Data is now everywhere in our lives, informing our decisions about which new show to watch, what path to take or whether to grab an umbrella. But it’s practically absent from the way our kids learn.

Our approach to teaching data science and data literacy has hardly evolved since I started my teaching career in 1995. Yet now more than ever, K-12 students need basic modern data science skills.

Nearly 1 in 4 job postings in the United States require data science skills. These aren’t just tech jobs — they span industries from manufacturing to agriculture to transportation. The ability to capture, sort and analyze data is as important for small business owners as it is for computer scientists.

Now is the time to reprioritize curricular emphases to reflect the importance of data science and data literacy. With data talent in high demand globally, other countries are investing billions in data education.

But American K-12 education still underemphasizes data science and data literacy skills — including the ability to understand qualitative and quantitative data, assess claims based on data and make data-driven predictions.

How do we know? Look at the data.

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According to the most recent NAEP results, between 2019 and 2022, student performance in data analysis, statistics and probability fell by a full 10 points for eighth grade students, representing what some experts consider a full grade level in lack of progress.

Data science education is typically reserved for higher education, but only slightly more than a third of Americans have a college degree. The opportunity to learn basic data skills should not be reserved for a select group of students.

Every student needs a chance to practice these vital skills from kindergarten through high school. That’s why I am excited for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to be a part of Data Science 4 Everyone’s national Chart the Course initiative, exploring the integration of data literacy and science across our most important school subjects. It will build upon NCTM’s work to reimagine, revitalize and increase math’s relevance for high schoolers.

As president of NCTM, I’ve had the honor of helping to lead the mathematics education community through a time of profound technological change, which has included developing a position statement on AI.

Additionally, in partnership with the National Science Teaching Association, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Statistical Association, we made an unprecedented joint call to build data science as an interdisciplinary subject across K-12 education.

Early in my teaching career, we focused on teaching students how to use a dataset to create a bar graph or scatter plot. Now, students need to know how to formulate the question that will generate the data, how to collect the data and how to interpret the data.

Students are eager to make sense of the world around them, but many don’t see how classroom instruction is related to the problems they will face as adults.

Data — in the form of numbers, graphics and videos — can provide the hook that pulls students into lessons with real-world examples and applications.

While a math teacher might look at a graph and observe that a certain variable decreased, a social studies teacher might say, “Of course there was a decrease, look at what was happening at that moment in history.”

If we want students to think with and use data analysis skills in their everyday lives during and after high school, we need to create relevant data-learning experiences that engage students in using statistics to make sense of the world around them. This will also result in better test scores because students will understand the material and be able to apply what they know.

Related: Do we need a ‘Common Core’ for data science education? 

We are now joining with Data Science 4 Everyone in an even broader effort to create the first-ever national K-12 data learning progression that stretches across school subjects. It will shape how generations of students study data.

Educator voices are vital to this process. We need input from the people who are closest to students and who will be rolling out data science lessons in their classrooms, so we’re asking them to weigh in. We need to engage our educators in order to effect change.

Data Science 4 Everyone’s Chart the Course voting platform is open through October 31, and we are encouraging teachers to vote for the learning outcomes they believe are the most important for K-12 students to learn by the time they graduate from high school.

The selection of the learning outcome options in Chart the Course was informed by 11 focus groups made up of students, educators, higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, curriculum designers and industry professionals.

The collaborative approach was designed to create a framework that meets the needs of students and reflects the cross-disciplinary potential of data science. We hope to equip students with the skills they need to understand data and think critically and carefully as they interact with AI tools and draw their own conclusions about the world around them.

Engaging with data is a way to make education relevant for all our students and bring our many subjects together in unique ways. It’s time to chart a course that connects classroom learning to the lives of students. That should be our goal for all teachers.

Kevin Dykema is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), an international mathematics education organization with more than 30,000 members. He has taught eighth grade mathematics for over 25 years in southwest Michigan.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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BROOKLINE, Mass. — It was a humid, gray morning in July, and most of their peers were spending the summer sleeping late and hanging out with friends. But the 20 rising 10th graders in Lisa Rodriguez’s class at Brookline High School were finishing a lesson on exponents and radicals.

As Rodriguez worked with two students on a difficult problem, Noelia Ames was called over by a soft-spoken student sitting nearby. Ames, a rising senior who took Algebra II Honors with Rodriguez as a sophomore, was serving as a peer leader for the summer class.

“Are you stuck on a problem?” Ames asked, leaning over to take a closer look.

The students in Rodriguez’s class were participating in a summer program created by the Calculus Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. Founded at Brookline High near Boston in 2009, the group now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 nearby districts beginning in the summer after seventh grade to help them complete advanced math classes like calculus before they finish high school.

It focuses on helping students who are historically underrepresented in high-level math classes — namely those who are Black, Hispanic and low-income — succeed in that coursework, which serves as a gateway to selective colleges and well-paying careers. While some states and districts are nixing advanced-math requirements, sometimes in the name of equity, the Calculus Project has a different theory: Students who have traditionally been excluded from high-level math can succeed in those courses if they’re given a chance to preview advanced math content over the summer and take classes with a cohort of their peers.

In recent years the Calculus Project’s work has taken on fresh urgency, as the pandemic hit Black, Hispanic and low-income students particularly hard. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action left even some college officials concerned that inequities in high school math would make it harder for them to fill their classes with students from diverse backgrounds. The Calculus Project’s national profile has grown — its staff advises the College Board on AP math exams and classes and have advised groups in a few other states — even as the organization has attracted some scrutiny from parents, due to its emphasis on students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“One out of 10 Black students in the eighth grade math scores were scoring basic or above,” saidKristen Hengtgen, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit advocacy group EdTrust, referring to last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. “When you see that, you need to throw certain student groups the life jacket,” she added. “We cannot combat a math crisis if we’re not helping the students who need it the most.”

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

The racial and socioeconomic gaps in math are stark: Only 28 percent of Black students and 31 percent Hispanic students nationwide took advanced math in high school compared with 46 percent of white students, according to a 2023 report from EdTrust. Just 22 percent of low-income students took advanced math. Experts say that’s because these students are less likely to attend high schools that offer higher-level math or to be recommended by their teachers for honors or AP classes, regardless of mastery.

They are also less likely to report feeling confident in math class or to enroll in calculus even when they are on a path to take the class early in high school, according to a report from EdTrust and nonprofit Just Equations. When it comes to Black and Hispanic students, Hengtgen blames what she calls “the belonging barrier.” “Their friends weren’t in the class,” she said. “They rarely had a teacher of color.”

As a math teacher at Brookline High in the early 2000s, Calculus Project founder Adrian Mims got firsthand experience in what the research was beginning to establish. Black and Hispanic students were largely absent from the high school’s honors and advanced math courses, he said, and the few Black and Hispanic students who did enroll often dropped out early in the year.

As a PhD candidate at Boston College, Mims was writing his dissertation on how to improve African American achievement in geometry honors classes. His findings — suggesting that Black students dropped out of the course because they lacked knowledge of certain foundational math content, spent less time studying and preparing for tests, and lacked confidence in their math ability — became the catalyst for the first iteration of The Calculus Project.

Mims’ idea was to introduce Black students over the summer to math concepts they’d learn in eighth grade algebra in the fall. Students would be able to take the time to really understand those concepts and to build their confidence and skills, learning both from district teachers and peer teachers who could provide individual support.

In the summer of 2009, Mims piloted his idea with a group of rising eighth graders. In addition to learning concepts they’d see in algebra that fall, they were exposed to the stories of famous Black and Latino figures who excelled in STEM, such as Black NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and Mexican-American astronaut Jose M. Hernandez. When the school year arrived, they participated in after-school tutoring at Brookline High.

The next fall, 2010, the district opened the program to all interested students, regardless of race. Summer participants were placed into cohorts so they could advance through math classes in high school with peers they knew.

Teachers and administrators at Brookline say the project had an immediate — and lasting — impact. “It’s so much more than learning math,” said Alexia Thomas, a guidance counselor and associate dean of students at Brookline High.

In 2012, Brookline High saw more Black students score as advanced on the state Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Math test than ever before; 88 percent of those students had participated in the Calculus Project. The highest-scoring student in the district was Black – and a program alum. Two years later, when the first cohort of students who participated in both the summer and year-long programs graduated from high school, 75 percent had successfully completed calculus.

Today, eight districts participate in the year-round program and another six send their students to the group’s summer programs, two three-week sessions that take place at Boston University, Emmanuel College and University of Massachusetts-Lowell. As of May 2024, 31 percent of students in the program identified as Black, 39 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 11 percent as Asian and 7 percent as white, according to program data. Mims has helped develop similar models in Florida and Texas.

In 2023, research consultancy group Mathematica, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, published findings from a two-year study on the effectiveness of the Calculus Project and two other math-oriented summer programs. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) According to the report, students in the Calculus Project outperformed students who hadn’t participated by nearly half a grade point in their fall math classes, on average.

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

The project runs counter to a recent push to engage high schoolers in math by making the content more relevant to the real world and substituting classes like data science for algebra II and calculus. Justin Desai, the Calculus Project’s director of school and district support and a former Boston Public Schools math teacher and curriculum designer, said he sees risks in that approach. Students need subjects like calculus, he said, because “it’s the foundation of modern technology.” To replace advanced math classes in favor of less rigorous math courses keeps students from accessing and excelling even in some non-STEM fields like law, he said.

The project finds ways to show students how math skills apply in the professional world.  Every semester students take field trips to Harvard Medical School, Google and to university research centers and engineering companies, where they are introduced to careers and see how the math they are learning is used in society.

In late July, a group of rising eighth graders from Newton Public Schools’ summer program took a field trip to the sprawling campus of global software company MathWorks. In one room, an engineer showed students how a car simulation model is built and used, while a second engineer helped students test a robotic arm. Another group of students learned how to use a programming software to turn an image into music.

As the Calculus Project has grown, there has at times been friction. In July, simmering tension between teachers and students at Concord-Carlisle High School came to a head when some project participants learned they’d been placed in financial literacy or statistics courses instead of calculus.

Some students being placed into lower-level classes has been a pattern since the program started at Concord-Carlisle in 2020, Mims said. He threatened to pull the program from the high school, and the students were reassigned to calculus (and one to statistics).

Mims said “this is a clear example” of how teacher recommendations can lock students out of advanced math classes. School administrators and teachers often point to students and parents as the reason for a lack of diversity in high-level math. “When we destroy that myth and we show that students can achieve at that level,” said Mims, “they can no longer point the finger at the students and the parents anymore, because we’ve created a precedent that these students can thrive.”

Laurie Hunter, the Concord-Carlisle superintendent, wrote in an email that her district is committed to partnering with the Calculus Project and that it “works closely with individual students and families to ensure their success and path align with the outcomes of the project.” She did not respond to specific questions. 

Milton Public Schools, another district that works with the Calculus Project, was the subject of a 2023 federal civil rights complaint from national conservative group Parents Defending Education. The group accused the district of discrimination by partnering with the Calculus Project, which it said segregates students by intentionally grouping students of certain backgrounds together as part of cohorts.

Mims rejects the group’s claims, noting that the Calculus Project is open to students of all backgrounds including white and Asian students. He says he has not heard from the federal government or the group about the complaint since early 2023. Parents Defending Education did not respond to several interview requests. A spokesperson for the federal Department of Education said the Office for Civil Rights does not confirm complaints but pointed to its list of open investigations. At the time of publication, there were no open investigations against Milton Public Schools.

Art Coleman, a founding partner at legal group EducationCounsel LLC, said that he doesn’t expect such challenges to be successful. School districts have a legal obligation to address inequities in student performance, he said, and “there is nothing in federal law that precludes that targeted support, as long as in broad terms, all students, regardless of their racial or ethnic status, have the ability to tap into those resources and that support.”

Related: How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

This summer, the Calculus Project expanded its programming, including by adding a college advising class for rising seniors. It’s part of the group’s mission to help its students succeed not just in high school but in college and beyond, Mims said.

The group plans to help its graduates secure internships while they’re in college and network once they’re out, he said, and will soon begin tracking students to see how they do in college and the workforce. “It’s really about giving them every advantage that rich kids have,” Mims said.

Ames, the Brookline High senior and peer teacher, said she has found the program “totally life-changing,” in part because of the relationships she’s built with other students and teachers.

“You can be in the hardest class or the easiest class and every teacher will be there to support you,” said Ames, who is taking AP Calculus this fall and is considering studying finance after high school. “Whatever questions you have, they’ll answer.”

Quentin Robinson, a college junior who joined the Calculus Project as a rising seventh grader, said it taught him that he enjoyed math and also how to advocate for himself.

“My freshman year, they tried to put me in a lower-level math class because they didn’t think I was capable,” Robinson said. But his summer experience empowered him, and he persuaded the school to place him in Geometry Honors instead. He graduated from high school having completed both calculus and a college-level statistics course.

Now, Robinson is an accounting and data analytics major at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. The Calculus Project, he said, helped him realize the voices of naysayers can be used as “a fuel” to achieve what you want.

Contact staff writer Javeria Salman at 212-678-3455 or salman@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Until she was 9 years old, Aisha O’Neil grew up in Zion National Park, where her father was a ranger. “That place raised me just as much as my family,” she said. Her love of the park’s sandstone cliffs and caverns became the bedrock of her passion for the environment, and for securing a future where her own children could enjoy the same experiences that she did.

But O’Neil never learned much about climate change in school. What she did learn came from the news, and it was “dramatically horrifying,” she said. “I started seeing articles every day — this city’s on fire, these people were evacuated.”

As a senior in high school last year, in rural Durango, Colorado, O’Neil started a statewide climate action group called Good Trouble. She and fellow students campaigned for state legislation to create a “seal of climate literacy” that high school graduates across Colorado could earn.

Thanks in part to their lobbying, the bill passed with bipartisan support, and O’Neil became part of the first group of students to earn the seal on her diploma this spring. “An education without referencing climate change is not complete,” she said. “You can’t say you’re educating kids about our future without telling them what that future will look like.”

But just what is “climate literacy”? What are the ABCs, the grammar and vocabulary, of climate change?

Related: Interested in climate change and education? Sign up for our newsletter.

The U.N. and other leading global organizations have identified education at all levels and across disciplines as a key strategy for fighting the climate crisis. The world is going through a historically rapid transition to clean energy and sustainable infrastructure, and the workforce is thirsty for people with the skills to do the necessary climate mitigation and adaptation work. Communities also need empowered citizens to push back against fossil fuel interests. But as of now, few states have comprehensive climate education, and most of the lessons that exist are confined to science classes — lacking in areas like justice and solutions.

Colorado’s seal of climate literacy, which high school graduates can earn through a combination of coursework and out of school projects, is one attempt to build support for more comprehensive climate education. Another attempt was on display in late September. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, with input from agencies including the State Department, NASA and the Department of Transportation, released a document called “Climate Literacy: Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change.”

The definition of climate literacy its authors arrived at, after 21 months of work, includes eight essential principles that I’m summarizing here:

      1. How we know: climate science, interdisciplinary observations and modeling

      2. Climate change: greenhouse gases shape Earth’s climate

      3. Causes: burning fossil fuels and other human activities

      4. Impacts: threats to human life and ecological systems

      5. Equity: climate justice

      6. Adaptation: social, built, natural environments

      7. Mitigation: reducing emissions, net zero by 2050

      8. Hope and urgency: “A livable and sustainable future for all is possible with rapid, just, and transformational climate action.”

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all subjects — even PE

During Climate Week NYC, dozens of educators crowded into a basement room beneath the grand marble Museum of the American Indian, in downtown Manhattan, to hear about the new guide. Standing at the front of the room was Frank Niepold, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He has been engaged in climate education within the federal government for 30 years, and he’s been as involved as anyone in helping this effort see the light of day. “This is a guide for educators, communicators and decision makers,” he said. “We’re not just talking to classroom teachers.”

This guide is technically a third edition. The first one appeared in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration; it was rapidly updated in 2009 when President Barack Obama took office. Then came the Trump administration, and, in Niepold’s words, the thinking was, “Don’t try to do this really complicated thing at that time.” Efforts restarted after Joe Biden was elected president, many new staffers who came in as part of the Inflation Reduction Act provided input to the new guide— and now here we are.

Niepold said that since the 2000s, there’s been a lot of evolution in our collective understanding of both the problem and the solutions. “Before, the document was called ‘essential principles of climate science literacy,’” he said. “We knew that was too narrow. We wanted something that gets you into an action, not just an understanding orientation.”

Still, earlier editions of the document were influential: They informed the Next Generation Science Standards, some version of which is now in use in 48 states. The previous guide was also incorporated into K-12 and college curricula and into museum and park exhibits.

With the new edition, Niepold hopes to see even more impact. The guide is unusually clear and accessible for a government report. The pages are laid out like a textbook, featuring artwork that depicts some of the core themes of climate literacy — as defined in the report – like climate justice and traditional and Indigenous knowledges (the plural s is intentional).

“Success means it would activate all forms of education, all stages, across all disciplines,” and outside the United States as well as within it, Niepold said. He wants to see more prominent NGOs taking on climate education as part of their purview — such as Planet Ed at the Aspen Institute, where, disclosure, I’m an advisor. 

Related: The climate change lessons teachers are missing

Niepold would like to see community-based climate efforts take public communication and workforce development seriously, and to see media coverage promote a fuller picture of climate literacy as well. “Success is: People, regardless of where they’re coming from, understand [climate change] and address it.”

His concern is similar to that of Aisha O’Neil in Colorado: that young people are currently learning about climate change primarily through the media, in a way that’s not solution-oriented, emotionally supportive, or trauma-informed. “That opportunity to be blindsided is high,” Niepold said. That’s why the guideline’s eighth principle unites urgency with hope. Said O’Neil:

“Being taught about issues in a way that emphasizes solutions is telling our youth that they can be part of progress and that the world isn’t doomed.”

Upgrading lessons to meet the moment is taking time. Even in New Jersey, known as a national leader for its comprehensive state-level climate education standards, teachers have shared concern about a lack of resources for implementation and training. Mary Seawell, whose organization Lyra campaigned for the climate literacy seal in Colorado, said her group wanted to take a grassroots, student-led approach. “We want to show demand. What the seal really is doing is creating an opportunity for youth to direct their own learning.”

In order to earn the seal of climate literacy, Colorado students have to take at least one science class in high school — which currently is not a general graduation requirement — and at least one other class that satisfies principles of climate literacy. They also have to engage in some kind of out-of-school learning or action. “This is opt-in,” said Colorado state Sen. Chris Hansen, who co-sponsored the legislation. “The state can’t tell districts what classes to offer. This is for districts that want to have something that is easily recognizable across the state and beyond.”

O’Neil, now a freshman at University of Colorado Boulder, said it’s a good start. Her student group at the college is campaigning for new state curriculum standards. “This is the only logical next move. “ she said. Although the climate seal of literacy encourages climate learning, “we need everyone to be educated, not just the ones who go out of their way.”

O’Neil thinks students could especially use tutelage on taking climate action, something she has had to figure out on her own, with some mentorship from her debate coach and from a state legislator. Planet Ed, for one, has just released a Youth Climate Action Guide with the Nature Conservancy that engages many areas of climate literacy, from mitigation to adaptation to justice.

“I feel like in an ideal world we would learn how climate impacts every element of our lives,” O’Neil said. “Not just the science, but social justice. Policy positions that have created it, and policies that can get us out. My goal right now would be to have students get to a place where they feel like they aren’t terrified by the climate crisis, but empowered by it.”

Contact the editor of this story, Caroline Preston, at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.

This column about climate literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger climate change and education newsletter.

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We are still in the early days of understanding the promise and peril of using generative AI in education. Very few researchers have evaluated whether students are benefiting, and one well-designed study showed that using ChatGPT for math actually harmed student achievement. 

The first scientific proof I’ve seen that ChatGPT can actually help students learn more was posted online earlier this year. It’s a small experiment, involving fewer than 200 undergraduates.  All were Harvard students taking an introductory physics class in the fall of 2023, so the findings may not be widely applicable. But students learned more than twice as much in less time when they used an AI tutor in their dorm compared with attending their usual physics class in person. Students also reported that they felt more engaged and motivated. They learned more and they liked it. 

A paper about the experiment has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but other physicists at Harvard University praised it as a well-designed experiment. Students were randomly assigned to learn a topic as usual in class, or stay “home” in their dorm and learn it through an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT. Students took brief tests at the beginning and the end of class, or their AI sessions, to measure how much they learned. The following week, the in-class students learned the next topic through the AI tutor in their dorms, and the AI-tutored students went back to class. Each student learned both ways, and for both lessons – one on surface tension and one on fluid flow –  the AI-tutored students learned a lot more. 

To avoid AI “hallucinations,” the tendency of chatbots to make up stuff that isn’t true, the AI tutor was given all the correct solutions. But other developers of AI tutors have also supplied their bots with answer keys. Gregory Kestin, a physics lecturer at Harvard and developer of the AI tutor used in this study, argues that his effort succeeded while others have failed because he and his colleagues fine-tuned it with pedagogical best practices. For example, the Harvard scientists instructed this AI tutor to be brief, using no more than a few sentences, to avoid cognitive overload. Otherwise, he explained, ChatGPT has a tendency to be “long-winded.”

The tutor, which Kestin calls “PS2 Pal,” after the Physical Sciences 2 class he teaches, was told to only give away one step at a time and not to divulge the full solution in a single message. PS2 Pal was also instructed to encourage students to think and give it a try themselves before revealing the answer. 

Unguided use of ChatGPT, the Harvard scientists argue, lets students complete assignments without engaging in critical thinking. 

Kestin doesn’t deliver traditional lectures. Like many physicists at Harvard, he teaches through a method called “active learning,” where students first work with peers on in-class problem sets as the lecturer gives feedback. Direct explanations or mini-lectures come after a bit of trial, error and struggle. Kestin sought to reproduce aspects of this teaching style with the AI tutor. Students toiled on the same set of activities and Kestin fed the AI tutor the same feedback notes that he planned to deliver in class.

Kestin provocatively titled his paper about the experiment, “AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning,” but in an interview he told me that he doesn’t mean to suggest that AI should replace professors or traditional in-person classes. 

“I don’t think that this is an argument for replacing any human interaction,” said Kestin. “This allows for the human interaction to be much richer.”

Kestin says he intends to continue teaching through in-person classes, and he remains convinced that students learn a lot from each other by discussing how to solve problems in groups. He believes the best use of this AI tutor would be to introduce a new topic ahead of class – much like professors assign reading in advance. That way students with less background knowledge won’t be as behind and can participate more fully in class activities. Kestin hopes his AI tutor will allow him to spend less time on vocabulary and basics and devote more time to creative activities and advanced problems during class.

Of course, the benefits of an AI tutor depend on students actually using it. In other efforts, students often didn’t want to use earlier versions of education technology and computerized tutors. In this experiment, the “at-home” sessions with PS2 Pal were scheduled and proctored over Zoom. It’s not clear that even highly motivated Harvard students will find it engaging enough to use regularly on their own initiative. Cute emojis – another element that the Harvard scientists prompted their AI tutor to use – may not be enough to sustain long-term interest. 

Kestin’s next step is to test the tutor bot for an entire semester. He’s also been testing PS2 Pal as a study assistant with homework. Kestin said he’s seeing promising signs that it’s helpful for basic but not advanced problems. 

The irony is that AI tutors may not be that effective at what we generally think of as tutoring. Kestin doesn’t think that current AI technology is good at anything that requires knowing a lot about a person, such as what the student already learned in class or what kind of explanatory metaphor might work.

“Humans have a lot of context that you can use along with your judgment in order to guide a student better than an AI can,” he said. In contrast, AI is good at introducing students to new material because you only need “limited context” about someone and “minimal judgment” for how best to teach it. 

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

This story about an AI tutor 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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Imagine engineering students retrofitting campus buildings to make them more energy efficient. Or students in a human behavior class applying what they’ve learned to encourage cafeteria visitors to waste less food.

Efforts like these are part of an instructional approach known as the “campus as a living lab,” in which classroom teaching mixes with on-the-ground efforts to decarbonize campuses. Earlier this year, I visited the State University of New York to see the living lab model in action.

During my trip, I sat in on a business class as students pitched their proposals for greening the New Paltz campus. They’d researched topics including solar energy and composting, acquiring skills in project management and finance as they developed their business plans. Students I spoke with said the fact that the projects had a chance of becoming reality — thanks to money from a university “green revolving fund” — helped the lessons stick.

“A lot of projects are kind of like simulations,” Madeleine Biles, a graduating senior, told me. “This one was real life.”

I was struck by how professors in fields as diverse as theater, economics and architecture were participating in the “living lab” model. Former NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz writes about a related trend in her latest column for Hechinger: Colleges embedding climate-related content into all sorts of classes — sociology, history, English literature, French.

“We want every major to be a climate major,” Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Duke University, told Anya. “Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do — preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators — if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Research take

This is Planet Ed, the Aspen Institute initiative on climate and education, highlighted strategies like these and more in its recent plan for how colleges and universities can respond to the climate crisis. The report talks about higher ed’s role primarily in four areas:

• Educating and supporting students: Higher ed can ensure all students obtain a basic level of climate literacy and also prepare students for jobs in renewable energy and related fields. One example: The Kern Community College system, in California, is attempting to move away from training students for oil jobs to jobs in carbon management.
• Engaging people in communities where colleges are located: Higher ed can convene and support community leaders as they develop climate plans. For example, the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University has worked with predominantly Black communities in the Gulf Coast to mitigate environmental harms.  
• Developing solutions for climate mitigation: Colleges must reduce their own climate footprint and prepare their campuses for climate risks. Some examples: Arizona State University has a “campus metabolism dashboard” that allows students, faculty and staff to track their resource use, while at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, 85 percent of its 41 campus vehicles are electric.  
• Putting equity at the center of their climate work: Colleges can prioritize support for students most affected by climate and educational inequities, and historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and other institutions that serve such individuals must be part of climate planning. The HBCU Climate Change Consortium, for example, strives to diversify the pipeline of environmental leaders.

The interview

I spoke with John B. King Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York and co-chair of This is Planet Ed, about higher ed’s role in fighting climate change and how it’s reshaping childhood. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are you doing at SUNY to combat climate change?

One of the first things I did was name a chief sustainability officer, Carter Strickland. He has convened a task force that is developing a system-wide climate action plan to address campus sustainability practices and educate students around climate issues and for green jobs. He also has worked with our campuses on their clean energy master plans. Each of our state operating campuses has identified what steps they need to take to get to the 2045 net-zero [greenhouse gas emissions] goal. We changed our algorithm for prioritizing capital projects to build in climate, so we are doing a number of projects that involve geothermal.

According to the nonprofit group Second Nature, only about 12 universities are carbon neutral. Why can’t SUNY and other universities move faster to reduce their carbon footprint?

It really comes down to capital. For our state-operating campuses, we project it’s going to take something like $10 billion in capital investment to get to our net zero targets. We also have a substantial critical maintenance backlog of $7 billion or $8 billion dollars. One way we’re trying to reconcile this challenge is as we do renovations of buildings, we are taking steps to make them as energy efficient as possible. We are adding more charging stations, we’re moving our fleets to electric, we’re changing out light fixtures, we are phasing in a ban on single-use plastic. We do think the Inflation Reduction Act may be a help because of the direct pay provision [which provides universities and other nonprofits payment equivalent to the value of tax credits for qualifying clean energy projects].

Could this result in students having to pay more to attend SUNY schools?

No. Our hope is that the governor and legislature will work with us to develop a comprehensive capital plan.

How is climate change already reshaping childhood?

Sadly. We already see school being disrupted regularly by extreme weather events, whether that’s hurricanes or heat waves. There is growing data on the negative impact of high temperatures on student learning. We already are seeing the negative consequences of climate change for the student experience. If you think about being a kid in Phoenix where it’s well over 100 for days, you’re not going to be able to play outside. But I do think increasingly you are seeing K-12 trying to engage students in how they can be a part of the solution — and students are demanding that.

Resources and events

• As this summer — the hottest on record — nears an end, I’m looking forward to several sessions on education happening Sept. 24, 25 and 26 as part of Climate Week NYC. Say hi if you’re going, too.
• EARTHDAY.ORG, a nonprofit that supports environmental action worldwide, recently released a “School Guide to Climate Action.” On Oct. 9, in Washington, D.C., the group will hold a workshop for educators on the guide and climate instruction in schools. Email walker@earthday.org with questions or to sign up.
• A new World Bank report argues that climate action has been slow in part because people don’t have the necessary knowledge and skills. Policy makers need to invest in education as a tool for fighting climate change, it says.
• New research in the journal WIREs Climate Change examines the fossil fuel industry’s extensive involvement in higher education. Oil and gas companies and their affiliated foundations finance climate and energy research, sit on university governance boards and host student-recruitment events on campus, the report notes. 

What I’m reading

The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. This novel tells the story of a family trying to survive in a Florida of the not-so-distant future that’s been ravaged by climate change. There’s an education angle: Storms and floods have driven away most residents of the fictional town of Rudder, including the only friend of 10-year-old Wanda, for whom school has become a hostile place. I found this book absolutely gutting but it also provides a glimpse of how people can persevere and even thrive in a world that looks very different from the one we’ve known.

Thanks for subscribing — and please let me know your thoughts on this newsletter and what you’d like to see me cover!

— Caroline Preston

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

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MILWAUKEE — On a muggy afternoon in late June, about 20 kindergarten through second-grade teachers sat in a classroom on the third floor of Milwaukee’s North Division High School. The air conditioning wasn’t working properly, but the heat didn’t seem to bother the teachers, who were absorbed in a math lesson.

Danielle Robinson and Alicia Socha, two teachers in the district, led the lesson.

“I went to the store to buy some fruit. I bought five apples and four bananas. How many pieces of fruit did I buy?” Socha asked.

The elementary teachers in the room solved the problem quickly. But the solution wasn’t the point. The teachers spent more time discussing what type of problem this was. Describing and deconstructing it helped the teachers reach a deeper understanding of not only how it works but how to explain it to their youngest learners.

“Put yourself into the mind of a child,” Robinson said.

Teaching counting and basic arithmetic sounds like a simple task. But early-childhood and elementary teachers have the daunting task of introducing abstraction to their students: What is a number? What does it mean for a number to be bigger? What does it mean to be a part of a whole?

Across the hall, Beth Schefelker and Claire Madden, two other math education specialists, led a group of teachers and principals in adding fractions. Since 2022, the district has spent close to a million dollars in Covid-19 relief funds to pay the coaches, principals and teachers to attend these sessions.

Many of these teachers never saw themselves as “math people.” Today, they were surprising themselves. Kayla Thuemler, a first grade teacher, added some fractions using a number line, where fractions are visually arranged along a horizontal line, similar to using a ruler. Thuemler had never seen fractions taught using a number line. But seeing fractions with different denominators on the same number line helped her see fractions as a more coherent system.

“Why am I enjoying myself right now?” she asked colleagues. “I hate math.”

Melissa Hedges and DeAnn Huinker strolled back and forth between the two classrooms. They shared giddy glances when they saw the teachers get excited about math. Hedges oversees all things math for the Milwaukee district’s elementary and middle schools. Huinker, a professor who advised Hedges’ doctorate in math education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a legend among Milwaukee’s math teachers.

Huinker led a math education revolution in the district when, between 2004 and 2014, almost every teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools received this type of training. Veteran teachers refer to this era as the golden years of math instruction. New district leaders abruptly ended that work. Ten years later, the teachers gathered on this balmy afternoon are the inheritors of Huinker’s legacy, tasked with preserving a vibrant culture of collaboration and a commitment to helping teachers master math.

“Every teacher wants to learn and do a better job teaching,” Huinker said. “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”

Related: Sign up for a limited-run newsletter that walks you through some of the most promising solutions for helping students conquer math.

Early in her career, Huinker dedicated herself to solving the problem of inequitable achievement in math, whether measured by test scores, grades or more qualitative surveys about students’ attitudes toward the subject. In the early 2000s, she saw a grant from the National Science Foundation as a possible solution for Milwaukee’s public schools.

The NSF, an independent federal agency, offers funding for math, science and engineering education in all 50 states. In 2003, the NSF awarded Huinker $20 million, the largest amount ever awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to establish a partnership between the university and the local school district.

 Huinker’s proposal was to have math education experts teach teachers more math while getting constant feedback from teachers on obstacles in the classroom. In 2002, a coalition of teachers, professors and administrators led by Huinker announced the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership.

“It’s like all the stars aligned,” she said. “You had the university professors from education and mathematics, as well as the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, who was very supportive.”

The $20 million allowed the district to hire 120 math teacher leaders who would serve as a crucial piece to the system Huinker had imagined. Each of the 120 schools had a teacher leader, who would serve as the liaison between Huinker and her university colleagues and the classroom teachers across the district.

Beth Schefelker was one of those teacher leaders. She was “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” about the partnership when it started, but she said she quickly ran into roadblocks. While some district administrators were on board, others were less enthused.

Schefelker recalled one meeting with a principal who leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk and said, “Convince me why I need to be a part of this.” Another principal told her, “You’re just another woman asking me to take a leap of faith.”

Schefelker responded, “What we’re doing is not working.”

Before the partnership, the district’s approach to math resembled what math instruction looks like today in many schools across the nation — a patchwork of different methods and approaches. The partnership sought to bring more consistency among educators in a way that reflected the conceptual cohesion of mathematics as a discipline. But none of this would be possible if teachers themselves didn’t understand the math.

While teacher leaders like Schefelker worked in individual schools and Huinker managed the partnership from the university, Henry Kranendonk mediated from the district office. He helped develop a “spectrum” that became the centerpiece of the program.

First, the district’s teachers agreed what students in each grade should learn in math and made sure these learning goals met state standards. Second, teachers and university professors helped develop standardized assessments for each grade level. Teachers within individual schools would then meet to discuss where students were weak and report these findings to Huinker and her colleagues, who would then develop teacher training sessions.

“At the end of the day, it was gratifying,” Kranendonk said. “We weren’t giving them orders. We were collectively trying to figure out the best form of instruction.”

In the classroom, teachers pushed students to reach a conceptual understanding of mathematics, a departure from the “drill and kill” methods of timed tests and memorizing procedures. The goal was to help students understand how different topics within math, everything from whole numbers and fractions to algebraic functions and areas of shapes, are interconnected. Students could then confidently solve unfamiliar problems without relying on formulas or by following the same step-by-step procedures. They would understand that individual problems are just expressions of concepts.

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

The partnership also gave teachers a say in how the district taught math. The training sessions went over state standards in detail and helped teachers unlearn their own bad math habits, while dispelling any false ideas a teacher might have about not being a “math person.” The training sessions were designed and improved based on the feedback classroom teachers gave to Kranendonk.

Through this ecosystem, teachers discovered just how fragmented math instruction had been in the district. For example, they realized early on that some students didn’t understand the “equals” sign. Schefelker recalled how some students thought the symbol stood for “the answer is” rather than a symbol that represents balance. They had seen the equal sign only in the context of solving problems, and not as one critical component of the language of math.

“The kids didn’t understand equality,” Schefelker said. “All they were doing was going through the process and not really understanding what they were doing.”

Once Huinker and her colleagues intervened through training sessions, teachers started to teach the equal sign differently, using problems like “5+7=__+6” to show how both sides of the equation need to be the same value.

Once the partnership gained momentum, the benefits became obvious, especially in test score data. According to one University of Wisconsin report, test scores rose by 10 percentage points for some groups. According to a report by Huinker’s team in 2011, one school in the district, 98 percent of whose students lived in low-income households, increased its mathematics proficiency by 40 percentage points. Milwaukee Public Schools became a beacon for math instruction across the country.

A long-term look at the data, however, paints a more complicated picture. In 2004, when the partnership fully launched, about 30 percent of the district’s eighth graders were either proficient or advanced in math, according to Wisconsin standardized test score data. But in the 2005-06 school year, the state created a new standardized test, and scores plummeted for students: That year, only about 10 percent of eighth graders in Milwaukee were either proficient or advanced. That rate for eighth graders peaked in 2012, with about 16 percent reaching proficiency or advanced status. During the partnership, fourth graders saw about an 8 percentage point gain in the rate of students who scored proficient or advanced.

According to Huinker and Schefelker, however, test scores were only the most public-facing sign of improvement. Grades, student interest and teacher satisfaction skyrocketed during those years.

Buy-in from teachers was one reason the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership worked, Huinker said. The second reason for the partnership’s success was more bureaucratic. Huinker, not the district, controlled the purse strings. Leaders at financially strapped districts like Milwaukee Public Schools constantly juggle competing priorities, and, according to Huinker and Kranendonk, district leaders were tempted to allocate some of the money to other areas of need. Huinker ensured that the money would be spent only on math instruction.

“The external funding really gave us a leverage point,” Huinker said. “We were accountable to the National Science Foundation for keeping track of how the money was spent towards the clear goals of the project.”

All this created a tight accountability structure that allowed everyone involved to stay focused on the goal of improving math achievement in Milwaukee.

The NSF money lasted nearly a decade, and the successes continued. When the federal money ran out, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction funded the partnership for two years.

Despite receiving national and statewide praise, the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership ended in 2014, when a new superintendent and curriculum director decided to terminate the district’s relationship with the University of Wisconsin.

Huinker, Kranendonk and Schefelker recalled that the new district officials wanted to have complete district control over math instruction. The end was sudden, a contrast to the amount of time that had been invested into making the partnership work.

“They broke it,” Schefelker said. “It took years of work to thread that needle. It took months to unravel.”

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

Today, about 12 percent of students in the district, compared to 41 percent statewide, are proficient in math, according to standardized test score data. Wisconsin administers its state tests to students in grades three to eight and grade 10. Hedges, the current math curriculum director for the district who held several positions during the partnership, recalled a colleague who had once called math the “crown jewel” of Milwaukee Public Schools. “If you look at our test scores now, we might not be able to say that,” Hedges said.

After the partnership ended in 2014, standardized test scores in math continued to rise incrementally. From 2016 to 2019, overall math proficiency in Milwaukee rose about 1 percentage point, to reach 16.2 percent. Hedges said some teachers remained committed to the partnership’s methods.

“We had such a strong leadership base,” she said. When the partnership ended, “there were 120 math teacher leaders out in the district, and some of them went back into classrooms.”

Huinker continues to train teachers for the district. Since the partnership ended in 2014, district leadership changed again, and there’s been more openness to collaborating with the university. The sessions for early-childhood educators, which meet for four hours a day for about two weeks, include both lessons in math and open forums for teachers to air grievances. The format of these meetings reflect the structure of the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership, with its focus on math content and fostering collaboration between teachers who need more help teaching math.

Today, Milwaukee Public Schools is reckoning with fiscal mismanagement, changes to leadership, clashes with the state and tension between administrators and teachers. On top of all that, the district will implement a new math curriculum across its schools this fall. Teachers feel unprepared and lament that they’ll only see it a week before the school year starts.

Although another systemic overhaul is unlikely in the near future, the people who were around during the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership are trying to pass down everything they’ve learned to the next generation of educators. The focus on the youngest learners is encouraging for newer teachers who got into the profession partly to avoid math.

Danielle Robinson was one of the teachers in the district who helped lead the sessions for early-childhood teachers. She wasn’t around during the partnership, but she adheres to the same goals and methods. Her job, she said, is to translate research in education and childhood development for teachers.

“I felt like I never really learned math, until I was able to learn” from Huinker and Hedges, Robinson said. “I always thought that social studies and literacy were more of my thing. These ladies really did change my life.”

Phoebe Goebels contributed reporting for this story.

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When people learn that I have a doctorate in educational psychology and quantitative methods, they often assume that I love math. And the truth is, I do now, although that wasn’t always the case.

Like many Black students, I faced challenges throughout my academic journey, with math tracking being the primary one. Despite high math scores in earlier grades and a passion for the subject, I was placed into lower-level math courses in middle school.

This experience happened more than two decades ago, but limited access to advanced and engaging math options is still a problem today, even for high-achieving Black and Latino students.

All students deserve to benefit from enriching math learning experiences and the promising future those experiences can unlock.

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

When I was in elementary school, my father, a master carpenter and math enthusiast, played a significant role in shaping my love and curiosity for math. He believed that no concept was too complex to learn, and he used carpentry to help me understand the interconnectedness of math and the world around me.

I learned about fractions, angles, precision and spatial awareness using wooden blocks and puzzle pieces I helped my dad create. By the age of 11, I could read a floor plan and calculate the length of a diagonal roofline using the Pythagorean theorem.

My dad taught me that math makes the world better, and that learning math is key to understanding the world.

But in middle school, being tracked into lower-level courses contradicted my math identity and eroded my confidence to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: I became a lower-level math student, which marked the beginning of a full-blown math identity crisis.

Frequent learning disruptions — a result of the lower-level classes also being used for students with behavioral challenges — combined with a curriculum without meaningful content facilitated a swift shift in my relationship with math.

Tracking also limited my access to advanced high school courses such as statistics and calculus that would have further developed my math skills and opened up numerous postsecondary opportunities.

Sadly, I was learning to hate math, despite my early love for it.

The tracked classes did, however, improve my social skills and popularity. Through regular exchanges of humorous insults with fellow classmates on various topics — such as who was the least intelligent or most economically disadvantaged — I developed a well-curated arsenal of diss material.

The joke-telling also became a great defense mechanism against the stigma of having been placed in lower-level classes. So instead of practicing math during study hall, I worked on refining my repertoire of jokes. I didn’t learn much math, but I did learn how to be funny.

Related: Racial gaps in math have grown. Could detracking help?

Unfortunately, my story is far too common. Indeed, more than half of U.S. states have recognized that their traditional approaches, including placement policies and limited math course options, often advantage an elite few while overlooking the needs of the broader student population.

While a lack of resources in underserved schools is a real issue, the most damage to students’ math identities and success can be attributed to dated perspectives on the type of math courses that should be offered and systemic racism dictating who they should be offered to.

I was fortunate to discover applied statistics in graduate school. This discovery marked a pivotal turning point in my post-elementary school relationship with math, which had, up until then, been more a “situationship” — a noncommittal and sporadic interest driven by prerequisite requirements.

For the first time since learning with my dad, I was engaged and sufficiently challenged while learning mathematics. Unlike my previous math classes, the statistics courses weren’t focused on rote memorization or problems that lack any relevance to the real world.

And since earning my Ph.D., I’ve used these skills across various professional domains.

I’ve used structural equation modeling to predict STEM access for underserved students and to make recommendations to broaden pathways to STEM. As a United Way director of education, I used statistical methods, such as linear regression, to make investment and funding decisions. During my 2019 run for Congress, my statistical expertise proved invaluable in analyzing trends, guiding campaign messaging and optimizing resource allocation. I felt empowered like never before, having the ability to make more accurate interpretations and informed decisions.

I recently co-authored a report addressing the equity dimensions of math education, delving into past policies and emerging strategies to better engage and prepare students for college and career in a data-driven society.

The report sheds light on the need to enrich students’ math experiences with challenging and relevant content that offers opportunities for deeper learning. This content should provide pathways for students to make connections between theoretical concepts and practical solutions, such as building sustainable communities in underresourced regions.

The most valuable lesson I learned throughout this journey was the inextricable link between math identity and math experiences. In other words, when people say they don’t like math, they really mean that they didn’t like their experiences learning math.

Students learn more than just mathematics in math class; they are affirming their abilities and math identities and discovering that they can have a place in shaping an advanced technological society. We owe it to our students to ensure that they have better math learning experiences than those I received decades ago.

Melodie K. Baker is national policy director for Just Equations, a nonprofit organization reconceptualizing the role of math to ensure educational equity.

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The post OPINION: As a Black middle-school student, I was tracked into lower-level math classes that kept me back appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Math education is living under a spell. Most classes and curricula operate under a pervasive and unspoken assumption; its benefits are widely accepted, but its flaws are all too hidden.

The assumption is that you learn math by solving strings of successively harder problems. At each stage, the teacher decides how hard to make the problems; that is, where to set the “difficulty dial.” The ideal is to gradually turn the difficulty dial from left to right, easy to hard, at just the right speed. For example:

There’s truth in this way of thinking, but when I start treating that slice as a whole loaf — when I catch myself thinking of where to set the difficulty dial as the only choice, or even the primary choice, that a math teacher faces — that’s when I slap my face, dump ice water on my head and write two crucial inequalities on my hand:

Focusing on “easy” vs. “difficult” can become a trap. The two appear to stand opposed, and so teachers can fall into the idea that we must pick one or the other.

But who really cares about “easy” and “difficult”? They are only proxies for two higher virtues, the actual qualities of successful instruction.

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

First, math class should be welcoming. Students need to feel comfortable in the intellectual work of mathematics. Teachers need to help them feel capable not just of solving an “easy” or dumbed down problem, but of tackling the real stuff.

Second, math class should be challenging. It should sharpen and deepen students’ thinking. They should master new skills and practice solving unfamiliar problems.

Unlike easy vs. difficult, welcoming and challenging aren’t opposites. We don’t need to choose between them. The best math instruction braids the two together, in puzzles that are clear yet subtle. A good math lesson, like a good sudoku, can welcome and challenge students simultaneously — welcome them by challenging them.

As a classroom teacher, one of my favorite instructional moves is “give me an example.” At any level of K-12 mathematics, it offers agency and freedom — and it’s easy to come up with such questions.

Asking such questions invites diverse responses. They’re hard to grade in a standardized, objective way. That’s why textbooks and question banks tend to steer clear of them — and that’s why teachers must not.

Mathematical truth may be black and white, but mathematical thinking is not. We need questions that draw out all the shades and hues of thought.

When I taught sixth grade, one of my students’ favorite activities was writing questions for each other. At the end of each unit, I’d designate two piles on my desk: one for straightforward practice questions (the kind easily placed on a difficulty dial) and one for novel problems or open-ended puzzles (including, but not limited to, “give me an example” questions).

Nothing is more welcoming, or more challenging, than the chance to welcome and challenge one another.

When I first taught high school precalculus, my students couldn’t make heads or tails of piecewise-defined functions. Then I lost a whole lesson to a ramble about federal income taxes — and saw their heads perking up after weeks spent slouched on their desks.

That led me to a suitably welcoming and challenging task: Design your own income tax system. Give a table of brackets and rates; give the tax bill for a specific worker in each bracket; and, trickiest of all, give the tax bill as a piecewise-defined function of income.

I’m not sure if the project was easier or more difficult than the exercises we’d been doing. But it excited them more, and pushed them harder. It welcomed and it challenged students.

Since then, projects have become a staple of my teaching — not as a replacement for quizzes and tests, but as a necessary complement.

Related: Why schools are teaching math word problems all wrong

Kids, being human, prefer easy tasks over difficult ones. When the homework is too difficult, they mutiny; when it’s too easy, they shrug and smile.

But on some deeper level, they don’t want math to be easy. They want it to be rewarding.

I saw this the first time I taught AP calculus. In precalculus the year before, my teaching had certainly not inspired them. But now, as 12th graders, they’d name-drop their math class in the hallway, as if they’d befriended a minor celebrity.

“Can’t talk, guys. I’ve got to do the calculus.” “Hey, have you started the calculus?” “Ugh, I was up so late last night doing calculus.”

I say this with affection, having written a book on the stuff, but calculus has little obvious appeal. It’s unnecessary for daily life and irrelevant to most professions.

Despite this, my students thirsted for it. For these kids in Oakland, calculus’s challenge wasn’t a turn-off. It was a badge of honor.

There’s no way to make calculus easy — but that doesn’t mean it can’t be welcoming.

Ben Orlin is a math teacher who can’t draw. He is the author of “Math with Bad Drawings” (2018), “Change Is the Only Constant” (2019), “Math Games with Bad Drawings” (2022) and, most recently, “Math for English Majors” (September 2024). He has previously taught middle and high school, and now teaches at Saint Paul College.

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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BROOKLYN, N.Y. — About one and a half years ago, Isaiah Hickerson woke up in the middle of the night having dreamt he was a coder.

The dream was totally random, as dreams so often are. He didn’t know a thing about coding.

He was 23, and though originally from California, he’d been living with his uncle in Miami. By day, he was answering phones in the grooming department at PetSmart. After hours, he was trying to figure out what to do with his life.

He’d tried social media. And he’d taken some community college classes in business and biology. He was lukewarm on both.

“I just felt empty,” Hickerson said. “I wanted to do something different, but I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a passion for anything. And I didn’t know what passion felt like.”

He knows how far-fetched it sounds, but seeing himself coding in the dream changed him. Moments after he woke up, he was online trying to figure out what it all meant.

“I remember the whole entire thing and it’s crazy. I can’t make it up,” Hickerson said. “I literally got up right from there, 2 in the morning, probably 2:05. I remember the whole entire timeline because this is what shifted — my dream is what brought me here.”

By “here,” Hickerson means the Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s nearly finished with a one-year software engineering fellowship program. It’s not a college or a for-profit tech boot camp, but a nonprofit, tuition-free program designed to help students from historically underrepresented communities — like Hickerson, who is Black — get high-paying jobs in tech.

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

Across the country, colleges and universities offer scores of programs designed to help students from underrepresented groups succeed in STEM education and prepare for tech careers. Far less common are independent nonprofits that focus on students who don’t have the resources to go to college, don’t want to go to college or don’t believe they can succeed in a demanding STEM program. These nonprofits offer short-term training programs, for free, and help with job placement.

Two prominent examples, on opposite coasts, are the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood, in Oakland, California. Hack the Hood conducts 12-week data science-training programs and has recently partnered with Laney College, a community college in Oakland, to offer students a certificate of achievement in data science.

Data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that Black and Latino people earn science and engineering bachelor’s degrees at a disproportionately low rate, are underrepresented in the college-educated STEM workforce and earn lower salaries in those jobs than their white and Asian peers.

Achieving better representation means finding ways to get students the academic and financial assistance they need. The financial resources needed for a four-year STEM degree — or even a two-year degree — can be prohibitive. Opening up shorter avenues that are free — or significantly less expensive than for-profit boot camps — can at least put students on the path toward a STEM career. Programs designed with these students in mind give them training so that they have a shot to compete for STEM jobs with salaries that can lead to economic and social mobility. (Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood are nonprofits funded by donations from philanthropic groups.)

Related: When universities slap their names on for-profit coding bootcamps

“STEM is a white, cis, heteronormative field,” Weverton Ataide Pinheiro, an assistant professor in the College of Education at Texas Tech University, said. “And these people are the only ones that are being able to get a slice of the pie. Actually, they’re eating the whole pie.”

For Ataide Pinheiro, these free alternative programs have value, regardless of whether they result in a college degree, if they allow people from historically marginalized groups to get just one step further than they would have gotten without the training.

“We are desperate to just try to support these folks because we know money matters,” Ataide Pinheiro said. “We know that they will only be able to compete if they have certain training, and they might not be able to pay [for it].”

Reuben Ogbonna, one of the Marcy Lab School’s co-founders, said his team has worked hard to establish partnerships with tech companies to get software engineering job opportunities for Marcy students when they finish the program. Ogbonna said a team of former educators and salespeople introduces Marcy to companies, hoping to convince them to consider Marcy students for roles that would typically require a bachelor’s degree.

To prevent Marcy students from being “met with a glass ceiling somewhere down the line” because of their nontraditional training, Ogbonna said that Marcy asks the companies to treat its students the way they’d treat anyone else in the job interview process so that they can prove their skills and show employers that they deserve equal treatment as they progress in their careers.

Since the Marcy Lab School opened in 2019, roughly 200 students have completed the program. In the first three years, about 80 percent of them graduated, and about 90 percent of those who graduated landed jobs in STEM with an average salary of $105,000 per year, according to Ogbonna. But in the past two years, during what Ogbonna called a tech recession, it’s been significantly more difficult for these students to get jobs. He said that this year, six months after graduating, about 60 percent of graduates had jobs.

Related: To attract more students to STEM fields in college, advocates urge starting in sixth grade

By pursuing an education at Marcy rather than attending a four-year college, students get three extra years to make money, build their savings and accrue wealth, Ogbonna said. And they won’t have student loans to pay off.

“We’re trying to reverse a really big problem that’s been around for a long time,” Ogbonna said. “And part of my theory of change is that if we can get wealth in the hands of our students earlier, it can come out exponentially for the communities that we’re serving.”

Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood also try to prepare students for what they might experience when they get into the workforce.

Hack the Hood serves students between the ages of 16 and 25 and, in addition to the technical curriculum, teaches students about racial equity, social justice issues and understanding their personal identities, said Samia Zuber, its executive director.

Zuber explained that these parts of the program help prepare students to confront issues such as imposter syndrome and to think critically about the work they are doing. For example, Zuber said, they teach students about racial bias in facial recognition software and the implications it can have for different communities.

This lesson was particularly striking for 24-year-old Lizbet Roblero Arreola, who recalled very little exposure to computer programming when she was in school.

“It really opens your eyes and makes you want to change it,” Roblero Arreola said, concerning the misuse of facial recognition data. “For me personally, I want to be somebody in those companies that doesn’t let that happen.”

For Roblero Arreola, a first-generation Mexican American, going to college was never a given. When she became pregnant with her first child shortly after graduating from high school, she decided to keep working in customer service jobs rather than go to college. Last year, after giving birth to her second child, she saw a friend post online about Hack the Hood. She’d been thinking about going back to school, and it seemed Hack the Hood could help ease her transition.

Roblero Arreola said that the Hack the Hood team supported her by helping her understand all the steps she would need to take to enroll at Laney College, including helping her figure out how to apply for financial aid. (Hack the Hood programs are tuition-free, but students who go on to pursue a certificate with Laney have to pay tuition there.)

After she finishes her associate degree in computer programming at Laney, she hopes to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree. Eventually, she’d like to build a career in the cybersecurity field. She said she’s putting in the work now so that her children will have more opportunities than she did.

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it

These programs also serve students like Nicole Blanchette, an 18-year-old from a rural community in Connecticut, who chose Marcy Lab School over a traditional college experience.

Blanchette’s father has an associate degree, and her mother, who is Filipino, didn’t pursue postsecondary education. Blanchette always dreamed of going to college, and during her senior year of high school, she became intrigued by a career in tech. She hesitated, however, because “the stereotypical computer science student does not look like me.”

But an ad for Marcy Lab on Instagram made Blanchette think a tech career was possible.

She did the math and found that one year of living in New York would be cheaper than attending any of the colleges she’d gotten into, even with financial aid. She convinced her parents to spend the money they’d saved for her education on her living expenses while she attends Marcy.

Ogbonna and Marcy Lab’s other co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee-Marcantonio, both started out as teachers and recruited the first class of Marcy students from their personal networks and from community organizations in Brooklyn.

Now, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Marcy Lab’s students are coming straight out of high school. Ogbonna said that for some of these students, “academic, economic and social barriers prevent them from being able to access a college that they can verify has strong outcomes.” They often believe they can’t afford any wrong turns. And for those who’ve already had some college, there’s often urgency to get a job because they need to pay back student loans or contribute financially to their households.

“Some of them were thinking about going to the short-term, very expensive coding boot camps,” Ogbunna said, and see a tuition-free program like Marcy Lab as “a less risky option.”

After feeling directionless and uninspired, Hickerson, who first thought about a career in coding after that vivid dream, now says he loves learning, and complex problem-solving tech challenges only make him want to learn more.

Before he started learning to code, he said he never knew what it felt like to be passionate about something. Now, when he talks about coding, what he’s learning in school and the career he hopes to build in software engineering, he doesn’t seem to ever stop smiling.

This story about STEM education programs 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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The U.S. currently does not have enough scientists to compete as a global leader in emerging high-tech fields.

Despite our national deficit in scientists, less than 30 percent of professors in STEM fields in the U.S. are women, even though women earn 40 percent of all doctorates in science, technology, engineering and math.

Each year, the federal government budgets billions of dollars for research and development, and gives much of the money to universities and research laboratories that train and support STEM researchers.

That funding is the lifeblood of scientific discovery, and it is imperative that the federal government demand more from institutions that are pushing women out of the sciences.

Many of the women who earn STEM degrees trickle out of academia after receiving years of government investment in their specialized training. Many leave mid-career, when they are at their technical peak for producing breakthrough research.

With a few small changes, we can provide adequate support for women in the sciences — and boost long-term scientific achievement.

We might then see an explosion in original thought and discovery at universities, and ultimately, a greater return on taxpayer money — a winning proposition for everyone.

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Historically, some of the greatest scientific innovations and technologies were developed with the support of government research funds, from artificial intelligence to diabetes treatments and the detection of gravitational waves.

Over the last 40 years, we’ve made tremendous progress in welcoming more women into STEM at a young age. In many fields women now outnumber men in undergraduate and graduate programs.

Yet as women progress in academia, they are often asked to carry a heavier workload than their male colleagues in terms of committee service, departmental service and mentoring duties. They also carry a heavier load in terms of care for family members and young children because they have to.

These extra duties, whether seen or unseen, coupled with subjective assessment criteria like “fit within the department,” make it harder for women to make the case for tenure and promotion.

Not surprisingly, only 44 percent of female tenured professors are mothers, while 70 percent of male tenured professors are fathers. And women professors, especially women of color, are still underpaid relative to their male colleagues with similar publication records.

Clearly, the vestiges of academia’s sexist history still haunt us. The most common reasons women leave academia are because of harsh workplace climates riddled with harassment, sexual assault, discrimination and dysfunctional leadership.

Workplaces in the nonprofit research sector tend to be more hospitable places for women, with organizations like Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, offering affordable child care and pre-K education. The share of public academic institutions offering child care services declined by 14 percent from 2004 to 2019. Colleges aren’t doing enough.

Similarly, unlike most business entities in the U.S., universities are seldom accountable for the actions of their employees. In the very setting where harassment is most harmful — the education of young people — harassers face few consequences.

The result of all this: incredibly talented and capable women are being pushed out of academia.

Take one example: Katalin Karikó, the 2023 Nobel Prize laureate in medicine. When the world was scrambling to discover a remedy for Covid, it was her research that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against the virus.

By the time she received the recognition she deserved, however, after years of rejection from funders, journals and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Kariko had moved into the private sector.

My own journey in scientific research began as a participant at SSP, a summer science enrichment program for high school students run by a nonprofit organization. I worked as a NASA-funded researcher for 10 years before becoming a professor at Brown University. I eventually stepped away from academia because it was not a supportive arena for doing what I love: scientific research and mentoring young people.

I have since found opportunities to continue these activities with supportive and caring colleagues at SSP, where I now serve as chief academic officer.

There is a lot that universities can do to improve working conditions for women. These changes include equally sharing departmental service loads, providing onsite, university-operated day care and preschools and creating formal and standardized policies for spousal and partner hires and leave for family care or the arrival of a new child.

Related: STUDENT VOICES: We need more women in STEM fields, and we have ideas for making that happen

These changes must be enacted alongside a shared understanding that such policies should be available to all and are integral to maintaining the equity that universities claim to seek.

Government funders of academia, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA, wishing to make serious progress in equity and inclusion, could withhold grants to universities that refuse to engage in these simple measures — especially those that protect professors with a proven track record of abuse and sexual harassment. Congress should provide additional support.

Universities need to know that they must do a better job in equity or risk losing federal funding.

This is ultimately a question of good finances and good science. Either we invest in our best or we force them out.

At SSP, I aim to equip the strong, bright, motivated high school teens I mentor with all the skills they will need to thrive in academia and achieve their career goals. I hope that the university and grant systems will enact changes to make the academic landscape more hospitable to these students, allowing their creativity, talents, interests and contributions to support the greater good.

We should not suppress half of the intellectual talent of our nation. Women must be supported. We cannot afford not to.

Amy Barr Mlinar is a planetary scientist and chief academic officer of SSP International.

This story about women and STEM 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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