves, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Contrary to Horn’s assessment, Michael’s mother, Lash, had long been involved in her children’s schooling. She also had faith in Benton Harbor’s schools, which she had graduated from about 20 years before. She still FaceTimed with her favorite teachers, who had become her mentors, and believed that with the right resources, the district would turn around. But she felt that the abbreviated school days of the past year had shortchanged her son.

After work, in the evenings, she would read with Michael before he fell asleep, and she noticed that even in late winter, his reading was stunted. He would labor over each word, and often skipped the ones he didn’t know. Her older sons had never struggled like this.

While Lash and her son were constructing his new loft bed, she sat him down and told him she had decided she wanted him to repeat the third grade. “It’s not because you’re not doing good,” she said softly. “I want you to have a fresh start … and be able to do the work.”

Michael was calm. “That’s OK, momma, whatever you think is better,” he said, and then changed the conversation to what color he could paint the walls of his room.

Parents whose children were learning virtually could opt out of testing and therefore the retention requirement. But Taylor wanted an honest assessment of how Na’Kiyrah and Calvin were doing. They had languished in the second grade. Her son accrued at least 10 suspensions, tied to behavioral problems that she believed originated when he was moved too quickly from special education to a mainstream track. Her daughter felt lost in the large class.

Taylor’s trust of Thompson ran deep — they had attended high school together and Taylor believed Thompson was her children’s best teacher yet. But this past year, her children’s attention had lagged. She tried to help them, purchasing multiplication flashcards and books and challenging them to spelling bees in the afternoons. But Taylor, who was back in college taking online courses to become a parole officer, knew she wasn’t a teacher.

In early May, before the state’s test, Taylor bought new backpacks for Na’Kiyrah and Calvin, one decorated with dinosaurs and the other with sharks. Though she could barely afford her $97 utility bill that month, she hoped the new bags would boost their academic confidence.

The morning of the exam, just before her children hopped out of her weathered Ford Expedition, she stopped them. “Make sure you take your time and understand what you read before you answer any questions,” she said.

Na’Kiyrah nodded nonchalantly, which worried Taylor.

On a sticky afternoon in late May, while Taylor and her four children were watching “Trolls,” she heard the mail truck drive by. Her son brought two letters inside and put them at his mother’s feet on the couch. One, from the state, was addressed to the parent of Na’Kiyrah.

Taylor tore it open and began to read.

We understand that this may be difficult news to hear, it said.

The more she read, the more she became consumed with how unfair it all felt, to raise the stakes for kids like this in the middle of a pandemic, when so many families like her own were stuck.

Taylor flicked off the movie and pulled Na’Kiyrah and Calvin to the dining table.

“You know what this is?” she asked Na’Kiyrah, holding up the note.

“No, what is it?”

“It’s the letter from the state saying that you are going to be held back.”

Na’Kiyrah’s eyes scrunched up in confusion. “For what?” she asked.

“I was telling you all school year long to be serious about this test,” Taylor said. “That was nothing to play with, it literally determines whether or not you go to the fourth grade.”

Her children went silent. Na’Kiyrah, with panic beginning to form in her eyes, studied her mother’s face.

“Mommy, are you mad at me?”

Taylor shook her head, relaxing her face. She wasn’t mad at her daughter. Taylor was frustrated with herself, wishing she could have done more for her children this year, despite her health limitations. She was relieved to learn that Calvin was promoted to the fourth grade, but knew that he passed “by the skin of his teeth” and feared that, if the Republican bill went through, he could face the threat of retention next school year too.

Of the 23 students in Thompson’s virtual class who took the test, five were flagged for retention. Such letters were sent to parents of 3,642 students statewide, accounting for about 5% of Michigan students who took the exam. (The state would not provide a racial or economic breakdown of those students, and neither the state nor Benton Harbor would disclose the number of third graders in the district who stand to be held back.)

“I look at the students like Na’Kiyrah and the other ones that just didn’t make it, and it breaks my heart,” said Thompson.

Despite its obstacles, Thompson views the year as a success. She witnessed growth in nearly all of her students, even though the state’s exams only measure how they compare to children across the state, many of whom have better resources.

In recent weeks, Whitmer reiterated her opposition to the strict reading law, as well as to the proposal to expand it. “Governor Whitmer has and will continue to oppose the state law that mandates retention based on reading scores,” said her spokesperson, Bobby Leddy, adding that with the pandemic, “it’s unfair to students, teachers, and parents to prevent children from taking the next steps in their education.”

Nationwide, students of color suffered a “strikingly negative impact” on their academic growth amid the crisis, with the gap continuing to grow markedly through last winter for Black and Latinx students. Those findings and others cited in this story were captured in a federal civil rights report commissioned by President Joe Biden on the impact of COVID-19 on America’s students. “The disparities in students’ experiences are stark,” the report concluded, calling the pandemic’s effects on existing racial and ethnic inequities “harsh and predictable.” “Those who went into the pandemic with the fewest opportunities are at risk of leaving with even less.”

Instead of giving Benton Harbor a break in the midst of the pandemic, state officials collected $420,000 in loan payments, with interest, from May 1, 2020, through May 1, 2021, according to the state treasury department. The department said it did not receive requests for loan assistance from the district during the pandemic. About $10 million of the debt remains.

Meanwhile, state legislators spent months sitting on $841 million in federal COVID-19-relief funds in an attempt to pressure the governor to relinquish her emergency powers to cancel sporting events and close schools when a community’s virus transmission rate went up. While some reports have suggested that Benton Harbor could receive more than $40 million in pandemic relief funds from the state and federal governments, according to district Chief Financial Officer Scott Johnson, the district had only received about $3.5 million as of June 22, money officials could use to enhance summer and online programming, prepare schools for the fall, upgrade ventilation in school buildings and address environmental issues like mold.

Whether the district will be able to pull itself out of not only the pandemic turmoil, but also the entrenched inequities of its past, only time will tell. “I want to earn our families back,” said Townsel, the superintendent, who has spent the year trying to recruit students to the district and helped secure a $3 million state grant to create new literacy programs over the next five years, which he believes could be a game changer. Whitmer has also proposed changing the state’s funding formula to provide more aid to districts with low-income or at-risk students.

But residents haven’t stopped worrying about what will happen if the turnaround plan fails and the state once again tries to dissolve its schools, like they did with Inkster and Buena Vista.

“They destroyed them — strong, rich-in-history Black districts that went through the same things that we went through,” said Reinaldo Tripplett, a district alumnus and former high school principal who sits on the school board and drives with a Benton Harbor Tigers mascot in his car. “Where we are today did not just happen overnight. Where we are today, in my opinion, had been planned a long time ago.”The Cruel Failure of Welfare Reform in the Southwest

Working with Thompson and Na’Kiyrah’s elementary school principal, Taylor was able to find a temporary reprieve for her daughter: Na’Kiyrah will enroll in summer school, which has been extended to eight weeks this year and started in late June.

At the end of the program, Na’Kiyrah will be reassessed, and if she passes, she will be able to move to the fourth grade with her brother. If she doesn’t, she’ll be forced to repeat third grade.

“I’m going to fourth grade,” Na’Kiyrah said, promising herself that she would pass at the end of summer. “This time, I’m going to know the answers.”

Annie Waldman

Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering education.