Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling.  Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more eye-popping were stories about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck. 

So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and helped them catch up academically.  Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid. 

One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.

“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” wrote Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.” 

The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what previous researchers had found for increases in school spending. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood. 

The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.

The poorest districts in the nation, where 80 percent or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6 percent of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1 percent of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.

Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student. 

On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30 percent or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss.  Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.

Middle-income districts, where between 30 percent and 80 percent of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.

In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional $13,000 per student for full recovery in reading and math.  That’s more than Congress appropriated.

There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.

Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget. 

The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.

And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on basic infrastructure, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not. 

Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.

This story about federal funding for education was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: Some of the $190 billion in pandemic money for schools actually paid off appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.

The post OPINION: There’s a promising path to get students back on track to graduation appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy.

One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called outcomes-based contracting and is a way of sharing risk between buyer (the school) and seller (the vendor). Outcomes-based contracting is most common in healthcare. For example, a health insurer might pay a pharmaceutical company more for a drug if it actually improves people’s health, and less if it doesn’t. 

Although the idea is relatively new in education, many schools tried a different version of it – evaluating and paying teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improved – in the 2010s. Teachers didn’t like it, and enthusiasm for these teacher accountability schemes waned. Then, in 2020, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research announced that it was going to test the feasibility of paying tutoring companies by how much students’ test scores improved. 

The initiative was particularly timely in the wake of the pandemic.  The federal government would eventually give schools almost $190 billion to reopen and to help students who fell behind when schools were closed. Tutoring became a leading solution for academic recovery and schools contracted with outside companies to provide tutors. Many educators worried that billions could be wasted on low-quality tutors who didn’t help anyone. Could schools insist that tutoring companies make part of their payment contingent upon whether student achievement increased? 

The Harvard center recruited a handful of school districts who wanted to try an outcomes-based contract. The researchers and districts shared ideas on how to set performance targets. How much should they expect student achievement to grow from a few months of tutoring? How much of the contract should be guaranteed to the vendor for delivering tutors, and how much should be contingent on student performance? 

The first hurdle was whether tutoring companies would be willing to offer services without knowing exactly how much they would be paid. School districts sent out requests for proposals from online tutoring companies. Tutoring companies bid and the terms varied. One online tutoring company agreed that 40 percent of a $1.2 million contract with the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, would be contingent upon student performance. Another online tutoring company signed a contract with Ector County schools in the Odessa, Texas, region that specified that the company had to accept a penalty if kids’ scores declined.

In the middle of the pilot, the outcomes-based contracting initiative moved from the Harvard center to the Southern Education Foundation, another nonprofit, and I recently learned how the first group of contracts panned out from Jasmine Walker, a senior manager there. Walker had a first-hand view because until the fall of 2023, she was the director of mathematics in Florida’s Duval County schools, where she oversaw the outcomes-based contract on tutoring. 

Here are some lessons she learned: 

Planning is time-consuming

Drawing up an outcomes-based contract requires analyzing years of historical testing data, and documenting how much achievement has typically grown for the students who need tutoring. Then, educators have to decide – based on the research evidence for tutoring –  how much they could reasonably hope student achievement to grow after 12 weeks or more. 

Incomplete data was a common problem

The first school district in the pilot group launched its outcome-based contract in the fall of 2021. In the middle of the pilot, school leadership changed, layoffs hit, and the leaders of the tutoring initiative left the district.  With no one in the district’s central office left to track it, there was no data on whether tutoring helped the 1,000 students who received it. Half the students attended 70 percent of the tutoring sessions. Half didn’t. Test scores for almost two-thirds of the tutored students increased between the start and the end of the tutoring program. But these students also had regular math classes each day and they likely would have posted some achievement gains anyway. 

Delays in settling contracts led to fewer tutored students

Walker said two school districts weren’t able to start tutoring children until January 2023, instead of the fall of 2022 as originally planned, because it took so long to iron out contract details and obtain approvals inside the districts. Many schools didn’t want to wait and launched other interventions to help needy students sooner. Understandably, schools didn’t want to yank these students away from those other interventions midyear. 

That delay had big consequences in Duval County. Only 451 students received tutoring instead of a projected 1,200.  Fewer students forced Walker to recalculate Duval’s outcomes-based contract. Instead of a $1.2 million contract with $480,000 of it contingent on student outcomes, she downsized it to $464,533 with $162,363 contingent. The tutored students hit 53 percent of the district’s growth and proficiency goals, leading to a total payout of $393,220 to the tutoring company – far less than the company had originally anticipated. But the average per-student payout of $872 was in line with the original terms of between $600 and $1,000 per student. 

The bottom line is still uncertain

What we don’t know from any of these case studies is whether similar students who didn’t receive tutoring also made similar growth and proficiency gains. Maybe it’s all the other things that teachers were doing that made the difference. In Duval County, for example, proficiency rates in math rose from 28 percent of students to 46 percent of students. Walker believes that outcomes-based contracting for tutoring was “one lever” of many. 

It’s unclear if outcomes-based contracting is a way for schools to save money. This kind of intensive tutoring – three times a week or more during the school day – is new and the school districts didn’t have previous pre-pandemic tutoring contracts for comparison. But generally, if all the student goals are met, companies stand to earn more in an outcomes-based contract than they would have otherwise, Walker said.

“It’s not really about saving money,” said Walker.  “What we want is for students to achieve. I don’t care if I spent the whole contract amount if the students actually met the outcomes, because in the past, let’s face it, I was still paying and they were not achieving outcomes.”

The biggest change with outcomes-based contracting, Walker said, was the partnership with the provider. One contractor monitored student attendance during tutoring sessions, called her when attendance slipped and asked her to investigate. Students were given rewards for attending their tutoring sessions and the tutoring company even chipped in to pay for them. “Kids love Takis,” said Walker. 

Advice for schools

Walker has two pieces of advice for schools considering outcomes-based contracts. One, she says, is to make the contingency amount at least 40 percent of the contract. Smaller incentives may not motivate the vendor. For her second outcomes-based contract in Duval County, Walker boosted the contingency amount to half the contract. To earn it, the tutoring company needs the students it is tutoring to hit growth and proficiency goals. That tutoring took place during the current 2023-24 school year. Based on mid-year results, students exceeded expectations, but full-year results are not yet in. 

More importantly, Walker says the biggest lesson she learned was to include teachers, parents and students earlier in the contract negotiation process.  She says “buy in” from teachers is critical because classroom teachers are actually making sure the tutoring happens. Otherwise, an outcomes-based contract can feel like yet “another thing” that the central office is adding to a teacher’s workload. 

Walker also said she wished she had spent more time educating parents and students on the importance of attending school and their tutoring sessions. ”It’s important that everyone understands the mission,” said Walker. 

Innovation can be rocky, especially at the beginning. Now the Southern Education Foundation is working to expand its outcomes-based contracting initiative nationwide. A second group of four school districts launched outcomes-based contracts for tutoring this 2023-24 school year. Walker says that the rate cards and recordkeeping are improving from the first pilot round, which took place during the stress and chaos of the pandemic. 

The foundation is also seeking to expand the use of outcomes-based contracts beyond tutoring to education technology and software. Nine districts are slated to launch outcomes-based contracts for ed tech this fall.  Her next dream is to design outcomes-based contracts around curriculum and teacher training. I’ll be watching. 

This story about outcomes-based contracting was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: We have tried paying teachers based on how much students learn. Now schools are expanding that idea to contractors and vendors appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.”

This story about mental health support in schools 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 Horticulture, horses and ‘Chill Rooms’: One district goes all-in on mental health support appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Universities, philanthropies, and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM,  an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with shortages of workers with technical skills. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with advertisements carrying the message that STEM fields pay well. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.

That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty.  Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline –  a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers –  likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.

The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.

The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as 38 percent of eighth graders  – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.

Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math. 

We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs. 

NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than 400,000 students are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation. 

Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop.  Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader  But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled. 

Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.

Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.

Let’s walk through the numbers together.

Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math

This chart shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10 percent and the top 25 percent, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.

Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels

This bar chart shows that before the pandemic 10 percent of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7 percent. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24 percent to 20 percent. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34 percent of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27 percent were well prepared.

Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms. 

Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped 

This chart shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade. 

Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where 9 percent of students are enrolled, according to the most recently available data from 2019. 

I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.

“Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”

Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.

Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently. 

The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.

This story about math scores was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: How Covid narrowed the STEM pipeline appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The impact of Black people in early care and education cannot be overstated. Black women, in particular, have played a crucial role in American society, caring for multiple generations of children.

Recent reports indicate that 95 percent of child care workers are female. And although Black people make up only 13 percent of the total U.S. workforce, 18 percent of U.S. child care workers are Black.

Early education and child care represent the most racially diverse and lowest-paid sector of the teaching workforce. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that child care workers make an average of $14.22 an hour. That’s just $29,570 a year. And Black child care educators earn an average of 78 cents less per hour than their white counterparts.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, elected officials praised child care educators for their efforts to keep working and keep the economy going: Without them, parents could not have returned to work. Federal child care stabilization grants also played a pivotal role, keeping these programs open during the pandemic by providing subsidies to child care centers and to families.

Yet, the same officials who funded those grants don’t seem willing to extend that support. Now that the $52 billion pandemic-era funding has expired, many educators and families wonder about the future.

An estimated 70,000 child care programs could close in the U.S. because of the lost federal money, impacting nearly 3.2 million children.

Related: Evictions, high rents and strict rules plague in-home child care

America’s lack of ongoing investment in child care at the national and local levels will disproportionately hurt Black educators, children and families. Pre-pandemic, there was already limited availability of affordable options; new closures will deepen the challenges faced by parents in securing reliable and accessible care for their children.

Recently, 49 percent of parents who responded to a survey said they plan to spend about $18,000 on child care in 2024, while 23 percent will spend more than $36,000. Black median-income households generally spend a quarter of annual pay ($46,774) on child care for one child; very-low-income Black households can spend nearly half. White median-income households devote 15 percent of pay ($75,412) to child care.

I have heard many Black educators, parents and advocates express frustration at the way public officials have overlooked early care and education, especially home-based child care, whose owners typically operate on small margins and are particularly vulnerable to funding losses.

Millions of young children spend time in home-based child care, also known as family child care (FCC). Yet, there were 10,000 fewer family child care programs in the United States in 2022 than in 2019. This is in addition to the drop of more than 90,000 (42 percent) licensed family child care homes between 2005 and 2017.

Black educators I speak with advocate for all families to have access to early learning programs that meet their child and family needs. They believe that this can be achieved if more states increase funding for child care and commit to making systems more inclusive of FCC programs in order to give FCC educators access to the opportunities, support and resources they need to thrive.

For example, Maryland now includes FCC programs in state-funded pre-K programs, and last year California became the first state to launch a retirement fund for child care workers, inclusive of home-based child care programs.

We must advocate for similar policies at the national and local levels to increase investment in child care, including funding for higher wages, subsidies for low-income families and support for programs.

Related: OPINION: Home-based child care providers deserve better pay, working conditions and respect

I think about FCC educator Tiffany Taylor, CEO of The Baby Play Place Inc. in New York. As a Black female family child care educator, she is seldom taken seriously or recognized as a leader and professional in her field.

From being called a “babysitter” to being on the receiving end of racist, sexist and derogatory remarks, she and other Black child care educators must routinely navigate and overcome obstacles to providing high-quality child care to families in their communities. They must also deal with low pay, inflation, lack of benefits and high employee turnover. These challenges are forcing many Black family child care educators to close their doors, adding to the already depleted options for family child care across the country.

Still, Tiffany is aware of the impact she and other educators have on our country’s youngest learners. She refuses to give up. She is determined to advocate for additional investment by showing how better wages, funding and resources for child care can positively impact our communities.

Black early educators have made tremendous sacrifices to help hold up this country’s economic recovery. Yet they still face daily discrimination and inequities.

It’s time to give them the respect — and the funding — that they deserve.

Erica Phillips isexecutive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, the largest national organization focused on supporting family child care (FCC) educators, who offer high-quality early care and education in their homes.

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

The post OPINION: After years of silent sacrifices and unseen struggles, Black women are still holding up the child care industry appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Why is it that only 15 percent of public school leaders say they’re “extremely concerned” about student absences, according to a recent Education Department survey? 

This question gnawed at me as I wrote my Feb. 12, 2024 column about how chronic absenteeism remains stubbornly high in elementary, middle and high schools. Defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or 18 out of 180 days, chronic absenteeism doubled from about 15 percent of students before the pandemic to about 30 percent in the 2021-22 school year. Attendance has failed to snap back and recovered only a bit during the 2022-23 year, according to data from 38 states and the District of Columbia collected by FutureEd, a think tank based at Georgetown University. More than one out of four students remain chronically absent. 

By any measure, this level of absenteeism is alarming. It’s why test scores are sliding and why schools are struggling to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Mass absenteeism also affects students who are attending school because teachers cannot keep pace with the lessons they’re supposed to teach when so many classmates have missed core concepts.

Why don’t more principals understand the crisis that is happening inside their school buildings?

The answer is not because absenteeism affects only a small number of high-poverty schools. Sixty-five percent of all schools had at least 20 percent of their students chronically absent in 2021-22, according to the most recent federal data. The surge is widespread across the nation, affecting not just cities and rural areas, but the suburbs, too. One small example: the number of chronically absent students more than doubled in Simsbury, Conn., a wealthy suburb of Hartford, from 6 percent in 2018-19 to 14 percent in 2021-22 and remained elevated above 12 percent in 2022-23. 

The complacency about absenteeism may have to do with the attendance data that school leaders see everyday, which is typically a list of absent students. Each day, this can seem like a reasonable number – perhaps 30 students in a school of 300. And yet alarmingly high absenteeism rates can lurk beneath attendance rates that seem fine. 

“Ninety percent sounds like good attendance, but it is not,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, who has been studying the post-pandemic surge in absenteeism.

Malkus showed me spreadsheets of 2022-23 attendance data from three states, Illinois, Ohio and Florida. In the districts where 90 percent of the students showed up every day, the chronic absenteeism rate ranged from 28 percent to 46 percent. Think about this. There are many schools where an overwhelming majority of students are present on any given day, but more than two out of five students are still missing big chunks of the school year.

Here’s a more current example from a middle school in Nashville, Tennessee. Its principal told me that his average daily attendance rate is currently 93.5 percent, an improvement from last year. But as of February 2024, chronic absenteeism is already 22.9 percent – more than one in five students. 

How can this be? At first glance it seems the combination of high attendance and high absenteeism is a paradox.

Dave Moyer, an education data analyst in Portland, Oregon, who has been studying absenteeism for more than a decade, helped me solve the puzzle. 

Consider a school with 90 percent attendance and 100 students. Imagine that in September, 90 kids have perfect attendance and the same 10 kids are absent for the entire month. Already 10 percent of the students have missed more than 18 school days, crossing the threshold of chronic absenteeism. 

Say their parents lure them back to the classroom and a different group of 10 students is absent for all of October. The chronic absenteeism rate doubles to 20 percent. In November, the October absentees return to school and a fresh group of 10 kids play hooky: chronic absenteeism jumps to 30 percent. 

If this extreme pattern continues, where a fresh group of 10 kids stops attending each month, you’ll reach 40 percent chronic absenteeism halfway through the year. In theory, the chronic absenteeism rate could grow to 90 percent during a nine-month school year, equaling the 90 percent daily attendance rate. 

Of course, most chronically absent kids aren’t missing for a whole month at once, and those who are out for weeks at a time tend not to have perfect attendance when they return. But this stylized example of a rotating cast of absent students helps explain why chronic absenteeism isn’t simply the opposite of attendance. Chronic absenteeism isn’t just 10 percent when attendance rates are 90 percent. It’s a lot higher.

Chronic absenteeism manifests itself in different patterns, Moyer said. Some kids will be out for a week or two in a row, and school leaders know who those kids are. Others miss three or four days every month. Those absences add up, eventually crossing the chronically absent threshold after several months, but they’re not as obvious.

It’s unclear how many principals are able to monitor their chronic absenteeism data on a regular basis. The state of Rhode Island recently built a public data dashboard to track chronic absenteeism at every school and it’s updated daily. Connecticut updates its absenteeism dashboard monthly.

For schools, it’s trickier to keep track of chronic absenteeism than it is to take attendance. It’s like remembering how many days each of your children has forgotten to do the dishes during the year. 

Schools generally don’t calculate chronic absenteeism in house. Typically, schools upload their attendance rolls to the district, and a computer in a back office does it. Sometimes chronic absenteeism calculations are conducted only once at the end of the year, for required state reporting to the Department of Education, which began collecting data on chronic absenteeism in 2015. By the time this data filters back down to school leaders, if it does filter down, it is old information and it’s too late for school leaders to do much about it.

Kevin Armstrong, the principal of the Nashville middle school mentioned above, read aloud his high chronic absenteeism figures from a computer dashboard purchased by his school district. He counts himself among the minority of principals who are extremely concerned about these numbers. His eighth graders, he said, have the highest rates: already 29 percent of them are chronically absent. But not all principals across the country have access to current attendance data like Armstrong does.

Armstrong said he’s put a team of teachers and staff on the problem. They are calling parents to find out why students aren’t coming. Chronic absenteeism has improved since last year, but it’s still much higher than before the pandemic. And it’s hard, as a school leader, to be judged by a metric that schools can’t control.  “I’m not the alarm clock,” he said. “We need to have parents at the table to figure out why they’re allowing their kids to miss 30, 40, 50 days of school.”

 “I’m frustrated,” he said. “We just want our kids to be here.” 

This story about absenteeism dashboards was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Chronic absenteeism has surged across the country since the pandemic, with more than one out of four students missing at least 18 days of school a year. That’s more than three lost weeks of instruction a year for more than 10 million school children. An even higher percentage of poor students, more than one out of three, are chronically absent. 

Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, calls chronic absenteeism – not learning loss – “the greatest challenge for public schools.” At a Feb. 8, 2024 panel discussion, Malkus said, “It’s the primary problem because until we do something about that, academic recovery from the pandemic, which is significant, is a pipe dream.” 

One district in the Southeast tried to tackle its post-pandemic surge in absenteeism with a computer dashboard that tracks student data and highlights which students are in trouble or heading toward trouble. Called an early warning system, tracking student data this way has become common at schools around the country.  (I’m not identifying the district because a researcher who studied its efforts to boost attendance agreed to keep it anonymous in exchange for sharing the outcomes with the public.) 

The district’s schools had re-opened in the fall of 2020 and were operating fully in person, but students could opt for remote learning upon request. Yet nearly half of the district’s students weren’t attending school regularly during the 2020-21 year, either in person or remotely. One out of six students had crossed the “chronically absent” threshold of 18 or more missed days. That doesn’t count quarantine days at home because the student contracted or was exposed to Covid. 

The early warning system color coded each student for absences. Green designated an “on track” student who regularly came to school. Yellow highlighted an “at risk” student who had missed more than four percent of the school year. And red identified  “off track”  students who had not come to school 10 percent or more of the time. During the summer of 2021, school staff pored over the colored dots and came up with battle plans to help students return. 

A fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research studied what happened the following 2021-22 school year. The results, published online in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis on Feb. 5, 2024, were woefully disappointing:  the attendance rates of low-income students didn’t improve at all. Low-income students with a track record of missing school continued to miss as much school the next year, despite efforts to help them return. 

The only students to improve their attendance rates were higher income students, whose families earned too much to qualify for the free or reduced price lunch program. The attendance of more advantaged students who had been flagged red for “off track” (chronically absent) improved by 1 to 2 percentage points. That’s good, but four out of five of the red “off track” students came from low-income families. Only 20 percent of the pool of chronically absent students had been helped … a bit.

The selling point for early warning systems is that they can help identify students before they’re derailed, when it’s easier to get back into the routine of going to school. But, distressingly, neither rich nor poor students who had been flagged yellow for being “at risk” saw an improvement in attendance.

Yusuf Canbolat, the Harvard fellow, explained to me that early warning systems only flag students. They don’t tell educators how to help students. Every child’s reason for not coming to school is unique. Some are bullied. Others have asthma and their parents are worried about their health. Still others have fallen so behind in their schoolwork that they cannot follow what’s going on in the classroom. 

Common approaches, such as calling parents and mailing letters, tend to be more effective with higher-income families, Canbolat explained to me. They are more likely to have the resources to follow through with counseling or tutoring, for example, and help their child return to school. 

Low-income families, by contrast, often have larger problems that require assistance schools cannot provide. Many low-income children lost a parent or a guardian to Covid and are still grieving. Many families in poverty need housing, food, employment, healthcare, transportation or even help with laundry. That often requires partnerships with community organizations and social service agencies. 

Canbolat said that school staff in this district tried to come up with solutions that were tailored to a child’s circumstances, but giving a family the name of a counseling center isn’t the same as making sure the family is getting the counseling it needs. And there were so many kids flagged for being at risk that the schools could not begin to address their needs at all. Instead, they focused on the most severe chronic absence cases, Canbolat said.

Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that is working with schools to improve attendance, said that a case management approach to absenteeism isn’t practical when so many students aren’t coming to school. Many schools, she said, might have only one or two social workers focusing on attendance and their caseloads quickly become overloaded.  When nearly half of the students in a school have an attendance problem, system-wide approaches are needed, Chang said.

One systematic approach, she said, is to stop taking an adversarial tone with families — threatening parents with fines or going to court, or students with suspensions for truancy violations. “That doesn’t work,” Chang said. 

She recommends that schools create more ways for students to build relationships with adults and classmates at school so that they look forward to being there. That can range from after-school programs and sports to advisory periods and paying high schoolers to mentor elementary school students. 

“The most important thing is kids need to know that when they walk into school, there’s someone who cares about them,” said Chang.

Despite the disappointing results of using an early warning system to combat absenteeism, both researchers and experts say the dashboards should not be jettisoned. Chang explained that they still help schools understand the size and the scope of their attendance problem, see patterns and learn if their solutions are working. 

I was shocked to read in a recent School Pulse Panel survey conducted by the Department of Education in November 2023 that only 15 percent of school leaders said they were “extremely concerned” about student absences. In high-poverty neighborhoods, there was more concern, but still only 26 percent. Given that the number of students who are chronically absent from schools has almost doubled to 28 percent from around 15 percent before the pandemic, everyone should be very concerned. If we don’t find a solution soon, millions of children will be unable to get the education they need to live a productive life. And we will all pay the price.

This story about school early warning systems was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Tracking student data falls short in combating absenteeism at school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The pandemic not only disrupted education temporarily; it also triggered permanent changes. One that is quietly taking place at colleges and universities is a major, expedited shift to online learning. Even after campuses reopened and the health threat diminished, colleges and universities continued to offer more online courses and added more online degrees and programs. Some brick-and-mortar schools even switched to online only. 

To be sure, far fewer college students are learning online today than during the peak of the pandemic, when online instruction was an emergency response. But there are far more students regularly logging into their computers for their classes now than in 2019, according to the latest federal data. In fact, there are so many more that online enrollment hit a new post-pandemic milestone in the fall of 2022 when a majority – 54 percent – of college students took one or more of their classes online, a nearly 50 percent increase from the fall of 2019 when 37 percent of college students took at least one online class. 

The sheer numbers are staggering: more than 10 million college students were learning online in the fall of 2022. Compared to before the pandemic, an additional 1.5 million students were taking all of their courses online and 1.35 million more students were taking at least one course online — even as the total number of college students fell by more than a million between 2019 and 2022. 

“Online has become more the norm,” said Phil Hill, a consultant and market analyst of education technology in higher education, whose newsletter alerted me to the new milestone. “It’s almost like exclusive face-to-face instruction is becoming the exception.”

The numbers come from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as IPEDS, which released fresh data for 2022-23 in January 2024. (Colleges are required to report masses of figures to the Education Department every year in order for their students to be eligible for federal student loans.) Hill extracted the online learning figures from the database and wrote about them in a Jan. 21, 2024  newsletter, “Fall 2022 IPEDS Data: Profile of US Higher Ed Online Education.” 

This column is largely based on Hill’s analysis, but buttressing the evidence for continued growth in online learning is newer fall 2023 data, released after the IPEDS data was made public and Hill’s report, from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the research arm of a nonprofit that assists colleges with their data reporting requirements. The Clearinghouse reported that student enrollment growth for the category covering primarily online institutions was twice as large as enrollment growth overall (2.2 percent versus 1.1 percent) between fall 2022 and fall 2023. It didn’t track online course taking at traditional colleges and universities.

At first glance, it might seem strange that both online classes and degree programs are growing while college enrollment has been declining for more than a decade. But Hill explained to me that lost tuition revenue is driving the online shift. Online classes and programs are a way for colleges to reach students who live far from their area. They also appeal to older working adults who cannot come to campus every day. The quest for new students (and their tuition payments) has become more critical for many colleges as there are fewer college-age students in many regions of the country – a population drop that’s spreading throughout the country and will soon affect colleges nationwide. In higher education, it’s called the “demographic cliff.”

“It’s starting to come down to schools saying, ‘If we’re gonna stay alive as an institution, we’re going to be a lot more aggressive in finding ways to reach students,” said Hill. “It’s an existential issue.”

In recent months, several colleges have announced that they’re transforming into purely online institutions to avoid closure. Goddard College in Vermont said it will end on-campus residency programs beginning in the fall of 2024. It had been faced with declining enrollment and tuition revenue, combined with rising operating costs. Three University of Wisconsin campuses are also ending in-person instruction:  UW Milwaukee – Washington County, UW Oshkosh – Fond du Lac,  and UW Green Bay – Marinette.

Four-year public colleges and universities are behind the large post-pandemic increases in online learning, according to Hill. In the past, for-profit colleges, primarily online nonprofits and community colleges had been large drivers of the online trend. 

The pandemic expedited the shift, Hill said, because many colleges hemorrhaged students during the public health crisis and got an early taste of the demographic cliff ahead. Colleges are restructuring for the future. At the same time, nearly all faculty tried teaching online in 2020 and that experience chipped away at their previous resistance, said Hill. Professors may still not be fans of online learning, but they’re not protesting it as much.

Another phenomenon is that colleges are banding together to offer online classes that individual campuses, especially ones in rural areas, cannot afford to teach on their own. It’s a bit like airline code sharing. Hill said the Colorado Community College System, one of his clients, is developing online courses that all 13 colleges can share with their students.

For students, the online shift is a mixed bag. In some cases, it means they can still take classes that otherwise might not be offered, or they can finish their degrees at an institution that might otherwise have shut down. But there’s a large body of research showing that students don’t learn as much from an online course and are more likely to fail or drop out.

One change from pre-pandemic times, according to Hill, is that more online instruction is now scheduled. Lectures still tend to be recorded for viewing at one’s convenience, but students are often required to log in for a discussion or an activity over Zoom. In entirely “asynchronous” courses, students can log in whenever they want. Often that means that they don’t log in at all.

Keeping students motivated online remains a challenge for community colleges, Hill said. “If you’re going to teach online, you still need comprehensive student support, but community colleges are resource constrained,”  he said, explaining that they don’t have enough advisers and counselors to make sure students are logging in and keeping up with their work.  Often, financial, work and family responsibilities interfere with school.

It’s worth noting that far fewer students are learning online at the most selective colleges. Fewer than 20 percent of students are taking an online course at Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, Williams and a handful of other elite colleges, according to Hill’s analysis. It’s yet another example of how schooling is changing between the haves and the have-nots.

This story about online college classes was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Most college kids are taking at least one class online, even long after campuses reopened appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.

Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.

This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.

I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.

But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.

Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.

In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.

It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.

Related: Congress is starting to tackle student mental health

Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.

In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).

Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.

This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.

Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.

This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.

But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.

Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.

They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.

That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.

Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.

The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.

Related: OPINION: One college president uses board games, bedtime stories, horses and ice-cream sundaes to help students cope

We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.

Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.

But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.

When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.

Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.

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

The post OPINION: Our college students are struggling emotionally. We need to understand how to help them appeared first on The Hechinger Report.