A much anticipated and highly hoped-for recovery from pandemic learning loss is, disappointingly, not materializing. Instead, grim findings from a recent analysis by three testing companies noted that stagnation is a general trend — with a few isolated exceptions.

Those few bright spots hold powerful lessons for schools that are struggling, particularly those serving high percentages of low-income students. The high-performing, high-poverty schools we recently studied show us that demography need not be destiny.

In fact, the results at those schools refute the assertion by some that poverty is inextricably tied to lower achievement. Most important, the leaders of these schools identify a short list of approaches that, if used widely, could drastically change our current national trajectory of endless mediocrity and stagnation.

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Three recent reports from our organization, Education Reform Now, highlight transformative strategies that high-poverty schools across three states — Texas, Massachusetts and Colorado — are using to drive stronger student outcomes. The reports focus on elementary and middle schools with high proficiency rates or significant growth in math or reading.

Here are our top four takeaways from these three states:

1. Demography Does Not Equal Destiny. We found high correlations between low school poverty rates and better student achievement overall, but there was still wide variability among high-poverty schools. In the schools we studied, all of which are in the top quartile of student poverty in their respective states, proficiency rates ranged from 0 percent to well above 90 percent. By figuring out what schools on the high end of the proficiency scale are doing, we can change the educational and life trajectories of an unprecedented number of students from historically disadvantaged groups.

2. School-level factors seem to be driving the most change. We did not, by and large, see high-performing, high-poverty schools concentrated in certain school districts. While district policies can provide opportunities for improving student achievement, our results suggest that this impact varies widely and requires strong school-level leadership and effort.

3. No school governance model is predominant. While it’s often assumed that the flexibility given to charter or nondistrict schools is necessary for innovation, we saw successful traditional public schools innovate as well, suggesting that there’s at least some degree of leeway for adept school leaders to break out of the status quo and pursue policies that dramatically boost student achievement.

4.  In surveys and interviews with leaders of successful high-poverty schools, we found astonishing consensus on what’s driving higher student achievement.

First, high-performing schools use data as a common thread to drive, monitor and adjust every aspect of their operations — including core instruction, small-group instruction, attendance interventions, social-emotional learning and professional development. Principals across all three states resoundingly reported that data helped guide them to solutions. Once all students have access to strong core instruction, educators can customize instruction for those with specific needs.

A second common thread is supporting teachers through professional development and coaching and with high-quality instructional materials. In many cases, coaches are in the classrooms repeatedly providing quick, targeted feedback to improve teachers’ practices in real time and ensure that takeaways from professional development are implemented in practice.

Third, schools across all three states have implemented family engagement programs to create strong partnerships between school and home — an especially critical practice to reduce chronic absenteeism.

Finally, it is clear that finding, training and supporting effective school leaders is key. This appears to be more important than geographic location, school district programs and policies or the type of school.

All these findings are consistent with a wide body of literature on what works. We need a concerted approach to help schools that are not using these proven practices to adopt them.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Four lessons from post-pandemic tutoring research

One fear we have is that too many education stakeholders have given up on school improvement because they don’t believe it’s possible. Our case studies show that not only is improvement possible but also that these common strategies can help even those schools with the most challenging circumstances to succeed.

It’s also clear that the laws governing school improvement must be revisited and strengthened. For example, requirements in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) that school improvement efforts be “evidence-based” are not quite panning out as intended, in part because they are not designed well and in part because school leaders have inadequate knowledge of what works. In fact, a recent report from the Government Accountability Office found that many administrators they interviewed cited the “evidence-based” requirements of the law as the most difficult to interpret and implement. Such principles are needed, but they must be understood. Moreover, the GAO recommended better monitoring and oversight by the U.S. Department of Education.

Given the state of student achievement and the findings of the GAO, we clearly need a nationwide, all-hands-on-deck approach to improving student outcomes through a clear, understandable approach to identifying, defining and disseminating evidence-based principles. Such an effort could begin within the first 100 days of the next administration, with a federal effort to spotlight success. That work could include convening state and local leaders to pinpoint what’s standing in the way of all schools adopting evidence-based school improvement policies and then strategizing to remove those obstacles.

The success stories we’ve highlighted in our series illustrate common practices that lead to better outcomes. Significant improvements are possible even in the face of adversity. By adopting core principles and tailoring them to their unique contexts, schools across the nation have the potential to change learning trajectories and foster academic success for hundreds of thousands of students.

Charles Barone is Education Reform Now’s vice president of K-12 policy, and Rianna Saslow is Education Reform Now’s senior policy analyst, K-12.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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Everybody is trying to find ways to help students catch up after the pandemic. One new data analysis suggests some promising ideas. 

TNTP, a nonprofit based in New York that advocates for improving K-12 education, wanted to identify schools that are the most effective at helping kids recover academically and understand what those schools are doing differently. These are not schools where students post the highest test scores, but schools where kids learn more each school year than students typically do. 

TNTP researchers plunged into a giant pool of data housed at Stanford University that tracked hundreds of millions of students’ scores on state tests at more than half the elementary and middle schools in the nation from 2009 to 2018. The researchers found that at 28,000 of the 51,000 elementary and middle schools in the database, students entered third grade or middle school below grade level. TNTP calculated that the top 5 percent of these start-behind schools – 1,345 of them – were helping students learn at least 1.3 year’s worth of material every year, based on how test scores improved as students progressed from grade to grade. In other words, the students at the top 5 percent of the start-behind schools learned the equivalent of an extra full year or more of math and reading every three years. 

“Growing at this rate allows most students to catch up to grade level during their time in school,” concluded the report, which was released in September 2024.

Previous researchers conducted a similar analysis in 2017 with whole school districts instead of individual schools. In that study, Chicago emerged as the nation’s most effective school district. Like the schools in the 2024 analysis, Chicago didn’t post the highest test scores, but its students were progressing the most each year. 

“There are many schools that are effective at helping students learn, even in high-poverty communities,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who was part of the team that developed the Stanford Education Data Archive. “The TNTP report uses our data to identify some of them and then digs in to understand what makes them particularly effective. This is exactly what we hoped people would do with the data.” 

TNTP did not name all 1,345 schools that beat the odds. But they did describe their overall characteristics (see table). 

TNTP did identify seven of the 1,345 highly effective schools that it selected to study in depth. Only one of the seven schools had a majority Black population, reflecting the fact that Black students are underrepresented at the most effective schools. 

The seven schools ranged widely. Some were large. Some were small. Some were city schools with many Hispanic students. Others were mostly white, rural schools. They used different instructional materials and did a lot of things differently, but TNTP teased out three traits that it thought these schools had in common.  

Seven of the 1,345 schools where students started behind but made large learning gains over a decade from 2009 to 2018

“What we found was not a silver-bullet solution, a perfect curriculum, or a rockstar principal,” the report said. “Instead, these schools shared a commitment to doing three core things well: they create a culture of belonging, deliver consistent grade-level instruction, and build a coherent instructional program.

According to TNTP’s classroom observations, students received good or strong instruction in nine out of 10 classrooms. “Across all classrooms, the steady accumulation of good lessons—not unattainably perfect ones—sets trajectory-changing schools apart,” the report said, contrasting this consistent level of “good” with its earlier observation that most U.S. schools have some good teaching, but there is a lot of variation from one classroom to the next.

In addition to good instruction, TNTP said that students in these seven schools were receiving grade-level content in their English and math classes although most students were behind. Teachers in each school used the same shared curriculum. According to the TNTP report, only about a third of elementary school teachers nationwide say they “mostly use” the curriculum adopted by their school. At Trousdale County Elementary in Tennessee, one of the exemplar schools, 80 percent of teachers said they did. 

While many education advocates are pushing for the adoption of better curriculum as a lever to improve schools, “It’s possible to get trajectory-changing results without a perfect curriculum,” TNTP wrote in its report.

Teachers also had regular, scheduled sessions to collaborate, discuss their instruction, and note what did and did not work.  “Everyone holds the same high expectations and works together to improve,” the report said. 

The schools also gave students extra instruction to fill knowledge gaps and extra practice to solidify their skills. These extra support classes, called “intervention blocks,”  are now commonplace at many low-income schools, but TNTP noted one major difference at the seven schools they studied. The intervention blocks were connected to what students were learning in their main classrooms. That requires school leaders to make sure that interventionists, classroom aides and the main classroom teachers have time to talk and collaborate during the school day. 

These seven schools all had strong principals. Although many of the principals came and left during the decade that TNTP studied, the schools maintained strong results. 

The seven schools also emphasized student-teacher relationships and built a caring community. At Brightwood, a small charter school in Washington, D.C., that serves an immigrant population, staff members try to learn the names of every student and to be collectively responsible for both their academics and well-being. During one staff meeting, teachers wrote more than 250 student names on giant pads of paper. Teachers put check marks by each child they felt like they had a genuine relationship with and then brainstormed ways to reach the students without checks. 

At New Heights Academy Charter School in New York City, each teacher contacts 10 parents a week—by text, email, or phone—and logs the calls in a journal. Teachers don’t just call when something goes wrong. They also reach out to parents to talk about an “A” on a test, academic improvement, or good attendance, the report said. 

It’s always risky to highlight what successful schools are doing because other educators might be tempted to just copy ideas. But TNTP warns that every school is different. What works in one place might not in another. The organization’s advice for schools is to change one practice at a time, perhaps starting with a category that the school is already pretty good at, and improve it. TNTP warns against trying to change too many things at once. 

TNTP’s view is that any school can become a highly effective school, and that there aren’t particular educational philosophies or materials that a school must use to accomplish this rare feat. A lot of it is simply about increasing communication among teachers, between teachers and students, and with families. It’s a bit like weight-loss diets that don’t dictate which foods you can and cannot eat, as long as you eat less and exercise more. It’s the basic principles that matter most.

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

This story about how to catch up at school 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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As a special education teacher, I often encountered students who struggled with solving math problems. Many would simply add all the numbers they saw without grasping what the problems were actually asking.

To help, I introduced keywords like “all together” for addition and “difference” for subtraction.

However, this approach fell short when students focused solely on the keywords, missing the problem’s context. Today, elementary school teachers share similar struggles with their students.

The issue isn’t just about teaching math; it also involves addressing gaps in literacy. Reading skills are closely related to children’s ability to solve math problems. And, as much as early literacy development plays a critical role in developing problem-solving abilities, early numeracy strongly predicts overall academic success, including literacy development: Research has found that literacy and math development are intertwined.

Yet, pre-K teachers spend an average of only 2.5 percent of their day on numeracy skills — a gap that underscores the need for teaching approaches that bridge math and literacy.

Teachers must do more to help students build foundational cognitive skills, such as logic and reasoning.

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Integrated teaching can help students view math and English language arts as complementary disciplines that help them solve real-world problems. It could lead to better academic outcomes and a richer understanding of the world. Unfortunately, most elementary schools teach math and English language arts separately.

One way that teachers can address these comprehension gaps is to initially remove numbers from word problems and encourage students to read through the entire problems before they add or subtract. By solving “numberless word problems,” students can visualize and grasp the context before computing.

We can also use the power of storytelling. In my classroom, I incorporated engaging literature into math instruction to help my students better understand word problems. We used “Amanda Bean’s Amazing Dream,” a Marilyn Burns Brainy Day Book by Cindy Neuschwander, to explore multiplication concepts; the book’s illustrations helped students identify repeated addition and multiplication and allowed them to recognize similar scenarios in math problems. Incorporating math through storytelling helps children better understand and remember math concepts and also improves their confidence and reduces math anxiety. By building on the critical skills students need to excel in math and ELA, we can better equip them to apply math to real-world problems.

Here is what this approach encourages:

• Improved comprehension: Stories and real-world scenarios promote a better understanding of math concepts, making abstract ideas more accessible.
• Math visualization: Using descriptive writing and storytelling to explain math concepts, such as measurement and fractions, gives students a tangible reference for math principles as they exist in the world.
• Vocabulary development: Just as students learn new words in ELA, with math storytelling they learn math vocabulary to enhance their understanding of the math concepts needed to solve problems.
• Critical thinking skills: When students analyze problems from various perspectives and use language to describe them, they’re better equipped to apply problem-solving skills across disciplines.
• Contextualized problem-solving: By establishing context through literature, students are able to construct meaning to solve other problems.

Administrators should encourage training for teachers and provide resources that effectively blend math and ELA. Supporting a curriculum that encourages the teacher to be a facilitator — rather than a sage on a stage — will encourage more students to talk about math, draw upon their language skills and solve problems together.

Here are some approaches educators can use to blend instruction to challenge students and enhance math and ELA skills:

• Project-based learning: Assign hands-on projects that require mathematical analysis and language arts skills, such as reviewing datasets, creating infographics and writing interpretations.
• Collaborative learning environments: Ask groups of students to work together to solve complex problems that require mathematical reasoning and effective communication. Their work could include debates or reviews of written mathematical explanations.
• Literature-based mathematical discussions: Read books that incorporate mathematical themes or concepts and include a character who uses math to solve problems; such books can spark lively debate and serve as a springboard to discuss how math applies to real life.

These strategies strengthen the connection between math and ELA and promote deeper learning and engagement for all students.

Related: You probably don’t have your preschooler thinking about math enough

Using an integrated approach with literature also provides a level of comfort for teachers. Not surprisingly, most elementary school teachers didn’t choose their profession due to a deep love of mathematics — and some may suffer from math anxiety themselves. Teachers can model problem-solving beyond the classroom by expanding what it means to teach math through children’s books and hands-on activities.

Math instruction will only improve if administrators, educators, parents and policymakers push for integrated curricula. Doing so will not only help students’ math, but promote a more effective education system overall.

Thera Pearce is the learning services manager at ORIGO Education. She has experience in instructional design, curriculum consulting and professional development coordination. She has also worked as a special education teacher and coach for 15 years in North Carolina.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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As the start of the school year approaches, high schools, colleges and universities across the country are figuring out how to help young people navigate the 2024 elections during these highly polarized and contentious times.

Here’s a way we can help students become informed and active participants in our democracy, while potentially avoiding fights in classrooms and on playing fields: Provide them with free, digital access to their community’s local newspaper so they can read it on their phones.

Engaging young people in democracy — getting them to follow the news and to vote — has always been a concern for educators and has always been a challenge. Young people pay less attention to the news and participate less than older people. This was the case fifty years ago and remains the case today.

That’s why in Oneonta, New York, Hartwick College’s newly launched Institute of Public Service is offering students a free digital subscription to the local paper, The Daily Star. This new initiative has emerged from the institute’s mission to help young people become more informed about and engaged with local government and the issues affecting the community where they go to school.

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It’s no surprise that the vast majority of teens report spending a lot of time on social media, especially YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram; a growing share say that they are on social media “almost constantly,” a recent report by the Pew Research Center shows.

Young people also say that social media is the most common way that they get news; many add that they do not actively seek out news, but are only exposed to it incidentally as part of their curated social media feeds.

Reliance on social media for information about candidates, policies and the actions of our government is a serious problem since much of the news content on social media is not the product of authentic, verified journalism. Inaccurate, misleading and conspiratorial information is common.

Moreover, the way social media algorithms work, readers with certain political leanings will increasingly be exposed only to content reflecting those leanings. This dynamic makes it hard for young people to find any common ground across partisan divides.

Providing young people with barrier-free access to a local newspaper is a concrete way for educational institutions to counter that trend and foster engaged citizenship.

This works because local politics is much less partisan than national politics, as New York Timescolumnist Ezra Klein pointed out in “Why We’re Polarized.” In most localities, we still see Democrats and Republicans working together to solve problems. The work of local government directly affects the lives of those in their communities.

Furthermore, Pew Research shows that Americans of both parties see value in local newspapers. Views about local news are not as starkly divided as opinions about the national media. As a result, local government and local news provide a good entry point to democracy for young people.

I’m heartened by new partnerships between local news outlets and academic institutions across the country, such as the one at the University of Vermont, through which the school is providing journalism students with the opportunity to write for local newspapers and get hands-on civic experience while also helping provide professional news coverage for their communities.

Related: Could colleges make voting as popular as going to football games?

By investing in local news, schools and colleges can invest both in their communities and in democracy. Due to the changing news media environment, local newspapers have been in serious decline. Over the past several decades, we have seen hundreds close down. Currently, the majority of counties in America have only one local newspaper or, even more problematically, none at all.

Without local news, it is very difficult for people and communities to know what their local elected officials are doing and to hold power to account.

Many high school and college libraries have databases that allow students to search and access stories from a range of newspapers, and these are wonderful services. But they also take time and work to access, requiring students to log in and wade through multiple portals to get to news stories. And often the content in these databases is not updated throughout the day.

Giving students subscriptions to their local newspapers enables them to simply click the app on their phones and start reading.

Moreover, research shows that, like many other democratic behaviors, including voting, reading a newspaper and following the news is a habit: Once you start doing it, you are likely to continue.

At Hartwick, we hope that providing free, easy access to our local newspaper will result in more students consuming verified, objective news and lead to more informed and thoughtful discussions on campus and in our classrooms.

We encourage other schools to do the same. Nudging even a handful of students to become lifelong newspaper readers is a way for educational institutions to transform the lives of those students while strengthening our democracy — and our local newspapers.

Laurel Elder is professor and chair of political science at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and is co-director of the Hartwick Institute of Public Service.

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The other day, one of my students told me that she’d been assigned the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar for her high school English class. It was the first time I had encountered a high school English assignment involving an author with whom I was wholly unfamiliar.

But can we even call rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar an author, his lyrics literature? Call me a snob, but I would argue that we cannot and should not, especially at a level so introductory to the English literary canon as high school. High school curricula are meant to present a broad and foundational overview of the important tenets of each core field of knowledge: mathematics, science, literature, history and language.

Related: TEACHER VOICE: How the sad shadow of book banning shuts down conversations and lacerates librarians

Many high school students are already consuming Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift on a daily basis without the intervention of the education system. In my view, using course time to analyze the lyrics of these popular artists not only precludes students from uncovering new knowledge but also encourages them to consider the fleeting music of our time — most of which, I predict, will be forgotten in the span of a generation — as great literature.

So why have we swapped out Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens for figures who are — at best — ancillary to literary study? Shouldn’t we teach students about the works of the Shakespeares and the Chaucers that English literature is based on — rather than present them with the words of contemporary songwriters such as Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift, whose works might belong entirely to a different category?

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As educators, the fate of tomorrow’s change-makers rests in our hands, and it is our goal to rear the next generation of successful thinkers. There is no better way to teach students to think than to encourage them to wrestle with the sort of complex ideas that we find in time-tested literature. We must not, therefore, alter our intellectual standards or deem literature unimportant and pretentious, especially for students who are at such a crucial period of their intellectual development. It is our job to guide students to aspire to intellectual mountaintops rather than confining them to more familiar valleys.

At a certain point, we do need to start distinguishing between foundational literature and the musical byproducts of our contemporary culture. New York University can offer as many Taylor Swift courses as it wants, and there might be nothing wrong with studying Taylor Swift as literature — but that should not happen until students have attained a robust understanding of the literary tradition.

At the high school level, we should challenge younger generations to understand the core facets of the humanistic tradition by presenting them with an accurate picture of what the field of literary study has always been: a profound exploration of the human condition through words and stories. These stories, expressed through vivid works of literature, will, in turn, compel them to think critically.

I teach writing to high schoolers through my college consulting firm. When preparing students to write their college essays, I always lead with literature — Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, for instance — for I believe that developing strong communication skills lies in understanding the writing styles and messages of these great thinkers and writers.

Many of my students, who will soon be sending in applications to America’s elite educational institutions, can no longer string a coherent sentence together without using AI tools such as ChatGPT or Grammarly. While there might be nothing wrong with using these tools as guidebooks and coaches, doing so must not come at the expense of developing strong writing skills, which are the cornerstone of strong communication. A generation that has lost the ability to write will lose the ability to effect meaningful societal change, for great change lies in effectively sharing ideas with others.

The students I work with are our future doctors, engineers and lawyers, among many other professions. In diluting their high school English curricula, we are collectively abandoning humanistic study as a society, letting go of our dedication to creating strong thinkers and visionaries. While not all teachers have swapped out Shakespeare for Swift, the presence of rappers and songwriters on an English syllabus is a telling sign that we have begun to change the standards of critical thinking and no longer emphasize the value of enduring communication.

I always prompt my college-bound students to challenge themselves intellectually. Instead of endlessly scrolling through Taylor-Swift TikToks, why not pick up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”? As I send my students off to college every year, many of them look back and thank me for encouraging them to make it through this literary behemoth, for there is a certain ineffable satisfaction to challenging yourself to engage critically with ideas: It makes us all stronger thinkers and communicators.

And I guarantee you that any 15-year-old can comprehend serious literature with the right mindset and the right mentorship.

As English teachers, our goal is to challenge our students to think critically in order to create the strong communicators of tomorrow — and hope that in the process, they will view literature not as pretentious but as beautiful and profound.

Liza Libes founded her college consulting startup, Invictus Prep, in New York City. Her writing has appeared in The American Spectator, Kveller, Jewish Women of Words and elsewhere.

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Like many high school chemistry teachers, Angie Hackman instructs students on atoms, matter and, she says, how they “influence the world around us.”

But Hackman also has another responsibility in class: developing students’ reading skills. For about 20 of the 80 minutes of almost every class, she engages her chemistry students in literacy skills, she said: closely reading passages from their textbooks, “breaking apart” prefixes and suffixes for relevant vocabulary and identifying root words. During a recent lesson, she discussed the word “intermolecular,” dissecting its prefix, “inter,” and connecting it to other words with that same prefix.

Every teacher at her school, the Health Sciences High and Middle College, in San Diego, shares in the responsibility of teaching students literacy skills, regardless of the subject they teach. That’s because so many students, even incoming ninth graders, arrive at the school without basic reading skills, according to Douglas Fisher, an administrator at the school. While some students also receive one-on-one remediation, Fisher said that research shows those interventions aren’t enough to close the gap.

“We have kids that on our benchmark knowledge assessments are scoring what is the equivalent of second grade, first grade, fourth grade,” said Fisher, who is also a professor and chair of educational leadership at San Diego State University. Yet, by the time students graduate, he said, the goal at the secondary school is that they have “reading levels ready for college.”

The San Diego charter school, known as HSHMC, has expected content teachers to integrate literacy into their lessons since its 2007 founding. To help them succeed, the school — which last year served just over 500 high schoolers, roughly 80 percent of whom qualified for free or reduced priced lunch — provides its teachers with daily professional development and coaching on literacy instruction and other topics.

HSHMC’s approach of integrating literacy into content classes is something that researchers are calling for. Jade Wexler, a professor of special education with a focus on secondary literacy at the University of Maryland, said her research suggests that while some students are able to catch up to their peers after interventions — or pull-out sessions in the special education setting — others merely “trudge along and maintain status relative to their typically developing peers.” According to Wexler, a bigger impact may come from embedding reading instruction into other classes, “where these kids spend a majority of their day.”

But very few schools currently integrate effective literacy practices into content classes, according to experts on reading. That said, a handful of states and school districts are starting to explore the approach.

Poor reading skills are a nationwide issue. On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 70 percent of eighth graders scored below “proficient” and, of those, 30 percent scored “below basic.”

“In a typical classroom that’s about 25 kids, that means about 17 are still struggling to comprehend text at the most foundational level,” said Wexler.

That may be due, in part, to larger failures of literacy instruction. For decades, the primary methods for teaching students how to read in the U.S. were out of line with current research, known as “the science of reading.”

The wide body of research indicates students need explicit instruction in foundational reading skills, like phonics, in order to be able to recognize and make sense of words on the page. But for years, many schools relied on a curriculum that ignored or minimized those skills.

Some high school teachers are seeing the fallout, said Wexler.

“Many students struggle at the secondary level with decoding, typically multisyllabic words, so those longer words that they’re encountering in science text, for example, or in social studies text,” Wexler said. “We also have a lot of our kids that can decode these words at decent levels and with fluency but they still struggle to comprehend the text that they’re reading.”

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In recent years, school systems have begun to make changes. Between 2019 and 2022, more than 200 laws to reform reading instruction were enacted in 45 states and the District of Columbia, according to a report by the Albert Shanker Institute.

But, according to the report’s authors and other experts, legislation on reading reform is focused on early grades. Some experts and educators worry the reading reform movement has left older students behind.

Susan B. Neuman, the report’s lead author and an education professor at New York University, said high schools were least affected by the wave of legislation up to 2022.

“It is mostly targeted on those early grades,” Neuman said. “You could even say that four through sixth grade is left behind a bit.”

Kayla Reist, another author of the Shanker Institute report, said that if states started focusing on high schoolers in reading reform legislation, they would “really have to start talking about teacher preparation programs” and professional development. That’s because many high school teachers finish their training without lessons on how to teach reading, since, traditionally, explicit instruction on reading skills ends around third grade.

“It’s widely known that elementary teachers in the U.S. over the past few decades have not necessarily been well prepared to teach kids reading in ways that are aligned with the scientific evidence base,” said Heidi Beverine-Curry, chief academic officer at The Reading League, a nonprofit organization that promotes the science of reading. “It’s even harder to find middle school and high school teachers who have been prepared with the requisite knowledge.”

Middle and high school teachers may also be hesitant to embrace the approach. In a 2008 practice guide on improving adolescent literacy, the Institute of Education Sciences (a research institution that is part of the U.S. Department of Education) stated that “many teachers report feeling unprepared to help their students or do not think that teaching reading skills in content-area classes is their responsibility.”

“If you are a science teacher, you want to teach science, you really don’t want to hang out and talk about the academic vocabulary of science,” Neuman said.

Related: America’s reading problem: Scores were dropping even before the pandemic

A few states are trying to do something about this, though. A law passed in Idaho in 2021 not only required all districts to teach reading using “evidence-based” instruction, it also required K-12 teacher preparation programs housed at any state institution of higher education to prepare teachers according to that reading plan. In addition, the law called for the state to assess students in teacher prep programs on their ability to demonstrate “teaching skills and knowledge congruent with current research on best reading practices.”

In Ohio, a new state law requires all of the state’s public school teachers and administrators to receive training in the science of reading, including high school content teachers.

Melissa Weber-Mayrer, the chief of literacy at the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, said part of the training that content teachers in grades 6-12 receive includes information about “advanced morphology” (the study of words’ structure and parts) and how to bolster vocabulary.

Some individual school districts are taking steps to integrate literacy into content instruction, too. The Mountain Views Supervisory Union school district in Vermont is in the process of training all content teachers in foundational literacy, said Julie Burtscher Brown, its literacy facilitator. This past academic year, all high school English and history teachers received training; this fall, it’s science and math teachers’ turn.

Since the training started, teachers have been “providing more opportunities” for students to engage with text and practice reading multisyllabic words, Brown said.

Patty Topliffe teaches social studies at Woodstock High School in Brown’s district. She said the training in foundational reading skills goes “hand in hand” with her regular instruction. Especially with primary source documents — historical texts, like the Declaration of Independence, that come from the time period being discussed — many students struggle due to unfamiliar vocabulary, she said. Topliffe recalled breaking down the word “democracy” by its parts to support comprehension and pronunciation.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Learning science might help kids read better

Back in 2000, the National Reading Panel, a 14-member group working with the Department of Education, identified six techniques for effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, guided oral reading, vocabulary and comprehension. Many of those same practices likely apply to older students as well, said Neuman, the NYU professor.

Beverine-Curry said the books used in class account for the biggest differences in how reading is taught to different age groups. Books that are designed to help kids practice foundational reading skills, known as decodable books, are mostly made for elementary classes.

“We definitely could use more decodable texts out there that are age appropriate in its illustrations, and in its content for teens and adults,” Beverine-Curry said.

Wexler said that for many subjects, about 80 percent of students do well in general education classes and don’t need supplemental interventions. But for adolescents who are learning to read, “that ratio is flipped.” She said there is “no way” schools can provide interventions to all those kids.

Wexler is researching ways to build “a school-wide literacy model at the secondary level” to address the widespread need for reading support. That might include strategies like the one HSHMC in San Diego has embraced.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Controversies within the science of reading

Kimberly Elliot, an instructional coach at HSHMC, said teachers of all subjects are receptive to the literacy training the school provides. But the instruction looks different in different classrooms.

“What a close read looks like in a science class might be slightly different than supporting students to break down a mathematics problem,” Elliot said.

While Hackman, the chemistry teacher, spends a lot of class time reading articles, Maggie Fallon, a math teacher, said she primarily supports literacy by teaching students new vocabulary.

“It’s more like figuring out what word equals a mathematical symbol,” Fallon said, explaining that she often asks her students to annotate word problems to derive meaning.

Faiza Omar, who took Hackman’s class last school year as a junior, learned English as a second language and didn’t receive the foundational reading interventions until she started at HSHMC in high school. She said the additional reading review in her main subject classes helped “make sure everyone is on the same page.”

“It gives me understanding of what’s going on,” Omar said.

Omar said that after learning basic decoding skills in school, she boosted her reading skills by reading manga and watching “K-dramas” with English subtitles. Her greater fluency has helped her in countless everyday ways: reading signs, navigating her city, reading menus at restaurants.

“It’s so nice to understand,” Omar said.

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

The post Many kids can’t read, even in high school. Is the solution teaching reading in every class? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

RUSSELLVILLE, Ala. — Lindsey Johnson and Yesenia De La Rosa were taking different approaches to teaching the same English lesson on silent letters as they sat at opposite ends of this first grade classroom in West Elementary School. On this March afternoon, Johnson, the classroom teacher, was reading a story with the 6- and 7-year-old children who were fluent in English. The students of bilingual aide De La Rosa were still learning the language, so while she read the same story, she went slower, translating words, acting out emotions and showing them pictures on her iPhone.

Valentina, 6, wearing a black T-shirt with a gold Nike logo and leggings, had arrived less than two weeks earlier from Guatemala. She sat on the floor near De La Rosa’s chair, her cheek almost touching her teacher’s leg. De La Rosa worked with her individually because she didn’t know any letters or numbers, in Spanish or in English. When Valentina went to kindergarten in her home country, all she did was color. “So when she came here, that’s what she thought she was going to do. Just drawing,” De La Rosa said. “But here it’s different.”

The Russellville City school district created De La Rosa’s position in early 2021 as part of a larger effort to help educate its growing population of students who speak English as a second language. Many of the English learners, as they’re called, have parents from Mexico or Guatemala who work at a nearby poultry plant and in local manufacturing and construction jobs. Today, in the district, 60 percent of children are Hispanic/Latino and roughly a third are English learners.

Without De La Rosa, Johnson said she wouldn’t be able to communicate with more than half of her students, or understand the challenges they face. Johnson knew that Yeferson, an English learner from Guatemala, was one of the smartest children in the class, already reading more than 100 words, well above the goal of 60. “He’s a sponge, he soaks everything up,” Johnson said. She learned from De La Rosa that he’s doing well in spite of his many responsibilities at home: His mom works night shifts, so Yeferson does the laundry, washes the dishes and looks after his younger siblings. Said Johnson: “Having a bilingual aide makes a world of difference.” 

Russellville may not seem like a community that would be home to investment and innovation for immigrant students. It’s a politically conservative city in northwestern Alabama of about 11,000, where 72 percent of voters chose Donald Trump in the last presidential election. When the poultry processing plant opened in 1989, the Hispanic population was about 0.5 percent. By 2000, it had grown to 13 percent, and in 2020, it was almost 40 percent. The school district, like many around the country, struggled early on to accommodate the rising numbers of English learners, who were dropping out at high rates, being pushed into special education classes and showing little academic progress. Yet their success matters: Today in the U.S., more than 1 in 10 students are English learners and, at a time when overall public school enrollment is falling, they are among the country’s fastest-growing groups of students.

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

In early 2015, when its superintendent announced his retirement, the district recruited Heath Grimes, then superintendent of the nearby Lawrence County school system, for the job. A self-described Southern conservative and man of faith from rural Alabama, Grimes, 48, set about overhauling instruction for English learners, establishing culturally relevant extracurriculars and reaching out to the Hispanic community. Those efforts had an impact: The share of Hispanic students taking Advanced Placement classes and dual enrollment courses at a local community college went up. Parental involvement increased. And Grimes led an effort to lobby lawmakers for a change in the state funding formula for English learners, boosting the state’s allocation more than eightfold, to $18.5 million. The district and Grimes won state and national recognition for their efforts with English learners.

“Any district with a significant English learner population has looked to Heath because he’s been ahead of the game,” said Ryan Hollingsworth, the executive director of the School Superintendents of Alabama, which represents the state’s 150 school districts. “It is just amazing to see what he’s been able to do in a small district with not a lot of resources.”

But as Grimes’ star rose statewide, according to local educators and residents, his relationship with city leadership started to unravel. Then, in mid-May 2023, a member of the school board told Grimes that it would not be renewing his contract, which was to end in June 2024. He agreed to retire when his contract ended the following year in exchange for a bump in his final year’s salary. Starting in November, I tried to talk with school board members, the mayor and City Council members about the school district and Grimes, but they did not respond initially to my interview requests. (When I introduced myself to the mayor, David Grissom, on the street in Russellville, he told me “no comment” and walked away.) But over the months, I was able to talk to more than 60 state officials, local administrators, teachers, former school board members, community leaders and residents, including people I met in businesses and on the street in Russellville. Those interviews suggest that the decision to force out Grimes as superintendent stemmed from a tangle of small-town politics, deep-rooted antipathy toward immigrants and a yearning for the city Russellville used to be.

“Heath Grimes put students first. And this ultimately may have hurt him,” said Jason Barnett, superintendent of the Guntersville City Board of Education in northern Alabama and one of dozens of district leaders in the state who worked closely with Grimes. Approximately 18 educators and community leaders in Russellville, many of them with knowledge of the events, told me that Grimes’ support for the growing English learner population was key to his loss of support among top city leadership. Many asked not to be quoted for fear of retaliation or straining relationships in this small community. One school administrator, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing their job, said of Grimes: “Many folks said the increase in the undocumented population was because he made Russellville schools a welcoming place that immigrants wanted to live in. People didn’t like that.”

In early July I went back to Grissom, school board attorney Daniel McDowell, and Gregg Trapp, who was until recently school board president, with my findings from months of reporting and a detailed list of questions. McDowell and Grissom replied with written statements that said that Spanish-speaking students had thrived in the district long before Grimes’ arrival and denied that the superintendent’s commitment to English learners had led to his departure. “Immigrants from Latin American countries have been moving to Russellville for the past 25 years and have always been welcomed into the city and the student body,” wrote Grissom. “Looking back, our high school has crowned a Latina Homecoming Queen, as voted by the student body and has recognized the first Latino Valedictorian. Those events took place long before Dr. Grimes came to Russellville.” 

Before Grimes arrived in Russellville, state lawmakers in 2011 had passed HB 56, widely considered the harshest anti-immigrant law in the nation. It gave police authority to stop individuals they believed did not have legal documents to live in the United States, and made it a crime for businesses to knowingly hire, and landlords to rent to, those who lacked documentation. Public colleges couldn’t admit students without immigration documents and, even though, under federal law, K-12 schools are required to serve students regardless of citizenship status, the Alabama legislation also called for school districts to collect information on their students’ citizenship status. While parts of the law were later struck down by a federal court, the message was clear: Immigrants weren’t welcome.

So when Greg Batchelor, then president of the Russellville City school board, was looking for a new school superintendent in 2015, he knew things would get controversial. The city’s Hispanic population was 22 percent and growing. Some longtime “Anglo” residents, as members of the white population call themselves, derisively referred to the city’s downtown as “Little Mexico” and complained about hearing Spanish spoken and seeing the colorfully painted houses they associated with the Hispanic community.

Batchelor and another former school board member, Bret Gist, recalled hearing from longtime residents who were enrolling their children in private schools or leaving Russellville because they didn’t want their kids to be “the minority.” Others worried that the English learners would drag down test scores and hurt their school district’s reputation. At that time, only five districts in the state had an English learner population above 10 percent; Russellville’s was the second highest, at 16 percent.

Batchelor, also chairman of the board of CB&S, one of Alabama’s largest community banks, said he knew the city’s future economy depended on the next school leader: “If our community survives and does well, it’s only going to be as good as we educate our kids.” He also said he believed that the town’s Hispanic students deserved the same chance as their peers, and he was deeply influenced by his father, who’d served on the Russellville City school board for 20 years. “My dad used to say everybody puts their britches on the same way, one leg at a time,” Batchelor recalled.

At the time, Grimes, a former special education teacher and football coach, was in his sixth year as Lawrence County superintendent. In his first four-year term, he had closed three high schools because of falling enrollment and a budget shortfall he inherited. “It’s very unusual in Alabama for a superintendent to close schools in a county and then be reelected — and he was reelected,” said Batchelor. “I felt like he’s not afraid to make tough decisions.” Gist, the former school board member, remembers the excitement the board felt after Grimes’ interview. “I was ready for him to come in and make a big impact,” Gist said.

On May 11, 2015, Grimes was voted in unanimously as Russellville’s new school superintendent. 

Kristie Ezzell, who retired from Russellville schools in 2022 after 31 years under four superintendents, saw the transformation firsthand. As a second grade teacher in the 1990s, she taught one of the district’s first English learners. Ezzell remembers a little girl who kept trying to communicate, but Ezzell couldn’t understand her. “She started crying and then I started crying and we both stood there and hugged and cried,” Ezzell recalled.“The language barrier between us was just heartbreaking.” 

The rapid increase in the English learner population had taken Russellville educators by surprise. The entire district had just one teacher certified to teach English as a second language, no interpreters and very little by way of professional development. “We had students come in that don’t speak a lick of English, their parents don’t speak a lick of English, and we’re expected to educate them,” one teacher, who asked not to be named to avoid repercussions, told me. “And I didn’t even know whether they are asking to go to the bathroom or are they hungry.” The situation was also unfair for the English-speaking students who missed out on learning time because their teachers were preoccupied, she said. “It was just a mess all the way around.” 

Grimes, who does not speak Spanish and had little experience with English learners in his previous roles, said the first thing he heard was: “How are you going to fix this?” “I think they thought I was going to somehow make the English learner population go away,” he told me. “And I was like, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’” Instead, he asked educators to “Accept, Embrace, Celebrate.” “You first have to accept that your district is changing. And when we embrace that change, we’re going to see some very positive changes that we’ll be able to celebrate,” he recalled telling them. “And every bit of that has come true.”

By then Ezzell was principal of Russellville Elementary School. She recalled Grimes’ first meeting with teachers, where he presented student test scores broken down by school. “I sunk down in my seat and tears came to my eyes because our data was not very good,” she told me.

His message, according to Ezzell, was simple: “No more excuses. Our teachers are not going to say anymore, ‘Well, they’re English learners.’ That’s not OK. They are going to grow just like everybody else.” As he laid out his expectations, teachers started looking around nervously, she recalled. Some cried and one had to leave the room. A few worried that Grimes was criticizing their competence; others dismissed him as an outsider. But she says one thing was clear. “We knew he meant business,” she said. “He was very empathetic for everything we were dealing with, but he said, ‘This cannot continue.’”

When Ezzell went home that evening, she couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting. She knew how hard her teachers worked. “They were never not teaching,” she said. But the dismal statistics proved to her they weren’t focusing on the right things. From then on, Ezzell told me, she was on a mission to find better ways of educating her students: “I dedicated my life to it.”

Related: English learners stopped coming to class during the pandemic. How one group is helping

Grimes said the prevailing attitude was that English learner students were a burden, similar to perceptions of the special education students he once taught. So he brought in a professor and education consultant, Tery Medina, who explained that immigrant children were district students under federal law. A Cuban refugee herself, she led discussions with teachers on similarities between Hispanic and Southern culture. “They love family. They’re hard workers and many have faith in Christ. It was all these things that everyone could relate to,” Grimes recalled. For her part, Medina said she was impressed with Russellville’s embrace of these learners. Under Grimes, “Russellville was a little gem,” she said, “where English learners were not seen as a burden.”

The district also invested in professional development for teachers, ensuring that it happened during work hours, said Ezzell. Experts, books, videos, detailed lesson plans — to teachers at the time, it felt like a blur of continuous learning. Slowly, educators began sharing strategies and co-teaching classes. “You know the saying, ‘When you know better, you do better?’” Ezzell told me. “That’s what happened.” Teachers experimented, made their lessons more hands-on and followed the latest research. Some teachers created what became an award-winning science class in three languages: English, Spanish and Q’anjob’al, a Guatemalan dialect. “We were making time for them to go and learn best practices. And it benefited all students, not just English learners,” Ezzell said.

Not everyone in the district bought into the change. Grimes remembers meeting with one teacher who led a class in which 30 percent of students were failing. She didn’t see it as a problem, Grimes said: “It was like, ‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years and you’re not going to tell me different.’” She retired soon after, Grimes said; some other teachers resigned.

But teachers who stayed said they could see that students were beginning to respond to the new approaches. English learners began participating more in class, no longer sitting at the back of the room. More started taking AP exams, as well as dual enrollment classes at nearby Northwest Shoals Community College. “We pushed them. And when you push with love, you’re going to have success,” said Ezzell. 

The district began to accrue accolades. Several of its schools received the coveted Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. Since 2021, Russellville High has been named one of the top 25 schools in Alabama by U.S. News & World Report. In 2022, it was the only majority-minority district in Alabama to receive an “A” grade in the state report card; in 2023, Russellville was one of only two in the state named a “Spotlight District” for reading and literacy, and its high school was named an A+ College Ready School of Excellence, a designation given by a nonprofit contracted with the state education department to maximize college readiness.

Core to Grimes’ strategy, along with building cultural understanding and professional development, were bilingual educators. Early on, Grimes placed interpreters at each school to help with day-to-day translation, but he knew teachers needed more help in the classroom. A national shortage of bilingual educators, though, required creativity. Grimes decided to focus on recruiting bilingual aides, who earn half the pay of teachers. He reached out to the Rev. Vincent Bresowar at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Russellville to help spread the word about the positions. 

Bresowar’s congregation had ballooned in size as immigrant families moved to Russellville; his church had recently built a new $4.5 million building to accommodate the increase.

His parishioners, meanwhile, worked long, irregular hours, struggled financially and often carried trauma. “The suffering is very intense and can be very difficult,” he told me. In addition, he knew how the language barrier could exacerbate misunderstandings. Bresowar says his own understanding and appreciation for the Hispanic community changed once he learned Spanish and spent time with them. “I think a lot of people are scared because they can’t communicate and it makes it harder to bridge the gaps,” Bresowar said. 

He connected Grimes to parishioners, and in 2021, using pandemic funds, Grimes hired a dozen bilingual aides from that community. At the same time, he connected them to an apprenticeship program, run by the nonprofit Reach University, so they could simultaneously train to become teachers. “It was a game changer,” Grimes said about that additional school help. 

Elizabeth Alonzo was one of those bilingual aides. She joined the staff at West Elementary in 2021, where she worked mostly with second graders in small groups, as well as interpreting for school activities and communicating with parents. As she walked down a hallway on a recent school day, Hispanic girls from other classes broke out of their lines and ran to give her a quick hug. “At first it was like, ‘Oh, you speak Spanish?’ Their face just lights up, you know?” said Alonzo, who was born and raised in Alabama by immigrant parents. Last December, she completed the coursework to become a teacher and hopes to stay on at West. 

If she does, she’ll be the sixth Hispanic teacher in the district, up from just one when Grimes arrived. The level of resources for English learners is very different from when she was in school. Her cousin was pulled out of first grade class to interpret for her when she was in kindergarten in a county school, she recalled. “And then when I was in first grade, I would be pulled out of class to help my younger brother.” Alonzo attended Russellville schools from 2008 to 2013. 

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Another Russellville teacher, Edmund Preciado Martínez, also remembers feeling isolated as a student in Alabama in the late 1990s. He sometimes confused Spanish and English words, he said, so was often too embarrassed to talk in class. “It landed me in special education because they thought something was wrong with me,” he recalled. 

He was a teacher in a nearby district when he heard about the changes Grimes was making in Russellville and decided to apply for a job. Six years ago, he was hired to work with English learners at Russellville High School. 

Every year, he says, teachers choose a slogan to unite around, like #whateverittakes, or #allin. The camaraderie is very different from stories he’s heard from counterparts around the state, who talk about their colleagues complaining about English learners and even referring to them with derogatory language and slurs.

“Whenever we need something, we simply ask for it and they do their best to get it for us,” Martínez said of his district’s leadership. “And even if they can’t, they find alternatives that we can use.”

Grimes also focused on involving Hispanic parents in their kids’ education. Many were too intimidated or embarrassed to speak to educators, he realized; in their home countries, it was sometimes seen as disrespectful to question a teacher or even ask about their child’s progress. So he set about building relationships by patronizing Hispanic businesses, meeting with community leaders and translating into Spanish all announcements on the district website and its Facebook account.

Those efforts changed the school experience of parent Analine Mederos. She’d dropped out of school in Mexico in seventh grade, and was desperate for her children to get a good education. But when her eldest daughter enrolled in Russellville schools in 2006, Mederos says she wasn’t involved in her education at all. “I was not interacting with the teachers because I didn’t speak very much English. I was afraid to talk most of the time,” she told me. She felt school employees looked down on her because of the language barrier, and she didn’t see a point in speaking up. “If you have questions, who’s going to help you?” she said. “So whatever they say, I was like, ‘OK, fine.’” 

But with her second child, now a 10th grader, it’s been a completely different experience. “Grimes has done a huge, I don’t even know how to say like a big impacto, especially with the Hispanic community,” she told me. Her daughter loves school, she said, and her son in middle school can’t wait to try out for the soccer team. When she sees Grimes in the community, she said she feels comfortable enough to talk to him about her children: “He’s going to listen. He’s not going to act like he’s listening. No, he does listen.”

Mederos finds it easier to follow school meetings now. Just a few years ago at West Elementary, there was just one interpreter for 600 children, which meant the school could schedule meetings with parents only when a child was in trouble or failing. Now, with six bilingual aides, school staff can have one-on-one meetings with every family at least once a year, and they also offer two full days of programming annually for parents in English and Spanish. Parents know there will be an interpreter in the room and that sends a clear message. “Our parents know we’re embracing them and we appreciate them,” Principal Alicia Stanford told me. 

A Hispanic Heritage Month event that Grimes started in Russellville High School has now grown into a big districtwide celebration, where students learn about different cultures and traditions, perform dances, read celebrated authors and research historical figures. But a soccer program Grimes started has received perhaps the biggest response. Students had lobbied for the program before Grimes’ arrival with no success, but he understood that it was a beloved and important part of Latin American culture. “They wanted something that was theirs,” he said. 

Related: English language teachers are scarce. One Alabama town is trying to change that

He didn’t have funds for a new soccer field, so he had the football field re-turfed, and students began playing in 2017. In 2021, when the Russellville Golden Tigers soccer team played in the state semifinals, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic families turned out in droves. “Everyone was cheering, ‘Sí, se puede,’ ‘Yes, we can,’” recalled Grimes when we met in his office this March. The school’s logo is a torch like that on the Statue of Liberty, and there’s a school tradition of holding up clenched fists to show unity and pride. “The whole Latino community stands up with their torches raised,” he added, “and they’re chanting, ‘Russ-ell-ville, Russ-ell-ville.’ That was very, very powerful.” 

Grimes’s office wall was decorated with sports trophies from events like these, along with framed academic credentials including his doctorate degree. He was the first in his family to attend college. There were also photos of his family and past students, along with a well-worn Bible on his desk.

Batchelor, the former school board president, says that, while the process was sometimes challenging, through Grimes’ sustained efforts and example, families of all backgrounds gradually saw that improving the outcomes of English learners meant that the entire school system was better. “I think the community has embraced the fact that there’s room for all of us,” he said. 

Not all of Grimes’ ideas worked. Early on, he separated English learners from other students during academic classes, but scrapped it after teachers told him it wasn’t working. Now schools do a combination of teaching English learners in small groups and with the entire class. After a back-to-school event took hours longer than expected because he asked for every sentence to be interpreted, Grimes decided to hold separate but simultaneous school meetings, where parents could choose to listen in Spanish or English. 

And it hasn’t been easy to sustain all of the gains. Between 2019 (when the bilingual aides were hired) and 2021, English learners in some grades recorded big increases on language proficiency tests. For example, proficiency levels for second graders went from 46 to 84 percent, and for third graders, 44 to 71 percent. But the growth since then hasn’t been consistent, and proficiency levels in 2023 for some grades fell below 2019 numbers. Administrators say that is because the number of English learners continues to increase while the number of educators has not, so children are receiving less individualized attention.

But the goodwill Grimes generated from embracing Hispanic families has paid off in unexpected ways. In 2018, the district needed roof work on school buildings but didn’t have the money to complete it, Grimes said. Someone in the Hispanic community called Grimes, he said, offering to do the work for free. “They volunteered their time, their efforts, their energy and their materials, and they completed those buildings,” he told me.

Today, Hispanic businesses dominate the downtown area of a few blocks, which until recently was full of deteriorating, vacant buildings. There are three Mexican bakeries, two Latin grocery stores, three barber shops, nail salons and a carnicería, or butcher shop. Business owners make it a point to support the school system, said Yaneli Bahena, who graduated four years ago from the Russellville school district and now owns a business called The Ville Nutrition. 

A Mexican restaurant catered a 200-person back-to-school event, bakeries often donate bread and treats, and some salons provide free haircuts before school starts. The soccer field is ringed by banners from local Hispanic businesses that have sponsored the team. Bahena herself sponsors meals for school events and donates backpacks and school supplies. “School gave me a sense of hope,” she said. “I had really good teachers. Everyone cared about me.” In high school, she noticed that, unlike in years past, the students were included on field trips and encouraged to take electives. Bahena said some of her classmates stayed in school instead of dropping out to work because educators “pushed help.” She, too, credited Grimes: “Everything they put into these kids would not be possible without the superintendent.”

In 2019, eager to find partners and support for his work with English learners, Grimes began chatting with other district leaders facing similar challenges and discussing what it would look like to advocate for those students statewide. Nationally, about 5 million children are English learners and most of them speak Spanish at home. But even though most are U.S. citizens, they rarely get the support they need, in part because their education has become politicized, according to Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, a former superintendent and assistant U.S. secretary of K-12 education in the Obama administration. “People see the world [in terms of] a limited amount of resources. And so they feel, ‘if you’re giving them that amount, then you’re taking away from me,’” she said.

In part as a result of that attitude, experts say, reading and math scores for English learners nationally are among the lowest of all student subgroups, their high school graduation rates lag behind, and they are less likely to go to college. “We need these kids and we need them educated,” said Patricia Gándara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and an expert on English learners. “They represent a very large part of the future of this country.” 

The next year, in 2020, Grimes founded a coalition of superintendents called Alabama Leaders Advocating for English Learners, under the umbrella of a state operation, Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools. “His passion was evident and he was not going to stop,” said Hollingsworth of the School Superintendents of Alabama. “If you keep knocking on the door, knocking on the door, eventually somebody’s going to open the door. And that’s kind of what happened.”

The superintendents coalition led by Grimes successfully pressed the Legislature for more funding for English learners, to $150 per student, from about $50 to $75 in 2015. Districts with an English learner population above 10 percent receive $300 per student. For Russellville, that meant a fourfold increase to $400,000, at a time when city funding declined. Grimes received a state award for his “remarkable contributions and tireless advocacy for English Learner funding in Alabama schools.” Thanks in part to his advocacy, the state now has instructional support for districts, 12 coaches and a state director of English learning. Grimes also advocated for English learners’ test scores to count on the state report card only after they’ve been enrolled for five years (approximately the time it takes for students to learn a new language). That law, which has some critics, went into effect last year.

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

Barnett of the Guntersville City Board of Education said Grimes’ efforts with English learners helped persuade other district leaders that they could do the work too. “Russellville is a great place, but there’s nothing special there that it can’t happen anywhere else,” he said. “There’s nothing in the water. It certainly can be replicated.”

For seven years, Grimes and the Russellville school board worked well together, he and former board members said. But discontent among other city leaders surfaced early on, several people told me. Grimes had started to clash with the city’s mayor, David Grissom, who was first elected in 2012, about funding. A Russellville resident close to the workings of city government who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation says Grimes had angered Grissom and some City Council members early on when he noted publicly that his schools budget was $200,000 less than that of his predecessor. (McDowell, the school board lawyer, wrote in his email to me that Grimes was made aware of this cut after he took office and had agreed to it.) City Council members “did not take kindly to having their feet held to the fire or being made to look bad. So from then on, Grimes was marked,” the resident told me. Grimes also angered Grissom when he declined to publicly support the mayor’s choice for a City Council seat in 2020, preferring to stay neutral, several people told me. 

In his response to me, Grissom did not comment on those specifics but wrote that he “had interviewed and have been interviewed by several hundred people of all races and ethnicities” about Grimes’ performance and that some of those he spoke with were dissatisfied with the superintendent. He posed questions about whether Grimes had been in his office every day, treated employees differently, and spent too much district money on conferences. Grimes said that he sometimes traveled around the state for his work, that the conferences were for professional development and approved by the board, and that as a leader he did sometimes have to make decisions that displeased people because he was weighing different perspectives and needs. He said he was shocked by the mayor’s statements because neither the mayor nor anyone else had previously brought such concerns to him. Gist and Batchelor, the former school board members, said they had never heard any such concerns from anyone in their roughly eight years of working with Grimes. “Not one word,” said Gist. Grimes’ personnel file did not contain any information indicating concerns with the superintendent’s performance. Neither the mayor nor the school board lawyer would provide any clarification about why, if such complaints existed, Grimes was not notified. 

As Grimes continued to invest in efforts to help English learners, their numbers rose every year, doubling in size during his tenure, to 33 percent. After the 2020 City Council election, in an effort widely seen as intended to remove Grimes as superintendent, Grissom and City Council members began replacing members of the appointed five-member school board that had supported Grimes. (In his email, Mayor Grissom wrote that the council has the right to replace board members and had done so prior to Grimes’ tenure as well.) In May 2023, Greg Trapp, the school board member, informed the superintendent they would not renew his contract when it expired the following year.

Gist, the former school board member, said that while he was shocked at first by the City Council’s decision to replace him and others, it made sense given the Council’s antipathy toward Grimes. “That’s small-town politics. In order for them to control the system, they had to get rid of the school board members that were doing it right,” he said, adding: “That’s the only way they could remove him.” What upset him was knowing the decision wasn’t driven by what was best for students, he said. “If they wanted to replace me with somebody better, that is fine,” he told me. “But when they did it for a personal reason, that bothered me.” (I reached out to Trapp at least three times, as well as to other board members, and they did not respond to my requests for comment.) Batchelor, who was replaced soon after he voted in favor of keeping Grimes, also said the board’s majority decision was a mistake: “I think he’s the best superintendent in the state of Alabama.”

In March 2024, the district named a new superintendent, Tim Guinn, a former Russellville High School principal, who was also a candidate for the superintendent position when Grimes was chosen. Most recently he’d worked as superintendent of the Satsuma district. Guinn did not respond to repeated interview requests. 

Already, some of the programs and practices Grimes put in place appear to be unraveling. As of June, most of the bilingual aides, whose salaries are paid for by pandemic aid that expires in September 2024, had not been rehired. In addition, some bilingual teachers did not have their contracts renewed. The board has not indicated if it has plans to move ahead with improvements Grimes planned for middle and high school English learners. A dual-language immersion charter school, which Grimes had advocated for and the board had approved, was set to open in 2025. It has been scrapped. (McDowell did not comment in an email on the district’s plans for English learners. Regarding the bilingual aides, he wrote that some of them were not rehired because the federal grants had expired. Grimes said he had planned to pay for their salaries using a combination of district reserves and funds he would save from teachers retiring: “You make decisions based on what your priorities are.”)

Grimes and the board had agreed for him to stay on until the end of the 2023-2024 school year as the district searched for a replacement. But a week after my March visit to Russellville, McDowell, the school board lawyer, accused him of intimidating people into talking to me, according to Grimes, and told the superintendent that he could not be on school property or speak to district employees unless it was in his capacity as a parent. At that time, Grimes stepped down from the day-to-day responsibilities of his job, but he will remain in the community while his 14-year-old daughter finishes high school. His wife also remains a teacher in the district. (In an email and in an interview, McDowell said that he had never accused Grimes of intimidating anyone nor banned the superintendent from school grounds.) Also after my visit, more than a dozen educators I spoke with in Russellville told me that they were no longer comfortable being identified for fear of losing their jobs. The Hechinger Report/palabra agreed to delay publishing this piece until Grimes received his last paycheck on June 30.

Last month, Grimes started a full-time position with Reach University, the nonprofit that trains the bilingual aides as teachers, as its regional director of partnerships in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. 

The past six months have taken a toll. Grimes has said little publicly about his departure and has told most people in the community that he’s retiring. When we were having lunch together at a local restaurant, El Patron, other diners kept stopping by to wish him well. Two of them joked about how he looked far too young to retire. Grimes laughed and played along, but after they left, his shoulders slumped and he blinked away tears.

“I’ve spent my career very invested, very committed to doing what was best for kids,” he told me quietly. “I didn’t feel like I deserved for it to end this way.” 

He said he doesn’t regret the changes he made for English learners in the city. “Jesus loved the people that everybody else didn’t. And that was part of his message — you love your enemies, you love your neighbors, you love the foreigners, you love the sinner,” he said. “I see God in those children.” 

Rebecca Griesbach of AL.com contributed reporting.

This story about Russellville schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and palabra, an initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, along with AL.com. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Subscribe to palabra’s newsletter.

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When I first started teaching middle school, I did everything my university prep program told me to do in what’s known as the “workshop model.”

I let kids choose their books. I determined their independent reading levels and organized my classroom library according to reading difficulty.

I then modeled various reading skills, like noticing the details of the imagery in a text, and asked my students to practice doing likewise during independent reading time.

It was an utter failure.

Kids slipped their phones between the pages of the books they selected. Reading scores stagnated. I’m pretty sure my students learned nothing that year.

Yet one aspect of this model functioned seamlessly: when I sat on a desk in front of the room and read out loud from a shared classroom novel.

Kids listened, discussions arose naturally and everything seemed to click.

Slowly, the reason for these episodic successes became clear to me: Shared experiences and teacher direction are necessary for high-quality instruction and a well-run classroom.

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Over time, I pieced together the idea that my students would benefit most from a teaching model that emphasized shared readings of challenging works of literature; memorization of poetry; explicit grammar instruction; contextual knowledge, including history; and teacher direction — not time practicing skills.

But even as I made changes and saw improvements, doubts nagged at me. By abandoning student choice, and asking kids to dust off Chaucer, would I snuff out their joy of reading? Is Shakespearean English simply too difficult for middle schoolers?

To set my doubts aside, I surveyed the relevant research and found that many of the assumptions upon which the workshop model was founded are simply false — starting with the assumption that reading comprehension depends on “reading comprehension skills.”

There is evidence that teaching such skills has some benefit, but what students really need in order to read with understanding is knowledge about history, geography, science, music, the arts and the world more broadly.

Perhaps the most famous piece of evidence for this knowledge-centered theory of reading comprehension is the “baseball study,” in which researchers gave children an excerpt about baseball and then tested their comprehension. At the outset of the study, researchers noted the children’s reading levels and baseball knowledge; they varied considerably.

Ultimately, the researchers found that it was each child’s prior baseball knowledge and not their predetermined reading ability that predicted their comprehension and recall of the passage.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Embedded within any newspaper article or novel is a vast amount of assumed knowledge that authors take for granted — from the fall of the Soviet Union to the importance of 1776.

Just about any student can decode the words “Berlin Wall,” but they need a knowledge of basic geography (where is Berlin?), history (why was the Berlin wall built?) and political philosophy (what qualities of the Communist regime caused people to flee from East to West?) to grasp the full meaning of an essay or story involving the Berlin Wall.

Of course, students aren’t born with this knowledge, which is why effective teachers build students’ capacity for reading comprehension by relentlessly exposing them to content-rich texts.

My research confirmed what I had concluded from my classroom experiences: The workshop model’s text-leveling and independent reading have a weak evidence base.

Rather than obsessing over the difficulty of texts, educators would better serve students by asking themselves other questions, such as: Does our curriculum expose children to topics they might not encounter outside of school? Does it offer opportunities to discuss related historical events? Does it include significant works of literature or nonfiction that are important for understanding modern society?

Related: PROOF POINTS: Slightly higher reading scores when students delve into social studies, study finds

In my classroom, I began to choose many books simply because of their historical significance or instructional opportunities. Reading the memoirs of Frederick Douglass with my students allowed me to discuss supplementary nonfiction texts about chattel slavery, fugitive slave laws and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by C. S. Lewis prompted teaching about allusions to the Christian creation story and the myth of Narcissus, knowledge they could use to analyze future stories and characters.

Proponents of the workshop model claim that letting students choose the books they read will make them more motivated readers, increase the amount of time they spend reading and improve their literacy. The claim is widely believed.

However, it’s unclear to me why choice would necessarily foster a love of reading. To me, it seems more likely that a shared reading of a classic work with an impassioned teacher, engaged classmates and a thoughtfully designed final project are more motivating than reading a self-selected book in a lonely corner. That was certainly my experience.

After my classes acted out “Romeo and Juliet,” with rulers trimmed and painted to resemble swords, and read “To Kill a Mockingbird” aloud, countless students (and their parents) told me it was the first time they’d ever enjoyed reading.

They said these classics were the first books that made them think — and the first ones that they’d ever connected with.

Students don’t need hours wasted on finding a text’s main idea or noticing details. They don’t need time cloistered off with another book about basketball.

They need to experience art, literature and history that might not immediately interest them but will expand their perspective and knowledge of the world.

They need a teacher to guide them through and inspire a love and interest in this content. The workshop model doesn’t offer students what they need, but teachers still can.

Daniel Buck is an editorial and policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the author of “What Is Wrong with Our Schools?”

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

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There is a long overdue movement in states and districts across the country to update K-3 reading and math curricula to ensure they adhere to research-proven practices. However, this movement has a big blind spot: preschool.

Close to half of all four-year-olds in the U.S. now start their formal education in a public preschool classroom, and this share is steadily growing. States invested well over $10 billion in pre-K programs in 2022-23, and the federal government invested $11 billion in Head Start.

Most public preschool programs succeed in offering children well-organized classrooms in which they feel safe to learn and explore. But they fall short in building the critical early learning skills on which a child’s future literacy and math skills depend.

Strong preschool experiences matter. The seeds of the large, consequential learning gap between children from higher-income and lower-income families in language, literacy and math skills in middle and high school are already planted by the first day of kindergarten.

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

Many studies in widely differing locales around the country have shown that attending preschool boosts children’s kindergarten readiness, and that its effects can — but don’t invariably — last beyond kindergarten and even into adulthood. This readiness includes the ability to follow teacher directions and get along with peers, a solid understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds, a strong vocabulary and a conceptual knowledge of the number line — all skills on which elementary school curricula can build and all eagerly learned by preschoolers.

But as with all education, some programs are more effective than others, and curriculum is a key active ingredient. Most preschool programs rely on curricula that do not match the current science of early learning and teaching. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch to do better. As a new National Academies report explains, we have ample research that points to what makes a preschool curriculum effective.

Three practical changes will help to move today’s curriculum reform efforts in the right direction.

First, public preschool programs need to update their lists of approved curricula, based on evidence, to clearly identify those that improve young children’s learning and development. In the 2021-22 school year (the most recent year for which figures are available), only 19 states maintained lists of approved curricula, and those lists included curricula that are not evidence-based.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

Second, because the most effective preschool curricula tend to target only one or two learning areas (such as math and literacy), programs need to combine curricula to cover all vital areas. Fortunately, preschool programs in Boston and elsewhere have done precisely this.

Third, tightly linking curricula to teacher professional development and coaching is required for effective implementation. Too often, teacher professional development focuses on general best practices or is highly episodic, approaches that have not translated into preschool learning gains.

We can’t stop with these three changes, however. Children learn best when kindergarten and later elementary curricula build upon preschool curriculum.

None of these changes will solve the problem of the inadequate funding that affects many preschool programs and fuels high teacher turnover. But they can provide teachers with the best tools to support learning.

Getting preschool curricula right is crucial for society to receive the research-proven benefits of early education programs. Evidence shows a boost in learning when programs use more effective curricula.

What’s next is for policymakers to put this evidence into action.

Deborah A. Phillips and Christina Weiland are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on a New Vision for High-Quality Pre-K Curriculum, which recently released a report with a series of recommendations to improve preschool curriculum, as is Douglas H. Clements, who also contributed to this opinion piece.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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