Rates of chronic absenteeism are at record-high levels. More than 1 in 4 students missed 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. That means millions of students missed out on regular instruction, not to mention the social and emotional benefits of interacting with peers and trusted adults.

Moreover, two-thirds of the nation’s students attended a school where chronic absence rates reached at least 20 percent. Such levels disrupt entire school communities, including the students who are regularly attending.

The scope and scale of this absenteeism crisis necessitate the implementation of the next generation of student support.

Fortunately, a recent study suggests a promising path for getting students back in school and back on track to graduation. A group of nearly 50 middle and high schools saw reductions in chronic absenteeism and course failure rates after one year of harnessing the twin powers of data and relationships.

From the 2021-22 to 2022-23 school years, the schools’ chronic absenteeism rates dropped by 5.4 percentage points, and the share of students failing one or more courses went from 25.5 percent to 20.5 percent. In the crucial ninth grade, course failure rates declined by 9.2 percentage points.

These encouraging results come from the first cohort of rural and urban schools and communities partnering with the GRAD Partnership, a collective of nine organizations, to grow  the use of “student success systems” into a common practice.

Student success systems take an evidence-based approach to organizing school communities to better support the academic progress and well-being of all students.

They were developed with input from hundreds of educators and build on the successes of earlier student support efforts — like early warning systems and on-track initiatives — to meet students’ post-pandemic needs.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

Importantly, student success systems offer schools a way to identify school, grade-level and classroom factors that impact attendance; they then deliver timely supports to meet individual students’ needs. They do this, in part, by explicitly valuing supportive relationships and responding to the insights that students and the adults who know them bring to the table.

Valuable relationships include not only those between students and teachers, and schools and families, but also those among peer groups and within the entire school community. Schools cannot address the attendance crisis without rebuilding and fostering these relationships.

When students feel a sense of connection to school they are more likely to show up.

For some students, this connection comes through extracurricular activities like athletics, robotics or band. For others, it may be a different connection to school.

Schools haven’t always focused on connections in a concrete way, partly because relationships can feel fuzzy and hard to track. We’re much better at tracking things like grades and attendance.

Still, schools in the GRAD Partnership cohort show that it can be done.

These schools established “student success teams” of teachers, counselors and others. The teams meet regularly to look at up-to-date student data and identify and address the root causes of absenteeism with insight and input from families and communities, as well as the students themselves.

The teams often use low-tech relationship-mapping tools to help identify students who are disconnected from activities or mentors. One school’s student success team used these tools to ensure that all students were connected to at least one activity — and even created new clubs for students with unique interests. Their method was one that any school could replicate —collaborating on a Google spreadsheet.

Another school identified students who would benefit from a new student mentoring program focused on building trusting relationships.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

Some schools have used surveys of student well-being to gain insight on how students feel about school, themselves and life in general — and have then used the information to develop supports.

And in an example of building supportive community relationships, one of the GRAD Partnership schools worked with local community organizations to host a resource night event at which families were connected on the spot to local providers who could help them overcome obstacles to regular attendance — such as medical and food needs, transportation and housing issues and unemployment.

Turning the tide against our current absenteeism crisis does not have a one-and-done solution — it will involve ongoing collaborative efforts guided by data and grounded in relationships that take time to build.

Without these efforts, the consequences will be severe both for individual students and our country as a whole.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, where he is the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

This story about post-pandemic education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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In matters both big and small, women in education leadership are treated, spoken to and viewed differently than their male colleagues. And it impacts everything from their assignments and salaries to promotions.

The career moves that are open to aspiring women leaders often propel them toward a very real glass cliff — leadership roles in which the risk of failure is high. By failing to address this bias, states and districts are constraining the rise of some of their most capable current and would-be leaders.

New survey data and research illuminates the experiences and perspectives of women who confront this bias and demonstrates the need for systemic change to dismantle the bias driving the gender gap.

The glass cliff for women is real, but it is not insurmountable. If more leaders — both women and, critically, men — take even a few steps forward, we can build a bridge to a future in which every leader can reach their full potential.

Here are some ways district and state leaders can transform the pipeline for who advances and leads their systems.

First, women in education leadership need more active support, with a shift from mentoring to sponsorship. That calls for women and men to take an engaged role in advancing up-and-coming women leaders — and all leaders, at all stages, who can benefit from on-the-job coaching.

These relationships can be game-changers, results from the first annual Women Leading Ed insight survey found. What’s more, they provide excellent opportunities for men to be allies in advancing gender equality.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

For example, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent of schools in Oakland, recently recalled having a male coach when she started out. He served as her sponsor, providing coaching and introducing her to other experienced leaders.

“When I started as superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, one of the former superintendents called me. This man coached me for two years every Friday,” Johnson-Trammell recounted. “He helped me and pushed me to be the leader I wanted to be as a Black woman. . . . His sponsorship helped open doors to accessing people, it helped me to connect to other superintendents.”

Second, rebalanced evaluation, promotion and hiring processes can be key levers in undoing bias. That means creating diverse applicant pools and hiring committees and providing bias training for those making key personnel decisions.

Seemingly small changes can have big effects. For example, having a finalist pool with two women candidates — instead of just one — made the likelihood of a woman getting hired 79 times greater, recent research in the Harvard Business Review found.

More broadly, the existing education leadership pipeline continues to disadvantage women. Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows — and the Women Leading Ed survey results verify — that women are predominantly funneled toward elementary school leadership and instructional leadership pathways that keep their trajectories below the top jobs in the district or state.

Men, however, are elevated to high school principalships and district positions that include fiscal or operational roles — precisely the kind of experiences that are prioritized during superintendent search processes.

The Women Leading Ed survey results underscore this divergence. Of respondents who had been principals, fewer than 20 percent served in a high school. Overall, just over one in 20 respondents had held finance or operations roles.

In one response to the survey, a woman who was a senior leader in a large urban school district described the bias of the skewed leadership pipeline succinctly: “I was told I’m too petite to be anything but an elementary principal.”

Third, bolstered family and well-being supports are essential to advancing more women leaders. These include parental leave, childcare, eldercare time and scheduling flexibility.

Rising to top district leadership positions comes with costs for women that are typically not shouldered by men.

Respondents to the Women Leading Ed survey reported feeling pressure to overperform professionally to prove their competency. Fully 95 percent of women superintendents believe that they must make professional sacrifices that their male colleagues do not, the survey data show.

Some women reported working long hours while neglecting family, under pressure to maintain unrealistic expectations at the office. One pointed out the additional responsibilities that women often carry in their personal lives, including the care of children or parents, attending and organizing school events, providing homework help and taking family members to doctor appointments.

Related: OPINION: We need more women in top leadership positions in our nation’s public schools

Added pressure at work and greater responsibilities at home lead to burnout: Roughly six out of 10 survey respondents said they think about leaving their current position due to the stress and strain; three-quarters said they think about leaving daily, weekly or monthly.

Providing high-quality benefits can be a key lever for addressing these underlying gender inequalities. So can offering flexible work schedules, hybrid work arrangements and remote work options that provide elasticity in where and when work gets done.

Finally, systems — not just individuals — must be accountable. Setting public goals for female leadership on boards and in senior management is a start. Reporting on progress toward those public goals is vital. So too is ensuring equal pay for equal work.

More than half the superintendents surveyed said that they have had conversations or negotiations about their salaries in which they felt their gender influenced the outcome.

One solution: establish audits for pay equity and increased transparency around compensation. Another: include salary ranges in job postings. These can be powerful steps toward the goal of pay equality.

Over 700 leaders have signed Women Leading Ed’s open letter calling for the adoption of these strategies. The strategies are already taking root through the advocacy and actions of women in education leadership and their allies of all genders.

It is a movement that is both growing and vital, as research makes clear that women continue to face a different set of rules than men in leadership, and districts too often give women window-dressing roles instead of actually reforming their practices to achieve gender equality.

The time for change is now.

Julia Rafal-Baer is the founder and CEO of Women Leading Ed, a national nonprofit network for women in education leadership, and co-founder and CEO of ILO Group, a women-owned education and policy strategy firm.

This story about women education leaders was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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SPOKANE, Wash. — Before giving birth to her daughter, Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, had given up on education.

She’d dropped out of school as a seventh grader, after behavior problems had banished her to alternative schools. Growing up in foster homes and later landing in juvenile court had convinced her to disappear from every system that claimed responsibility for her.

“I was just really angry with everything,” said Kaleeya.

But in early 2020, during what would have been her freshman year in high school, Kaleeya discovered she was pregnant. At her first ultrasound appointment, a nurse handed her a stack of pamphlets. One, advertising a new school for pregnant and parenting teens, caught her attention.

“Something switched when Akylah got here,” Kaleeya said, referring to her daughter. “I was a whole different person. Now it’s high school that matters. It’s a legacy — and it’s hope for her.”

Four years ago, and two months pregnant, Kaleeya enrolled as one of the first students at Lumen High School. The Spokane charter school — its name, which means a unit of light, was selected by young parents who wished someone had shone a light on education for them — today enrolls about five dozen expectant and parenting teens, including fathers. Inside a three-story office building in the city’s downtown business core, Lumen provides full-day child care, baby supplies, mental health counseling and other support as students work toward graduation based on customized education plans.

When the Spokane school district authorized the charter school, it acknowledged that these students had been underserved in traditional high schools and that alternatives were needed. Nationwide, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school degree by the age of 22. Researchers say common school policies like strict attendance rules and dress codes often contribute to young parents deciding to drop out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations to strengthen protections for pregnant and parenting students, though it’s unclear whether the revisions, which also include protections for LGBTQ+ youth, will survive legal challenges.

Solutions for these young parents have become even more urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. Lumen is located about 20 miles from the Idaho border, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans. Recently, representatives from a network of charter schools in the state toured Lumen to evaluate whether they might bring a similar program to the Boise area. Researchers have also visited the school to study how educators elsewhere might replicate its supportive services, not only for pregnant students, but those facing crises like substance use.

“There are some bright spots. Lumen is one,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the Justice + Joy National Collaborative, which advocates for young women, including teen mothers, referring to support in K-12 schools for pregnant and parenting teens. “By and large it’s just not really a priority on the list of many, many things schools are challenged with and facing now.”

Related: If we see more pregnant students post-Roe, are we prepared to serve them?

Nationally, teenage birth rates have fallen for the past three decades, reaching an all-time low in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the decline in teen births skidded to a halt in Texas, one year after the state’s Republican lawmakers had enacted a six-week abortion ban. Experts fear Texas’ change in direction could foreshadow a national uptick in teen pregnancy now that adolescents face more hurdles to abortion access in red states.

Decades of research have revealed the long-term effects of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: The CDC reports children of teen mothers tend to have lower performance in school and higher chances of dropping out of high school. They’re more likely to have health problems and give birth as teenagers themselves.

Shauna Edwards witnessed such outcomes as part of her work with pregnant and parenting teens for a religious nonprofit and in high schools along the Idaho-Washington border. She also learned the limits of trying to shoehorn services for those students into a school’s existing budget. At one campus, where Edwards helped as a counselor, she said the principal assigned just one teacher for all subjects and two classroom aides to handle child care for the babies of 60 students.

Frustrated, she tried to convince the superintendent of another school district to offer a similar teen parent program, but with more funding. He couldn’t justify the costs, Edwards said. Instead, he suggested she open her own school.

“I could serve all of Spokane, ideally, and wouldn’t have the risk of getting shut down by a school district trying to balance its budget,” said Edwards, executive director for Lumen.

Every morning, students from across Spokane County — at 1,800 square miles, it’s a bit larger than Rhode Island — trek to the Lumen campus downtown. Many take public transit, which is free for youth under 18, and end their rides at a regional bus hub across the street from the school. Once their children reach six months, Lumen students can drop them off at an on-site child care and preschool center, operated by a nonprofit partner, before heading upstairs to start their day. Before then, parents can bring their babies to class.

Funding for small schools in Washington state helps Lumen afford a full teaching staff — one adult each for English, history, math, science and special education. The charter also has a full-time principal, social worker and counselor. Other adults manage student internships or donations to the school’s food bank and “baby boutique,” where students can “shop” for a stroller, formula, diapers and clothes — all free of charge.

It’s common to see an infant cradled in a teacher’s arm, allowing students to focus on their classwork. On a recent afternoon, two couples traded cradling duties with their newborns during a parenting class on lactation.

“Delivering is something that happens to you. Not so with nursing. You have to do it,” said Megan Macy, a guest teacher, who introduced herself as “the official milk lady.”

Kaleeya shared a bit about her daughter Akylah’s delivery: “I was so depleted. I was her chew toy, her crying shoulder, her feeding bag. Once we got home, she wouldn’t latch at all.”

Her friend Keelah, 17, rocked her newborn in a car seat. (The Hechinger Report is identifying the parents who are minors by first name only to protect their privacy.) “It’s hard, and it’s scary,” she said of the first week home with the baby. “She lost a pound between the hospital and pediatrician.”

Related: ‘They just tried to scare us’: How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed in public schools

Lumen contracts with the Shades of Motherhood Network, a Spokane-based nonprofit founded to support Black mothers, to run the parenting classes. The school reserves space for health officials to meet with mothers and babies for routine checkups and government food programs. And founding principal Melissa Pettey has pushed — and paid for — teachers to make home visits with each student.

For each student, Lumen staff develops an individual graduation plan based on earned and missing credits from previous high schools. The school uses an instructional approach, called mastery-based learning, that allows students to earn credits based on competency in academic skills, often applied in projects. The parenting class, for example, counts as a credit for career and technical education, depending on how the contracted teachers evaluate each student.

The learn-as-you-go approach also allows Lumen to work around the instability in the lives of their students, who are often coping with children’s illnesses, daycare challenges, housing insecurity and other issues.

But the chaos in a young parent’s life can look like inconsistent attendance or even truancy on state accountability reports. Just a tenth of Lumen students attend school regularly, which the state defines as missing no more than two days of class each month.

Next year, the Spokane school district will review Lumen’s operations and performance to decide whether to renew the school’s charter. State data shows less than a fifth of Lumen’s students graduate on time, while a third dropped out. The state doesn’t publicly report testing data from Lumen, due to its size. But Edwards and Pettey said proficiency on state exams isn’t their main goal.

“One student attended 16 elementary schools. Six high schools before junior year,” Pettey said. “Think of the learning missed. How do we get that student to an 11th grade level?”

Added Edwards: “If you can grow them to read baby books to their kids, that’s a success.”

Lumen’s authorizer, Spokane Public Schools, will modify how it evaluates the charter’s performance to take its nontraditional students into account, according to Kristin Whiteaker, who oversees charter schools for the district.

She noted that about a third of Lumen’s incoming high schoolers test at an elementary level; another third test at middle school levels. But during the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent of students posted growth in math while at Lumen, and nearly two-thirds performed better on English language arts exams, according to the school. All of the students who make it to graduation have been accepted into college; 95 percent actually enrolled or started working six months after graduation.

“They’re serving such a unique population,” Whiteaker said. “If you can provide a pathway for students to the next stage of their lives, that’s accomplishing their goals.”

Lumen, she added, removes many of the barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face at Spokane’s traditional high schools. Some struggle to complete make-up work after missing weeks or months of classes for parental leave. Most have no access to child care, and regular schools don’t allow babies in the classroom.

Ideally, some experts say, expecting and parenting teens could remain in their original schools and receive these supports. That’s rarely the case, though, and the social stigma alone can keep young parents from finishing their education.

At the national level, a 2010 law that provided funding to help these students expired in 2019. Jessica Harding and Susan Zief, with the research firm Mathematica, studied the effectiveness of those federally-funded programs and found that successful ones work hard to provide flexibility, for excused absences or adding maternity clothes to dress codes. Others get creative, helping students navigate public transportation and modify their work schedules to meet with students after hours.

“Sometimes,” Harding said, “the solutions are not complicated.”

Related: Teen pregnancy is still a problem — school districts just stopped paying attention

In 2022, when the Supreme Court upended abortion care nationwide, Edwards expected students without reproductive choice in Idaho to attempt to enroll in Lumen. A handful have inquired with the school, said Edwards, but to enroll they would have to move across the state border to Washington where housing costs are significantly higher.

In fact, Lumen recently lost one student whose father found a cheaper home in Idaho. Average rents across Spokane County have risen more than 50 percent over the past five years. And as of March, about half of Lumen students qualified as homeless. One young mother slept outside during winter break while her newborn stayed with a friend. Three students, asked what they would change about Lumen, cited affordable housing or temporary shelter that could help them.

Across Washington, pregnant and parenting teens account for 12 percent of all unaccompanied youth in the homeless system. But the state has a severe shortage of shelter beds available for youth under 18, with even fewer supportive housing options that allow young families to stay together, according to a February 2024 state report. Edwards, meanwhile, has talked with developers to see if they could reserve affordable units for students or loosen rules that prevent minors from signing a lease.

“We missed a whole month of class. It was a long month,” said Mena, a 17-year-old junior who convinced her boyfriend, Rene, to enroll before their son’s delivery, in January.

Rene Jr., or RJ, had already lived with the couple in several homes during his first few months. A restraining order with one set of RJ’s grandparents and guardianship battle with the other pushed Mena and Rene to couch-surf with friends.

“School was the only way we could see each other,” Rene said. “I’m surprised, honestly, they can get me to graduation,” he added, while burping RJ. “He’s going to have a future.”

Later, as Mena suctioned RJ’s stuffy nose in another classroom, Rene struggled to stay awake in math. He had forgotten what he’d learned in some earlier lessons on graphing linear equations, and retreated into social media on his phone. Another student badgered him to “put in some effort,” but Rene resisted.

His teacher, Trevor Bradley, intervened. “What’s special about today? Why don’t you want to try?” he said. “You told me you’re tired because the baby’s keeping you up at night.”

After drawing another set of equations on the whiteboard, Bradley asked Rene and the other student for help with finding the values of x and y. Rene barely whispered his answer.

“That’s it! You do remember,” Bradley said, as Rene yawned.

From the start, Lumen’s founders planned to include fathers in the school. Pai-Espinosa, with the National Collaborative, said it’s unusual for K-12 systems to focus on fathers, since mothers often have custodial rights. And at Lumen, the inclusion of “baby daddies” — as students and staff refer to them — sometimes adds teen drama to the mix of emotions and hormones already present at the school.

Lumen’s lack of diversity among adults there has also bothered some students, including Kaleeya. Only 40 percent of her peers identify as white, and all of the school’s teachers and administrators are white. Edwards said it has been difficult to recruit a diverse staff. As a temporary solution the school contracted with the Shades of Motherhood Network for parenting classes.

“It’s hard being in a white space with no Black teachers,” Kaleeya said.

Still, she said she liked the school’s emphasis on engaging students in semester-long projects in different subjects and on real-world problems. Last year, confronted with drug-use problems near the downtown campus, students researched and presented options for the city to consider on safe needle disposal in public places. Each student’s individual graduation plan also includes an internship.

Payton, 17, has wanted to be a school counselor since before giving birth to her daughter in late 2022. Her internship at nearby Sacajawea Middle School convinced her to stay on that career path. Another mother, Alana, started an internship this spring with a local credit union and plans to use the marketing experience to help her advocate for children with disabilities in the future.

Kaleeya recently turned her internship, with a downtown restaurant, into a part-time job. She planned to save for college, but no longer needs to. Gonzaga University notified her in March of a full-ride scholarship to study there this fall.

“Lumen didn’t change who I was,” Kaleeya said. “I did this for my daughter. I didn’t want to be that low-income family. So I got my ass up, got into this school and I got an education.”

This story about teen parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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PITTSBURGH — Maria Hubal sent one student back to class just as another walked in. The sixth grader, slouched over with his hood pulled low, made a beeline to a hammock chair and curled up.

Hubal, Bellevue Elementary’s behavioral health school educator, gently asked if everything was OK and what she could do to help. He said he was at a “red” — based on a color thermometer posted by the door that students can use to describe their stress level.

“OK. Give me something so I know what’s going on,” Hubal responded.

The student finally mumbled, “I’m very, very stressed.” He sighed, continuing, “There’s a lot of stuff going on at my home, and also here at school.”

Conversations like this are common in Hubal’s class, the school’s appointed “Chill Room,” where students know her as the chill therapist. The room has an open-door policy — students who are feeling anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, or just need to reset can ask for a room pass at any time during the school day. They have 10 minutes in the room before they have to head back to class, unless Hubal decides they need more.

Bellevue Elementary is one of three school buildings in the Northgate School District, a district of 1,100 students two miles from downtown Pittsburgh. As Northgate returned fully to in-person learning in 2021, educators here noticed that student mental health had worsened, and decided to dedicate nearly a fifth of the district’s federal Covid-relief funds — about $800,000 — to building out its mental health programs.

It contracted with the Allegheny Health Network’s Chill Project, a school-based mindfulness and behavioral health initiative, enabling the district to add six full-time therapists to its staff. The district also partnered with a nearby farm specializing in equine-assisted therapy, and in February, hired a full-time horticulture therapist to expand a horticulture therapy initiative launched last year.

Three years in, educators and district leaders say they’ve seen a noticeable change in their students — both in their academics and their behavior and mental well-being. Behavioral incidents, particularly physical confrontations between students, have dropped in the past three years, according to Caroline Johns, the district’s superintendent. The district’s graduation rate has increased by nearly 11 percent in that time, to 94 percent.

That said, the effort has come with challenges: Northgate spent many months getting buy-in from school staff and families at a time when school-based mental health had become a target of the culture wars elsewhere. The federal funding that propelled these programs is set to expire this year, so the district will need to find other ways of sustaining the work.

“Covid lit the house on fire,” said Jeff Evancho, Northgate’s director of partnerships and equity. “In a lot of ways, this became a method to tackle that problem.”

Related: The school psychologist pipeline is broken. Can new federal money fix it?

The Northgate school district serves students from two small boroughs nestled along the Ohio River, about 90 percent of whom are eligible for the free and reduced-price meal program. Even before the pandemic, the district was dealing with poor academic performance, low attendance, disengaged family members, and student mental and behavioral health challenges.

When students returned to school after months of social isolation, many were grieving family members lost to Covid or coping with parents who had lost their jobs or homes, according to district officials. The district’s guidance counselors had to shift from academic to mental health counseling.

“The needs we saw when the kids came back were more significant than anything we’d ever seen,” said Johns, the superintendent.

A few months before the pandemic, Johns had seen a presentation about AHN’s Chill Project, launched in 2019, and longed to bring it to her district. Its founder and director, William Davies, had worked in urban and suburban schools and seen firsthand the lack of mental health supports. In the 2022-23 academic year, counselors nationwide served an average of 385 students; the numbers were even more stark for school psychologists — 1 to 1,119 students.

“There’s this perfect recipe and perfect storm for an absolute disaster scenario where kids are falling through the cracks, and they’re suffering greatly,” Davies said.

Davies sought to help schools create a culture that prioritized student and teacher mental health in several ways: by establishing universal interventions such as monthly lessons on coping with peer conflict, self harm and other issues; by providing a dedicated space that allows students and teachers to decompress or get immediate help from a therapist; and providing in-school therapy or crisis therapeutic sessions of the sort that are typically offered by a hospital or clinic.

When federal Covid relief funds became available, Johns was able to plow some of the money into bringing the AHN model to her district. Nationwide, other districts made similar calculations: More than a third of 5,000 school districts surveyed by the group FutureEd in 2022 said they planned to use at least some of their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds on mental health programs or staff. That said, the overall share of spending on those programs appears to be low, according to the group.

Today, Northgate’s three school buildings each have two full-time therapists who, like Hubal in Bellevue, are AHN Chill Program employees, in addition to three school counselors. One therapist at each school provides traditional talk therapy, while the other manages the Chill room and teaches monthly Chill lessons to help students develop strategies for dealing with stress and anxiety.

Sydney Jackson, a senior who has been a regular in the middle/high school’s Chill room since it opened, comes in every day to water the plants that line the window sills. There’s also a “nest” filled with bean bags, and comfy couches and chairs framing an electric fireplace.

Before the Chill room, Sydney said she would often go into the bathroom and cry. Now she visits “Miss Krissy” — Krissy Rohr, the middle/high school’s Chill therapist and educator — who helps her manage her feelings and develop coping skills.

“I’ve gotten so much better at identifying my feelings,” she said. “The thing that I do the most is called “catastrophizing,” which is finding the worst possible outcome of any situation. Miss Krissy has taught me what it is and how to deal with it. I’ve learned how to challenge those thoughts and feelings.”

The regular chill lessons have helped too, she said. On a Tuesday morning, Sydney sat in a classroom with the nine other students in her advisory group, listening as Rohr taught a lesson on healthy relationships.

Rohr opened the discussion by asking the class what friendship meant to them, then asked them to consider what they expect from their friends and the qualities they’re drawn to.

Later, Rohr divided the students into smaller groups and asked each to come up with answers to two questions: “What do you say to a friend that’s pressuring you to do something that you aren’t comfortable with?” and “Why is it better to talk something out with a person as opposed to talking about them with other people?”

As Rohr walked around the class observing, she told one group, “No matter what you do your whole life, you’re never going to be everybody’s cup of tea, somebody is always going to take an issue with something.”

Nevaeh Bonner, a senior, responded: “I try to remind myself of that every day. Just do what you do, do what you want to do, because someone’s just gonna find a reason.”

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

About a 20-minute drive away, Orchardview Stables sits on an expanse of green fields home to 16 horses, two goats, chickens and a resident cat.

Each semester, the district selects eight or nine middle schoolers to care for a horse on the farm — feeding, cleaning and riding it. Mary Kay Soergel, a riding instructor and the director of Orchardview Stables, said when kids come to work with the horses, “they learn compassion” and how to be responsible for another living being.

The farm is a family business for the Soergel family, who not only work but live on the farm. Soergel’s daughter, Tessa Maxwell, is a former special education teacher who serves as the farm’s executive director and the lead certified therapeutic riding instructor. The farm also employs a clinical trauma mental health professional, who also offers expertise as an equine-assisted psychotherapist.

“Horses are pretty honest through their body language. Horses are very accepting as long as you respect them,” said Maxwell. “It’s very therapeutic because kids don’t have to pretend to be something they’re not. They don’t have to worry about the shoes they’re wearing or the clothes they have on or the grades they’re getting.”

This year, the district is trying to align the equine therapy program more closely with the Chill program by having Maxwell and other professionals at the stables work with the district’s Chill therapists. The Orchardview staff try to keep the same themes and lessons the kids might be working through in school in their conversations with kids at the farm, while the Chill therapists help students debrief lessons or emotions they experienced in their work with horses.

The district has also started to embrace horticulture therapy, thanks to a $70,000 “moonshot” grant in 2022 from the organization Remake Learning. Horticulture therapy uses plant-based and gardening activities to help individuals struggling with stress, anxiety and depression.

Through a donation from nearby Chatham University, Northgate received its first greenhouse, built next to the football field outside the middle/high school. Chill therapists have run summer camps there and a gardening club started by the high school art teacher now numbers more than 55 members.

In January, the district hired a certified horticulture therapist to lead the program, including working in the greenhouse with ninth graders who participate in a mandatory life skills class.

Aside from building out specific mental health programs, the district’s elementary schools launched a “Kindness Club” in 2022 and the high school has a “No Place for Hate” club.

Related: Mental health: Is that a job for schools?

Northgate leaders know their level of investment in mental health programs is unusual.  It has also come with risks: School districts in Pennsylvania and across the country have faced opposition from community and school board members when they’ve tried to create programs that address students’ emotional and behavioral needs. Groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education have sued districts and targeted social-emotional learning programs in Bucks County and Cumberland County.

But Northgate has avoided that so far, in part by taking a gradual approach and being transparent with parents and school board members, say administrators. The district first invested in professional development to educate teachers about, and train them on, the Chill program. The district also started holding family engagement nights to showcase the mental health services and acquaint parents with the Chill lessons.

Cheryl Patalano, who serves on the district’s board of directors, said she is glad that her middle schooler and her high schooler have a safe space in the school they can visit to decompress.

Patalano said that the Chill Room is a place where students can go during the school day when they can’t go home to “get away from things.”

“Now we have this whole room, so I think it’s great,” she said. “They are very non judgmental, and I feel like just knowing that it’s there is also a huge help.”

Evancho, the partnerships and equity director, said the programs have begun to create an atmosphere where students feel comfortable talking about mental health. “There’s no problem for a kid to leave class and say ‘I gotta go to the Chill Room.’ The kids don’t feel weird about it, it’s just built into our school culture in a pretty authentic way.”

Nearly three times as many students access therapy now than before the district partnered with the Chill Project, according to Johns, the superintendent. The district is still collecting data to determine the programs’ effectiveness, and will spend the next school year analyzing the information collected over the past two years, Johns said.

The changes the district has seen in its students are driving it to find funding to keep the programs going when ESSER money evaporates later this year. So far it has secured some additional funding through statewide grants for mental health and school safety, and it is applying for other federal and philanthropic support. Eventually, Johns said, the district will have to find ways to fund the programs directly out of its own budget, which is about $28.5 million a year. All told, Northgate has dedicated about $920,000 in private and public money to the new programs, the vast majority of it for the Chill Project.

On a Tuesday afternoon just after recess, first grader McKenna ran into Bellevue Elementary’s Chill Room for a quick chat with Hubal. She pulled a tub of Lego bricks over to the table and sat down — it’s her favorite activity when talking with Hubal. McKenna said the room is calming, especially if she hugs a Squishmello, one of the many stuffed animals in the room.

She comes into the room when she has a “really, really bad attitude or is angry with somebody,” she said. But she said going to the Chill Room — and the lessons she gets there — has helped her learn to control her emotions and better communicate with her mother and classmates even when she’s frustrated.

Just knowing the room and Hubal are near reassures her, McKenna said: “I can come in here whenever I need and she helps me.”

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Although state and local leaders are building comprehensive plans to increase the number of Black teachers, few plans include the recruitment of more Black principals, who play a critical role in Black teachers’ development.

Only 10 percent of public school principals nationwide are Black, which helps explain why hiring and retaining Black teachers has been so problematic.

The roots of this issue go back to the historic 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which declared that laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional. While the Brown decision required faculty, administration and student bodies to be integrated, that’s not what happened; as student bodies integrated, Black teachers and principals were dismissed.

This year marks the decision’s 70th anniversary, yet the promise of Brown has not been fulfilled, nor has integration led to taking more seriously the role of Black educators in the lives of Black children.

Before 1954, Black principals played a unique and transformational role in ensuring Black students had Black teachers. Horace Tate, for example, featured in Vanessa Siddle Walker’s book, “The Lost Education of Horace Tate,” was a hero who, beginning in the 1940s, aggressively recruited undergraduate students from historically Black colleges and universities to teach in rural Georgia. He saw Black teacher recruitment and retention as critical to uplifting the Black community. Tate and the Georgia Teachers and Education Association also fought against unfair credentialing practices that strained the Black teacher pipeline.

Related: How to hire more black principals

In the wake of Brown, Leslie T. Fenwick tells in her groundbreaking book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip,” Black principals lost their jobs in such devastating numbers that a Senate committee hearing was called to investigate the problem in 1971. Lack of support from the Nixon administration meant that those principals had no redress; however, testimony from the riveting hearing preserved the historical record.

Fenwick notes that policy efforts today must acknowledge and deal with the relics of that “systematic dismissal of Black educators from public schools.” Her book calls for a deeper understanding of what has been, should be and can be.

If states are committed to fulfilling the promise of Brown, they must not only rebuild the Black teacher pipeline but also come to grips with the critical role Black principals have played and can play in developing Black teachers. Horace Tate is no relic of history; Black principals are still fighting that fight today. I did.

During my first year as principal of a Mississippi middle school, I fought to recruit Black teachers and retain the ones I already had on my campus. I spent countless hours calling teachers who once taught at the school and trying to convince Black graduates of HBCUs to give our kids a chance to be taught by someone who looked like them and shared their values.

Later, while working at the Mississippi Department of Education, I led state-level efforts to address the state’s critical teacher shortage and increase the share of Black, Latino and indigenous teachers. We built a comprehensive plan that focused on such policy changes.

We worked with the legislature to amend the law to include more entry points into teacher education programs by adding a provision that takes into account prospective teachers’ GPAs, instead of relying solely on ACT and Praxis scores.

We provided statewide access to training and tutoring for assessments in partnership with our teacher advocacy organizations and focused on building community among Black educators. And we launched the nation’s first state-run teacher residency program for teachers: Our first class of residents, as I recall, was over 70 percent Black.

Related: OPINION: A Black principal’s case against educator neutrality

Many educators, including me, see this work as following in the legacy of Black principals like Tate, and as embodying what activist Mary Church Terrell refers to as “lifting as we climb.”

These stories underline a growing need for state education agency leaders to truly engage with Black principals, understand the need for more of them and recognize how they have effectively done the work of increasing the share of Black teachers.

Any strategy that does not engage Black principals is short-sighted. Professor Jarvis Givens, in his book “Fugitive Pedagogy,” describes “defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence,” as a marker of Black educational leaders who saw their subversive acts as paramount to improving Black education.

Today’s efforts should no longer be fugitive. In fact, educational leaders should consider these efforts necessary. To start, leaders might support the work of Black school leaders to recruit high-caliber, diverse teachers by scaling grow-your-own and teacher residency programs like we did in Mississippi.

State policymakers must also invest in HBCUs and other institutions (such as Hispanic-serving institutions and institutions serving Native Americans) serving populations underrepresented in teaching and reform existing loan forgiveness programs to make them better recruiting tools for teachers.

If educational leaders fully grasp the profound impact Black principals have on the Black teacher pipeline, they’ll push to increase the share of Black principals — who, for decades, have called for greater attention to Black teacher recruitment and retention.

Phelton Moss is the acting director of American University’s Education Policy and Leadership Program. He is a professor of Education Policy at American University and a fellow in the center for Education Innovation at the NAACP.

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LEXINGTON, Ky. — Why do rural students have to “beat the odds” in order to get to college?

That’s the question Jim Shelton asked his fellow panelists during last week’s sixth annual Rural Summit, a gathering focused on addressing the needs of rural students.  Shelton is president of the philanthropic group Blue Meridian Partners and deputy secretary of the Department of Education during the Obama administration.

While rural students graduate from high school at higher rates than their urban and suburban peers, only about 55 percent go directly to college. Those who do drop out at high rates due to financial barriers, transportation, internet connectivity and family responsibilities, noted speakers at the summit.

While acknowledging the differences among and the diversity of rural communities in places like Oklahoma, Kentucky, Hawaii and Pennsylvania, speakers made the case that these communities all have the knowledge, talent and systems to help their students succeed academically in college and beyond — they just need the resources.

Education leaders and advocates say one answer is “place-based partnerships,” collaborations among local organizations working together to improve outcomes for students and families.

“Schools are only part of the solution,” said Russell Booker, CEO of the Spartanburg Academic Movement, a place-based partnership in the South Carolina city. He said it takes community partnerships that include the school system, housing, healthcare, the criminal justice system and local government to improve outcomes for rural students.

The summit was hosted by Appalachian Kentucky-based nonprofit Partners for Rural Impact. Dreama Gentry, the group’s president and CEO, said the goal is to bring together people working in pre-K, K-12 and higher ed to discuss the opportunities students need from “the cradle to career spectrum.”

Too often, Gentry said, educators focus on a single indicator — kindergarten readiness, for example — without considering how that relates to student preparedness and success at each stage of their education. “It’s actually taking that holistic look to make sure we’re supporting them at every step,” she said.

Here are a few of the initiatives highlighted at the three-day summit: 

• The Community Colleges of Appalachia launched a Rural Educator Academy in fall 2022 to train faculty and staff to better understand and meet the needs of students in rural Appalachia, particularly those from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds.

The six community colleges in the first cohort worked to identify and alleviate a specific issue facing students on their campuses. For example, Tri-County Technical College, in Pendleton, South Carolina, focused on educating faculty and staff about the barriers preventing students in poverty from succeeding in college, while Mountain Empire Community College, in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, developed a mentorship program to create a sense of belonging among first-generation as well as all incoming college students.

• The Hawaii-based nonprofit organization Kinai ʻEha launched in 2017 with the goal of disrupting the state’s school-to-prison pipeline, primarily for native Hawaiian and Micronesian youth. It runs a trauma-informed program, rooted in Hawaiian culture and language, that works with high schoolers who’ve dropped out of high school, as well as those who’ve experienced homelessness, poverty, incarceration or drug use. Students live and work on a farm, receive food and clothing, attend classes to complete their GED or HISET, and participate in work-based learning or vocational programs. In 2019, Kinai ʻEha helped to secure a state law requiring the creation of a task force to implement a system for evaluating and supporting kids who are struggling with trauma, behavioral or mental health problems and chronic absenteeism.

• Rural alliances in states including Indiana and Texas are providing high schoolers with career and technical education, part of an effort to expand access to post-secondary pathways in rural areas and combat rural shortages of skilled workers. For example, the nonprofit Rural Schools Innovation Zone launched in South Texas in 2019 to bring together five rural districts, five higher ed institutions and workforce groups to create more opportunities for students to access college and careers that are prevalent in their regions. The collaboration has established five career and tech academies at each high school focused on sectors like health and sciences, the military or skilled trade jobs; as of the 2022-23 school year, 54 percent of RSIZ students had received a certification in an industry of their choice. In 2023, the Texas legislature passed a bill to expand the program to other parts of Texas.

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Two years ago, when I visited Westwood High School in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, every incoming freshman started the year in a very unusual way.

Back when my mom attended Westwood in the early 80s, students made the typical walk from class to class, learning from one teacher in math and another for English or history or science. (My mom was one of two girls in Westwood’s woodworking class.) Flash forward a few decades, and in 2022, I observed four teachers and 135 freshmen – all in one classroom.

The model, known as team teaching, isn’t new. It dates back to the 1960s. But Arizona State University resurrected the approach, in which teachers share large groups of students, as a way to rebrand the teaching profession and make it more appealing to prospective educators.

Now, team teaching has expanded nationally, and particularly in the American West. The number of students assigned to a team of teachers tops 20,000 kids – an estimate from ASU that doubled from fall 2022. Mesa Unified, the school district that runs Westwood and the largest in Arizona, has committed to using the approach in half of its schools. And the national superintendents association last year launched a learning cohort for K-12 leaders interested in the idea.

Brent Maddin oversees the Next Education Workforce Initiative at ASU’s teachers college, which partners with school districts trying to move away from the “one teacher, one classroom” model of education.

“Unambiguously, we have started to put a dent in that,” Maddin said.

The Next Education Workforce Initiative today works with 28 districts in a dozen states, where 241 teams of teachers use the ASU model. It will expand further in the next two years: A mixture of public and philanthropic funding will support team teaching in dozens of new schools in California, Colorado, Michigan and North Dakota.

ASU has also gathered more data and research that suggest its approach has made an impact: In Mesa, teachers working on a team leave their profession at lower rates, receive higher evaluations and are more likely to recommend teaching to a friend.

Early research also indicates students assigned to educator teams made more growth in reading and passed Algebra I at higher rates than their peers.

“Educators working in these models — their feeling of isolation is lower,” Maddin said. “Special educators in particular are way more satisfied. They feel like they’re having a greater impact.”

Last year, the consulting group Education First shared its findings from a national scan of schools using different models to staff classrooms like team teaching. Among other groups, their report highlighted Public Impact, which supports schools in creating teams of teachers and has reached 800 schools and 5,400 teachers.* Education First itself works with districts in California to use a team structure with paid teacher residents and higher pay for expert mentor teachers.

In North Dakota, team teaching has caught the attention of Kirsten Baesler, the state superintendent of public instruction. Her office recently sent a group of lawmakers, educators and other policymakers to Arizona to learn about the model. Later this fall, Fargo Public Schools will open a new middle school where students will learn entirely from one combined team of teachers.

Jennifer Soupir-Fremstad, assistant director of human capital for the Fargo school district, recalled Mesa teachers telling her how much more supported they feel – by administrators and their fellow teammates. “That was a game changer,” she said.

The district’s new middle school will include a competency-based model where students can learn and work through content at their own pace. Five core teachers, whom the district refers to as mentors, will split responsibility for students in all three grades. Enrollment will be capped at 100 students for the first year, with plans to add more teams and serve up to 400 students in the future.

When my mom read my Hechinger Report story about what’s happening at her high school now, she questioned whether teachers could stay on top of 100-plus teenagers who just want to socialize. But she loved the idea of seeing her classmates more.

“I would have loved to be with my friends more,” she said. “We were separated for most of our classes. I think it’s awesome.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the description of the work of Public Impact.

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TULSA, Okla. — Amoni y Zoe esparcieron el contenido de una bolsa de sándwich llena de caramelos de frutas sobre sus escritorios como parte de una lección de matemáticas sobre proporciones.

“¿Qué significa tener el 50 por ciento?” preguntó su maestra, Kelly Woodfin, a los alumnos de sexto grado en su clase de matemáticas avanzadas. “¿Qué significa tener la mitad?”

Amoni y Zoe, ambas de 11 años, comieron solo un caramelo cada una, mientras convertían la proporción de manzanas verdes o fresas rosadas de su bolsa en fracciones, decimales y porcentajes. Cuando se quedaron perplejas con una estrategia para convertir un decimal en un porcentaje, inmediatamente levantaron las manos.

“Creo que hay que dar dos pasos hacia la izquierda”, dijo Amoni, su oración terminando en una pregunta.

“Has estado haciendo esto durante dos semanas, hermana”, la reprendió Woodfin en broma. “No sé por qué dudas de ti misma”.

Hace años, cuando Woodfin asistió de kinder hasta octavo grado en Union Public Schools, ella estudió en aulas bastante homogéneas. Woodfin recuerda que sus compañeros eran predominantemente blancos, un legado de que las familias blancas se mudaron a los suburbios cuando las escuelas de Tulsa empezaron a desegregarse durante los años cincuenta. Pero cuando ella regresó para enseñar en el distrito de Union en 2012, la población estudiantil blanca matriculado se había reducido a poco más de la mitad.

Sin embargo, hasta hace poco, los estudiantes en las clases avanzadas de matemáticas de Union seguían siendo en su mayoría blancos. Los estudiantes del itinerario acelerado en la escuela intermedia y secundaria procedían principalmente de escuelas primarias en vecindarios prósperos, donde los estudiantes tendían a sacar mejores resultados en la prueba de nivel de pre-álgebra para la cual tenían una sola oportunidad de tomarla en quinto grado. Pero en un día de invierno reciente, solo dos de los estudiantes de Woodfin se identificaban como blancos y más de un tercio todavía estaban aprendiendo el inglés.

La transformación en las clases de Woodfin representa más que un cambio general sobre quién asiste a las escuelas de Unión, donde hoy solo uno de cada cuatro estudiantes es blanco. También es el resultado de una campaña de años de duración para identificar y promover a más estudiantes de orígenes subrepresentados en los cursos de matemáticas más desafiantes del distrito.

En otros lugares, preocupaciones sobre quién puede acceder a clases de matemáticas avanzadas han llevado a los distritos a eliminar los sistemas de itinerarios (desagrupamiento) que separan a los estudiantes en diferentes clases de matemáticas según su capacidad percibida, o a eliminar las clases aceleradas por completo en nombre de la equidad.

Unión Public Schools, en cambio, ha intentado encontrar un término medio. El distrito, que se encuentra en partes de Tulsa y sus suburbios del sureste, continúa el sistema de grupos de clases de matemáticas separadas a partir del sexto grado. Pero también ha agregado nuevas formas para que los estudiantes califiquen para cursos de matemáticas de nivel superior, más allá de la prueba de nivel y ha aumentado el apoyo (incluyendo tutoría en las escuelas y períodos de clase más largos) para los estudiantes que han demostrado promesa en la materia.

Los datos de inscripción sugieren que el esfuerzo de hacer que las matemáticas de nivel superior sean accesibles para más estudiantes, habían comenzado a dar resultados antes de la pandemia. Pero han habido desafíos: en los últimos años, menos estudiantes se han matriculado en clases de matemáticas avanzadas en general, aunque el decrecimiento en número de estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos ha sido menos pronunciado que para otros grupos. Sentimientos anti-profesores, además de los bajos salarios docentes en Oklahoma, han dificultado la contratación de educadores de matemáticas, según administradores del estado. En Union High School, un puesto para enseñar Álgebra II permaneció vacante durante más de un año.

Pero el distrito sigue comprometido con sus cambios. Últimamente, directores de escuela y educadores de matemáticas veteranos han convencido a algunos exalumnos a que se unan a las filas docentes de Union. Shannan Bittle, especialista en matemáticas de secundaria en Union, dijo que los nuevos programas académicos del distrito, como aviación y construcción, podrían ofrecer a los estudiantes más formas de aplicar matemáticas avanzadas en empleos lucrativos.

“Nos esforzamos muchísimo para no dejar a la gente fuera” de las matemáticas aceleradas, dijo ella. “Pero hacemos todo lo posible para darles las herramientas para tener éxito”.

Tomar álgebra o matemáticas de un nivel superior en la escuela intermedia coloca al estudiante en el camino de tomar cálculo en la escuela secundaria, lo cual abre puertas a universidades selectivas y se considera un curso de entrada para muchas carreras STEM, las cuales son bien remuneradas. Datos federales sobre educación muestran que los estudiantes blancos en la escuela secundaria se matriculan en cálculo a una tasa casi ocho veces mayor que la de sus pares afroamericanos y aproximadamente el triple del promedio de los estudiantes latinos.

“Hay muchos estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos, y estudiantes procedentes de familias de bajos ingresos, que han demostrado aptitudes y anhelan más, pero sistemáticamente se les niega el acceso a cursos avanzados de matemáticas”, escribieron los autores “Esta práctica, y esta mentalidad, debe cambiar un informe de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro Education Trust y Just Equations”, publicado en diciembre del 2023.

Aun así, los enfoques que algunos distritos escolares han adoptado para aumentar la diversidad estudiantil en las clases de matemáticas han generado controversia.

En San Francisco, el distrito escolar eliminó clases de matemáticas aceleradas en las escuelas intermedias y secundarias en 2014 para poner fin a la segregación por capacidad, lo cual provocó protestas de padres. Tres años después, Cambridge Public Schools en Massachusetts comenzó a desmantelar su política de itinerarios de matemáticas aceleradas o de nivel de curso. Cerca de Detroit, el consejo escolar de Troy eligió eliminar las clases de matemáticas avanzadas para las escuelas intermedias empezando más tarde este año.

Asimismo, el año pasado la junta de educación del estado de California adoptó nuevas pautas curriculares que, entre otras ideas, alientan a las escuelas a posponer álgebra hasta el noveno grado. La junta insistió que el esquema “afirma el compromiso de California de garantizar la equidad y la excelencia en el aprendizaje de matemáticas para todos los estudiantes”. Pero los críticos, entre ellos profesores de matemáticas y ciencias, han opinado que hace lo contrario, al negar a los estudiantes la preparación académica que les hace falta para tener éxito.

“Veo el valor, en teoría”, dijo Rebecka Peterson, profesora de matemáticas de Union High y la Maestra Nacional del Año 2023, acerca de esfuerzos como el de California. Pero añadió: “Cada niño es distintivo, y como madre, una talla única no es lo que quiero para mi hijo”.

Peterson comenzó a trabajar en las escuelas de Union hace unos 12 años, impartiendo clases de matemáticas desde álgebra de nivel intermedio hasta cálculo de Advanced Placement. Desde el principio, Peterson notó la división demográfica en sus clases: “Somos un distrito con una riqueza cultural, y, sin embargo, mis clases de cálculo eran en su mayoría blancas”, dijo.

Decidió hablar con su directora de escuela en ese entonces, Lisa Witcher. Las dos descubrieron que, aunque Union High recibía a estudiantes de todos los 13 campus de primaria del distrito, los estudiantes de cálculo de Peterson venían principalmente de solo tres: los más blancos y ricos de las escuelas primarias de Union.

Poco después, oficiales administrativos del distrito recurrieron a Witcher para encabezar un nuevo programa de universidad temprana. Ella comenzó a reclutar estudiantes que habían tomado geometría en su primer año, pero descubrió que solo un décimo de los estudiantes afroamericanos de primer año en Union eran elegibles para inscribirse en esa clase. No habían tomado la clase requerida para entrar, Álgebra I, en octavo grado.

“Eso provocó algunas conversaciones incómodas”, dijo Witcher, quien se jubiló del distrito en 2021.

Al final, los administradores encontraron que la causa de la falta de diversidad estudiantil en las clases de matemáticas avanzadas de la escuela intermedia y secundaria se encontraba en el quinto grado. Ese era el año en el cual las escuelas administraban un examen mayormente basado en palabras, en el que los estudiantes tenían una sola oportunidad de aprobar. Los funcionarios del distrito dijeron que ese examen de gran peso perjudicaba a dos poblaciones en aumento en las escuelas de Union: los niños que todavía estaban aprendiendo el inglés y los niños de familias de bajos ingresos, cuyos padres no podían pagar tutores privados.

Este descubrimiento provocó una serie de cambios que comenzaron hace aproximadamente una década. El distrito escolar no eliminó el examen de quinto grado que servía como entrada a las matemáticas avanzadas, pero hoy los estudiantes pueden tomar el examen múltiples veces. Las escuelas primarias ofrecen tutores de matemáticas a partir del tercer grado, con programas extraescolares para estudiantes rezagados en la materia. Los maestros pueden recomendar a estudiantes prometedores a tomar matemáticas avanzadas de sexto grado, independientemente de su desempeño en el examen de nivel. Un administrador central también revisa las calificaciones de los estudiantes y el progreso en los exámenes de competencia para automáticamente inscribir estudiantes en clases aceleradas. (Se les envía una carta a los padres notificándoles sobre la inscripción automática y en ese momento pueden optar por que sus hijos no participen).

“Los perseguimos a todos los rincones del distrito escolar”, dijo Todd Nelson, ex profesor de matemáticas que ahora supervisa datos, investigaciones y pruebas del distrito.

Desde 2016, ha aumentado la diversidad de los estudiantes matriculados en los cursos avanzados de matemáticas del distrito. Ahora los estudiantes latinos representan el 29 por ciento de la matrícula total, antes representaban el 18 por ciento. Los estudiantes afroamericanos y multirraciales representan cada uno el 10 por ciento de la matrícula, en el 2016 representaban cerca del 8%.

Sin embargo, más recientemente la participación en matemáticas de nivel superior ha disminuido en todos los subgrupos de estudiantes en las escuelas de Unión. Las cifras del distrito muestran que esta tendencia comenzó antes de la pandemia, especialmente en las escuelas secundarias. Pero los administradores dicen que la interrupción debido a los cierres de las escuelas contribuyó a una persistente aversión a inscribirse en cursos desafiantes. Aun así, las proporciones de estudiantes afroamericanos, latinos y multirraciales que se matriculan en las clases avanzadas de matemáticas de Union han caído en tasas mucho más bajas que las de los estudiantes asiáticos y blancos.

“Consideramos que el trabajo que estamos haciendo es un proceso a largo plazo, a diferencia de solucionar el problema en un año”, añadió Nelson.

En la clase de sexto grado de Woodfin, Vianca, de 11 años, no estaba segura de cómo había terminado en la clase de matemáticas avanzadas. Recordó haber tomado un examen “súper difícil” cuando estaba en quinto grado y se registró para matemáticas estándar en la escuela intermedia.

“Parece que me colocaron aquí”, dijo.

Vianca dijo que la materia le ha sido un desafío este año. Pero un cambio reciente en los horarios de sexto grado que agrega más tiempo para las matemáticas significa que tiene 90 minutos con Woodfin cada día, en lugar de solo 45.

“Ella siempre va más despacio” cuando le parece demasiado, dijo Vianca sobre su maestra. “Puedo pedir ayuda”.

Duplicar la cantidad de tiempo para las matemáticas para los estudiantes de sexto grado en Union ha tenido un costo. Algunos padres se enojaron ante la reducción de actividades extracurriculares, como arte o música. El cambio requirió duplicar el número de profesores de matemáticas de secundaria, y los directores de escuela ya habían tenido dificultades para reclutar profesores para esas materias. (El año pasado, la tasa de rotación de docentes de Oklahoma alcanzó el 24 por ciento, la tasa más alta en una década, según datos estatales.)

La falta de diversidad docente también complica la misión general del distrito de incrementar la diversidad estudiantil en las matemáticas avanzadas, reconoció Bittle. Solo dos de aproximadamente 90 profesores de matemáticas de escuelas intermedias y secundarias se identifican como afroamericanos; y los esfuerzos para reclutar en Langston University, la única universidad históricamente afroamericana del estado, aún no han sido exitosos. Bittle añadió que los bajos salarios docentes en Oklahoma no ayudan. Las escuelas de los estados vecinos tienden a ofrecer mucho más que el salario inicial para profesores en Oklahoma de aproximadamente $40,000 anuales.

Las investigaciones acerca del debate sobre la eliminación de los sistemas de seguimientos demográficos presentan un panorama complicado. Casi al mismo tiempo que el distrito hizo sus cambios, un estudio internacional encontró que separar a los estudiantes dotados en clases aceleradas podría exacerbar la división entre ricos y pobres en las escuelas. Otro artículo, publicado por la Brookings Institution en 2016, encontró que los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos en estados que utilizaron más sistemas de itinerarios para separar a estudiantes de octavo grado en diferentes niveles de habilidad en matemáticas obtuvieron mejores calificaciones en los exámenes de Advanced Placement.

“Esto seguirá siendo turbio”, dijo Kristen Hengtgen, analista senior de Education Trust. “El proceso de eliminar los sistemas de itinerarios parece tener buenas intenciones, pero todavía no hemos visto de manera concluyente que funcione”.

Sin embargo, Unión sigue comprometido con sus esfuerzos. Y en una clase de cálculo totalmente silenciosa, donde sólo el zumbido del sistema de climatización interrumpía el frotar de los lápices, los estudiantes permanecían comprometidos con sus propios trabajos.

Lizeth Rosas estaba sentada en la última fila. Vestida con bata azul brillante del programa de enfermería que tendría más tarde ese día, la joven de 18 años garabateó notas sobre cómo encontrar el valor promedio de fricción en un intervalo determinado.

“¿Alguna pregunta?”, dijo su maestra. “Hablen ahora o callen para siempre.”

Sólo ocho de los 22 estudiantes de la clase se identificaban como blancos. Rosas comenzó a estudiar matemáticas avanzadas cuando estaba en séptimo grado, dijo. El año pasado, para su sorpresa, un maestro le recomendó tomar el curso de Advanced Placement.

“Al principio me cuestioné, y, mucho”, dijo. “No sabía si estaba lista. Es mucho que procesar y nos movemos muy rápido”.

Rosas planea trabajar como enfermera práctica con licencia después de graduarse y supone que las conversiones de medicamentos y líquidos intravenosos requerirán matemáticas. Su padre, quien dirige su propia empresa de remodelación, no puede ayudarla con sus tareas de cálculo, dijo ella. Pero su programa de enfermería, parte de un programa de extensión de la escuela secundaria en el cercano Tulsa Technology Center, ofrece tutoría académica.

“No me hace tanta falta”, dijo Rosas. “Los profesores aquí son realmente atentos. Simplemente me ayudan. Me recuerdan que puedo hacerlo”.

Este artículo sobre equidad en las matemáticas fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Regístrese para el Hechinger newsletter.

The post Cómo un distrito ha diversificado sus clases de matemáticas avanzadas — sin controversia appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LOS ANGELES — When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.

Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat. 

Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”

Being listened to and treated with empathy, Valladares said, “makes me feel better.” Better enough to put himself in his teacher’s shoes, consider what he could have done differently — and offer an apology.

This new way of responding to disrespectful behavior doesn’t always work, according to van der Fluit. But “overall,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”

In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.

A state law prohibiting willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3 went into effect in 2015; five years later, the ban was extended through eighth grade. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law adding high schoolers to the prohibition. It takes effect this July.

A Hechinger Report investigation reveals that the national picture is quite different. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.

As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.

From 2011-12 to 2021-22, as suspensions for willful defiance fell from 4,500 to near zero, suspensions across all categories fell too, to 1,633, a more than 90 percent drop, according to state data. Those numbers, plus in-depth research on the ban, show that educators in LAUSD didn’t simply find different justifications for suspending kids once willful defiance was off limits. Racial disparities in discipline remain, but they have been reduced.

Meanwhile, according to state survey data, students were less likely to report feeling unsafe in school. During the 2021-22 school year for example, 5 percent of LAUSD freshmen said they felt unsafe in school, compared with more than three times that nine years earlier. As for academics, state and federal data suggest that the district’s performance didn’t fall after the disciplinary shift, although the state switched tests over that decade, making precise comparison difficult.

“It really points out that we can do this differently, and do it better,” said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law. 

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

A pile of research demonstrates that losing class time negatively affects students. Suspensions are tied to lower grades, lower odds of graduating high school and a higher risk of being arrested or unemployed as an adult. Losen said this is in part because students who are suspended not only miss out on educational opportunities, but also lose access to the web of services many schools offer, including mental health treatment and meals.

That harm is less justifiable for minor transgressions, he added. And “what makes it even less justifiable is that there are alternative responses that work better and involve more adult interface for the student, not less.”

In part because of this research, Los Angeles, and then California, increasingly focused on disciplinary alternatives as they eliminated or narrowed the use of suspensions for willful defiance. 

LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.

The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.

All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.

That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.

Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.

The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.

And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance. 

Now, most days, van der Fluit sees things differently — but not always.

Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”

That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”

His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”

In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”

Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.

“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.

District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.

Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”

At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”

Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”

Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”

Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”

Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.

Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”

The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.

Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.

In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.

“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”

This story about PBIS was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post What happens when suspensions get suspended? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.

“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”

On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.

“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.

Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been trending downward, thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.

At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.

Related: A school closure cliff is coming. Black and Hispanic students are likely to bear the brunt

Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a district’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.

It’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.

Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the district’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.

Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the district’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the district’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; for the vast majority of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.

It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The district’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.

Related: A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom

“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.

Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even before the pandemic, the city had the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the national average.

Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Census estimate found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, down from about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.

It’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)

And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.

“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.

Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.

Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”

OPINION: Public school enrollment losses are a big problem

Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.

Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the enrollment center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.

“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.

To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.

Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”

Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”

Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s having the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.

Related: Dallas students flocking to schools that pull students from both rich and poor parts of town

Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn to school-ratings websites, which studies say push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.

As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”

She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”

After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.

Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.

Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.

When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.

The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t scheduled to open until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.

When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”

But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”

Related: Fewer kids are enrolling in kindergarten as pandemic fallout lingers

Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.

The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.

Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in “Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.

Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.

After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the district’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.

There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”

It’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”

In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollment above 30 percent for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent in the state of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicle investigation found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.

When Americans think of segregation academies, they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”

These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research has shown that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.

“It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.

In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School, a state-of-the-art facility that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, a biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.

Related: For some kids, returning to school post-pandemic means a daunting wall of administrative obstacles

But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.

To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.

So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups. 

“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”

A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.

“Domingo.”

“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)

“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)

In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking families has been credited with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant children have come to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce the paperwork hurdles they and other families face when trying to enroll.

But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures.

She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.

The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.

Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment has steadily increased, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.

On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”

Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.

Related: In a segregated city, the pandemic accelerated a wave of white flight

It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country are currently poised to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University, has described school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.

Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the district’s reputation.

Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.

For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. It’s mailed postcards.

Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)

And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s going wrong in SFUSD: It’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.

Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the district’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.

When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.

After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.

But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard horror stories of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”

When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.

Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.

Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to attend, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the district’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.

It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.

But change is coming. In 2018, the school board passed a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.

Related: Gifted education has a race problem. Can it be fixed?

If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.

She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.

Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the district’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “dynamic reserves” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.

It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.

What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?

Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” It’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.

“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.

With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”

It’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.

San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the district’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the city’s without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.

Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.

Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.

“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”

Related: New data: Even within the same district, some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones

But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”

In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.

Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.

This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.

Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”

And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”

“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”

This story about public school enrollment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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