Liz Willen, Author at The Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/author/liz-willen/ Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:49:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon-32x32.jpg Liz Willen, Author at The Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/author/liz-willen/ 32 32 138677242 ​COLUMN: Students want more civics education, but far too few schools teach it https://hechingerreport.org/column-students-want-more-civics-education-but-far-too-few-schools-teach-it/ Wed, 16 Oct 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=104389

Three weeks before a ferociously contested U.S. election, the views and voices of students should be heard louder than ever – even those of young people who aren’t yet eligible to vote. Trouble is, many won’t have learned enough about the issues to develop informed and thoughtful opinions. That’s partly because civics education in schools […]

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Three weeks before a ferociously contested U.S. election, the views and voices of students should be heard louder than ever – even those of young people who aren’t yet eligible to vote. Trouble is, many won’t have learned enough about the issues to develop informed and thoughtful opinions.

That’s partly because civics education in schools has significantly declined, a conundrum we’ve followed for years at The Hechinger Report. Many teachers say they are afraid to teach these topics in these sharply divided times while principals, too, fear discussing civics is simply too divisive.

Yet consider some of these startling, oft-repeated statistics:

  • Only 49 percent of students who took the most recent NAEP exam said they have a class that is mainly focused on civics or the U.S. government;
  • Only 29 percent said they had a teacher whose primary responsibility is teaching civics; 
  • And more than 70 percent of Americans failed a basic civic literacy quiz; 1 in 3 couldn’t name or explain what our three branches of government do, a 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found. Most Americans could name only a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment in a recent Annenberg survey, and our civic knowledge has not improved since 1998.

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Still, our schools have never made teaching civics a priority, Louise Dubé, executive director of iCivics, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civic learning founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, told me, echoing what I hear from countless advocates and educators. 

“Teaching the election should be the Super Bowl of this re-engagement, as all eyes are on our single most important democratic process,” Dube said. “The K-12 education system is a reflection of what our society judges as important, and citizenship is low on the list.”

What’s happened in the age of social media is even more concerning: Young people share a distrust of the media no matter what their partisan bias: Half of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. say they have some or a lot of trust in the information they get from social media sites, the Pew Research Center found, while 4 out of 10 young adults get their news from TikTok.

Related: OPINION: We did not need the Nation’s ‘Report Card’ to tell us we must invest in civic education

Clearly, there is enormous work to be done, and schools must do their part. The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for Democracy will hold a virtual conversation about potential solutions this week.

Many students, meanwhile, want to be more informed and engaged in the issues, one reason why The Hechinger Report is teaming up with Retro Report to highlight the lack of civics education in the U.S., along with solutions, resources and ideas for solving it.

Students make the most convincing argument of all in Retro Report’s new four-part series “Citizen Nation,” which premiered on PBS on Oct. 8. The series follows teenagers from across the country competing in We the People, the nation’s premier civics competition. The competition stacks teams of students from 48 states against one another, and they must argue their points before a panel of judges acting as members of Congress.

“We don’t actually listen to one another,” — Elias Wallace, Wyoming high schooler training for military service. Credit: Retro Report

“Citizen Nation” introduces us to public school students from Las Vegas to suburban Virginia and rural Wyoming. Theirs are the voices that will shape our future — and they are filled with determination. Watching these students learn about our constitution, answer tough questions and prepare to compete in a national contest is a reminder of what is at stake in our country — and gives me hope for the next generation.

“People nowadays don’t sit down and talk. We don’t actually listen to one another,” says Elias Wallace, a Wyoming high schooler aiming for a computer engineering degree on an ROTC scholarship, at one point during the series. “Instead, we just say no, no, no, you’re wrong. We don’t say — here’s why. … I feel that if we communicate, life would be a whole lot better for everyone.’’

Then there is Elizabeth (Eli) Fakoya, daughter of Nigerian immigrants in Las Vegas, who hopes to study law and grew up in a house where the news is constantly on. She prepares for the upcoming competition with a ferocious intensity.

“I’ve just learned that I really like debating politics, and I like to give speeches on it, and I like to discuss it. So, I’m always prepared for any topic,” she says.

Lessons in Civics

The Hechinger Report and Retro Report partnered to produce work about how students are participating in civic life and how they are being taught the significance of that activity.

READ MORE

Hearing from teachers and students throughout the series is a breath of optimism in these fraught times. David Kendrick, who teaches government and history at Loganville High School in Loganville, Georgia, often reminds his students that they are experiencing an election like no other.

Related: OPINION: A better democracy starts in our schools

“It’s very important that our up-and-coming adults, meaning our students, are aware and ready for their chance to take over and to ‘do it right,’ which we have struggled with doing here in the past,” Kendrick said.

“This is the most important class you will ever take in your high school career because you need to know your rights,” teacher Erin Lindt tells her students in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “You need to know if there is an issue, how to solve a problem. I think our world is headed in a really scary direction, and my generation has shown that they’re not going to solve it. But we can get the next generation to.”

It’s going to take a lot more than conversations in classrooms, at conferences and during one annual competition, though, to change the trajectory for civics education, even at a time when some state legislatures have passed bills to enhance civic education.

After the last 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Scott Warren, the founder of Generation Citizen, lamented that students aren’t learning “meaningful discourse, or how to discuss controversial issues. … When we fail to properly prioritize and fund civics education holistically, our discourse and democracy erode.”

Related: Teaching action civics engages kids and ignites controversy

To be sure, there are plenty of encouraging efforts, as Dubé notes, pointing to the iCivics games and videos played more than 9 million times a year.

And Michael Rebell argues in his book “Flunking Democracy” that failure to teach civics is a violation of both federal and state constitutions that can only be addressed by the courts, as some are now doing. (Rebell is the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity and a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where the Hechinger Report is an independent, nonprofit unit.)

In the months to come, we’ll be updating our project to include more student voices, essays and ideas on how to improve civics education. We welcome yours: Write to editor@hechingerreport.org

I’ve already reached out to a few experts who have spent years pushing for change, wondering how they are finding optimism.

“What gives me hope is that, despite the lack of formal efforts to reform civics education, so many of our kids are finding ways to go out into communities and get their hands dirty,” said Jonathan Collins, a writer, political scientist, and education policy scholar, also based at Teachers College, Columbia University. “They’re starting new organizations dedicated to addressing our society’s most pressing problems. We’ve left them in the dark, but they’re finding their own lights. It’s beautiful to see.”

There will be many other efforts and court arguments in the months and years to come no matter who wins in November, but let us hope for now that the voices of students will carry the day.

“I’m not satisfied with the way the world is right now,” Ethan Bull, a Las Vegas student activist whose parents work in the casino industry notes, while preparing for the competition. “But I try not to let all the negativity in the world get to me. Because if I let it consume me, then maybe I might become just another generic person who’s complacent with the system.”

Contact editor in chief Liz Willen at 917-690-2089 or willen@hechingerreport.org.

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

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]]> 104389 How could Project 2025 change education? https://hechingerreport.org/how-could-project-2025-change-education/ Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:13:49 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=102009

The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish.  The conservative Heritage Foundation is the primary force behind the sprawling blueprint, which is separate from the much less detailed Republican National […]

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The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish. 

The conservative Heritage Foundation is the primary force behind the sprawling blueprint, which is separate from the much less detailed Republican National Committee 2024 platform, though they share some common themes.

Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, said in an interview with USA TODAY that Project 2025 should be seen “like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory.” No one president could take on all these changes, he said. “It’s a manual for conservative policy thought.”

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The fast-changing political landscape makes it difficult to say which of these proposals might be taken up by Trump if he wins reelection. He has claimed to know nothing about it, though many of his allies were involved in drafting it. The exit of President Joe Biden from the presidential race may have an impact on Project 2025 that is still unknown. Finally, many of the broadest proposals in the document, such as changes to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would require congressional action, not just an order from the White House.

However, it remains a useful document for outlining the priorities of those who would likely play a part in a new Trump administration. The Hechinger Report created this reference guide that digs into the Project 2025 wishlist for education.

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EARLY CHILDHOOD
K12 EDUCATION
HIGHER EDUCATION

Early childhood

Child care for military families

Project 2025 calls for expanding child care for military families, who have access to programs that are often upheld as premier examples of high-quality care in America. – Jackie Mader

Head Start and child care 

Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year. Most Head Start children are served in center-based programs, which have an outsized role in rural areas and prioritize enrolling a certain percentage of young children with disabilities who often struggle to find child care elsewhere. Head Start also provides a critical funding and resource stream to other private child care programs that meet Head Start standards, including home-based programs. – J. M.

Home-based child care

A conservative administration should also prioritize funding for home-based child care rather than “universal day care” in programs outside the home, Project 2025 says. That funding would include money for parents to stay home with a child or to pay for “familial, in-home” care, proposals that could be appealing to some early childhood advocates who have long called for more resources for informal care and stay-at-home parents. – J. M.

On-site child care

If out-of-home child care is necessary, Congress should offer incentives for on-site child care, Project 2025 says, because it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” Early childhood advocates have been wary of such proposals because they tie child care access to a specific job. It also calls on Congress to clarify within the Fair Labor Standards Act that an employer’s expenses for providing such care are not part of the employee’s pay.– J. M.

K-12 education

Data collection  

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” should release student performance data based on “family structure” — in addition to existing categories such as race and socioeconomic status — Project 2025 argues. Family structure, the document says, is “one of the most important — if not the most important — factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment.” The document goes on to endorse “natural family structure” of a heterosexual, two-parent household, “because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” — Sarah Butrymowicz 

LGBTQ students 

Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” 

The plan also calls on Congress and state lawmakers to require schools to refer to students by the names on their birth certificates and the pronouns associated with their biological sex, unless they have written permission from parents to refer to them otherwise.

The plan also equates transgender issues with child abuse and pornography, and proposes that school libraries with books deemed offensive be punished. — Ariel Gilreath

Privatization 

In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.”

The document specifically highlights the education savings account program in Arizona, the first state to open school vouchers up to all families. Programs like Arizona’s have few, if any, restrictions on who can access the funding. Project 2025 also calls for education savings accounts for schools under federal jurisdiction, such as those run by the Department of Defense or the Bureau of Indian Education. 

In addition, Project 2025 calls on Congress to look into creating a federal scholarship tax credit to “incentivize donors to contribute” to nonprofit groups that grant scholarships for private school tuition or education materials. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton

School meals 

The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit, the document says. Policy changes under the Obama administration have made it easier for entire schools or districts to provide free meals to students without families needing to submit individual eligibility paperwork. — Christina A. Samuels

Special education 

Project 2025 says that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides $14.2 billion in federal money for the education of school-aged children with disabilities, should be mostly converted to “no-strings” block grants to individual states. Lawmakers should also consider making a portion of the federal money payable directly to parents of children with disabilities, it says, so they can use it for tutoring, therapies or other educational materials. This would be similar to education savings accounts in place in Arizona and Florida. 

The blueprint also calls for rescinding a policy called “Equity in IDEA.” Under that policy, districts are required to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling Black, Native American and other ethnic minority students in special education. Districts must also track how these students are disciplined, and if they are more likely than other students in special education to be placed in classrooms separate from their general education peers. Current rules, which Project 2025 would eliminate, require that districts that have significant disparities in this area must use 15 percent of their federal funding to address those problems. — C.A.S.

Teaching about race 

Project 2025 elevates concerns among members of the political right that educating students about race and racism risks promoting bias against white people. The document discusses the legal concept of critical race theory, and argues that when it is used in teacher training and school activities such as “mandatory affinity groups,” it disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” 

The document calls for legislation requiring schools to adopt proposals “that say no individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin,” among other recommendations. It also calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would give families a “fair hearing in court” if they believed the federal government had enforced policies undermining their right to raise their children. — Caroline Preston

Title I

This program, funded at a little over $18 billion for fiscal 2024, is the largest federal program for K-12 schools and is designed to help children from low-income families. The conservative blueprint would encourage lawmakers to make the program a block grant to states, with few restrictions on how it can be used — and, over 10 years, to phase it out entirely. Additionally, it says, lawmakers should allow parents in Title I schools to use part of that funding for educational savings accounts that could be spent on private tutoring or other services. — C.A.S.

Higher education

Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion 

The document calls for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that maintain affirmative action or DEI policies. That position matches the views expressed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, about the use of race in college admissions and beyond. — Liz Willen 

Data collection 

In higher education, the proposal argues that college graduation and earnings data need a “risk adjustment” that factors in the types of students served by a particular institution. While selective colleges tend to post the highest graduation rates and student earnings, they also tend to enroll the least-“risky” students. A risk adjustment methodology could benefit community colleges, which often have low graduation rates but enroll many nontraditional students who face obstacles to earning a degree. It would also likely benefit for-profit colleges, which similarly tend to accept most applicants. Historically, for-profit schools have received scrutiny under Democratic administrations for poor outcomes and for allegedly misleading students about the value of the education they provide. Republican administrations typically have supported less regulation of for-profit institutions. — S.B. 

Parent PLUS loans and Pell grants 

The blueprint calls for the elimination of the Parent PLUS loan program, arguing that it is redundant “because there are many privately provided alternatives available.” Originally created for relatively affluent families, the PLUS loan program has become a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college. In recent years, it has sparked criticism due to rising default rates and fewer protections than are afforded to other student loan borrowers.  

At present, interest rates for private loans are significantly lower than Parent PLUS rates, but they come with fewer protections, and it is more difficult to get approved for a private-bank loan. Project 2025 would also get rid of PLUS loans for graduate students.

If the federal PLUS programs were eliminated, it could stem one portion of the rising tide of families’ education debt, but it would also make the path to paying for college more difficult for some families. 

Project 2025 does not call for a change to the Pell grant program, which provides federal funding for students from low-income families to attend college. Some advocates have called for doubling the annual maximum allotment, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 school year, far below the cost to attend many colleges. — Meredith Kolodner and Olivia Sanchez

Student loan forgiveness 

Project 2025 would end the prospect of student loan forgiveness, which has already been largely blocked by federal courts; the Biden administration, in a sort of game of Whac-a-Mole, has proposed still more forgiveness programs that are being fought by Republican state attorneys general and others. Project 2025 would also dramatically restrict what’s known as “borrower defense to repayment,” which forgives loans borrowed to pay for colleges that closed or have been found to use illegal or deceptive marketing. Largely restricting the Education Department to collecting statistics, Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans to the Treasury Department. — Jon Marcus

This story about Project 2025 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. 

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]]> 102009 Four cities of FAFSA chaos: Students tell how they grappled with the mess, stress https://hechingerreport.org/four-cities-of-fafsa-chaos-students-tell-how-they-grappled-with-the-mess-stress/ Wed, 22 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=101140

By Liz Willen For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it […]

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By Liz Willen

For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it has derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students throughout the U.S., especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families.

The bureaucratic mess is also holding up decisions by private scholarship programs and adding to public skepticism about the value of higher education — threatening progress in efforts to get more Americans to and through college.

To see the impact in person, The Hechinger Report sent reporters to schools in four cities — San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Greenville, South Carolina — to hear students’ stories. Because we found them through schools, most of those we interviewed had counselors helping them; for the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.

“It was stressing me every day,” said one San Francisco senior who was accepted to 16 colleges but could not attend without substantial financial aid. Some became so frustrated they gave up, at least for now. Others said they will turn to trade schools or the military.

Students whose parents are undocumented had special worries, including concern that naming their parents would bring immigration penalties (although the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids FAFSA officials from sharing family information).

Do you already have financial aid but don’t understand your offer letter?

Try our Offer Letter Decoder, which will decipher your promised financial aid.

To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education, which keeps an updated list.

Despite heroic efforts by counselors and a slew of public FAFSA-signing events, just 40.2 percent of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, in contrast to 49.6 of last year’s seniors at the same time, according to the National College Attainment Network. The numbers do not bode well for college enrollment, nor for the many high school graduates who will not get the benefits of higher education. 

SAN FRANCISCO

By Gail Cornwall

Damiana Beltran, a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco, has been working with Wilber Ramirez and other staffers from a nonprofit group that runs the school’s Future Center, where students get advice about college options and financial aid. It was touch-and-go whether her FAFSA form would be processed in time for her to attend her top-choice college. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report

No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future. But at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying, so she did. San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother that “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.

But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center, but still, no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.

When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication that her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not asking her mother to take on debt. “I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.” She’s had trouble sleeping.

Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over the FAFSA. It took him about a month and two submission attempts to access the part of the online form that would allow him to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs to verify their identity, he said. Once he did, it took about three more weeks to process. The senior, who had received local news coverage for being accepted into 16 out of 20 schools, said he thought to himself, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”

Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. He cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications and had to stay up late into the night to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, went to figuring out how to pay for college. “It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez said.

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Finally, the University of California, Berkeley, told him that his FAFSA had gone through, and financial aid would pay for almost everything; the SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest. “It’s finally over,” he said.

But it was not over for Jocelyn, another Mission High senior, who asked to be referred to by first name only, to protect her family’s privacy. She said that her father had been working two jobs waiting tables and her mother had been saving what she could from the household budget for quite some time; they had amassed $1,000.  Jocelyn had saved $200 from working at an organic bagel shop. Room and board at San José State, her top choice too, runs $20,971 a year.

But that gap wasn’t her sole source of anxiety. By sending her undocumented parents’ names to the government in the FAFSA form, she feared she’d put them at risk, even though federal regulations forbid FAFSA officials from sharing private data with others.

Jocelyn (right) and Maria (left) are seniors at Mission High School in San Francisco, and both have had to deal with uncertainty about filling out the FAFSA form because their Spanish-speaking parents don’t have immigration documentation. Both also worried that delays in getting financial aid offers could mean they would have to defer going to college. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report

Jocelyn, who wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, didn’t share the FAFSA difficulties with her dad, who only went to middle school in Mexico, or her mom, who never got to go to school. “They’re just gonna say, ‘Stay in San Francisco, problem solved,’ ” she said. But she already takes a class at City College of San Francisco, a community college, and finds the idea of enrolling there, with so many “grown adults,” discouraging. A friend of the family who did that and then transferred to a four-year school told Jocelyn she felt lonely having missed out on the first-year bonding. Now Jocelyn thinks she’ll go to San Francisco State, live at home for a year, and then move into an apartment. But she’d still need financial aid to make that work. “It’s like, back to square one,” Jocelyn sighed — and then said she might forgo college and get a full-time job instead.

That’s not too far from Alessandro Mejia’s plan. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into. “College is my first choice,” Mejia said in late April, but he was eyeing trade school. Financing college “would just be much harder on our family,” he said, and “being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.” Of abandoning a tech career, he said, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”

School counselor Katherine Valle listened to Mejia with carefully concealed horror. “It’s shocking to hear,” she said. The Game Design Academy “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …” She couldn’t find words.

Source: National College Attainment Network Credit: Jacob Turcotte/The Christian Science Monitor

Valle said that for her students whose parents have white-collar jobs, the new FAFSA was everything promised: “easier process, less questions.” But it took kids in Mejia’s family income bracket many attempts to complete. He has the same potential as his wealthier peers, but those kids are “10 steps ahead,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Mejia finally submitted his FAFSA on April 29. He said if he didn’t hear back by the new decision deadline for California State University institutions, May 15, he wouldn’t enroll.

With less than a week to spare, Mejia learned his FAFSA had been processed. He committed to San Francisco State. Jocelyn did, too, though she would have preferred San José State. For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline came and went; she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in,” she said, and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.

CHICAGO

By Matt Krupnick

Ashley Spencer, left, a counselor at Air Force Academy High School in Chicago, kept telling senior Samaya Acker “We’re getting there, we’re close,” as they navigated college and FAFSA applications amid the confusion caused by financial aid delays and errors. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report

Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year. She applied for early action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application for financial aid two days after the window opened and came up with a backup plan to join the military, just in case.

Most of those preparations went well.

Acker, an 18-year-old senior at Air Force Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges (her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down) and planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college. But as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.

“It really put me on edge,” said Acker, whose high school years were interrupted first by Covid and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year, but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average over 4.0.

With Acker’s college decision deadlines looming, her counselor, Ashley Spencer, pulled her from class one day in mid-April to look over her options, whatever FAFSA results she got. “We are getting close to the end with you, slowly but surely,” Spencer said.

About a week later, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, which pays the full cost of college attendance for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Chicago’s Loyola University, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 per year. She plans to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

A few miles away, a group of students at Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago were not as lucky.

The FAFSA delays have created unique challenges for students with undocumented immigrant parents — including students at Hubbard. At a late-April meeting with Dulcinea Basile, the school’s college and career coach, four seniors whose parents are undocumented said they had spent months waiting for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information. “How many times have we logged in and it says ‘FAFSA not available’?” Basile asked rhetorically.

The glitch was finally fixed, but all four were still waiting, in early May, to find out how much financial aid they might receive.

“There’s really not much I can do,” said Javier Magana, 18, who was still trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that had accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”

Dulcinea Basile, second from right, a college and career coach at Hubbard High School in Chicago, has been concerned for months that financial aid delays might cause some of her seniors — from left, Javier Magana, Octavio Rodriguez and Ixchel Ortiz — to forgo college. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report

Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to a Chicago community college, but said if she didn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.

Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, said they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.

Rodriguez said he had been repeatedly frustrated by trying to complete the FAFSA. “I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he said. In late April he was notified that he had misspelled his own name on the application; in mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to re-apply from scratch.

“I’m slightly stressed,” he said in mid-May.

Raygoza said he had submitted his application on time but had failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.

“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he said. “I had to do it all again.”

All four said they would likely take a year off to work if they didn’t get aid.

BALTIMORE

By Kavitha Cardoza

LaToia Lyle works with students at the Academy for College and Career Exploration, a public high school in Baltimore. She’s a counselor from the nonprofit iMentor, which connects juniors and seniors to mentors for coaching on post-secondary planning. Many of her students are low-income and first-generation college prospects. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report

At the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, juniors and seniors have weekly class, run by the nonprofit organization iMentor, to help them understand and pursue postsecondary options, including colleges and various types of financial aid. Counselor LaToia Lyle worries about the long delays with FAFSA, because most of her students are low-income and will be first-generation college students, so they don’t always have someone to help them at home, and the delays could mean decisions had to be made quickly.

She helps them compare tuition costs and reminds them that housing deposits are not refundable and book fees add up. “Even gaps as small as $500 can make a difference,” she said.

For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, both seniors, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that froze were frustrating, but both students said they were relieved when glitches with the forms meant their college commitment deadlines got pushed back.

“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” said Wilson, an ebullient 17-year-old with a wide smile. “I kept bouncing between different things. I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”

Zion Wilson said the extra time caused by FAFSA delays allowed her to decide against going to college as she’d originally planned. She got into several universities but decided to study information technology as a trainee through Grads2Careers, a Baltimore City program. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report

She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to spend if she wasn’t working. But her family wanted her to go to college, especially because her elder sister had enrolled but dropped out after the first year.

Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University — but even with scholarships, she decided not to go. Instead, Wilson plans to go straight into the workforce through a program called Grads2Careers, where she will get training in information technology.

“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson said. After a two-week training period, she will be paid between $15 and $17 an hour, she said.

In the end, she filled out her portion of the FAFSA, but told her parents not to do theirs. “Why make my parents do this long thing and put in their tax information, if I’m not going anywhere that requires it?”

Wilson is relieved not to have to think about college anymore. “I think I made the right choice, and having some money in my pocket will also be a good push for me to continue to advance up.”

Camryn Carter, a senior in Baltimore, got accepted with a full scholarship to the University of Maryland, College Park, his first choice. He called the FAFSA delays “a blessing and a curse”: a blessing because his mother had more time to fill out the form and a curse because it was difficult for him to juggle the FAFSA process with his demanding AP courses and college essays. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report

Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the baseball, wrestling and track teams. He has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology. It began, he said, when he was about four years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.

“I was like, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ ” he said, recalling the video of a lion attacking a zebra. Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day. “I fell in love with ants, ecosystems, that just sparked my interest in biology.”

Carter applied to 14 colleges. He said filling out all the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it at the same time as he was taking a demanding course load, including AP Literature and AP Calculus. “It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to do that at the same time while I’m doing college supplemental essays and my personal statement.”

But the FAFSA delay also meant that his mother had more time to finish the form, something she had been putting off for months. Because he is the oldest of four children, his mom hadn’t had to complete a form like this that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data, he said.

“My mom was just brushing over it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please do this and please get on it.”

She did, but Carter said it likely wouldn’t have happened without the delay.

Carter got into his dream school, the University of Maryland, College Park, with a full scholarship, including tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have ended up paying $6,000 a year, which he didn’t want to do. “Definitely money was a big factor,” he said. He said he’s excited about starting a new chapter in September: “I feel like UMD is the perfect fit for me.”

GREENVILLE, S.C.

By Ariel Gilreath

Braden Freeman, a senior at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, South Carolina, talks to his school counselor, Nicole Snow, about his plans after graduation. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report

Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina. The sisters filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so that Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid to afford it.

Their mom, Nichole Henderson, said the stress of trying to fill out both their FAFSA forms at once led her to take her daughters and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a local college in April. Even with help from someone there, she found the forms confusing — Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she said, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.

“I don’t think there was a lot of help surrounding the whole FAFSA process,” Nichole said. “As a parent, it’s stressful. Especially when you have two.”

Chylicia is thinking about pursuing a degree in nursing or social work, and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. But the school emailed her saying they needed more information on her financial aid application; it wasn’t clear if the issue stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else, she said.

Then, on May 8, she got an email from South Carolina Tuition Grants, a program that provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork issue at Greenville Technical College, though, and so isn’t sure yet whether she’ll be able to enroll there.

And if Chylicia’s application is missing information, the family worries that Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting out at a community college, but Chy’Kyla also applied to a handful of schools in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. By May 8, she said, she hadn’t received word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.

“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother said.

Heather Williams, a school counselor at Riverside High School in Greenville, said students told her they struggled simply to complete and correct errors in their forms.

“Some of the errors they’ve had were just missing a signature,” Williams said. “Trying to circumvent that and fix it was hard for students because you can make corrections, but it was hard to get back in and [do it]. It was a lot of, ‘If I click this, then what?’ And being aware there’s an error, but not sure how to fix it.”

The FAFSA process has always been complicated, but the truncated timeline this year made it significantly more stressful, said Nicole Snow, a school counselor at J.L. Mann High School, also in Greenville County. Normally, her students and their families start filling out their FAFSA forms in the fall, but this year, they couldn’t access the form until January.

“By January and February, we’ve almost kind of lost those seniors that have already done their [college] applications,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s pull you back three months later and open up FAFSA.’”

Braden Freeman, a graduating senior at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, South Carolina, was still waiting to hear back from some colleges about financial aid in May of 2024. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report

The delay created some challenging decisions for students like Braden Freeman. Freeman, who is the student body president at J.L. Mann, submitted his financial aid application in January, right after it opened up. In March, he was told he got a full scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, but by May 1, he still hadn’t heard back from his other top choices — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia — on how much need-based and merit-based aid he would get. Those colleges had pushed back their decision deadlines because of FAFSA delays.

Instead of waiting to hear back from UNC and UVA, Freeman decided to put a deposit down at Southern Methodist, whose deadline was May 1. The full scholarship was a big factor in his decision. “With the rising cost of tuition, I just can’t take on that much alone,” he said.

Both UNC and UVA eventually sent Freeman his financial aid packages a week before their deadline to enroll, which was May 15. Freeman said he still planned to attend Southern Methodist.

“I’m fortunate enough to not be incredibly dependent on need-based aid,” Freeman said. “For kids that are waiting on that and don’t know, I can imagine that would be way worse.”

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

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]]> 101140 COLUMN: Disrupted graduations further tarnish higher education’s image https://hechingerreport.org/column-disrupted-graduations-further-tarnish-higher-educations-image/ Wed, 08 May 2024 15:30:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=100739

After weeks of pro-Palestinian protests and campus unrest, another powerful symbol of higher education faces disruption: commencement ceremonies, with all their iconic images of tassels turned around and caps tossed jubilantly into the air. Now, parents and guests from all over the world are weighing whether to travel in to attend watered-down, smaller commencement ceremonies […]

The post COLUMN: Disrupted graduations further tarnish higher education’s image appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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After weeks of pro-Palestinian protests and campus unrest, another powerful symbol of higher education faces disruption: commencement ceremonies, with all their iconic images of tassels turned around and caps tossed jubilantly into the air.

Now, parents and guests from all over the world are weighing whether to travel in to attend watered-down, smaller commencement ceremonies on campuses with armed guards, student demonstrators, potential graduation interruptions and arrests during protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

Related: Sign up for The Hechinger Report’s newsletters!

Columbia University canceled its main ceremony, some colleges have moved commencement away from campus and students at others are refusing to remove tent cities and protesting outside the homes of college presidents. Police are clearing a student tent encampment at the University of Chicago, while students at MIT are being arrested and refuse to budge from theirs, as are students from Rhode Island School of Design.

Emory College last week was described as “a war zone” by one professor, with 26 faculty and students arrested, and moved its commencement ceremonies off-campus. Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted graduations at the University of Michigan and college presidents elsewhere are being booed, while some students are walking out in the middle of ceremonies.

“These are awful images for higher education,” former Vassar president Catharine Bond Hill told me. “It’s distressing and will push us in the wrong direction. We could end up with some bad federal policies and reduced support, right when we need it most.”

Graduation ceremonies, while not always entirely peaceful, have long been the symbolic, feel-good ending many students and parents believed was worth waiting for, and, for the colleges, an important moment for relationship-building with parents and recent graduates who might one day be donors.

The disruptions come amid souring public sentiment over the value of a college degree, with many colleges shutting their doors due to declining enrollment and a public concerned over years of high tuition costs and student debt loads.

Still, not all graduations have been canceled or disrupted by arrests, raids and protests from students and faculty who support Palestinians in Gaza and are demanding divestment from Israel. Some colleges have held or are planning smaller, student-led ceremonies or are moving their graduation to venues far from campus.

At many others, students will be expressing their views peacefully, as they always have – with ribbons on their caps, in what they are wearing beneath or over their robes and in banners they’ll be hoisting, noted Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council of Education.

Related: Across the country, student journalists are covering protests of their own classmates and reaction by their own administrators

Mitchell nonetheless sees this moment as yet another warning sign to higher education, “a dark time” that calls for clear protocols – starting with college orientation – around free speech issues.  College presidents and administrators should also be constantly calling out the value of a college education, he said, saying “this is how we are preparing people for the world of work and how we help students graduate with low or no debt.”

The war and resulting protests are creating a climate on many campuses where no one can win: Presidents who have called in police to quell protests may not survive, while those trying to uphold free speech are also under fire for not protecting students and faculty from antisemitism, Mitchell noted.

Since April 18, more than 2,600 people have been arrested at more than 50 college campuses, The Associated Press reported. Some colleges are finding ways to come to agreement with students and maintain peace, but it’s becoming increasingly fraught:  Even the University of Chicago, with its legacy of protecting free speech, sent university police officers in riot gear to block access to the school’s quad.

Graduation ceremonies scheduled for May 19 at Morehouse College, the 157-year-old historically Black college in Atlanta, are also creating fear, as President Joe Biden is the keynote speaker. Many students and faculty members complained that the president should not get an honorary degree because of his steadfast support for Israel. Some are planning a protest, others have said they will not sit on stage and one activist group is calling for the invitation to be rescinded.

And uncertainty remains about what will happen on campuses that have been particularly volatile, including USC in California, where the school first canceled the valedictorian’s speech, later called police to campus after students set up a tent city (93 people were arrested), and then canceled the main stage graduation ceremony altogether.

The school will now host a major event for graduates instead at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

At UCLA, where police tore down a pro-Palestinian encampment, the college created a new safety position as it reopened campus and arrested dozens. Commencement, so far, is still scheduled for mid-June, amidst continued unrest and calls for the chancellor’s resignation.

Many Columbia students have reacted angrily to the cancelation of the main ceremony, but the decision remains firm. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College, Columbia University.)

Nationally, some groups of students are likely to be more hurt than others by the current unrest, including those who missed their own high school graduations and began their freshman year online during the pandemic.

Others, as Hill points out, are among the many first-generation students who have never experienced a graduation ceremony. Hill, now the managing director of the Ithaka S + R research and consulting service, recalls the excitement and goodwill that flourished at the many commencements she presided over during her tenure at Vassar, which paid special attention to such students, along with the proud family members lined up taking photographs.

“It was just so exciting and validating and hopeful for the future,” Hill said.

As the protests and unrest continue, that symbolic moment suddenly holds far less promise.

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

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]]> 100739 Asesores universitarios prometen “abrir la puerta” a estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos a pesar del fallo de acción afirmativa https://hechingerreport.org/asesores-universitarios-prometen-abrir-la-puerta-a-estudiantes-negros-e-hispanos-a-pesar-del-fallo-de-accion-afirmativa/ Mon, 06 May 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=100349

WILMINGTON, Del. — Entrando a un centro comunitario repleto de estudiantes de último año de secundaria, Atnre Alleyne tiene algunos consejos para la audiencia, miembros de la primera clase de solicitantes universitarios que serán influenciados por el fallo de la Corte Suprema del pasado junio que derribo las admisiones con conciencia racial. “Hay que obtener […]

The post Asesores universitarios prometen “abrir la puerta” a estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos a pesar del fallo de acción afirmativa appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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WILMINGTON, Del. — Entrando a un centro comunitario repleto de estudiantes de último año de secundaria, Atnre Alleyne tiene algunos consejos para la audiencia, miembros de la primera clase de solicitantes universitarios que serán influenciados por el fallo de la Corte Suprema del pasado junio que derribo las admisiones con conciencia racial.

“Hay que obtener buenas calificaciones, hay que encontrar una manera de hacer lo académico, pero también convertirse en líderes”, dijo Alleyne, el enérgico cofundador y director ejecutivo de TeenSHARP, una organización sin fines de lucro que prepara a estudiantes de entornos subrepresentados para la educación superior. “¡En sus escuelas, hagan algo! Luchen por la justicia social”.

A varios de los participantes de TeenSHARP reunidos ahí, que son predominantemente negros o hispanos, les preocupa que sus posibilidades de ingresar a escuelas de primer nivel hayan disminuido con la decisión del tribunal. Se preguntan qué decir en sus ensayos de admisión y qué tan cómodos se sentirán en campus que podrían volverse cada vez menos diversos.

Tariah Hyland con  TeenSHARP Alphina Kamara y William Garcia reunidos con los cofundadora  de  TeenSHARP Atnre Alleyne en Wilmington Delaware. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

En esta noche de otoño, Alleyne y su equipo responden preguntas de las docenas de estudiantes a quienes asesoran, sobre todo, desde plazos de aplicación temprana hasta qué escuelas tienen más probabilidades de otorgar becas y ayuda generosa financiera. El cambio en el panorama de admisiones solo ha aumentado la determinación del equipo de desarrollar una nueva generación de líderes, estudiantes que lucharán por que sus voces estén representadas en los campus y más adelante en el lugar de trabajo.

“Quiero que abran las puertas de estos lugares de una patada, para que regresen y abran más puertas”, dijo Alleyne.

Este objetivo lo comparten los ex alumnos del programa que Alleyne y su esposa, Tatiana Poladko, iniciaron en el sótano de una iglesia hace 14 años. Varios están presentes esta noche contando sus propias travesías educativas, que culminaron con becas completas para escuelas como la Universidad de Chicago y la Universidad Wesleyan, donde los costos anuales estimados se acercan a los $90,000.

Antes de la decisión de la Corte Suprema en el caso Students for Fair Admissions contrz Harvard, las universidades altamente selectivas servían como un faro de esperanza y movilidad económica para estudiantes como los que aconseja TeenSHARP. Muchos son los primeros en sus familias en asistir a la universidad y carecen de conexiones heredadas o de acceso a consejeros privados que durante mucho tiempo han dado un impulso a los estudiantes más ricos.

But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.

Incluso antes del fallo del tribunal superior, los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos estaban escasamente representados en estas instituciones, mientas que la brecha de títulos universitarios entre estadounidenses negros y blancos sigue empeoriando. Para algunos estudiantes, la decisión judicial envía el mensaje de que no pertenecen, y que, si ingresan, les preocupa resaltar aún más.

“Me sentí realmente molesto por eso”, dijo Jamel Powell, un estudiante de secundaria de Belle Mead, Nueva Jersey, que participa en TeenSHARP, sobre el fallo de acción afirmativa. “Este sistema ha ayudado a muchas minorías subrepresentadas a ingresar a estas escuelas de la Ivy League y sobresalir”.

Si bien el impacto total de la decisión sobre la demografía de los estudiantes no es claro, los representantes de 33 universidades escribieron en un informe amicus presentado en el caso que la proporción de estudiantes afroamericanos en sus campus caería de aproximadamente 7.1 por ciento a 2.1 por ciento, si se prohíben acciones afirmativas.

La incertidumbre sobre lo que significa la decisión está pasando factura a los estudiantes y consejeros escolares a nivel nacional, dijo Mandy Savitz-Romer, profesora titular de la Graduate School of Education de Harvard. Mientras las universidades analizan cómo pueden cumplir sus compromisos con la diversidad y al mismo tiempo cumplir con la ley, los estudiantes se preguntan si mencionar su raza en los ensayos de aplicación los ayudará o los perjudicará.

TeenSHARP alumnos del program Taria Hyland and Alphina Kamara se reencuentran  en Wilmington, Delaware. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

En la decisión mayoritaria, el presidente del Tribunal Supremo, John Roberts, escribió que la raza sólo podía invocarse dentro del contexto de la historia de vida del solicitante, haciendo de los ensayos la única oportunidad para que los estudiantes discutieran su raza y origen étnico. Pero desde entonces, Edward Blum, el activista conservador que ayudó a llevar el caso ante el tribunal, ha amenazado con más demandas, prometiendo cuestionar cualquier tema de ensayo que no sea “más que un subterfugio clandestino para divulgar la raza de un estudiante”.

El Departamento de Educación ha publicado directrices que dicen que, si bien las escuelas no pueden poner el dedo en la escala de los estudiantes en función de su raza, “siguen siendo libres” de considerar las características vinculadas a las experiencias de vida de los estudiantes individuales, incluida la raza. La National Association of College Admission Counseling emitió una guía similar, mientras que la Common App introdujo nuevos temas de ensayo que incluyen uno sobre la “identidad” y los “antecedentes” de los estudiantes.

Debido a la incertidumbre, los consejeros escolares necesitan capacitación específica en la elaboración de ensayos y en cómo hablar o no sobre la raza, dijo Savitz-Romer durante un webinar en Harvard, el mes pasado, sobre admisiones universitarias después de la acción afirmativa. “Necesitamos consejeros y maestros para que los estudiantes comprendan que la universidad todavía es para ellos”, dijo.

Es una tarea difícil: en promedio, los consejeros de las escuelas públicas atienden a más de 400 estudiantes cada uno, lo que ofrece poco tiempo para asesoramiento personalizado.

Esa realidad es la razón por la que grupos de asesoramiento sin fines de lucro como TeenSHARP trabajan junto a los estudiantes, guiándolos a través de un sistema de admisión cada vez más confuso. El equipo de tres asesores de TeenSHARP trabaja intensamente con aproximadamente 140 estudiantes a la vez, incluidos 50 estudiantes de último año que a menudo se postulan hasta a 20 universidades para maximizar sus posibilidades.

Esa es una fracción de los que necesitan ayuda, otra razón por la que los líderes del grupo dependen de su red de más de 500 “Sharpies”, como se conoce a los alumnos.

Emily Rodríguez, estudiante de último año de TeenSHARP que asiste a la Escuela de Ciencias Conrad en Wilmington, decidió abordar la raza de frente en sus ensayos universitarios: escribió sobre su determinación de no “hacer el papel de la pobre y sumisa mexicana”.

Hamza Parker, estudiante de último año de la escuela secundaria Smyrna de Delaware, quien se mudó a Estados Unidos desde Arabia Saudita cuando cursaba sexto grado, dijo que al principio estaba en contra de escribir sobre su identidad. “Siento que te pone en una posición en la que tienes que tener una historia triste para tu ensayo en lugar de hablar de algo bueno que sucedió en tu vida”, les dijo a Alleyne y Poladko durante una sesión de asesoramiento por Zoom.

Pero en la sesión, Alleyne y Poladko la alentaron a inspirarse en su propia historia, una de la que conocen algo gracias a su trabajo con su hermana mayor, Hasana, ahora estudiante de tercer año en Pomona College. La familia tuvo una mudanza difícil desde Arabia Saudita a la ciudad de Nueva York y más tarde a Delaware, donde Hamza se unió a la Black Student Coalition de Delaware.

Hamza decidió revisar su ensayo centrado en la lingüística para describir cómo experimentó el racismo y luego abrazó su herencia musulmana.

“Soy mi yo social normal y mi fe y vestimenta musulmana son ampliamente conocidas y respetadas en mi escuela”, escribió. “Incluso mi escuela tiene ahora un espacio dedicado a la oración durante el Ramadán”.

Alleyne y Poladko normalmente trabajan con estudiantes que están comenzando su primer año de escuela secundaria, por lo que la pareja puede guiar todo el proceso de solicitud de ingreso a la universidad, como lo hacen algunos costosos asesores privados. Los servicios de TeenSHARP son gratuitos y como organización sin fines de lucro, depende del apoyo de una variedad de donantes.

Ni Poladko ni Alleyne asistieron a escuelas de élite. Se conocieron como estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Rutgers y se comprometieron a iniciar TeenSHARP después de ayudar a la sobrina de Alleyne, estudiante de una gran escuela secundaria pública de la ciudad de Nueva York, a postularse para universidades.

Asombrados por lo complicadas e inaccesibles que podían ser las admisiones universitarias, los dos decidieron convertirlo en el trabajo de su vida, redactando subvenciones y obteniendo donaciones de bancos y fundaciones locales para poder atender a más estudiantes.

Su trabajo ahora es en gran medida remoto: durante la pandemia, la pareja se mudó de Wilmington a la Ucrania natal de Poladko para estar más cerca de su familia, lo que los llevó a una dramática fuga a Polonia con sus tres hijos pequeños cuando estalló la guerra. Poladko se está tomando un año sabático en TeenSHARP este año, aunque todavía ayuda a algunos estudiantes a través de Zoom. Alleyne vuela de Varsovia a Wilmington para reunirse con los estudiantes en persona, a menudo en el centro comunitario del lugar que alguna vez albergó sus oficinas.

También dependen de las relaciones que han construido a lo largo de los años con presidentes de universidades y funcionarios de admisiones en escuelas como Boston College, Pomona College y Wesleyan, Carleton y Macalester Colleges en Minnesota y muchas otras universidades las cuales han dado la bienvenida a los solicitantes de TeenSHARP.

“Necesitamos más ‘Sharpies’ en nuestro campus”, dijo Suzanne Rivera, presidenta de Macalester College, en Minnesota, y miembro del consejo asesor de TeenSHARP. “Sus preguntas son siempre muy inteligentes y reveladoras”.

Los Sharpies también tienden a convertirse en líderes del campus, en parte porque TeenSHARP requiere que sus estudiantes desarrollen habilidades de liderazgo. Eso es algo que William García, quien se graduó de la Universidad de Chicago la primavera pasada, les dijo a los estudiantes de último año en Wilmington.

Al principio, se sintió aislado en Chicago, reticente a hablar de sus experiencias como hispano. “Yo estaba en tu lugar hace cinco años”, dijo García. Más tarde se dio cuenta de que su experiencia podía ser una ventaja y la aprovechó para convertir un ingrediente de uno de los licores más populares de México en una iniciativa comercial para su propia empresa de bebidas de agave.

“Abraza tu historia; cuenta tu historia”, dijo García. “Contaba mi historia y la gente se interesaba mucho y empezaba a ayudarme”.

Alphina Kamara, graduada de Wesleyan University en 2022, instó a los estudiantes de último año a apuntar alto y mirar más allá de las escuelas estatales y los colegios comunitarios locales que tienen tasas de graduación más bajas y menos recursos, lugares donde podría haber terminado si no fueran para TeenSHARP.

“Nunca hubiera sabido que existían escuelas como Wesleyan y que yo, como mujer negra de primera generación, tenía un lugar en ellas”, dijo Kamara, hija de padres inmigrantes de Sierra Leona.

Aun así, siempre habrá algunos estudiantes de TeenSHARP que no van a querer estar en campus con un historial terrible en materia de diversidad, incluso antes de la decisión del tribunal.

Tariah Hyland, quien en la escuela secundaria cofundó la Black Student Coalition de Delaware, sabía que se sentiría más cómoda en uno de los más de 100 colegios y universidades históricamente negros (o HBCU, por sus siglas en inglés) del país. Le dijo a la audiencia de Delaware que está prosperando en su tercer año en la Universidad Howard, donde estudia ciencias políticas.

Powell, estudiante de tercer año de Nueva Jersey, está mirando tanto a Howard como al Morehouse College de Atlanta y dijo que probablemente sólo postulará a las HBCU.

“Cuando estaba en la escuela pública, era el único niño negro en mis clases”, dijo Powell, que ahora asiste a Acelus Academy, una escuela en línea. “Siempre fui una minoría, por lo que, al ir a una HBCU, probablemente vería más personas que se parecen a mí”.

Esto no sorprende a Chelsea Holley, directora de admisiones del Spelman College en Atlanta, quien dijo que espera “más interés por parte de los estudiantes negros y minoritarios, ahora que la Corte Suprema ha tomado lo que creo que es una decisión política regresiva”.

HBCU como Spelman, entre cuyos graduados se encuentran la fundadora del Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, y la autora Alice Walker, ya están viendo más solicitudes y se están volviendo aún más competitivas.

“Si los estudiantes afroamericanos de último año de secundaria ya no se sienten bienvenidos en campus predominantemente blancos, es menos probable que presenten su solicitud e incluso menos probable que se inscriban, aun cuando se les ofrece la admisión”, dijo Holley y agregó que los estudiantes pueden estar preocupados por más ataques a la diversidad y la inclusión en los campus universitarios y creen que se sentirán más cómodos en una HBCU.

Aun así, no todos predicen que el fallo judicial precipitará una caída permanente de estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos en universidades selectivas predominantemente blancas. Richard Kahlenberg, autor y académico de la Universidad de Georgetown, predice que la caída será temporal y que la prohibición de la acción afirmativa eventualmente conducirá a un panorama más justo para los estudiantes de bajos ingresos de todas las razas.

Kahlenberg, quien sirvió como testigo experto para Students for Fair Admissions, dijo que quiere ver el fin de las preferencias heredadas, así como del reclutamiento atlético, para que las universidades puedan dar “un impulso significativo” a los “estudiantes desfavorecidos de todas las razas”, agregando que es posible “obtener diversidad racial sin preferencias raciales”. Los desafíos a las admisiones heredadas están aumentando: el Departamento de Educación ha abierto una investigación sobre el uso de esta práctica por parte de Harvard y un reciente proyecto de ley bipartidista exige que las universidades pongan fin a esta práctica.

A medida que se acerca la mitad de diciembre, Alleyne y Poladko esperan ansiosamente ver cómo le irá al puñado de estudiantes de TeenSHARP que solicitaron una decisión anticipada.

“Los funcionarios de admisiones nos aseguran que su compromiso con la diversidad no ha cambiado”, dijo Poladko. “Pero tendremos que ver. Hemos explicado a las familias y a los estudiantes que este año es un año de aprendizaje”.

Hasta entonces, tanto Poladko como Alleyne seguirán presionando a los estudiantes para que ayuden a quienes vengan después de ellos.

“Nuestro objetivo es descubrir el juego de las admisiones y darles una ventaja a nuestros estudiantes”, dijo Alleyne. “Y nuestro trabajo es enseñarles cómo jugar”.

Esta historia sobre TeenSHARP es la primera en una serie de artículos producidos por by The Hechinger Report conjunto con Soledad O’Brien Productions, sobre el impacto de la decisión de la Corte Suprema que prohíbe la acción afirmativa.

The post Asesores universitarios prometen “abrir la puerta” a estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos a pesar del fallo de acción afirmativa appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

]]> 100349 COLUMN: The FAFSA fiasco could roll back years of progress. It must be fixed immediately https://hechingerreport.org/column-the-fafsa-fiasco-could-roll-back-years-of-progress-it-must-be-fixed-immediately/ https://hechingerreport.org/column-the-fafsa-fiasco-could-roll-back-years-of-progress-it-must-be-fixed-immediately/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2024 17:45:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=99353

The cursing came loud and fast from a nearby room, followed by a slamming sound. This was a few years back, and I immediately suspected the culprit: the dreaded FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, with all its glitches and complexities.  My husband was losing his cool while attempting to fill it out […]

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The cursing came loud and fast from a nearby room, followed by a slamming sound. This was a few years back, and I immediately suspected the culprit: the dreaded FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, with all its glitches and complexities. 

My husband was losing his cool while attempting to fill it out for the second time in two years. Across America right now, so are millions of parents, students and counselors, frustrated by a failed promise to finally streamline this unwieldy gatekeeper to college dreams.

It’s a terrible time for anyone who counted on that U.S. Department of Education promise, and many are calling for an urgent push for help, including through legislation  and a marshalling of resources from institutions like libraries and groups such as  AmeriCorps.

“I don’t think we’ve seen a full court press about FASFA completion yet,” said Bill DeBaun, a senior director at the National College Attainment Network. “This is an emergency. We need all-hands on deck: governors, state departments, agencies, influencers at the White House. We are kind of at the point where we need to stop nibbling and take a big bite.”

Anyone who has dealt with the FAFSA knows how needlessly complicated and unreliable it can be: In the midst of back-to-back college application season for my two kids, the site kept kicking us out, then losing the previous information we’d painstakingly provided. 

Don’t worry, parents were told over and over, it will get easier, it’s being fixed. A bipartisan law passed in 2020 initiated a complete overhaul of the FAFSA. But after a problematic soft launch on Dec. 30, glitches and delays are inflicting pain on undocumented students, first-generation college goers and others who can’t decide how and if attending college will be possible without offers and aid packages.

The so-called shorter, simpler form so far has been anything but, although DeBaun said many families have submitted it swiftly without problems. Still, as of March 8, there have been roughly 33 percent fewer submissions by high school seniors than last year, NCAN data show.

The finger-pointing and blaming right now is understandable, but not helpful: It threatens years of efforts to get more Americans to and through college at a time when higher education faces both enrollment declines and a crisis of public confidence, in part due to spiraling prices.

This year’s FAFSA rollout is frustrating sudents, parents and counselors and prompting calls for immediate help. Credit: Mariam Zuhaib/ Associated Press

Fewer than 1 in 3 adults now say a degree is worth the cost, a survey by the Strada Education Network found, and many fear FASFA snafus could lead to more disillusionment about college.

“FAFSA is such a massive hurdle, and if they [students and parents] can’t get this first step done, they may say it’s too complicated, maybe college isn’t for me,” said Scott Del Rossi, vice president of college and career success at College Possible, which helps low-income students and those from underrepresented backgrounds go to and through college.

Del Rossi wonders why the form wasn’t user-tested before being rolled out, and is among those calling for urgent solutions, beyond band-aid fixes that are literally keeping Department of Education staffers up all night.  

Related: Simpler FAFSA complicates college plans for students and families

“As much staff as government has, it’s not enough for students right now,” said Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the national advocacy group Complete College America. She wants colleges to do more to directly help applicants still struggling to fill out the forms.

“They should be sharing webinars and workshops and talking about what’s happening and how [students] can begin in spite of the problems,” Watson Spiva said. “If we don’t have those conversations, parents will say this [college] isn’t worth it, and they will look for other opportunities and options.”

Even before the FAFSA fiasco, that’s been happening. In 2021, the proportion of high school graduates going directly to college fell to 62 percent from a high of 70 percent in 2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. At the same time, costs have more than doubled in the last 40 years, even when adjusted for inflation.

The task ahead is daunting: The Department of Education only started sending batches of student records this week to colleges that will determine aid offers, and about 200 have already extended the traditional May 1st deadline for students to accept offers.

No wonder parents and students are “stressing out and overwhelmed,” said Deborah Yanez, parent programs manager at TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.

“This is a special time for them; they have dreamed about sending their kids off to college, but now they are being held in this place of limbo, not knowing what the numbers are,” Yanez told me.

More colleges should extend deadlines for student decisions, Del Rossi said. Counselors that College Possible works with usually say it take at least three interactions, or sessions, with parents to conquer the FAFSA, but many are now reporting the recent form requires more than six – and many are still unsuccessful, Del Rossi said.

“We have to continue to encourage them not to give up and not to lose hope,” Del Rossi said. “We tell them it is not their fault, these are just glitches, but it’s a little heartbreaking.”

But turning to college counselors for help is not always a viable option for public school students, where public school counselors handle an average caseload of 430 students, well above the 1:250 ratio the American School Counselor Association suggests.

And this admissions year has the added complication of being the first since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision barring colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, along with being a time of rapidly changing rules around whether standardized test scores is required for admission.

Related: Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action?

That’s why the message about the importance of a college education must continue, and students must be told not to give up. Still, if they can’t fill out the form and the government can’t turn the forms over to schools in time, it’s game over.

This story about the FASFA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.

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]]> https://hechingerreport.org/column-the-fafsa-fiasco-could-roll-back-years-of-progress-it-must-be-fixed-immediately/feed/ 2 99353 Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action? https://hechingerreport.org/will-the-rodriguez-familys-college-dreams-survive-the-end-of-affirmative-action/ Thu, 21 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=97742

WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.” Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11. Another“moment in time” […]

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WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”

Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.

Another“moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.

The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.

The Rodriguez family at their home in Wilmington, Delaware, left to right: Mom Margarita, middle daughter Emily, youngest Brianna, father Rafael, with their college adviser, Atnre Alleyne. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.

Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.

Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.

Affirmative Action ends

While affirmative action made strides in increasing diversity on college campuses, it fell far short of meeting its intended goals. And now that it’s been struck down, CBS Reports teamed up with independent journalist Soledad O’Brien and The Hechinger Report to examine the fog of uncertainty for students and administrators who say the decision threatens to unravel decades of progress.

Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.

The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.

“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne

But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.

About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.

For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.

College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.

She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.

Related: College advisors vow to kick the door open for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling

Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.

“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”

The entire Rodriguez family dropped Ashley Rodriguez off for her freshman year at Emory University’s Oxford College this fall. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez

Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.

Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.

This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.

That makes her angry.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”

Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University

Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.

“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”

That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.

“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”

Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.

Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.

Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.

Ashley Rodriguez fields calls, Facetime requests and texts from her family while settling in as a freshman at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez

Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”

Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.

Related: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity

The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.

Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.

Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”

Margarita Rodriguez, mother

Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.

Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.

Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide

“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”

HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.

Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.

Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily Rodriguez, high school senior

“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.

At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.

Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.

Related: A poster child for protesting affirmative action now says he never meant for it to be abolished

For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.

For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”

Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.

Rafael Rodriguez, affectionately known as “Papa Bear,” keeps a close eye on the jam-packed family calendar. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Rafael said as they huddled together in front of Emily’s laptop. Emily wore a white t-shirt with “Cornell” emblazoned in bold red letters on the front, for good luck. She wavered, then clicked.

“Congratulations, you have been admitted to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: College major: Animal Science at Cornell University for the fall of 2024. Welcome to the Cornell community!” said the email on her screen, adorned with red confetti.Annual estimated costs for next year would be $92,682 – but Cornell pledged to meet all of it.

Emily screamed, and the room erupted in cheers. Every member of the family began sobbing. Cinnamon, the family’s three-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, barked wildly.

Emily jumped up and down. “Ivy League!” she shouted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I did it.”

Brianna, a sixth grader who will work with TeenSHARP once she’s in high school, hugged both of her sisters.

It will be her turn next.

Additional reporting was contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz.

This story about the end of affirmative action is the second in a series of articles accompanying a documentary produced by The Hechinger Report in partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action. Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

]]> 97742 College advisers vow to ‘kick the door open’ for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling  https://hechingerreport.org/college-advisers-vow-to-kick-the-door-open-for-black-and-hispanic-students-despite-affirmative-action-ruling/ Tue, 05 Dec 2023 06:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=97276

WILMINGTON, Del. — Striding into a packed community center filled with high school seniors, Atnre Alleyne has a few words of advice for the crowd, members of the first class of college applicants to be shaped by June’s Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions. “You have to get good grades, you have to find […]

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WILMINGTON, Del. — Striding into a packed community center filled with high school seniors, Atnre Alleyne has a few words of advice for the crowd, members of the first class of college applicants to be shaped by June’s Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions.

“You have to get good grades, you have to find a way to do the academics, but also become leaders,” said Alleyne, the energetic co-founder and CEO of TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education. “In your schools, do something! Fight for social justice.”

Many of the TeenSHARP participants gathered here, who are predominantly Black or Hispanic, worry that their chances of getting into top-tier schools have diminished with the court’s decision. They wonder what to say in their admissions essays and how comfortable they’ll feel on campuses that could become increasingly less diverse.

Tariah Hyland joins fellow TeenSHARP alums Alphina Kamara and William Garcia to meet with and advise TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne in Wilmington Delaware. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

On this autumn night, Alleyne and his team are fielding questions from the dozens of students they advise, on everything from early decision deadlines to which schools are most likely to give generous financial aid and scholarships. The changed admissions landscape has only increased the team’s determination to develop a new generation of leaders, students who will fight to have their voices represented on campuses and later on in the workplace.

“I want them to kick the door open to these places, so they will go back and open more doors,” Alleyne said.

That goal is shared by successful alumni of the program Alleyne and his wife, Tatiana Poladko, started in a church basement 14 years ago. Several are on hand tonight recounting their own educational journeys, culminating in full scholarships to schools such as the University of Chicago and Wesleyan University, where annual estimated costs approach $90,000.

Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, highly selective colleges served as a beacon of hope and economic mobility for students like those TeenSHARP advise. Many are first in their families to attend college and lack legacy connections or access to the private counselors who’ve long given a boost to wealthier students.

Related: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible records on diversity

But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.

“I felt really upset about it,” Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, said about the affirmative action ruling. “This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”

While the full impact of the ruling on student demographics remains unknown, representatives of 33 colleges wrote in an amicus brief filed in the case that the share of Black students on their campuses would drop from roughly 7.1 percent to 2.1 percent if affirmative action were banned.

The uncertainty of what the decision means is taking a toll on students and school counselors nationally, said Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. As colleges sort through how they can meet commitments to diversity while complying with the law, students wonder if mentioning race in their essays will help or hurt them.

TeenSHARP alums Taria Hyland and Alphina Kamara reconnect in Wilmington, Delaware, to share advice on navigating college admissions and financial aid. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

In his majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, making essays the one opportunity for students to discuss their race and ethnicity. But since then, Edward Blum, the conservative activist who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits, promising to challenge any essay topic that is “nothing more than a back-channel subterfuge for divulging a student’s race.”

The Department of Education has published guidelines saying that while schools cannot put a thumb on the scale for students based on their race, they “remain free” to consider characteristics tied to individual students’ life experiences, including race. The National Association of College Admission Counseling issued similar guidance, while the Common App introduced new essay prompts that include one about students’ “identity” and “background.”

Because of the uncertainty,school counselors need specific training on crafting essays and how or whether to talk about race, Savitz-Romer said during a Harvard webinar last month on college admissions after affirmative action. “We need counselors and teachers to make students understand that college is still for them,” she said.

It’s a tall order: On average, public school counselors serve more than 400 students each, which offers little time for one-on-one advising.

Related: Why aren’t more school counselors trained in helping students apply to college?

That reality is why nonprofit advising groups like TeenSHARP toil alongside students, guiding them through an increasingly confounding admissions system. TeenSHARP’s team of three advisers works intensively with roughly 140 students at a time, including 50 seniors who often apply to as many as 20 colleges to maximize their chances.

That’s a fraction of those who need help, another reason why the group’s leaders rely on their network of more than 500 “Sharpies,” as alums are known.

Emily Rodriguez, a TeenSHARP senior who attends Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington, decided to address race head on in her college essays: She wrote about her determination that she would not “play the role of the poor submissive Mexican woman.”

“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed. But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”

Tatiana Poladko, co-founder, TeenSHARP

Hamza Parker, a senior at Delaware’s Smyrna High School who moved to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia as a sixth grader, said he was against writing about his identity at first. “I feel like it puts you in a position where you have to have a sob story for your essay instead of talking about something good, like, that happened in your life,” he told Alleyne and Poladko during a counseling session over Zoom.

But in the session Alleyne and Poladko encouraged him to draw from his own story, one they know something about from working with his older sister Hasana, now a junior at Pomona College. The family had a difficult move from Saudi Arabia to New York City and later Delaware, where Hamza joined the Delaware Black Student Coalition.

Hamza decided to revise his essay from one focused on linguistics to describe experiencing racism and then embracing his Muslim heritage.

“I am my normal social self and my Muslim faith and garb are widely known and respected at my school,” he wrote. “My school even now has a dedicated space for prayer during Ramadan.”

Related: The newest benefit at top companies: Private college admissions counseling

Alleyne and Poladko typically work with students who are beginning their first year of high school, so the pair can guide the entire college application process, much as some pricey private counselors do — although TeenSHARP’s services are free; as a nonprofit it relies on an array of donors for support.

Neither Poladko nor Alleyne attended elite schools. They met as graduate students at Rutgers University and became committed to starting TeenSHARP after helping Alleyne’s niece apply to colleges from a large New York City public high school.

Astonished by how complicated and inaccessible college admissions could be, the two decided to make it their life’s work, writing grants and getting donations from local banks and foundations so they could serve more students.

“I felt really upset about it. This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”

Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, about the affirmative action ruling.

Their work is now largely remote: During the pandemic, the couple relocated from Wilmington to Poladko’s native Ukraine to be closer to her family, leading to a dramatic escape to Poland with their three young children when war broke out. Poladko is taking a sabbatical from TeenSHARP this year, although she still helps some students via Zoom. Alleyne flies from Warsaw to Wilmington to meet with students in person, often at the community center downtown that once housed their offices.

They also rely on relationships they’ve built over the years with college presidents and admissions officers at schools like Boston College, Pomona College and Wesleyan, along with both Carleton and Macalester Colleges in Minnesota, many of whom have welcomed TeenSHARP applicants.

“We need more ‘Sharpies’ on our campus,” said Suzanne Rivera, president of Macalester College, in Minnesota, and a member of TeenSHARP’s advisory board. “Their questions are always so smart and so insightful.”

Sharpies also tend to become campus leaders, in part because TeenSHARP requires that its students develop leadership skills. That’s something William Garcia, who graduated from the University of Chicago last spring, told seniors in Wilmington.

“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll even if they are offered admission.”

Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta

At first, he felt isolated in Chicago, reticent to talk about his experiences as a Hispanic man. “I was in your shoes five years ago,” Garcia said. He later realized his background could be an asset, and drew on it to turn an ingredient for one of Mexico’s most popular liquors into a business venture for his own agave beverage company.

“Embrace your story; tell your story,” Garcia said. “I would tell my story and people would be really interested and would start to help me.”

Alphina Kamara, a 2022 graduate of Wesleyan University, urged seniors to aim high and look beyond state schools and local community colleges that have lower graduation rates and fewer resources — campuses she might have ended up at it not for TeenSHARP.

“I would have never have known that schools like Wesleyan existed, and that I, as a first-generation Black woman, had a place in them,” said Kamara, the child of immigrant parents from Sierra Leone.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide

Still, there will always be some TeenSHARP students who don’t want to be on campuses that had terrible track records for diversity, even before the court’s decision.

Tariah Hyland, who in high school co-founded the Delaware Black Student Coalition, knew she’d be more comfortable at one of the country’s more than 100 historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. She told the Delaware audience that she’s thriving in her junior year at Howard University, where she is studying political science.

Powell, the New Jersey junior, is eyeing both Howard and Atlanta’s Morehouse College and said he’ll likely only apply to HBCUs.

“When I was in public school, I was the only Black boy in my classes,” said Powell, who now attends Acelus Academy, an online school. “I was always the minority, and so by going to an HBCU, I would likely see more people who look like me.” 

That’s no surprise to Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, who said she’s expecting “more interest from Black and Brown students, now that the Supreme Court has made what I believe to be a regressive political decision.”

HBCUs like Spelman — whose graduates include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman and author Alice Walker — are already seeing more applications and are becoming even more competitive.

“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll, even if they are offered admission,” Holley said, adding that students may be worried about further assaults on diversity and inclusion on college campuses and believe they will be more comfortable at an HBCU.

Still, not everyone predicts the court ruling will precipitate a permanent drop in Black and Hispanic students at predominantly white, selective colleges. Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University predicts the drop will be temporary, and that the affirmative action ban will eventually lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students of all races.

Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, said he wants to see an end to legacy preferences as well as athletic recruiting, so that colleges can give “a meaningful boost” to “disadvantaged students of all races” and “you can get racial diversity without racial preferences.” Challenges to legacy admissions are mounting: The Education Department has opened an investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice, and a recent bipartisan bill calls for colleges to end it.

As mid-December approaches, Alleyne and Poladko are anxiously waiting to see how the handful of TeenSHARP students who applied for early decision will fare.

“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed,” Poladko said. “But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”

Until that time, both Poladko and Alleyne will continue pushing students to help those who come after them.

“Our goal is to figure out the game of admissions and give our students an advantage,” Alleyne said. “And our job is to teach them how to play the game.”

This story about TeenSHARP is the first in a series of articles, produced by The Hechinger Report in partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action. Stay tuned for an upcoming documentary and part II. Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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]]> 97276 COLUMN: Conservatives are embracing new alternative school models. Will the public? https://hechingerreport.org/column-conservatives-are-embracing-new-alternative-school-models-will-the-public/ Fri, 06 Oct 2023 15:31:26 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=96418

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Lizette Valles is a former teacher and librarian who runs a Los Angeles school that she believes represents a promising alternative to U.S. public education. It has three fourth-grade students, including her son, and just one other teacher: her husband. There’s no building, so they share space in a warehouse with a […]

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Lizette Valles is a former teacher and librarian who runs a Los Angeles school that she believes represents a promising alternative to U.S. public education.

It has three fourth-grade students, including her son, and just one other teacher: her husband. There’s no building, so they share space in a warehouse with a race car garage and plant nursery – when students aren’t out hiking, fishing or cycling.

“We have ripped the doors off the classroom. We learn anywhere, anytime,” Valles told me, noting that she is looking for a new location so she can recruit more students for the so-called microschool. Interest is growing in these small, independently run  “learning pods,” which are often operated by parents and enroll an estimated 1.2 to 2.1 million U.S. students.

Valles was among the enthusiastic would-be innovators and entrepreneurs I met at least week’s Harvard Kennedy School conference, Emerging School Models: Moving From Alternative to Mainstream. The event often felt like a pep rally for options beyond traditional school districts, where enrollment fell in the pandemic and is expected to drop another five percent by 2031.

John Bailey, Daniel Buck and Joel Rose talk about AI in education at a Harvard Kennedy School conference. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

I came to learn more about some of these alternatives at a time when parents and politicians are increasingly paying attention to homeschooling and other public school substitutes, accompanied by a rise in new networks, foundations and companies like Prenda and funds like Vela that provide growing financial and logistical support.

These options include microschools like Valles’ Ellemercito Academy, homeschooling co-ops like Engaged Detroit, “classical” options such as Haven School (focused on nature) in Colorado and Bridges Virtual Academy in Wisconsin, among others that spoke about their work.

Some are nascent and small, and they don’t necessarily have much in common. It seemed a stretch to see them as becoming “mainstream” — especially because scant evidence exists of their effectiveness in serving students, or even of how many students they enroll. And most American children — close to 50 million — remain enrolled in traditional public schools.

Still, a growing number of states – more than a dozen this year – have either expanded or started voucher programs that steer taxpayer money to these new options, which can include private and religious schools. Late last month, North Carolina became the latest state to pass a universal voucher program. 

It’s not always clear, however, that this money goes directly to schools and parents: In Arizona, millions of dollars also went to businesses and non-school spending, a recent investigation found. The Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, last month published an interactive feature chronicling “voucher scams.”

And choice efforts are faltering in some parts of the country like Texas, due in large part to public support for local school systems, although Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has called a special session later this month where lawmakers are expected to focus on school choice.

There’s also been plenty of pushback: North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has declared “an emergency for public education” in the state because of diminishing funding for it, along with the legislative push for vouchers. During a virtual panel Thursday sponsored by Parents for Public Schools, Cooper insisted that “the majority of people of North Carolina and across this country still support our public schools,” while calling complaints over so-called culture wars and indoctrination of students “nonsense.”

“We have seen an erosion [of support] and a legislature that has not only underfunded our public schools but chosen to essentially choke the life out of them,” Cooper said. “We cannot give up on public education even though some government leaders have.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic but is it what parents want for the long run?

Speakers at last week’s conference, sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, offered no such dissenting views. They repeatedly urged the audience to “join the [school choice] movement,” one that Valles sees herself as part of, in her position as the California field coordinator for the National Microschooling Center, a support network launched with start-up funding from the Stand Together Trust.

An email sent to participants afterward called the conference “an engaging and motivating event for proponents of educational choice,” one reason why Michigan State University professor Joshua Cowen, who was not invited, dubbed it a “political operation disguised as an academic conference.”

“It’s not a movement,” he said. “It’s a coup, with the idea to overthrow existing institutional structures.”

I spoke to Cowen because he’s spent years researching choice options such as vouchers, and has concluded they do more harm than good and often lead to worse outcomes for vulnerable children. He sees the latest push as a way to create a product – then build up a demand for it.

“Instead of focusing on how to improve existing supply (public schools) what they’ve done is start from the premise that taking down public schools is the first, necessary condition,” Cowen told me. “Think about how this works with advertising in our daily lives: microschools, the solution you never knew you needed!”

Related: After decades of studying vouchers, I’m now firmly opposed to them

Vouchers have meanwhile run into snags: In Florida, they often don’t cover the full cost of private school and many parents have had trouble finding space in the schools their children need or want. Yet demand for the vouchers is such that Florida parents and schools are having trouble accessing them.

At Harvard, the state’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., chalked up any snags to “growing pains,” while bashing the state’s public school system as “an employment program” for teachers and other staff members.  When asked about evidence of school choice effectiveness, Diaz said he believes “the ultimate arbiter is the parent themselves.”

“To me, the answer is a system that is based on the needs of the students and families. If we do that, we’ll have a better society and a better structure.”

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice

Conference goers also heard from (and cheered) keynote speaker Republican Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who said he hoped a lawsuit over the planned opening of the nation’s first religious charter school in his state would ultimately land before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Stitt called an Oklahoma state board’s approval – one being challenged by parents, clergy and education activists – a “win-win for religious and education freedom,” and repeated a popular stock line adopted by right-leaning politicians: “No parent wants to hand their kids over to a one-sized fits all education.”

Other familiar phrases spoken throughout the conference included calls for freeing students from failing schools, funding students instead of systems, supporting parent and family rights and fighting so-called “woke indoctrination.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic but is it what parents want for the long run?

Much of what I heard dovetailed with conclusions in Cara Fitzpatrick’s exhaustively researched new book, “The Death of Public Schools:  How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America.” In it she notes that conservatives are aiming to both “radically redefine public education in America,” and “use public dollars to pay for just about any educational option a family might envision.”

Dissent over choice options comes at a time of much hand-wringing in both political parties over how to improve lagging test scores and the country’s overall education performance. During a conversation with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute this week, former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan lamented a lack of bipartisan support for education initiatives, while repeating his oft-proclaimed dismay for a “one-size fits all” approach.

Duncan, who served under President Obama, also acknowledged that many parents consistently say they like their children’s schools, a conclusion supported by recent polls.

“It’s not a movement. It’s a coup, with the idea to overthrow existing institutional structures.”

Joshua Cowen, Professor, Michigan State University

Beyond the underlying politics, conference speakers pushed for removing obstacles to expanding microschools, by finding physical spaces for the schools and getting around what they described as a frustrating maze of regulations that prevents them from serving more children.

Bernita Bradley spoke passionately about ways she’s helping parents via Engaged Detroit, which offers support and coaching for homeschooling parents. “Traditional education has not worked for our children,” Bradley said, calling it “punitive for Black students.”

Choice programs “have to be based on what parents want,” said speaker Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice. “To me, the answer is a system that is based on the needs of the students and families. If we do that, we’ll have a better society and a better structure.”

Valles, meanwhile, envisions a new building with room for 10 students who, in addition to learning math and reading skills, might spend a day hiking, fishing, landscape painting or simply lying on the ground listening to the sounds of nature.

“A lot of people want this for their children,” Valles told me. “Microschooling offers a different pathway. …The questions it asks have more to do with what brings your child joy, peace, excitement and creativity, rather than rigidity, regurgitation and standardization.”

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

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]]> 96418 COLUMN: Can we find the solution to middle school math woes in a virtual world? https://hechingerreport.org/column-can-we-find-the-solution-to-middle-school-math-woes-in-a-virtual-world/ Tue, 19 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=95929

NEW YORK — I strap on a virtual reality headset. A screen appears and dramatic music pounds into my ears. I’m told there has been a nasty avalanche and that it’s my job to restore power to the grid. The exercise is part of a new program that encourages learning middle school math through real […]

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NEW YORK — I strap on a virtual reality headset. A screen appears and dramatic music pounds into my ears. I’m told there has been a nasty avalanche and that it’s my job to restore power to the grid.

The exercise is part of a new program that encourages learning middle school math through real world problem-solving, now in use in 190 school districts across 36 states.

The concept caught my attention during a demonstration at HolonIQ’s ‘Back to School’ summit in New York City earlier this month. The lesson seemed a lot more relevant than copying a row of equations from a chalkboard, which I remember from my own more traditional (and boring) math education so many years ago.

I was also intrigued because of the urgency of making math and science more meaningful for middle schoolers – these are the students who lost the most ground in math during the pandemic. It’s a little too early to know if VR lessons like this one will improve lagging test scores, but Anurupa Ganguly, founder and CEO of Prisms, the company behind the platform, is convinced it will.

“This is a whole new way of experiencing math instruction,” Ganguly, a former math and physics teacher, told me, pointing to promising early studies from the non-partisan research group WestEd, along with feedback from teachers and students on Prisms, which is hosted on the Meta Quest platform.

Instead of memorizing equations, students develop structural reasoning skills from solving real-life problems (such as a damaged power grid or limited hospital-bed capacity in a pandemic) with guidance from teachers trained in the purpose of the lessons.

Related: Inside the middle school math crisis

I sat through other new simulations at the summit as well, including Dreamscape Learn, something I’d heard and read about from a colleague who took a trip through its virtual Alien Zoo) and YouTube Player for Education, which is creating virtual lessons, content and assessments.

It’s never surprising to see and hear enormous enthusiasm for technology solutions at conferences: There are always a host of new apps and products on display that come and go. Entrepreneurs and investors packed Holon’s conference, eager to hear more about the global research and analytics platform’s latest survey results and reports on latest trends and ed tech for teaching and learning.

Naturally, that included lots of sessions on artificial intelligence, which many believe will be a bright spot for ed tech investing.

Instead of memorizing equations, students develop structural reasoning skills from solving real-life problems (such as a damaged power grid or limited hospital-bed capacity in a pandemic) with guidance from teachers trained in the purpose of the lessons.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore growing skepticism about the power of digital tools. Sweden moved away from tablets and technology this month in a return to more traditional ways of education – a backlash to its digital-heavy push that many in the country are blaming for student decline in basic skills. 

Sweden is instead embracing printed textbooks, teacher expertise, handwriting practice and quiet time. In addition, the recent UNESCO report entitled “An Ed-Tech Tragedy” documented vast inequality from pandemic-related reliance on technology during remote online learning, and concluded that lower-tech alternatives such as the distribution of schoolwork packets or delivering lessons via radio and televisionmight have been more equitable.

“The bright spots of the ed-tech experiences during the pandemic, while important and deserving of attention, were vastly eclipsed by failure,” the UNESCO researchers said in the report, which encourages schools to prioritize in-person learning and make sure that emerging technologies, including AI chatbots that many public schools are now banning, clearly benefit students before they are used.

Related: ‘We are going to have to be a little more nimble: how school districts are responding to AI

For her part, Ganguly is quick to note that Prisms is not an ed tech program, nor designed for remote learning: Once the VR headsets come off, teachers take over and guide students through the lessons. “Ninety percent of our resources are not in VR but in teacher training,” she told me.

I also raised questions about the use of ed-tech and screens during a session I moderated on early childhood education, where entrepreneur Joe Wolf, co-founder of the nonprofit Imagine Worldwide, described bringing solar-powered technology programs to remote areas in Africa, where few children have electricity and less than five percent have internet access; there’s also a dearth of trained teachers.

“There is no other technology in their lives,” Wolf noted, pointing to studies of a trial showing that children in Malawi not only loved using the program, they made significant gains in math and literacy using the program, despite pandemic disruption. Imagine Worldwide works with governments, communities, funders and other partners as it attempts to expand throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The bright spots of the ed-tech experiences during the pandemic, while important and deserving of attention, were vastly eclipsed by failure.”

UNESCO report, ‘An Ed-Tech Tragedy’

Ultimately, all of the problems both entrepreneurs and educators are trying to solve require a lot more research, noted Isabelle Hau of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, who was also on the panel, a view endorsed by Kumar Garg, vice president of partnerships at Schmidt Futures.

Garg spoke about “learning engineering,” and noted that pushback against education technology is a direct result of how quickly these tools rolled out in the pandemic.

“A billion kids got sent overnight home and we tried on the fly to create an online learning system with very little scaffolding,” Garg said, noting that it was impossible to know how many students were unenrolled and never even got online. “The crisis came, and everyone was like, ‘What’s the answer?’ ”

I suspect there never was one, as our team at The Hechinger Report found during this unprecedented interruption of education worldwide. But there is one result that is absolutely worth paying attention to: Plenty of entrepreneurs, foundations, nonprofit outlets, foundations and investors are looking for answers, and have new ideas that might (or might not) make a difference.

Regardless, we are eager to listen.

This story about teaching with VR was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.

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