OSLO — It was a July afternoon in 2011 when a car bomb exploded just a few blocks from Robert Ullmann’s office. Because it was the summer, only two employees from Kanvas, his nonprofit that manages 64 child care programs around Norway, were at their desks on the third floor of a narrow, nondescript building in central Oslo. Although the floor-to-ceiling glass windows shattered when the bomb exploded at 3:25 in the afternoon, both members of his team were unhurt.

When I arrived at Ullmann’s office a few months ago to interview him about Kanvas, he led me to one of the windows that looks out over Møllergata street. Just past the rusty roof of the building across the road, we could see the top of Regjeringskvartalet, a cluster of government offices, the target of that car bomb. “That’s our ‘Capitol Hill,’” Ullmann explained. The complex never reopened after the blast, which killed eight and injured more than 200. A few hours later, the far-right extremist behind the bombing opened fire at a youth summer camp on an island 24 miles from central Oslo, killing 69 people, most of them teenagers and young adults affiliated with the youth wing of the country’s Labor Party. 

The violent attack, extraordinarily rare for Norway, affected Ullmann deeply.

“I started some reflection,” he said as we stood by the window. “How can a young guy come up here and become a terrorist?” In the context of his work with young children, the goal became very clear. “What’s important is that everyone feel they’re included,” he said.

Ullmann’s conclusion embodies one of Norway’s goals for its citizens: to build a nation of thriving adults by providing childhoods that are joyful, secure and inclusive. Perhaps nowhere is this belief manifested more clearly than in the nation’s approach to early child care. (In Norway, all education for children 5 and under is referred to as “barnehagen,” the local translation of “kindergarten.”) To an American, the Norwegian philosophy, both in policy and in practice, could feel alien. The government’s view isn’t that child care is a place to put children so parents can work, or even to prepare children for the rigors of elementary school. It’s about protecting childhood.

“A really important pillar of Norway’s early ed philosophy is the value of childhood in itself,” said Henrik D. Zachrisson, a professor at the Centre for Research on Equality in Education at the University of Oslo. “Early ed is supposed to be a place where children can be children and have the best childhood possible.”

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

On a drizzly Thursday morning this spring in south Oslo, at Preståsen Kanvas-barnehage, one of Kanvas’ child care programs, children roamed around an expansive play yard, building sandcastles under a large evergreen tree and zooming down a hill on bikes. On an adjacent playground, children shrieked as they splashed through a large puddle. As more children were drawn to the water, rather than caution them about getting wet, a teacher handed them buckets to have at it.

There was a clear focus on inclusion: Children with disabilities, who would often be segregated in American child care programs, were included in activities, at times with the help of a city-funded aide. Posters on some kindergarten walls showed pictures of common items or requests so children who were still learning to speak Norwegian could point to what they needed. Children were learning about the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. A rack of free clothes and boots was parked inside the front lobby, with instructions for parents to take what they needed.

“Kindergarten is so important to level out social inequities,” said Ullmann as we drove to a second site run by Kanvas. “In Norway, we think it’s democratic that everyone can have the same opportunities and move out of being poor. Social differences are something Norway does not accept.”

I traveled to Norway in April, disillusioned after nine years of reporting on child care in the U.S., where parents often pay exorbitant sums for care that comes with no guarantee of quality and relies on underpaid workers. I was eager to see a country that prioritizes child care and generously subsidizes that system, two things that feel wholly out of reach in the United States. 

Norway’s model comes from a deep-seated belief that creating productive, contributing members of society starts at birth. The country offers robust social support for residents, making occurrences like the 2011 attacks that much more shocking. Investing in early childhood is seen “both as an investment for the society and an investment for the child,” said Kristin Aasta Morken, program leader of the city of Oslo’s initiative for upbringing and education. Unlike in America, no attempts have been made to lower age requirements for kindergarten teachers or increase student-teacher ratios and group sizes, and there have been few debates over whether child care is ruining children or families. Ironically, Norway’s policies have been inspired in part by American studies that found language gaps between higher- and lower-income children, as well as a high return on investment for early childhood programs.

“The argument I’ve heard is that if you don’t send your children to kindergarten, then you steal some possible experiences from them,” said Adrian Kristinsønn Jacobsen, a doctoral candidate at Norway’s University of Stavanger who studies nature-based early childhood science education and is a parent of two young children. “You sort of don’t give them the chance to play with other children so much, for instance, or get to know other adults.”

At a time when the U.S. has yet to meaningfully invest in widespread, high-quality child care for all, especially for infants and toddlers — and federal child care spending, provided to states through block grants, reaches only 13 percent of eligible American children — Norway provides an example of what affordable, universal, child-centric early care can look like.

To be sure, there are important contexts behind each country’s approach. Norway, a democracy with a figurehead monarchy, is home to about 5.5 million people, about 82 percent of whom are of Norwegian ancestry, across a space roughly the size of Montana. The U.S. has 62 times the number of residents and a far more diverse population. Norway is a top producer of oil which helped generate a per capita household income that was over $104,000 in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund. In 2022, per capita household income in the U.S. was about $77,000.

The countries’ priorities are different as well. Each year, nearly 1.4 percent of Norway’s GDP is spent on early childhood programs, compared with less than 0.4 percent in America. Public funding covers 85 percent of operating costs for child care programs. The tuition parents pay has been capped at 2,000 kroner (about $190) a month for the first child, with a 30 percent discount for the second. Tuition for a third child is free. This applies to both public and private programs, including in-home centers, giving parents some choice. Programs receive funding based on the number of children served, with sites drawing double the amount of money for each child under 3 to account for lower student-teacher ratios. 

Norwegian children are guaranteed a spot in a kindergarten after they turn 1, around the time many parents’ paid leave ends. All kindergartens are governed by the same framework and requirements, designed to protect the sanctity of the early years. If parents don’t send their children to child care, they receive financial assistance to keep them at home.

Norwegians are so serious about the right to child-centric early care, they wrote it into law. The country’s Kindergarten Act, which took effect in 2006, states that child care programs must acknowledge “the intrinsic value” of childhood. Programs must be rooted in values including forgiveness, equality, solidarity and respect for human worth. Through kindergartens, children are meant to learn to take care of each other and develop friendships. Programs are ordered to respect children, “counteract all forms of discrimination” and contribute to a child’s well-being and joy. They must be designed around the interests of children and provide activities that allow children to develop their “creative zest, sense of wonder and need to investigate.”

That doesn’t mean kids run free all day, though at times it can look like that. “If you’re standing outside a Norwegian kindergarten or just passing through, I would think you are looking at chaos,” said Anne Karin Frivik, head of kindergartens in the Bjerke borough of north Oslo. “But for us on the inside, it’s organized chaos. The autonomy of the child, the child’s own ability to choose and to learn and to interact, it’s very, very highly appreciated.”

About 7 miles north of Oslo, Sylvia Lorentzen’s two child care programs straddle a narrow, winding road amid the lush forests that encircle part of the city, offering limitless opportunities for children to immerse themselves in nature. Throughout the year, those in Lorentzen’s care ski, sled, swim, canoe, climb rocks and rest in hammocks. Around age 4, they learn how to safely use a knife. Then they huddle together outside, whittling wooden figures out of sticks to practice. At 5, they are cutting logs with a saw and building fires. 

By 11 on a Tuesday morning this spring, it was barely above freezing, but toddlers at one of Lorentzen’s programs, Turi Sletners Barnehave, had yet to set foot inside. Bundled up in colorful snowsuits and boots, they crunched through several inches of snow blanketing their picturesque play yard, splashed through muddy puddles and giggled as they chased Lorentzen’s petite, playful dog around the yard.

“Children should feel more like it’s a second home,” said Lorentzen. “We take the kids into our heart and we take good care of them.”

As the morning wore on, the five toddlers made their way up a gentle slope and stepped inside a large tent, modeled after one commonly used by the Indigenous Sami people of Northern Europe. There, the children crowded around a metal firepit and peered at the remnants of their last bonfire.

“What did you find?” their teacher, Paula García Tadeo, asked in Norwegian as a child held up some charcoal remnants. García looked closely and nodded, before instructing the child to put it back.

Another child reached into the remnants and started to taste an ashy piece of wood.

“Don’t eat it,” Garcia said calmly.

“In the kindergarten in Norway, the children find their own food!” Lorentzen joked to me, laughing. “Don’t write that!”

After a bit more exploring and singing some nursery rhymes, the toddlers set off across the play yard. Some wandered over to watch a rushing stream a few feet away, and others stumbled through the snow before sitting down to rest. The more confident walkers among them marched ahead, toward the warm meal that awaited them inside.

For Lorentzen and many other early educators here, this sort of laid-back morning, marked by child-led outdoor exploration, signifies how childhood and child care should look. Nature and outdoor play are staples of Norwegian culture. There’s even a word for it: “friluftsliv,” which translates to “outdoor life.” Norwegians are so protective of this outdoor time, they have a saying, “There is no bad weather, just bad clothes.” It’s standard for Norwegian kindergartens to have rows of cubbies just inside the door to the play area to store layers of spare clothes, rain and snow gear, boots and mittens.

Some of this outdoor focus is baked into the country’s 63-page kindergarten framework, based on the national law, which dictates the content that must be covered, staff responsibilities and kindergartens’ general goals. The framework focuses heavily on play, a word that is repeated 56 times in the English version of the document. Programs are required to facilitate a good childhood, with “well-being, friendships and play.” Learning about nature and the environment is one of the framework’s seven learning goals for children, and programs are instructed to “use nature as an arena for play.” Much of the other content, like health and movement, communication and art, is taught while children are playing, either inside chaotic-looking classrooms or while traipsing through forests.

In rain, snow or wind, children at Turi Sletners, and in programs across the country, spend their days climbing trees and getting muddy. Toddlers nap outside, bundled inside puffy, miniature sleeping bags affixed to their strollers. During the summer, Norwegian children in kindergartens spend, on average, 70 percent of their time outside. In winter about a third of the time is outside. The country’s embrace of nature is likely a factor in its high international happiness ratings, given that research has found spending time in nature can decrease anxiety and improve cognition.

Researchers have found that Norway’s kindergartens have positive effects on academic success and the adult labor force. “Putting all the pieces together, it’s a pretty consistent set of evidence that there are fairly long-term effects” of Norway’s early childhood programs, said the University of Oslo’s Zachrisson. “Which is funny, because what they do the first year is walking around in the woods eating sand and hugging trees, and [it] is super interesting to try to think of what causes them to do much better on the math test in fifth grade.”

It may be because play is the main way children learn, and Norwegian kindergarten days are overflowing with just that.

Related: What America can learn from Canada’s new ‘$10 a Day’ child care system

At Blindern Barnestuer, a child care program run out of four wooden houses across the street from the University of Oslo, children roam for hours, playing in a magical, expansive play yard while their parents research and teach at the university. On an April afternoon, a group of children crowded around a teacher sitting at a bench outside as he painted various insects on their faces on request.

Other kids chased each other up gentle hills as a nearby pirate flag, suspended from the branches of a knobby tree, waved. A group of preschoolers traversed an obstacle course constructed of wooden pallets and boards, clutching each other’s coats for stability. Some climbed trees and dangled from branches.

As Anne Gro Stumberg, one of the kindergarten’s lead teachers, known as a “pedagogical leader” in Norway, showed me around the outdoor play space, I commented on how Norwegians seemed to have a much higher risk tolerance for children’s play. In addition to the fire and knives that I had seen at other programs, preschoolers chased each other with brooms, fell several feet from tree limbs and stood on swings, things that gave me, a cautious American, pause. Nary a Norwegian looking on, however, batted an eye.

“We allow them to experience, and if they fall down, so what?” Stumberg said. 

I asked if she’s had many injuries among the children. 

She thought for a moment. “I can’t remember having one injury, not a serious injury,” she said. 

Stumberg sees endless lessons for children through play. At Blindern, teachers purposefully avoid teaching formal academics, like letters and numbers, unless a child is expressly interested in them. “We think that’s what they’re going to learn in school,” she said. “I don’t think it’s necessary to try to learn [reading] before school. There are so many other things that are very important, like all of the social skills, and how to move and do things on your own and to be able to have your own limits.”

This can only happen, Norway believes, with trained, qualified staff. The national framework instructs staff to behave as “role models,” and Norway’s law is strict about student-teacher ratios and qualifications. Programs are required to have one pedagogical leader, someone with a multiyear college degree or comparable education, per seven children under the age of 3, and one per 14 children older than that. Each leader is supported by two other teachers, who often have less education. For children under age 3, there may be no more than three children for each staff member, and there is a maximum of six children per staff for older children. In America, by contrast, no state has a ratio that low for toddlers. In some states, as many as 12 2-year-olds are assigned to one teacher, who is subject to far fewer training requirements than a peer in Norway.

At Jarbakken Barnehage, in northwest Oslo, director Mailinn Daljord said qualified teachers are vital, as they have a challenging job. One of the most critical lessons is teaching children emotional regulation, a skill that is imperative as children grow. “I want [children] to like being in kindergarten,” she said, as we sat in her office, surrounded by rows of early childhood pedagogy books and a pile of donated, toddler-sized skis. “But I also want them to feel disappointment, sadness and disagreement with others, because here we have grownups that will help them with their emotions, so they will learn to handle those situations on their own when they get older.”

Like Ullmann, one thing Daljord does not want children to experience is bullying or exclusion. As we spoke, she went on her computer to pull up Jarbakken’s annual plan, something every kindergarten must create to explain how it will meet the requirements of the law. This year, Daljord is especially focused on interactions and inclusion. Teachers gather small groups of children during play to provide support with interactions and give them ample opportunity to form connections with peers. During the year, Daljord’s teachers meet to evaluate how much they interact with individual children, a practice Ullmann spoke of as well. Daljord uses a scale: Green means frequent interaction with a child, yellow occasional, red infrequent. Then the kindergarten zeroes in on those getting less interaction. Often, those are the most challenging children, Daljord said.

“You need to do something to make sure all the kids are getting the same, and that they are seen and acknowledged for the person they are,” she said.

Later in our visit, as Daljord walked me through the bright kindergarten, housed in a boxy, modern building surrounded by outdoor play spaces, I was struck by the freedom children had. They could move from room to room and play with other groups of children, as long as they stayed in the area designated for their age group. As we toured, Daljord pointed out what children were learning about: dinosaurs, insects and the life cycle of plants. All around us, children scurried in and out of play areas — the word “classroom” is not used in Norwegian child care settings — laughing and chasing friends. While teachers engaged small groups of children in spontaneous activity at times, for the most part, the emphasis was on child-led play.

Daljord agreed that children in Norway have “way more” freedom — and responsibility — than in America. She told me a story that, to her, demonstrated the former. Nearly a decade ago, while visiting a park in the United States with her then almost 3-year-old daughter, she was approached by an American parent who chastised her for sitting on a bench while her daughter ran free. “Child abuse,” Daljord recalled the woman telling her. She said Daljord “needed to watch her, and stay close.”

Daljord seemed amused by the whole interaction. “Different culture,” she said, as she recalled the story.

Related: Free child care exists in America — if you cross paths with the right philanthropist

Norway’s early childhood policies are indeed part of a distinctly different culture. In 2020, UNICEF ranked Norway No. 1 among 41 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and European Union countries for conditions that support child well-being. Norway spends 3.3 percent of its GDP on family benefits, one of the highest rates among OECD nations, and about three times what the United States spends. In 2020, the medical journal The Lancet ranked Norway first out of 180 countries in a “child flourishing index.” That same year, UNICEF ranked Norway third among 41 wealthy countries in child well-being, as measured by mental well-being, physical health and academic and social skills. The United States, by comparison, ranked 36th. Norway also ranks highly in work-life balance, meaning even if children attend kindergarten, parents still spend hours with them each day, parents and educators told me.

Perhaps in part thanks to these circumstances, children and their families fare well in Norway. Child mortality and poverty rates in Norway are low, and most children report good family relationships. International test scores from before the pandemic showed Norwegian teenagers performing at or above international averages in science, math and reading, though scores have fluctuated over recent years, with the arrival of more immigrants, who tend to score lower on such tests. Nearly 86 percent of Norwegians graduate from high school, and 55 percent earn a college degree. College tuition is free for Norwegian and European Union residents at the country’s public universities. 

Many of the Norwegians I interviewed spoke of a strong cultural expectation that adults contribute to Norway’s economy. More than 72 percent of the country’s labor force works, 10 percentage points higher than in America. Norway’s child care policy has supported this.

Many of Norway’s values are uniquely Scandinavian and deep-rooted. But as my visit went on, I began to wonder if part of Norway’s no-nonsense, easy-breezy approach was because many of the things that keep American parents up at night, like school shootings, mass shootings — pretty much shootings of any kind — aren’t things Norwegian parents told me they regularly, if ever, think about. Norway has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Maybe in America, the strict, highly regulated approach we continue to take when it comes to child care is an attempt to control what we can for our children in a life where so many things feel very much out of our control.

I ran this theory by Ullmann as we drove to one of his kindergartens. I told him some of the things I worry about with my own children: If I hear sirens near my child’s school, is it America’s next school shooting? If I’m at a concert or mall, where will I hide my child if someone opens fire? Do Norwegians ever worry about those things?

Ullmann was so horrified, he missed the exit on the freeway. “That’s really very sad,” he said sympathetically, glancing at me as he took the next exit, crossed over the highway and headed back in the opposite direction.

To be sure, aspects of Norway’s kindergarten system are still being developed, and the country must adapt as its population becomes more diverse. Its first step was expanding access, experts told me. Between 2003 and 2018, the percentage of children ages 1 to 5 attending kindergarten increased from 69 percent to 92 percent. Now, the country is focusing on improving quality and targeting children who are behind in language development.

When it comes to kindergartens, “we’ve known for some time that the quality varies,” said Veslemøy Rydland, a professor at the University of Oslo and one of the lead researchers for the Oslo Early Education Study, a research project into multiethnic early childhood programs that was launched in 2021. Despite standardized requirements, finding staff for lower-income kindergartens, where turnover rates are higher, can be difficult.

As kindergartens have developed a stronger footing, the country is contending with a changing demographic and growing social inequality, testing its devotion to equity and progressive social values. Kindergartens are seeing this firsthand. Over the past decade, the number of “minority-language” children, kids with two parents who speak a language that is not native to the Scandinavian countries or English, has nearly doubled. Almost 20 percent of children in kindergarten primarily speak a language other than Norwegian, and in some cities as many as 35 percent of children are minority-language speakers. During the past decade, child poverty rates rose.  

Part of my goal in visiting Norway was to see how, and if, the country’s system and approach to child care has been able to meet the growing needs of more diverse children. Not all of Norway’s early childhood researchers are convinced that the country’s informal approach to learning works as its demographics evolve.

“This pedagogy has been doing a great job in protecting childhoods … and giving children the opportunity to explore,” said Rydland, At the same time, Rydland said when children have that much freedom, they may not be exposed to activities that could be beneficial, like whole-group reading, simply because they aren’t interested in them. “That might be the same children that are not exposed to shared reading at home,” Rydland said. “That’s the challenge with this pedagogy … I think it works better in a more homogenous society than what we have now, with much more social differences.”

Related: For preschoolers after the pandemic, more states say: Learn outdoors

There have been efforts to find a middle ground between the playful freedom inherent to Norwegian kindergartens and a more structured setting.

In Oslo, Rydland leads Språksterk, an initiative run by the University of Oslo, kindergartens in five Oslo districts and officials with the city of Oslo. The project, which roughly translates to “strong language skills” in English, is funded by the city and the Research Council of Norway and is aimed at improving adult interactions with children and ultimately enhancing language development. It’s one of several special projects and interventions in Oslo targeting children and families who are the most in need.

Like many Norwegian initiatives, Språksterk aims to “try to make the social inequalities less,” said Helene Holbæk, who develops projects for children in the Bjerke borough.

Grønland Torg is one of 80 kindergartens participating in Språksterk to help a growing number of immigrant children master the Norwegian language. Fifty-nine children attend Grønland Torg, and they altogether speak 40 different languages.

On a spring afternoon, teacher Hilde Sandnes sat on the floor of her room for 1-year-olds, next to a small cardboard box shaped like a birdhouse, as 11 children lumbered around the room, some playing alone while others interacted with the room’s two other teachers. Sandnes invited a toddler near her to come look at a collection of small, felt stuffed animals shaped like birds stacked inside the cardboard birdhouse, which had been sewn by her mother for the bird unit the children were embarking on. A child reached inside and pulled out a duck, proudly naming it in Norwegian.

Sandes repeated it and pulled out another bird, waiting to see if the child could identify it.

“Stork!” he proclaimed, a word that is the same in both English and Norwegian.

The child looked back over at the duck and excitedly proclaimed something in Norwegian.

“He told me the duck is taking a bath,” Sandnes said.

While kindergartens like Grønland Torg are attempting to adapt for immigrants, educators say not all newcomers are sold on the Norwegian model. Children who have immigrated to Norway are eligible to attend kindergarten soon after arriving, and their parents pay the same low rate, or lower, based on income. Educators said families new to Norway who enroll their children often struggle to accept the Norwegian approach to child care, expecting more academics or structure.

Many families choose not to enroll their children at all, an unintended consequence of a generous but divisive social policy in Norway: cash-for-care, which pays parents who stay home with their children. The idea is to support parents who wish to keep their children home longer — toddler enrollment in Norway’s kindergartens is lower than for older age groups — or sustain families if a child can’t get a spot in a kindergarten. Norwegian educators say children new to Norway are the ones who could benefit the most from child care and exposure to Norwegian language, yet are less likely to enroll before the subsidy expires when children turn 3.

At the same time, kindergartens are reckoning with how to support a steady rise in children with disabilities. Seventy percent of the country’s programs enroll children who qualify for special education support.

As these needs have grown, Oslo has responded with sufficient funding, educators told me. For students with disabilities, the city pays for and sends in specialists for added support. While these services are required for children under Norwegian law, national experts said the quality and extent of services can vary by city.

In America, the quality of publicly funded early learning programs is often scrutinized, especially in the pre-K years. I wondered how the Norwegian government makes sure all this public money is in fact leading to high-quality kindergartens that are adequately serving children.

While there is copious federal tracking of staffing numbers as well as quality and parent satisfaction metrics, Norwegians are skeptical of monitoring and measuring children’s development and do not focus much on the cost-benefit argument around early education. Norwegians largely see early childhood programs as a good that “leads to more equal and happy childhoods,” said Zachrisson from the University of Oslo. “This is what the public discourse is about,” he added. The value of Norway’s early childhood services is not contingent on long-term effects.

Elise Kristin Hagen Steffensen, director of Barnebo Barnehage in north Oslo, described a system based on trust. Programs report issues to their municipality as small as forgetting to lock a window or as big as teacher mistreatment of children. Hagen Steffensen regularly writes reports for the city to explain how her school is meeting various parts of the law’s requirements, and officials may visit, especially if they’ve heard a kindergarten is struggling. There is also copious federal tracking of staffing numbers as well as quality and parent satisfaction metrics. Programs failing to meet regulations face no fines, however; educators were somewhat confused when I asked about penalties for failing to meet regulations, as can be the norm in America. Instead, they told me, local kindergarten officials help programs improve.

“That approach is just the Norwegian model,” said Hagen Steffensen. “I like that very much.”

This sense of trust seemed so inherent to Norwegians that they were baffled that I was asking questions about it. One afternoon, as Frivik, head of kindergartens in Bjerke borough, walked me to a bus stop, she pointed out how fences are few and far between in Norway. The country’s “right to roam” law allows individuals to freely and responsibly enjoy “uncultivated” areas, regardless of who owns them. I mentioned that fit right in with the level of trust I discovered, both by the government toward residents and residents toward the government.

“Nobody regularly checks or scans my Metro ticket to make sure I paid,” I pointed out.

“Why wouldn’t you pay?” Frivik asked me.

Looking forward, Norway’s early educators and experts aren’t quite ready to declare success in building their system, especially as demographics change. They want to see higher quality across kindergartens and more teachers in the classroom to reduce student-teacher ratios, which are already low by American standards.

Ullmann, too, thinks there is still room for improvement. “If you take the money and the structural quality that we offer in Norway, yeah, compared to every other country in the world, these are more or less the most expensive kindergartens in the world,” Ullmann said. “It’s fantastic when you compare it to every other country.” But, he added, even that may not be enough when it comes to the youngest of children, on whom the future rests.

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

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

The post Norway law decrees: Let childhood be childhood appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The bottom line is troubling.

Scores on an international math test fell a record 15 points between 2018 and 2022 — the equivalent of students losing three-quarters of a school year of learning.

That finding may not be surprising considering the timing of the test. The world was still recovering from the disruptive effects of the global pandemic when the test, called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, was administered.

But in many countries, the slide in math scores began years before Covid-19 and was even steeper than the international average. That includes some of the world’s largest and wealthiest countries, and others acclaimed for their education systems, such as Canada, France, Germany and Finland. Only a few school systems — Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong — have been able to maintain their top results for the long haul.

Some of the scores set off another “PISA shock” — a term first used in Germany in 2000 when scores there were much lower than expected — that may change how mathematics is taught around the world.

Although there’s no single culprit behind the decline, PISA is more than a math test: It also includes a wide-ranging survey of the students who take the test, most of whom are around 15 years old and coming to the end of compulsory schooling in their countries. From their responses, and analysis by PISA researchers, several themes stand out, including disconnection from school and teachers, a lack of motivation and a sense that math does not clearly connect to their real lives.

Why motivation matters

PISA uses a series of word problems that assess how well students can use the math they’ve learned throughout their lives to solve problems they might face in the real world. For example, one question in the most recent test gives students the dimensions of a moving truck and then asks them to figure out how many boxes of a certain size can fit.

 Other problems require students to extract information from different types of data, such as a question that asks students to calculate which brand of car has the best value, taking into its price, fuel consumption, and resale value.

“Students need to have the confidence to try different things, and a level of persistence to do these kinds of problems,” said Joan Ferrini-Mundy, a mathematics educator and the president of the University of Maine. Ferrini-Mundy is also the co-chair of the PISA’s Mathematics Expert Group.

But nearly 1 in 4 students reported on the PISA survey that they gave up more than half the time when they were confronted with math that they didn’t understand. A little more than 40 percent said they never, or almost never, actively participated in group discussions in math class. And about 31 percent said they never or almost never asked questions when they didn’t understand the math they were being taught.

In Germany, where scores have dropped faster than those of many other PISA nations, researchers pointed to a collapsing interest in math as a subject that started around 2012, among other factors. Students reported less enjoyment, less interest and more anxiety around the topic, said Doris Lewalter, an educational researcher at the Technical University of Munich. They also were more likely to report that they saw fewer potential benefits from studying math.

The effects of screen time

Students who reported spending up to an hour on devices for learning purposes scored 14 points higher than students who said they spent no time on digital devices for learning. But too much use of digital devices was a distraction, even indirectly. Students who said they were distracted at least some of the time in school by their peers using devices scored 15 points lower than students who reported that they never, or almost never, were distracted.

Outside the classroom, digital device use also matters when it comes to math scores. Students who spent more than an hour on weekdays surfing the web or on social networks scored between 5 and 20 points lower than peers who spent less than an hour on devices.

Lack of real-world connection

On student surveys, only about a quarter of PISA-takers said they were asked “to think of problems from everyday life that could be solved with new mathematics knowledge we learned” for more than half or almost every lesson.

William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University and the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Curriculum Policy, has studied the seeming disconnect between math as it is taught, and math as it is used outside of school.

Schmidt examined the math textbooks of 19 countries, and said that about 15 percent of the computational problems in those books are word problems. But of those, only a tiny percentage — just over one-quarter of 1 percent — ask students to use math reasoning to solve a problem, in his view. An example might be determining how many items you can buy at a store for $52, given certain discounts and taking into account sales tax, he said.

Schmidt, also a member of the PISA math experts group, believes students should grapple with problems like this, which have the benefit of being more interesting as well.

“What we should be doing is exposing our children to real exercises that are real in their world and that have applications they would care about,” Schmidt said.

Good teachers are irreplaceable

Andreas Schleicher, who oversees PISA for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, said the student surveys also showed the importance of teachers’ connection to their students. Math scores were 15 percentage points higher, on average, in places where students said they had good access to teacher help. Those students also felt more confident in their ability to learn on their own, and remotely.

On the 2022 survey, about 70 percent of students reported regularly receiving extra help from teachers, but that figure represents a drop of 3 percentage points from 2012.

“That was actually a surprise to me, that we see fewer students growing up with the notion that my teacher knows who I am, my teacher knows who I want to become, my teacher supports me,” Schleicher said. “Many students perceive education to be more transactional.”

A call to action

Finland’s fall, from a top performer in 2006 to just slightly above the OECD average in 2022, has been the most dramatic among previous high achievers. In math, the proportion of low achievers rose to 25 percent in 2022, from about 7 percent in 2000.

Finnish students’ achievements have been dropping gradually for two decades, and the trend is reflected in national evaluations, said Jenna Hiltunen, a researcher in mathematical pedagogy at the University of Jyvaskyla, who was part of the team that implemented PISA in Finland. “I wouldn’t say that we were surprised by the decline, but we were a little bit surprised by how large the decline was.”

Finnish math education experts cited reduced motivation in students and a disconnect between their life goals and how young people feel about school. It plans to invest 146 million euros — about $158 million in U.S. dollars — over the next three years in schools in disadvantaged areas, and it is adding one hour per week of math lessons for students in grades three to six, which is planned to begin in August 2025. Local authorities will decide which of those grades will get the extra hour.

“We think it’s important to highlight the importance of basic skills, and learning the fundamentals,” said Tommi Karjalainen, a senior ministerial adviser to the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and a former education researcher at the University of Helsinki.

In New Zealand, where math scores on international tests in the past decade have fallen steeply, a new government campaigned on bringing a “back to basics” approach to education. The government has mandated an hour of reading, writing and mathematics in school each day and has banned cellphones. A government-created advisory group has also suggested that the country move to a more traditional, explicit form of mathematics instruction, as opposed to inquiry methods that focus more on having students create their own mathematics learning, with teachers serving as guides.

In Bavaria, one of Germany’s 16 states, leaders announced in February a plan to add additional math and German lessons in the primary years, part of a “PISA Initiative.”

France is responding to its sliding scores by introducing more tracking. Starting in September, France will start testing middle school students to track them into different mathematics and French classes, based on their scores.

And educators are looking to different countries to learn the keys to their success. The former Soviet republic of Estonia, as one example, achieved the highest mathematics scores on the PISA of any other country in Europe.

The country of 1.4 million people has not focused on international math scores as a goal in itself, said Peeter Mehisto, co-author of “Lessons from Estonia’s Education Success Story: Exploring Equity and High Performance Through PISA.”

Instead, it has stopped separating students into groups based on their academic performance, a practice called “streaming” or “tracking.” Mehisto, an honorary research associate at the University of London Institute of Education, said that research shows that “low-track” students often end up alienated from school.

In the United States, in comparison to other countries, no one is talking about widespread changes because of these math scores. No centralized government agency controls curriculum, and the U.S. actually moved up in comparison to other nations because those other nations did so poorly.

Unlike the belief in some other countries, the U.S. scores “are not cause for huge alarm,” said Ferrini-Mundy, one of the PISA experts. “We have to pay attention to this, but it’s not a catastrophe.”

Frieda Klotz contributed reporting and Sarah Butrymowicz contributed research to this story.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

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

The post Mathematics test scores in some countries have been dropping for years, even as the subject grows in importance appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid promised to be an easy process for all students, especially those from immigrant families. For the first time, students with undocumented parents were told, they would be able to complete this form online.

We should have known better. Students with undocumented parents are constantly getting error messages from the FAFSA portal and are struggling to create FAFSA IDs for their parents who don’t have Social Security numbers. When they contact the FAFSA helpline, they hear “It’s a glitch. Try at a different time. Try a different browser.”

As I have seen as a college adviser, the online process has only worked for a few of my qualifying students. Others were asked to send their parents’ documents for verification.

Many of these students are still waiting for approval and have been unable to complete their FAFSA forms. Delays in their FAFSA applications could mean delays in receiving financial aid packages and possibly mean getting less financial aid to cover the costs of college. Their FAFSA applications now echo the immigration policies in this country — forever in limbo, mired in legislative and bureaucratic delays.

It wouldn’t surprise me if those students’ documents were among the FAFSA program’s thousands of unread emails, indicative of its widespread failure.

Related: ‘Simpler’ FAFSA complicates college plans for students, families

This isn’t the only roadblock my students face while attempting to pursue a college education. And it just underscores their need for help from someone familiar with the system and the frustration it brings.

Sadly, there aren’t enough college advisers like me for the growing population of immigrant students in New York City. We need to earmark funds to hire more advisers because no matter how much we prepare students in high school to succeed academically at the next level, they also need someone trained in the intersection of immigration and education to get them there.

For nearly a decade, the New York State Youth Leadership Council (YLC) and Teach Dream, the council’s educator team, have pushed city officials for more support for immigrant students in schools.

Finally, in 2021, they launched the Immigrant Liaison pilot program in a collaborative project with CUNY’s Initiative on Immigration and Education. That program led to the creation of positions for school staff members with experience working with and supporting immigrant youth, undocumented students, their families and caregivers.

The pilot began with three New York City public high schools, including the one where I work; in its second year, it added two middle schools. But funds for the program ended last June, leaving many of us doing this work informally.

Two decades ago, I was an undocumented student in high school and was unable to complete the FAFSA because of my status. I did some research to try to find out if I would be eligible for academic scholarships. I made several inquiries to tri-state college admissions counselors.

Like many of my students, I wanted to be the first in my family to earn a college degree, but my research results were discouraging.

I’ll never forget one response: An admissions counselor said I would have to contact the office for “special education accommodation” — as if immigration were a disability.

Federal and state immigration policies have since changed, and options have multiplied for immigrant students. In 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, began to allow eligible immigrants like myself to obtain work permits and Social Security numbers.

In 2016, New York State changed its licensing rules, allowing DACA recipients like me to earn professional certifications in teaching, and I was able to continue my career as a math teacher in the Department of Education. And in 2019, the New York State Senate passed the José Peralta New York State DREAM Act, which gave undocumented students in New York State the ability to qualify for state aid for higher education.

Yet even with all these changes, undocumented immigrants in New York State make up less than 2 percent of the students enrolled in higher education despite the fact that undocumented immigrants comprise roughly 14 percent of the state’s overall population.

How many more could go to college if they had someone in their high school who could properly guide them through the college application process?

Related: OPINION: I’m a college access professional. I had no idea filling out the new FAFSA would be so tough

At schools across the country, at all grade levels, not enough counselors and staff are equipped to navigate the intricacies of the complex and often confusing immigration system.

We need state or city-funded immigrant liaisons at every school. Securing funding will be like working with FAFSA: We will need to be persistent and patient.

It’s worth it. This winter, I walked a student through the steps on how to create her mother’s FAFSA ID. The mother then tried multiple times for a month until she was successful in creating it.

After that, my student completed her FAFSA form in 10 minutes. Now, we are waiting to hear whether she gets financial aid to attend college.

My work as an immigrant liaison is never finished. I only wish more could join me.

Juan Carlos Pérez is a project researcher for the CUNY Initiative on Immigration & Education and a college adviser at an international high school in New York City.

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

The post OPINION: Immigrant students need trained advisers to navigate the problematic college admissions process appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The Oct. 7 terrorist attack and subsequent Israel-Hamas war transformed American college campuses into a different type of battleground. Extreme anti-Israel protests have been accompanied by a surge in antisemitic incidents. School administrators are walking a tightrope, trying to balance students’ freedom of expression with campus safety. The correct path forward is clear: College and university presidents should follow the law and enforce the rules equally for everyone.

A cornerstone of this approach is a moral and legal imperative to define and denounce antisemitism. Doing so is not a political statement. Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, colleges and universities are legally bound to protect their students from discrimination based on, among other things, religion or national origin. Failure to identify and properly address antisemitism is often a result of ambiguous or nonexistent definitions of the term.

Adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s standard, as the U.S. Department of Education has done, would provide colleges and universities with a globally recognized framework and align with schools’ obligations under the Civil Rights Act. The alliance’s working definition is as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” The alliance also includes practical examples of antisemitic content and commentary, along with resources for scholars and education professionals. Integrating this important tool does not require a formal announcement or change in official policy. Administrators can simply instruct deans and other campus officials to use the alliance’s definition when evaluating bias incidents on campus.

This is a necessary step, but it is not enough. The University of Pennsylvania adopted the alliance’s standard as part of an “antisemitism action plan,” but it was too little too late. President Elizabeth Magill’s lackluster response to a surge in antisemitism on campus led to a donor revolt, an embarrassing congressional hearing and eventually her resignation. A proactive approach to the issue with meaningful action to protect Jewish students would have almost certainly saved Magill’s job.

To avoid her fate, college and university presidents must consistently and relentlessly apply policies across the board. The basic legal and moral expectation on any college campus is that no students will be targeted due to their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin. Jewish and Israeli students do not seek special treatment. Selective enforcement, as we saw when MIT president Sally Kornbluth reversed suspensions for foreign students who had violated campus rules citing “visa issues,” undermines the integrity of institutional rules and sets a dangerous precedent. Having different sets of standards for student conduct is counterproductive and dangerous.

Related: Students have reacted strongly to university presidents’ Congressional testimony about antisemitism

While many institutions have struggled mightily in this climate, others have avoided scrutiny. High-profile leadership failures, such as the case of Harvard president Claudine Gay, make the front page. Those who successfully navigate these troubled waters do not generate headlines. Syracuse University is a great example of a school getting it right. A viral video captured Syracuse staff calmly and deliberately instructing students to remove signage calling for an “intifada.” The university interpreted the signage as calling for the genocide of Jews and therefore determined that this form of protest was a violation of the student code of conduct.

Colleges and universities often serve as melting pots for students representing a wide variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. It is the job of administrators to channel this dynamic into academic discovery and learning while keeping students safe from discrimination and harassment. Schools do not need to choose sides in geopolitical conflicts or decide between protecting one group of students or another. They must simply uphold and safeguard the rights of everyone. Institutionalizing the alliance’s definition of antisemitism will further protect Jewish and Zionist students now and in the future. Administrators must lead the way and take this practical action now.

Avi D. Gordon is executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness, which is sponsoring an advocacy campaign at several universities across the country, including Cornell and Northwestern, encouraging them to define and denounce antisemitism.

This op-ed about campus antisemitism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: How to combat antisemitism without compromising academic freedom appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — From the time she was in elementary school, Isabella Cross has dreamed of going to an Ivy League college to become an engineer.

But in her “little no-name town,” as she describes it, selective universities and colleges rarely came to recruit.

As a 17-year-old in rural Tennessee, and the daughter of a single parent, “I always kind of felt, like, I wouldn’t say necessarily trapped, but a lot of kids feel trapped,” Cross said. “And a lot of them never get out. They never get to explore and never get to see other things.”

Now Cross thinks she might get to a top-flight college after all.

Recruiters from some of the nation’s most selective universities — MIT, the University of Chicago, Yale — have, for the first time, come to her “little no-name town,” part of an effort to pay more attention to rural America, where students are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to go to college and, if they do, more likely to drop out.

“It kind of just felt like they heard us and they see us and that they know that there’s a need as well for small-town kids like me to have really big dreams,” Cross said.

Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent). But only 55 percent go directly to college.

The visit to Crossville was among the first by a new consortium called STARS, or Small Town and Rural Students College Network, prompted by a $20 million grant from a University of Chicago trustee who left a small town in Missouri to create a financial services company and who wants to see more people from backgrounds like his go to and through college.

It follows a long history of neglect of rural areas by many colleges and universities. Not even public research universities recruit in rural places, a study by scholars at UCLA and the University of Arizona found, disproportionately favoring higher-income public and private high schools in major metropolitan areas.

Even when they do find their way to these small towns, recruiters are up against increasing reluctance by students and their families to go to four-year institutions, and especially to campuses far away from home.

Sixteen colleges and universities in all — also including Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Southern California — have signed on to STARS and agreed to visit rural high schools in exchange for financial help with travel costs and staffing.

“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess,” said Karen Hicks, lead counselor at Crossville’s Stone Memorial High School, who has been an educator in the city for 36 years. “I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Rural communities can be hard to reach and often have only small numbers of prospective high school seniors, said Marjorie Betley, senior associate director of admissions at the University of Chicago, who helped organize STARS and serves as its executive director.

“Driving hours and hours on the road to meet with five students, that’s really hard,” said Betley.

But when that trustee, Byron Trott, asked in 2018 how many students at her university came from rural places, as he had, “we couldn’t even answer the question,” Betley said. After further inquiry, she said, “the numbers were not good.” Rural students comprised about 3 percent of enrollment at the time, which she said has since increased to 9 percent. Rural Americans comprise nearly 20 percent of the population, the Census Bureau reports.

Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent), according to the U.S. Department of Education. But only 55 percent go directly to college.

That’s a smaller proportion than suburban students. It’s also getting worse, down from 61 percent in 2016, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says. In Tennessee, the share of all high school graduates who went directly to college last year, though up slightly, was still 10 percentage points lower than five years before.

So rarely do top colleges recruit in rural towns, said Bryan Sexton, a father who came with his son to the college fair in Crossville, that, “you know, when I saw some of the names, I was, like, what are these schools doing here?”

A city of 12,470 named for the spot where an old stagecoach road crossed a onetime cattle drivers’ route between Nashville and Knoxville, Crossville is in the middle of the rocky, heavily forested Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains. And it’s a case study in how rural families aspire to, fret about and often decide to forgo college.

Outside the auditorium of the city’s Stone Memorial High School, Nae Evans Sims stopped and thought for a moment about the smallest community she’d ever visited as an admissions recruiter for Case Western Reserve University. “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Probably this one.”

Alongside representatives from Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago and other institutions, Sims was arranging brochures on a table in anticipation of the kind of college recruiting fair that draws throngs of anxious students and their parents almost every night of the fall in more densely populated towns and cities.

In Crossville, 81 students showed up for the recruiting night, to which students from adjoining towns across the county were also invited.

“My friends in the cities, their kids start talking about college when they’re freshmen,” said Rob Harrison, a city councilmember who stopped by. But in Crossville, he said, “a lot of kids don’t even think about the opportunities out there. It’s just not part of the culture.”

Then again, no one from those elite universities had ever come to Crossville, school officials said, even though the graduation rate from Stone Memorial is 91 percent, school statistics show.

Related: The shuttering of a rural university reveals a surprising source of its financing

Of the students here who choose to continue their education, many simply stick around and go to the community college just across the street, where tuition is free. More than one in 10 enroll in a local trade school, the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, and 4 percent enlist in the military.

That makes Crossville fairly typical of rural places, where residents are less likely to get bachelor’s degrees. Only about 20 percent of people over 25 in rural America (and 15 percent in Crossville) have bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a gap the Federal Reserve reports has been widening steadily over the last 50 years.

That not only contributes to the worsening divide between urban and rural America; it limits economic opportunity in rural places.

“Whenever a student graduates from high school on a path to create career success, communities benefit from strong workforces and from economic development,” said Noa Meyer, president of rootED Alliance, another STARS partner, which puts college and career advisors in rural high schools. “It’s essential for rural communities to have a skilled and invested workforce. Local businesses need skilled workers.”

Related: A big reason rural students never go to college: Colleges don’t recruit them

But the path to that goal is narrowing. At least a dozen private, nonprofit colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students have closed or announced their closings in the last three years. Public universities in rural parts of Kansas, Arkansas and West Virginia are cutting dozens of majors. Others are merging, including in Pennsylvania and Vermont. Spending on higher education fell in 16 of the 20 most rural states between 2008 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

About 13 million people now live in higher education “deserts,” mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education estimates.

“There is a significant untapped talent pool in our rural communities, yet rural students often lack access to the resources needed to help set them up for their education, careers and economic stability,” said Trott, founder, chairman and co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners.

Also as in Crossville, rural students who do go to college generally prefer to stay close to home, research shows.

“Even the ones that have the higher scores, that can survive at some of the more prestigious colleges, they like it here, and they don’t necessarily want to leave,” said Laura Kidwell, another Stone Memorial school counselor. “They want to be within driving distance from home and their family and friends and relatives.”

Aaron Conley is a senior at the high school. He’s deciding between learning heating, ventilation and air conditioning to start his own HVAC business or going to college to study physical therapy or nursing — though both of those fields require “a lot of college. It’s something that I just don’t know if I want to do for a long period of time like that.”

If he does go to college, Conley said, he’d opt for Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, 30 minutes away, so “I can come back and see my family whenever I want.”

Many parents here don’t want their kids to move away, either. Some are concerned that university campuses and faculty in far-flung places are too liberal and not religious enough, Hicks, the school counselor, said. In the surrounding Cumberland County, nearly four out of five voters in the 2020 presidential election cast their ballots for Donald Trump and 71 percent of Tennessee residents consider religion very important to their lives, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to the national average of 53 percent.

“Some of the things that you hear in the news and stuff that happens at different colleges is scary for a conservative family,” Hicks said. Parents think, “ ‘I have control of you now, and I know your environment, and to send you out to that big world is scary.’ ”

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

Amy Beth Strong would prefer that her daughter, Ellie Beth, stick around for at least a little while, and maybe start at the local community college after she graduates from Stone Memorial next spring.

“I’m not trying to hold on to them, and I want them to do what they want to do, but I would rather they have a little bit more life experience under their belt,” Strong said, instead of “throwing them out in the middle of the world and saying, ‘Okay, there you go, you’re 18, you’re done. So have at it.’ ”

Some rural parents also worry that their children, if they go far away for college, won’t come back, Hicks said.

Even Harrison conceded that they may be right. “We raise a lot of good kids, and they go off and there’s not a lot to come back to” in a city ringed by soybean, corn and cotton farms and whose main industries include the manufacturing of tile, porcelain, automotive parts and truck trailers.

Some Crossville parents are encouraging their reluctant children to go on to further education, however.

Tina Carr started college, stopping now and then to earn the money she needed to pay for it. But she never graduated.

Only 20 percent of people over 25 in rural places nationwide has a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally.

“I’ve always regretted not being able to finish,” Carr said, still in her scrubs after commuting home from her job in Knoxville as the front-desk coordinator at a surgeon’s office. “I just see where people get stuck in, it’s a bad word to say, but ‘dead-end’ jobs without a college degree.” And while she likes what she does, she said, “I’ve seen a lot of jobs posted throughout the years that I think I could do, but I can’t because I don’t have that degree.”

That’s why Carr is pushing her daughter, Kira, to continue her education after high school. “I don’t want her down the line to eventually regret that she didn’t go to college” too, she said.

Another major reason fewer rural high school students go to college is the cost. Median earnings in rural areas are nearly one-sixth lower than incomes elsewhere, according to the USDA. In Crossville, the median household income is $40,708, compared to the national median of $74,580. More than 20 percent of the population lives in poverty; 40 percent of the 1,000 students at the high school are considered economically disadvantaged.

Despite their higher graduation rates, rural students also often feel that they don’t belong at top colleges. That, along with homesickness and the cost, is among the reasons those who do go are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates.

Related: Number of rural students planning on going to college plummets

“We do have rural students come in who have that imposter syndrome, with classmates who took 20 [Advanced Placement courses] and their high school didn’t have any,” said Betley, at the University of Chicago.

At the Stone Memorial recruiting fair, the longest lines were to talk to representatives from the nearby University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee Tech. The shortest was for MIT.

“That’s typically not the MIT experience,” said Carlos Vega, the recruiter from that university. “I go somewhere and I have auditoriums full of students.” In Tennessee, however, two other high schools had told him not to bother coming for scheduled visits, he said, because they didn’t have any students who were interested — a first in his career.

Ellie Beth Strong — she goes by E.B., a nickname given to her by her soccer coach — wonders how comfortable she’d feel at a big or far-off university. Also a senior at Stone Memorial, she has applied to two Christian colleges and the University of Tennessee.

After growing up in a small town, “I don’t want to go to a giant university where I’m just another person that you pass by when you’re going to class,” she said. “I don’t want to have 300 people in my class and have the professor just lecture the whole time. I want to actually get to sit down and talk to the people and get to know everybody.”

Rural students often face cultural differences at universities that mostly enroll people from other backgrounds, said Corinne Smith, an associate director of admissions at Yale who reads the applications of many students from rural places.

“So many students when they get to these campuses, especially when they’re more urban campuses, they have shared challenges,” Smith said.

Related: How to raise rural enrollment in higher education? Go local

Smith is also the advisor to the Rural Student Alliance at Yale, formed five years ago to help rural students feel more of a sense of belonging. When the group was started, she suggested social activities such as apple-picking. But the students instead wanted help getting used to the unaccustomed urban traffic noise outside their dorms or off-campus apartments. “Then they said, ‘Can someone take us on a tour of New Haven so I can see where things are — my town has one stoplight.’ ”

Rural perspectives like these are essential to the diversity of campuses, said Smith, who is working on a dissertation about rural college-going.

“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess. I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”

Karen Hicks, lead counselor, Stone Memorial High School

“If you say you want to have a university with a wonderful political science department and then 100 percent of the students in that political science seminar are from urban and suburban towns with the same religious and political affiliation, then are you really having the discussions that we say our institutions are meant to be having?” she asked.

Isabella Cross, the aspiring engineer, has no doubt about what she could contribute to a campus: a small-town sense of community.

“We see you in Walmart? We’re going to stop and talk to you for 45 minutes. We’re going to ask how the kids are. We’re going to ask how your mom is doing. We’re going to ask about all of the things that, you know, sometimes you just don’t get in, like, New York City or whatever larger-scale city that you want to put in there,” she said. “I just think that that’s something that you can bring to a school where it’s definitely a cutthroat competition to get into.”

This story about rural college-going was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Lauren Migaki. Sign up for our higher education newsletter and try out our College Welcome Guide.

The post MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Numbers don’t lie, right? But they also don’t always tell the whole story. That’s the case with the most recent results from a key global education test, the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA. 

In the past, PISA results have often spurred anguished discussion about why U.S. students are so far behind other countries like Finland, Korea and Poland. But the most recent rankings, released in December 2023, indicated that U.S. 15-year olds moved up in the international rankings for all three subjects –  math, reading and science. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona credited the largest federal investment in education in history – roughly $200 billion – for keeping the United States “in the game” during the pandemic. (The tests were administered in 2022.)

But that rosy spin hides a much grimmer picture. Rankings may have risen, but test scores did not. The only reason the U.S. rose is because academic performance in once higher ranking countries, such as Iceland and the Slovak Republic, fell by even more since the previous testing round in 2018. Neither India nor China, which topped the rankings in 2018, participated in the 2022 PISA. In math, the U.S. rose from 29th place to 28th place, still in the bottom half of economically advanced nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international organization of 38 member countries that oversees the PISA exam.

The deterioration in math was particularly devastating. American students scored 13 points lower than in 2018, equivalent to losing two-thirds of a year of education in the subject. These were the lowest U.S. math scores recorded in the history of the PISA math test, which began in 2003. More than a third of U.S. 15-year-olds (mostly 10th graders) are considered to be low performers, unable to compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. Over the past decade, the share of U.S. students in this lowest level has swelled; back in 2012, a little over a quarter of U.S. students were considered to be low performers.

Only seven percent of American students can do math at advanced levels. The United States has more students in the bottom group and fewer students in the top group than most other industrialized countries that are part of the OECD. (Click here to see an international ranking of low and top performers in each country.)

The results also confirmed the widespread inequalities in U.S. education. Black and Hispanic students, on average, scored far below Asian and white students. Those from low-income backgrounds scored lower than their more affluent peers.

Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, emphasized that the inequities in the U.S. are often misunderstood to be primarily problem of weak schools in poor neighborhoods. His analysis indicates that low math performance is common throughout U.S. schools. Some students are performing much worse than others within the same school, and that range between low and advanced students within U.S. schools is much greater than the range in scores between schools. 

This new PISA test is the first major international education indicator since the Covid pandemic closed schools and disrupted education. Test scores declined all around the world, but the OECD found there was only a small relationship between how long schools were closed and their students’ performance on the PISA test. School closures explained only 11 percent of the variation in countries’ test scores; nearly 90 percent is attributable to other, unclear reasons. However, the OECD looked at the absolute level of test scores and not how much test scores fell or rose. More analysis is needed to see if there’s a stronger link between school closures and test score changes. 

Even if school closures eventually prove to be a more important factor, the pandemic isn’t the only reason students are struggling. Global scores have generally been declining for the past two decades. One hypothesis is that technology is distracting teenagers. Students were asked about technology distraction for the first time on the 2022 PISA. Forty-five percent of students said they feel anxious if their phones are not near them. Sixty-five percent report being distracted by digital devices during math lessons. Up to an hour a day of computer time for leisure was associated with higher performance. But heavy users, those who spent five to seven hours on computers for fun, had lower academic performance, even after adjusting for family and school socioeconomic profiles. 

Another factor could be the rise in migration across the world. Perhaps declining test scores reflect the challenge of educating new immigrants. However, the OECD didn’t find a statistically significant correlation between immigration and academic performance on average. In the United States, immigrants outscored students with native-born parents in math after adjusting for socio-economic status. There was no difference between immigrants and non-immigrants in reading.

Japan was one of the few countries to defy the trends. Both its math and reading scores rose considerably between 2018 and 2022. Akihiko Takahashi, professor emeritus of mathematics and mathematics education at Chicago’s DePaul University, said schools were closed for a shorter period of time in Japan and that helped, but he also credits the collective spirit among Japanese teachers. In his conversations with Japanese teachers, Takahashi learned how teachers covered for each other during school closures to make sure no students in their schools fell behind. Some went house to house, correcting student homework.  

It’s tempting to look at the terrible PISA math scores and say they are evidence that the U.S. needs to change how it teaches math. But the PISA results don’t offer clear recommendations on which math approaches are most effective. Even Japan, one of the top performing nations, has a mixed approach. Takahashi says that students are taught with a more progressive approach in elementary school, often asking students to solve problems on their own without step-by-step instructions and to develop their own mathematical reasoning. But by high school, when this PISA exam is taken, direct, explicit instruction is more the norm.

The new results also highlighted the continued decline of a former star. For years, Finland was a role model for excellent academic performance. Education officials visited from around the world to learn about its progressive approaches. But the country has dropped 60 points over the past few testing cycles – equivalent to losing three full school years of education. I suspect we won’t be hearing calls to teach the Finnish way anymore. “You have to be careful because the leaders of today can be the laggards of tomorrow,” said Tom Loveless, an independent researcher who studies international assessments.

There was one bright spot for American students. Fifteen-year-olds scored comparatively well on the PISA reading test, with their scores dropping by just one point while other countries experienced much steeper declines. But that good news is also tempered by the most recent scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) test, often called the Nation’s Report Card. Reading scores of fourth and eighth graders deteriorated over the last two testing cycles in 2019 and 2022.

Overall, the PISA results provide additional confirmation that U.S. students are in trouble, especially in math, and we can’t put all the blame on the pandemic.

This story about the 2022 PISA results was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: There is a worldwide problem in math and it’s not just about the pandemic appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

MONTREAL — Raad Jassim really likes his job.

As an adjunct faculty member at a Canadian university, Jassim has four teaching assistants to help him grade assignments and answer questions. He makes the equivalent of about $7,000 per course, per term. He has a multiyear contract and can typically pick the subjects that he teaches. He has an office, access to professional training and government-provided health insurance.

All of these things, he said, help him focus on the reason that he’s there: his students.

And few of these benefits, or that kind of pay, are available to his counterparts south of the border, in the United States.

The comparatively poor working situation of American adjuncts “is a sad story,” said Jassim, who teaches corporate finance, real estate investment and managerial and engineering economics at McGill University. “It breaks my heart.”

Now there’s new scrutiny of how adjuncts’ pay and benefits affect not only them but also their students, who often go into debt to cover rising tuition.

Some 44 percent of American university and college faculty are part-time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

U.S. adjuncts worry about their ability to engage with students and how well their students are learning, according to a new study that compares Canadian adjuncts with what it calls the “woefully under-supported and poorly compensated” American adjuncts.

“You’re almost like a starving artist.”

Antwan Daniels, an adjunct in Kansas City

“The people we’re relying on to teach our youth are dedicated and feel meaning in their jobs but are being relied upon without making a living wage,” said Candace Sue, executive director of Chegg’s Center for Digital Learning, a spin-off of the textbook and study help company that produces resources about technology and education and commissioned the study.

“It’s not fair to them — we know that. But it’s also not fair to the students who are relying on them to be focused on the classroom and to keep them going.”

The research is among the latest to document the woes of what has grown into an army of 792,000 U.S. university part-time and contingent faculty who work part time or on fixed contracts.

Related: What’s in a word? A way to help impatient college students better connect to jobs

American adjuncts earn a median of $3,700 per course, an amount that has declined significantly when adjusted for inflation, the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, says. The figure comes from 900 universities and colleges that provide employment data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty.

More than one in four adjuncts earn below the federal poverty level for a family of four, another new report, from the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, finds. More than three-quarters are guaranteed employment for only one term or semester at a time. That information is based on a survey distributed to adjuncts who are AFT members and, through social media, to adjuncts who are not members of the union; 1,043 responded. The AFT represents 85,000 adjuncts who have unionized.

“If you’re cobbling together jobs at different universities to make ends meet, you don’t have the time to do the work you want to with your students,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.

Fifty-seven percent of adjunct faculty, and almost all of the adjuncts at community colleges, get no medical benefits, the AAUP says. About one in five rely on Medicare or Medicaid, according to the AFT.

“You’re almost like a starving artist,” said Antwan Daniels, an adjunct in Kansas City and father of four who teaches chemistry at three different universities — one in person and two online — while also working on a doctorate in higher education administration.

Though much of the conversation around these salaries and benefits has centered on the toll it takes on adjunct faculty members themselves, researchers have turned to documenting how it is affecting students.

Forty-eight percent of university and college faculty are adjuncts, while fewer than a quarter are now full time and tenured.

“Like with everything, if a contingent faculty [member] doesn’t have security themselves, it’s really hard to do that million and one things to help their students,” said Josh Kim, a sociologist at Dartmouth and a senior fellow at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, who began his own career as an adjunct.

More than a third of adjuncts in the Center for Digital Learning study, which was conducted by Hanover Research, said low pay and lack of benefits or job security affected their ability to engage with students and the learning students take with them from class.

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Adjunct faculty are more likely than faculty in general to say they don’t have enough time to prepare their courses and don’t receive enough administrative support, according to a breakdown of a September faculty survey provided to The Hechinger Report by the educational publishing and technology company Cengage.

“Unless the school has a well-rounded support system for the adjunct faculty, you’re serving the students at probably 60 percent of your capacity,” Daniels said. “You’re having a rushed conversation. You’re trying to distill it down to, ‘What do you need at this moment?’ ” Students, he said, “are not served in the way they should be.”

Fewer than half of adjuncts say they’ve received the training they need to help students in crisis, the AFT survey found.

More than one in four adjuncts earn below the federal poverty level for a family of four. Fifty-seven percent get no medical benefits.

“We have a population of people that are being depended on to educate students that don’t have all the tools in their toolkit to do it in the way that we as a society expect them to be supported to do their jobs,” Sue said.

These new studies follow earlier findings by the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success showing that increased reliance on part-time and non-tenure track faculty resulted in higher dropout rates, lower grade-point averages and graduation rates and a reduced likelihood that community college students will continue on to four-year institutions for bachelor’s degrees, among other things.

Related: Some universities’ response to budget woes: Making faculty teach more courses

“There are now two decades of research saying that having more exposure to part-time faculty who lack the most support leads to more dropouts, lower graduation rates, lower GPAs and difficulty finding a major,” said Adrianna Kezar, director of the Delphi Project and the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, where it’s housed.

Last-minute hiring and lack of job security are among the biggest problems, Kezar said. But “it’s overwhelming and cumulative, the number of bad working conditions, so you can’t totally distill out one or two. There are so many of these things that add up.”

What’s bringing new attention to this issue, she said, is that “institutions are being held accountable more” for their success rates, “so they’re more worried about these connections.”

“There are now two decades of research saying that having more exposure to part-time faculty who lack the most support leads to more dropouts, lower graduation rates, lower GPAs and difficulty finding a major.”

Adrianna Kezar, director, Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Things appear brighter in Canada, the Center for Digital Learning study found in its comparison. Canadian adjuncts were almost three times less likely to be concerned about low salaries, and 87 percent of them get benefits.

“It does show that alternatives are available,” the report concluded.

While policies like that require financial investments by universities and colleges, Weingarten said it’s mostly a matter of these institutions’ priorities.

Instructional spending by universities, per student, goes down as the proportion of the faculty who are adjuncts goes up, a researcher from the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University found.

People think the cost of higher education is increasing “because there are more and more resources that are going into teaching and learning and it’s completely the opposite,” Weingarten said. “Where is the rising tuition going? Where’s the money going?”

Life as a Canadian adjunct isn’t perfect, said Jay Lister, who teaches education at McGill. But “I have guaranteed employment,” he said. “Even days when I’m just normal stressed, I worry about my students. I can’t fathom what I would do without the job security.”

At a coffee shop near the campus, wearing a union T-shirt, an Expos cap and a long beard tied with elastics, Lister said he also has enough to live on — though he said that might be different if he had kids.

Related: With tenure under attack, professors join forces with a powerful teachers’ union

Heather McPherson, a contingent lecturer at McGill, said her daughter — a doctoral candidate in anthropology at a university in California — has none of the relative job security she herself enjoys.

“She’s complained a lot,” McPherson said, outside the Faculty of Education Building on the slope of Mount Royal, which overlooks the city. “I don’t think her students suffer, but her stress level does.”

Adjuncts at McGill even get university email addresses for up to nine semesters after they teach a course, so students can reach out for recommendations or advice, said Jassim, who is president of the university’s Course Lecturers & Instructors Union.

Back in the United States, Kim likened the plight of adjuncts to those of autoworkers and Hollywood writers and actors, who have or are now striking for improved conditions.

“We have this system where the people who actually do the work are getting the least benefits and the least security. I think this is all related,” he said.

“What an enormous resource,” Kim said. “We have these motivated people. Just a little more security and a little more recognition and a little more pay would make such a difference.”

This story about adjunct professors 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.

The post Canada treats its adjunct professors better than the U.S. does – and it pays off for students  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Just over 50 years ago, long before a global pandemic knocked 100,000 Canadian women out of the work force and left child care providers reeling, a national commission urged the Canadian government to underwrite the costs for a nationwide child care system that would also lower fees for families.

Now, an offshoot of that recommendation has come to fruition. In 2021, Canada’s leaders committed $30 billion (about $24 billion in U.S. dollars) over five years to the country’s first federally-funded child care system. The new system aims to provide child care for an average of $10 a day in licensed settings, with plans to create an additional 250,000 spots for children by 2026.

Canadian experts say a host of factors contributed to the country’s eventual success in taking large-scale federal action on early learning. Ultimately, though, it took a pandemic, shutting down businesses and schools, for Canada to invest such a large amount of funds.

This movement came after decades of structured, organized advocacy, much of which started after the commission’s report. Child care has been a cornerstone of the feminist movement in Canada, and parents and various nonprofit groups have partnered to champion the cause. Canadian labor groups have also supported the efforts, something that has recently become a more prominent strategy in the United States, especially after efforts to pass child care legislation faltered in 2022.

More recently, advocates have presented child care as a public good and a right, similar to K-12 education. That argument has helped build support, said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, an advocacy association in Canada. “It’s always been understood that it is good for kids, and it’s good for the economy, and it’s good for society, to have a public led, funded and organized public education system. Why not the same for younger children, especially when we know that early childhood education is as important, if not more important, to the long-term well-being of children?”

Having women in positions of power — including Chrystia Freeland, the nation’s first female minister of finance — was crucial to ushering the proposed program through Parliament in 2021, experts say, despite continued opposition from some conservative lawmakers. Similarly, in Quebec, education minister Pauline Marois helped usher in the province’s child care system two decades ago. “The fact that we had a strong woman in power really, really made the difference both for Quebec in the late 1990s and for Canada in 2021,” said Sophie Mathieu, senior program specialist at the Vanier Institute of the Family, an organization focused on family wellbeing in Canada.

For many years, the province of Quebec has shown the potential benefits of government funding for child care. In 1997, Quebec began offering low-cost, flat-fee child care. While quality can be uneven, the program has contributed to an increase in the number of women in the workforce and a higher domestic income. Quebec also stood out from the rest of the country during the pandemic. “Canada saw that the [child care] system was not really affected by the pandemic in Quebec,” said Mathieu. “Childcare in Quebec is heavily subsidized, so the fact that they didn’t get the parents’ money didn’t really affect them.”

The nationwide child care initiative has embraced some key aspects of Quebec’s flat-fee plan, as well as messaging from British Columbia’s “$10 a Day” child care initiative, which rolled out in 2018 to bring low-cost child care to families in the province. That messaging is easy to grasp and well-liked by parents — more so, experts say, than American proposals to link child care costs to a percentage of a family’s income.

“Our federal government realized the popular success of the ‘$10 a Day’ branding,” said Sharon Gregson, provincial spokesperson for the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC. “I think the federal politicians were smart enough to pay attention and realize not only was this necessary, it’s also something people will vote for.”

These isolated efforts by provinces to pay for child care with public money helped inspire larger change, and could be a strategy for child care advocates in the United States, said Martha Friendly, executive director of the Canadian-based nonprofit Childcare Resource and Research Unit, who previously worked on child care policy in the United States. While a bottom-up approach can’t be the only strategy to ease the challenges in the child care industry, “You can do things incrementally to push things forward locally, on a state level or on a regional level, and sometimes that does have a way of pushing the envelope on something [larger],” she said.

Canada’s example of a federally-supported child care system may be of particular interest in the United States, and one many child care advocates hope to see here. But although the two countries are close — both geographically and in terms of having diverse populations spread out over a sprawling country — there is a key, social difference that Canadian experts point to that helped pave the way for this type of investment in child care. Long before the pandemic, far more Canadians than Americans embraced the idea that the government should offer extensive, universal support to families. Canada provides annual family allowances to support child rearing and the country offers universal health care. It boasts a comparatively generous paid parental leave policy: Young infants are rare in Canadian child care centers because parents can stay home with their children and receive part of their income for a year or more, depending on province.

“We expect government to step up,” said Susan Prentice, Duff Roblin Professor of Government at the University of Manitoba. “There remains, still, a Canadian tradition in believing that government is part of the solution.”

This is my last Early Childhood newsletter before I head out on leave as a fellow with the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School, where I will focus on researching and reporting on the consequences of a lack of high quality child care. If you’d like to chat about that topic, feel free to email me at jem2231@columbia.edu. In the meantime, my colleagues Ariel Gilreath and Sarah Carr will be your go-to sources for early childhood coverage. I’ll see you in 2024!

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

The post Inside Canada’s 50-year fight for national child care appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

GIBSONS, British Columbia — Two years ago, Marisol Petersen’s family was paying more than $1,200 a month for her son to attend child care in this small, coastal town about 20 miles across the Howe Sound from Vancouver. Despite the cost, which made it hard to put any money in savings, she felt lucky to even have a spot.

Then, in September 2022, the family experienced a dramatic shift in fortune. They were notified that there was a spot for them in a nearby child care center that had recently signed on to a government-led initiative to lower parent fees to just $10 a day. “It’s like I won the lottery,” Petersen said. “I got into child care and a ‘$10 a Day’ site.”

At the new center, the Huckleberry Coast Child Care Society, Petersen’s fees are capped at $200 a month. Without that reduction in fees, Petersen, who works as a social planner for the city of Vancouver, said her family would “be in massive trouble.”

The “$10 a Day” child care initiative, as it’s known in British Columbia, has been life-changing for parents. In the five years since it launched, it has also provided some financial stability for child care programs in the province, which now receive operating funds directly from the government instead of relying solely on family-paid tuition.

This idea — that parents should pay an average of $10 a day for child care and that public funds should underwrite child care programs — is now a cornerstone of a new national child care system rolling out across the country.

During the pandemic, Canada, like the United States, was forced to grapple with the fact that its already unsustainable child care system was on the brink of collapse. In 2021, the country’s leaders committed $30 billion (about $24 billion in U.S. dollars) over five years to the country’s first federally-funded child care system — borrowing ideas from a longstanding government-funded program in the province of Quebec as well as from British Columbia’s $10 a Day program. The new Canada-wide system was “very much situated in the context of economic recovery,” said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, an advocacy association in Canada.

Canada’s national system is nowhere near finished and is hardly perfect; there are staffing shortages in many parts of the country and still far too few seats available for children. But the new national initiative, known as “Canada-wide,” will bring Canada closer to joining the ranks of countries like Finland, Sweden and Iceland, long lauded for providing robust federal support for child care.

As American child care experts call for more federal investment to salvage a struggling industry, Canada’s experience may hold the most relevant lessons on how to make universal child care palatable to politicians and how to design a program to meet the needs of a diverse, geographically sprawling nation. With its new system, Canada has had to strike a balance between upholding the federal vision and allowing local autonomy over details, and between addressing the financial burden for parents while determining how to directly fund child care programs to ensure their stability.

“Canada shows that transformative child care reform is possible,” said Elliot Haspel, director of climate and young children at Capita, an international think tank, and the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It.” “I don’t think we can copy and paste what the advocates up there did. But I think there’s some real lessons in thinking about messaging of child care and what’s the actual policy.”

Related: With little federal support for families, states are stepping up

Any way you look at it, America’s child care system is in crisis. After years of underinvestment, and an end to pandemic-era aid, the industry is struggling. Child care teachers have fled for higher paying jobs; parents face years-long wait lists; and families face insurmountable costs even for mediocre care. 

The last major effort to significantly expand federal funding of child care in the U.S. — a proposal in President Joseph Biden’s Build Back Better legislation in 2021 — was dropped from the final version of the act. Legislation introduced earlier this year that would have provided $10-a-day child care to many American families failed to progress. Although greater investment in child care has some bipartisan support in the U.S., many lawmakers have balked at the cost. Some continue to say the government should have no place in child care, arguing that it is a private responsibility. Others suggest that universal access to child care is a communist policy, or that mothers should always stay home with their children. That’s in spite of the fact that America relies on working parents to keep schools and many services open.

In Canada, experts and advocates were “very effective at conveying the idea that child care is an important part of the overall well-being of the province and the nation,” Haspel added. “They hammered it home over and over and over again.”

The new national system passed Parliament as part of the nation’s budget in June 2021 and has been rolling out over the past two years. Participation is voluntary for provinces and territories. But all have signed on to access the federal dollars, which are presently given with no requirement that provinces invest their own money. Eventually, Canadian officials hope to achieve a 50/50 cost share with provinces and territories, but no money was required at the onset of the initiative. (America, in contrast, requires states to match funds for its current federal program aimed at lowering costs for low-income families.)

Each province or territory has control over many of the details of the Canada-wide program, like setting annual goals for expanding child care spots and early educator pay scales, as well as deciding whether for-profit centers are included in their system. Money flows to the provincial governments, which then have their own systems for providing funding directly to the child care programs. By 2026, the country intends for Canada-wide to be universal in fact as well as name — with 250,000 new spots and parents paying no more than an average of $10 a day for care.

While the system’s biggest effects likely won’t be seen until it expands, there are signs of progress. Nationwide, nearly half of the provinces and territories offer regulated child care for an average of $10 a day, or less. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the federal funds have also supported the creation of a new, full-day, year-round pre-K pilot program. In New Brunswick, the province upped early childhood educator wages. In British Columbia the federal infusion of funds has bolstered the work the province was already doing to bring more public funding into the child care industry. The province used the federal money it received to pay for 1,271 child care spaces between 2021 and 2022.

Related: The child care crisis is reaching crisis proportions nationally. Could Milwaukee provide the answer?

Child care programs say there are benefits to having access to more public funds. At Huckleberry, the program Marisol Petersen’s son attends in Gibsons, the board of directors saw signing onto the province’s $10 a Day plan as an opportunity to lower fees for parents without having to also lower wages for teachers. Huckleberry was also able to get $32,000 in additional funding from the province to hire a program manager to oversee budgets and support daily operations.

About 68 miles east of Gibsons in Mission, a town of about 39,000 in Canada’s bucolic Fraser Valley, child care provider Lorraine Trulsen said $10 a Day has provided much-needed stability. Before joining the provincial initiative, she was begging families to refer others to her program, the Heritage Park Childcare Centre, even offering half off a month of care. Although her tuition, which cost between $650 and $850 a month, was lower than that of centers closer to Vancouver, “it was a struggle to get full,” Trulsen said. Five years after becoming a pilot program for $10 a Day, Trulsen has a three-year wait list. Many of her parents cried when Trulsen announced her new, lower rate. Some couples decided they could have more children, she added, knowing they could now afford care. 

The publicly-supported initiative in British Columbia, “has given us a feeling of security,” Trulsen said. “We’ve actually never been more financially stable than we are right now.”

Despite Canada’s progress and growing support for the national, low-cost child care plan, the country’s pain points in Canada-wide’s rollout show there’s no quick way to make child care a public, federally-funded service, especially for countries that are late to the game. For example, in Canada, non-licensed, home-based providers have been left out of the system, as have other, more informal kinds of care.

About one-third of Canada’s children are cared for by either a relative other than their parent or by a non-relative in a home, for example. Some provinces plan to tweak their versions of Canada-wide to include more forms of child care in the future, but that is not the case across the country. “We are very concerned that the current plan is not equitable,” said Andrea Mrozek, a senior fellow with the Ottawa-based think tank, Cardus. “Billions and billions are being poured into a system that really helps the few,” she added.

And even some of the programs that have been the biggest beneficiaries of the child care expansion are still struggling with funding. Provinces and territories are financially supporting the budgets of child care programs at levels the programs say are too low. In many cases, the governments subsidize families’ costs, but fail to approve enough new money for child care programs that would allow them to raise teacher salaries. For example, earlier this year, British Columbia rejected a request from Huckleberry for a funding increase that would have raised teacher wages and provided employment benefits for the center’s small staff of two full-time and two part-time teachers.

The Esprit Daycare Centre near Huckleberry also asked program officials in British Columbia for additional funds so it could raise wages. The request was denied. Last year Esprit lost several staff members to a public early learning program that pays more. “The staffing has been the issue,” said Jennifer Braun, manager of Esprit. “Finding enough coverage here is like a unicorn.” 

Related: Finding child care is still impossible for many parents

In some provinces, families’ costs were cut dramatically long before many programs had the stability and staffing to handle the subsequent enrollment surge. And while some provinces have upped educator wages in an attempt to attract and keep teachers, others have been slower to make progress.

“I feel like the government is doing things in the wrong order,” said Trulsen, in Mission. “We’re creating spaces and we can’t find staff. We can’t find staff because we can’t offer decent living wages. So round and round you go.”

Canadian experts say their country’s experience has shown what to do, as well as what not to do, to create transformational change in the child care industry. Some American policy makers have proposed addressing the child care crisis here by sending more money to parents or upping tax benefits, rather than providing direct funding to child care programs. Canadian experts who have seen their system’s roll out are wary of such methods. “It’s absolutely clear that if you want to have a childcare system, you can’t do it only by giving money to the parents, you have to make sure that you have the supply,” said Martha Friendly, executive director of the Canadian-based nonprofit Childcare Resource and Research Unit, who previously worked on child care policy in the United States.

 “If you look at other countries, that’s the way they do it, they fund the operations.” Of most importance, said Friendly, is that countries address affordability, workforce and supply at the same time. “If you want to have a child care system that’s stable … You need to do all these things at the same time, because they’re interlinked,” she said.

In the U.S., some states are likely to balk at the idea of following in the steps of Canada and Scandinavia and setting up a federal “system” of care. Allowing autonomy at a state level is an aspect of Canada’s model America might adopt, said Gordon Cleveland, associate professor emeritus at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “But there also has to be a very strong overall concept,” he said, such as setting goals for parent rates, program expansion or educator wages.

Such a system would be costly: one proposal for a universal child care system by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has also proposed $10 a day child care, estimated the price at $700 billion over 10 years. In Canada, some child care programs have opted out due, in part, due to concern that they won’t have as much autonomy over their operations. And because unlicensed, informal care is popular in America, and the majority of the country’s young children are in non-center-based care, a system focused on formal programs, like Canada’s, could be a point of contention here as well.

Messaging in support of universal child care in the United States will likely need to differ from Canada’s. While it might seem counterintuitive, Haspel believes expanded government spending on child care should be tied to giving American families flexibility to choose and pursue their own destinies. “It’s about family freedom,” he said. “The number of children you can have, where you choose to live. The time you get to spend with your children should not be determined by the availability or lack thereof of affordable child care, yet for far too many families, it is.”

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

The post What America can learn from Canada’s new ‘$10 a Day’ child care system appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BANKE, NEPAL — English and health studies are 14-year-old Dilip Godiya’s favorite subjects. Unlike other subjects taught at his school in the city of Nepalgunj, they don’t require him to be effortlessly fluent in Nepali. Dilip grew up speaking Awadhi at home, the mother tongue of half a million Nepalis and millions more in northern India, so adjusting to Nepali as a language of learning was a major challenge. Until fourth grade, he found it difficult to read and hesitated from speaking up in class.

“Sometimes, I still struggle with speaking proper Nepali,” he says, an eighth grader now.

As many as 123 languages are spoken in Nepal, a linguistic diversity evident in the multicultural Banke district, where 3 out of every 5 residents are non-Nepali speakers. Despite a provision in the 2015 constitution mandating that all children have the right to education in their first language — as well as a national curriculum plan introduced in 2019 that mandates localized curricula and recommends multilingual instruction to facilitate learning for non-Nepali speakers — all eight municipalities in Banke district have yet to do so. 

“Repeating a grade or leaving school altogether may not be the direct result of the language barrier, but it is a side effect.”

Bikram Mani Tripathi, education expert

Consequently, many non-Nepali speakers send their children to schools across the border in neighboring India. Bhupendra Singh Sodi, who runs a dental clinic in Nepalgunj, is one of them. The Sodis migrated from the Indian region of Punjab five generations ago for business and, over time, Awadhi and Hindi — dominant in Banke — replaced Punjabi as their first languages. Despite the presence of a nearby government school, Sodi’s son and two daughters study at the Assembly of God Church in the Indian border town of Rupaidiha, where Sodi himself once studied. Hindi, the medium of instruction there, is easier for Awadhi speakers to comprehend than the Nepali used at the local school.

Sodi went on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in sociology at an Indian college. “I know all the Indian political history,” he says. “I know the Indian national anthem by heart; I know it was written by Rabindranath Tagore. But I don’t know who wrote the Nepali national anthem.” It saddens him to know so little about his own country — and he worries his children will experience this sense of alienation too. He wants his daughter to become a dentist and told her she could study in Kathmandu, where dental education is cheaper. “But she said she can’t succeed there due to the language barrier and expressed interest in pursuing dentistry in India.”

Related: Once criticized, ‘Spanglish’ finds a place in the classroom

Non-Nepali speakers consistently underperform at school. In the last five years, according to government data, rates of class repetition among elementary school students in Banke were higher in areas such as Nepalgunj, Narainapur, Duduwa and Janaki, where the proportion of non-Nepali speakers is higher. An analysis of the last three years of Banke district’s final secondary education exam results—conducted at the end of 10th grade—found that only 30 percent of students who scored a GPA higher than 3.0 were non-Nepali speakers. If learning outcomes were equal, that number would be closer to 60 percent, the percentage of Banke residents who are non-native speakers, according to the 2011 census. (2021 census language data was unavailable.)

Nepali-language instruction isn’t the only reason for these results, says Bhagwan Prasad Paudel, chief of the education development and coordination unit in Banke, a government entity. “Students are present during admissions season but have low attendance throughout the year, due to farmwork and festivities,” he says. “This rate is higher among members of the Madhesi community [who tend to be non-native Nepali speakers] than among people from hill communities.” In one school in Nepalgunj, for instance, 53 students are enrolled in the third grade but only 20 or so attend regularly.

But Bikram Mani Tripathi, an education expert and himself a non-native Nepali speaker — Awadhi is his mother tongue — says the language barrier manifests itself in more than one way. “In the past, each caste had an occupation: some worked with wood, some with iron, and others with leather or soil,” he says. “As these traditional occupations started dying, the burden of sustenance fell on farming activities, especially for communities who could not speak Nepali or English and could therefore not compete for government jobs. As their income dried up, parents started making their children work from a young age. Repeating a grade or leaving school altogether may not be the direct result of the language barrier, but it is a side effect.”

Satish Maharjan, a teacher at Shree Secondary School in Lagdahawa, says a poor grasp of Nepali sets students back. “In an eighth-grade science exam, if a student uses the Awadhi word for bullcart rather than the Nepali word, a teacher from a different community would deduct points,” he says. “This is why non-Nepali speakers don’t get good results.” Students tend to struggle with Nepali grammar and accent marks, and they have difficulty reading lessons out loud, says Kriparam Barma, assistant principal at Mangal Prasad Secondary School, adding that “as Nepali, Hindi and Awadhi share a written script, students tend to write cognate words the way they are written in their mother tongues, which is considered incorrect in Nepali.”

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

Teachers who speak the same language as their students could improve learning outcomes, but multilingual instructors are hard to find. In the school where Maharjan teaches, for instance, 5 out of 17 teachers are non-Nepali speakers compared to 70 percent of students. Municipal authorities, who decide what is taught in schools in their jurisdictions, cite this as a primary obstacle in implementing local curricula in languages other than Nepali.

There also is the challenge of having multiple languages spoken in a community. In Banke district, four of eight municipalities — Kohalpur, Rapti Sonari village, Khajura and Nepalgunj submetropolitan — developed their mandated local curricula this year. But neither they nor the other four municipalities have produced textbooks in languages other than Nepali, in part because of the linguistic diversity of local students who speak Awadhi, Urdu and Tharu, among other languages.

In Banke, Nepal non-Nepali speakers make up close to 60 percent of the population, but only 30 percent of students who scored a GPA higher than 3.0 at the end of 10th grade.

“Starting this year, we have implemented the local curriculum,” says Jeevan Neupane, head of the education branch in Rapti Sonari village, “but not in mother tongue.” Some municipalities are preparing to develop curricula in Awadhi, spoken by nearly 24 percent of Banke residents. The curriculum for grades one through 10 has been developed, says Tripathi, who has worked with the government on this project.

Fourteen-year-old Dilip may have graduated by the time Awadhi-language instruction is implemented in Banke, but it would be a boon to many who come after him. Even a teacher who would take the time to explain that “aama” is the Nepali word for “maa” in Awadhi — “mother” in English — would be a rare relief for children trying to follow an unfamiliar tongue. “Some teachers spoke very fast in Nepali,” he says. “I was often very nervous. When an Awadhi-speaking teacher stood in front of the classroom, it was easier to speak and ask questions.”

Global Press Journal is an award-winning international non-profit news publication that employs local women reporters in more than 40 independent news bureaus across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The post Nepal says students have a right to learn in their native languages —but it still isn’t happening appeared first on The Hechinger Report.