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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As their teacher pounded his drums, belting the lyrics to the Native folk rock song “NDN Kars,” middle schoolers Eli, Izzy and Manin rehearsed new guitar chords for an upcoming performance.

“I got a sticker that says ‘Indian Power,’” teacher Luke Cordova sang. “I stuck it on my bumper. That’s what holds my car together.”

Inside a neighboring greenhouse, a group of school staff and volunteers prepared to harvest herbs and vegetables for students to use in medicinal teas and recipes during science lessons on local ecology. Meanwhile, in a 19th century schoolhouse next door, eighth graders in a Native literature class debated the consequences of racism on college campuses. “Remember,” teacher Morgan Barraza (Akimel O’odham, Kawaika, Apache, Thai) told them, “power is not all with the decision makers. You as a community have power, too.”

Once the site of an Indian boarding school, where the federal government attempted to strip children of their tribal identity, the Native American Community Academy now offers the opposite: a public education designed to affirm and draw from each student’s traditional culture and language.

The charter school, NACA, opened its doors in 2006. Today, it enrolls roughly 500 students from 60 different tribes in grades K-12, bolstering their Indigenous heritage with land-based lessons and language courses built into a college preparatory model. High schoolers at NACA graduate at much higher rates and tend to outperform their peers in Albuquerque Public Schools — which authorizes the charter — and throughout New Mexico. Over the past decade, NACA’s academic track record and reputation with families and tribal leaders has spurred the creation of a network of schools designed to overhaul education for Native students across the American West.

At 13 campuses in five states, the NACA Inspired Schools Network supports tribal communities that have found little support in traditional K-12 systems and want academic alternatives that reflect their hopes and expectations for the next generation. Each school approaches that mission very differently, and with varying results. Some have struggled to keep their doors open, testing the Albuquerque-based network’s ability to sustain its success beyond the flagship school. Still, network leaders plan to continue expanding and hope to present the NACA model as a way to grant Indigenous families the self-determination and sovereignty that has been denied to them for generations.

“In 150 years, we moved from a foreign, abusive, violent structure to now, where maybe our communities have something to say about where education is going,” said Anpao Duta Flying Earth (Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Akimel O’odham), the network’s executive director. “We’re leading these schools. We’re in the classrooms. It’s not just maintaining status quo. It’s how we’re pushing the edge of what’s possible.”

Related: 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a sophomore year?

NACA was born out of an urgent need to reimagine education for Indigenous youth: In 2005, 

three quarters of Native American students graduated on time in the Albuquerque school district, compared to 87 percent of all students, according to state data. Only about 1 in 4 students identifying as American Indian tested proficient in math, while proficiency rates in reading and science hovered closer to 40 percent. A string of suicides in the city’s Native communities, especially among youth, shocked educators.

In response, Native administrators within the district started meeting with families, college graduates and tribal leaders to discuss what a better education for Native students might look like. More than 200 people weighed in, often sharing their poor experiences in traditional schools, such as pervasively low expectations and a lack of cultural awareness among teachers. Community members prioritized three things in their dream school for Native youth: secure cultural identities, college preparation and holistic wellness.

Those conversations prompted Albuquerque Public Schools to authorize NACA as its first charter. Today, courses at all grade levels include Indigenous history, numeracy, land-based science and language classes in Keres, Lakota, Navajo, Tiwa, Spanish and Zuni. About two-thirds of the school’s teachers are Native American, with many alumni now leading classrooms. 

NACA requires students to take at least two college-level courses and earn internship credit. Last year, nearly 80 percent of graduates enrolled in college, up from 65 percent for the class of 2022. The school also tracks college completion rates, with 59 percent of the class of 2012 finishing within six years. Since then, the numbers have slipped to the single digits, with just 5 percent of the class of 2016 finishing within six years, according to a data analysis from the charter school network. (School officials said the decline is due to incomplete data.)

Younger students attend the K-8 campus on the former boarding school site, while the high school is located in a gleaming new tower nearby at the Central New Mexico College.

During a lunch break, 11th graders Joshua, a Navajo Nation citizen, and Tyshawn, from the Laguna Pueblo, volleyed a badminton birdie under the tower’s shadow. Both are recent transfers to NACA — Tyshawn from a private Catholic school and Joshua from a traditional public high school.

“There was nothing like this. No language class, nothing,” Joshua said of his previous school. Discussions of tribal culture were limited to a few isolated craft projects during a history unit and inaccurate portrayals of Indians at the “First Thanksgiving,” he recalled.

“Yeah, not at my school,” Tyshawn agreed, chuckling. “You had to learn that experience yourself.”

“I was the ‘only’ a lot,” added Joshua, referring to his Native identity. “We fill an entire school here.”

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

It’s only recently that the U.S. has fully acknowledged its long history of using education as a weapon against tribes. An investigative report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior in May 2022 identified more than 400 Indian boarding schools, across dozens of states and former territories, as part of a system that directly targeted children “in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation.”

The investigation found evidence of at least 53 burial sites for children. Schools renamed students with English names, cut their hair and punished them — through solitary confinement, flogging and withholding food — for speaking Native languages or practicing their traditional religions. Manual labor was a predominant part of school curricula, but often left graduates with few employable skills.

“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, said at the time of the report’s release.

According to a 2019 national survey, close to half of American Indian and Alaska Native students reported knowing “nothing” or only “a little” about their cultural heritage. A majority — between 83 percent and 91 percent — of fourth and eighth graders in the survey said they could not speak or read in their heritage language, or reported knowing a few words or phrases at most. Other studies have found significantly higher child poverty rates, lower graduation rates and lower performance on standardized exams for Native students.

As the state of education for these children continued to languish, the U.S. Department of Education in 2018 pushed for the expansion of high-quality charter schools meant to serve Native communities, among other groups it deemed educationally disadvantaged and underserved by the existing charter sector. It later published, in partnership with the National Indian Education Association, a guide to help founders and supporters of new Native American charter schools.

“The word just hasn’t gotten out about the ability to do this,” said Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of state advocacy and support at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

In its tally of about 4,300 charter schools with at least one Native American student, the Alliance counts at least 16 schools specifically dedicated to Native American cultural affirmation. Only a handful offer classes taught in an Indigenous language.

Related: College tuition breaks for Indigenous students spread, but some tribes are left out

In one of those schools, about 90 miles northeast of Albuquerque, a dozen students walked into the front office of Kha’p’o Community School with stacks of books teetering in their hands.

They’d just cleaned the shelves at the Santa Clara Pueblo library, grabbing their favorite titles in Tewa, one of the languages spoken by the Pueblo people in New Mexico. The third graders juggled the books as they traversed a courtyard ringed by adobe houses-turned-classrooms, with teacher Paul Chavarria trailing them.

Back in their classroom, Chavarria, a first-year Tewa language teacher at Kha’p’o, commenced a lesson on the language. It’s a traditionally oral language, and speakers frown on any written form. Chavarria, though, scribbled a rough translation for “stone,” “trees” and “plants” on a whiteboard to help the students learn their heritage language.

For decades, the school (then known as Santa Clara Day School) was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, or BIE, which today operates 183 schools on 64 reservations. But in 2014, after the government-appointed principal barred a Tewa teacher from campus, tribal leaders took control of the school from the federal government, said Porter Swentzell, the school’s executive director and an enrolled member of the Pueblo. That same year, the school officially joined the NACA-inspired network as a K-6 charter school with a dual language immersion model. Today, it enrolls about 90 students. 

“In our hands, language is a sacred obligation. Our job is bigger than math or ELA,” Swentzell said.. “Our story doesn’t begin with us, and it certainly won’t end with us.”

Swentzell, who served on the school board when it shifted to tribal control, recalled a rocky start for Kha’p’o. The BIE withdrew the bulk of its support, he said. Teachers and staff had to reapply for their jobs, which no longer offered salaries at the federal level. In terms of school policies, technology systems, contracts and more, “we were starting from scratch,” Swentzell said.

Then, during the pandemic, Kha’p’o’s principal left, and enrollment plummeted from 120 students to 73, as multigenerational households kept their children at home. Half of the school’s teaching positions were unfilled, largely because of its remote location and lower salaries, according to Swentzell, who took over as head of school in 2022. 

Kha’p’o wasn’t the only school in the network to lose its leader during the pandemic. And each has since struggled to get academics and operations back on track, said Flying Earth, head of the charter network. The network has tried to help: In 2022, it created a fellowship program to nurture new leaders like Swentzell, a former professor at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. The fellows meet regularly on Zoom and gather in person once a year, along with a lead teacher or executive team member who could potentially become principal one day.

Related: How one Minneapolis university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Indeed, as the network has grown, it has confronted the difficulty of recreating the “NACA sauce” — as the flagship’s principal called it — in each new tribal community.

Six Directions Indigenous School opened the same year as Kha’p’o, in the western region of the state near the Navajo Nation and Zuni Reservation. Data from the New Mexico Public Education Department shows that 1 in 5 students at the charter school tested proficient in science. About 1 in 10 students perform on grade level in math, with a slightly better rate in reading, at 14 percent. 

Aside from academic problems, students at Six Directions have protested what they view as the school’s failure to fulfill its charter of serving Native youth. “It’s right there on all the signs: ‘This is an Indigenous school,’” said Caleb, a 14-year-old Hopi freshman. “This is supposed to be an opportunity for us to know our culture. These teachers weren’t doing that.”

At the start of the school year, in August, Caleb and other high schoolers at the K-12 campus staged an impromptu walkout to protest what they described as a revolving door of teachers hired from overseas and ongoing vacancies for language and culture classes. As of late fall, the entire school had just one core teacher, in science.

The walkout happened during Rebecca Niiha’s first week on the job as new head administrator of Six Directions. A former teacher who has worked on the Zuni and Navajo reservations, Niiha, who is Hopi, had admired Six Directions from afar. But she described finding its academic achievement and school climate as “degenerative” on day one.

After the walkout, two more teachers quit. Then the school’s current landlord announced it planned to sell the property, leaving Niiha unsure if she’d have to find a new location. In January, Six Directions received a warning from the state about its poor performance. 

The network’s support of struggling schools, like Six Directions, can only go so far. It does not directly authorize any charter and has limited ability to hold the schools accountable. 

Still, the network dispatches experts on finance, community engagement, student experience, curriculum and professional development. On a weekday last year, a team from the network met with Niiha to discuss options for the school’s location, training for teachers and an upcoming charter reauthorization. The network also recently partnered with AmeriCorps to place Indigenous educators in schools to offer classroom support, tutoring and mentoring, and has worked with individual tribes to certify teachers in heritage languages.

“Once a school’s created, we’re in it for the long haul together,” said Ben Calabaza, Kewa – Santa Domingo Pueblo and a spokesperson for the charter network.

Ultimately, the network wants to avoid being forced to close another of its member schools, as happened last year when Denver Public Schools shuttered the American Indian Academy. That school opened in fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and suffered from low enrollment and poor finances, according to the charter’s board of directors.

Flying Earth acknowledged the challenges of running a charter network that spans schools in several states. He said the charter model isn’t, on its own, a solution for poor educational outcomes for Native students. But he added that the NACA-inspired network has done what it promised: offered tribal communities a chance to have agency in building a dream school for their Native youth.

“How do we use the structures of education today, including charter schools, to lift up the genius that’s always been there, since time immemorial?” Flying Earth said, referring to the “genius” of traditional ways of knowing in Native communities. “The namesake school of NACA serves as an example of how one community did it.”

Many students, long after graduation, continue to contribute to that community. Some have returned as teachers and school staff. Emmet Yepa Jr., Jemez Pueblo, commuted two hours each way to attend NACA in downtown Albuquerque when he was in high school. Now, at 30, he sings every year at the school’s annual feast day — a traditional celebration among New Mexico pueblos.

“What attracted me to NACA was just the community,” he said. “They really emphasize your culture and holistic wellbeing.”

Yepa earned a Grammy Award as a child and later graduated from NACA as part of its inaugural class in 2012. From there, he went on to the University of New Mexico and now works for an Albuquerque nonprofit that includes land-based and outdoor education in civic leadership programs for young people.

Based on his positive experience, his siblings enrolled at NACA. His younger sister graduated  last year and now attends UNM, while his younger brother is a sixth grader.

“It’s hard to get into NACA now because there’s a waiting list,” Yepa said. “Thankfully he got a spot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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AURORA, Colo. — Until early this year, Alberto, 11, had never stepped into a classroom.

The closest school was many miles from his village in Venezuela, and Alberto’s father never allowed him or his mom, Yuliver, to stray far, according to mother and son. The school also charged far more than they could afford.

“I want to learn to become somebody in life,” Alberto said through an interpreter. “I’m going to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to go school, but dad wouldn’t let me.”

Yuliver, who has a third-grade education, stepped in as Alberto’s teacher, sharing what she knew about numbers and letters. He loved those lessons, and wanted to know more. (The surnames of Alberto and Yuliver, like those of other migrants in this story, are omitted due to privacy or safety concerns.)

Last summer, Yuliver and her son left their home country, walking through deserts and jungles across two continents before they arrived in Denver, where Yuliver’s sister lives, six months later. Alberto enrolled in suburban Aurora Public Schools as a fourth grader, and has learned enough English that his teachers hide their smirks when he makes a particularly witty, and inappropriate, pun. In math, however, he’s grades behind and even in Spanish struggles to follow his teacher’s instruction.

Alberto is one of approximately 2,800 migrant and refugee children who’ve arrived in Aurora, located just east of Denver, this academic year. The Denver school district — the state’s largest, with a total enrollment of about 88,000 — similarly has enrolled at least 3,700 newcomer students since last summer. In May 2023, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started sending immigrant families by the busloads to the Colorado capital, adding it to a destination list of other Democrat-led cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Aurora and Denver, like many school systems in Colorado, have long welcomed students new to the United States. In recent years, they have designated specific campuses to serve as resource hubs for migrant and refugee families, offering wraparound supports, integration services and dual-language programs. But the ongoing surge of immigrants — local educators hesitate to call it a crisis — have exposed clear signs of strain: Classrooms don’t have enough seats for students. Teachers are fatigued by large class sizes, discipline issues and new students showing up each day. And state and local leaders are increasingly resistant to helping shoulder the costs.

The city council in Aurora, for example, recently passed a resolution restricting migrants from receiving local public services, a move that opponents fear will place undocumented residents at risk if they experience a fire, medical emergency or violent crime. But when it comes to schools, requirements under the U.S. Constitution are clear: States are obligated to allow children living in the U.S. without legal documentation to access a basic education. That’s created a new dilemma for schools in communities like Aurora and Denver: The steady arrival of newcomers has all but reversed years of declining enrollment, staving off budget cuts and layoffs, but the costs associated with addressing the new arrivals’ basic needs are steep.

“It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. You have to serve these kids,” said Julie Sugarman, an associate director for K-12 education research at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “There are civil rights that support these kids, but it does come with real, significant costs.”

Related: How one district handles the trauma undocumented students bring to school

Although migration fell at the start of the pandemic in 2020, it rebounded quickly, with the number of migrants encountered along the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. Border Patrol more than quadrupling in 2021.

In a typical year, Denver Public Schools enrolls about 500 students who’ve just moved to the country. The district so far this year has been receiving an average of 250 each week, according to Adrienne Endres, the district’s executive director of multilingual education.

“We have some less-than-ideal circumstances,” she said. “We have some very full classrooms. We hear most from teachers, ‘This is kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot more kids and they all need a lot more from me.’”

The majority of migrant families in Denver have chosen to place their kids in schools with existing bilingual programs, Endres added. But many students who have little, or any, formal experience with education find a better fit in one of the district’s newcomer centers. The city opened its first center back in 1999, in an unused gym at Denver South High School, as a magnet program for refugee children who speak neither Spanish nor English.

The district has since expanded the program to six campuses, where students learn literacy skills for one to two semesters before gradually moving into general classes.

On a recent morning at South High’s newcomer center, teacher Karen Vittetoe worked with 14 teenagers from nearly as many countries — including Burundi, El Salvador and Sudan — on how to tell time and describe a daily schedule in English.

“Marta goes to work at 9:50 in the morning. Is that 9:15 or 9:50? Do you hear the difference?” she asked as two teaching assistants walked in the classroom.

The adults together speak six different languages, allowing them to help during small group and one-on-one instruction during the 90-minute period. But that’s not nearly enough in Vittetoe’s larger second period, where 31 students speak 11 different languages.

“Can you imagine?” she said. “I don’t even have enough desks for them all.”

One of her students, 18-year-old Momena, spoke no English when she first enrolled at South High about eight months ago. Her family left Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade. 

“I like everything about this school — except the food,” Momena said. “They have a nice curriculum and also kind teachers.”

Like her older brother, a nurse, Momena hopes to one day work in the medical field.

“This is very important for me,” she said of getting an education in the U.S. “I want to go to college, go into nursing. I try hard every day.”

Unlike Momena, most students in Vittetoe’s classes arrived after October 1 — the date on which Colorado determines its annual funding for K-12 schools based on enrollment. Only 10 other states rely on a single count day to allocate funding to districts. And in Denver, that’s required central administrators to draw from cash reserves and other department budgets to make up for the roughly $17.5 million that the district hasn’t received in per-pupil funding despite enrolling so many migrant and refugee children since last fall.

State lawmakers in February fast-tracked a plan to provide $24 million — to be split among districts across Colorado — to ease the strain on local school budgets. Gov. Jared Polis signed the legislation in early March, but the money has yet to trickle down to local districts.

“Without action in D.C., it’s up to each state if schools get any support at all,” said Jill Koyama, vice dean of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University’s teachers college.

Related: Convincing parents to send their children to a San Francisco public school

At Boston P-8 School in Aurora, the first few weeks made for a rough transition for Alberto.

He failed a vision screening test and received a voucher for an eye exam, but passed it. Teachers eventually determined he had such little schooling that he simply couldn’t identify letters to follow along in class. The school nurse also learned about trauma Alberto had experienced back home and on his journey to this country. School staff would have placed him with a therapist on campus, but no one on the mental health support team speaks Spanish. Many newcomers, including Alberto, have been referred to an online therapy service.

The school, however, had recently hired Danielle Pukansky, one of two English language development teachers who, in a tiny and cramped room, lead daily 45-minute classes for multilingual learners like Alberto.

“The trauma showed when he first got here,” Pukansky recalled, noting he had been aggressive toward other students. “How to re-regulate when these big emotions come up in such a little body, that is part of my background — and thank goodness.”

She said many of her students come to school worried about deportation, insecure housing and simply being misunderstood. “I try to help the kids not feel that fear,” Pukansky said.

Boston P-8 is one of six community schools in Aurora that provide intensive support services — such as medical care, food, clothing and adult education and language classes — to help stabilize families so kids can focus on academics in class. It’s similar to the community hub model that Denver Public Schools operates at six campuses. And as of 2022, the state has allowed low-performing schools to convert to the model as part of a school’s turnaround plan.

Late on a Wednesday afternoon, Yuliver sat in Boston P-8’s community room with her head in her hands. A worsening toothache had kept her awake for days, and made it hard to look for work or an immigration lawyer who might help her. After making a couple calls, a staff member booked her a tooth extraction, free of charge, at a nearby dental clinic.

“This is the only place I feel supported,” Yuliver said. “Clothes, Wi-Fi, food, shoes — they help with everything.”

Upstairs, in an afterschool science program, Alberto was learning about the education required to become a dentist.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Schools’ mission shifted during the pandemic with healthcare, shelter and adult ed

In Aurora and Denver, which both faced enrollment declines during the pandemic, the influx of migrant students this year presents an ironic silver lining: By contrast, enrollment statewide has continued to fall for two straight years — with the largest decreases in pre-kindergarten through first grade — prompting school closures, budget cuts and potential layoffs.

In the Denver area, the surge of students from other countries has more than made up the difference.

So far this year, Ellis Elementary in southeast Denver has absorbed 60 more students than initially expected. Several classes are packed with 35 students — the maximum allowed under the district’s contract with teachers. A week before even more students arrived in late February, Principal Jamie Roybal hired two novice educators. They had only a couple days to convert a teachers lounge and music room into their first classrooms.

Roybal said that on hard days many of her staff members contemplate leaving the profession. “We’re swimming in the deep end,” she said, looking into a classroom. “That’s a first-grade teacher with 35 newcomers. That’s a lot. When she goes home, she’s exhausted.”

By winter break, Hamilton Middle School in Denver had already absorbed 100 additional students over its projected enrollment. Priscilla Rahn, a Republican candidate for the Douglas County commission who teaches band and orchestra at Hamilton, said it’s been a joy to welcome so many new musicians who have never had an instrument of their own.

Still, Rahn wondered whether the community’s generosity had been exhausted.

“We’re cutting city services,” she said, referring to the mayor’s budget. “As a teacher, we can’t ask if you’re legal. It doesn’t matter. I teach all kids. But as a city, we’re pretty much at capacity. We cannot take any more families, because we don’t have the money or the space.”

At Centro de los Trabajadores, a local labor rights group, executive director Mayra Juárez-Denis has for months fielded calls from recent migrants trying to secure legal work or file complaints about employers who exploited them. Lately, her phone started ringing with rants from teachers overwhelmed with the current crisis.

The organization has tried to partner with Denver Public Schools, mostly to host a worker center or hiring fair for hourly jobs. Scott Pribble, a spokesman for the district, said it has looked for parents with legal documentation to work in cafeterias or get licensed to drive a bus.

“We want to help the district with labor integration for parents,” Juárez-Denis said. “They need not just immigrant teachers who serve Spanish speakers, but every staff position can use someone who is already part of the immigrant community.”

Related: School support staffers stuck earning poverty level wages

At some campuses, Denver principals have been able to identify and recruit migrant parents who used to teach in their home countries, but for out-of-country teachers, the checklist of requirements they must meet for eligibility to work in the state long. At Ellis Elementary, for example, a classroom aide from Venezuela finally got her teaching license approved in Colorado — three years after she first applied to teach in the U.S.

The latest federal bipartisan immigration reform proposal, which collapsed in Congress in February, would have expedited access to work authorization for asylum seekers, potentially allowing people like Yuliver to begin employment before the current six-month waiting period.

Without a job, Yuliver has struggled to afford an apartment — even one without hot water or central heating — for her and Alberto. She tried to sell household goods to shoppers on the street and would like to work in a beauty shop, doing nails and hair. Already, though, Yuliver has considered making the trek back to Venezuela if she can’t find employment.

“I wish for him to keep studying,” she said of Alberto. “He’s intelligent. He just wants to learn everything.”

Alberto, meanwhile, said he misses his friends and swimming at the beach back home. But here he’s learning to ride a bike — provided by the community school program — and has already made five new friends at Boston P-8.

During a sunny but chilly recess, Alberto drew a heart with wood chips on the ground in his school’s playground. He placed a stray feather in the middle, and said it was for those friends he’d made at his first-ever school.

*Correction: The photo credits in this story have been updated with the correct name for the photographer, Rebecca Slezak.

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

The post After enrollment slump, Denver-area schools struggle to absorb a surge of migrant and refugee children appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Parece que me colocaron aquí”, dijo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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TULSA, Okla. — Amoni and Zoe scattered the contents of a sandwich bag full of fruit-flavored candy across their desks as part of a math lesson on ratios.

“What does it mean to have 50 percent?” their teacher, Kelly Woodfin, asked the sixth graders in her advanced math class. “What does it mean to have half?”

Amoni and Zoe, both 11, ate just one piece of candy each, as they converted the share of green apples or pink strawberries from their bag into fractions, decimals and percents. When they got stumped on a strategy for turning a decimal into a percentage, the pair’s arms shot in the air.

“I think, you go two steps over, and to the left,” Amoni said, her voice trailing into a question.

“You’ve been doing this for two weeks, sister,” Woodfin playfully chided her. “I don’t know why you’re doubting yourself.”

Years ago, when Woodfin attended Union Public Schools from kindergarten through eighth grade, she sat in fairly homogenous classrooms. Woodfin recalled her peers as predominantly white, a legacy of families moving to the suburbs as Tulsa schools desegregated during the 1950s. But when she returned to teach at Union in 2012, the white student population had shrunk to a little more than half of total enrollment.

Until recently, however, students in Union’s advanced math classes remained mostly white. The accelerated track in middle and high school drew mostly from elementary schools in affluent neighborhoods, where students tended to perform better on a pre-algebra placement test that they had one chance to take as fifth graders. But on a recent winter day, only two of Woodfin’s students identified as white and more than a third were still learning English.

The transformation of Woodfin’s class rosters represent more than a general shift in who attends Union schools, where today only one in four students is white. It’s also the result of a years-long campaign to identify and promote more students from underrepresented backgrounds into the district’s most challenging math courses.

Elsewhere, concerns about who gets access to advanced math have led districts to end the tracking of students into different math classes by perceived ability or to remove accelerated classes altogether in the name of equity. Union, by contrast, has attempted to find a middle ground. The district, which overlaps part of Tulsa and its southeast suburbs, continues to track students into separate math classes beginning in sixth grade. But it has also added new ways beyond the one-time placement test for students to qualify for higher level math courses, and increased support — including in-school tutoring and longer class periods — for students who’ve shown promise in the subject.

Enrollment data suggest the effort to make higher-level math accessible to more students had started to yield results before the pandemic. But there have been challenges: In the last few years, fewer students overall have enrolled in advanced math classes, although the declines for Black and Hispanic students have been less steep than for other groups. Anti-teacher sentiment, on top of Oklahoma’s low teacher salaries, have made it difficult to hire math educators, administrators here say. At Union High School, an Algebra II position remained vacant for more than a year.

But the district remains committed to its changes. Recently, principals and veteran math educators have persuaded some former students to join Union’s teaching ranks. Shannan Bittle, a secondary math specialist for Union, said new academic programs — like aviation and construction — could offer students more ways to apply higher levels of math in lucrative jobs.

“We try really, really hard not to keep people out” of accelerated math, she said. “But we do our best to give them the tools to succeed.”

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

Taking algebra or higher in middle school places a student on the path to calculus in high school, which opens the door to selective colleges and is considered a gateway course for many high-paying STEM careers. Federal education data shows white students enroll in high school calculus at nearly eight times the rate of their Black peers and about triple the average for Hispanic students.

“There are many Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds who have demonstrated an aptitude and are yearning for more — yet they are systemically denied access to advanced math courses,” wrote the authors of a December 2023 report from nonprofits Education Trust and Just Equations. “This practice — and mindset — must change.”

Still, approaches school districts have taken to increase diversity in math have inspired controversy.

In San Francisco, the school district eliminated accelerated math at middle and high schools in 2014 to end the segregating of classrooms by ability, prompting parental outcry. Three years later, Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts began dismantling its policy of tracking students into either accelerated or grade-level math. Near Detroit, the Troy school board voted to remove advanced math for middle schools beginning later this year.

Similarly, the California state board of education last year adopted new curriculum guidelines that, among other ideas, encourage schools to delay algebra until ninth grade. The board insisted the framework “affirms California’s commitment to ensuring equity and excellence in math learning for all students.” But critics — including math and science professors — have suggested it does the opposite, by denying students the academic preparation they need to succeed.

“I see the value, in theory,” Rebecka Peterson, a Union High math teacher and 2023 National Teacher of the Year, said of efforts like California’s. But, she added, “Kids are so unique, and one size fits all — as a mom, it’s not what I want for my son.”

Peterson started working for Union schools about 12 years ago, teaching math classes ranging from Intermediate Algebra to Advanced Placement Calculus. Early on, Peterson noticed the demographic split in her classes: “We’re a very culturally rich district, and yet, my calculus classes were mostly white,” she said.

She decided to talk with her principal at the time, Lisa Witcher. The pair discovered that, although Union High enrolled students from all 13 elementary campuses, Peterson’s calculus students primarily started at just three — the whitest and wealthiest of Union’s elementaries.

Shortly after, district administration tapped Witcher to spearhead a new early college program. She began recruiting students who had completed geometry as freshmen, but found only a tenth of Black freshmen in Union were eligible to enroll in that class. They hadn’t taken the prerequisite, Algebra I, in eighth grade.

“That sparked some uncomfortable conversations,” said Witcher, who retired from the district in 2021.

Ultimately, administrators traced the cause of the narrow pipeline into advanced middle and high school math to the fifth grade. That’s when schools administered a heavily word-based exam, which students had one chance to pass. District officials said the high-stakes exam disadvantaged two growing populations in Union schools: kids who were still learning English, and children from low-income families, whose parents couldn’t afford private tutors.

This discovery prompted a series of changes, beginning about a decade ago. The school district did not eliminate the fifth-grade exam as an entryway into advanced math, but students can now attempt the test multiple times. Elementary schools offer math tutors starting in the third grade, with after-school programs for students struggling in the subject. Teachers can refer promising students for sixth grade advanced math, regardless of how they did on the placement exam. A central administrator also reviews student grades and growth on proficiency exams to automatically enroll students into an accelerated class. (Parents are sent a letter notifying them of the automatic enrollment, at which point they can choose to opt out.)

“We hunt them down from every corner of the school district,” said Todd Nelson, a former math teacher who now oversees data, research and testing for the district.

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

Since 2016, the diversity of students enrolled in the district’s advanced math courses has increased. Hispanic students now make up 29 percent of enrollment, up from 18 percent; Black and multiracial students each represent 10 percent of enrollment, up from about 8 percent in 2016.

More recently, however, participation in higher-level math has dipped in Union schools, across all student subgroups. District data show the trend, especially in high school, started before the pandemic. But administrators say the disruption of school lockdowns contributed to a lingering aversion to signing up for challenging courses. Still, the share of Black, Hispanic and multiracial students enrolling in Union’s advanced math classes has fallen at much lower rates than those of Asian and white students.

“We see this as the long-term process of the work that we’re doing, as opposed to fixing the problem in one year,” Nelson added.

In Woodfin’s sixth grade class, 11-year-old Vianca wasn’t sure how she got into advanced math. She remembered taking a “super hard” test as a fifth grader and registered for regular math in middle school.

“I guess I was just placed in here,” she said.

Vianca said the subject has been a struggle this year. But a recent shift in sixth grade schedules to add more time for math means she has 90 minutes — instead of just 45 — with Woodfin each day.

“She always slows down” when it feels like too much, Vianca said of her teacher. “I can ask for help.”

Doubling the amount of math that both sixth graders take in Union has come with a cost. Some parents bristled at the reduction of extracurriculars, like art or music. The change required doubling the number of secondary math teachers, and principals already had a hard time recruiting teachers for those subjects. (Last school year, the turnover rate for Oklahoma teachers reached 24 percent, the highest rate in a decade, according to state data.)

The lack of teacher diversity also complicates the district’s overall mission of increasing diversity in advanced math, Bittle acknowledged. Only two out of about 90 middle and high school math teachers identify as Black, and efforts to recruit at Langston University, the state’s only historically Black university, have yet to prove successful. Bittle added that Oklahoma’s low pay for teachers doesn’t help: Schools in neighboring states tend to offer much more than the roughly $40,000 starting salary for teachers in the Sooner State.

Research on the detracking debate presents a complicated picture. About the same time that the district made its changes, one international study suggested steering bright students into accelerated classes could exacerbate the rich-poor divide in schools. Another paper, published by the Brookings Institution in 2016, found that Black and Hispanic students scored better on Advanced Placement exams in states that tracked more eighth graders into different ability levels in math.

“This will remain murky,” said Kristen Hengtgen, a senior analyst with the Education Trust. “Detracking seems to have good intentions, but we just haven’t seen it work conclusively yet.”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Union remains committed to its efforts, though. And in a pin-drop quiet Calculus class, where only the hum of the HVAC system disrupted the scratching of pencils, students remained committed to their own hard work.

Lizeth Rosas sat in the back row. Wearing bright blue smocks for a nursing program she had later in the day, the 18-year-old scribbled notes on how to find the average value of friction with a given interval.

“Any questions?” her teacher invited. “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

Only eight of the 22 students in the class identified as white. Rosas first got into an advanced math as a seventh grader, she said. Last year, to her surprise, a teacher recommended she take the Advanced Placement course.

“In the beginning, I questioned myself — a lot,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was ready. It’s kind of a lot to process, and we move so fast.”

Rosas plans to work as a licensed practical nurse after graduation, and expects conversions of medications and IV fluids will require math. Her father, who runs his own remodeling company, can’t help with her calculus work, she said. But, her nursing program, part of a high school extension program at the nearby Tulsa Technology Center, offers academic tutoring.

“I don’t really need it,” Rosas said. “The teachers here are really helpful. They just kind of help me. They remind me I can do it.”

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

The post How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Mireya Barrera no quería pelear.

Durante años, se sentó en las reuniones con los docentes de educación especial de su hijo, luchando por mantener una sonrisa mientras entendía poco de lo que decían. En las ocasiones poco comunes en que se pedía ayuda a otros docentes que hablaban el idioma de Barrera, el español, las conversaciones seguían siendo vacilantes porque no eran intérpretes calificados.

Pero cuando su hijo Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, Barrera decidió invitar a un voluntario bilingüe de una organización local sin ánimo de lucro para que se sentara con ella y recordara sus derechos al equipo escolar.

“Quería a alguien de mi lado”, dijo Barrera, cuyo hijo tiene autismo, a través de un intérprete. “Durante todo este tiempo, no nos estaban facilitando las cosas. Eso provocó muchas lágrimas”. 

Independientemente del idioma que hablen los padres en casa, tienen el derecho civil de recibir información importante de los educadores de sus hijos en un idioma que entiendan. En el caso de los estudiantes con discapacidad, la ley federal es aún más clara: las escuelas “deben tomar todas las medidas necesarias”, incluidos los servicios de interpretación y traducción, para que los padres puedan participar de forma significativa en la educación de sus hijos.

Pero, a veces, las escuelas de todo el país no prestan esos servicios.

Las familias que no hablan inglés se ven obligadas a asistir a las reuniones sobre el progreso de sus hijos sin poder opinar ni preguntar a los educadores cómo pueden ayudar. Las diferencias culturales y lingüísticas pueden convencer a algunos padres de no cuestionar lo que ocurre en la escuela, un desequilibrio de poder que, según los defensores, hace que algunos niños se queden sin un apoyo fundamental. En caso de ser necesario, no es infrecuente que las escuelas encarguen a los estudiantes bilingües la interpretación para sus familias, poniéndolos en la posición de describir sus propios defectos a sus padres y tutores.

“Eso es totalmente inapropiado, en todos los sentidos posibles, y poco realista”, dice Diane Smith Howard, abogada principal de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Si al niño no le va especialmente bien en una asignatura académica, ¿por qué confiaría en que su hijo adolescente se lo contara?”.

Los distritos escolares culpan a la falta de recursos. Dicen que no tienen dinero para contratar a más intérpretes o a agencias de servicios lingüísticos y que, aunque lo tuvieran, no hay suficientes intérpretes calificados para hacer el trabajo.

En Washington y en algunos otros estados, la cuestión ha empezado a recibir más atención. Los legisladores estatales de Olympia presentaron este año una ley bipartidista para reforzar los derechos civiles federales en el código estatal. Los sindicatos de docentes de Seattle y Chicago negociaron recientemente, y consiguieron, servicios de interpretación durante las reuniones de educación especial. Y los distritos escolares se enfrentan a una creciente amenaza de demandas de los padres, o incluso a una investigación federal, si no se toman en serio el acceso lingüístico.

Aun así, los esfuerzos por ampliar el acceso lingüístico en la educación especial se enfrentan a una ardua batalla, debido al escaso número de intérpretes capacitados, la falta de cumplimiento a nivel estatal y el escaso financiamiento del Congreso (a pesar de que en 1974 prometió cubrir casi la mitad del costo adicional que supone para las escuelas proporcionar servicios de educación especial, el gobierno federal nunca lo ha hecho). El proyecto de ley bipartidista de Washington para ofrecer más protecciones a las familias fracasó repentinamente, después de que los legisladores estatales lo despojaran de disposiciones clave y los defensores retiraran su apoyo.

El sistema de educación especial puede ser “increíblemente difícil para todos”, dijo Ramona Hattendorf, directora de defensa de The Arc of King County, que promueve los derechos de las personas con discapacidad. “Luego todo se agrava cuando se introduce el idioma en la mezcla”. En todo el país, aproximadamente 1 de cada 10 estudiantes que califican para recibir servicios de educación especial también se identifican como estudiantes de inglés, según datos federales de educación, y esa proporción está creciendo. Cerca de 791,000 estudiantes de inglés participaron en educación especial en 2020, un aumento de casi el 30 % desde 2012. En más de una docena de estados, incluido Washington, el aumento fue aún mayor.

A medida que crece su número, también aumenta la frustración de sus padres con los servicios lingüísticos.

Durante el año escolar 2021-22, la defensora del pueblo en materia educación del estado de Washington recibió casi 1,200 quejas de los padres sobre las escuelas. Su principal preocupación, en todos los grupos raciales y demográficos, fue el acceso y la inclusión en la educación especial. La defensora del pueblo principal en materia de educación, Jinju Park, calcula que entre el 50 % y el 70 % de las llamadas que recibe la agencia son sobre educación especial, y que el 80 % de ellas son de clientes que necesitan servicios de interpretación.

Mientras que la mayoría de los estados conceden a las escuelas un máximo de 60 días desde que se remite a un estudiante a los servicios de educación especial para determinar si califica, las escuelas de Washington pueden tardar hasta medio año escolar. Y si un padre necesita servicios de interpretación o traducción, la espera puede durar aún más.

“Las leyes actuales no apoyan la participación plena de los padres”, escribió Park a los legisladores estatales en apoyo a la primera versión del proyecto de ley 1305 de la Cámara de Representantes, propuesta que finalmente fracasó. “Los padres para los que el inglés puede que no sea su lengua materna”, añadió, “a menudo, se ven abrumados por la información e incapaces de participar de forma significativa en el proceso”.

Barrera, cuyo hijo asistió al distrito escolar de Auburn, al sur de Seattle, dijo que, a menudo, se sentía excluida de su aprendizaje.

En el kínder, tras el diagnóstico de autismo de Ian, su equipo de educación especial llegó a la conclusión de que necesitaba un paraeducador asignado a tiempo completo, dijo Barrera. Recurrió a Google Translate y a otros padres para que la ayudaran a redactar correos electrónicos preguntando por qué no recibió ese apoyo hasta tercer grado. Sus solicitudes de copias traducidas de documentos legales quedaron en gran parte sin respuesta, mencionó, hasta que un director le dijo que la traducción era demasiado costosa.

Cuando Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, el acoso escolar y su seguridad se convirtieron en la principal preocupación de Barrera. Una vez llegó a casa sin un mechón de pelo, cuenta. A pesar de las repetidas llamadas y correos electrónicos a sus docentes, Barrera dijo que nunca recibió una explicación.

Además, cuando pidió ir a la escuela para observar, un docente le dijo: “Ni siquiera habla inglés. ¿Qué sentido tiene?”. Vicki Alonzo, portavoz del distrito de Auburn, afirma que el auge de la población inmigrante en la región en los últimos años ha llevado al distrito a destinar más recursos a ayudar a las familias cuya lengua materna no es el inglés. Casi un tercio de sus estudiantes son multilingües, dijo, y hablan alrededor de 85 idiomas diferentes en casa.

En el año 2019-20, el distrito gastó alrededor de $175,000 en servicios de interpretación y traducción, dijo; el año escolar pasado, esa cifra fue de más de $450,000.

Alonzo señaló que el distrito no recibió financiamiento adicional para esos servicios, que incluyeron alrededor de 1,500 reuniones con intérpretes y la traducción de más de 3,000 páginas de documentos.

El problema del acceso lingüístico es “un fenómeno nacional”, dijo Smith Howard, de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Es un problema de recursos y también una cuestión de respeto, dignidad y comprensión, que todos los padres deberían recibir”.

Los docentes también están frustrados.

El sindicato de docentes de Seattle protestó y retrasó el inicio de las clases el año pasado por unas demandas que incluían servicios de interpretación y traducción en educación especial. El contrato final, que dura hasta 2025, exige que los miembros del personal tengan acceso a diversos servicios que proporcionen traducción telefónica (un intérprete en directo) o de texto (en el caso de documentos escritos). El objetivo de esta disposición es garantizar que no se pida al personal bilingüe que traduzca si no forma parte de su trabajo.

Los docentes dicen que estas herramientas han sido útiles, pero solo en cierta medida: en ocasiones poco comunes hay intérpretes telefónicos disponibles para los idiomas menos comunes, como el amárico, y son frecuentes los problemas técnicos, como la interrupción de las llamadas.

La disponibilidad de intérpretes “no es tan constante como nos gustaría”, afirma Ibi Holiday, docente de educación especial de la escuela primaria Rising Star de Seattle.

También hay una cuestión de contexto. Es posible que los traductores no tengan experiencia en educación especial, por lo que las familias pueden salir de una reunión sin entender todas las opciones, lo cual puede ralentizar el proceso significativamente.

“Para muchas familias, la escuela de su país funciona de forma completamente diferente”, explica Mari Rico, directora del Centro de Desarrollo Infantil Jose Marti de El Centro de la Raza, un programa bilingüe de educación temprana. “Traducir no bastaba; tenía que enseñarles el sistema”.

Muchas escuelas del distrito de Seattle cuentan con personal multilingüe, pero el número y la diversidad de idiomas hablados no es constante, afirma Rico. Y existe un mayor riesgo de que el caso de un estudiante se pase por alto o se estanque debido a las barreras lingüísticas. Dijo que ha tenido que intervenir cuando las familias han pasado meses sin una reunión del programa de educación individualizada, incluso cuando su hijo estaba recibiendo servicios.

Hattendorf, de The Arc del condado de King, dijo que las soluciones tecnológicas más económicas, como las que utiliza Seattle, ofrecen cierta ayuda, pero su calidad varía mucho. Y los servicios pueden no ofrecer a los padres tiempo suficiente para procesar información complicada y hacer preguntas de seguimiento, explicó.

Al sur de Seattle, los Barrera decidieron cambiar a Ian de escuela secundaria.

Se graduó este año, pero la ley federal garantiza sus servicios de educación especial tres años más. Ian asiste ahora a un programa de transición para estudiantes con discapacidad, donde aprenderá habilidades para la vida, como conseguir un trabajo.

“Sabemos que, con ayuda, puede hacer lo que quiera”, dijo Barrera.

Ya, añadió, “todo es diferente. Los docentes intentan encontrar la mejor manera de comunicarse conmigo”.

Este artículo sobre los servicios de interpretación fue elaborado por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin ánimo de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, en colaboración con The Seattle Times.

The post Los padres de estudiantes de educación especial que no hablan inglés se enfrentan a otro obstáculo appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last year, Arizona became the first state in the nation to offer universal school choice for all families.

State leaders promised families roughly $7,000 a year to spend on private schools and other nonpublic education options, dangling the opportunity for parents to pull their kids out of what some conservatives called “failing government schools.”

But now, some private schools across the state are hiking their tuition by thousands of dollars. That risks pricing the students that lawmakers said they intended to serve out of private schools, in some cases limiting those options to wealthier families and those who already attended private institutions.

Critics of Arizona’s empowerment scholarship accounts, or ESAs, cite the tuition increases as evidence of what they’ve warned about for years: Universal school choice, rather than giving students living in poverty an opportunity to attend higher-quality schools, would largely serve as a subsidy for the affluent.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs,” said Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group. “This doesn’t help low-income families.”

A Hechinger Report analysis of dozens of private school websites revealed that, among 55 that posted their tuition rates, nearly all raised their prices since 2022. Some schools made modest increases, often in line with or below the overall inflation rate last year of around 6 percent. But at nearly half of the schools, tuition increased in at least some grades by 10 percent or more. In five of those cases, schools hiked tuition by more than 20 percent – much higher than even the steep inflation that hit the Phoenix metro area and well beyond what an ESA could cover.

Nationally, a dozen other states now offer ESAs, also known as education savings accounts, that incentivize parents to withdraw their kids from the public K-12 system. Another 14 states offer vouchers, which allow families to direct most or all of their students’ per pupil funding to a private school. As the programs grow in number, they offer a test of subsidized school choice — a longtime goal of the political right — and its effectiveness in serving kids from all backgrounds.   

Related: Florida just expanded vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

As of September, nearly 62,000 students in Arizona have received an ESA — more than twice the number that received the aid in the same month last year. Participating students receive 90 percent of what the state would spend to educate them at a public school; children with disabilities can access much higher funding. Recent state data pegs the median ESA award at just under $7,200. Families can spend their ESAs on almost any education-related expenses, such as private school tuition, tutoring and homeschool supplies. 

Before Arizona expanded eligibility for ESAs last year, proponents of the program argued the median award would cover median tuition at private elementary schools and about three quarters of the median rate at private high schools. Now, the recent rise in tuition may price more Arizona families out of the nation’s most expansive experiment in school choice.

For example, the cost of enrollment for seventh and eighth graders at Arrowhead Montessori, in Peoria, soared to $15,000, an increase of $4,200. In Mesa, tuition at Redeemer Christian School rose by nearly a quarter across most grades; families of high schoolers now pay $12,979, approximately $2,500 higher than the year prior. Similarly, at Desert Garden Montessori, in Phoenix, middle and high school tuition is now $16,000, nearly 24 percent higher than last year’s tuition rate of $12,950. And Saint Theresa Catholic School, also in Phoenix, reserved its biggest price hike – of about $1,800, or nearly 15 percent – for non-Catholic students in the elementary grades. Tuition for those students is now more than $14,000.

The Arrowhead, Desert Garden, Valley Christian and Redeemer Christian schools did not respond to requests for comment. ESA proponents, meanwhile, dismissed any tuition inflation as early growing pains.

Lisa Snell, a senior fellow of education at Stand Together Trust, a libertarian think tank, said that over time more private schools and educational providers will open in the state, creating greater market competition and pushing down costs. Already, Arizona has registered more than 4,000 vendors for ESAs — including retailers, tutors and even traditional school districts — a jump of 35 percent over last year.

“There’s obviously more risk with experimentation, but the only way to improve quality is to allow people to experiment,” Snell said. “We’re at the very early days.”

Related: COLUMN: Conservatives are embracing new alternative school models. Will the public?

ESAs gained prominence with Arizona’s passage of the nation’s first such program in 2011.

The state initially reserved participation to children with disabilities, but lawmakers later expanded the program to other populations, including children of active-duty military members and those attending a school that earned a D or F on state accountability report cards. Originally, most eligible students had to attend a public school for the first 100 days of the prior school year before applying for an ESA.

Then, in 2022, state leaders expanded eligibility to all K-12 students and removed the requirement of initial public school attendance. The Arizona Department of Education, which administers the program, estimated nearly half of students with an ESA have never attended public school — suggesting the state is sending millions of dollars to families who’d previously covered private school tuition out of their own pockets.

For some families, including those already enrolled in private school, the tuition hikes have caused sticker shock.

Pam Lang previously received an ESA for her son, who has autism, to attend a private school for students with disabilities. A real estate agent in the Phoenix area, she confirmed tuition at his program rose nearly $4,000. She said families received no prior notice of the increase, which showed up in an invoice before the start of a new academic year.

“Parents are faced with the possibility of having to drop other things they use ESAs for, like tutors — an expense that also increased for my son,” Lang said.

Meanwhile, some private schools encourage currently enrolled families to secure an ESA to cover the higher tuition rates, according to Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our School Arizona, a group that advocates for public education.

“It makes complete economic sense,” Lewis said. “If a family was already able to pay $11,000, what’s stopping the school from increasing tuition by the average ESA?”

Advocates of the program, however, argued families of varying income levels will make room in their budget for private schools.

Matt Ladner, a fellow with the nonprofit group EdChoice, said low-income parents might find second or third jobs to afford tuition for their kids. And, he added, even children whose families pay for private school on their own dime deserve some portion of state funding for education.

“Their parents pay taxes too,” Ladner said. “Everyone pays into the system, and everyone with a child should be entitled to an equitable share. We publicly fund education for all kids.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. Is it what parents want in the long term?

Of the 13 states with some version of ESA legislation, five — Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia — followed Arizona’s lead in granting eligibility to 100 percent of students, regardless of income level. The Grand Canyon State, though, stands apart in almost hands-off approach to the private school market.

Existing state codes set no requirements for the accreditation, approval, licensing or registration of private schools in Arizona. No public agency tracks the creation of new private schools in the state or what they charge for tuition. The state departments of education and treasury did not respond to repeated public records requests for vendor data on how families have spent their ESA awards.

“It’s a black box by design,” said Lewis.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs. This doesn’t help low-income families.”

Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group

In contrast, Iowa requires parents to use their ESA at an accredited nonpublic school — a requirement that Snell, of the Stand Together Trust, described as limiting and rigid.

She and other fans of Arizona’s law said its looser structure will open the door to many more choices for families. One option: microschools, where families bring their children together in smaller learning communities, with or without a licensed teacher. 

“It’s kind of a great thing about demand-driven systems,” Ladner said. “We don’t know what families will value and what directions they will take things.”

He also pointed to a new report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, showing that increases in private school tuition over the last 10 years were smaller in states that passed school choice policies than in those that didn’t.

Dan Hungerman, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied the impact of vouchers on private school finances, noted that the Heritage report’s main finding lacked the common elements of rigorous academic research: statistical significance and standard error.

Hungerman’s own research, conducted in partnership with an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found that voucher programs significantly boost the bottom line of churches that operate private schools and likely prevent church closures and mergers.

That concerns Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He said that high-tuition private schools were already out of reach for most students and will remain so, regardless of ESA programs. More distressing, Cowen argued, were the public campaigns — including one from a foundation backed by former U.S. education secretary Betsy Devos — aimed directly at saving Catholic education through school choice.

“Vouchers are at least partly about bailing out financially distressed church schools,” Cowen said. “Once school vouchers come to town, taxpayers become the dominant source of revenue for churches.”

In Chandler, the Seton Catholic high school sets two tuition rates: A $18,775 general rate for students enrolling in the 2023-24 academic year, and a discounted rate of $14,100 for Catholic students. The college prep academy requires families to secure verification from their parish to receive the discount.

“As a Catholic school, we work with people of all faiths, but our ministry exists to serve the Catholic church,” said Victor Serna, the school’s principal.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things. Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.”

Beth Lewis, executive director, Save our Schools Arizona

Nartowicz, with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he suspects that as more states pass ESA legislation like Arizona’s, the number of church-based schools offering discounts based on religion will also increase, allowing the use of public funds, in effect, to advantage those with particular religious views.

“We’ve never really encountered this before,” Nartowicz said.

Earlier this year, the Arizona department of education projected the expansion of ESAs would cost the state about $900 million — well above an original estimate of just $65 million. The ballooning price tag prompted Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to call on lawmakers to repeal the program’s universal eligibility. Republicans in control of both legislative chambers rejected the idea. 

ESA critics had hoped a bipartisan deal to create an oversight committee would lead to reforms of the program. But earlier this month, the committee ended its work with no proposed changes. 

Lewis, with Save our Schools Arizona, had previously said that the deal indicates even some Republicans may be worried about the financial impact of school-choice-for-all.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things,” she said. “Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.” 

But the state speaker of the House, Ben Toma, a Republican who chaired the ESA oversight committee, seemed to buck expectations that the program would significantly change soon.

“School choice is here to stay,” he wrote on social media.

Amanda Chen contributed reporting.

This story about Arizona school choice 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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SEATTLE — Mireya Barrera didn’t want a fight.

For years, she sat through meetings with her son’s special education teachers, struggling to maintain a smile as she understood little of what they said. On the rare occasions when other teachers who spoke Barrera’s language, Spanish, were asked to help, the conversations still faltered because they weren’t trained interpreters.

But by the time her son, Ian, entered high school, Barrera decided to invite a bilingual volunteer from a local nonprofit to sit with her and to remind the school team of her rights.

“I wanted someone on my side,” Barrera, whose son has autism, said through an interpreter. “All this time, they weren’t making things easy for us. It’s caused a lot of tears.”

Regardless of what language parents speak at home, they have a civil right to receive important information from their child’s educators in a language they understand. For students with disabilities, federal law is even more clear: Schools “must take whatever action is necessary” — including arranging for interpretation and translation — so parents can meaningfully participate in their kid’s education. 

But schools throughout the country sometimes fail to provide those services.

Families who don’t speak English are forced to muddle through meetings about their children’s progress, unable to weigh in or ask educators how they can help. Cultural and linguistic differences can convince some parents not to question what’s happening at school — a power imbalance that, advocates say, means some children miss out on critical support. In a pinch, it’s not uncommon for schools to task bilingual students with providing interpretation for their families, placing them in the position of describing their own shortcomings to their parents and guardians.

“That’s totally inappropriate, in every possible way — and unrealistic,” said Diane Smith-Howard, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. “If the child is not doing particularly well in an academic subject, why would you trust your teenager to tell you?”

“Parents for whom English might not be their primary language are often overwhelmed with information and unable to participate meaningfully in the process.”

Jinju Park, senior education ombuds, Washington State 

School districts blame a lack of resources. They say they don’t have the money to hire more interpreters or contract with language service agencies, and that even if they did, there aren’t enough qualified interpreters to do the job.

In Washington and a handful of other states, the issue has started to gain more attention. State lawmakers in Olympia earlier this year introduced bipartisan legislation to bolster federal civil rights in state code. Teachers unions in Seattle and Chicago recently bargained for — and won — interpretation services during special education meetings. And school districts face an escalating threat of parent lawsuits, or even federal investigation, if they don’t take language access seriously.

Still, efforts to expand language access in special education face an uphill battle, due to the small pool of trained interpreters, lack of enforcement at the state level and scant funding from Congress. (Despite promising in 1974 to cover nearly half the extra cost for schools to provide special education, the federal government has never done so.) Washington’s bipartisan bill to add more protections for families suddenly failed, after state lawmakers stripped it of key provisions and advocates pulled their support.

The special education system can be “incredibly difficult for everybody,” said Ramona Hattendorf, director of advocacy for the Arc of King County, which promotes disability rights. “Then everything is exacerbated when you bring language into the mix.”

Related: Special education’s hidden racial gap

Nationwide, roughly 1 in 10 students who qualify for special education also identify as English learners, according to federal education data, and that share is growing. About 791,000 English learners participated in special education in 2020, a jump of nearly 30 percent since 2012. In more than a dozen states, including Washington, the increase was even higher.

As their numbers grow, their parents’ frustration with language services is rising too.

During the 2021-22 school year, the Washington State education ombudsman received nearly 1,200 complaints from parents about schools. Their number one concern, across all racial and demographic groups, was access and inclusion in special education. Senior education ombuds Jinju Park estimates that between 50 and 70 percent of calls the agency receives are about special education — and 80 percent of those calls are from clients who need interpretation services.

While most states allow schools up to 60 days once a student is referred for special education services to determine if they qualify, Washington schools can take up to half a school year. And if a parent needs interpretation or translation, the wait can last even longer.

“Our current laws do not support full parent participation,” Park wrote to Washington state lawmakers in support of an early version of House Bill 1305, the proposal that ultimately failed. “Parents for whom English might not be their primary language,” she added, “are often overwhelmed with information and unable to participate meaningfully in the process.”

Barrera, whose son attended the Auburn School District, south of Seattle, said she often felt cut out of his learning.

In kindergarten, after his diagnosis for autism, Ian’s special education team concluded he needed a paraeducator assigned to him full time, Barrera said. She relied on Google Translate and other parents to help her compose emails asking why he didn’t receive that support until the third grade. Her requests for translated copies of legal documents largely went unanswered, she said — until a principal told her that the translation was too expensive.

When Ian entered high school, bullying and his safety became Barrera’s top concern. He once came home with a chunk of hair missing, she said. Despite repeated calls and emails to his teachers, Barrera said she never received an explanation.

Barrera said that when she asked to come to the school to observe, a teacher told her, “You don’t even speak English. What’s the point?’ ”

“That’s totally inappropriate, in every possible way – and unrealistic. If the child is not doing particularly well in an academic subject, why would you trust your teenager to tell you?”

Diane Smith-Howard, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network

Vicki Alonzo, a spokesperson for the Auburn district, said that the region’s booming immigrant population in recent years has prompted the district to commit more resources toward helping families whose first language isn’t English. Nearly a third of its students are multilingual learners, she said, and they speak about 85 different languages at home. 

In the 2019-20 year, the district spent about $175,000 on interpretation and translation services, she said; last school year, that figure was more than $450,000.

Alonzo noted the district received no additional funding for those services, which included about 1,500 meetings with interpreters and translation of more than 3,000 pages of documents.

“Families are our partners,” she said. “We need them to have student success.”

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

Lawmakers in other states have tried to address language access issues.

Proposed legislation in California would set a 30-day deadline for schools to comply with parents’ requests for a translated copy of their child’s individualized education program, or IEP, which details the services a school will provide for a student with disabilities. Similarly, lawmakers in Texas introduced a bill earlier this year to expand translation of IEPs if English is not the native language of the child’s parent (the bill died in committee).

“It’s a nationwide phenomenon,” said Smith-Howard of the National Disability Rights Network. “It’s a resource problem and also a matter of respect and dignity and understanding — that all parents should receive.”

In New York City, parents turned to the courts in pursuit of a solution.

Four families there filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2019, claiming the nation’s largest school district failed to provide translation services for families that don’t speak English. Like Barrera, one of the New York City parents asked for a Spanish interpreter at an IEP meeting; their school provided one who spoke Italian, according to M’Ral Broodie-Stewart, an attorney representing the families for Staten Island Legal Services.

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into New Bedford Public Schools in Massachusetts after students and families who speak K’iché, an Indigenous Mayan language, complained about discriminatory practices. 

A settlement reached last year commits the Massachusetts district to using professionally trained interpreters — and not students, relatives or Google Translate — to communicate essential information to parents.

Related: Is the pandemic our chance to reimagine special education?

Teachers are frustrated too.

In Washington state’s largest school district, the Seattle teachers union picketed and delayed the start of school last year over demands that included interpretation and translation in special education. The eventual contract, which lasts through 2025, requires that staff have access to various services that provide telephonic (a live interpreter) or text-based translation (for written documents). The provision was to ensure that bilingual staff weren’t being asked to translate if it wasn’t a part of their job description.

Teachers say these tools have been helpful, but only to a degree: There are rarely telephone interpreters available for less common languages, such as Amharic, and technical issues like dropped calls are common. 

The availability of interpreters is “not as consistent as we would like it to be,” said Ibi Holiday, a special-education teacher at Rising Star Elementary School in Seattle.

There’s also an issue of context. Translators may not have a background in special education, so families may come away from a meeting not understanding all the options. This can slow down the process significantly. 

“For a lot of the families, they attended a school in their country that functions completely differently,” said Mari Rico, director of El Centro de la Raza’s Jose Marti Child Development Center, a bilingual early education program. “Translating wasn’t enough; I had to teach them about the system.”  

Many Seattle district schools have multilingual staff, but the number and diversity of languages spoken isn’t consistent, Rico said. And there is a greater risk of a student’s case getting overlooked or stagnating because of language barriers. She said she’s had to step in where families have gone months without an IEP meeting even as their child was receiving services.

Hattendorf, with the Arc of King County, said that cheaper tech solutions like those Seattle is using do offer some assistance, but their quality varies widely. And the services may not offer parents enough time to process complicated information and ask follow-up questions, she said.

South of Seattle, the Barreras decided to move Ian to a different high school.

He graduated earlier this year, but federal law guarantees his special education services for another three years. Ian is now attending a transition program for students with disabilities, where he will learn life skills like getting a job.

“We know, with help, he can do whatever he wants,” Barrera said. 

Already, she added, “it’s all different. The teachers just try to find the best way to communicate with me.”

This story about interpretation services was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with The Seattle Times.

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By the close of this century, at least half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken today will become extinct – and that’s according to the rosiest of linguistic forecasts.

Already, about 2,900 languages, or 41 percent, are endangered. And at current rates, the most dire projections suggest that closer to 90 percent of all languages will become dormant or extinct by 2100.

The global linguistic crisis is most stark in the predominantly English-speaking countries of the United States, Australia and Canada. Between 67 and 100 percent of Indigenous languages in those three countries will disappear within three generations, according to a 2019 analysis of 200 years of global language loss by researcher Gary Simons.

The three countries share more than a common language: For several decades, their governments forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and relocated them to distant boarding schools. Children there regularly encountered humiliating, and sometimes violent, treatment as a means to suppress their Native American identity.

In the U.S., federal Indian boarding schools renamed children with English names and discouraged or prevented the use of Indigenous languages. “Rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing,” according to the first-ever federal investigative report, released last year, into the traumatic legacy of boarding schools.

To help Native communities heal from that trauma, the report recommends an explicit federal policy of cultural revitalization, one that supports the work of Indigenous peoples and tribes to preserve and strengthen their languages and cultures. Late last year, the White House announced it would put that idea into action, and soon will launch a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages, under the umbrella of a new initiative to advance educational equity and economic opportunity for Native Americans.

Between 67 and 100 percent of Indigenous languages in those three countries will disappear within three generations, according to a 2019 analysis by researcher Gary Simons.

That plan, set for release later this year, will focus on schools – run by the same government that attempted to strip Native children of their identity – as a critical partner to preserve and restore tribal sovereignty for the future. Details of the plan remain scant, but a draft framework calls for the revitalization of Native languages across all “ages, grade levels, and ability levels, in formal and informal places and settings.” The plan will cover early childhood, K-12 and higher education, but also extend to “academic settings throughout adulthood and a person’s entire lifetime.”

“We’re past the stage of education being done to us,” said Jason Cummins, an enrolled member of the Apsaalooke Nation and deputy director of the White House initiative.

Naomi Miguel, citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the initiative’s executive director, added that the pandemic fueled an urgency to develop the language plan. “A lot of tribes lost their last language speakers and elders,” she said.

With nearly 600 federally recognized tribes, no single solution will satisfy every tribal community, the draft framework states. Potential barriers to reversing language loss include striking a balance between honoring Native elders and implementing professional standards for language teachers and creating classroom materials and dictionaries without sacrificing tribal ownership of language; and even public relations.

The plan also must outlast the current presidential administration. But Miguel said she is not worried. “This is the one area left in the federal government, unfortunately, that is very much bipartisan,” she said of Native American issues.

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

In March, Miguel and Cummins started holding tribal consultation and listening sessions to collect feedback on the framework. They said they found inspiration for ideas they could use in the plan in places like Montana, where high schoolers can earn a seal of biliteracy on their diplomas for proficiency in Indigenous languages. And tribes across the board stressed the importance of connecting young people with Native elders and knowledge keepers.

“When a student can see themselves in their educational environment, when they see their own story … it’s very engaging. It’s very empowering,” said Cummins, who previously ran Crow language programs in schools in Montana.

Meanwhile, some tribal communities have already forged ahead with new school partnerships to reclaim and restore their heritage languages, which could serve as models for the White House effort.

“In America, you’re seen as less than, as lower if you don’t know English. We have to replace that with a mentality in our young people that the language is theirs. They can reclaim it and put it in the spaces they exist in.”

Alex Fire Thunder, deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium

Navajo Technical University, in Crownpoint, New Mexico, will start accepting students this fall for a new doctoral program – the first among tribal colleges and universities – in Diné culture and language sustainability. On the other side of the country, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts, meanwhile, starts much earlier with a language immersion program for preschoolers. And for nearly 40 years, the state of Hawaii has offered K-12 immersion programs in Hawaiian language that now enroll students on six of the eight major Hawaiian islands.

“That’s kind of our vision: preschool to PhD,” said Alex Fire Thunder, deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium, an educational nonprofit that since 2004 has worked toward a goal of Lakota being spoken in every Lakota household.

He spoke on a recent Thursday, after finding a spot of good cell phone service on his drive from a tribal elder’s home. Fire Thunder spends much of his time in the living rooms of older Lakota speakers, recording long interviews to document the language of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The consortium also uses the recordings for a language podcast and a third edition of the New Lakota Dictionary, which now includes 41,000 words.

“It’s the largest Native American dictionary in the world,” said Wilhelm Meya, executive director of the Language Conservancy, a Bloomington, Indiana-based nonprofit that works to preserve Indigenous languages.

“We’re past the stage of education being done to us.”

Jason Cummins, an enrolled member of the Apsaalooke Nation and deputy director of the White House initiative.

Meya cited the work in South Dakota as one of the best global examples of how to preserve and revitalize an endangered language. Exhibits A and B for Meya: the Lakota Berenstain Bears Project, which captured the popular children’s book and TV show into the first Native American language cartoon series, and the Red Cloud Indian School, a private Catholic school that Fire Thunder once attended.

While the White House hasn’t put a price tag on how much it will spend on the revitalization effort, Meya points out that the federal government spent roughly $2 billion in today’s dollars on its Indian boarding school policy.

For his part, Fire Thunder is already raising his young son entirely in Lakota. “In America, you’re seen as less than, as lower if you don’t know English,” he said. “A lot of our elders adapted that mentality from boarding schools. We have to replace that with a mentality in our young people that the language is theirs. They can reclaim it and put it in the spaces they exist in.”

This story about Native languages 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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