ALBANY, Ore. – It’s 7:15 on a cold gray Monday morning in May at Linn-Benton Community College in northwestern Oregon. Math professor Michael Lopez, in a hoodie and jeans, a tape measure on his belt, paces in front of the 14 students in his “math for welders” class. “I’m your OSHA inspector,” he says. “Three sixteenths of an inch difference, you’re in violation. You’re going to get a fine.”

He’s just given them a project they might have to do on the job: figure out the rung spacing on an external steel ladder that attaches to a wall. Thousands of dollars are at stake in such builds, and they’re complicated: Some clients want the fewest possible rungs to save money, others a specific distance between steps. To pass inspection, rungs must be evenly spaced to within one sixteenth of an inch, the top rung exactly flush with the top of the wall.

The exercise could be an algebra problem, but Lopez gives them a six-step algorithm that doesn’t use algebraic letters and symbols. Instead, they get real-world industry variables: tolerances, basic rung spacing, wall height.

Lopez breaks the class into five teams. Each team is assigned different wall heights and client specs, and they get to work calculating where to place the rungs. Lopez will inspect each team’s work and pass or fail the job.

Math is a giant hurdle for most community college students pursuing welding and other career and technical degrees. About a dozen years ago, Linn-Benton’s administration looked at their data and found that many students in career and technical education, or CTE, were getting most of the way toward a degree but were stopped by a math course, said the college’s president, Lisa Avery. That’s not unusual: Up to 60 percent of students entering community college are unprepared for college-level work, and the subject they most often need help with is math.

The college asked the math department to design courses tailored to those students, starting with its welding, culinary arts and criminal justice programs. The first of those, math for welders, rolled out in 2013.

More than a decade later, welding department instructors say that math for welders has had a huge impact on student performance. Since 2017, 93 percent of students taking it have passed, and 83 percent have achieved all the course’s learning goals, including the ability to use arithmetic, geometry, algebra and trigonometry to solve welding problems, school data show. Two years ago, Linn-Benton asked Lopez to design a similar course for its automotive technology program; they began to offer that course last fall.

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Math for welders changed student Zane Azmane’s view of what he could do. “I absolutely hated math in high school. It didn’t apply to anything I needed at the moment,” said Azmane, 20, who failed several semesters of math early in high school but last year got a B in the Linn-Benton course. “We actually learned equations I’m going to use, like setting ladder rungs,” he said.

Linn-Benton’s aim is to change how students pursuing technical degrees learn math by making it directly applicable to their technical specialties.

Some researchers think these small-scale efforts to teach math in context could transform how it’s taught more broadly.

Among strategies to help college students who struggle with math, giving them contextual curriculums seems to have “the strongest theoretical base and perhaps the strongest empirical support,” according to a 2011 paper by Columbia University Teachers College professor emerita Dolores Perin. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Perin’s paper echoed the results of a 2006 study of math in CTE involving 131 CTE high school teachers and almost 3,000 students. Students in the study who were taught math through an applied approach performed significantly better on two of three standardized tests than those taught math in a more traditional way. (The applied math students also performed better on the third test, though the results didn’t reach the statistical significance threshold.)

So far, there haven’t been systematic studies of math in CTE at the college level, said James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education at the Southern Regional Education Board, who ran the 2006 study.

Stone explained how math in context works. Students start with a practical problem and learn a math principle for solving it. Next, they use the principle to solve a similar practical problem, to see that it applies generally. Finally, they apply the principle on paper, in say, a standardized test.

“I like to say math is just like a wrench: It’s another tool in the toolbox to solve a workplace problem,” said Stone. “People learn almost anything better in context because then it has meaning.”

Linn-Benton dean Steve Schilling offers an example. Carpenters use a well-known 3-4-5 rule to get a square corner — lay out two boards at a square angle and mark one board at 3 feet and the other at 4 feet. Now a straight line joining the two marks should measure exactly 5 feet—if it doesn’t, the boards are out of square.

The rule is based on the Pythagorean theorem, a method for calculating the lengths of a right triangle’s sides: a² + b² = c². When explaining to students why the theorem describes the rule, the instructor uses math terms — “adjacent side,” “opposite side,” “hypotenuse” — that they’ll need to use on a math test, said Schilling. When using practical skills like the 3-4-5 rule on a project, “at first, they don’t even realize they’re doing math,” he said.

Related: Federal relief money boosted community colleges, but now it’s going away

Oregon appears to be one of the few places where this approach is spreading, if slowly.

Three hours south of Linn-Benton, Doug Gardner, an instructor in the Rogue Community College math department, had long struggled with a persistent question from students: “Why do we need to know this?” The answer couldn’t just be that they needed it for their next, higher-level math class, said Gardner, now the department’s chair. “It became my life’s work to have an answer to that question.”

Meanwhile, Algebra I was a huge barrier for many Rogue students. About a third of those taking the course or a lower-level math course failed or withdrew. That meant they had to retake the class and likely stay another term to graduate; since many were older students with families and obligations, hundreds dropped out, school administrators said.

For those who stayed, lack of math knowledge hurt their job skills. Pipe fitters, for example, are among the higher-paid welders, said welding department chair Todd Giesbrecht, but they need a solid understanding of the math involved. “Whether they’re making elbows, whether they’re making dump truck bodies, they’re installing steam pipe, all of those things involve math,” he said.

So, in 2010, Gardner applied for and got a National Science Foundation grant to create two new applied algebra courses. Instead of abstract formulas, students would learn practical ones: how to calculate the volume of a wheelbarrow of gravel and the number of wheelbarrows needed to cover an area, or how much a beam of a certain size and type will bend under a certain load.

Since then, the pass rate in the applied algebra class has averaged 73 percent while that of the traditional course has continued to hover around 59 percent, according to Gardner. Even modest gains like that are hard to achieve, said Navarro Chandler, a dean at the college. “Any move over 2 percent, we call that a win,” he said.

One day in May, math professor Kathleen Foster was teaching applied algebra in a sun-drenched classroom on Rogue’s wooded campus and launched into a lesson about the Pythagorean theorem and why it’s an essential tool for building home interiors and steel structures.

She presented the formula, then jumped to illustrated exercises: What’s the right length for diagonal braces in a lookout tower to ensure that the structure will hold? What length does the diagonal top plate for a stair wall need to be to ensure that the wall’s corners are perfectly square?

James Butler-Kyniston, 30, who is pursuing a degree as a machinist, said that the exercises covered in Foster’s class are directly applicable to his future career. One exercise had them calculate how large a metal sheet you would need to manufacture a certain number of parts at one time, a skill he’s used in the lab. “Algebraic formulas apply to a lot of things, but since you don’t have any examples to tie them to, you end up thinking they’re useless,” he said.

Related: Proof Points: Shop class sometimes boosts college going, Massachusetts study finds

Unlike at Linn-Benton, students at Rogue in any degree field can take this course, so some of the applied examples don’t work for everyone. Butler-Kyniston said he thinks applied math works better if it’s tailored to a specific set of majors.

Still, Foster’s class could rescue the college plans of at least one student. Kayla LeMaster, 41, is on her second try at a two-year degree. She had to drop out in 2012 after getting injured in a house fire. She’s going for a degree that will let her transfer to the University of Oregon to major in psychology; she hopes to eventually work as a school counselor or in some other job supporting kids.

But her graduation from Rogue hangs by a thread because she needs a math credit. She struggled in the traditional algebra class and had to withdraw, and the same happened in a statistics course. Applied algebra is her last chance. “When you add the alphabet to math, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. By contrast, in the examples in Foster’s class, “you get into that work mode, a job site somewhere, and you can see the problem in your head.” She got an A on her first test. “I’m getting it,” she said.

Gardner worries about the consequences of the traditional abstract approach to teaching math. When he was in college, “nobody ever showed me one formula that calculated anything really interesting,” he said. “I just think we’re doing a terrible job. Applied math is so fun.”

Oregon’s leaders appear to see merit in teaching math in context. In 2021, state legislators passed a law requiring all four-year colleges to accept an applied math community-college course called Math in Society as satisfying the math requirement for a four-year degree. In that course, instead of studying theoretical algebra, students learn how to use probability and statistics to interpret the results in scientific papers and how political rules like apportionment and gerrymandering affect elections, said Kathy Smith, a math professor at Central Oregon Community College.

“If I had my way, this is how algebra would be taught to every student, the applied version,” said Gardner. “And then if a student says, ‘This is great, but I want to go further,’ then you sign up for the theoretical version.”

At the level of individual schools, lack of money and time constrain the spread of applied math. Stone’s team works with high schools around the country to design contextual math courses for career and technical students. They tried to work with a few community colleges, but their CTE faculty, many of whom are part-timers on contract, didn’t have time to partner with their math departments to come up with a new curriculum, a yearlong process, Stone said.

Linn-Benton was able to invest the time and money because its math department was big enough to take on the task, said Avery. And both Linn-Benton and Rogue may be outliers because they have math faculty with technical backgrounds: Lopez worked as a carpenter and sheriff’s deputy and served three tours as a machine gunner in Iraq, and Gardner was a construction contractor who still designs houses. “I have up to 16 house plans in the works during construction season,” he said.

Back in Lopez’s class, on a sunny Wednesday, students are done calculating where their ladder rungs should go and now must mark them on the wall. One team struggles. “I don’t understand any of this,” says Keith Perkins, 40, who’s going for a welding degree and wants to get into the local pipe fitters union.

“I know, but you’re not doing the steps in the right order,” says Lopez. “Walk me through it. Tell me what you did, starting with step 1.”

As teams finish up, Lopez inspects their work. “That’s one thirty-second shy. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” he tells one group. “OSHA’s not going to knock you down for that.”

Three teams pass, two fail — but this is the place to make mistakes, not out on the job, Lopez tells them.

“This stuff is hard,” said Perkins. “I hated math in school. Still hate it. But we use it every day.”

This story about math in CTE courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Last April, an email went out to families in the Troy School District outside Detroit. Signed by unnamed “concerned Troy parents,” it said that a district proposal to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders was part of a longer-term district plan to completely abolish honors classes in all of its schools.

Superintendent Richard Machesky and his team were stunned. The district was indeed proposing to merge separate sixth- and seventh-grade math tracks into what it said would be a single, rigorous pathway emphasizing pre-algebra skills. In eighth grade, students could opt for Eighth Grade Math or Algebra I. But the district had no plans for changes to other grades, much less to do away with high school honors classes.

Earlier that month, Machesky and a district team of curriculum specialists and math teachers had unveiled the plan during a series of meetings with parents of current and incoming middle schoolers. Parents had largely expressed support, said Machesky: “We thought we were hitting the mark.”

No matter. The email blast spurred opponents to show up at a board workshop and a town hall, and a petition demanding that the middle-school plan be scrapped got more than 3,000 signatures. At a packed board meeting that May, more than 40 people spoke, nearly all opposed to the plan, and the comments got personal. “Are you all on drugs?” parent Andrew Sosnoski asked the members.

It’s part of the skirmish over “detracking,” or eliminating the sorting of kids by perceived ability into separate math classes. Since the mid-1980s, some education experts have supported such moves, citing research showing that tracking primarily serves as a marker of race or class, as Black and Hispanic students, and those from lower-income families, are steered into lower-track classes at disproportionate rates. In the last 15 years, a handful of school districts around the country have eliminated some tracked math classes.

While there’s been ample research on tracking’s negative effects, studies of positive effects resulting from detracking are scant. In perhaps the only attempt to summarize the detracking literature, a 2009 summary of 15 studies from 1972 to 2006 concluded that detracking improved academic outcomes for lower-ability students, but had no effect on average and high-ability students.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

Proposals to curtail tracking often draw fiery opposition, sometimes scuttling the efforts. The Portland school district in Oregon planned to compress two levels of middle school math into one starting in 2023, but after criticism, said the issue needed more study. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, won office in 2021 on an education platform that included protecting tracking, after an outcry over a state department of education plan that included language about “improving math equity,” which some interpreted as limiting tracking. The San Francisco Unified School District, which in 2014 detracked math through ninthgrade, recently announced that it’s testing the reintroduction of a tracked system, following a lawsuit from a group of parents who alleged that detracking hurt student achievement.

The pushback, often from parents of high-track students with the time and resources to attend school board meetings, is part of why tracking, especially in math, remains common. In a 2023 survey of middle-school principals by the Rand Corporation, 39 percent said their schools group students into separate classes based on achievement.

But some places have changed their math classes with minimal backlash, and also ensured course rigor and improved academic outcomes. That’s often because they moved slowly.

Evanston Township High School, in Illinois, started detracking in 2010, collapsing several levels in two freshman-year subjects — humanities and biology — into one.

Then, for six years, the school made no other changes. That allowed leaders to work out the kinks and look at the data to make sure there were no negative effects on achievement, said Pete Bavis, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

Teachers liked the mixed-ability classes and asked to expand them to other subjects, so in 2017 the school began detracking sophomore and junior English, Geometry and Algebra II.

At South Side Middle School and High School on Long Island, detracking went even slower, taking 17 years to fully roll out. The district started in 1989 with middle-school English and social studies, and progressed to high school math and chemistry by 2006.

The pace let parents see it wasn’t hurting their children’s achievement, said former South Side High Principal Carol Burris. During that period, the proportion of students earning New York’s higher-level Regents diploma climbed from 58 percent in 1989 to 97 percent by 2005. “I always told parents, when we started moving this through the high school, ‘Look, if this isn’t working, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to hurt your kid,’” she said.

Related: How one district diversified its math classes – without the controversy

Those slow rollouts contrast with what happened in the Shaker Heights City School District in Ohio in 2020. That summer, school leaders needed to simplify schedules to accommodate a mix of online and onsite students because of the pandemic. They saw an opening to do something that had long been in the district’s strategic plan: end tracking in most fifth- through ninth-grade subjects.

But teachers complained last spring that it had gone too quickly, saying that they didn’t get enough training on teaching mixed classrooms, and that course rigor has suffered. Even supporters of detracking suggested it had happened so fast that the district couldn’t lay the groundwork with parents.

Shaker Heights Superintendent David Glasner said he understands those concerns. But he said he also heard from parents, students and instructional leaders in the district who say they’re glad the district “ripped the Band-Aid off.”

In Troy, despite the pushback from parents, the school board ultimately voted 6-1 for the change, noting that the district had spent four years studying options and that teachers and outside experts largely supported the plan.

Machesky said if he had it to do over, he’d communicate with parents earlier. The anonymous email took advantage of an information void: The district had communicated the proposal only to parents of current and upcoming middle schoolers. Most who turned out to oppose it had younger kids and hadn’t been told, he said.

Leaders in Evanston and South Side both say they also framed detracking as a way to create more opportunities for all students. As part of getting rid of tracks, Evanston created an “earned honors” system. All students enroll in the same classes, but they can opt into honors credit — which boosts their class grade by a half-point, akin to extra credit — if they take and do well on additional assessments or complete additional projects.

School leaders in South Side also ensured that detracked classes remained as challenging as the higher-level classes had been previously, Burris said. To make sure students succeeded, the school arranged for teachers to tutor struggling students in a support class held two or three times a week and in a half-hour period before school, changing the bus schedules to make that work. Teachers also created optional activities for each lesson that would push higher-achieving students if they mastered the material being covered.

“You have to make sure you’re not taking something away from anyone,” said Burris.

To prepare for pushback, Evanston also formed a “rapid-response team” that answered parent questions about the new system within 24 hours and developed dozens of pages of frequently updated FAQs. That took the pressure off teachers, letting them focus on the classroom, said math department chair Dale Leibforth. By the end of the first year of detracking, the school had gotten just three complaints, all requests for fixes to narrow technical problems rather than wholesale critiques, said Bavis.

“We imagined a catastrophe,” he said. “We asked, ‘what could go wrong?’” and mapped how to handle each scenario.

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

In response to continued critiques of its detracking effort, last fall Shaker Heights pioneered another idea: an evening immersion experience that lets parents sit through detracked classes. The four mock sessions — two in literature and two in math — were followed by questions and answers.

Parents were respectful but probing: How do teachers work together to make the new system work? Do kids know when they’re grouped with others who are struggling in a skill? Are the books we worked with really at sixth-grade level? While there’s no data on the session’s effects, Glasner says they “absolutely did move the needle” on community opinion.

Research from the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, suggests that districts should focus on how detracking helps all students, rather than emphasizing that the efforts are aimed to advance equity and benefit students in lower tracks, said senior fellow Halley Potter. That approach gives parents of higher-track kids the idea that their own child’s academics are being sacrificed to help others.

That fits with what Machesky thinks happened last spring in Troy. “We kind of got caught up with the equity arguments that were raging in districts nationally at the time,” he said.

After last May’s board vote, opponents launched a recall petition against three board members who’d voted in favor of the change. To get on the ballot, it needed 8,000 signatures but got fewer than half that.

Since then, the opposition there has gone silent.

Last fall the district held “math nights” to talk about the new system and let parents ask questions. The students have settled in. “I have received zero negative communication from parents — no emails, no phone calls — zero,” said Machesky. 

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

Whether detracking spreads may depend on the experience of parents and students. Back on Long Island, parent Mindy Roman’s three children graduated from South Side High in 2009, 2012 and 2018, and she said she’s glad they were in classes with diverse groups of students. Her children didn’t have classes with a Black student until middle school because of the way elementary school lines were drawn, she said. And all three did well in the district’s detracked courses.

But Roman said she’s heard from current parents with the opposite experience. “It’s not ‘oh my God, my child is getting access to these unbelievable opportunities,’ but more like, ‘my kid is gonna get a 70 in a class when they could get a 90. I don’t want them to be put under that much pressure.’”

John Murphy, who was principal at South Side High from 2015 to 2023, said he started hearing around 2018 from people worried about the effects of the workload on their children’s mental health, and the school responded by giving less homework. Even so, “students are working way harder than they did 20 years ago,” said Murphy, now an assistant for human resources to Superintendent Matthew Gaven.

Still, academic outcomes at South Side have improved since the district eliminated tracking. In 2021-22, 89 percent of South Side graduates earned the highest-level diploma the state offers — the advanced Regents diploma — compared with 42 percent in New York state as a whole. Another 9 percent earned the Regents diploma.

That said, the district recently made an accommodation. Post-Covid, a small group of parents of middle schoolers told the district they didn’t think their children were ready for Algebra I because of the pandemic-era learning interruptions. So South Side Middle School retracked eighth-grade math starting in the 2023-24 school year, offering parents the choice of Algebra I or a grade-level math course. Gaven said that only around 7 percent of parents of eighth graders asked for that option, and that demand for it might taper as schools return to normal.

It’s an opt-in model far different from those that direct students into lower-level courses because of test scores or teacher recommendations, said Gaven. “We know our kids can handle algebra, but we respect our parents as partners and wanted to give them a voice and an option.”

This story about detracking 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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Last year, Brandi Pitts’ kindergarten students were struggling with a software program meant to help them with math. The tool was supposed to enable teachers to tailor their instruction to individual students’ learning needs, but even the kids who had strong math skills weren’t doing well.

At a training session this summer, Pitts, a teacher at Oakdale Elementary in Sandy, Utah, learned why: The program works best when teachers supervise kids rather than sending them off to do exercises on their own. Her school had received free software licenses through a state-funded project, but she’d initially missed the formal instruction on how to use the program because she was out sick.

“A lot of times with education, we have to figure things out on our own,” she said. “But having that training, I’m so much more encouraged that I can improve my teaching.”

School systems spend tens of billions of dollars each year on ed tech products, but much of that money is wasted. Educators, who are rarely trained on the software, often leave products unopened or unused. Meanwhile, with more than 11,000 ed tech products on the market and companies sometimes making extravagant claims about their effectiveness, it’s often impossible to determine which products work and which don’t.

But after much trial and error, Utah designed a system to ensure that the money districts spend on ed tech actually benefits students. The state’s K-12 Math Personalized Learning Software grant program, created in 2013, requires ed tech companies to train teachers like Pitts on their products and obligates the businesses to credit the state if the licenses are never used. Experts say it’s a promising model for alleviating some of the problems plaguing ed tech.

“There’s a coming reckoning as the pandemic funding comes to an end over the next year. School districts will have to make choices.”

Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking

It’s “driving more accountability,” said Tal Havivi, senior director of industry partnerships at the International Society for Technology in Education, which connects educators and ed tech providers. While he’s unaware of other states doing anything similar at this scale, he said there’s a growing movement among school districts to write contracts that require ed tech providers to show results before they are paid.

That movement can’t grow fast enough, according Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, which represents school tech leaders. During the pandemic, school systems dramatically expanded the number of software products they used as companies offered free subscriptions for a limited time and the federal government showered districts with emergency funding, he said. But many of the products weren’t high quality.

“There’s a coming reckoning as the pandemic funding comes to an end over the next year,” Krueger said. “School districts will have to make choices.”

Related: ‘Don’t rush to spend on ed tech’

The Utah state legislature created the personalized learning program in response to concerns that students were falling behind in math. The project would identify software programs that showed evidence of improving student math performance and give free licenses to school districts that applied for them.

But at first, few teachers took note. Halfway through the project’s first school year, 2014-15, just 9 percent of licenses distributed were being used, said Clarence Ames, who coordinates the project for the STEM Action Center, created by the same legislation. So, starting in the second year, the center began requiring software companies to offer in-person instruction for teachers at each participating school before they were paid.

The STEM Action Center made other adjustments too. Because district-level administrators typically requested the software programs, school staff were often unaware of them or learned about them too late for teachers to receive training. So, the center began requiring that district leaders, district IT directors and school principals all sign off. The center also moved up the timeline for schools to get the software — from August to February — so teachers would have ample time to test the products before a new school year.

In addition, Ames rewrote ed tech contracts to require companies to return any unused license to the project for use the following school year. The system operates like a money-back guarantee, putting providers on the hook financially.

Because of these requirements, some companies opt out of partnering, said Ames. The onsite training is expensive. “It’s a challenge for us as an industry because it’s not something companies have typically done,” said Charles Ward, a vice president at ed tech company Derivita, based in Salt Lake City. “But I think that’s on us to figure out.” 

Related: PROOF POINTS: How can tutors reach more kids? Researchers look to ed tech

At a time of increased scrutiny of ed tech, the results from the Utah effort are notable. Since the center retooled its approach, 100 percent of software licenses in participating districts are opened and used.

The state has also made progress in assessing which math software products correlate with improved student achievement. By collecting data for almost 10 years, the STEM Action team identified nine math tools that show a statistically significant impact on student outcomes.

For students using project-approved software, the gains have been real. A 2019 evaluation found that students who used such tools for half an hour or more per week were about 57 percent more likely to test proficient in math on state standardized math tests than a comparison group who didn’t use them.

During the pandemic, when learning went online and school districts elsewhere rushed to find proven tech tools to serve students, Utah had an advantage because of its approved provider list, said Ames. When the emergency hit, the state didn’t have to scramble to find vendors whose products showed evidence of success.

That may have shown up in test scores: Utah students’ fourth and eighth grade math scores on national-level tests fell during the pandemic, but the drops were smaller than those in most states. Ames is cautious about drawing conclusions but said the math software likely played a role in keeping Utah’s numbers from falling off a cliff.

But a lot depends on individual teachers: Those whose students more regularly use the software get better outcomes.

Heidi Watson, a math coach at North Park Elementary in the city of Tremonton, said the training on ed tech tools is invaluable. Using the program’s data, teachers can diagnose individual students’ challenges and more effectively work with them in small groups, she said. Teachers have also learned to refine their assignments — for example, by asking students to complete three modules rather than to spend 20 minutes with the software.

Some believe tech tools should minimize the role of teachers. A state leader once suggested moving entirely to software-driven learning to eliminate educators, calling them “the weak link,” Ames recalled. But if anything, Utah’s data suggests that despite the increasing sophistication of tech tools, educators are needed more than ever, Ames said. “100 percent of our data points to the fact that that is inaccurate,” he said of the argument that teachers have limited value. “The most important variable is the teacher, no matter what.”

Research in 2018 on 48 school districts concluded that a median of only 30 percent of licenses ever got used.

Ames said he’s heard from some other states and districts inquiring about Utah’s model for managing ed tech. A few years ago, the Texas Education Agency adopted Utah’s practice of requiring participating school districts to use only agency-vetted software tools that show evidence of improving student outcomes on state tests.

Math teaching is going better for Pitts this fall. She just had her students take their first quiz on the software, and because she understands the program better, she’s better able to use those results to pinpoint the specific help each student needs. She also knows where on the company’s website to find guidance, including a feature that lets her access other teachers’ real-time tips on how they’re using it, which she didn’t know about last year.

Most important, she sees how the tool fits with her instruction. “It’s not teaching for you,” she said. “It’s a tool to support your teaching.”

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HOUSTON — Steve Lachelop stood in front of a hostile audience on the morning of May 18 to ask for help. It was two weeks until the Texas Education Agency, where he’s a deputy commissioner, would remove Houston’s elected school board from their jobs.

In their place would be people hand-picked by agency head Mike Morath, an appointee of Republican governor Greg Abbott. Lachelop told sitting members they could help the new board by serving as liaisons to the community. “You guys know your communities. You guys have spent, each of you, many years deeply engaging with your communities, and that is incredibly valuable,” he said.

Board member Bridget Wade, a conservative Republican, was skeptical. The Texas Education Agency was taking away board members’ official email addresses starting June 1, she noted, so how could they be liaisons if citizens couldn’t reach them? “That’s a compelling point,” said Lachelop. “Let me go back and do some more thinking on this.”

On June 1, the TEA took over Houston’s school district, removing the superintendent and elected board. Critics say it’s an effort by a Republican governor to impose his preferred policies, including more charter schools, on the state’s largest city, whose mayor is a Democrat and whose population is two-thirds Black or Hispanic. In other districts where state-appointed boards have taken over, academic outcomes haven’t improved. Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders, according to some education experts. 

Supporters of takeovers say students’ futures are at stake and that the strategies help jolt failing school systems into better performance. Backers of the takeover of Houston Independent School District say it’s needed to improve performance in a few schools in low-income neighborhoods that have a history of poor academic outcomes.

The seeds for the HISD takeover were planted in 2015, with the passage of a state law mandating that the TEA step in if any school in a district were rated academically unacceptable for five consecutive years. Another law passed in 2017 incentivized districts to contract with outside entities, including charter school managers, to assume control of schools that aren’t meeting state standards.

“They may be weaponizing state takeovers in ways that they didn’t before and making it more obvious, in my view, what their intentions are. The reason I say Houston might be pointing in this direction is because the Houston school district itself is not struggling.”

Domingo Morel, New York University professor and author of a book on state takeovers

By 2018, four of Houston’s 274 schools, all of them in the city’s economically distressed north and east sides, hadn’t met the standards for four years running, putting the district at risk of a takeover. But at a packed meeting that December, Houston’s board narrowly voted down a proposal to have the district seek bids from outside entities to run the four schools under the 2017 law.

Citizens who spoke almost uniformly opposed the proposal, with many arguing it was the first step in an effort to privatize district public schools. It failed on a 5-4 vote.

On January 3, Gov. Abbott responded with a scathing tweet: “What a joke. HISD leadership is a disaster…. If ever there was a school board that needs to be taken over and reformed it’s HISD.”

The governor would get his wish, but it would take another four years.

Related: Inside an ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

Nationally, takeovers are relatively rare: Between 1988 and 2016, states took control of 114 school districts, about four per year. The first came in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1989 after Republicans gained control of the governorship and state assembly.  

Though the first state interventions were by Republican governors, in the 1990s and 2000s education-reform-minded Democratic governors began doing the same, said Domingo Morel, a New York University political science professor who wrote a book on the history of takeovers. Now that’s changed: The Democratic base is pushing back against takeovers, and Democratic governors are now far less likely to support them, said Morel.

In northeast Ohio, for example, community organizers and a Democratic state legislator, Lauren McNally, are pushing to repeal that state’s takeover law. State takeovers in the Lorain, Youngstown and East Cleveland school districts have been a “disaster,” the organizers say. On the latest state report cards, all three got 1 of 5 stars for academic achievement and were ranked near the bottom of districts statewide on that measure.

At least three studies have found that takeovers don’t increase academic achievement. The latest, a May 2021 working paper by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia, looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. “On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits,” the researchers concluded.

Takeovers are premised in part on the idea that improving school board governance improves test scores. But the 2021 paper concluded that may be wrong: “These results do not provide support for the theory that school board governance is the primary cause of low academic performance in struggling school districts,” the researchers wrote.

Race, meanwhile, plays a role in the likelihood of a district being taken over. The paper found that majority-Black districts were more likely to be taken over even when their academic performance was similar to that in white districts not taken over. The same was true for majority Hispanic districts, but the effect was less pronounced, said study co-author Beth Schueler.

And takeovers are more likely in states where Republicans control both the governorship and the state legislature, the paper found.

In Texas, Republicans have both, and its state interventions show those same patterns. From 2008 through 2022 the state removed elected boards in seven districts, all but one of which had higher proportions of nonwhite students than the state average. But it’s impossible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about the role race plays in an individual state like Texas given the small number of state interventions, said David DeMatthews, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin College of Education.

Related: Do state takeovers work in Mississippi?

In Houston, by the 2018-19 school year, all but one of the district’s four failing schools was meeting state standards. The exception was 96-year-old Phillis Wheatley High School. It narrowly missed the mark, though district officials pointed to a 2018 technical change the state made in how it calculated school ratings, designed to ensure at least adequate performance in all areas the state measures. That new rule tipped it from a D to an F under an A-F rating system Abbott had signed into law in 2017.

Wheatley sits in a neighborhood of small single-family homes with neat fenced-in lawns on the city’s east side. A poster at the school’s entrance shows the 2017 inductees to its alumni “wall of fame”: NFL player Lester Hayes, surgeon Frank Watson, plus a NASA division chief, a chemist, and others. Congressmembers Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland, and heavyweight champ George Foreman, all went to Wheatley too.

In December 2019 Morath, the TEA head, sent a letter to the district announcing that the state was taking over and removing the school board. A key reason, he said, was Wheatley, as well as allegations of misconduct against former HISD board members. The district sued to stop him. Morath had suspended state ratings in 2017-18 for Wheatley and other schools hit hard by Hurricane Harvey, which the district argued had restarted the five-consecutive-years clock set by the 2015 law. Two state courts agreed with the district and granted a temporary injunction while the case worked its way through the courts over three years.

In January 2023, the Texas Supreme Court sided with the state because of a new state law passed in 2021 clarifying that a year in which no rating is given doesn’t stop the count, among other provisions.

But during those three years, Wheatley improved. Its 2019 score of 59, an F, rose to 78 in 2021-22, a high C, during a period when academic outcomes around the country were getting hammered because of the pandemic.

Wheatley principal Sabrina Cuby-King credits several moves for Wheatley’s gains: professional development for teachers on how to fill gaps in student learning caused by Covid, holding teachers accountable for “bell to bell” instruction to wring every minute out of each class, pairing each student with a teacher or staff mentor. “That keeps them coming to school,” said Cuby-King. “That’s why they feel connected to the campus.” A chart in her conference room shows average attendance up 11 percent over this time last year, to 91 percent.

Administrators closely track individual student data so teachers can intervene if a student’s scores start to flag. The school now dedicates a full period each day to intervention, when students who’ve started struggling get extra help from their own teachers. Individual attention matters more at a small school like Wheatley — each of its 650 students’ scores counts proportionally more toward the school’s accountability rating than at larger schools, said Cuby-King.

Being in the news has motivated students too. “They started saying, ‘We really need to achieve. We need to show them who we are. We are not what they’re saying we are,’” said former Wheatley social studies teacher Kendra Yarbrough-Camarena.

The school’s 2021-22 accountability score — that C rating — is taped to the building’s glass front door. That, plus large letter “A’s” scattered around the school, are meant to keep students and teachers focused on the goal. “That lets people know that this is a place of academia. This is where we are now [the C rating]. But we’re looking to get from there to an A,” said Cuby-King.

The improvement at Wheatley didn’t dissuade Morath: On March 15, he sent a letter to superintendent Millard House and the board announcing they were being replaced. 

Public reaction was furious. Citizens interrupted information meetings the agency held in March to explain the mechanics of the intervention. The teachers union, the mayor and area legislators held a rally to protest the move. Hundreds of students walked out.

“I’ve not talked to a single student or teacher who’s for the takeover,” said Amarion Porterie, an 18-year-old senior at Stephen F. Austin Senior High School.

Morel, the New York University professor, said Texas’ move may be a sign that Republican governors intend to use district takeovers more often. “They may be weaponizing state takeovers in ways that they didn’t before and making it more obvious, in my view, what their intentions are,” he said. “The reason I say Houston might be pointing in this direction is because the Houston school district itself is not struggling.”

He sees the Houston intervention as of a piece with other types of red-state takeovers like Mississippi’s expansion of state police jurisdiction in majority-Black Jackson, Michigan’s takeover of Flint, and Georgia’s attempt to assume control of the election board in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located.

In 2021-22, the district earned an overall score of 88, a high B — better than more than a hundred other Texas districts, state data show. On that score the Brown University paper offers a warning: the higher-achieving the district, the more negative the effect of the takeover, Schueler said their data show. “Takeover can be a very disruptive intervention,” said co-author Joshua Bleiberg by email — because, for example, teacher collective bargaining agreements can be revoked and teachers and district staff dismissed, he said.

In Houston, some blame the district, not the state. Sue Deigaard, a board member from 2018 until she was removed June 1, said that after the 2015 law passed, if the district and board had “hyper-focused” on the lowest-performing schools like Wheatley, “you and I wouldn’t be talking.” She believes in local democratic control, she said. “But I think what I’m most angry about in all of this is we had the power to prevent this.” Instead, she said, the board got distracted by a bitter dispute between its members over who should lead the district as superintendent.

And area state legislator Harold Dutton, a Democrat and Wheatley graduate, wrote the language in the 2015 law authorizing takeovers of a district if one of its schools fails for five years running. He told local outlets that he doesn’t regret creating the provision, though he never thought a takeover would happen in Houston because the district would fix Wheatley. “It’s HISD’s responsibility to educate students, and when they let them fail they should be punished,” he said in March. (Dutton didn’t respond to several requests for comment for this article.)

“I think what I’m most angry about in all of this is we had the power to prevent this.”

Sue Deigaard, a Houston Independent School District board member from 2018 until she was removed on June 1

As the Morath-appointed board moves in, it has a clean slate. The elected board is gone. Superintendent Millard House had already left May 26, and at least five people in his cabinet had already resigned too. Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said many teachers have told her they’re not planning to return for the next school year because of the state’s move. On June 1, Morath appointed Mike Miles, a former superintendent of Dallas’ school system and the CEO of a charter school network, as the new superintendent, and named the nine members of his board of managers. 

At least three studies have found that takeovers don’t increase academic achievement.

If that means more charters are coming, Houston parent Anna Chuter is worried. Her son is in the special education program at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School on the city’s north side, and she is a teaching assistant there. State rules allow charters to deny admission based on student discipline records, and they serve smaller proportions of students with disabilities than do the state’s traditional public schools, according to a 2019 analysis by Houston Public Media. She fears lower-performing traditional schools being turned into charters and the remaining traditional schools like Roosevelt being forced to absorb more kids in special education. (While the district itself has no district-authorized charters, 100 charters operate inside the boundaries of the district under direct state authorization, according to TEA spokesperson Jacob Kobersky.) 

Since taking charge, Miles has made a number of dramatic moves, including overhauling 29 schools, Wheatley among them, by requiring all staff to reapply for their jobs and instituting a pay-for-performance plan for teachers at those schools that’s linked to test scores. Libraries in those schools are being turned into centers where students considered disruptive will participate remotely. And Miles has slashed the number of central office positions by almost 25 percent.

Under state law, it will be at least five years before Houston gets back its full elected board, and it could be far longer. In his March 15 letter, Morath said one condition of ending the takeover was “no more multiyear failing campuses” — meaning none of its 274 schools may fail state standards for more than a single year running. State agency spokesperson Jacob Kobersky confirmed that provision exceeds the requirements of the 2015 law that triggered the takeover. “The criteria that TEA is outlining would allow it to effectively control HISD indefinitely,” said Ashley Harris of the Texas ACLU.

The state education agency says that its past takeovers have had mostly positive academic outcomes: In six of the seven districts in which it’s intervened since 2008, academics improved, according to an online agency presentation arguing for the Houston intervention. Outside Waco, the town of Marlin’s school district, which has just three schools, saw its district rating improve from an F to a B since the state took over in 2019.

DeMatthews, at UT Austin, is skeptical. “The agency has taken over mostly small districts, some of them very tiny districts, that can be really dysfunctional,” he said. “You might have a couple of school board members who are not doing a good job and a superintendent who’s not watching the books.” That’s quite different from taking over a large district like Houston’s, he said. The district has 27,000 employees and 189,000 students.

Takeover opponents say they’re not done resisting. In March, the Texas ACLU petitioned the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the replacement of Houston’s board as a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. A parents group organized a protest before the replacement board’s June 8 meeting.

Some former elected board members aren’t in a mood to help either, Lachelop’s May 18 request aside. Elizabeth Santos is a former English teacher in the district who served on the board from January 2018 until she was replaced on June 1. In 2021 she’d won a close race to retain her seat. Now the person she defeated in that election, Janette Garza Lindner, serves on the replacement board after being appointed by Morath.

Sitting in her office for the last time on May 18 Santos, had a warning: “My students are going to come back together, and we’re going to put on our walking shoes and knock on doors. Our job is to remove this governor and to expel this agency. That’s where I’m at.”

This story about the TEA takeover 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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CLEVELAND — Eric Gordon, CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, is on an extended farewell tour full of surprises. It’s a chilly Wednesday in April at the end of his last-ever quarterly meeting with the district’s parent advisory committee. The group, made up of people with kids in the school system, functions as a communications channel between other parents and school principals and teachers.

“You all know that I call your kids my kids, and they won’t stop being my kids,” Gordon says, wrapping up the meeting. “Just because I stop being CEO doesn’t mean they stop being my kids. Thank you for letting me be a small part of your families and your lives.” He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes.

Tracy Hill, who leads the district’s family engagement work, pulls up a screen showing dozens of digital thank-you notes that the committee’s parents have written to Gordon and gives him a plaque from the group. The parents are on their feet applauding. Someone starts a chant: “Eric! Eric! Eric!”

Gordon is getting a lot of that: plaques, thank-yous, T-shirts, goodbye hugs from parents, teachers and current and former students. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, Gordon said later, trying to keep it together to finish out his last few weeks. It’s been up and down, too, for many others involved with Cleveland’s school system, who are on edge about what comes next.

By many measures, schools here made big gains under Gordon and the ambitious 11-year effort to overhaul the education system that he helped create. But the pandemic wiped out some of the improvements in academic performance and graduation rates that the district had seen under the so-called Cleveland Plan. Now, many worry that the district won’t rebound — and will head back into the cycle of rotating leadership, low performance and lack of public trust that existed before the turnaround.

A lot rides on the school system’s continued improvement: Not just student outcomes, but also the future of the city itself and the fortunes of its young, new mayor, Justin Bibb.

The effects of poverty on education make further gains a daunting challenge. Cleveland is one of the poorest major cities in the country, and research shows that family income level predicts school achievement and career success.

The graduation rate in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District rose from 56 to 81 percent between 2011 and 2020.

Schools can’t make up for lack of investment in the surrounding community on their own, say researchers. “Abject poverty in particular is a challenge to overcome,” said Raymond Hart, executive director at the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest urban school systems. But sustained efforts like Cleveland’s can make up a lot of ground and have done so in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Miami and Dallas, he added.

Still, the research on these efforts is mixed. Decades of chronic underfunding is often at the root of the struggles in districts like Cleveland to serve high proportions of Black and Latino students from low-income backgrounds, said Allison Rose Socol, a vice president at The Education Trust, an education advocacy group. “It is always, always about deep, longstanding, chronic, systemic inequities, and often racial inequities,” she said. “And so, no improvement efforts big or small in any city or district could be successful without both understanding historically how that has come to be and addressing it.”

Related: How to make Cleveland ‘great again’?

The Cleveland Plan began in the 2011-12 school year, a make-or-break time for the district. The school system, with the lowest student academic performance in Ohio, was deep in debt, had lost public trust, and the state was threatening to take it over. Then, Frank Jackson, the city’s mayor at the time, proposed that the city come up with its own plan.

He and Gordon, who’d been tapped in June 2011 as interim CEO after serving for four years as chief academic officer, pulled together a coalition of philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, local government officials and others to support the newly named Cleveland Plan.

What they devised was an all-of-the-above approach, salting in education ideas favored by liberals with those liked by conservatives. The plan would close and replace low-performing schools, including turning some over to charters; give principals more power over their own curriculums, budgets and policies; raise taxes to fund the effort; and offer high-quality preschool to all children.

The strategy was bolstered in 2019 when Gordon attracted a national college-promotion program called Say Yes. The program pays the balance of public college tuition for every student who graduates from the district, and provides support services to help them get to college — afterschool programs, tutoring, help with food, mental health and medical services, and more.

Student outcomes improved. The graduation rate rose from 56 to 81 percent between 2011 and 2020. The number of children enrolled in high-quality preschools almost doubled, the number of high-quality preschool providers tripled and kindergarten readiness improved in tandem. College-going rates increased from 44 percent before Say Yes to 49 percent after.

The efforts helped to persuade some parents, even those who could afford other options, to keep their kids in the district schools. Gesta Miller’s daughter, now a high school senior, was offered a full scholarship to a parochial school but turned it down to attend the Cleveland School of Science & Medicine, a selective district school whose curriculum better fit her interests. Another parent, Rachel Clawson, said that before the Cleveland Plan she wouldn’t have considered putting her children in a district school. Because of the improvements, her first grader attends William Rainey Harper elementary on the city’s south side.

Covid put the district’s gains in jeopardy. Performance on state tests tumbled 24 percent. The graduation rate dipped for the first time in a dozen years. Early childhood education programs were forced to cut capacity or close because of staff shortages, and the number of kindergartners on track in language and literacy fell in turn.

The proportion of chronically absent students in Cleveland schools doubled to about half of the entire student body from 2020 to 2022; students lost between 3 and 14 months of learning.

Among major cities, Cleveland was in an especially poor position to manage the pandemic, which hit low-income and Black and Latino communities the hardest. The Ohio city has the highest child poverty rate of any large city in the U.S., the lowest levels of internet connectivity and it is the eighth-most-segregated metro area in the country. The city’s high poverty and low vaccination rates made it one of the nation’s most vulnerable spots for the omicron variant of Covid that hit in late 2021.

The district had toggled between remote and hybrid instruction in 2020-21, returning to in-person classes at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, only to ping-pong between remote and in-person learning again after omicron struck, a situation that continued for the rest of the school year. The proportion of chronically absent students doubled to about half of the entire student body from 2020 to 2022. Students lost between 3 and 14 months of learning. English proficiency fell by 8 percentage points and math proficiency by 15, with the highest declines among low-income and nonwhite students. Enrollment fell by 7 percent from the 2019-20 school year to 2020-21.

Nouh Shaikh, a 17-year-old senior at the district’s John Marshall School of Engineering, was a straight-A student until the 2020-21 school year, when he was a sophomore. The first semester that year, his whole family got Covid and he had to take care of them — cooking, cleaning, buying groceries. In the second semester, he came down with the virus. He ended up with two C’s and a D that year. Of the students he knew, perhaps 10 percent managed relatively well in that period, and he was in that small group, he said. It was far worse for students who were already struggling; he knew many who gave up and stopped coming to class.

Related: How Cleveland revamped its preschool programs in just five years

In November 2021 Justin Bibb, a first-time mayoral candidate who’d never held elective office, upended Cleveland’s political establishment, winning by more than 20 points after running a progressive campaign promising to modernize city services, reform policing and modify the culture of City Hall.

Last June, midway through his first year in office, he called for a “great reset” and faster improvement in the schools, telling a reporter that, among other things, he was dissatisfied with the large percentage of district graduates who required remediation to start college.

Bibb and the school board didn’t offer to renew Gordon’s contract. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the board had been ready to renew in April but couldn’t do so without a signoff from the mayor, which the board did not get. The mayor confirmed to the Plain Dealer that he hadn’t been ready to decide in April whether he wanted Gordon to stay on and hadn’t met with him about whether they shared the same vision for schools.

In September, Gordon announced he was leaving. In an editorial, the Plain Dealer wrote that Bibb didn’t understand what an “immense loss to the district” the departure was.

Gordon said in an interview that he likely would have signed a contract renewal in spring 2022 had it been offered, but added that he’d already been thinking of leaving. Despite the damage from Covid, he wanted to hand off control to someone else while the school district was in a relatively strong financial position and had good relationships with the unions and high public trust, he said.

Bibb’s press spokesperson referred questions to Holly Trifiro, the city’s chief education officer. She said there was no decision not to keep Gordon and that the choice to leave was his. His contract wasn’t up till summer 2023 and so there was no reason to discuss renewing it last year, she said.

Some local leaders and educators are nervous about the mayor’s plan for schools post-Gordon. In November, the mayor issued a report on a listening tour on the school system he and his team conducted with 250 teachers, principals, parents and students.

The report acknowledged that students in several grade levels and subjects were exceeding expectations and that test scores were rebounding, but it also pointed to challenges: minimal advances in student learning since 2003, persistent achievement gaps between student demographic groups, few students ready for college at graduation. A quote from the mayor about the need to “accelerate the pace of change” in Cleveland’s schools was prominently displayed.

Cleveland Teachers Union president Shari Obrenski said she cautioned the mayor about using the term “acceleration” without acknowledging the gains of the last 11 years. “My biggest concern is that we focus too much on acceleration and not enough on where we’ve come from,” she said. Another person in the school system, who didn’t want to be named out of fear of losing their job, said they disliked the report’s tone: “Part of what I was taken aback by was, we just went through a global pandemic … I think the mayor is young. I really wish he’d taken more time to actually visit schools and really see firsthand what’s going on.”

Trifiro declined to comment on that characterization but affirmed that the administration believes the Cleveland Plan is “the right direction for our schools and our city.” In picking a new superintendent, the mayor was looking for someone who “deeply believes in the pillars of the Cleveland Plan,” she said. The mayor’s comment about a “reset” was in the context of recovery from the damage caused by Covid and doesn’t represent a desire to go in a different direction, she said.

On May 9, Bibb announced Gordon’s replacement — Warren Morgan, chief academic officer in the Indianapolis public school system. Morgan isn’t new to the district, having worked in Cleveland’s school system from 2014 to 2016 as a network leader overseeing a subset of its schools.

Discussing the future of the Cleveland Plan without Gordon, educators and parents here convey equal parts hope and fear. Behind the dueling sentiments is a question: Are the improvements Cleveland’s schools experienced before Covid due to the plan or to Eric Gordon?

“I think that where we found collaboration and success, I don’t know if I attribute it so much to the Cleveland Plan as it is Eric’s leadership,” said union vice president Jillian Ahrens. “We’re hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.”

Parents trust Gordon, in part because he “doesn’t talk down to them,” said Hill, the family engagement leader. At a recent board of education meeting, parent Teffannie Hale thanked Gordon during the public-comment period: “Every time I have called you, you have come, you have accepted my candor, you never accepted my assertion as aggression, and I appreciate that from you.”

Reflecting on Hale’s comments a few weeks later, Gordon told The Hechinger Report that in the past he’d had to intervene with those in leadership who wanted to cast her as an angry parent who would never be satisfied. “I had to say, ‘Time out. This is what we want. We want parents to advocate,’” he said.

And there are his bonds with students. Shaikh, the John Marshall senior, said that when he and a group of students were going door to door handing out letters to convince students to come back in person, Gordon was there with them knocking on doors.

Related: Who wants to lead America’s school districts? Anyone? Anyone?

Even as Gordon leaves, there are reasons for optimism. Hill is excited about the choice of Morgan as superintendent. She worked with him in his prior role with the district. “He’s a wonderful person. He has proven leadership,” she said. She watched him interact with parents during the interview process and said he seemed to form a very quick bond with them. Gordon, who hired Morgan for his prior role, said he has the “professional humility to understand that there are no quick silver bullet solutions to really complex problems.”

The district is starting to bounce back post-Covid. Student scores on state tests rose 42 percent between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. Last September, the district re-launched a campaign to cut the sky-high truancy rate. Parents received calls if their child missed consecutive days, but were also offered help with transportation, health care or other needs.

Longer term, Gordon points to the gains the schools have made despite the city’s high poverty rate, which hasn’t budged over the Cleveland Plan’s 11 years. “I would be the first to say we haven’t gotten enough progress. But we did all that in spite of the larger conditions,” he said. “If we’re really going to get the results that we want for our community, we must get at the disruption of these larger persistent things and particularly in dense, generational poverty.”

Cleveland’s public still buys into the plan. In November 2020, in the teeth of the pandemic, a referendum to raise property taxes to fund the schools won by more than 20 points — the third such vote in favor of increased taxes for education since the Cleveland Plan went into place. Voters “understand that there’s a ways to go, but … they believe in the system, they believe in the direction,” said Helen Williams, program director at the Cleveland Foundation, which funds parts of the plan and runs polls on education issues.

That support may be key to the plan’s success once Gordon leaves. In other efforts around the country to change the shape of education, the loss of a leader is indeed a challenge, said Socol, of The Education Trust. But when there’s community consensus, “there’s a much greater chance those things will be sustained than if it was just a big dream of one individual,” she said.  

On May 26 Cuyahoga Community College, which has campuses in and around Cleveland, announced it’s hiring Gordon for a new position as a senior vice president tasked with identifying and addressing gaps in the college’s student support systems. He’ll also design new approaches to helping students transition from early childhood through post-secondary education and early career as part of a new strategy at the college.

“I have said no to a lot of things, and I fully expected to say no to [this role] as well,” said Gordon. “And I found myself saying, ‘This is the stuff I love — figuring out coherence, advocating for students.’”

And though some fear worse times are ahead for Cleveland’s schools, others say there’s a solid foundation for the district to keep improving. “It’s always an uncertain time when leaders transition,” said Kara Porter, executive vice president of Starting Point, a nonprofit that supports children and families in northeast Ohio. But having the Cleveland Plan’s infrastructure will ensure that the community stays together on it: “That’s the gift Eric Gordon has given this city,” she said.

This story about the Cleveland Plan 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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ROANOKE COUNTY, Va. — It was a Thursday morning in November, a few minutes into Ruby Voss’ and Amber Benson’s eighth grade math class at Northside Middle School just outside Roanoke, a city of roughly 100,000 in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thursdays are spent in review in preparation for tests each Friday. The teachers posted a question on screen — “What’s the slope of the equation below?” — and gave students a few minutes to answer it. The room grew loud as students jostled into line to bring their completed graphs to the front, where Voss separated kids into two groups: Those who got the right answer wrote their initials on a touchscreen up front, and those who answered incorrectly went to Benson for additional help.

It was a public exercise, with the whole class watching. Each Monday, the class does something equally public: Teachers review their students’ test performance, with charts showing both the group’s recent performance and that of each student. “The whole class will either go ‘yay’ or ‘ohhhh,’ depending on how the class did,” said Voss.

That approach turns students into stakeholders in each other’s success, said Benson. And it’s possible because teachers dedicate significant time to fostering relationships with students and helping them get to know one another. At the start of each school year, for example, the class devotes a few days to trust-building exercises, not math. That focus, combined with other strategies like longer math periods and tutoring, has helped Northside Middle’s students bounce back from learning losses during the pandemic more quickly than middle schoolers in many other districts, teachers and administrators here say. Nationwide, students who started middle school early in the pandemic lost more ground in math than any other group and don’t appear to be recovering.

Test data paints a dire picture: Educational assessment nonprofit NWEA found that seventh and eighth graders’ scores on its math assessments fell in 2022, the only group of kids for whom that was true. NWEA researchers estimate it will take these students at least five years to catch up to where they would have been absent the pandemic. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, average eighth grade math scores declined eight points from 2019, hitting a level not seen since the early 2000s.

At Northside, the share of eighth graders passing the state math standards test fell by 19 percentage points from 2019 to 2021, to 68 percent. (No tests were administered in 2020.) But in 2022, the pass rate roared back to its prepandemic level of 87 percent; the state average was just 46 percent. Northside doesn’t owe its rebound to a well-off student body: About 42 percent qualified of students for free and reduced-price lunch in 2019-20.

Falling behind in middle school math has ripple effects. Students who fail Algebra I (which most kids take in ninth grade) are far less likely to graduate high school on time and attend a four-year college. Math proficiency predicts both an individual’s future earnings and a country’s economic productivity more than skill in other subjects.

So far, efforts to help students recover may not be enough. The federal American Rescue Plan Act, passed in April 2021, provided schools with nearly $200 billion to spend on needs related to COVID-19, but relatively little of that money is going to academic recovery and, until recently, some districts have been slow to get those dollars out the door.

“Students are running out of time,” said Emily Morton, an NWEA research scientist.

Related: Middle school is often difficult. Try experiencing it under quarantine

For a host of reasons, middle schoolers were hardest hit by pandemic school closures. More independent than younger kids, and no longer overseen as closely by parents, they were more likely to sleep late, miss remote classes and struggle with the online format. Some, just like high schoolers, had adult responsibilities — babysitting younger siblings, for example — but more often these early teens lacked the learning strategies and executive functioning to manage, said Ben Williams, assessment and research director for Roanoke County Public Schools, the district where Northside is located.

Math, meanwhile, gets more complicated in middle school, with the introduction of concepts like equations and linear functions. And parents — even those who are strong in the subject — often lack the confidence to help their kids, Williams said. Terrance Harrelson, an accountant and the father of Northside Middle eighth graders Braylen and Kylin Harrelson, found it tough to help his kids work on math from home during the 2020-21 school year because he didn’t understand the procedures being taught. “I would have to try to learn that process and try to get feedback out of my children. I need a textbook, I need some notes, right? Some examples. And I don’t have that,” he said.

Early adolescence is also a time of rapid cognitive change, when kids need social interactions with peers and teachers to learn. For many middle schoolers, working alone during the pandemic was a disaster.

That was the case for Evan Bruce, now a ninth grader at Northside High School, located across a parking lot from Northside Middle. Home five days a week during the 2020-21 school year, Evan had trouble paying attention to remote lessons via WebEx. Midway into that year his math grade hit single digits. “I started lying a lot to my parents about doing assignments,” he said. “At home I don’t have the motivation to get out of bed, open a laptop, and start working.”

Many of his peers were similarly struggling: The share of the school’s seventh graders passing the state’s standardized math test dropped by almost 30 percentage points from 2019 to 2021.

When Evan’s seventh grade math teacher, Stacy Puriefoy, saw what was happening to his grades, she started calling Evan’s mother regularly to check in and arranged for him come to school one day a week for at least three hours of one-on-one tutoring.

Evan’s mother also began returning early from work to watch him study, for two-and-a-half hour stretches. “I had to start doing my work — teachers were on me, my parents were on me,” Evan said. After only a few weeks, his grades started rising.

Northside Middle and Northside High have long-standing math intervention practices, such as tutoring and doubled-up math periods, that many districts across the county are just now rolling out.

While many districts are starting to hire tutors to work individually with students several times a week, at the Northside schools, math teachers tutor students themselves. Benson and Voss said they stay after school for an hour four times a week to work with students individually or in small groups. The district’s high school math teachers do the same, before and after school, said high school principal Jill Green. Benson said she and Voss had been putting in those extra hours, unpaid, even before Covid.

Teachers are ideal tutors because they tend to be invested in their students, say education researchers. They’re also more familiar with the material students are covering. But some researchers are skeptical about any approach that relies on teachers to work without pay.

“It’s not a replicable model to have teachers volunteer or be ‘volun-told’ to stay after with students,” said Kenya Overton, a math education doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut and a former public school math teacher, who co-authored a research brief on math catchup strategies in June.

Many districts are also considering adding math time during the school day. That approach has been in place in Roanoke County middle schools for almost 10 years — students get more than an hour and a half of math a day, a change the district introduced after the stricter requirements of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act, said Williams.

If the extra math time is used well — if teachers work with students to more fully develop skills — it can be “spectacular” for students, said Beth Kobett, an education professor at Maryland’s Stevenson University. “Extra time allows us to look at the progression more deeply and help students fill in maybe a missing piece here and there and make important connections,” she said.

Northside High ninth grader Taylor Orange said the double period helped him recover in math. As a seventh grader in the 2020 school year, he attended class in person only twice a week. On the days he was home, he struggled to pay attention via WebEx and his grades fell. Now, the hour and a half plus of Algebra I each day gives him time to focus and ask questions, Taylor said, adding that teachers often pull students aside to work one-on-one. He’s now earning As and Bs.

The Roanoke County district is so confident that longer math periods will enable students to make up ground, said Williams, that it is spending most of its American Rescue Plan money on hiring remedial teachers and tutors in its elementary schools, which don’t have the flexibility to build extra math time into class schedules.

Northside educators insist, though, that their students’ recovery is primarily due to strong teachers who are fanatically committed to meeting kids’ individual needs. “The kids like us,” said Puriefoy, the teacher who helped Evan two years ago, explaining why students’ scores have rebounded. Added Northside Middle principal Paul Lineburg: “Supporting students’ social-emotional needs, building positive relationships with them, is a key first step to their success in math.” Some research supports the idea that teacher-student relationships are important to students’ achievement.

Back in school full-time last year as an eighth grader, Evan averaged low Bs in math. Now in his second semester of Algebra I as a ninth grader, things are looking even better — he finished the first semester with an 88 average and is at 100 percent so far in his second. 

Puriefoy now teaches ninth grade Algebra I at Northside High and has Evan again as a student. “I think he likes school. He’s social, he’s in sports, he’s got good friends … he’s involved,” she said. “I really think that’s what a lot of the kids need, is to be connected.”

Correction: This version of the story updates two photo captions to more accurately describe the math problems that the students pictured are working on.

This story about middle school math 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 isolation of spring 2020 sent Lindsay Richmond’s 13-year-old son AJ into severe depression.

Born with a traumatic brain injury, he’d been diagnosed in kindergarten with a serious emotional disability and severe ADHD. Stuck at home during the early months of the pandemic, his mental health declined.

That fall he was briefly admitted to a psychiatric hospital after threatening to hurt himself—just after he started seventh grade at Sobesky Academy, a public school in a suburb of Denver. While at the hospital, he got into a fight with another resident his age, and the facility pressed charges for felony assault, according to a later state investigation.

The hospital notified the school. On Sept.18, Richmond received an email from the Jefferson County School District: AJ was suspended while the district evaluated his risk of violence, a formal process known as a behavioral threat assessment. 

AJ spent the next eight months out of school with limited virtual instruction, while his mother argued with the district that his rights as a student in special education were being violated in the name of school safety.

“My son has always really liked school because he really does like that interaction with his peers and other children his age,” said Richmond. “So taking him out of that network, it really does hurt him.”

Threat assessment teams — typically teachers, mental health providers, and law enforcement officials —use specific protocols designed to pinpoint emerging or imminent threats and stop violence before it happens. When teams use these protocols correctly, proponents say, schools are safer and the school environment is more tolerant. Some research supports this view, but there’s no evidence to date that use of the protocols prevents school shootings. And advocates say the process disproportionately targets students already at risk of not succeeding in school. Students in special education, in particular, are more likely than their peers to face a threat assessment, and some have been denied protections they are owed under federal law.

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

Still, policymakers increasingly see the use of threat assessment teams as a viable way to prevent mass shootings. In August, New Jersey joined 18 other states that require school districts to have such teams. Nearly every other state, including Colorado, encourages districts to adopt them. In 2018 Congress allocated federal funds to train schools on threat assessment. Twin bills introduced in Congress last year would expand that funding further by authorizing the Secret Service to set up a national program to research school violence prevention and provide training on the threat assessment process. (The Senate passed its version out of committee in September, but the House companion hasn’t moved since its introduction.)

Behavioral threat assessments have their roots in a Secret Service protocol re-configured for schools after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Since then, three main programs have emerged that follow similar approaches, said Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and principal author of the most-studied model. In addition, some states have developed their own versions.

Generally, after an incident occurs or staff receive a tip — say, a student gets into a fight or posts on social media condoning the use of violence — a team uses a structured process to gather information, interview the student and witnesses, and decide on a threat level to assign the student. Threat assessment teams are usually trained in this approach. For example, in Virginia, where the use of threat assessment protocols is mandatory, team members are required to get up to a full day of instruction.

Threat assessments of less serious incidents might result in an apology from the student or a referral for mental health services, said Travis Hamblin, director of student services for the Jordan School District in Utah. More severe offenses, as when the student brings a weapon to school, can lead to an intervention plan that might include more intensive mental health services or a referral to law enforcement, plus suspension, expulsion, or legal consequences.

But the goal of an assessment is to figure out why a threat was made and give students what they need to get back on track, not necessarily punish them, proponents say.

In AJ’s case, Richmond said the threat assessment team met over video with her and her son for just 10 minutes to ask questions: How did he feel about coming back to school? What would he do to make sure an incident like that at the hospital didn’t happen there? How depressed was he feeling?

The district did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

A few months earlier, according to a state report provided by Richmond, AJ had once threatened to knock another student down to steal his belt; his special education team had stepped in and concluded he posed no threat of harm to himself or others. But after the episode at the hospital, the threat assessment team determined that AJ was an ongoing safety threat due to a history of “concerning behaviors,” according to the state investigation, which was prompted by a complaint Richmond filed with the Colorado Department of Education. The district decided to ban him from in-person classes.

Under federal law, a student with a disability cannot be removed from school for disciplinary reasons unless the school has proved — through a review called a manifestation determination — that the behavior that triggered the removal was not caused by the disability. But the district claimed that AJ wasn’t being removed for a disciplinary violation, so no review was required, according to the state report.

AJ’s pediatrician, psychiatrist, and guardian ad litem all asked the district to reconsider, arguing continued isolation would worsen AJ’s mental health, said Richmond. None of his behavior appears to fit on a list of predictors of violence — like talking about a school attack or trying to obtain a weapon — that appears in Colorado’s model school threat assessment policy.

From September 2020 to April 2021, AJ sat at home, getting on average less than two hours of daily live interaction with teachers. Richmond tried for months to get the district to send her the threat assessment report and finally gave up, she said.

“They kind of just treated me like I was in denial and that he was a threat and I was crazy,” said Richmond. “I felt very alone.”

It’s unclear how often school districts use threat assessments in a way that may conflict with legal protections required by federal disabilities law, in Colorado or nationally. A      review by The Hechinger Report of complaints to the Colorado Department of Education found that district threat determinations appeared to flout disability law in at least four other cases since 2015. In addition, three other parents of Colorado students with disabilities told Hechinger that the threat assessment process failed their children. One student was suspended for minor infractions after an assessment. In another case, the student’s special education team wasn’t involved in the threat assessment review. In the third case, the school didn’t provide due process during the threat assessment, the parent said. No Colorado state agency collects data on school threat assessments, nor is any such information collected nationally.

The state education department referred questions about those complaints and whether changes are needed in the state’s approach to the Colorado School Safety Resource Center. That center offers voluntary threat assessment training to schools. Center director Christine Harms said by email that she couldn’t comment on specific complaints but affirmed that the center trains schools to include special education professionals on their threat assessment teams in cases involving students with disabilities to ensure federal laws are followed.

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Research in Virginia and Colorado by academics, including Cornell, suggests  complaints like those lodged by Colorado parents likely aren’t isolated cases. Two studies show students with disabilities are up to four times as likely to be subjected to threat assessments as others. Additional research in both states found mixed disciplinary outcomes: Two analyses found students were more likely to be suspended, and three found no significant differences.

Meanwhile the pressure schools face to prevent violence is real: In 2022 there were 285 school-shooting incidents in which a gun was brandished or fired, or a bullet hit school property, the most of any year since at least 1970, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database compiled by the Naval Postgraduate School. Schools risk lawsuits if they have even the slightest indication that a student is a safety concern and do nothing.

A few weeks after a school shooting in Maryland in March 2018, state legislators passed a law mandating threat assessment teams in schools. Megan Berger, an attorney with Disability Rights Maryland, said her organization was concerned that the policy would conflict with federal special education law.

“They kind of just treated me like I was in denial and that he was a threat and I was crazy … I felt very alone.”

Lindsay Richmond, whose disabled son was expelled after a threat assessment

Now those fears are being realized. One of her clients, an 18-year-old senior, has already been transferred from his school, apparently in violation of federal protections. He has a confirmed disability, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, which can result in ongoing irritability and anger and frequent, intense outbursts of temper.

In mid-February 2022, he was suspended for 10 days from his Maryland high school after he threatened to beat up a school employee who had ordered him out of a bathroom. (His name and that of the school are being withheld out of his mother’s concern for retaliation against his siblings.)

The school extended the suspension for an additional eight days while a team from the district  completed a threat assessment, according to a state investigation into the proceedings.

The district held the legally required manifestation determination meeting and found that the student’s outburst was indeed caused by his disability. But, according to Berger and a report of the investigation, it ignored that finding and barred the teen from returning based on the threat assessment’s conclusion that he posed a threat.

“I hope when that’s done it will be a guidepost for schools so that they don’t just call whatever they do a threat assessment,”

Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and principal author of a threat assessment model

Instead, the district transferred him to a vocational technical school, where he took vocational classes in person and his academic classes virtually for the rest of the year. His mother, Veronica, said the special education team that worked with her son wasn’t directly involved in the decision, nor did team members speak up about the process — one of the student’s special educators told Veronica she feared for her job.

Her son would never set foot in his high school again. “They took the rest of his 12th grade year from him,” said Veronica. Asked for comment, a district representative said federal privacy laws prohibited her from discussing individual students or their discipline records.

Related: Is the pandemic our chance to reimagine education for students with disabilities?

Cornell, the University of Virginia professor, said there’s a reason that students with disabilities are subject to more threat assessments: They make more threats. Some of these students need services for aggressive and impulsive behavior. It is not surprising to those who work in special education, he said, that “these students would be more likely to make threats than other students.”

Dan Stewart, a managing attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, said that type of argument overlooks the underlying reason why students with disabilities may be making threats. When students with disabilities do something aggressive or impulsive, they need help from their special education team to figure out what’s causing the behavior, not a threat assessment, he said. Federal law already has a process allowing schools, working with a student’s special education team, to temporarily remove students if they pose an immediate danger, he added.

There is evidence that at least some approaches to threat assessments may positively affect schools’ safety climate. A 2015 peer-reviewed study, for example, found that schools using Cornell’s model had lower rates of student bullying and other aggression and that teachers reported feeling safer.

Two studies show students with disabilities are up to four times more likely to be subjected to threat assessments than their peers without disabilities. Additional research on the disciplinary outcomes of assessments for these students is mixed: Two analyses found students with disabilities were more likely to be suspended, and three found no significant differences between disabled students and students without disabilities.

Hamblin, the student services director in a Utah district, said his district’s program, based on Cornell’s guidelines, emphasizes problem solving. Teams want to address the underlying issues that students might be experiencing — bullying, for example — before they escalate into violence, he said. And for staff, having a protocol takes the emotion out of deciding what to do. According to Cornell, studies show students receiving special education services have lower rates of suspension in schools with threat assessment protocols than they do in schools not using them.

Even some who see the value in threat assessments say they can be too easily misused.

Peter Mosby is principal at Rock Ridge Elementary School in a suburb of Denver. His son Chas, who is 17 and has ADHD and a serious emotional disability, was the subject of a threat assessment this fall when staff at his high school said they saw arrows in the back of Chas’ truck, said Mosby.

Staff searched the truck and found a flare gun with empty shell casings. The dean of the school, Grandview High School in Aurora, told Mosby they were considering expulsion. Chas overheard, lost his composure, and cursed at and aggressively stepped toward a school administrator, according to the school’s threat assessment report.

But Mosby said that report was inaccurate and lacked context. Chas is serious about archery, which is why there were arrow shafts in his truck. The report mentions that he had “one or two episodes” of previous violence, which Mosby disputes. And the report classifies Chas as a high-level threat, though the circumstances don’t meet the definition, Mosby said.

Related: Preschool for children with disabilities works, but federal funding for it is plummeting

Abbe Smith, spokesperson for the Cherry Creek School District, said by email that the district “very diligently” followed the threat assessment process and stands by the “determination and the facts outlined in the threat assessment report.” She said federal laws protecting student privacy prevented her from further comment.

In the end, Chas was not expelled. But Mosby said he has no way to correct claimed errors in the report, which will stay in Chas’ record.

Despite Chas’ experience, Mosby acknowledged that, as a school administrator, he finds threat assessments useful. “But like any tool, it can also be abused,” he said. “You have schools that do not want students with disabilities in their population.”

“[L]ike any tool, [threat assessment] can also be abused. You have schools that do not want students with disabilities in their population.”

Peter Mosby, elementary school principal, and parent of a student with a disability

Even as the use of threat assessment protocols has spread across the country, research on the new tool has been conducted in only a handful of places: Dallas, Memphis, four Colorado districts and statewide in Virginia.

“I’ve been calling for other states and other models to do research for years and years,” said Cornell. He’s working with others to develop standards for threat assessment programs that will include guidelines on training staff, selecting a program, and ensuring an equitable impact on students with disabilities and students of color. “I hope when that’s done it will be a guidepost for schools so that they don’t just call whatever they do a threat assessment,” he said.

Advocacy demonstrating the harm threat assessments may pose to students with disabilities could be having an effect. New Jersey’s new law requires that threat assessments of students with disabilities include their special education team to make sure legal requirements are met. And the U.S. Department of Education, in school discipline guidance issued in July, noted that schools can’t use threat assessments to circumvent the procedural safeguards of federal disability law.

Education equity advocates are demanding that the federal government do more to learn the scope of the problem. In comments submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in September 2021, a group of 50 organizations, including the National Disability Rights Network, asked that the department start collecting systematic data on the demographics of children being referred for threat assessments and then disciplined or referred to law enforcement as a result.

In the spring of 2021, after Richmond, AJ’s mom, filed her complaint with Colorado’s education department, the district allowed AJ to come back to school in person. But there were conditions: He could attend only one class and had to be accompanied everywhere on campus by a school police officer, said Richmond. She had to quit her job at a hospital to ferry AJ back and forth on the odd-hours schedule.

Richmond ultimately took AJ out of the district and moved him to the Denver public school system, where he was allowed to attend school full time. “They were like, ‘We have absolutely helped children with his needs before,’” she said. “They just welcomed him with open arms.”

This story about threat assessments 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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In 2016 Purdue University announced an income-share agreement program as a new guinea pig experiment in which students could get money for college in exchange for a share of their future earnings. “Back a Boiler,” it was called, in a nod to the school’s Boilermaker nickname. University president Mitch Daniels talked up the idea in testimony to Congress.

Intrigued, other university leaders wanted in. “We’re looking at what Purdue University is doing now, and we are thinking about it,” said Sheila Bair, then president of Washington College. In subsequent years, Purdue’s program won a think tank’s award for most innovative public policy proposal, and at least 14 other colleges or universities launched their own programs.

So Purdue’s announcement in June that it was suspending the Back a Boiler program came as a thunderclap in the world of income-share agreements, or ISAs, and could signal the beginning of the end of experiments involving college students splitting their future paychecks with investors.

The number of schools offering ISAs is sliding down the far side of the bell curve as several other accredited colleges or universities have ended or paused their programs. It’s a sign of fraught times for these schools and for the training boot camps that offer ISAs, with lawsuits mounting, federal and state governments imposing restrictions and students reporting mixed satisfaction.

Purdue’s pause points to bigger problems in the ISA industry. One reason Back a Boiler has been suspended is that program servicer Vemo Education went out of business, said Brian Edelman, president of the Purdue Research Foundation. (Two other Vemo clients — Messiah University and Colorado Mountain College — also reported that the company has shut down, though the company doesn’t appear to have made a formal announcement. It did not respond to inquiries asking for confirmation.)

At least eight accredited colleges or universities that once offered ISAs to students have either paused or ended their programs.

A year ago, Vemo was sued by 47 former students of a for-profit coding academy called Make School; the students alleged that Vemo and Make School colluded to run a high-cost ISA program that violated state and federal laws forbidding unfair or deceptive business practices and false advertising. The students had agreed to repay 20 to 25 percent of their pre-tax income each month for three and a half years or more, with monthly payments as high as $2,500; some students signed contracts under which they would owe as much as $270,000.

There’s another reason for Back a Boiler’s pause: clampdowns by the federal government on certain schools that offer ISAs. In a consent order last September issued by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau against several private ISA providers, the bureau concluded that the schools had violated federal law by falsely telling users that ISAs weren’t loans and don’t create debt. A sample contract on the Back a Boiler website, for example, notes that “This is not a loan or credit.”

In March, the Department of Education told accredited colleges and universities that, following on that order, they also must treat ISAs as loans. The protection bureau’s order interrupted the Purdue Research Foundation’s conversations with investors about an additional round of ISA funding, and Purdue decided to pause the program, Edelman said.

It’s not just Purdue: Seven other accredited colleges or universities that once offered ISAs told The Hechinger Report that they’ve either paused or ended their programs. Only four of the fifteen schools contacted said they’re continuing; three schools didn’t respond to inquiries.

Some of those closing shop report lack of interest. At the University of Utah, just 121 students have participated in the school’s ISA program since it started in 2019, at a university that enrolled more than 34,000 last year, Rebecca Walsh, a university spokesperson, said by email.

Others worry about federal scrutiny. Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, has put its program on pause while it seeks more clarity on the changing federal guidelines, Katherine Frohoff, a university spokesperson, said by email. Colorado Mountain College, which offered ISAs to undocumented students not eligible for federal aid, has suspended its program indefinitely. The school failed to get its not-for-profit program excluded from new regulations designed to weed out for-profit bad actors in the ISA space, Matthew Gianneschi, a college spokesperson, said by email.

And one of the four surveyed schools that’s continuing its ISA program — Clarkson University — has decided to restrict eligibility to juniors and seniors, who are better positioned to evaluate income-share agreements in light of their career pursuits and academic goals, according to a Clarkson spokesperson, Kelly Chezum.

“You’d be blown away by what we see with program quality and the lack of diligence by ISA providers.”

Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations, Student Borrower Protection Center

With ISAs, students get the money they need to pay for school and agree to share a portion of their future income with the program. The contracts typically cap the total amount users will ever have to pay back and include an income floor so that if their earnings fall below it, they pay nothing.

The terms of ISAs vary widely. Income shares can range from 2 to 20 percent. The contracts typically cap the total amount users will ever have to pay back, and include an income floor so that if their earnings fall below it, they pay nothing. But payment caps can be as high as three times the funded amount, according to a 2020 report by the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group.

Little is known about whether former students who have ISAs are happy with them. None of the schools contacted for this story had surveyed their participants, and advocates and experts knew of no such surveys. (Gianneschi said that Colorado Mountain College has just started research on student satisfaction.)

Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center, said that borrowers frequently report to center staffers that the actual terms of their contracts end up being far more expensive than they were led to expect. When ISAs first launched, proponents claimed that market discipline would produce transparent products that would align the interests of schools and students, Kaufman said. “What we see when we talk to borrowers, and as the industry is increasingly unable to deny, [is that] what has resulted is totally different.”

For some students, it’s the lack of a prepayment option that makes ISAs a bad deal. Grace Gusler, a former Purdue student, took out a $5,000 Back a Boiler ISA between her freshman and sophomore years. She’s paying just over 2 percent of her monthly income — about $80 a month — back into the program; those payments are slated to continue for nearly 8 more years. At her current earnings, she’ll end up paying more than $10,000 to Purdue (that will increase if she earns more money). The payments are manageable, but if she had it to do over, she says, she wouldn’t get an ISA because if she pays it off early — as she’s done with most of her other student loans — she’ll have to pay $12,500, the full payment cap set by the contract.

Student advocates say that feature constitutes a prepayment penalty, which is forbidden under federal rules governing student loans. In its March announcement, the Department of Education declared that ISAs are by definition private education loans. The department has not yet determined whether that means that ISA payment caps violate the prepayment penalty rules, Deputy Press Secretary Fabiola Rodriguez said by email. But “colleges that market private education loans are required to comply with all related legal and regulatory requirements” for those loans, she added.

Two states have already tightened their rules. Last August, California announced it would treat ISAs as student loans under state law; in Illinois, a law passed the same month defines them as loans.

And at least one investor has soured on using ISAs to fund boot camps that offer students short-term training on skills like coding. In 2019, Sean Linehan cofounded Placement Holdings. The company provided ISAs to help people move into higher-paying cities where they could earn more. Soon, it began offering career services to boot camp participants working closely with ISA providers. But some students, especially those without much prior education, had a tough time learning to code, Linehan told The Hechinger Report. Because ISAs let students enroll in them without paying up front, they had no skin in the game, meaning even fewer students successfully finished, Linehan said. Today his company offers career coaching, but he’s gotten out of the ISA business.

Meanwhile, lawsuits are piling up against boot camps offering ISAs. Since 2021 at least four have been sued. In the latest case, in June, Washington State’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against a South Carolina company that offered an ISA that obligated students to pay up to $30,000 for a 6- to 12-week online course providing software sales training. “You’d be blown away by what we see with program quality and the lack of diligence by ISA providers,” said Kaufman, of the Student Borrower Protection Center.

Lenaya Flowers, 30, graduated from the Houston campus of the Flatiron School, a coding boot camp, in May 2020. She found the school overpriced — $15,000 for a 15-week course — but it offered an ISA that sounded like a no-lose proposition: She’d pay back nothing till she got a job earning at least $45,000 a year. When she did, she’d give 10 percent of her monthly income to the school, up to a cap of $21,000 or 48 payments, whichever came first, she said.

After graduating, she looked for a full-time job for almost two years while taking on freelance data science projects, and she started paying back the ISA. In February 2022 she landed a position as a data analyst at a Houston company and now makes about $64,000. But she’s finding the $6,400 in annual payments tough in combination with her other student loans — in all, her ISA and loan payments will gobble about a third of her gross income once federal student loan deferment ends, she said. Given another chance, she wouldn’t take the ISA or do the program, she said.

Whitney Barkley-Denney of the Center for Responsible Lending said her group sees ISAs as high-risk alternatives to student loans. Borrowers like Flowers sign on without understanding how the ISAs will mesh with their other student debt and get themselves stuck with unmanageable monthly payments, she said.

The Flatiron School didn’t respond to requests for comment. A notice on Flatiron’s site dated May 2019 says the school no longer offers ISAs. At least one other company, a tech sales boot camp operator named Elevate, posted a LinkedIn announcement earlier this year that it’s no longer offering ISAs either.

The ISA industry has responded to the criticism by working with four U.S. Senators to craft a bill that would create a new ISA regulatory structure. Introduced July 19, it would give the consumer protection bureau formal regulatory authority over ISAs, require that borrowers receive a standard set of disclosures and create more protections for low-income borrowers, among other provisions.  

Even if it passes, it’s impossible to know whether it might halt the slide in ISA offerings. 

“There was a lot of optimism that this was going to be the replacement for student debt,” said Linehan, who thinks that ISAs won’t make up more than 1 percent of education financing going forward. “I don’t think it’s going to make a material dent there.”

This story about income-share agreements was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post Twilight of income-share agreements to pay for college? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Jodie Parks works full time as an occupational therapist at a Michigan state psychiatric hospital. But since October she’s had a second job: spending four hours a week, she estimates, making calls and chasing down paperwork to prove that she previously served in the military.

She needs that proof to have her student loans forgiven under the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created by a 2007 law that pledged to erase students’ debt if they took lower-paying but critical jobs with nonprofits and the government.

It’s a promise that, for most borrowers, has yet to pay off. Fewer than 2 percent of applicants were approved between 2017, when the first borrowers became eligible, and the onset of Covid-19. And among the huge number of applications denied or lost in the bureaucracy were many from Americans who perform perhaps the ultimate public service: joining the armed forces.

“I’m another veteran who’s been told that there’s a service for veterans, and then when you try to get through the red tape, it’s too hard,” said Parks, who was in the Air Force from 2009 to 2015, stationed in Arizona, Europe and Africa, before leaving the military and getting a degree in occupational therapy. “So you just kind of give up.”

Ninety-two percent of military borrowers who applied for loan forgiveness before the pandemic were denied by the Department of Education, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, due to confusing and narrow rules about eligible loan types and repayment plans that made it difficult for them to qualify.

“The law made a promise to people that if they went into public service jobs, they would have their loans forgiven. And a lot of people went to school on that basis,” said Christopher Madaio, vice president for legal affairs at Veterans Education Success, which advocates for military members.

Related: Getting educated while on active duty is getting harder as military rolls back benefits

In October, the Biden administration temporarily loosened the program’s rules for one year to give more borrowers the chance to qualify. Waived are many of the strict guidelines that stymied applicants. Borrowers now can retroactively convert to a loan type that makes them eligible. That’s helped more members of the military with student debt: About 1,500 have had their loans forgiven under the waiver since October, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said in an email.

But that’s a tiny portion of the almost 177,000 active-duty service members whose federal loans are or could be eligible for forgiveness according to the GAO. And that larger number doesn’t include the thousands like Parks who are no longer on active duty. She and other veterans said they’ve spent months trapped in a bureaucratic maze that may actually make it harder for them than for nonmilitary borrowers to get forgiveness.

It’s not clear how many other people might be stuck. The Department of Education had about 173,000 forgiveness applications in process as of the end of February.

Thousands of dollars apiece are in play for those who joined the military. About half the active-duty service members who have federal student loans have balances of more than $13,000, according to the GAO.

A lot is at stake for the armed forces, too. In an all-volunteer system, they have a tough time finding people to fill mission-critical jobs, including doctors and information technology specialists, for whom the forgiveness program could be an effective recruitment tool, the GAO noted. In a survey of military lawyers, 94 percent said they’d be more likely to quit the service if the program were eliminated.

For Parks and other veterans, the biggest hurdle in getting loan forgiveness has been proving to the Department of Education that they served — an odd problem, since a fellow federal agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, has that information.

Parks, 39, has about $48,000 in student loans, and when she heard about the temporary waiver in October, she got to work assembling her forgiveness application. A key piece of it is a form that applicants must get signed by eligible current or former employers — government agencies or nonprofits — certifying the dates that forgiveness applicants worked there.

For Parks, getting that employment certification form signed by the state of Michigan, her current employer, couldn’t have been easier: “They were on it. They knew exactly what form it was,” she said. 

She thought it would go the same with the Air Force. Instead, she spent weeks making calls to find out who in the bureaucracy might sign. Finally given the number of a person she was told could do it, she tried him every day for a month and never heard back.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees — as little as $41 — derail hundreds of thousands of California college students

Next, she tried the Veterans Administration, getting rerouted repeatedly until she reached an official who leveled with her: It would be nearly impossible to get a signature out of the VA because it didn’t have anyone designated to provide one. He suggested she go to a military base in person and ask someone there to sign the form, or contact a commander she knew. But most of her commanders had retired in the six years since she’d served.

All this would have been avoided had her loan servicer, a Department of Education contractor called FedLoan Servicing, accepted as proof a standard official document veterans get when they leave the military: their certificate of release or discharge from active duty, better known as DD Form 214. It shows veterans’ dates of service and is used as proof for benefits, including VA home loans.

But, Parks said, FedLoan told her it wasn’t enough — she’d need an actual signature on the employment certification form.

Since she couldn’t get one, FedLoan told her to pull together the documents she had, including Air Force W-2s from the time she’d served. She had only one, because her tax preparer throws away documents older than seven years. She finally submitted her application in February, four months after she started the process, but she doubts the single W-2 will be accepted as proof.

Other veterans and service members have experienced similar frustrations.

To qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a person has to not only work full time in a public agency or nonprofit, but also make the first 120 payments on their loans — which typically takes 10 years. Navy veteran Stacy Hunter, 46, submitted her DD 214 with her forgiveness application in October but was told in a letter from FedLoan and the Department of Education that her seven years of Navy service, during which her loan payments were deferred, didn’t count toward her 120 payments.

That’s despite the department’s announcement in October that months spent on active duty count toward PSLF even if the service member’s loan payments were in deferment. But neither the department nor FedLoan has explained why they’re not counting Hunter’s time, and she’s spent the months since trying to get answers. In February, she wrote her congressperson for help.

Mike Smiley, 42, also spent many hours getting military sign-off for, and seeking answers about, the loan forgiveness he believed he’d earned. He served 14 years in the Navy as a doctor, leaving in 2019. Today he’s a pediatric pulmonologist at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, a nonprofit in St. Louis. With $50,000 owed in student loans and four kids, he would be hugely helped by getting out from under that debt, he said. 

Related: At some colleges that recruit veterans and their GI Bill money, none graduate

FedLoan wouldn’t accept his DD 214 and even rejected a letter from the Navy’s personnel command verifying his service, Smiley said. But former Navy co-workers connected him with the human resources department at his old command, and the department signed his employment form. He submitted his forgiveness application in early December.

After hearing nothing for several weeks, he became concerned that his paperwork had gotten lost, especially when a nonmilitary co-worker who’d applied for loan forgiveness two weeks after he did was approved. So Smiley submitted a complaint to the Department of Education and later went to the department’s ombudsman. He also started calling FedLoan every two to three weeks, spending at least an hour on hold over his lunch hour waiting to talk to someone. On one call in early March, he found out that his application was stuck because he’d saved it as a PDF file.

Finally, on March 22, the department’s ombudsman contacted him: His loan forgiveness was approved.  

“I really wish they would come up with a process to take care of people, not just myself, but other people who are in my shoes who maybe aren’t as persistent,” he said.

For the Department of Education, part of the problem may be the avalanche of forgiveness applications. After the waiver announcement in October, the number spiked by 40 percent, said a Department of Education spokesperson. “The loan servicer system had not quite been reconfigured to be able to send the kind of automated communications that align with the terms of the waiver and the benefits that were being offered. … This is not a perfect process,” she said. (The latest department data show that, from October through early March, about 100,000 people total had qualified for loan forgiveness.)

If a forgiveness application is otherwise in order, the spokesperson said, the DD 214 “generally suffices” to prove military service. Asked in what cases it wouldn’t be enough, she said she didn’t know. “But it is a form of additional documentation that is acceptable,” she said.

Related: Veterans continue to battle for their military training to count as college credit

As for FedLoan, spokesperson Keith New said by email that DD 214 forms are acceptable if submitted with other information “supporting that the requirements for eligible employment have been met (e.g., full-time employment).” Such forms are “reviewed on a case-by-case basis,” he added. He said he couldn’t comment on Smiley’s and Hunter’s cases because of privacy laws. 

For all that, Madaio of Veterans Education Success gives the Biden administration credit for using its authority to temporarily waive the program’s narrow rules, a step military borrower advocates had called for since at least November 2020. “The administration is trying as hard as it can,” Madaio said.

And the Department of Education said it’s making improvements. It’s working with the Department of Defense to set up a system that would automatically match data across the two agencies, said a department spokesperson — which could end borrowers’ hours on the phone seeking signatures. And it’s collaborating with advocates to draft new permanent regulations designed to help more borrowers qualify after the waiver expires in October.

Ninety-two percent of military borrowers who applied for public service student loan forgiveness before the pandemic were denied by the Department of Education

“We’re really hopeful,” said Kelly Hruska, government relations director at the National Military Family Association. “We’re glad that the Department of Education is doing this rulemaking and taking on these issues, and so we are anxious to see the final results.”

For her part, Parks feels lucky that her work schedule makes it possible to keep on top of her forgiveness application.

“If I wasn’t at a job with an afternoon shift, there’s no way that I would have gotten any of this done,” she said.

This story about military veterans and student loans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Middle school science teacher Kent Heckenlively has spent part of his time teaching, well, not science.

A prominent anti-vaccine campaigner, Heckenlively made world news in 2017 when he was denied entry to Australia for a lecture tour to encourage parents to stop vaccinating their children, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That didn’t blunt the California science teacher’s ambitions: Since COVID-19 hit, he’s been on a writing tear.

In April 2020 he released a bestselling book with co-author Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who claims that vaccines “kill millions.” Last October the pair released another book. That one questions mask use and alleges, among much else, that masks weaken the immune system by restricting oxygen intake – an idea not supported by the CDC or World Health Organization.

Heckenlively works at Gale Ranch Middle School in San Ramon, California. He’s held a teaching credential in the state since 2006, based on passing the state’s biological sciences and geosciences teaching exams, state records show.

But his academic science background is unclear: He declined a request from The Hechinger Report to answer questions about his science training and how he discusses pandemic-related public health measures in class. His Amazon author page lists him as an attorney who majored in political science and English in college.

Related: How the science of vaccination is taught (or not) in public schools

Throughout the pandemic, the American public has struggled to be scientifically literate enough to separate well-grounded scientific findings from social media-driven fiction. Middle school science teachers matter: Early adolescence is a time of huge cognitive change and a critical time to build students’ understanding of and enthusiasm for science, according to the National Science Teaching Association.

But the shortage of qualified science educators may be hurting efforts to help more Americans learn how science works. To make up the gap, states are putting teachers without a strong science background in front of classrooms.

Data show many of the 69,000 U.S. middle-school science teachers have no scientific background. Almost a quarter have neither a science degree nor full certification to teach science, according to a 2017-18 survey by the U.S. Department of Education. At schools where at least three-quarters of students are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch, 32% of middle school science teachers have neither a science degree nor certification to teach science.

The problem isn’t necessarily state teacher certification requirements. Kentucky, for example, requires middle-school teachers seeking certification to have a science teaching degree and pass proficiency tests.

But the state’s teacher shortage means there’s no guarantee that there are teachers with a science background in classrooms. In a 2019 survey of the state’s school principals, 81 percent reported they could find few or no satisfactory applicants for middle-school science jobs.

Those without qualifications end up in front of classrooms in several ways, including an alternative certification process that lets someone start teaching under a provisional credential while they take courses to get fully certified.

Related: A study on teaching critical thinking in science

States can also issue emergency certificates to those without credentials – when districts can’t find qualified candidates in Kentucky, a person just needs a bachelor’s degree in any field. In 2019 about a quarter of Kentucky’s teachers held provisional or emergency certificates.

Kentucky isn’t alone. In the latest U.S. Department of Education nationwide report on teacher shortages, 20 states reported a shortage of middle-school science teachers during the 2017-18 school year. Of those 14 were in the South and West.

Against a backdrop of teacher shortages prompting widespread emergency measures, few middle school science teachers report feeling confident about all the material they are responsible for teaching.

Only 7 percent reported feeling “very well prepared” to teach lessons about modern physics, 19 percent about electricity and magnetism and 21 percent about the properties and behaviors of waves, a 2018 National Science Foundation-supported survey found. More than half the teachers said they felt “very well prepared” to teach only three topics – the structures and functions of organisms, ecology/ecosystems and states, classes and properties of matter.

A solid science background makes science teachers more effective, said Jonathan Osborne, professor emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His research indicates that students learn better through in-class dialogues. Managing those conversations is hard for teachers who don’t have a grounding in science, because they fear losing control or being exposed for not knowing how to answer a question, he said.

But graduates with a science background don’t see a financial payoff when they choose teaching.

Teachers with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math pay a steeper wage penalty for choosing teaching over alternative careers than do graduates with any other degrees, a 2019 analysis by the Brookings Institution concluded. By the end of their careers, teachers with STEM degrees were making about 40% less than their nonteacher peers with comparable degrees.

“If you pay teachers what we pay them, and you put the entire burden of society on their shoulders, then yes, you’re going to have a teacher shortage,” said Bertha Vazquez, a science teacher at George Washington Carver Middle School in Miami, Florida.

Related: Helping science teachers tackle misinformation and controversial topics

Some states have experienced epic teacher shortages for years. In Oklahoma, to fill vacancies, emergency teaching certifications have skyrocketed since 2009. One of the top subjects for those emergency credentials is middle school science: The state issued 83 emergency credentials in the topic in 2020.

Qualified teachers can help students learn to sort out the valid from the fraudulent – a critical skill when science issues get politicized. Teachers with a science background help students become “competent outsiders to science,” including the ability to assess the credibility of sources that make scientific claims, said Osborne. “When students look at a web page on vaccines or masks, the first question is ‘what is the scientific consensus on this? The second is ‘what claim to expertise does this person have?’”

The geography of the middle school science teacher shortage coincides with attitudes toward COVID prevention. Schools in the South and West have an especially hard time getting qualified teachers: 28% and 23% of middle school science teachers in those regions have neither a science degree nor full certification to teach science, compared with 18% in the Northeast, the Department of Education survey showed. Meanwhile, of the 10 states with the lowest percentages of their populations fully vaccinated and boosted, nine were in the South or West.

Even so, having science degrees hasn’t kept some middle school science teachers from spreading misinformation.

At a school board meeting last September in Beacon, New York, teacher Laurie Malin called the COVID vaccine “an experimental gene therapy that will alter your DNA, that has more deaths and adverse effects associated with it,” according to a local news report. (That’s not an accurate characterization of COVID-19 vaccines, which don’t change or interact with DNA in any way, notes the CDC.) Her LinkedIn profile says she is a science teacher at Beacon City Schools and lists an undergraduate degree in biology, ecology and oceanography.

Nearly a decade ago, leading science organizations like the National Research Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Science set out to improve science education in the U.S. by issuing the Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS.

Developed by 26 states in 2013, the standards require that students understand core ideas in scientific disciplines and the connections across those disciplines. Students must study how scientists and engineers work, and they have to put what they learn into practice by designing and conducting projects and explaining the data they collect.

Limited evidence exists about whether the standards have improved science education in schools. But teaching experts worry about how successful the standards will be if they’re delivered by teachers with no science background. Osborne pointed to nursing education, which he said improved because the professional community came together to define a list of what every nurse has to know to be qualified.

Related: Will new standards improve elementary science education?

“We haven’t done that with teacher education,” he said. “We need a coming together of stakeholders to say, ‘Look, these are the competencies and capabilities that we expect of somebody who’s a beginning teacher.’ ”

Agreement could be tough since there’s not even enough data on what beginning teachers need to know.

“The preservice (student-teaching) landscape is such a kind of Wild West,” said Heidi Schweingruber, who leads the Board on Science Education at the National Academy of Sciences. “The reality is middle school science and middle school science teachers’ preparation have been an issue for a long time, even before the NGSS.”

Not even the standards would have prepared teachers to address the biggest science issue this decade: They don’t mention infectious diseases or human immune systems.

That’s by design, said Schweingruber. The standards are meant to provide a conceptual framework that will help students learn any number of specific scientific facts. School districts can write their own standards-based curriculums that discuss specific subjects like epidemiology, immunology or the evolution of the coronavirus, Schweingruber said.

Charlotte Moser, assistant director at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center, thinks the standards should be updated to specifically require some knowledge of infectious diseases and human immunity. Assuming students will learn those concepts in college leaves out too many people, she argued.

“A lot of adults don’t have any formal science education opportunities beyond high school,” Moser said. “And because many adults don’t have a good understanding of how their immune system works, they have fears about vaccines.”

Whatever the content of the standards, some teachers are bringing pandemic-related lessons into their science classes.

In fall 2020, Corydon Strawser, who teaches engineering and is the sixth-grade gifted teacher at Lake Nona Middle School in Orlando, Florida, wrote a two-week curriculum on COVID for his school that covers the history of pandemics and the physics of masking.

He brings in (via Zoom) virologists and immunologists from the nearby University of Central Florida to discuss the data from their research on different types of masks. And students use atomizers – “we used to call them squirt bottles,” Strawser said – to simulate how far droplets travel in a sneeze.

Having students practice science themselves may take some of the politics out of these newly charged topics, Strawser said. So far, he’s not gotten any pushback from students. “I tell the kids, ‘This is a medically accurate and mature discussion, and we just have to leave it at that. I’m not here to preach.’ ”

This story about middle school science 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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