CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — When Natalia Molina began teaching her second grade students word problems earlier this school year, every lesson felt difficult. Most students were stymied by problems such as: “Sally went shopping. She spent $86 on groceries and $39 on clothing. How much more did Sally spend on groceries than on clothing?”

Both Molina, a first-year teacher, and her students had been trained to tackle word problems by zeroing in on key words like “and,” “more” and “total”  — a simplistic approach that Molina said too often led her students astray. After recognizing the word “and,” for instance, they might mistakenly assume that they needed to add two nearby numbers together to arrive at an answer.

Some weaker readers, lost in a sea of text, couldn’t recognize any words at all.

“I saw how overwhelmed they would get,” said Molina, who teaches at Segue Institute for Learning, a predominantly Hispanic charter school in this small city just north of Providence.

Related: Kindergarten math is often too basic. Here’s why that’s a problem

So, with the help of a trainer doing work in Rhode Island through a state grant, Molina and some of her colleagues revamped their approach to teaching word problems this winter — an effort that they said is already paying off in terms of increased student confidence and ability. “It has been a game changer for them,” Molina said.

Perhaps no single educational task encompasses as many different skills as the word problem. Between reading, executive functioning, problem solving, computation and vocabulary, there are a lot of ways for students to go wrong. And for that reason, students perform significantly worse overall on word problems compared to questions more narrowly focused on computation or shapes (for example: “Solve 7 + _ = 22” or “What is 64 x 3?”).

If a student excels at word problems, it’s a good sign that they’re generally excelling at school. “Word-problem solving in lower grades is one of the better indicators of overall school success in K-12,” said Lynn Fuchs, a research professor at Vanderbilt University. In a large national survey, for instance, algebra teachers rated word-problem solving as the most important among 15 skills required to excel in the subject.

Yet most experts and many educators agree that too many schools are doing it wrong, particularly in the elementary grades. And in a small but growing number of classrooms, teachers like Molina are working to change that. “With word problems, there are more struggling learners than non-struggling learners” because they are taught so poorly, said Nicole Bucka, who works with teachers throughout Rhode Island to provide strategies for struggling learners.

Too many teachers, particularly in the early grades, rely on key words to introduce math problems. Posters displaying the terms — sum, minus, fewer, etc. — tied to operations including addition and subtraction are a staple in elementary school classrooms across the country.

Key words can be a convenient crutch for both students and teachers, but they become virtually meaningless as the problems become harder, according to researchers. Key words can help first graders figure out whether to add or subtract more than half of the time, but the strategy rarely works for the multi-step problems students encounter starting in second and third grade. “With multi-step problems, key words don’t work 90 percent of the time,” said Sarah Powell, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies word problems and whose research has highlighted the inefficacy of key words. “But the average kindergarten teacher is not thinking about that; they are teaching 5-year-olds, not 9-year-olds.”

Many teachers in the youngest grades hand out worksheets featuring the same type of word problem repeated over and over again. That’s what Molina’s colleague, Cassandra Santiago, did sometimes last year when leading a classroom on her own for the first time. “It was a mistake,” the first grade teacher said. “It’s really important to mix them up. It makes them think more critically about the parts they have to solve.”

Another flaw with word problem instruction is that the overwhelming majority of questions are divorced from the actual problem-solving a child might have to do outside the classroom in their daily life — or ever, really. “I’ve seen questions about two trains going on the same track,” said William Schmidt, a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. “First, why would they be going on the same track and, second, who cares?”

Schmidt worked on an analysis of about 8,000 word problems used in 23 textbooks in 19 countries. He found that less than one percent had “real world applications” and involved “higher order math applications.”

“That is one of the reasons why children have problems with mathematics,” he said. “They don’t see the connection to the real world … We’re at this point in math right now where we are just teaching students how to manipulate numbers.”

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

He said a question, aimed at middle schoolers, that does have real world connections and involves more than manipulating numbers, might be: “Shopping at the new store in town includes a 43% discount on all items which are priced the same at $2. The state you live in has a 7% sales tax. You want to buy many things but only have a total of $52 to spend. Describe in words how many things you could buy.”

Schmidt added that relevancy of word problems is one area where few, if any, countries excel. “No one was a shining star leading the way,” he said. 

***

In her brightly decorated classroom one Tuesday afternoon, Santiago, the first grade teacher, gave each student a set of animal-shaped objects and a sheet of blue paper (the water) and green (the grass). “We’re going to work on a number story,” she told them. “I want you to use your animals to tell me the story.”

“Once upon a time,” the story began. In this tale, three animals played in the water, and two animals played in the grass. Santiago allowed some time for the ducks, pigs and bears to frolic in the wilds of each student’s desk before she asked the children to write a number sentence that would tell them how many animals they have altogether.

Some of the students relied more on pictorial representations (three dots on one side of a line and two dots on the other) and others on the number sentence (3+2 = 5) but all of them eventually got to five. And Santiago made sure that her next question mixed up the order of operations (so students didn’t incorrectly assume that all they ever have to do is add): “Some more animals came and now there are seven. So how many more came?”

One approach to early elementary word problems that is taking off in some schools, including Segue Institute, has its origins in a special education intervention for struggling math students. Teachers avoid emphasizing key words and ask students instead to identify first the conceptual type of word problem (or schema, as many practitioners and researchers refer to it) they are dealing with: “Total problems,” for instance, involve combining two parts to find a new amount; “change problems” involve increasing or decreasing the amount of something. Total problems do not necessarily involve adding, however.

“The schemas that students learn in kindergarten will continue with them throughout their whole career,” said Powell, the word-problem researcher, who regularly works with districts across the country to help implement the approach. 

In Olathe, Kansas — a district inspired by Powell’s work — teachers had struggled for years with word problems, said Kelly Ulmer, a math support specialist whose goal is to assist in closing academic gaps that resulted from lost instruction time during the pandemic. “We’ve all tried these traditional approaches that weren’t working,” she said. “Sometimes you get pushback on new initiatives from veteran teachers and one of the things that showed us how badly this was needed is that the veteran teachers were the most excited and engaged — they have tried so many things” that haven’t worked.

In Rhode Island, many elementary schools initially used the strategy with students who required extra help, including those in special education, but expanded this use to make it part of the core instruction for all, said Bucka. In some respects, it’s similar to the recent, well publicized evolution of reading instruction in which some special education interventions for struggling readers  — most notably, a greater reliance on phonics in the early grades — have gone mainstream.

There is an extensive research base showing that focusing on the different conceptual types of word problems is an effective way of teaching math, although much of the research focuses specifically on students experiencing difficulties in the subject. 

Molina has found asking students to identify word problems by type to be a useful tool with nearly all of her second graders; next school year she hopes to introduce the strategy much earlier.

One recent afternoon, a lesson on word problems started with everyone standing up and chanting in unison: “Part plus part equals total” (they brought two hands together). “Total minus part equals part” (they took one hand away).

It’s a way to help students remember different conceptual frameworks for word problems. And it’s especially effective for the students who learn well through listening and repeating. For visual learners, the different types of word problems were mapped out on individual dry erase mats.

The real work began when Molina passed out questions, and the students— organized into the Penguin, Flower Bloom, Red Panda and Marshmallow teams — had to figure out which framework they were dealing with on their own and then work toward an answer. A few months ago, many of them would have automatically shut down when they saw the text on the page, Molina said.

For the Red Pandas, the question under scrutiny was: “The clothing store had 47 shirts. They sold 21, how many do they have now?”

“It’s a total problem,” one student said.

“No, it’s not total,” responded another.

“I think it’s about change,” said a third.

None of the students seemed worried about their lack of consensus, however. And neither was Molina. A correct answer is always nice but those come more often now that most of the students have made a crucial leap. “I notice them thinking more and more,” she said, “about what the question is actually asking.”

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During the pandemic shutdown, daycare owner Roxana Contreras sold her house when her income evaporated overnight. Maria Teresa Manrique nearly lost her business, and her life, when a family brought Covid into her home daycare.

As an education reporter and editor in Boston during the pandemic, I was struck by the starkly disparate treatment of the state’s strongly unionized K-12 teacher workforce and the less-organized child care workforce, which includes Contreras and Manrique. Those caring for the youngest children frequently had no guaranteed income when their businesses closed; far less access to protective equipment and supplies, like air filtration devices and free, regular Covid testing; and they were pressed to return to in-person work — the kind of hands-on work where social distancing was impossible — many months before the first vaccines were available.

“We were asking those with very low pay … to do these extraordinary things,” Martha Christenson Lees, former director of the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education, told me at the time.

Nearly all of the half dozen women I interviewed for my 2021 story had been seriously debilitated by Covid in some way: financially, emotionally, medically. And this spring, three years later, with a new report from the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood showing that child care providers are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression, I decided to check in with this dedicated group of caregivers. Nationally, an estimated 1 million paid caregivers provide child care out of their homes to about 3 million children.

The two I reached, Contreras and Manrique, both immigrants living and working in the Boston area, have had mixed experiences trying to rebuild their businesses over the last four years. The women, who speak Spanish, were interviewed with the help of interpreter Iris Amador.

‘We have learned to value life’

For Contreras, business has slowly but steadily improved over the last three years. With no money coming in from families after mid-March 2020, she was forced to sell her house in Medford, Massachusetts, also home to her daycare, Gummy Bears, to support her family. She began rebuilding Gummy Bears from the basement of a nearby rental in the summer of 2020, yet struggled for over a year to recruit families reluctant to return to group care, and to hire assistants, many of whom, she says, switched in the pandemic to more highly paid jobs as nannies.

A turning point came in late 2021, when she and other Massachusetts child care providers started receiving monthly operations grants distributed by the state. Contreras used the money to increase pay for assistants, making it easier to hire them; and with the worst danger of the pandemic past, more families returned to group care.

Contreras had enough interest from families by early 2023 that she made plans to add a second site, Gummy Bears 2. It opened in another Medford rental space last September. Across the two locations, Gummy Bears serves 16 children. Although someday she hopes to be licensed for 20 across the two sites, “I am content and I am happy with the number we care for now, and I provide employment to other people who need it,” Contreras said. The continuation of the monthly grants since the fall of 2021 has been crucial to rebuilding and growth, she said.

Contreras has a new problem: turning away families. Gummy Bears’ current wait list stretches out to 2026, with families offering deposits on future spots. (Contreras doesn’t accept them.) There’s an increased demand from pre-pandemic days, possibly as a result of fewer child care spots overall, she said.

The pandemic’s major effect on Contreras was giving up home ownership; high interest rates and housing prices have put reclaiming that goal out of reach for now. But there have been gains, too. She is grateful every day for her health. “We have learned to value life,” she said. 

Elusive road to stability

For Maria Teresa Manrique, Covid’s devastating effects lingered, repeatedly upsetting her financial stability — and her health. She was hospitalized in late 2020 with a severe case of Covid and never fully regained her strength. “I am vulnerable now to infections in a way that I wasn’t before,” she said.

Manrique, a single mother of a teenage daughter, reopened in February 2021, spurred by financial duress. Twice since, she picked up Covid from a child or parent at her daycare. Most recently, in December, Manrique closed for a little over a week after contracting Covid. She not only ran out of the sick day allotment for providers who serve lower-income children on vouchers — meaning she got no pay for some of the time — but lost two students whose families were impatient about the closure. She now enrolls a total of five children.

“Whenever I achieve some balance, I am still behind,” she said. All of her income goes to cover rent and the family’s basic needs, Manrique added, making it impossible to fully pay off taxes she has owed for the last three years. Two months ago, one of her sisters, who also runs an in-home daycare, was diagnosed with a serious illness, and Manrique helps care for her.

She wanted to close the daycare to support her sister full time, but financially it was impossible.

The whole situation feels untenable — and intractable.

“This has been my work for 20 years and I am used to it,” she said. “It has allowed me to care for my own daughter, as I have been both Mom and Dad to her. But when you have been doing this work for 20 years, there is definitely some exhaustion. … There should be more consideration, I believe, for workers like us.”

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Jolene Hunt-Fleming did not hesitate nearly 13 years ago when her daughter asked for help with her newborn baby son. She knew her daughter, a single parent, needed full-time child care to finish school and work.

Hunt-Fleming, who has worked for years as a mortgage funder and is certified in human services, also stepped in when the next three grandchildren – now ages 2, 6, and 9 – came along. My daughter “was very skeptical about other people watching her children,” said Hunt-Fleming, who lives in La Habra, California.

Although the work has been a personal joy, it’s also been a financial sacrifice. The grandmother learned quickly from the Children’s Home Society of California that the state offers subsidies for family caregivers, but the pay might well be below minimum wage. At one point, Hunt-Fleming — who cradled her 2-year-old granddaughter in her lap during most of our interview over Zoom — made only $1.79 an hour for the work. She currently earns about $2,800 each month from the state to watch the 2-year-old full time, and her siblings part-time. “If I wasn’t providing care for the children…I’m sure it would be substantially more that I would be bringing in,” she said.

Family, friend and neighbor caregivers, often referred to as “informal” care, are both underpaid and too often unable to access the money they are entitled to, according to a new policy brief from Early Edge California, which supports quality early learning opportunities for children from birth; the brief was produced in collaboration with several other groups. Between a third and a half of all children under the age of five receive informal care from a family member, friend or neighbor, making it the most common child care arrangement for this age group outside of parental care. Many of these caregivers are grandparents, like Hunt-Fleming.

In many states, informal caregivers are eligible for some form of funded support for their work, the most common being child care subsidies for children from low-income families. There are also state and locally-funded models for support. But nationally, less than 20 percent of the more than 4.5 million informal caregivers receive the subsidies or related payment, according to a 2022 report from the BUILD Initiative, which provides support to state leaders for early childhood programs. In California about one in four of informal caregivers go unpaid, the Early Edge report noted.

The California effort is just one example of growing momentum across the country to provide more resources and support for these caregivers, who have only become more essential after the pandemic contributed to a devastating loss in licensed child care spaces in many communities. In Colorado, a recent law makes it easier for immigrants and undocumented caregivers to access the subsidies, according to the BUILD Initiative report. Meanwhile, Louisiana has simplified the process for informal providers to become registered. And New Mexico took steps to provide them with significantly more public funding.

California is unusual in that informal caregivers can be part of the collective bargaining unit for home-based child care providers in the state, as long as the children in their care are eligible for subsidies. That said, they have historically been less organized and visible in policy debates than licensed home-based providers. “We saw the need to give them a voice,” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

Scores of California caregivers don’t receive the state subsidies they are entitled to for a variety of reasons. “Many times there are language barriers,” Lozano said. And some caregivers “are afraid that their immigration status will impact whether they can get subsidies.”

The policy brief described several of the key barriers, including: mistrust over interacting with the government; fear of losing access to other government benefits; challenges navigating the enrollment system; and a lack of awareness.

The state needs to let more people know that financial support is available, Hunt-Fleming said. “It could start in the doctor’s office or the schools.”

The policy brief also provided recommendations for change and ramped up outreach. Those could include making multilingual posters and brochures available at libraries, parks and recreation services; technical assistance in navigating digital applications; and tax guidance so the caregivers don’t have to worry about jeopardizing other forms of government aid to access the subsidies.

“It’s important to acknowledge them and make them part of the system,” Lozano said. In California there’s a real need to raise the reimbursement rates for all types of child care providers, including informal ones, who currently receive 70 percent of what licensed family child care providers get, she added. “We can raise everybody,” she said. “The bar is so low right now.”

Hunt-Fleming doesn’t think she could make it work financially without a husband who brings in regular income. Besides the low pay, the reimbursement process can be slow. The state never processes subsidies toward the end of the month, when most people have rent and other payments due, she said. “That’s hard because I have bills,” she said.

Hunt-Fleming spends whatever hours she can on advocacy work for her colleagues through a program called California Leading from Home. After more than a decade spending her days changing diapers, taking kids to doctor appointments and helping the older ones with homework, she wants others in her situation — and policy makers, too — to view the work as more than a gesture of love. She wants them to see it as a real job.

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IQ tests created by French psychologist Alfred Binet in the early 20th century paved the way for widespread intelligence testing in American schools  — including of the youngest learners.

But Binet also had early doubts as to whether intelligence could be measured at all and he was adamant that his tests, adapted into the Stanford-Binet intelligence scales in the U.S., could not be used to determine how much progress an individual student was capable of making in the long term.

“I have often observed, to my regret, that a widespread prejudice exists with regard to the educability of intelligence,” Binet wrote in 1909. “The familiar proverb, ‘When one is stupid, it is for a long time’ seems to be accepted indiscriminately by teachers … [They] lose interest in students with low intelligence.”

I learned about Binet, and his ideas about how IQ tests should — and should not — be used in elementary schools while reporting a piece last month for The Hechinger Report and Slate on the debate over cognitive testing in school placement and psychology. In recent decades, more states and school districts have shifted in the direction of downplaying the role of intelligence testing in special education evaluations. Yet change isn’t happening fast enough for some educators and experts, who argue the tests should be used less frequently and more thoughtfully.

Binet’s interest in early childhood stemmed from watching his two young daughters develop and from observing firsthand the very different cognitive strengths and processes they brought to learning. He made his first attempt at crafting a formal assessment in 1905, when asked by French officials to devise a way to identify which students had intellectual disabilities and could benefit most from specialized support.

French officials asked for his help because they saw a need for something distinct from a medical doctor or a classroom teacher to help in diagnosing and supporting children with disabilities. In that sense, Binet was an early forerunner in the field of school psychology.

Many experts believe he was prescient on three main tensions and challenges that persist in the field today:

Binet wanted to avoid testing the quality of a child’s school and their exposure to books and learning at home.

“None of the tests in the original 1905 version assumed that the child could read or write,” wrote Derek Briggs in his 2021 book, “Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Sciences,” which has a chapter focused on Binet. His tests “were intended to be insensitive to information or skills that a child would have acquired through instruction.”

This effort to separate out innate intelligence from school-acquired knowledge remains a holy grail of contemporary intelligence testing, with test creators including Jack Naglieri, trying to assess “thinking” rather than “knowledge.”

Binet held the conviction that intelligence was changeable with access to high quality schooling.

While he was aware that some children could be more easily helped than others, Binet likely would have opposed some contemporary policies or practices that steer kids away from academic instruction based on their IQ score, or indirectly withhold learning disability diagnoses — and the academic support that should come with it — to children with lower cognitive scores.

“The aim of his scale was to identify in order to help and improve, not to label in order to limit. Some children might be innately incapable of normal achievement, but all could improve with help,” wrote biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man.”

Ranking children within a group was not Binet’s goal.

Binet was more interested in what cognitive tests showed about an individual child’s strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. As such, biographers say he likely would have opposed gifted programs that cull students from the top percentiles of intelligence test scorers. “He would have greatly objected to using IQ tests to classify — first, second, third, fourth,” Briggs, based at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s College of Education, told me. “Binet was interested in the immediacy of what to do next for an individual student, particularly for those with some sort of need of support.”

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Even before her son started kindergarten, Ashley Meier Barlow realized that she might have to fight for his education. Her son has Down Syndrome; when he was in prekindergarten, school officials in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, told Barlow that he wouldn’t be going to the neighborhood school, with some special education accommodations, as she had assumed.

Instead, the educators told Barlow that they wanted her son to attend a classroom across town meant for children who are profoundly impacted by their disabilities. Barlow immediately resisted, because she knew the curriculum would likely focus on life skills, and her son might never be taught much reading beyond learning the shape of common, functional words like stop and exit. “I think about it 10 years later and it still makes me want to cry,” said Barlow. “They had no confidence that they would be able to teach him.”

Driving the recommendation, Barlow knew, was her son’s low cognitive scores. “If [schools] have an IQ that suggests a child’s cognitive ability is significantly less than average, they will rely on it every time,” said Barlow, who now handles special education cases in her work as an attorney. To get her son even modified access to the regular kindergarten curriculum, Barlow would need to show that his potential to learn exceeded his test scores.

For generations, intelligence tests have played an outsize role in America, helping at times to control who can join the military and at what rank; who can enroll in the nation’s most elite private schools, and even who can be executed under federal law. They have also played a large role in America’s public schools, helping to determine from the earliest grades who can access extra help and accelerated learning and who can reap the benefits of high expectations.

After the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, schools suddenly found themselves required to label and serve children with a variety of special needs — including learning disabilities and what was then called mental retardation — without enough tools beyond testing to guide them. 

IQ tests’ centrality in many schools is now slowly starting to ebb after decades of research showing their potential for racial and class bias, among other issues. IQ scores can also change significantly over time and have proven particularly unreliable for young children. As a result, more states and school districts have adopted policies and practices that downplay the role of intelligence testing in special education evaluations.

Yet the change isn’t happening fast enough for many parents and researchers who say the tests remain deeply ingrained in the work of school psychologists, in particular, and that they are still regularly misused to gauge young children’s potential and assess whether they are “worthy” of extra help or investment.

“Cognitive testing is kind of the bread and butter of [school] psychologists,” says Tiffany Hogan, a professor and director of the Speech & Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston. “Casting doubts on the use of it is casting doubts on the entire field.”

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

About a year ago, my daughter, then 5, took an intelligence test as part of a standard education evaluation process. When I looked at the subtest results, a lot of it seemed predictable. My daughter performed especially well in the parts of the verbal section that measure general knowledge (a 5-year-old might be asked the opposite direction from north, for instance). That made sense because we talk constantly about the world around us. Her scores were lower in the portions of the test focused on visual and spatial patterning. That, too, tracked in a family that hates puzzles. 

My (fortunately) low-stakes experience speaks to the long-standing criticism that intelligence tests measure a child’s exposure and early education opportunities, especially for white, middle- and upper-class language and experiences, rather than “innate” intelligence. When the tests became common in public schools in the 1970s and 80s, the goal was they would assess children’s potential, while achievement tests would show how much progress they had made learning grade-level skills. This distinction was codified through a method of evaluating for learning disabilities called the “discrepancy model,” included in 1977 federal guidelines. This model, which I reported on in an article last year for The Hechinger Report and Scientific American, requires a significant “discrepancy” between a child’s IQ and achievement to establish a learning disability, making it hard for children with lower IQs to qualify.

“(School psychologists) had very few tools in the beginning,” said Mary Zortman Cohen, who retired last June after working 34 years as a school psychologist in Boston, “so cognitive testing took on an outsize role in special education.”

At the same time, intelligence tests faced some legal challenges. In the late 1960s, San Francisco school educators labeled a young African American boy named Darryl Lester mentally retarded (what we now call intellectually disabled) after an IQ test. Without fully informing his mother, the school district pulled him out of the regular education program and assigned him to classes focused on life skills. Years later, he recounted in a story published by KQED, San Francisco’s public radio station, that his school days were dominated by recess and field trips.

In the early 1970s, Lester, known in court documents as Larry P., became the lead plaintiff in a California lawsuit alleging that IQ tests discriminated against Black students and were too often used to label them “educable mentally retarded” and remove them from traditional classes. In Lester’s case, he struggled to learn to read but never got appropriate help. 

Lester and the other plaintiffs won their case. In the late 1970s, a judge ruled that IQ tests could not be used to determine special education eligibility for Black students. Despite the victory, Lester was never taught to read, according to the KQED update.

The California case had a big impact on the state with the largest public school enrollment but was an anomaly nationally. Even as California enacted the ban, IQ tests became central across the country to the relatively young and rapidly expanding field of school psychology. To this day, some schools, like Lester’s, withhold access to sufficient academic instruction for many children with low IQs, said Kentucky parent and lawyer Barlow. “It even happens in preschool, this withholding of academic supports.”

In many places, IQ scores have historically been embedded into the definitions of two disability types: intellectual disability (where an IQ score below the low 70s often plays a large role in qualifying a child for the designation) and specific learning disability, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia (where until the early aughts the federal government told states to use the IQ discrepancy model for diagnosis).

Yet cognitive testing is not limited to learning and intellectual disabilities, it is often part of the process for determining a wide range of disabilities, sometimes needlessly so. Children suspected of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and emotional and behavioral issues frequently get these tests, and the tests are a standard part of the protocol in many districts whenever a family or school outsider requests a special education evaluation for any reason. “I think what it boils down to is needing something to disqualify kids from services, and this pervasive view that it represents a child’s potential,” said Hogan, the Boston speech and literacy professor. She believes that cognitive testing can provide useful context on a child’s strengths and weaknesses but should never be relied on too heavily to diagnose, or fail to diagnose, a student.

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not

In his 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously assailed the validity and influence of IQ testing, bringing news of this developing critique to a broader audience. Contrary to the beliefs of some of the original creators and backers of IQ tests, Gould disagreed with the idea that the tests could be used to rank or assign value to people. And he pointed out the structural racism and subjectivity embedded in both the tests and how they were being used to perpetuate societal power structures. His book coincided with other research showing that IQ tests can be biased against Black or low-income students, as well as many others, because they contain language and content that is more familiar to white middle- and upper-income students. 

In the years after “The Mismeasure of Man,” a growing number of education researchers and scientists also began to question the validity and importance of IQ tests in diagnosing learning disabilities. The critiques prompted the federal government to change course in 2004, as part of reauthorizing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, strongly recommending that states consider alternatives to looking at the gap between intelligence and achievement scores when determining if a child has a learning disability.

So why does intelligence testing remain so pervasive?

“There’s a science-to-practice lag that can take many years,” said Zortman Cohen, the retired school psychologist. “It takes a long time to infiltrate large, bureaucratic school systems.”

School psychologists say procedures are changing, albeit slowly and inconsistently. Change has been possible in part because of the spread of an evaluation method, known as “response to intervention,” that looks at how children respond to different teaching strategies before making a call as to whether they have a disability.

School psychologist Regina Boland said that in her first job in Nebraska she was forced to rely on the IQ discrepancy model to determine if a child had a learning disability (that district now uses a different approach). “There’s general agreement that it is the least valid method,” she said. “There are some kids who don’t get services under that model who definitely deserve and need support.”

Since moving to Illinois, a state that uses response to intervention as its main method, Boland has a lot more latitude in when to use cognitive tests in the process of determining whether a child has a disability and what help they need.

Under response to intervention, “a lot more is in the control of the school psychologist,” she said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than what we’ve done in the past.”

While Boland believes that “the usefulness of IQ tests is overrated by some teachers,” she wouldn’t want to see them disappear entirely; she uses some form of cognitive testing in about 60 to 70 percent of her initial evaluations.

“I find it useful when kids who are lower functioning and may have intellectual disabilities come across as defiant and disrespectful, when really it’s a matter of them not understanding the information,” she said. “An IQ test can look beyond assumptions and capture abilities that are not assessed in the classroom.”

Related: What research tells us about gifted education

Not every intelligence test is created equal. Recent decades have seen a growth in cognitive tests with the goal of minimizing some of the race and class bias that plagued their predecessors.

Boland said she’s selective about which cognitive tests she uses. She avoids the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), a commonly used test. She finds it loaded with language that’s more familiar to middle-class white children and an overall bias “against cultural and linguistic minorities.” Research studies have critiqued the test in the past for including questions such as: “Who was Charles Darwin?” and “What is the capital of Greece?”

“I might use the Weschler if it’s a middle-class white kid,” she said. Fortunately, Boland added, there are more options than ever for cognitive tests that are “less language loaded.”

Jack Naglieri, an emeritus professor at George Mason University and a creator of some of those alternative tests, including the Cognitive Assessment System, said he noticed decades ago how blurry the distinction was between achievement tests and intelligence tests. Both, he said, test a child’s accrued knowledge, not innate capacity.

His tests try to measure “thinking rather than knowledge,” as he puts it.

As an example, his tests would attempt to assess a child’s ability to see patterns in a series of visual shapes (see diagram) while a traditional IQ test might require a child to show vocabulary and numeracy knowledge to answer a comparable question. “The field is mired in the past in 100-year-old technology that people think is good because it’s been used for so long,” he said, “not because it really works.”

Educators and school psychologists need to rely less on intelligence tests, use them more wisely in some instances, and ensure that they are choosing the least biased tests. But they cannot bear this responsibility alone. States and school districts play an enormous role in setting the parameters under which school psychologists must operate. Some district and state officials have denied children access to special education services by setting limits on how many children qualify — with cognitive testing at times playing a problematic role as gatekeeper. Boland, the school psychologist, for example, had more freedom to exercise her professional judgment when she moved to a state that didn’t mandate a heavy reliance on intelligence testing in diagnosing certain disabilities.

Training programs for school psychologists also must change, at least those that still include outdated materials or simplistic guidance on cognitive testing. “Strict cognitive testing is a poor way of addressing the pieces of the puzzle for any one kid,” said Zortman Cohen. “It takes a lot of good training to understand how to do this well.”

In addition to systemic and policy changes, we also need a shift in mindset. Embedded in too many schools’ practice and policy, to this day, is the idea that an intelligence test score can somehow measure human potential. It does not. At their best, these tests provide a snapshot in time of a child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses. But it is fundamentally unjust to deploy them in ways that conflate a score with a capacity for learning, and exclude children from full participation in that learning process by denying them access to an academic curriculum, or extra help learning to read. To continue to do so implicitly upholds the wild, ill-informed dreams of IQ exams’ 19th and early 20th century creators, many of them eugenicists who believed civilization would advance only upon social and educational exclusion and segregation determined by untested tests.

For nine months, Kentucky parent Barlow despaired that her son might fall victim to this kind of exclusion. She considered filing a legal complaint against the district, attended meeting after meeting, and reached out to national and local parent advocates alike — all to no avail. Then, a friend of hers was appointed principal of the neighborhood school — shortly before her son was scheduled to start kindergarten. The district relented, agreeing to let him attend the school.

Today he’s in seventh grade and receives regular instruction with his peers in math, English, science and social studies, with modifications. Barlow said he has made tremendous gains in areas including health, math, and reading. His learning enriches his life on a daily basis. It would not have been possible without exposure to a mainstream curriculum and peers, Barlow said.

“To see the bright lights go off when he is able to read the title of a TV show or the name of a song or the food he wants to eat on a menu — it’s like the angels are singing,” she said. “He can access the world because he can read.”

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

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Last week the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a child care bill that would significantly expand state investment in child care. 

Less publicized: The bill also includes provisions that could make it harder for private equity-owned child care providers to expand significantly in the state.

Specifically, the bill takes steps to ensure that any given for-profit provider operating more than 10 programs in the state consumes no more than 1 percent of the $475 millions in grants being proposed.

Investor-backed chains now manage an estimated one in 10 child care centers in the country. That figure is likely to grow, according to several child care researchers, as states — and potentially the federal government — put new funding into the area, attracting investors interested in low start-up costs and access to public money.

As a result, advocates and experts are pushing for more extensive and widespread regulations of the kind that are moving forward in Massachusetts. “We need to make sure there are real guardrails,” said Melissa Boteach, the vice president overseeing child care and early learning at the National Women’s Law Center. Along with colleagues, she plans this June to release a report outlining recommended regulations and safeguards.

In making the push, Boteach and others cite private equity’s troubling record in managing other government-backed social services, including nursing homes and autism services. “Private equity’s track record in other sectors supported by public dollars – including home care, hospice care, and housing – foreshadows challenges the child care sector could face,” Boteach wrote in an email. In child care, profit-driven companies will take “money out rather than using that public funding to pay child care providers and teachers a living wage, upgrading facilities, [and] expanding into under-served communities,” she said.

In a written statement, Mark Bierley, CEO of the Learning Care Group, one of the largest for-profit child care operators in the U.S., offered a very different take, calling it “our duty to prepare children socially, emotionally and developmentally for their transition into K-12 education.”

“We have the resources to upgrade facilities, equipment and technology to ensure we fulfill that commitment,” he added.

The proposed regulations in Massachusetts follow a couple other related state efforts. Vermont recently put ownership disclosure requirements into its package expanding funding for child care, and also capped tuition hikes by providers. New Jersey limits for-profit programs that participate in its public pre-K system to a 2.5 percent profit margin.

But Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita, who has been tracking private equity expansion in child care closely, described the proposed Massachusetts measures as “the most targeted guardrails we’ve seen to date” against investor-backed companies consuming the lion’s share of new public investment. 

Haspel points out that there’s been similar momentum internationally, with British Columbia specifying that priority for public funding goes to public and nonprofit programs, and Australia requiring larger providers that manage more than 25 sites to submit more extensive financial reports.

The U.S. has historically spent very little on child care compared to other wealthy nations. Partly as a result, investor-backed, for-profit chains in the U.S. operate predominantly in middle-income and wealthier neighborhoods and communities, where they can often charge substantial tuition. That could change if more public funds flow into child care, leading to significantly increased government subsidies for lower-income children.   

Last year, President Biden’s administration pushed for greater transparency and accountability in nursing home ownership after research showed that private-equity owned facilities on average had worse outcomes, including more patient deaths. But there’s not much information that compares the quality of for-profit and nonprofit child care programs, which could hinder efforts to put restrictions and regulations on the companies.

Haspel said “the first step for the federal government is trying to get a lot more information” in a landscape where the quality can vary dramatically within all ownership types — investor backed or not. That said, he added that there’s no reason not to take such steps as ensuring a certain percentage of public funding is used to pay educators and requiring centers to disclose financial and ownership information.

“Some of the potential guardrails are common-sense,” he said.

This story about private equity and child care 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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A wave of new laws across the country is attempting to transform how elementary school children learn to read. Most states have in recent years passed legislation aimed at aligning policies and practices with the “science of reading,” a term that has become associated with more phonics instruction but, if done well, also includes reading fluency, vocabulary building, comprehension and other skills.

What makes a current reading reform effort in New York state more unusual is its emphasis on strengthening the foundational skills of young children well before they reach kindergarten.

“Anything I’ve heard about the science of reading always seems to start with kindergarten, when the kid hits school,” said Jenn O’Connor, director of partnerships and early childhood policy at The Education Trust-New York. The organization is leading the effort to integrate the push for the science of reading with stronger preliteracy instruction for children ages birth to five.

But she added, “I wouldn’t want anyone to think we’re putting two-year-olds in classrooms at desks and drilling them on phonics.”

What the organization is asking for is that prekindergarten be included in a set of comprehensive reading reforms under consideration by the state legislature. The proposal calls for schools to use “scientifically proven” reading curricula by 2025, and to invest millions in retraining teachers.

Later this year, Education Trust-New York also plans to release resources and ideas related to the earliest years. “It’s crucial to think about what children are getting even before they enter pre-K,” O’Connor said.

The effort in New York is an anomaly for even attempting to incorporate children younger than 5 in a meaningful way, said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of childhood education and literacy development at the Steinhardt School at New York University.

“For the most part, early childhood education and literacy reform are seen as very separate entities, and it’s very discouraging to me, frankly,” Neuman said.

Neuman believes that the heavy emphasis on phonics and decoding in the current reform efforts excludes not only children younger than 5 but many kindergarteners as well. In prekindergarten and at the start of kindergarten, the emphasis should be on encouraging kids to talk and develop their oral language skills, engaging teachers in responsive talking and listening to children and helping kids recognize letters and begin to understand the relationships between letters and sounds.

“These years are a wonderful space where we could be doing so much in terms of instruction,” she said. Even though some states have described their reading reform efforts as encompassing pre-kindergarten through third grade, Neuman said none of the plans she has read spell out how the style and mode of instruction and teacher training should be different in pre-kindergarten and much of the kindergarten year. “I fear that some of them will actually say, ‘Let’s do phonics in pre-K,’” Neuman said.

Partly for this reason, the effort in New York includes some partners that have long modeled what effective literacy development can look like in children as young as infancy.

One of Education Trust’s nearly 80 partners, ParentChild+, works primarily in the homes of children ages 16 months to 4 years old, moving through a curriculum aimed at supporting caregivers to get the most out of reading with their child, and interacting with them in all kinds of settings. “We believe parents are the first and primary teachers of a child,” said Andre Eaton, ParentChild+’s New York director.

Early learning specialists, many of them parents who participated in the program themselves, visit homes twice a week for 46 weeks, modeling and guiding caregivers in terms of how they might teach their children about colors and numbers through books, for instance. In more recent years, ParentChild+ has adapted an abbreviated version of its curriculum for home-based child care providers.

“While I believe in the scientific methodology of phonics,” Eaton said, “we know the development of early literacy skills and the love of learning is really important early on.”

The bill in New York contains only one line specific to pre-K, noting that students at that age will be assessed based on their cognitive abilities and social-emotional learning. But for O’Connor, who pushed to add the line in a later draft of the bill, it’s a crucial step in the right direction to have anything in a piece of potential reading reform-related legislation specific to pre-K.

It’s a start at getting reading reform advocates thinking — and talking more about the youngest learners. And “whether the bill passes or not, [we] are committed to helping school districts and child care programs access resources,” she said.

This story about preliteracy 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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The pandemic underscored the stark differences in pay, working conditions, and respect between K-12 educators and child care teachers in many communities. The disparity is rooted in race, class and gender: Child care teachers are more likely to be female, less likely to be white, and more likely to come from lower-income backgrounds than public school teachers.

In spite of historically poor treatment and low pay, child care workers have been exceptionally hard to unionize, due to high turnover rates, the geographic spread and isolation of the workforce, labor laws, and other factors.

Yet there have been union victories in recent years. In California, Child Care Providers United, which represents more than 40,000 home-based providers, won the right to collective bargaining in 2019, and last year secured a second substantial reimbursement increase from the state for many home child care providers. In New Mexico, where it’s harder for employees to unionize, organizers have taken a different tack: Through the leadership of an organization called OLÉ, parents and child care teachers joined forces to organize a public awareness campaign which contributed to voters approving a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to free child care for most of the state’s families.

I spoke earlier this month with Alexa Frankenberg, executive director of California’s Child Care Providers United, and Brenda Parra, senior digital strategist for OLÉ about how to effectively organize child care workers and the importance of diverse strategies for doing so. The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell me about your personal background and how you became involved in the field?

PARRA: It’s been maybe six or seven years. I used to be a child care worker. I was in a classroom with 3-year-olds and I had to leave my position, unfortunately. I really loved doing the work, but the pay was very low and it was not supporting my family anymore. Somebody told me about OLÉ, which was doing child care organizing at the time. So I started joining these meetings. And I stuck around for a while until I decided to become an organizer. 

What have you learned about what makes organizing effective in the child care space?

FRANKENBERG: One of the things that makes it uniquely challenging is just how dispersed the family child care providers are. They obviously work in their own homes so there are tens of thousands of work sites around the state for the members that are represented by CCPU (Child Care Providers United). That means you need to figure out how to have conversations with people spread over [many] work sites about how organizing together to build power through a union can make a difference in their lives.

Another challenge relates to the low pay. Many child care providers and staff have to hold multiple jobs to be able to make ends meet and support their families. So it’s a challenge for them to find the time to have the conversations, do the organizing work, and work together to make change. That takes time.

Thinking about the success that you’ve had in California, what were some specific strategies that you used there to try to overcome some of these challenges?

PARRA: There’s work you can do in terms of systematically identifying and recruiting leaders, equipping them to do the work. You’re never going to be able to have the resources to staff a campaign to go to 50,000 work sites to talk to folks. That requires you to think early on about individuals leading and owning this work, including talking to their coworkers. 

When OLÉ first started its work, what was its strategy?

PARRA: From what I am aware, OLÉ started door knocking and organizers used to go to centers and, once there, they would talk to the director and ask if they could talk to their teachers and their parents.

How did strategies evolve over time?

PARRA: The digital work ramped up during COVID. 

It was super hard to be able to find child care because of the circumstances of COVID and everyone getting sick. There were a lot of centers closing down. We were running ads on social media. We were able to get further out there and get people more informed. When we started doing online organizing, we would get maybe a week’s worth of work visiting centers done in one day. 

Thinking of New Mexico, and OLÉ’s success at making inroads for child care teachers outside unionization, how important is it to think about other strategies apart from traditional organizing?

FRANKENBERG: I don’t think it has to be either-or. We have worked side by side with allies, such as parent advocates and others, here in California. And that has been part of what has allowed us to be successful, both at the state level as well as local level. We worked super closely with parent voices in Alameda County to win passage of a local measure to fund additional child care slots, higher pay and other supports that are needed. We continue to look to New Mexico for the work they’ve done to move to alternative methods. We obviously think that there’s some really critical and important guarantees that a union contract allows providers to have, but organizing and collective power take a lot of different shapes.

How have you been able to translate online organizing in New Mexico into concrete victories for child care workers?

PARRA: My work is to put up the online ad and collect the phone number and name of the person who responds. After that, I will put it into either a phone bank or a text bank so one of the organizers from the early education campaign can send them a text or get more information from them.

Do you feel the pandemic made it easier or harder to organize in the child care space?

FRANKENBERG: That’s a hard question to answer because there’s nothing about the pandemic that was easy. What these individuals went through — financially, physically, mentally, emotionally — all these things are still being felt. So it would be really hard to say it made things easy. What it did was make consequences very stark. It was very clear that there was work that was needed to ensure basic health and safety of individuals. We had to fight for Covid closure days so that people could close down and not lose money because they had Covid or someone in their child care had Covid.

The pandemic shone a spotlight on the value of child care to allow people that needed to go to work to go to work in those first few months, particularly when schools closed. Child care workers were holding up our economy for a long time. And they’ve never had a break, really.

What do you feel the future holds for child care organizing? 

FRANKENBERG: We’re in the middle of moving to cost-of-care reimbursement, which is something they’ve achieved in New Mexico. That’s a big thing on the horizon for us. There are a lot of short-term gains we’ve been able to make on pay. And it’s critical that we don’t continue to just go short-term to short-term to short-term, but really move towards a system. We’re glad to have the governor’s partnership on this. And we’re working toward ensuring people are receiving more than pennies on the dollar.

We need to make sure that the child care system that we have is one that really reflects who California is in the year 2024, not a system that was set up 50 years ago and may have some of those biases. We need to root out the racism, the sexism, that’s inherent in the system. It’s baked into the pay and compensation, but it’s also baked into really unjust policies that have negative impacts on families and providers.

This story about child care advocacy 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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For parents applying to the dual-language program at Rochester, New York’s public school No. 12, where students learn in both English and Spanish, the process can be both bureaucratic and baffling. After listing the program as a top choice, parents must schedule a testing appointment at the central office, where an instructor gauges such skills as whether each incoming kindergartener can hold a book properly and turn its pages, identify that a sentence is made up of words and spaces, use words to describe the scene in a picture, identify sounds in a word, and other pre-reading skills.

Families never receive a “score” on the test, which is available in both English or Spanish, or any information about how it is used in the admissions process — just word on whether their child made it in. (The district communications office did not respond to multiple queries about the process.)

After her 5-year-old son took the test several years ago, Rochester parent Llerena Searle was convinced that the news wouldn’t be good. He had a meltdown when asked to go with an unfamiliar instructor, acquiescing only when allowed to “test” from his mother’s lap. The boy was admitted, though, and is now in seventh grade; Searle believes he received a wonderful education at school No. 12. “I just wish it were more accessible,” she said. 

In some communities across the country, dual-language programs — one of the best means of ensuring equity for underserved groups, especially English learners — have taken an elitist turn. And with the Biden administration eager to help districts expand such programs, questions about who they help — and who gets left out — are becoming more urgent. 

In too many places, admissions processes send a message that dual-language learning is not for everyone (when research shows that actually it is). In Mamaroneck, New York, for instance, the local dual-language school at one point published information asking families to consider whether their child’s native language is developing within “normal” limits when deciding whether to apply. (After this article published, school officials reached out to say that has not been their practice for some time, and the program is open to all interested families.) In Boston, the dual-language programs significantly under-enroll students with disabilities, partly out of a misconception that learning in two languages isn’t appropriate for many students with special education needs.*

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

In other districts, the sin is one of omission rather than commission: failure to market the dual-language programs sufficiently to newcomer families; failure to locate the programs in communities where newcomers actually live; time-consuming admissions processes that can seem labyrinthine and opaque — even if they don’t involve testing recalcitrant preschoolers. 

Most experts recommend reserving at least half of seats in dual-language programs for English learners, who benefit most from programs partly in their native language, and dividing the remainder through random lottery after aggressive outreach to underrepresented communities, including Black families, low-income students and those with disabilities. Yet English learner enrollment shares are shrinking in most dual-language schools in large cities including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to a report released last spring by The Century Foundation and the Children’s Equity Project. 

Meanwhile, the share of white student enrollment was up in several other cities, most noticeably Washington D.C. “Many dual-language programs are at risk of tilting toward language enrichment for English-dominant children, instead of advancing linguistic equity and expanding educational opportunity for ELs,” the report’s authors wrote. Overall, the number of dual-language schools in the country has nearly quadrupled since 2010, and currently numbers more than 3,600. 

“[P]rograms that were ostensibly created to help English learners have turned into an extracurricular for native English speakers.”

Alina Adams, parent

There’s no one solution to this troubling shift — dual-language programs are gentrifying in many cities partly because the cities themselves are gentrifying. In some communities, English learner enrollments are depressed because of the lingering effects of hypocritical policies in the U.S. banning bilingual education for non-English speaking newcomers. Many immigrant families absorbed the “English only” message, and remained hesitant to try dual language even after the policies changed.

But school districts need to be far more vigilant in designing admissions processes and programs that favor the least privileged rather than the most. Otherwise, one of the most proven ways to combat the achievement gap, particularly for English learners, is at risk of playing a perversely opposite role: expanding educational opportunity for the elite.

Dual-language programs have never been monolithic in their demographics or their goals. When they began to appear in significant numbers in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, some opened with the intent of serving English learners and working-class Latino families. Others hoped to enroll a significant number of white, English-speaking families, and even deter white flight from urban areas. Some wanted to meet both goals. One-way language schools enroll predominantly students from a single language group, while most two-way programs try to enroll a roughly equivalent number of students from English-speaking households and the target language.

Widespread gentrification in the 1990s and early 2000s also brought many white and well-off families back to some urban neighborhoods where dual-language schools were taking root. That coincided with a growing recognition by privileged families of the economic and career benefits of bilingualism, and a particular interest in affluent communities in studying Spanish and Mandarin. Research shows that learning multiple languages early in life has cognitive benefits extending beyond language acquisition and helps children develop stronger social skills, including empathizing better with others. In sum, bilingualism is good for both the brain and the heart.

In New York City, meanwhile, some middle-class and affluent families have come to see dual-language programs as an alternative to gifted and talented education, particularly as the latter has become harder to access, said Alina Adams, a parent and creator of the website NYCSchoolSecrets.com. Over the last decade, “gifted and talented became more competitive every year and suddenly there were many more dual-language programs,” she said. Ambitious parents perceived it as a more rigorous, challenging curriculum. And at some locations, “programs that were ostensibly created to help English learners have turned into an extracurricular for native English speakers,” Adams added.

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs

Yet recent decades have also brought a growing research base showing that it’s precisely the students least likely to seek out gifted and talented programming who can benefit most from well-designed, supportive dual language programs. “Dual language is the one program we’ve found that truly closes the [achievement] gap” between English learners and the rest of the student population, said Virginia Collier, an emeritus professor of education at George Mason University.  Her research, done over the course of four decades in collaboration with her husband and GMU colleague Wayne Thomas, also shows that dual-language learning can be particularly effective for Black students, low-income students, and those with special needs — three groups that are often underrepresented in the programs. 

There’s a misconception among some educators and parents that bilingual education is inappropriate for students with developmental delays, or those predisposed to fall behind in an English-only curriculum. Yet a 2021 study found that dual-language “education can benefit … even students who often struggle in school because of special education needs.” And a 2018 paper found “no credible evidence that bilingual education adds or creates burden for children. Yet it is “incontrovertible,” according to the paper, that bilingual learning comes with decided advantages.

Spanish dual-language programs, the most common kind in the U.S., can be especially beneficial for students who struggle with reading. That’s because the Spanish language is more phonetic than the English one, with much less variation in the sounds that letters make. But some programs send the message — whether intentional or accidental — that dual language schools aren’t appropriate for children without strong early literacy skills.

“You might hear a parent say, ‘My kid didn’t start talking until age three and a half. They are already struggling — it would be too confusing to be in a dual language program,’” said Emily Bivins, former principal of a dual-language school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina whose company provides professional development for dual-language programs. “We all know the research is counter to that. These are the students who absolutely need to be in our bilingual programs.”

Bivins’ own three children attended dual-language programs, and she said it was most helpful for the child with an attention deficit diagnosis and early reading struggles. “Learning to read in Spanish was much better for her … the rules were clearer,” Bivins said. That’s part of the reason it’s so frustrating when she hears from colleagues at dual-language schools that use reading screeners where, if students “don’t score high enough [they] don’t get in.”  

Widespread interest in dual-language schools, including among the affluent, is a good thing, say proponents of bilingual education. But it becomes problematic if students from underserved groups are neglected or squeezed out of programs. Many communities lack sufficient bilingual educators to meet the desire for dual language. “It’s an iron law of education policymaking: nothing exacerbates educational unfairness like scarcity,” wrote the authors of the report released last spring.

The history of the Amigos School, a dual-language program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows that even seemingly minor changes to admissions processes can significantly shape how a school is perceived — and who applies — tilting preference toward privilege.

Thirty-five years ago, scores of first- and second-generation immigrant families from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, along with others, came to see Amigos as the place to send their kids. The school was located near subsidized public housing, where many of the families lived. And the school’s founder, Mary Cazabon, engaged in constant grassroots outreach, attending community events and churches, like Cambridge’s bilingual Saint Mary’s church, where she spread word about the school and the benefits of learning in two languages. “We wanted to make sure that we were going to address the needs of the students who were most vulnerable,” Cazabon says. “The priority was on them.” To that end, Spanish-speaking students designated as English learners were given priority in admissions, Cazabon says.

Then the biotech boom hit Cambridge in the 1990s, and a growing number of white and wealthier families began to take an interest in Amigos, drawn by the allure of raising bilingual children. At some point in the 2000s, the school district also made a pivotal switch: Instead of giving priority to English learners, as Cazabon had done, they introduced a system that awarded “Spanish points” to children who could show some knowledge of Spanish when applying to the school’s pre-K or kindergarten. 

Related: Once criticized, ‘Spanglish’ finds a place in the classroom 

The change opened the door to a much broader group of families gaining admissions preference: Families with some Hispanic heritage whose toddlers were exposed to both English and Spanish in the home, but also families with no Hispanic heritage who sent their children to a Spanish-language child care or hired Spanish-speaking nannies with the goal of getting a spot at Amigos. By 2010, the demographics of Amigos had shifted dramatically, and it enrolled fewer low-income students than almost all the schools in the district. Penn Loh, a lecturer at Tufts University, said that in his son’s class at that time, only two of 44 children qualified for free and reduced lunch.

In 2011, one mother filed a complaint with the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, alleging that Amigos no longer served the Hispanic community. And Loh and other parents at Amigos petitioned the school board to change the admissions process, worried that Amigos increasingly catered too much to the children of Cambridge’s elite. “The pool of Spanish-proficient applicants became more unbalanced, with more wealthy, privileged families having children qualify in this pool,” Loh said in a recent email.. “We heard that working class Latinx families, often in Cambridge for generations, were not … getting into the school.”

The school district changed the policy to give “points” to children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

The number of dual-language public schools in the U.S. has quadrupled since 2010, to more than 3,600. 

“We are on our way to being much more balanced,” said Sarah Bartels-Marrero, the school’s current principal. “To me, it’s very important that we have a very diverse group of Spanish-speaking students. That’s a core pillar of our school.” The Spanish points system helps ensure that, she added, although she acknowledged that some English-only parents have also employed it as a workaround. “Certain individuals with privilege and knowledge may look for a loophole,” she said. “That is a thing, but we work really hard to combat and mitigate that.” 

Amigos continues to enroll slightly fewer English learners and about 10 percent fewer low-income students than the district average. Although the current formula would virtually guarantee a low-income Spanish speaking student admission, only one such incoming kindergartener listed Amigos as their first choice in January 2022, according to data published by the district.  However, Bartels-Marrero pointed out that about 60 percent of families identify as Hispanic or Latino, a group that is incredibly diverse. “To me it’s fundamentally important that [Amigos] is an option and opportunity for every kid in Cambridge regardless of race or background,” she said. 

Some states and communities also suffer from a location problem when it comes to dual language. The predominantly white town of Maynard, Massachusetts created a Spanish dual-language school with its English speakers in mind — not its growing population of Portuguese-speaking students, for instance. But the thousands of Spanish-speaking English learner students in the much larger and heavily Hispanic city of Lawrence, located just 35 miles to the north, have for two decades lacked access to even a single dual-language Spanish program (two are slated to open in the next year or so). States and the federal government could, and should, incentivize districts to open programs where there is the most need, and discourage programs targeted mostly at English speakers.

But starting new programs takes time, and there are steps that school districts can take right now to help ensure that English learners, low-income students, Black students, and other underrepresented groups have equal, if not greater access, to dual-language programs. They should engage more in grassroots outreach and marketing of dual learning, tailoring the message as needed to different communities. They should make the admissions process as transparent and accessible as possible, avoiding complicated or burdensome steps that advantage those with flexible schedules and knowledge of school system bureaucracy.

And they should eschew any kind of elitist framing, intentional or not. 

Llerena Searle, the Rochester mother, liked the dual-language program at School No. 12 well enough to enroll her younger child there, too. This time, there was a pandemic going on and the child was tested over Zoom. Her daughter dutifully cooperated with the process. With little doubt of a successful outcome (the school also has an admissions preference for siblings) Searle was more relaxed this time, yet hardly sanguine about the admissions process. She never figured out exactly what district officials were trying to accomplish, but in the end worried that the test mostly measured privilege. 

*Clarification: This article was updated to reflect the fact that the dual language program in Mamaroneck, New York, is now open to all interested families, including those with disabilities.

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Eighty-seven percent of states lack enough speech language pathologists to reach all the infants and toddlers in need. Eighty-two percent suffer from physical therapist shortages. And among the service coordinators who organize critical therapies for America’s youngest children, the turnover rate is a stunning 42 percent, according to information compiled by the IDEA Infant and Toddler Coordinators Association from a survey that had 45 state respondents. (The K-12 teacher turnover rate, by contrast, only reached a mere 10 percent during the pandemic.)

With all the attention recently to the teacher and child care worker shortages in communities across America, the sector facing the most severe crisis has received comparatively little notice from policy makers, the media or the general public: those providing critical early intervention therapies for children under age 3 with developmental delays.

Last March, I published a story for Hechinger and USA TODAY on longstanding racial inequities in terms of who can, and has, accessed these therapies. One Rhode Island mother, for instance, missed out on early intervention entirely for her daughter because the toddler’s speech delay was attributed to the family’s bilingualism. “We missed that window from 1 to 4, which is such a precious age,” the mother told me.

Quality early intervention is critical for millions of families — and significantly reduces the likelihood that a child will need special education services in kindergarten. Most of the challenges and inequities in the system connect back to workforce issues. Staffing shortages are most severe in predominantly low-income communities, meaning longer waitlists when services are even available at all. Meanwhile, there’s a striking lack of diversity among early intervention personnel. One recent survey found that nearly 90 percent of early childhood special education personnel are white, 97 percent are female, and only 6 percent speak Spanish, according to Mary Bruder, the director of the University of Connecticut Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research, and Service.

Increased funding for early intervention — translated into increased pay for therapists and case managers — is essential yet insufficient on its own. Both Rhode Island and Illinois are among the states that have significantly upped pay rates for early intervention personnel in recent years and continue to lack critical staff. “There has been a big effort to raise wages and have sign-on bonuses but still it hasn’t been enough,” said Leanne Barrett, a senior policy analyst at Rhode Island Kids Count.

The workforce shortage “is at crisis proportions,” said Bruder.

In the last month, I interviewed a half dozen experts about potential strategies for expanding and diversifying the workforce. Here are some of the takeaways:

Expand mentoring and apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are underutilized throughout education, and could be especially helpful in the early intervention workforce, particularly for those from lower-income backgrounds who can’t afford to enter often pricey training programs without an income. “They would be getting funding while completing the credentials they need,” said Catherine Main, director of early childhood education at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Create a pipeline from related jobs

In communities facing teacher shortages, education officials have tried to increase the number of paraprofessionals and teachers’ aides certified to lead their own classrooms. The same pathway could and should exist in early special education services, with aides and others in lower-paid jobs in the field encouraged and offered financial support to get trained as therapists and service coordinators.

Offer perks to those already in the profession

Staff retention is key to meeting the needs of surging caseloads. States have talked about such incentives as repaying loan debt for early intervention professionals who make a commitment to stay in the field, and providing them with free child care (as Kentucky has done with child care workers). Barrett says there’s a need to “think creatively” and do more to make the jobs both appealing and sustainable.

Build in more culturally relevant curriculum and training

Many potential therapists, particularly people of color, don’t pursue or stay in training programs because the preparation is “very western and Eurocentric,” said Evandra Catherine, an assistant professor in the early childhood program at Arizona State University. Catherine added that both in academic and in-service training, there should be a focus on “affirming the identities of the families and communities they are servicing,” and the curriculum should feature research and literature by a more diverse array of scholars and practitioners. Among other things, there needs to be discussion of historic linkages between disability and race. “At one point in time, if you were Black you were considered disabled,” she said. To better relate to families today, providers need to understand that history, Catherine added.

Streamline higher education bureaucracy

The path to working in early intervention is not always easy or clear, with entirely different training programs and licensure requirements for a developmental therapist working with 2-year-olds vs. a special education teacher working with 3-year-olds — even though the training required is very similar, said Catherine Main. The different agencies that run early intervention and special education need to coordinate to better allow for staff crossover and sharing. That includes building more accessible pathways from community college programs into early intervention. “If our agencies came together to have a more uniform qualification system that would be really helpful,” Main said.

Support, support, support

Early intervention personnel and experts have told me of a surge in the number of toddlers trying to access the services, partly due to pandemic backlogs and delays. That’s been hard for providers, many of whom have seen their caseloads grow. “A lot are looking to leave the field because of stress due to growing caseloads,” said Bruder. We’re “seeing this dissatisfaction more than we have seen before.” Pay and benefits help but so does ongoing support, particularly in the form of mentorship and stability, for a job that even under the best of circumstances can bring unexpected challenges nearly every day.

More on early intervention

I found in my reporting that Black and Hispanic children not only receive less early intervention, but the services are lower in quality and less targeted to their specific needs. For instance, Spanish speaking children are more likely to get general speech services while English speaking ones receive help with specific articulation problems. That story is available in Spanish here.

Last month, in a similar piece, the Associated Press examined how the pandemic exacerbated early intervention staff shortages in Illinois and nationwide. 

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

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