FORTALEZA, Brazil – A panel of distinguished school leaders from around the world sat on a giant stage earlier this month and listened to a depressing list of data points, from vast spending inequities to tales of lagging student performance. There wasn’t much hopeful news.

For starters:

• By 2030, an estimated 300 million children and young people will still lack basic numeracy and literacy skills.
• Four in 10 countries spend less than 15 percent of their total public expenditure and less than 4 percent of their gross domestic product on education.
• Some 251 million children and youth worldwide are still not in school, most of them poor and living in sub-Saharan Africa.
• For every $1 spent per child on education in the world’s poorest country, $100 is spent in the richest.

While the conversation clearly focused on a continuing worldwide crisis in education, the UNESCO conference I participated in was different. It emphasized a topic of huge importance to improving student outcomes, and coincided with the release of a report detailing how effective leaders can make a big difference in the lives of children.

“We are all so different, but we are also uniquely alike. None of us have enough resources,” said Ryan T. Chee, the principal of Leupp Elementary School, the only school on the Diné reservation, as the Navajo Nation knows its people. It was Chee’s first time out of the U.S., and he began his remarks by addressing the crowd in his native Navajo language.

I had the privilege of moderating a session with Chee, along with officials from UNESCO, a mayor from Brazil and education ministers from Ecuador and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who spoke of small victories in improving student performance, against vastly different obstacles.  

Chee, who is also a sheep farmer, runs an elementary school 45 miles northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. Many children travel more than two hours each way from their homes on the reservation. They are immediately thrust into a culture of “No Excuses,” as part of the first Native American school to become a member of a nationwide college readiness program. He expects every one of his students to plan for a college education.

When Chee first began teaching at the school, he would ask his fourth grade students where they were going to college. “They had no idea,” he said. “I’d say what profession do you want to go into, and they would say, ‘What are you talking about?’ ”

Chee, who has also vastly improved literacy rates, takes his students to visit college campuses while they are still in elementary school. They eat lunch in a cafeteria at Arizona State University, where Chee is getting a doctorate, and learn about different programs and classes they might take. They “learn the logistics of a college application,” Chee said.

The conference gave me a chance to learn how UNESCO spends years compiling data and searching from common themes. I spoke with Manos Antoninis, who directs the Global Education Monitoring Report, which analyzes data used by policymakers around the world to strengthen their education systems. Because the conference took place before the election, we didn’t contemplate what will become of UNESCO’s relationship with the U.S. President-elect Donald Trump severed ties with the group during his first term. The relationship was re-established under President Joe Biden; Trump has said little about it since.

Antoninis said he hopes that the report will spark new ways to develop, recruit and support school leaders, many of whom came to Brazil to swap success stories and learn from the inclusion of profiles and comparisons from more than 200 countries. Antoninis  stressed the importance of reaching both the poorest and richest countries to collect data.

“An American reader should read the monitoring reports to open their eyes to the diversity in equality,” he told me. “You see it in your country, but not in the scale of how people live elsewhere, and in the low quality of learning. Some are just so far behind.”

Related: It’s time to bring back our relationship with UNESCO for its strong commitment to education

It isn’t always easy to read through the lengthy reports and to sit through the drumbeat of bad news and hand wringing that often accompanies the latest unnerving education reports. I count on my colleague, Proof Points columnist Jill Barshay, to help interpret the latest NAEP and PISA results by explaining trends and pointing out problems that seem to have worsened since the global pandemic. That’s one reason why I look forward to moderating a discussion of resilience among worldwide education leaders in Hong Kong next month.

I’m hoping for the chance to meet more leaders like Chee, to get behind the numbers and to learn how a school leader can change lives. Chee told me that several of his students have graduated from college in recent years. He cherishes the moments.

“Some of my former students are now teachers, and they come into the classroom and visit us,” Chee said. “Or a family will come in and say, ‘Hey, my son is graduating from college; my daughter graduated,’ and it all started here.”

This story about school leadership was written by Liz Willen and 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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It breaks my heart when the costs of college-level textbooks are labeled as “junk fees.” Or, when people complain that today’s textbooks are “overstuffed, chopped-up monstrosities” that are boring and do little to advance student learning.

Yet all this angst over textbooks misses these crucial facts:

Textbooks provide a carefully curated body of knowledge.

Textbooks need to be nearly 100 percent accurate.

Textbooks offer the view of an expert educator. Their quality cannot be compared to the free content that we find online.

It is time to reaffirm the indispensability of textbooks’ high-quality curated knowledge for educating the next generation— while moving them into a modern digital context and making them better at the same time.

Digital technology makes it possible to improve the clarity, precision and utility of a textbook. A process known as “knowledge engineering” powers those improvements. It involves a systematic choice of concepts, a rigorous mapping of the relationships between those concepts and logical definitions that allow them to be used by artificial intelligence and understood by humans.

Authoring textbooks so that their concepts can be read as computer code will usher in a transformation of publishing technology potentially greater than the development of Gutenberg’s printing press. We should embrace this process now.

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

Consider an illustrative application of this idea. While writing a biology textbook, we can logically define two biological terms as follows: A Eukaryotic cell is a cell that contains a nucleus surrounded by a membrane. An enzyme is a macromolecule that plays the role of a catalyst and has the function of decreasing the activation energy.

In the definitions above, “Eukaryotic cell,” “nucleus,” “membrane,” and “enzyme” are concepts that have meanings specific to biology; “is a,” “contains,” “plays,” and “has the function” describe relationships. The concepts and relationships taken together are referred to as a “controlled vocabulary,” and they are applied across the whole book. Once the controlled vocabularies are created, they can be used to introduce more complex concepts.

The simple act of using a controlled vocabulary is vital for learning any complex topic. In a subject such as biology, students have to master thousands of new words. Other complex fields, such as law, finance and medicine, are no different.

Knowledge engineering is not a new idea — library scientists and linguists regularly practice it. The creators of the “Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English,” for example, engineered it in a way that over 70,000 words can be defined using a core vocabulary of only 2,000 words.

Books are linear while knowledge is not. Mapping of relationships across vastly different topics makes learning exciting and supports many novel capabilities, including precise connections across chapters, visualizations at multiple levels of detail and the development of textbook expert chatbots that can answer students’ questions on the fly.

As an initial test of this approach, a team led by SRI International authored several chapters of a biology book. The resulting “intelligent textbook” was tested in a pilot study. SRI reported that the average homework and test scores of students using the intelligent textbook were 10 percent higher than those of students using the regular textbook.

Similar results were observed in a monthlong classroom trial of the intelligent textbook led by Lena Tibell of Linköping University. During the trial, students’ germane mental load — an indirect measure of learning — increased significantly. This indicated that the students were learning much more. At the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Peter Brusilovsky has shown the effectiveness of knowledge engineering for an information retrieval textbook.

Knowledge engineering also enables us to create concept-checkers for textbook authors that are more powerful than spell-checkers. For example, an author can ask the questions: Have any concepts or functions been left out of the textbook? Are any concept definitions inconsistent? This kind of support is unimaginable using current authoring tools.

Related: Nothing says welcome to college like exorbitant textbook prices

However, creating such textbooks will not be inexpensive. It is also not always possible to give a logical definition for every concept in a textbook.

Our ability to give logical definitions often ends at the boundary of current knowledge. Reaching those boundaries can be used to prompt wonder and curiosity. For example, one biological concept that is difficult to define is “Life” itself. To define such concepts, we must articulate exceptions and multiple points of view.

To seize these opportunities, we need a sustained effort to overhaul the authoring of textbooks using knowledge engineering. For maximum near-term impact, we should begin with textbooks for gateway courses such as biology and psychology.

We must train and nurture a new profession of knowledge curators for curricular resources to enable this transformation.

Most importantly, the textbooks of the future must continue to preserve and communicate the knowledge of the best educators of our generation even more accurately and precisely than before. Such textbooks, using the discipline of knowledge engineering, can support the curation, preservation and learning of all forms of human knowledge.

Vinay K. Chaudhri led AI research at SRI International including Project Halo and CALO (later SIRI) resulting in award-winning technology. He taught knowledge graphs and logic programming at Stanford University where he helped launch the Logic for All initiative.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Where a student chooses to go to college will affect their life in countless ways.

A lot goes into these decisions. One major consideration: Students often want to know what their life would be like at a given school. To help answer this big question, The Hechinger Report developed a tool that tracks various factors that could contribute to whether a student feels welcome on a college campus.

Our College Welcome Guide, first published last fall, provides answers to questions college applicants might have as they consider their options this year. Recently, we updated all of the data powering this tool to ensure college applicants get the most accurate responses to their questions. You can find updated answers for more than 4,300 colleges and universities. We also published a quick video explainer on how to use the guide.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

If you or someone you know are applying to college, here are some questions you may have that the College Welcome Guide can answer.

How diverse are the colleges I’m interested in?

Using data from the U.S. Department of Education, we list the demographics of each college’s student enrollment and faculty. We also provide colleges’ graduation rates broken down by racial and ethnic groups and what proportion of students receive Pell grants, which are awarded to students from low-income families.

In addition, the guide includes data on the gender breakdown on campus. And, in some cases, we are able to say what proportion of students are over the age of 25. Our guide also identifies which schools have LGBTQ+ resource centers and services for students with disabilities.

What are the free speech policies at the schools I’m considering?

The guide features a tool that evaluates policies protecting free speech on every campus. It grades campuses from “exceptional” to “abysmal” depending on a college’s score in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings, which is based on a survey of undergraduates.

I’m a veteran. Which schools provide resources for me?

Our guide measures the services that various colleges provide to veterans, including whether or not there is a publicly listed point of contact for support services and how many students are receiving post-9/11 benefits or Department of Defense tuition assistance.

The guide can be used to research which states provide in-state tuition for veterans, with or without conditions, including if applicants are using GI Bill benefits.

I’m considering applying to an out-of-state college. Will state laws be different and how will that affect my experience?

We provide maps that outline state laws that would be relevant to college students. Those include policies restricting diversity initiatives or the teaching of Critical Race Theory and laws permitting voting using student IDs. These maps also show which states provide in-state tuition or financial aid to undocumented students, restrict access to abortion and have passed anti-transgender legislation.

If you know someone who could use our College Welcome Guide, please send it to them. And if you have questions about the guide, send us an email at editor@hechingerreport.org.

Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at osanchez@hechingerreport.org. Contact Noble Ingram at ingram@hechingerreport.org.

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

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OK. I guess we’re doing this (again).

It feels awful for lots of reasons, of course, but mostly it’s because the country chose political vibes over policy ideas. As a researcher who spends his days trying to find evidence-based ways to make schools better, I’m at something of a loss.

See, whatever you thought about the Harris-Walz ticket’s particular proposals, the Democrats had things to say about education issues that genuinely shape children’s development: affordable early care and learning, access to nutritious school meals, funding for English learners, and more.

President-elect Trump’s education platform was made of much vaguer stuff — mostly culture war vibes. For instance, conservatives are eager to get the government involved in biological screenings to determine if kids have the “correct” genitalia for peeing in a particular bathroom or playing on a particular sports team. Trump talks about schools secretly imposing gender transition surgery on children. Finally, it’s likely that the administration will try to voucherize more public dollars to support families sending their children to private schools.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

But, again, all of this is light on substance. It’s pretty hard to see how bathroom-usage policies will help kids recover from the pandemic’s academic consequences, or get more children ready for kindergarten, or more third graders ready to read on grade level. School voucher programs may give anxious parents public money to pay for private education, but there’s not much evidence that they help students or the public schools they’re leaving behind.

Worse yet, some of conservatives’ K–12 ideas are at war with themselves. The Republican platform calls for federal defunding of schools teaching curricula that conservatives don’t like, but it also pledges — immediately afterward — to “veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education [sic].” So they’re promising not to nationalize how schools teach history, except when they don’t like how certain schools teach history.

Now, there was a detailed conservative plan for federal K–12 education drifting around during the campaign. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to “eliminate” and “redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government.” But Trump claimed to want nothing to do with it.

Related: How would Project 2025 change education?

Maybe he’s telling the truth — perhaps he’s realized that Project 2025 would significantly reduce his ability to enact any sort of affirmative education policy agenda. It would be harder to remake American schools in a Trumpian image without a federal Education Department, after all.

Of course, that’s assuming 1) that Trump has given K–12 enough thought to work through that strategic calculus, and 2) conservatives actually have an affirmative agenda for making schools more effective, something that goes deeper than lines like this from their platform: “Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do.”

Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance

Perhaps there’s a concrete, substantive plan for reforming Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act lurking in those words, and I just don’t have the right GOP decoder ring?

So look, conservatives: You’ve got to figure something out. The country’s schools can’t afford another four years like the first round of President Trump’s leadership, which left U.S. public schools reeling.

By 2018, the leadership at the Fordham Institute, the country’s most august conservative education policy think tank, was calling for Secretary Betsy DeVos to resign in the hopes that troubles from her first two rocky years could be sorted out by a replacement.

In a January 2021 piece headlined “The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind,” the New York Times editorial board wrote, “The Department of Education lies in ruins at precisely the time when the country most needs it.”

Related: Trump’s deportation plan could separate millions of families, leaving schools to pick up the pieces

Please forgive me if this reads like I’m being overdramatic. Perhaps it’s my outmoded instincts as a Very Serious Beltway Policy Researcher; I still think about policymaking as an effort to actually solve big public problems.

I’m a hidebound fossil that way. Of course, if you really want to own me, really want to prove experts like me wrong (again), you could shock everyone by setting aside the culture wars and giving substantive education reform a try.

Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a founding partner with The Children’s Equity Project, and a father of three children currently enrolled in public schools in Washington, DC. The views here are strictly his own.

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Over the past few years, it’s become clear that states need more money to support kids. Pandemic-related aid is long gone, but effects from that era still linger, evident in persistent child care shortages and ongoing child behavioral and mental health concerns. Now, states are increasingly trying to generate new sources of money to support young children, although in at least one state, a ballot measure was designed to pull back on just these kinds of efforts.

At least a dozen measures were on ballots across the country Tuesday, proposing tax increases or new revenue streams to pay for child care and other child-focused services. Voters overwhelmingly chose to maintain or increase spending on these initiatives — though there were some holdouts.

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

Here’s a look at how early childhood fared this election: (This story will be updated as vote tallies are finalized.)

Child care:

Washington state: Initiative 2109 aimed to repeal a capital gains tax that passed in 2021 and has since provided child care subsidies and money for select child care programs. By failing, the tax and funding stream for child care will remain in place. FAILED

Travis County, Texas: Proposition A called for a property tax increase to raise more than $75 million to create affordable child care spots and mitigate the loss of federal pandemic funds for local child care programs. PASSED

St. Paul, Minnesota: The 2024 Early Care and Learning Proposal is a property tax levy aimed at providing public funding to child care. The city would raise $2 million the first year and add an additional $2 million each year until year 10, with this money going into a special early care and education fund that would help families cover the cost of child care. (The city’s mayor, Melvin Carter, said he was unlikely to enact the tax if it passed). FAILED

Sonoma County, California: Measure I asked voters to approve a quarter-cent countywide sales tax to create a local revenue stream that would help pay for child care and children’s health programs, with a special emphasis on children who experience homelessness. The initiative gained over 20,000 signatures from registered voters to qualify for the November ballot. PASSED

La Plata County, Colorado: Ballot Issue 1A will redirect up to 70 percent of revenue from a lodger’s tax toward child care and affordable housing. PASSED

Grand County, Colorado: Ballot Measure 1A will increase the county’s lodging tax from 1.8 percent to 2 percent, with the revenue paying for tourism, housing and child care. PASSED

  Montrose, Colorado: Ballot Issue 2A will increase the city’s hotel tax and put 17 percent of the revenue toward local child care. PASSED

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

Early childhood Health, education and well-being:

Platte County, Missouri: The Platte County Children’s Services Fund measure calls for a quarter cent sales tax increase to create a revenue stream for mental health programs, including early childhood screening. PASSED

Pomona County, California: Measure Y aims to reallocate at least 10 percent of funds in an existing city general fund to create a Department of Children and Youth. The funds would also be used to pay for youth programs, child care and support for parents. LIKELY TO PASS

Santa Cruz, California: Measure Z proposed a $0.02 per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to raise funds that can be used for youth mental health and programs for children. LIKELY TO PASS

Colorado: Proposition KK aims to establish a $39 million fund by imposing a 6.5 percent excise tax on guns and ammunition. While most of the money is directed at crime victim and veterans mental health services, $3 million will fund behavioral health services for children. PASSED

Missouri: Amendment 5 would have established a new gambling boat license, with the estimated $14 million in revenue funding public school early childhood literacy programs. FAILED

  Nevada: Question 5 on the ballot this year gave voters the chance to exempt diapers from sales tax, starting on January 1, 2025. PASSED

Related: Her child care center was already on the brink — then coronavirus struck

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at (212) 678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

This story about ballot measures for child services was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. Sign up for the Early Childhood newsletter.

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How often have you heard someone say: “I’m just not a math person?”

People are reluctant to say they are illiterate but proud to share their low math identity.

We tend to think of math as a subject that’s accessible only to certain types of people. But that’s a false assumption, and it’s holding back achievement for far too many students. With the right instructional approach, everyone can learn and do math. There is no special “math gene” that naturally makes some people better at math than others.

Students come into school with differing levels of math preparation. Some have parents or guardians who have introduced them to foundational concepts and skills.

Some have had no exposure. The well-prepared students perform better at the outset of K-12 learning and the underprepared students struggle to keep up. Thus begins the fallacy that some students are “math people” and some are not.

The truth is that our brains, when given the right pushes, develop synapses that connect neurons together, allowing them to communicate and make meaning out of sounds and symbols. Imagine a synapse as a train station connecting different tracks. And our brains have elasticity, meaning that they are not stuck in a finite state. This neuroplasticity guarantees our lifelong ability to develop new synapses that keep our brains growing, allowing us to make new connections and develop new skills.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

At its core, math is about identifying patterns, then generalizing those patterns and applying them to solve new problems. This is a skill that anyone can learn. It’s also an ability that is becoming more critical in a world with increasingly complex challenges.

Learning math helps students become logical thinkers and analytical problem solvers. It helps students function in their day-to-day lives and opens up options and career paths.

However, the way math has traditionally been taught in classrooms — as a fixed discipline, with right and wrong answers — has kept too many students from realizing these benefits. Many classroom environments present math with a greater emphasis on problems that need to be solved than on building conceptual understanding.

In my own classroom I initially leaned more toward the procedural than the conceptual. I did not learn until much later in my educational career about conceptual teaching strategies and supports.

But if you look at the work of mathematicians, they aren’t just solving rote problems all day. They’re doing deep thinking. They’re reasoning. They’re critiquing ideas and working together collaboratively to solve problems. They’re working through the language of math.

Comprehension is expected of a good reader, as well as fluency and accuracy, so why not in math? We focus on fluency and accuracy without giving ample time to ensuring that students comprehend foundational mathematical concepts.

Numbers and formulas don’t make much sense when students don’t understand what they mean. Math is a language that builds on itself. Not understanding the foundations of math is like not understanding the structure of a language.

Related: Why schools are teaching math word problems all wrong

In addition to focusing on comprehension, we also need to change our approach to math instruction to make it more open, welcoming and inclusive of all students. Now, this is easier said than done when considering the conditions our educators teach in. The students who are most often left behind by our rigid, rules-based approach to math instruction are those who are already marginalized. We need to prioritize making math instruction grade-level, engaging, affirming and meaningful to ensure that all students learn the language of math and can use it outside of the classroom.

Here are five things we can ask of ourselves and our educators to achieve this goal:

1. Evaluate your own math identity. Think about how you experienced math growing up, and how you feel about math as an adult. This reflection will help you understand how you define success in your own classroom and where you might have biases or blind spots.
2. Ensure that you understand the content deeply. Knowing the concepts behind math formulas and procedures will help you make those concepts more accessible to students. If you anticipate where they might get stuck in a lesson, you can be prepared with ideas for navigating those barriers.
3. Encourage creative and collaborative problem-solving. Math shouldn’t be about just memorizing formulas. Giving students the opportunity to figure out a process for themselves and talk through their reasoning helps them become adept at finding creative ways to solve problems. It can even enlighten other students who are struggling.
4. Give students a voice. The teacher and textbook aren’t the sole authorities in the classroom. Listen to student ideas and leverage their personal and cultural knowledge, both local and historical. For instance, if students are into soccer, use this knowledge as a bridge to learning math, tapping into their knowledge of the scoring statistics of various players to understand fractions and percentages.
5. Plan collaboratively. Giving teachers common planning time to work together with their peers is critical because it helps broaden their perspectives and skill sets so that they can create multiple entry points for students to gain understanding of the material. When teachers come together, they’re exposed to new methods and ideas they might not be familiar with — ideas that can help make math more accessible for all students.

Once we reevaluate what it will take to teach all students while supporting our educators, we can truly seek justice in the details of teaching and learning.

Lacey Robinson is the president and CEO of UnboundEd, which works to empower educators to use evidence-informed, engaging, affirming and meaningful grade-level instruction to eliminate the predictability of student outcomes — so that all students succeed academically.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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In the fall of 2019, four high schools in a San Francisco Bay Area district shook up many of their ninth grade math classes. Students had traditionally been separated into more than five math courses by achievement level, from remedial to very advanced, and the district wanted to test what would happen if they combined their bottom three levels into one. Half of the students in those levels were randomly assigned to learn together, and half remained in their traditional tracks so that researchers could compare the difference. 

Students in the lowest level who were part of the experiment skipped remedial math and were able to learn algebra with the majority of ninth graders. The experiment also meant that average, grade-level students were learning alongside peers who lacked foundational math skills. 

It was risky. Students sometimes end up with lower math scores when they’re pushed to do work that is too advanced for them; that’s why California ended an eighth grade “algebra for all” initiative a decade ago. Grade-level students can also be harmed if teachers try to accommodate weaker students by making the material easier.

But if the heterogeneous class avoided those pitfalls, the new math placement would give hundreds of students with low test scores in seventh and eighth grades a better shot at progressing to advanced math courses and college. Too often, these students feel stigmatized and demoralized. “You’re giving students another ‘at bat’,” said Elizabeth Huffaker, a Stanford University researcher who studied this experiment for her doctoral dissertation.

The results were promising, according to a paper that was made public in October 2024. Half of the remedial students in the mixed class passed the ninth grade algebra course and moved on to geometry with their classmates. The other half still had to retake algebra in 10th grade, which is when they would have taken it anyway, but their test scores in 11th grade were higher than similar students who had learned math in a separate remedial classroom in ninth grade.  Eleventh grade math achievement for remedial students who had taken ninth grade algebra was so much higher that the difference was equivalent to an extra year’s worth of math, according to the researchers.

Meanwhile, average students appeared to be unharmed. Those who had been randomly assigned to the new mixed level class had test scores in 11th grade that were no worse than those who had learned Algebra 1 separately. 

Some detracking advocates argue that everyone benefits from mixed ability classes, but there was no increase in test scores for higher achieving students in this experiment. The vast majority of students in the mixed-ability classrooms would have been assigned to Algebra 1 anyway and relatively few were low achievers. It’s possible that there’s a point at which the concentration of low-level students becomes so high that it does negatively affect peers, the researchers said. 

In between the bottom students and the regular Algebra 1 students, there was a middle group of students who scored just below the cutoff for placement in Algebra 1 and were traditionally assigned to a double dose of algebra in ninth grade. The results were more ambiguous for these students, whose instructional time was cut in half by giving them only a single dose of algebra in a mixed-level class. They were less likely to pass geometry in 10th grade, but they appeared not to be worse off later in 11th grade. “One interpretation is that this was a pretty successful experiment for most students, but if you paired it with more instructional time, it would be even more effective,” said Huffaker. It would be more costly, too, she said.

The Sequoia Union High School District, where this experiment took place, educates a wide range of students. It includes wealthy neighborhoods in Redwood City, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto, and low-income neighborhoods. Roughly a third of the students in the district are poor enough to qualify for the federal subsidized lunch program, and 15 percent are categorized as English learners. Almost half of the students are Hispanic, 11 percent are Asian, and a third are white.

This experiment did not include more advanced students who had already taken algebra in eighth grade or earlier. More than a third of the 2,000 ninth graders continued to be taught in separate geometry or Algebra 2 classes. A handful of extremely accelerated freshmen were in precalculus.

That enabled this limited detracking experiment to avoid the community uproar that had engulfed San Francisco, where advanced students had been prevented from taking algebra in eighth grade and everyone was put into the same ninth-grade math class. 

Tom Dee, a Stanford education professor who conducted the math study along with his former graduate student Huffaker, said that this study shows that there are smaller things that schools can do between the two extremes of forcing all students into advanced coursework or barring any students from advanced coursework in the name of equity. “If we accelerate everyone,” Dee said, “it could be harmful to kids who aren’t fully prepared for that acceleration. And if we decelerate everyone, it can be potentially harmful to the achievement of higher performing kids and cap the kinds of things they might do.” 

“But it’s not the only arrow in our quiver,” Dee said.

Dee emphasized that this was just one group of students in one school district and the results would need to be replicated in other places before he would recommend the elimination of high school remedial math as a national policy. 

Inside the classroom

It’s hard to tell what might have been the key to success in this experiment. It’s possible that half of the remedial students never really needed remediation and they were incorrectly placed because of their middle school math scores. At the same time, the district changed the way it taught in these mixed-ability classes and it could be those changes that made the difference. Better teachers might have volunteered to teach them. These teachers had extra training, and were given an extra non-teaching period each day. 

The school handled mixed abilities in an unusual way. Instead of differentiating instruction by giving different practice problems to different students, which is a common approach in U.S. classrooms, the teachers were trained to give the same problems to all students.  Victoria Dye, Sequoia Union’s director of professional development and curriculum, told me that the district selected open-ended word problems that even a student with low skills could try, but that also provided a challenge to stronger students. (An analogy would be a game with simple rules, like Othello, which still provides a challenge to expert players.) Dye said that these “low-floor, high-ceiling” problems were selected to supplement the district’s curriculum, which emphasized procedural fluency and computations. 

Classroom math discussions took center stage so that students could discuss each other’s analysis. In one exercise, students each wrote down their reasoning and revised it several times. “It’s great because any kid can begin that and improve,” said Dye.

To make time for problem solving and discussion, teachers streamlined the curriculum to emphasize key concepts. That meant cutting some algebra topics. Teachers made their own decisions on how to weave in a review of middle school concepts that students needed for algebra. Dye described this review as happening briefly on a “just-in-time” basis, not a reteaching of a full unit. 

Today, remedial math has been eliminated in the district’s main high schools and nearly all students are in ninth grade algebra or a more advanced class, except for students with severe disabilities. The elimination of remedial math doesn’t fix everything. Many struggling students are still failing the subject and need more help. And it doesn’t reduce the huge disparities in math achievement inside school buildings. But it might help a large chunk of the most behind kids, and that’s particularly relevant after the pandemic when even more teens are woefully behind in math.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Those of us who worked with high school students in the wake of the Supreme Court’s historic decision overturning race-conscious admissions can’t profess shock over news showing decreases in enrollment among Black and Latinx students across many college campuses, especially those considered competitive for enrollment.

We saw this coming.

Last year we saw too many highly qualified students shy away from applying to schools because they were sent a message that they wouldn’t get in without affirmative action. This year, it is more important than ever that we encourage our Black and Latinx students to apply to schools attended by similar students before the court’s reversal. Mentoring is a critical catalyst to achieve this goal.

Another year of dips in enrollment among Black and Latinx students would arguably ignite a snowball trend in some of our nation’s most recognized institutions, leading to a perception that they are unwelcoming to students of color.

As a society, we simply can’t afford this. We are at a demographic crossroads: Generation Z is forecast to be the last majority-white generation; the majority of Americans under the age of 18 are “nonwhite.” If we don’t increase the numbers of Black and Latinx students going to colleges where they belong and deserve to have a seat at the table, we are impacting the future of America.

To change this new dynamic, we need to think outside the [check your race] box. College-educated adults hold the key to reshaping how to support Black and Latinx students getting to and through the college process so that they can unlock their full potential and achieve the “holy grail” of economic mobility.

As colleges put more emphasis on early action and deadlines specific to first-generation students, our Black and Latinx high school seniors have the chance to make their voices heard through the power of their applications.

Increasing applications by November’s early admission deadlines is a critical first step.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Also, vitally, first-generation students need to have strong, trusting relationships in place before, during and after the application process to reinforce a sense of belonging. The adults these students meet early in their lives — often outside the home — can help blunt a seismic shift in the makeup of college enrollment across our nation.

Over the past 25 years of working with primarily first-generation and low-income students, I have found that the path to and through college is built on a mentorship model that relies heavily on schools, corporations and communities working in lockstep. This tripod of support needs to work even more closely together to encourage students to increase their applications to and enrollment in selective universities.

Through a focus group of 42,000 (the total number of students mentored since 1999), my organization has shown that the model of starting junior year of high school with 1:1 mentoring is proven and ensures that every student has an adult champion to not only help them chart a path to college but also build the sense of belonging needed to persevere to graduation.

Mentoring develops the social capital to help establish careers and create the building blocks needed for long-term economic mobility.

Every adult needs to adopt a mentoring mindset. We cannot sit back and watch as Black and Latinx students are shut out of college.

One successful mentoring model I’ve seen uses partnerships with corporations that open their doors to high school students. This helps students start charting a course toward college and career paths based on interactive experiences in the conference room as well as the classroom.

Related: How did students pitch themselves to colleges after
last year’s affirmative action ruling?

As DEI initiatives decline on college campuses, many corporations are expanding their own affinity groups and DEI initiatives. For students, these corporate communities foster a sense of belonging in both college and careers. For adults, these experiences hone a greater understanding of the many inequities that Black and Latinx, often first-generation, students face.

Seemingly simple connections matter. Planting seeds of trust and confidence early in a relationship helps students see their future selves in their mentors. More Black and Latinx students need to hear “we don’t know if we don’t try,” and this work needs to start well before the beginning of senior year.

Looking through the lens of a trusted adult, students can better trust the process and not be deterred by such things as the reversals of court decisions.

While the decrease of Black and Latinx students enrolled in some selective universities this fall is discouraging, there is hope. The vast majority of students (97 percent) mentored in my organization who apply to college are accepted.

Higher education has a critical accountability role as well as we head into this admissions year. I applaud those who have already reached out to try to help encourage underrepresented students to apply for college.

Through an ecosystem of support, more Black and Latinx students will earn seats at the table in college and beyond.

Mentoring helps close equity gaps for first-generation students, guiding them toward successful college careers and beyond. Together, we can turn these recent challenges into a transformative opportunity for lasting impact. The future needs as many Black and Latinx college-educated students as possible.

Heather D. Wathington is CEO of iMentor, a national leader in 1:1 mentoring that builds long-term, personal relationships to help students, largely first-generation college students from underresourced communities, access and navigate postsecondary educations and careers.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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There’s a lot to consider when deciding where to apply to college.

Tuition costs, financial aid offerings and student loans are high on the list, but so are questions about campus culture and free speech policies. We’ve created a whole suite of tools with brand-new data that can answer your questions and help you research what life might be like at thousands of colleges and universities across the country.

Here is what these tools do and how they can help you.

• Tuition Tracker shows the difference between a college’s “sticker price” and the actual cost of attending. With a bit of information about the college or colleges you’re interested in, the tool will show you what students who have a similar household income to yours have paid for tuition in the past. Colleges and universities also can be compared based on graduation rate, which shows the likelihood of a student successfully completing their degree on time — a significant factor in affordability. Watch our video explainer on how to use Tuition Tracker.

Esta herramienta está disponible en español.

• The College Welcome Guide is a collection of interactive charts and maps that help you assess campus culture. They list the demographics of faculty and students, services for veterans or students with disabilities and more. The maps outline the state-level laws that might be most relevant to matriculating students, such as restrictions on teaching Critical Race Theory or laws permitting the use of student IDs when voting. The guide also allows you to compare the graduation rates of up to five schools at the same time. Watch our video explainer on how to use the College Welcome Guide.

• The Offer Letter Decoder helps college applicants understand the financial aid offer letter they receive from a college or university. The tool scans this letter and identifies what portion of the aid offered is a grant or scholarship that doesn’t need to be paid back and what is a student loan, a debt that has to be paid back. The decoder also can highlight differences between subsidized and unsubsidized loans and identify work-study programs, which require students to take a job on campus. Watch our video explainer on how to use the Offer Letter Decoder.

Esta herramienta está disponible en español.

• The Hechinger Report created the College Closure Tracker to document the more than 800 colleges and universities that have closed since 2008. The data come from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, and is updated periodically. And as an added bonus, read an interview with Jon Marcus, our senior higher education reporter, on how college applicants can gauge the financial health of schools where they may want to apply.

• A Game of College is an interactive website that explains how students successfully move from high school to college. Play the role of a student and select from a variety of different income levels and demographics. Then, navigate your way through college as debt-free as possible. This game was created in collaboration with CalMatters.

Have a question about any of these tools? Write to us at editor@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Caring for children during their first few years is a complex and critical job: A child’s brain develops more in the first five years than at any other point in life. Yet in America, individuals engaged in this crucial role are paid less than animal caretakers and dressing room attendants.

That’s a major finding of one of two new reports on the dismal treatment of child care workers. Together, the reports offer a distressing picture of how child care staff are faring economically, including the troubling changes low wages have caused to the workforce. 

Early childhood workers nationally earn a median wage of $13.07 per hour, resulting in poverty-level earnings for 13 percent of such educators, according to the first report, the Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024. Released earlier this month by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, the annual report also found:

• 43 percent of families of early educators rely on public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid.

• Pay inequity exists within these low wages: Black early childhood educators earn about $8,000 less per year than their white peers. The same pay gap exists between early educators who work with infants and toddlers and those who work with preschoolers, who have more opportunities to work in school districts that pay higher wages.

• Wages for early educators are rising more slowly than wages in other industries, including fast food and retail. 

In part due to these conditions, the industry is losing some of its highest-educated workers, according to a second new report, by Chris M. Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs. That study compares the pay of child care workers with that of workers in other lower-income professions, including cooks and retail workers; it finds child care workers are the tenth lowest-paid occupation out of around 750 in the economy. The report also looks at the ‘relative quality’ of child care staff, as defined by math and literacy scores and education level. Higher-educated workers, Herbst suggests, are being siphoned off by higher-paying jobs.

That’s led to a “bit of a death spiral” in terms of how child care work is perceived, and contributes to the persistent low wages, he said in an interview. Some additional findings from Herbst’s study:

• Higher-educated women increasingly find employment in the child care industry to be less attractive. The share of workers in the child care industry with a bachelor’s degree barely budged over the past few decades, increasing by only 0.3 percent. In contrast, the share of those in the industry who have 12 years of schooling but no high school degree, quadrupled.

• Median numeracy and literacy scores for female child care workers (who are the majority of the industry staff) fall at the 35^th and 36^th percentiles respectively, compared to all female workers. Improving these scores is important, Herbst says, considering the importance of education in the early years, when children experience rapid brain development.

This doesn’t mean child care staff with lower education levels can’t be good early educators. Patience, communication skills and a commitment to working with young children also matter greatly, Herbst writes. However, higher education levels may mean staff have a stronger background not only in English and math but also in topics like behavior modification and special education, which are sometimes left out of certification programs for child care teachers.

You can read Herbst’s full report here, and the 2024 workforce index here.

This story about child care wages 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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